As someone who primarily studies film I found Lynn Spigel’s intervention into television’s mode of spectatorial presence very compelling. In their landmark study The Classical Hollywood Cinema (1985), David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson argue that Classical Hollywood privileges narrative, using form to facilitate immersion within the diegesis. Editing, cinematography, set design, performance, etc. work to cultivate a sense presence within the diegetic space. Spigel argues that, rather than merely replicating this immersive mode of spectatorship, television cultivates a spectatorial presence more indebted to theater. The sense of “being there” the television viewer experiences is not a being within the characters’ diegetic space, but the experience of being an audience member watching a performance unfold—the “there” is that of a theatrical, rather than domestic, space. Spigel offers many examples for how this theatricalized viewing experience is formally constructed, from the mise-en-abyme structure of performance in The Burns and Allen Show to editing strategies like cutting on character entrances to proscenium staging.
Seeing as narrative cinema’s immersive mode of spectatorship has been the subject of ideological critiques, television’s frequent direct address and foregrounding of its own performativity could, at first glance, offer an antidote to spectatorial inculcation into a dominant ideology. However, Spigel’s concept of the “theatricalization of the domestic space” that occurs in sit-coms suggests that the medium merely constructs a different spectatorial relation to a dominant ideology, one based in post-war consumer culture. I want to think through this concept in relation to the episode of I Love Lucy that I watched for this week. “Kleptomaniac” (1.27) ends with what is, even on a narrative level, Lucy’s performance. Upset that Ricky thinks she is a thief, Lucy stages a scene with Ethel in which they pretend to have just robbed a bank, a gas station, and a circus. The narrative positions Ricky, Fred, and Dr. Robinson as the intended audience for this diegetic performance—Lucy and Ethel are trying to get back at them for accusing Lucy of being a kleptomaniac. The virtuosity of Lucy and Ethel’s theatrics is lost on the three men because they mistake what they are seeing for reality. By contrast, the televisual audience is “in the know”—we are fully aware that what we are seeing is a performance on the part of Lucy and Ethel (and, by extension, Lucille Ball and Vivian Vance). Through this dramatic irony, Ricky, Fred, and Dr. Robinson become the butt of the joke because they fall for the reality effect of Lucy and Ethel’s performance; they are the dupes who engage in a spectatorship that, like narrative cinema, confuses theatrics with reality. By contrast, we the television audience take pleasure in our awareness of the artifice of what we are seeing. This episode structures a viewing position that is, as Spigel argues, operates “contrary to the notion that these early television households presented a ‘mirror’ of the audience’s life at home.” Instead, Lucy’s living room takes “on the functions of the stage space” (19). I am attaching a screen grab from this final sequence. We see Lucy dressed as a bank robber, and her performance incorporates the signifiers of a typical film gangster: she puts on a New York mafia accent and James Cagney-like swagger, calling Ethel “baby face” and toting a machine gun. Further, as Spigel suggests, the staging and framing adhere to a tableau style, with action directed outward to the camera rather than contained within the characters’ milieu. The finale comes when Lucy brings in a baby elephant she has supposedly stolen from the circus, delivering a coup de grâce to any lingering trace of realism. As Patricia Mellencamp suggests, I Love Lucy is a prime example of how narrative is sublimated to performance in the sit-com; while Lucy fails in her ambition to escape domesticity (in this episode, her attempt to chair an upcoming auction), she succeeds in getting “exactly what she and the television audience wanted: Lucy the star, performing off-key, crazy, perfectly executed vaudeville turns” (88).
The final scene of “Kleptomaniac” also demands consideration of the other aspect of Spigel’s “theatricalization of the domestic space”: the audience’s domestic space becomes—or more specifically, incorporates—the space of the theater. What appears to disrupt normative spectatorship by eschewing realist immersion was, in fact, crucial to the construction of the Cold War consumer. Television’s theatricalization of the domestic space is part of the larger trend Spigel observes in observes in mid-century architecture, advertising, television, and commercial culture more broadly wherein middle-class homeowners were encouraged to bring the outside world into their domestic sphere through consumption (7). Just as Lucy brings a range of public sites into her living room through her final performance—the circus, the crime scene, the charity auction—the consumer is encouraged to bring outside entertainments into their own living room by watching television and other forms of domestic consumption. Of course, as Spigel demonstrates, utopian fantasies of public/private incorporation were accompanied by dystopian fears of domestic alienation. While Lucy’s final performance stays on the level of screwball comedy for the audience, through Ricky, Fred, and Dr. Robinson, we might identify anxieties around bringing the modern world—and its pathologies (i.e. kleptomania)—into the home through obsessive consumption.
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