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Florida State University Libraries Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2010 Exceptional TV: Post-9/11 Serial Television and American Exceptionalism Erika Johnson-Lewis Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES EXCEPTIONAL TV: POST-9/11 SERIAL TELEVISION AND AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM By ERIKA JOHNSON-LEWIS A Dissertation submitted to the Program in Interdisciplinary Humanities in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2010 Copyright © 2010 Erika Johnson-Lewis All Rights Reserved The members of the committee approve the dissertation of Erika Johnson-Lewis defended on March 25, 2010. ________________________________ Leigh H. Edwards Professor Directing Dissertation ________________________________ R.M. Berry University Representative ________________________________ David Johnson Committee Member ________________________________ Amit Rai Committee Member ________________________________ Jennifer Proffitt Committee Member Approved: _____________________________________ John Kelsay, Director, Program in Interdisciplinary Humanities The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members. ii This dissertation is dedicated to my parents, Judy and Mel, my husband, Alan, and my little man, Gareth. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation was completed with the help of many people. First, I would like to thank my advisor, Leigh Edwards, for all her help, encouragement, and impromptu training sessions in American studies. Her guidance and thoughtful comments were indispensible to me throughout this process. She always encouraged me to have confidence in myself and for that I am grateful. I would also like to thank all of my committee members, Jennifer Proffitt, Amit Rai, Ralph Berry, and David Johnson for their patience and support. Many friends have helped me throughout this process. I want to acknowledge Katheryn Wright for keeping me focused. Our long conversations about Starbuck, Dexter, and Al Swearengen helped me work through many of the ideas and arguments expressed in this dissertation. I wish to also acknowledge Erin DiCesare; her tireless work ethic inspired me to drive on and work hard. Other friends, old and new, have supported me over the years, and without them this dissertation would not have been possible. Most importantly, I wish to express my heart-felt gratitude for my family, to whom this dissertation is dedicated. To my Mom and Dad who always encouraged me to be my best; their mutual love and respect for each other and their belief in me has made me who I am today. To my loving husband Alan Lewis, without whom this project would have been impossible. He spent countless hours watching television shows and listening to me rattle on about them incessantly. He read many drafts as the project changed and grew. He made me coffee and kept me sane. And last to my little man, Gareth Johnson-Lewis, who always reminded me it was okay to take some time to have fun; he is my inspiration and my world. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................ vi INTRODUCTION....................................................................................................... 1 1. THE EXCEPTIONALIST MATRIX.........................................................................11 2. RE-IMAGINING THE FRONTIER .......................................................................43 3. TELEVISION, TORTURE, AND THE TICKING TIME BOMB ............................80 4. STATES OF AMERICAN EXCEPTION ............................................................115 CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................149 SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY ......................................................................................154 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...................................................................................170 v ABSTRACT This dissertation seeks to understand how a re-invigorated sense of American exceptionalism circulated within the texts of several prime time serial television programs. American exceptionalism has functioned as a foundational mythology and a justifying discourse that works to create a sense of national unity through participation in rituals of national belonging. Television is a cultural site where rituals of national belonging are experienced and shared. As such, it is important to examine how television texts engage with and participate in the creation, cultivation, and circulation of nationalist mythologies, ideologies, and discourses. To understand serial televisionʼs engagement with exceptionalist themes and myths, I begin in chapter one by offering a history of American exceptionalism as it emerged through the institutionalization of American studies as a discipline. Chapter two looks at HBOʼs Deadwood and CBSʼs Jericho and examines how they engage with foundational exceptionalist tropes such as destiny, frontier, and the jeremiad. Chapter three engages with the Fox series 24 and the Showtime series Dexter, to describe the intersection of American exceptionalismʼs history as a justifying discourse and the legal construction of the state of exception in the discourse of the ticking time bomb scenario as it was deployed to legitimize the use of torture. The final chapter analyzes how ABCʼs Lost and SyFyʼs Battlestar Galactica negotiate with American exceptionalism in terms of both the state of exception and the ticking time bomb as well as with the foundationalist tropes of mission and destiny, the frontier and the garden. vi INTRODUCTION On September 20, 2001 President George W. Bush declared that on the evening of September 11 “night fell on a different world.”1 It has become a commonplace truism that after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001 the world became a radically different place. In a 2004 New York Times article Joan Didion referred to this as a “new normal.” She explains: September 11 […] had created a “new normal,” an altered condition in which we were supposed to be able to see, as The Christian Science Monitor explained a month after the events, “what is—and what is no longer—important.” […] The “new normal” required that we adopt a “new paradigm,” which in turn required, according to an internal White House memo signed by President Bush, ʻnew thinking in the law of war,ʼ (Didion). But, what is it that has changed and how? Whose interests are served in the continued assertion that “everything has changed” and for what end? In 9/11 The Culture of Commemoration, David Simpson argues that, the United States, as a culture, has been too quick to make pronouncements about our new “post-9/11” world, in which the United States is locked in a struggle with pre-modern, primitive, barbaric terror(ists) determined to destroy the “American way of life.” The brave new world found at the center of post- 9/11 rhetoric trades on a fear that life stands at the brink of annihilation and that nothing less than the existence of the nation itself is at stake. The present is understood as existing in a state of permanent crisis. The United States is allegedly waging an epic battle against a nameless, faceless, and yet all encompassing enemy. The state of emergency is daily declared through a steady stream of possibly catastrophic threats: 1 The abbreviation 9/11 will be used to refer to the terrorist events of September 11, 2001 throughout. 1 terrorism, bioterrorism, global climate change, financial crises, the “Clash of Civilizations”, culture wars, torture, evolution, all pointing their deathly fingers towards an uncertain and monstrous future. The narrative of the presentʼs radical newness creates a problematic equivalence between “civilization” and the United States, which is indicative of what I will refer to as the “exceptionalist matrix.” At the same time the United States (and the world) was experiencing a supposed inauguration into a new historical period, the media landscape was also changing in response to developments in new media and digital culture. The Internet, through the proliferation of broadband access, continued its encroachment into territory previously dominated by television and film. New media outlets provided new spaces for the production and consumption of multifaceted immersion experiences and new possibilities for human interaction. The age of Web2.0, social networking, and online content (legal and otherwise) has chipped away at the television audience, and just as online downloading of music began to change the music industry in the late 1990s, the television industry has found that it must also change. Changes occurred across the industry in production, content, and distribution. Different strategies were employed to address the diminished and increasingly fragmented television audiences. One such strategy was an increased focus on the prime time serial. For example, 24 (2001-2007), Six Feet Under (2001-2005), and Alias (2001-2006) all began their runs in 2001 and Lost (2004-2010), Veronica Mars (2004- 2007), and Battlestar Galactica (2004-2009) began in 2004. These different series employed varying levels of serialization, but all of them included season or series long narratives. Additionally, some networks have also attempted
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