The Marxist critic Walter Benjamin once suggested that the era of mass communications would democratize culture by destroying the aura of unique works of art–as culture is mass-produced, so it is also made common, and therefore rendered more accessible to a wider public. With the benefit of decades of TV to learn from, Andy Warhol knew better: “Fame is when you market your aura,” he once said, in a comment that illustrates the continuing reification involved in mass communications. Perhaps he was anticipating the techniques of Sesame Street Live–the extravaganza that passed through the Rosemont Horizon not too long ago. Celebrating the TV show’s 20th anniversary, it consisted of 90 minutes of song, spectacle–and star presence. Let’s face it, there’s nothing Warhol could teach Jim Henson about marketing auras.
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Sesame Street is designed to entertain your children without boring you or making you feel guilty about parking them in front of the box while you scramble some eggs. You assume, correctly perhaps, that it won’t scramble their brains while you’re on nutrition patrol. Yet the popular success of Sesame Street is probably due as much to another feature: its clever use of double encoding–that is, the ability to serve two audiences simultaneously with the same message. In this case, the two audiences are kids and their parents, and Sesame Street’s genius is its clever appeal to us grown-ups.
You knew that Sesame Street really had this down when it began producing skits aimed at yuppies–the brilliant Springsteen parody “Born to Add” and the marvelously hip Miami Mice sequences, for instance. At the live show the adults lapped it all up every bit as hungrily as my three-year-old did. All around me moms, dads, and grandparents displayed beaming childlike faces–just the kinds of expressions you see on the faces of teenagers in the front rows at a rock gig. “Hey, this is a blast,” said the dad sitting behind me. “It’s 8:30 and I’m not even tired yet!”
Of course Molehill the hardheaded TV exec rejects the show; so Big Bird returns to Sesame Street, where the gang gets the idea of doing the show in its own neighborhood. “Do the show from just right here?” says Big Bird, proceeding to produce a wonderful moment of that famous double encoding: “It’s so crazy, it just might work!” (My son wanted to know why I was laughing–that’s the only drawback with double encoding. “Er, they made a joke, Jamie.”) The characters finish singing their very own theme tune, with “ON AIR” flashing above them. Educational TV defeats the combined forces of Oscar the Grouch and the broadcasting establishment–or are they the same thing?
And arguments about the effects of TV on literacy and education are more complex than they seem. As usual, it depends who’s watching. One important critical line on Sesame Street concerns its cultural imperialism–foreign-language versions like Plaza Sesamo are now exported to 83 countries around the globe, and some analysts believe they carry American ideologies with them. But if you’re a poor inner-city parent, there are worse things your kids could be doing than watching TV all day. In that context, Sesame Street might be a real boon. And those kids whose attention spans have outgrown the demands of a blipvert, and therefore Sesame Street-style learning, will no doubt find something else to do. You can’t make kids watch TV. They move on, whether you like it or not–even if, in the video age, they only move on to the narrative pleasures of full-length cartoons and action movies.
