This type of advertising – back then and now – is based not on demographics but psychographics;  information that goes beyond facts such as age, gender and income and attempts to portray the psychology, lifestyle and values of the consumer.  This ad dated around 1950s could have been based on the work of Ernest Dichter.  Dichter trained as a psychoanalyst before fleeing Vienna and the Nazis.  He landed in the U.S. and quickly determined that his psychoanalytic concepts and practices could help Big Business explore the psyches of consumers all the better to manipulate their unconscious motivations.  Dichter viewed his work as a kind of therapeutic democracy where institutions (government, corporations, non-profits) used “motivation research” to discover the neurosis, anxieties and inhibitions of the public psyche and benevolent technocrats would create advertisements or propaganda campaigns that would cure the public mental disorders and make a more smoothly operating society.  Dichter radically altered market research by experimenting with the open-ended interview of psychoanalysis and anthropology.  Rather than asking consumers direct questions such as why they liked or disliked a product, Dichter would allow the consumer to freely associate about any given topic.  Rather than asking “Why do like/use Dove Soap?” Dichter would ask “Describe the process of bathing?”  Dichter would give his interviewees ample time to free associate about the process – or as Dichter discovered – ritual of bathing.  As deep meanings and practices emerged from these interviews, Dichter would sell these findings to his clients to use in their ad campaigns.  So with the Dove Soap project Dichter found that bathing is a deeply felt cleansing ritual were consumers felt not only physically clean but spiritually purified and reborn.

If we interpret some of the signifiers in this ad we can see, on a manifest level, the advertisement comforting the bereaved by assuaging their fears that the “dear one” will stay dry through rain.  If we look at a latent level (which works with the manifest content) the ad is more about locking away the “dear one” thus connoting their inability to escape.  There is “deep” (as in buried deep in the ground) consolation provided by the “metal vault”.  Although vault is a common word in this area, here it seems to resonate with meanings such as bank vault or security vault; places were things are locked away and can only be retrieved with our consent.

This ad connects to our current fascination with zombies.  Where the above ad depicts a familial drama, zombies represent a social phenomena.  But is there a connection between the two scenarios?  The fear and guilt over our personal returning dead echoes  our fear regarding the dead returning en masse; we anxiously fear these faceless numbers will confront us for our unconscious desire that we wished them dead all along.  The socially neglected, marginalized and forgotten come back as zombies for revenge because death gives them the power to destroy a social order that excluded them all along and was based on a social violence that wanted to destroy them.  The survivors of the zombie apocalypse are reduced to the brutal life of mere survival; the state of social being the multitudes endured when things were “normal.”

This fantasy of pure survival is nothing but a purified, un-repressed  narrative of current social reality; an elite group of survivors possess the means of violence to liquidate and ultimately control the multitude of people/zombies.  Just as the ad above caters to our fear of and desire for the death of our “dear” ones, the zombie apocalypse fantasy plays to our fear of and desire for social destruction.  Furthermore it says that we are willing to submit to our own extinction in exchange for the experience of pure social violence; to experience for a short time without guilt our desire to destroy the social order by acting on our aggressive impulses towards other people i.e. zombies.

The city is the internalization of forgetting.

“The chapters in this book explore many processes of politics at levels usually not acknowledged or reported and indeed repressed and denied. Normally, these deep political processes are not brought to the public eye: for example, the way in which major drug traffickers are recurringly protected by the U.S. Justice Department, or the way in which some of the top traffickers have been recurringly named in connection with the systematic sexual corruption of members of Congress. Such ­arrangements are in fact widely known, but rarely written about. One way or another, scholars and journalists learn to back off.

The resulting social system is relatively stable, and the fact that cer­tain procedures are repressed from public consciousness becomes itself suppressed. Occasionally, however, such “connections” between overworld and underworld impact radically upon the public realm, and we have unexplained crises such as the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, and Contragate.

One thesis of this book is that, because of the underlying continuities of deep politics, such crises are interrelated. To study any one of them is to acquire knowledge about some of the principal players, and their procedures, in the others. In this way we become aware of a violent mi­lieu underlying American politics, including the ex-CIA Cuban exiles and their American handlers (such as the Watergate burglar Frank Sturgis, who earlier, as we shall see, had figured in the Warren Com­mission files on the Kennedy assassination).”

from Deep Politics and the Death of JFK

Scott defines deep politics as “all those political practices and arrangements, deliberate or not, which are usually repressed rather than acknowledged.”  What makes Scott so compelling is that he searches for information that is buried deep in the archive.  So, for example, rather than trying to figure out “who killed JFK” he rigorously compares the Warren Commission (1964) to the House Select Commission on Assassinations and finds the FBI lied to the Warren Commission on several occasions about Jack Ruby.  There is no recourse in his writing to a “shadow government” in control but the recognition of a political spectrum that runs from the public state to the deep state that is usually not acknowledged by mainstream political science or journalism.  A key point here is the role of oversight – if oversight ever accomplishes anything – and the complete lack of oversight on many of the “programs” and activities comprising deep politics.  Deep politics constitute the State as secrecy; a set of goals and practices that must remain unseen and unknown but are necessary for U.S. “democracy”.  What is startling is the oblique presence of deep politics (some of its operations are eventually revealed) within the political landscape.  Much of Scott’s information comes from a meticulous and rigorous compilation and comparison of sources that are available but buried deep within the archive.  However even when the deep state is uncovered and its corrupt practices made public, there is often a lack of any real outrage or political opposition stemming from the revelations.  As Scott explains about his methodology,

“The deep-politics paradigm… is essentially an extension of conventional political investigative methods to consideration of a much larger field of evidence, including, but not restricted to, the unacknowl­edged processes and events which conventional decorum excludes from our current ‘political science’ textbooks.  By thus examining overt events in this larger field of deep political arrangements, it breaks down the distinction between overt and covert power, and thereby hopefully avoids the frequently asked question: Which forces are in control, the public or shadow powers?”

The above video is Scott discussing his book The Road to 9/11    

On a similar note here is an interesting documentary by Bill Moyers.

“Objects are categories of objects which tyrannically induce categories of persons.  They undertake the policing of social meanings, and the significations they engender are controlled.  Their proliferation, simultaneously arbitrary and coherent, is the best vehicle for a social order, equally arbitrary and coherent, to materialize itself under the sign of affluence.”

We do not consume the usefulness of an object but its meaning, its social signification.  Furthermore because these objects signify social categories, they in turn categorize (or socialize) their owners according to a social logic that is “arbitrary and coherent”.  The information I receive about a person from their possessions tells me about that person’s social standing: status, gender, social mobility, wealth; it is a vague shorthand revealing how they fit into the social order of consumption.  Commodities are often markers of social aspiration to remind ourselves and others.

Question: how are the objects and the social categories “arbitrary and coherent”?   In the sense that Saussure said language was arbitrary and coherent?  Arbitrary because there is no natural (as opposed to conventional) reason say a Rolex watch should signify wealth, status and success or upward mobility.  These meanings are constructed from elements such as the price of the watch, its design, its marketing in the media.  Coherent because these objects are embedded in a code: these meanings can be read, they are intelligible.  Baudrillard gives the most complex and persuasive argument for the “manipulationist” school of the semiotics of objects.  Social meanings are “policed” and “controlled” so that in the process a certain social order (capitalist) is reproduced through the control of the code and the object’s sign-value or signification.

The word “tyrannically” illustrates how Baudrillard views these categories of objects (and consumption in general) as social control.  Baudrillard, writing this book from a Marxist perspective, views the logic of this order of commodity-signs as a triumph of capitalism in its struggle to impose a cultural and symbolic order compatible with capitalism and the mass production of commodities.

These objects and their meanings are imposed  from above through advertising, marketing, design, market research and more i.e.  the code.  They are regulative agents in the economic and cultural domain.  A quote related to the one above:

“In the field of connotations the object takes on the value of a sign.  In this way a washing machine serves  as a piece of equipment and plays  as an element of comfort, or, of prestige, etc.  It is the field of play that is specifically the field of consumption.  Here all sorts of objects can be substituted for the washing machine as the signifying element.  In the logic of signs, as in the logic of symbols, objects are no longer tied to a function or to a defined  need.  This is precisely because objects respond to something different, either to a social logic, or to a logic of desire, where they  serve as a fluid and unconscious field of signification.”

Social logic is an interesting term here.  It is a system composed of paradigmatic and syntagmatic elements that punctuate social relationships.  For example we need to think about the rules governing commodities and their exchange.  Exchange here not only denotes economic exchange but exchange as communication so that commodities can signify status, hierarchy and social aspirations.  Thus we never communicate individual information with commodities but group information.  Commodities communicate social standing as difference to ourselves and to others; it is by communicating social meanings to others and their recognition of that meaning that we see our own meanings.

Commodities materialize immaterial classifications like status and social standing and stem their inevitable drift.   Because the use of commodities is no longer tied to defined needs their ability to signify connotations becomes infinite and connects to a logic of desire.  Historically capitalist production outstripped the range of human needs and recognized the necessity for an ever expanding mode of consumption if consumption was to keep pace with production.  The logic of desire opens up a more flexible system which follows not the fulfillment of individual need but the competition and rivalry of conspicuous consumption.  Consumers under the logic of desire play with commodity connotations in a social field composed of competition and difference.  However Baudrillard suggests that the logic of the commodity-sign is increasingly displacing all the other social logics.  It is the “semiological reduction” that is reducing the symbolic.  Baudrillard has a very specific definition of the symbolic; it is the object as it is exchanged in ritual or traditional contexts.  For example a wedding ring is a good current example.  This object must be this specific object and no other.  In anthropological literature it is the objects and context of the potlatch and the kula.  The symbolic use of objects and consumption is strictly opposed to the commodity-sign which is abstract and interchangeable.  A Rolex or a BMW or an Armani suit can signify success or status.  Any commodity sign will do in capitalist exchange as long as it follows semiotic codes,

“an object specified by its trademark, charged with differential  connotations of status, prestige and fashion.  This  is the object of consumption.  This object does not assume meaning either in a symbolic relation with the subject (the Object of ritual, gift, potlatch) or an operational relation to the world (object -as-implement): it finds meaning with other objects, in difference, according to a hierarchical code of significations.”

Baudrillard argues that  the meaning of these signs and codes of consumption are imposed primarily by advertising, marketing and the media, therefore he goes on to develop a theory of media.  In these schema the organization of the structure of commodity-signs originate from the external agencies of advertising and the media.  Along these lines any political tactic based on a redemption of consumption such as “green” or earth-friendly consumption or “simple living” is destined to be co-opted because it merely mirrors the social logic of the capitalist system; it puts into play another social code that produces signification and categories whatever the intended economic or ecological goals.  The system of objects merely recuperates the alternative modes of consumption into the dominant form leaving one with the illusion of choice when it is really all consumption of signs.  Alternative modes of consumption that seek to provide a way out of capitalism end up producing commodities as signs, consumption as the production of social control.

One way to begin to place The Osbournes within an appropriate genre is to look at MTV’s presentation of the show. MTV sells The Osbournes as a reality TV sitcom and indeed its narrative structure is loosely similar to the sitcom formula, with real-life segments edited and sequenced to be reminiscent of a scripted program. More specifically, the show is framed within the genre of 1950′s sitcoms. The opening credits have a self-consciously retro look to them. The theme song replays a lounge music aesthetic both in its melody and in the voice of the male singer. The title of the show, The Osbournes, connotes early sitcom family names such as the Cramdens, The Cleavers and, of course, The Nelsons. Indeed a visit to The Osbournes‘ website explicitly draws this connection between the archetypal ’50s father Ozzy Nelson and MTV’s incarnation Ozzy Osbourne. The Osbournes is obviously too dark and “dysfunctional” to fall within the boundaries of ’50s sitcoms, however the ironic ’50s signifiers in the show’s opening credits contradict the typically straightforward use of generic signals, especially as they are used in movie and television credits. Traditionally, with television and films, genre is clearly signaled for and marketed to the target audience. The correct packaging of movies and television programs according to genre is meticulously researched so as to appeal to the appropriate audience. The tongue-in-cheek opening credits of The Osbournes do something more than signal an audience or define a genre: they suggest to the audience a possible intertextual reading of the show. The opening credits do not say to the audience “This is a fifties style sitcom,” rather they say, “This is not a fifties style sitcom but you can read it as though it were one.” By ignoring the typical conventions of generic signaling, MTV invites the audience to perform an intertextual reading, juxtaposing the heavy metal rock star dad within markers of a genre in which the signifiers of “dad” connote Ward Cleaver as opposed to Ozzy, creating an appropriate amount of added-value irony.

The Osbournes seem to be more closely aligned intertextually to another more recent subgenre of sitcoms, the anti-fifties sitcoms such as Roseanne and Married with Children. The Osbournes share with these sitcoms a cynical and dysfunctional view of modern family life; a self-conscious denial of the optimism and mutual appreciation associated with fifties sitcoms. However, what distinguishes The Osbournes from Roseanne and Married with Children is not so much the difference between fiction and non-fiction (reality TV), but the way highly visible markers of class operate within each show. Whereas these sitcoms present membership in the working class as an insurmountable given (particularly Roseanne’s final season with the revelation that the Conners’s lottery win was a fantasy), The Osbournes proves that even a working-class kid from Britain (whose “class” was tantamount to poverty) can realize the American dream of upward mobility and wealth, especially when paired with an ambitious upper middle-class wife/manager. There is a reversal here that reveals problems with the basic generic distinctions of fact and fiction: the fictional narratives of Roseanne and Married with Children present a more “realistic” portrayal of the experience of working class families and the minimal probability that could attain financial success at the level of the the Osbournes. The Osbournes, on the other hand, through their reality-based show, exemplify the American ideology of upward mobility. The reality of the Osbournes’ affluence is an ideological fiction for most working-class Americans.

This brings us to a more pertinent genre for classifying The Osbournes: reality TV. As a popular term, reality TV denotes a variety of shows from Cops to Survivor, from the The Bachelor to The Osbournes. The term reality TV implies the documentation of the “reality” of an event or “referent” that somehow, in some way, exists independently of the recording machines that capture the event. Not only does MTV bend the conventions of the fictional genre with its ironic use of opening credits, but it also bends the codes, conventions, and ethics of documentary filmmaking so as to capture a segment of the youth market. This practice efficiently produces an ironic brand of media for a presumed media-savvy, (read: young) audience. The footage of police pullovers that are recorded by dashboard-mounted cameras for the reality show Cops, however problematic, more accurately fit the description of reality TV. Programs such asSurvivor, The Bachelor, The Real World, and even The Osbournes do not document or observe an independent reality through a camera, as documentary films purport to do; they record the behaviors and activities appropriate to self-consciously constructed situations. As Erica Goode stated in a New York Times article, shows like Survivor, Big Brother, and The Bachelor are direct descendants of the social psychology experiments of the sixties and seventies. The film version of Stanley Milgram’s infamous studyObedience to Authority and Philip Zimbardo’s 1971 Stanford study provide the generic roots of reality TV. What these texts have in common, from Milgram’s study to Big Brother, is the construction of an all-encompassing social situation with compelling rules and rigidly defined roles that influence, in often highly predictable ways, the social actions of the people who are in the situations. What reality TV presents is not the unobtrusive observations of an event that would have existed independently of the camera, but a highly controlled situation that produces a social drama constructed specifically for the camera (or experimenter).

What is key here is that the type of manipulation and control which television shows like Survivor, Big Brother, or The Bachelorperform regularly with impunity would never be allowed in any kind of legitimate social science experiment, at least not without rigorous and strict oversight by a Human Subjects Review board.

As the institutional representation of the formalized code of the rights of participants in experiments or research, it is the principles of Human Subjects Review that suggest the deeper problems of the reality TV genre. Two of the fundamental principles of subjects’ rights are the right to confidentiality and the right of voluntary participation. The first right does not apply to the landscape of reality TV; indeed the participants of Big Brother or Survivor, we assume, gladly waive the right of confidentiality for their 15 minutes of fame. However, the right to voluntarily participate and to be free from coercion, carries with it some interesting corollaries that directly affect the manipulation and control that goes into the production of reality TV. Included in the notion of voluntary participation is the right of participants to review any and all materials that are derived from their participation (e.g. audio or video recording) and even to have them destroyed if they wish. It is the goal of this rule to shelter the participant from any embarrassment or discomfort (just think of Milgram’s “teachers” and their extreme unease as they believed they administered electrical shocks to the “learners”). This right of participants, which is a given in legitimate social science research, would completely transform the nature of production of reality TV. To give the participants or contestants of a reality TV show the right and power to destroy any part of the record would shift the power from the producers of the show to the participants. We see within this set of issues the coercion that goes into the making of reality TV; the contestants have no rights to the final text, which they have had a real hand in producing. The participants have only two choices; they can submit to the wishes of the producers or walk off the show. This lack of control on the part of the participants of reality TV mirrors the more subtle lack of choice of television viewers. Just as reality TV show participants have no say in the day-to-day production of the shows they take part in, so television viewers have no control over what appears on their television screens. Viewers, like reality TV participants, have only one limited choice of any consequence; submit to the wishes of the broadcasters or turn off the show.

What seems to give reality TV its feeling of reality, its “reality effect,” is the consolidation within the reality TV text of two powerful social discourses: surveillance and therapy. We can easily see a version of Foucault’s panopticon at work in this genre. For example, the total surveillance imposed on the Osbourne family, with 50 cameras following them continually, is an attempt to capture and display to the viewing audience the intimate elements in the lives of the Osbournes, much in the same way the observation tower of the panopticon aims to place the prisoners under constant inspection (or at least make them feel that way). However, the surveillance of reality shows differs from Bentham’s and Foucualt’s formulation in a fundamental way: Bentham’s panopticon disciplines the prisoner by inhibiting and thus curtailing behavior, but reality TV’s panopitcon sanctions (and disciplines) the participant to exhibit all types of behavior. Bentham’s panopticon implants in the incarcerated a controlling gaze; a gaze once internalized within the incarcerated produces a self-disciplining, self-regulating subject. This discipline works through the interaction of the panoptic architecture and the subject’s visible body to limit and reduce any unwanted behavior. Reality television works differently as it imposes on the participants a visual regime that requires the exhibition of all kinds of behavior. For reality TV, behavior of all sorts must be rooted out, not for the sake of limiting it, but for the sake of multiplying it, for expanding it and permitting it to play itself out. This can be seen in The Osbournes as we witness the family dealing with not only small domestic problems but with the major crises of alcoholism, drug use, and cancer. We have a kind of discipline (because the participants of reality TV are pressured to deliver the goods) through the disinhibition and exhibition of what we believe is private behavior for television cameras. This surveillance does not stop at presenting the participants’ actions, but must penetrate to the interior of the participant and expose for the spectacle his and her inner thoughts and emotions. This is the point at which mass media surveillance easily slides into the therapeutic realm.

Scholars such as T. J. Jackson Lears and Mimi White have pointed to the prevalence of the therapeutic ethos in modern culture, from advertising to talk shows. Reality TV has adopted the techniques of therapy, the use of the confession, the interview and the intimate disclosure, to extend its surveillance of the participants from their behavior to their emotions, desires, and thoughts. Surveillance must penetrate the exterior behavior of subjects and reveal the contents of their consciousness, and conscience. What was once the strict and private domain of therapists, psychotherapists, and counselors and their clients, is now open to public inspection. At one time it was enough for an individual to privately disclose to a professional their secret traumas, but within the mediatized therapeutic ethos, individuals must confess to the listener/camera and its audience, and we must listen and watch. In a society of total surveillance, therapy is no longer a means of helping people with their problems, but has become a technique of rendering us visible and transparent in all aspects of our lives.

So what about The Osbournes? Each member of the Osbournes has a developed performance persona in contrast to the anonymous celebrity wannabes who participate in reality shows. Unlike the participants in most reality shows, the Osbournes have a considerable amount of control over the conditions of production of the show. They negotiate a contract for an amount of money to which they agree, and cameras are not permitted in Ozzy and Sharon’s bedroom; in most shows there is no guarantee participants will get the prize and they have no say as to the ground rules.

Furthermore, performance plays too much of a central role in The Osbournes for the show to be categorized within the traditional definition of documentary, according to which any hint of self-conscious performance is an example of artifice or artificiality which then negates any claims to truth or reality. Their lives, up to the point of the show, were intertwined in the music and entertainment industries. Kelly and Jack’s careers grew out of Ozzy’s career: family life was often “on the road” and contextualized by his performance career. To support this value, each of the Osbourne children dropped out of school, with Sharon’s blessing, to pursue their careers. To separate the Osbournes’ real lives from performance seems impossible.

The Osbournes may more accurately be defined as a performative documentary, which records the highly reflexive exhibitions of its participants. This subgenre records the presentations of performers from drag queens to rock stars, as exemplified by the film Paris Is Burning. As Stella Bruzzi states, “Performance has always been at the heart of documentary filmmaking and yet it has been treated with suspicion because it carries connotations of falsification and fictionalization, traits that inherently destabilize the non-fiction pursuit.” The question that remains, then, is what are the Osbournes performing?

One level of performance is that of the rock star playing “dad.” The Osbournes is an example of ethnographic programming, which instead of providing a representation of an obscure tribe in a mountain village to a Western viewer, it brings to mainstream middle-class America this “other” in our midst: a heavy metal rock star and his family in Beverly Hills, a remote community of extreme wealth and fame inaccessible to most Americans other than via television. But Ozzy’s perennial working-class features reveal that he is not so “other” to most of us as he putters around the house taking out garbage, scooping up dog waste, and admonishing (with great irony) his kids not to use drugs. There is no otherness evident in these domestic scenes. We’re amazed to see this celebrity functioning very much the way we do; we find the familiarity bizarre. Another level of performance is that because real families are so unlike any television portrayal of the family, the Osbournes may flaunt the other end of the TV family/real family dichotomy. They are aware of the precedent and the irony they provide.

The better answer is that the Osbournes, as performative documentary, are performing a new myth of rock ‘n roll: the myth of the aging rock star as doting father and the rock star as domesticated family man. Up to this point we have had only two myths for aging rock stars; old Mick and dead Janis. Rock stars either fade away or live fast and die young. Ozzy provides us the intimate details of an older rock star as he lives his life outside of his rock ‘n roll image: it is an image of an exasperated father and a homebody.  Also, it is important that we realize that MTV was the producer of this new myth. It is now commonplace to say that MTV changed rock ‘n roll by making it more image-conscious. As the theory goes, rockers themselves were less image-conscious before MTV, less ruled by the laws of photogenic selection, and listeners were free to imagine their own stories and images along with the music. Critics of the music video phenomenon argue that MTV somehow dominated the listener’s imagination with a cultural imperialism of the image, though their theory is unfounded because whether or not listeners create their own little narratives or what they do is never discussed or proven. MTV did not make rock ‘n roll image conscious; the image was a key component of the performance of rock ‘n roll from the beginning, as evidenced by the visuality of live concerts with the youthful male body as the focus. Only think about the pouring over of album covers, magazines, and rock stars appearing in movies and making TV appearances. MTV may have intensified it, but the importance of images for rock ‘n roll was always there. What MTV did to transform rock ‘n roll was to domesticate the image of rock stars: MTV turned rock stars into TV stars. The image transformed them from rare and luminous to mundane and pixeled. Just as the image of a movie star is elusive in contrast to the pedestrian television star accessible in every home, the presence of rock stars became a standard feature of the home, as ever present as soap operas, commercials, and sitcoms. It is a logical extension of MTV’s televisual domestication of rock ‘n roll that a rocker’s family would star in his own show about home life on MTV.

Yet, is it really a myth if we see their lives in such intimate detail? The myths of rock ‘n roll are very distant to real lives. The myths of the lives of Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, and Elvis were about living fast and dying young, something most of us don’t do. The aging rock stars are still rock stars, of a sort, but we don’t have the kind of knowledge of their lives as we have about Ozzy’s life. In fact, aging rock stars are really caricatures of their former selves, sans their sex and physical appeal and their connection to youth culture. Rock ‘n roll was never about the home; it was about people who lived outside the conventions of patriarchy, the nuclear family, and the traditional home, which was marked by monogamy, sobriety, heterosexuality. The myth of rock ‘n roll rebellion offered youth a means of subverting the hearth and home, and the associated drug culture represented a means of escape from those boundaries and rebellion to family and rules. What makes this new myth resonate is that Ozzy is an established icon of the rock ‘n roll-as-rebellion myth and we are looking at Ozzy as the doting husband, bat-head biter.

MTV had prepared the way for a performative documentary about a rock star “performing” in his home by continually broadcasting into the home images of rock stars performing. Furthermore, Ozzy was the perfect person for this. He has all the characteristics of rock ‘n roll excess, but is unusually grounded in his family life. This concept of performativity allows us to focus on the performance of Ozzie Osbourne as a “domesticated” rock star and to view this performance as the origination of a new rock and roll myth; aging rocker as domesticated family man. This new myth is a logical extension of MTV’s domestication of the subversive images of rock and roll by situating these images within the everyday patterns of household and family routines through the constant repetition of music videos. This new domestic myth of rock and roll turns out to be the neutralization or containment of rock and roll’s transgressive impulses. The reason the show was so popular is that, unbeknownst to MTV, by sheer luck all these elements came together in The Osbournes.

References

The Belmont Report, Office of the Secretary, Ethical Principles and Guidelines for the Protection of Human Subjects of Research, The National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research, Department of Health, Education and Welfare, April 18, 1979.

Bruzzi, Stella. New Documentary: A Critical Introduction, Routledge: London, 2000.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Vintage Books: New York, 1979.

Goode, Erica. “Hey, What if Contestants Give Each Other Shocks?” The New York Times, August 27, 2000, in Ideas and Trends, pg. 3.

Lears, T.J. Jackson, “From Salvation to Self-Realization: Advertising and the Therapeutic Roots of the Consumer Culture, 1880-1930″, inThe Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History 1880-1980, Richard Wightman Fox and T.J. Jackson Lears, ed., Pantheon Books: New York, 1983.

White, Mimi. Tele-Advising: Therapeutic Discourse in American Television, The University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill, 1992.

(This is an essay my wife and I wrote several years ago.   It first appeared here and then was picked up by this textbook, 5th ed.  It came out of two experiences.  First our fascination with reality TV and secondly my disbelief at the manner in which reality TV producers manipulated their  ”contestants” who to my mind were similar to participants in a social science study.  The TV producer’s treatment of “participants” ran counter to the rigorous protections that I was required by a human subjects review board  to give the participants in my research.)

Stacey analyzed her respondents’ letters and developed several themes characterizing their cinematic experience.  The first theme, which emerged from her data, was the concept of “escapism”.  This term historically has had a pejorative meaning within popular and academic debates about film and other media.  It often connotes a sense of unhealthy fantasy and a trivial diversion from more important aspects of life.  Furthermore, escapism is often connected to specifically feminine forms of popular culture.  Stacey points out that her respondents frequently mentioned “escapism” as one of the reasons for going to the cinema.  She also questions the easy dismissal of the term in favor of a more complex understanding of escapism in the lives of British female film goers during the 40’s and 50’s using Richard Dyer’s theorization of the utopian nature of popular culture in his book Only Entertainment. So for example according to Dyer one of the most escapist forms of popular culture, the musical, provides solutions via fantasy to various social problems. Where Dyer considers escapism’s utopian solutions only in terms of the cinematic text, Stacey extends Dyer’s assertions into the social context and experience of going to the movies.

Stacey’s participants described not only the visual pleasures of the movies and the glamor of movie stars, but also the pleasures of the social ritual of attending the screening, the shared feelings and community of the audience, and the opulence and luxury of the cinema theater itself.  Stacey situates the notion of escapism and the experience of film going in the historical context of wartime Britain and contests the theorization of the concept in terms of universal and eternal attributes.  Stacey points out that it is important to see the experience of escapism in this context: women were escaping from the hardships, dangers and restrictions of wartime and post WWII Britain in a socially legitimate way.

The second major category Stacey notes is identification which she defines as “the relationship between stars and spectators and the processes of the formation of feminine identities through cinematic modes of address” (126).  Like the term “escapism”, Stacy problemitizes the concept of identification and the way it has been discussed within the discourse of film studies. Stacey discovered that British women had complex relationships of identification to the American film stars of the day, in contrast to previously held theories of identification proposed by scholars such as Laura Mulvey who hold identification as a universal and fixed position under patriarchy.

One drawback to Stacey’s work is its focus on the participant’s earlier film going experiences.  Although responses to questions of film attendance and interpretation are largely drawn from memories of past experience, Stacey leaves out the current experiences of her participants with films and film stars.

Although we often talk about movies, we tend to talk about the movies themselves and seldom discuss the act of going to the movies.  The ritual of attending films and all of the social practices that go into being a film viewer are seldom consciously addressed in our day-to-day conversations.

So it might be interesting to think about not only our own cultural practices of film viewing but those of other cultures as well.  The anthropologist Elizabeth Hahn gives an ethnographic account of a film audience, not in the United States, but in the Polynesian country of Tonga.  In her essay The Tongan Tradition of Going to the Movies Hahn looks at the activity of film audiences in a movie theater in the capital of Nuku’alofa. Tongans have a tradition of cinema viewing that dates back to the 1920’s.

Hahn contests the view of “media imperialism” that maintains that the one-way flow of information and images from first world media producers to third world media audiences is a condition strictly of cultural domination.  Hahn argues against the media imperialism view that importation of first world media products dominates or destroys indigenous cultures.  While not denying the power of first world media systems, Hahn argues for a more nuanced view of global media consumption by looking at the Tongan practice of going to the movies.  Hahn reveals how Hollywood films (action films like Rambo reign supreme, but religious films have also been popular) are folded into and experienced within the context of pre-existing Tongan rituals and performance practices.  As Hahn notes, “Tongan audiences experience the movies in the larger context of various faiva which are rituals of dance, music, poetry, oratory, and storytelling. Indeed, in the Tongan language, movie entertainment is generally referred to as faiva”.

Until about fifteen years ago “interpreters” or “narrators” were a key figure in Tongan cinema viewing.  On one level the “narrator” translated the film’s dialogue and action for the audience.  However, his role and performance encompassed much more than that.  The narrator also embellished the story of the movie, cracked jokes, and shaped the movie to the local community by relating the film to local people and events. Hahn also observed “narrators” making up their own dialogue for characters.  Audience members participated in the “screenings” often talking back to the narrator and with each other.  Hahn relates this to the Western practice of movie going which is primarily individualistic and private.

Another way that local Tongan culture affects movie going is the Tongan kinship rule of tapu.  Tapu regulates the brother-sister relationship and is one of the most sacred bonds of Tongan kinship.  To observe tapu means that brothers and sisters never go to movies together and to do so would mean embarrassment and great disrespect.   Tapu is strictly observed in movie going behavior. In fact to strictly follow tapu would mean that a brother and sister could not go to the same theater even separately on the same night.  Hahn then describes the changes in these traditions during the mid-80’s; Tongan audiences were beginning to look a little like Western audiences because there is less use of the “narrator”.

If scholars such as Hahn study non-Western modes of cinematic reception and exhibition then it would make sense to apply anthropological methods to U.S. modes of reception and exhibition.  Janet Staiger’s Perverse Spectators (2000) contains a series of essays, (“Modes of Reception”, “The Perversity of Spectators: Expanding the History of the Classical Hollywood Cinema” and “Writing the History of American Film Reception”) that radically critiques the textually based theories of cinematic spectatorship and the manner in which it  homogenizes the view of film audiences.  Staiger’s critique of Screen Theory rests on her practice of historical reception studies and a call for the return to actual audiences in their historical specificity with their diverse modes of reception within varying contexts of exhibition.

Staiger provides an extensive schematization of the practice of film reception.  She divides this into, on the one hand, “presumed normative reception activities”, as hypothesized by mainstream cinema studies that include such operations as  “identification” (identifying with the protagonist), “focalization” (focusing on the main action within a film) and “narration”  (building the plot) and, on the other hand, “beyond normative reception activities” that include “talking to characters” (that is movie characters), “cult involvement” (for example seeing The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) many times in a costume of a character), and “walking out” (an extreme form of aesthetic evaluation that short circuits any conventional notions of identification).  Staiger marshals these “extra” cinematic practices to show the limited view of audience reception that Screen theory and mainstream film studies holds.

Staiger’s form of historical reception studies, by directly investigating actual historical audiences, presents all sorts of viewing practices that fall outside the scope of mainstream film studies.  Furthermore Staiger asserts the somewhat controversial belief that academic “scholarly” production is similar to intense “fan” production.

Staiger’s main limitation is her focus on the past and her dependence, like most historical reception studies, on historical documentation such as movie reviews, fan letters, and industry writings.  Although this research is urgently needed to rewrite the history of cinema and cinematic reception, there must also be a direct investigation of current film audiences using qualitative methods and including some of Staiger’s concepts and insights.

Marie’s Sovereignty 

How does one explain Georges Bataille’s body of work, which like all bodies, physical and metaphorical, is assumed to be unified but contains on the one hand the jerking off of an encephalitic dwarf and on the other a critique of the Marshall Plan.

Perhaps it is necessary to reconstruct the image of the “body” of the work.  In Bataille’s case we could begin by severing the Cartesian head that thinks with a “clear and assured consciousness of that which is useful in life.”  The body of the work no longer a seamless whole, composed of a series of discourses revealing a full positivity but a body like the image of the Acephale; headless, sacred heart in its right hand, dagger in its left, self-mutilating, a labyrinth of en­trails, the skull of genitals.  The bowels are a labyrinth where food finds its soul to be shit. The night is a labyrinth where Marie…

What gender is Bataille’s excess? What sex?
About Story of the Eye Roland Barthes says “the erotic theme…is never directly phallic.”  And Michel Leiris writes concerning the novel’s erotic activity; “innumerable possible permutations in a universe so little hierarchized that all is interchangeable there.”  Bataille replaces the strictures of gender, sexuality and hierarchy, with the orgy of metaphoric chains and their inexorable combinations; eye/egg/testicle.

For example, Simone’s vagina transforms from the sex organ which Marcelle and the narrator adore, to the mouth that devours the bull’s testicle, and then to the socket for the priest’s eye that is the sad gaze of Marcelle. Vagina/mouth/ eye socket. All of the elements of the story go through these changes and experience the random mutations of the basic metaphor.  Always in threes, like a perverse parody of the Holy Trinity.  The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.  The Eye, the Egg and the Holy Testicle.  The hierarchy of gender, the dominance of the phallus broken by metaphor, by a new and obscene grammar.

The Dead Man raises the question “What gender is Bataille’s concept of sovereignty?”  But gender is a poor word when speaking of sovereignty.  Gender is a social con­struction, a figure created by the work of discourse.  Bataille’s notion of sovereignty is told in the story of Marie’s escape and transgression initi­ated by Edward’s death, by his sacrifice.  It is the sacrifice of Edward that opens the possibility of sovereignty and the sacred.  Bataille reveals the conditions of sacrifice; “The victim dies, thus the witnesses participate in an element which his death reveals. This element is what it is possible for us, along with religious historians, to call the sacred. The sacred is precisely the continuity of being revealed to those who fix their attention, in a solemn rite, on the death of a discontinu­ous being.”  The Dead  Man records Marie’s night of sovereignty, her “practice of joy before death.”  Her useful and everyday world crumbles away, replaced by a life rushing headlong towards death and silence.  Along the way towards death there are preparations with drunkenness, debauchery, and the “little death” of orgasm.  Burning with “la part maudite,” the excremental, and the heterogeneous, Marie recaptures a life which has been forgotten, repressed by a limited econ­omy of accumulation, equivalence and utilitarian project. The memory of this sovereignty would be something like the memory involved in the phantom limb of an amputee.

In The Dead Man Bataille mixes mortality and dark bur­lesque; the death rattle, orgasm and wail of laughter combine to create a total abjection.  Thus it is a sacred text. It is also a Hegelian text. Or rather a text that wrestles with Hegel’s imperial system.  If Marie is the character of sover­eignty then the Count embodies Hegel’s concept of Herrschaft.  A laughable, deformed figure that deserves our respect and derision much like Hegel’s system.

(Above is the introduction I wrote for the Ediciones La Calavera edition of Georges Bataille’s The Dead Man under the pseudonym Lord Ouch.)

Although woman rejected the prescribed gender behavior of “refusing to look” Cherry found that a number of  female horror fans nevertheless felt a certain stigma attached to being a women and a horror fan because of the popular association of horror with masculinity.  She also found that her participants had a particular dislike for typically male subgenres such as slashers and gore films and a preference for Gothic subgenres of horror such as vampire movies like Interview with the Vampire  because of the romance of the story.  We could suggest that even this traditional male genre of horror attracts female viewers that find pleasure in slasher and gore subgenres

Cherry’s participants also applied oppositional interpretive strategies when it came to the representation of gender in horror films rather than abstain from much of the genre because of its negative stereotypes of women.  These fans often deliberately ignored, diminished or reconstituted sexist or misogynistic representations within different horror films.  For Cherry’s fans the images of female victimization provided opportunities for critical and feminist readings of sexist imagery.  They also tended to emphasize within the genre the numerous images of female victims who fight back and exhibit strong aggressive behavior against a male monster.

Cherry’s ethnographic investigation of female horror fans is groundbreaking and a much needed antidote to the view that the horror genre is exclusively male and that women have little or no interest in it.  For example academia, journalism and popular opinion have created a strikingly similar image of the audience for horror films; this image of the horror film audience is often some version of adolescent boys identifying with and delighting in the misogynistic rampage of male monsters murdering female victims.  Often it is thought this image of teenage male spectatorship is driven by unconscious sexual desire; by watching horror films these adolescent males find an outlet for their anxious and confusing sexuality.

Cherry’s notion of the horror film fan runs counter to representations of the “fan” in general.  What Tulloch and Jenkins describe as academic views of science fiction fans as “representations of subliterate, infantilized or politically duped audiences” can be said about horror fans.  However this view of horror fans as “other” rests on little direct investigation of real horror film audiences; the scarcity of research on viewers of horror films mirrors the lack of research on film audiences in general.  Ironically the interest in film audiences comes at a time when the traditional forms of film rooted in a specific historical moment, Classical Hollywood cinema from roughly 1920-1960, wane and increasingly new and hybrid forms of cinema emerge from technological, institutional and cultural forces.  Some current research has attempted to correct this oversight.  Recent research on television within cultural studies significantly revised the picture of television audiences; this focus on television audiences and its various genres (news, soap opera) and contexts however left film and horror audiences in the dark.

Within the literature that deals with the horror genre there is often an explicit or implicit construction of the horror film audience.  Several genre critics construct an explicit representation of the horror audience in order to define the horror genre itself.  This reference to a particular type of audience in the exploration and definition of the horror genre is key because like other genres such as melodrama or pornography, horror’s meaning rests to a large part on the responses and behavior of the audience and not solely in the structures and devices of the generic text.  Intertwined with this audience-based genre criticism are psychoanalytic notions of the horror audience. the psychoanalytic audience in general – too much “perversion”; where the classic Hollywood spectator was “implanted” with cinematic perversions (voyeurism, masochism, narcissism, fetishism) the horror audience is seen to be inherently perverse.  His interest in horror films is already a perverse act over and beyond any perversion that may be involved with the fundamental constitution of spectators.

Furthermore the general conceptualizations of fans as “obsessive”, devoted to the object of their adoration and not in control of their reception is magnified within the assumption of the horror fan’s unwholesome emotional involvement with the horror film.  Horror fans are thus under suspicion for their emotional investment as fans and their unwholesome pleasure in images of monstrosity and carnage. Soap opera fans, Elvis fans, X-philers are seen as emotionally suspect only for their investment in fandom and the cult-like adoration.  However their pleasures in the object of fandom is not seen in itself as objectionable as is the case with horror films.  It may be the case that the perception of horror fans may be more about the   the pleasures derived from watching horror films more than the pleasures of fandom.

This intertextual dimension applies to the set of still images that appear at the end of the film.  Certainly the black and white photographs of the disposal of Ben’s body by an all white gang both fit the low budget nature of NotLD and add a visually striking and dramatic element to the death of Ben.  However the grainy, dot matrix quality to the photos connote a certain type of image; they have a documentary and journalistic feel as though they were snatched from a Life magazine or a newspaper.  The journalistic realism of the images seems to suggest, on the level of the horror narrative, a chilling sense that these events are possible thus adding to the horror of the film;  but the journalistically styled photos of an all white mob gathered around a slain African-American connects the scene with the historical reality of racist acts such as beatings, lynching and burnings.  Also the manner in which the film frames the group is important; the white men of the group are shot from a low angle to give them a feeling of dominance over Ben.  White dominance is further connoted as one photo shows a sinister “meat hook” that one of the vigilantes wields which reads as a “removal” tool, but also as a vigilante weapon to be used against Ben.  The whole sequence has a menacing feel that goes beyond the denotation of the scene as merely gruesome thrills of the “zombie” genre to a place where the viewer feels as though she is witnessing through news photos the racist brutalization of Ben’s body.

The ending is highly ambivalent as it breaks off a narrative that portrays Ben as the most dominant character. In the politics of representation Ben’s character runs counter to the racist stereotypes found in Hollywood films.  Ben comprises “traditional” characteristics of whiteness: rationality, courage, resourcefulness.  When compared to Harry Cooper, the white father of the family featured in the film, Ben displays a confident authority that violently ends with Ben wrestling a gun from Harry and later shooting him.

Beyond its intertextuality and prescient progressive politics of representation NotLD engages with racial discourses in another way.  Romero has stated in interviews, “In the script, his race is never mentioned. In my mind, when I wrote that initial scene, he was a white guy”.  The casting of Duane Jones as Ben was a matter of convenience.  But as stated above to cast an African-American actor in the lead role regardless of the director’s original intent within the historical context of the civil rights struggles automatically engages with racial discourses and practices.

What I suggest is that Romero’s original vision of Ben as white and then casting a black actor deftly plays with the racist tradition of black-face minstrelsy and turns it on its head.  Traditionally black-face minstrelsy was the racist practice of white performers donning black face to gain access to African-American personae and then reproducing racist stereotypes. This twist on minstrelsy permits Ben to carry the burden of racial meaning as a signifier of blackness while also escaping any restrictions based on race as a textual and  racial category.  Romero unconsciously created in Ben a character that resides inside and outside of racial discourses.

This relates to Richard Dyer’s insight into the compelling paradox at the heart of whiteness as a racial category.  Dyer states that whiteness as a racial category is both visible and invisible. One thing Dyer seems to be suggesting is that as a visible category, or signifier, whiteness is granted, ideologically and socially, a position of power.  At the same time whiteness as a racial category is invisible; that is whites are never marked or viewed as being determined by their race.  On the other hand Dyer suggests that other races however are defined in racial terms; each individual who is a member of a “non-white” race has his or her nature defined by their race, furthermore they are defined in relation to the “universality” and “normality” of whiteness.

Dyer’s insight resides at the heart of Ben’s minstrelsy; as a signifier Ben is encoded as racial, as being African-American, as non-white; but as a signified Ben connotes all of the traditional meanings associated with whiteness.   In NotLD race becomes, in Stuart Halls’ words, a “floating signifier” that confounds and counters the traditionally oppressive representations of race.