Spectators, Consumers, and Users

Spectators and Consumers

The articles for this week all seem to circulate around several different historically specific models of the spectator-consumer, all of which trouble the idea that television viewers are merely mindless dupes ready and willing to buy anything advertised (although maybe Rabinovitz does suggest this), but at the same time explicitly attempt to negotiate the way in which spectators have been figured as consumers. While none of these articles explicitly take up the issue of the “spectator” vs. the “consumer,” these articles do seem to willingly collapse the two, or at the very least they recognize that there is an industrial rationale for figuring the spectator as consumer that cannot be ignored. Haralovich situates the spectator-consumer against a specific historical context of market research and suburban development, Lipsitz discusses the role of ethnic sitcoms as modes of working out consumer insecurities (through an acknowledgement of the past and simultaneous rewriting of the past), Rabinovitz presents a view on soap opera weddings that focuses on the spectator as consumer rather than the hypothetical, idealized spectator, White looks for a place to locate spectatorial pleasure within the Home Shopping Network, and Berry traces the history (the discussion of make-up on p. 57 was very familiar….) of the personalized product while questioning the contemporary consumer’s excitement to give personal purchasing and preference (or fingerprint?) information. In many ways I think that this is a very appropriate set of readings as we move forward in class to discuss certain types of new media technology, since some of these ideas about how the spectator and consumer become collapsed (fairly easily and gleefully), seem to resonate strongly with the ways in which “user” and “consumer” have been and can be collapsed (I am thinking particularly about the introduction to Convergence Culture here). In some ways I think Lipsitz is really working through this tension at the end of his article by asserting the importance of a reconnection with history, and he seems to be open to a kind of resistance that seems to be shut off in Rabinovitz’s article on soap opera weddings. In some ways I found the title, “Soap opera bridal fantasies” to be a bit misleading. Whereas I understand Rabinovitz’s maneuver toward focusing on “real life” consumers (as the spectator), rather than an idealized spectator that can invest in the way in which soap operas interrogate the process of marriage (rather than accept it as an end), her conclusion about the disappointment that inevitably ensues when women try to recreate the soap opera wedding, seems to reinforce an idea of the spectator as cultural dupe in a mode that is both unsettling and seems to be only vaguely substantiated by anecdotes (although I am willing to take criticisms that I am being naïve here….).

Realism and Excess

If there is some level of collapse between spectator and consumer, Mary Beth Haralovich’s article, “Sit-coms and Suburbs: Positioning the 1950s Homemaker” presents a historical argument that combines information on growing changes and developments in market research, the growth of the consumer product industry and the policies and politics of urban and suburban planning in the 1950s to illustrate how Father Knows Best and Leave it to Beaver reproduce the values and policies of the time. The result is an argument that relies on the way in which both the articulation of space and a detailed mise-en-scene reproduce the division of labor and gender roles within the 1950s family (although it also seems like the “open plan” that she discusses seems to reek of some kind of family surveillance system). While Haralovich convincingly details the way in which the homes of the Andersons and the Cleavers produce an idealized suburban lifestyle, she also briefly mentions Robert Woods Kennedy’s idea that housing design should emphasize female sexuality, a point which Haralovich discusses through costume design. At several points within the semester we have talked about the way in which both mise-en-scene and costume can produce a degree of excess (that triggers or generates alternate forms of identification). Thus if these shows attempt to produce a spectatorial engagement with the home life, it seems to me that the presence of appliances and the suburban environment is producing a kind of excess that is the fantasy of more free time for housewives/homemakers. Admittedly part of my question here comes from the fact that none of these articles take up the particularly messy issue of integrating television and appliances within the family home (by the time I started the Lipsitz article I began to feel like I should have also been reading Spigel’s chapter “Women’s Work” for this week).