I. The Ubiquity of Narrative Auto-Dramatization in Corporate Media
Last week, I decided to wade into the subject of media literacy, and I made a few points:
Media literacy is a form of analysis that explores the genetic ground of a media product, i.e. the way that it’s made, as well as what potential effect it might have
It is promoted by authorities as a tool with which to interrogate texts, but in actual usage it tends to be a way of defending people’s favorite corporate entertainment products
People today are more media literate than ever before
Unlike media ecology, media literacy is an inductive practice by nature and thus encourages the analyst to create narratives in his mind about how the product was made
Media literacy privileges authorial intention and the use of biographical/historic modes of criticism while ignoring previously raised objections to them (as in new criticism, psychoanalysis, (post-)structuralism, etc.)
One’s refusal to accept the “correct” interpretation of a text (according to media literacy standards) fills media literacy people with anxiety, which can be great fun to exploit
I left the fourth point somewhat undeveloped, mostly because there was too much to say about it for that piece, so I’d like to expand upon that here.
One reason that “media literacy” has taken off as such a popular concept is that corporate entertainment has primed people to accept media literacy as the chief means of analyzing its various products. Media literacy is about understanding the creation of some text, — be it an advertisement, show, or film — through the conventions of narrative. As I said last week,
Who created this message? What creative techniques were used? What values and points-of-view were represented in or omitted from the message? Why was the message sent? When you start to answer these questions, you start to create a little movie in your head. Why does the Apple Macintosh commercial have a hipster guy representing a Mac, while the office nerd represents a PC? Well, once upon a time, some ad executives sat around and researched consumer perceptions surrounding Apple, and they decided to counter these perceptions by creating a character who represents the demographic to which they’re aiming to appeal, and then they decided that he would be best dressed in a sweatshirt and jeans, because research showed that a sweatshirt conveys blah blah blah… you get the picture.
When you engage in media literacy, creating stories is thus unavoidable: your imagination is stoked to come up with behind-the-scenes tales of how something came to happen as it did. Although media literacy authorities present this sort of analysis as a way of getting to the heart of the text — really understanding it in an elevated way — corporate media for decades has taken it for granted as something everyone does naturally, and they’ve exploited this approach to create yet more products for people to watch and analyze.
Corporate video entertainment is constantly drawing back the curtain and encouraging the viewer to take a look inside its creations. This is a very different situation from what you’ll find in novels during their heyday, where only the most outwardly transgressive works would regularly alert you to their own artifice (Tristram Shandy being perhaps the most historically significant example). Novels are an interesting mode of storytelling to think about, because they’re different from earlier written fiction, which would often feature a narrator who imitates an oral storyteller in the writing, filling the text with little “asides” to the audience outside of the story (e.g., “And therfore, whoso list it nat yheere, / Turne over the leef and chese another tale”). This was surely a convention designed to imitate the aural reception conditions that early audiences were used to in real life, but it eventually turned into a deliberate and fanciful archaism, much like calling out to the Muses for inspiration. So as time moved on and the novel became the dominant mode of narrative, novelists had mostly scrapped this sort of thing and became comfortable with approaching their works as self-contained vortices of meaning, as if hermetically sealed from the outside world, capable of creating their own inner-universe. Even Don Quixote, which draws attention to itself as a work of fiction, basically conceals Cervantes from the text. In the beginning of vol. 2, Don Quixote and Sancho respond quizzically to the existence of Don Quixote Vol. 1 within their own fictive universe.
Only in the twentieth century did novels about writing novels really start to blow up (although Little Women is one notable counterexample), and this was a consequence of electronic media, for which meta-fiction comes far more naturally. Moreover, novels about the process of writing a novel are generally perceived as experimental. The ones that aren’t seen that way are usually just about writers who need to write a novel, but then other stuff happens instead, like in Stephen King’s The Shining. Writing a novel is a long, solitary process, and thus novels truly about writing novels are going to be ambitious and unusual in their approach.
Corporate entertainment, on the other hand, is always a collaborative process that requires big teams of people, and it thus responds well to auto-dramatization. You’ve got lots of people having to interact with each other, and this makes for good storytelling. For that reason, writing a novel about the production of theater, which has similar qualities, has never been a problem (see Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister), and similarly a show about making a show is perfectly acceptable to the common viewer. And so, there’s lots and lots of it. From some article, here are at least 20 shows about making shows: 30 Rock, Studio 60 on The Sunset Strip, Sports Night, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Larry Sanders Show, GLOW, The Muppet Show, Murphy Brown, Great News, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Home Improvement, Extras, The Critic, The Comeback, The Wild Thornberrys, The Morning Show, Space Ghost Coast to Coast, Grosse Point, Episodes, and Newhart.
As for movies about making movies, here are just a few: Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019), Sunset Boulevard (1950), Hail, Caesar! (2016), Get Shorty (1995), The Artist (2011), Barton Fink (1991), The Player (1992), Sullivan’s Travels (1941), Teen Titans Go! To the Movies (2018), Adaptation (2002), Singin’ in the Rain (1952), Bowfinger (1999), Boogie Nights (1997), Hitchcock (2012), Dolemite is My Name (2019), Ed Wood (1994), The Aviator (2004), Pain and Glory (2019), Saving Mr. Banks (2013), State and Main (2000), The Stunt Man (1980), Matinee (1993), The Disaster Artist (2017), Shadow of the Vampire (2000), Be Kind Rewind (2008). For some of these, filmmaking is only a secondary part of the film, but then, a film like Ed Wood is perfectly palatable to the average moviegoer, and it’s almost entirely about his process of filmmaking.
And then there are plenty of movies and shows about other aspects of the corporate media/entertainment complex, such as magazines (The Bold Type, Just Shoot Me), radio (NewsRadio, Fraser) and advertising (Mad Men, The Crazy Ones).
One other reason for all these entertainment narratives about working in the corporate/entertainment media field is that they’re easy to write. Generally, people write about what they know, and most television and film writers don’t know much of anything besides working in television and film, so that’s what they can write about best. But given the readiness with which the public accepts these sorts of stories, the sheltered lives of entertainment writers don’t seem like too much of a problem.
Once you appreciate the sheer volume of electronic narrative media that is about the creation of other electronic narrative media, it becomes easy to understand two things: 1) why media literacy is so appealing of a concept for even the most unsophisticated of TV viewers, and, more importantly, 2) that even when we think about the construction of a piece of media in order to evaluate it, the way we imagine its construction will unquestionably be informed by codes and topoi that these other media have inculcated us with. Thus, as soon as we engage in a media-literacy-driven analysis, we’re already caught in a framework of narrative over which we have little control.
For that reason, I believe that there is hardly anything more revelatory in researching the way a movie was made, the writers’ intentions, etc., than in simply looking at the final product, because even when we try to imagine its genetic conditions and thereby wrest some control over it, the schemata through which we imagine everything still do not really belong to us. There are always factors at play that most people’s imaginations are too convention-conditioned to consider.
Put it this way: if asking questions like, “Who created this message? What creative techniques were used? What values and points-of-view were represented in or omitted from the message? Why was the message sent?” truly were to help us understand a message’s nature, then why does so much of corporate entertainment culture similarly encourage us to think about what’s happening behind the scenes? Could the rosy manner in which Hollywood and other industries depict themselves perhaps give us some insight into why “media literacy” is almost always used to defend media messages rather than criticize them in practice?
II. The Unsteadiness of Figure and Ground
If you look up what figure and ground means according to Gestalt psychologists, you will typically see the point illustrated with some version of this optical illusion, the Edgar Rubin vase:
Here, you perceive either the light part to be the figure, in which case you see a vase, or you see the dark part as the figure, in which case you see two faces. No matter what, you aren’t seeing two figures at once. As soon as the brain makes its decision for which component becomes the figure, the other becomes the ground automatically.
So it goes for when you start pondering the genetic conditions that lead to a piece of information. And the corporate media complex understands all of this quite well. Regarding Hollywood, half the fun of enjoying the entertainment (for many, anyhow) is in paying attention to what celebrities are doing, where they’re going, whom they’re partying with and talking to, and so on; and gossip magazines, web sites, and social media accounts have been instrumental in this dimension of its appreciation.
There are also entertainment products accompanied by their own separate behind-the-scenes documentaries, which then form their own separate pieces of narration. Between Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo (1982) and Les Blank’s documentary Burden of Dreams (1982) about the former’s filming, which is the figure, and which the ground? A surprising amount of people treat Burden as the figure.
In professional wrestling, the “dirt sheets” and other facets of the wrestling media act as the ground that people can pay attention to if they so choose, because they reveal the financial details, the business decisions, the locker room interactions between performers, and so on. For many wrestling fans, the relationship between the product and its behind-the-scenes information is itself a closed circle. The figure can morph into the ground and then morph back depending on what the fan chooses to pay attention to. And this dance of metamorphosis is enough to bowl some people over forever.
This whole process certainly denotes a kind of media literacy, but pay attention to the average wrestling fan who has become absolutely sucked into that world, and ask yourself: does this person really understand anything about what he’s watching? Does he have a solid grasp of proportion? Is he being mindful of the rules of physics? What about psychology? These questions each deserve their own lengthy explication, but generally, you’ll find that the more a fan is entranced with wrestling and its supplementary media, the less qualified he is to evaluate what he’s watching, not more — even though he’ll know who was arguing with whom, who got injured, how much money such-and-such pay-per-view generated, and so on. This is partly because the wrestling companies can exploit a fan’s desire to know the backstage scoop and purposefully misdirect him (and this often does happen), but it’s also because an excessive focus on the product itself, at the expense of more general “outside” information to help make sense of things, can yield bad fruit.
And the same goes for people study any one area of entertainment obsessively, whether they’re doing so at the academic level (like through “film studies”), or at the civilian, lowbrow level (through reading celebrity gossip). All of this constitutes media literacy, yet I’m not convinced that any of it reliably generates real understanding. When your interpretation of a message must involve some degree of narrative construction, you’re already under the influence of cultural encoding before you’ve even begun. The way you’ll interpret a figure’s ground has already been foreseen.
III. Metadrama and the Possibility of Endless Recursion
Lest this analysis seem too cynical, I’m not taking an altogether dismissive view on the idea of researching facts to understand something, nor even the concept of media literacy itself. The French poststructuralist Jean Baudrillard went in that direction when he said, commenting on McLuhan’s work in media ecology,
The medium is the message not only signifies the end of the message, but also the end of the medium. There are no more media in the literal sense of the word (I'm speaking particularly of electronic mass media) — that is, of a mediating power between one reality and another, between one state of the real and another. Neither in content, nor in form. Strictly, this is what implosion signifies. The absorption of one pole into another, the short-circuiting between poles of every differential system of meaning, the erasure of distinct terms and oppositions, including that of the medium and of the real — thus the impossibility of any mediation, of any dialectical intervention between the two or from one to the other.
And to be sure, there are some elements of truth to this, particularly the suggestion that the advent of electronic mass media has meant that “media” no longer exist as such. If we take it to mean that all forms of external media, electronic or otherwise, now conform to the contours and horizons of the electronic media landscape, then true enough: the technological innovation of electricity has had tremendous ramifications for all media, including print. We also can find something in this passage that indicates the naïveté of using information from one part of the electronic media apparatus to “check” against the information of the other. My discussion here should be understood partly as an exploration into why this is.
But this is Baudrillard, and what he’s essentially saying is that we humans have ourselves become extensions of the electronic media landscape rather than the other way around; we have surrendered our interpretive faculties to its inherent system of logic, hence the “implosion,” simulacra, the desert of the real, etc. This is where his reasoning becomes silly.
The problem with Baudrillard, as with nearly all the poststructuralists, is that he had no clue about how to integrate the semiotics of C.S. Peirce into his thinking other than as perhaps a footnote. The poststructuralists inherited and maintained Roland Barthes’s view that all signs should be understood to conform to the rules of language as established by Ferdinand de Saussure, who himself believed that linguistic signs attain their meaning only through each one’s differentiation from the other rather than motivated resemblance to their referents. Thus, the scent of a bergamot perfume should be treated as though there’s no motivated connection between itself and the scent of an actual bergamot, as though it’s just as arbitrary as the word “bergamot” itself. With such an impoverished semiotic inheritance, it is no wonder that these poor poststructuralists couldn’t even come close to positing some ground rules for how man interprets his world. More’s the pity, because man indeed has his own native faculties and interpretive mechanisms, themselves a medium distinct from all others. There is no “end of the medium.”
At the very least, a proper understanding of how we interact with media and culture should pay respects to Jakob von Uexküll’s notion that every living creature inhabits its own subjective world of phenomena, or Umwelt. And further, because it’s a biologically received filtering mechanism, man’s Umwelt cannot simply be abducted and altogether reprogrammed by his own technologies. Instead of considering such a thing, Baudrillard opts for an illusory distinction between simulation and the “real,” even going as far as to say that at one point our systems of signs gave us access to it, while our newer ones don’t! The old saying is right: when you scratch a pessimist, you’ll find a die-hard romantic.
I don’t want to go too far astray in this discussion, so let me make this point to conclude it. If we humans lacked an innate mechanism for interpreting what we encounter, and if our interpretations were maximally conventional and thus amenable to endless readjustments, then the metadramas and auto-dramatizations that I’ve been writing about could be endlessly recursive. I often think about this because theoretically our brains are capable of endless recursion (according to Chomsky), and endless deferrals of signifiers (according to Derrida), and so we should be able to accept media products that engage with many layers of signifiers in a big chain, but the idea is nonetheless just absurd to imagine. It’s common to see a movie about the production of a movie. But how often will you see a movie about the production of a movie, itself about the production of another movie? Or a movie about the production of a movie about the production of a movie about the production of a movie? Never. We simply don’t have the hardware to accept this kind of storytelling. It would be like watching a cuckold porn film about a cuckold watching another cuckold watching someone bang his wife. A potentially endless chain of cucks. Ridiculous.
But as far as I can tell, we do have some sort of natural inclination for stories, apparently within specific parameters. We’re all just really into stories, it’s a human thing — perhaps it’s something we’ve developed through natural selection, perhaps not — and it’s equally true that the media we engage with anticipate our desire to get the story behind each story. And for this reason, the strategies that media literacy experts encourage people to use when interacting with some message or another do seem insufficient if not altogether counterproductive. Someone might better understand a given television show by ignoring all television for a year — never learning a thing about how it’s made, the biases of various entertainment companies, the creators, and so on — and then watching that show once more after the mind has been cleared. Understand that I’m not altogether opposed to the concept of media literacy or its aims, but I would nonetheless like to end the discussion at last by suggesting this paradox: perhaps the most media “literate” people will be those who have forgotten how to “read.”