2/2 Gitlin Prime Time Ideology--Marina Massidda

 “The usual slants, then, fall into two categories: either (a) a legitimation of depoliticized forms of deviance, usually ethnic or sexual; or (b) a delegitimation of the dangerous, the violent, the out-of-bounds”(261). 

The depoliticization of deviance Gitlin refers to hinges on the location of such narratives within the private sphere. Television narratives at least superficially uplifting minority sexualities and ethnicities can thus propound the notion that self-actualization, the optimization of individual liberty and expression, “can be affirmed through the existing private commodity forms, under the benign, protective eye of the national security state”(265). While aesthetically deviant character representations and arcs can alleviate the threat of patriarchal authority to individual self-determination, they simultaneously subdue the societal grip of the same in the public imagination. Watching the episode of Father Knows Best, I felt soothed by the understanding that the protagonist is clearly capable of anything she sets her mind to, if not for the pesky societal expectations traditionally barring girls from engineering. It’s also interesting that her precocious desire to undertake a masculine vocation corresponds with her indifference to frivolous feminine articles like dresses, yet her inescapable feminine wiles are reaffirmed by her heterosexual attraction to her trainer. Their comical attraction seems to replace the oppressive authority of patriarchy as the obstruction to her unconventional career path, relocating a heteronormative battle of the sexes as benign, natural, and even desirable organization of roles. While progress within her desired field seems inevitable, the conventional femininity she seems to reject at the outset is reinforced as something intractable which lubricates her foray into a mens’ world.

Gitlin outlines the ways television predicts and responds to a mosaic of evolving tastes from a heterogeneous viewing population. This is part of the process by which television as an appendage of capitalism absorbs and domesticates the criticisms and contradictions of the capitalist model. While I absolutely agree with the way he describes this domestication in contrast to fascistic models, I have always been skeptical of the notion that commercial television responds primarily to changing audience tastes. Of course this has to be true to an extent, but I suspect the extent to which the industry manipulates public taste even in a heterogeneous sense is hugely underestimated. Programs, slants, broadcasting patterns and reformist sympathies in television evolve because novelty is baked into the capitalist model, rather than changing in step with an increasingly progressive social climate. I would like to know, if audience demands have any control over broadcasting/streaming releases whatsoever, how are these desire projected? How are we to know to want what has never been offered, say the portrait of the “regular hero” in Gitlin’s terms, such as a portrait of communist/anarchist rebellion freed from the abstraction of the supernatural or other forms of patriotic allegories?