it's not tv

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:

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.

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?

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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.)

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the talking cure

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?

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(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.)

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we'll be right back

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?

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this american life

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.

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(IN TWO WEEKS: “The Talking Cure.” Television as escape. Television as entertainment. Television as therapy?)

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