The Tiny Heart of Darkness

[I’m working on a seasonal offering with my co-blogger. But, as you can perhaps imagine, complications abound in working on anything with a gargoyle. Communication problems, for one — we’re still getting used to each other’s language. And no computer “hard”ware known is meant for handling by someone with fingers of stone and eyes incapable of focusing on anything but the vague middle distance. So in the meantime, there will probably be a couple of brief posts here — like the one below — just to keep the site at a low simmer.]

Among the many dramatic narratives playing across the pop-culture landscape of recent years, one of the most dramatic — from a certain perspective — has been the South Park saga. Not that there’s really a continuing story line (each episode stands more or less on its own), no; the “dramatic arc” such as it is comes from the tension between what the show is and does, and what the broader culture implicitly says it may say and do.

(The popular saying “pushing the envelope” seems a little lame to describe South Park. The envelope in question isn’t just being “pushed” from inside; it’s actually bulging, rippling, threatening at every moment to tear itself from the addressee’s hands.)

The chief source of this tension, as in many works of, umm, art and literature, is the antagonist. The villain. The… resident evil.

Eric Theodore Cartman.

If you haven’t seen the show, it may be a little (or a lot) odd that a child character — let alone one animated in such an elementary way — could be so throughly evil… and so funny at the the same time. His creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, once described him this way (Parker is speaking here of TV sitcoms in the 1980s, like Diff’rent Strokes and The Facts of Life):

…that was supposed to be our comedy, you know, and, so, it wasn’t until a little bit later that we saw syndicated runs of “All in the Family.” And we were, you know, really, like, “Wow, this, this was — what happened to this stuff?” ‘Cause it just went away when everything got so PC in the ’80s. And, you know, you could never have had an Archie Bunker again. It was — really, when we started talking about, “How could you bring an Archie Bunker back? What if you made him a little eight-year-old fat kid?” That, that really influenced one of our characters, Cartman, in the show. It was based on Archie Bunker.

A recent Weekend Edition story on NPR reported about a university class devoted to a study of South Park. The story is online, of course, but of particular interest here is the sidebar piece from a few months ago, “Eric Cartman: America’s Favorite Little $@#&*%.”

If you’re unfamiliar with the Cartman character, you can pretty much learn all you need to know just by listening to his answers to the so-called “Proust Questionnaire.” Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a way to embed this audio directly into a blog post, but you can find the link to it at that “Favorite Little $@#&*%” page, in a box below the picture of Matt Stone and Trey Parker. Excerpt:

Interviewer Julie Rovner: What sound or noise do you love?

Cartman: The sound of people who I don’t like, crying… the tears running down their cheeks and actually making noise… like a sweet sound.

Rovner: And what sound or noise do you least love?

Cartman: The sound of babies laughing.

Someone, somewhere in the world, probably works busily on a paper even as I type this — a paper tracing the path which pure evil has traced through Western civilization, starting with the serpent in the Garden and leading to Cartman. If you put it before me right now, that paper’s existence would register, kinda, on my consciousness. But I couldn’t read it. I’d be laughing too hard.