This July I learned that a colleague of mine, Ragan Fox, was going to be on season 12 of Big Brother. My interest in seeing someone I know on television soon had me hooked on the CBS series and, to my surprise, the Showtime series Big Brother After Dark. I have an appreciation of reality television not widely shared in academia. Many of my colleagues can’t stomach seeing a co-worker put his daily life on television. Too much information. Further, some worry if he will be able to maintain credibility in the classroom after America has seen him swear, cry, walk a balance beam in a robot costume, and deliver a few angry tirades against an unpopular cast member. By the end of July, two questions emerged from talk around the water cooler: Why would anyone want to watch this show? And will Ragan be able to survive this ordeal with his dignity intact?

Watching Paint Dry

Many people I discuss the program with initially say they find it boring. They then go on to discuss the details of the program at length. A week later they are hooked. And there is a lot to watch. First, CBS airs episodes three nights a week that feature competitions, evictions, and storylines constructed from the live footage, such as romantic relations or fighting between house guests. Second, viewers can tune into Showtime each night for three hours of live feed from the Big Brother house. Third, the most dedicated viewers can pay for online access to the 24/7 live feed from the Big Brother house. Viewers can chose how involved they wish to be, with most viewers sticking with the CBS episodes and online spoilers gleaned from the live feeds by more dedicated fans. The final massive text for 2010 will include 30 one-hour episodes on CBS, 225 hours on Showtime, and 75 mostly complete days online.

The Big Brother After Dark program serves some of the functions of U.S. style soap operas, the kind that are rapidly becoming extinct.1 These soap operas were designed for consistent but distracted viewing; a housewife returning to the living room from changing the laundry could easily slip back into the program because the plot moves slowly and any significant plot action is regularly repeated as the characters talk to each other.

New technology allows Big Brother to fill this niche. Viewers with access to the internet and a DVR can conveniently participate in the complete Big Brother experience when they have the time. Big Brother After Dark is ideal for distracted viewing because what little action occurs is endlessly re-hashed by the bored house guests. It’s good background noise that occasionally provides brief moments of excitement—a house guest breaks a pool cue, the shower backs up and must be plunged, or the much sought-after “nip slip.” But, who would want to watch the 24/7 live feed online? There are likely those tempted by the pornographic advertisements for the service. I declined to pay the $14.99 per month for access, but I suspect that there are more reliable and efficient ways to access pornographic images.

The other viewers of the live feed are those hard core fans who write summaries for websites like Big Brother Network and MortysTV.com. Their dedication to the program serves as a check on the ability of the producers to intervene in the game. To me, this is what makes the program distinct from shows like The Real World or Survivor. As a viewer, I can access a lot of raw material and use it to verify the narratives presented by the producers or to create my own narratives. Verifying the producers’ versions of reality is the viewing pleasure that I have personally enjoyed the most.

Why Did You Do It, Ragan?

My viewing experience is unique (I know a House Guest), but I can only watch the program like any other audience member and hope that Ragan can manage the contradictory and complex roles he will play on the program. Ragan was cast as “the gay guy,” a title he has used of himself while living in the Big Brother house. This casting practice gives him more responsibility for representation than, say, each the five heterosexual women on the program. Ragan is carrying the burden of representation for other groups as well: professors (did he really need to wear the bow-tie?), the discipline of communication (please don’t contribute to the stereotype that our discipline is worthless), and his campus (what will parents and donors think?).

Such burdens would be challenging for a scripted character, and crushing for a real person in the structured environment of the Big Brother house. For example, at three different times so far, Ragan has spent a seven days as a “have not”—a House Guest on severe dietary restrictions. These people grow irritable from eating “slop” while those around them enjoy regular food, wine, and beer. House Guests then label this irritability as crazy, cranky, or bitchy. You can guess which one was used for Ragan.

Even if Ragan could serve as a positive depiction of all the groups he represents, he would still not please everyone. He would face the dilemmas of what Edward Schiappa calls representational correctness, a trend within media criticism that “advances norms of representational accuracy, purity, and innocence”.2 Overcoming problematic representations, such as stereotypes, is difficult because “If one portrays someone in a manner consistent with the dominant stereotype, even in a positive way, then one risks reinforcing essentialism and polarization…But if one undercuts the dominant stereotypes by portraying the member of a social group as inconsistent with stereotypical expectations, then one risks reinforcing normative beliefs such as androcentrism, Whiteness, or heteronormativity”.3

Using the logic of representational correctness, if Ragan cries a lot on the show (which he does), that reinforces the stereotype of gay men as overly emotional. But if Ragan never cried and took pride in his emotional control, that performance could be interpreted as Ragan embracing the norms of hegemonic masculinity, denying the value of emotional experiences, and endorsing assimilation as a means to social acceptance.

Ragan seems aware of some of his audiences and their expectations, but has little control over how the producers will use the material he gives them. During a Big Brother After Dark episode, while crying in the company of two other House Guests, Ragan says “I’ve turned into everything I didn’t want to be. I did not want to be the guy who was crying the whole season. . . Every gay guy, I’m sure, who watches this show hates me. Because they [are] saying . . . exactly what I would be saying, ‘Why does this gay guy have to come up and perpetuate every stereotype of gay guys?’” House Guest Kathy comforts Ragan: “It just shows you’re human, that’s all. You’re just human.” Thus far, this moment has not made it into one of the CBS episodes, though other crying moments have, such as the “Heartfelt Moment” scene included in the August 18 CBS broadcast. The music, close up shots, and dialog all resemble something out of General Hospital.

Ragan consented to all of this surveillance and the judgments he will face. I have no inside information about why Ragan auditioned for the program. I suspect that one motivation might be the platform the program provides for someone to talk to America, or at least the 7.5 million Americans, mostly age 18 to 49, that watch the program. I must admit that I am a bit jealous of the opportunity he has to lay his trip on everyone. Despite the lack of control he has in the process, some of who he is and what he believes comes through. So, good luck, Ragan.

Image Credits:
1. Official cast picture
2. Advertisements for the live feed appearing on the Big Brother Network

Please feel free to comment.

1. Steinberg, B. (Aug 9, 2010). Daytime TV’s new entries push soaps down the drain. Advertising Age. Retrieved from http://adage.com/mediaworks/article?article_id=145291.
   
2. Schiappa, E. (2008). Beyond representational correctness: Rethinking criticism of popular media. New York: SUNY Press.
   
3. Ibid.

I love my television. It’s the largest one I’ve ever owned, and with size comes a seemingly limitless stream of engrossing images - Don Draper’s face, the many disfigured corpses of Fringe, Paula Deen’s concoctions. I never fully appreciated what high definition meant until I got this new television, and while I’m still trying to understand the benefit of seeing pores and other facial minutia, the exposure to sharply defined mise-en-scenes is exhilarating.

I started thinking more about high definition while watching Life on The Discovery Channel, an 11-part documentary series narrated by Oprah Winfrey. The series was originally produced by the BBC’s Natural History Unit, and the U.S. version of the show replaced David Attenborough’s narration with Oprah Winfrey and edited its script for an American audience. The images of wildlife on Life are stunning, no doubt, but the very act of watching it on my lovely television got me thinking about the strange marriage of technology and nature that allowed Life to be filmed for my consumption.

Each episode of Life focuses on a different class of animal or aspect of animal behavior – “Challenges of Life,” “Reptiles and Amphibians,” “Mammals,” “Fish,” “Birds,” “Creatures of the Deep,” “Hunters and Hunted,” “Insects,” “Plants,” and “Primates.” Each episode is followed by a short segment explaining how some part of the episode was filmed, with one episode, “The Making of Life,” devoted to explaining the “extraordinary lengths” the filmmakers went to acquire such remarkable footage.1 The footage is indeed remarkable, which Oprah constantly makes us aware of with dramatic statements along the lines of “This has never been filmed before.” Such claims, as Brett Mills points out, are common to contemporary cutting-edge wildlife documentaries, which constantly replay man’s ongoing primal struggle to conquer nature in some shape or form.2 The Life crew battled the elements, as the “making of” segments explain, to bring viewers scenes from the secret lives of animals big and small.

Despite the novel nature of the footage, though, Life engages in conventions scholars have identified as common to wildlife documentaries, namely anthropomorphism. Jan-Christopher Horak uses Steve Baker’s phrase “Disneyfication” to describe the facile and reductive ways that animals are often portrayed in popular culture and claims that even amidst today’s more sophisticated discourses of preservation, “the Disneyfication of animal images through extreme anthropomorphy continues unabated and in fact has been naturalized through new digital technologies.”3 Life falls into this pattern of mapping human social and cultural relationships onto animal species and societies. Mothers fight tirelessly for their offspring, for example, illustrated by the tortuous journey of the female strawberry poison-dart frog to bring her delicate offspring to safety, or the giant octopus that starves herself to death to watch over her eggs.

It is in this quaint appeal to animals’ humanity (?) that Life is a throwback to older kinds of wildlife documentaries – as Horak points out, current documentary and reality TV programming is dominated by “rescue narratives” that either emphasize the rescue of individual animals (Animal Cops) or make a general appeal to ecological and conservationist sympathies. Life engages in neither, focusing rather on the more mundane events in animals’ lives and attempting to get as close as possible to the action, which of course, as we are reminded throughout, is only possible because of the filmmakers’ ingenious and creative use of filmmaking technology. But I would argue that the emphasis on technological sophistication does participate in a subtextual conservationist narrative; in each “making of” segment of the episodes, there is a consistent emphasis on using the right equipment to get extremely close to the animals without disturbing their habitats. In “Hunters and the Hunted,” a female killer whale captures a baby seal, and members of the crew reveal how difficult it was to continue filming and not help the “victim.” The rule with wildlife filmmaking, though, is to not interfere in natural processes, and with that rule comes an assumption that any interference man makes in nature is harmful.4

But there is something seemingly paradoxical about watching this delicate imagery – of a world that must not be disturbed – on my high definition television. It seems strange that the march of modernization that allows filmmakers to capture and show sophisticated imagery of the natural world is part of the same processes that are encroaching upon this world and its non-human residents. Horak argues that the increase in television programming about nature is a way of managing environmental anxiety, and I would argue that the astonishing imagery of Life manages the discord between technological progress and environmentalism by linking them through consumption, using an old-fashioned wide-eyed fascination with nature to mask any ideological conflicts of interest. Horak says, “Today, the migration of nearly extinct animal species into the digital world can be seen as a virtual rescue from the uncomfortable reality of the natural world.”5

I would also argue that the use of human melodrama in Life is also a way of domesticizing the technological sophistication of its production, seamlessly integrating high definition natural imagery into the living room. There is one instance that stands out to me from the series that establishes a curious parallel between the text and the making of the text and creates an overt relationship between nature, technology and the audience. In the “Insects” episode, the last segment of the episode focuses on Argentine grass cutter ants. Ants are generally valorized for being focused hard workers, and Oprah tells us that their communities are “close to human cities” and “they work all day, every day.”6 She goes so far as to call the ants “farmers,” and what they do as “agriculture,” claiming that this is a near-perfect “corporate machine” that has existed for millions of years. The narrative of the industrious ants is closely followed by the “making of” segment that caps every episode, which explains the lengths the filmmakers went to create “butterfly vision” and capture hibernating Monarch butterflies in Mexico.7 The two segments are startlingly similar in their focus on the hardworking filmmakers/ants who use ingenious methods to achieve their respective goals and “take their falls in stride,” and the similarity in narrative works to not only integrate the filmmakers’ technique into the natural world, but also to make the use of high definition technologies easy for the television audience to consume.

The person who has the last word in Life, literally and figuratively, is of course Oprah. Oprah has created an empire of consumable emotions that lead to even more consumable products, and placing her brand name on Life creates a happy marriage of cutting-edge technology, unique documentary footage, and easy philanthropy. Described by The Discovery Channel press release as “one of the most influential voices of our time,” Oprah and her status as philanthropist are capitalized on by Life, supporting the conservationist subtext I refer to above.8 I find it remarkable that the use of her voice alone places a stamp of authenticity on the images we consume, further participating in the “virtual rescue” of Life’s flora and fauna from the “uncomfortable reality” that we live in.

Image Credits:
1. Filming the Humboldt squid
2. The Vogelkop bowerbird
3. The Strawberry Poison-dart frog
4. Filmmakers and ants working diligently

Please feel free to comment.

1. http://dsc.discovery.com/tv/life/episodes.html
2. See Brett Mills, “Television wildlife documentaries and animals’ right to privacy,” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 24.2 (2010): 194.
3. Jan-Christopher Horak, “Wildlife documentaries: from classical forms to reality TV,” Film History: Documentary Before Verite 18.4 (2006): 473.
4. Mills’ article engages with the ethical implications of intruding on animals’ territory, a fascinating topic that I don’t have room to address here.
5. Horak, 473.
6. I find it interesting to compare the representation of ants here to the more ominous overtones of a film like Them! (1954).
7. http://dsc.discovery.com/tv/life/about/press-release.html
8. http://press.discovery.com/us/dsc/press-releases/2009/discovery-channels-life-tells-intimate-stories-som/

Since Everybody Loves Raymond (1996-2005) premiered, critics have compared it to Seinfeld (1989-1998).1 At first glance, this association seems ridiculous given that the characters, structure, and themes of the two sitcoms ostensibly have little in common. For example, Seinfeld is a decidedly postmodern program featuring four unabashedly single Manhattanites; it is usually structured via short narrative segments, many self-reflexive in nature, that often interlock to form a tight yet complex whole; recurring themes include casual dating and sex, toilet habits, and political correctness. Conversely, Raymond is a conventional, middle-class family sitcom set in the suburbs; it employs a traditional, uncomplicated three-act structure; repeated topics include sexless marriages, in-law troubles, and sibling rivalry.2

Still, those critics who’ve looked closely at Everybody Loves Raymond and Seinfeld locate several similarities, even suggesting that fans of one program will readily become fans of the other. For instance, both sitcoms center on fortysomething stand-up comedians from New York who lack acting experience and whose comedy is grounded in the mundane observations of daily life. Moreover, both shows are very much ensemble efforts, distinctly ethnic (Italian-American and Jewish), and feature dysfunctional supporting characters “who barge through the door and into [each other’s] chaotic lives.”3 While these conclusions are legitimate — and in hindsight, rather obvious — I’m not sure they are the main reasons that viewers of Seinfeld, roughly 18 million during its heyday, would theoretically gravitate toward Everybody Loves Raymond, which also drew about 18 million during its prime.4 After all, King of Queens (1998-2007), Yes Dear (2000-2006), My Wife and Kids (2000-2005), The Bernie Mac Show (2001-2006) and According to Jim (2001-2009) also incorporated most of the above attributes, but they never had the ratings of Raymond or Seinfeld, not to mention the awards or critical success. Rather, I propose that so many Americans embraced Everybody Loves Raymond because it repositioned yet sustained the qualities that viewers (for better or worse) appreciated in Seinfeld: well-crafted, narcissistic characters suspended in adolescence, a consistent and humorous focus on the minutiae of human existence, and a guiding mantra of “no hugging, no learning.”

In “Seinfeld’s Humor Noir,” Irwin Hirsch and Cara Hirsch maintain that Seinfeld stands out among sitcoms because its adult characters function as adolescents, celebrate narcissism, and take pleasure in their own venal behavior.5 The four possess no “redeeming, positive, humanistic values,” Hirsch and Hirsch point out.6 Indeed, as all Seinfeld devotees know, Jerry (Jerry Seinfeld), George (Jason Alexander), Elaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), and Kramer (Michael Richards) value games over rules of propriety (e.g., masturbation contests, Trivial Pursuit with the Bubble Boy, Kramer’s gambling), break commitments over the smallest flaws (e.g., “low-talkers,” “bad breaker-uppers,” “man-hands,” “Jimmy legs”), obsess over bodily functions (e.g., reading on the toilet, “shrinkage,” nose-picking), scoff at traditional rites of passage like marriage or pregnancy (e.g., “Ugh, it’s been done to death”), and take pride in their emotional barrenness (e.g., George opts for coffee after the death of his fiancée, Kramer giddily videos an obese man who’s being mugged). Ultimately, all of this relentless cynicism and corrupt characterization is encapsulated in Seinfeld’s guiding philosophy “no hugging, no learning,” i.e., the show will offer no moral lessons, and the characters will never become sentimental with each other.7

Although its setting and characters may have relocated — from Manhattan to the suburbs of Long Island, from singlehood to married life — Everybody Loves Raymond maintains these distinctly Seinfeldian traits. First, like Seinfeld’s characters, the Barone family approaches life as a game, rivaling each other within their own little dysfunctional “clubhouse atmosphere.”8 While each family member exhibits this trait,9 it is perhaps most evident in the competition that takes place between Ray Romano’s Raymond — a sports writer, husband to Debra (Patricia Heaton), and favorite son of Frank (Peter Boyle) and Marie (Doris Roberts) — and his older brother, Robert (Brad Garrett) — a morose NYC policeman who still lives with his parents and openly resents virtually everything about his younger brother. For instance, the two have competed over the title basketball captain (1.11), a prize in a box of cereal (1.7), their appearances (1.14), gift purchases (2.31, 3.59, 4.84, 7.158), a Civil War reenactment (2.35), a toothbrush (3.55), dancing partners (3.71), the affection of children and future in-laws (5.119, 7.161), their names (6.132), tending bar (9.203), and overall, their parents’ attention. The brothers have also fought physically, wrestling each other to the ground like spoiled children because Robert’s promotion to lieutenant garnered more attention than Ray’s simultaneous announcement that he might publish a book (5.103).10

Second, also like Seinfeld, Everybody Loves Raymond scrutinizes the insignificant details of daily life and reveals how such analyses directly and humorously affect its characters. It is now common knowledge that Seinfeld procured the title “a show about nothing” because it created segments and sometimes entire episodes around such typically mundane topics as waiting in line at a restaurant, re-gifting a present, finding a hair on one’s food, and double-dipping a potato chip. In the same way, Raymond regularly makes something out of nothing. For example, episodes unfold around a fruit-of-the-month club (1.1), an engraved toaster (3.59), a can opener (4.76), P.M.S. (4.95), sneezing (5.107), choking (5.109), a vacuum cleaner (5.115), the wrong brand of Kleenex (6.135), sighing (7.154), the placement of a suitcase (7.196), tardiness (8.185), eating habits (8.189), and smoking (9.209).

Finally, not unlike Jerry et al, the Barones refuse to “hug” or “learn,” consistently shooting down moral lessons and possible moments of genuineness with insensitive or spiteful dialogue.11 For instance, in “Jealous Robert” (6.129), Frank recounts how, when he was younger, he was so envious Marie cooked for another man that he “punched the headlights off of [the guy’s] car” and then “spent the night in the hospital, picking glass out of [his] arm.” Here, the viewer seemingly believes that even the most hardened, unemotional man once had strong feelings for his wife. But this notion is quickly shattered with the next exchange:

Raymond: Wow, dad, I never thought there was a story like that behind you and mom. It’s almost romantic.

Frank Barone: Yeah, I know. I don’t tell that story a lot.

Ray Barone: How come?

Frank Barone: Because it doesn’t have a happy ending.12

Similarly, in “The Plan” (7.165), Robert and his fiancée, Amy (Monica Horan), reconcile after fighting over misspelled wedding invitations. Before the entire Barone clan, Amy confides, “Robert and I are getting married, and I want us to be honest and trusting. […] I want to get married because I know how great it can be. Maybe it isn’t easy, but I think it’s worth going for.” Robert lovingly concurs, and then the couple exits, leaving the viewer with a potential lesson about love, marriage, and forgiveness. Yet within seconds, that message is cut down with Debra’s dialogue, “Wow. Remember when we were that stupid?” The frame fades to black.

One of the most interesting uses of Seinfeld’s “no hugging, no learning” mantra is found in “The Lone Barone” (3.56), an episode in which Ray vents to Robert how miserable married life can be, e.g., waiting “all day for Debra’s damn curtains” to be delivered, being “held hostage, trapped inside all of these walls,” being “happy as she lets me be, sleeping when she lets me sleep, eating when she lets me eat,” and finally, seeing the movie she wants to see, “the one where the mother has the disease and the daughter who learns to care about the mother who has the disease.” When these declarations (allegedly) cause Robert to break up with Amy, Ray is forced to reexamine married life and deliver a revised speech. Here it is, paired with a similar one from Seinfeld:

The resemblances here are uncanny. Not only does some of the language match word for word, but also the (long-standing) philosophy that marriage is a prison and that once a man enters it, he is never alone or allowed to do what he wants to do. Indeed, married life can be, both shows argue, “a sad state of affairs.” No hugging, no learning.

One reason that this family sitcom gets away with such traditionally non-familyish qualities is that the Barone children (played by real-life siblings Madylin, Sullivan, and Sawyer Sweeten) rarely appear; they are usually, one critic notes, “tucked out of sight, leaving the adults to have at each other.”13 This setup differs dramatically from similarly constructed family sitcoms of the last couple of decades like Family Ties, Growing Pains, Full House, The Cosby Show, and Home Improvement — series in which “the situation was typically a problem involving one of the children” and the parents would “guide the child through a solution, providing a moral lesson along the way.”14 But again, this break from the norm is probably something viewers of Raymond should expect. After all, despite its surface appearances and traditional three-act structure, Everybody Loves Raymond is not like other family sitcoms. Rather, its juvenile characters with virtually no redeeming qualities and its almost complete rejection of moral lessons place it closer to its predecessor and short-lived contemporary Seinfeld than those which featured the always loveable Bill Cosby or Tim Allen.

Image Credits:

1. Cast Promo Shots of Everybody Loves Raymond and Seinfeld
2. George undergoes “shrinkage”
3. Jerry’s date grips him with “man hands”
4. Robert and Raymond engage in literal game-playing
5. All hell breaks loose over a new can opener
6. Image by author

Please feel free to comment.

1. Warren Berger, “Looks Like ‘Seinfeld,’ But Call It ‘Raymond,’ New York Times (1 Feb. 1998): AR41 (ProQuest); Neal Gabler, “Loving ‘Raymond,’ A Sitcom for Our Times,” New York Times (21 Oct. 2001): AR30 (ProQuest); David Wild, “The Cult of Ray,” Rolling Stone 17 Oct. 1996 (Academic Search Premier); Peter M. Nichols, “Raymond Is Loved. What’s Not to Love?” New York Times (17 Nov. 1996): TE3, (ProQuest); Bret Watson, Entertainment Weekly (13 Dec. 1996): 34; Tom Gliatto, “Picks and Pans: Everybody Loves Raymond,” People 46.11 (9 Sept. 1996): 14.
2. Gabler describes Raymond’s three-act structure as a “roundelay of rationalization, recrimination, and remorse.” For example, Ray begins the episode doing something “juvenile or selfish or both.” Then, he attempts to defend himself to his wife or other family members. Finally, Ray’s “guilt sets in, and the remorse, but only very occasionally the wisdom.”
3. Nichols; Berger.
4. Ratings for Raymond and ratings for Seinfeld.
5. Irwin Hirsch and Cara Hirsch, “Seinfeld’s Humor Noir: A Look at Our Dark Side.” Journal of Popular Film & Television (Fall 2000): 116-123.
6. Ibid, 123.
7. On Larry David’s cardinal rule “no hugging, no learning,” see Lisa Schwartzbaum, “Much Ado about Nothing,” Entertainment Weekly 9 (April 1993); Albert Auster, “Much Ado about Nothing: Some Final Thoughts on Seinfeld,” Television Quarterly 19 (1998): 24-33; and Matthew Bond, “Do you think they’re having babies just so people will visit them? Parents and Children in Seinfeld” Seinfeld: Master of Its Domain: Revisiting Television’s Greatest Sitcom, Eds. David Lavery and Sara Lewis Dunne, New York: Continuum, 108-150.
8. Hirsch and Hirsch use this phrase to describe Seinfeld’s locations, Jerry’s apartment and Monk’s Cafe, 119.
9. Other family members compete as well. For example, Ray and Debra battle over who is the better test-taker (1.4), children’s-book writer (2.30), checkbook-balancer (2.38), gift-giver (5.108), and disciplinarian (7.162). Frank challenges Ray to ping-pong (3.60), and Marie sabotages Debra’s food just so she can remain the favorite matriarch (2.37). Furthermore, Ray pits himself against his more sexually active father (4.77), Debra’s attractive aerobics teacher (4.78), his daughter’s outspoken Girl Scout leader (6.137, 7.166), and an annoying 8-year-old kid (7.155). Finally, the entire family tries to one-up each other over about which member is the angriest (6.123), the worthiest to represent them in a Christmas-letter (6.134), the most fun (6.136), the best marriage counselor (8.175), the best liar (8.178), and the most religious (7.164).
10. Also like Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer, Raymond’s characters engage in general juvenile behavior. For instance, Debra dumps food on Raymond’s crotch (1.4); Ray wants to keep an old rundown car only because he “got lucky” in it (1.15); Ray, Robert, and Frank devour an entire chocolate cake before Marie catches them (3.52); Ray places a blow-up clown in the bed so Debra will have something other than him to cuddle with (3.67); Frank uses Ray’s sports insight to gamble (4.76); Raymond tapes a football game over his and Debra’s wedding (4.89); and Robert is gored by a bull (4.88).
11. A handful of shows do not subscribe to this “no hugging, no learning” motto. Most of them are season finales, which are often told via flashbacks (e.g., Ray and Debra’s wedding, the birth of their daughter, etc.) and usually take on a slightly more sentimental tone.
12. Later in “Robert’s Jealous,” Frank still fumes that he let Marie’s food get the best of him (and his jealous nature) so many years ago: “Chuck Pacarello [the man for whom Marie was cooking]. Where the hell is he? That son of a bitch owes me. I’m serving his life sentence!
13. Berger.
14. Richard Butsch, “A Half Century of Class and Gender in American TV Domestic Sitcoms,” Cercles 8 (2003): 16-34.

It’s that time of year. As the networks promote their new fall series, artful publicity photos seem to be everywhere, constructed to maximize not only the attractiveness but also the rainbow of skin tones of the casts. Diversity clearly has cachet, lending a youthful and hip tone and cosmopolitan flavor to shows even before their premieres. The networks are simultaneously engaging in public relations efforts in sharing information with ethnic media outlets and advocacy groups that details the diversity of their new casts, such as when shows have hired Latina/o actors or when African American characters are included among the series regulars.1 Even for viewers who don’t follow such news, the networks’ promotional emphasis on the diversity of their casts may contribute to the belief that television is a now equal-opportunity playing field for actors and in series narratives.

The inclusion of actors and characters of color, and absence of images that are clearly denigrating, is not necessarily tantamount to equitable representation; however. Such emphasis on the corporeal and on “positive” representation overlooks the more central and ultimately powerful dynamic of focalization, as described by Ella Shohat and Robert Stam,2 regarding which characters we are meant to identify with, whose stories are being told, and which communities’ perspectives and ideological discourses are privileged. As Kristal Brent Zook aptly put it, “The stakes here are about more than entertainment. They’re about who we allow to dance inside our imaginations and why.”3 Such dynamics are thus important to keep central in analysis of the racial politics of contemporary television series.

Diverse ensemble cast series, while a boon for promotion to the increasingly non-white audience, offer considerable challenges to writers and producers, in part because it’s not easy to develop a large number of characters and keep their storylines manageable within the time constraints of a television episode or feature film. It also may feel risky to challenge Hollywood cinematic traditions of white heroism and centrism, even with the possibilities offered by an ensemble cast. With this in mind, the following questions, explored in the case examples of Glee (2009+), Friday Night Lights (2006+), Lost (2004-2010), and other series could aid media producers and scholars who wish to begin to interrogate the racial politics of diverse ensemble cast shows.

1. Are the characters of color fully realized individuals? This may seem simplistic, but it bears stating. Given how rare protagonists of color have been in Hollywood narratives, we may not always notice when characters of color are utilized primarily to lend a hip tone to a setting and in support of the white lead characters’ development. When in doubt, it can be useful to ask questions about the various characters. Whose families, home life, or inner worlds do we get to know? Whose motivations and development are we meant to follow? And if it’s a musical, who do we actually hear sing?

Glee, despite the United Colors of Benetton™ visual display of its high school show choir (as Sue Sylvester once groused), was problematic in this regard in its first season; it developed the white (or in the case of Rachel Berry, ambiguously white) characters much more than the characters of color and often reinforced this imbalance in its musical numbers. Viewers’ witnessing of the family lives of white male students Kurt and Finn also underscored their primacy in the narrative. Friday Night Lights, about a football-obsessed Texas town, similarly developed its white characters to a degree that it did not for its African American or its few Latino characters, even after African American actor Gaius Charles’s storylines were critically acclaimed. Lost, on the other hand, in its first seasons was particularly successful in developing its diverse characters in unique and often surprising ways through its narrative structure, which regularly included flashback sequences of characters’ home lives and childhoods.

2. Do the writers and producers appear knowledgeable about and interested in the worlds and perspectives of the non-white characters? Again, this might be assumed to be a given, but the history of underdeveloped characters of color makes evident that this continues to be an important question to explore. Considering again the example of Friday Night Lights, a series that I admire for its intimate and realistic portrayal of white Texans, I’ve wondered how the series might have been enriched by a Tejano or Tejana writer who could have revealed the Mexican American facets of the town of Dillon. (Strangely, when a few Latino characters were introduced, the writers went to pains to establish that they were not of Mexican heritage, adding to their unrealistic and “tacked on” feeling).

This is where I have to bring out that old saw, the need for more writers of color, given that they may have personal knowledge of potential characters and stories that white writers do not, and thus can make a unique contribution to vibrant, realistic, and compelling storytelling built around a diverse cast. Strangely, accounts point to writers of color having a harder, not easier time, finding work in television in the last few years as integrated ensemble casts are becoming the norm;4 statistics gathered by the Writers Guild of America West indicate that only 9 percent of employed television writers were non-white in 2007.5 Writers of all ethnic backgrounds, with in-depth experience or who have conducted in-depth research on a city or neighborhood also can construct true-to-life, empathetic, and narratively compelling characters that elevate a diverse ensemble cast series from one which engages in diversity window dressing to one which builds on its cast’s ethnic, class, and other diversity to entertain and educate its audience. David Simon’s experience with The Wire (2002-2008) serves an apt case in point. The creators of Lost also stand out as unique in this regard, for casting several actors of color, including Jorge Garcia and Yunjin Kim, because they found them talented and engaging, and creating roles for them that uniquely showcased their abilities.

3. Does the diversity of the cast appear natural? Given that cities and neighborhoods still are racially divided in the U.S. more often than not, giving every white lead a best friend of color without realistic explanation typically comes across as unrealistic and gimmicky. On the other hand, the right setting can offer worlds of story possibilities and interesting, believable characters of various ethnic backgrounds. (Whether these settings will appeal to advertisers is a different matter, however). The Wire and Friday Night Lights, set in Baltimore and the fictional town of Dillon, respectively, are two series that come to mind as presenting unique and engaging stories of Americans who normally are not shown in prime-time television and their interactions across race and class lines (although as mentioned above, FNL neglected its opportunity to include Mexican American characters).

Of course, school settings and work places have long been deployed by writers as sites where individuals from diverse backgrounds might naturally interact. Community (2009+), set at a Colorado community college, has a promising premise in this regard. And Lost provides perhaps the best-case example, with its premise of a jet on an international flight that crashed on a mysterious island, forcing an international and multi-ethnic group of survivors to learn to work together and form a community.

4. Finally, do the series or film producers exploit the natural diversity of a story’s setting or subject matter? This could take the form of populating the cast in accordance with the diversity of the region or of the career the characters engage in, for example. I’m always surprised when realism-enhancing character and story possibilities - and possibilities of reaching a new audience demographic - are overlooked by producers, whether because of lack of adequate research or lack of interest. Friday Night Lights, for instance, had a prime opportunity to include Tejano (Texan Mexican American) characters of varying types among the team and townspeople, yet has largely failed to do so. Roswell (1999-2002), a science fiction drama about teen aliens in Roswell, New Mexico, went so far as to change the Latina, non-alien female lead from the novels it was based on to a white character, perhaps in the belief that this would be more appealing to white teen audiences. Again, this is a facet of media storytelling that will be enhanced by a diverse group of men and women around the writers’ table, all of whom can offer differing glimpses of the characters and stories waiting to be brought to life.

Image Credits:
1. Glee cast
2. Friday Night Lights cast
3. Lost cast

Please feel free to comment.

1. Such news can be read in the on-line industry trade journal Latin Heat, http://www.latinheat.com/, or in African American-oriented newspapers such as the Los Angeles Watts-Times, http://www.lawattstimes.com/life-and-style-mainmenu-31/arts-a-culture/1166-blacks-featured-on-new-fall-tv-shows.html, just to mention two examples.
2. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (London: Routledge, 1994).
3. Kristal Brent Zook, Color By Fox: The Fox Network and the Revolution in Black Television (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 64.
4. Jennifer Armstrong and Margeaux Watson, “Diversity in Entertainment: Why is TV so White?” Entertainment Weekly (June 12, 2008). http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20206185,00.html.
5. 2009 Hollywood Writers Report: Rewriting an All-Too-Familiar Story? (Los Angeles: Writers Guild of America, West, 2009).

My last column closed by wishing for a new woman-centered sitcom for those of us who have resisted, or who just can’t afford, premium cable with its Weeds, Nurse Jackie, and United States of Tara. I hoped that TV Land’s Hot in Cleveland would be that sitcom. The casting alone—Betty White, Jane Leeves, Wendie Malick, Valerie Bertinelli—was enough to send me into nostalgia mode, yearning for some of those “good old-fashioned female sitcom pleasures” found in Designing Women and The Golden Girls. Eight episodes in, and I am still not certain if Hot in Cleveland is the answer to my prayers or a case of “be careful what you wish for.” The pilot set up a premise that was both zany fun and borrowed goods. In a plot device that plays out like the beginning of a Preston Sturges screwball comedy, engine trouble forces three middle-aged friends flying from LA to Paris into taking a layover in Cleveland. Surveying the locals at a bar-restaurant, the trio are gobsmacked to find women eating big portions of food without guilt and men being attentive to these “real women.” A “full calorie” beer, a basket of chili fries, and a roll in the hay with a plumber is all it takes for divorcee and self-help writer Melanie Moretti (Bertinelli) to decide that she wants to live in Cleveland. Melanie’s friends, ex-soap star Victoria Chase (Malick) and “eyebrow Queen of Beverly Hills” Joy Scroggs (Leeves), decide to skip Paris and vacation in Cleveland.

Wacky and well-played though this premise is, it is, at best, an homage to (and, at worst, a ripoff of) a first season episode of 30 Rock in which food-loving, insecure New Yorker Liz Lemon finds herself in Cleveland, where she realizes she can pass as a model. Whereas the joke in this 30 Rock episode is largely on Cleveland, in Hot in Cleveland the joke (and the critique) is on LA and its crazy-making standards for female attractiveness. The problem with plopping Melanie, Victoria, and Joy in Cleveland, however, is that, at least for the moment, they are without the careers they had in LA, so the episodes have been leaning heavily on squeezing comic situations and one-liners from these women’s concerns about dating men/sex with men, aging, and how they look—all of which becomes a bit painful given the whole “hot in Cleveland” setup. But there are signs that the series will begin incorporating more of the trio’s work into its storylines. Joy has begun to offer treatments to her friends (including an “emergency” bikini wax using a candle she pinches from a bar), while Victoria has done a surreal commercial for a Japanese product called “Lady Pants.” This commercial is one of the funniest moments of the television season, up there with Sue Sylvester’s (Jane Lynch’s) version of Madonna’s “Vogue” video in Glee.

On the basis of the Lady Pants commercial alone, I will give the frequent moments of conventional “female trouble” humor a pass, and hope that once Victoria and Joy decide to live in Cleveland, the series will become a little more like The Mary Tyler Moore Show or Designing Women and a little less like the more questionable aspects of The Golden Girls—that is, as much focused on these characters as career women as it is now on their heterosexuality, their age/looks, and their ability to make double entendres. Double entendre brings me to the fourth recurring character in Hot in Cleveland, Elka Ostrovsky, played by the iconic Betty White. Elka, a caretaker who lives in the guest cottage of Melanie’s house, is one of those eccentric sitcom characters who drops in whenever an episode needs a little spice. While there has been some attempt to give her an interesting backstory (she’s a Pole who escaped from the Nazis) and quirks (she’s a long-time pot smoker, she Bedazzles tracksuits), thus far Elka has occupied the Sophia Petrillo (The Golden Girls) role of the tart/sassy/blunt/outspoken octogenarian who is trotted out to deliver racy one-liners making liberal use of words like “whores,” “prostitutes,” and “sluts” to describe the other women. White’s timing is a joy to behold, but the “old woman with a potty mouth” shtick is going to wear thin very quickly—and the series’ recent move to provide Elka with male companionship has only added an equally tired “old woman talking about or having sex” shtick to her character “development.”

If White’s comic chops have been able to camouflage, at least in part, the more conventional aspects of her role, the superb teamwork of Bertinelli, Malick, and Leeves has been the primary pleasure of watching Hot in Cleveland. Even in the pilot episode, this trio of sitcom veterans play off each other as if they have been working together for years, which is critically important for a sitcom in which the characters are wildly mismatched and improbable friends. Considering my previous work on women-centered sitcoms, I was also tickled to see that it only took the series four episodes (five, if you count the pilot) to introduce lesbianism in the form of Hailey Nash, a singer Melanie idolizes. True to classic women-centered sitcom form, however, this plot thread combines having one of the recurring characters mistaken for a lesbian with this characters’ incredible naiveté about all things Sapphic. In this case, Nash mistakes Melanie’s bumbling and fumbling encounters as inept, if endearing, come-ons, while Melanie seems to be clueless about Nash’s sexuality, even given that one of her albums is titled “I Like Girls” and features the song “Love My Honeypot.” To the show’s credit, however, the possibility of an encounter between Hailey and Melanie is what the title of this episode finally—and wistfully?—refers to: “The Sex That Got Away” (a variation, of course, on “The Man That Got Away”).

For the most part, however, the playing out of this lesbian narrative thread makes you wonder if you are watching a 2010 sitcom, or something from the 1980s. Hot in Cleveland’s anachronistic qualities have been one of the major bones of contention in reviews and online commentary, with as many people welcoming this return to “old fashioned” (aka “classic”) situational and one-liner sitcoms—particularly one with mature women regulars—as bemoaning the series’ “derivative” time warp aura, including laughter from a live studio audience. I suppose this back-to-the-’80s vibe is why I am still on the fence about the show, relishing the all-woman comic ensemble work while being irritated by the post-feminist paces through which the scripts often put these women. Reading Alessandra Stanley’s review of the series in The New York Times again has make me cut the show some slack for the moment, as she points out that “it’s hard to argue that a new format makes for more contemporary comedy,” or more progressive politics. For example, while Modern Family features the currently popular sitcom trope of characters talking to a (reality show?) camera, as well as a gay couple, Stanley reminds us that the series also has “women’s roles. . .as traditional as [those] on Leave it to Beaver.”

I also need to remember that even The Golden Girls and Designing Women had their fair share of lame one-liners and “single” entendre humor, and that these shows took some time to develop multi-dimensional characters and put them into situations not rooted in women’s insecurities about men, looks, or age. But is it too much to ask that a show with producers like Will and Grace’s Sean Hayes and a creator/producer/writer like Suzanne Martin (Frazier and Ellen) keep in mind that these woman are already “hot in Cleveland” and, therefore, just say no to situations like the friends arranging bad dates for each other, or to lines like Joy’s “I haven’t felt like a piece of meat in so long”? While I’ll continue watching Hot in Cleveland, I want Sean and Suzanne to know that I am putting them on probation.

Image Credits:
1. The cast of Hot in Cleveland
2. Betty White sasses as Polish neighbor Elka
3. Producer Sean Hayes with the show’s cast

Please feel free to comment.

Rather than trying to make low budget versions of high-end Hollywood films, many contemporary young filmmakers are instead ignoring the commercial marketplace and making the movies they want to make on their own terms. At the forefront of these filmmakers are folks like Andrew Bujalski, Joe Swanberg, Aaron Katz, and Mark and Jay Duplass, who are considered founders of and key players in the so-called “mumblecore” movement, even though they uniformly find the moniker “reductive and silly”.1 There is far from consensus as to the value of their work, but much of the extant criticism is misplaced and focuses too much on what they’re doing in comparison to Hollywood and not enough on how they’re doing it, as it’s the how that may ultimately prove to be much more influential.

“Mumblecore” is a terrible name for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the way it has been pounced on by its detractors, who use the term derisively to emphasize what they see as its shortcomings. Take, for example, Amy Taubin, who asserts that “[o]n a technical level, these are micro-budget movies where sound is almost always a neglected element.”2 While the technical acumen isn’t always in the same league as a studio production, the sound is fine and regardless, I’d argue the term is less about sound quality then it is the way the characters talk, which is in halting, elliptically clipped phrases, full of the “ums,” “you knows,” and “likes” that are the lingua franca of the twenty-somethings these films typically feature. The inarticulateness is representative of an inability or unwillingness on the part of the characters to connect with one another on an emotional level that goes beyond their normal superficial but safe mode of communication.

While there are differences in the work of these directors, there are some unifying elements as well. Most of them shoot on digital video and there are a lot of long hand held shots. Part of this is aesthetic, but functionality and financial imperatives play a role too. With small, often non-professional casts and crews that are donating their time, it’s easier to do longer, uncomplicated shots. While the shots are simple, the editing often isn’t, in that there are frequently arrhythmic cuts, resulting in an unsettling effect on the viewer. Additionally, they tend to be more open to improvisation than most filmmakers. The reasons for this are also as much financial as they are aesthetic. Because they often get their friends to act (and crew and create the music, etc.) and typically shoot on digital video the only extra cost improvisation incurs is time, which, as they aren’t paying union rates for cast and crew, doesn’t translate to monetary cost in the same way that shooting extra footage does on a studio production. And, as Taubin writes, “. . . these non-actors are perfect choices for these films because their insecurity and embarrassment about voicing their characters’ ideas, desires, and feelings . . . dovetails with a defining characteristic of the particular cohort (white, middle-class, twenty-something) to which the filmmakers and their quasi-fictional characters belong. The mumblecore films literally speak in the voice of that cohort, and the best of them do so with remarkable and revealing precision.”

The subject of these films frequently centers around the characters’ “quarterlife crises,” which accompany the difficulty many post-grads have in transitioning from college to the working world. Dennis Lim evocatively describes this period as “the blurry limbo of post-collegiate existence, a period at once ephemeral and cruelly decisive” (commenting on “The Graduates”).3 This focus on post-college malaise has resulted in these filmmakers being dubbed the “voices of their generation,” a sobriquet with which they are justifiably uncomfortable, even while they acknowledge the possibility. As Bujalski posits, “‘fear of adulthood is a theme that pervades [my] films . . . and . . . maybe that is something that is specific, if not to ‘my generation,’ then at least my subset of it. I feel like a lot of people I know, myself included, are still figuring out what we’re doing, are single and so forth, even though we’re now at a point where we’re older than our parents were when they married and had us’”.4

But even if one views the term “mumblecore” as being more about the emotional stuntedness of its characters than a snide reference to its perceived technological deficiencies, it’s still a rotten term that doesn’t do the importance of the work justice. In describing the current state of independent cinema John Patterson claims that the “last independent generation has been co-opted by the studios, and the next one still labours in digicam/web-based/mumblecore obscurity, with its auteurs and iconoclasts yet to establish themselves.”5 Again, the idea that these filmmakers are working in “mumblecore” is derogatory in that they’re simply marking time until they get to the big league of Hollywood cinema. But what’s important to take from this is that many of them are going to eventually make their way to Hollywood; they are the next wave of filmmakers, and that’s exactly what they should be called: Next Wave filmmakers. There’s a lot of contention over whether or not the work of these filmmakers to date comprises a genre. David Denby refers without comment to “a recent genre of micro-budget independent movies,”6 whereas Taubin argues that mumblecore was “never more than a flurry of festival hype and blogoshpere branding” and definitely not a movement in “the grand sense of the French New Wave or the postwar American avant-garde.” While I don’t think the collective output of the Next Wavers comprises a genre, I do think there’s no doubt that a movement is afoot and history may well prove it to be every bit as grand as those Taubin cites. In fact, the French New Wave is a particularly apt analogy, in that it included a bunch of different filmmakers making a wide array of movies. The variance of their output prevented their being generically categorized, but the fact that they were making movies at the same time and that their work, often funded by the French government, was an anarchical alternative to mainstream European cinema is what made it a movement.

Kim Masters describes the output of Next Wave filmmakers as simply being “made with tiny budgets, shot on hand-held digital cameras, with unknown actors who talk a lot about their lives.”7 While true, there is more to their work than broad similarities that could just as accurately describe most home movies. In fact, there is a lot more narrative unity among the output of Next Wave filmmakers than there ever was among New Wave filmmakers. As Lim notes, “. . . what these films understand all too well is that the tentative drift of the in-between years masks quietly seismic shifts that are apparent only in hindsight. Mumblecore narratives hinge less on plot points than on the tipping points in interpersonal relationships . . . . Artists who mine life’s minutiae are by no means new, but mumblecore bespeaks a true 21st-century sensibility, reflective of MySpace-like social networks and the voyeurism and intimacy of YouTube.”8

The press has done a lot to pigeon-hole Next Wave filmmakers, in no small part because they typically focus on Bujalski, Swanberg, Katz, and the Duplass Brothers, which makes it seem more like an exclusive fraternity than a broad scale movement. Taubin is absolutely right when she taps Korean American filmmaker So Yong Kim as deserving inclusion in what I call the Next Wave movement. I would put Kelly Reichardt in this group as well. In fact, there are a ton of young Next Wave filmmakers of all colors, genders, and sexual orientations who are embracing the freedom and opportunity that comes with low budget filmmaking, digital or otherwise, and some of them will definitely break through and make their marks as filmmakers. The club as touted by the media is small, but that’s not reflective of the groundswell that’s taking place in the world of filmmaking right now. To wit, in the winter of 2010, the Sundance Film Festival included a new section that featured low and no budget films, tellingly titled “Next.” Eight films were selected for Next, all of them shot on digital video by a multi-ethnic array of directors who range in age from 24 to 32.9 While not identified as part of the “mumblecore” gang, there’s no doubt they are all working in the same ballpark. In “A Generation,” Lim writes that Next Wave filmmakers are part of “[m]ore a loose collective or even a state of mind than an actual aesthetic movement,” but I would argue that they are at the forefront of a revolutionary technological movement that will undoubtedly have profound long term effects on the industry. Add to that the fact that they are much more open to change and new methods than their elders, and it seems inevitable that they will play a role in the future of Hollywood. It’s not “if,” it’s “when.”

*This essay stems from a chapter on Next Wave filmmaking that will appear in American Film in the Digital Age, forthcoming from Praeger Press in November of 2011. http://www.praeger.com/catalog/C9862.aspx

Image Credits:
1. Funny Ha Ha poster
2. Still from Mutual Appreciation

1. Koresky, Michael. “The Mumblecore Movement? Andrew Bujalski on his ‘Funny, Ha
   Ha.’” Indiewire.com 22 August 2005.
2. Taubin, Amy. “All talk? Supposedly the voice of its generation, the indie film movement known as Mumblecore has had its 15 minutes.” Film Society of Lincoln Center.com November/December 2007.
3. Lim, Dennis. “The Graduates: Indie Captures Twentysomething Indecision, Like, Perfectly.” The Village Voice.com 19 April 2005.
4. Foundas, Scott. “Mutual Appreciation Society: The World of Andrew Bujalski.” LA Weekly.com 7 September 2006.
5. Patterson, John. “The Last Indie Film Generation has been Co-opted by the Studios, While the Next Still Labours in Digicam, Mumblecore Obscurity.” The
   Guardian [London].com 18 July 2008.
6. Denby, David. “Youthquake: Mumblecore Movies.” The New Yorker.com 16 March 2009.
7. Masters, Kim. “The Brothers Duplass Go Studio.” KCRW’s The Business Podcast 21 June 2010.
8. Dennis Lim. “A Generation Finds its Mumble.” The New York Times.com 19 August 2007.
9. Wood, Jennifer M. “Sundance’s ‘Next’ Wave of Indie Moviemakers.” Moviemaker.com 19 January 2010.

One of nine films in the 2010 Cinemalaya Film Festival’s retrospective exhibition of LVN studio classics,1 the 1961 crime thriller Sandata at Pangako (Weapon and Promise, dir. F.H. Constantino) was made at the threshold of the old and the new. Sandata was LVN Pictures’ last release and its only film featuring action icon Fernando Poe, Jr. (“FPJ”), the wildly popular box office king whose decision to break his studio contract in favor of independent producers’ larger talent fees heralded the studio system’s demise.2

The enthusiastic audience at Cinemalaya’s retrospective screening of Sandata had come for a glimpse of the late star in his youthful glory, but we left savoring other pleasures: the technical polish of a well-made studio film and the bright-eyed, incandescent “screen personality” of multi-awarded actress Charito Solis, cast alongside the legendary FPJ. (The action king was rumored to have been her first real heartbreak).3

At the end of the screening, a college student filing out of the theater remarked—“We should have just watched all the LVN films!”4 —confirming that Cinemalaya, known for fostering independent filmmaking, is also creating an audience of young film buffs eagerly rediscovering older films.5 This emerging cinephilic encounter results in a horizon of retrospective reception that counters easy dismissals of studio era films as hackneyed formula pictures made solely for profit. More importantly, moviegoers who may have come to see how familiar stars once looked end up discovering how familiar places once looked as well: a registering of historical time inscribed in the Philippine cityscape of the forties, fifties, and sixties. This is cinematic remembering, one enabled by the archive.

Established in 1938, LVN was among the Big Three studios whose output accounted for 65% of the films produced from 1946 to 1960, a period roughly coextensive with the Golden Age of Filipino filmmaking.6 The commercially profitable star vehicles crafted by executive producer Doña Sisang7 at LVN were an admixture of nationalism, commercialism, and escapism. Director Lamberto Avellana recalls her saying, “Why remind audiences of their hardship?”8 Studio era escapism was most often achieved by predictable happy endings. Yet in Gregorio Fernandez’s 1955 melodrama Higit Sa Lahat [Above All]9, the obligatory narrative resolution is undermined by the film’s trenchant critique of postwar materialism.

Based on a serialized radio play, Higit pursues the tragic consequences of the idea that money is the highest expression of love. The film’s critique of the emptiness of the postwar culture of acquisitiveness comes through in an early scene when Roberto (studio icon Rogelio de la Rosa) and his wife Rosa (Emma Alegre) go window shopping in Manila. If the similarity between cinema screen and department store window rests on their ability to sell the pleasures of the gaze to consumer-spectators,10 then the onscreen shop window in Higit attempts to do the reverse, exposing the moviegoer’s complicity in conspicuous consumption.

When an accidental fire razes the warehouse, everyone concludes that Roberto is dead, despite the fact that he was not killed in the fire. Deciding that the windfall from his life insurance would give his family the future he could not otherwise provide, Roberto embraces self-imposed exile from his family. The intricately plotted story forces Rosa to mourn her living husband thrice over: first, when his necklace is found among a co-worker’s remains; second, when his wallet and a family picture are discovered on the person of a dead thief; and lastly, when Rosa spots him being run over by a car. When the dust from the near-collision clears, Roberto and his family are reunited at last. People are more important than money, Rosa maintains throughout the film, but Roberto is convinced that providing for his loved ones is more important than being with them (his situation is chillingly prescient of the conundrum of overseas Filipino workers today, who are forced to leave their families in order to sustain them).11

Like Higit, Sandata also contests dismissals of LVN as churning out nothing but “antiseptically rigid”, “wholesome” films. The film’s plot centers on organized crime, drug addiction, and pedophilia, surprising present-day spectators expecting a stereotypically “chaste” studio product. The plot traces a hapless couple’s involvement with a crime syndicate: Mando (FPJ), an ex-gang member, successfully helps his sweetheart Dolores (Charito Solis) overcome drug addiction.
Scene transitions are conspicuously marked by graphic matches, dialogue bridges, and matches on action. In one effective transition, a match on action across two scenes underscores the thematic of filthy lucre.

The numerous editing flourishes ended up eliciting laughter from the Cinemalaya audience, whose campy response signaled not ridicule but affection.12 At one point, a form of call and response among Sandata’s viewers seemed to be taking place, with comments by a group of girls in the front of the theater provoking good-natured replies from spectators in the rear. Affectionate laughter greeted the action king’s impossible action feats as well.

Watching LVN films several decades after their initial release invites a retrospective horizon of reception. More than camp enjoyment, retrospective reception also provokes a spatial sense of the uncanny, as evident in another narratively gripping and technically polished Gregorio Fernandez film, Kung Ako’y Mahal Mo [If You Love Me, 1960].

A spurned suitor’s attempted rape of Lydia (Charito Solis) along Highway 54 is foiled when Ramon (Nestor de Villa) responds to Lydia’s cries for help. In the ensuing scuffle, Lydia drives off, so Ramon is alone when the villain inadvertently shoots himself. In the absence of the woman he claims to have saved, the police disbelieve Ramon’s protestations of innocence. His worsening plight at the hands of the justice system is intercut with shots of an impeccably dressed Lydia en route to her flight to the US the next morning. In an LVN version of the vanishing lady motif,13 Lydia’s failure to appear results in an innocent man’s conviction. Years later, unaware of their shared past, socialite and mechanic fall in love. Delayed revelations dilate the plot’s progression towards the inevitable happy ending, when all is forgiven and the lovers are reunited at last.

For contemporary viewers, scenes of the lovers against the backdrop of Balara are unexpectedly startling. When Ramon says of Balara, “The sights here are beautiful!”14 the scene triggers a kind of spatial uncanny, an unfamiliar, because forgotten, evocation of familiar urban space.15 I was amazed by Ramon’s line because I went to high school near Balara and remember it as a bustling jeepney stop and the far from scenic site of the Metropolitan Waterworks and Sewerage System (MWSS).16 My mother recalls Balara as an idyllic picnic spot in the late forties; in Fernandez’s 1960 film, it is a scenic resort.

In Kung Ako’y Mahal Mo, the LVN logo and opening credits are superimposed over a crane shot of Highway 54, site of Lydia’s rescue by Ramon. For contemporary viewers, however, Highway 54 is best remembered as the pre-sixties name for Metro Manila’s most vital artery, E. de los Santos Avenue (EDSA). Today, EDSA’s north- and south-bound thoroughfares are crammed with cars, people, buildings, and billboards. Onscreen, Highway 54 in 1960 is above all a long dangerous stretch of darkness, the undeveloped real estate between Guadalupe and Buendia, notorious in the fifties for roadside robberies.

Footage of Ramon and Lydia driving around Luneta Park along T.M. Kalaw inspires an uncanny sense of spatial recognition, of presence and absence. To the right rear of the 1960 shot is the Manila Hotel, built in 1909. In the left rear is the Manila Army and Navy Club, built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 1911 along Luneta on Dewey (renamed Roxas Boulevard in the sixties). Invisible, offscreen and to the left of the frame, would have been the now-abandoned Luneta Hotel, built in 1918; most strikingly, the expansive, grassy foreground in the lower left of this 1960 shot calls to mind the same spot today: a tangle of condominiums and storefronts, a Shell gas station and a 7-Eleven among them.

For Vivian Sobchack, the inscription of history in film is not metaphoric but literal: in her well-known analysis of film noir, history inheres to the visible places of the story world, the “concrete locality” of the mise-en-scène.17 In these LVN films, the visibility of historical time as place is owing to location shooting: the orderly expanse of Baguio’s Burnham park in Susana de Guzman’s Sumpaan [Vow, 1948]; Balara and Luneta in Kung Ako’y Mahal Mo. The pleasures of the archive are to be glimpsed not only in the faces of stars as they once looked but also in the forgotten visage of the Philippines’ urban iconography.

I am grateful to Vicky Belarmino and Nestor Jardin for graciously agreeing to be interviewed for this piece. This essay was made possible by the place-memories of my mother, Dr. Felicidad Cua-Lim, and the spatially-attuned cinephilia of Joya Escobar. This is dedicated to both of them, with profound thanks.

Image Credits:
1-11. Author Provided Screencaptures

Please feel free to comment.

1. According to CCP film archivist Vicky Belarmino, she and film historian Nic Tiongson chose the films for the Cinemalaya LVN retrospective from a dozen relatively well-preserved LVN titles with good image and sound quality (see my prior Flowtv.org column on the archive crisis in Phlippine cinema.) They adopted the following criteria in choosing nine films for the retrospective program: good copies must be available in digital format; the titles must be rarely exhibited; and the program as a whole must comprise a mix of genres. Personal interview with Vicky Belarmino, July 23, 2010.
2. Coincidentally, FPJ’s father, Fernando Poe, Sr., starred in LVN’s very first film, Giliw Ko [My Darling, 1939]. Two years after FPJ broke his contract with mother studio Premiere Productions in 1960, he founded his own production company, ushering in the post-studio trend of independent superstar-producers. The decline of the studio system meant that by 1965, a handful of top stars were getting paid six times their normal asking price in comparison with their usual fee in 1960; the film industry as a whole was producing almost 200 films a year, double the annual number of films produced in the studio era. See Ross F. Celino. “Busiest Stars of 1965.” Weekly Graphic 32, no. 28 (January 5, 1966): 38-39; and “Sandata at Pangako (1961)”, http://fpj-daking.blogspot.com/2008/09/sandata-at-pangako-1961.html
   FPJ’s film career began in the mid-1950s and spanned almost five decades; he was a contender in the 2004 presidential elections but was defeated by Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. FPJ is widely believed to have won more electoral votes than Arroyo, but Arroyo was never impeached despite proof of her direct involvement with large-scale vote tampering.
3. According to Baldovino, Charito Solis received twelve acting awards and thirteen nominations over the course of a forty-three year career in movies. As a young actress, Solis was quiet and introverted, despite the “incandescence that showed in her eyes”. (Tirol, 46) She possessed what LVN studio chiefs called a “screen personality”, “that indefinable ‘something’ that causes the audience to rivet its attention” on her. (Torre, 11) See Gypsy Baldovino’s two-part article, “Charito Solis: Empress of Drama,” and “Charito Solis: a Tough Act to Follow”, Manila Bulletin, July 14 and 21, 2009; Lorna K. Tirol, “The Starmaker,” in Doña Sisang and Filipino movies, ed. Monina A. Mercado (Metro Manila: A.R. Mercado Management, 1977) 46; and Nestor U. Torre, “Doña Sisang: Her Times, Her Studio,” in Doña Sisang and Filipino Movies, 10-16.
4. “Dapat pala, puro LVN na lang ang pinanood natin!” All translations from Tagalog to English are my own.
5. Businessworld reports that, from 8,000 attendees at the first Cinemalaya in 2005, “the audience turnout for the film event has shot up by as much 54% every year. Last year, Cinemalaya’s box-office attendance ballooned to 42,000, from about 30,000 a year ago. For this year, Mr. Jardin said organizers hope to attract an audience of 50,000.” Jeffrey O. Valisno, “Old hands join newbies in Cinemalaya,” BusinessWorld July 8, 2010. Available http://www.bworldonline.com/weekender/content.php?id=13910.
6. LVN is an acronym for the surnames of its three founders: Narcisa Buencamino vda de Leon, Carmen Villongco, and Eleuterio Navoa, Jr. Tiongson writes, “The 1950s and early 1960s have been described by many writers as the Golden Age of the Filipino film… [because] most of the films churned out by the Big Three Studios of this period – Sampaguita Pictures, LVN, and Premiere Productions… achieved a higher level of technological expertise and artistry in filmmaking.” Nicanor Tiongson, “The Filipino Film Industry,” East-West Film Journal 6.2 (1992): 29.
7. Known simply as “Doña Sisang,” LVN Executive Producer Narcisa Buencamino viuda de Leon was the preeminent female auteur of the studio period. Film critic Nestor Torre credits Doña Sisang’s “painstaking attention to every phase of moviemaking” with creating the studio’s legendary house style. “Doña Sisang read scripts, decided on projects, supervised casting, designed costumes, viewed rushes, all down the line. This helps explain why LVN pictures tended to look and sound alike (“the LVN style”) despite the fact that they were filmed by many different megmen.” Torre, “Doña Sisang,” 14.
8. “Bakit mo ipapakita sa tao na mahirap sila?” Quoted in Paulyn P. Sicam and Babsy Paredes, “The Director’s Director”, in Doña Sisang and Filipino Movies, 78.
9. This film won Best Director and Actor at the 1956 Asian Film Festival FAMAS awards for Best Actor, Picture, Story, Editing, and Sound.
10. Anne Friedberg, Window shopping: cinema and the postmodern (Berkeley and LA: University of California Press, 1993) 3.
11. Almost 10 million Filipinos work abroad, accounting for nearly 10% of the total Phlippine population. For the Philippine economy’s reliance on ever-increasing remittances by Filipino migrant worker E. San Juan, Jr. “Overseas Filipino Workers: The Making of an Asian-Pacific Diaspora,” The Global South 3.2 (Fall 2009): 99-100.
12. Susan Sontag’s appraisal of camp applies here: she calls it “a mode of enjoyment, of appreciation—not judgment. Camp is generous. It wants to enjoy…People who share this sensibility are not laughing at the thing they label as “camp”, they’re enjoying it. Camp is a tender feeling.” Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp”, Against Interpretation (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1967) 291-292.
13. For the disruptive figure of the vanishing lady in cinema, see Karen Beckman, Vanishing Women: Magic, Film and Feminism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).
14. “Ang gaganda nga pala ng mga tanawin!”
15. I am thinking of the Freudian notion of the uncanny as the unfamiliar in the unfamiliar: “In general,” writes Freud, “we are reminded that the word heimlich is not unambiguous, but belongs to two sets of ideas which, without being contradictory, are yet very different: on the one hand it means what is familiar and agreeable, and on the other, what is concealed and kept out of sight.” Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny (1919),” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, General ed. James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud, vol. xvii (1917-1919) ‘An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works’. (London: Hogarth Press, 1955) 224-225.
16. A The Balara Treatment Plant receives water sourced from the Angat Dam via the Novaliches Reservoir; it supplies the eastern half of Metro Manila. See “Metro Manila Water Supply System, http://www.mwssro.org.ph/publication_mm_watersupply_system.htm
17. Vivian Sobchack, “Lounge Time: Postwar Crises and the Chronotope of Film Noir” Refiguring American Film Genres: History and Theory ed. Nick Browne (University of California Press, 1998) 130, 157-159.

The simple black and white cover of the June 1, 2008 issue of the New York Times Magazine says all you need to know about today’s Tyra Banks. The former supermodel-turned-business savvy media mogul looks straight at the camera, her waist cinched by a thick belt, revealing her curvy figure. The words on the page are stark: “Martha. Oprah. Tyra.*” And then at the bottom of the page: “*Is she the next big female branded self?” Look around contemporary popular culture and it would be difficult to disagree.

While Banks has been a staple of American media culture for close to two decades, it is her recent shift from television personality to multi-media brand that I want to investigate. In late December 2009 Banks publicly announced that she would be leaving her Emmy-winning afternoon talk show The Tyra Show to pursue the development of her film company Banksable Productions. Industry insiders have revealed that Banks plans to shift her attention to movies in order to “bring positive images of women to the big screen.”1 This attention shift also sees Banks develop an extensive online presence through her recently relaunched website, Tyra.com, where she has spearheaded her Beauty Inside Out (B.I.O) campaign. This campaign has become a key component of her current branding strategy, which centers on the body as a site for both power and self-esteem for young women.

Tyra Inc.

Having first gained popularity as a sultry supermodel in the mid-1990s, Banks’ celebrity persona developed within the climate of neoliberalism and promotion of color-blind rhetoric and post-feminist notions of gender. Perhaps ironically though, Banks became popular in part because of her positioning as a raced and gendered body. She was the first black model to grace the covers of Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, GQ, and the Victoria’s Secret catalogue. But while her body earned her the status of a pioneer in the modeling world, Banks has always maintained – and continues to reiterate through her role as host and judge on her successful reality television show America’s Next Top Model – that it was her resiliency and work ethic that earned her mainstream success.

While Banks has credited a ‘strong work ethic’ as essential to her career, it has always been her promotion of her body as brand that has dominated her marketing strategy, even after retiring from modeling in 2005. In particular, Banks’ breasts have become “a major signifier of the Tyra brand.”2 Her “booty” has also become somewhat prominent in her brand identity since a 2007 episode where, after a tabloid magazine called her fat, Banks retorted defiantly on her talk show, telling “all those who have something nasty to say to me or other women who are built like me: kiss my fat ass!”

Banks’ Tyra.com website reveals how she has utilized her brand identity to reframe her public mission as a crusader for both positive media representation and self-esteem for young women. This new mission is also indicative of her shift from a post-2005 television personality to 2010 multi-media celebrity, with her brand now extending beyond television and into both the Internet and film.

Banks launched her Beauty Inside Out Campaign in fall 2009, along with her rebranded website. The first initiative of the campaign was the “Fiercely Real” teen modeling competition, which was limited to “plus size” teenagers who would compete on Banks’ talk show in order to win the title of the “Fiercely Real” model winner, a modeling contract, and a photo shoot with Banks. On her site Banks writes that “the term ‘Plus-sized’ models sounds super old fashioned…so I’m changing the term ‘Plus-sized and making it ‘Fiercely Real’!” The pictures from the final shoot were posted on Banks’ website and the first Fiercely Real winner, Sheridan Watson, a “17 year-old, size 14, fierce teen from New Jersey” was “crowned” in March 2010.

From the outset, Banks’ B.I.O. Campaign appears to be a progressive, feminist approach to body image and media representation. After all, feminist research has demonstrated the harmful effects of unrealistic media images on the confidence of girls and women.3 However, Banks’ mission is clearly a corporate one. In her discussion of the ‘Fiercely Real” competition she writes, “It’s my mission to expand the definition of beauty. To show unique, atypical, fiercely real, quirky, clumsy, five-headed girls through all of my many media projects and businesses. So watch out for what I have in store next!” While Banks does invite girls to make a “B.I.O. pledge” as to how they’re going to rally against “unrealistic” media images, Banks’ project appears to be more about her own brand identity and her “many media projects and businesses” than about feminist politics per se.

This becomes particularly evident in the language that she uses to discuss the campaign. There is a glaring absence of any reference to feminism or the long history of work by feminists to combat unrealistic images of women and girls in the media. There is also no mention of the many organizations throughout the United States and the world that are currently lobbying for more positive representations of women not just in terms of body size, but also in terms of race, ethnicity, sexuality, class, ability, and other identities. While it would make sense for Banks to use the connectivity that the web offers to link to other related feminist projects with the hopes of forming a broad coalition of media activists, she specifically chooses not to. Thus, Banks’ project exists in isolation from feminist media activism and is instead represented as the brainchild of Banks as an individual mentor and businesswoman.

Banks continually utilizes the words “fierce” and “real” throughout her discussions of the B.I.O. campaign. The word “fierce” is an interesting choice for several reasons. While Banks has appropriated the term within the past few years, using it frequently on America’s Next Top Model to describe something particularly outstanding, the word has a longer history within marginalized communities. It was originally used in queer communities and in particular, was taken up by queer people of color, such as the FIERCE organization for LGBTQ youth of color in New York City.4 It was integrated into the fashion industry, primarily by gay men of color, such as America’s Next Top Model judge and runway coach Miss J Alexander, where it became mainstream.

Considering its history as a word from the margins, Banks’ reliance on “fierce” raises several interesting implications. First, it potentially alludes to her own marginalized position as a black woman in a media industry dominated by white men, as well as the marginalized position of her “fiercely real” sized teen models in an industry dominated by thin, white women. Second, it potentially allies her with the queer community, where she has been recognized with the 2009 Excellence in Media Award from the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLADD). She also employs several openly gay men on her America’s Next Top Model team, as well as has featured several lesbian and one transgendered contestant.5

But despite the potential spaces to challenge dominant white heterosexual norms with which the word ‘fierce’ carries, Banks refuses this opportunity. Instead, she empties the word ‘fierce’ of its political context, while promoting a very stereotypically white, feminine gender performance in the B.I.O. campaign. For example, in March 2010 Banks writes on Tyra.com that, “This week is all about being natural. Real. The real you.” She continues to instruct her visitors,

You see the pictures on the cover this week? I’m barely wearing any make-up and I got the real hair goin’ on (with a relaxer of course). Sometimes you just need to let go, have fun, and show those freckles… Of course I don’t expect you to go to school or work with no make-up, but maybe on a Saturday out to the grocery store you could keep your fresh face and just add some clear lip-gloss! … Fierce & Love,
Tyra

Banks’ suggestion to “add some clear lip-gloss” may send the signal to be more natural, but it also implies the importance of still being adequately feminine. Additionally, it still assumes and requires that one has clear lip-gloss, that it is part of every girl’s make-up essentials. Furthermore, her disclaimer that of course she doesn’t “expect you to go to school or work with no make-up” maintains traditional ideas about feminine beauty - that in the formal public sphere, women must still be clearly feminine.

Despite Banks’ rhetoric about loving and embracing your “real” body, Banks is known for always wearing a hair weave and having her hair relaxed. Her comment above, that she’s “got the real hair goin’ on (with a relaxer of course)” indicates that her hair relaxer is a non-negotiable, an assumed part of her “real” beauty. But while Banks’ hair discourse is clearly about issues of race and beauty, Banks refuses to frame it as such, instead positioning her hair relaxing as a personal choice, equivalent to putting on lip-gloss. Thus, Banks’ beauty discourse remains within the neoliberal post-race project, where black women are entitled to choose to whether to relax their hair, divorced from the broader political and social implications that this decision may imply.

Banks’ B.I.O. campaign relies on neoliberal discourses of choice, empowerment, and freedom in order to promote self-esteem by loving one’s ‘real’ body. This ‘real’ body though remains unquestionably feminine, even if one ‘chooses’ to leave the house sans make-up one day. Furthermore, this empowerment is a personal project guided by Banks’ advice, rather than broader political activism. Thus while Banks makes obvious the ways that femininity is constructed through markers like make-up and hair relaxers she does not undertake a Butlerian analysis of the performative aspect of femininity, instead encouraging her fans to embrace a ‘real’ femininity that nonetheless still relies on normative understandings of gender, race, class, and sexuality.

While Banks considers herself “curvy,” she has always maintained a slim, disciplined body and has required her Top Model contestants to do the same. Banks does have the power to change normative standards of beauty through casting America’s Next Top Model, however, she has yet to actually do so. While most of the models on the show are extremely thin, the odd “plus-size” girl that is featured is often very similar to the thin girls, albeit a few sizes bigger – more of a size eight than a size zero. It is for this reason that I see this Banks’ increased emphasis on “Fiercely Real” beauty as part of a branding strategy that will keep her fans engaged within her various multimedia projects while developing a star text that appears progressive, modern, and non-threatening to her many advertisers, including cosmetics companies like Cover Girl.

From ‘Fierce’ to Farce?

Banks’ latest endeavor raises many questions about the place of beauty and body image issues within mainstream media. While I don’t think that Banks’ Beauty Inside Out campaign is entirely negative, I do think that Banks’ position as a celebrity entrepreneur must be interrogated in relation to this rebranding project. For example, Banks is embarking on this mission at a time when public discourse about body image in fashion is popular, with The New York Times even recently doing a story about the increase use of “plus –size” models in fashion magazines. Furthermore, brands such as Dove have capitalized on their promotion of positive body image through their ‘Real Beauty’ advertisements and skin care products, demonstrating that selling ‘self esteem’ can be successful.6 The promotion of an empowered consumer therefore is an already established marketing discourse that affirms the neoliberal project promoted by Banks. Framed in this way, Banks’ initiative seems more like a bid to keep her celebrity status relevant than to actually become engaged with the complex politics of body image.

I’d also like to suggest that true empowerment for girls and young women must go beyond their physical body. While being comfortable with your body is certainly important it should not be promoted as the ultimate marker of self-esteem or empowerment. Instead we should be telling girls to develop their minds through intellectual, artistic, and athletic pursuits, which offer them skills beyond their appearance. Consequently, Banks’ continual focus on her own body as her source of self-esteem – and the bodies of girls and young women - prevent Banks from undertaking truly fierce work.

Image Credits:

1. Banks’ NYT Cover

2. Banks with Sheridan Watson

3. Banks with Miss J Alexander

4. Top Model’s only “plus size” winner, Whitney Thompson

Please feel free to comment.

1. Thomas, K. (2009). Tyra Banks leaves her daytime talk show. The Examiner.com. Retrieved April 29 from http://www.examiner.com/x-21513-Nashville-Celebrity-Headlines-Examiner~y2009m12d28-Tyra-Banks-leaves-her-daytime-talk-show.
2. Joseph, R. (2009). ‘Tyra Banks Is Fat”: Reading (Post-)Racism and
   (Post)Feminism in the New Millennium. Critical Studies in Media Communication 26 (3), 237-254.
3. Bordo, S. (1993) Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Kilbourne, J. (1999). The More You Subtract the More You Add: Cutting Girls Down to Size. In Deadly Persuasion (pp. 128-154). New York: Simon and Schuster.
4. Queers United Blog. (2009). Word of the Gay: Fierce. Retrieved May 8, 2010 from http://queersunited.blogspot.com/2009/02/word-of-gay-fierce.html
5. While increased representation of gay and lesbian people on television is important, the transgressive possibilities of gay representation on Top Model arguably remain limited, as gay men are already assumed to be interested in fashion and style. Thus, Banks is not necessarily challenging stereotypes or transgressing boundaries with queer representation on her show.
6. Dye, L. (2009). Consuming Constructions: A Critique of Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty. Canadian Journal of Media Studies 5 (1). Retrieved May 4, 2010 from http://cjms.fims.uwo.ca/issues/05-01/index.html.

In 2001, Revenant Records, a small Austin, Texas label, released Screamin’ and Hollerin’ the Blues, a seven-CD box set chronicling Delta Blues legend Charley Patton.1 The set included all known Patton sessions between 1929 and 1934, a hardcover “78 [rpm] album” in which compact discs were stored, a reprint of John Fahey’s 1970 book on Patton, plus 100 pages of “exhaustive new writing,” reproductions of Paramount Records’ advertising for Patton releases, and a “complete Paramount/Vocalion Record Label Sticker Set.” A few years later, Revenant released Holy Ghost, a nine-CD set of “rare & unissued records” by free jazz saxophonist Albert Ayler, including a full-color hardbound book with essays by Amiri Baraka and others, “artist testimonials of first encounters with Ayler’s music,” and more, all contained in a “lavish Spirit Box…cast from [the] hand-carved original.” Included in the box is a pressed flower, a forget-me-not, perhaps a message to jazz fans regarding Ayler’s legacy. How does one critically evaluate this kind of unprecedented, even excessive packaging?

Not to be outdone, Atlanta’s Dust-to-Digital introduced their label with Goodbye, Babylon, a six-CD box set of 135 songs and twenty-five sermons, a 200-page book that includes Bible verses, lyric transcriptions, and liner notes giving historical context for each recording. Perhaps the most unusual touches of the package are the materials used, as detailed on the label’s web site. The contents are “reverently packed with raw cotton and housed in a deluxe 8” x 11” x 2.5” cedar box.” Dust-to-Digital defines their mission as producing “high-quality cultural artifacts, which combine rare, essential recordings with historic images and detailed texts describing the artists and their works.” A growing number of small music labels have quietly created innovative niches by pushing the limits of the traditional CD box set through the creation of lavish packages unprecedented in their appeal to music fans, scholarly attention to detail, and aesthetic excess, in an attempt to cultivate a record collector culture that has long been part of recorded sound’s societal circulation. The company slogan of Susan Archie’s World of Anarchie, which designed each of these box sets, is “we think INSIDE the box,” a strong statement as the CD format’s popularity wanes.2

What might these lavish CD packages suggest about the recording industry’s marketing in their specific appeals to consumers and collectors? What might the trajectory of production and consumption in recorded sound culture suggest about similar practices regarding film and television packages in the DVD market?

For the film and television industries, a new collector culture rose with the popularization of laser discs, videotape, and DVD technologies.3 Research on the DVD’s impact on film and television has convincingly mapped this technological, industrial, and cultural shift. Chuck Tryon suggests that film DVDs’ emphasis on extras and “insider” knowledge invites the home viewer into “discourses of cinematic knowledge or connoisseurship.”4 As Derek Kompare writes about TV collections on DVD, “People have long been regarded in media studies as ‘spectators,’ ‘viewers,’ and ‘audiences,’ but much less so as ‘users,’ ‘consumers,’ and ‘collectors,’ as television moves from what Bernard Miège sees as a move from “a logic of flow to a logic of publishing.”5 While visual media studies’ “collector’s turn” marks an important transition, it has come at a paradoxical moment. With the advent of audio file distribution, recorded sound as a medium seems to be abandoning the recording industry’s object-based past, at least in part, just as the film and television industries discover it.6

At present, both visual and aural media circulate in somewhat similar collector cultures, despite some differences. While film and television DVD packages carry increasing amounts of content, most leave the “extras” to the disc themselves.7 The greater storage capabilities of DVD have likely encouraged this practice. This may also have to do with differences in what counts as “extras” in CD vs. DVD box sets. DVD extras have largely remained focused on disc-based extras (deleted scenes, commentary tracks, “easter eggs”). With contemporary movies, these extras are created with the DVD package in mind. Compare this to many CD box set collections, particularly those that reference much earlier eras of recorded sound. Those packaging the music, collectors, enthusiasts – they are often recontextualizing secondhand. Often those working on these box sets are dealing with a finite amount of original recordings (how many Charley Patton recordings are known to exist?). These figures can also be somewhat marginal with the passing of time, which may require extensive archival research. This issue makes both the creators of such box sets into armchair music historians, scholars and aesthetes. This amount of work in collecting various materials and packaging them for sale encourages the producers of such box sets to see their audience in much the same way. In fact, it is relatively common for record collectors, music fans, and historians to supply materials for these releases, as is the case for each CD box set I mentioned above.

Of course, the Revenant and Dust-to-Digital box sets point to a long history of record collecting. In many ways these releases share an ancestral lineage with Harry Smith’s three-LP reissue package of commercial blues and country recordings that date from the 1920s and 1930s. Released by Moe Asch’s Folkways label, Smith conceived of his anthology in fundamentally different ways than those common to other Folkways releases. While he tried to introduce and illuminate on the one hand, he also tried to mystify and confuse with the other. This latter dynamic is evident in Anthology’s artwork, which features collages referencing ancient notions about the power of music and the mystical origins of music in the “celestial monochord.”8 Smith’s project points to these later releases as a way to attract new listeners to relatively obscure figures in musical history. To borrow Roy Shuker’s phrase, Smith’s project was an act of “cultural preservation” as well as musical enjoyment.9 This added dynamic at work in these CD box sets – cultural preservation projects as well as commercial products – also point to a more ephemeral relationship at work in the recording industry and its relatively low barrier to entry.

Contradictory developments impact CD box sets at present, as mentioned in the introduction to this column: 1) the niche return of vinyl and vinyl box sets, whose devotees affirm the importance of packaging as well as audio quality as a reason for their preference; and 2) the digital distribution of recordings, either by downloads or digital streaming.10 The CD box set seems endangered from both vinyl aficionados and from digital downloaders, in different ways.11 It may also be that the collecting impulses that have so shaped recorded sound culture come down to generational tastes. If CD and DVD technologies are both nearing the end of their technological relevance, then it will be DVDs that will be better equipped to transition to streaming and downloads, since the DVD’s format life has been relatively short.12 But to think that the power of the object (audio or otherwise) in collector culture will disappear in any quick or simple way is to misunderstand that culture, despite its love-hate relationship with the audio stockpile. In their scholarly focus and aesthetic lavishness, these box sets affirm for fans the transformative importance of music and a desire to understand and experience in various ways. And the work continues. For the past few years, Dust-to-Digital and Revenant have been collaborating on a new retrospective box set chronicling guitarist and Revenant co-founder John Fahey, which some sources suggest could be released as early as this month.

Image Credits:
1. Screamin’ and Hollerin:’” Deluxe Packaging
2. Goodbye Babylon Box Set
3. Susan Archie of World of Anarchie
4. By Brakhage, Volume 1-2: The Criterion Collection’s emphasis on DVD packaging

Please feel free to comment.

1. See my interview with Revenant Records’ co-founder Dean Blackwood, “American Primitive: Revenant Records’ Tenth Anniversary,” in Perfect Sound Forever, April 2006. http://www.furious.com/perfect/revenantrecords.html
2. Archie’s company has won numerous Grammy Awards for their work. They are involved in creating vinyl box sets as well. For Clem Coleman’s fascinating discussion with Archie, read the January 2003 interview in Sound Collector #8 here: http://www.worldofanarchie.com/pressf/sc8.html
3. Of course, collectors have always been interested in film and television. But the historical focus for film and television collectors has been on paraphernalia rather than primary texts.
4. Chuck Tryon, Reinventing Cinema: Movies in the Age of Convergence. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009, 21.
5. Derek Kompare, “Publishing Flow: DVD Box Sets and the Reconceptualization of Television,” Television & New Media. Vol. 7, No. 4, November 2006, 353, and Bernard Miège, The Capitalization of Cultural Production. New York: International General, 1989, 12.
6. Sound recording as a medium remains based in the material. See Jonathan Sterne’s “The MP3 as Cultural Artifact,” New Media and Society, October 2006, Vol. 8, No. 5, 825-842.
7. There are notable exceptions (e.g., The X Files box set, which as Kompare notes attempts to add value by having the object directly reference the show’s narrative, or the Seinfeld set, which does the same by referencing the show’s in-jokes).
8. See Kevin Moist’s “Collecting, Collage, and Alchemy: The Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music as Art and Cultural Intervention,” American Studies Volume 48, Number 4, Winter 2007,111-127.
9. Shuker notes that Revenant issued a fourth volume in 2000 that was part of Smith’s original intention.
10. See Shuker’s “Formats, Collectors and the Music Industry” in Wax Trash and Vinyl Treasures: Record Collecting as a Social Practice, 57-82.
11. Ibid. Shuker’s ethnographic research suggests a real generational shift in a preference for downloading audio as primary distribution point.
12. The video game market is also working out its own relationship to the collectible object, while offering a range of options from download-only games to limited-edition packages.

In a recent article published in the journal Music, Sound and the Moving Image, Michele Hilmes questions the silence on sound and music in television studies. Arguing for the necessity of studying this essential aspect of television aesthetics, form and reception, Hilmes notes that television’s roots in radio as well as its streaming seriality distinguish television sound from film sound. While it is commonplace for scholars, technicians and artists working in television to note the fundamental noisiness of the medium (verbocentric and musical, television sound is rarely silent), there has been very little research in the area of television sound and music. Confronting this silence with the acoustic richness of television’s radio roots, Hilmes makes a case for considering the medium’s streaming structure as an integral part of its musical and aural fertility.

In my last column I related television’s seriality to the ritualistic and repetitive nature of the opening credits and the music associated with them. As I argued there, opening credits can attain an aesthetic and cultural impact and significance that cannot be subsumed under the functional analysis of the informational structure of the credits themselves. Credits frequently surpass the information they give and a large part of their aesthetic, stylistic and affective impact is the music associated with them. Whether a song, original score or a new version of a well-known hit, the opening music for a series plays a crucial role in the success and influence of not only the credit sequence but often the series as a whole.

Music also of course plays a large role in the paratextual economic synergies associated with a series: a good opening sequence can create a hit song as in Jace Everett’s “Bad Things” from True Blood, make a composer’s career, increase the popularity of a show or renew and redefine a series in a new season. For instance, the controversial new opening credits and song for Big Love’s Season 4 radically changed both song and visuals in order to reflect the changing emotional and narrative events of the series. While a number of series have changed opening credit songs and visuals over the years, the shift in Big Love’s opening can be read as indicative of a crucial thematic and narrative shift – the move from brightly lit ice skating accompanied by The Beach Boy’s “God Only Knows” to falling through darkness scored by the Engineers’ ambivalent and questioning “Home” is indicative of the changing lives and certainties of the characters in the series.

But beyond the credits alone, the role of music within television series offers insight into the fundamental differences between film and television sound outlined by Hilmes. For a composer associated with a series, the length, repetition and formal specificities of artistic creation are all impacted by the streaming seriality of the medium. Rather than creating a score for a single film, the television composer works across a changing landscape of narrational, thematic and characterological events and nuances. Creating motifs and themes that work throughout a large number of episodes is a far different challenge than composing for a single film. Add to the greater overall use of music within television and the aesthetic changes and challenges that come with working with a number of different directors, the art of the television composer provides opportunities, challenges and rewards that shape the style, form and aesthetics of his or her work.

For instance, if we consider the work of Daniel Licht, the composer for Showtime’s Dexter, we note the prominence of music in creating the overall tone and atmosphere for the show. Visually the show foregrounds the paradoxical parallel of its brightly lit and colourful Miami locale and Dexter’s “dark passenger” of serial killing. This is immediately palpable in the opening designed by Digital Kitchen that places the everyday in the context of the grotesquely violent (like American Psycho, Dexter’s opening uses food as a visual analogue for blood), a contextualization that is stressed by the Rolfe Kent’s opening music, a blend of upbeat Latin rhythms with a slight sinister edge. This visual paradox of brightness and beauty and sinister ugliness is carried throughout the series, but is most palpable in the series’ emphasis on blood splatter patterns, especially visible in Dexter’s lab where the bright, saturated vibrancy of red stands out against white, clinical backgrounds. In the opening credits, crime scene, lab and images hanging from the walls of Dexter’s office, blood becomes a purely aesthetic subject: blood splatters take on the visual style of abstract art.

This predominance of blood is musically evident as well, as Licht’s signature “blood theme” is almost as prevalent as Dexter’s own musical theme in the soundscape of the series. Given the series’ focus on a blood splatter analyst/ vigilante serial killer, it is not surprising that Licht’s music for Dexter articulates the dark, uncanny and grotesque. Emphasizing unusual percussion (Licht even uses human bones as percussive instruments) and minor keys, Licht’s music stresses the intensity of action and the melancholic sadness that shape Dexter’s character. In combination with the foregrounded voiceover (Dexter’s stream of consciousness/ direct address to the viewer) and elaborate and viscerally present sound effects, the music of Dexter provides the context and content of much of the series’ violent and bloody action.

In combination with the musical scoring, foley and sound effects concentrate attention on the sounds of bodily violence and dismemberment. For instance, in addition to the “blood theme,” there are musical cues tied to Dexter’s signature cheek slicing, his gathering of killing tools and his acts of murder. Sound effects and foley are also played loud in the mix, especially those relating to violent physical action such as blood splatters, body blows and plastic bags containing body parts being dumped over the side of Dexter’s boat. These moments usually downplay dialogue as music and effects take over to convey action and bodily presence.

In Dexter violence and the body have an acoustic presence equal to that of any character – tools sing, blood has tunes and body blows weave in out of the percussive elements of Licht’s score. Each episode features repeated themes and motifs with certain developments, variations and nuances across the series as a whole, but the dominance of the “blood” and “Dexter” themes unifies the action across the series and offers an affective and narrational context that moves beyond the weekly repetition of content. A serial killer is by definition repetitive, so a television series on serial killing suggests a kind of synchronicity of form and content – the seriality of television was made for the serial killer and Dexter’s wild popularity confirms this. Sold on soundtracks, posted on youtube, discussed in internet forums, Licht’s score holds a prominent place in this popular seriality and it is in large part recognized as a key aspect in making uncanny and dark the brightly lit and colourful mise en scene and cinematography.

Blood is a crucial part of this bright mise en scene – a primary colour most often framed against blinding whiteness, blood becomes an aesthetic element in Dexter and, as we have noted, a musical one. Emphasizing this musicality, my title takes its cue from Godard’s famous “that’s not blood, that’s red”: Godard’s answer to attacks on the violence of his films reminds his viewers of the aesthetic, performative and artificial nature of cinema.

Godard insists that blood in film is first and foremost an element of aesthetics, cinematography and mise en scene, and television crime shows such as Dexter remind us that music is part of this mix as well. As a blood splatter analyst, Dexter always reminds us that blood tells stories, but if we listen closely, we also realize that it sings.

Image Credits:
1. http://www.d-kitchen.com/projects/dexter-main-title#
2. http://www.sho.com/site/dexter/episodes.do
3. http://pjmix.tumblr.com/post/377787059/jean-luc-godard-pierrot-le-fou-1965