DARING CARTOONS FOR GROWN-UPS

In Praise Of

FAMILY GUY, AMERICAN DAD & DRAWN TOGETHER

FOREWORD [Autumn 2012]

This essay was written in 2007. It expresses my profound admiration for what was achieved in three seminal episodes of contemporary television cartoons. Ideally, the Reader will have seen the episodes and experienced the great pleasure in humour & thought that they offer. But, for those unable to find the DVDs, I quote enough of the text to give the story and feel of each episode : and to justify my praise. I decided against offering still images from the episodes.

INTRODUCTION

In this essay I will argue that the true avant-garde in fictional narration is now to be found in the adult-cartoon :  the perfect examples being Family Guy, American Dad and Drawn Together. (The phrase ‘adult-cartoon’ means a moving-tv/cinema animation, rather than still-paper cartoon, that is addressed to adults and not children: it is not a euphemism for pornography.)  Not that many decades ago, during a different war, the artistic rather than military avant-garde was opening the fronts of modernism, futurism, surrealism – for the advent of film had shattered the boundaries and redefined the practice of drama, opera, painting, sculpture - Marinetti, Joyce, Picasso, Dali, Bunuel, Lorca.

When compared to the daring themes brilliantly opened in these cartoons, most tv-dramas and cinema films are as insubstantial in theme and clichéd in execution as the valium of narrative, the tv-soap & its disturbed offspring, the Reality Show. I believe that the cartoon episodes discussed below have intellectual beauty and moral daring, as well as great humour. They deserve the highest prizes, and the honour of being taught in school and college.

I challenge the sceptical Reader to name any other television or film programmes in the past 30-50 years, anywhere in the world, which have opened up Oedipal themes, vagina-phobia and cross-cultural themes with such diamond like compression and clarity: and which would also open up the deepest, most daring and fruitful discussions in an A-level or a High School class.

The structure of the essay is as follows:

PART A

A brief history is given of the basic elements of a story (content and telling-technique) and the nature of audience experience: before and after the advent of cartoons. This will allow us to examine the specificity of this latter story-medium. It is possible to skip this the first time, and start at Part B.

PART B

A presentation of the perfect cartoon-episode from each of the three series. As the text of tv-cartoons is rarely available, and audiences usually don’t re-watch and take notes, I will present in the Section 1 a brief ‘screen-play’ of each episode. It ought to be possible to get a feel of the entire episode from my sketch. Then in the next section, I will present the same material with my comments. Of course, if the Reader has seen the programmes, they can skip the first section and go to Section 2. There is a skip-link at the start of Part B.

PART C

Final comments and conclusions.

PART A: A BRIEF HISTORY OF MAKING & SHOWING STORIES

In this Part I will look at some very basic ideas.

1: The Content of stories that humans make and tell/show to each other.

2: The Techniques involved in making them, and how they have changed.

3: The Audience/Receivers of stories – the composition of the audience and its experience.

This will set the context to introduce:

4: The Pre-Adult Cartoon.

5: The Adult Cartoon. : opening remarks.

6: The Adult Cartoon – its elements/structure

A1: CONTENT

There is no story without an audience. And now there is no new story, or plot. For as Ecclesiastes lamented “There is nothing new under the sun”. That was thirty centuries ago – long before Homer, Aeschylus, Ramayana, Sei Shogun, Shakespeare, and Orson Welles. That Jewish genius knew that what men & women want & do doesn’t change. But life truly being  just one damn thing after another, going nowhere fast, we still find even familiar stories compelling and soothing, for their not-quite damnable series of connected  incidents & accidents leading to resolutions & conclusions of marriage and/or death.

If Darwin is correct that all humans share the same range of human emotions, and if Freud is correct that we are often the puppets of our unconscious emotions, and if Ecclesiastes is correct that there are no new stories, then there are only a limited number of plots that any balanced adult would find genuinely interesting, enjoyable, or useful. According to Flann O’ Brien “There are five things only that can be written about – the fastness of friendship, the treachery of one’s nearest, the destruction of good by good, passion which overrides reason, violent & proud death.”   Coleridge famously remarked that he had come across the perfect plot only three times – Oedipus, The Alchemist, Tom Jones.

I propose that there are certain (rarely attempted) plots that have both perfect structural balance & perfect moral balance such that this unity produces in the reader/audience the rare experience of perfect aesthetic joy, a calm ecstasy. One way to think about this is to re-acquaint oneself with the awe one feels as one reviews the range & depth of plots & themes that Shakespeare tackled in almost forty plays. Most writers and filmmakers do not come close in range. The interesting, rather than controversial, question is - What plots & themes did Shakespeare not attempt to present?  Imagine this question asked in English degree courses. Given his infinite capacity, the reason will never be inability: which leaves only insufficient daring, a psychological point. Here are some such plots he shied away from: and which would still be daring today, from Malawi to Malibu. 

PLAYS SHAKESPEARE DID NOT DARE WRITE

a) An Oedipal triangle intersecting an Elektral triangle.

This is perfectly realised in the film American Beauty. Of course it is present in Hamlet : but there it is complicated and in fact weakened by the boy-Hamlet’s father and the girl-Ophelia’s mother being dead before the story begins. I’ve explored in an earlier research project the puzzle of Shakespeare’s convenient pre-play despatch of mothers in the principal comedies, who would inevitably complicate the plot with Oedipal issues.

b) Clash of Civilizations

Civilizations are defined by their conception of theology and/or politics and the way these legitimize & police economic opportunity and so also political power, sexual pleasure and artistic expression. The Golden Elizabethan Age inherited the following clashes:

i)   Jews contra Pagans [Egyptians, Greeks, Romans]

ii)  Christians contra Pagans [Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, New World savages]

iii) Christians contra Theists [Jews, Muslims]

iv)  Monarchy contra democracy

A brutal but conceptually weaker clash was of course Catholicism versus Protestantism. It is said that Shakespeare collaborated on a play on Sir Thomas More, a self-justifying torturer. But imagine the Bard having written, even as closet-drama :“The Tragedy of William Tyndale” : or even “Scenes from the Making of the Holy Bible – Gutenberg to King James ”.  He is consistent in avoiding any significant questioning of the monarchical-Christian paradigm, even in the final fantasy The Tempest. The common populace’s aspiration to participation in, let alone holding, actual power is routinely trashed from Henry VI  to Coriolanus. The clash is sometimes displaced onto the less risky terrain of sexuality / gender relations: Othello and Titus.

c) The Denial of Education Meeting the Daring to Learn

Those who hold power – political or religious - know it is easier to maintain power over a predominantly ignorant citizenry/congregation. From the cave-days, all parents have seen the absolute truth that all babies learn to speak & think, learn skills and how to invent. This is the capabilities approach developed by the philosopher Martha Nussbaum. But rulers invent theories and invoke deities to justify denying education – to poor men, all women, all non-whites etc. Though he would have known of the myth of Pope Joan and the truth of Christine de Pizan, Shakespeare fudges this theme, again and again: in The Merchant of Venice and All’s Well that Ends Well and The Tempest. It is most clearly explored in Singer’s short story Yentl : a young woman so wants to study the Torah in a Yeshiva, she dresses as a boy to get in. In real life, the 19C young woman X, unlike Shakespeare’s too-girly heroines, put on manly clothes, in order to study and practice medicine. It is said Beatrix Potter submitted the proto-theory of penicillin, long before Fleming, but the male-chauvinists of the Royal Society did not give her a chance to enter their labs.

d) The Leveller’s Question

With sublime simplicity they asked the Bishops and Christian Princes of the world:

When Adam delved and Eve span,

Who was then the gentleman?

Shakespeare, the greatest writer of history plays,  got his knighthood or at least Gent status for not-delving into such originary histories. Long before him, Dante had excoriated such conceptions of nobility. What is most shameful about our contemporary cash for honours scandal is the refusal to foreground how unworthy of moral honour most aristocrats have been and remain: and that it is a shallow, venal aim to join them. Shaw disperses the aura of aristocracy in Pygmalion.

e) History Now

The closest Shakespeare came to being tortured like his uncle and his fellow playwright Kydd,  was when an opportunist political coup d’etat faction persuaded his theatre company to put on his play about the usurpation of a king, Richard II.  In a light and witty lecture the contemporary American historian Howard Zinn delineates a stunning and captivating series of historical stories that Hollywood Never Tells.  It might seem a naiive conclusion, but it is true nevertheless, that what this strategy intends is to prevent the audience from connecting the historical situation with the present, especially if the forbears protested successfully against the State.

f) The Eroticisation Of Creativity

Watching another person doing something well, making something, inventing something - alone or in a creative group -  one becomes aware of not only one’s intellectual admiration, but also of a desire to be connected to them – not only a sexual desire, but a desire for conversation, a desire to learn and to join in the making. There is staggering naiivety about life in the assumption that sexual fulfilment can substitute for and erase all other desires. Freud drew the line of health using the criteria of both sexual-love & creative-work. Auden put it even better:

“Between two collaborators of whatever sex, age or appearance there is always an erotic bond, a true marriage of minds. Queers, to whom normal marriage and parenthood are forbidden, are fools if they do not deliberately look for tasks which require collaboration. It’s brought me greater erotic joy, as distinct from sexual pleasure, than any sexual relation I have ever had.” 

How often does such a theme get foregrounded in a story?  In Shakespeare its nearest but not purest expression is in Anthony & Cleoptra : probably the only equal male-female adult couple in the entire canon. There is a dim echo in Ophelia’s remark about pre-bereft Hamlet: “The courtier's, soldier's, scholar's, eye, tongue, sword”  but of course she is only a receiver not a collaborator in his manly projects. There also some hints in the strange quasi-homosexual fascinations of the comedy lords for the disguised-girls. But society then was afraid of talented working women. Portia and Miranda are muffled.

The purest narrative expressions are:

a)      Short Story – Doris Lessing :  One Off the Short List

b)      Documentary Film – Kahn    :  My Father, The Architect

c)      Fiction-Film  – Gondry           : The Science of Sleep

Lessing’s character, a jaded former-poet turned radio-hack,  is so humiliated by seeing a designer talking excitedly in a creative group, he rapes her. Kahn’s mother endured a shadow life as one of the architect’s mistresses for decades because of a chance to work with genius. In the last film, the protagonist’s sensibility is split between his eyes seeing & wanting the blonde who is prettier: and his core-self which invents and loves inventors, and so cannot not-be-attracted to the plain, inventing brunette.

A2: TECHNIQUE: THE STORY-MAKERS & STORY SHOWERS

We’ve seen that the content is limited. Two things can change: firstly,  how the story is told  - the shifts in permutations of the elements of a story and the shifts in technology that heighten one or more of the elements : and the context of the production and showing/distribution of the story. One cannot get very far or, as I would argue, even begin to analyse narrative without the foundation of Aristotle’s six elements of story – plot, character, diction, thought, song, spectacle. I will speak in more detail below of each of these elements. The second thing that might change is to-whom the story is told, the audience.

A2a : The Story-Makers / Showers : Medium & Technique.

Let us assume a fixed audience (from any culture/period) of a minimum of six and a maximum of a hundred persons of any composition. There has been something like this progression.

1:  Solo- Person reciting :  centre of a circle or (slightly) raised dais.

2:  Two-Persons reciting :  centre of a circle or (slightly) raised dais.

3:  Two-Persons acting & Chorus (six-twelve) : outside theatre: Greece BC

4:  Three-Persons acting & Chorus (two-six) : outside theatre: Greece BC

5:  Three-plus-Persons acting & Chorus (two-six) : outside theatre: Greece BC

6:  Three-plus-Persons acting : No chorus : outside theatre: Greece BC

All of the above present actions involving mortals, gods, semi-divines and animals with speech & emotion.

7:  Painting Series in church & Puppetry in town-square: Medieval Europe.

These present biblical stories for an illiterate congregation eg the nativity or via dolorosa. No cartoon flickbooks yet!

8 : Mystery Plays :  Europe: a few principal actors in the town-square but also involving towns-people as both actors and audience. Theatre is again the poor (non-reader’s) Bible.

9:  Renaissance Europe : As (6) above. Imitation of ancient dramatists giving way to the end of the use of the classical unities & chorus. Also some plays are presented indoors : masques emphasise spectacle and song.

10: Restoration & Pre-modern : As (6) above, but mostly inside specially designed theatres. Opera foregrounds song, and spectacle.

11: Film :  silent, then talkies: – both at first imitating theatrical presentation: then moving into its own idiom of visual emphasis.

12 : Television : As (6) and (11) above. Differs from cinema-film in use of distance and close-up.

13: Cartoon : In Renaissance times this meant a final preparatory-to-painting draft or a stand-alone drawing. It was not inflected with humour: thus the famous Pete & Dud skit mocking Leonardo’s St. Anne. In 18C there developed in England the satirical, almost pedagogical, series of cartoons. One-off joky and/or satirical cartoons developed in papers and magazines like Punch.

14: Cartoon flick-books were developed along with stereoscope, mechanically-moved film-stills.

15 : Modern Cartoon Developments :

The cartoon-film is a very large series of drawings filmed and made to move so as to look to the human eye as if real-time motion is happening. They can be drawn on paper, or directly onto film, or recently using computers, and finally CGI images, even made to look like paper drawings.

The Revolutionary Genius Principle

It is worth keeping in mind the fact that one person from the avant garde that is establishing a new media or technique often exhausts its entire possibilities. So following artists working in that medium have not merely the anxiety of influence but the certainty that historians will see them merely as footnotes to absolute genius. eg.

Shakespeare on non-unities verse-drama

Melies on film

Joyce on multi-lingual stream of consciousness

Max Fliescher on self-referential, human & paper character cartoon.

A3 : AUDIENCE : THE STORY RECEIVERS

Let us begin by defining the categories of the audience: they are basically of only three kinds:

i)  People personally-known (kin, friends and acquaintances) to the story-makers.

ii)  Strangers

iii) Some mixture of (i) and (ii).

How an ordinary adult (member of the audience) attends to a story depends on a complex web of desires and anxieties.

a) Her desire to attend to a story. The motive may include the pleasures of:

a1) Vicarious identification with the moral-puzzles, technical tasks and pleasures experienced by the characters.

a2) Relishing the story-teller’s technical skill in manipulating the elements of a story.

a3) Fear and pity at the character’s distress: distinguishable from identification

a4) Mirroring. This is a fundamental wonder, the pre-condition of a connection between the story-maker/teller and the story-receiver, the willing suspension of disbelief at the fiction, that the story is like human-life.

b) Her capacity/ability to attend to a story – that particular permutation of story-elements the story-maker has chosen.

c) Her part-desire, born of envy and spite, to spoil the story she wants to attend to. 

It might seem superfluous to say this. But most human desires are full of ambivalence, and envy & spite are mostly unconscious & protean. Just recall all those people who the moment you start telling them a joke, or a tale of personal joy, interrupt and spoil it.

d) Her awareness of how she manages the anxiety of attention, the fear of forgetting, using recording-technology. At worst this leads to not-attending in real-time to a story she is being told: because the recorded version can be seen/heard later. As Benjamin cautioned – one can’t divest oneself of the knowledge history has given us. But for a moment try - imagine being an old or young ancient Greek listening to Homer recite. Oral cultures, by definition, had neither the technology nor perhaps even the imagination to record information and narrative. Imagine being Alex Haley’s antecedents listening, in dem-old cotton-fields that weren’t back-home, to the tale of Kunta Kinte.  They, unlike Homer’s audience, would have the seen the means of literacy – pen, paper, books and schools – but knew these were forbidden them: and besides all their African stories were not written down. For both groups, ancient Greek, modern(ish) Afro-Americans, (and also my parents’ generation) it was ordinary-life to attend to a story without the psychological support of knowing that a later hearing/reading was possible.

But it was still wonderful when the Pythons fore-grounded an ordinary difficulty of attention at the Sermon on the Mount – distance and deafness. Two Galileans are at the back of the crowd of five-thousand.

“What did he say?

“Blessed are the cheese-makers.”

“Why them: what’s so special about cheese-makers?”

“It’s not meant to be taken literally: it means all who work in dairy products.”

For footballs fans of a certain age, there were experiences of puzzlement shortly after the instant replay was introduced on tv: a hopeful expectation that the goal one had just missed – because of biting on the forbidding pie – would be played again. Now of course the fan at the live game has before him/her – the actual players, the big-tv screen, their own mobile phone, other mobiles, MP3 radio, and possible some techies small-tv. This inevitably facilitates, even justifies, careless attention.

Now, imagine Sappho, Leonardo, Shakespeare, Hitler, Lennon, Dietrich, or even Jesus, suddenly appearing in your bedroom in the middle of the night : and at the moment they say imploringly “You’re chosen for this mighty news. It will take just a minute. Listen and remember this list”, you realize your superduper moby and six other recording machines are downstairs, and you have no pen and paper by your bedside. How confident would you feel remembering? More or less than Hamlet when his father’s ghost says “List O list!”?  Because he is a book-man, after the ghost departs, the Prince imagines mental writing.

Might you feel you’ve lost the capacity to retain. Of course it is not merely about the laziness of the soul that recording media facilitates. Even today the crucial thing – in all cultures - is what happened in the early development of the child: what kind of examples of benign attentiveness the parents showed their infant/child/teenager. As I have argued elsewhere, the true deficit of attention in a family with a child (mis)diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder is in the parent. The poor child realizes – sometimes even before words – that its parents will never give her enough attention. She may become very quiet, one of those people who say “I can’t tell a joke. I’m no good at telling stories”. Or she may become so clamorous and disruptive, she has to be drugged!

The Maker-Receiver Dyad

At its most abstract, the story-makers/performer(s)  produce information – about themselves, other characters, the set and the real world – which the audience processes. Perhaps there is a bio-psychological ‘law’ that humans can’t produce information that at least one other human can process. (eg Russian-novel family-names, Finnegans Wake, Feynman’s Lectures!) Perhaps there is another deeper law that the story-maker is always communicating to human capacities and limits. The bio-psychological parameters depend on physical health, imagination and time.

a) Our visual (brain) apparatus allows us to take in information from the visual field in tiny-bits, 210 degree panorama, and various-sized gestalt. It can take-in in an instant the entire set and cast of Waiting for Godot : but it would struggle for several minutes to take in all of a painting by Bosch or one shot of a Peter Greenaway film. Similarly for our aural (brain) apparatus, we can’t take in – or even notice - the precisely layered-sounds of animals in the Beatle’s Sergeant Pepper’s Good Morning : or in the film Raging Bull.

b) A child attending to a story – from mum&dad, panto, tv, film – accepts the disruption of the classical unities because it doesn’t yet have the imagination to understand the concept of unities: or even to identify and categorise life-forms, intention, causation.   One’s appreciation as an adult to understand what the story-teller is daring in how he/she plays with the classical unities (and another element we might call psychological unity) depends on how one passed from the magical thinking of childhood to a (clear) sense of life-forms, intention, causation. Even Shakespeare in Henry V felt he had to spell things out through the Chorus – requesting the audience to use its imagination to fill in the gaps in the signs his words had provided.

c) Time

One’s sense of time(-passing) is related to one’s sense of the volume-of-thoughts passing through consciousness. The biological determinant facilitating thought, and awareness of thought, is adrenaline. There is no figure for the baseline volume that is applicable to all persons. Each person’s baseline volume is given autobiographically by what they say is the most frequent and enduring emotional state: this defines the ordinary by which they measure extraordinary (and under-whelming) experiences. Everybody shares the two limiting-cases: it feeling like only-five minutes extra-sleep but an hour passing: and it feeling like a long-time has passed during the actual seconds of a car-crash/mugging. In the latter experience one feels one is thinking faster than at any time in one’s life ever.

There is a famous paper by a Scottish philosopher, X, Time Transcendence in the Arts. He begins by making the plain but rarely fore-grounded point that we experience time differently during our experience with different art-forms: a painting, a sonata, a poem, a novel, a film, a play, a tv-programme, a pop-song. It is a category mistake to expect time in one art-form to pass as it does in another. This isn’t just stating the bleeding obvious – that most sonatas are longer than most pop-songs or that both take longer to take in than a painting. Different art-forms carry different amounts of  (potential) information and induce thought and affect, thinking and feeling, in different volumes, proportions and intensities. Attending to an art-work requires mastery of instinctual impatience: that information, and the satisfaction this brings, will only be revealed by the artwork at a certain rate. In time-dependent works, as all were before recording technologies, one has to simply wait. For some people this is agony: and they will turn to the final page of a novel, soon after beginning it. This is of course pathological terror and an insult to the  writer.  I doubt such people buy two/play or film tickets: and see the last ten minutes before watching the beginning. A lesser fault is to pay proper attention to some works, but then expect all art works to ‘work’ at the same speed.

Perhaps a difficulty arises from trying to use one strategy of mastery of instinctual impatience in one art-form to cope with and enjoy another art-form. Imagine someone, with thousands of hours of watching ‘action’ films at the cinema and tv  at their first trip to the theatre, watching Chekhov. I fancy myself to be a bitova film-buff – knowing the different lengths & rhythms of art-house as well as commercial Western films. But watching some Indian films recently, I found myself tiring at about two hours, vexed by another reversal, bored by another song & dance routine. I looked across at my father and my cousin over from India. They seemed entirely comfortable. Quite clearly they had long ago developed a capacity and desire for the standard three-hour film from Bollywood.

Most television comedy is under 30 minutes long. To allow for programme-breaks it is 28-29 minutes on State-channels BBC. On commercial channels advertising revenue places greater restrictions: they are 25-26 minutes long : in the US, 20-22 minutes.

The story-maker knows, and perhaps must always know, what experience of art-time the audience has had, and expects. The cartoon-makers too has to decide how much time is optimal for their art-form. 

A4: THE PRE-ADULT CARTOON

I will now make some brief remarks about pre-adult cartoons.

A4a : TIME

The first cartoons were brief, 5-10mins, and shown in cinemas : Betty Boop, Loony Tunes, Mickey Mouse et al, Tom and Jerry: and their European counterparts. The full-length & colour cartoon-film eg Snowhite, (1937) of 70 mins long preceded the tv-programme-length cartoon, 20-25 mins Popeye, Topcat, The Flintstones, Scooby Do.

A4b : AUDIENCE

Anglo-American cartoons were essentially for children and so were simple enough for them to enjoy. But they were also executed with great wit and invention, surpassing a child’s capacity to appreciate. Adults could enjoy the latter: as well as the pleasures of regression.

A4c:  THEME

C1 : Absolute but not-annihilating competition, a sort-of-war  but really play-fighting.

Tom & Jerry, Roadrunner, Bugs Bunny etc pursue and are pursued, are mortally injured: they get-knocked-down-but get-up-again. They need each other to be: like siblings.

C2 : Aspirational Modern Family Life (without politics)

It is said that MASH was a programme about the past Korean war used to dissect the contemporary Vietnam war. Though it wasn’t about family life, yet it wasn’t a politicised account of professional life. The Flintstones was a programme about sixties middle-class aspiration set in BC US!

C3: Dysfunctional Modern Family Life

It is universally agreed that The Simpsons heralded a revolution in the cartoon presentation of the American family. Here was a non-idealised ordinary blue-collar family, without ability or pretensions to rise to the middle-class proper. There has been such dazzling invention of situation for so many years that it repeatedly reaches the top-cartoon-ever  spot.

A5 : THE ADULT-CARTOON

These are distinguished by including themes and language not suitable for prepubescent children, 6-12.  Puberty being a movable feast, and the Law being a strict chef, there will always be a gap. No doubt, curious and precocious young teenagers watch adult cartoons. This persuades the makers to include risqué as well as controversial material. (When the mighty work of Crumb was made to move in film, it was given an adult classification. He doesn’t seem to have been invited to do a tv series).

I don’t know if The Simpsons were the first to introduce the adult cartoon: for there seemed to be post-watershed adult-Simpsons and Drawn Together South Park and Family Guy arriving in the UK around the same time. Some people were dismayed that the Simpsons production company were as ready as Google to trim and censor their creation for a known tyrannical state: the enfeebled Saudi version.

The Adult Cartoon will of course ride on familiar plots. So the question is – what are the  characteristics that distinguish it from other forms of  fictional narrative for adults? I propose that these are the volume and rhythm of digression. Perhaps also the density and speed of incident – including digression – allows the flight towards dangerous ideas because there will soon be a reassuring return. This is subtly different from the final-scene hugging and moralising that Seinfeld stated as something he absolutely intended to avoid. I will return to this.

I reiterate that I will not be discussing the other genre indicated by the phrase adult-cartoon viz pornographic content expressed through line drawing. The internet contains vast amounts of material showing received cartoon characters (including the ones I discuss here) engaged in all sorts of sexual activity. The plagiarists would probably offer the extenuation of a bitovalarf but it strikes me as quite pathetic.

ADMISSION OF PREFERENCE/BIAS

I’ve seen a couple of dozen of the vast Simpsons output. I’ve enjoyed them, and can see their wit and invention, but I’ve never liked them enough to make time for the next episode. I don’t warm to the drawings. I like Lisa but find Homer & Bart tiresome.  I hate the drawings & screechy voices in South Park – just as I have never warmed to the drawing style of the still-cartoonist Trudeau in the way I am fond of Steve Bell, Crumb, and most of the Private Eye cartoonists. In fact, I can’t bear to watch South Park, despite its occasional welcome departure from bottom-jokes into daring religious satire etc. Given the cheapness of tv-cartoons compared to production costs on tv-films, it is surprising British television does not have an output equivalent to the US. But, although its scenes are shorter, Monkey Dust can stand besides the American works I am praising.

Perhaps I’m more than a bit-of-a-Susan – the character in Woolf’s The Waves whose mantra is “I love! I hate!”.  Giving time to what strikes me as quite-funny and quite-good stuff seem to me to be waste of soul. I walk out films and stop reading books quickly. In the humanly-acted comedic-fictions, I  think Bilko, Cheers and Seinfeld, Fawlty Towers, Yes, Minister were perfect sitcoms: compared to which Frasier and Curb Your Enthusiasm, Will & Grace are tiresome, complacently vain and dull.

Now let me say why I think the cartoons named in my subtitle deserve to be among the greats. 

I will introduce the four programmes through the filter of Aristotle’s six elements: plot character, diction, thought, song and spectacle. (Those unfamiliar with using his electron microscope might like to pause a few minutes and experiment by seeing how those elements function in Hamlet or American Beauty or Emmerdale.) 

A6: THE  (ARISTOTELIAN) ELEMENTS IN ADULT CARTOONS

These are usually given in the order – plot, character, diction, thought, song & spectacle.

I will introduce them in a slightly different order.

A6a : CHARACTER

FAMILY GUY (FG)

Peter  30+, white, Irish Catholic background, assembly-line worker, dumb, optimistic.

Lois  30+, white, US Protestant aristocracy, house-wife, part-time piano-teacher.

Meg 14-15, their daughter plain, dull, anxious.

Chris  12-13, their son, fat, dumb, cheerful.

Stewie  2-3 , their baby : shows occasional baby behaviour but mostly speaks and acts like a cynical, louche, cultured, thirty-something, British homosexual (Rex Harrison.)

Brian  their mature dog: rarely shows doggy behaviour: mostly speaks & acts like a world-weary street-wise, barfly, aspiring writer: and he is in love with Lois.

Their Neighbours

Cleveland & Loretta black couple, with 7-year-old son.

Joe (white, crippled part-time cop, gungho) Bonnie (pregnant wife) & Kevin (12 year-old son).

Quagmire  30+ sex addict, pilot, slightly creepy.

DRAWN TOGETHER (DT)

As in Congreve and Sheridan all the characters are named-types.

Foxxy Love  Young black woman, street-detective and media wise.

Princess Clara  Beautiful Cinderella/Barbie innocent, ambitious for fairy tale life.

Captain Hero  Ultra-macho, homophobic Ken-GI Joe-Batman.

Spanky Ham Half-man-half-pig spiv.

Toot Braunstein  Betty Boop at aged 60, fat and vain.

Xandir Pretty-boy, repressed homosexual.

Ling Ling Japanese pet-character : his utterances are translated by subtitles.

Wooldoor Sockbat  Wacky pliable cartoon character.

AMERICAN DAD (AD)

Stan  30+, white, Episcopalian, CIA desk-agent, extreme right-wing patriot, ultra-macho.

Francine  30+, white, housewife, teaches Sunday school, easier temperament.

Hayley  17, their daughter, left-wing, charity worker, smokes dope with hippy types

Steve   12, their son, dim, nerdy, happy with his nerdy friends

Roger  their houseguest, ET looking alien, smart, who once saved Stan’s life  but can’t leave the house: so he drinks and watches trash tv

Klaus their houseguest, German goldfish, failed genetic experiment, who lusts after Francine.

Bullock  Stan’s CIA boss:  His arse is Stan’s paradise.

At first glance, the two family-sitcoms, Family Guy  & American Dad, hardly seem original: dim, larky characters in ordinary families, with their predictable longings and failures set as amusing scrapes etc. Nor do the greater number of self-conscious allusions to tv and film in Drawn Together seem that  innovative. But look again: a talking-dog novelist, a gay baby, an alien and a lusting goldfish, each woven seamlessly into the life of the family. Why? I will return to this in the section on thought.

A6b: DICTION

By this, Aristotle means the use of the many literary devices of heightened language and also tonal registers. Being adult cartoons, the first thing one notices is the absence of censorship of the vernacular and of ordinary swearing. There probably isn’t as much as in real-life but it is not left out. Mostly there is American demotic, some street-talk, some regressed teen-speak. It is very rarely arty or lahdedah. The non-humans and the baby speak the most cultured and inventive idiom. The Drawn Together characters speak in character-type.

A6c: PLOT

Family Guy & American Dad feature the trials of ordinary family-life: hearth, workplace, school etc. The premise of Drawn Together is that the characters are in a Reality TV show in Big Brother mode. Most tv-sitcoms featuring an ordinary family manage to present just one plot, usually of staggering banality: Terry & June, My Family, Vicar of Dibley, Frasier.  Even most ‘serious’ dramas on tv and film go for one plot: whereas, Shakespeare nearly always had a main-plot with an echoing sub-plot or two mirroring main-plots. It is a rule that what doesn’t advance the plot – main and/or sub – is spectacle, even a completely superfluous distraction. I will return to this crux below. At its most elegant, a Seinfeld episode began with each of the four main characters having a separate project/plot-line. These begin to intersect and overlap, the finale being the beautiful cat’s cradle. Family Guy & American Dad often have a subplot.

SUB-SCENES & SIDE-SCENES of STORY

Their Structural & Emotional Grammar & Weight

If we take the analogy of grammar, a sub-plot stands to a main-plot as a subordinate-clause stands to a main-clause. Just as a subordinate clause often intensifies the action of the main clause, so the subplot intensifies the themes of the main-plot. Eg fathers and sons in Henry IV. Some stories have two or three main-plots of equal weight (eg The Hours) just as a sentence can have two or more main-clauses connected by a conjunction ‘and’. When a story/narrative is described as episodic, it means there is a sequence of incidents/plots that do not hang together in an interesting way: all the incidents seems to blur, inducing the same level of emotionality and thinking in the audience, whether tragic or comic. Children or even excited adults lapse into “And then X, and then Y and then Z…” An open-ended format like a soap can’t avoid being episodic. They have to make molehills out of mountains, and then gamely attempt the reverse, make mountains, however illusory. But they end up taking an Alpine rang of Freytag’s pyramids and make a desert. The limiting case of the episode is of course the list: the Naming of the Ships in The Illiad : and  all the ‘begat’ paragraphs of The Bible.

In Family Guy, there are occasionally two main-plots or a subordinate plot. The most common devices for further narrative complexity are the sub-scene and the side-scene. It is difficult to predict when they will appear: with the opening credits or at any time in the story. What do they do?

a)   They rarely add crucial narrative information. One may distinguish them by saying;

ai)  Sub-scenes have some link to the main-plot or sub-plot.

aii) Side-scenes have no link to the main-plot or sub-plot: they are spectacle/interlude.

b)   Mostly, they simply and satisfyingly reinforce the comedic character trait we associate with the character: but sometimes they will disrupt that expectation by having the character show – momentarily -  the opposite trait.

c) They redundantly illustrate what a character in the present is now saying about the past. This can happen in any narrative form. In Branagh’s Othello as we hear, in the present, the Moor saying how he wooed Desdemona, and then we are shown a past scene illustrating his words.

d) They might offer pure spectacle – almost completely unconnected to the main plot.  

eg. Peter’s fight with the Chicken-Man.

e) They allow a moment of witty or revolutionary commentary.

f) They surprise the audience with a transgressive thought from the character’s or the writer’s unconscious. This is the most subtle use.

Of course there must not be so many sub-scenes & side-scenes many that they become tiresome. Side-scenes arrive suddenly but the structural marker of sub-scenes is that they are often prefaced by such phrases as: “That reminds me of the time…”, “This is worse than when I …” , “Just like I did when..”, What about when you did…”   Such ‘digressions’ were used lavishly in ordinary tv drama: Billy Liar, Young Ones, Dream On, Ally Macbeal …… I will give a couple of examples from my cartoons.

 A NOTE ABOUT QUOTATION PRESENTATION

They will be boxed in. Stage-directions & names will be given in plain-black in brackets. A character's words will be given in colour. Family Guy quotes will be in green: American Dad in blue and Drawn Together in pink. 

1: SUB-SCENE : Family Guy

This is so surprisingly affirmative of a feature of women that most men feel vexed by or fearful of. It confirms Peter’s qualities of wonder, impatience, generosity and his love for his family. He is too dumb to pick up the Elektral desire that the seedy Quagmire instantly gets.

2: SIDE-SCENE : Family Guy

As with so many of the programmes, there is such a beautiful & daring compression of themes in this two-minute sequence. Both parts, the serfs and the masturbators, deal with forbidden knowledge, transgression and danger.

a)  The Serfs

It is a simple comedy trope for a character to notice the wrong thing. Lois is obviously pointing to the photo and article about her. Peter is suddenly distracted by the fact of communication technology and its political consequences. To have said dramatically: Oh My God! Moveable type!” is a small respectable joke. He could riff on this and tease Lois, which would also be as funny as mild teasing is. All he needs to do is say the words about serfs. What is unusual is the illustration of his joke-point. He opens his front door, revealing medieval serfs in his garden and holds them in dialogue: an anachronistic tableau. This of course can happen in human-acted comedy, as in The Young Ones : but it is just faster and less obtrusive in cartoon. The serf-theme is strictly irrelevant to the flow of the main-plot : a woman’s right to her preferred career. But it does foreground rights, the right to read and know and think and the fear Power has of learned citizens. Even the phrase moveable type instantly associates to Gutenberg, Luther, Tyndale and the Reformation.

b) Incest

But this theme is quickly displaced by Lois returning to her model fantasies, and  Peter and Chris to theirs! Peter makes explicit what shame and guilt usually keep tacit about the fashion-glamour photo:

i )      It is often a hypocritically, legitimised form of (very soft) pornography.

ii)      Sometimes it is used for the pleasures of scopophilia, fantasy, masturbation.  

(Recall that it is a ‘glamour’ photo that 35 year-old George is wanking over when his elderly mother comes in Seinfeld:  The Contest.)

What is odd is that Peter imagines a fantasy of having the woman he has already had. But of course what he hasn’t yet had is Lois with the sexual aura given by the fashion model-shoot. Chris is still a virgin. Interestingly Peter is not shocked when Chris echoes his dream of wanking – albeit to his mother not his wife. Chris’s remark is an Oedipal crux: the adolescent boy – with functioning genitals – imagining sex with his mother. This men-together defence is repulsed though,  by another woman in the story: despite most men fantasising about two women in any picture. What is beautiful and tragic is Meg’s desire to fit in. She is carried by the momentum of excitement manifest by the rest of the family and just says Me too. At this point Peter is horrified. It is an astute part-echo of Sophocles that he has him injure himself as well as banish Meg for her transgressive desire: which of course wasn’t a sexual desire at all.

When Sharon Stone was offered Playboy’s big-dollar, she asked her father’s comment. She reported that he honourably said that having bought Playboy for years, he could not forbid her. She didn’t add whether he saw her pictures. Perhaps Lois’s father forbade the teenage Lois to be a model as a defence against his own incestuous imaginings becoming photos/films.

Interestingly the notionally Catholic Peter doesn’t chide Meg with the terms ‘wrong’ or ‘sin’: but with the vernacular superlative ‘sick’. (Old joke: An idle man rings work and says he is sick. “How sick?” the Boss asks wearily. The cunning fellow replies “I’m in bed with my sister. Is that sick enough!”)

Though we know from other episodes that Brian is in love with Lois, and even has a brief chaste marriage with her, when Peter is thought dead, bestiality not being transgressive in this strange family universe, he doesn’t comment.

This two-minute side-scene is a sublimely compressed and powerful comment on incestuous longings. Such imagined events were the daily reality of the serial-killers Fred & Rosemary West’s childhood and then their own children’s lives.

NARRATIVE WEIGHT

Our introduction of the concepts of ‘sub-scene’ and ‘side-scene’, to supplement main-plot and sub-plot, implicitly foregrounds the importance of balance in a story. We can take the analysis further and introduce the concept of the ‘heaviest-line/idea’. In the scene above Meg, doesn’t realise she has – in her family’s moral universe – uttered such a line. Below is a character more knowingly using such a line, and in fact trying to defuse it.

AMERICAN DAD : Hayley’s Finger

Perhaps, Hayley hoped her sexuality would dissolved his death-wishes. The audience knows life is not so neat. So it laughs at her misunderstanding his confusion: for she imagines that being politically certain, he can be troubled only by a sexual move. But, on a later viewing, one does understand the weight of this tiny confusion and the revolutionary gesture of her finger. The finger has a precise place in male sexuality: It used to be the teenager's daring, exploratory proto-penis:

“Fish & finger pie in summer”  [Penny Lane : The Beatles: 1966].

In sexual geometry and sexual engineering, the hole is assigned by males to be of incrementally lesser worth than that which enters/fills the hole: though nut and bolt both have the thread that facilitates the desired condition of a binding fit. To persist with finger-play, is to be marked as having an inept feeble penis and/or to be emasculated, to become the woman’s masturbating finger. Thus the scornful phrase, allowed to signify all forms of laziness and incompetence, in men and women, “Pull your finger out!”. Showing the finger is mostly but not only a male-to-male insult. But to put the finger into the anus is, in the Judaeo-Christian dispensation, a misuse of the sexual body, a perversion, a crime, a sin. So it becomes an inviting transgression, promising great pleasure. The question then is who dares. Hayley puts her finger in her lover’s anus. (It is said that this was a technique Wallis used on Edward VIII.: a pleasure for which he gave up Emperorhood!)

For some men, the possession of a hole is troubling: because I am the man, my anus must remain intactica. Perhaps Hayley did not think of these categories. Like modern Greek women, untroubled by anal sex, she did not associate anal penetration with humiliation, only with extra pleasure. But she can see that a man might. Thus her gentle explanation. Interestingly, for an Arab in a state with punitive codes against the expression of homosexuality, he doesn’t question that part of the night’s pleasure. 

What is clever in this tiny detail is the conflation of sexual and political confusion. We can gauge her daring from the following extract from a short story and from a recent stand-up comedian’s piece:

(i) THE HEROIC FINGER

Here is an extract from a young American’s journal, 2005. A woman has given him the glad eye and hand!

"With her hands already going for my cock, I figured she was good to go, so I slipped my hand down her crack and began to finger her asshole, just to show her that I was serious. She was startled, probably because most dudes she ever fucked went for her cunt first, but I was out to prove that I was the fucking man.”  [my emphasis]

That's why Hayley thought her lover might be confused! It took great narrative skill to place that line & idea there.

(ii) THE CLINTONESQUE FINGER

Here is Micky Flanagan, a stand-up comedian on English tv: February 2007:

“I’ve become middle-class. I can do their parties, speak like they do. I’m not afraid to speak. The other night for instance, there we were - three couples - despairing of the world. Someone brought up the old fact of Britain having the highest number of teenage pregnancies. “What can you do?” moaned another. Then I spoke up: “What you should do is bring back fingering”.

I was shocked, and impressed that he had shocked me. I saw the camera pan round: most of the audience wore shocked-laughter expressions. For some strange reason, I could suddenly feel the affect from intentions & experiences of adolescent fingering. I felt uncomfortable, and nearly switched it off. He carried on:

“It doesn’t always have to be full-sex. If you’ve had a finger, you feel you’ve got something. I remember taking this girl to Wimpy’s. As we came out, I thought -Yes I’ll be getting finger. She probably was too. And even her parents: her dad saying Don’t worry mother, he’s taken her to Wimpy’s: she’ll have a bit of finger. There’s no need to wait up. (pause) The dinner-guests weren’t too taken with this…” 

Each time the camera went to the audience, there was the same mixture of visible shock and laughter. It was a brilliantly executed piece. I also thought that there would have been less shock had he talked just about anal sex. Fingering is not illegal in any UK or US state, but somehow he had made it seemed troubling. He had suddenly connected them to an early experience of desire, embarrassment and uncertainty.

A6d : SONG

Shakespeare, like Bollywood writers, is forever throwing in fine, fitting songs, whether in the tragic or comedic idiom. These reveal character and thought more than advance plot. So it would be foolish to say song is used in these cartoons as mere comic relief.

A6e : SPECTACLE

Plain dramatic stage-action advances the plot, showing reversals of circumstance, shifts in character, or clarifying thought : and it contributes to the sense of form, of the story being a whole. Spectacle is the presentation of setting or of an action, which by its unusual nature or unusual duration, draws more attention to itself than to the principle elements – plot, character, thought, diction. It can become almost separable from the whole. The most common forms of spectacle are fighting, embracing and setting.

i)   Fighting :  where the fight becomes a balletic interlude. The audience senses, from the structure, who will win – the plot-advancing detail - and so provide moral  and aesthetic pleasure. Some fights go on so long – whether John Wayne’s sluggings in western saloons or Eastern dance-like martial arts  - the intention is seduction “Yes little man/woman in the front row – imagine joining in here” . The implausibly long crime-drama fight is brilliantly parodied in a Fast Show sketch and also in the Family Guy Chicken Fight.

ii)   Embrace :  where the kiss/skin-contact becomes a pornographic interlude, even if neither penetration nor even great nudity is shown. Again, it might be important to the plot to know who wants or is having skin-contact with whom: but it is rarely dramatically necessary to see it in detail. Most distinctions between so-called soft and hard porn are conceptual nonsense. Here the seduction of the audience is more familiar: “Imagine yourself naked in this scene.” 

iii)   Setting :  where the stage/film setting is so unusual,  or so unusually detailed, it distracts one’s attention from what the characters are saying and the plot advance. eg the hyper-realism of Stanislavsky’s Chekhov,  the too-densely visual-frame of some Peter Greenaway scenes, and the lame visual correlates of routine metaphors on Newsnight.

In CSI, the central sight is the severely damaged or dead human body. Such sights are of course ordinary for military workers, emergency service workers and morticians, but they are not ordinary for the majority of the citizenry, and most tv watchers. So there is there instant sense of shock at this unfamiliar and distressing gestalt of the human form. Consciously there may be revulsion and fear of death: but unconsciously or partly consciously, there may be two ordinary and related human impulses – scopophilia and epistemophilia: the desire to see and the desire to know. Desire, by definition, moves the person, the minded-body, from stasis to tension and demands release from tension.

THE SPECIFICITY OF CARTOON SPECTACLE

(i) LINE PEOPLE

The first thing to notice is that there is something intrinsically spectacular about the cartoon. Coleridge gave us the greatest phrase for the puzzle felt and the solution achieved by each member of an audience at a play the willing suspension of disbelief. We know that the people on the stage – who look like people - aren’t in love with or really about to murder the other actors: but our enjoyment of the play depends on not-quite-knowing that. But cartoon characters are not even people pretending to be other people, they are merely lines speaking lines. Our ability to be seduced by this in real life was most movingly shown in a shocking advert for the NSPCC. We see a brutal dad, played by an actor, shout at and kick and throw his 7 year-old kid around their dysfunctionally messy home, literally bouncing him off the walls and down the stairs.  But the kid is shown as a cartoon-boy. So he immediately gets grouped with the indestructible Road-Runner, Bugs, Goofy, Tom etc. In the final frame, the cartoon-boy is lying at the bottom of the stairs. We expect him to bounce-up. Instead he morphs into a real-boy (actor) whose legs have been broken by the fall and is unconscious, possibly dead.

(ii) LINE SETTINGS

To build the pyramids or even Kings College Chapel took decades: to build the sets for 2001 took Kubrick and his team years. But as Escher knew, as well as Disney and Leonardo, anything can be built on paper using lines of ink in minutes: the impossible can be made to look possible: and the improbable is just easy-meat for the penster. The cartoonist is not remotely restricted in what kind of settings and incidents are makeable and showable. This can become a fateful, dangerous temptation to distracting pointless excess: criticisms made of de Mille, Gilliam and Greenaway.  Its first commandment is “If you can, you should”, which was used in a NTL advert. This is of course one of the technological fallacies.

As we said above, it is a philosophical task of categorization to say which incidents in the whole story are plot and which are spectacle. The integrity and purpose of a story depends on the balance of elements. There is an assumption in Aristotle that some permutations of the balance of the elements don’t work aesthetically. It is important to accept that this is a point about psychology – what and why we enjoy in art - not censorship.

(iii) LINE-SEX

In none of the cartoons mentioned has there been any presentation of the sexualised breasts penis, vagina, penetration, ejaculation: nothing of the kind we would find with Crumb or Manga – stills or film.. (Imagine a football match on tv in which you were never allowed to see the ball, who and how they put it in the goal: but could only see the flurry of midfield. What if you’d been at the original match, but the State disallowed you to see a true representation of what you’d already seen. Thus mainstream tv/film erotica.)  In the adult cartoons I am discussing there is a different intention: and not merely compliant self-censorship.

A6f : THOUGHT

Very few narrative media – stage, film, novel – present consciously, or even unconsciously, any serious thinking about the human body. Of course I know a drama isn’t a lesson in anatomy, metaphysics or psychoanalysis: but the greatest narratives are full of aesthetic thoughts. One of the greatest is of course Hamlet : but even there it is a puzzle why Shakespeare presents the ‘dust to dust’ speech twice, almost three times. Peter Greenaway is also up there. In The Cook etc and Bodies in the Seine and Making a Splash, one is presented with the body in innovative ways, which induce troubled thoughts. This is one of the two main reasons why CSI is such a revolutionary fictional narrative.

I will discuss the element of thought in adult-cartoon in the final section.

****************************************************************

PART B 

Section 1 : THE SUBLIME EPISODES

A PRECIS, WITHOUT COMMENT, FOR READERS WHO HAVE NOT SEEN THEM

(Readers who have seen the episodes may go straight to Section 2, which has comments.) 

Unlike written literature or even film, one cannot easily presume the Reader’s familiarity with the material. With film there may be a recollection of scenes but rarely of much actual dialogue – unless a true fan of Mary Poppins, Life of Brian, Godfather etc. With cartoons, it is even rarer for people to bother noting the lines. To give the reader a sense of the episodes, I will in the first section present them without comment. I will note all the scenes and give enough stage directions and/or dialogue to reveal the story. Then in the next section I will give the same passages but, this time, comments on each. I'll use the box presentation referred to above.

CARTOON 1 : FAMILY GUY : “AND THE WIENER IS”

THE CHARACTERS

Peter  30+, white, Irish Catholic background, assembly-line worker, dumb, optimistic.

Lois  30+, white, US Protestant aristocracy, house-wife, part-time piano-teacher.

Meg 14-15, their daughter plain, dull, anxious.

Chris  12-13, their son, fat, dumb, cheerful.

Stewie  2-3 , their baby : shows occasional baby behaviour but mostly speaks and acts like a cynical, louche, cultured, thirty-something, British homosexual (Rex Harrison.)

Brian  their mature dog: rarely shows doggy behaviour: mostly speaks & acts like a world-weary street-wise, barfly, aspiring writer: and he is in love with Lois.

Their Neighbours

Cleveland & Loretta black couple, with 7-year-old son.

Joe (white, crippled part-time cop, gungho) Bonnie (pregnant wife) & Kevin (12 year-old son).

Quagmire  30+ sex addict, pilot, slightly creepy.

SCENE 1 : TOWN POND

SCENE 2 :  HIGH SCHOOL

SCENE 3 : 'DRUNKEN CLAM'  - BAR  

SCENE 4 : HOME:  LOUNGE

SCENE 5 : SCHOOL

SCENE 6 : YMCA

SCENE 7 : PETER & LOIS'S  BEDROOM

SCENE 8 : DINNER TABLE

SCENE 9 : SCHOOL CAR PARK

SCENE 10 : SUPERMARKET 

SCENE 11 :  CAR DEALER

SCENE 12 : HOME

SCENE 13 : GUN CLUB

SCENE 14 : HOME - GARDEN

SCENE 15 : BEDROOM

SCENE 16 : GUN CLUB OWNER’S LOUNGE

SCENE 17 : WOODS : HUNTING CLUB EVENT

SCENE 18 : CHEERLEADER’S PARTY

SCENE 19  : WOODS

CARTOON 2 : DRAWN TOGETHER   VAGINAETHEUS UNBOUND [My Title]

CHARACTERS

They all live together in a Big-Brother Reality-TV house. They talk to each other and also to the numerous cameras. Their spoken words will be given in pink in the scene-boxes.

Foxxy Love  Young black woman, street-detective and media wise.

Princess Clara  Beautiful Cinderella/Barbie innocent, ambitious for fairy tale life.

Captain Hero  Ultra-macho, homophobic Ken-GI Joe-Batman.

Spanky Ham Half-man-half-pig spiv.

Toot Braunstein  Betty Boop at aged 60, fat and vain.

Xandir Pretty-boy, repressed homosexual.

Ling Ling Japanese pet-character : his utterances are translated by subtitles.

Wooldoor Sockbat  Wacky pliable cartoon character.

SCENE 1 : KITCHEN

SCENE 2: LOUNGE

SCENE 3 : FOXXY’S BEDROOM

SCENE 4 : KITCHEN

SCENE 5 : TOP OF THE STAIRS

SCENE 6: BOTTOM OF THE STAIRS

SCENE 7 : FOXXY TO CAMERA

SCENE 8: LOUNGE : FOXXY LOVE’S SEX EDUCATION TALK

SCENE 9 : BATHROOM

SCENE 10 : LOUNGE

SCENE 11 : SHED

SCENE 12 : FOXXY’S BEDROOM

SCENE 13 : BATHROOM

SCENE 14  : THE BACHELOR SET

SCENE 15 : KITCHEN

SCENE 16 : THE BACHELOR SET

=========================================================================================================================

EPISODE III  AMERICAN DAD : STAN OF ARABIA  : Part One

CHARACTERS

Stan  30+, white, Episcopalian, CIA desk-agent, extreme right-wing patriot, ultra-macho.

Francine  30+, white, housewife, teaches Sunday school, easier temperament.

Hayley  17, their daughter, left-wing, charity worker, smokes dope with hippy types

Steve   12, their son, dim, nerdy, happy with his nerdy friends

Roger  their houseguest, ET-looking alien, who once saved Stan’s life : clever, but can’t leave the house: so he drinks and watches trash tv

Klaus their houseguest, German goldfish, failed genetic experiment, who lusts after Francine.

Bullock  Stan’s CIA boss:  His arse is Stan’s paradise.

SCENE 1 : LANGLEY FALLS PUBLIC PARK

SCENE 2 : STAN’S HOME

SCENE 3 : CINEMA

SCENE 4 : HOME

SCENE 5 : BULLOCK’S PARTY

SCENE 6 : PARTY VENUE ENTRANCE

SCENE  7: BULLOCK’S OFFICE

SCENE 8 : SAUDI ARABIA : AIRPORT

SCENE 9 : THEIR NEW APARTMENT

SCENE 10:  DESERT PIPELINE

SCENE 11 : APARTMENT BLOCK

SCENE 12 : DESERT PIPELINE

SCENE 13: APARTMENT

SCENE 14 : KITCHEN

SCENE 15: LOUNGE

SCENE 16 : Bazaar

SCENE 17 : APARTMENT KITCHEN

SCENE 18 : BURGER KING

SCENE 19: BAZAAR

SCENE 20 : DESERT

SCENE 21 :  APARTMENT : LOUNGE

SCENE 22: KITCHEN

SCENE 23 : LOUNGE ALCOVE

CARTOON 4  : AMERICAN DAD : STAN OF ARABIA : PART TWO

SCENE 1 : APARTMENT

SCENE 2 : BAZAAR

SCENE 3 : DESERT:  FLATLANDS

SCENE 4 : DESERT  HILLS PALACE

SCENE 5 : NEAR KAZIM’S APARTMENT

SCENE 6 : HOOKAH CAFE

SCENE 7 : BULLOCK’S OFFICE : USA

SCENE 8 : DESERT FLATS

SCENE 9: DESERT PALACE

SCENE 10 : KAZIM’S BEDROOM

SCENE 11:  HOOKAH CAFE & MARKET SQUARE

SCENE 12 : POLICE CELL

SCENE 13 : DESERT PALACE

SCENE 14 : DESERT FLATS

SCENE 15: KAZIM’S BEDROOM

SCENE 16 : US EMBASSY RECEPTION

SCENE 17 : DESERT PALACE

SCENE 18: DESERT : EDGE OF TOWN

SCENE 19 : COURTHOUSE

SCENE 20 : ANYWHERE TV AD BEING SHOWN

SCENE 21 : STADIUM

SCENE 22: DESERT PALACE

SCENE 23 : WASHINGTON AIRPORT  

************************************************************** 

Section 2 : THE SUBLIME EPISODES 

 SCENE PRECIS and COMMENT

CARTOON 1 : FAMILY GUY : “AND THE WIENER IS”

THE CHARACTERS

Peter  30+, white, Irish Catholic background, assembly-line worker, dumb, optimistic.

Lois  30+, white, US Protestant aristocracy, house-wife, part-time piano-teacher.

Meg 14-15, their daughter plain, dull, anxious.

Chris  12-13, their son, fat, dumb, cheerful.

Stewie  2-3 , their baby : shows occasional baby behaviour but mostly speaks and acts like a cynical, louche, cultured, thirty-something, British homosexual (Rex Harrison.)

Brian  their mature dog: rarely shows doggy behaviour: mostly speaks & acts like a world-weary street-wise, barfly, aspiring writer: and he is in love with Lois.

Their Neighbours

Cleveland & Loretta black couple, with 7-year-old son.

Joe (white, crippled part-time cop, gungho) Bonnie (pregnant wife) & Kevin (12 year-old son).

Quagmire  30+ sex addict, pilot, slightly creepy.

SCENE 1 : TOWN POND

COMMENT

This is a remarkable opening to a remarkable episode. It is barely two minutes long, and yet such powerful themes are broached: how much competitiveness, loose sexual-energy, petty malice and violence there is in human play in families. To underline this, there are the two shocking reference points of a miracle made & undone and an attempted murder. As in Shakespeare and The Great Gatsby the first few lines give the tone of the whole story. Mother and daughter are shown as being happily attuned, complimentary and supportive. But it is strange Lois invites her daughter to indulge in some casual malice towards a young sports celebrity. One could say this is Lois showing unconscious envy of young women. But their sharing even this, heightens the contrast with the competitiveness between fathers and sons. The writers chose not to have a mirroring competitiveness between mothers and daughters. The Acid- Girl from Pakistan story introduces a different moral universe. Peter merely says “in your face” : he doesn’t throw acid in his son’s face. I didn’t even notice this speech until the third viewing. It is a horrifying image: based on fact. I saw the Newsnight feature some years ago about this form of misogyny being facilitated in India by the availability of cheap acid. That Kevin re-cripples his just-healed father reverses the detail from the ancient story, in which Oedipus gets lamed, and named - swollen foot!

SCENE 2 :  HIGH SCHOOL

COMMENT

Even  In the American Republic, meritocracy is not enough: there is a hierarchy based on the luck of beauty and riches. But like a good feudal society, everyone has a place in a social group.

SCENE 3 : DRUNKEN CLAM BAR  

COMMENT

The Andy Capp cameo/side-scene is at best an homage. What follows is a beautifully compressed account of how much anxiety fathers feel about the blossoming strength of their sons and the moment of supercession that marks the beginning of their slide to the grave. In Sophocles, the Oracle speaks of a literal murder of the father by the son. Here, Joe can only remember that he fell into a haze, a fugue state, in which he was such a murderous threat to his son, the State took his son away. Peter is over-defended against thinking about such truths. A pathetic failure in his career, small triumphs over his kids and friends is all that will bolster his ego. It is a familiar scene to show blue-collar workers dissing each other’s masculinity and laughing, Reservoir Dogs. Pathetic!

Another defining characteristic of cartoons is that the characters can always, however implausibly, produces the object necessary for the next joke: how & why would

baby-Stewie be carrying a rocket-launcher, or Peter a training bra?

SCENE 4 : HOME:  LOUNGE  

COMMENT

Though it is on their tv, the family do not see or comment on  the side-scene. So it seems  to be addressed to the viewer. It is funny, appealing to that part of one which wants to laugh at innocence mocked. Freud spoke of maturation and therapy as being comprised of necessary disillusioning. The childhood reference point is when the kid learns Santa does not exist. It is a gratuitous cruelty to show Rudolph rotting

Stewie and Brian’s deflation of Meg’s news of making flag-girl is also a cruel intrusion of dull reality into a familiar children’s fantasy of being born in a palace, the planned and longed-for child of monarchs and gods.

The cutlery competition is what one would expect of siblings. That it ends in injury fits with the usual denouement of such manic games, tears before bedtime.

SCENE 5 : SCHOOL

COMMENT

Like the Blue-eye-Brown-eye experiment, this shows how quickly yesterday’s outsiders become today’s excluders, given half the chance. The desire to ascribe insufficiency, even sub-humanity, and finally animality, to others lies dormant in the Nazi corner of each person’s heart. Freud’s sublime phrase narcissism of minor differences comes to mind.  It is poignant that she mocks her mother’s care to prove that she is as beyond needing motherly care as the cool girls.

SCENE 6 : YMCA

COMMENT

Brian, the dog, is Peter’s friend and peer, so like an Uncle to the kids. Here he is encouraging the boy more than teasing his friend. The ‘old man’ is spoken in level-tone: but Peter takes it as provocation. He taunts his son. Then when push comes to shove he, like an Ancient Greek, cheats – even his own son. It is a moot point how innocent or plain dumb Chris is. He clearly loves his dad playing with him and is happy with his subordinate position. So it seems ponderous to say he is over-defended against any awareness of the symbolic value of defeating his dad.

SCENE 7 : PETER & LOIS'S  BEDROOM

COMMENT

Laius fears Oedipus will kill him. Peter feels Chris’s penis has symbolically speared him, and made him impotent. He projects his obsession onto Lois. His specious genetics lesson is tragically funny. Lois’s ambivalence is beautifully observed. There is wonder at the big-penis, and then disavowal of any desire. This leads her into an absurd analogy: for it is an axiom of American culture that she would know – that for most men, bigger breasts are better breasts. Peter’s lament witnesses the truth that all men know, and have suppressed for millennia,  - size does matter, even if women can be persuaded, by men, to say it doesn’t.

SCENE 8 : DINNER TABLE

COMMENT

It seems as if Lois is offering Meg the hardest Christian counsel. Chris is too dumb to see that mathematics (including numbers, measuring and ratios) is the last subject his dad wants to think about. Peter taunts Chris as if they were in a bar. Lois, perhaps only unconsciously, thinks about her son’s penis growing big and strong. Taking milk from one’s child is the perfect proof of the murderous parent. viz Lady Macbeth. Interestingly, with milk all over his face Peter looks like the money-shot woman. Rocket Man is said to have ambiguous lyrics : perhaps about a happily married but bored astronaut or a junkie being dumped by his wife for having a damp squib in his pants, consoling himself with superhero fantasy

SCENE 9 : SCHOOL CAR PARK

COMMENT

This sub-scene is the least plausible. Though one could argue the dodgy teacher chose Meg because she is neither seductive nor seducible. More interesting is the boredom of the privileged turning to violence. Unlike in the 1950’s, modern teens no longer accept that grown-ups have the right to chide, even punish them: and that the law is with them now.

SCENE 10 : SUPERMARKET

COMMENT

Again we must accept that Chris is too dumb to be consciously taunting his dad. But Peter can’t accept this, and sees only intentional insult. He is further vexed when Lois reprises her earlier ambivalent sophistry, in that lovely Freudian slip ten inches or less. Utterly desperate, he resorts to the strategy of the small-breasted teenage-girl – falsies. He uses his infant Stewie to bulk up his cod-piece area: two cocks!

SCENE 11 : CAR DEALER 

COMMENT

Peter’s world has reduced to the quest for a bigger penis. As for Boccaccio’s provincial puritan St Anthony,  the whole world reflects back only missing sex. He dreams of triumph, but we know the story demands the smashing of that dream. The models he longed to impress laugh at his wilted car.

SCENE 12 : HOME 

COMMENT

Though in other episodes we see Meg and Lois in familiar mother-daughter tensions, here she is unconditionally her daughter’s champion. In fact she frightens Meg with her eagle analogy. It is a significant moment for a child when they see their parent show courage or cowardice, especially in defence of the child. Freud was troubled for decades by his father’s story of being humiliated for being a Jew. David Bowie sang to his son:

“Don’t pick fights with the bullies or the cads,

 Coz we’re not much cop at punching other peoples dads.”

I am happy to report that when, at 13, I told my dad of what nowadays would be called low-level bullying at school , he was instantly on the case. It stopped. Eye-ripping is of course Oedipus’s desperate act of atonement.

SCENE 13  : GUN CLUB

COMMENT

Peter’s vain via dolorosa continues. The existence of the gun-club shows the ubiquity of the misery.

SCENE 14 : HOME- GARDEN

COMMENT

The rampant bare-gun is the socially allowed exhibition of the rampant penis. Reader, do you like me, feel utterly unimpressed by those frequent news-scenes of young men – mostly Islamists, some Irish, and trainee gangsters of any nation – ejaculating bullets into the sky at any opportunity. It is as pathetic as Lois says. She finally articulates the father-son-envy. Peter affirms it in his denial. Poor Chris simply feels unloveable.

SCENE 15 : BEDROOM