Abstract
This essay reviews some of the literature that focuses specifically on self-reflexive television (or television as self-reflexive), a formal device that explicitly thematizes television and its border wars with the real. It asks how critics can take into account the rigorous recuperative ability of capitalism without simply slipping into a nostalgic privileging of stable distinctions between reality and entertainment, fact and fiction, outside and inside. The author applies this theoretical landscape to a close reading of a self-reflexive episode of The West Wing -- "Access," which takes the form of a fictional documentary about C.J. Cregg and her role as Press Secretary -- considering the textual, spectatorial, and economic operations in evidence. The essay explores how key problematics function in this specific case, but also demonstrates a broader intellectual approach that leaves space for complexities and contradictions. Ultimately, the essay argues that, while it is important to hold in view the complicity of self-reflexivity with consumer capitalism, the multiple subjectivities and realities of television's boundary crossings render this alliance far from simple or totalizing. What's evident in "Access" is that self-reflexive television (and, perhaps, television overall) is not intended to be mistaken for anything but a self-contained fiction, a simulacrum, a gimmick; but, at the same time, it transgresses these categories, ruptures the screen, seeps out of the television set, allows the spectator to pass into it -- in ways that are no less "real."
Recommended Citation
Russo, Julie Levin
(2009)
"Inside the Box: Accessing Self-Reflexive Television,"
The Journal of e-Media Studies: Vol. 2:
Iss.
1, Article 4.
DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.1349/PS1.1938-6060.A.324
Available at:
https://digitalcommons.dartmouth.edu/joems/vol2/iss1/4