Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 7 No. 17, July 2003
Jonathan Gray
Critiquing the Critics: On _Teleparody_
_Teleparody:
Predicting/Preventing the TV Discourse of
Tomorrow_ Edited by Angela Hague and
David Lavery London: Wallflower
Press,
2002 ISBN
1-903364-39-6 198 pp. Parody's 'mission', writes
Umberto Eco, is to 'never be afraid of going too far. If its
aim is true, it simply heralds what others will later
produce, unblushing, with impassive and assertive gravity'
(quoted on page 1). With this as their rallying cry, the
contributors to Angela Hague and David Lavery's _Teleparody_
have set out with the project of, as the sub-title
proclaims, 'Predicting/Preventing the TV Discourse of
Tomorrow'. A bold and highly amusing book, often as outright
hilarious as it can be insightful, _Teleparody_ collects
numerous parodic reviews of non-existent books on
television. From _Don't You Be My Neighbor: Dystopian
Visions in Mister Rogers' Neighborhood_ to _Beavis,
Butt-head, and Bakhtin_, from _Equinicity: Contending
Discourses in Mister Ed_ to the year's work in Teletubbies
Studies, and referring to supposedly pre-existent works such
as _Aerosmith and Otherness: An Answer to Said_ (63) and
_Timmy's Down the Well Again: The Life of the Lassies_ (20),
the book charts a humorous journey through a world of
television discourse gone wrong (or, perhaps to some
readers, gone wonderfully right). With twenty-six reviews,
and with targets in the fields of sitcom, drama, cartoons,
science fiction, soap opera, reality television, sports,
gender, and theory, there is plenty to laugh at, and much
comic ground covered. And yet it is not 'just' comedy, and
the book represents considerably more than an excuse for
academics to narcissistically chortle amongst ourselves or
to scorn certain traditions of practice. Parody, after all, is
theory in illustration, and when done well, represents an
intense level of critique, one which is prepared to climb
right into the targeted discourse and show what is wrong,
rather than postulate from a coldly removed distance. While
philosophy and media studies, in Habermasian fashion, tend
to fetishise reason, logic, and rational exposition, and
simultaneously frown upon other techniques, a healthy
counter-tradition, represented by the likes of Bakhtin,
Hutcheon, and Sloterdijk has successfully argued the case
for parody's often unique abilities in shedding light on the
weaknesses, follies, and absurdities of genre and image, and
of the thinking and base assumptions behind different
genres. As Bakhtin has written, successful parody's
laughter, 'has the remarkable power
of making an object come up close, of drawing it into a zone
of crude contact where one can finger it familiarly on all
sides, turn it upside down, inside out, peer at it from
above and below, break open its external shell, look into
its center, doubt it, take it apart, dismember it, lay it
bare and expose it, examine it freely and experiment with
it' (quoted on page 23). Parodic laughter is the
ultimate defamiliariser. It is important, then, that with a
book such as _Teleparody_, we do not discount it as mere
play. At the same time, though, it would be equally
counter-productive to share the view of one of the
publishing houses who rejected the book, writing, as Angela
Hague recounts, that 'because we publish in the area of
television and popular culture studies we do not believe
that this collection would be appropriate for our list' (8).
Parody does not bring down the house; rather, it recommends
or *demands* sorely needed structural work as well as basic
cleaning, and it is at this level that _Teleparody_
succeeds. As might be imagined, with
twenty-six reviews, a considerable amount of cleaning is
recommended. Receiving a particularly scornful eye is a
proclivity amongst some television studies academics to
approach their subject from a ludicrously close and heavily
engaged standpoint. 'Close reading' is under fire in
literary and film studies itself, but its appropriateness as
a stand-alone methodology for a text that is as frequently
transient and fast-moving, and that is watched as
inattentively, as the television text is brought under
intense scrutiny. Thus, for instance, Kevin Kehrwald's
review of the aforementioned _Don't You Be My Neighbor_
mildly mock-laments the author's decision to focus great
attention on the PBS logo, rather than look at the show
itself; while Ken Gillam and Shannon Wooden's review of _A
Creature Feminine: The Politics of T and A in Primetime
Television, 1970-2000_ makes much of _Laverne and Shirley_'s
supposedly closeted lesbian attributes, such as Laverne's
wearing of 'The Scarlet L' (for Lesbian) through having a
name beginning with L, and of her 'telling' occupation as a
bottle-capper at the Schotz brewery, where 'she prevents the
gush of foam from phallic bottles -- constraining man's
'aqua vitae'' (131). Or, in one of the collection's most
amusing entries, Rhonda Wilcox tracks the central role of
the nose in television through her review of the
Mulvey-esque _Visual Pleasure and Nasal Elevation: A
Television Teleology_. Look close enough at any programme,
these reviews ridicule, and one can find all the noses and
scarlet letters that one wants. Meanwhile, over-closeness
of a different sort is played with by both Bill Freind and
Matthew Hills in particular. Freind's review of _From Gidget
to the End of History: Sally Field and the American Century_
(Volumes I and II) notes in passing that its author's
'research', involving writing over sixty-five letters to
Field, and sleeping outside her house in a car for ten days,
led to Field obtaining a restraining order against him (21);
while Hills writes of a book written using only words from
the scripts of the programme under analysis. Through taking
us to such comic extremes, though, Freind and Hills both
make valid points regarding the degree to which we as
researchers can occasionally allow our own obsessions to
take research and analysis to their own questionable, and
wholly personal, extremes. Freind's review also
serves as an especially hilarious attack on the
over-inflation of symbols and symbolism that can take place
when writers attempt to situate texts within lines of
history and teleology. In Freind's reviewed book, therefore,
Sally Field's life is linked with and paralleled to
twentieth-century American history, culminating with the
announcement that the actress is the 'cinematic mother of
the end of history' (23). Similarly, an argument is made
elsewhere that the Teletubbies incessant 'Again! Again!' led
to the American electorate voting in a second Bush (56), the
muffled mumblings of _South Park_'s Kenny become 'the future
phonetic fate awaiting the human race' (65), and an episode
of _The Beverly Hillbillies_, in which Granny goes to a
beatnik coffee house, 'encompasses almost the entire history
of American civilization to that point, from the earliest
settlement days, through westward expansion and women's
rights, to the hippie movement' (30). Indeed, academic-speak and
the everyday obfuscation of clear thought, of which too many
of our kin are guilty, is ruthlessly mocked at multiple
turns. Take, for instance, Eugene Halton's surmisal of a
review of _On Temptation Island: The View from the Hot
Tub_: 'Isn't this kind of
jeremiad theorizing, especially in relation to TV, not only
passe but pre post-critical? Or is this [author]
Dimsdale's ultimate trump card, a subtle, ironic commentary
that appears on the surface to link him empathically to the
common continent of humanity, while in reality he remains an
island of post-Cartesian ego unto himself, gazing into that
hall of mirrors out of which 'reality' is endlessly
constructed while convincing us that we are seeing the real
man objectively describing the real thing?'
(108). Or, weighing in with a
wonderful deconstruction of deconstructive writing, Gillam
and Wooden quote the following gibberish, 'as
[author] Kilkenney puts it': 'A/not/her
o(bj)ectified and op-posit-(ion)al he<lp>mate w/hose
l(ass)-it-ed-e to/ward -- (off) nomi((a)nal)ism be/lies/
(not) phallic hetero-st/ru(p)ctures' (129). Like the series
of _It Was a Dark and Stormy Night_, Bulwer-Lytton Fiction
Contest books that award prizes to the most
awfully-constructed first lines of a novel, _Teleparody_'s
contributors provide a fashion show of jargon and
over-theorisation at its worst. A particularly refreshing
aspect of this book is its complete lack of compunction in
talking about quality. As Charlotte Brunsdon notes, too many
of us within media and cultural studies have become scared
of using the word 'quality', and even more scared of making
evaluation judgments, resulting in a situation whereby
conservative media pundits are yielded the stage (124). As a
discipline, we must find new ways to re-integrate talk of
quality, but until more traditional academic languages have
worked out ways to do this, several of these reviews do so
parodically. Indeed, David Lavery's review of
_Californication and Cultural Imperialism: Baywatch and the
Creation of World Culture_ is an outstanding piece that
talks quality precisely by parodically treating a profoundly
poor text (_Baywatch_) with great respect. Lavery writes of,
for instance, 'the classic [episode] 'Panic at
Malibu Pier'' (41), and even parallels another writer's act
of studying _Baywatch_ to Erik Erikson's curiosity about the
Reformation in _Young Man Luther_. As with many of his
fellow contributors, Lavery is not afraid to say a text is
bad, nor is he afraid to mock the act of studying such a
text so closely. Lavery, of course, has fostered an industry
of sorts of books on popular television texts, with
offerings on _Twin Peaks_, _The X-Files_, _Buffy the Vampire
Slayer_, _The Sopranos_, and a forthcoming title on
_Seinfeld_, so the point is clearly not that studying
television *per se* is perilous, but that, in terms of
quality, not all texts are as equal as others. However, here we also
reach a slight limitation of the book, for while, as I have
noted, numerous writers ridicule the (painfully) close
reading of television, this seems to be because this is the
model of television scholarship with which many of the
contributors seem most familiar (or, at least, at which they
take aim). The consequences are twofold, I believe. First,
it means that there are few reviews that toy with a more
cultural studies, or mass communication, approach. Matthew
Hills and Will Brooker's reviews are notable exceptions
here, as, for example, Hills opens with a playful swipe at
John Hartley's penchant for neologisms, while Brooker offers
a magnificent and extremely funny reversal of fan studies'
love of queer readings, reviewing _Straight Readings:
Resistance, Reappropriation, and Heterosexuality_.
Otherwise, however, few of the reviews come at their targets
from an overtly sociological angle, nor from a political
economy angle, as evidenced, for instance, in the lack of
reviews on news books. It is perhaps unfair to criticise the
book for not dealing with these areas (particularly when
several of the reviews cleverly mock reviewers' insistence
on books covering every conceivable angle!), but it leads to
a second consequence. Ultimately, the book risks validating
political economy and sociology approaches as inherently
*better* than textual approaches, through its silence in
dealing with (or mocking) the former. This, however, is a
problem for the reader to overcome. It is also one that the
editors have created the means by which to do so, for they
have also set up a _Teleparody_ website (http://www.teleparody.com),
at which visitors are invited to submit their own reviews.
It is this reviewer's hope that some readers will answer
this call, for if seeing Sally Field as mother of the end of
history is in need of rebuke, parodies are also waiting to
be written on, for instance, how Rupert Murdoch's political
will power influences Bart's opening credit blackboard lines
in _The Simpsons_, or on how having older brothers who watch
cop shows drastically increases one's chances of becoming
sociopathic and/or a drug addict. As both Bakhtin and
Sloterdijk's studies of parody and ridicule render clear,
and as much humour theory echoes, parody is often most
necessary when its target has grown too powerful. Jonathan
Swift's famous parody/satire 'A Modest Proposal' was needed
because the Irish voice had been so powerfully stifled and
excluded from the English public sphere; today's online news
parody _The Onion_ (http://www.onion.com)
is needed because the news is too powerful a filter for our
information; and _The Simpsons_'s parody of the all-happy
American Dream was needed in the face of the resurgence of
neoconservative American 'family values' in the 1980s. Thus,
however, some may wonder at the 'necessity' of _Teleparody_,
since media and cultural studies often fancy themselves as
the ever-marginal disciplines. And yet, with ever-growing
student numbers, ever-increasing numbers of courses
worldwide, and with more and more academics from other
disciplines 'dipping into' media studies, television studies
is growing in power. More than just attesting to television
studies' 'arrival' as a discipline, then, _Teleparody_
importantly reminds us that the field is already held back
by certain traditions. To mock these traditions is not
necessarily to reject them utterly: parody is often a form
of flattery and homage. However, it is to say that we must
at times stop to evaluate the very nature of our discipline,
and the degree to which its traditions are holding back new
and hopefully better work. Therefore, it is particularly
interesting to see how some of the reviews, while ostensibly
comic pieces, serve to position their writers' own attitudes
towards issues within their non-parodic work (witness, for
instance, Hills's toying with the role of the 'academic fan'
in his review, compared to his discussion of the same in
_Fan Cultures_). At times, _Teleparody_'s
reviews can overlap or even repeat each other. Bakhtin's
'heteroglossia', for example, receives at least three
re-workings, as does dialogism in general, hence tiring the
joke somewhat. Thus, the book is most enjoyable and most
effective if read in bits, one review at a time, over time.
Inevitably, too, some will be found more or less funny than
others, or even more or less objectionable. Overall, though,
it is an encouraging collection, carving out a space for
itself that is totally unique within television studies. The
book is amusing, at-times trenchant and acutely accurate in
its criticism of television studies and of the review form
itself, and, as parody should, neatly mixes critique with
fun. University
of California, Berkeley,
USA Bibliography Mikhail Mikhailovich
Bakhtin, _The Dialogic Imagination_, trans. Caryl Emerson
and Michael Holquist (Austin, Texas: University of Texas
Press, 1981). Charlotte Brunsdon,
_Screen Tastes: Soap Operas and Satellite Dishes_ (London:
Routledge, 1997). Matt Hills, _Fan Cultures_
(London: Routledge, 2002). Linda Hutcheon, _A Theory
of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms_
(London: Routledge, 1985). Peter Sloterdijk,
_Critique of Cynical Reason_, trans. Michael Eldred
(Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press,
1987). Copyright ©
Film-Philosophy 2003 Jonathan Gray, 'Critiquing
the Critics: On _Teleparody_', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 7 no.
17, July 2003
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol7-2003/n17gray>. Read a response to this
review-article: David Lavery, 'Response to
Jonathan Gray', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 7 no. 18, July 2003
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol7-2003/n18lavery>. Join the _Film-Philosophy_
salon, and receive the journal articles via email as they
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