La Nouvelle Orleans n'existe pas

So, this past Sunday, HBO's big New Orleans-based series Treme premiered, to much fan-fare and excitement. I don't have HBO; I didn't watch it. But, in this postmodern day and age, I'd say that makes me most qualified to write about it. Right? Pace Baudrillard? Naturellement!

Having seen the previews and read a handful of reviews (Billy's is, of course, the best), I can say that I'm familiar enough with the concept that the creators are going for -- and, also, that I'm moderately perturbed by it. Like anyone who's spent a considerable amount of time in New Orleans, I, too, am guilty of constructing and perpetuating the standard mythologizing rhapsodies about the city. It's free! It's wild! It's an aesthetic and cultural roller coaster!, etc. However, happy as I am to wax nostalgic about a place that also happened to have been the locus of my coming of age, I'm skeptical about nostalgia in general, and deeply conservative regional nostalgia in particular. Treme, to me, seems like the culmination of a strange and somewhat schizophrenic fantasy project that started the minute the levees broke, sending thousands of evacuees to Google Street View to watch a shroud of murky green water creep over most of Uptown. Because, let's be honest. No matter how ethnically diverse the cast, the intended audience of this show is of the same demographic, the same class/race that inhabited said Uptown, and the one most responsible for propagating the aesthetic-cultural myth of the city in the wake of Katrina; i.e., a) affluent and b) white. It's a textbook example of a liberal white American coterie searching for authenticity vis-a-vis the ethnic Other, and, in the process, gently moving from the role of respectfully distanced observer to guardian, protector, patron... (izer).

So, this is where things get a little ookie. It's our (white middle-to-upper class) responsibility to preserve New Orleans culture, to rescue it from the twin perils of Bush-era neglect and post-reconstruction corporate whoredom. And, by all accounts, Treme has attempted to do just that, to squeeze as many insider references to the food, music, geography, politics, and social ritual of the city as possible into each hour-long episode. Except, with my dead sexy Masters in a minor regional literature, I can tell you exactly what happens when an artist attempts that kind of project. It's a tale as old as Chateaubriand and Sir Walter Scott: either s/he misses one detail and gets mountains of flak for sloppy inattentiveness and insensitivity to cultural specificity, or s/he compiles so much detail that the entire project sags under the weighty effort of being both super-studied and "genuine." But what's the point of being slavishly imitative of reality if a) reality is, by definition, ephemeral, fluctuating, and irreducibly prosaic, and b) if the kind of art we (white upper-to-middle class) like is all about opening up metaphorical channels, suggesting multiple readings and broader, cosmic connections? If art -- as opposed to, say, ethnography -- is more complex creation rather than reductive recreation, then how does the freezing of one particular temporal cross-cut of a place say anything about what that place actually is, was, or will be? And, finally, for a city so invested in authenticity and peculiarity, how does one reconcile the urge to perform this aforementioned freezing operation with the danger of reducing it all to a caricature, a kitschy tchotchke ready-made for tourist consumption? The more obscure and hermetic the references that get name-dropped, the more Google-fu will be performed by the adoring hip masses in order to decode them -- and, before you know it, your next door neighbor in Williamsburg knows more about muffulettas and second lines than your average inhabitant of the CBD.

I can address some of these concerns with the triple punch of empirical observation, social theory, and paraphrased chocolate snack-treat commercial: just as there's no one way to eat a Reese's, there's no one way to show a city. A city is a phantom, an astral projection, a collective hallucination based on Benedict Anderson's idea of the "imagined community." It's not just the sum total of underappreciated jazz musicians, giant grease-laden sandwiches, or parade rituals that one can research, catalog, and copy. It's an unquantifiable gestalt of every individual's experiences, wishes, drunken half-memories, and fantastical exaggerations. In short, and to bring this back to the part of the world I'm most scholastically qualified to discuss, it's the difference between 18th century sentimental travelogues and Gogol's Dead Souls. One is uncritically engaged in the contradictorily simultaneous praise and patriarchal protectorship of "the noble (peasant) savage"; the other is one of the greatest pieces of literature of all time. And it isn't because Gogol got the local costume right and Karamzin didn't -- they're both equally distorting and misrepresenting, but the difference is, Gogol can fucking write, and write he does: experience, fantasy, hallucination, the whole nine yards.

So, these are the questions I would like to ask the creators of Treme and everyone involved in the obviously Herculean task of the show's production: who exactly are you addressing, what exactly are you preserving, and why?

But maybe they've already answered those, or are planning to, or trying to, and I just need to get on the media boat and watch.