In 2023, I found myself involved in two challenging and exciting research projects. That summer, I was the institutional host of “Embodying the Video Essay” (“EVE”), a weeklong workshop for media scholars and artists whose objective was to explore the video essay’s capacity to “frame, shape, and enhance positionality, relationality, and intersectionality” through “embodied practices.”1 Simultaneously, my research partner, Joel Burges, and I were overseeing a large-scale, 15-month cross-institutional project to develop a digital history of the close-up, with a focus on how it foregrounds race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality in American film and television from 1950 to 2000. “Alterity Onscreen: A Gen-X Mediascape” emerged from the generative convergence of EVE and “A Digital History of the Close-Up,” surfacing out of the torrent of TV and film clips—many from shows I happened to have grown up watching in Los Angeles—produced by our close-up project curators.
On the one hand, the EVE workshop encouraged me to put myself—a White, cis-gender, heterosexual, middle-class woman—into the (moving) picture in pursuit of an “intersectional practice-based research with a focus on positionality and relationality.”2 On the other hand, many of the moving pictures on my mind, which came from popular 1970s shows like The Brady Bunch and Little House on the Prairie, offered a succession of outrageous, painful, and offensive images of Black Americans—images from which I would have been just as happy to disassociate myself as an individual, even if I had become deeply involved with them as a scholar.
I had so many of these images accumulating in our project database that they had begun to superimpose themselves on my own memories of that period in my life. These racial representations engaged with—sometimes directly, sometimes obliquely—key developments in post-civil rights America that coincided with my childhood in a predominately White, middle-class suburb, including Nixon’s Silent Majority, suburban White flight, red-lining, and forced desegregation. The asymmetry between the 1970s represented onscreen and my own recollections of the period was exacerbated by a lack of childhood photographs that might have centered me visually in the essay, since nearly all of those were lost when my family’s garage flooded decades ago. One of the few water-stained images that I do have appears briefly at the beginning of “Alterity Onscreen,” only to be subsumed by the media surrounding it. Paradoxically, then, I found myself revisiting as a researcher what ought to have been the familiar territory of my childhood, only to discover a landscape teeming with racialized identities and their contestation—a landscape I passed through uncritically as a girl, with a naiveté made possible by both youth and privilege. To what extent, I wondered, did the shows I watched as a child mediate my own sense of self? How did they affect my experience of growing up in the social hothouse of 1970s Los Angeles, shaping my relationship to race and, more broadly, to notions of alterity? How do they continue to shape me ideologically?
In Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture, Alison Landsberg argues that the rapidly increasing circulation of images and narratives about the past, particularly in cinema and other commodified mass culture, has produced forms of “prosthetic memory,” which she defines as the ability to suture oneself into larger histories.3 “Alterity Onscreen” takes the notion of prosthetic memory as a point of departure. Here, videographic criticism makes possible a personal discovery of the racial histories I sutured myself into through my childhood viewing practices. The video essay is also, however, an effort to make those histories available to Millennials, Generation Z, and Generation Alpha so that they might, as Landsberg theorizes, begin to construct their own prosthetic memories, ones that could, she suggests, “serve as the grounds for unexpected alliances across chasms of difference.”4 The value of this kind of intergenerational consideration of racial representation on the small screen was confirmed when my students at Bowdoin asked why I hadn’t included a warning about the video’s content after I screened a short first cut for them. Many of them found the images it contained distressing, and yet my fellow Gen-Xers and I had come of age with them. I added the warning, and hope that the video essay can help bridge a gap across our different generations’ experiences and understanding of how alterity has been represented onscreen over the last half-century.
“Alterity Onscreen” is many things, then, and its heterogeneous nature reflects my own complicated personal and scholarly relationship to the material it contains. It is a startling compilation of absurd and, for many, offensive representations of race in popular 1970s American television, revealing, for example, white savior tropes and uncritical assertions of race as biological fact (e.g., Little House on the Prairie, The Brady Bunch). It is also a compilation of considerably more nuanced depictions of race from the same period, some of which make self-reflexive recourse to blackface to expose the socially constructed nature of race in America (e.g., Bewitched, M*A*S*H)—a characterization I offer even while recognizing the loathsome history of blackface in American theater, film, and television.
“Alterity Onscreen” explores the video essay’s capacity to both represent and make available for analysis the idiosyncratic flow of commercial television that characterized my own Generation-X early childhood in a particular media market: a flow that is, I think, increasingly irretrievable, or alien, to successive generations of viewers. Here, videographic criticism offers a unique opportunity to answer Raymond Williams’s call to analyze flow – the kind of sequencing characteristic of broadcast television, which includes programs, station identifications, trailers of programs, commercials, and news breaks.5 Jonathan Gray and Amanda Lotz observe that there is an inherent challenge in studying flow, because viewers are likely to experience it in significantly different ways.6 The video essay, however, seems uniquely suited to reproduce such differences and make them available to others. A key tool in this work in “Alterity Onscreen” is the essay’s grid format, which evokes both the “small” grid of The Brady Bunch’s opening credit sequence and the “big” grid of the TV guides that historically guided our encounter with television media. As Burges points out, the latter “rationalized the experience of watching television so that the multiplicity of specific viewing options could be embraced in their simultaneity.”7 Crucially, the video essay’s grid format also invites viewers to consider, as Williams does, the ways in which the meanings and values of programs and commercials are mutually transferred to each other.8 It seeks to accomplish this by placing shows in direct dialogue with each other, as well as with a number of advertising spots from the same era.
While my video essay offers an uncomfortable history of racial representation in 1970s America, it also offers moments of grace in that history. These include, for example, the bold performance of a young Todd Bridges as the titular character Solomon in Little House on the Prairie’s “Wisdom of Solomon,” a brilliant comedic performance by Jack Baker in Happy Days’s “Fonzie’s Friend,” and yet another one by Redd Foxx, whose perfect timing and delivery in Sanford and Son’s “Home Sweet Home” is crucial to the episode’s gentle but effective critique of interracial discrimination. Norman Lear, who makes a brief cameo in the video essay’s opening grid, famously said, “I’ve never seen anything I thought was too good for the American people or so far above them that they’d never reach for it if they had the chance.”9 Many of the clips featured here illustrate this view, particularly in their efforts to utilize popular entertainment to educate the viewing publics about racism. Gil Scott-Heron famously sang that “The Revolution Will Not be Televised,” but a closer look at some of the shows featured in “Alterity Onscreen” underscores the importance of taking TV—even cringe TV—seriously as a cultural site for the negotiation of alterity.10
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Endnotes
- “Videographic Methods and Practices,” Embodying the Video Essay, accessed August 19, 2024, at https://sites.google.com/view/embodiedpractices2023.
- Embodying the Video Essay, “Videographic Methods and Practices.”
- Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture(Columbia University Press, 2004), 2.
- Ibid., 3.
- Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (New York: Routledge Classics, 2003), 91.
- Jonathan Gray and Amanda D. Lotz, Television Studies, 2nd ed. (New York: Polity Press, 2019), 132.
- Joel Burges, “Temporality,” in A Concise Companion to Visual Culture, ed. A. Joan Saab, Aubrey Anable, Catherine Zuromskis (London: Wiley Blackwell, 2021), 120.
- Raymond Williams, Television, 118.
- Norman Lear, quoted in Emily Nussbaum, I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way through the TV Revolution (New York: Penguin Random House, 2020), 24.
- Gil Scott-Heron, “The Revolution Will Not be Televised,” Pieces of a Man, Flying Dutchman, 1971.
Allison Cooper