This was originally published as The Trucam Show in Sight and Sound(July 1999). Good to be asked to write something like this — ie about non-dead media haha — and find I've (sorta) predicted Big Brother *and* Blair Witch (not that anyone noticed, much...)
THE GLAMOUR OF ACTION OVERTURNED
IN THE UTOPIA OF NOTHING
“We’re gonna be on televii-sion! We’re gonna be on televii-sion!”
—Stan, Kyle, Kenny and Cartman, South Park
What many film critics found implausible in The Truman Show was the notion that a mass public might continue to be gripped, over months and then years, by the day-by-detail of an ordinary life lived – albeit unknowingly – on camera.
Sometime in 1997, Pennsylvania student Jennifer Kaye Ringley positioned a cheap little webcam on top of her Mac monitor, set to snap in black-and-white whichever part of her apartment it faced, and her too, if she was there. A picture was posted at her website, updating every three minutes. Without publicity, her page became a web rumour, then a wider media phenomenon: before long, the college server was swamped, and she had to charge for access to afford the wider bandwidth her growing hordes of viewers demanded. Two years later, in colour and now updating every two minutes, JenniCAM is a successful paying site (non-paying viewers get a new picture three times an hour). Visitors number in the millions; in all, perhaps a quarter of a million JenniCAM pics have fleetingly existed.
Not without reason, netlore still supposes that the only sites that can charge for entry and prosper are those posting porn; certainly most on-line discussion of JenniCAM and its mushrooming sister sites orbits a fairly straightforward topic: the virtual sex-needs of the lonely nerd. What else can JenniCAM be calling to? Or Badd Grrl’s Domain, or everydayitems, or www.voyeurdorm.com (“the Real-Life, Adult-Version of The Truman Show: 31 Cameras, 7 Women, 1 House, 24 Hours, 7 days a Week, All Year Round!!”)?
Problem is, the voyeurdorm paysite’s blatant sex-promise renders the others mysterious: as everydayitems says of itself (a little nervously), “tho not an adult site there may be images and content which could offend some viewers”. Certainly the anxiety of identity is there, and a fascination with the overlap: but there’s a will to be different, also — this is not porn. One site calls for "porn-free adult webcam sites"; and Webcam World, which promises the Top 100 Webcams and delivers a dozen, insists that “Adult sites will be deleted”. Many webcam sites have male stars — such as The Nerdman Show, with a “record-breaking” 14 cams at home and in the office — while others view busy traffic intersections, empty traffic intersections, a dentist’s reception area in Northern Japan, or the queue for The Phantom Menace. Two nesting peregrine falcons on an office windowledge in Toronto have become one chic object of observation; countless other supposedly cute pets live their unsuspecting lives out on webcam. In San Francisco can be found the ‘Turtles for World Peace by the Year 2000’ (the political mechanism is not well explained).
Plainly voyeurism is a part of what’s on offer, and exhibitionism too. Every now and then Jennifer acts up for her camera: every now and then it captures something funny, something sexy, something conventionally stimulating. But whatever momentary glimpses JenniCAM watchers may have had, now and then over the last years, of the moonfaced redhead with her kit off, or spooning with her boyfriend — the cam isn’t censored, except when she remembers — the meat of the show is (a) Jennifer (like John Giorno and Tilda Swinton before her) asleep, for hours at a stretch; (b) Jennifer absorbed in computerwork we can’t see, or (c) Jennifer not there at all, sometimes for days at a time. Boredom, claimed composer Erik Satie many years ago, is mysterious and profound: it better be, because that’s what’s playing on this site, with millions paying to view.
Something has surfaced here which has haunted the entire century of cinema. Modern physics advises us that 90 percent of the cosmos is made up of dark matter, present but not seen. Cinema’s ‘dark matter’ — who knows what percentage of the whole? — is the easily mocked ‘home movie’. But of course this derision derives from uneasiness as much as superiority. It’s probably not coincidence that most filmed porn before a certain date is nothing if not home-movie material — yet it’s very easy to misdirect ourselves over this. It’s not sex that conjures up these anxieties (though, since thought so often clouds in its vicinity, sex very often becomes the scapegoat). Something else is at issue, something even more powerful.
If we step back a moment, we can see a Hollywood that’s currently obsessed by the frissons of the unfakeable on celluloid. We know the evil Nicolas Cage confronts in 8mm is genuine — however bogus this particular representation — because a snuff movie only has piquancy to its connoisseurs if it ain’t faked (if it is, it might as well be Itchy and Scratchy). Hence the pruriently thrilled fetishisation of the medium itself as social threat, the title that blames the technology. The point of EDtv — latest in the Truman cycle — is less that Matthew McConaughey as Ed is having his life broadcast 24-7, as a fly-on-the-wall cable show, than that the documentary maker who dreamt up the concept is Ellen DeGeneres, fresh from a high-profile sitcom-apes-real-life fracas (a show which lost bite as it gained authenticity).
Film believes in truth out of glamour, action, violence, drama, dynamic craft: faced with enervation as a fact of life, it seizes on it, works it into its opposite. The featureless grey corridors of CCTV only ever enter movies to highlight the rupture of routine: the exceptions that the security guard sees, or misses, the heroes or villains visible only to us down there at the left. X-Files credit-sequence ghost notwithstanding, genuine CCTV records hour on hour of nothing at all: the arty blizzard of footage that opens Tony Scott’s Enemy of the State is symptomatic only of how fiercely film must twist to evade the dreary quotidian of the spycam society (the pursuit of perps remains unromantic slog, even if it’s office-chair vinyl you’re wearing out, rather than shoe-leather). And the pervasive mechanical eye continues to be trusted because – like the home movie before it – what it records is unstructured , uncrafted, meaninglessly random low-res anti-art. It has to be real because who’d bother to fake it.
Pro or con, the objectivity of the camera eye has been a given for a hundred years, for both Hollywood and its discontents have — even if the Dream Factory, in the name of entertainment, has always swerved away towards reality’s technological enhancement. But it isn’t technology that’s bringing this paradigm to its close, CGI FX or no CGI FX: it’s the little remarked rule-free acting up everywhere of what we probably ought to have stopped calling “ordinary people” some while back, those vanguards of the masses not narcotised into sullen passivity by mass media (as so endlessly theorised), but instead galvanised, towards hilarious creative perversity.
Nothing highlights this so well as the chattermedia folk panic about falling standards in documentaries: the subtext here being that researchers, interviewers, editors, directors, producers and commissioners — the trained human machinery of telejournalism — can no longer quite tell when the formerly malleable objects of such journalism are anything like what they claim they are. Everyone blames money — as tired a scapegoat as sex. There’s a better, deeper explanation is this: as mediation proliferates and intensifies, as more and more kinds of media are folded into a larger and larger unified machinery (the true role of digital), control will shift from the centre. Objects are become subjects, active, alert and perilously inventive.
Everyone world-famous for 15 minutes: mention of John Giorno is apposite for two reasons. First, (the Empire State Building was already famous), his was the slumbering superstar form (in Sleep, 1963), that functioned as avatar of Warhol’s prediction. Second, Warhol’s was the most boldly contradictory wing of 60s Underground Film: home movie as improvised refusenik utopia, snapshot havens (from Pull My Daisy to Flaming Creatures) of other ways to live. On one hand, this whole zone of alternative glamour grounded its authenticity in tedium, where celebrity intersects with the radically mundane; on the other, it yearned to be a species of safe family life, that sunlit idyll beyond reach of the world’s storms (as more fully explored by Derek Jarman in the 80s).
Yet as Amy Taubin has often pointed out in these pages [eg Sight and Sound], the most important underground film was Abraham Zapruder’s home-movie-turns-snuff-movie footage of JFK’s head bursting into pink mist, on that sunlit but unsafe day in Dallas. Bought up by Time-Life for $150,000, aired for the first time in 1975 on Geraldo after a court case, this was where private film space first saw public nightmare spill into it. Guileless utopia, recast as a sequence of hard-to-read stills, seems to freeze before forensic enquiry.
But screen-view forensics is everywhere a drama of conflicting interpretations; the official expert is always hostage to the learned obsessions of the armchair buff. Dziga Vertov’s truth 24 times a second turns out to leave a lot of space, the lost motion between the stills, as it were, for enigma and undecidability. (In the Rodney King trials in 1991, defence and prosecution rested on rival readings of George Holliday’s balcony-shot home video of the beating: to get the police off in white Simi Valley, the tape had been played back superslow, with appropriate ‘context’ read into the gaps; to indict them second time round, the state had to work to reaffirm the common-sense, normal-speed, mass-public, black reading.)
Courtesy a technology enabled as much as anything by the porn industry — VCRs, the portable handicam, digital reproducibility — and to fill its ever-ballooning virtual spaces, routine television is today a jungle of ‘unofficial’ footage, of accidents and disasters public and private, from amateur warzone evidence to the inadvertent slapstick of kids and pets. Media figures are positioned as gate-keepers, to advise us how to respond: carny grotesque Jeremy Beadle in the 80s, as ringmaster to a freakshow of civilian pratfalls (You’ve Been Framed); Bob Mills in the 90s (In Bed with MeDinner), wised-up media-savvy everyman playing back bad documentaries, dug up from the news-media graveyard, and, well, ‘deconstructing performative rhetorics’, is how an academic would put it. In other words, laughing at how people, finding themselves on TV, have failed to master its conventions of delivery and poise, or to transcend its clichés.
Using non-actors and a faux-verité style, Harmony Korine’s Gummo churned up its 15 minutes of panic-scandal last year, pulling out of the air possible shapes and moves of the fun in the ‘ordinary life’ of the future, in all its unguardedly creative perversity. Later this year, planning two films made according to the
rules of Dogme ’95, Korine threatens to make one entirely on CCTV. Though you wouldn’t know it, from the response it’s generated among film commentators (mostly less able even than Hollywood scriptwriters to comment insightfully on television and the ‘lesser’ screen arts), the Dogme manifesto is the cheekiest response to date to to all this turmoil. Its famous rules demand of the viewer exactly the reaction s/he would once have offered, unasked, to the viewing of a home movie (or a snuff movie): a response, that is, to the unfakably real.
But Lars von Trier and Korine are hardly the kind ever to be naive about objectivity, about what can’t lie (the camera, the silent majority… ) True, they’ll have their fun with queasy silliness around ‘real’ erections and ‘real’ penetration — they are peerlessly manipulative multi-media operators, after all, auteur cousins of the pranksters who’ve been bamboozling their way onto Vanessa lately. Who would you rather put your (guarded) faith in, as regards human nature: the confidence trickster or his innocent victim?
Which brings us back to webcams. If we are, as everything indicates, at the twilight of the era when the (represented) real could be recognised for its clumsiness, its artlessness, its tedium, then sites like JenniCAM offer this version of reality — to all anorak-dom, and to the rest of us, if we’re open to it — in its final, pure warrior state, defiantly militant in its commitment to boredom.
But they also know what time it is. Remember Real World, the ongoing fly-on-the-wall student-cam US documentary series that debuted on MTV in 1992? Within the Jennipage complex is this capsule review, proudly quoted from Entertainment Weekly: JenniCam, it seems, is, “Real World-esque”.
With special thanks to Kate Stables, Adair Brouwer and Becky Sinker
©Mark Sinker July 1999/January 2002
[FURTHER NOTES/OMITTED ANGLES]
w1: “The death of God has left us with a lot of appliances”
—Avital Ronell, TraumaTV: 12 Steps Beyond the Pleasure Principle
w2: if the 20th century is remembered for anything, it will be its archive frenzy, no corner of human life too dull to miss documentation.
w3: “People doing nothing watching people doing nothing – and money’s changing hands!”
w4: The way people act vs the way people are
w5: from Warhol to Zapruder: the arrival in the home movie of real death
w6: (The terrible draw of even the Bulger CCTV footage, which combined impossibly awful backstory with utterly banal actual action, the glue being the aesthetic force – weird colour, ‘low-quality’ pixillation – of the representation])
w7: ‘ordinary people’ becoming the directors of the show of their own lives
The scandal of docusoaps isn’t that they make poor television: it’s that they make good television, and very cheaply too. The transgression Dogme is exploiting isn’t the question of ‘real’ erections, ‘real’ penetration – but exactly the [xx] that has blown up around docusoaps, that ‘real people’ don’t know how to BEHAVE real any more. They’re uppity; they’re pranksters; if they aren’t in on the moviemaker’s careerist scam, they’re inventing their own (better, funnier) scam.
w8: the home movie crept into art with the New York underground in the late 50s, with the improvised beatnik utopia of Pull My Daisy, and Claes Oldenberg’s records of Happenings [say more]. Gay space [from Anger/Flaming Creatues]. These were snapshot-havens of other ways to live – though as Jarman would later [xx], suburban domesticity itself seemed to promise (retrospective) idylls beyond reach of the gale of the world, family life as a sunlit haven. Even in the most abusive family, an album of snapshots is full of smiles
w9: Warhol was one of the first recognise the unease haunting the border territory between types of media – between, for example, gallery art, newspaper photos, advertising, home-movies, diary-writing and the Hollywood interview. One major [xx] in this contested territory, perhaps the major [xx], resided not so much in claims to being truth-bearing, as in rival – sometimes incommensurate – [xx] ways to adjudge truth-value.
w10: Warhol was one of the first also to understand how radically odd might appear the seeming banal domesticity of the home movie, say, in a high-art context.
w11: More than anything, home video – a technology enabled largely by the porn industry – combined with portable handicam and digital reproducibility – shifted home-video out into the world. This hidden mass slumped out into view.
w12: It is, in effect, a policing activity, as You’ve Been Framed (UK child of America’s Favourite Home Videos) was before it: home videos as a freakshow of mentioned rather more mysterious: as everydayitems says of itself (a little nervously), “tho not an adult site there may be images and content which could offend some viewers”. Certainly the anxiety of identity is there, and a fascination with the overlap: but there’s a will to be different, also – this is not porn.
w13: civilian pratfalls revisiting the early history of cinema, (mostly) unintential keystone kop routines complete with added-on soundtracks with ringmaster Jeremy Beadle as the carny grotesque – somehow reassuring and frightening, oleagenous and abrasive – to remind us what kind of show this was. As a policing activity, it failed:
w14: The Webcam craze is the return of this repressed massif of [xx].
w15: the return, against all elite conventions of aestheticisation, of the artistic organisation of the ‘found material’ that constitutes film, of material reality (video’s equivalent to “the music of chance”)
w16: Why webcam now? The contued mainstreaming of porn? Not quite (tho porn has a presence – and certainly generates a cloud of related anxieties – throughout this story)
w17: we are increasingly aware of the wised-up film-and-TV literacy of those who inhabit home-movie world. its [xx] are already creeping across genre-lines, to create scandals (indeed, the genuine energy of scandal that DOGME seek to exploit is the folk panic surrounding, among other things, the so-called ‘fake’ documentary: a genre in which the innocence of the subject is even less reliable as an assumption than the omniscience of the director).
w18: If the home movie becomes a directed art object, if ‘ordinary people’ are now [xx] actors with hidden agendas, where does that leave ‘the real’:
w19: in the webcam realm, casual snaps are part of a performance.
w20: UNDERGROUND FILM: Claes Oldenberg’s and Robert Franks’ home movies; and Warhol, of course – the subjects being sex and boredom. Zapruder inadvertently introduces death.
w21: Video-art pioneer NAM JUNE PAIK’s 1969 [?] protest that the moonshot footage fell well below the quality theshold the TV networks brandished at underground film, as a gatekeeping [xx]. [this barrier breached by MTV…]
w22: Hitler, photographed unknown in crowd at outbreak of WW1.
w23: TV teaches us how to be ‘real’: fly-on-the-wall as [postmodern] socialisation
w24: Over lap of tech and aesthetics (and dialectics) of surveillance: archiving CCTV
w25: Shadow side of the age of mechanical reproduction: iceberg mass of holiday snaps, home movies, audiotapes of family [xx]. As mass politics to formalised parliamentary politics; this iceberg mass affects the ‘mainstream’ w/o having power over it
All notes and fragments
© Mark Sinker January 2002
