the timboucher experience

My friend John and I were just discussing how modern tv sitcoms are a really good way to understand polytheism. I don’t think I ever posted about this before, so I thought I’d give it a whirl. From this perspective, I’m regarding polytheism as a mental model or state, wherein different faculties and functions of the mind are expressed symbolically by characters and their interactions with one another.

The most literal example of this idea is that weird tv show from the early ninties, Herman’s Head. In case you never watched it or don’t remember it all that well, it was rather unusual because it had both an exterior and interior cast of characters. By that, I mean that there was the normal group of characters consisting of friends and coworkers, just like you have in any sitcom. But then, the gimmick of the show was that you also saw characters who represented his internal drives. His intellect was represented by a character called Genius; his fears by Wimp; his sensitive womanly side by a female character, Angel. And then you also had the guy who represented his lust, named Animal.

I actually don’t remember the show tremendously well, but I know that scenes in it basically consisted of edits between what was happening in Herman’s exterior life, and how all the internal drives were interacting based on that. You could compare this show to that old Clash of the Titans movie, where in some scenes, you see the gods on Mount Olympus interacting with one another (inside Herman’s head), and other scenes consisting of events happening on the world below. (On a side note, two of that show’s actors later went onto became famous on the Simpsons, Hank Azaria and Yeardley Smith.)

Moving along the spectrum, you have then run into shows like Seinfeld, with a central character and supporting cast. Where in Herman’s Head, exterior and interior characters were split, in these types of shows the inner & outer are fused together. In some sense, you could say that George, Kramer, Elaine (and Neumann) are all representative of Jerry’s internal drives (just like in Herman’s Head), but that they have been projected outward and “mapped” onto other characters in his life. That is, his “gods” came down from Mount Olympus. [Note: James pointed out the Seinfeld characters are based on real people, but I'm trying to do a fanciful/psychological interpretation of the whole thing - SO THERE.]

And then past that, you have shows like Friends which are based around an ensemble cast, with somewhat mutable relationships, operating around the constraints of some basic patterns. Since there’s no one central character, it’s hard to say one character is another’s projected internal drive (god) figure. Maybe they are all of them projecting their internal struggles onto one another (which is pretty much how every single one of us lives our lives for real).

Or, I might venture the guess that for the viewers of this show (and any other, ultimately) the effectiveness of it comes from the fact that the audience is the central character who does the projecting and the mapping of our internal drives onto these external figures. Since we identify parts of ourselves in them, they take on a sort of numinous mythical quality. And this process is what I would say probably causes “celebrity worship,” because we get in the habit of projecting personal interior contents onto these other people in ritualized settings (ie, watching tv, sitting in a movie theatre, etc).

• Celebrites as Modern Day Greek Gods
• Arab on Radar
• Philosophical Paganism
• Biblical Polytheism
• Feel-Good Paganism