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Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television Jeffrey Sconce HeUNTED I1EDIH Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television So 12 Z—ooc) Haunted Media Console-ing Passions Television and Cultural Power Edited by Lynn Spigel Haunted Media Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television Jeffrey Sconce Duke University Press Durham & London 2000 © 2000 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper oo Designed by C. H. Westmoreland Typeset in Times Roman with Stone Sans display by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book. to my parents, Jerry and Evelyn Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction i 1 Mediums and Media 21 2 The Voice from the Void 59 3 Alien Ether 92 4 Static and Stasis 124 5 Simulation and Psychosis 167 Notes 211 Bibliography 233 Index 249 ■'■‘AZ * .'I-- T*. ■ .>» JKi •>.'*;. * : -f ■>’■' -ev ' ^ -• iC ..■' -Jr' j 1 ♦rffrV »f i-m/ 1 « t « '■M - ■ 4 V ' ■> 1 ^ • * 1 *■' ' ^' Jt-i'<ljari.«f. - '4-. > »-*' 7A44 •.« - J ^ : -««• •jNi. T < itfT V 'if If ■ J- ■*■■■ »* -m .jh. , 'j*-:. V t< V«! -V ■■rr . tiiM Acknowledgments Many people have contributed significant advice, time, and assistance to the research, ruminating, and writing phases of this book. I would like to thank especially Julie D‘Acci for her guidance of this manuscript at a particularly difficult time in its genesis, as well as John Fiske, Michele Hilmes, Don Crafton, and Jack Kugelmass for their many useful com¬ ments on this work while it was still a dissertation project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Friends and colleagues around the country have also provided valuable commentary on various parts of this manuscript. I would like to thank in particular Chris Anderson, Mark Alvey, and Hilary Radner for their years of advice, friendship, and support on this and other projects. William Boddy, Micheal Curtin, and Tom Gunning have also ofl'ered valuable advice on the manuscript. I would also like to thank my colleagues at the University of Southern California, and in particular, Dana Polan, Michael Renov, Marsha Kinder and Tara McPherson for their comments on this work. I am grateful as well to Jan Olsson for the opportunity of editing a special issue of the journal Aura, an experience that helped focus many of the arguments during the completion of this book. This book is indebted as well to the community of scholarship in Madi¬ son during the early 1990s, and I would like to thank in particular Dave Brean, Steve Classen, Robert Dawson, Kevin Glynn, Lisa Parks, and Sally Ross for their direct and indirect influences on this manuscript. I would especially like to thank Moya Luckett and Sean Feeney for being great friends and intellectual partners who always inspired me to produce better work, both in the land of badgers and beyond. Much of this manuscript was revised while I was teaching at the Uni¬ versity of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, and I would like to acknowledge the val¬ ued friendship and support of Dan Streible, Teri Tynes, Karla Berry, and Franca Barricelli during my years there. I am also grateful to the early encouragement of faculty at the Univer¬ sity of Texas-Austin, including Janet Staiger, Tom Schatz, and Horace Newcomb. Mark Fenster, Jim Wehmeyer, and Barbara Burton remain valued friends from my time in Texas as well. Acknowledgments Finally, this book would not have been possible without the advice, wisdom, patience, and support of Lynn Spigel, who was a great inspira¬ tion for this project both in its earliest inception and in the final days of its revision. A shorter version of chapter 2 appeared as “The Voice from the Void: Wireless, Modernity, and Distant Death” in the International Journal of Cultural Studies i, no. 2 (1998). Chapter 4 appeared in a different version as “The ‘Outer Limits’ of Oblivion” in The Revolution Wasn’t Televised: Sixties Television and Social Conflict, edited by Lynn Spigel and Michael Curtin (New York: Routledge, 1996). \ X Introduction Amid daily newspaper coverage of national politics, foreign policy, and local crime, readers of the New York Times in the early fifties encountered three bizarre and seemingly unrelated stories concerning the then emerg¬ ing medium of television. On the night of 20 October 1952, Frank Walsh went to bed in his Long Island home while his wife and children watched an episode of Abbott and Costello on the television set downstairs. Dis¬ turbed by the volume of the program and unable to sleep, Walsh got out of bed, found his handgun, and started down the staircase. Halfway down the steps, Walsh paused, aimed, and in the words of the Times reporter, “stilled the television with one shot from his .38 caliber revolver.” After a few moments of stunned silence, Walsh’s wife called the police to report the incident, but, as the paper observed, “Since there is no law against shooting television sets, the only charge against Mr. Walsh will be a substantial one from the repairman.” ^ Walsh was able to avoid even this charge, however, by converting his newfound status as a television as¬ sassin (“They should give him back his gun; his work has barely started,” quipped columnist Jack Gould) into an opportunity to appear on a quiz show. As a contestant on Strike It Rich, Walsh won a new television set.^ On 30 June 1953, Richard Gaughan, an unemployed shipping clerk who would later describe himself to police as a “professional justice man,” rushed past the guards at CBS studios in New York with two newly pur¬ chased kitchen knives. Gaughan made his way onto a set where a rehearsal was taking place for the series City Hospital. In a scuffle with actors, technicians, and security personnel, Gaughan managed to stab a CBS cam¬ eraman and smash a pitcher of water over an actor’s head before finally being apprehended. Gaughan confessed at the police station that he had “purchased the knives for the specific purpose of killing someone con¬ nected with television.” Later he told the police that he hated television because its shows were “scandalous.” More important, he also felt he was being personally “slandered by the programs.”^ Finally, on 11 December 1953, readers of the Times met a family from Long Island that had been forced to “punish” their tv set for scaring the children. As Jerome E. Travers and his three children were watching Ding Haunted Media Dong School one day, the face of an unknown woman mysteriously ap¬ peared on the screen and would not vanish, even when the set was turned off and unplugged. “The balky set,” which “previously had behaved itself,” according to the Times, “had its face turned to the wall . for gross misbehavior in frightening little children.”'' The haunted television finally gave up the ghost, so to speak, a day later, but not before scores of newspapermen, magazine writers, and tv engineers had a chance to ob¬ serve the phenomenon. Visitors to the Travers’ home also included Fran- cey Lane, a singer from the episode of the Morey Amsterdam Show that had preceded Ding Dong School on the day of the initial haunting. Lane was thought to be the face behind the image frozen on the screen, and her agent apparently thought it would make for good publicity to have the singer meet her ghostly cathode-ray double.^ Something less than newsworthy, these odd incidents from the early days of television are nevertheless of interest as diverse examples of a common convention in representing television and other electronic media. Each of these stories draws on a larger cultural mythology about the “living” quality of such technologies, suggesting, in this case, that televi¬ sion is ''alive... living, real, not dead”® (even if it sometimes serves as a medium of the dead). The “living” quality of television transcends the historically limited and now almost nonexistent practice of direct “live” broadcasting to describe a larger sense that all television programming is discursively “live” by virtue of its instantaneous transmission and recep¬ tion. Central as well to the initial cultural fascination with telegraphy, telephony, and wireless, such liveness is at present the foundation for a whole new series of vivid fantasies involving cyberspace and virtual real¬ ity. At times this sense of liveness can imply that electronic media tech¬ nologies are animate and perhaps even sentient. Although the various parties involved in the peculiar episodes detailed above may not have actually believed their tv sets were “alive,” the reporters who needed to make sense of these assignments certainly wrote as if their readers would make, or at least understand, such an assumption. These stories are either amusing or alarming to the extent that the reader shares in a larger cultural understanding that television and its electronic cousins are, paradoxically, completely familiar in their seemingly fundamental uncanniness, so much so that we rarely question the often fantastic conventions through which we conceptualize and engage these media. 2 Introduction Perhaps initially only a product of Frank Walsh’s insomnia, for exam¬ ple, shooting the tv set has become over the years a familiar gesture in the nation’s hyperbolic loathing of television as an intruding house guest. Although it would be difficult to document exactly how many people really do shoot their sets in a given year, it is easy to gauge the sym¬ bolic importance of this act by how frequently it appears in films, books, and even in television programming itself. In this scenario, the television figures as an obnoxious, deceitful, cloying, banal, and/or boring visitor within the home whom must be dispatched with extreme prejudice. The intrusive, imperious and, above all else, living presence of television is such that it cannot simply be turned off or unplugged — it must be vio¬ lently murdered.
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