Is it Katy Perry herself, drawing on her intensity of emotion to speak truth to her own condition? Is it the social psychology of gender, speaking from a deep rooting in the minds of many? Is it an echo of Paul Simon? Is it universal wisdom? Romantic psychology? Russell Brand?

"I will be part of your interpretive discourse. Always."

Roland Barthes begins his seminal essay “The Death of the Author” with a similar question related to Balzac*. His answer to his own question seems extendable to the literature of celebrity, from the accounts of their thoughts an actions, to their own statements in the public sphere, to the murmuring curiae across all professional, amateur and social media, to the very names and identities that appear in our lunchtime conversations:

We shall never know, for the good reason that writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing.”

- Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author”

That is to say, nobody is really “saying” that Katy Perry unfollowed Russell Brand on Twitter. We are reading it, but once it is down in text (or really, any medium that is subject to interpretation by a reader), it is no longer attributable to an active, talking person capable of will and intent. Because she is not alive in this context, “Katy Perry” is dead, as are any individuals who might claim to speak for her or about her with authority. Their intentionality no longer exists with regards to this story, or in the collected discourse that makes up the myths, tales, gossip and songs around the literature of Katy Perry’s celebrity existence.

(Russell Brand the celebrity is also dead in this same way, but because of social forces and also because he is somewhat less well-liked, more controversial, and more prone to self-destruction, this is somehow less shocking.)

Dammit Jim, I’m a Doctor, Not Perez Hilton.

Bones McCoy needs a Zooey Deschanel-esque portmanteau, a la "adorkable", that combines "spacefaring doctor from the future" with "homespun country wisdom" -- and also "grizzled."

Announcing the deaths of things people like is one of the ways philosophers and theorists socially alienate their involuntary readers — so to step away from Barthes’s postmortem, let’s talk about what it means — in the act of literary interpretation — for identities to shuffle off their mortal coils, for intention lose its claim on meaning, and for the writer to be “dead.” The death of the author is to one degree or another taken for granted in the trendy study of literature these days, and at risk of making the jump from good blogger to bad graduate student,  it seems just as clearly so in the interpretation of celebrities.

After all, the interpretation of celebrities and the argument over the meaning of celebrities are a great deal more popular and enthusiastically practiced these days than up-close-and-personal encounters with Balzac*.

But let’s be clear what we’re talking about, because if we don’t, we end up feeling sheepish next to the Wolfenstein 3D enthusiast in the “Neitzsche is dead… God” t-shirt.

We are not saying Katy Perry does not exist as a corporeal being — that she no longer walks, breathes, lives, loves or feels in her brain, a distinct object with its own phenomenology. No, Katy Perry’s physical existence can be experimentally confirmed (though only the very creepiest of logical positivists would make the attempt).

We are not saying Katy Perry deserves no credit for her work, that she is unpraiseworthy, or that she shouldn’t necessarily be paid royalties for “California Gurls,” so long as we live in a society where people possess intellectual property rights — and/or the authority to extend such rights — for which currency is exchanged.

We are not saying that she is irrelevant, or that what she does is meaningless or unimportant.

We are saying that, with regards to the literature that is Katy Perry — and specifically interpreting and attempting to discern the meaning of that literature — Katy Perry herself cannot step forward and claim authority as the author, or as the celebrity. When we are sitting there looking at the Huffington Post article about her unfollowing Russell Brand on Twitter, she cannot point to it and show us where she is in it, or persuasively claim to know what it means, because dammit, she is Katy Perry.

More importantly, since Katy Perry isn’t generally in the business of this anyway, nobody else can step forward and claim to derive that same authority from knowing her intentions.

“I know what this article means, because I am Katy Perry’s number one fan. I know her heart, and I know how she feels about Russell. This is what it really means,” is nonsense.

In saying Katy Perry is dead, we say she isn’t alive and present as a celebrity exerting her intentions through celebrity gossip about her. The many influences on it and the maelstrom of ideas, preconceptions, echoes, references, marketing meetings, Facebook wall posts, and everything else associated with it, once they are literature, aren’t really derived from the willful acts of a celebrity anymore. There are too many intermediaries between the writing and the reading of a text (or, again, any interpretive medium) for the reader to allow for this sort of authorial authority to preside over meaning and interpretation.

The Walking Tall Tale

But what do I mean when I say “the literature that is Katy Perry?” Katy Perry is a person, right? And all this talk we go about doing with regards to her being a person doesn’t make her any less a person, does it? Let’s look back to Barthes:

As soon as a fact is narrated no longer with a view to acting directly on reality but intransitively, that is to say, finally outside of any function other than that of the very practice of the symbol itself, this disconnection occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death, writing begins.”

Definitions of literature in literary theory, whether relative or absolute, tend to flock around this general area — literature is information that doesn’t have to correspond to reality, but can have an effect, whether that is beauty, truth, tension, sublimity or any of the other familiar or exotic goals of literary pursuits, without needing to do anything else.

Poetry is a form of literature. Drama is a form of literature. Film is a form of literature. I’m positing, and I can’t reasonably be the first person posit it, but that doesn’t matter, (especially in discussions of the death of the author — because, after all, as you read this, I am not present in or in relation to it as a living being either) that celebrities themselves have these days so far transcended a relationship with reality that they have become a form of literature themselves, supported by the discourse around them across media and platforms.

Why do these people have a show? They’re just famous for being famous.”

- Every curmudgeon who thinks he is clever but is really just having a bad day, including me sometimes, about the Kardashians

By “the literature that is Katy Perry” I mean that Katy Perry as we read and interpret her — the body of information that we encounter that has this name associated with it in which we look for a certain meaning and/or significance — is far less a corresponding description of a person than a literature in itself, endeavoring in these same familiar and exotic literary pursuits.

Dasein In the Membrane (A.K.A. I Don’t Know If This Rhymes, Because Nobody Uses This Word In Actual Conversation)

As I’ve noted in previous articles and podcasts, I find the term Dasein, drawn from Martin Heidegger’s Being And Time, useful in discussions like this, because it doesn’t bog us down in scientific argument over the qualities of a person or of cognition, or of the functionality of the mind, and concerns us primarily with the thing capable of  experiencing “stuff.” Dasein refers to an entity which, “in its very Being, comports itself understandingly towards that Being.”

Sein und Zug

People who are alive in the world are Daseins. Philosophical zombies, theoretical beings who are materially indistinguishable from people but who do not possess subjective consciousness (which I find to be a problematic term because it sidetracks us into discussions of emergent properties and information theory), are not Daseins. Trains are not Daseins. Thomas the Tank Engine, were he to be real, would be a Dasein.

Daseins can be authentic or inauthentic. It is generally believed to be a good thing to be authentic as you’re going about the business of being-in-the-world. Celebrities, especially heavily managed and choreographed ones, with teams of publicists, stunt marriages, scripted interviews, meaningless but lucrative endorsements of useless products, and other such Kardashian endeavors, are often seen as inauthentic. They are fake, phoney, and emotionally detached, their pictures are heavily Photoshopped, their bodies are virtually cybernetic — the litany is familiar; they are not being honest.

I would take it one step further and say that when you see something like this:

"You gotta have blue hair." - Strong Bad

You’re not looking at an image of an inauthentic Dasein — Hell, you’re not even looking at a person anymore. There is so much interference and cultural interplay in this information that you return to an act of reading as described by Barthes, divorced from the act of writing. You are looking at something “narrated no longer with a view to acting directly on reality but intransitively, that is to say, finally outside of any function other than that of the very practice of the symbol itself” — you are looking at literature with a dead or absent intentionality.

Why Arguments About Objectification So Rarely Actually Go Anywhere Productive

Now, this of course, brings up a major problem. The idea of the death of the author runs afoul of complaints about objectification.

And as much as it may sidetrack me, I have to mention it here, because after posting that picture people are going to yell at me about it anyway in the comments (except I’m not here! And my intentionality does not exist in this work as you read it, ‘natch!).

The idea behind objectification is that by understanding a representation of a person as less than a fully realized person, we instrumentalize or use that person, which, in a Kantian sense, is a crime against the dignity they ought to be afforded as rational beings, and in a Marxist sense, sets up a dialectic that subjugates and alienates them, most likely for the economic benefit of your own class of people.

However, if you want to look at an image of Katy Perry (or even a darker, sparser corner of the Internet where people actually look at Balzac*) and employ judgement in relation to the “thing-in-itself” through any number of rational formulations, or if you are seeking to lift up Katy Perry from her subaltern place in socioeconomic discourse, you will be sorely disappointed, because you are knocking on the door of an empty house. And, no I’m not saying she’s dumb (I’m sure she’s very smart).

Katy Perry isn’t actually there. That image is a literature of Katy Perry, and if you’re looking at it, the intentioned Katy Perry with whom you are seeking to interact with is already dead.

So, arguments about objectification often run into this problem, as for political reasons people continue to will that literature be capable of producing its causal agent for redressing, redefinition or redemption, when that agent is long absent and even asking for it is an incoherent act.

This of course does not mean objectification is good, or that protesting it is bad — but just that most of the time it is quite difficult to do anything about it, except to try not to allow systematic trends in its use to create deleterious effect on people’s standards of living.

The important thing to remember here is that these problems are intrinsic to the act of interpretation and finding meaning. One of the ways to try to get out of this is to not try to find the meaning in things, but to engage in art in different ways. That in the rest will have to be covered in another article.

Katy Perry Is A Commercial Enterprise

You may notice this advertisement exemplifies pretty much everything I've been saying. You might.

You might have stopped earlier in this article when I said something that was clearly and knowingly incorrect, or at least incomplete:

Katy Perry herself cannot step forward and claim authority as the author, or as the celebrity. When we are sitting there looking at the Huffington Post article about her unfollowing Russell Brand on Twitter, she cannot point to it and show us where she is in it, or persuasively claim to know what it means, because dammit, she is Katy Perry.”

-Me, “Earlier In This Article (We were all so young then. Look at the hair I had! Crazy!)”

If you’re paying attention, you might have stopped here and said of course she can! Dammit, she is Katy Perry!

And indeed you would be right — Katy Perry could indeed step forward and make an authoritative statement about what the article saying she unfollowed Russell Brand on Twitter actually means, and she’d have the power to back it up. She could have her lawyers send a cease and desist. If you did the wrong thing with her celebrity, of which she did not approve, she could sic Chris Dodd on you. I don’t get the sense that Katy Perry is mean-spirited enough to do these things, but people who would lay some claim to her celebrity intentionality would.

Regardless, let’s say she did do it, would she be doing it because she is correct?

Far from a refutation of the death of the author, this power is one of the big reasons why the essay “The Death of the Author” exists — because this sort of act is not an act of interpretation, but an act of intellectual tyrrany — that if you aspire at all to freedom or dignity in the human mind, you should find it abhorrent that in capitalist societies and other similar societies people of wealth, power and influence get to step forward and claim to everybody else what something means just by virtue of them being the “author,” which is of course cognate with the word “authority.”

If celebrities are the modern-day folk heroes — the lenses through which people see their own lives, craft their relationships, and plan their own rituals, it the literature of their day-to-day is in celebrity gossip — what right that derives from truth rather than power does Katy Perry or one of Katy Perry’s lawyers have to come along to a random dude or lady reading People magazine at the checkout line and insist on what it means?

It is thus logical that in literature it should be this positivism, the epitome and culmination of capitalist ideology, which has attached the greatest importance to the ‘person’ of the author… The image of literature to be found in ordinary culture is tyrannically centred on the author…”

- Roland Barthes, Ibid.

If celebrity is literature, and I think it is, and the act of interpreting celebrity is confined to the reader of celebrity, which I think it is, and if all the confounding factors make intentionality in the creation of celebrity untransferable, which I think they do, then for an interested party (including the Dasein associated with celebrity of the same name) assert authority over readings of the literature of that celebrity by virtue of authorship or celebrity itself is an act of economic and social power — not interpretive value, reading, or meaning.

It’s bullying. It’s not nice. And I’m gonna tell Roland Barthes**, so nyah.

Let’s finish with something from the end of Roland’s essay, for symmetry:

Thus is revealed the total existence of writing: a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author. The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination… Classic criticism has never paid any attention to the reader; for it, the writer is the only person in literature. We are now beginning to let ourselves be fooled no longer by the arrogant antiphrastical recriminations of good society in favour of the very thing it sets aside, ignores, smothers, or destroys; we know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.”

- Roland Barthes, Ibid.

**- Roland Barthes is dead. Unfortunately. PBUH

*- Always pun intended. Always.

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Unless you’re Rebecca Black, the accidental YouTube sensation, and the number one entry in 2011′s Google Zeitgeist:

I’m sorry. Did you forget that Rebecca Black and “Friday” happened? Let me remind you:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfVsfOSbJY0

In a way, I suppose that the dilemma of choosing between the front seat and the back seat is indicative of the great policy split of our era between advocates of government intervention in macroeconomics and advocates of a more laissez-faire approach. In a way.

Keynes vs. Hayek: which seat should I taaaake?

But in all seriousness, it’s clear that, once again, the Google Zeitgeist is anything but a zeitgeist. It doesn’t represent the true spirit of the times; it just represents what people search for on the internet (celebrities and technology news, plus a horrific disaster thrown in for good measure). But it does represent something significant, given the ubiquity of Google and its position as the first stop for many people on their way to other parts of the internet. So with that in mind, let’s use this as an opportunity to revisit the Rebecca Black “Friday” phenomenon, several months after its peak and likely at one of her last moments of relevance in pop culture.

For those of you who lost interest in Rebecca Black several months ago, here’s a quick update on her post- “Friday” adventures. She’s released two other songs, appeared in the Katy Perry music video “Last Friday Night,” and even scored an endorsement deal with Australian telecom company Telstra. That’s the good news. The bad news is that her subsequent singles have seen diminishing success, much less anything close to the notoriety achieved by “Friday,”  and worst of all, she was bullied out of her middle school.

She was the most searched for person on the entire Internet, she appeared in a Katy Perry music video, and yet, she experienced the ultimate alienation that any young person could face: exile from her school and her peer group. In the same year. She went from complete anonymity to near-total ubiquity to the ash heap of history (or at least to its outer edges). In the same year.

It would be too easy to ascribe this extreme volatility to the fast-paced, zero attention span information age. That certainly is at play here, but what’s far more interesting (not to mention relevant to the ostensible topic of this article, Google Zeitgeist), is the accidental, serendipitous nature of the whole affair. Presumably, nobody sat down with a master plan to create a song/music video so terrible and yet so appealing that it would catapult a nondescript middle-school girl into worldwide fame and the top of a list of most popular searches on Google for the year. Technology allowed this accident to happen, but it’s still an accident. An exception that proves the rule that, in spite of oddball viral fads that produce huge sensations from the grassroots, our world views are still dominated by hegemonic influencers and tastemakers, just as they were in the days before the Internet.

Look at the rest of the top ten list.

Six of the top ten are essentially the products of huge corporate publicity machines: a major label musician (Adele), mass market technology products (Battlefield 3, Google+, the iPhone, and the iPad), and the man who ran one of the best corporate publicity machines of all time. The other three are essentially current event items: Ryan Dunn, the Jackass star who was killed in a car accident, Casey Anthony, the subject of a sensational trial, and the aforementioned Japanese tsunami/nuclear disaster.

Rebecca Black may avoid the seemingly inevitable fate of obscurity and go on to a long and successful career as a musician. But assuming she doesn’t, she will remain an exception, an accident, rather than a truly zeitgeist-defining moment.

Which was a very long way of saying what we knew along: that the Google Zeitgeist isn’t a zeitgeist at all.

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Belinkie:

The Glee reviews on Gawker have become increasingly hostile. This makes me wonder, what are the TV shows with the sharpest drop-offs in quality/fan base? I remember Heroes started off super-popular, than crashed hard in its second season. Didn’t watch it, but it went from geek favorite to object of scorn in about six months.

Fenzel:

The OC

Shechner:
Chuck, though it’s less an object of scorn as it is an object lesson in quality control.  Perhaps sci-fi geeks have gotten used to being disappointed over time, whilst those of other genres are only now getting acquainted with the phenomenon?

Fenzel:
I always like to trot out Gene Roddenbury’s Andromeda at times like this. And that show had a Dantean descent through deeper circles of mediocrity every season. Although, hey, I like to trot it out anytime, who am I kidding?

Gene Roddenbury’s Earth: Final Conflict actually had a much sharper drop-off in quality. Although that was around Season 4, not season 1. The Canadian sci-fi show Lexx also fell _way_ off the map after season 2. Season 2 is pretty interesting and scary on a Dr. Who-ish level. Season 3 is straight trash.

But none of these shows are what I would call “very good” anyway. What makes them remarkable is just how terrible they got – specifically because they were sci-fi shows that changed production companies or some other syndication contract issue such that they lost their special effects budgets and found an arbitrary reason to either make characters who had previously worn a lot of makeup look like normal people as well as maroon their characters somewhere mundane and earth-like because they no longer had the budget to show spaceships.

I would say “The Weakest Link” qualifies. It was totally hot shit in the USA for almost exactly one year, and then it just totally bombed out and recorded a shitload of episodes for like PAX and the Game Show Network.

And, while I love it dearly, by the end, _24_ was at the point where _Hard Target_ was sending it concerned emails and scheduling an intervention.

“I learned it from YOU, Dad! I learned it from watching YOU!”

One big reason why sci fi does this so much is syndication. If the production of the show and the distribution and broadcast of the show are closely linked, a show isn’t likely to be allowed to suck and lose its entire following without getting canceled, and its budget isn’t likely to be cut so severely that its show concept just doesn’t work, but it can still get produced.

If you’re shopping around a sci-fi show, it’s unlikely you have end-to-end interest from a network. You’re niche programming looking to fill spots. And you’re seen as interchangeable. So it’s more likely a sci-fi show will jump from business partner to business partner – whereas if Fox doesn’t want to show Glee anymore, other than reruns, they probably just make a different show rather than make really cheap shitty episodes of Glee.

Also with sci-fi, you see the money onscreen, so it’s easier to know for sure when the producers hit hard times or the networks aren’t interested anymore.

Mlawski:

Twin Peaks is another example.  Also: AMC’s The Killing. The critics went nuts over the first episode, liked the second episode, and then by the fourth episode decided it was the worst show ever. And then came the season finale, which made most critics and fans  feel murdery.

Perich:

By “the critics” you’re including me, right? :-)

Mlawski:

Ah, true, true! I had forgotten about your Killing posts (sorry!), but, well, there you are :)

Perich:

I own up to my sins.

Shechner:

Actually, I’d disagree about Twin Peaks. Sure, the second season misses out on a lot of the core factors that made the first so great (really taking its time to emphasize ambiance over plot, for one…), but there’s still a lot of good stuff going on there.  For one, the series finale is one of the most impressively shocking pieces of avante guarde artistry ever put on national television, unless–like me–you tend to turn off the sound during super bowl halftimes and watch it instead while listening to Trout Mask Replica.

McNeil:

In light of Perich’s new undertaking, the West Wing deserves mention here.   For a lot of fans and reviewers, the show lost its soul when Sorkin left.  Personally, I really enjoyed the subsequent seasons. Their bleak look at the impotence of even the most powerful man in the world to effect change actually helps me deal with certain political disappointments of mine.  On a similarly noncommital note, I also want to mention Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Seemed like half of the show’s fanbase started bitching the second that Dawn showed up in Season 5.

So, readers, what shows disappointed you most in the end?  What makes a show go off the rails? Sound off in the comments!

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On the last Overthinking It Podcast, Fenzel and I got into a discussion about the return of Beavis & Butt-head. I had recently seen the show on MTV’s website, and I delivered the news that “Beavis & Butt-head is back!”

Fenzel asked whether I didn’t mean “Beavis & Butt-head are back,” since compound subjects joined by “and” take a plural verb.

We’d like to imagine our use of language is consistent (it isn’t, but we still like to imagine it), and so one of the ways to resolve a question is to consider similar questions. In this case, Pete’s question about the number of verbs is related to collective nouns, or what H. W. Fowler calls “nouns of multitude.” These include words like “firm,” “band,” and “party.”

The deciding factor is whether you are using the noun to refer to the collective as a single entity (singular) or as a group of single individuals (plural). In natural language, we would say “R.E.M. is breaking up” (you’re referring to a single band, so the verb is singular—all the more persuasive because “breaking up” posits a unity that is being disrupted)[1], but we would say “R.E.M. are pursuing solo projects” (admittedly tortured syntax, but the point is clear: you’re referring to a collection of individuals, so the verb is plural.)

It’s important that you’re consistent in your choice of singular and plural, especially if you’re going to use a pronoun later on to refer to the collective. For example: “The hunting party loses its way” (singular, because the party is traveling together and has one way) or “The hunting party lose their hats” (plural, because each individual has a hat and they are lost separately), but never “the hunting party loses their way” (singular verb, plural article: nonsense!).

Similarly with our adolescent cartoon friends: When I said “Beavis & Butt-head is back,” my sense was “The show Beavis & Butt-head is back.” The understood subject was singular, so I used a singular verb. If I were to say something like “Beavis & Butt-head are awful people,” I’d be talking about two individual characters, so the verb would be plural.

This determination was borne out by evidence. Beavis & Butt-head Do America, the movie title, refers to both individual characters and not to the show as a collective. Beavis and Butt-head, the separate entities, each do America separately.

That seemed to settle the grammatical issue, but I had the nagging suspicion that I couldn’t shake that there was something to overthink here. And, upon reflection, I think it’s this: The distinction that Fenzel and I ended up drawing has to do not just with grammatical number, but with the relationship of the speaker to the work of art she is describing.

What I’m about to suggest is limited to works of narrative art—it can be any sort of fiction in any medium, but it must be a story with characters. When we talk about these works, we are signalling our role as an audience member and talking about the work as a cultural artifact. “Beavis & Butt-head is back” implies that Beavis & Butt-head is a thing and that I am separate from that thing.

Contrast the statement, “Beavis and Butt-head are working at the Burger World.” I’m talking about the characters as individuals and using plural verbs, but there’s something else: I’m talking about them as though they are ontologically on par with me—as though I’ve stepped into the narrative world. And if I were to supply some context, as in “In the latest episode, Beavis and Butt-head watch music videos,” it makes the leap explicit. More on the prepositions in a minute.

First, let’s ring the changes: The Smurfs (the show) was adapted as a movie, but the smurfs (all the little blue pests themselves) were awful in it. Or, more generally, though The Smurfs smurfs smurfily, the smurfs smurf smurfily. And when you say the latter, you’ve entered their diagetic or imaginative world—and started speaking their language. (You know what’s a funny word? Smurf. Type it eight times in a paragraph and it’s bound to look wrong.)

Bill and Ted are in the phone booth in the circuits of time, but Bill and Ted is in the five dollar bin at Blockbuster. Harry and the Hendersons (a great example because the title contains both a conjunction and a proper noun in plural but we still use…) is a moving tribute to the humanity of yetis everywhere. The Kardashians is a terrible show, but the Kardashians are terrible people.

There are some corner cases, as when the title names a collective entity other than characters: Star Wars was ruined by the prequels, but the star wars were won by the clone army. Or at least one of them was. Covert Affairs is on tonight. So is Weeds. So is Wings, but it (singular pronoun) is in syndication.

Finally, consider a show that brought the characters of Beavis and Butt-head back but was called something else. You could say that Beavis & Butt-head is back as Adolescent Sublimity. But you’d say that Beavis and Butt-head are back in Adolescent Sublimity.

(Adolescent Sublimity is entirely made up. But if it were to be made, I know a podcast that would be more than happy to cover it.)

The prepositions do some of the work in this last example. “As” implies likeness between two things—when one thing can stand in as another, they must be similar in some respect. A TV show for a TV show, a narrative for a narrative. On the other hand, saying that characters are “in” a show implies an ontological difference. A narrative has a different quality of being than the characters it contains do, precisely because the show can do the containing and the characters have to be contained. (The Simpsons played with this difference in the episode where a 3D-animated Homer walked down a live-action city street.)

So when we watch or think about a TV show, there’s a three part structure: On one side there’s a character, on the other the audience, and then there’s the show which is the barrier between them. When you talk about the show and use a singular verb, you are staying firmly on your side of the fence. What I’m suggesting is that when you use the plural verb—”Beavis and Butt-head are“—you have somehow leaped the fence, and the structure of the language you use implies that the characters are independent entities (which they aren’t) and have equal ontological status to you (which they don’t).

I can foresee a number of objections, one being that this is a distinction without a meaningful difference. We talk about all kinds of things all the time—objects, ideas, suggestions, wishes, characters, works of art, abstract principles—and it doesn’t give anybody any trouble. Fair enough. But suppose I were the Parents Television Council or something, and I wanted to warn America: “Beavis and Butt-head are terrible role models.” This hypothetical concerned watchdog group would be ascribing a certain amount of agency to the characters—the ability to model behavior for children. Ironically, this is exactly the thing they were trying to minimize, but in the attempt, they managed to actually elevate the characters to entities on par with other (real) bad role models like Howard Stern or your older brother. The language itself is working against them.

This is an extremely fiddly point and probably not widely applicable outside of the limited circumstances I describe. But if you, like me, believe that one of the most important factors of intelligence is negotiating your path up and down levels of abstraction, it’s very important to be explicit about which level you stand on. The grammatical relationship elides the relationship of the speaker to a work’s diagesis; I’m not sure it’s always clear to us that we know what we’re talking about.

What do we talk about when we talk about fictional characters? Are the more occasions of slippage than the one I’m describing here? Are there narratives where you’d be more or less reluctant to talk about the characters independently? Think I’m overstating the case? Sound off in the comments!

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• Fenzel on Dragon Ball #3: Metonymy and Metaphor

Dahlia Lithwick has an interesting piece over at Slate about Ultimate Fighting, and whether or not it can be considered a form of Art — that’s art as in fine, not as in mixed-martial — for legal purposes, granting it protection under the first amendment. This isn’t an academic issue:  some MMA types are suing the state of New York, which currently bans the practice, for the right to hold tournaments.

So what makes something art?  Actually, hold that thought. Why is art protected under the first amendment, anyway? The relevant portion of the amendment’s text is quite simply “Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech.” Don’t get me wrong! I’m quite happy that art is constitutionally protected.  Nothing gets me riled up faster than censorship. But is art — all art — really speech?

Speech obviously doesn’t mean just what you say. Words don’t stop being protected when you write them down, for instance.  And if you make a painting, or a symphony, or a performance art piece that expresses the same idea, that should be protected too.  As I understand the logic, then (although surely there’s a specific legal precedent I should be referring to?), art needs to have an outer form that communicates some inner meaning in order to qualify for protection. There are people who would jump ugly with you over the idea that art expresses something beyond its surface form, but let’s run with that idea for now:  if a piece of art has a message, it is speech, and therefore protected.  But who gets to decide what has a message?  The creators?  The public? Can we just assert that something is art in order to make it legal?

Kind of, yeah. Take porn, for instance.  Prostitution is illegal, but pornography isn’t.  Which means that you can legally pay people to have sex with you, as long as you’re actually hiring them to be “actors” and “actresses” in an “independent film” starring “your genitals.”  If Lars von Trier hired a couple of ultimate fighters to improvise a scene in which their characters beat the crap out of each other, New York would have a hard time banning the result.  You could protest that the fighters don’t see their activity as a performance — but then, some porn stars would doubtless say the same thing.  And do the textile workers who make Christo & Jeanne-Claude’s giant swathes of cloth see their activity as artistic? Probably not.  Would banning that activity effectively criminalize a particular artistic statement?  Probably so.

Another example is ballet. For the most part, this is unproblematically art, and unproblematically speech. The dancers care very deeply about the expressive content of their work:  they are artists trying to communicate, so what they do is protected.  But as a thought experiment, let’s imagine that we’re dealing with a dancer that is NOT trying to communicate:  a ballet dancing robot, or a ballet dancing zombie, or just a normal ballet dancer who’s been very carefully lobotomized.  Our imaginary dancer can still dance, and does so perfectly, contracting the appropriate muscles at the appropriate time.  But they’re not trying to express anything anymore.  Is what they’re doing still “art”?

Whether the robo-dancer is making an artistic statement of their own or not, we could probably all agree that there’s an artistic content to the choreography if that was made by a third party. Ballet is a recreative art, like acting and music performance.  And, I would suggest, like sports.

As Lithwick notes, no sport is currently recognized as a form of speech under U.S. law.  And yet all sports are highly aestheticized.  The enjoyment that we take from sports is not easily separable from the kind of enjoyment that we take from theatrical performances and music, especially when you start getting into unscripted forms like long-form improv, and competitive ones like battle-rap.  And although individual athletes may or may not care about the entertainment value of what they do, it’s unquestionably the case that the governing bodies of every sport care about this deeply.  Changes to the rules are quite often intended to make the sport more exciting.  And why were the rules made up in the first place?  Sports aren’t just a contest, they’re a stylized contest.  And that stylization has an aesthetic value.

Let me explain. Even MMA, which made its reputation by selling itself as no-holds-barred isn’t really no-holds-barred.  As that one episode of Friends helpfully reminds us, MMA outlaws groin attacks, eye gouging, and fish-hooking (and since then, headbutts, biting, small joint manipulation, and a few other categories of low blow). But there’s more to it than that.  You know what else MMA outlaws?  Having two of your buddies jump in and grab the other guy’s arms.  Pepper Spray. Knives.  Threatening to have the other fighter arrested if he so much as lays a finger on you.  Kidnapping his children and threatening to have them killed if he doesn’t take a dive.  In a real fight, any of these might be effective strategies… and this means that MMA, in that it does not allow them, is not a pure bloodsport.  It’s a highly stylized contest that values certain attributes — speed, strength, extremely dense shinbones — over others, like having lots of friends, or a switchblade, or no moral compass.

Boxing is also a pretty violent sport. If you don’t protect yourself very carefully from blows to the head and neck, you can end up knocked out or worse. But it’s stylized in that it doesn’t allow grappling or kicks.  These are considered “not sporting.” If you want not to get punched, grappling your opponent is one of the smartest things you can possibly do — but boxing values blocking and dodging over grappling, and tailors its rules appropriately.

Stylization isn’t just about what you can’t do, either:  sometimes it’s about what you must do.  U.S. Kickboxing, unlike Savate and Muay Thai, doesn’t allow kicks to the leg. This creates a problem, which is that the fighters sometimes stop kicking at all.  If low kicks aren’t allowed, it turns out that a boxer will beat a kickboxer more than half the time.  As a result, it’s built into the ruleset that fighters must attempt a certain number of kicks per round.  This obviously values kicking over punching.

All martial arts exist on a continuum between violence and stylization.  The logical limit of violence is actual combat, with guns and everything.  Way over on the stylized end of the spectrum, you have breakdancing, which depends on a lot of the same skills as actual combat, and is a competition, but not one in which you are allowed to touch your opponent.  Somewhere in between you have combat sports.  Each of these, even MMA, makes some techniques illegal.

Fighters tailor their styles to take advantage of these rules. In boxing and American kickboxing, you don’t have to protect your legs at all, which frees up more time for protecting your head. An interesting corollary is that the best way to fight one of these guys, if you absolutely have to, is probably to kick their legs and grapple, because those are the techniques their fighting styles are least well-equipped to deal with.  Same with MMA. If you ever find yourself in a fistfight with Mirko Filipovic, your best way out of a VERY bad situation is probably to gouge his eyes, pummel his genitals, and then have two of your friends jump him from behind.  Scratch that — have them jump him first.  Or better yet, break out the pepper spray. (Maybe hold off on threatening his children, though. Wouldn’t want to make that guy angry.)

But the fact that fighters adapt to the rulesets is a consequence of the rules, not a justification for them.  The point of the rules is actually expressive.  By privileging certain techniques over others, martial arts rules make a statement about what kinds of fights are better — and although this can sometimes be parsed as a moral value (i.e. no threatening the opponent’s children), there are also cases, like the anti-punch bias in American kickboxing, where it’s hard to experience it as anything but an aesthetic choice.

These values are not necessarily very interesting.  But they’re there.  They are communicated by every bout, every “performance” of that particular ruleset.  (And this isn’t just a feature of combat sports, either.  Football privileges planning and discipline; Soccer, improvisation and adaptability.)  And it inevitably follows, to my mind, that preventing that communication is an abridgment of freedom of speech.  It might not be the fighters’ speech, exactly — they could be like zombie ballerinas, or cogs in a machine (although I’m guessing they usually aren’t). But someone is speaking.  Maybe Hélio Gracie is having a spirited debate with the Marquess of Queensberry.  Arguably the content of the speech is stupid and repetitive, but that’s no reason to go around banning it.

Related Posts

• Episode 186: Wrong Enough to be Human
• You Want Me To Be Eye Candy? Thoughts on Soderbergh and Stunt Casting
• Episode 170: Guy who makes the craft services who feeds Aaron Sorkin
• Open Thread for September 9, 2011
• Open Thread for April 8, 2011

And remember… you can always buy OTI-branded merch in our very own store! Now… on to the presents.

Web Hosting
If you’re looking to start your own site on the internet, you could do worse than OTI’s own hosting provider, A2 Hosting, who have been with us from the beginning, grown with us, and helped us through the rough patches.

Lee & Mlawski: Community Season 1

Somewhere, there is an NBC executive who weighs the fate of Community in his (it’s probably a dude) hands. He’s probably a soulless corporate stooge who wouldn’t recognize brilliant art, even if it reached out from the glove compartment of his Lexus and smacked him across his smug face. But he’s heard that this Community show is critically praised and gives NBC some credibility among that elusive but coveted “geek” demographic. He looks at the ratings numbers. They are not good. He looks at his expensive Cartier watch. It is fancy. Then he looks at the DVD sales figures. They are better than they would be if you didn’t buy them for yourself or your loved ones. He considers this piece of information along with everything else he’s factoring into his decision. And maybe, just maybe, he does the right thing and lets Community live for another season because that DVD sales figure was higher than it would be if you didn’t buy Community: Season 1 for yourself or your loved ones.

Still not convinced? Check out Mlawski’s Half-Assed Infographic (click for larger version).

Shechner: Through The Wormhole with Morgan Freeman Season 1 and Season 2

Each passover, we Hebrews sing the children’s song Dayenu–loosely translated: “It would have been enough.” Diyanu’s one of those songs with cumulative verses, ala’ “Old MacDonald had a farm,” but with the MacDonald role being played by Yahweh, his farm replaced with dynastic Egypt, and the animals replaced by His numerous miracles.  I guess the Jews are like, farm-hands or something.  Anyway, as the song continues, the progression of verses extoll the bounty of miracles gifted upon The Chosen People as they were freed from Egypt, each more glorious than its predecessor.  For years now, I’ve thought that this form of praise–bizarrely steeped in a kind of  passive aggressive worship–would be perfect in all kinds of other scenarios, too.  Observe:

If Science had only given us a revolution in modern physics, Dayenu!
If only the Science Channel had decided to make a new miniseries of documentaries highlighting these developments, Dayenu!
If only they’d green-lit the series with one of the largest production budgets ever used for scientific documentaries,Dayenu!
If only they’d given it an incredibly slick presentation style, steeped in beautiful cinematography, lighting and eye-popping CGI, Dayenu!
If they’d only scored interviews with the best and brightest scientists, and evoked from them fascinating descriptions about their work, Dayenu!
If they’d only gotten Morgan Freeman to narrate the series, Dayenu!

But lo!  Science (and the Science Channel) did all of these things, and framed it to appear as though Morgan Freeman himself had spent years pondering these fundamental questions underlying the whole of reality.
(DAY-YE-NU! &c.)

Yes, this not just an exquisitely produced, provocative, fun and entertaining documentary series about physics (and sometimes, metaphysics and biology).  Through the Wormhole does such a quality job of presenting its host and narrator as the central creative mind behind the project that I honestly can’t tell if Morgan Freeman’s just playing a part. Could it possibly be that he’s actually spent his life thinking about and reading up on the nature of particle physics, of quantum entanglement or of the origins of life?  Man, I have no idea, but I want to believe it.  I want to believe that one day, our paths will happen to cross, and after I finish gushing about how awesome Glory was, he’ll say, “Thanks, Dave.  Now, I have some questions regarding RNA catalysis that I’d like to ask you about.”

Squee!

Belinkie: The Compleat Motherfucker: A History of the Mother of All Dirty Words

Needless to say, one must show discretion in the giving of this gift. It should not, for instance, be a part of any Secret Santa situation. But for the right person, this will be a highly enlightening and amusing read. This 164 page volume is written by Jim Dawson, whose  resume also features Who Cut the Cheese?: A Cultural History of the Fart, Blame It on the Dog: A Modern History of the Fart, and of course, Did Somebody Step on a Duck: A Natural History of the Fart. So basically, The Compleat MF represents a bold departure for him.

This is an exercise in the very best traditions of overthinking stuff, and you will never swear the same way again. Did you know that the insult dates back to the 5th century BC? Did you know that the English version rose to prominence through the African-American community? (Dawson cites a theory about how it ties into slavery.) Did you know that this book contains an entire chapter on Samuel L. Jackson?

An entire motherfucking chapter.

Perich: The Hunger Games Trilogy

I suspect this movie is not going to catch on the same way Twilight did. Don’t get me wrong; it will still be the smash teen action hit of 2012. It will put Jennifer Lawrence on the map, as well as Josh Hutcherson and Liam Hemsworth. But suburban housewives won’t swoon over Gale and Peeta the way they do over Edward and Jacob. Twelve-year-old girls won’t flood archery classes. The three-fingered salute won’t catch on among America’s youth.

You ought to read these books anyway. Two reasons:

First, you want to participate in the cultural conversation. You want to know what goes on with American youth. You want to learn what all the fuss is about. For once, you can be ahead of the curve.

Second, these books deserve to be more successful than the Twilight series. With all due respect to Ms. Meyer, the Twilight series teaches young girls to let the men in their lives direct them, stage suicide attempts to hear their crush’s voice in their heads, and to abandon your past life to move in with your boyfriend’s weird family of addicts. The Hunger Games teaches young girls to provide for their families, stick up for what they believe in, and shoot their enemies in the face. Rock on, Katniss Everdeen.

Fenzel: Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception

Disturb us, Lord, when we are too well pleased with ourselves,
When our dreams have come true because we have dreamed too little,
When we arrived safely because we sailed too close to the shore.

Disturb us, Lord, when with the abundance of things we possess
We have lost our thirst for the waters of life;
Having fallen in love with life, we have ceased to dream of eternity
And in our efforts to build a new earth,
We have allowed our vision of the new Heaven to dim.

Disturb us, Lord, to dare more boldly, to venture on wider seas
Where storms will show your mastery;
Where losing sight of land, we shall find the stars.

We ask You to push back the horizons of our hopes;
And to push into the future in strength, courage, hope and love.

—Sir Francis Drake

There are a lot of great video games out there this holiday season, but for the Overthinker in your life who leans in the glorious and highly esteemed direction of history nerd-dom, as well as the direction of lovingly overwrought premises, bankable franchises, and theatrical fistfighting action – and who also happens to have a Playstation 3 -there is no better new game on the market right now than Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception.

The franchise takes a premise worthy of a Hollywood syndicated action hour – our hero is a fictional descendant of the famous-but-not-Columbus-calibur English explorer Sir Francis Drake on a series of quests for Lost Cities and other assorted dusty relics and secret conspiracies – this time taking it on a globe-trotting quest around the middle east that vibes heavily on Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, The Mummy, and a lot of other loveable, pseudo-imperialistic, post-pulp, self-conscious High Adventure.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zN3rj6YemkI

Uncharted games are third-person adventure/shooter/etc. games that play out in big, sweeping stories, jumping in and out of gameplay elements while also showing you what amounts to a very long, very professionally put together adventure movie. It’s a lot more Max Payne than Grand Theft Auto - don’t expect endless free-roaming, don’t expect top-level cutthroat multiplayer, but do expect an entertainment on the cutting edge of its medium, with lots of style, flash, art, depth, action and historical references.

Unlike a lot of the big-name games out right now, Uncharted games are accessible to non-gamers with a pretty low learning curve – which makes Uncharted 3 a great gift for somebody you know who really loves video games (and has a PS3), but maybe don’t keep up with the latest or play them as many hours as the hardcore gamers out there. And it can also be a good gift for hardcore gamers, because it came out during the same few-week span asBattlefield 3, Modern Warfare 3 and Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, which at least as far as I can tell from the buzz, are going to be games the gamer in your life is more likely to have already purchased.

There’s something really charming about a video game that is a whole experience right out of the box, andUncharted 3 is a big one that spans the earth and makes up all sorts of nonsense about Queen Elizabeth and T.E. Lawrence. What’s not to love?

Wrather: The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales

Four decades before the launch of Overthinking It, child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim was doing some overthinking of his own, subjecting children’s fairy tales to a level of scrutiny they didn’t seem to deserve. The result, now a classic narratological work, was The Uses of Enchantment. In it, he argues that the form and content of fairy tales serve an important function for children, preparing them imaginatively to engage with life’s contradictions and vicissitudes.

Traditions are inherently nostalgic: By reenacting past events ceremonially at the same time every year, we acknowledge that history contains a continuum of like observances that stretches backward and forward, and that we are situated on that continuum, like travelers walking backward, only able to see the past. And the Christmas tradition explicitly involves telling stories—religious stories, like the one about a virgin birth; secular ones, like the one about a fat red guy coming down a chimney; and family ones, about the time your favorite uncle got drunk and…well, let’s not go there.

So it seems like a good time to reflect on stories and the uses to which we put their particular kind of enchantment. I hate to be a Scrooge, and I know a lot of people like Phineas and Ferb, but I don’t think it will be controversial to suggest that show is perhaps somewhat less profound than, say, the stories of Hans Christian Andersen or the Brothers Grimm.

So curl up on a cold winter’s night with this book, and give a thought to what kind of stories you want your life to contain. We make our popular culture and it, Bettelheim demonstrates, makes us.

Stokes: On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen

This is quite possibly the most overthought book in existence. Not using our tagline definition of giving something more attention than it deserves (which would be impossible, because what deserves more attention than food?), but rather the actual unstated mission statement of this website, which is taking something everyone knows about, in this case food, and approaching it from a completely off-kilter intellectual angle. On Food is not a cookbook.  It is something like a history, and something like an encyclopedia, and something like a science textbook. It will not teach you how to make a delicious risotto.  But it will teach you how rice makes a delicious risotto.

Furthermore, it is compulsively readable, both in short bursts and for extended sessions.  I would read it on the beach, if I didn’t think I would get looks, and on car trips if I didn’t think it would make me want to stop for a meal every twenty minutes.

If you feel like you’ve gotten to the point in your cooking where you can follow a recipe perfectly, but you’d like to move on to being able to just wander into a kitchen and make something with whatever happens to be there, this is the book for you.  If there are people in your life who like cooking, or want to like cooking, or never cook but fancy themselves foodies, this is the book for them.

That’s it for this year. Have your own favorites you’d like to share? Sound off in the comments!

Related Posts

• [Think Tank] Overthinking It Gift Guide, 2009
• Post-Racial Friday
• OTIs Holiday Ornaments Available through November 4
• OTI Black Friday Gift Guide 2010
• The Claws Conspiracy

A couple of weeks ago, we asked “Are we out of touch with America?” The answer would seem to be “yes.”  Click through for charts of your responses and some verbatim replies to the open-ended questions.

Thanks to the 445 of you took the time to take the survey.  For those who haven’t, it’s still open – take it here.

Clearly, I am not the only one out there who got a "D" in Spanish.

What do you like about Two and a Half Men?
The producers of these series (THM and BBT) have more than 50 years of experience in the comedy show world. They simply know how to make you laugh. Stupid, silly stuff is shown, and it doesn’t matter. I feel ashamed for their uncreative jokes, but I automatically laugh. And in the end, it feels good, provided I don’t think too much about what I just saw…

Don’t watch it “regularly” – more like “whenever ESPN’s not talking about football and I’m too lazy to turn off the TV”.

According to the comments about it, Modern Family is basically just like Arrested Development. If that's the case, why did AD fail while MF is one of the most popular shows on TV?

What do you like about Modern Family?
Modern Family is not Arrested Development, but it has a similar comic and narrative feel. It’s willing to do a smart joke that only 10% of the viewers will get and then move on.

Modern Family had lazy stereotyping to begin with, but is the closest you can get to the immoral, relentlessly evil/dumb characters and huge continuity of Arrested Development

Modern Family is the closest thing to Arrested Development you can find on TV.

Modern Family’s asides and subtler jokes remind me of Arrested Development. It’s broader jokes are wearing thin, however.

It’s very well-written and acting is outstanding; it’s reminiscent of Arrested Development in many ways.

Dysfunctional family life. Like Arrested Development but popular for some reason.

Modern Family has an honest kind of delivery of some absurd behaviors or lines that I find hilarious.

“Modern Family is funny” seems like a simplistic and not helpful answer, but…it’s funny. It makes me laugh. The humor is more happy and joyful than most other shows. Also Phil Dunphee is delightful.

I like the mockumentary style and its absurdity. I think it’s also nice that all these people genuinely care about each other and show that they care about each other; it’s refreshing.

I watch them with my family.

Theyre funny. I laugh. That is all.

As OTI’s token Brazilian reader, I love Sofia Vergara’s accent and crazy latin-ness

Sofia Vergara has amazing boobies.

If it's not your parents, who's watching this show?

What do you like about NCIS?
NCIS may be a blandish procedural, but it fills the gap where I used to have Law & Order (also, while this season is not as good for it, the characters have entertaining depth – e.g. Tony DiNozzo’s knowledge of cinema would make him a worthy OTI contributor if you could find him off-duty). (Unlike, say,

I enjoy the formula of NCIS. Its comforting to know that every episode will be the same and you can focus on the characters.

I’ve fallen in love with the characters on NCIS, plus you can’t go wrong with a good crime drama.

For NCIS, it’s the way that the group dynamic is scripted; it’s almost “Whedon-esque”

It’s simple ‘shut-your-brain-off’ TV. NCIS has a nice take on character development and a formula that works perfectly well. A mixture of investigations and gun fights, I enjoy it because it does all my thinking for me whilst entertaining me at the same time.

Freaky right-wing military cop family workplace procedural drama. Typical Bellasario fare. Only pop cult reference I share with my 85 yo mother.

Good work, elitist snobs!

What do you like about Criminal Minds?
Criminal minds, I like because it shows you the point of view not only of law enforcement, but also of the perpatrator of the crimes. I think it’s a fresh take on the police procedural genre.

I like how the main characters in Criminal Minds relate to each other (and I love Garcia!), but can’t stand the gore and torture porn aspects of it.

its on basic cable at roughly the time i’m sitting on the couch. so, convenience is really the word. oh, and joe montagna. he’s such a badass, have you seen thinnerer? that acid scene, it was like he was the inspiration for a taliban training video somewhere.

It’s on all the time and I can watch it while I farm for herbs in WoW.

Sometimes CM is so left field that it’s actually original. e.g.- The two episodes with David Carradine. How often does the woman run off with the serial killer?

First of all, amazing long-term character arcs. Second, giving victims agency and spending time with victim’s family. Third, 3/7 of the main ensemble are women (ignoring the nonsense of last season). Fourth, lasting physical consequences to stuff that happens (on at least three occasions – Reid’s leg, his drug addiction, and Hotch’s ear). Um… etc, etc? I could probably go on for ages.

Criminal Minds: More female characters than most crime/police procedurals; both female victims and non-victims have more agency than usual.

I watched Criminal Minds reruns for a few days, but decided the dark “arrive just too lately” was not as enjoyable as the CSI “arrive in the nick of time” formula.

Well. That's just lazy. Thanks to the 60+ commenters from the original article who cared enough to phone home.

What do you like about Mike and Molly:
Because they are fat, though the show seems to have given up on making that mean anything.

They make you laugh without making you think. They are pure escapism.

bc I like rom-coms, and this is novel bc they are plus-size.

What do you like about Fuerza Del Destino:
No hablamos espanol.

Nerds telling nerds to watch nerds. Let the navelgazing commence!

What do you like about The Big Bang Theory?
Big Bang Theory thinks a smart joke is made by taking a normal joke and adding smart-sounding words to it (often ignoring the true meaning of the words). It will then return to the joke to make sure you know that the writers used smart words and are, for that reason alone, much smarter than you are.

I enjoy the nerd culture on Big Bang. It’s like I am in on the joke… and the girl is hotish and ostensibly from Nebraska… oh and Blossom.

I live in hope of Big Bang Theory being a good advocate of geek culture. I am often disappointed..

Big Bang Theory: I’m a recent PhD, and having spent some of my time with Physics PhD, I find the jokes humorous.

I watch Big Bang Theory mainly for the character of Sheldon and also his incredibly absurd views on life and the comical way he expresses them. The other characters exist as foils to him as far as I’m concerned.

I like nerdy boys. My sister sort of got me into the show. The jokes are sometimes clever.

I like because it doesn’t have the same, average joe characters, that most sitcoms have; instead, they have people that are supposedly geniuses and that have the same types of problems of any other sitcom character, however the ways that they solve their problems are usually not average.

Star Trek / comic book / physics references plus the always-relatable story of needing to feel popular.

It manages to have extremely funny nerd characters without them being cheap stereotypes. It also does its research. I can’t remember it ever getting a geeky thing wrong.

Big Bang Theory: Good joke timing, good actors despite nerd stereotypes.

It’s got a wealth of interesting characters (including three strong, smart women who aren’t just decoration) and doesn’t talk down to its audience.

I can’t make it through a full episode of Big Bang Theory. It really is geek “blackface”.

Finally, I want to thank all of you who answered the final “Why do you hate us?” question with: “no, no, I love you guys.”   For those that didn’t get my attempt at survey-based humor there, “Why do you hate us?” was the response to EVERY possible selection for “Which of these shows do you want Overthunk?”   We weren’t bashing these shows—we genuinely haven’t watched them.  If anything, we’re bashing the people who market them.

I’ll post some of the favorite responses to the “Why do you hate us?” question in the comments.   Special shout out to the one respondant who called us “pretentiois assholes” for our perceived dislike of NCIS: Los Angeles.

In the meantime, how should we Overthink the Big Bang Theory?   Overview-style commentary?  Statistical analysis of Star Trek vs. Star Wars references?   What do you think?

Related Posts

• Think Tank: When Good Shows Go Bad
• “We are so out of touch with America”
• The Biggest Mistake in the History of NASA
• USA v. USA Network: When they watch Burn Notice, the terrorists win.
• The End of Movie Stars?

Belinkie: 28 million people watched Two and a Half Men last night. Amazing.

Fenzel: The only TV I watched last week was The Last Starfighter and The Man Who Knew Too Little on some random movie station. I don’t generally watch TV.

Mlawski: My mother’s review: “The new Two and a Half Men was actually pretty good! And Ashton Kutcher… you didn’t see him completely naked, but woof! Whatta body!” Imagine this in a Long Island accent to get the full effect.

Perich: I feel the same way every time I see an article about Tyler Perry’s exceptional success. There’s a substantial swath of America—I might even say the majority – whose tastes are completely foreign to we coastal types.

McNeil: Peter Dinklage, the Halfman, just won an emmy. Two and a Half Men just broke a bunch of records. Robocop is half man, half machine. There’s a post here, but I’m not sure what it is.

Belinkie: We should deal with this on the site. The fact is, Overthinking It sort of ignores the most popular of pop culture. I’m curious – did anyone watch any of the top 25 shows last week? 

Sheely: I watched Sunday night football…

Shechner: ¡FUERZA DEL DESTINO!

Stokes: I love Fuerza del Destino. And I found the little bit of Tyler Perry that I’ve seen oddly compelling. And yet I hate Two and a Half men.

~ FIN ~

It took me a month, but I’ve decided that Belinkie’s right: we should deal with this on the site. We’ve mentioned these shows a lot, but never tried to figure out what’s so appealing about these shows and why tens of millions of people are so into them. At first blush, it seems that none of us know anything about the most popular shows in America, so we’re turning to you for some guidance.

Please help us shuffle off our coastal elitism and guide us in to the cozy living rooms of the millions of Americans who truly, deeply care about the investigators of the United States Navy.

Take the following quick survey and help us get a handle on the juggernauts of broadcast television. Then tell us which of America’s favorite shows you’d like us to overthink. And for those of you who vote for Fuerza Del Destino just because you know I nearly failed Spanish in college: “Yo sabe que donde su casa esta, Shechner.”

→ Take our popular popular culture survey.

→ View the Survey Results.

I’ll post results next week, but in the meantime, lets drop the Boomers on OTI. Go ask your parents or parental figures why they like NCIS and post the answers in the comments.

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ACT UP, Infinite Jest, O.J. Part Two, Johnny Depp

iPhones, Federer, Who Let the Dogs Out?

Halle Berry, cloned Dolly, and another Kennedy

Jon Stewart, American Psycho, tsunami, Danger Mouse

I’m not sure which is lazier: the fact that he didn’t even try to put things in chronological order, or the fact that he padded the length by reprinting Billy Joel’s chorus six times. In any case, I was inspired to create the Golden Phone Award, for great achievements in the field of phoning it in.

Today, we have another winner. May I present a piece from the October 18 edition of the Old Grey Lady, “It Was Real, Cradle to Grave. Or Was It Just TV?” Already, the title is swinging for the fences.

The best I can figure, this is supposed to be a humor piece, in which an entire life story is retold via titles of reality shows. A sample:

She said yes, and then she said Yes to the Dress, a bare-midriff number that made her look a little trampy, but so what? At least she was no Bridezilla. Sure, she was a former Playmate, but I was willing to overlook that as long as she would overlook the fact that, without my Kiss makeup on, I was kind of a schlub. In any case, we cashed in the Family Jewels to pay for our wedding.

We’d hoped it would be catered by a Top Chef, but we had to settle for some Hairy Bikers, who served sausage hors d’oeuvres made from river rats they had shot earlier in the day. We took a Cash Cab to our honeymoon suite but didn’t stay long; we had to find a place to live.

This goes on for 1,100 words. I repeat, MORE THAN A THOUSAND WORDS. It’s like some sort of summer camp rainy day activity that happens to have been published in a major newspaper.

Confusingly, the author chooses to break his story up by days of the week, but they have no connection to the actual days the TV shows air on. The above passage happens on “Sunday,” but we all know that Say Yes to the Dress is on Fridays and Top Chef is Wednesdays. It wouldn’t make the article better if the author had made this accurate, but it would have made it a more impressive pointless feat, like a man who attaches clothespins to his face just to see how many he can fit.

And so Neil Genzlinger, I’m happy to award you this jpeg of a phone I found via Google Image Search. I would have put your name on it, but we don’t have an art department out here in the Real World. Ooooh, see what I did there? Can I have a column now?

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPh_CZSFRRw

What makes this moment special is not only the odd pairing of Ghostbusters and Rihanna but also the amazing dedication to cosplay on display. This ensemble managed to field three Ghostbusters with realistic accessories (not those awful inflatable proton packs), Dana Barret dressed as Zuul, Louis Tully with a brain-scanning hat, AND a puppet Slimer.

And if that weren’t enough, after the dance, they performed a reenactment of the TV commercial. They just had the lines memorized, ready to go. Just perfect.

Update 10/24/2011: Through the magic of Twitter, I discovered that these guys are the Minions of Gozer, and that they present a live action “shadowcast” (think Rocky Horror Picture Show) of Ghostbusters. Check out their website for upcoming live shows in NYC.

The rest of my “best of show” moments aren’t crazy mash-ups, but still worth calling out separate from the costume photo gallery.

This guy dressed as Bane was definitely a crowd favorite. The prop Batman was a nice touch, but mostly, he deserves props for being ahead of the curve by dressing up as someone who will surely be popular at next year’s Comic-Con due to the summer 2012 release of The Dark Knight Rises. 

The prop Batman took a lot of abuse, as the on-screen Batman likely will in The Dark Knight Rises:

It’s not cosplay, but this Michael J. Fox/Marty McFly impersonator drew a big crowd o this Back to the Future photo-op booth:

The effect may be somewhat lost in these photos, but seeing this in person was kind of…creepy.

Back to fan costumes: Army of Darkness is a personal favorite of mine, as I once led a marching band dressed as Ash while using my chainsaw hand as a conductor’s baton. This woman’s costume had me saying “Hail to the King, baby.”

I mean, check out that chainsaw! Love it.

Lastly, I end with not a costume, but a proclamation of Comic-Con that they insist on making year after year in spite of the fact that…it’s a boldface lie:

As I remarked last year, what happens at Comic-Con doesn’t stay at Comic-Con. It gets posted all over the internet, for everyone to see.

I understand the spirit behind this–that cosplay and Comic-Con allow for people to escape their everyday lives and experience the fantasy of being a dancing Ghostbuster or a Batman-smashing Bane–but I don’t like the sentiment that there’s some sort of hermetic seal between the spirit of Comic-Con and everyday life, or that Comic-Con has the same sort of secretive nature that an illicit Las Vegas getaway might have. Neither should be the case. People shouldn’t be ashamed of their costumes or their intense love of pop culture. They should be appropriate about it, for sure, but they shouldn’t have to apologize for it or hide it like an extramarital affair.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, loving pop culture means never having to say you’re sorry.

Aaand on that terrible note, I’ll wrap up this Comic-Con post. Still to come is a video interview with author of multiple Star Wars books Dan Wallace. Stay tuned!

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