Critic and professor Mark Crispin Miller, one of the voices I hear in my head, had this to say about TV in his essay, "Deride and Conquer," part of a 1986 anthology titled "Watching Television."
On first reading this piece about how TV blurs the lines between different sorts of programming (and ads), I remember thinking Miller overstated his case. Twenty years on, we live in a 1000-channel, product-placement-heavy universe. Top-dollar ads and prime time dramas strive to look like Hollywood studio pictures. The news often resembles a weepy TV movie, a combative syndicated talk show or a home shopping channel. And TV Guide Channel and E! treat the comings and goings of celebs and pseudo-celebs as an "event" or a "story." "Deride and Conquer" now seems prophetic.
In 1986, Miller described TV as having "...gone beyond the explicit celebration of commodities to the implicit reinforcement of that spectatorial posture which TV requires of us. Now it is not enough just to proffer an infinitude of goods; TV must also try to get its viewers to prefer the passive, hungry watching of those goods, must lead us to believe that our spectatorial inaction is the only sort of action possible. Appropriately, TV pursues this project through some automatic strategies of modern advertising....
"First of all, TV now exalts TV spectatorship by preserving a hermetic vision that is uniformly televisual. Like advertising, TV today shows almost nothing that might somehow clash with its busy, monolithic style. This new stylistic near-integrity is the product of a long process whereby TV has eliminated or subverted whichever of its older styles have threatened to impede the sale of goods; that is, styles that might once have encouraged some non-televisual type of spectatorship. Despite the rampant commodity emphasis on TV since the mid-50s, there were still several valuable rifts in its surface, contrasts that could still enable a critical view of TV's enterprise.
"For instance, there was for years a a stark contrast between the naturalistic gray of TV's 'public interest' programming (the news, and 'educational television') and the bright, speedy images surrounding it--a contrast that sustained, however vaguely, the recognition of a world beyond the ads and game shows. That difference is gone now that the news has been turned into a mere extension of prime time, relying on the same techniques and rhetoric that define the ads."
Miller's observations have dated in the sense that TV does allow keen stylistic gradations between channels. Such HBO dramas as "The Sopranos," "Deadwood" and "Rome," for instance, tend to be emotionally cooler, more classically directed, more rooted in wide masters and deliberate camera moves than, say, the jagged, documentary-affected, emotionally turbocharged dramas you see on FX ("The Shield," "Rescue Me"). But he was right about TV news, which has become even more frenetic, jumbled and prone to melodrama than when Miller wrote "Deride and Conquer." And he was right when he wrote that TV, like all durable media, had incorporated self-awareness, even a mild pantomime of self-criticism, as a means of defusing distrust and ensuring its own survival. That impulse explains the occasional appearance, on news channels or medium-conscious outlets like TV Land and Trio, of media experts who are given anywhere from 10 seconds to a minute to describe (but never actually critique) the neon funnel cloud swirling around them.
"TV solicits each viewer's allegiance by reflecting back his or her own automatic skepticism toward TV," Miller wrote. "Thus, TV protects itself from criticism or rejection by incorporating our very animus against the spectacle into the spectacle itself."
Wednesday, February 01, 2006
From the short stack: Mark Crispin Miller on TV
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16 comments:
THat is a very interesting idea -- that TV is sort of a self-deprecating medium for the most part, reveling in how much of it sucks. THis is a bit off the beaten path, but I wanted to rant against the laughtrack. I can't watch comedies with them anymore unless they are older ones that I grew up liking. It's strange -- at some point TV got so lazy that they started using the same size laugh for every joke. In the 70s, you'd have giggles, guffaws and riotout laughter -- but now all the reactions are identical, acting as if everything that is said is the most hysterical thing ever put on TV.
That's not off the beaten track at all. The laugh track is a perfect example of television telling you how you are supposed to respond to it. The decline of the laugh track was one of the more heartening developments of recent commercial TV history. It's incredible how much better, even sophisticated, even the simplest comedies seem without one.
A laugh track tidbit: The networks used the same laugh loops in various combinations for decades and decades. If you have a keen ear, listen closely to, say, a Norman Lear comedy from the 1970s and an "I Love Lucy" from the 1950s. You will hear the same guffawing man, the same gasping-for-breath squeaky-voiced woman, etc.
Whenever I think of laughtracks, I always think of the scene in "Annie Hall" when Woody Allen watches Tony Roberts give his crew instructions on where to sweeten the laughs on his show.
I just thought of something else regarding TV's lowering of its own expectations: do you remember any of John Lithgow's Emmy speeches for "3rd Rock from the Sun" -- he almost would explicitly say how silly it was that he kept winning for such a show.
My thing with laughtracks is that I'll always give a comedy with no laughtrack a longer leash than one with it. If a bad joke gets greeted with silence, I let it go, but if it's accompanied by wave after wave of guffaws, I just feel insulted.
One of the few laughtracked comedies I really enjoyed in recent years was Fox's "Titus" (from the same guy who created "Book of Daniel"). It had one of the loudest, most obnoxious laughtracks on TV, which I always assumed was artificial. Then I went to an episode taping and discovered that they didn't need to boost the laughs at all. I think there's something about experiencing a joke live that makes it seem funnier, whether it's at a sitcom taping, a comedy club, "Saturday Night Live," whatever. From the distance of your couch, the immediacy fades and so does the humor.
I can't wait for the day when blogs are more than hypertextual diaries. I read this and I saw this and hear's a picture of me with my wife. I'm sure there are sites that aspire to be more than what we have, something more abstract, creative, and maybe even a little poetic in terms of how ther are laid out. I've been reading these movie blogs for a couple of years now and they're stale. It's the orthodoxy of punk all over again. We're going to create a new world and it has to look exactly like this. It's time to rip it up and start again. These blogs are like cocktail parties: I'm reading Mark Crispin Miller and oh, have you seen the new Malick, and isn't it a shame about Spielberg, and Hey, let's play a game! Everyone name their top five...blah, blah, blah, and who is this man and why is he saying this, he shouldn't be allowed to speak, that's not what we're here for, now everyone be civil. Mr Zoller, I've been trying to read you and your comrade White's film reviews for six years now and I go no longer go on. I couldn't stand Kael when she was alive and now I've got the two of you putting the kibosh on anything that doesn't strain to be at least three IQ points below your own. Leave the populism to Lyndon LaRouche. Kael hated only what she felt made her use her mind. Because how could anyone dare tell her that she didn't already know everything there is to know. Your pal White's cowardly attack on Spike Lee (Spike Lee lives in a nice house and drives a Mercedes!? How dare he!) revealed him to be the adolescent wannabe Marxist that he is. And I know you or your "administrator" are probably not going to post this rant because it has nothing with the topic, but you should, because I am off to search for other places in this thing we call cyberspacejkvbbfcbnsdfOvb sfvbSVB DAWVB SKVB ASBDVKJBV JAWBDVKSBN FSFK/J VBN/S VBN/SVN /CKSNJASDVJKBDKJVBDVB A!
Wow. That was kind of amazing.
Anonymous is really gonna love the next post, where I list some articles I kind of enjoyed and encourage readers to check them out so we can talk about them.
You're right, however, that we're probably headed into another orthodoxy of punk, if indeed we aren't already in it. But I'm not sure what the answer is, and for a variety of reasons, I am not sure I'm the guy to find it.
Remember, though, this is still a young medium that's finding its way. It took movies about twenty years to really get cooking, and it took TV about 50. Be patient.
In the meantime, though I'm having a hard time accepting the idea that Kael, who championed some of the great pop artists of the 20th century, didn't like movies that made her think. (She understood that to watch movies was to think with one's eyes, one of the most frequently ripped-off observations in criticism, probably because it's one of the smartest.) For the next frontier of artistic expression, check out Google Video, which offers as close to a picture of 21st century folk art as you're likely to find anyplace.
Damn you, anonymous. You're in my imagination now. I keep coming back to this post and reading it again, and each time I am more amused by it.
I must ask: Did you know when you wrote it that it was metacriticism-as-performance-art, essentially a smartass summary of the very principles set forth in the excerpt from Miller's TV essay?
If the answer is no, then your post is the greatest coincidence in this blog's month-old run.
If the answer is yes, I ask you to consider coming back to post again.
Of course, you know thanks to Dubya, anonymous Internet posting can be considered illegal now. :-)
Anonymous originality benefits no one, though. Come back, metacritical performance artist comments poster!
Mr ZS, you remind me of someone I once knew when I took acting classes at NYU. Back then I was prone to wearing very colorful short-sleeve button down shirts as a way to brighten up the rest of my rather drab wardrobe. No matter what shirt I wore, as soon as I walked into class, there was this guy, I think his name was Talish Barrow, and as soon as he would see me he would come over and look at my shirt and say Hey that's a nice shirt and I would say thank you and then he would say No, I mean that's a really great shirt. At some point he would feel the fabric of my shirt and loudly proclaim its merits, and then he would call everyone over in class to look at my shirt, which they would do, since it seemed at the time that the aforementioned Mr Barrow, with his thick black smart glasses and soft white curls, was, in this setting, a stunning example of male pulchritude. Within moments I would become an exhibit for him to pontificate on; is this a Hawaiian shirt? is he wearing it to be retro? does he think it's a good-looking shirt? is he being ironic? why is he so quiet? and so on and so on, until the entire class was kind of laughing and kind of not. And then there was me, standing in the middle, not saying a word, just wanting to find my seat, wishing I had never picked out this particular shirt. This went on day after day, until I realized that I was just a prop in an ongoing performance that Mr Barrow had probably perfected sometime in high school in order to attract girls and to draw attention away from the fact that his only skill was the subtle ridicule of people who didn't really fight back. Yes. You kind of remind me of him.
I wasn't actually making fun of you. And I love the internet.
In other words, no sarcasm intended. Every word was meant sincerely, weird as that might seem. Especially the part about that first post being kind of amazing, and hoping you would post again.
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