CRITICAL STUDIES

HYBRID DOCUMENTARY

WIRES & LIGHTS

GERMN HERRERA
14TH DECEMBER 2012

WIRES & LIGHTS We have currently a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information. Our mass media reflect this. But unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse and insulate us, then television and those who finance it, those who look at it and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture too late. This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box. There is a great and perhaps decisive battle to be fought against ignorance, intolerance and indifference. This weapon of television could be useful Said Edward R. Murrow in front of the Radio-Television News Directors Association. His full speech was a reflection of current practices in broadcasting and also a call to consider the possibilities of the medium, not only as a showcase of popular entertainment but as an oulet for news and public affairs programming. This statement was made 54 years ago. Since then television has grown, matured and after the internetsome people considered it dying or at least in process of revision. Murrow's concern feels completely contemporary however he was missing the point. Between then and now, Marshall McLuhan came into the scene and pushed forward the understanding of media. As his most known quote tells us: "...the medium is the message () it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action. The content or uses of such media are as diverse as they are ineffectual in shaping the form of human association. Indeed, it is only too typical that the "content" of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium. (McLuhan, 7) Murrow complained about the entertainment shows of television outweighting the cold, hard hitting journalism he was known for. He only mentioned the technical quality of TV in passing and as a negative: wires and lights in a box. But it is in this wires and lights that we find the true character of television. For McLuhan The movie, by sheer speeding up the mechanical, carried us from the world of sequence and connection into the world of creative configuration and structure. The message of the movie medium is that of transition from lineal connections to configurations.
(McLuhan , 7)

That is to say: Every new medium absorbs a previous one, in our case film took the linearity of events from print (books and newspapers) to a non-linear/simultaneous configuration in television. To me this idea of configuration is akin to that of staging a theather play, it involves more than just reading a script to move from one action to the next one, it is a very conscious process of selecting, designing, adapting to, or modifying a performance space. As a curious note, in its beginings, moving pictures and filmaking took codes and conventions from theater and the stage, an example of this are Mlis first forays into film making. For him film as another way of making magic, another way of staging his illusions.

Again from Understanding Media: To a highly literate and mechanized culture the movie appeared as a world of triumphant illusions and dreams that money could buy.(McLuhan, 12) Configuration, Staging, Performance, Illusions, therein lies the conflict because Murrow was first and foremost a journalist, in McLuhan's terms a typographic man, trying to make the transition to this new graphic medium of television. His direct translation from traditional journalismthe linear thought, the quest for truth through research and documentation to the screen was flawed because filmmaking in itself induces creative, non-linear configurations into its subject matter, in other words: It favors creative configurations, staging, performance, illusions... Entertainment. Murrow's quest for illumination of the audiences through the presentation of meticulously researched facts can be traced directly to the Enlightment and its faith in the ability of science to solve social and individual problems but since the 20th century there has been a generalised perception of failure in our social institutions, which provided the corner stone of Postmodern Phylosophy : A crisis of representation and the collapse of the real. In their book Faking It: Mock-Documentary and the Subversion of Factuality, Craig Hight and Jane Roscoe bring forward Postmodernist Phylosophy as a direct critique to documentary: Baudrillard(1984) in introducing the notion of simulation, argues that there is no gap between media and representations and the originary event or image in the post modern world. Both must be considered real, with the implication that neither can be accorded the status of authentic.(Hight & Roscoe, 28) It is this postmodern critique that presents the greatest challenge to media of all types and particularly to the exercise of journalism (documentary) in television and film: The representation of facts and fictions and the blurring of the boundaries between them. Because if we can agree that there is no truthful medium, we should be able concede that there is no greater truth to express it in. All we are left with is just a reigning artificiality, the one favored by the medium itself. And that's when Truthiness kicks in... In 2006 Merriam-Webster, an Encyclopedia Brittanica company, chose as Word of the Year a term coined by Stephen Colbert in his homonymous show, The Colbert Report: TRUTHINESS: "THE QUALITY OF PREFERRING CONCEPTS OR FACTS ONE WISHES TO BE TRUE, RATHER THAN CONCEPTS OR FACTS KNOWN TO BE TRUE". In his ownoff-characterwords, from an interview for The Onion AV Club: It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that's not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. It's certainty. (Rabin) This was the thesis behind the development of his show, The Colbert Report and his homonymous character: To parody, mock, the current state of journalism in the North American landscape and the rise of the pundit, a person with expert commentary on any issue

regarding current affairs. The huge success of both the character and the show brought a lot of attention towards a group of comedians taking the guise of political commentators, specifically how their critique and commentary become not only valid but also pertinent to the public sphere. In an interview for Big Think's Age of Engagement, Lauren Feldman (Ph.D. from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania) said Recent survey data suggest that at the same time as young Americans are abandoning traditional news media, they are more likely to identify late-night comedy programs, particularly Comedy Central's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, as a destination for learning about election campaigns. () Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert satirize what mainstream news outlets are saying, and then the mainstream outlets, in turn, report on the comedians critiques. () So, perhaps one of the most important ways that The Daily Show, in particular, is influencing mainstream news coverage is by exposing its limitations and encouraging journalists to break from conventional norms or at least to think more expansively about what journalism should look like today. (Nisbet) This mirrors some recent commentaries from british documentarist Adam Curtis, in a brief interview during the MediaGuardian Edinburgh International Television festival, Curtis said 'In the old days journalism was about fighting battles against bad people (...) But in the modern era those things don't apply: we have tried to find baddies but we all know that is not substantial enough.' Curtis argues that rather than looking at the world from above and trying to make sense of the lie of the land, too many people who make TV programmes have become trapped into using the opaque language of the very people they're meant to be reporting on. 'Every month we are told the eurozone is going to collapse and the jargon used is utterly dense but then nothing happens. We need new tools to be able to tell these stories.'" (Manzoor) Stewart, Colbert et al found in comedy a tool to explore the world around them and to engage the audience in their findings. They have done so thanks to the power of parody. Now its easy to undermine the validity of this effort as comedic or a simple exercise in style lacking any depth but as Hight & Roscoe remind us by quoting Carl Platinga: The terms 'satire' and 'parody' are often used as synonyms but have slightly different meanings. Both involve the imitation of and ironic commentary on another discourse. Yet satire implies ridicule of its target, while a parody need not devalue its object, but many range from an ethos of condemnation to one of homage and celebration (Hight & Roscoe, 30) It is precisely by mocking, parodyzing the current codes and conventions of NorthAmerican news shows that these comedians are able to induce reflection on the subjects and practices of contemporary journalism because Parody can both reinforce and be critical of its subject matter. The parodic text, then, is both object and subject of its criticism and can be read as both against the object of criticism and as sitting alongside it () Parodic texts actively construct a position for viewers through which they can take up an at least potential critical stance towards the object of the parody (Hight & Roscoe 30-31) In their research on Mock-Documentary Hight and Roscoe propossed 3 different Degrees of mock-documentary as a frame of reference for thisreativelynew approach to documentary filmmaking:

INTENTION OF THE FILMMAKER Degree 1 PARODY To parody, and implicitly reinforce, an aspect of culture

CONSTRUCTION OF THE TEXT The 'benevolent' or 'innocent' appropiation of documentary aesthetics The Classic Objective Argument accepted as a signifier of rationality and objectivity The ambivalent appropriation of documentary aesthetics A tension between an explicit critique of documentary practices and practitioners and an implicit acceptance of the generic codes and conventions The 'hostile' appropriation of documentary aesthetics Documentary as a representative of a mythical and problematic socialpolitical stance toward social-historical world

ROLE CONSTRUCTED FOR THE AUDIENCE Appreciation of the parody of popular culture, and the reinforcement of popular myth Nostalgia for traditional forms of docmentary The more critical viewers are able to explore the form's latent reflexivity Appreciation of parody / satire of popular culture Varying degrees of reflectivity towards aspects of the documentary genre Reflexive appreciation of parody or satire of popular culture An openly reflexive stance towards factual discourse and its associated codes and conventions

Degree 2 CRITIQUE

To use the documentary form to engage in a parody or satire of an aspect of popular culture

Degree 3 DECONSTRUCTION

To critique an aspect of popular culture To examine, subvert and deconstruct factual discourse and its relationship with documentary codes and conventions

This third degree, the Deconstruction, is in fact a very complex piece of work and a rare event. In the case of both the Stephen Colbert character and The Colbert Report, even if it isn't a mock-documentary in the strict sense, its principles are perfectly executed. It trascended the simple parody and critique to become a participant in the very facts it was supposed to cover and with this interaction he constructs a new set of relationships between the audience and the discourse taking place in the real world. In doing so he is taking control of the medium, the so called Creative Configurations propossed by television's nature, which allows room to explore a more complex narrative than the traditional good guys-bad guys expos of traditional journalism and in the end reconciles entertainment, information and audience engagement in a way Murrow could not forsee. Just like Cardinal Newman said of Napoleon, 'He understood the grammar of gunpowder.' (McLuhan, 13) It can be said that Mock-documentary and its bethren (Stewart, Colbert...) not only understood the grammar of television but decided to use it against it and that might help Mr. Murrow sleep better in his grave.

REFERENCES McLuhan, Marshall Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man The MIT Press; Reprint edition (October 20, 1994) Hight, Craig Roscoe; Jane Faking It: Mock-Documentary and the Subversion of Factuality Manchester University Press (February 8, 2002) Nisbet, Matthew C. Distraction or Engagement? Researcher On What Viewers Learn from The Daily Show September 16, 2010
http://bigthink.com/age-of-engagement/distraction-or-engagement-researcher-on-what-viewers-learn-from-the-daily-show

Rabin, Nathan INTERVIEW Stephen Colbert January 25, 2006

http://www.avclub.com/articles/stephen-colbert,13970/

Manzoor, Sarfraz Adam Curtis argues TV needs 'new tools' to tell its stories Wednesday 22 August 2012
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/aug/22/adam-curtis-edinburgh-tv-festival