Three curious genre features of the American TV-series

 Genres are strongly habitual. As we learn to understand or perform a genre, we also learn to accept any number of conventions as normal that may or may not be rational or true. These things become naturalized to the user to such a degree that he or she can move through the genre repeatedly without ever stopping to reflect on their genre-bound conventionality. Here are three such conventions from a genre my long life as a father of small children has given me amble opportunity to experience: the American TV-series of sufficiently unchallenging character to be consumable when very tired.

The “as you know” conversation

Being about interesting people, and not just ordinary dofuses like you and me, the American TV-series frequently moves in environments permeated by experts. Given that the field in question will be a driving force in the plot of individual episodes and longer story arches, some minimal knowledge of the field is required. However, since the viewer, being in fact an ordinay dofus like you and me, cannot be expected to actually understand the field or fields of expertise involved, there is the “as you know”-conversation.

In this genre of conversation, two experts with a deep, shared, field-specific knowledge will engage in an exchange of 101-level knowledge about it. This conversation will be initiated by one of them saying, “as you know …”, or a variation thereof, to her colleague. The other person will then be nodding with encouragement and otherwise look interested in the extended explanation of stuff she knows already, and might even pitch in with a few pieces of entry-level information herself.

Curious addition: House MD omitted the "as you know" conversation from its genre register. By consequence, it's diagnostic discussions are fast-paced, energetic, agonistic, and well-nigh impossible to follow for a lay person. I love them to death, of course.

The strangely – and badly – kept secret

Contrasting genre interpretation.

In a Russian novel, if a character has personal information or even conjecture that should obviously be kept from her significant other, she will immediately storm into a dinner party where her significant other is present and shout it in his face, adding, “you are a bad person Ivan Ivanovitj, a bad and LOW person. You disgust me!” The ensuing chaos from the untimely reveal will then take up the rest of the novel.

However, in an American TV-series, if a character has personal information that should obviously be revealed immediately to his significant other, he will for some unfathomable reason decide that it is imperative that the information is kept secret. I mean, why tell your significant other that you have applied for a job in another state, have discovered a child from a liaison 12 years ago, or has been diagnosed with a crippling degenerative disorder? The secret will then obviously not be kept but instead revealed at the worst possible moment. The ensuing chaos from the aberrant decision to keep it secret in the first place, will then take up several episodes in a story arch.

The P….-moment

If you are a seventeenth century person, the thing to be is “virtuous”. If you are a modern day researcher or research application, the thing to be is “excellent”. However, if you are a character in an American TV-series, the pinnacle of achievement is to make somebody “proud”. Thus, the P….-moment. The moment occurs at emotional high point of a series. It includes high-strung feelings, and declarations about making people proud. It is expressed in sentences like,

·        “I have always been proud of you”,

·        “All I ever wanted, was to make you proud”,

·        “You have made me so proud”,

·        “Your father would have been so proud of you, if he had seen you today”, or

·        Your uncle Ben would have been so proud of you, if he had seen you today”.

(Ok, that last one is Spider Man, obviously, but you get the idea.)

Apparently, making a significant other “proud” counts as the ultimate validation of a person’s being. It means that you are an excellent person in possession of all the necessary virtues to make your life and your contribution to the world meaningful. The P.…-moment activates that validation as a tension in the plot (the “all I ever wanted”, variety), or as its crowning moment and concluding release.

All these genre features are, of course, intimately connected to the plot. And—as you know—it has been known  at least since Aristotle that the plot is at the core of a narrative text. They are all there to enable the action of the plot, as drivers, informers, motivators, and if you see them as plot devices more than anything, and recognize the enormity of the task of establishing any dynamism in a plot structure that has to move through often more than 100-episodes, they will look much less absurd. At least in this case, there’s a method to the genre convention.

I still want to know about the P....-thing, though. Why proud? What is the cultural significance of the word? Why do American characters need to make people proud more than European characters do?

Norms and creativity in genre use

In late 2015 a satiric article from The New Yorker took a turn around my SoMe circles. It was titled “Academic Job Listings for my Exes” and contains what might reasonably be described as a clash of form and content. One of the listings read:

The renowned Department of Psychology at Dartmouth College is soliciting applications for a tenure-track Associate Professor of Hypochondria. We seek a candidate with an affinity for Peter Pan shoes, extensive experience diagnosing resting bitch face, and a willingness to see other people. Teaching responsibilities include courses in Recreational Ambien Use and upper-division seminars in Neediness and/or Polyamory. Successful applicant will be expected to establish a research agenda of panic attacks, puppy-dog eyes, germaphobia, and a chronic mistrust of happiness.

 The text is, of course, an uptake (Freadman) on the genre of the job listing, it is parodic, but in keeping with the theory of parody of Linda Hutcheon it is not directed at the “high” genre that it mimics, but rather at the low material, fitted into it.

                 The uptake into this satiric article, obviously, voids the original function–and thus the original raison d´être–of the job listing genre. There are no job opening to be filled, and no place to send the application. In terms of Rhetorical Genre Studies, the job listing would usually be part of (at least) one genre set (Devitt), a genre system (Bazerman), and a genre chain (Swales) leading to the actual hiring of an applicant. No such patterns exist in this case. Or rather: The genre patterns into which these listings fit are very different and have to do with news publications rather than job hirings. Furthermore, the basic job description, and the qualifications described, are such that nobody in their right mind would ever search for a person with those rather dubious qualities. So you´d have to be a fool to take these job listings seriously–not that such fools don´t exist: There is at least one homepage dedicated to tracking people who foolishly buy into stories from the satiric news service The Onion (and its equally prankish sister site Clickhole)–and it has plenty to report.

                 However, despite the fact that there clearly is no job listing at all, the genre of the job listing is still there as a template on which the text is molded. There is the institution hiring, the actual job to be filled, and a description of the needed candidate. To specify this as an academic job offering the job listing given here also specifies the teaching obligations and the research expected of the chosen candidate. Moreover, the style, choice of words, sentence structure etc., is largely compliant with the job listing as a genre. I say “largely compliant”, of course, because some of the wording used to describe the required applicant is exactly what is off compared to the usual job listings.

                 This, of course, begs the question “why?” What is achieved by this alternate uptake on the genre of the job listing? Well, first of all we have the fundamental method and effect of almost all parody: The clash of styles. These two elements belong together: It is a method, because it is effective, and the effect usually is comical. This kind of entfremdung or making the known slightly strange as a way of making you see differently, is a mainstay of generic manipulation.

                 What you see differently is something which is usually presented in another, less formally organized genre: the rant. Each individual job listing draws a picture of a perfectly insufferable boyfriend, whose faults will make him a living nightmare to be with. However, if presented simply as a listing of the bad qualities of the boyfriend it would come off as a pitiful or aggressive rant, however the choice of an alternate genre gives it a form which makes it humerous, ironic, and even somewhat elegant.

So why the choice of the job listing? Probably because it has a certain affinity to the search for a partner. In both cases there is a sort of “open” need that can be filled by one person or another, but where the person actually chosen to fill the need will be an important presence to the employer/partner. Thus, making a viable choice is of crucial importance. Both the would-be employer and the person who searches for a partner will have certain requirements that they want to have met in order to commit to a hiring or a relationship.  Even if in the case of the search for a partner the demands are rarely made completely specific.

                 The title of the piece clearly marks the retrospective character of the job listings, they are “for my exes”, and thus there is a clash between the open character of the call on one side, and the specific person, they claim to have be molded on, on the other. By presenting the deplorable qualities of the person in the genre of the job listing, the article makes their shortcomings abundantly clear, and also exposes the stupidity of dating them. The contrast between the usual content of the genre and its actual realization in the article makes evident that nobody in their right mind would ever search for a person with those qualities. And thus even the hiring purpose of the job listing-genre, which the text so evidently discounts, has a role to play in the interpretation of it.

As is evident even from this very simple example, picked up more or less at random, the normative and the creative elements in the text intertwine, and though the text itself is some kind of generic novelty, it is clearly determined by the formal, thematic, and rhetorical character of the job listing as genre. This does not entail that the relationship between norm and creativity always follows this exact pattern, quite the opposite: The relationship is highly mutable and hard to put on a fixed formula. So it has to be examined and re-examined according to the particular context over and over.

                 To belabor my point: Genres are not, nor have they ever been, immutable. Genres have a strong regulative influence on our interpretation of a given utterance or situation. This influence, however, is of a special nature, as regulations imposed by genre can be broken at a moment’s notice or made the subject of manipulation or interpretation. Depending on the character of this break, it can lead either to an ingenious use of the genre, to a break between genre and utterance, or to a work that moves into, or even defines, an entirely different genre. Generic knowledge may not be a result of what is written “between the lines” on the lines as such; but all the necessary information certainly is not written on them either. What happens is that the text generates meaning by referring to or making a play on our structure of expectation.

                 As we move from simple examples to more complex ones, it will come as no surprise that fitting a given text into a genre becomes more and more difficult, and that the generic patterns involved become increasingly complex. However, the tacit interpretative interchanges between reader and genre persist into the more advanced cases. Indeed, in such cases the task of much scholarly interpretation becomes simply to make explicit what has in fact already been communicated tacitly. 

                 This may well be one of the great advantages of generic interpretation. By focusing on the relationship between an utterance and the kinds of utterances that it is involved with, or that have been shaping it, we highlight a central point in the communication between utterance and receiver: the textual or cultural knowledge that is assumed by the utterance to be known. This enables us to see what the text does with the assumed cultural knowledge, how it repeats it, reinterprets it, twists it, or develops it into something new.