Heteroglossia in the Ensemble Programme
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Heteroglossia in the Ensemble Programme By Roberta Pearson We asked Rick Berman whether Trek’s message shows tended to be on the liberal side of the spectrum. “I would say that they do. I think they certainly did with Gene, and I think there’s a bit more of a liberal bent. But we’ve tried to examine issues from both sides.”i Berman’s answer underestimates television and Trek’s capacity for a remarkably complex engagement with the public sphere; the multiple narrative voices of a series with an ensemble cast enable the presentation of many more than two sides. The ambiguities resulting from this polysemy make it difficult to identify the “truth” within the textual actual world or, by extension, in the real world upon which it comments. Says Marie-Laure Ryan, Though the text should be regarded as the highest authority in establishing the facts of the fictional world, this authority does not derive from a monolithic power but is distributed – in accordance with Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea of dialogism – among a plurality of narrative voices. Since these voices may contradict each other, fictional truths cannot automatically be derived from textual statements. ii A television programme with an ensemble cast resembles in many respects the novel from which Bakhtin derived his concepts of heteroglossia and the dialogism to which it gives rise. According to Bakhtin The novel can be defined as a diversity of social speech types … and a diversity of individual voices, artistically organized…. The novel orchestrates all its themes, the totality of the world of objects and ideas depicted and expressed in it, by means of the social diversity of speech types and by the differing individual voices that flourish under such conditions. Authorial speech, the speeches of narrators, inserted genres, the speech of characters are merely those fundamental compositional unities with whose help heteroglossia can center the novel; each of them permits a multiplicity of social voices and a wide variety of their links and interrelationships…. iii Bakhtin was an important influence upon John Fiske’s pioneering application of cultural studies theory to television in the 1987 Television Cultures. Fiske has for some become emblematic of a certain strain of cultural studies which has celebrated audience resistance and 1 the semiotic guerrilla while neglecting ideology and structural determinants. But Fiske’s analysis of television texts is a socio-political one, taking up Bakhtin’s notion of “the dialogic nature of language, which was a struggle among socio-linguistic points of view….”iv Fiske argues that the polysemy of the television text arises not just in reception but in production, necessitated by the producers’ bid for the widest possible audience. An essential characteristic of television is its polysemy, or multiplicity of meanings. A program provides a potential of meanings which may be realized, or made into actually experienced meanings, by socially situated viewers in the process of reading….. The motivation to exploit the polysemy of the program is social: the polysemy of the text is necessary if it is to be popular amongst viewers who occupy a variety of situations within the social structure.v The structural determinants of the marketplace often produce texts incapable of resolving their own ideological contradictions, says Fiske. As society consists of a structured system of different, unequal, and often conflicting groups, so its popular texts will exhibit a similar structured multiplicity of voices and meanings often in conflict with each other…. The structure of the television text and its ideological role in a capitalist society may well try hard to iron out and resolve the contradictions within it, but, paradoxically, its popularity within that society depends upon its failure to achieve this end successfully. vi Horace Newcomb and Paul M. Hirsch expressed a similar view in their article “Television as a Cultural Forum,” originally written a few years before Fiske’s book. The conflicts we see in television drama, embedded in familiar and nonthreatening frames, are conflicts ongoing in American social experience and cultural history. In a few cases we might see strong perspectives that argue of the absolute correctness of one point of view or another. But for the most part the rhetoric of television drama is the rhetoric of discussion…. We see statements about the issues and it should be clear that ideological positions can be balanced within the forum by others from a different perspective.vii 2 If most texts at most times simply reproduce the dominant ideology, then why bother studying television or any popular culture? Our insistence upon acknowledging the polysemic and contradictory nature of many Trek episodes celebrates not Star Trek but the best of the cultural studies tradition. Our insistence upon the medium-specific ways in which different texts create meaning also celebrates this tradition. As we indicated above, a television show with an ensemble cast orchestrates in novelistic fashion a plurality of voices. Ella Taylor makes this point in reference to The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Though Mary is the start, the MTM Show has no single perspective. She works within an ensemble…. And if the group, the work- family, is of primary importance, so too are its individual members. Far more than in I Love Lucy or The Dick Van Dyke Show, the viewer’s attention and allegiance are shunted from one character to another. The narrative is less linear and the characters decentered, creating a world more relativistic and less clearly demarcated into good and evil.viii The ensemble casts of workplace sit-coms or dramas provide good conduits for polysemy, the characters initially designed around a series of binary oppositions which aid plot generation. For example in Frasier, argues Jonathan Bignell, “Frasier’s and his brother Nile’s sophistication and relative youth can be contrasted with their father’s crudeness and elderliness….’ix A diverse and varied crew has been a Star Trek hallmark since TOS, with demographic oppositions of male and female, youth and maturity, human and non-human, and, as many who have written about the show’s ideology have pointed out, white and non- white. Emotional oppositions also structure the crew’s makeup; Spock’s cool logic versus McCoy’s warm compassion; Picard’s reserve versus Riker’s easy charm; Data’s rationality versus Worf’s hotheadedness; Odo’s integrity versus Quark’s lack of scruples. Such contrasts are not unique to the television medium; novelistic, theatrical and cinematic characters are also structured around binary oppositions. But the construction of these characters and their binary oppositions across a series of episodes rather than in a one-off text is a defining characteristic of television as opposed to the cinema which occasionally adopts the serial form. This narrative structure brings with it, we would argue, enhanced opportunities for heteroglossia. Hyper-link films, those with multiple characters and narrative strands, some intersecting and some running parallel, do exhibit what Fiske calls a “structured multiplicity of voices and meanings often in conflict with each other.” This multiplicity of voices and meanings can be used for ideological critique, as in Crash (Paul Haggis, 2004) or Syriana (Stephen Gaghan, 3 2005), but risks stereotypical characterization and viewer confusion. As Village Voice critic J. Hoberman said about Syriana, “There are too many points of view and there is too little time to fully develop the key characterizations.”x Syriana gives us a world-weary middle- aged spy (George Clooney), a thrusting young businessman (Matt Damon), the liberal leader of a third world country (Alexander Siddig, a.k.a Julian Bashir in DS9), a slick and evil corporate lawyer (Christopher Plummer) and a supporting cast of less well-known names playing equally stereotypical characters. Given the complex and confusing plot, the star system serves to orient the viewer narratively. But, at the same time the star system inevitably throws the well-known actors into higher relief and closes down heteroglossia. A television series has the narrative space to flesh out all the characters; after several episodes all the members of even the largest cast (e.g., Lost or Heroes) become familiar, making it easier for the writers to stage and the competent viewer to follow debates among them. This familiarity may also make viewers more apt to heed the opinions of even the most unlikeable characters; Quark may be without scruples but we grow fond of him after a season or two. We would argue that the drama series’ ensemble cast offers one of the most effective means for television to engage with the public sphere. We illustrate this point through analysis of two episodes, the second season TOS “A Private Little War” and the third season TNG “The High Ground.” “A Private Little War” is one of TOS’s most direct engagements with contemporary political debates, the Federation/Klingon confrontation at its heart a very thinly disguised Vietnam War metaphor.xi In the episode, Kirk returns to a primitive planet that he first visited thirteen years ago as a young lieutenant. He discovers an ongoing conflict between the planet’s inhabitants, the villagers and the hill people, the former armed with flintlocks given to them by the Klingons. The Klingons have disturbed a Garden of Eden, which, Kirk argues, would have developed into a remarkably civilized culture if not for their intrusion into planetary politics. This resonates with the contemporary hegemonic rational for American intervention in Vietnam; Americans were not embroiling themselves in a civil war but fighting Communist outsiders to restore stability. Kirk decides to re-establish the balance of power by giving the hill people their own flintlocks, his strategy clearly linked to the Cold War policy of brinksmanship and assured mutual destruction.