Friends, Adorno, and the Illusion of TV Enlightenment

Introduction: Enlightenment and the Complexity of Friendship

One of the most complex words in the English language is Enlightenment. Consider the many layers of meaning attached to the word throughout history and across the many dictionaries that line the shelves of modern libraries. According to the online reference site Brainydictionary, "Enlightenment" is a noun meaning the "act of enlightening, or the state of being enlightened or instructed." In this sense, Enlightenment relates to the "expansion of conscious states, expanding consciousness, expansion of consciousness, consciousness expansion" (Brainydictionary, 2004).

However, the expansion of the mind on a personal level is a relatively recent meaning attached to the word. A definition maintained by PBS situates the Enlightenment as a historical intellectual movement beginning in England in the seventeenth century, one that "then spread to have eventual influence over all sections of the world." This historical definition takes a dim view of medieval darkness in contrast to the presumed neo-classical spirit of rationality and light. The period is "rooted in an intellectual skepticism to traditional beliefs and dogmas," sweeping away "the supposed dark and superstitious character" of earlier eras with "the power and goodness of human rationality" (PBS Glossary, 2004).

Another word perhaps just as complex as "Enlightenment" is the word "Friends." A friend can be a close associate, but the term can also be casually applied to someone one merely knows through the social context of work or school. One may know such a friend by sight while maintaining only a false intimacy with that face. The word can even be deployed sarcastically, as many television and movie villains are wont to do.

Friends is also the title of a popular NBC sitcom — ending its run in 2004 — about a group of close companions whom Americans came to regard, with a click of the remote control at 8 p.m. EST on Thursday nights (and in syndication in many areas), as their living-room or bedroom companions, even though they had never met the characters of Joey, Phoebe, Rachel, Monica, Ross, and Chandler in real life. This begs the question: who really are these "friends" in the modern television era?

Defining Enlightenment: Reason, Feeling, and American Culture

According to the classical European view, the Enlightenment held reason as "the most significant and positive capacity of the human." In this tradition, reason enabled one "to break free from primitive, dogmatic, and superstitious beliefs holding one in the bonds of irrationality and ignorance" (PBS Glossary, 2004). Friends clearly does not conform to this 18th-century standard of rationality. The sitcom deploys anything but reasonableness in its characters' choices and behavior.

Yet one could argue that, rather than realizing the "liberating potential of reason" — by which "one not only learns to think correctly, but to act correctly as well" and "through philosophical and scientific progress, reason can lead humanity as a whole to a state of earthly perfection" — the sitcom instead suggests that through feeling one becomes Enlightened. In this reading, Friends offers a distinctly American Enlightenment of correct feeling rather than correct rational thought.

Such a reading suggests that, through the medium of non-familial friendship, humans become equal and therefore deserving of equal liberty and treatment. Rather than insisting that "beliefs of any sort should be accepted only on the basis of reason," feeling — as expressed through emotion, sexuality, love, and even shopping — becomes the means by which the characters grow most fully human. Rachel irrationally leaves her conventional fiancé in the first episode, takes a job at a coffee shop, and eventually finds her passion working as a buyer for Bloomingdale's. She has a child out of wedlock with an old boyfriend and discovers herself by irrationally following her heart's desires. Similarly, Ross breaks out of his stultifying intellectual world as a paleontologist by irrationally and passionately pursuing a high school flame (PBS Glossary, 2004).

Some commentators have suggested that the sexual content of Friends and the political nature of its topics — spanning unmarried mothers, lesbian weddings, surrogacy, and the difficulties of constructing a coherent family network in a confusing world — are groundbreaking for a sitcom. They argue that Friends offers viewers a potential source of Enlightenment regarding these topics. Others take a dimmer view, stressing the show's formulaic nature.

Friends as a Vehicle for Social and Cultural Commentary

Perhaps the most potent metaphor for this controversy over Friends' potential to enlighten may be found in a relatively early episode. As a kind of revenge against his then-roommate, the fastidious Chandler, the jock-like Joey puts on all of Chandler's clothing at once and proudly announces that he is "going commando" — that is, wearing no underclothes. The sexual implications could be read as homoerotic; on the other hand, the shame derives from the fact that this heterosexual man is embarrassing another heterosexual man by coming into contact with his clothing in a state of nakedness.

Is Friends, then, truly Enlightening? Does it strip us of our ideological clothing, forcing the audience to confront uncomfortable political and sexual ideology in prime time? Or, rather than going "commando" — naked of cultural assumptions — does the show merely create the illusion of titillation and nakedness while covering the viewer with even more ideological clothing than before, much like Joey himself?

Conclusion: Liberation or the Illusion of It?

Adorno, T. "How to Look at Television." Culture Industry. Routledge Classics.

Brainydictionary. "Enlightenment." http://www.brainydictionary.com/words/en/enlightenment160280.html

"Enlightenment." PBS Glossary. http://www.pbs.org/faithandreason/gengloss/enlight-body.html