
What makes "Beavis and Butt-head" so brilliant is its framing of the idea that
there's resonance, if not eroticism, around representation itself, and that
sometimes that resonance is the only point being made. Few, if any, of the
institutions threatened or lampooned by the show's acerbic satirical edge have
managed to pick up on it. Most media accounts of the show can't get beyond the
"stupidity," and lay the blame for its tremendous popularity on the ballsiness
of its stupidity. Newsweek's October cover story is a prime example;
under the banner of an article called "Stupid TV," critic John Leland insists
that the show, among others, is stupid, stupid, stupid and a reflection of
societal malaise. Like a mediocre freshman comp student, he somehow manages to
miss the almost over-the-top obviousness with which the show frames the act of
TV-viewing itself as an issue. He even speaks of one program the decadent duo
watch, about whales, as "a rich moment, ripe with television's power to make
remote events movingly immediate." Leland, scandalized, quotes Butt-head's
reaction to the animation-within-animation: "Uh, did you fart?"
Such willful ignorance stems from the mainstream media's fear of thinking of TV as anything but a medium, a conveyor of other things. Sure, what it represents can sometimes be bad if we show too much of it, like sex and violence, but if that goes overboard we just call together a congressional committee. Congress then responds: less sex and violence is cool, more sex and violence sucks. TV itself is never anything more than an innocent disseminator of information or an innocent representor of worthy or unworthy subjects. That's why it only became possible for the major media to talk about Beavis and Butt-head when a familiar kind of scandal emerged -- a midwestern five-year-old's alleged burning of his sister as a response to Beavis' penchant for fire. Only when the show could be a bad guy, a criminal, a sign of society-out-of-control, could it be grafted neatly onto the formats offered by the nightly news and most newspapers. Only when it became a story with a moral could it be represented. And appropriately enough, the tale told was one of the pathological fantasy of representation -- see something represented on TV, and it has the same effect in reality. See fire represented, light a fire. See a guy represented lying down in the middle of a road, lie down in the middle of a road. The solution called upon again and again is the Beavis and Butthead paradigm, albeit inverted: "There should be less fire on TV."
Meanwhile, an argument like Leland's begins to seem less like an argument and more like an endless repetition of something that's been endlessly repeated since TV, not to mention every new technology since the wheel, was invented. This [show, art form, technology] is stupid. It shows how society sucks. It's really, really stupid. Huh-huh. Huh-huh-huh-huh. Sound familiar? Beavis and Butt-head's triumph, more than their triumphs over their principal, the court system, Stuart the Winger-loving neighbor, the dreaded WWII vet Tom Anderson, Bill Clinton, etc., comes in the moment when the pair expose these accounts as mere mimicries of their own mumbly slackerisms. The show's real brilliance lies in how Beavis and Butt-head's inarticulacy illuminates the utter inarticulacy of its critics. I've always found something ironic, odd, and privileged about charges of "inarticulacy" and "stupidity" levelled by mainstream press writers who rehash arguments week-by-week, whose opinions become about as predictable as California weather. What really keeps us from seeing the weekly rants of John Leland, William Safire, or Hal Crowther as just as repetitive and exasperating as Beavis and Butt-head are accused of being?
If the right things could just get on TV or in a column, then we'd reach (liberal, conservative, adolescent, slacker) nirvana; it's a fantasy Leland, Safire, Crowther, Beavis, Butt-head, and probably most of us, all share. What makes Beavis and Butt-head so much smarter is that they're perfectly conscious of the fact that nothing means so much to them as when it's on TV. They understand that something means differently when it's on TV than when it's out somewhere else, like a classroom or a living room or a book. They're the most masterful TV critics of all, because they recognize the meaning of TV as a medium, and they've discovered the humorous, subversive power of saying things in the living room or classroom that only make neat, transparent sense on TV. All their joy, and emotion in general, comes not so much from TV itself as from the dissonance between their lives watching TV and the other parts of their lives -- the glee that comes with saying "Joey Buttofuocco" in class, the paralyzing fear that accompanies the sight of actual naked chicks (and guys) at a nudist colony rather than in a video.
The fantasy of representation, the Beavis and Butt-head paradigm, keeps us
operating under the assumption that a pathological addiction to something bad
called stupid TV has been fucking up something good called real life. But the
way Beavis and Butt-head make every place they go (such as the bathroom, the
classroom, or the nudist colony) kinda like, but not really, TV, helps us see
that this supposed "real life" itself is really a whole, huge range of
contexts, each with its conventions as to what, as Butt-head would intone
ironically, "means something." TV is one. Other media, political bodies, the
university, the family, the church, and the gym are some others. What gets
represented in one isn't going to have an immediate effect on what gets
represented in another. Bad TV isn't necessarily going to make people go out
and do bad things. Unfortunately, however, more bare butts on TV will most
likely only bring more bare butts on TV. And more talk about "Beavis and
Butt-head's" "stupidity" will only bring, appropriately, more responses like
"Uh, did you fart?"
Family auditioning for "Family Feud"