I Like to Watch

Nov. 19, 2006 | Americans savor the mythology of winners and losers. We love to declare people winners, then lament their fall to loser status, then pick them up and dust them off and call them winners again.

As long as someone falls in the "winner" category, we embrace them unconditionally, set them high on a pedestal, create a rich fable out of their rise to victory and celebrate their shortcomings as if they're strengths. But the second a winner's popularity slides, either on the retail shelves or in the theaters or in the polls or in the media, we shake our heads in faux-sympathy and then outline why their decline into loserdom was inevitable: Mistakes were made. Tragic flaws were there all along, poised to ruin everything. A taste for junk food or loose women is enough to knock a natural-born winner into the loserly gutter; a streak of luck or a bestseller is enough to bestow a coke-addled moron or an angry sociopath with endless praise and accolades. We gladly rewrite history over and over again, depending on whether a person is winning or losing at the moment.

The oppressive importance of winning is the root cause of the disingenuous nature of our culture. Whether you're winning or losing, it's crucial that you give the world the impression that you're winning, and winning big. When those in the spotlight -- politicians, musicians, actors, business leaders -- hint at the slightest weakness, the masses react with confusion and dismay. "Does this mean he/she is a loser?" we ask each other, befuddled. Stock prices fall, records don't sell, "industry insiders" hint that careers are being mismanaged.

Honesty is the worst policy

Consider the most brutally honest public figure of the last 30 years: Jimmy Carter. Every time Carter opened his mouth and spoke the truth, the media declared him an unabashed loser. How fitting that he would lose to Ronald Reagan, the most transparently full-of-shit president in modern history and, not coincidentally, the president most universally embraced by a culture that begs to be spoon-fed sugary lies. Reagan knew how to tell Americans what they wanted to hear: "We're winners, we're winning! If we keep stockpiling nukes, we'll be winners forever and ever!" Yes, every mushroom cloud has a silver lining.

But when you've told the world that you're winning and you're a winner and everything is going according to plan, over and over again, and obviously everything is going to hell in a hand basket, eventually the public is going to catch on. That's when you have to take drastic measures, usually by blaming your losses on outside parties, then distancing yourself from those losers.

Recently, a herd of deadbeats got the boot: Britney dumped K-Fed, Reese Witherspoon dumped Ryan Phillippe, Bush dumped Rumsfeld, and the country dumped the Republican majority in the House and the Senate. These rude dismissals afforded the involved parties an opportunity to redefine themselves as winners: Britney is clearly headed for a post-Federline makeover and an upsurge in popularity, Bush is likely to sell us on a "humbled" version of himself, and Democrats are sure to trumpet their new, aggressive reimagineering of the country. Winners once more! Winners all around!

Our popularity depends on our ability to serve up delusional optimism on command, resulting in a culture of strained smiles and forced cheer. Looking on the bright side, though, this patently fake climate ensures the cultivation of generation after generation of angry, bile-spewing rebels, clutching "Catcher in the Rye" to their chests, hunching their shoulders and gritting their teeth in disgust over the misfortune of growing up in a nation of professional cheerleaders. These misfits may not smell very good, but at least they recognize that the rest of us are patently fake and untrustworthy.

Think win-win

What's particularly nice is that many of these foul-smelling, hunchy-shouldered revolutionaries and suspicious, pissed-off alternative types have grown up and decided to make some money in the patently fake and untrustworthy TV industry. Gone are the grinning geezers that brought us '70s and '80s programming, with its insistence that every story feature at least one clear winner and a big, important, heartwarming moral at the end, replaced by people like Aaron Sorkin and Rob Thomas and J.J. Abrams, people who one suspects spent their formative years shuffling around in Army surplus jackets, pouting and replaying "London Calling" and "I Wanna Be Your Dog" on their walkmen so that everyone would leave them the hell alone once and for all.

Naturally the bed-headed, walkman-wearing demographic has a soft spot for losers and a suspicion toward winners, thus do we find a proliferation of stories on TV about the absurd importance of winning in American culture, and our culture's fickle, skin-deep responses to loss and victory. On NBC's "Friday Night Lights" (8 p.m. Tuesdays), for example, a high-school football coach in a small town in Texas is either reviled or widely embraced by the townspeople, depending on whether the team did well in the last game it played. Even when coach Taylor (Kyle Chandler) is winning, though, the rewards are bittersweet because the same people who praise him were insulting him to his face when he lost the week before.

More important, though, the emotional heart of the show lies with the team's fallen quarterback, Jason Street, a nice-looking, lovable, all-American boy with an adorable cheerleader for a girlfriend. In the pilot episode, Street (Scott Porter) takes a hard tackle during the first game of the season and ends up in a hospital bed, paralyzed from the waist down. Instead of treating us to the "You can do it!" clichés of a million-and-one late '70s and early '80s physical therapy and rehabilitation scenes ("Ice Castles" anyone?), Jason is brutally informed of his limitations day after day. In one particularly harsh scene, Jason and his girl make out, then the nurse comes in and dryly lets Jason know that he can't have sex, because semen could back up into his catheter and cause serious problems. Ah, yes! I'd love to watch footage of the professional cheerleaders of the world visibly flinching through that scene. The born winner's attempt to deal with being transformed into a "loser" -- at least through the lens of our shallow culture -- provides a vivid parable to contrast with the rather arbitrary struggle for victory on the football field.

Next page: The biggest losers of "Lost"