Social resonance separates art from just plain silliness.
Just plain silliness has its place in media, especially television. Herman Munster is just plain silly. The root image of the animation running above is a publicity still of Herman Munster (as portrayed by actor Fred Gwynne). The Munsters aired on CBS from 1964 to 1966. As a television icon Herman Munster defused any horror the 1931 cinematic Frankenstein monster may have evoked. Of course, that cinematic monster bore little resemblance to Mary Shelly’s original 1817 vision of an artificial life form struggling to exist in the harsh organic environment we call reality.
Which brings me to Max Headroom, a cyber-creation generated purely for television (yet played by an actor: Matt Frewer). Max Headroom first manifested presenting music videos on The Max Headroom Show in 1985 on Channel 4 in the UK. This led to the cyberpunk television movie, Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future (1985). Later Max had a show (1987-1988) on ABC in America. He also appeared in the Art of Noise music video, Paranoimia (1986), a coke commercial (1986), and inspired hackers to disrupt shows on two Chicago television stations in 1987. Visually there is a connection between Max Headroom and Herman Munster, which the above animation points toward.
Bill Maher’s HBO show, Real Time with Bill Maher (2003-present), treads a fine line between dealing with social issues and lampooning them. Bill Maher conducts interviews, interacts with guests in panel discussions. The talk is serious, the tone light. One of Bill Maher’s favorite topics/targets is religion. He produced and appeared in a documentary, Religulous (2008), which homed in on the limitations of religion. Bill Maher describes himself as an atheist. The only way I can see how atheism might hurt a creative person is if somehow it stifled their imagination. Religion and imagination are scarcely one, though. They can even be described as antithetical. Often, as with the Frankenstein monster, imagination simply feeds off itself. Obviously, the monster exists only as a character in sundry works of fiction. But that fictional character has taken on a life all its own. Hollywood placed a unique visual stamp on the monster. Modern pop culture being what it is, it was inevitable the monster should take on a comical aspect. America drives pop culture and Americans are a deeply cynical people. In a sense, we celebrate imagination by mocking it. We make humor the underbelly of imagination. The Frankenstein monster is a doppelgänger, an extension of Mary Shelly infused with Hollywood design/saturated by commercial television. The animation running above hints at the possibility of the image of Bill Maher melding into that Frankenstein doppelgänger and thus allowing the comedic variant of the monster to continue resonating/evolving.
© 2010 Peter Schmideg