Review of Project: ALF (1996) by Leigh M — 23 Jul 2007

An aside: one time some friends I were watching some very late night public access television back in Arizona when suddenly without warning, ALF was on... only different. There was a timecode across the bottom of the screen and the episode hadn't been scored or postdubbed, which means no laugh track. It was undubbed underground bootleg ALF! Everytime ALF talked there was a long pause afterwards. It was like a nightmare alternative universe ALF in which laughter was forbidden. ALF turns surreal without it. I didn't know where the jokes were. It was the episode in which ALF suspects Mr. Ochmonek of killing Mrs. Ochmonek, Rear Window-style. ALF wakes Willy and wife telling them what he saw. Willy tells ALF he's crazy and jumping to conclusions and then offers a series of rational explainations for Mr. Ochmonek to be carrying an ice pick across the living room. ALF says "Oh, yeah, maybe they were playing ice pick bingo! (long pause)." I think that was a joke.

Project: ALF misses the mark by abandoning the ALF/Wily dynamic in favour of relationship between ALF & the US military. A friend described the ALF/Wily relationship as demonstrating a Hegelian dialectic.

I think the implications are far more radical. Because it isn't so much that ALF is Willy's negation, but rather as a sign of everything not-Willy--and not of this world--ALF signals the total artifice of Willy's existence, and potentially (if pursued beyond the artifice the laugh track signals) ours.

If Hegel's master-slave dialectic plays itself out through Willy and ALF, it does so ONLY as play. ALF is intelligible by way of the miracle of personification--to say nothing of imagination of the Jim Henson Creature Shop, creative camera placement and the selective use of a little person in an ALF suit. That is, through the tools of artifice. The laugh track is part of this. The laugh track emasculates Willy, radically negating him and subsuming his existence within the pervasive artificiality that permeates fiction. In this, we find the impossibility of Willy ever achieving a sense of his own self-consciousness or at the most extreme, existence itself.

Being television, with the specific demands of the medium, this artifice effect is heightened. The laugh tack defuses the threat to existence that ALF constitutes by way of his very being. The only tact is to deny ALF's existence in the first place, which de facto denies Willy's existence; while at the same time appealing to the universality of and "humanity" of both, through the experience and bodily sensation of laughter, in its imitation. ALF is "funny," therefore humanish--and the irony is of that amusement can be present only as imitation (unless ALF is actually to be found funny on a subjective and singular basis, which is very difficult to theorize in a Hegelian mode). Laughter universalizes ALF, but laughter itself is only present as artifice. For theorizing that you have to turn not to Hegel, but to Bergson's work of laughter, or other theories of sensation.

On the other hand, it is as though the laugh track is the only trace of order in the series--through the blatant artifice of laughter some binding order is asserted. However, removing the laughter--as I noted--only signals its absence, which runs the risk of heightening the artifice effect and may well be the sign of the absolute infinite negativity that I myself seem to be desire.

Hence, Hegel and dialectics are not really en vogue at the dawn of the 21st century, except in their (academic) novelty they offer easily distractible grad students as a means of theorizing impossible absolutes. There is no way to free Willy from this artifice, just as there is no way that we can free ourselves. Post-hence, I really want to finish my philosophy paper or cease to exist.