Finding brilliance in Beavis and Butt-Head

About 30 years ago, an academic named Allan Bloom wandered out of Chicago’s South Side muttering something about “the closing of the American mind.” He wrote a book with that title that became an unlikely best-seller — one of those books that a lot of us buy but few of us read — that was met with polarized reviews. His premise was that American culture was contemptible; that the students he encountered every day as a professor were not only ignorant but — through years of exposure to vulgar sensations, chief among them rock music — had been desensitized to beauty.

Critics mainly lined up along political lines. Conservatives cheered Bloom, who called ’80s-era America “a Disneyland version of the Weimar Republic for the whole family” and argued that the cultural upheaval of the ’60s and ’70s was more a result of sloppy self-indulgence than true liberation. Liberals thought his book cruel and antidemocratic. David Rieff, a senior editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, wrote that The Closing of the American Mind was a book ‘“decent people would be ashamed of having written.”

I read the book. And I thought Allan Bloom (his name, some reviewers noted, might have been a little too on the nose had he been a fictional character) might have been right when he argued that we had become dis-

connected from the great traditions of Western thought. His complaint was that we had lost the thread, that our society had become politically correct and devoid of intellectual rigor. If you believe beauty is only in the eye of the beholder, that there is no objective standard, you fail to value that of genuine worth.

While Bloom argued for Apollonian structure for a serious moral approach to living, he seemed to deny (in his book at least; in real life he was a not-so-closeted hedonist) the vital need for Dionysian release. Human beings need fun, they need silliness and play. And people like Mick Jagger (whom Bloom dismissed as a “drag queen”), Lady Gaga and Tom Waits can produce art of great beauty and lasting worth. There is nothing sacred about those Abraham Lincoln called “the Old Fogies” — human beings have always done remarkable things, and every age produces greatness.

Which brings us to Mike Judge and Beavis and ButtHead. Heh-heh.

If we are to understand our times, it’s probably helpful to rewind at least 60 or so years to the post-war America that — having escaped the bombs that ravaged and rubbled most of the industrialized world — enjoyed a booming economy that allowed marketers to create the demographic class known as teenagers. In a prosperous society, these not-quite adults could delay their entry into the serious workforce. They had leisure time and a bit of discretionary income. And so rock ’n’ roll was created — something for these teenagers to spend their money on.

But we know what happened with rock ’n’ roll — it captured the imagination of the world. Sam Phillips and Elvis Presley set a fire in Memphis that eventually consumed the globe. It started out in commercial innocence, began to take itself seriously, began to be taken seriously by writers and critics, grew decadent, imploded, was revived by punks who restored its true spirit of nihilistic capitalism, rinse, repeat. Now it occupies a place in our culture roughly equivalent to Hollywood, but technology and the sheer ubiquity of the form makes it volatile and unstable.

Roughly 25 years ago, Judge introduced us to Beavis and Butt-Head, stupid young teenage layabouts who existed primarily to deliver bone-chillingly dumb comments about the music videos that were played on MTV. Last week a 12-DVD set titled Beavis and Butt-Head: The Complete Collection ($46.99 retail; street price is somewhat lower) was released, containing all 98 episodes, plus the 1998 feature film Beavis and Butt-Head Do America and a plethora of bonus material, including the original uncut short film Frog Baseball that introduced the characters.

I have a vivid recollection of seeing Frog Baseball as part of an animation festival in 1991. During the early Clinton years I watched the show on MTV rather religiously. As a fan, I’m not surprised that a lot of publicity around this release calls Beavis and ButtHead a “stupid” show. Even a lot of the series’ fans describe it that way.

But it’s not. It’s a smart show about stupid people.

If you happen to be professionally engaged with the products of American pop culture, you get to know the stupid pretty well. You can spend a lot of time and verbiage identifying and classifying various species of the stupid. There is the stupid that thinks it’s smart. There is the inadvertently stupid, and — worst of all — the stupid contrived by people who think they are smarter than the audience.

You probably know all about Beavis and Butt-Head. They are cretins. They are the kind of ugly, barely literate latchkey kids over whom we shake our heads in dismay. They inhabit a Manichean universe divided into things that ‘‘s***’’ or things that are “cool.” They spend some of their time imagining inane and foredoomed schemes to get either money or “chicks” or both (not that they’re smart enough to know what to do with either). Mostly, however, they simply sit on the sofa at Butt-Head’s house, watching music videos and making mindless (although cogent) comments.

Beavis is the skinny one with the blond hair and the heh-heh giggle. He wears a Metallica T-shirt and grins like Jack Nicholson. ButtHead, slightly smarter, is also skinny. He wears an AC/DC T-shirt and can probably beat Beavis up. His braces expose horrible pink gums.

Products of single mothers who never appear onscreen, they are perpetually 14 years old and live in a kind of middle-class suburban squalor in a dingy part of some New West desert town.

While the living room they hang out in is an unhygienic dump, they are not poverty-stricken. Their neighbors have riding lawn mowers and working cars. They are loser loners who have only each other. While they would protest, it is possible to read Beavis and Butt-Head as a kind of love story, a graphic haiku. There is a thread of sadness that runs through each episode. In a way, the boys’ obviousness seems as touching as Krazy Kat’s irrational unrequited longings toward Ignatz Mouse, as heart-giving as Wile E. Coyote’s boundless, unreasonable optimism.

In all candor, we thought they were merely a ’90s fad and would be gone by now. That they could be viewed today — in the 21st century, post-Sept. 11, 2001 — as something other than nostalgia seems amazing. But their American haplessness — their curious but frighteningly common combination of absolute certainty and persistent know-nothingness — rings too true to be dismissed as a joke. Beavis and Butt-Head do not rule, but they abide. And now they probably vote.

In a way, Beavis and ButtHead is a more accurate and useful critique of American culture than The Closing of the American Mind. Both critiques make the same point — that there’s a narcotizing effect to the mindless consumption of light and sound, that in our bourgeois late

capitalist society it’s increasingly possible to slide down solipsistic rabbit holes and become inured to the real occasion for delight and awe.

In the timeless territory of home-video products, Beavis and Butt-Head watch MTV. And they probably watch Beavis and Butt-Head. They probably don’t realize that they are not the heroes of Beavis and Butt-Head. They probably think that they are like Starsky & Hutch or Sonny Crockett and Ricardo Tubbs, that they wouldn’t be starring in a television show unless they were indeed cool.

Beavis and Butt-Head are black holes with no purpose, no goal other than to consume the mass-produced artifacts of our society. They are the sort of arrested adolescents who will never outgrow their MTV or be able to relate to the chicks they covet. To more attuned viewers they might serve as a kind of cautionary tale: This is what watching too much TV (too much MTV) might do to you.

Beavis and Butt-Head has the grace to assume most of its fans aren’t stupid either. It allows us to be complicit in the joke — and the joke is more on the sponsoring network than the putative morons who enjoy the program for its scatological asides and displays of goonery. As nihilistic as the characters may be, Beavis and Butt-Head is a moral work of art. Creator Judge manages the difficult task of acknowledging Beavis’ and Butt-Head’s humanity — the implicit worth of the human soul, no matter how stunted or feral — while condemning their every unthinking act.

Beavis and Butt-Head are stupid; Beavis and Butt-Head is really, really smart.