More Than Zero. - Review - book review

Reason, July, 2000 by Charles Oliver

Shows About Nothing: Nihilism in Popular Culture From The Exorcist to Seinfeld, by Thomas S. Hibbs, Dallas: Spence Publishing, 208 pages, $22.95

Are Homer Simpson and Jerry Seinfeld symbols of a spiritual rot in American popular culture? Philosopher Thomas S. Hibbs thinks so. Like William Bennett and Michael Medved, Hibbs charges that popular entertainment is suffused by an aesthetic of nihilism--a belief that life is random, that the choices we make are largely meaningless, and that there are no objective standards of right and wrong. What's more, popular culture is fascinated with evil and violence. But unlike Medved and Bennett, Hibbs doesn't believe nihilism has been foisted on Americans by a Hollywood cabal. Hibbs, a professor of philosophy at Boston College, holds the audience for this material at least as responsible as those who purvey it. In the end, his argument isn't with the entertainment industry as much as it is with modernity itself. Nihilism, he says, is the inevitable product of certain strains of Enlightenment thought.

Although he is a more subtle analyst than the typical cultural conservative, Hibbs exaggerates both the pervasiveness of nihilism and the degree to which it reflects a fundamental social problem. There's no doubt much of popular entertainment is morbid and grotesque. From the satanic messages in the music of Marilyn Manson to the misogynistic lyrics of gangsta rap to the casual violence of many Hollywood films, there's material out there that can offend the most tolerant of persons. But in careful readings of films such as The Silence of the Lambs, The Exorcist, and the 1991 remake of Cape Fear, Hibbs argues that those who focus on the explicit elements of such material miss the real danger: the warped metaphysics shared by these films.

In Cape Fear, which was directed by Martin Scorcese and starred Robert DeNiro, the nuclear family is portrayed as corrupt, set against itself by lust, adultery, and dishonesty. Into this world comes convicted rapist Cady, looking for the father, the defense attorney who helped convict him. Cady is the only person in the film who is allowed any admirable character traits. Although he's brutal and violent, Hibbs writes, Cady practices the virtues of courage, of heroic individualism, the virtue most lacking in modern society. In his desire for revenge, he has a clarity of purpose all the other characters in the film, caught up in their bourgeois lives, lack. This film and many others center on, even celebrate, a Nietzschean anti-hero who is beyond good and evil. In these films, there is no higher order in life, no justice. There's only violence, and victory goes to the strong or lucky.

Jerry Seinfeld may not seem to have much in common with Cady. But for Hibbs, the world of his TV series is, in its own way, just as nihilistic as that of Cape Fear. The main characters on Seinfeld are ruled by their passions, he notes. Their obsessions are revealed always to be arbitrary and irrational and the Seinfeld universe is ruled by chance. The four main characters consistently find their plans rewarded or thwarted not by their own actions but by circumstance. For instance, in one episode, Kramer goes to California and meets a girl. Unfortunately for him she is murdered by a serial killer, and he is blamed for the crime. "Luckily, so to speak, there is another murder while he is in jail," Hibbs writes. The precariousness of one's present choices divests the ultimate issues of all significance, Hibbs writes.

Most Seinfeld episodes turn on questions of social protocol, not on moral issues. When someone does take a moral stand, it is ultimately revealed to be mere posturing. In one episode, a loud argument breaks out over the issue of abortion. Just a little while later, another loud argument starts over when a pizza becomes a pizza. "Pizza, abortion--it's all the same," Hibbs says. Moreover, the rules of etiquette are also revealed to be arbitrary and meaningless. Instead of the nihilistic era eliminating rules, initiating a lapse into a kind of anarchy, there is a medley of rules with no clear relationship to one another, Hibbs writes.

Most famously, the central characters in Seinfeld never learn from their mistakes, never grow. The final episode ends with the same conversation that began the series. Seinfeld treats the aspiration for transcendence, for permanence or wholeness, as misguided, Hibbs says. There is nothing but banal repetition and the experience of eternal recurrence as unending frustration. Jerry Seinfeld, the character, is Nietzsche's Last Man. He looks into the void and shrugs.

Drawing on the work of Nietzsche and Alexis de Tocqueville, Hibbs argues that liberalism tends to generate such nihilism. There are two dominant passions in a democracy, he says: the love of liberty and the desire for equality. The two are at odds, and the more powerful of the two is the desire for equality. When allied to the longing for physical well-being, Hibbs writes, the passion for equality leads to a remarkable sameness of condition and to uniformity of opinion, even as it dissipates the soul by immersing it in the pursuit of consumer goods and petty pleasures.