Small Screen, Big Feels

Television and Cultural Anxiety in the Twenty-First Century

Melissa Ames

• Verlag: The University Press of Kentucky
• Jahr: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780813180090
• Thema: Social Sciences
• Thema: Media Studies

While television has always played a role in recording and curating history, shaping cultural memory, and influencing public sentiment, the changing nature of the medium in the post-network era finds viewers experiencing and participating in this process in new ways. They skim through commercials, live tweet press conferences and award shows, and tune into reality shows to escape reality. This new era, defined by the heightened anxiety and fear ushered in by 9/11, has been documented by our media consumption, production, and reaction.

In Small Screen, Big Feels, Melissa Ames asserts that TV has been instrumental in cultivating a shared memory of emotionally charged events unfolding in the United States since September 11, 2001. She analyzes specific shows and genres to illustrate the ways in which cultural fears are embedded into our entertainment in series such as The Walking Dead and Lost or critiqued through programs like The Daily Show. In the final section of the book, Ames provides three audience studies that showcase how viewers consume and circulate emotions in the post-network era: analyses of live tweets from Shonda Rhimes's drama, How to Get Away with Murder (2010–2020), ABC's reality franchises, The Bachelor (2002–present) and The Bachelorette (2003–present), and political coverage of the 2016 Presidential Debates.

Though film has been closely studied through the lens of affect theory, little research has been done to apply the same methods to television. Engaging an impressively wide range of texts, genres, media, and formats, Ames offers a trenchant analysis of how televisual programming in the United States responded to and reinforced a cultural climate grounded in fear and anxiety.

Part I

Post-9/11 Televisual Trends

Analyzing the Affectual Climate on and off the Small Screen

1

Screening Terror

How 9/11 Affected Twenty-First-Century Televisual Fiction

The national tragedy of 9/11 directly and indirectly influenced the cultural production within American society during the first two decades of the twenty-first century. In the years following the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, cultural products have been sites for interrogating and remediating the trauma that 9/11 caused for the citizens of a country that believed itself to be untouchable. Although these cultural concerns were played out in both nonfictional and fictional spaces across media, as I will discuss in following chapters, this chapter argues that televisual narratives provide great insight into societal concerns during the start of this century. They do this in a unique space that repackages these concerns, displacing them from reality into the safe confines of fiction, where they can be addressed time and time again with more favorable results.

In studying how the media and popular culture products responded to 9/11, in the contest of timeliness there is no debate. In general, television was quicker to respond to the tragedy than any other medium (e.g., film, print novel)—both as it was happening and in the months and years after. Quite obviously there was the real-time news broadcasting the day of the events, but special programs and documentaries also appeared in the weeks that followed. The events of 9/11, however, also seeped into the fictional worlds found in television sitcoms and dramas within only a few weeks. There were some early televisual attempts at understanding the tragedy. CNN re-aired its documentary Beneath the Veil and its sequel, Unholy War—both focused on the plight of Afghani women under the Taliban regime—in the weeks following 9/11, and to commemorate the six-month anniversary of the attacks, CBS also aired Jules and Gédéon Naudet’s documentary 9/11 on March 10, 2002. The speed of this response is attributed more to television’s production processes and freedoms and less to its actual desire to be the pioneers of a post-9/11 narrative. But what is more interesting, and not as theorized, is not how television responded to 9/11 immediately after the tragedy, but how it responded (and continues to respond) to it years later.

In contrast to television, Hollywood did not begin producing films inspired by or based on 9/11 until 2006, with the release of both Paul Green-grass’s United 93 and Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center. It is this specific year—one marking the five-year anniversary of the attacks—that clearly showcases the post-9/11 affective work that would dominate televisual narratives for the coming years. When compared to the films being released now, the stories delivered through television separate themselves from the documentary-style narratives of 9/11-related film and enter the deep recesses of fiction—even into the realms of science fiction, where it is once again acceptable to be playful and perverse even while trying to work out cultural concerns lingering from a half decade earlier. But before getting to that fateful year of 2006—the year that broadcast loud and clear that the United States was a nation waiting to be saved—and the televisual trends that have lingered since, one must start at the beginning: television post-9/11 and television’s history of being a cultural tool for coping with the catastrophic.

The Televisual Landscape in the Wake of 9/11

Television did not immediately begin spawning fictional narratives loosely related to the attacks. In fact, right after 9/11, television executives were quite concerned about the content of their programming, specifically any fictional narratives that might be considered disturbing, violent, or traumatic in the aftermath of the national crisis. Lynn Spigel recounts how films such as Collateral Damage, The Siege, Lethal Weapon, Carrie, and even Superman and King Kong were pulled from television lineups.¹ Inadvertent censorship and coverage changes also occurred during this time, however. For example, Spigel notes that the “humorists Dave Letterman, Jay Leno, Craig Kilborn, Conan O’Brien, and Jon Stewart met the late-night audience with dead seriousness” on the nights following 9/11, which caused some critics to declare “that the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center had brought about the ‘end of irony.’”² Although the industry heads were attempting to save viewers from their prepackaged violent imagery, during this period the public was actually eager to consume such depictions of trauma. Video retailers reported an increase in customer rentals of films like those pulled from the network’s lineups, which suggests that the consumption of explosions, toppling buildings, and apocalyptic scenarios—at least when situated in fictionalized backdrops—was just what the doctor ordered in terms of coping strategies and escapism.³ So it is not really a surprise that televisual narratives would pick up on these motifs in a relatively short time in the crafting of new programs and episodes.

Although much was going on in the fictional programming found on television, for the most part early media scholarship on 9/11, the U.S. attacks in Afghanistan, and the early stages of the “war on terror” focused primarily on print and television news coverage.⁴ This work from the academy often attended to “the narrative and mythic ‘framing’ of the events; the nationalistic jingoism …; competing global news outlets, particularly Al Jazeera; and the institutional and commercial pressure that has led to ‘infotainment.’”⁵ But as Spigel states, “Despite its important achievements … the scholarly focus on news underestimates (indeed, it barely considers) the way the ‘reality’ of 9/11 was communicated across the flow of television’s genres, including its so-called entertainment genres.”⁶ In order to accomplish the latter goal, her essay “Entertainment Wars: Television Culture after 9/11” analyzes Comedy Central’s November 7, 2001, episode of South Park and NBC’s October 3, 2001, episode of West Wing to showcase the various ways that television genres responded to the attacks through their narratives. Similarly, this chapter aims to fill in part of this academic void by analyzing various thematic motifs that appeared (or were amplified) in televisual fiction after 9/11 in order to prove that, indeed, these are important sites where the “‘reality’ of 9/11” is—even all this time later—still being worked out.

Although one might have expected television programming to grow more serious in the wake of 9/11, the opposite ultimately occurred. Some reporters, such as Louis Chunovic of Television Week, were hopeful that the face of television would change following the attacks: “In the wake of the terrorist attack on the United States, it’s hard to believe Americans once cared who would win Big Brother 2 or whether Anne Heche is crazy. And it’s hard to believe that as recently as two weeks ago, that’s exactly the kind of pabulum, along with the latest celebrity/politician sex/murder/kidnapping scandal, that dominated television news…We cannot afford to return to the way things were.”⁷

But as Spigel notes, ironically, “the industry’s post-9/11 upgrade to quality genres—especially historical documentaries—actually facilitated the return to the way things were.”⁸ Or, almost the way they were. If we look carefully, the ghost of the toppled towers leaves a shadowy imprint on the television programming during the remainder of the decade, suggesting that while viewers wanted to return to the comfort of “the way things were,” they also were not ready to forget the tragedy that had unfolded on their home turf.

Watching Trauma Unfold on the Small Screen

In many ways, it is not surprising that fictional TV programs evolved into a space to work through cultural anxieties. After all, when many think of 9/11, their memories are of seeing the event unfold on their television screens. Also, 9/11 was framed as a trauma to be seen (in order to be felt), and television has long been the medium in charge of controlling feelings through the art of seeing specifically constructed imagery. For many Americans (and others across the globe), 9/11 unfolded in front of their eyes much like a Hollywood blockbuster film—almost too spectacular to believe. Slavoj Žižek writes: “When we watched the oft-repeated shot of frightened people running toward the camera ahead of the giant cloud of dust from the collapsing tower, was not the framing of the shot itself reminiscent of spectacular shots in a catastrophe movie, a special effect that outdid all others?”⁹ Indeed, many survivors used the simile “it felt like a movie” to explain the experience.¹⁰ As Susan Sontag argues, “‘It felt like a movie’ seems to have displaced the way survivors of a catastrophe used to express the short-term inability to assimilate what they had gone through: ‘It felt like a dream.’”¹¹ So, is it really a surprise that the American public turned to the realm of visual culture and media to replay the event dominating their own memories? Marc Redfield argues that the phrase itself “‘it was like a movie’ conjures up not just an excess of event over believability, but a sense that this event is to be mediated, that it would have no sense, perhaps would not even have occurred, if it were not being recorded and transmitted.”¹² In this explanation, the medium was needed; it was the only way that people could move from disbelief (that which they could not comprehend and some could not physically see) to belief (that which they could comprehend only through repeated seeing).

This incomprehensible tragedy of 9/11 is often classified as a cultural trauma, but it differs quite a bit from other national catastrophes. Redfield points out: “That the attacks inflicted a shock of historical scale seems clear, but the shape and scope of this wound is not…. If we try to conceive of trauma on a cultural level things become more ambiguous…. [The attacks] were not of a society-threatening scale (as warfare, genocide, famine, or natural cataclysm have been for so many human societies) and the literal damage they did to the military and commercial orders symbolized by the Pentagon and the World Trade Center was miniscule; it is of course as symbolic acts of violence that they claim culturally traumatic status.”¹³

He continues to analyze the common affects of trauma and the coping process that individuals usually go through: “Trauma involves blockage: an inability to mourn, to move from repetition to working through. It is certainly plausible that hyperbolic commemorative efforts such as those on display in ‘9/11 discourse’… are in fact testimonials to blockage.”¹⁴ Redfield argues that “wherever one looks in 9/11 discourse, trauma and the warding-off of trauma blur into each other, as the event disappears into its own mediation.”¹⁵ I propose that a very similar process is at work in the televisual narratives that proliferate after 9/11; through their mediation of fictionalized scenarios they present trauma in order to do away with it, hence becoming a sort of emotional security blanket for viewers existing in an unstable post-9/11 world.

Susan Douglas posits that communications technologies “have some inherent capabilities that privilege some senses—and thus some cognitive and behavioral processes—over others.”¹⁶ I would agree and claim that these cognitive and behavioral processes relate to certain affects—the most prevalent being the affect of fear. To claim that television has this emotional power is not new, nor is the association of television with fear. In determining how television portrays 9/11 (and post-9/11 concerns), however, the association seems important. The television scholar Louise Spence observed that a year after 9/11 her students “still understood the events of 9/11 in affective and emotional terms.”¹⁷ It could be argued that almost two decades later most Americans still do. Part of this emotional understanding, and emotionally charged memory, of the event is in part due to the way it was presented through the medium of television.

Post-9/11 Thematics

In the aftermath of 9/11, two emotionally charged motifs seemed to receive this constant reinforcement in both fictional and nonfictional television programming: the rejuvenated theme of national patriotism and the fear of the “other.” In the news broadcasting world, these two areas of focus seem quite interrelated. Scholars have compared this current trend of ...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Watching (and Feeling) Contemporary American TV: Understanding the Relationship among Societal Conflict, Technological Advancement, and Television Programming
• Part I. Post-9/11 Televisual Trends: Analyzing the Affectual Climate on and off the Small Screen
• Part II. Mediating Fear and Anger: How Televisual Affect Reflects and Influences Current Cultural Conflicts
• Part III. Amplifying Affect: Twenty-first-Century Viewing Practices–From Fandom to Digital Activism and Beyond
• Conclusion: Screening Emotion, Archiving Affect, Circulating Feelings: Final Thoughts and Even More Questions
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index