The couch. Yes, the couch.
End of the work week, the daily trudge home, the brain dull and the eyes glazed. Time for some TV! And some of America’s finest television is available, just over the cable, no iTunes or websites or DVDs necessary. TV, the way Apollo intended it! Apollo, god of prophecy (not to mention health, music and poetry, and salty snacks). Apollo, speak through this vehicle, this Toshiba, not flatbellied (er, screened) with muscular definition, no, but prepared to absorb your Delphic pronouncements.
Speak, Apollo. Let’s see: the last bit of “My Name is Earl” and then “The Office” vs. “Grey’s Anatomy.” We can watch both, no problem, and even bits of “BloodRayne” on the SciFi channel. Hey! Ben Kingsley, vampires and thus blood, swordplay, provocative costuming, hilarious dialog. Is that Meat Loaf? Yes, it is. Oh no, not Geraldine Chaplin… but alas, yes again. And Michelle Rodriguez, who used to be in “Lost.” Perfect. Because “Lost” follows “Grey’s Anatomy,” and during commercials “ER” still hangs in there, verily concluding its 14th season, and who should show up on that episode but Stanley Tucci and Steve Buscemi. There is a LOT of acting talent available to us tonight, but Buscemi’s going to triumph over all comers — from Steve Carell to Ben Kinglsey. Even Meat Loaf doesn’t stand a chance. Steve Buscemi has channeled Apollo: He chooses, he suffers, the Mob wants him dead. He does his duty. He gets under our skin.
Time for a commercial. Don’t touch that remote!
It’s a commercial about television. Americans spend something on the order of 200 billion hours watching television every year. That’s the estimate I read in an essay by Clay Shirkey. At first that seemed high, but there are 300 million or so of us, and that’s just 700 hours a year of TV, two hours a day on average. You can’t count babies or people without TV, but then there are some people who watch a little more. Let’s accept that number. The point of Shirkey’s essay is that this constitutes “cognitive surplus.” We’ve created a society with a massive cognitive surplus. This weekend he calculates that we’ll spend 100 million hours watching ads on television. That happens to be what he and an IBM guy figure have been spent on establishing Wikipedia. 100 million hours of human thought. You might already guess where Shirkey is going: We are just learning what we can do with the cognitive surplus. The potential for future Wikipedia-like projects — and imagine a world now with Wikipedia, practically impossible for those of us online — beckons.
Back to the couch. Where was I? Blood spurting from mortal sword wounds, I think. Because a healthy woman with a sword is a very powerful thing. An actress at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival once told me that, and she was right. But c’mon, Jim and Pam are canoodling on “The Office.” Some people I know (Kristi!) are deeply involved in the Jim and Pam thing, and it IS the healthiest relationship I know about on television. Sure beats the Sawyer-Kate-Jack triangle on “Lost.” At least for healthy. But I do like the tension of the triangle: That Kate has those boys wrapped around her little finger, and talk about weapon handling, she knows her way around a pistol, all right. Sex and violence.
Mighty Apollo, what is the nature of television? Sex and violence. Yeah, but there’s also Jim and Pam, and Earl for that matter. Good folks trying to do the right thing, doing their duty, trying to stay true to themselves. Like Steve Buscemi. Apollo would be proud. And they are deterred by all that sex and violence, mostly on other shows. Apollo, if we watched a LOT of Jim and Pam, would our relationships be just as cuddly? Or even more so, because we could learn from them to be yet more cuddly and cute and understanding?
I don’t want to ruin Shirkey’s essay. I would encourage you to use some of your own cognitive surplus and jump to it, right after you finish here! But I absolutely loved the way Shirkey ended it, with the story of a four-year-old girl who is watching a DVD with her parents. Suddenly, she hops up and starts rustling around the wires behind the TV set. I’ll let Shirkey finish the story:
Maybe she’s going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn’t what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, “What are you doing?” And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, “Looking for the mouse.”
I’m looking for the remote. Dr. McDreamy is hangdog over Meredith who is hangdog over Dr. McDreamy. But what I like about “Grey’s Anatomy” (and I confess to Apollo that I’m not an avid watcher of any of these shows) is the variety of human emotion expressed. The show is really “about” the intensity of those emotions, their variability, and that means there’s an acting challenge involved, which by and large the show meets. I happen to be a big fan of Brooke Smith, who plays the head of cardiothoracics at mythical Seattle Grace Hospital, a fine stage actor who is in my favorite film adaptation of a play, Louis Malle’s Vanya on 42nd Street, and she is typically excellent in this episode. And what about that kiss she planted on Dr. Torres at the end. Wow! Plus: doctors don’t have swords, but they DO have scalpels.
I’m not as involved in “Lost” for some reason. Maybe the distraction of Steve Buscemi on “ER.” But with both, I know I’ve missed out on key narratives and character development. On “ER,” Luca’s having his usual love problems, check. The seemingly terminally repressed Neela is about to break out! Abby suffers: She deserves better. And when I watch the show, I always enjoy Mekhi Phifer as Dr. Pratt. They are all learning to do the right thing. Which is pretty much what’s going on in “Lost,” too, learning to do the right thing, though it’s harder to suss out what exactly that is with the smoke monsters and all. Flawed people trying to do the right thing. Sex and violence, getting in the way.
I’m on the couch. Time has passed. I have felt virtuous, because I’ve drunk from the river of shared American culture. That culture has urged me to be virtuous, even though it warns me that virtue can be hard. Ben Kingsley, one of our greatest actors has been made to look ridiculous, sure, but even “BloodRayne” had its moments. I like the idea of the attractive half-vampire/half-human vampire slayer, Buffy with a twist. It’s more clearly Manichaean: We all contain light and dark, and the body just about always gets us in trouble. Apollo might disagree: Whatever you do, it’s going to end up in a muddle. Sorry.
But at some point, even I — representing the transitional generation that whiffed on a lot of the cognitive surplus, spent it on the couch — even I start rumbling around for the mouse. Other humans enter the room. We start doing primate things.
The Toshiba falls silent.
The Delphic oracle collapses.