Margaret Morse's essay explores how the analogous relationships between television, freeways, and malls each contribute to the habitual displacement of an average person from their spatial and temporal reality. Personally, I found Morse’s essay surprisingly compelling (more so than the McCarthy and Colomina pieces which I thought had nuggets of useful comparisons in between some distracting tangents), and while I initially was skeptical of the direct relationship between her three main subjects, I found myself reflecting on past readings that had also made connections between television, driving, and shopping in different ways (for example, Anne Friedberg’s examinations of window shopping and the relation between windows in public commercial spaces to theater screens was something that came up).
Morse interestingly breaks apart oppositional binaries of reality/irreality, private/public, inside/outside by unpacking how television, malls, and freeways transport us to liminal spaces between these binaries. I thought Morse’s essay addressed a problem Anna McCarthy brought up in her piece, the problem of defining the television watcher as a “passive” subject. I found that Morse’s analysis opened the possibility for television viewing to not be viewed in an active/passive dichotomy but on the basis of “disengagement;” a somewhat aware yet not aware state of being in which the person is simultaneously engaging and not engaging with televisual content.
Additionally, I appreciate her ability to combine Williams's conception of "flow" and Modleski's ideas on interruption. Morse's conception of "passage and segmentation" not only allows us to understand the fragmentation and stitching together of segments on TV (accounting for content like series and commercials), but also how TV can be extended into our understanding of passage through spatial reality (like when driving hypnotically on the freeway or walking like a zombie through a mall).
While tracking Morse’s description of the breakdown of time and space that occurs when traveling through a mall or on the freeway, I had trouble imagining moving through a mall as an experience totally comparable to the mobile yet static movement capable in a car or through a televisual experience. Morse describes mobility as “a paradoxical feeling of stasis and motion,” which can definitely be applied to moving through a mall and stopping in the shops, however, I’d argue the undeniable fatigue after a decent walk around the mall definitely has the ability to bring a person back to the subjective reality of one’s physical body. Compared to driving and watching TV, which are both modes far more prone to “vegging out,” I’m not sure if I can put walking around the mall into the same category.
Your post and pushback to Morse's of mall-walking as a vegetative non-reality brings up a lot of possibilities! I definitely read Morse in an accepting rather than critical state of mind (the excitement of her argument connecting TV, malls, and freeways got her a lot of good will from me), but I think bringing up the instances where the distracting of non-space lapses opens up even more critical avenues. I won't deny I zone out-- or into? an autopilot headspace while driving, but one of the descriptions of the the elegant choreographed dance of cars on the highway made me pause as, well, a pretty middling driver. What of the lucid moments that shock someone out of distraction? Is there a way to critically move through a mall or watch television? This made me wonder about bel hooks' "Oppositional Gaze," and its applicability to TV theory. Perhaps this is just a difference that we can chalk up to medium specificity. The flow and segmentation of TV acts on the spectator in ways different from the unity of television, but is an oppositional viewing practice possible here? Are there spectators for whom immersion in the TV media landscape is impossible?
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