"The Lasagna Zone":
The Anxiety of Endless Consumption
"Garfield and Friends" (broadcast October 7, 1989) also contains episodes that treat the anxiety of obsolescence—such as the opening segment, where Binky, "the most popular kid show host on TV," is suddenly replaced by "Bowling for Meatloaf" because it's "more intellectual than a clown show"; or the "Garfield quickie" that follows, where Booker reflexively asks: "What do you get when you cross a lasagna-loving cat with a bunch of zany farm animals?" and Sheldon replies: "You get picked up for another season!" Yet the "Lasagna Zone" episode is far more representative of the series as a whole, in that it focuses both on Garfield's constant alternation between extreme boredom and anxiety and on his dual consumerist obsessions with eating and watching TV ("Microwave lasagna and a TV set—what more could
anyone ask out of life!"). Beverle Houston theorizes the connection thus: "In its endless flow of text, [television] suggests the first flow of nourishment in and from the mother's body, evoking a moment when the emerging sexual drive is still closely linked to—propped on—the life-and-death urgency of the feeding instinct. . . . It is no accident that the main textbook in American television studies is called The Tube of Plenty ."[46]
Like "Muppet Babies," "Garfield and Friends" constantly alludes to other TV shows and movies, but it also focuses on the tension TV creates in positioning its spectator both as a unique individual with distinctive tastes, like Garfield (who is thus distinguished from other feline media stars like Heathcliff, Tom, and Sylvester), and as part of a mass audience with common appetites. This opposition is reflected in the program's title, which pairs the unique Garfield with his anonymous friends (who nevertheless include a creative pig named Orson, a name that evokes the unique Orson Welles). In the opening title sequence, where Garfield is featured as star performer before a chorus line of "friends," he aggressively confronts his viewer(s) in direct address: "Hey you with the gum, I hope you've got enough for everybody. [Then, in voice-over:] Here are some commercials, and then, more of ME!" Like Miss Piggy, the narcissistic Garfield flaunts his mask of uniqueness, as if to guard against the postmodernist erasure of boundaries.
This opposition between the individual and the species is intensified by the choice of an animal as protagonist. In his discussion of totemism, Claude Lévi-Strauss quotes Henri Bergson as saying:
To recognize a man means to distinguish him from other men; but to recognize an animal is normally to decide what species it belongs to. . . . An animal lacks concreteness and individuality, it appears essentially as a quality
and thus essentially as a class." It is this direct perception of the class, through the individuals, which characterizes the relation between man and the animal or plant, and it is this also which helps us to understand "this singular thing that is totemism.[47]
Our consumer culture has developed a new form of totemism in which we alleviate anxiety and gain an illusory sense of empowerment by bestowing our conception of human individuality onto animals—by giving homes to them (rather than to orphans or the homeless, who themselves are frequently treated as an animal species devoid of individuality); by letting them substitute for missing members of the dysfunctional family; by interpellating them as icons of uniqueness with unusual names like Heathcliff, Garfield, and Orson; and by transforming them into voracious consumers for whom we are always buying new products and with whom we therefore increasingly identify. This process is intensified when animals appear in the doubly domesticated realm of television, where they are often identified by excesses of human desire coded as "functional difference" (like Coyote's obsession with Road Runner, the Turtles' passion for pizza, and Garfield's lust for lasagna), particularly since desire—as opposed to instinctual drive—helps to distinguish humans from other animals. By identifying with such anthropomorphized creatures, spectators acknowledge their own slipperiness as signifiers—as both animal and human—while still affirming their "uniqueness" as the animal that possesses the functional difference of human subjectivity.
Identification with animals is especially appealing to kiddie spectators, who, like Animal, Cookie Monster, and Slimer, are still in the process of what Althusser calls "the long forced march which makes mammiferous larvae into
human children, masculine or feminine subjects ."[48] In one experimental study where ninety-six third-graders (with a median age of eight and a half) were asked to respond to two stories, one with human characters, the other with animals, 74 percent of the children preferred the animal stories, perhaps because they were less emotionally involving and therefore aroused less anxiety about "good" versus "bad" (that is, socially disapproved) behavior.[49] Even for us adults in our congealed subject positions, identification with animals helps us regain some of the lost fetal flexibility that is so central to a popular toy genre like transformers, to the current craze for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and to a character like Sheldon in "Garfield and Friends," a chick only half out of his shell. Instead of evoking a single individual or species, these creatures suggest a system—of evolution, reproduction, biological development, acculturation, or transmedia intertextuality. Identification with such creatures serves as an entrance into these larger systems, where traditional boundaries are ambiguous. In describing our age of cyborgs, for example, Donna Haraway claims: "The dichotomies between mind and body, animal and human, organism and machine, public and private, nature and culture, men and women, primitive and civilized are all in question ideologically."[50]
Animal signifiers also help us to see beyond the waning nuclear family and the growing influence of the single mother by "naturalizing" alternative models for human bonding. Consider the buddy relationship between Garfield and his bachelor owner, John; the loyal pack or gang on "Heathcliff," "California Raisins," and "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles"; the multiracial nursery on "Muppet Babies" (which reminds one of day care or a foster home); and the integrated neighborhood on "Sesame Street," including numerous species that do not easily fit into a single nuclear
Image not available.
The little chick Booker and his brother Sheldon, who is a transformer only half out
of his shell, star in the quickie that follows "The Lasagna Zone."
© 1989 United Feature Syndicate.
family (an issue that is the thematic focus of the Muppet movie Follow that Bird ).
These instabilities of the subject and its oscillations between pleasure and anxiety, passivity and control, are the focus of "The Lasagna Zone." In this clever parody of "The Twilight Zone," we are entreated (in direct address) by a cartoon Rod Serling to "consider, if you will, the case of one Garfield the cat," who, after dropping lasagna on his owner John's new satellite dish, "finds himself in the wrong end of that cathode ray tube." Garfield's entry into the TV screen parodies the celebrated dream sequence from Sherlock Junior , where Buster enters the fictional world of the movie he's projecting. In "The Lasagna Zone," this bizarre premise generates TV parodies within a film parody within a TV
Image not available.
An animated Rod Serling, as on-screen narrator, describes Garfield's
entry into "The Lasagna Zone." © 1989 United Feature Syndicate.
parody—a multilayered structure like lasagna and like the TV supertext (which "Garfield and Friends" reproduces with its unpredictable segmentation).
Garfield's anxious entry into the "lasagna zone" (that intermediate space between reality and play) can also be read as a variant of the sleep-bargaining genre. After a dialogue with John, who urges him to go to bed and who warns against staying up all night, Garfield continues the dialogue with the TV set, in a liminal state between waking and sleep. Compulsively consuming more images and lasagna to keep himself awake and alive, he projects his bedtime fears of castration, obsolescence, and death onto the TV set and its stream of images, those transitional objects with which he totally identifies. Thus, not only does Garfield consume TV,
but TV consumes Garfield. As Brooks predicts, the repetition compulsion seeks "to master the flood of stimuli," yet every switch of the dial brings a new short circuit, and every new fiction threatens him with another premature death.[51]
Once Garfield is inside the diegetic imaginary of television, with its paradoxical combination of endless flow and constant interruptions, the sequence focuses on the television medium itself. The source of the image is not the light beam from a nearby projector, as in cinema, but a signal that comes from outer space. (Earlier, when Garfield was adjusting the satellite dish, he remarked: "I want to watch a western . . . I'll point it toward Texas.") The segmentation of TV programming is intensified by the changing of channels through the remote control unit, which is manually operated by Garfield's canine friend, Odie, though Garfield tells him (through direct address) when to push the button.
John's satellite dish receives over one hundred channels and the pace of the channel switching keeps accelerating; there is no escape for Garfield. Each program proves more boring in its familiarity, and each new fictional world more threatening than the previous one. Garfield's coherence as a signifier is destabilized by a series of grotesque masquerades, and his assimilation and accommodation of the TV image are thrown off balance. Garfield becomes a black-and-white monster in a Frankenstein movie, a "colorized" football receiver chased by the opposing team, a macho cowboy in a card game (where the betting of two horses, two pianos, and two mayors recalls a surreal image from Buñuel's Un Chien andalou ), a ballerina in pink tutu in Swan Lake , a survivor on a deserted island about to be eaten by a gorilla, a participant in the Binky clown show, and a bargain in a used-pet emporium ("Here's a 1978 wide-bodied pussy cat with all the standard equipment—whiskers, claws, fleas, the works!").
While Garfield's masquerade as a ballerina may seem to
Image not available.
When Garfield is inside the fictional world of television,
he speaks to his privileged canine spectator Odie in direct
address and at one point actually faces him, as in a mirror relation.
© 1989 United Feature Syndicate.
undermine the rigid gender boundaries that are ordinarily reinforced in children's programming, this female role is presented as merely one of a series of monstrous or perilous subject positions to be rejected. Within this catalogue, the one identification that appropriately proves impossible to evade is that of a commodity—for after awakening and returning to his spectator position, Garfield retains the plaid muffler, one of the accessories he acquired (and one of the best visual puns) in the used-pet emporium.
Before Garfield can escape from the TV set, though, the remote control unit breaks down, as if revealing the falseness of its promise of empowerment. Consequently, Garfield is forced to keep running as the background images con-
Image not available.
Garfield's appearance as a ballerina in tutu with a chorus line is one of the rare moments
when his gender is compromised. ©1989 United Feature Syndicate.
tinue to change at an accelerated pace, placing him on Gilligan's island, in a toothpaste commercial, the weather report, the home shopping channel, an episode of Booker and Sheldon from his own "Garfield and Friends," and so on. Finally Garfield shouts, "Odie, help, my vertical hold is slipping," and images roll by in an indecipherable blur, ending this montage sequence that so clearly extends the vertical axis of a paradigm onto the syntagmatic plane.
Such transformative intertextuality is even more intense in the fall 1990 season of "Garfield and Friends," which premiered on CBS in its new 9:00 A.M. time slot on Saturday, October 13, with a range of parodies including "The Hound of the Arbuckles," "Moby Duck," "Odilocks and the Three Cats," and "Quack to the Future." Even the toys advertised
Image not available.
Garfield's hand in a card game is called with two horses, two mayors, and a piano, an image
that evokes one of the most subversive moments from Buñuel's surrealist classic
Un Chien andalou . ©1989 United Feature Syndicate.
between these segments were promoted for their protean ability to be interactively transformed by young consumers—for instance, Barbies with "cool cut hair" that can be bobbed and restored, and "Baby Uh-Ohs" with changeable diapers. Appropriating the theme of active imagination from "Muppet Babies," the new Garfield show varies this credo by linking it primarily to books (rather than to television, movies, and toys), yet in fact the show demonstrates television's powers of home delivery not just for literature, but for movies and any other product.
The theme of creative imagination is explicitly introduced in the first episode, where, after a mysterious technical breakdown prevents Garfield from watching a Sherlock
Holmes movie on TV, John tells him that books (in this case, the Conan Doyle novel on which the movie was based) are better than TV or movie adaptations because they allow you to use your own imagination to fill in the pictures. Yet this statement also implies that (in contrast to books) the visual mass media provide a better analogue for the human imagination at work—an idea that is reinforced when Garfield, instead of finishing the Conan Doyle novel, chooses to go to sleep "and have a dream sequence." In simulating dreams (the ultimate adaptive medium that internalizes consumerist desire for external products), television displays its full transformative powers, both as a source for and adaptation of dreams and other audiovisual media. In Garfield's personal dream adaptation of "The Hound of the Baskervilles," he plays a brainy Dr. Watson to an obtuse Sherlock Holmes, whose character owes more to the animated TV star Inspector Gadget (whose cases are actually solved by his clever dog, Brain) than to Conan Doyle's brilliant detective. Garfield's master, John Arbuckles, plays the client in search of his lost dog, who sounds suspiciously like Odie. After Garfield awakens from his dream, he finds the missing Odie entangled in the TV antenna wire—thus solving two mysteries at once. But Master John, like Inspector Gadget, takes all the credit. Ironically, then, in adapting the classic literary source, both Garfield's dream and his TV series make us reread Sherlock Holmes through the filter of the parodic TV detective Inspector Gadget (not vice versa), for the subversive Garfield identifies with and therefore privileges the underdog/undercat/undermedium, which prove to be superior after all.
The theme of creative adaptation is also explicitly echoed in Orson's song celebrating imagination that introduces the second episode. In this parody of Moby-Dick , Orson the pig, playing Ishmael, alludes to other familiar whale tales like Pinocchio and the biblical story of Jonah. Yet instead of
sticking with the parody of the whale tale, the episode turns into a series of imaginative generic transformations, determined not by TV channel switching as in "The Lasagna Zone" or by movies, television, and toys as in "Muppet Babies," but by the books Orson chooses to read. By projecting a series of adventure books onto the syntagmatic plane of the narrative, the episode establishes a paradigm of monsters, whose members (whale, dinosaur, polar bear) all prove highly adaptable to the television medium. But when Orson tries to escape from this paradigm by picking a coloring book as a "safe choice," he inadvertently positions colorization as a monster, whose roots can be traced back to coloring books and animation and which now threatens the status of personal choice in movies and television. Thus the intertextual connections among commodities combined in a series prove far more powerful than individual choice—a paradox that is central to all commercial television and especially to advertising discourse. This disavowal of the consumer's choice is also echoed in Garfield's precommercial tag line, where he threatens to kill the pet dog of any spectator who dares switch to another channel.
Despite these overt threats to the viewer in the new season, nowhere is the anxiety of subject positioning more intense than in "The Lasagna Zone," for in that episode John's repeated warning comes true: by obsessively watching too much television, Garfield has become one himself—a malleable receiver, a consumable object of exchange with a broken "joystick." This spectator position, Beverle Houston has persuasively argued, describes how the female subject has been theorized under patriarchy (a perspective that makes Garfield's female masquerade in pink tutu more resonant):
The sliding from the imaginary pleasure of mastery through the passivity of being ourselves the object of di-
rect address and the seductive gaze; the attendant reduced stake in an apparent coherence of the signified; the multiple identifications called for in the movement from fiction to fiction and mode to mode; finally, the forced acceptance of painful delay, deferral, waiting—these characteristics put all of television's spectators into the situation provided for the feminine in theories of subjectivity as well as in her actual development and practice in patriarchy.
At times, Houston's analysis of television's unique form of spectator positioning precisely defines Garfield's plight: "Rather than suturing the viewer further into a visually reevoked dream of plenitude [as in cinema], it keeps the ego at a near-panic level of activity, trying, virtually from moment to moment, to control the situation, trying to take some satisfaction, to get some rest from the constant changes . . . taking something like pleasure in the terror of desire itself."[52]
Whereas Garfield's desperate situation results from his accidental entry into a warp zone, this "near-panic activity to control constant changes" exactly describes how video games ordinarily position the active player, for there "warp zones" and multiple worlds are built into the system and "games and their organization . . . forestall the frightening aspect of playing."[53] Although Houston argues that "in its suggestion of better possibilities, the channel changer reiterates lack . . . [and] further weakens our chance of immersion,"[54] one could also argue that the remote control box (or "joystick") potentially performs a sex change on spectator positioning,[55] changing the TV viewer from a passive watcher to an active player (or, put in Applebee's cognitive terms, from the spectator mode that responds to the whole to the interactive mode that responds piecemeal).
In this pivotal sequence, then, the meaning of "the twilight zone" is expanded beyond mere allusions to earlier texts like the Rod Serling sci-fi series and Buster Keaton's Sherlock Junior to include a rich intertextual prefiguring of the constructed "virtual reality" (VR) one finds in video games and in the latest interactive multimedia (the kinds of VR that were also prefigured in films as diverse as Celine and Julie Go Boating [1974], Looker [1981], and Total Recall [1990] and were greatly elaborated in William Gibson's popular novel Neuromancer [1984]). I am thinking, for example, of the Mandala System by Vivid Effects (on exhibit in Tech 2000), where an on-line video camera records the live performance of the player and the sounds that he or she makes on imaginary instruments, then instantly integrates them within a prerecorded music video now being displayed; or of VPL's electronic helmet, goggles, and glove that enable a player to perceive, enter, and manipulate a three-dimensional VR world of computer-generated images with a mere turn of the head or twist of the hand; or of the new systems, developed with funding from the telephone industry, where two players can meet and interact in a fantasy VR environment of their choice—a technology with great potential for transforming telephone sex. Originally developed for tank warfare and for repairing spaceships in outer space, these experiments with VR promise to expand the same illusory freedoms that early cinema granted its oppressed urban spectators, with similar ideological effects—at least as described by Walter Benjamin: "Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling."[56]