Confinement, Conversation, and the Corporeal in Videodrome.

Confinement, Conversation, and the Corporeal in Videodrome.


In its exploration of the simultaneous mobilization and imprisonment of the spectator by electronic media, the protagonist of David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983), Max Renn (James Woods) plays the part of both victim and villain. The film inculpates the audience for producing, consuming and being dependent on -- as well as imprisoned by -- electronic technologies. Furthermore, Videodrome asserts that our interactions with media are dangerous, warning of a world in which the reality of the lived-in human body becomes indistinguishable from the reality of the on-screen, electronic presence.

The false sense of mobility and agency that we as media consumers have is highlighted by Cronenberg, who demonstrates the audience’s lack of power and influence in his depiction of the complex hierarchies that exist in the world of media[i]. Videodrome points out the ways in which we as viewers are imprisoned by the pervasive technologies in our lives and how attempts to mobilize and involve the spectator often result in greater degrees of dependence on media, ultimately immobilizing us by constructing an existence in which technology plays a central role. "As they have mediated our engagement with the world, with others, and with ourselves,” writes Vivian Sobchack in “The Screen of the Scene: Envisioning Cinematic and Electronic Presence,” “cinematic and electronic technologies have transformed us so that we presently see, sense, and make sense of ourselves as quite other than we were before them” (139). Max’s secretary appears on his home television screen each morning to inform him of his schedule and provide friendly reminders. Nikki Brand (Deborah Harry) hosts a radio program called The Emotional Rescue Show and is depicted giving life-saving advice to a depressed and a desperate caller she addresses as “lover”. Max depends on the posthumous videocassette advice of Brian O’Blivion (Jack Creley) and the Videodrome tapes to tell him what to do next. In Videodrome, just as in 21st century daily life, we encounter people who depend on screens and media to inform, direct, advise, and save them[ii]

In each of these instances, the exchange hinges on the configuration of a standard conversation and is paradoxically regarded as a more advanced stand-in for human interaction and reciprocity. That Brian O’Blivion’s “preferred mode of discourse is the monologue” (even when appearing on talk-show style programs, where the host stands in for the viewer) is emblematic of the illusory and false nature of a mobile, participatory audience. “There is nothing real outside our perception of reality,” an on-screen O’Blivion says “to” Max, “is there? You can see that, can’t you?” According to Lev Manovich, “the screen is aggressive. It functions to filter, to screen out, to take over, rendering nonexistent whatever is outside its frame” (34). O’Blivion calls attention to his own performance as a screen, conspicuously dictating not only what the viewer is seeing (by creating, starring in, and distributing the tape), but also what the viewer should be seeing (by explaining how one is to interpret the content). This exchange and its emphasis on seeing[iii] -- both as a visual mechanism and a means of understanding -- illustrates the spectator’s “immobile, static and atemporal Gaze, which belongs more to a statue than to a living body, becom[ing] immobile, reified, fixated, cold and dead” (Manovich, 34). O’Blivion asking Max, “you can see that, can’t you?” is the ultimate rhetorical question; it doesn’t matter whether or not Max can see it, he cannot reply in any meaningful or effectual way.

Conceived by O’Blivion to be “the next phase in the evolution of the human being as a technological animal,” Videodrome documents humans becoming machines, machines becoming human, and the subsequent implications for the culture at large; “as these technologies become culturally pervasive,” Sobchack writes, “it can come to profoundly inform and affect the socio-logic, psycho-logic, and even the bio-logic by which we daily live our lives” (138). As Max embarks on his Videodrome journey, we observe the emergence of a new kind of duality – one that enables a person to disregard the human body altogether in order to meld his mind with technology. Videodrome’s mantra of "long live the new flesh" suggests that stepping forward into the future requires the shedding of our primitive, human bodies, and that abandoning these bodies will enable us to transcend the limitations of an inevitably transient life.

Videodrome is dangerous, Max’s business associate Masha (Lynn Gorman) asserts early on in the film, because it is “political” and has something that Max does not: a philosophy. Replaying these words in his head, Max retrieves a handgun. Later in the film, Max – despite not being physically coaxed by any apparent external forces – painfully inserts the gun into a mysterious and rapidly opening wound in his stomach. He has internalized the violent philosophy of Videodrome; his literal consumption of a dangerous technology and the fact that this item now resides within him is another step towards a total, inextricable fusion between man and machine. Though Max displays an extensive degree of agency in his experience with Videodrome[iv], inserting himself into the narrative and becoming a mobile player in the Videodrome arena, he is always being instructed and informed by images on a screen, programmed (and imprisoned) by the various forces and media around him[v]. “Changing the program” within Max is always a violent and corporeal experience; often done against his will, those responsible for “programming” Max (the distributors and producers of media) are presented as rapists of sorts, invading and desecrating the human body with their content.

Max’s voluntary abandonment of his physical self[vi] is evidence of what Sobchack calls the trivialization of the human body by the electronic, “the crisis of the lived-body… [in] this historical moment in our particular society and culture. Its struggle to assert its gravity, its differential existence and situation, its vulnerability and mortality, its vital and social investment in a concrete life-world inhabited by others” (152). Max struggles to overcome the impact of the Videodrome signal on his mind and body, but it ultimately defeats him. When Harlan (Peter Dvorsky) and Barry Convex (Leslie Carlson) instruct Max to “open up” so they can insert a new Videodrome tape, his body reacts independently of his mind; large gusts of wind blow open his shirt and the cavity on his torso expands obediently. The implication that Max’s physical body, much like a machine, has no free will and must respond accordingly when triggered reflects this crisis of the lived-in body and our cultural tendency to privilege the electronic over the physical. This notion is exceedingly visible in the character of Brian O’Blivion, who, despite having died, continues to exist (on-screen) via thousands of recorded videocassettes; “by the end,” Bianca says of her father, “he was convinced that public life on television was more real than private life in the flesh. He wasn’t afraid to let his body die.”

The lives created by cinema, Jean Epstein describes in her 1923 essay “On Certain Characteristic of Photogenie,” “have little in common with human life… to things and beings in their most frigid semblance, the cinema thus grants the greatest gift unto death: life” (317). Nearly a century later, films like Videodrome suggest that humans themselves, having “devalued the physically lived body and the concrete materiality of the world,” have become frigid, inanimate objects that require meaning to be bestowed upon them by technological representations (Sobchack, 152). Epstein asserts that being a viewer is not enough: one must actively engage with the film in order to be enhanced by cinema (a challenge when the very structure of screens and media function to imprison and immobilize the spectator). The 21st century fixation on validating one’s existence through a web presence, coupled with the simultaneous terror at the lack of erasure and potential privacy intrusion that accompanies this presence, are manifestations of the anxieties explored throughout Videodrome. With the evolution of electronic technologies, human life has evolved and adapted in order to appropriate and utilize the available technologies; perhaps the cost of making room for these allegedly life-enhancing things is that humans have lost sight of their corporeal humanity and physical reality.


Works Cited
Epstein, Jean. "On Certain Characteristics of Photogenie." French Film Theory and Criticism. By Richard Abel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ., 1988. Print.
Manovich, Lev. "Toward an Archaeology of the Computer Screen." Cinema Futures: Cain, Abel or Cable? : The Screen Arts in the Digital Age. By Thomas Elsaesser and Kay Hoffmann. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 1998. 27-43. Print.
Sobchack, Vivian. "The Scene of the Screen: Envisioning Cinematic and Electronic "Presence"" Materialities of Communication. By Hans Ulrich. Gumbrecht and Karl Ludwig. Pfeiffer. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1994. 137-54. Print.
Videodrome. Dir. David Cronenberg. 1983.

[i] Max’s role as the President of Civic TV is central to the film’s narrative, and his interactions with other media figures shed light on the hierarchal structure of the industry (including corporate, military, and government interests). One of the first scenes in the movie depicts Max meeting with Chinese pornography distributors, whose content Max then screens with his partners at Civic TV. The sequence demonstrates the multitude of barriers and gatekeepers that our content is filtered through prior to the public’s consumption of it; furthermore, it draws attention to the variety of screens that exist surrounding what we ultimately see on our own screens and the lack of meaningful participation and influence available to the spectator.

[ii]According to Brian O’Blivion, “the screen is the retina of the mind’s eye; therefore the television screen is part of the physical structure of the brain. Whatever appears on the television screen emerges as raw experience to those who watch it”. Later in the film, O’Blivion describes Videodrome as a “new outgrowth of the human brain which will produce and control hallucination to the point that it will change human reality”. By O’Blivion’s logic, the threat posed by Videodrome has already been realized -- as Manovich writes, “the screen disappeared. It completely took over the visual field” (34). The pervasive presence of screens and technologies in our everyday lives, coupled with our inability as viewers to distinguish between Max’s hallucinations and real experiences (as well as, according to Sobchack, our tendency to understand our lives as movies and understand our minds/bodies as computers), implies that Videodrome is not so much a warning about the future as it is a comment about the present.

[iii] Videodrome further explores the role of eyes and seeing through glasses and photography. The prominence placed on eye glasses suggests, among other things, that we are not even qualified to be spectators in our natural bodies; we require enhancement from a foreign addition to validate our sight and make sure what we see is real and accurate.
Both Videodrome and Peter Greenaway’s 1996 film The Pillow Book position photography as a middle ground, eventually exposing the medium’s shortcomings. Harlan (a pirate and photographer) and Hoki (Nagiko’s Japanese photographer acquaintance) are portrayed as being medium-mediums: middle men who act as go-betweens between hierarchal forces (Harlan delivers Videodrome to Max while posing as his friend [also, as a pirate, filters content from one source to another]; Hoki proposes Nagiko write a book and offers to deliver the work to the Publisher). When Max believes he has killed Masha, he immediately enlists Harlan to come photograph the evidence, reflecting Max’s belief that a photo is more dependable than his own eyes. [Moreover, the fact that Harlan wears glasses and is a photographer can be read several different ways; it could indicate a kind of superiority and ability to see things in a realer, more accurate way or be interpreted as a visual manifestation of his role as a “medium-medium”. The combination of glasses and photography can also be seen as indications of Harlan’s multiple identities -- evidence that he is hiding his actual self and should not be trusted.]
Ultimately, Harlan and Hoki represent the inadequacy of photography as a medium. Despite laying the groundwork for Videodrome, when things begin to escalate Harlan tells Max that he’s “out of [his] depth now… [and] has to bring in the reinforcements” before revealing his involvement with Barry Convex. Hoki does not satisfy Nagiko sexually nor does his skin provide a suitable surface for her to write on; additionally, his presentation of Nagiko’s writing is rejected. Just as photography plays a central role in the history and implications of film and other electronic technologies, both Harlan and Hoki are integral to the plots of their respective films and serve as catalysts for fundamental storylines, only to eventually be relegated and deemed inferior.

[iv] Just as a “screen’s frame separates two spaces, the physical and the virtual,” for us as viewers, Max encounters these same multiple spaces in his experience throughout Videodrome, blurring the lines not only on screen but within our own physical, material world (Manovich, 34). This paradox is visible both in the on-screen narrative of Videodrome and the off-screen reality of watching the movie as a spectator; Max Renn’s experience in the film positions him as both a mobile participant and an immobile viewer, resulting in a parallel journey of sorts between the viewer and Max.
Max inhabits a lived-in body, but many of his experiences take place beyond and separate from this body. Because of our immobility as viewers, we are dependent on Max's navigation and understanding of the worlds he encounters; because of the hallucinatory elements and general premise of the film, Max is far from a stable narrator and his mobility complicates our knowledge of what constitutes reality. At the same time, as spectators of a film, none of what we are watching is reality, and all of Max’s experiences (even the “real” ones) are occurring in virtual space. Videodrome’s emphasis on the “new flesh” undermines and destabilizes the human lived-in bodies on the screen, placing our own lived-in bodies somewhere beyond immobility and closer to irrelevant.

[v] Despite her location as the subversive alternative to the totalitarian Videodrome, Bianca is equally guilty of playing Max “like a video tape recorder” and forcing him to follow her orders. All producers and distributors of content are inculpated in the film, and essentially every media authority figure we are introduced to is dead by the end of the movie. Harlan explains to Max that as a society, we are “entering savage new times – we need to be pure and direct and strong to survive them,” while Max defends his station’s controversial programming as being a “matter of economics” during his television appearance and claims that he only watched Videodrome “for business”. Videodrome consistently aligns media production and distribution with violence and capitalist interests, and nobody is blame-free. Even those with the power to “make you do what they want” are subject to harm by those who they are corrupting, ultimately asserting that any and all interaction with electronic technology involves the imprisonment and eventual destruction of the user (while also demonstrating the general vulnerability of the human body).
Throughout both Videodrome and The Pillow Book, we witness what Sobchack calls the “expansive and totalizing incorporation of Nature by industrialized culture, and the specular production and commodification of the Unconscious” (148). The publisher in The Pillow Book is similarly vilified as a corrupt person who demands sexual favors in exchange for publication (the publishing industry is also condemned for polluting both the planet and the minds of the consuming public). Financial concerns are brought to the forefront in both films; Nagiko being told that her work “is not worth the paper it is written on,” emphasizes the politics of gatekeeping and the way editors, publishers, and producers exist as aggressive screens that “function to filter, to screen out, to take over, rendering nonexistent whatever is outside its frame” (Manovich, 34). Moreover, the subsequent acceptance of the same work when printed on skin reflects our culture’s prioritization of material commodities over human worth.

[vi] Videodrome and The Pillow Book end with the deaths of Max and the Publisher, respectively. Max watches an image of himself committing suicide (with his hand-gun handgun) on a television set. The publisher enlists Nagiko's final book, The Book of Death, to end his life. In both cases, it is the medium that does the killing (also, both people being killed previously functioned as gatekeepers and screens). Max dies on screen on screen, and the audience is left to decide whether or not he actually kills himself; raising the question of how something that occurs on a screen on a screen is any less (or more) real than something that happens on only one screen. The voluntary abandonment of their physical bodies performed by the Publisher and Max is evidence of the screen becoming the “vehicle for directly affecting reality…rather than acting solely as a means to display an image of reality,” because in both instances, the medium is the weapon (Manovich, 32).

Mandy Moore as Aquaman’s Kryptonite: Authenticity, Intertextuality, and the Hollywood Homosocial in Entourage. May 2011

Mandy Moore as Aquaman’s Kryptonite: Authenticity, Intertextuality, and the Hollywood Homosocial in Entourage
The four protagonists of HBO’s Entourage sit on the balcony of what has been established as Jessica Alba’s Malibu beach house, which she “lent to [them] while off shooting a new Fantastic Four”. Eric Murphy (Kevin Connelly), Hollywood up-and-coming actor Vincent Chase’s (Adrien Grenier) manager and childhood friend, reads names of actresses off of a list provided by James Cameron, the director of Chase’s next movie, Aquaman.
Eric: What do you guys think of Cameron Diaz for Aquagirl?
Turtle: Fuck that, she’s got a boyfriend. Who wants to make a movie with someone you have no shot at?
Vince: He’s got a point.
Eric: Jennifer Garner?
Turtle: Boyfriend.
Eric: Kirsten Dunst?
Turtle: She already fucked a superhero. She’s single, though. Who else you got?
Eric: Mandy Moore? You did a few weeks on a Walk to Remember, Vince. Did you like her?
Vince: Yeah, she was great.
Johnny: Come on, Vince, we’re not gonna get into this whole thing again, are we?
Eric: What whole thing? Vince, did you go out with Mandy Moore?
Vince: A couple of times, it was no big deal.

Emblematic of the weaving of the real and the fictional within the narrative of Entourage, the conversation quickly and undetectably slips in and out of reality and the narrative constructed for the show. The content of the discussion references real filmographies and real relationships of real actresses. Melded with these facts is the diegesis that Vince, a fictional character, was an extra on A Walk to Remember, a real movie, and dated Mandy Moore, it’s real star. The Aquaman arc in the show’s second season (2005-06) – which features fictionalized versions of Mandy Moore and James Cameron played by Mandy Moore and James Cameron – constructs pretend personal and professional lives for these real people. Resulting in the dislocation of customary responses and prompting viewers to draw on other texts in order to determine meaning, the show’s self-reflexivity is enhanced by this casually meta ebb and flow in and out of reality. Mandy Moore’s narrative arc not only provides an interesting opportunity to examine the way Entourage utilizes the intertextuality of real stars in order to enhance and authenticate its narrative, it also demonstrates the threat posed by women to the intense male homosocial bonds that reside at the core of Hollywood.
"Whenever we run into people, they say they want to do the show," series creator Doug Ellin says in a USA Today interview. "It often provides them with a different take on who they are" (Keveny). While nearly every episode of Entourage is littered with celebrity cameos and guest appearances, the intertextuality that accompanies Mandy Moore makes her uniquely amenable to playing herself -- as playboy Chase’s first and only true love -- in this extended storyline. After a career as a teen pop star in the late 1990s, Moore moved on to leading roles in successful movies. “I’ve been kind of an underdog [compared to] the people I came out around the same time as, and that worked to my benefit,” said Moore in a 2008 interview. “At the time that Britney and Christina came out and were at the top of their game, I was like the weird little sister. But because I didn’t have the monumental success that they did, it allowed me to go off and do A Walk To Remember, and that put me in a different position” (Stewart). A tabloid fixture, Mandy Moore is recognized less for her singing and acting and more for being a celebrity. This ability to transcend niches makes it possible for her to blur the lines between “Mandy Moore” and “Mandy Moore in Entourage” – particularly fitting for a show that is an exploration of fame (and not necessarily talent). This relative ambiguity does not, however, translate to anonymity. Over the past decade, Moore’s personal relationships with a variety of famous men – including Andy Roddick, Wilmer Valderrama, Zach Braff and Ryan Adams – have received endless media attention. This media scrutiny and interference from tabloids pervade both her real life and her arc on the show, much of which focuses on (controlling, mediating, and anticipating) the public’s response to Mandy rekindling her romantic relationship with Vince after ending things with her (pretend) fiance.
Fictional tabloid snippets such as “what soon to be super actor gets along so swimmingly with his engaged co-star that friends say her impending nuptials are drowning?” function in Entourage in the same way Entertainment Tonight functions in Robert Altman’s 1992 movie The Player. “The inclusion of Entertainment Tonight demonstrates how the experience of Hollywood is purveyed by other media,” writes Christopher Ames of the movie, “It also reminds us of the fictionality of actors playing themselves, when such things as talk-show appearances and fan-magazine publicity are openly part of the maintenance of a favorable public image” (208). Entourage, like The Player, “enters into a vigorous intertextual dialogue with American popular culture,” through its “references to contemporary social trends, consumer products, and actual films and film stars” (Intertextual Encounters,15). Assumptions that viewers are familiar with Moore’s off-screen persona is symptomatic of the “increasing immersion of contemporary Americans in all forms of mediation,” evoking what Dunne refers to as “a contemporary rhetorical community based on a mutual recognition of mediated experience on the parts of senders and receivers of cultural messages” (Metapop, 13, 11).
Despite Moore’s paradoxically vague and overexposed public image, she is highly associated with the image of the manufactured pop star – a notion she explores (and ultimately succumbs to) during her stint on Entourage. “No aspect of the media can be more obviously attended by hype than the production of stars,” asserts Richard Dyer in “A Star is Born and the Construction of Authenticity,” “there is nothing sophisticated about knowing they are manufactured and promoted… even the media knows it. Yet in the very same breath as audiences and producers alike acknowledge stars as hype, they are declaring this or that star as the genuine article” (173). While Mandy is presented as being real, sincere, and down to earth, the audience is also exposed to the well-oiled machine functioning behind her.
After Vince and Mandy miss important appointments because they were too distracted by one another, Eric meets “Mandy’s people” – a team consisting of a manager, a music agent, a publicist, an attorney, a music manager, and a theatrical agent. “Stars are a form of capital and a resource of great value to the commerce of Hollywood, and the production of stardom is a vital part of the film industry,” writes Paul McDonald, “the industry that makes motion pictures also manufactures, with the aid of the press and other media, movie stars” (168). “We both know Vince has fucked half the actresses in this town, E,” Mandy’s agent, Barbara Miller (Beverly D’Angelo) says during their meeting, “Mandy, on the other hand, is a good girl”. “We wanted someone innocent,” series creator Ellin said of the decision to cast Moore as Vince’s first love, emphasizing the parallels between the real Mandy Moore and her fictional counterpart (Strauss). By making visible the “organized and restricted network of professional functions” responsible for producing stardom, Entourage exposes its artificiality (McDonald, 168).

In self-reflexive Hollywood texts like Entourage and The Player, “our attention switches quickly –and intertextually—between realistic representation of the story and self-referential film technique. We must therefore interrogate both” (Intertextual Encounters, 114). In the first scene of an episode titled The Bat Mitzvah, we see Vince and Mandy -- attached to harnesses and wearing unglamorous sweatpants and sneakers -- hanging in front of a large blue screen on a soundstage. Eric stands in a sound booth, watching James Cameron as he tinkers with multiple monitors, soundboards, and complicated electronic technology. “It may not look like much now,” Cameron says of the two dangling actors and large blue wall, “but wait till you see Poseidonis in 3D with Aquaman riding Storm”. In scenes like this, “when we are reminded that we are reading a novel or watching a film, the realist frame is temporarily broken,” writes Ames. “But self-reference in a film does something that self-referentiality in literature does not: it foregrounds circumstances of artistic production and reception, the dynamics of industry and audience” (8).
The scene is intertextual on multiple levels; seeing James Cameron -- the quintessential director of the big-budget, CGI Hollywood blockbuster – in this stage of movie making reflects the deepening of a text via what David Marshall refers to as “the proliferation of information about the making of a film or cultural commodity” (77). Although the viewers of Entourage will never see the finished Aquaman, (after all, it does not, and will never, exist) being involved in the fictional production process provides a more significant connection between the audience and the (nonexistent) movie. Moreover, this proximity to Cameron and the production equipment puts us in a privileged position, providing us with access to a part of Hollywood even the stars are denied entry to.

At the same time, the mise-en-scene jarringly reminds us that what we are watching is itself a production; as Dunne writes, “seeing films discussed, made, and shown on screen eventually makes the audience aware that the embracing film probably went through similar processes. At least, the audience’s willing suspension of disbelief is shaken by these reminders that films are not ‘life,’ but artistic constructions” (Intertextual Encounters, 123). Hanging in a harness in front of the blue screen, an unknowingly miked Vince tells Mandy that he is still in love with her while Eric listens in from the sound booth. The scene presents an interesting commentary on the invasion of celebrity privacy (by both their management and by the public), on the intersection between the personal and professional lives of movie stars, and on the self-reflexivity of Entourage as a Hollywood text.

The fact that the conversation revolves around the imaginary love life of Mandy Moore, an actual Hollywood celebrity, underlines the way “a fictional construct (the celebrity as real person) functions… as the reality against which other fictions are contrasted. Within the fiction of the movie, the appearance of movie stars portraying themselves adds verisimilitude at the very same time… exposing Hollywood phoniness. It makes the fakery more realistic” (Ames, 208). The references to – and appearances of – real Hollywood people (as well as real Hollywood scandals, jokes, etc.) is the primary way in which Entourage authenticates itself as a Hollywood insider narrative.
Viewing Entourage, like “viewing a Hollywood Picture… necessarily involves our recognition of the allusive, intertextual, self-referential dimensions of the present cinematic text” (Intertextual Encounters, 106). “Warner Brothers is very concerned,” agent Ari Gold (Jeremy Piven) tells Vince regarding his relationship with the newly single Mandy in the episode Blue Balls Lagoon, “they don't want you pulling an Angelina Jolie.” “Yeah, or a Russell Crowe,” publicist Shanna (Debi Mazar) adds, “he broke up Meg Ryan and Dennis Quaid on Proof of Life. Movie cost 80 mill to make, did less business than Gigli”. This dialogue – already complex and self-reflexive in that it addresses concerns over fictional intertextuality potentially interfering with metadiagetic fiction – is laden with pop-culture references and Hollywood allusions. “The rhetorical intention of the self references,” Dunne argues, “has shifted considerably… away from the artist’s self-expression and toward an affirmation of the mediated community that is embracing both creator and audience” (Metapop, 7). Here we see not just the rewarding of viewers in the know, but an out right exclusion of those who might be unfamiliar with the world of Hollywood.

At the same time, a viewer who does not understand a particular reference is always one Google search away from an explanation; in Mimi White’s piece, “Crossing Wavelengths: The Diegetic and Referential Imaginary of American Commercial Television,” she comments on how “the easy accessibility of old television events in the forms of reruns and compilation elides the historical distinctions that once restricted intertextual referencing, when only memory could give access to the past of television and film” (51). Both Dunne’s and White’s points are illustrated in the episode Exodus; after Johnny Drama (Kevin Dillon) and Turtle (Jerry Ferrara) see Mandy and her former fiancé leaving a Blockbuster together, Drama insists that they bribe the cashier to find out what movie the pair rented.
Turtle: What exactly are we trying to find out? We already know they rented a movie.
Drama: Yeah, but what movie? Texas Chainsaw Massacre, that says one thing. Nine and a Half Weeks? That says something very different.
Entourage presupposes not only its audience’s but also its diegetic characters’ familiarity with other texts. Dunne’s assertion that “we exist in a culture that is brokered for us primarily by the mass media” is evident lines of dialogue like “Page Six is one thing, cover of US Weekly is another,” or Ari’s statement that his wife “doesn't read Variety. She reads InStyle,” both of which underline the ways in which cultural referents are used to impart information and as signifiers of identity within the narrative (Metapop, 15).
Investigating the ways that we as viewers “enter into intertextual dialogue with Hollywood and the American culture for which Hollywood functions metonymically can help us think more productively about” Hollywood texts and “our relations as viewers” to the content (Intertextual Encounters, 106). In the season and a half of Entourage prior to Mandy Moore’s arrival, Vince is portrayed as having few weaknesses. He seems to float above the Hollywood nonsense, fully secure in his talent and his self-image, carelessly moving from woman to woman. When she comes back into his life, we get a glimpse into the existence of Vince’s insecurities and witness his career and public image on shaky ground for the first time in the series. More importantly, Vince’s relationship with Mandy induces unfamiliar tension and conflict among the boys of the entourage.
The fallout that results from their group leader being in love with a woman highlights the deep homosocial bonds that reside at the core of the show and the world it represents. “The problem with this male‐male dynamic of relationships,” writes Shaamani Yogaretnam in a piece on the series, “is that women are presented as either sexually available, and thereby disposable, or as problematic entities to be avoided or dealt with” (105). Even before Vince and Mandy rekindle, his buddies are apprehensive about her return; she is repeatedly referred to as Vince’s “kryptonite” and Turtle urges him not to work with her, saying, “this girl ruined your youth. You’re the star, tell them you don’t want her.” Never is the threat posed by females to the male homosocial relationship clearer than in season two finale The Abyss, in which Vince’s firing of Ari and first ever fight with Eric are shown as direct consequences of Mandy Moore’s presence in his life. After she breaks up with him, Vince’s world comes undone; Eric has quit as his manager, neither Turtle nor Drama is speaking to him, and he decides not to do Aquaman because he refuses to work with Mandy.
“The female star emerged as an inherently contradictory construct,” writes Allen Larson in “1937: Movies and New Constructions of the American Star,” “threaten[ing] to unsettle the symbolic foundations of a patriarchal culture organized by the sexual division of labor and gendered assignment of economic roles” (195). In using Mandy Moore as a catalyst for chaos in Vince’s world, Entourage demonstrates that, seventy years later, Hollywood’s ideologies about gender have not significantly evolved. In an article titled "Let's Hug It Out, Bitch! The Negotiation of Hegemony and Homosociality Through Speech in HBO’s Entourage,” the author uses René Girard's 1961 theory of the erotic triangle, in which women act as a "conduit" for homosocial bonds, in order to contextualize the male relationships on Entourage: “while there are numerous heterosexual interactions with women, the homosocial spaces between the main characters on Entourage are enduring. Tensions within these spaces are key to understanding the constructions of noticeable power dynamics in this group of friends: homosocial bonds between the men facilitate contemporary understandings of the norms of hegemonic masculinity” (Lee).

Questions of gender, intertextuality, and authenticity in Entourage would benefit from further investigation into the implications of the show’s interactions with reality beyond the work I have done here. Part of what is intriguing about Entourage is the way it has shifted from a reflection of Hollywood reality to somewhat of a Hollywood reality in and of itself; “as the show's visibility has grown,” USA Today journalist Bill Keveny writes, “particularly in the entertainment world, the sitcom seems less a case of art imitating life than paralleling it — and even influencing it”. In the June 16th, 2006 issue of Variety magazine, HBO placed a two-page ad touting the success of new James Cameron epic Aquaman, pronouncing that the movie had earned $116 million during its opening weekend, becoming the highest grossing movie of all time. The ad gave no indication that the movie was not real; “it even fooled some of the director's friends into thinking they had missed the premiere of his latest film starring Vincent Chase, the show's fictional star,” Variety reported the following day. By exploring and experimenting with the intersection between fiction and nonfiction, Entourage epitomizes the inherent reflexivity of a Hollywood production about Hollywood. Furthermore, in its attempt to authenticate something that is arguably artificial to begin with, the HBO series at once reveals truths about and further mystifies and romanticizes the world of Hollywood.


Works Cited
Ames, Christopher. Movies about the Movies: Hollywood Reflected. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky, 1997. Print.
Entourage, season 2. (2005-06). Created by Doug Ellin.
    Episodes: “Oh, Mandy”.“I Love You, too” “The Bat Mitzvah” “Blue Balls Lagoon” “Good Morning Saigon” “Exodus”
Dunne, Michael. Intertextual Encounters in American Fiction, Film, and Popular Culture. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular. (2001)
Dunne, Michael. Metapop: Self-referentiality in Contemporary American Pop Culture. (1992).
Dyer, Richard. “A Star is Born and the Construction of Authenticity”
Holmes, Su. ‘Starring... Dyer?’: Re-visiting Star Studies and Contemporary Celebrity Culture” (2005).
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The Late Night Commodity: The Integration of New Media in Late Night Talk Shows. May 2011

The Late Night Commodity: The Integration of New Media in Late Night Talk Shows

Before taking over NBC’s Late Night franchise from Conan O’Brien in 2009, new host Jimmy Fallon began posting 5-10 minute comedy shorts online at 12:30 each night. In conceptualizing the program, producer Lorne Michaels’ idea “was to go back to late night's roots – an experimental comedy show for a different generation,” writes Bill Carter in his book The War for Late Night. “The target would be the college crowd that had anointed first Letterman and then Conan. Now of course because that group had infinitely more diversions for its time, most of them tech based, a new young host would have to be adaptable to the tech world” (169).

Despite being marketed by NBC as a new breed of late night host, Fallon’s show hardly deviates from the late night format established half a century ago. Packaging Late Night with Jimmy Fallon as a modern and progressive take on a longstanding television format is an example of network television attempting to capitalize on the new media landscape without significantly compromising any of their old media values, attitudes, or business strategies. Interestingly, in some ways Fallon’s predecessor, late night purist Conan O’Brien, represents the most progressive take on the late night talk show. That Fallon’s program incorporates technology into its narrative or is watched by a young, Internet-centric generation is not symptomatic of network television embracing new media and its participatory nature. Rather, with its emphasis on product placement and production of content specifically to be distributed online, Late Night with Jimmy Fallon stands as an interesting example of how television success is defined in what is often referred to as the “post-television era”.

In The Business of New Media, John Caldwell asserts that “content development based on a project’s potential for reiteration across platforms is as crucial today as initial air dates were in electronic media’s analogue era” (65). The late night talk show formula – which “always start[s] with the monologue -- Johnny Carson made it a national pastime -- then come[s] the behind-the-desk interviews, followed by the occasional stunt or impersonation” – is one that Fallon sticks to rigidly (Lowry). But with its high-production shorts easily shared on the Internet, fragmented variety format and the host’s youthful, comedy-geek approach, Fallon’s show is able to market itself as a 21st century product for a 21st century audience.

A recurring bit called Late Night Hashtags enables a handful of viewers to see their tweets on television; official show website latenightwithjimmyfallon.com provides fans with opportunities to play games and shop. The modern and democratized illusion offered by Fallon through products like his popular smartphone application and active web presence is emblematic of the way large media companies are becoming “more adept at monitoring and serving audience interests” and have learned ways to effectively “exploit the intense feelings” of consumers’ attachment “through the marketing of ancillary goods from t-shirts to games with promises of enabling a deeper level of involvement with the program content” (Jenkins, 165). “Mr. Fallon has already dived into the Web,” wrote The New York Times on the eve of his show’s official premiere, “he is the first late-night host to start a video blog… running snippets of comedy bits and background reports on how he was building the show [and] has been courting fans through Facebook and Twitter” (2009). The same communication technologies that enable interactivity and participation “are wielded to foster the entrenchment and growth of a global corporate media system that can be said to be anything but transparent, interactive or participatory” (Deuze). Closer examination of Jimmy Fallon reveals the extent to which his persona and content are mediated and controlled by NBC and other corporate interests.

Fallon, who has said his show “treats a video game premiere almost like a movie premiere,” is often recruited by large companies to hawk their new gaming systems and gadgets (geeksugar.com). And while it is hard to imagine any of his late night peers establishing a “Video Game Week” -- in which each night a new game is debuted on the program -- the incorporation of these products into the show’s narrative is less illustrative of Fallon’s innovative style and more an example of how “play has been increasingly colonized by the culture industries well beyond childhood in recognition of its heightened importance in the formation of the audience’s pleasures at the beginning of the new millennium” (Marshall, 69). An Examiner article titled “Is Jimmy Fallon becoming the new face of video games?,” asserts that Fallon’s intertextuality (“the process of cultural knowledge that flows back and forth between the audience and the individual text as the audience member injects other sources into the text”) makes him believable as a genuine consumer of gaming technologies (Marshall, 70).

Yet just as Fallon’s seemingly independent and subversive comedy shorts are actually mediated by the self-interest and financial concerns of the network producing them, the integration of gadgets and games into Late Night with Jimmy Fallon is evidence of what P. David Marshall calls the commodification of play (70). Similar to the ways in which the emergence of internet content has destabilized the traditional linear business model of the culture industries, “games have challenged the hegemony of narrative forms such as television and film and television as the dominant entertainment modes for adults in contemporary culture,” (Marshall, 71). According to Marshall, if the contemporary cultural industries can keep the audience, viewer or player within the system of entertainment choices, then they are “effectively maintaining their market;” a notion exemplified by the mutual embrace of network television and games depicted on Fallon’s show (74).

While Fallon’s love of technology and ancillary bundles of content may seem forward-thinking, they are in reality manifestations of old media corporations, “defined historically by the entertainment experience of the screen, the narrative, the star and the genre” now “liv[ing] to calculate, amass, repackage, and transport entertainment product across the borders of both new media technologies and forms” (Caldwell, 63). These “attempts to link consumers directly into the production and marketing of media content,” explains Jenkins, “are variously described as 'permission-based marketing,' 'relationship marketing' or 'viral-marketing'” and are increasingly promoted as the model for how to sell goods, cultural and otherwise, in an interactive environment (165).

NBC’s simultaneous resistance to and adoption of new media in its late night content is further complicated by the controversy and commotion that has surrounded the Tonight Show and Late Night franchises in the last several years. In The War for Late Night: When Leno went Early and Television went Crazy, Bill Carter explores the 2009 debacle in which NBC, less than a year after handing over the Tonight Show reigns from Jay Leno to Conan O’Brien, rearranged the late night programming schedule, bumping the Tonight Show from 11:30 to 12:05 and moving The Jay Leno Show to the 11:30 slot. NBC’s decision to go ahead with their late night shake-up despite a large public outcry and negative media attention marked “a conscious choice by the network to shift its priorities in late night toward a mass audience strategy and away from the more targeted lets-play-young focus that had prevailed when Conan was named for the job. NBC seemed to be conceding that the audience for late night was going to be considerably older for the foreseeable future” (Carter, 354).

When Jimmy Fallon went on ABC talk show The View following the Leno vs. O’Brien showdown, he was asked to share his feelings regarding the programming shift that would have moved his show from 12:25 to 12:55. “I don’t mind,” he answered. “I don’t think time really matters as much to my generation; no one cares what time you’re on cause we TiVo everything. [If Conan stayed] I would still be on, I would just be on later. I don’t think it would’ve mattered really for me”. Six months after Conan officially announced his departure to cable channel TBS, the late night ratings picture “turned darker – and starker. Nobody was doing well… both [Leno] and Letterman had dropped to their worst audience levels ever. The culprit, in most evaluations, was the digital video recorder, the increasingly ubiquitous machine that allows viewers to record all their favorite shows with ease,” Carter writes. “Besides the DVR, whose impact was only likely to get worse as its penetration spread from under 40 percent to more than 60 percent… the late-night shows were all seeing their relevance undercut by hyperavailability” (391).

In his article Redefining the Home Screen: Technological Convergence as Trauma and Business Plan, William Boddy explores the DVR, unpacking its implications and the “impact upon traditional assumptions about television and its audience, assumptions themselves informed by specific historical forces within and outside of the television industry”. Boddy notes that “the current turmoil … throws into stark relief how far the industry has moved from the instrumental fantasies of reception, ontology, and national identity associated with the era of network television in the United States from the 1940s into the 1980s”. The notion of watching a product titled The Tonight Show or Late Night during the day is emblematic of how “people inhabiting the pre-modern world would experience time as inextricably bound to a sense of place… [one characteristic of] modernity [is] the change that has occurred in the social arrangements of space and time,” (Wood). Recording a show that is characterized, identified, and packaged as being bound to a specific moment in time and experiencing it during another moment in time is evidence of “the modern era [as] characterized by ‘empty time’—an increasingly globalized sense of temporal arrangements” (Wood).

In an open letter addressed to “The People of Earth,” O’Brien shared his opinions regarding the controversy, stating that, “for 60 years the Tonight Show has aired immediately following the late local news. I sincerely believe that delaying the Tonight Show into the next day to accommodate another comedy program will seriously damage what I consider to be the greatest franchise in the history of broadcasting. The Tonight Show at 12:05 simply isn't the Tonight Show”.

O’Brien’s insistence that a show’s time slot significantly influences its cultural meaning is interesting in a media landscape where commercials are seemingly optional and the time of a show’s initial broadcast is becoming less and less important. Considering this traditionalist and somewhat old-school outlook, it is curious that O’Brien is the late night personality who best acknowledges and exemplifies the fact that “professional identity is increasingly influenced and shaped by the various ways in which professionals interact with and give meaning to their publics as consumers and co-creators” (Deuze). “Team Coco” – the name for the online community of Conan supporters – emerged in the wake of the Leno-O’Brien time slot shift, garnering extensive media attention and, as Carter puts it, “eclips[ing] ‘viral’; it was more like the plague” (202). In “Interactive Audiences?” Jenkins posits that online fan communities like Team Coco, “expansive self-organizing groups focused around the collective production, debate, and circulation of meanings, interpretations, and fantasies in response to various artifacts of contemporary popular culture” might be the most effective way for citizens to realize the potentials of the interactive new media environment (167). Team Coco stands out as among the most celebrated recent examples of these fan communities, which “have long defined their memberships through affinities rather than localities” (167). The notion of fandoms as “virtual communities, 'imagined' and 'imagining' communities,” was visible when groups “sprang up all over the web and in individual cities. The Facebook group ‘I’m with Coco’ [which boasts almost two million members] organized Conan rallies in New York, Chicago, Seattle and LA” (202).

The current Team Coco website arguably realizes Mark Dueze’s assertion that “convergence culture serves both as a mechanism to increase revenue and further the agenda of industry, while at the same time enabling people – in terms of their identities as producers and consumers, professionals as well as amateurs – to enact some kind of agency regarding the omnipresent messages and commodities of this industry”. Conan’s engagement with social media far surpasses Fallon’s, utilizing sites like tumblr, flickr, and getglue on top of participatory segments such as “blimpspotting,” “Coco MoCa,” “Fan Fridays” and “Fan Corrections”:

    Blimpspotting: Somewhere over the eastern United States there's a giant orange Conan Blimp lurking overhead. Hunt it down, check in to it on FourSquare, and earn yourself the coveted ‘Conan Blimpspotter’ Badge. Curious how to find the blimp? We've got a live tracker on that baby @ teamcoco.com/blimp

    Coco MoCa: Enter The Museum Of Conan Art -- a museum FOR the people and BY the people. So whether you're a painter, sketch artist, sculptor, or a Photoshop pixel-pusher, we want to see your Team Coco themed artwork. With a bit of luck, it might end up backstage in the "Conan" Green Room.

    Fan Fridays: If there's one thing we love, it's our fans. (If there are TWO things, it's our fans and "Portal 2". Holy crap that game is so awesome... But we digress). Our fans are our lifeblood. Our bones. Our skin. The wind beneath our wings. The clam in our chowder. The buttons on our overcoat. The sequins on our Michael Jackson glove. I could go on. The point is, TEAM COCO FANS RULE. And we want to celebrate our ruling fans - that's YOU, btw - by profiling one at random every week.

    Fan Corrections: Have you noticed something on "Conan" that's not quite right? Be it a factual error, incorrect pronunciation or some other random stupidity, we want to hear about it. So fire up the old webcam, make a video explaining our alleged screwup, and upload it as a Video Response to this YouTube video. We might just investigate the accuracy of your claim – and feature you on our show.

It is clear that the producers of O’Brien’s content “presume a more active spectator who can and will follow these media flows. Such marketing strategies promote a sense of affiliation with and immersion in fictional worlds” (Jenkins, 165). The name “Team Coco” – a term originally coined by fans which now stands as the name of O’Brien’s official website and used as a referent for the people involved in the actual production of his TBS show “Conan” -- offers an interesting example of the simultaneous sincerity and incongruity that resides in the attempts of “cultural industries” to both involve and profit from individual viewers. Who, exactly, is on this “team” and how equally are influence and agency distributed among these members? While Team Coco originated as a grassroots movement to redress a decision made by a major American network, it has arguably undergone a process of commodification via O’Brien’s embrace and expansion of it.

On May 3rd, 2011, Steve Martin appeared on “Conan”. The following segment took place towards the end of the interview:

O’Brien: It has always been a dream of mine to play deuling banjos with Steve Martin.

Martin: Okay. You kick it off.

[Conan plays his part]

Martin: My banjo is in the dressing room.

[the camera follows Martin as he walks the considerable distance to his dressing room. We see backstage, we see the messy dressing room. He picks up his banjo, plays his part, puts it back on the stand. The camera follows him as he walks back to the stage. He sits down. Conan plays the next part of the song.]

Martin: Oh, you want to keep playing.

[He stands back up; the bit is repeated.]

The segment is emblematic of new media: people connecting and collaborating, regardless of physical proximity; fulfilling a desire to do something or interact with someone without really ever doing it or interacting with them; the sharing of mundane, unnecessary, and private moments with the whole word, exemplified by the long, tedious shots of Steve Martin walking and invasion of the dressing room space. Furthermore, the fact that Martin – famous for being an actor and stand-up comedian – is on the show to promote his new blues album is indicative of the ways in which media content is constantly being repurposed in order to be marketed more effectively for a particular audience or platform.

In theory, we could be watching an interview from 1993; the classic tropes of the late night talk show are all present, both O’Brien and Martin have been in the business for over two decades, and, as opposed to Fallon’s high tech set and hip hop house band, there is no real indication that its 2011. It is a different time, a different channel, a different show. But everything is pretty much the same.

    Works Cited

    Caldwell, John. "The Business of New Media." The New Media Book. 2002. 56-68. Print.

    Carter, Bill. The War for Late Night When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy. Plume, 2011. Print.

    Harries, Dan. The New Media Book. London: British Film Institute, 2002. Print.

    Jenkins, Henry. "Interactive Audiences?" New Media Book. 2002. 158-170. Print.

    Marshall, P. David. "The New Intertextual Commodity." New Media Book. 2002. 70-104. Print.

    Sternbergh, Adam. "Is the Good-Natured Jimmy Fallon the Logical Heir to the 'Tonight Show' Chair? -- New York Magazine." New York Magazine -- NYC Guide to Restaurants, Fashion, Nightlife, Shopping, Politics, Movies. 10 Nov. 2010. Web. 25 Apr. 2011. <http://nymag.com/arts/tv/profiles/69366/>.

    Wood, Helen. Talking with Television: Women, Talk Shows, and Modern Self-reflexivity. Urbana: University of Illinois, 2009. Print.

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