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.