Media

...If there's a better or bitterer little essay on what's wrong—and stupid—about the pornographic imagination, I'd like to see it...

...But that's a sophisticated approach to the show...

...It explains—strike that, it illuminates—the ongoing power of Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde—and Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, Martin and Lewis, Fred and Barney Flintstone...

...There was the little old lady who converted to Catholicism after reading the Jesuit sermons in Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man...

...The lads, in short, are a savage parody: of our worst fears about what MTV-watchers are or will become...

...and making mindless comments thereupon, punctuated by their signature, nanocephalic "huh-huh-huh" gigglesnort laugh...

...It was, I think, Delmore Schwartz who said "Art, being bartender, never gets drunk...

...To put it another way: don't try this at home...

...B&B" is so crude in its satire, so unrelenting in its implicit critique of the couch-potato mind-set, so severe in its condemnation of everything Beavis and Butthead represent, that I—in all honesty— must regard it as a moral act...

...Never mind—I'll explain "Ren and Stimpy" in a while...

...The Tipper Gore remedy is the infamous Warning label: do not eat the fruit of this tree...

...of the "Generation X" which is now ascending...

...Newscasters with grave faces discussed the tragedy and the charges...

...and our boys...

...Ugly, glue-sniffing, and barely articulate students at "Highland High" (every pun, natiirlich, intended), they spend their days devising inane and foredoomed schemes to get either money (which they're too dumb to know what to do with) or girls (which ditto...

...and Ren the psychotic cartoon rat and his friend Stimpy the submissive cartoon dog (told you I'd get there...

...Condemnatory letters flooded in to newspapers...

...Beavis is the blonde one in the "Metallica" T-shirt, with the lobotomized Jack Nicholson smile...

...Some of the things they do would cause a real person to get hurt, expelled, possibly deported...

...Aristotle also observed that comedy is essentially the conflict of the aladzon, the boastful man, with the eiron, the self-effacing man, who in their tension intimate but never achieve a truly human norm...

...Well, yes...

...And "B&B" has featured prominently in the congressional hearings on TV violence—again, with most of the senators not having seen the show—and also looms behind Attorney General Janet Reno's portentous rumblings that, if the networks can't clean up their own act, sex-and-violencewise, then the Feds may have to take a hand...

...They stay, till nightfall, transfixed against the wall, staring at people who don't think of the body as the stuff of bad jokes, unable to join them, and unable to leave...

...And that's one of the few take-it-to-the-bank observations about the imagination ever made...

...If I had a kid of twelve or so, I'd much rather he watched "B&B" than, say, the softcore and softhead blandishments of "Bay watch" or "Beverly Hills 90210...

...28 MEDIA ART IS DANGEROUS 'BEAVIS & BUTTHEAD/ FOR EXAMPLE Having established a reputation as an antinomian nihilist pornographer (sounds like a "Geraldo" guest) with my defense of "NYPD Blue," I now proceed, with some trepidation but a still-unshaken faith in reasoned dialogue, to talk about the "Beavis and Butthead" phenomenon...

...of that scariest of cultural inventions, the future...

...You've all heard about the show, of course, though I doubt that many of you have watched it...

...Blessed are the geeks, for they shall inherit the earth...

...And what do B. and B. do...

...What about all those impressionable and unsophisticated people who might watch it and take its clear negatives as positives...

...MTV itself moved the show to a later hour and now, before every installment of "B&B," runs the following disclaimer: "Beavis and Butthead are not role models...

...I could be wrong here, but I just don't see the average Commonweal subscriber spending a lot of time with MTV...

...And doesn't the moral life itself, maybe more than anything else, need to come with a warning label...

...But, upon my soul, I can't see how that could happen...

...Frank—are you calling 'Beavis and Butthead' art...

...Nice, that, for the artists—but no help for the rest of us, who presumably do get snockered on the sublime...

...And, since it will be from the imagination, it will be as dangerous as it is life-enhancing—like the moral life itself, I would argue...

...Beavis (the eiron) trails along uncertainly...

...The easy, smartass liberal solution is a dismissive wave of the hand and the observation that, well, people like that just shouldn't be watching the thing in the first place...

...As Aristotle understood, comedy is anarchic, dangerous, offensive, and much more unrelentingly judgmental than tragedy...

...Butthead, the dominant, is the brunette in the "AC/DC" shirt whose braces make his face a nightmare of exposed gums...

...The kids who watch "B&B"—and it is very popular—are the very kids we are afraid are going to turn into B&B...

...Rarely has there occurred so urgent an instance of TV's possible deleterious effect on the young...

...The real answer, I think, is that there is no answer...

...The awful truth, known since Plato had Socrates banish poets from his Republic, is that art can—can always—be misused...

...FRANK MCCONNELL 30...

...Very commendable, not to say politic, of MTV, I'm sure...

...They're not even human...

...There was the couple in the twenties, man and woman, who conspired to kill the lady's husband and at their Paris trial claimed they hatched their plan after reading Andre Gide's great novel, The Immoralist (Gide was shaken...

...In one episode, after watching some predictably salacious videos, Butthead (the aladzon) gets the idea to join a nudist colony, so they can see (huh huh huh) naked chicks...

...I note in passing that the creator of "B&B" has the splendidly apposite name, Mike Judge...

...I leave aside (though I do not forget) the fact that five-year-olds should not be unsupervised, and that kids (I am the veteran of three, two natch and one step) are fascinated with fire even without the Tube telling them to be so...

...And here's a hard point...

...And very off the point...

...The reason—the awful reason—for this notoriety is that, a few months ago, an unsupervised five-year-old decided to play with matches and started a fire that killed his infant sister, and that the mother claims that the boy started the fire because he had been watching "Beavis and Butthead" (Beavis is an inchoate pyromaniac, who often giggles, while watching rock videos, "Hehheh—fire's cool...

...A recent New Yorker— which, even under the editorship of Tina Brown, still runs an occasional good cartoon—features two grunge-chic teens strolling along, one saying to the other, "You know, I guess 'Beavis and Butthead' is the 'Ren and Stimpy' of our generation...

...And I have absolutely no doubt that somebody, somewhere, has read Madame Bovary and decided that adultery and suicide are—huh huh huh—cool...

...And first, you have to understand the show...

...Didn't work in the Garden, doesn't work now...

...Beavis and Butthead" is a not-bad but not-seismically-important bit of product that, because of an alleged concatenation of terrible events (a kid left alone, a TV set, a book of matches), can give us if we're smart an insight into the relationship between TV and behavior or, to lay down all my cards, art and reality...

...And there they're greeted by a nude (not naked—it's a semantic world of difference) young woman who invites them to join the community in their day of swimming, volleyball, and all the other things you associate with a picnic of friends...

...They are rejected, to be sure, but climb over the wall to the compound...

...So what's the way out...

...When they're not doing that, they're sitting on a sofa watching the worst of MTV heavy-metal videos (egad, Holmes—could this be authorial self-consciousness...

...Newsweek and Time have both given big spreads to "B&B" as the salient example of the dumbingdown of the American consciousness...

...In fact, the show has achieved the kind of "fame" peculiar to our informationbulimic era: something about which everyone has an opinion, even and especially those who've never experienced the thing itself...

...There was—to stare again into the abyss of our century—the careful murder of 6 million Jews justified, in part, by a butthead misreading of Nietzsche...

...They're cartoons...

...Beavis and Butthead are cretins...

...Until we become—terrible thought—a theocracy, what can be imagined and uttered will be...