Career Movies: American Business and the Success Mystique

CHAPTER 5. WORKING IN AMERICAN TELEVIRTUALITY

It’s not worth doing if it’s not on TV. —    ( )  To Die For () As Truman grew up, we were forced to manufacture ways to keep him on the island. . . . Seahaven is the way the world should be. —  ’  / ( )  The Truman Show () CHAPTER 5 WORKING IN AMERICAN TELEVIRTUALITY It is the revolution in televisual and other communications technologies that most defines the contemporary age and, in conjunction with the promotion industry, sets the tone of everyday experience in American work and leisure. In addition to the central cultural position of television , both the specific work roles and career tracks of today’s businessperson are increasingly impacted, like the marketplace, by the new hardware, software, and networking systems of the information age. When the constant demands of new communications technologies are coupled with the managerial trend toward the isolation of the individual as an entrepreneurial unit, the contemporary worker appears to have become an increasingly uprooted functionary of the mediated economy, however seductive and sometimes profitable that economy may be. This chapter is therefore devoted primarily to films that trace television and new media technology’s imprint on avocational and cultural identity. For the sake of brevity, this chapter investigates those films most directly engaged with the business and culture of television and the televisual, where the powers of technoculture are currently most in evidence. For the benefit of perspective, one need only consider the recent history of television career films. In the s, Network and The China Syndrome offer a cinema that is representative of significant social protests in TV contexts. Broadcast News and Switching Channels in the s offer a cinema of accommodation to TV careerists and their medium. And in the s, Wag the Dog and The Truman Show offer a 200   cinema of the power and threat of the new televisual reality. Each film decade demonstrates changes in TV career experience as well as alterations in the business and cultural role of the televisual, including its increasing sovereignty as part of an expanded and converging digital media environment. Television workspace is tied to leading-edge communications technology and serves, through advertising, those political economic forces that most directly shape national policy and cultural attitudes. Television is also the imaging system that continues to be the main switchpoint of today’s basic culture and reality sense. As the electronic family member in the home that we still watch and listen to the most, it is the working person’s evening escape mechanism and the cultural guidepost for young and old alike. Its massive cultural outreach, saturation of daily leisure schedules, and ability to set the momentary tone and content of public discussion and awareness is undeniable. This pervasive mediation of everyday reality, and increasingly of the past and the future, is the predominating consciousness and memory of public events, and increasingly of private ones, lending itself to the concept of a ‘‘televisuality.’’ The public reliance on TV reality that is joined in the s by rapidly increasing attention to Internet/Web access and virtual effects has created convergent systems of interactivity that have the further potential of complete simulational experience, or ‘‘virtuality.’’1 But this term alone fails to give television its due as the continuing cultural power center, the dominant cultural and economic industry that continues to supply the bulk of the most expensive advertising and full-motion news and entertainment, and which has yet to be unseated in its daily levels of influence by the Internet and the virtual reality of cyberspace. A term that preserves both televisuality and virtuality, therefore, would be ‘‘televirtuality.’’ This nomenclature has the advantage of reflecting the greater scope of the total televisual, digital and online communicational world that now exists. Writing in , Sherry Turkle observes that we are standing ‘‘on the boundary between the real and the virtual,’’ that moment of liminality and ‘‘passage when new cultural symbols and meanings can emerge,’’ and when ‘‘we are flooded with predictions of doom and predictions of imminent utopia.’’2 When the rapid expansion of the World Wide Web, e-commerce, and all of the related electronic business and commercial communications systems are added to the televisual mix, they infinitely extend the hegemony of the televirtual loop. Ellen Seiter observes how television and Internet connections are increasing so that ‘‘resemblances between     201 websites and television programming’’3 are on the...