For those readers who have been following my book-in-progress Complex TV, you may have noticed a lengthy hiatus since I last posted a chapter. Not coincidentally, the last chapter I posted was in August 2012, shortly before returning to the classroom after my sabbatical. Since then, my writing process has stalled considerably, in large part due to the demands of teaching, serving as department chair, being back in the U.S. as a homeowner, etc. – not to mention my work on another book, How to Watch Television, which is due to be published in late-August (more on that soon!). But my writing problems were not just about time and focus, as I had two chapters left to write that were causing some issues.

One of those chapters is on Endings, and I wanted to leave that for last for both poetic and strategic reasons. The other one, which I’ve been struggling with for months, was the Genre chapter. In part this was due to my ambivalence of returning to the scene of my first book, Genre & Television, as I feel I’ve said most of what I need to say about television genre. But more than other chapters, I’ve had a difficult time structuring my arguments that I did want to make, so I’ve done a lot of starting and stopping in drafting this chapter. I also decided to cut the History chapter during this starting & stopping, incorporating some of that material in this chapter and recognizing that a history of television storytelling was far beyond the scope of a feasible chapter.

Although this delay was frustrating to me (and my publisher), it turns out to have been worthwhile. Since the time when I’d hoped to be done with the chapter, I’ve read a few new pieces of scholarship (both published and forthcoming) that allowed me to rethink much of what I wanted to say, especially Linda Williams’s work on The Wire and melodrama. Inspired by that work, I’ve changed both the name and focus of the chapter to be specifically about Serial Melodrama rather than Genre more broadly. I feel the resulting shift has led to a more coherent and appropriate addition to the book, and I must thank my colleague & friend Louisa Stein for her frank feedback on an earlier draft – but you can read it and be the judge!

Here’s the (revised) abstract that will be in the book’s introduction:

One of the central narrative drives found within complex television is serial melodrama. This chapter explores the role of melodrama within contemporary serial narratives, starting with the soap opera’s debatable connection this mode of storytelling. By separating out the narrative norms of soap operas from the emotional appeals of melodrama, I argue that soap’s storytelling form is less vital to primetime serials than the discursive history that has linked seriality to the soap genre for decades. Instead, I consider how the emotional responses triggered by serial melodrama help forge the mixed-gender appeal of narratively complex series, with programs like Lost, Veronica Mars, Friday Night Lights, The Good Wife, and The Wire playing with such conventions to complicate well-established assumptions about genre categories and their gendered appeals.

Some of these bits are recycled & adapted from blog posts, including two pieces on soap operas, and my discussion of Skyler White. And I have made the decision to leave the previous versions of chapters up on MediaCommons Press, even though they are now out-of-date (in referencing this as the Genre chapter rather than Serial Melodrama), figuring that an archive of the highly-contingent writing process might be of interest to some readers.

As always, feel free to leave comments on this chapter, or any of the others that you may not have gotten a chance to read yet. I hope the hiatus to the next chapter will be much shorter, and I’ll be poised to submit a revised manuscript to NYU Press later this summer!

Thanks in advance for comments!

At first, I thought I didn’t have much more to say beyond what I said in my initial tweets: “I don’t see the downside of using Kickstarter for major studio projects. It helps support Kickstarter, which should help indies as well. As for fans as funders, we’re basically just pre-buying merchandise, DVDs, or experiences. How is that unethical?” I still hold to that basic sentiment, which resonates with this great interview with VM creator Rob Thomas:

The nice thing is that we never wanted to be perceived as a charity. We always imagined that we’re putting up a Kickstarter page, and we’re selling real product at real prices to fans. It’s not like a pledge drive where you pledge 100 dollars and get a 4 dollar tote bag, where it’s done out of the goodness of your heart, and for charity. We wanted to created packages where people look at what they’re getting and think, ‘Wow, I got a script and a digital download and a t-shirt for $35. I would pay that!’ So all those people worrying that we’re asking for this money to make our movie, we’re selling you a product. Think of us as a store, not a charity.

Now I do understand that it gets slippery to use the same site as a “store” for a mass market project like Veronica Mars and a “charity” (or at least non-equity support) for fringe or special-interest projects that would struggle to raise 1/1000 of Thomas’s campaign, and there is a danger of co-opting the site for major projects. But I think there’s greater upside in thinking that many of those 50,000 supporters are new to Kickstarter, and might discover other, more indy projects on the site that interest them as well. Certainly my own experiences with Kickstarter include both established filmmakers (backing Hal Hartley’s newest project Meanwhile) and up-and-comers (like a documentary on the Wisconsin Uprising or my former student’s first feature Manchild), and I feel happy to have both types of project co-existing via the platform.

What inspired me to write this post was remembering the first thing I ever wrote about Veronica Mars – not my analysis of its perfect pilot, but a piece for Flow in 2005 called “Exchanges of Value.” That article was about my experience of watching the first season via BitTorrent, and how such illicit consumption arguably added more value to the franchise than the more conventional way I watched the next two seasons (recorded on my TiVo, skipping ads, and not counting in any metric of viewership). The Flow piece is a snapshot of its time when the industry was just experimenting with monetizing digital downloads (I note at the end that Apple just released a video iPod!), but it also calls attention to an unusual fact: despite being a big fan of the show and calling it one of the last decade’s best series, I have never spent any of my own money on Veronica Mars. I have generated income for the series indirectly: ordering the DVDs for our college library, and regularly teaching the pilot, which inspires many students to keep viewing the series on Netflix or other sources.

So the $50 I spent on Wednesday to get a copy of the film’s script, a digital download in release week, a DVD, and a T-shirt (what a bargain!) was the first time I actually spent money on one of my favorite media texts. So while on the one hand I was pre-buying access to the film, I was also finally paying for the many hours of pleasure that Veronica Mars has given me. This type of serial investment is hard to quantify, as I could have certainly continued to not pay for my enjoyment of the series (and clearly my investment was not what triggered the film’s greenlight), but I felt moved to buy a stake in its continuation in large part because I felt I owed the series something for that past pleasure.

And I am also buying a stake in another form of serial pleasure: “a ticket to the ride” that is Kickstarter, in the words of Ian Bogost:

We’re paying for the sensation of a hypothetical idea, not the experience of a realized product. For the pleasure of desiring it. For the experience of watching it succeed beyond expectations or to fail dramatically. Kickstarter is just another form of entertainment. It’s QVC for the Net set. And just like QVC, the products are usually less appealing than the excitement of learning about them for the first time and getting in early on the sale.

For $50, I’m not only getting all that merchandise, I’m also getting regular emails from Rob Thomas updating me on the project, and a badge of honor for being a member of a growing tribe of supporters. I may have no equity stake in the project, but I do have an emotional one (which is arguably worth more than what my meager funds could purchase in profit sharing). So while I’m giving my money to Warner Bros., I do the same every time I pay my cable bill or buy a ticket to one of their films. But this time I’m getting something more palpable: I’m entering into a commercially-facilitated, serialized one-way relationship with a mass media text and its production crew – which is a pretty good definition of fandom in general.

First though, I want to link to a piece I wrote for the Chronicle of Higher Education about open access, MOOCs, and the like that is probably more broadly of interest. Read on if you’re interested in the inside-baseball arguments of television studies, or want to see a humanist playing around with numbers.

“Mapping a Pluralistic Field: What Does Television Studies Really Look Like?”

A recent trend in television scholarship is to begin articles and presentations with claims about trends in television scholarship. Although such sweeping declarations are typical for traditional territory-clearing justifications for why what you’re about say really, really matters, it does seem like a recent style is to characterize not just relevant gaps in the field, but to claim that the field as a whole is transforming. The language used to characterize such shifts is frequently “the turn,” whether a turn toward something (aesthetics, production studies, fan studies) or away from something else (cultural politics, history). Ron Becker offers one recent example of such rhetoric in his Antenna post summing up his Flow Conference paper:

Television studies is in the middle of what I would call a post-cultural-studies turn. The dramatic transformations of our object of study have redirected the attention of many scholars. More work, for example, is being done on aesthetics and form as well as on production and certain types of audience analysis (e.g., aca-fandom). Certainly many of these paths emerge out of cultural studies’ models and imperatives and some of the work being done in these areas are centrally motivated by a desire to engage with the unequal distribution of social power (for me, the heart of the cultural studies project). Others, however, seem differently invested. If television studies is drifting away from the cultural studies project (and I would argue it is), what might we do to revive the connection between the two?

Using Becker’s diagnosis as a case study for such diagnoses of the field’s direction and priorities, I am led to ask what exactly is the problem with such shifts in scholarly focus? After all, shouldn’t the field be pluralistic enough to embrace all sorts of topics, methods, and questions? One answer would be that Becker and others regard work on aesthetics, production, and aca-fandom as illegitimate scholarship, and thus want to purge it from the field—I assume that is not the case, both based on my own conversations with him and because I have not seen any direct attacks in that direction. (If that is the actual motive, then let’s have that debate out in the open.) The other answer I can think of involves the finite space for scholarship in the field: if these newer focuses are rising, then traditional work in cultural studies might become crowded out and marginalized. But this claim raises some key questions: has television studies actually turned? Does television scholarship now favor issues of aesthetics, fandom, and production practices over political and cultural concerns? These are empirical questions that can be researched, and that’s the goal of this presentation: mapping television studies to get a more accurate sense of what types of scholarship, if any, are dominant or marginal.

To accomplish this project, I first need two things: a corpus of scholarship to represent the field, and a set of categories to map that work. Defining a manageable corpus to stand-in for the entirety of television studies is quite difficult, as scholars tend to publish across a range of formats, from books to chapters to journal articles to blogs. In choosing a corpus, I needed to select work that would be accessible to be analyzed, thus ruling out conference presentations. It needed to be prominent enough to reflect top work that would help shape and reflect the field. It needed to be published without market considerations, ruling out books and anthologies that are often shaped by what publishers believe most marketable and appropriate for classroom use, not necessarily reflecting the full scope of the field. This leaves journals, whose submissions and acceptances are (ideally) based solely on quality of work, not popularity of topic. I needed to look at open calls only, as journals that publish theme issues (like Velvet Light Trap) or have an overall special focus (like Feminist Media Studies or Transformative Works and Cultures) would narrow the scope of scholarship. Finally, I needed a journal that was prolific and long-lasting enough to measure change, with a substantial number of television studies essays spanning many years; this ruled out broader titles like Cinema Journal and Critical Studies in Media Communication whose television coverage is more erratic.

These factors point to one title as the best corpus to chart television studies over the past decade: Television and New Media, the only television studies journal published in the United States with a broad scope covering the entire field. Started in 2000 around the same time that SCMS’s Television Studies Interest Group began, TVNM published quarterly until 2008, when it switched to a bimonthly, resulting in a total of 64 issues released thus far. In that time, there were 16 theme issues that were assembled through invitation or a narrow call, so they do not qualify for the corpus; after also excluding editorials, short commentaries, interviews, and book reviews, there were 203 articles of at least 10 pages to comprise my sample of television scholarship. Of those, 26 fell into the “and New Media” side of the journal with no television content, leaving a sample of 177 television studies articles spanning 14 years to categorize.

Deciding how to categorize this corpus was more straightforward, as there is a fair amount of consensus as to the broad contours of media studies, broken down into categories of industry, text, audience, medium, and the like. I chose to use the framework I am most familiar with: the six facets of television that I outline in my book Television & American Culture: Commercial Industry, Democratic Institution, Textual Form, Cultural Representation, Everyday Practice, and Technological Medium. These were adapted from similar models developed by other media scholars, and as far as I know are not controversial in excluding or privileging particular academic interests or fields. I conceived of these facets broadly and adapted them for the broader global scope of TVNM, allowing Industry to include non-commercial production practices, Democratic Institution to encompass broader issues of nation and policy beyond just democracy, and Everyday Practice to encompass all aspects of reception.

To categorize the essays, I created a spreadsheet logging each article, and assigned it a primary category and up to two secondary areas—18% of the essays only received a primary designation into one of these six fields, as they seemed solely rooted in a singular topic and approach, while 62% had a single secondary facet and 20% had two secondaries. My criteria for judgement was certainly subjective, based on my reading of the essay and understanding of the field; I’m sure that some people might disagree with my classifications, especially between primary and secondary facets, so I’ve made my spreadsheet available to be downloaded and I welcome feedback on the classifications. As examples, two of the most downloaded essays (according to the journal’s website) are “Watching Television Without Pity: The Productivity of Online Fans” by Mark Andrejevic, and “Free TV: File-Sharing and the Value of Television” by Michael Newman. I categorized Andrejevic’s piece primarily in Reception, as it studies the practices of online fans, and secondarily within both Industry (regarding how producers engage with the site) and Medium (as it considers how online media impact television reception); I placed Newman’s essay primarily in Medium, as its argument focuses on how technological shifts impact our understanding of television, and secondarily in Reception, concerning illicit viewing practices. While there’s certainly a case to be made for alternate primary categorizations in such examples, I analyzed the data on both primary and secondary categories to minimize the impact of such judgment calls.

While creating the article log, I included in each entry its authors, publication information, the keywords as listed in the journal, the country focused on in the essay, any key programs examined, and whether the piece was historical or contemporary in scope. This did lead to some interesting insights about the journal’s content. For instance, there were 15 keywords that got at least five hits (not counting the generic “television”), listed here in descending order of frequency: reality TV, globalization, gender, broadcasting, new media, race, celebrity, Internet, masculinity, media, media policy, national identity, nationalism, neoliberalism, and television history. Of course the process of assigning keywords is quite subjective and variable, and frequent terms are broad enough to cross many approaches to television studies. Another interesting insight from the data is that despite some scholars complaining that too much of television scholarship focuses on a narrow group of “quality” programming, only two series were written about more than once: Seinfeld has three essays, and The Office had two. The journal’s contents are certainly American-centric, with 56% of essays focused on U.S. television, but given its American publication home (and the global importance of U.S. television), almost half of the pieces being non-American is actually surprising. The accusation of television studies’s contemporary focus seems to be true, with 78% of articles focusing on contemporary topics (defined as within 10 years of the article’s publication), although the presence of “new media” in the journal’s title might discourage more historical submissions.

As to the main data, how did the scope of the journal’s articles map onto the categories of television studies? We could hypothesize that if the field were to be equally balanced between these six facets, then each category would command around 17% of the articles, but the data are far more unbalanced than that—the top two categories comprise 26% and 23% of articles, while the bottom two receive only 6% and 11%. Not surprisingly to me, the most prolific category, comprising more than a quarter of articles, is Cultural Representation, considering how television portrays various identity categories and conveys dominant social norms—this has long been the main focus of television studies, and the contents of TVNM bear that out. The second category at 23% is Industry, both political economic critiques and production culture analyses. The third category at 20% is issues of Nation, whether regulatory and policy studies or discussions of national practices of media and citizenship—together these three categories comprise almost 70% of the journal’s focus. On the less frequent end of the scale, Textual Form comprised only 6% of articles, covering issues of narrative, style, and genre, while Medium Technology, including issues of transmedia transformations and medium history, was the focus of 11% of the essays. Reception, including fandom and general audience studies, fell into fourth place with 14%, still below the average prediction of 17%. Based on these overall data, it would seem like the focus of the field is very much centered on issues of industry, politics, and representation, not form and fandom.

Primary focus of all articles

As I noted earlier, the primary category designation is subject to more subjective judgments, as it can be difficult to place a multifaceted article into a singular category. Looking at the data combining primary and secondary designations provides a different vision of the journal’s foci, hopefully reducing the impact of subjective judgments and capturing more balance in focus. We need to look at counts of categories rather than percentages, because the variable numbers of secondary designations makes it hard to imagine the count as a portion of a whole, but charting the counts of articles falling into each category offers a perspective on the balance. The top three above-average categories are the same from the primary ranking, although Nation includes the largest number of articles when including secondary designations. Both Medium and Form expand proportionally, but still are below expectations for a balanced field.

Combined count of primary & secondary focuses in all articles

Of course one of the questions I set out to answer is whether the field has shifted over time—might the weighting we see throughout the journal’s run obscure these new trends in the field? We can compare the percentages of articles with a primary focus on each category before and after 2008, an approximate midpoint in my sample, and indeed some changes are notable. From 2000 to 2007, Form was truly marginal as a primary focus, with only 1 article out of 82 (“The Frenzy of the Audible : Pleasure, Authenticity, and Recorded Laughter” by Jacob Smith), while from 2008 to the present, 11% of articles are primarily focused on formal topics. However the growth in formal analysis does not come at the expense of more typically political topics of Representation and Nation, both of which see no significant changes at the midpoint; instead, the main drop comes in a reduction of Medium studies, from 13% pre-2008 to 8% since—a surprising result given the importance of recent technological transformations and massive shifts in what we consider the television medium. Along with slight drops in both Industry and Reception studies, the balance since 2008 is certainly different concerning Form, but overall the journal’s focus has not radically transformed to suggest a massive turn in the field. We can similarly include secondary categories to chart changes in these proportions—in this comparison, we can see the most balanced range of essays, with only Nation significantly above average and Reception significantly below. But yet again, there is no evidence of a transformation toward an unbalanced field where traditional issues of cultural studies are marginalized.

Compared proportions of primary focus, pre-/post-2008

Comparison of primary & secondary combined, pre-/post-2008

Another way to examine the change over time within the journal’s contents is to look more granularly at categorical trends over TVNM’s 13 years. To capture this change, we can look at each year’s set of articles and chart the percentage of them falling into a category as either primary or secondary.[1] Graphing the number of each category over time confirms the consistent grouping of Nation, Industry, and Representation as above-average, and Form, Reception, and Medium as below, but it is hard to discern changes over time with the fluctuation between different time periods. We can better visualize these tendencies by charting trendlines from these data, performing a basic regression analysis to level out the fluctuations. What these pictures tell us most clearly is that Form is definitely on the rise as both primary and secondary characteristics, but still falls below average in its share of articles, with the rise more stemming from how few articles concerned form in the first half of the journal’s run. Other trends are less stark, although Medium and Reception are certainly declining in importance, and Nation, Industry, and Representation have some overall shifting in weights within the top three in both primary and secondary categories.

So what can we learn from this data? First off, claims that cultural politics have been marginalized within the field seem unfounded, as majority of essays still foreground issues of Nation, Representation and Industry. Likewise, formal analysis is certainly more common today than it was ten years ago, but it is still appears with below average frequency. Most surprisingly to me, articles concerning medium and technology are in decline, despite the massive shifts in television technology that we are currently experiencing.

As for what do we do with this research, it does raise the question about how representative TVNM is of the field as a whole—after all it is only one journal whose reputation and editorial guidance might shape the submissions and selection process. We could do similar analysis of other journals, as well as books, anthologies, websites, and conference programs, although the mitigating factors and issues of access make such data complicated. Ultimately, unless new analyses prove that my account is not representative of the field as a whole, I would hope we could retire saying that the field is “turning” without backing up those claims. I see no evidence that new trends are crowding out other types of scholarship, as there is ample space for all types of television studies. Instead of spending time decrying what’s wrong with the field, we should do the type of work that we believe needs to be done; if we all focus on doing the type of media scholarship that we most want to see represent the field, then the field will effectively represent us all.

—
Many thanks to my friends & colleagues Matt Kimble and Caitlin Myers for their crash courses in data analysis.

[1] Note that because of a large number of special issues, 2003 only had 3 television-themed articles, so I grouped it with 2002 to create a larger, more consistent sample; likewise I grouped the two issues published thus far in 2013 with 2012.

If you haven’t seen it, take the eight minutes to watch & enjoy. But there’s a good chance you’ve seen it, as it’s been viewed over 72,000 times (and counting) in the three days it’s been online. It’s been written about on Buzzfeed, Jezebel, CBS News, CBC, Yahoo!, Mashable, and many other blogs & Tumblrs, not to mention hundreds of Facebook shares. In short, it has become spreadable, the term that Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford & Joshua Green offer as an alternative, more active concept than “viral.”

My perspective on this video is unique, as it was made by my student Bianca Giaever as her final project at Middlebury before graduating last week, and I was the project’s adviser. Middlebury has a Winter Term every January where students enroll in a single intensive course or do an independent project, and Bianca approached me to make a video over the month. I’ve known Bianca for a few years, teaching her in class and helping to guide her independent-designed major in Narrative Studies, The bulk of her creative background was in audio production for radio, and oral storytelling in creating a Middlebury branch of The Moth live storytelling performances. In the fall semester, she made “Holy Cow Lisa,” an excellent project in her Video Production course that took an audio interview and “visualized” it through creative & playful video footage. She wanted to see if she could make another project in that vein as a kind-of “proof of concept” that illustrated audio stories could work as a format – the result was “The Scared Is Scared.” Consider the concept proven!

One of the very best parts of my job is helping facilitate my students’ creativity. Although I’m scholar by training and practice, Middlebury’s Film & Media Culture is a hybrid department mixing critical studies and hands-on creative work. I occasionally teach courses that are creative in focus, often mix creative projects into critical studies courses, and regularly advise students’ creative projects in video production, screenwriting, or other media. I love to listen to a student’s ideas, give them some feedback to push them forward or offer a critical perspective, and then get out of the way to let them create something.

In the case of “The Scared is Scared,” I feel particularly invested in the project because I saw it develop from nothing to a spreadable hit over the course of a single month. A project adviser’s role can be quite variable, but if things are working well, an adviser’s contributions are necessary but insufficient aspects of the final product – in this case, it was definitely true, as I introduced Bianca to Asa, the video’s storyteller and my son’s friend. Without that necessary introduction (as well as giving Bianca the water wings that Toby Mouse wears), the video would not be what it was – but obviously the journey from that introduction to the final work was all due to Bianca, Asa, and their many collaborators. Throughout the month, my role was primarily to assure Bianca that there was potential in her ideas and that the audio and video she was putting together was excellent – in fact, she quoted me saying “This might work” as the blurb for the video’s poster around campus!

So I’ve watched the video spread (up to 78,000 views in the time it took me to write this post!) and receive glowing acclaim with the pride of a coach & teacher (and a little bit of the ownership you feel at the wedding of two people you introduced!). I also watch it spread from the meta-perspective of a scholar of digital media, which raises numerous questions. What does it mean to traditional educational hierarchies to have a student’s work seen & enjoyed by thousands of people? Does spreadability matter when assessing and grading students’ work? Should we encourage students to seek spreadability as a goal, or just facilitate it as a potential byproduct of creative success? How do such accomplishments impact the reputation of the department and potentially benefit other students’ opportunities? And most immediately, how will this success help Bianca make a living after Middlebury? (Please contact her if you have any answers to the last one.) I have no answers to these questions yet, but they point to some of the new dimensions of teaching film and video that I would not have anticipated mattering when I arrived at Middlebury ten years ago.

But in the meantime, I’ll just enjoy watching the video and its rippling wake, and relish in my own favorite moment: the way Asa says the word “merengues.”

So I’m presenting a paper here (on the conference’s only panel dealing with television) that I’m sharing for feedback – I hope to expand and publish the essay, so please offer thoughts on where I might extend the ideas. The title explains the topic – the argument unfolds beneath the fold.

“Haunted by Seriality: The Formal Uncanny of Mulholland Drive.”

The most acclaimed American film of this century was a television program.

I am not referring to The Wire or The Sopranos, or any of the other landmark television series that many critics hail as equal to, or surpassing, most of recent cinema. Rather, I literally mean that the American film of the 21^st century that is ranked highest on the standard-bearing Sight & Sound critics’ poll (at #28 in the 2012 poll) actually was a television show, at least before it became a film. Mulholland Drive, David Lynch’s 2001 mind-bending film noir, literally was a television program, as it was conceived and produced as a pilot for ABC in 1998, before they rejected it the next year for being too violent and strange. The French company Studio Canal Plus asked Lynch to see the pilot a year later, and ended up purchasing its rights and providing funding to shoot more footage to create a feature film version.

This unusual, and perhaps even unique, production history is typically treated as a footnote for critical and scholarly analyses, often just as an aside marveling that such a remarkable film could emerge out of such initial commercial failure.^[1] Some critics outright reject the significance of the film’s origin story; as one writes in reference to its television beginnings, “People often talk about this fact like it was some kind of obstacle, but to [me] it is the least important thing in the world. Especially given [my] interpretation it shows just how in control Lynch is regarding every bit of what we see.”^[2]. However, I contend that a key part of what makes Mulholland Drive truly remarkable is precisely its televisual origination—not because it transcended the limits of televisual failure through a twist of cross-media fate, but because its initial design for television is essential to its cinematic achievements, and provides a crucial key to understanding the film’s power and emotional resonance. But to get there, we first need to look at how the film has been typically talked about by viewers and critics.

Not surprisingly for a film that is so oblique and unconventional, the primary question that critics and viewers alike have focused on is “What does Mulholland Drive mean?” Although this question seems fairly straightforward—or at least simpler than its potential answers—there are two distinct ways to think about a film’s meaning.^[3] The first is a question of comprehension, trying to understand the literal coherence of the film’s narrative events, especially involving the shift that occurs at the 110 minute mark, where the narrative reality transforms and nearly all of the characters take on new identities and relationships. The most common explanation for the film’s narrative is that the first 80% of Mulholland Drive is Diane Selwyn’s dream, and that the final act portrays the reality she is trying to escape, but many other explications argue for various versions of dreams, reality, deaths, and parallels, all catalogued online on websites like Lost on Mulholland Drive.^[4] Such detailed analyses of narrative worlds, plots, and characters are part of a trend that I have called “forensic fandom,” flourishing around contemporary complex television series but also common to films, literature, and other media.^[5] Lynch himself has seemingly contributed to such forensic criticism, as the film’s DVD features no extra content except for an insert listing “David Lynch’s 10 Clues to Unlocking This Thriller,” highlighting stylistic and narrative features that seem to link the two parallel storyworlds—although fans have also postulated that Lynch might be using ironic misdirection in these clues to further confound viewers.

The other way to answer the question about Mulholland Drive’s meaning is to engage in interpretation, looking for the meanings beneath the surface, at the level of symbolism, thematics, or subtextual significance. Not surprisingly, this has been the main purview of academic analyses, where we can find readings of the film as illustrating Lacan’s theories of fantasy, desire, and reality;^[6] evoking contemporary technologies of virtual reality;^[7] dissolving the boundaries between semiotic oppositions;^[8] offering a lesbian tragedy as an indictment of homophobia;^[9] and critiquing the dream-crushing logic of Hollywood cinema,^[10] among many others. It is telling that in all of these interpretive essays, there is nary a mention of the film’s televisual origins and unusual split production history, as these scholars treat the completed film as a coherent, self-contained text to be exhumed, rather than the product of a unique creative process that might actually help us understand the film’s meanings and aesthetic power.

Thus I want to ask a related but quite different question: how does Mulholland Drive work? By “work,” I am acknowledging that the film is an aesthetic object with its own unique design, and to understand its narrative and emotional impact, we need to unpack and analyze that design in the context of its production history. This approach stems from a subfield of film studies that David Bordwell has termed “historical poetics,” analyzing the formal techniques employed by any text within the contexts of its production and circulation.^[11] To understand how Mulholland Drive works as a cinematic text, I cannot think of any bit of information more important than the knowledge that most of it was written, produced, and edited for a different medium altogether—and most vitally for my purposes, that it was designed as the first installment of an ongoing, serialized story.^[12]

Taking its production history into account seems like it shouldn’t be controversial, especially given that Mulholland Drive’s story is in large part about producing a film, and thus the film calls attention to the mixture of inputs and goals that go into the production process. Both comprehension and interpretation-based analyses mine the film for obscure details to support their theories, so the film’s core setting and plot as a Hollywood behind-the-scenes drama seems like a clear invitation for greater contextual reflection. I think part of the resistance to considering its production history stems from how critics have a contradictory relationship to the concept of a film’s intention. On the one hand, critics regard the film text as surpassing the limits of intentionality, suggesting that the final product speaks for itself beyond the creative process that went into making it. On the other, critics place so much faith in the overriding vision of Lynch as auteur that they imagine the film as the unobstructed realization of his creative goals, ignoring the very real obstructions that sidelined the project for over a year and then transformed its medium and form. Instead of focusing on intent, I want to highlight design as the contextualized process by which Lynch and his collaborative team’s goals are realized—no matter what Lynch may or may not have intended, we know for certain that the story was initially designed as a serialized television program, and then redesigned as a self-contained film. This dramatic shift between media and narrative formats helps explain much of the text’s striking emotional power.

Fan sites have documented this design process, including detailed comparisons between the television pilot and completed film versions.^[13] The television version begins with the car accident that triggers Rita’s amnesia, and ends with Betty outfitting Rita in a blond wig, with few minor variations in editing, dialogue, pacing, and a couple of sequences that appear differently in each version, but by and large they are highly similar 90-minute sequences of storytelling. The bulk of the changes for the film version are found in a different opening sequence of a jitterbug contest, and the final 45 minutes consisting of all-new footage.^[14] Although ABC rejected the pilot, there is no doubt that the story was designed to continue onward from the wig scene, and all evidence suggests that the ongoing story would proceed in a direction quite differently from the film’s final act—the mysteries of Rita’s identity and her involvement in Diane’s death would slowly be revealed, Betty would become more directly involved with Adam and his film, and the threads of mobsters, detectives, and a fright-inducing dumpster-dwelling bum would all become interwoven into the enigmatic ongoing narrative. These original sequences function exactly as most dramatic television pilots do: setting up scenarios, character relationships, and dramatic conflicts that will continue to develop into sustained serial storytelling, and building up the overall expectation that the ongoing story will eventually come together and make sense.

Of course, the Mulholland Drive pilot is an example of failed seriality, as the story never did get a chance to continue, at least as it was originally designed. But that design still remains mostly intact at the core of the self-contained film, and I believe the spirit of seriality haunts the completed film. Many critics note that the first part of the film is fairly conventional in tone and style, at least for Lynch’s typical brand of Hollywood experimentation. As Todd McGowan writes, “Almost everyone who sees Mulholland Drive notes that the first part of the film makes a good deal of sense—at least for a David Lynch movie…. While the first part of Mulholland Drive is not without strange characters and events…, the mise-en-scène conforms on the whole to the conventions of the typical Hollywood film: scenes are well lit, conversations between characters flow without awkwardness, and even the plainest décor seems to sparkle. The editing also tends to follow classical Hollywood style, sustaining the spectator’s sense of spatial and temporal orientation.”^[15] McGowan uses such stylistic analysis to highlight that the film works to construct fantasy as more realistic than the unconventional “reality” found in the second part, a reading that certainly seems justified. However, he never mentions that this contrast is traceable directly to the film’s design, as its more conventionally narrated and styled section originated for television, a much less experimental form (especially in 1998) that demanded more narrative coherence than allowable on film; thus the “conventional” portion of the film seems to make sense precisely because it was designed to, but not to signify “fantasy” as much as “television.”

Mulholland Drive’s power and pleasures as a film derive less from a compelling narrative structure or even its symbolic meaning, but from its piercing moments of emotional affect and ability to create a deeply unsettling feeling in its viewers. Some of these moments would standout in either medium—the first Winkies Diner scene (which was shot for television, but edited out in the version submitted to ABC), Betty’s remarkable audition, the Club Silencio sequence—but others acquire a strange uncanny impact in the repurposed context of the film. I contend that the contrasting style and tone between the film’s two parts works much more on an emotional level than a symbolic or narrative one, and that this affective dimension is created in large part from the lingering sense of thwarted seriality in the made-for-television section. Much of the film’s affective power is achieved by keeping viewers off-balance via thwarted expectations, as in Betty’s surprisingly sultry audition, and thus the film as a whole uses our expectations that a serial narrative will continue and come together coherently, creating a productive dissonance between what the first part was designed to do and what the second part actually delivers.

One strategy of failed seriality is the inclusion of loose story threads in the film’s first part. Characters and plotlines are introduced in the first hour of the film that were clearly designed to continue onward if the television series had been produced, but then are transformed and redefined in the film’s conclusion (or ignored altogether) in ways clearly counter to how the pilot had been scripted and shot. For instance, one memorable scene shows Joe murdering Ed to retrieve his black book, presumably in search of Rita to kill her for the crime syndicate that is involved in producing Adam’s film. The scene functions as a dark comedic sequence of an escalating botched murder in the vein of the Coen Brothers or Quentin Tarantino, but also sets Joe up as an ongoing character with a story arc to be continued in subsequent episodes. One popular press article mulls the significance of this sequence in establishing ineffectual Joe in the dream sequence as a latent desire for the hit man Diane hires to kill Camilla in the reality sequence to have failed, but also as “part of the confusing background noise Lynch likes to put into his movies. It is a deeply felt contention of his that not everything makes sense. Less charitably, you can say it’s a loose end from the TV series that never got made.”^[16] But to dismiss the possibility of the “loose end” as a “less charitable” reading misses the power of the film’s failed seriality—the reason Joe’s scene works within the film is because it was not meant to be “confusing background noise,” but precisely because it was designed to actually make sense. Lynch certainly does include moments of random oddity in most of his films, but Mulholland Drive’s unique feature is that many of its least explicable moments were conceived as part of an ongoing sense-making narrative design. A scene like Joe’s botched murder is conventional enough to encourage us to expect a narrative payoff in connecting it into the main plotlines or establish Joe as a three-dimensional character, so the film’s refusal to weave together such threads in conventional ways helps create its sense of unsettling disorientation.

The film’s casting choices also play against convention and expectation in productive ways. Dan Hedaya is the fifth listed actor in the opening credits, suggesting a significant supporting role in keeping with his recognizable face as a character actor—by 2001, Hedaya had been in over 70 films and television programs, including a well-known recurring part on Cheers and major roles in films like Blood Simple, Clueless, and Dick (playing the titular character of Richard Nixon). Yet his character of mobster Vincenzo Castigliane appears in only one scene in the film, with just three brief lines. Similarly, Robert Forster plays Detective Harry McKnight (although unnamed within the film), a minor character appearing in one scene with three lines totaling less than twenty words. Yet he is one of only eight actors listed in the opening credits, with his name placed in the final spot as “And Robert Forster,” a signal of a major supporting character typically played by a well-known veteran actor. Forster fits that bill, with dozens of film and television roles since the late-1960s, and a 1997 Supporting Actor Oscar Nomination for Jackie Brown. While there is a tradition of named actors appearing in brief cameos, the contractual dictates behind actor credits suggests that both Hedaya and Forster were cast to become regulars in the television series despite their brief presence in the pilot. For viewers, the paratextual indicators of recognizable actors and prominent credit placement help establish the expectation that they will recur later in the film with some dramatic significance, as Murray Smith has discussed the importance of such character recognition in guiding cinematic comprehension.^[17] But contrary to these established expectations, both actors’ single appearances remain as unresolved dissonances throughout the rest of the film, with the original design casting an unsettled shadow on the final version, and the specter of failed seriality confounding our normal strategies of narrative expectation and comprehension.

Although watching the final film of Mulholland Drive is not a serial experience, I would argue that seriality is crucial to our understanding in two major ways. First is the pilot’s original serialized design that remains present yet unfulfilled throughout the film, as I have discussed; second is the serial nature of the production process itself. As both Sean O’Sullivan and I, among others, have argued, the essential element of seriality is the temporal gap between installments, both for viewers and creators.^[18] Even though viewers never experienced Mulholland Drive as a serial, I would argue that David Lynch himself did. After finishing the pilot in 1999, Lynch had a gap of over a year before he returned to transform it into a film; he recounts the process after Studio Canal Plus optioned the project:

It came time for me to really commit to making it into a feature. I had zero idea how I was going to do that, so it was a time of high anxiety. One night, I sat down, the ideas came in, and it was a most beautiful experience. Everything was seen from a different angle. Everything was then restructured, and we did additional shooting. Now, looking back, I see that [the film] always wanted to be this way. It just took this strange beginning to cause it to be what it is.^[19]

Serial authorship is defined by an ongoing creative engagement with an unfolding text, typically in dialogue with its cultural reception; from Dickens to contemporary television producers, serial creators release works that are unfinished by design, and allow feedback and the passage of time to help shape future installments. Although the pilot of Mulholland Drive was not broadly seen and consumed beyond television and film executives, Lynch’s own gap between producing the pilot and redesigning the film enabled his ability to see it from a different angle, thus facilitating this remarkable narrative shift that clearly was not part of the pilot’s initial design. It is not hard to imagine that after a year away from the text, Lynch viewed the pilot footage as a distant dream, redesigning the film around that revised perspective. Even though Lynch restructured the story and reimagined its framework, it is telling that he left the bulk of the pilot’s structure and footage untouched, following the norm of serial authorship that future installments add to, rather than remake, previous episodes. Thus we are left with the first installment intact and embedded within its revised conclusion, suggesting an implicit seriality in the narrative construction. The scene where Rita opens the blue box with the blue key may symbolize the shift from Diane’s dream to reality, but also represents the shift from serial television to stand-alone cinema; however at both levels, the shift does not leave behind where it came from, with the new form only explicable in reference to its earlier framework.

Most critics have focused their attention on the finished film as a stand-alone textual object that reveals its own cultural meanings and aesthetic techniques. But just as its story is in large part about the making of a film, I contend that the film is also “about” the extra-textual level of its unique production contexts, and that the key to unlock the blue box of Mulholland Drive is to attend to how the film became what it is through the key of serial television. The television pilot opened itself up to serial expansion and continuation, and thus much of the film’s celebrated uncanniness stems from its lack of continuity and dangling narrative threads—plotlines and characters who were clearly designed to grow more significant in future episodes are left frustratingly unresolved and oddly insignificant in the film version. So much of the film’s haunting, dreamlike narrative sensibility stems from its failure to follow conventional closed cinematic storytelling norms in lieu of the markers of serial television, which it then undermines through an ending that both offers and subverts closure. Just as these haunted remnants of seriality that persist help explain the power of its final closed narrative form, Mulholland Drive’s cross-media history provides an unusual window into the affective powers and pleasures central to all serial storytelling.

I have no personal expertise in understanding gun violence, trauma, or mental illness, but I do hopefully have something to offer as the blame game shifts around to question the media’s role in our overly violent country. Personally, I have little tolerance for the way our television news media covers such tragedies, as they fill the 24-hour cycle with unfounded speculation, ill-informed opinions, and most of all undiluted emotional manipulation. But my own distaste is not the same as claiming that a key cause of such inexplicable violence is to be found in the media’s coverage of shootings (as was inexplicably misattributed to Morgan Freeman in a widely-circulated Facebook post), or in media violence more broadly. I do believe that as media citizens, we should ask ourselves what type of violence we want to see on our screens, and that families should make informed, conscious choices for their children. But blaming the media for violence like the Newtown massacre is simply wrong.

There may be some correlation between violent behavior and particular media consumption practices, and in some instances, violent media might be a contributing factor to inspire particular violent actions, but such linkages are so much lower than other factors (like poverty, drug/alcohol use, patterns of physical & emotional abuse, and access to weapons) that suggestions to curb violence by changing media are simply an impractical, ineffectual distraction. If violent media were such a major cause of violent behavior, then Japan, whose media are as violent as or more than ours, would likely match or exceed America’s violent crime rates, rather than trailing the U.S. by a huge gap in nearly every category. If violent media were the triggers that caused such violent outbursts, then millions of viewers & gamers would be committing daily acts of murder. This holds true for all media, including videogames that take the brunt of the blame today.

I have not done primary scholarship on the topic of media violence, but as part of my textbook, Television & American Culture, I reviewed the literature and tried to offer a measured account of how scholars tackle these issues. I’ve decided to share that portion of the book here to hopefully offer a bit of clarity to such conversations that often embrace broad generalizations and sweeping claims. In the name of instructors using the book being able to emphasize their own perspectives, I probably cut the media effects tradition a little more slack than it deserves – for a much more pointed takedown, see David Gauntlett’s work. If you’ve studied media studies, there’s probably little new here (and it was written four years ago, so there might be some updated scholarship that I haven’t taken account of), but if you see someone spouting off on how the media is to blame – especially if they are quoting Morgan Freeman – send them here for a little lesson in Media Studies 101.

***

From Jason Mittell, Television & American Culture (Oxford University Press, 2009), chapter 9, “Viewing Television”:

Television Viewers: Passive or Active, Effects or Influences?

One of the questions surrounding television that has been most studied concerns the medium’s impact on viewers—how does television affect us? An entire subfield of academic study of television has developed around this issue of media effects, researching the medium’s impact on people who consume it. Other researchers, who embrace a model of active viewers, have questioned the underlying assumption of the media effects paradigm that television viewing can even be understood within a framework of causes and effects. This debate rages among media scholars and causes such sharp division that some adherents to each side view the research produced by the other side as simply illegitimate. While this book makes no claims to reconcile this division, this section lays out the core arguments and criticisms of both media effects and active viewer research, suggesting how the insights from both models might inform our understanding of television’s role in everyday life.

The Media Effects Paradigm and Passive Viewers

For a large number of scholars, the dominant research agenda for understanding American television is to measure how the medium affects its viewers, an approach generally known as the media effects paradigm. This approach is common among researchers, and used quite frequently by policymakers, critics, and the television industry to justify regulatory policies, condemnations of programming, and marketing campaigns respectively. It is most commonly found within research in the field of mass communications, which emerged in the mid-20^th century in the United States and still thrives as an academic field. Underlying early mass communications research was a three-stage model of the communication process: a sender creates a message and transmits it to a receiver. This sender/message/receiver model follows basic commonsense regardless of the medium—someone speaks to other people in hopes that they will understand the intended message, just as I write this book trying to convey ideas to its readers. If we analyze either a conversation or book, we might consider communication successful only if the receiver understands the message as intended by the sender. In this model, senders have the power to communicate effectively, and success is judged by whether receivers accept the messages they receive—in other words, receivers primarily function as passive recipients of messages that they can accept or reject.

Early mass communication research was particularly interested in analyzing propaganda, as the field emerged in the wake of World War II and during the rise of the Cold War. Propaganda messages are designed to have a direct persuasive effect on its receivers, shaping opinions and motivating actions. Not surprisingly, the research on persuasion and propaganda has been most directly applied to television advertising, where senders are highly motivated to generate specific effects upon viewers, as discussed in Chapter 2. For some researchers, the fact that propaganda and advertising can have direct and measurable effects on its viewers is evidence that all media operate similarly, with clear effects upon viewers. However, we must be careful to distinguish between media that are designed expressly to persuade, like advertising and propaganda, and programs created with less persuasive goals, such as to entertain, to inform, to amuse, or to provoke emotions like fear, sadness, or excitement. Do such programs, which comprise the bulk of television besides advertising, have similarly measurable direct effects?

This is a question that divides the field of media studies. For media effects researchers, the answer is a firm “yes”—all kinds of media can potentially affect viewers in significant, direct, and measurable ways. Such researchers have developed a number of different methodologies and theoretical models to account for the effects of media on viewers. The most commonly employed approach follows the paradigm of behavioral effects theory, in which the actions and behaviors of viewers are directly affected by an outside stimulus like television. In its most extreme form, such research adheres to a hypodermic needle model of media effects—television is a foreign substance injected into a passively viewing victim, which directly causes a change in behavior. While almost no researchers subscribe to such a crude approach today, the metaphor is still powerful in the common sense of many media critics, policymakers, and parents looking to “save” children from perceived deadly and addictive effects of drug-like media.

More subtle approaches to media effects still believe that the stimulus of television can cause direct effects, but reactions are much more variable and tied to a variety of factors and contexts than the metaphor of a direct injection. Researchers looking to prove behavioral effects commonly rely upon experimental research, typically measuring changes in attitudes, actions, or physiology after exposure to particular media content. Many such experiments have suggested behavioral effects of media upon some viewers—for instance, experimental research has suggested that viewing violent programming increases the immediate likelihood of some viewers exhibiting aggressive behaviors. Such experimental research must be understood with some important caveats, as it typically demonstrates only immediate short-term effects, not the long-term social impacts of television that many media critics ultimately believe shape viewers’ attitudes and behaviors. Experimental research is also always removed from the way that actual viewers experience media, as the laboratory setting itself can influence behaviors; additionally, even when direct effects are observed, it is always just in a statistically-relevant portion of the research subjects, not a universal reaction to the experiment. Thus the bulk of media effects research suggests a model of limited effects—some media have some effects on some viewers in some circumstances—but far from the overwhelming claims of television’s harmful impacts that are often repeated in the press and by politicians.

Another way of measuring media effects relies on real world behaviors rather than laboratory experiments. Via survey methods, viewer attitudes and behaviors are collected and coded, and researchers attempt to find connections between variables, such as links between the amount of television viewed and beliefs about violent crime. One of the most well developed approaches to analyzing media effects via survey research is called cultivation theory. This approach uses long-term surveys to chart the correlation between television viewing and social attitudes, based on the hypothesis that people who view a large amount of television are likely to share opinions and values that are reinforced by programming. Cultivation analysis typically does not consider specific programs or genres, but rather looks at how consuming television as a medium impacts people’s perspectives of the world—cultivation researchers view the medium of television as an entire ecological system or environment, as discussed more in Chapter 11, rather than conveying particular meanings within specific texts. Researchers chart the broad cumulative patterns of meaning offered by television, and then pose questions via surveys to chart how varying degrees of television viewing might cultivate opinions that mesh with television’s meanings. In many ways, cultivation theory follows an ideological approach to textual analysis as discussed in Chapter 7, but uses quantitative methods to measure the correlation between television viewing and beliefs in areas such as consumerism and racial identity. The most well-known hypothesis offered by cultivation theory is called the mean world syndrome, arguing that heavy viewers of television are likely to view society as more violent than it actually is, fostering emotions of fear, distrust, and anxiety.

While survey research and cultivation theory offers provocative claims about how media consumption might shape our world views and cultural norms, such methodologies can only demonstrate a correlation between factors, showing that it is statistically more probable than by chance that particular variables coincide together—this mode of research cannot prove causation, or that one variable caused another. Thus a survey might show that children who watch more televised violence are more likely to behave aggressively, but this does not prove that television caused the aggressive behavior—viewers with aggressive personalities might be more likely to enjoy violent programming, or both behaviors might be tied to a third variable, like educational aptitude or family situations. Such correlational research generally finds that the statistical linkages between media and behaviors are less significant than other structural and contextual variables, so again these studies point toward a limited effects model for some viewers in some contexts, positioning media consumption as a potential “risk factor” for particular behaviors rather than a direct catalyst. Surveys can also fall prey to a number of research flaws, like questions biasing respondents toward particular answers, or the inaccuracies of reporting people’s own behaviors and attitudes. Well-constructed surveys showing correlations between media and behaviors can be quite useful, especially as long-term studies measuring changes within the same group over time, but it is crucial not to mistakenly equate evidence of correlation with proof of causation, as press and policy summaries of such research often do.

The bulk of media effects research focuses on the impact of violence upon viewers. Researchers typically use techniques of content analysis, as discussed in Chapter 8, to quantify and label the amount of violence in varying programs; these quantitative accounts of violence are then used as evidence to support the cultural impact of more limited experimental or survey findings. It is crucial to note that no reputable researcher claims that simply identifying the content of a program proves its impact—while the most adamant voices against media violence believe that the experimental and survey research has conclusively proven definitive harmful effects of television violence, the content of texts themselves does not evidence its impact on viewers. For adherents to the media effects research paradigm, the evidence from experimental and survey research appears to conclusively suggest that media violence produces the effects of fear, aggression, desensitization to violence, and lowering inhibitions toward actual violent behavior. They admit that such effects are only strong in a small percentage of viewers with predispositions toward violence or other contextual factors, but contend that television causes small negative effects upon the majority of the population. However, a large number of scholars question the core foundations of media effects as a paradigm.

Part of the criticism of media effects research stems from a broader divide between quantitative social scientific research, which nearly all media effects researchers embrace, and adherents to qualitative methods more common in the humanities and certain social sciences like anthropology and sociology. For qualitative researchers, the meanings within television programs and the ways that viewers respond to them are far too varied and complex to be easily quantified into simple categories like “violent” and “non-violent”—such criticisms point out that in some quantitative studies, an image of Bugs Bunny hitting Elmer Fudd might be coded identically to news footage of a war zone or a bloody shoot-out in a fictional police drama. Likewise a broad range of viewer attitudes and opinions are typically reduced to one or two variables for statistical purposes, oversimplifying the breadth and complexity of human behavior for analytical convenience. For qualitative researchers, the phenomenon of media viewing must be understood through more interpretive means—in-depth analyses of programs, as explored in Chapters 7 and 8, and through interviews and observations of actual viewer behaviors, considered more below. The disagreement between quantitative and qualitative researchers is perhaps an irreconcilable divide, as each side can argue that their methods are the only way to truly understand the phenomena that they study. A reasonable middle ground is to acknowledge that insights can emerge from each approach, and that the specific research questions being posed might effectively be explored from a variety of relevant methodologies.

Media effects research has also been criticized for its core assumptions and attitudes toward television. Media effects researchers typically hold a negative opinion about television, seeing it as a destructive social influence—their research looks to prove the specific ways that they believe television causes problems. Yet this perspective arguably clouds their analysis in key ways—by searching for problems caused by television, they typically ignore both potential social benefits of the medium and the additional factors that might be more powerful causes of the social ills linked to television. For instance, if the social problem being researched is youth violence in America, many factors correlate much more strongly with violent behaviors than television viewing, including poverty, drug use, peer influence, parenting styles, educational achievement, and psychological conditions. Likewise some studies of television viewing suggest that just as violence can provoke negative effects in some viewers, the same content might reduce or redirect aggressive behaviors in other viewers, an aspect that media effects researchers rarely explore seriously. According to the strongest critics of media effects research, the inherent anti-television biases of researchers undermines the entire field, as studies are designed and interpreted only through the lens of proving researchers’ already-held beliefs about the medium’s lack of value.

The final major critique of media effects research concerns how the field conceives of television viewers as passive recipients of messages and social effects. The basic model of media effects conceives of senders and messages as more powerful than receivers in a communication system. At its extreme, the hypodermic needle assumption treats viewers as entirely passive recipients of drug-like media injections, but even more nuanced and complex accounts of viewing through cultivation theory and limited effects models assume that the primary place of viewers in the media system is to receive messages and feel their associated effects. Even the use of the term “effects” implies that what happens to viewers is caused by external factors, similar to the effects of an ingested substance like drugs or medicine. Another school of media research avoids the language of “effects” by focusing more on “media influences,” considering how the media function within a larger cultural context of people’s lives.

The Media Influence Paradigm and Active Viewers

No media researcher would argue that the content of television lacks impact on viewers—obviously television provides information, persuasive messages, and emotional experiences that significantly influence both individual viewers and society as a whole. The divide within the field concerns both the relative power of such messages versus the actions and choices of viewers, and the most appropriate methods to understand the influence of television. While media effects researchers attempt to measure direct effects of television upon viewers using quantitative methods, a competing approach could be understood as the media influence paradigm. Under this approach, researchers believe that the impact of television is best understood by studying actual lived experiences, rather than abstracted surveys or laboratory experiments, using qualitative methods like interviews and interpretation. Scholars studying media influences look at television as one of many factors that help shape behaviors and attitudes, avoiding claims of simple causality or direct effects; rather, media are considered as part of a broader cultural context to be studied from the perspective of a viewer’s everyday life.

Media effects researchers tend to regard programs or entire media systems as stimuli with measurable effects, measuring average effects on a large number of viewers. The media influence approach looks at the power of messages in relation to the power and practices of viewers themselves. This shift in emphasis requires a different understanding of the basic act of communication, rethinking the core process of sender/message/receiver. An influential revised model of communication, developed for understanding television news but applicable to all media, focuses on the encoding/decoding of messages. According to this approach, the creation of media texts involves multiple meanings and competing ideas being included in the production process—as discussed in Chapter 5, formal choices conveying meanings in a television program might signify a broad range of ideas and represent the input of dozens of production personnel. Thus texts are seen as encoded with multiple meanings through their production, rather than a singular “sent” message. Most scholars looking at texts through this framework consider how a program encodes ideological and hegemonic representations; as discussed in Chapter 7, many messages are not explicitly intended by creators, but reflect an unquestioned set of “common sense” norms and assumptions. By looking at a range of encoding meanings, scholars explore how programs allow for a cultural forum of ideas, rather than a singular uniform message.

The process of consuming or decoding a text allows for a similar range of interpretations and understandings, rather than a simple “reception” of an intended meaning. For scholars of media influence, understanding the varying ways to decode a program is crucial to assess its cultural impact. This decoding process is not an open free-for-all to interpret any meaning into a program, but framed by cultural and social limitations. Obviously many encoded messages frequently convey their intended meanings, as news programs communicate facts about current events or a soap opera projects its emotional tone; however, it would be a mistake to think that all encoded meanings are conveyed equally, or that the only meanings people take away from programs result from intended messages. Viewers bring their own frameworks and expectations to the decoding process, including their particular social situations, like age or economic class, as well as their personal tastes and experiences. Thus the process of decoding is an intersection between a text that contains a multitude of encoded messages, and a viewer with a range of influences that shape his or her perception—out of this junction emerges a limited number of different possible interpretations.

Scholars have charted a spectrum of decoding as it specifically relates to the ideological messages within a text. At one extreme is a dominant decoding, which fully accepts ideological messages as common sense, similar to the “hailed” viewer discussed in Chapter 7—thus for a shampoo commercial, a viewer with a dominant decoding might see her own hair as worse than the woman in the ad and believe that happiness could be achieved by better hair, as obtainable through this shampoo. At the other extreme is an oppositional decoding, which recognizes the ideological messages of the text and rejects them as flawed or irrelevant to the viewer’s own social position and experiences—a viewer with an oppositional decoding looks at the shampoo advertisement as misleading and manipulative, trying to convince her to be unhappy for failing to live up to unrealistic beauty norms.

Most viewers fall somewhere between these two poles, engaging with texts via negotiated decodings that accept some dominant meanings while rejecting others, based on how they relate to viewers’ own experiences and social positions. There could be many different negotiated decodings of this hypothetical ad, such as a viewer who identifies with the problem of split ends but doubts that this shampoo could solve it, or a viewer who uses the advertised shampoo but does not see split ends as a real problem—or even a bald viewer who finds the messages and product ironically amusing. Such readings are always subject to the limits of the text, as viewers have the ability to negotiate with textual meanings but not to invent completely new interpretations—a viewer who saw the shampoo ad as advocating for universal health care would be dismissed as misinterpreting the text. Thus this approach to studying television consumption examines both the degree to which media messages influence viewers, and how viewers’ own backgrounds and beliefs influence how they might embrace, reject, or negotiate with those messages.

Advertisements are typically straightforward messages to examine for media influence—they are encoded with explicit messages designed to influence viewers, and resulting consumer behavior is a fairly direct measure of that influence. Most programming is much more complicated, both in terms of the complexity of encoded messages and the various ways that viewers might decode them. For instance, the political thriller 24 is encoded with a broad array of meanings, ranging from reinforcing traditional gender roles with helpless female characters rescued by powerful men, to offering commentary on government corruption and bureaucracy. For a media effects researcher, the show’s central meaning might concern its portrayal of violence, conveying the message that extreme violence and even torture can be a heroic solution to problems—researchers might use experiments or surveys to gauge how viewer behaviors and attitudes toward violence and politics might be affected by consuming such meanings. A media influences scholar would look at a broader range of meanings and ways of decoding the show, trying to account for how a viewer’s background and beliefs influence the way they make sense of 24. A viewer with a law enforcement background who believes that terrorists and criminals must be stopped using every available technique might find that 24 reinforces his dominant beliefs, while other oppositional viewers might find the graphic violence and ideological messages so distasteful that they watch the show only to be outraged. Other viewers might enjoy the show despite the violence, embracing its narrative suspense and complex storytelling but rejecting morally-questionable behaviors of characters, thus negotiating with the program to focus on the particular meanings and pleasures most relevant to them; such negotiations might be motivated by other aspects of the text as well, embracing on the show’s representation of an African-American president, the quirky personality of Chloe, or the visual style of split-screens and hand-held cameras. Media influence researchers reject a simple model of direct effects, arguing instead that meanings are made at the intersection between a broad assortment of elements within a show like 24 and the range of viewer experiences and social positions.

How do researchers proceed in making sense of the various factors and possibilities that factor into media influences under this model? Most scholars follow an approach that is known as cultural studies, a set of related methodologies and theories that explores culture as a site of negotiation and struggle, rather than simply the cause of social problems. To understand how people are influenced by television, cultural studies scholars use two primary approaches. The first is textual analysis, as discussed in Chapter 7, where researchers analyze the range of meanings encoded in texts and consider how they represent particular meanings that might uphold or challenge dominant ideologies. Textual analysis can outline a spectrum of potential meanings, forming the limits of multiple interpretations that might be activated by viewers’ decoding, and highlighting how a text might privilege particular meanings through narrative structure or other formal elements. But to understand the decoding process, cultural studies scholars use qualitative reception research to investigate how actual viewers make sense of texts. Such research can use open-ended surveys, interviews, focus groups, observations, analyses of published reviews or comments (like in a magazine or online forum), or other related methods, sometimes in tandem with quantitative methods to correlate the decoding process with people’s social identities via categories like race, age, or economic class. The unifying goal of cultural studies reception research is to capture the ways that people actually consume and decode media in their everyday lives, charting both how media influence viewers and how various viewers influence the interpretive process.

This reception research has pointed to some broad trends concerning how people make sense of media. Foremost, the research has highlighted the inability for media messages to uniformly determine their own influences, as actual viewer responses and practices are much more wide-ranging and variable than either media effects researchers or traditional ideological critics claim. These diverse interpretations are typically limited by what is encoded in the text, but also are directly shaped by a viewer’s context—pre-existing beliefs, social situations, identities, attitudes, and modes of viewing are central factors in shaping how people decode and make sense of media texts. While certainly messages can have powerful influences on viewers, and people’s social contexts can guide their interpretations, cultural studies research argues that television viewers are ultimately much more active than the passive model portrayed by media effects research, and engage with a television program in a broader variety of way than simply absorbing singular messages.

Critics have questioned both the methodologies and findings of cultural studies research, highlighting some of the limits of the paradigm. The qualitative methods of interviewing and interpretation are certainly not designed to be the controlled scientific measures that media effects research often claims to be—qualitative studies typically focus on a small number of non-random viewers that do not statistically represent a broader pool of viewers. Such studies claim that their usefulness is not in predicting behaviors or measuring cause and effect, but in examining the range of practices comprising everyday life that viewers might follow—just because one viewer offers a particular interpretation does not mean that others will see the program in the same way, but it points to a distinct possibility amongst a range of options. Such research is inherently interpretive rather than framed by controlled experiments or statistical surveys, and thus must rely on the power of persuasive argument to convey the broader relevance of such real world viewing practices. Cultural studies research is dependent on viewers relating their own practices and perspectives, and thus can be critiqued for both relying on questionably subjective self-reported information and offering only inconclusive interpretations of what people say about themselves. At its worst, cultural studies research simply reports the opinions of viewers without sufficient analysis of their significance and contexts, but well-done research can point to how broader social factors help shape our viewing experiences and attitudes in a more complex and varied fashion than media effects models of direct causality.

How can we understand that two groups of well-respected scholars studying television viewers can paint such divergent pictures of how messages impact people? In part, the difference between media effects and influences paradigms stems from the core attitudes and starting points of the researchers. Many media effects researchers start with a core belief that television is a negative social influence and thus conduct studies to prove this influence, while cultural studies scholars tend to be more focused on understanding the social practices of everyday life and thus start by regarding viewers more sympathetically to see how television fits into their lives. One of the key differences between the media effects and media influence approaches is the willingness to consider the activity and agency of viewers in making cultural judgments, interpretations, and decisions through the act of watching television. Thus researchers might view the same data on viewing behaviors quite differently—a media effects scholar would foreground the evidence that some viewer behaviors shifted negatively in reaction to programming, while a media influence scholar would emphasize the broad range of responses that viewers can take away from programming, complicating simple negative/positive characterizations.

The biggest danger in trying to understand the effects or influences of television is the tendency to oversimplify what is a tremendously complex and multifaceted social practice into a simple slogan or generalization. Almost no studies claim to have definitively proven that television causes real world violent behaviors, or that television viewers are free to make whatever meanings they care to—however these claims are often made by people referring to such studies, used to justify industrial and policy decisions, and offered as justification for condemning or celebrating television as a medium. The impact of television programming on viewers is much studied, but still up for debate. Understanding the methodological strategies and findings of such research, and looking at competing models to compare competing viewpoints, is the key to discerning the important question of how viewers are impacted by what they see on television.

Last night’s episode seems to be particularly divisive, as some major things happened that set-off many folks’ plausibility meters. I agree with Todd VanDerWerff’s take wholeheartedly that “plausibility” is a red herring for much of serial TV, and if you’ve seen “Broken Hearts,” you should read it now, as it’s a great review/essay. If not, Todd’s essential spoiler-redacted argument is this:

Watching TV for plot is a fool’s game, and it’s just going to end with you being disappointed. But watching TV for long-term character arcs can be very rewarding, particularly if you’re in the hands of writers who keep an eye on the characters in a way that keeps them more or less consistent. It’s all but impossible to blow through plot at the level Homeland does without running out of room…, but it is possible to keep the big character moments coming, and the show has done an excellent job of that this season.

What’s more, I find character stuff more emotionally satisfying, generally. What I admire most about this season of Homeland is the way that it dropped a bombshell… then played out fairly logically how all of the other characters in the show’s orbit would react to that happening…. I’ve more or less bought everything that’s happened since on that level of the characters behaving rationally. That seems to be the modus operandi of this season: Something big and occasionally ridiculous happens, and then the show goes out of its way to examine just how the characters would react to said ridiculous happening. I suspect if you’re someone who watches for plot, primarily, you get stuck on the big thing happening…. But for character watchers, the real meat comes after the inciting incident.

I’m not trying to say watching TV for plot is wrong. It certainly isn’t, and there are certainly shows that have been able to deftly weave rocket-paced plots that nonetheless provide room for character introspection in the moment. But at the same time, every story contains its plausibility concerns, and if you poke at them hard enough (or come at them from the right point-of-view), you’ll find them. (See Film Crit Hulk on this issue.) I certainly find watching TV more rewarding when watched from a character or thematic or emotional or structural basis, but I’m not here to tell you how to watch TV and, instead, to defend mostly enjoying this episode when I see the haters are already out in force for it. But the way I’ve always seen TV is heavily influenced by something our own Scott Tobias said in the wake of XXX on Friday Night Lights: Serialized storytelling is often about throwing ridiculous plot points at already established characters and seeing how they react to them. More and more, I’m convinced the “problem” with this season of Homeland many of you are having has less to do with the ridiculousness of the plot points and more to do with how the show didn’t exactly scale its way up to them but, instead, just jumped right to them.

Truth. (Although, ridiculousness has always been in Homeland‘s DNA, as aptly summed up by James Poniewozik on Twitter: “Man, this show about the brainwashed POW coming  home to become a terrorist congressman is suddenly getting totally implausible.”)

So in this light, Homeland‘s chief narrative enigma isn’t about terrorist plots, CIA moles, or political maneuvers. It’s about how do Carrie and Brody really feel about each other. The series’s writers have often said that Homeland‘s magic ingredient is the chemistry between Claire Danes & Damien Lewis, and how it infuses all of the espionage plots with emotional stakes. That emotional depth is what elevates Homeland over 24, and why plot plausibility doesn’t really matter – but emotional character plausibility does.

Which raises the question: were the events of “Broken Hearts” plausible to the characters and storyworld as the program has established them? My answers – and many plot spoilers – beneath the fold.

My big plausibility question from “Broken Hearts” is not whether you can kill someone remotely with a pacemaker (which the writers say is feasible, if unlikely, but they fail to address whether it’s been tried on Dick Cheney), or how Brody could infiltrate the Naval Observatory so easily, or how Nazir could move about the D.C. area openly, or such plot matters—those all seem consistent enough with the heightened dramatic license of Homeland‘s storyworld. The big question is why would Brody risk everything to save Carrie? And that’s Todd’s main plausibility gripe as well:

I’m not sure I’ll believe that Brody will put everything on the line like this for Carrie or, crucially, that Abu Nazir really thinks Brody would do everything he wants to ensure Carrie’s life. In the moment, I more or less went with it, because I was sort of toying with the idea that the show might really kill Carrie (even as I knew it wouldn’t), but the more I thought about it, the less I really thought that Brody’s feelings for her ran all that deeply. I’ve always seen him as viewing her as another part of a life he can’t quite get under control, not the person he loves more than anything (as Carrie obviously feels about him). The connection between the two of them is palpable, but it can’t explain everything.

I see two possible explanations for why Brody rolls the dice to save Carrie: either his emotional connection to her trumps rational logic, or it’s part of a long-con that he & Nazir have worked out. The latter option is one that Emily Nussbaum has been mulling on Twitter [Update: and now she's blogged about it], basically saying that Nazir is trying to convince Carrie that Brody loves her & implicate her in covering up the VP murder for some future benefit. Part of me likes this: we’ve still got a major gap in time when Brody was captured by Nazir in Virginia, and we know he’s withheld at least some information from the CIA (that he & Nazir prayed together). Plus as Carrie likes to remind us, Nazir’s just too good to be going for a simple plan like the one that they busted last week. In fact, during this week’s Previously-On segment, my wife & I discussed whether Brody is still helping Nazir, and I thought he probably was. But if this turns out to be true, the next two episodes have a lot of retconning to do to make me buy that Brody’s freak-out from getting Nazir’s call & seeing Carrie captured was a ruse for her benefit.

For now, I totally buy that Brody’s emotional connection to Carrie (and Nazir) is enough to sign-on for the pacemaker plot to save her. And this gets to the real point of this post: Homeland regularly uses the word “love” to describe how Carrie feels toward Brody, and suggests that Brody does not feel the same for Carrie. But I do not think “love” sums up either of their emotions particularly well, especially not in how most of us experience love in relationships in terms of romance, friendship, and pleasure. Instead, best term I can come up with for how Carrie and Brody feel toward each other is emotionally tethered. This feeling is mutual, and it overrides both logic and other relationships (aside from one).

Let’s start with Carrie, as she’s the one who instigated this relationship. As became clear from my rewatch, Carrie’s emotions toward Brody were forged during her month of video surveillance, where she observed every part of his intimate personal life (aside from what he did in his garage prayer room) and made him part of her everyday life. Just as we sit on the couch, eating ice cream and making intense emotional connections with people on a screen, Carrie’s attachment to Brody was first established virtually—and rudely cancelled by Saul just as it was getting good! Carrie made the virtual into a physical relationship in part to pursue her suspicions, but also because she needed to feel that connection to Brody, as he represented a form of togetherness & intimacy that she otherwise lacked. Carrie often mentions her fear of growing old alone and struggle to connect with anyone outside the agency, while also telling Brody how hard it is to have experiences and secrets that nobody else can understand. There’s always manipulation under this dialogue, but that doesn’t make it untrue. While yes, she loves the passionate eavesdropping-Saul-mortifying sex that they have, ultimately what Carrie needs from Brody is that tether, the sincere emotional connection & sharing that she lacks with anyone else in her life.

For Brody, things are more complicated—8 years living in isolation while being broken by terrorists will do that to a guy. He does have the potential of intimacy with Jess, but he can never be honest with her and knows that Mike has taken his place in her heart, enough that he’s willing to push the two of them together at times. He can share more with Dana, but it’s always clouded by his deception and necessary distance from her, concerned how she’ll regard him and his choices. He certainly can’t be fully honest with Carrie early in their relationship, but he can share more of his vulnerability with her than anyone else. And what we know about his time in captivity is that he was searching for connections, and desperately latched onto whatever was offered: first Islam, then Issa, then Nazir. Back in the USA, he becomes disconnected from Nazir, especially once he goes into deep cover as a Congressman, and Carrie’s bold bid to reconnect rekindles his need to tether himself to someone, establishing a sense of intimacy that he otherwise lacks, even with his family. In the masterful episode “Q & A,” Carrie lays this all out for us, making it clear that Brody desperately needs a tether to something real and sincere, and offering herself up as that point of connection. He doesn’t love her in any conventional way (Saul-shaming sex aside), but he needs her and what she represents: the ability (or maybe just the possibility) to communicate without pretense.

When Nazir captures him to reestablish their connection, it puts Brody at the heart of a tether triangle: whose connection does he value the most? If we believe that he ultimately did betray Nazir and that events in “Broken Hearts” are as they appear, then Brody’s actions to kill the VP seek to reaffirm both of his tethers: he carries out his revenge mission for Nazir, and ensures Carrie’s safety for his future connectedness. (And if he refused, he loses both of them.) Of course, Nazir speaks of his own tether to Nicholas (pronounced as only Nazir can say): “Sometimes, when you’re breaking a man, an emotional transference takes place. For me, with Nicholas, it was quite powerful. It was really a kind of love.” Although characters on Homeland lie all the time, I think they usually speak the truth when discussing such emotional connections. I do believe that Nazir reciprocates Brody’s tether to a lesser degree, that Brody is more than just a sleeper agent to Nazir (hence his quick willingness to side with Brody against Walker in “Marine One”), but an intimate connection who share mutual love for a dead boy and a Muslim faith. And much has been made about how tethered Carrie feels to Nazir, obsessively trying to get inside his head and treating him like her white whale, although that seems to be a solely one-way connection.

All this is to say that the core emotional realism of the show still feels completely true to me, and that Brody’s search for connection does fully motivate his actions in “Broken Hearts” – and I think even Emily’s long-con theory would make sense at its emotional (if not practical) core as well, as it would deepen Brody’s connection with both Carrie and Nazir. Of course, one of the great challenges about analyzing such serial storytelling is that we’re trying to catch a moving target—anything I say here could be reversed, undermined, or recontextualized by the next episode’s twist. But that’s why Todd’s point is so essential: for viewers of serial stories, trying to latch onto a fast-moving plotline is a fool’s game. Instead, we must tether ourselves to the relative stability of the characters and their motivations, seeking that connectedness as we watch their intimate moments from our own couches.

Random Asides:

While this is not an episodic review like TV critics tend to offer, I do envy the format of the “hail of bullets” common in weekly reviews as you can write things about an episode that doesn’t otherwise flow with the whole argument. So…

• Homeland often uses double meanings in its titles, but “Broken Hearts” wins for a triple meaning: the shattered loves among the tethered triangle, the pacemaker malfunction, and the interrupted card game between Chris & Brody!
• The scene with Saul & Dar Adal, or the “beard-off” as it’s being called, was great as expected, but I kept getting flashbacks to F. Murray Abraham’s last restaurant scene – in the “Dad” episode of Louie – so I was waiting for him to order two Cornish hens and talk about a credenza.
• And a theory for what’s happening with Quinn, Saul, etc.: I think Dar Adal & Estes plan to take down Carrie in addition to Brody once Nazir is neutralized, and thus detained Saul to avoid complications. There are too many loose ends to leave these potential wildcards in play. But I refuse to even consider that they’d hurt even a hair on Saul’s beard!
• Update: A link to a great Mo Ryan post that offers an assortment of theories as to where this season might be going, and some kind words about this post!

But for now, I’ve often wondered what some of the tools of Digital Humanities might look like applied to media objects rather than the literary texts or historical artifacts that they’ve tended to focus on. One such tool is the word cloud, measuring concordances within a text to seek patterns of frequently used words. Films and television programs feature words as well, and thus we might imagine looking at dialogue as a dataset to be analyzed and reconfigured using a tool like Wordle. Of course, the methods of scanning and digitizing books don’t work for moving images, but the other day it occurred to me that most DVDs already include digitized text of the dialogue, in the form of the subtitles and captions.

So I was happy to realize that there is already a tool available for extracting captions and turning them into a text file: ccextractor. Alas, this open-source application works best on Windows & I’m a diehard Mac user, so I had my colleague Ethan Murphy install it on a departmental PC and figure out how best to get it working. (The Mac version is command line, so you need to know what you’re doing more than I do to use it effectively.) The results are pretty impressive; this page details the process of decrypting a DVD (technically illegal, although I think this is clearly fair use & wouldn’t be an enforceable violation, as it fits with the spirit of the DMCA exemptions that have been established for educational use) and outputting the captions into a text file. This process took around 10 minutes for one DVD.

I test drove this process using the first episode of The Wire. Here’s what the famous first scene looks like extracted:

( police sirens wailing )
( police radio chattering )
( McNulty )
SO, YOUR BOY'S NAME IS WHAT ?
( man )
SNOT.
YOU CALLED THE GUY SNOT ?
( man )
SNOTBOOGIE, YEAH.
"SNOTBOOGIE."
HE LIKE THE NAME ?
WHAT ?
SNOTBOOGIE.
THIS KID WHOSE MAMA
WENT TO THE TROUBLE
OF CHRISTENING HIM
OMAR ISAIAH BETTS ?
YOU KNOW,
HE FORGETS HIS JACKET,
SO HIS NOSE STARTS RUNNING,
AND SOME ASSHOLE
INSTEAD OF
GIVING HIM A KLEENEX,
HE CALLS HIM "SNOT."
SO, HE'S "SNOT" FOREVER.
DOESN'T SEEM FAIR.
LIFE JUST BE
THAT WAY, I GUESS.
SO...
WHO SHOT SNOT ?
I AIN'T GOING TO NO COURT.
( dog barking )
MOTHERFUCKER, AIN'T HAVE
TO PUT NO CAP IN HIM THOUGH.
DEFINITELY NOT.
HE COULD'VE JUST
WHIPPED HIS ASS,
LIKE WE ALWAYS WHIP HIS ASS.
I AGREE WITH YOU.
HE GONNA KILL SNOT.
SNOT BEEN DOING THE SAME SHIT
SINCE I DON'T KNOW HOW LONG.
KILL A MAN OVER
SOME BULLSHIT.
I'M SAYING,
EVERY FRIDAY NIGHT
IN THE ALLEY
BEHIND THE CUT-RATE,
WE ROLLING BONES, YOU KNOW ?
I MEAN, ALL THE BOYS
FROM AROUND THE WAY,
WE ROLL TILL LATE.
ALLEY CRAP GAME, RIGHT ?
AND LIKE EVERY TIME,
SNOT, HE'D FADE
A FEW SHOOTERS.
PLAY IT OUT TILL
THE POT'S DEEP.
THEN HE'D SNATCH AND RUN.
EVERY TIME ?
COULDN'T HELP HISSELF.
LET ME UNDERSTAND YOU.
EVERY FRIDAY NIGHT,
YOU AND YOUR BOYS
WOULD SHOOT CRAP, RIGHT ?
AND EVERY FRIDAY NIGHT,
YOUR PAL SNOTBOOGIE,
HE'D WAIT TILL THERE
WAS CASH ON THE GROUND,
THEN GRAB THE MONEY
AND RUN AWAY ?
YOU LET HIM DO THAT ?
WE CATCH HIM
AND BEAT HIS ASS.
BUT AIN'T NOBODY
EVER GO PAST THAT.
I GOTTA ASK YOU.
IF EVERY TIME SNOTBOOGIE
WOULD GRAB THE MONEY
AND RUN AWAY,
WHY'D YOU EVEN LET
HIM IN THE GAME ?
WHAT ?
IF SNOTBOOGIE
ALWAYS STOLE THE MONEY,
WHY'D YOU LET HIM PLAY ?
GOT TO.
THIS AMERICA, MAN.
( man chattering )

And here’s what the whole episode looks like when turned into a Wordle, graphically representing the program’s unique brand of profanity:

Wordle of dialogue for THE WIRE, “The Target”

Now, there are some key tweaks that need to be made to accurately tabulate words within the dialogue. The captions include some sonic cues in parentheses — “( police sirens wailing )” — that shouldn’t be incorporated into the dialogue, and Wordle treats the all caps of the dialogue differently from these lowercase cues, thus both “MAN” and “man” appear separately. Additionally, the character names in parenthesis indicate when a character is speaking off-screen, so these are misleading cues as well. ccextractor can be set to change cases and maybe to filter out cues depending on how a given DVD encodes them, so there’s need for a bit of customization. And it’s essential to remember that this is a transcript, not a screenplay—not only are character names not indicated, but the screenplay form includes a performance and visual blueprint and sense of rhythm that this raw transcript neglects. (You can compare this scene with an early version of the pilot screenplay downloadable here.)

In surveying work in Digital Humanities, it may seem that the point of the field is developing and playing with such tools, but as with any method or model, the techniques only work when paired with a research question that is an appropriate match for the approach. So for what questions is such “caption mining” useful to answer? I had some ideas, but also asked people on Twitter and Facebook for their thoughts as well. Concordances and other quantitative measures can be useful to get a sense of the dialogue quirks and tendencies that comprise a given film or TV program’s verbal style. Such analyses are most productive comparatively, whether looking across a given writer’s work, comparing examples within a genre or across eras, or charting differences throughout the ongoing run of a series. Daniel Chamberlain, another scholar at the nexus of DH & Media Studies, offered the following suggestions: “There are probably some low-level arguments to be made by comparing this with literacy metrics (some shows use big words, some are aimed at less educated audiences), or using simple tools like voyant (Amy Sherman-Palladino packs more words into an episode than anyone else). You might be able to frame questions about the long run of a series (do the scripts “repeat” or get “stale” or do they continue to develop). You might be able to generate evidence making claims about what happens as showrunners or writers come and go. You could even look to make Zeitgeist arguments by comparing batches of shows from different years or eras. These are mostly about gathering familiar (if more robust) forms of textual evidence.” (And Miriam mentioned that the Zeitgeist question evokes Ben Schmidt’s work with TV anachronisms.)

This approach can also target specific key words—for instance, on Twitter a colleague mentioned she’d be interested in looking at how often the world “torture” is used within various series she is analyzing to supplement her study of narrative representations of torture. If we had a particularly large corpus of series, we could chart the shifting use of profanity or other culturally-charged terms surrounding identity or politics. Probably for such a project to work, we’d need to develop a huge database of transcripts along the lines of the massive literary databases of scanned books like Google’s ngrams, an endeavor complicated by copyright issues (as I assume HBO would balk at an open database of the entire Wire dialogue!) and high labor costs—if we could overcome the copyright issues, perhaps we could agree on standard forms and upload self-extracted transcripts to a site like how Cinemetrics crowdsources editing data for films and television?

Another potential use for these transcripts is as a guide for navigating a video, especially for the vast body of a serial. When working on a program, I’ve often struggled to remember precisely where a scene might fall in a series—video is impractical to search, but having a full transcript would make that process much simpler for teaching and analysis (at least if the scene’s memorable feature is tied to dialogue, not visuals). ccextractor allows for the transcript to include timecode, making this navigation process quite easy—especially if you’re working on a video essay or remix (which I see as fertile ground to connect DH and Media Studies), where a transcript can facilitate creating a useful editing log.

There are lots of possibilities for making discoveries about the language of a film or television text, but this tool raises one large caution flag: we cannot mistakenly reduce a moving image work to its dialogue. There is a long tradition of scholars trained to study language & literature treating film texts just as they consider printed work, focusing on narrative structures, verbal style, metaphors, etc., but paying scant attention to visual style, music, performance, temporal systems, or other formal elements that make film essentially than literature. But with that caution in mind, we shouldn’t ignore a moving image text’s dialogue and verbal systems, and I hope that ccextractor offers a useful tool to provide some new access to these elements.

So I end this brainstorming post with a question: what would you use this tool to discover about a film or television program?

I wanted to break blog silence by posting my position paper that I’ll be presenting on Friday at the Flow Conference in Austin. For those who don’t know the unique format of Flow, it’s structured as much more conversational than presentational, with topical roundtables focused on a specific topic and set of questions, and 5-8 participants each contributing to the discussion. We each write short position papers and post them online at the conference website ahead of time, and then engage in vibrant conversation at the conference. The roundtable I’m contributing to is about Teaching TV, and my co-panelists are raising a number of great points around incorporating TV into courses across the humanities, collaborating with industry people in courses, teaching with empathy, and selecting productive screenings. My contribution focuses on the use of textbooks, written from the perspective of a textbook author. It’s posted below – if you’re coming to Flow, I hope to engage the conversation in person, but if not, leave thoughts and comments here and I’ll try to weave them into the discussion Friday morning!

Please Criticize My Textbook

I never set out to write a textbook, as I have generally found the format to be less of a pedagogical aid than an impediment—textbooks typically aim to (over)simplify, focusing on consensus rather than debate, and stripping out the elements of academic inquiry that scholars find most exciting in the name of presenting information in an accessible and easy-to-digest form. That is not how I view teaching, a practice that I believe should strive to excite students through complexities and nuance, debate and dialogue, and working toward discoveries rather than repeating established knowledge. For my annual introductory course, Television & American Culture, I had given up on finding a textbook that would teach up to students rather than teach down to them, that would span across television’s industrial, cultural, and social practices, and that would actually present ideas and arguments rather than just facts and definitions. It was only through a conversation with an editor that I realized that there was a niche to be filled and that other faculty might have use for a book that treats both the topic of television and the genre of textbook differently. I wrote the book with the goal of modeling my pedagogical style, both in approaching television as a multifaceted cultural form, and including academic argument and debate within the often sterile realm of the introductory textbook.

Now that Television & American Culture is written, published, and circulating in some classrooms, I want to reflect a bit on how I see such a book functioning within the television studies course. For me, a successful use of the book can inspire students to push back against its claims and examples, asking “why doesn’t it doesn’t it discuss X?” or “how can Mittell claim Y?” Often, faculty will need to model such pushback, as students are conditioned to treat a textbook as a repository of knowledge to be mined rather than a set of claims to be debated, so I hope that faculty treat the book as a launching pad for conversation, critique, and inquiry, rather than something to be digested and absorbed—which is one reason I have resisted offering exam questions or lecture outlines as supplemental material. When I find syllabi teaching the book, I am gratified when I see the chapters reordered or recontextualized, or paired with another reading that I know will dispute claims I make in the book. One of my most gratifying pedagogical experiences came two years ago, when a student in my course approached me after reading the “Representing Identity” chapter, and asked why I didn’t include a section discussing disability on television. After some initial hemming and hawing about the topic being underrepresented in television studies, and acknowledging that no book could do it all, I finally frankly said it was an issue that I just hadn’t thought much about. I’ve now added it to my to-do list for a revision, and included a reading about Glee’s representations of disability in my syllabus. My student demonstrated that she was getting the deeper lesson I hoped to teach about questioning representations and omissions in a television program by applying that level of inquiry to the textbook—and the textbook’s author—itself.

For those who do use my book, I hope you treat it as a resource to teach both from and against, rather than just something to teach to—by modeling the critical use of a textbook (even if you agree with it), we can help instill an attitude of critical engagement with all sorts of texts and practices as a core tenet of media studies. I hope such an attitude can extend to any assigned textbook, using an inquisitive pedagogical style to model critical engagement toward authoritative sources of knowledge. In the discussion at Flow, I hope we can discuss the various contexts and constraints that might facilitate or limit such critical pedagogy, such as differences in student bodies, teaching loads, departmental curricula, methodological adherences, or
pedagogical freedom—as well as modeling some criticism of teaching with textbooks.

As I always do, I want to share the syllabi for my classes publicly – the two courses I’m teaching this semester are “classics” from my teaching repertoire. I’ve taught Television & American Culture every one of the 10 years I’ve been at Middlebury (excepting sabbaticals), and it formed the basis for my textbook of the same name. Most of the changes for this time involve updating readings & examples throughout, although for the first time I’m serializing a single season throughout the semester. This is something that many colleagues at Middlebury and elsewhere have tried in other courses to great success, as it builds strong semester throughlines and students hopefully get invested in the series collectively. I’ve never found a series to use for this course, as the range of topics are hard to connect to one fictional program. But this year I’m going with the first season of Homeland, not only because I think it was a great stretch of television, but because it speaks to issues of citizenship, democracy, and television coverage of politics much better than other series I’ve considered using, plus we can talk about the significance of President Obama being a fan when we discuss television consumption!

The other change this semester is that I’m incorporating one of the research projects that I worked on during my sabbatical – together with Ethan Thompson, I coedited a book called How to Watch TV that is forthcoming from NYU Press (hopefully to be released next spring in time for Fall 2013 teaching). I’ll have more to say about the book in future posts & will release some excerpts pre-publication, but the premise is that it offers 40(!) new essays from a great lineup of media scholars, each offering an analysis of a single television program from a particular critical perspective. The essays are shorter than journal articles (around 3,500 words), and designed as models for the best type of writing we might hope that our students will produce. The topics are wide-ranging – my own contribution is on Phineas & Ferb and how it offers narrative complexity for kids – and hopefully speak both to student and faculty interests. Although the book’s not available yet, I’m exercising editor privilege and assigning eight of the essays in manuscript form.

My other course is Storytelling in Film & Media, an advanced class on narrative theory as applied to film, television, and videogames. The big addition is that I’m having students read the manuscript-in-progress of Complex TV, working through my ideas about television storytelling (and getting another source of feedback on the project). I’m also trying a new screening, watching both the film and TV miniseries versions of Mildred Pierce, while bringing David Bordwell to campus in November to lecture about the film and its relationship to classical Hollywood storytelling. I always love to teach this course, and this version is particularly exciting to me.

Add my continued duties as department chair, my attempts to finish writing Complex TV, and the regular demands and joys of family, and it’s looking like an extremely busy, but fun, semester. Hopefully I’ll have a few chances to write some blog posts and watch new TV!

This made me realize that I started at Middlebury exactly 10 years ago, and like Annie, found myself teaching my first theory course within a department that had not covered much theory before. I’ve learned a lot of lessons about how to (and how not to) teach theory to undergraduate students since then, and Twitter was inadequate to share some of those experiences with Annie, so I figured I’d broaden the audience to the blog and prattle on way beyond 140 characters. While my experiences are centered around teaching theory to undergraduates within the realm of media & cultural studies, I think the advice is broadly applicable to courses in a wide range of humanities & social science disciplines. As always, I encourage discussion & feedback in the comments.

So let’s set the stage. You’ve gotten a Ph.D., spending your most recent stretch of academia immersed with a cohort of like-minded intellectuals who get off from debating the subtleties of the most difficult things you can read. You’ve spent years in courses where the goal is to rip apart complex works, highlighting the flaws and inconsistencies in monographs written by people whose jobs you aspire to have. You’re surrounded by people who love this stuff—there’s probably some densely-packed theorist that you treat like airplane reading (mine was Foucault).

Now you’re on the other side of the seminar table, leading the discussion and crafting the reading list. The bulk of your teaching might be intro courses with predetermined textbooks or syllabi, or history/criticism/topics courses whose goals and scope are seemingly straightforward. But just maybe, one of the courses you get to teach is designed as a “theory course” – mine was initially awkwardly named “American Cultural Studies,” but has evolved into “Theories of Popular Culture,” the recent version of which is online here. While the temptation is to emulate the graduate seminars that may have provided years of intellectual rush, the undergraduate students in your theory course aren’t there (yet). So here are some lessons I learned through years of getting things wrong:

Explain what you mean by “theory.” Your average undergraduate, even the very smart ones I get to teach at Middlebury, probably don’t think of “theory” the same way that faculty and graduate students do. Theory might evoke something in math, or the “theory of evolution,” but it seems for most undergrads, theory implies a tentative hypothesis that has yet to be proven—more than a hunch, but less than a fact. So it’s important to explain what we mean by theory in the humanities: a framework or set of ideas that transcends the individual example, but that cannot be proven.

I find this lack of “provability” to be particularly irksome to some students. Undergraduates, especially the well-prepared & bright students I teach, like to learn the right answers. The American secondary school system puts a lot of emphasis on learning things that can be tested, so they try to figure out what is correct and how to follow the lead of such proven lessons. One of the main challenges to teaching theory to undergrads is getting them to understand that it’s not about coming up with the “right answer,” but rather exploring how any given theory helps provide insights and new ways of understanding. So it’s crucial define what “theory” means in your disciplinary context so students have a way to make sense of it & calibrate their expectations.

Theories are in dialogue with each other, and often contradict. Much of what I know about teaching theory I learned in graduate school from one of my mentors, John Fiske – I discuss that experience more here. One of John’s gifts was the ability to make theoretical paradigms and frameworks fit into a longer intellectual history, framing each new theory as an ongoing dialogue between theorists. I’ve tried to ape that approach in teaching cultural theory, meaning that I always contextualize where the main authors are coming from, what influences they were reacting to, and how they changed the way a school of thought worked. Providing such contexts helps students understand any theory as part of an ongoing process of discovery, not an absolute progression toward truth. I don’t treat these contexts as a bunch of facts that students need to learn in mastering a field’s intellectual history, but as part of a story, with characters who are products of their experiences and influences—I’ve found students enjoy thinking about these theorists talking to one another more than just as dead, dense words on a page. It’s particularly helpful to find a book that narrates such contexts for students—I particularly like John Storey’s Cultural Theory & Popular Culture books, in large part because his voice and approach reminds me a lot of Fiske (and when I met Storey a few years ago and told him this, he said he was honored by the comparison).

Another key part of this dialogue is conveying the contradictions between schools of thought. I’ll often draw charts or tables on the whiteboard to map how different theorists might respond to a similar issue or text, providing comparisons and contrasts. In doing so, for instance between theories of culture industry, ideology, and hegemony, I’m not trying to argue that one of these is inherently more “right” than another, but that each provide different ways of thinking about a cultural object. Students want to be able to figure out what’s the correct or more valued approach, but I try to present each theory on its own terms in the best light, and then allow them to figure out what works best for them—and, most importantly, which theories are best suited to tackling a particular text, object, or cultural formation.

Theories are meant to be applied. My graduate program and background emphasized theory as a tool to be put into practice, not an object of study on its own. I remember taking a Comparative Literature course that treated theoretical writings as aesthetic objects to be admired and studied, where my attempts to actually “do something” with a theorist was skeptically regarded as not being “true” to the theory. Not surprisingly, I’ve found that undergrads respond much better to applying theoretical writings than trying to appreciate them on their own terms. So when I teach a given theory, I always try to assign a three-part combination: an overview reading that summarizes & contextualizes the theory (like Storey’s volume), some excerpt of the theoretical writings from the big-name theorists themselves, and an example of the theory as applied to an accessible cultural object. In class, I ping-pong between laying out the contexts & the ideas of the theory, and applying them to a new example where we can collectively make sense of a video or image in the style of today’s theorist. A class meeting where we’re not using a theory to make sense of a cultural object is usually an unsuccessful day.

Likewise, my assignments are always about applying the theory more than recapping or summarizing it. In fact, I strongly discourage students from quoting from theory—a strong essay explains the relevant aspects of a theory in the student’s own words and through their analysis, not by retyping the words of a great theorist. (And if you read my own academic writing, you might notice that it’s far less quote-heavy from other academics than most, as I try to model this approach and would much rather read work without wading through other people’s greatest hits.) In crafting assignments, I always give students free choice in what they analyze, because I want them to be inspired to rethink cultural objects that interest them through the lens of the theories we’ve read—it’s hard enough to digest and apply dense theory that they should have the comfort of writing about their own preferred topics. Because of this, I’ve gotten to read analyses of a huge range of popular culture, thus expanding my own knowledge of eclectic topics like sneaker collectors, jam bands, and the “Will It Blend?” videos.

The perfect object of analysis can make the theory work. I sometimes think 90% of getting a class meeting to work is finding the right object of analysis to use to apply a given theory, and thus it is important to always be on the hunt for examples to pull into class (being a voracious consumer of pop culture helps!). Sometimes these objects are simply perfect to illustrate a theory—in the early 2000s, I was looking for a video I could bring into a class where I was teaching Adorno & Horkheimer’s theory of the culture industry, so I set my VCR(!) to tape a showing of MTV’s TRL, thinking it would illustrate how the media packages & sells musical artists. By pure happenstance, the episode featured two videos that encapsulate the theory perfectly: N’Sync’s It’s Gonna Be Me, with the band literally seen as plastic figures to be bought & sold, and Eminem’s The Way I Am, a rant against being packaged and sold by radio & MTV. Not only were the videos perfect, but the way TRL frames them and portrays fan affections & passions provides a comprehensive illustration of so many concepts from this essay: standardization, pseudo-individuality, predigested consumption, popular culture as social cement. It’s so perfect that I’ve been using it for 10 years, and will probably keep using it long after students can remember TRL or either artist. [Update: I uploaded this TRL clip to Critical Commons - feel free to use it for your own teaching and/or pleasure.]

Another important use of examples is as a thread running throughout a semester. In my Theories of Popular Culture course, I start the semester by screening the film High Fidelity. We come back to it throughout the semester, thinking about how a wide range of theories might help us understand it, both as a work of popular culture and as a representation of people’s relationship to popular culture. I hope that by the end of the semester, students understand that since no single theory can explain everything about this film, what critics need is a range of theoretical tools and approaches to be able to answer specific questions and address particular issues, rather than treating theory as dogma in which we’re all seeking a single belief system to apply universally.

Don’t worry about the theoretical nuances. It’s vital to remember the goals for such a class versus the goals for a graduate theory course. In my undergraduate courses, I’m not training academics to be able to write publishable scholarship—although that sometimes happens, as with my former student Ioana Literat’s recently published piece on Trapped in the Closet that first emerged as a term paper in my narrative theory course. I see an undergraduate theory course as having two main goals. First, I want to introduce students to the range of theoretical thinking within the field, offering a sampling plate of tastes to get a sense of what might fall under the umbrella of cultural theory and potentially stoking their interest for further study. More importantly, I want students understand what it is to do theoretically-informed analysis, making the connection between broader frameworks and specific criticism. Most of my students will not go onto grad school in the humanities, so I don’t expect them to become expert practitioners of theory or criticism, but I do hope they come away from my class with more awareness about their own underlying frameworks and assumptions that they use when they consume (and produce) culture. Even if they never actively “use” the theories we read, whenever a former student watches a film and thinks about how it is ideologically addressing him/her, or skeptically questions assumptions about passive viewers absorbing a television program’s messages, that is an indication of pedagogical success.

These goals require very different choices than a graduate theory course. Most importantly, it necessitates simplifying complex theoretical ideas to make them accessible for undergrads, an approach that may be particularly galling to newly minted Ph.Ds who have spent recent years focused on the complexities and nuances of theories. I try not to “dumb-down” theories, but rather emphasize the core concepts and arguments over the more advanced nuances and subtleties that typically thrive in advanced seminar discussions—I think Streeter’s online essay is a model for such distillation and exploration. I’ll happily discuss such nuances with students who care about them, but I try to avoid delving too deep into the weeds in a full-class discussion. It’s more important that all of my students come away with the central nuggets of a given theory than that the small minority who care about theoretical subtleties emerge as fully engaged with any theory’s complexities and nuances. A student who has the passion for theory will find a way to dig deeper on their own or in future studies, but my courses strive to be a place where everyone gets a solid foundation without being alienated from the conversation by getting too deep into nuance.

Share your passion for theory without making them feel bad for not getting it. If you’re teaching a theory course, you probably love talking and thinking about theory—that passion and excitement is your secret weapon in such a course. Most students will be resistant to theory at first, as it’s hard to read, often seems pointless, and can challenge their core assumptions and beliefs. Your job as a theory professor is to convey your passion without dismissing the students’ skepticism and resistance. You’re a tour guide to very foreign lands with passengers who’d rather be home in their comfort zones. So you need to show them how exciting theoretical ideas can be, especially when applied to cultural objects they care about. I often geek out on theories as I’m teaching them, showing my excitement about how a concept like the arbitrary relationship between signified and signifier changes how I see the world—I think (some) students find that excitement a bit contagious, and want to work through the readings in order to find similar passions of their own. I remember my own lightbulb moment when I first studied semiotics as an undergraduate and realized this is was a conversation I wanted to participate in for the rest of my life, and I aim to help my students experience similar revelations (even if they don’t end up going down the professional academic route).

You also need to acknowledge how difficult it can be as an undergrad to make productive sense of this stuff on the first read-through, and reiterate that difficulty throughout the semester. Usually I have a couple of theory jocks in every class, and it’s important to avoid turning into each meeting into a conversation between me and those students who are really into it, making the students who don’t get it feel lost and dumb for not being able to engage at that level. So I make sure that everyone is participating in the conversation, celebrating seemingly “stupid questions” that help ensure all the students are getting the basic ideas, and trying to shut-down the more advanced conversations. I explicitly tell students that it’s okay to read a theoretical piece and feel like you have no clue what it’s about, as we’ll work through it in class to unpack the argument. Online discussion forums are useful for getting broad engagement, as they can discuss the readings amongst themselves and give me a sense of who is getting it and where we need to clarify in class. Few things are more gratifying as a teacher than to see a student who started as resistant to and lost in theory find a foothold and get excited about a particular concept or approach—that’s the joy of intellectual discovery that teaching undergrads facilitates, and what keeps me going through the grading and busywork.

OK, that was clearly way more than 140 characters! I’d love to hear from other people’s experiences, whether from the prospective of faculty teaching theory to undergrads, or your own experiences as an undergraduate learning theory. What works and what doesn’t, and what frameworks can we detach from our own personal experiences to make such courses succeed?

Breaking Bad is well known for its enigmatic and puzzling opening teasers – as Lisa Coulthard analyzes for the first three seasons, these often involve flashbacks, flash-forwards, or enigmatic moments whose relationship to the main action is oblique. Such moments invite us to think about the narrative function of the opening via the ludic, puzzle-solving mode of forensic fandom and the operational aesthetic that I’ve discussed at length in Complex TV. “Dead Freight” starts in that vein, with an unknown boy riding a dirt bike in the desert, collecting a tarantula, and hearing a train whistle – cut to credits. Experienced Breaking Bad viewers are left to question how this relates to the main characters and their exploits.

The bulk of the episode ignores this dangling thread, so it’s left to viewers as to whether we actively remember the teaser as something to anticipate, or file it away into the memory archive until Tarantula Boy returns in the final moments. And it seems that viewers’ experiences varied–personally, I got swept away by the train heist (even though the train whistle was the clear link between the two timeframes) that I completely had forgotten about the teaser until Tarantula Boy returned to see Jesse’s celebration dance, creating a moment of surprise memory (punctuated by a surprise gunshot). My wife said she’d remembered throughout, and was waiting to see what might happen when he returns, creating a classic case of Hitchockian narrative suspense.

I posed the question on Twitter & Facebook to see if other people experienced these different narrative engagements. Based on my highly unscientific sample & responses, viewers were split: 10 people reported that they’d remembered Tarantula Boy and anticipated his return in some fashion, while 11 viewers forgot like me. A few others said they were spoiled on the ending, either by Twitter reports or watching a rerun and mistakenly seeing the last minute of the episode’s previous airing, and those viewers said it didn’t ruin the experience, as the anticipation toward the inevitable was also quite compelling. I think it’s quite telling that three different modes of cognitive engagement – surprise, suspense, and spoiled anticipation – were all rewarding for viewers, offering varied but potent pleasures. Such experiences are a great illustration of the range of narrative engagement that I explore in the Comprehension chapter of Complex TV.

While I’ve got your attention, I want to talk about the character arc and thematic impact of Todd’s shooting of Tarantula Boy. A few reviews of “Dead Freight” that I’ve read (such as James Poniewozik’s) question whether having Todd pull the trigger is a cop-out, letting Walt & Jesse off the hook of figuring out how to deal with the witness and rationalize whatever action they take. But I think that Todd’s action sets up some better moral questions: if Walt & Jesse are now the bosses, how do they deal with a crew member who follows orders so well–remember Jesse’s instructions, “The point is, no one, other than us, can ever know that this robbery went down. Nobody”–that it results in a dead child. And it’s no coincidence that this situation mirrors the exact events that caused Jesse (and later Walt) to turn on Gus in season 3: Gus’s crew killing a child to tie-up loose ends, and Gus dealing with it as a rational, business-minded manager. Now Jesse has similar blood on his hands and conscience, and Walt must face the reality that if a random kid can get shot as collateral damage for his operation, then he cannot pretend that his own kids are truly safe.

One of the main themes of season 4 was that Walt resented being treated as an employee, and he felt he deserved to wear the mantle of leadership. Now that he “won,” season 5 is playing out the consequences of being the boss, and forcing both Walt and Jesse to grapple with the costs of being in charge, shattering their illusion that there is a way to run this dirty, death-creating business cleanly. For these characters, dealing with Todd’s obedient service without derailing the business is a much bigger and more satisfying moral quandary than solving the problem of Tarantula Boy as the heist’s only loose end.

I must admit I don’t really understand the anti-Skyler vitriol, as I’ve always found her to be an interesting character who both provides a compelling dramatic foil for protagonist Walt and has developed her own intriguing arc of moral boundary-pushing. One thing that remains unclear to me is how much people dislike Skyler White the fictional person (finding her annoying, unsympathetic, or otherwise doing things that stand in the way of characters we like more) versus Skyler White the character (finding her unrealistic, poorly acted, or out-of-place in the storytelling) – do any articulate Skyler-haters want to clarify in the comments? (And I talk some about this distinction between character and person in Complex TV.)

[Spoilers through the fourth episode of season 5 below the fold.]

Amidst the general ongoing Skyler-hating, I’ve seen some specific pushback to how Skyler has reacted to Walt this season, as she responded to Walt’s victory over Gus and subsequent ego boost through paralyzing fear. The thrust of this complaint is questioning why should Skyler freak out so much when clearly Walt killed a horrible criminal who was going after the White family? After all, Walt assures her that the threat is dead, and now they’re all safe. But this points to one of the challenges of interpreting characters in a serialized narrative, as it is difficult to keep track of and differentiate between what we know as viewers, and what particular characters know about the story events. On one hand, this might make Skyler’s reaction seem even more unwarranted – after all, Skyler has no idea of many worse things that Walt has done and how much he has lied to her!

But if we think about what she knows and how her perception of Walt has shifted over the series, we can see a very different vision of her character and relationships. Thinking through this, I started remembering how Skyler has experienced Walt’s transformation, and imagining the story from her perspective. I thought about trying to edit down the series to only Skyler’s scenes to help map her experiences, but I lack the time to fully work through the video archives. Instead, I’ll try to recap how the series has portrayed Skyler’s story, what she knows and how she’s reacted to Walt, ending with my thoughts on season 5′s shifts and one theory about Skyler-hating.

Skyler started the series in a content and comfortable place, if not living the life she had dreamed when she married the older Walter White, an ambitious and successful scientist who was a bit too risky in wanting to spend beyond his means. But Walt’s professional failings and the challenges of having a disabled son shifted their life into a more struggling but stable existence: she gave up trying to be a writer to work as a part-time bookkeeper, he became a chemistry teacher who had to moonlight at a car wash. A surprise pregnancy changes things, but more abruptly Walt starts acting highly erratically around his 50th birthday. Walt’s behavior soon is explained when he reveals that he has terminal lung cancer, and is resigned to die rather than getting treatment. In an effort to keep her family together, she convinces Walt to undergo treatment and extend his life.

But Walt’s behavior remains bizarre, including a fugue state, connection with a druggie former student, numerous unexplained disappearances, strange parenting decisions (what was up with Junior and the tequilia?), and possibilities of a second cell phone that points toward his deception. Despite being 8 months pregnant, she goes back to work to help pay for their medical bills, even though her boss’s affections creep her out. And on top of everything, Walt misses their baby being born with a shoddy excuse. When Walt undergoes cancer surgery, he confirms his second cell phone, leading to Skyler investigating some of his cover stories, revealing a web of deception worse than she imagined – and thus she leaves him as soon as he has recovered from surgery.

Soon after their separation, Walt tells Skyler his secret: that he has been cooking meth. He assures her that it’s a safe job, with no violence or threat of danger, but she’s outraged at how this risks everything for their family and demands a divorce. Walt refuses, calling her bluff and moving back in despite her threats to go to the police. So she lashes out in the only way that she can think of: having an affair with her boss, who has his own corrupt business practices that she finds herself wrapped up in. Eventually Walt does agree to a divorce, but Skyler decides to remain married for the legal protection. When Hank is  shot and left paralyzed due to circumstances seemingly related to Walt’s crimes, Skyler agrees to pay for Hank’s medical costs, devising a cover story for Walt’s riches involving compulsive gambling and card-counting, drawing her deeper into Walt’s criminal interests. As Skyler learns more about Walt’s business, she puts her bookkeeping skills to work to help launder money and purchase a car wash as a front, rationalizing her decision that helping Walt is better for the family than breaking the law for Ted.

Although their relationship is far from solid, Skyler and Walt reach a balanced arrangement of mutual benefit, until she learns that one of his drug associates was killed in cold blood. After expressing concern for their safety, Walt lashes out with an anger she has never seen before, claiming to be “the danger” in a threatening moment. She comes close to taking baby Holly and fleeing, but decides she must remain to “protect this family from the man who protects the family” – how much she honestly fears Walt versus seeing him as a blowhard out of his depths is uncertain, but clearly she feels like she can still manage him. Trouble with Ted returns in the form of an IRS investigation, which she helps skirt by paying him off – and enlisting Saul’s help to convince him to step aside. And then a threat to Hank’s life prompts the family to go into protection, which ends when Gus Fring is killed in a nursing home explosion.

That takes us to season 5, which opens (after the flash-forward teaser) with Skyler’s conversation with Walt, when she realizes he was responsible for the bomb. Remember, this is the first indication she has gotten Walt is capable of murder – while we witnessed his procession of increasingly amoral killings (that I’ve discussed more here), to Skyler, this means Walt has suddenly gone from a criminal chemist who seems in over his head, to a scheming murderer willing to blow-up a nursing home to take out an enemy. Just imagine what might go through your mind if you discovered such news about your spouse, and what else you might imagine he has done that you’ve yet to discover. Suddenly she’s not only aiding a drug criminal, she’s an accessory to murder – and soon learns that her efforts with Ted have led to his near demise and resulting terrorized paralysis. Skyler is simultaneously repulsed by the murderer who moves back in & assures her “life is good,” and horrified that she too has made moral compromises in the name of protecting her family, taking her down the road that Walt has already traveled. But unlike Walt, she experiences remorse and horror at her own actions, changing course toward a state of passive paralysis to plan how to protect her children from “the danger.”

I find this contrast to be one of the brilliant resonances of this season thus far, reminding us that Walt’s slide into monstrosity was due to a series of active choices & moral failings, not the reactive “shit happens” that Skyler calls out as part of his perpetual series of rationalizations. And now his path has taken him to another fork in the road: see himself as the man that his wife sees to try to save his marriage (and perhaps his humanity), or puff himself up to bully or manipulate her into accepting Heisenberg, just as he did with Jesse. And he has clearly chosen to double-down as Heisenberg, continuing his color palette redesign with the matching black hat and macho car. The argument in their bedroom was one of the most violent scenes the show has ever done – despite the lack of physical contact, it is clear that Skyler is now a battered spouse, desperately seeking any way to protect her kids and self while she waits for Walt’s cancer to overtake his body.

So why do so many people hate Skyler, despite her clear position as victim? Aside from the knee-jerk misogyny that Rosenberg discusses, I think a large part has to do with the power of first impressions: the first season of Breaking Bad did a pretty mediocre job developing any character beyond Walt and Jesse, and of those undeveloped characters, Skyler was the most central in the story. Thus we didn’t see that much of Hank before he became more nuanced in the second season, but we’d seen enough of Skyler to cement a sense that she was unappealing. Plus in those early days, we were rooting for Walt to break out of his boring life into the more exciting world of crime, and Skyler’s primary function was to ground him in mundanity. But just as Walt has transformed as a character into a hateful and repulsive man, Skyler became more fully-realized and complex, far more nuanced than her first impressions. But seemingly, many viewers cannot get beyond those initial impressions to see and appreciate Skyler’s transformations, both as character and person. (Again, if any Skyler-haters want to offer other explanations, I’m eager to read them!)

At the end of the fourth season, my main investment was in seeing Jesse survive the series, hopefully rising above Walt’s toxic influence. But 1/4 through the final season, my allegiances are just as strongly with Skyler, the only character who sees Walt truly for what he is. We know she won’t be there for his 52nd birthday, but I truly hope she’s found her escape from Walt’s oppressive bullying to a safe place.

And with that, I end with this brilliant triptych image that circulated on Twitter yesterday – Walter White’s character “development” over three birthdays:

UPDATE: Just a few links that I’ve found or were posted after writing this. First, a nice examination of these issues by Feminist, Unplugged. Next, a good interview with Anna Gunn on her character & the backlash. Finally, a very interesting take by Kelli Marshall, who articulates her dislike for Skyler from a feminist perspective.

One of the challenges of a long-form serial narrative is maintaining viewer comprehension throughout a variety of viewing practices, whether it is weekly and seasonal installments through broadcast schedules, or the more variable patterns afforded by DVDs, online viewing, and DVRs. This chapter builds on cognitive theories of narrative comprehension to consider how television serials have created methods to both maximize understanding and play with knowledge differentials between characters and viewers. I focus on issues of viewer memory as addressed both within the core narrative text and associated paratexts (like recaps and DVD extras), considering the varying ways programs trigger memories and exploit viewer’s fading memories to create unusual surprises in programs like Battlestar Galactica, Dexter, and Lost. The chapter also analyzes different approaches to suspense, surprise, anticipation, and curiosity that have emerged for long-form serial television, and how viewers thwart such narrative pleasures through spoilers. Finally, it concludes with a detailed account of the serial viewer’s activity in watching an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Much of the chapter is either brand new writing (including over 4,000 words about the brilliant Curb episode “Vehicular Fellatio”!), or major reworkings of past pieces. These include a condensed account of the essay on Lost spoiler fans that I co-wrote with Jonathan Gray and discussed more here on the blog, and a reworking of my essay on the mechanics of memory on serial television, as well as poaching from this post as well. It represents an attempt to merge cognitive poetics with more typical cultural studies accounts of television consumption – hopefully it’s a feasible marriage!

As always, I welcome and encourage feedback on this chapter, as well as the others that remain online for your reading and commenting pleasure. Thanks!

My one addendum to Weinman’s analysis is that I think much of the controversy over NBC’s primetime coverage involves a genre misunderstanding of what the evening broadcasts are trying to offer. To get what NBC is doing, we need to understand that the nightly programs are not sportscasting as we typically think of it. Instead, it’s better thought of as a nightly magazine program recapping the day’s events through a combination of replays, feature stories, travelogues, interviews, and inexplicable appearances by Ryan Seacrest. A good parallel is the difference between USA Today‘s daily sports page, and the weekly Sports Illustrated magazine. NBC’s primetime Olympics show is a sports magazine, in the model of Today as a news magazine – notably, it is produced by Today‘s production team.

I’m not a fan of this approach to covering the Olympics, as I want to watch the events live and with minimal interruptions, and without the formulaic human interest features. But clearly many viewers enjoy this magazine style blending extended highlight reels with personal profiles. So if I could change anything about NBC’s coverage, I’d make this genre label more explicit, calling the primetime show Olympics Today and clearly embracing its magazine format. Then show all of the major events live on the various NBCU channels as actual sportscasts, even if they’ll be repeated in primetime. (Yes, they are streaming everything online, but I’ve had a hard time getting decent quality without major buffering lags & skips.)

And, of course, get rid of Ryan Seacrest.

UPDATE: As some excellent after-the-fact evidence for this analysis, see Joe Posnanski’s interview with NBC legend Dick Ebersol, where he highlights that the Olympics are a television event, not a sporting event.