Author Archives: falafel

In the article ‘Secrets of the City,’ Lanahan describes a scene from the streets of Baltimore, then claims that “it could be a scene from ‘The Wire'” (24). Unlike Homicide and The Corner, The Wire is actually fictional, yet so much emphasis is placed on its reality. The elaborate contexts of the systems that drive people rather than the traditional character driven plot, the blurring of good guys and bad guys, the irresolution of problems…

According to Simon, good journalism should bring “”real life and real issues through the keyhole” in a way that leads to “meaningful thought, if not action”” (26). Does The Wire attempt to take on this aim? I find it difficult to believe that people would watch this show and be compelled to action. The reality of the problems presented seem overwhelming, systemic, and without any foreseeable solution. And is reality what people watch television for? Especially fake reality? Might it be possible that the somewhat low viewership numbers were there despite, rather than because of, the brilliantly gritty realism?

It is surprising to me that Williams’ concept of ‘flow’ became “so important to the development of television criticism” (8) when even Thompson claims that it is “neither self-evidently useful nor true” (8). While the scheduling of programs and pace and timing of commercials is very important to the networks in terms of profits and competition, as evidenced by the various strategies employed (hammocking, tent-poling, etc) I don’t think that it should play such a big role in the study of television itself. Some may argue that flow greatly impacts the viewer’s experience of the shows, and Williams goes so far as to suggest that audiences watch television as a whole and may only “register” commercial breaks as “interruptions” (10). Thompson tears at this notion by giving examples of how real life interruptions affect our behavior and ability to consume an ongoing narrative. I think that studying flow and program blocks as the focus of television studies is like studying is like studying the lighting and framing of a portrait instead of the painting, or the binding of a book and the environs of a library instead of the literature itself. Certainly, context and access help us frame how we view works of art, but I do not think that study of context should replace study of the art itself. This tendency in television studies to study the effects and context of television rather than the works themselves goes back to the general trend towards “cultural studies,” people dismissing or feeling threatened by television as a medium, or studying it “symptomatically in terms of their reflections of modern society,” (5) rather than aesthetically and analytically. Perhaps another one of the reasons, why flow became such a common element of television studies is that flow is “the effect that TV executives hope will result from their rescheduling” (12). The concept of flow seems to give weight to the order and control that programming networks hope to create and study in an otherwise very random and unpredictable world of viewer behavior.
I was also intrigued by Thompson’s setup of the contrasting “Classic Hollywood” versus “European Cinema” dichotomy of ‘character driven events’ versus ‘event driven characters’. In a show like Homocide, it definitely seems as though the characters are more situationally driven. They have goals to solve the crimes and other personal agendas, but it still feels as though they are largely reactionary to the turns of events and whatever evidence pops up. While the detectives may actively pursue certain paths, they so often meet with dead ends and frustrations due to circumstance. I’m not sure where exactly this occurs but one of the detectives makes the analogy that working in homocide is like mowing the lawn: you work to accomplish something, mow the lawn, but next week you have to do it again, which really emphasizes the uncontrollable circumstances that force the characters to keep moving.

I think that it is very interesting that Peter Wollen distinguishes auteur theory from the art cinema theory by claiming that “auterur theory does not limit itself to acclaiming  the director as the main author of a film” (520). He sees the auteur theory not as a way of attributing creative authorship to a single person, but rather as a means of reading a film which can reveal certain insights and details that might otherwise be overlooked. He describes it as an “explanatory device” (532) which can be applied to some, but not all, films. This method of film analysis proposes to ‘decode’ meaning from a finished film by an “operation of decipherment” (520). Wollen’s emphasis that a film is “associated with a single director, an individual, not because he has played the role of artist, expressing himself or his own vision in the film” (532) undermines our usual assumptions about authorship and attempts to attribute creative authority. The “force of ‘a director’s’ preoccupations that [leave] an unconscious, unintended meaning …in the film” (532) departs entirely from the notion of an artist’s willful construction and creative vision. Given Wollen’s version of the auteur theory, it would be virtually impossible to distinguish an auteur’s personal, unconscious influence from the “lots of voices” (Caldwell, 212) involved in television.

This doesn’t mean people don’t try to leave their individual marks though. A television director I worked with over the summer told me that he tries to put the image of a cat into every program that he does. He was hired to produce 2 / 13 episodes for the show.