Through the Looking Glass: Class and Reality in Television

1
Through the Looking Glass Class and Reality in
Television

• Monica Brasted, Ph.D.

2
Brasteds Thesis

• A persons position in society can determine the
  television shows he or she will watch and how he
  or she will interpret them.

3
Social Class Determines Experience

• Cars, houses, food
• Consumption of cultural products such as
  television shows, theatre events, music
• Determines interpretation of these events

4
Culture defined

• Consists of the meanings we make of our social
  experience and of our social relations
• Provides us with a sense of our selves and who we
  are in relation to others around us
• Key role in defining our social and psychological
  identities (even our human identity)
• Experience of culture defined by our position in
  society

5
P. Bourdieu

• Social class viewing differences are based on
  concept of cultural capital
• Cultural capital
• a societys culture is as unequally distributed
  as its material wealth
• serves to identify class interests and to promote
  and naturalize class differences
• Replacing economics as a means of differentiating
  classes

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Television

• Makes class boundaries permeable and blurs the
  idea of cultural capital
• Unique in its availability to all classes
• Undermines class division at the level of
  culturehomogenization of the classes

7
Frankfurt School

• High culture has its own integrity and inherent
  value which cannot be used by elites to enhance
  their personal power
• Mass culture (television) undermined class
  divisions through homogenization

8
Television as Commodity

• What sells is what will be produced
• Appearance of choice, however, the
  differentiation of products reflects the
  differentiation of audiences they have created
• Differentiation created in the minds of audience
  by mass culture when products are very similar
• Doesnt produce radical products because must
  support the status quo
• Multiple channels give the illusion of choice
  whereas programming really doesnt vary much

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Commodification of Culture

• Individuals reduced to customers
• Ideological choice is removed
• Viewers become customers on 2 levels
• Consumers of individual programs
• Customers to be sold to advertisers
• More they are commodified, the more they lose any
  critical potential
• Rather than be a tool of social criticism, the
  television industry reinforces the dominant
  ideologies which are that of consumerism,
  liberalism, and capitalism.

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Good Question

• Does television simply inject us with ideas or
  can we, as consumers of television meaning, do
  something more with the ideas presented to us?

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Interpretation of Culture

• Social class does influence the meaning an
  individual takes from a text
• Homogenization has been resisted
• through the multiple meanings in texts
• the ability of audience members to resist the
  dominant ideology
• Differences in meaning are produced in the way
  viewers interpret, which is influenced by their
  social class

12
Meaningsite of struggle

• Polysemy of television
• Popularity in class structured societies makes it
  necessary
• Texts can be deconstructed to reveal their
  instability, their gaps, their internal
  contradictions and the arbitrary textuality
• Reveals potential for readings that are reduced
  by the audiences, not by the culture industry

13
Andrea PressWomen TV

• Inclination to identify with television
  characters varies with their assessment of the
  realism of these characters and their social
  world
• Working-class women were much more likely to find
  TV characters and situations real than were
  middle-class women
• Working-class women were critical of the
  depictions of their class on TV and find these
  depictions to be unrealistic
• Middle-class women were more critical of the
  reality of depictions but still identified more
  with the characters on a personal level
• Television is both a source of feminist
  resistance to the status quo because of its
  images of female strength, and at the same time a
  source for the reinforcement of many of the
  status quos patriarchal values

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Press

• Womens reception of television is affected by
  both their position as women in our society and
  the membership in social class and age groups
• Criticized the media for creating a societal
  ideal of women in the workplace and the
  traditional nuclear family, which is not easily
  attainable
• Does not address the real problems and issues
• Does create false images and distortions of
  reality
• Television can only be seen to help glorify and
  support a status quo that is in many ways
  oppressive to women
• TVs unwillingness to confront, admit, and
  address so many troublesome aspects of womens
  situations in our society is unfortunately one
  the strongest forces ensuring that it is
  perpetuated

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Brasteds Conclusion

• Television has the power to support the dominant
  classes and the status quo by reinforcing the
  dominant ideology through its routinized program
  choices
• Because people are not cultural dupes who blindly
  believe all that is presented to them, they are
  able to interpret television programs in
  different ways.
• Television provides the possibility of resistance
  though how effective that resistance might be
  remains an open question

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Brasteds Research Paper

• Explores conflicting views on the topic
• Carefully defines exactly what she means while
  taking into account the complexity of reality
• Integrates sources in an orderly fashion
• Gleans relevant information from each
• Comes to her own conclusion by meshing the ideas
  within the research

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The Imagination of Disaster

• Susan Sontag

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Twin Specters of Modern Life

• Age of extremity
• Unremitting banality
• Inconceivable terror

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Fantasy

• An escape into exotic dangerous situations which
  have last-minute happy endingsbeautifies world
  experience
• Normalizes what is psychologically
  unbearableneutralizes world experience

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Science Fiction

• Reflects world-wide anxieties
• Serves to allay them
• The naïve level of the films neatly tempers the
  sense of otherness, of alien-ness, with the
  grossly familiar
• All art draws its audience into a circle of
  complicity with the thing represented
• The films perpetuate clichés about identity,
  volition, power, knowledge, happiness, social
  consensus, guilt, responsibility
• Predictable nature

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Sci-Fi Films

• Immediate representation of the extraordinary
  physical deformity and mutation, missile and
  rocket combat, toppling skyscrapers
• Sensuous elaboration
• Immediate gratification

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Science Fiction

• Not about science
• About disaster, which is one of the oldest
  subjects of art
• Aesthetics of destructionpeculiar beauty to be
  found in wreaking havoc, making a mess
• Requires good technology and lots of money

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Lure of Disaster

• Releases one from normal obligations
• Extreme moral simplification
• Overlaps with horror films
• Undeniable pleasure from looking at freaks, at
  beings excluded from the category of the human
• Sense of superiority over the freak conjoined in
  varying proportions with titillation of fear and
  aversion makes it possible for moral scruples to
  be lifted, for cruelty to be enjoyed
• We become mere spectators

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Technological View of Disaster

• Dispassionate, aesthetic view
• Things, rather than the helpless humans, are the
  locus of values because we experience them,
  rather than people, as the sources of power
• Man is naked without his artifacts
• Things stand for different values, they are
  potent, they are what gets destroyed, and they
  are the indispensable tools for the repulse of
  the alien invaders or the repair of the damaged
  environment

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Strongly Moralistic

• Standard message about the proper, or humane,
  uses of science, versus the mad, obsessional use
  of science
• The most ingrained contemporary mistrust of the
  intellect is visited upon the scientist-as-intelle
  ctual
• Scientist becomes satanist and savior

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Wishful Thinking

• The hunger for a good war, which poses not
  moral problems
• The yearning for peace, or for at least peaceful
  coexistencefantasy of united warfare

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Science Technology

• The great unifier
• Utopian fantasy
• Universal rule of reason meant universal
  agreement
• Reflects powerful anxieties about the condition
  of the individual psyche

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Real DangerDehumanization

• Mans ability to be turned into the
  machinepurged of all emotions, volitionless,
  tranquil, obedient to all orders

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Expectation of the Apocalypse

• The occasion for a radical disaffiliation from
  society
• The imagery of disaster in sci fi films is above
  all the emblem of an inadequate response
• Intersection between a naïvely and largely
  debased commercial art product and the most
  profound dilemmas of the contemporary situation

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Surviving Armageddon Beyond the Imagination of
Disaster

• Mick Broderick

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Thesis

• Orients itself in contrast to Sontags argument
• the sub-genre of sf cinema which has entertained
  visions of nuclear Armageddon primarily concerns
  itself with survival as its dominant discursive
  mode

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Shift away from imagination of disaster to one of
survival

• Drawn upon pre-existing mythologies of
  cataclysmal and survival in their renderings of
  post-holocaust life
• Most potent myth is the recasting of the
  Judeo-Christian messianic hero who battles an
  antichrist and his followers, liberating an
  oppressed community and thereby enabling social
  rebirth
• Articulate a desire for (if not celebrate) the
  fantasy of nuclear Armageddon as the anticipated
  war which will annihilate the oppressive burdens
  of (post)modern life and usher in the
  nostalgically yearned for, less complex existence
  of agrarian toil and social harmony through
  ascetic, spiritual endeavors

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Imagination of Survival

• Enables the spectator to evade or dismiss the
  human causal chain in nuclear warfare and to
  replace it with an archaic mythology steeped in
  heroic acts, inspired and propelled by some
  inscrutable and predetermined divine cosmic plan
• Post-nuclear survivalist cycle of the Eighties
  has signified another mode by which a generation
  has learned to stop worrying and loveif not the
  bomba (post-holocaust) future, which after some
  initial hardship will provide the compelling
  utopian fantasy of a biblical Eden reborn in an
  apocalyptic millennia of peace on Earth

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SF in Contextprior to atomic bomb

• Man-made chemical and mechanical warfare
• Cosmic natural in origin
• City and metaprolis as a site for natural
  disaster dates far back to the very origins of
  cinema

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Subgenres of SF

• Preparation for Nuclear War and its survival
• Encounters with Extraterrestrial, Post-Holocaust
  Societies
• Experiencing Nuclear War and its Immediate
  Effects
• Survival Long after Nuclear War

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Preparation for Nuclear War and its survival

• Responded to threatened atomic war in 3 distinct
  ways
• Prevention by heightened surveillance and
  counter-espionage
• Resignation by escaping targeted areas to assumed
  havens
• Immunity from attach by using a comparable or
  superior defensive technology
• Agrees with Sontags assertion of preoccupation
  with the perennial human anxiety about death
• Contradicts Sontags claim that their purpose is
  to accommodate and negate this anxiety, evident
  in their portrayal of civil defense posturing and
  fallout shelters as extremely dubious solutions

37
Encounters with Extraterrestrial, Post-Holocaust
Societies

• Scenarios of both cosmic and man-made holocausts,
  most often in the guise of humans encountering
  extraterrestrial civilizations well in advance of
  ours who have paid a terrible price for abusing
  nuclear power
• Totally annihilated extraterrestrial species
• Superman sole survivor of apocalyptic explosion
  of his native Kryptonsuperior alien capabilities
  of intellect and strength that ultimately leads
  to his unilateral eradication of Earths nuclear
  missiles
• Oppose Sontags thesis in that they oppose the
  status quo
• Rely upon discursive strategies which combine
  rhetoric and imagery to warn explicitly the human
  protagonists (the audience) of the dangers of
  nuclear conflict
• Alien emissaries from alien planets come to guide
  and teach us of dangers of nuclear warfare and
  other technologies

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Experiencing Nuclear War and its Immediate Effects

• Depict nuclear war and its short term
  consequences
• Nuclear war becomes a lived (not imagined) event
• Characters symbolize the old world struggling
  to exist in a new post-nuclear environment
• Some depiction of the social normalcy of the
  status quo prior to its material destruction
• Function of the plot is to engender a sense of
  familiarity by locating protagonists (and
  spectators) within the pre-conflict equilibrium
  of the known before the predominant narrative
  discourse relocates into the disorientating
  post-holocaust realm
• 3 discursive modes
• Renewal which posits the war as promotion
  socio-cultural rebirth usually in the form of the
  heterosexual couple, the family or small
  community
• Catharsis which graphically depicts the
  destructive impact of nuclear war and the
  problematic of survival
• Terminal films which portray the end of the human
  species by showing long-term survival as
  impossible

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Vs. Sontag

• Only the Catharsis group closely approximates
  Sontags imagination of disaster
• Vast majority of these narratives are devoted to
  survival not repetitive imagery of disaster
• Nor do they fulfill Sontags wishful thinking
• The ultimate prevailing theme has been humanitys
  resilient survival after a global ordeal by fire

40
Survival Long after Nuclear War

• Portrayals of long-time survival in a
  post-nuclear war environment are more appealing
  than the other approaches
• Nuclear war forces the viewer to imagine survival

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SF themes

• Homo Nuclearus The theme of radiation mutation
  on human and animal life over the years
• The Future as Past
• Apocalypse Now Today as Tomorrows
  Yesterdaytime travel
• Exterminating Angels The Post-apocalyptic
  Heroheroic acts of justice, reprisal and/or
  vengeance warriors, terminators, exterminators,
  equalizers, hunters and gladiators
• The Good depict the idealized good forces of
  the post-holocaust world as the communities which
  attempt reconstruction through renewal of an
  earlier superseded morality and social ethos
• The Evil antithetical to good
  survivorsdominated by patriarchal law, satiate
  immedatie short-term requirements

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SFs Hero

• Conforms to the classical cross-cultural mould of
  mythological champions
• Almost always male
• Frequently a drifter who has rejected social
  conformity due to a past of persecution at the
  hands of the forces of evil
• Self-preservation
• Changes from a morally ambiguous character to one
  of respect
• Aided by magical helpers who have been victimized
• Predestined role confront the evil regime and,
  with the help of others, wreak vengeance on his
  foes in a terrible battle and ultimately destroy
  the oppressors bringing social rebirth
• Speaks to the unconscious yearning in each of us
  to be hero

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Ronald Reagen

• Entertained the paradoxical belief in a
  foreseeable Biblical apocalypse in which he
  thought the Soviets were going to be involved,
  while committing his nations military-industrial
  complex to save the world from this imaginary
  destruction by making nuclear weapons obsolete
  via a Strategic Defense Initiative
• Capacity to imagine beyond (apocalyptic) disaster
  and into a realm of (millennial) survival

44
Brodericks Conclusion

• The apocalyptic imagination requires an
  imagination of disaster
• Armageddon becomes an apocalyptic reason for
  being the forces of good and evil are destined
  to battle each other