Art is dangerous: 'Beavis & Butthead,' for example - television program

Commonweal, Jan 14, 1994 by Frank McConnell

Having established a reputation as an antinomian nihilist pornographer (sounds like a "Geraldo" guest) with my defense of "NYPD Blue," I now proceed, with some trepidation but a still-unshaken faith in reasoned dialogue, to talk about the "Beavis and Butthead" phenomenon.

You've all heard about the show, of course, though I doubt that many of you have watched it. (I could be wrong here, but I just don't see the average Commonweal subscriber spending a lot of time with MTV.) Newsweek and Time have both given big spreads to "B&B" as the salient example of the dumbingdown of the American consciousness. A recent New Yorker-- which, even under the editorship of Tina Brown, still runs an occasional good cartoon--features two grunge-chic teens strolling along, one saying to the other, "You know, I guess 'Beavis and Butthead' is the 'Ren and Stimpy' of our generation." (Never mind--I'll explain "Ren and Stimpy" in a while.) And "B&B" has featured prominently in the congressional hearings on TV violence--again, with most of the Senators not having seen the show--and also looms behind Attorney General Janet Reno's portentous rumblings that, if the networks can't clean up their own act, sex-and-violencewise, then the Feds may have to take a hand. In fact, the show has achieved the kind of "fame" peculiar to our informationbulimic era: something about which everyone has an opinion, even and especially those who've never experienced the thing itself.

The reason--the awful reason--for this notoriety is that, a few months ago, an unsupervised five-year-old decided to play with matches and started a fire that killed his infant sister, and that the mother claims that the boy started the fire because he had been watching "Beavis and Butthead" (Beavis is an inchoate pyromaniac, who often giggles, while watching rock videos, "Heh heh--fire's cool.! ").

Rarely has there occurred so urgent an instance of TV's possible deleterious effect on the young. Condemnatory letters flooded in to newspapers. Newscasters with grave faces discussed the tragedy and the charges. MTV itself moved the show to a later hour and now, before every installment of "B&B," runs the following disclaimer: "Beavis and Butthead are not role models. They're not even human. They're cartoons. Some of the things they do would cause a real person to get hurt, expelled, possibly deported. To put it another way: don't try this at home."

Very commendable, not to say politic, of MTV, I'm sure. And very off the point. I leave aside (though I do not forget) the fact that five-year-olds should not be unsupervised, and that kids (I am the veteran of three, two natch and one step) are fascinated with fire even without the Tube telling them to be so. "Beavis and Butthead" is a not-bad but not-seismically-important bit of product that, because of an alleged concatenation of terrible events (a kid left alone, a TV set, a book of matches), can give us if we're smart an insight into the relationship between TV and behavior or, to lay down all my cards, art and reality. And first, you have to understand the show.

Beavis and Butthead are cretins. Ugly, glue-sniffing, and barely articulate students at "Highland High" (every pun, naturlich, intended), they spend their days devising inane and foredoomed schemes to get either money (which they're too dumb to know what to do with) or girls (which ditto). When they're not doing that, they're sitting on a sofa watching the worst of MTV heavy-metal videos (egad, Holmes--could this be authorial self-consciousness ?) and making mindless comments thereupon, punctuated by their signature, nanocephalic "huh-huh-huh" gigglesnort laugh. Beavis is the blonde one in the "Metallica" T-shirt, with the lobotomized Jack Nicholson smile. Butthead, the dominant, is the brunette in the "AC/DC" shirt whose braces make his face a nightmare of exposed gums.

The lads, in short, are a savage parody: of our worst fears about what MTV-watchers are or will become; of the "Generation X" which is now ascending; of that scariest of cultural inventions, the future. Blessed are the geeks, for they shall inherit the earth?

The kids who watch "B&B"--and it is very popular--are the very kids we are afraid are going to turn into B&B. But, upon my soul, I can't see how that could happen. "B&B" is so crude in its satire, so unrelenting in its implicit critique of the couch-potato mind-set, so severe in its condemnation of everything Beavis and Butthead represent, that I---in all honesty-- must regard it as a moral act. If I had a kid of twelve or so, I'd much rather he watched "B&B" than, say, the softcore and softhead blandishments of "Baywatch" or "Beverly Hills 90210."

As Aristotle understood, comedy is anarchic, dangerous, offensive, and much more unrelentingly judgmental than tragedy. (I note in passing that the creator of "B&B" has the splendidly apposite name, Mike Judge.) Aristotle also observed that comedy is essentially the conflict of the aladzon, the boastful man, with the eiron, the self-effacing man, who in their tension intimate but never achieve a truly human norm.