MTV Trash

Just the other day, I stopped in a pizza joint by my house for a quick bite to eat. The pizza is decent, nothing spectacular, but it’s cheap, so it suits me well when I’m trying to be frugal. This particular pizzeria is a popular spot for Italian adolescents. During peak hours, the times when I make it a point not to go there, the place is jammed with loud teenagers, sitting inside at the tables and hanging around outside, chomping away at pizza as they sit on their scooters, parked up on the sidewalk in typical chockablock Italian fashion.

As is usual for me, I timed this visit during a lull in the restaurant’s business to avoid the shoulder-to-shoulder experience with rambunctious Italian teenyboppers. As I was eating, the television nestled in the corner was blasting MTV, accompanied of course, with the requisite Italian subtitles. I have to confess, I’m really something of a pop-cultural naïf when it comes to MTV; I’ve hardly ever watched it, so most of what I do know about it has come to me second or even third-hand. But judging from the painful five or ten minutes I caught while eating a few slices of mediocre pizza, I have to officially declare my professed naïveté as a badge of honor. Okay, before I proceed, I’ll issue a preemptive rejoinder to the inevitable accusation of being an uptight Catholic prude or boring killjoy: No one who revels in Renaissance and Baroque art, as I do, can be successfully pinned down as a through and through puritan. But what I was getting from MTV the other day was, to put it as succinctly as possible, banal filth. The network probably has the singular honor of boasting that it has perfected the art of imbecilic gutter entertainment to a T. Indeed, the most bizarre and disturbing thing about the particular show of the hour was how mightily it strove to make what can only be described as sleaze (lame jokes about pornography, sleeping around, etc.) appear as something hip and normal to young people. These shows, while doubtlessly mindless and hollow as a tin can in substance, nonetheless reflect an intelligent design of sorts, as they are carefully crafted to seduce and bag impressionable youth.

A friend of mine once coined the useful phrase “coliseum entertainment” to describe the cultural phenomenon of highly addictive, yet thoroughly asinine, television reality shows. I thought it was a pretty smooth appellation. The basic gist is that some “entertainment” quite literally entrances us, and has a soporific effect on those higher faculties that would otherwise alert us to the danger, and stupidity, posed by the experience. We become, in a sense, lost within ourselves, as the rush of passions, adrenalin and curiosity overwhelm our psyche. After all, what was the entertainment of choice in the august days of ancient Rome: The mob enthralled by an endless stream of macabre battle spectacles, all unfolding on the blood-soaked sand of the coliseum. The Academy Award winning film Gladiator magnificently captured this gruesome historical anecdote of roma antica.

Our enlightened twenty-first century sensibilities are rightly scandalized at the thought of thousands of gawking spectators whipped into a frenzy at the sight of bloody face-offs between human beings, hell-bent on tearing each other part. Unfortunately, much of the mainstream, pop-culture entertainment of today, while lacking the gory edge of Roman times, nevertheless takes direct aim at stimulating and controlling our basest passions, particularly in the arena of unrestricted sexual license. The modern day forum for much of what passes as entertainment these days unfolds on television; late night shows and MTV in particular. It’s certainly tragic that these shows, dripping with a poisonous ideology that exploits human sexuality, have ensnared legions of insecure teenagers and twenty-somethings.

As I watched the show at the pizzeria I couldn’t help asking: “Is that the best they’ve got to offer my generation?” I was more than a little irked and insulted at the thought of highfalutin, ne’er-do-well network execs and producers seated around a large table, presuming to know what I wanted to see and proceeding further, based on their muddled theories, to concoct some newfangled brand of degenerate coliseum-style entertainment, glossed-over of course, with a gauzy veneer of glamour and celebrity. I would like to believe that the majority of American youth do not reflect, in their everyday lives and choices, the debauched stereotype graphed onto them en masse by the know-it-alls at MTV. And what’s more, I certainly hope that the majority of American youth, guided and enlightened by basic common sense and decency, are not attracted to such shows.

However, that this crooked caricature of American youth is interminably beamed around the world particularly galls me. While it is unfortunately true that many youth do follow the kind of lifestyle represented and promoted by the MTV culture, it would be unfair to generalize and assume that all, or even a majority, follow such a path. And, given the artificially overrated, but nevertheless high-profile, status MTV has attained as a reputable outlet for young lads in search of quality leisure time, is there any wonder why people the world over make moral correlations between the decadent Roman Empire of Caligula’s day and the United States of today? In fact, if I was living in an isolated village in country bled mercilessly by the abuses of the most recent Johnny come lately dictator who, nevertheless, had me convinced that America was to blame for all of my problems and further, if I was exposed regularly to glitzy American life as depicted on MTV, I would understandably arrive at some pretty harsh conclusions about the good ol’ U.S. of A. “Down with Rome!” So Americans, in addition to being incensed at the corrupting influence MTV effects on the nation’s youth, should also express outrage at the disservice MTV is doing to our image across the globe.