From the Nov 30 – Dec 6, 2000 issue

Visual Art

Behind the Window

A Man Without a Television Decides What America Will Watch

by Grant Cogswell

I GOT THE INVITATION in the mail a couple of weeks in advance. Hollywood, California was the return address: words that instantly evoke hollow opportunity. A vast audience waiting on a trickle of response: contestant, witness, married to a crazy person, chosen.

Now it was my turn. You have been selected to participate in a survey whose findings will DIRECTLY INFLUENCE what you see on TV in the future. (That wouldn't be much: I haven't had a set for years.) The event was on a Friday night at the Sea-Tac Marriott Hotel, two buses and one quarter-mile-block walk uphill in a light rain in a nightmare airport suburb, with rows of cars for sale, and wasted space and concrete like white noise in which the businesses are interruptions. The yawning gaps between the businesses are landscaped for invisibility from the window of a car, but on foot you are present to document every weary league.

Hollywood had chosen me for what is called a focus group, in which a random gathering of citizens is brought together to have its reactions to products tested, in order to craft the marketing of those products. In the ballroom next door to the banquet room reserved for "Television Preview" was a reunion of men who had served on a WWII battleship. A minute in that room, or even a glance at the faces of one of the old couples filing in across the hall toward the clatter and smell of a buffet table, had more complexity and depth than a lifetime of TV shows. Maybe too much. The ones who died, our blood debt to them, the young survivors, the sum of their long lifetimes since. Don't we turn to television for its simplicity, its lack of options that lulls us into a thrashed sort of relaxation? I'm as guilty as anyone. The reason I don't own a TV is because I am a "recovering" addict: alcohol, painkillers, Internet porn, binge-eating, exercise (too lazy to harm myself there), the personals, sex. Any time I am within reach of a remote control, I'll flip and flip and flip. Coffee is all I have left, and I'd brought some along to protect me.

I expected to view the presentation with a handful of losers: On Friday night, people go out, they find some time to spend with their kids, they go to cookie-cutter bars hoping to get laid, they have lives. Two hundred people showed up--young couples, whole families, retirees, multi-racial clutches of middle-aged, single professional women. (I think I was the sole hipster tourist; when I think that I am not a stereotypical aging punk rock city dweller, that the sensibilities of the gays have not rubbed off too thickly on me and I can slide back into ordinary American at the peg of some whitewashed jeans, it only takes some intimacy with a suburban setting such as this to prove me wrong, a raging freak.)

On the way in, as ABC would have us do (the network's ad campaign last year consisted of winking admissions of the vacuousness of television), we chuckled at our idle curiosity, the sucker-for-anything gullibility that brought us there, our boredom. The MC of the proceedings was a heavy man in his early 30s, a decent, fairly intelligent guy whose resistance had been dulled. He seemed to deflect the pain threatening to close over him by using a self- effacing sense of humor. With a little more aggression, he could have been one of those yeah-I'm-a-fat-guy type of comedians, but he lacked the animus. He never thought it would come to this, but he wasn't going to take it out on anybody.

After a quick briefing, he passed out a booklet illustrated with variations on different products: frozen pizza, shampoo, facial tissue, sleep aids, earplugs, anti-smoking cures, depression and anxiety therapies, liquid chlorine bleach. Please circle the ONE you truly want. The layouts, with their labeled packages, were like consumer porn for the Fourth World. The page featuring anti-depressants particularly caught my eye. Prozac, Paxil, Effexor, Celexa, Serzone, Wellbutrin, Remeron, Zoloft. As a regular outpatient of the mental health profession, even I was surprised there were so many. And on the next page, Nicorette, Nicoderm, Walgreens' Nicotine Transdermal Patch, Nicotrol, Zyban tablets, Habitrol, value equivalent in hypnosis seminars or self-help programs, three cartons of cigarettes, $30 cash. Any items that the winner of the drawing had circled would be delivered to that person's home.

I slipped the booklet into my bag as a souvenir. Somebody won, the lights came down, and we were treated to a half-hour program from a few years back, being shown now to gauge whether anything of value was left to mine from the program's star: Valerie Harper, in City. It was atrocious. Set in an Anywhere, U.S.A. city hall, the show dragged out matters of tragic concern--government corruption, helplessness in the face of bureaucracy, parental estrangement, the loneliness of aging while single--only to whack them with a rubber chicken. The rhythm of setup line/question/ setup line/punch line/laugh track was so regular that in a motel, from behind a wall, it would have sounded like the tide. Why are you in such a bad mood today? I'm not in a bad mood! You yelled at an old lady in the crosswalk! She was taking forever! She was using a walker!

At longer intervals came the ads: Coca-Cola, Zoloft. You may be experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder. The Red Cross, a sleep aid called Sonata with a hilariously lengthy list of warnings and qualifications that seemed to eliminate everyone but the mailman and the dog from taking the drug. Jif, Clorox. On the show, a sluttishly dressed, funny-accented Carmen Miranda stereotype was introduced for no reason other than to hold up her foreignness for a lame laugh or two. Then she was gone.

When the sitcom ended, we filled out a survey. In a situation like this (I spied on the answers of the woman next to me. She liked it!), it is easy to begin dividing the world into those with a clue and those without. There is a secret fellowship based on something that a long time ago was called "hip," before that lost all meaning and was perverted into another exclusionary strategy of social Darwinism and meanness. But as friends with whom you have much in common disappoint you, and you find innocent goodwill in the most narcotized of rubes, such distinctions become meaningless. The pH scale of one's own politics shifts as the body ages, left and right switch places, right and wrong turn as nuanced as an impressionist canvas. While the advertisers of the above products take the denizens of Federal Way--and that Federal Way of the Mind, which spreads over this strip-malled continent--for fools, I don't. They are my people, concerned and over-comforted, although I fled their country long ago. They are running too. Their national motto might be that line from the narrator of Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son stories: I've gone looking for that feeling everywhere.

The next program, called Blind Men and starring Wallace Shawn, was still in development. The stock title sequence showed a misty skyline that we soon learned was supposed to be Columbus, Ohio, where Shawn played an aging, failing salesman in a store selling blinds. Threatened with downsizing, the sales staff stick together to protect Shawn's caricature of a man facing the loss of his livelihood: "I'm 52 and I still rent!" he snivels to a burst of laughter from the studio audience. It was funny.

And on came the ads: for Formula 409 cleanser, that smell of childhood; Crisco vegetable oil, pitched as a back-to-basics ally in an age of fast food; a beautiful woman spinning through pollen-fogged fields, protected by Allegra allergy medicine. Asked to put down our immediate, unfiltered response to the commercials, I found myself writing again and again, I want to fuck her. Clorox once more, Duncan Hines: a fork sinking wetly into a rich, dark slice of cake, a nearly audible sigh from the room, and a feeling much like when I glimpsed the Allegra woman turning in her thin blouse. A black family grows delirious over the absorbency of Bounty paper towels. I began to feel the veracity of something I had thought to be a leftist bogeyman: a carrot-and-stick consumerist conspiracy that feeds compulsion and addiction from both ends, isolating and wearing down a sad populace, depressed and self-medicating, selling them cigarettes and a nicotine patch, fatty foods and guilt and the sex they'll never have if they look like that. It all seemed, here in the nostalgic scent of this airport-smelling room, entirely real.

What of the great playwright Wallace Shawn legitimizing the whole enterprise? Here after all is the man who wrote The Designated Mourner, in which the intellectual class is caught between an uprising of the poor and the resulting government crackdown, viewed by both as the enemy. Will the syndication of Blind Men pay for another wonder like Aunt Dan and Lemon (the biggest quantum leap in American lit toward understanding the Holocaust)? This questioning is itself a Shawnian monologue much like the one in My Dinner with Andre, in which the writer plays himself, agonizing over upper-middle-class guilt and the joys of his (hazardous, as it turns out) electric blanket.

The show concluded; more stuff was raffled off. The final round of testing began: "Do you use shampoo... more than once a day? Once a day? More than three times a week?" After a gamut of inquiries into everyone's personal hygiene had been fielded, the MC said, "Now I'm going to ask a kind of uncomfortable question. It's difficult, and I'm... I'm sorry. Have you ever experienced a life-threatening trauma, loss of a loved one, war, combat, natural disaster, or other catastrophe which still causes you nervousness, depression, difficulty with sleeping, work, or intimacy? And I'm sorry to have to bring these things up. Would you support reform of laws governing political campaign financ-ing? And this is another kind of ugly one. Are you in favor of televised state executions?" There was a murmur, and the MC, daring himself, said, "Well... I guess that's one show they couldn't call Survivor."

We were thanked and went out into the night. I walked alone downhill to catch the bus. There was a familiar looking man sitting near the front by the driver, a co-worker of mine from a summer job I held about five years ago. Suddenly he barked at me, "What the hell are you looking at?" I told him he resembled a guy I used to know: Dale, from Kentucky.

His demeanor changed. It was Dale. He came back and shook my hand, sat down with me. Drunk and dirty, he blearily caught me up on the last five years: He had gotten married, had a daughter, they lived in SeaTac. He was on the way to the store for something, angry with his wife for the inconvenience of the errand. Again and again he apologized for his hostility, saying, "You can't be too careful." And then, talking about his life and sadly shaking his head summoned a larger truth even the passengers laughing at him seemed to quietly ratify. "It's just... fucked up. You know? This is what you get." I felt his future would be my own: Addiction would swamp my little boat again, I would disappoint everyone, and it wouldn't matter. To be this man's child! The idea horrified me. He would leave his wife and daughter. They would be better off: His name would only be the subject of scorn and a source of pain to them. He got up when the bus came to the arc-lit Larry's complex on Highway 99, and kissed my hand. I thought of the marketers: Here was their victim. Back in the city it was Friday night; the movement of pedestrians had meaning, a night like none other in the week, release. I had no idea what was on the tube.