"Tell me what you don't like about yourself."

When I watched the first two seasons of Nip/Tuck, I wrote (back on xanga--oh how far we've come) that the show made me want to change my life, that it made me want to be something better than what I am. In the trademark line, in the shifting desires of Sean and Christian, in the desires of patients for transformation, there is the the constant urge toward change, improvement, regeneration, evolution.

But there was another aspect of the show that stands out: the constant need to top itself. It just keeps going and going and going, until you think there is no possible way to carry the extremes further. And now I watch the show grinning, even laughing, at the excesses of plot and subject (my experience of the show is through DVD, so I'm on season four). After surprise transsexuals, a serial killer plot line, murders, affairs, every sort of sexual debauchery imaginable, what next? And yet it continues: incredibly, unbelievable, the show tops itself with the over-the-top, the absurd, the excessive, the perverse, the strange. I didn't think it could do it, but it does.

But the desire to change my life? Since I watched it, I've bought a house, had a child, become a vegetarian (and even tried an extended bout of veganism), and started new and better blogs. I won't pretend the show inspired any of these life changes--but I won't pretend the desire for transformation and rebirth isn't at the heart of the show's appeal for me.

Scattered Pointless Thoughts

Both/And
I'm a secular humanist and a christian. I'm a socialist and a libertarian. I'm a pacifist and I'm an overly devoted fan of a very violent sport. Certainly on one hand these contradictions seem untenable--but these seeming contraditions are something that keeps intriguing me about post-structuralism/deconstruction

Nip/Tuck
Two things make Nip/Tuck continue to work for me.
1. They continue to top themselves. The first episode gets us started with wierd and wild behavior--and each episode since goes so far over the top that the first episode seems conventional.

2. The character dynamic evolves. Which characters are ethical or depraved, safe or reckless, desiring of freedom or desiring of family, is constantly in flux.

Sources of my Ideas
You can look here, here, here, and here for some of my comments against modernism. My ideas aren't terribly original, of course--they are just expressions of whose side I lie on. Here's a quotation from Peter Barry's Beginning Theory on postmodernism and modernism that summarizes the view I have clearly (and, since this is a book I read in grad school, is one of the sources of the ideas I now have about modernism and postmodernism):

"The modernist features [fragmentation] in such a way as to register a deep nostalgia for an earlier age when faith was full and authority intact. (...) For postmodernists, by contrast fragmentation is an exhilarating, liberating phenomenon, symptomatic of our escape from the claustrophopic embrace of fixed systems of belief. In a word, the modernist laments fragmentation while the postmodernist celebrates it" (83-84)

Here's another quote from Barry about postmodernism that puts me squarely in the postmodernist camp:

"postmodernism rejects the distinction between 'high' and 'popular' art which was important in modernism, and believes in excess, in gaudiness, and in 'bad taste' mixtures of qualities. It disdains the modernist ascetism as elitist and cheerfully mixes, in the same building, bits and pieces from different architectural periods" (84-85)

Like most people, the great ideas floating around in my head are not my own: all I can do is attempt to illustrate or argue for the great ideas of others.

"for here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life."

It was after watching several episodes of Nip/Tuck that I came to an understanding of the definition and purpose of art.

Great art should inspire you to be something better than what you are.

As Rainer Maria Rilke may be saying in "The Archaic Torso of Apollo." Enjoy.