Beavis and Butt-head save America's youth!
By sneering along with the B-boys, kids learn to mistrust creepy commercial manipulation
By DAN KENNEDY
A prodigiously endowed exotic dancer named Pam tells Montel Williams why she teaches "sex secrets" to her 14-year-old daughter. Among the topics on Mom's syllabus: how to perform fellatio, and an introduction to sex toys. "When she's 16 and starts dating," explains Pam, nearly falling out of her too-tight red satin gown, "I don't want any guy who's more experienced pulling the wool over her eyes."
Cut to the studio of "Talk Soup," the E! cable channel's nightly roundup of lowlights from the previous day's talk shows. "In the event of an emergency," smirks the boyish host, John Henson, perfectly turned out in designer slackerwear, "Pam could be used as a flotation device."
Over on MTV, the Toadies are slashing through "Possum Kingdom," with its repetitious opening line "Make up your mind/Make up your mind." Cut to the living-room couch, where Beavis and Butt-head offer running commentary. "I already made up my mind," says Butt-head. "This sucks." Later, during a dark, pompous, empty video, Beavis asks, "What are we watching, Butt-head?" The reply: "Nothing."
Welcome to postmodern media, a distinctively 1990s phenomenon in which existing content is cut up and repackaged so that it takes on an entirely different meaning. As Douglas Rushkoff puts it in "Media Virus! Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture," "Most of the media is the media commenting on media commenting on media." It's everywhere, from camp humor ("Mystery Science Theatre 3000") to lowbrow entertainment ("America's Funniest Home Videos"), from the halls of justice (Court TV) to the mean streets (any rap song that cops a riff). We live in a pop culture that has no frame of reference other than itself, and postmodernism is its ultimate expression.
"Talk Soup" and "Beavis and Butt-head" are unique in their subversiveness. In the first instance, lesbian nun motorcyclists on shows such as "Rolonda," "Jerry Springer," and "Gordon Elliott," meant to shock and titillate their low-income, uneducated daytime viewers, are brought back in the evening for a curtain call, this time as farce. In the second, music videos that are usually presented as wet dreams come to life for horny adolescents, or as desperately serious work by desperately serious artistes, are deconstructed in the most scatalogical of terms.
The way the two shows work, though, is quite different. "Talk Soup," despite its sheen of fun and Henson's comedic touch, carries with it a vicious subtext aimed at its mainly yuppie audience: "Here's what the unemployed were doing all day while you were out busting your ass." The emphasis is on freak shows: love triangles featuring obese, inarticulate black people (blacks are disproportionately represented on daytime talk shows -- a sign, perhaps, that the spirit of "Amos 'n' Andy" still lives); identical twins who enjoy "practical jokes" such as sleeping with each other's boyfriends; and a multiply pierced ex-con gang member named "Frostbite," who explains to Sally Jessy Raphael what a bad idea it would be to piss her off. "I'll take out your home, your family, your kids," she says, her voice rising for dramatic effect. "If you got it, I want it. It's mine."
The appeal of "Talk Soup," says Northeastern University sociologist and TV-talk expert Jack Levin, is that "we can look down our noses at these shows without really admitting that we like them." Ultimately, "Talk Soup" preaches a sneering sort of hatred, reinforcing attitudes that let us casually dismiss problems like poverty and crime as products of the warped world of daytime TV.
By contrast, "B&B" is aimed at the same adolescent headbangers who already watch MTV. Thus, Beavis and Butt-head's emergence as the Siskel and Ebert of music videos is empowering, even liberating; the show helps kids resist manipulation at the hands of powerful commercial interests that play on their sexual longings, their insecurities, and their angst. When Dr. Dre makes off with an airplane, Butt-head speculates that he's going to unload it at a yard sale. When Henry Rollins screams out "Low Self-Esteem," the boys make fun of his tattoos and his bulging neck muscles. When Courtney Love writhes her way through "Violet," Beavis offers crude, sophomoric jokes about the name of her band, Hole.
This is irony as education, and it's subtly powerful stuff. It's hard to imagine any kid who's a regular "B&B" watcher ever taking music videos seriously again. Let the cultural warriors howl: "Beavis and Butt-head" teaches teenagers more about how media conglomerates prey upon their emotions than any family-values lecture will.
Dan Kennedy is the media reporter for the Boston Phoenix.