By Dan Moore
Setting the Tone
On the Tuesday of this past election, where much of the course was still unclear something enlightening happened that revealed much of my own concerns and thoughts. I was watching the nightly news coverage of the election countdown on one of the generic cable channels (likely ABC or CNN but does it really matter?) and they made an announcement that scared us all, and got me yelling at the TV in terror of what could be a hint towards a Trump victory. Trump was shown leading in Virginia, and due to the follow-up analysis which sought to place a possible failure on the democrats due to a lack of campaigning in the state which they won the last election, it ultimately was a useless bit of reporting. Biden won the state as expected by quite a great deal (Virginia 2020 Election Results: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidential_election_in_Virginia), and it got me thinking, what was the point of that reporting? Why couldn’t they’ve said something as simple as, “Trump is currently ahead in Virginia, but ballots are still being counted. Please stay tuned as we have more updates.” Sure that’s very vague, but everything that was happening at that point was very vague, it showcased a sensationalizing of a very basic and mundane happening that caused undue stress.
The result of Virginia, was resolved after ultimately a few day-long cliffhanger that ended in an absolutely predicted outcome. That’s acceptable, as much of what happens around us is very predictable (not all of it of course) so it’s okay for honest and clear coverage. But the problem was really the formal aesthetics of the news at that point, their condensing of this scenario into entertainment.
Bazin, Rony, Youngblood and Billy Joe Shaver:
In one of my favorite pieces of theory, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” the French film theorist and critic André Bazin makes a particular observation about the power of photography that feels all the more relevant when more and more footage is being released and manipulated for broadcast and remix on the internet and television. He calls photography (this can be applied to video as well), “the disturbing presence of lives halted at a set moment in their duration, freed from their destiny; not, however by the prestige of art but by the power of an impassive mechanical process.” (Bazin 1960, 8)
This “disturbing presence” is rarely given weight by much of the mainstream media who supposedly offer unbiased reports which they believe gives these images some sort of authority. Bazin’s comment becomes in itself highly disturbing in its prescience when you think about the lack of consideration of photography, video, and the film is given by its manipulation and reuse. This is a comment noted by Fatimah Tobing Rony, in the book The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle. In the conclusion, she discusses the images of violent events such as lynchings and the lack of critical thought put into their usage, “the arrogance of Western culture which looks at a Life magazine photograph of a lynched man as merely an objective document of historical brutality is emphatically called into question by the Observer who knows that this is somebody’s loved one, this could be my loved one, this could be me. How could this photo have been taken?” (Rony 1996, 216) The lives that are halted have an incredible significance, so it’s baffling people still aren’t able to answer these questions. Why are we using this? What is gained by so called “objective” reporting? By using this image (or images) am I laying bare the ills of our world in an effective manner? Maybe the adage from the great recently deceased country singer Billy Joe Shaver in his song “Black Rose” provides an explanation for a lack of self-awareness, and repeated abuse of image by the news,
“Well, the Devil made me do it the first time
The second time I done it on my own”
Mistakes and error are a part of human nature, but the continuing unending lack of awareness, reveals an unawareness(or at worst complete unacknowledgement) of something as basic as the power of the image, or the source of the image.
Much of what Gene Youngblood said about the dated and manipulative means by which commercial entertainers work in his 1970 book Expanded Cinema remains prevalent to the manipulative use of space and time by commercial media. “By perpetuating a destructive habit of unthinking response to formulas, by forcing us to rely ever more frequently on memory, the commercial entertainer encourages an unthinking response to daily life, inhibiting self-awareness. Driven by the profit motive, the commercial entertainer dares not risk alienating us by attempting new language even if he were capable of it. He seeks only to gratify preconditioned needs for formula stimulus.” (Youngblood 2020, 60) This unthinking to me is admittedly less destructive in say a thriller starring Liam Neeson as an air Marshall (Non-Stop) but becomes disturbing when you think of the authority much of commercial media has on people, well moving image media is inherently subjective, the latter is manipulating world events so great responsibility immediately falls onto them. They are unaware the notions of Bazin, Rony, and Youngblood completely. As Youngblood noted in 1978 that increasing access to communication should be defined really as a type of power rather than access, specifically, “the power to control the meaning context that defines the reality that you see and the reality that you want to live in. What that means then is that we want access to the power to create new contexts.” That is becoming more of a reality today, we have the power to make videos and essentially create our new contexts, but who is seeing the contexts? We need the power of wider visibility.
When I say that the news media in a sense is more irresponsible than much of the mindless narrative entertainment produced, I’m not clearing commercial narrative media of responsibility, I’ve always thought that what the British director Ken Loach says below needs to be relevant. Why are we telling this story? Are we perpetuating more unthinking? What are we doing when we’re taking more and more time from people’s limited lives?
But the structure of news media has me thinking of a comparison to their format that’s rather discrediting to their authority. Let’s backtrack this for a minute, and think about the structure of the pointless Virginia cliffhanger for the 2020 election. It was inherently a cliffhanger in that results were still being tallied and a definite answer wasn’t ready yet, however their presentation leaned into a sensationalization of the events. Keep in mind this style of presentation for cable news or nightly news isn’t an anomaly, many times the ABC Nightly News features at least one story that resolves in about a minute and a half but that’s built up with through the lens of a commercial break that brings about tension through waiting. It’s dead tension that reveals nothing of what are common and serious occurrences that should be examined. The cliffhanger for the Virginia results exacerbated tensions that were going to take place inevitably over days. It’s not unlike the structure of reality tv, that I mentioned beforehand in my last journal entry. Saturday Night Live’s sketch “The House” is not far from the empty build-ups and tension of much of the programming on Bravo.
I learned this over the past few months while watching the Bravo show Below Deck Mediterranean, a supposed spin-off of a popular show Below Deck, about the dysfunctional crew working on a Super Yacht. The engineers or much of the players who occupy important roles are shunted to the side as they’re uninteresting to the editing style of the producers. It instead focuses on the dehumanizing antics of the crew (stewardesses, and raunchy deckhands). As critical of the show as I am, it’s entertaining and highly addictive, and its cliffhangers are based around, whether the new chef’s risotto is good, and conflicts with rude guests. As empty, and indulges us to a state of “unthinking” it’s not nearly as damaging as the structures and methods of the news media, as it rejects a general linking of these enclosed events to political or social resonance, while much of the reporting of a story for ABC nightly news is inherently stripped of its social or political resonance. As I mentioned before, I understand that act of image making or combination is selective, it’s a compression of space and time, but we have to pay due attention to how we enact this process.
Conclusion: Critiquing the News through Humor
What do we do from here? We can look at a bit of history to set our tone, first through wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parody#Origins) which leads me to Aristotle. I can tie in our groups central theme of cultural parody by looking at his very-brief analysis of the form in Poetics. I emphasize parody here over satire based on the philosophers description of the works of Elder Euclid as parodies, due to his mocking of the easiness of poetry’s form by acts such as drawing out words for comic effect (Aristotle 2013, 460). It’s about the humorous criticism of format. We need new Euclid’s today to critique the easiness of the format of cable news, and the nightly news. Particularly their flaunting of authority, much as we see in the work of the great prankster and artist Joey Skaggs (https://joeyskaggs.com/).
Well the tones of the poems Euclid was critiquing represented deep indulgence, what is represented by mass media is far more frightening (to me in this present era at least(. Criticism should lead to some sort of enlightenment, there’s simply no one way to engage in parody, however, I lean towards the repurposing of clips and footage as a type of humor that can be derived directly from the source of parody. Editing and remixing can be done through simple arrangements and contrasts between news clips and say reality tv, or a direct manipulation and aware repurposing of images that involve dissolves, metamorphosis, and general collision of images in the model of a film like Godard’s recent The Image Book (his film isn’t comedic, but we can still apply much of those techniques in this manner). There are so many options to explore, but one thing needs to be kept in mind, we can’t become worse then who we’re critiquing. It’s a great thing to be angry, but to be hateful renders us as not an alternative viewpoint but an antagonistic viewpoint. We need to use humor to remind the world and media makers, about the power of images through the perspective of scholars like Bazin and Rony.
Bibliography:
Aristotle. 2013. Poetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press USA – OSO. Accessed November 22, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Bazin, André, and Hugh Gray. 1960. “The Ontology of the Photographic Image.” Film Quarterly 13, no. 4: 4-9. Accessed November 22, 2020. doi:10.2307/1210183.
Rony, Fatimah Tobing. 1996. The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle. 1 ed., Durham: Duke University Press.
Youngblood, Gene. 2020. Expanded Cinema: Fiftieth Anniversary Edition. New York, NY: Fordham University Press.
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