Arrested Development and Philosophy, page 10
The Bluths’ relationship to real labor is equally troubling. During the Bluth Company’s crunch time on a new housing development, it comes to Michael’s attention that his mother and siblings have been receiving paychecks for years without doing any work for the company. To remedy this, Michael puts Lindsay in charge of the office and Buster and Gob on the construction site. The only family member who finds that he enjoys manual labor is Buster, and even then it’s because the process offers him a sense of novelty and whimsical camaraderie (“I love it here! And the language these guys use! Rough. One of these guys told me to take my head out of my bottom and get back to work. My bottom!”). Meanwhile, when Gob takes up the workers’ plight as his own and organizes a work stoppage, Lindsay retaliates by presenting Lupe’s family (who thought they were being taken on a vacation trip to Catalina) as scabs. Seeing the Bluths forced to work for the first time in their lives quickly turns into watching them do everything they can to avoid actually working. These shenanigans are the privilege of privilege: if the Bluths were working class—or even middle class—they wouldn’t have the choice of “opting out” of labor practices in the ways that they do. Indeed, if we think about who in the show actually does work, we find that the answer is: children (George Michael at the banana stand, Maeby at the movie studio), women of color (Lupe and her family), machines (the Roomba that replaces Lupe), and sometimes—sometimes—Michael.
There’s Always Money in the Banana Stand: Class Status and Performance
The characters of Arrested Development are never quite sure where they stand. Consider Tom Jane—the famous actor that Lindsay meets while he is slumming as a homeless man to research a movie role. Tom Jane is an interesting counterpoint to the Bluths. Lindsay meets him outside of a bar, assuming him to be a casually dressed celebrity (he had the effortless, dressed down look of a movie star, anyway). Then, walking into a liquor store, the clerk tells them he doesn’t allow homeless people in the store, and Lindsay is immediately repulsed. Of course, we later find out that Jane has affected the trappings of homelessness in order to further his goals (in this case, to study for an acting role). This incident shows that one of the ways in which social class becomes recognizable in Arrested Development is through performance. How one dresses and carries one’s self, how one grooms, and the places one frequents are all ways of performing what one wants to be. Whereas for Lindsay and the rest of the Bluths, this performance is upward-directed, for Tom Jane’s research interests it is downward-driving. While being a member of a socioeconomic class isn’t just how one appears to others (after all, Jane still is a movie star), markers such as clothing, speech, and performance are important social signals for how other people will perceive you.
Class is also about place. A recurring theme of Arrested Development is the places that the characters do and do not occupy among Southern California’s rich, powerful, and elite. The Bluths are sustained by constant attention to, and preoccupation with, their ability to gain access into the most prestigious schools (the Milford Academy and Openings), exclusive restaurants (Rudd), and other cultural institutions (the Living Classics pageant). And when it comes to public institutions such as the legal system, the Bluths expect (and indeed receive) special treatment and privilege within those institutions—George Sr. paying off the Mexican authorities, a series of expensive (if often incompetent) private attorneys, and so on.
In fact, the game of keeping up the appearance of an aloof, privileged Southern California lifestyle is more important to the Bluths than actually developing the financial resources to sustain that lifestyle. Passing as upper class becomes a priority over actually being upper class. Needing to present themselves as part of the bourgeoisie becomes the point of intentional activity, and the result of this is a constant anxiety over class status, presentation, and identity. Consider Lucille’s shock and horror upon learning that her country club membership had been downgraded to “poolside only.” Her sense of revulsion is so complete that even her body responds violently: her stomach, after all, isn’t “used to curly fries.” What it is to be upper class is so intimately tied to what it is to present one’s self as upper class that Lucille’s very body can’t handle the unexpected revelation that her persona and gradual “slide into poverty” is more visible than ever before.
I Thought You Meant of the Things You Eat: the Bluths and the Politics of the Family
By many standards the Bluths are a nontraditional family: Michael is a single parent, Lucille’s husband is in jail, Lindsay and Tobias are separated and struggling, Gob unknowingly has a son out of wedlock, Lucille adopts (and subsequently neglects) a child across national and racial lines. Adultery is normalized and expected. Alcoholism is tolerated and encouraged (I mean, we don’t want the vodka to go bad, do we?). The Bluth men fight over women (Marta, Lucille Ostero) just as they fight over toys in the Boyfights VHS movies (which, incidentally, were a huge hit in Mexico). They are, in many ways, the opposite of the perfect nuclear family.
And yet, these are features of family life that are a substantial part of the fabric of American reality. Single parenting like Michael’s is no longer an unexpected, remarkable feature. With millions of Americans in jail, families separated by the prison system are increasingly common. Young men, like the teenaged Gob, father children without bearing the fiscal or emotional responsibilities of fatherhood. There is no question that these are problems that face, not just Americans today, but people generally. What makes these features notable is not the fact that these things are happening, but the context in which they appear. These are features of family life that we’re not used to seeing portrayed on television within the upper-middle class, white So-Cal demographic, unless of course we’re big fans of The O.C. (don’t call it . . . wait, that’s actually the name of the show . . .).
Michael, of course, is supposed to be the moral center of the family unit: he’s the character who most explicitly takes it upon himself to keep the family together and to promote their well-being. But Michael has his own list of failings and familial betrayals. In romantic relationships, he’s less than a gentleman: he steals Gob’s girlfriend Marta, he culpably fails to realize Rita’s mental retardation, and he seduces and lies to a (supposedly) blind woman (finally throwing a Bible at her in court in an effort to both embarrass her and get his father out of paying his debt to society). He’s unable to actually listen to and communicate with his son, George Michael (and what father would give his son the name of the pop star and former lead singer of Wham?). Rather than supporting his son, he meddles with and dismisses George Michael’s relationship with Ann (“Bland,” “Egg,” “Yam,” “Plant”), even leaving her in a foreign country at one point.
Is Michael’s devotion and commitment to family values genuine? Or, rather, are Lindsay, Gob, and Tobias’s criticisms of him true: that his self-satisfaction at being the “good guy” is the driving motivation behind his actions, and that he is in fact only happy when he’s needed by others? Is the Bluth family—perpetually in crisis—the only context he can thrive in?
In answering this, one point worth noticing is that much of the humor of Arrested Development relies on subverting our expectations of happy, functional families. Consider Dr. Fünke’s 100 percent Natural Good-Time Family-Band Solution: the illusion of family togetherness, love, and stability serves as means of marketing chemical supplements with disgusting and problematic side effects (“Let’s take it from ‘Loose Stool’!”). The supplements—Teamocil, Euphorazine, and Xanotab—work by tranquilizing their users: they make docile bodies of volatile subjects.
For the Bluths, however, it’s only with these products that the features we take to be necessary conditions of an emotionally functional family—trust, care, affection, honesty, and mutual respect—emerge. Perhaps this unrelatability, unconventionality, and unexpectedness really were factors in the show’s short network television lifespan (it’s not as if they didn’t realize it, either!). The Bluths are not the sort of family we’re used to seeing on TV. It’s difficult to see these characters in terms of the familiar categories and roles that we’ve grown accustomed to seeing elsewhere in the television sitcom world. Lucille and Lindsay are not mothers in the same way as, for example, The Simpsons’ Marge Simpson or Family Guy’s Lois Griffin are: they don’t exist as the responsible moral center, they don’t offer the promise of stability and comfort, and they don’t serve as mere foils to their husbands’ punchlines. “If I go with you,” Lindsay tells her daughter Maeby when discussing the Bluth Company’s Christmas party, “it’ll just make me seem like a mother.”And while Maeby has never thought of her this way, and while this may make her—and the other Bluths—more fitting and robust comedic characters within the space of the show, it doesn’t make them any more likable. The Bluths fail to be relatable qua (a bourgeois way of saying “as”) people, but also qua members of a televised family unit. Whatever complications arise in real life, we expect our sitcom families to be antiseptic and emotionally nonconfrontational. This is why the Bluths both horrify and delight us.
The Important Thing Is That You Guys Don’t Lose Focus on Yourselves: Narcissism as a Crisis of Bourgeois Identity
In thinking through the Bluth’s social practices, anxiety about class status, and dysfunctional family ties it’s worth thinking about another feature of the Bluths’ psychology: namely, their relationship to themselves. They’re selfish, self-centered, self-aggrandizing, and self-righteous, all without any real insight into their own inner lives or motivations. The Bluths for the most part operate without any attention to why they may be doing the things they do or wanting the things they want. And it isn’t clear that they’re interested in investigating how their behavior hooks up to the world, let alone how their actions impact those around them. A culture of narcissism permeates the Bluths’s world. In addition to opting out of conventional labor and family responsibilities, they opt out of genuine human relationships whenever possible.
Consider, for example, Lindsay’s self-aggrandizing political “activism” (HOOP and anti-circumcision, protesting the war in Iraq only when she finds out her hair stylist is being sent to the front, or helping Johnny Bark protect the trees near the Bluths’ housing tract lot until she realizes that this entails a lack of modern plumbing). Unlike legitimate political activism that arises from homegrown struggles for equality, justice, and liberation, Lindsay’s activism is born of attention seeking. When she ends up dancing in front of a crowd at a war protest (in “Whistler’s Mother”), Lindsay discovers that “the activism that came out of her desire for prettier hair did in fact boost her self-esteem.” Later in the series, Lindsay stops by an anti-gun protest to check out the scene, not having “picked a side” yet. Then, despite her shouts of “murderer” she is swayed by television’s “Frank Wrench” and flips sides to the anti-gun-control movement. Her motivation for defending the separation of church and state, similarly, comes after she stubs her toe on a statue of the Ten Commandments at the courthouse. Lindsay is not authentically invested in the positions she defends (how can we forget this triad: “No More Meat!” “No More Fish!” and “More Meat and Fish!”?). As an outsider to these political struggles, she finds herself fulfilled by the attention she receives without actually having to hold any political, social, or ethical commitments.
Or consider the family’s lack of sensitivity following Buster’s seal accident. After Buster’s hand gets bitten off, his mother and siblings can barely contain their disgust and resentment. They are unsympathetic to the point where even the sight of Buster—or sitting too close in the stair car—is perceived as an unreasonable burden. The Bluths lacks the simple human capacities to take the needs and desires of others—even their own kin!—into account. This narcissism—this lack of attention or care paid to others’ lives and interests—functions as a privilege. There’s something specifically bourgeois about this pathology. Because their wealth, status, and suburban location insulate them from unwanted human contact, the Bluths are afforded the luxury of spending their time worrying about themselves rather than others. The psychopathology behind Buster’s panic attacks, Gob’s Spring Break binges, and Tobias’s time-sink acting career delusions are made possible by the Bluths’s financial wherewithal. The Bluths’s considerable resources enable a lifestyle of opting out of genuine human interactions. The result of this privilege—narcissism—is a siege on human communication and meaningful relationships.
What, then, can we say about the pathology structuring the Bluths’ lives? How are the dsyfunctionality, narcissism, and anxiety related to their class status? This brings us back to our original discussion of the traditional definition of the bourgeois. Remember that Marx originally understood the term as a way of talking about that group of people who own and control the means of production. Of course, this is only part of the story. Controlling the means of production isn’t all there is to being a good member of the economic elite: The good capitalist will reinvest, expand, and produce more wealth. By increasing production, reinvesting capital, keeping wages and overhead low, expanding into other markets, and further penetrating existing markets, the owners of the means of production can secure their position for years to come.
The Bluths, of course, don’t do any of this. Despite Michael’s best efforts, not only do they fail to grow or produce more wealth (I mean, they celebrate being upgraded to a “don’t buy” company with a huge party!), they’re constantly under threat of losing control of the company: either by being bought out by the likes of Lucille Ostero and Stan Sitwell or by being shut down by the courts. Mismanagement—financial and familial—is at the heart of the Bluths’ crises. Unable to control their wealth, their anxieties, or each other, the Bluths represent a family beset by the complications and anxieties of being bourgeois.
PART THREE
SOME HUGE MISTAKES
Chapter 8
WHAT WHITEY ISN’T READY TO HEAR
Social Identity in Arrested Development
J. Jeremy Wisnewski
You There, Reading This Book . . .
So you’re a reader—and a fan of Arrested Development. A TV-watcher and a reader. I know your kind. You probably think you’re some kind of intellectual, too? I mean philosophy . . . that’s some highfalutin stuff. I’m getting a sense of what I might expect from you. You’ll finish reading this sentence, you’ll talk about Arrested Development, and you probably harbor warm feelings for Ron Howard (and who could blame you?).
I bet you’ve got some siblings you annoy, and who annoy you, and I bet you lost a hand to a seal a couple years ago. I also bet you’ve got a weird romance thing going on with your mother and that you have dabbled in cartography. You’re probably even wearing cutoff jean-shorts under your pants.
Sorry. I got a little carried away there. What I’m doing is interpreting you. I’m taking some small fact about your actions and I’m using that small fact to figure out who you are. In this case, the only fact I’ve got is that you’re reading these sentences—but that gives me a lot to go on. I can take that one little thing and construct a world around it—a world full of boxes to check and labels to place—a world where I know exactly what it means to be someone like you.
So, book reader, I’ve got you figured out. But you’ve got me figured out as well. I’m that snarky philosophy professor who thinks he’s so cool because he likes Arrested Development, and who thinks he’s so hip because he writes snotty little essays that directly address his readers. And right you are!
But identity isn’t all fun and games. If there’s anything I’ve learned from Arrested Development, it’s that identities are things we can be forced into—that can blind others to who we are, or that might even blind us to who we are. Whether in the O.C. (don’t call it that) or elsewhere, we aren’t just who we want to be. We’re also what others determine us to be. And here’s the scary thing, book reader. That’s how all identity works. We aren’t simply born whole from the heads of Zeus or George Sr. We’re social animals, as Aristotle (384–322 BCE) reminds us. We are the product not just of who we think we are, but of who, and what, others think we are. Identity is thus fundamentally a social enterprise. It isn’t simply something one can choose. In lots of ways, our identities are things that are constantly negotiated with those around us. Because identities are negotiated—because they can be forced on us by others—they have an inherently ethical dimension.
Whatever I Do, I Won’t Quote Hegel
The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor argues that a “crucial feature of human life is its fundamentally dialogical character. We become full human agents, capable of understanding ourselves, and hence of defining our identity, through our acquisition of rich human languages of expression.”1 These “languages” aren’t just the spattering of words we happen to know (if so, Annyong would be in big trouble in the Bluth household!). Taylor has in mind a much broader notion of language that captures all those things that allow us to express and define ourselves: our interests, our goals, and even our artistic and professional projects. A language, in this sense, is any systematic expression of who one is—of “where one stands.” (Hell, even a commitment to the Sudden Valley Housing Development, or the Cornballer, might count.) As Taylor goes on to point out, “people do not acquire the languages needed for self-definition on their own. Rather, we are introduced to them through others who matter to us . . . the genesis of the human mind is in this sense not monological, not something each person accomplishes on his or her own, but dialogical.”2
