Desperate Housewives and Resublimation

I may be permanently ostracised from every intellectual clique on the planet for writing this but, Desperate Housewives ranks as one of my favourite  works of art.  It is one of the cleverest, most elegant pieces of social satire I’ve ever seen/experienced, although, admittedly, the quality of writing has deteriorated over the last couple of seasons.  Viewed superficially, it’s just another another soap opera, filled with banal characters and cheap sentimentality.  Its cleverness resides in two aspects. Firstly, its a pastiche of every kind of kitsch, melodramatic convention dredged up from day time soaps, tele-movies and romantic comedies.  For example, each character represents a very clearly defined archetype: the frigid homemaker, the nymphomaniac, the glamourous model, the career woman, the emasculated husband, the rugged handyman and so on.  Secondly, the various elements of this pastiche are heightened and exaggerated to the point of producing a kind of emotional pornography- situations, characters and conflicts that are respectively, so absurd, contemptible and over the top, that even the most uncritical viewer cannot help but suspect the writers have some underlying motive or allegorical intent.  Each episode and season reaches a resolution that is so saccharin and cloying that one is compelled to search for some additional meaning.

Quite simply, the show points to the awfulness of the kind life that the worst excesses of consumerism, in a Lukácian sense, the total reification of society- the pointless striving for material goods, the banality and poverty of inter and intra-personal relationships, and the kind of hopelessness these generate.  In this way, it seems to exhibit one of Marcuse’s criteria for ‘great’ art, “Artistic alienation, is sublimation. It creates the images of conditions which are irreconcilable with the established reality principle.” But the difference here is that it a cultural product, i.e. the pastiche which is sublimated or elevated to an art form.  This kind of reflexivity and self-criticism is increasing in popular culture (although it’s not just a post-modern phenomenon)- pop culture can be elevated to high culture, that is to say, the popular have critical, political, social, and aesthetic value.

berg, schoenberg and adorno

Adorno, amongst other things, was a musicologist, music critic and composer.  He studied composition with Alban Berg, and was intimate with, and influenced by Arnold Schoenberg, the ‘father’ of the twelve tone music or ’serialism’.  I would have liked to upload a few snippets from each man, but unfortunately wordpress doesn’t make this easy to do- this doesn’t really matter, Its not too difficult to find their music on the web- wikipedia is a pretty good place to start.

Adorno’s affiliation with the Second Viennese School is interesting for several reasons. Firstly, this kind of music, (pre-serialism) is atonal, and dissonant,  often making for heavy, if not traumatic listening; its often said that 2oth century orchestral and ‘classical’ music reflects/ed the grimness of life in the 20th century: social fragmentation, industrialisation, and war, representing a kind of aesthetics of despair.  Indeed, Adorno is famous for saying that is was barbaric to write poetry after the holocaust.  Music, and more generally, art is not, or should not be,”  ’entertainment’; in the words of one commentator, “it should hurt and educate”.  

‘Painful education’ is perhaps most evident in Bergs’ Wozzek, based on Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck.  This is not easy listening or causal entertainment; the libretto is deeply depressing, and the music jarringly atonal.  I’d recommend reading Büchner’s play instead,  often hailed as a ’socialist masterpiece’, and which anticipates with uncanny accuracy twentieth century drama’s themes and form’s, even though it was written sometime in the 1830’s.  Werner Herzog’s film adaption is also worth seeing, and Tom Waits’ album Blood Money, inspired by both Wozzek and Woyzeck is also very good, and probably gives the best ‘feel’ for the opera, without having to actually sit through it.

On another note, and reflecting on the  last post, it interesting to note that both Berg and Schoenberg’s music is deeply ‘rational’, even mathematical, reflecting an immense knowledge of musical theory and requires great technical proficiency to execute.  Adorno’s praise for both men is based on the apparent ‘freshness’ and ‘novelty’ of their work, but in a way, this kind of music is little different to that of the high baroque.  In reacting against culture, tradition and social constructions, it requires a deep and appreciation of those very things.  Berg and and Schoenberg were products of the middle class, which gave them their appreciation of art and literature.  It’s also interesting to note that the avant-garde nature of both men’s works was condemned as decayed, bourgeois rubbish by Soviet realists and as decadent, filth by the National Socialists, again, finding its chief audience in the educated middle and upper classes.