by Cory Barker
NOTES
1. Producer Brian Grazer has confirmed a fifth season for Arrested Development, and Netflix’s Chief Content Officer, Ted Sarandos, stated that the negotiations with the cast and crew are underway. Elizabeth Wagmeister, “‘Arrested Development’ Season 5? Ted Sarandos Teases New Netflix Episodes,” Variety, July 28, 2015, accessed January 30, 2017, http://variety.com/2015/tv/news/arrested-development-new-season-5-netflix-1201549902/.
2. Brett Mills, The Sitcom (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009); Jason Mittell, Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling (New York: New York University Press, 2015).
3. Examples of Arrested Development fan communities that explore the participants’ collective intelligence to discuss and discover new information about the series are the Wikipedia page for Arrested Development, in http://arresteddevelopment.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page, the interactive websites that map out recurring jokes and gags from the series, such as Previously, on Arrested Development (http://apps.npr.org/arrested-development/) and Recurring Developments (http://recurringdevelopments.com/), as well as the series’ forum on Reddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/arresteddevelopment).
4. Emil Nielsen, “Arrested Development—Behind the Scenes Season 1,” YouTube video, October 3, 2012, accessed January 30, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWSaG_hyj9E.
5. Pierre Bourdieu, As Regras da Arte: Gênese e Estrutura do Campo Literário (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2005), 245.
6. Jean-Pierre Esquenazi, As Séries Televisivas (Lisbon: Edições texto&grafia, 2011); Mittell, Complex TV.
7. Esquenazi, As Séries Televisivas; Tara Burnett, Showrunners: The Art of Running a TV Show (London: Titan Books, 2014).
8. Alan Sepinwall, The Revolution Was Televised: The Cops, Crooks, Slingers, and Slayers Who Changed TV Drama Forever (New York: Touchstone, 2013); Gary Edgerton and Jeffrey Jones, ed., The Essential HBO Reader (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008).
9. Michael Curtin and Jane Shattuc, The American Television Industry (London: British Film Institute, 2009).
10. David Hesmondhalgh, “Bourdieu, the Media and Cultural Production,” Media, Culture & Society 28.2 (2006): 211–231.
11. Nancy Hass, “And the Award for the Next HBO Goes to,” GQ. January 29, 2013, accessed January 30, 2017, http://www.gq.com/entertainment/movies-and-tv/201302/netflix-founder-reed-hastings-house-of-cards-arrested-development.
12. Whitney Friedlander, “‘Transparent,’ Amazon Break New Ground with Emmy Wins,” Variety, September 20, 2015, accessed January 30, 2017, http://variety.com/2015/tv/news/transparent-amazon-break-new-ground-with-emmy-wins-1201598229/; Todd Spangler, “Yahoo Loses $42 Million on ‘Community,’ 2 Other Original Series,” Variety, October 20, 2015, accessed January 30, 2017, http://variety.com/2015/digital/news/yahoo-misses-q3-earnings-marissa-mayer-narrower-product-focus-1201622483/.
13. Michael Curtin, Jennifer Holt, and Kevin Sanson, ed., Distribution Revolution: Conversations About the Digital Future of Film and Television (Oakland: University of California Press, 2014).
14. Curtin, Holt, and Sanson, ed., Distribution Revolution.
15. Dawn C. Chmielewski, “More Mainstream Movies for Netflix Online,” Los Angeles Times, October 1, 2008, accessed January 30, 2017, http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/entertainmentnewsbuzz/2008/10/more-mainstream.html.
16. Curtin, Holt, and Sanson, Distribution Revolution.
17. Brian Stelter, “Netflix to Stream Films from Paramount, Lions Gate, MGM,” New York Times, August 10, 2010, accessed January 30, 2017, http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/10/netflix-to-stream-films-from-paramount-lionsgate-mgm/?_r=0.
18. Curtin, Holt, and Sanson, Distribution Revolution, 134.
19. Ibid., 141.
20. Lacey Rose, “Netflix’s Ted Sarandos Reveals His ‘Phase 2’ for Hollywood,” The Hollywood Reporter, May 22, 2013, accessed January 30, 2017, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/netflixs-ted-sarandos-reveals-his-526323?page=1.
21. Tiffany Kaiser, “Netflix Says ‘House of Cards’ Is the Reason for Subscriber Growth,” Daily Tech, April 23, 2013, accessed January 30, 2017, http://www.dailytech.com/Netflix+Says+House+of+Cards+is+the+Reason+for+Subscriber+Growth/article30404.htm.
22. Andy Greene, “‘Arrested Development’ Creator Mitch Hurwitz on His Two-Year Odyssey to Revive the Show,” Rolling Stone, May 20, 2013, accessed January 30, 2017, http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/news/arrested-development-creator-mitch-hurwitz-on-his-two-year-odyssey-to-revive-the-show-20130520#ixzz3LiCiMpCI.
23. Rose, “Netflix’s Ted Sarandos Reveals His ‘Phase 2’ for Hollywood.”
24. Ibid.
25. Emily Farache, “Steven Spielberg, Ron Howard Go POP,” E! Online, October 26, 1999, accessed January 30, 2017, http://www.eonline.com/news/38906/steven-spielberg-ron-howard-go-pop.
26. Emmy TV Legends, “Ron Howard Interview Part 6 of 6—EmmyTVLegends.Org,” YouTube video, August 31, 2009, accessed January 30, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9CYOOpvwKY.
27. Ethan Thompson, “Comedy Verité? The Observational Documentary Meets the Televisual Sitcom,” The Velvet Light Trap 60 (2007): 70.
28. The Arrested Development Documentary Project, directed by Jeff Smith (2013; Los Angeles: 20th Century Fox, 2013), DVD.
29. Jason Mittell, “Notes on Rewatching,” Just TV, January 27 2011, accessed January 30, 2017, http://justtv.wordpress.com/2011/01/27/notes-on-rewatching/.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid.
32. Mittell, “Narrative Complexity in Contemporary American Television,” The Velvet Light Trap 58 (2006).
33. Ibid., 34–35.
34. Mills, “Comedy Verité: Contemporary Sitcom Form,” Screen 45.1 (2004): 63–78; Thompson, “Comedy Verité?”
35. Marcel Vieira Barreto Silva, “Sob o Riso do Real,” Ciberlegenda 1 (2012): 30.
36. Christian Hugo Pelegrini, “Sujeito Engraçado: A Produção da Comicidade pela Instância de Enunciação em Arrested Development,” Dissertation, University of São Paulo (ECA/USP), 2014.
37. Greene, “‘Arrested Development’ Creator Mitch Hurwitz on His Two-Year Odyssey to Revive the Show.”
38. Willa Paskin, “Arrested Development Creator on the Future of TV and Bringing Back the Bluths,” Wired, May 2013, accessed January 30, 2017, http://www.wired.com/2013/05/arrested-development-creator-mitch-hurwitz/.
39. Christina Radish, “Mitch Hurwitz Talks Arrested Development Season 4, Bringing Michael Cera into the Writer’s Room, and Status of the Movie,” January 10, 2013, accessed January 30, 2017, http://collider.com/arrested-development-movie-season-4-mitch-hurwitz/.
40. Michael Groves, “‘Chalk One Up for the Internet: It Has Killed Arrested Development’: The Series’ Revival, Binge Watching, and Fan/Critic Antagonism,” in A State of Arrested Development: Critical Essays on the Innovative Television Comedy, ed. Kristin M. Barton (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2015), 224–236.
41. Jaime Costa Nicolás, “La Serialidad Ergódica en Arrested Development: El espectador/usuario en el Medio Digital,” Pompeu Fabra University, 2014, 60.
42. Matt Zoller Seitz, “Matt Zoller Seitz’s 10 Best TV Shows of 2013,” Vulture, December 9, 2013, accessed January 30, 2017, http://www.vulture.com/2013/12/matt-zoller-seitzs-10-best-tv-shows-of-2013.html.
43. Espen J. Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1997).
44. Nicolás, “La Serialidad Ergódica en Arrested Development,” 56.
Circulating The Square
Digital Distribution as (Potential) Activism
JAMES N. GILMORE
Washington may be in an advanced state of moral decay, thanks to us Americans mostly disengaging from civic life. But ordinary Egyptians are in a state of total & complete civic engagement. what [sic] they are doing should be an inspiration to all of us here, who are increasingly feeling defeated by the nexus of money, power, and corruption that is slowly corroding the core of Amer
ica.
—Anonymous review of The Square (2014)
The early stages of many protest movements of 2011—including the Egyptian Revolution, the Arab Spring, and Occupy Wall Street—were predicated on digital media access and the ability to disseminate and circulate various calls to action. As Tim Markham notes, “Facebook was particularly popular in the Tunisian uprising, Twitter was the medium of choice in an already well-established culture of blogging in Egypt, while online the civil war in Syria is largely being played out on YouTube.”1 Social media was integral in creating communities and organizing protests. These users set dates and places for physical communal engagement as well as spread the rhetoric of their social action across global virtual space. These social movements immediately—and increasingly—became the subject of popular histories and academic studies that, to varying degrees, detail how digital media fosters political revolution as well as how civic engagement operates in conjunction with the ideals of participatory culture. Much as how Twitter helped organize protests, it also played a role “as a bridge between Egypt and outside communities.”2
This essay attends to the mediated afterlife of these revolutions in documentary images, arguing that the digital circulation of political documentaries in on-demand media spaces such as Netflix is crucial for continuing to emphasize social media’s potential to incite social action. Precisely, I am interested in the documentary The Square, directed by Jehane Noujaim, which was partly crowd-funded, premiered at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, and was subsequently acquired and distributed exclusively through streaming media platform Netflix in early 2014.3 As the first political documentary acquired exclusively by Netflix—which heretofore had largely dealt in original series programming and acquisition of older, previously released media—for a streaming release, the documentary’s distribution site and method of circulation became as much a story as its images of political revolt. The film’s 2014 Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Feature lent it a sense of cultural capital that, coupled with its discursive position as a major step forward in Netflix’s plans to acquire and disseminate exclusive content, frames it as an important component of current political documentary distribution. Apart from how it both represents political revolution and reflects the corporations that digitally shepherd documentaries to subscribers, The Square must also be understood in terms of how it is both about and reflective of broader dynamics of media spreadability.
Political documentaries made about these movements and distributed through these sites espouse democratic ideals in that they circumvent the structures of theatrical distribution to ideally reach wider audiences, but these implications are far more complicated when analyzed through problems of media circulation, such as geoblocking. As Netflix begins to acquire an increasing number of social and political documentaries, its site will simultaneously become a mobile archive of cultural, historical, and social representations. Along similar lines, W.J.T. Mitchell has argued archives are not only physical institutions; they are increasingly online discursive channels where “the shaping of perceptions of history … is immediately represented in audio-visual-textual images transmitted globally.”4 Considering that Netflix now accounts “for 34.2% of all downstream usage during primetime hours” in North America, we must speculate not only on what its rampant consumption means for reshaping film and television into what Chuck Tryon calls “on-demand culture,” but also what is to be gained from all of this consumption, especially as Netflix positions part of its output as a boutique documentary distributor.5 Our research questions must focus on who accesses the site, why viewers engage particular texts, what they derive from consumption, and the sociopolitical implications of on-demand culture.6 More than promoting certain forms of consumption, analyses of Netflix must consider the political potential of this platform for raising awareness and education about many key global social issues.
This essay considers how this mode of media distribution and circulation both represents and imagines certain forms of civic engagement. The Square’s history of the Tahrir Square protests capitalizes on multiple hallmarks of participatory culture’s shift towards do-it-yourself (DIY) or democratized media production, as outlined most notably by Henry Jenkins, who suggests participatory culture has engendered less “changes in institutions or laws, which are the focus of traditional political science, but more … changes in communications systems and cultural norms,” most notably in the practices of popular culture.7 I argue that the dissemination of political documentary content through Netflix highlights the political potential of media spreadability, and the need to continually regard the politicization of media circulation and social media. The act of viewing and discussing The Square is, in this analysis, part of ongoing global conversations occurring across digital technologies and through grassroots media efforts to contest social and political inequalities. Media objects like The Square are partly mimetic calls to action and partly consciousness-raising projects that link locally situated social movements into a globally fluid network of media dissemination, consumption, and activism.
This essay proceeds first by discussing some of the spatial stakes of social media use in relationship to activism in general and the 2011 social movements in particular as well as the evolving place of political thought in literature on participatory culture, before turning back to The Square to analyze its aesthetic and its reception. Ultimately, I argue that studies of participatory and on-demand culture can learn significantly from each other in terms of how media circulation services such as Netflix can further the political potential of documentaries through their ubiquitous mobility.
Bridging Online/Offline Space
The social movements of 2011 have already inspired a number of studies that have emphasized, in varying degrees, the role of social media use in facilitating and organization physical protests against the state and its policies.8 Importantly, the fact of social media is not enough in discussing these movements. Mark Warschauer argues, “What is most important about ICT (information and communication technology) is not so much the availability of the computing device or the Internet line, but rather people’s ability to make use of that device and line to engage in meaningful social practices.”9 Much like the mere existence of Twitter in Egypt is not enough to create social action, neither is the existence of The Square on Netflix evidence of its importance for continuing projects of social engagement or for raising consciousness about the events in Egypt. Rather, attention must be paid to the text, its circumstances of distribution, and the way users imagine use value for their media consumption. Following Joel Penney and Caroline Dadas’s analysis of Twitter use in Occupy Wall Street, which aims to discover “how people are using language to construct new social and political realities, and how they are incorporating social media technologies into that process,” this essay considers how Netflix fits into the imagination of social and political realities, and how its standard modes of consumption could foster social action.10
Jan van Dijk similarly takes aim at those who suggest that access to technology alone is able to operate as a corrective to social problems. Van Dijk importantly thinks about media access in terms of spatial relations, arguing, “not having access to online environments increasingly also means absolute exclusion from particular offline environments and from a number of social, economic, and cultural opportunities.”11 In this kind of spatial access, communities formed online can translate into socially and politically beneficial “offline environments”—what might be understood as a digital grassroots activism working to bridge different kinds of spaces. As Manuel Castells argues, “There is no question that the original spaces of resistance were formed on the Internet” as a way to mitigate against the difficulties of “traditional forms of protest.”12 Digital spaces afford a place for protestors to find groups and to discuss their aims and tactics before proceeding into physical space. These models echo Henri Lefebvre’s famous contention that “(social) space is a (social) product,” that p
art of how we collectively apprehend space is through the social relationships acting upon any given site—so too did the social connections of Twitter and Facebook mesh with and transform the sociopolitical potential of Tahrir Square.13
In Egypt, those who responded to the digital calls for participation were overwhelmingly young, “for whom social networks and mobile phones were a central part of their way of life,” prompting recognizable age disparities between those who can not only access but actively use social networks efficiently.14 Paolo Gerbaudo reads the spatial differences between social media and protest camps as rethinking how we imagine the space of activism and revolution.15 Here, social media participate in a “choreography of assembly” designed “to sustain their coming together in public space.”16 Again, social networks bridge divides between “virtual” (or online) and “real” (or public) space. They form a directive that creates methods of behavior and modes of being that can translate into densely packed protest camps that rewrite public space in the name of ideological revolution.
That is to say, the 2011 social movements—and their subsequent representations—create a new form of “MediaSpace,” Nick Couldry and Anna McCarthy’s dialectical term “encompassing both the kinds of spaces created by media, and the effects that existing spatial arrangements have on media forms as they materialize in everyday life.”17 Utilizing this concept suggests that, as much as social media movements have instigated political protests in physical spaces, so too has the everyday circulation and consumption of media representations through Netflix added another level to the kinds of spatial imaginaries we might construct. Manuel Castells further adds to this discussion of what “space” means in this context. In discussing public spaces that have been co-opted by revolutionary bodies, he asserts, “Occupied spaces are not meaningless: they are usually charged with the symbolic power of invading sites of state power.”18 Where van Dijk partly suggests analyzing digital media access through how online participation translates into or inhibits participation in offline spaces, Castells complementarily notes that the very ability to occupy a space, and to do so through online social organization, turns Internet users into producers of media messages capable of inventing new ways of everyday being.19 This conjures images of media spreadability—or media’s ability to circulate in a number of different ways in digital space. The ability of media to flow across space means that public and online spaces become increasingly interrelated, such that activism “extends from the space of places to the space of flows.”20