Smit, Alexia Jayne (2010) Broadcasting the Body: Affect, Embodiment and Bodily Excess on Contemporary Television
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Smit, Alexia Jayne (2010) Broadcasting the body: affect, embodiment and bodily excess on contemporary television. PhD thesis. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/2278/ Copyright and moral rights for this thesis are retained by the author A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the Author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the Author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Glasgow Theses Service http://theses.gla.ac.uk/ [email protected] Broadcasting the Body: Affect, Embodiment and Bodily Excess on Contemporary Television Alexia Smit A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Film and Television Studies, Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies, University of Glasgow, September 2010. (c)Alexia Smit, 6 September 2010. 2 Abstract In recent years television has seen a notable increase in evocative images of the human body subject to exploration and manipulation.Taking the increasing viscerality of television’s body images as a starting point, the work presented in this thesis asserts the importance of considering television viewing as an embodied experience. Through a focus on displays of the body across a range of television formats this thesis demonstrates the significance and complexity of viewers’ affective and embodied engagements with the medium and offers an alternative to accounts of television which are focussed only on the visual, narrative or semiotic aspects of television aesthetics. This work challenges approaches to television which understand the pleasures of looking at the body as simply an exercise in power by considering the role of the body in fostering the sharing of affect, specifically through feelings of intimacy, shame and erotic pleasure. Additionally, the research presented here accounts for and situates the tendency toward bodily display that I have described in terms of traditional television aesthetics and in relation to conditions within the television industry in the United States and the United Kingdom. Rather than considering the trend toward exposing the body as a divergence from traditional television, this thesis argues that body-oriented television is a distinctly televisual phenomenon, one that implicates the bodies onscreen and the bodies of viewers located in domestic space in its attempts to breach the limitations of the screen, making viewers feel both intimately and viscerally connected to the people, characters and onscreen worlds that television constructs for us. The methodological approach taken in this thesis is based on close textual analysis informed by a focus on affect and embodiment. This thesis relies on the author’s own embodied engagement with televisual texts as well as detailed formal analyses of the programmes themselves. In order to understand the place of explicit body images on television this thesis engages with a broad range of contemporary debates in the field of television studies and with the cannon of television studies. This thesis is also deeply informed by writing about affect developed in film studies and studies of reality television. This thesis is structured around a set of case studies which each explore different dimensions of the trend toward bodily excess across a broad range of genres including reality television, science programming and the drama series. The chapters in this thesis are organised around four tendencies or modes related to traditional television aesthetics: Intimacy, community, public education and melodrama. Each of these case studies examines how the affective body capitalises upon and extends the traditional pleasures of television through an affective appeal to the body. 3 Table of Contents Abstract ....................................................................................2 Acknowledgements .......................................................................4 Chapter 1: Introduction Television, Bodies and Affect: ‘Fleshing Out’ Television Studies...............5 Chapter 2 Tele-affectivity: The Body and the Intensified Intimacy of Contemporary Television................................................................................28 Chapter 3 Exposing the Body: Considering Care, Intimacy and Shame on Plastic Surgery Reality Television.......................................................................59 Chapter 4 Bodies of Knowledge: Performative and Experiential Models of Pedagogy in Television Science.....................................................................95 Chapter 5 White Men with Scalpels: Affect ‘Male Melodrama,’ and Irony in Nip/Tuck and Dexter .................................................................................. 151 Chapter 6: Conclusion ...............................................................195 Bibliography ........................................................................... 204 Videography ...........................................................................216 4 Acknowledgements I am deeply indebted to my supervisors, Dr. Karen Lury and Professor John Caughie for their enthusiastic, incisive and meticulous supervision. I was exceptionally fortunate to work under the guidance of two people who continued to surprise and inspire me with the originality and acuity of their insights throughout the course of this project. I must thank Karen Lury for sharing with me a very contagious love and respect for television in all of its forms and for the encouragement and reassurance that was vital to getting me through this immense undertaking. Thank you to John Caughie for bringing to this project not only a wealth of knowledge, insight and experience but a disposition toward television that is very different from my own and which forced me to interrogate and test my own assumptions. I am indebted to the administrative and academic staff at the Theatre, Film and Television Studies Department at the University of Glasgow for providing me with a research experience that has developed me as an academic and as a teacher. In particular, my thanks go to Professor Christine Geraghty for sharing with me her insights on melodrama, and to Dr. Karen Boyle for her guidance and support, and for lending me some very gruesome video tapes. I also owe special thanks to my teacher and friend, Professor Lesley Marx, at the University of Cape Town for her encouragement and support of me throughout this process. I am greatly thankful to the Patrick and Margaret Flanagan Scholarship for granting me an award that has allowed me to travel all the way from South Africa to Scotland to undertake this degree. This research would not have been possible if it were not for this funding. I am also greatly thankful to the University of Glasgow’s Arts Faculty Scholarship for providing me with financial support that was essential to the completion of the final year of this degree. Finally, I would like to thank my family who have encouraged and supported me throughout this process. Few PhD candidates are lucky enough to have two parents who have been through the experience themselves. My parents Dan Smit and Jenni Smit, have been both my inspiration and my guides. I especially thank my mother for hours spent proof reading this document. I dedicate this thesis to my sister, Olivia. Thank you for watching television with me and for inspiring the insights presented in this thesis. 5 Chapter 1 Introduction Television, Bodies and Affect: ‘Fleshing Out’ Television Studies In the last ten years my everyday engagements with television have granted me extremely intimate access to other people’s bodies. I have been taken on computer-generated journeys into the slimy insides of corpses on CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (CBS, 2000 -). I have cringed as surgeons vigorously stuff breast implants into narrow surgical incisions and winced at close-up shots of fluids seeping out of gaping wounds on a plethora of plastic surgery shows such as Extreme Makeover (ABC 2002 - 2007), Dr. 90210 (E! 2004 -), Make Me Perfect (ITV, 2006) and Cosmetic Surgery Live (Five, 2004). I have shuddered with the participants on these plastic surgery television shows as they anxiously anticipate their next surgery. Watching Anatomy for Beginners (Channel 4, 2005) I have shared a flinching response with the live studio audience as Gunther von Hagens slices open real human corpses. I have delighted in the gruesome detail and stylized displays of corpses, eviscerated bodies and their fluid on ‘quality’ U.S. cable programmes like Six Feet Under (HBO , 2001- 2005), Dexter (Showtime, 2005-) and Nip/Tuck (FX, 2003 - ). As much as the bodily displays that I have described above allow certain pleasures in looking at the body they are also centrally about feeling. These images and their related sound tracks interest me for the way in which they complicate standard modes of thinking about how television addresses its audience. When the open wounds, sliced organs and decaying flesh on television aggressively demand and solicit physical responses from the bodies of viewers it is no longer enough to write about these images as popular tropes or sign systems. Such visceral material makes it necessary to discuss television’s sounds and images