Television in an Age of Transition: Closet Monsters and other Double Codings

Canadian Review of American Studies Volume23, Number 2, Winter 1993, pp. 115-147 115 Televisionin an Age of Transition: Closet Monsters and other Double Codings GaileMcGregor Remember "Beauty and the Beast?" One of the most surpnsmg successesof the 1987-88 television season. Or perhaps not so surprising. The neonihilistwould no doubt see this series as an exemplary telefable for the postmodern era. Vincent-tall, primitive, powerful (albeit a little stooped as he roams his underground kingdom)-is clearly the father-become-child, the phallus reclaimed by the womb. The message, then, is a timely one: in Baudrillard'ssimulacrum world, we all share the woman's lot.1 "Unmanned" bythe incessant replications of spectacle that assault us from every direction ("the repetitiveness, the self-sameness, and the ubiquity of modern mass culture," as Adorno put it a quarter century ago2 ), we conspire in our own disenablement. Like Vincent, with his feminine alter ego, his cultivated tastes, his obsessive, horrified attempts to repudiate his ani~ality, we are conditioned not only to settle for but actually to prefer substitutes: substitutes for freedom (the male on call, running through the tunnels), substitutes for love (it's all in the mind), substitutes for potency (when Catherine conceived Vincent's child in December 1989, flowers unfolded, volcanoes erupted-but the father himself slept through the whole thing). As the sign denied its signified, Vincent is the postmodern subject par excellence.According to this reading anyway.The trouble is, such a reading only works if one is careful to ignore context. For all his angst, it is made clear by the structur~ and even more the inter- and extra-textual reference 116 Canadian Review of American Studies of the series as a whole (I'll be returning to this later) that Vincent bespeaks something above and beyond emasculation. More to the point for present purposes, there are good reasons for suspecting the validity of generalizations based on one, even so striking, representation. If any television protagonist represented the phallus in 1987, in fact, one would have to say it was Hawk, the tall, cold-eyed, philosophy-spouting, ostentatiously undomesticated Afro-American enforcer from "Spenser For Hire," with his bare, shining skull and very large gun. It matters not that his spinoff lasted only one season-the character itself had enough audience appeal that the network thought it worthwhile to keep him on when his home program was cancelled. Any explanation for "Beauty and the Beast," then, has to explainHawk aswell.And Wiseguy-a loose phallus if there ever was one. Not to mention the new western, the new war drama, and the new "Star Trek." Laying the Ground Before considering counterreadings, I think it necessary that we look a little more critically at that missing dimension to which I alluded earlier: that is,the context. For the purposes of this paper, what I mean by this term is not economic or technological or even political climate (though these may all come into play as contfibutory factors), but specifically the context of meaning. The question I want to ask, in other words, is: how does television connect with-what does it signify for-the social at-large from whence it arises? Most commentators agree at the very least that the world presented on the small screen reflects or delineates in some mode and degree some facet or facets of public reality-so much seems obvious. There are some, however, who would go considerably further than this essentially mimetic function to assign television a role in the actual constitution of culture.3 Of this latter group, a smaller but still significant number have specified that this role is a mythic one. The attribution is not, of course, in itself in any way novel. It has become a critical commonplace over the last couple of decades that popular culture, in numerous aspects from film to advertising, is like, or contains, or functions as, myth.4 Far from providing a coherent horizon for interpretation, however, what emerges when one examines the GaileMcGregorI 117 pertinent literature is that not everyone is talking about the same thing when theyinvoke the magic word. It's not alwaysclear, for instance, whether the putative"mythicness...