|
Article Excerpt
[W]e were never going to be the "next" Donahue. We were becoming the first Jerry Springer!
--Springer and Morton 90
American (1) talk television has cut a significant swathe across the broadcasting landscape. As a genre it is one of the most extensively syndicated and franchised media forms world-wide. American talk shows have long been pre-eminent not only in the massive export of multiple products, but also as genre-setting influences in the relatively recent proliferation of home-grown American-style talk shows in other countries. Moreover, American talk show hosts are not only household names across a "global communication village," but some have become figures whose personal iconic status is matched or at least approached by staggering economic capital (both in terms of personal wealth and corporate industry). For instance, Harpo, the multi-stranded empire of Oprah Winfrey, not only produces her talk show, but is involved in a considerable range of media, educational and charitable ventures. Finally, the talk show is, in itself, both central to and has been formative in the growing and global industry of constructed reality television.
In the evolution of talk television, the Jerry Springer Show has a distinctive place in three respects. First it is a hybrid genre drawing not only on the traditional talk show form (long theorised as a feminized space) but also on other cultural genres. These include an odd mixture of seemingly incompatible forms from the "camp" choreographies of professional wrestling and cartoon animation (see, for example, Gamson, Freaks Talk Back) to the prurient, masculinized sensibilities of the dogfight or mud wresting. Second, and as a result, the talk show can no longer be properly described (if it ever could) as a singular genre. The advent of the Jerry Springer Show, oft described as the worst of "trash," "tabloid" or "lowest common denominator" television and widely received as a kind of anti-Oprah, confirms and consolidates a perceived dispersal of the genre into subtypes. It can be argued that there is a continuum of talk television with the vast majority of shows (both in the USA and elsewhere) falling somewhere between the Oprah and Jerry poles. If the "Oprah Sensibility" (Max) is distinctive for its "serious", pedagogical, emotionally literate, self-improvement and progressive social reform dimensions, the Jerry Springer Show has come to represent virtually the opposite tendency, emphasizing as it does, the scatological, the salacious and expulsive emotion. Third, not only is the Jerry springer Show a composite, reflecting and deploying many genres, but it has also been an agenda-setting phenomenon in its own right. The show has had a transformative impact in the talk show arena, where we have seen a widening gap between tabloid and serious versions, with tabloid talk (for example, Ricki Lake, Jenny Jones, Sally Jesse Raphael) looking more and more like the Jerry Springer Show. Indeed, it can be argued that the Jerry Springer Show has virtually invented the new televisual school of what could be described as "cruelty realism." This new school, whose stock in trade is humiliation and gross spectacle of and by "ordinary" people, now appears not only in globalized "constructed reality" franchises like Big Brother and Survivor (or the British Cruel Winter and Cruel Summer), but is increasingly infiltrating the range of televisual forms from the humiliation quiz show (for example, The Weakest Link), through a seemingly endless stream of fetid fly on the wall 'Uncovered'-style documentary (for example Ibiza Uncovered) to the brutalization of such fuddy-duddy shows as Blind Date (the British version of the Dating Game).
Taking the Jerry Springer Show as a case study (2), this paper elaborates on and challenges earlier assessments of the tabloid talk phenomenon. We begin by considering the resources and limitations of the talk show literature, arguing the need for a reassessment of the genre in the light of the formative place of the Jerry Springer phenomenon in the current global proliferation of what might be termed "cruelty realism" in television. We move on to analyze the Jerry Springer formula, focusing on the ways in which speech, space and emotions are regulated to produce the show's iconic "spontaneity" and also identifying the characteristic "hooks" around which the moral and emotional universe of the show is organized. The next section explores the ways in which the Jerry springer Show draws on and stages Freudian psychic positions. Here we argue that it is through this cultural repertoire that the show's emotional valences take on a particular currency in a reification of gender, race and particularly class distinction. We then reflect on the ways in which emotional performance, in conjunction with the Springeresque conventions of semaphoric violence, disorganized speech and narrative incompetence, consolidate a speech/emotion community bound in a "pact of inequality". We conclude by suggesting that the Jerry Springer Show offers a chimera of democracy and tolerance and that its fixing of inequalities through broken narrative, cliches of the psyche and the performance of "trash" and brutalizing emotions is not simply representational, but a productive space in its own right
Re-Theorizing Talk Television
Talk shows have given rise to a significant but surprisingly small (given its extraordinary profile and prevalence in popular television) body of analytic literature. However, much of this literature is now somewhat dated rendering many of the earlier lines of argument (both about the talk show in general and tabloid talk specifically) quite problematic. First, as we have noted, the talk show has evolved and dispersed in ways not anticipated in earlier studies. Even Gamson's pivotal book, Freaks Talk Back, which provides an early analysis of a major shift in the evolution of the genre, could not foresee the ways in which the Jerry Springer Show, in particular, would become a flagship of the new globalized mode of cruelty television.
Similarly, there is a well developed strand of analysis that has examined the talk show as a distinctive site of representation in which notions of democracy, identity formation, the politics of social difference and personal/social reform are explicitly mediated (3). In this context, particular attention has been paid to the talk show's participatory mode of production, content and address; its emphasis on "ordinary" folk and their "ordinary" problems; and the unprecedented space these shows have provided to empower socially marginalized groups (at the very least, by allowing them to take the airwaves). In so doing, such analyses have implicitly acknowledged realist elements (or at least pretensions) of the talk show. What has received far less attention, however, is the question of realism as a generic device of talk television--a specific televisual style and strategy of representation. As Parmar's study of documentary imagery suggests, realism is not simply an artistic pretension (nor a window on the "real") but a mode of truth claim that is productive and has material effects. Indeed, as we shall argue, it is precisely the realist dimensions of the talk show that propose (and reproduce) its representational economies of race, gender/sexuality and class as "real" world. This circuit of meaning is further entrenched by the particular foregrounding of emotion in the Jerry Springer Show, and the ways in which emotions in themselves carry cultural currency as both "real," and unmediated.
A third emphasis in the talk show literature, especially those studies concerned with the tabloid variant, has been on questions of spectacle, the bizarre and emotional excess. This strand draws particularly on Bakhtinian notions of carnival and the grotesque (Bakhtin, Rabelais). However, interestingly, there has been relatively little focus on the very stuff of the genre--talk. Even those studies (including our own previous work) that deploy minute analyses of what has been said have been more interested in distilling out the cultural repertoires in play, than in the utterances themselves (4). Few earlier studies have considered those aspects of talk show speech that bind speaker and spoken to in communities of meaning and that generically constitute the speech arena as a rule governed space (Bakhtin, Speech Genres). Furthermore, talk shows deal not just in talk, but in narratively structured talk--that is, they deal in the orchestrated deployment of stories (or as we shall see in the case of the Jerry Springer Show, story fragments). As Ken Plummer's work suggests, narrative can be understood as an organizing matrix for the social world, where, for example, the tellability (or not) of specific stories is embedded in (and constitutive of) the core sensibilities and power relations...
|
