Full Title: Flow Favorites: The Bronze Fonz: Public Art/Popular Culture in Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Every few years, Flow’s editors select our favorite columns of the last few volumes. We’ve added special introductions to these important pieces, and appended the original comments to the piece below. Enjoy!

Flow Senior Editor Mabel Rosenheck:
One trend we’ve seen more and more of at Flow in the last few volumes is the discussion of media in public spaces. Whether digital art in the subway via the mobile phone, or online archives of urban indie rock performances the city, like the music, is simultaneously “un-mediated and hyper-mediated.” In addition to Michaela Ardizzoni and Ben Aslinger’s articles, my favorite example is Michael Z. Newman’s “The Bronze Fonz,” which explores not only the relationship between art and popular culture, but between cultural memory and urban space. Through the Bronze Fonz, Newman points to the palimpsests inherent not only in media or the city, but in everyday life.

The Bronze Fonz

In August the latest in a series of recent public artworks in the U.S. honoring TV and movie characters was installed in downtown Milwaukee, Wisconsin: a life-size bronze statue of Arthur Fonzarelli– Fonzie, The Fonz–with his signature two thumbs up. Other statues, most sponsored by TV Land, have included Rocky Balboa at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Ralph Kramden at the Port Authority Bust Terminal in New York City, and Mary Richards tossing her tam skyward in Minneapolis.

The Fonz of course was a main character in the ABC sitcom Happy Days whose black motorcycle jacket was long ago enshrined at the Smithsonian alongside Archie and Edith Bunker’s chairs. Although shot in Los Angeles in the 1970s, Happy Days was set in Milwaukee in the 1950s, as was its spinoff Laverne & Shirley. Henry Winkler, who played Fonzie, and much of the rest of the Happy Days cast “returned” to Milwaukee for an unveiling. A crowd showed up. Speeches were made. Photos were snapped. Now the statue is a point on the city’s tourist itinerary, along with brewery tours and museums and the pretty lakeshore.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The announcement in 2007 of plans for the Bronze Fonz was the occasion for more than just curiosity and excitement. Within the city’s arts community, the Bronze Fonz was an object of controversy and scorn. Rather than a project spurred by local arts institutions, the Bronze Fonz was the product of funds raised by Visit Milwaukee, a non-profit agency whose mandate is to promote tourism to boost the local economy. The Bronze Fonz was launched without the sanction of anyone in the local art world, and the local art world bristled at this trespass onto its turf. A prominent gallery owner threatened to close up shop and leave town if the plans went ahead (his gallery did close earlier this year). The director of the Milwaukee Art Museum wrote in opposition to the Bronze Fonz. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel art critic followed the controversy in a series of blog posts gently slanted against the project. A debate was joined between defenders of a concept of public art as serious and important to a city’s legitimate cultural identity on one side, and defenders of the virtues of increased tourism and fun on the other. The aesthetic mission of art opposed the crowd-pleasing, commercial taint of entertainment, and entertainment won the day.

This episode was yet another occasion for reasserting the cultural hierarchies which place television and pop culture as illegitimate, and which function to reproduce social distinctions. Even the statue’s promoters bought this line. The CEO of Visit Milwaukee, Dave Fantle, told a Journal-Sentinel reporter that the Bronze Fonz is “not art but a piece of pop culture.” In part this clarification was self-justifying; Visit Milwaukee managed an end around the usual processes involved in installing a public artwork in a prominent city location. But no matter the motivation, the discourse positioning a Fonzie statue as at best frivolous fun misses the appeal and significance of popular culture in ordinary people’s lives. To look at the photos people take of themselves posing with the statue is to recognize the depth of our identification with the narratives of popular culture. It might be fun, but it isn’t frivolous.

Sam and Mike with the Bronze Fonz

But at stake in this debate was more than just the promotion of values endorsed by the snooty guardians of culture or the populist civic boosters. The identity of the city was also a term in the controversy, and this identity is tied up in the representation of place in popular culture like Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley.

Like many Midwestern cities, Milwaukee’s past as a site of productive industry is more glorious than its post-industrial present. Today unemployment is high, especially among the city’s large and segregated racial underclass, and economic growth is slow. The city does not like to present this face to the region, the country and the world. It hopes to attract “creative class” young people and spendthrift convention tourism. It wants to seem like a hip, vibrant town with plenty of attractions to excite out-of-towners.

Happy Days (and Laverne & Shirley) might be a fond memory, but is not much to hang onto as a point of pride for Milwaukee. The setting was in some ways incidental to the show. Its producer Garry Marshall wanted to set Happy Days in his hometown of the Bronx, but the folks at Paramount thought this would come off as too ethnic (Brant, 20). They were looking to duplicate the family format of 1950s shows like Father Knows Best and clearly preferred to represent an idealized middle America. Wisconsinites are proud of their culture, for instance their foodways (the German-influenced beer and sausages; dairy foods like cheese and frozen custard; and Friday fish fry events where the Brandy Old Fashioneds are more often savored than the fish). But the ethnic or regional identity of Wisconsin or Milwaukee is hardly in evidence in Happy Days. For instance, more of the show’s characters have Italian names (Fonzarelli, Delvecchio) than the more locally common German ones. One hears more New York accents like Winkler’s than Wisconsin accents. You wouldn’t know from watching Happy Days that the typical white Milwaukeean speaks more like Sarah Palin than Mrs. C.

The setting of the show in Milwaukee was in a sense the denial of place rather than an investment in it. Marshall, and Italian-American and New Yorker, seems to have wanted to do urban-ethnic, but in some ways the specificity of his characters’ identities got scrubbed from the representation. Setting the show in Milwaukee was a way of striking a note of Americana — an idealization of “normal” America just as much as it was an idealization of the 1950s as a more innocent and familiar and comforting time in history. Jefferson High, where the characters go to school, and Arnold’s drive-in restaurant, where they slurp milkshakes and dance to jukebox records, are meant to be the kind of school and hangout that you might find anywhere in the USA.

Fonz with the cast of Happy Days

Milwaukee can be tickled to have a Fonzie statue because Fonzie is essentially cool. But it’s hard to be proud to have been chosen as an undistinct enough place to stand in for Anytown, USA. America of the big cities and coasts is often blind to the specificity of the places in the middle of the country, and Happy Days is symptomatic of this. (Things change in Laverne & Shirley, which is more blue-collar and which has the brewery setting to add local color.)

But we are also proud to have been the setting of a popular show at all, an opportunity for “Milwaukee” to have been uttered on a regular basis to an audience of millions. To this day, legend persists that a frozen custard stand called Leon’s was the inspiration for Arnold’s. Leon’s has gorgeous vintage signage and looks like it hasn’t changed since the 1950s.

Leon’s Frozen Custard Stand

If you ask the custard server if it’s true about Leon’s being the original Arnold’s she might say yes (I’ve heard it myself). But the truth is otherwise. Tom Miller, a producer at Paramount, suggested setting Happy Days in the suburban Milwaukee neighborhood where he grew up after Garry Marshall’s Bronx setting was nixed (Brant, 20). Jefferson High was based on Nicolet High in Glendale, WI. Arnold’s was based on a drive-in called The Milky Way on Port Washington Rd. that no longer exists. But it pleases people around town to think that the place that inspired Arnold’s still serves food, and that you can still go back there if you want to visit the 1950s as represented on television. Like everywhere else, nostalgia for a past that never existed lives in Milwaukee.

Michael Z. Newman revisits his column for Flow Favorites:
“The Bronze Fonz” was an occasion for me to think about the connection between a television show I loved as a child and the city where I have lived for seven years as an adult. Now when I occasionally catch a Happy Days episode I find the Milwaukee setting pretty laughable. The distance between the representation of 1950s Milwaukee on TV and my experience of the real Milwaukee in the past few years is great. But I remain a fan of the Bronze Fonz even if he stands for a Hollywood fantasy of middle-American wholesomeness.

Image credits:
1. The Bronz Fonz – photo by author
2. Sam and Mike with the Bronze Fonz – used with permission
3. Fonz with the cast of Happy Days – Author’s personal collection
4. Leon’s Frozen Custard Stand – photo by author

Diane Negra said:

Thanks for this thoughtful, beautifully written piece. I really like the way you draw attention to the role of tv-based public (though often privately sponsored) art, to tv nostalgia and to the slipperiness of ethnic representations in popular culture. Miriam Greenberg’s new book on urban branding is certainly relevant to this discussion.
-November 3rd, 2008 at 3:23 pm

Carly Kocurek said:

Yes, I agree. This is an interesting thing to think about. I myself grew up in a region that has been made iconographic through the writings of Larry McMurtry — Texasville was shot in my home town — and there’s an interesting overlap in the way that the specificity of something like McMurtry’s work can work to the same ends as the placelessness of something like Happy Days. In both, there’s a sort of flattening of the real and a crystallization of time, and the past that was can function much like the past that never was.

And, of course, the debate over the purpose and role of public art is always contentious. I think the question I always turn to is which public is the art supposed to serve? The general public, who seems pleased with the statue? Or, the art public, who finds it revolting? I think too often “public art” means art provided to the public, rather than for or with the public.

In short, a fascinating piece that could be the jumping off point for a number of discussions.
-November 4th, 2008 at 11:12 am

Mabel said:

Although the Rocky statue in Philadelphia was not actually related to any of the other statues, it too has a fascinating and pertinent history. It was constructed by Sylvester Stallone for use in Rocky III after which he “donated” it to the City of Philadelphia and the Philadelphia Museum of Art… they however didn’t want it for the exact reasons you cited about the Fonz statue in Milwaukee: the art world said it was a movie prop not art. It was subsequently placed at the Spectrum arena in South Philadelphia (where the fights in Rocky I and II took place) and moved back to the art museum briefly for filming other movies (including subsequent Rocky movies and also the movie Philadelphia). What is particularly interesting is the way in which after 25 years the Philadelphia art community allowed the statue to be re-erected at the art museum (though at the bottome of the stairs, not the top as in the movies) because of the immense interconnection between the city and Rocky both in cultural history and in public history and in the minds of the people of Philadelphia.

My point with this extended recounting of the Rocky statue in Philadelphia is that it is very intersting to see the ways in which different cities adopt and adapt their cultural representations in media over time. Of course with or without a statue the iconic steps are bounded up with tourists (and locals) humming “gonna fly now” daily

What is further interesting in the case of Philadelphia is that it is has a history of public art from the Calders to Robert Indiana’s Love statue to the Percent for Art program started in 1959 mandating one percent of all new building projects be devoted to public art. Where has Rocky fit into this tradition of art and public art which has ranged from 37 foot realist William Penn statue atop City Hall to Alexander Calder’s abstract “stabiles” to the pop art of Robert Indiana? In this range of artwork and definitions of art, why did it take so long to accept a pop cultural icon (and Academy Award winner) to be accepted as art?

In any case, great article and a debate about media and place which I would love to see explored further.
-November 4th, 2008 at 3:43 pm

Dave Sagehorn said:

Great work. I really enjoyed this essay and fully intend to get my own picture next to the Bronze Fonz next time I’m in Milwaukee.

I recently did some work on how Wisconsin is represented on television, although more specifically through the show “Aliens in America” – and in doing so realized that the list of Wisconsin-set shows is surprisingly lengthy. But that was one of my favorite aspects of the Bronze Fonz debates, that in one article I read someone argued that the Fonz was at least cooler than Shirley Feeney and Laverne DeFazio. So the issue is for some not only about high culture/low culture divides, but rather that Milwaukee has such an excess of television history that they can choose which TV icon to have bronzed.

I think it’s interesting to consider that this statue is not only being tied to the show’s fictionalized 1950s, but perhaps also to the 1970s Milwaukee that saw “Happy Days” in its initial run – there are multiple eras in play to be nostalgic for, and the statue could just as easily evoke personal memories of where and when someone watched the show in addition to recalling the narrative setting. Those kinds of personal ties are real even if the show’s semi-generic version of Milwaukee is decidedly less so.
-November 7th, 2008 at 9:05 am

Daniel Marcus said:

Nice piece, Mike, especially about Milwaukee as a stand-in for Anywhere, USA and thus leeching any meaning from its potential specificity. I eagerly await the statue of four teenagers sitting in around a table in a smoke-filled basement as a tribute the That ’70s Show, which did play up the Wisconsin setting a little bit more. Perhaps the whole thing could periodically swivel 90 degrees.
-November 21st, 2008 at 5:53 pm

Michele La Rue said:

The 50’s were my parents generation, and the Fonz is accurately portrayed as a real person in Milwaukee. I really believe that the Bronze Fonz really represents the city of Milwaukee very well. It immortalized the values he portrayed on the t.v. series “Happy Days”. Although jobs are hard to find now compared to the 1950’s, the Bronze Fonz makes a positive thing for people to view when they come to Milwaukee. I’m glad the producers of “Happy Days” chose Milwaukee as the home of the Fonz. The Bronze Fonz represents a more peaceful, fun loving 1950’s as compared to the hectic lifestyles of today.
May 14th, 2009 at 10:00 am

Please feel free to comment.

Lost: The Most Torrented Show of 2008

During one recent week, more than 1.7 million people accessed the latest episodes of Heroes and Lost using BitTorrent. Other heavily shared shows included 24, The Big Bang Theory, and Battlestar Galactica. TV accounts for half of BitTorrent traffic, and clearly many viewers are substituting downloads for other forms of access. In 2008, Lost was the most torrented show and its most popular episode was downloaded more than 5.7 million times (13.4 million American viewers tuned in the old-fashioned way, according to Nielsen).

The industry worries that this distribution stream will drain its profits. During the Pirate Bay trial, one of the products for which the media companies demanded compensation was the first season of Prison Break. But some shows’ fortunes have risen with BitTorrent, much as syndication and iTunes have helped Law & Order and The Office. The initial fan enthusiasm for Battlestar Galactica in the US was aided by its availability online before SciFi began to run it here (it aired in the UK first). Episodes of Pushing Daisies, Sarah Connor Chronicles, and True Blood, which might appeal to young, affluent, and technically adept torrenters, have been leaked to the network to arouse buzz. If file-sharing is sometimes figured in the media industries as a criminal, even terrorist threat, it is sometimes also seen as good promotion.

Battlestar Galactica

P2p TV can be used in many ways, for many reasons. Some users catch up on missed episodes or seasons. Having caught up, they might tune in using more conventional delivery systems. For others, BitTorrent is a source of programs from abroad and helps overcome the maddening asynchronicity of international television flows. Australians often have to wait weeks or months after a favorite show airs in the US before the local channel makes it available. Streaming video at network websites or Hulu is unavailable because of geo-blocking. Participants in online fan communities find this infuriating, and BitTorrent overcomes the scheduling inconveniences imposed by TV channels.1 I use BitTorrent to make clips and caps to use in teaching or research or to post on my blog. This offers me easily downloaded high-def files free of DRM, which, unlike Hulu videos, can be saved to disc. That is, I use p2p to access what I can’t conveniently get another way. It’s mostly content I have already accessed legitimately.

Too many questions are raised by this development in the technology and experience of television to consider in this space, questions having to do with many aspects of the economics of the media business, indeed, questions about what “television” means. I want to focus in the space remaining on one issue that arises in relation to p2p TV: the ethics, from the user’s perspective, of this mode of television distribution and consumption.

Unlike ordinary movie and television viewing, p2p sharing often involves an ethical calculation. File-sharers risk legal action, however unjustified, for copyright infringement. They rationalize their behavior in terms of costs and benefits, and justify their practices not only in terms of legal categories like fair use but also in terms of judgments about right and wrong. For instance, they reason that it’s ethical (or should be) to download content not otherwise available, or to a sample a product before committing to it. Perhaps they believe that downloading is justified when one has also paid for the product. (On the evidence that The Dark Knight was both the box office and BitTorrent champion of 2008, we can assume that many viewers paid to see the film and downloaded it for free.)

The Dark Knight: Box Office and BitTorrent Champion of 2008

This kind of reasoning is evident from the way the popular press covers file-sharing. Following the propaganda of media trade groups, p2p is often portrayed in mainstream media as stealing. Lev Grossman jokes that using BitTorrent to access television shows means selling your soul. Yet some writers see justification or at least compromise. A Slate columnist describes BitTorrent as “TiVo for the tech-savvy and the ethically flexible.” An essay in The Independent remarks that “downloading of movies is apparently a victimless crime, and if there is a victim, it’s ‘The Man.’” It might be wrong to steal, but when it’s the devil whom you’re stealing from, well, not so bad. We can call this a compromise ethic. Many of those using BitTorrent might prefer to access television content legitimately, but they see no better alternative right now than file-sharing. They might even judge the media industries as unethical for using DRM, for charging too much (the average monthly cable bill was $85 last year), or for impeding the synchronization of global distribution. They might see their own questionable ethics in a favorable light when compared with the media industry’s.

By contrast, champions of free culture defend piracy in moral terms, owning the name pirate as in “Pirate Bay” and seeing a cultural imperative to save society from corporate and legal overreaching. Pirates of this sort are activists against excessive copyright legislation and enforcement, defenders of the public domain and the cultural commons. Their ethic is one of community and peer exchange as an antidote to corporate consumerism. They might quote Richard Stillman’s GNU software manifesto: “I consider that the golden rule requires that if I like a program I must share it with other people who like it.” Siva Vaidhyanathan describes MP3 file-sharing as “a rational revolt of passionate fans.”2 Matt Mason writes in The Pirate’s Dilemma, “If democracy is about creating processes that allow people to empower themselves, then pirates are clearly the perfect catalysts for such processes.”3 Copyleft activists and sympathizers see virtue in precisely what the media industries most fear about file-sharing: the removal of popular culture from the circuit of commercial exchange. This piracy is counter-hegemonic. The media industries want to control and monetize every window of distribution; champions of free culture want to preserve a gift economy of prosumers.4 Theirs is a pirate ethic.

Peer distribution of television would seem to demand a somewhat different set of calculations when compared with music and movie file-sharing. For as long as these cultural forms have been produced industrially, the business model of music and movies has been to exchange media for money. The disruption of this exchange allows the audience to access for free what otherwise might have cost it materially, which can easily be framed ethically as free-riding. (This despite the fact that we access “free” movies and music all the time, for instance, when using public libraries or visiting friends.) Television, with some exceptions, is an advertising-driven medium, in which the exchange is of the audience’s attention for the sponsor’s commercials. With digital technologies, audiences are increasingly empowered to avoid commercials, but this can hardly be cast in negative moral terms when so many people consider advertising a nuisance or even a cause of harmful social effects. DVRs probably disrupt the business model of “free” TV more than BitTorrent, yet one rarely observes an ethical discourse around digital time-shifting. (In 2002 Jamie Kellner, then Turner’s CEO, called DVR use “stealing” and was widely ridiculed.)5 Like the DVR, p2p de-commercializes TV. BitTorrent files of TV shows are ad-free. But the DVR is a digital VCR, a legitimate cultural technology. BitTorrent, by contrast, is the new Napster.

Thus TV torrenters, like the ones who comment at the news aggregator site Digg, often defend their practice in ways that establish specific ethical norms for television. They reason that those already paying for cable are entitled to download, and insist that DVR recordings and downloads as ethically equivalent. BitTorrent is merely “bandwidth-consuming timeshifting.” As one user explains, “The networks BROADCAST their shows, sending them out FOR FREE into the air all over the country. How can they claim that I am stealing if they are giving it away for free?”

Image Credits:
1.) Lost: The Most Torrented Show of 2008
2.) Battlestar Gallatica
3.) The Dark Knight: Box Office and BitTorrent Champion of 2008

Please feel free to comment.

1. Tama Leaver, “Watching Battlestar Galactica in Australia and the Tyranny of Digital Distance,” Media International Australia 126 (February 2008), 145-154.
2. Siva Vaidhyanathan, Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity (New York: New York UP, 2001), 197.
3. Matt Mason, The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture is Reinventing Capitalism (New York: Free P, 2008), 47.
4. Johan A. Pouwelse, Pawel Garbacki, Dick Epema and Henk Sips, “Pirates and Samaritans: A decade of measurements on peer production and their implications for net neutrality and copyright” Telecommunications Policy 32 (2008), 701-712.
5. Ted Johnson, “TiVo-lution,” Variety (June 7, 2004

We watched Six Feet Under for an episode or two when it began in 2001. I was put off by its inconsistent tone and wasn’t sure I was up for a show in which someone dies every week. Years later, long after it had established a wide and passionate following and run its final episode, we began to watch Six Feet Under again and this time we pretty much couldn’t stop.

The show follows the Fisher family, their employees and friends and lovers, across five cable-size seasons: sixty episodes, fifty hours of drama. The characters grow and change, they have relationships and marry and have children, new characters are introduced while old ones are forgotten. As befits a shows set in a funeral home, some of the most (and least) beloved characters die. It took the original audience more than five years to see all of this play out. They had to wait a week for each new episode and endure months of hiatus between seasons. By contrast, we watched in two sustained bursts of viewing first in the summer of 2008, while much of the schedule was filled with junk, and then in the early winter of 2008 and 2009 after the November sweeps period again ushered in a period of reruns and specials. We binged.

As much as any narrative medium, television affords intense engagement with characters. We get to know the people on the screen so intimately that they become our TV friends. Sometimes we know them better than our real-life friends, because we get so much insight into their psychology, their secrets, their hopes and fears and dreams. Spending years with characters, they become regular visitors to our living rooms, like pals we see week after week at the same hangout. Binging intensifies the pleasure of this engagement by making characters all the more present in our lives. The relationship becomes more like a passionate but doomed affair, a whirlwind that enlivens us so well for a time, only to leave us empty and lost when it sadly, inevitably, ends.

Binging isn’t new. As a kid I watched my favorite shows several times a day for years. But the fact that I could binge on a show like Six Feet Under is certainly a product of its historical context. We watched the show on DVD, programming our revival at our pleasure. This kind of viewing experience emphasizes the serial nature of a soapy show such as SFU, reproducing the daily rhythms of daytime drama with content originally intended to be seen weekly.

Binging also makes one more conscious of the season as a narrative unit. Shorter seasons and long hiatuses between them encourage viewers of original cable shows to see the season as a meaningful narrative category. So of course do DVD sets. When we watched The Wire we would near the end of a season and go online for our “re-up” (Baltimore slang for a fresh shipment of heroin) of a new season to have ready when we would be. A season of twelve or thirteen episodes can more naturally be constructed as a coherent story, and viewing those twelve or thirteen hours over the course of a week or two (or less) shows off this unity.

The shows I binged on as a kid were programs like Three’s Company that aired in the hours between school and dinner. They are episodic rather than serial. Often the episodes were rerun in a different order from their original airing, though I do recall the sitcoms of my childhood progressing year by year, so that you would see a few months of Chrissie episodes of Three’s Company followed by a brief stint of Cindy episodes, and then a few months of Terri episodes only to return to the early Chrissie seasons. Other than these cast changes, the binging Three’s Company viewer would have scant awareness of the sequencing of episodes. I certainly never had any idea when a season of the show was beginning or ending. Each episode tells its own story and the viewer doesn’t need to have seen the earlier ones to get the later ones. But watching all of a serial drama like SFU on a binge is like tearing through a thick novel in a week at the beach. It’s all one story, and even though episodes and seasons resolve at their conclusions in some respects, as a viewer you always find yourself in the middle.

Other things we have watched this way were similarly soapy in their narrative form. We often binge on the first season or two of a show to catch up when critics and friends tell us we’re missing something good. “Quality TV” these days demands a completist mandate: start at the beginning. This first happened for us with The Sopranos. Battlestar Galactica was another. I find now that I liked BSG much more during our early-seasons binge, when I could better keep its complicated story straight. Long breaks between seasons make it harder for me to remember the situation, the stakes, the state of characters’ relationships with one another. The experience of the first two seasons was so vivid from binging that the subsequent ones have made less of an impression, and my enthusiasm for BSG has diminished.

No matter the format of a show, watching on a binge intensifies the continuity of character arcs. Shows that are hybrids of episodic and serial narrative forms like Degrassi: The Next Generation and Judging Amy seem more serialized when viewed in heavy regular doses. The Wire, which has fairly self-contained season-long arcs with strong thematic and narrative unity and coherence, starts to seem more like five volumes of one big book (e.g., Proust’s In Search of Lost Time) than like a series of novels with continuing characters (e.g., the crime novels of the show’s writers Dennis Lehane and George Pelecanos).

This new kind of binging further removes us from the conditions that obtained for television viewing for many decades. The DVD frees us from the program schedule and the flow of content, which in many cases includes commercials, promos, and idents, as does watching with the aid of a DVR or iTunes or BitTorrent. The new technologies that give viewers the agency to program their own media mark a shift from ephemeral to collectible content. TV shows and movies are now more like books: you can own or borrow copies of them, use them whenever you like, and keep them on a shelf as an advertisement of your taste.

Something is lost in this process, and we should be wary of accepting this new way of viewing as an evolutionary step. In some ways, binging feels unnatural. Watching this way, we lose our connection to the larger viewing audience as community and to the temporality of broadcasting that unites a program with the moment of its airing. (Viewers still get this experience from sports and reality TV and news and talk shows — from genres of programming inimical to binging.) We also lose a significant aesthetic effect of the weekly rhythm of the prime-time serial. It’s hard to be specific about what this means, but it’s a function of how we appreciate a show that airs once a week, and takes a break of a few months between seasons — what we pay attention to, how it makes an impression on us, and how the interval of time between episodes and seasons encourages us to talk and think about the characters and their situations in the space between installments of their story. Binging makes the experience of television more intense and personal. It can feel like too much of a good thing, and maybe it is.

Image Credits:

1. The Fisher family of HBO’s Six Feet Under
2. Students from HBO’s fourth season of The Wire
3. The cast of Sci-Fi’s Battlestar Galactica

The Bronze Fonz

In August the latest in a series of recent public artworks in the U.S. honoring TV and movie characters was installed in downtown Milwaukee, Wisconsin: a life-size bronze statue of Arthur Fonzarelli– Fonzie, The Fonz–with his signature two thumbs up. Other statues, most sponsored by TV Land, have included Rocky Balboa at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Ralph Kramden at the Port Authority Bust Terminal in New York City, and Mary Richards tossing her tam skyward in Minneapolis.

The Fonz of course was a main character in the ABC sitcom Happy Days whose black motorcycle jacket was long ago enshrined at the Smithsonian alongside Archie and Edith Bunker’s chairs. Although shot in Los Angeles in the 1970s, Happy Days was set in Milwaukee in the 1950s, as was its spinoff Laverne & Shirley. Henry Winkler, who played Fonzie, and much of the rest of the Happy Days cast “returned” to Milwaukee for an unveiling. A crowd showed up. Speeches were made. Photos were snapped. Now the statue is a point on the city’s tourist itinerary, along with brewery tours and museums and the pretty lakeshore.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The announcement in 2007 of plans for the Bronze Fonz was the occasion for more than just curiosity and excitement. Within the city’s arts community, the Bronze Fonz was an object of controversy and scorn. Rather than a project spurred by local arts institutions, the Bronze Fonz was the product of funds raised by Visit Milwaukee, a non-profit agency whose mandate is to promote tourism to boost the local economy. The Bronze Fonz was launched without the sanction of anyone in the local art world, and the local art world bristled at this trespass onto its turf. A prominent gallery owner threatened to close up shop and leave town if the plans went ahead (his gallery did close earlier this year). The director of the Milwaukee Art Museum wrote in opposition to the Bronze Fonz. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel art critic followed the controversy in a series of blog posts gently slanted against the project. A debate was joined between defenders of a concept of public art as serious and important to a city’s legitimate cultural identity on one side, and defenders of the virtues of increased tourism and fun on the other. The aesthetic mission of art opposed the crowd-pleasing, commercial taint of entertainment, and entertainment won the day.

This episode was yet another occasion for reasserting the cultural hierarchies which place television and pop culture as illegitimate, and which function to reproduce social distinctions. Even the statue’s promoters bought this line. The CEO of Visit Milwaukee, Dave Fantle, told a Journal-Sentinel reporter that the Bronze Fonz is “not art but a piece of pop culture.” In part this clarification was self-justifying; Visit Milwaukee managed an end around the usual processes involved in installing a public artwork in a prominent city location. But no matter the motivation, the discourse positioning a Fonzie statue as at best frivolous fun misses the appeal and significance of popular culture in ordinary people’s lives. To look at the photos people take of themselves posing with the statue is to recognize the depth of our identification with the narratives of popular culture. It might be fun, but it isn’t frivolous.

Sam and Mike with the Bronze Fonz

But at stake in this debate was more than just the promotion of values endorsed by the snooty guardians of culture or the populist civic boosters. The identity of the city was also a term in the controversy, and this identity is tied up in the representation of place in popular culture like Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley.

Like many Midwestern cities, Milwaukee’s past as a site of productive industry is more glorious than its post-industrial present. Today unemployment is high, especially among the city’s large and segregated racial underclass, and economic growth is slow. The city does not like to present this face to the region, the country and the world. It hopes to attract “creative class” young people and spendthrift convention tourism. It wants to seem like a hip, vibrant town with plenty of attractions to excite out-of-towners.

Happy Days (and Laverne & Shirley) might be a fond memory, but is not much to hang onto as a point of pride for Milwaukee. The setting was in some ways incidental to the show. Its producer Garry Marshall wanted to set Happy Days in his hometown of the Bronx, but the folks at Paramount thought this would come off as too ethnic (Brant, 20). They were looking to duplicate the family format of 1950s shows like Father Knows Best and clearly preferred to represent an idealized middle America. Wisconsinites are proud of their culture, for instance their foodways (the German-influenced beer and sausages; dairy foods like cheese and frozen custard; and Friday fish fry events where the Brandy Old Fashioneds are more often savored than the fish). But the ethnic or regional identity of Wisconsin or Milwaukee is hardly in evidence in Happy Days. For instance, more of the show’s characters have Italian names (Fonzarelli, Delvecchio) than the more locally common German ones. One hears more New York accents like Winkler’s than Wisconsin accents. You wouldn’t know from watching Happy Days that the typical white Milwaukeean speaks more like Sarah Palin than Mrs. C.

The setting of the show in Milwaukee was in a sense the denial of place rather than an investment in it. Marshall, and Italian-American and New Yorker, seems to have wanted to do urban-ethnic, but in some ways the specificity of his characters’ identities got scrubbed from the representation. Setting the show in Milwaukee was a way of striking a note of Americana — an idealization of “normal” America just as much as it was an idealization of the 1950s as a more innocent and familiar and comforting time in history. Jefferson High, where the characters go to school, and Arnold’s drive-in restaurant, where they slurp milkshakes and dance to jukebox records, are meant to be the kind of school and hangout that you might find anywhere in the USA.

Fonz with the cast of Happy Days

Milwaukee can be tickled to have a Fonzie statue because Fonzie is essentially cool. But it’s hard to be proud to have been chosen as an undistinct enough place to stand in for Anytown, USA. America of the big cities and coasts is often blind to the specificity of the places in the middle of the country, and Happy Days is symptomatic of this. (Things change in Laverne & Shirley, which is more blue-collar and which has the brewery setting to add local color.)

But we are also proud to have been the setting of a popular show at all, an opportunity for “Milwaukee” to have been uttered on a regular basis to an audience of millions. To this day, legend persists that a frozen custard stand called Leon’s was the inspiration for Arnold’s. Leon’s has gorgeous vintage signage and looks like it hasn’t changed since the 1950s.

Leon’s Frozen Custard Stand

If you ask the custard server if it’s true about Leon’s being the original Arnold’s she might say yes (I’ve heard it myself). But the truth is otherwise. Tom Miller, a producer at Paramount, suggested setting Happy Days in the suburban Milwaukee neighborhood where he grew up after Garry Marshall’s Bronx setting was nixed (Brant, 20). Jefferson High was based on Nicolet High in Glendale, WI. Arnold’s was based on a drive-in called The Milky Way on Port Washington Rd. that no longer exists. But it pleases people around town to think that the place that inspired Arnold’s still serves food, and that you can still go back there if you want to visit the 1950s as represented on television. Like everywhere else, nostalgia for a past that never existed lives in Milwaukee.

Image credits:
1. The Bronz Fonz – photo by author
2. Sam and Mike with the Bronze Fonz – used with permission
3. Fonz with the cast of Happy Days – Author’s personal collection
4. Leon’s Frozen Custard Stand – photo by author

Please feel free to comment.

IN ADDITION TO OUR REGULAR COLUMNISTS AND GUEST COLUMNS, FLOW IS ALSO COMMITTED TO PUBLISHING TIMELY FEATURE COLUMNS, SUCH AS THE ONE BELOW. THE EDITORS OF FLOW REGULARLY ACCEPT SUBMISSIONS FOR THIS SECTION. PLEASE VISIT OUR “CALLS” PAGE FOR CONTACT INFORMATION.

The best television show of the summer of ‘06 by far, says Virginia Heffernan, television critic and blogger for The New York Times, was not Rescue Me or Entourage, or even Project Runway. It actually wasn’t on television, strictly speaking, but on YouTube.¹ It was lonelygirl15, which is the username of its star, Bree, a personable sixteen year-old video blogger who has appeared in a regular series of short videos, some of which have been viewed more than half a million times. In her vlogs, Bree sits facing a camera in her bedroom and opens up about her life. She talks about her strict, religious parents, her homeschooling, and her friend Daniel (a/k/a Danielbeast), who often appears in the background sprawled on Bree’s bed reading a magazine. Daniel supposedly edits Bree’s videos and occasionally posts some of his own in response to hers; he is probably also madly in love with her. When we first encountered them, lonelygirl15 and Danielbeast seemed like just another couple of kids with a computer and a webcam engaging in participatory culture and creative expression. They could have been any of millions of young people living in the age of web 2.0, when the consumer/producer distinction is passé and one’s whole life is “content.”

But it is now evident that despite appearances, Bree and Daniel are fictional characters rather than real people and that the videos are not their creation alone. It is also clear that those who participated with Bree and Daniel in creating the lg15 phenomenon–by responding to their videos with other videos, by writing about them and spreading their fame, by engaging them in discussion, by taking them at face value, all in good faith–were in some sense bamboozled by a crafty group of storytellers eager to harness the power and exploit the credulity of a new media community and the tastemakers who track it. Like the marks of any good trick, we who were fooled want at once to congratulate and castigate the tricksters. Most of all, we want to understand how they pulled it off. lg15 demonstrates the sharp double edges of today’s participatory media. Web-shared video seems like a democratic technology making it possible for ordinary people in their everyday lives to create an alternative to mainstream media. lonelygirl15 demonstrates that it can also evidently be used by more sophisticated media producers to engage that very audience of eager participants–and to what ends it remains to be seen.

When she first attracted widespread attention, Bree was supposedly an average girl who might just make it in Hollywood on the strength of a homemade screen test. Her videos inspired a legion of admirers and detractors, many of whom posted response videos to YouTube. She got written up not only in numerous entries of Heffernan’s blog, but in the Times of London and in New York magazine, which declared that the videos marked “the birth of a new art form,” a line that the lg15 creators later parroted to advertise their intentions. Just as Bree’s star was rising, however, the lg15 community began to doubt the very authenticity that made her persona compelling. One YouTuber expressed skepticism because the videos use fill lights and have a story arc, two things absent from the typical vlog. Bree would reply to some fellow users’ and some reporters’ e-mails, but remained coy about her identity and location. Wikipedia editors opposed her inclusion in their website with the wacky fervor of JFK conspiracy nuts on the grounds, partly, that no one could say if she was real or fake. An untold multitude began to pay more than casual attention and many found themselves descending, in the terms of their fan community, “down the rabbit hole.” Could lonelygirl15 be a viral marketing campaign for a consumer product yet to be revealed, or an elaborate promotion for another media product, like a horror movie, or more simply a Blair Witch-style mockumentary? Could it all be a kind of game? Is Bree sweet or is she a fraud? Is she sixteen or more like twenty-one? Are the videos spontaneous or scripted? When it came to lg15, the lines between reality and fiction, natural personal expression and the mechanics of narrative, authenticity and contrivance were never very clear, and this is what made it such vital, momentous entertainment.

Although the audience is still watching and wondering about Bree and Daniel, the show lost some of its special charm beginning on September 8, when a confession signed “The Creators” posted on the lonelygirl15.com message board claimed that the videos are the work of filmmakers telling a story rather than kids innocently sharing their lives with the world. The following day, the Los Angeles Times reported that an e-mail supposedly from Bree to a MySpace account had been traced to an IP address at the Creative Artists Agency in Beverly Hills. On September 12, the community was abuzz with news that the woman who appears as Bree in the videos is a 19 year-old actress from New Zealand named Jessica, whose MySpace pictures (concealed by a privacy setting but previously public) were discovered in Google’s cache, apparently by some industrious fans’ sleuthing. For several weeks the YouTube and lg15 fan communities had been skeptical. But with this series of revelations, it seemed that part of what made lg15 so fascinating was gone. lg15 worked the tension between faith and doubt, but without that it began to seem like just another commercial media come-on. As one blogger declared, “lonelygirl15 minutes are up.”

Finally, over the following several days, many media outlets reported identities of “The Creators” as filmmakers Miles Beckett, Ramesh Flinders and Greg Goodfried, and their objective as initiating “a new form of collaborative online entertainment” (Adler). It turns out that the means of their production were quite modest. According to published reports, all they needed were a computer and some software, a $150 camera, some cheap desk lamps, a good actress they found using craigslist, and an open YouTube community where anyone can post or view a video. They shot lonelygirl15 in their own bedrooms.

In the beginning were the videos. Watching them, one can’t help but sympathize with Bree, who complains in her first vlog about her strict upbringing and confesses that the town where she lives is so boring that she has nothing better to do than spend time on her computer. She quotes from Guns, Germs and Steel and idolizes Richard Feynman. Her room is decorated with a Napoleon Dynamite poster and a pink feathered boa. She calls herself a dork and possesses every dorky smart boy’s fantasy, a combination of brains and beauty that makes her seem like a perfect fusion of Alex and Mallory Keaton. Most important, though, Bree has talent as a performer. She uses her eyes, lips, arms, and legs like a comedian of the silent screen. Every time she frowns, shows a wide-opened gaze or protruding tongue, every time she rests her chin on her knee she expresses some essential quality of adolescence. The internet is home to innumerable kids goofing off in front of a camera, pulling faces, dancing in their bedrooms, hamming it up. Bree does this routine as well as anyone.

But that was at most half of lonelygirl15’s appeal. The rest was a product of speculation about the production and provenance of the videos. To those like me who were taken in by lg15, the experience of tracking the theories sometimes overwhelmed the experience of watching the show. Long before The Creators’ confession, there were many hints that lg15 wasn’t just a sincere production of two talented kids. Not only are the videos well lit and not only do they trace an arc, they also have unusually clean sound, good postproduction work with fast motion and music, and lots of editing. Although they are hardly technically polished like a feature film, they are several notches above the typical teenage YouTuber’s work. More curious yet, in a video posted August 6, we see a shrine in Bree’s room to Aleister Crowley, the British occultist. The suggestion that her family’s faith is something obscure, cultish, and possibly Satanic seemed contrived to generate controversy and discussion. Another hint of fakery came when it was discovered that the domain name of a fan site, lonelygirl15.com, was registered one month before the first video was posted, suggesting a planned launch. Finally, for two months no one was able to pin down who exactly Bree is or where she lives. No friends came forward and people’s efforts to get in touch with her produced only a few uninformative e-mails.

Taken together, the primary texts and their surrounding discourses made lg15 into compelling narrative. The videos themselves are full of plot, scenes that play out between Bree and Daniel and stories she tells about her conflict with her homeschooling parents. Blogs, message boards, comment threads, and articles about the videos generated other kinds of narrative: speculative stories that fans and amateur lonelygirl scholars wove about the creation of the vlogs. Considering both the videos and these discourses surrounding them, lg15 was a rich and layered text. One became immersed in its world just as when watching a television serial like Battlestar Galactica or reading a fat novel with a good plot. The videos and the ideas that sprouted from them brought to mind Lost and The Da Vinci Code, and although the audience for lg15 was still smaller than for either of those, its passion was as strong.

Before the confession of fakery, Heffernan told NPR’s On The Media that lg15 fans would not be disappointed to find out that it’s not exactly what it appears to be. Everyone had basically assumed that to be the case. But the fans were dying to know the rest of the story not only of Bree and Daniel and her religious rites and strict parents, but also of how The Creators managed to hook us on it, how they got our attention and what their objectives were. lg15 appealed to what Neal Harris, in his biography of P.T. Barnum, calls “the operational aesthetic.” Barnum’s hoaxes and museum exhibits presented astonishing spectacles and the audience would be eager not only to witness the incredible, but also, essentially, to be shown how the showman pulled it off. The videos were an internet equivalent and the audience was eager to see it unraveled. We were taken in by the magic but at the same time, we needed to know how it had been conjured. The internet has been the site of a zillion hoaxes, but there is something unusual about this one. It comes during this cycle of greater democratization and interactivity, with media users and makers coming together like never before. lg15 has been a contradictory phenomenon, at once drawing its energy from the web community and taking advantage of it. Daniel and Bree’s videos are among the best things to watch on any size screen these days, and this is a testament not only to the craft and imagination of their makers, but also to the audience that has made their feat possible in so many ways.

Note
¹ Heffernan made this claim in an interview on NPR’s On The Media during the episode of September 1, 2006.

Image Credits:

1. Video Blog on You Tube

2. With Scissors

3. Reading Viral Marketing for Dummies

4. The real lonelygirl15

Works Cited
Adler, Shawn. “Internet Phenom Lonelygirl15 Reveals Secrets, Says Bree Is Someone ‘Everybody Can Relate To’.” MTV News. MTV Networks. 14 Sept. 2006.

Harris, Neil. Humbug: The Art of P.T. Barnum. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981.

Richards, Jonathan. “Worldwide Fame for a Lonely Girl.” Times online. Times Newspapers Ltd. 19 Aug. 2006.

Rushfield, Richard. “Lonelygirl? Not any Longer.” latimes.com. Los Angeles Times. 16 Sept. 2006.

Sternbergh, Adam. “Hey There, Lonelygirl.” New York Magazine. New York Magazine Holdings. 28 Aug. 2006.

Please feel free to comment.