by Gary Reger

I teach Greek and Roman history. I=ve never taken a class in communications or media in my life, and until this summer I had never read a book or article on any aspect of these disciplines. But I grew up in the 1960s, when television really came into its own as a medium. I can just remember our old black and white TV, a cavernous monster that lurked in a fake wood cabinet in the basement, with a massive speaker on the side. I can remember years of begging my parents to upgrade to a color set, long to no avail. And, most important, I can still remember not just the lyrics to the theme songs of shows like AThe Beverly Hillbillies@ and AGilligan=s Island,@ but even the plots of particular episodes. In school the day after some great televised event, like the showing of the movie ASpartacus,@ my friends used to gather in the cafeteria to discuss, vocally and with passion, the details of plot and character. That is to say, television had deep meaning for us, even if it was a meaning that we often left uninvestigated in our eagerness to apply the skills we used dissecting The Scarlet Letter to the latest episode of APetticoat Junction.@

One night after dinner my mother told me she had a surprise for me. She wouldn=t tell me what it was, only that I could have it at 7.00 pm. Puzzled and eager, I waited in the basement, in front of the TV with the rest of the family. At seven she said, AHere it is,@ and tuned the TV to the first episode of a new show: AThe Flintstones.@ Here was something that seemed, on the face of it, completely different, totally new, and I was mesmerized. A cartoon in prime time! I watched every episode with all the fidelity I had given to AStar Trek. Others followed, like AThe Jetsons,@ or were discovered, like the inimitable ARocky and Bullwinkle,@ which had run originally in the 1950s, when I was too young to watch, but found a new lease on life in a slightly different form a decade later.

Cartoons seemed original and vibrantly different because they expanded the limits of the possible. On AGilligan=s Island@ Gilligan could fall off a cliff or flounder in the sea, but on AThe Flintstones@ Fred=s head could be smashed flat with a frying pan, only to pop back to normal a second later. Of course, I knew from Saturday mornings C which in those days were filled with Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck C that cartoons had this wonderful ability; the striking thing was that someone thought it was appropriate to run cartoon magic in prime time. These shows weren=t for kids, though kids enjoyed them; they were aimed at adults. Only many years later, when I realized that AThe Flintstones@ was in fact a parody C or perhaps better, a rip-off C of the AHoneymooner@ skits on the AJackie Gleason Show@ and that ARocky and Bullwinkle@ was a decidedly left-wing send-up of the Cold War, did it occur to me just how adult these cartoons were supposed to be. You can imagine the pleasure with which I tracked, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the progress of Matt Groening=s ASimpsons@ from brief skits in AThe Tracy Ullman Show@ to a full-blown prime-time cartoon show, the first in over a decade. It was another cartoon show aimed at adults C except this time I was an adult, and I got all the jokes the first time round.

In May of 1997 I happened to read in AThe Nation,@ a venerable left-wing poliitical magazine that also tries to run hip reviews, about a new MTV cartoon show called Daria. The author of that review is here today, and can speak for herself; but for me, Alyssa Katz=s vivid description of a cynical, smart adolescent girl trapped in a high school full of vacuous cheerleaders and their boyfriends reminded me of my own experiences many years ago C with of course a slight gender difference. I watched the premier episode and found it to be everything Alyssa said, and more. As I watched ADaria@ over the next few months, I got to wondering how young people, especially young women, were responding to the show. I also reflected on the apparent contradictions of MTV, a network founded on the wonders of testosterone and the drive to sell records, sponsoring a show that seemed to undercut many of the consumerist premisses that underlie so much of TV and to promote a feminist take on modern high school life extravagantly at odds with the male framework of the network.

These questions seemed worth exploring to me, especially as the show itself struck me as so well conceived and so strongly, sometimes brilliantly, written. But, given my own ignorance of the literature and disciplines of communications and TV criticism, I never considered teaching a full class on ADaria.@ I was convinced to do so only because Trinity College has a special category of half-credit courses called First-Year Colloquia. Faculty who teach a special seminar for first-year students C as I did, on ancient Greece and Rome last fall semester C are offered the chance to teach a colloquium in the spring. At half a credit, these courses are less demanding than a regular course, and we=re encouraged to be a bit Aexperimental.@ Moreover, they are supposed to have some kind of Apublic@ component. It seemed to me that an exploration of ADaria@ with a small, select group of students was a perfect subject for a Colloquium, and that a conference, at which students and invited guests could give papers and exchange ideas about the show, and about cartoons and satire more generally, might make a marvelous public component. So over the summer I tried to collect episodes on tape in rerun and to read some books. I discovered Scott McCloud=s brilliant Understanding Comics, which, though covering only comics on the written page, has wonderful insights that can be applied without modification to TV cartoons, especially ADaria@ C for example, his argument that the abstraction of a cartoon character=s features, which leaves them distinctive but without the detail of a real human face, allows the viewer more easily to identify with the character, applies beautifully to Daria herself, whose big glasses make her at once both unmistakable and open to the self-identification of all us nerds out there with glasses and brains. (We=ll be hearing more about this later today.) Mark Crispin Miller=s trenchant essay in the Todd Gitlin collection Watching Television offered an explanation for the apparent contradiction between the cynicism of so many sitcoms and their primary role as sellers of advertising time in the role of irony as a mechanism for creating distance. And Lisa Lewis=s Gender Politics and MTV, though mostly about female rockers and MTV, helped me understand the complex ways in which gender might work in a land long colonized only by boys -- and made me realize that my simple presuppositions about the gendered terrain of MTV were twenty years out of date.

This reading, and my watching and rewatching of ADaria,@ structured the course I have been teaching this semester, which has focused both on Aclose reading@ in the old English lit sense of individual episodes of ADaria@ like APinch Sitter,@ and on broader discussions of gender, commercialism, and other issues of interest to everybody who lives in post-post-modern America. We=ll be visiting some of these questions in the course of the rest of the day. But before we start, I would like to add one thing: my thanks to the folks who make ADaria@ for giving us a show that is not just wonderfully engaging for people of all ages, but also with enough depth and breadth to sustain -- and invite -- real thought.

And that=s why we=re here AWatching Daria.@