Arrested Development and Philosophy (21 page)

The stories we tell about ourselves result in a constant sort of self-awareness on our part. In turn, one of the characteristic qualities of
Arrested Development’s
narration is its frequent use of postmodernly hip self-reference. During a segment from the poorly made television show
Scandal Makers
dramatizing George Sr.’s escape from prison (acted just as poorly by Tobias) in “Spring Breakout,” Ron Howard notes:

Due to poor acting, the burden of the story was placed on the narrator . . . but this inattention to detail was typical of the laziness the show’s narrator was known for. Real shoddy narrating. Just pure crap.

If we know what bad narration sounds like, what exactly does the show suggest as better narration? Are we to take the show’s narrator as any sort of indication? Perhaps. But the show’s narrator often treads the line between passive observer and active participant.

In a particularly clever moment, the show pokes fun at this very predicament of narrator as participant and observer. During a confrontation between Michael and his just-fired secretary Kitty Sanchez, the local newsman John Beard (a real-life Los Angeles-based news anchor) is seen in the background, and immediately departs the scene:

Kitty:
Did you hear that everyone? Michael Bluth is threatening me!

John Beard:
I’ve got to get out of here. I’m part of the story. I can’t be a part of the story. I can’t be a part of the story. [“Missing Kitty”]

On the surface, John Beard is surely being a good journalist. On another level, it also works as the subtle posing of a question—can narrators be part of the story, and should they be? Soon after, we then see John Beard on the newscast, under the sly on-screen caption, “I” Witness: “A woman shows all during a fracas at a local restaurant”—adding “sources say” under his breath. If only the real news could be so clever. If we think of ourselves as the narrator of our own stories, this puts us in an awkward position—we’re always part of the story that we tell, and yet must somehow find a way to be removed enough from it in order to tell a good story. At any given time, we find ourselves as the storyteller, the main character, or simply a background character in our or other people’s stories.

The question of how we might be both observers and participants of our self-creating story is something that we may address in turning to another philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). For Nietzsche, the key is that a mindfulness of style is very important to the way in which we fashion our lives:

How can we make things beautiful, attractive, and desirable for us when they are not? And I rather think that in themselves they never are. Here we could learn something from . . . artists who are really continually trying to bring off such inventions and feats. Moving away from things until there is a good deal that one no longer sees and there is much that our eye has to add if we are still to see them at all; or seeing things around a corner and as cut out and framed; or to place them so that they partially conceal each other and grant us only glimpses of architectural perspectives; or looking at them through tinted glasses or in the light of the sunset; or giving them a surface and skin that is not really transparent—all this we should learn from artists.
13

As Nietzsche indicates, there is more to narration than a simple recounting; there is an aesthetic principle at work. Nietzsche wants us to be like the artist who can both see the object of his attention in the minutest details and also step back and see the bigger picture: “Where art ends and life begins; we want to be the poets of our life—first of all in the smallest, most everyday matters.”
14
Much as in the telling of a story, style can become a defining characteristic of our lives if we want to be mindful of what we might call an aesthetic coherence of the way our self-narratives come together.

We see this awareness of style in the narrative selectivity of the show. In one situation that exemplifies this narrative freedom, the narrator uses an opportunity while Michael tells an especially boring story about his high school locker combination, to “channel surf” amongst the other Bluth family members:

Narrator:
Hey, let’s see what some of the other folks are up to.

Crickets chirping.

Narrator:
Nothing there.

Quiet clicking.

Narrator:
Or there.

(Shows Buster in a hospital bed, pretending to be in a coma, while his nurse climbs in with him).

Narrator:
Oh, my. Let’s get back to Michael. [“Family Ties”]

In our own lives, we are accustomed to long periods in which nothing out of the ordinary seems to happen. We wish we could jump around and select only those things that are interesting to us. But, if we are to fully appreciate Nietzsche’s sentiments, we must accept that even the most mundane of moments are in fact very much an essential part of the larger story of our lives.
15

The very nature of telling our self-story is nevertheless quite difficult, as Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) helps us see:

It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards. And if one thinks over that proposition, it becomes more and more evident that life can never really be understood in time simply because at no particular moment can I find the necessary resting point from which to understand it—backwards.
16

As Kierkegaard points out, telling the story of our lives must of necessity be an incomplete and ever-evolving undertaking. We’re always adding to the material of that story, and we’re confronted with the choice of how we go about telling that story at every moment. If we agree with Kierkegaard’s proposition, then this sort of narrative sense-making is a ceaseless process of backward-moving reinterpretation. We’re always looking backward into our past in telling such a story because life is always moving forward in time. Likewise, that very same backward-looking approach is what rewards rewatching in a show like
Arrested Development.
It’s only then that we catch some of the show’s very subtlest humor—for instance, when Buster rediscovers his hand-shaped chair, “Well, I never thought I’d miss a hand so much,” several episodes before he finds himself being “all right.”

Lucille:
How’s my son?

Literal Doctor:
He’s going to be all right.

Lindsay:
Finally some good news from this guy.

George Michael:
There’s no other way to take that.

Literal Doctor:
That’s a great attitude. I got to tell you, if I was getting this news, I don’t know that I’d take it this well.

Lucille:
But you said he was all right.

Literal Doctor:
Yes, he’s lost his left hand. So he’s going to be “all right.”

Lucille:
I hate this doctor!

Lindsay:
How do we keep getting this guy?

Michael:
Mom, he’s a very literal man. [“Hand to God”]

Perhaps the greater benefit of all of this narrative awareness, both in the show and in our everyday experiences, is that it can help us appreciate the ways in which even the seemingly most insignificant of details and moments play a greater role than we at first suspect: “Over the course of a lifetime stories may change. Characters first dismissed as ‘bit players’ may gain importance. Gestures or words earlier thought unimportant may, in retrospect, take on greater significance.”
17
Stories define and guide us; they provide us with a sense of purpose out of which the various narrative fragments that constitute our daily lives cohere into a greater sense of meaning.

Narrative structure can also provide a sense of finality. In the show’s last episode “Development Arrested,” the narrator closes with “It was
Arrested Development
”—a fitting tying together from the opening credits of every episode (“It’s
Arrested Development
”). That sense of finality is oftentimes one of the things that makes fiction fictional; only rarely do we have such clear-cut distinctions between the beginnings, middles, and endings of events in our lives. Even when we like to think that we’re starting a “new chapter” of our lives, or that we’re “turning the page” on some stage of our lives, we still face ambiguity and open-endedness.
18
In the end, narrative provides us with an analogy for life and how we might understand it, but narrative is not actually life, and life is not actually narrative—nevertheless a narrative understanding can be “an abstraction one uses . . . to understand, and predict, and make sense of, the behavior of some very complicated things.”
19
Narrative helps us to connect the expected and unexpected, the intended and the accidental, the successes and disappointments, into a meaningful coherent whole by which we come to understand the selves that we are. We get a better sense of ourselves and others through the stories that we tell, and the stories that we hear—perhaps even when development of those stories is arrested.

NOTES

1.
Loyal viewers will be quite familiar with the “On the next Arrested Development . . .” trailers at the end of every episode, which almost never actually happen in the following episode. Show creator Mitch Hurwitz described these in-jokes as “call forwards”—hints of events that hadn’t yet happened.

2.
Mark Turner,
The Literary Mind: The Origin of Thought and Language
(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 7, 12.

3.
Anthony Paul Kerby,
Narrative and the Self
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), p. 60.

4.
Barbara Hardy, “Towards a Poetics of Fiction: 3) An Approach through Narrative,”
Novel: A Forum on Fiction
, 2 (1) (Autumn 1968): 5.

5.
Judith Butler,
Giving an Account of Oneself
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), pp. 37–38.

6.
John Davenport,
Will as Commitment and Resolve: An Existential Account of Creativity, Love, Virtue, And Happiness
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), p. 183.

7.
John Lippitt, “Getting the Story Straight: Kierkegaard, MacIntyre and Some Problems with Narrative”
Inquiry
, 50 (1) (2007): 52.

8.
Ibid., p. 49.

9.
Hannah Arendt,
The Human Condition
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 192.

10.
Kerby p. 39.

11.
Paul Ricoeur, “History as Narrative and Practice,”
Philosophy Today,
29 (3) (Fall 1985), p. 214.

12.
Turner, p. 5.

13.
Friedrich Nietzsche,
The Gay Science
, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), p. 239.

14.
Ibid., p. 239.

15.
For an interesting study on this idea of unity in human life through narrative, check out Alasdair MacIntyre’s excellent book,
After Virtue
.

16.
Søren Kierkegaard,
Journals and Papers,
ed. Howard V. and Edna N. Hong (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967–1978).

17.
Jeannette Bicknell, “Self-Knowledge and the Limitations of Narrative,”
Philosophy and Literature,
28 (2) (2004): 406–416.

18.
And as we now well know, the end is never really the end, especially in television. At the very end of that episode, we see a brief cameo from Ron Howard and a foreshadowing of things to come: “No, I don’t see it as a series. Maybe a movie?”

19.
Daniel Dennett, “
The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity
,” in F. Kessel, P. Cole and D. Johnson, eds,
Self and Consciousness: Multiple Perspectives
(Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1992).

CONTRIBUTORS

Banana Stand Employee Roster

Deborah Barnbaum
is an associate professor of philosophy at Kent State University. She is the author of
The Ethics of Autism
, as well as numerous articles on clinical and research ethics. She would like to dedicate her contribution in this book to her brother.

Annyong (Hello) Bluth:
Which isn’t a name, but the Korean word for “hello.” Annyong.

George Michael Bluth
: Frozen banana salesman/child.

Michael Cholbi
has written a number of articles in ethics and a book about philosophical issues surrounding suicide. He satisfies his craving for bangers and mash with occasional visits to the Yellow Fang Pub.

Brett Coppenger
is a graduate student at the University of Iowa whose research interests include epistemology and the philosophy of science. He has presented papers on the history of the philosophy of science, the epistemological problems of perception, and the threat of skepticism. His relentless efforts to axiomatize a system of magic have resulted in ongoing condemnation from the Alliance of Magicians, who strangely demand both to be taken seriously and not to be understood.

Darci Doll
is a doctoral candidate at Michigan State University and a Lecturer at Delta College and Central Michigan University. She has published in
Pornography and Philosophy,
and her research interests include ethics and Ancient Greek Philosophy. For ease of the reader, she initially wanted to change all the gendered pronouns “he”/“she” to the feminine “she”; however, upon seeing how doing so in “The Man Inside Me” potentially alienated a broad audience, decided that it could be a huge mistake.

Michael Da Silva
is a law student at the University of Toronto. He is also vice-president of the Canadian Society of Christian Philosophers and a (co)-contributor to
30 Rock and Philosophy
. He is serious and he is a professional, just like Wayne Jarvis.

Jeff Ewing
is an independent scholar, focusing on Marxian thought and egalitarian alternatives to capitalism. He has been spending his spare time helping get the Bluths back on their feet, through co-producing a second Franklin album,
Franklin Attains Class Consciousness
, and the newest
Boyfights
special,
Boyfights: The Fight Against Alienation
.

Erin Faye
is in her last year of studies at Endicott College, where she’s majoring in liberal studies with minors in creative writing and philosophy. Ask her what she’s going to do with that and she’ll probably say, “Live in a box. What else?” (Secretly she wants to be a real, full-time writer. Don’t tell her word’s out on that dream, okay?) She’s always on the lookout for Lucilles and loose seals ‘cause she hears that either can be damaging to career goals—especially those that require two hands.

Paul L. Franco
(Ph. D, University of Pennsylvania): Him?

Maeby Fünke
is the second youngest movie executive in Hollywood, and has produced such classics as
Snow Boarding School 2
,
Gangy
,
The Young Guy and the Sea
, and
The Ocean Walker
(in production). She is also a high-school student, and has attended such prestigious schools as Openings.

Brett Gaul
teaches philosophy at Southwest Minnesota State University. He is the author of articles on Descartes and G. E. Moore. Although he doesn’t drive a stair car, he always watches out for hop-ons anyway.

Christopher C. Kirby
is assistant professor of Philosophy at Eastern Washington University. He specializes in the history of philosophy—particularly that of ancient Greece and China—and writes on topics that connect these to American thought. He lost his hand while part of an expedition to capture a loose seal. If you have any information regarding the seal’s whereabouts, please contact Mr. Gene Parmesan, Private Investigator, at 555-0113.

Jonathan E. Hilliard
is a senior at Eastern Washington University. He can be found riding his Segway between bookshelves in the library. If his philosophy career doesn’t pan out, his backup plan involves a certain banana stand. . .

Matthew J. Holmes
is a recent graduate of Eastern Washington University. He recently abandoned his plans to enter graduate school in order to become an actor, and used his tuition money to take acting lessons from Carl Weathers. He now works on the Mr. Banana Grabber cartoon as the voice of Baby Banana Grabber.

Tim Jung
is a Libra who enjoys psychoanalysis, continental philosophy, teaching, and writing. When he is not philosophizing, he works part-time teaching lessons.

Daniel P. Malloy
teaches philosophy at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. He has published numerous articles on the intersection of philosophy and popular culture. Daniel is also a proud graduate of Carl Weathers’s acting workshop. You going to finish that? I’ve got a stew going.

Rachel McKinney
is a PhD student at the CUNY Grad Center. In her free time, she enjoys hunting dragons. In the future.

Douglas “Steve Holt (!)” Paletta
works primarily on the nature of moral arguments and social contract theory. His recently defended dissertation, which explains how social contract arguments work, reminds him of Ann; it has a low center of gravity and you can’t knock it down. (Her?)

Kristopher Phillips
is an ABD graduate student of philosophy at the University of Iowa. His research interests include early modern metaphysics; specifically in Descartes and Spinoza. He has presented papers on Descartes, Hume, Berkeley, Spinoza, Leibniz, and the philosophy of biology. He has also contributed to
Coffee: Ground for Debate.
He is not, at least according to his website (
http://imkristopher.com
), the same person as the author of
The Socrates Café
.

Jason Southworth
is an ABD graduate student in philosophy at the University of Oklahoma, Norman, and a philosophy instructor at Fort Hays State University, Hays, Kansas. His research interests include philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. He has contributed chapters to many pop culture and philosophy volumes, including B
atman and Philosophy, Heroes and Philosophy, X-Men and Philosophy, Steven Colbert and Philosophy,
and
Final Fantasy and Philosophy
. After thinking about it, he still isn’t sure where to put it . . . maybe in her brownie.

T-Bone:
He’s a flamer (but I’m telling you this in confidence).

Ruth Tallman
is an ABD graduate student at the University of Oklahoma, Norman, and an adjunct instructor of philosophy at Fort Hays State University, Hays, Kansas. She has written chapters for other pop culture and philosophy volumes, including
Heroes and Philosophy
and
Christmas and Philosophy
. She is a country music loving lady.

Tyler Shores
is currently a graduate student at Oxford. He received his B.A. from University of California, Berkeley, where he created and for six semesters taught a course on The Simpsons and Philosophy (inspired by William Irwin’s book of the same name). Tyler has contributed to
Heroes and Philosophy
,
Alice in Wonderland and Philosophy
, and
30 Rock and Philosophy
. He has also previously worked at Google and the [email protected] lecture series. Prior to this, his fondest accomplishment was the time his debate club went to Sacramende for the semifinals.

M. E. Verrochi
is a graduate student in philosophy at Michigan State University. Her philosophical interests range from feminist philosophy of language to concerns regarding the intersection (and influence!) of pop culture and ways of being. In 2007, she publicly announced that she
really
is the long-lost Bluth family member, N. Bluth. Unfortunately, though supposedly nothing comes before family (except, on occasion, breakfast), she has yet to be acknowledged by the clan as one of their own. She has one thing and one thing only to say to the Bluths:
C’mon!

J. Jeremy Wisnewski
has edited
Family Guy and Philosophy, The Office and Philosophy,
and
30 Rock and Philosophy.
He has also written
Wittgenstein and Ethical Inquiry, The Politics of Agency,
and
The Ethics of Torture.
He is contemplating giving up writing, though, to take up full-time work in the Banana Stand.

Willie Young
is associate professor of Humanities at Endicott College. He has written essays for
South Park and Philosophy
,
Poker and Philosophy
, and other pop culture books. He also is the author of
Uncommon Friendships
and
The Politics of Praise
. He is secretary of the Society of NeverNudes in Massachusetts, or SNM for short.