Beyond representation: Television drama and the politics and aesthetics of identity

Beyond representation

Beyond representation

Television drama and the politics and aesthetics of identity

GERALDINE HARRIS

Copyright © Geraldine Harris 2006

The right of Geraldine Harris to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for

ISBN 978 0 7190 7458 5

First published 2006

15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06        10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Typeset by Servis Filmsetting Limited, Manchester

Printed in Great Britain

by Biddles, King’s Lynn

For Colin Knapp (who else?)

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction: beyond the politics of identity?

1 Beyond realism? Modes of reading in Marxist-socialist and post-Marxist-socialist television drama criticism

2 The end(s) of feminism(s)? From Madonna to Ally McBeal

3 Divided duties: diasporic subjectivities and ‘race relations’ dramas (Supply and Demand, The Bill, Second Generation)

4 The world of enterprise: myths of the global and global myths (Star Trek)

5 Only human nature after all? Romantic attractions and queer dilemmas (Queer as Folk)

Conclusion: beyond (simple) representation? Metrosexuality and The Murder of Stephen Lawrence

References

Index

Acknowledgements

This book was completed with the support of the Arts and Humanities Research Board in the form of a research leave grant. My gratitude is also due to Manchester University Press for their patience and support. Similarly to my colleagues and ex-colleagues in Theatre Studies at Lancaster University, Nigel Stewart, Kate Newey, Gabriella Giannachi, Karen Juers-Mumby, Chris Roberts. Special thanks to Dr Alice Booth for her help on the manuscript and for intellectual crossfertilisation. Very special thanks to Elaine Aston for Sea World, Dostoevsky’s hat and so much more, and to Andrew Quick, who would like it to be known that the money he owed me was a mere pittance and was repaid long ago, unlike my greater, more abstract, debt to him. Thanks also to Mike Bowen, Dave Blacow and Andy Sellars in the Lancaster University Television Unit and to all the students over the years who have taken the TV drama course. Finally thanks to colleagues in Cultural Studies and Women’s Studies, and in particular to Sara Ahmed, whose work so clearly inspires much of this book.

Introduction: beyond the politics of identity?

The title for this book is inspired by a 1998 radio interview in which Michael Jackson, then controller of Channel 4, was asked about the company’s current position on its policy of catering for ‘minority’ or ‘special interest’ groups, established as part of its original charter in the 1980s. Taking the series Queer as Folk (1998) as an example, Jackson stated that it is now possible to go beyond ‘simple, positive representations’ of such groups to provide more complex characters and dramatic narratives. On a basic level, these comments indicate something of the terrain of this project, in so far as it is largely concerned with analysing the representation of so-called minority or ‘marginalised’ groups within various television dramas including Queer as Folk, with specific reference to the portrayal of character and dramatic narratives. However, what struck me about this comment was that it implied a ‘narrative of progress’ in the representation of these groups, which may be part of a broader social and political context but which in terms of the televisual is signified through reference to aesthetics.

There is no question that twentieth-century movements such as feminism, anti-racism, and gay and lesbian or queer liberation have had significant, albeit varying, degrees of impact across a wide range of different institutions in both Britain and North America, including those of television and of the academy. Yet in an essay evaluating the ‘progress/progressiveness’ of gendering within recent television drama with reference to The X-Files (1994–2000) and the British crime drama Silent Witness (1996–), Robin Nelson concludes by asking whether, in these and other recent dramas, there has been a ‘fundamental change in the language of representation’ or simply a process of inversions of binaries and ‘role reversals’ which actually leaves the foundations of the sex/gender system intact (Nelson, 2000: 72–3). This question also forms the core of my project but I want to extend Nelson’s enquiry to consider the ‘progress/progressiveness’ of representations of ethnicity and sexuality, as well as of gender, within recent television drama. However, I also intend to turn Nelson’s question back on the academic theories that inform his perspective and which appear to have created an expectation in the late twentieth century that there could or should have been a fundamental change in the language of representation of minority groups on television, beyond Jackson’s notion of more complex characters and dramatic narratives. This means I will explore the thinking around subjectivity and identity and the relationship of these things to aesthetics that have emerged from poststructuralism, postmodernism, and most especially from ‘postmodern’ feminism, anti-racism, postcolonialism and queer theory. This thinking is sometimes represented as a fundamental change in perception and my concern is to examine how far, and in what ways, these ideas can and have been appropriated and deployed as part of a process of inversions, reversals and substitutions that leaves the systems they critique intact.

None of this is intended as a negative critique either of television criticism, or the theories of subjectivity and identity that may have informed it, since many of the ideas I am questioning continue to inform my own argument. Nevertheless, I am concerned with the way that, in the aftermath of the poststructuralist/postmodern theory explosion, notions of subjectivity based on principles of difference and on the fluidity and instability of meanings, have hardened and come to be taken for granted within the academy as part of what is, in effect, a metanarrative of progress/progressiveness. This metanarrative often embraces a sense of having gone ‘beyond’ identity politics, even as events in the world of the social have continued, repeatedly and violently, to place them back on the agenda.

Television drama provides a particularly fruitful site to consider gaps and differences, as well as concordances, between academic theories and public practices. This is not least because, due to its increasing ubiquity and importance as a medium across the globe, television is now understood as an important site for the discursive construction and production of identities. As a result, in the latter part of the twentieth century it has been a focal point for the articulation of both celebratory and pessimistic understandings of what was generally defined as postmodernity, in ways that have gone far beyond issues of ‘simple’ representation. Within this context it is my aim to navigate between ‘high theory’ and television practice, in a manner that interrogates both fields, so as to revisit and reopen certain issues as debates around the modern and the postmodern, still relevant to the twenty-first century.

At the risk of stating the obvious, all of the above signals that this book, like most works dealing with television, is very much an interdisciplinary project and this tendency to interdisciplinarity, in itself, can be understood as one of the effects of the impact of poststructuralist/postmodern theory within the academy. In so far as it is associated with deconstructive methodologies and the challenging of tradition, interdisciplinarity is also sometimes taken as a signifier of progressiveness. As part of my interrogation of narratives of progress/progressiveness, then, I should perhaps acknowledge some of the limitations as well as the opportunities of my own work as an interdisciplinary undertaking. One of the points I constantly re-visit in this book relates to how, within some postmodern thought, any confusion of boundaries produced through the play of repetition and difference in the process of making meanings comes to be perceived as inherently progressive. In fact, as Jean Baudrillard pointed out, such confusions can lead to ‘indeterminacy’ or pure relativism, whereby differences are embraced to the point and in a fashion that reduces them to the same (see Baudrillard, 1988 and 1993). In this sense, the term postmodern is of course profoundly problematic, in that it can not only refer to a period and an aesthetic but also functions as a catch-all term encompassing a diverse, sometimes completely opposing, set of post, anti and anti-posthumanist theories. As such, the use of this term can confuse boundaries in ways that actually obscure and suppress differences, and within the academy, detract from the specificity of the object of study and its location within particular traditions and histories.

I am not arrogant enough to suggest that I can manage to avoid these pitfalls in this book. I am attempting to work a pathway through a complex interdisciplinary terrain and this inevitably involves the reduction of profuse fields to a series of narratives of similarity and difference that entail exclusions, compromises and generalisations. However, I make no apology for the fact that in the course of developing my argument in this book, I start each chapter by reiterating some key points of ‘classic’ debates in the field(s). While these earlier sections of chapters are especially useful for those less well versed in either the history of television criticism and/or theories of subjectivity and identity, they may be frustrating for readers already familiar with the terrain, who may therefore prefer to start reading at the points where I start to break into less worked-over ground. However, one of the critiques of postmodernity has been the way that this ‘sensibility’ has encouraged a ‘forgetting of history’, through a favouring of the (apparently) ‘new’, as part of a process of commodification that declares objects and ideas to be obsolete, long before they have outworn their potential use value or been fully explored and assimilated. Moreover, to problematise a narrative it is always necessary to repeat it and, for me, reflecting back on the history of some influential ideas in these fields is crucial to understanding and questioning the ways and means by which, in recent years, certain formal strategies and modes of representation on television have come to be perceived as either progressive or conservative. Further, my intention in this reiteration is to point up issues that may have been acknowledged in the past but sometimes get overlooked in the rush towards the future. In rehearsing these narratives, I do sometimes employ the term postmodern as a catch-all for the sake of brevity and convenience and because this is how it has frequently been used in both the public and academic realms. At the same time, a large part of this book consists of exploring strands of thought that are sometimes subsumed within the postmodern, so as to remark their distinctiveness as well as their commonalities.

The same principles apply to my approach to the television drama texts I consider. I am not attempting to survey or comment on the whole field of television drama and there is no intention that my examples could or should stand for the whole. In fact, I would argue that now that television is established enough to have a ‘history’, has achieved the status of a global medium, and the means of disseminating programmes has become so diffuse and diverse, as a whole field television drama is ‘beyond’ simple representation. In practical terms, at any one moment there is just too much of it being disseminated, by too many different providers, for any one person to monitor, not least because as well as current production there is a significant ‘back catalogue’ of television drama now available on video and DVD through the internet.¹ As I point out in my discussion of narratives of globalisation and of Star Trek (Chapter 4), the more there is of something the more it is possible to find numerous examples, on the level of the local and specific, to support opposing views and conflicting arguments.

Yet because television is still a relatively new medium and a commercial one, in some ways it is fairly slow moving and conservative, so that it is possible when the focus is limited to English-language, terrestrial television in Britain and the US, to identify some ‘trends’ in terms of form, genre and programme format and even to some extent on the level of representation. Yet even on this point it is worth noting that in all these areas there are differences between television drama in Britain and North America, which sometimes get overlooked in television criticism.

I have to admit that all this means that my choice of which television drama texts to discuss is opportunistic but not random. The shows I consider have either caused debate in relation to issues of subjectivity and identity, or refer to key debates around these issues. Nevertheless, if they are not intended to exemplify the whole field of television drama neither are they simply employed to exemplify particular theories. My ‘home’ discipline is Theatre Studies and as such, like Robin Nelson, I gently but firmly insist on the television text as a ‘useful analytical category’ and on paying attention to the specificity of the ‘languages of representation’ within which television texts operate (Nelson, 1997: 2). My methodology in this book is concerned to allow concrete instances of television practice to interrogate abstract theory as much as vice versa, in ways that cannot be conclusive but which do raise questions as part of a debate about the progress/progressiveness of both.

Chapter 1 starts by summarising some well-rehearsed debates from the early to mid-twentieth century, concerning realism and naturalism in television drama and the impact on those debates of poststructuralist and postmodern theory. This lays the ground for a more complex discussion of the assumptions about form, subjectivity and identity, production and reception that were produced on the way. Such issues help identify limitations and problems within the postmodern, ‘post-Marxist’ approaches that often dominated television criticism in the 1990s. Discussion of these establishes the discursive context(s) within which ideas examined in later chapters appear and opens up the key questions and issues for the book as a whole. This chapter is almost exclusively theoretical but this is ‘balanced’ by the concluding chapter of the book, which mainly offers a detailed discussion of two television drama texts.

Chapter 2 uses the debates produced around the first three seasons of Ally McBeal as a starting point to explore the complexities of the relationship between the ‘feminine’, feminism, postfeminism and postmodern feminism, in both the academic and the public spheres. In the process I map out the differences and similarities between a ‘resistant feminine aesthetic’, as developed within feminist theory of the 1970s and 1980s, the formal strategies associated with postmodern feminism in the 1990s and a more general ‘postmodern aesthetic’. I argue that because all of these are defined in opposition to a monolithic notion of ‘realism’ and in relation to one another, a collapse can occur in which ‘the feminine’, as both a subject position and an aesthetic, becomes characterised as ‘inherently’ resistant and subversive. As such, it is easily appropriated to a discourse of a postmodern ‘feminisation’ of culture, which may in effect be a reversal and substitution rather than a displacement of the dominant norms of enlightenment subjectivity. This discourse can also represent a trivialisation of the feminist debate. This discussion is pursued with reference to developments within feminist television criticism, and to the representation of feminism in two British dramas, Two Golden Balls (1994) and Big Women (1998), before focusing in detail on Ally McBeal (1997–2002).

The starting point for Chapter 3 is Jim Pines’s essay which asks whether or not British television crime drama could be said to be ‘inherently racist’ on the level of form as well as representation (Pines, 1995). In the light of the Macpherson Report on the inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence (1999),² this question is extended to raise some more general issues concerning ‘institutional’ racism within television. However, this chapter opens with a consideration of the problematic concept of ‘race’ itself and an exploration of developments in thinking around issues of representation within anti-racist and postcolonial theory. This covers the rejection of realism as part of an attempt to get beyond simple positive or negative representations of subaltern groups, and the subsequent development of theories of cultural hybridity and diaspora aesthetics. In examining these latter concepts, I explore their potential recuperation and depoliticisation as part of a more generalised and abstracted postmodern aesthetic, within which repetition and assimilation can win out over subversion and transformation. The second part of the chapter returns to Pines’s essay and offers a comparison of two British crime dramas, Supply and Demand (1996) and a post-Macpherson episode of The Bill (2000), so as to consider whether there has been any fundamental progress in the representation of ‘race’ and ethnicity in British crime drama since the early 1990s. The chapter concludes with a brief evaluation of some twenty-first-century British television dramas that might be said to show evidence of a diaspora aesthetic.

Chapter 4 explores various accounts of the role television is thought to play in the processes of globalisation with particular reference to the issue of ‘cultural imperialism’. In doing so it questions the manner in which the postcolonial theories of cultural hybridity and diaspora discussed in Chapter 3 can function within postmodern narratives of globalisation to produce a generalised concept of ‘new global subjectivity’, which depends on a relativism that conceals a return to the white, western status quo by other means. The second part of the chapter pursues these ideas in relation to an examination of the status of Star Trek as a ‘franchise’ owned by a giant transnational corporation, as a myth of the global and global myth and as a metanarrative no more or less ‘imaginary’ or ‘performative’ than many academic accounts. This moves through a discussion of the impact of a ‘postmodern aesthetic’ on the late 1990s series Voyager and Deep Space Nine and then to an analysis of the first season of Enterprise (2000) as a nostalgic and conservative postmodern return to the style and period of Star Trek: The Original Series (1966–69).

Chapter 5 opens with a discussion of conflicting and competing definitions of ‘queer’ in the public and academic realms. This includes a consideration of the concept of a queer or ‘camp’ aesthetic and of the practice of ‘queer reading’ in general but also specifically in relation to television. My main concern in this section is to examine how queer is thought to have become depoliticised on the one hand, through its articulation within high theory, and on the other, through its appropriation and commodification within mainstream heterosexual culture. In either case, there is a danger that a queer or camp aesthetic becomes indistinguishable from a generalised postmodern one, in ways that once again can lead to either pure relativism or a return to status quo by other means. The latter part of this chapter offers an analysis of Queer as Folk (1998) which argues that if this drama can be considered ‘progressive’, this is not simply a matter of its use of a postmodern and/or camp aesthetic but of interplay between the formal devices associated with these ‘sensibilities’ and a certain level of referential realism.

The conclusion takes a comment by Russell T. Davis, the writer of Queer as Folk to touch on the problematic relationship between notions of ‘good television drama’ and those of ‘political correctness’. This is pursued through a discussion of two dramas, Metrosexuality (2000) and The Murder of Stephen Lawrence (1999), not in an attempt to establish a ‘model’ for politically progressive drama but as a means of reflecting back on the questions around aesthetics and the politics of subjectivity and identity raised in the course of the book.

Notes

1 The Internet Movie Database, for instance, provides full production details for a large number of television drama programmes, including most of those cited in this book. It also provides details of where videos or DVDs of these shows can be obtained commercially on the web. In the instance of recent and very popular programmes, these details are available from the numerous ‘official’ websites. For these reasons, in this book I am only giving specific production details as relevant to the discussion.

2 Black British teenager Stephen Lawrence was brutally murdered in Eltham, South London in a racist attack in 1993. Despite available evidence and a long campaign by his family and anti-racist support groups, no one has ever been successfully prosecuted for his murder. Concerns about the handling of the case by the Metropolitan Police Service eventually led to the Home Secretary, Jack Straw, establishing an official inquiry led by Sir William MacPherson in 1997. The inquiry report, published in 1999, concluded that the police investigation had been affected by ‘institutional racism’ within the police service. This report prompted widespread discussion of institutional racism across a range of public services in Britain. For further information see for example www.archive.official-documents.co.uk/document/CM42/4246/sli-0htm.

1

Beyond realism? Modes of reading in Marxist-socialist and post-Marxist-socialist Television drama criticism

The ‘back story’: the critique of realism and the turn to form

In the context of mid- to late twentieth-century British television drama criticism, the relationship between politics and aesthetics was most often defined through reference to the Marxist-socialist tradition and more specifically to the work of theatre practitioner and theorist Bertolt Brecht.

Brecht famously developed a critique of what he termed ‘Aristotelian’ or ‘dramatic theatre’, which he defined as offering an illusion of reality that conformed to the ideology of the ‘parasitic bourgeoisie’ (Brecht, 1987: 160–1). Usually understood as an attack on naturalism and/or realism, Brecht’s analysis of this aesthetic embraced all aspects of production including illusionist staging, linear narratives, psychologically motivated characterisation and naturalistic acting. He argued that these characteristics operate together to passively ‘implicate the audience in the stage situation’ by means of an emotional identification with the characters and with their situation, as if these represented universal truths (37). For Brecht, this type of theatre ‘takes the human being for granted’ as a product of ‘evolutionary determinism’ and therefore as ‘unaltering and unalterable’ (37). In its stead, he posited a model of politically progressive ‘epic’ theatre, based on characters represented as contradictory ‘social types’, episodic and dialectical narrative structures and various other anti-illusionistic ‘alienation effects’ which draw attention to the theatrical ‘means of production’. According to Brecht, this form would produce an active spectator, a ‘rational’ observer who remains detached from the action within which the human being is constructed as ‘the object of inquiry’, as altering and alterable, or as he puts it ‘man [sic] as process’ (37).

As Elizabeth Wright pointed out in 1989, there is already something more than a little ‘postmodern’ about Brecht’s ideas. Nevertheless, his approach did not constitute a rejection of the ideas of a radical realist aesthetic, nor of the possibility of representing the ‘truth’ of the human subject. Rather, he acknowledged that each era has its own mode, or rather modes, of representing reality and he offers up epic theatre as a form of socialist realism, designed to reveal the truth of the class struggle in ‘the scientific age’, as a contribution to the inevitable triumph of Marxist-socialism (Brecht, 1987: 107–12). In his theatre, then, notions of the human subject and reality may be