white

How to Watch Television edited by Ethan Thompson and Jason Mittell

by

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)

White by Richard Dyer

by

Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner

Dyer, Richard. 2017. White. 20th Anniversary Edition. New York City: 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?

Richard Dyer’s purpose in White is to examine what had previously gone relatively unexamined in the realm of cultural criticism and identity-based investigations into the meanings and constructions of race, specifically whiteness. He conceives of whiteness as a cultural void, a non-identity which allows other aspects of identity (sexuality, gender, religion, (dis)ability, etc.) to come to the fore. Whiteness is seen as the norm, but a norm which has no real form such that anybody who falls outside of it is automatically and unrecoverably marked by their inability to meet its basic criteria. Whites are the basic humans, at least in the realm of visual representation that Dyer focuses on (and which he argues forms much of the basis for how we think about the world). That is, to be white is to be afforded a basic humanity while every other skin color must argue, fight, and try to retain their humanity via strategies that often depend upon them changing themselves to seem more white (either in skin tone or action).

Dyer doesn’t leave it at that, though, as he works in theories of embodiment, which allow him to show how whiteness is connected to religion (via Christianity’s concept of a body/spirit connection that transfers to whiteness), science (via biological and genealogical conceptions of race that have been used to create hierarchies of bodies), and enterprise/imperialism (via ideas about what kinds of bodies can perform the actions of empire because they are perceived as being more able to work and persevere). Dyer also notably describes whiteness as instable, because it must contain paradoxes of “a need to always be everything and nothing, literally overwhelmingly present and yet apparently absent, both alive and dead,” an instability which allows it to have great strength as an enticement (you too can be white if you conform to these ideals) and a promise of flexibility (if you’re on the lower levels of whiteness you can move up just by making these changes) (39).

Dyer next turns to three senses of the word “white” to examine how white as a hue, skin color, and symbol form three distinct meanings and ways of thinking about whiteness but between which slippages occur such that white, which is conceived of as the lack of color (the hue meaning) melds with the symbolic meaning of purity and transcendence to imbue white skin, and particularly the unblemished white woman’s skin, as the ultimate symbol of purity and goodness (and which must be used to reproduce, which brings heterosexuality into the picture as well). In the next section he looks at technologies of visual representation, from print (white blankness marked with black spots that create meaning) to painting, to photochemical technologies like film. Here whiteness is linked to translucency, especially from the magic lantern on, and that translucency is linked with the un/realness of the visual image. Whiteness is then both very real but also nothing much at all, as Dyer previously posited. This section contains the part of this book that I’ve read before, which looks at the way that film and lighting techniques for the cinema were developed to represent the white face first and foremost, with any deviance from that posing a “problem.”

In the next two chapters (which I admittedly skimmed), Dyer puts the ideas he developed in the first three chapters of his book to work in analyzing first the set of films which feature heavily muscled white men (usually in foreign locations as agents (stated or implied) of empire), then a tv show which looks at the concepts of whiteness and empire through a more woman-oriented lens. In both cases, Dyer goes deep into analysis to show the multifaceted, sometimes surprising ways that whiteness operates in these kinds of visual representations.

Finally, Dyer concludes with a look at whiteness and death, two concepts which are linked in the figures of androids (Blade Runner and Alien), vampires, and zombies. He notes that horror and sci-fi are the places where white filmmakers can reckon with the problems and fears associated with whiteness, primarily the connection between paleness and death. He wraps up the book by positing the concepts of “ordinary” and “extreme” whiteness, the latter of which only exists in these horror spaces and a few real-world instances (he points to the midcentury fascists who operated on explicit white supremacy) and to which “ordinary” whiteness can point and say, see, I’m not that, that’s extreme, I’m just regular me. Extreme whiteness, then, becomes the enabling symbol for the insidious normalcy implied by whiteness as a whole.

Ridley Scott’s Alien

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?

Dyer doesn’t seem to be calling out any particular scholars but rather a way of thinking that inform(s)(ed) much of the writings on race and whiteness before this. He notes in his introduction that whiteness is not often discussed precisely because it is perceived as the norm, and so his attention to it is in part a call for others to pay attention to what might have been ignored in their own writing. Dyer pulls from a large pool of scholarly discussions, including sociology, history,  and film, art, and literary theory to make intriguing and wide-ranging points throughout his book. Dyer’s conclusions ask us to be more aware of the role that culture has to play in our conceptions of ourselves and the world around us, including things like the way that our culture influences our ideas about technology (as in the example of what became normal and what was therefore conceived of as a deviation from that norm in lighting for photography). As (sections of) this book is/are taught in college courses, it must remain highly influential, and therefore central to how we continue to think about whiteness and race 20+ years after its initial 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?

Dyer explicitly draws attention to the representative strategies developed by humans to picture (literally) themselves for much of their history. Dyer pays special attention to film as the dominant media of the 20th century, but he doesn’t hesitate to look elsewhere as well. To drive his analysis, Dyer largely operates by making a large claim before breaking it down into several subclaims, each of which he backs up by analyzing at least one textual example or common daily life example (looking at, for example, clichés and idioms that use white to mean good and clean). As I said above, the first three chapters explain how whiteness works, while the next two look at specific instances of that work happening, before a coda that investigates the concept of death as linked to whiteness.

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

In his introduction, Dyer explains his personal history with the concept of whiteness to explain why he feels he has a somewhat special attunement towards observing and understanding how it works. He links it to his homosexuality, a category which sets him off as an outsider (albeit not as much of an outsider as a person with a different skin color) to whiteness’ ideal. Throughout the text, Dyer takes great pains to explain his terminology and walk readers through his thought process as he decided upon which words to use in which situation. This deliberativeness endows Dyer’s work with an extra sense of completeness, a belief develops that Dyer has put in the work to really consider every aspect of his work here.

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?

Dyer’s concept of whiteness as the default will be crucial to my work, as many of the movies I want to study are continuations of franchises that fall into this idea of whiteness. I didn’t really see any big problems with Dyer’s work here. It’s a well-developed and intriguing book.

Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight

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

whiteness, white, non-white, representation, visual culture, cultural studies, normal, norms, paradox, transparent, translucent, instability, power, symbol, technology

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

Moreover, the position of speaking as a white person is one that white people now almost never acknowledge and this is part of the condition and power of whiteness: white people claim and achieve authority for what they say not by admitting, indeed not realizing, that for much of the time they speak only for whiteness. The impulse behind this book is to come to see that position of white authority in order to help undermine it. (xxxiv)

The point of seeing the racing of whites is to dislodge them/us from the position of power, with all the iniquities, oppression, privileges and sufferings in its train, dislodging them/us by undercutting the authority with which they/we speak and act in and on the world. (2)

White people have power and believe that they think, feel and act like and for all people; white people, unable to see their particularity, cannot take account of other people’s; white people create the dominant images of the world and don’t quite see that they thus construct the world in their own image; white people set standards of humanity by which they are bound to succeed and others bound to fail. (9)

To be able to think at all of bodies containing different spiritual qualities, or of some having such qualities and others not having them (a trope of white racism), of bodies containing that which controls them and then extends beyond them to the control of others and the environment (a trope of enterprise and imperialism), all this requires the first conceptual leap represented by the bodies of Christ and Mary, the sacraments, observances and theologies that rework them and the distinctive European culture founded upon all of this. (18)

White identity is founded on compelling paradoxes: a vividly corporeal cosmology that most values transcendence of the body; a notion of being at once a sort of race and the human race, an individual and a universal subject; a commitment to heterosexuality that, for whiteness to be affirmed, entails men fighting against sexual desires and women having none; a stress on the display of spirit while maintaining a position of invisibility; in short, a need always to be everything and nothing, literally overwhelmingly present and yet apparently absent, both alive and dead. Paradoxes are fascinating, endlessly drawing us back to them, either in awe at their unfathomability or else out of a wish to fathom them. Paradoxes provide the instabilities that generate stories, millions of engrossing attempts to find resolution. The dynamism of white instability, especially in its claims to universality, is also what entices those outside to seek to cross its borders and those inside to aspire ever upwards within it. Thus it is that the paradoxes and instabilities of whiteness also constitute its flexibility and productivity, in short, its representational power. (39-40)

Thus, white as a hue is, like all others, not as determinate as we tend to think, and we are not always sure that it is a hue anyways. This way of conceptualizing white as a hue, apparently the most objective aspect of color, provides a habit of perception that informs how we think and feel about its other aspects. The slippage between white as a color and white as colorlessness forms part of a system of thought and affect whereby white people are both particular and nothing in particular, are both something and non-existent. (47)

In sum, white as a skin color is just as unstable, unbounded a category as white as a hue, and therein lies its strength. It enables whiteness to be presented as an apparently attainable, flexible, varied category, while setting up an always movable criterion of inclusion, the ascribed whiteness of your skin. (57)

Any simple mapping of hue, skin and symbol onto one another is clearly not accurate. White people are far from being always represented as good, for instance. Yet I am now persuaded that the slippage between the three is more pervasive than I thought at first, to the extent that it does probably underlie all representation of white people. For a white person who is bad is failing to be ‘white’, whereas a black person who is good is a surprise, and one who is bad merely fulfills expectations. (63)

The extreme image of whiteness acts as a distraction. An image of what whites are like is set up, but can also be held at a distance. Extreme whiteness is, precisely, extreme. If in certain periods of derangement – the empires at their height, the Fascist eras – white people have seen themselves in these images, they can take comfort from the fact that for most of the time they haven’t. Whites can thus believe that they are nothing in particular, because the white particularities on offer are so obviously not them. Extreme whiteness thus leaves a residue, a way of being that is not marked as white, in which white people can see themselves. This residue is non-particularity, the space of ordinariness. The combination of extreme whiteness with plain, unwhite whiteness means that white people can both lay claim to the spirit that aspires to the heights of humanity and yet supposedly speak and act disinterestedly as humanities most average and unremarkable representatives. (223)