Rollins College Rollins Scholarship Online Faculty Publications 3-2017 Identity and Scene: Alterity and Authenticity in Taxicab Confessions Steven W. Schoen Rollins College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarship.rollins.edu/as_facpub Part of the Television Commons, and the Visual Studies Commons Published In Citation to Original Work: Schoen, Steven W. “Identity And Scene: Alterity And Authenticity In Taxicab Confessions” Imaginations 7:2 (2017): 142-153. This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Rollins Scholarship Online. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of Rollins Scholarship Online. For more information, please contact [email protected]. REVUE D’ÉTUDES INTERCULTURELLES DE L’IMAGE JOURNAL OF CROSS-CULTURAL IMAGE STUDIES GUEST EDITORS • IMAGINATIONS NATHALIE CASEMAJOR & WILL STRAW JOURNAL OF CROSS_CULTURAL IMAGE STUDIES | LUC GWIAZDZINSKI JONATHAN ROULEAU REVUE D’ÉTUDES INTERCULTURELLES DE L’IMAGE MARIA TERESA SOLDANI REBECCA HALLIDAY Publication details, including open access policy KATIE ROCHOW & GEOFF STAHL and instructions for contributors: STEVEN W. SCHOEN KATHRYN YUEN http://imaginations.csj.ualberta.ca LIVIA RADWANSKI LAURA MONCION The Visuality of Scenes Editorial Team: Brent Ryan Bellamy, Daniel Laforest, Andriko Lozowy, Tara Milbrandt, Carrie Smith-Prei, Sheena Wilson THE VISUALITY OF SCENES ISSUE 7-2 March 17, 2017 March 17, 2017 To cite this article: To link to this article: Schoen, Steven W. “Identity And Scene: Alterity And Authenticity In Taxicab Confes- http://dx.doi.org/10.17742/IMAGE.VOS.7-2.8 sions” Imaginations 7:2 (2017): Web (date accessed) 142-153. DOI: 10.17742/IMAGE. VOS.7-2.8 The copyright for each article belongs to the author and has been published in this journal under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial NoDerivatives 3.0 license that allows others to share for non-commercial purposes the work with an acknowledgement of the work’s authorship and initial publication in this journal. The content of this article represents the author’s original work and any third-party content, either image or text, has been included under the Fair Dealing exception in the Canadian Copyright Act, or the author has provided the required publication permissions. IDENTITY AND SCENE: ALTERITY AND AUTHENTICITY IN TAXICAB CONFESSIONS STEVEN W. SCHOEN | ROLLINS COLLEGE Résumé Abstract Cet article examine la rhétorique visuelle de l’émission de This essay examines the visual rhetoric of HBOs reality TV téléréalité d’HBO Taxicab Confessions New York, New York program Taxicab Confessions, New York, New York (2005). (2005). En m’appuyant sur l’interprétation rhétorique de Burke Drawing on Burke’s rhetorical understanding of scene and de la scène et sur l’approche de Straw de la scène en tant que Straw’s approach to scene as a category for the analysis of urban catégorie pour l’analyse de la culture urbaine, je soutiens que culture, I argue that the taxicab interior and nighttime street l’intérieur du taxi et les images nocturnes des rues de New York images of New York City structure a scene of indeterminacy, créent une scène d’indétermination, d’intimité et de « réalité intimacy, and “reality,” thus framing the passengers’ self- », cadrant ainsi l’autoreprésentation des passagers dans un presentations within a context of “authenticity.” The program’s contexte d’« authenticité ». La structure visuelle de l’émission visual structure locates passengers simultaneously outside of permet de situer les passagers tant à l’extérieur qu’à l’intérieur and within social norms and reinforces hegemonic notions des normes sociales et de renforcer les notions hégémoniques of race, gender, and sexuality. Passengers are situated within de race, de genre, et de sexualité. Les passagers sont situés a scene that positions them as both eccentric and ordinary, dans une scène qui les positionne à la fois comme excentriques while audiences are provided with a symbolic other that works et ordinaires, tandis que le public est doté d’une symbolique to contain stretched-but-not-broken norms and thus anchor autre qui travaille à contenir des normes assouplies, mais non the normality of the viewer. enfreintes, enracinant ainsi la normalité du spectateur. DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.17742/IMAGE.VOS.7-2.8 axicab Confessions: New York, New The opening coaxes us to explore a scene already strategic selection of characters do not necessarily York opens like other programs in familiar to us. The show offers the excitement detract from its efforts to claim authenticity for itself (Corner; Deery; Andrejevic). Some of the resulting the Taxicab Confessions series, with a and danger of the urban night as a vicarious thrill viewed in the safety of our own homes. By using purportedly candid conversations are selected, then Tfrenetic montage of urban nightlife. View- developed into segments of a one-hour program based the iconic theme song from the The Wizard of Oz, ers are invited into a churning world of both in a particular city. The examination here will focus the opening sequence also promises something dark and light, a world of hard-shadowed on Taxicab Confessions: New York, New York, released new on the other side of the rainbow—a strange in 2005.1 The discourse within Taxicab Confessions surfaces—streets and buildings glow from land of “Oz,” but with a difference that reassures generates claims of authenticity and offers viewers flickering neon and spots of red and white us there’s no place like home. A theme is set: enticing opportunities to explore the boundaries light arrayed in high-contrast moving pat- the familiar with a twist, the quotidian with and articulations of space and identity through a terns. Images of towering skyscrapers are something new. The normal and bizarre are television imaginary of stories that incongruously graft mixed with the figure of a disheveled man pushed together to challenge but ultimately the improbable onto the ordinary within the fluid, reinforce the boundary between domestic safety overdetermined scene of a New York City taxicab. The in a thick, tattered overcoat slowly pushing “real” interactions depicted in Taxicab Confessions are a shopping cart down the sidewalk. Bright and urban mysteries. The show constructs what carefully constructed and stylized. As is the case with yellow taxis whiz by couples dancing, kiss- Kenneth Burke in Permanence and Change terms other reality TV programs, the sequences presented “perspective by incongruity:” the randomness ing, and touching. Icons of the city such as to viewers are framed, shot, structured, and edited of big-city life brings together people and places according to the goals and interests of the program the arch in Washington Park, the Statue of in unlikely and disconcerting ways, a revealing producers (Dovey; Kilborn; Andrejevic and Colby). Liberty, and the New York skyline mark the mix of the expected and unexpected (See clip 1). My analysis presumes no connections to the day- coordinates of urban night to the rock tem- to-day performances of self by the program’s actors po and distorted guitars of an amped-up Home Box Office (HBO) premiered Taxicab (Goffman), much less any possible access to authentic version of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” Confessions in 1995 as part of its America Undercover selves behind the depictions. As Rachel Dubrofsky documentary project. The series uses hidden cameras and Antoine Hardy note, “Good RTV participants sung in a detached, smoky male voice. to record conversations between purportedly real perform not-performing” (378). Likewise, I approach passengers and loosely scripted cab drivers (who are Taxicab Confessions: New York, New York as a media show producers, but not clearly identified as such). text, examining the scenic contexts of the city and the As with other reality TV programs, the unabashed taxicab for their symbolic function in structuring the constructedness of its editing and its obviously possibilities of program. ISSUE 7-2, 2017 · 143 IDENTITY AND SCENE: ALTERITY AND AUTHENTICITY IN TAXICAB CONFESSIONS The particularized scene of the taxicab is crucial to the (“Different Spaces”) describes as a heterotopia: a implicit explanations or motives (in Burke’s language) rhetorical work of Taxicab Confessions; my analysis productive, liminal no-place removed from ordinary embedded in our symbolic expression. These motives draws theoretical insights about scene from Kenneth scrutiny, expectations, and social rules. The ambiguity have the capacity, often subtly or even surreptitiously, Burke’s dramatism (Grammar of Motives; Rhetoric of of this space is fertile ground for incongruous but to transform the ways we understand situations by Motives) and recent work by scholars who use scene symbolically productive juxtapositions. literally shifting the terms by which imagine them as a category for the analysis of urban culture (Shank; (Payne). While the five terms of Burke’s pentad, Straw, “Cultural Scenes”; Straw, “Some Things a Burke’s perspective by incongruity describes particularly in their interactions, can be used for Scene Might Be”). The New York taxicab setting, as a an important way to use language to break free textual analysis, my interest here is focused on Burke’s scene, shapes the way we make sense of and identify of entrenched social patterns. For Burke, these use of scene. with the program’s characters, as Burke’s framework incongruous juxtapositions are an important tool to (Grammar of Motives) implies. The scene in Taxicab imagine new possibilities and open space for social In Burke’s analysis, scene is “a blanket term for the Confessions resonates with Straw’s sketch of scene as transformation (Goltz). The analysis here develops concept of background or setting in general, a name an analytical category for urban culture: the program Burke’s idea of perspective by incongruity to show the for any situation in which acts or agents are placed” shows a space expressing the “theatricality of the city” use of the taxicab as scenic context for the instability of (Burke, Grammar of Motives xvi, original emphasis).