Why We Love Sociopaths: A Guide To Late Capitalist Television

Why We Love Sociopaths: A Guide To Late Capitalist Television

by Adam Kotsko
Why We Love Sociopaths: A Guide To Late Capitalist Television

Why We Love Sociopaths: A Guide To Late Capitalist Television

by Adam Kotsko

Paperback

$14.95 
  • SHIP THIS ITEM
    Qualifies for Free Shipping
    Usually ships within 1 week
  • PICK UP IN STORE
    Check Availability at Nearby Stores

Related collections and offers


Overview

Sociopaths are pervasive in contemporary television, from high-brow drama all the way down to cartoons — and of course the news as well. From the scheming Eric Cartman of South Parkto the seductive imposter Don Draper of Mad Men, cold and ruthless characters captivate us, making us wish that we could be so effective and successful. Yet why should we admire characters who get ahead by being amoral and uncaring? In his follow-up to Awkwardness, Adam Kotsko argues that the popularity of the ruthless sociopath reflects our dissatisfaction with a failed social contract, showing that we believe that the world rewards the evil and uncaring rather than the good. By analyzing characters like the serial killer star of Dexter and the cynical Dr. House, Kotsko shows that the fantasy of the sociopath distracts us from our real problems — but that we still might benefit from being a little more sociopathic.
,

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781780990910
Publisher: Collective Ink
Publication date: 04/16/2012
Pages: 107
Product dimensions: 5.30(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Adam Kotsko is Assistant Professor of Humanities at Shimer College, Chicago. He is the author of Žižek and Theology (2008), Politics of Redemption (2010), and Why We Love Sociopaths: A Guide to Late Capitalist Television (2012). He is the translator of Agamben’s The Sacrament of Language (2010), The Highest Poverty (2013), Opus Dei (2013), Pilate and Jesus (forthcoming) and The Use of Bodies (forthcoming). He blogs at An und für sich (itself.wordpress.com).

Read an Excerpt

Why We Love Sociopaths

A Guide to Late Capitalist Television
By Adam Kotsko

Zero Books

Copyright © 2010 Adam Kotsko
All right reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78099-091-0


Chapter One

The Schemers

In a two-part episode of South Park, the show's star, Eric Cartman, joins forces with Bart Simpson against a common enemy: their new-found competitor in the realm of irreverent, adult-oriented cartoon shows, Family Guy. After a brief debate over which child is more of a trouble-maker and should thus take the lead, Cartman triumphs when he reveals that he once fed chili made from the flesh of a classmate's own parents to him for revenge. What's so remarkable about this incident is that Cartman's cannibalistic chili isn't the only trump card he could've used against Bart. This fourth grader has had a remarkable career in mayhem. One episode has him stumbling across dead fetuses, which inspires him to start his own business selling fetuses for their stem cells. In another, he starts a wildly successful Christian band on a bet, substituting the name "Jesus" into popular love songs and writing similarly-themed originals (such as "I Want to Get Down on My Knees and Start Pleasing Jesus"), and then, finding that the Christian music industry gives out Myrrh Albums instead of the Gold Album necessary to win his bet, Cartman exclaims to a horrified audience of Christians: "Fuck Jesus!" Yet another finds him somehow installed as a teacher of at-risk urban youth and serving as an inspirational teacher like Jaime Escalante of the film Stand and Deliver—except that Cartman teaches them cheating (the white person's path to success!) instead of calculus.

Even when he's not engaged in large-scale evil plots, Cartman is personally abrasive. Based on the classic TV character Archie Bunker, he indulges in every possible form of bigotry. He is sexist, as when he laughs at the idea of breast cancer, asking to be shown these fantastical "killer boobies." He is racist, persistently referring to the one black student in his class (subtly named Token) as "you black asshole." Above all, however, he is anti-Semitic, leading him to continually torment and distrust his Jewish friend Kyle—and in one episode, inspired by a viewing of Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ, he goes so far as to dress like Hitler and incite the members of a Passion fan club to attempt a reprise of the Final Solution. He is also homophobic and classist, as illustrated by an anti-gay on-camera rant during an episode where he is acting like a stupid redneck in the hopes of thereby succeeding as a NASCAR driver.

On top of his malice and prejudice, Cartman is whiny, pushy, and selfish. His voice is annoying and harsh and, in what is normally the kiss of death for one's playground popularity, he is extremely obese. He is, in short, presented as the most loathsome possible character on every level, and most of his classmates, including even his nominal "best friends," hate him. At the same time, Cartman is too evil to be satisfied with plots that he can pull off single-handed—and more often than not, he winds up with more than enough followers. These followers can be total strangers, as when he leads a group of Civil War reenactors to reopen hostilities, pushing back Union forces so decisively that President Clinton formally surrenders. Yet they can also be those who know him best, such as his three primary co-stars, Kyle (whom he constantly insults for being Jewish), Kenny (whom he continually torments for being poor), and Stan (of whom he is jealous for his relative popularity), or in later episodes, his long-suffering sidekick, the pathetic Butters.

Given the fact that large crowds are uniformly presented as idiotic in South Park, perhaps Cartman's success in misleading them is understandable—but what are we to make of his manipulation of those who ought to know better? What is it about this repulsive schemer that is so seductive, not only to his fellow cartoon characters but also to the show's audience and even its own creators? Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the duo behind South Park, reportedly based the characters of Stan and Kyle on themselves, yet have frequently said that Cartman is their favorite, an assessment shared by most fans. What accounts for the widespread fascination with this foul-mouthed child?

In order to answer this question, I believe it is helpful to situate South Park within the broader genre that the opening scene of this chapter highlights: the adult-oriented cartoon. That means first of all relating South Park to its predecessor, The Simpsons, the founder of the adult cartoon genre, and in particular relating Cartman to Bart Simpson. Why has Cartman become so central to South Park while Bart has been replaced by his father, Homer, as the central character of The Simpsons? What is Cartman delivering, what fantasy is he fulfilling, and why has Bart failed by comparison?

The decline of the lovable scamp

When I was a child, I wasn't allowed to watch The Simpsons. To some extent, this was understandable: my parents were fairly conservative, and Fox was associated with some pretty raunchy and racy material at the time, perhaps most notably the sitcom Married ... With Children. Yet when I watch the early episodes, it's hard for me to see what they really would have objected to in the show had they watched it themselves. Bart is certainly a troublemaker, and the low-class setting of the show perhaps lent itself to crass behaviors that my parents would disapprove of. Overall, however, Bart's escapades were arguably less subversive than the sheer mayhem one would find in the average episode of Dennis the Menace. In fact, compared to the latter character, Bart is simply boring. He is unintelligent and certainly not nearly as clever as Dennis the Menace, and he consistently lacks the courage of his convictions with regard to his troublemaking, often regretting his mischief or even trying to stop plots that he has put in motion.

The t-shirts might have proclaimed that Bart was a proud underachiever, but the plots of most of the episodes showed him to be essentially a normal—even a mediocre—kid. There is certainly something to be said for an honest portrayal of childhood, and the early episodes that focused on the struggles of Bart's more sensitive and intellectually curious sister, Lisa, remain fan favorites to this day. Yet unflinching honesty seems an unlikely path to becoming the longest-running primetime program on American television, as The Simpsons became in 2009. (The more likely outcome for a show characterized by its honesty, such as the high school drama My So-Called Life, is critical acclaim, a devoted cult following, cancellation after a season or two, and steady DVD sales driven by word of mouth recommendations of the "underappreciated gem.")

Furthermore, a more or less straightforward presentation of anything feels particularly inappropriate for a cartoon. Like many children, I know that I strongly preferred cartoons and found most live-action programs boring, for the simple reason that in a cartoon, anything can happen. A boring old car can transform into a robot! Huge anthropomorphic turtles can learn the martial arts and fight crime! Rabbits can fight back against their hunters (often in drag)! Live action shows frequently have the same fantasy element, but it's the core competency of animation, which more than live action directly actualizes the wonder of television and film: the wonder of a picture coming to life. The Simpsons' predecessors in the animated sitcom genre, The Flintstones and The Jetsons, had the fantasy element built-in, and a large part of their humor came from trying to reproduce everyday modern life in a much different setting, as in the use of dinosaurs for appliances or the sentient robot maid. We can see a present-day kid getting in trouble and maybe learning moral lessons anywhere—using a cartoon to deliver that familiar product seems like a waste.

Over time, the writers of The Simpsons seemed to realize the limitations of using Bart as a central character and, in what would become a defining moment for the adult cartoon genre, gradually shifted their attention to Bart's father, Homer. A selfish, ignorant, and lazy man given to alcohol abuse as well as child abuse (the iconic "why you little ..." followed by strangulation), Homer initially seems an unlikely hero. This is not only due to lack of sympathy but due to his seeming lack of competence to do much other than perform poorly at his job, slink away to the bar, and consistently disappoint his wife and children. In principle, Homer should be as boring as Bart, but the twist the writers introduced was to make the dad into the Dennis the Menace character, who makes up for his lack of competence through the greater power that comes from being an adult—for instance, having money, being able to drive, and commanding at least some token respect and deference from his fellow adults.

This was the fantasy that made The Simpsons such an enduring fixture: the fantasy of a child who not only has the body of an adult (this phenomenon is all too familiar), but can act on his childish motivations without suffering the consequences. He has all the benefits of being an adult—including a long-suffering wife to clean up after him—but is not bound by any of the responsibilities, because he is, after all, a cartoon character. He can crash the car, or go to work drunk, or burn down the house, or alienate the entire town, or get entangled with the mafia, or whatever other bizarre scenario the writers dream up, and next week everything will be back to square one.

Taking it a step further, Homer is perhaps even more a child than children themselves, as his adult status frees him from any effective restraint, such as that of parents, teachers, or other authority figures short of the police. This enables him to act on his every impulse, and the lack of any "reality principle" allows his reasoning—if that is what it should be called—to become ever more random and unpredictable. For example, one episode begins with a bizarre non-sequitur that leads Homer to jump from making advance funeral arrangements for his father to installing a tennis court in his backyard—and once it's installed, he's exclaims, "This is tennis?!," as he apparently thought a "tennis court" was the name for a "foxy boxing" arena where attractive women would engage in hand-to-hand combat. Yet he quickly recovers from his disappointment, embarking on an adventure that ultimately puts him in contact with many of the best tennis stars in the world. By the next episode, of course, the tennis court is gone and the entire affair has been forgotten.

Homer's central status in The Simpsons was well-established by the time South Park debuted in 1997. This was a show that took the notion of an adult-oriented cartoon seriously, taking advantage of the looser restraints of a cable (as opposed to broadcast) network to fill the show with raunchy, irreverent, and crude content as well as the fantasy elements the cartoons do best. For instance, the very first episode features Cartman receiving an alien "anal probe" that periodically reemerges and expands to the size of a small building, and the show mocks the convention of resetting everything to normal each episode by killing off the same character, Kenny, every single episode for the first five seasons (and many episodes since). Yet the show has remained resolutely focused on child characters, never shifting the primary focus to any of the adults.

What accounts for this difference? I believe that South Park managed to maintain its focus on child characters by enacting the same basic fantasy that Homer Simpson fulfills, except in the opposite direction. That is to say, Cartman represents an adult in a child's body. The show's creators have often claimed that Cartman is based on the sitcom character Archie Bunker, whose narrow-minded views contemporary audiences would never tolerate coming from an adult character—they can only be expressed if put in the mouth of a child.

Along with these "adult" opinions that seem to have come from nowhere (his mother certainly demonstrates no biases), the writers also give him a variety of other adult-like qualities, most notably focus, concentration, and the ability to create long-term plans. Where Homer drifts aimlessly from impulse to impulse, Cartman seeks his goals with an often obsessive focus. Yet Cartman's goals remain, for the most part, those of a child. For instance, one multi-episode series opens with Cartman waiting impatiently for the Nintendo Wii's release date, which is two weeks away—in the eyes of a child, a veritable lifetime. Unable to bear the waiting, he arranges for his hapless friend Butters to "cryogenically freeze" him (by burying him in the snow) and then unfreeze him when the two weeks are up. He winds up being buried by an avalanche and only unfrozen many centuries later, but despite being in a futuristic environment filled with marvels (including highly evolved sea otters that are making war with humans), he maintains his megalomaniacal focus on the Nintendo Wii, ultimately devising a scheme to travel back in time when it becomes clear that the video game system is no longer available in the future.

In another episode, he imprisons Butters in a fallout shelter for two weeks and convinces him a nuclear strike has occurred, all so that he can be invited in Butters' place to a birthday party at a Mexican restaurant called Casa Mamita, which includes rides and other gimmicky attractions. Butters finds his way home on the day of the party, however, and police are there to intercept Cartman when he arrives at the restaurant—yet he runs past them and quickly visits all the tacky attractions, ultimately surrendering to police with all the serenity of a boy whose deepest desires have been fulfilled.

Even more important than any fleeting pleasure is Cartman's desire to one-up his friends, particularly his Jewish friend Kyle. Here again he displays amazing resourcefulness and focus. In the episode where he's trying to get Family Guy cancelled, a significant part of his motivation is the fact that Kyle likes the show, and he makes a cross-country voyage on his "big wheel" tricycle to sabotage Kyle's attempt to save it. Another multi-part episode focuses on Cartman's attempt to make good on Kyle's claim that Kyle would "suck his balls" if Cartman could show him a real leprechaun. When Kyle does in fact see the leprechaun, he refuses to comply—and Cartman ultimately takes his case all the way to the Supreme Court, which orders Kyle to fulfill his promise.

What all this shows is that Cartman isn't fully self-aware in the sense of literally being an adult stuck in a child's body—a condition that actually sounds terrifying to me. Cartman can't recognize his childish desires as petty and pointless, for instance, and just as Homer is more impulsive than any actual child as a result of his adult status, so also is Cartman even more childish in his desires than any actual child as a result of his adult competence. There is a level, however, on which Cartman does seem to be very aware that he's a child, and that is in recognizing how much a child can really get away with.

One of the things that allows human society to function is that children don't realize how powerful they are. I have often wished that my parents hadn't made me participate in certain things—for instance, I hated going to summer camp. Yet when I think about it, how exactly were they "making" me go? If I was absolutely dedicated to avoiding summer camp, were they going to tie me up and throw me into the car? Even if so, what would keep me from trying to escape? The same goes for many things that children experience as an imposition: in reality, the only thing "making" them go is their instinctive obedience to their parents, an obedience that is certainly based in love, but that is reinforced by the feelings of guilt and shame that most often accompany disobedience.

(Continues...)



Excerpted from Why We Love Sociopaths by Adam Kotsko Copyright © 2010 by Adam Kotsko . Excerpted by permission of Zero Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments....................vi
Introduction: On the desire to be a sociopath....................1
Sociopathy as reverse awkwardness....................4
Love and other market forces....................9
The varieties of sociopathic experience....................14
Chapter 1: The Schemers....................19
The decline of the lovable scamp....................21
Enabling mothers, MILFs, and negative feminism....................27
A show about nihilism....................32
Childish games: Adult edition....................38
Chapter 2: The Climbers....................42
From reality television to "realism"....................45
The paradoxes of sociopathic social climbing....................49
The perils of changing "the game"....................58
Chapter 3: The Enforcers....................65
The lawless lawman....................69
Serial murder as community service....................78
The inhuman humanitarian....................84
Conclusion: Redeeming the fantasy sociopath....................94
From the B&N Reads Blog

Customer Reviews