Culture is only true when implicitly critical, and the mind which forgets this revenges itself in the critics it breeds.
—Theodor W. Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” 1967
In the pilot for Girls, Hannah steals the tip her parents left for the hotel housekeeper. This scene foreshadows the bad behavior of Hannah and her circle of friends in the coming episodes. These young women are “self-centered,” “vapid,” “narcissistic” and much worse, according to many critics who disapprove of the show. The characters’ “unlikability,” these critics say, makes the show unenjoyable and perhaps even a bad influence in the culture. These critics, thereby, arrive at a negative aesthetic judgment as to the value of Girls. But these critics are wrong and they are watching TV in the wrong way.
The characters’ unlikability is just one of the many things about the show that some critics don’t like, but that actually make Girls unique and revolutionary among TV shows. What are some of the other revolutionary aspects? First, Girls is frank and non-judgmental in its depiction of female promiscuity, at least in Hannah’s friend Jessa’s case. Second, awkward, disempowering, and one-sided, but realistic, sexual encounters abound in Hannah’s storyline. And, finally, Girls gives lots of screen time to Lena Dunham’s “non-Hollywood” body. None of this has been seen before on mainstream TV where, in particular, sex is depicted in a timid way. In “Hollywood,” the act is often not shown at all but only hinted at, or if it is shown it’s portrayed in a stylized, unrealistic manner. It’s cleaned up and smoothed out. Everyone is loving, communicative, and sexually satisfied. Plus, on mainstream TV female promiscuity is always a judgment. And, finally, we are all well aware that mainstream TV partakes in the general culture’s denigration of the average female body type, elevating and idolizing something more akin to a condition of anorexia. To challenge these aspects of the mainstream is a virtue.
What theory of how to watch television would hold that the representation of unlikeable characters, awkward sex, female promiscuity and unglamorous nudity are laudable virtues of a TV show?
Answer: It’s the theory offered by German-born philosopher of American popular culture, Theodor W. Adorno. Adorno argues that “the culture industry”—that is, the commercial institutions in which pop cultural artifacts are produced—results in TV shows that create individuals susceptible to totalitarian and ideological control.1 “The repetitiveness, the selfsameness, and the ubiquity of modern mass culture tend to make for automatized reactions and to weaken the forces of individual resistance,” Adorno says in “How to Look at Television” in The Culture Industry. “Mass culture is the seed bed of political totalitarianism,” he writes in The Dialectic of Enlightenment.
Adorno’s accusation that cultural products create unthinking automatons might seem exaggerated. But there is more than a little truth to it. We know that some TV is mind-numbing and some TV makes you think. And we should admit that individuals do not so much create society as society creates individuals. So, according to Adorno, what’s important is not whether a show is good or bad in terms of aesthetic pleasure. What’s important is the psychological effects TV has on an each individual’s critical faculties which, when sharp, allow us to see the tragic truth about our socioeconomic position in the culture. When these faculties are dulled, we are imprisoned unthinkingly in our position. “The effort here required is of a moral nature itself: knowingly to face psychological mechanisms operating on various levels in order not to become blind and passive victims.” So, TV that does not numb your mind, but rather exercises it can provide a path to what Adorno evocatively calls, “emancipation.”
This chapter presents Girls as a cultural artifact that Adorno would approve of. Girls is a rarity that avoids the very serious and consequential pitfalls Adorno finds in most products of the culture industry.
Standardization
Mainstream TV shows—such as safe, laugh-track shows like Gilligan’s Island and The Brady Bunch—are “standardized” in Adorno’s terminology such that there can be no practice of our critical faculties in an interpretative relation to the show. On the other hand, in Girls thinking is required of the viewer in order to digest the novel aspects of the show. Adorno says that in the case of popular music—produced in the same standardized way by the same culture industry that produces cookie-cutter TV shows—the songs are “pre-digested” and do not require a thoughtful response. Indeed, they inhibit one. “Standardization of song hits keeps the customer in line by doing their listening for them, as it were,” Adorno writes. Particular aspects of TV shows will come “pre-digested” and without anything novel to stimulate a viewer every time those aspects are copied from an earlier show. Some aspects of That 70s Show, Big Bang Theory, and How I Met Your Mother are copies of formulas from the commercially successful show Friends, which is itself a formulaic show copied from previous popular shows. There is no new thinking required by these standardized shows.
The culture industry’s standardized product is psychologically debilitating. But how does standardization come about? Adorno says it’s caused by the competition inherent in capitalism. Economists usually say that competition tends to create variety in the marketplace. But that’s the capitalist line. Adorno saw, in agreement with Marx, that competition encouraged imitation of what had already succeeded, with the aim of creating the most profits with the least investment.
“As one particular song [or TV show or movie] scored a great success, hundreds of others sprang up imitating the successful one… and the process culminated in the crystallization of standards. Under centralized conditions such as exist today these standards have become frozen.” Capitalism “institutionalized the standardization and made it imperative,” guaranteeing that “…nothing fundamentally novel will be introduced.” This standardizing process explains why there is such a repetition of form in TV shows, popular music, and movies as well as in “motor cars and breakfast foods,” as Adorno puts it. Thus, an audience is fed a variation on the basic ensemble of character types, such as The Hero, The Anti-Hero, The Love Interest, and the Buddy. Jerry, Kramer, Elaine, George and Ed, Peg, Kelly, Bud and Richie, the Fonz, Joanie, Ralph, et cetera. Other aspects of TV shows are standardized if thought successful, such as plot lines, locales, themes, and even particular jokes. But the less novelty, the less thoughtful engagement with the show is invited.
In order to acquire a psychological benefit from an artwork, you must experience and interpret it. But for this, engagement and effort is required. Standardization and the fact that people are alienated from their labor operate hand-in-hand to prevent genuine experience of an artwork. The working person wants relief from the boredom of his or her job as well as relief from effort:
A fully concentrated and conscious experience of art is possible only to those whose lives do not put such a strain on them that in their spare time they want relief from both boredom and effort simultaneously… They seek novelty, but the strain and boredom associated with actual work lead to avoidance of effort in that leisure time which offers the only chance for really new experience… The whole sphere of cheap commercial entertainment reflects this dual desire. It induces relaxation because it is patterned and pre-digested. Its being patterned and pre-digested serves within the psychological household of the masses to spare them the effort of that participation without which there can be no receptivity to art.
Work at most jobs is both tiring and boring. So in leisure time working people want relief from boredom as well as from effort. Standardized popular culture can relieve boredom and effort both. But non-standardized cultural artifacts are challenging and require effort to watch and understand. Mainstream cultural products, by contrast, offer no opportunity to practice effortful critical thinking and thus diminish the viewer’s capacity for it.
Challenging TV shows that are neither predictable nor selfsame require thinking and, therefore, allow for the individual to achieve “autonomy,” “maturity,” “emancipation,” and “genuine experience.” These are Adorno’s words for the “most desirable effect of television” and for the most desirable result of culture’s role in the psychological formation of an individual’s subjectivity and self-understanding. Adorno is drawing on the Kantian claim that autonomy is maturity, i.e., the capability of exercising your own discretionary judgment, and making up your mind for yourself. When culture obstructs the development of critical consciousness of social reality, a more insidious “integration” is produced. Adorno believes that the main effect of the standardization of culture is the promotion of critical immaturity in the citizenry.
The exercise of any critical faculties with respect to social reality is frustrated and prohibited by standardized art forms. “The very capacity for life experience may be dulled.” But, it stands to reason, if a TV show is not standardized, is not predictable, but is thought-provoking and upends previous forms, then the TV show may help an individual achieve maturity, autonomy, emancipation and genuine independence from the conceptual categories offered by society. Hannah’s body, for example, generates at the very least a mental realization that all the other bodies you’ve seen on TV are not at all average. The non-judgmental depiction of Jessa’s promiscuity might get you to think that the usual stigma is unjustified and so on.
Fake-realism
The same aspects of Girls that demonstrate that it’s different from most other shows (that it’s not standardized), also demonstrate that Girls does not participate in the structural form which Adorno calls “fake-realism.” Fake-realism offers a fantasy world as if it were really attainable. The representation of promiscuity, nakedness of what Sheila Ruth would call a “non-serviceable” kind, and awkward or disempowered sexual encounters, make it such that Girls deviates from the standard form and content of most TV shows. And those same features of Girls also keep the show from evincing fake-realism.
Sex in the City definitely exhibits fake-realism. The show is ostensibly “realistic” insofar as it does not incorporate any surrealism, magical realism, or supernatural plot points or devices. And yet the reality depicted in Sex in the City is something completely unattainable for most people or at any rate it is an unrealistic fantasy world. As Adorno writes, “The culture industry presents the everyday world as a paradise.” And so what is pure, unattainable fantasy (for everyone except perhaps the 1%) is presented as a real world to which you must merely aspire. For Adorno, this fits the role of “ideological representation” in a capitalist mass culture: the real material conditions of 99% of society are obscured or obliterated from consciousness by an alternate reality which claims for itself its own (false) legitimacy via naturalistic representation in moving images.
Fake-realism, then, is a form of representation that artworks from the culture industry adopt in which a false and unattainable reality is offered to the masses. The masses receive it both aspirationally and in terms of escapism. It’s aspirational, and yet as Adorno maintains, the fantastical promise is never fulfilled. In the end, it is a trick. As Lena Dunham says in the DVD commentary for Season One Episode One, because of Sex in the City “people moved to New York City and [yet] it didn’t work out.”
Escapism goes hand-in-hand with aspirationalism because when you aspire to what isn’t, you turn away from what is, which helps obscure social reality from view. Fake-realism is thus perniciously ideological, doing nothing to expose the status quo. Fake-realism passes off the social-economic and material conditions of life for the masses as natural and inevitable, Adorno says.
Escapist and aspirational TV shows exhibit fake-realism and thereby undermine an individual’s emancipation from societal strictures. In fact, it binds them all the more effectively:
When the audience at a sentimental film or sentimental music become aware of the overwhelming possibility of happiness, they dare to confess to themselves what the whole order of contemporary life ordinarily forbids them to admit, namely, that they actually have no part in happiness. What is supposed to be wish fulfillment [think of Sex and the City’s aspirational aspects] is only the scant liberation that occurs with the realization that at last one need not deny oneself the happiness of knowing that one is unhappy and that one could be happy… The actual function of sentimental music [or TV] lies rather in the temporary release given to the awareness that one has missed fulfillment.
Aspiring to a fantastical life, escapism and wish fulfillment might possibly have a pleasant psychological outcome. “It is catharsis for the masses, but catharsis which keeps them all the more firmly in line… Music that permits its listeners the confession of their unhappiness reconciles them, by means of this ‘release’, to their social dependence.”
Girls avoids fake-realism precisely by not being aspirational and not being escapist. The purposeful unlikability of the characters prevents on the part of the audience any aspiration to be like the characters. Recall the episode in which Jessa mercilessly analyses the others at rehab, but cannot see her own failures as a friend. Recall when Charlie and Ray find and read publicly from Hannah’s diary in which she has condemned Marnie and Charlie’s relationship. Instead of apologizing to Marnie, Hannah selfishly asks, “If you had read the essay and it wasn’t about you, do you think you would have liked it?” And recall when Hannah thoughtlessly asks Laird, the recovering addict, to risk relapse by procuring heroine for her. You can’t aspire to this kind of behavior. It would amount to “the tyranny of pluck,” Elaine Blair writes in The New York Review of Books, to want on TV only likable characters whose main concern is always doing the right thing or being happy-go-lucky. These characters, which Blair describes as “raw and bruised,” are not to be aspired to.
Even though the awkward sex and the “non-serviceable” nudity challenge the culture industry’s usual images and representations of women in media, these aspects are not presented as something to aspire to but which is nevertheless impossible to obtain. They are all too easy to obtain. Furthermore, no fantasy is offered into which we may fruitlessly escape. The pernicious ideology of fake-realism is thus avoided.
Hidden Messages
In “How to Look at Television” Adorno says that mainstream TV comes in a “multilayered structure,” including “hidden messages” below the surface-level plot. The idea from psychoanalysis that persons have multiple layers of personality is used by the culture industry perhaps not entirely intentionally “… in order to ensnare the consumer as completely as possible and in order to engage him psycho-dynamically in the service of … [certain] effects.”
Consider Adorno’s example. He discusses an “extremely light comedy of pranks,” in which there is:
a young schoolteacher who is not only underpaid but is incessantly fined by the caricature of a pompous and authoritarian school principle. Thus, she has no money for her meals and is actually starving. The supposedly funny situations consist mostly of her trying to hustle a meal from various acquaintances, but regularly without success… Overtly, the play is just slight amusement mainly provided by the painful situations into which the heroine and her arch-opponent constantly run. The script does not try to ‘sell’ any idea. The ‘hidden message’ emerges simply by the way the story looks at human beings; thus the audience is invited to look at the characters in the same way without being made aware that indoctrination is present… The heroine shows such… high-spiritedness that identification with her is invited and compensation is offered for the inferiority of her position.
So, the manifest content of the script does not come with an explicit “moral to the story.” No one behaving in a certain way is then given or denied a prize or a reward. Nevertheless, there is a message hidden in the way we are invited to identify (as in what happens with fake-realism) with the main character.
In terms of a set pattern of identification the script implies: ‘If you are as humorous, good-natured, quick-witted, and charming as she is, do not worry about being paid a starvation wage. You can cope with your frustration in a humorous way’… In other words, the script is a shrewd method of promoting adjustment to humiliating conditions by presenting them as objectively comical and by giving a picture of a person who experiences even her own inadequate position as an object of fun apparently free of any resentment.
Because we identify with the plucky schoolteacher we are given to think that the way she handles her situation would be appropriate for us. We are encouraged to adjust to humiliating socio-economic conditions. “The ‘message’ of adjustment and unreflecting obedience seems to be dominant and all-pervasive today,” Adorno says. These stories “teach their readers that one has to be ‘realistic’, that one has to give up romantic ideas, that one has to adjust oneself at any price, and that nothing more can be expected of any individual.” Girls would transmit a hidden message except for the fact that identification with the characters does not take place. If a viewer were somehow to identify with the characters in Girls, then he or she would receive the hidden message that funny one-liners, careless valley girl blathering, myopia about the plight of lower socio-economic classes and about other people’s problems constitute an appropriate response to the vicissitudes of life.
All this happens at the level of the subconscious. A show with a plot like that of the plucky, put-upon schoolteacher “does not pretend to touch anything serious and expects to be regarded as featherweight. Nevertheless, even such amusements tend to set patterns for the members of the audience without their being aware of it.” As a matter of fact, “the hidden message may be more important than the overt, since this hidden message will escape the controls of consciousness, will not be ‘looked through’, will not be warded off by sales resistance, but is likely to sink into the spectator’s mind.”
Looking at the hidden message in this way is in accordance with the “assumption shared by numerous social scientists that certain political and social trends of our time, particularly those of a totalitarian nature, feed to a considerable extent on irrational and frequently unconscious motivations.” The majority of television shows today “aim at producing, or at least reproducing, the very… intellectual passivity and gullibility that seem to fit with totalitarian creeds even if the explicit surface message of the shows may be anti-totalitarian.”
However, if a TV show does not exhibit fake-realism and if, thereby or for some other reason, does not allow a member of the audience to identify with the characters, then a hidden message of the kind Adorno discusses is not possible. Girls, thus avoids hidden messages of such a kind because Girls does not participate in fake-realism, the characters are unlikeable and thus cannot be identified with and the show is not aspirational, nor escapist.
Bad Criticism
I wish to conclude by considering some of the professional journalism out there about Girls that I consider to be bad art criticism. Often times these critics will have a bad theory or no theory at all about how mass media affects the audience psychologically. Or these critics will have a bad theory or no theory at all about how to have a deep engagement with the representation of the characters of a fictional text that will lead to an insightful interpretation of said text. For example, requiring likable characters or requiring the characters be role models is a bad critical engagement with a text. The possibility of anti-heroes will not be precluded by any worthwhile version of feminist art criticism, for instance. That is to say, a show with main characters who are unlikable but rather more like anti-heroes can still be a feminist show, even if those characters themselves do not act as feminist role models. This is true if only because the alternatives in which it is false are so depressingly unsophisticated and pedestrian as critical approaches to art.
Catherine Scott writes in The Independent an article titled, “Girls is not diverse, not feminist and not empowering.” She says, “What’s there to celebrate for feminism when a show depicts four entirely self-interested young women and a lead character having the most depressing, disempowered sexual relationships imaginable?” But how would Scott have a show’s characters and events be depicted? It looks as though she would require that a feminist show only represent characters who are models of what feminism rightfully hopes for women. Feminism is correct to advocate for a future in which young women are not narcissistic and arrange for themselves only empowering sexual relationships. But in a fictional text it simply won’t help to achieve the just ends of feminism by only ever representing women as feminist icons. Role-modelism of that sort invites identification with the characters. As we’ve seen, identification with the characters invites all sorts of pernicious effects on the audience at the psychological level of the subconscious. Perhaps that won’t be a problem if the identification on the part of the audience is always with a faultless feminist hero. But the problem will be that if we demand, as Scott and others seem to do, that the characters always be role models there will be very little or no chance for a dialectical engagement with the text that sharpens our critical faculties. Imagine a world in which TV shows, artworks and other cultural products only represent characters as role models. Doesn’t that strike you as insufferably uninteresting, unengaging, and in fact horrifically dystopian? The role-modelism in Girls criticism doesn’t seem well thought out.
Instead, what Adorno wants in terms of good art and the concomitant good criticism includes artworks that break from established genres, that challenge mainstream tropes and conventions of representation, that eschew fake-realism, that avoid pernicious hidden messages of adjustment to our situation (by avoiding simplistic identification with a main character whose adjustment should be lamented), and that requires active and critical thinking on the part of the audience if the audience is to achieve “autonomy” and “emancipation” with respect to the prevailing ideology of our time. Girls does all that.
When I originally wrote this article, it was a much more innocent time in terms of worrying about citizenry turning fascist. In fact, back then when I read Adorno, I found it fascinating but I kind of had a suspicion that his worry was overblown. Culture isn’t going to make people susceptible to fascist leadership. How times have changed! One among many problems today is many populations’ incredible weakness in terms of their critical faculties—on the right and the left, I’m afraid to say.
What a sharp correlation!