Rebel, Rebel
Mar 27th, 2006 at 7:33 am by Susie
Salon’s Heather Havrilesky on the cult of individualism in TV:
America rewards and celebrates individualism, and TV land reflects this spirit. But as the movers and shakers on TV demonstrate, you can’t just come blasting out of the gate as an individual. No, first you have to conform to the dominant notions of behavior and style, winning allies and climbing the social ladder. Only by achieving conventional success within your chosen realm will you be able to recognize the limits of the current structure, which will allow you to go off the tracks and work outside the system.
It’s all very exhausting. First you’ve got to wear the nice suits, walk the walk, talk the talk, and marry the homecoming queen. Then, after you recognize that your bosses are morons, your wife is a cheating whore, and the corporate structure you exist within is inefficient, corrupt and growth-focused to the point of idiocy, that’s when you can you feed the rugged individualism eating you up inside, that devil-may-care spirit that subverts terrorist plots, nabs money from Armenian criminals, and gets to the bottom of who’s been blackmailing gay students at Neptune High.
