Media critic Neal Gabler has suggested that popular entertainment is turning the nation into a giant transcontinental soap opera. Individual citizens are creating "life movies" starring themselves, and the entertainment industry has become "a force so overwhelming that it has finally metastasized into life."
Gabler's assessment comes immediately to mind in light of the way that Hollywood and the entertainment industry are repackaging reality--even when dealing with issues as intimate as realities of family life and the institution of marriage.
Columnist Lee Siegel considers the meaning of television in his recent review of the HBO series, Big Love. "Culture events such as Big Love are to the media what the doings of a mysterious new family are to gossip in a small town," Siegel explains. Thus, the appearance of the series--now under contract for a second season--provides a catalyst for many in the media to raise questions about marriage, polygamy, the Mormon movement, and a host of related issues. Nevertheless, sex and marriage are at the very center of the "gossip" about this series.
Siegel suggests a very interesting argument. In his view, the success of HBO's various series, including Big Love, The Sopranos, and Six Feet Under, can be explained by the fact that the network goes for stories from the margins of society. "Their weirdness both normalizes your own most unsettling impulses and gets your vicarious wheels turning," Siegel asserts. "But the latter effect is stronger than the former."
Looking at the history of the television medium, Siegel suggests that the older television programs "sought out the everyday and diversified it with the exceptional." Now, the situation is reversed. Television now seeks "the ordinary in the extraordinary." The Sopranos succeeds, he argues, because of "the simultaneity of the routine and the horrific." The characters in the HBO dramas appear quite normal in many ways--dealing with the very normal complications of marriage, work, kids, and the larger world. Yet, when it comes to The Sopranos, these include "normal" people who kill for a living.
Lee Siegel's central thesis is this: "Commercial society's deepest aspiration, after all, is a synthesis of total instinctual gratification with the preservation of the social order." Advertisers may have depended upon something like "subliminal seduction" in the past, but, in the current context "unconscious desire is as plainly visible on television as that iPod in your hand."
Siegel's essay appears in the May 22, 2006 edition of The New Republic. He is a keen observer of the culture at large, as well as an analyst of the television screen. When he looks at Big Love, he sees "a man ordering twenty more tablets of Viagra from the pharmacy on one phone, while on another phone, at the same time, he is exchanging pleasantries with one of his three wives, all of whom have him racing back and forth between their different beds in separate houses like a bull in June."
Thus, Big Love takes its viewers "one giant step closer to the fusion of conscious and unconscious planes of existence so desperately sought by television and commerce."
Now, Siegel's analysis appears to be rooted in economic theory and at least a soft form of Marxist criticism. At the same time, his criticism appears to be mostly on-target, pointing to issues far beyond the economic--reaching into the most intimate spheres of life.
Big Love may deal with "issues," like plural marriage, the future of the family, patriarchy, along with many others, but the real power of the series is its presentation of the bizarre as (at least partly) normal. Siegel calls this new television form "allegorical realism." "Its extreme situations always verge on symbolic resonance, but they are too closely tied to familiar dialogue and context to acquire much abstract meaning." In other words, the compelling power of the story, and the familiar structure of the dialogue, conspire to hide the truly bizarre nature of polygamy from view.
