ABSTRACT
After a day’s work at the film studio, Alfred Hitchcock Af used to doze off in front of the TV screen; “Television,” he said, “was made for that purpose.” For film theorists, psychoanalysis has provided a useful way of discussing our relationship with the cinema. It has done this primarily through an analogy between film and that product of slumber, the dream-tracing the relationship between films themselves and the dream-work, that unconscious process of transformation that permits us to relate “stories told in images” to ourselves while we sleep. But if the dreamer and the film spectator are kindred spirits in some ways, what kinds of conclusions can we draw when we apply this analogy to the study of television, a medium whose very techniques and processes, while similar in some ways to film, are vastly different in crucial ways? In what follows, I will discuss the principles of psychoanalytic criticism as they have developed in film studies, the main features that differentiate television from film in this regard, and, finally, the ways in which psychoanalytic theory must be modified when applied to TV, through a discussion of the soap opera-considered by many to be the “quintessential televisual form.” However, from the very outset it is important to emphasize that cinema and television are two completely distinct media; as textual systems, and in the manner by which we engage with them as viewers, film and television are profoundly different. The conditions that produce visual/auditory images and that shape our viewing experience in the cinema are simply not the same when we watch TV. For this reason, where psychoanalysis is concerned, there can be no simple exchange of method from one medium to the other. Rather, what the psychoanalytic approach might provide, in its application to television studies, is the definition and description of an entirely new type of social subject, part viewer, part consumer-the “tele-spectator” (to use French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard’s evocative term).
