W O R D S  | review

Stompanato, you might remember, was the thick-necked professor who chaired the pop culture studies department at the College-on-the-Hill in Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel, White Noise. Early in the book, as the assorted academics confess that they can’t look away from televised natural disasters, Stompanato tells a colleague, "For most people there are only two places in the world. Where they live and their TV set. If a thing happens on television, we have every right to find it fascinating, whatever it is."

Though the comment at once exaggerates and oversimplifies the relationship most of us have with our TV, it was a pretty fair way of looking at things. The television universe was much smaller when DeLillo wrote those words almost 20 years ago, and there was, for all but a handful of scientists, no Internet. Which meant that Americans did not have to devote any of their crucial primetime viewing hours to online pornography and constantly updated basketball scores.

It followed that viewing options reflected the broader culture. When Mr. Drummond brought a new love interest into the Diff’rent Strokes household, he was acting as a sort of surrogate for thousands of single fathers. When The Facts of Life girls hit puberty, they served as stand-ins for millions of adolescent girls. When the babysitter helped ease Mike Seaver’s Growing Pains … well, you get the point.

Against the backdrop of the Cold War’s last act, the proliferation of powerful regional and global organizations (NAFTA, the EU, the WTO), and the increasing reach of multinational corporations, Cantor’s book makes an interesting claim. He argues that, more than simply mirroring societal changes, TV, in particular the 8-11 p.m. offerings, provides viewers with "a window into ideological developments in America."

Not a revelation, this, but Cantor does make his share of points.

Dividing the book into four sections — one each for his examinations of Gilligan’s Island; Star Trek; The Simpsons; and The X-Files — Cantor charts the evolution of American politics and society from the 1960s to the present day. He explains, "I regard this book as an experiment — to see what happens if we provisionally drop our intellectual prejudices against television and try to learn from it."

This is where Cantor shines — the portions of the book in which he is unpretentious and loyal to his hypothesis. An English professor at the University of Virginia, he is a perceptive sort who along the way pulls in everything from the Blair Witch Project to LBJ’s Great Society. It’s the type of book in which Karl Marx and Punky Brewster get equal attention (one mention apiece).

Borrowing a phrase from Austrian novelist Robert Musil, Cantor sees the character at the center of the short-lived (just four seasons) but enduring Gilligan’s Island as "the true man without qualities." Unlike his isle-mates, writes Cantor, "Only Gilligan has no distinctive excellence and hence none of the traditional claims to rule. In the democratic utopia of Gilligan’s Island, he therefore emerges as the truly representative human being and the chief figure in the community … He stands as an eternal monument to the great American ideal: ‘On any given Sunday, anybody can rule anybody else.’"

This is surely more thought than anyone, aside from the show’s creative staff and its most ardent fans, ever gave Gilligan. Perhaps it’s more than he deserves. Take Cantor’s analysis of the episode in which Gilligan is chosen as the island’s "president." As Cantor sees it, Gilligan’s election is derived from his outsider status — he never before had held any position of authority. "One might even say," he writes, "that Gilligan’s victory was a portent of all the politicians in the United States who were soon to be running against ‘politics as usual’ and trumpeting their positions as outsiders to the political establishment."

This is an interesting thought, but is the reader really supposed to believe that, say, Gilligan producer Sherwood Schwartz anticipated the campaign strategy of Ross Perot and the emergence of the Reform Party?

This is a consistent problem. Too often Cantor goes searching for confirmation of his thesis and finds evidence even when it’s not there. It’s fair to say that Star Trek reflected the ambivalence so many felt toward the rapid spread of the American way of life, but isn’t it a little silly (and condescending to all involved) to suggest that the evolution of the Dr. Sulu character suggests that the world might be left "in the hands of the Japanese?"

Cantor’s chapter on The Simpsons supplies ample evidence for just how intelligent the program is on a consistent basis. As Cantor points out, the program’s handling of issues as varied as the economy, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and immigration shouldn’t be ignored. But when he feels it necessary to search for hidden meaning in the show’s portrayal of government officials as careerist hacks, it gets frustrating. Of course the politicians on The Simpsons are phonies and crooks. It’s a lot funnier than depicting them as honest, and, as Cantor sometimes seems to forget, the program’s chief duty has been to make people laugh, not instruct them on the societal changes of the second half of the 20th century.

Cantor’s knowledge of The X-Files is equally copious, yet again his take can be a bit skewed. To claim, as Cantor does, that an episode in which a ghoulish boss literally "sucks the life" out of his employees is a "Marxist allegory" that "identifies capitalism as monstrous" is a bit much.

These missteps could almost be excused if Cantor was an easier-going tour guide, but too often Unbound reads like a college textbook. With its lengthy explanation of the author’s fact-gathering methods and more footnotes than a David Foster Wallace essay, the book is as much of a scholarly text as it is possible to write while still including phrases like "Gilligan Meets Jungle Boy." 

Cantor’s prose, though, is unnecessarily dry. Here, for example, is a line from the X-Files chapter: "I want to begin to explore the challenge to the nation-state’s legitimacy in The X-Files by concentrating on one subset of episodes, which corresponds to one subgenre of traditional FBI stories." In a way, everything that is right and wrong with Cantor’s book is on display in that one sentence. It’s logical and brimming with information, but who wants to read it?