Core Response #1! - Dan Hawkins 9PM

 

Core Response #1

            The televisual and entertainment landscape is extremely different now than the publication of Gray’s book Watching Race, and obviously the trends he identified are only more pronounced – corporate entertainment structures increasingly see non-white audiences as profitable reserves. I’m still interested in the way representation is commodified and sold to a hungry audience. The way Gray ends his essay, “television programmers… generate profits by identifying and packaging our dominant social and cultural moods” (177), shows a clear consideration of these products as wholly transactional: black, ethnic, and LGBTQ+ representation is a demand that the industry will mechanically supply. My main question is therefore: in an era even more corporatized than ever, what distinguishes the creative from the corporate? By this I mean, in a media environment that is both more corporate and more diverse than it has ever been before, is the value of representation diminished by the cynicism with which it is created? Gray, I think, ultimately argues that corporate programming is merely reflective of an existing cultural demand, the “mood,” but I wish the reading was a little more critical of the products themselves. I suppose I’m just a little underwhelmed with the evaluation that mainstream, corporate producers react to dominant cultural demand, because that seems to be a little less than revelatory of a conclusion.

I hesitate before my other question, which is: does commodified representation diminish its own value? I cringe at the word pandering, because it’s so loaded with a conservative connotation. However, I also think about Call of Duty – Black Ops: Cold War, which allows the player to select their body type independently of their pronouns and includes gender-neutral options -- a realistic-looking Ronald Reagan will refer to the player-character using their preferred pronouns in between missions of committing war crimes and international violence. There’s an extreme incongruity between the textual significance of Call of Duty’s conservative politics and the inclusive representation it affords the player. On the other hand, almost every day on social media I read about how corporate media’s representation is meaningful to a lot of people – fans of The Sims fighting for the game to include more diverse skin tone and hair options of their characters, for example. I guess, the question Gray’s essay left me with was: If there is not an inherent relationship between economic motivation and the positive quality of representation, what distinguishes this understanding of media as production from any other form of corporate production?

Reading over this, I’m afraid I’ve made no sense in an almost profoundly terrible way, but that’s the way it goes sometimes.