Scrawled in Wax

What are we as viewers supposed to do when we don’t like the people we see on screen? Or worse: what happens when we do?

As happens at the end of any significant TV series, there was a great deal of discussion before and after the finale of Seinfeld. While most articles written at the time tended to concentrate on the show’s trademark ‘nothing’, other critics pointed to our strange affection for these lying, sycophantic, machiavellian characters. The defense put forth was often rather Aristotelian: that, unlike drama, comedy shows you how not to be and that, as a viewer, you aren’t asked to identify with the characters as a whole as much as you are supposed to relate to their foibles while laughing at their faults.

This relationship between viewer and object works because it is easy to put oneself in one of two positions: “oh yeah, something kinda’ like that happened to me once”; or “oh my god, I can’t believe they’re doing that! How funny!”. Drama, on the other hand, works somewhat differently, in that you are often asked to relate to the characters, particularly the protagonist. When Hamlet spends weeks procrastinating, the long, introspective speeches and sympathetic portrayal ask you to emphathise with his difficulty. Similarly, the protagonist of Iron Man is unambiguously the guy we are supposed to be rooting for and there is a clear demarcation between good and bad.

It is this latter model of the good guy or gal that dominated TV drama for decades. While Archie Bunker was making viewers squirm, the closest dramatic television would come to ambiguity was when cop/vigilante justice was meted out in a violent fashion. But the cathartic release of watching a criminal ‘get his/her due’ and the lack of shades of grey go hand-in-hand: if dramatic film works by asking you to relate to some of the characters on screen, then one can hardly have evil people up there on the screen; it’d be like being asked to sympathise with the devil. Even when characters seem to be immoral – think Dennis Franz’s character from NYPD Blue – they are usually softened by having a heart of gold or some other form of ‘moral escape route’.

Then what is one to make of the fact that ambiguous, ambivalent characters have come to dominate the TV landscape today? Obviously, the current rush started with The Sopranos and has perhaps best been exemplified by critically adored The Wire. But from more ‘edgy’ shows like Weeds and Dexter to clearly mainstream fare like Grey’s Anatomy, House and Lost, the moral clarity that once so thoroughly permeated television has started to evaporate, and has instead been replaced by an army of characters who one isn’t sure whether to adore, revile or simply watch, uncomfortably feeling a mixture of the two. When Weeds‘ Nancy Botwin sleeps with a rival dealer to placate him, then cries on the drive home, what are we supposed to be feeling? Pity? Revulsion? Disdain? Empathy? Respect? You either come down hard on either side or remain awkwardly in the middle and something, whether it is nuance or yourself, gets lost in the process.

If one were to ask “Why?”, the most obvious response to this development is also the most boring i.e. that these are the aesthetic manifestations of pluralism, cultural relativism and the postmodern breakdown of master narratives. And I can’t help but yawn when I type a sentence like “devoid of moral certainty, TV has come to reflect the ambiguity of modern times”. But beyond being a now-clichéd way to ‘explain’ art, there’s something to the statement that, if not false, still sounds somehow incomplete.

Perhaps a better place to focus than the work itself would be on the relationship of the viewer and the work of art. If dramatic film functions through empathy, then what seems different here is that we are presented with one of a couple of options: a character who is compelling but impossible to empathise with; or a character who, when we empathise with them, forces us to confront not just our flaws and foibles, but our darker, more insidious characteristics. But the thing is, the aesthetic space has always left these options available. You were always free to relate to Fagin or Iago if you so wished. So what does it mean when the primary locus of contemporary popular culture – and yeah, I still mean TV when I say that – presents us with drug-dealing suburban moms, mob bosses, serial killers or crooks on the run and then asks us to care about their stories and their situations? Because these aren’t the usual tales of redemption; far from it, these characters seem to go from bad to worse.

I’m hesitant to venture a guess, but to me this feels like a way of aestheticising a kind of ‘moral resignation’. Yes, this may be yawn-inducing, but in the absence of a unified moral code, what is there to do except to present ambiguous situations and then let the viewer ambivalently orient themselves in relation to the on screen action? Isn’t that simply a concentrated version of verisimilitude in which the relationship, rather than the object, of representation becomes reflective of the socio-ideological context that produces art? That in order to reflect reality, one has to put the viewer in an uncomfortable space that not only acknowledges the asbsence of moral norms but also the constant subjective flux of one’s relationship to that thing we still loosely call ‘the moral’?

Or, conversely, is there nothing to this other than the latest trend or marketing ploy? Hit the comments if you want to disagree, add a point or just tell me to stop blogging with a glass of red wine next to my keyboard…