SALON

Community

Friday, Jul 7, 2000 7:19 PM UTC

Feeling lonely?

A Harvard prof blames TV and boomers, but the real culprits are bowling hoodlums, beer and big business.

By

The sound you hear on your MP3Lit audio clip is the flushing of “social capital” down the drain, the glub-glub of expiring citizenship, the death gurgle of American fraternity, sorority, reciprocity, solidarity and volunteer-fire-brigade togetherness.

In “Bowling Alone,” Harvard political scientist Robert D. Putnam crunches numbers to indicate that by just about every conceivable measure — from voter turnout and Sunday school attendance to the habits we report, the opinions we express and the fears we confide to pollsters, social scientists, people meters, time diaries and the “DDB Needham Life Style” archive — we are less inclined than we used to be to leave the house for any reason except work. Nor do we invite folks over as often for games of bridge, hands of poker, kinky sex or plotting coups. Since 1968, “civic engagements” of every sort have plunged by 20 to 40 percent across the American board, irrespective of race, creed, class, income, marital status and erogenous zones. Fewer of us trust our neighbors or our institutions, volunteer our time or energy, pitch in or help out. Whether for meetings of the school board, the union local, the Odd Fellows, the Boy Scouts or Hadassah, we are failing to show up. We even write fewer letters to editors and members of Congress.

Everywhere that Putnam looks, he sees a rising tide of apathy and a downward trajectory to “malaise.” In this unbrave new Malaisia, it’s not just that we are a third less likely to attend town meetings and donate blood than Americans were in the ’60s, or that we give a smaller percentage of our income to charity — that we are less Masonic, less Jaycee and less in league with women voters. If formal religious worship has fallen only 10 percent, participation in the social life of the church or the synagogue, from Bible studies to potluck picnics, has dropped by a third since the ’60s and a half since the ’50s. The figures are likewise down, by 10 to 20 percent in the past two decades, for fishing, hunting, camping, skiing, jogging, swimming, tennis, softball, football and volleyball. All the women playing sports (after Title IX) and all the children playing soccer (now that there are college scholarships), all the 12-steppers and all the New Age encounter groupies, don’t make up for huge defections elsewhere in the culture. More than twice as many adults have dropped out of league bowling in the past 20 years than have ever been in all of the self-help programs combined, including Weight Watchers and Alcoholics Anonymous.

While the gross numbers may be up for memberships in professional societies, the proportions are down, considering how many more professionals there are now. (For instance, the ratio of lawyers to the rest of us has doubled since 1970, maybe because the rest of us no longer trust anybody unless we have a legal contract plus our personal pit bull. But the American Bar Association’s “market share” of this excess fell a third in the same three decades.) The picture’s even bleaker if we look for members who do more than merely pay their dues. And don’t tell me that you’re a card-carrying member of the ACLU, the Children’s Defense Fund, Greenpeace and Amnesty International. So am I. And neither of us has gone to a single meeting of any of these organizations. Instead, we’ve written a check for a lobbying group with a professional staff in Washington or New York. We could be living right next door to each other and not know that we are “members” of the same interest group. We are, instead, “consumers” of a direct-mail cause.

In other words, like a bunch of hippies, we are dropping out. Unless, that is, we happen to have been born between 1910 and 1940 — in which case we belong to Putnam’s “long civic generation” and can be counted on to do a lot more good than those narcissistic baby boomers, who, when they aren’t pushing money through their modems, are probably watching soft porn on cable television. When handing out blame for our antisocial funk, Putnam assigns the biggest chunk to self-involved boomers, the next biggest to time-stealing television and smaller percentiles to mobility and urban sprawl (relocation, the lonely commute), financial anxiety (fear of falling, downsized syndrome), workplace blues (what we used to call the alienation of labor), working mothers (there goes the PTA) and a general agnosticism or paranoia about reality itself. He sees little evidence that the behavior of government, the decline of the traditional family or the advent of rap music and the Internet has much to do with it. He should at least have mentioned the designated hitter in American League baseball.

Of course, Putnam is guessing. And so will I.

It’s always fun to beat up on boomers with a stick. And they will certainly be sorry. They’ll be sorry, first of all, because joining a group is good for everybody. “Civic virtues,” Putnam notes, tend to “cluster.” If you belong to a service club, you’re more likely to volunteer in a meals-on-wheels or reading program, contribute to a library building fund and vote for a school or sewer bond. Thus, as if by shrewd investment, a single act of wandering into a “domain of sociability” multiplies to help create the social capital that trickles down to benefit education, health, seniors, children and the lonely, needy and strange. (My favorite odd datum in this fact-filled book is that people who listen to lots of classical music are more likely to attend Cubs games than people who don’t.)

The boomers will be even sorrier, second of all, because joining is better for body and soul. Medical studies suggest it’s healthier to get out of the house: “As a rough rule of thumb,” Putnam tells us, “if you belong to no groups but decide to join one, you cut your risk of dying over the next year in half. If you smoke and belong to no groups, it’s a tossup statistically whether you should stop smoking or start joining.”

Otherwise, move to North Dakota (for reasons I won’t go into, although Putnam does at length, North Dakota is a social-capital exception to the sullen rule of Malaisia) and wait for a revival of something like the Progressive movement that saved us from the social Darwinism of the Gilded Age almost exactly a century ago. (E-mail and Web bulletin boards could help if they encouraged us to meet face to face with like-minded strangers and raise some political hell.)

Rather touchingly, Putnam suggests that the goals of such a revival would be campaign finance reform and citizens who voted as if they were fans; reduction of the criminal discrepancy between rich and poor; a more family-friendly and community-congenial workplace; fewer cars and more pedestrians in our neighborhoods and public spaces; less television in our wired caves and more singalongs, theater festivals and break dancing in our streets. While he’s at it, I would like my Volkswagen bug back, the one with the daisies on it.

Thus ends the synopsis. Now begins the rant.

Let me say this about crybaby boomers. The reason they weep is that all that they wanted in the idealistic ’60s was social justice, racial harmony, peaceable kingdoms, multiple orgasms and Joan Baez. What they got, besides assassinations and the tantrums of the cadres, was Richard Nixon and AIDS.

Let me say this about television. Yes, the same people who own it also own everything else. And they commune with their mystical parts by the medium of ad agencies whose hypnotherapeutic practice is, as Barbara Ehrenreich once explained, to sell us cars by promising adventure and to sell us beer by promising friendship. And it is obviously not in the best commercial interests of such ownership to devote a lot of time to bad-news programs about declining cities, the race war, foreign-policy adventurism, indeterminate sexuality, corporate predation or anything else that readers of Putnam or Salon can be counted on to care about.

But the surprise is, if you actually watch television, it’s not as bad as it ought to be, and certainly not as bad as people like Putnam say it is. I’m not just talking about the remedial seriousness of public-television series like “Frontline” and “P.O.V.,” Bill Moyers on Iran-contra, Frederick Wiseman on public housing, Ofra Bickel on the satanic ritual abuse hysteria, “Tongues Untied” and “Eyes on the Prize.” Nor do I speak of C-Span’s pair of citizen bands, its basilisk eye on Congress and its book-chat programs. Nor Discovery’s remarkable miniseries on the CIA, David Halberstam’s History Channel account of the 1950s, Neal Gabler’s A&E meditation on Jews, movies and the American Dream, John Frankenheimer’s films for HBO and TNT on Attica and George Wallace, the development on premium cable of documentary units like HBO’s “America Uncovered” (capital punishment and homophobia) and Cinemax’s “Reel Life” (war crimes against Muslim women in Bosnia and the rape of Ecuador’s rain forest by American oil companies) and not even our very good fortune that distributorless movies like Anjelica Huston’s “Bastard Out of Carolina” and Adrian Lyne’s “Lolita” show up on Showtime.

Never mind any of this, and the Lifetime Women’s Film Festival, and Bravo’s exposis of journalists on junkets, and cable movies that take the risky sort of chances from which networks and public TV flinch. The fact remains that, in spite of Jerry Springer, commercial television, in its movies, its dramatic series and even its sitcoms, has more to tell us about common decency, civil discourse and social justice than big-screen Hollywood, big-time magazine journalism and most book publishers.

Seeking to please or distract as many people as possible, to assemble and divert multitudes, TV is famously inclusive, with a huge stake in consensus. Of course, brokering social and political gridlock, it softens lines and edges to make a prettier picture. But it is also weirdly democratic, multicultural, Utopian, quixotic and rather more welcoming of difference and diversity than the audience watching it. It has been overwhelmingly pro-gun control and anti-death penalty; sympathetic to the homeless and the ecosystem; alert to alcoholism, child abuse, spouse battering, sexual discrimination and harassment, date rape and medical malpractice. It was worried about AIDS as early as 1983 in an episode of “St. Elsewhere,” 10 years before Tom Hanks appeared in “Philadelphia.” And television — where the ad cult meets the melting pot to stipulate a colorblind consumer — may be the only American institution outside of the public schools to still believe in and celebrate integration of the races.

Until Harvard can explain why the nation got so mean while TV was telling us to be nicer to women, children, minorities, immigrants, poor people, sick people, old people, odd people and strangers, one of its professors shouldn’t say that “prevailing television coverage of problems such as poverty leads viewers to attribute those problems to individual rather than societal failings and thus to shirk our own responsibility for helping to solve them” — because it isn’t true.

And let me say this about bowling. In fact, even now, hardly anybody bowls alone. Bowling as we know it derives from an ancient Polynesian ritual called ula maika, in which stones were hurled at standing objects from a distance of 60 feet. Nobody knows why, but 60 feet it remains today. And since bowling got gentrified, with boys replaced by automatic pinsetters, alleys renamed “lanes” and the availability of slim-line plastic contour chairs in multiple pastel hues and compressed-air blowers to cool the warriors’ sweaty palms, it has become, as Putnam tells us, “the most popular competitive sport in America.”

Bowlers outnumber joggers and golfers by two to one, soccer players by three to one and tennis players by four to one. Ninety-one million of us bowled in 1996, 25 percent more of us than voted in the 1998 congressional elections. What pains Putnam is that fewer of us bowl as members of a team, in a league, in a domain of sociability where “cohorts” develop cooperative habits and skills. While the total number of bowlers in America increased 10 percent between 1980 and 1993, league bowling fell by more than 40 percent.

What he neglects to mention is that many of us who used to go bowling with our families, or on dates, were driven out of the game in the 1970s by the very leagues he celebrates (who monopolized most of the lanes) and the very teams whose dismemberment he mourns (who sneered at civilians). About these teams you should know that their principal business, in green Shantung jackets with Aztec serpent totems and bulging purple stretch pants, was to topple themselves with as many beers as soon as possible. As composer Frank Zappa once observed:

Consumption of beer leads to military behavior. One day you’re going to read about some scientist discovering that hops, in conjunction with certain strains of “yeast creatures,” has a mysterious effect on some newly discovered region of the brain, making people want to kill — but only in groups. With whisky, you might want to murder your girlfriend — but beer makes you want to do it with your buddies watching.

I am inclined to think that such groups have about as much civic virtue as, say, gangbangers, the Ku Klux Klan and the Michigan and Montana militias — all equally blotto on bottled bile. Putnam himself has observed that religious fundamentalists in general, and Operation Rescue activists in particular, are exceptions to the general trend toward Malaisian noninvolvement. Some of us are actually relieved that the annual membership renewal rate of the National Rifle Association is only 25 percent, that the Promise Keepers can no longer fill a football stadium and that the Christian Coalition and the Moral Majority are as much mail-order consumer causes as the National Audubon Society and the L.L. Bean catalog. Some of us moved to big cities in the first place to escape small-town book burners.

Anyway, with the ebbing of the leagues, those of us who have tried once more to bowl find to our astonishment that we are required to relinquish one of our own street shoes before we will be allowed to borrow, for a price, a pair of ratty rentals. They don’t trust us. Imagine that.

And so I come to my last big qualm about this fascinating and meticulous scorecard on “bonding” and “bridging,” machers and schmoozers, the rise of rap and the decline of newspapers, these 24 chapters, three appendixes, a hundred charts, a thousand footnotes, this encyclopedia of industrial averages of a market for meaning so bearish that the suicide rate for our youngsters has almost tripled. I wonder if some of our suspicion — of institutions, of groups and of strangers — hasn’t been thrust upon us like a lousy credit rating.

There is the insurance agency finding a reason to refuse our claim, the HMO deciding we have the wrong disease, the bank-owned credit card company compounding its own interest and the employer who listens in on our phone calls and voice mail, reads our e-mail and computer files, videotapes our workstation and sucks our blood to test for drugs. There is the corporate branding of our commons, the spin-doctor scripting of our public life and the malign neglect of our public schools. There is soft money, hate radio, the gated communities that instruct us what flowers to plant and which colors to paint our gingerbread houses, the malls that abolish our First Amendment right to free speech and assembly and, wherever we look, urban spaces increasingly militarized — what Mike Davis in “City of Quartz” called “the architectural policing of social boundaries” and “the totalitarian semiotics of ramparts and battlements.”

So determined was Los Angeles, you’ll remember, to make sure that its upscale downtown merchants would be forever safe from another Watts riot that, starting in the ’70s, it became a fortress, with corporate citadels and surveillance towers, elevated “pedways” and subterranean concourses, “tourist bubble” parks and panopticonic shopping strips, residential enclaves like hardened missile silos and libraries like dry-docked dreadnoughts. Add to this a pacification of the human-landfill poor in strategic-hamlet housing projects, urban Bantustans and Bedouin encampments on barricaded streets in inner-city neighborhoods bereft of public toilets (“crime scenes”) and zoned against cellphones and whistling, with barrel-shaped bus benches to make sure you can’t sleep on them, caged cash registers in convenience stores, bulletproof acrylic turnstiles in fast-food joints, metal detectors in hospitals, lockdowns in elementary schools and curfews that outlaw groups of more than two juveniles from “associating in public view” in their own front yards.

And, as Davis reported in his sequel to “City of Quartz,” “Ecology of Fear,” it worked. No sooner had Simi Valley acquitted the cops who rioted all over Rodney King than “sentient” buildings with mainframe brains went into prevent mode. Steel gates rolled down over entrances to the great bank towers, escalators froze, electronic locks sealed off pedestrian passages and a financial district prophylacticked against sans-culottes went on happily recycling Japan’s trade surplus into Southland turf and surf. Too bad about the Koreans. Too late for the rest of us.

Community for whom? It smells like team spirit. I look at what they have done to us and I am reminded of an old English proverb: “They agree like bells; they want nothing but hanging.”

John Leonard is the Culture Watch columnist for the Nation, media critic for "CBS Sunday Morning" and television critic for New York magazine. More John Leonard.

Friday, Mar 16, 2012 12:45 PM UTC

“Community’s” identity crisis

The show tones itself down for its mid-season return. It should just embrace its crazy, exhausting self

By Alison Brie as Annie (Credit: NBC/Jordin Althaus)

Confession: I have a case of “Community” fatigue. “Community,“ NBC’s low-rated, but passionately beloved, sitcom returned to the NBC lineup last night. It had been pulled from the schedule in December, kicking off another round of anxiety among fans, critics and the cast that the Greendale Study Group might not be back for a fourth season next fall. In the lead-up to last night’s episode, the “Community“ faithful hectored anyone and everyone who appreciates good television to help save the show and boost “Community“ to the ultimate goal, that longed-for TV state: six seasons and a movie.

“Community” is a wonderful, unique television show, ambitious and rare beyond measure, astonishing for the ways that it has bent and busted the limits of the genre and for the unflagging, unending energy with which it has done so. But the passion in certain parts— the parts where a TV critic spends her time— has reached such a pitch that just liking ”Community” feels inadequate. I imagine it’s a little bit like attending an N’ Sync concert in the late ’90s if you only sort of enjoyed “Bye Bye Bye.” Everyone around you would be screaming, fainting, eager to explain why this was the best boy band ever, and ready to get in a fist-fight if you had a bad word to say about Chris Kirkpatrick’s hair or how he seems a little fundamentally unlikable. (Please understand, I don’t mean to insult “Community” or its fans by comparing either to the boy band of yore. Have you seen what teenage girls are capable of, passion-wise? If “Community” had that kind of support, we’d be talking 20 seasons and eight movies.)

All this zeal is exhausting. And it makes me feel like a Grinch for saying that last night’s low-energy episode, “Urban Matrimony and the Sandwich Arts,” wouldn’t even make it onto the third volume of “Community’s” greatest hits. (But Britta’s hair did look very nice!)

In an interview “Community”-creator Dan Harmon did with the AV Club about last season, he confessed that in making 22 episodes of TV a year, some of the episodes just get crammed through to meet the schedule’s insane deadlines. (Keeping up with this frenetic pace is something all shows deal with.) Because last night’s was the first after such a long hiatus, and so carefully riffed on the show’s reputation for weirdness, it’s unlikely that this was one of those episodes, and yet … it played like one. Not every episode of “Community“ has to be a send-up of all action movies, created entirely in claymation, contain multiple different realities, or be a gonzo riff on “My Dinner With Andre,” but they are all supposed to be funny. I chuckled out loud twice (and actually clapped when Theo Huxtable danced to “Motown Philly”).

In many ways the episode was a very savvy, good faith, if probably not very successful, attempt to appeal to new viewers. The plot was as unalienating and classic as a comedy plot can be: It ended in a marriage. Shirley and her ex-husband Andre decide to get hitched again, just as Shirley and Pierce decide to start a sandwich business together. Britta ends up planning the wedding and realizes she’s very good at it; Jeff has to give the toast and realizes he’s very bad at it; Annie runs around trying to help people; and Abed and Troy decide to be “normal.” It is this last subplot — Troy and Abed’s attempt to “de-whimsify” themselves — that provides this episode with “Community’s” standard dose of meta-narrative. Troy and Abed are standing in for the show as it tries to behave in a “normal” way.

But just as Shirley’s husband, Andre (“The Cosby Show’s” Warner), doesn’t buy Troy and Abed’s attempts at normalcy — “Hey, man, you don’t have to be sarcastic,” he says to Abed — I’m not sure a newer viewer would either. By the end of this episode Britta is sobbing about how she’s destined to get married because it’s in her DNA (“This may shock you, Annie, but I come from a long line of wives and mothers”); Jeff is sobbing about how marriage is a lie; Pierce, in the Gordon Gekko outfit he’s been wearing all episode, is cackling drunkenly on his father’s grave; and Troy and Abed are talking like characters from “Inspektor Spacetime.”

“Community” is not normal, and being not normal is what it does best. However well executed the more muted episodes are, the big, insane spectacles are what make “Community” so special. At this point, it should play to its base, the people who know and love it for being so unconventional. Thankfully, at the end of the episode Troy admonished Abed, “We need to be weird!” So, presumably “Community“ will be back to full-weird and whimsy next week. I’ll rest up for it.

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Willa Paskin

Willa Paskin is Salon's staff TV writer. More Willa Paskin.

Friday, Jan 6, 2012 1:00 AM UTC

Can a 26-year-old MBA become a gardener? Is that cool?

I've got a BFA too, and I've run a nonprofit, but I want to do what makes me happy

By (Credit: Zach Trenholm/Salon)

Dear Reader,

After writing yesterday’s column,  and before heading out to watch “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” at the Sundance Kabuki (and before trying to figure it out), I saw a Dec. 12 “Vanguard” piece on Current TV about Occupy Wall Street in which correspondent Christof Putzel moves into Zuccotti Park. I was quite moved by a sequence  about Fetzer Mills, a retired Naval officer from a small town in Lauderdale County near Memphis, Tenn. It brought home the economic devastation that many people are experiencing firsthand.

So as my wife and I turned onto Geary Boulevard on our way to the movies, I thought about what it must be like to be living in a small town and watch the destruction of factories and stores that have been there your whole life. I realized how lucky I was to be employed and going to the movies. It occurred to me that my ideas about how an unemployed professor might cope with joblessness and “social death”  may sound hollow to somebody who’s out of a job and has watched his whole town fall apart.

It’s fine to help an individual cope, but where is the solution? Are all America’s jobless supposed to just sit and meditate and read sociology until things change?

It is not enough to just survive joblessness. We must work for collective political solutions.

My role at Salon is to write about how individuals face crises. But individual crises have roots in political conditions. I don’t share the belief that we can alter our fate simply by visualization, or chanting, or that it’s enough to get into therapy to cope with our misfortune. Bad things happen to good people for political reasons. Good people get screwed over by indifferent strangers thousands of miles away because laws and regulations allow it.

The capitalist world is full of peril. Government’s proper role is to regulate capitalism so its most savage effects are managed and its worst excesses prevented.

That’s what politics is for.

I am employed. I live in a house. One day soon it may be time to crawl into a tent and spend some time with my spiritual brothers and sisters on the front lines of a new and just movement for human dignity and reform. That’s how I feel about it.

Now on to today’s letter.

Cary, please help me.

I loved your latest column because I face a similar issue, but I am at a different phase in my life. I’m 26, married and unemployed. I’m not depressed; I enjoy life and my hobbies, but I don’t know what to do with my life. I have two degrees, some decent experience and no idea what I want to do. I don’t know exactly what I’m good at, so I go by what my husband and some people that I’ve worked with have said.  They say I’m good with people — a relationship builder. I’m a good communicator as well. I am articulate with a great vocabulary, and have worked a lot on my verbal presentation skills. I’ve also been told I’m a decent writer. I’m good at figuring things out and getting them done — a quick learner.

Well, what are my passions? Aside from reading a lot of advice columns, I want to become enlightened, I want to help people, and I want to help the creatures and plants on this earth. Being drawn to sunlight and plants, I worked at a greenhouse in high school, and later as a community garden coordinator (my first “real job”). I learned a lot in the two years as a garden coordinator because I was the only employee. I did fundraising, grant writing, community building, press stuff, and the basic work of the organization. It was a great experience, but I became cynical and soured quickly.

I have a BFA and an MBA, but I don’t have a passion for art anymore, and the business degree I got in order to help with the nonprofit administration, which I clearly didn’t continue with. I’ve done a lot of thinking about the things that I value in a job. I liked the readings that you linked to, especially the whole “work for meaning vs. work for money” dichotomy in “So what’s work?”

I have thought a lot about that, because I’ve never made enough money to survive in my entire life. (My social conditioning says that is pathetic, a comment I try very hard to ignore.) My husband makes enough money that we live comfortably and I’m extremely grateful for that. He thinks it’s safer not to be completely dependent on one income, and I agree.

It is for this reason that I want to work, but also because I want to contribute. I want to participate in life. I know above all, I want to work with nice people … but I need direction. I thought about getting a degree in horticulture, because that is the only thread I can follow in my very short “career.” But what in the hell am I going to do with that degree?

I’ve thought a lot about economics, which perplexes me, and I’ve thought about trying to change the entire field from the ground up. I have only taken one very basic course in this subject, mind you, so I’ve considered auditing some classes in the subject. I want to start a municipal compost program in my city, but I don’t work for the city, and I am a bit daunted by the task that I don’t know anything about, and the fact that there is no one lined up to pay me for it. So I’ve come up with some grandiose ideas about things I want to do, but “practically speaking” it just seems like a crazy fantasy that has nothing to do with an income. Cary, what should I do with my life?

In a Morass

Dear In a Morass,

You like gardens. You like helping people. You like working with money.

Gardens. People. Money. I suggest you follow a path back into the garden, where there are people and also money. There may also be education there. What if you could combine gardening, money, people and education? What if you could teach people about money using the garden as a foundation? What if you could create a nonprofit organization that teaches people how to manage their money by using the garden as a metaphor or experiential teaching ground? That would be interesting.

That’s one idea. There are lots of ideas. But you are in a prime place to do something extraordinary. You don’t have to limit yourself to dull, salary-making activities. Now is the time to dream up something unique and wonderful.

It’s not always going to be like this. Anything could happen. You could have a kid. Your husband could lose his job. One of you could become ill. This is a golden opportunity. So get with somebody who can help you plan and do the paperwork, and come up with something original and wonderful.

Now, ideas are cheap. Advice is cheap. This advice, in matter of fact, is free. And there’s a lot of advice on the Web. One thing I do that others don’t is I try to bring your attention to small events and decisions that may have long-lasting consequences. I look for the little swerves in life that we don’t realize we’re making.

For instance, your disheartening experience with community gardens. You may think that you simply came to some conclusions — that the nonprofit world sucks, that people are insane, etc. — but you may also have unconsciously plotted a path away from the very thing that makes you happy. So  it is crucial to look at this two-year community garden thing you did. First, appreciate it for how great it was. Really. It’s one of the coolest things imaginable. You may have understated just what an accomplishment it was.

Next, ask yourself exactly what happened. Were there conflicts with others? Did you get in a power struggle? Were you blindsided or betrayed in some way? Did the project fail, and did you experience feelings of grief and hopelessness at its failure? Did you see other people behaving in ways that are dishonorable, and did that sour you on working with others? Tease it out. It might help to write it out, maybe in the form of a 12-step inventory.

I really think you will benefit from examining in detail what happened, rather than closing it off as simply an experience that soured you and made you cynical.

Besides, if we look at the origins of cynicism, we see it taught that “the purpose of life was to live a life of Virtue in agreement with Nature.” So when you became “cynical,” it may be that you are seeing into the true nature of people — that they can be duplicitous, shallow, manipulative, mean-spirited, self-destructive, conniving, etc. True enough. Welcome to humanity. People are like that. That doesn’t need to make you bitter or dispirited.

The question is, How, therefore, shall I live?

You have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity right now to create something new, fun and wonderful, and to be in charge of it. I’ll bet there are foundations that would willingly fund an innovative program for helping people learn how to manage their money, meet their neighbors and grow vegetables at the same time.

Like I say, it’s just one of many ideas. The main thing is, follow what you  love. It will lead you to what you need. And you’ll end up helping others along the way. As you work, you will experience setbacks. At times, nothing will make sense. At times, you will wonder if you’ve done the right thing. No one job or path is going to eliminate worry or uncertainty or random misfortune. But your best bet is to seize the opportunity right now and follow what you love.

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Cary Tennis

Cary Tennis writes Salon's advice column, leads writing workshops and creative getaways, publishes books, plays guitar, performs in art galleries, writes an occasional newsletter and tweets as @carytennis.

Join Cary's Online Writing Workshops More Cary Tennis.

Friday, Nov 18, 2011 5:30 PM UTC

Stop the remakes!

NBC's new "Munsters" reboot spells the end of civilization -- or at least the death of all original ideas

By The Munsters (Credit: IMDB)

Should you have ever believed that there couldn’t possibly be any more entertainment barrel yet to be scraped, remember this: NBC has just approved a pilot for a remake of “The Munsters.” Yes, the sitcom about a wacky monster family, a show that has been off the air since 1966, is returning at last. Naturally, this new version will “have a darker and less campy feel” than the Vietnam War-era original. Well, that makes it sound awesome. And NBC is the network that put “Community” on ice while giving “Whitney” a pickup — so I, the viewer, trust its taste implicitly!

It might be a hopeful sign that the show will be overseen by Bryan Fuller, who created the imaginative, not completely awful “Pushing Daisies.” Less hopeful: Fuller is also developing a show based on “Silence of the Lambs.” This undoubtedly essential “Munsters” update comes in the midst of an unprecedented glut of reboots and reimaginings, all thick with the promise that No, really, this will be very different. It will creepy and full of action and with a feminist theme. You know what’s really different? A stinkin’ original idea.

We have already endured the small-screen update of “Charlie’s Angels” and the cinematic revival of “Footloose” – both of which, by the way, died on the vine. Broadway is now almost exclusively revivals, “jukebox musicals,” and stuff based on old Whoopi Goldberg movies. We will soon be treated to both a new “21 Jump Street” and “Dark Shadows.”

Other classics also up for a fresh look: “Godzilla,” which you may recall, fared so well last time someone attempted it.  “The Crow.”  “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.”  “Woody Woodpecker.” Leonardo DiCaprio is currently considering a “Six Million Dollar Man” remake. Oh, and “rehearsal is for fags” impresario Brett Ratner may be redoing “The Last American Virgin.”  I know I don’t catch everything going on with the young folk, but has there been a great national longing that translates into “Give the people another ‘Last American Virgin’!”? Have you seen the original? It’s no “Porky’s.” Quite frankly, it’s not even “Zapped!”

Tired old ideas aren’t just spawning like Duggars, they’re being cloned. There are currently two “dark and less campy” television dramas based on old fairy tales — “Grimm” and “Once Upon a Time.” There are two competing Snow White movies coming out in 2012, “Snow White and The Huntsman” and “Mirror Mirror.” Both, of course, feature a totally kickass Snow White who doesn’t waste her time trilling to little birds. She’s busting heads! Even “The Munsters” will find itself vying for NBC’s attention against another pilot the network has approved: “Frankenstein.”  (Not to be confused with the movie of “I, Frankenstein,” also currently in the works.) There are 300 million people in America. And four ideas.

Humans have always had a natural inclination toward returning to the same stories. It’s why the plays of Aristophanes continue to be performed, why vampire tales still ignite the imagination, why “Doctor Who” never goes out of style. I’m not convinced, however, that’s why remakes of “Get Smart” and “The A-Team” happen.  Every time a television show or movie gets underway, millions of dollars and hundreds of careers are on the line. It’s understandable that a seemingly sure thing would have more allure than something riskier. (Again I say, “Community.”) And sure, Hollywood has had a self-sucking parasite for eons. That element of terribleness existed even before Ernest made that “Beverly Hillbillies” movie all those years ago.

But all you have to do is sit through the trailers at the next movie you attend, or read what the network midseason replacements include, and you’ll feel a little bit of contact death of the soul, a plague emanating from somewhere deep in the bowels of L.A. But I can’t be alone in saying that I don’t want to watch a movie because I saw it 20 years ago. And I sure as hell don’t want to watch it because it was a crap TV series 20 years ago – no matter how edgy anyone promises that reboot of “Hangin’ With Mr. Cooper” will be.

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Mary Elizabeth Williams

Mary Elizabeth Williams is a staff writer for Salon and the author of "Gimme Shelter: My Three Years Searching for the American Dream." Follow her on Twitter: @embeedub. More Mary Elizabeth Williams.

Wednesday, Sep 28, 2011 10:30 PM UTC

An interview with the dean of “Community”

Dan Harmon, the hit sitcom's creator, talks to Salon about comedy, agony, paintball, "The Simpsons" and "Glee"

By "Community" creator Dan Harmon (l) and castmembers Alison Brie and Danny Pudi(Credit: AP/Matt Sayles, NBC)

NBC’s “Community” (Thursdays, 8 p.m./7 Central) is one of the most deceptively light shows on network television — a seeming spoof of pop culture and pop obsessives that’s as densely imagined as the world of “The Simpsons,” and that has a lot more on its mind than movie and TV quotes and self-referential devices. 

Last week I interviewed the show’s creator, Dan Harmon. Our wide-ranging conversation covered many of the expected areas: his sense of humor, his influences, behind-the-scenes production anecdotes, and hints of episodes to come. But it also delved into more elusive and heady issues: the role of pain and humiliation in comedy; the question of how self-referential a show can get without destroying our ability to sympathize with its characters; and the influence of “The Simpsons” and — yes, really — “Gilligan’s Island” on “Community.” It’s also the only interview I’ve ever done with a TV showrunner who casually dropped the word “vestigial.”

Now that we’ve waded into the show’s third season, I wanted to ask you what sort of reaction Season 2 got from the show’s fans. This series is closely watched and obsessively scrutinized.

I guess my perspective on fan reaction is distorted because I don’t scour the Internet for objective appraisals of the show. I pretty much sit on Twitter, which is about 99 percent positive emotional energy slung at you by fans in 140-character bursts. That’s why it feels secure to me, because it balances my self-loathing and fear. I can kind of work in a vacuum. To me the reaction to the second season is about the same as [Season 1], which is people saying “It’s great,” mainly, and one guy per month going, “You’re fat!” and “Your show is stupid!”

If you were asked, “How much of a spoof is this show, or how serious is it?” would you even have an answer?

I don’t suppose I would. It’s not really a spoof of the sitcom format, I guess, because the sitcom format is being as much honored and appreciated by the show as it is sometimes rattled by the show’s energy. If there is a consciousness drawn to the frame around the show, it’s never to suggest that the frame shouldn’t be there. It’s always just making use of the medium. There are a lot of nice things that the format can do for you as a storyteller. I don’t know — the canvas, its paint swirls outward, and then sort of blends with the the frame, and makes it easier for me to accept that this is a two-dimensional thing hanging on the wall.

You guessed it correctly — my answer is boring and pretentious!

Well, not necessarily, though. While rewatching Season 2 in preparation for this interview, I was struck by how in the second season, you seemed to push further and further and further into a kind of self-conscious, metafictional, at times almost abstract kind of direction. And yet it still seemed very sincere. There were moments where I thought, “There is no possible way I can feel anything for these people, because what’s happening has no weight,” then I found myself getting a little choked up at times. It’s strange, that dynamic.

That’s exactly — well, I shouldn’t say the intention, but it’s certainly what I hope will be the case when I’m driving to work. I am constantly assuring people that that can be the case, so they’ll trust me and stuff.

I grew up watching TV. Saying something is TV is like saying it’s a sonnet or a haiku. It’s got its rules, and those rules, when obeyed, are part of what makes the thing beautiful. You use it to communicate to someone. If you say, “This is a sonnet I wrote for you,” then you better not give them a limerick. If you say, “This is a limerick that I wrote for you,” you’re using that medium. This is a sitcom for everybody, and it’s through that medium, the sitcom, that I’m saying, “This is what humanity has been to me, for 38 years.” So yeah, you’re seeing something that is supposed to be kind of alienating and snarky, yet there’s this weird guy behind it all who is saying, “This is how I am communicating with you.” That’s why the show is neither spoof nor humble servant to its medium.

I did “Heat Vision and Jack” in 1999 with Rob Schrab, and that was us going, “We love ‘Knight Rider.’” But a spoof? That’s why we have that word “homage.” Homage means you’re actually worshiping something and obeying it. It can easily be taken as satire, but it’s not satirical.

There’s also a sense in which nothing that happens on this show is quote-unquote “real.” The community college where the action takes place obviously doesn’t bear any relation to any community college that has ever existed. A friend of mine was trying to explain to somebody who didn’t like or get the show and found the whole thing totally ridiculous what he believed the show was. And he said, “It’s really science fiction.” This college is real in the way that the island was real on “Gilligan’s Island.”

Right!

Which is to say, it’s not.

That’s a perfect example, “Gilligan’s Island.” Because here’s the thing: We could talk about whether or not the “Cheers” bar was a realistic depiction of a bar, and everybody would understand the difference between TV and reality in that respect, because even the characters’ hair looks nice, and a bar seems like a nice place to be. But then you talk about “Gilligan’s Island” versus reality, and people are turning invisible, and people are swimming in fast motion because they’re trying to get off the island, and reality itself is kind of being disregarded because they’re on Gilligan’s island.

That’s one of the greatest examples of a show that had to create its own system of physics to tether the audience to. The key to its success is the cleanliness [of the writing of] the characters. Mr. Howell was always Mr. Howell, and he was always Mr. Howell in relation to the Skipper, and the Skipper was always the Skipper in relation to Gilligan. So this crystalline pattern is there that you can always, always rely on, just as you could always rely on Charles Schulz’s “Peanuts” characters and Jim Henson’s Muppet characters.

There was a “Cheers” board game that I saw in a Toys R Us once. It made me realize, “Holy shit — if your characters are really, really clean, if you start with cartoons, with icons, the relationships between them become so real, through the dependable cause/effect science of, ‘If I say something mean to you, your feelings are hurt.’”

Yes.

Ginger can hurt Gilligan’s feelings, she can make him feel like a terrible person, and those can be the stakes of an episode. And not only can you do real stories then, in a wacky environment, it makes a statement if you do it in such profound contrast. You find yourself thinking, as you said earlier, “I know I’m not supposed to believe this, and yet I do.” You’re not supposed to believe that Peter Pan is coming in this window and saying, “Come to this place,” but you do. The emotional gravity can tether you, and reality can be a balloon. It’s pretty nuts.

What you’re talking about reminds me of when I was a kid and I would play with stuffed animals or action figures or Tonka Trucks, and imbue them with personalities and have them talk.

Yes.

I might have them be really, strongly at odds with one another, and I would really be feeling it, to the point where it almost became like my own little kid version of acting. That quality of almost-anthropomorphism is there in these characters from “Community.” There are times when I almost feel like you could be doing it as an animated show. It strongly reminds me of early “Simpsons” episodes. That running gag on “The Simpsons” where they won’t tell you where Springfield is. It somehow has mountains and a beach. There’s a canyon there, too. And you just accept it.

That’s exactly the case with Greendale, by the way. It is technically part of the canon that they’re in Colorado somewhere, if I’m not mistaken. The reason for that is, sometimes on-screen you’ll see like, a driver’s license, and because it has to be from a state, we decided to use the state of Colorado, which is just my code for “in the middle of somewhere.”

But I learned from “The Simpsons” to keep that kind of thing somewhat vague. Where is Greendale? It’s down the street from your house. Why put it anywhere more specific? That’s from “The Simpsons.” And those characters being dependable, growing the universe outward from a simple family … and of course, the timing of the comedy! You had these really great Harvard Lampoon writers who were suddenly unshackled to write setups and punch lines and deliver them with scientific precision, because the characters were being drawn for them. There’s a whole generation of comedy writers that’s basing its sense of timing on that one animated show.

There were times in the second season when it seemed as though you were pushing into more serious territory. Philosophical and at times almost cosmological territory. My favorite was probably the “Pulp Fiction” episode. But I was rewatching the two paintball episodes — “A Fistful of Paintballs” and “For a Few Paintballs More” — that ended Season 2, and those seemed to have some of those qualities, too.

A ll the other flights of fancy on the other somewhat experimental episodes are anchored to something tangible — it’s a fantasy, it’s a reflection of one character’s internal state, what have you. But there is no rational, scientific explanation for why, in those two episodes, the “Community” universe has totally changed and the show has suddenly become a hard-edged action movie, or why there’s a super-villain in an ice cream cone costume giving the orders to attack the heroes. And at a certain point you’re like, “Why is he still wearing the suit?” It started out as a disguise, but after a certain point he doesn’t have to wear a disguise anymore. But he’s still wearing it!

[Laughs] Right! He chooses to keep wearing the suit. That’s the funny thing about people on TV — they can kind of choose to be insane, because it helps them to create an insane reality.

You almost got into Luigi Pirandello territory with the “Pulp Fiction” episode. And in the paintball episodes, there were some pretty profound personal issues being worked out between Chevy Chase’s character, Pierce Hawthorne, and the other characters in the study group, and the working-out just happened to occur in this kind of skewed universe that was like a spaghetti western in the first episode and a sci-fi war movie in the second.

Well, it’s definitely not that way because I ever come to work in the morning thinking, “I want to do an episode of television that changes the way people think or feel about everything!” I take my job as a pacifier of an existing society very seriously. I first want to make people comfortable and entertained. I don’t want to subvert their consciousness at all.

But then what happens is, stories are about people changing. They are about people realizing things and revealing things to each other. That has to feel a little profound, relative to the characters. So what we end up doing is taking our job as storytellers seriously, and saying [to each other], “This should feel as if something new is happening to this character.”

In order to do that with a character like Abed, who is so smart — and so on-the-same-level as the writers, and perhaps in some ways above them — now you have to become cosmological, because it’s the only way to tell a story in which a character like Abed becomes revelatory.

It’s just us trying to mine our salt. Sometimes it takes on an artistic air by definition.

Role-playing seems to be a very important aspect of all the episodes to some degree. Oftentimes, during the regular course of business in any given episode, the characters will be asked to pretend to be something that they would not otherwise think of themselves as being. And the upshot of that is, you get to see the actors try on different personas. In the “Pulp Fiction” episode, there were a couple of points where Danny Pudi actually seemed to be channeling Andre Gregory’s performance in “My Dinner With Andre,” while at the same time remaining recognizably Abed.

Yeah! And that’s really interesting to see.

That’s the one Emmy snub that hurt the hardest. I’m pretty sure we submitted that episode hoping that Danny would be considered for supporting actor.

You’d probably have to be a pretty hardcore fan of the show to even know this, but that performance is not just about Abed putting on a mask and being good at doing an imitation for the length of an episode. In that episode, you can actually track, by percentages, the changes, and see that by the middle of the episode he’s starting to be about 50 percent Abed and 50 percent Andre Gregory. And then you see him be 70 percent, and then 90 percent, and then suddenly 0 percent Andre Gregory! That’s pretty astounding to watch.

It is. And I think viewers are so knocked out by what’s happening with Abed that they may not notice that something similarly deep is happening to Joel McHale’s character, Jeff Winger, at that dinner. He discloses a level of insecurity and self-loathing to Abed that’s rather alarming.

We agonized over that. Well, I shouldn’t say agonized, because that’s the wonderful thing about story structure — you know there’s always an answer to any problem you have, and once you find it, it kind of relieves the pressure from you. But it could be backbreaking work, trying to figure out the criss-cross at that dinner table. I think we did a good job of finding that [moment for Jeff].

But more important, we were sending [pages] down to that set, and I don’t know how [the director] Richard Ayoade and Joel McHale and Danny Pudi — the three-member team that was at the center of that episode — managed to operate almost completely independently of the writers who were writing Abed’s “Cougar Town” monologue a thousand yards away in a stinky room.

Richard and I communicated a lot before he started shooting, and a little bit afterward. But during, he was just making one piece of this thing. He and Joel and Danny Pudi really saved my bacon on that episode.

Are there any rules that absolutely have to be observed during the writing of an episode, or any lines that cannot be crossed? Or is anything fair game?

In point of fact, we often stumble across things. We will realize all of a sudden that we’ve been thinking in terms of rules, and we take that opportunity to stop, during that moment, and ask ourselves why those things are rules.

I hope the statute of limitations on offending people has run out on this, because I need to give a particular example, which is that the first season’s paintball episode was the end result of a conversation that began with a thought experiment asking the very question that you just asked me.

I said, “Take the top no-no. Is it possible to do a Columbine episode? Is it possible to have shootings in a school? Is there a way to get away with that without offending anybody?” And then somebody said, “Well, paintball would be an example.” The thought experiment ended there, but that’s where the question led us. That conversation led there.

I think those conversations are important from a Norman Lear perspective, too, because a lot of the stuff you’re not allowed to do, doing maybe 20 percent of it might lead to some kind of social revelation or something, I don’t know.

Again, that’s not our job. But, I think that you have to ask yourself what the rules are, and why they’re there, in order to shore the ones up that are important, and get rid of the ones that have become vestigial.

Might one of those rules be that characters in a comedy cannot suffer too much real, extreme physical pain?

I don’t think that’s an unbreakable rule.

There is a school of thought that says that agony is the enemy of light comedy.

There is something behind the statement you’re suggesting that is absolutely true. We don’t want to just watch pain and feel like we’re just watching it. But the fact that we don’t want to watch pain means that we need to turn away from it, which in turn means that energy could be tapped into, and somehow manipulated to make you believe that a character is real.

When Dick van Dyke comes into his living room and flips over the ottoman, we don’t call that pain anymore. But there was a time when people tripping on shit and falling down was an easy way to make people laugh. They’re falling down and scraping their knee and stuff — it became a comedic device. It became slapstick. You can make the audience like a character by having them be clumsy, because we have all been in situations beyond our control, and you can identify with a character who’s hurting, who’s getting dumped for no reason, or smacking their head on a doorway, or tripping in front of the president.

But if you’re talking about waterboarding, or having a character have nails driven through his skin, how can you turn that into comic gold? I’m not sure that you can. But you never know.

Have there been any ideas for episodes that were abandoned because they were either too complicated in terms of their imagining, or too expensive to stage?

That’s a good question. I’ve never been asked that before.

I thought of this while watching the paintball episodes, where it looked as though you covered your whole existing set in these Jackson Pollock paint splatters. Also the “Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas” episode, which was stop-motion animated, a very different type of production from what you usually do.

Yeah — that kind of stuff is totally expensive.

I’m trying to think of something we thought of, only to realize, “We can’t do that until we have more resources.” The only thing I can think of is to do a “Glee” type of episode, and be able to do it sufficiently, including doing these outrageously expensive, real pop music covers. We could never get that done. They have a machine over there [at "Glee"] that is designed to succeed at that. And we could never do it. If I thought I could wave a magic wand and do an episode that was kind of like what they do on “Glee,” I’m one of the many people in this town that would immediately do it.

Have you ever considered something like that? In the flashbacks-that-weren’t-really-flashbacks episode, there was a musical interlude that I liked pretty well, and that I hoped would go on longer than it did.

Well, I may have a little surprise for you this year. You never know.

Are you talking about the musical bit that opened the Season 3 premiere? Or do you have something more elaborate planned down the line?

Something else planned down the line.

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Matt Zoller Seitz

More Matt Zoller Seitz.

Friday, Jul 15, 2011 5:16 PM UTC

Alison Brie: Buttoned-up sex bomb

Why the "Community" star is television's baddest good girl

By Actress Alison Brie attends a special screening of "The Decision", a short film promoting the John Frieda Precision Foam Colour hair product at LAVO on Tuesday, March 22, 2011 in New York. (AP Photo/Evan Agostini)(Credit: Evan Agostini)

She didn’t snag an Emmy nomination Thursday — despite being in the cast of both a beloved comedy and a critically acclaimed drama series. But “Community” and “Mad Men’s” Alison Brie is nonetheless having a swell week. 

First, a clip of her doing a rocking karaoke duet of “Total Eclipse of the Heart”  last month with Emily Blunt in Ann Arbor, Mich., went viral, proving her adorable shamelessness knows no bounds. Then GQ answered America’s prayers and served up a black lingerie-clad Brie getting spanked with the business end of a hairbrush by her “Community” costar Gillian Jacobs.  Take that, Betty White. 

What is it about the fresh-faced Brie that makes her such a standout? Well, the looks don’t hurt. Like Katy Perry, she’s got the kind of doe eyes and formidable rack that would make a manga character jealous.  But more than that, Brie isn’t just another hot chick lucky enough to land on a sitcom. 

In her relatively short career, the 27-year-old actress has managed to carve out a distinctive niche for herself as the most winningly uptight woman on television. On “Mad Men,” her buttoned-up Park Avenue princess, Trudy Campbell — the Charlotte York of the Beatles era — has dazzling, youthful spark, touching naiveté and, increasingly, deep wells of inner strength. But it’s on “Community,” as the studiously “irony-free” Annie Edison, a woman who boasts, “I like being repressed! I am totally comfortable with being uncomfortable with my sexuality!” that Brie really shines. Troy and Abed may get all the attention, but Annie is the show’s most reliably warped scene-stealer. 

In letting her often exasperating characters fall just shy of unlikable, Brie somehow manages to make them vulnerable and real and eminently appealing. How can you not love a lady whose “Community” back story of losing her virginity to a gay man, in a closet, to the strains of Madonna’s “Erotica,” was based on a mortifying incident from Brie’s own freewheeling college years?  That she’d turn her sexual disaster into a comic bit is hilarious, that it happened in the first place is close to brilliant. 

What makes Brie fantastic is her unique knack for being smart, sexy and utterly weird at the same time. She brings to mind Susan Sarandon’s Janet Weiss — a woman who’s one part uppity priss, one part wanton sexpot. Few performers of either gender could get away with her commitment to playing both parts so convincingly — and be so wickedly funny while doing it. And though she may not get awards for it, there’s nobody else out there so beautifully comfortable being uncomfortable.

 

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Mary Elizabeth Williams

Mary Elizabeth Williams is a staff writer for Salon and the author of "Gimme Shelter: My Three Years Searching for the American Dream." Follow her on Twitter: @embeedub. More Mary Elizabeth Williams.

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