Serialized Story Is Everything

With production week on the horizon and genre week still rattling around in my brain, this little bit of popular analysis felt like it was worth a repost. It's surprisingly less stupid than most entertainment journalism. In short, Furious 7 is the future of all media. (Until it isn't.) And closed storytelling is a dying breed. (Until it's big again.)

Mad Men & Marxism + Mad Men & Melrose Place

There's so much relevant stuff on Mad Men related to what we're talking about in class.

Firstly, a comparison of MM and Melrose Place from Molly Lambert at Grantland, they're even more alike than it is with Passions!

http://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/madrose-place-what-mad-men-and-melrose-have-in-common/

And secondly, Hannah Rosin from Slate's "slightly bogus Marxist theory of MM:

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/tv_club/features/2015/mad_men_season_7_part_2/episode_1/mad_men_season_7_recapped_slate_s_tv_club_dissects_each_new_episode_1.html

Experience Every Genre with Community!

I walked out of class after our discussion of genre today, and had a realization - I can't believe I didn't bring up Community! The show is famous for its almost weekly exploration of different genres.

Community is always a comedy, but on top of that, it goes from also being a zombie thriller one week, to a western the next, to a police procedural the next. With every genre-change also comes the expert jokes on that genre's tropes. Basically, it's a show for film and TV nerds.


If you've never watched the show, here's a list of amazing genre episodes to check out:


1. Basic Rocket Science (204): Astronaut movie like Apollo 13 and Armageddon 

2. Advanced Dungeons and Dragons (214): Fantasy epics like Lord of the Rings

3. A Fistful of Paintballs (223): Spaghetti Western

4. Abed's Uncontrollable Christmas (211): Classic Christmas specials like Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer

5. Epidemiology (206): Zombie outbreak 

6. Horror Fiction in Seven Spooky Steps (305): Horror

7. Pillows and Blankets (314): Ken Burns-style documentary

8. Basic Lupine Urology (317): Police procedural like Law & Order

Colorbent Casting for AMC's "Preacher" Adaptation

AMC is adapting popular comic book “Preacher.” The female lead, written as a (fully) White woman, will be played by half-Ethiopian, half-Irish actress Ruth Negga. Some colorbent casting for genre TV.  

Music Video Auteurs

Full transparency: I am unabashedly obsessed with Nabil and Kahlil Joseph.

It seems that we’re in the second age of the music video auteur. Even though new music videos from artists/bands such as Kanye West, Frank Ocean, James Blake, Nicki Minaj, Nas & Damian Marley,  Arctic Monkeys, FKA Twigs, Foals, and alt-J (exhaustive list because I love all these acts) are events in and of themselves, when they are released, blogs usually lead with the fact that they are Nabil-directed.

Kahlil Joseph, whose works is most associated with Kendrick Lamar and Flying Lotus, is arguably hip hop’s most important director (and currently has an exhibit at MOCA running until August 16th). Lamar commissioned Joseph to direct a short film based on his debut album good kid, m.A.A.d city. The video he directed for Flying Lotus Until the Quiet Comes was a film festival favorite.

Whereas the first era, circa Spike Jonze pre-film, was wedded to TV screens and music television channels, music videos are now located on computer screens via music and pop culture blogs. Now they are portable and the most accessible cinematic form. How does the music video, which is arguably the most dynamic cinematic space at a mass audience’s fingertips, exist as an intensely auteur form in a mass context?

Core Response #4: Gender and Genre in the Era of "Prestige TV"

In film theory last term, we learned through Patrice Petro's work that the study of TV was very looked down upon by cinema scholars, mostly male because it was considered a mass medium, a lower medium. We all know this also was the case for Cinema, when scholars of art and literature were apprehensive of this new medium. The cycle goes on.

Tara and Michael Kackman's pieces both touch on how popular discourse on legitimating TV is done through a masculinization of a feminized medium. Kackman concludes his Flow piece:

While much recent television scholarship has seemingly moved beyond the field’s roots in feminist media criticism, it often does so by re-embracing the gendered hierarchies that made the medium an object of critical and popular scorn. And while “quality television” is a complicated aggregation of industry discourses, aesthetic norms, audience practices and politics, it’s also, at least historically, a political demand – a kind of Jamesonian hermeneutic dream of being… different. I’d like to urge some skepticism about celebrating television’s new golden age of aesthetic quality. By becoming “legitimate,” we risk eliding our field’s history of politically and culturally invested scholarship. And as the characters of Lost might yet one day learn, the search for legitimacy entails great cost, while illegitimacy has intriguing rewards.

More often than not, when it comes to cable programming, this masculinization is achieved through a likeliness to Cinema, or going away from being called not "Just TV," as Kackman shows the HBO slogan was a return to "elitist aesthetics." IF you think about a series like the Sopranos, about a well-off family with questionable morals, it's a long form, serialized, soap opera take on the gangster film. If it has a higher production value, its aesthetics is "cinematic." A formal analysis of TV's aesthethics and its narrative became very popular. The tendency towards highly serialized AKA narratively complex came from the soap opera, which came from the melodrama, another maligned genre often called "women's film." 

Kackman rightly argues that the feminist roots of TV study simply can't be forgotten or undermined because a seemingly new "era" of the medium occurred. And Tara discusses all the different ways 24 tries not to align itself with the melodrama: "old fashioned technologies like 'hero television' and the intrepid, lone-wolf masculinity, stylistically and formally it sculpts a loving look at the dispersion of screen languages into everyday life." (p.118) It's great to see how the description of 24, its narrative and aesthetic, reads so much like the media texts Jane Feuer discusses, with a tradition firmly rooted in melodrama.

Twin Peaks is another great example of quality TV and cinema: David Lynch's aesthetic blended with Mark Frost's Hill Street Blues abilities, and I'm sure Frost was doing a lot of the managerial stuff given his experience working in TV. The story was very soapy, very dishy. But it had Lynch's cool aesthetic to a network TV product, so it's quality. The subsequent hipster appropriation and fandom we see today of Twin Peaks is really incredible to see.

Emily Nussbaum, The New Yorker's TV critic, has often written on the gendered dynamics of television representations. In this article, a response to Matt Zoller Seitz's call for a more formal, aesthetic take on TV, she unfortunately does not draw on the gendered politics of this:

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/cahiers-du-buffy

CORE RESPONSE #3 - Torture 24

In Tara McPherson's “Techno-Soap: 24, Masculinity, and Hybrid Form,” she contemplates the way in which the much-praised serialized drama 24 is like a soap opera, even while trying to distance itself from this feminized form. (p. 174). It's not a soap opera, argues the show's creator and executive producer Bob Cochran. It's a quality show that has some elements of serialization. (p. 175).

This idea of hierarchy, that soap operas are trash, and that 24 is quality, is a subjective idea that critics promote and viewers seem to accept without question. It's quality because it has this element of a deadline, 24 hours. It's quality because it has a lot of technology. It's quality because it has a higher budget than a soap opera. Is it also “quality” because it's not geared toward women? Is it quality because it has a lot of violence? It seems creating a “dark” and “gritty” storyline almost guarantees that many people will consider your story “quality” content. McPherson also investigates the way in which calling this series “quality” serves to elevate TV itself as a medium worthy of watching and studying.

Beyond this slippery definition of “quality,” she is also troubled by 24's nationalism, (p. 173) and its “very particular vision of a white, male, post-9/11 hero.” (p.174). Later she writes, “24 consistently offers up rationales for torture and for operating outside the law.” (p. 185). This is a particularly troubling aspect of the show, and one which has been hotly debated.

In a 2014 article in Variety “The 24 Effect: How 'Liberal Hollywood' Carried Water for Torture.” Brian Lowry argues that 24 and other movies and TV series in which both the good guys and the bad guys use torture, helped desensitize Americans to torture in a 9/11 era. “A lengthy 2007 New Yorker piece by Jane Mayer about the politics of 24 emphasized a declaration by conservative talkradio host Laura Ingraham that its hero’s popularity was “as close to a national referendum that it’s O.K. to use tough tactics against high-level Al Qaeda operatives as we’re going to get.”

People may argue that 24 is just a show. That it's just entertainment. To this Lowry replies, “Yet a series like 24 is grounded in reality precisely because that makes such life-or-death situations resonate. And because viewers generally don’t have first-hand experience in such matters (at least, let’s hope not), it’s understandable that their perceptions would be filtered through media – as the New Hampshire Union Leader did in an editorial flagged by the liberal watchdog site Media Matters, which said that Jack Bauer would consider champions of the Torture Report “wusses.”

McPherson sees 24 as a kind of investigation into what it means to be masculine, especially in the 21^st century. The picture that emerges from the minds of 24's storytellers isn't pretty. I'd rather watch Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. (p.187).