TKing

Conservative American pundit and public intellectual William F. Buckley Jr. was host of the television series Firing Line from 1966 until 1999, making it the longest running talk show in history to have a single host. The format was simple: Buckley had on one or several guests who were qualified to have something to say on a given topic. He and they would discuss and often debate that topic. As Buckley put it, "the show is based on the proposition that an interesting person can be interesting for sixty minutes consecutively." The show was noted for its formal, respectful tone as well as its generally high intellectual calibre.

Despite the success of the show, Buckley is perhaps best remembered for his extended television confrontation with liberal intellectual Gore Vidal, not on Firing Line, in which both men dispensed with intellectual discourse and viciously insulted each other.

Buckley is often credited as an important public intellectual of his time, and also for his more unwitting contribution to the kind of incendiary insult punditry we often see in contemporary talk TV, both right (Fox News etc) and left (Bill Maher etc).

Examine the legacy of Buckley the debater, and how he changed the way politics is discussed on television.

Comedian Tim Heidecker first became famous for his oddball sketch comedy television series Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! Since the show’s run ended in 2010, he has pursued a number of creative projects in a range of media, including stand-up comedy, two rock albums with the duo Heidecker and Wood, and the web/television series On Cinema and Decker, as well as several podcast appearances and a sustained social media presence.

In many of these projects, Tim plays a version of himself as the consummate Hollywood boor: ill-tempered, egotistical, pretentious, vulgar, and desperately out of touch.

What does this character represent, and why does he have such appeal? Is he in fact one consistent character? How does the Heidecker persona change from one context to the next? What factors remain consistent, and how has the persona evolved over time?

Consider, also, the historical precedents for such a figure, such as Andy Kauffman’s toying with the media and Stephen Colbert’s persona on The Colbert Report, even characters like Barry Humphries’ Dame Edna.

Sausage Party, an R-rated animated feature, has provoked controversy since its release earlier this month. Many critics say that the film makes distasteful use of ethnic, religious and sexual stereotypes, perpetuating offensive associations that have long plagued Hollywood and western culture generally. However, as some of defenders of the film have pointed out, the characters in Sausage Party are not human beings, but rather products made by humans, and so represent and enact the assumptions embedded in the society that produced them. Such being the case, the defenders go on, the world in which the film takes place offers a space to explore the relation between these stereotypes and the culture from which they emerge.

Is Sausage Party an offensive film? Is its play with stereotype clever, or just lazy? Is it totally out of line, or does it constitute a legitimate satire of Hollywood’s tendency to depend on stereotype?

Often, I find myself speaking up for Ang Lee’s Hulk, a film that is widely disregarded as slow, pretentious and generally misguided in its execution. Inevitably, the matter of the Gamma-ridden poodles will be brought up. However, I hold up Hulk as an artifact of the early days of the present super movie craze when each film was a distinct treatment of its source material, and each time the artistic voice of the director brought something new. This is before the monetary and perceived artistic success of one or two comic book movies, needless to name here, came in and flattened everything out. Is anybody with me?