When I was little, my parents warned me that watching TV would rot my brain. Being the gullible child that I was, I took them literally -- I could almost feel my brain cells decomposing as I stared at the neighbors' screen for hours on end. (We didn't have a TV of our own until I was about 14.)
I was reminded of this when I read Richard B. Woodward's piece in Slate about why characters on The Sopranos are always "pissing, farting, crapping their pants, or -- most stunningly ordinary of all -- sitting on the toilet." According to Woodward, by putting in so much scatological material, Sopranos creator David Chase is just negating the way broadcast television works:
Every television show exists, according to Chase, "to make people feel good so they'll buy stuff." However high-risk a drama pretends to be -- he didn't name The West Wing or ER; he didn't have to -- the scheduled breaks for a few lucrative words from GM or Pfizer ensure that even the nerviest producer will push controversy only so far. Looked at this way, it seems obvious why network producers would avoid the scatological: People don't want to think about shit, and they don't want to buy things associated with it.
TV doesn't rot your brain, it washes it, making you want things you didn't want before, and conditioning your expectations along a particular field of ideological possibilities (read Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent together with Mark Crispin Miller's Boxed In for more on this). The Sopranos is different, Woodward is saying, because it's on cable, where the producers don't have to cater to their advertisers' squeamish requirement of universal inoffensiveness. The show allegedly escapes the advertising mandate by having no commercials.
But is The Sopranos really outside this loop of advertorial control? Every episode features prominent product placements: sometimes they're just regular props (the twelve-pack of Coca-Cola on the kitchen table), sometimes they're plot points (the Nissan SUV that Tony gives his daughter), and sometimes they work their way into the dialogue (Artie Bucco offers Carmela some bottled water, saying "I got a great deal on this Ramlösa water").
Woodward concludes by arguing that Chase subverts the consumerist impulse behind American culture:
The Sopranos makes the hallmarks of the American family and of the American economy -- the uncontrollable urge to own ever bigger homes and cars, to purchase more and more shit -- look about as attractive as a fat man on the can with a bad case of the trots.
But the subversion can only extend so far, because the show is still beholden to those corporations that place their products inside it. Indeed, the ideological conditioning -- making people feel good so they'll buy stuff -- is even more insidious on an HBO program, because the viewer has paid for the privilege of being exposed to all those ads. If Chase were really interested in deconstructing and subverting consumerism, he'd use fictional or generic products as props -- much as Repo Man did. Instead, by filling his show with corporate logos, he's made himself an inextricable part of the indoctrination machine, no matter how many layers of subversive irony you want to frost on top of it.
It's not surprising the Woodward is blind to this, writing as he is for a magazine funded by a global megacorporation that wants to control more media content; it's ideologically impossible for him to question the practice of product placement, because the whole appeal of The Sopranos depends on this strict separation between commercial TV (bad) and noncommercial TV (good). The line isn't so sharp, as we can see: the advertisements just become less overt, and ultimately you have to pay for the ads. It's an advertiser's dream: sensational content that glues people to the set, but parts them with their dollar before they've started watching. And, not incidentally, it conditions them to accept ubiquitous advertising.
Posted by Chris at April 15, 2004 10:49 AMHi Chris! Great to see you weekend before last. I'm going to give Columbia one last chance to sell itself when I visit next weekend, but barring any major revelations we will be Berkeley bound.
So this is my first-ever blog post. I have to take issue with your suggestion that Chase would raise the subversion ante by using fake products instead of real ones. If Tony drank "Buzz Cola" instead of Coke, you'd lose the immediate jolt of identification the real brand names force on viewers, which would allow us to distance ourselves from his polymorphously perverse appetites. By placing Tony in the exact same product universe as the rest of us, the show gets right up in America's face about cultural habits that a lot of people probably never even thought it was possible to question, precisely because of the ideological blinders reinforced by commercial television.
Without real brands, the Sopranos would lose some of its moral urgency. Folks down here in North Carolina could more easily say "Boy, those folks in New Jersey sure lead messed-up, evil lives that bear no resemblance to mine." But because Tony drives an actual Suburban, they can't admire it, as a straight-up commercial might persuade them to do, without feeling queasily stuck in the same libidinous mud that perpetuates his endless misery.
You could just as easily argue that, were he to leave out real brands, Chase would be kow-towing to powerful corporate interests who didn't want to have their names associated with an evil mother like Tony. Instead, he hoists them by their own petards: You want product placement? We've got your perfect spokesmodel--he whores, he lies, he kills. Then he drives his SUV home, drinks a Coke, pops some Prozac, takes a crap, and goes to bed. Sounds like America to me. But it's hardly "Have a Coke and a smile!"
Posted by: Marcus Wohlsen at April 16, 2004 07:00 AM