Let me give some background to this first. The Australian equivalent to the American Emmys is called the Logies –after the Scottish engineer John Logie Baird, one of the major contributors to the invention of television. The Logies are screened annually and they used to be one of the highlights of the Australian television calendar: the token international star was flown in to patronise the local industry, occasionally controversy was generated by a presenter or nominee who would turn up drunk or affected by some other kind of substance, and for many years they were hosted by our equivalent of Johnny Carson – a much loved, quick-witted but occasionally caustic, industry survivor called Bert Newton. There are two categories of competition in the Logies: for the ‘most popular’ (actor, presenter, drama series etc) selected by the television audience who vote by mail, mobile and online; and for ‘the most outstanding’ (actor, drama series etc) selected by a judging panel drawn from the industry itself. The Logies have lumbered along, largely unchanged, for 54 years. As a television event, the Logies are very similar to the Oscars: they regularly run drastically over time (the latest one took almost five hours!); much of the audience who at least watched begrudgingly in the past now doesn’t watch at all (or at least not for long); the ‘red carpet’ pre-show rates higher than the awards and attracts a younger audience; and there is an annual round of sniping and speculation about who is going to be this year’s host.

What is slightly novel about the Logies is the annual award of ‘the Gold Logie’ (all the others are silver) to the ‘most popular TV personality’ of the year. The winner can be drawn from any genre – news, comedy, drama, sport, the full range. Mostly, as you might expect, Gold Logies have gone to performers with a long career behind them: much loved, and often respected, servants of the industry. They have been won by stars of long-running soaps, by hosts of successful chat or variety shows, and by news and current affairs presenters – effectively, those who have earned the affection of the audience over many years of appearing regularly on television. This year, though, certain things have changed.

First, five of the six the nominees for the Gold Logie are relatively young – that is, under forty. Three of them are edgy comedians, with a track record of working on youth-oriented, perhaps even niche, programming. Only one of these three has been involved with a high rating show – and ironically that person has worked only on the publicly funded, non-commercial network, the ABC, which usually comes in fourth (out of five) in the free-to-air network competition. The eventual winner was comedian and occasional mock-doc producer and presenter, Hamish Blake. His success was surprising to say the least (and more on that soon). It was greeted by the mainstream press with some resentment; they reported that he was assisted by the fact that he could mobilise his 290,000 followers on Twitter and his 1.5 million Facebook friends. (To put that number of Facebook friends in perspective, 1.5 million is roughly 7% of the Australian population!) A little disingenuously, given the contemporary newspaper’s desperate exploitation of every media platform it can get its hands on to retain readers and attract subscribers, the press seemed to think that this constituted a form of cheating.

To be fair, the context in which such suggestions might be raised does go back quite a way. We can trace some of its origins to the widespread criticism of the manner in which the Oscars have been reduced to an advertising duel between rival studio marketing agencies. In the Australian context, though, it is probably more relevant to point out that it is widely assumed that the Logies are just plain rigged. They are sponsored by what was for many years the leading broadcasting network and a print media television guide (TV Week) that was published by their sister company. Many observers have, from time to time, suggested that the host network nominees get a bit of an edge in the competition. These complaints and suspicions aside, however, it is hard not to see this result as a new example of the synergies that can be generated between old and new media.

The most interesting thing about this result, however, is not its dependence on a canny use of social media. Rather, it is the fact that Hamish Blake has never had a continuing role in an established television program. (All the other contenders did: one was a star of a daily soap, two were hosts of daily current affairs programs which had run for some years, another hosted a successful music quiz show for seven years as well as a chat show now in its second series, and the sixth was the star of a top-rating drama series now in its third series.) The programming cited in Blake’s award was his mock-doc travel show, co-produced with his partner Andy Lee, called Hamish and Andy’s Gap Year, which ran for 10 episodes to moderate ratings. However, those voting would have encountered him more often as a recurrent guest on a group of youth oriented comedy programs: the game show Talkin’ About Your Generation, the improvisational comedy Thank God, You’re Here, and the music quiz show Spicks n’ Specks . Only one of these has been a big ratings earner, but all of them pitch to a demographic of 14-39 year olds. Hamish and Andy, though, do have a parallel career in radio; they have been hosting a ratings leading daily radio program on a music station for some years – and the ‘gap year’ referred to in the title of the television series is time spent away from their radio program.

What we have then, is a major television star who has built his career on being a guest on other people’s programs, on maintaining a major social network presence, and on hosting a successful time-slot on a youth-oriented radio station. Even the chance to produce Hamish and Andy’s Gap Year was brokered on the back of this pattern of performance. It is probably worth noting just how frequent these television appearances were – there have been weeks when Hamish would have been on all three of his favourite programs as a guest. Obviously it helps that he is extremely quick and funny, and that he is also very cute and boyish. His attraction to a Gen Y demographic, in particular, in a medium increasingly running out of ideas about how to bring that audience back to television, made him irresistible to the mainstream commercial networks as well as to the publicly funded broadcaster.

Australia does not have an especially high level of media platform convergence, although there is a very high level of concentration of media ownership (and these two may well be related). So, this is quite a novel development in that respect. But it is also a novel development for the fact that a form of what we might call ‘indie’ or DIY celebrity has achieved this degree of penetration into the mass media market. There are analogous but smaller scale precedents, of course, in the regular bursts of YouTube celebrities who go viral and turn up featuring briefly on our television news magazines and chat shows. But this is a far more substantial mainstreaming of a celebrity much loved by social media. Hamish Blake has achieved the highest level of recognition available to Australian performers within the mainstream media. The newspapers are probably right, that this could not have happened without the participation of those social networkers, and so a large chunk of the demographic so commonly assumed to have left television behind now seems, once again, to be paying attention.

Image Credits:

1. The Logie Award
2. Hamish Blake holding a Logie

Please feel free to comment.

Since the late 1990s, lesbian celebrities have garnered an astounding amount of power, respect, and loyalty from fans, cultural critics, and the popular press. National civil rights organizations like the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) and the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) feature lesbian celebrities during fundraisers and in promotional materials. Publications, like the lesbian lifestyle magazine Curve, annually rank public figures, assessing their cultural significance based on wealth, political clout, and pop-culture resonance. Journalist Elizabeth Picard writes: “nothing has helped more to bring the issue of gay and lesbian rights forward than famous celebrities having come out of the closet.”1 Comments like this one tend to confirm the narrative that by being out and famous, lesbian celebrities are granted legitimacy as political activists. Significantly, this narrative also assumes that by coming out, celebrities unequivocally want to be political voices in support of lesbian and gay rights.

The production of lesbian celebrity, however, tells a different tale; the ways that celebrities construct their public personas suggest that lesbian activism is characterized by celebrity ambivalence, rather than by an easy association with minority politics. Comedian Wanda Sykes offers a useful case study for examining the contemporary relationship between coming out and political activism; since coming out as lesbian in 2008, Sykes seems reluctantly to have turned her life – as both a gay and black woman – into a prime example of representational politics.

Known for her abrasive wit, Wanda Sykes was an under-the-radar success on the comedy scene for years. She got her break in 1997 opening for comedian Chris Rock in New York, where she then was hired as a writer for The Chris Rock Show (1997-2000), a late-night HBO comedy talk show. She has appeared in a variety of film and TV titles, and is especially well-known for her role as Barb on CBS’s The New Adventures of Old Christine (2006-2010) and for her recurring role on HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm. Sykes’ humor has always had a decidedly liberal twist, but it wasn’t until she came out in 2008 that lesbian and gay rights became a staple of her comedy routines and public appearances. Along with other lesbian celebrities such as Jane Lynch and Suze Orman, Sykes has talked about California’s Proposition 8 as the impetus for coming out.2 At a Las Vegas rally protesting the passage of Prop 8, Sykes gave an impassioned speech, which she ended by publicly proclaiming for the first time: “I am proud to be a woman. I’m proud to be a black woman, and I’m proud to be gay.” Yet, after the rally, dozens of media outlets quoted Sykes saying that she “had no ‘intention’ of publicly ‘coming out’ and ‘shocked’ herself by speaking openly about her sexuality.”3 Framed as an unplanned event, a moment of accidental activism, Sykes’ coming out suggests that becoming a celebrity activist often occurs precisely because it seems to be the “right” thing to do. Indeed, since coming out, fans, critics, and celebrities have claimed that Sykes has changed for the better. On the October 23, 2009 episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show, Winfrey told Sykes that since coming out she is “prettier and funnier…I think that’s what freedom does.” Sykes agreed with Winfrey, and repeated these familiar tropes of coming out in a series of interviews she gave after the passage of Prop 8. In an interview with TV Guide Magazine, for example, Lisa Bernhard asks Sykes, “How has your career changed since you announced you married a woman?” Sykes replies, “If anything, it has helped my career, because creatively I don’t have anything to dance around or be not so forthcoming with…It’s totally been liberating.”4

Click here to view the embedded video.

For Sykes, though, coming out as lesbian also revealed the ways she negotiates her own multiple voices, being black, lesbian, and female.5 In her 2009 HBO stand-up special, I’ma Be Me, she says that after the passage of Prop 8 she “had to come out…I had to say something ‘cause I was so hurt and so fuckin’ pissed, I had to say something.” She goes on to describe the landmark election night that was, for many citizens, a triumph and a failure; Obama had been elected the first black President and, as Sykes says, lesbians and gays in California were back to being “second class citizens.” Sykes says, “I was up here and now I’m back down here.” Dropping to her knees, she says, “Actually I’m lower, I dropped lower, you know ‘cause as a black woman at least I could do whatever, marry whoever, but as a gay, black woman, uhuh, even lower.” Her comments underscore the ways that the coinciding of these two events revealed triumph on the racial front concurrent with the powerful renunciation of lesbian and gay rights.

Since coming out, marriage rights, in particular, have become central to Sykes’ comedy; in performances across the country, Sykes tells audiences, “I’m for gay marriage…but I don’t like that I have to say that because, to me, it shouldn’t even be debated, it shouldn’t even be in the court system. Government shouldn’t be involved in this.” In Sykes’ comedy, these serious political critiques come with biting satire that critics describe as “no-bullshit,”6 “tart,” and “irreverent.”7 As audiences applaud Sykes’ stance on marriage rights, she adds a punch-line: “It’s very simple: if you don’t believe in same-sex marriage then don’t marry somebody of the same sex.” As a satirist, Sykes encourages viewers to play with politics, pointing out the absurdity of arguments against marriage equality: “We’ve got to protect marriage, that’s what they say…Same-sex couples, I don’t think that’s the biggest threat to marriage. I think the biggest threat to marriage is divorce…What they should do is ban divorce, right? Make marriage like the mafia; once you’re in, you’re in…The murder rate will go up, but you know.” On one hand, Sykes appears to embrace and embody the politics of authenticity as a lesbian celebrity and vocal proponent of marriage rights. On the other hand, her approach to the topic of marriage signals a reluctant willingness to be a voice for the cause; after all, she opens the set by saying that she doesn’t like to have to say that she supports marriage equality because she doesn’t think it’s a decision that belongs to the government. Sykes’ comedy, then, is in the service of making an argument she feels compelled to make rather than one she is passionate about.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Both passion and humor do come through in Sykes’ interviews, where narratives of domesticity have come to define her public persona. Sykes and her wife, Alex (who is white and from France), married in California in 2008 during the brief five-month window when the right was legally recognized in the state, and they had twins a year later. Interviews tend to focus on Sykes as a spouse and mother, allowing her to discuss marriage rights within the homonormative terms of state-sanctioned marriage, child-rearing, and domestic life. Prop 8, and marriage rights in general, easily translate to these normative ideals; throughout Prop 8’s history, its challengers – those who support marriage rights for lesbians and gays – have framed their arguments through the lens of normalcy and sameness, establishing a generic appeal to the notion of equal protection under the law. On an October 29, 2009 appearance on The View to promote Sykes’ short-lived FOX talk show, Joy Behar welcomes her to the stage by saying that “The Wanda Sykes Show puts another woman in late-night and that’s not the only good news she’s gotten lately: she’s a newlywed and a new mom of twins.” This introduction frames the questions to follow: Sherri Shepherd, for instance, asks about married life one year after their wedding, while Elisabeth Hasselbeck asks about her children, and whether they have put a strain on the marriage. Almost two years later, in an appearance on The Ellen Degeneres Show, Sykes discusses the lessons she’s learned from parenting her twins. Sykes tells Degeneres that the children are in the throes of the “terrible-twos” saying “no, no, no” all the time: “I want to discipline them but we agreed that we are not going to spank the kids…so I have to get a little creative.” Filled with witty sarcasm, Sykes tells of giving her son “chip clips” to play with when he’s misbehaving, ensuring that he pinches himself with the less-than-child-friendly gadget for keeping an open bag of chips fresh. Through marriage equality’s associations with homonormative values of marriage, family, and domesticity, Sykes produces a tempered form of political activism, rooted more in her identity as an accidental activist than in a call to political arms.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Although Sykes’ comedy and her participation in fundraisers, speaking events, and Public Service Announcements draw on a long history of Hollywood activism, they also reflect how Sykes navigates the role of celebrity activist. For her, it seems that Prop 8 offered a means of structuring her public identity, wherein she could embrace the personal-as-political as a black lesbian celebrity. Yet, this embrace was timid, driven by conflicting ideals: the desire to embody an “authentic” and “complete” person and a simultaneous hesitancy to become a celebrity in the service of political action. Sykes’ story suggests that we ought to challenge the prevailing logic that coming out inevitably produces willing celebrity activists. As I’ve tried to show, in each of Sykes’ appearances, interviews, and comedy routines, there is a discernable dance of ambivalence. Maybe it is this ambivalence that characterizes lesbian celebrity activism today.

Image Credits:
1: Wanda Sykes

1. Elizabeth Picard, “Influential Lesbian Celebrities,” Helium, http://www.helium.com/items/1035520-influential-lesbian-celebrities (accessed April 2, 2012).
2. On November 4, 2008, the same day that Barack Obama was elected America’s first African American President, California voters passed Proposition 8, a statewide ballot initiative that limited marriage to a union of a man and a woman. Prop 8 overturned the California Supreme Court’s May 2008 ruling that marriage was a fundamental right, which could not be denied to lesbian and gay couples. Since its passage, it has been appealed to state and federal courts, headed next to the U.S. Supreme Court. (On February 7, 2012, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a 2-1 majority opinion that declared Prop 8 unconstitutional, saying it violated the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution). For a complete history of Prop 8 see:
   Equality California http://www.eqca.org/site/pp.asp?c=kuLRJ9MRKrH&b=5716101,
   National Center for Lesbian Rights http://www.nclrights.org/site/PageServer?pagename=issue_marriage,
   Prop 8 Trial Tracker http://www.prop8trialtracker.com.
3. “Wanda Sykes – Wanda Sykes ‘Shocked’ Herself with Lesbian Speech,” Contact Music, June 3, 2011. http://www.contactmusic.com/news/wanda-sykes-shocked-herself-with-lesbian-speech_1223004 (accessed April 2, 2012).
4. Lisa Bernhard, “Wanda Sykes Uncensored!” November 4, 2009, TV Guide Magazine. http://www.tvguidemagazine.com/feature/wanda-sykes-uncensored-3083.html (accessed January 21, 2010).
5. That Prop 8 motivated her to come out is especially significant because Prop 8 was highly divisive along racial lines. When Prop 8 passed by a slim margin, media reports attributed its adoption to black voters; exit polling indicated that seven out of ten blacks voted in favor of Prop 8 and this bias was broadly attributed to cultural and religious beliefs that firmly opposed homosexuality and the right of lesbians and gays to marry. Despite nuanced critiques that offered analyses of the factors leading to Prop 8’s passage, black homophobia was the dominant narrative in the press.
6. Rip Empson, “HuffPost Review: Wanda Sykes’ I’ma Be Me,” The Huffington Post, October 10, 2009. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rip-empson/wanda-sykes-ima-be-me_b_316294.html (accessed March 12, 2012).
7. Brian Lowry, “Review of The Wanda Sykes Show,” Variety, November 8, 2009. http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117941562?refCatId=32 (accessed March 11, 2012).

1978 had less in common with ’68 than ’28 and ’38: the old motto ‘give the people what they want’…Ten years ago filmmakers were making films about things that they ought to – [things] they thought ought to be explored, with thoughts that they wanted to explore, and lessons they wanted to teach…One of the things that bothers me is this mass, kind of “lemming syndrome” of the movie-going public; they feel they have to see a movie if everyone else is seeing it …Some of the films we liked best last year were the serious one that did have some ideas. So let’s go on to the box office favorites of the public and some of our own favorites of 1978.

The above statement was made by Roger Ebert to Gene Siskel in a 1979 episode of Sneak Previews (PBS, 1975-82) rebroadcast in 2011 as a “classics from the vault” on Ebert Presents: At the Movies (PBS, 2011- ). The immediate question is what relevance any discussion of the best and worst films from 1978 has for the film consumer in 2011 beyond a middle-aged nostalgia factor or what sounds intriguing enough to add to the Netflix list. What Siskel and Ebert remind us–then and now–is that the seemingly unlimited yearly supply of wretched movies was, is, and always will be the fault of the audience and not the filmmakers, the industry, and especially not the critic.


In comparing 1978’s “blockbusters” Grease, Animal House, Jaws II, and Heaven Can Wait with their favorite films of the year which had modest or little box-office success (An Unmarried Woman, Straight Time, Days of Heaven, Autumn Sonata), Siskel and Ebert did not engage in Hollywood bashing. Ebert pointed out that he “loved Grease” and that Animal House made his “Best Ten” of 1978, while Siskel roundly dismissed the idea that movie critics hate any and all popular films. Rather, Ebert recounted receiving a letter of complaint from someone who saw Autumn Sonata after he and Siskel recommended the film and found it incomprehensible, while Siskel confidently estimated “one out of maybe fifty viewers” saw Straight Time. Here a faux populism is constructed wherein the critic can enjoy movies as much as the common audience member yet maintain his privileged status above said audience member, who is largely incapable of appreciating the more challenging and “serious” films.

Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel

This distinction becomes crucial in constructing a representation of “the audience” by Siskel and Ebert. As Ebert contended, the problem was filmmakers and studios being forced to “give the public what they want,” which amounted to formulaic, trivial films that “everyone else is seeing.” In turn, Siskel’s solution was that audiences needed to “take some chances” as film consumers. Hence, Ebert reviled Jaws II as “pure trash,” and Siskel similarly lambasted it as “a cheap imitation of the original” with a key qualifier: “I guess people loved to see the shark eat more people.” One might also say that the public simply eats up popular films like Grease, Animal House, or Jaws II, whether good or bad, while a film like Autumn Sonata is not as easily digested. My contention, to stretch this metaphor even further, is that the true shark may not be the movie-going public with its insatiable appetite for any and all films but the culture industry with its ravenous consumption of the public. In this scenario, the critic more or less serves as the toothbrush after the feeding frenzy.

Theodor W. Adorno

Theodor W. Adorno described consumers of mass culture as somewhere between pathetic victims and resigned collaborators in their relationship to the culture industry: “They force their eyes shut and voice approval, in a kind of self-loathing, for what is meted out to them, knowing fully the purpose for which it is manufactured. Without admitting it they sense their lives would be intolerable as soon as they no longer clung to satisfactions which are none at all.”1 However, Adorno formulated this unenviable situation around standardized cultural production which instills standardized cultural consumption:

The categorical imperative of the culture industry no longer has anything in common with freedom. It proclaims: you shall conform, without instruction as to what; conform to what exists anyway, and that which everyone thinks anyway as a reflex to power and omnipotence. The power of the culture industry’s ideology is such that conformity has replaced consciousness.2

Siskel and Ebert’s comments in 1979 can be recycled thirty-plus years later to perpetuate a vulgar yet increasingly popular version of Adorno’s culture industry argument that reconfigures the blame around demand rather than supply. An apt comparison can be found in Deborah Cook’s The Culture Industry Revisited: Theodor W. Adorno on Mass Culture, in which Cook paraphrases Adorno’s fellow Frankfurt School adherent Herbert Marcuse who she says “once quipped [that] freedom in capitalism is the freedom to choose a hundred different brands of toilet paper.”3 This is not at all contending that Hollywood films–or TV and popular music, for that matter–amount to uniform toilet paper for the mind. The crucial issue is the extent to which popular culture functions as affirmative culture and whether it has the potential to offer points of opposition and resistance (something I would contend, contrary to Adorno, is quite possible). Arguments merely focused on the qualitative differences of mass culture products and the aesthetic superiority of Grease and Animal House over Jaws II could be tantamount to debating the merits between Charmin, Cottonelle, and Scott. Cultural production is also a cultural commodity; cultural products that are “works of art” achieve that status through critical discourse.

AMC Randhurst 12 Cineplex
(Mount Prospect, Illinois)

In the end, Siskel and Ebert express the none-too-veiled “snobbery” that Adorno is frequently accused of manifesting. While Adorno detested mass culture for its immense social costs, Siskel and Ebert stipulate which films are worth the price of admission; in doing so, their position is as thoroughly ideological as Adorno’s with far different stakes. Adorno’s oft-criticized “elitist” position actually aligns him with the masses and against the culture industry. Consumer choice in the mass culture market is a sham assortment of equally no-win choices, and the “lessons” are ideological indoctrination. Siskel and Ebert’s “populist” brand of film criticism belittles the public and lets the culture industry off the hook. According to them, serious films (art) by enlightened filmmakers (artists) provide important “lessons” to enrich audiences’ lives, while more enlightened critics (themselves) determine which films best accomplish this lofty task in a presupposed “free market” of culture.4 For the audience, it is simply a matter of correct consumer choice: selecting among the cultural industry’s products with the best educational and entertainment value for the money as deemed by the critic.


While Ebert castigated the public’s “lemming syndrome,” Adorno stated, “If the masses have been unjustly reviled from above as masses, the culture industry is not among the least responsible for making them into masses and then despising them, while obstructing the emancipation for which human beings are as ripe as the productive forces of the epoch permit.”5 For those of us engaged in the enterprise of “cultural criticism,” my concern is for the moment we can take Adorno’s assessment and, as Siskel and Ebert would seemingly have it, substitute “the critic” for “the culture industry.”

Image Credits:
1. FilmDrunk
2. Nutshell Movies
3. NNDB
4. ScreenRant

Please feel free to comment.

1. Theodor W. Adorno, “Culture Industry Reconsidered,” in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J.M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 1991), 103.
2. ”Culture Industry Reconsidered,” 104.
3. Deborah Cook, The Culture Industry Revisited: Adorno and Mass Culture (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996), 123.
4. A recommended discussion is Eileen R. Meehan, Why TV Is Not Our Fault: Television, Viewers, and Who’s Really in Control (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005).
5. “Culture Industry Reconsidered,” 106.

In The Straight Story, a secret passage opens in the mouth. Alvin and his older brother Lyle no longer speak to each other after having fought ten years earlier when they “said some things [they] shouldn’t have” to each other. Each of them has spoken too straight; both of them straight talkers. But for each, saying what needs to be said, talking straight requires a certain convolution, a detour from the straight and narrow, a form of talking straight that strays, that requires one to say too much and to say in the end things one shouldn’t have. In the end, at the end of the road, one ends up not talking at all. At the end of language, the end of language. From saying too much to not talking at all, the regulation of language in particular, but a larger economy of the mouth determines a variety of passages in The Straight Story. Alvin’s daughter Rose stammers; she speaks in small bursts, as if propelling or expelling the words from her mouth. She also carries a deep wound from the loss of her children, which remains unspoken. Alvin stopped drinking, because he drank too much in an attempt to suppress the memories (and guilt) of war (World War Two) he carries inside him. Throughout his journey, Alvin talks to strangers, telling them intimate details of his life, building toward a confession in a bar to stranger over a glass of milk. Alvin had accidently shot a comrade during World War II; his guilt appears to be less over the accident than his silence, his refusal to speak of his fatal mistake, to accept responsibility before others. The mouth in The Straight Story is a secret passage, and a passage for secrets; a way in and a way out that is not always accessible.

In a world that appears to be largely as it appears, the other side of The Straight Story exists in the sky, in the frequent shots of the nighttime sky and stars; the other side of earth and of life. The imminence of death, for Alvin as well as Lyle frames the temporality of The Straight Story. Of Lyle’s house, which marks the endpoint of Alvin’s journey, which is also marked as the near-endpoint of life, Michel Chion says: “This poor dwelling seems the endpoint of a life, from where the only way out, in visual terms, is the starry sky above.”1 The refrain of the sky and the floating camera of this film establish a world other than that depicted; a second, other world that hovers above the finite and visible world of The Straight Story. Lynch says: “With The Straight Story I wanted the film to have a floating feeling. I particularly wanted that quality to come through in the aerial landscape shots, and it took a lot of explaining to get the helicopter pilots to slow down enough to get the look I was after.”2

The passages are most labyrinthine in Inland Empire, where the fragmentation of places, times, scenarios, identities, and psychic conditions produces a schizoid frenzy. (Martha P. Nochimson says, “Here time present is also time past and time to come.”)3 During a rehearsal scene for the planned film “On High in Blue Tomorrows,” the first reading for its principal actors, Nikki Grace (Laura Dern) and Devon Berk (Justin Theroux), to be directed by Kingsley Stewart (Jeremy Irons, an actor known for, among other things, his doubled role as twin gynecologists Beverly and Elliot Mantle in David Cronenberg’s 1988 Dead Ringers), a disturbance on the nearly completed set interrupts the reading. Devon investigates the disturbance and, hearing retreating footsteps, he chases the intruder deep into the darkened set to its end, the façade of a house. After peering into the window and seeing only darkness unfolding (it appears to be unfolding, darkness from darkness), he returns to the reading and reports that someone, “disappeared where it’s real hard to disappear.” At this point the director, Kingsley, reveals the secret history of this production.

“On High in Blue Tomorrows,” it turns out, is a remake. Or rather, the resumption of a film that was never completed. (Nachträglichkeit.) “It was based,” says Kingsley, “on a Polish gypsy folktale. The title in German was ‘Vier-sieben,’ four-seven.” (Worlds within worlds: a Hollywood remake of a Polish gypsy folktale with a German title. But there is more: 47 is the room number where Majid lives in Haneke’s Caché, which references Lynch’s Lost Highway, in the anonymous videotape and the surname “Laurent,” from Dick to Georges. Toward the end of Inland Empire, a Susan Blue finds herself in front of a room 47. Within Haneke Lynch, Lynch within Haneke.4 ) Before the film was completed but after production had begun, the two leads were murdered. “It was said to be cursed,” says Kingsley. The other side, the other world is already entering into the present, into the living. One world haunting the other. Nikki’s tears, which stream as she begins to read from the script as if on cue, fuse multiple worlds into one; theater, cinema, narrative, history are blended in her tears. One world leaking into another.5

The other side of this scene appears slightly later in the film. Nikki Grace has now slipped into her character, into an alter ego, Susan Blue. Back and forth, in and out. The worlds meet temporarily when she enters a building, passes through a darkened corridor and continues onward until she sees at the other end a rehearsal, the same scene from the other side. One hears Nikki’s voice, “Oh shit, look in the other room,” as Susan walks toward the camera, her face slowly materializing from the darkness at first blurred then slowly tightening into focus. Susan is herself the intruder, another figure of herself, a second self occupying the same body (Laura Dern’s) here and now, but elsewhere. The displacement that Lynch forges is made even more radical by the point of contact he facilitates. Susan watches the four at their reading (Devon, Nikki, Kingsley, and his assistant, Freddie Howard, played by Harry Dean Stanton), seeing herself there, elsewhere. This ecstatic trope appears throughout Inland Empire: in the opening scenes when Visitor #1 (Grace Zabriskie) appears, here, and again later when Susan sees herself on the other side of Hollywood Boulevard. As in the previous scene, Devon leaves the reading to investigate the intruder. Susan watches him approach but after a cut to her face and an offscreen comment by Nikki, the camera returns to the table where Nikki is now missing (only Kingsley and Freddie are there). Nikki has disappeared from this scene, just as Susan (then unknown) disappeared in the earlier scene. A symmetry of appearances and disappearances.

In a repetition of the earlier scene, Devon enters deeper into the set and Susan retreats, increasingly frantic. Susan’s husband Piotrek Król (Peter J. Lucas) watches the scene from a window. Seeing him, Susan calls out in warning, “Billy!,” the name of the character played by Devon. Nikki and Devon, inside this scene, inside this set, have become the characters they play in their film. Two worlds, one ostensibly real, the other a film diegesis have crossed into one another. Billy doesn’t hear Susan’s warning; Devon runs toward the end of the set, the façade of a house. Susan turns toward the house, which lights up as she approaches. With husband watching, Susan opens the door of the façade and enters into a room, a contiguous room not accessible to Devon in the earlier version of the scene, into the other side, another world. The instant is electric, a surge and flow of energy from side to another. Susan has crossed over and back, and appears to have taken Nikki with her.

Susan shuts the door behind her and slowly turns to observe the darkened pink room in which she finds herself, loses herself. (It is a room like so many of Lynch’s rooms, familiar in its unfamiliarity.) Susan rushes back to the door, which she can no longer open. Devon/Billy’s shadow appears at the window. Calling to him, Susan peers out and sees the previous shot of Devon looking into a darkened window. If this is indeed the same shot repeated, then Lynch has sutured two different worlds: in the first scene, Devon looks into a darkened surface, into nothing, an empty space behind a façade. In the second version of the scene, Susan is there, looking back at Devon, now Billy, who looks into the room. He seems to see nothing, but Lynch inserts a reaction shot of Susan calling out “Billy.” A reaction shot with no subject: he looks and one sees what he does not, Susan looking back at him, calling to him. There is no subject in this sequence, although it consists of a shot and reaction shot. A reaction with no subject; two worlds, each with discrete agents, a point or moment of apparent contact in which one world flows, surges into another, but the inhabitants of each world fail to form subjects to each other and with one another; each occupies her world, his world, alone.

(Eventually Devon and Billy are gone; outside a garden, contiguous to the house that Susan occupies. After a brief return to the darkened set through a lace curtain, the set recedes permanently and the diegesis settles around the house: a garden, enclosed by a gate, beyond it a street, and on the other side a house. One plane after another extending into space, the world unfolding around this house that is now sealed in its own world. The transition complete, the passage between the worlds of Nikki and Susan, Devon and Billy, reality and cinema has closed. The switch has been shut off, the current between the worlds interrupted. Susan is now free to exit. The door opens into the yard, which she steps into. The outside is now merely outside and no longer ecstatic.)

Image Credits:
1. All images are screen captures from Inland Empire, David Lynch

Please feel free to comment.

1. Michel Chion, David Lynch, trans. Robert Julian (London: British Film Institute, 2006), 205.
2. David Lynch, Lynch on Lynch, ed. Chris Rodley, revised edition (London: Faber and Faber, 2005), 259.
3. Martha P. Nochimson, “Inland Empire,” Film Quarterly 60.4 (Summer 2007): 11.
4. The telegraphic lines between Haneke and Lynch appear to be open: In his 2005 Caché, Haneke borrows the trope of anonymous videotapes that arrive on one’s doorstep, along with the surname of his protagonist Georges Laurent, from Lynch’s 1997 Lost Highway, which features a character named Dick Laurent. Lynch appears to have cited, in his 2006 Inland Empire, Majid’s apartment number, 47, in the original title of “On High in Blue Tomorrows,” a remake of the ill-fated Vier-sieben, or four-seven. (A common point of origin for both films may be a license plate W47 which appears in footage from an abandoned opening of Billy Wilder’s Sunset Blvd.) And like Lynch, Haneke recycles actors and names, most notably Juliette Binoche as Anne Laurent in Code inconnu (2000) and Caché, and actors Maurice Bénichou and Walid Afkir, who play adversaries in Code inconnu, father and son in Caché.
5. Michael Haneke’s first feature film, The Seventh Continent (Der siebente Kontinent, 1989), develops and affective architecture similar to those found in Lynch’s cinema: a film without interiority, or rather without any expression of interiority, the characters that populate The Seventh Continent, set in Linz, Austria, expose their interiorities only by leaking them. Anna’s brother Alex begins weeping suddenly at the dinner table, shifting without any indication from one affect to another, from relaxed merriment to inconsolable sorrow with no apparent transition. Anna begins to leak tears during the family’s regular ride through a car wash, her tears flowing along the fluids that stream across the car’s windows. Everything takes place around orifices, Eva’s claims of failing eyesight (Anna is an optometrist), the congested respiration of Anna under heavy sedation, Georg’s nauseated reaction to Anna’s breathing, and ultimately the poisons the family swallows as a way to travel metaphorically, metaphysically from Austria to Australia. The Seventh Continent can be seen as a film without language, an illiterate and speechless film in which words fail to represent what cannot be represented by words in the first instance.

I am writing these days about something I call sacred security, which is the business of selling video surveillance and other security measures to religious institutions. But it’s not just any old business. Sacred security is the work of a few dozen religiously-identified companies who market themselves to their spiritual brethren in a language that combines Old Testament metaphors with the anxious tropes of Homeland Security. What is being sold is the creeping militarization of the American church, in which ministers are literally being asked to “secure the perimeter” around their sanctuaries. From CCTV cameras above the altar to Sunday morning greeters trained to conduct a quick “threat assessment” on newcomers, surveillance culture has hit the American church.

The twenty-five companies that I’m following express little interest in the security needs of American Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Catholics, or liberal Protestants. Instead, most of the vendors, like most of the customers, seem to be white evangelical conservatives living in small towns and suburbs in the American south and lower Midwest. Envisioning themselves as “God-centered” capitalists on a sacred mission, these companies pitch their services to small rural congregations and suburban mega-churches alike—anyone looking for an electronic sentry to watch over the faithful like a “shepherd” or a “guardian” around the “Lord’s tent,” as the brochures and websites promise. Although these people are probably more “Moral Majority” than persecuted minority, I suspect that they feel exposed and vulnerable to attack when they are tempted to place surveillance cameras in their sacred spaces. And I am, above all else, interested in how they feel about the presence of these cameras. In almost two decades of writing about media culture, I have thought a great deal about what it feels like to look through a lens onto the world. I’m now beginning to think about how it feels to be the subject of that lens.

I’m interested in my own feelings about CCTV as well, even surprised by them. Until recently I didn’t know I cared about cameras in sacred spaces at all. Yet I keep returning to religious angles that I’ve never pursued in the past. I wonder who would want surveillance cameras above the pews glaring down at the worshippers? What could be so alarming to a room full of gun-owning, God-fearing middle-aged white people in a small town run by other white people? In other words, who really needs sacred security, and what is so damn frightening that you’d replace the free-flowing calm and compassionate welcome of the idealized church with an ominous sense of lock-down? Apparently, it is not enough that some deacons are literally carrying guns to Sunday services or that some pastors are literally clasping specially-designed bulletproof Bible holders at the altars. Something else is needed to assuage the fear.

Although I am only beginning to explore these questions, I can hazard this much: terrorism is not their demon of choice. Rather, it is the rank stranger outside the gate. It is the black cloud of evil that can settle anywhere, anytime, in their fretful vision of modern America. It is the vile nature of strangers, of difference, of heathens, but also the evil within: what the pastor might do to the organist, what the children might allege in the nursery—and if they don’t fear these things, the marketing of sacred security explicitly tells them that they should. Thank God—or Gideon Protect Services, or Watchman Security, or Savior Protection, Inc.—that video surveillance cameras, properly installed, will protect the innocent and ward off the wicked. Such is the sales pitch from the companies that I have been researching in this complex economy of fear.

What draws me to this topic is the sheer contrast between the ideal of hopeful refuge and shoulder-to-shoulder togetherness in a sacred space, and the insinuated, carefully marketed anxiety of the security business, forever amping up the threat of looming violence and the necessity of eternal vigilance. Must everything drip with fear?

I’m not sure that I qualify as a religious person with an obvious stake in these matters. I have so many qualms, detachments, even revulsions, but I have felt something else as well. Like Emerson, “I like the silent church before the service begins…” I get a charge in the sanctuary that I quite like, because I don’t get it at the mall. In moments of crisis and sometimes in moments of calm, I am shot through with peasant superstition and Irish sentimentality that says preserve this beautiful space, this ancient ideal of communitas, this relative openness to strangers in a world of enclosure, monitoring, and locked gates. Throw away the rest of the institution if Richard Dawkins appeals to you, but somehow keep the safe contemplation of the sublime and what Martin Luther King called the sanctity of the beloved community. Don’t spoil it with the paranoid lens of CCTV on every flat surface.

So what rattles me about so-called “worship surveillance” is the vague feeling of violation. That plastic camera near the roofline seems out of place, almost seeming to function like a rival to the crucifix—and one just as alive with potentiality. My father’s old broken Catholicism, my mother’s stern Church of Christ, my own peevish teenage Lutheran apostasy, my surreal exile in Catholic boys school, all tells me that I’m looking the wrong way, that I’m responding to the wrong icon when I look past the crucifix to stare at the CCTV camera. But that camera is where I feel watched and judged. I want it to stop looking, to simply trust me not to harm, whether I’m in a church or The Gap. But it never sleeps, never closes its glassy unblinking eye.

Queasy as I am about the blurring of cameras and crosses, of old theology and new technology, I wonder if they have a certain affinity. Both emblems of judgment from afar, of an inscrutable downward gaze. Along with other forms of tracking human behavior, increasingly ubiquitous surveillance cameras represent yet another encroachment on our privacy and liberty—yet few Americans seem concerned about CCTV in churches or anywhere else. Perhaps we would find this encroachment more disturbing if the new eye of providence didn’t feel so much like the old one—that is to say, if ancient patterns of belief hadn’t prepped the ground for this new outgrowth of the security state?1

I understand the desire to control, even to take on the responsibility of protecting a flock, but I worry that sacred security will make the American church feel like a post-9/11 airport (“please remove your shoes before communion…”)—or even worse, the MGM Grand. With the expansion of our “control society” into every realm of American life, I fear that we’re building a gaudy Las Vegas of the mind, a slick zone of mechanized distrust in which we’re always under someone’s watchful eye. In Scorsese’s Casino, Ace Rothstein, the savvy operator played by Robert de Niro, explains this culture of relentless scrutiny:

In Vegas, everybody’s gotta watch everybody else. Since the players are looking to beat the casino, the dealers are watching the players. The box men are watching the dealers. The floor men are watching the box men. The pit bosses are watching the floor men. The shift bosses are watching the pit bosses. The casino manager is watching the shift bosses. I’m watching the casino manager. And the eye-in-the-sky is watching us all.

Of course, the “all-seeing eye” used to refer to the divine. Now it is a small lens linked to a video monitor in the back room of a church, casino, shopping center, or office building. And therein lies the dismal bathos of the contemporary moment in which the cross is not adequate protection even for believers: God’s not dead, he’s just been demoted.

Let me provide a specific example from the world of sacred security. Not long ago, ABC news broadcast a story about a woman in Houston who stole money from purses during church services, even after exchanging the “sign of peace” with her victim. She is a woman of color, part of a worrisome pattern in these widely circulated news stories and the sacred security marketing built around them. The news provides us with the POV of the church surveillance camera: we gawk in judgment from above as the petty thief helps herself to someone’s wallet. The ABC video footage, filled with standard-issue piety about Holiness debased (perhaps not too different from my own), is then used by sacred security companies to press their case. “Church leaders have been very reluctant to install church video surveillance systems because they believe it conveys distrust and sends a message of fear to the congregants,” a website called SmartSurveillanceTips.com tells us. “The truth is, properly installed church video security monitoring systems will never affect the feeling of openness and trust that most congregations wish to experience.” Phew, what a relief: there are no side effects to injecting another all-seeing eye into a small congregation. The marketers explain away all doubts, even as they gin up the fear with long lists of atrocities committed on church grounds. Separating media hyperbole from actual danger is impossible in the welter of emotions that sacred security generates: fear, outrage, guilt, anger, vigilance, hope.

So much of this business works on an affective level where religion flourishes as well. Because we have no compelling evidence that CCTV serves as a deterrent, churches are buying it “on faith” for the feeling of security that it provides (and perhaps for the satisfaction of being able to say after the next crime, “We did all we could.”). Thus the proposition “CCTV will make me safer” is no different in kind than “the Lord will provide” or even “everything happens for a reason.” In this sense, religious institutions may offer fertile soil for the new gospel of insecurity that the security industry is preaching.

The first commandment of sacred security is Thou Shall Fear Thy Neighbor, which is why the sales pitch seems designed to scare the bejesus out of complacent congregations. “Sense of Sanctuary Lost as Church Attacks Spike” is one headline in the litany of crimes against sacred spaces that is offered in almost every piece of sacred security marketing. “This will be the 32nd violent attack this year” [2010], another company reminds its customers, before listing many of these atrocities, often with links to news stories that emphasize the urgency of the crisis. Similarly, the Church Security Alliance features dramatic headlines on its website: “Pastor Shot In The Head While Hosting Youth Group Event… Man Drives Car Into Church And Sets Building On Fire… Murder-Suicide At Texas Church Altar…. Minister Beaten After Clashing With Muslims On His TV Show.” Or again in the Lone Star state, this time from a company called Safe at Church: “Gunman Kills Seven, and Himself, In Texas Church.” To keep these warnings from seeming anecdotal, a few vendors add a veneer of social science, such as the security consultant who publishes a “comprehensive list of Ministry related deadly force incidents.” His litany purports to describe hundreds of violent crimes committed on church grounds in the US since 1999. Although some churches have faced grave threats to their security, I’m not certain that CCTV is necessary or helpful in most cases, especially in light of its ambiguous effects.

It’s too early for me to say if CCTV eases or intensifies the fear of crime in a particular congregation. Perhaps security cameras will be perceived (paradoxically) as symbols of insecurity, as reflections of a history of violence and vandalism in a particular location. I’m interested in these perceptions as well as the other psychological baggage that accompanies the proliferation of CCTV. For instance, I’m curious if the addition of video surveillance enables a kind of comprehensive, unseen seeing that humans are not used to possessing, one that far exceeds the imaging technologies of the 20th century? Will the proliferation of small, powerful, and networked surveillance cameras represent an unprecedented expansion of vision, one that approaches certain aspects of the divine omnivalence described in Proverbs 15:3: “The eyes of the Lord are in every place, beholding the evil and the good”? The theology of video surveillance is my ultimate destination in this current project.2

How we internalize video surveillance and the other imperatives of a control society is, for me, the heart of the matter. Well before Jeremy Bentham made this internalization of the guard’s gaze a key aspect of his diabolically clever Panopticon, the 15th century German monk, Nicholas of Cusa, disciplined an entire abbey with a single portrait of Jesus, whose eyes had been painted to appear to follow the monks wherever they went.3 As much as it inspired a greater degree of piety in the abbey, the constant gaze was also an irritant, an oppressive force for those who had to live with what I imagine as a bug-eyed Jesus. A perverse parable emerged for Nicholas of Cusa’s brethren, in which the hunger for security begat a new kind of insecurity, and I suspect that we will discover much the same thing in our mania for technologies of control. What should have offered comfort and calm (Jesus, CCTV) may end up provoking discomfort and unease, if not painful self-consciousness. Maybe we will feel clumsy and naked on this perpetual stage, or maybe we will revel in it as we embrace lives of carefree exhibitionism. Privacy be damned, some will say, relishing the sense of being watched as a way to give meaning to their lives. Perhaps our deeds, both petty and grave, will take on a greater depth of meaning that comes from our sense of being monitored.

Yet I’m also interested in the flip side: being the divine watcher must have its own perils. In his short story, “Human Moments in World War III,” first published in Esquire in July 1983, Don DeLillo imagined the God-like sensation that accompanies the rapid expansion of vision that an astronaut might experience:

Earth orbit puts men into philosophical temper. How can we help it? We see the planet complete. We have a privileged vista. In our attempts to be equal to the experience, we tend to meditate importantly on subjects like the human condition. It makes a man feel universal, floating over the continents, seeing the rim of the world, a line as clear as a compass arc, knowing it is just a turning of the bend to Atlantic twilight, to sediment plumes and kelp beds, an island chain glowing in the dusky sea.

As we increasingly scrutinize other people on CCTV in our churches, homes, and offices, or from small flying drones equipped with surveillance cameras, will we not feel this God-like perspective of gazing down from above, sitting in judgment, convinced that we are all-seeing “I”? 4) (I say convinced because the all-seeing eye, whether technological or theological, is always fantasy: knowledge and visibility are never coterminous). Will we become God-like voyeurs in our desire to watch our friends and neighbors, co-workers and students, studying each of them with a Stasi-like efficiency on an ever-expanding surveillance system. A popular app already enables the fantasy of anonymous global voyeurism, allowing us to tap into live surveillance feeds from around the world. Look it’s snowing in Japan… a man is jaywalking in Sweden… a car has just parked in Florida. We can even move these faraway cameras, changing angles, rotating the view. Perhaps the next generation of the app will let us speak to the jaywalker in Sweden: Hey! You’re breaking the law. I see you! Shape up! And he will look up, suddenly flush with fear and trembling, scurrying away from this anonymous scolding. Eventually, if I may wax Ballardian for a moment, the peep-junkies may be able to direct small bursts of foul odor or electric shocks in order to hassle the wicked souls appearing on their CCTV monitors, thereby adding an element of “gamification” to the disciplinary regime. The possibilities are endless at the leading edge of the techno-theological.

Of course, more than petty scoldings are at stake when surveillance technology allows us to watch and judge in secret—we are also being tempted to assume an authoritarian mindset that seeks to categorize and control human behavior from above, rather than remaining in the democratic fray. To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf’s incomparable novel about a genteel English family on holiday, includes a passage in which she described a young girl standing over a tide pool, playing God with its tiny marine inhabitants. As she becomes bored with the little universe at her feet, she begins to fantasize about her power over all that she surveyed:

Brooding, she changed the pool into the sea, and made the minnows into sharks and whales, and cast vast clouds over this tiny world by holding her hand against the sun, and so brought darkness and desolation, like God himself, to millions of ignorant and innocent creatures, and then took her hand away suddenly and let the sun stream down.

Herein lies the future of CCTV, a world in which every petty soul can play God over some private puddle. As we sit in private judgment, seeing without being seen, we have taken the “first step in the construction of God” as one of Bentham’s explicators has suggested.5 In my bleaker moments, I imagine us increasingly hunched over a bank of surveillance monitors in the back of a high school, private home, or church, surveying some little world through a lens as we munch on salty snacks and scratch ourselves. We’ll spend the afternoon peering dyspeptically into every crevice of human behavior that can be displayed on screen, scouring the surface of things for the merest hint of danger. Dully obsessed with our seemingly limitless gaze, neither satisfied with our digital voyeurism nor able to give it up, we’ll simply be brooding over our own little kingdoms of insecurity, struggling in vain to remember what privacy, security, and community felt like before the advent of the plastic all-seeing eye.6

Image Credits:

1. Savior Protection Ministries’ mission statement
2. Image from a church surveillance camera provided by author
3. New Mexico billboard

1. It is important to note that Christian scripture also been used to endorse an open door policy of trust and compassion in other congregations, and that some evangelical Christians express considerable hostility toward surveillance culture. Determining why fear takes root in some congregations and not others is an important question for me.
2. Not much has been written on the intersection of theology and surveillance culture, but I would recommend David Lyon’s short essay (excellent but hard to find), “God’s Eye: Surveillance and Watchfulness in the Twenty-first Century,” Transmission, Summer 2010, as well as Eric Stoddart’s Theological Perspectives on a Surveillance Society: Watching and Being Watched (Surray UK: Ashgate, 2011).
3. Although it seems likely given the context, I’ve been unable to confirm that the portrait was of Jesus or someone else whose gaze would affect the monks so deeply. See Christopher M. Bellitto, Thomas M. Izbicki, Gerald Christianson, Introducing Nicholas of Cusa: A Guide to a Renaissance Man (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2004) 389.
4. “In such a world, deadly gadgetry is just a grant request away, so why shouldn’t the 14,000 at-risk souls in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, have a closed-circuit-digital-camera-and-monitor system (cost: $180,000, courtesy of the Homeland Security Department) identical to the one up and running in New York’s Times Square?”(http://www.salon.com/2012/03/05/the_cost_of_americas_police_state/
5. See Slovenian philosopher Miran Bozovic’s introduction to Jeremy Bentham, The Panopticon Writings (London: Verso, 1995) 11.
6. Or perhaps we will feel safe at last behind our banks of video monitors, luxuriating in our own version of Total Information Awareness, like primates content to scour the horizon for predators? My hope is that future ethnographic data will shed some light on this difficult question.

Let me begin with an allegory. In Malcolm Bull’s wonderful essay, “Where Is the Anti-Nietzsche?” he proposes that a properly radical reading of The Genealogy of Morals would refuse the text’s preferred modes of identification.

Through the act of reading, Nietzsche flatteringly offers identification with the masters to anyone, but not to everyone. Identification with the masters means imaginative liberation from all the social, moral and economic constraints within which individuals are usually confined; identification with ‘the rest’ involves reading one’s way through many pages of abuse directed at people like oneself. Unsurprisingly, people of all political persuasions and social positions have more readily discovered themselves to belong to the former category. For who, in the privacy of a reading, can fail to find within themselves some of those qualities of honesty and courage and loftiness of soul that Nietzsche describes?

To find the anti-Nietzsche, he suggests that readers identify with the losers, the subhuman and the philistines in his texts. We should identify with the lambs instead of with the birds of prey.

In this column, I want to suggest an analogous strategy for thinking through the politics of activity and passivity in television and new media. For however much television has been legitimated in the last decades, new media savants still regularly hold it up as an icon of mass stupefaction, conformity, and passivity. I don’t think I’ve ever read an issue of Wired without a potshot at passive consumption, with old-style television as the ideal-type. Or consider the ad copy for Peter Lunenfeld’s new book The Secret War Between Uploading and Downloading.

In The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading, Lunenfeld makes his case for using digital technologies to shift us from a consumption to a production model. He describes television as “the high fructose corn syrup of the imagination” and worries that it can cause “cultural diabetes”; prescribes mindful downloading, meaningful uploading, and “info-triage” as cures; [...] After half a century of television-conditioned consumption/downloading, Lunenfeld tells us, we now find ourselves with a vast new infrastructure for uploading. We simply need to find the will to make the best of it.

While it’s bad scholarship to argue against blurbs, and while I actually agree with the participatory spirit behind Lunenfeld’s point, please allow me this one excess, and I’ll try to stick to his words between the inverted commas and not those of MIT’s copyeditor.

Leaving aside decades of debate within studies of television and mass culture2, the blurb proposes that downloading—and television—embody a passive, ideological form of consumption, whereas uploading is presented act of participation and production (even though it, too, is often a form of consumption). And therein lies the problem.3

Some of my favorite social thought from the 1970s and 1980s emphasizes a point analogous to Lunenfeld’s: activity, participation, interaction, interconnection—these will be the solutions to the alienation of the modern world. In writing on music, especially, the language turns utopian. Charles Keil (1994) argued persuasively that musical meaning is formed through participation in musical events, and not in the text or score. Christopher Small (1977) waxed poetic about a world where the distinction between musician and non-musician no longer existed, and Jacques Attali imagined a world of “composition”—expanded out from avant-garde jazz—where the means of creativity inhered in each person (1985, 135).

Yet that same rhetoric works differently today.4 Active participation is now a privileged mode of consumerism. As Jodi Dean has written, “our deepest commitments—to inclusion, equality and participation within a public—bind us to practices whereby we submit to global capital” (Dean 2002, 151). Contemporary media beg for and sometimes demand active participation. They ask their users to intertwine them with as many parts of their lives as possible. It is not just so-called social media (a misnomer if there ever was one—since all media are by definition social). Magazines and newspapers implore us to write back and explore on multiple platforms. TV shows ask us to go online and participate in discussions and games, books get their own Facebook pages where readers are asked to “like” them, software companies put together “street teams” of users willing to promote them in a manner analogous to what concert promoters used to do.

There are some great things to be found in a more apparently participatory culture, and certainly there are even more great things in cheap access to the means of dissemination. This is a point long repeated in studies of radio and cassettes, and much of the current excitement about the political promise of Twitter, for instance, follows on this model. A mobile phone and a little know-how gets you access to a potential world of auditors. Writers like Henry Jenkins (2006) have eloquently shown the ways in which platforms for online participation can make media more responsive to fans, audiences, and users. Though to be clear, for Jenkins this participatory culture is an amplified version of participatory cultures that emerged around radio and television, not a development in opposition to supposedly pacifying media.

But we need to ask after another issue. At least in for-profit sectors, the goal of most institutions during the broadcast era was to produce measurable audiences for sale to advertisers. It was to attract attention. In that sense, there is a smooth continuity with the internet era, where media organizations also hope to produce attention that can then be parlayed into one or another form of market value. When people’s participation becomes someone else’s business—and here I mean business in the market-share and moneymaking sense of the term—the social goods that are supposed to come with it can be compromised. If you want democratic participation, you also need a reflective populace. If you’re going to break the fourth wall in your theater production or installation piece, the participants have to be able to take on some kind of critical perspective on the work in order for it to have any avant-garde potential.

The demand to participate can become coercive, exhausting the very collective faculties it officially celebrates. While interactivity can be imagined as the “like” or “retweet,” it also encompasses the “agree to terms” button. The supposedly democratic call to dialogue and participation can turn sour when people have good reasons and desires to retreat. In his discussion of Melville’s famous story “Bartleby the Scrivener,” John Durham Peters calls this the “cold righteousness of dialogism,” a “moral tyranny” of the call to the other to interact on a subject’s pregiven terms. “Dialogue’s supposed moral nobility can suffocate those who prefer not to play along” (Peters 1999, 159).

The issue here isn’t that we need a pure space from which to critique capitalism—for you as reader and I as writer are always already compromised. It is that we need some occasions for reflection that aren’t simply subsumed under the sign of participation. My colleague Darin Barney has written beautifully on this subject, arguing that any kind of meaningful political—and I would add cultural—judgment requires some assertion of distance, some strategic and temporary disengagement on people’s own terms. This is not to say all participation is bad, any more than it is to say that all consumption was bad in the golden age of mass culture criticism. Neither activity nor passivity are goods in themselves; both have roles to play in culture, politics and personal life.

What if all the bad things that media critics have been said about passivity for the past century or two are now equally applicable to all the demands to interact, to participate? What if interactivity is now one of the central hinges through which power works? In many moments today, the most compliant gesture we can make is to consent to interact on the terms presented to us by our software and machines. This pull is especially strong in those commercial platforms that celebrate their own difference from the so-called passive media of previous decades, and in the process monetize their users’ participation either directly or indirectly. What if—from time to time—we chose not to identify with the interactive promise of new media platforms or for that matter new media art? What if, when the new media savants lambast so-called old media audiences as denizens of passivity and ideology, we say, “yes, that’s me”?

Please feel free to comment.

Image Credits:
1. grantneufeld via Flickr
2. jeremywilburn via Flickr
3. RMM’s IRIS
4. Adbusters, 3 April 2012

Offline sources:

Attali, Jacques. 1985. Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Cooley, Charles H. 1909. Social Organization: A Study of the Larger Mind. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press.
Dean, Jodi. 2002. Publicity’s Secret: How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press.
Keil, Charles. 1994. “Participatory Discrepancies and the Power of Music.” In Music Grooves, 96-108. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Peters, John Durham. 1999. Speaking Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Rosenberg, Bernard, and David M. White, eds. 1957. Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America. New York: The Free Press.
Small, Christopher. 1977. Music-Society-Education. London: John Calder.

1. I am certain I heard this phrase from someone else, but a Google search didn’t reveal my source. For now, its provenance remains a mystery. Also, my copious thanks to William Moner and the Flow crew for their help getting my pieces online this year, and to Paul Gansky for the invitation to write. It’s been fun! Thanks also to Carrie Rentschler and Dylan Mulvin for comments on drafts of pieces.
2. The locus classicus for my generation was the turn to audience studies in the 1980s and the so-called “active audience” position advanced by people like David Morley and Ien Ang, who studied people watching television and showed that they were not simply passive consumers. This was an important move in the history of cultural studies, because it short-circuited claims that ideology could simply have a textual effect by being there. Of course, this is a very old debate that predates cultural studies and even television. At the beginning of the 20th century, sociologist Charles Cooley wrote that modern media would “enlarge” modern consciousness and facilitate democracy, as well as allow people to find others of like minds (Cooley 1909). Similarly, the range of debate in Rosenberg and White’s classic 1957 Mass Culture collection should be familiar to modern readers, with Henry Rabassiere defending what we’d now call an active audience model against Gunther Anders’ critique of television as a “phantom world” (1957, 158–74).
3. There’s a third issue as well. The high-fructose-corn-syrup-causes-diabetes-metaphor moralizes illness as it metaphorizes it. This is a classic American and Protestant trope. It condescends adult-onset diabetics (since the noted evil ingredient has no causal relevance to type I, I must assume this is a dig at type II diabetics—indeed this is a classically Nietzschean scenario where we are asked to identify with people who are clearly not stupefied enough to get diabetes in either its real or cultural form). It ignores scores of epidemiological studies and thereby does no favor in characterizing the social problems it metaphorizes.
4. The term “prosumer” is widely used in industries that produce software and hardware for video and audio production, where a large portion of sales goes not to professionals, but to consumers who also want to produce. The term is read differently by different populations—as pretenders to professionalism, as a grade of equipment quality between “professional” and “consumer” and as a name for amateur producers. Paul Théberge brilliantly argued in 1997 that making music—especially electronic music—had increasingly become a form of technological consumption. We could say that for many other kinds of cultural production today. In a way, even though it’s an early example, Microsoft Word is the apotheosis of a prosumer application. It is sold to a broad swath of people who write, whether amateurs, students, or professionals. Indeed, as a writer I have often wished for word processing software better geared to the needs to the academic and book writer, so in my own professional role I guess I also turn my nose up at prosumer applications.

In an age when “all media are mixed media,” the modernist emphasis on media specificity seems antique.1 Yet the idea never goes out of style among those who wish to devalue or otherwise restrict photography. Following Susan Sontag, the medium is said to be inherently fragmentary (lacking narrative or even episodic coherence), devoid of context (needing verbal captions to be semantically grounded), and superficial.2 This last failing is particularly damning, as it rules out both the rich interiority of subjective experience and the philosophical depth of verbal representation, analysis, and reflection. Look as much as you like, but don’t pretend that you are really thinking, much less plumbing the depths of human experience.

Sontag’s continuing value to media theory comes in part from her maddening knack for being just about exactly half right. Thus, rather than to refute her claims outright, a better approach can come from filling in the missing piece. Let’s assume the same for the conventional wisdom whenever the term “superficial” is applied to a medium tout court, be it photography, television, film, or digital media. Instead of declaring that hidden depths really are waiting to be found by those who care enough, why not explore the terrain of superficiality? A similar attitude animated cultural studies’ assault on the high-low hierarchy in the arts and popular culture, but we have in mind something a bit more specific. What might be key features of a hermeneutic for the critical study of surfaces?

This interest surely is one part of the great deal of recent work across the disciplines on the materiality of culture. Surfaces are material things (at least most of the time) , and the turn to the artifacts themselves, to the built environment, and to practices of embodiment typically involve reduced emphasis on deep structures, fixed category systems, or hidden logics. Even so, there is an understandable caution against the lure of the fetish, while embodiment often becomes the vehicle for a new depth model for articulating subjectivity. The value of such projects is not in question here, and one still can ask whether something might have been missed precisely because a great deal of thought was put into understanding (literally) how things are social and cultural objects.

So it is that photography is particularly interesting as an example of an inherently superficial medium. The camera records the surface of things: that is exactly what it does. That is not all that it does, of course, for it also isolates, frames, and relays some view of some person, place, or event, and is used to do much more as well. But let’s not get ahead of things.

One of the important virtues of photography is that the camera is necessarily not intentional while still capable of automatically comprehensible representation. This combination separates it from the paintbrush, for example, and from Photoshop or other editing software. Photographic artistry will involve more than the camera itself, but not less. Nor can this simple binary relationship be easily parsed, as has been demonstrated by the conceptual artist John Baldessari.3

What appears to be an inherent limitation of photography—a negative feature of medium specificity—need not be. A (seemingly) poorly organized, ill proportioned, messy, featureless, banal photograph reveals—what? That most photographs are already crafted according to conventions of visual salience and order; that a carefully organized and beautified environment can appear ugly when seen from another angle; that perspective, imagination, and insight rather than facts are the keys to art; that ordinary life depends on not seeing as much as on seeing? Yes, all of the above, but also perhaps this: that there is, if not art, at least value in the slavish announcement of facts. The artist now is not there merely to enhance how one sees, but rather to bring to one’s attention how much is visible but still not being seen. Ironically, of course, this is what the camera alone can do.

Photography becomes a medium for social thought in part by prompting the viewer to take surfaces seriously. There are a number of directions in which one might develop this perspective, and we’ll mention three here: First, surfaces can reveal the texture of actions and events; second, they can reveal the inevitable gap between social categories and enactment; third, by reading laterally instead of in terms of surface and depth, one can become more attuned to affective connections, surges, paths, and networks.4

Surfaces are the place, and the only place, where one can observe the texture of political action. Texture in this sense refers to how the social context of an event is evident on the surface of things. More to the point, texture reveals how the context for action is often richly overdetermined by social discriminations such as class, status, fashion, subculture, and so forth, and how these many motives articulate variously in patterns, partial patterns, frayed patterns, and gaps, each of which can influence how events develop. (The point here should be familiar to students of discourse analysis and rhetoric: images, like texts, are forms of action whose meaning is determined by their relationship to social contexts and strategic situations.) Everyone is more or less attentive to social texture, but the genius of the camera is that it captures everything that is there on the surface, whether anyone intended to see it or not. Thus, photography provides a particularly powerful medium for recording, framing, observing, and thinking about how action is motivated. Other visual media can do the same, with obvious differences (greater intentionality of depiction, use of staging, temporal modulation, etc.) but photography can serve as a representative case because it usually works with less, leaving the focus clearly on what might have been visible but overlooked in everyday life.

So it is that surfaces can tell the story even when underground, and perhaps especially when seemingly little is happening and people are more acted upon than acting.

The homeless are social outcasts, typically depicted as crazed, drunken or lazy vagabonds living a nomadic lifestyle signified by the trash bags and stolen grocery carts in which they keep their worldly goods. Whether they choose the lifestyle or are forced into it by economic hardships, the clear assumption is that they have rejected the conventions of “normal” domesticity. The couple above lives in an underground flood channel beneath the Las Vegas strip, a dark and dank cellar-like space marked by low “ceilings” and random graffiti. The smear of tags across the concrete surfaces accentuates their vulnerability: instead of privacy, they lie exposed in a degraded public space. Help is not to be expected, however, for although in public view they remain “appropriately” out of sight.

It is notable, however, that for all of their abject poverty they nevertheless have reproduced the conventions of domestic life that would seem to be precluded by their economic circumstances. And what is notable is the texture of that domesticity as it is marked by, among other things, the dog sitting on the bed, the apparently clean sheets, and the shirts neatly arrayed on a rack in the background. Most of us, of course, would take all of these items for granted, part of the texture of a simple and normal life that would warrant no attention at all if the photograph were of a scene in a middle class home, but as captured by the camera here they offer modest surface reminders of unexpected continuities across a system of economic segregation.

Textures remain superficial, however, and the play of surfaces can be highly contingent and ephemeral. Rather than locking those involved into the category systems defining a social space, attention to the surface as such can serve a different analytical objective than merely identifying social ascriptions. By seeing how things are worn and wearing, attention to the surface can expose the gap between the social code and its enactment: between the job seeker’s smile and the frayed hem, or the real estate developer’s scale model and the tired strip mall, or the labor organizer’s Southern drawl and his progressive politics. The social fabric is riven with such gaps, for performance is always falling into that space between social logic and situated adaptation.

For example, consider this portrait and ask yourself who or what you see?

The photograph is altogether commonplace. A simple head shot of an altogether ordinary, middle class white guy. He looks healthy. His face is washed, his hair and mustache nearly trimmed. He is what used to be called “clean cut.” If you passed him on a street corner you would not give him a second glance. His name is Daniel Fore and he is a resident of Oak Park Village, a quite and moderately affluent suburb on Chicago’s west side. He has regularly attended Village Board meetings for the past twelve years but his petition to run for office on that council was peremptorily refused. Why? You might ask. And the answer is simple, he is homeless. He lacks an official residence. One might expect the homeless to wear their countenance differently, of course, more in accord with conventional stereotypes described above, but here attention to the surface challenges such simple assumptions posing important questions about the ordinary enactment of prevailing social codes. There but for the grace of God …

One important corollary is that by revealing how people are not quite in role or on cue, the photograph carries enormous potential for emotional connection. The affective spark can leap across a gap—whether between two people (subject and spectator, for example), or between what one assumed and what one encounters, or between the real and the ideal. The key point here is that one doesn’t have to cycle one’s emotional response through interior circuits, between the social surface and a self defined by its hidden depth, but rather from point to point, laterally, following or arcing across the surface of things. Thus, photographs are emotional precisely because they are superficial, which says more about the nature of human connectivity than it does about the limitations of the visual image.

And so we end with this photograph of a homeless man drawing warmth from a steam grate in Denver.

Once again we have a scene that most of us would probably not notice if we were to encounter it while walking down the street—or perhaps more to the point, we would avert our gaze so as to avoid any encounter that might challenge our safety or comfort. And yet the image invites us to attend to the relationship between the man “nesting” by himself in a blanket on a public thoroughfare and the flock of pigeons huddled together as a “community.” Humans and animals have seemingly reversed roles and in a way that underscores not just how we tend to anthropomorphize animals by accenting their human qualities (usually by focusing on their eyes, but here on their impulse to collective organization), but how also we tend to animalize (or dehumanize) individuals who don’t fit within normative and prescribed social roles. And it is precisely this surface relationship that gives the photograph its emotional charge, for just as ordinary pedestrians might treat the homeless person with a certain degree of caution, so too do the birds choose not to see him, even as they keep their distance.

As with our earlier posts on banality, we do not want to pretend that our emphasis on one pole of a binary distinction should be comprehensive. Terms such as surface and depth are necessarily linked, and the pairing obviously has considerable utility. We note, however, that critical interpretations praised for their “depth” often pay more than usual attention to the surface of the artifact. Perhaps the end result of admitting to the superficiality of a medium could be something like profundity.

Image Credits:

1. John Baldessari, An Artist Is Not Merely the Slavish Announcer . . .
2. Residents of a Las Vegas flood channel
3. Daniel Fore of Oak Park Village
4. Homeless man in Denver

Please feel free to comment.

1. W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 5.
2. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977).
3. John Baldessari, “An Artist Is Not Merely the Slavish Announcer . . .,” 1966–68. Photoemulsion, varnish, and gesso on canvas, 59 1/8 × 45 1/8 in. (150.2 × 114.6 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with funds from the Painting and Sculpture Committee and gift of an anonymous donor 92.21.
4. See Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).

Extant literature from within the field of film and gender studies examines the representation of the male action hero, paying particular attention to the spectacular body and the herculean physical performances of characters such as John McClane/Bruce Willis, Martin Riggs/Mel Gibson and Indiana Jones/Harrison Ford. And yet, at a time when these stars are returning to the action roles that made them famous, in some cases, several decades later, scholars continue to ignore and overlook the fundamental notion of age in their discussions of the hard bodied, hegemonic hero. After all, hegemonic masculinity has associations with physical prowess, sexual virility, social dominance and aggression, which are potentially at odds with the image of the ageing male. With this in mind it is interesting to consider the depiction of the ageing action hero in the popular and long running Die Hard series (1988, 1990, 1995, 2007, 2013) and consider the ways in which mature masculinity is either conforming to or challenging the hegemonic ideal.

I have suggested elsewhere that the hegemonic ideal is both impossible to create and implausible to maintain for the contemporary male, and as such, this figure of powerful masculinity ‘may only ever be embodied by mythical figures, legendary heroes and a very small number of men in society’. Therefore, it is interesting to examine the ways in which the most masculine of Hollywood genres presents the male hero in relation to the hegemonic ideal. The male driven action film is understood to be the most visually explosive and macho of Hollywood genres due to the spectacular sight of the hard male body. Indeed, extant research from within the field of feminist film theory makes it clear that it is the body of the hero that sets the tone for the action narrative. We are told that action heroes are ‘constructed almost exclusively through their physicality, and the display of the body forms a key part of the visual excess that is offered in the muscular action cinema.’1 It has even been suggested that ‘American action movies work hard, and often at the expense of narrative development, to contrive situations for the display of the hero’s body.’2

Extant literature on both the action hero and the hegemonic male routinely refers to issues such as class, race, sexuality, nationality and the body. However, little research to date focuses on the notion of age and ageing as a sign of difference to be studied in relation to the hegemonic male, on or beyond the big screen. One might suggest that a lack of research on the ageing action hero is unsurprising given the predominance of the thirty-something hard body to the genre in question, a genre that focuses on the physical prowess of the male body for the viewing pleasures of a youthful male audience.

That said, there currently exists a trend for older actors reprising earlier heroic and hard bodied action roles, be it Bruce Willis (52) in Die Hard 4.0 (2007), Dolph Lundgren (53) in The Expendables (2010), Arnold Schwarzenegger (55) in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003), Bruce Willis (58) in A Good Day to Die Hard (2013), Sylvester Stallone (60) in Rocky Balboa (2006) and (62) Rambo (2008) and Harrison Ford (66) in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008). And there are currently rumours surrounding a sixth installment of the Die Hard franchise starring Bruce Willis.

Putting a fifty-something actor and character in the role of the pre-supposedly young adult action hero will of course lead to some negative commentary and ageist criticisms, and a wide range of news, magazine and review media were fast to challenge the appeal of the ageing action hero in the Die Hard franchise. Reviewers quipped that the latest installment of the series should read ‘Die Hard: with a bus pass’ or ‘Die Hard with a Hernia’. Commentators talked about John McClane ‘squeezing back into his sweaty vest and wheezing out a few more catchphrases’ and announcing that Willis is ‘so old that Die Hard 5 will have to feature a plot that largely revolves around a Werther’s Original theft in a haemorrhoid cushion factory’. That said, commentary on the ageing action hero was overwhelmingly positive, and the small number of negative reviews as seen here were more mocking than hostile to the presentation of the mature maverick cop.

Indeed, both popular and professional review literature seemed to form a consensus in their praise of the ageing action hero in the most recent Die Hard film. We are told that ‘age catches up to Bruce Willis’ everyman hero, and it makes him all the more appealing’ and that although ‘Bruce may be aging fast […] he still looks the part and plays John McClane so convincingly you reckon he could go on for ever’. In this same way it was said that even as a fifty-something balding male ‘Willis still reeks of hero; still ranks as someone who gives bruises as good as he takes ‘em; still rocks when he’s in the wrong place at the wrong time’. In this way, it has been suggested that ‘the aging body can work as an asset, just another challenge that our battered hero has to overcome’ rather than an unreliable or failing image of problematic or powerless masculinity.

Indeed, some reviewers made the point that the franchise is based on the physical assaults on the male hard body irrespective of the film in question or the age of the actor at that time, and as such, it is the physical toughness of the body rather than its age that is of importance here. Therefore, although John McClane has aged during the life span of the Die Hard franchise, the character has always been middle-aged rather than youthful in the series. Bruce Willis was 35 when he made the original film, and thus already beyond a youthful image of masculinity. The point here then is that McClane always was and continues to remain a tough guy with a hard body that can withstand routine pain, repeated punishments and habitual brutality, and as such the ageing hero is not only accepted, but applauded, by audiences and critics alike. The fact that Bruce Willis is currently talking about making another Die Hard film before retiring from the franchise goes further to quash any suggestions about the deteriorating action body or the loss of hegemonic power for the heroic male.

At a time when the ageing body can be said to ‘represent a narcissistic affront to, even an attack on, the adult ego,’3 the ageing action hero remains potent and powerful rather than weak, unreliable or failing, which perhaps represents a less than realistic, and thus less than helpful, version of the ageing body.

Image Credits:
1. Live Free or Die Hard
2. Die Hard
3. Die Hard 2
4. Die Hard With a Vengeance

Please feel free to comment.

1. Yvonne Tasker, Spectacular bodies: gender, genre and the action cinema (London 1995) 35.
2. Ibid., 79.
3. Charlotte Herfray cited in Chris Holmlund, Impossible bodies: femininity and masculinity at the movies, (London 2002) 145.

In one of the heights of the Israeli reality show Connected (Mehubarim, 2010) – an original format providing semi-celebrities the opportunity to self-document 24/7 for the entire nation to watch – television writer Ran Sarig, one of the impromptu stars of the show, receives on camera the news that his show Ramzor, was licensed for adaptation by the U.S Fox network. As the episode unfolds we continue to watch the train wreck that is Sarig’s life as the intense joints and cigarette chain smoker, father of three children from two different relationships is showered with adulation and media attention. After all, selling a television format for adaptation in the U.S is the new Israeli American dream. Similarly to success stories of Israeli high-tech companies in the Silicon Valley, successful Israeli-U.S format deals are celebrated in the local media as a national achievement of the “David vs. Goliath” variety, wherein ingenuity overpowers size in cutting edge global industries.

Indeed, despite Ramzor’s ultimate failure as the quickly cancelled Fox’s Traffic Light, 2011 proved to be a break-out year for Israeli formats in Hollywood. Amongst a host of format deals Connected itself was licensed for U.S adaptation by MTV. That notwithstanding, the jewel in the Israeli television formats crown for 2011 is, without a doubt Showtime’s award winning adaptation of the Israeli drama Hatufim (Prisoners of War) – Homeland. Developed in the U.S. by executive producer/show-runner team Howard Gordon and Alex Ganza (24) with the cooperation of Israeli creator Gideon Raff, Homeland easily won two out of its three Golden Globe nominations (for best drama and best actress Clair Danes), emerging as the big winner of this year’s award. News from D.C confirmed that president Obama is also on the roaster of Homeland addicts, alongside other Washington movers and shakers1.

This success comes exactly three years after the first of the current wave of U.S. adaptations of Israeli series, HBO’s In Treatment, landed five Golden Globes nominations, including best drama series, and won one for best actor Gabriel Byrne. As Deadline.com reporter, Nellie Andreeva notes, Homeland’s achievement, after only four years of U.S. presence for Israeli formats far surpasses that of more established television industries. This year, as result of the rising interest, U.S. networks bought as many pitches based on Israeli formats as they did formats coming from the U.K – despite the much longer standing tradition of British-American exchange, spanning over four decades and dozens of shows.2.

Amongst the Israeli shows in different stages of U.S. development are the game show Who’s Still Standing and drama series Timrot Ashan (Pillars of Smoke) on NBC; the CW remake of the daily musical/time-travel telenovela Danny Hollywood (retitled Joey Dakota); as well as several other dramas (The Naked Truth, HBO) comedy (Tall and Greenbaum and Life Isn’t Everything, CBS) and reality series (3, CBS; Connected, MTV; The Frame, CW).

The most obvious questions at this point are Why Israel? Why now? What are the circumstances making it possible for this young, miniscule, isolated television industry to explode overnight as major exporter in the lucrative U.S. market?

The answer of course lies first and foremost in the rise of global television formats trade and its revolutionary influence on the ways television programming get conceptualized, bought, sold, and licensed3. The format – sold as a televisual concept rather than finished text, opens up new opportunities for players from previously hopelessly marginalized markets, which can now compete on the home turf of the world’s most influential industry4.

If television globalization was, until quite recently, defined by the flow of “canned” U.S shows, nowadays television executives (such as a group gathered recently in a National Association of Television Program Executives (NATPE) panel on “Format Wars”), take for granted that top U.S properties (such as the CSI franchise) find their global audience in niche cable channels these days, while the broadcast platforms everywhere are dominated by local productions of “formatted” shows. When struggling to define “formats” these executives replicated the same cliché scenarios, emphasizing the predictability of formulae (“if you don’t know what you get week after week, it’s not a format,”), and the “cultural neutrality” of globally successful forms5.

None of this works however, in the case of Israeli-U.S. exports. Taking into consideration the prominence of scripted, none formulaic forms in this trade; the notorious particularity of the original Israeli subject matter; and the staggering range of adaptation practices – varying from “loose inspiration” (Homeland) to a word-by-word translation of original scripts (In Treatment’s first season) – what seems to be traveling here are much more complex and nuanced set of ideas, ways of thinking, story telling practices, character traits, and themes. Most of these are neither formulaic nor culturally neutral.

One way to start to explore the complexity of this exchange is to conduct a highly contextualize investigation of the industrial processes involved on both ends of these deals. While further development of this project is certain to take me on several fieldwork trips to Israel in summers to come, at this early stage I focus on mapping out some initial explanatory discourses emerging from public interviews with industry executives in both Hollywood and Tel Aviv. A couple of themes emerge immediately and, in favor of time I will not do much more than listing these here.

The first set of discourses concerns the history and unique constraints of the Israeli industry. Here, commentators note that the industry is just now reaching maturity as it first transitioned from a single-channel public system to a commercial multichannel one in the mid 1990s. Moreover, there is a sense that this developing industry now produces more than the limited local market can actually absorb (Avi Armoza CEO of Israeli Armoza Formats notes the high ratio of film schools per capita in the country, and the limited built-in audience of approximately 7 million Hebrew speakers, personal communication, January 23, 2012). Homeland’s Alex Ganza offers an interesting observation of the advantage of the industry relative youth: “They’re not boxed into any way of telling stories yet” he said in an interview “We tend to get very narrow-minded about things — doctors, lawyers, police procedurals, and the Israelis…have broken free of that.” 6.

The Israeli industry’s financial constraints are mostly discussed as an advantage as they force local talent to refine scripts before shooting commences; allow more risk taking as the initial investment is minimal; and encourage innovation in storytelling ideas to help offset a shoestring budget. Another important aspect is the absence of a pilot as vetting mechanism given the high costs of pilot production. Thus, Israeli networks commit to create and air full seasons, guaranteeing more time for characters and storyline development. Finally, the Israeli audience is described as both media savvy and impatient, leading local broadcasters to develop a policy of “edgy mainstream,” more daring and bold than most American primetime fare.

A second group of statements concerns the particular cultural connection between Israel and the U.S. These fall into two, somewhat contradictory discourses. According to the first, Israeli and American cultures are very similar, because Israel is so thoroughly Americanized. This is summed up by David M. Israel (Executive Producer, Third Rock From The Sun) in his discussion of Israeli comedies in an L.A. master class:

Other than the fact that they were in Hebrew there was nothing, to me, that was Israeli about them…. I think our cultures are so similar that it really struck me as like wow we have a lot in common… Tel Aviv to me is a whole lot closer to New York or LA than a lot of places in the middle of America.

The opposite explanation views U.S-Israel cultural similarity as a new, post 9/11 phenomenon, wherein in an era of “war on terror,” and a sense of vulnerability and paranoia surrounding homeland security, Americans are uniquely positioned to identify with the Israeli “under siege” mentality.

Last but not least, a somewhat problematic group of statements relates Israeli format’s success to “the Jewish connection” between Hollywood and Tel Aviv. As Steven Zeitchik puts it in an L.A. Times article: “Unknown to most viewers, a small group of creators and industry types has built a pipeline between Israel and the Los Angeles entertainment world 9,000 miles away” (January 12, 2012). This “pipeline” discourse is enhanced by statements from top Hollywood industry executives, expressing a cultural belief that Israelis are good story tellers, because, just like many in the American entertainment business, they are Jews. As Howard Gordon declares: “Whatever culture of storytelling that might be specific to Jews and made them prominent in Hollywood makes it understandable that 8,000 or 9,000 miles away a lot of Jews in a small place would be good storytellers”7.

The interesting question remains, how do these emerging discourses around Israeli formats’ U.S. adaptation help reevaluate the core format literature? How can they enhance the understanding of formats as easily relocateable “generating formulas,” into which local cultural content gets infused as afterthought? How does this account shift when the “local” culture adapting a foreign programming concept is the dominant U.S.? (I am yet to encounter anxious discourses fearing an Israeli “cultural imperialism”).

How, for example, could this case study rework accounts such as the one by Keane et al,8. who observe that global formats are responsible for a continued centralization of creativity in global television as a few Western media hubs conduct the R&D (research and development) for, and then distribute and capitalize on these popular forms? Could the Israeli case suggest a counter example wherein minor actors can use a small market as “laboratory” to hone higher-end globally successful televisual fare?

Instead of drawing any grand conclusions I’d like to close on a more personal note, contemplating the significance of this case for a potential de-westernization of the field of Television Studies. As knowledge of the Israeli origin of some of the most innovative and successful shows on American screens becomes more public, the interest in the industry I have been monitoring closely for over a decade is rising. That, of course is a good thing. Not just for Israeli TV, but also for those of us trying to diversify the sources and sites of Television Studies scholarship. Yes, one can still publish a book on “reality television” using examples from one or two U.K or U.S shows, but similar work centering on Israeli, Italian, Danish, Iraqi or any other non U.S./U.K. examples is ghettoized as an “area studies” affair. Hopefully, as more Anglo scholars, publishers, critics, and audience members became aware of contemporary global television’s profound multi-directionality, such a pitch would no longer be so hard to sell to the mainstream of TV Studies.

Image Credits:
1. FRMarkDWhite Blog
2. Saloona.com
3. Film Affinity
4. Dish Network Blog
5. Sky Arts
6. Share TV
7. UCLA Younes & Soraya Nazarian Center for Israel Studies
8. Format Wars

Please feel free to comment.

1. Associated Press. (2012) “Obama watches ‘Homeland’ so Washington tunes in.” The Washington Times.com . February 12. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/ 2012 /feb/10/obama-watches-homeland-so-washington-tunes-in/. Last accessed March 30, 2012
2. Andreeva, N. (2012). “Israeli TV Formats’ Big U.S. Breakthrough.” Deadline.com. January 16. http://www.deadline.com/tag/showtime-homeland/ Last accessed March 30, 2012.
3. Keane, M. and Moran, A. (2008). Television’s new engines. Television and New Media. Vol. 9(2). p. 155-169.; Moran, A. (1998). Copycat TV- Globalization, Program Format and Cultural Identity. Luton: University of Luton Press.; Oren. T and Shahaf, S. (2011) “Introduction” in Global Television Formats – understanding Television across Borders. New York and London: Routledge.; Waisbord, S. (2004) McTV – understanding the global popularity of television formats. Television and New Media. Vol. 5 No. 4. 359-383.)
4. Oren. T and Shahaf, S. (2011) “Introduction” in Global Television Formats – understanding Television across Borders. New York and London: Routledge
5. Moran, A. (1998). Copycat TV- Globalization, Program Format and Cultural Identity. Luton: University of Luton Press.; Waisbord, S. (2004) McTV – understanding the global popularity of television formats. Television and New Media. Vol. 5 No. 4. 359-383
6. Owen, R. (2011). “Israeli Skeins tap U.S. pulse” Variety. December, 2011. Pp. 9.
7. Lipinsky, Y. (2011). “Israel is a hotbed of Inspiration for American television” Thejewdo.com. (July 13)
8. Keane, Michael, Anthony Fung, and Albert Moran. 2007. New Television, Globalization and the East Asian Cultural Imagination. Hong Kong Hong Kong University Press

A cup of tea?

In the January 14 New York Times, Sam Tanenhaus charts an intellectual history of recent conservative insurgencies. What distinguishes the Tea Party movement of the past two years, he suggests, is that it is the first truly bottom-up activist cycle; in the past, such efforts were “centralized operations, often guided by insiders, in many cases Ivy League intellectuals who helped groom political figures for the national stage.”1 Figures like F. Clifton White, L. Brent Bozell, and William F. Buckley served, for years, as focal points of right-wing intellectual thought, and helped lay the rhetorical groundwork for the candidacies of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. Debates among them and the policy institutes they helped found “had the effect of uniting intellectuals with politicians, and of bridging differences that might otherwise have separated ‘top-down’ strategists from ‘bottom up’ activists.” With the emergence of the loosely organized Tea Party movement in recent years, however, this coalition has largely fractured, with activists increasingly turning against conventional political establishments – even those that had become cherished institutions of the right. The most obvious example of this is the apparent inability of the Republican Party to coalesce around a presidential candidate, though the fractures are widespread.

To Tanenhaus, this schism has led to an activist movement that is unmoored, lacking an intellectual platform or ideological coherence. He does acknowledge that the Tea Party sees itself as pursuing big ideas, but, he writes, “they tend to emphasize quixotic crusades — the repeal of the 17^th Amendment, which established the election of United States senators by popular vote, or Representative Ron Paul’s mission to abolish the Federal Reserve.”

Like many political commentators, Tanenhaus misreads the intellectual foundations of the Tea Party movement. The movement may seem rudderless and their “crusades” quixotic when viewed from the perspective of mainstream national party politics, but they are hardly insignificant. They’re also in no way new.

This is a movement that is very much about ideas, and most of them have been around for a long time.

In fact, the most cherished principles of the Tea Party reveal a clear consistency when they’re traced back to the white nationalist ideologies that articulate them in more strident form. Though the mainstream Republican Party is loath to admit it, many of those core principles are simply historical platform points of the radical right, gone underground for the past several decades. The movement to repeal the 17^th Amendment, for example, seems “quixotic” only if one overlooks the Dixiecrats and the centrality of the “Southern Strategy” to the Republican realignment of the 1960s and 1970s. To the Dixiecrats and other neo-Confederate advocates of “states’ rights”, the repeal of the 17^th Amendment was a key mechanism by which Southern whites hoped to restore their political hegemony in the face of federal civil rights protections for people of color (for Dixiecrats, one of the key rights they hoped to preserve was the ability of states to maintain Jim Crow segregation laws).2

Strom Thurmond’s split from the national Democratic party in his 1948 Dixiecrat run was one key step toward the defection of Southern whites to the Republican party by the late 1960s.

When political figures like Texas governor Rick Perry voice their support for repeal of the 17^th amendment or invoke the possibility of using the rhetoric of “states’ rights” to nullify federal statutes, they make an implicit but unmistakable nod to segregationist politics that have been anathema on the national political stage for four decades. Overt white nationalist ideologies have been outside the pale of acceptable political discourse for years, though they’ve been preserved – nurtured, even – by the Patriot and militia adherents who have long used micro-publishing and low-power and pirate radio for their political organizing. What has changed, in the years since the emergence of the Tea Party in 2009, is that ideas long laid dormant and disavowed have found a new home in mainstream politics.3

The segregationist White Citizens’ Councils that so staunchly defended states’ rights in the civil rights era are now gone, largely collapsed into the still-active Council of Conservative Citizens, which positions itself as a defender of white heritage against an onslaught of racial crime. Their website, cofcc.org, is supported by advertisers like Lighthouse Literature, which calls itself “a bright light for the white knight”, and “your premier online bookstore for right-thinking and white-thinking literature.” The CCC has actively supported Tea Party events, with mixed responses to their overtly racist rhetoric.4

As I’ve discussed earlier, “ending the Fed” and returning to the gold standard – that other “quixotic” quest of the Tea Party – is a core principle for the Patriot movement. Even were it not central to their ideological beliefs, the buying and selling of gold as a hedge against the market manipulations of the Federal Reserve is so central to the economics of Patriot radio that it is impossible to imagine it functioning without it.

The engine of Patriot radio is the precious metals market.
Bob Chapman, retired gold and silver broker and author of the International Forecaster newsletter, is a regular guest of the Alex Jones Show. His newsletter is cross-promoted with Midas Resources, the precious metals distributor that is Jones’ principal sponsor, and which is owned by Ted Anderson, who also owns the radio network on which the show airs. Chapman regularly appears on the air with Jones, often to offer commentary about geopolitical affairs with a particular eye toward their potential impact on the precious metals market (rarely do his insights lead anywhere other than a call to buy more gold).

In September, 2011, for example, Chapman told listeners to expect “gold shortly at $2,000 to $2,200 with silver at $60 to $70. By March gold could be $3,000 to $3,200 and silver $100.00…. September and the final quarter of 2011 is going to be a wild and wooly affair. If you are not yet into gold and silver related assets you had best start getting involved. If you own them buy more. You have no idea how really wild this is going to get.” 5 The frenzied buying promoted by Chapman, Jones, and Anderson seems, at least in the short run, to have lined their pockets at the expense of their customers. In fact, gold and silver both peaked right around the time of Chapman’s pronouncements – silver at around $43/oz, and gold at $1900/oz. As the small print says, past performance is no guarantee of future results – but as of March 13, 2012, gold is trading at $1697 (vs the $3000+ Chapman predicted), and silver is $33.60, just a third of Chapman’s predicted price.6 The enthusiasm of the gold sellers remains, however, undimmed.

Though you’d likely never see it mentioned on more mainstream Tea Party websites, the turn to gold and the aversion to the Federal Reserve goes far deeper than a skepticism toward fractional reserve banking as an economic principle. Instead, a gold economy is seen as an ideological bulwark against the global totalitarianism of “international banker” cartels – a fear that, as I discussed in the first installment of this article, is little more than a modern version of the anti-Semitic canards of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

True to that mission, as part of the background materials on Chapman’s website, he offers a downloadable PDF of the holdings of the Rothschild banking cartel, titled simply “World Governance Rothschild”. It’s a fascinating document, not simply for the kinds of information it includes (about interlocking economic relationships, and the presumed geopolitical powers structured by them), but as a model for the workings of ideology and power. Read that way, it reveals the Patriot movement and its intertwined conspiracy theories to be a kind of Bizarro parallel to leftist critiques of media consolidation.

Never mind that the Rothschild chart is full of innuendo and dubious math; it nonetheless represents a kind of conceptual model of power relations that is, if you squint hard enough, familiar to many media scholars. Its conclusions support a hard right white nationalist ideology, but the Patriot movement’s critical methodologies are borrowed, at least in part, from the left.

Somehow, somewhere along the way, it looks a lot like somebody in the white nationalist movement read the Jewish Frankfurt School theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, and managed to use them to build a model of a world under threat of a Zionist conspiracy.

Ideas lead strange lives, indeed.

This wouldn’t be the first time that left and right politics meet; the most fertile point of cross-pollination, it seems, is down at the bottom of the Political Compass, where anarchists and libertarians comingle. That cross-over has been going on for years, and likely helps explain in part the contradictory mix of participants at Occupy events, as well as the sometimes ambiguous and contradictory politics of anarchist punk subcultures. It is also reflected in tensions within anti-globalization movements. Leftist “black bloc” activists who rally at meetings of the World Trade Organization and the G7/G8/G20 economic summits have complained about being accused of harboring hate groups because of the small percentage of white nationalist National Anarchists who also attend their events.7

The range of critics of neoliberal globalization is vast – ranging from those drawing attention to the developmental inequalities facing the global South to labor and human rights activists, to nationalist/protectionist groups – and these commonalities are probably best understood as sites of resonance, not intentional coalitional politics. What they share though, at some level, is an antipathy toward consumer society, a skepticism toward centralized state power, and a critique of the narcotic effects of mass culture, which they believe lulls us into complacency.

Adorno and Horkheimer called it false consciousness, and attributed it to the alienation of citizens from the products of their labor, and from one another; instead of meaningful human relationships, we are conditioned to seek solace and pseudo-individuality in the saccharine pleasures of a media culture that only sells us more conformity and self-reproducing myths.

Alex Jones calls it an Info War, and blames it on a Zionist banking conspiracy and airplanes distributing mind-control agents.

In one of the most striking convergences of radical right and Marxist thought, Alex Jones invited MIT linguist and noted activist Noam Chomsky onto his radio show. Their conversation, which aired in May of 2007, is fascinating.

In introducing Chomsky, Jones had nothing but praise, citing his influential book Manufacturing Consent (co-written with media scholar Ed Herman) and the documentary film of the same title, both of which chronicle the effects of concentrated corporate control of media on public access to information. Jones describes Chomsky’s work, but inflects it with several shibboleths of the Patriot right:

“He also gets into what the editors do, what the newspaper articles [do], how television’s controlled, and comes to the same conclusion that we have – that it’s a global elite controlling it and steering it, and dumbing down the population.”
“More semantical deceptions, always corralling thoughts and ideas, giving you phony decisions, phony choices. That, my friends, is the very essence of modern mind control, behavioral modification – and until you realize that the sitcoms and the cartoons have more propaganda in them than the newspaper or the nightly news, you will not begin to even scratch the surface of the level of this inculcation, this soaking, in the propaganda state – every facet, every level, deluged, infested. The human mind is like a computer: garbage in, garbage out. And they’re training us with phony meanings for words, they are conditioning us to believe in a false political paradigm and system. That’s basically what it boils down to – and Noam Chomsky calls it manufacturing consent.”

The conversation continues for some forty minutes, with Jones continually pushing Chomsky about the true source of the systematic deception that both men see as structuring the public’s access to meaningful political information. Chomsky repeatedly connects the conversation to a critique of capitalism and its exploitative hierarchies; Jones grows increasingly frustrated. When Chomsky cites Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and points out the anti-democratic principles espoused by the Founders and Framers of the US Constitution, Jones grows increasingly agitated.

The conversation deteriorates completely once the topic turns to the 2nd Amendment and gun control. Jones insists that Britain has higher gun crime rates than the US; Chomsky is skeptical. In Part 4 of the interview, Jones finally cuts the interview short, having decided that Chomsky isn’t an ally after all:

AJ: Professor Chomsky, thanks for joining us. But I’d just like to say this: one big part of controlling the thought process and the debate – for the rat that thinks it has a choice of whether to go forward, left, right, or back, but it’s still in their system – is having people out there talking about this propaganda state and Madison Avenue, and only pointing out certain parts of it, and misdirecting people back into the big government paradigm. And frankly, sir, you need to get the information on the guns, on the land-grabbing, on all of it – because I have it right here, and I respect your work, but at the same time, right here talking to you, I think some of it isn’t as honest as it could be.
NC: Well, that’s for people to decide when they look at it. Yeah.
AJ: It certainly is. My audience is pretty well educated. Thanks for joining us. Say hi to David Rockefeller for me.
(the line goes dead; Chomsky has been cut off)
There goes Noam Chomsky, ladies and gentlemen! I’ve read his books, and now I’m more sure of it than ever. He’s a New World Order shill, up one side and down the other!

What ensues is another ten minutes of Jones mocking Chomsky’s “little professor voice” and calling him just another lackey of the “global elite”, offering just enough truth to keep selling the Big Lie. Though they sometimes model the world in superficially similar ways, apparently Marxist critiques of the culture industries and New World Order conspiracy theories are not, in fact, the same thing.

Still, the popular career of intellectual ideas can lead to some strange bedfellows and flabbergasting convergences. The Frankfurt School social theorists would have been horrified by this attempted appropriation of their work, particularly as dissident Jews driven out of Nazi Germany by proponents of the same Zionist conspiracy theories as those espoused by the Patriot movement. But as Adorno and Horkheimer would themselves have quickly pointed out, Jones and his comPatriots aren’t the first, and won’t be the last, figures to promise “true” enlightenment that will rescue us from a world of deception, only to collapse ultimately back into its own mythologies.

In closing, the continually accumulating wreckage that is the political rhetoric of the Tea Party and Patriot movements brings to mind another Frankfurt School social theorist. Walter Benjamin, who died fleeing the Nazis, showed remarkable grace in the face of the sometimes cruel machine that we call civilization. In Thesis # 9 on the Philosophy of History, he writes,

“A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”

This little koan of Benjamin’s, too, has a modern Internet corollary:

Who got it right – Benjamin, the Internet facepalm guy, or neither? There’s a war on for your mind. You decide.

Image Credits:
1. A cup of tea?
2. FreshXpress
3. World Governance by the Rothschilds
4. The Concentrated Media (Chart)
5. Give Us Libery 1776
6. Wikipedia – Walter Benjamin
7. freerepublic.com


Please feel free to comment.

1. Visit article at New York Times
2. Kari Frederickson, The Dixiecrat Revolt and the End of the Solid South: 1932-1968, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.
3. Visit Huffington Post article by clicking here, also Leonard Zeskind, Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream. NY: Farrar & Giroux, 2009.
4. Visit ADL Article
5. Visit shftplan article here
6. All gold and silver spot prices from shftplan article here
7. All gold and silver spot prices from www.kitco.com
8. Read the Anarchist Library article here