Humor and Critique

A delay in posting--it was the first week back at UDM of the winter term, with the usual first-week craziness. I've been watching some old Monty Python television episodes, with their jumpy shifts between film and video, their stories-within-stories-within-stories, and their rampant self-reflexivity. I remember watching these when I was a kid, and wondering when one skit was ending and another beginning. Characters spilled around from one skit to another; there seemed to be no center to the episodes.

Movies like Blazing Saddles were the same way: everything at the end of that movie undid everything that had come before. In grad school I learned that a lot of the elements I associated with Python and Blazing Saddles (and later Pee Wee's Big Adventure) were called "postmodern," but most of the theory I read regarding postmodern cinema referenced serious films, like Blade Runner, or Body Heat, or Blue Velvet. It was as if comedies did not seem worthy of theoretical reflection.

In some ways, this has changed. What happens when theory finds itself outwitted by cultural objects themselves? McSweeney's, no 11 (2003; edited by Dave Eggers) includes a DVD whose contents are made up entirely of deleted, extra-deleted, behind the scenes of deleted scenes, and outtakes from the deleted scenes:

This last shot is from the "The Editing of the Making of McSweeney's Issue #11 DVD," with audio commentary. It's one long shot lasting over 20 minutes, with no cuts. Nothing happens except this guy sitting in front of the computers editing the DVD we're watching.

Does something like this go beyond parody and become almost self-theorizing? I think so: implicit in the DVD is a funny--but savage--critique of celebrity, and new media, and technologies that elevate what Graeme Harper has called "supplementary-ness" to a new level. I think that in recent years (decades?) "theory" as conceived of as a Bad-and-Easily-Mocked-MLA-Session has taken a rap not because theory has gotten worse, but because it hasn't gotten better. More precisely, at least since Pop Art, swaths of pop culture have become adept at theorizing themselves, or at least exposing the narrative paradigms that allow them to find audiences. In fact, self-critique has become a dominant cultural form. As Robert Ray has argued (in his book How a Film Theory Got Lost), the old cultural studies models of film and media theory lost much of their power once film itself began acknowledging its invisible codes.

If media studies has retreated to a merely descriptive stage, now, this is only temporary. If our most well-known new media theorists today describe how new media work and operate, if they describe merely the formal patterns and paradigms of new media, if they refrain from making broad, Adorno / McLuhan / Sontag style claims, it is because new media already reveal their own ideologies. In fact, new media depends upon this self-revelation: what more is a DVD than a confession of artifice? And what more is a DVD about the artifice of DVD than a confession of theory?

Soon, "new media studies" and "media" will come to be known as the same thing.

P.S. A thank you to Drastic Plastic Press (a zine out of Ypsilanti, Michigan) for their nice review of Ramones (under "Book Report").
 

 

Comments

[Matt]

"I remember watching these when I was a kid, and wondering when one skit was ending and another beginning."

Something the Pythons were very conscious of, one of their goals for the show being to get away from punchline skits, skits that ended with a blackout.

"[N]ew media already reveal their own ideologies."

This is one of the things I have come to notice more and more about videoblogs in the vein of, say, Rocketboom and The Carol & Steve Show--namely, that there is a real and perceptible gap between the ideologies revealed by their forms and formats, on the one hand (the residue of old media ideas, i.e. individual fame, celebrity, etc), and the rhetoric of their makers, on the other (the rhetoric of digital democracy, communication, the long tail). There is a space for the theorist here--a space I'm more than willing to fill--recognising the contradictions between self-theorising media and the rhetoric of its authors.