television delivers people

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.

Even after a half dozen re-viewings, I am still rendered momentarily speechless each time I watch this video. Moreover, the first time I watched this in a museum setting—just a few weeks ago—an older woman came up to me, disregarding the sanctity of my headset listening bubble, to remark, urgently, “Just ask yourself how much has really changed.”

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-DVD promise: ad-free-TV. But even with these alternatives, we still see the lingering ghost of advertisements in fast-forwarded flashes or suspenseful fade-to-blacks. Commercials are built into the structure of television; dismantling the commercial matrix of television would involve a radical restructuring of the medium—one I’m not sure it would survive, as such. (You’ll note that I’m purposefully omitting pay-cable channels like HBO and Showtime from this discussion. Right now, I’m not prepared to jump on that elephant (in the room), but rest assured I’ll come back to it someday. For now, let me just say that HBO’s tagline, “It’s not TV…It’s HBO,” is not coincidental.)

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.

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(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.)