The Mirror (term transposed from Lacans study of developmental psychology): drama in the ancient and early modern period and sitcoms in the post-modern. Tradition is questioned and becomes a problem to be overcome, sometimes the central conflict. Think Antigone or Hamlet https://twitter.com/FlightAstral/status/1332291778540687363

Lacan claims the image of the Self is a construct made up of both a child’s visible assessment of itself and the gaze of “the other,” beginning with the mother. He further asserts that the ego is superimposed upon the spontaneous self as if through an optical illusion [...]

created by a distorted mirror. Readers of Zizek will know this as the “parallax view.” The parallax is created when one has an image of oneself from a specific vantage, and this view changes from a different vantage. In other words, the image of the self is dependent upon [...]

the position of the viewer; change position, the illusion dissociates. Culturally, in this phase, civilization is coming in contact with increasingly more cultures and therefore the vantage points from which to view it are multiplying. At the same time urbanization [...]

is rapidly developing, which increases trade and brings more and more people from disparate cultures into the body politic. The culture becomes unwieldy and the previous traditions and laws are incapable of sustaining the cohesion in society. This demands reassessment of [...]

law, custom, finance: everything about the way a culture conducts itself. It emerges from the landscape as an integrated agrarian people & into the city as an urban political entity. The realignment from tradition to law, from instinct to intellectualization, is played out [...]

on the stage first as great internal struggles with drastic consequences, and devolves into the management of day-to-day trivial matters of managing a household. Antigone agonizes over whether or not to honor her family or her society: custom or law. The same struggle [...]

tortures Hamlet, who is commanded by the ghost of his father to take revenge. Instead of acting immediately upon this summons from the spirit realm, or what is demanded by tradition, the conflict between his destiny and his identity drives him mad. Oedipus Rex [...]

or even a film like Return of the Jedi mark a turning point in this phase, when the past is left for good and tradition overcome. The murder of the father represents the new political entity, the intact image of the self, overcoming the gaze of the parent, or the stultifying [..]

effects of tradition. The illusion persists: the parallax view is fixed. As Nietzsche observed in The Birth of Tragedy, once this phase is firmly established, big problems like tradition are sorted out and in come concerns with minor issues of daily maintenance.

American sitcoms serve this role, and can be contrasted with Westerns, the manifestation of the mythic. In sitcoms we first see an idealized family with some escapist elements and an intact patriarchy. This can be used for comedic effects as with I Love Lucy [...]

(one may argue that comedy itself is a symptom of the overcoming of tradition), the escapist opulence of Silver Spoon, or the traditional nuclear family of Family Ties. But integrated with these we see fissures irrupting and the illusion coming apart :

The Brady Bunch attempts to reconcile divorce by keeping the traditional family structure intact. Rosanne deals with working class issues and true financial pressures. In Roseanne, not only do we have a matriarchal arraignment, but problems are not resolved [..]

at the end of the half-hour or even season. Stretching the illusion to its breaking point, the next generation of shows bring in homos*xuals and drugs as a fully integrated element of family life and these subverting themes are incorporated into the family, somehow sustaining [.]

The illusion of societies perception of itself. Will and Grace initiates this phase, with the homos*xual as the friend, still the outsider, but as a stand-in, alternative, or supplement to the patriarch.

With Sex and The City the females relationship with homos*xuals and her pursuit of sex for pleasure is central, and the problem to be worked out is whether or not to even *have* a family. Modern Family fully [..]

integrates the homos*xual into the family unit as well as elevating a foreign-born servant to the role of matriarch. Note that as Nietzsche observed the Greeks took the chorus out of their drama, Modern Family removes the patriarch. He is old and feeble, his authority [...]

totally usurped by his wife and children. Breaking Bad and Weeds continue this disintegration using drugs. In these stories, characters are unable to establish themselves as autonomous entities within society by using the traditional avenues: marriage or gainful employment.

Note that in both cases this occurs because the pressures of family life cannot be dealt with by using the tools offered by the body-politic. (Cont’d).

These examples are all late-phase are are all insufficient measures attempting, desperately, to keep the illusion form dissociating into a disparate and disintegrating collection of constituent parts. Note that during this phase we also see the rise of satire

In Greek drama this would be comedy, but with television we see shows like The Simpsons and Married...with Children, which are wholly self-aware of themselves as both artificial representations of family life as well as narratives employing overused tropes.

When these forms of narrative give way to The Real, all pretense of fictionalization is dropped and narrative is eschewed for supposed actuality. Taking its place is brute “entertainment,” characterized by violence and over-stimulation.

These observations were inspired by Nietzsche, Lukacs, David Foster Wallace, Lacan, Zizek, and Alan Kirby.

@bronzeagemantis I didn’t get too into it but my point is as traditional role of father as patriarch breaks down and he as sole protector/bread winner is no longer prominent in as women and gays become further enfranchised, we see father resort to drug dealing etc (see thread)