David Morley's article "Where the Global Meets the Local: Notes From the Sitting Room" is an unconventional but telling reading for ideas surrounding the globalization of television. On the one hand, it is clearly attempting to encapsulate a wide range of theories surrounding the ways in which both viewers and the industries connect within and to each other, detailing the specific qualities and failings of such disparate modes as audience studies, contexts of viewership, and cultural studies. On the other hand, it references the specific global potential (or lack thereof) of television very little, if at all, and indeed mostly elides discussion of specific texts, be they English-language or not, in favor of dissecting the underlying principles behind viewership. Such an approach can certainly be considered vague and risky, but in this case Morley's insight produces an incisive look into the precise relationship between the viewer, the screen, and a larger, simultaneously imagined and real community of viewers.
While this might not qualify as global in the strictest sense, it opens up the possibility for visualizing the collective spectators as a transnational entity, one that possesses its own particular traits that are both local and global. As Morley says, "the 'local' is not to be considered as an indigenous source of cultural identity, which remains 'authentic' only in so far as it is unsullied by contact with the global. Rather, the 'local' is itself often produced by means of the indigenization of 'global' resources and inputs" (9-10). Thus, the countless different individual communities that are made up by single viewers are indelibly influenced by their surroundings, both in a physical and mental sense; if this doesn't go some way in encapsulating what makes up the global, then I don't know what will.
With this in mind, I'd like to use a similarly unconventional example, at least in the sense of the globe: Twin Peaks: The Return, a series which, as per David Lynch's modus operandi, is concerned with America and the American like few other media objects. Indeed, in a series that criss-crosses the United States and spends significant portions in some kind of alternate dimension, Lynch and Frost spend exactly one shot outside of America, a close-up shot of some nebulous device in Buenos Aires. Nevertheless, in Morley's contextualization, this is a revealing example, both textually and extratextually.
Without delving in detail into the surprisingly significant narrative ramifications of this scene, this actually is one of the few scenes in the eighteen-hour run that features a person watching a television. But whereas other scenes feature vaguely threatening wildlife or boxing footage, this is a very specific text, one which induces a whole world of metatextual associations. For the sizable cadre of David Lynch fans that made up a significant portion of the viewing audience, this carries all manner of importance: it's one of his primary artistic influences, the character that Lynch plays in the show was named after this very clip, and Sunset Boulevard is one of the main settings in his earlier Mulholland Dr.; that it uses such associations to directly affect the narrative is noteworthy in and of itself, in a manner that Lynch uses at intervals throughout the series.
But of course, it is at least partially reliant on the viewer's ability to recognize and understand this reference. Even more than the original series, The Return is a cult television show, and the nature of its weekly rollout on Showtime — a platform made exclusive and thus more elite, in the parlance of Morley, by its subscription model (I myself signed up only to watch the show, and cancelled shortly after) — made it an anomaly in the age of binge streaming. The extended run of the show, along with its obviously superior command of audiovisual form, acted as a refuge amid the fallout from the 2016 election, for both myself and the many friends I knew who watched the show as it aired. Compounding this feeling was the knowledge that fellow cinephiles who typically didn't watch TV otherwise were among the main viewers, fostering a miniature community that, at least for me, was only manifested in person once at a viewing party. Our only other means of contact was through instant Twitter reactions immediately after — notably, eschewing the livetweeting status quo established by more conventional shows like Game of Thrones.
To close, it's worth considering the status of the television in the scene. While it is implicitly cast as a destroyer in the first part of the show, it is a rejuvenator here, by sheer dint of its combination of television and film. Of course, this hearkens back to the earliest days of television, when rerun films formed the bulk of programming. Just as significant is that this comes about more-or-less by accident: Dougie turns on the television set by playing with the remote like a child. Here, the television is fully integrated in the domestic space, often neglected but ever-present, a state of existence that is shared all around the world.
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