Color Light & Space Alan Kirby

Postmodernism Curbed? Contemporary TV Comedy and the Apparently Real

Miranda Gray, the art school student who is kidnapped by the besotted and asocial Frederick Clegg
in John Fowless novelThe Collector (1963), passes much of her time in her locked room drawing. Illeducated and uninformed, Clegg judges her work by the only criterion he knows: whether or not it is
a good likeness. As an adherent of a late modernist aesthetic, Gray responds to his assessments
with understandable contempt, but they have the merit of focusing attention on one of the most
enduring of artistic puzzles, the relationship between the aesthetic object and the real. Cleggs
assumption that the purpose of art is to achieve an exact reproduction of the real is disdained by
Gray, who believes that the role of the artist is to, as it were,personalize the real, to infuse it with a
singular vision, a signature style, within which the works quality or its absence will inhere. Almost
half a century since the publication of The Collector, todays reader is unlikely to be very sympathetic
to either characters aesthetic doctrines. Postmodernism was to redefine the real as a fiction which
artworks rely on but cannot be accessed. The postmodernist real is already swamped by
representations, images, fictions themselves; the postmodernist artwork places itself among
preceding and competing artworks, seeking neither a likeness nor a vision of something
supposedly located beyond the field of representation. The author, neither the minion of a real
which s/he slavishly seeks to mimic nor its godlike reinterpreter, becomes a fiction too, ironically
signaling his/her position within this kaleidoscope (or Joyces collideoscope) of pre-existing texts. In
J. G. Ballards words:
We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind mass-merchandizing, advertising, politics conducted
as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the
increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the pre-empting
of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an
enormous novel.

In my book Digimodernism (Continuum, 2009) I argue that one of the signs in the 21st-century
cultural landscape of the exhaustion of postmodernism is the retreat of this notion of the necessarily
fictive real. In its place, I argue, has come the aesthetic of the apparently real. Owing something to
the example of the Dogme 95 filmmakers at the end of the last century, this aesthetic finds its natural
home on television, most banally in the genres of the docusoap and reality/interactive TV. It has also
spread across television comedy (sometimes spun off into films) in shows like The
Office, Jackass, Ali G, and Borat. The real in such texts seems to be unproblematically held out to
the viewer: what we see seems to be real, though the naivety of this aesthetic is in fact entirely
deceptive.
Within the contemporary TV landscape, such programs stand at the opposite pole to Seth
MacFarlanes Family Guy (Fox, 1999-2002, 2005- ), which many critics have hastened to label as
postmodern. Depthless and affectless, Family Guyalternates broadly between two styles: a
foregrounded pseudorealism supposedly and ironically sited relative to the traditional genre of the
family sitcom, with its domestic squabbles, petty tensions, learning, and loyal loving; and the
cutaway snippets, brazenly antirealist and often alluding to popular culture (ads, other shows,
movies, etc.). Though these styles are routinely blurred by the shows makers, Family
Guy recognizably deploys a fictive notion of the real as composed of a miasma of texts, above
all The Simpsons, through which one can navigate but beyond which, to paraphrase Derrida, nothing

lies. Despite its moments of brilliance, I would argue that Family Guys collapse of the postmodernist
sophistication of the Simpsons aesthetic into a snarky and punkish juvenilia suggests a reductio ad
absurdum, a decadent final stage in the decline of an historical style. Its to the point here, though,
that Family Guy relies on a specific use of color, light, and space: clean and even primary colors;
logical, structured, and staged framing; brightness and precise illumination. This is the look, of
course, of an advertising that glamorizes and simplifies the world it evokes; there is an idealizing
crispness and well-lit sheen to Family Guythat suggests a store catalog, though this is immediately
played off with a subversiveness which will be wearily familiar to long-term observers of
postmodernism the pervasive ugliness and stupidity of the characters depicted.
At the other extreme to Family Guy, it can be argued, stand Larry Davids Curb Your
Enthusiasm (HBO, 2000- ) and Armando Iannauccis The Thick of It (BBC, 2005- ), the latter recently
spun off into the movie In the Loop. These are sophisticated examples of the apparently real within
the field of the sitcom. Both shows variously deploy a documentary aesthetic: hand-held cameras
that wobble and shake; natural and uneven lighting and sound; entirely location shooting;
underdressed, stark sets; washed-out colors; retroscripted dialogue (where the actors improvise
within a known framework, much like life); caught or stolen shots filmed through physical
obstructions; distorted angles, wonky framing, or blurring of images as characters suddenly shift
position; camerawork that, in rapid exchanges, cannot keep up with the unpredictable switches of
speaker; dialogue that is sometimes inarticulate, incoherent, repetitive, awkward, or confused to the
point of inaudibility; and so on. The primary effect of these techniques is to make the viewer feel that
the events depicted are genuinely happening; moreover, it is to make us feel that we are actually
present at them, since our behavior, reified by the camerawork and reinforced by the content of the
shot, positions us within the process of recording itself.
Comedy has always drawn on the kind of embarrassment, humiliation, and pain episodically
depicted by David and Iannucci. However, the advent of the aesthetic of the apparently real permits
such authors to seemingly insert the viewer as implicated witness into the toe-curling scenes which
their plots throw up. In fact, these are not documentary techniques, and not only because David
and Iannucci unambiguously present their shows as fictions; they are not even faux-documentaries
in the style of the BBCs legendary Ghostwatch (1992), since no viewer is likely to be fooled by their
ontological status. Instead, the battery of techniques works to mimic the physical movements and
perceptions of someone actually there at the time and in the place of filming. To speak, then, of an
apparent reality in these shows is to refer to something visceral, something experiential, with no
basis in hard fact. This distinguishes them from the 1960s cinma-vrit techniques of The Battle of
Algiers or The War Game, which were driven by a desire for naked truth about recent colonial history
or the effects of nuclear war; such films, which superficially resemble these shows, believed in and
sought to capture and communicate a dogged likeness to objective fact. David and Iannucci, by
contrast, purvey reality after postmodernism: the fictive real may have disappeared, but there is no
motivating belief in the accessibility or desirability of objective truth. They therefore present their
work as fiction which is experienced, physically and perceptually, as reality, without extending this to
the realm of the objective; that one show involves several famous people playing a version of
themselves, and the other alludes to well-known personages and events, does not, paradoxically,
enhance their apparent reality. This latter is conveyed and felt, but it has no intellectual or
philosophical content.
Yet even on these terms the apparently real is problematic. Why, for instance, should washed-out
colors strike us as real? Walking down a street or moving through everyday public or private places

affords us a plentiful supply of color. The answer, it would seem, is that the techniques of the
apparently real are no more than the flipside of Hollywoods traditional professionalism, with its fixed
camera set-ups, well-equipped studios, huge props budgets, hi-tech lenses, crisp dialogue, posed
scenes, careful and artificial lighting and sound recording, and so on. This is filmmaking as
industrialized and expensive artifice; the systematic negation of these techniques therefore looks to
our eyes like spontaneous and cheap reality. Yet this is doubly misleading. On one side, these
shows depend to a self-evidently high degree on professional expertise: they require experienced
actors, deft editors, non-diegetic music, and painstakingly honed scripts (if only in outline) which, far
from clinging to a naturalism that may be supposed coterminous with apparent reality, in practice
weave artificial and complex webs of coincidence and strategy to arrive at self-consciously farfetched conclusions. On the other side, unmediated experience does often appear to us, as already
noted, as rich in color, visually posed and structured, and well-lit. Hollywoods vast commercial
success has conditioned us to read its techniques as marketing devices, as insincere trickery
designed to part us from our cash; in unreflecting reaction we may assume that life as it is directly
and authentically lived (should we feel at ease with such thorny and whiskery terms) eschews such
promotional devices. It goes without saying, however, that whatever techniques they may employ,
Davids and Iannuccis shows are also commodities in the cultural marketplace; the apparently real is
not some post-consumerist nirvana, as Davids own stupendous personal wealth attests.
It is 25 years since Fredric Jameson noted that aesthetic production today has become integrated
into commodity production generally. He claimed that this would spark a culturally dominant
aesthetic that was depthless and affectless, that recycled imagery in a blizzard of pastiche and
allusion, a postmodernist art, in short, of Family Guy and the fictive real (Warhol, Prince, Sherman,
etc.). It might be felt that Jameson assumed too narrowly that art would inevitably mirror or
interrogate its own prevailing cultural-historical conditions. Yet when this response grew tired or
stale, such conditions might, without losing their force, induce artists to revolt against the supposed
necessity of representing or addressing them. Rather than achieve a likeness or critique of a world
ruled by fictions, such artists might then find ways of suspending or circumventing that global
tyranny, in particular by seeming to resuscitate that early 60s shibboleth, the unmediated real. If so,
the apparently real would become merely another visual expression, subsequent to the fictive real,
of postmodernism; in this case, it would not signal a decisive move in contemporary art beyond the
postmodern.
There is some truth to this point. However, texts such as Davids and Iannuccis do achieve an
important innovation: whereas postmodernist fictions would undermine their own illusion by breaking
the fourth wall and addressing the viewer, David and Iannucci suck the viewer experientially into
their productions in a way that reinforces their own perceived reality. The flatness of the fiction is not
critiqued or undercut in a skeptical, deconstructive manner; instead, it is extended out toward us in a
finally spurious but experientially powerful way such that it appears to engulf us. We feel that we
participate in such fictions in much the way that we are implicated, potentially or actually, in the
haphazard text-making of Web 2.0 platforms. David and Iannucci do not take their own texts apart;
they expand them outward in their own production till they seem to encompass their own viewer.
Consequently, they have no use for self-conscious fictiveness or the cultural backward gaze;
instead, they recuperate a real which, under special and known conditions, is held to be here right
now, and which derives its contemporaneity from the multiple and onward authorship of the Internet:
a digimodernist real.