Television and the Embodied Viewer

Affect and Meaning in the Digital Age

Marsha F. Cassidy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781315282633
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Television History & Criticism

Television and the Embodied Viewer appraises the medium's capacity to evoke sensations and bodily feelings in the viewer. Presenting a fresh approach to television studies, the book examines the sensate force of onscreen bodies and illustrates how TV's multisensory appeal builds viewer empathy and animates meaning.

The book draws extensively upon interpretive viewpoints in the humanities to shed light on a range of provocative television works, notably The Americans, Mad Men, Little Women: LA, and Six Feet Under, with emphasis on the dramatization of gender, disability, sex, childbearing, and death. Advocating a biocultural approach that takes into account the mind sciences, Cassidy argues that interpretive meanings, shaped within today's dynamic cultural matrix, are amplified by somatic experience.

At a time when questions of embodiment and affect are crossing disciplines, this book will appeal to scholars and students working in the fields of television, film, and media studies, both in the humanities and cognitive traditions.

1 Television, Sensation, and Meaning

Television bodies are visible on screens everywhere. They stream onto our computer monitors, accompany us on our tablets as we travel, appear in miniature on our cell phones, and cohabit the rooms in our homes we set aside for viewing. Onscreen bodies have rightly fascinated scholars from the inception of television studies as a discipline. Indebted to paradigms from literary and film traditions and borrowing robustly from a range of other disciplines, television scholarship deemed the body on the screen a discourse constructed by social, cultural, and historical forces.¹ This sphere of interpretation has produced a remarkable foundation of knowledge that continues to enrich our understanding of television and its representations.

Innovative paths of thinking in film studies in the 1990s began to move beyond this principal focus on cultural bodies and to pose fresh questions about a film’s somatic attractions and the sensate body of the film spectator. Phenomenology and other branches of Continental film studies approached this revised conceptual model from a philosophical tradition in the humanities, while cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and evolutionary neurobiology derived their intellectual force from analytic philosophy and practices in the natural and social sciences.² Both philosophical traditions reinserted the somatic into the understanding of film spectatorship and restructured accepted paradigms.

Only recently has attention been directed at television’s capacity to evoke the full human sensorium.³ In the context of emerging ideas in screen studies, this book rethinks the interrelation between bodily sensations perceptible in a television work and a program’s emotional and thematic dynamism. Appreciating the corporeal matrix through which we sense, feel, perceive, experience, and contemplate the world, this volume strives to track the ways in which a television work is devised to captivate the thoughtful mind within the lived body.

To validate the salience of bodily responses, we only need to access our own reactions to television programs or recall the unfettered responses we see and hear from co-viewers. Vivian Sobchack famously describes her tactile response to the opening shots of The Piano (Campion 1993), but have we not all reacted ourselves or witnessed others reacting to TV images with sensation and feeling? For those of us who screen television programs in the classroom, our students’ collective chuckles, sighs, flinches, murmurs, and gasps are a commonplace occurrence. None of this qualifies as empirical evidence, but it cannot be overlooked that television viewers, like television scholars, value qualia—the sum total of their subjective personal experiences as they witness TV works—as authentic and meaningful.

The approach followed in this book does not search for primal or essentialist feelings that exist outside culture. It accepts the precept that culture and history powerfully shape how we “live” our bodies. Don Ihde has conceptualized the twinning of our experienced bodily being in the terms “body one” and “body two” (2002, xi), body one corresponding to the phenomenological lived body of “motile, perceptual, and emotive being-in-the world” (xi) and body two, the cultural or socially constructed body (2002, 70). For Ihde, body two is body one as “permeated” with cultural significance and situated knowledge (2002, viii, 71). My purpose is to suggest an enhanced model for the television viewer that takes into account the sensate human body as permeated by culture.

From the beginning of the 21st century, television itself has entered a transformative era, and the field of television studies is correspondingly in transition. The decline of the broadcast networks and the rapid rise of new digital forms have prompted an energetic reconsideration of “the project and purpose of television studies,” as Lynn Spigel explains (2004, 8).⁴ As scholars review television studies as a discipline and summarize its multiple paradigms,⁵ this juncture seems an especially productive time to rethink televisual bodies. “Television studies in the humanities,” writes Spigel, “has always been a hybrid interdisciplinary venture, drawing on fields of inquiry that are often at odds with one another” (2004, 8).

My project reflects this interdisciplinary impulse and offers a missing strand of analysis. Although it fits most squarely into what Spigel calls the “textual tradition,” with roots in literary and film criticism, it also draws upon foundational ideas in cultural studies⁶ and reaches across disciplines to consider what science may have to offer. In this chapter, I explain in more detail my perspective on television’s capacity to elicit sensation, bodily feelings, and affect, recognizing contributions from divergent fields of inquiry. Chapter 2 reviews digital television’s revamped aesthetic possibilities and its variable viewing practices to argue that these developments serve to foster or maintain an invigorated viewer experience.

Sensation on Television: Cigarette Advertising and the Body

My reassessment of a chiefly cultural approach to the interpretation of bodies on the television screen was prompted by my study of cigarette advertising on TV. Between 1948 and 1971, cigarette commercials on television numbered in the thousands, and, in 2006, I set out to investigate how these ads targeted women and prompted them to take up smoking. My study began as a straightforward feminist critique of the multiple social and cultural appeals found in these ads, which promised women sophistication, weight control, sexual allure, social status, and good times. Yet, in my survey of some 300 cigarette commercials, I soon discovered that almost every ad detailed the physical act of smoking as its centerpiece. While questions of gender remained prominent, I began to see that applying feminist theory alone was not sufficient to explicate fully the clever somatic appeals powering these ads (Cassidy 2009).

Emergent theories of phenomenology, synesthesia, and sense memory in film studies were crucial to understanding the full force of these cigarette commercials. Here I turned especially to the pioneering work of film scholars Vivian Sobchack, Laura Marks, and Jennifer Barker. Sobchack, whose approach follows the writings of phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, argues that all of us are synesthetes in our ability to readily experience films across the full span of our senses, even though the film experience is only visual and auditory (2004, 68, 71). “Our fingers, our skin and nose and lips and tongue and stomach and all the other parts of us understand what we see,” she writes (84). Laura Marks privileges the evocation of “sense memories” in cinema viewing (2000, 148)—she says, “All sense perceptions allow for, and indeed require, the mediation of memory” (202)—and suggests that viewing an image with the eye activates senses that film “cannot technically represent: the senses of touch, smell, and taste” (129). Barker, likewise exploring embodied spectatorship (2009, 3), says that film is able to provoke a deepening sense of touch, “from surface to depth,” and argues that cinema is “an intimate experience” rather than a “distant experience of observation” (2009, 2).

With these ideas in mind, I studied the cigarette ads afresh and concentrated my analysis on three potent bodily sensations repetitively evoked through synesthesia and sense memory: first, tactility as centered on hands and lips; second, the “taste” of cigarettes—“rich,” “fresh,” “mild,” “smooth,” and “cool”; and finally, the whole body’s complicated somatic reaction to inhalation, exhalation, and the accompanying kick of a nicotine high.

The sensory, interoceptive, and visceral ploys of the cigarette ads could not be separated from gendered and social discourses of the past but neither could their somatic appeals be left unexamined. Philosophical precepts in phenomenology as applied to film studies offered a breakthrough, but further thinking also led to “scientific” questions about the body: what exactly are the effects of nicotine inhalation on the body? How can an understanding of these somatic effects reveal the ways they were represented so masterfully in advertising? I learned, for example, that nicotine inhalation is variable in its bodily effects, able to both stimulate and sedate smokers, and it became clear to me that these variations were artfully crafted into the ads: some associated smoking with a blur of activity and shallower puffing, while others portrayed the slow, drawn-out pleasure of smoking for relaxation and contentment, as nicotine’s stimulation of dopamine in the brain took hold.

In my study of cigarette advertising, Sobchack’s paradigm shift for the film spectator was revelatory. Playing with the words “cinema” and “synesthesia,” Sobchack postulated a “cinesthetic subject,” a theoretical film spectator for whom synesthetic perception “is the rule” (2004, 67, 70). If Sobchack is right that we experience the reciprocity and intercommunication of the senses “without a thought” (her emphasis 71), then the task of the television scholar is to acknowledge the television viewer’s sensate body and to bring to critical consciousness TV’s appeal to her full sensorium.

Television’s Multisensory Appeals

Foundational to my interpretation of Mad Men, Little Women: LA, and Six Feet Under is the supposition that the visual and audio tracks of these series are calculated to induce a multisensory and corporeal experience and that these responses augment meaning. This approach is indebted in part to the insights and theories put forward by film scholars in the humanities who place focus on the body. As Sobchack summarizes, the lived body sits “in readiness as both a sensual and sense-making potentiality” (2004, 76), and it is carnal thoughts “that ground and inform more conscious analysis” (60). Interpretation, she writes, is “constituted as both a carnal matter and a conscious meaning that emerge simultaneously … from the single system of flesh and consciousness that is the lived body” (her italics throughout 73).

Marks, who links “tactile epistemology” to the Frankfurt School and to the “mimetic faculty” proposed by Walter Benjamin (2000, 140), believes the film experience rises above the purely visual (146) to appeal simultaneously to senses “closer to the body” (130).⁷ Marks goes on to build the broader concept she calls “haptic visuality,” which functions alongside optical visuality, but draws upon touch and kinesthetics to appeal to the body “as a whole” (163). It is through haptic visuality, she argues, that “the viewer is more likely to lose herself in the image” (184).⁸ Barker explores tactility, musculature, and viscera in cinema and heralds the inclusion of all manner of kinesthesia in the film experience: “[t]ension, balance, energy, inertia, languor, velocity, rhythm” (2).

Alongside the work of theorists grounded in Continental philosophy and the humanities like Sobchack, Marks, and Barker...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Television, Sensation, and Meaning
• 2 Watching Television: Bodies on Both Sides of the Screen
• 3 Mad Men: The Pleasures and Perils of Food and Drink
• 4 Real Little Women: The Multisensory Experience of Dwarfism
• 5 Meditating with Corpses: Six Feet Under and the Transcendent
• 6 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index