Page 197 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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182 Now
Explicitness without understanding: social porn, Monica
Lewinsky and current affairs

The visual is essentially pornographic, which is to say that it has
its end in rapt, mindless fascination; thinking about its
attributes becomes an adjunct to that, if it is unwilling to betray
its object; while the most austere films necessarily draw their
energy from the attempt to repress their own excess (rather
than the more thankless effort to discipline the viewer).
Pornographic films are thus only the potentiation of films in
general, which ask us to stare at the world as though it were a
naked body.
(Jameson 1993: 1)

The theoretical accounts previously discussed (for example, McLu-
han and Baudrillard’s) emphasized the dumb, narcotic fascination
engendered by the media’s screens. Above, Jameson radically inter-
prets this as an innate property of the camera. In Banality TV, the
concept of ordinariness does the same type of ideological work
(albeit less dramatically) that body-based sentiment does in pornog-
raphy. In both cases, the reality of the immediate is given prec-
edence over contemplative thought so that: ‘The genre … is a kind
of machine for producing ordinariness, where ordinariness is associ-
ated with emotion (the body) and expertness with reason (the
mind), the former a signifier of the private world of personal
relations, the latter a signifier of the larger universe of social
relations’ (Grindstaff 2002: 21). Such is the democratic nature of
ubiquitous celebrity, that sophisticated interpretive skills become
devalued. The predominantly conversationally based and personal-
ized content of Banality TV and daily news programmes (and the
increasing similarities of the two formats) inhibits conceptual com-
plexity while their provocative content finds itself naturally aligned
with the accommodating grammar of television: ‘they orchestrate
emotional encounters on television in order to capitalize on the
visual immediacy of the medium’ (Grindstaff 2002: 59).
The net result of all the processes encountered in the previous
chapters is the creation of a cultural climate in which the self-
referential realm of ‘news’ has more to do with the internal needs of
the mediascape than it manages to relate to the dispassionate
reporting of events that could be more squarely located within the
realm of ‘serious’ news. Thought that is critical of the dominant
tele-frame is made more difficult by formats whose raison d’être is
sensationalism and an excessive dependency upon images. That
Banality TV mitigates against serious debate of abstract issues is
hardly surprising given its obvious purpose as an entertainment
vehicle and its subsequent structural dependence upon the decon-

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