Screenic seeing: Television uses screens like we use it to find solutions to puzzles

I have found investigative television preferable to watch mostly because although I will be put on edge all through the episode, television finds a solution by the end of the episode. The criminals are found and imprisoned, and the sick people have successful surgeries. It all ties up nicely, and I do not have to wait for the next episode. I have found the ways of television’s “working through” to be very interesting. In my second paper, I wrote about a clip in Castle where television’s way of working through the given mystery was very much like ours as described by Freud- the character repeated a blocked memory as an action. Now, I would like to look at the ways through which television uses itself to work through its problems. By itself, I refer to the very form of television- its screenic nature, its programme line up and its multiplicity.

In his essay Working Through: The Age of Uncertainty, John Ellis writes that the process of working through, for television, is not a straightforward process but rather a multi-faceted and leaky process involving a constant process of making and remaking meanings, and exploring possibilities. The characters try to solve the crime with the evidence they have gathered, creating different scenes and making them fit in the jigsaw. Where it doesn’t make sense, the pieces are moved around or new pieces are found. Television, in the clips I have chosen works through this messy and multi-faceted process using what I have come its very form.

In the ‘Elevator Love Letter’ from Grey’s Anatomy, Dr. Shepard proposes in an unusual yet very romantic way using CT scans of patients from surgeries he had performed- with Meredith or because of Meredith.

In her essay, Guided by TV, Lynne Joyrich talks about a habit of collecting TV guides, something I thought was disturbing but as she argues, schedule and flow are not one and the same, but that the schedule yields a certain understanding and awareness to the complexity and implications of the flow (215). In his proposal, Derek presented what would be the ‘schedule’ of his relationship with Meredith with the CT scans. Meredith is a very emotionally complicated character who would be very hard to propose to, and Derek must present a coherent argument as to why they should get married to get past her defenses. It resonates directly with what Joyrich says about TV Guide when writes, ‘That is, in its efforts to make television coherent, TV Guide doesn’t just arrange, but rearranges TV, transforming the characteristic flow of commercial television- that flux of textual bits which, paradoxically, creates a sense of continuity precisely through the discontinuity of interwoven program segments…’ The CT scans in the ‘Elevator Love Letter’ are not the relationship. Not exactly. They are evidence of the relationship, each CT scan representing a part of the flow; their first surgery, another after which he ‘kissed you in the hallway’ and another where ‘Dr. Bailey kicked you out of surgery because she caught us in the car.’ This seemingly continuous collection of scans, very much like screens, is the evidence that the Derek presents to Meredith to work through the relationship and decide that it was worth going to the next step.

In Castle, the characters usually work through their cases using a board in their offices that then serve as a visual aid, a flow chat or just a ‘work-through’ board. In the ‘Double Down’ episode where the team solves two murders, they create a timeline for their murderer. (up to 0.20)

powered by Splicd.com

Joyrich talks about a responsiveness that is created when watching TV. She writes about the television viewers not being passive. In both clips from Grey’s Anatomy and Castle, the experience is shifted to the other end of the television screen. Naturally I do not expect any form of passiveness from the television characters, but their responsiveness and critical responsibility is a result of looking at screens that are like program line-ups in the case of the clip from Castle and a collection of schedules to give coherence to flow in the one from Grey’s Anatomy. Heidi Rae Cooley in her essay It’s all about the Fit: The Hand, the Mobile Screenic Device and Tactile Vision talks about this kind of responsive relationship and calls it screenic seeing, as opposed to window-ed seeing where the viewer would simply see through instead of looking at the screen (143). In viewing the screenic devices like the board in the NYPD offices, or the CT scans from patients, the characters ‘enter into a relationship with the screen’ (143) since they converge and fuse with that which they look at. The screens are not films or boards anymore in the encounter with the characters but exist, separate from their frames, as evidence of a relationship with marriage potential or a murderer’s schedule. In the clip from ‘Smoked’, episode 10 from the fourth season of NCIS, we see the interaction that Cooley explores between the hand, device and the screen.

powered by Splicd.co

Dinozzo and Ziva, use the remote to access different slides on the screen as they displayed evidence they had found and collected to Special Agent Gibbs, their boss. Here, there is a participating hand accompanying the seeing and this is the tactile vision (145) that creates the fit helping the characters to work through their case. Television uses this visual lay out- on the screen, on the board, and on the CT scan film to link together discrete scenes merging them to work through to one final solution at the end of the episode.

In all three clips, we see use of different screenic devices that television utilizes to put together discrete scenes to create a flow in each of the series. Mimi White in her essay, Crossing Wavelengths: The Diegetic and Referential Imaginary of American Commercial Television explores how explicit discontinuity is threaded together in diegetic brilliance through inter-program referentiality in televisual texts. Here, television is still a multiform body that somehow manages to find continuity in its multiplicity- except this time not with other televisual texts but with other screenic devices.

There have been many times, for several people, that they have sat and stared at their television sets looking for ‘clues’ from discrete scenes, probably even different texts, to find a solution. They enter a relationship with it and collect evidence to work towards a solution to their problem. It seems that the experience is the same on either side of the television screen.

Television: The Martyr

As television becomes a more familiar type of media to us, it also begins to take more responsibility for shaping society and thus more risks. Television has notoriously reflected the current time period – such as the Mary Tyler Moore show being centered around a woman in the workplace in the 70s and the struggles she faced as such, and a Brady Bunch episode in the early 70s dealing with interracial adoption. These shows would simply skim the surface compared to the kinds of risks taken in Television today, though. For example, while those shows would simply air episodes that straightforwardly or seriously tackled controversial topics, now we see scenes more like this, taken from the episode of The Office where it is revealed that one of the employees is gay:

From an objective standpoint, without analyzing the manner in which this content is being presented, these scenes would seem to be simply insulting through the lighthearted manner in which they’re showing the concept of a boss needing to be able to tell if his employees are homosexual and thus looking for a mechanical instrument that would beep when positioned near somebody gay. They stray away from the typical method of discussing controversial issues in a serious way and choose to show us our own insensitivity to issues such as homosexual stereotyping through the ignorance of the show’s (notoriously most ignorant) characters. To some who don’t recognize this method, however, these scenes could just seem insensitive and insulting. They are taking a risk in using this method. In “The Garden of Forking Paths,” Jorge Luis Borges tells the story of a man who went on a journey, being chased down by a man looking to kill him, to a man named Stephen Albert with the intention of killing Albert to get a message across to Germany. In doing so, he would be caught by the man chasing him and undoubtedly be executed. Thus, he sacrificed his life for the message he wanted to get across. It would seem as though Television itself is doing just that – using itself as a medium, sacrificing itself through potentially being misconstrued as insensitive/racist/sexist/etc. for the message it is attempting to get across to viewers – that acting like the people on their screens would be equally as insensitive and ignorant.

Similarly, this clip of House shows the main character being openly racist, but for knowledgeable viewers, this character is notoriously insensitive and thus one would view this scene as a warning of how not to act:

This brings about the idea that Ellis talks about in “Witness: A New Way of Perceiving the World.” He talks about television as a mode of information so integrated in society that we as viewers have become witnesses to what we see on television and thus accomplices. Television is showing us these situations in which wrong is being done and we are meant to witness them and recognize them. Ellis states:

“Events on a screen make a mute appeal: ‘You cannot say you did not know.’ The double negative captures the nature of the experience of witness. At once distanced and involving, it implies a necessary relationship with what is seen. The relationship is one of complicity, because if you know about an event, that knowledge implies a degree of consent to it. With this complicity comes an aching sense that something must be done.” (11)

When we witness the insensitivity shown on the screen, we are supposed to recognize that something must be done about it – that we must change and attempt to rid ourselves or our society of the kind of racist/sexist/etc. behavior we see being presented on our screens.

Additionally, Fiske & Hartley point out in “’Reading’ Television” that television, as a medium, “shows us…our collective selves” and “…presents us daily with a constantly up-dated version of social relations and cultural perceptions.” Television, as a medium that is entirely current, is a mode of reflecting our image back to ourselves – what we see on our screens is an image of us, as a society, and thus when we see something on television that is wrong, we can recognize that that is something that is wrong with our society and it something we should try to take control of and, hopefully, fix.

30 Rock is an example of this in that it’s a show entirely based on the head writer and lead actress’s life and previous job. It is a show that essentially takes a reality and exaggerates it in an outlandish way that makes it not only humorous but obviously pointing out flaws. One scene from the show takes a conversation between two women – the main character and the objectified, ditsy, younger female intern – and exaggerates it to emphasize the ways in which women are stereotyped or objectified in society:

By showing the clearly-ditsy and exaggerated character of the intern talking about how she doesn’t “need” to wear a bra, being oblivious to the way she appears towards men and other people in the workplace, discussing her life plan as marrying rich and designing handbags, and implying that a woman who doesn’t wear pristine or revealing clothes as someone who must have been tainted by marriage or having children, we recognize that not only are these often views of people in society, but they are completely ridiculous beliefs.

These three examples have in common their ridiculous, outlandish characters that viewers are aware that they are supposed to take with a grain of salt. These shows have developed these characters as ones to enjoy through the fact that they are the exact opposite of how a person should act. Furthermore, they are all shows or characters that are centered around putting on a show – they are very aware of the medium in which they exist:

The Office is a mockumentary, which essentially means that every second of every episode of the show is these characters acting or performing in front of the cameras that surround them.

30 Rock is a show about putting on a show, and many of its most ridiculous characters are, in fact, actors.

House strays from this a little in that it isn’t very obviously performance-based. However, the character of Gregory House has always been a very closed-off person and thus everything he does and says is a form of performing in that he is over-acting his cruelness and insincerity to keep his true self hidden and protected from others.

Thus, television uses this concept of “performance” the way it is exclusively done on the TV screen to emphasize the points it’s attempting to make. In doing so, we can conceptualize McLuhan’s idea of the medium being the message. McLuhan says that “In other words, cubism, by giving us the inside and outside, the top, bottom, back, and front and the rest, in two dimensions, drops the illusion of perspective in factor of instant sensory awareness of the whole. Cubism, by seizing on instant total awareness, suddenly announced that the medium is the message.”(13) Television seeks to tap into this instant total awareness, engrossing us in the televisual world as a whole and thus through this medium, teaches us the message.

I Want To Go To There: How Television Knows By Creating and Exploring Places

Many television scholars have emphasized television’s uniqueness as a medium in regards to time – its accomplishment (or appearance) of “instantaneity;” of “present-ness,” means that it experiences the world the way we do, always on the cusp of something (Ellis 32; Doane 222). Which is all well and good and true, but I’ve been wondering over the course of this class: what about place? Unlike, say, the written word, television is able to visually and kinetically explore nearly anywhere, large or small, real or imaginary, in a way that many humans (as visual, mobile creatures) can viscerally and emotionally relate to. And unlike cinema, television is multifarious and seemingly endless – it doesn’t seem all that out of hand to think that it could visually map the entire world, or that it’s striving to, or even that it already has (Amelie Hastie points out that television builds in its own structured “forgettability” and asks accordingly “in what temporal state . . . television criticism reside[s]”; maybe an alternate model could explore framing television criticism in a physical rather than temporal way; say, by using the “geo-annotation techniques” practiced by Lisa Parks (Hastie 75-7; Parks 104-5)? Just a thought). Television shows off its place-exploring skills, and then creates more ways to use them by representing more slippery types of knowledge – the invisible or hidden, the factual, and the emotional – as places, and exploring them accordingly.

Because of its status as a visual and motion-based medium, television is probably the ultimate exploratory tool. At the very least, it likes to see itself that way – you can tell from many of its series’ opening sequences, those “best feet forward” that let viewers know what they can expect and look forward to from a show. The opening sequence from Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, for example, takes the viewer through an island jungle, over a rabbitty campsite and up a stone wall before she’s allowed inside the playhouse (a place that itself represents what the show is all about, with its zany gadgets and child-adults) while the one from Star Trek pulls away from a computer-generated solar system into and promises a journey to “the final frontier.” You can also tell from its series’ trailers, which are, advertisements for the most sellable components of an advertisement-based medium and therefore should be the savviest commercials out there. Take, for example, the advertising campaign for Planet Earth.

In the U.S., Planet Earth aired on the Discovery Channel, which has a pretty representative interstitial channel advertisement itself. A tiny world spins, stuck in its orbit between the massive words “Discovery” and “Channel,” both world and network dwarfed by the much larger space of the television screen. Earth < style="mso-spacerun: yes"> The words “Explore Your World” slam above the whole graphic like three consecutive photographs (and what is film, or television, but very, very fast consecutive photographs?). It’s an example of what Margaret Morse defines as a mise-en-abyme, “in which a nested or embedded representation reproduces or duplicates important aspects of the primary world within which it is enclosed” (Morse 200). With this advertisement, The Discovery Channel promises quite literally to do this – to bring the world to our screens, and make it ours.

Planet Earth has a similar goal, and it’s not an easy one to accomplish. That’s why, in the trailer, it hails itself as a “landmark television series” (the operating word here - “landmark” - literally meaning, of course, something that marks a boundary or a locality) and describes exactly how much time and effort it took to put together. The visual images send the same message, with repeated cuts and zoom-outs between close-up and far-off views, individual organisms and large groups, a side-view and then an up-view of a leaping treefrog, underground caves and overcloud mountain tops, a sped-up rotation around a group of migrating wildebeests as if to cut them off. “Prepare to see it as never before,” the text promises, while demonstrating what it means by taking advantage of a bunch of angles and distances. The words chase a little cephalopod over the ocean floor like the camerapeople must have had to in order to get that shot in the first place. The overall sense is one of movement, and of being granted access to not only rare images, but representative ones – the whole world in the eye of a lizard, man’s ambition in the leap of a salamander. Nature is just like us, it seems to tell us. It would watch TV about itself, too.

In this clip from the “around-the-world-in-20-episodes” contest show The Amazing Race, contestants are challenged to install television antennae on homes in the rural part of Uganda that hosted this leg of the race. The whole segment can be seen as a knowing wink at television audiences more used to creature comforts like cable or stepladders – without some sort of higher technology, after all, we wouldn’t be watching this show in the first place. Later in the episode, competitors will once again be waylaid and asked, this time, to find Ghana on a map – the ones who can’t will be quietly embarrassed in front of adorable Ugandan schoolchildren and millions of viewers at home. The show winks at us again, inviting us to be proud that we, of course, would be able to pass such a simple geography quiz (nevermind that we’ve been shown a map at the beginning of the episode).

By associating knowledge with place – on the scope of an extended planetary documentary or a one-country map quiz, by bringing television footage to us or letting us watch people grant it to other people – Planet Earth and The Amazing Race interpolate us as what Sarah Livingstone would call “public/citizen viewers,” hoping to eventually take action using the knowledge we have gained from television, as opposed to “the mindless and voyeuristic masses” who just want to be entertained (Livingstone 91). In “Take Responsibility For Yourself: Judge Judy and the Neoliberal Citizen,” Laurie Ouelette argues that by rewarding plaintiffs who show personal responsibility and punishing those that seem to rely on larger organizations, Judge Judy promotes the economic philosophy of neoliberalism. So, what do Planet Earth and The Amazing Race want us to do? It’s easy to hazard guesses that I could support fairly easily – they want us to protect the environment, respect other cultures, and learn our geography – but I think that’s missing one important point. Ouelette also points out in her article that Judge Judy needs to keep its viewers convinced of neoliberalism to the point that they continue to watch it instead of relaying their trust to government courts, but it also has to make sure its lessons never take entirely and it is never faced with a completely personally responsible viewership, because then barely anyone will watch it (Ouellette). Similarly, both Planet Earth and The Amazing Race depend on viewers who are interested in learning about the world and exploring it, but not so much so that they get off of their couches and try to go do it themselves, or through other media. As with most shows, their primary message – LEARN from us! – is undercut by a secondary one necessary for their survival – learn from US.

Television has been taking us places, real and imaginary, since long before David Attenborough ever cleared his throat or Phil Keoghan practiced his dramatic pause. And when it has something it wants to get across, but doesn’t necessarily have a place to take us, it makes one up. Take, for example, almost all pharmaceutical and hair and skin product commercials. The advertised product never just makes you look better, it affects your physical landscape – fixing those nasty fraying parts of your follicles, smoothing weird light-blobs into your pores. The camera travels around in an animated close-up world, letting us know what’s going on by exploring this space. It takes care of the What by showing us the Where.

We’ve had the technology to do things like this for a while. Maps, for example, have stuck around as ways to orient ourselves and other things, to figure out where we are and where we’re going. Television takes advantage of our familiarity with such objects and doesn’t bother to explain them. In this clip, rock star/entertainer/confusing personage Andrew W.K. draws attention to our intuitive understanding of such weathermaps by poking fun at it. He takes the symbols that overly the map literally, employing a traditionally chipper weatherman’s tone and exaggerated physical gestures, almost turning himself into a physical map of the weather in order to complement his backdrop. As viewers, we generally just go along with fictional television constructs like this even when we know they’re fake – John Ellis gives the examples of the necessary myth of direct address (another vital part of the weather report), and reality shows the “reality” of which is a chronological impossibility (Ellis 31; 35). By buying into pharmaceutical ads and weather reports as accurate, or at least acceptable, representations of the real world, we are letting television create that world - and if the world is created by television, we need television to navigate it.

Fictional television shows create completely fantastical worlds unabashedly, and they are easy to accept and dive into because they are up-front about their falseness. However, fictional television shows also use places, often in the same way they use images and motifs, to convey very real themes and ideas. One of the themes constantly being conveyed on True Blood involves the similarity between the vampires and “regular people,” and between all the inhabitants of Bon Temps and us, the viewers. In his extremely detailed recaps of the show, Jacob Clifton makes this point over and over, bringing our attention to images . . .

“Hoyt's mother Maxine comes running up with a fan and a golf visor, playing Southern Lady. Like a vampire's black coffin, like a fangbanger's collar” (Sex On Fire p. 1)

. . . characters . . .

“[Sookie] can be that woman. She can trust that woman: Brave as Godric, ecstatic as Maryann.” (Rough Music p. 22)

. . . and extratextual/real-world situations . . .

“the thing about having a girl teen vampire is that it queers the whole thing, both figuratively and literally” (Sex & Candy p. 26)

that emphasize these connections. Two of the main locales on the show, the vampire bar Fangtasia! and the human bar Merlotte’s, also demonstrate parallels. Although the characters talk about them as though they embody and represent completely opposite things, the show often sets up shots and plot situations invite connection between them. For example, although Fangtasia! is seen as a hotbed of general unbridled desire, Merlottes has a bit of that going on too, as evident in these very similar shots.

And when Lafayette and Andy both end up trapped in cold places (the dungeon in Fangtasia! and the freezer in Merlotte’s, respectively . . . everyone’s always getting trapped in the dungeon and the freezer), you can bet they both spent their time there thinking about ways they could have done their jobs better.

Like The Amazing Race and Planet Earth, pharmaceutical and beauty products, weather reports, and True Blood need to keep us coming back. Thus, their exploration always comes with an infinity clause – “your skin is flawless, you know how to dress for the weather, your narrative thirst is quenched” they say, but we know that, as with all television (and much of life), in reality your skin will get used to the product and get dry again, the weather will change tomorrow, and there’s going to be a cliffhanger at the end of every episode of every show ever made about vampires or anything else. In this more than anything, television constructs knowledge as a place – the world is infinitely explorable, everything is always changing, you can come back tomorrow and things will be different, just like television itself is infinitely explorable and ever-changing. Ironically, the “message” of television doesn’t do well at getting this across as the medium itself does – as we have seen, most of televison’s “explorations” come prepackaged, with a narrative arc and an economic agenda. The question that interests me now is a modified version of one that Raymond Williams poses in his book Television, about violence: does an increase in peoples’ exposure to violence through television cause them to become more violent, or does it “scratch an itch” and help them keep their hands to themselves (Williams 128)? So: does television’s constant taking-on of the mantle of exploration encourage its viewers to explore in different ways, or are they content getting their thrills from doing it vicariously? As usual with television, most of the thrills are there – you just have to know the right channel. And most of the disappointments of exploration are too – you just have to be convinced that you’re always on the wrong channel.

“Knowing Television, Knowing Oneself: Returning to the I-land” by Corey Gates

My previous project focused on televisual information and catastrophe with specific reference to my favorite TV show: Lost. I looked at the way the show’s narrative embraced the technical form of television, that is, its signifying problematic in terms of post-9/11 anxiety, and concluded that the goal of this process of cross-pollination between our world and the world of Lost (non-fiction and fiction TV forms) was to create a profit. For it seems television waits for and (via fiction shows) produces catastrophes to avoid the real catastrophe of it all: the breakdown of TV’s commercial system. Two factors influenced my (admittedly bitter) statement about TV: that I had restricted myself to TV theories solely pertaining to the concepts of information and catastrophe, and that I was still recovering after Lost’s series finale broke my heart. I’ve had relationships with TV serial fictions all my life that have ended badly, and I always swear that I’ll never get hooked on one again; Lost was no exception. My former conclusive statement was a vengeful attempt to work through my pain—and “working through” is what I will be exploring here. My selected textual examples all pertain to Lost; however, I think that they demonstrate a process of working through TV’s information and catastrophes that applies to the viewer and to TV itself.

John Ellis defines working through as “a constant process of making and remaking meanings, and of exploring possibilities,” and notes, “[it] is an important process in an age that threatens to make us witness to too much information without providing us with enough explanation,” (79). Like Lost’s viewers, anyone who saw the 9/11 coverage witnessed infinite contradictions and red-herrings to the big ‘why’ behind it all and got little explanation—we are still fighting two wars and have yet to find the widely-agreed-upon prime suspect for the attacks. By the time Lost entered its final season, the plot had become so convoluted that it literally split in two following an explosion that causes the screen to go blank for several seconds. This clip from the opening scene shows the final season’s narrative device: the ‘flash-sideways,’ which depicts two separated in space, but united in time plotlines—TV’s definitive characteristics of simultaneity and repetition.



The narrative logic for the split is that the characters believe there is mythical power on the island that will allow them to travel back in time to prevent their plane from crashing and stranding them there in the first place (which by then had accumulated a shroud of conspiracy and myth all its own), and the only way they can accomplish this is to detonate a hydrogen bomb. Lynn Spigel notes that post-9/11 programming utilized narrative and mythical framing of events, especially the clear-cut binary of WWII, to “[offer] people a sense of historical continuity with a shared, and above all moral, past,” (245). Putting the chaotic events of 9/11 into terms we could understand—like Pearl Harbor, highlighting problematic civil rights issues within the culture of extreme Islam, and an all around desire for good old American values—allowed us to work through the shock of the incident. Lost, situated in history from 2004 to 2010, seems like resistance to the return of the repressed with events similar to the real-life catastrophe of 2001 yet no mention of 9/11 whatsoever over the course of its six seasons (but references the 2004 MLB World Series and quite possibly WWII with the hydrogen bomb being the solution to all their problems). This is OK; we know that resistances will spring up in the process of working through and Lost certainly helps us through in a way that places us in, what Ellis calls TV’s distinctive contribution to the modern age, a “safe area in which uncertainty can be entertained, and can be entertaining,” (82). But what about working through the catastrophe (at least for fans and TV networks that make money off it) that is itself the conclusion of a show as epic as Lost?

This next clip from Jimmy Kimmel Live! aired during a special Lost commemorative episode immediately after Lost’s final episode ended. Throughout the final episode, Kimmel’s show was advertised as having three alternate endings to Lost that would screen following a Q & A with the actors.



As you can see, these were not legitimate alternate endings but parodies of famous past TV show finales (across different genres) starring the writers and stars of Lost: Survivor (reality show), The Sopranos (serial fiction) and Newhart (that sitcom whose finale was the stuff of intertextual legend). In fact, these intertextualities facilitate the process of working through by “rendering familiar, integrat[ing] and provid[ing] a place,” (Ellis, 79) in TV’s megatext. Even though we know that Kimmel is merely capitalizing on Lost’s popularity; that it is “television’s embracing self-perpetuation as a medium,” (White,52) we get the feeling that somehow all is right with the world as this difficult show finds its place among the TV legends—and are reminded that there was and will always be epic TV. This is comforting to audiences and network big wigs alike.

My final clip, a trailer that aired during Lost’s fifth season, further demonstrates TV intertexuality’s pursuit of perpetuating itself in form and content while “working through.” Right away we are told that this show has something directly in common with Lost before we even find out that it too deals with working through a catastrophe, shares many of the same actors, and that it takes as its title the narrative device employed by Lost during its fourth season—and to top it all off, this show’s premiere was exactly five years after the same date as Lost’s premiere.



For better or worse, Flashforward did not survive its first two seasons; perhaps on account of its central catastrophic event seeming too ironically similar to TV’s hypnotic effect on the viewer. But it could also be the case that audiences received the occasional unpleasure of repetition from the show—the interest of this particular type of show has been worked over—suggesting that the issues it represents have been worked through. However, the question that this trailer asks (‘if you saw your future, what would you do?’) seems pertinent to my reformulated general understanding of television, for it positions the viewer in the impossible position between our world and TV’s world via direct address and infinite subjectivity within TV’s super and mega texts.

I have worked through my issues with Lost and can appreciate it in terms of its mastery of TV form, instead of being bitter because my own hopes for narrative content were not fulfilled. This time I did not swear off TV fandom, I have accepted that I will be back for more. Which is why, if I saw my future, I would do nothing except watch TV and take comfort in the image of my present reflected back at me. I have come to the conclusion, via my understanding of its process of working through, that we know TV as we know ourselves. Just what kind of “self” we are dealing with could be too much to explain here. However, I think Borges hits near the mark in his descriptions of the First Emperor of China and Shakespeare. The former ordered the construction of the Great Wall while simultaneously ordering that all books containing information of the past prior to him be burned, perhaps thinking that “the wall in space and the fire in time were magic barriers designed to halt death,” (82). And of the latter, that like God, he was “many and no one,” (93). The combination of these two comes closest to the TV viewer self that watches to expand itself through the infinity of possibilities that TV presents, or to reinforce itself by only looking for its reflection in the static. Personally, I’m going to go with the “flow.”

Working Through War on Television

Working Through War on Television

By Aaron Lemle

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzqXiNKzutk

Tuning In, Working Through, and Getting Out, by Garrett McCoy

The human brain, just like television, consists of a constant flow of information and sensations, both of which never truly reach an end. Certainly, programs on television may end and emotional problems in the brain may be assuaged, but more information will always continue to pour into and through both the TV and the brain.

Knowing this, it is impractical to realistically expect a "final catharsis", that is, complete and total peace of mind, from watching television. What should be desired, instead, is revelation and progress through the process of watching and interpreting television. To put it simply, concrete segments of television are not capable of truly defining the individuals who watch it, just as one segment of television cannot define television as a whole. Rather, immersion in the flow of television, specifically in heavily psychoanalytic shows such as Neon Genesis Evangelion and In Treatment, can act as a mirror for the viewer's ego and provide a unique reflection of the viewer's identity. Even Lebron James' Nike commercial titled Rise asks more questions about the viewer than the subject himself. Additionally, since these introspective shows are designed in such a way so as to rely on their viewers to interpret them, it can also be said that the shows (and television as a whole) are reciprocatingly defined by the pensive viewers themselves.

While these three texts of television seem to be quite different (and they are), let us isolate each one and explain their significance before establishing the commonalities shared among them. The 26th episode of Evangelion is the final episode of the science fiction anime series. The final two episodes radically depart from the narrative and instead depict a psychoanalytic session regarding the main characters of the show. This therapeutic culmination of Evangelion serves as a means of interpreting the characters, the show, and ourselves through its experimental method of delivery. In the following clip, taken from halfway through Episode 26, Shinji Ikari, the show's protagonist, plays the role of the patient as he comes to terms with his own existence.



In the first third of this episode, Shinji's psychological manifestations of the show's other characters acts as interrogators as Shinji works through his issues. The format follows closely the work of Freud, whose essay “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through” explains the process of a psychoanalyst asking questions and allowing a patient to come to their own revelation about that which was bothering them, consciously or otherwise. The questions in Evangelion are meant to “overcome the resistance within [the patient]” (Freud 33), and as they break down Shinji's psychological barriers, he arrives at the clip's first and most important quotation: “What am I?”.

At this point, of course, the viewer has seen Shinji, in Freud's terms, “overcome his hostility towards his free associations” (Freud 33) and address the most fundamental and basic of all questions, that of his existence. Of course, when he asks “What am I?”, the viewer is forced to see him as an unknown person with whom the viewer cannot fully understand. After all, if the character is struggling with their own identity, then the audience must struggle with it as well. Episode 26 makes the viewer realize that after 25 episodes, they do not know Shinji as well as they thought. Because of this, the process of defining Shinji's existence occurs for the benefit of both Shinji and the viewer.

In this clip of Evangelion, visual and audial continuity are abandoned as what is seen and heard follows Shinji's stream of consciousness rather than any concrete narrative. A cohesive flow of words comes from the disembodied mouths of many characters and the scene rapidly shifts between imaginary domains to tangible ones. This creates a sense of anonymity among the speakers and a feeling of universality regarding the questions. The viewer doesn't know who or where the questions originate from, so they could be said by anyone and could apply to anyone, both within the show and without. The entire episode, therefore, becomes therapeutic not just for Shinji, but for the viewer as well. Just as the people enabling him to “work through” his problems are simply images and exist insofar that his mind perceives them, the images of television are simply images on a screen, yet they enable us to”work through” out own psychological issues. Moreover, both this clip and television in general are revealed to share the same nature: a flux of images, sounds, and speakers, all of which are simultaneously cohesive and segmented.

But just what is this process of “working through”, and what is its role in television? Most shows are not as stylistically radical as Evangelion, yet some similarly strive to be therapeutic both for their characters and for their viewers. One such show is In Treatment, a serialized show focusing on the week-to-week psychiatric sessions of its various characters.

One patient in particular, named Sophie, deals with the issues of her parents' break-up and feels responsible for it as she and Dr. Weston meet weekly. Eventually Sophie's relationship with her father is isolated as her most significant psychological problem, and in the final episode her father unexpectedly joins her for a session with Dr. Weston. In this final episode of Sophie's sessions (but not the final episode of the season), by confronting her father directly Sophie is able to come to terms with her sense of self and sense of responsibility regarding his actions.

Sophie's dad, who the audience has not encountered before this episode, begs Sophie to let him stay with her after she breaks down. But Sophie tells him to get out. By rejecting her father she is able to reject her dependence on his image and fully embrace her own identity, saying, “This is my therapy. Mine.” Indeed, it is Sophie whom we have seen each week with Dr. Weston, and this new figure of her father almost seems like in intruder into both Sophie's time with Dr. Weston and Sophie's time with us, the viewers. Sophie has achieved a catharsis, and the viewer, having also heard the questions brought up by Dr. Weston, has undoubtedly undergone some psychological development as well.

Two authors of television studies, David Foster Wallace and John Ellis, aptly put into words the reasons behind the sense of catharsis we feel when the characters (such as Sophie or Shinji) overcome their issues. Wallace, in his essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and US Fiction”, discusses (among other things) the “metawatching” of television. He believes someone who continually watches programs and absorbs their information changes and “becomes spectatorial, self conscious” (Wallace 160). In the case of In Treatment, the viewer finds themselves becoming a part of the show, and their weekly meetings with their television parallels Sophie's meetings with Dr. Weston. “We spend enough time watching, pretty soon we start watching ourselves watching. We start to 'feel' ourselves feeling, yearn to experience 'experiences'” (Wallace 160). We want Sophie to figure out her problems both for her sake and for ours, since through Sophie we vicariously address the same questions she faces.

Ellis details this process of “working through” our own issues in his essay “Working Through: The Age of Uncertainty”, with television acting as both psychoanalyst and witness to our “therapy”. The characters of any text, by achieving their catharsis, demonstrate the possibility of the viewer reaching their own state of relief. While the television obviously cannot “as it used to in the era of scarcity, provide any overall explanation” (Ellis 79), it can act as a catalyst for our psychological introspection, enabled largely by the viewer's immersion in what Wallace calls the “metafiction” of the show.

Nothing encapsulates the themes addressed by Evangelion and In Treatment as appropriately as Lebron James' Rise commercial.



The questions Lebron poses are many. But his questions, while seeming to address both everyone and no one in particular, cannot be answered. The viewer is not going to speak with Lebron about these issues, and Lebron cannot be expecting any actual answers. Knowing this, Lebron, despite his role as the subject, the patient, the one with the problem, seems to be the psychoanalyst. The viewer, in turn, is also the patient in the sense that these questions are meant to make us think about ourselves rather than about Lebron. After all, Lebron is going to ultimately do whatever he wants, regardless of what answers the viewer might come up with.

Beverle Houston's essay titled “Viewing Television” references the way in which television acts as a mirror and relies on “the repetitive reformulation of desire” (Houston 185). Lebron doesn't want to know the answer to these questions. Lebron wants us to want to know the answers to these questions and, ultimately, to connect with Lebron and see ourselves in his position. Houston's metaphor of TV as a mirror fits this idea nicely as the clip's final line, “Should I be who you want me to be?”. With this line, we realize the commercial is not about Lebron so much as it is about us, the viewer.

Having discerned what television tells us about its characters and its viewers, what does all of this, with regards to the psychoanalytic process, tell us about television as a whole? With a more significant understanding of these three programs, who we are as viewers, and who we are as ourselves, we can step back and recognize television as less of an object and more of a dynamic process, or a phenomenon. Most viewers can relate to these issues of self-identity, relationships with their parents, and relationships with those in society. The problems brought up by these three texts are relatively universal and not unique to the characters in each show. In this way, the texts, while challenging their subjects to think about the questions presented, challenge the viewers to interpret their own lives as well. In these specific cases, all individuals, fictional or otherwise, benefit from the therapeutic nature of television. More than just a “television set”, television is an entity which acts as a catalyst for our emotions, our thoughts, and our experiences, all of which are brought to light as the programming of television serves as a conduit for our own psyche to “work through” itself.

Television: Rendering Familiar the Strange

Television is a powerful social force. Through the encoding, preservation and manipulation of “symbolic representations of knowledge” (Livingstone 91), it can enter inaccessible worlds, highlight issues and communicate norms, rules, and ideologies. Building on nature documentaries – a genre that seeks to tame the chaos of wilderness into manageable narrative images – I hope to show how television normalizes what it presents. This paper will explore how these representations of knowledge enable television to assimilate and render familiar the strange. This two-pronged ‘way of knowing’, I argue, develops televisions ubiquity and familiarity while reaffirming its place as a mediator of culture capable of normalizing and investigating the knowledge it displays.

Clip 1: BBC Life - The Venus Fly Trap

Footage of Life, a BBC One documentary of Earth’s varied habitats, reveals how television can ensnare us with the exotic even as it tames and renders it ordinary. Carnivorous plants are rare in the world, yet their unique ability to “hunt” and consume prey has made them objects of fascination. Like the Venus Fly Trap in this clip, television ensnares us through the allure of what John Ellis calls “its ability to bear witness” (31). We are not sure what we are witnessing as soft violins beckon the viewer into the scene, but television quickly informs us (sec 10). Through the narrator’s direct address, the viewer is provided a sense of“liveliness” and “co-presence”, as we are guided into a nature that is “intimate and domestic” rather than “hostile and distant” (Ellis 32). The motion of the camera encircling the Venus Fly Trap reinforces televisions reassuring presence (sec 50), explaining what we see from all angles. It also gives the impression of an ambush, an appropriate image as the prey - a fly - lands on its hunter. The sound effect of a ticking timer (sec 1:12) introduces not only the mechanisms by which the plant captures its target, but also the ways television ensnares the viewer. Heightened anticipationand dramatic music create “feelings of proximity” that evoke liveliness in what we are viewing (Ellis 35). An extreme close-up (sec 2:05) seals a double ensnarement, that of the fly and that of the viewer, who is by now fully caught up in the act of witnessing. Little thought is given to the fact this may be an illusion, as we fail to realize the studio can provide simulacra of place and events (Ellis 32), and frequently does in nature documentaries. Yet by the narrativization of events and direct address, television also provides a space for us to process. As John Ellis writes, television “attempts definitions, tries out explanations, and makes intelligible” (79) so that we are able to integrate and render familiar what we have seen. By explaining the exotic, television tames it, protecting the viewer and giving the impression it has the capacity to manage what is seemingly unmanageable: nature and reality.

Clip 2: Conan O' Brian - American Express Ad

Television can also provide “symbolic representations” of the exotic through advertisements, using figures of “authority” to construct and promote particular products and worldviews. Just as Judge Judy draws from the “symbolic authority of the state” - the courthouse, the U.S flag, and a gavel-wielding judge - (Oullette 224) to promote a neoliberal society, this ad draws on the popularity of a late-night comedian and shared assumptions of economic dynamo that is India, to implicitly legitimize a globalized, economically interdependent world, an image very much in line with the product being advertising: American Express. With opening shots of forts and cultural landmarks, the clip takes the visual form of a documentary, it’s premise a trip to Jaipur, India as Conan searches for the finest materials to make curtains for his new show. A contrast between two cultures - a tall, gangly westerner walking against a current of short turbaned men and robed women (sec 06) - is bridged when in broken Hindi, Conan demonstrates detailed knowledge of fabrics. This humorous act (sec 14), notbelievable on the face of it, reassures us we are in still in the familiar world of comedy. Playing off Conan’s obsession to detail, a subtle characteristic of the humor of his show, television references itself to develop the themes of the ad. Stereotypical representations of India: haggling (sec 46), using a loom to weave fabric (sec 1:06) and elephant ride in traffic to the tune of Bollywood(sec 1:24) are made easier to relate to as Conan entertainingly performs them. While Judge Judy’s “stern demeanor and camera shots from below accentuate her power” and lend authority to her neoliberal resolutions (Ouellette 230), housewives waving (sec 1:24) and a gossip session with the local washing ladies (sec 1:30), lend Conan a similar sort of “authority”, this time cultural. By the time we hear the AMEX slogan “If you are really serious about entertainment, every detail counts” (sec 1:50), the viewer has become “familiar” with India through our familiarity with Conan. Nonetheless, while showcasing its diversity and economic possibilities, this ad creates a picturesque image of India that obscures less glamorous aspects like poverty and caste and gender discrimination, etc., just as Judge Judy “emphasizes individual shortcomings over societal complexities and inequalities” (Ouellette 228). Narrating the exciting origins of silk curtains through Conan O’ Brian, this ad legitimizes an ideology of a globalized world, in which to find the best commodities we must go to exotic places, a story that makes American Express more compelling but is only the half of it.

Clip 3: Modern Family

Television can also normalize certain societal values through the encoding and circulating of “representations of knowledge” that informs how viewers come to know about the world, including their place in it (Livingstone 92). Just as shows like Leave it to Beaver presented normative visions of what constitutes an ideal suburban family in the 60’s and 70’s, current programs like Modern Family attempts to make similar claims. It does so through what Livingstone calls “mediated knowledge” whereby televisions “recognition of the familiar or legitimation of the known” give it the ability to not just to explore the new but alsoto “legitimize the hitherto marginalized” (97). This mechanism is apparent in Modern Family. However, whereas the sitcom family is familiar “because it resembles our own”, reinforcing assumptions and offering the pleasure of the familiar (Livingstone 99), Modern Family is unique because it offers a challenge to these images, as non-traditional portrayals coexist alongside normative reproductions of the typical family.

In this clip, Gloria - married to a divorced older man, Jay - reaffirms traditional expectations of a Latina in the US, as an exotic, hyper-sexualized figure, accent and all (Sec 10). At the same time, her son Manny is portrayed as a near genius, smarter than everyonearound him. Jay’s character often reinforces and contrasts these two competing expectations, as in this clip where he claims he’ll teach them real chess (sec 40). Direct address, is foundational to this text, invoking the discursive elements of the documentary to explain and emphasize certain emotions or behaviors (sec 58, 1:20), adding a patina of realism and“personal” knowledge and justification, which Livingstone says is “routinely excluded from the sitcom genre” (98). Mitchell and Cameron, a gay couple, are, in many ways, also the most traditional. When they fear a man entered their child’s room, we see how they respond with a bat and absolute resolve; only to with fulfill stereotypes with exaggerated gestures and the phrase “If a Spider had broken in here, he would have been in trooouble” (sec 1:53). In all, Modern Family encapsulates well how television can “mediate knowledge” departing from a point of familiarity to embrace and normalize the exotic.

As the world becomes moreconnected, televisions ability to assimilate and normalize will continue to be crucial in creating shared experiences and perhaps even values to which we can all relate to. It is precisely this ability what has made it so ubiquitous, as we keep returning to television to access worlds from which we would otherwise be removed.