“How could you? Did our
promise mean nothing to you?”
“I couldn’t help myself. I didn’t know
what I was doing. It was just that one time, I won’t do it again!”
You all know this
scene. It repeats itself, regularly, in living rooms across the nation. It is a
pitiful, cliché filled tableau of guilt, possession, desire and betrayal. You know it well.
"I still can’t believe
you did it. I can’t believe you watched episode 10 without me.”
Infidelity, unwilling
to be confined to its animating role in the drama on the small screen, has leapt right out and, increasingly, shapes our
relationship to and around TV itself. For those unfamiliar with this new relational
landscape let’s take a moment to look at an entry from a dictionary*:
TV-infidelity (noun): the act of breaking an implied or explicit promise
to watch a particular tv show only in the company of particular other person/s.
e.g. ‘TV-infidelity, a crime most heinous, is often considered grounds for
separation’.
Synonym: TV-cheating (noun, verb) e.g. ‘I can’t believe you TV-cheated
on me, TV-cheating is the worst, you’re such a TV-cheat!’, and ‘I just walked
in on him TV-cheating on me!’
Antonym: TV-monogamous (adjective) e.g. ‘I am sorry, I can’t watch the
new Game of Thrones with you… Jenny and I are GoT-monogamous'.
I would hazard a guess
that this phenomenon is only as old as TV on DVD.
Before that, if TV studies is to be believed, we were all happy TV sluts**- dropping
in and out of viewership not only over the course of the season but over the
course of an episode (‘can we pause while I go grab some more icecream?’ was, until
recently, just a dream). Our TV companions were not special intimates who stuck
with us through the good times (‘Let’s watch another one!’) and the bad (‘Is
that the time? SHIT! I have work tomorrow!’). Instead we saw
ourselves as part of an big imagined community of fellow TV viewers who we could picture
tuning in at exactly the same time as us to watch exactly the same thing.
Basically,
watching TV was like having some kind of serial, anonymous, textual orgy.
For better or worse, those days have passed.
The more control and choice we gain over what we watch and when, the more
fanatical we become about who we watch what with. As we abandon the tv guide we also abandon the imagined community it represents. And so we make promises
(and break them) and try hard to pin back down a sense of a TV experience shared. In the age of box-sets and streaming we have become TV-monogamists.
And that's why, knowing full well that the siren call of an episode fresh from the US can turn even the best boys bad, we gather our courage and ask somebody new, "do you... um, do you wanna go TV-steady with me?”
* This did not come
from an actual dictionary. I made it up. You can probably tell.
** I’m using 'slut' here
as a deliberately provocative yet morally neutral term for ‘promiscuous person’.
Quick guide to correct usage: ‘I hate you, slut!’ = Bad, you sexist prick! ‘I feel like
getting slutty!’ = Fine, and go for it, sister!
This is a great reflection, Jess! So if the collective TV experience was like an imagined mass (serial, anonymous, textual) orgy, would you say we are sliding even further along the scale past TV monogamy towards masturbation? I'm thinking of the challenge of i-view and the increasing pattern (in my own life, for example) of two ppl spending physical proximity, but watching different things on their iPads
ReplyDeleteTotally, Remy. But I guess my response is that there's nothing necessarily wrong with a little bit of texual self-pleasure. Some would even say it's healthy.
DeleteIf we were to take a leaf out of the book those who practice negotiated non-monogamy (like, the actual, not-TV kind) they might say it doesn't so much matter what you promise so long as you keep it.
In short, watch TV alone, with someone special, or with a whole room full of people you just met. Just be honest. Because the truth will out... in this case probably when you accidentally spoil something that happens two episodes from now. And then you've cheated AND spoiled, which makes you pretty much the scum of the earth.
Thank you for this excellent post, Jess, and to both of you for your follow-up comments. It is very interesting to think this problematic of self-pleasure and possible excess in relation to television consumption. There is a long history of ethical problematisation around sociability and reading - especially novels - precisely because reading the novel is understood as textual self-pleasure, and thus seen as intrinsically anti-social. (And what, I ask, does that make a reading group? Mutual masturbation? A scene of sexual pedagogy of a very special sort?) Of course it doesn't map neatly, but it is interesting to think about emergent ethics around different forms textual consumption in the context of that history, too ie which forms are mapped as sociable forms and on what scale?
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