Author: Alex Thompson

Storytelling in Film and Television by Kristin Thompson

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David Lynch’s Twin Peaks

Kristin Thompson, Storytelling in Film and Television (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2003)

Summary & Implications: What is the author’s project and why is it important now? What’s the narrative about the field that’s emerging from the reading? What narratives are silent? Whose voices are silent?

Kristin Thompson spends most of the four essays (collected from a speaking series given about a year earlier) here arguing for the value of looking at individual episodes, seasons, or series as objects of analysis. Opposing Williams’ idea of flow where viewers are basically unable to distinguish between what is the programming and what is the interruption (in terms of ads or even changes of show or channel), Thompson suggests (rightly) that viewers are not only able to make such distinctions, but that the storytelling, which aligns with her conception of the classical Hollywood storytelling structure, helps viewers make this distinction and forms the fundamental argument for her desire to focus on shows in every scale as the objects of study for television scholars. While this argument may seem somewhat unnecessary, I’d wager it only really seems that way now, in 2020, almost 2 decades after Thompson first made this argument. Her mode has become the standard, but TV scholarship is still relatively new, and it is very possible that the time between her argument and now has been shaped by that very argument.

To focus more on how that storytelling works, she notes that film is reliant upon redundant storytelling that uses dangling hooks and multiple narrative threads, and that TV weaponizes those concepts to ensure that viewers understand what is happening in an episode, season, and series. It’s a compelling argument.

She also, in the third essay, argues that the prevalence of TV has changed the way that we tell stories overall. She claims that the concept of seriality has become so embedded in the public consciousness that it has influenced film and literature, leading to a resurgence of sequels, prequels, and saga style storytelling. I find this claim to be very credible, but I think it both needs some more bolstering and some further thought given the developments of the past 20 years. But I guess that’s what I’m here for.

In her fourth essay, she argues that there can be such thing as Art Television the way there is Art Film, following Bordwell’s famous essay outlining the six features of art cinema. She shows that there are pretty tight homologies between the two media in how they handle the same ideas, using David Lynch’s Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet as her primary examples.

Context: Who is this author debating with and why? What is the context of the text’s production and distribution? What historical, cultural, etc. factors affect the way it makes meaning? Does the author seem to be in conversation with other scholars and/or paradigms? Where is this piece of writing centered in the field? What is their intervention in the literature/field? What text is this text in conversation with?

As I said above, she only really argues with (or even references outright) Raymond Williams’ concept of flow. Otherwise, she’s obviously positioning herself as an argument for what might be seen as a standard film theory angle on TV theory. I think it’s important to notice what is similar between the two media, as well as what is different. Though I wouldn’t go as far as McLuhan does on the concept of medium specificity, there are definite differences that make for real, meaningful variances in how the two media handle similar ideas/stories/techniques. Thompson provides a good first step here by noting that there is a tendency towards a unified act structure in different types of TV in a way that is similar to the classical Hollywood style, but there’s so much more to explore (and that was already explored after Thompson’s publication).

Methodology: What is the methodological framework of this text? What methodological moves or questions does the author engage? What is their object of analysis?

Textual analysis of several different kinds of TV shows, including some extended dialogue scenes that are presented in script form.

Rhetorical Moves: What are the major rhetorical moves of the author’s arguments?

By trying to port film theory ideas to TV theory, she both argues for their fundamental similarity and notes the obvious differences.

Engagement & Application: How do I engage this text? How does this apply to my work? Does it support or provide a counterargument or model for strong intro or lit review? In other words, why is this piece of writing useful to me and/or how is it limited (bad writing style, problematic, didn’t consider x, y, and z)? Does it intersect with other items on the list?

Her argument is pretty foundational for TV studies as far as I can tell, as her focus on aesthetics and poetics is a core from which other kinds of analysis can be built. I’ll definitely be going back to her ideas on serialization, even if I don’t think they’re as fully developed as they need to be.

Key Terms: What terms are key to the author’s argument, and are they operationalized explicitly or implicitly?

film, television, poetics, serialization, serials, sequel, redundant narration, dangling hooks, art film, art television, flow

Significant Quotations: What key quotations from this work would I want to have quick access to?

In Storytelling in the New Hollywood, I argued further that the norms and widespread use in recent decades are essentially still those of the “Golden Age” of studio filmmaking in the decades before 1960. This is not to say that all films draw on all aspects of that model, and certainly there are some films that stretch the conventions. I mean rather that the norms are still there to be drawn on, and most films do. Here I would like to take one further step and suggest that many of these norms have been adopted or adapted by television precisely because they have been so suited to telling straightforward, entertaining stories. (19)

Thus it would appear that in some cases even half-hour programs that are not interrupted by commercials tend to include major turning points that divide them into large-scale parts, or acts – though obviously here the authors were not required to time these moments as precisely as they did. With the increasing number of original series produced by premium channels like HBO in the U.S., one might wonder whether these commercial free programs also fall into evenly timed acts. A look at one half-hour sitcom, Sex and the City, and one roughly hour-long drama, The Sopranos, suggests that act structure is somewhat more flexible in such programs, but that it is not abandoned or radically altered. (51)

Such divisions of programs into acts, whether rigidly or flexibly proportioned, are not simply arbitrary. They give an episode a sense of structure, much as the balanced movements of a classical concerto do. They provide the spectator with a sense of progress and guarantee the introduction of dramatic new premises or obstacles at intervals. They allow for the rising and falling action that many writers refer to as crucial to good plots. Regular turning points also give variety to a story, ensuring that the action does not simply involve a character striving toward a goal and meeting a series of similar obstacles. Thus there are reasons why even television episodes that are broadcast without breaks would draw on an act structure. (54-5)

Currently all the familiar studios of Hollywood’s golden age are subsidiaries of large multinational corporations. In many cases, adaptations are attractive because such companies already own the rights to various narratives that have already been produced in one medium but which are available to be recycled in another. Moreover, these huge companies have been able to market their products, including movies, in part by using synergy. That is, a company’s TV stations will promote its movies, while its record division puts out the soundtrack, and so on. Such marketing now has also come to mean selling the same narrative over and over in different media. (81-2)

What, then, of serial narratives? It is possible that the vogue for sequels, series, and serials in film reflects an influence from television. […] These films [in the Lethal Weapon series] also, however, incorporate the mild seriality of much serious television, with the characters and their situations gradually changing. (103)

It is apparent, then, that the tendencies toward adaptations of stories among media, toward sequels, and toward seriality are all part of a general stretching and redefinition of narrative itself. In particular, the notion of firm and permanent closure to any given narrative has loosened across media. Series television, with its broad possibilities for spinning out narratives indefinitely, has been a major impetus in these tendencies. They, along with the innovations and interwoven multiple plot lines discussed in the last chapter, seem to me some of the most intriguing areas where an analyst might explore the aesthetic specificity of series television. (105)

How to Watch Television edited by Ethan Thompson and Jason Mittell

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Greg Daniels and Michael Schur’s Parks and Recreation

This is the first anthology I have to deal with on this list, and I’m not going to go into the kind of intense detail I usually go into for these kinds of things. Mostly, I’ll give a brief overview of what the purpose of the anthology is (and whether it seems effective based on what of it I read) and then look at the essays I selected in brief, just covering the thesis and methodology of said essays.

Thompson, Ethan, and Jason Mittell, eds. 2020. How to Watch Television. 2nd ed. New York: New York University Press.

Collection Overview

In their introduction, Thompson and Mittell work to position this book as an “owner’s manual,” accessible to both lay readers and students who might be using the book as a first step in research. As such, the essays have been kept short, and are focused on a particular series with one area of investigation (as can be seen in the essay titles). This can also be seen in the introduction’s focus on explaining what critical inquiry is, separating it from the “thumbs up, thumbs down” world of evaluation. This is all very introductory stuff, but they lay it out well and it could even be used as a way of introducing the concept of media criticism in a classroom.

Funnily, I’ve only seen two of the shows that I read essays about as of the time of this writing, and I kind of want to leave that as a guessing game for you. Leave a comment with your guesses!

“Better Call Saul: The Prestige Spinoff” by Jason Mittell

Mittell is a talented writer and television academic, and so it is no wonder that his essay here is really great at being both succinct and clear-eyed about its premise: that the concept of “prestige TV” is somewhat antithetical to the way TV has operated throughout most of its history as an imitative form, and that a spinoff of a prestige TV show is doubly antithetical and required a deft handling from its showrunners to mark it as both indebted to the original show and as something worthy of attention in its own right. Mittell nicely lays out what the term “prestige TV” has come to mean in its focus on a more masculine style and deliberate moral grayness that at one time felt new but now has settled into a concrete style. Through a close reading of the show’s first episode, Mittell shows how some of the very things that read as callbacks to those who were coming from Breaking Bad could also be read as pretty basic genre signifiers of prestige TV, thus bridging the gap between the two seemingly opposed impulses.

Concepts like “prestige” or “formulaic” are not inherent markers of quality; rather, they fit into larger constructions of taste and value embedded within broader cultural hierarchies such as gender, class, and education. Early television was viewed as a “lowbrow” medium compared to literature, theater, and film, largely because the domestic mass medium was seen as less elite and more the domain of women and children. As the category of prestige television rose in the twenty-first century, much of its cultural legitimacy was earned by distancing itself from traditional feminized genres such as melodramatic soap operas and embracing the cinematic and literary cache of serious drama while employing established film writers, directors, and actors. […] Even though a prestige drama can be great TV, we must not assume that only prestige series are high quality, nor that the sophisticated style of prestige is a guarantee of aesthetic success. Instead, we must remember that labels like “prestige,” “quality,” and “lowbrow” are all cultural constructions, used to reinforce hierarchies steeped in social power and identity. (15-6)

“One Life to Live: Soap Opera Storytelling” by Abigail De Kosnik

De Kosnik here argues that soap operas have a unique potential to tell stories over decades, which allow for some unprecedented storytelling opportunities. She argues that the soap opera form encourages three elements in its storytelling. The first is the ability to plant character traits much further in advance than can happen in typical tv or other stories. Even things that weren’t intended as seed for a later payoff can be utilized in this way, she claims. Secondly, there is a mirroring ability to have events ripple throughout a much longer timespan than can normally happen. Finally, the rough approximation of real-time allows for a tighter sense of relevance and identification on the parts of audience members. Each of these, De Kosnik claims, makes the soap opera into a more-realistic-than-normally-considered medium for storytelling, a claim she backs up by demonstrating how one character (Vicki) on OLtL has been a source for storytelling surrounding the concept of child abuse that has had semi-realistic long-lasting repercussions.

A deep seed and long reveal need not have any “authorial” intent behind it, but the reveal must accord with viewers’ recollection of characters’ histories in order to ring true. (73)

No matter how long these male-oriented narratives [of James Bond and comic book films] remain a part of the popular cultural landscape, they rarely allow their core characters to substantially age, or to undergo the significant psychological and emotional crises that accompany different stages of life – by their emphasis on repetition rather than character growth, they lack the kind of narrative journey that One Life to Live writers were able to give viewers who followed Vicki’s advancement from youth into middle age. (73)

“Buckwild: Performing Whiteness” by Amanda Ann Klein

In this essay, Klein does a bit industrial reading of what she calls the MTV identity shows, those programs like Jersey Shore and Teen Mom which focused on a specific subsection of society to appeal to those audiences as well as a broader audience. She claims that shows like Buckwild, which was the “redneck hillbilly” version, encouraged people to sell themselves as being the heightened version of their identity, a melding of real-world and “reality” that makes people into the pawns of capitalism at best and can have deadly consequences, as happened for the star of Buckwild, at worst. This falls in line somewhat with Racquel Gates’ arguments about the “negative” depictions of black women on reality shows, though Gates sees in this melding a place for agency while Klein’s view is more ominous and insidious.

In the midst of this so-called crisis of whiteness, Buckwild likewise offers a model of whiteness emblematic of resilience and resourcefulness in the face of economic hardship. The Buckwild cast works menial jobs (or in some cases, no jobs at all) but embraces and celebrates the freedom this unfettered lifestyle provides. They engage in a kind of rural bricolage, turning old pickup trucks into swimming pools and “skiing” on old garbage can lids tied to the back of RTVs; such resourcefulness suggests that being poor and white isn’t all that bad as long as you can still have fun. Furthermore, the series effectively rebrands whiteness as freedom, ingenuity, and bravery, thus reclaiming it from negative signifiers like poverty, racism, and lack of education. (119)

Indeed, Buckwild‘s tragic ending highlights how on-screen identities and material bodies are bound tightly together in MTV’s identity cycle. When your job is to play yourself, you are never not working. And when being yourself means endangering your body, then both work and being yourself is a never-ending state of precarity. (124)

“Parks and Recreation: The Cultural Forum” by Heather Hendershot

Hendershot argues that the age of niche TV has made it almost impossible for a tv show to be “controversial” in the way that they were back during the era of the Big Three stations when everybody was watching roughly the same things. There is no longer a “cultural forum” (borrowing from Newcomb and Hirsch) where ideas can battle it out in the span of a single show or episode, instead each show seems more ideologically one-sided. Hendershot then argues that Parks and Rec is a show that at least gives voice to both sides of a debate, even if its framing and handling indicate a left-leaning bias. She interestingly notes that the characters of Leslie and Ron are opposites but ones that aren’t ideologically pure themselves. Each one leans obviously in one direction or the other, but has championed tendencies towards their opposing ideology. It is this balance that resurrects the cultural forum within the show.

Can programs hope to address – or even confront, challenge, or offend – a “mass” rather than a “niche” audience, or does our narrowcasting environment ensure that politically ambitious programs preach to the choir? If the old cultural forum idea truly fizzled out with the decline of the dominance of the Big Three networks, would any series dare to speak to a heterogeneous audience? There is at least one program that strives to do exactly this: NBC’s Parks and Recreation. Celebrating the virtues of local government and staking a claim for the value of civic engagement and the possibility of collaboration – or at least peaceful coexistence – between different political camps, Parks and Recreation offers a liberal pluralist response to the fragmented post-cultural forum environment. (232)

“Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life: TV Revivals” by Myles McNutt

McNutt’s essay is the one most clearly relevant to my area of study, as he is talking directly about the kind of show I am interested in studying. Here, he talks most about the balancing act such shows have to pull off as they try to walk the line between industrial and fan pressures, each of which is vital to the revival’s very existence. He notes that an environment in which a cancelled show retains some sense of cultural cache, from streaming availability to even podcasts like Gilmore Guys, is crucial for setting the grounds for such a revival as it gives the industry an indication of the show’s ongoing popularity while its continuing relevance ensures a welcoming audience. He notes also, however, that these are not guarantors of a well-received revival once it actually happens. Fans are a fickle friend, and especially when the show in question was seemingly cancelled before its time, the pressure can create an environment that is difficult to navigate.

The logic supporting the trend of television revivals depends on three key factors. The first, and simplest, is that television development remains driven by existing media properties: movies, past television series, books, video games, and even podcasts are developed into new series based on the idea that an existing fan base and cultural awareness will create a built-in audience for that series. […] Revivals, however, are dependent on more than brand recognition. The second key factor to a revival is ongoing success in aftermarkets: The trend is built on shows that have had a significant afterlife beyond their initial broadcast, whether through traditional syndication, DVD sales, or – increasingly – through streaming platforms like Netflix. A series’ presence in these aftermarkets provides continued visibility, such that new viewers can become invested in the series and existing viewers can have their interest in the series refreshed. In a contemporary marketplace, a show’s fanbase is not just those who watched a show when it aired but also those who have been exposed to it through the increasingly large number of spaces where that television series lives. […] Third, and most intangibly, there needs to be evidence that people are taking advantage of this opportunity, and that viewers are still invested in these characters. (252)

Revivals are made because both industrial logic and fan narratives support their existence as a way to leverage continued interest in the series while also providing characters with the conclusion or continuation they deserved: If the series were to continue, however, the fan narratives shift dramatically, and “Another Year in the Life” risks reading as a cynical iteration of an existing franchise rather than a necessary revival of a story fans are invested in. Revivals sit at the complicated crossroads of industrial logic and creative imperative, and Gilmore Girls is neither the first nor the last program to explore the challenges of bringing a series back to life in an age where revisiting your favorite show is as easy as looting up Netflix or Hulu. (258-9)

“The Walking Dead: Adapting Comics” by Henry Jenkins

Jenkins writes about a different set of audience-creator tensions. While he notes that comics like The Walking Dead seem like they’re perfectly suited for adaptation, especially as the industry continues in its trend towards mining previously existing IP for whatever its worth, he also points out that they can come with their own set of audience expectations and pressures in the form of fidelity towards the source material. He writes about how one big scene from early in the comics got pushed back by about a season in order to foil fan expectations, and how other relationships were given greater depth on the show than was allowed within the relatively short confines of a comic book. He also writes about the fan tensions around the CDC subplot that ends the first season, and how the show’s creators didn’t want to deviate too much from the comic creator’s desire to leave the zombies’ origins unexplained. Jenkins looks for the letters published at the end of the comics for evidence of fan investment and creator response surrounding these topics.

As this Walking Dead example suggests, there is no easy path for adapting comics for the small screen. There are strong connections between the ways seriality works and comics and television, but also significant differences that make a one-to-one mapping less desirable than it might seem. Television producers want to leave their own marks on the material by exploring new paths and occasionally surprising their loyal fans. The challenge is how to make these adjustments consistent not with the details of the original stories, but with their “ground rules,” their underlying logic, and one good place to watch this informal “contract” between reader and creators take shape is through the letter columns published in the back of the comics. It is through this process that the producers can help figure out what they owe to the comics and to their readers. (390)

Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan

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Marshall McLuhan himself

McLuhan, Marshall. 2003 (1974). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Edited by W. Terrence Gordon. Critical Edition. Berkeley, CA: Gingko Press.

Summary & Implications: What is the author’s project and why is it important now? What’s the narrative about the field that’s emerging from the reading? What narratives are silent? Whose voices are silent?

Marshall McLuhan has two big concepts that, tellingly, make up the first two chapters of this massive text. The first is his pithy “the medium is the message,” a statement he returns to throughout to explain exactly what he means and some of the intricacies of the implications thereof. The point is that it isn’t the content of a medium which matters but the medium itself which most meaningfully changes the ways humans operate. He uses bodily metaphors of amputation and prosthesis to explain how we have ceded much of our sensory organs to these media, which then structure how we interact with the world and the other people in it. This idea is augmented by his other important idea, that of the temperatures of media, where a hot medium is “high definition” and requires little human interaction in order to achieve a sense of “closure” with the medium while a cold medium is “low definition” and therefore requires more human work in order to achieve that closure. For McLuhan, closure is a rebalancing that must occur whenever a new medium is introduced to human life, which inevitably creates a numbness in the corresponding bodily sense, a phenomenon he borrows from the medical field called “autoamputation.”

McLuhan suggests that these hot and cold media have different effects depending on whether the society it enters is prepared to handle its intrusion or not. He supposes, for example, that print exploded a previously tribalistic society in Europe into a land of individuals while the introduction of radio tended to cause an implosion of nationalism. These things, again, happen no matter what the content of the medium is, it is the technological form of the medium that dictates what will happen when it becomes integrated with the culture it comes from, or comes in contact with.

Which brings us to McLuhan’s ickier side. He writes a lot, like, a lot a lot, about how various peoples are unprepared to deal with the mediums that those in the West might be able to integrate more smoothly. He writes with large, sweeping assumptions, for example, about the continent of Africa and its peoples, and how such “primitive” societies might respond poorly to different media. It’s a bunch of hooey as far as I’m concerned, and it makes one question everything else he says about “understanding media.”

Where most other theorists have linked the movies to prior media like photography or theater, McLuhan links it instead with print, and specifically the book, given its visual presentation of a high density of information and its linear progression. I think there are fundamental flaws to this idea, especially when one starts to consider the content of the media (which, to say the least, is an area where McLuhan and I have some differences of opinion). He does, however, productively link it to an industrialized society where people come together to make one thing, which, he says, is similar to the symphony orchestra of the 19th century. He also, like Eisenstein, links film to stream-of-consciousness writing in the works of James Joyce and others.

McLuhan writes that TV is a medium well-suited to looser personalities (like JFK instead of Nixon, famously) and process instead of product. McLuhan also believes that, because TV (in 1964, at least) is a cool medium in which the audience must participate in order to experience closure, TV then leans towards the documentary and makes us into people who require a depth of knowledge on a subject presented to us via its poorly resolved images. I tried to foresee what McLuhan would have made of TV in is current form, which is higher definition and therefore hotter. I couldn’t really do it. McLuhan doesn’t provide a whole ton of great roadmaps for a project like that, and thinking of a medium without its content seems antithetical to me anyways (and, frankly, impractical, given McLuhan’s own ultimate failure to do so).

Context: Who is this author debating with and why? What is the context of the text’s production and distribution? What historical, cultural, etc. factors affect the way it makes meaning? Does the author seem to be in conversation with other scholars and/or paradigms? Where is this piece of writing centered in the field? What is their intervention in the literature/field? What text is this text in conversation with?

McLuhan is in conversation with scholars and writers of his time who, he claims, think about media in a wrong way. McLuhan’s arguments are indeed more expansive than many, though I think they are bound up in some really bad assumptions that taint them pretty thoroughly. More importantly, McLuhan has been a source for debates in several of the books I’ve read so far, and likely more as I keep reading. The strongest pushback to him I’ve found so far is Raymond Williams’ in Television: Technology and Cultural Form, where he argues that McLuhan’s is a theory of technological determinism which ignores the culture’s role in a given medium’s invention, production, and reception. There is still some merit to be found in McLuhan’s big ideas, but they need to be separated out from the unuseful stuff and properly accounted for to be of any real value

Methodology: What is the methodological framework of this text? What methodological moves or questions does the author engage? What is their object of analysis?

McLuhan’s strategy here seems to be largely scattershot. The first section of his book develops the big theoretical ideas before the second part, the longer part, dives into a bunch of media on an individual basis where he discusses that particular medium’s peculiarities in the context of his larger ideas. Within these chapters, however, thoughts seem to bubble up out of aphorisms and telling anecdotes. This can lead to a confusing and difficult to follow flow of ideas.

Rhetorical Moves: What are the major rhetorical moves of the author’s arguments?

McLuhan seems to be going for a kind of gestalt-based theory. He’ll throw dozens of vaguely connected ideas at you in a given chapter, from a variety of angles, and hope that something sticks. It often does, but it also leads to a sense of time wasted, unfortunately.

Engagement & Application: How do I engage this text? How does this apply to my work? Does it support or provide a counterargument or model for strong intro or lit review? In other words, why is this piece of writing useful to me and/or how is it limited (bad writing style, problematic, didn’t consider x, y, and z)? Does it intersect with other items on the list?

As a work of theory I think this is valuable but heavily flawed. I remain unconvinced of his content-less understanding of the media, while his imperialist tendencies make it difficult to read his arguments in good faith. I’m sure I’ll return to him, but more likely as a person to argue against than with.

Key Terms: What terms are key to the author’s argument, and are they operationalized explicitly or implicitly?

medium, message, closure, autoamputation, prosthesis, high definition, low definition, hot medium, cool medium, literacy,

Significant Quotations: What key quotations from this work would I want to have quick access to?

In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium – that is, of any extension of ourselves – result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology. (19)

What we are considering here, however, are the psychic and social consequences of the designs or patterns as they amplify or accelerate existing processes. For the “message” of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs. (20)

Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot. For the content of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind. The effect of the medium is made strong and intense just because it is given another medium as content. The content of a movie is a novel or a play or an opera. The effect of the movie form is not related to its program content. The content of writing or print is speech, but the reader is almost entirely unaware either of print or of speech. (31)

There is a basic principle that distinguishes a hot medium like radio from a cool one like the telephone, or a hot medium like the movie from a cool one like TV. A hot medium is one that extends one single sense in “high definition.” High definition is the state of being well filled with data. A photograph is, visually, “high definition.” A cartoon is “low definition,” simply because very little visual information is provided. Telephone is a cool medium, or one of low definition, because the ear is given a meager amount of information. And speech is a cool medium of low definition, because so little is given and so much has to be filled in by the listener. On the other hand, hot media do not leave so much to be filled in or completed by the audience. Hot media are, therefore, low in participation, and cool media are high in participation or completion by the audience. Naturally, therefore, a hot medium like radio has very different effects on the user from a cool medium like the telephone. (39)

Intensity or high definition engenders specialism and fragmentation in living as an entertainment, which explains why any intense experience must be “forgotten,” “censored,” and reduced to a very cool state before it can be “learned” or assimilated. […] For many people, this cooling system brings on a life-long state of psychic rigor mortis, or of somnambulism, particularly observable in periods of new technology. (40)

Nevertheless, it makes all the difference whether a hot medium is used in a hot or a cool culture. The hot radio medium used in cool or non-literate cultures has a violent effect, quite unlike its effect, say in England or America, where radio is felt as entertainment. A cool or low literacy culture cannot accept hot media like movies or radio as entertainment. They are, at least, as radically upsetting for them as the cool TV medium has proved to be for our high literacy world. (48)

The present book, in seeking to understand many media, the conflicts from which they spring, and the even greater conflicts to which they give rise, holds out the promise of reducing these conflicts by an increase of human autonomy. (76)

By putting our physical bodies inside our extended nervous systems, by means of electric media, we set up a dynamic by which all previous technologies that are mere extensions of hands and feet and teeth and bodily heat-controls – all such extensions of our bodies, including cities – will be translated into information systems. Electromagnetic technology requires utter human docility and quiescence of meditation such as befits an organism that now wears its brain outside its skull and its nerves outside its hide. Man must serve his electric technology with the same servo-mechanistic fidelity with which he served his coracle, his canoe, his typography, and all other extensions of his physical organs. But there is this difference, that previous technologies were partial and fragmentary, and the electric is total and inclusive. An external consensus or conscience is now as necessary as private consciousness. With the new media, however, it is also possible to store and to translate everything; and, as for speed, that is no problem. No further acceleration is possible this side of the light barrier. (86)

If the movie merges the mechanical and organic in a world of undulating forms, it also links with the technology of print. The reader in projecting words, as it were, has to follow the black and white sequences of stills that is typography, providing his own sound track. He tries to follow the contours of the author’s mind, at varying speeds and with various illusions of understanding. It would be difficult to exaggerate the bond between print and movie in terms of their power to generate fantasy and the viewer or reader. (383)

Film is not really a single medium like song or the written word, but a collective art form with different individuals directing color, lighting, sound, acting, speaking. The press, radio and TV, and the comics are also art forms dependent upon entire teams and hierarchies of skill in corporate action. Prior to the movies, the most obvious example of such corporate artistic action had occurred early in the industrialized world, with the large new symphony orchestras of the nineteenth century. (392)

As much as the infinitesimal calculus that pretends to deal with motion and change by minute fragmentation, the film does so by making motion and change into a series of static shots. Print does likewise while pretending to deal with the whole mind in action. Yet film and the stream of consciousness alike seem to provide a deeply desired release from the mechanical world of increasing standardization and uniformity. Nobody ever felt oppressed by the monotony or uniformity of the chaplain ballet or by the monotonous, uniform musings of his literary twin, Leopold Bloom. (395)

The TV image requires each instant that we “close” the spaces in the mesh by a convulsive sensuous participation that is profoundly kinetic and tactile, because tactility is the interplay of the senses, rather than the isolated contact of skin and object. (419)

With TV came the end of bloc voting in politics, a form of specialism and fragmentation that won’t work since TV. instead of the voting block, we have the icon, the inclusive image. Instead of a political viewpoint or platform, the inclusive political posture or stance. Instead of the product, the process. (427-8)

Now that we have considered the subliminal force of the TV image and a redundant scattering of samples, the question would seem to arise: “What possible immunity can there be from the subliminal operation of a new medium like television?” People have long supposed that bulldog opacity, backed by firm disapproval, is adequate enough protection against any new experience. It is the theme of this book that not even the most lucid understanding of the peculiar force of a medium can head off the ordinary closure of the senses that causes us to conform to the pattern of experience presented. The utmost purity of mind is no defense against bacteria, though the confreres of Louis Pasteur tossed him out of the medical profession for his base allegations about the invisible operation of bacteria. To resist TV, therefore, one must acquire the antidote of related media like print. (436)

If we ask what is the relation of TV to the learning process, the answer is surely that the TV image, by its stress on participation, dialogue, and depth, has brought to America new demand for crash-programming in education. Weather there ever will be TV in every classroom is a small matter. The revolution has already taken place at home. TV has changed our sense-lives and our mental processes. It has created a taste for all experience in depth that affects language teaching as much as car styles. Since TV, nobody is happy with a mere book knowledge of French or English poetry. The unanimous cry now is, “Let’s talk French,” and “Let the bard be heard.” And oddly enough, with the demand for depth, goes the demand for crash-programming. Not only deeper, but further, into all knowledge has become the normal popular demand since TV. […] the right approach is to ask, “What can TV do that the classroom cannot do for French, or for physics?” The answer is: “TV can illustrate the interplay of process and the growth of forms of all kinds as nothing else can.” (439-40)

The young people who have experienced a decade of TV have naturally imbibed an urge toward involvement in depth that makes all the remote visualized goals of usual culture seem not only unreal but irrelevant, and not only irrelevant but anemic. It is the total involvement in all-inclusive nowness that occurs in young lives via TV’s mosaic image. This change of attitude has nothing to do with programming in any way, and would be the same if the programs consisted entirely of the highest cultural content. The change in attitude by means of relating themselves to the mosaic TV image would occur in any event. It is, of course, our job not only to understand this change but to exploit it for its pedagogical richness. The TV child expects involvement and doesn’t want a specialist job in the future. He does want a role and a deep commitment to his society. (443)

Genre and Television by Jason Mittell

by

Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse’s Lost

Mittell, Jason. 2004. Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture. New York: Routledge.

Summary & Implications: What is the author’s project and why is it important now? What’s the narrative about the field that’s emerging from the reading? What narratives are silent? Whose voices are silent?

Jason Mittell takes up as his task the laying out of a theory of genre’s intersections with television that goes beyond the traditional assumptions of textual primacy. His repeated refrain is that scholars need to understand and study genre as a collection of discourses that occur within and beyond texts to include interlocutors such as industry, audience, and academia. In doing so, he claims, we’ll be able to better understand what genres do (provide the structures for such discussions) and their role in culture(s). He suggests that for too long we have paid attention to only one of the three ways genre is used in such discourses (interpretation of texts), ignoring definition and evaluation. In order to understand how genre operates, he suggests that academics look at each of these three uses of genre within historical and specific contexts that, hopefully, take into account the full range of people and areas of discourse who interact with said genre. He also argues for some attention to both media specificity and form, for the purposes of paying attention to, for example, the extended production schedules of television as compared to the typically one-off productions of films, and as a way of contextually situating the form of a work or works given its textual precedents.

Mittell’s format splits much of these ideas off for longer discussion within discussions of different generic examples. I’ll briefly lay those out here.

His first chapter is the big theory chapter which sees Mittell develop, carefully and thoroughly, much of what I’ve written above here. Here he does the heavy lifting which allows each subsequent chapter to develop offshoots and spend as much time as possible on the case studies. He draws on Foucault’s notion of discursive practices to arrive at the three things people do with genres: define them (this is what constitutes a genre), interpret them (this is what a genre does in the culture), and evaluate them (put them into hierarchies, use them as cudgels against other people or ideas). Here he also identifies a difference between television genre, or the way that genres operate in relation to television, and genre television, or the specific examples of texts that fall within certain generic categories.

His second chapter is a model of the way academics can study the historical processes of television genres, using the historical development of the quiz show genre to uncover the pre-existing discourses that were weaponized in the scandals of that genre in the 1950s. Here he demonstrates the importance of a deep archival search for related materials from all kinds of people who interacted with quiz shows, from the letters written by audience members to the behind-the-scenes discussions of the people making the shows and the reportage about the scandals. Having such a deep and wide understanding of what the cultural assumptions surrounding the genre were at the time is crucial, he argues, to understanding why the scandals were so contentious in the first place.

His third chapter is focused on uncovering the industrial shifts that occurred to turn cartoons from short films in front of (or between) films and which appealed to a wide audience through their association with Saturday morning (and therefore a narrowing of audience to mostly children) and eventually to a network of their own (which broadened the audience again somewhat). Here he shows how the production and exhibition sides of television can influence how a genre is understood by audiences and the culture at large.

His fourth chapter is an investigation of the audience practices of talk shows in the late 90s used to show the efficacy and importance of studying real audiences as places where genres are used and interacted with. He notes particularly how evaluation plays a large role in the real audience interactions with genres and how even sub-genres can be evaluated and hierarchized. Here he leans heavily on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of a culture-influenced concept of taste in order to explain how audiences use their understandings of genre to make distinctions between shows and their audiences in a hierarchical fashion.

His fifth chapter is an investigation of the genre precedents for Dragnet, following David Bordwell’s concept of historical poetics to contextually situate a discussion of the formal aspects of the show in order to illuminate where those ideas came from and what other cultural ideas they were attached to prior to their intermingling in Dragnet.

His sixth chapter is a study of genre mixing in which he argues against the concept of hybridity given its biological roots and the fact that it doesn’t fully explain what happens when genres mix, in addition to containing some iffy notions of “purity.” Mittell advocates instead for genre mixing as a term, and claims that when genres mix their salient features aren’t worn away but rather highlighted by the interactions between those genres and the discourses surrounding them.

Mittell’s project is admittedly limited given its focus on US television. He advocates for further research using the medium and community specificity in other locations and populations, even though some of the larger ideas might also be transferrable across geographic lines.

Context: Who is this author debating with and why? What is the context of the text’s production and distribution? What historical, cultural, etc. factors affect the way it makes meaning? Does the author seem to be in conversation with other scholars and/or paradigms? Where is this piece of writing centered in the field? What is their intervention in the literature/field? What text is this text in conversation with?

Mittell mostly argues with television genre theorists who ignore the way genre operates outside of the text. His big project is to expand the notion of what genre is and where it occurs, and as such he pushes back on a lot of the work that has come before (much of which is problematically based on filmic genre studies). He uses ideas from Foucault (via Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott), Rick Altman, and David Bordwell to bolster his own, and he works hard to give scholars a model that they can use in their own research. In this way it is a great work of theory.

Methodology: What is the methodological framework of this text? What methodological moves or questions does the author engage? What is their object of analysis?

Mittell spends the first chapter doing the heavy theoretical work before dedicating most of the remaining chapters to case studies of different types. Each case study is preceded by a brief theoretical justification, where Mittell weighs the benefits and deficits of prior ways of studying whatever it is he is looking at before he does the same for his new method. He also spends much of his time laying out methodological practices, including archival research, surveying, and, yes, textual analysis. He doesn’t view these methods uncritically, however, noting the potential pitfalls of each of them before suggesting that they can still be useful tools so long as academics know what they’re doing.

Rhetorical Moves: What are the major rhetorical moves of the author’s arguments?

Mittell’s biggest rhetorical move is in setting up various examples of the way genre study in the world of television is usually done before knocking it down as inadequate for a variety of reasons and propping up his own vision for television genre studies. He identifies a problem and then fixes it, and does so by advocating a fuller accounting of the kind of discourses that surround genres and television.

Engagement & Application: How do I engage this text? How does this apply to my work? Does it support or provide a counterargument or model for strong intro or lit review? In other words, why is this piece of writing useful to me and/or how is it limited (bad writing style, problematic, didn’t consider x, y, and z)? Does it intersect with other items on the list?

I think Mittell’s concept of genre in relation to television is really strong and useful, and I’m already thinking about ways that it might apply to my own work.

Key Terms: What terms are key to the author’s argument, and are they operationalized explicitly or implicitly?

genre, genre television, television genres, television, discourses, discursive practices, discursive formations, historical poetics, definition, evaluation, interpretation, audience, industry, production, genre mixing, context, history, intertextuality, generic clusters,

Significant Quotations: What key quotations from this work would I want to have quick access to?

Despite the strengths of what may be understood through aesthetic paradigms, definitional approaches and formal analyses [of genre] have distinct limitations. One such limitation of formal analysis is that examining the mechanics of a text cannot generally explain how that text functions within larger cultural contexts, which I would contend is the main goal motivating cultural media studies – and is certainly the central goal of my project. […] To avoid dubious assertions about audiences, we must look beyond the text itself – to understand how genres work beyond mere textual mechanics, we need to look behind the wheel as well as under the hood. (3)

Just as audiences and industries use genre definitions to make sense of media, people interpret genres and associate them with certain meanings on a daily basis. This is the question that interpretive genre criticism might shift toward, asking how a given genre has accrued particular meanings in a historically specific instance. Thus, instead of reading outwards from a textual interpretation to posit how people make sense of a genre, we should look at the meanings people make in their interactions with media genres to understand the genre’s meanings. […] Instead of asking what a genre means (the typical interpretive question), we need to ask what a genre means for specific groups in a particular cultural instance. (5)

Genres only emerge from the intertextual relations between multiple texts, resulting in a common category. But how do these texts interrelate to form a genre? Texts do not interact on their own; they come together only through cultural practices such as production and reception. […] Even when one text explicitly references another (such as in the case of allusions, parodies, spin-offs, or crossovers), these instances become activated only through processes of production or reception. […] Thus, if genres are dependent on intertextuality, they cannot be an inherently textual component. (8)

Genres transect the boundaries between text and context, with production, distribution, promotion, exhibition, criticism, and reception practices all working to categorize media texts into genres. But by decentering the text as the site of generic essence, a potential problem emerges – if genres are categories that do not emerge from intrinsic textual features, then isn’t any system of categorization potentially a genre? […] Genres are more than just any category. They must be culturally operative within a number of spheres of media practice, employed by critics, industries, and audiences. (10)

Discursive formations do not adhere to seemingly clear boundaries, such as between texts and audiences. Foucault emphasizes that discourse is a practice, and as such, we must analyze discourses in action as they are culturally operative, not in abstract isolation. Thus for genres, we must look at how they transect boundaries that have inadequately located genre primarily within the bounds of the text. Genres do run through texts, but also operate within the practices of critics, audiences, and industries – anyone who uses generic terms is participating in the construction of genre categories. Thus we might look at what audiences and industries say about genres, what terms and definitions circulate around any given generic instance, and how specific cultural assumptions are linked to particular genres. These discursive practices concerning genres should not be used as a “check” against textual genre features, as traditional scholars have used “commonsense” cultural genre definitions to verify their own textual definition. Rather, the discourses surrounding and running through a given genre are themselves constitutive of that generic category; they are the practices that define genres and delimit their meanings, not media texts themselves. Since genres are formed through intertextual relationships between texts, then the discursive enunciations that link texts under a categorical rubric become the site and material for genre analysis. (13)

Following Foucault, Bennett, and Woollacott, we can break down the discursive practices that constitute genres into three basic types: definition (“this show is a sitcom because it has a laugh track”), interpretation (“sitcoms reflect and reinforce family values”), and evaluation (“sitcoms are better entertainment than soap operas”). These discursive utterances, which may seem to reflect on an already established genre, are themselves constitutive of that genre – they are the practices that define genres, delimit their meanings, and posit their cultural value. Cultural practices of definition, interpretation, and evaluation are the three primary ways genres circulate and become culturally manifest; thus these practices should be the central objects of study for genre analysis. (16)

Although genres are constantly in flux and under definitional negotiation, generic terms are still sufficiently salient that most people would agree on a similar working definition for any genre. Even if we cannot provide an essential definition of a genres core identity, most of us still know a sitcom when we see one. Discourse theory offers a model for such stability in flux – genres work as discursive clusters, with certain definitions, interpretations, and evaluations coming together at any given time to suggest a coherent and clear genre. However, these clusters are contingent and transitory, shifting over time and taking on new definitions, meanings, and values within differing contexts. (17)

Since genres are systems of categorization and differentiation, linking genres distinctions to other systems of difference can point to the workings of cultural power. The ways these linkages might play out are limitless. While there is certainly a strong tradition linking genre analysis and gender differences down to their etymological roots, we can broaden this approach to include other axes of identity differentiation as well, such as race, age, sexuality, class, nationality, etc. We might also look at how genre differences are implicated within hierarchies of cultural value, both between genres and within one specific genre; the common process of generic evaluation locates genres within social hierarchies and is one of the crucial ways in which genres are culturally constituted. (26-7)

Depending on the specific era, topic, and events within a generic history, historians should look beyond media texts to explore how genres operate in sites such as trade press coverage, popular press coverage, critical reviews, promotional material, other cultural representations and commodities (like merchandise, media tie-ins, and parodies), corporate and personal documents, production manuals, legal and governmental materials, audience remnants, and oral histories. (31)

How do industries produce film genres through techniques such as marketing (advertising campaigns, trailers, posters, press releases, star publicity, internet presence, merchandising), distribution (packaging, saturation versus rollout, targeting markets, international sales, re-releases), exhibition (placement in film bill, location of theaters, showtimes, ratings, theatrical technologies), and non-theatrical practices (availability and location within video stores, sales to television, editing for new markets)? (57)

If we are to understand media audiences within a cultural approach to genre, then we need to look beyond the realm of the text, as texts contains neither the audience nor the genre. (95)

In these [contextual] approaches, analyzing relevant historical contexts, including other texts, genres, institutional practices, and social forces, reveal the pressures and limitations that limit the potential polysemy of texts, giving clues to the probable negotiations that actual readers engage in through the process of reception. While acknowledging that contextual analysis can never guarantee the actual meanings that viewers might take away from their media consumption, a contextual approach offers a happy medium between a polysemic free-for-all (as some caricatures of cultural studies have attributed to “straw theorists”) and the textual determinism typical of most critical approaches. (96)

Yet I believe we might examine form without being formalists – studying form does not have to be an end unto itself. Since cultural approaches to media studies have suggested that texts are one of the important sites in which meanings are made and political processes are played out, it behooves us to engage closely with textual practices to understand how texts are encoded, both industrially and formally. The formal analysis of media texts can – and should – be one of the most productive tools available to examine the processes that constitute our cultural field of analysis. We can move beyond formal analysis as a closed exercise without abandoning the insights that such examinations might provide. One such model, which has not received adequate consideration by cultural television scholars, is David Bordwell’s approach of historical poetics, situating formal practices of media making within explicit historical contexts of production and reception. (122)

Genres can be – and often are – mixed through the various discourses of generic definition, interpretation, and evaluation that constitute genres as cultural categories. Looking at the material ways that genre mixing plays out in cultural practice leads to distinctly different conclusions than have been asserted by both traditional genre critics and postmodernists – through the case studies below, I contend that generic mixing generally does not lead to the declining importance of genre, but actually reinforces and reasserts the role of genres in media practice. (155)

Television: Technology and Cultural Form by Raymond Williams

by

Matt Groening’s The Simpsons

Williams, Raymond. 1974. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. Second Edition (1990). New York: Routledge.

Summary & Implications: What is the author’s project and why is it important now? What’s the narrative about the field that’s emerging from the reading? What narratives are silent? Whose voices are silent?

Raymond Williams dedicates much of this book to explaining what television is as a technology (that is, an extension of the more fundamental technology that is broadcasting, which first came to prominence via audio and the radio), what kinds of cultural requirements called it into existence (the increasingly atomized social world of a post-Industrial Revolution society), and the effects it has (to be listed later). It seems he writes largely to counter Marshall McLuhan’s conception of technological determinism, in which the technology just kind of pops into existence and has certain effects that are largely disconnected from the culture in which the technology exists. Williams, on the other hand, says that we need to return intention, history, and context to the discussion of television and its effects.

Williams tracks the history of the development of the technology that would lead, eventually, to television and then traces the way that other technologies were results of social needs (tele-phony/graphy as a way of communicating brief information across long distances quickly as a result of a growing desire to organize military and capitalist maneuvers) as a way of setting up how television, which is centrally produced but distributed broadly to individual homes, allows for a similar social requirement to be met. That social requirement is the need for distribution of information (and, less importantly but still crucially, entertainment) to a people who are increasingly separated from a sense of community that had once held society together. As societies get bigger and more spread out thanks to industrial practices and pressures, television (and radio before it) became a way to redeploy the kinds of things that might have been accomplished via town meetings or even public gatherings.

Williams then turns to examining who controls the production and dissemination of television programming, which, he notes, was always secondary to the fact that the signal existed in the first place. It was not that there were tv shows sitting around waiting for a technology to allow them to be broadcast into people’s homes, but that once that signal existed there was then a need for something to send over it. By looking at several British and American tv stations, he looks at what it means to have publicly owned stations and privately owned stations, both what that means for the kinds of shows that are being produced and shown on the channels and what it means for the way that the channels are being run financially. Williams later notes that as technologies of dissemination continue to develop, these signals will soon be able to reach around the world, which will have various additional effects of cultural imperialism and further consolidation of power.

Williams then investigates the way television works on a programming level. Here is his most famous concept from this book, that of flow as the dominant mode of televisual communication. He outlines how tv shows flow into one another, how within those shows there is a flow from scene to scene (or from show to commercial and back) and how within those smaller units there is still a continual flow of visual and aural information. This, he claims, is what makes it hard to turn the tv off, and what makes television seem insidious to those who would classify it as a means of society’s degradation. Even though we might switch between channels to find alternate programming, there is still an experience of flow from one channel to the next. It’s everywhere!

Williams then investigates the effects of television. Here is where he makes his strongest case against McLuhan, who he claims is treating the television as an ideology rather than a technology that has been made and used by a society. Television isn’t pushing the things on tv, society is via the television. Looked at this way, Williams claims, we can see how television was developed to help facilitation communication between those in power and those who have power over them, but also how others can co-opt that system for their own ends. Here lies the realm of pirate radio and tv stations, which exist fully within the boundaries of what is made possible with the technology even if they are not an intended effect of that technology. This kind of thing seems crucial to understanding the rest of William’s project, which projects the current (for 1974) situation of television into the future and in which Williams largely predicts the internet, in concept if not explicit detail.

Williams lays out how the continual development of technology related to broadcasting will soon create an international network of competing and conflicting distribution methods, aka the internet. Williams sees two ways of this working out. On the one hand, if arguments can be made that there should remain some level of local control over what is sent across these new means of broadcasting, there might be a real democratization of information and communication. On the other hand, if corporations are able to influence the development of these technologies enough, they might be able to manipulate the course of events towards a situation where the corporations are able to control what is seen as acceptable and possible within their neigh-unescapable grasp. It seems clear to me that Williams, in creating this binary of possible outcomes, hit exactly on what has happened, in that the internet has allowed for a greater ability for people to communicate with each other and learn about the world, but that corporations still largely control the ways in which those people use that information and lay out patterns of thought that those people still largely follow. There are cracks in the system because both of these outcomes happened at once and the corporate control is not nearly as all-encompassing as it would have needed to be to create that full dystopia and is indeed largely in control of the ways people communicate, but still those pirate messages are possible and even likely within this system. Perhaps it is utopian after all.

Williams’ concept of television and broadcasting is largely limited to Britain and the US, which does tend to limit his analysis somewhat. I would be curious to read a history of television during this time in other countries to see if the English language examples are as universal as Williams seems to claim they are.

Sarah Palmer watches TV on David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return

Context: Who is this author debating with and why? What is the context of the text’s production and distribution? What historical, cultural, etc. factors affect the way it makes meaning? Does the author seem to be in conversation with other scholars and/or paradigms? Where is this piece of writing centered in the field? What is their intervention in the literature/field? What text is this text in conversation with?

Williams really only explicitly debates with McLuhan, who he pretty well takes to task for his technological determinism. Other than that, the biggest bit of context is the period in which Williams is writing. About 20 years after television’s popularity began, and with an ensuing 40+ years of development that has followed had made some of his arguments a little outdated. For instance, he writes about the technological inferiority of television as a visual medium when compared to the cinema. While that still remains true, at least on a level of scale, television is no longer so technologically inferior that it limits what can be shown on it the way it did in Williams’ time. Indeed, televisions can now have more color information than a digital projector at a theater can. This means that tv as a way of transmitting old (or new) movies is no longer a matter of dealing with poorer picture quality for the convenience of home viewing. Still, Williams’ analysis allows room for this change to happen, and even briefly predicts it.

Methodology: What is the methodological framework of this text? What methodological moves or questions does the author engage? What is their object of analysis?

Williams takes the socio-political view of the development of technologies as his main way of understanding how technologies come to be based on desires that needed to be fulfilled. He also examines not just the intended effects of a technology such as television but also their unintended and yet still possible effects. By looking at intentions and then effects, he is able to see why television came to be and what it is doing, and what it could be doing.

Rhetorical Moves: What are the major rhetorical moves of the author’s arguments?

Williams methodological choice is largely his rhetoric. Here he argues that technological determinism is a flawed way of understanding the ways technology interacts with societies, and he aptly argues for a fuller understanding of its role as a social tool.

Engagement & Application: How do I engage this text? How does this apply to my work? Does it support or provide a counterargument or model for strong intro or lit review? In other words, why is this piece of writing useful to me and/or how is it limited (bad writing style, problematic, didn’t consider x, y, and z)? Does it intersect with other items on the list?

As the start of my television-theory readings, this works really well to ground me in a way of thinking about tv as a medium. Even though it contains little in the way of theories of television as a medium of drama, where most of my readings will be focused, it still will likely remain foundational to my understanding of what is going on at a societal level with tv.

Key Terms: What terms are key to the author’s argument, and are they operationalized explicitly or implicitly?

television, technological determinism, cause and effect, cause, effect, social, society, broadcasting, flow, commercial, public, technology, medium, programming

Significant Quotations: What key quotations from this work would I want to have quick access to?

If the technology is a cause, we can at best modify or seek to control its effects. Or if the technology, as used, is an effect, to what other kinds of cause, and other kinds of action, should we refer and relate our experience of its uses? (2)

[I]n the particular case of television it may be possible to outline a different kind of interpretation, which would allow us to see not only its history but also its uses in a more radical way. Such an interpretation would differ from technological determinism in that it would restore intention to the process of research and development. The technology would be seen, that is to say, as being looked for and developed with certain purposes and practices already in mind. At the same time the interpretation would differ from symptomatic technology and that these purposes and practices would be seen as direct: as known social needs, purposes and practices to which the technology is not marginal but central. (6-7)

The cheap radio receiver is then a significant index of a general condition and response. It was especially welcomed by all those who had least social opportunities of other kinds; who lacked independent mobility or access to the previously diverse places of entertainment and information. Broadcasting could also come to serve, or seem to serve, as a form of unified social intake, at the most general levels. What had been intensively promoted by the radio manufacturing companies thus interlocked with this kind of social need, itself defined within general limits and pressures. (21)

The ‘commercial’ character of television has then to be seen at several levels: as the making of programs for a profit in a known market; as a channel for advertising; and as a cultural and political form directly shaped by and dependent on the norms of a capitalist society, selling both consumer goods and a way of life based on them, in an ethos that is at once locally generated, by domestic capitalist interests and authorities, and internationally organized, as a political project, by the dominant capitalist power. (36-7)

But there has never been a time, until the last fifty years, when a majority of any population had regular and constant access to drama, and used this access. Even within the last half-century, at the peak of popularity of the cinema, figures for Britain indicate an average of less than one attendance a week per head of the adult population. It is difficult to get any precise comparative figures for television. But it seems probable that in societies like Britain and the United States more drama is watched in a week or weekend, by the majority of viewers, then would have been watched in a year or in some cases a lifetime in any previous historical period. […] Whatever the social and cultural reasons may finally be, it is clear that watching dramatic simulation of a wide range of experiences is now an essential part of our modern cultural pattern. Or, to put it categorically, most people spend more time watching various kinds of drama than in preparing and eating food. (56)

But the cultural importance of the serial, as an essentially new form, ought not to be limited to this kind of traditional ratification. Few forms on television have the potential importance of the original serial. If the form has been overlaid, understandably, by the ‘classic’ emphasis, and more generally by the stock formulas of crime and illness, that is a particular cultural mediation, which it is necessary to understand and look for ways beyond. (58)

What is being offered is not, in older terms, a program of discrete units with particular insertions, but a planned flow, in which the true series is not the published sequence of program items but this sequence transformed by the inclusion of another kind of sequence, so that these sequences together compose the real flow, the real ‘broadcasting’. (91)

The flow offered can also, and perhaps more fundamentally, be related to the television experience itself. Two common observations bear on this. As has already been noted, most of us say, in describing the experience, that we have been ‘watching television’, rather than that we have watched ‘the news’ or ‘a play’ or ‘the football’ ‘on television’. Certainly we sometimes say both, but the fact that we say the former at all is already significant. Then again it is a widely if often ruefully admitted experience that many of us find television very difficult to switch off; that again and again, even when we have switched on for a particular ‘program’, we find ourselves watching the one after it and the one after that. The way in which the flow is now organized, without definite intervals, in any case encourages this. (94)

Especially in advanced industrial societies the near universality and general social visibility of television have attracted simple cause-and-effect identifications of its agency in social and cultural change. […] What is really significant is the direction of attention to certain selected issues – on the one hand ‘sex’ and ‘violence’, on the other hand ‘political manipulation’ and ‘cultural degradation’ – which are of so general a kind that it ought to be obvious that they cannot be specialized to an isolated medium but, in so far as television bears on them, have to be seen in a whole social and cultural process. Some part of the study of television’s effects has then to be seen as an ideology: a way of interpreting general change through a displaced and abstracted cause. (121-2)

[McLuhan’s conception of the media] is an apparently sophisticated technological determinism which has the significant effect of indicating a social and cultural determinism: a determinism, that is to say, which ratifies the society and culture we now have, and especially its most powerful internal directions. For if the medium – weather print or television – is the cause, all other causes, all that men ordinarily see as history, are at once reduced to effects. Similarly, what are elsewhere seen as effects, and as such subject to social, cultural, psychological and moral questioning, are excluded as irrelevant by comparison with the direct physiological and therefore ‘psychic’ effects of the media as such. The initial formulation – ‘the medium is the message’ – was a simple formalism. The subsequent formulation – ‘the medium is the massage’ – is a direct and functioning ideology. (130)

All technologies have been developed and improved to help with known human practices or with foreseen and desired practices. […] There will be in many cases unforeseen uses and unforeseen effects which are again a real qualification of the original intention. […] While we have to reject technological determinism, in all its forms, we must be careful not to substitute for it the notion of a determined technology. […] We have to think of determination not as a single force, or a single abstraction of forces, but as a process in which real determining factors – the distribution of power or of capital, social and physical inheritance, relations of scale and size between groups – set limits and exert pressures, but neither wholly control nor wholly predict the outcome of complex activity within or at these limits, and under or against these pressures. (132-3)

The unique factor of broadcasting – first in sound, then even more clearly in television – has been that its communication is accessible to normal social development; it requires no specific training which brings people within the orbit of public authority. If we can watch and listen to people in our immediate circle, we can watch and listen to television. (135)

All this will take time and prolonged effort. The struggle will reach into every corner of society. But that is precisely what is at stake: a new universal accessibility. Over a wide range from general television through commercial advertising to centralized information and data-processing systems, the technology that is now or is becoming available can be used to affect, to alter, and in some cases to control our whole social process. And it is ironic that the uses offer such extreme social choices. We could have inexpensive, locally based yet internationally extended television systems, making possible communication and information sharing on a scale that not long ago would have seemed utopian. These are the contemporary tools of the long revolution towards an educated and participatory democracy, and of the recovery of effective communication in complex urban and industrial societies. But they are also the tools of what would be, in context, a short and successful counter-revolution, in which, under the cover of talk about choice and competition, a few para-national corporations, with their attendant states and agencies, could reach farther into our lives, at every level from news to psychodrama, until individual and collective response to many different kinds of experience and problem became almost limited to choice between their programmed possibilities. (156-7)

Double Negative by Racquel J. Gates

by

John Landis’ (or Eddie Murphy’s) Coming to America

Gates, Racquel J. 2018. Double Negative: The Black Image & Popular Culture. Durham: Duke University Press.

Summary & Implications: What is the author’s project and why is it important now? What’s the narrative about the field that’s emerging from the reading? What narratives are silent? Whose voices are silent?

In Double Negative, Racquel J. Gates argues that the categorizing of “positive” and “negative” examples of representation in media (particularly that of Black characters, but seemingly broadly applicable to other groups and sub-groups) problematically creates a tendency in academic and popular discourses that align representation to the politics of respectability. Looking to subvert that tendency, Gates takes as her objects of study those negative representations (and their containing media) in order to reveal that, despite their reputation, they can be places where Black creators (actors, writers, directors, and even reality show stars) can insert the kinds of topics and ideas that aren’t allowed by a politics of respectability or understood by a hegemonic white Hollywood and audience. The idea is that these so called “negative” representations act exactly as photographic negatives do, revealing what isn’t there in the “positive” image by inverting it, and even bolstering that positive image by way of giving a means of expression to real feelings, ideas, and attitudes that aren’t acceptable when the goal is to become “respectable.” It is in this spirit that Gates advocates for deploying strategic essentialism to retain these positive and negative labels but to investigate what we really mean when we say that something contains or is a “negative” portrayal of a certain kind of person, and what work that image is really doing in the world, rather than just relegating it to the gutter and ignoring it except as a useful bludgeon against the media as a whole.

Gates lays all of this out in a very detailed opening chapter, which begins by running through several examples of the responses by Black celebrities (Chris Rock and Katt Williams) to the resurgent popularity of Flavor Flav at the same time as Barack Obama was trying to become president. It’s a perfect example to begin with, laying out the stakes of the project at the highest level and showing how these kinds of discourses vary depending on who the person speaking is and to whom they are speaking. She then explains herself and her conception of exactly what the words “positive” and “negative” mean in her reckoning, before at the end detailing several different kinds of negative representations, each of which she focuses on for a chapter in the remainder of the book using various exemplars as the way of working through her ideas.

Formal negativity: when a work contains formal elements, from aesthetics to narrative, that are a reversal of what is accepted in positive works. Her example chapter focuses on Coming to America, which, sandwiched between Hollywood Shuffle and Do the Right Thing as far as release dates go, contains elements of both the positive, hegemonic portrayal of Black characters within the film’s main plot, the romance, while it uses formal qualities like echoes of Eddie Murphy’s sketch comedy background in the side plots to express ideas, feelings, and jokes that were ignored by the mainstream critical reception to the film but spoke to Black audiences directly and clearly. Interestingly, she also spends some time looking at the production history of the film to suggest that it challenges traditional auteurist understandings of who is responsible for the film by showing that John Landis, the film’s director, was basically responsible for the romantic A-plot while Murphy basically had control over everything else in the film. In this way, Gates argues that we shouldn’t rely upon an easy Black writer/director = Black film equation, noting that a variety of factors might influence who should get credit for the making of a film.

Relational or comparitive negativity: when the positive representation is so dominant that its reverse is hardly visible at all. For this chapter, Gates examines a collection of what she calls “sellout films,” which were released at the same time as the respectable Boyz N the Hood and Menace II Society but were focused on Black characters who were trying to survive in white-dominated workplaces and who had to fight to retain a sense of their Black identity in the process. Gates ably argues that these sellout films were just as important as the more critically respected black male struggle films because they were able to speak to a group of people who were experiencing the same anxieties about selling out to whiteness in order to get ahead. Example by example, she shows how these films were able to both express that anxiety and show that there was a way towards both being successful and retaining a Black identity.

Circumstantial negativity: in these cases, outside discourses, for example, those surrounding Halle Berry over the first ~10 years of her career impart a kind of transference of negativity onto a text that doesn’t otherwise have anything negative in it. Gates uses this opportunity to study Berry’s evolving star image, how it was damaged by her role as a “tragic mulatto” in Queen, even though the star herself tried to counter the narrative that foregrounded her biracial identity by declaring firmly and frequently that he thought of herself as a Black woman. This confusion in the press lead, Gates argues, to Berry’s swift downfall following her Oscar win for Monsters Ball. Berry became unable to control her own star image, which led to her inability to get good roles in good films, Gates claims.

Strategic negativity: when a show or other kind of media is already dismissed categorically as “trash,” like reality TV, people who make the show, including the onscreen stars, can actively use that label as a way of bypassing the respectability politics that dominates prestige tv for their own ends. Here Gates explores several shows, like The Real Housewives of Atlanta and Love & Hip Hop for the way that their stars assert their agency within the show’s production under the guise it must maintain of capturing “reality.” Throughout this chapter, Gates demonstrates how these shows, which were broadly labeled “ratchet” by cultural activist Michaela Angela Davis. Gates argues that, though limited by production realities and so on, the trashiness of these shows allows both the stars and their audiences places to express those ideas about their identity that wouldn’t fit in to a sitcom or traditional drama. Gates also views the ratchet reality star as one who has a degree more control over her image than one who acts in a more accepted manner. The agency, the ability to talk about things that are taboo elsewhere, and the ensuing increase in wealth and fame are the key points in this chapter.

Gates ends by looking at Empire, a show which pretends at negativity but still subtly pushes the tainted respectability politics of positive portrayals of Black characters. She notes that in its carefully manipulated depiction of its queer characters and the show’s acceptance by various critical bodies, including awards shows, Empire reveals that for all of its trashy aesthetics, it still engages in a large amount of respectability politics. Maybe one day we’ll be able to fully celebrate the so-called negative representation, Gates claims, but that day has not yet come.

Context: Who is this author debating with and why? What is the context of the text’s production and distribution? What historical, cultural, etc. factors affect the way it makes meaning? Does the author seem to be in conversation with other scholars and/or paradigms? Where is this piece of writing centered in the field? What is their intervention in the literature/field? What text is this text in conversation with?

Gates provides an important push back against what seems to be the dominant mode of talking about representation on film. The job, she argues, focuses on determining which representations are good and bad and for what reasons, then throwing the bad ones out to celebrate the good ones. Gates’ corrective is to argue for the value of studying the negative portrayal, and not just for how it was made and came to be, but for what it can actually do. She counters the claim seemingly inherent to academics that push for positive portrayals because they will make the society at large more accepting and understanding all on their own. This isn’t how it works, Gates writes, and closer attention must be paid to what representation actually does and what it doesn’t do.

The cultural context, the belief in a post-racial America following the election of Barack Obama and, at the time of the book’s release, the backlash to his presidency in the form of Donald Trump, is also crucial to understanding Gates’ project. Obama, she says, was an exemplar of the so-called “talented tenth” of Black Americans whose very existence and prominence would lift up the entire group of Black Americans, that is if the negative exemplars didn’t pull them back down. This kind of rhetoric is problematic in all kinds of ways, and Gates carefully unpacks the harm it does and, in opposition, the good that “negative” portrayals can bring to Black audiences.

All of this isn’t to say that Gates is claiming that we should only celebrate the negative representations of Black people in media, but that the positive should always be examined with, not against, the negative. It’s a call for a fuller scholarship, and that’s a valuable contribution as far as I’m concerned.

via GIPHY Love & Hip Hop Atlanta‘s Joseline Hernandez

Methodology: What is the methodological framework of this text? What methodological moves or questions does the author engage? What is their object of analysis?

Gates moves between and through various kinds of discourses, looking at film history, auteurism, genre studies, star studies, and production environments in the process of uncovering and examining her various kinds of negative representations. As she does so, she dives into varying levels of depth with her examples. Coming to America merits nearly 40 pages of investigation, Berry’s star image gets a good amount of depth as well, while both genre chapters, the sellout and ratchet reality show examples, get less space for each example, sacrificing depth for breadth. Both modes work for Gates’ points, though, and after the extensive theoretical work of the opening chapter, she can largely focus on the specifics of each case study in as much depth as she needs to.

Rhetorical Moves: What are the major rhetorical moves of the author’s arguments?

By connecting the already accepted terminology of positive and negative representations to the photographic concept of a negative that creates a positive, Gates strongly connects her ideological goals to the existing discourse on the topic. It makes for an easy and fruitful transition into digging into her way of thinking on the subject at hand. She also taps into a kind of underdog narrative that Americans are primed to buy into, which works well for her.

Engagement & Application: How do I engage this text? How does this apply to my work? Does it support or provide a counterargument or model for strong intro or lit review? In other words, why is this piece of writing useful to me and/or how is it limited (bad writing style, problematic, didn’t consider x, y, and z)? Does it intersect with other items on the list?

I want my future discussions of representation, which will form a fundamental part of my work even if I come at it somewhat obliquely, to be as nuanced as possible. Gates provides a lot of great ways of thinking about what we might otherwise write off, and a way towards discussing those texts that might not be as good on that front as we want them to be. What else might those texts be doing that we’d miss by easily dismissing them? I’ll find out!

I’ll also take anybody’s arguments against auteurism anytime they want to provide them. It’s a valuable tool, but obviously not the only one and not always applicable.

Key Terms: What terms are key to the author’s argument, and are they operationalized explicitly or implicitly?

representation, positive, negative, ratchet, star studies, star image, auteur, genre, film history, production, agency, respectability politics, Black, hegemony, strategic essentialism

Significant Quotations: What key quotations from this work would I want to have quick access to?

Designations of positive versus negative with regard to representations of blackness and black people can be frustrating. Taken as a straightforward descriptors, they are limiting categories that do not allow us to access the full, complex range of images that circulate in the media, nor do they allow for the possibility of nuanced engagement with these images by the people that consume them. Conventional uses of “positive” and “negative” support politics of respectability and close off possibilities for multi-layered conceptions and performances of identity. At their worst, to invoke these categories uncritically reinforces racist ideologies that use discourses of black exceptionalism to further marginalize black behaviors and people that deviate from white, middle-class, heterosexual norms. (12)

The problem is that, try as we might, we cannot seem to shake the assumption that representations do the work by themselves. In other words, there is an unshakable belief that images do work outside of the histories and contexts in which they circulate. (13)

In the end, I am suggesting that it is not necessary to eradicate these categories as much as to deconstruct them: understand how they develop, where they are applied, how, and when. And further, by using these terms strategically, as critical race scholars have already done with strategic essentialism, we gain much in the way of developing a lens of analysis and language with which to understand and talk about what these texts are actually doing. Therefore, taking up Herman Gray’s call to analytically shift discussions of identity and media “from signification and representation to resonance and experience,” I propose that we actually embrace the designation of “negative” that has long been assigned to certain types of images. To activate the dictionary definition of “negative” as “expressing or containing negation or denial” reveals the ways that disreputable images such as those found in reality television, for instance, disrupt hegemonic norms regarding race, class, gender, and sexuality. […] I embrace the term “negative” because of its historical use in defining certain types of black texts and because it implies a direct, tangential relationship to “positive” representations. If the current post-racial, color-blind moment truly is a moment of color-muteness[, following Linda Williams], then perhaps the negative image functions as the repository for those identities, experiences, and feelings that have been discarded by respectable media. (15-6)

This book offers two, interrelated definitions of a “negative” text. The first type of negative text is a qualitative one that is defined by its distance from normative, white hegemonic standards of quality. […] The second definition of a negative text is a formal category that functions as an inversion of another media text. In the second sense of the term, the film or television show in question may not be thought of as stereotypical or demeaning, but has simply been erased from critical discourse because its salient formal and ideological components are not recognized as bearing significant meaning. […] The concept of negativity derives first from the idea of a photo negative. In fact, my approach in this book is based heavily on the metaphor of a photographic negative, in which a positive image is considered normal (or, in the case of media, normative) and a negative is the complete inversion of that image. I argue that these negative images engage in explorations of identity and a manner that is inversely proportionate to contemplations of identity and respectable media texts. Just as a negative is necessary for the production of a photograph, this book argues that the negative image is a necessary component for the production of the “positive” images that circulate throughout popular culture and scholarship. (17)

As a framework, negativity helps to elucidate how tastes, politics, and modes of performance develop and change, and it reveals the ways that time forms our perceptions. (18)

I argue that reclaiming these overlooked images from black popular culture and offering an alternative history of their meanings and possibilities also provides a strong intervention and present-day debates about proper black behavior and the role of popular culture in the current sociopolitical moment. Moreover, as the veritable gutter of black media, negative representations serve as the repository for all of the feelings that positive images cast aside. (21)

Negative spaces can exist as havens for topics deemed outside of the boundaries of respectable texts, particularly when those topics have to do with matters of identity. […] Similarly, reality television functions as the metaphorical gutter for the rejects of respectable black media representation. Interestingly enough, these individuals, groups, and topics that I refer to here as rejects happen to intersect and overlap with the same individuals, groups, and topics that are typically marginalized by mainstream and black uplift narratives in society. […] Many of these negative texts open up possibilities for non-normative feelings, experiences, and allegiances that, I argue, are simply not possible in the image-policed spaces of positive texts. (25-6)

For, if this book aims to highlight the way that whiteness functions invisibly and media, it must also point out that whiteness occupies a similar default position in scholarship on the media. In other words, we should productively trouble these existing discussions of taste and culture by first acknowledging that whether we use adjectives such as high, low, mass, or trash in front of the word “culture,” all of these descriptors are still referring to white culture, in that the producers, texts, and fan communities that constitute the foundations of this scholarship do not typically include people of color. (27)

While I acknowledge that negative representations sometimes fall prey to the same limiting constructions of race as their positive counterparts, I believe that the power of the negative image rests in its ability to shift the dynamics and popular culture. We see negative texts actively influencing mainstream popular culture and pulling it into the gutter in certain ways […] And, unlike the Bakhtinian carnivalesque, these are not shifts that simply bubble up temporarily only to be ultimately reabsorbed by dominant culture and robbed of their subversiveness. Nor are these subcultures that exist as a sort of parallel, underground universe to that of mainstream culture. Rather, the reverberations of negative texts function as tremors that irrevocably weaken the foundation on which their positive counterparts are constructed. Those are, in fact, performances that matter in spite of the fact that they have traditionally been understood as inconsequential as far as I articulating ideas about black identity. To this end, I examine the ways that they privileged disreputable behavior, characters, genres, and media as the means to negotiate the dynamics of culture, race, and power. (29-30)

Formal negativity involves a text that becomes a negative because one or more of its formal qualities – aesthetics, mise-en-scène, narrative, and so on – can function as an inversion of those typical positive texts. Although this type of negative text may not have a direct corollary in the positive realm, it gestures toward practices and genres either in mainstream media representation or in black media. (32)

In relational or comparative negativity, the positive counterpart directly overshadows the negative text. (32)

In circumstantial negativity, a media text is categorized due to the issues and debates surrounding it, rather than because of a direct relation to its positive counterpart. (33)

[Strategic negativity refers to] media texts that make full use of their location in the metaphorical “gutter” of media that is negativity, taking advantage of their distance from the politics of respectability to explore topics that their positive counterparts do not typically address. […] I argue that, as a genre, reality television escapes critical attention because of its negative status and because the genre itself masks the real labor of the cast and crew as “reality.” (34)

Further, [Eddie] Murphy’s immense and unmistakable influence on the film [Coming to America] runs contrary to auteurist theories that would place John Landis, the director, as the main creative force behind the film. Not simply a challenge to director-centric theories in film studies, this reimagining of Murphy as the visionary behind the film rather than Landis likewise complicates our understanding of how we define a film as “black.” Is it possible for a white director to make a “black” film, where “black” is understood not just by the race of the cast but also by its cast, themes, politics, and popularity with black audiences? Coming to America would suggest so and, therefore, troubles the commonly held assumption that Hollywood-produced films are only capable of promoting films ideologically aligned with whiteness. (38)

For it is one thing to acknowledge the structural and industrial pressures that lock black women into certain mediated tropes, but it is another thing altogether to grapple with the notion that these women actively choose to represent them themselves in these ways. Moreover, when the show creator is herself an African American woman, and the bulk of viewers are also African American women, we must contend with matters of choice and agency on every level, from production to performance to reception. Let me be clear here: I am not suggesting that we ignore the ways that larger social, historical, and industrial factors constrain the kinds of options that these women have available to them. I am, however, proposing that we look at the various ways in which the women associated with these shows negotiate these limited choices within the system of reality television, and how they use the very behaviors labeled as “ratchet” to achieve a degree of autonomy regarding the representational and economic aspects of their lives. (144)

Therefore, while some may view reality television’s conventions as tools to mask its regressive politics, I am interested in exploring how reality television actually lends itself to contemplations of racial (and gender) identity that are specific to its genre conventions. In other words, I argue that, in contrast to critically attended-to genres such as the sitcom or the hour-long drama, reality television involves deeper considerations of race, gender, class, and sexuality precisely because it is perceived as frivolous, fun, and trashy. It is reality television’s distance from respectability, its location in the gutter of television programming and critical regard, which allows it to delve into topics and issues that its respectable counterparts shy away from. (147)

Death 24x a Second by Laura Mulvey

by

via GIPHY Psycho by Alfred Hitchcock

Mulvey, Laura. 2006. Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image. London: Reaktion Books.

Summary & Implications: What is the author’s project and why is it important now? What’s the narrative about the field that’s emerging from the reading? What narratives are silent? Whose voices are silent?

Mulvey’s project in this book is to rethink spectatorship through the lens of the new possibilities opened by home video technologies like DVD and so on, which she argues returns the notion of stillness to the otherwise moving image. Because the spectator now has control over pausing, rewinding, and revisiting only certain scenes of a film, Mulvey argues, the spectator is made more undeniably aware of the cinema’s inherent stillness (in the material form of being composed of still images played in quick sequence to simulate motion). That stillness, she continues, opens the spectator’s potential line of engagement with a film not only as a story but also as a historical document of the indexical (or, broadly, real) aspects of the film image that are usually hidden behind the story’s iconographic impulses. In other words, recognizing that film is basically made up of photographs via technological manipulation of the film image enables both what Mulvey calls a “possessive” and a “pensive” spectator.

The possessive spectator is one who uses their ability to pause, rewind, and repeat images to sadistically, in Mulvey’s terms, control the object of their spectatorship. They develop a fetishistic attachment to the image that was once only possible with the help of extratextual aids like production stills or calendar images. Interestingly, she points out that this new control over the image basically negates the strong masculine voyeuristic tendency she saw in Hollywood films in her formative “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” essay. Or, if not outright negating the voyeuristic part, it demasculinizes the gaze and turns it towards a more individualized and therefore less-gendered form. This happens for women as well as men, she claims. She also notes that the possessive spectator is one who is attuned to the star persona’s complicated balance of energy/motion (which drives the action of the film and the gaze of the camera) and stillness, which is embodied in the pose which is either captured in still images like the production photos or in the span of time when a star pauses on screen, or when a spectator pauses the action at their own whim.

The pensive spectator is less interested in control and more interested in observing how the stillness they create in a film reflects back within the film when it is played in its normal capacity. What attention does the pensive spectator bring to the film during their pauses, delays, and repititions? It is similar to the attention a film scholar brings to films, and Mulvey convincingly argues that the ability to manipulate the time of a film has turned anybody who wants to be into a film scholar who can almost automatically understand the strange play of tenses that occurs when one watches an older film. The old film plays out in what Barthes calls a time of “this was now” where the index (again, reality, kinda) is captured at a particular moment in time. He had argued that this only works with the singular photograph, while the film tends to blur that indexicality into nothingness. Mulvey rescues his assertion for film by claiming that the ability to pause it and so on snaps spectators into a position where they can recognize the indexicality of the image and the historical nature of it. This, she argues, is crucial for political readings and uses of films to bridge the gap between the present and the past in a world which tends to want to insist on the immediacy of the moment.

Crucially for Mulvey, these ways of seeing films as containing stills was not only excavated via video control. It was always hidden, from the very early experiements of the Lumière and Méliès films, in the moments of slow motion and “still” frames achieved by the repetition of cells in sequence to create the illusion of stillness within a technically still moving medium, a phenomenon she calls “delayed cinema.” These traditional filmic techniques opened opportunities to see stillness on film and recognize the importance of stillness to the medium of film. Mulvey ties this to the narrative death drive she notes motivates many films. Hence the trope of ending on a static shot to, symbolically at least, represent the death of the story being told. With this association between stillness and death, Mulvey continues to pull at the cinema’s relationship between time passing, which is inherently captured on film but now can be paused by spectators and even reversed given the right technological tools, and the ability to see beyond death. When we see old movie stars on our home screens, we are not only watching old movies, we are conjuring ghosts and that is yet another reminder that time passes and the present always comes from the past.

Context: Who is this author debating with and why? What is the context of the text’s production and distribution? What historical, cultural, etc. factors affect the way it makes meaning? Does the author seem to be in conversation with other scholars and/or paradigms? Where is this piece of writing centered in the field? What is their intervention in the literature/field? What text is this text in conversation with?

Mulvey is in closest conversation with the twin pillars of Bazin and Barthes, each of which form a crucial part of her argument about stillness via their writings on photography and its properties. In addition to the two of them, Mulvey also engages with Miriam Hansen’s augmentations of her ideas from “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” which Mulvey also engages with several times. Of course, Freud and various readings of his ideas form the foundations of Mulvey’s fundamentally psychoanalytic approach to spectatorship. I tend to bristle at psychoanalysis, but I was able to dig around in Mulvey’s version of it and find what seemed to be most crucial so I didn’t have to throw the baby out with the bathwater there.

The other bit of crucial contextual info is Mulvey’s writing at the dawn of the 21st century. She uses this temporality to position her argument within conversations about the cinema’s centenary and the nearly concomitant discussions around the “death” of cinema thanks to the invention and propagation of digital filming and projection technologies. Mulvey largely dismisses this later idea, noting that the loss of the direct materiality of film’s imprint of light and shadow is retained in all but a literal sense when what happens is instead a numerical translation of the same data. The indexicality is not fundamentally lost, she claims, and I tend to agree. Otherwise, her arguments tend to rest on the affordances of the DVD, which was picked up and expanded upon by Benson-Allott less than a decade later.

via GIPHY Journey to Italy by Roberto Rossellini

Methodology: What is the methodological framework of this text? What methodological moves or questions does the author engage? What is their object of analysis?

Mulvey’s is a largey theoretical text, working mostly with other theorists who wrote on similar subjects to develop her own thoughts. She does, however, spend three chapters dedicated primarily to close readings of Psycho, Journey to Italy, and the works of Abbas Kiarostami. Here she draws out the ideas developed in the first half of her book about the role of stillness in cinema and how it connects or doesn’t to the death drive/passage of time inherent in cinema and narrative. She also delves into some smaller close readings in several of the other chapters, but those are used mostly to demonstrate ideas rather than as the primary purpose of her text.

Rhetorical Moves: What are the major rhetorical moves of the author’s arguments?

Mulvey devleops her points by first talking about how the video spectator’s ability to pause a film is an extension of the filmmaker’s ability to maniuplate the flow of time in their film. After showing that the spectator’s manipulation is related to the filmmaker’s manipulation, she traces how filmmakers used the manipulation of time to their own ends in metaphorical expressions of death and connects it to the uncanny of both Freud and Jentsch. She goes on to connect these ideas to narrative theories of death as a metaphorical ending to stories. After exploring this idea in her three close reading chapters, she comes back to develop a theory of spectatorship based on the ability to pause, rewind, and reorder a film via technology, which she claims creates a two new kinds of spectators, the possessive and the pensive.

Engagement & Application: How do I engage this text? How does this apply to my work? Does it support or provide a counterargument or model for strong intro or lit review? In other words, why is this piece of writing useful to me and/or how is it limited (bad writing style, problematic, didn’t consider x, y, and z)? Does it intersect with other items on the list?

Though I don’t buy most psychoanalytic theories, Mulvey was still quite convincing in her explanation of the way that home video opens new possibilites in recognizing the stillness at the center of film as a medium, and in the implications thereof. She also inspired a new way of thinking about the legacyquel that I’ll have to ponder on. Ultimately, her work is not only salvageable from the psychoanalysis but likely crucial to some of my upcoming work.

Key Terms: What terms are key to the author’s argument, and are they operationalized explicitly or implicitly?

stillness, movement, death, uncanny, spectatorship, pensive spectator, possessive spectator, fetish, voyeur, the death drive, narrative, video, delayed cinema, aesthetic of delay, automata, cinephilia, star, star system, pose, control, power

Significant Quotations: What key quotations from this work would I want to have quick access to?

Delayed cinema works on two levels: first of all it refers to the actual act of slowing down the flow of film. Secondly it refers to the delay in time during which some detail has lain dormant, as it were, waiting to be noticed. There is a loose parallel here with Freud’s concept of deferred action, the way the unconscious preserves a specific experience, while its traumatic effect might only be realized by another, later but associated, event. (8)

A dialectical relationship between the old and new media can be summoned into existence, creating an aesthetic of delay. In the first instance, the image itself is frozen or subjected to repetition or return. But as the new stillness is enhanced by the weight that the cinema’s past has acquired with passing time, its significance goes beyond the image itself towards the problem of time, its passing, and how it is represented or preserved. At a time when new technologies seem to hurry ideas and their representations at full tilt towards the future, to stop and to reflect on the cinema and its history also offers the opportunity to think about how time might be understood within wider, contested, patterns of history and mythology. Out of this pause, a delayed cinema gains a political dimension, potentially able to challenge patterns of time that are neatly ordered around the end of an era, its ‘before’ and its ‘after’. The delayed cinema gains further significance as outside events hasten the disappearance of the past and strengthen the political appropriation of time. (22-3)

The dialectic between old and new produces innovative ways of thinking about the complex temporality of cinema and its significance for the present moment in history. As the flow of cinema is displaced by the process of delay, spectatorship is affected, reconfigured and transformed so that old films can be seen with new eyes and digital technology, rather than killing the cinema, brings it new life and new dimensions. The process of delay not only bring stillness into visibility but also alters the traditionally linear structure of narrative, fragmenting its continuities. (26)

To look back into the reality of that lost world [of the early 1900s] by means of the cinema is to have the sensation of looking into a time machine. However cliched the concept, the presence of that reality, of the past preserved, becomes increasingly magical and uncanny. Furthermore, as electronic and digital technologies have overtaken the cinema and, as a new ‘new’ arrives, the old ‘new’ becomes relegated to ‘the old’. Paradoxically and incidentally, the new technologies have contributed further to bringing the uncanny back to the cinema. The ease with which the moving image can now be halted exposes the cinema’s mechanisms and the illusion of its movement, as though the beautiful automaton had become stuck in a particular pose. (52)

Cinema’s forward movement, the successive order of film, merges easily into the order of narrative. Linearity, causality and the linking figure of metonymy, all crucial elements in story-telling, find a correspondence in the unfolding, forward-moving direction of film. […] But at the end, the aesthetics of stillness returns to both narrative and the cinema. Death as a trope that embodies the narrative’s stillness, its return to an inanimate form, extends to the cinema, as though the still frame’s association with death fuses into the death of the story, as though the beautiful automaton was to wind down into its inanimate, uncanny, form. In this sense, endings present different kind of aesthetic exchange between narrative and cinema. Freud’s concept of ‘the death drive’ negotiates between the two, including, as it does, movement towards an end as the desire to return to an ‘earlier’ state. (69-70)

While the flow of the image at 24 frames a second tends to assert a ‘now-ness’ to the picture, stillness allows access to the time of the film’s registration, its ‘then-ness’. This is the point, essentially located in the single frame, where the cinema meets the still photograph, both registering a moment of time frozen and thus fossilized. (102)

As people and history recede into the past, the traces they leave on the world mark their absence, the impossibility of regaining time, but also bear witness to the reality of their once-upon-a-time presence. With the cinema, the past is preserved in the full appearance of reality. In the Pompeii sequence [of Journey to Italy], filmed in 1952, with the living presence of the anonymous workmen as well as Hollywood stars, another layer of fossilized history is superimposed on the ruins of the city. Those alive in the scene, then, are now as fossilized in their screen image as the plaster casts of the Pompeiian couple. (107)

The discovery of a particular sequence or segment that responds to textual analysis necessarily leads to questions of film form both in terms of material and language. To halt, to return and to repeat these images is to see cinematic meaning coming into being as an ordinary object becomes detached from its surroundings, taking on added cinematic and semiotic value. But delaying the image, extracting it from its narrative surroundings, also allows it to return to its context and to contribute something extra and unexpected, a deferred meaning, to the story’s narration. (150-1)

New ways of consuming old movies on electronic and digital technologies should bring about a reinvention of textual analysis and a new wave of cinephilia. But the cinema is deeply affected by the passing of time itself. Now, to look at films such as those made by Douglas Sirk is to have the impression of looking into history. Even studio sets and stars take on the status of document, and close readings inevitably lead to questions of context as well as text. But reflection on film now leads not only to its surrounding history. To see Imitation of Life now, after Lana Turner’s death and, no doubt, the death of many of the extras surrounding her on the set, is to see time itself caught and fossilized into the illusion of movement. Now, as Lana Turner runs down the steps onto the Coney Island set, conjuring up the meanings inscribed into Sirk’s film and her performance, she also shifts between the ghostly and the living. Her presence brings with it the cinema’s unique ability to return and repeat the past, which becomes both more real and more mysterious as the film’s fragment is itself subject to repetition and return. (160)

When a film industry streamlines its star system, instantly recognizable, iconic screen actors produce a highly stylized performance, enhanced by an equally highly stylized star-focused cinema. Start performance is, not inevitably but very often, the source of screen movement, concentrating the spectator’s eye, localizing the development of the story and providing its latent energy. But the great achievement of star performance is an ability to maintain a fundamental contradiction in balance: the fusion of energy with a stillness of display. However energetic a star’s movement might seem to be, behind it lies an intensely controlled stillness and an ability to pose for the camera. Reminiscent, figuratively, of the way that the illusion of movement is derived from still frames, so star performance depends on pose, moments of almost invisible stillness, in which the body is displayed for the spectator’s visual pleasure through the mediation of the camera. (162)

Watching Hollywood films delayed both reinforces and breaks down these oppositions. The narrative drive tends to weaken if the spectator is able to control its flow, to repeat and return to certain sequences while skipping others. The smooth linearity and forward movement of the story become jagged and uneven, undermining the male protagonist’s command over the action. The process of identification, usually kept in place by the relation between plot and character, suspense and transcendence, loses its hold over the spectator. And the loss of ego and self-consciousness that has been, for so long, one of the pleasures of the movies gives way to an alert scrutiny and scanning of the screen, lying in wait, as it were, to capture a favorite or hitherto unseen detail. With the weakening of narrative and its effects, the aesthetic of the film begins to become ‘feminized’, with the shift in spectatorial power relations dwelling on pose, stillness, lighting and the choreography of character and camera. Or, rather, within the terms of the ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ model, the aesthetic of pleasure of delayed cinema moves towards fetishistic scopophilia that, I suggested, characterized the films of Josef Von Sternberg. These films, most particularly the Dietrich cycle, elevate the spectator’s look over that of the male protagonist and privilege the beauty of the screen and mystery of situation over suspense, conflict or linear development. The ‘fetishistic spectator’ becomes more fascinated by image than plot, returning compulsively to privileged moments, investing emotion and ‘visual pleasure’ in any slight gesture, a particular look or exchange taking place on the screen. Above all, as these privileged moments are paused or repeated, the cinema itself finds a new visibility that renders them special, meaningful and pleasurable, once again confusing photogénie and fetishism. (165)

The possessive spectator commits an act of violence against the cohesion of a story, the aesthetic integrity that holds it together, and the vision of its creator. But, more specifically, the sadistic instinct is expressed through the possessive spectator’s desire for mastery and will to power. In the role reversal between the look of the spectator and the diegetic look of the male protagonist, the figure that had been all powerful both on and off the screen is now subordinated to manipulation and possession. Film performance is transformed by repetition and actions begin to resemble mechanical, compulsive gestures. The cinema’s mechanisms take possession of the actor or star and, as their precise, repeated gestures become those of automata, the cinema’s uncanny fusion between the living and the dead merges with the uncanny fusion between the organic and the inorganic, the human body and the machine. (171)

Bellour makes the crucial point that a moment of stillness within the moving image and its narrative creates a ‘pensive spectator’ who can reflect ‘on the cinema’. Not only can the ‘pensive’ spectator experience the kind of reverie that Barthes associated with the photograph alone, but this reverie reaches out to the nature of cinema itself. This pause for the spectator, usually ‘hurried’ by the movement of both film and narrative, opens a space for consciousness of the still frame within the moving image. Similarly, the pensive spectator who pauses the image with new technologies may bring to the cinema the resonance of the still photograph, the association with death usually concealed by the film’s movement, its particularly strong inscription of the index. These reflections are not lost when the film is returned to movement. On the contrary, they continue and inflect the film’s sense of ‘past-ness’. And the ‘pensive’ spectator ultimately returns to the inseparability of stillness from movement and flow; in Bellour’s words, ‘two kinds of time blend together’. (186)

Sometime after writing ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, I tried to evolve an alternative spectator, who was driven, not by voyeurism, but by curiosity and the desire to decipher the screen, informed by feminism and responding to the new cinema of the avant-garde. Curiosity, a drive to see, but also to know, still marked a utopian space for a political, demanding visual culture, but also one in which the process of deciphering might respond to the human minds long standing interest and pleasure in solving puzzles and riddles. This curious spectator may be the ancestor of the pensive spectator and the cinema of delay unlocks the pleasure of decipherment, not only for an elite but also for anyone who has access to the new technologies of consumption. Of particular interest is the relation between the old and the new, that is, the effect of new technologies on cinema that has now aged. Consciousness of the passing of time affects what is seen on the screen: that sense of a ‘sea-change’ as death overwhelms the photographed subject affects the moving as well as the still image. There is, perhaps, a different kind of voyeurism at stake when the future looks back with greedy fascination at the past and details suddenly lose their marginal status and acquire the aura that passing time bequeaths to the most ordinary objects. (191-2)

The tape creates a dialogue between the cinema of the past and video, between the special insights of a 1960s critic and the new technology that makes critics as of us all. This exchange creates a dialectical relation between the old and the new, breaking down the separation from the past from which nostalgia is derived. But at the same time, it is elegiac: there is no escape from passing time and death itself. (194)

Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens by Caetlin Benson-Allott

by

David Cronenberg’s Videodrome

Benson-Allott, Caetlin. 2013. Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens: Video Spectatorship from VHS to File Sharing. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Summary & Implications: What is the author’s project and why is it important now? What’s the narrative about the field that’s emerging from the reading? What narratives are silent? Whose voices are silent?

Caetlin Benson-Allott writes persuasively that the old theories of film spectatorship should now be adjusted based on the fact that the cinematic experience is no longer the most dominant form of filmic consumption. She argues that home video now holds the position of being the primary way one sees films (and that’s certainly true in the very present moment of Summer 2020, thanks to the dangers of COVID-19). She argues that because much of spectatorship theory is based on the cinematic apparatus as a structuring metaphor, the fact that most people now watch movies at home should trigger a revision of spectatorship based on the aspects of home video as the structuring metaphor. She continues to claim that the shift to home video has changed the way filmmakers compose their films and address their audiences, which covers everything from the prevalence of over-the-shoulder shots (that, she claims, provides a presence within the film that excuses the outside attention grabbers like a partner walking in front of the tv or other such distractions) to color changes (which, she argues comes with other shifts in the political nature of the films that have changed).

Similar to Connor‘s claims that films are always about their own making, Benson-Allott uses horror films, which are always about cultural anxieties, to show how many films within that genre are places where filmmakers worked through the anxieties related to the shift to home video viewership. This comes in the form of 5 close-reading-based chapters, which follow a general historical/temporal path. The first, a series of readings of George Romero’s Dead series sees how one filmmaker shifted storytelling and filmmaking techniques in response to changes in distribution models. Then Benson-Allott reads Videodrome and The Ring for their focus on the VHS as a space for thinking through anxieties of cultural imperialism and reproduction/piracy, with the former coming at the start of the home video phenomenon and Canada’s fears of US media imperialism and the latter coming at the inflection point between VHS and DVD, a supposedly more secure home video format which allowed the filmmakers to truly demonize the easy reproducibility inherent in VHS. Then Benson-Allott looks at the Grindhouse film(s) and how they create a simulacrum of what she calls “cinematicity” or the “unique process and experience of theatrical exhibition” as a singular cinema object even as they also prepare for their eventual permanent home on separate home video discs, a fate which would render that simulacrum even more visible and pointed in an effort to bring attention to the falseness of the cinematic “truth” (133). Benson-Allott wraps up her close readings with a chapter on what she calls “faux footage” horror films, from The Blair Witch Project to Cloverfield, each of which, she claims, calls attention to the dangers of peer-to-peer file sharing as a place where unverifiable footage (files) could lead to hauntings and other dangerous outcomes. 

Benson-Allott closes her book in a brief but dense conclusion, thinking through the supposed “freedom” that home viewers feel in relation to the films they watch. She claims that the freedoms associated with home viewership are still largely structured and controlled. In other words, you get some limited temporal control over the film you watch (you can choose when to start it, and to pause it for a moment or overnight if necessary, and you can of course rewind and fastforward and jump around) but that the temporal freedom is not total in that you are not able to choose different orders or takes or events to happen. The movie is still the movie. She also claims that things like DVD menus and the like are used to put your viewership of the film in a particular context, a certain limited perspective on the film. In other words, though the home video spectator is more empowered than the cinema spectator, who is traditionally seen as subjecting themselves before a film, that power is still quite limited and used to turn the spectator into a subject, just one of a different variety.

Benson-Allott’s readings and claims are largely persuasive, as she calls attention to a platform that has largely been either ignored or only marginally considered. I hope that my own work in the future can further extend some of the claims she makes here into the streaming age.

Context: Who is this author debating with and why? What is the context of the text’s production and distribution? What historical, cultural, etc. factors affect the way it makes meaning? Does the author seem to be in conversation with other scholars and/or paradigms? Where is this piece of writing centered in the field? What is their intervention in the literature/field? What text is this text in conversation with?

Benson-Allott’s major task is to decentralize spectator theory put forwards by apparatus theorists like Christian Metz, Laura Mulvey, and company. She does so not by following other critiques of that theory on the grounds of its totalizing vision of the cinematic apparatus from which nobody can escape but by historicizing it as once being somewhat explanatory in its concept of the way films position their spectators but that movies now position their spectators differently because those spectators are most likely to be spectating at home. In the process of this project, she also responds to D. N. Rodowick’s musings on the “end of cinema” to claim that movies aren’t dying, just changing. She uses Vivian Sobchack’s phenomenology to talk about the way VHS and bodies interact in Videodrome, Barbara Creed’s concept of the monstrous feminine to write about the abject horror of the VHS tape as womb, and Derrida’s simulacrum to think about what it means for something to have cinematicity. Each of these theorists are given their due and woven into the larger work Benson-Allott is doing here.

As is becoming a refrain here, though, Benson-Allott’s book has its limitations in that it doesn’t quite come up to the present anymore. What does the proliferation of streaming channels, especially now that companies are consolidating many of their back catalogues under their own service mean for what she lays out here? In many ways her text is easily extensible to the present moment, which marks it as a very valuable text indeed. But it is limited in that she is necessarily unable to address the things that have come to be after the time of her writing.

Eduardo Sánchez and Daniel Myrick’s The Blair Witch Project

Methodology: What is the methodological framework of this text? What methodological moves or questions does the author engage? What is their object of analysis?

Benson-Allott takes the concept of spectator theory and apparatus theory under a microscope using horror films for close readings in an effort to understand how spectatorship changes when one is sitting on their couch watching a movie on their tv instead of in a movie theater. Each close reading has several subsections, which usually revolve around explaining one aspect of the film-in-question’s nature, from the filmic techniques to the political and technological context, including often one major relevant film theorist as noted above.

Rhetorical Moves: What are the major rhetorical moves of the author’s arguments?

Benson-Allott gets most of her rhetorical power from the strength of her close-readings and the context she provides in each chapter for those close readings. She adds on to spectator theory in a valuable and important way, critiquing it for being too narrowly focused and not adapting to the realities of spectatorship over time. In tracking how home video spectatorship was thought about through the films themselves, Benson-Allott is able to provide examples of how this work can be done beyond what she covers in her book as well, opening the door for further work done in her model after the fact. In that way, Benson-Allott provides a great example of scholarship, one to emulate.

Engagement & Application: How do I engage this text? How does this apply to my work? Does it support or provide a counterargument or model for strong intro or lit review? In other words, why is this piece of writing useful to me and/or how is it limited (bad writing style, problematic, didn’t consider x, y, and z)? Does it intersect with other items on the list?

This one really opened some doors for me. For one, it triggered a breakthrough in my conception of the legacyquel as designed for home viewership on platforms like Disney+ (which houses all of the Star Wars films and much of the ancillary material) and HBO MAX (which houses many of the DC universe films). I’m excited to work through the details and consequences of this new area and way of thinking for my project.

Key Terms: What terms are key to the author’s argument, and are they operationalized explicitly or implicitly?

home video (as an expansive term encompassing basically any technology/platform that allows movies to be watched outside of a theater), spectatorship, apparatus, formats, spectator, simulacrum, cinematicity, postcinematic, control, power, film subject, video subject, phenomenology, abject

Significant Quotations: What key quotations from this work would I want to have quick access to?

This study takes the polemical position that video distribution changed and is changing spectatorship and that film and new media theorists must attend to these changes. We must attend to the ways video platforms affect the motion picture experience if we want to continue to comment on the ideological significance of motion pictures for contemporary culture, politics, and subjectivity. (2)

Like movies about video and movies made possible by video (such as the aforementioned 1980s horror cycle or the concomitant increase in children’s features, or “kid vid”), movies made in periods of technological change offer a deep well of material for new theories of motion picture spectatorship in an age of multiplatform distribution. The producers and artists working within the US and Canadian entertainment industries know that most viewers approach their products through one video format or another; only “film studies” continues to insist on the primacy of the cinematic experience, and we do so in spite of our own video-enabled research and pedagogy. (6-7)

[…] I examine how innovations in motion picture exhibition have changed the way filmmakers imagine and address the spectator. What one can show influences what one can say, so the effect of video platforms on filmmaking matters not only because they influence production (as Janet Wasko, Frederick Wasser, and David Bordwell have shown) but also because they shape the transmission of ideas. By examining how the movies’ production design, cinematography, and editing anticipate video distribution, we begin to recognize new patterns and how they interpellate the spectator. By reading these formal innovations in conversation with the narratives they convey, we can see how filmmakers negotiate story, platform, and form to achieve a particular response and a viewer. (26)

Thus I argue (contra Neale and Bordwell) that the allegedly disposable shoulder represents not a concession to but a thematization of video exhibition, specifically of the other video viewers whose bodily presence remains irritatingly visible during televisual exhibition and so must be psychically repressed from one’s movie experience. This need does not exist in the same way at the cinema, where silhouettes of heads tend to block the bottom of the screen instead. Hence Romero’s “over-the-disposable-shoulder shot” – which was nowhere near as prevalent in Day of the Dead and non-existent in Dawn of the Dead and Night of the Living Dead – must be recognized as a new video convention that reflects the current mode of consumption. Indeed, it could even be read as creating a spectatorial continuum between the video viewer and the diegetic look that further involves the spectator in the narrative. (56)

Unlike remakes, reboots rarely follow the narratives of their antecedents and typically create new mythologies for the old horrors, mythologies that can then produce a new line of sequels. In some cases such reinventions can lead to innovations in the horror genre – such as the attention to feminine class markers in the new Texas Chain Saw Massacre – but most reboots merely cash in on name recognition. (59-60)

Videodrome (1983) was among the first narrative representations of home video and develops preexisting anxieties about the technology’s capacity for surveillance, psychic violence, and espionage. As early as 1977, movies like Demon Seed began to suggest that viewers beware lest their new consumer electronics consume their lives and identities. Yet few of the movies about video address the machines of exhibition themselves, much less our embodied encounters with them. Cronenberg’s Videodrome and Gore Verbinski’s The Ring (2002) are unique in their willingness to focus on videocassettes as material objects we manipulate – and are manipulated by. These two movies bookend the videotape’s reign as the dominant motion picture platform, and both use cassettes as metaphors for larger media takeovers (specifically the Americanization of Canadian media and the threat of digital piracy). They do not bear the traces of video distribution in the same ways that Romero’s later zombie movies do, but they do advance the artistic tradition of self-reflexive filmmaking by turning the camera on the VCR and the cultural battles it catalyzed. Through unsettling narrative and formal techniques they ask how home video reconstructs the film spectator and in whose interests these changes occur. (70)

As this chapter will show, Videodrome uses the story of Max Renn’s involvement with Videodrome to contend that video spectatorship forces the viewer to adapt physically to suit a new technological environment. It will then explore how the movie imbricates Max’s story in a series of explicit references to Canadian media history and uses these connections to ground its reading of consumer electronics in a surreal critique of the United States’ technocultural imperialism. After outlining this political intervention, I will argue that Videodrome offers its spectator a phenomenology of new media through a radically destabilizing form of first-person filmmaking. (71-2)

Grindhouse invokes cinematic abjection to emphasize the historical contingency of spectatorship. Its simulacrum of suboptimal viewing conditions thus brings the spectator’s attention to the here-and-now-ness of spectatorship and utopian fantasies about the cinema. For inasmuch as the movie depicts a cinematic utopia – and its idealized theatrical nonplace that never was – it drags the spectator into this fantasy as well, since she is also part of the motion picture apparatus. Indeed, the motion picture apparatus and the simulacrum interpellate the spectator similarly. (146)

By emphasizing the thrills of illicit viewing but associating it with inevitable death, [faux footage] movies make pirate spectatorship horrifying. Taken on their own, these movies can seem innocuous, far-fetched, even silly, but read within their industrial context, including the MPAA’s war on piracy, they offer intimations about the dire consequences of illicit spectatorship that may scare viewers away from the pleasures of piracy. Like Videodrome and The Ring, they promise death to pirates, yet they do so by uniting tropes from horror films, reality television, and MPAA public service announcements. Indeed, they teach the spectator not to go searching for underground videos, because what she finds could be deadly. (168)

Whereas cinema and television immerse the spectator in the illusion of voyeurism or indulge her in narcissistic fantasies of panoptical vision, the prerecorded video apparatus replaces such powers with temporal control. That is, all video playback technologies give their subjects (limited) temporal control over the motion picture and sustain the subjects fantasy of coherence and autonomy through an illusion of temporal mastery. (204)

Prerecorded video compromises some of those [cinematic spectatorial] pleasures by making the apparatus visible to the spectator and foregrounding her participation in it. Indeed, it can be rather difficult to prostrate oneself to a thirty-inch screen when other people, noises, or technologies keep interrupting. The prerecorded video apparatus compensates for these losses by allowing the viewer to fantasize that she is in possession of the text instead of being possessed by it. Not only can the spectator physically possess her video tape or disk, but she may experience similar feelings of possession regarding her digital files. […] Through possession, prerecorded video gives its spectator a powerful illusion that she can control time and marshal outside events to suit her schedule. (206-7)

In foregrounding pre-recorded video as an apparatus, I am suggesting that the video subject internalizes the prerecorded video interface much as she does the remoteness of the cinematic projector or the flow of various television channels. More than any individual technology, the persistence of the basic functions of video playback has come to unify and define the spectator’s experience of video. The video spectator possesses temporal control over a movie, but that is not the same as the power of self-determination, the power to imagine what it means to be a video subject. (207)

Thanks to prerecorded video, it now seems that we can watch what we want when we want, but who we understand ourselves to be in that moment remains a function of the motion picture apparatus, because spectatorship is always a power play. (208)

Fans: The Mirror of Consumption by Carl Sandvoss

by

J.J. Abram’s Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

Sandvoss, Carl. 2005. Fans: The Mirror of Consumption. Malden, MA: Polity Press.

Summary & Implications: What is the author’s project and why is it important now? What’s the narrative about the field that’s emerging from the reading? What narratives are silent? Whose voices are silent?

Carl Sandvoss sets out to first recap many of the ways that fandom has been theorized before his writing in the early 2000s before offering his own theory on how fans interact with the texts they’ve chosen to be fans of. Specifically, he refutes Fiske’s assertion that fandom is a place of inherent resistance to the desires and values of the “power bloc” Instead, he conceives of fandom through a four-step process which he uses to develop his idea that fandom is inherently self-reflective and therefore not inherently partisan or emancipatory, as fans are as likely to use their fandoms to close off revolutionary ideas within a text as they are to embrace them or perform revolutionary acts with their texts.

The first step in Sandvoss’s project is to develop a sense of fandom as a place with properties like that of Heimat, a sense of home with attendant notions of security and warmth but which also implies a hierarchy of those allowed within that Heimat and those who are excluded. While fandoms might give fans a sense of community and togetherness based on that shared adoration of a fan text, it also allows them to discriminate against those who deemed unworthy of belonging for whatever reason.

Sandvoss’ next task to to examine the psychoanalytic nature of fandom, which he mostly congeals into a combined act of projection and introjection which allows fans to see themselves in the text and see elements of the text within their own worldview. In this sense, the text doesn’t have much control over what a fan uses it for, and different fans can have wildly different uses for the same fan text. This is another reason why fandoms aren’t inherently emancipatory.

Developing this idea of intro-and-pro-jection further, Sandvoss borrows from several readings of the Narcissus myth, including Winnicott’s and McLuhan’s, to put forth his own thesis that objects of fandoms are more like mirrors than anything else. Fans see in them what they want to see, and the objects therefore reflect back what a fan puts into them. This is different, he says, from literature, which, according to Jauss, uses its gaps to expand readers’ “horizons of expectations.” In fandom, gaps and blanks are either worked around, ignored, or used for further reflection of the fan’s point of view. This is all possible because objects of fandom, Sandvoss claims, are so polysemic (open to possible readings) that they are in effect “neutrosemic” or open to any reading. Fans also tend to encourage this reflection by rejecting anything within a fan text (say, an episode of a tv show or a spinoff novel) that does not conform to their horizon of expectation. Fan texts and fandoms are then likely to conform to the status quo as fans use them only to confirm what they already believe, which is likely to be well within the boundaries set up by the “power bloc.”

Sandvoss does allow for one area where fandoms can be a force for change, however. It is in the discussion of an object of fandom which will necessarily feature fans with different perspectives (because they are based on the fan’s pre-established beliefs) talking to each other. Here Sandvoss imagines a place where fans might challenge each other’s understanding of the fan text and provide at least some expansion of the horizon of expectations.

Like Fiske before him, Sandvoss again creates a kind of totalizing system of fandoms, this time, however, not based in (again, totalized) class distinctions but instead on the (one more time, totalizing) universality of psychoanalysis. This allows Sandvoss to claim that all fandoms work in this one way, and that differences in identity or positioning matter little to his framework he’s developed. I tend to be skeptical of these kinds of projects, even as I am convinced by much of his argument. In other words, I think this works well as a framework but careful study of individual fandoms (and facets of fandoms based on different identificatory affiliations) should feel open to pushing back on some of the broader claims Sandvoss makes here. I think here of bell hooks’ proposition that black women filmgoers often watch with an oppositional gaze developed through years of being underserved by the white male dominated popular culture. What kind of resistance would this oppositional gaze bring to Sandvoss’s concept of fandoms as self-reflective?

Context: Who is this author debating with and why? What is the context of the text’s production and distribution? What historical, cultural, etc. factors affect the way it makes meaning? Does the author seem to be in conversation with other scholars and/or paradigms? Where is this piece of writing centered in the field? What is their intervention in the literature/field? What text is this text in conversation with?

Sandvoss cites a heck of a lot of people here and builds on much of their work within fandom. He writes about the first, second, and third waves of fan studies and positions his work as building upon all of them. His is a theory deeply enmeshed in dozens of other voices. However, it’s also a product of its time. Sandvoss does mention some online fandom gathering places and the kinds of interactions that are performed there, but I could easily see a sequel study done which might expand greatly on what Sandvoss has already done here w/r/t online fandoms. I’ve found, for example, both an impulse towards the kind of self-reflective fandom and the push-back provided by other fans seemingly increase in intensity on the internet. Sandvoss also claims that fans have little to no input on how the objects of fandom are created, but recent examples like Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker and the (eventual) release of the Snyder cut of Justice League would call that into question as well, never mind the historical examples of viewer feedback causing big changes in film serials, tv shows, and so on.

The fan group called the 501st Legion was used as extras on Disney’s The Mandalorian

Methodology: What is the methodological framework of this text? What methodological moves or questions does the author engage? What is their object of analysis?

Sandvoss pulls a lot from previous fan studies for his examples, including his own study of sports fans. These are contextualized with theoretical frameworks like psychoanalysis and Marxist critical theory to try to get at what fandoms are, and what they can do. One might most accurately say that this is a study of prior studies, as it is more interested in developing an overarching theory than it is in actually looking at specific fandoms.

Rhetorical Moves: What are the major rhetorical moves of the author’s arguments?

The largest rhetorical move Sandvoss engages in is the introduction of several fan studies that have previously made claims about how fandom works in a specific area which Sandvoss engages with to explain and pick out the high points before discarding the majority of the theory for being not particularly useful. For example, he takes from Fiske the three kinds of fan productivity but disputes the larger claim Fiske makes about the emancipatory nature of fandoms. This lends Sandvoss a sense of both magnanimity as well as a logical superiority as his theory is developed on only the good parts of the many studies that have come before his. He also builds his case nicely, using each chapter after the second (the recap chapter) to develop one important part of his theory that is then used as the core of the next part. It makes for a clean, logical procession of ideas.

Engagement & Application: How do I engage this text? How does this apply to my work? Does it support or provide a counterargument or model for strong intro or lit review? In other words, why is this piece of writing useful to me and/or how is it limited (bad writing style, problematic, didn’t consider x, y, and z)? Does it intersect with other items on the list?

As currently configured in my brain, my dissertation will end on a study of how the Star Wars fandom responded to the three legacyquel films (TFA, TLJ, TRoS), and I could very much see how Sandvoss’s theories would be directly applicable to what I’ve seen so far. It’s going to be central, I think, to that chapter.

Key Terms: What terms are key to the author’s argument, and are they operationalized explicitly or implicitly?

fans, fandom, fan text, object of fandom, Heimat, self-reflective, horizon of expectations, popular culture, literature, fan productivity, polysemic, neutrosemic, mirror, introjection, projection, identity, fan practices, consumption, habitus

Significant Quotations: What key quotations from this work would I want to have quick access to?

For the purpose of empirical investigation and academic analysis, we therefore need to turn to observable aspects as defining marks of fandom. I thus want to suggest a definition of fandom focusing on fan practices. This admittedly devolves the problem to the question of which fan practices are most indicative of fans’ emotional investment and affect. (6)

I define fandom as the regular, emotionally involved consumption of a given popular narrative or text in the form of books, television shows, films or music, as well as popular texts in a broader sense such as sports teams and popular icons and stars ranging from athletes and musicians to actors. (8)

Consequently, fandom can be subversive, especially when based on textual productivity; yet there is no automatism which positions the tactics of reading in necessary opposition to the strategies of (mass) production. (29)

In this sense, I believe, fandom best compares to the emotional significance of the places we have grown to call home, to the form of physical, emotional and ideological space that is best described as Heimat. […] Understanding fandom as a form of Heimat thus accurately combines the significance of symbolical, personal space in fandom with the importance of territorial place within which such fandoms is physically manifested. However, these spaces differ from the territorial place conventionally understood as Heimat. Rather, as our discussion here has illustrated, they can be physical as well as textual, and hence can be accessed by fans in different mediated and unmediated ways, at different times, and from different localities. […] But the notion of fandom as a form of Heimat comes with its own implications with regard to the social and cultural consequences of fandom. The idea of Heimat is based upon notions of security and emotional warmth, but Heimat also always involves an evaluation and categorization of others. (64)

The theoretical challenge here is to account for the dual function of the object of fandom as experienced not in relation to the self, but as part of the self, despite constituting an external object. The basic premise of my argument, then, is that the object of fandom whether it is a sports team, a television programme, a film or pop star, is intrinsically interwoven with our sense of self, with who we are, would like to be, and think we are. (96)

Here, I want to take such arguments to their conclusion and suggest that in the intense interaction between self and object of fandom, acknowledgment of the object of fandom as an external object disappears. Rather than as a transitional realm between the self and an external world, the object of fandom forms part of the self, and hence functions as its extension. (100)

The object of fandom in this sense is not so much a textual possession; nor does it only define the self. It is part of the fan’s (sense of) self. For the object of fandom is as an external object – whether it is Bruce Springsteen or, say, Star Trek – to be experienced as part of the fan’s fabric of self, fans need to build an intense identification with their object of fandom. (101)

[Following McLuhan’s reading of the Narcissus myth,] [w]e may then be aware of parallels between ourselves and our objects of fandom, and even actively seek to foster and construct these, yet self-reflection is always based on a misrecognition of the external object. Our fascination with the object of fandom does not arise out of the fact that, objectively, it is like us, but is instead based on the projection of our own image. The object of fandom, like the river in the Narcissus myth, is the coincidental medium of self-reflection, whose true quality lies in its reflective capacity. (104)

Moreover, as the object of fandom becomes part of our fabric of self through processes of self-reflection, fans actively maintain this stage of self-performance and projection. Fans thus seek to emulate and emphasize parallels between themselves and what they recognize as external qualities of the object of fandom. […] Yet, beyond resemblance and imitation, the actual origin of meaning in either the fan object or the fan becomes unclear. In fans’ self-reflective relationship with their object of fandom, we cannot allocate the origins of personal beliefs and attitudes and either the fan or the fan object. (111)

From such a self-reflective reading it follows that texts allow not only for a multiplicity of meaning, but for any meaning. Only if fan texts function as a mirror, can fans find their reflected image in the object of fandom. Having stated that all texts are polysemic, because they cannot carry a single, definitive meeting, this supposes that at the end of the spectrum polysemic texts allow for so many different readings that they can no longer be meaningfully described as polysemic. The notion of self-reflection and fandom suggests that some texts come to function as a blank screen on which fans’ self-image is reflected. These texts are polysemic to a degree that they become neutrosemic – in other words, carry no inherent meaning. By ‘neutrosemy’, I describe the semiotic condition in which a text allows for so many divergent readings that, intersubjectively, it does not have any meaning at all. (126)

The definition of textual boundaries forms a key strategy that allows fans to construct a self-reflective reading of the object of fandom. It is a simultaneous process of inclusion and exclusion. On the one hand, the discriminative power of fans to serves to maintain the object of fandom as a space of self-reflection. […] The object of fandom thus always consists of a textual hybrid, a meta- or super-text composed of many textual episodes whose boundaries are defined by the fan him- or herself. The reader, then, does not, as Rorty suggests, beat the text into a shape which will serve his or her own purposes (cf. Eco 1994), but cuts his or her own text out of all available signs and information like a figure out of a seemingly endless sheet of paper. (131-2)

The multiplicity of meanings in literary texts thus has a double function. In the first instance, it is reminiscent of the common interpretation of the notion of polysemy in media studies, in that it occurs in the different readings of the same text by different readers. There is, however, a second, qualitatively decisive dimension: the multiplicity of meanings within a given text experienced on the level of the individual reader, thus creating semiotic ambiguities and challenges to the value position of the reader, thereby invites a reflexive dialogue between reader and text. On this level of indeterminacy, literary texts differ fundamentally from fan texts. It is precisely these semiotic ambiguities and challenges that are lacking when the fan of a sports team can so easily project his values and beliefs onto the team, when the Bruce Springsteen fan finds her own philosophy readily represented in Springsteen’s songs, or when the fan of Star Wars finds no difficulty in relating the fan text to his own military career and aspirations. (143)

It is important to note that in all these cases texts are turned into fan texts through a relative judgment following the fan’s horizon of expectations, not any objective generic qualities. What comes to function as a fan text to one reader may still possess literary qualities to another reader. (144)

Secondly, reception aesthetics provides us with a useful tool for analyzing the reading of fan texts. However, while the relationship between fans and their object of fandom is at the heart of fandom, it does not account fully for all aspects of fan performance and social interaction. Beyond fan texts as fan objects are many texts, conversations and forms of communication which form part of fandom, yet lack the neutrosemic quality of the fan text. While in the mediated quasi-interaction between fans and the object of fandom the fan texts cannot intervene in the normalized, self-reflective meanings that fans construct, other fans and texts which we encounter in our fandom can. Secondary texts, including, of course, academic studies of fan texts, may challenge fans’ normalized, self-reflective readings. Moreover, the interaction with other fans through in situ consumption, everyday life conversation, fan meetings and online communication potentially constitutes an array of challenges to fans’ (self-reflective) interpretation of the fan texts, demanding forms of self-reflexivity not dissimilar to those that Iser ascribes to reading of literary texts. The challenge to fans’ horizon of experience and expectation consequently does not lie in the fan object but in the experiences and interactions that surround the relationship between fan and fan text – in other words in fandom as ‘interpretive community’. (147)

Commonly, this discrepancy – given the inherent textual distance of mediated quasi-interaction, as well as fans’ need to maintain their relationship by to the object of fandom based upon familiarity – will be kept at bay by the fan. However, different factors can trigger a decreasing textual, and hence growing aesthetic, distance between fan and object of fandom. First, the fan text is more complex in its boundaries over time and space than single literary texts. As dynamic texts evolving over time, fan texts cannot fully meet the fan’s horizon of expectations, and thus remain truly banal. The departure of a lead character from a given television show, the increasingly international labor market and professional sports, the new artistic direction of a given musician or band, or the death of one’s favorite star in this sense possess literary quality, in that they increase the aesthetic distance between text and fan. In these moments of rapture, the fan assumes a quality similar to that proposed by Iser for literary texts, in that it evades attempts at normalization and thus demands a reflexive reaction. […] In the first case the fan resolves the discord between his or her values and sense of self and the now altered fan text through rejection of the former object offend them. The fan text thus loses its significance, and the respective fandom comes to an end. […] Fans also overcome dissonance and indeterminacy by reinforcing the norms encapsulated in the fan texts, thus refashioning the self in an attempt to conform with its changing reflection and what I have previously described as the fan’s tendency to serve as servo-mechanism to the object of fandom. If textual blanks and aesthetic distance in the reading of fan texts, and subsequent processes of a reflexive readjustment of self, however, are created through the economic and social forces which already structure the conditions of modern industrial living, fandom cannot function as a space for the creation of new social norms; neither, then, can fandom reflexively challenge the macro parameters of the production of fan texts, which in turn are reflective of the economic and social status quo. (150-1)

“The Cultural Economy of Fandom” by John Fiske

by

Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Fiske, John. 1992. “The Cutlural Economy of Fandom.” In The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media, edited by Lisa A. Lewis, 256. New York: Routledge.

Summary & Implications: What is the author’s project and why is it important now? What’s the narrative about the field that’s emerging from the reading? What narratives are silent? Whose voices are silent?

John Fiske builds upon Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital to put forth the idea of a fan culture that creates a “shadow cultural economy” which involves the appropriation of the products of the larger cultural economy while also providing for the production of its own products and output, which might involve the remixing/rewriting of the original texts (30). The idea is that, because the texts fan cultures are based on aren’t valued by the dominant culture, they are more amenable to this kind of adaptation and reuse, they contain within them space for fans to interact and create more readily than do the “texts” of the dominant culture. Fiske proposes that there is still a strong drive, at least among those who fit in well with the dominant culture (straight white men) to evaluate the fan-attracting texts as the dominant culture does to the dominant texts, hierarchically, meanwhile those less likely to fit in with the dominant culture care less about valuation and hierarchy as tools for interacting with their fan-accessible texts.

Fiske proposes that fans engage in three kinds of “productivity” in response to and conversation with the texts they are a fan of. The first, semiotic productivity, involves the reading and understanding of a text, and isn’t specific to fandom in particular. The second takes the ideas developed in that semiotic reading and turns it into dialogue in the form of enunciative productivity, which is, basically, fan talk. Writing first in 1992, Fiske argues that this fan talk is often limited because there is a relatively small chance of overlapping fandoms within a fan’s immediate vicinity. This will later explode with the popularization of the internet. The final kind of productivity is textual, which sees fans produce their own texts in a complex web of interactions with the original texts and personal desires/creative impulses.

Fiske notes that fans and the dominant culture both revolve around accumulating collections of cultural artifacts, but that fans are generally more interested in the size of the collection whereas the dominant culture is generally more concerned with the monetary value of their collected materials. He notes also that because fan-attached texts aren’t usually valued by the dominant culture, their collections and productions are less likely to be valuable economically.

Fiske holds one way of seeing the difference between the fan and dominant cultures as being almost inalienable: the dominant culture is always going to be uninterested in the fan-attracting texts except as ways of extracting money from fans, while the fans will be uninterested in the official, proscribed use of a fan-attracting text and will instead value it for what they can do with it and how they can undermine it or fundamentally change it.

Fiske also writes that gender is a primary differentiator in the world of fandom, that differences in how fans react or respond to texts will tend to vary with their gender. He notes that race might also be part of this calculation but doesn’t think that it holds as much explanatory or differentiating power as gender and class do. This point is obviously arguable.

Context: Who is this author debating with and why? What is the context of the text’s production and distribution? What historical, cultural, etc. factors affect the way it makes meaning? Does the author seem to be in conversation with other scholars and/or paradigms? Where is this piece of writing centered in the field? What is their intervention in the literature/field? What text is this text in conversation with?

As stated above, Fiske is most interested in augmenting the work of Bourdieu to explicate the difference between the dominant cultural economy and the “shadow” cultural economy of fandoms. This is a valuable contribution, even if it only starts and doesn’t finish this conversation. Its own time of production in the pre-internet era severely limits its base explanatory power, though minor corrections and additions might address some of the new situations created by the internet. The biggest change that has made it less explanatory at this moment in time is the shift in the dominant culture to appropriate and absorb many facets of what was once limited to fan culture. the MCU, Star Wars, and the continued growth of videogames as a huge cultural product has made the relationship between fandoms and the dominant culture much more difficult to sharply distinguish from each other. How might this change in the relationship between the dominant and fan cultures explain the straight-white-male backlashes to diversity in popular (once-fan-based) media?

Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek

Methodology: What is the methodological framework of this text? What methodological moves or questions does the author engage? What is their object of analysis?

Fiske’s task is to take ideas from Bourdieu’s concept of cultural economy and tease out the differences that occur when the texts aren’t those specified as valuable by the dominant culture. He provides examples based on his and other research into different fandoms of how fan economies vary from the dominant economies.

Rhetorical Moves: What are the major rhetorical moves of the author’s arguments?

The biggest rhetorical move is the sharp distinction between the dominant and fan cultures, which holds some value still but has been complicated by changes in both landscapes over the past 30 years. The same has happened with the other rhetorical move Fiske performs as he prioritizes gender over race (or sexuality, or even the complexities of gender) as the dividing line between different kinds of fans. A more thorough investigation of fan cultures would attend to these other dimensions of fans and fandoms.

Engagement & Application: How do I engage this text? How does this apply to my work? Does it support or provide a counterargument or model for strong intro or lit review? In other words, why is this piece of writing useful to me and/or how is it limited (bad writing style, problematic, didn’t consider x, y, and z)? Does it intersect with other items on the list?

I think the idea of looking at fandom through the lens of a cultural economy has its limitations, even as I understand how valuable it might be to my future studies. In the end, I think the economic lens can only go so far in explaining how fans respond to texts and why those responses come in the forms they do. That being said, I think Fiske will likely show up, in some form, in my later work.

Key Terms: What terms are key to the author’s argument, and are they operationalized explicitly or implicitly?

fandom, cultural economy, dominant culture, capitalism, industry, productivity, cultural knowledge, producerly, texts, gender, discrimination, hierarchy, habitus

Significant Quotations: What key quotations from this work would I want to have quick access to?

Fandom is typically associated with cultural forms that the dominant value system denigrates – pop music, romance novels, comics, Hollywood mass-appeal stars (sport, probably because of its appeal to masculinity, is an exception). It is thus associated with the cultural tastes of subordinated formations of the people, particularly with those disempowered by any combination of gender, age, class and race. (30)

We need to add to Bourdieu’s model gender, race and age as axes of discrimination, and thus to read his account of how culture works to underwrite class differences as symptomatic of its function in other axes of social difference. […] [H]e leaves proletarian culture and the proletariat as an undistinguished homogeneity. This leads him seriously to underestimate the creativity of popular culture and its role in distinguishing between different social formations within the subordinated. He does not allow that there are forms of popular cultural capital produced outside and often against official cultural capital. (32)

Fans discriminate fiercely: the boundaries between what falls within their fandom and what does not are sharply drawn. And this discrimination in the cultural sphere is mapped into distinctions in the social – the boundaries between the community of fans and the rest of the world are just as strongly marked and patrolled. (34-5)

Those who are subordinated (by gender, age or class) are more likely to have developed a habitus typical of proletarian culture (that is, one without economic or cultural capital): the less a fan suffers from these structures of domination and subordination, the more likely he or she is to have developed a habitus that accords in some respects with that developed by the official culture, and which will therefore incline to use official criteria on its unofficial texts. It would not be surprising in such a case to find that older fans, male fans, and more highly educated fans tend to use official criteria, whereas younger, female and the less educated ones tend towards popular criteria. (36-7)

Fan productivity is not limited to the production of new texts: it also participates in the construction of the original text and thus turns the commercial narrative or performance into popular culture. Fans are very participatory. […] This melding of the team or performer and the fan into a productive community minimizes differences between artists and audience and turns the text into an event, not an art object. […] The reverence, even adoration, fans feel for their object of fandom since surprisingly easily with the contradictory feeling that they also ‘possess’ that object, it is their popular cultural capital. (40)

Fan texts, then, have to be ‘producerly’, in that they have to be open, to contain gaps, irresolutions, contradictions, which both allow and invite fan productivity. They are insufficient texts that are inadequate to their cultural function of circulating meanings and pleasure until they are worked upon and activated by their fans, who by such activity produce their own popular cultural capital.  (42)

In the same way, the dominant habitus uses information about the artist to enhance or enrich the appreciation of the work, whereas in the popular habitus such knowledge increases the power of the fan to ‘see through’ the production process normally hidden by the text and thus inaccessible to the non-fan […]. This knowledge diminishes the distance between text and everyday life, […] or between star and fan. […] The popular habitus makes such knowledge functional and potentially empowering in the everyday life of the fan. (43)

In capitalist societies popular culture is necessarily produced from the products of capitalism, for that is all the people have to work with. The relationship of popular culture to the culture industries is therefore complex and fascinating, sometimes conflictive, sometimes complicitous or co-operative, but the people are never at the mercy of the industries – they choose to make some of their commodities into popular culture, but reject many more than they adopt. (47-8)