Last year, I was invited to become a columnist for FlowTV and to write a series of short pieces addressing current issues in television and television studies which could speak to both an “academic” and a “general” audience at once — indeed, which could challenge this very distinction between the “academic” and the “general” by acknowledging that those who regularly watch TV and those who seriously think about it are very often one and the same. This is, I would argue, just as it should be, as demonstrated by how such a multiply articulated identity (as viewer and reader, as fan and critic) is fruitfully claimed by all of the authors represented in this special issue, who deftly move among and between their personal and scholarly interests in Battlestar Galactica (2003-present) — a program that itself explores the concept of multiply articulated identities and that, in its own moves among and between stories of personal relations and scenes of political reflection, fantasy formations and critical commentary, futuristic (as well as historicist) vision and allegories for the present-day, encourages precisely the complex readings, receptivities, and identifications evident in the essays collected here. And this is not yet even to mention those who, like Battlestar Galactica star Mary McDonnell (who plays the lead role of President Laura Roslin in the program and is also a contributor to this special issue), work in television and thus also, of course, think very hard about it — again suggesting that, when it comes to television’s “reproductions,” the lines between the “general” and the “specialized” television community, the “ordinary” and the “extraordinary” TV participant (whether viewer or producer, artist, critic, or fan) are necessarily and productively blurry ones.

Not that this made it any easier for me to write my first “short column” for FlowTV. Attempting to think of a nice little topic that I could handle in a mere thousand words, I (in a moment of insanity, perhaps reminiscent of the Baltar-esque delusions of some of Battlestar Galactica’s own characters) came up with the following: what’s the relationship between television and “personhood,” between our culture’s most pervasive medium and our notions of “being human”? Short, manageable topic, right? And even further complicated by the fact that I tried to address both television viewing and television programs, ranging over considerations of what it means to watch TV, alone or with others (and thus, what sorts of “selves,” “families,” and communities television might yield), as well as over considerations of what various television texts themselves — with Battlestar Galactica as a prime example — might indicate about the possibilities and/or limitations of “personhood,” the “human self,” “family,” and community. Probably needless to say, I couldn’t, in the requested length, quite do justice to the complexity of the topic—and to the complex and multivalent way in which Battlestar Galactica itself handles these issues.

This complexity emerges from what might, at first glance, appear to be a commonplace science fiction trope: Battlestar Galactica traces the after-effects of an apocalyptic nuclear attack on human civilization by cyborg beings, initially built to “serve man” as machines and/or slaves. Yet these familiar scenarios are defamiliarized by the very ways in which Battlestar Galactica regenerates and re-imagines previous images of generated automata (not to mention pressing real-world concerns about war and biopolitics). The premise of the program is deceptively simple, encapsulated in the show’s first season title sequence:

The Cylons were created by Man.
They Rebelled.
They Evolved.
They Look and Feel Human.
Some are programmed to think they are Human.
There are many copies.
And they have a Plan.

A “Plan,” though with some unexpected debate among the Cylons, to wipe out the vestiges of the human population (now on the run, in search of “a mythical planet called Earth”). This agenda must therefore be resisted and foiled by President Roslin and military commander Admiral Adama (Edward James Olmos), along with the crew of Galactica and an assorted fleet of civilian ships under their leadership, through a counter-plan to save the survivors and ensure the continuation of humankind, thus requiring the maintenance and renewal both of the populace and of “human culture” as a whole.

As even just this premise indicates, Battlestar Galactica is all about reproduction — technical, textual, familial, even “universal” — from the generation of babies, to the regeneration of equipment, to the replication of Cylons (in addition to the creation of assorted “hybrids”), all the way to the very “delivery” of humanity… or maybe more accurately, as hinted at in the notion of hybridity, an expanded conception of what we might call “humanity plus.” Yet as that “plus” indicates, this is not reproduction in the sense of simply duplicating the same; rather, there is reproduction with a difference — that is, a re-visioned, re-envisioned production — at every level of the program and its own creation, re-creation, and propagation.

It is this dynamic that we are attempting to evoke with our title for this issue, “Re/Producing Cult TV.” Clearly, as I’ve indicated, “reproduction” is a narrative theme across the program. But beyond Battlestar’s stories of what we might see as literal reproduction — the birth of children, cyborgs, civilizations — there are stories that involve a more figural reproduction, that disrupt the boundary between the literal and the figural, that, indeed, re-produce (and, in so doing, incite us to re-view) our own stories, histories, and possible futures. Many of the program’s plots have complex allegorical dimensions, alluding to issues and events as varied as, for example, Nazi genocidal politics and WWII resistance efforts (as well as more recent “final solution” or “ethnic cleansing” policies in places like Cambodia, East Timor, Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur); guerilla warfare, as reminiscent of Vietnam (not to mention the present-day Iraqi insurgency); the threat of infectious diseases, viral epidemics, and biological warfare, as feared today; political and religious conflicts, with their attending conflicting meanings of terms like “terrorism,” “counter-terrorism,” and “suicide bombings,” as devastatingly evident in the clashes in the Middle East; timely debates about the detention and torture of “unlawful combatants”; the possibility of election fraud, with its real-life corollary being, I trust, obvious — indeed, I would suggest that, though assumed by some to be “merely” a trivial fictional program in a campy cult genre, Battlestar Galactica offers the most serious and sustained (and never cut-and-dried) examination on television of life in a “post-9/11″ world.

In its televisual reflections of our world, Battlestar Galactica does not often look at TV itself… with the exception of the diegetic communications network “the wireless,” highlighted in an intriguing episode (”Final Cut,” 9/9/05) in which a Cylon, posing as a human, produces a documentary about life aboard Galactica — a “machine-subject” (a cyborg) deploying another “machine-subject” (video) to construct a way of viewing and re-viewing humanity. But, even beyond this, in its very operations, Battlestar Galactica embodies how television itself functions as a technology of production and reproduction, generating knowledges of our world through the “labor” of everyone and everything involved in TV: media institutions (which, of course, produce not only programs, but textual norms, social discourses, demographic categories, tie-in commodities, and consumer desires), industry workers (with the complex dynamics of multiple authorship that a medium like television necessarily entails among executives, writers, producers, directors, actors, and crew); and television viewers, investing meanings and desires in what they see.

The current Battlestar Galactica is itself a televisual reproduction of an earlier series, a program that aired in 1978-79 and that has since become a cult camp classic (despite, or because of, its own tangled history of replication, pointing toward the complicated relations and reproductions that also link media, political, and legal discourses—for instance, the questions of “intellectual property” that played out in battles with the first series over charges, eventually dropped, of copyright infringement). Later, after several failed attempts to revive the program in the intervening years, the Sci-Fi Channel (with Ronald D. Moore as creative force and co-executive producer) finally brought the re-imagined series to fruition in 2003, with first a mini-series and then an on-going weekly serial (now on hiatus until its fourth and final season premieres in April).1 In turn, one might say that Battlestar Galactica brought the Sci-Fi Channel fully to fruition—a case study in the shift in the television industry from “broadcasting” to “narrowcasting,” as well as in the “convergence” of television and so-called “new” media technologies (such as the internet), in that this fictional drama, with its own explosive premise, both relied on and furthered the explosion of channels in the “cable revolution” and the explosion of outlets, audiences, authors, and textual and product tie-ins in the “digital revolution.” With “cult television” now conceived by the industry as a viable economic strategy and, alternatively, by groups of viewers as a particular relationship to animating and re-animating TV, the scene was set for the emergence (or re-emergence) of the complex phenomenon and textual constellation known as Battlestar Galactica.

This phenomenon also, of course, involves a constellation of people, all involved in creative work even as they are simultaneously (and necessarily) enmeshed in commodity culture — the two of which, as television has taught us, cannot be seen as oppositions. While it is no doubt true that the television industry defines “personhood” and “human identity” in consumer capitalist terms (selling audiences to advertisers and offering a “demographic” rather than “democratic” vision), this perspective does not exhaust the implications and operations of television and television viewing. Indeed, viewing itself can be seen as re-production with a difference — as both pleasure and labor, proliferating and propagating meanings, affects, identities, relations, and communities in multiple ways (some, arguably, disempowering; others perhaps quite empowering, albeit within certain limits). This is particularly evident with the fan communities that are so active in their viewing and re-viewing, identifications and appropriations of cult texts like Battlestar Galactica. Producing an amazing range of creative material — fan fiction, art, films, and videos; podcasts, blogs, archives, and wikis; public events and private reflections — these viewers claim their own authorship over television, challenging notions of fixed hierarchy, authority, property, and propriety through their varied practices and actualizations. Again, this is especially evident with self-identified fans; but I would argue, as many other TV scholars have argued, that all viewing works this way (or can and should work this way): not simply as a means of consumption, but as a means of production that challenges, then, that very production / consumption divide, along with other such divides like education versus entertainment or critical versus popular response.

Our objective in putting together this issue of FlowTV was to encourage and embody exactly this boundary crossing, this intermixture and hybridity. The contributors include people who labor at television (re)production from both sides of the screen: Mary McDonnell, who is, of course, centrally involved in creating the show, and myself, Melanie Kohnen, David Bering-Porter, Sarah Toton, Julie Levin Russo, Alanna Thain, Anne Kustritz, and Bob Rehak, all of whom are involved in re-creating it in our work as spectators, enthusiasts, and academics. But, in our multiple roles, we might all be seen as all of the above: viewers, producers, artists, critics, and fans. Our hope is that, through the mutual dialogue that is the goal of this special issue (and of FlowTV as a whole), the multiple roles that all of us play in our relationships to television, culture, critique, and “personhood” will also be further animated, amplified, and propagated — that is, will also be “re-produced.”

Author Bio:

Lynne Joyrich is an Associate Professor in the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. A member of the Camera Obscura editorial collective, she is the author of Re-viewing Reception: Television, Gender, and Postmodern Culture (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1996) and of a number of articles and book chapters on film, television, feminist, queer, and cultural studies in various anthologies and journals.

Issue Credits:

Lynne Joyrich, Guest Editor, “Re/Producing Cult TV: The Battlestar Galactica Issue”
Julie Levin Russo, Guest Associate Editor, “Re/Producing Cult TV: The Battlestar Galactica Issue”
Jean Anne Lauer, FlowTV Editorial Liaison, “Re/Producing Cult TV: The Battlestar Galactica Issue”

Image Credits:
1. SciFi promo of Battlestar Galactica
2. Images and captions from the title sequence (season 3), screencap provided by author.
3. A prophetic vision of the first Cylon-human hybrid baby, ibid.
4. Scenes from the occupation of New Caprica, ibid.
5. Reporter (and Cylon) D’Anna Biers films Lt. Gaeta in the episode “Final Cut,” ibid.
6. An entry in the SciFi.com fan film contest Videomaker Toolkit, ibid.

Please feel free to comment.

1. The Sci-Fi Channel is the U.S. home of Battlestar Galactica; in the U.K. and Ireland, the series airs on Sky One.

In part one of “Women are from Mars?”, I detailed the striking–and, arguably, quite stupifying–stories of rapes that have occurred across Veronica Mars, focusing in particular on a plot earlier this season in which a series of campus rapes were revealed to have been committed by, not one, but two groups of “rapists:” a pair of college men as well as a collective of feminist women, the latter of whom staged some (I believe unclear number of) “fake rapes” to call attention to the problem of sexual violence. Perhaps needless to say, such a plot–in which these women did, in fact, use sexually violating means to “get back” at harassing frat boys and created turmoil (if not trauma) for some women on campus (who, along with the show's viewers, might not have realized that some of this was “fake”)–risks only multiplying the problems. This was the case both within the diegetic world and, maybe even more so, for viewers of it, since, of course, the very attempt to mark a distinction in this way between “real” and “fake” rape, between the “true” and the “false” assault, hazards participating in the same logic and ethos of sexual violence that the program seems to be trying to critique.

I would like, in this part, to go on to elaborate how this televisual confusion about what counts as “real” vs. “not-quite-real” rape mirrors a confusion in our wider cultural as well legal discourses about what counts as “real rape.” Further, understandings (or misunderstandings) of rape seem intimately, if not necessarily legally, linked with understandings of gender–which is why Veronica Mars's exploration of what it means to be raped (and/or to be a rapist) is, I believe, so paradoxically interwoven with its exploration of what it means to be gendered. Most people–and most TV shows–seem to have the easiest time seeing something as “real rape” if it involves a clear-cut, violent, physical attack with penetration of a woman by a man with whom she is not friendly (precisely what first appeared to be the situation as described by prosecutors with a case explicitly referenced by Veronica Mars: that involving Duke lacrosse players in Durham, NC, which seemed to promise the clarity of not only explicit violence and gender difference, but explicit domination and subordination as defined by race and class as well). Situations involving acquaintance rape, same-gender rape, “virtual reality” attacks, sexual assault involving things other than penis-in-vagina, and so on often seem to elicit much more confusion and ambivalence. Yet as the enormous complications, social double binds, tragic paradoxes, and mishandlings (by both legal system and the media) of the Durham case reveal, rape–even the supposedly “clearest” form of rape–is never that simple. In fact, from a legal standpoint, the “clearest” and “simplest” form of rape is one that might not seem all that “real” to some people or in some cases: statutory rape, in which sexual contact occurs with a person who is stipulated, by law, as unable to agree to sex (such as a person below the designated legal “age of consent”), thus evacuating the need to determine whether or not force occurred and whether or not the contact was “willed” (with the inverse situation involving people who are stipulated by law–such as slaves and, until shockingly recently in the U.S., both wives and prostitutes–who are presumed to be unable to do anything but consent to sexual contact with designated subjects–their “owners,” husbands, and/or perhaps men in general). That is, statutory rape laws presume that certain categories, or genres, of people do not really (or do not yet) have “will,” full consciousness, choice and/or desire, and so “consent” is, definitionally here, impossible. (1)

By contrast, understandings of all other (i.e. non-statutory) rape depends on a notion of will, consciousness, intention, and desire–on a conception of subjectivity and selfhood, a sense that the “mind” (or “spirit” or “emotions” or “consciousness”) might differ from the body, internal intention from (at least in theory) externally observable bodily events, so that evidence that the body was involved in sexual contact need not imply that subjective consent was wanted and/or granted. Thus, rape cases in both legal and media discourses typically involve competing narratives of the self, in which the person charging rape states that s/he did not will the contact–that it was not self-controlled or subjectively authorized–while the person denying a rape charge may likely state that s/he believed that consent was given–that the contact was consciously desired and intentionally chosen. Given this connection between the definition of rape and narrational possibilities of the self, perhaps it is not surprising that rape has been linked, textually, to particular cultural forms that themselves are focused on the narrational and relational possibilities of consciousness and the self (with, for instance, representations of rape historically tied to the rise of the novel and still central to such genres as soap operas that emphasize the affective dynamics of inter- and intra-subjectivity). The prevalence of rape stories in these forms can certainly be troubling (for instance, there was a big outcry when the first central daytime lesbian character, Bianca Montgomery, was raped on All My Children, with some arguing that this amounted to a “punishment” for her sexuality)–but, paradoxically, one might also wonder if, through such narratives (depending, of course, on the specific construction of the text), the possibility of explorations and assertions of typically subjugated subjectivities can be offered (which I would argue was, at least to some degree, the case with All My Children, in which Bianca's rape further integrated, rather than segregated, this lesbian character into the complex world of the soap opera, where, in order to have any narrative centrality, characters must, in some ways, be threatened with trauma–with rape unfortunately still being perhaps the central articulation of this in the soaps in general, and with the assault, in this particular case, tying Bianca to a detailed family story involving multiple generations of women dealing with the threat or trauma of sexual assault and thus to a detailed, multi-generational critique of patriarchal and violently heterosexist sexual politics).

Obviously, this is very complicated terrain, about which there is much ambivalence and debate (and, to be totally clear, I certainly am not arguing for the “positive” value of rape, even as a narrative device). But the discourses of rape in our culture often have ambiguous effects, with, for instance (and as previously suggested) “clear” cases of rape, such as those depending on statutory/generic definitions, sometimes operating to deny the very selfhoods and “vulnerable” subjectivities that they are designed to protect while, conversely, “competing narrative” rape stories sometimes presuming an equality of subjectivity (or at least an equal ability to assert subjectivity) that denies the social dynamics and hierarchies which always impact (if not, in fact, form and determine) “the self.” Indeed, the serious problems and devastating consequences that can ensue from these discourses, and from the gaps between them, are more than evident in the Durham case, in which the competing narratives of the accuser and defendants have been reductively measured by the media as either, on the one hand, only individual, subjective accounts–to be weighed by the “integrity” of the selves involved, as if those selves exist in isolation of social factors–or else, on the other hand, as nothing but social emblems, with the complexity of subjectivity evacuated and erased.

In an attempt to bridge the gap between these conceptions of rape, some feminist theorists and legal scholars (most notably, Catherine A. McKinnon(2)) have suggested instituting rape laws that have as their basis an understanding of gender as the determinant of sexual violence, so that the crime is not just against a self but against a sex. By thus marking gender as the category that fully defines both subjectivity and sociality, it is also asserted as the generic category that fully defines rape (so that, prototypically, men rape women; women are socially constituted as those who are available to be raped; and, when rape occurs between members of the same sex, it operates quintessentially “as if” it were male-on-female violence, with the rapist, of whatever gender, assuming the position of a “man” so as to treat the rape victim, of whatever gender, as a “woman”). There is a certain elegance and simplicity to this formulation–but it also, of course, has a great many problems, perhaps most importantly involving its monolithic view of gender as the essential aspect of society and self and its ensuing blindness to other (I would argue equally significant) determinants, such as race and class. In effect, this approach makes all rape “stipulated,” or we might say “generic,” rape, as explained above, with, here, gender (rather than age of consent) as the determining category–and, as a consequence of this substitution, with the potential and paradoxical effect of infantilizing and disavowing the subjectivity, desire, and will of all women (all of whom are seen as unable to have any real, meaningful “consent” in this culture) despite its stated feminist goals.

But what does any of this have to do with Veronica Mars? As previously detailed, Veronica Mars is not quite generically a soap (though it has “soapy” elements) and not quite a detective show (though it has mysteries); it is framed by a female voice-over (thus suggesting an exploration of female consciousness) but, engaging many elements associated with “men's genres” and spaces, it's not a “girly” show; indeed, Veronica Mars (both program and character) can't be classified as “masculine” or “feminine” (or, for that matter, any other stable, stipulated category). It obviously then involves quite a different vision of self and society than the one offered by the MacKinnonesque view outlined above…which perhaps helps to explain its particular treatment of rape. In Veronica Mars, rape might be “real” or “staged” (and then what's the difference?); it might just as likely be perpetuated by women as men, against either women or men (and then is there a difference?); its “feminist” (or is “anti-feminist”, or “post-feminist”?) heroine (or anti-heroine?) might just as often “protect” the boys as the girls (and does this make a difference?) even as she tries (not always successfully) to protect herself. What are we to make of this? Does this re-vision of gender and of rape (and of the relationship between them) open up the program, and its viewers, to more “liberating” possibilities (and how would we even define this “liberation” if it involves equal-opportunity sexual assault more so, at least in narrative time and emphasis on Veronica Mars, than equal-opportunity success)? Or–even though the program, I would argue, creates a vision of gender multiplicity rather than gender neutrality–does it dangerously evade still very pressing questions of gender (and other social) determination? As all of my embedded questions indicate, I don't know. To be honest, much as I love the show, I'm not sure what to think about this program's representation of rape, and I am hesitant about stipulating an answer. As mentioned, I do not believe that (however over-the-top my plot summary might seem to non-viewers) Veronica Mars evacuates the import of the issue of sexual violence; rather, I think that it announces this importance precisely by the way in which it is palpably caught in the contradictions of our discourses of rape. I thus find the show very thought-provoking (which is, perhaps, the best thing we could want from a television program)…but, as to whether these stories of rape might “provoke” more sexism and violence because of their disruption of the usual alignments, or whether, through this very disruption, they might work to discourage such offenses, this jury, for one, is still out.

Endnotes

(1) I take this term “stipulation” from Frances Ferguson's brilliant article, “Rape and the Rise of the Novel,” Representations 20 (Fall 1987), 88-112, to which I am indebted for many of the thoughts leading to this essay.

(2) See, for example, the essays in Catharine A. MacKinnon's books Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1989) and Sex Equality, University Casebook Series (NY: Foundation Press, 2001).

Image Credits:
1. Veronica is attacked, “Spit and Eggs”
2. A drugged Veronica, “Spit and Eggs”

Please feel free to comment.

In my last Flow column, I noted how various options for viewing, and various television texts, have helped me to consider what might seem to be an absurdly huge question, one apparently far removed from the “trivialities” of commercial television: what it is to be a person. Yet however silly it might seem to link a discussion of television with a discussion of the meaning of personhood, I realized that, for me at least, thinking about both TV viewing dynamics and TV textual dynamics can raise interesting questions about the possibilities, as well as limitations, of the self in a mass-mediated society. But, of course, the self is not simply an isolated entity; it is, again, always mediated–socially and culturally articulated, even if not always (or only) televisually. In the previous column, I thus tried to point toward how certain social and cultural dynamics, and the identity categories that follow from those dynamics, were articulated in some television programs' imaginings of “selves”–how, for instance, conceptualizations and claims of raced, classed, ethnic, familial, and sexual selves operate in such programs as Oz, Dexter, Battlestar Galactica, and Ugly Betty. Those programs are amongst my all-time favorite shows, due, in no small part, to the way in which they explore exactly these issues of identity (and, as I tried to elaborate previously, the way in which they explore the construction and conventions of identity not despite but precisely through their simultaneous exploration of televisual construction and conventions). One show I didn't mention then–though it too is among my very favorites–is Veronica Mars: a program that, with its very premise of a teen “girl dick,” announces its exploration of “masculinity” and “femininity,” of the possibilities and limitations of gendered identity categories as these intersect, in the diegesis, with categories of, especially, class and generation and, in the production, with categories of narration, style, and genre.

Veronica Mars crosses many boundaries, both sexual and textual. In its focus on a young woman who solves mysteries, it has been described as a sort of Nancy Drew for the millennium–although this TV series goes beyond that (itself multiply interpreted) literary series in its categorical ambiguity. The mysteries that Veronica probes arise through both the work that she does for her father's P.I. business and the daily enigmas of high school, and then college, life. She thus operates as an investigator both privately and publicly, personally and professionally, in a familial as well as an extra-familial context. That narrative situation partially explains the generic mix of the show, which simultaneously operates as teen drama and detective program, soap opera and crime investigation, exploration of family dynamics and narration of family rebellion, melodrama and screwball comedy, cult television and mainstream programming. That mixture also suggests the play with gender and generation the program involves, which, again, emerges through not only the series' plots but its textual qualities: the aforementioned genre mix; the deployment of image and music to mark cultural style; the combination of seriousness and humor; the irony created by dialogue and gestures that almost seem designed to taunt and befuddle network censors; and the use of a mellifluous female voice-over, expressing the beautiful Veronica's inner thoughts, to frame stories that are often not so sweet or pretty.

In fact, if there is a dominant “story”–or actually, set of stories–that has defined Veronica Mars, it is the ugly story of rape. The program is structured to trace both season- (or half-season-) long mystery arcs while, at the same time, involving smaller mysteries that can usually be closed by the end of each episode–and mysteries surrounding various forms of rapes have appeared across both of those story forms. So, for example, while the first season's extended mystery focused on the death of Veronica's best friend, Lily, that central plot intersected with the question of statutory rape via the discovery of Lily's sexual relationship with an older man (who just happened to be a famous movie star and the father of first Lily's and then, later, Veronica's boyfriend) and with the possibility of Veronica herself having been raped (during an incident in which she passed out at a party, with no clear memory afterward of what had happened). After she suspects and investigates numerous potential perpetrators, viewers are led to believe that, in a sense, Veronica was raped, but not by a rapist: she was accidentally drugged (by having a bit of someone else's drink, which had been laced with GHB by one of Veronica's suspects in an attempt to get that other girl into bed) and then, in a not-quite-conscious state, had sex with her sweet ex-boyfriend who believed that she consented. If this wasn't confusing enough (a rape, meant by a potential rapist for someone else, actually committed by a man with no intention or consciousness of rape), we later find out that even this story isn't true. It turns out that, before her boyfriend entered the room where the drugged Veronica lay, another teenage boy, Cassidy–the brother of the one who put the GHB in the drink–had come in and had nonconsensual sex with Veronica, a rape he perpetrated not only because he was being egged on by his brother and friends, but, we discover in the next season, because he was acting out the rage and sexual confusion he had as a result of too being a victim of rape (when he was molested as a child by his then-Little League coach, now County Supervisor-cum-”Mayor of Neptune”). In fact, this rage and confusion also led Cassidy to orchestrate the bus crash that provided the series' second season-long mystery arc (a crash designed to stop the other Little League victims from revealing what had happened and so exposing all the boys to further scrutiny); to rape, viewers are led to presume, his own girlfriend Mac (one of Veronica's best buddies and co-investigators) when news of his heinous deeds is about to emerge; to kill his molester-now-”mayor”-of-the-town; and to try to kill Veronica (who figures all of this out) herself–all so that he can “protect” himself from further feminization after having been subjected to childhood sexual abuse. Need I add that Cassidy–both rape victim and rapist, survivor of child molestation and mass-murderer–goes by the (hated-by-him) nickname of Beaver, while his crass and sexist brother is known as Dick?

The current season of Veronica Mars is also full of rapes (so many that it might initially seem–though I don't actually think this is the case–as if the program can't possibly take rape seriously but merely uses it, over and over, as a convenient plot device). Indeed, a rape plot is what has provided the on-going mystery arc of (at least the first half) of the season. And again, this is really multiple and intersecting rape-plots-within-rape-plots: now at college (the same college where, last season in a single-episode mystery, Veronica had cleared an old friend of charges of date rape), Veronica gets drawn into a campus-wide mystery about a series of rapes in which women are drugged, sexually assaulted, and then finally left with their heads shaved. Her connection to these events is itself multiple: these rapes seem to be a continuation of the pattern revealed in the previous season's date rape story; Veronica's friend Mac's new roommate is one of the victims (in fact, is assaulted at the very moment that Veronica enters the darkened dorm room without realizing what's going on); Veronica's job at the campus newspaper leads to an assignment at a sorority house tied to the rape investigation; some of Veronica's old high-school acquaintances (including Cassidy's brother Dick, now at the same college) are suspects in the rapes; Veronica is hired by a fraternity to use her P.I. skills to try to prove their innocence; and Veronica herself almost becomes one of the rapist's victims. The over-all story (in which, as a further textual complication, direct allusions were made to the contemporaneous real-life investigation into allegations of rape against three Duke University lacrosse players) is perhaps even more convoluted than the previous season's central story–too convoluted to elaborate here–but the upshot is this: it turns out that there were actually two groups of rapists. One involved a pair of male college students (one of whom drugged the girls while the second assaulted them), but the other group–and the one positioned in the narrative arc as the big, shocking reveal (exposed first in the series but with at least as much drama as the second revelation, with the men almost as an afterthought)–consisted of a group of women, part of a feminist collective called “Lilith House,” who both staged some “fake rapes” to try to pressure the university to do more to address the problem of sexual violence on campus and, in fact, “really” sexually assaulted one of the male suspects by anally inserting a plastic egg with coded information inside of it that alluded to a girl who had a nervous breakdwon after being sexually taunted by members of the suspect fraternity and its “sister” sorority. Of course, with all of this, one might wonder here about the distinction between “real” and “fake” rape, given that–even beyond the actual revenge penetration of the frat boy by the “fake rapists”–it is never clear (to Veronica or to viewers) whether all of the women “assaulted” by the angry members of Lilith House were in on the masquerade or whether some were, in fact, drugged, left unaware of what happened (or didn't happen), and thus equally traumatized.

This televisual confusion about what counts as “real” vs. “not-quite-real” rape mirrors, I would argue, a confusion in our wider cultural as well legal discourses about what counts as “real rape.” Further, understandings (or misunderstandings) of rape seem intimately, if not necessarily legally, linked with understandings of gender–which is why Veronica Mars's exploration of what it means to be raped (and/or to be a rapist) is, I believe, so paradoxically interwoven with its exploration of what it means to be gendered. In part 2 of this column (to appear here March 9), I will thus attempt to think through those legal and cultural discourses in order, finally, to consider the perplexing implications of Veronica Mars's–and, in general, narrative television's–treatment of rape…with all that that implies for its construction (or deconstruction) of gender and sexuality.

Image Credits:
1. Veronica Mars Season 3 Episode 2
2. Veronica Mars Season 1 Episode 1

Please feel free to comment.

Recently, I had a conversation with a friend who I had not seen for quite some time about the pleasures and/or irritations of watching television with others. Do I find it more enjoyable, he asked, to watch TV alone or with a group? He himself, he explained, had been finding it difficult to watch TV with other people, particularly after having spent quite a bit of time away from his social circle, busy with work and various projects. Although he recognized and (in theory) valued the companionability that group TV viewing could yield, he feared that it made the TV programs themselves seem “bad”…and even worse than that, it could make him feel bad–unappreciative, anti-social, and inhumane, a “bad person.” What program did he try watching with others, I asked. “Dexter,” he said. “Oh…well there's your problem; that's a program that really has to be watched with one's self.”

While I will return to Showtime's Dexter and its relation to the self in a moment, the issues that this seemingly simple and somewhat silly conversation raised are really not quite that silly nor simple. What is the relationship (if any) between “bad TV” and “bad personhood,” between television and “humanness” (as self and as sociality), between appreciating media texts and appreciating one's self in relation to others (and vice-versa–appreciating others in conjunction, or in distinction, to oneself)? Of course, by traditional standards, it may seem nonsensical to link one's complaints about the possibility of “bad TV” to a fear of being a “bad person.” By high cultural norms, all TV (or at least almost all TV) is by definition “bad,” and the aesthetic taste and judgment to recognize this is, if anything, a mark of a more discerning humanity, a sign of civilization and culture. Such views have, no doubt, been changing over the past decade or so, with greater acknowledgment of the aesthetic possibilities of television and a discourse of “television appreciation” now more common in both commercial and (supposedly) anti-commercial venues. This discourse in the U.S. is related to the development of original programming on such “commercial free” (i.e., pay cable) networks as Showtime and its even more esteemed competitor HBO, which began airing its first original dramatic program, the prison serial Oz, in 1997–the same year that it introduced its famous tagline, “It's not TV, it's HBO.” Yet as that line indicates, “good” TV still tends to be defined by most people by its supposed lack of televisuality–by its difference from, rather than deployment of, televisual qualities. While I disagree with such assessments, this is not because I would want to argue that subscription cable programs like Oz or Dexter are “bad”; to the contrary, they're amongst my favorite and most admired TV shows. But what I admire about them has to do precisely with the ways in which they make use of–rather than repudiate–the potential that exists in television's forms (such as the potential that emerges from playing with the border between television's “masculine” coded crime-and-punishment genres and it “feminine” coded soap opera genres, as well as with the borders that exist between televisual realism and its anti-realist artifices and between U.S. TV's twin obsessions with “liveness” and with death). In other words, my interest in these programs arises because of how, exactly, they are TV (not just pay cable) and how, in their televisual articulations, they can make us think about the relationships between textual forms and social forms, aesthetics and politics, narrative dynamics and viewing dynamics, being a “good show” and being a “good person” (or just being “a person” in relation to other people).

There are numerous reasons why U.S. television typically tends not to be treated seriously in aesthetic or political terms (including, significantly, its commercial-driven base). But one of these reasons is simply its familiarity: television's omnipresent, everyday, routine existence in our lives. Its very ordinariness seems to belie the discourse of “appreciation” (which is why a channel like HBO attempts to assert its supposedly extraordinary features, its ability to be unfamiliar, distinct from the usual family of networks). Indeed, television's familiarity is intimately bound up with its “familialarity”: its relation to the ordinary, routinized construction of family life, which television seems constantly to articulate not just in its stories but in its very terms of address (its hailing “we”). In other words, not only is “the family” television's favorite subject matter (whether figured as an “actual” family, a family of friends or co-workers, or a jocular “news family”). Family is also the way we come to matter as subjects for TV–the way that we are interpellated across TV's series and serial forms, its “fact” and “fiction” genres, its individual texts and the metatext of its flow (that is, through both repetitions of family reintegration and continuations of family disintegrations, via narrative display of others' situations and the inclusive rhetoric of “our” shared interests, within the enclosures of TV's domestic settings and the reflexive self-enclosure of the domesticated TV world as a whole). Because of both this address (literalized in such things as networks' greetings “from our family to yours”) and the typical domestic viewing context itself, this familial construction extends to the television audience. Most of us watch television in familial space (together with those with whom we live, or perhaps alone in precisely an attempt to get space away from those with whom we live), but, given how such formations have historically developed and crystallized, even beyond these literal enactments (or rejections) of family dynamics, television has the interesting effect of making any viewing group feel like a “familial” one (so that, for instance, one way of establishing and marking a comfortable closeness among people is to watch TV together–even if this is a “virtual togetherness” as occurs with TV fan communities).

There are, of course, a great many things that one can critique about television's familiarity/”familialarity” (with the aforementioned consequence of discouraging serious aesthetic discussion being probably the least of them). No doubt, the structures I've briefly noted have made U.S. television particularly effective at instilling and installing restrictive notions of, almost always, middle-class, white, heteronormative “family values” into the most intimate recesses of our spaces and times, our psyches and our social dynamics. But while I certainly think that it's crucial to critique these oppressive restrictions, I also think that it's important to see what other effects, possibilities, and openings–even if small–might emerge from these formations. One effect is to raise questions about the very meanings of “family,” familialism, and the familiar. If “TV families” can encompass groupings that range from biologically linked clans, to gangs of buddies or co-workers, to assemblages formed across diverse diegeses and locales, and if this can extend out to us as viewers in our own diverse situations and locales, then what is a “family”? Does this narrow our understanding of human relations by defining everything via just one familiar form, or does it, rather, broaden our understanding, appropriating the notion of “family” from “family values” discourse and deploying it instead for the formation of a variety of modes of humanity and community (including the “virtual”–yet quite familiar and “real”–ones created by shared media interest and communication)? If “families” can be constituted by media formations, then what new ways of thinking about kinship, affiliation, culture, and communication can we envision? Are families the epitome of “civilization,” the mark of Western culture (as proponents of “family values” like to argue) or its opposite (particularly given the often “uncivilized” behavior that takes place around the TV set or the way in which TV viewing can be used as a strategy to impede conversation and closeness as much as it might be used to establish such familiarity)? If this familiarity can help us negotiate either being alone or being with others, how can it also help us negotiate (or question) both the otherness within, and the familiarity to, the self? And with such multiple possibilities for self and other, for extended families and for intensive communities, how might we envision new forms of being, new socialities, new conjunctures and collectivities?

All of which brings me back to the question of what it is like to watch television alone or with others–situations which themselves raise the question of what it means to be a mediated self and/or to mediate one's relation to others. Moreover, these questions are not simply posed by the scene of television viewing; they are also posed within television scenes themselves, as some TV texts seem to press these very issues, making them (as my previously mentioned answer to my friend suggests) particularly appropriate for various enactments of mediated being and/or sociality. While, admittedly, my comment about Dexter being a show best watched alone was somewhat flippant, I might have been on to something about this program (or, to reverse that, something might, through this program, have been on to my “I”). It's not because of squeamishness that this text strikes me as one I'd prefer to view by myself (with no one to see my potential gasps and grimaces). Whereas the promotions for the program have played up its (rather clichéd in its very improbability) high-concept premise of a serial killer who kills only other serial killers, I would argue that the show is much more about what it means to be a person than what it means to do away with people. Through its focus on a character who, although in close contact with many others, believes he has no real feelings, Dexter poses the question of what it is to feel (and feel like) a familiar “self,” to balance between being human and acting “humane,” to mediate between “inner” emotions and “outer” appearances, to relate to and be known by others and the self. In the narrative, the damaged Dexter was, while a child, tutored by his father on how to live in society, assuming an air of ordinary familiarity so as to mask and manage his sense of estrangement from the world. In its very textual construction, the program reproduces this ambivalence of familiarity and estrangement, emotion and performance, the ordinary and the extra-ordinary, the recognition of the self in the other and the alienation that may emerge from the other-in-the-self. From its opening credits that hint at the moments of uncanny violence which lurk in daily domestic routine (squeezing orange juice, flossing teeth), to the program's use of punctuating voice-over (in moments of direct address to the viewer that invert TV's usual mutually flattering “we” through their self and social repudiations), to its intermixtures of several TV forms (so that characters that start out seeming like mere caricatures or backdrops to a central series figure become, through serialization and intrusions of “reality,” much more complex figures of their own self/other struggles), to its revision of TV's usual portrayals of family matters (both the “father-knows-best” model of “actual” families and the camaraderie of the TV “cop family”), this program doesn't only dramatize questions of “humanity,” civilized or savage selfhood, connections to or refusals of others; it draws the viewer into these questions as well, producing an uneasy experience (again, perhaps one best experienced alone) of evaluating our own singular and/or sociable selves.

In contrast, a program that I love watching with others is the Sci Fi Channel's Battlestar Galactica–a text that, conversely to Dexter's explorations of selfhood which may incite the viewer's own exploration of self, dramatizes the struggles of group alliances even while eliciting group feelings in its audience. Like Dexter, Battlestar Galactica might also be described as a program about the very meaning of what it is to be a person, to be part of the “family of humankind”…although, of course, it raises these questions in a very different way (through its science-fiction space opera about the battle between the human Colonies and their cyborgian Cylon creations and/or “offspring”). Through its use of allegorical narrative (with stories that involve issues like religious warfare, abortion and “ethnic cleansing”, suicide bombings, the use of torture, prison camps and forced occupation, the treatment of “traitors,” and so on), Battlestar Galactica uses futuristic drama to comment on multiple incidents in our historical past and, importantly, in our present day (ranging from references to World War II Poland and France, through Vietnam and Bosnia, to the clear references to today's Israeli-Palestinian conflict and War in Iraq). Needless to say, this can inspire a great deal of discussion and debate on the part of the show's viewers, making it a text that, I would suggest, implies group viewing (via, for example, webs of virtual communities) even if one doesn't literally watch this show with a group. Or, of course, one might do both. For example, I am delighted to have the chance to get together weekly with a gang of folks to watch and discuss Battlestar Galactica, but I also participate in a post-viewing “vlog” in which we bring that discussion out to anyone in cyberculture who might want to tune in, reproducing the program's own play with the line between the human and the non-human through our harebrained (or, much more generously, daringly brainy) device of voicing much of our commentary via the avatars of stuffed animal puppets!

Producing a similar effect of invoked group viewing–but, again, in a very different way–is, I think, the ABC program Ugly Betty, which takes up such issues of humanity, community, the conjunctures and disjunctures between appearances and emotions in a more earthly global fashion than Battlestar Galactica's movement through the universe. I don't actually watch Ugly Betty together with others…but, paradoxically (or maybe this is precisely to the point), I feel as if I do. The first telenovela made in the U.S. for (as they say) a “mainstream” network and a “general audience,” Ugly Betty (produced through a joint venture between Salma Hayek's production company Ventanarosa and Touchstone Television) is based on the enormously popular Colombian Yo Soy Betty La Fea (written by Fernando Gaitán and produced between 1999 and 2001 by the network RCN), which was not only a huge hit in Colombia but was rebroadcast and/or adapted in numerous other countries (from throughout Latin America, to Germany, India, Israel, the Netherlands, and Russia, among others). Through this text's dispersion over space and time; its movement between comedy and melodrama, ironic camp and heartwarming sentiment; its cast of characters that cross national, ethnic, racial, class, gender, generational, and sexuality lines; and its shows-within-shows (since Betty's family in this telenovela are themselves fans of a fictional telenovela, which just happens to feature many “real” telenovela stars, thus calling up a whole web of interrelated soaps, soap figures, and soap communities), this program truly institutes a “global” perspective–one that invites the viewer to be part of its inclusive community. While certainly a “familial” show (it is, after all, a soap opera), this inclusivity is, I would argue, differently articulated than the standard inclusive (but, in effect, actually exclusive) “we” typical of U.S. broadcasting. Not only has this program finally broken down mainstream U.S. TV's jingoist resistance to the globally popular form of the telenovela, but where else on TV have we ever seen, just to give a few examples, a sympathetic on-going story of an “illegal alien” or a loving portrayal of a proto-gay child, not to mention a revision of what counts as “good” or “bad” aesthetics (for both programming and people)? Watching this program, I can feel part of multiple viewing communities–communities that cross the usual borders of nation and class, gender and sexuality–and, because of that border-crossing, get a different sense of what it might mean to be a person among other people in today's world.

While radically different from one another, all of the programs I've mentioned–Oz, Dexter, Battlestar Galactica, and Ugly Betty–are examples of what I would call “good TV,” TV that is “good” to watch. But more important than my own personal assessment of these program's aesthetics and politics is the fact that, as I've tried to suggest, they open these very questions for viewers: they incite us, in their quite distinct ways, to think about the relations between personal feelings and public mediations; between what's considered “good” and what's considered “bad” (whether in appearance or action); between being a “person” alone and being a person among others; between joining familial, global, and/or “universal” communities and insisting on recognizing differences, specificity, and singularity. Does this make watching television (whether alone or with others) good for you? Go ask your (real or virtual) viewing companions what they think.

Image Credits:
1. Showtime’s Dexter
2. Battlestar Galactica
3. Ugly Betty

Please feel free to comment.