Everything Bad is Good for You by Steven Johnson

Stephen Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good for You first published in 2005 is a non fiction discussion on popular culture.

Steven Johnson has a degree in semiotics and literature and you can kind of tell. This book has the subtitle “How popular culture is making us smarter”. That’s plenty provocative enough, so with that you expect him to plead his case well. And he does.

Johnson takes on the task of discussing mass culture as something other than a trivial past time with no inherent merit. It’s kind of a mouthful to go at, but he does it with verve and humour and a good deal of theoretical structure hiding behind the blithe smile of the text.

It’s actually a relief to find that someone is willing to discuss mass culture as something other than a guilty pleasure we all indulge in, but won’t talk about in the clear light of day. What he goes after is proving that the current expressions of mass culture have definitely become more sophisticated and challenging in later years.

When talking about computer games he point out that the most popular games are not the shoot ‘em up games that get all the attention, but the slow and painstakingly complicated ones like SimCity and Age of Empires. He pleads a good case for the delayed gratification these games offer, the things you so rarely hear discussed, like how many hours you sometimes have to spend on a relatively sedate task in order to achieve some minor goal and the frustration that goes with that.

When discussing television he compares the series Dallas to 24 or the Sopranos, making good arguments for how the complexity of the story line has something to do with the taste of the viewers. There’s also a mention of the extremely fast paced and incredibly complicated series The West Wing, a series that actually doesn’t explain anything to the viewer, and more than that, makes it really necessary for the viewer to be active rather than passive.

He also discusses things like how the show The Apprentice or Survivor requires skills like social intelligence rather than the trivia knowledge you need to keep pace in random game shows.

Why is all this relevant? Well, there’s something to it, alright.

“So this is the landscape of the Sleeper Curve. Games that force us to probe and telescope. Television shows that require the mind to fill in the blanks, or exercise its emotional intelligence. Software that makes us sit forward, not lean back. But if the long-term trend in pop culture is toward increased complexity, is there any evidence our brains are reflecting that change?” (Johnson, p. 136).

I am a child of the postmodern, or what Bauman has chosen to term “liquid modernity” so of course this approach is going to appeal to me. Johnson offer the opinion that you have to ask a different set of questions to the popular culture than has been done in the past. I’m all for it. By all means, look at the statistics and see how the levels of complexity offered in computer games challenge the players ability to vast amounts of information at a glance and what that means in terms of intelligence and information assimilation.

There’s always been a sort of canonical war between high and low culture, but there’s always been considerable crossbreeding between the two as well, and this book argues the point that the sheer complexity of some popular culture is a symptom of something or other. That, in an of itself, is enough to make this a work worth reading.

And besides… it’s fun.

Mule

Liar, Liar… Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry is probably best known to the public as the looming presence of Jeeves the butler of Jeeves and Wooster, or as a comedian in numerous British series, such as A bit of Fry and Laurie and Blackadder. More recently he has also made an incisive documentary on manic depression, confessing himself to be seriously afflicted with the condition. He is also an impressively well-read writer, openly gay and hugely intelligent. His first novel The Liar (1991) is the story of young Adrian Healy, the self-professed liar of the title.

The reader gets to follow young Healey as he describes the affected life of a young schoolboy in the good old English public school tradition, complete with astrakhan coat, walking stick, artificial Oscar Wilde wit and a huge adolescent crush on his young Adonis school chum Hugo Cartwright. Adrian Healey continues on to university where he encounters Professor Trefusis, an eccentric in the true meaning of the word and probably the first person Adrian encounters who can see right through him. Adrian subsequently gets involved in espionage through his connection with the university. Seems complicated? Yes, well… Throw in Adrian running away from home and working as a rent boy on Piccadilly, faking a Dickens manuscript at college, teaching school to young boys, an uncle in the government and a lot of other subplots and themes and you basically have the story.

It has wit, sex, intrigue and a level of verbal excellence that should make Fry’s teachers proud and perhaps a bit nervous. He is not exactly kind to the British school system. Every cliché about what happens when you lump too many hormone-laden young boys together is fulfilled here, up to and including an actual description of true love. And perhaps that will put some people off, but then again so could the high level of erudition.

The MacGuffin of the plot is something called a Mendax machine, sort of a more advanced polygraph which has the ability to not only measure if the truth is being told, but induces the subject to speak the truth. Not to give too much away here, but there is a good reason why the title of this novel is The Liar. Adrian is pretty much incapable of telling the truth. It’s not that he embellishes and garnishes his truth with a little sparkle, he tells great big whopping steaming elephant-dung lies. And it does take the reader some time to work out what, if anything, is true. But you have a great time getting there. This novel is funny, brilliant and dirty. Here’s a sample of the jargon amongst the schoolboys of Arian’s house when they speak of distributing an illegal magazine.

“Now, said Tom, ‘we face the problemette of distribution.’

More of a problemola than a problemette,’ said Bullock.

‘A problerama, even,’ said Sampson.

‘I’d go so far as to call it a problemellaroni,’ said Bullock.

‘It’s a real cunt,’ said Tom, ‘no question’.” (Fry 1991, p. 97).

It’s the mixture of the high and low that makes it so amusing. In amidst references to frankly obscure subjects such as philology and espionage you find this Rabelaisian streak that keeps you laughing all the while. Adrian Healey is perfect spy material since his natural state is to tell untruths. It is so ingrained in him he does not seem to know how live any other way which makes him an incredibly unreliable narrator – and funny as all hell.

Mule

Half is nowhere, Dexter… Darkly Dreaming Dexter

Jeff Lindsay’s Darkly Dreaming Dexter (2004) is the basis for the television series Dexter. We have the lead character Dexter Morgan whose inner monologue we are treated to as an interesting counterpoint to what is actually going on around him.

Dexter works as a forensic officer for the Miami Police. His area of expertise is concerning blood and blood spatter patterns, that kind of thing. Riding along behind Dexter’s slow boyish smile is the other persona he calls the Dark Passenger, a double, a separate part of his personality which has a distinct need – Dexter is a serial killer. What makes it all alright is the fact that he only hunts other serial killers. That is until the “ice truck killer” comes along and spoils the moral parameters that Dexter’s stepfather have set up. Within this framework Dexter is allowed to hunt and kill other killers, but he is not allowed to hurt the innocent and that’s exactly the temptation the “ice truck killer” offers.

There are all kinds of moral ambiguities you could argue out within this particular story, some of the more interesting ones concern the classical double standard of killing the killers, being judge-jury-and-executioner, is it still morally valid if you enjoy it too much and so on and so forth… Dexter describes himself as a monster. He means this in the way we sometimes hear psychopaths described, but the portrait is mostly about the surface. There is no deeper understanding of the psychopath’s inner workings – something you can find in for instance Bret Easton Ellis American Psycho (1991). The story itself if swift and enjoyable, the gore is not too gory and you will not be unnecessarily troubled by the fact that it is a first person narrative, since the voice is dry, witty and keeps a certain distance.

This is basically a slightly more twisted than usual detective story.

However – and this is a big however – the ending sucks. I wish there was a better expression for it but there it is, that’s what is does. The characters anagnorisis is a terrible disappointment to me at least since I have read sufficiently about psychopathy and sociopathy to recognise some of the basic patterns of character and see how these could have been developed in much more interesting ways. Dragging up a second dark double to double Dexter’s Dark Passenger (and feel free to hear Iggy Pop playing inside your head at this point – I definitely do) is interesting, but like any good horror movie proves – you don’t want to see the monster exposed in broad daylight. Suddenly all the darkness goes out of the story and it turns sentimental and you can see the masks on the performers in the rubber suits. And that’s exactly what you don’t want. I for one don’t care why Dexter feels the way he does. I don’t care why he has the need to kill. There are other much more interesting themes to develop.

This novel is polished and stylish, sure, but it lacks depth and is seems a little too polite. It’s too bad Jeff Lindsay chickened out and didn’t take it all the way.

Mule