9 parts, read articles ask a question for each part, 1-5 sentence/part

2) Sharzer, Greg. “Frank Grimes’ Enemy: Precarious Labour and Realism in The Simpsons.” Animation 12 no. 2 (2017): 138 – 155. 

Part9 readings:

1) Carroll, Hamilton. “Men’s Soaps: Automotive Television Programming and Contemporary Working-Class Masculinities.” Television & New Media 9 no. 4 (2008) 263 – 283.

2) Lyle, Samantha. A. “(Mis)recognition and the Middle-Class/Bourgeois Gaze: A Case Study of Wife Swap.” Critical Discourse Studies 5 No. 4 (November 2008): 319 – 330.

Due May. 24

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263

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DOI: 10.1177/1527476408315495
2008 9: 263 originally published online 18 March 2008Television New Media

Hamilton Carroll
Working-Class Masculinities

Men’s Soaps : Automotive Television Programming and Contemporary

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263

Author’s Note: I would like to thank Lara Cohen, Eric Lott, Liam Kennedy, and Doreen Piano for their
comments on an earlier draft of this essay. Thanks are also due Todd Kuchta for his insightful comments
during our conversations about American Chopper. Portions of this essay were written while I was a fellow
at the Clinton Institute for American Studies at University College Dublin, and I would like to acknowledge
the support of the institute. Thanks also to the anonymous reader from Television & New Media.

Television & New Media
Volume 9 Number 4
July 2008 263-283

© 2008 Sage Publications
10.1177/1527476408315495

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hosted at

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Men’s Soaps
Automotive Television Programming
and Contemporary Working-Class
Masculinities
Hamilton Carroll
University of Leeds, United Kingdom

In this paper I argue that the Discovery Channel’s reality-based automotive show
American Chopper produces a recuperative blue-collar masculinity that attenuates the
putative losses suffered by working-class men under the postindustrial service economy
of the contemporary United States. In its on-screen presentation of blue-collar work,
American Chopper valorizes a form of working-class manual labor at precisely the
moment when such labor has all but disappeared in the United States. In its presenta-
tion of a world of masculine labor and fraternal affect, American Chopper constructs a
nostalgic world of blue-collar work in which the skilled manual laborer—always
understood to be male—still reigns supreme, untroubled by the supposed defeats suf-
fered by hegemonic masculinity in the post-civil rights era. By celebrating neoliberal
consumer capital and the traditional consumption of the American dream as cotermi-
nous discourses of celebrity identity, the show elides the still vast gaps in opportunity
and remuneration in the contemporary United States.

Keywords: reality television; masculinity; labor; whiteness; celebrity

[American Chopper’s] popularity is demonstrable, if resolutely inexplicable.

—David Chater, The Times

These guys are highly volatile.

—Steve Nigg (producer), American Chopper

Americans have, of late (and perhaps again), developed an infatuation with blue-collar labor. To take professional sports as an example, the 2004 champions in
each of the country’s three major sports leagues (the NBA, the NFL, and Major
League Baseball) all claimed solidarity with the American workingman. The NFL’s

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264 Television & New Media

New England Patriots secured their third Super Bowl in five years despite a much-
heralded lack of superstars. The Detroit Pistons of the NBA took pride in their self-
proclaimed status as a team of “blue-collar workers” who brought their “lunch pails”
to every game. During their run to the World Series, the Boston Red Sox rallied
around the nickname “the idiots” and claimed to be a team of hard-working individuals
who reflected the blue-collar heritage of Boston—this despite a team payroll in excess
of $121 million (second only to arch-rivals the New York Yankees) and individual
salaries of as much as $19.8 million (with twenty players earning over $1.5 million
each).1 Since the 1970s, however, the transformations of globalization and the post-
industrial service economy have produced marked transformations in the landscape
of American labor that simultaneously belie and account for this infatuation. As a
result of these transformations, “the labor force as a whole is being polarized into a
mildly expanding top echelon, a shrinking middle, and an enlarged bottom” (Lowe
1995, 34). As traditional forms of industrial work and blue-collar manual labor have
been replaced by the knowledge and service work of the new economy, the blue-
collar laborer valorized by the millionaire athletes of the Patriots, Pistons, and Red
Sox has all but vanished.

Transformations in the labor economy of the United States have produced a series
of cultural effects that, as George Lipsitz has pointed out, have “worked to detach
individuals from the traditional authority of work, community, and family” (Lipsitz
1990, 630). In the United States, this detachment from “traditional authority” has
produced an understanding of worker disenfranchisement that—predictably—
manifests itself along gendered lines of demarcation as transformations in labor roles
require reconstitutions of domestic labor in the private sphere of home and family. As
Mike Hill suggests, “the conditions of labor now impinge on the traditional domestic
arrangements that it once required, with the consequence of diminishing the real numbers
of traditional male-headed heterosexual families” (Hill 2004, 93). Such erosions of
patriarchal enfranchisement produce marked effects across the spheres of work and
family. In Stiffed, her bestselling study of the “betrayal of the American man,” Susan
Faludi, for example, claims that the decline in traditional “masculine” jobs has led
to a rise in insecurity in the American male psyche. Increasingly marginalized in the
postindustrial service economy of contemporary neoliberal capitalism, American
men, Faludi suggests, are suffering a crisis of masculinity. Hobbled by a lack of
education and by a cultural climate that understands the majority of available
service/knowledge work to be feminized (and feminizing), the working-class male
in contemporary America has become the foremost victim of neoliberal labor eco-
nomics (Faludi 1999, 51-101). While there can be no doubt that blue-collar labor has
become increasingly scarce in the United States and that certain sectors of the work-
force have become increasingly disenfranchised, arguments such as Faludi’s play
into a broader and more pernicious culture of white male injury or victimhood.

White injury—phantasmagraphic though it may be—is a phenomenon that attempts
to recoup political, economic, and cultural authority. Under the so-called “crisis of
masculinity,” white men, whose franchise on opportunity in the United States has

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putatively been revoked, are commonly understood to be the individuals most
affected by recent social transformations. David Savran has suggested that the phe-
nomena of white male injury “represent[s] an attempt on the part of white men to
recoup the losses they have allegedly suffered at the hands of those women and persons
of color who, in fact, have had to pay for the economic and social prosperity that
white men have historically enjoyed” (4). As such, white injury is a response to what
Thomas DiPiero has described as a “contemporary push toward opening up new
raced, gendered, and sexual identities that do not take the white male as their nor-
mative ground” (2). Savran argues, however, that the new interest in—or visibility of—
white masculinity should also be seen as “an attempt by white men to respond to and
regroup in the face of particular social and economic challenges,” the most signifi-
cant of which is “the end of the post-World War II economic boom and the resultant
and steady decline in the income of white working- and lower-middle-class men” (5).
In what follows, I use an analysis of the recent cycle of automotive programming
on cable television to examine such contemporary discourses of masculinity at the
level of cultural representation. In particular, I focus on a reading of the Discovery
Channel’s highly successful reality-based television show, American Chopper, which
stands at the vanguard of a number of popular reality-based automotive programs
that have appeared in the past few years. In addition to American Chopper, for
example, the Discovery Channel also airs Monster Garage, Motorcycle Mania,
American Hotrod, and Biker Build-Off. Popular automotive shows on other channels
include MTV’s Pimp My Ride, Spike TV’s Ride with Funkmaster Flex, TLC’s
Overhauling, and The Speed Channel’s Tuner Transformation, Build or Bust, and
Dream Car Garage.

American Chopper premiered as a two-episode pilot in September of 2002,
emerging as a fully-fledged series in March of 2003. With over seventy episodes
having aired to date, the show follows the day-to-day trials and tribulations of father
and son team Paul Teutul, Senior (Senior) and Paul Teutul, Junior (Paulie), the own-
ers of Orange County Choppers (OCC), a custom motorcycle shop located in upstate
New York. Other central “characters” in the show include Mikey Teutul, Senior’s
youngest son, and OCC employees Vinnie Dimartino, Cody Connelly, and Rick
Petko. The show consistently attracts over three million viewers per week and is
amongst the highest rated non-sports shows on cable television.2 A typical episode
of American Chopper follows the Teutuls and their employees as they design and
build a one-off, custom motorcycle (chopper) built around a specific theme.
Episodes of American Chopper have seen the Teutuls build bikes for companies such
as Snap-on Tools, Gillette, Nike, Trim Spa (a diet product company), NAPA, and
Caterpillar. The Teutuls have also built bikes for individuals such as the golfer Davis
Love III, “Tonight Show” host and motorcycle enthusiast Jay Leno, and the actor
Will Smith (as a tie-in for the film I, Robot). In addition to commissioned bikes such
as these, the Teutuls have also built commemorative theme bikes saluting U.S. vet-
erans of the Vietnam War, the American worker, and the New York City firemen3

who lost their lives on September 11, 2001.

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While American Chopper’s phenomenal success can be attributed in part to its
position within the broader cycle of reality-based television that has recently saturated
network and cable television, the show’s central appeal derives from its presentation
of men at work and its production of a masculine family melodrama.4 The combative
relationship between Senior and Paulie is a central focus of the show, and the on-
screen arguments between the two men are highlighted in the show’s advertising. I
situate American Chopper within the broader cultural paradigm of white male injury
and examine how the show produces a recuperation of the prerogatives of patriarchal
authority. If, as Hill (2004) suggests, “the encroachments of capital upon the patri-
archal family unsettle masculinity” (93), capital also has the capacity—and the
motive—to restore masculine authority. I argue here that American Chopper pro-
duces a recuperative blue-collar masculinity that attenuates the putative losses suffered
by working-class men under the postindustrial service economy of the contemporary
United States. White masculinity, DiPiero suggests, should be understood not as a
fixed identity position, but “as a symptomatic reply to cultural demands” (DiPiero
2002, 3). In its presentation of the Teutuls as authentically blue collar, American
Chopper valorizes a form of working-class manual labor at precisely the moment
when such labor has all but disappeared in the United States.

“A Very Patriotic Theme”: Myths of
Mobility and Blue-Collar Celebrity

I worked for everything in my life. I never got anything given to me.

—Paul Teutul, Senior

We have some of the most affluent audience in the history of the network, it’s not
downmarket in the least.

—Clark Bunting, Discovery Channel General Manager

Central to the allure of American Chopper is the mythic status of the custom
motorcycle and the “outlaw” biker lifestyle in American culture. The custom motor-
cycle embodies a powerful set of symbolic resonances that integrate the outlaw
lifestyle of the biker gang with the myth of the American frontier that still maintains
a powerful hold on the American psyche. Riding a chopper, Senior tells the viewer
in one episode, is “kind of a real freedom feeling.” Like the western gunslinger, the
outlaw biker is a figure of fantasy wish fulfillment. Symbolizing freedom from the
constraints of society, the chopper and the outlaw biker evoke a series of potent
American myths about civilization, individuality, and social responsibility.
Mythologized in films such as The Wild One (1954) starring Marlon Brando, outlaw
motorcycle clubs and the motorcycle subculture arose in the United States in the

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immediate aftermath of World War II. The GIs returning from Europe brought back
army surplus motorbikes and began riding, racing, and customizing them for recreation.
The outlaw chopper culture of Southern California that grew out of these clubs—
most notoriously depicted in Hunter S. Thompson’s Hell’s Angels: The Strange and
Terrifying Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gang (1966)—became a powerful symbol
of youthful rebellion and of the counterculture movements of the 1960s. The chopper’s
status as a sign of countercultural rebellion was codified in Dennis Hopper and Peter
Fonda’s classic anti-establishment film Easy Rider (1969).

In the current nostalgia boom fueled by the purchasing power of the newly afflu-
ent baby boomer generation, the custom motorcycle has become a nostalgic symbol
of youthful rebellion co-opted (apparently without irony) to display middle-class
affluence. Retaining the patina of its original symbolism, the custom motorcycle
serves as a powerful signifier of rebellion and individuality for the middle-class con-
sumer while also connoting economic success. The motorcycle’s countercultural
symbolism has made it a potent icon for the members of the baby boomer genera-
tion who, “finally [have] the time and money to buy the choppers they could only
long for in their youth” (Flaherty 2004, 15). For the middle-class consumer of the
motorcycle, the mutual imbrications of these two symbolic functions are a much-
desired aspect of the motorcycle’s commodity function as economic affluence provides
consumers the freedom to rebel—albeit only symbolically. As the baby boomer
generation has moved up the socioeconomic ladder and come to command an
increasingly large percentage of the nation’s purchasing power, popular culture has
undergone a series of transformations that reflect the values of the baby boomer gen-
eration and a nostalgic longing for the popular youth cultures of the 1950s and 1960s.
Following David Harvey’s work on postindustrial modes of flexible accumulation,
Lowe suggests that “the new pattern [of capital accumulation] favors the production
and consumption of a variety of rapidly changing, specialized products targeted at
specific market segments” (Lowe 1995, 18). American Chopper illustrates the degree
to which the outlaw biker and the blue-collar worker have become commoditized
identities made available for middle-class consumption. While the show valorizes
a particularly working-class form of manual labor, it does so for a predominantly
middle-class audience. As the success of shows such as American Chopper and the
renewed popularity of the Harley-Davidson motorcycle as a symbol of economic
success might suggest, the counterculture has gone mainstream; the motorcycle has
gone from being a countercultural symbol of dissatisfaction with the traditional val-
ues of bourgeois American nationalism to precisely a symbol of it. As the asking
price of a new Harley-Davidson (which can cost in excess of $20,000)5 or an OCC
chopper (upwards of $50,000)6 would seem to suggest, only the truly affluent can
afford to be rebels in contemporary America.

The Teutuls’ upward economic mobility is as significant to the success of American
Chopper as the outlaw status of the motorcycles they build and, while the show
celebrates the Teutuls as genuine blue-collar workers, it also betrays a slavish attention

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to their economic success. As such, American Chopper evidences an often-contradictory
set of impulses that nevertheless replicate traditional American beliefs about the
interrelationships between individuality, community, and social responsibility. The
voice-over narration for the second American Chopper pilot calls OCC “an American
Dream built on blood, sweat, and steel,” and since the show first aired, OCC has
grown into a multi-million dollar enterprise. The Teutuls have become icons of a
rejuvenated working-class masculinity at precisely the moment they transcend it. In
each season of American Chopper, OCC has moved into ever more spacious accom-
modations, and the Teutuls’ increasing economic affluence has been put on display
for the viewer: new homes, expensive cars, and extravagant gifts such as custom
Harley-Davidsons, have all featured prominently on the show. The Teutuls have also
been transformed by their celebrity status and have become frequent guests of late
night television hosts Jay Leno and David Letterman. The massive popularity of the
show and its stars has significantly increased the asking price for the Teutuls’ bikes.
While a “basic” OCC chopper currently starts at about $50,000, theme bikes built on
the show have cost as much as $250,000.

Because of the increasing popularity of the show, the celebrity status of the
Teutuls, and the marketability of OCC as a recognizable brand, the relationship
between the show’s stars, the bikes they build, and the corporations who commission
them has become increasingly complex. In addition to direct endorsement by the
Teutuls and on-air product placement on American Chopper, the creation of theme
bikes for corporate clients is a central aspect of the show. When a company such as
Gillette commissions a one-off bike from OCC, they are purchasing not only the
bike itself but also—through the episodes in which the bike is built—a one or two
hour-long advertisement for their product and the implicit endorsement of the
Teutuls. Advertisements for Gillette razors, for example, prominently book-ended
each segment of two episodes during which the Teutuls built a bike for Gillette
themed on the style and colors of the company’s new Mach III razor. The first episode
began with the Teutuls taking a tour of Gillette’s headquarters in Boston and using
the company’s products. In addition, the Discovery Channel names each individual
episode after the company or product around which the bike is being built (i.e.,
“Gillette Bike,” “Caterpillar Bike,” “NAPA Bike”). The Teutuls have also been hired
to advertise and endorse companies such as AOL, 7-Eleven, and NAPA Auto Parts
(for whom the Teutuls built a theme bike during two show episodes). As Senior
observed, “we’re so marketable, we could sell ice to the Eskimos” (Flaherty 2004, 14).

While episodes of American Chopper that feature the building of bikes for corpo-
rate clients clearly indicate the increasingly entwined connections between cultural
production and consumer capital, the show also relies on an affective nationalist
discourse that cites consumption as the proper location for patriotic citizenship. Early
in American Chopper’s second season, for example, the Teutuls were commissioned
by Miller Electric (a company that manufactures welding equipment) to build a bike
commemorating the company’s seventy-fifth anniversary. Rather than seeing the bike

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as a commissioned project for a corporate client, however, the Teutuls understand it
to be, in the words of Paulie, a “tribute to the American worker.” The “Miller Electric
Bike” constructs a fantasy of American masculine labor in which the blue-collar
worker is cast in a nostalgic position of anteriority and is abstracted to a series of
beliefs about American national identity. In its discourse of commensurate affect,
American Chopper produces a form of blue-collar patriotism that situates the American
worker as a nostalgic figure, and the Teutuls’ celebration of working-class masculinity
should be understood to be a response to the declining labor opportunities in the
postindustrial economy of the late-twentieth century. John Hartigan, Jr. has suggested
that references to white trash, redneck culture, and “downmarket chic” have surged
in concert with the “dramatic changes of the post-civil rights era and the rise of
postindustrialization in the United States” (Hartigan 2005, 119). American Chopper
betrays a similar fascination with the laboring body as it recuperates a form of
working-class patriotism from the wasteland of traditional labor forms.

The affective logic of working-class masculinity evinced in the “Miller Electric
Bike” is codified through a series of explicitly patriotic cross-identifications in
which comparisons are made between blue-collar labor and patriotism. Commenting
on the bike’s red, white, and blue color scheme, OCC mechanic Vinnie Dimartino
makes this connection explicit for the viewer when he proudly observes that “every-
thing about this bike definitely screams ‘Made in America.’” During the bike’s
unveiling in front of an audience of workers at the Miller Electric plant, Paulie claims
that the bike “really is a tribute to the American worker,” and Miller Electric Vice
President Jeff Rappold echoes Vinnie’s earlier observation when he emphatically
proclaims, “make no bones about it, this is a ‘Made in USA’ bike.” The final words
of the episode belong to Senior, who claims, “it’s all about the red, white, and blue
and to me, you know, this is a special project for us.” The relationship that is evoked in
these statements between U.S. patriotism and traditional labor practices produces a form
of working-class nationalism that turns on the celebration of core American values.

Many of American Chopper’s early episodes feature similarly patriotic themes. In
the first pilot episode, for example, Paulie builds a “Jet Bike,” modeled on a U.S.
military aircraft, that he describes as a “very patriotic theme” that “people are just
going to eat . . . up.” Other episodes from the first two seasons of the show see the
Teutuls build a “Liberty Bike,” plated in copper reclaimed from the Statue of Liberty,
and a “Comanche Bike,” modeled after a top secret U.S. Army helicopter. Commemorative
projects such as these concatenate the show’s idealization of working-class identity
with traditional American values such as liberty and freedom and a form of militaristic
patriotism that codify the affective engagements with working-class labor evidenced
in the “Miller Electric Bike.” Arjun Appadurai has suggested that “late industrial
consumption relies on a peculiar tension between fantasy and nostalgia that gives
substance (and sustenance) to consumer uncertainty about commodities, money, and
the relationship between work and leisure” (Appadurai 1996, 81). American
Chopper negotiates that tension by constructing a fantasy of blue-collar labor in the

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present that is predicated on a nostalgic form of exemplary citizenship. The Teutuls
literally embody the interrelationship between nostalgia and fantasy.

In the “Miller Electric Bike,” the link between the working class male body and the
tools of its trade are sentimentalized as the bike becomes an opportunity to celebrate
Senior’s own labor history. During the build, Senior recalls his own humble beginnings
as a freelance welder and explains the personal significance of the bike. “I’m kind
of excited about this project,” he states, “because, you know, for the past thirty five
years these tools and what not have been a pretty big part of my life.” “In a way,” he
continues, “you can say that they made me what I am today and I think that it’s great
that OCC is getting an opportunity to pay tribute to that.” “I think that,” he continues,
“you know, it’s special that, you know, you’re able to build this bike for the people
that build the product that allows you to build the bike for them.” As an opportunity
for Senior to celebrate his own working-class roots, the bike both pays tribute to an
abstract notion of working-class identity based on the patriotic cross-identification
signified in the statement “Made in America” and explicitly signifies the working-
class origins of Senior’s own economic success. If Stanley Aronowitz is correct and
globalization is “capital’s counterattack against the constraints on its power won by
labor movements throughout the world, including the United States,” then the trans-
formation of physical labor into commodity spectacle obfuscates the lived effects of
capital’s assault on opportunity (Aronowitz 2003, 27).

In its celebration of Senior’s own humble beginnings, American Chopper con-
catenates the mythic figure of the outlaw biker and the sentimentalized figure of the
blue-collar laborer. An overbearing and physically imposing giant of a man, Senior
is presented as a hardworking and industrious individual who, before he started
OCC, single-handedly built a multi-million dollar company (Orange County Ironworks)
from the humble beginnings of a single welding machine and a second-hand truck.
As Paulie states of his father, “he built himself an empire from a pickup truck, so he
has earned anything that he wants to do.” Paulie’s choice of the word earned situates
his father within a clearly definable frame of American individualism and condones
his success: coming from nothing he is entitled to everything. Senior is portrayed as the
apotheosis of the nostalgic logic of blue-collar labor, a workingman who has
achieved the American Dream through hard work and sacrifice and who is now able
to reap the benefits of his hard work. “It was really cool watching my father drive
the bike in, you know,” states Paulie, “he started in business thirty years ago and he’s
come such a long way since then.” Despite the show’s focus on labor, Paulie’s
description of his father’s journey involves more than just his business success.

American Chopper situates the Teutuls within a habitat of addiction, self-help, and
recovery. Despite Senior’s business acumen and resulting success, however, during
the early years of the ironworks his personal life was a shambles as he struggled with
alcohol and drug addiction. In the second pilot Senior admits that “most of my life
I was involved in drugs and alcohol” and describes a cycle of depression, addiction,
and destructive behavior that ultimately led to the breakdown of his marriage. In the

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same episode Paulie describes the effect his father’s problems had on him when he
was a child. “With alcoholism he wasn’t always there,” he claims, “so there was a
lot of bitterness.” Despite being a talented athlete and a member of his high school
football team, Paulie followed Senior into an early adulthood of alcoholism and
unmet expectations. “It got really bad and I actually, like, experienced a nervous
breakdown,” Paulie explains. Having hit bottom, Senior “got involved in programs
and . . . got sober.” Paulie, likewise, was saved when he discovered religion, and he
is shown attending church while a voice-over describes his battle to overcome his
own addictions.

Recovery is understood in American Chopper to be a sign of masculine strength,
and the show portrays the Teutuls’ problems with addiction within a narrative arc that
replicates their socioeconomic ascendance. Senior cites the time when he overcame
his addictions as the hardest period of his life, but he also points out that it was the
period when he was able to properly focus on his business. Similarly, for Paulie, “it
wasn’t until I got cleaned up that I was able to function properly and really get cre-
ative on the level that we’re at now.” By presenting the Teutuls as recovered addicts,
American Chopper mobilizes a logic of recovery and self-help in which both men
are ultimately strong enough to help themselves and do not require the intervention
of the state. By yoking its discourse of recovery to the American Dream of economic
and social mobility, American Chopper mobilizes an “antipolitical politics [of]
national sentimentality” in which the home and the family have become the appro-
priate sites for individual action (Berlant 1997, 11). As such, the Teutuls produce a
powerful corrective to the ills of the welfare state. The proper recipients of the
opportunities offered by America, the Teutuls stand as exemplars of both the promise
and the reward of the American Dream, proof that hard work and native know-how
are all you need to get ahead in America.

Although the Teutuls’ talk of addiction and recovery seemingly runs contrary to
the rugged individualism of the outlaw lifestyle and blue-collar masculinity
American Chopper ostensibly valorizes, it seamlessly fits into the show’s sentimental
logic of masculine affect and neoliberal citizenship. Thus, when Senior states that he
“never got anything given to [him],” he should be understood to be talking about
both his economic success and his recovery from drug and alcohol addiction.
Hardworking, independent, highly motivated, and patriotic, the Teutuls are presented
as exemplary citizens who want nothing given to them and have earned everything
they have. As such, the show evinces what Lauren Berlant has called a “conservative
ideology” that “has convinced a citizenry that the core context of politics should be
the sphere of private life” (Berlant 1997, 11). Inasmuch as recovery is understood to
be a sign of masculine strength, American Chopper sites individual responsibility
that eschews the welfare state as the proper way to deal with addiction. The example
of Senior and Paulie’s self-help situates the privatization of public life under neolib-
eralism at the heart of a sentimentalized masculine citizenship.

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“Nothing You Do Motivates Me”: Family Melodrama
and the Cultural Politics of Visible Labor

His failure as a son is your failure as a father.

—Mikey Teutul

We’re from two different schools.

—Paul Teutul, Junior

As much as American Chopper draws on the cultural resonances evoked by nostalgic
blue-collar labor and the outlaw biker lifestyle, conjoined through the custom motor-
cycle, the show also trades on a complex set of beliefs about the nature of work in
American culture. The show devotes considerable attention to a long-running series
of arguments between Senior and Paulie that are a central aspect of its popularity.
These arguments are often about the nature of real work and reproduce a commonplace
series of cultural dichotomies: public/private, production/consumption, masculine/
feminine, physical/mental, work/leisure. In the distribution of labor at OCC (at least
as it is presented on American Chopper), Senior is a self-made businessman and
Paulie is an artist. However much Senior may enjoy the fruits of Paulie’s artistic
labor, he doesn’t quite trust it. The value of Paulie’s artistic labor to the success of
the business is a common subject in the arguments between the two men. When
Paulie is able to show concrete progress on a build (the fabrication and welding of a
gas tank, for example) his father is happy, however, when Paulie is engaged in the
mental labor of artistic and conceptual work (during which he may spend an hour or
a whole work day staring at a bare motorcycle frame as he comes up with design
ideas), his father inevitably appears and an argument ensues. During the course of these
arguments, Paulie is inevitably accused by his father of being lazy, self-absorbed,
and unaware of the significance of deadlines. “Here we are, already behind schedule,”
quips Senior in one memorable incident, “and Picasso is changing his mind about
what he wants on this bike.” By derisively referring to Paulie as “Picasso,” Senior is
equating his son’s work with leisure and a type of luxury he believes he cannot afford.
This dynamic relies on commonplace beliefs about the relationship between manual
and mental labor and is largely a product of Senior’s inability (or unwillingness) to
recognize mental labor as work.

Senior’s inability to recognize Paulie’s labor as such is hardly surprising. Despite
the real economic benefits he derives from it, what Senior sees when he watches
Paulie is not what he expects work to look like. The distinctions between labor and
leisure that motivate Senior’s distrust of Paulie’s work ethic also reflect trenchant
beliefs about the relationship between gender and work in American culture. As
Michael Denning has suggested, “culture is seen as the equivalent of leisure, not
labor” (Denning 2004, 91). If Senior’s view of labor (as something tangible and

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quantifiable) is trenchantly masculine and working-class, Paulie’s labor (intangible
and unquantifiable) is both feminine and bourgeois. The mental labor Paulie must
engage in to build the theme motorcycles that account for OCC’s success is not rec-
ognizable to his father as real work because he understands it to be a feminized form
of leisure that stands outside the sphere of real work.

Because of his experiences running Orange County Ironworks, Senior is used to
being able to measure and reward the output of his employees. His status as the
signer of weekly paychecks is often raised as a threat to Paulie and other workers
whom Senior believes to be slacking on the job. As its name might suggest, Orange
County Ironworks functions under the traditional logics of capitalist accumulation.
Raw materials come in, finished products go out; each employee has a function in a
chain of tasks that must be completed, and their value to the company can be clearly
evaluated. Under such a system, the value of each individual worker and their cor-
responding remuneration is clearly quantifiable. As Paul Willis points out in Learning
to Labour, “the productivity of capital is the liberated productivity of labour power
given not as a quantity but as a capacity” (Willis 1977, 131). Indeed, this is one of
the grounding assumptions of wage labor, and Senior fully expects OCC and its
employees to manifest just such a recognizable relationship between labor and pro-
duction. Paulie’s mental labor, then, is untrustworthy to his father because it isn’t vis-
ible or quantifiable labor; it is not measurable in the form of a weekly pay packet.7

Senior also believes that Paulie’s ineffective work habits are linked to time (“here
we are, already behind schedule”), and the producers of the show rely on this link
for much of the show’s narrative tension. Because almost every episode of American
Chopper revolves around a tightly scheduled bike build, the issue of time and its
relationship to labor is invested with great significance. “‘Time is money’,” Willis
(1977) suggests, “but the real measure which connects the two is abstract labour”
(131). Indeed, if the deadlines that seem to constantly plague OCC are understood
from Senior’s perspective, they are imbued with an almost moral weight. The confla-
tion of domestic melodrama with labor dispute is a central aspect of the show’s
appeal. As Senior himself suggests, “it’s a family show. And people have the same
struggles we do, and they identify with it” (Howard 2004, 2). To the considerable
degree that Senior believes that Paulie is always behind schedule, he finds his son’s
tardiness to be a moral failure and a sign of Paulie’s lack of commitment both to the
company and to his father. To measure the passage of time (and to ensure that time
is being spent wisely), Senior is always looking for recognizable signs that Paulie is
working; when he cannot find them he gets upset. “You don’t get involved in any-
thing that you gotta get your hands dirty with” quips Senior at one point. Because
his own labor history is such a significant part of his self-identity, Senior views
Paulie’s seeming rejection of his values as a personal attack. Paulie—for whom their
arguments are about the value of artistic expression—often complains that his father
doesn’t understand the artistic process and that his continual interference only causes
further delays. During one such argument, Paulie tries to explain the nature of artistic

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labor and its different relationship to time to his father: “There was a lot of staring
at this bike that just needed to be done to figure out what had to be done,” he argues,
“even when there was time that we were here working there was still a lot of figur-
ing, you know what I mean?” What is clear is that Senior doesn’t know what Paulie
means. Thus, while Paulie is understood to be the artistic member of the partnership,
Senior is presented—and self-identifies—as “Old School.”8 For Senior, the term Old
School signifies authenticity, tradition, and the value of hard work and manual labor.9

The valorization of manual over mental labor that Senior exemplifies in his cham-
pioning of Old School ways upholds a gendered division of labor that compliments
traditional capitalist modes of production. As Willis (1977) suggests, “manual labour
is associated with the social superiority of masculinity, and mental labour with the
social inferiority of femininity. In particular manual labour is imbued with a masculine
tone and nature which renders it positively expressive of more than its intrinsic focus in
work” (Willis 1977, 148). As such, the reversal of the manual/mental dichotomy func-
tions hegemonically as it assures capitalist production of a willing workforce, in part
because manual labor becomes tied to assumptions about masculinity and the rela-
tionship between work and the body. And this, perhaps, is why Senior’s response to
people mistaking Orange County, New York for Orange County, California is to get
a large “OCC New York” tattoo (a process that is shown on air). However, as Willis
also points out, “in the capitalist mobilization of the mental/manual distinction it is
conventionally, and according to the dominant ideology, the mental labourers who
have the legitimized right to superior material and cultural conditions. Mental work
is held to be more exacting and therefore to justify higher rewards” (148). Thus,
while Senior believes that his work habits are authentic and Old School, it is Paulie
who is more instep with the realities of the contemporary neoliberal guise of com-
modity capitalism. If, as Appadurai (1996) suggests, “consumption has . . . become
the driving force of industrial society,” American Chopper turns industry into a form
of consumption (and vice versa) (82). The arguments between Senior and Paulie
about the nature of real work are both a dramatization and—as importantly—a work-
ing through of the transformation to neoliberal modes of capitalist production and
consumption.

“Like Martha Stewart on a Motorcycle”:
Gender, Class, and the Laboring Body10

They get way too much play for cake decorators.

—Bill Dodge, West Coast Choppers

The issue of authenticity is a central aspect of debates about American Chopper, and
the Teutuls’ celebrity has made them problematic figures, signifying counter-cultural
rebellion and working-class authenticity for some and bourgeois co-option for

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others. Like the arguments between Senior and Paulie about the nature of real work,
the debates about authenticity often break down along a common fault line of class
and gender-based assumptions. As the epigraph from Bill Dodge (an employee of
West Coast Choppers, an OCC competitor)—“they get way too much play for cake
decorators”—suggests, their fellow bikers often deride the very aspects of the
Teutuls’ bikes that make them popular with a mainstream audience. That derision is
regularly produced as an issue of gender inauthenticity. As “cake decorators,” the
Teutuls are situated in the domestic sphere of family, leisure, and femininity.
Deemed to be insufficiently masculine, the Teutuls do not warrant the respect of
hardcore bikers. Because they build choppers for corporate clients and—in the eyes
of some—do little more than assemble their bikes from pre-fabricated parts, the
Teutuls are believed to have lost touch (if they ever had it) with the authentic roots
of the biker community. As such, many other chopper builders actively work to dis-
tance themselves from the media-fueled celebrity of builders such as the Teutuls.
Scott Long of Central Coast Choppers, for example, says, “people tell me [my bike]
doesn’t look like the choppers they see on TV, and that’s about the biggest compliment
I can get.”11 Yoshi Hannya of Rodeo Motorcycles echoes Bill Dodge’s complaints
about the overly decorative sort of bikes the Teutuls build when he states, “I don’t
think a chopper should have any parts on it that don’t make it go faster or look better.
Original choppers were basically just frames, motors, and a few parts for style—
that’s all” (Seate 2004, 12). Because their design aesthetic more often relies on the
embellishment than the paring down of the motorcycle’s basic components, the Teutuls’
choppers signify leisure, feminized domesticity, consumption, and inauthentic for
bikers such as Hannya and Dodge.

Authentic masculinity is an issue of skill and dedication that has become diluted
by culture, leisure, and consumption. As Mike Seate claims in his book Outlaw
Choppers, “riding and managing not to crash a radical chopper back in the day
labeled the rider a hard man amongst men, the sort of guy who chases his tequila with
Jack Daniels” (Seate 2004, 59, italics added). Warren Fuller, the creator of a biker
lifestyle web site, highlights the relationship between consumption and authenticity
that ground such beliefs when he claims that the Teutuls do not truly represent the
chopper community. “These guys are pulling a $25,000 motor out of a box,” he says,
“what’s so special about that?”12 Because they can afford to buy an expensive motor,
the Teutuls evidence a form of consumerism that holds little value for the biker com-
munity, which places more value in abilities, such as bartering, that are driven by
economic necessity. Such comments, then, reflect a two-fold complaint about the
Teutuls’ work and—implicitly—their celebrity status that further highlights the rela-
tionship between gender and socioeconomics. Therefore, while American Chopper
presents the Teutuls as authentic examples of both the outlaw biker and the blue-
collar worker, they do not function as such equally for everyone. The Teutuls are
deemed to be inauthentic because of both the feminized nature of their work and
their newfound socioeconomic standing.

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The problematic status of the Teutuls is also an issue for American Chopper’s fans.
The relationship between consumption, class, and authenticity arises most clearly in
arguments about the relationships between the Teutuls and OCC employees such as
Vinnie Dimartino and Rick Petko. These debates, which take place on online discus-
sion boards devoted to the show (such as the one hosted by the Discovery Channel on
its web site13), focus on whether OCC’s employees are given enough respect and
acknowledgement by the Teutuls for their contributions to the success of OCC. Vinnie
and Rick perform the real work at OCC and possess the real mechanical skills, the
argument goes, and without them the Teutuls would be exposed for the fakes they
really are; Senior and Paulie have gained a financial success that is incommensurate
with their mechanical ability, while highly skilled mechanics such as Vinnie do the
“real” work. While viewers of the show often debate whether OCC’s employees are
given enough credit for their contributions to the Teutuls’ success, this question seems
doubly relevant in the case of the invisible workers who produce the OCC-branded
merchandise that accounts for a large percentage of the economic windfall the Teutuls
have realized since the show has been on the air.

While a significant portion of American Chopper’s success results from the
show’s validation of a world of blue-collar manual labor that—coded through the
Teutuls’ laboring bodies—is understood to be both masculine and definitively male,
the economic mobility the Teutuls have gained comes in large part from the labor of
others who are rendered invisible in the show’s making. Fans of American Chopper
and OCC who are unable to afford the astronomical asking price for an OCC chop-
per but who still wish to buy into the show’s performative masculinities, can buy a
myriad of American Chopper and OCC-themed merchandise such as t-shirts and
baseball caps.14 The Teutuls have attained celebrity because of their putative status
as (and claimed solidarity with) blue-collar workers, and benefit economically from
the hidden labor of others. The solidarity the Teutuls espouse for the American
worker in American Chopper does not seem to extend to the laborers—many of them
women of color—of the garment industry. This is, in part, because the forms of solidarity
with working-class labor the show valorizes have been transformed into the elective
choices of postindustrial consumer society. “Mass culture has won,” suggests Denning
(2004), “all culture is mass culture under capitalism” and, as such, “there is no work-
ing-class culture that is not saturated with mass culture” (103). American Chopper
contextualizes consumption as a form of labor that attenuates the real issues of class,
gender, and racial inequality produced under neoliberalism. Therefore, such workers
do not count in the show’s index of authentic labor, despite the actual loses suffered
by women under the neoliberal service economy of contemporary America.

In disputes about their authenticity, the Teutuls are often compared to Jesse James,
the owner of West Coast Choppers, the subject of a Discovery Channel special
Motorcycle Mania, and the host of the channel’s other hit automotive reality show,
Monster Garage. James is presented as a far more rebellious figure than the Teutuls.
While the Teutuls are “cake decorators,” Jesse James is “an artist and people see the
dignity in the way [he] makes his living” (Halliday 2004, 8). While American Chopper

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focuses on family relations, in Motorcycle Mania James is portrayed as a loner and
an outlaw. James claims to be a descendant of the Jesse James of American frontier
mythology (the stylized chambers of a pair of six shooters are a signature piece that
embellish many of his motorcycles), and the show presents him as the last of a dying
breed of real men. As with American Chopper, Motorcycle Mania also conjoins the
iconography of the biker with blue-collar labor and devotes much attention to
James’s considerable skills as a metalworker. James is portrayed in the show as an
artisan who pays tribute to the workers who have come before him and to the old-
fashioned/traditional ways of working with metal that have been rendered obsolete
in the contemporary world of automated manufacturing. He is repeatedly hailed—
not without hyperbole—as the last worker of his kind in the world. By positioning
James as the last of a dying breed, Motorcycle Mania also constructs a nostalgic
view of manual labor. As an artisan, James is understood to be the embodiment of
an authentic manual labor that makes a space for culture by coding artistic labor as
artisanship and craft.

Over the course of the three Motorcycle Mania specials, the viewer sees James make
a gas tank from scratch out of sheet metal, use an obsolete metal rolling tool he sal-
vaged from an abandoned factory to smooth out sheets of steel, and take a pilgrimage
to learn how to work with copper from one of the last skilled copper workers in the
country. The viewer also sees James’s scarred and bloody hands—proof that he does
the work himself and a sign of his dedication to the old ways.15 The motorcycles
James builds are believed to embody an aura of authenticity that they gain from their
status as one-off, hand-built machines. Like the Teutuls, however, James also builds
bikes for corporations (such as R. J. Reynolds and AOL), and the asking price for his
motorbikes (which begin at $40,000) places them squarely out of the reach of the
average consumer. Indeed, much like OCC, West Coast Choppers has become an
identifiable brand name and, because of the visibility brought on by Motorcycle
Mania and Monster Garage, a recent addition to the company’s buildings in Long
Beach includes a storefront for the sale of WCC merchandise. James also has an
extensive celebrity client list that includes the likes of basketball player Shaquille
O’Neal, wrestler Goldberg, rock star Kid Rock, and male supermodel Tyson
Beckford. Despite the differences in representation between the Teutuls and James,
the comparison between them indicates how the original status of the custom chopper
as a signifier of countercultural rebellion sometimes conflicts with its newfound
position as a consumable object of bourgeois fantasy identification.

“From the Heart”: The Affective
Production of Male Sentimentality

This project had more than mechanical aptitude and ability; it had deep, deep meaning.

—Dan DaVinci, DaVinci Performance

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Watching Chopper, you learn a little about bikes and a lot about how men express love
with outbursts and power tools.

—James Poniewozik, Time

American Chopper’s affective discourse of working-class sacrifice and commemo-
ration achieved its most potent expression in a bike the Teutuls built to commemorate
the New York City firemen who lost their lives on September 11, 2001. The single
most popular OCC creation and a significant reason for the overall success of
American Chopper, the “Fire Bike” was built over the course of three episodes that
first aired in April and June of 2003. The “Fire Bike” distills American Chopper’s
affective logic of working-class masculinity in the figure of the New York City fireman.
The elevation of New York City’s firemen to everyday heroes after September 11,
2001 produced a potent affective logic of unimpeachable masculine sacrifice into
which the “Fire Bike” successfully feeds. As the Teutuls celebrate the fallen firemen
of September 11, they situate those heroic figures within a realm of working-class
masculine sacrifice and domesticity. The valor and heroism for which the fallen
firemen are being celebrated comes to signal the value of working-class masculinity in
general. The affective commemoration of New York City firemen becomes a cele-
bration of the white ethnic working-class masculine identity the Teutuls themselves
embody for the audience of American Chopper. Through a series of cross-identifications,
the “Fire Bike” episodes situate the Teutuls within the same representational space
as the fallen firemen.

The relationship between the Teutuls and the firemen they wish to commemorate
is rendered both explicitly and implicitly. While Paulie is designing the bike, he and
Mikey visit a firehouse in the Bronx where Mikey’s best friend, Al Ronaldson, is a
junior fireman. When Paulie and Mikey visit the firehouse, they help the firemen
cook dinner and, replicating a task he is often seen performing at OCC, Mikey takes
out the trash. The two brothers also eat with the firemen and follow them when they
go out on a call that interrupts the meal. After the visit, Paulie claims that, “ever since
I was younger I’ve always admired firemen.” “Getting a chance to spend some time
with these guys,” he continues, “really helped me to see a little more into the mean-
ing of the project other than just building a bike.” The finished bike is later unveiled
at the same firehouse for an audience of New York City firefighters. The connections
between the Teutuls’ authentic blue-collar roots and the figure of the fireman are also
produced in more implicit ways, most clearly in the presentation of Paulie as an
exemplary citizen.

If the “Miller Electric Bike” episodes cited Senior as the proper locus of blue-collar
commemoration, the “Fire Bike” episodes situate Paulie in a similar logic of affective
engagement. During the course of one “Fire Bike” episode, Paulie shows a visiting
group of high school-aged students around OCC and the iron works. Hosting the
students is a significant nostalgic moment for Paulie because they attend a Board of

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Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES) continuing education/high school
equivalency institution in New York State that Paulie himself attended.16 Much like
the focus on Senior’s humble beginnings in the “Miller Electric Bike” episodes, the
inclusion of the students’ visit to OCC during the “Fire Bike” episodes situates
Paulie as an exemplary figure. As one student claims when asked about the trip, “I
never thought that someone who was in a program like me could succeed like this.”
The success of Paulie and OCC in the eyes of the BOCES students codifies the affective
value American Chopper gives to blue-collar labor because it highlights the rags to
riches transformation of the American Dream while still valuing manual labor as a
bona fide origin point for economic success. Moreover, this gesture also replicates
traditional sentiments about the intrinsic value of manual labor. Seeing someone like
Paulie succeed is good for the students, the BOCES instructor tells the viewer,
because it shows them that “anything they do with their hands is worth doing well.”
The placement of this encounter during the “Fire Bike” build is significant because
the viewer is encouraged to view Paulie’s success as the result of a form of sacrifice
and hard work that mirrors—albeit with starkly different results—the sacrifice of the
firemen. Manifesting a commensurate logic of affective production, Paulie’s authentic
blue-collar identity is being celebrated alongside that of the firemen.

The “Fire Bike” episodes also create a masculine sentimentality in which each of
the principle builders involved in the creation of the bike professes the emotional
effect their involvement in the project has had on them personally. Paulie lays out the
emotional stakes of the project at the very beginning, claiming that, “ever since 9/11
I think that, you know, it’s been in my heart to do something for the firemen, you
know, just to pay tribute.” “These guys are true heroes,” he states later, “there’s just
no question about that. I just hope I could create a bike that will honor them in the
way they deserve to be honored.” In the understanding of many of the men involved
in the build, working on the “Fire Bike” changed them. Paulie himself claims, “I
don’t know what it is about this particular bike, but it’s really affected me in a way
that no other bike has.” In a proclamation about the significance of the bike that must
have thrown his father into conniptions, he tells the viewer, “this bike is more important
than any deadline.” By referring to the issue of deadlines, Paulie’s statement interrupts
the show’s normal narrative logic by producing a transparency that transcends the
artifice of television. Because of the solemnity of the bike’s commemorative subject
matter, both the show’s normal rules of operation and the Teutuls’ disputes are to be
put on hold during the course of the build.

Woking on the “Fire Bike” is also a significant experience for the vendors OCC
contracts during the build. Justin Barnes, the bike’s painter, explains the effect the
bike has had on him, claiming, “I’ve never worked on anything that has affected me
quite like this bike.” “There were a couple of times when we were working on it that
the whole meaning of the bike really hit me hard,” he continues, “especially when
we started doing the ’343’ . . . what that number represents.”17 Working on the bike
not only has a profound affect on its builders, but this affectivity is also understood

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to exact a physical toll—it also takes a lot out of them. The builders of the bike’s gas
tank and wheels, for example, each claim that they “put a lot of heart and soul into
this one.” This statement highlights the investment in physical labor as a form of
feeling in which—as it was in the “Miller Electric Bike”—affect is routed through
the relationship between the body and the machine. The sentimental burden of com-
memoration is transformed into the expenditure of manual labor. The “Fire Bike”
places tears back at the center of the “blood, sweat, and steel” of American
Chopper’s American Dream by producing an affective equivalency between steel
and tears as both become the product of emotion and the correct response to
American valor and sacrifice. In the affective economy of manual labor evidenced in
American Chopper, the bike’s builders channel their emotions through a proper conduit,
and the affective discourse of commemoration is routed through an inanimate—and
overtly masculinized—object. As much as the “Miller Electric Bike,” the “Fire Bike”
is a concrete expression of the exhortation to “buy American.” Because that object—
the custom motorcycle—has become a signifier of bourgeois success, consumption
is presented as a proper means of emotive expression.

American Chopper presents an idealized realm of masculine interaction that
reproduces traditionally coded divisions of public and private, masculine and feminine,
labor and leisure while updating those divisions in the face of the corrosive pressures of
the neoliberal service economy. Collapsing the separate spheres of public and private,
work and home into pseudo-domestic world of fraternity and labor that is the OCC
workshop, American Chopper relocates the franchise of masculinity. If, as Robyn
Wiegman has argued, the white male subject in contemporary American culture “is cast
not only as a minority identity but as one injured by the denial of public representation,”
then automotive television programs such as American Chopper raise to view the white,
male laboring body and situate that body at the heart of a nostalgic construction of
authentic citizenship (Wiegman 1999, 116). In its presentation of a world of mascu-
line labor and fraternal affect, American Chopper constructs a nostalgic world of
blue-collar work in which the skilled manual laborer—always understood to be
male—still reigns supreme, untroubled by the supposed defeats suffered by hegemonic
masculinity in the post-civil rights era. By celebrating neoliberal consumer capital and
the traditional consumption of the American dream as coterminous discourses of
celebrity identity, the show elides the increasingly vast gaps in opportunity and
remuneration that separate the haves and the have-nots in the contemporary United
States. As Vinnie Dimartino, OCC head mechanic and American Chopper’s moral
center says, “it’s just the way you do something, and then the way it’s shown on TV”
(Flaherty 60). What American Chopper shows on TV every Monday night is a world
of fraternity and male bonding that rehabilitates blue-collar labor by presenting the
world of work as an emotionally fulfilling habitat in which men are still free to be
men and masculine identity is produced as consumer choice. Through the example
of the Teutuls and their employees, American Chopper constitutes a patriarchal form
of normative citizenship predicated on modes of consumption that elide the real
loses suffered by both men and women under neoliberalism. Moreover, by collating the

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Teutuls’ American Dream and the privatized neoliberal consumer subject, the show
incorporates the very losses it elides into the structures of possibility it celebrates.
Searching for the exemplary neoliberal citizen, American Chopper finds him at the
heart of the American Dream.

Notes

1. For salary details, see http://asp.usatoday.com/sports/baseball/salaries/ (accessed February 7,
2006).

2. See Stilson (2003) for a brief analysis of American Chopper viewing data.
3. I am intentionally using the term firemen rather than a more gender-neutral term such as firefighter in

this essay to highlight the fact that it is undoubtedly men who are being valorized in this commemorative affec-
tivity. For an interesting discussion of this investment in gender specificity after September 11, see Terese M.
Floren’s insightful article, “Too Far Back for Comfort,” Firework, October 2001.

4. While American Chopper’s status as a reality-based TV show is significant, genre is not the central
focus of this analysis. Therefore, while I attend to the formal aspects of the show and do not wish to sep-
arate it from the broader cycle of reality television in which it is situated, I am more interested in questions
of cultural politics that are not predicated solely on the genre conventions of reality TV. For a discussion
of the reality TV cycle, see Murray and Ouellette (2004).

5. See www.harley-davidson.com (accessed February 7, 2006).
6. See www.orangecountychoppers.com (accessed February 7, 2006).
7. In his discussion of the relationship between time, money, and labor, Willis suggests, “in middle

class professions it is clear that the yearly salary is paid in exchange for the use of continuous and flex-
ible services. Remuneration here is not based on the particular amount of time spent on the job and of
course those ‘on the staff’ are expected to work overtime and at home for no extra cash. Such workers,
their wage form makes clear, are being paid for what they are: for the use of their capacities, for their gen-
eral potential as managers, accountants, etc. The social implications of the weekly wage packet are very
different. The general capacity of labour power which is recognized by the salary form is here broken up
into weekly lumps and riveted to a direct and regular reward. Weekly wages, not yearly salaries, mark the
giving of labour. The quantity of the wage packet is the quantitative passing of time. Its diminution is loss
of measured time, its increase ‘overtime’” (1997, 131).

8. The authenticity of Senior’s “Old School” roots are confirmed when he and Mikey restore one of
Senior’s first choppers, originally built in 1974. The bike was later featured in the Harley-Davidson enthu-
siast magazine V-Twin Motorcycles under the title “Paul Sr.’s Pride and Joy” (Garson).

9. Needless to say, this hasn’t prevented him from turning it into a commodity identity, and OCC now
features a signature line of bikes, the Old School Paul Sr. Series, with an asking price of $55,000. See
http://www.orangecountychoppers.com/occweb_ver2_oldschoolseries.php (accessed February 7, 2006).

10. Mikey Teutul used this witty term during a “best of” episode to describe his father’s desire for
cleanliness. While I will not discuss them here, a number of major arguments between Senior and Paulie
center on issues of neatness and Paulie’s inability to keep his workspace tidy.

11. Mike Seate (2004, 32). There is, of course, a certain irony in the fact that Long makes this statement
in a book that would not exist without the popularity of shows like American Chopper.

12. Ann Oldenburg (2004). See also http://www.choppersrule.com (accessed February 7, 2006).
13. See .
14. OCC-related products include t-shirts and baseball caps bearing the OCC logo, coffee table books,

Teutul bobblehead dolls, American Chopper DVDs, “Full Throttle” cologne, miniature models of the
theme motorcycles built on the show, children’s coloring books, and a video game in which the player
gets to ride the bikes built on the show.

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15. In this light, it is interesting to note that one of the few work-related injuries seen on American
Chopper involves OCC employee Rick Petko getting his hand caught in a drill. Despite his young age,
Senior believes that Rick is “Old School” like him, a belief that is confirmed by the fact that Rick returns
to work immediately after visiting the emergency room for stitches. For a discussion of hands and the
laboring body, see Janet Zandy, Hands: Physical Labor, Class, and Cultural Work.

16. See http://www.ouboces.org for further information about the program (accessed February 7,
2006).

17. A total of 343 firefighters lost their lives on September 11, 2001.

References

American Chopper. The Discovery Channel.
Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press.
Aronowitz, Stanley. 2003. How Class Works: Power and Social Movement. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Berlant, Lauren. 1997. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Choppers Rule. 7 February 2006. http://www.choppersrule.com.
Denning, Michael. 2004. Culture in the Age of Three Worlds. New York: Verso.
DiPiero, Thomas. 2002. White Men Aren’t. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Faludi, Susan. 1999. Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man. New York: Perennial.
Flaherty, Mike. 2004. American Chopper: At Full Throttle. Des Moines, IA: Meredith Books.
Floren, Terese M. 2006. Too Far Back for Comfort. Firework. October 2001. February 7. http://www

.wfsi.org/resources/archive/article_archive.php?article=12.
Garson, Paul. 2005. Paul Sr.’s Pride and Joy. V-Twin Motorcycles June 2005: 91–96.
Halliday, Jean. 2004. Tuners Fit in with Customizing Fare. Advertising Age May 31, 2004: 8.
Harley-Davidson. February 7, 2006. http://www.harley-davidson.com.
Hartigan Jr., John. 2005. Odd Tribes: Toward a Cultural Analysis of White People. Durham, NC: Duke

University Press.
Hill, Mike. 2004. After Whiteness: Unmaking an American Majority. New York: New York University Press.
Howard, Teresa. 2004. ‘American Chopper’ Stars Climb Aboard AOL. USA Today January 19, 2004: B2.
Lipsitz, George. 1990. Listening to Learn and Learning to Listen: Popular Culture, Cultural Theory, and

American Studies. American Quarterly 42.4: 615–36.
Lowe, Donald M. 1995. The Body in Late-Capitalist USA. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Motorcycle Mania. The Discovery Channel.
Murray, Susan, and Laurie Ouellette, eds. 2004. Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture. New York: New

York University Press.
Oldenburg, Ann. 2004. Leaders of the Pack. USA Today March 25. February 7, 2006

.usatoday.com/life/television/news/2004–03–25-american-chopper-main_x.htm>.
Orange County Choppers. February 7, 2006. http://www.orangecountychoppers.com.
Orange-Ulster BOCES. February 7, 2006. http://www.ouboces.org.
Poniewozik, James. 2004. My Wheels, My Self. Time March 5: 98.
Savran, David. 1998. Taking it Like a Man: White Masculinity, Masochism, and Contemporary American

Culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Seate, Mike. 2004. Outlaw Choppers. St. Paul, MN: Motorbooks International.
Stilson, Janet. 2003. It’s All About the Family Thing. Television Week October 27: 20.
USAToday.com. February 7, 2006. http://asp.usatoday.com/sports/baseball/salaries/.
Wiegman, Robyn. 1999. Whiteness Studies and the Paradox of Particularity. Boundary 2. 26.3: 115–50.
Willis, Paul. 1977. Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. London: Gower.
Zandy, Janet. 2004. Hands: Physical Labor, Class, and Cultural Work. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers

University Press.

282 Television & New Media

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Hamilton Carroll is a lecturer in American Literature and Culture in the School of English at the
University of Leeds. His work is broadly interdisciplinary and, within the framework of a critical U.S.
American Studies, interrogates the effects of globalization, neoliberalism, and transnationalism on the
form of the contemporary nation-state. He is currently completing work on Affirmative Reaction: White
Masculinities and the Politics of Representation, a book-length examination of contemporary forms of
masculinity in U.S. culture.

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(Mis)recognition and the middle-class/bourgeois gaze: A case study
of Wife Swap

Samantha. A. Lyle�

Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick, Warwick, UK

This article will argue that Wife Swap and other ‘reality’ television formats can be seen as part
of a wider project: a bourgeois project that, on the one hand, is preoccupied with self-

improvement and the accrual of just the right forms of cultural, symbolic and economic

capital, and on the other, defines itself in opposition to an imagined working-class project
of disinvestment of the self. This article argues for the existence of a middle-class gaze in
the production of ‘reality’ television shows in general and in Wife Swap in particular and
examines the complex and inextricable links between the middle-class gaze and gender.

Keywords: Feminism; gender; individualisation; middle-class gaze; ‘reality’ television;
social class

Introduction

This article originates from my profound reactions to ‘reality’ television in general and to a

particular episode from Series One of Wife Swap broadcast in 2003 (Channel 4). The episode

in which Lizzie and Emma exchange families is most obviously troubling because of the dra-

matic way in which Lizzie brings a halt to the swap. In this article I will argue that this

episode exemplifies many of the themes pertinent to the numerous series of Wife Swap and

‘reality’ television more widely, most notably those relating to contemporary discourses circu-

lating about social class and gender.

When Bafta Award-winning ‘reality’ television show Wife Swap first aired in 2003 it was an

instant hit, with audience figures peaking at 7.2 million for the first series (http://www.rdfmedia.
com/reality/WifeSwap.asp).1 It is one of several high-profile television programmes made by
RDF Media, including Holiday Showdown and Ladette to Lady. They all involve taking people

out of their own environment and placing in them in one which is organised around values different

from those they have previously expressed. Furthermore, ‘reality’ television’s modus operandi is

designed to foster discomfort with the aim of fostering individual self-recognition and self-

improvement. As I will argue, the importance of such explicit individualism is a key theme in

debates around the significance of social class.

Wife Swap provides ample opportunities for reflecting upon both class and gender, for the

participants, audience and programme makers. As the narrator tells us, the two couples have

never met, ‘but the wives have agreed to swap homes, husbands and children for two weeks

to see what they can learn about their own lives’. In preparation, both women fill in a

‘manual’ on how their own household is organised, including details of income, the roles of

family members and the family’s social routine. In the first week the wives have to follow

the rules as outlined in the household manual. In the second week they may try to lay down

new rules for the family. Class differences are highlighted by the producers by the selection

ISSN 1740-5904 print/ISSN 1740-5912 online

# 2008 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/17405900802405239

http://www.informaworld.com

�Email: s.a.lyle@warwick.ac.uk

Critical Discourse Studies

Vol. 5, No. 4, November 2008, 319 – 330

of particular couples, while gender is centralised not only by the emphasis on women’s and

men’s family roles, but also by the adoption of melodramatic techniques which Woods and

Skeggs (2008) associate with a genre attracting a female spectatorship.

This article will argue that Wife Swap and other ‘reality’ television formats can be seen as

part of a wider project: a bourgeois project that, on the one hand, is preoccupied with self-

improvement and the accrual of just the right forms of cultural, symbolic and economic

capital, and on the other, defines itself in opposition to an imagined working-class project of dis-

investment of the self. At the heart of Wife Swap lie inescapable debates regarding the precise

roles of men (husbands/fathers) and women (wives/mothers) and how these relate to the links
between lifestyle choices and social class.

I propose the term middle-class gaze to understand the ways in which the media opera-

tionalise middle-class habitus, a Bourdieusian (1984) term which Skeggs (2004) has deployed

when theorising about the making of middle-class ‘selves’. I suggest that the middle-class gaze

in this context is structured and structuring class debates in the production of ‘reality’ televi-

sion formats such as Wife Swap. The main thrust of the term echoes the work of film theorist

Mulvey (1988), who argues for the existence of a male gaze which is evidenced not just in the

Freudian understanding of anxiety that woman is said to ignite, but also by virtue of the fact

that most aspects of the films production are informed by patriarchy in all its (dis)embodied

forms. My use of the term suggests that a middle-class gaze is a mode of production (symbolic

as well as material) which is underpinned by an anxiety about the working classes that has

historically entailed the (mis)recognition of the working class as being of lesser value, as

particularly suited to specific forms of labour, and as a pathological, abject other. This (mis)-

recognition of the working class shores up the upper and middle classes’ own identities as of

greater value and as also particularly suited to different, yet specific, forms of labour, as

morally good and right and as the embodiment of propriety and good taste (Skeggs, 2004;

Sayer, 2005). After briefly locating ‘reality’ television in its televisual context, I will illustrate,

through the work of new class theorists, the imperatives that are currently at work in the making

of the working and middle classes, specifically in relation to gender, to argue for the significance

of social class in the UK. The subsequent section will include a close reading of the Lizzie and

Emma episode to illustrate the analytic capacity of the

middle-class gaze.

Locating Wife Swap

‘Reality’ television is a worldwide phenomenon and much has been written about why ‘we’

appear to be so fascinated by the mundane and intimate daily behaviour of ‘ordinary people’

(Hill, 2002; van Zoonen, 2001). Of several explanatory readings of the phenomenon, I will con-

sider those advanced by Dovey (2000) and van Zoonen (2001). Dovey argues for an economic

perspective as well as consideration of the perceptual shifts of what constitutes appropriate

public and private behaviour. He claims that an expensive and ideologically suspect tradition

in documentary film and television, combined with the explosion of commercial television, pre-

cipitated the decline of documentary. The ‘authenticity’ and subjectivity that used to underpin

the validity of documentaries about social problems has now been linked, through the new tele-

vision formats, to the exploration of individual subjectivities.

Although it marks a shift from the explicit remit of documentary makers to inform the

general public about social problems, Wife Swap also purports to have an informative

aspect – but in this case for the individual participants of the show, providing them, as well

as the audience, with ‘a chance to see how others live their lives and to reflect on what they

might learn from this’ (voice over, Wife Swap). It is instructive to think about how the rise

of ‘reality’ television programming on Channel 4 came about at the same time as the 1992

320 S.A. Lyle

Broadcasting Act, since this had major implications for Channel 4. Until that time, Channel 4’s

remit was as a public broadcaster and it did not have to secure its own funding but shared

commercial advertising with ITV. When Channel 4 began to generate its own funding,

there was a shift in its output to a stronger emphasis on programmes that would appeal to a

wider audience, as well as an increase in imported big hit shows from the United States. Its

commitment to public broadcasting and its reputation for more challenging and risky televi-

sion-making, combined with the financial imperative to secure large audience ratings, is the

context in which its choices to commission dramatic but ‘edgy’ ‘reality’ television formats

like Wife Swap are made (R. Moseley personal correspondence). ‘Reality’ formats also

echo traditional documentaries in their use of ‘ordinary’ people, rather than paid actors, but

have moved away from making clear links between individual problems and social conditions

(Corner, 1996).

Indeed, Dovey (2000) argues that the post-war ideological shift towards the individual and

the emergence of new technologies and commercial opportunities has enabled the relationship

between individual subjectivities and social problems to be un-coupled in favour of the explora-

tion of individual subjectivities in an ever-widening range of scenarios. He writes that the ‘up-

close-and-personal’ nature of reality/factual shows is ‘characterised by a shifting understanding
of what constitutes the acceptable domains of the private and the public’ (Dovey, 2000 p. 21). He

supports this with reference to the emergence of programmes using the video diary format, the

prevalence of the ‘confessional’ in a variety of chat/self-help shows, and the uncharacteristic
outpouring of ‘grief’ in the wake of the death of Princess Diana. Van Zoonen (2001) agrees,

further arguing that the proliferation of intimate subjectivities available through factual/
reality formats and their huge popularity can be read as acts of resistance to bourgeois proprieties

involving the strict demarcation of behaviours appropriate to public and private spheres.

This rather positive explanation for the rise of the phenomenon is challenged if we use the

middle-class gaze to analyse the show’s production in relation to the sorts of moralities that

are traded.

Writing about Wife Swap, Helen Piper (2004, p. 276) argues that class and specifically the

notion of aspirational consumption is a central theme of the show for audiences, ‘inviting affinity

or disaffinity with its display of cultural tastes’. However we should recognise that this invitation

is not neutral but structured by a middle-class gaze and is therefore more problematic than

Piper’s analysis might suggest. Another important way that the concept of a middle-class

gaze might usefully be deployed is when thinking about whose values are given more authority.

Piper (2004) rightly argues that ‘an opposition between normality and difference is constructed

by the inclusion of extreme characters’. She uses the example of the Dee and Sonia episode,

which contrasts a white, working-class and racist family with a family that is aspiring upper

working class and black. Piper (2004) argues that this episode ‘represent positions that are popu-

larly and politically outmoded and reactionary so they confine the debate to a battle that is

always already won, at least in principle (though clearly not in practice)’. This may be true

for the episode to which she refers, where racism, recognised as outmoded, takes centre

stage, but this is not true for class, where the debate for which values have positive status

may have been started but has certainly not been won. However, meaning making is open to con-

testation. The research of Woods and Skeggs (2008) and Skeggs and Woods (2004, 2004 – 2008)

suggests that a middle-class gaze is not monolithic and that working-class viewers, at least, reg-

ularly both re-inscribe, re-work and challenge the normative assumptions of the middle-class

gaze in their own television watching.

In the next section I shall move to examine recent debates on class, individualisation and

gender, and link current political projects, especially those embodied by New Labour, to

‘reality’ television formats such as Wife Swap.

Critical Discourse Studies 321

Social class and the imperative of self-improvement

As the subtitle above suggests, the resurgence of debates on social class in recent years has renewed

interest in the centrality of social class to social processes, social mobility and individual life

chances, but in a distinctive fashion (Beck & Beck-Gernsheim, 2001; Bottero, 2004; Crompton,

2006; Fraser, 2000; Giddens, 1991; Johnson & Lawler, 2005; Kelly, 2001; McDowell, 2006;

Nayak, 2006; Reay, 2005; Savage et al., 2005; Sayer, 2005; Skeggs, 1997, 2004, 2005; Walkerdine,

2003). Changes in global economies and a move in the UK towards a service and knowledge

economy and the concomitant expansion of further and higher education have led to claims by

some sociologists that social class has become an increasingly redundant concept. Individuals

are thought to have greater freedom to plan and set the terms of their own biographies, leading

to the attenuation of class structures/constraints. Despite theoretical nuances between the
writers, such debates have become known as the ‘individualisation’ thesis.

However Skeggs (2004) argues that it is crucial to recognise that the centralisation of indi-

vidual aspirations, as in the work of Beck (1992) and Giddens (1991), is produced within a

middle-class habitus that should be challenged by empirically based theorisation making

class, gender and ‘race’ visible. Research documents how class and gender, often inscribed

on the body, continue to impact upon social mobility, while aspects of working-classness, in par-

ticular, remain an aspect of social derogation (McDowell, 2006; Reay, 2005; Sayer, 2005;

Skeggs, 1997, 2004, 2005; Walkerdine, 2003). The middle-class gaze as we see it on ‘reality’

television revolves around taste and appearance. The acquisition of ‘taste’ is signified through

knowledge of and access to cultural artefacts. Skeggs argues,

Appearance matters. It is the means by which others are recognized and it is part of the way in
which we want to recognize ourselves. But this is not just a matter of interpersonal, even dialogical
construction of subjectivity; it is a matter of how symbolic violence may or may not occur. (Skeggs,
2000, p. 129)

Taste is not simply a cultural matter but has distinct political and economic dimensions. Skeggs

(2004) charts how the most recent ideologies of the neo-liberal economic order privilege and

naturalise what Paul du Gay (1996) terms the ‘enterprising self’, whereby people are required

to become ‘entrepreneurs of the self’ – to accrue and exchange the ‘correct’ cultural, economic

and moral capital or resources – that is, to become a subject with value. As Skeggs (2004, p. 77)

argues, ‘we have different access to becoming a subject with value’. She further argues that

Thatcherism, Blairism, market analysts and Third Way sociologists all produce a normative

rhetoric of individualisation, implying that we can all be middle-class now. Those who

cannot or will not submit themselves to the processes that create an enterprising ‘self-improving’

aesthetic self which will hold up under the surveillance of the middle-class/bourgeois gaze can
be identified as part of a variously posited ‘problem’, not part of the ‘solution’. So well hidden is

the middle-class habitus that a veil is placed over collective/class (in)action and the way in
which constitutive limits are set through the gendered, racial and classed signifiers inscribed

upon the body.

Of course much of this self-improvement is linked to class mobility, but it is also linked to

gender, explicitly so in a show like Wife Swap. Skeggs (1997, 2004) argues that white, working-

class women have historically and remain today the objects of abject, visceral affects which

emanate from the middle classes. Skeggs (1997, 2004) and Parker and Lyle (2005, in press)

further argue that the middle classes pathologise the working class in order to shore up their

own identities. Feminists have argued that, because women are the symbolic bearers of cultural

and therefore class identity, femininity and class are inextricably linked (Yuval Davis, 1997).

Women’s propriety is monitored through mechanisms that control women’s conduct through

surveillance and a gamut of social and state authorised sanctions. Presenting oneself in public

322 S.A. Lyle

as decorous is a key signifier of middle-class status, just as allowing oneself to appear indecorous

marks one as working class. The working class have long been associated with excess, with

inability to control basic desires, while bourgeois notions of femininity have been constructed

in opposition to so-called working-class femininities (Skeggs 1997, 2004).

It is the middle-class gaze, coupled with the neo-liberal abhorrence of economic dependence

on the state that informs the production and consumption of programmes such as Wife Swap.

Class struggles are constantly (re)produced through the acquisition and display of ‘taste’.

Skeggs’s (2000, p. 136) argument that ‘judgments are still made on the basis of appearance

and read as conduct’ is highly pertinent for an analysis of Wife Swap.

While all texts are polysemic, through an examination of my own reactions to the show, I

will argue that the Lizzie and Emma episode personifies the above debates about class,

gender and individualisation and the anxiety that they produce. I will argue that one of the domi-

nant and yet veiled roles of ‘reality’ television is the (re)production of middle-class values via

the (re)production of the working class as abject other. Through a close reading of pertinent

extracts I will illustrate how the show’s ostensible main aim – improvement in the family

unit – has mixed results for the participants, including strong resistance to, as well as the adop-

tion of, the middle-class gaze by participants.

Lizzie and Emma

Every episode of Wife Swap opens with introductory shots of the participants: the wives, their

husbands and their children. In this ‘getting to know you’ sequence we also see shots of the par-

ticipants’ homes, and sometimes their cars. From the beginning of the show participants are

being fixed in class terms. We are first introduced to the two smiling families by the use of

their ‘family’ name. In this episode we are told that Colin and Emma Sprye have been

married for 10 years and have two children, a boy and a girl. The establishing shot shows

their family as a whole, followed by close-up shots of each family member. Both parents are

dressed smart-casual, flanking their two children; Emma stands next to her daughter and

Colin next to their son. Both children are also dressed smart-casual. They look like the model

2.4 family.

Mark and Lizzie Bardsley are not introduced in the same way. Unlike the Spryes we are told

straight away where they are from: Rochdale. No mention is made of how long they have been

married. The establishing shot of Mark and Lizzie is of them both holding young children – one-

year-old twins. The camera pans away and focuses on a further six children, one after the other.

In contrast to the Sprye family’s introduction, we are told the ages of all their eight children, and

the slow revelation of the size of their family is clearly for dramatic effect. The editing makes

perfect sense within the context of alarmist media debates round falling birth rates in the UK

where profound class anxieties are rehearsed through ‘concerns’ about the right sort (read:

middle-class) of people not having enough children and too many of the wrong sort (read:

state-dependent, working-class and teenagers) having too many. The participants’ dress stereo-

typically connotes working-classness: Mark and Lizzie are in matching sportswear. Lizzie is

overweight, as is one of their girls. Mark has visible tattoos, the two boys have shaved heads

like their Dad and one of the young twins is sucking on a bottle. All of the Bardsley family

are shown in greater close-up than the Sprye family, fetishising what Moseley (2000, p. 314)

calls ‘the threatening excessiveness of the ordinary’.

My initial reactions to this episode were probably not unlike those of other middle-class

viewers. Even before the participants’ employment status is revealed, I had already assigned

Lizzie and Mark a ‘non-respectable’ working-class status and positioned Emma and Colin as

middle-class-ish. At this stage in the show I already knew that this swap was loaded with

Critical Discourse Studies 323

explosive potential. I had already situated both families into common class narratives; I already

‘know’ that these families are going to clash because their appearance will be read as conduct

(Skeggs, 2000). My own reaction was distaste at the size of Lizzie’s family, at Mark’s

tattoos, their matching clothes, their overweight and ‘un-kempt look’. We are told they are

from ‘the North’, which in Britain is code for ‘working-class’. Although at the time a relatively

naive viewer, I was already well versed in what Skeggs (2000) calls the (mis)recognition of the

working classes as pathological and readily recognise when ‘[stereo] typical examples of

working-class life are exhibited for our contemplation’ (Cook, 2000, p. 105).

The choice of participants by the programme-makers, and the way in which the Spryes and

the Bardsleys are juxtaposed within the first few minutes of the show, combined with the slow

revealing of all the children is, I would argue, intended to fix them as physically repulsive in

class terms. As Skeggs (1997, 2000, 2004) argues: white working-class woman has always

been ‘othered’ by the middle classes; everything that she does is subject to surveillance, criticism

and legislation in a society dominated by higher classes. Judgement and scorn have been thrown

at her dress, her public and private conduct, how she raises her family, the men she loves, the

paid work that she does/does not do. She has been a scapegoat for the nation’s ills from the pros-
titution laws of the nineteenth century (Walkowitz, 1984) to the lone mothers debates in the

1990s (see Wright and Jagger, 1999 Eds). While the specific historical antecedents of current

debate may not be known to the majority of the viewers, I would argue that many of them

will be more or less conversant with the implicit class codes replete in this section of the

show.
2

In fact, I would argue that the success of the show rests upon it.

However, there is something else at work here – we learn quickly that the Sprye family is not

really middle class; they make a number of ‘blunders’ that expose their aspirations to be middle

class. In the next part of the show, the wives are shown talking about their family values. Now

the focus is on Emma, and everything she says is seen in contrast to what we already know about

Lizzie. The information about the Spryes is presented through voice-overs, by Emma and Colin

themselves, and ‘interviews’ with Emma. Emma describes herself and Colin as a ‘modern

couple’, ‘ambitious’ and ‘aspirational’. Despite having two children she does not consider

herself to be maternal: ‘I’m not a maternal mother’. This is a pivotal moment in the show: in

each episode there is a point at which the more ‘respectable’ family reveals something about

themselves that is potentially discrediting. In this episode, Emma’s relationship to motherhood

is presented as problematic. While Emma is certainly positioned in opposition to Lizzie, it

appears that Emma is not middle class either; rather she has middle-class aspirations. She is

heavily invested in the bourgeois project of self-improvement, but as a family they have not

‘made it’ – yet. We learn that Emma is a secretary, while Colin is the manager of a nightclub;

crucially they are planning to open their own restaurant. Emma states that her ideal home would

be ‘a mansion, with a pool and a butler maybe’. In saying this, Emma exposes that she is not

conversant with middle-class codes that dictate (whatever the reality) that the desire for

upward mobility and social and financial ambitions should be expressed discretely, if at all,

so as to seem invisible in effort and self-evident in achievement.

I would argue that Emma and Colin have been chosen as participants because they are differ-

ent enough from Lizzie and Mark to provide conflict, drama and spectacle, but also for another

crucial reason: they are open to ridicule at this stage in the programme by a more ‘authentic’

middle-class gaze which can spot that they aspire to, but do not possess, the signifiers of the

middle classes.
3

They can also be the object of ridicule and humour for the working classes.

Perhaps one of the few working-class defences against the controlling and judgemental gaze

of the middle classes is to accuse them of being pretentious. Skeggs argues ‘not only is anti-

pretentious humour a form of surveillance and a critique of the middle-class by the working-

class, it also operates as a form of surveillance within the middle-class . . . as they too must

324 S.A. Lyle

not step outside of their social position’ (Skeggs, 2004, p. 114). The distinctions that operate in

the middle classes are not fully explored by Skeggs; what my reading of Wife Swap highlights is

another important piece of boundary work, namely that between the more established/authentic
middle classes (programme makers and a knowing audience) and the lower middle classes such

as the Spryes.

As we know, women and appropriate femininities are a central focus of the show; these are

always played out in antagonistic terms, as illustrated in a segment shot before the women have

left their own homes:

Narrator: Lizzie is concerned what Mark’s ‘new wife’ might be like.
Lizzie: Well I don’t know she might be a trollop, could she not, that’s putting it politely.
The camera cuts to Emma showing the camera a silver glitzy dress that she is about to unpack. Cut to
Lizzie.
Lizzie: . . . I don’t know if she gets a bit frisky after she’s had a drink do I? Goodness knows what
she’ll be saying about me [direct to camera], but he’s mine so keep your mawls off!

The camera cuts to Emma, still holding up the dress.

Emma: I hope I’ll be getting a lot of wear out of this in the new house.
Cut to Lizzie holding up a pair of jeans.
Lizzie: . . . [direct to the camera] No! They’re not a size ten . . . but I don’t care, because me husband
loves me!

Cut to Emma who is combing her shoulder length dyed blond hair in front of a full length mirror.
Emma: . . . Mark would like his new wife to be glamorous, conscious about her appearance and a
good conversationalist.

Cut to Lizzie who puts on and then takes off a long hair piece saying.
Lizzie: Ooh, I’m a stunner aren’t I! (Laughs as she packs it into her bag).

The short montage ends and we see the wives leaving their homes and saying goodbye to

their families. This extract serves to further underline the differences between the two families

through the two women’s seemingly different commitment to and investment in their feminin-

ities. The editing of this part of the show serves a number of purposes that reflect the imperatives

of a middle-class gaze at work. Showing Lizzie first and the fast cuts to Emma initially work to

show Lizzie’s fears about Emma’s motives, but my own internalised middle-class gaze tells me

that it is laughable that Emma would be sexually attracted to a man like Lizzie’s husband Mark.

Overall the joke is on both women because we ‘know’ that Lizzie does not fulfil the desired

characteristics that Emma has listed and that Emma is not going to get an opportunity to

wear her glitzy dress.

Next the wives get to explore their new homes before they meet their new families: these

sequences are strikingly similar in each episode. The wives look around, the more ‘middle-

class’ wives appear to struggle to hide disdain at the ‘state’ of their new homes; the

‘working-class’ wives invariably comment on how nice, smart and ‘posh’ their new homes

are. Opening a kitchen cupboard Lizzie mimics a ‘posh’ accent and says ‘oohh very posh,

shops at Sainsbury’s’. Which supermarket one shops in is a still a signifier of class in Britain.

The most mundane aspects of family life such as food shopping are loaded with class meaning.

Through reading the household manual and by beginning to live under the rules of the other

wife, every episode portrays a period of culture shock and adjustment for the swapped wives.

These are typically played out in relation to how the other wife manages the household, such

as the cleanliness of the home, the level of investment in and deployment of taste in the interior

decoration, the gender division of labour regarding childcare as well as paid work. In the version

that the programme makers give us, both wives seem very aware of the ‘differences’ in the

Critical Discourse Studies 325

wifely practices of the other, but for Emma and far more profoundly for Lizzie, what unfolds is

the consequence of the symbolic violence of the middle-class gaze in action.

The programme continues with the use of a voice-over that informs us that, as a ‘modern’

husband, Colin does all the cooking; Emma has not seen the cooker in six months. Lizzie, we

are told, does all the cooking. Next we see the wives going through the household manual; as

with the previous montage, Lizzie’s narrative is privileged with Emma’s juxtaposed. If we

have any doubts about Emma and Colin’s ‘values’, the following excerpt from the household

manual dispels them; Lizzie reads out loud:
4

Lizzie: We are hard workers and do not like people who don’t have life ambitions, we are achievers
and aspirational.

A shocked Lizzie says

Lizzie: To put that in a book, to have somebody else to come in and have to read it, it’s as if you feel
that person’s not worthy to come into your house.

Meanwhile, Emma is reading that both Lizzie and Mark are unemployed, and says ‘Right, no one

works then’. The message is clear: Emma only considers paid work to be legitimate, echoing

many of the dominant discourses circulating about the working-class in the contemporary as

well as age-old debates about ‘women’s work’. But as Skeggs (1997) argues, working-class

women know when they are being looked down upon – and Lizzie is no exception.

The swap progresses and for the rest of the first evening Lizzie in conversation with Colin is

shown to be defensive about the benefits of organic food, calling Colin a ‘wuss’
5

because he

enjoys doing the majority of the cooking and housework. At the other end of the country

Emma is coming to grips with what appears to be a more traditional division of labour;

looking after eight children overwhelms her and she is reduced to tears on a number of

occasions. Mark performs his masculinity in a very rigid, ‘old-fashioned’ way when making

use of the video diary, can of lager in one hand, hand-rolled cigarette in the other, his

‘entries’ are peppered with expletives. The message is clear: Mark is the opposite of Colin.
6

The differences between the families are dramatised through the husbands’ performative mas-

culinities, which are associated with class stereotypes (Beynon, 2002), for instance, the

working-class as aggressive, rigid and old-fashioned and the aspiring middle class as more

open to ideas, progressive in their gender roles, modern.

As the show progresses it is clear that Lizzie is feeling the full weight of the middle-class

gaze: in Emma’s place of work, her home and in the restaurant to which Colin takes her.

Colin reads Lizzie’s defensive, loud and increasingly antagonist behaviour as jealousy, which

could also be read as ‘justified resentment’ (Hughes, 2007), a term which takes far better

account of the unequal and unjust economic structures which frame social class antagonisms

than a derogatory word like jealousy.

During the swap Colin shows pictures of Emma to Lizzie, and asks Lizzie how she feels

about Emma being in her house. Lizzie has learned that Colin was married when he and

Emma first got together. For Lizzie this is the catalyst (or pretext) for her withdrawal from

the swap. The conversation between Lizzie and Colin turns into an argument about trust and infi-

delity. Here, issues of sexual morality and appropriate conduct for women and men, which I have

already argued are dripping with classed discourses, are battled through. Colin and Emma see-

mingly have completely different views; Lizzie sees all women as a potential threat to the

marital bed and places all responsibility on the woman’s shoulders; Colin takes a more ‘pro-

gressive’ stance of trusting his partner. I suggest that the middle-class gaze here works

towards a preferred reading of this scenario through which Lizzie’s ideas of gender, fidelity

and family formation are made to look outdated and ridiculous in the context of her own

family formation, while Colin and Emma’s are presented as reasonable and modern.

326 S.A. Lyle

Lizzie’s behaviour cannot be straightforwardly read. The middle-class gaze and its layers of

symbolic violence buffet Lizzie throughout the show. However, in her own way she acknowl-

edges it, challenges it and subverts it by parodying a ‘posh’ accent, defending her own position

while criticising the Spryes’s, and ultimately she calls a halt to the swap after three days. Lizzie

is well aware of the way her femininity (and her smoking) is perceived, interrupting Colin when

he says ‘I think you’re . . .’

Lizzie: You think I’m picky, you think I am obnoxious and you think I am rude . . . and you don’t like
me, do you not . . . way hey! Life’s a bitch . . . And on that note [puts on ‘posh’ voice] I shall go and
intake some nicotine.

Lizzie’s asthma is brought on by staying up all night worrying and smoking, so she fails to go to

work on the third day of the swap. Lizzie is interviewed in bed where the impact of the swap (and

I would argue, the symbolic violence of the middle-class gaze) hits her:

Lizzie: She’s got every thing and I’ve got nothing, that’s the way that it feels.

That evening Lizzie books herself into a hotel and the swap is off. The explanation that Lizzie

gives is that she has found out that Colin was married when he and Emma got together, and feels

that she does not want a women ‘like that’ in her house. My initial response to Lizzie’s reasons

for halting the swap was that she was being irrational and ridiculous. I suggest that this is not an

unreasonable audience reading considering how the programme has positioned her thus far. The

editing of the programme, which includes news of her asthma attack conveyed via voice-over

accompanied by shots of her smoking in her nightie, works to inform us that Lizzie is at best

contradictory if not irrational.

As in every episode of Wife Swap, the couples ultimately meet up to discuss their experi-

ences. This is always a volatile and dramatic part of the show, and as the entire show is

wired for conflict this should come as no surprise. The confrontation between Lizzie and

Emma largely involves Lizzie shouting at Emma. Emma appears to be the model of self-

restraint by not shouting back, positioning herself self-righteously as morally superior to

Lizzie and Mark. In the extract below we see that what Lizzie shouts is painfully revealing

not only of the overwhelming force with which the symbolic violence wreaked by the swap

but also of the very distinct ways in which the middle-class gaze revolves around the contested

sites of gender, work, parenting and health/life styles. For example:

Emma: I am not used to staying in the home everyday living off benefits; I go out and earn my living.
Lizzie: So do you see us as second class citizens because we are in receipt of benefits?
Emma: Yeah, I do.

Further interaction includes Emma telling Lizzie she should not smoke around her children and

telling Mark that he should get a job and be independent. Here Emma again reveals the ambig-

uous nature of the middle classes by demonstrating both the lack of reserve associated with the

upper-middle classes and the adoption of a moralising tone associated with the lower-middle

classes. Lizzie continues:

Lizzie: What you think doesn’t come into it, at the end of the day the way you live your life and your
whole lifestyle is an out-and-out farce . . . you’re so pathetic Barbie Doll, Miss Penelope . . . you’re
pretty sad really aren’t ya.

While Lizzie is talking and defending her family by trying to expose Emma and Colin’s preten-

sions to middle-classness, the shot we see is of Emma and Colin who are just smiling and looking

on in disbelief as Lizzie’s voice gets louder and louder.

Lizzie: You might think I am a gobby cow, whoopee de do for you, do you want a Blue Peter badge
or something like that.

Critical Discourse Studies 327

Emma, smiling, glances down then laughingly looks towards Colin.

Lizzie: Yeah look down your noses at us.
Colin: It’s not a question of looking down our noses Lizzie.
Lizzie: [she is getting really angry at Colin, starts pointing her finger at them] Don’t shout at me.
You are no better or no worse than I am . . . don’t start fluttering your eyelids at my husband
you fucking tart.

Emma talks to Colin telling him to leave her to deal with Lizzie.

Lizzie: [pulling a face at Emma] There’s me the gobby cow and there’s you sitting there, the blonde
one, acting or civil and sophisticated like one that you like to think that you are – but you’re not

Any feelings of disdain that I have for Lizzie and Mark turn to pity – until I remember that ‘Any

judgement of the working-class as negative [including pity] is an attempt by the middle-class to

accrue value’ (Skeggs, 2004, p. 104), at which point I feel complicit, guilty recognition and

finally empathy. Mark is trying to get a word in edgewise and Emma tries to make room for

him to speak:

Lizzie: Hey you don’t you fucking give my husband permission to talk [she gets up and is looking
ready to grab Emma] you stupid fucking Moo.

Mark tells Lizzie to calm down, which she does; he explains that he will talk when he wants to

talk

Lizzie: No . . . she sat there, fucking patronising cow, tits on fucking two with her [Lizzie does what
can only be described as a crude imitation of a snooty woman with large breasts as she shouts] look at
me! Look at me!
Mark: You can be very patronising towards us.
Colin: I just don’t think she trusts you Mark, she sees Emma, beautiful Emma there . . . and you are
threatened by Emma being there Liz.

Lizzie questions Emma’s morals and Emma explains the circumstances of her and Colin coming

together and how she fell madly in love; the editing gives us the impression that this silences

Lizzie, suggestive of the dictum that love conquers all. The next shot shows Lizzie trying to

explain her anguish by drawing on a distinctly moralistic tone that contrasts the love, emotional

commitment and protection of a family against the pleasure in the cultivation and consumption

of things that she thinks characterises Emma and Colin:.

Lizzie: When you’re home every day with your kids and your husband and you tell them everyday
that you love ‘em, and you do. But when you’re in an extreme situation such as this one you realise
how much [Lizzie starts crying and trying to hold back the tears] you love them and they’re yours,
they are the most precious things to you, they’re not your belongings, they’re yours.
Colin: It’s the first time I’ve seen you with emotion all week Liz.
Mark: She is normal.

The episode ends with Lizzie’s face desperate to not cry and then a shot of all of them hugging

goodbye. The ending provided by the programme makers hints at dilemmas very close to the

heart for the middle classes. That is, the tensions that come about from the struggle for distinc-

tion, such as the accrual and display of taste and morality via consumptive habits, all of which

take time and money. Ironically, as the last extract suggests, such investments ultimately may

threaten a key site of middle-class superiority – the family.

Conclusions

I have argued that the framing and investigation of individuals through stereotypical ways of

‘knowing’ the working and lower-middle classes simultaneously evoke anxiety around

gender, taste, employment, parenting and health and work to shore up middle-class identities

328 S.A. Lyle

and hegemony. The controlling and pervasive nature of the middle-class gaze structures the par-

ticipant’s experiences during the swap and encourages a preferred reading by the audience in

terms of classed identities, thus (re)producing symbolic violence through viewer affects. The

programme makers have of course not invented such class antagonisms, and despite Lizzie’s

powerful act of halting the swap, are implicated in (re)producing a pervasive and controlling

middle-class gaze.

The programme provides an example of how the middle-class gaze not only operates as an

unofficial – though officially sanctioned – form of social (re)production, but may also be chal-

lenged in self-defence by those against whom it is directed. I have argued that the middle-class

gaze is not monolithic but in certain contexts, such as the production of ‘reality’ television shows

like Wife Swap, its effects are somewhat over-determining for participants and (though less

clearly) for some viewers. In conclusion, it is important to be clear that the programme

makers have selected participants for their incompatibility and dramatic potential. We see

that the gaze operates in three distinct but interlinked ways, on and from the participants, the

producers of the programme and the audience. All are both surveying and surveyed but with

unequal access to modes of self-narrativisation that enable individuals to present themselves

as persons of equal value.

Notes on contributor

Samantha Lyle is currently an ESRC-funded PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at the Univer-
sity of Warwick. Her research focuses on formations of social class in general and middle class-ness in
particular.

Notes

1. Wood and Skeggs (2008) counted 92 ‘different reality television programmes from UK terrestrial and
free-view television packages in one week in November 2005’.

2. Skeggs, Wood and Thumin (2008) explore through Wood’s (in press) Text In-Action methodology how
working-class and middle-class research participants actually reacted to viewing programmes such as
Wife Swap, and there appear to be strong differences between the groups.

3. I am unsure whether this exposes or further conceals that the process by which cultural capital is accrued
is socially constructed because the Spryes’s ‘not there yet’ status could serve to further naturalise it.
I would add that the programme makers are in effect inviting a section of its audience ‘who are in
the know’ to collude with the subtlety of the differences amongst the middle-classes.

4. The DVD has special features, one of which is that you can look at the household manuals; there is a
section which asks the wives to sum up the philosophy of their family. Unless they had the DVD or
had seen all episodes, the viewer would not know about this.

5. This word is used to describe a man who is weak and effeminate, i.e. not a ‘real’ man.
6. There are many more examples of the ways in which the husbands are subjected to the middle-class gaze

through the investigation of their masculinities. I am committed to the theorising of masculinities as part
of a feminist project; however space does not permit that analysis to take place here.

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330 S.A. Lyle

https://doi.org/10.1177/1746847717695434

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an interdisciplinary journal
2017, Vol. 12(2) 138 –155
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Frank Grimes’ Enemy:
Precarious Labour and
Realism in The Simpsons

Greg Sharzer
Kyung Hee University, Gyeonggi-do, Republic of Korea

Abstract
Although many fans have identified the end of The Simpsons’ golden era in 1997, at the beginning
of season nine, there has been little critical analysis of what that shift signified for the show and for
popular culture as a whole. For The Simpsons, this shift signifies two important qualitative changes:
first, in the changing definition of work, from a Fordist model of employment to a precarious one,
and second, as a result of the first, in its mode of realism, moving from an internally coherent to
a fractured portrayal of the characters’ lives. The first sign of this transformation comes in season
eight through the character of Frank Grimes. His relationship to Homer marks a turning point,
after which characters and viewers alike are no longer able to inhabit a stable Fordist universe. If
the task of realism, as a mode of expression is to approach social reality then The Simpsons’ failure
to provide consistent characterizations reflects neoliberalism’s own dislocations.

Keywords
animated series, capitalism, cultural studies, Frank Grimes, Homer Simpson, neoliberalism,
precarity, realism, The Simpsons, working class

The Simpsons has seen better days. As far back as 2004, Harry Shearer, voice actor of Mr. Burns,
Waylon Smithers Jr. and over a dozen other major characters, was stating publicly that he could not
watch recent episodes since they compared so poorly to earlier ones (Legett, 2004). In 2014, he
was asked if he thought the show’s quality had declined and answered, ‘I think about it but I don’t
talk about it’ (Hogan, 2014). As of 2017, the show has continued for 28 seasons, withstanding rat-
ings a tenth of its golden era (Dodge, 2014) and even the deaths of major voice actors. This could
be due to an estimated total franchise revenue of between US$2.8 billion and $13 billion (Molloy,

Corresponding author:
Greg Sharzer, Department of Global Communication, Kyung Hee University, 1732 Deogyeong-daero, Giheung-gu,
Yongin-si, Gyeonggi-do 17104, Republic of Korea.
Email: gsharzer@gmail.com

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Sharzer 139

2011; Statistics Brain, 2016). However, a show that once defined a satirical, counter-hegemonic
cultural space for millions of people is well past its golden era.

It could be hoped that the nearly two decades since seasons 2 to 9, when that era ended,1 would
have seen a critical consensus develop about the show‘s impact. While many authors have used
The Simpsons to illuminate specific aspects of American society,2 there have been few attempts to
synthesize its narrative arc to see what its shifts mean for contemporary popular consciousness. For
this purpose, we can follow Wallace (2001: 148) in his privileging of The Simpsons as a text which,
‘like all cultural products, develops from and reflects the material and historical conditions of the
age in which it was created; reflects, in other words, the ideology of capitalism in late twentieth-
century America’ (emphasis in original).

That ideology is neoliberalism: the shift away from government responsibility for social welfare
and towards the marketization of daily life. The Simpsons reflects that shift in two important ways:
first, in the changing definition of work, from a Fordist model of employment to a precarious one,
and second, as a result of the first, in its mode of realism, moving from an internally coherent to a
fractured portrayal of the characters’ lives. The character of Frank Grimes, in ‘Homer’s Enemy’ (4
May 1997), is representative of these shifts: his relationship to Homer marks a turning point, after
which Simpsons’ characters and viewers alike are no longer able to inhabit a stable Fordist universe.
If the task of realism as a mode of expression is to approach social reality, then The Simpsons’ failure
to provide consistent characterizations reflects neoliberalism’s own dislocations.

During the golden era, the show spoke to the lived experience of working class people, portray-
ing and subverting spaces of home, work and school. This was encapsulated in the Simpsons, a
stereotypical nuclear family: Marge the homemaker, Lisa the preternaturally-intelligent daughter
and Bart the precocious son. But it was Homer, the Simpsons patriarch, who would quickly become
the most popular character on the show as an anti-hero, adopting the worst traits of a stereotyped
working class man: unfit, with a terrible diet and, despite being a safety technician at a nuclear
power plant, no work ethic, ‘a product of the working class in defeat’ (Nesbitt, 2007).3

‘Homer the Heretic’ (8 October 1992), chosen as the best-ever episode in a round-robin elimina-
tion vote by fans in 2006 (No Homers Club, nd), encapsulates the charm of Homer in particular and
The Simpsons’ community in general. After deciding to sleep in on Sunday and skip church, Homer
enjoys the creature comforts of a hot shower, homemade ‘moon waffles’ and sports TV, so much
so that he decides to renounce church altogether. He ignores his wife and neighbours’ entreaties to
return to the faith and, in a direct dialogue with God, rejects the demands of work and social rituals
that are increasingly meaningless: ‘I’m not a bad guy. I work hard and I love my kids … so why
should I spend half my Sunday hearing about how I’m going to hell?’ He is eventually defeated by
his own laziness, setting the house on fire after falling asleep with a lit cigar. However, even his
rescue by kindly, religious townsfolk only reinforces the anti-ideal scenario: Springfield is a town
populated by lovable losers who manage to – barely – survive through their affection for one
another, and in the process revealing the real hypocrisy of institutions – church, government and
school – that function as tools of social control. It is this combination of emotional connection and
social critique that marked dozens of early episodes as part of the golden era.

This began to change at the beginning of season 9, ‘The Principal and the Pauper’ (28 September
1997), when Springfield Elementary principal Seymour Skinner was revealed as an imposter
named Armin Tamzarian. This marked the onset of what one author (Sweatpants C, nd c) has
termed ‘Zombie Simpsons’: animated shells that share the appearance and voices of their past
incarnations but are dramatically and psychologically dead. In the place of consistent characteriza-
tions and plots anchored in a working class reality, the show came to feature ‘emotional treacle,
wild plot twists, poor storytelling, Homer acting insane, and lots of self voiced celebrities’.4 This
involved a heavy reliance on national stereotypes and spontaneous travel episodes, ceaseless

140 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 12(2)

expository, and Homer enduring the kind of physical suffering that The Simpsons itself neatly lam-
pooned in its cartoon-within-a-cartoon Itchy and Scratchy. This shift also meant abandoning one
of the focal points for The Simpsons’ universe: labour.

Transition One: From Fordism to Precarity

‘You know, I’ve had a lot of jobs: boxer, mascot, astronaut, imitation Krusty, baby proofer, trucker,
hippie, plow driver, food critic, conceptual artist … But protecting Springfield, that gives me the
best feeling of all’ (‘Poppa’s Got a Brand New Badge’, 22 May 2002). Homer’s partial list (he
notes many more in the speech) underscores how so many classic episodes revolved around the
theme of work yet, coming shortly after the end of the golden era, it also suggests the paradox of
these later seasons, when work shifts would be more prominent and less significant. Earlier shows
dealt poignantly with the misery of wage-labour and the threat of unemployment. This is not sur-
prising, considering The Simpsons began broadcasting during the recession of the early 1990s,
when millions of Americans were losing their jobs (Nesbitt, 2007). ‘O Brother, Where Art Thou?’
(21 February 1991), in which Homer meets his long-lost brother Herb, an auto magnate whose
business Homer ruins, depends on the decline of the American industrial working class for its nar-
rative heft. Class politics feature explicitly in one of the show’s top-rated episodes, ‘Last Exit to
Springfield’ (11 March 1993), when Homer leads the nuclear power plant out on strike to protect
the union contract’s dental plan. In ‘Burns Verkaufen der Kraftwerk’ (5 December 1991), Homer’s
terrible workplace regime – which is both a product of, and impetus for his own alienated work
ethic – is contrasted with a corporatist Fordism, when German investors buy the power plant. A
new manager, Fritz, tells workers that efficiency is predicated upon ‘Happy workers who feel
secure in their jobs!’ When Homer is fired for his dismal job performance, he tells his wife that he
cannot simply get a new job: ‘Marge, it’s not the money. My job is my identity. If I’m not a safety
whatchamajigger, I’m nothing!’ He cannot quite grasp his Fordist identity, but he knows it is there.

This is even clearer when Homer tries and fails to leave the nuclear plant. When he cannot earn
enough at the bowling alley to support a pregnant Marge, he must return to his hated workplace
(‘And Maggie Makes Three’, 22 January 1995). He is taunted by his boss Mr. Burns, who not only
forces him to crawl through a door marked ‘Supplicant’ to plead for his old job but also installs a
plaque above his workstation reading ‘Don’t forget: you’re here forever.’ The direct message –
there is no escape from wage labour – is accompanied by a startlingly personal expression of class
power: Mr. Burns’ positive joy at Homer’s predicament shows that the job is not just boring and
poorly paid but also a source of humiliation. In a sense, Mr. Burns is a reflection of Homer’s own
alienation: he does not need a plaque to feel inadequate, but it emphasizes, without ambiguity, how
destructive to his personality Homer finds work to be. The fact that Homer covers it with photos of
his youngest daughter, Maggie, changing the letters to ‘Do it for her’ is a sad acknowledgement
that, despite his motivations, he remains trapped in a system he cannot escape from.

It is also a Fordist sentiment: Homer has a system to be stuck in, and his family’s livelihood
depends on it. In a broader sense, class is a central organizing concept for the show: witness
Marge’s attempt to move up several social classes after discovering a Chanel suit hidden in a
discount store (‘Scenes from the Class Struggle in Springfield’, 4 February 1996). Another
time, after alienating Lisa, Homer buys her a pony from a wealthy, aristocratic horse breeder
and must work days and nights to find the money to care for it (‘Lisa’s Pony’, 7 November
1991). Later, the family must choose between buying an air conditioner and a saxophone to
alleviate Lisa’s depression (‘Lisa’s Sax’, 19 October 1997). This logic extends to the entire
town. Homer proves himself worthy of Marge’s sisters’ respect when he saves their job at the
Department of Motor Vehicles, taking responsibility for their cigarettes when they are caught

Sharzer 141

smoking indoors (‘Homer vs. Patty and Selma’, 26 February 1995). When Bart’s friend’s father,
Kirk van Houten, loses his job at the cracker factory (‘A Milhouse Divided’, 1 December 1996)
it is precipitated by his divorce and compounds his personal tragedy that sees him ending up
living in a seedy bachelors’ apartment complex. The consequences of being un- or underem-
ployed are immediate, tragic and complex.

Even when reality begins to stretch in the later classic episodes, and work is treated as a focus
for comedy rather than tragedy, it remains the pivotal point around which characters and plots
rotate. In ‘Homer The Great’ (8 January 1995), Homer joins a secret society and discovers he is
privy to workplace privileges like massage chairs, good parking spots and the freedom to insult his
boss. ‘King-Size Homer’ (5 November 1995) has Homer hating his job so much he over-eats to
become obese, get special accommodation and work from home. What saves the episode from fat-
phobia is the very real motivation to create a better job that Homer demonstrates and our ability to
sympathize with his predicament. He fantasizes about a life spent drinking lemonade in the back
garden and dancing with his wife. On his first day telecommuting, he muses, ‘I pity those poor
suckers on the freeway. Gas, brake, honk. Gas, brake, honk. Honk, honk, punch. Gas, gas, gas.’ His
weight gain is a means to freedom, and he is genuinely hurt when others criticize him for it. King-
Size Homer demonstrates the length Homer is willing to go to escape his workplace: disfigure-
ment, public humiliation, the approbation of his family and boss (in the next scene, the photo is
used in the employee newspaper and captioned ‘Burns survives brush with shut-in’), and using a
computer system he has no understanding of. Yet his grin speaks volumes: all conditions are worth
it to better negotiate the terms under which he sells his labour power. The scheme unravels due to
his laziness but, as with the company plaque in season 6, he rectifies the situation and goes back to
the plant because of his family, not because his job has improved.

This changed dramatically with zombification. Not only did the number of jobs Homer took rise
from four or five per season in the early years to over 10, but ‘Homer finding new jobs and new
ways to get hurt increasingly substituted for the kind of smart, aware and layered comedy that had
been the show’s foundation’ (Sweatpants C, nd b: ‘Jerkass Homer Gets a Job’). Work became cen-
tral at precisely the point it stopped mattering. In fact, Homer was not really finding work, in the
consistent Fordist sense that marked the early seasons, because his life no longer centred around it.
Compare Homer’s attitude towards his job pre- and post-zombification. In ‘Simpson and Delilah’
(18 October 1990), Homer gets promoted to Vice-President at the nuclear plant because of his
lustrous new head of hair, then loses the position once he can no longer afford the growth formula.
He is sent back to his old desk:

Homer: I’m stuck in that dead-end job again. The kids are gonna hate me ‘cause I can’t buy
‘em all the stuff I promised ‘em. And you’re not gonna love me as much ‘cause I’m
ugly and bald!

Marge: Oh, Homer. Your job has always put food on our table, and the kids will get over it.
Homer: And? What about …
Marge: Oh, Homer … come here. You are so beautiful, to me.

Later in the season (‘Lisa’s Substitute’, 25 April 1991), Homer has to explain his class position
to his 8-year-old daughter:

Homer: Now, you’ll have lots of special people in your life, Lisa. There’s probably some
place where they all get together and the food is real good, and guys like me are serv-
ing drinks. Oh, well, maybe I can’t explain this, but I can fix your dollhouse for you.
At least I’m good at monkey work. You know, monkey? You know what I mean?

142 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 12(2)

Lisa: Yeah.
Homer: I can hold these nails in place with my tail.

The poignancy of both these exchanges derives from the fact that there are real-world conse-
quences for under-employment, not just financially but emotionally. In one, Homer is ashamed of
his lowly status and salary; in the other, he recognizes that there is another working world only
available to highly-specialized mental labour. Despite his technician job, he is good for ‘monkey
work’ alone.

As reality begins to stretch in later classic seasons, the loss of a regular income still remains a
grounding, universal theme. For example, in ‘Lisa’s Rival’ (11 September 1994), Homer finds a
shipment of sugar and decides to sell it door-to-door. Marge frets about the loss of income:

Homer: And you didn’t think I’d make any money. I found a dollar while I was waiting for
the bus!

Marge: While you were out earning that dollar, you lost forty dollars by not going to work.
The plant called and said if you don’t come in tomorrow, don’t bother coming in
Monday.

Homer: Woo-hoo! Four-day weekend!

Work and income still matter, even if their relationship is becoming tenuous. However, this changes
drastically. By season 11, in ‘Alone Again Natura-Diddly’ (13 February 2000), Homer videotapes
bereaved neighbour Ned Flanders for a personal ad. Noticing the involved nature of the scheme,
Bart asks him ‘Do you even have a job anymore?’, to which Homer replies, ‘I think it’s pretty obvi-
ous that I don’t!’ Previously something to find humour in precisely because it is so all-encompass-
ing, the very concept of work is now a joke. In ‘Diatribe of a Mad Housewife’ (25 January 2004),
Homer gets fired and buys a 1960s ambulance:

Marge: I was hoping you could watch the kids while I work on my novel.
Homer: Slow down, Picasso! You were gonna start a novel without informing me?
Marge: Homer, you left two jobs and bought an ambulance without even a phone call.
Homer: I also fed some ducklings.
Marge: I know. I got your message.

This passage is significant because it gestures towards the dual meaning of labour and work. After
season 9, Homer could do any job at all because wage labour ceased to matter in Springfield. This
is an erasure of the exploitative relationship that gave Homer’s struggles meaning to audiences.
Although season 9 marks its formal beginning, its opening salvo was in season 8, with the brief
appearance of Frank Grimes.

Homer’s enemy, Frank Grimes

Towards the end of season 8, Frank Grimes is featured on a TV documentary as a disadvantaged
worker who overcomes terrible odds to get a degree. Moved by the power of his story – the American
dream writ small – Mr. Burns hires him. Grimes’ office is placed next to Homer’s, and the two men
embody a contradiction: the former is diligent, well-trained and intelligent, yet his education and
career path have been thwarted at every turn. Homer is demonstrably stupid and unmotivated, yet he
has been rewarded with a full-time job and the stability of home and family that come with it.
Grimes encounters Homer with the wide-eyed horror of someone who has had to struggle to get

Sharzer 143

what little he has, meeting someone who has – in this episode – never struggled. Frank Grimes dis-
covers Homer has stolen his personalized pencils, after being denied permission to borrow one. This
visual joke resonates not only because Homer is being lazy and selfish, but because of the contrast
between their expectations of the workplace. For Homer, it is at best a rest area and, at worst, a trap;
for Grimes, it is his reward for years of labour and a means of escaping poverty. The embossed
pencils are part of his professional identity, something Homer lacks.

At one point, Homer tells Grimes he can turn the security camera around and have a nap, to
which Grimes says, ‘I don’t think we’re being paid to sleep.’ Homer replies, ‘Oh yeah, they’re
always trying to screw you.’ Homer’s reticence to work is nothing new – laziness was a defining
part of his character from the beginning – yet the contrast with Grimes’ diligence is a major shift.
From being someone thrown into a job he never wanted and which barely supports him and his
family, now Homer is shirking for the sake of it. He is no longer sympathetic. Grimes echoes the
German investors of season 3, but his tone is one of disgust:

Grimes: I’ve never seen him do any work around here. I mean, what is his job?
Lenny: Safety inspector.
Grimes: That irresponsible oaf? A man who by all rights should’ve been killed dozens of

times by now?
Lenny: 316 times by my count.

Of course, Grimes is correct. Homer nearly killed everyone in the entire town by not knowing how
to shut down the nuclear reactor (‘Homer Defined’, 17 October 1991). But, crucially, Grimes is the
only one who realizes it, and he is utterly outside the Springfield community. To distance itself from
the Fordist premise of Homer’s life, The Simpsons had to introduce a character who could voice the
neoliberal critique of Fordism: that its full-time, benefited jobs promote lazy, slovenly workers.

The subplot of the episode, in which Bart buys an abandoned factory for one dollar, shows the
social context of this critique. Bart brings Milhouse to his vast, empty factory floor; the latter is suit-
ably impressed and exclaims, ‘Wow. Adding machines! Industrial waste! What should we do with
all this stuff, Bart?’ Bart directs them to dump the machines into the waste, and then hires Milhouse
as a cleaner and security guard, telling him, ‘Get to work!’ Yet he has no money, and there is no
functioning factory (indeed, the building collapses overnight). It is a simulacrum of work, and its
presence suggests that it is Grimes, not Homer, who is closer to reality. The industrial heartlands of
the US have been emptied, and Homer’s laziness is at odds with the millions of desperate ex-work-
ers trying to survive.

To correct the bad impression he has made, Homer invites Grimes over for dinner, and the latter
is duly shocked:

Grimes: Good heavens! This is a palace! How can – how in the world can you afford to live
in a house like this, Simpson?

Homer: I dunno. Don’t ask me how the economy works.
Grimes: Yeah but look at the size of this place! I live in a single room above a bowling

alley and below another bowling alley.
Homer: Wow.

Homer is in awe of Grimes’ life, but this only highlights his stupidity. Grimes’ critique is not sim-
ply that Homer lives in luxury but that he is parasitic, without the necessary diligence, subservience
or productivity that the labour market demands. We are shown the contrast between a comfortable,
even bemused Fordist Homer and the tired, angry neoliberal subject Grimes, whose unknotted tie

144 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 12(2)

and briefcase signify that even as a guest of the Simpson family, in a domestic setting, he alone is
not allowed to stop working:

Grimes: I’ve had to work hard every day of my life and what do I have to show for it? This
briefcase and this haircut. And what do you have to show for your lifetime of sloth
and ignorance?

Homer: What?
Grimes: Everything! A dream house, two cars, a beautiful wife, a son who owns a factory,

fancy clothes, and lobsters for dinner! And do you deserve any of it? No!
Homer: What are you saying?
Grimes: I’m saying you’re what’s wrong with America, Simpson. You coast through life,

you do as little as possible and you leech off decent hard-working people, like me.
If you lived in any other country in the world, you would have starved to death
long ago. You’re a fraud, a total fraud.

Note what is being equated with leeching: a full-time job with benefits that supports a family.
The joke is on Grimes, as the Simpson family’s living conditions are far from luxurious. The fam-
ily cars are old and dented; Homer is constantly stealing white goods from Flanders. A running
visual gag shows the camera panning from their living room to the upstairs and revealing asbestos,
a snake or the family pets trapped between floors. The chimney collapses (‘You Only Move Twice’,
3 November 1996), prompting Marge to agree to sell the house, which is in such terrible condition
they eventually abandon it. In ‘Homer the Great’, the Simpsons’ basement floods. But this kind of
squalor is still better than Grimes’ life between bowling alleys, and this is the point of his neoliberal
discourse: to prepare us, by example and didacticism, for our lives to get worse.

Through the exchange with Grimes, Homer denies none of the charges: he simply cannot
understand what is wrong. This is because, up to this point, he represented the old, internally
consistent Fordist worker, to which even a trip into space (‘Deep Space Homer’, 24 February
1994) worked as humour because it contrasted so clearly with his well-anchored circum-
stances. Grimes, in his abject suffering, signalled an anti-worker bias that the early show, for
all its stereotyping of Homer, took pains to avoid. Fordist Homer is defined by exploitation:
he is in no way privileged, unless one considers having a full-time job a mark of distinction
– something the show tries very hard to show is not the case, through Homer’s constant
workplace humiliations. After season 9, this would change. In one of the most egregious
examples, ‘Maximum Homerdrive’ (28 March 1999), Homer becomes a long-distance
trucker, only to discover that other truckers have a self-driving mechanism in their cabs.
They threaten him when he promises to reveal their ‘laziness’. Neoliberal subjectivity is
even read backwards into history, when Homer’s father, Abraham Simpson, confesses that
he used to grift in the 1930s: ‘Yeah in the Depression you had to grift. Either that, or …
work’ (‘The Great Money Caper’, 10 December 2000). The only universe in which Homer’s
soul-destroying, dead-end job could be seen as a privilege is the one that Frank Grimes
inhabits: the precariat.

Frank Grimes electrocuted himself, a victim of the insanity Homer’s laziness drives him to. Yet
in a broader sense, he won, because the kind of work world he represented would be one Homer
increasingly came to inhabit. Homer’s conceit, continually shown up, was his vain struggle to
control the process of his work and thereby his life; the tragedy of The Simpsons, after season 9, is
that there was nothing to control. The Simpsons came to reflect a different, emerging aspect of
work: the end of stable employment and the rise of irregular contract work and permanent
unemployment.5

Sharzer 145

These changes are not simply reflected in post-Fordist Simpsons: the show addresses precarity
directly in ‘Kiss Kiss, Bang Bangalore’ (9 April 2006), when Mr. Burns outsources the nuclear
plant to India and Homer wins a competition for the sole remaining American job by becoming a
supervisor. The episode is made thoroughly in Zombie Simpsons mode, as the characters embark
on outlandish adventures, the episode relies on old stereotypes of the Indian subcontinent, and, in
typical Orientalist fashion, it transposes a reference to Apocalypse Now (dir. Francis Ford Coppola,
1979) from Vietnam to India, as Homer’s job drives him insane with power and he comes to
believe he is holy. Yet it is also one of the few times Zombie Simpsons makes a concrete reference
to work: crucially, not Homer’s, as he turns the power plant into Kurtz’s jungle redoubt, but that of
the Indian workers themselves. They are hired because they are cheaper than American workers,
but Homer lets them unionize, take breaks and have flex-time. For Mr. Burns, this is Homer’s cru-
cial mistake, not his God delusion. This, too, captures something about the world of precarity
because the replacement workers want the same security the Americans had: when Burns dismisses
the Indian staff, they cheer, ‘Two months’ severance! Early retirement! Golden parachutes for all!’
The workforce is united in appreciation of Homer’s Fordist management, demonstrating not only
the breadth of that particular workforce’s unity but, with their raised fists, a universal symbol of the
trade union movement, a sly reference to the American workforce which once harboured those
traditions en masse before neoliberalism. However, their explicit working class subjectivity is
undercut by Lisa’s compliment to her father when she says, ‘You’re the first man to ever outsource
the American worker’s sense of entitlement and privilege.’ Grimes may have died, but his legacy
was firmly ensconced.

Transition two: From linearity to fracture

If seasons 5 to 8 mark the show’s first tension between Fordism and precarity, ‘Homer’s Enemy’
marks the official defeat of the former. As Davis et al. (2015: 184) suggest, ‘Grimes’s past, like
Bob’s, weighs heavily upon him; in Homer’s charmed life, which intersects with a series of major
and minor historical figures, nothing sticks.’ To add a further nuance: Grimes’ appearance and
death mark the point at which Homer’s past no longer sticks. By showing the rise of precarity,
‘Homer’s Enemy’ also demonstrates the shift in The Simpsons’ underlying concept of realism.

Having destroyed wage labour, the anchor for Homer’s presence in Springfield, the show began
to tear down all other markers of continuity. The show had always relied on what showrunner
David Mirkin has called ‘flexible reality’: using animation to place characters in hyper-real or sur-
real environments, the better to find humorous contrasts with their established daily lives:

Once you sort of set up that there’s flexible reality, then you’re going, ‘Well, we could flex in this direction,
we could flex in this direction.’ And as long as you come back to center, you can get away with those
moments of fantasy. (Fox, 2014)

For 8 years, completing overturning reality was confined to the annual Hallowe’en episodes; other
disruptions, however extreme, were temporary. This changed as the show ‘increasingly rel[ied]…
on cartoonish tricks and (danger free) action sequences to tell its stories’, and giving gravitas to
those moments (Sweatpants C, nd a: ‘Armin Tamzarian’). As Matt Groening puts it, all actions are
supposed to have consequences:

‘I always say that we can put the Simpsons in whatever situation we want as long as they behave the way
somebody in that situation would behave. [Yet] I think I’m the only one who really cares about that rule;
we violate that rule a lot.’ (Lloyd, 2012)

146 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 12(2)

However, it was not the over-the-top comedy per se that marked the show’s narrative degeneration,
but the fact that it was integrated into the plot as serious beats. Flexible reality snapped, and the
jarring, self-consciously zany actions of the characters had to be integrated into the overall narra-
tive arc, which eventually snapped.6

It is not the case that, prior to season 9, there was a single, coherent narrative. The Simpsons
played with the usual tropes intended to maintain interest in a long-running TV show: long-lost rela-
tives (Homer’s brother Herb; Homer’s 1960s radical mom in ‘Mother Simpson’, 19 November
1995), marriage crises (Marge’s romance with a bowling instructor in ‘Life on the Fast Lane’, 19
November 1990; Homer’s romance with a coworker in ‘The Last Temptation of Homer’, 9 December
1993), and single-appearance characters (Karl, Homer’s suave, gay assistant from ‘Simpson and
Delilah’; Mr. Bergstrom, the teacher from ‘Lisa’s Substitute’). But it did so to establish a critical
distance from those stereotypes: as with the workplace, the outlandish scrapes the family got itself
into gained meaning by being offset against the solid core of home, school, bar and church.

From season 9 onwards, discontinuity and fragmentation became standard, as Homer went on
James Bond-worthy adventures and endured superhuman physical suffering without complaint. Plot
points were abandoned without any reference to the careful narrative building that established them.
‘The Principal and the Pauper’ came in for special approbation from fans, not only because it rewrote
the show’s chronology but due to its being so ‘thick with abrupt plot twists, expository flashbacks,
and unbelievable character turns that there’s hardly any humour to it’. Skinner, as a minor character,
had run out of narrative significance: ‘The writers were out of ideas, and the fans were attached to
what they already knew’ (Sweatpants C, nd a: ‘Armin Tamzarian’). But to suggest that the episode’s
destruction of linearity was ‘a source of delight for the writers involved’ (Davis et al., 2015: 180), is
to downplay the significance of that shift. As Shearer recalled of the Tamzarian episode:

I said, ‘That’s so wrong. You’re taking something that an audience has built eight years or nine years of
investment in and just tossed it in the trash can for no good reason, for a story we’ve done before with other
characters. It’s so arbitrary and gratuitous, and it’s disrespectful to the audience’. (Wilonsky, 2001)

Season 9’s change was certainly ‘the construction of characters and settings less anchored to a very
precise historical setting, and thus more “floating”, than [the animated sitcom’s] live-action coun-
terparts’ (Davis et al., 2015: 185). But by destroying the precise historical setting, the characters
were destroyed as well. Time may no longer pass chronologically for The Simpsons, but it used to,
and that loss had profound consequences.

Despite its many episodes with strong characterizations and functional narratives, season 9
also introduced numerous plots that stretched credibility. For example, Springfield Prison is an
established venue from earlier episodes, but season 9 introduces an extra, abandoned prison, with
the mayor simulating death by electrocution – a simulation that itself turns out to be real, but
somehow non-fatal (‘This Little Wiggy’, 22 March 1998). Marge’s new job reveals a ‘murder
house’ on a hill in Springfield that all characters are familiar with but has never been mentioned
before or since (‘Realty Bites’, 7 December 1997). Homer attempts a botched insurance scam
with bartender Moe Sizlak, trying and failing to risk death on train tracks and surviving a plunge
into the ocean in a car (‘Dumbbell Indemnity’, 1 March 1998). Major plot points are introduced
and abandoned for the sake of provoking a reaction among viewers: ‘The show had certainly done
episodes with outrageous endings before, but generally only once or twice per season, and even
then things weren’t played for tension or shock the way they often are in Season 9’ (Sweatpants
C, nd a: ‘Armin Tamzarian’).

The critical consensus – The Simpsons ‘holds up a mirror where we can examine both the frag-
mentation and continuity of postmodern life’ (Wallace, 2001: 148) – is understandable given the

Sharzer 147

sheer number of post-golden era episodes, in which fragmentation between and within stories is
common. But this insight applies largely after the season 9 shift. Just as Sideshow Bob’s son illus-
trates a fractured chronology (Davis et al., 2015: 181), Grimes’ own son, Frank Grimes Jr., illus-
trates the consequences of that fracture. He shows up in ‘The Great Louse Detective’ (15 December
2002), to take revenge on Homer for his father’s death. But Homer’s charmed life saves him again:
he survives being trapped in a boiling sauna, getting shot and having his brake lines cut. The very
lack of consequences that Frank Grimes criticized Homer for, and which got Grimes killed, have
no effect on post-Fordist Homer. Significantly, Sideshow Bob himself – Bart’s arch-nemesis – is
brought in to stop Grimes Jr. Bob, having been defanged of all power, leads an uncomfortably plot-
ted finale where he has Bart at his mercy yet cannot kill him, internalizing the deus ex machina that
had usually foiled him in the past. Even Bob is not safe from The Simpsons’ erasure of character
and narrative.

The Simpsons as contemporary realism

While explaining this shift from a chronological to a non-linear perspective, Davis et al. (2015)
identify a crucial theme, suggesting that changing the timeline of Homer and Marge’s youth from
the 1970s to the 1990s is ‘particularly mind-boggling if one is trying to hold onto a realist under-
standing of characters and their biographies’ (p. 79, emphasis in original). This is key to under-
standing what season 9 signified: a shift in The Simpsons’ mode of realism. This is different from
an erasure of that mode altogether, what Wallace (2001: 148) calls the ‘perfect depiction of the
fragmented, disjointed, contradictory world of capitalism’.7 Indeed, from Georg Lukács’ (2007:
47) definition it would appear The Simpsons fails the realist test:

The realist must seek out the lasting features in people, in their relations with each other and in the
situations in which they have to act; he [sic] must focus on [and reveal] those elements which endure over
long periods and which constitute the objective human tendencies of society.

The centrality of wage labour to the show, consistent throughout the golden era and abandoned
post-season 9, makes The Simpsons temporary realists at best.8

Davis et al. (2015: 180) suggest that we should not ‘impose more logic upon a work of fiction
than the work allows. Paradoxes … are a frequent feature of fiction that we should learn to live
with.’ This is formally correct, yet it leaves open the reason why, before season 9, The Simpsons
largely contained their paradoxes, remaining internally consistent and anchored in a working class
family, workplace and community. Frank Grimes, as the outsider to Fordism, knew this, and it was
those inconsistencies that triggered his descent into madness. When Mr. Teeny, the showbiz mon-
key, exclaimed at the end of a particularly fractured show, ‘This episode made no sense – tell the
people!’ (‘Trilogy of Error’, 29 April 2001), he was not simply expressing the writers’ acknowl-
edgement that the series had declined, but the possibility that the logic of fiction had changed,
because the logic of capitalist governance had changed as well.

Despite appearances, Zombie Simpsons also acts in accordance with the realist artist, whose
‘goal is to penetrate the laws governing objective reality and to uncover the deeper, hidden, medi-
ated, not immediately perceptible network of relationships that go to make up society’ (Lukács,
2007: 38). If the golden era’s elements – like Homer’s stable, living-waged job, the nuclear family,
home-ownership, public schooling, and so on – ceased to endure, then an art that describes chaos,
instead of the ‘lasting features’, echoes the disintegration of Fordist-era social formations. It
approaches realism for the precarious age.

Lukács feared that abandoning attempts to synthesize the social totality in favour of modernist
disjuncture would only lead to solipsism: ‘[since] chaos constitutes the intellectual cornerstone of

148 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 12(2)

modernist art, any cohesive principles it contains must stem from a subject-matter alien to it’ (p.
45). However, Lukács meant chaos as a formal artifice concealing an absence of meaning, a
highly contested understanding. It can also point towards the co-existence of many conflicting
meanings, held in tension with one another and inscribed into the social fabric of capitalism itself:
the knowledge that

our housing, our income and our play are temporary and contingent, forever at the whim of the landlord,
policeman, bureaucrat or market. The only constant is that of insecurity itself. We are gifted the guarantee
of perpetual flux, the knowledge that we will forever be flailing from one abyss to another. (Todd, 2015)

All these chaotic signs are in The Simpsons, and any cultural production that shows the results of
these contradictory drives is doing reality a service. As Brecht (2007[1938]: 82) suggests, ‘Reality
changes; in order to represent it, modes of representation must also change.’ As Eagleton (1981)
warns us, immediate experience is itself an ideological construction. There are no such people as
the Simpsons, and no such place as Springfield – a point the show itself has made many times,
when it refuses to specify the state that Springfield is located in. This does not relieve the show’s
makers from responsibility for the shift to flimsy characterizations, but it does allow another way
to approach its significance: not as the failure of a phenomenon to approach its essence, but as a
companion to broader shifts, comprehensible by individuals but beyond any single person’s experi-
ence. As Eagleton explains Brecht’s position:

You thus cannot determine the realism of a text merely by inspecting its intrinsic properties. On the
contrary, you can never know whether a text is realist or not until you have established its effects – and
since those effects belong to a particular conjuncture, a text may be realist in June and anti-realist in
December … A text may well ‘potentialize’ realism, but it can never coincide with it … Texts are no more
than the enabling or disabling occasions for realist effectivity. (p. 88)

After season 9, The Simpsons stopped conforming to the laws of physics, let alone social norms.
Yet in its failure to be traditionally realist, the show ended up reflecting and even anticipating a new
reality: the upside-down world of late capitalism, in which the ever-greater solidity of processes of
capital accumulation is mirrored by the dislocation and degeneration of the welfare state in the
Global North. Or, as ‘Kiss Kiss, Bang Bangalore’ puts it:

Mr. Burns: Effective immediately, I’m closing the plant and moving all our operations to
India!

Lenny: Does this mean we’re losing our jobs?
B: No, no, your jobs are safe. They’ll just be done by someone else in another

country.

In one sense this topsy-turvy world is nothing new: as Marx and Engels argued in The Communist
Manifesto I (1998[1848]):

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic
relations … and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man [sic] than naked self-interest,
than callous ‘cash payment’.

Capitalist development is defined by fixed relations and signifiers becoming free-floating. But
focusing on this continuity with past social forms would be to deny the real, material changes in
work organization that have taken place since The Simpsons’ heyday in the mid-1990s, and in par-

Sharzer 149

ticular, the financialization that precipitated the 2007 global crisis. The Simpsons’ fractured narra-
tives can only be understood in light of the structural transformations that precipitated them.

Conclusion

It is not enough to mourn the passing of The Simpsons’ golden era: we must understand why it
passed. For this task, the intention of the makers is secondary; the real changes of contemporary
capitalism are constitutive of consciousness and its effects, including those in popular culture.
Nesbitt (2007) suggests the key to the show’s popularity was its birth in the late 1980s, a period of
working class defeat, as the Simpson family inhabited a world of people struggling to survive the
end of the American Dream. There is no reason why the show should not also reflect subsequent
changes, and The Simpsons’ transition to zombie-mode represents this moment: the radical re-
organization of work, the end of socialism as an ideological threat and rise of a multipolar world.

Frank Grimes was the perfect foil to usher in this new era, allowing the show to blame Homer
for both the failure of Fordism and, more cleverly, for the lack of success of the neoliberal subject,
Grimes himself. Paradoxically, this shows just how precarious The Simpsons’ own ideology had
become by this point. It is a sign of the very fragmentation inherent in precarity – Frank Grimes’
own life in this case – that the show cannot muster a coherent critique of the model it seeks to pre-
sent. It must blame Homer, for Homer is the only solid signifier remaining. In the years to come, it
would seek to divest Homer from any remaining coherency, making him and the show as a whole
a blank page on which to write whatever immediate social issue, celebrity appearance and pop
culture fancy could gain viewers.

Grimes’ paradox – he is the harder worker, yet he is not rewarded commensurately – matches
right-wing anti-union arguments: long-term stability breeds laziness and entitlement. Moreover,
his example helps justify the lack of success precarity affords individual workers: after all, it is the
lazy, entitled Homers who are supposed to be holding back the entrepreneurial Grimes from thriv-
ing in the marketplace. But there is a double-movement happening here. The Simpsons formally
operates within the deep neoliberal orthodoxy that secure jobs are a fetter to productive forces, and
that precarity can shake the workers out of their torpor and unleash the dynamic businessperson
within. This is not only imbricated in Frank Grimes’ single episode story but the broad arc of post-
season 9 characterizations, in which Homer is rewarded for being fundamentally irrational.9
However, simultaneously through its post-season 9 narrative degenerations, The Simpsons demon-
strates the impossibility of a stable, successful, and productive worker that would result from the
marriage of Homer’s circumstances and Grimes’ skill. Its very zaniness is proof that the neoliberal
subject, in its disintegration of both social democratic standards of living and class-conscious polit-
ical representation, cannot exist stably. Although the shell of Fordism remains, in that Homer and
his family still reside at 742 Evergreen Terrace and he still sometimes goes to the nuclear plant, he
exists in a reality that has no consistent bearing. Fordist Homer was the anti-Frank Grimes; precari-
ous Homer has gone far beyond Grimes’ tenuous circumstances. Thus The Simpsons’ chaos repre-
sents a real discontinuity in the working class’s mode of life, a concomitant end to ideological
coherency and the inability to come up with new forms of representation.

Yet it is not necessary to agree with Wallace’s (2001: 149) contention that The Simpsons, in
its scattershot approach to humour – punching down as well as up, in contemporary parlance –
‘not only fails to suggest the possibility of a better world, but teases us away from serious reflec-
tion on or criticism of prevailing practices’. If we accept the complete postmodern fragmentation
of narrative, this is true. And it is dishonest to read against the text in order to construct a pro-
gressive narrative from key moments.10 But as this article has argued, The Simpsons has accom-
plished two important tasks: first, it has signalled a key shift in the way labour is organized in

150 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 12(2)

contemporary capitalism, and second, it has reflected – through an end to chronological narra-
tive, as well as many other discontinuities – the impact of that shift on social reality. Wallace
suggests that

The Simpsons is a sort of Brechtian television show. Much in the same way that Bertolt Brecht rejected the
artificial elements of drama – the unified plot, sympathetic characters, universal themes – for techniques
that ‘alienated’ or distanced the audience. (p. 140)

And, as Eagleton (1981: 85) reminds us:

Brecht’s practice is not to dispel the miasma of ‘false consciousness’ so that we may ‘fix’ the object as it
really is; it is to persuade us into living a new discursive and practical relation to the real. ‘Rationality’ for
Brecht is thus indissociable from skepticism, experiment, refusal and subversion.

As a text, The Simpsons demonstrates a subversive realism by being unable to coherently hold
together what it portrays. ‘Homer’s Enemy’ was our enemy too, in that Grimes signalled the arrival
of a new, harsh labour regime. Homer may have inadvertently killed Grimes, but The Simpsons’
realism demonstrates that the crime happened in reverse: Grimes’ precarity would end up destroy-
ing Homer’s world.

It is possible to mourn the loss of accurate characterizations while appreciating how accurately
The Simpsons foreshadowed the rise of neoliberalism. Yet this conclusion is deeply dissatisfying to
fans whose emotional connection to the show and its characters was based on more than an intel-
lectual appreciation. The viewers’ judgment is not incidental: as Eagleton asks the author, ‘If you
want to know whether your play was realist, why not ask the audience? Did it, in their estimation,
“discover the causal complexes of society”?’ (p. 88).

The answer from fans is a resounding ‘no’. Social insight has been obscured by the horrific
spectacle of The Simpsons characters’ voices and bodies being kept alive decades after the
characters stopped being themselves, augmented by celebrity appearances and pop-culture ref-
erences, without significance and quickly forgotten. But if we take Brecht’s (2007[1938]: 85)
definition of realism as a process – ‘a ceaseless activity of dislocating and demystifying’ – then
the question changes. To give the fans their due, one of the reasons an emotional projection was
so easy to make is because The Simpsons, pre-season 9, made a claim on realism: its characters
spoke to the viewers’ lives, and it posited a fantastical world that was recognizably a distorted
version of the American working class in decline. Its appeal lay in its accuracy because it never
lost sight of the contradictions of Fordism: the exclusionary, productivist nature of the post-
World War Two social contract that guaranteed Homer had an unfulfilling job and Marge was
stuck in the house. When Frank Grimes came to push over the flimsy edifice, he was the har-
binger of an unwelcome premise we are still coming to terms with: the ceaseless re-organiza-
tion and hyper-exploitation of the global working classes, sentenced to precarity and stagnation.
As Eagleton (1981: 84) asks of Lukács: ‘why should accurate cognition and representation of
the real afford aesthetic gratification?’ The fans’ observation that The Simpsons has abandoned
realism and become a less interesting, poorly-made show, can be true at the same time as the
show’s frenetic fracturing demonstrates something real about the present conjuncture. It may be
that the present is simply less pleasant to watch.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit
sectors.

Sharzer 151

Notes

1. For a quick but representative survey of the consensus on the golden status of seasons 2 through 9, with
outliers on either side, see ‘No Homers Club’ (2010) and Hunter (2015); and ‘Did We Appreciate What
We Had’.

2. Henry (2012) provides the broadest overview – specific to an American context – of The Simpsons’
intersectional politics, showing how the show touches on changing concepts of race, class and gender.
However, this is the exception in the literature. In other, more specific treatments, The Simpsons has
been the lens through which to view foreign perceptions of the US (Gray, 2007), critical media educa-
tion (Gray, 2005), sociology pedagogy (Scanlan and Feinberg, 2000), neoliberal educational reform
(Kiedrowski, 2013; Meskill, 2007), religiosity (Pinsky, 2007), ethics and continental philosophy (Irwin
et al., 2001), and the revalorization of the nuclear family (Cantor, 1999). In a bizarre treatment, Cooper
et al. (2005) graft tribal symbolic consumption patterns onto Simpsons’ characters. These problematics
tend to value The Simpsons as a descriptor of an external social phenomenon, rather than as a normative
text with internal transformations.

3. The Simpsons was not unique in portraying working class life in this period; Cheers, Roseanne, and even
Married … With Children sought to show working class characters struggling with issues like unemploy-
ment, bad jobs and poverty, in a break from the traditional happy sitcom family with few real problems.
However, The Simpsons’ animation meant its humour could deepen characterizations in a way that live-
action sitcoms could not (Ortved, 2009: 6).

4. The importance of audience to The Simpsons can be rooted in Marx’s concept of ideology and Stuart
Hall’s (2006) concept of decoding. Ideology is encoded in the life processes of members of a particu-
lar class – including authors and animators – who assume their worldview is shared by everyone else
(Mitchell, 1986: 176). However, while audience members are just as ‘ideologized’ as the text-makers,
they are not passive. Audiences decode texts by shaping the meanings they receive, because the latter
‘are themselves framed by structures of understanding, as well as being produced by social and eco-
nomic relations … permit[ting] the meanings signified in the discourse to be transposed into practice or
consciousness’ (Hall, 2006: 166). Since meanings are open to interpretation, a text’s reception must be
studied to understand its full import.
Williams (2006: 140) goes further, suggesting that ‘emergent practices and meanings’ arise from texts
that are shaped, rather than absorbed. This critical engagement forms a ‘practice … [and] a complex of
extending active relationships’ (p. 143). While Schiller (2006: 306) warns that the sheer volume of output
of daily media dilutes a series’ effects, the very size of The Simpsons’ oeuvre and its decades of accumu-
lated fan commentary make it a representative template for an audience reception study.

Fans are crucial for creating relationships with texts. Their ability ‘to be quite self-reflexive and able to
analyze their own behavior’ lends credence to their analysis: they actively shape the narratives of the text
they engage with, including pointing out omissions (Busse and Gray, 2011: 428). We need not accept
Smythe’s (2006) conclusion that audiences are simply commodities, buying the consumer products of
advertising and, with them, the legitimacy of the state and capital. Rather, those fans most invested
in the text can best identify the changes in the emotional arcs of The Simpsons universe. In turn, the
scholar must re-situate the meaning production already taking place within new theoretical frameworks.
Despite infinitely varied approaches, it is precisely because fans exist within ‘limited shared interpretive
spaces’ (Busse and Gray, 2011: 435) that their analysis counts. Fans construct and contest social mean-
ings through their receptions of The Simpsons’ texts.

5. Precarity generalizes from the exclusion built into the Fordist era: women, people of colour and migrants
were often on the margins of the American labour market. However, for men, private-sector job-tenure
declined by a quarter since 1973, the roots of the neoliberal era in the profit shock and oil price spike.
Healthcare and pension benefits declined precipitously. Unemployment has risen over 40 per cent from its
1973 levels. After each recession – there have been four in the US alone since then – private sector male
employment has become much more irregular. This has provided the backdrop for massive shifts from
manufacturing to logistics services among the US working class, with the shorter hours and contracts
and lower wages endemic to service work. See Benanav (2015) for a defence of the precarity thesis, and
Moody (2016) for a nuancing of it that places the emphasis on occupational shifts, not just insecurity.

152 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 12(2)

6. When pressed, writers attribute shifts in The Simpsons’ style and substance to changes in popular
tastes and the contributions of individual writers. With the exception of Shearer, the show’s crea-
tors reject the criticism that The Simpsons has peaked, perhaps as a reaction to the intensity of fan
response from the early days of the show, coinciding as it did with the first online fan forums. This
was skewered directly in season 8 (‘Itchy and Scratchy and Poochie’, 9 February 1997), when Comic
Book Guy calls an Itchy and Scratchy episode ‘Worst episode ever’ and Bart replies, ‘What? They’re
giving you thousands of hours of entertainment for free. What could they possibly owe you? I mean,
if anything, you owe them!’ Groening roots fan criticism in intense emotional investment in the
show:

The ones who are the most passionate are generally the most critical. I attempted once to have a conver-
sation with them … about how in any long-running pop culture enterprise it’s hard to keep up with the
audience’s memory of their favorite experience, because you can never have that first time, first impres-
sion again. They got out the knives after I said that. (Lloyd, 2012)

He also admits writers may get defensive out of a love for their craft:

I think people who work in comedy and humor are hesitant to analyze it too much, because you feel like
if you take it apart, you’ll break it and not be able to put it back together again … Examining humor too
closely does seem to destroy it. (Ryan, 2009)

While this self-reflexivity is admirable, it would be a mistake to cast the fan-creator dialogue solely in
psychological terms, judging the veracity of claims to quality solely on qualities internal to the creative
process. Considering the broader, socio-economic context of production and reception allows an imma-
nent set of criteria to be considered: the degree to which texts approach or reject a realist understanding
of the shared social processes both makers and consumers participate in.

7. Indeed, some analysts consider The Simpsons a postmodern show outright, due to its portrayal of ‘a truly
postmodern arena devoid of meaningful social structure and lacking a moral center’. Yet this analysis
also rests on a realist core, in which 742 Evergreen Terrace ‘remains an asylum in a postmodern world’
due to its reliance on traditional labour and gender norms and its tacit defense of the nuclear family
(Snow and Snow, 2001: 83).

8. Groening’s motivations for The Simpsons are, in one sense, highly political:

With The Simpsons and with Futurama, what I’m trying to do in the guise of light entertainment, if this
is possible – is nudge people, jostle them a little, wake them up to some of the ways in which we’re being
manipulated and exploited. (Doherty, 1999)

Groening was closely identified with the American counter-culture in high school and college, and his
Life in Hell comics consistently targeted shibboleths of the religious and patriotic right (Ortved, 2009:
10). Given this background, his statement that ‘if there’s a message that runs through the show … it’s that
maybe the authorities don’t have your best interests at heart’ (Scott, 2001) is consistently reflected in the
early Simpsons oeuvre. But it is precisely the ambiguity of anti-authoritarian politics that hobbles The
Simpsons from having a coherent political perspective. Groening’s initial target was not politics per se
but television sitcoms of working class life, which had become ‘obsequious’ since the 1960s. (Groening
references The Andy Griffith Show as an inspiration [Lloyd, 2012]; the other obvious choice is The
Flintstones, which gets frequent direct allusions in The Simpsons.) The fact that The Simpsons inspired a
revival of satirical animation – ‘a certain kind of Dumb Dad with Family template’, as Groening calls it
– may be a political success of the show, but it also points to its weakness: the show’s satire attacks left
and right. Wallace (2001: 146) points out:

The writers of The Simpsons seem to have taken pains to avoid earning our sympathy for the family or
for anyone who suffers or endures. In their apparent refusal to pick a side, ridicule is equally distributed
among the powerful and the helpless.

Sharzer 153

This means it is up to commentators to consider the nature of the show’s realism, as the show’s creators
refuse to directly consider questions of power and its effects.

9. Season 9 has Homer’s manifesto on irrationality, when he tells Lisa (‘Lost Our Lisa’, 10 May 1998):
‘Stupid risks are what make life worth living. Now, your mother, she’s the steady type and that’s fine in
small doses. But me, I’m a risk taker. That’s why I have so many adventures’:

Lisa: Dad, you’re headed for the river again!
Homer: Feel your heart pumping a mile a minute? That’s what my heart’s doing all the time.

This exchange is atypical in that Homer tries to justify his maniacal behaviour, something he would cease
to bother with for the rest of the series.

10. The most commonly cited cases for Homer’s radicalism are where he declares “the machinery of capi-
talism” to be “oiled with the blood of the workers” (‘The Crepes of Wrath’), and ‘Homer the Great’, in
which Homer finds and keeps his father’s Communist Party membership card. But these are rareties:
open discussion of radical politics is nearly completely absent from the show.

Episodes cited

‘A Milhouse Divided’ (season 8, episode 6, 1 December 1996)
‘Alone Again Natura-Diddly’ (season 11, episode 14, 13 February 2000)
‘And Maggie Makes Three’ (season 6, episode 13, 22 January 1995)
‘Burns Verkaufen der Kraftwerk’ (season 3, episode 11, 5 December 1991)
‘Deep Space Homer’ (season 5, episode 15, 24 February 1994)
‘Diatribe of a Mad Housewife’ (season 15, episode 10, 25 January 2004)
‘Dumbbell Indemnity’ (season 9, episode 16, 1 March 1998)
‘Homer Defined’ (season 3, episode 5, 17 October 1991)
‘Homer’s Enemy’ (season 8, episode 23, 4 May 1997)
‘Homer the Great’ (season 6, episode 12, 8 January 1995)
‘Homer the Heretic’ (season 4, episode 3, 8 October 1992)
‘Homer vs. Patty and Selma’ (season 6, episode 17, 26 February 1995)
‘Itchy and Scratchy and Poochie’, (season 8, 9 February 1997)
‘King-Size Homer’ (season 7, episode 7, 5 November 1995)
‘Kiss Kiss, Bang Bangalore’ (season 17, episode 17, 9 April 2006)
‘Last Exit to Springfield’ (season 4, episode 17, 11 March 1993)
‘Life on the Fast Lane’ (season 1, episode 9, 18 March 1990)
‘Lisa’s Pony’ (season 3, episode 8, 7 November 1991)
‘Lisa’s Rival’ (season 6, episode 2, 11 September 1994)
‘Lisa’s Sax’ (season 8, episode 3, 19 October 1997)
‘Lisa’s Substitute’ (season 2, episode 19, 25 April 1991)
‘Lost Our Lisa’ (season 9, episode 24, 10 May 1998)
‘Maximum Homerdrive’ (season 10, episode 17, 28 March 1999)
‘Mother Simpson’ (season 7, episode 8, 19 November 1995)
‘O Brother, Where Art Thou?’ (season 2, episode 15, 21 February 1991)
‘Poppa’s Got a Brand New Badge’ (season 13, episode 22, 22 May 2002)
‘Realty Bites’ (season 9, episode 9, 7 December 1997)
‘Scenes from The Class Struggle in Springfield’ (season 7, episode 14, 4 February 1996)
‘Simpson and Delilah’ (season 2, episode 2, 18 October 1990)
‘The Crepes of Wrath’ (season 1, episode 11, 15 April 1990)
‘The Great Louse Detective’ (season 14, episode 6, 15 December 2002)
‘The Great Money Caper’ (season 12, episode 7, 10 December 2000)
‘The Last Temptation of Homer’ (season 5, episode 9, 9 December 1993)
‘The Principal and the Pauper’ (season 9, episode 2, 28 September 1997)
‘This Little Wiggy’ (season 9, episode 18, 22 March 1998)

154 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 12(2)

‘Trilogy of Error’ (season 12, episode 18, 29 April 2001)
‘You Only Move Twice’ (season 8, episode 2, 3 Nov 1996)

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Available at: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheSimpsons/comments/4ddmv1/did_we_appreciate_what_
we_had_during_the_simpsons/ (accessed 23 June 2016).

No Homers Club (2010) September 28, 1997 – the end of the golden age, 17 February. Available at: http://
www.nohomers.net/showthread.php?85405-September-28-1997-the-end-of-the-golden-age (accessed
23 June 2016).

No Homers Club (nd) Simpsons best episode: Finals (Homer the Heretic Wins). Available at: http://www.
nohomers.net/showthread.php?58282-Simpsons-Best-Episode-Finals-(Homer-the-Heretic-Wins)
(accessed 23 June 2016).

Sweatpants C (nd a) Season 9 – Armin Tamzarian and the death of story. Available at: https://deadhomerso-
ciety.com/zombiesimpsons/zs9/ (accessed 23 June 2016).

Sweatpants C (nd b) Season 10 – Jerkass Homer Gets a Job. Available at: https://deadhomersociety.com/
zombiesimpsons/zs10/ (accessed 23 June 2016).

Sweatpants C (nd c) Zombie Simpsons: How the best show ever became the broadcasting undead. Available
at: https://deadhomersociety.com/zombiesimpsons/ (accessed 23 June 2016).

Author biography

Greg Sharzer is Assistant Professor in the School of Global Communication at Kyung Hee University, Seoul,
Republic of Korea. He has a PhD in Political Science from York University in Toronto, Canada and writes on
the social, cultural and political implications of changes in contemporary capitalist political economy.

http://www.avclub.com/article/matt-groening-25525

http://www.avclub.com/article/matt-groening-25525

www.statisticbrain.com/the-simpsons-total-franchise-revenue/

www.statisticbrain.com/the-simpsons-total-franchise-revenue/

Breaking chains: precarity in the Age of Anxiety

http://www.sfweekly.com/sanfrancisco/shearer-delight/Content?oid=2141526

http://www.sfweekly.com/sanfrancisco/shearer-delight/Content?oid=2141526

Did we appreciate what we had during The Simpsons Golden Age?
byu/ZiggyPalffyLA inTheSimpsons

Did we appreciate what we had during The Simpsons Golden Age?
byu/ZiggyPalffyLA inTheSimpsons

http://www.nohomers.net/showthread.php?85405-September-28-1997-the-end-of-the-golden-age

http://www.nohomers.net/showthread.php?85405-September-28-1997-the-end-of-the-golden-age

http://www.nohomers.net/showthread.php?58282-Simpsons-Best-Episode-Finals-(Homer-the-Heretic-Wins

http://www.nohomers.net/showthread.php?58282-Simpsons-Best-Episode-Finals-(Homer-the-Heretic-Wins

https://deadhomersociety.com/zombiesimpsons/zs9/

https://deadhomersociety.com/zombiesimpsons/zs9/

https://deadhomersociety.com/zombiesimpsons/zs10/

https://deadhomersociety.com/zombiesimpsons/zs10/

https://deadhomersociety.com/zombiesimpsons/

Listeningto Labour: Mainstream Media, Talk
Radio, and the 2005 B.C. Teachers Strike

Shane Gunster
Simon Fraser University

Abstract: In October 2005, B.C. public school teachers conducted a two-and-a-
half-week illegal strike that attracted widespread support from the public. This
article conducts a comparative content and discourse analysis of the news cov-
erage provided by the leading provincial outlets in three media types: The
Vancouver Sun (newspaper), the News Hour on Global (television), and The Bill
Good Show (political talk radio). The Bill Good Show’s open-ended, participa-
tory format, coupled with the host’s commitment to journalistic norms of objec-
tivity and diversity, allowed teachers to play an active and significant role in
shaping discussion and debate about the strike. Conversely, coverage by The
Vancouver Sun and the News Hour, both owned by CanWest Global, largely
failed to reflect public opinion and instead reproduced the ideological bias of
conventional strike scripts.

Keywords: News media; Talk radio; British Columbia; Labour

Résumé : En octobre 2005, les enseignants des écoles publiques de la Colombie-
Britannique ont mené une grève illégale de deux semaines et demie qui a suscité
l’appui du public. Cet article effectue une analyse de contenu et de discours
comparative de la couverture médiatique fournie par des représentants impor-
tants de trois formes de média dans la province : le Vancouver Sun (quotidien),
le News Hour on Global (journal télévisé) et le Bill Good Show (radio parlée
politique). Le format ouvert et interactif de ce dernier, doublé d’un engagement
de la part de l’animateur envers les normes journalistiques d’objectivité et de
diversité, a permis aux enseignants de jouer un rôle actif et important dans les
discussions et débats entourant la grève. En revanche, la couverture du Sun et du
News Hour, tous les deux propriétés de CanWest Global, n’a pas reflété l’opin-
ion publique, reproduisant plutôt des partis pris idéologiques entourant les dis-
cours conventionnels sur les grèves.

Mots clés : Médias d’actualité; Radio parlée; Colombie-Britannique; Main-
d’œuvre

Shane Gunster teaches media studies and critical theory in the School of Communication at Simon
Fraser University, 8888 University Drive, Burnaby, BC V5A 1S6. He is the author of Capitalizing on
Culture: Critical Theory for Cultural Studies as well as articles on critical theory, advertising, and
consumer culture. He is currently researching conservative political discourse in Canada. Email:
sgunster@sfu.ca.

Canadian Journal of Communication, Vol 33 (2008) 661-683
©2008 Canadian Journal of Communication Corporation

“It says here”: Strikes, media, and the public good
Writing in the 1920s, Upton Sinclair observed that “whenever it comes to a ‘show-
down’ between labor and capital, the press is openly or secretly for capital” (cited
in Bekken, 2005, p. 72). Over the past four decades, critical analyses of media cov-
erage of labour issues confirm that little appears to have changed (e.g., Bekken,
2005; Douglas, 1986; Hackett, 1983; Kumar, 2007; Martin, 2004; Puette, 1992).
Summarizing the stark findings of this research, Jon Bekken notes that “every
empirical study of labour coverage has concluded that it is generally superficial
and hostile, and increasingly rare” (2005, p. 73). The combination of minimal
attention to workplace issues and conditions with occasional sensationalistic
reporting on labour disputes has been toxic for unions and their members: stripped
of the broader social, economic, and political factors that set them in motion,
strikes appear as needlessly disruptive and confrontational events in which a select
group of (privileged) workers holds the public hostage in order to serve their own
particular needs and interests (e.g., Goldman & Rajagopal, 1991; Knight, 1982).

As Christopher Martin (2004) documents in extensive detail, these patterns
of coverage (and omission) only grew worse in the 1990s, when the “consumer
frame” truly achieved hegemony and anything that interrupted or limited the free-
dom of individuals to buy goods and services as easily and cheaply as possible
was construed as destructive of the public good. Yet as Deepa Kumar (2007) and
Martin have also argued, there are rare instances, such as the 1997 strike by
United Parcel Services employees, in which workers can challenge this script and
secure more balanced media coverage that looks beyond the disruptive effects of
a strike or protest to explore the conditions behind it or why those engaged in it
believe their actions are justified. The legitimacy of the news media in a democ-
racy and, more importantly perhaps, the marketability of its products depend
upon the perception—however illusory or ideological in nature—that the news
both serves and reflects the needs, desires, and values of its audience. Thus when
the public supports a strike, it can become more difficult for the news media to
recycle one-dimensional strike scripts in which any signs of disruption and incon-
venience automatically mean that the strike is “bad news” (Glasgow University
Media Group, 1976).

In October 2005, 40,000 B.C. teachers walked off the job for just over two
weeks in an illegal strike after the Liberal provincial government imposed a con-
tract upon them for the second time in three years. Teachers were especially frus-
trated with the government’s refusal to negotiate on the classroom conditions and
bargaining rights issues that rank-and-file teachers had identified as key priori-
ties. Despite an aggressive campaign by the provincial government attacking
teachers for breaking the law, a B.C. Supreme Court (BCSC) decision finding
their union in contempt, and the fact that 600,000 students were kept out of
school, the public sided with the teachers throughout the dispute. The British
Columbia Teachers’ Federation (BCTF) also received strong support from mem-
bers of other unions, especially the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE)
and, in the strike’s second week, from the B.C. Federation of Labour (BCFL), in
the form of sympathy strikes and protest rallies, including an October 17 shut-
down of the provincial capital.

662 Canadian Journal of Communication, Vol 33 (4)

Faced with escalating labour action, strengthening public support, and unity
on the picket lines, the government was forced to bring in mediator Vince Ready
to facilitate talks. On Friday, October 21, Ready offered non-binding recommen-
dations for settlement (which fell considerably short of what teachers had asked
for, especially in the area of learning conditions), and the BCSC imposed a
$500,000 fine on the BCTF for failing to obey previous court orders. Seemingly
under significant pressure from the BCFL to end the strike, the BCTF held a
weekend vote in which their members voted to return to their classrooms. For a
variety of reasons, the strike presents an ideal opportunity to further explore ques-
tions raised by Kumar, Martin, and others about the intersection between labour
conflict and the public good in the news.

First, it received extensive coverage in the regional media, generating an
average of six items per day (excluding letters to the editor) in both the leading
daily and on the most popular provincial newscast. The strike was featured every
day on the former’s front page and as the latter’s top story on all but two
evenings. In terms of public attention, political significance, and social impact, it
was the most significant labour action in Western Canada since “Operation
Solidarity,” when a coalition of B.C. labour unions and social movements had
opposed budget cutbacks and neo-liberal social policies in the early 1980s
(Magnusson et al., 1984).

Second, the struggle of each side to articulate their own particular interests as
universal or “popular” (Laclau, 1977) played a far more central role in this dis-
pute than in most labour conflicts. Such struggles often feature far more promi-
nently in public sector disputes, especially those with a high media profile: as the
employer, governments rationalize hardline positions as reflective of their demo-
cratic obligation to represent the interests of all citizens, usually conceived of as
taxpayers; for their part, unions try to associate the terms and conditions of their
employment with the quality of services available to the public. In this case, the
fight of both parties to position themselves as guardians of the public good was
further intensified by additional factors.

On the one hand, the fact that the teachers were clearly breaking the law com-
bined with the strike’s extraordinarily disruptive effects on the daily lives of hun-
dreds of thousands of families supplied powerful rhetorical ammunition to those
who argued that the action was not only hurting the public but also in clear vio-
lation of the core values of a democratic society based on the rule of law. The
teachers countered by invoking the ideas and symbols of civil disobedience to
position their action as an ethically justified protest against the punitive and fun-
damentally unjust law used to impose the contract. They also offered a com-
pelling defence of the strike as a desperate bid to resist neo-liberal cutbacks to the
public education system and reassert the right of public sector workers to engage
in free and fair collective bargaining. Further complicating matters for the
Liberals was a healthy budgetary surplus, which effectively deprived them of the
economistic frame that federal and provincial governments had used with such
success in the previous decade to justify cutbacks in the civil service (Knight,
2001). How were these struggles to define different visions of the public interest
reflected (or marginalized) in the news media?

Gunster / Listening to Labour: Mainstream Media and the Teachers Strike 663

Third, recent Canadian scholarship in this area has tended to focus upon
Ontario (e.g., Knight, 1998, 2001; Kozolanka, 2006, 2007), with very little atten-
tion paid to Western Canada. Given the draconian nature of the “common sense”
revolution launched by Mike Harris’s Conservative Party in 1995 and the fierce
resistance to it mounted by labour and social justice groups, this emphasis upon
Central Canada is not entirely surprising. However, as David Camfield (2006)
persuasively argues in his analysis of the 2004 Hospital Employees’ Union strike,
this pattern of neo-liberal restructuring and working-class opposition was equally
as pervasive in British Columbia after Gordon Campbell’s Liberals took office in
a landslide victory in 2001.

From a media studies perspective, the lack of recent critical scholarship on
the state of the B.C. news media is especially surprising given how the corporate
media landscape has evolved in the province over recent years. In 2000, CanWest
Global, a transnational media conglomerate controlled by the Asper family of
Winnipeg, completed a blockbuster deal with Conrad Black’s Hollinger corpora-
tion in which it acquired ownership of both of the city’s daily newspapers, The
Vancouver Sun and The Province, as well as a chain of 12 Lower Mainland com-
munity papers. CanWest currently exercises a stranglehold over local news, con-
trolling over 90% of paid daily circulation in Vancouver as well as a 70% share
of the supper hour news with the News Hour on Global (Gutstein, 2005).
According to one report, the city now has “the most highly-concentrated media
ownership of any major city in a G7 country” (Edge, 2007, p. 163).

Media convergence and consolidation have devastated newsrooms with
budget cuts and layoffs as well as varying degrees of editorial pressure to con-
form to the business-friendly philosophy of owners and managers (Edge, 2007;
McChesney, 2004; Skinner et al., 2005). Over the past 15 years, for example, The
Vancouver Sun and The Province have experienced staff reductions of 50%
(Sandborn, 2007). This has taken an especially damaging toll on the labour beat,
leaving many reporters with little understanding of and even less empathy for the
issues and concerns of unions and their members (Costain, 2005; Serrin, 2002).
Many critics, including former Sun staff, also allege an editorial bias at CanWest
media outlets that favour the provincial Liberals and a pro-business and anti-
union political agenda (Edge, 2007).

Although Sun reporters aren’t given direct orders to write glowing
reports about the provincial government, they say they are discouraged
from writing claims made by government critics. There has also been a
conscious decision from the paper’s management to ignore government
protesters, even when their actions are top stories for national news agen-
cies. More often than not, The Sun is not a voice of the community, but
a mouthpiece for the provincial government. (Condon, 2007)

The 2005 strike which pitted the Liberals against the British Columbia Teachers’
Federation, their allies in the labour movement, and a public largely sympathetic
to the teachers offers a perfect case in which to assess these criticisms. As the lead-
ers in their respective fields and the two most influential sources of news in British
Columbia, the News Hour on Global and The Vancouver Sun set the agenda for
political news in the province. Did their coverage of the strike reflect public sup-

664 Canadian Journal of Communication, Vol 33 (4)

port by providing a more sympathetic and/or balanced treatment of the teachers’
action? Or did the news media invoke the traditional strike frame of disruption and
thereby bolster the government’s case against the BCTF and its members?

Virtually all critical scholarship that examines the representation of labour in
the news focuses upon newspapers, magazines, and broadcast news. The medium
of talk radio, which has emerged in the past two decades as one of the most
important venues for the formation and expression of political opinion, has been
entirely ignored. This absence is especially surprising given arguments from
many in the labour movement that the most effective education and communica-
tion campaigns are those that allow workers to tell their own stories in their own
words (Glass, 2003). Notwithstanding the openly conservative ideological bias of
many talk radio shows (Barker, 2002; Brock, 2004; Jamieson & Capella 2008),
this medium is more accommodating to the expression of personal experience
(and the political opinions that emerge from it) than any other in the news genre
(Livingstone & Lunt, 1994).

In British Columbia, the leading program of this type is The Bill Good Show,
which is broadcast Monday through Friday from 8:30 a.m. to noon on CKNW
(BBM Canada, 2005). Much like the News Hour and The Sun, the program
devoted considerable attention to the strike: the topic occupied more than half of
the show’s 31⁄2 hours for 8 of 13 broadcasts, including three days in which it was
the only item discussed. How did this coverage compare with that provided by
print and broadcast media? In particular, how did the flexible, participatory for-
mat of talk radio affect the range, diversity, and depth of issues that were consid-
ered? Did it privilege a “consumer” frame in which individuals railed against the
union and its allies for causing disruption and inconvenience? Or did it provide
an opportunity for teachers, parents, and students to speak about their experiences
and interests with respect to public education?

Strike stories: Crowded classrooms, suffering students,
and the lawbreakers who love them
As noted above, the two-and-a-half-week strike (October 6 to 24) received sig-
nificant coverage in each of the three outlets: in total, the News Hour broadcast
96 stories (with an average duration of just under 21⁄2 minutes); The Vancouver
Sun printed 152 items (including 47 news reports; 23 columns, editorials, and op-
eds; and 61 letters); and The Bill Good Show aired 131 segments (averaging close
to 7 minutes in length).1 The content of each item was coded according to four
broad types of variables: the type, size, and placement of the item; the primary
topic; the presence of 23 key facts and arguments relevant to the dispute; and the
type of source, guest, and caller that appeared, including their orientation to the
strike. All stories were coded by the author, and an intracoder reliability test was
conducted that verified the consistency and accuracy of the results.2 Although the
different formats of these sources limit the extent to which one can statistically
compare these three venues, a comparative quantitative description does provide
a broad sense of which themes and issues each one prioritized as well as the type
and disposition of the sources utilized. This overview lays the foundations for the
discursive analysis to follow in which dominant themes in the News Hour and
The Bill Good Show are explored at greater length.

Gunster / Listening to Labour: Mainstream Media and the Teachers Strike 665

Topics, sources, and callers: A study in contrasts
Not surprisingly, all three venues prioritized the issue of law and order, which
involved both reporting upon the legal issues at play in the dispute as well as
the philosophical and political debate about whether teachers were ethically
justified in breaking the law to defend public education and their right to col-
lective bargaining. The struggle between the teachers and the government to
frame their own perspective as reflective of the public interest was clearly
dependent upon how the causes and consequences of the strike were portrayed.
Why were the teachers out on strike and what were the effects of such an action
likely to be?

As Table 1 shows, we find there is a striking divergence in the answers pro-
vided by The Vancouver Sun and the News Hour on the one hand, and The Bill
Good Show on the other. In devoting more stories (and time) to the disruptive
effects of the strike than any other topic, Global stuck very closely with a con-
ventional strike script, which interpellated the audience as self-interested con-
sumers whose primary interest and concern in such disputes is (or ought to be)
how their everyday lives have been negatively affected: 12 of 17 newscasts fea-
tured at least one such report. Once other labour groups joined the fight against
the government, the News Hour turned its attention to their supporting actions
and associated negative effects. In both types of stories, unions appeared directly
responsible for the infliction of hardship and inconvenience upon ordinary peo-
ple in order to achieve their own objectives. Beyond an occasional nominal men-
tion, the core teacher demand for improvements to classroom conditions was
almost entirely ignored by the News Hour.

At first glance, The Sun’s coverage appears somewhat better in terms of bal-
ancing the three key themes of law and order, classroom conditions, and disrup-
tive effects, especially when the letters page is figured into the data. However, the
picture becomes much bleaker when the numbers are broken down by the type of
article: while 14 of the 16 items on disruption were penned by the paper’s
reporters (and thus sanctioned as “hard” news), not a single one of the classroom
conditions pieces was written by a journalist. In other words, neither The Sun nor
the News Hour chose to provide any substantive coverage at all to the most sig-
nificant issue of the strike and, more importantly, the one that explained why so
many teachers felt justified—even obligated in terms of safeguarding the learn-
ing conditions of their students—in breaking the law.

In contrast, The Bill Good Show devoted extensive air time to discussing and
debating the issue of classroom conditions, especially concerns about growing
class sizes and declining resources for children with special needs. Unlike tradi-
tional news venues or some host-driven talk radio programs with limited oppor-
tunities for audience participation, The Bill Good Show’s political agenda is
strongly influenced by what the callers want to discuss. Given the extensive
focus upon disruption in the other two venues, one might have expected the
show to have been flooded with calls from angry, frustrated parents venting
about the inconvenience they were suffering. Yet only 4 segments, just over 3%
of the total, dealt primarily with this topic, and all of them during the latter half
of the strike. At one point, the host even explicitly set aside time to discuss the

666 Canadian Journal of Communication, Vol 33 (4)

strike in these terms, urging people to call him with stories about how they were
coping with the disruption, yet those who phoned insisted upon raising other
issues, such as the state of education in the province or who was to blame for the
impasse. Equally as significant as the time given to classroom conditions was
the clustering of these segments in the strike’s early days, when the two sides
were engaged in such a fierce competition to frame the dispute in their own
terms: 18 of the 24 segments on this topic aired in the first four days, with 8 on
the first day alone.

In order to dig a little deeper into the substance of the coverage, each item
was also coded for references to 23 key facts and arguments (Table 2). This vari-
able did not measure the extent to which an issue was discussed but simply
whether or not it was mentioned. Given the differences in format between the
three media, caution must be exercised in using these results for comparative pur-
poses: a segment on The Bill Good Show, for instance, is close to three times the
average length of a Global news story, and thus one can reasonably expect it to
include a greater quantity of information.

Even taking these differences into account, though, some significant patterns
confirm the trends noted above. First, references to class size and composition
issues occurred in over half of The Bill Good Show segments, a significantly

Gunster / Listening to Labour: Mainstream Media and the Teachers Strike 667

Table 1: Primary topics

The News The Sun The Sun The Bill
Hour (w/out letters) (w/ letters) Good Show

law and order 17 (17.7%) 22 (24.2%) 31 (20.4%) 25 (19.1%)
classroom conditions 1 (1.0%) 8 (8.8%) 18 (11.8%) 24 (18.3%)
teacher salaries/benefits 3 (3.1%) 0 2 (1.3%) 0
role of labour unions 15 (15.6%) 10 (11.0%) 10 (6.6%) 5 (3.8%)
flawed negotiating process 1 (1.0%) 8 (8.8%) 13 (8.6%) 13 (9.9%)
effects and disruption 21 (21.9%) 16 (17.6%) 20 (13.2%) 4 (3.1%)
to parents/students
unity/support of teachers 6 (6.3%) 1 (1.1%) 1 (0.7%) 7 (5.3%)
for BCTF/strike
education funding/ 0 1 (1.1%) 1 (0.7%) 2 (1.5%)
administration
ready mediation/ 9 (9.4%) 7 (7.7%) 7 (4.6%) 6 (4.6%)
recommendations
teachers’ vote to accept 3 (3.1%) 1 (1.1%) 1 (0.7%) 0
back to school 3 (3.1%) 0 0 0
critical of BCTF/Sims 0 0 11 (7.2%) 3 (2.3%)
critical of Liberals 2 (2.1%) 4 (4.4%) 16 (10.5%) 2 (1.5%)
no central theme 3 (3.1%) 3 (3.3%) 6 (3.9%) 40 (30.5%)
other 12 (12.5%) 10 (11.0%) 15 (9.9%) 0
Total 96 (100%) 91 (100%) 152 (100%) 13 (100%)

Note: Percentages refer to units or “items” (not time or word count). Percentages calcu-
lated on the basis of time and word counts do not differ substantially from those based on
units.

higher proportion than the other two. Second, given the absence of accurate, reli-
able statistics on classroom conditions (the provincial Ministry of Education did
not collect this data), anecdotal evidence from personal experience was the prin-
cipal source of information on this issue for the public and, more importantly per-
haps, counterbalanced stories about frustrated parents and students who were
inconvenienced by the strike. It was an essential component in the teachers’ argu-

668 Canadian Journal of Communication, Vol 33 (4)

Table 2: Topic/Issue mentions by venue

News The Sun Bill
Hour (w/out letters) Good

Liberals breaking the law 3.1% 11.0% 30.5%
Government now has a financial surplus 4.2% 5.5% 6.1%
Other public sector unions accept 2.1% 6.6% 9.9%
zero wage increase
BCTF political campaign against 1.0% 5.5% 17.6%
Liberals in election
Personal story supporting the strike 3.1% 3.3% 20.6%
Personal story opposing the strike 14.6% 3.3% 13.7%
Public support for the strike 14.6% 18.7% 16.8%
and/or the BCTF
Public frustration with the strike 11.5% 6.6% 9.2%
and/or the BCTF
Support of rank-and-file teachers 17.7% 16.5% 19.8%
for the BCTF
Disunity between rank-and-file teachers 4.2% 4.4% 12.2%
and the BCTF
Support of other labour unions 22.9% 25.3% 9.2%
for the BCTF
Disunity between other labour unions 3.1% 7.7% 2.3%
and the BCTF
Arguments in support of the strike 16.7% 22.0% 26.0%
as civil disobedience
Condemnation of the strike 28.1% 45.1% 36.6%
as breaking the law
Arguments in favour of sympathy strikes 10.4% 12.1% 7.6%
by organized labour
Arguments against sympathy 5.2% 6.6% 11.5%
strikes by organized labour
Criticism of the BCTF 35.4% 46.2% 59.5%
Support for the BCTF 36.5% 24.2% 16.0%
(excluding rank and file teachers)
Criticism of the Liberal government 37.5% 44.0% 59.5%
Support for the Liberal government 5.2% 2.2% 8.4%
Classroom conditions: class size 18.8% 40.7% 50.4%
Classroom conditions: class composition 9.4% 27.5% 50.4%
Classroom conditions: other 6.3% 9.9% 13.7%

Note: Percentages refer to the percent of items that mention the specific topic/issue.

ment that short-term disruption that resolved problems of overcrowding and
underfunding was preferable to the much longer-term and far more disruptive
effects of allowing those problems to grow worse.

Based on its preference for official sources, The Sun gave little attention to
any personal stories (though they obviously featured prominently on the letters
page). Global’s extensive reliance upon the disruptive frame clearly privileged
the experiences of those suffering because of the teachers’ action (or encouraged
those it featured to conceptualize the strike in terms of its negative, short-term
effects). Conversely, over one-fifth of The Bill Good Show’s segments included
at least one personal comment in support of the action, which most commonly
took the form of teachers, parents, or students describing their experiences in the
education system.

Third, the News Hour and The Sun were each twice as likely to feature argu-
ments condemning the strike as an illegal action as compared to those supporting
the action as a legitimate form of civil disobedience. Good’s program was far
more balanced in terms of presenting both arguments. Lastly, mentions for most
topics—15 of 23—were highest on talk radio, suggesting that its audience was
consistently exposed to a greater range of facts, arguments, and background
information, supporting both positions, than in the other venues. Much of the ani-
mosity between the BCTF and the Liberals, for instance, was symptomatic of the
toxic political relationship between them that had evolved over the past four
years, especially during the bitterly contested provincial election campaign of
May 2005. Good’s program was far more likely to refer to this historical context
than the other two. Even more remarkable is the divergence in the content in
terms of covering the Liberals’ record of breaking collective agreements with
other unions and its subsequent censuring by the International Labour
Organization (ILO) of the United Nations: close to one-third of Good’s segments
included reference to these important details, as compared to only 11% of Sun
stories and a minuscule 3% of News Hour items.

Looking at how sources appeared in each venue (Table 3), the most notable
difference was The Sun’s much greater reliance upon official, institutional repre-
sentatives and spokespeople as opposed to the predominance of parents, teachers,
and students on the News Hour and The Bill Good Show. Over half of those fea-
tured on Global’s newscasts were from these three groups, and they constituted
close to one-third of Good’s guests (and the majority of those who called the pro-
gram), but they were cited in only 16% of Sun items. However, the prominence
of teachers on Global did not translate into an opportunity for them to speak to
the issues they considered important: they rarely served as “definers,” who set the
story’s theme and suggest how the audience is to make sense of it (Hackett &
Gruneau, 2000, p. 195). Instead of addressing learning conditions, for instance,
teachers were more commonly called upon to justify their actions as lawbreakers
or apologize for disrupting the lives of parents and students. Similarly, students
on Global appeared nearly 40 times in stories about disruption but only twice in
the single item on classroom conditions. Along with parents, they were over-
whelmingly portrayed as victims of the strike, helpless to do much other than
complain about how their lives were being negatively affected.

Gunster / Listening to Labour: Mainstream Media and the Teachers Strike 669

Conversely, the much looser constraints on talk radio in terms of time and
narrative consistency allowed parents, teachers, and students much greater free-
dom and autonomy to speak about the issues that mattered to them, thereby mod-
elling a far more active form of deliberative citizenship in which individuals have

the ability and the desire to form their own opinions about political issues rather
than supply sound bites for the scripts assembled by others. Political pundits and
columnists were the most frequent source type on The Bill Good Show, and their
principal role was to supply critical analysis, background, and political commen-
tary. Again, fewer time constraints as well as the chance to engage in often spir-
ited debates with callers meant these segments often featured a much deeper and
more far-ranging analysis of the causes, conduct, and possible consequences of
the strike than occurred in the other two venues.

Consistent with the dominant paradigm of objectivity in which balance is
secured through the citation of competing sources (Hackett & Zhao, 1998), The
Sun leaned heavily on union representatives, provincial politicians, and school
board and other institutional spokespersons to frame, define, and describe the
strike and its implications. This helps explain the paper’s greater attention to issues
such as the legal wrangling between the parties in the court, including the decision
by the B.C. Supreme Court to hold the BCTF in contempt of court for its actions,
the strike’s effects on different organizations, and official statements from power-

670 Canadian Journal of Communication, Vol 33 (4)

Table 3: Sources utilized during strike media coverage

News The Sun Bill
Hour (w/out letters) Good

BCTF representative 22 (7.8%) 41 (13.3%) 8 (4.5%)
Liberal politician 25 (8.8%) 39 (12.7%) 8 (4.5%)
BCPSEA representative 9 (3.2%) 16 (5.2%) 7 (4.0%)
NDP politician 2 (0.7%) 13 (4.2%) 1 (0.6%)
schoolboard representative/trustee 8 (2.8%) 10 (3.2%) 12 (6.8%)
school administrator 1 (0.4%) 7 (2.3%) 5 (2.8%)
representative from other union 27 (9.5%) 41 (13.3%) 1 (0.6%)
(eg. CUPE, BCFL)
pundit/columnist 0 1 (0.3%) 48 (27.1%)
academic/expert 7 (2.5%) 20 (6.5%) 13 (7.3%)
parent 41 (14.5%) 13 (4.2%) 23 (13.0%)
teacher 53 (18.7%) 24 (7.8%) 35 (19.8%)
student 56 (19.8%) 12 (3.9%) 4 (2.3%)
other education system stakeholder 7 (2.5%) 11 (3.6%) 10 (5.6%)
BC Court judge/official 2 (0.7%) 10 (3.2%) 0
mediator Vince Ready 1 (0.4%) 5 (1.6%) 0
institutional/corporate spokesperson 10 (3.5%) 29 (9.4%) 0
person-on-the-street 4 (1.4%) 8 (2.6%) 0
other 8 (2.8%) 8 (2.6%) 2 (1.2%)
Total 283 308 177
Note: Numbers refer to guest appearances within one unit. Multiple guests of the same
type may be present within one unit and are counted multiple times.

ful provincial political actors, including the B.C. Federation of Labour and corpo-
rate leaders in the province. Commentary from academics or other experts did not
feature prominently in any of the three venues, and when these sources did appear
it was to address topics such as law and order, the dysfunctional bargaining
process, and the role of mediation in labour conflict: at no time was an academic
or other expert called upon to discuss or analyze educational policy or changing
learning conditions in the province’s classrooms.

In terms of orientation to the strike (Table 4), sources in favour of the teach-
ers’ action moderately outnumbered its critics in all of the venues. The higher
numbers for the News Hour and The Sun are, in large part, a consequence of two
patterns: first, teachers and members of other unions were often used as sources;
and, second, they were virtually unanimous in supporting the strike. In The Sun,
for instance, BCTF representatives, teachers, and other union members
accounted for more than 80% of pro-strike sources. However, when it came to
parents and students, the two groups most closely associated with the broader
“public interest,” the numbers are quite different. The balance between students
explicitly taking a position in favour of the strike and those directly opposing it
was pretty even on Global, at 11 to 9. But the ratio shifts decisively once we fac-
tor in the 30 students who spoke about the hardship the strike had imposed with-
out directly blaming either party. In terms of the parents who appeared on the
News Hour, 23 described the action and its effects in negative terms, with only
5 speaking in support.

Table 4: Source orientation to the strike

News The Sun Bill
Hour (w/out letters) Good

source supports the strike 113 (39.9%) 127 (41.2%) 53 (29.9%)
source broadly supports education 7 (2.5%) 13 (4.2%) 9 (5.1%)
change but opposes the strike
source opposes the strike 58 (20.5%) 77 (25.0%) 34 (19.2%)
source disrupted by the strike but no 46 (16.3%) 29 (9.4%) 3 (1.7%)
explicit opinion in favour or opposed to it
source has mixed opinion on the strike 5 (1.8%) 2 (6.5%) 17 (9.6%)
source is neutral or cannot identify 54 (19.1%) 60 (19.5%) 61 (34.5%)
his/her opinion
Total 283 308 177

Both as guests and callers, teachers also furnished the majority of strike-sup-
portive voices on The Bill Good Show. Similarly, the majority of parents opposed
the action, though not in the same unbalanced proportions as on Global. More
interesting, though, was the fact that guests and callers on Bill Good’s program
were far less likely to speak only to the strike’s disruptive effects without also tak-
ing a position on the action itself. Although this may be partially explained by the
high priority given to disruption stories on the News Hour and in The Sun, it also
speaks to the very different role that sources play in talk radio as compared to
print and broadcast news. In the latter case, they largely speak through quotes and

Gunster / Listening to Labour: Mainstream Media and the Teachers Strike 671

sound bites, which are selected and edited for their relevance to a news item’s
principal theme as determined by the news organization. Unconstrained by such
limits, callers and guests on Good’s program often moved beyond the largely pas-
sive role of a victim or witness describing the strike’s impact into the more active
(and political) position of explaining why it had happened, whether or not it was
a good or necessary action, and how it should be resolved.

It is also worth noting that the pro-teacher disposition of the majority of The
Sun’s sources (as well as the public at large) was not at all reflected in the paper’s
editorials, columns, or op-eds. Of 12 columns pertaining to the strike, 1 was sup-
portive, 4 were critical, and 7 were of mixed opinion; 2 of The Sun’s 5 editorials
were critical and 3 were of mixed opinion (though decidedly more critical of the
BCTF than of the government); and 2 of the 5 guest op-eds were critical, 2 were
mixed, and only 1 was supportive. In sum, less than 10% of the commentary and
opinion published by The Sun favoured the strike, while over one-third was
clearly opposed. Far more representative of public opinion were letters to the edi-
tor, with 28 supporting the union’s actions and 18 opposed.

Overall, the somewhat surprising picture that emerges from this content
analysis is that talk radio, a medium commonly disparaged for its right-wing ide-
ological bias and superficial treatment of politics, offered more substantive, bal-
anced, and diverse coverage of the strike than its counterparts in print and
broadcast news. The Bill Good Show devoted considerable attention to the prin-
cipal strike issue for the teachers, namely, the deterioration of classroom condi-
tions through increasing class sizes and fewer resources for special needs
students. It also regularly touched upon a wide variety of background issues and
provided its listeners access to a diverse range of opinions, arguments, and analy-
sis that located consideration of the strike’s illegality and disruptive effects in a
broader social, political, and historical context. While the host showed a slight
bias against the strike (tending to disagree more with its supporters and agree
more with its critics), the show’s open-ended format allowed those who favoured
the action ample opportunities to make their case.

In contrast, the most noticeable characteristic of The Sun and the News
Hour’s coverage was an almost complete failure to investigate or even report
upon classroom conditions in any depth, a shocking omission given the critical
significance of this issue to the conflict. Instead, both outlets privileged questions
of law and order and prioritized documenting the strike’s disruptive effects on
students and parents, a news agenda that fit very well with the communicative
strategy of the Liberal government. In order to flesh out these patterns with illus-
trative examples and a more qualitative treatment of key themes, let us move on
to a critical discursive analysis of the News Hour and The Bill Good Show.3

Speaking of the public: the News Hour on Global
Ten days into the dispute (and on the same day that a massive rally in favour of
the teachers occurred in Victoria), News Hour anchor Tony Parsons introduced a
story on the continuing support of British Columbians for the teachers as follows:
“As the strike enters its second full week, you might be surprised to learn that the
B.C. public is still siding with the teachers” (“Public Opinion,” October 17).4
Why would Global’s audience—which is presumably somewhat reflective of the

672 Canadian Journal of Communication, Vol 33 (4)

general public—be surprised to find out what it thinks? And yet, in the context of
the station’s unequivocal portrayal of the strike as bad for students and parents,
its claims that the union lacked the support of its members, and its spectacular
failure to spend any time investigating why so many teachers felt they had no
choice but to engage in an illegal action, Parson’s comment makes perfect sense.
If one’s only source of information about the strike had been the News Hour, it
would have been impossible to conclude that teachers were not only defending
their own interests but also those of the broader public. Story after story about
cancelled sports events, anxious high school seniors worried about final exams,
and stressed out parents wondering how to care for their kids reinforced a con-
ceptual and normative divide with teachers on one side and the public on the
other. The bald logic at play here was that people simply do not support strikes,
especially when they “drag on” for more than a couple of days: disruption and
inconvenience invariably trump whatever sympathy or solidarity people might
have felt for the teachers.

Consider, for example, the single story by Global that did focus upon class-
room conditions and which was nominally organized around two pro-teacher ral-
lies in Vancouver, one conducted by students and the second by parents. “Recent
opinion polls have shown that a majority of parents support the teachers in the dis-
pute,” observed Parsons, “but how are parents feeling right now as the strike drags
on with no end in sight?” Clearly, Parson’s reasoning suggests, support for the
teachers will likely dissipate in the face of widespread inconvenience for parents.
Growing public frustration and anger will (and ought to) be properly directed at
the teachers and their union; the possibility that it might also be focused upon an
intransigent Liberal government is never considered. The piece opens with brief
clips of student demonstrators talking about overcrowding and funding cuts,
which are followed by the reporter openly challenging the significance of the
protests, reminding the viewer that many people do not agree with the students.

While these students support their teachers, there are many parents who
feel differently. We’ve been getting emails from around the province say-
ing that teachers need to stop holding children hostage, they need to stop
breaking the law and they need to go back into the classroom before
more valuable school days are lost. And people we’ve stopped on the
street—parents—they feel the same way.
A few brief “streeters” are featured in which passers-by express mild skepti-

cism about the strike. The story ends by briefly covering the second rally by par-
ents and, again, the suggestion is made that once the reality of the situation sets
in, support for the teachers is likely to diminish. “Even though their children have
missed a week of class, many parents sympathize with the teachers, at least for
now” (“Student Rally,” October 14, emphasis added). Polls and protest rallies are
both important instruments through which the values, beliefs, and opinions of the
public are expressed, and when they converge in support of a particular view,
such as favouring the teachers, the media have an obligation to represent the pub-
lic accordingly. In this case, the News Hour did almost exactly the opposite, con-
structing and framing the story so as to minimize the significance of public
support for the teachers.

Gunster / Listening to Labour: Mainstream Media and the Teachers Strike 673

Given the de facto positioning of journalists and anchors as representatives
of the public, the statements, arguments, and questions they present on-camera
furnish powerful conceptual and affective cues as to how the audience itself
ought to think and feel about the issues, actors, and events at hand. Such cues also
help establish the hegemony of certain views, values, and perspectives as wide-
spread, normal, and reflective of common sense. Thus when anchors and
reporters modelled an aggressive, confrontational stance toward teachers or their
union, the underlying message was that the public ought to treat them (and their
arguments) in the same skeptical fashion.

Noteworthy in this regard are several occasions in which News Hour
reporters confronted teachers and BCTF officials about the democratic and ethi-
cal legitimacy of their actions. On the first day of the strike, for instance, a story
entitled “A Bad Example?” wondered how teachers could possibly justify their
actions. As teachers and students explained the historical, ethical, and legal foun-
dations for civil disobedience in Canada, they were challenged with questions
that echoed government talking points on the topic almost exactly. “If it’s illegal
does that mean that . . . you can just . . . pick and choose what laws you like and
what laws you don’t like, and you can break them?” (“A Bad Example?” October
7). A few nights later, after the B.C. Supreme Court found the BCTF in contempt,
teachers were once again interrogated about the ethics of their actions. “Are you
at all worried . . . that as a role model you’re setting the wrong example for the
kids by breaking the law?” (“SCBC Ruling,” October 12). Most egregiously per-
haps, as the strike was drawing to a close and the BCTF were preparing to vote
on the Ready recommendations, a reporter asked, “Was breaking the law worth
it? You don’t feel that you’ve been used by the BCTF?” (“On the Picket Line,”
October 21). Teachers are given a fair opportunity to respond, but the fact that
these difficult and often hostile questions were reserved almost entirely for one
side suggests that it is the words and actions of teachers that must be carefully
scrutinized and challenged.

Interviewed on The Bill Good Show as a regular participant in a segment on
B.C. politics, Keith Baldrey, the senior legislative reporter for Global, acknowl-
edged the central importance of classroom conditions to the strike, claiming that
“everybody’s newscast has had the same stories with teachers . . . explaining
exactly what’s going on in the classrooms” (October 14, 10-11am).5 As the pre-
ceding analysis has shown, this was clearly not the case. In the absence of such
stories, the strike and those positioned as bearing primary responsibility for it
were consistently and unequivocally portrayed as standing in opposition to the
public interest. Within the constraints of a 10- or 15-second clip, students, teach-
ers, and other union members were given the chance to make their case that the
strike’s ultimate objective was to increase and protect educational resources for
B.C. classrooms, a fundamental public good that outweighed the short-term hard-
ship caused by the disruption. But this perspective was never sanctioned by the
News Hour in the form of stories exploring it at any greater length. Moreover, it
was consistently drowned out by a sea of stories about cancelled athletic and stu-
dent leadership events, overstretched families struggling to cope with emergency
child care costs and arrangements, and high school seniors worried about missed

674 Canadian Journal of Communication, Vol 33 (4)

opportunities for university scholarships: night after night, the News Hour offered
graphic, compelling, and often highly emotional evidence about how the strike
was taking a serious toll on the public. Quite simply the interests, values, and
beliefs of the public were consistently framed as logically and categorically dis-
tinct from and opposed to those of the BCTF and its allies, ignoring and trivial-
izing powerful evidence to the contrary from polls, rallies, and support for
teachers on the picket lines. A couple of stories bucked this overall trend, but they
were few and far between, rare exceptions in a field of coverage in which anchors
and reporters championed the interests of a public seemingly more concerned
with disruption, inconvenience, and the rule of law than with deteriorating learn-
ing conditions and the erosion of collective bargaining rights.

Talking to teachers: The Bill Good Show
On the first morning of the strike, Bill Good remarked on the fact that guests
Vaughn Palmer, political columnist for The Vancouver Sun, and the aforemen-
tioned Baldrey were uncharacteristically quiet. “It’s not a bad day for listening,”
replied Palmer, reflecting upon what he had heard: “When you’re talking about
class size or the problem of special needs children, you’re not talking about a pay
raise for teachers, you’re talking about putting resources in the system.” In the
space of a few words, the context in which to understand and assess the motives
of those on strike shifted dramatically from personal gain to the learning condi-
tions of students, from self to public interest. Palmer did not discount this logic
as a BCTF public relations strategy but instead attributed it to the process of lis-
tening to teachers explain their motives by describing conditions within their
classrooms. Moments later, “Brad” called:

I am a teacher in Coquitlam. And I’d like to talk briefly about the com-
position of my [grade three] class. . . . I have 20 children, 11 ESL chil-
dren. . . . I have one boy who is reading . . . at a grade 9.2 level . . . and
I have another gal who doesn’t know her ABCs, she can make the letters
up to H and that’s it. She doesn’t recognize numbers after 11. . . . And
this girl has no extra help in my classroom. She does go until 11:30 each
day to the resource room and then she’s back in my class. . . . I’m fight-
ing to get help for her.

The caller went on to explain why he believed the analogy between the civil
rights movement and the current strike was justified. After thanking him, Good
urged other teachers to call in with their own thoughts, experiences, and opinions:
“We have the benefit of hearing directly from teachers and I hope we will until
this is resolved because it is important that people hear what teachers’ working
conditions are like, how they have evolved and why they feel under such stress
and pressure” (October 7, 10-11am).

Beyond simply offering individual teachers, among others, an opportunity to
express their views and share their experiences, this dynamic established a basic
familiarity with these views and experiences as an essential prerequisite for
developing a rational, coherent, and informed opinion on the strike. To be
informed, in other words, required one to acknowledge, listen to, and learn from
the views of the workers. Such an approach represented a clear departure from

Gunster / Listening to Labour: Mainstream Media and the Teachers Strike 675

conventional strike epistemologies, as mediated and scripted by the news media,
in which even minimal levels of inconvenience and disruption justify the public’s
normative dismissal of strikes as unethical and unjustified, irrespective of the rea-
soning and experience of workers.

Both as guests and as callers, teachers were framed as the crucial source of
knowledge about the state of education in British Columbia. For a variety of rea-
sons, including the lack of official data on class size and composition and the
government’s reputation for ruthless cost-cutting in its first term, the Liberals had
little credibility with the public on issues of education policy: the government’s
positioning of the Labour Minister, not the Minister of Education, as their princi-
pal spokesperson on the strike only reinforced this perception. Thus the BCTF
and, more importantly, its members were the only group that could credibly
address the issue of learning conditions in provincial classrooms. As we’ve seen,
The Sun and the News Hour largely ignored the stories of teachers on this topic,
nominally reporting that class size and composition were important to the union
but never investigating their concerns in any depth. In contrast, Good’s program
assembled several panels to investigate these topics in the strike’s first week,
bringing teachers and parents together to discuss their own experiences in the
school system and reflect upon how they might help the public understand the
root causes of the dispute.

On the first day of the strike, for example, Good and his callers spent a full
hour engaging four teachers on issues ranging from the effect of larger class sizes
on learning conditions and interaction with students to the experience of integrat-
ing special needs children over the past decade to why they believed an illegal
strike was their only option to advocate for their students. “You don’t strike me
as a lawbreaker,” Good noted in conversation with an elementary school teacher.
“You don’t strike me as being incredibly militant or over the top political . . . but
you feel you have no choice?” “I think it is really important that I do stand up and
say no on this issue,” she explained,

because it’s not about me, it’s about the kids. It’s about improving the
working and learning conditions and historically . . . the only time that
improvements to education have come about is when teachers have stood
up and said no . . . and the feeling of frustration comes from being pushed
into a situation where I feel I have to stand up and do this because I have
no other way to say no, enough is enough.

Expressed in concert with personal stories about their classroom experiences,
arguments such as this offered compelling accounts of why “law-abiding citi-
zens” were willing to take the extraordinary step of collectively engaging in an
illegal strike. Equally as important, they countered the government’s claim that
the strike reflected the political ambitions of militant BCTF leaders, not the will
of its members. On the following Monday, the program devoted an hour to a par-
ents panel, with two supporting the strike and two opposed. And the day after
that, another full hour was spent discussing class composition with two special
needs teachers, including the president of the Special Education Association of
B.C. and two parents of children with special needs. Segments such as these pro-
vided extensive detail and significant insight into the working and learning con-

676 Canadian Journal of Communication, Vol 33 (4)

ditions in the classroom as well as a diverse range of opinion about why those
conditions had deteriorated and how they might be improved.

Beyond offering a forum in which classroom experience could be shared, The
Bill Good Show excelled as a space in which facts, observations, and historical
details were forged into competing political arguments. From academic experts
and partisan political commentators to the teachers, parents, and others who
called in, the program modelled a form of deliberative, democratic discourse that
was virtually non-existent in the other two venues. Not unexpectedly, the quality
of debate and analysis was highly uneven: sophisticated, insightful, and complex
interventions mingled with comments that can charitably be described as simplis-
tic, clichéd, and often misleading. Yet the overall effect was the creation of a pub-
lic sphere in which individuals with varying levels of knowledge and rhetorical
ability were not only encouraged to develop and share their opinions and experi-
ences with others but, more importantly perhaps, to reflect upon, defend, and
even modify their views as they listened to, learned from, and engaged with the
arguments of others. Where partisan rhetoric in the news media is usually served
up in the form of serialized talking points—the proverbial menu of “he said, she
said”—the presentation of fact and opinion on Good’s program was often subject
to a rigorous, though usually fair, deconstruction by those with differing views.
Thus the spectacular interpellation of the audience as a passive consumer of
information was challenged by a deliberative discursive practice that called upon
listeners to actively engage with and assess the different arguments on the table.

Similar to the other venues, the topic of law and order received more atten-
tion than any other topic on The Bill Good Show. But rather than dwell upon the
procedural aspects of the legal process or simply attack teachers for setting a bad
example, the program delved into these issues from a variety of different angles.
First, it consistently problematized the distinction between the teachers as law-
breakers and the government as impartial custodians of the rule of law. The
Liberals’ blatant disregard for legal contracts, binding arbitration, court decisions,
and international treaties received a great deal of attention on the show, not sim-
ply as points of fact but as a means of challenging the common sense equation of
law and justice as well as drawing attention to the use of legislation as an instru-
ment of power. The following quote from a caller is lengthy but worth reproduc-
ing in its entirety to illustrate the often complex arguments that appeared in this
context:

I wanted to reframe the question a little bit because we’ve been talking a
lot about whether it is ethical for teachers to go out on an illegal strike.
But I think for me the issue is really is it ethical for the government to
use legislation to really just pre-empt any negotiation at all and just say
“No, we’re not going to talk, we’re just going to make it illegal and
you’re just going to have to accept that.” For me that is a profoundly
unethical thing for them to have done to us, to say “We won’t even talk
to you.” And I think that is really the reason that you see so much frus-
tration from teachers, is that we’ve really just been shut out and shut
down. And it’s not like they had a reasonable settlement that we turned
our nose up and said it wasn’t good enough. They had no offer, no

Gunster / Listening to Labour: Mainstream Media and the Teachers Strike 677

options, “just accept what you’re given.” And I don’t know too many
people who would accept that from their employer no matter who it is. It
is a fundamental right to be able to sit down with your employer
(October 13, 11am-noon)

Expressed in an accessible yet sophisticated and critical manner, explanations
such as these challenged simplistic arguments that teachers had to obey the law
like everyone else.

Second, guests and callers spent considerable time unpacking the deeper con-
nections between civil disobedience and democracy. One of the teachers who
joined Good on the strike’s first day, for instance, reminded listeners that obedi-
ence is only one element of the rule of law in a democracy. “The second part of
the equation is that everyone is to be treated fairly by the law. And where you see
unfairness you have to take steps to remedy it” (October 7, 9-10am). A few days
later, Good brought in a series of expert commentators to address civil disobedi-
ence in greater detail. A board member of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association
explained that the democratic objective of civil disobedience was to shift impor-
tant political issues out of the legal system and return them to the public sphere
for deliberation by their fellow citizens (October 13, 11am-noon). Mark
Thompson, a professor of industrial relations, ventured that “democracy isn’t
only about elections. . . . It also entails respect for minority rights and this gov-
ernment has imposed more contracts by legislation than any government I know
of in Canadian history . . . in the order of nine times. I think that’s part of the frus-
tration we’re seeing” (October 18, 10-11am).

The devolution of public speech into sound bites and talking points, end-
lessly repeated by politicians and others trained to stay “on message,” makes it
more important than ever for the news media to investigate the veracity, mean-
ing, and intent of the discursive shorthand that now passes for political dialogue.
Shifting coverage of this issue beyond repetition of abstract pieties about the
rule of law or rhetorical invocations of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, The Bill
Good Show supplied its audience with information, analysis, and debate that
ranged widely over diverse conceptual and political terrain. Above all, it invig-
orated a deeply political understanding of the core issues and principles of the
dispute as contestable, subject to public deliberation and discussion in which the
quality of any particular claim or argument was dependent upon sound reason-
ing, supporting evidence, and an expansive understanding of political and his-
torical context.

Class dismissed? Concluding thoughts
Based on the preceding analysis of the News Hour and The Vancouver Sun, the
mainstream news media in Vancouver appeared remarkably immune to the dem-
ocratic logic of accountability that Kumar (2007) and Martin (2004) have dis-
cerned in corporate media coverage of labour disputes. Instead of
accommodating and reflecting the public’s solidarity with the teachers based on
a shared interest in a well-funded public education system, both news organiza-
tions maintained their focus upon the strike’s illegality and its disruptive effects.
They remained committed to the ideological public of conventional strike scripts
to whom the only thing that really matters is how, when, and to what extent they

678 Canadian Journal of Communication, Vol 33 (4)

are inconvenienced. When that public failed to appear spontaneously, the News
Hour desperately tried to create it through endless news reports about suffering
students and frustrated parents while, for the most part, avoiding stories that
might have highlighted the common interest of teachers and the public in a sta-
ble, well-funded public education system.

For its part, The Sun’s editorial position consistently favoured the government
by insisting that the only way to resolve the crisis was for teachers to return to
work and accept the Liberals’ offer to discuss their concerns through multi-stake-
holder consultations. Given the strategic mishandling of the strike by the Liberals,
it was very difficult to position the government as the custodian of the public’s
interests. Accordingly, the media initially slotted judge Madam Justice Brenda
Brown (and the principle of the rule of law) into this role: her contempt ruling, for
instance, was widely praised and portrayed as giving the BCTF an honourable
means of backing down. In the dispute’s final days, however, Brown’s place was,
somewhat surprisingly, taken by Jim Sinclair and the BCFL. As lead organizer and
spokesperson for a wave of sympathy strikes by “big labour” to bolster the BCTF,
Sinclair was initially (and predictably) framed as a “union boss” mobilizing his
authoritarian control over workers to attack a democratically elected government.

In the strike’s latter days, though, the BCFL head was celebrated for his emi-
nently pragmatic schooling of the teachers in the realpolitik of labour relations,
which decreed that they had no choice but to accept a settlement that fell far short
of their objectives. In the end, then, media coverage in this case largely followed
the ideological scripting of strikes as newsworthy to the public only insofar as
they cause disruption and inconvenience.

Explaining the failure (and unwillingness) of the News Hour and The Sun to
reflect public solidarity with the teachers lies beyond the scope of this paper. One
might, however, reasonably conclude that the monopoly CanWest Global holds
over regional news was a major factor in allowing the News Hour and The Sun to
be so remarkably unresponsive and unaccountable to the public that they osten-
sibly serve. In the absence of a real choice between different media organizations,
news agencies are easily able to insulate themselves from pressure to better
reflect the diverse views and opinions of citizens.

“Workers,” argues Fred Glass, “are the best experts at their own lives” and
thus, “the first rule of an organizing model for labor communications should be
simply to trust workers” (2003, p. 7). He goes on to develop an alternative
approach to labour education and communications that abandons the tools, tech-
niques, and priorities of commercial public relations in favour of giving workers
the opportunity to tell their own stories in their own words. It is an approach that
the BCTF seems to have taken to heart. Following the gutting of their collective
agreement in 2002, the teachers fought back with a multi-faceted campaign to
raise public awareness about the deleterious effects of the government’s policies
upon the provincial education system, including extensive efforts to mobilize
rank-and-file teachers to speak about the worsening conditions in their class-
rooms. Moira MacKenzie, director of Communications and Campaigns for the
BCTF, explained that the union “deliberately and clearly chose classroom teacher
voices . . . and really wanted to make sure that their stories and their experiences,

Gunster / Listening to Labour: Mainstream Media and the Teachers Strike 679

the learning conditions that they had in their classrooms, were really a big fea-
ture” of outreach campaigns (personal communication, January 12, 2007).

The first target for such campaigns were often teachers themselves, who wor-
ried about being perceived poorly by the public. Peter Owens, also a BCTF com-
munications officer, recalls focus groups with teachers in 2004 in which they
expressed a reluctance to speak out on these issues, preferring that the BCTF make
the case for them. Accordingly, the union had to convince members that they
“were the most credible source of information about public education . . . and that
the public did want to hear from them because that’s who they believed the
most . . . about the neighbourhood school” (Peter Owens, Assistant Director,
Communications and Campaigns, BCTF, personal communication, January 12,
2007). Strong, personal connections between children, parents, and teachers was a
crucial factor in explaining the strength and longevity of public support for the
strike, especially in the face of such hostile media coverage. Once teachers had the
confidence to share their concerns directly with parents (and the union secured
their legal right to do so by overcoming strong opposition from the Liberals,
Ministry of Education bureaucrats, and some school boards), they were no longer
so dependent upon the news media to communicate their concerns to the public.

However, personal communication is not the only way through which the
experience, expertise, and knowledge of workers may be shared. New and/or
alternative media are commonly fetishized as the only means of circumventing
the ideological filters of the corporate media system. The most interesting find-
ing of this study, however, is how talk radio can become a site of contestation and
struggle over the meaning of labour actions, especially those which spill across
the borders that usually separate the worlds of work and politics. “The big bene-
fit of having our teachers out on picket lines with cellphones,” explained Owens,
“was that they could listen to radio talk shows and phone in and tell their story,
and they did over and over and over again. It was a big advantage: the nature of
the talk shows changed” (personal communication, January 12, 2007).

Often associated with conservative political “shock jocks” such as Rush
Limbaugh, talk radio is easy to dismiss as a biased, confrontational, and largely
right-wing medium with little credibility as a serious venue for political dialogue.
As this study has demonstrated, however, programs such as The Bill Good Show
that have preserved a commitment to traditional journalistic conventions such as
objectivity and balance can accommodate a diverse range of views on political
topics. Previous news media scholarship (e.g., Hackett & Zhao, 1998) has rightly
criticized the ideological role that the “regime of objectivity” has often played in
disguising the systematic and structural bias, which often characterizes the pro-
duction of news. Yet, considered in the specific context of talk radio, this regime
can also have the salutary effect of allowing this medium to serve as a venue in
which a diverse range of views, opinions, and experiences can be shared, dis-
cussed, and debated. The growing dominance of this medium by personalities
who unabashedly celebrate their allegiance to conservative ideological values and
perspectives, and thereby condemn commitments to objectivity and balance as
antiquated and irrelevant, increasingly make such conversations unlikely
(Jamieson & Capella, 2008).

680 Canadian Journal of Communication, Vol 33 (4)

However, those programs and hosts that buck this trend, in part by maintain-
ing a commitment to diversity, balance, and a desire to learn from different types
of guests and callers, can serve as sites for deliberative, democratic discourse. In
such cases, irrespective of the political orientation of the host (and most do lean
to the right), the genre’s heavy reliance upon “ordinary” people and preference
for opinions that are grounded in “real world” experience make it a surprisingly
hospitable venue for workers to speak as experts about their own experiences.
This is precisely what the teachers did, allowing them to carve out a public sphere
in which the strike was analyzed, discussed, and debated in far greater detail and
with a much broader range of perspectives than one found in the leading daily
newspaper or television newscast.

Acknowledgments
My thanks to Bob Hackett, Donald Gutstein, and Dennis Pilon for their helpful
comments on an earlier draft of this article.

Notes
1. Due to technical problems capturing the News Hour and The Bill Good Show, there are small gaps

in the sample: the Global newscasts on Sunday, October 9, and Monday, October 10, are missing,
as is a one-hour segment on The Bill Good Show that aired on October 17 from 10:00 to 11:00
a.m. Although these absences are unfortunate, they represent comparatively minor gaps and,
therefore, do not compromise the validity of the quantitative or qualitative findings.

2. Several months after the initial coding was completed, 10% of the items from each source were
recoded. All variables were above 80% in terms of consistency with the earlier results. The test-
ing showed 92.6% consistency for the 30 variables in The Vancouver Sun coding schematic,
93.7% for the News Hour, and 91.9% for The Bill Good Show. These results are well within the
range of acceptability for media content analysis.

3. Unfortunately, due to considerations of space, a similar discussion of The Sun has not been
included. Given the relative absence of academic treatments of regional broadcast news media in
British Columbia (as compared to several good studies that focus upon print media such as The
Sun—e.g., Hackett & Gruneau, 2000), I have given priority to the News Hour and The Bill Good
Show in the latter half of this article.

4. Citations from the News Hour broadcasts take the form of a story title and date.

5. Citations from The Bill Good Show take the form of the date and hour in which the segment was
originally broadcast.

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684 Canadian Journal of Communication, Vol 33 (4)

Article

Corresponding author:
Stephen Groening, Brown University, Modern Culture and Media, 155 East George St, Providence
RI 02912–1957, USA.
Email: Stephen_Groening@Brown.edu

From ‘a box in the theater
of the world’ to ‘the world
as your living room’: cellular
phones, television and mobile
privatization1

Stephen Groening
Brown University, USA

Abstract
The ability to receive and view television programs (and other moving image material)
on the cellular phone should be seen as part of a larger system of asserting private
space in an environment that is crowded with both people and technology. I begin with
Walter Benjamin’s notion that the rise of the private individual can be indexed to the
set of practices that transform the dwelling place into an interiorization of the external
world through the collection of images and objects while at the same time acting as
a place of refuge from the external world. Linking those observations to Raymond
Williams’ notion of mobile privatization, I argue that the contradictory impulses of
moving through the world while retreating from it are the product of economic and
social structures which act to isolate individuals from each other while connecting them
to the products of corporate media, and do not arise from any inherent traits within
cellular phone technology.

Key words
Walter Benjamin, cellular phones, mobile privatization, public/private divide, social
atomization, television, Raymond Williams

New media devices, such as radio and television, accentuate an ongoing emphasis on
private life, privacy and privatization already present in 18th- and 19th-century European
life. Increased privatization, in which private space attempts to encompass public space
and the world at large, is one of the central tendencies of electronic visual media. New
communications media enable and produce new social orders marked by an accentuation

new media & society
12(8) 1331–1347

© The Author(s) 2010
Reprints and permission: sagepub.

co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1461444810362094

http://nms.sagepub.com

1332 new media & society 12(8)

of private space, with regulated and limited connections to the public. As I will show, this
emphasis, which takes the form of an effective identity, has political and social implica-
tions. Raymond Williams calls this retreat ‘mobile privatization’: an identity offered by
contemporary capitalism and enabled by communication technologies that promises new
freedoms and forms of mobility in the seclusion of the domestic space.2 This article
argues that the introduction of television-style programming on cellular phones indicates
a changing role for television in the public/private dichotomy, a categorical divide that
structures modern life and experience.

The project of transforming cellular phones into mobile television receivers in the
USA has a history dating back to initiatives in 1999.3 This article is a retrospective look
at the past five years of the advertising discourse of mobile television. By analyzing the
‘the official art of modern capitalist society’ (Williams, 2005: 184), I seek to demonstrate
the ramifications of omnipresent portable television. The promotional materials of con-
sumer electronic manufacturers and cellular service providers represent the fantasies of
mobile television’s promoters, which may have little to do with actual use. Nonetheless,
these fantasies are attempts to appeal to potential users and so are based on market
research and the advertising expertise of commercial firms, and must rely on a code of
signification that can be understood by its audience. In other words, the promotional
materials engage their audience based on a shared worldview, and so these promotional
materials envision new technological interactions within a pre-existing social order.
Commercial firms sell new products by addressing ideas already present in the target
market. Max Dawson has pointed out, ‘advertisements for mobile television services
address affluent, technologically advanced male consumers between the ages of 18 and
34’, a target market which influences the types of appeal and the kinds of idealized
situations portrayed (Dawson, 2007: 233). The primary fantasy within these commer-
cials is one of control over sensory stimuli. But, as I will show, this control over what
cellular phone users devote attention to necessitates a withdrawal from sociability and
interpersonal interaction and an immersion in a private ‘bubble’ (Bull, 2004). Crucially,
the cellular phone is a device many users feel they must always carry with them, in order
to achieve ‘perpetual contact’ (Katz and Aakhus, 2002), and so this article investigates
the consequences of carrying television technology on one’s person. In particular, I am
concerned with the transformation of cellular phones from devices that allow communi-
cation between private individuals (through telephony, text messaging or email) into
handheld receivers for commercialized product.4

The boundaries of public and private are fluid because they are culturally and histori-
cally structured. For instance, certain bodily functions considered private in one place
and time may not necessarily be given the same consideration in another. But fluidity
does not mean that the public/private distinction should be ignored. The opposition
between public and private is crucial to how we structure our experience and to how our
experience is structured by institutions (particularly those, like liberal-democratic state
governments, which rely on the distinction for their very existence). Indeed, the contest
over this boundary has been a vital force in human rights movements (including feminist,
gay activist, anti-racist and others), advocacy for economic justice and the environmental
movement, to name just a few contemporary debates. The flexibility of these categories
is testament to their power.

Groening 1333

Jeff Weintraub provides a useful framework for untangling the web of meaning
characterizing the discourse of public and private. Weintraub notes that visibility and
collectivity form the foundation for most conceptions of public and private. The first
supplies us with the notion of public as open to examination and accessible. The second
is the background for ideas that link participation and citizenship to public-ness: what
is private is individual and personal; what is public is general and impersonal. Visibility
and collectivity are hardly complementary, and the tensions between these two rudi-
ments give rise to some of the inherent contradictions in the discourse of public and
private (Weintraub, 1997: 5–7).

As an example, television watching is traditionally understood to be a domestic
activity and therefore private.5 Television’s central place in the market economy, as a
commodity and an advertising medium, also makes it private in the sense of private
property. Television provides access to debates and information about public life, yet
watching television is a secluded activity. Seclusion precludes the interaction crucial to
public-ness as a form of sociability; and, because it effects a one-way conversation,
television also precludes the kind of collective action and decision-making central to
notions of the public-ness as a kind of citizenship. Nonetheless, television has become
the pre-eminent technology of communication, through which knowledge of the world
is mediated and produced. Television’s role as communication technology is as crucial
to the formation of the public sphere as newspapers once were (Habermas, 1991).
Television provides a membrane between the public and the private, allowing particular
images and sounds of the outside world into domestic space. These fragments of public-
ness are controlled and regulated by television producers and programmers initially and
secondarily by the viewers themselves. In fact, it is through television-watching that
public events, activities and ideas are brought into private space.

The adoption of cellular phones as television platforms presages a changing role for
television in the public/private divide. This type of mobile television turns these long-
held notions of television-watching on their head. In domestic viewing, television brings
what is out there into the relative safety, security and seclusion of the home. The ability
to watch television on a cellular phone while riding public transportation, waiting at an
airport lounge, or on a park bench means that the viewer is already out there. The fact
that the television is mobile does not simply compound public-ness so much as it creates
a small-scale mobile private space that interacts with public-ness as a television set in
the home would. Indeed, the promotional and advertising discourse surrounding these
technologies frames mobile television as an idyllic form of privacy and attempts to
persuade consumers that mobile television allows us to carry our home around with us,
outside domestic space.

The techniques of using visual media to produce an interface between public and
private did not originate with television or cellular phones. In fact, the admixture of inte-
rior and exterior as a personal collection is symptomatic of mass culture and industrial
capitalism. As Walter Benjamin’s essays on Baudelaire as well as his analyses of the
urban culture of turn-of-the-century Paris detailed, the hypertrophy of the private was
already occurring before the invention of cinema, radio or television.6 In numerous
essays, Benjamin drew attention to the home as a place providing both shelter from and
access to the outside. The new modes of visual display at work in the home make it an

1334 new media & society 12(8)

arcade, ‘something between a street and an intérieur’ (Benjamin, 2003: 19). Reflecting
back nearly a century to the 1830s and 1840s, Benjamin observed how the private indi-
vidual negotiated a protracted and partial retreat from the public. This particular form of
privatization involves careful regulation of the exterior’s intrusion on the interior, all
the while making sure the private space of the home controls public space. Consider the
following passage from Benjamin’s ‘Paris, capital of the 19th century’ (1999: 19):

The private individual, who in the office has to deal with realities, needs the domestic interior
to sustain him in his illusions. This necessity is all the more pressing since he has no intention
of grafting onto his business interests a clear perception of his social function. In the arrangement
of his private surroundings, he suppresses both of these concerns. From this derive the
phantasmagorias of the interior – which, for the private individual, represents the universe. In
the interior, he brings together remote locales and memories of the past. His living room is a
box in the theater of the world.

Here the individual is associated with interiority. In other words, the singular and
atomized person is secluded in a space cut off from society. The private individual uses
the office to carefully control interfaces with the outside world. The private individual
has withdrawn from social obligations in the economic sphere. Likewise, the interior of
the dwelling place is the realm of illusions, the souvenirs, collectibles, mementos and
dreams of distant times and places that have significance to the individual dweller. There
is no room for social obligations in the bourgeois interior. Benjamin concludes by stating
that the private individual is thus an observer, a member of an audience watching the
world from a private box. Benjamin uses the same image of the theater box in ‘The Paris
of the Second Empire in Baudelaire’, in which the ‘man of leisure’ inspects objects with
a set of opera glasses (Benjamin, 2003: 27–8). Importantly, during the performance,
those in the private box, a privileged vantage point above and separated from the crowd,
are invisible to the performers (invisibility being a form of privacy) until the house lights
come on and everyone can see the important personages in the box, giving the private
individual a public-ness associated with celebrity.

For Benjamin, the equation of the home with seeing the world begins in the early age
of photography, and grows from an encounter with mass culture and urbanization. The
private individual becomes overwhelmed with objects and access to those objects.
Collecting and managing becomes a way to cope and a form of power. The imagined
unfettered and unlimited access is, as we shall see, a sustaining part of bourgeois ideology
and remains a trope for promoting new media technologies up to and including the present
moment. The lure of such a vision requires constantly representing new objects and new
modes of availability to private individuals.

Benjamin provides a clear path from changes in social relations – the withdrawal of
the individual into seclusion – to the compensatory act of observing and watching. In
short, what Benjamin describes in these passages is a form of what Williams, in his book
Television: Technology and Cultural Form (2003) calls ‘mobile privatization’. For
Williams, mobility is a basic impulse borne of curiosity (which Williams treats as an
essential part of human nature). Likewise, the new and larger social organizations
brought about by industrial capitalism required the increased mobility of workers and

Groening 1335

goods. Contemporary to these developments is a series of struggles on the part of laborers
to shorten the work day, and gain increased wages and improved working conditions.
According to Williams, the combination of these conditions led to an increased emphasis
on improving the single family home. Thus the home is made possible by changes in the
social structure and a defensive response to these changes. Communications technologies,
such as radio and television, allowed the private dwelling an outward looking disposi-
tion. These communication systems, television in particular, substituted for public life by
granting their users a whole social intake: music, news, entertainment, sports and drama.
The concept of mobile privatization is a powerful and productive way of analyzing a
society that is both isolating and connecting, atomizing and cosmopolitan, or inward-
dwelling but outward-looking. Likewise, the concept of mobile privatization allows an
examination of the interplay between communication systems and the society in which
they are embedded (Williams, 2003: 19–25).

I will use Williams’ premise that technologies arise from emergent social, cultural and
economic needs as my starting point for discussing how cellular phones interact with the
already present mode of living of mobile privatization. When Williams links technology
to emergent needs, he is not referring to the technical devices that are nifty gadgets that
never become instituted in society. He means the ubiquitous technologies that pervade
society and without which, often enough, we cannot imagine existence. In particular,
Williams characterizes communications systems as an outgrowth of already existing
societal conditions, since the formation of communication systems are foreseen, even in
the technical details, before their crucial components are in place. Cellular phones,
whose genealogy includes wireless telegraphy, radio, wired telephony and citizen’s band
two-way radio, have long been prefigured in industrial society. Although its current
incarnation on cellular phones may seem faddish, mobile television (that is, a television
set one can carry around and still receive signals on) has been a recurring figure in tele-
vision’s history (Spigel, 2001). The cravings fulfilled by these devices are the cravings
described by Benjamin, although I will use slightly different language. The contemporary
equivalent to Benjamin’s theater box are the various media devices (television sets,
radios, the internet and cellular phones) that allow us to be simultaneously isolated and
connected. We want to be open to certain types of communication: from friends, family
and/or the workplace. At the same time, the cellular phone acts as a shield from unwanted
contact. It becomes a means of escaping the hyperstimulus of modern urban environ-
ments. I would argue, further, that if these yearnings were not widely felt, the cellular
phone would have remained a technical device rather than the pandemic communications
device it has become.

The cellular phone allows its users to carry the home with them, even into the work-
place, creating an uninterrupted path of mobile private space throughout the day, a
withdrawal into interiority unsullied by social obligations, even during the commute.
The cellular phone links its users to these stationary private interior spaces such as the
home and the workplace. Additionally, with its capacity to take and store digital images,
phone numbers, addresses and other personal information such as birthdays, the cellular
phone supplies the mobile user with an approximation of the comforts of home. These
collected fragments, akin to the accessories and mementos evoked by Benjamin, con-
stitute an assemblage of the home. Likewise, the email, instant messaging, clock and

1336 new media & society 12(8)

calendar functions turn the cellular phone into a portable facsimile of the workplace.
Company-issued cellular phones, especially, strengthen the obligation of worker to
workplace even when physically absent. Indeed, the cellular phone enables the collapse
of the boundary between workplace and home. The dwelling and the workplace have
become interpenetrated. They are now more than ‘complements’ (as Benjamin portrayed
them), and no longer simply organized along similar ideologies of efficiency and tech-
nological progress (the home economics movement is a good example). The cellular
phone acts as the membrane through which these relationships coalesce. In this way, the
private individual, used to retreating into the dwelling to flee from the realities of the
workplace, finds the theater of illusions (to borrow Benjamin’s terms again) is no longer
the refuge from the office it once was. The response to this, somewhat paradoxically, is
to use the same device that has collapsed the opposition between dwelling and work-
place (a historically short-lived opposition), to escape into the theater of illusion despite
the individual’s physical position.

Cellular phone technology was initially adopted because it offered an amount of pri-
vacy to conversations. Utilizing radio technology (similar to cordless phones, citizen’s
band radio and even television), cellular phones transmit conversations in such a fashion
as to disallow eavesdropping and keep the conversation secluded and private. These
characteristics – mobility and secrecy – make the cellular phone a favorite tool for those
involved in financial transactions: traveling salespeople, field agents, stockbrokers, even
drug dealers. In the past 10 years, the cellular phone has transformed from a device
enabling mobile conversations between two people into a multi-use technology; many
models can also be used as web browsers, phone/address books, planners and alarm
clocks. More recently, the business orientation of cellular phones has been augmented
with increasing leisure and amusement features such as music player, digital camera
(still and/or motion), video game platform and television. Indeed, the Apple iPhone
series of commercials endeavor to show that any conceivable activity has a correspond-
ing ‘app’ that can transform the cellular phone into an essential tool for that activity.

Alongside an emphasis on entertainment is a widespread advertising discourse that
trumpets cellular phones as a way to partake in an exciting and vibrant entertainment
culture. Since advertising attempts to transfer values and meanings on to the commodity
being sold, they portray fantasies featuring the commodity. Regardless of the actual real-
ization of these fantasies, the point of advertising is to convince consumers that the
transferred values and meanings will accrue to the buyer. Therefore, in examining the
promotional rhetoric of these advertisements, it makes little difference whether or not
cellular phones actually come to be used in the manner portrayed.7

In 2005 Verizon printed an advertisement promoting a line of entertainment services
called VCast that appeared in Vibe Magazine. The full-page ad consisted of a close-up
photograph of a hand holding a clamshell style phone with an image of the band Green
Day on the screen. The advertisement foregrounded the close-up against a scenic Central
Park filled with picnickers, bicyclists and groups of people lounging in the grass and
socializing. The advertisement implied that the cellular phone has all the capabilities of
a home theater system and that, unlike your home entertainment system, the phone can
be brought outside. The phone, then, is imagined as a way to bring the interior space and
comforts of the home into the exterior, the ‘box in the theater of the world’ is now mobile

Groening 1337

and handheld. By placing the phone so prominently in front of an image of Central Park
filled with people, the advertisement effectively claims that the out-of-home entertain-
ment system of the cellular phone can replace socializing with others; or, at the very
least, it comes first. The screen size of the cellular phone prohibits the kind of group
viewing possible in a movie theater or a home television set. The form of sociality offered
by the park is not available to those using their phone as an entertainment system. As a
replacement, they are given access to musical acts, sporting events and movie stars.
Others in the park cannot receive these materials. Verizon was therefore offering mobility,
access and freedom of choice inside a package of exclusivity. The decision to place the
phone in front of the crowded park marks the phone user as standing out from the crowd:
the user is distinct, different, an individual. But the user is not alone, because the cellular
phone provides companionship through the presence of images of famous celebrities.
The advertisement claimed that the cellular phone makes its user’s social circle a circle
of exclusivity: the rich and successful can be the user’s constant companions.

Commercials for ESPN’s mobile service also utilized the fantasy of celebrity to
promote the viewing of video on cellular phones. A series of television commercials
premiered during the February 2006 Super Bowl featured a man absorbed in his cell-
phone screen, while various athletes and sports stars perform around him. In one com-
mercial, he crosses a street with marathoners, while Formula 1 cars drive by, basketball
players dribble around him and gymnasts cartwheel as he walks. These athletes, of
course, represent what the user is viewing on his cellphone and what we could be watch-
ing as well, if only we had the service. However, these are not the only figures appearing
in the commercial, and while the cellular phone user acts as if the athletes are not around
him, he also acts as if the pedestrians, cars and buses that constitute the urban environ-
ment outside the fantasy world of ESPN Mobile do not exist. He never looks up, never
moves his gaze from the phone, never reacts at all, even when a bus pulls up to his stop.
In essence, the commercial takes the stereotype of the couch potato or television zombie
and updates it to a more mobile, sophisticated cellphone zombie who nonetheless reacts
the same to reality and fantasy.8

The fall 2005 Samsung Wireless commercial entitled ‘Living Room’ is particularly
emblematic of the imagined spectatorship found in this advertising discourse.9 The com-
mercial portrayed several young, hip, sophisticated-looking people transfixed by their
cellular phones in a hyperkinetic urban world. Lying in highway medians, sitting on stacks
of newspapers, reclined in an elevator or sitting in the scoop of a loader, the cellular phone
users let nothing distract them from their cellular phones. Their body language is of youth:
languid teenagers marking their ownership over space by using it in rebellious and nontra-
ditional ways, thus demonstrating that in some way they belong in the city, but are not
subject to it, in contrast to the businessmen walking by in suits, or the cars rushing by
along the highway. In each instance, they stare at the cellular phone screen, never speak-
ing, holding the phone at near arm’s length, to make sure that everyone can see what they
hold. On the soundtrack various sounds – a crowd cheering, a comedian telling a joke, a
newscaster reading a report – ostensibly emanate from the phone’s earpieces, putting the
viewer at home in the position of the cellular phone user. At the end of the commercial, a
female voice-over intoned, ‘Imagine the world as your living room. With Samsung leading
the way with entertainment on demand, it’s not that hard to imagine.’

1338 new media & society 12(8)

Crucially no one uses the cellular phone as a telephonic device; no one talks to anyone
else. In the ‘Living Room’ commercial, the actors who display the phone are cut off from
those immediately surrounding them, occupied, presumably with their own private
perceptions.10 A device which formerly enabled conversation and sociability (even of a
limited sort) has been repurposed into a device encouraging (even compelling) seclusion
and atomization. Any communication technology produces possibilities for communal
bonds simply by enabling communication between individuals and/or groups. In this
way, communication technologies have the potential for public communication, encour-
aging citizenship and political participation as well as sociability. Repurposing the cellular
phone from a technology with these potentials to one that enables and facilitates the
consumption of cultural commodities inhibits public-ness.

The phone users in this commercial are transfixed by their phone, transported to
another world outside the hustle and bustle of the urban space. Everything is in motion
around them: pedestrians, cars, bicycles, elevators and even the camera crew. Contrary
to what we might expect from a commercial promoting mobile phones, the phone users
are immobile, as are, presumably, the viewers of the television commercial itself. The
users are also surrounded by the markers of developed urban modernity: glass and steel
skyscrapers, the light glass structures of chic shopping malls, the flow of automobile
traffic and the ersatz space of waiting characterizing the hotel lobby. Information sur-
rounds them: newspapers, magazines, street signs, even the air, characterized by the
soundtrack, crackles with cacophonic information and talk. None of the actors use the
phone as a phone, no one uses the phone for what is ostensibly its primary purpose: to
connect people via conversation. For instance, the third scene of the commercial por-
trays a woman lying on her back in the sidewalk with a set of headphones in her ears.
The women carrying shopping bags who walk nearly on top of her do not disturb her.
Since, according to the cues on the soundtrack, she is listening to some sort of chat
show, perhaps a comedy routine or an interview, the phone provides a kind of insulation
but it is an exclusive, personal insulation that cannot (and perhaps should not) be shared
with others.

The Samsung commercial portrays the cellular phone users as oblivious or indiffer-
ent to their physical environment: people walking by them (sometimes walking almost
on top of them) or cars speeding by. In the logic of the ad, this emphasizes their detach-
ment from the soon to be obsolete (at least in the cultural imaginary) wired world, an
imprisoning and confining world in which workers are chained to desks and offices due
to the non-portability of assets and tools like copiers, computers, fax machines and wired
telephones. The commuters rushing by the still actors are compelled to travel to the
machines they tend. If they had the new cellular phones, they would not need to hurry to
work; the machines they tend are portable and connected to all the information they
need. The cellular phone user’s constant companion is the network, which carries with
it the potentials of information technology. Their intimate attachment to their phones
and the digital network enables their detachment from those physically around them.

According to the commercial, the users are in their own private living rooms provided
by the phone. In other words, the phone allows the performance of private activities in
public spaces. The posture of the actors, lounging as if a pile of newspapers or the scoop
of a loader is a piece of furniture, indicates a lack of self-consciousness and a familiarity

Groening 1339

associated with the living room. The couple in the highway median, unperturbed by the
speeding automobiles inches away, watch the screen as a couple locked in a romantic
embrace. Of course, those sorts of displays of affection are not uncommon in public
parks, beaches and sidewalks. As Anna McCarthy (2001: 121) observed in Ambient
Television, ‘public spaces are not purely and self-evidently public; they are, like every
other cultural space, characterized by particular configurations of public and private.
Indeed, what makes the public/private division such a major category of social power
is the fact that it is dynamic and flexible.’ The commercial uses the fluidity of these
categories to imply that the cellular phone is the necessary tool for the creation of private
space anywhere and at anytime. What the Samsung commercial proposes is that cellular
phone users can be simultaneously radically private – involved in their own thoughts,
interacting with personalized cultural commodities that cannot be experienced by those
around them – and conspicuously public, by displaying the privacy achieved with the
phone. Privacy depends on keeping others out of a space, be it financial, religious or
domestic.

In actual phone use, cellular phone users must negotiate the shifting divisions between
public and private. The phone does not do this for them. The phone is incapable of shut-
ting out the world entirely by creating a bubble impervious to outside interference (Bull,
2004). Nonetheless, imagining this bubble is the crucial selling point of new media
devices in general and cellular phones in particular. The incredible lure of this bubble is
that it allows mobility and access. The cellular phones in these advertisements keep
unwanted experiences out and yet allow their users to pull desirable experiences in; it is
a form of mobile privatization.

In his book on television (2003), Williams’ treatment of mobile privatization describes
people as mobile, while the spaces and devices of privatization (the home, television
sets, radio receivers) are stationary. This leads Lynn Spigel, in her essay on portable
television, to call for reversing the term to ‘privatized mobility’. Analyzing 1960s adver-
tising campaigns promoting portable television sets shaped like suitcases, Spigel wrote,
‘While early advertising promised viewers that TV would strengthen family ties by
bringing the world into the living room, representations of portable receivers inverted
this logic. Rather than incorporating views of the outdoor world into the home, now
television promised to bring the interior world outdoors’ (Spigel, 2001: 71–2). Like
Benjamin’s aforementioned arcades, portable television dissolves the boundaries
between exterior and interior, creating space that is neither and both. For Spigel, the
phrase privatized mobility aptly captures the way in which the home is imagined as a
vehicle, a mode of transport, and also refers to the rise of the mobile home recreational
vehicle.

While this imagery may seem quaintly retro, the image of the journey in a vehicle as
safe, familiar and comforting as the stationary dwelling place still has a powerful hold.
Samsung’s campaign is an outstanding example of this. Here, instead of the dated and
clunky images of RVs or suitcase-like televisions, the vehicle is the lightweight, hand-
held and stylish cellular phone. Unlike the RV or the portable television, the cellular
phone is so powerful that it renders the entire world safe, familiar and comfortable. As
Spigel demonstrates, the old slogan of bringing the world into the living room has been
reversed: the cellular phone renders the distinction between world and living room

1340 new media & society 12(8)

obsolete. In such a fashion, the private individual still does not venture forth from the
living room to enter the world: the world and the living room are coterminous.

The cost of such a change in spatial relations is the lack of sociability. The society of
portable personal electronics is a society in which private space is as physically mobile
as the populace and privacy itself is radically mobile. The private is itself mobilized
under this social configuration, which was emergent in the 19th century (as Benjamin’s
essays on flânerie indicate) and has now become the dominant mode of living for the
world’s wealthy and privileged. In other words, mobile privatization, which has been
often characterized as an outgrowth of technological innovation, is actually a new set of
social relations. In a society in which individuals interact only with their digital devices,
the private has overtaken and displaced the public. Publicity has been reduced to a form
of display. The public-ness of the cellular phone user consists of the proclamation that
one is a cellular phone user.

The promise of being able to take your home with you in your pocket can be found
again in a 2008 ad, ‘Life on Blackberry’, for Research in Motion’s smartphone, the
Blackberry Storm. In the ad, a young woman is watching a show on her flat-screen
television on the couch in her apartment. After checking her watch, she realizes she has
to go to work. She gets up, places her hands in the air to form a rectangle, akin to the
viewfinder gesture stereotypically attributed to film directors, and frames the television
on her wall with her hands. She slowly makes this rectangle smaller, shrinking the flat-
screen television into a pocket-sized phone. The next shot is of her watching the show on
her handheld screen on her way to work. The living room thus becomes mobile and what
was once public space becomes a segmented series of mobile private spaces. The woman
at the center of the ad does not talk to anyone (although she kisses her male romantic
partner on the cheek before going to work) and remains transfixed throughout by the
one-way communication enabled by mobile television.11 The cellular phone offers a
private shell and a space of retreat. It is an escape hatch into a microcosmic world.

A 2006 commercial for Amp’d Mobile (a service that rents time from other cellular
providers) demonstrates this escape-hatch fantasy well. The commercial shows a young
man on a bus, who points to other occupants, ordering them to dance, fight or play music.
The commercial is fairly tongue-in-cheek and relies heavily on absurdist humor to cap-
ture the attention of its target audience. The commercial ends with the slogan ‘the power
to entertain yourself’. This slogan appeals to the primary fantasy of the control of sensory
stimuli mentioned earlier and implies that others cannot or will not occupy your attention.
In other words, the commercial posits a world in which we do not need other people for
fulfilment, only images. Since the ability to get others to adhere to your every whim is
clearly fantastic, what Amp’d Mobile really offers is the cellular phone as solution to the
problem of boredom. The answer to the isolating, impersonal milieu of public transpor-
tation, in the logic of the cellular phone ad, is not increased sociality but a further with-
drawal into the interior.

Crucially, these commercials focus on the commute as the appropriate place for this
kind of retreat and anti-sociality. By emphasizing the mobility of TV on a phone, these
commercial campaigns call attention to the pervasiveness of transportation preceding
and accompanying the omnipresence of communication devices. For many scholars the
categories of transportation and communication are associated but separate. But it strikes

Groening 1341

me that the distinction may no longer hold, particularly in the case of handheld digital
devices. The cellular phone is at once a device of communication and a device of trans-
portation. Transport indicates carrying away, in the sense of physical mobility, movement
between worlds and even emotional ecstasy. Understanding the term in this way can lead
to fruitful new ways of understanding new media technologies. In the case of TV on a
phone, users are transported by their cellular phones, in the sense of physically moved,
perceptually shifted and also enraptured. Re-understanding new media as technologies
that convey or carry across allow us to think of new media as constitutive of mobility, not
simply as enabling or serving mobility.

Williams’ concept of mobile privatization groups together technologies of communi-
cation and transportation as emblematic and constitutive of modern living. In a 1983
speech to the Socialist Society entitled, ‘Problems of the coming period’, Williams
emphasizes how mobile privatization is not a quality of television; it is an ambivalent
identity offered up by contemporary capitalism and is thus not simply a technological
predicament. Williams connects mobile privatization with the home and conspicuous
consumption, but also emphasizes that it: ‘confers … an unexampled mobility. You may
live in a shell of this kind in which you and your relatives, your lovers, your friends, your
children – this small-unit entity is the only really significant social identity. It is not living
in a cut-off way, not in a shell that is just stuck. It is a shell which you can take with you,
which you can fly with to places that previous generations could never imagine visiting
(Williams, 1989: 169).

The new freedoms and mobilities available through this identity are crucial for
Williams, because, in his view, mobile privatization is an identity chosen by people,
rather than one forced upon them. But these very same mobilities and freedoms underline
the ambivalence of this identity, which depends on ‘[f]ull employment, easy cheap credit,
easy cheap petrol’, conditions which are neither sustainable or permanent (Williams,
1989: 169). And because of the contingency and instability of the conditions necessary
for mobile privatization, this home-centered, highly mobile and choice-oriented identity
engenders animosity towards anything perceived as threatening the continued existence
of these mobilities and freedoms (higher taxes would be a good example).

Unlike his treatment of mobile privatization in his book on television (2003), here
Williams does not connect mobile privatization to broadcast communication technologies
but to the technologies of rapid personal transportation. By referring to easy cheap petrol,
a condition that Williams rightly points out as temporary, he critiques the culture of the
private automobile. The infrastructure which enables such extreme individual mobility
and freedom relies on the extraction of a finite supply of raw materials and involves
constructing a network of routes which impede mobility as much as they enable it (Urry,
2004). In the case of the work commute, the conditions of industrial production and
urbanization concentrate production centers and disperse living areas. This separation of
workplace from dwelling has resulted in the necessary mobility of laborers.

The period of time needed to journey from home to work – a gap created through the
processes of capitalism – is rarely, if ever, remunerated or subsidized by employers. The
technologies of mobile privatization work to romanticize this time, turning a period that
is not highly valued by employers into one highly valued by employees as a refuge from
work and the hyperstimulus of the urban environment. In turn, a series of technologies

1342 new media & society 12(8)

have arisen to substitute for the lack for remuneration and turn the commute into personal
time. The private automobile that separates commuters from one another exacerbates the
privatization of experience. Here, the private automobile provides the illusion that the
commute is different for each person, that we are all in different situations. The automobile
contains a series of media technologies – radio, the CD player, the digital media system,
the global positioning system navigator – that allow the driver to choose from a wide
array of sonic experiences (and, in some cases, visual as well).12 The fashion in which
this mobility is undertaken, then, as a solitary activity, each worker separated from other
workers by the protective shell of the automobile, is partly the result of bourgeois ideol-
ogy, a longing to assert individuality and a concerted effort on the part of corporations
to sell products to as many consumers as possible (it is in automakers’ interest to stymie
the development of mass transit, which accustoms workers to traveling in concert and
depresses automobile sales).

The process of privatization enabled by this array of technologies encourages com-
muters to see themselves as having little in common, working against social bonds and
the ties of community. The commute can then become a field of competition, in which
drivers compete to reach their destination the quickest, or with the least amount of fuel
consumption, or with the loudest music. The automobile is a good example of private
space that is both enclosed and on display. The personal automobile provides a sheltered
space for moving through the world, which is often treated as a private space, adorned
with personal possessions, filled with sounds (and scents) chosen by its users, and with
temperature suited to the personal tastes of the driver and passengers. Passengers even
get their own window; the personal automobile personalizes and frames the landscape
(Friedberg, 2002). The window, however, allows others to look into the car, opening the
private space for public viewing. The car precedes the cellular phone. Each provides a
personalized, private and mobile space that becomes a statement of individuality by
traversing public space. As presented by Williams, mobile privatization does not account
for the form of visible exclusivity that the automobile and the cellular phone provide. It
is the display of the mobile private space to others that makes the personalization of these
technologies so attractive: mobile privatization becomes an expression of dominion and
individuality. That mobile private space has become visual and observable by others is
partly why it is so jealously guarded.

Nonetheless, the concept of mobile privatization still has salience, which manifests
itself in the form of Williams’ exposition of the political implications of mobile privatiza-
tion.13 He declared mobile privatization to be a kind of prize offered up by capitalism in
return for acquiescing to its terms. The idea that we can shield ourselves from the outside
world and yet have unprecedented access to it is now seen as being as ordinary and com-
monplace as wages: it is what we deserve in return for work. The retreat from sociability
is something that is earned: a prize, a fringe benefit, a treasure at the end of the day. It is
a hard-earned reward for the struggles mentioned above: the shortening of the workday,
improved working conditions and better pay. So it is very difficult to condemn, as
Williams pointed out, because it also offers freedom and mobility, which are powerful
enticements. This is why it also creates hostility. For anything that threatens our wages,
our freedom and our mobility – in short our identity as modern subjects – is also a threat
to our existence.

Groening 1343

Williams goes on to argue that the political right in England (and elsewhere, although
he spoke specifically of Thatcherism) has been quite effective in pandering to the idea of
mobile privatization and in portraying itself as a protection against those outside threats to
this identity. Mobile privatization, as an identity, is therefore a political problem. It is the
crystallization of a set of technological and economic circumstances which deliberately
separates individuals; indeed it is that separation which is prized by so many of us. The
political problem, then, is figuring out how to frame sociality, bonding, or, to borrow from
Williams, a ‘common culture’, as rewarding in a way that surpasses mobile privatization.
In other words, we have to offer up a vision of inclusiveness to counter the constant repeti-
tion of imagined exclusivity embedded in the mobile privatized identity. Here, I think, is
why misunderstanding the concept as merely a descriptive term of the content of media
technologies rather than as a dominant mode of living has held back potentially important
and powerful avenues for analyzing the deployment of media technology as both cause
and effect of political struggles.

Benjamin saw the potential in film for the proletarian overthrow of the bourgeoisie, or
at least the potential for capitalism to abolish itself, because he saw film as a mass
medium. In a footnote to the second version of ‘The work of art in the age of its repro-
ducibility’, Benjamin (2002b: 132) writes: ‘Mass reproduction is especially favored by
the reproduction of the masses. In great ceremonial processions, giant rallies, and mass
sporting events, and in war, all of which are now fed into the camera, the masses come
face to face with themselves. This process, whose significance need not be emphasized,
is closely bound up with the development of reproduction and recording technologies.’

Currently the cinematic mass, best exemplified as the mass ornament – a Busby
Berkeley dance number or Charlie Chaplin leading a parade in Modern Times – has been
reduced to the occasional passing reference or homage in a primetime television cartoon.
The dominant cinematic image is not the mass but the family and the domestic space –
the private shell. The decreasing screen size of the portable television set (be it part of a
cellular phone or not), the migration of the movie theater to the home theater, even the
multiplexing of movie palaces, constitute the move away from the large-scale and there-
fore a denial of the collective in favor of the private individual. The small-format televi-
sion allows the private individual to come face to face only with the private individual.
It is no accident that in 2000, the company formed by the merger of SBC Communications
and BellSouth was named Cingular, a homophone for singular.14 Although the marketing
division would have no doubt preferred the connotation of ‘without equal’ rather than
‘eccentric’, the deliberate misspelling carries associations with distinction, individuality
and the particular. In other words, the very name of the company effectuates the private
individual.

The image of masses so crucial to Benjamin’s conceptualization of a revolutionary
cinema has been tossed aside in favor of the private individual, who is promised freedom
and mobility through screen technologies. The triumph of communication technologies
such as radio, television and cellular phones lies in their ability to offer the bourgeois
identity of the private individual, an identity requiring the domestic interior and the tools to
sustain this interior. This identity, as previously mentioned, acts as a refuge from the
exterior even as communication and transportation technologies enable seemingly unfet-
tered mobility through the world at large. As such, mobile privatization treats the world

1344 new media & society 12(8)

as a display that can be traversed and inspected. Cellular phones are but the newest and
most versatile of electronic media to enable the assumption and spread of this identity.
A 2008 Blackberry Storm commercial, ‘Press and be impressed’, demonstrates this well.
Promising to allow you to ‘mobilize your social life’, the commercial depicts the phone
within a whirlwind of CGI and simulated imagery. Within this commercial there are no
users, no people, no society, only image and display.15 The political problem presented
by the cellular phone as television set is that it strengthens separation, seclusion and
isolation while offering virtual commonality, intimacy and connection: it represents the
possibility of social interaction without the burden of social obligation.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the editors of New Media &Society and the anonymous readers
who offered extremely helpful criticism and feedback of this article. Thanks are also in order to
Andrea Christy, Keya Ganguly, Eva Hudecova and Haidee Wasson for their help on earlier drafts
of this article. A version of this article was presented at the 2007 Society for Cinema and Media
Studies Conference in Chicago.

Notes

1 The title quotations are from Benjamin (1999: 19) and the Samsung ‘Living Room’ ad campaign,
respectively.

2 Others have pointed to the inherent tension between old and new occupied by mobile
television. Shani Orgad (2009), for instance, points out that even among its promoters, mobile
television appeals to already present social structures.

3 MobiTV, a service provider of live television to mobile technologies, was founded in 1999.
The first US carrier to carry its service was Sprint in 2003 (MobiTV, 2003; Howe, 2005).
Cingular contracted with MobiTV in January 2005 (MobiTV, 2005). In 2004, a British
telecom, NTL, announced plans to launch a digital television service for its mobile phones
(‘Hi-tech phones sent TV channels’). That same year, ESPN announced plans for ESPN
mobile, predicting 3m users by 2008 (Hiestand, 2004). Verizon announced its service, VCast,
at the start of 2005.

4 Other portable digital devices, such as iPods, Sony PSPs and the Zen Media player, also
have the capability to provide audiovisual content to their users. The technology for portable
handheld television dates back to the Sony Watchman. These particular devices are not
under consideration here; while they certainly support my argument regarding seclusion and
social atomization, they are far more likely to be initially procured as personal entertainment
devices, not as interpersonal communication technology.

5 See, for instance, Spigel (1992) and Tichi (1991). For some important exceptions see
McCarthy (2001).

6 See, for instance, ‘The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire’ (Benjamin, 2003), ‘Paris,
capital of the 19th century’ (Benjamin, 1999), and ‘The storyteller: Observations on the works
of Nikolai Leskov’ (Benjamin, 2002a).

7 Indeed, contrary to all the portrayals in the advertising discourse addressed in this article, studies
‘report early adopters primarily view mobile television in their homes’ (Dawson, 2007: 234).

Groening 1345

8 These commercials can be found on Youtube: youtube.com/watch?v=pkg8OU8la8w and
youtube.com/watch?v=RVQHO69Wi_Q

9 A version of this commercial can be viewed at http://www.clipshack.com/Clip.aspx?key=
CB454D0E1D6DB386

10 The new generation of touch-screen phones, following the introduction of the iPhone (and
iPod touch) would seem to indicate a new kind of interactivity. However, the kind of haptic
activity required for operating these devices ceases while viewing video material. So in
the moments of actually watching a clip from ESPN, for example, the user interface is not
of primary relevance. This is illustrated in the 2008 ad for the Blackberry Storm, ‘Life on
Blackberry’, in which the touchscreen, email, messaging and telephonic functions of the
phone are not mentioned at all. The only phone feature promoted is the potential to watch
television on the go. A version of this commercial is available on Youtube: youtube.com/
watch?v=0eXFfFr_iR4

11 A version of this commercial is available on Youtube: youtube.com/watch?v=0eXFfFr_iR4
12 In the case of public transportation, commuters use a variety of techniques to differentiate

and customize their experience, from books and newspapers to personal music players,
handheld video games, to cell phones. For a qualitative study of the kinds of practices
employed by cellular phone users to create private space in these public environments, see
Humphreys (2005).

13 Shaun Moores (2000) referred to this passage in ‘TV, geography, and mobile privatization’,
and used the motorcar and the airplane as examples of combinations of mobility and privacy.
Moores completely ignored the political implications of mobile privatization, and instead
claimed, ‘Williams was opening up important questions concerning media and time-space
relations’ (p. 96). This is undoubtedly true, but remains tellingly incomplete. David Morley,
citing Moores’ citation of Williams in Home Territories (2000), exemplified the ‘shell you
can take with you’ as the motorcar, an attribution certainly within keeping of Williams’
characterization, but it misses Williams’ larger concerns with the sociology of culture (Morley,
2000: 148).

14 Cingular merged with AT&T wireless in 2004 and by 2007, the name Cingular was retired in
favor of AT&T wireless.

15 This commercial can be viewed on Youtube: youtube.com/watch?v=usMReLth57U

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Groening 1347

Stephen Groening is the Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Modern Culture and
Media at the Cogut Center for the Humanities at Brown University, where he is working
on a book manuscript entitled Cinema Beyond Territory: In-flight Entertainment and
Atmospheres of Globalization. His work has been published in Velvet Light Trap, Journal
of Film and Video, Journal of Popular Communication and Cultural Critique. His article
on 1920s silent training films will appear in Useful Cinemas, forthcoming from Duke
University Press. Address: Brown University Modern Culture and Media, 155 East
George St, Providence RI 02912–1957, USA. [email: Stephen_Groening@Brown.edu]

An Aesthetic Appropriate to Conditions: Killer of Sheep,
(Neo)Realism, and the Documentary Impulse

Paula J. Massood

Wide Angle, Volume 21, Number 4, October 1999, pp. 20-41 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI:

For additional information about this article

Access provided at 27 Nov 2019 18:58 GMT from Simon Fraser University

https://doi.org/10.1353/wan.2004.0004

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/170731

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31

20

Fig. 1. Stan in the slaughterhouse, from Killer of Sheep, dir. Charles Burnett
(1977). Video frame enlargement.

Angelia Fell
muse stampl

21WIDE ANGLE NO. 4 (OCTOBER 1999), pp. 20-41.V O L . 2 1
© OHIO UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF FILM

An Aesthetic
Appropriate to

Conditions:
Killer of Sheep, (Neo)Realism,

and the Documentary Impulse

by Paula J. Massood

SCOOTER: YOU CAN BE A MAN IF YOU CAN, STAN.
—KILLER OF SHEEP (CHARLES BURNETT, 1977)

On August 11, 1965, violence broke out in the Watts section of Los Angeles,

the result of an incident between officers from the LAPD and an African

American man named Marquette Frye. Faced with another instance of police

brutality, the predominantly black community rebelled against the police pres-

ence, the prevailing poverty, and the government disinterest that had long de-

fined and limited life in Southcentral Los Angeles. Watts burned over the

next six days as the nation and the world viewed televised coverage of the re-

bellion while hearing reports of rioters “run[ing] loose, looting, burning, and

rampaging.”1 Following the Watts rebellion, urban insurrections occurred

again in 1967 and 1968 in cities including Newark, Detroit, and Chicago. Un-

like earlier racially-motivated uprisings—from the teens or the forties, for ex-

ample—the urban rebellions from the sixties were nationally televised. They

acted as a warp in the United States’ racial repressed by bringing to the surface

Paula J. Massood is an Associate Professor of Film Studies in the Film Department at
Brooklyn College/CUNY. She is the author of Black City Cinema: African American Urban
Experiences in Film (Temple University Press, 2003).

22

white America’s deeply-buried fears of African American aggression with foot-

age remarkably resembling Birth of a Nation’s(D. W. Griffith, 1915) infamous

images of Reconstruction-era looting and rampaging. For white suburbia

these images defined the black ghetto.2 The broadcasts served a different

purpose, however, for many African American spectators who saw resistance to

the specific wrongs, such as poverty, decay, and unchecked police brutality,

faced by residents of the inner city.3 In contrast to earlier problem picture de-

pictions of race relations that graced movie screens in the fifties and early six-

ties or news coverage of Civil Rights protests, the newscasts redefined the im-

ages of African Americans on screen for both blacks and whites.

By the end of the sixties, televisual images of inner city anger and despair

were supplemented by new representations of African American city space

introduced into mainstream cinematic discourse in the form of the short-lived,

though influential, blaxploitation, or black action, genre. Serving as the pre-

cursor to the genre, Melvin Van Peebles’ independent feature, Sweet Sweet–

back’s Baadasssss Song (1971), introduced many of blaxploitation’s conventions,

such as an empowered black masculinity, on-location shooting in recognizable

city spaces, and a sense of temporal immediacy aided by costume, dialogue,

and musical soundtrack. More “mainstream” blaxploitation vehicles, such as

Shaft (Gordon Parks, 1971), quickly appropriated these features into their nar-

ratives. Inspired by the financial success of Sweetback, the Shafts, Superflies,

and Dolemites that followed became box office hits, especially with an audi-

ence that was primarily (though not limited to) young, urban, African Ameri-

can men. At the same time however, their images, like Sweetback’s before them,

were highly contested, as both black and white critics opposed the films’ glori-

fication of criminal life. Soon, religious and political groups such as the Coali-

tion Against Blaxploitation (CAB) were demanding more “realistic” represen-

tations of black life in film, and the pressure exerted on the industry by these

groups (as well as an industrial shift towards blockbuster and crossover films)

resulted in the eventual disappearance of blaxploitation productions.

Emerging on the periphery of both Hollywood and blaxploitation was a group

of filmmakers working under the auspices of the film program in the Theater

Arts Department at UCLA. This group, variously referred to as the “L.A.

23

Rebellion” and the “L.A. School of Filmmakers,” was made up of African and

African American graduate film students and included Haile Gerima, Ntongela

Masilela, Larry Clark, Billy Woodberry, Alile Sharon Larkin, Julie Dash,

Zeinabu irene Davis, and Charles Burnett, among others. Unlike many of the

African American filmmakers working within the mainstream, members of the

L.A. School expressed an explicitly political agenda that extended beyond

profit-making and the superficial interrogation of representation; instead, they

were concerned with what they saw as the internal colonization of African

Americans and film’s role in the construction of subjectivity and self-respect.

To this end, they were interested in deconstructing Hollywood’s ideological

prisonhouse, “recoding black skin on screen and in the public realm by revising

the contexts and concepts with which it had long been associated.”4 Rather

than replicating Hollywood’s classical realism and linear narrative structure,

members of the L.A. School drew from a diverse cross-section of filmmaking

styles in order to formulate “an aesthetic … appropriate to [their] conditions.”5

They were concerned with finding a film form that was, according to Ntongela

Masilela, “unique to their historical situation and cultural experience, a form

that could not be appropriated by Hollywood.”6

Charles Burnett enrolled at UCLA in 1967 and was one of the “first wave”

members of the L.A. School. The films Burnett worked on while at UCLA,

especially his directorial debut, Killer of Sheep (1977), Haile Gerima’s Bush

Mama (1976) and Billy Woodberry’s Bless Their Little Hearts (1984), provide us

with an interesting example of the intersecting influences coming to bear not

only on Burnett, but also on most of the filmmakers working within the Univer-

sity’s film program. Furthermore, they illustrate the way in which a filmmaker’s

political and cultural context can directly effect his or her aesthetic choices.

This fact resonates once we examine Burnett’s Killer of Sheep, a film about a

family man (Stan) who works at a slaughterhouse during the day and who

spends sleepless nights, desensitized and distanced from everything surround-

ing him. The film combines both documentary and fictional filmmaking tech-

niques—products of the many political and aesthetic discourses that influenced

the L.A. School group—in an attempt to formulate an aesthetic that spoke to a

post-Civil Rights, post-Rebellion context. Killer of Sheep and other L.A. School

films are examples of situation-specific African American filmmaking: works

24

that are simultaneously positioned on the geographic and industrial margins of

Hollywood and which self-consciously reject the concerns and conceits of

blaxploitation.

In “The Los Angeles School of Filmmakers,” Masilela provides a first-hand

account of the groups’ diverse, yet interconnected, influences: The Black Arts

Movement and its concern with identifying a Black aesthetic; the revolution-

ary politics of the Black Panthers; the writings of Amilcar Cabral and Franz

Fanon on the effects and after-effects of colonization; Oscar Micheaux’s inde-

pendent filmmaking practices, reworked for a “working class milieu”; and the

revolutionary Third Cinemas emerging from Latin American and African

countries, particularly Cuban Cinema and Brazil’s Cinema Nôvo. Masilela

notes that “cinema from the Third World … was to have a lasting influence on

the Los Angeles school,” and even resulted in the formation of a Third World

Film Club, which screened many of the films emerging from Latin America

and Africa at that time.7 Many of the filmmakers associated with the L.A.

School adapted Third Cinema’s revolutionary and reflexive filmmaking tech-

niques, along with its proponents’ concern with the effects of internalized co-

lonialism, for an American context. Burnett and others were attempting to

free their audience “from the mental colonization that Hollywood tries to im-

pose on its audiences, black and white.”8

A similar rhetoric of revolution and resistance was echoed by Van Peebles with

Sweetback. He too had an interest in “de-colonizing” his audience’s minds.9

Sweetback’s mythic qualities, his virility, and his agency were Van Peebles’

attempt to rewrite Hollywood representations of a disempowered or tamed

black masculinity, the most recent being those linked with Sidney Poitier and

his roles in problem pictures like Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (Stanley Kramer,

1967). Notwithstanding Sweetback’s experimental form, inspired by cinema

verité, the French New Wave, and Soviet filmmaking practices, members of

the L.A. School were not drawn to the film as a model because while “some of

Sweetback’s techniques and procedures were acceptable to the insurgents … its

politics were not.” Instead, films made by members of the L.A. School, espe-

cially those by Burnett and Gerima, focused on “family, women, history, and

folklore.”10 The concern with family, in particular, determines Killer of Sheep’s

25

narrative and helps define Burnett’s vision of black urban space, one that is,

unlike Sweetback, enabled by communities working together in various forms

rather than by individuals working alone.

Like many filmmakers working within the environment engendered by UCLA

at this time, Burnett’s particular version of what has been called’“Black urban

realism,” “poetic realism,” “subtle realism,” and” “neo-realism” has direct an-

tecedents in the political and aesthetic practices of Third Cinema. The politi-

cal impulse of many Third Cinema filmmakers was a desire to break with a

colonial past by rejecting dominant cinematic codes in favor of articulating a

film form that was appropriate to its own national context: Cuban, Brazilian,

Senegalese, for example. In formulating their aesthetics, filmmakers like Tomás

Gutíerrez Alea and Carlos Diegues looked to disparate cinematic forms and

national cinemas, such as Soviet Cinema, Italian Neorealism, and the French

New Wave, as models. Third Cinema filmmakers, especially those in Latin

America, also drew from the documentary filmmaking practices of John Grier-

son, the founder of the British documentary movement in the thirties.11 Brit-

ish social documentaries from this time presented a model of advocacy which

provided its subjects with a voice and a focus on matters that were important

to the working classes; a rubric first seen in Edgar Anstey and Arthur Elton’s

Housing Problems (1935). Additionally, both Neorealism and British documen-

tary were models of low-budget filmmaking. They were “examples of an art-

isanal, relatively low-cost cinema working with a mixture of public and private

funds, enabling directors to work in a different way and on a different economic

scale from that required by Hollywood and its various national-industrial rivals.”12

While Killer of Sheep has been often associated with Neorealism, its debt to

documentary has been just as often overlooked. Yet Burnett possessed a first-

hand knowledge of Griersonian documentary principles through his associa-

tion with Basil Wright, one of the original members of Grierson’s film unit dur-

ing the thirties, and an instructor at UCLA while Burnett was enrolled in the

program. In fact, Wright is credited with persuading Burnett to pursue film in

the first place.13 Burnett himself notes that Wright was a mentor who provided

the initial impetus for his own filmmaking. According to Burnett, “before I

discovered Third World Cinema, Basil Wright’s [documentary] class started

26

things for me.”14 It wasn’t only Grierson’s and Wright’s low-budget approach to

filmmaking or their interest in working class social problems that influenced

Burnett, it was also their method of documentary observation. Whether or not

it is possible to gauge the success of the films made under Grierson’s supervi-

sion (because of their links to the films’ sponsors), many combined advocacy

with a notion of observation with minimal intervention. Burnett, with the ad-

ditional influences of cinema verité and direct cinema documentary methodolo-

gies, reworked this approach to observation for his own specific and personal

context, thus using global aesthetics for local ends.

Burnett’s method of observation is distinct from that practiced by Grierson and

Wright. Both filmmakers and other personnel associated with the Empire

Marketing Board (and later the General Post Office), originally came from the

British middle- and upper-classes and were not immediately familiar with the

concerns or experiences of their subjects. Burnett, on the other hand, lived

most of his life in the community, possessed a first-hand knowledge of the

district’s history as an African American neighborhood, and drew upon his ex-

periences for his depiction of Watts. In interviews and writings we get a sense

that Burnett’s subject matter is influenced by his own observations and experi-

ences, in which “characters are definitely based on … a collection of things I

have seen in people, in my community, in my family.”15 Yet, I want to caution

against falling into the trap of assuming a false or oversimplified indexicality

from Burnett’s observations since he never claims that his characters or set-

tings are true or real. Instead, his characters and settings are influenced by

what he’s seen and they provide us with some insight into his statement that

“Killer of Sheep is supposed to look like a documentary.”16 They are not a reflec-

tion, but rather a refraction in the Bakhtinian sense—they dialogue with con-

text but they are not mimetic replacements for reality.

Burnett’s approach to personal observation also is concordant with the Neo-

realist techniques to which he was exposed while at UCLA. Seemingly incom-

patible in terms of style and mode, Griersonian documentary and Italian Neo-

realism shared certain core attributes beyond their modest economies-of-scale.

British documentary principles, such as location shooting, the use of everyday

people, and an improvisational approach, influenced Neorealist filmmakers,

27

especially Roberto Rossellini, who began his career making nonfiction films in

Italy during WWII.17 Just as documentaries such as Grierson’s Drifters (1929)

focused on the working man (albeit as a means of championing Britain’s her-

ring industry), Italian Neorealist films like Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief

(1948) focused on the lives of everyday people in a fictional format. This was

an important shift in focus from the more mainstream fascination with stories

of the extraordinary practiced by Hollywood and Hollywood-influenced cin-

emas. Furthermore, both documentary and Neorealist practices emphasized

site-specific, location filmmaking, as is evidenced in the council housing in

Housing Problems and the streets of Rome in Open City (Robert Rossellini,

1945). In these examples, the space defines the film and serves as an example

of what Grierson referred to as “the drama of the doorstep.”18

Part of the Griersonian approach to documentary was an emphasis on provid-

ing the film’s subjects with a voice, as when people in the films explain their

jobs or their grievances. The sounds of the streets, particularly vernacular and

slang, can also be found in Neorealist films, although it wasn’t until the sixties

that lightweight and affordable sound technologies allowed for reliable sync-

sound recording. Direct sound became a characteristic of films in the sixties,

and its use, especially when exploring African American language and stories,

is an important facet of Burnett’s films in particular, and those of the L.A.

School as a whole (especially Gerima’s Bush Mama). The use of direct sound,

combined with location shooting, provides the films produced by the L.A.

School with a sense of documentary realism, establishing what seems to be

“only the slightest, if any, departure from the contiguous offscreen reality.”19

Burnett takes first-hand observations of his environment and transposes them

into a fictional narrative that is documentary in both look and sound. In this

combination of fictional and documentary techniques, Killer of Sheep also ex-

emplifies its Third Cinema roots in its formulation of an aesthetic that “make[s]

use of the documentary or the fictional mode, or both” and uses “whatever

genre, or all genres.”20 (This is not to suggest that blaxploitation films, or other

films from the sixties and seventies,” Easy Rider [Dennis Hopper, 1969] for

instance, did not also incorporate vernacular into their soundtracks. The dif-

ference with Burnett is that his characters combine contemporary slang with

words and phrases from a Southern, rural past, thus acknowledging the influence

28

of African American history on Watts’ present, a historical perspective that is

rarer in blaxploitation films from the same time.)

In its emphasis on the everyday, Killer of Sheep also borrows closely from

Neorealism, with The Bicycle Thief its closest precursor. Both films focus on

family men and their struggles to support their families while maintaining

some semblance of dignity and self-respect. Both films also situate their di-

lemmas in specific post-traumatic contexts: The Bicycle Thief in a post-WWII

Rome recovering from bombardment and occupation and Killer of Sheep in a

post-’65 Watts showing the scars (empty lots, abandoned buildings) of the Re-

bellion. Finally, both suggest the ways in which their male leads’ existential

crises—sparked by global politics and economics—effects their families, as

both men punish their loved ones for their own perceived personal failings.

Yet, while Burnett borrows his approach to subject matter from Neorealism—

so much to that Killer of Sheep has been described as a “masterpiece of Ameri-

can neo-realism” and other similar observations21—he adapts his narrative

structure for an African American cultural context. At the time they first ap-

peared, Neorealist films were novel because of their focus on the everyday and

for their aesthetics of immediacy. But they were not novel in terms of their

narratives, which continued to be structured according to dominant (Western)

cinematic approaches to story, especially in their plot-driven, linear narratives

and in their reliance on the codes of melodrama.22 The films’ plots continued

to involve some form of narrative advancement—climax, resolution, and clo-

sure—even if modest in comparison to Hollywood classical narrative.

Killer of Sheep, on the other hand, combines a series of dramatic narrative vi-

gnettes with documentary-like nonnarrative footage both of Stan’s job in an

abattoir and of neighborhood children at play, a cyclical and episodic structure

that has its roots in African oral traditions.23 Manthia Diawara includes Killer of

Sheep in a cross-section of African American films that, as he says,

“defamiliariz[e] . . . classical film language” by “contain[ing] rhythmic and

repetitious shots, going back and forth between past and present.”24 The film

makes strange dominant film language by juxtaposing a number of seemingly

disparate scenes offering no clue to time frame and providing no sense of a

linear progression. In other words, the structure disallows conventional narrative

29

agency because the plot does not seem to progress and the rising action of

melodrama is substituted by a more permanent (or, at the least, recurring)

cycle of pathos that provides a complex sense of the frustrating sameness of

Stan’s experiences. While the sections are distinct, each is distinguished by

features that offer insight into Stan’s existential dilemma because they connect

different aspects of his life and suggest the effects of context on psyche.

Killer of Sheep’s episodic structure intertwines three stylistically distinct sec-

tions that are loosely related through setting and character. The majority of

the narrative is set in the domestic sphere and includes most of Stan’s interac-

tions with his family, as well as all of his contact with his friends, and provides

a first-hand sense of the characters’ personalities. Most of the domestic scenes

are aimed at illustrating Stan’s complex and contradictory frustrations: on the

one hand he has a demoralizing and desensitizing job that, for all his hard

work, still impoverishes his family. Stan spends his time at home emotionally

distanced from his wife and kids, and yet his malaise does not stop him from

engaging in attempts to better their lives (through laying a new kitchen floor

or trying to fix their car). While these activities suggest Stan’s attempts at

agency, the only way out of his situation—at least as presented by a number of

the men surrounding him—is to turn to crime, an option he resists. Stan is

trapped, and in many of the domestic scenes Burnett uses tight framing, long

takes, slowly-paced editing, static camera, and stilted dialogue to illustrate the

stagnation and claustrophobia of his situation. He is on a treadmill, and his

inability to effect change indicates a lack of power—as a father, as a man, as a

citizen—so profound that he can no longer envision a way to escape.

The narrative scenes are indebted to Neorealism in the use of location shoot-

ing and performances by non-professional actors, including Burnett’s daughter,

Angela (who also appeared in Woodberry’s Bless Their Little Hearts). Most

scenes are shot in interior, domestic spaces—kitchens, bedrooms, living

rooms—and the mise-en-scene, combined with shot composition, suggests

both Stan’s paralysis and his emotional distance from those around him. An

example of this stagnation appears early in the film in a scene between Stan

and his friend Bracy. Sitting in Stan’s kitchen, the pair is framed in a two-shot,

facing each other across the table as they drink coffee and play dominoes.

30

The emotional distance between Stan and his friend is communicated by the

physical expanse separating them, while the sense of limits, of a forced immo-

bility, is suggested in the tightness of the frame (which presses in on the pair)

and their lack of movement. Additionally, the gap between the men is appar-

ent in their stilted dialogue and the long silences indicating either that they

don’t have much to say to one another or that they lack the energy, the will, or

the emotional vocabulary to communicate their thoughts and worries.

Moments between Stan and his wife (who is not named in the narrative), es-

pecially those set in the kitchen, are similarly claustrophobic and stilted, un-

derlining the couple’s almost complete emotional estrangement (an estrange-

ment that is much more Stan’s than his wife’s). Most of their scenes in the first

three-quarters of the film are shot in this manner; however, an interesting

break from this pattern occurs in a scene of the couple dancing with one an-

other. Rather than being separated by their usual physical distance within the

frame, the couple embrace to the sounds of Dinah Washington’s “This Bitter

Earth.” Framed in a medium shot, they engage in a long, slow dance while

backlit by a window doubling as an additional framing device. In the static

camera and the long take this moment resembles most of the film’s other do-

mestic scenes, particularly scenes in which Stan’s wife unsuccessfully attempts

to connect with her husband. The difference in this scene is that both Stan’s

alienation from his wife and her frustration with him are nonverbally commu-

nicated through her facial expressions and body language which register desire

first, then desperation, and finally frustration and anger.

Fig. 2. Stan and Bracy in the kitchen, and Stan and his wife dancing, from Killer of
Sheep, dir. Charles Burnett (1977). Video frame enlargements.

31

The slow dance scene is also illustrative of the film’s complex sound design.

It is unclear whether the sound is diegetic or nondiegetic; the song is meant to

be diegetic, but no other noises are audible when it’s playing. In most of the

narrative sections, Burnett uses direct sound; however, there are times when

nondiegetic music occurs on the soundtrack. In these moments the music

functions as a sound bridge leading either into or out of the more “documen-

tary” sequences. Here Washington’s song lasts for most of the scene, com-

menting ironically on the characters’ actions, a strategy that Burnett uses more

frequently in the documentary-like sequences in the slaughterhouse or of the

children at play, the former of which are characterized by nondiegetic music.

Like the less narrative scenes, the music here comments upon the couple’s

relationship, and as such it exemplifies “the impact of black music on the new

black cinema” in its “broadening [of] the primary narrative statement” of the

film.25 The tightness of the frame may visually suggest the boundaries of the

relationship, but Dinah Washington’s voice truly captures the agony that the

emotional and physical separation has wrought on both individuals.

While family and friends offer little opportunity for emotional release, Stan’s

lesser-known acquaintances present alternatives that are not much better.

Near the beginning of the film Stan is visited at home by two men, Smoke and

Scooter, from the neighborhood. The pair are coded as street characters, their

leather jackets and hats reminiscent of the clothing choices of blaxploitation’s

pimps and dealers. In the process of discussing their exploits, Smoke and

Scooter try convincing Stan to participate in the murder of another neighbor-

hood man named Buddy. Upon overhearing their conversation, Stan’s wife first

disagrees with them over their suggestion that Stan’s participation would be

proof of his manhood, then she chases them off. The scene is shot outside the

house, which would suggest more freedom and openness than the claustropho-

bic interiors we have seen previously, but the overall shot composition and ed-

iting pattern bears a remarkable resemblance to earlier domestic scenes. It is

shot with a static camera in a long take lasting from the moment the men reach

the door of the house to a point just after Stan’s wife’s interjection. While Smoke

and Scooter proposition Stan, he sits with his back to the house with the pair

standing in the foreground, bracketing him. When Stan’s wife first appears,

she stands behind him, completing the triangle and further entrapping him.

32

As she begins to disagree with Scooter, she moves in front of Stan, removing

him from the conversation and literally erasing him from the onscreen action

(she blocks our view of him). Stan’s static and submissive position symbolizes

his paralysis in the face of both Scooter’s rather tautological demand that Stan

“can be a man if [he] can” and his wife’s definition of manliness.

This scene suggests that each component of Stan’s environment—his job, his

community, his family—attempts to define his masculinity for him. For

Smoke and Scooter manliness is related to economics and violence; as Smoke

argues, “Look at what Stan got? He don’t even have a decent pair of pants. All

we trying to do is help, nigger. You can’t live if you are afraid of dying.”26 For

Stan’s wife, masculinity is related to intelligence. Either way, Stan has little to

say in the constructions of these definitions, even when his wife urges him to

stand up for himself. The overwhelming suggestion is that Stan’s struggle

with self-definition is linked to a larger community dilemma of self-definition,

as exemplified by the tension between the men and Stan’s wife.

In its focus on the interrelated themes of masculinity, agency, and the family,

Killer of Sheep is related to a group of independent “black-subject” films from

the sixties,27 and most closely resembles Michael Roemer’s Nothing But a Man

(1964). Roemer’s film draws together themes of black masculinity, its relation-

ship to the family, and the prevailing social forces, such as poverty, racism, and

governmental programs (Welfare, for example), decimating African American

communities. In Nothing But a Man, Duff, the main character, is forced to

choose between quietly accepting abuse (in the form of union-busting or out-

right racism) in order to keep a job or standing up for his beliefs and hence

failing to support his family. The film’s central crisis revolves around the per-

ceived incompatibility of the maintenance of a unified African American fam-

ily and an empowered black masculinity, and suggests that doing what’s right

is a complicated venture when one takes into account the specificities of con-

text, especially poverty-line subsistence and a lack of jobs paying a living

wage. Both films offer a more complex rendering of family life than the fa-

therless, welfare-dependent black family demonized by the Moynihan report

of the sixties. The difference between’Killer of Sheep and an earlier film like

Nothing But A Man, however, is that the former’s family dilemmas are situated

33

Fig. 4. Stan entrapped outside his house, from Killer of Sheep, dir. Charles Burnett
(1977). Video frame enlargement.

in a post-Rebellion, and thus a more pessimistic, Watts environment. The

family has to fight against the dehumanizing combination of Stan’s job, inner-

city Los Angeles, and the lure of crime (which forms the subtext to many of

Stan’s interactions with friends and acquaintances).

While the film’s narrative episodes illustrate Stan’s interactions with family and

friends, his work experiences and urban environment are more clearly detailed

in documentary-like vignettes interspersed between them. The slaughter-

house scenes provide detail about Stan’s life as a wage-earner. As if to indicate

this change in focus from the family scenes, the film’s style changes as well,

and in this shift we can see most clearly the influence of documentary conven-

tions on Burnett’s filmmaking aesthetic. Rather than continuing with the static

camera, the long takes, and the stilted dialogue, the slaughterhouse scenes are

characterized by the shaky movements of a hand-held camera, and a looser

framing style. This visual design allows the audience to witness Stan, the other

workers, and the sheep freely move about the space of the slaughterhouse. In

34

keeping with the observational impulse of Griersonian documentary, combined

with the shaky camera work of cinema verité and the direct cinema movements,

these scenes are more directly “documentary” in their exploration of the blood

and gore of the abattoir—complete with footage of actual sheep being bled,

skinned, and dismembered.

In addition to the rapid camerawork and editing strategies, the sound design in

the slaughterhouse scenes also differs from the domestic scenes. Where the

scenes in the home are mostly shot with direct sound and the occasional piece

of music on the soundtrack, the slaughterhouse scenes are characterized by an

absence of dialogue or any other diegetic sounds and the addition of an asyn-

chronous musical soundtrack—comprised of vocal and musical blues, gospel,

swing, and orchestral pieces—that often comments ironically on the images.

In this use of sound, the scenes differ from the more observational strategies

of their closest documentary antecedents with their reliance on sync-sound

Fig. 5. Stan in the slaughterhouse, from Killer of Sheep, dir. Charles Burnett (1977).
Video frame enlargement.

35

technologies. Instead, the juxtaposition of sound and image is an adaptation

of a Soviet approach to filmmaking for an African American cultural context.

For example, the first time the slaughterhouse appears on screen, the images

are accompanied by swing music. This soon segues into a children’s rendition

of “This Old Man” as the interior verité shots are replaced by long, static shots

of the abattoir’s exterior. The children’s song is a sound bridge connecting the

events occurring within the slaughterhouse to the following scene, a return to

the domestic sphere introduced with shots of Stan’s wife in the kitchen. The

lullaby links the abattoir with the kitchen not only because both spaces are

connected to Stan, but because the spaces affect his psychological state. In a

larger sense, the sound bridge relates Stan’s job to the themes that most define

the family scenes, fatigue and malaise, thus suggesting that his condition has

become a vicious cycle in which work effects home and vice versa.

The slaughterhouse scenes graphically detail Stan’s job. We know, from ear-

lier family scenes and his discussion with Bracy, that the job is a source of ten-

sion and disillusionment, and that Stan would like to find another source of

employment. The footage documenting actual blood and gore (the real

slaughter of sheep), combined with Stan’s criticisms of his job, has led most

critics to focus solely his job as the primary cause of his crisis. Nathan Grant is

more accurate, however, when he argues that “it is not his job at the slaughter-

house that is responsible for his state of ennui. Lack of connection with all that

is around him, a being out of touch, appears to have gained control.”39 Stan

seems almost paralyzed in the family scenes. He is either clearly immobile, as

in the scene with his wife, or unsuccessful in his endeavors to change things,

for instance when he and his friend Gene buy an automobile engine, only to

drop it—an ironic metaphor for the pairs’ lack of agency in Los Angeles’ car

culture. On the other hand, Stan is most active in the slaughterhouse scenes;

he moves freely in and out of the frame, sure of his actions and movements,

thus suggesting that he is neither incapable nor afraid of hard work. In the

final slaughterhouse scene Stan even manages a rare smile, an act he has prob-

lems completing in most of the family scenes and which is noted by one char-

acter earlier in the film. Thus, Stan’s crisis should be understood as part of a

combination of pressures: the slaughterhouse fails to satisfy him on both a per-

sonal and an economic level, but his family and friends, as we have seen, also

36

complicate his life by demanding that he conform to a set of expectations that

takes no account of who he is.

The third part of the film’s triad of approaches further supports the suggestion

that Stan’s internal crisis is the result of external factors. The scenes of chil-

dren at play appear first in Killer of Sheep and help introduce the film’s setting

by including footage shot on-location in Watts’ rail yards, alleyways, empty

lots, and streets. Most of the scenes use direct sound, combined with loose

shot compositions, relatively slow-paced editing, and a variety of long or me-

dium shots rather than close ups. This style provides more of a feel for the

children’s spaces than the setting for other characters in the other sections of

the film, and the view of Watts provided here is more graphic and despairing

than what we see elsewhere in Killer of Sheep. The space itself resembles a

war zone, with empty lots and abandoned buildings dotting the urbanscape.

This metaphor is carried over into the children’s activities: in almost all the

scenes, the kids are engaged in some sort of combative play, ranging from

rock-throwing battles, to wrestling, hitting, and bullying each other (normally

on the basis of gender). The family scenes also include examples of children

at play, but with the exclusion of the sibling rivalries between Stan, Jr. and

Angie, these interactions are peaceful in comparison. Perhaps it is because of

the bloody footage of dead sheep that the abattoir scenes have received more

critical attention, but the children’s scenes offer more compelling suggestions

about context: in the streets, the interactions are violent, with the shots of

kids throwing rocks eerily echoing the televised images of Watts from a de-

cade before.

While the children’s scenes are not directly related to Stan’s narrative, they are

connected to the overall story through the presence of Stan, Jr. and Angie in a

few of the earlier episodes. The connections with Stan are much more allegori-

cal and center on the suggestion that the community is in crisis: Watts, accord-

ing to Burnett, was left with “a vacuum—moral, economic, political”; it was a

“community without a center.”29 By linking Stan’s crisis, as explicated in

other parts of the film, with his immediate context (Watts of the past and

present), Killer of Sheep expands what first appears as a sole focus on a singular

hero and suggests that Stan’s existential dilemma is undeniably linked to a

37

larger community crisis. With this connection Burnett shifts conventional

narrative identification from the individual to the community, thus adapting

the film’s narrative for an African American collectivity by expanding the aes-

thetic influences of Neorealism and documentary and disputing blaxploi-

tation’s assertion that an empowered lone male figure leads to salvation.

The expansion from individual to community is made most clearly in one of

the rare moments when the children’s sections shift out of sync-sound. In an

episode in which the kids play near an abandoned building, the direct sounds

are joined by the nondiegetic sound of Paul Robeson singing “The House I

Live In.” As the song continues, the images of kids at play are replaced by

footage of the interior of the abattoir. Again, there is the faint, synchronized

noise of the space, now combined with Robeson’s voice on the soundtrack. To

Robeson’s repeated refrain, “What is America to Me?,” sheep are led to the

slaughter. At this, the images segue to another narrative episode, the scene

with Smoke and Scooter discussed earlier. The series of cuts, combined with

the unifying sound bridge, expands the dilemma from a single focus on Stan to

his entire community by linking playful violence (acted out in the empty lots

left in the wake of the Rebellion), literal capitalist violence (Stan’s dehumaniz-

ing and bloody job), and the neighborhood’s prevalence of violent crime (the

result of a post-Rebellion, post-industrial economy). According to Grant, in

the combination of slaughterhouse images and the narrative scene focusing on

murder, Stan “is witnessing not only the threat to his own survival as that is

made evident by the actions of his friends, but he is also watching his

community’s self-destruction.”30 Grant’s observation, while prescient, is lim-

ited to Stan’s difficult job and Smoke and Scooter’s plans for a murder; my as-

sertion is that we also see the continuation of community self-destruction in

the kids’ activities and surroundings. In this context, the family not only con-

tends against the specific forces Stan faces, but also those awaiting the next

generation, Stan, Jr. and Angie. Stan Jr.’s budding nihilism is suggested by his

repeated statements about needing money and his sullen demeanor. More-

over, he seems as distant from his family, especially his mother, as is his father.

Stan Jr.’s emotional distance is much more malicious however, as he misbe-

haves and, by the end of the film, refuses to come when his mother calls.

38

Burnett’s concern for the community and its future welfare, can be traced back

to his first-hand knowledge of Watts. His observations regarding the area’s loss

of a center—a shared epistemology of sorts—remembers a pre-1965 period, when

Watts did have a center (a center that was perhaps best captured in Carl

Franklin’s Devil in a Blue Dress in 1995). Killer of Sheep links the area’s African

American community base to its rural, southern past—the “back home” that

Stan mentions near the beginning of the film and in other subtle references to

his and his wife’s southern roots—and the migration that resulted in the growth

of a vibrant black community in Los Angeles during the forties. This past is

quoted in the vernacular spoken by some characters in the film and in the rail-

road yards and trains used by the children as a playground and toys. (It will be

quoted fifteen years later in a similar scene in John Singleton’s Boyz N The Hood

in 1991.) The sounds and shots of the past reference a form of social and geo-

graphic mobility that, Burnett suggests, was disappearing for men of Stan’s gen-

eration and is all but gone for Stan, Jr. In the Los Angeles captured in Killer of

Sheep, social mobility is curtailed by higher unemployment and a lack of job

opportunities like the defense industry and porter jobs that promised a move

into the middle classes for many African Americans of Stan’s father’s generation.

Stan’s generation seems stuck in the wreckage of a post-industrial, post-Rebel-

lion urban landscape. What remains are low-paying and demoralizing jobs, like

Stan’s (and what Bracy refers to as a’“slave”) that lead nowhere. He embodies

middle-class work ethic and ideology that is ultimately out-moded in the con-

text of late-twentieth century industrial practices. Stan labors but he will

never get ahead.

These historical and cultural references, as well as the film’s episodic narrative

structure, suggest the impossibility of considering’Killer of Sheep’s Watts’ setting

without a comparable consideration of its history. Such spatio-temporal relation-

ships are connected to Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope, or “materi-

alized history” where temporal relationships are made literal by the objects,

spaces, or persons with which they intersect.31 While seemingly geared towards

Western literary texts, the chronotope is a useful concept for analyzing Third

Cinema texts that, according to Paul Willeman, organize “time and space in their

own specific ways.”32 Elsewhere, I’ve used the chronotope as a tool for analyz-

ing African American cinematic constructions of the city and to argue that

39

sections of the urbanscape associated with African American life are presented

as truly material (whether contemporary, recent, or older), as the streets and

buildings call up a multiplicity of pasts.33 In a related way, Burnett’s rendering of

the abandoned lots and railroad yards of Watts illustrates both the history of an

African American presence in the city and (possibly more importantly) provides

a sense of the paradox presented by the city: migration was what enabled the

settlement of Watts in the first place, but the mobility of the area’s black popula-

tion became severely constrained over time. Stan’s experiences are thus re-

lated to a larger historical and political context, and as such his quiescence rep-

resents failed expectations and the lack of options on a much more global scale.

What is surprising then is that the film ends on a slightly uplifting, though

definitely unresolved note when Stan, his wife, and Angie return from an

unsuccessful attempt to spend the day at the racetrack. For a brief moment

there is an intimacy in the trio’s interactions, as Stan answers Angie’s query

about the origins of thunder during a storm. As Stan provides Angie with an

explanation, drawing upon a folk tale about the devil beating his wife, the

three exchange glances and smile at one another. In the course of the film,

this is the first time that Stan has shown any sort pleasure towards his wife and

children and it suggests the possibility of a continuing, if tentative, intimacy in

the household in spite of the surrounding conditions. In using the folk refer-

ences in one of the rare scenes of connection among family members, Burnett

suggests that the welfare of Stan, of his family, and of the community as a

whole, is dependent upon the maintenance of an historical perspective that

acknowledges a southern, or rural, past.

In Killer of Sheep, Third Cinema, documentary, and Neorealist influences, com-

bined with Burnett’s personal knowledge of Watts, create a unique form of

cinematic realism that marries techniques such as on-location shooting, long

takes and direct sound, with the more disparate stylistics of moving camera,

rapid editing, and the ironic juxtaposition of sound and image. On its most

literal level, the film focuses on Stan and his interactions with his family and

friends by providing vignettes of his day-to-day existence. On a more allegori-

cal level, the film explores Stan’s crisis of self-definition, and its relationship

to masculinity and the family, linking his experiences to a community-wide

40

dilemma faced by, at the least, the African American residents of Watts. In its

polyphonic combination of documentary and fictional modes, the film is an

example of what Third Cinema filmmakers and members of the L.A. School

were striving for in their filmmaking in the sixties and seventies: the formula-

tion of an aesthetic that dialogued with and refracted a unique set of cultural

conditions. Killer of Sheep offers one example of what this might mean for a

post-Civil Rights, post-’65 alternative filmmaking practice.

Notes

1. Robert Mayer, ed., Los Angeles: A Chronological and Documentary History, 1542–1976
(Dobbs Ferry, NY: Oceana Publications, Inc., 1978), 136.
2. Mark A. Reid, Redefining Black Film (Berkeley: Univ. of CA Press, 1993), 74.
3. Thomas Cripps, “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadassss Song and the Changing Politics of
Genre Film,” in Close Viewings: An Anthology of New Film Criticism, ed. Peter Lehman
(Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1990), 240.
4. James A. Snead, “Images of Blacks in Black Independent Films: A Brief Survey” in
Blackframes: Critical Perspectives on Black Independent Cinema, eds. Mbye B. Cham and
Claire Andrade-Watkins (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1988), 22.
5. Paul Willeman, “The Third Cinema Question: Notes and Reflections,” in Questions
of Third Cinema, eds. Jim Pines and Paul Willeman, (London: BFI Pub., 1989), 4.
6. Willeman, 108.
7. Ntongela Masilela, “The Los Angeles School of Black Filmmakers,” in Black
American Cinema, ed. Manthia Diawara (New York: Routledge, 1993), 110.
8. Masilela, 111.
9. Quoted in James P. Murray, “Running With Sweetback” Black Creation 3:1 (Fall 1971):
10.
10. Toni Cade Bambara, “Reading the Signs, Empowering the Eye: Daughters of the
Dust and the Black Independent Cinema Movement,” in Black American Cinema, ed.
Manthia Diawara (New York: Routledge, 1993), 119-20.
11. Willeman, 5.
12. Ibid.
13. Masilela, 112.
14. Quoted in Bérénice Reynaud, “An Interview with Charles Burnett,” Black
American Literature Forum 25.2 (Summer 1991): 328.
15. Reynaud, 326.
16. Quoted in Monona Wali, “Life Drawings: Charles Burnett’s Realism,” The Indepen-
dent 11.8 (October 1988): 20. Emphasis added.
17. Roy Armes, Patterns of Realism: A Study of Italian Neo-Realist Cinema (Cranbury,
New Jersey: A. S. Barnes, 1971), 19.
18. Quoted in Erik Barnouw, Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film, rev. ed.
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 85.
19. Clyde Taylor, “Decolonizing the Image: New U.S. Black Cinema,” Peter Steven,
ed., Jump Cut: Hollywood, Politics, and Counter Cinema (New York: Praeger Pub., 1985),
168.

41

20. Julio García Espinosa, “For an Imperfect Cinema,” in New Latin American Cinema,
vol. 1, ed. Michael T. Martin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997), 81.
21. Wali, 16.
22. Andre Bazin, “An Aesthetic of Reality: Cinematic Realism and the Italian School
of the Liberation,” in What is Cinema?, vol. II, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1971), 21.
23. Taylor, 172.
24. Manthia Diawara, “Black American Cinema: The New Realism,” in Black American
Cinema, ed. Manthia Diawara (New York: Routledge, 1993), 10.
25. Taylor, 174-5.
26. Phyllis Rauch Klotman, ed., Screenplays of the African American Experience
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 105.
27. Taylor, 167.
28. Nathan Grant, “Innocence and Ambiguity in the Films of Charles Burnett,” in
Representing Blackness: Issues in Film and Video, ed. (New Brunswick, New Jersey:
Rutgers University Press, 1997), 139.
29. Wali, 17.
30. Grant, 140.
31. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, Michael Holquist, ed., Caryl Emerson and
Michael Holquist, trans. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 247.
32. Willeman, 15.
33. Paula J. Massood, Black City Cinema: African American Urban Experiences in Film
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003), 4-9.

The Shot: Mise-en-Scene

f all the techniques of cinema, mise-en-scene is the one with which we are
most familiar. After seeing a film, we may not recall the cutting or the cam-
era movements, the dissolves or the offscreen sound. But we do remember

the costumes rn Gone with the Wind and the bleak, chilly lighting in Charles Foster
Kane’s Xanadu. We retain vivid impressions of the misty streets in The Big Sleep
and the labyrinthine, fluorescent-lit lair of Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs.
We recall Harpo Marx clambering over Edgar Kennedy’s peanut wa-gon (Duck
Soup), Katharine Hepburn defiantly splintering Cary Grant’s -eolf clubs (The
Philadelphia Ston), and Michael J. Fox escaping hi-eh-school bullies on an impro-
vised skateboard (Back to the Future).In short, many of our most sharply’ etched
memories of the cinema turn out to center on mise-en-scene.

\7hat Is Mise-erl-Scene ?
In the original French, mise en sc\ne (pronounced meez-ahn-sen) means “putting
into the scene;’ and it was first applied to the practice of directing plays. Film schol-
ars, extending the term to film direction, use the term to signify the director’s con-
trol over what appears in the film frame. As you would expect, mise-en-scene
includes those aspects of film that overlap with the art of the theater: setting, light-
ing, costume, and the behavior of the figures. In controlling the mise-en-scene, the
director stages the event for the camera.

Mise-en-scene usually involves some planning, but the filmmaker may be open
to unplanned events as well. An actor may add a line on the set, or an unexpected
change in lighting may enhanc e a dramatic effect. While filming a cavalry proces-
sion through Monument Valley for Sh e Wore a Yellow Ribbon, John Ford took ad-
vantage of an approaching lightning storm to create a dramatic backdrop for the
action (4.1). The storm remains part of the film’s mise-en-scene even though Ford
neither planned it nor controlled it; it was a lucky accident that helped create one
of the film’s most affecting passages. Jean Renoir, Robert Altman, and other directors
have allowed their actors to improvise their performances, making the films’ mise-en-
scene more spontaneous and unpredictable.

rt7

4.1 She Wore a Yellow Ribbon’ a thunderstorm in Monument
Valley.

Realism
Before we analyze mise-en-scene in detail, one preconception must be brought to
light. Just as viewers often remember this or that bit of mise-en-scene from a film,
so they often judge mise-en-scene by standards of realism. A car may seem to be
realistic for the period the film depicts, or a gesture may not seem realistic because
“real people don’t act that way.”

Realism as a standard of value, however, raises several problems. Notions of
realism varv across cultures, over time, and even among individuals. Marlon
Brando’s acclaimed realist performance in the 1954 film On the Waterfrorlr looks
st1 lized today. American critics of the 1910s praisedWilliam S. Hart’sWesterns for
bein’e realistic, but equally enthusiastic French critics of the 1920s considered the
same films to be as artificial as a medieval epic. Most important, to insist rigidly on
realism for all films can blind us to the vast range of mise-en-scene possibilities.

Look, for instance, at the frame from The Cabinet of Dn Caligari (4.2). Such
a depiction of rooftops certainly does not accord with our conception of normal re-
ality. Yet to condemn the film for lacking realism would be inappropriate, because
the film uses stylization to present a madman’s fantasy. The Cabinet of Dn Caligari
borrows conventions of Expressionist painting and theater, and then assigns them
the function of su-ggesting the madman’s delusion.

It is best. then, to examine the functions of mise-en-scene in the films we see.
While one film might use mise-en-scene to create an impression of realism, others
might seek very different effects: comic exaggeration, supernatural terror, under-
stated beauty, and any number of other functions. We should analyze mise-en-
scene’s function in the total film-how it is motivated, how it varies or develops,
how it works in relation to other film techniques.

The Power of Mise-en-Scene
Confining the cinema to some notion of realism would impoverish mise-en-scene.
This technique has the power to transcend normal conceptions of reality, as we can
see from a glance at the cinema’s first master of the technique, Georges M6lids.
M6lids’s mise-en-scene enabled him to create a totally imaginary world on film.

A caricaturist and magician, Mdlids became fascinated by the Lumibre broth-
ers’demonstration of their short films in 1895. (For more on the Lumidres, see
pp. 182-1 83.) After building a camera based on an English projector, M6lids be-
gan filming unstaged street scenes and moments of passing daily life. One day,

The Power of Mise-en-Scene 113

4.2 An Expressionist rooftop scene
created from jagged peaks and slanted
chimneys in The Cctbinet of Dn Caligari.

rr4 CHAPTER 4 The Shot: Mise-en-Scene

“When Bunuel was preparing The
Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie,
he chose a tree-lined avenue for the
recurring shot of his characters

‘ :in’ I’ ; :,0 ::: ::,!;-; ;’ J ! i,,
open country and it perfectly
suggested the idea of these people
coming from nowhere and going

nowhere. Bufiuel’s assistant said, ‘You

can’t use that road. lt’s been used in
at least ten other movies.’ ‘Ten other
movies?’ said Buituel, impressed.
‘Then it must be good.”‘

4.1 Georges M6lids’s desi-en for the
rocket-launchin._q scene in A Trip to the
Moon and…

4.5 The Merntoicl created an undersea world by placing a fish
tank between the camera and an actress, some backdrops, and
“carts for monsters.”

the story goes, he was filming at the Place de I’Op6ra, and his camera jammed as
a bus was passing. After some tinkering, he was able to resume filming, but by
this time, the bus had gone and a hearse was passing in front of his lens. When
M6libs screened the film, he discovered something unexpected: a moving bus
seemed to transform instantly into a hearse. Whether or not the anecdote is true,
it at least illustrates Mdlids’s recognition of the magical powers of mise-en-scene.
He would devote most of his efforts to cinematic conjuring.

To do so wollld require preparation, since M6lids could not count on lucky ac-
cidents like the bus-hearse transformation. He would have to plan and stage action
for the camera. Drawing on his experience in theater, M6lids built one of the first
film studios -a

small, crammed affair bristling with theatrical machinery, bal-
conies, trapdoors, and sliding backdrops. He sketched shots beforehand and de-
signed sets and costumes. The correspondence between his detailed drawings and
the finished shots is illustrated in 4.3 and 4.4. As if this were not enough, M6lids
starred in his own films (often in several roles per film). His desire to create magi-
cal effects led Mdlibs to control every aspect of his films’ mise-en-scene.

Such control was necessary to crcate the fantasy world he envisioned. Only in a stu-
dio could M6lids produce The Mennaid (4.5). He could also sulround hirnself (playin-e
an astronomer) with a gigantic amay of caftoonish cut-outs in kt Lune (1 tut nfttre (4.6).

4.4 the scene in the fihn.

4.5 The telescope,, globe, and blackboard are all flat, painted
cnt-onts tn Lo Lurte ci urte nfttre.

Aspecrs of Mise-en-Scene

4.7 L’Arroseur arrosd.

4.9 Gennatty Yeor Zerc.

115

M6libs’s “Star-Film” studio made hundreds of short fantasy and trick films
based on such a control over every element in the frame, and the first master of
mise-en-scene demonstrated the great range of technical possibilities it offers. The
legacy of M6lids’s magic is a delightfully unreal world wholly obedient to the whims
of the imagination.

Arpects of Mise-eo-Scene
What possibilities for selection and control does mise-en-scene offer the filmmaker?
We can mark out four general areas: setting, costumes and makeup, lighting, and
stagrng.

Setting
Since the earliest days of cineffi&, critics and audiences have understood that setting
plays a mol€ active role in cinema than it usnally does in the theater. Andr6 Bazin writes,

The human being is all-important in the theatre. The drama on the screen can exist with-
out actors. A ban-ein-e door. a leaf in the wind, waves beatin.,g on the shore can heighten
the dramatic effect. Some film masterpieces use man only as an accessory, like an ex-
tra. or in counterpoint to nature, which is the true leading character.

Cinema setting can come to the forefront; it need not be only a container for human
events but can dynamically enter the narrative action. (See 4.124, 4.127, 6.114,
6.124.6.125. 8.135, and 8.136 for examples of settings without characters.)

The filmrnaker may control settin-e in many ways. One way is to select an
already existin-e locale in which to sta-ee the action, a practice stretching back to the
earliest films. Louis Lumidre shot his short comedy L’Arroseur arrosd (“The Wa-
tererWatered.” 4.7 ) in a garden, and Jean-Luc Godard filmed the exteriors for Con-
tentpt on the resort island of Capri, off the coast of Italy (4.8). At the close of World
War II. Roberto Rossellini shot Germany Year Zero in the rubble of Berlin (4.9). To-
da)’ filmnrakers often -qo on location to shoot.

Alternatively, the filmmaker may construct the setting. M6libs understood that
shooting in a studio increased his control, and many filmmakers followed his lead.
In France, Germany, and especially the United States, the possibility of creating a
wholly artificial world on film led to several approaches to setting.

Some directors have emphasized authenticity. For example, Erich von Stro-
heim prided himself on meticr”rlous research into details of locale for Greecl (4.10).
All the Presiclent’s Mert (1976) took a similar tack, seeking to duplicate the Wash-
irtgtort Post office on a soundstage (4.11). Even wastepaper from the actual office

4.8 The filmmakers constructed none of the
character placement and framing turn it into a

setting in this shot from Contentpf, but control of
nearly abstract composition.

116 CHAPTER 4 The Sl-rot: Mise-eu-Scene

4.10 Details like han-ein-e flypaper and posters create a tavern
scene tn Greecl.

412 The Babylonian seqLlences of Intolerctn(‘e conbined
influences from Assyrian history, 19th-century biblical
illustration, and modern dance.

4.ll Replicatin-9 an etctt-titl newsroonr in A ll tlrc Pre.siclent’s Mert.

4.13 In lyurt the Ten’ible, Part 2, the
decor merkes the characters seem to
wri-9.-9le from one space to another.

4.15 ln Brant Stoket”s Drac’ulu, apart from the candles, the
settin-e of this scene has been obliterated by darkness.

4.14 ln Wings o.f Desire, busy, colorful
attention away from the man lyin-e

on the

graffiti on a wall draw
gror”rnd.

Aspects of Mise-en-Scene IT7

was scattered around the set. Other films have been less committed to historical ac-
curacy. Though D. W. Griffith studied the various historical periods presented rn In-
tolerance, his Babylon constitutes a personal image of that city (4.12). Similarly, in
Ivan the Terrible, Sergei Eisenstein freely stylized the decor of the czar’s palace to
harmonize with the lighting, costume, and figure movement, so that characters
crawl through doorways that resemble mouseholes and stand frozen before alle-
gorical murals (4.13).

Setting can overwhelm the actors, as in Wim Wender’s Wings of Desire (4.14),,
or it can be reduced to nothing, as in Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s
Dracula (4.15).

The overall design of a setting can shape how we understand story action. In Louis
Feuillade’s silent crime serial The Vampires, & criminal gang has killed a courier on his
way to a bank. The gang’s confederate, Irma Vep, is also a bank employee, and just as
she tells her superior that the courier has vanished, an imposter, in beard and bowler
hat, strolls in behind them (4.16). They turn away from us in surprise as he comes for-
ward (4.17). Working in a period when cutting to closer shots was rare in a French
film, Feuillade draws our attention to the man by centering him in the doorway.

Something similar happens in a more crowded setting in Juzo Itami’sTampopo.
The plot revolves aroLlnd a widow who is trying to improve the food and service she
offers in her restaurant. In one scene, a truck driver (in a cowboy hat) helps her by
takin.-e her to another noodle shop to study technique. Itami has staged the scene so
that the kitchen and the counter serve as two arenas for the action. At first, the widow
watches the noodle-man take orders, sitting by her mentor on the edge of the kitchen
(4.18). Quickly, the counter fills with customers calling out orders. The truck driver
challen_ses her to match the orders with the customers, and she steps closer to the cen-
ter of the kitchen (4.19). After she calls out the orders correctly, she turns her back to
us. and our interest shifts to the customers at the counter, who applaud her (4.20).

As the Tantpopo example showS, color can be an important component of set-
tin-es. The dark colors of the kitchen surfaces make the widow’s red dress stand out.
Robert Bresson’s L’Argent creates parallels among its various settings by the recur-
rence of drab sreen back..grounds and cold blue props and costumes (4.21-4.23). In
contrast, JacqLles Tati’s P/al Time displays sharply changing color schemes. In the
first portion of Plat, Tirrte, the settings and costumes are mostly gray, brown, and
black-cold, steely colors. Later in the film, however, beginning in the restaurant
scene, the settings start to sport cheery reds, pinks, and greens. This change in the
settin,_9s’ colors supports a narrative development that shows an inhuman city land-
scape that is transformed by vitality and spontaneity.

A full-size settin-e need not always be built. Through much of the history of the
cinema, filmmakers used miniature buildings to create fantasy scenes or simply to
economtze. Parts of settin-qs could also be rendered as paintings and combined pho-
to-eraphically with full-sized sections of the space. Now, digital special effects are
used to fill in portions of the setting, such as cities in The Phantom Menoce and The
Frfth Elenrcrt (4.24). Since such special effects also involve cinematography, we
look at them in the next chapter.

In manipulating a shot’s setting, the filmmaker may create props-short for
propet’ru This is another term borrowed from theatrical mise-en-scene. When an ob-
ject in the setting has a function within the ongoing action, we can call it a prop.
Films teem with examples: the snowstorm paperweight that shatters at the beginning
of Citizen Kane, the little girl’s balloonin M, the cactus rose in The ManWho Shot
Liberty Valonce, Sarah Connor’s hospital bed turned exercise machine in krmina-
tor 2: Judgrnent Day. Comedies teem with props used for humorous purposes (4.25).

In the course of a narrative, a prop may become a motif. The shower curtain in
Psycho is at first an innocuous part of the setting, but when the killer enters the
bathrooffi, the curtain screens her from our sight. Later, after the murder, Norman
Bates uses the curtain to wrap up the victim’s body.

Alexander Payne created a story motif by repeating one type of prop in Elec-
tion. The fussy, frustrated high-school teacher begins his day by cleaning out the

4.16 In Les
fiame created

Vctmpires, a background
byalargedoorway…

4.17 . . . emphasizes the importance of
an entering character.

‘,, “Th€ best sets are the simplest, most
‘decent’ ones; everything should

, cotltribute to the feeling of the story
, and anything that does not do this
‘ has no place. Reality is usually too
‘ complicated. Real locations contain
, too much that is extreme or

contradictory and always require
some simplifying: taking things away,
unifying colors, etc. This strength

‘ through simplicity is much easier to
achieve on a built set than in an
existing location.”

– Stuart Craig, art director, Notting Hill

118 CHAPTER 4 The Shot: Mise-en-Scene

4.18 In kunl)opo, at the start of the scene. the noodle cor-rnter,
with orrly two custorners. occr-rpies the center of the action. The
widow and her trr”rck driver mentor stand inconspiciously at the
lefi.

4.2O When she has triumphantly rnatched the orders, she ,gets il
round of applaLlse. By turnin-e her erwery from us, Itarmi once nrore
eurpharsizes the counter alea, now filled with customers.

419 Afier the counter is full. the drauratic enrphasis shifis to
the kitchen when the widow rises and takes the challenge to nalne
the customel s’ orciers. Her recl dress helps draw attention to her.

4.21 Color links the home in L’Argent .

. . and later to the prison.

afterward, he picks up hallway litter (4.27). At a
he decides to conceal a decisive ballot, which he
a wastebasket (4.28). Payne calls this the rnotif of
since that’s in fact the climax of the film. . So

4.21

facnlty refrigerator (4.26). Soon
major turning point in the plot,
crllmples and secretly drops into
trash, “of throwing things away,
we establish it early on.”

When the filmmaker uses color to create parallels among elements of setting,
a color motif may become associated with several props, ?S in Souleymane Ciss6’s

4.22 to the school

Aspccts of Mise-crr-Sccne 119

4.24 Tlte Fi.fih Elemerrl creates a collagelike city using computer graphics to join images
from various sorlrces.

4.25 The irresponsible protagonist of Grounclhog Duy eats an
enormous breakfast made up of props that dominate the
foreground of the diner setting.

Finye (Tlte Wincl, 4.29-4.31). In these and other scenes, the recLlrrent use of orange
creates a cluster of nature motifs within the narrative. Later in this chapter, we shall
examine in more detail how elements of setting can weave through a film to form
motifs within the narrative.

Costume and Makeup
Like setting, costume can have specific functions in the total film, and the range of pos-
sibilities is huge. Erich von Stroheim, for instance, was as passionately committed to
authenticity of dress as of setting, and he was said to have created underwear that would
instill the proper mood in his actors even though it was never to be seen in the fihn. In
Griffith’sThe Birth of a Nation, apoignant moment occurs when the Little Sisterdec-
orates her dress with “ermine” made of cotton dotted with spots of soot (4.32). The
costume displays the poverty of the defeated Southemers at the end of the Civil War.

In other films, costumes may be quite stylized, calling attention to their purely
graphic qualities. Throughout lvan the Terrible, costumes are carefully orchestrated
with one another in their colors, their textures, and even their movements. One
shot of Ivan and his advers ary gives their robes a plastic sweep and dynamism
(4.33). In Freak Orlanclo, tllrike Ottinger (herself a costume designer) boldly

t70 CHAPTER 4 The Sl-rot: Mise-en-Sceue

4.26 In Elec’tiort, as he discards spoiled leftovers, the teacher is suspicior-rsly watched by the
custodian-who will play an important role in his downtall.

4.27 He tosses a scrap of paper into the corridor trash bin.

4.28 A close-up of the teacher’s hand discarding the crucial vote for student council
president.

4.29 Firtye begins with a woman carrying an oran-qe calabash
as the wind rustles through weeds.

4.31 At the errcl. the little boy passes his bowl to someone
offscreen-llossiblr the colrple seen earlier.

4.33 The sweepin-e folds of a priest’s
li-ghtwei_uht black robe contrast with the
heavy cloak ancl train of the czar’s finery
in Ivan the Tert’ible .

As/recrs rf Misc-ctr-Scorc

4.30 Later, the vengeful -grandfather prepares to stalk his
grandson’s persecutor by dressin.e in oran-ge and nrakin-9 ma-uic
before a fire.

4.32 In The Birth qf u ltlutiort, the Little
Sister realizes how shabby her dress
remains despite her attempts to add festive
trtntmtn_9.

tzr

4.14 Stylized costumes in Frectk Orlanclo.

r27 CHAPTER 4 The Shot: Mise-en-Scene

4.36 Hildv’s stylish hut with u low-
dipping hrinr worn c-ar’lv in Hi,s Girl
Fridn\’…

4.37 . . . is rcpllrcccl hv ir “nrascr.rline”
hat with its hrin’l puslrr’cl up..journalist-
stvlr-. when she re-trrnrs to work.

4.35 ln Bt/z, sun-glasses shield Marcello from the world.

uses costLlmes to display the spectrum’s primary colors in maximLrm intensit\/
(4.34).

Costumes can play important motivic and callsal roles in narratives. The film
director Guido in Fellini’s B1/z persistently uses his derrk -elasses to shield himself
from the world (4.35). To think of Dracula is to recall how his billowing cape en-
wraps his victims. When Hildy Johnson, in His Girl Fridav su,itches from her role
of aspiring housewife to that of reporter, her hats chan-ee as well (4.36, 4.37). In the
rLrnaway bus section of Speecl, during a phone conversation w’ith Jack, the villain
Howard refers to Annie as a “Wildcat”; Jack sees Annie’s University of Arizona
sweater and realizes that Howard has hidden a video canreril aboard the bus. A cos-
tume provides the clue that allows Jack to outwit Howard.

As we have already seen in Tarnpopo and L’Argert (p. 118). costume is often
coordinated with settin-{. Since the filmmaker r”rsually wants to emphasize the hu-
man figures, settin.-q may provide a more or less neutral background, while costllme
lrelps pick out the characters. Color desi..en is particularly important here. The Freuk
Orlando costumes (4.34) stand out boldly against the neutral gray background of
an artificial lake. In The Night of the Shooting Sturs, luminous wheat fields set off
the hard black-and-bh”re costumes of the fascists and the pearsants (4.38). The di-
rector may instead choose to match the color values of settin-e and costume more
closely. One shot in Fellini’s Casanovo creates a color -eradation that rLlns frorn
bri,_eht red costumes to paler red walls, the whole composition capped by a small
white accent (4.39). This “bleeding” of the costume into the setting is carried to a
kind of limit in the prison scene of THX I l38, in which George Lucas strips both
locale and clothing to stark white on white (4.40).

Ken Russell’s Wornen in Love affords a clear example of how costume and set-
tin-g can contribute to a film’s overall narrative progression. The opening scenes
portray the characters’ shallow middle-class life by means of saturated primary and
complementary colors in costume and setting (4.41).In the middle portions of the
film, as the characters discover love on a country estate, pale pastels predorninate
(4.42). The last section of Wornen irt Love takes place around the Matterhorn, and
the characters’ardor has cooled. Now the colors have become even paler, domi-
nated by pure black and white (4.43). By integratin..q with settin_e, costume may
function to reinforce narrative and thematic patterns.

Many of these points about costume apply equally to a closely related area of
mise-en-scene, the actors’ makeup. Makeup wers originally necessary because ac-
tors’ faces would not register well on early film stocks. Up to the present, it has
been used in variolls ways to enhAnce the appearance of actors on the screen. Over

4.38 The clirnactic skirrnish of The Niglt o.f’the Shootirtg, S/cr’.r.

Aspecs rf Mise-err-Scene r23

4.39 Casartoln.’ subtle color gradations and a drarnatic accent
in the distance.

4.41 Bri-eht colors in an early scene of
Wtrtten irt Loye -give way . . .

4.40 Heads seem to
settings Lrlend in THX

float in space as white costnmes and
II38.

4.42
fields . .

to the softer hues t-lf tree’s arnd 4.43 . . . and finally to a predominantly
white-ancl-bIack schente.

4.45 In lyart tlte Terrible, Parrt l.
nrarkeup shapes the eyebrows and hollolvs
the eye sockets to empharsize lveln’s
plercrng gaze.

4,44 Li-uht, blank back-{rouncls focus
attention on the actors’ faces in many
shots of La Pus.siott tle Jeurtrte cl’Arc.

rz4 CHAPTER 4 The Shot: Mise-en-Scene

4.46 ln Heot, Al Pacino’s
eyebrows and, with the help
under his eyes.

maker-rp gives him sli-ehtly
of the lighting, minimizes

the course of film history, a wide range of possibilities has emerged. Dreyer’s La
Passion cle Jeanne d’Arc was famous for its complete avoidance of makeup (4.44).
This film relied on close-ups and tiny facial changes to create an intense religious
drama. On the other hand, Nikolai Cherkasov did not look particularly like
Eisenstein’s conception of Czar Ivan IV so he wore a wig and false beard, nose, and
eyebrows for lvan the Terrible (4.45). Changing actors to look like historical
personages has been one common function of makeup.

Today makeup usually tries to pass unnoticed, but it also accentuates expres-
sive qualities of the actor’s face. Since the camera may record cruel details that
would pass unnoticed in ordinary life, any unsuitable blemishes, wrinkles, and
sagging skin will have to be hidden. The makeup artist can sculpt the face, making
it seem narrower or broader by applying blush and shadow. Viewers expect that fe-
male performers will wear lipstick and other cosmetics, but the male actors are of-
ten wearing makeup, too (4.46, 4.47).

Film actors rely on their eyes to a very great extent (see box, p.

134

), and
makeup artists can often enhance eye behavior. Eyeliner and mascara can draw at-
tention to the eyes and emphasize the direction of a glance. Nearly every actor will
also have expressively shaped eyebrows. Lengthened eyebrows can enlarge the face,
while shorter brows make it seem more compact. Eyebrows plucked in a slightly ris-
ing curve add gaiety to the face, while slightly sloping ones hint at sadness. Thick,
straight brows, commonly applied to men, reinforce the impression of a hard, seri-
ous gaze. Thus eye makeup can assist the actor’s performance (4.481 4.49).

In recent decades, the craft of makeup has developed in response to the popll-
larity of horror and science fiction genres. Rubber and plasticine compounds create
bumps, bulges, extra organs, and layers of artificial skin in such films as David Cro-
nenberg’s The Fly (4.50). In such contexts, makeup, like costume. becones impor-
tant in creating character traits or motivating plot action.

Lighting
Much of the impact of an image comes from its manipulation of lighting. In cin-
ema, lighting is more than just illumination that permits us to see the action. Lighter
and darker areas within the frame help create the overall composition of each shot
and thus guide our attention to certain objects and actions. A bri-ehtly illuminated
patch may draw our eye to a key gesture, while a shadow may conceal a detail or
build up suspense about what may be present. Lighting can also articulate textures:
the curve of a face, the grain of a piece of wood, the tracery of a spider’s web, the
sheen of glass, the sparkle of a gem.

4.47 In The Goclfather Part III, made
five years before Heat, Pacino looks older.
Not only has his hair been whitened, but the
makeup, again assisted by the lighting, gives
him more sunken and baggy eyes, more
hollow cheeks, and a longer, flatter chin.

rounded

the bags

Aspecrs of Mise-en-Sccne

4.50 Jeff Goldblum, nearly
Llnrecognizable under .-grotesque makeLlp,
during his transforrnartion into Tlte Fly.

4.51 ln The Cheat, Cecil B. DeMille
suggested a jail cell by castin-9 a bri-uht
light on a man’s face and body throu-eh
Llnseen barrs.

4.52 Robert Bresson’s P icklxtcket.

r75

4.48 In Speerl, Sandra Bullock’s eyeliner, shadow, and arched brows make her eyes vivid and
-9ive her an alert expression.

4.49 For the sal-ne scene. the eyeliner on Keanu Reeves makes the upper edges of his eyes
stand out. Note also the somewhat fierce curve of the eyebrows, accentuating his slight frown.

Li,_ehtin._s shapes objects by creating highlights and shadows. A highlight is a patch
of relative brightness on a surface. The man’s face in 4.51 and the edge of the fingers
in 4.52 display highlights. Highlights provide impor-tant cues to the texture of the sur-
face. If the surface is srnooth, like glass or chroffie, the highlights tend to gleam or
sparkle; a rougher surface, like a coarse stone facing, yields more diffuse highlights.

There are two basic types of shadows, each of which is important in film com-
position: attached shadows, or shading, and cast shadows. An attached shadow oc-
curs when li.-qht fails to illuminate part of an object because of the object’s shape or
surface features. If a person sits by a candle in a darkened room, patches of the face
and body will fall into darkness. Most obviously, the nose often creates a patch of
darkness on an adjoining cheek. This phenomenon is shading, or attached shadow.
But the candle also projects a shadow on the wall behind. This is a cast shadow, be-
cause the body blocks out the light. The shadows in 4.51, for example, are cast
shadows, made by bars between the actor and the light source. But in 4.52, the
small, dark patches on the hand are attached shadows, for they are caused by the
three-dimensional cLlrves and ridges of the hand itself.

rz6 CHAPTER 4 The Shot: Mise-en-Scene

“Light is everything. lt expresses
ideology, emotion, colour, depth,
style. lt can efface, narrate, describe.
With the right lighting, the ugliest
face, the most idiotic expression can
radiate with beauty or intelligence.”

– Frederico Fellini, director

4.53 Attlrched shadows on firces crearte ir
dramatic composition in John Huston’s
Asphalt Jungle.

4.54 In this shot from Satyajit Ray’s
Apttrr4jilo, Apu’s rlother and the globe she
holcls are ernphasizecl by hard lighting.
wlrile . . .

As these examples suggest, highlights and shadows help create our sense of a
scene’s space. In 4.51, a few shadows imply an entire prison cell. Lighting also
shapes a shot’s overall composition. One shot from John Huston’s Aspholt Jungle
welds the gang members into a unit by the pool of light cast by a hanging
lamp (4.53). At the same time, it sets up a scale of importance, emphasizing the
protagonist by making him the most frontal and clearly lit figure.

A shot’s lighting affects our sense of the shape and texture of the objects de-
picted. If a ball is lit straight on from the front, it appears round. If the same ball is
lit from the side, we see it as a half-circle. Hollis Frampton’s short film Lemon con-
sists primarily of light moving around a lemon, and the shifting shadows create dra-
matically changing patterns of yellow and black. This fihn almost seems designed
to prove the truth of a remark made by Josef von Sternberg, one of the cinema’s
masters of film lighting: “The proper use of light can embellish and dramatrze every
object.”

For our purposes, we can isolate four major
ity, direction, source, and color.

features of film lighting: its qual-

Lightin g quali4, refers to the relative intensity of the illuminati on. Harcl lighting
creates clearly defined shadows, crisp textures, and sharp edges, whereas soft light-
ing creates a diffused illumination. In nature, the noonday sLln creates hard light,
while an overcast sky creates soft light. The terms are relative, and many lighting sit-
uations will fall between the extremes, but we can usually recognize the differences
(4.541 4.55).

The direction of lighting in a shot refers to the path of light from its source or
sources to the object lit. “Every light,” wrote von Sternberg, “has a point where it
is brightest and a point toward which it wanders to lose itself completely. . The
journey of rays from that central core to the outposts of blackness is the adventure
and drama of light.” For convenience we can distinguish among frontal lightin._e.
sidelighting, backlighting, underlighting, and top lighting.

Frontal lighting can be recognized by its tendency to eliminate shadows. In
4.56, from Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise, the result of such frontal li-ehtin-e is a
fairly flat-looking image. Contrast 4.57, from Touch of Evil, in which Orson Welles
uses a hard sidelight (also called a crosslight) to sculpt the character’s features.

Backlighting, oS the name suggests, comes from behind the subject filmed. It
can be positioned at many angles: high above the figure, at various angles off to the
side, pointing straight at the camera, or from below. Used with no other sollrces of
light, backlighting tends to create silhouettes, as in 4.58. Combined with more
frontal sources of light, the technique can create an unobtrusively illuminated con-
tour. This use of backlighting is called edge lighting or rint lighting (4.59).

As its name implies, underlighting suggests that the light comes from below
the subject. In 4.60, the underlighting suggests an offscreen flashli-eht. Since

4.55 . . . in another shot from the same
film. sofier lighting bh”rrs contours and
textures and makes for more diftusion and
gentler contrasts between li_qht and shade.

4.56 ln La Chinoise, fiontal lighting
makes the actress’s shadow fall directly
behind her, where we cannot see it.

Aspects of Mise-en-Scene r27

4.57 In Touc’lt r1f Evil, sidelight creates
sharp attached shaclows by the charzlcter’s
nose, cheek, and lips, while long cast shad-
ows appear on the file cabinets at the lefi.

4.58 In Godard’s Passiort, the lamp and
window provide backlighting that presents
the woman almost entirely in silhouette.

4.59 In Wings, a narrow line
makes each actor’s body stand
the background.

of light
out from

4.60 ln Tlte Si.vr/r Sertse, a flashlight lights the boy’s face trom below,
enhancin-s our enrpathy rvith his fright as he feels the presence of a ghost.

underlighting tends to distort features, it is often used to create dramatic horror
effects, but it may also simply indicate a realistic light source, such as a fireplace.
As usual. a particular technique can function differently according to context.

Top lighting is exemplified by 4.61, where the spotlight shines down from al-
most directly above Marlene Dietrich’s face. Von Sternberg frequently used such
a high frontal light to bring out the line of his star’s cheekbones. (Our earlier
example from Aspholt Jungle rn Figure 4.53 provides a less glamorous instance of
top lighting.)

Lighting can also be characterized by its source. In making a documentary, the
filmmaker may be obliged to shoot with the light available in the actual surround-
ings. Most fictional films, however, use extra light sources to obtain greater control
of the image’s look. In most fictional films, the table lamps and streetlights you see
in the mise-en-scene are not the principal sources of illumination for the filming.
Br.rt these visible sollrces of light will motivate the lighting decisions made in pro-
duction. The filmmaker will usually strive to create a lighting design that is consis-
tent with the sources in the setting. In 4.62,, from The Miracle Worker the window
in the rear and the lantern in the right foreground are purportedly the sources of il-
lumination, but you can see the many studio lights used in this shot reflected as tiny
white dots in the glass lantern.

Directors and cinematographers manipulating the lighting of the scene will
start from the assumption that any subject normally requires two light sources:

4.61 Top lighting in Josef von Sternberg’s
Slrunghoi E.rpr?.s.s.

4.62 Apparent and hidden li-eht sources
in The Mirac’le Wtrken

r78 CHAPTER 4 The Shot: Mise-en-Scene

4.6, Strong key and soft fill light
combined in The Bodl,guard.

“When taking close-ups in a colour
picture, there is too much visual
information in the background, which
tends to draw attention away from
the face. That is why the faces of the
actresses in the old black and white
pictures are so vividly remembered.
Even now, movie fans nostalgically
recall Dietrich . . . Garbo . . . Lamarr . . .

Why? Filmed in black and white,
those figures looked as if they were
lit from within. When a face
appeared on the screen over’
exposed-the high-key technique,
which also erased imperfections-it
was as if a bright object was
emerging from the screen.”

– Nestor Almendros, cinematographer

4.64 Bezhin Meadow.

a key light and a fill light. The key light is the primary source, providing the
dominant illumination and casting the strongest shadows. The key light is the most
directional light, and it usually corresponds to the motivating light source in the set-
ting. A fill is a less intense illumination that “fills in,” softening or eliminating
shadows cast by the key light. By combining key and fill, and by adding other
sources, lighting can be controlled quite exactly.

The key lighting source may be aimed at the subject from any angle, as our ex-
amples of lighting direction have indicated. As one shot from lvan the Terrible
shows (4.11), underlighting may be the key source, while a softer and dimmer fill
falls on the setting behind the figure.

Lights from various directions can be combined in any way. A shot may Llse
key and fill lights without backlighting. In the frame from The Boclyguarcl (4.63). a
strong key light from offscreen left throws a dramatic shadow on the u,all at the
right. The dim fill light inconspicuously shows the back wall and ceilin-e of the set.
but leaves the right side of the actor’s head dark.

In 4.64, from Bezhin Meaclovv, Eisenstein uses a number of light sources and
directions. The key light falling on the figures comes from the left side, but it is hard
on the face of the old woman in the foreground and softened on the face of the man
because a fill light comes in from the right. This fill light falls on the woman’s fore-
head and nose.

Classical Hollywood filmmaking developed the custom of usin g at least three
light sources per shot: key light, fill light, and backlight. The most basic arrange-
ment of these lights on a single figure is shown rn 4.65. The backlight comes from
behind and above the figure, the key light comes diagonally from the front, and a
fiU light comes from a position near the camera. The key will usually be closer to
the figure or brighter than the fill. Typically, each major character in a scene will
have his or her own key, fill, and backlight. If another actor is added (as in the dot-
ted figure in 4.65), the key light for one can be altered slightly to form the backlight
for the other, and vice versa, with a fill light on either side of the camera.

ln 4.66, the Bette Davis character in Jezebel is the most important figure, and
the three-point lighting centers attention on her: a bright backlight from the rear
upper right highlights her hair and edge-lights her left arm. The key light is off left,
making her right arm brightly illuminated. A fill light comes from just to the right
of the camera. It is less bright than the key. This balanced lighting creates mild
shading, modeling Davis’s face to suggest volume rather than flatness. (Note the
slight shadow cast by her nose.) Davis’s backlight and key light serve to illuminate
the woman behind her at the right, but less prominently. Other fill lights, called
background or set lighting, fall on the setting and on the crowd at the left rear.
Three-point lighting emerged during the studio era of Hollywood filmmaking, and
it is still widely used, as in 4.67, from Steven Spielberg’s Catch Me IfYou Can.

bock

co mero

4.65 Three-point lighting, one of the basic techniques of
Hollywood cinema.

4.67 ln Cutclt Me If Wru Cart, the ne’er-do-well father can’t
sLlppress a -9rin at his son s impersonation, and the high-key
lightin-e accentuates the upbeat tone of the scene.

You may have already noticed that this three-point lighting system demands
that the larnps be rearranged virtually every time the camera shifts to a new framing
of the scene. In spite of the great cost involved, most Hollywood films have a dif-
ferent lighting arrangement for each camera position. Such variations in the light
sources do not conform to reality, but they do enable filmmakers to create clear
compositions for each shot.

Three-point lighting was particularly well suited for the high-key lighting used
in classical Hollywood cinema and other filmmaking traditions. High-key lighting
refers to an overall lighting design that uses fill light and backlight to create low
contrast between brighter and darker areas. Usually, the light quality is soft, mak-
ing shadow areas fairly transparent. The frames from Jez,ebel (4.66) and from Catclt
Me If You Can (4.67) exemplify high-key lighting. Hollywood directors and cine-
matographers have relied on this for comedies, adventure films, and most dramas.

Aspecrs of Mise-en-Scene r79

4.65 The three-point system’s effect as it looks on the screen in
Jez,ebel.

4.68 Bac’k to the Future: day

4.69 versLrs ni-ght.

130 CHAPTER 4 The Shot’ Mise-en-Scene

4.7O ln Kanctl, low-key lighting creates
a harsh highlight on one side of the
woman’s face,, a deep shadow on the other.

“When I started watching films in the
1940s and 1950s, lndian
cinematography was completely
under the influence of Hollywood
aesthetics, which mostly insisted on
the ‘ideal light’ for the face, using
heavy diffusion and strong backlight.
I came to resent the complete
disregard of the actual source of light
and the clichdd use of backlight.
Using backlight all the time is like

. using chili powder in whatever you
‘, cook.”

– Subrata Mitra, cinematographer

High-key lighting is not used sirnply to render a brightly lit situation, such as a
dazzling ballroom or a sunny afternoon. High-key lighting is an overall approach to
illurnination that can suggest different lighting conditions or times of day. Consider,
for example, two frames from Bock to the Future. The first shot (4.68) uses high-key
illumination matched to daylight and a brightly lit malt shop. The second frame (4.69)
is from a scene set in a room at night, but it still Llses the high-key approach, as can
be seen from the lighting’s softness, its low contrast, and its detail in shadow areas.

Low-key illumination creates stronger contrasts and sharper, darker shadows.
Often the lighting is hard, and fill light is lessened or eliminated altogether. The ef-
fect is of chiaroscuro, or extremely dark and light regions within the image. An ex-
ample is 4.70, from Andrzej Wajda’s Kanal. Here the fill light and background li,_qht
are significantly less intense than in high-key technique. As a result, shadow areas
on the left third of the screen remain hard and opaque. In 4.71, a low-key shot from
Leos Carax’s Mauvais scu7g, the key light is hard and comes from the side. Carax
eliminates both fill and background illumination, creating very sharp shadows and
a dark void around the characters.

As our examples indicate, low-key lighting has usually been applied to somber
or mysterious scenes. It was common in horror films of the 1930s and films noirs
(dark films) of the 1940s and 1950s. The low-key approach was revived in the
1980s in such films as Blacle Runner and Rumble Fish and continued in the 1990s
in films noirs like SeTen and The Usual Suspects. In El Srtr (4.72). Victor Erice’s
low-key lighting yields dramatic chiaroscuro effects that portray the adult world as
a child imagines it.

When the actors move, the director must decide whether to alter the lightin-e.
By overlapping several different key lights, the filmmaker can maintain a constant
intensity as actors move around the set. Although constant lighting is not particu-
larly realistic, it has advantages, the main one bein._e that distracting shadows and
highlights do not move across actors. At the end of Fellini’s ^A/iglrts of Cabiria, tor
example, the heroine moves diagonally toward uS, accompanied by a band of
singing young people (4.7314.74). Alternatively, the filmmaker may have his or her
figures move through patches of light and shadow. The sword fight in Rn.s ltontort rs
intensified by the contrast between the ferocious combat and the cheerfully dappled
lighting pouring into the glade (4.7 5).

We tend to think of film lighting as limited to two colors-the white of sunlight
or the soft yellow of incandescent interior lamps. h-r practice, filmmakers who
choose to control lighting typically work with as purely white a light as they can.
By use of filters placed in front of the light source, the filmmaker can color the
onscreen illurnination in any fashion. There may be a realistic source in the scene

4.72 Low-key lighting in El Sur suggests a child’s view of the
adult world as full of mystery and danger.

4.71 ln Mauvctis setrg, a sin-ele key light
actress’s f’ace leaves her expression nearly

without any fill on the
invisible.

4.71 In Niglr t,s r1f Cabiria,
surounded by a band young
mLlslclans.

4.74 As she walks, the lighting
face does not change, enabling us
sli-eht changes in her expression.

Aspects of Mise-en-Scerre 131

4.75 Dappled lighting in Rashonnn.

4.77 ln Ivurt tlte ‘lbrt’ilile, a character’s
t’ear registers 0n his fercc . . .

4.78 . . . but a blue light also suddenly
and briefly shines on it until it disappealrs
and the scene continues.

the heroine is
street

on her
to notrce

4.76 An orange filter su-e-eests that all the li-eht in this scene
from The Greert Roon l comes from candles.

to motivate the hue of the light. For example, cinematographers often use filters
over lighting equipment to suggest the orange tint of candlelight, as in FranEois
Truffaut’s Tlte Greert Roont (4.76). But colored light can also be unrealistic in its
motivation. Eisenstein’s lvan the Terrible,Part 2, uses a blue light suddenly cast on
an actor, nondie-eetically., to suggest the character’s terror and uncertainty (4.77,
4.78). Such a shift in stylistic function-using colored light to perform a function
usually confined to actin-q-is all the more effective because it is so unexpected.

Most film lighting is applied during shooting, but computer-generated imagery
allows filmmakers to create virtual lighting designs. Powerful 3D programs enable
filmmakers to add broad overall illumination or strongly directional effects. Spot-
li-ehts can sprinkle highlights on shiny metal, while “shader” tools rnodel objects
with attached shadows. In normal filn-ring, filmmakers must reduce the vast amount
of visual information in front of the camera,, using lighting to clarify and simplify
the space. In contrast, digital lighting is built up little by little from simple elements.
For this reason, it is very time-consuming; a program may need a day and a night
to render moving cast shadows in a single shot. Still, new software and faster com-
puters are likely to accelerate the work process.

We are used to ignoring the illumination of our everyday surroundings, so film
lighting is also easy to take for granted. Yet the look of a shot is centrally controlled
by light quality, direction, source, and color. The filmmaker can rnanipulate and
combine these factors to shape the viewer’s experience in a great many ways. No
component of mise-en-scene is more important than “the drama and adventure
of light.”

r37 CHAPTER 4 The Shot: Mise-eu-Sceue

4.79 ln Tlte Hud,suc’ker Pro-rrl when the rnailboy Norville
proposes his new toy idea. the clicking balls on his boss’s desktop
sr”rddenly and inexplicably stop.

Parabolc uses lighting and a pLlre
sculptural forms.

Staging: Movement and Performance
The director may also control the behavior of various figures in the mise-en-scene.
Here the word figures covers a wide range of possibilities,, since the figure may
represent a person but could also be an anirnal (Lassie, the donkey Balthasar’.
Donald Duck), a robot (R2D2 and C3PO in the StarWars series), &r object (4.791.
or even a pure shape (4.80). Mise-en-scene allows such figures to express feelings
and thoughts; it can also dynamize them to create various kinetic patterns.

In 4.81, from Seven Sanrurai, the samurai have won the battle with the bandits.
Virtually the only movement in the frame is the drivin-e rain. but the slouchin-s pos-
tures of the men leanin-g on their spears express their tense wearirtess. In colttrast.
in Wltite Heat, explosive movement and ferocious facial expression present an irn-
age of psychotic rage (4.82).

In cinema, facial expression and movement are not restricted to human fig-
ures. Chapter 10 will discuss animation’s flexibility in combining abstract drawings
or three-dimensional objects with highly dynamic movement. For example, in sci-
ence fiction and fantasy films, monsters and robots may be given expressions and
gestures through the technique of stop-ctction (also called stolt-ntotiort). Typically.
a small-scale model is made with articulated parts. In filming, it is posed as desired,
and a frame or two is shot. Then the figure is adjusted slightly and another frame
or two is exposed, and so on. The result on screen is a continuous, if sometimes
jerky, movement. The horrendous onslaught of ED-209,, the crime-fi-ghting robot in
Robocop, was created by means of a 12-inch miniature filmed in stop-action (4.83).
(A full-scale but unmoving model was also built for long shots.) Stop-action can
also be used for more abstract and unrealistic purposes, as in Jan Svankmajer’s Di-
ntensions of Dialogue (4.84).

The filmmaker can stage action without three-dimensional objects moving in
real space. Drawings of characters who never existed, like Aladdin or Daffy Duck,
can be used in animated films. Dinosaurs and fabulous monsters created only as
models can be scanned and made to move in a lifelike fashion through computer-
generated imagery (see | .29).

Acting and Actuality Although abstract shapes and animated figures can be-
come important in the mise-en-scene, the most intuitively familiar cases of figure
expression and movement are actors playing roles. Like other aspects of mise-en-
scene, the performance is created in order to be filmed. An actor’s performance

4.80 The abstract film
background to errph astze

4.81 The actors strike
Seven Sarnurai.

weary poses ln

4.82 ln Wltite Herft, Cody Jarrett (Jarnes
Ca.-eney) bursts up from the prison lness
table after learnin-9 of his mother’s death.

4.83 A miniature used rn Robocop.

consists of visual elements (appearance, gestures, facial expressions) and sound
(voice, effects). At times, of course, an actor may contribute only visual aspects, as
in the silent era. Similarly, an actor’s performance may sometimes exist only on the
sound track of the film; in A Letter to Three Wives, Celeste Hohn’s character, Ad-
die Ross, speaks a narration over the images but never appears on the screen.

Actin.-e is often approached as a question of realism. But concepts of realistic
actin-e have chan-9ed over film history. Today we may think that the performances of
Russell Crowe and Renee Zellweger in Cinderella Man or those given by Heath
Led-eer and Jake Gyllenhaal rn Brokeback Mountain arc reasonably close to people’s
real-life behavior. Yet in the early 1950s, the New York Actors Studio style, as ex-
emplified by Marlon Brando’s performances in On the Waterfront and A Streetcar
Nantecl Desire, was also thou-eht to be extremely realistic. Fine though we may still
find Brando’s work in these films, it seems deliberate, heightened, and quite unreal-
istic. The same might be said of the performances, by professional and amateur ac-
tors alike, in post-World War II Italian neorealist films. These were hailed when they
first appeared as almost documentary depictions of Italian life, but many of them
now seem to us to contain polished performances suitable to Hollywood films. Al-
ready. rnajor naturalistic performances of the 1970s, such as Robert De Niro’s pro-
tagonist in Taxi Driver seem quite stylized. Who can say what the acting in The
Insider In the Bedroom, and other recent films will look like in a few decades?

Changing views of realism are not the only reason to be wary of this as a con-
cept for analyzing acting. Often, when people call a performance unrealistic, they
are evaluating it as bad. But not all films try to achieve realism. Since the perfor-
mance an actor creates is part of the overall mise-en-scene, films contain a wide va-
riety of acting styles. Instead of assuming that acting must be realistic, we should
try to understand what kind of acting style the film is aiming at. If the functions of
acting in the film are best served by a nonrealistic performance, that is the kind that
the skillful actor will strive to present. Obvious examples of nonrealistic acting
style can be found in The Wizard of Oz, for fantasy purposes. (How would a real
Wicked Witch behave?) Moreover, realistic performance will always be only one
option in film acting. In mass-production filmmaking from Hollywood, India, Hong
Kong, and other traditions, overblown performances are a crucial source of the au-
dience’s pleasure. Viewers do not expect narrowly realistic acting from Jim Carrey
or from martial-arts stars such as Jet Li or Jackie Chan.

Finally, when we watch any fictional film, we are to some degree aware that the
performances on the screen are the result of the actors’ skills and decisions. (See ‘A
Closer Look.”) When we use the phrase “larger than life” to describe an effective
performance, we seem to be tacitly acknowledging the actor’s deliberate craft. In
analyzing a particular film, it is usually necessary to go beyond assumptions about
realism and consider the functions and purposes that the actor’s craft serves.

Aspecrs of Mise-cn-Scene 133

4.84 A conversation between clay
figures de-eenerates as they begin to claw
each other to bits in Dimertsiorts o.f
Dialogue.

“l get impatient with many
Hollywood films because there’s this
assumption that meaning or emotion
is contained in those few square
inches of an actor’s face and I just
don’t see it that way at all. I think
there’s a power in withholding
i nformati on, reveali ng thi ngs
gradually, Letting the audience
discover things within the frame in
time, in the way they stand.”

– Alison Mactean, director, Crush

THE FILM ACTOR’S TOOLKIT

We might think that the most impor-
tant task facinS an actor is reading dia-
logue in a convincing and stirring way.
Certainly,voice and delivery are very
important in cinema, but considered in
terms of mise-en-scene, the actor is al-
ways part of the overalI visual design.
Many film scenes contain littte or no di-
alogue, but at every moment onscreen,
the actor must be in character. The ac-
tor and director shape the performance
pictoriatty.

At all times, film actors use their
faces. This was most evident before
movies had sound, and theorists of the
silent film were futt of praise for the sub-
tte facial acting of Charlie Chaplin, Greta
Garbo, and Littian Gish. Since some basic
facial expressions (happiness, fear, anger)
are understood easi[y across cultures, it’s
not surprising that silent film coutd be-
come popular around the world. Today,
with mainstream fiction films using
many close-ups (see pp. 43-44), actor’s
faces are hugely enlarged, and the per-
formers must control their expressions
minutely.

The most expressive parts of the
face are the brows, mouth, and eyes. A[[
work together to signal how the charac-
ter is responding to the dramatic situa-
tion. ln Jerry Maguire, the accountant

Dorothy Boyd accidentally meets )erry
at an airport baggage conveyor. She has
a crush on him, partly because she ad-
mires the couraSeous mission state-
ment he has issued to the sports agency
they work for. As he starts to back off
from the statement, she eagerty quotes
it from memory; Renee Zellwegger’s
earnest smile and steady gaze suggest
that she takes the issues more seriously
than )erry does (4.851. This impression is
confirmed when )erry says, “Uh-huh,”
and studies her skeptically, his fixed
smile signaling social potiteness rather
than Senuine pride (4.861. This en-
counter sets up one premise of the
fitm-that Jerry’s ideatistic impulses wi[[
need constant shoring up, for he might
at any moment stip back into being “a
shark in a suit.”

The eyes hotd a special place in film.
ln any scene, crucial story information is
conveyed by the direction of a charac-
ters gtance, the use of eyelids, and the
shape of the eyebrows. One of Chaplin’s
most heartrending moments comes in
City Lights, when the btind flower girt,
now sighted, suddenly reatizes that he’s
her benefactor. Chaptin twirts a flower
in his teeth, so we can’t see the shape of
his mouth; we must read yearning in his
brows and rapt, dark gaze (4.871.

4.85 Perky and sincere, Dorothy
pledges allegiance to Jerry Maguire’s
idealistic memo.

4.86 Jerry smiles politely, but his
sideways glance and brows suggest that he
is a bit put off by her earnestness.

134

Normally, we don’t stare intent[y at
the people we tatk with. We glance
away about half the time to gather our
thoughts, and we btink 10-.12 times a
minute. But actors must [earn to look
directly at each other, locking eyes and
seldom blinking. lf an actor gtances
away from the partner in the conversa-
tion, it suggests distraction or evasion.
lf an actor bIinks, it suggests a reaction
to what is happening in the scene (sur-
prise, or anxiety). Actors ptaying force-
fuI characters often stare fixedly.
Anthony Hopkins said this of ptaying
Hannibal Lecter: “lf you don’t blink you
can keep the aud ience mesmeri zed.”
(See 10..l,

.l0.3.) ln our Jerry Maguire
scene, the protagon ists watch each
other fixedty. When )erry does close his
eyes in response to Dorothys praise, it
indicates his nervousness about con-
fronting the issues that his mission
statement raised.

Actors act with their bodies as we[[.
How a character walks, stands, or sits
conveys a great deal about personality
and attitude. ln fact, during the l8th and
lgth centuries, attitude was used to re-
fer to the way a person stood. Stage
acting gave early film a repertoire of
postu res that cou [d express a charac-
ter s state of m ind. In the 1916 ltalian
film Tigre Reale (The Royal Tigress), the
diva Pina Menichelli plays a countess

with a shady past. At one point, she
confesses this in a florid attitude that
expresses noble suffering (4.881. White
few actors today would resort to this
stylized posture, early film audiences
would have accepted it as vividly ex-
pressive, like a movement in dance.
Menichelti plays the rest of the scene
more quietty, but she stitI employs ex-
pressive attitudes f4.89, 4.901.

Chaplins and Menichellis gestures
show that hands are important toots of
the film actor. Hands are to the body
what eyes are to the face: They focus
our attention and evoke the character’s
thoughts and feelings. Actress Maureen
O’Hara said of Henry Fond?, ‘Att he had
to do was wag his little finger and he
could steal a scene from anybody.” A
good exam p [e can be seen in the
doomsday thri[[er Fail-Safe. Henry
Fonda plays the U.S. president, who has
learned that an American warplane has
been accidentally sent to bomb the So-
viet Union. Fonda stands erect at the
phone as he hears d istressing news
about the planes progress, and he hangs
up with his left hand 14.91-4.941.By
keeping most of the shot sti[[ and bare,
director Sidney Lumet has given Fondas
fingers the main rote, letting them ex-
press the president’s measured pru-
dence but also suggesting the strain of
the crisis.

4.87 In the climax of City Lights, by
concealing his mouth with the flower he
twirls nervolrsly, Chaplin obliges us to find
his hope expressed in the upper part of his
face.

4.88 In Tigre Reale, Menichelli’s right
hand seizes her hair, as if pulling her head
back in agony; but her body still expresses
defiance, thrust forward and standing firm
as the left hand grips her waist.

t35

4.89 As Menichelli begins to feel
shame, she retreats toward the fireplace,
turning from us and slumping in a way
that suggests regret.

4.92 The president pauses and rubs his
fingers together thoughtfully . . .

4.9O She keeps her back to the camera
as she withdraws, now a pathetic figure.

4.91 . . . then he taps into the intercom
with his right hand.

491 In Foil-Safe, the president stands
erect at the phone as he hears distressing
news about the plane’s progress, and he
hangs up with his left hand.

4.94 As he u’aits. for a brief moment
his left fin-9ers wag-ele anxioush’.

Acting: Functions and Motivation In 1985, Hollywood observers were sur-
prised that Steve Martin wasn’t nominated for an Academy Award for A ll of Me. In
that film, Martin portrays a man whose body is suddenly inhabited on the ri-eht side
by the soul of a woman who has just died. Martin used sudden chan’ees of voice.
along with acrobatic pantomiffie, to suggest a split body. In 1999, a similar outcry
occurred when Jim Carrey was not nominated for an Oscar for Tlte Tnurtart Sltow,
a comedy about a man who is unaware that his entire life has been broadcast as a
sitcom on television. Neither Martin nor Carrey could be expected to perform
realistically in the naffow sense of the word, since the situations they portray could
not exist in the real world. Yet in the context of each of these fantasy-comedies, the
performance is completely appropriate.

In films like All of Me and The Truman Show, a more muted and superficially
realistic performance would clearly be inappropriate to the context established by
the genre, the film’s narrative, and the clverall mise-en-scene. This suggests that a
performance, realistic or not, should be examined according to rts fiinctiort in the
context of the film.

We can consider performance along two dimensions. A performance will be
more or less individualizecl, and it will be more or less stltlizecl. Often we have both
in mind when we think of a realistic performance: it creates a unique character, and
it does not seem too exaggerated or too underplayed. Marlon Brando’s portrayal of
Don Vito Corleone in The Godfather is quite individualized. Brando gives the God-
father a complex psychology, z distinctive appearance and voice, and a string of fa-
cial expressions and gestures that make him significantly different from thet36

standard image of a gang boss. As for stylization, Brando keeps Don Vito in the
middle range. His performance is neither flat nor flamboyant; he isn’t impassive,
but he doesn’t chew the scenery either.

But this middle range, which we often identify with realistic performance,
isn’t the only option. On the individuality scale, films may create broader, more
anonymous types.Classical Hollywood narrative was built on ideologically stereo-
typed roles: the Irish cop on the beat, the black servant, the Jewish pawnbroker, the
wisecracking waitress or showgirl. Through Qpecasting, actors were selected and
directed to conform to type. Often, however, skillful performers gave these conven-
tions a freshness and vividness. In the Soviet cinema of the 1920s, several directors
used a similar principle, called typage. Here the actor was expected to portray a typ-
ical representative of a social class or historical movement (4.951 4.96).

Whether more or less typed, the performance can also be located on a contin-
uum of stylrzatron A long tradition of film acting strives for a resemblance to what
is thought of as realistic behavior. This sense of realism may be created by giving
the actors small bits of business to perform while they speak their lines. Frequent
gestures and movelnents by the actors add plausibility to the humor of Woody
Allen’s films (4.97). More intense and explicit emotions dominate Winchester 73,
in which James Stewart plays a man driven by a desire for revenge (4.98).

Psychological motivation is less important in a film like Trouble in Paradise, a
sophisticated comedy of manners in which the main concern is with more stereo-
typical characters in a comic situation. In 4.99, two women competing for the same
man pretend to be friendly. Again, the performances are perfectly appropriate to the
genre. narrative. and overall style of the film.

4.97 Verisimilitude in
actin-u: N{ia Farrou’ as
Hannah. Diane Wiest as
her sister Holly. and
Carrie Fisher as their
friend April set a table,
chatting about the other
guests tn Hurtrtah arrcl Her
Si.srers.

4.98 ln Winc’hester 73, Jinmy Stewart’s
mild manner occasionally erupts into
explosions of anger, revealing hirn as on
the brink of psychosis.

4.99 The exaggerated smiles and
gestures in Zra uble in Porctclise are
amusing because we know that each
woman is trying to deceive the other.

Aspecrs of Mise-en-Scene t37

4.95 The opening of Sergei Eisenstein’s
Strike presents the cartoonish clichd of the
top-hatted capitalist . . .

4.96 . . . while in contrast the workers
are later presented as earnest and resolute.

4.100 Nikolai Cherkasov’s dramatically
raised arm and thrown-back head are
appropriate to the hei-ehtened style of lvcut
the Tert’ible.

138 CHAPTER 4 The Shot: Mise-en-Scene

4.101 Playing the heroine of Au Hasarcl Bulthasar Anna
Wiazemsky looks without expression at her would-be seducer,
who wants her to get in his car . . .

Comedy doesn’t provide the only motivation for greater stylization. Ivan the
Terrible is a film that heightens every element-music, costume, setting-to create
a larger-than-life portrait of its hero. Nikolai Cherkasov’s broad, abrupt gestures fit
in perfectly with all of these other elements to create an overall unity of composi-
tion (4.100).

Some films may combine different degrees of stylization . Amadeus contrasts a
grotesque, giggling performance by Tom Hulce as Mozart with Murray Abraham’s
suave Salieri. Here the acting sharpens the contrast between the older composer’s
decorous but dull music and the young man’s irrepressible but offensive genius.

Films like Caligari, Ivan the Terrible, and Amadeus create stylized perfor-
mances through extroversion and exaggeration. The director can also explore the
possibilities of very muted performances. Compared to normal practice, highly re-
strained acting can seem quite stylized. Robert Bresson is noted for such restrained
performances. Using nonprofessional actors and drilling them in the details of the
characters’ physical actions, Bresson makes his actors quite inexpressive by con-
ventional standards (4.101 ,4.102). Although these performances may upset oLlr ex-
pectations, we soon realize that such restraint focuses our attention on details of
action we never notice in most movies.

Acting in the Context of Other Techniques By examining how an actor’s
performance functions in the context of the overall film, we can also notice how
acting cooperates with other film techniques. For instance, the actor is always a

4.102 …and
thoughts, before

glances

gettrng

4.103 ln The Cabinet qf Dn Caligari,
Cesare’s body echoes the tilted tree trunks.
his arms and hands their branches and
leaves.

downward, still without re-gisterin-e her
into the car.

4.104 Jean Seberg in Brectthless, an
inexpressive performance or an enigmatic
one?

graphic element in the film, but some films underline this fact. In The Cabinet of
Dn Caligori, Conrad Veidt’s dancelike portrayal of the somnambulist Cesare makes
him blend in with the graphic elements of the setting (4.103). As we shall see in
ollr examination of the history of film styles, the graphic design of this scene in
Coligari typifies the systematic distortion characteristic of German Expressionism.

In Breathless, director Jean-Luc Godard juxtaposes Jean Seberg’s face with a
print of a Renoir paintin g (4.104). We might think that Seberg is giving a wooden
performance, for she simply poses in the frame and turns her head. Indeed, her act-
ing in the entire film may seem flat and inexpressive. Yet her face and general de-
meanor are visually appropriate for her role, a capricious American woman
unfathomable to her Parisian boyfriend.

The context of a performance may also be shaped by the technique of film ed-
iting. Because a film is shot over a period of time, actors perform in bits. This can
work to the filrnmaker’s advantage, since these bits can be selected and combined
to br-rild up a performance in ways that could never be accomplished on the stage.
If a scene has been filmed in several shots, with alternate takes of each shot, the ed-
itor may select the best gestures and expressions and create a con-lposite perfor-
mance better than any one sustained performance could be. Through the addition
of sound and the combination with other shots, the performance can be built up still
further. The director may simply tell an actor to widen his or her eyes and stare off-
screen. If the next shot shows a hand with a gun, we are likely to think the actor is
depictin._e fear.

Camera techniques also create a controlling context for acting. Fihn acting, as
most r,’iewers know, differs from theatrical acting. At first glance, that suggests that
cinema alr,vays call for more underplaying, since the camera can closely approach
the actor. But cinema actually calls for a stronger interplay between restraint and
emphasis.

In Lr theater. we are usually at a considerable distance from the actor on the
stage. We certainly can never get as close to the theater actor as the camera can put
us in a filrn. But recall that the camera can be at anv distance from the figure.
Filmed trom very far away, the actor is a dot on the screen-much smaller than an
actor on stage seen from the back of the balcony. Filmed from very close, the
actor’s tiniest eye movement may be revealed.

Thus the film actor must behave differently than the stage actor does, but not
always by being more restrained. Rather, she or he must be able to acljttst to each
O’pe o.f ccurtero distance. If the actor is far from the camera, he or she will have to
-qestLlre broadly or move around to be seen as acting at all. But if the camera and
actor are inches apart, a twitch of a mouth muscle will colne across clearly.
Between these extremes, there is a whole range of adjustments to be made.

Basically, a scene can concentrate on either the actor’s facial expression or on
pantomimic -gestLlres of the body. Clearly, the closer the actor is to the camera, the
more the facial expression will be visible and the more important it will be (al-
though the fihnmaker may choose to concentrate on another part of the body, ex-
cluding the face and emphasizing gesture). But if the actor is far away from the
carnera, or turned to conceal the face, his or her gestures become the center of the
performance.

Thus both the staging of the action and the camera’s distance from it determine
how we will see the actors’performances. Many shots in Bernardo Bertolucci’sThe
Spicler’s Stratagem show the two main characters from a distance, so that their
manner of walking constitutes the actors’ performances in the scene (4.105). In
conversation scenes’ however, we see their faces clearly, &S in 4.106.

Such factors of context are particularly important when the performers are
not actors, or even human beings. Framing,editing, and other film techniques can
make trained animals give appropriate performances. Jonesy,, the cat in Aliens,
seems threatening because his hissing rnovement has been emphasized by light-
ing, framing, editing, and the sound track (

4.107

). [n animated films, the

Aspecrs of Misc-en-Scene r39

4.105 In this long shot fron The
Spicler’,s Strategem, the stitf, upright wety
in which the heroine holds her parasol is
one of the main facets of the actress’s
performance . . .

4.106 . . . while in a conversation scene
we can see details of her eye and lip
movements.

“You can ask a bear to do something
like, let’s say, ‘Stand up,’ and the bear
stands up, But you cannot say to a
bear, ‘Look astonished.’ So you have
him standing up, but then you have
to astonish hlm. I would bang two
saucepans, or get a chicken from a
cage, then shake it so it squawked,
and the bear would think,’What was
that?’ and ‘click’ I’d have that
expression.”

– Jean-Jacques Annaud, director, The Bear

4.107

r40 CHAPTER 4 The Shot: Mise-en-Scene

4.108 Devil
Mctsc’ot.

and thief puppets rn The

4lO9 A strikin-e instance of frontality in L’Atvertura: The
characters alternate . . .

filmmaker’s manipulation must go further, as in Ladislav Starevich’s The Mascot.
There a conversation between a devil and a thief includes subtle facial expres-
sions and gestures, all created through the frame-by-frame manipulation of
puppets (4.108).

As with every element of a film, acting offers an unlimited range of distinct
possibilities. It cannot be judged on a universal scale that is separate from the con-
crete context of the entire film’s form.

Putting It All Together:
Mise-eo-Scene in Space and Time
Sandro and Claudi a are searching for Anna, who has mysteriously vanished. Anna
is Claudia’s friend and Sandro’s lover, but during their search, they’ve begun to drift
from their goal of finding her. They’ve also begun a love affair. In the town of Noto,
they stand on a church rooftop near the bells, and Sandro says he regrets givin,_e up
architectural design. Claudia is encouraging him to return to his art when suddenly
he asks her to marry him.

She’s startled and confused, and Sandro comes toward her. She is turned away
from us. At first, only Sandro’s expression is visible as he reacts to her plea “Why
can’t things be simpler?” (4.109). Claudia twists her arms around the bell rope, then
turns away from him, toward us, grasping the rope and fluttering her hand. Now we
can see that she’s quite distraught. Sandro, a bit uneasy, turns away as she says anx-
iously, “I’d like to see things clearly” (4.110).

Brief though it is, this exchange in Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura (“The
Adventure”) shows how the tools of mise-en-scens-sstting, costume, lighting, per-
formance, and staging-can work together smoothly. We’ve considered them sepa-
rately in order to examine the contribution each one makes, but in any shot, they
mesh. They unfold on the screen in space and time, fulfilling several functions.

Most basically, the filmmaker has to guide the audience’s attention to the most
important areas of the image. We need to spot the items important for the ongoin-e
action. The filmmaker also wants to build up our interest by arousing curiosity and
suspense. And the filmmaker tries to add expressive qualities, giving the shot an
emotional coloration. Mise-en-scene helps the filmmaker achieve all these purposes.

How did Antonioni guide our attention in the Claudia-Sandro exchan ge? First,
we’re watching the figures, not the railing behind them. Based on the story so far,
we expect Sandro and Claudia to be the objects of interest. At other points in the
film, Antonioni makes his couple tiny figures in massive urban or seaside land-
scapes. Here, however, his mise-en-scene keeps their intimate interchange foremost
in our minds.

4.110 turning their backs on the camera.

Putting It ALL Together: Mise-en-Scene in Space and Time

Consider the first image merely as a two-dimensional picture. Both Sandro and
Claudia stand out against the pale sky and the darker railing. They’re also mostly
curved shapes-heads and shoulders-and so they contrast with the geometrical
regularity of the rails. In the first frame, light strikes Sandro’s face and suit from the
right, picking him out against the rails. His dark hair is well positioned to make his
head stand out against the sky. Claudi ?, v blonde, stands out against the railing and
sky less vividly, but her polka-dot blouse creates a distinctive pattern. And consid-
ered only as a picture, the shot roughly balances the two figures, Sandro in the left
half and Claudia in the right.

It’s hard to think of the shot as simply two-dimensional, though. We instinc-
tively see it as portraying a space that we could move around in. Claudia seems
closer to us because her body masks things farther away, a spatial cue called over-
Iap. She’s also somewhat larger in the frame than Sandro, which reinforces our
sense that she’s closer. The rope slices across the bottom third of the frame, sepa-
rating her from him (overlap again). Sandro himself overlaps the railing, which in
turn overlaps the sky and the town. We get a sense of distinct planes of space, lay-
ers lying closer to or farther from us. Elements of mise-en-scene like costume,
lighting, setting, and figure placement create this sense of a three-dimensional
arena for the action.

Antonioni has used mise-en-scene to emphasize his characters and their inter-
action. But that interaction unfolds in time, and it gives him an opportunity to guide
our attention while building up suspense and expressing emotion. Claudia is turned
away from us when Sandro presses her to marry him, and the rope is taut between
them (4.109). How will she respond?

Antonioni starts by giving Claudia a bit of business. She twists the rope around
her arms and slips it over her back. This could be a hint that she’s drawn to San-
dro’s proposal. At the same time, she hesitates. For as soon as he presses her, she
turns away from him (4.110).

We know that faces give us access to characters’ thoughts and emotions. An-
other filmmaker might have had Claudi a already facing us when Sandro asked, so
we’d see her response immediately. Antonioni instead makes things uncertain for a
moment. He has concealed Claudia’s reaction and then lets her turn toward us. To
make sllre that we watch her and not Sandro at this moment, Antonioni has him turn
away when she gestures and speaks (“I’d like to see things clearly”). Our attention
is riveted on her.

Soon enough, Sandro turns back toward the camera,, so we can see his reaction,
but already Claudia’s anxiety has flashed out at us. Her complex relation to San-
dro-attraction (sliding under the bell rope) and uncertainty (turning away
tensely)-has been presented to us concretely.

This is only one moment in a complex scene and complex film, but it shows
how various elements of mise-en-scene can cooperate to create a specific effect-

r4r

4.111 Narrative expectations guide our eye to the main characters in Tootsie.

r42 CHAPTER 4

“The audience is only going to look
at the most overriding thing in the
frame. You must take charge of and
direct their attention. lt’s also the
principle of magic: what is the single
important thing? Make it easy for
them to see it, and you’re doing your
job ”

– David Mamet, director

4.112 A lirlitecl palette ellphasizes this synrnretrical
conrposition in Li.fe on u Strirtg.

the delayed revelation of a character’s emotion. That revelation coLlldn’t have oc-
curred without the director’s choices about what to show Lts art particular poirrts.
When we look at an image, we look pLlrposefully. What we notice is gLlided by our
expectations arbout what rni_eht be significatnt.

Often the form of the whole filrn sets Lrp ollr expectittions. If a shot shows ir
crowd, we will tend to sceln it lookin-e for a character we recognize frorn earlier
scenes. In 4.lll, althou.-qh there are several people in the fore-ground of this shot
from Tootsie, we will likely notice Julie (Jessica Lan_ee) and Dorothy Michaels
(Dustin Hofflneln) quickly, since they are oLlr rnain charercters. Similarly,we notice
Les, seen here for the first titne, because he and Dorothy are exchangin-9 srniles.
Sirnilarly, sound cetn becotne eln important factor controlling oul’attention. Lls \\e
shall see in Chapter 7.In addition to the filrn’s stclry context. there are several u’ar s
directors can guide our expectations about what to notice. In the spirit of tryilts to
..qrasp all the options on the mise-en-scene menu. let’s look in nrore detail at the spa-
tial and ternporal possibilities.

Space

Screen Space In many respects, a filrr-r sl-rot
flat an’ay of colors and shapes. Before we even
dimensional space, mise-en-scene offers melny
emphasizing elernents in the frame.

Take something as simple as balancing the
tribute verrioLls points of interest evenly around
ers will concentrarte ntore olt the Ltpper half of

resembles a paintin_e. It presents er
start to read the inrage as a three-

cLres for -guiding oLu’attention ancl

shot. Filmrnakers ofien try to dis-
the frarne. They assunre that view-
the franre’ probably becaurse thart’s

4.113 Mrtr,s Anut’k.r/.’ centerin-9 a single character’ 4114 and balancin-sti two.

Putting It ALI Together: Mise-en-Scene in Spncc and Time

where we tend to find characters’faces. Since the film frame is ahorizontal rectan-
gle, the director usually tries to balance the right and left halves. The extreme type
of such balancing is bilateral symmetry. In the battle scene in Life on a String, Chen
Kaige stages the action symmetrically (4.112).

More common than such near-perfect symmetry is a loose balancing of the
shot’s left and right regions. The simplest way to achieve compositional balance is
to center the frame on the human body. Filmmakers often place a single figure at
the center of the frame and minimize distracting elements at the sides, as in 4.113.
Many of our earlier illustrations display this flexible balance. Other shots may
counterweight two or more elements, encouraging our eye to move back and forth,
as in 4.114 and our L’Avventura dialogue (4. 109,4. I l0).

Balanced composition is the norffi, but unbalanced shots can also create strong
effects. In Bicycle Thieves, the composition emphasizes the father’s new job by
massing most of the figures on the right. They don’t balance the son, but he seems
even more vulnerable by being such an ineffective counterweight (4.115). A more
drastic example occLrrs in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Il Griclo (4.116), where two
strong elements, the hero and a tree trunk, are grouped on the right side of the shot.
One could argue that the shot creates a powerful urge for the audience to see the
woman’s hidden face.

Sometimes the filmmaker will leave the shots a little unbalanced, in order to
prin-re our expectation that something will change position in the frame. The cin-
ema of the l9 l0s offers intriguing examples. Very often a doorway in the back of
the set allowed the director to show that new characters were entering the scene, but

4.115 This composition from
Thieves emphasizes the father’s
by rnassing rnost of the figures
ri_eht.

4.116 ln Il Griclo, instead of balancinq
the couple, the composition centers the
man. If there were no tree in the frarne,
the shot wor”rld still be somewhat
weighted to the right, but the unexpected
vertical of the trunk makes that side even
heav ier.

4119 As the ballerina lowers her arm.
the door opens and her father appears.

r43

4.117 From quite early in cinemir
history, filmmakers used unbalanced
compositions to prepare the viewer for
new narrative developments. ln Yevgenii
Bauer’s The Dyirrg Su’nn (1916), the
yoLrng ballerina receives a tiara f}orn an
adrn irer.

4l2O Her father comes to the front area
and balances the cornposition.

Bicycle
new job

on the

4.118 She admires herself in a minor. in
a notably decentered f}aming.

r44 CHAPTER 4 The Shr’rt: Mise-en-Scene

4.121 In V. I. Pudovkin’s Motltcr; the
spectator concentrates on the nreln’s fhce
rather than on the darkness sLlrroLrndin-e it.

4.122 In Lark.s on a String, the junkyard settin-e provides earthy
grays and blacks a-eainst which the characters’ lighter clothes
stand out sharply.

then figures closer to the camera had to be rearranged to permit a clear entrance.
The result was a subtle unbalancing and rebalancing of the composition
(4.117-4.120). In Chapter 6, we’ll see how cutting can create a balance between
two shots with relatively unbalanced composrtrons.

The filmmaker can guide our attention by use of another time-tested strategy,
the principle of contrast. Our eyes are biased toward registering differences and
changes. In most black-and-white films, light costumes or brightly lit faces stand
out while darker areas tend to recede (4.121). If there are several light shapes in the
frame, we’ll tend to look from one to the other. But if the background is light, black
elements will become prominent, as Sandro’s hair does in our L’Avventura scene
(4.109). The same principles work for color. A bright costume element shown
against a more subdued setting is likely to draw the eye. Jir.i Menzel exploits this
principle in Larks on a String (4.122). Another pertinent principle is that when
lightness values are equal, warm colors in the red-orange-yellow range tend to at-
tract attention, while cool colors like purple and green are less prominent. In Yil-
maz Gtiney’s Yol, for example, the setting and the characters’ outfits are already
quite warm in hue, but the hot pink vest of the man in the central middle ground
helps make him the primary object of attention (4.123).

Color contrasts don’t have to be huge, because we’re sensitive to small differ-
ences. What painters call a limited palette involves a few colors in the same range.
as in our earlier example from Fellini’s Casanovct (4.39). Peter Greenaway’s The
Draughtsnmn’s Contract employs a limited palette from the cooler end of the spec-
trum (4.124). An extreme case of the principle is sometimes called monochromatic
color design. Here the filmmaker emphasizes a single color, varying it only in pu-
rity or lightness. We’ve already seen an example of monochromatic mise-en-scene
in the white ddcor and costumes of THX I 138 (4.40). In a monochromatic design.
even the slightest fleck of a contrasting color will catch the viewer’s attention. The
color design of Aliens is dominated by metallic tones, so even a din-ey yellow can
mark the stiltlike loader as an important prop in the narrative (4.125).

Film has one resource that painting lacks. Our tendency to notice visual differ-
ences shifts into high gear when the image includes ntovenrcnt. In the L’At’retturct
scene, the turning of Claudia’s head became a major event, but we are sensitive to far
smaller motions in the frame. Normally, for instance we ignore the movement of
scratches and dust on a film. But in David Rimmer’s Watching for the Queen, in which
the first image is an absolutely static photograph (4.126), the jumping bits of dust on
the film draw our attention. In 4.127, from Yasujiro Ozu’s Record of a knentent
Gentlenran, many items compete for our attention. But the moment that a scrap of

4.121 Warm colors guide the eye in ktl.

4124 The Drctughtsmctn’s Contract uses a limited palette of
green. black, and white.

Putting It ALI Together: Mlsc-err-Sccne lrr Spnce and Time r45

4125 Aliens uses warm colors like yellow sparingly.

4126 Watc’hirtg.frtr the Queen
ernphasizes scratches and dr,rst.

4.127 A tiny rnovenrent in Ret’orcl o.f ct
Te tt e nt e tt G e rt I e rnu rt.

newspaper flaps, it immediately attracts the eye because it is the only motion in the
frame.

When several moving elements appear on the screen, 3S in a ballroom dance,
we are likely to shift our attention among them, according to other cues or depend-
ing on our expectations about which one is most salient to the narrative action. In
4.128. from John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln, Lincoln is moving much less than the
dancers we see in front of him. Yet he is framed centrally, as the major character,
and the dancers pass rapidly through the frame. As a result, we are likely to con-
centrate on his ..eestures and facial expressions, however slight they might be com-
pared to the ener,_qetic action in the foreground.

Scene Space Lookin-s at a film image as a two-dimensional picture helps us ap-
preciate the artistry of filmmakers, but it requires some effort. We find it easier to
immediately see the edges and masses on the screen as a three-dimensional space,
like the one we live in. The elements of the image that create this impression are
called clepth cues.

Depth cues are what enabled us to understand the encounter of Sandro and
Claudia as taking place in a realistic space, with layers and volume. We develop our
understanding of depth cues from our experience of real locales and from our ear-
lier experience with pictorial media. In cineffi?, depth cues are provided by light-
in-9. settin.-9. costumes, and staging-that is, by all the aspects of mise-en-scene.

Depth clles suggest that a space has both volume and several distinct plarles.
When we speak of an object as having volume, we mean that it is solid and occu-
pies a three-dimensional area. A film suggests volume by shape, shading, and
movement. ln 4.104 and 4.129, we do not think of the actors’faces as flat cutouts,
like paper dolls. The shapes of those heads and shoulders suggest solid people. The

4.128 Emphasizing a background figure
in Yowtg Mn Lincoln.

4129 Shading and shape suggest volume
in Dreyer’s ltt Passion de Jeanne d’Arc’.

4.130 A flat composition in Norrnan
Mclaren’s Begone, Dull Cure.

r46 CHAPTER 4 The Shot: Mise-en-Scene

attached shadows on the faces suggest the curves and recesses of the actors’feat-
tures and give a modeling effect. We assLlme that if the actor in 4.104 turned her
head, we would see a profile. Thus we use oLlr knowledge of objects in the world
to discern volume in filmic space.

An abstract film. because it can Llse shapes that are not everyday objects, can
create compositions without a sense of volume. The shapes in 4.130 give us no
depth cLles for volume-they are unshaded, do not have a recognizable shape, and
do not move in such a way as to reveal new views that sLlggest roundness.

Depth cLles also pick out planes within the image. Planes are the layers of
space occupied by persons or objects. Planes are described according to how
close to or far away from the camera they are: foreground, rniddle ground,
background.

Only a colnpletely blank screen has a single plane. Whenever a shape-even
an abstract one-appeal’s, we will perceive it as being in front of a background. In
4.130, the four red S shapes are actually painted right on the frame surface, nS is the
lighter, textured area. Yet the textured area seems to lie behind the four shapes. The
space here has only two planes, as in an abstract painting. This example, like oLlr
L’Avventrtro scene, sLlggests that one of the most basic depth cues is overlap. The
curling S shapes have edges that overlap the background plane, block oLlr vision of
it, and thus seem to be closer to us. In 4.115, the people overlap the ladders, so we
understand that they are closer to the camera than the ladders are, while in 4.116.
the tree overlaps the figure of the woman.

Through overlap, a .-qreat many planes can be defined. In 4.56, from Jean-Luc
Godard’s Lct Chinoise, three distinct planes are displayed: the background of fash-
ion cutouts, the woman’s face that overlaps that background, and her hand, which
overlaps her lower face. In the three-point lightin-q approach, edge-lighting accelt-
tuates the overlap of planes by emphasizing the contour of the object, thr-rs sharpll’
distinguishing it from the background. (See again 4.59, 4.64, and 4.66.)

Color differences also create overlapping planes. Because cool or pale colors
tend to recede, filmmakers commonly use them for background planes such as set-
ting. Similarly, because warm or saturated colors tend to come forward, such httes
are often employed for costumes or other foreground elements. as in Sarah Mal-
doror’s Sambiz,anga (4.131). (See also 4.29,4.34, and 4.125.)

Animated films can achieve brighter and more saturated color thart most live-
action filming, So depth effects can be correspondingly more vivid. In Chuck
Jones’s One Frogglt Evening (4.132), the luminous yellow of the umbrella and the

4.131 ln Sambi:,ctrtg,ct, the heroine’s dress
fairly saturated colors. making it stand out
pale back-gror-rnd.

has very witrm and
di sti nctly a-gainst the 4.112 Vivid colors ernphasize the sense of extreme depth in

Orte Fntggt’ Evenirtg.

Putting It ALI Together: Mise-en-Scene in Space and Time

frog’s brilliant green skin make him stand out against the darker red of the curtain
and the earth tones of the stage floor.

Because of the eye’s sensitivity to differences, even quite muted color contrasts
can suggest three-dimensional space. ln L’Argent (4.214.23), Robert Bresson uses
a limited, cool palette and relatively flat lighting. Yet the compositions pick out sev-
eral planes by means of overlapping slightly different masses of black, tan, and
light blue. Our shot from Casanova (4.39) articulates planes by means of slightly
differing shades of red. In The Draughtsman’s Contract (4.124), much of our sense
of distant space is created by strong black verticals and by horizontal strips of var-
ious shades of green. Together these colors define distinct layers in this scene.

In cineffi?, tnovetnent is one of the most important depth cues, since it strongly
suggests both planes and volumes (4.128). Aerial perspective, or the hazing of
more distant planes, is yet another depth cue. Typically, our visual system assumes
that sharper outlines, clearer textures, and purer colors belong to foreground ele-
ments. In landscape shots, the blurring and graying of distant planes can be caused
by actual atmosphen c haze, oS in Gtiney’s The Wall (4.133). Even when such haze
is a minor factor, our vision typically assigns strong color contrasts to the fore-
ground, &S in the Santbi:,onga shot (4.13 I ). In addition, very often lighting is ma-
niptrlated in conjunction with lens focus to blur the background planes (4.134).

In 4.135, the mise-en-scene provides several depth cues: overlap of edges, cast
shadows, and size diminution. That is, figures and objects farther away from us are
seen to get proportionally smaller; the smaller the figure appears, the farther away

4.133 Fog emphasizes
the distance between the

foreground and back-
ground trees in The Woll.

4lt4 In Michael Curtiz’s The Cltorge of the Light Brigade,
aerial perspective is artificially created through diffused lighting
of the background and a lack of clear focus beyond the
f ore-gro u n d c h arac te r.

r47

4.135 Depth cues in Strar-rb and Huillet’s The Chrcnic’le o.f Annct
Magdalenu Bach.

148 CHAPTER 4 The Shot: Mise-en-Scene

4.116 Several scenes of Wajda’s Asftes
large foreground and distant backgror,rnd

ancl Diamonrls create
planes.

we believe it to be. This reinforces our sense of there being a deep space with con-
siderable distances between the various planes.

The same illustration dramatically displays linear perspective. We will con-
sider perspective relations in more detail in the next chapter, since they derive as
much from properties of the camera lens as they do from mise-en-scene. For now,
we can simply note that a strong impression of depth emerges when parallel lines
converge at a distant vanishing point. Off-center linear perspective is illustrated in
4.135; note that the vanishing point is not the geometrical center. Central perspec-
tive is exemplified rn 4.124 from The Draughtsman’s Contract.

In many of the examples already given, you may have noticed that mise-en-
scene serves not simply to direct our attention to foreground elements but rather to
create a dynamic relation between foreground and background. In 4.56, for in-
stance, Godard keeps our attention on the whole composition by using prominent
backgrounds. Here the pictures behind the actress’s head lead us to scan the vari-
ous small shapes quickly.

The La Cltinoise shot is a shallow-space composition. In such shots. the mise-
en-scene suggests comparatively little depth, and the closest and most distant
planes seem only slightly separated. The opposite tendency is deep-space compo-
sition, in which a significant distance seems to separate planes. Our earlier exam-
ple from The Chronicle of Anna Magclalena Boch (4.135) exemplifies deep-space
mise-en-scene. Often a director creates a deep-space composition by making the
foreground plane quite large and the back-eround plane quite distant (4.136).

Shallow and deep mise-en-scene are relative. Most compositions present a
moderately deep space, falling between the extremes we have just considered.
Sometimes a composition manipulates depth cues to make a space appear deeper
or shallower than it really is-creating an optical illusion (4.137).

At this point, you might want to return to shots illustrated earlier in this chap-
ter. You will notice that these images use depth cues of overlap. moven-lent. cast
shadows, aerial perspective, size diminution, and linear perspective to create dis-
tinctive foreground/background relations.

The fact that our vision is sensitive to differences allows filmmakers to -euide
our understanding of the mise-en-scene. All the cues to story space interact with
one another, working to emphasize narrative elements, direct our attention, and set
up dynamic relations among areas of screen space. We can see this interaction
clearly in two shots from Carl Dreyer’s Day of Wrath.

In the first shot, the heroine, Anne, is standing before a -grillwork panel (4.138).
She is not speaking, but since she is a major character in the film. the narrative
already directs us to her. Setting, lighting, costume, and figure expression create

4lI7 Leo Carax flattens
the actor in the foreground
on the wall behind.

space in Bo.r’ Meets Girl by making
seem to blend into the advertisement

pictorial cues that confirm our expectations. The setting yields a screen pattern of
horizontal and vertical lines that intersect in the delicate curves of Anne’s face and
shoulders. The lighting yields a patch of brightness on the right half of the frame
and a patch of darkness on the left, creating pictorial balance. Anne is the meeting
point of these two areas. Her face becomes modeled by the relatively strong key
lighting from the right, a little top lighting on her hair, and relatively little fill light.
Coordinated with the lighting in creating the pattern of light and dark is Anne’s cos-
turns-n black dress punctuated by white collar, and a black cap edged with
white-that again emphasizes her face.

The shot is comparatively shallow, displaying two major planes with little dis-
tance between them. The background sets off the more important element, Anne.
The rigid geometrical grid in the rear makes Anne’s slightly sad face the most ex-
pressive element in the fraffie, thus encouraging our eye to pause there. In addition,
the composition divides the screen space horizontally, with the grid pattern running
across the top half and the dark, severe vertical of Anne’s dress dominating the
lower half. As is common, the upper zone is the stronger because the character’s
head and shoulders occupy it. Anne’s figure is positioned slightly off center, but
with her face turned so as to compensate for the vacant area on the right. (Imagine
how unbalanced the shot would look if she were turned to face us squarely and the
same amount of space were left empty on the right.) Thus compositional balance
reinforces the shot’s emphasis on Anne’s expression. In all, without using motion,
Drever has channeled our attention by means of lines and shapes, lights and darks,
and the fore-.srollnd and back,_ground relations in the mise-en-scene.

Irr the second erample. also from Da1, of Wrath, Dreyer coaxes our attention
into a to-and-tro movement (4.139). Again, the plot -guides us, since the characters
and the cart are crLlcial narrative elements. Sound helps too, since Martin is at the
moment explainin-9 to Anne what the cart is used for. But mise-en-scene also plays
a role. Size diminution and cast shadows establish basic foreground/background re-
lations, with Anne and Martin on the front plane and the cart of wood in the back-
ground. The space is comparatively deep (though the foreground is not as
exaggeratedly close as that rn Ashes and Diamonds, 4.136). The prominence of the
couple and the cart is reinforced by line, shape, and lighting contrasts. The figures
are defined by hard edges and by dark costumes within the predominantly bright
setting. Unlike most shots, this puts the human fi-eures in the lower half of the
frame, which gives that zone an unusual importance. The composition thus creates
a vertical balance, counterweightin-9 the cart with the couple. This encourages us to
glance up and down between the two objects of our attention.

Sinrilar processes are at work in color films. In one shot of Yasujiro Ozu’s An
Auturrtrt Aftentoon (4.140), our attention is concentrated on the bride in the center
foreground. Here many depth cues are at work. Overlap locates the two figures in
two foreground planes, setting them against a series of more distant planes. Aerial
perspective makes the tree foliage somewhat out of focus. Movement creates depth
when the bride lowers her head. Perspective diminution makes the more distant ob-
jects smaller. The figure and the bright silver, red, and gold bridal costume stand out
strikin,_ely against the muted, cool colors of the background planes. Moreover, the
colors bring back a red-and-silver motif that began in the very first shot of the film
(4.141).

In all these cases, compositional elements and depth cues have functioned to
focus our attention on the narrative elements. But this need not always be the case.
Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac uses a limited palette of dark and metallic hues, and
warmer colors tend to stand out (4.142). Such a distracting use of color becomes a
stylistic motif in the film.

Time
Cinema is an art of time as well as space. So we shouldn’t be surprised to find that
many of our examples of two-dimensional composition and three-dimensional

Puttirtg It AIL Together: Mise-err-Scene in Space ancl Thne r49

4.138 Day of Wrutft.’ concentr:rtin.-q on a
single figr-rre.

4.119 Day of’Wratft; dividin-e attentiott
between fore-ground and back-ground

fi-gures.

4l4O A simple shot from An Autuntrt
A.ftentoon etnploys several depth cLles.

4.141 The striped smokestercks establish
a color motif for Art Autunut Aftentoon.

150 CHAPTER 4 The Shot: Mise-en-Scene

4.142 In Luncelot clu Lac, a groLlp of conversing kni-ehts is
centered and balanced in the fore-eround planes, yet a pinkish-
pr,rrple saddle blanket on a passing horse momentarily draws oLlr
eyes away from the action.

4.144 Synchronized rhythrn rn 42rtcl
Street.

scenic space have unfolded over time. The director’s control over mise-en-scene
governs not only what we see but when we see it, and for how long. In our L’Avt,en-
tura scene between Sandro and Clar-rdia on the rooftop, the timing of the characters’
movemsnts-Sandro turning away just as Claudia turns toward us-contribr-rtes to
the effect of a sudden, sharp revelation of her anxiety.

The director shapes the speed and direction of moven-lent within the shot. Since
our eyes are attuned to noticing changes, we cern pick Lrp the slightest cLres. In
4.143., from Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielrrtctrt, 23 quui clu Corrtrrterce, 1080
Bru.relles, the protagonist simply peels potatoes. This feminist film traces. in
painstaking detail, the everyday routines of a Belgiarn house\\’if-e. The composition
of this shot strongly centers Jeanne, and no competin-s nrovenrents distract us from
her steady and efficient preparation of a meal. The selme rhvthnr is carrried through-
out the film, so that when she does start to vary her habits. ue are prepared to no-
tice even the sli,_eht errors she makes under emotional pressLlre.

A far busier shot is 4.144. from Busby Berkeley’s 42tul Streer. This overhead
view presents strongly opposed r-r-rovernents. The central and outer rin_es of clartce’r’s
circle in one direction, while the second ring turns in a contrarl,’ direction. The
dancers also swing strips of shiny cloth back and forth. The result is a partially ab-
stract composition, br”rt it’s easy to -srasp because the movement of the wheels
within wheels has a ..qeometrical clarity.

The dancers in 42nd Street are synchronized to a considerable degree. but
4.145, from Jacques Tati’s PlalTime, contains nrovenrents of differin-q speeds, u ith
diffbrent visual accents. Moreover, they occLlr on difterent pletnes and follou

4.141 Slow, quiet mo\/en-rent in Jeanrte Dielrnan, 23 clttui dtt
Crntutterc’e, I 080 Bnrrel le,s.

4.145 Competin-9 rhythms of movement in a busy shot from
Plav Tinte.

Putting It AII Together: Mise-en-Scene in Space and Time

contrasting trajectories. These diverse movements accord with Tati’s tendency to
cram his compositions with gags that compete for our attenhon.

As we have already seen, we scan any film frame for information. This scan-
ning brings time sharply into play. Only a very short shot forces us to try to take in
the image all at once. In most shots, we get an initial overall impression that cre-
ates formal expectations. These expectations are quickly modified as our eye roams
around the frame.

As we’d expect, our scanning of the shot is strongly affected by the presence of
movement. A static composition, such as our first shot from Day of Wrath (4.138),
may keep pulling our attention back to a single element (here, Anne’s face). In con-
trast, a composition emphasizing movement becomes more time-bound because our
glance may be directed from place to place by various speeds, directions, and
rhythms of movements. In the second image from Day of Wrath (4.139), Anne and
Martin are turned from us (so that expression and gesture are minimized), and they
are standing still. Thus the single movement in the frame-the cart-catches our at-
tention. But when Martin speaks and turns, we look back at the couple, then back at
the cart, and so on, in a shuttling, dynamic shift of attention.

Our time-bound process of scanning involves not only looking to and fro across
the screen but also, in a sense, looking into its depths. A deep-space composition
will often use background events to create expectations about what is about to hap-
pen in the foreground. “Composing in depth isn’t simply a matter of pictorial rich-
ness.” British director Alexander Mackendrick has remarked. “It has value in the
narrative of the action. the pacing of the scene. Within the same frame, the director
can organize the action so that preparation for what will happen next is seen in the
back.-uround of what is happening now.”

Our example from The Dying Swan (4.117-4.120) illustrates MacKendrick’s
point. The same principle is used rn 4.146-4.148, from Three Kings. Here the frame
starts off unbalanced, and the fact that it includes a background doorway prepares
us for the scene’s dramatic development. In addition, any movement from

151

4.146 In this shot from Three Kings, Chief Elgin comes in to
tell the partying GIs that their superior is coming. Normally,
when a character is looking offscreen left, he or she is set a little
off center toward the right. But Elgin is set to the left, leaving the
tent flap behind him prominent. Without being aware of it, we
expect soure action to develop there.

Confirming Elgin’s warning, the superior officer bursts
background.

4.147

into the

4.148 The officer comes forward, which is always a powerful
way to command the viewer’s attention. He moves aggressively
into close-up, ramping up the conflict as he demands to know
where the men got alcohol.

r57 CHAPTER 4 The Shc’rt: Mise-en-Scene

4.149 ln Aclarn’s Rib, the wife who has
shot her husband is given the greatest
emphasis by three-point lighting, her
animated gestures, and her frontal
positioning. Interestin-91y, the exact center
of the frame is occurpied by a nurse in the
background, but Cukor keeps her out of
focus and unmoving so that she won’t
distract from Judy Holliday’s
performance.

background to foreground is a strong attention-getter. At moments like these, the
mise-en-scene is preparing us for what will happen, and by arousing ollr expecta-
tions, the style engages us with the unfolding action.

The Dving Swan and Three Kings examples also illustrate the power of frontal-
i4r In explaining one five-minute shot in his film Adam’s Rib, George Cukor si-s-
naled this. He remarked how the defense attorney was positioned to focus our
attention on her client, who’s reciting the reasons she shot her husband (4.149).
Katharine Hepburn “had her back to the camera almost the whole time. but that had
a meaning: she indicated to the audience that they should look at Judy Holliday. We
did that whole thing without a cut.”

All other things being equal, the viewer expects that more story information will
come from a character’s face than from a character’s back. The viewer’s attention
will thus usually pass over figures that are turned away and fasten on figures that are
positioned frontally.A more distant view can exploit frontality. too. In Hou Hsiao-
hsien’s Citu of Sadness, depth staging centers the Japanese woman coming to visit
the hospital, and a burst of bright fabric also draws attention to her (4.150). Just as
important, the other characters are turned away from us. It’s characteristic of Hou’s
style to employ long shots with small changes in figure movement. The subdued.
delicate effect of his scenes depends on our seeing characters’faces in relation to
others’ bodies and the overall setting.

Frontality can change over time to guide our attention to various parts of the shot.
We’ve already seen alternating frontality at work in our L’Avventura scene, when
Sandro and Claudia turn to and away from us (4. 109, 4.110). When actors are in di-
alogue, a director may allow frontality to highlight one moment of one actor’s per-
formance, then give another performer more prominence (4.151 ,4.152). This device
reminds us that mise-en-scene can borrow devices from theatrical staging.

4.150 Although she is farther frorn the
camera, the woman visiting the hospital in
Citl’ of Sadness draws our eye partly
because she is the only one facing front.

4.152 . . . but when the producer turns to
the camera, his centered position and
frontal posture emphasize him.

4.I5I In a conversation rn The Bad arul tlrc
Beoutiful, our attention f’astens on the studio
executive on the right because the other tr,l’o
characters are turned away fiom Lls . . .

4.153 Mise-en-scene in the widescreen frame in Rebel Without
a Cause.

4.155 Jim offers Plato his jacket, his action centered and his
brightly lit white shirt making him the dominant player. Judy
remains a secondary center of interest, segregated by the office
window and hi-ehlighted by her bright red coat.

I’Jarratiue Functions of Mise-en-Scene in Our Hospitality r53

4154 Jim comes forward, drawing our attention and arousing
expectations of a dramatic exchange.

4.156 Judy turns abruptly, and her face’s frontal position
signals her interest in Jim.

4.157 At the height of the drama in
Naniwa Elegy,, Kenji Mizogr,rchi has the
heroine move away from us, into depth

4.158 . . . and as she passes through
patches of distant darkness, our curiosity
about her emotional state intensifies.

A flash of frontality can be very powerful. In the opening scene of Rebel With-
out a Cause, three teenagers are being held at the police station (4.153). They don’t
know one another yet. When Jim sees that Plato is shivering, he drunkenly comes
forward to offer Plato his sport coat (4.1541 4.155). Jim’s frontality, forward move-
ment, bright white shirt, and central placement emphasize his gesture. Just as Plato
takes the coat, Judy turns and notices Jim for the first time (4.156). Like Claudia’s
sudden turn to the camera in our first example, this sudden revelation spikes our in-
terest. It prepares us for the somewhat tense romance that will develop between
them in later scenes. Overall, the scene’s setting, lighting, costume, and staging co-
operate to develop the drama.

The director can also achieve a strong effect by denying frontality, keeping us
in suspense about what a character’s face reveals. At a climactic moment in Kenji
Mizoguchi’s lVaniwa Elegy, some of the cues for emphasis are reversed (4.157,
4.158). We get a long shot rather than a closer view, and the character is turned from
us and moving away from the camera, through patches of darkness. Ayako is con-
fessing to her suitor that she’s been another man’s mistress. Her withdrawal con-
veys a powerful sense of shame, and we, like her friend, have to judge her sincerity
based on her posture and voice. In this and our other examples, several techniques
of mise-en-scene dovetail from moment to moment in order to engage us more
vividly with the action.

Narrative Functions of Mise-er)-Scene
in Our Hospitality
Our Hospitality, like most of Buster Keaton’s films, exemplifies how mise-en-scene
can economically advance the narrative and create a pattern of motifs. Since
the film is a comedy, the mise-en-scene also creates gags . Our Hospitality,then,

r54 CHAPTER 4 The Shot: Mise-cn-Scene

“The most striking aspect of the
Keaton pictures was the enormous
amount of trouble lavished over
every gag. Production value on such a
scale requires more than a simple
desire to make people laugh. lt is not
surprising that Keaton’s childhood
aim was to be a civil engineer.”

– Kevin Brownlow, film historian

exemplifies what we will find in our stLrdy of every filrn technique: An individr”ral
element almost always has severctl functions, not Just one.

Consider, for example, how the settings function within the plot of Our
Hospitolin’. For one thing, they help divide the film into scenes and to contrast
those scenes. The film begins with a prologLre showing how the feud between the
McKays and the Canfields results in the deaths of the yoLlng Canfield and the hr-rs-
band of the McKay family. We see the McKays living in a shack and are left in
suspense about the fate of the baby, Willie. Willie’s mother flees with her son fronl
their southern home to the North (action narrated to us mainly by an intertitle).

The plot jumps ahead many years to begin the rnain action, with the .-{rown-Llp
Willie living in New York. There are a number of gags concerning early l9th-
century life in the metropolis, contrasting sharply with the prologue scene. We are
led to wonder how this locale will relate to the southern scenes, and soon Willie re-
ceives word that he has inherited his parents’home in the South. A series of amus-
ing short scenes follows as he takes a primitive train back to his birthplace. Dr-rring
these scenes, Keaton Llses real locales, but by laying out the railroad tracks in dif-
ferent ways, he exploits the landscapes for surprising and unusLlal comic effects we
shall examine shortly.

The rest of the film deals with Willie’s movements in and around the southern
town. On the day of his arrival, he wanders around and gets into a number of comic
sitr-rations. That night he stays in the Canfield house itself. Finally, &r extended chase
occurs the next day, moving through the countryside and back to the Canfield house
for the settling of the feud. Thus the action depends heavily on shifts of setting that
establish Willie’s two journeys, as baby and as man, and later his wanderings to es-
cape his enemies’ pursLlit. The narration is relatively unrestricted once Willie reaches
the South, shifting between him and members of the Canfield family. We usually
know more about where they are than Willie does, and the narrative -generates sus-
pense by showing them coming toward the places where Willie is hidin_e.

Specific settings fulfill distinct narrative functions. The McKay estate. rvhich
Willie envisions as a mansion,, turns out to be a tumbledown shack. The McKay
house is contrasted with the Canfield’s palatial plantation home. In narrative ternrs.
the Canfield home gains even more functional importance when the Canfield father
forbids his sons to kill Willie on the premises: “Our code of honor forbids Lrs to
shoot him while he is a guest in our house.” (Once Willie overhears this. he deter-
mines nerler to leave.) Ironically, the home of Willie’s enemies becomes the orrly
safe spot in town, and many scenes are organized around the Canfield brothers’at-
tempts to lure Willie outside. At the end of the film, another settin-e takes on sig-
nificance: the landscape of meadows, mountains, riverbanks, rapids. and waterfalls
across which the Canfields pursue Willie. Finally, the feud ends back in the Can-
field house itself, with Willie now welcomed as the daughter’s husband. The pat-
tern of development is clear: from the opening shootout at the McKay house that
breaks up Willie’s family to the final scene in the Canfield house with Willie be-
coming part of a new family. In such ways, every setting becomes highly motivated
by the narrative’s system of causes and effects, parallels and contrasts. and overall
development.

The same narrative motivation marks the film’s use of costume. Willie is char-
acterized as a city boy through his dandified suit, whereas the southern gentility of
the elder Canfield is represented through his white planter’s suit. Props become im-
portant here: Willie’s sr-ritcase and umbrella succinctly sLlmmarrze his role as visi-
tor and wanderer, and the Canfields’ ever-present pistols remind us of their goal of
continr-ring the feud. Note also that a change of costume (Willie’s disguising him-
self ils a woman) enables him to escape from the Canfield hor-rsehold. At the end,
the putting aside of the varioLls .-qllns by the characters signals the end of the feud.

Like setting, lighting in Our Ho,sltitality has both general and specific func-
tions. The filrn alternates scenes in darkness with scenes in daylight. The feuding
in the prologue takes place at night; Willie’s trip Sor”rth and wanderings through the

I’larrotiue Functions of Mise-en-Scene in Or-rr Hospitality

town occur in daylight; that night Willie comes to dinner at the Canfield’s and stays
as a guest; the next day, the Canfields pursLre him; and the film ends that night with
the marriage of Willie and the Canfield daughter. More specifically, the bulk of the
film is evenly lit in the three-point method. Yet the somber action of the prologue
takes place in hard sidelighting (4.159r4.160). Later, the murder scene is played out
in flashes of light-lightning, gunfire-that fitfully punctuate the overall darkness.
Because this sporadic lighting hides part of the action frorn us, it helps build sus-
pense. The gunshots themselves are seen only as flashes in the darkness, and we
must wait to learn the or”rtcome-the deaths of both opponents-until the next flash
of lightning.

Most economically of all, virtually every bit of the acting functions to support
and advance the caLrse-effect chain of the narrative. The way Canfield sips and sa-
vors his julep establishes his southern ways; his southern hospitality in turn will not
allow him to shoot a guest in his house. Similarly, Willie’s every move expresses
his diffidence or resourcefulness.

Even rlore concise is the way the film uses staging in depth to present two nar-
rative events simultaneously. While the engineer drives the locomotive, the other
cars pass him on a parallel track (4.161).In other shots, Willie’s awareness or ig-
norance of a situation is displayed through planes of depth (4.162, 4.163). Thanks
to such spatial arrangements, Keaton is able to pack together two story events, re-
sultin-9 in a tight narrative construction and in a relatively unrestricted narration. In
4.162. we know what Willie knowS, and we expect that he will probably flee now
that he r-rnderstands the sons’plans. But in4.163, we are aware, as Willie is not, that
dan-eer lurks around the corner; sLlspense results, ?S we wonder whether the
Canfield boys’ ambush will succeed.

to a stark key li-sht from the

r55

4161 Within the same trarne, we see
both caLlse-the engineer’s cheerful
ignorance, made visible by frontality-arrd
ef1ect-the runaway cars.

4:159 In Ottr Ho,sltitulity, Wlren the
elder McKay flin-ss off his hat to clor,rse the
lamp, the illumination chan-ues from ar sofi
blend of key. fill. and backlight . . .

4.152 The Canfield boys in the
fore-ground make plans to shoot Willie,
who overhears them in the background.

4.160
fireplace.

4.163 While Willie
LlnsLrspectingly in the
Canfield waits in the
ambr,rsh him.

ambles along

back._ground, one

foreground to

r56 CHAPTER 4 The Shot: Mise-en-Scene

4164 After an explosion
dam, the water spills over a
creates a waterfall.

dernolishes a

cliff and

All of these devices r narrative economy considerably unify the film, but
some other elements of mise-en-scene function as specific motifs. For one thing,
there is the repeated squabble between the anonymous husband and wife. On his
way to his estate, Willie passes a husband throttling his wife. Willie intervenes to
protect her; the wife proceeds to thrash Willie for butting in. On Willie’s way back,
he passes the same couple, still fighting, but studiously avoids them. Nevertheless,
the wife aims a kick at him as he passes. The mere repetition of the motif strength-
ens the film’s narrative unity, but it functions thematically, too, as another joke on
the contradictions surrounding the idea of hospitality.

Other motifs recur. Willie’s first hat is too tall to wear in a jouncing railway
coach. (When it gets crushed, he swaps it for the trademark flat Keaton hat.)
Willie’s second hat serves to distract the Canfields when Willie coaxes his do-9 to
fetch it. There is also a pronounced water motif in the film. Water as rain conceals
from us the murders in the prologue and later saves Willie from leaving the Can-
field home after dinner (“It would be the death of anyone to go out on a night like
this!”). Water as a river functions significantly in the final chase. And water as a wa-
terfall appears soon after Willie’s arrival in the South (4.164). This waterfall ini-
tially protects Willie by hiding him (4.1651 4.166) but later threatens both him and
the Canfield daughters as they are nearly swept over it (4.172).

Two specific motifs of setting help unify the narrative. First there is the recLrr-
rence of an embroidered sampler hanging on the Canfield wall: “Love Thy Neigh-
bor.” It appears initially in the prologue of the film, when seeing it motivates
Canfield’s attempt to stop the feud. It then plays a significant role in linking the
ending back to the beginning. The sampler reappears at the end when Canfield, en-
raged that Willie has married his daughter, glances at the wall, reads the inscription,
and resolves to halt the years of feuding. His change in attitude is motivated by the
earlier appearance of the motif.

The film also uses gun racks as a motif. In the prologue, each feuder goes to
his mantelpiece to get his pistol. Later, when Willie arrives in town, the Canfields
hurry to their gun rack and begin to load their pistols. Near the end of the film. when
the Canfields return home after failing to find Willie, one of the sons notices that
the gun rack is now empty. And, in the final shot, when the Canfields accept the
marriage and lay down their arms, Willie produces from all over his person a sta._e-
gering assortment of pistols taken as a precaution from the Canfields’ own supply.
Thus mise-en-scene motifs unify the film through their repetition. variation, and
development.

Yet Our Hospitality is more than a film whose narrative system relates eco-
nomically to patterns of mise-en-scene. It is a comedy, and one of the funniest. We
should not be surprised to find, then, that Keaton uses mise-en-scene for gags. In-
deed, so unified is the film that most of the elements that create narratrve economy
also function to yield comic effects.

The mise-en-scene bristles with many individually comic elements. Settings are
exploited for amusement-the ramshackle McKay estate, the Broadway of 1830, the
specially cut train tunnel that just fits the old-fashioned train and its smokestack
(4.167). Costume gags also stand out. Willie’s disguise as a woman is exposed by a
gap in the rear of his skirt; later, Willie puts the same costume on a horse to distract
the Canfields. Most strongly, comedy arises from the behavior of the figures. The
railroad engineer’s high kick unexpectedly swipes off his conductor’s hat (4.168).
The elder Canfield sharpens his carving knife with ferocious energy, just inches from
Willie’s head. When Willie lands at the bottom of the river, he stands there looking
left and right, his hand shading his eyes, before he reahzes where he is. Later, Willie
scuds down the river, leaping out of the water like a fish and skidding across
the rocks.

Perhaps the only aspect of mise-en-scene that competes with the comic bril-
liance of the figures’ behavior is the film’s use of deep space for gags. Many of the
shots we have already examined function to create comedy as well: The engineer

4.165 The new waterfall begins to hide
Willie as he sits fishing . . .

4.156 . . . and by the time the Canfields
rush into the foreground, he is invisible.

IrJarrative Functions of Mise-en-Scene in Our Hospitality r57

4.167 The tunnel cut to fit the old-
fashioned train.

4.168 As the engineer, Keaton’s f-ather,
Joe, used his farnous high-kick vaudeville
stunt for this gag.

4169 The motif begins as Willie is
jerked into the water.

4.172 Willie dangles like a fish on the
end of a pole.

stands firmly oblivious to the separation of train cars from the engine (see 4.161)
just as Willie is unaware that the Canfield boy is lurking murderously in the fore-
ground (4.163).

Even more striking, though, is the deep-space gag that follows the demolition of
the dam. The Canfield boys have been searching the town for Willie. In the mean-
time, Willie sits on a ledge, fishing. As the water bursts from the dam and sweeps
over the cliff, it completely engulfs Willie (4.165). At that very instant, the Canfield
brothers step into the foreground from either side of the frame, still looking for their
victim (4.166). The water’s concealment of Willie reduces him to a neutral back-
ground for the movement of the Canfields. This sudden eruption of new action into
the scene surprises us, rather than generating suspense, since we were not aware that
the Canfield sons were so close by. Here surprise is crucial to the comedy.

However appealing the individual gags are, Our Hospitality patterns its comic
aspects as strictly as it does its other motifs. The film’s journey pattern often
arranges a series of gags according to a formal principle of theme and variations.
For instance, during the train trip South, a string of gags is based on the idea of peo-
ple encountering the train. Several people turn out to watch it pass, a tramp rides
the rods, and an old man chucks rocks at the engine. Another swift series of gags
takes the train tracks themselves as its theme. The variations include a humped
track, a donkey blocking the tracks, curled and rippled tracks, and finally no tracks
at all.

But the most complex theme-and-variations series can be seen in the motif of
“the fish on the line.” Soon after Willie arrives in town, he is angling and hauls up
a minuscule fish. Shortly afterward, a huge fish yanks him into the water (4.159).
Later in the film, through a series of mishaps, Willie becomes tied by a rope to one
of the Canfield sons. Many gags arise from this umbilical-cord linkage, especially
one that results in Canfield’s being pulled into the water as Willie was earlier.

Perhaps the single funniest shot in the film occurs when Willie realizes that
since the Canfield boy has fallen off the rocks (4.170), so must he (4.171). But even
after Willie gets free of Canfield, the rope remains tied around his waist. So in the
film’s climax, Willie is dangling from a log over the waterfall (4.172). Here again,
one element fulfills multiple functions. The fish-on-the-line device advances the
narrative, becomes a motif unifying the film, and takes its place in a pattern of par-
allel gags involving variations of Willie on the rope. In such ways, Our Hospitality
becomes an outstanding example of the integration of cinematic mise-en-scene
with narrative form.

4l7O Tied to Willie, the Canfield boy
falls off the cliff . . .

4:171 . . . and Willie braces himself to
be pulled after.

158 CHAPTER 4 The Shot: Mise-en-Scene

The viewer who wants to study mise-en-scene should look for it systematically. We
should watch, first of all, for how setting, costuffie, lighting, and the behavior of the
figures present themselves in a given film. As a start, we should try to trace only
one sort of element-say, setting or lighting-through a scene.

We should also reflect on the patterning of mise-en-scene elements. How do
they function? How do they constitute motifs that weave their ways through the en-
tire film? In addition, we should notice how mise-en-scene is patterned in space and
time to attract and guide our attention through the process of watching the film and
to create suspense or surprise.

Finally, we should try to relate the system of mise-en-scene to the large-scale
form of the film. Hard-and-fast prejudices about realism are of less value here than
an openness to the great variety of mise-en-scene possibilities. Awareness of those
possibilities will better help us to determine the functions of mise-en-scene.

On the Origins of ise-en-Scene
As a concept, mise-en-scene dates back to the l9th-century
theater. For a historical introduction that is relevant to film,
see Oscar G. Brockett and Robert R. Findlay, Century of
Innovation (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, l9l3).
The standard film works are Nicolas Vardac, Stage to
Screen (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949),
and Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs,, Theatre to Cinema:
Stage Pictorialism and the Early Feature Film (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1997).

On Realism in ise-en-Scene
Many film theorists have seen film as a realistic medium
par excellence. For such theorists as Siegfried Kracauer,
Andrd Bazin, and V. F. Perkins, cinema’s power lies in its
ability to present a recognizable reality. The realist theo-
rist thus often values authenticity in costume and setting,
naturalistic acting, and unstylized lighting. “The primary
function of decor,” writes V. F. Perkins, “is to provide a
believable environment for the action” (Film as Film
[Baltimore: Penguin, 1972], p. 94). Andrd B azin praises
the Italian neorealist films of the 1940s for “faithfulness
to everyday life in the scenario, truth to his part in an
actor” (What Is Cinema? vol. 2 [Berkeley: University of
California Press, 19701, p. 25).

Though mise-en-scene is always a product of selec-
tion and choice, the realist theorist may value the film-
maker who creates a mise-en-scene that appears to be
reality. Kracauer suggests that even apparently unrealistic
song-and-dance numbers in a musical can seem im-
promptu (Theory of Film [New York: Oxford University
Press, 1965]), and Bazin considers a fantasy film such as

The Red Balloon realistic because here “what is imaginary
on the screen has the spatial density of something real”
(What Is Cinema? vol. 1 [Berkeley: University of Califor-
nia Press, 19661, p. 48).

These theorists set the filmmaker the task of repre-
senting some historical, social, or aesthetic reality
through the selection and arrangement of mise-en-scene.
Though this book postpones the consideration of this
problem-it lies more strictly in the domain of film the-
ory-the realist controversy is worth your examination.
Christopher WilliaffiS, in Realism and the Cinemc (Lon-
don: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), reviews many
issues in the area.

Computer Imaging and ise-en-Scene
Digital, or 3D, animation typically involves a few widely
used prograffiS, such as Maya for creating movement and
Renderman for adding surface texture. Animators deal
with specific needs of their projects by developing new
software for such effects as fire, water, and moving fo-
liage. The figures to be animated are created either by
scanning every surface of a maquette (a detailed model,
such as the dinosaur in 1.29) or by using motion capture
(“mocop”), filming actors or animals in neutrally colored
costumes covered with dots, which are the only things
visible to the camera. The dots are connected by lines to
create a “wire-frame” moving image, and the computer
gradually adds more detailed layers to build a textured,
three-dimensional, moving figure. Backgrounds can also
be created digitally, using matte-painting programs. For
figure animation, see The Art of Maya: An Introduction to
3D Computer Graphics, 3d ed. (Alias Systems, 2005),
which includes a CD-ROM with introductory material.

For fiction feature films, 3D animation became vi-
able with digital conxpositing, used for the T:1000 cyborg
in Terntinator 2: Judgment Day.Here a grid was painted
on the actor’s body, and the actor was filmed executing
movements. As the film was scanned, the changing grid
patterns were translated into a digital code similar to that
used on compact discs. Then new actions could be cre-
ated on the computer frame by frame. For a discussion,
see Jody Duncan, ‘A Once and Future War,” Cinefex 47
(August 199 I ): 4-59. Since Terminator 2, sophisticated
software programs have enabled directors to create “ac-
tors” wholly from models that can be scanned into a com-
puter and then animated. The most famous early example
is the gallimimus herd rn Jurassic Park. The phases of the
imaging process for this film are explained in Jody Dun-
can, “The Beauty in the Beasts,” Cinefex 55 (August
1993): 42-95. Both analog image synthesis and digital
compositing were used in The Matrix; for background,
see Kevin H. Martin, “Jacking into the Matrix,” Cinefex
79 (October 1999): 66-89. The rendering of realistic hu-
man and humanlike characters depended on finding a
way to create the elusively translucent quality of skin.
Such figures as Jar Jar Binks rn Star Wars Episode I : The
Phantom Menace and especially Gollum in The Lord of
the Rings finally achieved this goal. See Cinefex 78 (July
1999), completely devoted to The Phantom Menace;Joe
Fordham, “Middle-Earth Strikes Back,” Cinefex 92 (Jan-
uary 2003): 70-142; and Joe Fordham, “Journey’s End,”
Cinefex 96 (January 2004): 55-142.

The combination of live-action filming with com-
puter animation has created a fresh range of cinematic
effects. Mdlids’ urge to dazzle the audience with the mag-
ical powers of mise-en-scene continues to bear fruit.

Particular Aspects of Mise-eo-Scene
On costume, see Eli zabeth Lees, Costume Design in the
Movies (London: BCW, 1976),, and Edward Maeder, ed.,
Hollywood and Historv: Costume Design in Film (New
York: Thames & Hudson, 1987). See also Vincent J.-R.
Kehoe, The Technique of the Professional Make-Up Artist
(Boston: Focal Press, 1995).

L6on Barsacq, with careful assistance by Elliott
Stein, has produced the best history of setting to date,
Caligari’s Cabinet and Other Grand lllusions: A History
of Film Design (New York: New American Library,
1976). Other major studies of decor in the cinema are
Charles Affron and Mirella Jona Affron, Sets in Motion:
Art Direction and Film l{arrative (New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press, 1995); Dietrich Meumann, ed.,
Film Architecture: Set Designs from “Metropolis” to
” Blade Runner” (Munich: Prestel , 1996); and C. S.
Tashiro, PretQ Pictures: Production Design and the His-
tory of Film (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998).
For insightful interviews with set designers, see Vincent

Where to Go frorn Herc r59

LoBrutto, By Design (New York: Praeger, 1992), and
Peter Ettedgui, Production Design & Art Direction
(Woburn, MA: Focal Press, 1999). An excellent overview
is offered by Vincent LoBrutto in The Filntmaker’s Guide
to Production Design (New York: Allworth, 2002). Pascal
Pinteau’s gorgeously illustrated Special Effects: An Oral
History (New York: Abrams, 2003) covers not only mod-
els and digital effects but also make-up, setting, and even
theme park rides.

A wide-ranging analysis of performance in film is
Richard Dyer, Stars (London: British Film Institute,
1979). This book is complemented by Charles Affron,
Star Acting: Gish, Garbo, Davis (New York: Dutton,
1977), and James Naremore, Acting in the Cinema
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). Useful
practical guides are Patrick Tucker, Secrets of Screen Act-
ing (New York: Routledge, 1994), and Tony Barr, Acting

fo, the Camera (NewYork: Perennial, 1986). The ways in
which a performance can be integrated with a film’s over-
all form are considered in two other manuals, The Film
Director’s Intuition: Script Analysis and Rehearsal Tech-
niques, by Judith Wilson (Studio City, CA: Michael
Wiese,2003), and Delia Salvi’s Friendly Enemies: Max-
imizing the Director-Actor Relationship (New York: Bill-
board, 2003). Michael Caine’s Acting in Film: An Actor’s
Take on Movie Making (New York: Applause Books) of-
fers excellent and detailed discussion; see also the ac-
companying video, Michael Caine on Acting in Film.

Two fine surveys of lighting are Kris Malkiewicz,
Film Lighting: Talks with Hollywood’s Cinematogra-
phers and Gaffirs (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1986); and
Gerald Millerson, Lighting for Television & Film, 3d ed.
(Boston: Focal Press, 1999). John Alton’s Painting with
Light (New York: Macmillan, 1949) and Gerald Miller-
son’s Technique of Lighting fo, Television and Motion
Pictures (New York: Hastings House, l9l2) are useful
older discussions, with emphasis on classical Hollywood
practices. A useful reference book is Richard K. Fern-
case’s Film and Video Lighting Terms and Concepts
(Newton, MA: Focal Press, 1995).

Depth
Art historians have long studied how a two-dimensional
image can be made to suggest a deep space. A compre-
hensive introductory survey is William V. Dunning,
Changing Images of Pictorial Space: A History of Spatial
Illusion in Paintins (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press,
1991). Dunning’s history of Western painting emphasizes
the manipulation of five techniques we have considered
in this chapter: linear perspective, shading, the separation
of planes, atmospheric perspective, and color perspective.

Though film directors have of course manipulated
the image’s depth and flatness since the beginning of cin-
ema, critical understanding of these spatial qualities did

160 CHAPTER 4 The Shot: Mise-en-Scene

not emerge until the 1940s. It was then that Andr6 Bazin
called attention to the fact that certain directors staged
their shots in unusually deep space. Bazin singled out
F. W. Murnau (for Nosferatu and Sunrise), Orson Welles
(for Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons),
William Wyler (for The Little Foxes and The Best Years of
Our Lives), and Jean Renoir (for practically all of his
1930s work). By offering us depth and flatness as analyt-
ical categories, Bazin increased our understanding of
mise-en-scene. (See “The Evolution of the Language of
Cinema,” in What /s Cinema? vol. 1.) Interestingly,
Sergei Eisenstein, who is often contrasted with Bazin, ex-
plicitly discussed principles of deep-space staging in the
1930s, as recorded by his faithful pupil, Vladimir Nizhny,
in Lessons with Eisenstein (New York: Hill & Wang,
1962). Eisenstein asked his class to stage a murder scene
in a single shot and without camera movement; the result
was a startling use of extreme depth and dynamic move-
ment toward the spectator. For a discussion, see David
Bordwell, The Cinema of Eisenstein (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1993), chaps. 4 and 6. For a
general historical overview of depth in mise-en-scene,
see David Bordwell’s On the History of Film Style (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), chap. 6.

Color Design
Two clear and readable discussions of color aesthetics in
general are Luigina De Grandis, Theory and Use of
Color trans. John Gilbert (NewYork: Abrams, 1986), and
Paul Zelanski and Mary Pat Fisher, Colour fo, Designers
and Artists (London: Herbert Press, 1989).

For general discussion of the aesthetics of film color,
see Raymond Durgnat, “Colours and Contrasts,” Films
and Filming 15, 2 (November 1968): 58-62; and William
Johnson, “Coming to Terms with Color,” Film Quarterly
20,, 1 (Fall 1966): 2-22. The most detailed analysis of
color organi zation in films is Scott Higgin s, Harnessing
the Rainbow: Technicolor Design in the 1930s (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2006).

Frame Composition and the
Vewerts Ey”
The film shot is like the painter’s canvas: It must be filled
up, and the spectator must be cued to notice certain things
(and not to notice others). For this reason, composition in
film owes much to principles developed in the graphic
arts. A good basic study of composition is Donald L.
Weismann, The Visual Arts as Human Experience (En-
glewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall , 1974), which has
many interesting things to say about depth as well. More
elaborate discussions are to be found in Rudolf Arnheim,
Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative
Eye, rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press,

1974), and his The Power of the Center: A Study of Com-
position in the Visual Arts, 2d ed. (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1988).

Andr6 Bazin suggested that shots staged in depth and
shot in deep focus give the viewer’s eye greater freedom
than do flatter, shallower shots: The viewer’s eye can
roam across the screen. (See Bazin, Orson Welles [New
York: Harper & Row, 19781.) Noel Burch takes issue:
‘All the elements in any given film image are perceived
as equal in importance” (Noel Burch, Theory of Film
Practice [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
19811, p. 34). Psychological research on pictorial percep-
tion suggests, however, that viewers do indeed scan im-
ages according to specific cues. In cineffi&, static visual
cues for “when to look where” are reinforced or under-
mined by movement of figures or of camera, by sound
track and editing, and by the overall form of the film. The
psychological research is outlined in Robert L. Solso,
Cognition and the Visual Arts (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1994), pp. 129-156. In Figures Traced in Light:
On Cinematic Staging (Berkeley: University of Califor-
nia Press, 2005), David Bordwell studies how the film-
maker uses staging and frame composition to guide the
viewer’s scanning of the shot.

Websites
www.thescenograph er.com/ Website for The

Scenographer magazine, which deals with production
design and costume design; has some online articles.

www.makeupm ag.com/ Website for Make-Up Artist
Magazine, professional journal for film and television
workers; has some online articles.

www.l 6-9.dk/2}03-O5/sidell minnelli.htm,z In a well-
illustrated article, “Medium Shot Gestures: Vincente
Minnelli and Some Came Running,” Joe McElhaney
provides a very good example of close analysis of long-
take staging. The page is hosted by the Danish online
magazine 16:9.

Recommended DVD S,rpplements
DVDs often include galleries of designs for sets, cos-
tumes, and occasionally make-up. Documentaries on the
subject include Pulp Fiction’s “Production Design Fea-
turette.” The unusually large, labyrinthine, enclosed
spaceship interior in Alien, as well as the film’s other sets,
are discussed in the “Fear of the Unknown” and “The
Darkest Reaches” segments. (The former also deals with
costume design.) Speed’s “On Location” supplement
deals with the 12 different buses that appeared at various
stages of the film’s action, as well as how the freeway
locations were used.

Lighting is an area of mise-en-scene that receives rel-
atively little coverage. An exception is “Painting with

Light,” a documentary on cinematographer Jack Cardiff ‘s
work on the extraordinary color film Black lr,.larcisszs. A
brief but informative look at lighting comes in the
“Shooting on Location: Annie’s Office” supplement for
Collateral. In the “Here to Show Everybody the Light”
section of the “Working like a Dog” supplement for A
Hard Day’s Night, director of photography Gilbert
Taylor talks about how high-key lighting on the Beatles
achieved the characteristic look of the images and about
such challenges as rigging lighting equipment in a real
train. Toy Story’s “Shaders and Lighting” section reveals
how computer animation can simulate rim and key
lighting.

Auditions are commonly included in DVD supple-
ments, such as those for “The Making of American Graf-
rtfi” and especially The Godfather-where 72 minutes
cover the casting, including many screen tests ! Some
discs go more deeply into aspects of acting. Collateral’s
extras include a short segment, “Tom Cruise & Jamie Fox

Where to Go from Here 161

Rehearse.” “The Stunts,” included with Speed, shows
how the drivers’ maneuvers with the vehicles involved in
the accidents and near-misses were choreographed using
models, as well as covering how decisions are made
about whether to let stars do their own stunts. “Becoming
an Oompa-Loompa” details the training Deep Roy un-
derwent to play all the Oompa-Loompas in Charlie and
the Chocolate Factory. A detailed exploration of the dis-
tinctive acting in the films of Robert Bresson is offered by
Babette Mangolte’s “The Models of Pickpocket,” includ-
ing lengthy interviews with the three main performers re-
calling the director’s methods.

The Dancer in the Dark supplement “Choreography:
Creating Vincent Paterson’s Dance Sequences” takes an
unusually close look at this particular type of staging.
(This section can be best appreciated if you have watched
the whole film or at least the musical numbers “Cvalda”
[Track 9] and “I Have Seen It All” fTrack 13].)

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