How to Watch Television, Second Edition. Группа авторов
than as invested in the political visibility congruent with identity politics. As Tim Teeman wrote for The Daily Beast, “Looking seems at special pains to be so nonpolitical, so over all the kind of nitty-gritty stuff that people do talk about and experience: marriage equality, homophobia, discrimination, the plight of gays abroad.”7 Such a review resonates with numerous descriptions of the series, including one from executive producer Haigh, as less about what it means to be gay and more about a group of men who happen to be gay. Second, its homonormativity removes the edge from the stereotypical depiction of San Francisco gay culture as salaciously hedonistic, rendering sexuality in rather stale terms. And indeed, most criticisms of Looking revolve around it being “boring,” even from the series’ defenders. This may be a part of a larger generic and aesthetic project of HBO, who programmed Looking with its widely discussed series Girls and the also short-lived Togetherness on Sunday nights: All, to varying extents, engage in citations of mumblecore cinema, focusing on the mundane problems of privileged, mostly white people often through improvised dialogue and the slow progression of plot. When applied to the concept of queer television, however, this produces an uncomfortable approach to the expectations many viewers have about the role of representation.
To claim that Looking is not representative of a coherently imagined gay community may be a common complaint, but it is not a necessarily deep critique. Rather, its productive value lies in how irritation and frustration become wielded as strategies for viewing: in forming the backbone of practices of antifandom, perhaps, or in asserting an affective texture to the politics of representation. Yet Looking presents this texture as aesthetically technological, illustrating how representation becomes literally filtered to beautify its characters in uniformly bland ways. In one Out magazine profile lauding the series, Christopher Glazek writes that “Looking does not rely on glittering wit, slick fashion, or edgy transcendence to power its storyline. It relies on the joy of recognition that sometimes accompanies viewing a well-calibrated reproduction of daily life.”8 The “well-calibrated reproduction of daily life,” of course, is what attracts millions of users to apps such as Instagram, in which ordinary and ephemeral routines and rituals are captured, stylized, and presented to the general public. Instagram’s interface does not privilege political discourse, as opposed to that of other social media apps such as Facebook, where one can engage in a heated political debate with estranged relatives, or Twitter, both the preferred platform of President Donald Trump and a tool erroneously credited with bringing democracy to many parts of the Middle East. The Instagram effect allows for brand stylization (of babies, vacations, food, or selfies) in narcissistically beautiful yet universally flattening ways. Perhaps it should then come as no surprise that a television series that evokes such a visual signature of San Francisco technoculture could not sustain itself against the demands of serial television, which require more attention to narrative storytelling and character development.
In his canonical essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin proffers the concerning idea that capitalism and fascism function through the aestheticization of politics. The discontents of different social groups, normally promoted through collective struggle, become neutered through mass reproduction and the loss of the art object’s aura. For Benjamin, this is potentially liberating, as it allows for the formerly passive mass spectator to adopt a critical and rational stance.9 Looking’s smartphone aesthetics certainly fits within such a schema, as the desire for accurate or realistic representation is an impossibility for Looking’s idealized post-gay audience. But Looking also surprisingly instructs to look, to shift televisual spectatorship away from its distracted reception (compounded in today’s convergence culture with its attending devices) and to treat the program’s lush aesthetics as background visual noise free from politics. In the very first scene of the series, Patrick attempts to cruise for sex in Buena Vista Park, a decidedly atechnological means for hooking up. Partially obscured by blurred leaves, Patrick and a bearded suitor begin to give each other a hand job, but Patrick cannot shut his mouth, asking the man if he “comes here a lot” as well as his name (violating virtually all cruising etiquette). The man, having had enough of Patrick literally seconds into the series, tells him to “stop talking” before an ill-timed phone call ends the encounter for good. What if, indeed, the audience were to take the anonymous man’s cue, silencing the ordinary drama of urban gay men and refracting it into an indulgence in the purely visual? In encouraging the audience to always already be looking for something better, Looking outs itself perhaps not simply as anti-television, or as homonormative, but as an app running in the background, an imagescape that might be best viewed by hitting the mute button.
FURTHER READING
Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016.
Clare, Stephanie. “(Homo)normativity’s Romance: Happiness and Indigestion in Andrew Haigh’s Weekend.” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 27, no. 6 (2013): 785–98.
Snickars, Pelle, and Patrick Vondarau, eds. Moving Data: The iPhone and the Future of Media. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.
NOTES
1 1. See Instagram, “Instagram’s Newest Filter: Willow,” December 11, 2012, http://blog.instagram.com/post/37739409065/instagrams-newest-filter-willow-yesterdays; and “Instagram’s Newest Filter: Mayfair,” December 22, 2012, http://blog.instagram.com/post/38546919409/instagrams-newest-filter-mayfair-yesterdays.
2 2. Clive Thompson, “Clive Thompson on the Instagram Effect,” Wired 20.01, December 27, 2011, www.wired.com.
3 3. American Society of Cinematographers, “Reed Morano Preps Looking in San Francisco,” Parallax View (blog), August 28, 2013, www.theasc.com/site/blog/parallax-view/reed-morano-preps-looking-in-san-francisco.
4 4. Matthew Hammett Knott, “Heroines of Cinema: Reed Morano, the Next Big Thing in American Cinematography,” IndieWire, November 28, 2013, www.indiewire.com.
5 5. Nadav Hochmann and Lev Manovich, “Zooming into an Instagram City: Reading the local through Social Media,” First Monday 18, no. 7 (July 2013), https://firstmonday.org.
6 6. Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003), 179.
7 7. Tim Teeman, “Yes, Looking Is Boring. It’s the Drama Gays Deserve,” Daily Beast, January 24, 2014, www.thedailybeast.com.
8 8. Christopher Glazek, “Modern Love,” Out, January 14, 2014, www.out.com.
9 9. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 217–52.
5
Mad Men
Visual Style
JEREMY G. BUTLER
Abstract: Through a detailed examination of how the visual look of Mad Men conveys the show’s meanings and emotional affect, Jeremy G. Butler provides a model for how to perform a close analysis of television style for a landmark contemporary series.
Much has been written about the look of AMC’s Mad Men—and not surprisingly, as the program has vividly evoked mid-century American life—the hairstyles and clothing, the