The Electrical Transformation of the Public Sphere: Home Video, the Family, and the Limits of Privacy in the Digital Age
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THE ELECTRICAL TRANSFORMATION OF THE PUBLIC SPHERE: HOME VIDEO, THE FAMILY, AND THE LIMITS OF PRIVACY IN THE DIGITAL AGE By Adam Capitanio A DISSERTATION Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY American Studies 2012 ABSTRACT THE ELECTRICAL TRANSFORMATION OF THE PUBLIC SPHERE: HOME VIDEO, THE FAMILY, AND THE LIMITS OF PRIVACY IN THE DIGITAL AGE By Adam Capitanio One of the constituent features of the digital age has been the redrawing of the line between private and public. Millions of social media users willingly discuss intimate behavior and post private photographs and videos on the internet. Meanwhile, state and corporate bodies routinely violate individual privacy in the name of security and sophisticated marketing techniques. While these occurrences represent something new and different, they are unsurprising given the history of home and amateur media. In this dissertation, I argue that contemporary shifts in the nature of the public/private divide have historical roots in the aesthetics and style found in home movies and videos. In other words, long before Facebook and YouTube enabled users to publicly document their private lives, home movies and videos generated patterns of representation that were already shifting the unstable constitution of the “private” and the “public” spheres. Using critical theory and archival research, I demonstrate how home moviemakers represented their families and experiences in communal and liminal spaces, expanding the meaning of “home.” When video become the predominant medium for domestic usage, home mode artifacts became imbricated with television, granting them a form of phantasmagoric publicity that found fulfillment in the digital era. Finally, I analyze select films, including Rachel Getting Married (Jonathan Demme, 2008) and Family Viewing (Atom Egoyan, 1988), to understand the implications of home video for the narration of family history and the depiction of the family home. In these analyses I pay particular attention to the scope and the limits of video’s power to narrate family history, and the colonizing power of video’s representations over our intimate family and national spaces. Copyright by ADAM CAPITANIO 2012 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my dissertation committee at Michigan State University: my director, Ellen McCallum, with whom I had my very first seminar as a doctoral student, and whose rigorous but gentle guidance throughout my graduate career is largely responsible for my thinking today; Stephen Rachman, whose ability to respond intelligently to any problem or question inspires; Karl Schoonover has been especially helpful in offering comments and advice in the late stages of this project; and finally Gary Hoppenstand, who is the most egoless scholar I have met and for whom the well-being of students always comes first. Jennifer Fay also had a profound effect on the initial impetus for this project. I also thank the individuals and institutions that enabled the research reflected in this project: The Paley Center for Media; The Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institute, especially Wendy Shay and Franklin A. Robinson; The Human Studies Film Archive, also at the Smithsonian, where archivists made me feel welcome when a day of research was cut short by a building evacuation; and the Home Movie Archives at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, where I took my very first research trip and where the inklings of many ideas appearing in this dissertation emerged. Finally, I thank the American Studies Program and the Graduate School at Michigan State University for providing me with funding throughout this entire process. Lastly, thanks to the many friends I made during graduate school who may not appear directly in these pages, but are reflected in them. They not only served as sounding boards for ideas, but also as a de facto therapy group, and helped make the last seven years among the best in my life. Thanks and love to Emily Walz, who has dealt with more than her fair share of my agonizing over this dissertation. Finally to my parents, who have always offered advice when v asked and then allowed me to make my own bad decisions, and furthermore listened patiently when I complained about the consequences. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION: THE NOT-SO PRIVATE REC-ORD 1 CHAPTER 1: WHAT’S PAST IS PUBLIC: HOME MOVIES, PUBLIC SPACES, AND REFLECTIVE NOSTALGIA 21 Home Movies and Nostalgic Response 21 “Home” Movies and the Public – Gesture, Space, and History 27 Living in the Space of the Home Movie 39 CHAPTER 2: HERE IS HOME VIDEO, THEIR MIRROR ONTO YOUR WORLD 59 Television and Home Video Publicity 63 Home Video: The Realist Style and Private Memory 74 Memory in Exchange: America’s Funniest Home Videos 86 CHAPTER 3: NARRATING THE FAMILY IN THE HOME VIDEO FILM 98 Rachel Getting Married and the Problem of Home Video Narration 98 Dialectics of Home and Media: sex, lies, and videotape and Film 110 Family Narration Amidst the Documents (and the Documentary Mode): 51 Birch Street 123 CHAPTER 4: VIDEO CONQUERS THE WORLD (AND CANADA): NARRATING FAMILY AND NATIONAL HISTORY IN ATOM EGOYAN’S VIDEO FILMS 134 Family Viewing: Memory and Home Colonized by Video 136 Video Amongst the Panoply: Media Response to National Trauma in Ararat 150 CONCLUSION: OFFICE POLITICS: A WAY OF CONCLUDING 166 WORKS CITED 183 vii INTRODUCTION: THE NOT-SO PRIVATE REC-ORD The video opens with a shot of a bouquet and the date – July 28, 1991 – superimposed over it. It fades to a title card with the names of the bride and groom, Sherry and Mark. “Leather and Lace” by Stevie Nicks plays in the background, a love song emphasizing give and take, a gendered play of strength and fragility common to the genre - not be an unusual sentiment for a wedding. Abruptly we cut to a long shot of the church ceremony’s conclusion, with Mark lifting Sherry’s veil to kiss her. Another cut brings us outside the church, where the couple walks down the steps to the waiting limousine. Mark seems particularly stiff, perhaps unused to the attention. Once in the limo, the couple is framed in close up, with Mark closer to the lens. “Congratulations guys,” says the videographer. “The scary part is over, right, now its time to party.” Sherry has a huge grin on her face, but Mark responds unenthusiastically, “I don’t know.” Sherry and the videographer laugh uncomfortably. The next shot frames the “just married” tag on the back of the limousine, and we then move to the wedding reception, where guests toast the (un?)happy couple. One woman, centered in the video camera’s spotlight, wishes “the best of health and happiness to both of you, have millions of children, and congratulations.” So far this video resembles a number of similar artifacts residing in the homes of thousands of married (and divorced) couples, albeit compressed by a YouTube editor. After this lengthy prelude, the song “I Was a Lover” by TV on the Radio begins, and we shift genres from a wedding video to an unofficial music video. The music’s electronic, stuttering beat is echoed in the temporal jump cuts of the images, repeating moments and juxtaposing them as Sherry 1 performs an elaborate, theatrical dance for the wedding guests to the clear embarrassment of her new husband. Shots of the earlier ceremony are intercut with Sherry, alone, on the dance floor, and as the song enters its bridge, shots of wedding guests dancing join the conglomeration of images. Mark appears expressionless and uncomfortable throughout, perhaps even angry, just as 1 he did in the limousine. A combination of performance and repetition seems to comment on the nature of wedding videos. Both song and video utilize repetition as a stylistic device, accomplished with digital technologies like synthesizers and video editing software. Meanwhile, the behavior of the participants suggests the ingrained performance and repetition of a ritual, with the ceremony, dancing at the reception, and well wishing the newly married couple. Looping the clips suggests the rituality of the participants’ movements, like re-enactments of actions they’ve witnessed other couples perform, or have seen on television, or in other home videos. Sherry’s theatrical dance, which has obviously been choreographed and practiced, further emphasizes the ritualistic, performative factor of the wedding reception. One wonders, aided by the accomplished editing of the YouTube artist, the extent to which many of the expected “events” during a traditional wedding – anything from the introduction of the wedding party to the first dance to the toss of the bouquet – are nowadays performed as much for the family’s benefit as for the benefit of cameras, so that the family can return to the recordings later, point to those ritual events, and create from them an individual narrative of “a wedding.” Weddings and their videography become a closed circuit – events recorded and later reviewed, and the family recognizes its own iteration of a social ritual, which in turn enforces the notion that further weddings should not take place unless properly documented with a video recording. Repetition is the perfect stylistic 1 This video can be seen on YouTube under the title “I Was a Lover,” posted by user estoydpaso. 2 device for the wedding video, because the wedding itself just “repeats” actions that have been performed (and recorded) countless times before. However, there is a uniqueness of event in the video as well. Mark’s attitude of indifference and Sherry’s exaggerated dance performance lend the video a “punctum,” to use 2 Roland Barthes’ phrase, wisely emphasized by the creator of the music video. Barthes stresses that the punctum is an individual effect, but the video’s creator has isolated a possible one (Mark’s apparent displeasure) and emphasized it through montage.