Televisuality And Its Discontents: More Reconsideration
A long standing pre-occupation of mine is television, and television is growing more and more pre-occupying. The initial problem for students studying international film can be summed up as the hesitation before difference. The problem of studying television is the opposite. It is too familiar. Too ordinary. Its crumbs litter our living rooms, bedrooms, dens, game rooms, and sometimes kitchens and dining rooms. But I persist in thinking that the work I began two decades ago on the influence on narrative of the discontinuities built into the seriality of television with No End To Her: Soap Opera and the Female Subject (1992) is crucial to our understanding of the stories cultures tell themselves. I continue to reconsider that insight.
In No End To Her, I performed a service to serious students of television by tracing in the virtually endless narrative of soap opera a powerful counterforce against the misrepresentation of women, and also minorities, that is facilitated by traditional closed story form. At the time, I insisted that because the history of soap opera up until the writing of my book had proven that the gaps and endlessness built into the soap opera form had always privileged women an interrogated the male power figures who oppressed them, that such a value system was inevitable in soap opera.
As it turns out, the form can be perverted to privilege what is typically understood as conventional male entitlement and aggression. In the 1990’s a slow turn began in which thug-like male characters became the primary figures on American soap operas, both in terms of the value the soaps placed on them (to the detriment of the female characters who had formerly been the major protagonists) and in terms of their importance to the stories being told on daytime. I was over-optimistic in my thinking that the form could not be misused against its own tendency to subvert a domination/submission definition of human relationships. After my time writing for the soaps, how could I have been so foolish? To paraphrase Fox Mulder, of the X-Files, “I wanted to believe.”
However, in this case, time has proven me correct in my original beliefs. The tendency of soap opera IS toward the validation of feminine values not generally privileged in American culture. What I had not foreseen is the obliviousness of misinformed network management. In the 1990s, the insistence of the networks that writers skew their narratives away from the old narrative that had been based on the flow of emotion and toward the much more prevalent emphasis in our culture on narratives of power has lead to the destruction of a more than half of the soap operas that were on the air when I published No End To Her. At this writing, General Hospital, the only soap opera still being shown on ABC-TV out of a field of six that were on the daytime roster in 1992, is scrambling to cleanse itself of its gangster “heroes” and return to the previous, successful model of soap opera writing. I wish them luck, but am not currently optimistic.
In 1992, I had also simplified things too much by making the case that it was only the soap serial, which never reaches traditional closure unless it is cancelled, that would be able to tell liberatory pop culture stories. I now know that it is worthwhile to explore evening serial dramas and comedies to make manifest their use of the discontinuities and gaps of the serial form to alter the effect of closure on storytelling. Certainly, at the end of The Sopranos, creator David Chase demonstrated what could be done to the traditional gangster story by emphasizing the shock of the termination of the electronic images out of which his series had been made. Battlestar Galactica is equally interesting to study, but much more painful, since it collapsed from an experimental, three year subversive narrative experience into a conventional story as it began to reach closure in the fourth season. The Wire, Boardwalk Empire, and the latest subject of my interest, British comedy series Doc Martin, have piqued my curiosity to the bursting point. I went looking for Jim Burr again. I now have a contract for a book about “television beyond formula,” the title of which is yet to be determined. Full steam ahead!