On Michael Haneke

Death, with Television

167 Meghan Sutherland death, with Television In 1935, almost a decade before American broadcast television began to air on a regular basis, it would have been difficult for the young medium to effect much of anything. Still, the mere prospect of its emergence already loomed large enough in the popular imagination to inspire a B movie, starring Bela Lugosi, with a title that now sounds like a forensic classification for all the social and psychic ills attributed to it since: Murder by Television.1 despite the sweeping evocations of this title, one of the great charms of the film is that the murder mystery it enacts takes care to draft a more precise autopsy of its victims. By the end we learn that it is neither the molecular warp of the electronic image nor the hypnotic power it holds over masses of viewers that does the killing but rather the president of a broadcast network who fears losing his monopoly claim to a patent on television technology—a charged bit of social criticism at a moment when RCA executives were securing just such a monopoly.2 Television, the film seems to quip, does not do anything; it takes an executive to execute. The prospect of death by television has generally taken a more amorphous form as a figurative threat in the discourse of mass culture, casting a broad shadow of doom over twentieth- and twenty-first-century cultural theory, middlebrow criticism, popular punditry, and social scientific analysis of the Left and the Right. depending on which commentators and theorists one consults between the years of 1943 and the present, television is responsible for the waxing and waning of any number of indices charting the decline of Western civilization—whether the endpoint of that decline is posited as good old-fashioned godlessness or a capitalist regime total- 168 M E G H A n S U T H E R L A n d izing enough to smother any remaining fire left in the world. To be sure, some arguments posit good effects for television, and some focus more specifically on, say, advertising or cartoons; some are more warranted or more thoughtful than others. For instance, a wide gulf of concerns separates Fredric jameson’s worries about the fate of the political unconscious in “Video: Surrealism without the Unconscious” from the battery of social scientific experiments that connect violence or obesity to something called “television” (why not conglomeration? or fascist parents? or war machine ?).3 Still, the grounding assumption of all such discourses is ultimately the same: television, or alternatively, “the media”—an epithet that speaks well to the vagueness of such talk—does something to us and to society. In addition to affecting reality, it effects reality. While the nature of the effects and the scale on which they occur remain a matter of energetic debate, their existence is more or less taken for granted both in the academy and in many of the same living rooms where television is apologetically declared a guilty pleasure. Television is the social, cultural, and political equivalent of smoking: we know it will kill us and that it is unbecoming moreover, but out of either defiance or gluttony we refuse to quit. It must be said, however, that television is not entirely like cigarettes. In particular, it does not result in physical asphyxiation, and it does not directly promote the growth of cancerous cells that colonize bodies in a new state of death. So it is worth asking a question that is seldom, if ever, taken very seriously: What would it mean for television to have an effect on the existence of democracy, or intelligence, or our bodies? What would the nature and terms of responsibility—something that suggests a certain concrete causality—even be for a medium? And furthermore, what would it mean to take seriously the ultimate effect—death—as a potential effect of watching television? This question is in many ways preliminary to the more familiar kinds of discussions about ideological subjects and good or bad representations . It simply asks, What is the ontological status of television, which is to say, the ground on which it exists in relation to our existence? Or even more simply, How does television intervene in reality? Perhaps because behavioral social scientists have pursued these foundational kinds of questions with such uncomplicated zeal, in the last few decades television and new media scholars have eschewed them altogether. In fact, if the humanities-based practice of media...