Arrested Development and Philosophy E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: The Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 369

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT AND PHILOSOPHY Is George Michael's crush on his cousin unnatural? Is it immoral for Lindsay to lie about stealing clothes to hide her job? Is Gob better off living his life in bad faith? What inferences can we draw from Tobias's double-entendres? Are the pictures really of bunkers or balls? The Bluth family's faults, foibles, and character flaws are so excruciatingly familiar that we squirm in painful recognition of the outrageous impulses that we all have but would never act on. The Bluths seem utterly unaware of the gaping distance between their behavior and accepted social norms. Lurking behind this craziness are large moral and philosophical issues to be explored. From Plato to Aristotle, from Descartes to Marx, Arrested Development and Philosophy draws from great philosophical minds to shed new light on the show's key questions and captivating themes, including the nature of self-knowledge and happiness, business ethics and capitalist alienation, social class, the role of error in character development, and much more.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part One: Family First

Chapter 1: Is the Examined Life a Huge Mistake?

The Life of Arrested Development Is Not Worth Living

Michael: “The Good One, the Moral One, the Fool.”

Gob: “They’re Laughing with Me, Michael, They’re Laughing with Me.”

Lindsay: “You Call Yourself an Environmentalist, Why Don’t You Go Club a Few Beavers?”

Tobias: “You Blow Hard.”

The Arresting of Happiness

Chapter 2: Kissing Cousins

The Argument from Naturalism

The Yuck Factor, and the Wisdom of Repugnance

Chapter 3: Freudian Arrested Development

Analysts and Therapists for the Bluths

Use Your Allusion: Freud

Perhaps an Attic Shall I Seek—The Unconscious

Freud’s Company Model

Prove It: Baiting the Unconscious

Shémale and Misreadings

Michael, Marta, Ann Other Freudian Slips

Motherboy, or the Oedipus Complex

Totem . . . : Boyfights

. . . and Taboo: Les Cousins Dangereux

Pop-Pop Gets Put on the Couch?

Chapter 4: Don’t Know Thyself

Gob Isn’t Just Deceiving Himself

Gob Plays His Roles

Be Yourself, Gob

Gob Makes Huge Mistakes in Good Faith

The Wisdom of Bad Faith

Part Two: A Business Model

Chapter 5: Dr. Fünke’s 100 Percent Natural Good-Time Alienation Solution

Happy Bluthday to You! The Bluth Family History

Marx and Alienation—Or, How to Never Succeed in Life While Really, Really Trying

A Case of “Light Treason”: A Man Who Would Do Anything to Make a Buck

Lucille and Gob

Meet the Fünkes

Michael

Don’t Buy This Book! Down with Capitalism!

Chapter 6: Family First

Product Safety: The Cornballer

Marketing Ethics: The Model Home

Treatment of Employees: The Banana Stand and Child Labor

Treatment of Employees: The Office and the Construction Site

International Business: “Light” Treason

Moral Development Arrested

Chapter 7: Bourgeois Bluths

Your Uncle Doesn’t Not Work Here Anymore: Marx, Labor, and Capital

It’s a Gaming Ship: Consumption and Leisure

There’s Always Money in the Banana Stand: Class Status and Performance

I Thought You Meant of the Things You Eat: the Bluths and the Politics of the Family

The Important Thing Is That You Guys Don’t Lose Focus on Yourselves: Narcissism as a Crisis of Bourgeois Identity

Part Three: Some Huge Mistakes

Chapter 8: What Whitey Isn’t Ready to Hear

You There, Reading This Book . . .

Whatever I Do, I Won’t Quote Hegel

It Ain’t Easy Bein’ White

Stuff Whitey Isn’t Ready to Hear; African-Americany Might Not Be Ready, Either . . .

An Ethics of Identity

Chapter 9: “I Just Blue Myself”

I Christen This Ship the Lucille

“I’ve Been a Horrible Mother.”

“Blueing” Oneself

The Hearer Doesn’t Just Lay There, Michael, If That’s What You Were Thinking

Chapter 10: To Bias Tobias

How to Solve a Problem Like Tobias

A Gender Enigma

The Man Inside Him

Mister Gay

Tobias, the Blow Hard

Denying the Man Inside Him

Gender Empowerment

Analraping Tobias

Tobias as the Ideal

Chapter 11: I’m Oscar.com

Bland (I mean, Ann), Marta, the Richters, Aristotle, and the Metaphysical Question

Oh My God . . . You’re Oscar. Dot com. [and George Sr. and the Metaphysical and Persistence Problems]

Larry (the Surrogate), Forget-Me-Nows, and Locke’s Criticism of Descartes

Thomas Reid, Gob, and the Problem of the “Forget-Me-Now”

Part Four: The One Where They Do Epistemology

Chapter 12: You Can’t Do Magic

Career Advice from Aristotle

The Virtues of an Illusionist

Why Gob Can’t Do Magic

The Magical World of Gob

Chapter 13: Is Justified True Bluth Belief Knowledge?

I Didn’t Even Know That There Was a Cabin . . . He Wasn’t Taking Me To . . .

As You May or May Not Know [JTB] and I Have Hit a Bit of a Rough Patch . . .

First You Dump All Over It, Now You Want to Know How It’s [Solved] . . .

Chapter 14: Bunkers and Balls

Choosing Between Wayne Jarvis and Barry Zuckerkorn

The Lenses of Wayne Jarvis, Barry Zuckerkorn, and George Michael Bluth

Q: War! What Is It Good For?! A: Well, Certainly Not Buster Bluth

How to Choose Between Bunkers and Balls

Who Knows What Balls Look Like?

In the Absence of Opie (Sorry, Ron)

Part Five: Solid As Iraq: Politics and Ethics Arrested

Chapter 15: No Touching! George Sr.’s Brush with Treason

“Do You Know How They Punish Treason?”—First Time . . .—“I’ve Never Heard of a Second!”

A Company Whose Founder May Be on Trial for Treason: The Case Against George Sr.

“He’s Guilty, Michael, of Medium to Heavy Treason”: The Degrees of Treason

“We Do Need to Stick Together Like a Family on This”: Why Treason Is Wrong

“I’ve Made a Huge Mistake”

Chapter 16: “I’ve Made a Huge Mistake”

“And I’m Not Afraid to Make Mistakes. Or Have You Forgotten to Read This . . .”

“Nobody Makes a Fool out of Our Family without My Help.”

“. . . She Keeps Saying That God Is Going to Show Me a Sign. The . . . Something of My Ways. Wisdom?”

Chapter 17: The Comedy of Contradiction

Seemingly Deceptive: Lindsay’s Lies

A Jealous Gob

Think of the Children

“I’m Not Sure if My Ethics Teacher Would Love It if I Cheated on My Essay”

Going Both Ways

Beyond the Never-Nude: Nietzsche’s Man of the Future

Contradiction and the Form of Comedy: There’s Always Money in the Banana Stand

Part Six: And On The Epilogue . . .

Chapter 18: And Now the Story of a Wealthy Family Who Lost Everything

Narrating the Bluths: “A Clear-Cut Situation with the Promise of Comedy”

“And That’s Why You Always Leave a Note”: What Lessons Can We Learn From Our Narratives?

“And That’s How You Narrate a Story”—What We Tell, What We Are

Contributors

Index

The Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series

Series Editor: William Irwin

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Edited by Robert Arp

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Green Lantern and Philosophy

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The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Philosophy

Edited by Eric Bronson

Arrested Development and Philosophy

Edited by Kristopher Phillips and J. Jeremy Wisnewski

Copyright © 2012 by John Wiley and Sons. All rights reserved

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey

Published simultaneously in Canada

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

And Now a Few Words from the New CEOs of the Bluth Company

Three years ago we set out to keep this family together . . . and it looks as if . . . (pardon us if we get a bit choked up here) it looks as if we’ve succeeded in that goal. Okay, maybe we’re not really the CEOs of any company, and we certainly didn’t succeed in keeping the Bluths on television, let alone together, but we do have some people to thank for making this book happen.

We really lucked out a number of times and would like to extend serious thanks to our Banana Stand staff both for moving the Bluth Company down one floor to save on costs and ultimately saving the company, and for contributing wonderful works to our book without having made too many huge mistakes. We’re also endlessly grateful to Connie Santistiban for making this work sparkle, and Bill Irwin for his Michael-esque patience in working with Kris’s (very) Buster-esque pestering (panic attacks and all) about the viability of the project.

Kris would like to thank Shawn Akbar and Amber Griffioen for their help and encouragement; you guys are the Gob and Lindsay to his Buster. He would also like to thank various co-graduate students at the U of I for reading papers and giving him invaluable feedback, in particular Seth Jones, Sam Taylor, and Matt Drabek. Kris would also like to extend thanks to his parents Jeff and Joyce Phillips, mostly for being nothing like George Sr. and Lucille, and by that he means, for encouraging him every step of the way. Most importantly, he would like to thank his wife Nateasa McGuire for reading, re-reading, and listening to him read the papers in this book, for giving him ideas much better than those that he came up with himself, and for all of your support.

Jeremy would like to thank Jackie Seamon for reading through the book, hunting out mistakes, and then yelling about them. He would also like to thank all of those friends who listened to him recite scenes from episodes of Arrested Development, patiently smiling, and indulging him despite the oodles of other things they had to do. You know who you are. Finally, Jeremy would like to thank his wife, Dorothy, for her continuous support. He wouldn’t make it without her. The children also deserve a thank you. It ain’t easy being a philosopher’s kid—so thanks are due to Audrey and Lucian.

Of course, frozen bananas dipped in chocolate deserve the most thanks of all. When things get rough, after all, there’s always money in the Banana Stand.

INTRODUCTION

Kristopher Phillips

This is the story of a wealthy family who lost everything (including their show) and the group of philosophers who had no choice but to write a book about it.

Well, it’s a matter of philosophical debate whether or not we really had a choice in the matter (or ever), but one thing is for sure—we really wanted to.

The reasons for wanting to write on the philosophical underpinnings in Arrested Development are probably as diverse as the characters in the show—I, for one, had many different reasons, including (and certainly not limited to) an intense desire to watch and rewatch the entire series with friends and professors. As I watched, and rewatched, I found myself wondering whether the Bluths really are as unrelatable as they think they are (at least in the third season).

As I watched Buster, the youngest of the Bluth boys and the self-proclaimed “scholar” of the family, it occurred to me that perhaps the show ended prematurely not because the family is weird and difficult to relate to, but rather because each character might be seen to exhibit the traits that we are afraid (“fear turns to anger . . . so frightened inmate number 2 isn’t frightened at all, he’s a crabby old coot!”) that we exhibit in the various roles we fill. For example, I often fear that Buster represents academics in general (or at least perpetual graduate students), especially those of us that tend to study the more esoteric—heady—topics. Buster is someone who is “moderately intelligent” and uses his family’s considerable assets to pursue academic avenues that—well, let’s face it—really don’t offer much by way of preparation for the real world; didn’t everything get mapped out by Magellan, or NASA? Buster’s life embodies the spirit of the question most often asked to students of philosophy: “What are you going to do with that?”

And Buster is not alone in representing what academics might fear about themselves; just take a look at Tobias. Qua (in the role of) academic, Tobias has an impressive resume: He “was chief resident of psychiatry at Mass General for two years and did [his] fellowship in psycholinguistics at MIT.” Not too shabby. Not to mention the fact that he was both a practicing therapist and a practicing analyst—a professional twice over . . . but the business cards almost got him arrested, and with good reason! Tobias engenders the old archetype of the academic who is so well educated that he just doesn’t really know how to be a real person; he lacks common sense entirely, which might explain the “analrapist” business cards, and the administering of CPR to a sleeping (but healthy) tourist. The traits he embodies, when we look at him as an academic, make him an exaggeration of those fears that academics may have—the total loss of ability to relate to anyone else, complete failure to function in the world, and so on, and all for the cost of an impressive academic resume.

While it’s not always obvious how some academic pursuits prepare their scholars for the real world, surprising and extenuating circumstances do pop up.1 I am optimistic that even if the principles of seventeenth century agrarian business don’t quite apply to the housing development business today (we’re not too concerned about any uprisings . . . are we?), by the end of this book, the philosophers who contributed to it will have convinced you that the principles of seventeenth-century philosophy (and those that are “much, much . . . MUCH older”) really do apply to everyday life in the O.C. (don’t call it that)—as well as to life in general. Besides being relevant to everyday life, philosophy might even be able to help prevent you from emulating Gob—that is, we might even help you to avoid making “a huge mistake.”

NOTE

1. Who would have guessed that a philosophy education could be used to edit a book on the Bluths?

PART ONE

FAMILY FIRST

Chapter 1

IS THE EXAMINED LIFE A HUGE MISTAKE?

Happiness, Self-Knowledge, and the Bluths

Jason Southworth and Ruth Tallman

Ignorance is bliss—or is it? While you hear that little nugget of folk wisdom fairly often, some people desire the truth regardless of the repercussions. On the side of ignorance, George Michael decides not to tell Maeby that she’s adopted (she’s really not) because he thinks she is happier believing she is her parents’ biological child.1 Michael chooses not to tell George Michael that he slept with his ethics teacher (after George Michael professed his love for Ms. Barely), because George Michael is happier not knowing.2 Yet, on the side of truth, George Sr. escapes from a Mexican prison only to go home to verify his wife’s relationship with his brother. So what makes us happier, ignorance or knowledge?