Let’s entertain the judgment that media culture today is overly concerned with “modeling.” This is related to the importance of “optics” in political spin and framing—one does something not because it’s right or good, but because it will look right or good. On the flipside, one regrets an action, optically, not because it is wrong, harmful, etc., but because it might be seen such, and thus be counterproductive to one’s deeper aims. Optics encompasses a great deal, but “modeling,” as I’m interested in pursuing it right now, is largely a matter of fictional or semi-fictional representation. It’s a way of harnessing the imagination to perform what we might want to do, ourselves, or to see done. I think it serves also as a reservoir for the displacement of some deeper social-psychological feelings, but in a way that remains mostly under the surface.
Media characters are said to model identities and behaviors. I think it’s implied that the task of the discerning viewer, then, is to appreciate these models and how they work together. We are not supposed to be neutral observers who limit our judgment to grounds of mere taste. We are to take in our assorted media objects, and the actions depicted within them, responsibly, like people are encouraged to treat their diets. The responsible, active spectator thus avoids imbibing bad ideology from the culture machine, avoids doing it like some flyover rube would, and instead savors the nutrition and allows the occasional “problematic fave” in the same way that a healthy eater allows a limited number of bacon cheeseburgers or cinnamon buns into their diet.
So people will claim, for instance, that Ted Lasso “teaches” viewers how to apologize sincerely, or how to be a non-toxic masculine person, or whatever. In fact, as I’m drafting this, an article appears in one of my feeds about “what Ted Lasso gets right about therapy.” This whole atmosphere—not just the texts, but of the modality of reception and circulation—bears the scent of the “very special episode,” which breaks through the fun-and-games to remind us of what’s really real (which is what the spectacle says is really real). And yet, the demand on our ethical obligations very often, weirdly enough, just goes back to policing norms of taste.
Case in point, the remake of Scenes from a Marriage. Nothing against Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain, both fine actors, but I’m unlikely to watch it. However I was intrigued to see a review arguing that Hagai Levi’s remake was “irresponsible.” What could that mean? What did it mean in this context? It boils down to this:
“But then, what's the point of swapping gender roles assigned in the 1973 original series? We have plenty of female villains in media today, especially in the US. Levi's decision to flip the original series to make the female spouse (Mira) the unfaithful abuser doesn't add anything new to the conversation about marriage or gender roles at all. It's just frustrating to watch unfold for five hours.”
Apparently one of the things they’ve changed in the remake is shifting the role of the aggressor from the husband to the wife. In Bergman’s original it’s Erland Josephson, who is human, all too humanly awful. I think the charge of irresponsibility comes from the premise that it’s fair game to have a domineering husband act horribly within the context of patriarchy—it doesn’t do harm to men or husbands in general, even—but that in a society that is still patriarchal and sexist, it’s a “bad look” to make the wife in this hetero coupling the unsympathetic one. As people have pointed out, it’s kind of a lose-lose scenario if we can’t have characters be flawed, nuanced, unsympathetic, etc., simply because they aren’t straight white cis men. A simplistic game of positive representations and respectability politics isn’t going to sustain us in our drama and in our imagination.
(Coming sooner or later here: some thoughts on film and parrhesia, a pairing relevant to this problem.)
I’d also push back against the implication that the original Scenes from a Marriage has a villain, per se—but that could just be more Internet brain worms, maybe, where any unsympathetic character is classified a priori as a “villain.” Culture commentators are incentivized to translate any and all representation of human activity into terms that make sense for a kid’s show. From Pasolini to Paw Patrol, all media content reduces to the same basic function, right? Right?
There’s an aspiration towards a weird kind of depoliticized-yet-very-political media ecology here, where one must consider gravely the weight and consequences of one’s “actions” (i.e., what one likes or normalizes or amplifies when watching stuff on screens).
This makes me uneasy, personally. Maybe it makes you uneasy, too. Or maybe I’m wrong and you want to say why you think I’m wrong. I want to try to loosen the grip of the idea that, as Debord put it in The Society of the Spectacle, “that which appears is good, that which is good appears.” Teasing out the implications of that statement on visibility is one of my persistent, perhaps myopic tasks. But it’s necessary. To me the stranglehold on our attention is an immanent, imminent, and everpresent problem; a solution that leans in to this corporate media attention, straightfaced, is likely just Stockholm syndrome.
This all poses the question of how priority and frivolity should relate to one another in our lives. I think this is a fundamental question in politics, although it is not solely a political question. When we speak of something having priority, its existence or exigency is greater and deeper than other things.
To give a frivolous example, when I wake up and attempt to make coffee in the morning, our fluffy cat may interrupt me for her morning belly rubs. Here, the stakes are low. How quickly do I need that caffeine? I can take a few minutes to pet the cat if and when I choose to.
However, if on that morning I were making coffee for an important event with impatient guests, or I had an early flight to catch, I’d be wise to act in accordance with my priorities. Probably most people would agree I should do the more professional or responsible thing before any idling. If the ceiling above us started caving in unexpectedly, well, that would take even greater priority still. There’s no escaping some priority and urgency in our lives. And it’s all bounded by death.
Now, if we had a total view, a synoptic view, of all ethical and moral priorities on the planet, of all existential threat, at all times, we would be incapable of accepting the frivolous in any capacity, at any time. I think this is a meta-problem that itself takes great priority—an inability to appreciate frivolity! One way I could frame my own political convictions is to say that I am in favor of arrangements of life that allow people ample leisure, so that necessary priorities, like hunger or insufficient shelter for starters, do not unbalance the gift of existence.
Frivolity speaks to that gift, that surplus: it presumes rest and idleness, the ability to say, “I don’t need to make coffee this very second; I can pet the cat.” Framing is important because frivolity won’t undo or override a priority, an exigency. But an existence which allows for frivolity is the most prior, I think, of all possible human existence. The reality that so many lives are lived without this deepest priority-of-frivolity is a testament to how limited and exploited existence is for most people on the planet.
There is also the question of “feeling seen,” a phrase with a lot of currency, and which I think eventually will come to stand in as a synecdoche for its epoch (like “dropping out” or “I feel your pain”). I think there are two distinct aspects of this concept, which are not unrelated, and often overlap, but are also not the same.
One meaning of “feeling seen” involves the redress of an entertainment industry which, like many other industries, has both systematically and anecdotally shortchanged enormous swaths of the population for the spectacular prioritization and maintenance of certain categories of being—male, white, Western, straight, and so on. “Feeling seen” expresses a clear and comprehensible trajectory in this context. Populations and identities who had limited representation, no representation, or distorted and degrading representation are asserting themselves in distinction to the representational paradigm that has previously been both figure and ground. One doesn’t need coursework in media studies to understand the basic principle; it’s something people talk about on their own, in their own ways, all the time.
But there is another framing of “feeling seen” that I think relates absolutely to the commodification of representation in our attention economy. When we submit to this spectacular paradigm, we in fact raise up an idol who, we imagine, supervises us. That’s how I think of it: a fiction of supervision, a deception embraced willingly because it gives shape to our fears and our wants. In light of this ersatz-God’s omniscience, we hope for the proliferation of our best look, the forgiving acceptance of our flaws, the satisfaction of our life’s narrative as if it were one we would watch on a screen, and the reinforcement of the belief that our visibility is linked to our recognition by others, which is linked to our status. And if our status is validated, so too is our agency.
Whatever other unfortunate choices Ricky Gervais has made in his career, he still did one of my very favorite sitcoms, The Office, and a few lines that he speaks, as the ineptly officious, attention-seeking David Brent, have always stuck with me as an illustration of this supervision mentality. When trying to sum up his legacy as a boss and as a person, he says to the camera, without self-awareness:
“If I make them laugh along the way, sue me. And I don't do it so they turn round and go ‘Thank you David for the opportunity, thank you for the wisdom, thank you for the laughs.' I do it so, one day, someone will go ‘There goes David Brent. I must remember to thank him.’”
It’s the mediated imagination of status acknowledgment driving him, and justifying his striving. You can look around and see a lot of actions that make sense when understood as appeals to be seen as being good and worthy of attention.
There is a question to be asked: is this supervision structure really an ersatz-God, or is it the postliterate, the spectacular, expression of a God—just as earlier expressions of God coincided with forms of archives and literacy? (The major monotheistic religions of the Middle East are all, also, “religions of the book.”) When I call this Great Supervisor a mere ersatz-God, can I be certain that I am not simply reacting from the residual perspective of the literate observer—the not-yet-fully-postliterate observer?