Page 198 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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The politics of banality: the ob-scene as the mis-en-scéne 183
textualized and overtly dramatic. What is much more disturbing is
the extent to which the conventional meaning of current affairs has
seamlessly merged with the sexual connotations of that term. Nomi-
nally serious and entertainment-based formats are now increasingly
indistinguishable with television becoming:

a machine for making the money shot. How else to explain the
incessant news coverage of President Clinton’s affair with
Monica Lewinsky? Not since the coverage of John Wayne Bobbit
have I heard so much public discussion about a man’s penis.
There were moments when the biggest difference between
Larry King Live and Jerry Springer was the fact that all the
guests on King’s show were white men with perfect teeth.
(Grindstaff 2002: 250)

It is critical media theory’s consistent re-emphasis of the implications
of McLuhan’s axiom – the medium is the message – that illuminates the
ironical situation whereby explicit subject matter obfuscates politi-
cally informed thought because, as Jameson contends, film promotes
a pornographic attitude to the world around us.
McGrath’s description of the ideological work carried out by the
naturalist television dramas of the 1970s is still remarkably pertinent
to today’s mediascape and this growing conflation of the discourses of
sobriety with Banality TV:
Naturalism contains everything within a closed system of rela-
tionships. Every statement is mediated through the situation of
the character speaking. Mediated to the point of triviality … In
terms of presenting a picture of society, it can only reveal a
small cluster of subjective consciousness, rarely anything
more … it encapsulates the status quo, ossifies dynamics of
society into a moment of perception, crystallizes the realities of
existence into a paradigm, but excludes what it refers to.
(McGrath 1977, cited in Dovey 2000: 152)

McGrath’s statement is important for the succinct way it summarizes
some of this book’s key themes. In particular, it points to McLuhan’s
account of the unconscious, narcotic infiltration of the medium’s
effects as it presents its content to the audience (as in his previously
cited image of the burglar using a juicy steak to steal from under the
nose of the watchdog of the mind) and Baudrillard’s emphasis upon
the overwhelming nature of the absorption and fascination engen-
dered by the screen. McGrath’s description of the early precursor to
Reality TV sums up the paradoxical phenomenon of explicitness
without understanding – the media’s frame circumscribes social expe-
rience into a closed self-contained system and as it does so, excludes the
very thing it represents. The cultural forms created by this process have

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