I'm sorry to report that Looking for Pleasure will be on hiatus until further notice. I will, however, leave all my entries up in hopes that I will be able to come back and frolic in the televisual landscape again soon.
~Aviva
Update (September 7, 2008): No update on the status of LoP, but I've started a new blog, Fourth Wave Feminism, and plan to post there about television, among other things. Check it out.
Every time I tune into the Food Network, I wage an internal war with myself: do I find the ubiquitous Rachael Ray obnoxiously perky or charmingly adorable? You may think I'm exaggerating about the extent of this debate. After all, Rachael isn't really always on the Food Network, is she? My three favorite FN programs have nothing to do with Ms. Ray: Iron Chef America, Ace of Cakes, and Good Eats, Alton Brown's foodie tribute to that geek-childhood favorite Bill Nye the Science Guy. Regardless, Rachael Ray is still all over the Food Network whether you're watching one of her myriad shows or not (and even amongst her shows, you can take your pick: her talk show, her travel show, her travel-on-the-cheap show, or the show that started it all, her cooking show 30 Minute Meals. I'd wager that you can't make it through an hour of Food Network programming (maybe even a half-hour) without seeing Rachael Ray at least once (in an ad for Dunkin' Donuts or Triscuits, at the very least). Plus, I'm a wee bit embarrassed to admit that I also have a subscription to her magazine, so I truly do live Everyday with Rachael Ray. But why is this of any interest to anyone but me? Because as with Rachael Ray's meteoric rise to fame over the past five years--certainly fueled in large part by the ineffable powerhouse of promotion that is Oprah--so has the Food Network, and food TV in general, grown to baffling proportions, leading me to wonder, what's the appeal? And, is it possible that Food TV (and Rachael Ray) might one day grow too big for its ramekin, hit the top of the oven and implode like a soufflé?
First of all, as much as I myself love it, I'm a little flummoxed by the appeal of the Food Network--even, indeed, my own interest in it. What's so exciting about watching other people cook? It makes you hungry for things that none but the most gifted of us could possibly prepare for ourselves, especially not on the fly at the very moment when the program we're watching makes us most desire the presented food object. Cooking shows highlight the average viewer's own failures in the kitchen, an "I'll never be able to do that" jealously that's somehow simultaneously frustrating and seductive. This is the case for most Food Network cooking shows, even those that sport titles implying that the recipes are appropriate for the home cook--not only 30 Minute Meals, but also Sunny Anderson's Cooking for Real, Giada De Laurentiis' Everyday Italian, and Paula Deen's Paula's Home Cooking. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure that a lot of people do cook the meals made on these shows, but chances are they have to go the "traditional" route first by looking up and printing out the recipes. But I'm certain there's an equally-substantial number of viewers (like me) who watch these or other cooking shows without actually cooking anything they see (except perhaps very occasionally). Now, a show like Ace of Cakes makes sense to me because it highlights the extreme expertise of a radical baker and his funny hipster team of fellow artists. It's a show about people as much as it's a show about fabulous cakes. Most people probably have no desire to bake like Duff, but it's fun to watch Duff and company create and goof off and then marvel at how they pull together ever-astounding, playful designs. And his staff seem like real people, the kind of people you'd like in your circle of friends, which is always an added bonus for any of the gentler reality shows, including makeover shows and the like. If you're into the cutthroat, nasty competition of shows like Survivor, you're probably not watching the Food Network--let's just face it, the demographics probably don't overlap much--but you may be watching something like Fox's popular show Hell's Kitchen, which impressively juxtaposes the competitive asshole mentality of Survivor and The Apprentice with food preparation and culinary prowess. Despite similarities in composition and genre, Food Network competition shows like Iron Chef America or Food Network Challenge--with their respective emphases on a Samurai-like code of honor, precision and respectful superiority and a competitive spirit shaded with amiable virtuosity--can't hold a candle to the hardcore, sado-masochistic challenges and failures that Hell's Kitchen's promises and delivers week after week. Speaking of sado-masochism (speaking of clumsy segues), despite the push-pull of frustration/pleasure at watching the preparation and consumption of amazing culinary treats we may never get to taste ourselves, watching people cook is immensely sexy, although not necessarily in the way that, I don't know, Sex and the City or The Tudors can be sexy. Food TV is sexy in part because it has nothing to do with interpersonal relationships and everything to do with individual responses to singular, personal relationships with sensory pleasure. Eating has often been equated with sexuality, so that's nothing new, but almost every moment on the Food Network could easily stand-in as a metaphor for desire and satisfaction: Rachael Ray's passionate chorus of "yums" and "oh wows" and "mmmmmms" on her two food/travel shows ($40 a Day and Tasty Travels); Emeril Lagasse's signature, eruptive "Bam!"; the intense, vigorous fervor in Kitchen Stadium on Iron Chef America and the judges obvious delight in getting to sample dish after dish of savory and sweet and everything in between; Alton Brown's nerdy-cute, Harley-riding, boyish-but-strangely-adult enthusiasm for the open road and diner culture in Feasting on Asphalt (although this last one may be just me--a consequence of my inexplicable Alton Brown fetish). Suffice it to say, I think I may have answered my own question. Rachael Ray's enthusiasm, her pleasure in, of and for food, is both what I love and don't love about her; I can overcome the slight discomfort of her sometimes seemingly false vivacity because that same vivacity is so charming. And exactly what's appealing about the Food Network is how it frustrates and what it lacks. Food TV offers us the desire with little of the satisfaction (except whatever satisfaction we glean from the faces of others, who are also unreachable fantasy "characters"), which is both a little bit pleasurable and a larger bit maddening. Kind of like Andy Warhol writing that "sex is nostalgia for sex," and being annoyingly right. Food TV is always already about being hungry for more hunger (the desire to desire). Not unlike a lot of television, Food TV asks us to want what we can't have and then enjoy that concomitant sensation of our stomach's growling in empty protest. Talk about sado-masochism. ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~(IN TWO WEEKS: “Animaniacs.” In which I again use a title to describe a post that will not actually discuss the show it references. Instead: Family Guy...The Simpsons...Cartoons for adults? Why? Why not? Why do we love them so?
While I thoroughly, if a wee bit begrudgingly, enjoyed every moment of the new rom-com Forgetting Sarah Marshall, one of its subplots was especially hilarious, keeping me in stitches for hours after the film ended. In the film, the protagonist’s ex-girlfriend, the eponymous Sarah Marshall, is the star of a hit TV crime drama called Crime Scene: Scene of the Crime (a clear send-up of the very real and likewise redundantly-titled CSI: Crime Scene Investigation). The clips of this fictional show were so hysterical—characters oozing misplaced sensuality over dead bodies in the morgue, dialogue full of horrible puns, outrageously unrealistic sexualized crimes, and dramatic music emphasizing each new twist with a knowing ba-BUM — that I’d probably be willing to pay to see the film again just for those brief snippets. Except, I don’t really need to go to all the trouble (and expense) of trekking back to the theatre. If I have a hankering for spectacularly over-the-top sexually-charged dramas, all I need to do is turn on my television, sit comfortably on my couch and wait. Significantly, the satirical Crime Scene: Scene of the Crime from Forgetting Sarah Marshall is a pretty reasonable facsimile, maybe ratcheted up only a notch or two, of what’s actually on these days (including shows that I used to be able to take seriously that have since jumped the shark—you know who you are…coughERcough). To add insult to injury, as the film’s closing credits roll, a preview for another fake show, Animal Psychic, combines the premise of Ghost Whisperer and with that of Dog Whisperer, resulting in a concept that is both laughably outrageous and not too far from the peculiarity of very real offerings about, say, immortal detectives or heroic dolphins (to mix my contemporary and historical examples). Like Karen from Will and Grace often says, slurred with drink: “It’s funny ‘cause it’s true.”
Obviously, sometimes peculiar concepts work and they work quite well. Shows like New Amsterdam or Flipper, while I only barely remember the latter and have admittedly not yet had a chance to watch the former, are established on slightly absurd fantasies. But that’s all fine and good. It’s one of the wonderful things about television: it allows us to live comfortably in the realm of fantasy for an hour or two, where we can imagine a world in which we may befriend dolphins or can live forever. As far as I’m concerned, comedies have free-rein as far as ridiculous plot twists go, and dramas should be able to operate under whatever guidelines govern the creator’s vision for the show’s world, however fantastical that premise may be. As far as central tropes go, most things are fair game. For example, it’s ridiculous to imagine that tiny little Cabot Cove is so full of criminals; at the rate of murder per capita established on Murder She Wrote, everyone in the town would be dead in a few years. But these are the types of scenarios we have to accept in order to enjoy televisual make-believe and find pleasure in each episodic storyline. Especially in the procedural drama, a diverse offering of compelling plots depends on an already-established, set foundation of inalienable facts about the show, its characters and their lives—even if it’s Nancy Drew being 18 years old for over seventy years. So, I’m not interested in quibbling about the premises of shows, although I suppose someone might want to take that on as a pet peeve (but, do we really want to watch shows about real life? Really? I don’t think so.). Rather, I’ve been noticing an increasingly trend lately toward plots which exceed the bounds of the even the most carefully-constructed drama’s pre-set conventions. Older, long-running, popular shows—ER, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit (the original Law and Order has somehow remained pretty even keel), and CSI (although more so its spin-offs than the original) seem to be especially guilty of this. Characters act completely out of character completely out of the blue, relationships are upset and/or established (or both) at every possible opportunity, certain characters experience more traumas and/or dangerous situations in one season than any person does in a lifetime, and every week is the “most shocking night on television” or an episode so incredible that “you’ve never seen anything like it” or something “you have to see to believe.” Gone are the days when realistic character upheavals could sustain an entire season of well-developed and emotionally resonant plots—like Detective Christine Cagney suffering date rape and struggling with alcoholism in the final season of Cagney and Lacey. This wasn’t tackled in one or two action-packed episodes; her pain filtered through every day interactions in a dozen episodes, little moments of vulnerability as she tried to maintain a grip on her job and her professionalism. And this is just what we might expect of tough, stoic Cagney when her personality is established in the early seasons. This is not to say that all contemporary television shows are guilty of this pandering to spectacle. But when Doctor Romano had his arm cut off by a helicopter blade in Season 9 of ER only to be killed by a different helicopter a season later, I had to say enough is enough. What, are we to believe that helicopters are out to kill Romano? And how many times can Abby and Luka get together and break up and date other people and get back together and have a baby (who is, by the way, born premature and almost dies) and then almost get engaged but not and then definitely get engaged and then plan one wedding but have another? I don’t know about you, but I’m exhausted. I know I’m picking on ER a little, but I could have just as easily chosen another whipping boy to make my case. For example, two weeks ago on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, Detective Olivia Benson went on an undercover operation in prison and was beaten and very nearly raped and killed by a corrupt prison officer, last week her secret relationship with a reporter ended when he was suspected of being a leak in a criminal case, and this week, if the previews are to be believed, she’s going to be kidnapped by a deranged Robin Williams. What a month for Detective Benson! We need to put a moratorium on the never-ending, lightning-apparently-does-strike-the-same-place-twice plot twists or soon these oft-maligned characters are going to come out of the TV and throttle their creators. Albert Einstein said that God does not play dice with the universe. Neither do TV writers. But some of them are playing Russian Roulette.~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~(NEXT WEEK: “Yum-O.” Giving new meaning to the term couch potato: watching people eat and the cult of food TV.)
In the spirit of true self-reflexivity—taking its point of origin from my recent post about therapy—I decided to spend a little while thinking about television writing, a real navel-gazing sort of exercise. While I laid out some semblance of a rationale (manifesto?) for my own engagement with television in my inaugural entry of Looking for Pleasure, I thought it might be interesting to take a look at how, what and why other people write about the small screen. Also, it’s good to keep an eye on the “competition.” (Although what exactly we’re competing for, I’ll never know. But, I’m probably losing. So. Yeah.) In any case, I looked at three representative examples from three very different sources in the blogosphere: John W. Jordan writing a published, peer-reviewed online article in the FlowTV journal about the end of the writer’s strike; James Poniewozik, Time magazine’s television critic, writing about the first post-strike episodes of 30 Rock and The Office on his blog Tuned In; and Michael N. weecapping the aforementioned post-strike 30 Rock episode over at Television Without Pity.
First, we have Jordan at FlowTV lamenting television’s inability to address its absence and instead highlighting conspicuous fortitude at expressing self-appreciation for its own presence: This makes my head hurt, too. I completely understand what Jordan is getting at: the lack evoked by television’s post-strike ellipsis of the actual strike; television is just back, but refuses to acknowledge why it was gone in the first place. However, I’m not exactly sure I’m on board with his tone. Read the whole article and you’ll realize that Jordan is berating television (or, I guess, the producers and programmers and network execs, since you can’t really berate an object) for dancin’ a little sidestep à la the song sung by the politician in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (my words, not his—I’ve just been trying to find a way to use TBLWiT in an analogy somehow and this seemed apt). Television executives, like politicians, are extraordinarily good at eliding the truth—we need look no further for proof than the sketchy negotiations during the strike itself—but is this really all that curious? Sure, television is a medium that depends on its audience’s fidelity to keep it chugging along, but politicians also rely on their constituencies and that doesn’t make them any less likely to gloss over unpleasantness. Actually, just the opposite is usually the case. Call me cynical, but I would have found it curious if television had acknowledged the strike as something more than an unfortunate unnamed hole in its programming. People are easily convinced to forget about things they wished hadn’t happened in the first place, so why would execs acknowledge their tyrannical grasp on the industry and its workers when it’s far easier to unequivocally celebrate television’s “return?” Aren’t we happily convinced to celebrate with them? Case in point, Time writer Poniewozik’s review of the “welcome back” episodes of The Office and 30 Rock, in which he writes a comparative analysis of the two shows and only briefly hints at the ramifications of their return: As the networks have begun announcing return dates for shows that have been off-air since the early days of the strike – including some of my favorites, like The Office and 30 Rock – I find it curious how television is treating the issue of these shows’ absence. The first time the networks really seemed to have acknowledged the fact that these shows have been gone has been in their celebratory announcement of their return. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to frame this in terms of how their absence is being erased by the networks through the irony of celebrating their return. A non-acknowledged hole has now been filled, apparently to everyone’s rejoicing. The memory of the strike is overcome by the nostalgia of our return to pre-strike television. I know I watch a lot of TV, but that makes my head hurt.
To overgeneralize a little, 30 Rock is mainly about jokes and The Office is mainly about characters. Neither approach is inherently better than the other. But last night I found myself laughing louder at 30 Rock, while enjoying The Office more overall. […] I'll be interested to see how the rest of the strike-shortened season plays out, though. Unlike 30 Rock—which is a hybrid of serial and standalone elements—I'd think The Office would suffer more from losing episodes in which to develop the season's arc, and I worry season 4 will seem rushed from here on out.
Poniewozik makes clear his adoration for both The Office and 30 Rock (as I nod in agreement) and provides compelling reasoning for how these shows can sustain completely different audience types and still hold together as a back-to-back pair in NBC’s line-up. I really like his style, although he is a critic through and through, which is necessarily very different from Jordan’s academic perspective. Poniewozik, as someone paid to review television shows, has to be invested in its return, rather than its absence.
And, last but not least, one more example from Michael N’s 30 Rock weecap at Television Without Pity:
[…] this doesn't look like the Discovery Channel. Wait, she's still talking. Tina Fey wants to know who is behind the quote in the paper and the room full of staffers shrug in unison. Now Jonathan walks in and asks her to go see Jack Donaghy in his office. Alec Baldwin? She demands a fess-up from the staff before she goes, insisting this time she will not be taking the bullet for anyone. Frank denotes: "This is bad. Real bad," and then the TV in the room that is set that night's finale of MILF Island focuses in as the MILF Island host squarely says "Prepare for the craziest night of television of your life." Wait a minute ... the strikes over? The strikes over! The strikes ova!!!
First expressing false confusion and then very real glee at the thought that he’s watching a new episode of 30 Rock rather than the Discovery Channel (used to fill the strike-shaped void), Michael somehow manages to simultaneously merge the varying foci of Jordan and Poniewozik’s posts while doing something completely different. The rest of the weecap outlines the episode while commenting on its efficacy, humor, narrative, etc., but he clearly signals through his enthusiasm that television is not alone in its celebratory post-strike amnesia. Writer’s strike? What writer’s strike?
The end of the writer’s strike as the return of the prodigal medium. As we all shout “hoorah, television is back!” (and kill fatted calves), the writers have been here all along, doing what they felt was right. When do we celebrate that? And, as fellow writers who rely on television to do what we like do to, whose side are we on?
*IMHO is the netspeak acronym for “in my humble opinion.”
[Author’s Note: Writing about writing about television proved much more difficult than I thought it would be, although I can’t say why. In any case, many apologies for posting this a week later than planned.]
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(NEXT WEEK: “America’s Most Shocking.” Is it just me or does television get more and more dramatic every three seconds?)
Last week, in my discussion of television and/as therapy, I forgot to mention an important facet of this analogy. That is, that in psychoanalysis, in order to facilitate transference, the therapist becomes (whether subconsciously or consciously) the “subject supposed to know” in the eyes of the patient. This is not to say that the therapist is actually in the know or knows deep secrets about the analysand, but that the analysand begins to believe in the therapist’s superior facility over the patient’s unconscious thoughts. In regards to television, I could posit that shows are sometimes approached as more veracious than real life (who hasn’t thought, at least fleetingly, “well that’s not how couples act on [pick you show of choice], so we must be doing something wrong”); however, while television may approach that “subject supposed to know” status, it’s really the internet that’s already there. Or is it just me who gets angry with Google if it can’t find exactly what I’m looking for? We expect a lot from the internet as a form of collective intelligence: to know what we’re looking for, to have solutions to our problems, to understand our perspective, etc… But I’m starting to get off-track here, because we’ve come to expect more and more from television too these days. In fact, we often expect television to not be television at all. And that’s what I want to talk about today.
Traditionally, television is a commercial medium and a serial one. Among a few other things, I would argue that television’s episodic structure—the cycle of shows, one after the other, along with the weekly repetition of new episodes of the same show—defines it as a medium. Obviously, there are a few exceptions to the weekly configuration: television movies, news programs (usually daily), competitions (i.e. American Idol’s extra elimination shows), rerun marathons, etc. However, even these exceptions fall within the overarching cyclicality of the medium as a whole, and most shows of a certain ilk (read: narrative shows) stick to a weekly format. Lucky for HBO, then, that “it’s not TV” (as its tagline proclaims), so it can undermine some of the very qualities which make television television. First, there are no commercials, which is certainly part of the appeal of pay cable channels like HBO and Showtime. Secondly, HBO can offer shows like In Treatment, which I mentioned last week and which attempts to imitate daily life more closely than most narrative shows. Instead of a once-a-week condensation of goings-on in the character’s lives, In Treatment airs five nights a week for half-an-hour, showing a slightly abridged version (25 minutes instead of the conventional 50) of a therapist’s session with his patients. Each day's show corresponds to a different patient and on Fridays the therapist, Paul (played by Gabriel Byrne), goes to his own therapy session. Thus, In Treatment eschews the weekly televisual format in favor of the professional therapeutic format—the same patient only once a week, but different patients each day, offering us more fully developed characters and long blocks of time in which to contemplate them without the distancing breaks of either parallel action or commercials. Of course, even before In Treatment, there were ways to mold television to our will, to subvert both the episodic structure and the commercial interruptions. The earliest manifestations of this subversion came in the rather clumsy form of television shows on VHS, which quickly (thankfully) evolved into TV-on-DVD and On Demand (digital cable’s answer to popular “commercial-free” networks like HBO and perhaps an attempted stop-gap against DVD sales curbing actual television viewing). And, of course, who can forget DVR and the beloved TiVo. TiVo, especially, has enough cultural relevance that it’s still routinely mentioned in television shows themselves—which I don’t doubt has something to do with strategic, wily product placement. Unlike TV-on-DVD and Netflix’s Watch Instantly feature—both industries which could theoretically give people a reason to cancel their cable—TiVo necessitates a cable subscription and indulges viewers with that ever-seductive mirage of choice. Instead of being forced to watch whatever’s on TV, have to schedule yourself according to certain shows, or, god forbid, have to set a cumbersome VCR, with one click of a button TiVo records what you want when you want it and may even suggest other shows based on what it thinks you like. In an amusing episode from Sex and the City’s final season (1997-2003, episode 6.2, “Great Sexpectations"– another HBO show, this one used the pay cable, not-TV system to its advantage by showing a fair amount of nudity rather than altering episodic convention), the character of Miranda panics when her nanny accidentally deletes her entire TiVo hard drive. Still recovering from a break-up with the father of her child, Miranda can’t quite fathom losing the only thing that’s there for her whenever she needs it in whatever way she wants it: her TiVo. Eventually, Steve, Miranda’s ex, fixes her TiVo much to her relief, and all is well with the world. However, TiVo’s seductive allure remains a constant, prompting Alex Richmond over at Television Without Pity to explore her own love of TiVo in her recap of the aforementioned episode: I’m personally torn about the TiVo/DVR technology. On the one hand, how wonderful to be able to walk up to my television, sit down, and watch exactly what I’m in the mood for when I’m in the mood for it. On the other hand, how tragic to lose the adventure of flipping channels, the chance operations of what’s on now that I associate with television and, indeed, with some of the pleasure I get out of the medium. And if a machine’s making all my choices for me—what I might like to watch, what’s ready to be discarded, etc.—what’s the point of having all those other options? Television spoils us for choice, but doesn’t TiVo just encourage us back into a bunch of niche markets? Of course, then there are new internet-based programs like Hulu, which serve as repositories for all the legal streaming video of television shows, films and favorite clips provided by various networks and production companies. This television-on-demand-online may be my favorite it’s-not-TV format because it keeps my television adventure—flipping channels on the actual set—intact, while allowing me the choice to watch something I really want to watch when I want to watch it. The best of both worlds. But if television isn’t only on television anymore, is it still television? Is this a “if a tree falls in a forest” kind of question? (Does anyone care?) Or do we have to come up with a new name, like, webervision? Telenet? Intertelevisinet?TiVo is an amazing invention; it's really taught me a lot. I'm working on a story called "Lessons TiVo Has Taught Me," which include being selective, learning to let go, when to dump shit you know you don't really need, and really focusing on something. When I first got TiVo, I felt so liberated; I was forever freed from commercials, and no longer a slave to the delayed instant gratification of watching the news live. I can now watch a half-hour show in twenty minutes by zapping the ads, but now if I watch TV and am on the internet at the same time, I know I'm missing a lot. So, because of TiVo, I choose carefully and know when to move on. It's changed me.
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(NEXT WEEK: “IMHO,” in which I engage in a self-reflexive exploration of television bloggers—how we write about what we see.)
And I wake up and I ask myself what state I'm in
And I say well I'm lucky, cause I am like East Berlin
I had this wall and what I knew of the free world
Was that I could see their fireworks
And I could hear their radio
And I thought that if we met, I would only start confessing
And they'd know that I was scared
They'd would know that I was guessing
But the wall came down and there they stood before me
With their stumbling and their mumbling
And their calling out just like me…
~Dar Williams, “What Do You Hear in These Sounds?” from the album End of the Summer (1997)
I was watching TLC’s What Not To Wear (2003-present) the other day and marveling at how its two hosts, Stacey and Clinton, fancy themselves both fashion experts (which they are) and amateur therapists (which they aspire to—curing people’s neuroses and poor self-image through the healing power of fashion). In this particular case, they were making over a woman in her early twenties from Austin, Texas who insisted on wearing extremely short skirts and provocative clothing that was exceedingly unflattering, though she didn’t realize it. She also often accessorized with a fake raccoon’s tail pinned to the back of her jeans or skirt, in order to “stand out” and “make a statement” about “who she is.” Basically, she was using her clothing to get (the “wrong” kind of) attention from men and Stacey and Clinton told her as much, eventually coaxing out of the girl a genuinely sad tale of a past relationship with a very controlling man who all but forbade her from leaving the house. And, hence, she surmised, this was why she felt the need to flaunt herself in public, using her over-the-top outward appearance to mask her very deep-seated insecurities. In the first half of the episode, she continually fretted over Stacey and Clinton not only taking away her clothes, but thereby also taking away her sense of self and self-worth. Talk about pulling at our heartstrings. But by the time the episode was over, Stacey and Clinton (along with hairdresser, Nick, and make-up artist, Carmindy) had transformed this walking ball of contradictions—a woman whose friends claimed regularly “dressed like a hooker,” but who was simultaneously kind of mousy, immature and insecure—into an adorable, self-confident Cinderella-at-the-ball (without the midnight bell toll). While Stacey and Clinton often caution that fashion can’t cure deeper emotional issues, the show promises that it can prove a tantalizing stop-gap salve to ease away perceived flaws.
This is all well and good, and although I’m not sure I entirely buy the fashion-positive moral of the What Not To Wear storyline, I’m content to leave it be for now. I’m more interested in the trend to want to help people on television and through television, a discussion I started in my post on Oprah’s The Big Give and which I’ll continue here on a broader scale. I think we’re all agreed that television usually entertains, that it often serves as an escape from the humdrum blahs of everyday life, and that it perhaps even educates at times. But can television help us become better people? Can it provide a place for us to process our traumas and recover from the woes of the daily grind?
When I asked, perhaps a bit coyly, in last week’s preview, whether television is therapy, I wasn’t talking about the obvious attempts to make television shows somehow therapeutic or curative—shows like What Not To Wear or The Biggest Loser (NBC, 2004-present) or TLC’s new frighteningly televangelist-like self-help show that I can’t bring myself to watch, I Can Make You Thin—although the growing number of makeover shows is certainly part of the television-as-therapy trend. Nor was I referring to the few narrative shows that feature psychologists/psychiatrists, like Showtime’s Huff (2004-2006) or the brilliant new HBO show In Treatment, which I adore in an obsessive way that probably isn’t healthy.
No, when I talk about television as therapy, I mean television as a whole—a landscape of pixels and sound waves, narratives and advertising, hypnotic glow, endless flow and ubiquitous cultural resonance. For better or for worse, television is a mirror of our society, or parts of our society. And while this reflection may be always distorted, I believe it proves crucial in our formation of cultural and social identity. In his essay on the mirror stage, French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan posits that infants first learn to recognize themselves as separate from their mothers by looking in the mirror and seeing a perfect, complete, discrete child-being (the child herself) with whom they identify (later he argues that this isn’t necessarily a childhood identification, but more of an on-going internalized split in every individual’s subjectivity--but that’s really beside the point). Essentially, there is always a disconnect between who we feel we are (incomplete, confused, ungainly) and who we see ourselves to be (complete, composed, balanced).
Let’s put aside for a moment that this is a grossly oversimplified version of Lacan’s mirror stage (for the real deal, check out the first two volumes of The Seminar of Jacques Lacan (Book I and Book II), and his collection of essays, Ecrits), and introduce yet another exceedingly abridged psychoanalytic construct to the mix, that of the Freudian “talking cure.” While the phrase “talking cure” was not coined by Sigmund Freud, but rather by a patient of his lesser-known colleague, Dr. Josef Breuer, this phrase has come to epitomize psychiatric techniques, Freudian and beyond. Loosely: by allowing the patient to talk through her problems, perhaps circuitously or by continually revisiting the same ideas from different angles or by letting the patient dictate the path of the conversation, the psychoanalyst can help the patient overcome neuroses/traumas/etc. While talking, the patient is not only able to process what she is going through, but she also unknowingly reveals certain symptoms, connections and patterns that frame her mental state, allowing the therapist to glean the oft-hidden root of her problem(s) even when she cannot.
Thus, the concept of television-as-therapy can be approached in two, not necessarily mutually exclusive ways—television as mirror stage (making apparent how we reflect on our own identities) and television as talking cure (in which we converse, figuratively, with our favorite shows and unintentionally reveal our own neuroses in how we respond to them). In the case of the former, I’d like to refer back to my epigraph by singer-songwriter Dar Williams, which might actually make sense now in context. Television has the potential to reveal to us (especially, it pains me to say, reality TV) that everyone else is at least as befuddled by life as we are. But what about television as a talking cure—not in the framework of the individual show but in regards to the medium as a whole?
Actually, I’m asking the question backwards or, perhaps, the wrong question entirely, because it’s not a matter of whether or not television affords us the opportunity to watch ourselves watching, to reveal to us the inner workings of our mental lives—our wants, desires, needs. Of course, television has the potential to do this (just as the books we read, music we listen to, and art we like probably speak volumes about who we are). The questions isn’t whether or not television can serve as a technological manifestation of the talking cure, but rather…who’s listening even if it does?
(NEXT WEEK: “It’s Not TV.” This may be HBO’s slogan, but the initiative to make television that isn’t quite television has taken on a life of its own.)
Just a brief hiatus while I refuel with back-to-back episodes of CSI and Scrubs. You won't have to wait long for the return of my regularly-scheduled blogging...with all new episodes and a shocking twist you have to see to believe!
Er...or not.
Next week: “The Talking Cure.” Television as escape. Television as entertainment. Television as therapy?
Forgive me for stealing the title of this post from my favorite NPR radio program, but the analogy seemed too apt (check out their site if you have no idea what I’m talking about). For a while now, I’ve been fascinated by how the American family is portrayed on contemporary television, from the tendency of coupling overweight husbands with skinny wives in sitcoms to the favored trope of the families we choose trumping those we’re born into in many dramas (particularly those of the adventure, action and sci-fi genres). Surely, a comprehensive study of American families on television warrants a book: starting with something like I Love Lucy (1951-1957) and moving through other landmark shows featuring families--both nuclear and alternative--like (get ready for a pretty random selection) Bewitched (1964-1972), The Odd Couple (1970-1975), All in the Family (1971-1979), Kate & Allie (1984-1989), The Cosby Show (1984-1992), and Boy Meets World (1993-2000). Not to mention more recent offerings like Gilmore Girls (2000-2007), Arrested Development (2003-2006), and Family Guy (1999-present) and a few wildcard shows like Gilligan’s Island (1964-1967), Star Trek: Voyager (1995-2001), and Lost (2004-present), in which wildly incompatible people (sometimes actual enemies) are thrown together and forced to rely on each other to survive.
Naturally, there’s a lot I could say about television families and, chances are, I’ll revisit this topic with a gentler example as my subject matter in the near future, but, for now, I want to think about the American family as dystopia. Last week I closed with a question—“What if motherhood is no longer a choice but an inevitability, and your facility as a mother is the only thing that stands between humanity and an apocalypse?”—asked in regard to Fox’s Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (2008-present). As an action-adventure drama, this show may not be the cream of the crop, but there’s something compelling about the characters and their interactions that keeps drawing me back into the story. And I think I’ve figured out why. (I should also say, by way of a disclaimer, that despite the following analysis I actually really enjoy the show. In spite of myself, perhaps, but I do.)
Taking up where James Cameron’s 1991 film Terminator 2 left off, The Chronicles follows Sarah and her teenaged son John (ostensibly the eventual savior of mankind) as they fight for their lives against cybernetic assassins from the future (the eponymous terminators) while trying to stave off a technological apocalypse. Actually, Sarah does most of the fighting, along with Cameron, a cybernetic terminator-girl sent to help them, while John gets into trouble and has to be rescued over and over again. John’s relative weakness compared to Sarah’s strength provides an interesting reversal of the lady-in-distress trope, but this apparent subversion loses some of its feminist clout if you consider that John is just filling the role of the child in need of protection and guidance and that Sarah is his Mother, “naturally” inclined to protect him at all costs.
Of course, Sarah is also a working mother, in two senses of the word: first, she has to maintain a waitressing job to keep up appearances while providing for the household in superficially nurturing ways (having breakfast ready in the morning, cooking dinner, doing laundry, not allowing John to skip school, and hiding 9mm guns and semi-automatic rifles behind toasters and under drywall). Secondly, being a mother is her raison-d’etre—the only reason she keeps fighting is her need to keep John alive and safe so he can, in turn, deliver humankind from the destruction of an imminent machine uprising (an obvious Mary and Christ re-visioning if I’ve ever seen one). While the narrative of The Chronicles changes the stakes of the game a bit when John insists that he’s not capable of becoming a resistance fighter and pleads with his mother to avert the apocalypse before it happens instead, this doesn’t really change Sarah’s character or her place in this dystopic rendering of the American family. While it’s made quite clear that Sarah loves John deeply, the premise of the show (and the films before it) dictates that she didn’t want him, that she didn’t chose him or their life together. Rather, in the age-old tradition of the long-suffering, accidental hero, this life was thrust upon her and she’s just risen to the occasion. Motherhood, for Sarah, was not a choice, but is more of a burden—whether she openly says as much or not.
And let’s not beat around the bush: Sarah is kind of a bitch, which is not to say that her determination isn’t impressive or her heroism admirable. She does what she has to do in order to get things done. Once Sarah has hardened herself into this role of reluctant, but quite capable, mother-savior-warrior-martyr (a personality that is fully formed by the time of The Chronicles’ pilot episode), she bristles at any possible intrusion into her compact family unit of two. She bolts from a man who loves her when he asks her to marry him, and she generally eschews outright affection in favor of abject concern, tough love and anger with the world. When Cameron, a reprogrammed terminator sent from the future, ruffles Sarah’s Weltanschauung by coming to their rescue, Sarah accepts her—and allows her to become part of the family with an air of deep mistrust (Cameron masquerades as John’s sister)—only because Cameron is a useful tool in the fight against Skynet and the terminators. And you’ll remember that in the first Terminator movie, Sarah slept with Kyle Reese (John’s father, sent back to the past by future-John himself to protect his mother) out of the kind of desperate affection that comes with life-threatening, imminent-apocalypse types of situations (in film, at least). Sarah’s is a family built, from son to “daughter” to mother to the absent (dead) soldier/hero father, out of necessity—a family born of fear, not love.
It is clear at every turn that Sarah’s family is only a fragile metaphor for life never being what we expect of it, that extraordinary circumstances call for extraordinary measures and a certain degree of sacrifice. Instead of the utopian idea that differences can be overcome through love and trust, The Chronicles confronts difference with distrust and violence. This is not dissimilar from another American dystopian vision of the future, but one we’ve been facing now for years in the real world. The morals espoused implicitly by The Sarah Connor Chronicles are as follows: protect your children at all costs, openly distrust outsiders because they may be the enemy, allow help from your allies only on your own terms (and distrust them, too, only keep it to yourself), prophecies of future devastation sanction preemptive violence, and all is fair in war.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but does this rhetoric sound familiar to anyone else? And who better than someone masquerading in the utopian, wholesome guise of an American Mother to carry this message to us viewers, innocently seeking entertainment in a world of turmoil. But sometimes a mother is just a mother. And sometimes she’s not.
(IN TWO WEEKS: “The Talking Cure.” Television as escape. Television as entertainment. Television as therapy?)
Postfeminist wisdom would have us believe that the feminist movement is a thing of the past. Women fought for their rights and they won and now women can do anything they want to do, from being a homemaker with three children to running for the Presidency. Not only that, but we’re told that any struggles contemporary women may face on account of their sex/gender—harassment, discrimination, domestic violence, body dysphoria, etc.—are individual issues, not due to endemic socio-cultural conventions. Putting aside for a moment that these above statements are rather ludicrous (American women by-and-large may have more choices these days about the paths their lives will take, but they’re still hemmed in by gendered cultural norms and expectations), I want to spend some time today thinking about the postfeminist (tele)visual heroines of the late 1990s and 2000s. Actually there are at least two types: first, the career-oriented, hyper-femme thirty-something who has spent her life playing the field and/or working her way up and suddenly finds herself at a loss when she realizes she wants a husband and a family (think HBO’s astoundingly popular Sex and the City (1998-2004), with a film coming out this May marking its continued appeal). Even shows that don’t explicitly have that Sex and the City feel (i.e. the never-ending romantic comedy approach) often employ this character-trope. For example, 30 Rock’s Liz Lemon (NBC, 2006-present) spends as much of her time stumbling over her mess of a love life as she does dealing with the shenanigans of her boss (Alec Baldwin) and a hilarious ensemble cast. In one particularly telling episode, Liz (played by the brilliant Tina Fey) unintentionally steals a baby from a coworker when her biological clock begins to tick too loudly (again, this baby-envy theme has a filmic version, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler’s comedy Baby Mama, coming out in April). This obsession with family, husband and/or babies leads me to the second type, my actual focus today: Moms. Shows like Desperate Housewives (ABC, 2004-present) showcase the current televisual mother-fetish, and more recent incarnations such as Cashmere Mafia (ABC>, 2008) and Lipstick Jungle (NBC, 2008-present) try to combine the career-oriented, swinging single girl type with the mom/wife character with mixed results. NBC’s Medium (2005-present), a crime show with more serious subject matter than the above lifestyle shows, considers how Allison Dubois, a psychic mother-of-three, balances her paranormal career with her family. Even reality shows are weighing in, with offerings like Your Momma Don’t Dance (Lifetime, 2008-present)—not to be confused with its unofficial companion-show My Dad Is Better Than Your Dad (NBC, 2008-present)—and The Secret Life of a Soccer Mom (TLC, 2008-present). Compellingly, The Secret Life takes the career-first-than-scrambling- to-find-love theme of Sex and the City and turns it on its head. Only two episodes have aired so far, but the central premise promises to stay the same if we believe TLC’s promotional materials and the show’s website: each week, a woman who has found a wonderful husband and had several beautiful children is given the chance to go back to the career she chose to leave behind when she had kids. It’s important to note that these women aren’t/weren’t necessarily homemakers by profession—meaning that they (or at least the first two women, a former fashion design and a former chef) had successful careers before they became wives and/or mothers. The Secret Life allows them to take a break from their full-time jobs as moms and go back out into the working world for a week while their husband takes care of the kids and manages the house, all the while believing his wife is at a spa as part of a nonexistent reality show that rewards stay-at-home mothers. The tagline for The Secret Life, which shimmers on the screen at the start of each episode, reads, “For anyone who has put their dreams on hold…your time has come,” and the show seems intent on showing mothers what they’re missing in their long-abandoned careers. It’s a curious premise. Ostensibly, it gives women a chance to see what they left behind—the path not taken—but the two women so far have been offered jobs after their week-long, secretive trial run and have had to make tearful decisions about whether to go back to work or stay home with their kids. This once in a lifetime opportunity to reclaim the past is fraught with problems—sometimes it’s just not that simple to reinvent yourself and your family. For example, tonight’s mother, Katie, would have loved to go back to work as a chef in one of LA’s top restaurants; however, even though her husband and toddlers encouraged her to go for it, she ultimately decided to stay home because she didn’t feel the family could bear the financial burden of putting two boys in daycare full-time. Tearfully, Katie lamented that if the timing had been better…things might have been different. This “choice” is a very sharp double-edged sword, and television developers seem to find more and more inventive ways of manipulating the dichotomy already faced by women between what they want and what’s expected of them in and by society. I wanted to conclude this post with a discussion of Fox’s new show—still on the fence, I think, concerning its renewal for next season—Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (2008-present). However, I think the title character’s dystopic rendering of the American mother as a violent, stoic, gun-totting protectress will have to wait until next week. This show begs the questions: What if motherhood is no longer a choice but an inevitability, and your facility as a mother is the only thing that stands between humanity and an apocalypse? Where do we stand on the career versus family debate then? ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~(NEXT WEEK: “This American Life.” A meditation on television families—those we choose and those we are born into.)
Watching The Ellen DeGeneres Show (2003-present) last week forced me to consider the degree to which philanthropy, the receipt of free stuff, and talent contests have become part of the fabric of the American Dream as presented by television. From the now almost eighty-year-old Miss America Pageant (remember, it’s a scholarship fund not a beauty pageant) to The Apprentice (2004-present), proving we are better than someone else and then being rewarded for our competitive spirit and superiority—with money, cars, celebrity, careers, and maybe even a chance to make a difference in the world (feature optional)—is an American tradition.
This was all brought to mind for me because of two things. The first was the “Highway to Ellen Road Trip,” a prize awarded to four women from Nevada who received a “brand new GMC Acadia” in which they traveled across the country from Ellen’s hometown of New Orleans to The Ellen DeGeneres Show set in Los Angeles, stopping over at various national landmarks along the way. There was much screaming and eye-popping excitement from the bevy of friends when Ellen called to congratulate them in mid-February and, a mere week later, there was equally much screaming and bouncing and happy flailing when they finally arrived weary and not-so-bushy-tailed (but definitely excited, exceedingly excited) on Ellen’s set. Their response reminded me of the “Favorite Things” episodes of Oprah (1986-present), a pre-Christmas show in which every audience member receives hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars worth of merchandise—items that Oprah considers her favorite things of the season and wants to share with her fans. The “Favorite Things” episodes are always a surprise—not scheduled as such—so many audience members who find themselves unexpectedly involved in one of these amazing giveaways burst into tears or leap around in gleeful hysterics when Oprah announces the news at the beginning of the fateful show.
And, yes, it would be very exciting to unwittingly stumble into a situation wherein you receive an incredible quantity of top-of-the-line, sponsor-donated goods—from Ralph Lauren polo shirts to dishwashers. Who doesn’t like free stuff? What strikes me as curious is the hysteria revolving around such events and the popularity these days of evoking that hysteria and/or emotionality over and over again in every possible reality show context. There’s also the obvious appeal of celebrity—Rachael Ray sells knives because she has fans who worship her technique, gumption and extraordinary perkiness; Oprah has so much clout that her endorsement for Democratic presidential candidate carries serious weight; and the “Highway to Ellen Road Trip” ladies were probably just as thrilled about getting to meet Ellen DeGeneres and be on the show as they were about the free spa treatments, other fancy prizes, and all-expenses paid vacation weekend they spent in LA afterwards. A more in-depth consideration on the cult of celebrity may have to appear in another entry, since there’s something specific lurking in the talk show genre that bears further examination. Is it like therapy for the masses—the talking cure for the televisual nation?
But, for now, onwards. Because what I really want to talk about is Oprah’s The Big Give, the series premiere of which just aired on ABC yesterday and which is sure to spark a new genre of reality television (there are probably executives and producers mulling this over as I write, wondering which celebrities they could woo to host and how they would alter the formula just enough to get away with it). The Big Give is predicated on a philanthropic model of competition rather than the usual cutthroat, I-deserve-this-more-than-you-do model. Each week, contestants are challenged with new ways to “give big”—finding unique and exceptional ways to change the lives of individuals and communities with the resources allotted to them. Then the givers are judged on their creativity, their passion and their actual gifts (be they monetary, personal, spiritual or material) and the least-giviest competitor is sent home. The clincher? The contestants think that they’re just competing for the sake of competing—to show the world “how one person can make a difference” (as Oprah put it) and to have the opportunity to feel good about themselves as magnanimous philanthropists. But, of course, there’s prize money at the end of the tunnel; however, in true Oprah form, the contestants don’t know about the one million dollars they could win if they succeed in becoming the biggest giver (though, really, they must suspect it, given that every reality show worth its snuff has some sort of prize money, “secret” or not).
The contestants include people from all walks of life—from a former army captain and, indeed, a Miss America pageant winner, to a relief worker and a singer who considers herself a “survivor.” Dedicated to “changing the lives of complete strangers in the most dramatic ways,” the big givers and The Big Give itself sure pull at the heartstrings, with most of the givees in the first episode—among them a homeless woman with two teenaged kids and a young mother who’d recently lost her husband in a random shooting—bursting into uncontrollable sobs when their gifts were revealed. The best gifts were about presentation rather than just monetary value. Two givers (the singer and the army captain) managed to raise $40,000 in a mere 15 minutes at a local church for the homeless woman and her family and were able to present her not only with the money, but also a new home and a car and job training. Another team (the relief worker and the contractor/dedicated family man) set up an amazing block party to celebrate the memory of the young widow’s husband, an event which was so heartfelt that it all but trumped the $50,000 they raised for her to help cover her mortgage and the eight years of educational scholarships they secured for her two young girls.
So, there’s something to be said for presentation in philanthropic gestures—which is why the “Highway to Ellen” crew probably wouldn’t have enjoyed their prizes as much if they hadn’t been sandwiched with a visit with Ellen herself. But is philanthropy the new entertainment (and is it even entertaining in the long run)? Where does it fit in with the old version of the American Dream (that’s the land of opportunity, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps version)? Is philanthropy (or, at least, the dispersal of free stuff and money) the inevitable outcome of the talk show genre? Money and prizes instead of mass therapy? And, as a nation, which do we need more?~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ (NEXT WEEK: “Playing the Mom Card.” Motherhood and television: protective mothers, restless homemakers, and career/Armageddon versus family.)
I still can’t decide whether it’s encouraging or terrifying that my biggest complaint from my twenty-four hour television viewing extravaganza was that I developed a stiff neck. I never found myself forced to watch infomercials. I was never mind-numbingly bored, although there were, of course, a few moments of “oh god, when will this end.” Neither my brain nor my eyes bled (although my eyes were feeling a bit strained by hour fourteen or so). And I’m fairly certain I didn’t kill any brain cells or lose any IQ points. In fact, I was surprisingly pleased by the ideas those twenty four hours generated; there’s seemingly always something on worth watching (although I guess that depends on your definition of “worth”), and I was able to give shows a chance—and find that I enjoyed them—that I would never usually give a second glance during the course of a normal day. For the record, Roland Barthes was right: “Boredom is not far from bliss, it is bliss seen from the shores of pleasure.” Sure, I wafted in and out of boredom, but moments of entertainment or insight or (tele)visual pleasure were never far behind. That’s not to say I would recommend watching television for twenty four hours become a weekly or even monthly activity. I think someone might have to pay me to get me to do it again, but not because I was bored. I felt mostly content, if a little cramped, until around hour twenty, when I became incredibly, irreparably sleepy and never fully recovered (i.e. never fully regained consciousness). The rules of inertia dictate that a body at rest stays at rest and while earlier in the day I moved around the room and stretched and even danced to keep myself from turning into an uncomfortable heap of stiff muscles, it eventually became nearly impossible for me to drag myself off the couch, which I think contributed to my later lack of alertness. Besides chronic exhaustion, the other hazard of televisual gluttony is literal gluttony: I consumed twice the daily recommended calories and twice the maximum recommended grams of fat for my age and gender in little under fifteen hours (since the last ten hours or so I didn’t eat much). Sedentary viewing breeds hunger—not that this is huge news flash to any of us—especially when every other commercial is telling you to order Papa John’s or drink Miller Lite. One thing this experience did leave me with is a vast inventory of comments and observations from which to draw on in the next weeks and months, so in lieu of an extensive account today, here’s an overview of my day and evening. It was sunny on Friday, when I scheduled myself to undertake this marathon, a fact which I initially resented as I could have been outside flying a kite like Mary Poppins (but then I realized that the likelihood of that happening was slim to none, so my resentment ebbed). The experiment began at 11:30am with the second half of The Today Show (NBC). After half an hour, I was not only insanely jealous of their frolicking ‘winter-break edition’ in Miami, but also knew the entire NBC line-up for the rest of day by heart. Apparently around lunchtime NBC prefers to promote itself rather than have actual advertisers. From there I moved on to Randy Jackson Presents America’s Best Dance Crew on MTV; I didn’t even know this was a show, but I was pretty impressed by the dancers (plus, it’s hosted by Mario Lopez, formerly of Saved By the Bell—alas, yon Slater, I remember him well). This show, though kind of cool, begged the question of what they’ll think up next in the “America’s Best…” genre of television: America’s Best Carpenter? So You Think You Can Scuba Dive? Seriously, where will it end? The subsequent few hours were occupied with an episode of Family Matters on ABC Family (another blast from the past), Ten Years Younger on TLC (because nothing says “the learning channel” like veneers, Lasik surgery and a new wardrobe—although I do appreciate the attempt at a mind-body-soul approach to the makeover genre: i.e. better looks begets better lifestyle begets better overall health and happiness), a Law and Order rerun on TNT (ah, Law and Order, it’s like chicken soup for the televisual soul—such a comforting constant of the TV landscape), and an episode of Stargate Atlantis on the SciFi channel (a show I’d never seen before; hence I was very, very confused). The Ellen DeGeneres Show brought me back to NBC at 4pm and will fuel a more lengthy discussion next week about talk shows, the American Dream, free stuff and philanthropy. After an hour back in the land of the thousand reality shows with The Discovery Channel’s It Takes a Thief (apparently going to jail is a good career move, one that can be parlayed into a reality show where you prove to people how easy it is to burglarize their homes and then provide them with better security systems), I drifted back into narrative television with Will and Grace on the CW (a show I sorely miss) and King of the Hill on Fox (a show I’ve been unfairly prejudiced against until now). From there I moved on to CSI: Crime Scene Investigation on Spike (an enduring favorite, and the only time I accidentally ended up watching an episode I’d seen before). CSI segued nicely into Fox’s Bones (which will certainly fuel its own discussion one of these days about perception versus reality and rational thought versus emotional appeal) which, in turn, segued nicely into CBS’s The Ghost Whisperer (which I enjoyed but will probably never be able to watch again because there were too many, well, ghosts). Done with my parade of crime shows for a little while, I moved on to Family Guy on the CW (always entertaining) and Out of Jimmy’s Head on the Cartoon Network (surprisingly confusing/weird even for a kid’s show or perhaps I just couldn’t have cared less). TLC’s What Not To Wear brought me back briefly to the makeover genre (one reality show that I absolutely adore, as shamed as I am to admit it). After that, two more sitcoms—reruns of Frasier on Lifetime and The Jamie Foxx Show on BET—made for rather entertaining counterpoints to each other, and not only because of the tension between race, class and each of their perceived audiences. At After that eerie-yet-minor lapse, things progressed swimmingly again with an episode of Good Eats with Alton Brown (the Bill Nye of food) on the Food Network and learned how to make olive bread, followed by a strange episode of The Jefferson’s on TV Land (actually, I find The Jefferson’s just generally strange). The History Channel’s Prostitution: Sex in the City provided a rather fascinating account of the world’s oldest profession, although I was disturbed by the implication that Greek slave women preferred prostitution to other possible tasks. Oh really? Yeah. Okay. In the “and now for something completely different” category of channel flips, I moved on from prostitution to The Cosby Show on Nick-at-Nite (more thoughts on race and perceived viewership may result eventually) and then from wholesome family togetherness to VH-1’s Top 20 Video Countdown (which was possibly the most boring program all evening—the videos I watched were supposedly from the top 6, but they seemed incredibly facile and sluggish). A rerun of Dawson’s Creek on TBS reminded me how young Katie Holmes and Michelle Williams looked and seemed in the late nineties, and a rousing episode of Little House on the Prairie on the Hallmark Channel reminded me how idealistic television used to be in the 19th century (okay, fine, the mid-seventies). After that, things start to get a little blurry and Sesame Street on PBS merges in my memory with ABC’s Good Morning America and Bravo’s The Millionaire Matchmaker to form a highly unlikely scenario: Elmo and Zoe fight over who will marry the next Democratic presidential candidate. As I’m sure this didn’t actually happen, let’s just say that by the last few shows I was more than a little tired. The stats: 24 channels, 29 programs (mostly reruns), 20.5 alert hours, 3.5 hours half-asleep, 3795 calories and 119 grams of fat consumed. The verdict: I think I can safely say that television is far from a vast wasteland. But I wouldn’t say it’s a vast utopia either. Vast is entertaining—and apparently only boring in the best of ways—but we shouldn’t necessarily be satisfied with quantity over quality. Still, after all that, I’m mostly left with the same ruling as last week: television is vast. End stop. But at least now I have even more to say about it. ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~(NEXT WEEK: “A Helping Hand and the Greater Good.” Talk shows, philanthropy, talent contests, and the American Dream.)
Ever since 1961, when newly-elected Chair of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Newton Minton described television as a “vast wasteland,” the phrase has been bandied around quite a bit—sometimes justifiably, sometimes carelessly—by the medium’s critics, its advocates, and those whose tele-cultural loyalties fall somewhere in between. I, for one, take issue with the phrase not because I don’t agree that some television programming is bleak and barren, but because the phrase implicitly encompasses all television, television as a medium, rather than just allowing that some television shows are kind of dumb (just as some art/film/music/insert-your-cultural-object-here is kind of dumb or, as Star Trekcreator Gene Roddenbury supposedly once said,“They say that ninety percent of TV is junk. But, ninety percent of everything is junk”). That doesn’t mean I’m ready to let television completely off the hook. There have been enough indictments of television as mindless, soul-destroying and intellect-diminishing that it’s pretty hard to just shrug off.
Here’s what I do agree with: television is vast, ridiculously so; it is an omnipresent, ubiquitous force in American culture. Television is often distracting, seductive, hypnotic—a medium people seem to either love or hate. But whatever we may say about television—and even I, a great lover of the medium, know I’m guilty of moralizing in my constant griping about reality shows—people do watch television. Billions of people. And it would be pretty difficult and pretty arrogant to say that billions of people are stupid, misguided and uninspired in their desire to watch. There is something fascinating about television, perhaps even because of its vastness, and I want to take a bit more time to explore this fascination one element at a time. Last week, I talked about seriality and narrative, and I want to continue today thinking bit a more about seriality and excess (the “vast” in “vast wasteland”). Most television is serial and/or episodic (or are those the same thing?). While episodes are narrative and a season might have a narrative arc that binds its episodes together, the continuity of the television show is not narrative or linear, but serial and protracted. Its impossible to watch a conventional television show from beginning to end when broadcast as part of a normal, weekly schedule. Instead, you have to always “tune in again next week” for more—satisfaction continually deferred through seriality. Even if you’re watching television-on-DVD or a marathon of repeats, there’s simply no way you could watch an entire series in one sitting (unless it’s a hapless series like Joss Whedon’s much-admired Firefly (2002-2003), of which there were only thirteen episodes). Even watching an entire season in one sitting is pretty untenable, considering a full season of episodes is usually (and this is a purely non-scientific estimate) fourteen to twenty-six hours worth of material. Sure, you might be able to do it, but would you actually be able to enjoy it or remember anything about what you were watching? That said, the traditional mode of television viewing is one-show-after-another, each show leading into another show that’s often not related to its predecessor in any way, shape, or form except in the sense that they share a network or cable channel lineup. We might want to flip channels, a televisual experience par excellence, but, unfortunately, flipping channels is often disappointing. I might search for something good to watch or a particular show and not be able to find what I’m looking for (even if I have 200+ channels). Or, if I do find the show I want, it may have already begun or be an episode I’ve seen. TiVo and DVR have aimed to cure some of these televisual dissatisfactions, but I sometimes find that I enjoy my experience more when I don’t find what I’m looking for, when I come across something unexpectedly. In television, I often find that boredom can be extremely productive and surprisingly pleasurable. Of course, all of this is leading up to something, a strange, perhaps foolish wish of mine to become completely overwhelmed by television’s vastness, to experience it in all its excessive, serial glory. My thoughts on seriality (some of which I’ve discussed above) led me to the point of wanting to engage in a kind of conceptual, psychological experiment: 24 hours of television, with rules designed to allow (force?) me to experience as much as possible in that amount of time. Maybe this will help me form some opinion about whether or not we ought to believe that television is a vast wasteland. Maybe it’ll be a lot of fun. Maybe I’ll just be bored to death. Only the Shadow knows.Rules and Methods
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ (NEXT WEEK: "Vast Wasteland, Part 2." In the words of French philosopher Roland Barthes: “Boredom is not far from bliss, it is bliss seen from the shores of pleasure.”)
When I was a kid in the early 1990s, there were these obnoxious Trix cereal commercials. You may remember the general theme: the white Trix Rabbit would plot yet another cockamamie scheme to get his hands on some cereal, only to be caught by a gaggle of cruel children and told “Silly rabbit! Trix are for kids!” Not only did I hate these commercials because I felt sorry for the poor, cereal-deprived rabbit, but I was also irked by the company’s penchant for serial advertisements in which two or three ads would be connected by the same narrative. (Trix cereal wasn’t the only product employing serial advertising; if I remember correctly, the Keebler Elves and others were also guilty-as-charged, but the Trix commercials really stuck with me). For example, in ad number 1, the Rabbit would devise a plan, often involving elaborate disguises; in ad number 2, he would execute his plan, his fingertips inches away from the bowl of Trix; in ad number 3, he would get caught and the kids would snatch the cereal away from him laughing while the Rabbit lamented his bad fortune. These serial cereal ads (pun intended) were such a nuisance to me because I never seemed to see more than two of them; even though I knew the Rabbit would never get his Trix, I held out hope time and again. Besides the fact that I think the Rabbit ad campaign was seriously flawed—catering only to mean, vindictive children who liked denying pleasure to cute, cartoon animals; I felt so bad for the Rabbit, I’m not sure I would have eaten Trix if someone had paid me—my childhood memory of these Trix commercials provides a useful springboard for a consideration of our (my?) desire for narrative closure in the televisual universe.
(NEXT WEEK: “Vast Wasteland, Part 1.” An introduction to an experiment in televisual seriality and visual/sensorial excess. Taking the narrative out of narrative television: a day in the life.)
In 1973, artists Richard Serra and Carlota Fay Schoolman created a six minute video art piece entitled Television Delivers People. In the work, Serra and Schoolman deconstruct the political-industrial-commercial matrix of television and the mass media in a straightforward, yet scathing, critique; their text, accompanied by jazzy elevator muzak, scrolls slowing over a blue screen, compelling viewers to confront the curious dichotomy of the seemingly innocuous melody with the artists’ polemic. Asking viewers to read a text dismantling the illusion of television as sheer entertainment on a television set, only furthers Serra and Schoolman’s conceit of contradictions and lends credence to their statements, statements which are presented as fact, even though there is no actual evidence provided to support any of their allegations (which is not to say that they’re not right).
Here’s an excerpt from their text, including the first line and the final lines and some of the statements in between. The entire video is available here and can be purchased from Video Data Bank.
The Product of Television, Commercial Television, is the Audience.
[…]
Television is the prime instrument for the management of consumer demands.
Commercial television defines the world in specific terms.
Commercial television defines the world so as not to threaten the status quo.
Television defines the world so as not to threaten you.
Soft propaganda is considered entertainment.
[…]
Every dollar spent by the television industry in physical equipment needed to send a message to you is matched by forty dollars spent by you to receive it.
You pay the money to allow someone else to make the choice.
You are consumed.
You are the product of television.
Television delivers people.
I didn’t need to ask myself anything. Nothing has changed. American television has always been commercial. And television has always been about the audience. “Viewer” is just another name for “visual consumer.” I know that. I think we all know that deep down when we watch television. This is not the part of Serra and Schoolman’s piece that I find so startling—although the clarity with which they present their points is quite brilliant, as is the implicit (but intentional?) connection they draw between television and God in the phrase “television delivers people.” Sure, television delivers people, in the sense that viewers inherently shape every aspect of the televisual product—the kind of advertising, the types of shows, whether a new series will rise or fall. However, in the same breath television that depends on its viewers’ fidelity and fascination, it denies us any true power over the programming. Our desires—what we want to watch, for example—are consumed, processed, and regurgitated in the form deemed most acceptable for a mass market. Thus we are both consumed and produced by and for television.
But we like it. At least I do. I know that in the eyes of the television executives, I’m just a statistic, just market research, but that’s part of television. What would television be without viewers qua consumers? Would it even exist? That’s what find most startling about my own reaction to Television Delivers People; I agree with much of the critique, but not the implied accusatory tone. I love television for precisely some of the reasons it’s often decried: its unabashed commercialism, its endless appeal for escapism, even its occasional pandering to the lowest common denominator. Sure, I’d like to see a world in which reality TV played a smaller part in the daily line-up of offerings, but I’m not sure I can quite imagine a world in which television wasn’t commercial. Particularly, what would television be without the commercials?
Of course, this is just what TiVo and television-on-
All this is not to say that I like watching commercials—although sometimes I do. Let’s just say that I love to hate them. After all, what would the Super Bowl be without the ads? What would we do without the parade of funny animals, vulgar humor, vague racism, and sexist visual punch lines to entertain us?
I think part of the appeal of these 30 second spots is their ability to tell a brief, often amusing story about some aspect of American (consumer) life. A rejected Budweiser Clydesdale pulls himself up by his virtual bootstraps and trains like Rocky Balboa until he can join the team. Animals scream cartoonishly as a car swerves to avoid them on a dark road. Napoleon uses a Garmin to find his army.
Commercials are tiny stories. Soft propaganda is considered entertainment, as Serra and Schoolman write. The appeal is in the narrative, in the story as it is offered to the viewer to entertain and educate on an aspect of daily life. It’s just that in the case of the commercial, the moral of the story is the product.
I could say more, but we need to take a short break. Stay tuned.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
(NEXT WEEK: “Once Upon A Time.” An ode to narrative in which I discuss why Reality TV is just another fairy tale and re-visit the question of why non-reality television just seems so much more real than real life.)
“Before I was shot, I always thought that I was more half-there than all-there—I always suspected that I was watching TV instead of living life. People sometimes say that it's the way things happen to you in life that's unreal. The movies make emotions look so strong and real, whereas when things really do happen to you, it's like watching television--you don't feel anything. Right when I was being shot and ever since, I knew that I was watching television. The channels switch, but it’s all television.”~ Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol
“You're not anybody in America unless you're on TV. On TV is where we learn about who we really are. Because what's the point of doing anything worthwhile if nobody's watching? And if people are watching, it makes you a better person.”~ Suzanne Stone Maretto (Nicole Kidman), To Die For, 1995
(Next Week: “Television Delivers People,” in which I consider Richard Serra and Carolta Fay Schoolman’s 1973 video, Television Delivers People, alongside commercialism, spectatorship and the pleasures of mass media consumption.)
