Much has been written about the politicization of the modern sporting mega-event, and with considerable justification.  Looking specifically at the Olympic Games–from de Coubertin’s distinctly Eurocentric and masculinist inaugural modern Olympiad in 1896 Athens, through the Third Reich’s Berlin Olympic maneuvers of 1936, the 1968 Mexico games brutally sanitized by the Díaz Ordaz regime, to the scrupulously choreographed spectacle of Beijing 2008–there exists an incontrovertible history of ruling elites looking to use the very delivery of the games as a seductive mechanism for legitimating systems and practices of governance to internal and external audiences alike.

Notwithstanding the Chinese state capitalist 2008 Beijing Olympiad, it would seem that the most overtly politicized Olympiad of recent times was the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympic Games.  While on the surface this would appear to be the case, it could be argued that every contemporary Olympic Games, and indeed other commercially mass-mediated sporting mega-events, are implicated in the tacit politicization of everyday life.  They are, in Debord’s terms, monumental spectacles responsible for informing the political economy of the vernacular. 1

Coming a few months after the attacks of September 11, 2001, and in a complementary vein to the delayed Super Bowl XXXVI which was rescheduled for the same week as the Games’ opening, the Salt Lake City Olympics provided an emotive context for the ceremonial performance of the United States’ wounded but nonetheless newly energized nationalism.  Doubtless scripted as a justification for its contemporaneous (Afghanistan) and future (Iraq) military incursions that were, initially at least, publicly trumpeted as seeking to right the wrongs of that “one day in September”.2

Of course, the Salt Lake City opening and closing ceremonies provide an illustrative example of the convergence of sport and politics.  However, it would be remiss not to acknowledge the role of the U.S. television broadcaster, NBC, in the delivery and indeed politicization of this and other recent Olympics.  As the host broadcaster, NBC played a key role in, quite literally, representing the Salt Lake City Games to the worldwide viewing public.  However, its narrativizing of the post-September 11 Olympic spectacle to the American public evidenced the role played by the commercial media in corroborating the political sensibilities and machinations of the moment.  That is not to say NBC, or any other commercial national network broadcaster for that matter, necessarily possesses an identifiable and consistent political orientation.  Rather, by their very raison d’etre, commercial broadcasters are compelled to seek the maximum possible audience for their corporate advertisers which, whether consciously or otherwise, thereby guides production decisions and content.  In order to produce programming with a broad-based appeal and thereby commercial value, network broadcasters thus have to be closely attuned to the “mattering maps” of the national audience at any given time: the “socially determined structure of affect which defines the things that do and can matter to those living within the map.” 3

Attention to contemporary cartographies of affect were clearly evident within NBC’s coverage of the Salt Lake City Games.  With specific regard to the all important primetime network broadcasts, the carefully scripted words of Katie Couric, Bob Costas et al, myriad background features, and the overall production aesthetic and orientation, framed the Games in a manner which both engaged, and simultaneously advanced, the then ascendant ideological tropes of “American jingoism, militarism, and geopolitical domination.” 4   Largely as a by product of its commercial impulses, as opposed to any conspiratorial political machinations, NBC’s Olympic representation could thereby be said to have acted as a de facto corroboration of the affective investments in the subject positions advanced by the Bush regime (i.e. those of the uncritical and unquestioning American patriot) in securing its position of authority and justifying its hawkish stratagems.  As a consequence, NBC’s Olympic coverage became a seductive agent of popular conservatism, in that its affectively-charged coverage of the games actively reinforced, and mobilized popular support for, the ideological underpinnings of America’s ascendant militaristic and neo-imperialistic order.

The argument herein centers on the notion that national network sport broadcasters contribute to the politicization of everyday life, however, they do so in a manner which belies an ideological promiscuity resulting from the primacy of commercial logics.  In this vein, NBC’s coverage of the 2008 Beijing Olympics confirmed the popular conservatism of network broadcasters, through coverage which to some degree afforded an unstated legitimacy to China’s blend of state socialism and market capitalism.  For, if they had chosen to do so, NBC could have used the Beijing Olympics as the catalyst for a considered examination of the Chinese state, with specific references to its well scrutinized economic policies, political organization, and human and civil rights record.  Of course such a contextualizing of the Beijing Games on network television is all but unthinkable.  While it would placate a minority who long protested the awarding of the games to China, it would doubtless extinguish the interests of the vast viewing majority looking to NBC for its established blend of sporting performance and soap opera melodrama.

Hence, from the choreographed televisual magnitude of Zhang Yimou’s opening spectacular, through the remainder of the games, NBC pad scant attention to extra-sporting issues, preferring instead to celebrate the spectacular nature of Beijing 2008, in seemingly equal measure regarding its phantasmagorical built environment (specifically the instantly iconic bird’s nest and water cube stadia) and the superhuman feats of those performing within it (specifically Usain Bolt and Michael Phelps).

What of the forthcoming 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics?  In a moment charactered by prolonged healthcare indecision, enduring military sacrifice, purported economic recovery, and attendant Presidential vulnerability, one could expect NBC to use the Vancouver Games as a 17-day dramatic and entertaining escape from America’s woes.

Doubtless this is Dick Ebersol and the rest of the NBC Universal production team’s brief.  Nonetheless, even within the throes of Olympic escapism, one is never far from the affective investments responsible for the rightward shift in American life over the past 40 years.  Uppermost among these is the preoccupation with abstracted individualism associated with the instantiation of roll-with-it neo-liberalization. 5   Thus, every one of the interminable narrative focuses on individual Olympic athletes’ lives–their trials and tribulations, strengths and weaknesses, failings and redemptions–as a means of representing sporting contests and competitions, inexorably accents the neo-liberal individualism whose hegemonic position has stymied the development of the collective conscience necessary for the realization of a true American democracy.  So much for the liberal [sport] media.

Image Credits:
1. Olympic Torch Runner, Berlin 1936
2. The “World Trade Center Flag” at the Salt Lake City opening ceremony
3. Performers in traditional costume from the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics
4. NBC’s Vancouver Olympics Logo

Please feel free to comment.

1. Debord, G. (1994 [1967]). The society of the spectacle (D. Nicholson-Smith, Trans.). New York: Zone Books.
2. Silk, M., & Falcous, M. (2005). One day in September/A week in February: Mobilizing American (Sporting) nationalisms. Sociology of Sport Journal, 22(4), 447-471.
3. Grossberg, L. (1992). We gotta get out of this place: Popular conservatism and postmodern culture. London: Routledge, p. 398.
4. Silk, M., & Falcous, M. (2005). One day in September/A week in February: Mobilizing American (Sporting) nationalisms. Sociology of Sport Journal, 22(4), 464.
5. Keil, R. (2009). The urban politics of roll-with-it neoliberalization. City: analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action, 13(2), 230-245.

Every year, consumer electronics manufacturers and their partners in the entertainment industry and Silicon Valley gather at the Las Vegas Convention Center in early January for the International Consumer Electronics Show, or CES. With over 2,500 exhibitors the CES is the global consumer electronics industry’s largest and most important trade show, and plays host to dozens of press conferences, thousands of product launches, and far too many networking sessions to count. In recent years, however, the show has taken on another identity as a global media event, joining Black Friday and the Super Bowl as one of the high holidays of the high-tech consumer society. If these latter events present the faithful with annual occasions to dutifully participate in national rituals of consumption, the CES is set aside for the exaltation of the industry and its products. For four days in January, the LVCC becomes pilgrimage site where the people who make flat-screen TVs, iPod knock-offs and, USB-powered desk fans come together to celebrate themselves and, in the words of Consumer Electronics Association President and CEO Gary Shapiro, their power to “invent the future.”1

Enticed by the possibility of coming face to face with tomorrow’s hype today, this year I joined the 120,000 who made the pilgrimage to Las Vegas for CES 2010. In between attending rousing keynotes by the industry’s chief evangelists and conference sessions with titles like “Pay TV’s Days Numbered?” and “Streaming Salvation to the Music Industry,” I wandered amidst the thousands of booths covering the convention center’s 1.8 million square feet of floor space, where I beheld the miracle of 3D television and genuflected across the surfaces of next Christmas’s touch-screen devices. LG’s breathtaking exhibition, which dominated the entrance to the convention center’s Central Hall, resembled nothing less than a cathedral in which the stained glass windows had been swapped out for 55-inch LCD monitors displaying high-definition video loops of butterflies, solar eclipses, and other assorted wonders of creation. At the Intel display, attendees queued up for an opportunity to play data God on the Infoscape, a pair of adjoining 7’-by-7’ glass touch screens on which it was possible to survey and manipulate information pulled from 20,000 Internet sources.

On the outskirts of the convention center’s three halls, I visited with some of the hopeful entrepreneurs who had wagered $41 per square foot on the possibility that their combination wind- and solar-powered mobile phone battery charger or iPhone wrist sock would catch the eye of a CNET correspondent who had gotten lost while searching for a power outlet to charge his MacBook Pro. Here, at folding card tables located far from the monumental pavilions of the mega-conglomerates, the most sought-after commodity was an invitation to join the elect in the private suites on the convention center’s second floor, where sales reps, marketing gurus, and buyers for national chains were ironing out the details of deals that would determine the allocation of shelf space and web page real estate for next year’s major shopping events.

One of the phrases most often repeated in the CES’s official promotional materials was the promise that show attendees would experience an advanced preview of “the next decade of technology innovation.” Indeed, the CES’s primary emphasis has traditionally been on products that are months, if not years, away from commercialization. For the second year in a row Microsoft CEO’s Steve Ballmer’s show-opening keynote address showcased Project Natal, a natural user interface that transforms users’ bodies into Xbox 360 game controllers. The biggest news to come out of Ballmer’s speech was not, as some fanboys had hoped, that hands-on demos of Natal would be available on the floor, but rather that Microsoft had settled on December 2010 for Natal’s release date. Many exhibitors similarly used the show to hype vaporware, or at least next year’s product lines. The global consumer electronics industry has always oriented itself toward the future through its marketing tropes and brisk replacement cycles. But coming off a year in which the industry saw a 7.7 per cent drop in revenues, its first decline since 2001, this future orientation offered show attendees a brief respite from having to contemplate the current economic climate. In the LVCC’s exhibition halls, industry reps and their various partners and hangers-on welcomed the opportunity to momentarily lose themselves in the promise of a digital hereafter in which our television sets would all be OLEDs, our laptops would never run out of juice, and their books would always be in the black.2

If the CES’s exhibitors encouraged show attendees to look beyond the current recession and toward this digital hereafter, my time in Las Vegas left me with the distinct impression that the CES is as much about “inventing the past” as it about “inventing the future.” For in addition to launching more than 20,000 new products, the show commemorated – and in fact initiated – the obsolescence of at least as many devices. The CES’s scheduling in early January couldn’t be more appropriate, timed as it does to coincide with a slow period in the annual news cycle, but also with the arrival of December’s credit card statements. It is at the CES that the consumer electronics industry begins to cultivate consumers’ dissatisfaction with the purchases they made during their recent holiday spending binges. Nothing takes the luster off a new gadget quite like the announcement of an upgrade. And so it is that just as our all-too-brief interest-free honeymoons with the PCs, TVs, and mobile phones we purchased over the holiday season is coming to a close the industry unveils the upgrades designed specifically to replace them.

Contrary to media reports and blog posts, the “big story” of the 2010 CES was not the 3D television sets and Blu-Ray players demoed by some of the industry’s biggest names. The 3D technologies showcased by Sony, Panasonic, Samsung, and others may have “stolen the show,” as the tech blog engadget.com put it, but the even bigger story was one that few of the show’s attendees or exhibitors were eager to talk about: that is, that if manufacturers have their way the industry’s 3D push will soon obsolete current HDTV sets and Blu-Ray players.3 American consumers spent over $25 billion purchasing nearly 30 million HDTV sets in 2009 alone, none of which are 3D-ready.4 As set prices drop, and as native 3D digital games, post-Avatar 3D blockbusters, and 3D coverage of top-flight sporting events becomes widely available, it is conceivable that millions will replace these sets with 3D equipment. Sooner than any of us would like to imagine, the 2D HDTV sets purchased over the last few years will begin to find their way into basements, attics, or, bar that, landfills, where they will join the cathode ray tube receivers they themselves only recently superseded in leeching toxic substances into the soil. While many big-name exhibitors dedicated a corner of their pavilions to showcasing their “green” initiatives, few had much to say about their industry’s responsibility for the global e-waste catastrophe. And yet it is at the CES that the lusted-after Black Friday “door busters” of the just-concluded holiday season begin their rapid metamorphosis into the e-waste of tomorrow.

At the CES 3D’s biggest proponents promised that converters will insure backward compatibility with 2D sets. But history tells us that by design such devices seldom satisfactorily bridge the gaps separating the successive generations of media technologies. In fact, in recent years consumer electronics manufacturers, and game console manufacturers in particular, have gone out of their way to frame backward compatibility as a costly and unnecessary impediment to technological progress, and have engineered their innovations so as to be backward incompatible with their predecessors. Obsolescence comes faster now, and is less negotiable, than ever before in the past. It is no longer simply a corollary of fashion, but is enforced by deliberate hardware and software incompatibilities or even government decree, as was the case with the United States’ recently-concluded conversion to digital television. The CES is where the consumer electronics industry’s participants ritually reaffirm to themselves, their partners, and consumers their faith in the economic and spiritual value of planned obsolescence. It is a celebration of disposability as a precondition of the possibility of renewal, and of waste as the guarantor of progress.

Max Dawson is an Assistant Professor at Northwestern University, where he teaches in the Department of Radio, Television & Film. His essays on television technology and form appear in the journals Technology and Culture and Convergence, and in the edited collections American Thought and Culture in the Twenty-First Century (Columbia University Press, 2008) and Television as Digital Media (Duke University Press, 2011).

Image Credits:
1. The 2010 International Consumer Electronics Show
2. Author Image
3. Author Image
4. The Intel Infoscape
5. Author Image
6. Author Image
7. Author Image

1. Shapiro’s opening convocation is available at http://www.cesweb.org/docs/GaryShapiroOpeningKeynote.pdf
2. That said, reminders of the recession were never far away. Las Vegas’ unemployment rate hovered around 13 per cent for most of 2009, and the city’s once-booming commercial construction industry is at this very moment grinding to a halt. Anyone who took a cab during the show undoubtedly heard stories from their driver about the hotel vacancies, the empty restaurants and shopping malls, the cancelled conventions, and their impact on the local tourism economy.
3. http://hd.engadget.com/2010/01/21/3d-stole-the-show-at-ces-2010/
4. http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid= 114483

Cellphone Cozy

In the fall, I taught one of my favorite courses, a small undergraduate lecture/discussion course on cultural studies of sound technologies and popular music.1 The goal of the course is to challenge students to think critically about the devices and acoustics they take for granted, such as telephones and portable music players, and to foster their analytical skills when listening to hip hop or watching videos or singing karaoke. Among my agendas for this course is to train them to think historically about what are, in the grand scheme of things, relatively recent innovations in sound recording and telecommunications. I had taught a version of the course once before, two year earlier. What struck me this time around was that it wasn’t just the students who needed to take the long view, but that I also needed to take a short view and recognize how quickly the uses and meanings of some technologies have shifted. I often identify as a proponent of old media, but I quickly came to recognize how differently students now relate to audio devices and aesthetics just two years later. Below, I offer some observations about what struck me as significant shifts in the ways undergraduates today understand the sonic scene.2

Tangible music collection

The students’ first writing assignment was a relatively basic one: chronicle the audio technologies they use and reflect upon how those devices or behaviors have changed over time. The two recurring comments that stood out among the papers both related to music and might be seen as effects of the fact that their consumption of music has been almost entirely during the period of peer-to-peer sharing and digital playlists. Keep in mind, Napster debuted more than a decade ago. (Feel free to feel old.) First, students no longer describe their music collections in terms of the number of CDs they own. Instead, they describe their music collections in terms of gigabytes. This suggests a shift in orientation away from albums as a unit of measurement, or even songs, which might make more sense in the age of single-song downloads. Instead, tracks have become largely disintegrated from albums when they have been downloaded, and students download a broad swath of music in a pattern of accumulation and grazing to see what they like. Their music libraries, then, are measured by how much memory their iPods need in order to make all the tracks accessible. This suggests to me a major reconceptualization of music as data, rather than music as the specific expression of particular artists or part of a larger coherent work. Secondarily, students reported having less of an investment in particular musicians because they tend to listen to different artists on a song-by-song basis. They may identify as fans of one or two groups, but by and large their tastes are vary between genres and performers—again an effect they attributed to downloading a large and largely undifferentiated mass of song files. I was also struck, the first day of class, that more students introduced themselves as liking Led Zeppelin than hip hop.

Cellphones off, please

In what is perhaps my most sadistic assignment, I asked my students to go 24 hours without using a phone for any purpose—not just talking and texting, but also using GPS or alarm clock or music player functions or any other apps. The students were required to write and reflect upon their deprivation, to interrogate what I presumed to be their dependence upon the technology as well as the ways not using the phone changed their sense of social relations and perceptions of time passing. I also gave the students a caveat, knowing some of them would fail the test: if they broke down and used their phones, interrogate why they felt it necessary. The biggest change from two years prior was that not only has texting replaced talking as the students’ primary communicative mode, but a surprising number of students said that they activity avoided talking to their friends. Almost every student claimed that cell phones made them feel “connected”—an abstraction that they all seemed reluctant to question—but they also indicated, paradoxically, that they no longer actually wanted to engage in conversation. Many of the students were given their first phones by their parents during middle school or high school so that the parents could always find out where they were; this kind of protective parenting seems to have created a culture wherein almost all the students continue to use their phones to call their parents every single day. (Call me old fashioned, but I thought part of the appeal of college was becoming an independent adult.) Some of the students expressed near-spiritual epiphanies by turning their phones off, but many more simply refused to experience disconnection. In one case, a student started his 24-hour experiment at the beginning of his Spanish class and made it all of 50 minutes before Googling a verb conjugation on his iPhone; in other words, he didn’t even make it through a single class period and didn’t try again.

Sheet music for “Kissing Papa Through the Telephone” (1898)

In my lecture about the cultural constructions of telephones, including their gendered connotations and the ways adoption deviated from their inventor’s imagined uses, I talk about early popular songs (and their sheet music illustrations) that attempted to narrate and make sense of telephones: the fantasmatic strangeness of hearing voices detached from bodies and the new romantic intimacies of sweet talk without chaperones. What is striking is that so much of recent music does much the same: popular songs regularly reference cell phones as part of our daily lives and romantic intrigues (or betrayals). For example, listen to Soulja Boy’s “Kiss Me Thru the Phone” or Lady Gaga and Beyoncé’s “Telephone.” In my favorite assignment for the class, students had to make mix CDs and write liner notes for tracks that commented upon audio technologies, the music industry, practices of listening, or self-reflexive musical form. (The first day, a student asked what liner notes were, further indicating a dissociation of music form tangible media and their paratexual elements such as album covers, printed lyrics, or production data.) The students found a number of songs that made connections between popular music forms and commentary on the sounds and technologies that pervade our world: from the obscure 1970s love song “Rings” by Lobo to Daft Punk’s commentary “Technologic” to Pogo’s hyper mixes of dialogue sampled from Disney films (my favorite being “Alice” with snippets of Alice in Wonderland) to Britney Spears’ catchy (though admittedly tacky) ode to aural sex, “Phonography.” The assignment not only forces the students to think differently about the music they already listen to, but it also gives me a sense of their listening tastes. One of the challenges of teaching popular culture, of course, is keeping up with the times and knowing which songs or TV shows or films actually resonate. In the age of downloading, YouTube, and hundreds of cable channels, it’s even more difficult to predict. But that’s part of the pleasure of teaching popular culture and new technologies.

Image Credits:

1. Cellphone cozy
2. Tangible music collection
3. Cellphones off, please
4. Sheet music for “Kissing Papa Through the Telephone” (1898)

Please feel free to comment.

1. Course website available online at: https://eee.uci.edu/09f/26240/home.html
2. Although the course’s appeal to audiophiles skewed enrollment just a bit to attract a few more straight white male students than I typically have, the class of 35 students had an even gender balance and a diverse mix of white, Asian/Asian-American, and Latino students. UC Irvine is by far the most diverse university at which I have taught.

“It’s getting late early.” - Yogi Berra1

A few weeks ago while discussing search engines and knowledge organization with my undergrads I made a rather startling discovery. During the framing moments of our conversation, wanting to be able to draw comparisons between different classification systems, I asked the group how many of them had used a card catalog. Then, a strange thing happened. No, it was not the fact that only a handful ever had — this I suspected — but rather that a few asked, “What is a card catalog?” A bit taken aback, I started to explain, to which one student responded, “Oh, I have seen them in old movies.” (Thanks to Ghostbusters my explanation was made a bit easier.) And so here is my concern, in the same way that I argued the issue is not “media,” I want to make the more important claim that what we are talking about here is not “new,” and the continued use of the term “new” is at best less than rigorous, and at worst dangerous.

As the “card catalog” example suggests, there is certainly not anything “new” about using computers to organize information or the ubiquitous Google search box. I have been teaching “digital stuff” for about eight years now and in those eight years I have noted a rather significant shift. While it used to be the case that when we would discuss the internet, social media, and the digital network, students would approach it with a certain lack of familiarity — “What is this strange object before us?” Now they simply take it in stride. There is nothing particularly strange/odd or even noteworthy to many of them about the practice of having a Facebook page. (Indeed this is the second semester in a row where nearly all of my students have a Facebook page.) I used to approach teaching these matters as the question of looking at the strange and contextualizing it in terms of the familiar. I now find that my job is to take the familiar and make it strange, or as Siva Vaidhyanathan observed during an online discussion about this issue, “I use the ‘I’m teaching fish about the ocean’ perspective. I try to make it weird again.”2

I do not mean here to suggest all of that nonsense about digital natives versus non-digital natives; indeed I am actually suggesting something quite the opposite: students are not digital natives who possess some unique set of skills whereby they can magically manipulate the network and gadgets to do whatever they want with outstanding acumen, rather that students are for the large part unreflective about the way they use these network technologies, and what is more are unreflective about the ways in which their use (or our use) has already been historically determined and shaped, an unreflective response which gives up power and control over to these systems.

And so this is my problem with the word, “new.” It suggests that what is happening, the profound shift from a social and cultural structure whose primary form of archivization is analog to one which is digitally networked has not already been significantly shaped by a past. In the first instance as Armand Mattelart convincingly argues, the networking of the world has a longer historical trajectory than simply the last 20 years.3 But secondly, and perhaps more importantly, the social customs, cultural norms, and legal institutions which have come to shape the way that we are using the digital network are not particularly new, and are by the day becoming increasingly more established and codified. Back in the days of Amiga and OS/2 you might have been able to convince me that there was something new going on, but when we are now at the point where three players dominate the Operating System market, with Microsoft owning 90% share, we are no longer at the moment of the new, we are at the moment of the historically established. When Facebook has 350 million plus active users it is no longer a cultural outlier, it is the norm.

The problem with the word “new” is it tends to convey a sense of the different, a recent change, as in, “Do you like my new haircut?” as opposed to the already established and significantly integrated. The internet has been around since the 1960s; there is nothing “new” about it. And, even if one is talking about the internet as widely used and publicly available, the timeline is at least ten years. Now ten years might seem “new” in the world of academia where any literature written after 1900 is considered contemporary, but in the cultural, legal, and social realms, ten years is at least two generations.

Treating the digital network as “new” allows us to ignore it or treat is at less than critical, yet to be determined, or less than urgent, when in fact precisely the opposite is true. These digital networked technologies have so thoroughly penetrated our economic, legal, and social structures that they now form the basis of much of what we do. After the invention of the printing press it took at least a hundred years, much longer in many cases, for the norms of printing press culture to develop (pagination, title pages, copyright laws, reading practices). In this sense the printing press remained a new technology for a long time. The window for negotiating the norms of printing press culture in this respect stayed open quite a while4, but in the case of the digital network that window is much shorter and our unreflexive use of the term “new” carries the unfortunate consequence of deceiving us into believing that we have much more time than we actually do. These “new media” aren’t new; they are central and a fundamental part of our cultural, legal, and social institutions. It is time we started treating them as such.

Image Credits:
1. Card catalog
2. Apple II
3. Arpanet
4. Facebook

Please feel free to comment.

1. Although this quote is often attributed to Yogi Berra, what he actually said was, “It gets late early out there.”
2. This was said as part of a discussion on Twitter about the issue of teaching undergraduates. @sivavaid
3. Armand Mattelart, Networking the World, 1794-2000. University of Minnesota Press. 2000.
4. For a thorough examination of this history see Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book. University of Chicago. 2000.

When we committed to write about Avatar several months ago, we had no idea that it would be the most profitable movie ever.1. The stratospheric costs of the film’s production set a very high bar for profitability. This film, which ultra-auteur James Cameron imagined 1975 but could not make until CG technology evolved to create this particular artificial world, both profits from and critiques technology. And in order to do this, it focuses on bodies–non-normative, genomically identifiable, gendered bodies. Annalee Newitz points out in “When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like Avatar” that the film’s plot revisits and revises of the narrative of going native, leading many, including television’s South Park, to deride it as “Dancing with Smurfs.”

Clearly, Avatar lends itself to a critique of empire, yet has not yet been read in terms of its most striking visual trope, exploited in the trailer: disability. It is precisely because gender and disability are persistently addressed in the film but not in commentary about the film that we know how central it is. As Cameron said in his interview with Newsweek this January, “It’s the Story, Stupid,” his attempts to “sell” the movie were far more successful when the trailers depicted Jake Sully’s disabled body than when they focused on depicting the lush landscape and ultra-expensive “effects”. Cameron claims that the second trailer emphasized “story” or narrative, a feature that even the most effects-driven films must have (and a feature that keeps them well within the genre of narrative film rather than spectacle, as most IMAX films have been) and that the film’s success is ultimately due to this.

Though technology can fix many things in Pandora and in our world, it still apparently cannot or rather chooses not to fix human bodies. This is of great note in a film that both displays and is about the transcendent qualities of CGI and biotechnology. When Jack Sully transmits his consciousness into the hybrid Na’avi body that he eventually comes to occupy permanently, a world of limits is evoked. We can see that the bias against disabled people is exactly the same in the future as it is at present–one passing soldier refers to Sully as “meals on wheels” and another replies “that’s just wrong,” apparently refering to Sully’s very presence on Pandora.2 Sully’s spinal injury is repairable, but he can’t afford it. However, as we see during the avatar-training scenes, the disabled body is viewed as “waste” that a thrifty military industrial complex can recoup. Disposable military bodies, often bodies of color in this film, are continually sacrificed: Sully is given the ability to acquire a prosthetic alien-soldier body not as compensation for his disability, but in spite of it–his genomic capital as the identical twin to his scientist-brother makes him the only possible match for the cloned Na’avi body, a technology far more expensive and precious than his own defective body.

The film’s tag line “I see you” points both to the film’s innovative technological apparatus, the glasses and screen and images that let us see like never before, and to the possibility of empathy…towards aliens. What does it mean that, while it’s possible in Avatar to see a critique of both gender and disability, this is not what critics seem to be “seeing”? The disabled body in this spectacular film is the sole spectacle we are meant to look away from, the blind spot in this visual field which otherwise seems to invite immersion.

While Jake’s masculinity is called into question via these disability hazing rituals, Avatar is constructed specifically for a heterosexual male fantasy of penetration–the question is whether the film’s revisions to this structure are decorative or substantial. The movie first hyper-masculinizes Jake, who bursts into his re-born ability in a boyish romp across the avatar base, but then pursues dual tracks of developing his violence-capable masculinity and at the same time steadily feminizing him. He learns not to stab Gaia with an improvised flaming spear, but instead to engage nature through a collaborative hairstyling.

This interbraiding is probably not an intentional homage to the performance artists Marina Abromovic and Ulay, who in Relation in Time (1977) sat for 17 hours with their hair braided together, though this lengthy film does give extended consideration both to asymmetrical warfare (involving both male and female warriors) and to an exploration of spiritual connection with the world which is figured as material–that is, as scientifically observable.

One obvious visual pleasure offered up by Avatar is the spectacle of the giant, blue-skinned nearly nude Neytiri; in an interview with Playboy Cameron acknowledged (or bragged) about the centrality of her “smoking hot” body to the picture: “Right from the beginning I said, ‘She’s got to have tits,’ even though that makes no sense because her race, the Na’vi, aren’t placental mammals.” However, Cameron’s feminist sensibility must be acknowledged, and the violent maternal figures played by Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2 (1991) and originally by Weaver in Aliens (1986) are central to the pleasure of those narratives. Cameron’s feminism, however, appears both narrow and generalized to the point of meaninglessness in Avatar.

Action films now seem either conscientious or trendy about including women capable of violence, as evidenced by the Lord of the Rings films’ efforts to beef up the roles of Liv Tyler and Miranda Otto. Here, while Weaver appears in a kind of homage to both her earlier role with Cameron and to her characterization of Diane Fossey in Gorillas in the Mist, Michelle Rodriguez essentially reprises her role from Aliens as a butch marine with a penchant for salty tag-line dialogue (and has her own moment of going native when she wears a discreet swoosh of war paint as she pilots her helicopter into battle against the human mercenaries). The film is full of gestures of equality and showcases female combat and leadership, yet those touches should not obscure how deeply the narrative is organized by gender. For example, the male Na’avi understand weapons, and the women understand the network.

The planet’s network-culture decides what peripherals or hardware can interface with each other; one could say that it organizes both ability and gender. It regulates what organ can plug into what port or orifice; echoing the technological machine culture of the military industrial complex, the planet’s animals are the peripherals or hardware that the natives employ as prostheses. The culture of positivist digital technology development, exemplified by Avatar’s telegenic, Minority Report-style interactive displays and 3-d imaging, echoed in the film’s exhibition itself, is contrasted with the earthy pleasures to be had from the groovy eco-spirtuality of the “Gaia Hypothosis,” in which the natural world is considered as a single living organism.

Near the end of the film, after the big battle has, in effect, been won, Colonel Miles Quaritch, wearing a mecha-suit, a metal prosthetic soldier body (very similar to the suit Sigourney Weaver wears at the end of the Aliens) goes to find Jake Sully for a form of personal revenge. This battle is fought between a stereotypically virile hyper-masculine marine who controls his mechanical body physically, and a biological being, “wet ware,” controlled by a disabled, feminized body so vulnerable that it cannot reach its own breathing machine. Ultimately, Neytiri joins the fight, bringing a third term to this hard body / soft body dichotomy. She is a real being. Her body is visually but not ontologically like Jake Sully’s avatar body. The thanator, a violent and uncontrollable animal that submits to her for the purpose of this fight, signifies the seamless and intuitive connection with “nature” that crunchy feminism has often attributed to women. Neytiri and her mount disrupt the oedipal conflict between two men and their prostheses.

Neytiri is then seen cradling Jake’s tiny, frail human body. While this scene replays–with genders reversed–the scene in which a giant avatar version of Jake Sully cradles a tiny dying human version of Grace Augustine, it also has some significant ramifications for our concerns with gender and disability. The scene is an odd pieta, but rather than the Virgin Mary cradling the dying Christ, we see powerful, authentic female nature nurturing the damaged vestige of masculine humanity. Here Cameron may for the first time in the film go beyond his earlier butch feminist heroines to offer a queerer formation of gender and ability.

It’s easy to bash Avatar. In fact, the proliferation of reviews in the popular press that do a good approximation of an academic critique of colonialism leads us to wonder how this critique came to be part of popular culture. So common is the “Dances with Smurfs” critique that when someone forcefully and coherently takes a contrary view it’s worth paying attention–as with the argument made by Metafilter user Pastabagel, who asserts that “the plot is completely predictable, not because you’ve seen it before, because you actually haven’t. Avatar differs from the plot of every single one of those archetypical films in one extremely important way - the forces of civilization/progress/technology lose.” Whether this defeat is either unique or transformative might be debated, but this argument usefully demonstrates our faith in science fiction’s ability to get us beyond the trap of our own historical postcolonial moment. It seems, however, that our current ideologies of gender and disability are harder for the film to transcend.

In the final scene of the film, then, we find Scully laid at the foot of Tree of Souls in order to transfer his “soul” from his human body to his avatar/golem. If Avatar suffers from the same traps of all the nativist fantasies that have preceded it, both filmic and literary, in this fantasy the protaganist must literally die (just as humanity has been literally defeated). In order to occupy a place in the world of the Na’avi “others”, Jake Sully must fully relinquish this human form. There will be no going back. While this could be seen as another Christian reference (this time to the Resurrection), it is also a fantasy of being able to live in virtuality, leaving our physical bodies, and their political baggage, behind.

As media critics, we have a responsibility not just to bash Avatar, but to come to terms with its remarkable popularity, which has occurred either because or in spite of the ease with which the film can be critiqued for its virtual colonialism. Avatar is popular because it provides a good deal of spectatorial pleasure to a relatively diverse audience, pleasure that for some has turned into depression as they realize that Pandora is an artificial world, and not one they can enter at will. It’s no wonder that some audiences are said to experience such powerful post-Avatar blues, a nostalgia for an entirely artificial place. The film gives us a navigable-looking virtual world (modeled after the groovy visual style of Roger Dean, a favorite of the stoner set from the 70s) and it’s not surprising that audiences are disappointed that they can’t live there (without dying first). And its narratives about transcending or “losing” the defective bodies resonates particularly strongly in the age of reality programming such as The World’s Biggest Loser and Extreme Makeover.

Avatar manages to bring together spectators that like war movies with spectators that like peace movies. It’s of equal interest to adults and to children. It offers points of identification for folks who are diversely positioned by race and by gender. Can we derive any reasonably hopeful message from this popularity? Is there any chance that these differently positioned audiences are talking to each other about the issues raised in the film? Or are we simply seeing the movie side by side, taking away our separate messages, and going home changed only by the weight we gained from our buttered popcorn and twizzlers? The centrality of disabillity and gender in the film’s narrative is easily hidden within its lush CGI-generated landscape–a visual achievement which is its most powerful agent and advertisement–yet which grounds it back in the body, just where the viewer finds herself when she takes off her 3-D glasses.

Image Credits:
1. Avatar movie poster
2. Jake Sully, the wheel-chair using hero of Avatar
3. Na’avi and Jake
4. Thanator attacks Sully

1. see Acland, “Avatar as Technological Tentpole,” http://flowtv.org/?p=4724
2. Avatar, p8–the screenplay is available at http://www.foxscreenings.com/media/pdf/JamesCameronAVATAR.pdf

Let the night of ABC programming that took place on January 4th, 2010 go down in history as the most profound staging of the relation between literal and figurative meaning since Paul De Man’s deconstruction of rhetoric in the 1979 Allegories of Reading. Perhaps it was something in the air—and I’m referring here to The Bachelor: On the Wings of Love, the first show of ABC’s prime-time lineup, and the point from which all of the rhetorical intrigue took off. If the titular pun on the newest bachelor’s profession as a pilot did not immediately register as the cue for a rim-shot, the poetic stylings of the ladies hoping join him “in the cockpit”—as more than one blushing contestant put it—would clarify any confusion.1 Perhaps most memorably, a Cambodian hopeful named Channy used the beauty of her native language to assure the bachelor that he “could land [his] plane on [her] landing strip anytime.” Indeed, De Man may have been the first to argue that figurative language grounds our sense of both literal meaning and ontological reference to an extent where “it matters little whether we call the inside of the box [of language] the content or form, the outside the meaning or appearance,” but it was surely Channy whose reference to a decidedly non-linguistic box brought the deepest conceptual implications of this argument into the profanity of material existence.2

And yet, Channy’s bid to impress The Bachelor would not mark the last invocation of such literal and figurative boxes on ABC that night; nor would The Bachelor: On the Wings of Love mark the high-point of the evening’s rhetorical lessons. On the contrary, ABC had even more advanced material planned for the evening than a much-hyped franchise debut: the special broadcast of a new dating show pilot, produced by Endemol, called Conveyor Belt of Love. Much as the title suggests, the show presents itself as a campy demystification of The Bachelor’s romantic rhetoric: in the course of an hour, thirty men lined up on a conveyor belt pass before the eyes of five single women. In a flagrant violation of industrial principles of efficiency, though, the belt pauses for 60 seconds while each man does all he can to convince one of the women to invite him into her box—a feature of the mise-en-scene that inspired fits of giggles whenever a contestant shouted “I want him in my box!”—unless and until a more appealing man rolls by and takes his place there. The last men standing get a date.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the show’s bravado display of high-concept low-humor cultivated considerably more rhetorical ardor than The Bachelor in the television trades and the blogosphere. In fact, I am confident that no other programming event in the history of television—with the possible exception of Bill Clinton’s testimony on the Lewinsky affair—has ever inspired so many TV critics to entertain the vagaries of linguistic reference. When ABC announced the show in early December, for instance, the website TV Squad published an article called “ABC’s Conveyor Belt of Love Will Literally Treat People Like Meat,” which began with the appropriately De Manian declaration, “ABC has officially found a way to turn reality dating shows into a literal metaphor.”3 By the time the show finally aired a month later, it was clear that even the most wizened assessments of the show would be conveyed with the same rhetorical excess that defined the evening’s programming itself. “After ABC’s new Bachelor takes flight tonight,” wrote another giddy reviewer, “stay tuned for a reality dating show that really keeps it moving. Literally.” 4 Several reviews even went so far as to include stock-photography scenes of industrial grade meat portions plopped side-by-side on a conveyor belt. 5

As this last flourish illustrates particularly well, it was the show’s employment of an actual conveyor belt that inspired so much talk of literalism. And it was the apparent matter-of-factness of this flourish that produced an apparently uniform interpretation of the show as a metaphor for the industrial production of contemporary television programming, on the one hand, and the reality dating show’s commodification of bodies, love, and romance on the other. Appropriately enough, this interpretation also has the quality of obviousness that defines the literal as such—especially when one recalls that the show’s triumphantly literal title itself appropriates the proven marketing formula of another mainstream exploitation hit, the illustrious Snakes on a Plane (2006). And yet, if we take seriously the proposition of a “literal metaphor” that these readings both cite and enact, then we must also recognize that an industrialist reading of the show depends on a rhetorical tautology for its sense of matter-of-factness: one “literal” conveyor belt must stand in metaphorically for another “literal” conveyor belt. Or rather, the conveyor belt must serve at once as figure and ground, trope and referent for the material base of industrial production.

It is here that De Man’s deconstruction of linguistic boxes proves especially instructive for thinking through the rhetorical excess of all these other boxes—the gendered language of constrained transgression that defined one particular night of ABC reality, to be sure, but also the industrialized language of materialism that generally defines how we think about the “real” logics of production and reproduction organized by the boxes in our living rooms. For indeed, De Man’s objection to the metaphor of the box for thinking of language rests on his argument that the literal “ground” of the discourse of reason always already depends for its referential stability on an aesthetic rationalization of the stylistic excesses that, ironically, undo this stability as well. Put another way, the aesthetic dimension of language plays a constitutive role in producing the discursive ground that we point to when we call something true or real. Accordingly, if we want to speak comfortably of economic rationalization or a material “base” for aesthetic affects, then we must ignore the history of irrational tropes that found the philosophical justifications for these seemingly transparent discourses of ontological truth and substance. De Man’s conception of rhetoric thus requires that we recognize the literal and figurative foundation for the dominant Marxist theory of production—which is to say, the “base” of industrial relations—itself depends for its foundational and even literal quality on the very metaphor of foundationalness that designates it. And as Ernesto Laclau has argued, we must thus begin to think not simply of the ways in which material relations produce aesthetic modes of existence, but also of the ways in which aesthetic relations, and style in general, produce the discursive ground on which the ontological production of social and political materiality takes place as such.6

In the case of Conveyor Belt of Love, for example, we might recognize that if the imagery of mass-production works with such transparent uniformity as a high-concept sight-gag about popular media, it is only because this imagery holds such a time-honored place in the rhetorical repertoire of cultural theory and criticism. Or rather, it is because the aesthetic traits of what Adorno and Horkheimer so memorably described as The Culture Industry also furnish the sense of a transparent, rational, and uniform order that we attribute (perhaps rather willfully) to industrial production. On this point it is instructive to recall how Adorno describes the aesthetic of the variety act in “The Schema of Mass Culture”—an essay that precedes The Dialectic of Enlightenment by three years. Reflecting on the endless presentation of different attractions promised by continuous vaudeville, he wryly concludes that variety in fact “already represented the magical repetition of the industrial procedure in which the selfsame is reproduced in time—the very allegory of high capitalism.”7

Adorno’s choice of imagery here is interesting enough as another instance where the aesthetic figure of total production helps constitute the origin of industrial materiality that seems to ground it. And yet, if we return once more to the eponymous Conveyor Belt of Love, his reference to variety theater also helps clarify the potential rewards of re-thinking the show’s aesthetic beyond the confines of a techno-industrial critical economy. After all, if we do not automatically accept the conveyor belt as a transparent metaphor for the rationalized procedures of the industrial assembly line, then another set of metaphors comes into view—one closer to Adorno’s, but with very different critical, theoretical, and methodological implications for how we might think about the ontological ground of television “production”. Indeed, if we take the object “conveyor belt” seriously as an element of style, then the former becomes recognizable not just a conveyor belt, but also a figure of the “serial assembly” of “timed units” that Raymond Williams dubbed television “flow,” and the organic movement of water and time whose image it summons; not just televisual “flow”, but a figure of the presentational aesthetic that, as Williams also observes, connects the trope of flow to the formal structure of popular variety theater; and not just the formal conceit of “popular” variety theater that so struck Adorno, but also the presentational aesthetic that marks both the taxonomic orders of natural science and the rotating display cases of the early modern department stores where variety shows first began. More simply put, the Conveyor Belt of Love becomes recognizable not just as another metaphor for mass-production, but a fortiori, as a rhetorical condensation of the excessive figurative relation that it shares with the spectacular aesthetic of the variety show, the ontological aesthetic of television technology, and the evidentiary aesthetic of both natural and man-made taxonomies of material plenitude. And while this way of seeing the show may at first sound like an exercise in rhetorical excess itself, it in fact opens up some very provocative ways of re-thinking the claim to transparency and totality that the figure at the heart of this excess makes. Perhaps most importantly, it draws our attention to the resemblance between the trope on spectacular display here—a trope of unity or continuity articulated through the presentation of difference—with the “equivalential chain” of differences that Ernesto Laclau has described as the aesthetic condition of all hegemonic discourse.8 We might thus begin to think of the show’s aesthetic as a staging of the figure through which any particular set of differences can be generalized as an ontological whole—nothing more or less than a spectacular object lesson in the art of hegemonic production. 9

To put matters this way is not to suggest that the conditions of industrial production are irrelevant to television aesthetics, or that we can ignore the economic motivations for television’s logics. It is simply to suggest that we can only understand the full complexity of these logics if we recognize that they do not define the ontological ground of what or how television produces as discursive forms of existence. More to the point, it is to suggest that we might see the “logics” of television in altogether new ways if we begin to explore how the materiality of television aesthetics—the stylistic ground of the television image itself—also works to “produce” the ontological affects that define our social and political reality. In turn, we might also begin to reconsider our sense of what constitutes the logical, unadorned, and indeed transparent “ground” of the industrial “base”—not to mention the methodologies to which we attribute a “material” or “materialist” value in relation to our thinking of it. After all, we have long insisted that television is not simply a “toaster oven with pictures.” Why treat it like a box?

Image Credits:

1. The Bachelor: On the Wings of Love
2. Sixty Seconds of Fame
3. Men in Boxes
4. Judgment Time

Please feel free to comment.

1. It should also be noted that the parodic schmaltziness of The Bachelor: On the Wings of Love is hardly restricted to the linguistic. A pillow-shot repeated throughout the first episode shows a lone airplane banking off the clouds of a hot-pink and orange sunset while Jeffrey Osborne’s eighties hit “On the Wings of Love” plays.
2. Paul De Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 5.
3. Danny Gallagher, “ABC’s Conveyor Belt of Love Will Literally Treat People Like Meat,” http://www.tvsquad.com/2009/12/09/abcs-conveyor-belt-of-love-will-literally-treat-people-like-mea/, 9 December 2009.
4. Matt Webb Mitovich, “Conveyor Belt of Love: Wild Show’s Secrets Revealed!” http://www.fancast.com/blogs/2010/tv-news/conveyor-belt-of-love-wild-shows-secrets-revealed/, 4 January 2010.
5. In addition to the TV Squad review cited above, see (for just one example): Michael Schneider, “ABC Finds Conveyor Belt of Love: Speed-Dating Reality Special to Air in January,” Variety, 9 December 2009. http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118012472.html?categoryid=14&cs=1.
6. For Laclau’s most sustained discussion of the role that De Man’s conception of rhetoric plays in the ontological production of social relations, see Ernesto Laclau, “The Politics of Rhetoric,” in Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 229-253.
7. Theodore Adorno, “The Schema of Mass Culture,” in The Culture Industry, ed. J.M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 1991), 70.
8. See Ernesto Laclau, “Why Do Empty Signifiers Matter to Politics?” in Emancipation(s) (London: Verso, 1996).
9. I explore this proposition at much greater length in my dissertation, “Variety, or the Spectacular Aesthetics of American Liberal Democracy” (Ph.D. Diss, Northwestern, 2007), and a book manuscript that I am currently adapting from it.

Allan King’s “actuality drama” about the life of an ordinary couple, A Married Couple, is 40. In the simplest terms, A Married Couple observes the relationship of a white, middle class couple in mid-life (he is 40, she is 30) with a young family. They wrestle with their intimacy and simultaneously with social gender roles in the nuclear family. Billy works in advertising; Antoinette works in the home. In place of plot, the film offers a compelling series of set pieces in which repetitious emotional scripts are enacted. Although the couple seems unhappy with the marriage most of the time, and many of the scenes are of fighting, they also seem ill equipped to resolve their difficulties. Or, put differently, the viewer is invited to see that awareness and even insight about problems doesn’t necessarily lead to change.

70 hours of footage shot over ten weeks was edited down to just over 96 minutes. Even those 70 hours represent but a fragment of the eight years Billy and Antoinette had spent together by the time the film was shot in the summer of 1968. Rather than see the film as a transparent window onto the Edwards’ relationship, King astutely labelled the film more generically as about a particular kind of relationship—marriage—and frankly acknowledged the effect of both camera and editor on the everyday performances filmed. As King put it, “One has to be very, very clear. Billy and Antoinette in the film are not Billy and Antoinette Edwards, the couple who exist and live at 323 Rushton Road. They are characters, images on celluloid in a film drama. To say that they are in any other sense true, other than being true to our experience of the world and people we have known and ourselves, is philosophical nonsense. There is no way ninety minutes in a film of Billy and Antoinette can be the same as the actual real life of Billy and Antoinette.”1

A Married Couple had an impact on the growing area of non-fiction drama and was cited as an inspiration by Craig Gilbert, producer of An American Family, itself often credited with being an inspiration for reality TV.2 Today, in an era characterized by the dominance of reality-based programming, the importance of the film as a pioneer in mobilizing observational media in personal spaces is inarguable. Yet, as time passes, the originality and insight of A Married Couple comes into even greater focus.

Although the idea of recording and exposing everyday life is arguably a foundational part of the documentary impulse, a corrective to the artificial fantasy of mainstream fiction perhaps, King’s version was entirely of its moment. In the late 1960s, traditional domestic and cinematic forms were both, in different ways, being brought under scrutiny. King’s concept of using observational documentary to explore the changing experience of the nuclear family was extremely timely. But its interactive form is perhaps its greatest innovation. The film is connected at once to practices of action therapy and avant-garde theatre.

Psychodrama’s emphasis on group interaction and “relationship-based psychotherapy” became a significant influence on the post-war self-help movement.3 According to this theory, acting out became a way of bringing the unconscious to the surface. At the same time as the theatrical was becoming a popular cultural idiom, practitioners of experimental and avant-garde theatre were questioning the conventions of the stage. The sentiment of avant-garde theatre of this period can be encapsulated by the following question: “How do we know we are watching theatre and not simply observing the world around us?” For many artists experimenting with theatrical practice, the answer was to place emphasis on the frame itself as the technology that created spectator and theatrical event alike. Groups such as the Living Theatre brought these questions to the fore, attempting to bring about revolutions in perception, which could be brought to bear outside of the theatrical experience. If perceptual patterns reinforced social norms—indeed were social norms—then interrupting perception at the artistic level could have an effect on other social regulations. The avant-garde’s ideas about the blurring of lines between art and life influenced the 1960s counterculture’s even looser ideas about be-ins and happenings.

Although not usually thought about in this context, observational cinema emerged in the same period and shared some features with post-war avant-garde theatrical theory and therapeutic discourse alike. Its lightweight hand-held cameras and tape-recorders were developed in order to allow for the capture of uncontrolled, spontaneous situations. Theatre could now take place anywhere. The sense of “being there” was an essential part of what lent this kind of filmmaking its sense of authenticity. Not only was the emphasis on authentic performance, but, as in the theatrical avant-garde, the observational cinema frame is clearly accentuated.

There was, on the part of some observational filmmakers, and likely film subjects as well, a direct engagement with the discourses of therapy. Ever since anthropologist-filmmaker Jean Rouch and sociologist Edgar Morin had encouraged people to talk in the presence of the camera in Chronique d’une été (1961), observational filmmakers had been open to the role of camera as provocateur. What was being captured on film were precisely the kinds of heightened performances the camera could elicit. While American observational filmmaking tended to emphasize public performance, another strain, including King’s, focussed on the private realm and the need for intimate communication and personal self-reflection. For this strand of filmmaking truth has a psychoanalytic resonance “because of the way the camera brings to the surface what is normally hidden or repressed in the subject’s social personality.”4 This psychological or therapeutic understanding was closely related to the relationship of the filmmaker to film subject. In a sense both were equally exposed and the interaction had to be an ethical one predicated on mutual trust.

Reality-based media are now central in mainstream culture, of course. Their production and analysis would certainly be enriched by attention to historical predecessors such as A Married Couple. For instance, today, with a preponderance of reality-based programming on television, aspects of the idea of everyday performance have become commonplace. The fact of ordinary people performing for the camera has become an increasingly common aspect of both everyday amateur media usage and large-scale entertainment. Questions of authenticity are routinely invoked. Yet the social analysis mobilized by 1960s practitioners and theorists of observation, performance and theatricality is often lost. Frequently, truth is conflated with the technological means of reproduction. The avant-garde idea of using media experimentation to challenge social norms and frameworks of perception is lost. Gone too are ideas of the heightening of experience in front of a camera to enhance participant insight. If anything, today’s reality television naturalizes rather than questions the Social Darwinism of competitive capitalism and the governmentalized social context of neoliberalism that it exposes.5

The proliferation of reality-based TV today makes a re-examination of A Married Couple all the more astonishing. How might reality TV question the social order rather than reproducing it? How might film and videomakers work with their subjects to craft interactive hybrids such as the “actuality drama”? King, who died last year, said: “I thought it would be fascinating and illuminating to stay with the couple and observe… Most particularly, I was concerned with a marriage in crisis and wanted to observe the kinds of ways in which a couple misperceive each other and carry into the relationship anxieties, childhood patterns, all the things that make up one’s own personality and character. But these inevitably distort the other person and make true intimacy or true connection difficult. … It puzzled me that people always seemed to get less from marriage than they wanted.”6

Four decades on, A Married Couple still shows how reality-based media might operate to propose questions and spark engagement from participants and viewers alike.

Image Credits:

1. A Married Couple
2. A Marriage in crisis
3. Allan King

Please feel free to comment.

1. Alan Rosenthal, “A Married Couple,” in Alan Rosenthal, ed. The New Documentary in Action: A Casebook in Film Making (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 32.
2. Jeffrey Ruoff, An American Family (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 12.
   
3. Paul Wilkins, Psychodrama (London: Sage, 1999), 12.
4. Michael Chanan, The Politics of Documentary (London: BFI, 2007), 215.
5. Mark Andrejevic, Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched (New York: Rowan and Littlefield, 2004); Laurie Ouellette and James Hay, Better Living Through Reality TV. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008.
6. Alan Rosenthal, “A Married Couple,” in Alan Rosenthal, ed. The New Documentary in Action: A Casebook in Film Making (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 23.
   

On 7th January 2010, BBC television personality Jonathan Ross announced that he was leaving the Corporation after thirteen years presenting a range of television and radio programs; most notably the late night talk show Friday Night with Jonathan Ross. Less than one month earlier Ross, the BBC’s highest profile and highly paid personality, had offered to take a 50% pay cut on his record £16.9million 3-year contract, which is due to expire later this year. It is clear that the BBC’s decision not to take up Ross’ offer was, as The Guardian’s media correspondents observed, motivated by a desire to rid itself of what had ‘become one of the BBC’s most toxic political issues’. But what does this parting of ways tell us about both the economies of television’s personality system, and what Su Holmes has suggested is the need to understand the ‘possibilities of … public service television fame’.1

For many commentators Ross’ departure from the BBC was inevitable following the Sachsgate affair of 2008, in which Ross and comedian Russell Brand left lewd messages on Andrew Sachs’ (who played Manuel in Fawlty Towers) answering machine as part of Brand’s BBC Radio 2 show. This incident had resulted in a record number of complaints about the program, the resignation of Brand and Radio 2 controller Leslie Douglas as well as the suspension of Ross.2 Whilst undoubtedly, as TV critic Mark Lawson observed, Ross was shorn of some of his cutting edge by being forced to pre-record his shows post-Sachsgate, the notion that his ‘star’ was therefore inevitably on the wane deflects us from closer scrutiny of the political economy of television fame and the role of public service broadcasting in this.

Historically there has been a popular incompatibility between BBC presenters and the commercial exploitation and reward of their televisual image. Jerome Bourdon has suggested that star salaries are just one of the key sites through which public service broadcasters must ‘carefully negotiate the popular’, arguing that such broadcasters have only reluctantly given ‘a place to its hosts, but never fully accepted them or rewarded them in proportion to their appeal’.3 For example, Jamie Oliver’s 2002 switch to Channel 4 and What Not to Wear hosts Trinny & Susannah’s 2006 move to ITV have all been linked to the restrictions placed on commercial endorsements by the BBC, whilst the Corporation has always stressed that Ross’ salary was lower than those offered by commercial rivals.

But there has always been a place for highly paid personalities both in terms of ‘popular’ personalities and what we might term the ‘public service personality’. As Espen Ytreberg has suggested, the public legitimacy of public service broadcasters is often communication ‘through persons of authority.’4 Historically figures such as Richard Dimbleby or David Attenborough have personified this type of public service personality with their commercial and cultural value recognized by the BBC. For example, following an offer from the new ITV service in 1958 to Richard Dimbleby, made a counter offer of £10,000 a year for ten years to the man they described as ‘Mr TV’.5 This would have made Dimbley the top earner in UK broadcasting. However, performers who might be understood more firmly in line with the ‘popular’ were also valued by the BBC. Again fearing defection to ITV, the BBC offered [but was ultimately rejected] the first ‘golden handcuffs’ deal to Benny Hill to tie the performer to the Corporation for £15,000/year in 1959—a sum described as ‘far higher than any fee we have ever paid previously to any British Artist’.6

So what has changed?

To my mind the ease with which many, particularly right wing, press outlets were able to depict Ross as a liability to the Corporation has to do with what Paul du Gay has described as a shift away from the bureaucracies of the public sector, which is perceived as a ‘moral danger that breeds dependency, limits growth and suppresses freedom’, to a discourse of self-enterprise congruent with neo-liberal discourses of privatization, personal responsibility and consumer choice.7 As Ouellette & Hay’s study of reality television within this framework suggests, the entrepreneurial self and the private sector is seen as an efficient alternative to the red tape and bureaucracies of the public sector.8 In the depiction of Ross as a liability to the BBC, it was his pay, rather than his behavior, that was attacked as a highly visible example of such inefficiencies.

Moreover, in an era where fame is no longer a rarefied commodity, Ross’ pay stands in contradistinction to the radical, supposedly democratic potentialities of contemporary ‘do-it-yourself’ celebrity. Thus whilst Ross is castigated for his pay, Simon Cowell (a figure not unknown for unkind comments to vulnerable performers) is held up as a figure who might revitalize public debate—via a commercial television format—for his entrepreneurial skill in creating formats and pop stars. Similarly a DIY celebrity, such as Digg.com’s Kevin Rose, is celebrated by mainstream media outlets — described as the ‘poster boy’ of web 2.0 culture and ‘The Most Famous Man on the Internet’9 — for his entrepreneurial success in the creation of the site, which had amassed 30million unique users and US$40million in venture capital by late 2008. Much like other DIY celebrities, such as Sandi Thom, Rose’s fame is achieved through self-promotion: mastering a myriad of social networking tools; his Twitter following of 1,159,960 places him well ahead of Ross’ 489,083. Interestingly, Digg.com itself allows users to rate and discuss news stories, fulfilling the ‘participatory turn’ of web 2.0 culture celebrated by new media theorists like Henry Jenkins, but also effectively creating a privatized public sphere congruent with neo-liberalism.

The desire to distinguish the BBC from the perceived inefficiencies and bureaucracies of the public sector was not only evident in the departure of Ross but also BBC Director General Mark Thompson’s attempt to defend the Corporation’s pay structures in its wake. Claiming ‘we are not a county council, we need the best’, Thompson’s comments extended the debate about presenter-pay to the BBC executive, and the economies of public service broadcasting itself. In a year, if not era, ahead that is already being termed ‘austerity Britain’ high profile arguments about the (over)pay of public sector workers, including celebrities like Ross, serve to exacerbate the neo-liberal ideologies of free markets and DIY citizenship—and celebrity—as the antidote to ‘big government’.

Deals such as Ross’ are unlikely to be repeated as the BBC seeks to slash its presenter wage bill. But two significant exceptions remain that shed further light on the political economy of television personalities and public service broadcasting. Firstly, and unsurprisingly, the pay of ‘public service personalities’ such as David Attenborough or Simon Schama—who’s televisual images are congruent with a Reithian notion of public service as ‘improving’, through education and information—have not come into question. More interestingly, at the ‘entertainment’ end of the public service spectrum Jeremy Clarkson—whose image is aligned with conservative ideologies—has struck a pay deal for a cut of the exploitation of Top Gear’s intellectual property rights through the BBC’s commercial arm, BBC Worldwide. Operating within the efficiencies of the global market for television formats, an eyelid has not been batted at this highly profitable deal for Clarkson in these recent debates.

Image Credits:
1. BBC Television Personality Jonathan Ross
2. The New Pathways to Fame
3. Digg Founder Kevin Rose

1. Holmes, S. 2007. ‘The BBC and television fame in the 1950s: Living with The Grove Family (1954-7) and going Face to Face (1959-1962) with television’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 10(4): p. 436.
2. See Lisa Kelly’s excellent analysis of the affair and the role of ‘comedy’ in scandal: Kelly, L. 2010. ‘Public Personas, Private Lives and the Power of the Celebrity Comedian: A consideration of the Ross and Brand “Sachsgate” affair’, Celebrity Studies Journal, vol. 1(1): forthcoming
3. Bourden, J ‘Old and New Ghosts: Public service television and the popular-a history’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 7(3): p. 283.
4. Ytreberg, E. 2002. ‘Ideal types in public service television: paternalists and bureaucrats, charismatics and avant-gardists’, Media, Culture & Society 24: p. 759.
5. BBC press clipping, Richard Dimbleby File 1b, BBC Written Archives; BBC Internal memo, From: Head of Talks, Television, To: Outside Broadcasts, Television, Subject: Richard Dimbleby; 30/04/58.
6. Letter from Tom Sloan, Assistant Head of Light Entertainment to Head of Light Entertainment on the subject ‘Benny Hill, dated 18th Feb 1960.
7. Quoted in Ouellette, L. & Hay, J. 2008. Better Living Through Reality TV: Television and Post-Welfare Citizenship, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, p. 23.
8. ibid.
9. Business Week Tech Team, ‘The Poster Boy: Kevin Rose’, Business Week, n.d. 2008, http://images.businessweek.com/ss/08/09/0929_most_influential/18.htm; Max Chafkin, ‘Kevin Rose of Digg: The Most Famous Man on the Internet’, Inc Magazine, November 2008, http://www.inc.com/magazine/20081101/keeevviin_Printer_Friendly.html.

In 2009, journalist Ellie Levenson asserted that “women bosses are… absolute terrors [and] make life hell for their junior colleagues.”1 Popular culture concurred with this seeming truism. By several accounts, romantic comedy The Proposal was one of 2009’s sleeper hits. A return to box-office form for star Sandra Bullock, it also further raised the popular cultural profile of the figure of the female “Boss-zilla” who is terrorizing workplace fictions onscreen. Bullock is publishing executive Margaret Tate, feared and loathed by her cadre of underlings who dart away when she appears, testifying to her inhumanity with panicked IM warnings of her arrival: “It’s coming!” Unsurprisingly for a postfeminist “chick flick” it does not conclude until Tate’s unruliness is curbed, ambition adjusted,2 and she has endured various humiliations through this revenge exercise in “taming the savage boss,”3 magnanimously saving her from a future of abject singlehood and the fate of having “nothing and no one” on her deathbed.

Contemporary conceptualizations of female workplace authority figures have come to be encapsulated by the reductive assignation of the pejorative epithet “Boss-zilla,”4 which (like variations “Momzilla,” “Wifezilla” and the ubiquitous “Bridezilla”) has entered the lexicon postfeminist culture to create a glib verbal shorthand for what is merely a modish way of articulating an old and continually pervasive trope: the interminable “monstrous feminine.”5 Hence texts that feature this figure contain several such over-determined epithets (Tate is also “Satan’s Mistress” and “the witch” while Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada is both “Dragon Lady” and the eponymous “Devil”), which characterize these female authority figures as cartoonishly monstrous, demonic and/or destructive.

Barbara Creed’s canonical treatise on the subject influentially demonstrated that such demonization of women in representational culture is an age-old phenomenon, but I am keen here to flag some ways these newer, knowing and over-determined signifiers of female monstrosity have been tailored to and re-mediated for their postfeminist context. Invoking major points of contention, debate and cultural visibility as regards feminine identities and subjectivities in postfeminism, these femininities are derogated and made monstrous by the “zilla” handle. This speaks to continuing concern and anxiety over the ever culturally apposite issues of motherhood, marriage and work, and the need for the female subject in postfeminism to achieve, manage and balance them, without transgressing current codes of behaviour through misdirected goals or muddled priorities, which would render her abject, and labeled with one or more of these monstrous appellations.

Having characterized the representational backdrop of workplace centred popular culture of early postfeminism, notably in much discussed films like Working Girl and Disclosure, the “diabolical working woman,”6 who is “overloaded with monstrousness”7 has persisted in recent popular culture, latterly returning for a noticeable encore in a group of recent texts like The Proposal, but also tent-pole “chick flick” The Devil Wears Prada,8 (and de facto offshoot The September Issue), and television drama Damages, which have become key cultural touchstones for discourse surrounding the female “Boss-zilla.” Both Prada and Damages have some similarity to their cinematic forebearers from the 80s and 90s, and make inter or intra-textual allusion to extant iconic hate figures of postfeminist culture that have dominated popular cultural conceptualizations of female workplace authority figures: editor-in-chief of US Vogue Anna Wintour and Fatal Attraction’s Alex Forrest. However, a notable development is that each takes the tensions, face-offs and discord in a fraught working relationship between a baby-boomer female boss and her Gen-Y minion as the thematic focal point. “Bosszilla” can thus be understood as one of what Diane Negra calls the “new archetypes of the female labor market”9 in postfeminism: “the middle-aged “bad” female professional whose interests are antithetical to the heroine’s.”10

It is this generational discord upon which I now focus my comments, as it marks an aspect of the evolution of “Boss-zilla” from a player in the aforementioned early postfeminist cautionary tales into an overused archetype, but latterly with a nuanced representational dynamic, accounting for a shifting sociocultural context, specifically the entry of new generations of young professional women in the workforce. Hence the generational multiplicity of postfeminism’s subjects in the represented public sphere, which popular culture has tended to place at loggerheads correspondent to what Negra has described as the “postfeminist propensity for setting women in conflict with each other.”11

As illustrated in these posters, female conflict is central to the premises of these texts, which articulate their respective mêlées around motherhood, bridehood and female workplace authority, imbuing the depicted mutually antagonistic relationships between these women with violent toxicity; hence the boxing bout aesthetic of Monster-In-Law, the pseudo-sword fight of Bride Wars and the high heel to the jugular in Damages.

Damages centers on fearsome lawyer Patty Hewes (Glenn Close) who, Lucas Hilderbrand notes, “destroy[s] everyone she meets.”12 He highlights the theme song lyrics (“when I am through with you, there won’t be anything left”) as a textual nod towards the destructive monstrosity that characterizes her, which recalls the way soundtrack songs like Ladytron’s “Destroy Everything You Touch” and VHS Or Beta’s “Burn It All Down,” which accompany footage of Anna Wintour at work in The September Issue, similarly over-determine her characterization as monstrously destructive. Patty’s monstrosity is similarly averred both by her bullying office antics, massive mood swings, manipulative machinations and most of all by her attempt to have her young entry level protégée Ellen (Rose Byrne) murdered. Thus, the heart of the tensions that drive the character dynamic and make for the central conceit of Damages is the troubled bitter working relationship between them, that from early in the second season becomes increasingly overtly articulated as a “mother-daughter dyad” of the kind Astrid Henry highlights is “a trope [used] to describe intergenerational conflict” between second and third wave feminists.13

Both Ellen and Prada’s heroine Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway), an aspiring journalist working as a fashion magazine editor’s assistant, are urged to quit their browbeaten professional lives by their boyfriends (both much more securely professionally settled as a gourmet chef and doctor) but these women are simultaneously drawn by intrigue toward and repelled by fear from their “Boss-zilla,” which also speaks to the configuration of their relationships as maternal/filial via Adrienne Rich’s concept of “matrophobia” wherein “there may be a deep underlying pull towards [the mother], a dread that if one relaxes one’s guard one will identify with her completely.”14 Andy, having transformed into a budding Miranda, avoids this fate, breaking from her by flinging away the cell phone that heretofore bound her to her boss. Events in Damages have seen Ellen morph from a diligent ingenue into Patty’s duplicitous short-tempered mini-me.

Thus they both journey toward a scenario in which the power balance between them and their respective employer is either leveled or reversed from that of the early days of their downtrodden employment under Miranda and Patty, which saw them wither before “Boss-zilla” in response to severe words and curt dismissals from which they slunk away humiliated, in a walk of shame from an expansive forbidding executive office. Redressing this imbalance through their respective moral and psychological victories, Andy and Ellen’s stories seem to stand as cultural manifestations of what Angela McRobbie calls “post-feminism as daughter’s revenge”15 upon their formidable “Boss-zillas” whose professional identities have made them monsters.

It is regrettable that destructive monstrosity, in whatever form, mode or tone it is mediated, and as it is reconceptualised for shifting mores and contexts, remains visible and recurrent in the discursive landscape of postfeminist media culture. One that rhetorically categorizes women into reductive, yet predictable, identity brackets according to perceptions that their personifications of these roles (boss, bride, wife, mother) transgress the boundaries of acceptable, reasonable or normal behaviour within the mutable norms of their moment, to the extent that they are characterized as rampaging beasts that grotesquely derogate the feminine identity they envelope, leaving destruction in their wake. Stomp… STOMP… STOMP.

Image Credits:

1. Sandra Bullock as “monster” Margaret Tate in The Proposal
2. “Momzilla”, “Bridezilla” and “Boss-zilla” in Monster-in-Law, Bride Wars and Damages
5. Intergenerational office tensions between the women of The Devil Wears Prada and Damages (Author screen grab)

Please feel free to comment.

1. Ellie Levenson, The Noughtie Girl’s Guide to Feminism (Oxford: Oneworld, 2009), pp 70-71.
2. Diane Negra, What a Girl Wants?: Fantasizing the Reclamation of the Self in Postfeminism (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 95-99.
3. Manohla Dargis, ‘From the Corporate Jungle to Wild Alaska: Taming the Savage Boss’ The New York Times (19 June 2009), http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/06/19/movies/19proposal.html.
4. In critiquing media constructions of this figure, I acknowledge the existence of bullying bosses. My memories of unpredictable tantrums, and patronizing condescension, and inner anger at being addressed as “young lady” in my mid twenties are quite vivid: “Hannah, will you just DO what I ASKED you to do!”, “GET OUT OF MY OFFICE!”
5. Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1993).
6. Suzanne Leonard, Fatal Attraction (Oxford and Malden, Massachusetts: Wiley Blackwell, 2009), p 55.
7. Charlotte Brundson, ‘Post-Feminism and Shopping Films’ in Screen Tastes: Soap Opera to Satellite Dishes (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 92.
8. Adapted from Lauren Weisberger’s novel based on her experiences working for Anna Wintour at Vogue, it is the iconic entry in a sub-genre of “chick-lit” that Kate Betts called “bite-the-boss” fiction (also called “underling lit” or “assistant lit”), ‘Anna Dearest’ The New York Times (13 April 2003), http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/13/books/anna-dearest.html.
9. Negra, What a Girl Wants?, p 86.
10. Ibid., p 88.
11. Negra, ‘Trauma Time: Family, Community and Criminality in Close to Home’ FlowTV. Vol. 3, No. 9 (13 January 2006), http://flowtv.org/?p=256.
12. Lucas Hilderbrand, ‘Justice Is a Bitch: On Damages as a Liberal Revenge Fantasy’ FlowTV. Vol. 10, No. 1 (12 June 2010), http://flowtv.org/?p=4014.
13. Astrid Henry, Not My Mother’s Sister: Generational Conflict and Third-Wave Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), p 182, p 47.
14. Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1976), p 235.
15. Angela McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change (London: Sage, 2008), p 40.
    

While popular discourse about the role of women in games is usually limited to the hyper-sexualized portrayal of female avatars or how to lure women and girls to play, the latest controversy over working conditions at a major game development company is a rare public opportunity to consider the gender and class politics of the video game industry.

On January 7 a post from anonymous author “Rockstar Spouse” appeared on Gamasutra, a news and information site for video game developers. The post reads as a collective complaint from the wives of employees about the working conditions at Rockstar San Diego. Rockstar is a top-tier video game developer owned by publisher Take-Two Interactive and most famously known for the Grand Theft Auto and Max Payne franchises. Rockstar Spouse borrows its handle from “EA Spouse,” the anonymous author of a 2004 LiveJournal post who raised nearly identical labor concerns about Electronic Arts.1 In both cases, the key issues include prolonged unpaid overtime (referred to in the industry as “crunch time”), declining morale and depression, physical and emotional suffering, lack of raises or cost of living increases despite record-breaking game sales, and the toll these working conditions take on the domestic life of employees, spouses and their children. As a result of months of abuse and inaction on the part of the company, Rockstar Spouse declared, “action must be taken to protect the rights of employees and those who depend on them.”

This latest labor relations controversy raises many points worthy of discussion, but in this brief piece I wish to draw specific attention to the gendered nature of this event.2 What the Rockstar Wives (as the post is now described) have written is a Marxist feminist critique of labor in the games industry, demonstrating once again that the personal is political and that corporatism inflicts tangible material consequences on workers and workers’ families.

The history of women and labor rights in the United States provides an important context for understanding the actions of both EA Spouse and the Rockstar Wives. In addition to being members of unions and battling for rights as laborers, women who not employed outside the home have held central roles organizing on behalf of their striking husbands. From the wives of striking packinghouse workers in Chicago during the early 1900s, to the “ladies auxiliary” units of the Colorado Fuel and Iron strike of 1913-1914 and the 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters’ Union strikes, there is ample precedent for how women become vital actors in battles for improved wages and working conditions for their partners.3 Barbara Kingsolver writes in her book about the Arizona Copper Mine Strike of 1983 that women were compelled to become involved in their husbands’ fight with the Phelps Dodge Corporation because they were keenly aware that the welfare of their families was at stake. At first women participated in traditional roles of support, providing childcare and meals for striking workers, but through the long months of the strike, they became political actors as well, “walking the picket line, organizing rallies, going to jail (and) walking into the governor’s office.”4

While there were plenty of calls for unionizing game development workers after EA Spouse posted her missive, four years later no union has successfully organized the industry.5 Without a formal union-backed grievance process or a safe internal company structure for raising concerns, the partner of EA Spouse and several of his coworkers, pursued legal action against EA resulting in a $14.9 million settlement in 2006. The attention brought by EA Spouse shook the industry as hundreds of similar stories surfaced, setting the atmosphere for a costly payout. Rockstar Wives are threatening the same action: “[I]f these working conditions stay unchanged in the upcoming weeks, preparation will be made to take legal action against Rockstar San Diego.”

A second important element highlighted by the Rockstar Wives story is the relationship between workplace diversity and quality of life concerns. In 2005 the International Game Developers Association issued the results of a workplace demographics survey of mostly US and Canadian developers. The report quantified what most in the industry knew: The “typical” game developer is white, male and heterosexual.6 Furthermore, the survey revealed the workforce is younger and more likely to be single or childless than the average population. Men dominate the creative roles of game production such as programming, art, audio and design by at least 88%, while more gender parity exists in human resources, operations, marketing, and public relations. The positions most affected by “crunch time” are the creative roles. These extreme working conditions have, according to IGDA, “been linked, in part, to the industry’s inability to attract female workers.”

But the desire for a family-friendly environment and a healthy work-life balance is not exclusive to women. The games industry is an industry that eats its young. It relies heavily upon labor from young men with few attachments outside the office, who are new to professional life, with less than 5 years industry experience, and little political leverage to affect change. According to IGDA’s 2004 Quality of Life report, a third of survey respondents reported an intention to leave the industry within 5 years and over half expected to leave within ten, citing the heavy work load, job insecurity and unrealistic deadline pressures as key factors for their planned exit.7 Calling this high turnover rate “catastrophic” to the long-term success of the industry, IGDA advised management to reign in crunch time and institute quality of life “best practices” which included recognizing the importance of family and other non-work relationships to the retention of employees. Despite the decrease in crunch time across the industry, IGDA’s most recent quality of life survey (2009) found that a majority of developers still felt “they needed more time for themselves and their families.”8

Third, when EA Spouse posted her outrage at Electronic Arts and concern for her partner’s well being, she forced recognition that industrial relations involve not only workers and employers, but also families and communities. When Rockstar Wives demand “action must be taken to protect the rights of employees and those who depend on them” they too are insisting that their husbands do not go to work alone. This point may seem obvious, but in the current economic environment where money for leisure goods such as video games is tight and unemployment is rising, drawing attention to the nexus of family and work in order to demand change is risky. The Rockstar Wives are particularly brave given the precarious position of the San Diego studio. Red Dead Redemption, the current title in production, has alleged been mismanaged, forcing Rockstar corporate to enact crunch time to meet an arbitrary industry timeline. There is widespread talk of scuttling the studio upon completion, contributing to the psychological and financial worry of its employees.

Perhaps most significantly, the description of work life and its consequences outlined by EA Spouse and the Rockstar Wives challenges assumptions about digital labor and the “cool factor” of creative production. Like film, television, advertising and other creative industries before, working in game development is a dream job; the rock star life. Often cast as the antithesis to the corporate environment – with open-space offices, after work LAN parties, and a relaxed dress code – this image exists in sharp contrast to the labor lives of our fathers and grandfathers. However, this well-crafted veneer obscures industry practices of long hours, unpaid labor and, as this critique from Rockstar Wives reveals, decidedly un-rock star-like treatment: “A sentiment grows [at Rockstar San Diego] that [employees] have lost not only the sense of being valued, but [have been] turned into machines as they are slowly robbed of their humanity.” With their allegations of depression, and chronic and stress-related health problems, EA Spouse and Rockstar Wives crack the veneer and expose the material consequences of immaterial labor.

Their methods may be new (anonymous, viral blog postings), but the actions of EA Spouse and Rockstar Wives have precedent in the history of women and labor in the United States. Unless the root concerns discussed above, which are delaying the industry’s place as a fully relevant and culturally rich medium, are addressed, we can expect to see future posts from Blizzard Wives and Nintendo Spouses.

Image Credits:
1.) The Rockstar San Diego Logo
2.) Red Dead Redemption


1. EA Spouse was revealed to be Erin Hoffman after a lawsuit involving her husband against EA for uncompensated overtime was settled in 2006.
2. See Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter (2006) for a broader analysis of EA Spouse that also offers an useful framework for considering Rockstar Wives, particularly their investigation of corporate cultures, labor laws and industry-wide practices that encourage exploitation. Dyer-Witheford, N. & de Peuter, G. (2006). ‘EA Spouse’ and the crisis of video game labour: Enjoyment, exclusion, exploitation, exodus. Canadian Journal of Communication, 31, 599-617.
3. Jones, S. (2002). A woman’s place is on the picket line: Towards a theory of community industrial relations. Employee Relations, 24(2), 151-166.
4. Kingsolver, B. (1989). Holding the line: Women in the great Arizona mine strike of 1983. Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, p. 135.
5. Resistance to unionization has come, in part, from game developers themselves, who, in white-collar jobs that require a college degree, do not see themselves in union-type jobs. This perspective supports the efforts of the industry to keep unionization out of game development. For a fuller discussion of unionization, see Hyman, P. (2005, August 9). Video game workers still on the fence regarding unionization. The Hollywood Reporter.
6. International Game Developers Association. (2005, October). Game developer demographics: An exploration of workplace diversity. Mt. Royal, New Jersey: Author. Retrieved January 19, 2010, from: http://www.igda.org/game-developer-demographics-report
7. International Game Developers Association. (2004, April). Quality of life in the game industry: Challenges and best practices. Mt. Royal, New Jersey: Author. Retrieved January 19, 2010, from http://archives.igda.org/qol/whitepaper.php
8. International Game Developers Association (2010, January 13). Regarding overtime concerns at Rockstar San Diego. Mt. Royal, New Jersey: Author. Retrieved January 19, 2010, from http://www.igda.org/igda-regarding-overtime-concerns-rockstar-san-diego