#3 // People Watching TV in Art
#3 // People Watching TV in Art
Last week, I published a piece at Slate called, “Rewinding Helen DeWitt: The Last Samurai and the Streaming-Video Revolution.” As always, that’s a pretty long title for a thousand-word essay, but it’s a long title because it’s about a bunch of my favorite things! The primary favorite thing, of course, is Helen DeWitt’s 2000 novel The Last Samurai, which, for a variety of frustrating and dramatic reasons, has been out of print for quite some time and is now in print via New Directions and available for all of you to buy and hurriedly consume as soon as you finish reading my short—thousand words!—article on some of its many fine features.
Another of my favorite things discussed in this essay is what I’ll call—in my Toast-iest cadence—People Watching TV in Art. This particular interest of mine is, on a spectrum of interests from “Super Accessible and Understandable and Everybody Gets Why You’d Be Interested in That” to “Academic,” like probably an 8. But, nevertheless, I love watching people watch TV. The Last Samurai joins David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest and William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition to form the holy, turn-of-the-twenty-first-century trinity of People Watching TV in Novels. (In Pattern Recognition, it’s video files on a computer, but I’ll allow it.) It’s a phenomenon much more widespread in film, though. And my favorite sub-genre in this regard is people watching surveillance tape—I teach a course on surveillance and cinema, so I’m not just creepily generating this list of voyeurs off the top of my head—which includes, most notably and most recently, Zero Dark Thirty, Inside Man, The Dark Knight, Cache, The Lives of Others, Ex Machina, and, on TV itself, The Wire, Homeland, Mr. Robot, and Orphan Black. It’s a hack I give to my students in intro film classes: if you ever see anybody watching anything in a movie, step back and see what’s going on. Filmmakers love mirroring themselves and their art, so representations of spectatorship often get to carry a little extra weight. And when people watch TV—rather than see a movie or a play at the theater—there's the added resonance of the home, conspiracy rather than vulnerability. I remember Paul Giamatti saying that he took his role in American Splendor because, in the script, there was a scene where all his character did was quietly read a book on the couch. Watching isn't reading, obviously, but there's a similar unexpected intimacy to encountering someone else as a private spectator.
It’s an insanely common image (and, obviously, an insanely common practice), but it’s not talked about that much as an archetype or even a widespread aesthetic component of media or art. Teju Cole, a few years ago, curated a Twitter feed of photos and stills of TVs and people watching TVs and poets writing about TVs and watching TVs called “TV Guide.” It doesn’t come with any specific analysis, but the sheer preponderance of the image, the depth of the archive, is scary or maybe moving or maybe both. It’s a great and epic work of “posted without comment” internet art, and I highly recommend you scroll through it for a while. It’s mesmerizing.
TV shows, of recent vintage, have also really drilled in to the idea of their characters as spectators. Mad Men really did this with "Nixon vs. Kennedy" and with the assassinations of 1968 and with the moon landing, cutting together scenes of viewing, showing the way history is experienced as a series of mediations. (Mad Men’s direct ancestor The Sopranos loved to show Tony watching the History Channel.) The People v. OJ Simpson did a similar thing with the Bronco chase and the trial in ways I’ve written about for LARB. And The Americans has really been preoccupied with it in terms of Reagan’s televised speeches, the airing of The Day After, and the precision with which the writers “program” shows for the Jennings kids to watch.
It’s not a coincidence, I don’t think, that these series are all historical dramas. It’s easy, when depicting people in the contemporary moment watching TV, to ignore it the same way we ignore ourselves watching TV. In other words, the content of the act, for us, is the content of what we’re watching, not the act itself. But thinking about spectatorship as a part of history—a la Mad Men—as a way of experiencing history—a la OJ—or as a substantial element of coming of age—a la Americans—is a way of thinking about what exactly it is that we’re doing when we’re watching TV. Are we passively receiving stimulus and spectacle, or are we engaging? Are we in control, or are we being controlled? Is TV neutral, or is it teaching/indoctrinating/nudging us in terms of our beliefs, our politics, or the way we see the world? I mean, of course it is and it isn't. None of these are new observations, but, thinking about just how hard Helen DeWitt thinks about them is somewhat inspiring. We don't need to take it for granted. I try not to.
*All illustrations are screengrabs from Teju Cole's "TV Guide" feed.
Finally Started // Man, we are on vacation, sorry.
Flagging // Samesies. Everything.
Finally Finished // LeBron James Redeeming the City of Cleveland (all channels)
Recommendations //
I don’t really feel like I have the ability to say anything of value about the horrific attack at Pulse last week, but I’ve read so many people who do have important and beautiful things to say. One of those people is Alfred Soto, whose essay on “Into the Groove,” dancing, and queer liberation is one of the most moving short pieces of criticism I’ve ever read.
Sonia Saraiya, newly and justly installed as TV critic at Variety, also has a great, terribly sharp critical recap of news coverage of the shooting.
Lili Loofbourow is working on a great new site called The Bee—check it out!
In addition to my own piece at Slate, there have been a couple of wonderful deep dives into The Last Samurai on the occasion of its resurrection, specifically, this one at The Paris Review and this one at The Millions. And, if you aren't familiar with DeWitt and want to dip a toe into her brief and fantastic archive before starting up TLS, you might try her recent beautiful, harrowing essay on being stalked.
And blister some tomatoes, while you're at it. I like this recipe, but do it with grape tomatoes, and toss them in balsamic vinegar after.
Not the Tom Cruise movie,
Phil.