Romantic relationships have long been defined in terms of duration: anniversaries, long-term relationships, summer flings, and one-night stands. The courtship experience can likewise be understood as an experience of subjective time: the anticipation of longing, the ecstasy of timelessness during lost weekends, the performance anxiety of keeping it up, or the end of an era marked by a break-up. The concept of temporality has become central to queer theory of late, and while this column does not build from this scholarship directly, the very concept that sexuality is experienced in and across time has informed my own recent reflections on online dating. Here I think through the ways conceptions of past, present, and future interpenetrate, and they ways that the subjective experience of online dating can fuck with one’s sense of time.1

Future

The marketed temporality of online dating is futurity: that, if a user logs in, they will find a partner. The allure of online dating is the belief in a structure of possibility: in this utopia (virtual non-place), you will find the perfect match. Using interfaces of self-representation and algorithms of compatibility, various sites suggest that there is, at least in theory, someone for everyone and that the most efficient way to meet is via database calculations. More than once, I’ve been advised that the only way to meet people is to go online. This mythical structure of possibility suggests that, if you keep searching, you will find someone, but also that there might always be a better match in the future. There’s an illusion of unlimited options and a continued hope that new and better matches will come online. Thus, there’s also a recurrent temptation for deferral.

In my experiences—and those of friends with whom I’ve compared stories—the effect can be one of increasing selectivity, that the implicit promise of inexhaustible and perfect matches can prompt users to reject potential dates for any number of minor flaws, from punctuation errors in messages to pop culture tastes to unflattering angles in profile pics. Such turn-offs repeatedly also reveal the shortcomings of computer matching: regardless of the percentiles calculated based upon surveys of users’ self-defined values, there is no accounting for attraction. No computer can predict chemistry or affect; it can only narrow selection down to often arbitrarily articulated interests or often ill-fitting broad identity categories chosen from a limited range of options in a drop-down menu. The architecture of the profile’s fields frequently pre-determines they ways users can self-represent.2

The process of writing one’s profile is also a process of imagining one’s future readers and writing toward a desired response. Writing a profile is a kind of labor time; I’ve even read profiles that suggest that the author should be paid for writing. Along similar lines, in their song “Personal,” members of The Ballet sing, “Saw you on Gaydar/Your profile was so clever/The references to Baudrillard/Must have taken you forever.”3 Self-representation becomes a calculated investment in future return. For subscription sites, what is paid for is time: monthly fees for access. Messaging drives toward the ultimate goal of arranging a future date. One of the differences between gay and straight online dating, however, is that there seems to be far more fluidity about what form new relationships will take. On the one hand, the technology might more frequently lead to quick hook-ups for gay male users, but for same-sex dating, there’s also far more likelihood that dating sites function as social networking and that relationships facilitate online will actually transition into platonic friendships.

Present

If the draw of online dating is the promise of a future match, the experience is primarily one of the instantaneous and the interminable now. Searching online personals is real-time experience, one that can quickly become rote but nonetheless compulsive, as users click through to the next page of search matches. Browsing at profiles can as often as not be an act of procrastination rather than directed searching. Sites track and tell users when each person is online or when they’ve last logged in; they also indicate if it’s been awhile since a person has been contacted—thus marking undesirability or potential desperation. But there’s also a privileging of the new: new members are promoted on homepages, searches, and auto-messages. Likewise, existing profiles are flagged when they are updated. Thus, there is a logic of planned obsolescence, wherein the new member or the updated profile is preferable to the pre-existing options. The impulse toward instantaneity perhaps counteracts the thoughtful reflection that should perhaps undergird romantic involvement, so that even if you want a long-term relationship, you usually want it to start now. Thus, there’s a contradiction of impulses and expectations.

Online dating inverts the typical temporal structure of finding and flirting: looking for potential mates, which in the real world takes time, is nearly instantaneous with search engine technologies, but the temporality of interaction, which would be the temporality of looks and conversation in person, unfolds in mediated time full of delays, from the gap in time until someone checks messages to the time it takes to compose a response to the likelihood of waiting for a reply that never comes. Waiting is an age-old experience of dating. Yet, the temporality of online dating is supposed to be one of instantaneity: with online chatting, smart phone apps, and instant email auto-forwards. Thus, the duration of the present is intensified, as the expectation of instant reply can make now feel like forever. Upon subscribing, as with Facebook or other kinds of sites, initial rush of absorption can easily turn into unplanned hours of profile writing (and revising), searching, and messaging. Online dating sites’ frequent email alerts with new matches or, even more maddeningly, anonymous notices that someone has looked at and rated your profile, attempt to drive traffic back to the site with regularity and repetition even after the first blush of excitement. Being on the receiving end of such incessant bot messaging can at times be neurosis-inducing, as it teases the user with both potential mates, reminders of the limited options, and probable rejection. I quickly learned that non-response has come to be an accepted social custom through online dating, and even people with whom one exchanges messages might disappear without explanation. One quickly relearns social mores and customs, which differ online from in-person communication. But the temporality of response also communicates, so that a delayed reply probably suggests limited interest, unless there are apologies indicating otherwise. The present becomes a mix of seeking and waiting.

But through user tracking, sites such as OK Cupid also become repositories of data, which reveal information about our contemporary moment. OK Cupid has released graphs that suggest statistics of self-identification, desire, and perhaps most tellingly, actual messaging behavior. Perhaps OK Cupid is the new Kinsey Report? Yet even here, the allure of quantitative data can tell us little about qualitative matters of affect, desire, and satisfaction.

Past

Online dating has a history. If it is, indeed, the only way to meet people now, by resisting online dating for the better part of a decade, I was behind the times when I eventually began this social experiment. But around the time I first began considering going online, I came across a couple of curious ads for Man-to-Man “gay dating by computer” dating from the late 1960s. The promise of computer technologies to rationally make romantic matches stretches back further than we might expect, to the pre-world wide web days. A 1968 ad that ran in the San Francisco-based magazine Vectors and the New York-based glossy magazine Ciao promises that punch card-era computer matching would be scientifically sound. The ad’s simple line-drawing image curiously, however, retreats from the new media of the mainframe to neo-classical iconography. A year later, the ad’s text was updated to contrast the real and the virtual worlds of cruising: “Forget standing on street corners—being harassed by the authorities—searching through smoky bars—Now! do it—the easy-scientific way.” Already technology was imagined to intervene and make romance efficient and clean; what would potentially be lost were spontaneity and the thrill of transgression. In this new age of dating, time was of the essence: the ad repeatedly urges potential clients, “don’t delay.” This document of new media before new media suggests both that the desire for online dating predates the technology itself and perhaps inverts the ways we imagine the history of invention and the development of social networking.4 But it also promises instantaneity, despite the fact that a mail-order computer service would take longer to process than a street pick-up. Yet, perhaps again the difference was that a rational match was imagined to last, where as a trick would be temporary.

Going even further back, Alan Turing, the homosexual inventor of the computer, wrote of his Automatic Computing Engine in 1947, “the machine must be allowed to have contact with human beings in order that it may adapt itself to their standards.”5 Biographer David Leavitt suggests this sentimental computer science reflected the inventor’s own sense of social isolation and projections of the desire for contact. The history of the computer reveals that it was not only a calculation machine but also one that was always informed by the desire for human connection and the romantic notion of rational matching. The history of technology is always a history of an imagined future, though the ways technology becomes adopted by users often departs from the inventor’s fantasies. The rational and emotional, the quantitative and qualitative are always intertwined. Going online to find sex, love, and companionship is an act of the present with an eye toward the future, but it has unexpected connections to the past.

Image Credits:
1. Sexual Activity by Smartphone
2. Chemistry.com
3. OK Cupid Map
4. OK Cupid Chart 2
5. OK Cupid Chart 2
6. Man-4-Man Computer Dating Ad, Queen’s Quarterly, Summer 1969

Please feel free to comment.

1. My thinking has been informed by Alexander Chase, Corella Difede, Patrick Keilty, and Shaka McGlotten and their presentations on the recent SCMS panel “The Virtual Life of Queer Sex Publics.”
2. On technological structures and regulation, see Tarleton Gillespie, “The Tales Digital Tools Tell” in New Media
3. The Ballet, “Personal,” Mattachine! (2006).
4. Lisa Gitelman has examined historical aberrations of iterations of the internet before the internet in Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006).
5. David Leavitt, The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer (New York: Norton, 2006), 208.

Throughout the second season of Cougar Town, the sitcom’s opening credits have winkingly acknowledged its vexed title with weekly modifications to its opening credits, remarking: “Titles Are Hard” or “Not What The Show Is” or, my personal favorite, “It’s Okay To Watch A Show Called…” For some reason, the very premise of a show about middle-aged women who date younger men has caused mass suspicion. I’m even a bit hesitant to admit I watch the show or to recommend it, because whenever I do, people seem to respond with judgment and disbelief. And, you know what? Many of my friends are 40-ish women, a number single and dealing with the frustrations of dating, some involved with younger men. So why all the haters? Why should there be such distain for a show about dating and friendship among women in their 40s? (I, for one, still love Sex and the City, though the similarities between the two shows are superficial.) The show was initially marketed as a tacky sex comedy set on Florida’s gulf coast, though it was always more about self-deprecation and repartée among a circle of friends. Even if the show was about cougars, what’s wrong with that?

I had heard that the show “got better” when it transitioned away from being about cougars, so I watched the first season finale on Hulu upon a friend’s nudging. The recent seasons of Project Runway and Mad Men had ended, leaving holes in my life, and I figured I had nothing to loose. I was pleasantly and immediately surprised and promoted the new episodes to DVR status. After becoming hooked on the second season, I decided to Netflix the first season to see how bad it was at the beginning. To my surprise, I was enamored by the pilot before the first fade-out for commercial break: the series opens with recent divorcée Jules (Courtney Cox) flashing herself in a mirror, examining places where her skin stays slack after she pinches it, and the spots of flab that jiggle. Cut to Jules and her younger friend and employee Laurie (a game Busy Philipps) playing a game of “son or boyfriend?” while looking around at intergenerational couples. The show is immediately on the side of the older woman, and it’s one of those rare sitcoms that’s actually smarter and better-written than one would expect. The series begins with performances and pacing that are a bit punchier, then it transitions to a slightly more snappy quality. Still, some of the best material was there at the start.

From the start, Cougar Town has been in the shadow of its hugely popular ABC lead-in, Modern Family. Whereas Modern Family purports to represent a range of domestic structures, Cougar Town strikes me as far more porous in its definitions of family. There are various traditional types of relationships–spouses, exes, parents, sons, boyfriends, girlfriends, friends, bosses, employees, and neighbors—but here kinship has less to do with nuclear families than with communities. Affection and intimacy are expressed through jokey insults based upon deeply knowing each other’s flaws. In the pilot, after coaxing from Lori, the usually wound-up Jules goes out for a drink at a hip young club. Laurie suggests, “Say something judgmental about me. That always loosens you up.” Jules responds, “You can’t wear fake nails on just one hand. You look like a crazy whore.” Laurie explains her logic, “I only had four left, and this is my smoking hand,” as she makes a smoking gesture while modeling her manicure. Philipps’ delivery is priceless.

To my great pleasure, the show’s new parents primarily avoid their baby rather than privilege it or structure their lives around it. In the fourth episode, Ellie (Christa Miller), Jules’ bitchy and botoxed best friend and neighbor confesses, “I hate my baby. … We have completely different tastes in food, music, and books. And I just know when he gets older he’s going to do something to drive me crazy like marry a poor person.” Later in the season (in “Wake Up Time”), two women compare their daddy issues over morning coffee: Sara (guest star Sheryl Crow) explains, “My dad left when I was a kid. I’m kind of messed up sexually.” Ellie flippantly responds, “I had crappy father, too, but I didn’t go slutty. I just died inside.” Such throwaway lines not only offer character development but suggest a critique of nuclear families. Beyond the dialogue, the show regularly undermines the primacy of couples through visual jokes as well: intimate moments are often presented in two-shot or in shot/reverse-shot before a cut to a belated wide shot reveals that other characters are in the space and rupturing the private romantic or confessional conversations. Somehow, this gag never gets old to me.

As in series co-creator Bill Lawrence’s Scrubs, the show also plays with the quirks of straight masculinity and homosocial love between guy friends, particularly Ellie’s whipped but well-endowed husband Andy (Ian Gomez) and his mancrush on Jules’ cracker ex-husband Bobby (a bit too broadly played by Brian Van Holt). In “Letting You Go,” Jules’ romantic foil Grayson (Josh Hopkins) reveals that he has late-night jam sessions dancing to Enya’s “Orinoco Flow” in his old acid-wash jeans; in “Little Girl Blues” (second season), three 40-something male friends rally to soothe Jules’ 19-year-old son Travis’s (Dan Byrd) sexual performance anxieties by explaining the various ways that they, themselves, worry about being bad in bed.

The show’s transitional episode, “Turn This Car Around,” comes late in the first season and is themed around the challenges of mid-life change and the need to come to terms with the life one has. Grayson realizes he’s bored with bedding girls half his age, and Bobby adopts a dog to pre-empt his loneliness when his son goes off to college. The cul-de-sac crew assembles to watch American Idol with wine, and Jules, filling the glasses so full of wine that she has to slurp the top off, comments, “You know, they say you can get four glasses of wine out of one bottle, but I only get like one and a half.” In the episode’s central arc, Jules decides to stop drinking for a month, which nearly ruins all of her relationships, and her loved ones gather to stage an intervention to get her to start drinking again. Ellie states, “Nothing could ever make me stop loving you, except you not drinking. Twelve steps, schmelve steps. Alcohol makes people fun.” When Jules falls off the wagon, she remarks, “You what sucks about getting older? You still have all the same dreams that things are going to be different, you know, in a year, ten years, twenty, whatever. But deep down inside, you know those dreams aren’t gonna come true. I just get out of bed every day and I just say, ‘This is it. I am who I am.’” Not quite reaching for profundity, the show nonetheless hits middle-aged settling on the head with candor and a sense of humor.

Rather than what Whitney Houston once proclaimed “the greatest love of all” (self-acceptance), perhaps all the characters’ first love is red wine. They drink and talk about drinking all the time, and they take great pleasure in their middle-aged bourgie indulgence. At one point they even explore “morning drinking” after tasting the dregs of the prior night’s winefest. They embrace their lives as lushes, bantering as they binge drink. In the first season finale, Jules discovers an online report that moderate drinking can not only be healthy but can also help maintain lower weights for women. Jules announces, “Drinking keeps women skinny!” Laurie exclaims, “Ohmygod!” Ellie assesses, “This is bigger than curing cancer.” If I’m totally honest, one of the most pleasurable habits I’ve picked as a singleton in my 30s is drinking cheap shiraz while watching TV—an indulgence that developed during the second season of Grey’s Anatomy. Now one of my drinking companions is Cougar Town.

Image Credits:
1. Cougar Town
2. A Circle of Friends
3. Laurie
4. Enya
5. A New Drinking Companion

Please feel free to comment.

On the same September day, the two albums that I have been listening to most this fall debuted: Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark’s The History of Modern and Mark Ronson’s Record Collection. This coincidence of release slates prompted me to think through the albums’ implicit nostalgia in dialogue. OMD, which became most famous for its single “If You Leave” (the prom song in Pretty in Pink, 1986), has nonetheless maintained something close to credibility for its early new wave experiments with musique concrète (most notably on the album Dazzle Ships, 1983) and for the catchiness of its later synth pop catalog. As a band that now seems “so ‘80s,” it’s perhaps worth noting that their early songs also harkened back to earlier eras of technological wonder, particularly in the case of “Telegraph.” The new release, with its titular reference to both historiography and modernism is striking in part because it suggests the band’s datedness yet locates the group within the wrong historical moment: they were a band of the age of postmodernity. Their first album in 14 years, The History of Modern is inevitably a comeback, yet one that has managed the rare feat of sounding both current and very much like classic OMD as the same time. In fact, the very concept of an album is now nearly a relic in the age of single-track downloads.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Anachronism has long been producer Mark Ronson’s signature style, one most famously on record with Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black (2006), on which a throaty-voiced young white British singer performed in a precociously aged and ambiguously racinated style. It’s a feat of simulating 1960s black soul and jazz—as well as Dusty Springfield—though its lyrics are just anachronistic enough to not quite be taken for an unearthed “lost” recording: “Me and Mr. Jones” begins with the lyric, “What kind of fuckery is this?” This Ronson-produced album, listened to again after Winehouse has become something of joke for her drugged-out trainwreck celebrity persona, holds up as a compelling and smart record.

Ronson’s first solo album, Record Collection, is self-consciously a hybrid construction, something of a mixed playlist reflecting a famed producer’s generic range and anachronistic tastes. This is suggested both by the album title and even by its cover, a collage of almost-real album covers—and as if its layers of reference were not enough, the cover itself is a riff off of Christian Marclay’s record collages. The images on Ronson’s cover, most visibly a direct nod to Duran Duran’s 1982 Rio, suggest a 1980s aesthetic (Duran Duran’s Simon Lebon provides guest vocals on the title track); although the songs mix sounds of various times, it is perhaps most referential to the new wave, synth pop, and early cross-over rap of the time. It is, in the classic definition of postmodern culture offered by Fredric Jameson, “blank parody.” Furthermore, it’s pastiche in both senses: as combination and as imitation. And it is often referential without particular meaning. These tendencies have often been reiterated, but there’s something specifically of the 1980s moment to what Jameson was thinking through and to Ronson’s new album, though it may now be thought of as more retro than “postmodern,” a term that seems to have waned in impact. Ronson’s record is, in a curious way, nostalgia for the postmodern.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Even this simulation of the postmodernism now seems out of sync with the digital age aesthetics of remixing and appropriation. There’s something specifically ’80s in Ronson’s aesthetic, something specifically MTV and analog about his emulation, as distinct from digital sampling. To see what I mean, check out the video for the lead single form Ronson’s album, “Bang Bang Bang.” The lyrics of the song, drawn largely from the traditional French children’s song “Alouette,” are nonsensical but in a way that is so sing-songy as to be fiercely catchy. The video actually makes even less rational sense. Rather, it brings together a series of seemingly random cultural references—and references from different cultures—in a mishmash that is the epitome of postmodern appropriative parody without politics. It’s an imitation of a postmodernism, from the pseudo-self reflexive analog signal glitches upon changing channels to references including a Francophone commercial for Nutella, a Japanese talk show, synth pop split-screens, cross-over rap and breakdancing, computer-generated science fiction and video game imaging, and a hotheaded tennis star in the mode of John McEnroe. In this way, the video harkens back to the early days of music video and the playful way that so many of the early 1980s song clips brought together poppy images that offered little connection to the lyrics or to each other. This video bears the markers of 1980s television, recorded off-air with a VCR and, just maybe, watched over and over again by a child obsessed with music videos. I may be projecting here, but as Ronson and I are almost exactly the same age and seem to have similar musical sensibilities, let me run with it.

A particularly affecting counterpoint to the exuberant incoherence of “Bang Bang Bang” is the video for the more recent single “Somebody to Love Me,” which features vocals by Boy George and Andrew Wyatt of Miike Snow. The vocals bring together a has-been from the early 80s whose voice sounds well past its prime and another recently celebrated producer-turned-performer. The video, significantly, erases Wyatt from the scene and focuses exclusively on Boy George, or rather a memory of the star as a young androgyne. The video consists entirely of simulated analog home video footage, with magnetic tape dropout and a fraudulent 1982 timestamp. The footage has poignancy and the appeal of private footage from the bygone moment of Boy George’s cultural ascendance. In juxtaposition, the lyrics suggests a kind of loneliness, “I want somebody to love me,” sung with a thin and worn voice from someone decades older who cannot relive the past or get back to that prior moment. But what Ronson also surely understands was that it was Boy George’s image, not his voice that mattered in the first place. Or, rather, his image was his talent. His guest performance on the album is more about the cultural reference than the inherent talent of the singer. Just as Boy George’s androgyny was what made him compelling, so the ambiguity of this video is essential to what makes it work. But the grain of Boy George’s aging voice is also effectively reflected in the distress on the “aged” video footage. But there’s also something else a bit off in the footage, something that is initially difficult to identify. This footage is fake. Ronson performs in drag as the iconic young and playful Boy George. The effect is not just one of making reference to a cultural influence but one of nostalgia for a time when Boy George seemed so new, so full of promise, and so playful. A time, in other words, when Boy George pushed boundaries with his gender-blending persona rather than became embroiled in scandals for drug abuse and served time for assault and imprisoning a male escort.

Although I usually think of Culture Club and other British pop from the early 1980s under the category of New Wave, they were actually conceived at the time as part of New Romanticism. Somewhere along the way, it seems like we forgot this as a cultural movement, and perhaps this spirit of romanticism it what makes it seem like something so precious that has been lost. In contrast to “Bang Bang Bang” there actually is something deeply personal, mournful, and meaningful in “Somebody to Love Me”—something that is more present in the video than in the song itself. There’s something not so blank about this parody. Maybe it’s something only a member of the MTV generation can feel.

Image Credits:
1. Mark Ronson, Music Collection, Album Cover
2. Christian Marclay’s record cover collage Footstompin’ from the series “Body Mix,” 1991

Please feel free to comment.

For several years now, I’ve wanted to write about workout videos. Aerobics tapes were central my thinking about videotape more generally because of the way the cultural degradation of the workout video has become ever-more intertwined with the physical degradation of the VHS format. For “research,” I have been known to pick up dusty celebrity releases at thrift stores (my most preposterous specimen is Regis Philbin’s My Personal Workout) in order to build my archive. But reflecting on such tapes in light of the recent emphasis in queer theory on discourses of shame1 and the even more recent attempts at fostering institutionalized queer mentoring by the Society for Cinema and Media Studies’ Queer Caucus, I’ve shifted my orientation somewhat to try to grapple with the complexity not just of the workout tape as a cultural and material text but also about my own conflicted personal relations to the form—and to one of its most popular personalities: Richard Simmons.

With Jane Fonda’s breakthrough Workout, aerobics videos were the second major kind of content to build the home video sell-through market and with which VHS became identified. Like pornography, the first kind of content credited with growing home video, aerobics tapes were a low cultural form, one that was too excessively carnal. In this respect, aerobics videos function like a synecdoche for the format more generally: they were ubiquitous, yet they have generally not been taken seriously for their actual interventions.2 In part, what interests me about workout videos is the dialectic between aspiration and degradation: that is, the dynamic tension between the drive toward self-improvement—and the form itself was commercially hugely successful—and the ways these tapes have always been kind of embarrassing.

But there’s something even more revelatory than this content-platform mirroring. I suggest that, more than pornography or perhaps any other kind of home video releases, workout videos distinguished the format and its unique spectatorial relations from cinema or broadcast television. The viewer, while doing a workout, performs a physically mimetic type of spectatorship; the problem is that, when actually doing a workout, many of the motions make it impossible to see the screen at the same time. So the mirroring is often one that is frustrated, whether in moments of confusion (what’s that move?) or in moments of failure (fatigue, inability to perform specific contortions, missing the beat, tripping, or falling out of step). It’s the moments of breakdown when one’s relationship to the text and the screen make the text most self-evident. More specific to video spectatorship, the workout tape operates on the premise of repetition: if you practice, the routine becomes easier as you learn to anticipate the moves and your body builds endurance. One of the central appeals of home video was likewise this idea of repetition: that you could record or buy a movie, a TV show, a cartoon, a workout routine, and that you would be able to watch it repeatedly on your own schedule in your own home. This was what made video different from cinema or even broadcast TV.3

The logic of self-improvement through repetition, however, operates in the inverse to the technological degradation of the tape from repeated playback. After writing a book on the aesthetics of home video, one that claims degeneration is inherent in its form, I was delighted to discover “Body Fuzion,” a Saturday Night Live digital short that self-reflexively illustrated the analog defects of dated and worn videotape in service of a parody of 1980s workout videos. These defects operate not just as markers of degradation but also as signs of nostalgia. The cast of women in their 30s (Drew Barrymore, Kristen Wiig, Maya Rudolph, and Amy Poehler) suggests a generation-specific women’s cultural memory of these tapes as formative texts. For me, it’s impossible to watch the SNL video without also imagining these actresses as their younger selves watching and doing workout tapes in their own living rooms in the 1980s. “Body Fuzion” suggests a double-edge affect of shame and affection, a conflicted retrospective relation; if they associate these tapes with their mothers, probably the people who brought these videos home, there’s likely a mixture of adolescent embarrassment of how uncool they are and earnest attachment. But the short also suggests a knowing sense of the ways the grossly sexualized positions and camera framing opened these texts—and the women’s bodies on screen—to the erotic gratification of men; indeed, although the workout craze was framed as being about self-improvement, it was critiqued as making women’s bodies over in service of their sexual desirability for men.4 “Body Fuzion” affectionately mocks the pelvic close-ups, leotards, color palette, and even the dual routines (low impact and high impact) that pervade workout videos, but it does so with such precision that the makers had to have known the object of the parody intimately. The same goes for the subtle but insightful use of analog video glitches in what is hailed as a “digital short.”

My own personal relation to workout videos was more public than domestic. Whenever given a choice during high school gym class between, say, a unit on aerobics and one on weight lifting, that I invariably chose aerobics. Now, you might think that there was a certain shame to my choice, but here’s the thing: aerobics was one of the few physical activities things I was good at, whereas failing spectacularly at bench-pressing in front of a room full of testosterone-fueled boys would have been far more humiliating. The gym teachers would wheel an A/V cart into the wrestling room and put on a tape; between the airless stink of masculinity and the cushiony wrestling mat floor, there was something great about that space. The tape the girls and I usually chose was Richard Simmons’ Sweatin’ to the Oldies. Sometimes we’d mix things up by doing Sweatin’ to the Oldies 2.

Richard Simmons has always been, in a word, shameless. To borrow a term from José Muñoz, I have always disidentified with him, his spastic behavior, his flamboyance, even his relentlessly accepting attitude.5 Thinking back, he may have been the most consistently visible queer public figure of my youth, even if he was never exactly “out” or precisely the kind of positive role model I sought, despite his indefatigable mission to help so many people with body issues help themselves. The most honest word for my feelings would have to be ambivalence: he seemed to disavow his sexuality, yet he seemed to be his own person; I found him slightly abject, but I also actually enjoyed his tapes. It’s only now, decades later, that I feel less conflicted admiration for him. Part of what strikes me as so revolutionary in retrospect is that Simmons has never been identified with the kinds of idealized hard-bodied fitness junkies who make other people feel bad about themselves; instead, his Sweatin’ to the Oldies featured bodies that were, according to dominant cultural standards, imperfect: plus-sized, middle-aged, and very probably lower classed. The bodies on screen were mirrors for his demographic rather than unattainable ideals, and the goal was to help people take the first step toward self-improvement. He worked his butt off to make people’s lives better. I wasn’t necessarily his target demographic, yet what better queer mentor might there be?

At the recent SCMS conference, after a workshop on queer mentoring, I coincidentally learned that Simmons still teaches classes at his own workout studio in Beverly Hills, called Slimmons.6 So I went, of course. When Simmons entered the studio, he hugged and kissed every single participant to make us feel welcome. He wore a bedazzled tank top with concentric hearts and tights under his striped shorts. The clientele was a mix of friendly regulars—mostly older women—and tourists, including a few more young women and men than I had expected. His instructional media were vinyl LPs, which he carried loose in a tote bag and let drop on the floor, and he cranked the stereo so that the speakers bristled with the crackle of old vinyl. But he wasn’t just anachronistic; he used LPs to occasionally push the routine ever harder by playing the records at a faster RPM. In person, he had more edge and wit than expected: he turned down the volume on the stereo to shout bitchy insults like a drill sergeant, and he barked double-entendres such as, “What has your butt been doing all day?” But Simmons engaged his audience with such availability that ultimately critical distance just seemed cynical. How ironic could I be when I was drenched in sweat? Or when the legendary fitness and self-improvement guru was, if less the force of nature I imagined, seemingly genuine and lacking any pretense? Richard Simmons touches lives. I wish I could say the same.

Midway through the class, Simmons incisively interrogated how I, an interloper, knew all of his moves. His theory was that I was trying to steal his identity. I playfully denied. But upon further reflection, maybe he was seeing a deeper kind of mimesis than I initially wanted to admit. And I’m okay with that.

Image Credits:

1. Regis Philbin’s My Personal Workout
2. Jane Fonda
3. Jane Fonda
4. Richard Simmons’ Sweatin’ to the Oldies
5. Richard Simmons
6. Photo by author
7. Photo by author

Please feel free to comment.

1. For an excellent recent essay on productive shame and gay fandom, see Chad Bennett, “Flaming the Fans: Shame and the Aesthetics of Queer Fandom in Todd Haynes’s Velvet Goldmine,” Cinema Journal 49, no. 2 (Winter 2010): 17-39.
2. An emerging generation of scholars who grew up with home video, however, are shifting the discourses about video. In addition to myself, I would include Joshua Greenberg, Caetlin Benson-Allott, Max Dawson, Daniel Herbert, and others among younger scholars who take home video seriously.
3. On workout videos see also Vanessa Russell, “Make Me a Celebrity: Celebrity Exercise Videos and the Origins of Makeover Television,” in Makeover Television: Realities Remodeled, ed. Dana Heller (New York: IB Tauris, 2007): 67-78. The introduction of record, fast-forward, rewind, slow-motion, and pause controls were also significantly new modes of spectatorship ushered in with VCRs.
4. For one feminist critique, see Susan Douglas’s chapter “Narcissism as Liberation” in Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1995). Even before the workout tape craze, the emerging body culture’s orientation toward male satisfaction was parodied in the homo resolution of Olivia Newton-John’s video for “Physical”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWz9VN40nCA
5. See José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). For an essay on Simmons’ campiness, see Rhonda Garelick, “Outrageous Dieting: The Camp Performance of Richard Simmons,” Postmodern Culture 6, no.1 (1995). Text available online at: http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/text-only/issue.995/pop-cult.995
6. Thanks to Lindsay Giggey for this tip.

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.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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.

Perhaps no hit this fall has been more unlikely than Glee, a show about marginalized teenagers with mainstream ratings—and a (mostly disintegrated) musical to boot. It has courted a cult audience with its genre-bending and improbable choir group covers. But not unlike high schoolers themselves, Glee has awkwardly struggled to find its own identity and politics. From episode to episode—even sometimes within the same episode—the series lurchingly shifts in tone, from bitchy satire to gooey romance to after-school special lesson on tolerance to power-ballad emotive excess. From the start, Glee has operated outside the conventions of realist plausibility, but it nonetheless makes attempts at social relevance; in the process, at times it clumsily slights its multicultural cast with what I assume to be an assimilationist appeal for ratings.1 As I suggest below, the in-progress first season’s seemingly conflicted negotiation of difference has suggested an evolution from marginalization to self-critique to pleas for tolerance. One of the recurring problems with the show’s “progress” toward tolerance, however, is that in making reductive equivalences between different kinds of marginalized experiences, it flattens out the complexity of difference.2 Yet, in spite of these critiques, it’s hard not to sing along.

All of Glee’s teen characters purport to be losers by virtue of their musical proclivities, but there remain clear social hierarchies within the group, even if they are not the ones the show typically acknowledges. I was struck during the pilot that, among the conspicuously diverse cast of characters, only the white characters are fleshed out as characters or get to sing the solos. (And here I should point out that the show’s ingénue, the type-A diva Rachel Berry, played by Lea Michele, is referenced throughout the series as both Jewish and white.) The rest of the cast seemed like set dressing. The show pays lip service to team solidarity, but the show has occasionally been out of sync with true equality. I have no actual access to network scheming, but this seemed to reek of the logic that the show had to be palatable enough for mainstream ratings before the minorities would incrementally get their own numbers and subplots. This fall, that’s pretty much what’s been happening.

The seventh episode, “The Throwdown,” then seems to call the show out on its prior politics of difference. In one of the show’s typically absurd situational set-ups, bulldozing Cheerios Coach Sue Sylvester (the witheringly funny and, incidentally, lesbian comic Jane Lynch) has been assigned to lead the glee club alongside its founding director Will Shuester (Matthew Morrison). Ever competitive and incisively savvy, Sue decides to divide and destroy the glee club by creating competing numbers. Her strategy? Pick all the minority kids who’ve been ignored by the Will—and by the show. With her trademark insensitivity, she hails “Sue’s Kids” as: “Santana! Wheels! Gay kid! Asian! Other Asian! Aretha! Shaft!” The students know exactly whom she means, and they join teams with not a little enthusiasm. At this point in the series, the fact that Sue calls two of the students “Asian” and “Other Asian” doesn’t merely reflect upon her; these characters, in particular, had never gotten more than momentary attention on the show. (I still don’t know Other Asian’s character name.) A few days later, when the two teams split after hanging out altogether in the rehearsal room, Artie (“Wheels” for his wheelchair, played by Kevin McHale) bids his friends, “Bye, white people.” Artie is white, but he’s only ever marked as “other” by the show. It should be stated, though, that the white minority characters have, up through episode ten, been privileged over the students of color.

If episode seven self-consciously addressed the show’s inequities between the “white kids” and the minorities, episode nine, “Wheels” was a plea for empathy and parity between others.3 “Wheels” was Artie’s episode, as it focused on his structural exclusion from the group because the school can afford neither a handicapped accessible van to transport him to competitions nor ramps to make the auditorium accessible. To raise empathy, Will assigns each of the glee members to spend three hours a day in a wheelchair and to perform a musical number in wheelchairs. That climactic number, “Proud Mary,” with its pun on “rolling” on the river, unabashedly showcases the minority students. It’s exhilarating in that they finally take center stage, and for a moment at least, music does seem therapeutic and celebratory.

But music is also the basis of competition, particularly for the solos Rachel typically wins. During the same episode, gay kid Kurt (Chris Colfer) wants to sing a female part in a number from the musical Wicked, which involves falsetto. After initial resistance, Will gives him the chance to have a diva-off audition with Rachel. (A recurring motif in the show is that Will, the presumed identificatory figure for the mainstream audience, learns to open his mind after initial ignorance, week after week.) If at first it seems that the equivalences the episode makes between Artie’s paralysis and Kurt’s feminine voice might be equivalences of castration, the characters refuse that point. Artie informs us (and his crush, “Asian” Tina, played by Jenna Ushkowitz—wait a minute, Ushkowitz?) that his penis is fully functional, and Kurt insists he’s more of a man than his father, because he has the strength to deal with taunts of “fag” and to eventually leave Ohio for gayer pastures. But the show also veers close to becoming the “disability” episode through the inclusion of a cheerleader with Down syndrome. This becomes an uneasy way to soften Sue’s character, and it likewise creates equivalences between disabilities and queerness.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The show is often at its best when it disrupts the expected ways of addressing difference, such as eroticizing Jewishness or letting the minorities sing about experiences not reduced to their identity categories, as with black diva Mercedes’ (Amber Riley) performance of romantic revenge on “Bust Your Windows.” The twist here is that she has let herself get hurt by a misguided crush on Kurt, and this number goes out to all the fag hags who’ve been scorned by their best friends. Even Will comes most alive when performing hip-hop numbers, and I’ll be damned if that white boy can’t dance. (Check out the “Bust a Move” clip below.) Yet in its matchmaking, the show has been consistently segregationist: the white, straight, able-bodied kids only date within their own demo, whereas the various minority characters have primarily had failed flirtations amongst themselves.4

Click here to view the embedded video.

When the plot veers into problematic territory, music has often been the show’s saving grace for working through issues and for giving the audience what it wants. British pop music scholar Simon Frith has insightfully suggested that musical investment is most intense in our youths as it functions to negotiate identifications, intense emotions, and the sense that time is both fleeting and never goes quickly enough.5 Arguably, marginalized youth—kids of color, queers, the economically disadvantaged—are the ones who invest in music most intensely and visibly, though the tastes and modes of consumption vary. Frith further argues that we use music to express embarrassing emotions we can’t articulate ourselves, a claim that was actually vocalized explicitly in episode ten, when students are assigned to sing ballads. Again, the show demonstrates a degree of self-awareness, but it simultaneously disappoints when, in this episode, the marginalized students band together to make the cheerleader and the football star feel better through song. This treacly performance brings me back to the series’ beginning, with its climatic attempt at uplift that worked in spite of the text’s conflicted textual politics of difference.

The pilot concludes with the glee club’s first knockout performance, a choral cover of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’.” For all the issues of representation the pilot raises, the number is nonetheless irresistible, even if this relentlessly peppy rendition evacuates the song of the working-class social realism and lustful escapism scripted in its lyrics. The lyric that does shine through is “living to find emotion.” And that emotion is glee—an affective boost that compensates irrationally, within the logic of the show, for the characters’ feelings of marginalization. Of course, that’s how music works in life, too. But this intensity of such investment in popular culture seems to extend beyond the characters to the show’s audience as well: this is a series that people really seem to want to love. It’s a show that the fans have, so far, not stopped believing in, even when the reality of its representations don’t quite live up to the utopian aspirations.

Image Credits:

1. Glee cast
2. Glee Club members

Please feel free to comment.

1. Although I am focusing on the issue of cast diversity in this column, it strikes me that Glee is also significant as a successful new industrial model that works through a diversity of platforms: an early pilot to build blog buzz, onscreen cast Twitters during the pilot’s rebroadcast, iTunes downloads of popular numbers week by week, embedded video clips that circulate the web without take-down notices, a series of CD soundtrack albums, and a mid-season DVD release. The musical numbers not only offer an additional revenue stream for the show, but it also revives the popularity of the original recordings. A comparative analysis with its fellow FOX series American Idol might also be illuminating.
2. For a critique of civil rights politics that draw equivalence between queerness and racial difference, see Janet Halley, “Like-Race Arguments” in What’s Left of Theory?: New Work on the Politics of Literary Theory (Judith Butler, John Guillory & Thomas Kendall eds., Routledge, 2000).
3. In the transitional episode, “Mashup,” the newly self-identified Jewish Puck, played by Mark Salling, has the epiphany that “Rachel was a hot Jew and the good lord wanted me to get into her pants.” But the show has also been intolerably cruel to the football coach Ken Tanaka, played by Patrick Gallagher, going so far as to blame his mixed ethnicity for his bad genes.
4. Significantly, the show fails most spectacularly with its most normative heterosexual relationship: Will’s marriage. His wife Terri (Jessalyn Gilsig) is a hysterical shrew, whereas his extramarital crushes on the OCD guidance counselor Emma (Jayma Mays) and ex-high school diva on the skids April (played with torchy fire by Kristen Chenoweth) are treated far more sympathetically.
5. See Firth’s essay “Toward an Aesthetic of Popular Music” in Music and Society, eds. Richard Leppert and Susan McClary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 133-149, as well as his book Sound Effects (New York: Pantheon, 1981).

In summer 1989, sex, lies, and videotape won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and was released theatrically to acclaim and profitability. I was 13 at the time, and I couldn’t wait to see it. I would have to wait, for its video release when I was 14. But I was fascinated. The hype around sex, lies, and videotape suggested to me, for the first time probably, that there was something to cinema other than Hollywood. But it wasn’t just me: the alluring title, the quality performances, and most of all, its commercial success helped open up the new market for independent films for the next decade. Despite its impact at the time and the lingering influence it has had in reshaping the cinema scene, this twentieth anniversary has gone—as far as I can tell—unremarked.

Of course, there were independent films before sex, lies, and videotape, and there would be abundant mediocrity afterwards; nonetheless, the publicity and commercial success of this single film helped fuel a boom of festivals, art-house multiplexes, cable stations, and video releases that fostered the release and exploitation of independent cinema. sex set the scene for cinematic possibilities. sex also set a template of sorts for Miramax’s early 1990s cinema of quality transgressions: The Grifters, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, Delicatessen, The Crying Game, Reservoir Dogs, The Piano, Pulp Fiction, Heavenly Creatures and others. It was a brief but stunning run until Miramax turned toward the studio model and joined forces with Disney, and before “independent” cinema became a euphemism for formulaic character studies that had little to do with any kind of alternative culture or actual financial anarchism. sex, by presenting an alternative heterosexuality in which every sexual act and relationship is non-normative may also have also helped the door for the heralded New Queer Cinema (Poison, Paris Is Burning, Swoon, etc) that immediately followed on the festival circuit in 1990-91.

Given the film’s groundbreaking production and distribution history, it’s striking that the film’s narrative and character psychology likewise focus on independence: from sibling obligations, from traditional marriage, from personal baggage. In the film, the protagonist—or antihero, depending on your point of view—Graham (James Spader) doesn’t want to deal with the commitments of a relationship, a house, a job, or, as he puts it, keys. When he comes to visit an old college buddy John (Peter Gallagher) and his wife Ann (Andie MacDowell), he also liberates Ann from her marriage and, one might assume, her need for therapy. Maybe I was too young to question such things, but Graham’s “issues” (he gets off by masturbating videotaped interviews that he has conducted with women about their sexual histories) never seemed so strange. When he said that he felt “comparatively healthy,” I kind of agreed. I had more of a moralizing view of adultery, which, in the case of sex, lies in an ongoing liaison between John and Ann’s flippant younger sister Cynthia (Laura San Giacomo). If I have evolved in my response to the film, it’s in my deepening appreciation of San Giacomo and sympathy with Cynthia—though even as a young prude, I always savored her post-orgasmic dismissal, “You can go now.”1 At a key moment midway through the film, the film cuts out and withholds the intimate encounter between Graham and Ann. The film eventually does deliver the goods, when dramatically more essential (a trick of expository withholding and narrative jigsaw puzzling that Soderbergh mastered in his most pleasurable film, Out of Sight), a move that foreshadowing recurring trends in nonlinear narratives ever since. Until then, the audience has to wait for video. Throughout the film, we see the dichotomies of film and video, professional and amateur, promiscuous and celibate, sex acts and sex talk.

Although the film is about sex, there’s little sex actually in the film. It was marketed as a provocative, erotic comedy but is not, for the most part, particularly sexy. The film, despite the titillating title and common connotative associations between home video and pornography, takes sex seriously as something of incredible complexity: it can be pleasurable or unpleasurable, it can happen with or without intimacy, it can have little or nothing to do with intercourse, and it can mean different things to and with different people. I don’t think it had occurred to my pubescent mind before this film that sex was something that had meaning beyond the simplistic binary of good/sinful. I was lucky enough that my dad gave me the birds-and-bees talk as a child, but I was also taught that sex should only exist within marriage. Certainly, I knew people in movies had affairs, but they were usually either passionate or punished. sex offered a wholly different view of sex, relationships, love, and marriage, than what I had ever seen before—although maybe the fact that the film’s skepticism about coupledom resonated so deeply with my own attitudes suggests that maybe I needed therapy as badly as Ann. I took the film very seriously, as something to study and watch repeatedly; it was only belatedly that I recognized the humor in the film, or much more recently, discovered peers who likewise owned and rewatched the film to the point of memorization. Again, this kind of intense relationship to a text could only exist because of video.

Home video made sex more visible—both by giving filmmakers such as Soderbergh the necessary seed money for independent productions through pre-sold rights and by bringing innovative and/or pornographic works into the privacy of the home entertainment center. And despite the film’s importance as an independent film, it was surely seen far more widely on videotape. The film’s alternative economics and mores were interrelated, bound together by videotape. In the published production diaries (themselves deeply enlightening to me at the time as revealing that films are made with intentional meanings and serendipitous revisions), Soderbergh makes tangential references to The Last Picture Show.2 If that film offered a semi-nostalgic look at awkward adolescent sexual negotiations concurrent with the demise of cinema in the age of television, sex offered a more adult view of sex after some of the mystery had worn off, concurrent with the impact of home video and the ascendance of independent film.

In retrospect, it was only too fitting that the movie was all about film’s other: videotape. In the film, home video becomes the site of intimacy—a grainy image full of gray areas, of bruisy black and blues—in stark visual distinction to the slick surface of things shot on film. sex, lies has always seemed to me remarkably truthful in its representation of our conflicted feelings and values about sex. The film is talky yet incisive and compelling, perverted yet intelligent. For me, it was a formative text, one that made me understand both the cinema and sex differently.

Image Credits:

1. Ann (Andie MacDowell) with a video camera in sex, lies, and videotape
2. Cynthia (Laura San Giacomo) exhibits her comfort with sex and with herself
3. Talking about sex: Graham (James Spader) and Ann (Andie MacDowell)
4. Graham looks away from a tape when the emotional intimacy gets to be too much
5. The ugly truth: Ann on tape

Please feel free to comment.

1. If the film gets something wrong, it’s that John is so completely unlikable, without a glimmer of charisma or redeeming values. Perhaps it’s to the film’s credit that the character who most closely resembles a normative ideal (yuppie straight white male) is the character with whom it’s hardest to identify. But it’s also hard to imagine that he and Graham had ever been friends. In that respect, Lynn Shelton’s Humpday rights sex’s wrong: it presents a finely observed social study of straight male sexuality and friendship after both have gone slightly off path. Like sex, it present a post-collegeiate reunion, one titillating in its promise of pornography, yet one is less about sex per se than about the meanings we attach to it in the form of hang-ups.
2. Steven Soderbergh, sex, lies, and videotape (New York: Harper Perennial, 1990).

For this column, I offer a polemic that might alternately be called “semiotics of the digital,” a cranky reflection on the ways we talk about digital technologies and the meanings that underlie seemingly benign grammatical usage. (This is what happens when there’s nothing good to watch on TV.)

Noun
“Digital” is not a noun.1 It’s an adjective that modifies a technology, an image, a culture, an “age,” or the like. “The digital” is not a thing in itself; it merely points to an underlying structure of binary code that manages information without any medium specificity or essence beyond a string of 1s and 0s. “The digital” does not exist. And yet “the digital” is often spoken of and even occasionally theorized as a self-evident category—one whose vagueness hedges against rapid obsolescence or implies an entire world changed by computation and new delivery platforms.2 We all know more or less what is meant by “the digital”: a mythical technological utopia that has so often been hailed and believed in. When used as a noun, what does it name? It names an abstraction, an ideology, an emperor with no clothes.

Additionally, there is no such thing as a recognizable or stable digital aesthetic. “The digital” has not ushered “the end of cinema” as was feared at the turn of the millennium, but rather it has opened up a broader conception of the cinema as related to moving images, screens, and interfaces including but extending beyond celluloid.3 “The digital” extends to so many devices that claims to a singular aesthetic are difficult to justify. Email, electronic thermometers, DVDs, and microwave timers are all “digital” technologies, yet we do not experience them in the same way. As others have pointed out before me, we do not perceive their underlying codes and computational commands; we perceive their graphical interfaces and control buttons.

As more and more of our communications and art become digitized, the mere fact of digitality comes to matter less and less. When it comes to “the digital” there’s no there there. What we experience is a variety of interfaces and storage formats—not “the digital.” Rather than speaking in terms of “the digital” we should think in more precise ways that recognize the multiplicities of digital technology. Conceiving “the digital” as a noun—as a subject, an object, a thing—perhaps misleads us into conceiving of electronic technologies and media as something unified, something with ontology. We lose the complexity and specificity of “the digital” by reducing it to a generalizing noun.

Adjective
“Digital,” in its most accurate usage, is a neutral modifier pointing to information encoding. Yet there is often implicit valuation in the use of the term “digital” as an adjective that suggests better, advanced or high-tech. Digital technologies are not inherently better than analog ones, though oftentimes they are uncritically accepted as just that.

Recently, I was reminded of when I turned against the adjectival “digital”—or at least, when I began to see it as an empty promise. In the early 2000s, a friend in Manhattan “upgraded” to Time Warner Cable’s new digital cable service. This was in the early days of bundling: in exchange for an increasingly expensive monthly fee, he could subscribe to digital cable featuring music channels, high-speed Internet, and phone service. I was struck by how unreliable the digital signal was: the Internet crashed, the phone went dead, and the TV image frequently froze or broke up into blocky color patterns. Meanwhile, my own apartment’s old school analog cable from the same company worked just fine. At the time digital cable was a novelty with kinks that hadn’t yet been worked out yet, like the premature launch of a buggy Beta version of a new platform.

However, digital video has made little progress over the past decade. We’re all too familiar with the recurring its failures: DVD-Rs that cannot be read, dirty Netflix discs that freeze, academic talks derailed by PowerPoint or DVD menus, satellite TV signals that disappear due to atmospheric interference, screenings foiled by faulty projector connections, streaming videos that halt or have been deactivated. This trend came full circle when I recently moved into a 1920s apartment building in Hollywood and subscribed to Time Warner Cable with the HD tier and a DVR. Although we are supposed to have entered the age of high definition and digital broadcasting by now, the interference on my digital cable service is the worst that I’ve ever seen—and this in the heart of the entertainment industry.4 Too many channels and signals are compressed and forced through insufficient wiring, while the remote and cable box seem positively reluctant to communicate with each other. The image breaks up, and the sound drops out just about every minute. Now if I’m watching a screwball comedy recorded from TCM or a catty reality TV confession on Bravo, I can no longer expect to be able to hear all the dialogue. This is progress? It feels as though the heralded digital revolution was forced upon the people, rather than the other way around.5

I’m not against digital technologies per se; I’m addicted to as many digital devices and modes of communication as the next person. But I am skeptical of the marketing ruse and theoretical hype that digital technologies always improve upon existing analog ones. Machines break, and signals drop out. The underlying digital code does nothing to ameliorate that fact of life. If anything, it exacerbates it. We need to think of “digital” as a neutral, boringly informational adjective, not as a superlative.

Adverb
Okay, so I’m fudging my semantic framework quite a bit here, but how might we modify the meaning of digital’s adverb form—digitally—to understand audiences’ choices and actions? How do audiences use digital media? The tension between marketed innovations and everyday adoption has perhaps most tellingly been exposed during the past few years. While the content and electronics industries have been pushing the rollout of HD TVs and Blu-ray, the technologies that consumers have more voraciously adopted have been anything but high definition. Instead, it’s the low resolution mobile and access technologies of YouTube and cell phones that have spurred nearly instant adopters. The convenience of immediate access and the exchange of free media (though the hardware is anything but free) have far outstripped enthusiasm for HD. Yet again, this suggests that technologies are adopted in unpredictable ways that defy the industry’s intentions and goading.

Maybe this dialectic of low resolution/high definition suggests that “digital” has already changed its meaning and its connotations to have less to do with medium specificity or formal considerations and more to do with infrastructures and behaviors. Among young viewers, in particular, there seems to almost be an indifference to aesthetics in favor of finding media how and when and where they want it.6 I suppose if you’re texting, emailing, IM-ing, surfing the web, and sipping your Starbucks while watching TV or streaming a feature film on YouTube, it doesn’t matter what the video looks like or if it keeps stalling to load or if it’s segmented into a dozen separate clips because you’re multi-tasking. This, apparently, is how the digital generation consumes content now. Although I’ve never been a “glance” TV viewer (when I watch TV, I watch TV), I was struck while teaching film and media theory this past spring that prior TV studies theories of distracted viewing may be newly relevant for reconceptualizing how audiences watch now.

The appeal of watching “digitally” for many users, then, is not about optimal images but instead about accessibility and, possibly even expectations of technical difficulties. This raises questions, then, about which of our cinema and media studies frameworks actually give us the language to think beyond “the digital” to the ways audiences now watch digitally.

Image Credits: 
1. The 1s and 0s of Binary Code
2. Noun: A person, place or thing.
3. Neon Adjective
4. “Wookie Here! Save the Adverb!”
5. Coaxial Cables, photo by author.
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1. Dictionary.com offers one meaning for “digital” as a noun: “10. one of the keys or finger levers of keyboard instruments.” I’m pretty sure that I have never heard anyone use the word this way.
2. I’m not targeting specific new media theorists here so much as responding to a recurring tendency toward abstraction or casual generalization about digital technologies within and beyond media studies. Some of the early work in the field, such as Sherry Turkle’s conceptualization of the performance of identities online, seems more useful than ever in the age of social networking and Second Life, while later historical work by Lisa Gitelman and others have challenged the premise of newness and insisted on the materiality of the hardware.
3. D.N. Rodowick has offered perhaps the most exhaustive interrogation of medium specificity and anxieties about the meaning of cinema in the digital technology age in The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007).
4. In 2008 the City of Los Angeles sued Time Warner Cable for its poor customer service. See http://articles.latimes.com/2008/jun/05/business/fi-cable5
5. Obvious connections can be made here to the controversial digital broadcast conversion, and I encourage comments on the topic. See also Lisa Park’s Flow column on the topic: http://flowtv.org/?p=2266.
6. HD TVs, which excel at brightness, contrast, and color saturation, may be mesmerizing for spectacular images but do little to improve the low-res everyday.

Let me just say up front that nothing bores me more than TV procedurals along the lines of Law and Order. So it look a lot of coercion to talk me into watching Damages. To my great pleasure, despite being a lawyer show, Damages cares little for the rules of that genre and, moreover, offers a cynical view of the law as out-of-order. More paranoid thriller than procedural, the show refuses courtroom speeches, and the end-of-season verdicts seem practically irrelevant; it breaks from both the plausibility of “authenticity” and the strictures of the legal process. Instead, it reflects a complete lack of faith in the system and the people who operate within it. Damages is about justice outside the rule of law; it’s a liberal vengeance fantasy that societal harm will be exposed, that knowledge actually does equal power, and that a strong woman can make the powers-that-be (straight white men) pay for their misdeeds.

That strong woman, of course, is played by Glenn Close. Damages is perhaps most visible as a star vehicle, but it’s one that taps Close’s savvy and strength from Dangerous Liaisons rather than her hysteria from Fatal Attraction. Close plays Patty Hewes, a class-action litigator who is the kind of character other characters refer to by first and last name, even if they know her. She’s legendary for playing dirty, always winning, and destroying everyone she meets. The theme song, speaking for Patty, repeats, “When I’m through with you, there won’t be anything left.” Yet, she is not a monster; her politics are progressive, and she has a complex personal sense of right and wrong. She doesn’t care, for instance, that her husband cheats on her, but she hates him for being stupid enough to get caught and even more so for betting against her with corrupt investments. The character invites admiration and suspicion, and Close plays her with a kind of shrewd control and superiority—at least until some long pent-up scenery chewing finally erupts near the end of the second season with, for instance, the divaesque line, “I’ve had a shitty month, and somebody’s going to pay”.

Damages is, in many ways, a revenge plot—of a diva who proves she can carry a TV series in the face of an ageist film industry, of a young lawyer who was nearly destroyed by her boss, and of a liberal who is mad as hell and isn’t going to take it anymore. During the first season, Patty Hewes’ firm takes on a Enron-style tycoon (played by Ted Danson) who has bankrupted his employee’s pensions while profiting enormously himself. To gain access to an elusive witness, she hires new law school grad Ellen Parsons (Rose Byrne), a smart but exploitable subject. The primary arc of the first season is about the ways Patty manipulates and destroys Ellen. In the second season, Patty goes after a company that has been dumping toxic waste and poisoning a small town, and Ellen goes after Patty. Between the first and second seasons, Byrne’s Ellen transitions from an undernourished beauty with a striking emerald trench coat to a far more compelling damaged and pissed off broad. Damages, fascinatingly, revels in transgression for the sake of the public interest.

The show thrives on that early stage of legal work: “discovery.” Knowledge—and the ability to prove that knowledge—is the core of Patty’s legal work. Such epistephilia and dramatic irony are likewise central to the show’s appeal. Without official institutional positions within the boys clubs of the government or corporations, Patty’s power comes from her incisive ability to see through the pricks in power, creatively amass evidence against her defendants, and to bluff when in a pinch. Patty often violates legal process to gain access to privileged information, and likewise the show frequently refuses to play fair the viewer through misleading plot twists. Damages offers a pulpy narrative of teasing flash-forwards, sudden revelations, and dubious reversals—the kind of narrative complexity and manipulation that only television allows. Yet the show strategically refuses the audience the ability to make sense of the puzzle the way other complicated, masculinist serials often offer the satisfaction of narrative mastery; instead, Damages suggests that we, the viewers, can’t possibly understand and that we just have to trust that Patty knows how to win in the end. And part of the fantasy is Patty’s implausible knowledge—that Patty could know so much, could have so many undercover sources, and that she could always be one step ahead of the characters and the audience. When Ellen enacts her personal vendetta against Patty, it’s again primarily through leaking knowledge and betraying confidences as an informant for the feds. Yet, compared to Patty, she’s a novice, and so we wait anxiously for her to be undone.

The pleasures of the text make Damages good TV, but I think the show resonates beyond its clever form. I suggest that Patty isn’t just a fun antihero, but that she is actually embodies a contemporary liberal revenge fantasy. In the post-Bush, post-Enron, post-regulation era, we have repeatedly seen the failure of our government, corporate, and watchdog leaders to act in the best interest of the people. Instead, we have seen conservatives steal elections, mislead the public, abuse power, poison the environment, impoverish the citizenry, and promote the collapse of infrastructure. They fight dirty, and too often liberals have let them. Patty, unethical as she may seem, plays tough, fights back, and is driven to take these kinds of guys down. To quote Tina Fey’s famed Saturday Night Live claim about Hillary Clinton during last year’s primary, “Bitches get things done.” Patty Hewes is a bitch, and she is out for justice.

Damages is not a show about the law, rights, ethics, or morals. It’s not about due process or closing arguments. It’s about justice. For some time now, I have been interested in the tensions between ethics and the law—in the dilemma that they are not always one and the same, that the law can actually fail to serve the public interest because so often it is written to protect special lobbies. Justice, I think, suggests a third category, one that comes into play when neither ethics nor the law have sufficed in guiding actions and when some kind of equalizing retaliation becomes desirable. Obama may have given us hope and begun reform, but conservatives and CEOs still have a lot of atoning to do. Damages offers a retribution fantasy—one that vicariously allows viewers to take pleasure in transgressing legal ethics or due process and that seeks justice from those who’ve so betrayed the American Dream. In the world of the show, Patty demands that corporate crooks and government sell-outs recognize their accountability, and she brings transparency to the ways in which the system can be bought. She strives to punish those in power for what they’ve done, proves that the system needs regulation, and accepts that, if necessary, questionable inside dealing—even violence—may be the way effect progressive change. Of course, as much as we might want our liberal leaders to play a little dirtier at times to get shit done, in reality it would ultimately be difficult to endorse the ends-justifies-the-means model of political process. (It also problematically offers a neoliberal solution to problems caused by neoliberal policies.) That may be why the justice pursued in Damages is so satisfying as a fantasy: through discovery, Patty allows us to know the truth, and through manipulation and litigation, she exacts her—and our—revenge.

Image Credits:

1. Damages on FX
2. Glenn Close in Damages
3. Glenn Close and Rose Byrne in Damages
4. Glenn Close, Ted Danson, and Rose Byrne in Damages

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