It's a Meta, Meta World

We know it's a meta, meta world we live in when even Bill Clinton is asking the public to believe that "The media did it." The blame for the Lewinsky mess, says the President of the United States, lies with circulation-driven newsmongers and that devil Kenneth W. Starr. Painting himself as the victim of the media, Clinton claims that he is the one who has been wronged.

Clinton--or, more accurately, the Clinton team--is very clever to shift the American people's attention to scribblers, paparazzi and all the professionals who make their living off of buzz. Members of the media--involved in a business, not a nonprofit service--are always tempted to slant the story to further their own purposes. Consider, for example, that the person who encouraged Linda S. Tripp to bring Monica Lewinsky's story into the open was Lucianne Goldberg, a New York book agent. (Though her Republican sympathies no doubt had a large role in her desire to expose Clinton's indiscretions, she surely envisioned the profits from a juicy bestseller.)

The reason Clinton's charge against the media holds right now is that America--even on its most pop-culture "George of the Jungle"-level--has become so thoroughly self-conscious that it wants to examine the vehicle along with the cargo.

After all, who cares about the history anymore? Though we once watched films to see Knute Rockne win one for the Gipper, we're now cheering on his agent. As much as Cuba Gooding, Jr., may have stolen the show in Jerry Maguire, the 1997 movie was built around the football player's slicked-up dealmaker. James Bond movies used to paint the Russians as the enemy; the most recent Bond film, Tomorrow Never Dies, vilified Elliot Carver, a media mogul intent on boosting ratings.

On television, we care less about Ally McBeal's clients--however intriguing older women who fall in love with 18-year olds and guys who have a fetish for women's feet are--than for our favorite legal professional. We are, indeed, more cynically meta today than we have been in decades. Though Chicago the Musical had to take a second seat to the warm and fuzzy Oklahoma when it debuted on Broadway in the mid-1970s, the show-that-hams-it-up-because-it's-a-show won the 1997 Tony Award for Best Revival of a Musical and has been enjoying more-than-robust ticket sales.

But however wicked pop culture gets with its self-consciousness, I still think there's a certain wish for sincerity that cuts through. After all, Jerry Maguire is about an agent who finally finds his heart, and its Oscar went to the dancing football player who isn't afraid to get sentimental about the kwan. This pendulum swing back from meta-gazing helps to explain the success of the gooey, sunset-flooded Titanic and its Celine Dion title song. Of course, we're not returning to the El-Cid era of filmmaking in which we're expected to throw our hearts immediately into the valiant Charleston Heston's 11th-century siege of Valencia. Titanic, at least, puts the story in the memory of Rose DeWitt Bukater, justifying any sentimental outrage by framing it in her memory. I admit that even I bought into the lavish beauty of it all--if only for three hours.

It is this option out of being absorbed with metacommentaries that accounts for the draw of The Truman Show. Netting the most of any movie this summer ($60 million), this movie had an irresistible premise: a man whose entire life has been a drama broadcast into living rooms suddenly realizes that even his most natural moments occur according to a rehearsed script. Though we laughed when his wife looked directly into the camera to advertise a cooking product and when the show's director prompted, "Cue the sun!", the movie's emotional center was Truman's exit. The movie broke out of being simply another meditation on the control of the media and the audience's complicity in "to be continued" plot lines.

Playing around with the contrivances of Hollywood is fun, but Truman wants simply to live a real life without wondering whether or not the people around him are honest. Even if there was a hint of mocking in Americans' pinning on "Free Truman" buttons this summer, they were still--on some level--refusing to let the media dictate the substance of our lives. Just ask the woman in the seat in front of me about this movie that allowed the star to give up his artificial stardom; she couldn't stop gushing, `This is the best movie I've ever seen!'

If Clinton took his cue from The Truman Show, he'd know that he can't keep blaming the media forever. At some time, we're all going to get tired of thinking about a story's "spin" and come back to wonder whether there is, in fact, a story to tell. After all, even though we, the television audience, know it's ridiculous for Ally McBeal to keep hearing secrets in the law firm's bathroom, we still forgive it, for sake of unfolding the plot. Heck, it is TV, and she has to find out somehow--why not in the bathroom? At this moment, the public is more disgusted by the media's insistence on publishing every sordid detail and the viciousness with which they pounced on this story than by the President's sexual acts.

But, what will Clinton do when the American audience is tired of listening to the media ask, Has the media gone too far?, and wants ask, What's really going on outside of Seahaven? I know that I am willing to suspend my suspicion of the toilet talk if there's the possibility of learning about the story that he has tried so hard not to tell. Jia-Rui Chong '99 is a history and literature concentrator in Kirkland House. Her column appears on alternate Mondays.