Comment #5

Here is my follow up post on BEEF episode 2. I love how second episode picks up right where we left off. In the previous episode, we end with Amy reciting Danny's license plate numbers out loud for her to remember. Episode 2 starts with her slamming her front door, still furious by the circumstance and situation at hand. From a production stand point, I also love a lot of the smooth dolly movements that match Amy and Danny's coverage; they are framed very similarly despite the vast differences in their life. The virtual, screen war feelings very refreshing in life: who they are in person versus who we perceive them to be online whether it's a clean, compact and steady construction profile or a fake instagram account. Perception versus reality is really at play in this series in a very comical yet dark way which I appreciate and have found entertaining. 

Television Outside the Box Core Response #5

"Rather than these technological assassins causing the death of television, as many writing about television in the mid-200s claimed, the unprecedented shift of programming onto tiny mobile phone screens, office computers, and portable devices ultimately resorted the mediums significance?" (50)

Are movies "dead," because their optimal viewing environment and medium are theaters? Is television thriving because the venue is less "fixed" in that they are meant to be watched at home. I know movies are also distributed and streamed online, but for some reason they just "feel different".  It feels to me like televison is never screened at a movie theater unless it's a premiere, and if then, it's still an exclusive experience. 

I recently went to go see the movie "Air," in theaters which I know, is a movie and not television but I was struck by how close the coverage was. I spoke about it with my friend whom I went to see it with and his theory, as a cinematographer, is that coverage is getting closer as content is being watched at home rather than in theaters. If we're watching things on smaller screens, then faces need to be up close rather than far away because wides are strictly meant to be enjoyed in theaters. This made me think of Kate, Mariam, and I's presentation at the start of the semester. Where you watch something matters to production students. Are the ways films are made and shot changing due to the where they are being received? Who owns a tv at home? Who watches tv on their laptop? Where do you watch tv, in the couch or in bed? Does the "living room" viewing still exist today? (59)

I also loved how this reading simplified the technological advancements of television in two ways: fixed versus portable. I especially liked the use of the phrase "convince technologies," which I hadn't heard of prior to this reading (62). I found it interesting that the advancement of how and where to watch television pushed the ways in which people were responding to this technology as well. The specific quote that comes to mind is: "...new digital technologies have also enabled viewers to archive, share, and review content in a far more active manner and in ways that suggests emergent uses of television" (69). 

Comment #4

 I just wanted to say I finally was able to find time to watch the first episode of BEEF. I love the simplicity of the fight between two completely different sets of people and getting a sense of their personal conflicts while theirs grow and become more entangled: first a car chase and then a urinating revenge, which prompts Ali Wong's character, Amy, to memorize Steven Yeun's character, Danny's license plate like he did for hers at the start of the show.

I look forward to discussing it in greater detail on Friday morning. I think I'm going to give episode 2 a watch-

TV + Genre Feuer Comment #3

I know the focus for this week is on melodrama but I couldn't help but think about one of the quotations in the "Feuer reading in regards to more 'masculine" genres. Feuer writes: 

Traditionally male-oriented genres such as the western or the gangster film did not problematic the reader in the same way as melodrama. Thus few articles appeared on 'The Western and the Male Spectator.' If one assumes, as early studies of male genres did, a non-problematic and universalized male subject, then westerns and gangster films can be studied by means of the textually-based structuralism in vogue during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Melodrama, in problematizing questions of spectatorship and gender, demands reader-response based modes of analysis such as psychoanalysis (8). 

I love ganster films and narratives, but something that has always struck me is the treatment of women in these stories and how, no matter how badly the men treat their wives, the woman always stay instead of stray. To me, that is not considered an accepted "non-problematic and universalized male subject, " but instead is something worth dissecting and pushing like we would any melodrama as it is, to use Feuer's language, a "domestic" problem (7). Women accept their circumstances instead of respond to them.

Some key terms that I found interesting in this reading are: the idea of "day-time soap operas" geared towards women (I had never heard of this before (8). Also this notion of how older melodrama's were filled with "visual hysteria" and closure, whereas more modern tv does not follow through with that traditional treatment of the genre (8). 

Core Response, 4/5 Banet-Weiser Reading

Something I am noticing across all three readings is this treatment of post-feminism as a kind of undoing. Now that issues pertaining to sex are being "addressed," they are seen as a past or post issue, when in reality, these issues have just been commodified for economic or marketable gain (Banet-Weiser, 204). We discussed this similar problem when discussing inclusivity in the workplace a couple weeks ago: show runners and studio executives checking diversity boxes for distributional gain, which while it "seems" like progress it in fact is not as the intention behind the inclusion is greedy and thereby unearned. To use Banet-Weiser's words, "...representations and narratives...are marketed by media corporations as cool, authentic, and urban, and have proven to be incredibility lucrative economic tools for marketing to broad, especially white, audiences" (Banet-Weiser, 204). This "normalization"so to speak can be seen as a kind of charade wherein the cinematic or commercial appearance or inclusive of race and gender issues thereby makes it seems like these so-called social problems have gone away when they in fact have not (Banet-Weiser, 204). 

I found the Nickelodeon "girl power" example incredibly interesting: "the empowerment of girls is now something that is more or less taken for granted by both children and parents" (Banet-Weiser, 202). I, myself, own many "post-feminist" t-shirts so to speak, which I love and wear, but reading this article has made me question some of my purchases. It's similar to this notion of re-posting political articles on your instagram as a way to call attention to a problem without doing anything about it. 

This reading left me thinking: How do you shine light on a problem without blinding the problem in the process? 

Camila Comment 1/5

I continue to be unable to comment on other people's posts so this is me piggybacking on Alexandra's blog about developing shows for the wrong reasons. I too was frustrated when reading Warner article on how streaming services treat diversity as a "tactic": a way to trick audiences into believing that a show is more progressive.

Television While You Wait, Core Response 3/5

Anna McCarthy tracks the "practices associated with television and the act of waiting in a few carefully chosen sites--focusing sometimes on TV screens that are placed within waiting rooms per se and TV screens in multiuser environments that serve to designate a space of waiting" (199). My biggest question while reading this is what about the people today that wait and focus on their own screens, ie. their phones or tablets or computers, in a public setting. Other examples include in the subway, in a car, on the plane. More often than not, people choose to look down at their pre-downloaded shows, or excel spreadsheets, or text messages or instagrams and "wait," rather than the tv screen hanging on the wall. Would McCarthy's argument still hold true with this application or these additional screens in mind? As the digitization and technologically advanced today seem to be more individualized, less communal, and much more portable causing people to wait and thereby detach all the time Are we really "waiting" anymore so to speak? Or in someways, do we "wait" all the time? Is it so invisible if everyone is doing it (looking down rather than up)? What about parents who give their kids an iPad to watch while sitting at a dinner table? Or during a car ride? I argue that waiting is no longer "a public address" but rather a "private entertainment" (201).

Modleski on Soap Operas, Housewives, and Commercials, Core Response 2/5

Modleski argues that soap operas are focused on the dialogue, and more specifically the questions surrounding an action rather than the action itself. " She also believes that soap operas are meant to resonate with the average viewer then glorify them. In someways, it seems as though soap operas, per Modleski's analysis, could be compared to reality tv today. And so I pose the question, is reality just the modern equivalent to soap operas? 

As a production student, I loved the brief mention about how soap operas are cinematically framed, which is with an emphasis on closeups to capture a character's thinking and facial expressions. Modleski takes this a step further by emphasizing how closeups are also a way to fetishize women: "A face in close-up i what before the age of film only a lover or a mother ever saw." One stark contrast between the then and the now is what today filmmakers choose to show on camera in regards to relationships (I am not a reality tv watcher myself, but I have many friends who are). Put simply, television today is far less censored and more often than not, anything goes.

I also loved this notion about how commercials are an inscape into the house wife's anxiety. The thought of that is terrifying to me; how women in the home couldn't reach the outer world so television was a way for them to feel heard and listened to. Television back then could be seen as a cinematic therapist and confirmation of sorts (which is just awful). Commercials as women's best friend--a way of teaching the world about the legitimate struggles of being a housewife. 

I have also included my favorite quote of the reading: "Commercials, of course, present the housewife with mini-problems and their resolutions, so after witnessing all the agonizingly hopeless dilemmas presented on soap operas, the spectator has the satisfaction of seeing something cleaned up, if only a stained shirt or a dirty floor." This quotation feels like a mind game to me. This reading also has made me re-think the sort of commercials I have watched, and since it's Super Bowl season, has made me think about the ways those commercials work in relation to sports and in this case men?

Gitlin & Superman, Core Response 1/5

Petrus writes that she was “struck…reading… Todd Gitlin’s contemplations of the upholding of ideological hegemony in television.” Prior to reading Gitlin, I had never defined genre as a “popular mood” and I found the Superman franchise example to be especially interesting (257). Gitlin surveys the evolution of this specific superhero as a form of social conscience. I graduated from Bowdoin College with an Art history Major and so reading how the later Marvel Comic renditions of Superman may have been influenced by “Pop and minimal art” was especially interesting to me: In the sixties and seventies, individuals were learning to not take themselves too seriously which meant Superman’s character should do the same (258). Put simply, though genres are formulaic, the changes in the formula often are reflection of what is considered fashionable for audiences (258). And the producers in charge of identifying these trends complicates the issue.

On an entirely separate note, I also found it interesting to learn that producers in the 50s were willing to show more “risky” material on a TV movie than a weekly airing show (261).