Talking trash page 2
But conservatives are too confident in their claim that mass media have a
demonstrably negative impact on behavior. If anything, television produces
indolence, passivity, and voyeurism, not criminality. Like all good
educators, it changes attitudes without fomenting action. The epidemic of
violence in urban neighborhoods is caused by complex social disintegration
unrelated to television.
The daytime talk show genre has in fact been in artistic decline for the past half-dozen years. The range of new topics is finite, and the frenzied pace of five programs per week brutalizes producers and hosts alike, who end up going for the easy laugh and the cheap shot, an adolescent Three Stooges buffoonery. However, the dramatic structure of the talk show has been transcendently successful, taking over a huge expanse of television, from homey religious broadcasting to swoony cosmetics infomercials and chatty shopping channels.
The meteoric rise of issue-oriented talk radio, typified by Rush Limbaugh, has also drained creative energy from TV talk shows. Radio's faster, more aggressive mode of participatory democracy has made television talk seem cumbersome, predictable, and overcontrolled. The tone of daytime TV talk has gradually changed, as the shows have gravitated toward a younger as well as a more working-class audience -- a process also discernible in big-budget general-release movies, with their violent action-adventures and special-effects-crammed science fiction.
If anything, television produces indolence, passivity, and voyeurism, not criminality.
Daytime talk shows now resemble stunt wrestling, stockcar racing, or video games. Colorful confrontationalism and quick, bruising skirmishes are the rule. Psychologists (Dr. Joyce Brothers was the beaming prototype) are carted out like priestly confessors to dispense bromides and give dramatic closure, but they are relatively peripheral to the shows' fascinating panorama of contemporary sociology. Nowhere else do lower-middle-class and working-class citizens have such direct access to coast-to-coast communications. Every race and region is represented among talk show guests, with their rich backwoods accents or hip, mean-streets attitude.
The lofty moral critique of the Bennett coalition is too full of prissy bourgeois assumptions about "good taste." Daytime TV is no more offensive than the sex-and-crime tabloids of19th-century immigrant-era yellow journalism. Working-class style is inherently brasher, louder, more flamboyantly expressive, and physical to the point of pugilism. Throughout history, the doyennes of etiquette and propriety have scorned working-class behavior as "coarse," "common," and "vulgar" -- which literally means "of the people." As in raunchy early rock and roll, tastelessness is pop culture's most revolutionary weapon against bourgeois repression.
In 1973, while teaching at my first job in Vermont, I picked up the phone at
home to hear a fierce, rural woman's voice announce, "You leave my husband
alone!" It took some doing to convince her that she had the wrong number.
But I knew that I had had a tantalizing glimpse of the ancient, riveting,
shamelessly public tribal drama of bimbos, man-eaters, cheating,
husband-stealing, and scratch-her-eyes-out cat fights that were the stuff of
country ballads and trashy films -- and that would soon flower in that
supremely populist American art form, the daytime TV talk show.