Chuck Klosterman's Sex, Drugs, And Cocoa Puffs

Existentialism is explored in Chuck Klosterman’s excerpt from his book “Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs”, titled, “Being Zack Morris”. Although the title of Klosterman’s excerpt alludes to the once popular cliché television show, Saved by the Bell, he also discusses other shows such as The X-Files and M.A.S.H., noting the differences between the shows to help argue his main point. In the beginning of his excerpt, he discusses stereotypes and clichés through personal reflection on his life when he states, “My feelings about politics… and the rest of life’s minutiae can only be described through a labyrinthine of six-sided questions, but everything that actually matters can be explained by Lindsey fucking Buckingham and Stevie fucking Nicks in

Important things are inevitably cliché, but nobody wants to admit that” (Klosterman 136). In that quote, he is saying that certain things will always be considered important and there will not be much of a difference in its meaning, whether or not people are willing to admit it. As a society, people all value the same common things; Therefore, stereotypes and clichés are important to everyone because they value them and find them important. That is an important concept related to how people view television shows. The viewers are assigning meaning to shows, that are often stereotypical and cliché in nature. The concepts of stereotypes and clichés correlate to existentialism, the idea that everything is inherently meaningless until someone assigns meaning to it. Existentialism is demonstrated in the excerpt when Klosterman mentions The X-Files. He asserts, “You can’t place something into its aforementioned “context” unless you know where (and how) to culturally file it, and I honestly don’t care where The X-Files belongs in the American zeitgeist” (Klosterman 137). In the quote, Klosterman is making an important point, that the form in which someone consumes something indicates its meaning. He was uninterested in The X-Files, so he found the show