Prosthetic Intimacies: Television, Performance Studies, and the Makings of (a) Life

Spring 2010 97 Prosthetic Intimacies: Television, Performance Studies, and the Makings of (a) Life Nick Salvato Five Uneasy Pieces In a recent article on television fandom, Nick Couldry advocates to fellow scholars: [F]andom research needs a theoretical flexibility to match the phenomenological complexity of much fan experience. Instead of a “unified” model that privileges one framework of interpretation (psychological, sociological, economic, textual, spatial), we need perhaps a toolkit from which, when faced with particular fan experiences, we can draw on any or all of these frameworks.1 Adopting Couldry’s thoughtful recommendations for the study of television fandom—and extending them to the study of television more generally—I would ask, is not the “toolkit” that Couldry imagines already provided by the methodologies of performance studies? And does not his declining to name the toolkit explicitly as a performance studies approach suggest the extent to which scholars still fail to think capaciously across disciplinary formations like television studies and performance studies, even when one or the other (or both) of those disciplinary formations has positioned itself as an inter-discipline, if not an antidiscipline ?To ask these questions is to translate another, more idiosyncratic question with which I have been tarrying as I contemplate performance studies’ potential contributions to television studies: What insights might profitably emerge from considering together the following five, uneasy pieces of evidence? 1. In an episode of the NBC sitcom 30 Rock, “Generalissimo,” Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin) discovers the source of his girlfriend’s grandmother’s otherwise unaccountable animus toward him: he looks exactly like the actor Hector Moreda (Alec Baldwin), who plays the arch-villain on the telenovela, Los Amantes Clandestinos, a favorite of the grandmother, Conception (Teresa Yanque). Eager to secure Concepcion’s affections, Donaghy wields his power as an executive at a fictional approximation of NBC and colludes with Moreda to transform the Nick Salvato is Assistant Professor of theatre and a member of the graduate faculty of English at Cornell University. His first book, Uncloseting Drama: American Modernism and Queer Performance, is forthcoming from Yale University Press in fall 2010, as part of the series Yale Studies in English. He has published articles in such journals as Modern Drama, TDR: The Drama Review, and Theatre Journal. 98 Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism arch-villain, known as El Generalissimo, from “pure evil” into “everything that [Concepcion] desire[s].”2 2. In response to a survey about television viewing habits and practices of everyday life, a friend writes to me: I use jokes from sitcoms to make friends and influence people. In ‘real life’ I am not all that funny. However, I am frequently described as such mainly because I steal jokes from Will & Grace and use them in everyday conversation ALL THE TIME. And I play them off like they’re my own. Sometimes I’ll confess this habit to significant others (honestly – I do it so much, it doesn’t seem fair that I get all the credit); however, hardly anyone ever believes me and if they do – I am quite certain they fail to recognize the magnitude of my deception. I have so deeply succumbed to this behavior, that I’ve purchased every DVD of the show and I watch at least two episodes / day (though I’ve seen them all several times) just to keep my game tight. I obviously have a second set of copies of seasons 6 and 7 (the funniest seasons) that I keep at work to watch when inspiration wanes. I have stolen so many jokes over so many years, I’m a bit unclear where my humor stops and where their writing staff begins. While this habit makes me feel like a less-than-totally-genuine human being, I can’t say I beat myself up all that bad[ly] for my rampant conversational plagiarism. Will, Jack, Karen and Grace (I’m quite sure) would all appreciate it.3 3. Responding to the same survey, a stranger begins by declaring emphatically, “I do not own a TV and do not watch TV,” then modifies this claim: I watch so little TV, and then [on] the occasion in recent years when I did (watch all...