Just call him Professor TiVo
Middlebury scholar teaches ‘Miami Vice’ like Shakespeare
|
|
Middlebury College professor Jason Mittell is a huge admirer of the HBO series “The Wire,” seen here on the screen behind him. Vyto Starinskas |
Toolbox
By SUSAN YOUNGWOOD
Staff Writer - Published: February 3, 2008
While their peers in nearby classrooms study advanced subjects like linear algebra, molecular biology and international relations, one group of Middlebury College students has watched scenes from "The Simpsons" and "Miami Vice."
Yup, that's stuff from the boob tube - mindless entertainment.
It's hard to imagine that television is taken seriously at this highly selective liberal arts college. After all, isn't TV a vast wasteland of reality shows, soap operas and other dreck, watched by couch potatoes who should be reading a good book, enjoying friends or skiing?
Not according to Jason Mittell. A newly tenured professor at Middlebury, Mittell believes television can be a serious art form, to be analyzed and evaluated just as rigorously as fine literature.
"There's a stigma attached to television," he says. "Part of my mission as a teacher and researcher is to push against that stigma."
The study of popular culture - not just television, but the Internet and graphic novels and anime, is becoming more common on college campuses. The University of Vermont, for example, recently added a film and television studies department. Mittell's work is a prime example of how television, one of the most derided art forms, can be taught seriously.
Mittell doesn't focus on highbrow entertainment like "Masterpiece Theater." He loved "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Northern Exposure" and "Alias." He's written scholarly articles on fan culture and video games and spoilers (when fans share information to figure out future storylines) and considers himself Vermont's premier expert on "The Simpsons."
This is a professor who manages to be both unabashed fan and academic.
Phil Collins singing "In the Air Tonight" thrums loudly in the darkened classroom; on the screen Don Johnson races his Ferrari through the gaudy streets of Miami. When "Miami Vice" first aired in 1984, these Middlebury students hadn't yet been born.
Mittell shows the clip after discussing what he calls "the formal techniques used to convey meaning" - like sound, editing and graphics. Referring to the clip, he asks, "Why are these choices being made?" And, he asks, how is this style different from that of "Dragnet" and "Hill Street Blues," two cop shows the students had watched the previous evening.
"'Miami Vice' was seen as radically different in the 1980s - which is hard to understand now," he tells the students. The mood, tone, editing and music sent a message to the viewer that this was a different type of cop show.
The editing techniques of "Dragnet," he says, suggested, "Justice is a machine. Machine works. Justice is served." In contrast, the chaotic editing of "Hill Street Blues" questioned the efficacy of justice. And "Miami Vice"?
"Who cares if justice works? Cops are cool."
Mittell, 37, grew up in suburban Boston and went to Oberlin College for his undergraduate degree. He was a theater geek but didn't quite fit in with what he calls "people in black" - the artsy, skinny-black-jeans-wearing, cigarette-smoking types.
"I'm interested in how people become emotionally engaged in stories," he said in an interview. He majored in English and theater, and after graduating he moved to Minneapolis, where he took a class in theories of pop culture.
"It was really eye-opening," he said. "It made me think about how you can use complex theories and a critical eye on common everyday practices. In that class, I wrote a paper about 'The Simpsons.' ... It awoke a connection in me: I could study something that seemed simple, disposable and commonplace, and learn why it mattered so much to people, and for me."
He added: "I've always been an engaged TV watcher. I'm not a fanatic. I'm not a fan in the fan-culture, fandom style. I've always found watching TV and film ... to be something satisfying."
He earned his graduate degree in media and cultural studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and started teaching at Middlebury in 2002. He lives with his wife and three children in Middlebury.
While Mittell mainly studies television, he also pays close attention to trends in film, video games, animation, music and books, focusing on where they intersect with TV narrative. In conversation, don't be surprised if he refers to YouTube, podcasts, fanvids, fan fiction, wikis and Second Life.
His first book, "Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture," was published in 2004. He is writing a textbook on American television and keeps a blog (called JustTV, at http://justtv.wordpress.com) that comments on television and other pop culture phenomena. Recent entries discuss "30 Rock," "The Wire," "Heroes" and "Lost," although he also ruminates on the writers' strike, the Red Sox, media bias, and intellectual property and copyright issues.
"I'm a participant observer," he wrote in a scholarly journal. "I belong to a community that I am also analyzing."
There is, of course, a television in Mittell's office, as well as shelves crammed with videos. There are sundry TV-land posters (like "I Love Lucy"), Simpsons memorabilia and a statue of St. Clare - the patron saint of television.
When Middlebury students first settle into Mittell's classes, they often expect to learn how television is bad for society. Mittell expects that. After all, he explains, "For a long time, the dominant research about TV was on what is wrong with TV: television as a pathology."
But he takes a different approach.
"I want to teach kids that TV has a wide range of programs and a wide range of uses," he said. "For some, the television is background noise; it's always on. Other families have appointment viewing. ... Television brings them together."
There is bad television, he concedes, but there are also bad books. "The other thing, the other thread in my class, is television appreciation," he said. "Part of what I try to do is show the students some television shows that they may not know about but I think are really good."
Mittell is in the forefront of a new brand of television studies, one that does not focus on the social impact of the boob tube. Instead, he looks at the medium's narrative form, and has pinpointed a new mode of entertainment television that he says is distinctive for what he labels "narrative complexity." Shows like "Lost," "The West Wing" and "The Sopranos" are prime examples of this new format.
What makes these shows different? Each episode does not stand alone; instead multiple storylines flow through several episodes and seasons. Like a novel, these series have a plotline that takes a whole season - or series - to reveal (boxed DVD sets can have the same narrative cohesion as a novel). There is an emphasis on both character and plot development, and on maintaining continuity throughout the show's lifespan.
Writers are increasingly experimenting with unconventional storytelling strategies, or so-called narrative special effects - such as genre mixing, shifts in perspective, flashbacks, dream or fantasy sequences, plot twists. Viewers are as invested in how the creator tells the story as what the story is, Mittell said. And they get a nice cognitive workout, challenged by these strategies to figure out what is happening.
Not to say that there aren't a lot of conventional shows still around, but Mittell argues that a confluence of technological advances, changing viewing practices and new industry trends has led to "an era of narrative experimentation and innovation, challenging the norms of what the medium can do." Viewers are buying DVDs, watching shows closely and more often, and joining others online to interpret and discuss what they watch.
One result of this trend, argues Mittell, is that fan subculture behavior is becoming more mainstream. Fans have always been hyper-involved with their fandom, writing stories, forming communities, analyzing. As some TV shows have grown in complexity, more watchers are joining these participatory activities.
"This programming form," he writes in an article published in a scholarly journal, "demands an active and attentive process of comprehension to both decode the complex stories and modes of storytelling offered."
Couch potatoes no more: This television genre is forcing its watchers to think.
"You can't lean back and let it wash over you," he said. "You have to take an active interest in it and decode it."
On March 29, 2006, Mittell was watching "Lost" when, for 10 seconds, an intricate diagram flashed on the screen (for viewers of the show: It was the blast door map).
As a fan of "Lost," Mittell was intrigued by the map. As a researcher, he wondered how fans would react. He started logging on to various fan sites. Less than an hour after the episode aired, the map was on the Internet. Within eight hours, he said, fans had opened it in PhotoShop and started figuring out the words. In 24 hours, by working together, fans had completely decoded the diagram - a prime example of what scholars call "collective intelligence."
"That map was put in the show for hard-core fans to decode," he said.
A week later, the map took up a page in Entertainment Weekly magazine, an example, he tells his students, of "hard-core fandom online seeping into the mainstream."
Mittell relays this anecdote during a 90-minute lecture on fans and fandom, even screening a fanvid (a fan-made video using clips from other sources) for his students to show the level of creativity taken by fans to deepen their connection to the text.
"For many fans, fandom is about creativity," he says. Just as important, he continues, is the community they become immersed in. "The number one reason they do it is for the community that forms around the text."
"It would seem unhealthy," he says. "But is it unhealthy, when you see it from the inside? ... It's important to think of fandom from the inside, (to ask) why are they doing it? What are they getting out of it?"
Judging from the growing numbers - and expanding popularity - of Web sites where television fans congregate, like Television Without Pity and Lostipedia, the increased complexity of TV shows is creating more active fans. After each episode airs, they interpret meaning, revel in plot twists, track characters' motivations and unveil clues to puzzle out answers to plot mysteries - and despair when a good show goes downhill or celebrate when an episode is particularly touching or meaningful.
So, is "good" television analogous to a "good" novel? Is the intricate plot of "Lost" as good as that of a Charles Dickens tale? Is the character development in "Buffy" as insightful as Jane Austen's?
As long as writer-creators like Joss Whedon ("Buffy" and "Firefly") and Tim Kring ("Heroes"), JJ Abrams ("Alias" and "Lost") and Rob Thomas ("Veronica Mars") are given creative freedom to develop TV shows, then Mittell would probably say the answer is yes.
And he'll continue to use his TiVO to his heart's content - and then use clips of his favorite shows in the classroom.