Cul de Sac

In case you hadn't received the memo announcing the organization of your entire life, public and private, to serve the needs of giant corporations, here's a brief update from Saturday's New York Times. Apparently ABC filmed an entire reality series, then killed it because it interfered with the target marketing of a movie launch. Thus the life of the so-called mind in the post-millennial US.

Ironically, this was one reality show some among us might have liked to see. Called "Welcome to the Neighborhood," it featured a contest for a house in a neighborhood south of Austin, Texas. It's a white, Christian neighborhood; the contestants, naturally, were drawn from lifestyles and/or ethnic categories predicted to clash with all that: black and Asian families, the excessively tatooed, the gay. The idea was that the outcasts would "win over" the existing residents, and thus win the (to my mind dubious, but whatever) right to join them.

As a distillation of the immigrant or outsider experience in America, it's about what we'd expect from reality tv: crass and reductive, sensationalizing rather than usefully interrogating the absurd frictions of American life, pushing toward the great mushy Oprah-friendly ending we've come to demand. You can bet this epic struggle will not take place on the outcasts' terms. You can bet, too, that the final message, one way or another, will be about sameness: the outcasts, the suburbanites, the viewers' too. We're all residents of the well-swept cul-de-sac in the end.

Think, then, in small terms, of small victories. The winners of the contest turned out to be a gay couple with an adopted biracial son. There's a sense in which these really are two Americas coming face to face with one another: the identity swirl of what we might call the enlightened, progressive, and urban; and the resolutely regressive of the religious, affluent, and suburban. Note that I didn't say the two Americas. The gay couple is made up of two well-off white guys, after all, both of them quite comfortable in the manicured environs of their new home. You might say the community around them was asked to choose its poison, and it chose the one least likely to make it choke.

That said, it does appear — at least in the Times account — that the community wound up embracing the two, and that in at least one case some profound change was worked. The neighbor most opposed to them at the beginning of filming ended up, apparently, not only inviting the couple to a standing dinner engagement at his house each sunday night but coming to accept his own gay son's identity for the first time. I guess he saw it didn't necessarily mean an end to the manicured suburban way of life after all. The transformation, by this gent's own reckoning — he is a True Believer, a down-home red-state Bushie all the way, Karl Rove's legendary "base" — was profound, unexpected, and revelatory. It was the kind of thing even he felt everyone should see.

ABC disagreed. Or, rather, Disney, ABC's parent, disagreed. Apparently the show was to debut right around the time disney was launching The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, their fantasy epic based on C.S. Lewis's book and the anchor, they hope, of a sequel fest to rival The Lord of the Rings. Disney figures, though, that for their master plan to succeed, they'll need evangelical Christian America in the tent. Evangelical Christian America, they figured, would be none too keen on seeing one of its own embracing — literally, as the article notes — members of the hated homosexual contingent. Evangelical Christian America, they figured, upon witnessing such an embrace on a Disney-owned network television show, would mount a boycott of Disney products or services, or would fail to abandon previously mounted boycotts, or would just generally not go along with the Disney plan of marketing Narnia from the pulpit, which it appears was the ultimate goal. So the show was killed.

Here you have one of the more telling convergences of contemporary American life, a parallel to convergences we're seeing elsewhere, espcially in politics. Every community is in the final analysis little more than a sales demographic; narratives of personal growth or change or just struggle itself are commodities; "truth" and "reality" are vectors of market positioning; every venue of American life, including the church pulpit, is a marketing opportunity waiting to be taken advantage of, or missed. Note that the religious leaders of the church seem only too happy in this narrative to have their congregations horse-traded by the various interests of Disney, Republicans, religious power-brokers, et al.: we'll exchange our boycott of your theme parks for the cancellation of your series; and we'll throw in a pitch or two on Sunday and a quote for the DVD box. Note that what you see in your home and in theaters is determined by this kind of quasi-ideological, quasi-fiscal bargaining among giant interests; and note that it's made possible by the consolidation of the disparate nations of intellectual production — television, movies, theme parks — into one massive empire. Think about this and you'll see what I mean: if Disney did not own ABC, the show couldn't be pulled. But then if Disney didn't own ABC, the religious groups would have no reason to complain about the show to Disney in the first place, so Disney would never be threatened. ABC could show what it wished (which means what it thought, of course, would be successful), we could all watch what we liked, and maybe a few evangelical Christians would be moved by the enlightenment of a fellow traveller. Or not. But at least we'd then be viewers, free to choose, and not mere statistics in a marketing and power-trading scheme.