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.