Viscerally Uncomfortable TV: Affective Spectatorship and Televisual
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Viscerally Uncomfortable TV: Affective Spectatorship and Televisual Neoliberalism A dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Modern Culture and Media Hunter Reed Hargraves Brown University Spring 2015 © Copyright 2015 by Hunter R. Hargraves This dissertation by Hunter R. Hargraves is accepted in its present form by the Department of Modern Culture and Media as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Date: _____________ __________________________________________ Lynne Joyrich, Advisor Professor, Modern Culture and Media Brown University Recommended to the Graduate Council Date: _____________ __________________________________________ Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Reader Professor, Modern Culture and Media Brown University Date: _____________ __________________________________________ Rebecca Schneider, Reader Professor, Theatre Arts and Performance Studies Brown University Date: _____________ __________________________________________ Laurie Ouellette, Reader Associate Professor, Communication Studies University of Minnesota Approved by the Graduate Council Date: _____________ __________________________________________ Peter Weber, Dean of the Graduate School Brown University {Curriculum Vitae} Hunter Hargraves Born on 26 May 1983 in Bellevue, Washington. Education: M.A. Modern Culture and Media, Brown University, 2011. B.A. History and Political Science, Stanford University, 2005. Minor (with Honors), Asian American Studies. Awards and Honors: Joukowsky Family Graduate Dissertation Fellowship, 2013-2014. Andrew W. Mellon Graduate Workshop Grant, 2013-2014. Office of International Affairs International Travel Grant, 2011, 2014. TDR: The Drama Review Student Essay Contest Shortlist, 2012. Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women Graduate Student Fellowship, 2011-2012. Publications: Refereed Articles “(TV) Junkies in Need of an Intervention: On Addictive Spectatorship,” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 88 (forthcoming 2015). Book Chapters “Tan TV: Reality Television’s Postracial Delusion,” in A Companion to Reality Television, ed. Laurie Ouellette (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2014): 283-305. Other Articles “…Telentangled,” Spectator 34.2 (2014): 81-87. “You Better Work: The Commodification of HIV in RuPaul’s Drag Race,” Spectator 31.2 (2011): 24-34. “‘Are You Iffy?’: A Social Marketing Campaign to Address Uncertainty in HIV Status Communication Among Men Who Have Sex with Men,” Sexually Transmitted Diseases 38.5 (May 2011): 457-458 (co-authored with Jen Hecht, Jason Riggs, Chongyi Wei, and H. Fisher Raymond. {Preface} This is a dissertation about being made to feel uncomfortable by American television. While the aesthetic, industrial, technological, generic, and convergent changes to television of the past three decades have been extensively documented, little has been written about the affective texture of millennial television, or how these changes elicit different affective responses and investments from its spectators. Although fan studies has attempted to read some of these changes together – most notably through attending to the digital technologies that enable participatory culture and media convergence – Viscerally Uncomfortable TV examines millennial television from a different angle, through the contradictory feelings of pleasure and discomfort that come from television’s present fascination with the perverse. I turn to affect as necessary to make sense of millennial television. As I explore in later pages, the renewed interest in affect across the humanities and social sciences resonates with the ascendancy of neoliberalism in life and representation, I refuse distinctions between the affective and the ideological, believing that both analytical modes are necessary for making sense of television, the dominant entertainment medium of late capitalism. We might say, following Amy Villarejo, that this demands a rather ethereally “queer” project: queer not only in that it demonstrates the entanglement of political-economic, aesthetic, technological, and formal concerns, but queer in that it thinks through the rather “queer” feeling experienced by spectators who are confronted with excessively intense material on their screens.1 If the primary intervention of cultural studies was to reveal the ideological effects of such an entanglement of forces, my goal v here is to reveal the affective effects of those same forces on the spectator (or better still, the entanglement of the ideological and the affective). The clash between affect (as presubjective in the sense of subjectivity or as subjective in the sense of being personal or individual) and ideology (as institutional or as social) makes the act of identifying and categorizing uncomfortable television difficult. Who determines, for example, what counts as uncomfortable, and for which audiences? Many series with uncomfortable elements do not appear in this dissertation, and not just for lack of space: fantasy and horror series such as Game of Thrones (HBO, 2011- present) and American Horror Story (FX, 2011-present) would seem to qualify as deeply uncomfortable, given their displays of sexual and racial violence, but I see their generic classifications as doing other work to govern the mechanisms of disavowal and critique by which uncomfortable affects become rerouted into viewer pleasure.2 Such exclusions may strike some readers as being unfair or as incorrect, but I do not mean to limit narrowly definitions of discomfort through establishing these parameters. Rather, I provide a representative sampling across four genres that, by and large, have come to define millennial television: serialized drama, reality TV, hybrid comedy, and the transformative works exemplary of a convergent participatory culture. The following chapters outline how the viscerally uncomfortable as a model registers these spectatorial performances of pleasure and discomfort in many genres of millennial television: it touches upon reality, narrative drama, police procedural, news, real crime, serialized comedy, and fan-produced satire. Moreover, the dissertation argues against the ontological differentiation of these genres with respect to cultural status (i.e. “quality,” “middlebrow,” and “trash”). Through wielding the viscerally uncomfortable, I vi trace how spectators are both complicit in (through, for example, buying into the branding culture of quality television) and resistant to (through the queerly perverse spectacles of trash television) the prevailing cultural logics of neoliberalism that calcified in 1990s America. In emphasizing television as an object in which to read these cultural histories, I draw from a discipline significantly steeped in feminist modes of thought; as a medium that primarily entered the national imaginary through the domestic space of the suburban American home, television has always emphasized questions of gender and sexuality. Viscerally Uncomfortable TV thus makes an intervention into analyses that examines television “after TV,” demanding that a “queer” television studies synthesize work in affect and performance into its methodological repertoire. The dissertation is intended to provoke discomfort among its readers, who must account for their own spectatorial pleasure in the popular texts of a pervasively neoliberal American culture. While such discomfort might ultimately be nothing new – American television has never claimed to be an antagonistic force against the status quo – my dissertation intends to pressure the category of the “popular,” highlighting how the perverse and the popular, ideological and affective critique, and scriptive things and spectators all circulate when we consume millennial TV. Chapter 1, “Television Scripts,” provides the theoretical framework for understanding the viscerally uncomfortable, as well as accounting for the richness and complexity of the three terms that animate this project: millennial television, affect, and neoliberalism. Highlighting television’s role in scripting audiences to think with and vii against neoliberal rationalities, I sketch out the changes to television that have enabled the viscerally uncomfortable to emerge. Chapter 2, “(TV) Junkies in Need of an Intervention: Theorizing Addictive Spectatorship,” reads theories of narcoanalysis alongside episodes of recovery television, a subgenre of reality TV in which addicts are profiled and reformed through a staged intervention. Using an episode of the reality series Intervention, I show that reality television’s structuring of affect provides audiences with a motive to disidentify with its subjects in order to disavow their own addictions – including, importantly, their addiction to TV itself. Chapter 3, “Crossed Wires: Appropriative Intermediality and Quality TV,” considers what has been called a new “golden age” of serialized drama; these current programs feature anti-heroes and are heralded by critics and scholars as “literature” or as “cinema.” Examining why a dislikable or morally repugnant protagonist is presumed to be a necessary component for televisual risk-taking, and why both have been branded as “art,” I use discourses surrounding HBO’s The Wire to read intermedial appropriation – the disavowal of televisuality in favor of a more legitimated art form – against theories of cultural appropriation. Chapter 4, “The Grand Supreme Cometh: Consenting to the Haptic Uncanny of the Predatory Spectator,” takes up the idiom of the exploited child in reality television, juxtaposing the 1996