Yesterday I took my little sister to the mall to pick up a DVD and look for anything related to Alice in Wonderland. She’s really, really excited about the upcoming remake — and it makes me sad to think that this younger generation won’t be as critical of these so-called “films,” these CGI landfills. But I’ve complained enough about that, and I’m trying to be a good big brother. (Also, she has a stellar taste in movies overall.)

We went to FYE for the DVD and then to Hot Topic for the Alice products. I used to like Hot Topic in high school, but back in the ’90s it was quite a scarier place. Yeah, they still have the Slipknot t-shirts, but they also have Super Mario and Spongebob. And right now, the whole front section of the store is devoted to a Disney movie that hasn’t yet been released. Granted, it’s also a Tim Burton movie — but I doubt there will be anything too horrific about it.

The past few posts have been pretty heavy. Or maybe that’s a matter of taste. Some might claim that the only light post on this blog so far was the horror movie guide last Halloween. And anyone making that claim wouldn’t be totally incorrect.

Either way, I owe you a “light” post, and my idea of light is Wife Swap, an ABC reality show which I found through its syndicated version on Lifetime. At this point a large percentage of readers will probably be laughing out loud and/or navigating away from this blog. Please stay with me! I’m not crazy (and I don’t normally watch Lifetime — it was at a holiday get-together with family). This show must be discussed.

I had no idea that the show was first broadcast in the UK in 2003 and has existed in various incarnations since, both there and in America. To me it appeared to be the reason that reality shows were invented. The premise: two families with multiple opposing characteristics, habits, and beliefs trade wives for two weeks. During the first week, the guest wife has to conform to the lifestyle of the host family. Then in the second week, the wife gets to run the show. She creates new rules or guidelines based on what she feels would benefit the host family. It’s chaotic, painful, and hilarious.

I’ll break down the first episode that grabbed me. One family has about five kids who have to do many chores per day. The father doesn’t do any chores himself, whereas his wife does the work of three people, driving the kids around and running the house. And the 16-year-old daughter isn’t supposed to talk to the father after 9 pm because she’s “too emotional.” The second family only has one teenage daughter. The two bedrooms are lofts with no walls or doors, so there’s no privacy in the home. The father is at the beckon call of both wife and daughter, and does all the cleaning and laundry. And the wife is obsessed with her pets — 3 or 4 dogs and one goat — all of which are welcome throughout the house at all times. The goat even comes in her bed!

The reason I think this is the epitome of all reality shows is because, from the very start of that genre, the shows have presented anything but reality. They are usually some kind of competition, filmed in a way that makes it look more like a live show — i.e. like real life. But in Wife Swap, it doesn’t matter how they film it, or even if parts of it are scripted or “encouraged” by the producers (and I’m sure that does happen). What does matter is that the participants’ lives—especially the parents’ egos—are completely torn apart. They are forced to examine their weaknesses and how they are negatively affecting the people around them.

The possibilities are manifold. Fathers make their sons turn baseball into a religion, thus taking the fun out of it while making competition a lifestyle. A mother lets her daughter treat the father like a slave, because neither parent is brave enough to stand up to their one “baby girl” and make her grow up. Both parents let their three adolescent boys behave like depraved lunatics because they don’t want to stifle their creativity by imposing too many boundaries.

Naturally, it’s often highly rewarding when the guest wife gets to set the rules. In the “goat” episode, the animals get locked outside and the house stays clean for once. The teenage daughter gets a bedroom with walls, does her own laundry, applies for a part-time job—and smiles for the first time in the show. Back at the house-of-chores, each of the five kids get to pick out a small animal at the pet store, and the 16-year-old daughter is allowed to communicate with her father after 9 pm.

As for my other examples…the baseball boy gets to take guitar lessons, and his instructor refers to him as a natural talent at the instrument. The three adolescent boys—well, their lunacy pretty much stays the same, but their crack-pot science project-loving father stops setting such a bad example for his sons.

Once again, the point is that they have to examine themselves to better the situation for everyone involved. And if that becomes a norm in society, we’ll all be better off…even if the inspiration did come from a trashy TV show. However, since most people will never participate in a wife swap, we are introduced to a bigger issue. What the show really exposes is how the institution of marriage creates a static environment for bad traits, habits, and beliefs to flourish. This builds from the individual family to the whole of society, and explains why America is so sick and deranged.

Everyone—from OCD clean to farm animal messy; from commanding to easy-going; from muscians to sports fanatics; from high school-educated to advanced degree-awarded; from liberal to conservative; from north to south; from urban to rural—everyone needs to reevaluate their lives. Not once, but at regular intervals. It’s chaotic, painful, hilarious, and absolutely necessary for mankind to progress. And that’s why Wife Swap deserved discussion.

Here’s the first part of the “CA Elite vs. MS Redneck” episode (see “related videos” for parts 2-5).

David Foster Wallace was a new name when an acquaintance lent me the book A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. Inside the 1997 collection of essays and articles, a bookmark had been placed at a selection titled “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” an 80-odd-page exploration of the relationship between TV and fiction writing at the start of the ’90s. The title is a twist on E Pluribus Unum, or “Out of Many, One” in Latin (but I had to look that up, even though it’s a common phrase in American history). The essay still serves an important purpose 19 years on, in that it helps explain a complex subject from a perspective I cannot personally obtain. After all, Wallace wrote this in 1990, when I was a wee little boy.

Wallace actually discusses both fiction and literature from the 1950s on, but focuses on a few main points or theories. He asserts that the one thing tying together TV and fiction circa 1990 was irony (i.e. – “A statement that, when taken in context, may actually mean the opposite of what is written literally; the use of words expressing something other than their literal intention, notably as a form of humor.” – Wiktionary). He develops this argument by discussing why people watch TV in general, how TV got so ironic, and what happened when fiction tried to reclaim the irony throne it had held since long before ironic TV got so pervasive.

Part of the reason I found the essay so interesting is because, as an adolescent, I was an eager consumer of television. My time spent growing up can be mapped as a steady path from Sesame Street to Nickelodeon to Saved by the Bell to…well…to all the sitcoms aimed at people over the age of 12. Then I got to high school and realized that most TV shows are retarded (for lack of a better word). And things only got worse after that: Survivor and American Idol led the way for “reality” TV, while dumbed-down dramas still dictate a large portion of adult viewership.

Now, looking back, I’m sort wondering how it had gotten so bad before I was even born. Enter Wallace, who unforgivably calls TV a “malignant addiction.”

“By 1830, de Tocqueville had already diagnosed American culture as peculiarly devoted to easy sensation and mass-marketed entertainment, ‘spectacles vehement and untutored and rude’ that aimed ‘to stir the passions more than to gratify the taste’” (p. 36).

“Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests. It’s all about syncretic diversity: neither medium nor Audience is faultable for quality” (p. 37).

As you can see, Wallace didn’t let himself resort to calling TV an evil device intended for brainwashing or mind control. I’d rather not be so forgiving, but he argues the point well. Still, he doesn’t let TV off the hook for being capable of such high levels of manipulation, spread across the areas of psychology, emotion, and behavior.

“The modes of presentation that work best for TV…are unsubtle in their whispers that, somewhere, life is quicker, denser, more interesting, more…well, lively than contemporary life as Joe Briefcase knows it” (p. 39).

“The most frightening prospect, for the well-conditioned viewer, becomes leaving oneself open to others’ ridicule by betraying passé expressions of value, emotion, or vulnerability” (p. 63).

“…Also, inversely, trains us to relate to real live personal up-close stuff the same way we relate to the distant and exotic, as if separated from us by physics and glass…” (p. 64).

After Wallace outlines the core of the problem, he introduces a subgenre called Image-Fiction. He claims that this style was closely tied to television, not only as a reflection of the various content on TV, but also in that it was an attempt to reclaim irony for the world of literature. The peak of this subgenre, according to Wallace, was the then-brand-new novel My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist by Mark Leyner. The work “incorporates elements of science fiction, cyberpunk, tabloid journalism, and advertising slogans; and as the book is also filled with TV and pop-culture references (e.g. to kung-fu films) and literary allusions it may be difficult to read without the wide-ranging knowledge of current affairs” (Wikipedia).

In other words, Leyner created a novel as random, flighty, and all-encompassing as TV itself. Unfortunately, though, Image-Fiction was (arguably) a fruitless effort.

“The reason why today’s Image-Fiction isn’t the rescue from a passive, addictive TV-psychology that it tries so hard to be is that most Image-Fiction writers render their material with the same tone of irony and self-consciousness that their ancestors, the literary insurgents of Beat and postmodernism, used so effectively to rebel against their own world and context. And the reason why this irreverent postmodern approach fails to help the new Imagists transfigure TV is simply that TV has beaten the new Imagists to the punch” (p. 52).

Wallace takes this as a dead-end for contemporary fiction, in that the lone device television (“E Unibus”) had become just as much a consumer and recycler of culture (“Pluram”) as it was an entertainment culture provider. These fiction writers couldn’t escape what Wallace called TV’s aura. But he also claims that rebellion in the face of institutionalized irony is pointless.

“…Irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It’s critical and destructive, a ground-clearing. Surely this is the way our postmodern fathers saw it. But irony’s singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks” (p. 67).

I especially liked a quote from another author: “Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage” (Hyde, p. 67). This reminded me of Pitchfork Media, and the essay I wrote about that organization – which brings up interesting questions about modern times, post-Y2K. Even if the Internet and other media have started to wean us as a culture from the grip of TV, do we still remain a society of ironic rebels with no clue how to construct a better future for ourselves? At the time, Wallace thought that having more control over content – the type, sequence, timing, etc. – would make no difference. Furthermore, he seems scared of the idea of anarchy, as if having any one device or organization determine his content input was a source of comfort. I’d like to think that the Web 2.0 explosion, with stars including YouTube, Last.fm, and Facebook, is a sign that people do appreciate having such control. But I’m looking at the subject 20 years later, so I have that advantage.

Wallace admits that his missing escape plan might be due to his lack of foresight or imagination. I have to agree with that notion, since I founded Supraterranean on the hopeful idea that we can further develop our creative ambitions through new forms of expression and interaction. This reminds me of The Matrix: once you stop trying to bend the spoon with your mind, you realize that only your mind can bend, not a metal object (…and after all, there is no spoon). We’re beginning, as a culture, to learn how to bend our minds, when once we had convinced ourselves (or had been convinced by TV) that it was impossible. What I’m trying to say is that, when we’re ready, TV will become obsolete. And that process is already under way.

But then again, I have been in a better-than-normal mood lately, so that could be swaying my conclusion.