"Life is a bitchin' party ..." "Life sucks ..."
These two contrasting messages are entwined in the new MTV series "Skins." The show adapted from a British program has recently caused something of a fervor because it depicts underage actors and actresses, ranging from ages 15 to 17, getting high and having sex in the super intense nightlife atmosphere for which high schools are universally renowned.
Some have gone so far as to accuse the show of being child pornography which, having watched the first two episodes in growing disgust and cranky disapproval, I can say is basically true. But what better way to market sex to kids as every station for teens and pre-teens is always trying to do than by depicting kids having sex? "Skins" represents the logical conclusion of MTV's programming goals. Unless MTV is willing to feature a program where babies shoot each other in the face, there is nowhere else to go. We have plumbed the depths and finally hit the cold, concrete bottom.
The egregious exploitation of young high schoolers aside, "Skins" is simply symptomatic of the wider popular nihilist fantasia. "Entourage" is another show that depicts hollow people moving through an all-encompassing emptiness while doing things like buying $500 sneakers, founding their own tequila brand and having sex with porn stars. And yet despite the fact that this is all superficially cool, the shared message of "Entourage" and "Skins" eventually against its own will morphs from "Life is a bitchin' party" into "Life sucks."
Prostitutes, blowjobs, eccentric drug dealers, overdoses all become beads tethered to the same string of tedium. If "Skins" wasn't supposed to be entertaining and make us think that its heartless reptilian characters were representative of us and our generation, it would actually be an interesting visual depiction of T.S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men." The endless cell-phone chatter that opens the first episode starts to sound "meaningless / As wind in dry grass / Or rats' feet over broken glass / In our dry cellar." If anything makes the show compelling, it is the centripetal force of its downward spiral.
So what? Yeah, nihilism is being marketed to us and to younger versions of us, but we evidently like the poison. And if we like it, what can be done? I submit that we don't like it, but we think we like it which is the worst kind of despair. Plenty of people watched "Sex and the City," but I think if they really analyzed what having a closet full of 50 pairs of shoes actually means, they'd gag themselves. The only thing that holds us in front of the screen is a kind of excited morbidity. At least, that's why I watch these things. Bingeing on "Entourage" is the equivalent of gorging yourself on Big Macs. It is never healthy and almost always results from an emotionally confused mindset.
What shall we watch instead? Or rather, what will the executives at Viacom let us watch? Of course, I don't object to such fine, heartfelt TV shows as "Modern Family." But I think that, once we've cleaned out all the "Entourage" and "Skins" type shows, there will be room for another kind of entertainment. Works of art that explore the moral dimension of life already exist on TV "The Wire" was a good example but there is room for more of them and for a larger audience. The ideal televised entertainment would tend towards inducing a feeling of empathy and fellowship among humanity a sense of our common troubles and common joys.
"Skins" and "Entourage" both make manifest the American desire to win self-gratification by conquering women, drugs, cars, men what have you. They exalt the self, insisting that the individual has the right to subjugate the world in the name of achieving personal pleasure. This is a perversion of what our primordial sage, Emerson, saw as the goal of the American dream. Emerson did not envision the ideal person as someone who attempted to lord their superiority over the world, but rather as a person who sought solace in his or her own principles and creative energies, attaining an inward freedom.
We must demand more than a prolonged dissection of the contents of the gutter. Otherwise, we risk becoming what our television entertainment states that we are pieces of meat, full of live nerves wriggling like maggots.
