Abstract

This essay interrogates the concept of queer incest within The OC by exploring the relationship between principle characters Ryan Atwood and Seth Cohen, both on the show and in fanfiction. The goal of this discussion is not to offer any sort of recuperative reading of ‘incest’ per se, but to address the indefinably queer relationship that viewers have constructed between these two characters (who are adoptive brothers.)

And I have learned that even landlocked lovers yearn,
For the sea like navy men;
‘Cause now we say goodnight from our own separate sides,
Like brothers on a hotel bed.
-“Brothers on a hotel bed,” Death Cab For Cutie

“I’ve always pushed for the big marriage that the whole entire audience has always seen coming: Ryan and Seth walk down the aisle hand in hand”
- Setoodeh 2006

The television drama series The OC (Fox Network, 2003–2007), created by Josh Schwartz, focuses primarily on the relationship between adoptive brothers Seth Cohen and Ryan Atwood, who come from oppositional class backgrounds. Fan-fiction and fan-produced media about these characters tends to underscore their solid foundation as brothers, but slash fiction – that is, fan writing that focuses on same-sex romance – has transformed the filial bonds between Ryan and Seth into overt eroticism. Since Ryan and Seth are legally but not biologically connected, this erotic refashioning opens up a lot of critically interesting and provocative spaces for the proliferation of alternative sexual discourses, including queer sexuality and consensual incest. The goal of this essay then, will be to explore what I see as the textured and ambiguous space between what the show itself implies, and what the slash fan-fiction makes explicit. In doing so, I will analyze some key moments from The OC alongside three fan-fiction cycles that are currently published online. I will also discuss the possibility of same-sex incest within other programs, including Supernatural (Eric Kripke, WB Network, 2005–present).

I am approaching the topic of same-sex incest from both a psychoanalytic and textual studies methodology, using dialogue from specific episodes as well as excerpts from fan-produced narratives in order to position The OC as a unique case study for critical queer analysis. The show begins with the arrival of Ryan Atwood into the wealthy bubble community of Newport in Orange County, California. Ryan is eventually adopted (both symbolically and legally) into the Cohen family, becoming a surrogate brother to Seth and an unexpected child to Sandy and Kirsten Cohen. A number of fanfic cycles have now been produced by writers who see the Seth/Ryan relationship as one that uniquely collapses the boundaries between brothers, friends, and lovers. The show itself gestures playfully to this by continually placing Seth and Ryan in homosocial, and potentially homosexual, situations, playing up this potential through dramatic aesthetics, for example by dressing Ryan in tank-tops and having him brood artfully while emo music plays in the background.

I will treat three fanfic cycles specifically here – “Yelling,” by M.F. Luder (2007), “The Complete Book of Questions,” by Zahra (2005a), and “Towards the Limits of Maps” (Zahra 2005b) – in order to interrogate their flexible and erotic deployments of queer sexuality, incest, and family violence. The authors have generously allowed me to cite their work in this article under pseudonyms. I also want to contextualize both the show and its fanfic adaptations within a critical discussion of same-sex incest by addressing broadly the role of incest in feminist and queer analyses. As I will discuss, although heterosexual incest (specifically father/daughter) has been treated quite expansively since its enshrinement within Freudian discourse, homosexual incest (brother/brother, or father/son) has been given comparatively little attention. My goal with this discussion is not to offer any sort of recuperative reading of queer incest, nor to suggest that Seth and Ryan’s relationship on The OC is patently incestuous; rather, I want to explore the difficult and highly charged relational space that may be said to exist between incest and queer sexuality, with Ryan and Seth’s relationship as a unique touchstone. In doing so, I will draw principally upon the work of queer-feminist and psychoanalytic theorists Judith Butler and Juliet Mitchell.

From its very first episode, The OC is a show concerned with issues of class, property, exchange, use value. Who or what can be used, what or who can be exchanged? In a wealthy community like Newport, any transaction seems possible, even the wholesale exchange of human beings. The pilot begins, in fact, with an act of theft: Ryan Atwood and his older brother, Trey, are caught stealing a car. Trey, due to his prior record, is given jail time, but Ryan ends up meeting Sandy Cohen, his new public defender. When Sandy brings Ryan home to stay, “just for the weekend,” his wife Kirsten responds as if he’s brought a particularly dangerous animal into her house. She keeps asking Sandy to “take him back,” as if he were a purchase – and Ryan himself, after later giving his court papers a cursory glance, concludes that “I’m the property of the state now” (2.01).[1] Sandy and Kirsten see Ryan as a potential family-member, but their language actually configures him as an object of exchange, a commodity. When Sandy decides that Ryan might benefit from spending time with his birth mother, he simply whisks Ryan’s mother away to Newport and presents her proudly to a stunned Ryan, as if he were offering a gift. In Newport, which is filled with “pod people,” as Seth calls them, social exchange endlessly returns to Marx’s commodity fetish.

According to Levi-Strauss, incest is also a form of exchange. In The Elementary Structures of Kinship, he states that “the prohibition of incest is less a rule prohibiting marriage with the mother, sister, or daughter, than a rule obliging the mother, sister, or daughter to be given to others. It is the supreme rule of the gift” (1971, 481). If incest, as Levi-Strauss also suggests, is the ground of culture, “the fundamental step because of which, by which, but above all in which, the transition from nature to culture is accomplished” (1971, 24), then this machinery by which culture emerges is really a factory, an operative conditioning based upon strict principles of exchange. Feminist analyses have generally labeled this as the exchange of mothers and daughters, but if we can just un-moor incest for a moment from the field of exclusive reproductive heterosexuality, it might equally apply to brothers and sons. I will not marry my sister, I will giver her up; I will not marry my brother, I will give him up – and my neighbor will do the same. In the case of The OC, Ryan Atwood becomes the outsider who disrupts the incestuous community of Newport, but he also becomes the object (or subject) of queer incest, a kind of loving twin to Seth Cohen. He is first described jokingly as “the cousin from Boston,” (1.01) then he and Seth become “like brothers,” or “almost brothers,” but the exact nature of their paternity is never quite ironed out.

What this has to do with Ryan, specifically, is something that I hope to make clear by citing some of the incestuous fanfic written about him. Many fans would argue that incest, in fact, has nothing to do with Seth and Ryan’s relationship, since they aren’t bound by the laws of consanguinity – they aren’t brothers by blood, or even by law. The OC is deliberately cagey about defining the exact placement of Ryan within the Cohen family. The word adoption is never used, although Sandy and Kirsten do admit to being “legally responsible” for Ryan, at least until he turns eighteen. They are not precisely his foster-family, and not his adoptive parents, either. So what, then, is Seth to Ryan? Are they brothers, or… others? He is the changeling, the outsider-child who turns Newport upside down upon his arrival, whose very proximity in a room full of “Newpsie” girls can create a grumbling undercurrent of aggression from their possessive boyfriends.

Figure 1: Ryan and Seth. Brothers, or… others? The OC © Fox Network, 2004.

In “The Debut” (1.04), after Ryan has been legally inscribed within the Cohen family (when Sandy signs the paperwork for his guardianship), Seth gives him a performative entrée as well: “Dude. You’re a Cohen now. Welcome to a world of insecurity and paralyzing self doubt.” Like the priest’s “I now pronounce you,” Seth’s utterance closes the legal circle, completing the transaction that has Ryan as its end-product. But, as I have asked before, who exactly is Ryan to Seth? When Ryan leaves at the end of Season One, Seth also abandons Newport, claiming that he can’t bear it without Ryan. Summer, Seth’s girlfriend at the time, clarifies this as “running away like a little bitch,” but Seth sees it as a necessary flight from – what? A flight from Ryan, or a running toward him? For Seth, Newport holds no meaning without Ryan. Sandy actually has to send Ryan after Seth, like an erotic courier, and Ryan’s arrival in Oregon (where Seth is staying with, of all people, Luke’s gay dad , is what actually forces Seth to return home. In this sense, as well as in other scenarios, Ryan usurps the role of the symbolic father, becoming the parent who must discipline Seth as a wayward boy. Seth, in turn, feels that he is paternally educating Ryan, giving him a sort of cultural tutelage in Newport society, even as Ryan continues to watch his back and protect him from – well, just about everyone.

The pilot episode ends with an impromptu embrace between Ryan and Seth, just before Ryan is forced to return to his biological family. After Sandy drives him back to Chino, they both discover that Ryan’s house is empty – his mother has literally abandoned him. But just before this happens, Ryan comes up to Seth’s room to say goodbye, thinking that it might very well be forever. What makes this moment significant? Perhaps it is the duration and tightness of the embrace; perhaps it is the fact that Seth, having been woken up by Ryan in the middle of the night, is wearing only a t-shirt and boxer shorts; perhaps it is Seth’s gentle “c’mere” as he deflates Ryan’s handshake and pulls him into a hug, knowing that his only friend in Newport is about to leave. Most likely, though, it is the curious expression on Ryan’s face: confusion, at first, and then a kind of disbelief, as if he is asking himself, do people actually do this? Then, the disbelief fades into warmth as he hugs Seth back, allowing himself to be held, just for that moment. Seth is so thin beneath his undershirt that we can see the curve of his spine, his shoulder blades – he appears so flimsy, a fragile bundle of nerves and love that could be blown away at any moment – unless Ryan holds on.

I’ve deliberately chosen not to draw any ironclad distinctions between what’s queer and what’s homosocial within The OC, since I don’t believe those distinctions exist legibly in the outside world. If every homosexual act is produced by and interpellated within an original homosocial kickoff or flashpoint, then both terms are really just part of the same emanation. This is the touchstone for any queer reading of canon, as it were, and in this sense it becomes easy to mediate the same-sex affection shared by Ryan and Seth as something that straddles both realms.

After he has been legally sworn into the Cohen family, Ryan is forced to attend a cotillion—a coming-out party for the debs of Newport. As he takes Marissa’s hand, leading her, quite literally, into society, into culture, we realize that Ryan himself is also coming out here as a social being. He is a “white knight,” but he is also a debutante, just like Marissa, being led into a painful and uncertain future. After a fracas predictably occurs – this time centering on Marissa’s father and his money problems, not on Ryan – Seth claps Ryan on the back and tells him: “that’s quite a little debut you had tonight” (1.04). Now that Ryan has stepped into Newport society, where does he go from here?

Figure 2: Ryan and Seth. Where do they go from here? The OC © Fox Network, 2004.

What Ryan doesn’t realize is that he has actually been written into the role of femme fatale. From the moment that he arrives in Newport, every girl wants to possess him, and every boyfriend wants to expel him. Sandy wants desperately to understand him, Kirsten feels like she has to protect Seth from him, and Seth just wants to be him, or at least to be seen by him. Ryan spends most of Season One wearing a dirty white tank-top, very much Brando in Streetcar Named Desire (Elia Kazan, 1951), brooding silently or appearing just in time at parties where his presence will cause the maximum amount of sexual panic. The only time he appears even remotely happy is when he’s playing video games with Seth, and many fanfic writers have grasped this practice as a unique mediating tactic between the two boys. Whenever anything in Ryan’s life gets too overblown, whenever he is about to come undone, we always find him playing video games with Seth. The console, the digital violence, the kinship, all act as sublimatory devices for the anger and turmoil that he is always feeling just below the surface. Rather than see this as repression, however, fanfic often reimagines these game-playing sessions as a kind of extended foreplay between Ryan and Seth. This can be seen in the work of fic-writers like Zahra and MF Luder, as well as other fanfic cycles on Fanfiction.net or LiveJournal.com.

Figure 3: Ryan and Seth. Domestic/erotic in the pool. The OC © Fox Network, 2004.

The OC continually dramatizes the close bonds between Ryan and Seth by pushing, ever so gently, on the sexual and cultural boundaries that separate homosociality, homosexuality, and fraternity (and no more so than college fraternities themselves, as well as companies like Abercrombie and Fitch that celebrate them.) For Ryan, moments of quietude and safety always come from playing video games with Seth or watching TV with the Cohens, as the domestic bleeds and swirls into the potentially erotic. In season one, especially, when Ryan first moves into the Cohens’ pool-house, he seems constantly to be in a state of tantalizing undress while Seth stammers and watches him, clearly embarrassed but also unmistakably curious. In “The Proposal,” when Seth walks in on Ryan as he’s toweling off from the shower, he practically faints:

SETH: Hey! Oh… sorry. I’m surprised that hasn’t happened before. Not saying I’m disappointed it hasn’t happened before just saying the mathematical probability—
RYAN: Yeah. Crying during chick flicks…walking in on me getting dressed—
SETH: Yeah, what’s your point? Okay, I’m not seeing what you’re getting at. Do you work out?
RYAN: Not really.
SETH: Cool, me neither. I’m gonna go watch some hockey.
RYAN: Hockey season’s over. (1.23, “The Proposal”)

The embrace that they share in the pilot episode is rare for two male characters on television, and is especially unusual here since at this point in the show’s narrative arc the two haven’t yet been produced/mediated as ‘family.’ When Seth runs away to Portland (to live with Luke’s gay dad, let us remember), only Ryan can convince him to come home – and the scene that ensues, with Seth’s foot tapping nervously as the music swells, then Seth and Ryan running to the front door simultaneously, is worthy of any John Hughes moment of romantic drama. Their dialogue is playfully romantic: after running to the door, Ryan says “hey, so, ah, I was thinking – “ and Seth replies “I was thinking too. You know, they don’t even have a water polo team here. That’s just gonna be a problem for me” (2.01). Newport’s water polo team is the source of multiple gay jokes in the series, but aside from this, Ryan’s “I was thinking” echoes so many other cinematic and televisual moments of reconciliation that the audience half expects them to kiss. Summer constantly jokes about how hot Ryan is (Seth jokes that “we all know you get a lot of mileage out of a tank top” [1.04]), and later in the series, Seth even plans a birthday celebration for Ryan with huge cardboard cutouts of him (including Fireman Ryan and Policeman Ryan) in a metatextual nod to about a dozen stereotypes of queer iconography. Their relationship is, in Seth’s own words, “extremely minty.”

In his famous fantasy-scenario, “A Child is Being Beaten,” Freud illustrates a collective repressed memory by which all of us first come into being as desiring subjects. It begins with hazy edges, very much like a dream: a child is being beaten. At first, it seems as if the child is being beaten by “a crowd” of other children, but as the scene resolves itself, we see that there are only two figures. Freud writes: “[m]y father is beating me (I am being beaten by my father). This being-beaten is now a meeting place between the sense of guilt and sexual pleasure. It is not only the punishment for the forbidden genital relation, but also the regressive substitute for it” (1997, 184). Freud offers different scenarios for boys and girls, but he is clearly more concerned with the little girl’s fantasy; he dismisses this by saying that “I have not been able to get so far in my knowledge of beating-phantasies involving boys, perhaps because my material was unfavorable” (1997, 192). Both fantasies are ultimately the same, since, despite the fact that the boy sees his mother in place of his father, this is simply a screen-memory for the placeholder father, the name of the father: “In both cases, the beating-phantasy has its origin in an incestuous attachment to the father” (1997, 195). I mention this scenario because it forms an incestuous linchpin in the workings of the Oedipus complex. The child first desires the parent, but sublimates that desire into a masturbatory fantasy (a child is being beaten), and turns instead away from the family for erotic fulfillment.

What Freud fails to factor into this primal scene, however, is the defining presence of siblings. Why must it always be the father who is doing the beating, and why must the father be critically set up as the superego within the child’s developing consciousness? Why couldn’t it be a brother or sister, especially in cases where an older sibling is the family’s primary caregiver? Juliet Mitchell frames the question this way:

Classically in the theoretical explanation, this [superego] ideal is postulated as being modeled on the real object of the father…but isn’t it also likely that the original model may be another child, a heroic or critical older (or other) sibling? For most of us, when our conscience is putting us down, making us feel inferior, the voice we hear is reminiscent of the tauntings not of adults but of other children. (2003, 12)

The title of this paper, “Ryan is Being Beaten,” refers just to this possibility, as well as to the flexibility of Freud’s fantasy-scenario. This could actually be the subtitle for The OC, since almost every episode defines Ryan in relation to an economy of beating, violence, the exchange of blows, blood, fists, overlaid by the exchange of capital. Ryan is either being beaten, or he is the one doing the beating. In the pilot episode, Ryan gets into a fight while defending Seth from a group of bigger kids, only to end up getting pummeled himself. “That’s how we do things here,” says Luke, who will become Ryan’s nemesis for the season (as well as his romantic competition for Marissa Cooper, who is literally the girl of his dreams). As Ryan is beaten, kicked, and left groaning on the beach, we are reminded of the first conscious phase of Freud’s beating-scenario: a child is being beaten by a crowd.

After they drag themselves home, Seth and Ryan stumble drunkenly into the poolhouse – Ryan’s dwelling, just adjacent to the Cohen residence, which also represents his erratic ambit and placement within the family. Then a curious thing happens. Seth falls asleep, and Ryan watches him – just watches him. Not in an overtly sexual way, but in an entirely ambiguous way, a possibly brotherly, possibly otherly way. Mitchell reminds us that:

[s]ibling incest is taboo… but, rather than this being strongly repressed and hence so unconscious a desire that it can only return in a disguised form in psychopathic symptoms… it is instead transformed into a preconscious, sometimes vaguely remembered possibility, prohibited metaphorically by the mother, but easily indulged in when parents are absent (2003, 21).

Since Kristen and Sandy are almost exclusively working and away from home during the day, at least in the beginning of the series, this “easily indulged in” practice becomes a kind of erotic slippage for Ryan and Seth. Fanfic writers like Zahra and Luder, whose work I will discuss below, have seized upon what Mitchell calls a “vaguely remembered possibility,” (2003, 21) and spun it quite liberally into countless stories, one-shots, epics, blog entries, and even fan-made videos, all devoted to sexualizing Ryan and Seth’s relationship. This strategy, in part, depends upon not defining the relationship, or over-defining it until it loses all symbolic currency within the family system. They are, after all, not “really” brothers.

Supernatural, a recent show about two fraternal demon-hunters looking for their father, also provides a fascinating cultural ground for looking at same-sex incest. Sam and Dean Winchester (named after the rifle) are typical “middle-American” siblings, despite the fact that they were raised on vampire lore and strategies for demon-killing. Dean reappears in Sam’s life after an extended absence, saying cryptically that “dad’s on a hunting trip… and he hasn’t been back in a while” (1.01). Sam, having previously dreamt of law school and a ‘normal’ life, must then accompany Dean on a season-long quest for their father, John. Given the intimate relationship, sarcastic banter, and close spatial proximity of the brothers in nearly every episode – they spend most of their time in cramped hotel rooms, or driving a righteously phallic Chevy Impala – fans have produced an already large collection of incest-fiction relating to the Winchesters. There are several online communities already dedicated to Sam/Dean “slash” fiction (the show only began last year), and one of the bigger archives boasts over four-thousand stories on Supernatural alone (http://www.fanfiction.net).

Figure 4: Demon-hunting brothers Sam and Dean Winchester. Supernatural. Source: http://www.cwtv.com © CW Network, 2006.

Figure 5: Dean (left) and Sam in “Hell House”, Season 1, episode 17. Supernatural. © WB Network, 2005.

In one fic called “Conversations Over the Front Seat,” Sam and Dean are trapped in the Impala in the middle of a rain storm, and so they resort to talking about their fantasies in order to pass the time. Sam unwittingly relates an incest fantasy to Dean, who responds with surprising tenderness. “We’re working a job,” Sam begins, “and they capture us, tie me down”:

They’ve got your hands tied behind your back so one of them has to position you but once the hand moves away, it’s just all you and me and I’m holding my breath and I don’t know how I could want something so much and hate it so much all at the same time. And then you lean into me, enter me… (A sniff, a gasp, more crunching of leather as legs and hips shift and rock.) It hurts and I cry out and I can feel your face against my back and feel tears because you think you’re doing something so terrible to me. (Sam’s voice is scratchy and stuffy sounding and almost like hiccups the way he gasps between every few words.) And I just want to tell you it’s okay. And all I can do is think it and hope that you get it. Because sometimes it’s like that between us, we don’t have to speak to each other to get it. (Sampson 2006).

As the show progresses, we begin to get hints of Sam’s own demonic heritage, which arguably divides the brothers and seems to make them appear less related biologically. Yet, as Sam’s own powers grow, he relies on Dean more and more, even as Dean suspects that he might not really know this person who calls himself Sam Winchester – that he may never have really known anything about his own brother. What does this do to their relationship? Would you still love your sibling if he developed demonic powers? I’d like to suggest that this space of hesitation between Sam and Dean – this interruption of their consanguinity through demonic intervention – also opens up a similar space of erotic flexibility. Fans seem to have seized upon this space by crafting stories, videos, graphic manipulations, and other visual/textual mediations that make the subtle eroticism between the Winchesters overt. What remains to be seen is whether this eroticism is attractive to fans – many of whom identify as straight women – precisely because it is ambiguous, or rather, because it is unambiguously taboo.

The incest prohibition is itself a paradox, simultaneously instituting precisely what it is supposed to prevent, and containing within itself the very possibility that it should foreclose. In Antigone’s Claim, Judith Butler explains this paradox as the means by which all subjects are formed: “To the extent that the incest taboo contains its infraction within itself, it does not simply prohibit incest but rather sustains and cultivates incest as a necessary spectre of social dissolution, a spectre without which social bonds cannot emerge”. (2002, 10) What we have lost, through numerous Freudian, Kleinian, and other analyses of incest, is that “vaguely remembered possibility” that is incest’s actual inchoate form, the possibility for it to occur in ways that can’t be defined clearly as ‘abusive’ or ‘harmless,’ the various and silent relays between brother/brother and sister/sister by which it can short-circuit our own clinical taxonomies. In her essay, “Quandaries of the Incest Taboo,” Butler clarifies this by saying:

I do think that there are probably forms of incest that are not necessarily traumatic or which gain their traumatic character by virtue of the consciousness of social shame that they produce… the prohibitions that work to prohibit nonnormative sexual exchange also work to institute and patrol the norms of presumptively heterosexual kinship. (2004, 157)

Ryan/Seth slash fanfic explores these bonds, which, in Butler’s hedging words, are “not necessarily traumatic”. As a concept, slash is generally understood to be queer relationship- or sex-fiction between television or cinema characters, its title denoting the ‘/’ that joins those characters together in a romantic tryst. It can also extend to comics, miniseries, novels, cartoons, and just about any other media where sex and romance are possible. The slash tradition emerged from the K/S (Kirk/Spock) slashers, who recast the homosocial relationship between Kirk and Spock on the original Star Trek. Angela Thomas, in her 2006 article “Fan Fiction Online,” summarizes the data from a critical study of “a 400 participant fan fiction world,” an online community called Middle Earth Insanity. Exploring the roots of fanfiction, she states that “[its] origins… can be traced back to the 1930s pulp magazine Fanzines, and it enjoyed a surge in the late 1960s with the popularity of Star Trek” (Thomas 2006, 226).

The K/S slash community produced an amazing network of erotic zines in the 1970s and ‘80s, made all the more impressive by the fact that they only had access to the most conventional of fan technology – a VCR, a printer, a public photocopier, and so on. Constance Penley (1997) discusses this fan community in detail in the introduction to her book NASA/Trek, describing how the Trek slashers, who are primarily heterosexual women, don’t radically reposition Kirk and Spock so much as give their relationship the nudge from “homosocial” to “homoerotic” – which always remains the impossible boundary to cross in network television. In “Slashing the Romance Narrative,” Anne Kustritz writes about the “Renegade Slash Militia,” a collective of female slash writers who “reserve the right to slash anyone, anywhere, at any time” (2003, 371). Kustritz originally defines slash as any type of “noncanonical romantic relationship,” and later specifies that slash fiction, as well as fanfic in general, allows “fans [to] discuss the narratives and characters provided for them by the mass media, and then alter those hegemonic messages to reflect their own needs” (2003, 374). Lest we see her definition as too uncritically utopian, she also adds that “there [are] however alternative types of fan activities besides wholesale adoration” Slash fiction can be elegantly critical, repositioning characters in “noncanonical” situations from which unique choices and strategies might emerge, as well as which disrupt the conventional hetero-narrative of the original text itself.

There are two main online sites for OC slash: Fanfiction.net, which is a clearinghouse for all kinds of different fic (it includes hundreds of shows and films), and a separate LiveJournal” posting-board specifically for OC slash-fic (The OC Slash: http://community.livejournal.com/theoc_slash). While sites like Fanfiction.net allow the user to custom-search for different types of fic, using different keywords (like “slash,” or “Ryan/Seth”), The LiveJournal site only contains fic with slash elements. Other LiveJournal sites focus on het pairings and romance, as well as fan-produced media. Various predictable partnerships emerge, like Ryan/Seth, Marissa/Summer, Marissa/Alex, as well as some more unorthodox ones, like Sandy/Ryan, or Ryan/Luke. Often, the most slash is written about the characters who seem the least romantically compatible, since, like the incest taboo, it is the very impossibility of their partnership that contains a sort of germinal potential, a maybe or might-have-been, or even must-be.

“Yelling,” by M.F. Luder (the author gave permission to include this pseudonym), is an ongoing series that focuses on Ryan’s abusive sexual relationship with the invented “Mr. Dart,” an old family-friend of the Cohens. There is actually very little romantic subtext between Ryan and Seth in these stories, which is what makes them rather unique among the other slash-fic. “Yelling” begins with a traumatic childhood memory of abuse, a past-phantom that returns to Ryan when he unexpectedly meets Mr. Dart again after managing to stay away from him for nearly six years. We discover that, when Ryan was eleven, his mother worked as a personal assistant of sorts for the wealthy Mr. Dart, and would frequently leave Ryan in the older man’s ‘care’ while she ran errands. These episodes of parental absence were just the opportunities that Mr. Dart needed to sexually abuse Ryan, swearing him to silence unless he wanted his mother to lose her job. Ryan, ever the young pragmatist, agreed to keep silent. But when his abuser returns, Ryan finds himself entering into their familiar ‘relationship’ once again, offering his body to Mr. Dart, who in turn agrees to keep the Newport Group from sinking financially. Once again, we are given a transaction where sex, violence, and money are all contiguous:

Eyes were wide shut, as much as he could, trying to block everything out. He took a deep breath a second before there was pain on the edges of his eyes and his head, on his back as it was pushed forward, stomach on top of the green velvet of the pool table. The wood edge cut into his hips, but that was nothing, that pain was nothing, against the one in his hips and lower legs… “I like you, Ryan. I really like you. You’re special.” The words are whispered, low in Ryan’s ear, making the boy shudder and shake. “You’re so special. So pretty, so young. So perfect. Hmm… Perfect. (Luder 2007)

As Ryan submits once again, six years later, to sex with Mr. Dart, a question crystallizes within his own scarred, torn-up, avulsed life, constantly being cut open and sutured messily back into shape: who are you? He asks this question as an eleven-year-old boy, staring into the mirror after being anally raped by Mr. Dart, and then again, as a seventeen-year-old, after enduring the same act. Who are you? The same question that lies at the bottom of the incest prohibition, the same question that inaugurates and installs culture, like a movie that we’re all doomed to watch without ever understanding the plot. Six years later, as he once again finds himself bent over that familiar pool-table, his body pressed painfully into an act of violent, non-consensual sex, Ryan finds himself thinking of… Seth. His safe place. His lighthouse. Even as Mr. Dart begins to pant as he nears climax, Ryan dreams of Seth:

Seth’s laughing, curls a mess, heart light, as he makes his way down the harbor with his skateboard. Ryan’s laughing as well, in this picture Ryan has in his mind’s eye. He’s laughing, grin on his lips, mouth wide open in happiness. He’s riding his bike along Seth’s side, the two of them, like it’s always been. It’s just the two of them. (Luder, 2007)

Incest has been critically understood, within feminist analyses, as an act existing along the continuum of rape, an expression of violent patriarchal intrusion. “The feminist analyses of incest,” says Vikki Bell, “see incestuous abuse as an extreme form of the training that all girl children receive. The normalizing aim of such training is feminine, subordinate girls and women” (1993, 168). But Bell herself, who is critiquing these analyses in her book Interrogating Incest, also states that “incest is theoretically placed at the intersection of discourses on predatory masculine (hetero)sexuality, children as sexually attractive, and children as possessions” (1993, 79). This idea of “children as possessions” harkens back to my earlier discussion about Ryan as human property, a possession of the Cohens. He belongs to them in the sense of being a part of the family, being included in their family-text of love, but he also belongs to them literally as a legal responsibility, a child with no money and no prospects who must be cared for, provided for, fed, clothed, and watched constantly.

How do we locate incest as a crime, and what happens when something defined as ‘criminal’ occurs between two siblings who claim to be consenting? Freud argued that all homosexual attachments were by nature incestuous and narcissistic, since they sublimated hatred towards the same-sex parent into an ‘obsessive’ desire. If we follow this theory to its conclusion, then Ryan’s queerness is actually the product of his troubling relationship with Trey, his older brother. A great deal of slash fic includes memories of Trey, specifically memories where Trey acts as a kind of mothering influence, substituting for their absent parents. In the fan fiction piece “Towards the Limits of Maps” (Zahra 2005), Ryan remembers an instance where Trey, only a few years older himself, cooked dinner for him (powdered mac and cheese), then tucked him into bed. Interestingly, in the show itself, one of Ryan’s first acts in the Cohen household is to cook everyone breakfast, telling Kirsten sheepishly that “my mom’s not much of a cook.” (Pilot, 1.01). While Seth envisions taking a “pancake tour” of America, just like Jack Kerouac – while safe in he knowledge that he will eat pricey Thai-takeout every night – it becomes clear that Ryan actually grew up on pancakes and mac and cheese, since his mother was constantly absent. Juliet Mitchell clarifies the question that emerges from this essential relationship of care between Ryan and Trey, a relationship that crumbles once Trey is sent to jail: “[w]here older siblings rather than parents are the main carers of younger children, where children are left alone in their peer groups, are prohibitions accepted and internalized? Can siblings in themselves be each other’s lawgiver?” (Mitchell 2003, 53). In essence, if Ryan has become his own “lawgiver,” or if Trey has been installed as Ryan’s own critical superego, than what possibilities does this open up for an unorthodox relationship between two adoptive brothers – Seth and Ryan? If we’re all inside various enactments of the incest prohibition, all moving the machinery ourselves, then what happens when two erotic circuits converge in an unexpected way, when two desiring subjects suddenly decide to remake the law?

In “The Complete Book of Questions”, Zahra (2005a, pseudonym used with permission) explores this question, triangulating her story of Ryan/Seth with the phantom of Trey. In the actual show, Trey survives a shooting (by Marissa, no less), and then removes himself from Ryan’s life, ostensibly to give him a chance at being ‘normal.’ In this fic, however, as well as in several others, Trey actually dies, and Ryan is left to deal with his grief. Like most Ryan/Seth slash, “Towards the Limits of Maps” (Zahra 2005b) hinges upon parental absence – Kirsten and Sandy are away on a trip, and Ryan and Seth have the house to themselves. In actual fact, they are also sharing the house with Trey, since Ryan still has an urn with his ashes in it. This slash, I would contend, is actually a spectral threesome, a Ryan/Seth/Trey encounter, which is erotic in the classical sense because it involves a triangulated sense of lack. After returning home with the urn, Ryan appears to come undone, and Seth moves to comfort him, entirely unsure of what he is doing, how such a thing should be done, what should be said. Seth realizes that “Ryan had spent over a month sleeping in the same room as his dead brother’s ashes” (Zahra 2005b) and doesn’t know how he failed to notice this ghostly invasion, as if an outline of Trey was sleeping in Ryan’s bed with him, curling up to Ryan, holding his little-brother in cold, unreachable arms.

As Ryan ponders what to do with the urn in this fic piece, he finds himself desperately trying to escape from this phantasmal presence of Trey: “[he] used to lie like Trey lies, with this slippery charm that eases people into the lie. Eases people into believing in him. I swear on Mom, Ry. Ryan hates himself for the pieces of Trey that still live within him, that show up when he looks in the mirror” (Zahra 2005b). Meanwhile, in attempt to establish some sort of intimacy with the unusually taciturn Ryan, Seth resorts to asking him questions from the eponymous book of the title. It is through these questions, this peculiar and fragile dialogue, that Seth and Ryan’s desire for each other slowly emerges in “Towards the Limits of Maps”. When Seth asks Summer for advice, her reply is tart and incisive, as usual: “Cohen… you and me? Ryan and Marissa? That’s not how this turns out, that’s not where the, like, lines get drawn in our little four-square box.”

Where the lines do get drawn is a matter of some contention, especially since, as is spelt out in the show itself, Seth doesn’t “feel gay,” even though he admits to having a “huge man-crush” on Ryan. He protests that Ryan isn’t “exactly” his brother, and Summer replies firmly that: “If he’s not your brother, then you’re like, way spicy” (Zahra 2005b). This is a creative corruption of Seth’s favorite gay adjective on the show, “minty,” which he uses to describe just about every situation where he and Ryan are pushing queer subtext; it emerges after Ryan admits to having performed musical theater in junior-high, and Seth says “that’s extremely minty of you. I didn’t even know they had musicals in Chino” (1.11). Minty, like spicy, is also a kind of subtext, a scent, an odor of desire that one has to sniff or suss out (and that one can take pleasure in sniffing out).

In the fic “Questions” by Zahra (2005a), Ryan begins sleeping in Seth’s bed, although the two of them only touch by accident. One morning, however, as Seth wakes up and spies Ryan by the window, he makes a voyeuristic discovery:

Ryan is standing by the window, his back to Seth, and the light is edging his silhouette, burning an outline around his messy hair and his muscles and his narrow hips, and Seth can’t tell but he’s pretty sure that Ryan, in that moment, is glowing (Zahra 2005a).

Later, as they get drunk and spin more questions from the book, Ryan finds himself getting closer and closer to Seth, who resists/invites the contact like a classical ephebe, never quite asking for, but never quite declining, the attentions of the erastes. As desire sparks, leaps the gap, enflames the air between them, how can it be characterized? Are they two brothers in love? Ryan seems to reject their fraternal connection, but Seth insists upon it, understanding that, whatever is happening between them, their brotherhood is its ground, its field:

Seth feels Ryan moving closer to him. He expects the press of Ryan’s front against his own back before he feels it, and when he feels Ryan’s nose against the nape of his neck he isn’t surprised by it. He doesn’t move, but he lets Ryan’s arms tighten around him. ‘I don’t want another brother,’ Ryan whispers against Seth’s t-shirt. Seth feels the words vibrate there, even more than he hears them. ‘I ruin people, Seth. I don’t want you to go anywhere.’ (Zahra 2005a)

Their kiss is “also a crash,” (Zahra 2005a) and although it occurs as the climax of the fic, it also seems subservient to the real desire, which occurs through recollection. Fetish items, like Ryan’s leather wrist cuff, the necklace that he only wore for part of the first season, the bottle of tequila passed between them, snippets of things that Trey once said to him, all culminate in a kind of mnemonic sexuality, an erotics of memory that is more powerful than the actual sex that eventually occurs. This is also the case in “Towards The Limits of Maps” (Zahra 2005b), by the same author, where Ryan and Seth embark an erotic road-trip that never seems to arrive at any acceptable destination.

Unlike “Questions”, which is roughly contiguous with Trey’s shooting in season two, “Maps” occurs several years later—Ryan has become a successful architect for the Newport Group, and Seth has moved to San Francisco, where he is haphazardly working on “a novel that is in no way like a comic book” (Zahra 2005b). Mostly, he is sleeping with a girl who reminds him of Summer, and not doing much of anything else. When Ryan arrives at his door and asks him to go on an unexpected road-trip, Seth agrees because he has nothing else to do, but also because Ryan is asking. Like all picaresque journeys, this one has a hidden truth – Ryan and Marissa are engaged, and Ryan can’t quite bring himself to tell Seth.

Ryan first takes him to Fresno, his childhood home, where he points out the empty parking lots, concrete playgrounds, and other desolate, in-between spaces where he grew up “as part of a pack” with Trey, Arturo, and Theresa(Zahra 2005b). Once again, Ryan finds himself animalized, rendered as something not quite human, and this remediation is firmly bound up with his own sense of shame over being poor. “I know it sounds like it was really bad,” he starts to tell Seth. But, it was something else entirely. It was a life lived with other people, with friends, a life with connections and lifelines. Being part of a pack has always been Seth’s dream. Being part of anything has always been Seth’s dream, anything beyond a life lived in Japanime action-films and secret conversations with his confidante, a plastic horse named Captain Oats:

He is remembering days sitting alone underneath the jungle gym with his Luke Skywalker action figure and Captain Oats while the kids climbed overhead and pointed at him through the bars. He is remembering coming home from school and sitting cross-legged on the floor of the laundry room with his comic books, listening to Rosa sing songs in Spanish under her breath. He is remembering skateboarding down the pier alone and watching Luke and Marissa and Summer and Chip and Holly and all their stupid shiny friends tossing French fries at one another, sneaking closed-mouth picante-flavored kisses and laughing. ‘No,’ he says again, ‘it doesn’t sound like it was really bad at all’. (Zahra 2005b)

As with “The Complete Book of Questions” (Zahra 2005a), although this slash-cycle culminates in more than one sexual scene, the real desire in “Maps” (Zahra 2005b) sleeps in these little moments, these erotic attenuations of lost time and memory, time passed and bodies passed out of existence, houses exchanged and parks filled in with concrete. Ryan actually visits his old house, only to find that the wallpaper in his former bedroom, “rocket-ships, or maybe racing cars,” is just barely visible beneath the new coat of paint. In “Towards the Limits of Maps” Seth begins to feel, after a time, that he is walking in Trey’s footsteps, but also that he is becoming something different to Ryan, a partner for which there really is no definition. Talking to Summer, Seth insists that he’s “not gay,” but “just Ryan gay,” (Zahra 2005b) as if Ryan-gay is actually a variation on bisexuality – as if Ryan himself, his mysterious body, the way his skin glows against the window, as if all of these things signal a primary frustration of the sexual binary, a ‘/’ between gay and straight that may be no punctuation at all, or may be everything.

I am not naive enough to suggest that incest has the same positive flexibility as queerness, that it is an area ripe for deconstruction, rather than a force that has the power to sexually cripple the lives of children. Rather, like many fanfic writers, I want to explore a continuum of incest that allows for potential expressions of non-traumatic sexuality, while keeping in mind Judith Butler’s claim that:

If the incest taboo is also what is supposed to install the subject in heterosexual normativity, and if, as some argue, this installation is the condition of possibility for a symbolically or culturally intelligible life, then homosexual love emerges as the unintelligible within the intelligible; a love that has no place in the name of love, a position within kinship that is no position. (2004, 160)

The prohibition against incest remains always the prohibition against homosexuality, and in order to avoid creating exiled-loves, shadow-loves, “a love that has no place in the name of love,” (ibid) we need to be willing to acknowledge a continuum along which sexuality – both queer and straight – gender, power, and incest all exist as nodal points, linked threads, or competing energies and intensities, capable of deep annihilation and paradoxically loving expression at the same time.

Bibliography

Bell, V. 1993. Interrogating Incest: Feminism, Foucault, and the Law. New York: Routledge.

Butler, J. 2002. Antigone’s Claim. New York: Routledge,

———. 2004. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge.

Freud, S. 1997. Sexuality and the Philosophy of Love. New York: Touchstone.

Kustritz, A. 2003. “Slashing the Romance Narrative.” Journal of American Culture. 26.3, Sept .

Levi-Strauss, C. 1971. The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Boston, MA: Beacon.

Luder, MF. 2007. “Yelling.” Sept. http://sdlucly.livejournal.com/tag/yelling (accessed Feb. 10 2009).

Mitchell, J. 2003. Siblings: Sex and Violence. London: Polity.

Penley, C. 1997. NASA/Trek, London: Verso.

Sampson, JD. 2006. “Conversations Over the Front Seat.” Jan 21.

Setoodeh, R. 2006. “Unknown To Hit: Ben Talks To Newsweek.” Newsweek, Jan 15.

Thomas, A. 2006. “Fan Fiction Online: Engagement, Critical Response and Affective Play through Writing.” Australian Journal of Language and Literacy. Vol. 29, No. 3.

Zahra. “The Complete Book of Questions.” 2005a. (no longer available online)

Zahra “Towards the Limits of Maps.” 2005b. (no longer available online)

Film & Teleography

A Streetcar Named Desire, Elia Kazan, 1951.

Supernatural, Eric Kripke, Warner Brothers Television, 2005-Present.

The OC, Josh Schwartz, Fox Network, 2003-2007.

Notes

[1] The citation convention for television episodes used in this paper indicates season followed by episode number.

[2] Luke is Marissa Cooper’s ex-boyfriend, a typecast jock who antagonizes both Ryan and Seth until discovering that his dad is actually gay and having an affair with man.

Author Bio

Jes Battis is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Regina, specializing in Fantasy and Science Fiction, Queer Studies, and Children’s Literature. He is also a novelist.

Abstract

This paper examines the British series The Bill as an example of, and benchmark for, the television police genre. Although the series holds a special position within the genre, not least because of its longevity and embedding within Australian and British popular culture, it has attracted very little academic analysis. Existing research in relation to the television police series genre focuses on history and output of specific production companies and television industries; textual analyses of specific and defunct television police series; form and ideology; moral lessons and the place of crime in public life; the effect of changing cultural discourses; and anxiety about violence. However, this paper focuses on The Bill as a television series rather than the issues raised by The Bill as a television series. In doing so, a number of issues are explored. These include an overview, from the 1950s onward, of the television police genre within Australia, Britain and the USA; the interplay of elements of repetition and difference in a balance acceptable to producers, audiences and critics; four production eras and the influence of individual Executive Producers Michael Chapman, Richard Handford, Paul Marquess and Jonathan Young on the format and style of the series over a twenty- five year period from 1984 to 2009; and the blurring of generic boundaries in response to contemporary imperatives. In relation to these issues, it is argued that the television police genre is shaped by national, rather than global, discourses and is displayed in iconography that reflects national attributes and cultural context. It is further argued that the interplay of elements of repetition and difference impacts on viewer loyalty, and this interplay has been driven by a small number of individual Executive Producers, each constrained by contextual features such as industry trends, changes in cultural norms, falling ratings, and the need for a change in audience demographics. In accommodating these contextual features, traditional generic boundaries have blurred so that The Bill, exemplifies the merging of a masculine genre such as television police with a feminine genre such as soap opera.

Overview

Since its inception as a series the British television police drama The Bill (Geoff McQueen, 1984-present, UK) has regularly redefined the boundaries of the television police genre in relation to production values, characterisation, memorable characters and the creation of an active fandom. First broadcast in 1984 as an example of the police procedural category of the television police genre, it was hailed by critics and audience for its authenticity and gritty realism, for its production values and for its storylines.

Twenty years and some 2000 episodes later The Bill had incorporated, in a deliberate production strategy to attract more viewers, numerous elements of the soap opera genre. The emphasis was no longer on gritty realism and police work but rather on personal relationships and morally questionable behaviour within a specific police community. Traditional generic conventions of law and order gave way to anarchy, chaos, and a focus on the private, rather than the public, lives of protagonists. It is not the only police series to incorporate soap opera elements but was, in 2004, the only police series to incorporate so many of them. However, with the advent of executive producer Jonathan Young (2005 - present), The Bill refocussed on a balance between contemporary realism and personal relationships. As producer Tim Key said after the series won the Screen Nation Award for Diversity in Drama in February 2009, “The programme aims wherever possible to accurately reflect multi-cultural life in modern Britain… ” (http://www.thebill.com/videos/videodetail/item_200014.htm)

Such a progression is a feature of television police series on international screens. As McQueen (1998, 28) notes, shifts in generic conventions allow for creativity within the boundaries of tried and tested formulas, but an imbalance in the interplay of repetition and difference may lead to confusion or disinterest on the part of the audience. Blue Heelers (Hal McElroy and Tony Morphett, 1994-2006, Australia) features the private lives of characters but eschews anarchy and chaos. Law & Order (Dick Wolf, 1990-present, USA) features anarchy and chaos but eschews the private lives of characters. Both series have maintained viewer loyalty by balancing the interplay of repetition and difference in the depiction of national attributes and cultural context and by remaining within the boundaries of tried and tested formulas. The Bill, in contrast, has challenged generic conventions so strongly and varied the interplay of repetition and difference so much that it has blurred the boundaries between the television police and soap opera genres. In doing so, it has acquired a new audience in the form of soap opera viewers and has reversed falling audience ratings. The strategy of blurring boundaries has been successful: in March 2004 various media channels announced that ITV1 had commissioned a further 480 episodes of The Bill at a cost of 200 million pounds. The ‘golden handcuffs’ deal ensures that The Bill will be screened until at least 2010.

From 1984-1997 the major Executive Producer was Michael Chapman, who had worked on various television series since the 1960s. His production edicts shaped The Bill in its pre-1997 incarnation as a police procedural drama with strong documentary overtones. Falling ratings and a changing societal environment led to his replacement in 1997 by Richard Handford, who had previously worked as a producer on The Bill. Handford varied the interplay of repetition and difference by introducing elements of romance and a glimpse into the private lives of his characters but failed to arrest falling ratings. He was replaced in 2002 by Paul Marquess, from 1999-2001 a producer of the British soap opera Brookside.

Marquess abandoned the pre-1997 semi-documentary overtone of The Bill, reshaped the series as a serial, and focussed on sensational storylines, sexuality, and soap opera stereotypes. He organised a live episode in October 2003 to celebrate 20 years of production and hinted that one of the episodes transmitted in 2004 would feature an interactive element. Viewers who lost interest in the new format were outnumbered by a younger and more diverse audience with expectations shaped by familiarity with the television soap opera genre.

Jonathon Young replaced Marquess as Executive Producer in 2005, toning down sensationalist storylines and, whilst keeping an element of interpersonal relationships, aiming for a more realistic representation of contemporary policing in London.

Genre

In order to investigate the longevity of The Bill it is necessary to examine the ways in which the series conforms to, and the ways in which it departs from, generic protocols. The Bill holds a special position within the British television police genre. Pre-1997 it was used as a benchmark by industry and audience judging British television police series but was also classified by its critics as pedestrian, dull and boring because of its focus on the small currency of daily life and because of its emphasis on realistic police procedure. Metropolitan Police surveys (pre-1997) indicate that it was the main television police program through which viewers are provided with an insight into the world of real life policing. By introducing elements not usually associated with the television police genre and by focussing on the minutiae of day-to -day policing rather than on the big pictures of crime statistics and terrorism, and by incorporating narrative elements more readily associated with the television soap opera genre, The Bill continually redefines generic boundaries. It has become embedded within Australian and British popular culture but, unlike Dixon of Dock Green (Ted Willis, 1955-1976, UK), Z Cars (Troy Kennedy Martin, 1962-1978, UK), Miami Vice (Anthony Yerkovich, 1984-1989, USA), and Hill Street Blues (Steven Bochco and Michael Kozoll, 1981-1987, USA), has not yet been the subject of detailed academic analysis.

Existing research in relation to the television police series genre focuses on history and output of specific production companies and television industries (Moran 1985); textual analyses of specific and defunct television police series (Hurd, 1981; Clarke, 1982, 1986, 1992; Moran, 1985; Laing, 1991; Thompson, 1996); form and ideology (Buxton, 1990); moral lessons and the place of crime in public life (Sparks, 1992); the effect of changing cultural discourses (Nelson, 1997); anxiety about violence (Brunsdon, 1998) and fandom, social commentary and construction of identity (see Allen, 2007).

Tulloch (2000, 33-55) provides an overview of theoretical approaches to the television police genre and implicitly acknowledges that the television police genre is shaped, in the first instance, by national, rather than global, discourses and is displayed in iconography that reflects national attributes and cultural context. Iconography used by producers and expected by viewers in examples of the television police genre includes specific uniforms, equipment, vehicles, and jargon. Audiences remember Joe Friday’s dry ‘Just the facts, ma’am’ and the staccato theme music of Dragnet (Jack Webb, 1951-1959, USA), George Dixon’s ‘Evenin’ all’, the catchy lyrics of Car 54, Where Are You? (Nat Hiken, 1961-1963, USA), the black Granada crashing through a plate glass window in The Professionals (Brian Clemens, 1977-2983, UK), the heroes of The Sweeney (Ian Kennedy Martin, 1975-1978, UK) snarling ‘Get yer trousers on, you’re nicked’ or ‘We’re the Sweeney, son. So if you don’t want a kicking… ’, the operatic soundtrack of Inspector Morse (Colin Dexter, 1987-2000, UK), and the guns of many USA examples of the genre. Iconography is evident in the sub-industrial Melbourne back streets of Homicide, and in Blue Heelers, visually replete with the markers of a Australian country town. It is evident in The Bill, which is full of what Brunsdon (2001, 43) describes as the iconography of London. It is evident in the weapons, poverty, and gritty urban landscape of Hill St Blues and in the crowded precincts and courtrooms of NYPD Blue (Steven Bochco and David Milch, 1993-2005, USA) and Law & Order (Dick Wolf, 1990-present, USA).

As Fiske (1987, 222) notes, the television police genre, like all genres, modifies its conventions in a dialectical relationship with changes in social values. Neale (1980, 22-23) argues that particular features which are characteristic of a genre are not normally unique to it but that it is their relative prominence, combination and functions which are distinctive. Thus police series and sitcoms feature protagonists in everyday life but assign different foci to their activities. The television crime genre is a case in point. It usually depicts characters dealing with criminal activities rather than juggling romantic and sexual activities. It encompasses programs about amateur sleuths, private eyes, professional crime fighters, and real life crime-watch depictions. The boundaries of the television police genre are more limited in that the genre deals specifically with the actions of police officers. But it too has wide and shifting boundaries. Perhaps the most obvious and unarguable point is that television police series portray some aspect of police work.

In general, television police programs before the 1980s avoided topical and controversial subjects. Examples of the genre tended to focus on a no-nonsense, factual presentation as in Dragnet, or to focus on specific neighbourhoods as in Homicide and Division Four (Lynn Bayonas and Marcus Cole, 1969-1976, Australia), or the promotion of specific cultural values as in Dixon of Dock Green. The Bill, in contrast, featured topical and controversial subjects on a regular basis. Within the British television police genre Dixon of Dock Green shared similarities with The Bill in that it was set in a police station in London’s East End and focused on routine police procedure and low-level crime, but, unlike The Bill, it avoided controversial subjects. In the 1960s, Z Cars, another landmark British television police series, focused on routine police procedure. However, it redefined the boundaries set by Dixon of Dock Green by structuring one episode around the issue of pornography (Happy Families, 1964) and by portraying police officers as fallible human beings. In the 1970s, The Sweeney and The Professionals focused on combating armed robberies and terrorism. The one episode of The Professionals that dealt specifically with racism (Klansmen, Series 1, episode 13, filmed in 1978) was never shown on British terrestrial television because its subject matter was thought by London Weekend Television to be offensive to some viewers.

In contrast, The Bill dealt with controversial topics on a regular basis and, in doing so, redefined the boundaries of the British television police genre by moving closer to the generic conventions of British soap opera. Clutching at Straws (1984) dealt with child molestation, Burning the Books (1985) with pornography, Homebeat (1985) and Domestics (1987) with racism, and The New Order of Things (1987) with a suicidal AIDS victim. Storylines in The Bill were topical, immediate, and raw. Police officers were sometimes shown as sexist, racist, and politically incorrect, yet the same officers were also shown as caring, sensitive and heroic. From the first episode of The Bill (Funny Ol’ Business-Cops And Robbers, 1984), characters were multidimensional. Some of them, such as Sgt Bob Cryer and WPC June Ackland, echoed character types embedded in the national consciousness. Many of them had histories that were revealed to viewers over time.

History of The Bill

From that first episode, too, as Lynch (1991, 15) notes, storylines were multi-stranded so they could accurately reflect both the routine work and the diversity of cases dealt with by a single relief (‘A’ relief) in Sun Hill, a typical Metropolitan police station. Funny Ol’ Business - Cops and Robbers opens with a briefing from Sgt Cryer and Sgt Alec Peters, shows PCs Carver and Francis ‘Taffy’ Edwards arresting a car thief who is revealed as an informant for DS Burnside from Barton Street nick, PC Dave Litten assisting CID with a case involving a series of house break-ins related to a double-glazing company and WPCs Ackland and Martella unsuccessfully attempting to arrest a gang of pickpockets. Viewers learned that Sgt Cryer disapproved of ‘bent’ (dishonest) coppers and that he strongly suspected DS Burnside was one of them. They learned that ‘snouts’ (informants) were not to be trusted, and that DS Burnside was capable of treating colleagues and villains with equal callousness.

As an example of the television police genre The Bill met with some initial opposition. A number of critics voiced their disapproval of police officers portrayed as fallible beings rather than exalted gods of irreproachable morals. The then Police Commissioner objected to the projection of unprofessional and unrealistic attitudes and actions. The editor of Police Review decried the tendency of the series to show police officers virtually at war with society. Overall, however, audience reception of the early episodes of The Bill was encouraging enough for further series to be commissioned. Lynch (1992, 17) argues that the initial popularity of The Bill was due to its production excellence, its realistic look, the fact that it was character driven rather than relying on plot and effect, the fact that its characters were believable, and the fact that the audience could identify with the characters. However, Kingsley ascribes its success differently, agreeing with Sparks (1992) and Brunsdon (1998) that violence and fear play a part in persuading viewers to embrace the television police genre. She writes:

The Bill came to the screen in a year when few people were neutral about the role the police were taking in society. The service lost popularity, seeming to be no more than a tool of the Tory government when riot police charged against demonstrations by striking miners. But incidents such as the shooting of WPC Yvonne Fletcher outside the Libyan embassy in April and the terrorist bombing of the Grand Hotel, Brighton, during the Tory Party conference which occurred only four days before the first episode of the first series in October [1984] perhaps moved public opinion in the other direction. (Kingsley 1994, 28)

Sun Hill’s iconography reflects that of the real London Metropolitan Police. Although Sun Hill does not exhibit what Thomas (1997, 186) identifies as a ‘visual expression of Englishness… village greens and gardens, medieval lanes and churches, and wood panelled interiors where log fires burn even in high summer’, it does show a distinctive iconography in keeping with its fictional site somewhere in London’s East End. The iconography of The Bill is urbanised and somewhat bleak. It does not rely on the visually pleasing heritage nostalgia iconography so obvious in, and arguably so essential to the success of, Inspector Morse and Heartbeat (Patrick Harbinson and Stephen Leather, 1992-2009, UK). The site that Sun Hill occupies is indicated by what Brunsdon (2001, 43) refers to as London iconography – a geographical position defined by double decker buses, red telephone boxes, the river Thames, smart housing enclaves and bleak council estates such as the Bronte, the Abelard and the Jasmine Allen - which adds to the generic convention of ‘gritty realism’ pioneered in Z Cars and used with such effectiveness in The Sweeney and The Professionals. The Bill features the bobby on the beat idealized by earlier British police series such as Dixon of Dock Green and the meeting places of pubs and cafes so important in creating a sense of community in British soap operas such as Coronation Street (Tony Warren, 1960-present, UK).

Although The Bill drew on a tradition of notable British television police series from previous decades such as Dixon of Dock Green; Z Cars; and The Sweeney, unlike its predecessors, it had a large ensemble cast and there were no ‘stars’. Parallel narratives meant that the focus was never on only one or two members of the team. While Dixon of Dock Green is inextricably linked with George Dixon, Z Cars with Charlie Barlow, and The Sweeney with Jack Regan, viewers of The Bill would be harder pressed to name a single character or actor who exemplifies the series. DS/DI Frank Burnside is arguably the most memorable character of The Bill, but he does not exemplify the series in the way that he does in the spin-off series Burnside (Lizzie Mickery and Steve Griffiths, 2000, UK), that George Dixon does in Dixon of Dock Green and that Jack Regan does in The Sweeney.

One of the factors that impacts on the longevity and cultural embeddedness of The Bill 1984-1997 was a tradition of excellence in writing, direction, and technical production. In keeping with the gritty realism that typified the early years of The Bill, episodes were shot using a handheld M2 Ikegami camera. Camera shots, sometimes jerky and almost always from the viewpoint of a police officer, conveyed a sense of immediacy, familiar from news broadcasts, that helped to establish credibility in the eyes of viewers. Naturalistic lighting was preferred and rehearsals were minimal or non-existent. Editing techniques featured long takes with the camera panning from character to character rather than the more traditional shot-reverse-shot cutting.

Lynch (1991, 76) reports that the ensemble cast and the necessity of producing 104 half hour episodes each year dictated a tight production schedule. Two separate and colour coded production teams were formed. Each team was headed by a producer and divided into teams that worked on episodes at various stages of production. Each team produced two episodes every two weeks. Each episode was allocated four weeks of preparation, five days of shooting, ten days of editing, and four days of sound dubbing. When necessary, as for example in the move from North Kensington to South Merton, a third team was used to create a stockpile of episodes.

Episode ideas, in the form of a two or three paragraphed outline, were provided by scriptwriters, and considered at weekly script meetings attended by the Executive Producer, other producers, script editors, assistant script editors, police advisors (ex-Metropolitan Police officers) and the project coordinator. Scriptwriters were asked, after outlines had been considered for dramatic content, procedural credibility and the feasibility of shooting on a five-day schedule, to provide a three-page storyline. If the storyline fitted relevant criteria the writer was asked to provide a full script. Scriptwriters were expected to research their storylines in some detail. This involved visits to police stations, courts, social service agencies and hospitals. Attention to correct police procedure was considered essential and was ensured by the presence of two police advisers who organised actors’ visits to real police stations to introduce them to police operations, procedures and duties. The names of characters were checked against those of serving police officers. Such protocols, combined with acceptance and approbation from the Metropolitan Police, helped to mirror the realism of British policing that was so important in audience acceptance of the series.

Geoff McQueen (the original writer and a driving force behind the program) said:

We agreed that it would always be the police officer’s story, that nothing should be shown without one of our police men or women being there… we also agreed to keep out of the police officers’ homes. I wanted to see how it was affecting their work at the station rather than how the work at the station was affecting them at home. Immediately you go into the police officers’ private lives, it’s the kiss of death to police series, as I see it. (cited in Kingsley 1994, 25)

Although it was episodic rather than serialised, in its location and subject matter The Bill did not rely completely on established television police generic conventions but shared common strands with examples of the British soap opera genre such as Coronation Street (Tony Warren, 1960–present, UK) and EastEnders (Julia Smith and Tony Holland, 1985-present, UK): an urban working class neighbourhood, a clearly defined hierarchy and a focus on the minutiae and topicality of daily life. This, in a national culture that embraces the soap opera genre in print, radio and television media, is a factor in the longevity and institutionalisation of the series. In addition, unlike most contemporary television police series, The Bill incorporated, in many episodes, an element of the humour more commonly seen in British situation comedies. In Blind Alleys, Clogged Roads (1987) Inspector Roy Galloway’s arrest of a taxi driver caused a traffic jam in front of the police station. In Beer and Bicycles (1989) Chief Inspector Derek Conway (Ben Roberts) followed several false trails while searching the station for caches of alcohol and PC Tony Stamp (Graham Cole) objected to having to transport a flatulent police dog in his Area Car. Dancers (1996) involved a tea dance for retired police officers, a disappearing rabbit, a disrupted bridal celebration, a stolen car, a tray of cream cakes, and a villain who fled (‘had it on his dancers’) after a bank robbery in the 1970s but returned for his granddaughter’s wedding.

The Bill differed from other television police series in its approach to characterisation. Laing quotes the casting director of Z Cars’ first series as saying:”Before we began rehearsals I spent a clear week with [the actors] discussing the complete social background of every character – age, parentage, why they were in the police force, what they wanted out of it. We filled it all in, in great detail. Not one of these blokes would say a line without knowing why he was saying it” (1991, 128). In contrast, Kingsley (1994, 45) quotes Pat Sandys, one of the producers of The Bill, as saying, ‘When a new regular joins, he or she is given the character’s professional background – then that actor is left to find his own space’. Some actors were comfortable with this approach. Others were not, and their characters quickly disappeared from the personnel list at Sun Hill. The character that emerged was usually a meld of the producer’s vision and the actor’s interpretation.

From episode 1 of Series 1 (Funny Ol’ Business-Cops and Robbers, 1984) until the end of Series 3 (Not Without Cause, 1987), The Bill consisted of weekly fifty-minute episodes. Episode 1 of Series 4 (Light Duties, 1988) heralded, in a direct challenge to established British soap operas such as Coronation Street, the era of two twenty-five minute episodes per week. Some five years later, with the transmission of episode 1 of Series 9 (Dying Breed, 1993), The Bill’s twice-weekly broadcasts were increased to thrice weekly twenty-five minute episodes on the basis of favourable ratings. Australian viewers were introduced to The Bill in 1986 courtesy of the government funded Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC). The series achieved consistently favourable ratings and has been a staple series on the ABC ever since.

In 1997 Michael Chapman’s position as Executive Producer was taken over by Richard Handford, whose brief was to revamp the series in an effort to reverse falling ratings. As The Bill was ITV’s pivotal program, broadcast three times a week, it was considered particularly important that the series regain and increase audience ratings. Figures quoted in the popular press at the time showed that The Bill’s audience shared had dropped from 50% to 40% within a year. The men who directed the revamp – apart from Handford, who had been a producer under Michael Chapman – had a solid background in the soap opera genre so it was perhaps unsurprising that they turned to the conventions of that genre and moved The Bill in a new direction that focused less on a semi-documentary style of police procedure and more on sensationalist and farfetched storylines that left little to viewers’ imaginations. The new direction for The Bill, while somewhat atypical of the masculine television police genre, confirmed the ability of the series to adapt to changes in industry and audience expectations and to challenge, with its interplay of repetition and difference, the generic boundaries of the television police series.

While acknowledging the traditional high production values and the meticulous writer influenced plots which aided the institutionalisation of The Bill, the new regime argued that viewers wanted to learn about the experience of being a Metropolitan police officer in the 1990s, and that such experience included racism, alcoholism, sexual harassment and sexual relationships in officers’ professional and private lives. They argued, too, that viewers wanted younger, more attractive officers in the corridors of Sun Hill. As there was no increase in budget, this meant that by April 2003 over 20 regular characters were written out of the series.

In early 2002 Paul Marquess (Alas, Vegas, 1998; Picking up The Pieces, 1998; Brookside, 1999-2001) was appointed Executive Producer. His brief from ITV, as reported in multiple media channels, was to boost ratings, and his experience was solidly in the soap opera genre. Perhaps unsurprisingly, his strategy to gain audience share incorporated elements of soap opera that went far beyond those introduced by Handford. All pretence at achieving quality television was dropped. Marquess claimed in the print media that ITV and Thames Television had decided the serial aspects of The Bill were very successful and that audience research supported this belief. His appointment reputedly included very definite instructions to turn the series into a serial. The Guardian reported his view that The Bill was a product held in affection by viewers: “No one here wants to piss that away and it gets 7m viewers as it is, but if you look at The Bill’s core demographic, it is white men over 50. And guess who it was being written, produced and directed by? White men over 50. I’m not here to slag it off, as there have been some terrific episodes. I’m here to make it more relevant”. (Marquess 2002) Marquess revamped the official website of The Bill (http://www.thebill.com), terminated the official on-line fan forum and erased all mention of program history prior to his regime. In April 2001, he introduced a regular electronic newsletter alerting fans to upcoming developments and new characters. Despite claims in the May 2001 electronic newsletter that ‘crime stories will now come in a wide variety of shapes, sizes and durations - much more like real life in fact’, long term fans argued that the only crimes visible on The Bill were the sensationalism and simplistic storylines combined with stereotypical and shallow characterization that changed their favourite series beyond recognition and altered the interplay of repetition and difference so drastically that The Bill appeared to have migrated to the feminine soap opera genre. Fans who visited the official website of The Bill were invited to subscribe to the newsletter to keep abreast of developments. However after a few months the newsletter was relegated to the backburner and made only sporadic appearances. On the rare occasions it did appear Australian and New Zealand fans (several months behind the UK) were infuriated to discover that it was written for the British fandom and contained major spoilers (exposition of as yet unseen storylines) in relation to events at Sun Hill.

The Bill post-1997 continued to redefine the boundaries of British television police genre with its production techniques and intensive schedules. Both Handford and Marquess, aware of budgetary constraints and logistical requirements, continued the use of colour-coded production units. The production site remained based at South Merton and, as in the Chapman era, the show remained the star, but the post-1997 years were notable for an increased use of actors from soap opera programs. The focus of an episode or storyline was often on one or two members of the team and the use of parallel narratives became less frequent. Handford, for instance, was responsible for the Fox/Santini storyline (Deep End, The Party’s Over, Bang Bang You’re Dead, and Team Spirit, 1998), in which PC Eddie Santini sexually harassed PC Rosie ‘Rosebud’ Fox; and for the DS Beech as bent copper storyline (The Rate For The Job and The Personal Touch, 1998; Walking On Water, 1999; Supping With The Devil and Touch And Go, 2000; Fake Fur, In Safe Hands, Find The Lady, Fifty-Fifty, and The River, 2000) which culminated in the removal of Chief Supt Brownlow and most of the Sun Hill CID team (All Fall Down, Parts 1 & 2, 2000).

Handford was also responsible for the return of mean and menacing DCI Frank Burnside (Cast No Shadow, 1998), last seen as a DI at Sun Hill in 1993, and for Badlands (1999), in which PC Dave Quinnan was beaten by a fifteen-strong gang of local youths at the local sports club. Conforming to pre-watershed conventions, the severity of the beating was emphasised through the reactions of the characters involved rather than an explicit depiction of the incident. Viewers saw PC Quinnan hit the panic button on his radio, causing the alarm to sound in the CAD room, and heard the horrifying sounds of the attack. They saw PC George Garfield’s frustration at being locked outside the club, unable to rescue his colleague. They saw the reaction of police officers in the CAD room at Sun Hill. Badlands was the beginning of a storyline, extending into the Marquess era, that involved a competition between PCs Quinnan and Garfield for the affections of a nurse, the resignation of PC Garfield, an affair between PCs Quinnan and Polly Page (Lisa Geoghan), the break up of PC Quinnan’s marriage, the rejection of his marriage proposal to PC Page, his breakdown and transfer and her breakdown and extended sick leave. Stephanie crystallised the thoughts of many fans in regard to the Handford era, writing, in a comment posted to the BillFans.net forum on February 6, 2003: “I feel… that once Handford had let certain genies out of bottles there was no way they could be put back, and I also feel the nineties audience just wanted a lot more personal stuff than an eighties one did”. Post-1997 The Bill gradually changed from a series to a serial in the television soap opera tradition. Although this was explicitly attributed to falling ratings, it was also an implicit acknowledgment not only of the fragmentation of audiences due to an increasing diversity of media channels but also of Feuer’s (2007, 27) argument that ‘the distinction between ‘serialised’ [with some continuing story arcs] and ‘series’ television that once defined the difference between daytime and prime-time television formats no longer really exists’.

Episode titles were abandoned in 2002 when Marquess took over and storylines often covered ten or more episodes. Romantic relationships and sexual exploration took centre stage. However, given that British culture embraces the soap opera genre, this probably saved The Bill from cancellation. Marquess was unrepentant about changing the program. He insisted that the focus would remain firmly on crime, but that The Bill would show how crime affected the characters on a personal as well as professional level. Much of the iconography embedded during the Chapman era was replaced. This was partly due to the need to mirror changes in uniforms, equipment, vehicles, and identification codes within the Metropolitan Police force and partly to signify a change in the generic interplay of repetition and difference. The iconic plodding feet seen in the credits disappeared in early 1998 and were replaced with iconic police images such as epaulettes and hats. Thereafter the title sequence, credits and logo that established the program as a recognisable example of the British television police genre were changed on a regular basis.

As a result of the changes instituted by Marquess, actors no longer had the freedom to create their own characters. Several actors left the series after disagreements over the direction their characters’ lives were taking. Many more were removed as a result of sensational storylines that disposed of large numbers of officers (the exposure of DS Beech as a bent copper and the Sun Hill station firebombing). By 2003 The Bill had effectively changed its audience profile from ‘white men over 50’ to a younger demographic and had doubled its target audience in the 16-34 year old bracket. Marquess (cited in Tibballs 2003, 13) said ‘serialisation has delivered a younger audience and a much bigger female audience’. His words underline the validity of Pearson’s assertion:

The increasing fragmentation of the audience… meant that a programme’s demographic profile counted for more than sheer numbers, with advertisers seeking the ‘right’ viewers, those with disposable income and inclined to spend it… by the end of the twentieth century demographic thinking had become the norm among industry executives. (2007, 15)

Both Handford and Marquess abandoned short episodes in favour of one-hour episodes. Although audience research indicated that viewers liked tight half hour storylines, the rationale given by production executives for the expanded episode format was that it enabled producers to meet contemporary audience demand to develop characters’ personal lives and that it served as a platform for stronger and more challenging storylines. In 2002 Marquess challenged television police genre boundaries by changing The Bill from a series to a serial. Episodes were no longer given titles but were assigned numbers. Ep 1 dealt with an undercover operation in a lap-dancing club. Ep 2 introduced the race riots storyline that resulted in Chief Inspector Conway’s death in a car bombing, and the deaths of a number of officers in the firebombing of Sun Hill police station.

Transmission frequency in Britain was subject to scheduling variations but in Australia the ABC continued to broadcast new episodes every Tuesday and Saturday nights, except when a block of eight Tuesday nights during November 2003-January 2004 was taken over by MIT: Murder Investigation Team (Paul Marquess, 2003-2004, UK), a spin-off of The Bill. From early 2008 the ABC dropped the Tuesday night transmission and presented a ‘double bill’ of back to back episodes. Although regulatory authorities prohibit depictions of graphic violence in The Bill’s pre-watershed timeslot, both Handford and Marquess oversaw storylines that dealt with issues of extreme violence. In an attempt to boost ratings, both producers also focussed on the personal lives of Sun Hill police officers and emphasized aspects of modern living such as drug taking, sexual harassment, child pornography, personal vendettas, murder, extramarital activity, and divorce. While fans were not happy with the direction taken by both producers, the most virulent fan criticism was reserved for Marquess. Australian fan sdbrown wrote on the Billfans.net forum on February 6, 2003:

A key criticism of Marquess has been his use of ‘controversial’ storylines. I guess this depends on what one considers to be ‘controversial’ - personally, I have no problem with storylines about gay police officers, corrupt police officers, or police infighting, because in actual fact all are aspects of police work and the police lifestyle. A friend of mine who worked for the NSW police told me many stories about the extremely political, competitive, and harsh nature of the police… On a personal level as a fan, I enjoy watching my favourite show, whilst undergoing significant change, remain an entertaining, engaging, and relevant TV show. Like everything in life, a TV show must change and grow if it is to survive, and I believe The Bill is doing this.

Marquess instituted regular story conferences at which he indicated how future storylines were to be delineated. The pre-1997 refusal to explore the private lives of Sun Hill police officers was vetoed, with the result that well crafted crime solving gave way to gratuitous groping and clichéd coupling. It was noticeable that by 2003 many former writers and directors had left the series. However, post-2005 under Jonathan Young, the interplay of repetition and difference changed to incorporate more elements of the original police procedural concept. In order to accommodate grittier storylines ITV announced in January 2009 that the program would be shifted to a weekly post watershed slot in the UK.

Another of the factors that impacted on the longevity and cultural embeddedness of The Bill was a tradition of incorporating humour – sometimes subtle, sometimes blatant – into episodes and storylines. This, too, almost disappeared post-1997. As kerry holmes_protégé noted wryly on the Billfans.net forum on May 2, 2003:

In the good old days The Bill had a sense of humour and irony. Now whenever I laugh during an episode I’m not sure if that’s the intended effect or just woefully bad scripting.

Nevertheless, there were some humorous moments. Some, particularly in the Marquess era (exemplified by the following example), were centred around dialogue, as when Sgt Craig Gilmore and PC Nick Klein watched PC Cathy Bradford pole dancing during a covert operation. Klein said: ‘Well seriously though Craig, doesn’t she do anything for ya?’ Gilmore replied: ‘Look, I’m just more interested in the pole, alright?’ (Ep 1, 2002)

Not everyone was happy with the changes in form and content. In Britain, media reports indicated that audience share dropped from 9.74 million for the week ending 15 June 1997 to 8.89 million for the week ending 14 June 1998. Ratings at this time indicated an audience share that fluctuated between 42% and 32%. Research indicated that viewers liked The Bill and its format of a single story contained in each 30-minute episode, which allowed them to dip in and out of the series. Journalist Stephanie Bentley (1998, n.p.) reported that John Hardie, ITV’s marketing and commercial director, announced a three-month heavyweight promotional campaign for a ‘new, improved’ version of The Bill, one that explicitly advertised a change in generic conventions. One-hour specials, allowing more time for character development, and the use of continuing storylines to keep viewers hooked, were planned. Hardie promised that authenticity would not be lost, arguing, ‘The Bill is not a soap. It is an authentic police drama. We don’t want kitchen sink drama, we want crime stories.’ Fans saw the situation somewhat differently. One, anon, argued cynically on the Billfans.net forum on March 6, 2003:

The answer to why more people watch The Bill now is simple. The show now is watched not only by the type of viewer who watched it years ago and watches it for the crime, but also by another very large audience: the ’soap viewer’- the result is a very high following. Unfortunately there’s no shortage of the ’soap viewer’ wanting to watch the latest sensationalist story.

Despite tension between audiences in an increasingly diverse digital environment, Marquess’s strategy was successful in attracting and maintaining audience figures. In October 2003 he celebrated twenty years of The Bill with a live episode that was transmitted in Britain from two broadcast units at the studio and used 104 technical crewmembers in six production teams and 22 cameras rather than the usual 24 technical crewmembers, one production team and one camera. Media reports indicated that ratings averaged 9.9 million (peaking at 10.4 million in the final 15 minutes) with a 40% audience share. Shortly afterward, in March 2004, The Sun announced that, in a 200 million pound deal, ITV1 had ordered 480 new episodes of The Bill. Nigel Pickard, head of ITV drama, told The Sun that the deal was done in order to stop rival networks poaching the series. Five years later, in 2009, media reported that The Bill, at the heart of the ITV1 schedule, was to be repositioned in a weekly post watershed transmission (http://www.thebill.com/productionnews/articledetail/item_100012.htm). It seems that, in the evolution of The Bill, pushing generic boundaries, attracting a soap opera audience and acknowledging industry trends has been successful.

Summary

Since its inception as a series the British television police drama The Bill has regularly redefined the boundaries of the television police genre in relation to production values, characterisation, memorable characters and the creation of an active fandom. From 1984 to 2004, The Bill challenged generic boundaries, moving within and from a police procedural format notable for authenticity and gritty realism to a hybrid that combined police procedure with soap opera elements. From 1984 to 1997 it was well known for its authenticity and gritty realism, for its production values and for its storylines.

However, falling ratings dictated a series redefinition and post-1997 The Bill attracted a number of audiences, the main ones of which were long-term fans (many of whom had grown up with The Bill) and soap opera viewers with different expectations shaped by familiarity with British soap operas such as Coronation St and Eastenders. Long-term fans looked for quality drama; the soap opera audience looked for sensationalism. The existence of such diverse audiences showed that The Bill, regardless of its age and thousands of episodes, was still evolving, still challenging generic boundaries, and still balancing the interplay of repetition and difference. With its institutionalised geographic and culturally specific setting, the series provides a readymade bridge between the traditionally masculine genre of police drama and the feminine one of soap opera and highlights a pathway to contemporary industry realities.

Bibliography

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Feuer, Jane. 2007. “The Lack of Influence in Thirtysomething” in The Contemporary Television Series, edited by Michael Hammond and Lucy Mazdon. Edinburgh University Press,.

Fiske, John. 1987. Television Culture. London: Routledge.

The Guardian.co.uk http://media.guardian.co.uk/mediaguardian/story/0,7558 ,651855,00.html (accessed 19 February 2002).

iTV.com. 2009. “ITV Announces a new format for The Bill” 23 Jan http://www.thebill.com/productionnews/articledetail/item_100012.htm (accessed 4 March 2009).

iTV.co. 2009. “The Bill Wins Award for Diversity in Drama” 23 Feb http://www.thebill.com/videos/videodetail/item_200014.htm (accessed 4 March 2009).

Kingsley, Hilary. 1994. The Bill: The First Ten Years. London: Boxtree.

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Lynch, Tony. 1992. The Bill: The Inside Story of the Successful Police Series Seen on ABC TV. Crows Nest, NSW: ABC Enterprises.

McQueen, David. 1998. Television: A Media Student’s Guide. London: Arnold.

McLean, G. 2002. “From corner shop to cop shop”, Guardian, 18 February 2002.

Neale, Steve. 1980. Genre (London: BFI Publishing, 1980).

Pearson, Roberta. 2007. “The Writer/Producer in American Television”, in The Contemporary Television Series, edited by Michael Hammond and Lucy Mazdon. Edinburgh University Press.

Thomas, Lyn. 1997. “In Love with Inspector Morse,” in Feminist Television Criticism: A Reader, edited by Charlotte Brunsdon, Julie D’Acci and Lynn Spigel, (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 1997).

Tibballs, Geoff. 2003. The Complete Low-down on 20 Years at Sun Hill Sydney: ABC Books.

Tulloch, Joh. 200. Watching Television Audiences: Cultural Theories and Methods. London: Arnold.

Teleography

Blue Heelers 1994-2006. Hal McElroy and Tony Morphett, Seven Network, Australia.

Burnside 2000. Lizzie Mickery and Steve Griffiths, ITV, UK.

Car 54, Where Are You? 1961-1963. Nat Hiken, NBC, USA.

Coronation Street 1960-present. Tony Warren, Granada Television, UK.

Dixon of Dock Green 1955-1976, Ted Willis, BBC, UK.

Division 4 1969-1976. Lynn Bayonas and Marcus Cole, Nine Network, Australia.

Dragnet 1951-1959. Jack Webb, NBC, USA.

Eastenders 1985-present. Julia Smith and Tony Holland, BBC, UK.

Heartbeat 1992-2009. Patrick Harbinson and Stephen Leather, ITV, UK.

Hill Sreet Blues 1981-1987. Steven Bochco and Michael Kozoll, NBC, USA.

Homicide 1964-1976. Lynn Bayonas, Seven Network, Australia.

Inspector Morse 1987-2000. Colin Dexter, ITV, UK.

Law and Order 1990-present. Dick Wolf, NBC, USA.

Miami Vice 1984-1989. Anthony Yerkovich, NBC, USA.

MIT:Murder Investigation Team 2003-205. Paul Marquess, ITV, UK.

NYPD Blue 1993-2005. Steven Bochco and David Milch, ABC, USA.

The Professionals 1977-1983. Brian Clemens, LWT, UK.

The Sweeney 1975-1978. Ian Kennedy Martin, Euston Films, UK.

Z Cars 1962-1978. Troy Kennedy Martin, BBC, UK.

Author Bio

Dr Margaret Rogers is an Independent Scholar. She completed her doctoral dissertation, ‘Previously on The Bill: Factors in the longevity of a British television police series’, in 2004. She holds undergraduate and postgraduate Business degrees majoring in Organisational Communication and Communication. Her research projects encompass pub rock, masculinity and Australian identity; the impact of the ‘ten pound’ migrants on Australian popular music; Australian media and cultural identity in the 1970s; Australian television series; television police series in Australia, Europe and the USA; slash fiction and the television police series; and virtual communities in fandom. She is currently writing a crime novel, the first in a series featuring the Australian Federal Police, set in Canberra.

Contact Email: margaret.rogers2@bigpond.com

Abstract

This paper argues that television articulates an operation of power that can be usefully conceptualised through the Deleuzian notion of control. Drawing on the writings of Gilles Deleuze and other French philosophers, the paper examines television’s cultural and technological force through the notion of control with specific reference to the television mockumentary. Through a discussion of the Australian mockumentary We Can Be Heroes (Chris Lilley 2005) the paper also outlines the capacity of television to offer opportunities of resistance to its operations of control. Beginning with an acknowledgement of Deleuze’s position on the role of television (cf short essays 1995a; 1995b, 1995c), this paper proposes that televisual control holds the potential for a mode of “inhabited resistance”. Exploring the mockumentary television mode and its theorisation, the paper develops the concept of inhabited resistance to describe a complicit, pragmatic and creative formation of resistance. This type of resistance works from within the televisual operations of control. Generated from control and unable to escape it, the relation of control and inhabited resistance assists in describing the formation and practice of the television mockumentary as an idiosyncratic and particular televisual form.

Introduction

Written and performed by Australian comedian Chris Lilley, We Can Be Heroes is a six part mockumentary first screening in Australia on the ABC television network in 2005. Following the stories of five characters who have each been nominated for the annual Australian of the Year awards, We Can Be Heroes is a biting, blackly comic satire on contemporary Australian culture and values. Lilley plays each of the characters, and the series never strays from the strictly documentary style and aesthetic, which is a feature of the mockumentary. In this paper We Can Be Heroes is employed as an example illuminating television’s connection to the contemporary operation of power, described by Gilles Deleuze, as one of control (1995a; 1995b; 1995c). The particular resonance of the mockumentary with the quintessential television practices of documentation, observation and surveillance allows us to consider television’s operation of control: for the mockumentary explicitly calls into question television’s capacity to capture and broadcast real events. In this way, television mockumentary can be viewed as reflexively addressing the medium’s technological qualities. Connected to the spread of reality television, and with a common ancestry in documentary practice and technique, the mockumentary tells us much about the state of Western television in the early 21st century. In particular, it is in the mockumentary form that we can observe television’s potential to offer up formations of resistance to the operation of control, what I term here “inhabited resistance”. While the question of resistance in television studies can be seen as somewhat problematic, here I offer the concept of inhabited resistance to describe pragmatic, creative televisual practices and movements of resistance.[1]

The Age of the Mockumentary?

The mockumentary is now a recognisable and popular television style. As such, it invites further consideration both in terms of specific programs like We Can Be Heroes, as well as the way in which the television practice of mockumentary may be theorised. Looking back at the past few years of television production, we can observe an increase in the production of television mockumentaries. In Australia alone we have seen We Can Be Heroes and its later counterpart Summer Heights High (Chris Lilley 2007, ABC TV), as well as Frontline (Working Dog 1994–5, ABC TV; 1997), Kath and Kim (Jane Turner and Gina Riley 2002–4, ABC TV; 2007, Seven Network) and The Librarians (Robyn Butler and Wayne Hope 2007 ABC TV). Similarly, the form is evident overseas with Britain’s The Office (Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant 2001–2003, BBC TV), together with Arrested Development (Mitchell Hurwitz 2001–2003, Fox) and Curb Your Enthusiasm (Larry David 1999; 2000–-present, HBO) in the United States. These television mockumentaries have precedents in film, with productions such as Rob Reiner’s infamous This is Spinal Tap (1984, Embassy Pictures, USA), as well as the later works of Christopher Guest such as Best in Show (2000, Warner Brothers, USA), Waiting for Guffmann (1997, Sony Pictures, USA) and A Mighty Wind (2003, Warner Brothers, USA).

As its name suggests, the mockumentary is constructed using the documentary style, and it mocks both the characters and scenarios it presents, as well as documentary’s traditional, social, realist functions. These features have been summarised by John Corner as documentary’s ‘project of democratic civics’, its ‘journalistic inquiry’ mode, and ‘documentary as radical interrogation and alternative perspective’ (Corner 2002, 259). What happens when documentary becomes mockumentary is analysed at length by Roscoe and Hight (2001). They note that while the central function of the mockumentary is parody, there is an ‘ambivalence’ and ‘ambiguity’ to this parody, whereby the mockumentary generates both ‘contempt’ and ‘sympathy’ towards the object of its parody (2001, 30). They also observe that ‘parodic texts talk to a knowing viewer’, working as parody ‘only if we are familiar with the codes and conventions of documentary and its serious intent’ (2001, 31). Roscoe and Hight classify three levels of mockumentary. ‘Parody’ focuses on an aspect of popular culture rather than documentary practice (2001, 68). ‘Critique’ includes some critique of documentary practice (2001, 69) and ‘deconstruction’ involves a sustained critique of the documentary (2001, 72). Roscoe and Hight, in effect, are defining a genre, one that reflexively references the documentary through a comic practice. However, as well considering mockumentary in terms of genre, I would argue it is productive to consider it more broadly, as a television practice or style. This allows us to engage with a mockumentary series such as We Can Be Heroes in terms of what it demonstrates about the current field of television, not only in terms of content and genre, but also in terms of plays of force, power and the televisual mobilisation of resistance.

This perspective resonates with John Corner’s identification of a ‘postdocumentary’ culture of television (2002). In his essay, Corner observes that there has been a ‘radical dispersal of documentary energies across the schedules’ (2002, 263). We can understand mockumentaries (as comedies that utilise a documentary style) as connected to the radical dispersal Corner describes. While he does not specifically mention the mockumentary form, what he describes as the most recent transformation in documentary style – the ‘documentary as diversion’ (2002, 255-269) – connects strongly with We Can Be Heroes and other television mockumentaries. So as a fictional comedy, the veracity of We Can Be Heroes, as a truthful account of supposedly everyday Australian heroes, is not the source of its success or appeal. However, We Can Be Heroes also employs the aesthetic style of the documentary that Corner defines as ‘documentary as journalistic enquiry and exposition’ (2002, 259) with the structuring mode of ‘reporting’ where the camera functions as a ‘witness to visual evidence’ (Corner 2002, 259).

We Can Be Heroes is performed outside the traditional three camera sitcom studio, without a live audience or laugh track, instead using location shooting and thus coding its images with the authenticity associated with the documentary function. We Can Be Heroes also employs the unseen narrator typical of documentary, using the authoritative voiceover of well-known Australian journalist Jennifer Byrne to connect the stories of the five protagonists. It is this combination that produces We Can Be Heroes in the style of the mockumentary (rather than a traditional TV sitcom) and is arguably the source of its attraction for television audiences, as well as for television studies.

Corner’s description of the dispersal of documentary energy across the television schedule (2002), visible in the mockumentary form, is particularly relevant with regard to television’s operations of control. That is, what Corner describes as “documentary energy” (2002) can be understood as the disciplinary procedure of observation. As he notes in some earlier writing, ‘[t]he idea of unseen observation’ is ‘central to documentary aesthetics’ (Corner 1996, 85). In documentary’s journalistic, reporting mode the role of the television camera is to “impartially” observe incidents and occurrences, providing a record of them in audiovisual form.

Corner’s characterisation of such procedures as “energy” is particularly suggestive in terms of my present discussion. If, in the contemporary television landscape the documentary impulse to observe now operates as energy, it is potentially able to move and insert itself into various television styles and formats. This allows the observational, surveillance practice of the traditional documentary mode to infuse other genres and television practices. Thus, images and sounds are produced that might perform different functions, with different effects to those of the traditional mode of the documentary. In understanding the mockumentary as an adaptation of the documentary impulse for surveillance and observation, we can use the form as an example for discussing television’s technological operations of control, as well as its potential for offering a mode of inhabited resistance.

Television: A technology of control

The potential connection between television and control invites further investigation. In Deleuze’s discussion in ‘Letter to Serge Daney’ (1995a) he comments on the relationship between television and cinema, highlighting their differences through television’s operations of control. Together with some of Deleuze’s other short writings, this essay enables us to see more clearly the resonances between television and control under consideration here.

Deleuze defines the differences between television and film in this essay in terms of questions of form and function. Cinema is an aesthetic form, while, in comparison, TV is characterised by a social function: a consequence of its operations of control. As Deleuze describes: “TV’s social functions … stifle its potential aesthetic function. TV is, in its present form, the ultimate consensus: it’s direct social engineering, leaving no gap at all between itself and the social sphere, it’s social engineering in its purest form”. (1995a, 74) In his essay, Deleuze sees TV’s social engineering, and its capacity to intervene directly in the social sphere, as significantly endangering cinema’s viability as a cultural and artistic form. Indeed, Deleuze somewhat gloomily notes that ‘it’s from television that there comes the new threat of a death of cinema’ (1995a, 75). Deleuze explains that this is ‘[b]ecause television is the form in which the new powers of “control” become immediate and direct’ (1995a, 75).

To clarify just what Deleuze means when he signals the concept of control we can look to his ‘Postscript on Control Societies’ (1995b, 177-182). Here Deleuze describes the society of control, drawing points of distinction with the operation of disciplinary power. Drawing from Michel Foucault’s powerful analysis of discipline (1977), Deleuze (1995a, 1995b, 1995c) argues that a change in social formations of power can be observed with the contemporary operation of control. We could summarise Foucault’s project in terms of his detailed description of mechanisms of disciplinary power (surveillance, observation), which are visible in various modern institutions (schools, prisons, hospitals), and have the correlative effect of making visible the resistive practices of delinquency (1977).

It is important to realise that the relation between discipline and control is not characterised by opposition, or a linear transition from one form to the other. Rather, there is a connection and overlap between the two forms. As Brian Massumi notes, in the society of control, ‘disciplinary command functions are not dismantled, but rather released. They disseminate and vary, coming to be even more finely distributed throughout the social field’ (1998, 56). Control, then, might be characterised as the intensive dispersal of particular disciplinary operations. Specifically, Deleuze discusses control through its transformed operations of force, its smoothing of boundaries, and as a mode of capitalism and production. More significantly, Deleuze’s comments also act as a starting point for formulating the concept of inhabited resistance which connects strongly with the television form of the mockumentary. In this paper, I consider how television can be understood as a technology of control in terms of these qualities. This grounds my discussion of how control is evident in the television mockumentary, as well as the potential realised in this form for inhabited resistance to televisual control.

Control operates through what Deleuze describes as processes of ‘modulation’ (1995b, 179). He observes how, ‘[c]ontrol is short-term and rapidly shifting, but at the same time continuous and unbounded, whereas discipline was long-term, infinite and discontinuous’ (Deleuze 1995b, 181). As Rodowick points out, here we can see a “wave-like” conception of force emerging, ‘[w]here the idea of waves or currents becomes the dominant conception of force’ (2001, 208). Hence, Deleuze’s observation that controls, in contrast to discipline, ‘are a modulation, like a self-transmuting molding continually changing from one moment to the next’ (1995b, 179).

This image of continual modulation is crystallised in Deleuze’s metaphor: [s]urfing has taken over from all the old sports’ (1995b, 180), a description that articulates the undulations and modulations of the operations of force in the control society. Clearly, there is a resonance that can be observed between control’s characteristics of force and television’s operations as a technology. Given television’s constitutive technical processes of scanning and transmission, Deleuze’s association of television with control would seem to be appropriate. Modulation and waves are also apt descriptions of the way the technology transmits a fluctuating stream of images and information. And in this technical description we find a resonance with the technological concept of liveness, as well as TV’s capacity to observe and broadcast “real” events, seemingly as they happen.

There is a strong relation between these technical capacities of television and the practice of documentary. That is, to varying degrees the premise of the documentary is that television observes, captures and broadcasts the “real world”. Television’s predilection for documenting the world, and the connected assumption that this is a worthwhile and interesting practice, is what is reflexively addressed by the mockumentary, with its frequently absurd and banal parodies of everyday life.

Connected to control’s modulating operation of force, Deleuze (1995b) describes a second characteristic of control as the smoothing out of institutional barriers. As Deleuze notes, ‘[w]e’re in the midst of a general breakdown of all sites of confinement – prisons, hospitals, factories, schools, the family’ (1995b, 178). He describes further how:

In disciplinary societies you were always starting all over again (as you went from school to barracks, from barracks to factory), while in control societies you never finish anything – business, training and military service being coexisting metastable states of a single modulation, a sort of universal transmutation. (Deleuze 1995b, 179)

Thus, in disciplinary societies there was a conceivable separation between institutions and spaces such as those of the family, school and work. With the boundaries between institutions and spaces that produce distinctive behaviours blurring, then individuals can be produced as child-student-worker in the open field of the control society. They modulate between each of these positions depending on the variable intensities of force at particular moments.[2]

These features of control also resonate with the technological operation of television. In its production and flow of images, television also has the capacity to smooth boundaries; between public space and private space (arguably anachronistic concepts), between local events and the saturating worldwide broadcast of them. The technology is mobile, with a reach that extends to all corners of the globe. Television has become an inescapable part of our culture, neatly described by Uricchio as “ubiquitous” (1998). TV transmits everything, from wars, floods and famines, to cats trapped up trees, throughout our social field. This means that all places and events in our contemporary culture are implicitly or explicitly “televisual”. They have the potential to receive a television broadcast and they are potential sites for the generation of new television images. By executing its technological mobility through an intense dispersal in our social and institutional fields, television is indeed a technology of control.

Despite the time that has passed since Deleuze made these comments regarding television and control, his essays remain useful starting points for considering contemporary television practice. We would no doubt question Deleuze’s privileging of cinema over television, and his use of aesthetic criteria to do so, together with his lack of consideration of cinema’s potential operations of control. However, the value of looking to these essays is not only the specific reference to televisual control. Deleuze’s discussions in these essays form part of his oeuvre, and the concepts I refer to here are more fully explored in his other writings, both individually and in collaboration with Felix Guattari (A Thousand Plateaus 1987; Foucault 1988). So, although we may have some minor reservations, these essays are valuable for initiating further discussion and as points from which to develop new analytical concepts.[3] For while television has clearly transformed as a cultural technology, in the intervening years I would argue that the technological operations of control have not waned, but rather, intensified.

Considering these characteristics of control, what is particularly incisive about We Can Be Heroes is that it holds up to ridicule the celebration of mediocrity and ordinariness on the very medium and technology that was part of the mobilisation of this strong vein in Australian culture in the first place. The role of television is clearly under the microscope in this, and other mockumentaries. For is it not through TV that audiences have become schooled and accepting of the dramatisation of the everyday life? In the now ubiquitous genres of reality TV, we can clearly observe the collapse of public and private domains which Deleuze notes is characteristic of the society of control. Writing on The Office Tara Brabazon neatly summarises one effect of such contemporary media practices: ‘[w]hen ordinary people are placed in an extra-ordinary situation and granted value and celebrity, cultural and critical literacies are devalued. Mediocrity is celebrated…the consequences of feted ordinariness are revealed’ (2004, 107). Indeed, as with The Office, We Can Be Heroes furthers our understanding of this aspect of contemporary media that Brabazon identifies. We Can Be Heroes satirises our culture’s tendency to place “ordinary” and “everyday” people in the spotlight, shifting the frequently unremarkable details of their daily lives into the public domain. In this way, not only is the public-private boundary irretrievably blurred, but their lives accrue the added value of celebrity, merely by being seen on television. And it is the disjunction between the characters’ growing belief in their own uniqueness, and the audience’s recognition of the absolute ordinariness that provides both the humour, and the pathos, of these programs.

We Can Be Heroes also utilises a flexible camera perspective, discarding the three camera set up traditionally found in studio based sitcoms. This means scenes can follow the characters wherever they go. As is the case with so much television documentary, the boundaries between public and private, inside and outside are fluid and open, meaning that nothing is out of bounds. Technologically, this feature of the documentary, and the mockumentary, connects to the operation of control, where television’s globalising, modulating force means traditional oppositional boundaries can be smoothed out through the technological production of the television image. The mockumentary then, adopts the same technique, but with the addition of its satirical intent it also questions the reality of such images.

Deleuze also describes the new procedures of the control society in terms of a “mutation in capitalism” (1995b, 180) in a way that resonates with television’s operations. Specifically, he comments on the contrasting capitalist modes of production between discipline and control:

[N]ineteenth-century capitalism was concentrative, directed towards production, and proprietorial… But capitalism in its present form is no longer directed toward production … It’s directed toward metaproduction. It no longer buys finished products or assembles them from parts. What it seeks to sell is services, and what it seeks to buy, activities. It’s a capitalism no longer directed toward production but toward products, that is, toward sales or markets. Thus it’s essentially dispersive, with factories giving way to businesses. (Deleuze 1995b, 180-81)

What Deleuze describes here is a widely accepted view of the changes in capitalism that have accompanied the explosion of consumer society since the mid-nineteenth century. Indeed, Massumi provides a succinct summary of this transformation in capitalism that supports Deleuze’s description when he states that, “[c]apitalism is now more processual than it is productive, more fundamentally energetic than object oriented” (1992, 134). We need look no further than the proliferation of media and mass communication technologies, including television, for the type of service, market-oriented capitalism that Deleuze identifies as characteristic of control.

Indeed, contemporary culture’s fetishization of fame for its own sake (seen for example in the celebrity figure of Paris Hilton) is placed under the microscope in We Can Be Heroes. For each character (all of them played by Chris Lilley) uses their nomination as a stepping-stone for seeking fame in an unrelated area. Canberra student Ricky Wong has invented a groundbreaking solar panel, but what he really wants is an acting career on the popular Australian television soap opera Home and Away (1988-present Seven Network). Foul-mouthed South Australian teenager Daniel Sims is donating his eardrum to his twin brother, but he wants to be a famous rapper.

Figure 1: Daniel and Nathan Sims. Source http://www.abc.net.au/tv/heroes/daniel/photos1.htm ©Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 2005.

Ex-policeman Phil Olivetti from Brisbane saved some children from a wayward jumping castle. He dreams of becoming a motivational speaker. Snobby Sydney schoolgirl J’aime King sponsors up to 80 children in the third world, but mistakenly believes she is supermodel material.

Figure 2: J’aime’s sponsor board. Source http://www.abc.net.au/tv/heroes/jamie/photos.htm ©Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 2005.

While middle-aged housewife Pat Mullins in Western Australia has perfected the little known sport of “rolling”, setting a world record in rolling from Perth to Fremantle and during the course of the series is preparing for her next challenge. In seeking entry into contemporary culture’s (and particularly television’s) machinic production of fame and celebrity, what we see here in the characters Chris Lilley develops and portrays is a microcosm of control’s capitalist metaproduction of activities and services, reproduced thematically in the mockumentary.[4]

By outlining some of control’s central characteristics, including its modulating operations of force, the smoothing of institutional and social boundaries, and new procedures of capitalism, this paper has highlighted connections and resonances between television and control. Moreover, if television has been instrumental in this fusing of public and private into a modulating open space, where the ordinary and everyday become prime fodder for surveillance, observation and display, then television might also have the potential to question and critique such practices of force and power. In We Can Be Heroes this happens with a vengeance, not only thematically, but also formally through the practice of mockumentary.

Not only does Deleuze’s description of the control society provide an instructive perspective on television’s operation as a contemporary technology, the theory of control can also generate a discussion about the potential for forming modes of resistance as part of television’s operation. In order to look at how a television mockumentary like We Can Be Heroes makes an operation of resistance to control visible, we can first consider in more detail the formation of resistance within the televisual operation of control.

Television Mockumentary as Inhabited Resistance

If the operation of control represents a shift in the formation and workings of social power, then it is possible also to consider the political dimension of this transformation. As We Can Be Heroes clearly demonstrates, the mockumentary has a great potential for cultural critique and political comment. This is the kind of process Michael Hardt might be referring to when he notes that ‘[t]he place of modern liberal politics has disappeared’ (1998, 142). Although, rather than simply bemoaning our deficit of political action, we can now (somewhat more optimistically) explore whether the places and spaces of politics may have shifted. Surely in our contemporary digital, media, image-affluent culture, forms and technologies like television offer opportunities for political and culturally resistive constructions.

Implicit in Hardt’s comment is that, with the transformation of the control society, oppositional critical positions are fast becoming both ineffectual and anachronistic. However, a more pertinent question is not whether control constructs an apolitical culture, but rather how the notion of politics and resistance changes with the emergence of the control society. What mockumentaries show us is that, in the televisual field of control, our entire conception of resistance must change, allowing us to see how movements and practices of resistance no longer work from an oppositional, outside position. Rather they “inhabit” the very forms they also resist.

Deleuze is not very optimistic about the possibility of constructing effective modes of resistance in the society of control.[5] His comments in shorter writings in this regard are fairly brief and a little speculative. In ‘Letter to Serge Daney’ Deleuze asks, ‘whether this control might be reversed, harnessed by the supplementary function opposed to power: whether one could develop an art of control that would be a kind of new form of resistance’ (1995a, 75). Deleuze also questions control’s politics of resistance in the conclusion of the ‘Postscript’ essay, asking whether trade unions still have a role to play, ‘or will they give way to new forms of resistance against control societies?’ (1995b, 182). Indeed in these writings he seems rather despondent at times about the consequences of control, somewhat pessimistically noting: “Compared with the approaching forms of ceaseless control in open sites, we may come to see the harshest confinement as part of a wonderful, happy past. The quest for “universals of communication” ought to make us shudder”. (Deleuze 1995c, 175) The central difficulty with the control society seems to be that there is no outside position from which resistance might be developed and maintained. With the smoothing out of boundaries and the operation of control no longer specific to particular institutions, there is no escape from control’s operations. Thus, indistinctness and flexibility in terms of critical positions also develop.

This connects to Deleuze’s point of dissatisfaction with television. Deleuze’s description of the technology allows for no “gap” between its operation and the “social sphere”. If that is the case, then it is extremely difficult to resist television’s operations, because, as a technology of control, television does not accommodate locations from which to escape or oppose its operation. However, rather than simply be defeated by the seemingly endless power of televisual control, we can also consider ways in which formations of resistance might be constructed to counter the intense and modulating forces of control.

Massumi describes control in terms of ‘the principle of complicity, or untranscendable control’ (1998, 58): a key point for any consideration of control and resistance. Deleuze hints at the type of complicit behaviours such resistance might encompass in his interview ‘Control and becoming’ (1995c): “It’s true that even before control societies are fully in place, forms of delinquency or resistance (two different things) are also appearing. Computer piracy and viruses, for example, will replace strikes and what the nineteenth century called ’sabotage’ (’clogging’ the machinery)”. (Deleuze, 1995c, 175) These comments by Deleuze suggest that the kind of resistive practice required for the operation of control is one generated from within the system, rather than from outside it.

This is a significant point in terms of control’s politics of resistance, and the suggestion is elaborated on further by Rodowick in his discussion of the resistive strategies appropriate to control, which he conflates with digital culture. He writes:

The question then is how to introduce some friction into “friction-free” capitalism… The ethics and tactics of the “digital underground” are exemplary in this respect: culture jammers, guerrilla media, cyberpunk culture, warez or software pirates, hackers and phone freaks all provide rich material for examining the creative possibilities that already exist for resisting, redesigning, and critiquing digital culture. (Rodowick 2001, 233-34)

Again, the types of resistive behaviours Rodowick describes are practices that inhabit and take advantage of a system, disrupting and resisting from a position within it. Such practices recognise the unavailability of an oppositional, outside critique.

By noting these examples’ complicit mode of operation and their “inside” relation with the system they are disrupting, we can see the potential of certain practices to produce new locations from which to operate in different ways to that which the system proscribes. As Rodowick notes, this is a “tactical” and “creative” response to the operations of control. However, it is important to emphasise here that the endpoint of such a complicit mode of resistance is that ultimately it is reassimilated into the modulating flows of capitalist control.

The practice of producing a mockumentary can be understood in these terms. That is, by infusing the televisual documentary style and practice of observation and surveillance with the comic tendencies of parody and satire, the mockumentary is a peculiarly disjunctive synthesis of comedy and documentary: it is both these things at once and the tension between the comic and documentary mobilises a creative, pragmatic televisual practice that can be conceptualised as an inhabited resistance. This tension between the comic and the documentary resistively inhabits the televisual field to produce a different form, a different televisual practice. That is, We Can Be Heroes is neither simply comedy nor documentary but combines elements of both into an unusual viewing experience. It is funny, dramatic and often uncomfortable viewing.

A good example of this is the comic pathos which emerges throughout the Ricky Wong storyline. There is comedy here in Ricky’s seemingly ludicrous efforts to play the lead indigenous character in the student musical, “Indigeridoo”. This comedy exists somewhat uneasily with the dramatic scenes between Ricky and his father (who is less than enthusiastic about his son following his acting dreams). So while We Can Be Heroes documents the difficult relationship between Ricky and his father without emphasizing any comedy, the other aspect of the Ricky storyline conforms to the comic mocking we would associate with the mockumentary. So we can see how the inclusion of the comic as part of the televisual documentation of Ricky Wong can be conceptualised as inhabited resistance. The comic inhabits the documentary, resisting its more serious impulses and connotations. In doing so, a new television form is created, the mockumentary. In this way we can see how the televisual field is resistively inhabited by the mockumentary, however, ultimately any transformation of television’s operations is only ever fleeting and transitory, in so far as it only lasts until the start of the following program.

As a concept, inhabited resistance resonates with Deleuze’s suggestions on the forms which resistance might take: ‘The key thing may be to create vacuoles of noncommunication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control’ (Deleuze 1995c, 175). Deleuze’s choice of words is significant here. That is, we may momentarily “elude control”, but we cannot escape it. Again, his comments point to a tactical and complicit practice of resistance, rather than an oppositional mode of operation. The need for tactical, complicit responses to control is also evident in Deleuze’s more explicit request for creativity to form part of control’s transformed relations of power and resistance. He declares: ‘Our ability to resist control, or our submission to it, has to be assessed at the level of our every move. We need both creativity and a people’ (Deleuze 1995c, 176).

Massumi also sees that there is potential for resistance in the society of control but specifies that it must take a particular form. He points out that such resistance ‘would define itself less as an oppositional practice than as a pragmatics of intensified ontogenesis’ (1998, 60). Massumi also comments on the particular characteristics of such a pragmatic form of resistance:

Productive interference patterns that fail to resonate with capitalist legitimation, either by excess or by deficiency or with humor, are at least momentarily unassimiliable by the supersystem … Tactical noncommunication might take a ritualistic form, mimicking the ritual legitimation of capitalist power, to very different effect – and affect. For it would not be sadistic but joyful, not exorcistic but invocational, calling forth what are, again from the point of view of the supersystem, vague and alien powers of collective existence whose determinations escape. (Massumi 1998, 61)

Again, we can see a reference to tactics here, as well as the potential of such tactics to encompass excess, humour and joy as ways of operating in a resistive relation to the processes of control. This is a point that it is useful to consider further in developing the concept of inhabited resistance for television, defined by pragmatic, tactical and complicit ways of operating in the control society. Moreover, Massumi’s description hints at the potential Michel de Certeau’s writing on the tactical practice of everyday life has for developing the concept of inhabited resistance for the society of control. The notion of everyday life being a tactical practice is thematically evident throughout most of the characters’ stories of We Can Be Heroes. For example, what the five protagonists have in common is a desire to inhabit their lives in different ways. They are striving to create new identities for themselves: Phil Olivetti as a motivational speaker, Ricky Wong as an actor, Daniel Sims as a rapper, Pat Mullins as a “roller” and J’aime King as a philanthropist turned celebrity. We see them creatively using the “heroic” events of their Australian of the Year nominations for different purposes. That is, they are tactically self-serving in their pursuit of fame.

In The Practice of Everyday Life (1984), de Certeau explores how everyday life can be understood as a “politics”. Through a consideration of the “tactical ways of operating” available to individuals in contemporary culture, his theory has some extremely productive resonances with Deleuze’s concept of control. De Certeau also points to the possible humour and joy that tactical practices of resistance can mobilise. Like Deleuze, de Certeau observes a transformation of the contemporary social field into a modulating and contingent space, describing both its freedoms and its intense, multiple procedures of control. De Certeau writes: “The system in which they [consumers] move about is too vast to be able to fix them in one place, but too constraining for them ever to be able to escape from it and go into exile elsewhere. There is no longer an elsewhere”. (de Certeau 1984, 40) Distinct from the quasi-criminal practices discussed by Rodowick and Deleuze, de Certeau’s ideas resonate with Massumi’s comments suggesting the political potential of a resistive practice of humour, as well as the overall joy this might produce. De Certeau points out that, ‘such a politics should inquire into the public… image of the microscopic, multiform, and innumerable connections between manipulating and enjoying, the fleeting and massive reality of a social activity at play with the order that contains it’ (de Certeau 1984, xxiv). Here de Certeau invokes a joyful, contingent mode of resistive practice, one that is part of the social field as well as using it to a different purpose. Such a practice is defined by a playful, creative relation, producing an alternative mode of existence.

De Certeau’s writing furthers the concept of an inhabited mode of resistance with some evocative images of tactical practice: ‘It poaches in them. It creates surprises in them. It can be where it is least expected. It is a guileful ruse’ (de Certeau 1984, 37). Moreover, de Certeau observes a potential connection between this mode of tactical practice and “wit”. By manipulating and enjoying the unexpected opportunities for resistance in the social field through ‘[c]ross-cuts, fragments, cracks and lucky hits in the framework of a system, consumers’ ways of operating are the practical equivalents of wit’ (de Certeau 1984, 38). Again, this theoretical observation is thematically and narratively evident in the journeys of the We Can Be Heroes characters. So often we see characters take advantage of a situation and twist it for their own personal ambition. Daniel Sims’ crude attempts at rapping for the camera during interviews is one example. Similarly, J’aime King’s continual selfish preening for the cameras, overshadowing her sponsoring of third world children is another instance of a manipulation of an individual opportunity for self-advancement. Whether or not they are successful is ultimately beside the point. It is in the attempt to manipulate an opportunity that we can observe a tactical, inhabited mode of resistance.

Figure 3: Phil Olivetti and the jumping castle. Source http://www.abc.net.au/tv/heroes/phil/photos.htm © Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 2005.

This engagement with critical theory allows us to now return to We Can Be Heroes with fresh eyes and concepts to better understand its significance in the television landscape, not simply as an increasingly popular television genre, but as a practice that highlights the capacity of television to accommodate tactical and resistive movements within its field of operation. Through the flexible utilisation of techniques of surveillance and observation in combination with the mockumentary’s comic, satirical tendencies, we can understand the mockumentary not only as “mocking” the documentary tradition, but also as one fulfilment of the televisual operation of control. That is, mockumentaries, such as We Can Be Heroes, can be described not only generically, but also as one way in which television reveals to us how the disciplinary impulses of documentary transform. That is, as part of the televisual operations of control, documentary combines its energies with other televisual practices such as humour. While I have noted a number of thematic and narrative examples here so far, we can also understand the mockumentary as a stylistic or aesthetic practice of inhabited resistance. The mockumentary’s comic tendencies infuse and inhabit the documentary practice of television observation that structures the look and feel of the series. It is in this practice that we can locate an operation of inhabited resistance.

Apart from the satire mobilised in the construction of the characters and the narrative, this mockumentary (and others like it) can be understood as “playing” with the forms and field of television production, albeit from a place within it. In other words, to recall de Certeau, the mockumentary is a tactical televisual practice of inhabited resistance. It draws on those quintessential features of television (the capacity to record and broadcast real people and events). Yet, as these practices increase and flow through the television field accompanying TV’s technological intensification of control, they infuse and combine with other forms, such as television comedy, creating new forms like the mockumentary. By seeing the mockumentary as a televisual practice of inhabited resistance, at once complicit with, yet also creatively resisting, television’s well-established practices, we can begin to comprehend the flexibility and potentially resistive characteristics of this form. This is most evident in the moments of awkward discomfort mobilised through the mockumentary’s fusion of comedy and drama. We can think particularly of the resolutions of the various characters’ stories. One of the scenes that is most difficult to watch is when Phil Olivetti’s deception of his family is exposed at the Australian of the Year ceremony in Canberra. Here, the mockumentary demonstrates its capacity to swiftly shift from comedy to drama. To a large degree, the flexibility in the tenor of the program allows allows the mockumentary to resist categorisation simply as comedy. We Can Be Heroes functions as cultural critique, drama, comedy and even sometimes horror. The boundaries between different television forms and the whole notion of genre becomes fluid, arguably in a way that corresponds with the smooth-striated institutional fluidity of the control society. As Brett Mills notes, ‘the conventional sitcom form has been repeatedly challenged in recent years’ (2004, 68). And indeed the television mockumentary represents a clear challenge to the sitcom.

By portraying its characters through the comic techniques of excess and exaggeration, to the point where some of them tip from the realm of the comic to the horrific and tragic, We Can Be Heroes also creatively inhabits audience expectations of the comic to produce a different formation. In this series, the mockumentary has a flexible relation between comedy and drama. We Can Be Heroes swings effortlessly between each of these different tenors. One minute the audience may be laughing, the next minute we can cringe in horror or feel genuine empathy for the characters. Phil Olivetti and J’aime King are both monstrously selfish and self-serving creations at whom we conceivably gape in horrified awe.

Figure 4: Pat and Terry Mullins. Source http://www.abc.net.au/tv/heroes/pat/photos.htm ©Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 2005.

In contrast, the gentler portrayals of Ricky Wong and Pat Mullins arguably evoke such empathy. Indeed, the passing away of Pat in the final episode is a stunning example of the way in which in the mockumentary, “the distinction between the ways in which the comedic and the serious are conventionally signalled have begun to be dismantled”. (Mills 2004, 68) Pat’s death was a particularly affecting moment, as was the earlier conflict between Ricky and his father regarding Ricky’s dream to follow his desire to act.

Figure 5: Ricky being dramatic. source http://www.abc.net.au/tv/heroes/ricky/photos.htm ©Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 2005.

In these instances We Can Be Heroes shifts away from the functions of parody, critique and deconstruction that Roscoe and Hight (2001) identify as characteristic of the mockumentary. Arguably then, this is a mockumentary that inhabits the mockumentary form while also resisting its comic tendencies in moments of true drama. Here, we can see the potential that lies in the practice of inhabited resistance for such movements to reflexively turn and twist in even more complicit play.

Conclusion

Arguably, the continuing popularity of mockumentary production tells us much about the television landscape at this time. Programs such as The Office, Curb your Enthusiasm, Arrested Development and We Can Be Heroes are as much about the specific characters and narratives they depict, as they are about the cultural and political force of contemporary television. By locating a discussion of the mockumentary within considerations of television’s technological operations of power, we can see certain resonances between content, form and style through the Deleuzian concept of control. If indeed television is a quintessential technology of control, then it is crucial that we consider the potential television holds for offering places and formations of resistance to control. What my discussion in this paper has shown is that even though television is strongly connected to the operation of control, such operations always hold possible complicit, and frequently playful, movements of resistance.

As the mockumentary demonstrates, in the technological operation of control our whole understanding of resistance must change, allowing us to see how resistance actually “inhabits” the very forms it resists. It acts as part of them, rather than from some outside, oppositional position. In a parasitic, pragmatic fashion, the potential for inhabited resistance accompanies all of television’s operations, and is made visible when the televisual field is disrupted and occupied in creative ways, that nonethless remain “inside” the televisual field. By recognising these technological and political capacities, we can see that despite certain claims to the contrary, television remains a peculiarly contemporary and vital technology.

Bibliography

Brabazon, T. 2004. ” ‘What have you ever done on the telly?’: The Office, (post) reality television and (post) work.” International Journal of Cultural Studies. Vol 8(1); 101-117.

Corner, J. 1996. The art of record: A critical introduction to documentary, Manchester; Manchester University Press.

Corner, J. 2002. “Performing the real: documentary diversions.” Television and New Media. Vol 3(3); 255-269.

Davis, W. 2006. Event TV: The production and inhabited resistance of images of control. PhD thesis, Central Queensland University.

DeCerteau, M. 1984. The practice of everyday life, Berkeley; University of California Press.

Deleuze, G. 1988. Foucault. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.

Deleuze, G. 1995a. “Letter to Serge Daney.” In Negotiations: 1972-1990. New York; Columbia University Press.

Deleuze, G. 1995b. “Postscript on control societies” In Negotiations: 1972-1990. New York; Columbia University Press.

Deleuze, G. 1995c. “Control and becoming.” In Negotiations: 1972-1990; New York; Columbia University Press.

Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari, 1987. A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.

Dienst, R. 1994. Still life in real time: theory after television. Durham, Duke University Press.

Foucault, M. 1977. Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison, London; Penguin.

Hardt, M. 1995. “The withering of civil society.” Social Text. Vol 45; 27-44.

Hardt, M. 1998. “The global society of control.” Discourse. Vol 20(3); 139-153.

Heath, S. 1990. “Representing television.” In Logics of television: essays in cultural criticism. edited by P. Mellencamp, London, BFI.

Massumi, B. 1992. A user’s guide to capitalism and schizophrenia: deviations from Deleuze and Guattari,.Cambridge Massachussetts, MIT Press.

Massumi, B. 1998. Requiem for our prospective dead (toward a participatory critique of capitalism power). In Deleuze and Guattari: New mappings in politics, philosophy and culture, edited by E. Kaufmann and K.J. Heller, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.

Mills, B. 2004. “Comedy verite: Contemporary sitcom form.” Screen. Vol 45(1); 63-78.

Rodowick, D.N. 2001. Reading the figural, or, philosophy after the new media. Durham; London, Duke University Press.

Roscoe, J. and C. Hight 2001. Faking it: mock-documentary and the subversion of factuality. Manchester; New York; Manchester University Press.

Uricchio, W. 1998. “The trouble with television.” Screening the Past. Vol 3; 1-10
http://www.latrobe.edu.au/www/screeningthepast/firstrelease/fir998/Wufr4b.htm (retrieved 16 August 2000).

Wise, J.M. 2002. “Mapping the culture of control: Seeing through The Truman Show.” Television and New Media. Vol 3(1); 29-47.

Filmography

A Mighty Wind 2003, Christopher Guest, Warner Brothers.

Best in Show 2000, Christopher Guest, Warner Brothers.

This is Spinal Tap 1984, Rob Reiner, Embassy Pictures.

Waiting for Guffman 1997, Christopher Guest, Sony Pictures.

Teleography

Arrested Development 2003-2006, Fox, USA.

Curb Your Enthusiasm 1999; 2000-, HBO, USA.

Frontline 1994-95; 1997, ABC TV, Australia.

Kath and Kim 2002-2004, ABC TV, Australia.

Kath and Kim 2007, Seven Network, Australia.

Summer Heights High 2007, ABC TV, Australia.

The Librarians 2007, ABC TV, Australia.

The Office 2001-2003, BBC TV, UK.

We Can Be Heroes 2005, ABC TV, Australia.

Notes

[1] For example Richard Dienst (1994) offers a critical position to the seminal work of John Fiske (1987). In Television Culture (1987), Fiske presents analyses of television concerned with resistive pleasures. However, his perspective on television has not been without its detractors of what is seen as an overly celebratory approach to the technology. Dienst somewhat sarcastically argues that : ‘Fiske… whistles a happy tune of resistance whenever the dark clouds of ideology gather’ (1994, 31). Stephen Heath also criticises the approach to television and popular culture represented by Fiske’s work, characterising its embrace of resistance as ‘patronizing’ (1990, 285).

[2] Deleuze’s comments on institutional breakdowns have had broader consequences and application for other theorists. For instance, Hardt (1998) engages with this aspect of control, pointing out how Deleuze’s comments provoke a new conception of space. In this ‘collapse of the walls that defined the institutions’ (1998, 140), Hardt describes how “[t]here is progressively less distinction, in other words, between inside and outside’ (1998, 140). There are connections here also to A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1987), where Deleuze collaborates with Felix Guattari. Of particular relevance is their discussion of smooth and striated space, where they note: “smooth space is constantly being translated, transverse into a striated space; striated space is constantly being reversed, returned to a smooth space” (1987, 474). This description resonates with Hardt’s later observation where he observes that in the society of control, “[s]ocial space is smooth, not in the sense that it has been cleared of the disciplinary striation but rather in the sense that those striae have been generalized across society” (1995, 35). These ideas can also be employed in considering other contemporary cultural sites and technologies. For instance, Wise provides an illustration of control’s smoothing of boundaries with the increasing trend toward product placement in the media. As he observes: “[p]roduct placement represents the migration of advertisements from separated, regulated spaces into the spaces of programs, films, and eventually out of the media and into our lives” (2002, 37). This all too familiar cultural practice is an instructive example of the smoothing of boundaries between advertising, entertainment and everyday life. These aspects of media production connect in what Deleuze would describe as a “coexisting metastable state” (1995b, 179) characteristic of the operation of control.

[3] The potential cinematic operation of control is discussed in more detail in my 2006 PhD thesis, Event TV: The Production and Inhabited Resistance of Images of Control.

[4] For a discussion of the relation between television’s “machinic” qualities and its images, see Chapter Two of Dienst’s Still Life in Real Time: Theory after Television (1994).

[5] However, the notion of resistance is not one that is absent from Deleuze’s writing. In both Foucault (1988) and A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari 1987) resistance appears as a theme throughout, although it is not always named as such. The conceptual language of A Thousand Plateaus is filled with notions that connect to my terminology of “inhabited resistance”. Examples abound, including “lines of flight”, “becoming” and deterritorialization” (1987). Similarly, their commentary on language and linguistics where they discuss the connection and relation of major and minor languages (1987; 75-110) encapsulates to some degree my notion of inhabited resistance. For instance, Deleuze and Guattari propose that we, “[u]se the minor language to send the major language racing”(1987; 105). By “racing” they would seem to mean language can be inhabited by pragmatic, creative variations and transformations that are at once complicit and resistive. Furthermore, in Foucault (1988) Deleuze explicitly addresses the notion of resistance as he sees it emerging in Foucault’s writings. Here we understand that the potential for resistance is always present: “the final word on power is that resistance comes first” (1988; 89). Moreover, “the diffuse centres of power do not exist without points of resistance that are in some way primary; and that power does not take life as its objective without revealing or giving rise to a life that resists power.”(1988; 95). Such conceptualisations of resistance offer alternatives to more traditional notions of oppositional or dialectical formations power and resistance. In this way, they are more relevant to the complex threads and interminglings of force in the contemporary culture of control.

Author Bio

In 2006 Wendy Davis completed a PhD entitled “Event TV: The Production and Inhabited Resistance of Images of Control” with the School of Humanities at Central Queensland University. She has since published articles in Media International Australia and Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture and is currently employed as a lecturer with CQU’s Division of Teaching and Learning Services.

Contact Email: w.davis@cqu.edu.au

Abstract: This paper reports on results of a statistical analysis correlating superhero characteristics such as powers, motivations, weaknesses, and costumes with commercial viability as represented by comic book sales and number of appearances in new media such as cinema and television. Results indicate that features of a character have little impact in the comic book market, and that new media trends support a move away from god-like, untouchable heroes to heroes displaying more human frailties and highly visual super abilities. Continue Reading »

Split screens spell double trouble. This special issue of Refractory is devoted to the dangers of division, the difficulties of duality and the duplicity of the double, not to mention acts of severing, splintering and splicing.

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Abstract: The split screen is a well-known multi-frame technique used in film, television, and video. This essay focuses on cases in which this denomination seems incorrect, but that are currently classified under the same heading. In these instances, images of usually distinct characteristics are arranged on screen. The aim is to explore and define this specific technique, here termed mosaic-screen. Continue Reading »

Abstract: The embedded screen is a key feature of contemporary film and television texts featuring ‘terrorism’. Recurring chronotopes in these narratives, such as the control room and television news programmes, present us with frames within frames that have two complementary functions. First, embedded frames enact circular modes of logic, such as tautology and autology, which are crucial in the creation of a coherent notion of ‘terrorism’. Second, embedded frames are the screen-manifestation of the legal concept of the state of exception, which must be invoked so that the forces of law and order can take extraordinary measures in the face of a ‘terrorist’ threat. The rhetoric of interiority/exteriority that is enunciated by the frame within a frame reflects and constitutes sovereignty’s reliance on the notion of the state of exception in order to establish and consolidate itself. Just as, following Giorgio Agamben and others, the state of exception is at the heart of the power of the state, so is the embedded frame at the heart of the depiction of power in contemporary narratives. This analysis is based primarily on the television series 24 and on films based on novels by Tom Clancy. Continue Reading »

Abstract: This paper argues that the democratisation of digital cinema has inaugurated a prevalence of the long take and the split screen and a resultant excess of images. Mike Figgis’ use of both the split screen and long take in his Timecode exemplifies the intimate connections between surveillance culture, digitisation and ideologies of material wealth. The idea, then, is that the split screen and the long take function in tandem as codified expressions of industrial culture’s ostensible abundance and patterns of consumption. The connection between aesthetics and economics is registered not only in terms of the raw materials necessary to record the image, but, when the image is multiplied by the split screen and then protracted within a long take, of vision itself. Continue Reading »

Abstract: This article sketches a genealogy and typology of the split screen in mainstream film, identifying three distinct phases in the integration of this device since the 1950s, each relating to broader cultural shifts ushered in by media advances and transitions: telephone in the 1950s, television in the 1960s and 1970s, and the computer since the 1990s. I argue that the emphasis upon fragmented and multiplied display relates largely to the cinema’s demonstrated capacity for negotiating the meaning and significance of media change to a wider audience. Through its variegated split screens, the cinema functions as a guide to and user manual of the dangers and possibilities of technological transformation. Continue Reading »

Edited by Angela Ndalianis and Wendy Haslem

Some of the essays in this special bumper issue were presented as papers at the Men in Tights! Superheroes Conference, which was held at Melbourne University, June 2005.

Contents

1. True Lies: Do We Really Want Our Icons to Come to Life - Louise Krasniewicz

2. The Comicbook Superhero: Myth For Our Times - Nigel Kaw

3. Toys and Grrls: Comparing Figures in the Merchandising of Television’s Action Heroine - Miranda J. Banks

4. What the *Hezmanah* Are You Talking about?: Alien Discourses in ‘Farscape’ - Jes Battis

5. Xena’s Double-Edged Sword: Sapphic Love & the Judaeo-Christian tradition - Ivar Kvistad

6. Romancing the vampire: the lives and loves of two vampire slayers: Anita and Buffy - Ingrid Hofman-Howley

7. Smallville’s Sexual Symbolism: From Queer Repression to Fans’ Queered Expressions - Anne Kustritz

8. Cyborg girls and shape-shifters: The discovery of difference by Anime and Manga Fans in Australia - Craig Norris

9. The Bold and the Forgetful: Amnesia, Character Mutability and Serial Narrative Form in The X-Men - Radha O’Meara

10. All’s Well, the Twentieth Century Dies: David Bowie as Postmodern Art Detective Professor - Kellie A. Wacker

11. Side FX - the Aura of Electronics in the Information Age - Rock Chugg

12. More than Meets the Eye: the Suburban Cinema Megaplex as Sensory Heterotopia - Leanne Downing