What the heck does "uber-dubious" mean?

WHAT THE HECK DOES “UBERDUBIOUS” MEAN

I coined this term to describe an increasingly common event in literary & dramatic structure, “a state of extreme cahoots betwixt the narrative and its own contents in which is attempted a doubling of sublime mistrust.” Uber (ultra) dubious material is designed to enhance the direct experience of the mutual core that is shared between faith & mistrust. It violates the categories of belief and disbelief and thus immediately displays their common functioning principle.

It is this sort of function that motivates human societies in the collective-ideological dimension of their being. It is generally invisible, concealed by its subtlety when in juxtaposition with crude stories & representational suggestions – such as comprise the obvious bulk of any communicative work. Only by short-circuiting our messages, in a skillful manner, can we stare directly into this other dimension at which site is manufactured the un-proclaimed operating instructions for social beings.

One powerful way to gain such access is through the experience of harmlessly suspected mistrust. Think of the feelings and subliminal ideation that occurs in the viewer when Rod Serling suddently steps from behind a door and explains that the story you are watching is contained within a weird, distorted semantic field he names THE TWILIGHT ZONE. It isn't dangerous, but still – what the heck is he up to??? This is normal pleasant distrust. We experience it when we watch a kitten or a puppy being obvious in their attempt to sneak up on us and pounce! Whenever Calvin, from Watterson's CALVIN & HOBBES, approach the door of his home he is seized by the ordinary emotion of playful yet ominous suspicion. Already this experience draws us intimately towards the screen of deeper sub-symbolic exchanges – but for many this is a damnably elusive pursuit and so attempts are made to amplify the experience. Such magnifications are what I happily refer to as uber-dubious.

To better explain the distinction between the merely dubious & the uber-dubious I usually invoke the comparison of Melville's MOBY DICK with Hurwitz's three-season sit-com ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT. Remember Melville's opening passage: Call me... Ishmael. We the readers are instantly invited to regard the narrator-protagonist as a highly suspect personage (HSP). If the the text is willing to deceive to you immediately and openly concerning the identities of its own characters then how can we possibly believe any of it? It opens by casting doubt upon its own capacity to function as the “I” who tells the tale.

Melville's first authorial act is to require a suspension of belief to overlap the ordinary suspension of disbelief that enables access to an imagined storyline. In order to believe him – you must suspect him of not being believable. This should cause us considerable alarm! If the Narrator cannot be relied upon then THERE IS NO STORY. And yet... the story goes on.

Although widely denounced in its day for being “terrible writing” it slowly ascended into that still rare circle of modern texts that can compete with the Sacred Classics of the older civilizations. Despite its perverse denial of the very premise of literature it exerts powerful literary influence. We all recall the archetypical Captain Ahad in his obsessive, peg-legged pursuit of God & that god damned White Whale. He was played for us by the original George Clooney -- Gregory Peck -- and later by the inimitable and hilarious Patrick Stewart. And what about Starbuck? His name has entered the public lexicon along with a vague recollection of the great tattooed Aborigine: Queequeg. How has this occurred if the text denies us the opportunity to enter its world by relinquishing its claim to minimal validity?

The answer, clearly, is that we can enter into this world despite the dubiousity of Narrator. In fact it turns out that belief in the text and its claims are not essential to the effects of the works. We must assume that faith in the Speaker, in his claims, and in his attitude toward what he enunciates is not considerably important to the functioning of the work.

Obviously this has grave implications for social theory. It suggest the premise that “beliefs” are not significant motivators. The stories exchanged as belief systems, the apparent attitudes toward these stories & the references to authoritative structures ARE NOT the signals that define our social space and behaviours. These are mere narration-factors.

This is a dubious matter, sure, but electronica has gone even further – though with less depth and consideration --than Herman Melville. In order to see how this revelation of the disbelieving kernel of belief can be magnified let us consider ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT. The Voice Over narration is provided by the wholesome child-star and populist film director Ron Howard whose sense of nostalgic sincerity is rivalled only by the narrator of “The Wonder Years” and the paternal benevolence of Ronald Reagan. It is the sound of the well-meaning rural volk. Hurwitz deploys it alongside the sinister ignorance and obscenely layered misinterpretations of the once-prominent Bluth clan. Periodically a contradiction will arise between the claims of the narrator and those of a character. For example, the emotionally retarded stage-magician G.O.B. (George Oscar Bluth, a.k.a. “Jobe”) announces that he has sexually consummated his marriage to a woman who sells seals. Ron Howard, hovering like the watchful Jehovah in his primal garden, denies and has already denied claim. Now we are at that place of absurdity which Melville invoked – the impossible contradiction in which the narrator's status is cancelled by its pretense. Jobe did not catch God -- the text itself -- off guard with his claim! Very dubious. It becomes uber-dubious when this failed magician, apparently oblivious to the narrator, nonetheless restates him claim as if it had been challenged.

Variations on this pattern occur through the three seasons of the show. The dubious narrator routine is intensified by the disagreement of narrated characters who are embedded in the text only by means of their pretended alienation from the self-expression of the text which they reveal by a deliberately falsified attempt to act if their conflict with the narrative were totally coincidental and in no way a response to the dubious narrator.

This is UBER-DUBIOUS narration.