Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road?” Hyper-Irony and Robot Chicken, Part 2

Here’s Part 1.

To examine how we got from The Simpsons to RC, however, I want to first look at another show—Seth McFarland’s FOX comedy, Family Guy. Family Guy is often criticized for being a rip-off of The Simpsons, and superficially this claim does seem to stand up. Both shows focus on a nuclear family lead by a drunk and ineffectual father and a long-suffering but loving mother. These parents also have a son and daughter who argue constantly as well as a baby who shows uncanny intelligence. The humor is often crude and juvenile and seems to be written for the purpose of making its audience uncomfortable as well as amused.

However, these are only superficial similarities. Family Guy took the hyper-irony game begun by The Simpsons and expanded it to even more ludicrous proportions. The quotationalism of The Simpsons was still linked to the plot in some way, and in many ways enhanced the plot. It acted as a cultural short-hand that cued the audience, if it was properly in the know, how to feel about the situation. For instance, in one of the episodes that Matheson references, “A Streetcar Named Marge,” Maggie and her cohorts attempt to break out of an oppressive daycare. The theme from The Great Escape plays in the background as they seek to free their confiscated pacifiers. This quotationalism is funny, certainly, but it also serves a purpose within the action of the scene. It cues the audience to feel that Maggie is doing something heroic and even adds an element of melodrama to the plot. Many of the other instances of quotationalism within The Simpsons behave in the same way—they are woven throughout the plot of the episode so that the action is enhanced, rather than broken, by the bevy of pop culture references.

Family Guy takes the quotationalism begun in The Simpsons one step further. Instead of enhancing the plot, the quotationalism often takes the audience out of the plot entirely. It also forces the Griffin family to break character, as they act out a brief sketch to illustrate whatever reference or joke has just been made. For instance, in one episode, Peter mentions playing a joke on Ashton Kutcher. The scene then switches to a shot of Peter throwing a tomahawk at Ashton Kutcher, causing him to pass out. Peter then explains that he only hit Kutcher because that is the purpose of his television show—to go around filming himself hitting people with tomahawks. Then the scene ends, and the audience is returned to the regular plot of the show. This parody of Punk’d has nothing directly to do with the plot of the episode and seems to serve no purpose other than to make viewers who get the reference feel “in the know.”

This parody and other pop culture references like it within Family Guy, breaks up the show. Instead of enhancing the plot, it actually detracts from it. The quotationalism of Family Guy is often criticized because it is irrelevant to anything else going on in the episodes. However, the quotationalism can’t be that unfunny, or Family Guy would not be one of the most popular comedies in America. Rather, Family Guy takes the cult of pop culture knowingness begun in The Simpsons and raises it to a new level. In The Simpsons, the quotationalism still had a purpose within the show. In Family Guy, the quotationalism is its own purpose. It references purely for the sake of referencing, and only audience members who are in the know are assumed to be worthy of the joke.

This quotationalism for its own sake is, I believe, the natural progression of hyper-irony in comedy. If everything is a source of  ridicule and the best we can hope for is a constant game of one-up-manship in the rules of a particular ideological discourse, then Family Guy does not try to disguise that game behind a plot. Instead, it blatantly exposes the game and acknowledges that it is being hyper-ironic. The show even mocks itself for its constant breaks in the flow of the plot, as occasionally characters will make a bizarre pop culture reference or mash up and then pause. “I thought we had a clip for that,” Stewie says on one such occasion. “Oh? No we don’t? Never mind, then.” The show makes fun of its own quotationalism, proving that even it is not free from ridicule.

Though Family Guy is fresher than The Simpsons, after nine seasons, it too seems to be stalling. Just as The Simpsons has settled into a particular ideological comfort zone of family values and liberal-leaning politics, so too has Family Guy. For instance, in the episode “Trading Places,” in which Meg and Chris swap places with their parents for a week, Chris eventually becomes so stressed that he has a heart attack. When he revives in the hospital and admits that being an adult is harder than he thought it would be, Lois comforts him with a reminder that he still has his family to help him through difficult times. Many recent episodes have ended with a reinteration of family values, and the Griffins seem to take comfort in the fact that while the world may be cruel and unpredictable, at least they have each other to depend upon. In older seasons, this idea of the importance of the family would be under-cut, and to some extent, it still is. After all, what kind of family does Chris have to depend upon? Peter is a selfish drunk. Meg is superficial. Stewie is too concerned about planning world domination and understanding his sexual orientation to care about anything else. Brian is too busy finding a girlfriend and working on his novel (or drinking and thinking about working on his novel), and while Lois might mean well, she rarely offers real solutions to her family’s problems. However, the episode and many like it, seem to end with the message that even though the Griffins are all flawed, they love each other, and that love is enough overcome their faults. This uplifting end note is becoming a common theme on the series, suggesting that Family Guy may be slowly dropping its hyper-ironic stance for a more touchy-feely message.

So why have The Simpsons and Family Guy gone soft? I believe that their nature as  situation comedies prevents them from upholding their hyper-ironic cynicism for too long. Because both shows involve a regular cast of re-occuring characters, these characters and their relationships must develop in some way after a period of time. After all of their wacky adventures and mishaps, how could the Simpsons or Griffins not have a strong bond with each other? In twenty-two minutes they undergo some sort of crisis, resolve it, and return their world to normal. In some sense, the love that they have for each other is enough to get them through any kind of trouble, simply because at the end of each episode, they must have re-established their normal lives so that they will be ready for the next episode. The nature of the situation comedy forces them to find some sort of ideological ground, even if it is a tenuous one.  Chris, voiced by Seth Green, can depend on his family, because the medium in which he exists insists that he can.

But another show involving Seth Green does not have such limitations, which brings us to the next progression of hyper-irony: Robot Chicken. Unlike situation comedies, sketch comedy is under no compunction to always include regular characters and plots, thus it does not become entangled in requiring those characters to grow or change in some way. It is neither required to force its quotationalism to conform to their plots nor does it need to break a plotline to include it. Its quotationalism is purely for the sake of comedy, but it avoids the criticism that plagues Family Guy. Because nothing about sketch comedy is required to be constant, it avoids the risk of settling on some ideological platform, and instead may freely mock anything and everything. Sketch comedy appears to be hyper-irony’s most suitable medium.

What makes Robot Chicken different from other sketch comedies, such as SNL, however, is that it relies entirely on hyper-irony for its humor. SNL contains multipe parodies of popular culture and current events, but these sketches usually exist to convey some sort of message. SNL also relies on physical comedy, absurdism, and its audience’s ability to relate to uncomfortable social situations for humor. Quotationalism is a large source of its comedy, but it is not the only source. And there are lines that SNL will not cross. RC, however, leaves no sacred cow unskewered. It exists purely to under-cut and then to under-cut its own under-cutting.

In some sense, hardly any of its material is wholey original, because nearly all of its sketches references at least one form of popular culture. The Simpsons and Family Guy may borrow from popular culture, but they also feature their own original characters and plotlines. RC is almost entirely intertexual. It plays the pop culture referencing game better than any other contemporary show, but that is because sketch comedy is the natural progression of hyper-irony as comedy. There are multiple playlists on YouTube consisting of just the cutaway gags from Family Guy. Why bother with regular characters and a plot when the best bits are quotational? Unencumbered by regular characters and their relationships, which must be held together in some manner for the show to continue and thus demand a commitment to some sort of ideology, RC may be as irreverent as it likes. (The fact that it is shown on Adult Swim of Cartoon Network, a cable channel that runs adult-themed cartoons at early hours of the morning also helps, as unlike The Simpsons and Family Guy, it is held to much looser standards of censorship.) It holds to no higher authority, even its own, and its medium allows it to move fluidly from one subject of mockery to the next.

Robot Chicken, then, is the culmination of comedy in our postmodern society where there is no ultimate source of authority or truth. It is a show where every source of understanding is constantly put into question. It engages in a rapid-fire battle of pop culture analogies with its viewers, challenging them to get the references quickly before it moves on to the next sketch. We may not be able to ultimately know anything, but we can at least prove that we know how the pop culture game works and we can play it better than anyone else. After all, in a society where all authority is questioned, the old rules no longer apply. The old jokes, like “Why did the chicken cross the road?”, are no longer funny. Instead of attempting to remake the old, we must make something completely new from what’s left of the past. We’re not entirely sure what we are now or where we are, and like the robot chicken, all we can do is sit back, watch the whole experience, and laugh.

Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road?: Hyper-Irony in Robot Chicken, Part 1

“Why did the chicken cross the road?”

“I don’t know. Why did the chicken cross the road?”

“To get to the other side!”

Everyone knows this joke, so much so that it is no longer funny. And yet, is has become a sort of symbol for comedy. Though no one laughs at it, it has almost become synonymous with the word “joke.”

It is also the beginning of Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim show Robot Chicken (RC) created by Seth Green and Mathew Senreich. In the opening, a mad scientist (we know he’s mad because his hair is messy and he has a maniacal grin on his face) finds a chicken, presumably dead, in the middle of the road. The opening obviously references the classic joke that no one finds humorous anymore. However, in this version of the joke, the chicken has failed to complete its passage across the road. In fact, it is lying dead in the middle of the road. The old joke has been left incomplete, perhaps even died itself. The mad scientist takes the chicken back to his laboratory and rebuilds it as a cyborg that is half machine and half organic. A melodramatic voice announces, “It’s alive!” Then the scientist forces his resurrected creation, a la A Clockwork Orange, to watch the comedy sketches that comprise the show.

In just the opening, we see exactly what RC’s take on comedy is, as well as what it sets out to do to with comedy.

Just like the robot chicken, the show itself is a combination of the new and the old. Despite their crude humor and ever-current pop culture references, in many ways, the RC sketches are no different than previous forms of comedy. They are incredibly brief, some lasting merely a second or two, but comedy, unlike drama, is a fast-paced medium. A joke can’t have a long lead-up, otherwise the audience will become bored. Stand-up comics often offer jokes that are one-liners before moving on to new material. Sketch comedy is also not new in television. The Ed Sullivan show and others like it offered their viewers a wide variety of entertainment, and if audience members found one act boring, well, another, more interesting one would soon follow it. Monty Python’s Flying Circus also bombarded its viewers with comedy sketch after comedy sketch, some sketchs being very brief and others weaving themselves throughout the show. Saturday Night Liveoften focuses on short sketches that parody some form of popular cutlture. RC uses this same technique. Its humor is quick, with little build-up or introduction. As soon as we’ve seen the joke, we’re on to the next one, and if one sketch fails to satisfy, well, a new one will be on shortly. The humor itself would probably have shocked and disgusted Ed Sullivanviewers and may be too risque for even Monty Python or the not-yet-read-for-Prime-Time players, but the style in which it is presented is not unlike old-time variety or sketch comedy shows.

The humor itself often relies on parody, either by stretching the object of ridicule to its ludicrous extreme, such as the militarism of George W. Bush or the violence present in U.S. television, or by inverting a well-known pop culture phenomenon. (The kind and loving Care Bears become racists promoting ethnic cleansing.) The show, like most comedy, also often relies on stereotypes, such as the recurring nerd character, who may be brilliant but cannot overcome his social awkwardness to find a girlfriend. Parody, in any of these forms, is nothing new. Even the ancient Greeks used parody to critique their social institutions, so parody is nothing new to comedy.

Though RC is not completely new, it is also different from any show that has come before it. And in the opening, the mad scientists does not remake the chicken only to have it complete its road-crossing journey. Instead, the old seems to be thrown out in favor of a new one. The chicken may be resurrected, but the joke itself is not. As John Cleese might say, “And now, it’s time for something completely different.”

In many ways, RC is a response to our postmodern, technology-driven lives. The chicken itself is half biological, half machine, just as we have built our lives around our machines. We carry phones with us everywhere that can connect us to the internet in a matter of seconds. We check our emails daily, if not hourly. Cars, buses, and airplanes carry us to our destinations. Our homes can be heated or cooled, regardless of the temperatures outside. We are a sort of cybog, a robot human that is so reliant on technology that it might as well be physically attached to us. RC is responding to that change. Our lives are fast-paced, and require a fast-paced television show. After all, one RC episode only lasts fifteen minutes, while other shows are at least half an hour long. We expect web pages to download in seconds, we express ourselves through 140 characters on Twitter, and we want our entertainment to be as immediate and brief. RC delivers with bite (or byte?) sized humor.

However, to say that RC is merely pandering to an audience whose attention spans are stretched thin is to miss the show’s full significance in the evolution of comedy. Specifically, the show relies almost entirely on what Carl Matheson called “hyper-irony.” In his article “The Simpsons, Hyper-Irony, and the Meaning of Life,” Matheson tracks the changes in American comedy up until The Simpsons, which he cites as the first show to make use of hyper-irony, often through quotationalism, a “rapid-fire sequence of [pop culture] allusions” used in “a constant process of under-cutting.” One cannot understand the humor of The Simpsons, he asserts, unless one has a thorough background in popular culture.

For those of you who don’t have the time to read Matheson’s argument, I will summarize it thus (Although, seriously, go read it. It’s entertaining, well-written, and academic. A rare combination, indeed!): What makes The Simpsons different from the shows that came before it that referenced popular culture is that The Simpsons lacks any sort of moral agenda. It does not parody or allude to popular culture in order to promote any sort of values, be they liberal or conservative, but instead merely references for the sake of referencing. Matheson’s explanaition for the continuous use of allusions is that in our postmodern society, all authority is in question and we lack a solid place in which to put our faith. In such a social climate, Matheson asserts, contemporary artists often go back to the past for inspiration. However, because even history if one of the forms of authority in question, this inspiration from the past is often under-cut. What results is a constant flow of references, and those who can catch the most references are lucky enough to be “in the know.” They are members of what Matheson calls “the cult of knowingness.” This cult is built, Matheson claims, by the idea that even though there may be no ultimate truth, one can demonstrate one’s superior understanding of a set of intellectual rules. The point is not to have a depth of knowledge, but to have a broad understanding of a variety of ideological positions…and popular culture. One then proceeds to tear down any sort of ideological ediface that claims to have an understanding of ultimate knowledge. In other words, anything and everything is up for grabs as an object of parody. However, in the process of tearing down every source of ultimate truth, the show itself lacks any sort of ideological ground to stand on.

The Simpsons may have begun to maximize quotationalism and hyper-irony in comedy, but the show has since stalled. Both society and The Simpsons have changed since Matheson’s essay, and the show is now something of family-values comedy with liberal-leaning politics. While it paved the way for many of the popular comedy shows today and has had a huge influence on American entertainment, it has not been able to uphold its hyper-ironic stance for twenty-two seasons. I believe that the nature of The Simpsons as a situation comedy prevents it from being able to uphold a hyper-ironic worldview indefinitely, and that shows in sketch comedy form, like RC, are the natural progression of hyper-ironic comedy.

Stay Tuned for Part 2!

Are We Cyborgs Yet?: Evolution of the DROID Commercials

I distinctly remember the first DROID commercial I ever saw. It was for the DROID 2, and it ran in 2010. Somehow, it seems so long ago, perhaps because the idea of a smartphone still seemed novel and now it’s become a part of everyday life. In any case, upon seeing the commercial, I was taken with the way in which the smartphone turns the man in the commercial into a machine—literally. As he types on the slide-out keyboard (which only a year later seems so quaint), his fingers, hands, and arms gradually become metallic, his muscles replaced with metal and his tendons transforming into wires. The phone has made him a cyborg—an amalgamation of human and machine.

I found myself mesmerized and a little disturbed by the commercial. If the comments on the commercial’s YouTube video are anything to go by, I wasn’t the only one. Most of them approved of the commercial, but others seemed displeased with the lack of humanity, references to The Terminator and Cybermen of Doctor Who, and disgust with corporations turning their clients into robots. Personally, I think the red DROID eye is reminiscent of the glowing Hal of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Whatever the reference, the glaring red light that seems to be looking at the viewer is reminiscent of various movie and television examples of technology gone awry and controlling people’s lives. Hal takes over the ship in 2001. The Terminator, a robot meant to infiltrate human society and kill a particular human target, is the result of Skynet, a self-aware program that rebelled against the humans that created it in the Terminator movies. The Cybermen are the frequent adversaries of the Doctor in Doctor Who, as they overpower biological subjects and turn them into metal automatons. All of these robots are pop culture warnings of what can happen when technology becomes too all-consuming in our lives.

Other DROID commercials also portray the smartphones as part of a person or in one case, a snowman, and not merely a tool to be used. However, the commercials seem to be moving away from presenting the DROID as a physical part of a person. The DROID Bionic commercial places the smartphone outside the protagonist of the commercial. In fact, the ending tagline states that the DROID was “made from machines to rule all machines.” This most recent commercial seems to be making up for the earlier ones, in which the phone was so seemlessly melded to its user that it was hard to tell who was controlling whom. The statement that the DROID Bionic “rules all machines” suggests that the smartphone is giving the user control over machines instead of being controlled by them.

So, who really does control our smartphones? Do we control them, or do they control us? Or have we entered into a sort of symbiotic relationship with them? In many ways, we are beginning to think of our technology as extensions of ourselves, though whether this is due to marketing that gives us an identity associated with a product or to the increasing prevelance of technology in our society, I can’t say. Most likely, it’s some combination of the two. In any case, as these commercials show, our close relationship with our technology is turning us into a sort of cyborg, something part human and part machine. Technically, anytime our culture presents the human body as being something like a machine, like a piece of technology, it is presenting us as cyborgs.

Rather than worry about whether this is a good thing or a bad thing (because there are good arguments on both sides), I’d like to focus on how these commercials present our interactions with technology as embodied. Usually, when we think about going on the Internet or using smartphones, we aren’t thinking much about our bodies. We tend to think more about our minds, since Western culture has generally placed more emphasis on the mind over the body. But using technology is an embodied experience. We type on our keyboards, our smartphones, our iPads or tablets with our fingers. We manipulate webpages with our hands, whether through a touchscreen or a mouse. Our interactions with technology are not something that takes us out of our bodies. Instead, they do the very opposite. They rely on our bodies, so much so that they have become an extension of our bodies.

As changes in the DROID commercials suggests, this doesn’t seem to be a concept that we, as a culture, are completely comfortable with yet.

We’re Straight! We Swear!: Being Homosocial in a 3OH!3 Music Video

What do you call two straight men who are very, very close friends?

Give up? I don’t know either. While our society seems to recognize and often even celebrate purely platonic bonds between women, we still don’t quite know what to do with men who are close but not romantically interested in each other. Recently, we’ve attempted to give a name to this relationship—the “bromance,” but the term is still a pun on the word “romance” and has a homoerotic undercurrent.

This is the bind that patriarchal society puts men in. On the one hand, they are expected to be blatantly heterosexual. A man’s not a man if he can’t seduce and impregnate a woman, and the more women he can do this too, the more manly he is. At the same time, however, women are mere objects for his sexual pleasure, and as a man (who is expected to be intelligent and strong while women are expected to be flighty and weak), he can’t really form a deep and meaningful bond with a woman. (I’m referring here to the ideals of patriarchal society and how they are often portrayed in certain aspects of popular culture, not to how relationships between men and women really play out.) He can seek out these meaningful bonds with other men, but these relationships must be tempered. They can’t be too emotional, lest they seem “womanish” or “sissy,” and they must be restricted in how they show affection, lest they be mistaken for homoeroticism. You can save your buddy’s life, beat up his enemies, and tell him you’ve “got his back,” but you can’t hug him or tell him that you love him.

So how does popular culture present close, emotional bonds between two men and avoid homoeroticism? It surrounds those men with adoring, beautiful women. The effect the women are supposed to serve is a that of a signifier for heterosexuality. “See, we’re straight,” the men seem to say as they bask in female attention. “We’re surrounded by all of these women, and we love it! Oh, that guy over there? He’s just my buddy. But we’re totally straight! I mean, look all of these women!”

Many of the music videos put out by 3OH!3, the pop duo consisting of Nat Motte and Sean Foreman from Boulder, Colorado (area code three-oh-three), take this convention to ludicrus extremes. Nearly all of the videos focus on a platonic relationship between Motte and Foreman, but to avoid the accusation of homoeroticism, the videos surround them with adoring women. The videos are often concoted around ridiculous premises to explain why women would be fawning over them, but the absurdity of the videos often highlights the bizarre position in which patriarchal society places men and their platonic relationships.

(Note: From here on out, when I refer to Motte and Foreman, I do not mean them personally. Instead, I am referring to the pop personas that they have taken on and perform in their music videos.)

3OH!3’s best known song and video, “Don’t Trust Me” features a ridiculous premise. It is, so an introduction informs us, the story of two male models who are the only survivors of a virus that has wiped out the rest of earth’s male population. While anyone else faced with this highly unlikely situation might show some concern,  Motte and Foreman, in the context of the video, see this as an opportunity to bask in the adoration of a planet full of women who are starved for men. (Because, of course, women want nothing more than a man to satisfy them. Even lesbians are just waiting for the right man.)

But are they really basking in the women’s adoration? A quick view of the music video might assume that they are, but a closer look reveals that the video isn’t so much about the women as it is about Motte and Foreman. The women exist on the periphery, literally. Most of the camera shots focus them as they stand together in the middle of the shot, its focus, while the women are placed, like props, to the side of the frame. Te women’s prescence is merely that of a signifier of male heterosexuality. They are there to reassure us that, no matter how much Motte and Foreman might wrestle with each other, rap together or playfully shove each other, they are ultimately heterosexual.

I also think that the video, to some extent, is aware of its own ridiculousness. At the beginning, after we have established that Motte and Foreman are male models, the first shot of them we see portrays them as adorned in purple capes and speedos. They don’t look like male models so much as they look like two frat boys playing at being male models. Neither of them are particularly muscular or toned, the “ideal” body for male pop stars. (Aside: I actually find their average physical appearances refreshing. Unlike many pop stars, who are so perfect-looking as to be interchangeable, Motte and Foreman actually stand out.) Motte is tall, skinny, and lanky, with long, stringy hair, while Foreman is short and stocky. When paired together, their opposite physiques are even more noticeable. They do not dance so much as they flail and crudely mime the lyrics to their songs. The video mocks the performance of pop—the elaborate costumes, the impossible perfection of pop stars’ bodies, and the ostentatious dance routines that often accompany music videos. “This is all in fun. Don’t take it too seriously, because we certainly aren’t,” the video seems to say to the audience.

Stripped of its spectacle and reduced to what looks almost more like two fans rocking out to their favorite song than two pop artists in a music video, the video makes Motte and Foreman more relatable to the audience. They’re just two average guys—straight guys, mind you! Very, very straight! Did you see all those hot chicks back there? They’re kind of hard to see because they’re just on the edge of the camera shot, but they’re there and boy, are they hot!—having a good time together. This stripped version of pop, however, adds to the masculine image of the video. Dancing artistically, wearing elaborate costumes, and looking beautiful are all coded as “feminine” in patriarchal society, so to prove that they are not feminine (and therefore not gay), Motte and Foreman, in their video, eschew anything that could be construed as homoerotic.

Their “Starstrukk” video, featuring Katy Perry, goes one step further and inserts a girl between them. All of the elements from “Don’t Trust Me” remain. The new ridiculous premise is that the guys have found a fountain full of coins that women have tossed in, wishing for men. When they remove the coins, they become the answer to the women’s wishes, and the women run at them, eager (we are led to assume) to have sex with them. Unlike in “Don’t Trust Me,” in which Motte and Foreman were paired as the focus of the camera shots and interacted with each other, they are now joined by Katy Perry, who stands between them, like a bulwark protecting them from any accusations of homoeroticism.

However, the video is still more about the buddy relationship than it is about relationships with women. The scenes in front of the fountain are intersperced with scenes of Motte and Foreman, always together, doing manly and adventurous things…in order to attract women, of course. In one scene, they are boating in Italy and hold up champagne glasses to the (presumably female) viewers with “come and get it” gestures. In other scene, they pose for the camera while dressed as street toughs, the bodies of other, weaker men whom they’ve just beaten, strewn on the side of the shot. Though these scenes appear to be about attracting women, they actually emphasize the relationship between the two men. Women may come and go, but they’ll still have their friendship and be able to do things like climb mountains while feeding each other sashimi (a homosocial and perhaps even vaguely homoerotic image if there ever was one). Like the “Don’t Trust Me” video, this video also emphasizes the buddy relationship between Motte and Foreman, and it uses the women in the video to assert their heterosexuality. They may be close, but they’re not that close.

All of the hypermasculine imagery of the 3OH!3 music videos works for the purpose of establishing Motte and Foreman as heterosexual men. The videos are unkind to women, perhaps even misogynistic, but the reason for it is to establish the 3OH!3 duo as he-men. The bind that patriarchal society puts women in is obvious in these vidoes, but what also becomes apparent is the bind that patriarchal society also puts upon men who have close friendships with other men. There is a tension in the videos between emphasizing the bond between Motte and Foreman and also trying to de-emphasize the bond so that their relationship does not seem homoerotic.

This tension points to the larger problem within patriarchal culture, which does not seem to know what to do with male-male friendships. When women are nothing but objects, to have any kind of meaningful relationship, men must seek out other men. At the same time, however, these men cannot appear to close to each other for fear of being branded homoerotic. Our society lacks any kind of way to talk about and discuss male relationships that are not sexual, and as a result, the homosocial and the homoerotic tend to become inflated. Men can, of course, be straight and have close, platonic relationships with other men. Unfortunately, our society lacks a way to place and understand these realtionships outside of homoeroticism.

The American Psycho Still Walks Among Us

“The city is at war./Playtime for the young and rich!/Ignore me if you see me,/’cause I just don’t give a shit./The city is at war./Bless the young and rich/with designer drugs and designer friends.”–Cobra Starship, “The City is at War”

I just finished reading Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho for a class, and I found myself shocked at how timely it seemed, despite its being so firmly situated in the late 1980s. Give Pat Bateman an iPhone and he’d fit right in today on Wall Street.

The plot of the book (SPOILERS!) follows the life of Patrick Bateman, an executive on Wall Street who makes millions of dollars, despite the fact that he doesn’t actually do anything at the office besides reading Sports Illustrated. His friends often remark that his family has enough money that he doesn’t even really need to work. Much of his life revolves around going to expensive nightclubs, scoring cocaine, and torturing and murdering women whom he takes back to his apartment. He also gruesomely kills the occasional dog or rat for good measure. Another of his targets are co-workers whom he envies and the homeless. Anyone not lucky enough to be white, male, and rich, really.

While the book has been denounced by many as nothing more than meaningless violence and shock value, I think there is a point buried under all the guts and gore. At the end of the novel, after the reader has witnessed the horrendous acts Bateman has committed, he still has not been found guilty or even suspected of any of the murders he’s committed. How, any reader with even a shred of conscience asks, could this happen? As Bateman jokes with his friends, such as they are, at a New Year’s Eve party, the news on TV discusses the Iran-Contra Affair, and someone wonders how Reagan ever got away with it.

How did Reagan get away with the Iran-Contra Affair? How did Bateman get away with his murders? They were white, rich men. Their money, power, and connections ensure that they will not have to face the consequences of their actions. Such people are privileged in our society. So privileged, in fact, that they can get away with murder.

There’s a broad field of sociology called Conflict Theory, which seems to be applicable to American Psycho. The gist of it is this: In every society, there are those who Have and those who Have Not. Usually, what the Haves actually possess is material resources, and this gives them power over those who Have Not. (Think about it. Does Bateman want for anything? He has a sumptuous apartment, more food than he could ever eat and often doesn’t. Meanwhile, the homeless that he passes on the street regularly have nothing and are grateful for even a few cents.) Those who Have resources, by virtue of their having, control the power in society. So, they set up the society in such a way that they can retain their power and easy access to resources at the expense of the Have Nots. While we might not think of it in such blunt terms, according to Conflict Theory, in order for Bateman and those like him to have all of their luxuries, someone else has to go without, perhaps even die, from lack of resources. While Ellis’s portrayal of a spoiled rich man literally killing (and sometimes eating) the poor or those who just happen to be less privileged in some way (women, animals, children, etc.) might seem like an extreme metaphor, in terms of Conflict Theory, it’s quite apt.

Now let’s look at today. What, exactly, has changed since Pat Bateman’s time? Not much. The music and other pop culture references might be different, but the story is essentially the same. To the super-rich and super-powerful, the rest of us are interchangeable and we don’t matter so much. A small percent of the people hold the majority of the resources and the power, leaving the rest of the people to muddle through without employment, healthcare, or the heaps of money it takes to influence governmental policy.

If any of my descriptions sound familiar, it’s because I’m referencing the language used by the Occupy Wall Street movement. While the media has, generally, been confused by Occupy Wall Street (OWS), I think the movement makes a pretty bold statement about what the state of the U.S. is today. People don’t have jobs but they still have debt. We’re in a recession with no hope of getting out of it. The middle class is shrinking. People are feeling disheartened, hopeless, and confused. Where is that American dream that we were promised?

This confusion cuts across race, ethnicity, gender, age (to some extent) and party lines. There are people at Occupy Wall Street of all political persuasions. But they all want one thing–they want a voice in their government that doesn’t depend on millions of dollars and lobbyists. They want a chance at getting a job again. Is this so much to ask? While I don’t know if their actions will accomplish these goals, I think that the point of this protest isn’t so much to reach an end goal as it is to sustain an idea–the idea that the majority of people in this country need to be recognized even though we aren’t lucky enough to be Wall Street billionaires.

The ’80s have come and gone, but Pat Bateman, it seems, is still roaming around the country while wrapped in the protection that his privilege gives him. Occupy Wall Street, as far as I can tell, is a movement that is attempting to call attention to his presence  and give the average American a way to combat unchecked corporate power. As far as I’m concerned, the Pat Batemans of the U.S. have been getting away with their actions for far too long. The 99% needs to be heard.