In that spirit, Christopher Lasch, the Bill Cosby of dead populist historians, once complained that the culture industry always seems to approach Middle American characters with contempt. Sometimes, he said, it deploys the kindly condescension of "compassion." Other times it's more directly contemptuous, depicting the professional elite as noble and cultured and inland Americans as ignorant boobs.
On the surface, Waiting for Guffman, Christopher Guest's mock documentary about a small-town play, fits Lasch's second category. The townsfolk of Blane, Missouri, don't just lack talent, sophistication, and the ability to grasp what stands directly in front of their noses. They are convinced that they do possess these qualities, and, laboring under that delusion, they make public fools of themselves. One might accuse the movie of cruelty as well as contempt. It is, Lasch could declare, a mean-spirited invitation to sneer at Missouri's wretched booboisie.
It is also one of the funniest films of the last 10 years, and along with the brilliant This Is Spinal Tap it set the template for Guest's subsequent comedies. However condescending it may be toward its subjects, Waiting for Guffman treats its audience with nothing but respect. Guest and his collaborators understand that many gags are funnier when they are allowed to lurk in the background, and they trust us to spot them there. There are no insulting efforts here to hammer home what's already obvious -- just constantly witty acting, writing, and direction.
And there is something more to this movie, a quality that defies the Laschian critique. Waiting for Guffman is as venomous as a good satire has to be. Yet there is an affection to it -- a sweetness, even -- that is anything but contemptuous. Blane actually seems like a rather nice place to live. The townsfolk enjoy the play as a pleasant diversion, and they don't mind (or even notice) that their neighbors aren't especially talented. When the players aren't rehearsing, they return to their ordinary professions: dentistry, travel-agentry, labor at the local DQ. At no point does the film suggest that these people are bad at their jobs.
In short: As corrosive as this movie is, it respects its characters' lives. It may lampoon them for being small-minded small-town people, but it only attacks them for pretending they aren't.
As the story progresses, an idea overtakes the troupe: the insane notion -- at first funny, soon almost tragic -- that their show will go to Broadway. A theatrical agent named Guffman has promised to attend their performance. He will "discover" them, the players hope, and turn them into stars. When this doesn't happen, they leave town anyway, all but one joining the lowest rungs of the entertainment industry. We see them in the film's closing scenes, a funny but unpleasant sequence that lacks the sweet affection that preceded it. What was charming in Blane becomes grotesque outside it. Our would-be entertainers have left behind their real livelihoods, not to mention the only appreciative audiences they'll ever find, to pursue the dream of celebrity.
You can argue that the filmmakers, successful entertainers all, are merely directing a calculated sneer at any ordinary American who aspires to join them in the limelight. One can find evidence for this in the slogan that adorned Guffman's posters: "There's a reason why some talent never gets discovered." Like so many movie ad campaigns, this is exactly wrong: The small-town players in Waiting for Guffman cannot act, dance, or sing, but none is less talented than, say, David Spade or Carrot Top.
But consider what the filmmakers have accomplished here. It's hard to launch a credible assault on the culture industry from that same industry's commanding heights. Many movies have tried; most, whatever their other qualities, are sanctimonious and hypocritical. (Witness Quiz Show and Natural Born Killers.) The pictures that pull off the trick are those that actively refuse to idealize the people who stand outside the center of media attention, from the would-be Broadway stars of Waiting for Guffman to the would-be bowling champs of Kingpin. Fulminate all you want that these movies are cruel or crude -- at least they're funny, and at least they aren't cliches. In Hollywood, those are substantial accomplishments.
Think about that. When Stoll ran a little website called smartertimes.com, he was a sometimes useful corrective to the Gray Lady. Now he runs a daily paper called The New York Sun. I'm sure it pays better, but it has neither readers nor content worth reading. If blogs are part of a media revolution -- and yeah, I think they are -- it's not because the people who write them could beat the Times at reporting, editing, or even opining. Some probably could. But most definitely can't.
In fact, blogger triumphalism aside, I'm not sure most of us could even fact-check better than the Times. I mean, it's not like we caught Jayson Blair. It's nice that the warblogging crowd has pointed out so many errors in the BBC's report on the rescue of Jessica Lynch. Good work, folks. But I get the impression that a lot of you are less interested in setting the record straight than in changing the subject: There were plenty of reports debunking the official story of the Lynch rescue before the British Broadcasting Corporation weighed in, and none of them included the BBC's nonsense about soldiers firing blanks. Yet those blanks are all you seem to be talking about. Why spend so much time taking the BBC to task and almost none probing the folks who might have gotten the first version of the story wrong, too? Could it be because one dubious report challenges your prejudices, while the other one confirms them?
Bloggers are at least as fallible as the Times or the BBC, usually more so. It's just that we dwell in this big electronic soup, where everyone's axes grind up against everyone else's and all those fallibilities cancel each other out. On an individual level, we've all got our heads up our asses, just like the unlamented Howell Raines. It's just that there's so many of us, and our asses come in such different shapes and sizes. It's so much more obvious when we're adjusting the facts to fit our faiths; and somehow, maybe, that makes it more obvious when the Big Media guys do it as well. Screw the emperor -- none of us are wearing any clothes.
RETURN OF THE WIRE: I caught the first season of The Wire in reruns, after Oz left the air earlier this year. What a wonderful TV show, or mini-series, or 13-hour film -- however you like to look at it -- a detailed and far from formulaic police procedural with well-drawn characters, a good ear for dialogue, a strong sense of place, and a skeptical attitude toward the drug war and toward all large, hierarchical institutions. (It wasn't above the occasional in-joke either, like throwing a line from a Steve Earle song into a criminal's mouth in one of the episodes where Earle played a recovering junkie. Or giving Baltimore's real-life police commissioner, Ed Norris, a bit role as a low-level detective.)
The second season/series/story arc starts tonight. I can't wait to see it.
REFORM CORNER: A recurring debate in Britain: how to reform the House of Lords. All factions are ready to jettison the old arrangement, in which the scions of England's decrepit aristocracy inherit their parliamentary seats. But what system shall replace it? The Conservatives want a regime that will maintain their hold on the House. The Labourites, naturally, want something different. And the far left, as always, whispers plans to abolish the House of Lords altogether, and perhaps the royal family as well.
I propose that they take their cues from the American experiment in welfare reform and from conservative proposals to privatize PBS:
1. Members of the House of Lords should have two years to find jobs in the private sector; after that, they will be booted from Parliament. The state should, of course, take into account the centuries of dependency that have rendered the British upper class so dysfunctional and indolent, and provide the departing Lords with life-skills training.
2. The crown jewel of the British aristocracy -- that is, the crown itself -- should take advantage of its status as a popular commodity. Just as Sesame Street and Barney could easily survive without public subsidy, the Windsors should capitalize on their franchise. There exists a large and apparently insatiable market for royal-family merchandising, even outside the Empire. Thus far, only outsiders have taken advantage of this, as with Elton John's decision to release a Lady Di tie-in CD.
It is, of course, difficult to release creative energies that have for so long been wasted on ritual ceremony, low-key activism, bulimia, and inbreeding. But with the right incentives, the English aristocracy might finally be transformed from parasites to productive members of society.
There is no magic number -- 35 percent, 45 percent, 25 percent -- that represents the perfect amount of stations a TV network should be allowed to own. Nor should the government be in the business of trying to compute such a figure. If you're satisfied with TV programming now, you will probably continue to be satisfied with it under the new rules. If you're dissatisfied, there's no way to rejigger this reg upwards or downwards that's going to please you.
Perhaps for that reason, the ideological opponents of media consolidation -- as opposed to the miscellaneous industry lobbyists who oppose the changes for reasons of their own -- have also made an issue out of the way the new rules are being passed. It's happening too fast, they say, and with not enough public input. When the FCC reduced the number of public hearings it held on the issue, Democratic commissioners organized independent forums of their own, in theory to get more views on the table and in practice to show how the decision-makers at the agency aren't interested in listening to The People.
On one level, the critics have a point: Federal communication policy is made by unelected bureaucrats with closer ties to the industry they regulate than to the public they nominally represent. On another level, though, the critics are playing make-believe. The commissioners are already aware of all the arguments about these issues, and delaying the decision so more people can be heard isn't likely to change the outcome. If the system is undemocratic, it is because is concentrates so much power into so few hands, not because the rest of us have so little time to make our case. At best, those guerrilla forums are a form of theater, a way to dramatize the cozy relationship between the regulators and the regulated. At worst, they're complaints aimed at the wrong target.
Meanwhile, the defenders of deregulation are being even more disingenuous. The revised rules will (mostly) loosen the government's control of the airwaves, and so the reformers present themselves as the advocates of economic freedom. But when it comes to a much more important libertarian issue -- opening the spectrum to new users and uses -- most of them have been AWOL. Serious changes in the way spectrum is allocated and allowed to be used could radically alter the airwaves, bringing in a world of cheap or free broadband-quality Internet access that is portable, wireless, and therefore capable of competing directly with AM, FM, and TV broadcasters. There is a serious debate over how best to accomplish this technically, but virtually everyone who's a part of that argument recognizes that the most important prerequisite is a matter of regulation, not engineering. The FCC must allow much more flexibility in how licensees may use their spectrum, thus eliminating the allocation bottlenecks that so aggravate the telecom industry; and it must make more room for unlicensed use of the ether, so shared-spectrum technologies such as Wireless Fidelity and UltraWideBand can flourish. FCC chief Michael Powell has, to his credit, given a rhetorical boost to these new technologies. But his agency has offered very little in the way of real reform.
That could change. But if that happens, it will not be because the beneficiaries of the government's entry barriers make spectrum reform part of their "deregulatory" agenda. They care about real economic liberty about as deeply as their opponents care about the precise level of the ownership cap.