University of Minnesota Press
Chapter Title: Installing the Television Set: Popular Discourses on Television and Domestic
Space, 1948—1955
Chapter Author(s): Lynn Spigel
Book Title: Private Screenings
Book Subtitle: Television and the Female Consumer
Book Editor(s): Lynn Spigel, Denise Mann
Published by: University of Minnesota Press. (1992)
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.cttttg4w.4
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Better Homes and Gardens 31 (October 1953), p.8
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Installing the Television Set: Popular Discourses
on Television and Domestic Space, 1948—1955
Lynn Spigel
Between the years 1948 and 1955 more than half of all American homes
installed a television set and the basic mechanisms of the network oligopoly
were set in motion. Historical studies have concentrated upon the latter
half of this problem. That is to say, the history of television has been
conceived primarily as a history of the economic, regulatory, and political
struggles which gave rise to the network industry.1 But television histories
have only marginally attended to the social and domestic context into
which television inserted itself. At most, television histories typically explain the coming of television into the home through a set of economic
determinations, including manufacturer and network business strategies
and the postwar climate of consumption. But these economic determinations cannot fully comprehend the process by which television came to
be a domestic object and entertainment form.
In this paper I look at the coming of television in the context of a history
of representation. The years which witnessed television's arrival in domestic space were marked by a vast production of discourses which spoke to
the relationship between television, the home and the family. The industry
and its advertising campaign, popular magazines, books on interior decor,
films, newspapers, and television programming itself spoke in seemingly
endless ways about television's place in the home. By looking at these
representations and the media institutions from which they were distributed, we can see how the idea of television and its installation in the home
was circulated to the public. Furthermore, we can see that even while the
industry and its advertising campaign were attempting to promote the
purchase and installation of the television set, popular discourses were
replete with ambivalence and hesitation.2 Utopian statements which idealized the new medium as an ultimate expression of technological and social
progress were met by equally dystopian discourses which warned of television's devastating effects on family relationships and the efficient functioning of the household. Indeed, television was not simply promoted;
rather, it was something which had to be questioned and deliberated upon.3
3
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4 Lynn Spigel
For example, how would television affect romantic relations of the couple?
Would it blend with interior decor? Would it cause eyestrain, cancer, or
even as one orthodontist suggested in a 1953 issue of TV Guide, would
television lead to "malocclusion —an abnormal arrangement of the teeth
likely to be caused by Junior's cradling his jaw in his hand as he watches
television?"4
This essay brings together a variety of popular discourses on television
and domestic space which were distributed from a number of institutions —
including popular books and magazines, especially middle-class women's
home magazines, magazine advertisements for television which idealized
a middle-class lifestyle, and early television narratives, especially family
situation comedies which took the middle-class domestic interior as their
principal setting.5 In examining these discourses in connection with one
another, I want to establish the ways in which representations disseminated
by different media institutions converge or intersect around questions of
television's place in the home. I want to look at the meanings attached to
the new object and the modes of use or reception which the media advised.
Although these discourses most certainly do not reflect directly the public's
response to television in the postwar period, they do begin to reveal the
intertextual context through which people (and here especially middleclass women) might have made sense of television and its place in everyday
life.
The following pages deal with a specific theme central to these discourses
on television and the home—namely, the theatricalization and specularization of domestic space. These representations depicted the home as a
theater, and they gave instructions for ways to arrange the home as a space
of exhibition. In addition, these discourses deliberated upon ways in which
to organize the gaze in the home equipped with television. They suggested
ways to maximize visual pleasure in television—both as a household object
(as part of the aesthetics of interior decor) and as an entertainment form.
Just as importantly, they dramatized television's displeasurable effects and
sought ways to manage the new medium. Finally, these discourses help
to illuminate the representational conventions established in early television programming because they reveal a set of expectations about what
constituted pleasurable or displeasurable narrative modes for home entertainment. Here I address these problems in the following way: First, I
focus on the domestic reception context and look at the discursive refiguring of the home as a theater. Next I examine some of the representational
strategies used in domestic sit-coms—in particular their theatricality. And
finally, I move back to the reception context and look at the organization
of the gaze in the home—especially in the light of television's highly disruptive effect on visual pleasure in domestic space.
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Installing the Television Set 5
There are two mechanical contrivances. . . . the talking motion picture and the
electric vision apparatus with telephone. Either one will enable millions of people
to see and hear the same performance simultaneously, by the 'seeing telephone'
and the telephone, or successively from kinetoscopic and photographic records
of it . . . . these inventions will become cheap enough to be, like the country
telephone, in every home, so that one can go to the theater without leaving the
sitting room. From this fact we may call both devices the home theater.
S.C. Gilfillan, "The Future Home Theater,"
in The Independent, 1912s
Although the idea of home television had been suggested in the popular
press by early media prophets like S.C. Gilfillan and also widely discussed
in industry trade journals since the 1920s, the actual installation of a
television set was still a completely new concept for most Americans in
the 1940s. As late as 1939, the year when the New York World's Fair
celebrated the technological future with its "World of Tomorrow" (including RCA's debutante ball for TV which took place in its radio tubeshaped building), Gallup polls revealed that only 13% of the public would
consider purchasing a television set for their homes.7 Even so, postwar
Americans installed TVs at a speed far surpassing any previous home
entertainment medium. In order to understand the phenomenal growth
of television, historians have recently begun to consider the social conditions which made the coming of television possible. As both Douglas
Gomery and Mary Beth Haralovich have argued, among the most important of these conditions was the construction of a new suburbia in the
1950s.8
The suburban housing boom entailed a massive migration from the city
into remote farm lands reconstituted by mass-produced housing which
offered, primarily to the young adults of the middle class, a new stake in
the ideology of privacy and property rights. A severe housing crisis, caused
by a decline in residential construction during the Depression that lasted
through World War II, was fueled by an increasing demand for housing
as marriage and birth rates rose to new heights. Often unable to secure
housing in the densely populated urban areas, the middle-class homeless
looked to the new pre-fabricated housing built by corporate speculators
like Levitt and Sons. With the help of the Federal Housing Association
and veteran mortgage loans, these young couples, for the first time in
history, found it cheaper to own their own homes than to rent an apartment
in the city. One of the prevailing historical descriptions of the ideology
which accompanied this move to suburbia emphasizes a generalized sense
of isolationism in the postwar years, both at the level of cold war xenophobia and in terms of domestic everyday experiences. From this point
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6
Lynn Spigel
of view, the home functioned as a kind of fall-out shelter from the anxieties
and uncertainties of public life. According to this argument, the fifties
witnessed a nostalgic return to the Victorian cult of domesticity which
was predicated upon the clear division between public and private spheres.9
The problem with this kind of explanation is that it reifies the very
ideology of privacy which it attempts to explain — in other words, it begins
by assuming that the home was indeed a retreat and that people understood
their domestic lives and social lives to be clear cut and distinct entities. I
would argue that the private and public dimensions were experienced in
a less distinct fashion. The ideology of privacy was not experienced simply
as a retreat from the public sphere; instead it also gave people a sense of
belonging to the community. By purchasing their detached suburban
homes, the young couples of the middle class were given a new, and
flattering, definition of themselves; in newspapers, magazines, advertisements and on the airwaves, these young couples came to be the cultural
representatives of the "good life." Furthermore, the rapid growth of familybased community organizations like the PTA suggests that these neo-suburbanites did not barricade their doors, nor did they simply "drop out."
Instead, they secured a position of meaning in the public sphere through
their new found social identities as private landowners. In paradoxical
terms, then, privacy was something which could be enjoyed only in the
company of others. When describing the landscape of the mass-produced
suburbs, a 1953 issue of Harpers magazine succinctly suggested the new
form of social cohesion which allowed people to be alone and together
at the same time. The magazine described "monotonous" tract houses
"where nothing rises above two stories, and the horizon is an endless
picket fence of telephone poles and television aerials."10 There was an odd
sense of connection and disconnection in this new suburbia, an infinite
series of separate, but identical homes, strung together like Christmas tree
lights on a tract with one central switch. And that central switch was the
growing communications complex through which people could keep their
distance from the world but at the same time imagine that their domestic
spheres were connected to a wider social fabric.
The domestic architecture of the period was itself a discourse on this
complex relationship between public and private space. Women's home
magazines, manuals on interior decor, and books on housing design all
idealized the flowing, continuous spaces of California ranch-style architecture which followed the functionalist design principles of "easy living"
by eliminating walls in the central living spaces of the home.11 Continuous
spaces allowed residents to exert a minimum of energy by reducing the
need to move from room to room. Beyond the "form follows function"
aesthetic, however, this emphasis on continuous space suggested a profound preoccupation with space itself. These rambling domestic interiors
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Installing the Television Set 7
appeared not so much as private sanctions which excluded the outside
world, but rather as infinite expanses which incorporated that world. The
home magazines spoke constantly of the illusion of spaciousness, advising
readers on ways to make the home appear as if it included the public
domain. Landscape paintings and wallpaper depicting scenes of nature or
a foreign city welcomed far-off spaces into the home.12 Particularly emphasized were large picture windows or a wall of sliding glass doors which,
as Better Homes and Gardens suggested in 1953, "magnifies [the] room's
effect."13
Given its ability to bring "another world" into the home, it is not
surprising that television was often figured as the ultimate expression of
progress in Utopian statements concerning man's ability to conquer and
to domesticate space. In 1946, Thomas H. Hutchinson, an early experimenter in television programming, published a popular book designed to
introduce television to the general public, Here is Television, Your Window
on the World. In his opening pages, Hutchinson wrote, "Today we stand
poised on the threshold of a future for television that no one can begin
to comprehend fully. . . . We do know, however, that the outside world
can be brought into the home and thus one of mankind's long-standing
ambitions has been achieved."14 And in Radio, Television and Society, a
general readership book of 1950, Charles Siepmann explained that, "television provides a maximum extension of the perceived environment with
a minimum of effort. Television is a form of 'going places' without even
the expenditure of movement, to say nothing of money. It is bringing the
world to people's doorsteps."15 Indeed, as this statement suggests, television meshed perfectly with the aesthetics of modern suburban architecture. It brought to the home a grand illusion of space while also fulfilling
the "easy living," minimal motion principles of functionalist housing design.
In fact, I would argue that the ideological harmony between Utopian
dreams for housing design and for technological solutions to distance
created a joint leverage for television's rapid growth in the postwar period.
Both of these Utopias had been on the agenda well before television's
arrival in the fifties. As Leo Marx has suggested with reference to nineteenth-century literary Utopias, the dream of eradicating distances was a
central trope of America's early discourse on technology. Particularly in
the post—Civil War years, it was machines of transport (especially the train)
which became the rhetorical figure through which this dream was realized
in popular discourse and literature.16 By the end of the nineteenth century,
communication technology had supplanted transportation. It was now the
telegraph, telephone, radio —and later, television—which promised to conquer space.
In the years following World War II, this technological Utopia was joined
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8 Lynn Spigel
by a complementary housing Utopia which was for the first time mass
produced. Although the 1950s witnessed the most extreme preoccupation
with the merging of indoor and outdoor space, this ideal had been part
of the model for interior design in the first suburban houses of the latter
nineteenth century. In their widely read book of 1869, The American
'Woman's Home, Catherine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe suggested,
for example, that the thrifty Victorian housewife might fashion a "rustic
[picture] frame made of branches . . . and garnish the corners with . . . a
cluster of acorns," or else copy their illustration of a large window "ornamented with a variety of these rural economical adornings."17 For the
Beecher sisters the merging of indoor and outdoor worlds was a response
to the Victorian cult of domesticity—its separation between private/female
and public/male domains. Also concerned with bringing nature into the
home, the architects of the late 1870s began to build bay windows or else
smaller windows that were grouped together in order to form a composite
view for the residents.18 Here, the natural world was associated with the
"true woman" who was to make her home a kind of nature retreat that
would counteract the signs of modernity—smokestacks, tenement buildings, crowded streets—found in the urban work centers. As the sharp
gender divisions between private and public worlds became increasingly
unstable at the end of the nineteenth century, the merging of outside and
inside space became more important for domestic architecture, and its
meaning was somewhat altered. By the early decades of the twentieth
century, the nature ideal still would have been understood in terms of its
association with femininity, but it also began to have the more modern
meaning of an erasure between separate spheres of public and private life.
The bungalow cottages built across the country began to merge inside and
outside worlds with their window views and expansive porches.
The most exaggerated effort to erase spatial barriers took place in the
modernist architecture movements which emerged in the 1920s in Europe.
Architectural modernism, or the "International Style" as it was also called,
quickly took root on American soil, and architects working from a variety
of traditions developed many of the principles of modernist design, not
least of all the erasure between public and private domains. Homes ranging
from Richard Neutra's classical modernist Lovell House of 1929 (a machine-like futuristic structure) to Richard Keek's almost-all-glass Crystal
Palace of 1934 to Cliff May's rambling ranch-style homes of the 1940s,
foregrounded the merging of indoors and outdoors with window walls,
continuous living areas, and/or patio areas that appeared to extend into
interior space.
Although these "homes of tomorrow" were clearly upper-class dreamhouses—too expensive or too "unhomey" for most Americans—the public
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Installing the Television Set 9
was at least to some degree familiar with architectural modernism because
it was widely publicized through fairs, museum exhibitions, department
stores, home magazines, and the movies.19 In the years following World
War II the spatial aesthetics established by modernists appeared in a watered down, mass-produced version when the Levittowns across the country offered their consumers large picture windows or glass walls and continuous dining-living areas, imitating the principle of merging spaces found
in the architectural ideal. That this mass-market realization of Utopian
dreams for housing was to find its companion in television, modernity's
ultimate "space-merging" technology, is a particularly significant historical
meeting.
Indeed, the ideological harmony between technological Utopias and
housing Utopias created an ideal nesting ground for television's introduction to the public in the postwar years. Women's home magazines often
displayed television sets in decorative settings which created the illusion
of spatial conquests. The set was typically placed in rooms with panoramic
window views, or else installed next to globes and colorful maps.20 The
image of television as a "global village," which media critic Marshall
McLuhan spoke of in the sixties, was already suggested in the popular
discourses of the postwar period.
Even the manufacturers seemed to realize the marketing potential of this
new global village in a box. Advertisers for television typically used this
illusion of the outside world as part of their promotional rhetoric. They
placed their TV sets against scenic backgrounds suggestive of the far-off
spaces which television promised to make domestic. In 1953, Arvin's
advertising campaign used the Eiffel Tower and Big Ben as backdrops for
its console models.21 In that same year, Emerson TV went further than
Europe. Its television set, with a picture of New York City on its screen,
appeared among the planets (and note that the ad also included a smaller
TV with a little girl and her poodle, thereby tying domestic meanings to
the sci-fi imagery).22
This obsession with a view of far-away places was also registered in
family sit-coms. Like the model homes in women's magazines, these TV
homes incorporated an illusion of outside spaces which could be seen
through large picture windows that often dominated the mise en scene. It
was not just that these domestic interiors repeated the popular architectural
ideal; they also fulfilled the expectations about television which were voiced
in popular discourses of the time. That is to say, the depiction of domestic
space appears to have been based in part upon those Utopian predictions
which promised that television would provide for its audiences a view of
outside spaces. Thus, the representation of the family's private interior
world was often merged with a view of public exteriors, a view which
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10
Lynn Spigel
Better Homes and Gardens 33 (March 1953), p. 130
was typically a fantasy depiction of high-priced neighborhoods not readily
accessible to television's less affluent audiences. Beginning with its first
episode in 1950, The Burns and Allen Show included numerous windows
and glass doors through which appeared a painted backdrop depicting
George and Gracie's Beverly Hills yard. In Make Room for Daddy, a
slightly more realistic window view of New York City dominated the mise
en scene of the Williams's luxury penthouse. Margie Albright, the spoiled
rich girl character of My Little Margie, was typically depicted lounging
in her sprawling New York apartment—complete with a terrace view of
the city skyline. In 1955, the most popular show on television, / Love
Lucy, attempted to give the TV audience a vicarious vacation by moving
its characters to Hollywood for the entire season. The Ricardo's hotel
suite contained a wall of windows through which audiences were given a
panoramic view of the Hollywood Hills. This travelogue motif was to
become conventionalized in the sit-com form when, for example, subsequent seasons saw Burns and Allen's move to New York, / Love Lucy's
and The Honey moaners' season-long European vacations, and Make
Room for Daddy's visit to the Grand Canyon.
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Installing the Television Set 11
My Little Margie (1952); I Love Lucy (1955); The Burns and Allen Show (1951)
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12 Lynn Spigel
Make Room for Daddy (1954)
This interest in bringing an illusion of the world into the home can be
seen as part of a larger historical process in which the home was designed
to incorporate social space. Increasingly in the twentieth century, home
appliances and other luxury items replaced community facilities. In the
postwar years the community activity most under question was spectatorship. According to a 1955 Fortune survey, even while postwar Americans were spending a phenomenal "30 billion dollars for fun" in the
prosperous postwar economy, when calculated in terms of disposable
income, this figure actually reflected about a 2% decline since 1947. By
far, the greatest slump was in the spectator amusements—most strikingly
in movie attendance, but also in baseball, hockey, theater, and concert
admissions. The Fortune survey concluded that American spectators had
moved indoors where high fidelity sound and television promised more
and better entertainment than in "the golden age of the box-office."23
Fortune's analysis indeed describes what happened to spectator amusements during the early fifties. But its conclusion was also typical of a wider
discourse which spoke of television as part of a home entertainment center
which promised to privatize and domesticate the experience of spectatorship. Moreover, as in the case of the Fortune survey, it was primarily the
movies and the movie theater which television promised to replace. In
1948, House Beautiful told its readers that "looking at a television program
is much like going to a movie."24 Advertisements variously referred to the
"family theater," the "video theater," the "chairside theater," the "living
room theater," and so forth. A 1953 Emerson ad went one step further
by showing an oversized television set which appears on a movie theater
stage as a full house views the enormous video screen. The caption reads,
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Installing the Television Set 13
"Now! A TV picture so clear, so sharp . . . you'll think you're at the
movies."25
The discursive refiguring of the site of theatrical exhibition was by no
means a matter of simple substitution. While "going to television" might
replace going to the theater, this replacement ushered in a grave spatial
problem, primarily stated as a woman's problem of spatial confinement
in the home. The movie theater was not just a site of exhibition, it was
also an arena in which the housewife was given access to social life in the
public sphere. In 1951, a cartoon in Better Homes and Gardens stated
the problem in graphic terms. On his way home, a husband imagines a
night of television viewing while his kitchen-bound wife dreams of a night
out at the movies.26 As this cartoon suggests, the Utopian discourses which
promised that television would connect the home to outside spaces were
met by dystopian counterparts. For even if television offered a grand
illusion of the outside world with its panoramic vistas and travelogue
plots, it seems likely that women were critical of this illusionism, that they
recognized the discrepancy between the everyday experience of domestic
isolation perpetuated by television, and the imaginary experiences of social
integration which television programming constructed.
Better Homes and Gardens 29 (Nov. 1951), p. 218
Beyond this separation from the public sphere there were other complications for women in their new "family theaters." Although television
was often promoted as the great instrument of family togetherness, it was
just as often depicted as a divisive force. This was especially true in the
case of women, who were typically shown to be isolated from the group
watching television. In 1951, American Home showed a continuous living
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14
Lynn Spigel
and dining room in which a woman supposedly was allowed to accomplish
her housework among the group watching television. However, as the
graphic representation shows, the woman's table serving chores clearly
isolate her from the television crowd which is pictured in the background,
as the woman stands to the extreme front-right border of the frame.27
This problem of female spatial isolation gave way to what can be called
a corrective cycle of commodity purchases. Typically here, in 1950, Hotpoint advertised its dishwasher by claiming that the machine would bring
the woman into the living room where she could watch television with
her family.28
American Home 46 (Sept. 1951), p. 27
Tht- television advertisements in women's home magazines (as well as
general audience magazines like Life and Look) also attempted to negotiate
this conflict between women's domestic isolation and their integration into
social life. Here, the television set itself was figured in the context of a
night out on the town. Advertisements typically displayed glamorously
dressed husbands and wives whose evenings of television took on, for
example, the status of a theater date.29 According to the logic of such ads,
television turned the home into a public meeting hall in which residents
could imagine that they were involved in a social occasion.
Indeed, television —at its most ideal—promised to bring to audiences
not merely an illusion of reality as in the cinema, but a sense of "being
there," a kind of hyper-realism. Advertisers repeatedly promised that their
sets would deliver picture and sound quality so real that the illusion would
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Installing the Television Set 15
come alive. In 195 2, Motorola promised that its "new dimension of realism
brings action right into the living room."30 Far exceeding the imagination
of Motorola's advertising firm were the advertisers for Sparton television
who produced what might be called the emblematic advertisement of this
"come to life" genre. The 1953 ad pictured a large full-color photograph
of a baseball stadium. On home plate stood a Sparton TV console whose
screen showed a picture of a baseball player up at bat. Out in right field
(and in the foreground of the composition), stood a modern-style easy
the Television
chair with baseball bats and catchers Installing
mitts placed
nearby. InSetthis15way
Sparton TV literally transported the living room to the baseball field.31
come alive. In 1952, Motorola promised that its "new dimension of realism
brings action right into the living room."30 Far exceeding the imagination
of Motorola's advertising firm were the advertisers for Sparton television
who produced what might be called the emblematic advertisement of this
"come to life" genre. The 1953 ad pictured a large full-color photograph
of a baseball stadium. On home plate stood a Sparton TV console whose
screen showed a picture of a baseball player up at bat. Out in right field
(and in the foreground of the composition), stood a modern-style easy
chair with baseball bats and catchers mitts placed nearby. In this way
Sparton TV literally transported the living room to the baseball field.31
Life 34 (April 27, 1953), p. 12
You Are There: Theatricality and the Illusion of Presence
It is in the context of this promise of hyper-realism that we might begin
to understand the modes of representation used in many early domestic
comedies. Early television drew upon a number of representational and
performance traditions, incorporating principles from cinema (such as
continuity editing) and radio (such as direct address), as well as vaudeville,
burlesque and legitimate theater (such as theatrical scenery flats). In borrowing from and extending upon these traditions, early television was
Life 34 (April 27, 1953), p. 12
varied in style, and often family comedies mixed various modes of storytelling with musical, dance and stand-up comic-type performances.32 Given
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varied in style, and often family comedies mixed various modes of storytelling with musical, dance and stand-up comic-type performances.32 Given
the fact that we do not have a body of literature on the development of
representational conventions in television (such as exists for cinema), it is
16 Lynn Spigel
in this sense, what I have in mind is quite different from mimesis. For
more than presenting an illusion of resemblances—the spectator's imaginary sense of being placed in a scene—early television attempted to present
a reproduction of the entire situation of being at the theater—the spectator's imaginary sense of being placed on the scene.
This "ideology of liveness" has been noted by television critics and
historians who have argued, for example, that TV's illusion of presence
is rendered through the real-life appearance of the electronic image and
the eternal "flow" of the television text (its sense of an ever-present,
simultaneous world). Apart from this, there is very little work done on
the specific representational strategies through which the simulation of
live performance is accomplished.331 would like to argue that early domestic comedies both developed (and borrowed from other media) modes of
representation, or what I will call "theatrical" modes of representation,
which produced the simulation of live theater. These representational strategies had important connections to the expectations about television and
its mode of reception which were voiced in popular discourses in the early
period. Theatricality fulfilled the Utopian promise that television would
present an illusion so compelling that it would be identical to a live performance. This can be seen in sit-coms which were broadcast live, filmed
live in front of a studio audience, or filmed in the studio without a live
audience. I want now to demonstrate these points through a number of
examples.
The first of these is the emblematic example of theatricality in the sitcom form, The Burns and Allen Show. At the level of content, this program
was based on the premise of a real life couple (George Burns and Gracie
Allen) who played themselves playing themselves as real-life performers
who had a television show based on their lives as television stars. If this
is a bit hard to follow, it should be, because the fundamental principle of
this program was a mise-en-abyme structure, an endless stage within a
stage, a bottomless pit of representation.34 Gracie Allen's style of humor
was also a kind of bottomless pit in which audiences were caught in an
endless quagmire of meta-realities. In formal construction this program
repeated the mise-en-abyme structure because it continually "reframed"
the action in two separate, but intricately linked spaces —a stage space
and a domestic space. The spatial articulations between the stage and
domestic spaces created for the home audience the illusion of being at a
live theatrical performance. There were a variety of ways in which this
was achieved. In the most simple form, the stage space was shown as a
proscenium with drawn curtains, behind which the domestic space was
contained. After the initial commercial, we cut to the stage, the curtains
opened, the domestic space was revealed, and the evening's story unfolded.
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Installing the Television Set 17
It wasn't simply the image of the stage on the TV screen which gave the
illusion of being at the live theater—rather, it was the alternation between
the stage space and the domestic space which gave a sense of "being there."
Through this alternation, viewers experienced a kind of layered realism
in which the stage appeared to contain the domestic space, and thus, the
stage appeared spatially closer—or more real—than the domestic space.
This heightened sense of realism on the stage space was further suggested
by the shifting forms of address as the program moved from the stage to
the domestic space. At various intervals during the program, the diegesis
of the sit-com story was frozen and the terms of address were altered. For
example, in a 1952 episode35 George literally walks out of his role as a
character in the space of the story, moves up-stage to reveal the entire
domestic setting, takes his place in front of the curtain on the right side
of the stage and delivers a monologue in direct address to the camera.
After the monologue, George walks back across the stage to reveal once
more the domestic setting behind him. He arrives at the front porch, knocks
on the door, Gracie answers, and George walks into his living room —
literally returning to his place in the story.
Obviously, in this example the domestic space is rendered with a high
degree of artifice; in fact there is no attempt to sustain the illusion that it
is a real space at all. Instead, it is the stage space which is represented
through realist conventions. The spatial and temporal unities of the stage
space are kept intact, and the actions on the stage always appear to unfold
in real time—that is, in the time that it takes the home audience to watch
the program. Thus, the stage appears more real than the domestic space,
and the home audience is given the sense of watching a live play in the
theater.
This heightened sense of realism rendered through the framing of the
story also served as an advertising discourse. In a number of episodes the
announcer appeared on the stage at the beginning of the story, where he
would relate a commercial message and then introduce the program. This
stage within a stage device served to represent the idea that it was the
advertiser who was responsible for the evening's entertainment. It also
had the effect of marking off the sponsor's discourse from the level of
story, a point which is further demonstrated in a 1952 episode of I Love
Lucy ("Lucy Does a Commercial") in which the sponsor's product literally
served as the stage of representation for the narrative. In the opening
sequence we see a cartoon drawing of an oversized box of Philip Morris
cigarettes. This cigarette box turns into a stage when two cartoon figures
which represent the real-life stars, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, approach
the box. They peel up the cigarette box wrapper (which now looks like
a curtain) to reveal a narrative space in which the lead character, Lucy
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18 Lynn Spigel
Ricardo, appears sitting on her living room sofa. The camera then zooms
into this narrative space and the sit-com story begins. At the end of the
story, an animation sketch representing a theater stage appears, and the
two cartoon drawings of the stars draw the curtains over the narrative
space of the Ricardo home. Subsequently, the real-life Lucille Ball and
Desi Arnaz appear in a heart shaped frame and deliver a commercial for
their sponsor. Not only did this framing structure work as a graphic
reminder that the story had been brought to our homes through the courtesy of the sponsor, it also served to make the advertiser's discourse appear
to be in a world closer to the viewer's real life.
I Love Lucy (1952)
This kind of hyper-realist effect becomes clearest in The Goldbergs, a
popular Jewish-ethnic family comedy. At the start of each episode, the
central character, Molly Goldberg (but ambiguously also the star, Gertrude
Berg) leaned out her window and delivered her sponsor's commercial
directly into the camera. This served to give the home audience a sense
of being Molly's next door neighbor, and the advertising discourse took
on a life-like quality. The heightened realism of the commercial message
was further constructed through the transition into the domestic space
where the story unfolded. In a 1952 episode,36 for example, the transition
from the window frame to the domestic space served to produce an illusion
of moving from a level of pure discourse to the level of story, of moving
from a kind of unmediated enunciation to a narrative space where the
fiction took place.
The episode begins with the usual advertisement delivered by Molly in
direct address as she leans out her window. In this particular case, Molly
delivers a commercial message for RCA television sets. This leads to another
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Installing the Television Set 19
mise-en-abyme structure when Molly introduces us to an RCA representative who appears in a filmed commercial segment which is demonstrational in nature. The RCA rep shows the home audience a series of TV
monitors which all promise "true tone," and which all picture Molly
leaning out of her window frame. At the end of this demonstrational
narrative we cut back to Molly (live) at her window who continues the
commercial with her neighborly advice. The commercial ends when Molly
turns her back on the window frame (as well as the TV frame) and enters
the Goldberg living room where she now takes her place in the story. This
transition from commercial to story is made absolutely explicit in the
program because Molly literally turns her back on the ad's enunciative
system and takes her position in the tale as she walks into the living room
where her daughter, Rosalie, now addresses Molly as a character in the
story. In this way, Molly's turn from commercial to fiction dramatizes the
separation of the ad from the program, thus giving the ad a non-fictional
status. However, this transition from ad to story also alerts the viewer to
the artifice of the domestic setting, thus making us more aware of the
fictional status of the story itself.
The world that Molly Goldberg's window opened onto was, as in all
television, an alternate view, an endlessly self-referential world as opposed
to a document. The domestic spaces contained within the frame of these
stages were also often represented as stage-like, as prosceniums rather than
real spaces. In some ways, this had to do with technological conditions
and in-studio shooting practices. On the ten and twelve inch television
screen, it was typically difficult to show depth of field, and the even, high
key lighting used for live and live-on-film television gave the picture a kind
of flattened-out quality. In addition, because many of these sit-coms were
broadcast live, or else filmed live in real time, it was impossible to shoot
reverse fields. Finally, sound booms were often rooted in one place at the
front of the stage, so that the principal dialogue usually took place in a
frontal, proscenium position. (Note, however, that many programs did
utilize off-screen sound effects and dialogue which added a more realist
dimension of space.)
Aside from these technological and practical determinations, it appears
that theatricality was also a preferred style for the representation of the
home in early television. Contrary to the notion that these early television
households presented a "mirror" of the audience's life at home, I would
suggest that these early family sit-coms presented the home as a theatrical
stage and thus depicted highly abstract versions of family identity. In Burns
and Allen, for example, domestic spaces actually took on the functions of
the stage space. For instance, at the end of the program, George and Gracie
often did a short vaudeville routine on the stage. However, the front porch
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20
Lynn Spigel
of their house was just as typically used as the stage for their final act. In
addition, windows, doorways, and passageways between rooms typically
became the framing stages for performance segments. Even commercial
messages were frequently integrated into the narrative space, so that the
home became a stage for product display.
This theatricalization of the domestic world has been a subject of interest
for film scholars —in particular, Serafina Bathrick, whose illuminating analysis of Meet Me In St. Louis (MGM, 1944) demonstrates the way the
Hollywood musical mixed performance and storytelling conventions
within the domestic setting.37 Early TV domestic comedies, I would argue,
imported these kind of representational strategies from the cinema, but
they developed them in relation to their own broadcast context. Domestic
comedies like Burns and Allen existed alongside variety-comedy, which
had been highly popular on radio since the 1930s and was especially
popular in early television. Burns and Allen was in many ways a transitional
text because it included both elements of domestic comedy (organized
around story development and continuing characters) and elements of
variety-comedy (organized around vaudeville-type gags, performance, direct address, etc.). In fact, the series' first episodes, which aired in 1950,
included variety ensembles that performed song and dance numbers on
the stage space between acts of the sit-com story. However, by 1951—1952
these variety acts had been incorporated into the narrative/domestic space,
so that now performances were clearly motivated by the story.
This mixture of variety-act performance with story elements is particularly significant when looked at in the context of the popular discourses
which promised that watching television would be like going to a live
theater. As others have argued, the variety-comedies, with their kinetic
acts and studio audiences, produced a sense of live spontaneous action.
By incorporating these elements into the diegesis, the domestic comedy
was able to produce an illusion of being there —an illusion which must
have been particularly compelling considering that some of the most popular programs were organized around these principles.
For example, two of the most acclaimed and highly rated comedies,
Make Room for Daddy and / Love Lucy, each systematically incorporated
variety-act performances into their domestic worlds. Like Burns and Allen,
these latter two were each based upon the alternations between a stage
space and a domestic space. But unlike Burns and Allen, both the stage
and the domestic spaces were part of the story. In these cases the premises
of family melodrama were seamlessly joined with the premises of varietyshow entertainment through storylines which focused on the domestic
lives of "show-biz" families. The male heroes (Danny Williams and Ricky
Ricardo) were entertainers who regularly performed on their nightclub
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Installing the Television Set 21
stages. However, these performance segments were just as often incorporated into the domestic space where they were integrated with the story.
This sense of the home as a theater was also operative in programs
which were based upon more realistic story premises. A good example is
The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, a sit-com of enormous popularity
which began on television in 1952. In popular magazines the Nelsons were
famous for their typicality, and in many ways the program was constructed
on realist codes of representation. The Nelson home was decorated with
a warm family feel, and shots of their surrounding neighborhood created
a sense of a real space. The stories centered around normal, real-life adventures, so that the program had a general sense of "everydayness" about
it.
Even with this "overkill" of realist codes, however, the interior space
of the Nelson home was often rendered in a highly theatrical fashion,
particularly in the early episodes. In a 1952 episode entitled "The Chairs,"
the foyer in the Nelson home served as a proscenium on which the events
took place in the opening scene. A round white rug which covered the
center of the foyer floor functioned as a spotlight for the action. The scene,
which lasted for about six minutes of screen time, contained a minimal
amount of editing, and the camera moved only in order to follow the
principal action or to reframe the action slightly as actors entered or exited
the frame. The scene was played almost entirely in long to medium long
shot. Given this high degree of stasis, the editing, camera movement, and
shot distance variation which was employed tells us something about the
rules of representation upon which, I would argue, many of these early
sit-coms were based. There are a total of five edits in this lengthy scene.
The first is a cinematic form of editing, a match cut on action which is
used as Ricky Nelson opens the front door. But mixed with this form of
cinematic realism is an editing style based on a theatrical conception of
representation—namely, editing on the stage entrances and exits of principal actors. First we get two cut away shots as Ozzie and Harriet each
enter the central space of action. Later in the scene, the camera pans to
follow Ricky and David as they exit the room, after which we cut back
to Ozzie.
The other sense of theatrical representation in this scene stems from the
absence of point-of-view editing between characters. Much as in the live
theater, the action and dialogue in this scene is played to the audience, a
pattern typical of many scenes in early situation comedies. But it wasn't
just that these kinds of scenes imitated the theater; they were not simply
documents of the performance. Instead, I would suggest that there were
camera practices and editing rules for television which proceeded on theatrical assumptions about representation. For example, although this scene
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22
Lynn Spigel
in Ozzie and Harriet is played almost entirely at a wide camera distance,
towards the end of the scene, Ozzie Nelson engages in a long telephone
conversation in which the camera first zooms into a close-up and then
cuts to an extreme close-up of his facial expressions. Through what logic,
if any, do these shots appear?
These close-ups are symptomatic of a more general shot rhetoric of early
television. Often the scenes in these sit-coms were shot and edited on
principles of distance (close-up, medium shot, long shot) or angle variation.
In these kinds of scenes the action is less motivated by story elements (such
as character psychology, or even unity of time and space) than it is by the
viewer's relationship to the performance of the action. It is the viewer's
sight—his/her ability to see an action performed—which becomes the
central interest in the scene. In this case, the camera movement and editing
are motivated by Ozzie Nelson's facial expression—his face registers exasperation with the party on the other end of the telephone. Ozzie's "be-
The rug works as a spotlight for the action as
Ricky and David play football in the Nelson foyer
(The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, 1952)
Ozzie performs his "gag" in a close-up
(The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, 1952)
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Installing the Television Set 23
fuddledness" was a recurring gag on the program, so that this moment
would have been particularly meaningful for the viewer who would have
understood that Ozzie now was going to "do his gag." Camera movement
and editing, then, were often motivated by performance details. While the
camera's wide view narrativizes a story played out on the central stage/
foyer of the house, the close-ups of Ozzie's face give us another kind of
performance—here what can be called, "mugging for the camera."
This kind of "theatrical" representational strategy was used in the cinema—in particular, film comedies featuring well-known comedians relied
heavily on "mugging" close-ups. Television sit-coms developed these kinds
of passages with particular force, and within their specific broadcast context. The diegetic universe—in shows ranging from Burns and Allen to
Ozzie and Harriet—was often interrupted by scenes that seemed to be of
another order. Here, shooting and editing on distance and angle of view
gave sit-coms a sense of immediacy, of "unmediated" action, of performance aimed directly at the spectator at home. Put another way, the action
appeared to be less mediated by characters (less based on secondary identification) and more directly addressed to the viewer (or more based on
primary identification with the camera).38
The surrounding trade and popular discourses on television style help
to illuminate the significance which these representational practices held
for producers, critics and audiences at the time. According to these discourses, it was not just that television in the home had to approximate
the live theater—instead, TV was ideally intended to perfect the experience
of watching a live performance. Television was meant to give the home
audience not just a view, but rather, a perfect view.
This perfect vision was typically discussed in terms of television's ability
to depict action at optimum distances and to provide ideal angles of sight.
Television was better than the theater because it could give people both
a wide view of the action and a sense of intimacy through the close-up —
and all within the space of one's private living room theater. Both industry
trade journals and the popular press repeatedly debated upon the shot
distances through which certain kinds of action were best portrayed. For
example, in 1949 House Beautiful compared the televised concert to its
performance in the concert hall claiming that "Television not only embodies [the concert performance] it ... adds a dimension not offered to
the concert goer." This dimension was the specialized view which could
be had in the home—the "close-up" which permitted "the spectator to
look at the orchestra and the conductor from every angle, to peer into the
faces of the musicians, to note their physical characteristics, and to watch
the play of emotion on their patently exposed faces."39 In 1950, a critic
for the same magazine thought it better to present the action in the televised
concert from a wider distance, stating that, "all musical talent on TV had
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24 Lynn Spigel
to be made to look better," by for example, "the elimination of the closeup of the players sweating."40
We might recall here that early discourses on the cinema likewise idealized the notion of a perfect view. But again, this ideal had specific meanings
within the context of broadcasting and home reception. The perfect view
in the cinema was intended to evoke a state of forgetfulness — to make the
spectator feel somehow absent from the space of reception and thus more
fully immersed in the fantasmatic illusion of presence rendered by the scene
itself. But in the discourses on television, the perfect view was meant to
produce a different kind of spectatorial fantasy. Implicit in these discourses
was the notion that the television text should address its spectator as an
audience member—as someone present on the scene of action. Scenes like
the one in Ozzie and Harriet helped to create the illusion of "being there"
because they acknowledged the viewer's presence—they seemed to say,
"We know you are watching . . . you out there in television land!" When
the camera moved to a wider angle to show Lucy ride on a trick bicycle,
or alternatively when it moved in to show one of her numerous mug shots,
the text appeared to acknowledge the spectator's presence because its
change in perspective was motivated by the audience's point of view, rather
than the point of view of the characters or enunciative agency.
Thus, to recapitulate my earlier remarks, the spectator of domestic
comedy was not simply placed in the scene of a story — but also at many
points in the text the spectator was placed on the scene of action, addressed
as part of an audience watching a play. (And the studio audiences and/or
laugh tracks used in the domestic comedies added to the sense of "being
there"). This illusion of presence was part and parcel of the surrounding
discourses on television, discourses which promised that TV would give
its audience a sense of connection to the outside world. In this way the
private activity of watching television was made pleasurable precisely because one could remain alone in the living room, but at the same time
sustain an illusion of being in the company of others.
The Domestic Gaze
While early television programming attempted to fulfill the Utopian promise of bringing the world into the home, popular discourses continually
deliberated upon the degree to which this new way of seeing could be
enjoyed within the domestic context. In some cases, the home was figured
as a kind of "ideal theater" where visual pleasures achieved new heights.
In fact, the perfect view in television was not only discussed in terms of
representational strategies in programming, but also in the context of the
home reception environment. In his book, The Future of Television, Orrin
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Installing the Television Set 25
E. Dunlap, Jr. wrote in 1947 that television was "Utopia for the Audience."
Appraising an early NBC drama, he claimed, "The view was perfect—no
latecomers to disturb the continuity; no heads or bonnets to dodge. . . .
In television every seat is in the front row."41
The arrangement of the perfect view in the home was constantly discussed in women's home magazines, which advised readers on ways to
organize seating and ambient lighting so as to achieve a visually appealing
effect for the spectator. In these discussions the television set was figured
as a focal point in the home, with all points of vision intersecting at the
screen. In 1951, Good Housekeeping advised its readers that "television
is theatre; and to succeed, theatre requires a comfortably placed audience
with a clear view of the stage."42 Furniture companies like Kroehler "TeleVue" advertised living room ensembles which were completely organized
around the new TV center. As this focal point of vision, television was
often represented in terms of a spatial mathematic (or geometry) complete
with charts indicating optimal formulas for visual pleasure. In 1949, Better
Homes and Gardens suggested, "To get a good view and avoid fatigue,
sit on eye level with screen at no more than 30 degrees off to the side of
screen."43 Even the TV networks recognized the significance of this new
science. CBS in conjunction with Rutgers University studied 102 television
homes in order "to determine the distance and angle from which people
watch TV under normal conditions."44
This scientific management of the gaze in the home, this desire to control
and to construct a perfect view, was met with a series of contradictory
discourses which expressed multiple anxieties about the ability of the
domestic environment to be made into a site of exhibition. The turning
of the home into a theater engendered a profound crisis in vision and the
positions of pleasure entailed by the organization of the gaze in domestic
space. This crisis was registered on a number of levels.
Perhaps the most practical problem which television was shown to have
caused was in its status as furniture. Here, television was no longer a focal
point of the room; rather it was a technological eyesore, something which
threatened to destabilize the unities of interior decor. Women's magazines
sought ways to "master" the machine which, at their most extreme, meant
the literal camouflage of the set. In 1951, American Home suggested that
"television needn't change a room" so long as it was made to "retire at
your command." Among the suggestions were hinged panels "faced with
dummy book backs so that no one would suspect, when they are closed,
that this period room lives a double life with TV."45 In 1953, House
Beautiful placed a TV into a cocktail table from which it "rises for use
or disappears from sight by simply pushing a button... ."46 These attempts
to render the television set invisible are especially interesting in the light
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26 Lynn Spigel
of critical and popular memory accounts which argue that the television
set was a privileged figure of conspicuous consumption and class status
for postwar Americans. This attempt to hide the receiver complicates those
historical accounts because it suggests that visual pleasure was at odds
with the display of wealth in the home.
It wasn't only that the television set was made inconspicuous within
domestic space, it was also made invisible to the outside world. The overwhelming majority of graphics showed the television placed in a spot where
it could not be seen through the windows of the room.47 This was sometimes stated in terms of a solution for lighting and the glare cast over the
screen. But there was something more profoundly troubling about being
caught in the act of viewing television. The attempt to render television
invisible to the outside world was imbricated in a larger obsession with
privacy —an obsession which was most typically registered in statements
about "problem windows." As discussed earlier, the magazines idealized
large picture windows and sliding glass doors for the view of the outside
world they provided. At the same time, however, the magazines warned
that these windows had to be carefully covered with curtains, Venetian
blinds, or outdoor shrubbery in order to avoid the "fish bowl" effect. In
these terms, the view incorporated in domestic space had to be a one-way
view.
Television would seem to hold an ideal place here because it was a
"window on the world" which could never look back. Yet, the magazines
treated the television set as if it were a problem window through which
residents in the home could be seen. In 1951, American Home juxtaposed
suggestions for covering "problem" windows with a tip on "how to hide
a TV screen."48 Even the design of the early television consoles, with their
cabinet doors which covered the TV screen, suggested the fear of being
seen by television. Perhaps, this fear was best expressed in 1949 when the
Saturday Evening Post told its readers, "Be Good! Television's Watching."
The article continued, "Comes now another invasion of your privacy.
. . . TV's prying eye may well record such personal frailties as the errant
husband dining with his secretary. . . ,"49 The fear here was that the
television camera might record men and women unawares—and have
devastating effects upon their romantic lives.
The theme of surveillance was repeated in a highly self-reflexive episode
of the early fifties science fiction anthology, Tales of Tomorrow. Entitled
"The Window,"50 the tale begins with a standard sci-fi drama but is soon
"interrupted" when the TV camera picks up an alien image, a completely
unrelated view of a window through which we see a markedly lower-class
and drunken husband, his wife and another man (played by Rod Steiger).
After a brief glimpse at this domestic scene, we cut back to the studio
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Installing the Television Set 27
where a seemingly confused crew attempts to explain the aberrant image,
finally suggesting that it is a picture of a real event occuring simultaneously
in the city and possibly "being reflected off an ionized cloud right in the
middle of our wavelength, like a mirage." As the episode continues to
alternate between the studio and the domestic scene, we learn that the
wife and her male friend plan to murder the husband, and we see the
lovers' passionate embrace (as well as their violent fantasies). At the end
of the episode, after the murder takes place, the wife stares out the window
and confesses to her lover that all night she felt as if someone were watching
her. As this so well suggests, the new TV eye threatens to turn back on
itself, to penetrate the private window and to monitor the eroticized fantasy
life of the citizen in his or her home. That this fantasy has attached to it
a violent dimension, reminds us of the more sadistic side to television
technology as TV now becomes an instrument of surveillance. Indeed, this
fear of surveillance was symptomatic of many statements which expressed
profound anxieties about television's control over human vision in the
home—especially in terms of its disruptive effects on the relationship between the couple.51
Television brought to the home a vision of the world which the human
eye itself could never see. We might say that in popular culture there was
a general obsession with the perfection of human vision through technology. This fascination of course pre-dates the period under question,
with the development of machines for vision including telescopes, x-rays,
photography and cinema. During the postwar period many of these devices
were mass produced in the form of children's toys (including microscopes,
3-D glasses, and telescopes) and household gadgets like gas ranges with
window-view ovens.
Television, the ultimate expression of this technologically improved view,
was variously referred to as a "hypnotic eye," an "all seeing eye," a "mind's
eye," and so forth. But there was something troubling about this television
eye. A 1954 documentary produced by RCA and aired on NBC suggests
the problem. Entitled The Story of Television, this program tells the history
of television through a discourse on the gaze. A voice-over narration begins
the tale in the following way:
The human eye is a miraculous instrument. Perceptive, sensitive, forever tuned
to the pulsating wavelengths of life. Yet the eye cannot see over a hillside or
beyond the haze of distance. To extend the range of human eyesight, man
developed miraculous and sensitive instruments.
Most prominent among these instruments was the "electronic eye" of
television.
In this RCA documentary, the discourse on the gaze was used to promote
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28 Lynn Spigel
the purchase and installation of the TV set. However, even in this industry
promo, there is something disturbing about the "electronic eye" of television. For here, television inserts itself precisely at the point of a failure
in human vision, a failure which is linked to the sexual relations of the
couple. Accompanying this sound track is a visual narrative which represents a young couple. A woman frolics on the hillside and we cut to an
extreme close-up of a man's face, a close-up which depicts a set of eyes
that appear to be searching for the woman. But the couple are never able
to see one another because their meeting is blocked by an alternate, and
more technologically perfect view. We are shown instead the "electronic
eye" of a TV control tower which promises to see better than the eyes of
the young lovers. Thus, the authority of human vision, and the power
dynamics attached to the romantic exchange of looks between the couple,
is somehow undermined in this technology of vision.
This failure in the authority of human vision was typically related to
the man's position of power in domestic space. In 1953, TV Guide asked,
"What ever happened to men? Once upon a time (Before TV) a girl thought
of her boyfriend or husband as her prince charming. Now having watched
the antics of Ozzie Nelson and Chester A. Riley, she thinks of her man
as a prime idiot." Several paragraphs later the article relates this figure of
the ineffectual male to an inability to control vision, or rather television,
in the home. As the article suggests, "Men have only a tiny voice in what
programs the set is tuned to."52
In a 1954 episode of Fireside Theatre, a filmed anthology drama, this
problem is demonstrated in narrative terms. Entitled "The Grass is Greener," the episode revolves around the purchase of a television set, a purchase
which the father in the family, Bruce, adamantly opposes. Going against
Bruce's wishes, the wife, Irene, makes use of the local retailer's credit plan
and has a television set installed in her home. When Bruce returns home
for the evening, he finds himself oddly displaced by the new center of
interest: Upon entering the kitchen door, he hears music and gun shots
emanating from the den. Curious about the sound source, he enters the
den where he sees Irene and the children watching a TV western. Standing
in the den doorway, he is literally off-center in the frame, outside the
family group clustered around the TV set. When he attempts to get his
family's attention, his status as outsider is further suggested. Bruce's son
hushes his father with a dismissive "Shh," after which the family resumes
its fascination with the television program. Bruce then motions to Irene
who finally—with a look of condescension—exits the room to join her
husband in the kitchen where the couple argue over the set's installation.
In her attempt to convince Bruce to keep the TV, Irene suggests that the
children and even she herself will stray from the family home if he refuses
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Installing the Television Set 29
to allow them the pleasure of watching TV. Television thus threatens to
undermine the masculine position of power in the home to the extent that
the father is disenfranchised from his family whose gaze is fastened onto
an alternate, and more seductive, authority.
Bruce's son hushes his father as television takes
center stage in the home (Fireside Theatre, 1954)
This crisis in vision was also registered in terms of female positions of
pleasure in television. In fact, for women, pleasure in viewing television
appears to have been a "structured absence." These representations almost
never show a woman watching television by herself. Typically, the woman
lounges on a sofa, perhaps reading a book, while the television remains
turned off in the room.53 Two points emerge. First, for women the continuum, visual pleasure—displeasure, was associated with interior decor
and not with viewing television. In 1948, House Beautiful made this clear
when it claimed, "Most men want only an adequate screen. But women
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30 Lynn Spigel
alone with the thing in the house all day, have to eye it as a piece of
furniture."54 Second, while these discussions of television were often directed at women, the continuum, visual pleasure—displeasure, was not
associated with her gaze at the set, but rather with her status as representation, as something to be looked at by the gaze of another.
On one level here, television was depicted as a threat to the visual appeal
of the female body in domestic space. Specifically, there was something
visually displeasurable about the sight of a woman operating the technology of the receiver. In 1955, Sparton Television proclaimed that "the
sight of a woman tuning a TV set with dials near the floor" was "most
unattractive." The Sparton TV, with its tuning knob located at the top of
the set, promised to maintain the visual appeal of the woman.55 As this
ad indicates, the graphic representation of the female body viewing television had to be carefully controlled; it had to be made appealing to the
eye of the observer.
Beyond this specific case, there was a distinct set of aesthetic conventions
formed in these years for male and female viewing postures. A 1953
advertisement for CBS-Columbia Television illustrates this well. Three
alternative viewing postures are taken up by family members. A little boy
stretches out on the floor, a father slumps in his easy chair, and the lower
portion of a mother's outstretched body is gracefully lifted in a sleek
modern chair with a seat which tilts upward.56 Here as elsewhere, masculine viewing is characterized by a slovenly body posture. Conversely,
feminine viewing posture takes on a certain visual appeal even as the
female body passively reclines.
This need to maintain the "to-be-looked at" status of the woman's body
within the home might be better understood in the context of a second
problem which television was shown to bring to women—namely, competition for male attention. Magazines, advertisements and television programming often depicted the figure of a man who was so fascinated with
the screen image of a woman that his real life mate remained thoroughly
neglected by his gaze. Thus, in terms of this exchange of looks, the television
set became the "other woman." Even if the screen image was not literally
another woman, the man's visual fascination evoked the structural relations of female competition for male attention, a point well illustrated by
a cartoon in a 1952 issue of the fashionable men's magazine, Esquire,
which depicted a newly wed couple in their honeymoon suite. The groom,
transfixed by the sight of wrestling on TV, completely ignores his wife.57
This sexual scenario was also taken up by Kotex, a feminine hygiene
company with an obvious stake in female sexuality. The 1949 ad shows
a woman who, by using the sanitary napkin, is able to distract her man
from his TV baseball game.58 Perhaps, the ultimate expression of female
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Installing the Television Set 31
competition with television came in a 1953 episode of / Love Lucy entitled,
"Ricky and Fred are TV Fans." Lucy and her best friend, Ethel Mertz, are
entirely stranded by their husbands as the men watch the fights on the
living room console. In a desperate attempt to attract their husbands'
attention, Lucy and Ethel stand in front of the TV set, blocking the men's
view of the screen. Ricky and Fred Mertz become so enraged that they
begin to make violent gestures, upon which Lucy and Ethel retreat into
the kitchen. Having lost their husbands to television, the women decide
to go to a drugstore/soda shop. However, once in the drugstore they are
unable to get service because the proprietor is likewise entranced by the
TV boxing match.
Ladies' Home Journal 66 (May 1949), p. 30
But in what way could this sexual/visual competition appeal to women?
A 1952 Motorola ad provides some possible answers. The graphic shows
a man lounging on a chair and watching a bathing beauty on the TV
screen. His wife, dressed in apron, stands in the foreground holding a
shovel, and the caption reads, "Let's go, Mr. Dreamer, that television set
won't help you shovel the walk." Television's negative effect on household
chores was linked to the male's visual fascination in the televised image
of another woman. This relationship drawn between the gaze and household chores only seems to underline TV's negative appeal for women; but
another aspect of this ad suggests a less "masochistic" inscription of the
female consumer. The large window view and the landscape painting hung
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32
Lynn Spigel
over the set suggest the illusion of the outside world and the incorporation
of that world into the home. In this sense, the ad suggests that the threat
of sexuality/infidelity in the outside world can be contained in the home
through its representation on television. Even while the husband neglects
his wife and household chores to gaze at the screen woman, the housewife
is in control of his sexuality insofar as his visual pleasure is circumscribed
by domestic space. The housewife's gaze in the foreground and cited
commentary further illustrate this position of control.59
This competition for male attention between women and television also
bears an interesting relationship to the construction of the female image
in domestic comedies. Typically the representation of the female body was
de-feminized and/or de-eroticized. The programs usually featured heroines
who were either non-threatening matronly types like Molly Goldberg,
middle-aged, perfect housewife types like Harriet Nelson, or else zany
women like Lucy Ricardo who frequently appeared clown-like, and even
grotesque.
/ Love Lucy (1954)
Popular media of the postwar years illuminate some of the central tensions expressed by the mass culture at a time when spectator amusements
were being transported from the public to the private sphere. At least at
the level of representation, the installation of the television set was by no
means a simple purchase of a pleasure machine. These popular discourses
remind us that television's Utopian promise was fraught with doubt. Even
more importantly, they begin to reveal the complicated processes through
which conventions of viewing television in the home environment and
conventions of television's representational styles were formed in the early
period.
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Installing the Television Set 33
Magazines, advertisements and television programming helped to establish rules for ways in which to achieve pleasure and to avoid displeasure
caused by the new TV object/medium. In so doing they constructed a
subject position—or a series of subject positions —for family members in
the home equipped with television. Certainly, the ways in which the public
took up these positions is another question. How women and men achieved
pleasure from and avoided the discomforts of television is, it seems to me,
an on-going and complicated historiographical problem. The popular media examined here allow us to begin to understand the attitudes and
assumptions which informed the reception of television in the early period.
In addition, they illustrate the aesthetic ideals of middle-class architecture
and interior design into which television was placed.
As historian Carlo Ginzburg has argued, "Reality is opaque; but there
are certain points —clues, signs —which allow us to decipher it." It is the
seemingly inconsequential trace, Ginzburg claims, through which the most
significant patterns of past experiences might be sought.60 These discourses
which spoke of the placement of a chair, or the design of a television set
in a room, begin to suggest the details of everyday existence into which
television inserted itself. They give us a clue into a history of spectators
in the home —a history which is only beginning to be written.
NOTES
1. For the standard three volume text written along these lines see Erik Barnouw,
A History of Broadcasting in the United States, 3 vols. (New York: Oxford,
1966-70).
2. In fact, even while television manufacturers advertised heavily in women's
home magazines and the general slicks like Life, the magazines did not simply
promote television — rather, as this essay shows, they also spoke of the problems
which television brought to the home. This should remind us that the ideological content of consumer magazines is not entirely determined by the sales
effort. Rather, women's magazines had, since the nineteenth century, been a
site for "women's discourses" — albeit in a mass-produced form. The ad-man
had to place his consumer messages in this site in order to appeal to potential
female consumers. In this sense, I would argue, we need to give the sales effort
a less deterministic role and to remember that while magazines and advertisers
might work in mutual relations of support, they are relatively autonomous
institutions whose strategies might sometimes be at odds. For more on this
see my forthcoming dissertation for UCLA, "Installing the Television Set: The
Social Construction of Television's Place in the Home and the Family, 194855."
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34
Lynn Spigel
3. The media's ambivalent response to technology pre-dates television. In particular, the innovation of household communication technologies like the radio
have been greeted by the popular press with skepticism. See, for example,
Catherine Covert, "We May Hear Too Much: American Sensibility and the
Response to Radio, 1919-1924," in Mass Media Between the Wars: Perceptions of Cultural Tension, 1918-1941, ed. Catherine L. Covert and John D.
Stevens (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1984), pp. 199-220. Certainly, then, television's introduction in the early period is part of an entire
historical context of technological innovation, and it bears continuity with
other technologies in this regard. A comparative study which looks at television
with respect to other media might better reveal historical differences between
them. My work, which explores the case of television and postwar domestic
ideals, is, I think, a necessary first step in answering these larger questions.
4. TV Guide 1 (June 5-11, 1953), p. 1.
5. This article is based on the research for my dissertation (see above). Three
leading home magazines (House Beautiful, Better Homes and Gardens and
American Home) and one leading women's service magazine which foregrounded home economics (Ladies' Home journal) were examined in entirety
for the years under consideration. All of these magazines presented idealized
(upper) middle-class depictions of domestic space, and were addressed to a
female-housewife, middle-class reader. According to audience research studies
conducted at the time, the magazines all attracted a largely female, middleclass readership. See for example, Alfred Politz Research, Inc., The Audiences
of Nine Magazines (N.p.: Cowles Magazines, Inc., 1955). In addition to examining these publications, I used sampling techniques to analyze leading
general magazines, men's magazines, and a leading women's magazine, Good
Housekeeping (which was directed at a less affluent class). The print advertisements were found in these magazines. Finally, the paper is based upon a
large number of programs from the early period including almost all episodes
from Burns and Allen, I Love Lucy, and The Honeymooners as well as numerous episodes from Ozzie and Harriet, The Goldbergs, Make Room For
Daddy, and / Married Joan. I refer to these programs as sit-coms, although
it should be noted that at the time the sit-com form for television was not yet
fully conventionalized.
6. S.C. Gilfillan, "The Future Home Theater," The Independent 73 (October 17,
1912), p. 886.
7. Warren J. Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon, 1984), p. 218.
8. Douglas Gomery, "The Coming of Television and the 'Lost' Motion Picture
Audience," Journal of Film and Video 3 8 (Summer 1985), pp. 5-11; and Mary
Beth Haralovich, "The Suburban Family Sit-com and Consumer Product Design: Middle-Class Consumption in the 1950s," forthcoming in Quarterly
Review of Film Studies.
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Installing the Television Set
35
9. See, for example, Douglas T. Miller and Marion Nowak, The Fifties: The Way
We Really Were (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1977), especially Chapter 13;
and Clifford E. Clark's recent book, The American Family Home, 1800—1960
(Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1986). Clark
writes, "Almost without thinking middle-class suburbanites took the protectedhome vision of the nineteenth-century reformers and turned it into their central
pre-occupation" (p. 236). Clark does acknowledge that the new suburbanites
were often involved in community activities, but he maintains that the haven
model for the home persisted at the ideological level. My argument, on the
other hand, insists that the ideology of suburbanization was not merely a
return to a nineteenth-century ideal, but rather it included within it the terms
of the contradiction between community involvement and domestic seclusion.
10. Harry Henderson, "The Mass-Produced Suburbs," Harpers 207 (November
1953), p. 26.
11. For popular books on architecture and interior decor see, for example, Sunset
Homes for Western Living (San Francisco: Lane Publishing Co., 1946); Robert
Woods Kennedy, The House and the Art of Its Design (Huntington, NY:
Robert E. Krieger Publishing Company, 1953); Cliff May, Western Ranch
Houses (Menlo Park, CA: Lane Book Co., 1958); Katherine Murrow Ford
and Thomas H. Chrieghton, The American House Today (New York: Reinhold
Publishing Co., 1951).
12. Mural wallpaper was especially used in the homes of the wealthy as exhibited
in the exclusive client-built homes of Architectural Digest. See, for example,
vols. 12 (June 1948), pp. 47, 90; 14 (circa 1955), p. 23.
13. Better Homes and Gardens 31 (December 1953), p. 71.
14. Thomas H. Hutchinson,Herew Television, Your Window on the World (1946;
New York: Hastings House, 1948), p. ix.
15. Charles Siepmann, Radio, Television and Society (New York: Oxford, 1950),
p. 340.
16. Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in
America (New York: Oxford, 1964), see especially p. 193.
17. Catherine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, The American Woman's Home
(New York: J.B. Ford and Company, 1869), pp. 91, 96.
18. Gwendolyn Wright discusses this in Building the Dream: A Social History of
Housing in America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), p. 107.
19. For an interesting discussion of how modern architecture was popularized
through the cinema see Donald Albrecht, Designing Dreams: Modern Architecture in the Movies (New York: Harper & Row, 1986).
20. See, for example, "Home Without Compromises," American Home 47 (January 1952), p. 34; Better Homes and Gardens 33 (September 1955), p. 59;
Good Housekeeping 133 (September 1951), p. 106.
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36
Lynn Spigel
21. Better Homes and Gardens 31 (October 1953), p. 48; Better Homes and
Gardens 31 (December 1953), p. 21.
22. Better Homes and Gardens 33 (March 1953), p. 130.
23. Fortune editors, "$30. Billion for Fun," reprinted in Mass Leisure, ed. Eric
Larrabee and Rolf Meyersohn (1955; Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1958), pp.
162-168.
24. House Beautiful 90 (November 1948), p. 230.
25. Better Homes and Gardens 31 (October 1953), p. 8.
26. Better Homes and Gardens 29 (November 1951), p. 218.
27. American Home 46 (September 1951), p. 27.
28. House Beautiful 92 (December 1950), p. 77.
29. See, for example, Ladies'Home Journal 67 (May 1950), p. 6; American Home
46 (October 1951), p. 8; House Beautiful 97 (November 1955), p. 126; Colliers 126 (December 9, 1950), p. 58.
30. Better Homes and Gardens 30 (October 1952), p. 215. For other examples
see, Life 34 (October 26, 1953), p. 53; Life 35 (October 5, 1953), p. 87;
House Beautiful 91 (November 1949), p. 77.
31. Life 34 (April 27, 1953), p. 12.
32. Early television borrowed this mixed style from popular radio shows of the
forties like The Aldrich Family which also blended conventions of live vaudeville performance (such as the studio audience and the variety act) with classical
storytelling conventions (such as temporal and spatial continuities).
33. For an interesting discussion of the aesthetics and ideology of "liveness" in
contemporary TV programming see Jane Feuer, "The Concept of Live Television: Ontology as Ideology," in Regarding Television, ed. E. Ann Kaplan
(Los Angeles: University Publications of America, Inc., 1983), pp. 12-22.
34. In fact, in the 1956-7 season, the mise-en-abyme became literal when George's
magic TV was incorporated into the story. George replayed the story on his
magic TV and commented upon the narrative events.
35. This episode, for which I have no title, was broadcast live on June 23, 1952.
36. The episode, for which I have no title, deals with a spat between Uncle David
and his brother.
37. Serafina Kent Bathrick, The True Woman and the Family Film: The Industrial
Production of Memory, diss.; University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1981.
38. The fact that many of the early domestic comedies featured characters who
were named for real-life stars (like George and Gracie, Lucy, or the entire
Nelson family) and whose roles as characters often directly corresponded to
real-life events in the lives of the stars, added to this sense of immediacy.
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Installing the Television Set 37
Patricia Mellencamp discusses this conflation of fiction and reality with respect
to / Love Lucy in her article, "Situation Comedy, Feminism, and Freud: Discourses of Gracie and Lucy," in Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches
to Mass Culture, ed. Tania Modleksi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1986), see especially pp. 87-88.
39. Samuel Chotzinoff, "The Future of Music on Television," House Beautiful 91
(August 1949), p. 113.
40. Henry W. Simon, "The Charm of Music Seen," House Beautiful 92 (August
1950), p. 97.
41. Orrin E. Dunlap, Jr., The Future of Television (New York: Harper and Brothers,
1947), p. 87.
42. "Where Shall We Put the Television Set?" Good Housekeeping 133 (August
1951), p. 107.
43. Walter Adams and E.A. Hunferford, Jr., "Television: Buying and Installing It
is Fun; These Ideas Will Help," Better Homes and Gardens 28 (September
1949), p. 38.
44. Cited in "With an Eye ... On the Viewer," Televiser 7 (April 1950), p. 16.
45. "Now You See I t . . . Now You Don't" American Home 46 (September 1951),
p. 49.
46. House Beautiful 95 (December 1953), p. 145.
47. See, for example, House Beautiful 91 (October 1949), p. 167; Better Homes
and Gardens 30 (March 1952), p. 68; Better Homes and Gardens 31 (December
1953), p. 71.
48. American Home 45 (January 1951), p. 89.
49. Robert M. Yoder, "Be Good! Television's Watching," Saturday Evening Post
221 (May 14, 1949), p. 29.
50. Circa 1951-1953.
51. We might also imagine that television's previous use as a surveillance medium
in World War II and the early plans to monitor factory workers with television
sets, helped to create this fear of being seen by TV. For an interesting discussion
of these early surveillance uses, and the way in which this was discussed in
the popular and industry press, see Jeanne Allen, "The Social Matrix of Television: Invention in the United States," in Regarding Television, ed. E. Ann
Kaplan (Los Angeles: University Publications of America, Inc., 1983), pp. 109119.
52. Bob Taylor, "What is TV Doing to MEN?" TV Guide 1 (June 26-July 2,
1953), p. 15.
53. See, for example, Better Homes and Gardens 33 (September 1955), p. 59;
Better Homes and Gardens 31 (April 1953), p. 263; Popular Science 164
(February 1954), p. 211; Ladies' Home Journal (May 1953), p. 11.
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38
Lynn Spigel
54. W.W. Ward, "Is It Time to Buy Television?" House Beautiful 90 (October
1948), p. 172.
55. House Beautiful 97 (May 1955), p. 131.
56. Better Homes and Gardens 31 (October 1953), p. 151.
57. Esquire 38 (July 1952), p. 87.
58. Ladies' Home Journal 66 (May 1949), p. 30.
59. Better Homes and Gardens 30 (February 1952), p. 154.
60. Carlo Ginzburg, "Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific
Method," History Workshop 9 (Spring 1980), p. 27.
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House Beautiful 91 (Nov. 1949), p.l.
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Television
& New Media
http://tvn.sagepub.com/
Space, Place, and New Orleans on Television: From Frank's Place to Treme
Helen Morgan Parmett
Television New Media 2012 13: 193 originally published online 7 October 2011
DOI: 10.1177/1527476411421351
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421351
51Morgan ParmettTelevision & New Media
TVN13310.1177/15274764114213
Space, Place, and New
Orleans on Television:
From Frank’s Place
to Treme
Television & New Media
13(3) 193–212
© The Author(s) 2012
Reprints and permission:
sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1527476411421351
http://tvnm.sagepub.com
Helen Morgan Parmett1
Abstract
This article compares the HBO series Treme to an earlier television series that was
also set in the Tremé neighborhood—Frank’s Place. I suggest that whereas for Frank’s
Place, media scholars’ emphasis on the show’s representational practices of race and
place was entirely appropriate, these questions are not sufficient to make sense of
Treme. The latter enjoins media scholars to ask a different set of questions that
examine both the show’s practices within the city as well as the city’s practices that
implicate the show. Specifically, I suggest that the show requires an analysis of labor
and hiring practices, tourism, and corporate social responsibility in the city. In so
doing, I propose considering Treme not in terms of its representational practices,
but rather, as a set of spatial practices bound up with the material production of city
space as well as its citizen-subjects.
Keywords
critical media studies, cultural politics, race, television, cities, cultural economy,
media, and space
Introduction
Built by free people of color in the early 1800s, New Orleans’ Tremé neighborhood is
a key site for the city’s black culture, history, music, and traditions. In their recent HBO
series, Treme (HBO 2010-), which takes its name from this historic neighborhood,
1
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA
Corresponding Author:
Helen Morgan Parmett, Department of Communication Studies, University of Minnesota, 225 Ford Hall,
224 Church St., Minneapolis, MN 55455
Email: morga429@umn.edu
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194
Television & New Media 13(3)
David Simon and Eric Overmeyer pay tribute to both these practices as well as the
spaces from which they emerge. In the series premiere, the episode begins with a
depiction of the first second-line parade after Hurricane Katrina in memory of a key
figure associated with Tremé’s history and culture, Austin Leslie, chef of the once
famous restaurant Chez Helene. Leslie and his restaurant gained national, and even
international, notoriety after Chez Helene was used as the model for the short-lived but
critically acclaimed series Frank’s Place (CBS 1987-1988), for which Leslie also
served as an advisor. This detail makes the closing scene of Treme’s first episode significant not only for what it reveals about post-Katrina New Orleans and how it pays
tribute to the city’s culture, music, and history but also for the ways in which it speaks
to and pays tribute to television’s history. Despite this brief intersection between these
two texts, however, much has changed since the days of Frank’s Place.
In this article, I compare Treme to this earlier television series that was also set in
New Orleans’ Tremé neighborhood. I turn to an analysis of Frank’s Place, as a foil to
Treme, to suggest that in the twenty-three years since Frank’s Place, changes in media
culture, urban renewal and planning policies, and the role of cultural and creative
industries in these practices have changed the role that television productions play in
cities, and especially in New Orleans. Whereas for media scholars who critiqued
Frank’s Place, the space of New Orleans was only tangentially figured, media scholars today are enjoined to figure the city space itself as a central actor in the workings
of Treme. Centrally, what is at stake in the comparison of Frank’s Place to Treme is a
question of the tools needed to do critical media studies of television in today’s changing cultural economy in cities. Specifically, I call for a need to move beyond analyses
that center on how cities are represented on screen and to take into account the broader
ways in which media participates in the production of material space in the city. To
query the significance of Treme, then, I suggest viewing Treme in terms of a set of
spatial practices, where the series is inextricably intertwined with the decisions and
policies aimed at particular configurations of racialized spaces within the city and the
material production of city space and citizen-subjects.
Given the relative paucity of blackness on television at the time and the long trend
of stereotypical representations of blackness before then (Bogle 1989), it is unsurprising that the politics of representation figured centrally as the pressing political struggle
in Frank’s Place. Whereas the postwar era of the 1950s and 1960s produced a ghettoized black population through the engineering of new zoning policies and real-estate
practices that explicitly problematized black bodies as a threat to property value
(Hirsch 2000), in the 1980s and 1990s public policy aimed to cordon off what was
represented as a dangerous and pathological black culture (Haymes 1995; Wilson
2006). Rather than being explicitly racialized, this latter era worked in code through
inferential and colorblind discourses of race. It represented a shift in struggles over the
dismantling of black public space to one over the re-signification of black public space
and the disarticulation of it from sites of memory and practices of black vernacular
culture and ...
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