Imagine an introduction.

Imagine a pleasant how-do-you-do, a polite its-nice-to-meet-you, a penitent I’m-sorry-my-hands-are-sticky-I’m-chopping-mangoes-for-the-fish. Just please don’t imagine this introduction in the office. Why not the office? Because an office is no place for you to be chopping mangoes for fish. Just ask my office-mate, but make sure she puts down the fly swatter first, she’s been grumpy lately. Besides, when’s the last time any office introduction was pleasant? No. No offices. Office introductions are a subject for another time.

 Just now we were imagining a pleasant introduction at a dinner party. Your hands were sticky. Your face was smiling. And the friend who just introduced you to their date was about to end the sticky silence following your confession to say: “the Reader here is a great cook.” And the date, a cultured Emily Post type was about to add: “really, that’s wonderful, where did you learn?”

“Oh, on the ship,” you reply without a change in your smile, “when I left the orphanage in the old country I didn’t have two nickels to rub together.  But this old captain on the pier, a kind looking man with a birthmark under his left eye and an advanced case of syphilis, he told me I could stow away in the galley if I did the scutwork for Cookie.  And ol’ Cookie taught me a few things. But just a half-day’s steam from the Marquesas ol’ Cookie caught the fits.  And I’ll tell you I had to learn pretty quick after that with the whole crew bearing down on me for three meals a day.”

Whoa… you’re a bit of a smart ass aren’t you? Hard to imagine. 

At this point the date has two options. Their first option is to recognize your sarcastic persona and laugh. (Laughter is polite even if the date finds your monologue uninspired). Their second option is to don a quizzical, concerned look and ask with a hint of astonishment: “oh my god, are you serious?” I’ll let you take it from here, do you continue on with an already tired joke or wait for your friend to clue the date in? It’s like a choose your own dinner party adventure. (Send PayPal or credit card information to ryan.tuggle@gmail.com and I’ll write up alternate endings for you).  

But rather than forge ahead with our adventure right now I think we should discuss what we just imagined.  Because whether you’re just too-clever-by-half or sincere or politely laughing or genuinely astonished in the type of situation we just imagined, you are able to imagine it.  And if you are tuned to popular culture, I assume you’ve noticed an increase in such exchanges of late.  There are more and more personas out in the world today offering stories and opinions that they themselves recognize to be false. 

I’m not talking about James Frey—author of the partially-fabricated memoir A Million Little Pieces and the first author to recognize that the only thing more lucrative than Oprah’s praise is her scorn. I’m also not talking about Dan Rather—former CBS News Anchor who seems to have been made redundant for airing a story about forged documents.  I’m not talking about people caught lying or exaggerating. I’m not Colombo. And I’m definitely not a reader of that fact check website Smoking-Gun.

What I’d like to talk about are those people who set forth to lie and exaggerate in a deliberate manner as a form of social commentary or entertainment.  You, for example, are one of these people I’d like to talk about.  Because you just did this a minute ago when you told your friend’s date that you learned to cook on a sea-faring vessel.  You knew it wasn’t true, but you said it anyway. Why? 

If you’re like me you said it because it was entertaining. You hoped for a laugh.  Maybe you’ve seen The Parrot Sketch and appreciate dead-pan comedy. Maybe you’re no Bob Newhart but you know how to deliver a line straight. Or maybe you remember Mark Twain who once said: “the humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it.”

There is an academic description for this style too.  It’s what Wayne C. Booth—a literary critic from the University of Chicago—described as an unreliable narrator in his book The Rhetoric of Fiction.  An unreliable narrator is a narrator that offers a story from a point of view that is different from that of the implied author.  The implied author in this case was you.  You with your soft hands and your shirtsleeves who look nothing at all like the kind of person that would say syphilis in polite company.  But you go ahead and offer up this narrator anyway, with a different point of view than your own, because it allows you to say something a bit ridiculous and possibly get a laugh from your friend’s date.  Then on the other hand, it could confuse your friend’s date and make them ask if you’re serious. 

It’s a tough spot for your friend’s date. Most people trust narrators to give it to them straight.  In fact, it’s that expectation that make unreliable narrators fun. Once exposed, unreliable narrators don’t require the same kind treatment and social considerations due the implied author. If they’re in on the joke, your friend’s date can get creative poking fun at a hard luck story in an exotic locale rather than having to feign interest in yet another insufferable account of how someone put themselves through college working in a restaurant.  But that fun is predicated on recognizing the unreliable narrator. And they aren’t always easy to identify.  

Just about every great film with a surprise ending uses an unreliable narrator in order to achieve surprise.  When Verbal’s gait straightens out at the end of The Usual Suspects he reveals that the audience’s trust in his narrative was misplaced.  This revelation is so striking that it pushes the audience actively into the narrative they thought they had been passively observing.  Not only does Keyser Soze get the better of the film’s hero and its street-wise cop, he gets the better of the film’s audience too.  No one escapes Keyser Soze. 

Fight Club tries this too, as does Nicole Kidman in The Others. In The Sixth Sense, the audience discovers that it can’t trust M. Night Shymalan’s silent narrator to tell them that Bruce Willis is a ghost (or to tell them that Shymalan’s next three films would die on arrival). More recently, there was The Illusionist, which did the unreliable narrator  poorly, and The Prestige, which I’m told does it better.

Oh yes, and then there’s Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. A symbol of our times, Borat is today’s unreliable narrator of the moment.  We like him very much. 

Of course we know Borat is not to be trusted. And we know it from the start.  We’ve read the reviews. Before the film started we sat through 23 trailers for mindless Fox Searchlight comedies in a packed multiplex. We’ve been so thoroughly prepared to be misled that in the opening moments of the film, we already know to laugh at authentic soviet-era still images framing the credits, even though we’re not sure why. By the time Borat begins to walk us through his Kazakhstan village—with the help of an adroit camera man that frames shots and keeps our eye active in the accomplished manner we movie-goers are accustomed—we know that it is ok to laugh because it’s not really his sister he just molested. We know also that the Kazakh authorities don’t really issue trophies to prostitutes. So we laugh.

Immersed in the strange culture Borat purports to represent, we follow him to America and watch with wonder as he spins his false narrative to countless Americans who aren’t in on the joke.  We laugh at these Americans expense most of all. And a few times we are shocked by the opinions some of these Americans harbor behind their veneer of sociability. No one escapes Borat.   

Hollywood hype tells us that what Borat reveals about these people amounts to revolutionary social commentary.  Borat gets to the real America behind all our talk of ideals and shining cities on hills, they tell us.  They are almost right.  It’s easy for an audience in-on-the-joke to recognize the folly of our foreign policy in the simplicity of a man with a western drawl who explains that all peoples from over in that part of the world, whether they are Muslim types or worshipers of the hawk as Borat is,  ought to shave their mustaches and stop looking like terrorists before our armies go over and clear them all out.

These moments reveal troubling aspects of our society. *Yet despite Hollywood’s hype, these moments are few and far between.  That is not to say the laughter is spotty. I laughed right through.  But to be fair to America I have to admit that I was mostly laughing at tasteless jokes and the come-uppance of decent people that were guilty only of accepting a Kazakh reporter at his word and not being knowledgeable enough to challenge the authenticity of his implicit cultural claims (with those moments when they did challenge him expertly edited out).   

I might justify my tasteless laughter at these tasteless jokes as a part of the social commentary of the Hollywood hype. But with respect to these decent people fooled by Borat’s unreliable narrative, I believe it is too easy for people in on the joke to look down on them and put on airs of discerning enlightenment.  

Unfortunately for me, my claims of enlightenment wouldn’t hold up.  I know a bit about Kazakhstan’s oil industry.  I know that its capital is Astana and that China is funding an oil pipeline that will eventually connect up with the Caspian. But would I be able to expose Borat with just that knowledge? No way. If I were actually discerning I would be able to tell you what language Borat was speaking to his producer throughout the film.  It sounded like a fake Russian-sounding sort of gibberish to me.  But it could have been authentic. I just don’t know. And I didn’t Google it out of fairness to those people on the street who didn’t have Google at their fingertips. 

So I admit it, my knowledge would not have revealed Borat’s unreliable narrative.  And yet I still claim that I would have figured him out.  My ego insists: you can’t fib a fibber.

When you and I had that little exchange at the dinner party we discovered that we are both versed in the ways of the unreliable narrator. I contend that many in our generation share a similar familiarity.  And this familiarity helps us to recognize when someone is being insincere. 

Our recognition is honed by comedians like Stephen Colbert and John Hodgeman and other Daily Show alums.  These guys make us laugh by espousing ideologies and facts they know to be flawed.  We all laugh together because we are in on the joke. And we love the approach because it is so irreverent.

When Stephen Colbert took his unreliable narrator to toast President Bush at last year’s press club dinner he became a mouthpiece for the frustration of our generation.  The older and established set of the Washington Press either didn’t get his approach or didn’t like it.  But our generation saw the video on YouTube and flooded chat room traffic with support. So much support surfaced that the old established New York Times admitted they might have misjudged the speech after all.  

What led the Times and others to misjudge the speech in the first place was their view of the media, which has not shifted along with the view of younger media consumers.  Old time journalists still aspire to speak truth to power.  New media denizens aspire to reveal the absurdity of power.  And their favorite tool is the unreliable narrator.    

It’s now a cliché observation that more young people get their news from Stephen Colbert and John Stewart than the traditional evening news.  Studies have also showed that the audience of these comedy shows tend to be more educated than viewers of Bill O’Reilly or other “news” programs. 

But with all our education and knowledge is our generation really more discerning and enlightened than O’Reilly viewers? We’re in on the joke. But are we in the know? Could we recognize absurd abuse of power in our own communities? And if we did, would we do anything about it other than mock it?

When Douglas Coupland defined Generation X in his novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture he depicted a group of young people so put-off by what they saw and experienced in society that they withdrew into sarcasm and suspicion.  When someone finally gets enough time of work to define this next generation of ours they may depict a group of young people so sarcastic that they have re-engaged with the world in the guise of an unreliable narrator. 

To be fair, it’s true that our generation is not always in on the joke. Borat fools young people too.  He gets a group of young college men from South Carolina, for example, to proudly ham up their alcoholism, sexism, and xenophobia.  But these young men’s ideas are such a sad conflagration of beer commercials, lifestyle magazines, and the Republican politics of anti-affirmative action and anti-immigration or the Democratic politics of anti-outsourcing and trade protections (blame the other for unfair advantages), that I had to question if they weren’t a bit unreliable themselves.  In this age of reality television and user-generated content I have often seen young people mug for cameras in a race to be more ridiculous or demeaning.  These guys on their road trip thought they were giving the cameraman what he wanted.

Our drunk and ignorant ranks aside, has our generation’s penchant for unreliable narrators shaped the political dialogue? As Frank Rich recently observed in the Times:

The 2002 midterms were ridiculed as the ‘Seinfeld’ election — about nothing — and 2006 often does seem like the ‘Colbert’ election, so suffused is it with unreality, or what Mr. Colbert calls ‘truthiness.’ Or perhaps the ‘Borat’ election, after the character created by Mr. Colbert’s equally popular British counterpart, Sacha Baron Cohen, whose mockumentary about the American travels of a crude fictional TV reporter from Kazakhstan opened to great acclaim this weekend. Like both these comedians, our politicians and their media surrogates have been going to extremes this year to blur the difference between truth and truthiness, all the better to confuse the audience.  (Monday November 6, 2006).

Mr. Rich blames media and politicians for our confusion. This seems to imply the important question is whether we can trust the narratives of those in power.  Or whether we have enough knowledge to discern truth from truthiness. 

With so much change afoot in Washington, Frank Rich might argue that knowledge won out and truth prevailed in the last election.  I would caution that it is not always knowledge that reveals unreliable narrators.  Sometimes its just a good old fashioned sense of irony. And while irony is good for a laugh, it often results in more cynicism than change.

The question for our generation is whether Borat and Stephen Colbert do the important work of exposing social ills so that we can engage to mitigate them, or, if their work only allays our guilt about these ills by letting us in on the joke. 

Wait a minute, what’s that smell? Oh god, the fish is burning. I guess it’s time to get back to your dinner party. Maybe we should ask your friends date what they make of today’s unreliable narrators and whether they think being in on the joke is the same as being in the know.

Lawrence Kasden taught me everything I know about archaeology. He wrote Raiders of the Lost Ark. Well he wrote part of it anyway.  And if he wrote the part that demonstrates archaeologists’ scientific techniques for retrieval of Amazonian golden idols from booby-trapped altars, then he taught me everything I know.  If you happen to be reading this from a satellite connected web-enabled device deep in Brazil, I warn you, be careful not to overfill the pouch with sand. And one more thing, you may also find a snake on your plane upon your return, try not to be alarmed.

For those of you less far afield, and with a few moments to spare, I offer some other, less practical, insights offered by the body of Mr. Lawrence Kasden’s work for your consideration.  For it just so happens that Mr. Kasden's social scientific contributions were not limited to ancient cultures but also reached into contemporary sociology.  His seminal work on navel-gazing narcissism, The Big Chill, invigorated a pseudo-science devoted solely to the examination of differences between individuals that arise because of differences in their year of birth and coming of age.  At first, new work in this field focused on the unique challenges facing people born in the years following the second world war. But over time it grew to include analysis of people born well before the second world war, who the people born after it came to call the greatest generation, as well as analysis of people born after the people born after the second world war, who they came to call generation X.    

Some strains of this research have yielded a wealth of useful insights.  Mr. Kasden’s work, for instance, raised an important question about the dynamics of ageing and its implications for stereotypical generational classifications.  After Kasden’s work, researchers sought answers to a pressing question: Just how did all those hippies turn into yuppies so quickly?  In the late 1980s, a guest lecturer at a venerable institution of social science theory, A&E’s an evening at the Improv, employed a technique that George Costanza later defined as “another one of those ‘did you ever notice?’ schticks,” to explore this question in greater detail.  After clearly laying out the problem at hand (“so what’s the deal with these yuppies anyway?), this lecturer posited that the shift may have occurred on a street corner on the edges of a San Francisco business district when a young gentleman of bohemian grooming and attire became distracted by a passing symbol of conspicuous consumption.  The lecturer posited that this gentelmen’s thoughts may well have progressed from world peace and universal love to admiration for a BMW sedan. “Peace… love… nice beamer,” as the lecturer explained.  

Respected theorists in attendance at the Improv, recognizing the inherent difficulty that the lecturer faced in reconciling these stereo-typical associations of two eras despite their chronological proximity, were driven to raucous joy at his hypothesis.  To better understand this response, I’ll borrow, if I may, a deconstructive critique pioneered by Jon Stewart.  You see, it’s funny cause hippies and yuppies look and act real different but some of them were the same people, so there’s humor in the juxtaposition. (note: Stewart’s technique is most effective if you pronounce each syllable of juxtaposition slowly and don a quizzical face, pause a beat, and launch into your next thought with a laugh). 

Such juxtapositions are common in other eras as well. Take our current times for example.  Over the last ten years or so, images of young people in popular media have shifted from slacker, cynical, chat-room monkeys to creative, media-savvy, information technology gurus.  Business journals have pushed the commercial and management implications of this shift into the public consciousness.  Now reporters often assess organizations’ potential according to their ability to attract a new generation of native web surfers and integrate their ideas with those of old fuddy duddy web-migrant managers.  Better keep it interesting for these hip new surfers, they warn, just because they wear flip flops to work doesn’t mean they won’t run out on their job if a better offer floats their way. 

With information technology changing organizations, media, and even geography (thank you Mr. Freidman for dispelling the myth about the earth being round, I hope you take on the moon landing next) it seems fair to ask if generational differences are a useful way to interpret these changes. It does seem that it’s people, and their use of technologies rather than the technical equipment itself, that most change systems.   Telecoms buried enough fiber optic back in the late 1990s for IP digital content to supplant broadcast television as the primary model for entertainment distribution.  But it wasn’t until the last two years or so, when people began to consistently turn to You Tube or their Ipod for video that the shift from the broadcast model began. Eminent scholar Conan O’Brien identified this trend in a key-note address before the academy of television arts & sciences (Emmys) last year.

So, are young people responsible for this change? Is NBC’s recent announcement that its primary business is no longer television broadcast, simply a reflection that its target demographic increasingly hails from the so-called net generation?  And if this net generation can change television as we know it, is there any facet of society they will spare?  Certainly politics isn’t safe.  If fund-raising schedules and voting records are any indication, airing television advertisements is politicians single highest priority for the United States. What will happen if those ads have to be run on solely on the internet? Even worse, what happens if they have to pander to a net generation that is sarcastic and irreverent and detached?

These are tough questions.  Be sure to thank Lawrence Kasden next time you see him, for introducing a technique to help answer them.  Net generation,  it’s time for some serious navel-gazing about this generation of ours that comes after the generation after the generation that enthralled us all with their miraculous shift from hippies to yuppies.  It’s time for our weekend reunion. And its only fitting that our weekend reunion would actually be a weblog done on the sly from a non-descript office building in the suburb of America's capitol.

As we set forth to examine these important questions about our generation and its impact on society and indeed the universe, it seems important to note that most of what we will have to discuss does not stray much from the media universe.  It is entirely possible, for example, that the entire notion of generational differences is in fact a misleading heuristic developed by marketers whose primary goal is to sell more soap.  Is our net generation really so different from generation X? Were hippies ever all that different from yuppies?  Consumption patterns and choices in media are often the only markers we use to examine these questions.  Is it significant, for instance, that popular media’s defining moment of the great peace movement of the late 1960s, was in fact a media event itself, a rock concert?  And while it may be noteworthy that recent generations are sarcastic and drawn to unreliable narrators (if this blog is not enough evidence of a penchant for unreliable narrators, consider 80% of the postings on McSweeney’s or the popularity of Stephen Colbert or the soon-to-be remarkable popularity of Sacha Baron Cohen).  It may also be noteworthy that sarcasm has been around as long as language itself and that James Fennimore Cooper often employed an unreliable narrator to challenge European-Americans perceptions of native peoples.  (To no avail of course, is that grounds for cynicism?).

In any case, I hope you’ll join me in examining these pressing generational non-issues in local and global affairs in the weeks to come.  And perhaps someone could tell me if I can still refer to affairs as being global, which implies roundness, when in fact the media has established that a perfect storm reached a tipping point and the world is now flat.

 Ryan Tuggle is president of the Lawrence Kasden fan club. He thinks he stole the idea of parodying biographies from the Onion but he could be mistaken.