A Brief Cutaway from Progress

The following is a first-draft of a script to a performance-lecture piece that I never did. It gives a critical history of 21st century American progressivism through clips of Family Guy, a television show on FOX. The piece was to be performed while I wore a Brian Griffin costume and drank martinis that a bartender on the side of the stage would have been making for me throughout the performance. Ideally I also hoped to have a Brian Griffin impression down by the time of the performance. I never managed to get this impression down but my Peter, Joe and Stewie are all solid. I would pull up YouTube clips from the show as I referenced them throughout the talk – these are signaled in this script by hyperlinks. I solely use YouTube clips rather than actual episodes, because I noticed this is how many, if not a majority of people are actually exposed to Family Guy.

I don't love this piece but I spent enough time with it that I wanted to put it somewhere.

For a year, I ran a novelty Family Guy Instagram account that posted a new frame of violence from Family Guy everyday. I just ended the account a couple of weeks ago when I reached three hundred sixty-five posts, which only caused three suicide threats in the comments. 

Initially I was interested in this because after getting continually recommended Family Guy clips on YouTube, one day while lying in bed I impulsively went through clip after clip of moments where members of the Griffin family commit violent acts against each other and themselves. After about two or three hours of this I looked through all the clips I collected and wondered, “why am I doing this? I have all of these screenshots, so I feel like I should do something with them.” So @familyguycruelty was born. 

Even towards the end, it often felt like there was an infinite pool of these moments. I had watched Family Guy since at least middle school, but it never occurred to me how often characters outright assault and/or kill each other (only to be revived in the next scene). I also found that there was an aesthetic pleasure in these pictures. 

When decontextualized from the moving image, some of the pictures began to look like Magritte paintings with the untextured but uniform quality of the image; rigid figures with ambiguous expressions; representation of motion without the typical aesthetic markers of motion (e.g. motion lines or smears), which Family Guy expresses with its trademark tween animation; and play with perspective that draws attention to the flat picture plane, now carried out in an unconscious way by Family Guy utilizing the same style between characters and background, where previously backgrounds were painted and objects in motion were inked.

Obviously to maintain this level of output I had to watch a lot of Family Guy. This heavy exposure to Family Guy caused me to consider what the show actually is.

I imagine some or all of you haven’t seen Family Guy. I was having a hard time summarizing what Family Guy is about, so this is what Google says: “Peter Griffin and his family of two teenagers, a smart dog, a devilish baby and his wife find themselves in some of the most hilarious scenarios.” I would also like to add that the show is ostensibly about TV, at least to begin with, though this is partly lost later on. In the logo for the show the “i” is dotted with a TV. Many scenes begin with the characters watching TV which leads into cutaway gags of what they’re watching. Later in the show, cutaway gags become spontaneous things that characters can summon at will. [Read in Peter Griffin impression:] “This is worse than the time I gave a performance lecture on Family Guy.” The characters themselves are based on archetypes popularized by American sitcoms, specifically, The Simpsons.

But Family Guy is also a show in a unique position to express progressive Democrat consciousness throughout its ideological moments in the 2000s and 2010s. To say it simply, Family Guy is not-so-secret Democratic Party propaganda on the Republican TV station, FOX. 

But this can be said of many of the shows on FOX to greater or lesser extents – those who work in the culture industry tend to lean progressive, and FOX is really no exception with regards to their comedy and drama TV shows. What then makes Family Guy unique in this regard you might ask? In large part, this is because of its creator Seth MacFarlane, who happens to be one of the more significant donors to the Democratic Party in Hollywood.

A frequent fun fact dropped in TILs online is that Seth MacFarlane would’ve died on 9/11 if he hadn’t slept through his alarm. But what often flies under the radar is how many times 9/11 has been restaged in Family Guy. In one particular restaging Brian goes back in time and stops 9/11. The fact Brian is the one to do this is especially important  – but more on this later.

Family Guy began in 1999, but was cancelled in 2002. However, successful DVD sales and popular ratings on Adult Swim caused the show to be brought back in 2004. Many look back at the original three seasons as a golden age of the show, but for me, it’s this post-2004 period of Family Guy where it really comes into its own. Why’s this? Because in 2003, during Family Guy’s hiatus, this happened.

The 2003 Iraq War is the “in” – where Family Guy begins to express its particular form of political consciousness. It’s here where you can begin to treat Family Guy as a “narrative ideological arc” for Democratic Party consciousness – a subjectivity that has unconsciously transformed into an objectivity – a subjectivity which holds a monopoly on empirical reality itself.

Certain things must be considered about the 2000s politically – firstly, this was the tail-end of a string of Republican presidencies (only broken up by Bill Clinton, who of course was acceptable to the Reagan Coalition as a president willing to compromise with Republicans); secondly, the Iraq War gave rise to the anti-war movement, a broad Leftist coalition which presented a real opportunity for the American Left to reconsider what it had been and what it could become. In other words, from the standpoint of the present in the early 2000s, the US was being dominated by a decrepit right-wing hegemony characterized by the Reagan coalition (note: stop after the Reagan clips), but this obvious domination is in part what seemed to present a real political opportunity. 

[AT THIS POINT I WALK OVER TO THE BAR AND GET A MARTINI]

Fun fact: in 2007, the streaming service Hulu was launched via a limited-invitation beta. Most people who knew of Hulu however, myself included, did not know it was a streaming service. Rather, Hulu was known for its YouTube channel, where it prominently featured high quality clips from The Simpsons and Family Guy. If you watched clips from Family Guy online in the late 2000s, it was likely through Hulu’s YouTube channel. Circa 2008 in suburban North Texas, I watched this one over my friend’s shoulder on his dad’s computer.

Here Family Guy fully expresses the discontent from both sides of the aisle that the goal of transplanting Western democracy into Iraq was a pipe-dream. The US imperialist intervention in Iraq was necessary for global capitalism, in order to maintain the international market and to keep armed conflict from spreading to the periphery of the first world (stop at 0:47). “Spreading liberal democracy” became the necessary lie to achieve these ends, a lie that was generally understood as a lie, but accepted nonetheless. Brian and Stewie stand-in for the audience: how else to respond but with mouth agape at the unrealizable (and perhaps secretly undesirable) lie becoming realized. 

One of the images of Iraq in this sequence that is swept away by an archetypal image of America is a recreation of a leaked photo from the Abu Ghraib CIA blacksite, where naked prisoners are piled on top of one another while two soldiers about to do a cavity search candidly pose behind them. Not the only time Family Guy recreated one of these leaked photos...

In 2008, Obama was elected president. To quote D.L. Jacobs in his recent article, “What was the Millennial Left”... 

“This was an uncomfortable time for the Left. They had spent the 2000s focused on protesting the Republican Party and ended the decade by helping to elect the first black president of the United States, with a hold on Congress in the middle of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Obama’s election had signaled the collapse of the anti-war movement and within several months, it was clear that he was not going to be the progressive the Left had convinced itself he would be.”

The liquidation of the Left into progressive Democratic politics is mirrored by a change in the undercurrent in Family Guy. No longer did it have undertones of “resistance” against an undesirable status quo, but it became a vehicle to uphold the status quo. Not that Family Guy should be expected to uphold some kind of Leftist politics – rather the apparent shift in Family Guy following Obama’s election represents the actual continuity in its content – an expression of Democrat consciousness. 

Up until this point, I’ve been showing clips of Family Guy that coincide with significant moments in 21st century America. But what’s more interesting than what Family Guy has lampooned or referenced, is what they haven’t referenced. YouTube search “family guy occupy,” you will receive no satisfying results. At the time of my writing, the most relevant result wasn’t a direct reference to Occupy, but rather a gag that critiques Millennial work culture. 

This might seem shallow and pedantic, but if you have watched Family Guy, you’ll realize how unusual this actually is. Family Guy references everything, and it has had 20 seasons to reference everything. To not have even touched upon something as significant as Occupy means something. And it’s not as though the writers didn’t know about Occupy, because in 2011, Family Guy writer Patrick Meighan was arrested at an Occupy LA protest. The easy answer to this question is, “perhaps right-leaning FOX didn’t want any attention paid to Occupy,” which, perhaps. But I don’t think it’s because of an intervention on the part of FOX, because also in 2011 in an episode written by Patrick Meighan, Family Guy did this gag. 

FOX not only cleared this segment, but conservative pundit Rush Limbaugh plays himself in it, fully in on the joke. And why 2011 for this gag? Tracing our steps from other clips we’ve watched, on first impression many parts of this gag feel as though they might be coming from the pre-2008 moment. But the 2012 election between Obama and Mitt Romney was right around the corner: the threat of another Republican president still loomed large.

In this clip, the supposed threat represented by the Tea Party, for which Lumbaugh was a large advocate, is given life by illustrating their vision of an idealized America. The audience is allowed to counter-identify through Lois, who plays the liberal voice of reason there to make counterpoints to Limbaugh and Brian – the Anita to Brian’s Maria in the Republican AM talk radio rendition of “I’m So Pretty.” (Besides 9/11, West Side Story is one Family Guy’s favorite things to reference). For a potential progressive liberal viewer it says: “things might be bad now – but this is the ridiculous world that Republicans want, we must stand behind Obama.” 

The memory and fear of Republican hegemony was not soothed by the fact that the 2008 recession had occurred under Obama’s term. The Occupy and Tea Party movements emerged from the Left and Right respectively, but they expressed the same discontent – the crisis of neoliberalism had not been properly addressed following the recession. Occupy became something that must not be addressed for its potential to sow discontent among the Democrat voter base. But if you consider the Tea Party an expression of the same crisis, perhaps by reading this clip against the grain, you can see a buried perspective on Occupy. 

[AT THIS POINT I WALK OVER TO THE BAR AND GET ANOTHER MARTINI]

Let’s punch out and talk about cartoons in general. Traditionally, cartoon characters aren’t “characterized” per-say. They have characteristics: Bugs Bunny is a clever trickster, but he’s not explored in the narrative tradition of, say, to be really annoying, the bourgeois novel – Proust, Tolstoy, etc. I don’t mean this as a critique or anything because that’d be silly, just an observation. Rather, cartoon characters traditionally exist as mediums for gags. 

But what about the late 20th and 21st century category of “adult cartoons”? This seems to complicate this in some ways. When cartoons become “for adults,” suddenly they’re apparently permitted to explore more mature themes, and allow characters more characterization through development over time (this post-Simpsons characteristic rubs off on “children’s cartoons” as well). But the “personalities” now allowed to cartoon characters are insidious and illusory. I’ll quote a passage from Adorno’s “Prologue to Television”: [While reading this passage I play the Family Guy intro]

“The vocabulary of… image-writing [in television] is composed of stereotypes. They are defended with technological imperatives, such as the need to produce in a minimal period of time a terrific quantity of material, or the necessity of presenting vividly and unmistakably to the viewer the name and character traits of the protagonists in the sketches, which most often are only a quarter-hour or half-hour long. Criticism of this practice is countered with the rebuttal that art has always operated with stereotypes. But there is a radical difference between the die-cast stereotypes calculated with psychological cunning and those that are clumsy and awkward, between those that intend to model human beings like mass production and those that try to conjure up objective essences out of the spirit of allegory one more time. Above all the highly stylized character types, like those in the Commedia del l’arte, were so removed from the everyday life of its public that no one could possibly succumb to the idea of conceiving their own experience in terms of the model of the masked clowns. On the other hand, the stereotypes in television resemble externally, up to and including intonation and dialect, every Tom, Dick, and Harry, and they propagate maxims—such as that all  foreigners are suspect or that success is the supreme goal of life—while they also, through the simple behavior of their heroes, present these maxims as though they were divinely sanctioned laws cast in stone once and for all, before one might draw a moral that sometimes even means the inverse.”

Let’s ask, who is Peter Griffin? What is Peter Griffin’s “personality”? On one level he’s this New England Irish-American archetype. He’s working class, he works in a toy factory for the first half of the show and in a shipping department at a brewery for the second half of the show. But he also is portrayed as being middle class by his lifestyle, and occasionally his work. I’d argue this vagueness isn’t an accident. But the big thing that dominates Peter Griffin is he’s just this big dumb guy, and the archetypical baseline he’s allowed occasionally echoes more with the older tradition of cartoons than it does with the adult cartoon. He might be allowed more “serious” episodes, but there’s no actual continuity with his characterization. 

But this blurring between modes - “is he a cartoon cartoon character or a “serious” cartoon character?” – allows some trickery to happen. The illusion of personality created by development within a single episode, and the mode of the adult cartoon that the show operates within that supposedly allows for greater “characterization”, is often exploited to obscure when Family Guy enters into gag-mode in order to slip some things by. Here’s this bit in an episode where Peter has a stroke. 

Peter here (probably a Republican tbh) becomes a mouthpiece for the writers to advocate for a progressive issue, one that was very prevalent at the time of this episode’s release in 2008. While the show maintains a raunchy and un-PC tone for its audience of “deplorables,” this tone merely functions as an aesthetic veneer to slip in more “desirable” political positions. For Seth MacFarlane, perhaps the ideal consumption scenario for his media is the archetypical white construction worker getting drunk with his friends, turning on Family Guy, laughing at a racist cutaway gag, then screwing up his sunburned face when a “truth bomb” such as this gets dropped, causing them to proclaim aloud, “damn he kinda right though.” 

By starting with Peter’s baseline archetype which seems to gesture towards this conservative working class figure, perhaps the writers presume that conservative members of the audience (correctly presumed to be archetypes forged by the culture industry as well) will feel encouraged to identify with him, so that when he learns the error of his ways (or expresses so much stupidity that no one would care to identify with him), they too might change and “see the light”. Now you might say: who would identify with Peter Griffin?

Brian as a character is especially significant for the show. Early on, Brian simply functions as a pragmatic voice, but following the show’s revival after its initial cancellation, his character becomes an often lampooned bleeding-heart liberal. However, Brian’s political positions typically mirror Seth MacFarlane’s own. He’s also the only character that Seth MacFarlane does using his actual voice. 

It might then be implied that Brian is a stand-in for Seth MacFarlane himself, and perhaps even a vehicle for self-critique. While Peter Griffin typically just acts in a way that illustrates his own apparent ignorance, when Brian commits transgressions, there seems to be more weight to it due to the show’s insistence upon his intelligence. But did you know there’s an episode where Brian tries to have sex with a high schooler? What about this moment?

If Brian, Family Guy’s bleeding-heart liberal, is a vehicle of self-critique for Seth MacFarlane, and the show itself functions to outwardly project a progressive Democratic position, perhaps Brian Griffin acts as a kind of libidinal avatar for liberal viewers to sublimate their unacceptable drives by channeling them through Brian, a doggy. But this becomes complicated – there is a moment where Brian reflects on his inability to be a person, as he believes he cannot overcome the animal impulse he is endowed with. 

And yet, despite the desire to reject his second nature as a free subject in society, and become just a dog, he cannot accomplish this. Even though he’s just a dog, Brian is allowed more characterization than any character on the show, and despite the parody his character receives, Brian is always there to finally deliver the “correct” position. He acts as the mouthpiece for the subjective attitude which holds a monopoly on empirical reality, a subjectivity which at least in part exists because of the world-historical failure of the Left to overcome the conditions of capitalism. The jabs Brian receives on the show for his bleeding-heartism aren’t to undermine his progressivism, rather they exist to reinforce it. The jabs are there to remark on Brian’s character flaws, flaws precisely because they interfere with Brian being the outstanding Democrat he’d like to be. 

All of this seems to complicate his desire to ‘return to nature’. But in this way he embodies the underlying subjectivity of contemporary progressivism.

To quote Marx in the Grundrisse, “The [ancient world] provide[s] a narrow satisfaction, whereas the modern world leaves us unsatisfied, or, where it appears to be satisfied, with itself, is vulgar and mean.” It is only as a bourgeois subject unable to fully realize himself in capitalism that Brian can actually express the desire to “return to nature.” He continually attempts to renounce his subjecthood by asserting the “unnatural” character of his second nature (our nature in society), but there is no going home: he is a subject in spite of himself. He is forced to be free – in however limited a scope one can be free in capitalism – but possesses what Wilhelm Reich described as “fear of freedom.”

The reactionary desire to return to nature is just the flipside of the ideology of progressive capitalism in its current impulse, but underlying it all is death drive, the foreclosing of possibilities, and the melancholic desire to repeat the past. Quoting Chris Cutrone’s article “The end of the Gilded Age,” “The question is, who are the progressives and who are the conservatives, politically? Perhaps the progressives are the more cunning conservatives — or the conservatives are the more cunning progressives.” 

Progressivism as this “cunning conservatism” becomes manifest in a foreclosing of opportunities for the future, linking the immiserated with the massive bureaucratic apparatus which keeps them solvent through welfare. The meaningless labor of late modernity is merely another form of this welfare outsourced to the private sector. And all of this welfare is of course, a police measure. But what of progress as it was originally understood? To quote the Grundrisse again, “What is progress if not the absolute elaboration of humanity’s creative dispositions . . . unmeasured by any previously established yardstick[,] an end in itself . . . the absolute movement of becoming?”

[AT THIS POINT I GET MY LAST MARTINI]

2016, Donald Trump was elected. 2019, Family Guy does this.

If you’ve watched Family Guy, you'll notice this is a play on the chicken fight gag – where Peter fights a giant chicken. Here, veils fall away, and Peter fully becomes a vehicle to live out the Democrat fantasy to beat up Trump. Consider all of the individual gags that happen throughout this sequence – Peter instigating a fight by insulting Trump’s wealth; the audience identification with popcorn eating members of the secret service, i.e. the literal feds; Peter picking up, straightening and kissing Obama’s portrait (knowing what you know about Peter’s character, ask yourself who is really doing the smooching); and finally an idealized “progressive” Canada intervening to “save the day.” This is a moment of consummation – a denouement where progressive desires are all answered for in one fell swoop.

Also.

In the episode with the Trump fight, the show has Trump sexually assault Meg, and Peter as her father must defend her (also consider here the fantasy being played out, a family member is sexually assaulted, all so that we might take revenge for them?). Trump is decried for misogyny, racism, homophobia, fascism – often by politicians who could be accused of the exact same thing. “He wants to reform the Confederacy! As a matter of fact, Republicans have secretly desired to reform the Confederacy for years!”

But in another way, Trump ran on a platform that actually seemed to fulfill many of the desires of American progressives. There were real critiques of Trump to make, and yet, progressive Democrats’ critique of Trump was often the conservative one. Previous “opponents” of neoliberalism now cling to it, as Trump and now Biden signal a movement away from it into a post-neoliberalism. 

The point here isn’t to uphold Trump, but to remark that the rather conservative demands of progressives seemed to be answered by Trump’s campaign promises. Yet there was an ideology in place where they could not support him. Family Guy denounces Trump, yet watching the show, you see many of its political discontents answered by him. Perhaps Trump is hated because in him, his “progressive” critics see an all-too clear reflection of themselves. Their “radical” demands were never so radical to begin with, and could be fully accommodated by capitalism. 

What’s missing from all of this is a socialist politics, as Republicans and Democrats are nothing but two right-wings of one party. It must be remembered that if there was a living socialist movement, Family Guy and the rest of the culture industry would deploy all the moves practiced on Trump, on it.

When I was working on @familyguycruelty, going frame by frame through these violent moments to find the “perfect” still, I discovered a commonplace animation practice in the expressions of Family Guy characters as they witnessed a violent act. Before a face will tween into horror, there’s often a beat, usually a single frame, of melancholy [scroll through and find some]. These became my favorite types of pictures to post.

Maybe while we move through the blind march of “progress” under capitalism, it is secretly understood that we are building an unsurpassable wall to change – the society we work for in the name of progress is designed to be a cage, to permanently manage the contradiction of capitalism while never actually working through this contradiction. Perhaps at the level of thought, there is a mental equivalent of a “single frame” that passes before us in preconsciousness, that grasps the tragic character of our activity. Yet we do not reach out and withdraw it into consciousness, for if we were to do so we would realize the massive, dangerous and necessary task we have inherited. As soon as this moment is gone, then comes the horror…