A couple of days ago, I argued consumers would respond to the present economic downturn by "dwelling" instead of "surging." I argued that this change would be governed by cultural subroutine called "homeyness." (Both Virginia Postrel and Tyler Cowen were kind enough to point their readers to the post, and I am grateful for the coverage.)

McCracken, Grant.  2008.  What consumers do in a downturn.  This blog sits at the intersection of anthropology and economics.  October 22, 2008. here.

McCracken, Grant.  2005.  Homeyness: a cultural account of one constellation of consumer goods and meanings.  Culture and Consumption II: Markets, meanings, and brand management.  Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 22-47.  Available from Amazon.com here.   

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Sue and her website How to Keep House here for the image.  This house captures one of the seven symbolic properties of the homey home.  

He says (something like),

“When you weigh what I do, women don’t even notice you. I’m just not a good looking guy.”

One of the detectives (Tim Kang) says (something like),

“That’s not true. If you went on a diet that was low on fat and rich on protein, you’d look completely different.”

And he says it earnestly. Obviously, the detective a) had thought about this sort of thing a lot, and b) felt he had to share.

The chief detective (Robin Tunney) smiles a little smile. She is charmed.

And we’re charmed too. So far, this has been a grueling interrogation, the police humorless and unrelenting, the suspect openly scornful of their authority. For the detective to hold forth in this way goes against the grain of the event, the script that informs every interrogation, and the role the detective has played in this interview so far.

A couple of days ago, I was commenting on the dialog in a recent episode of Life On Mars. A detective (Michael Imperioli) has offered what he thinks is an analogy, and conversation then turns on what an analogy is. I don’t remember conversations of this kind happening on The Rockford Files. In fact, I think we watched the Rockford Files with the implicit promise that we were never going to hear the word “analogy” or watch characters break from character.

Dialog in the Rockford Files had a job to do: move the plot along. If necessary, it could provide emergency service. If things got muddy, if the plot was unclear, dialog would step in and offer exposition. As in, “So you’re saying the butler did it!” Remarks were never “stray,” dialog didn’t wander. Philosophical speculation and idle advice was not forthcoming.

The police procedural has been with us for the beginning of recorded history. (The cave paintings in the south of France? Obviously an equine chase scene.) And now it’s on the rise. CBS owes its current success to the fact that it is all about the procedural.

But notice that this sort of dialog signals, or may signal, that something is trying to tunnel out of the procedural. In this the most formulaic of the TV shows, there are stray remarks and wandering dialog everywhere. And we are charmed.

Of course, this might be a kind of cultural gilding. Everyone party the police procedural is better than the form. The producer, the writers, the actors, all have skills and sophistication the Rockford team could not dream of. So, inevitably, we are going to see a high caliber of work “leaking” out of the prime time TV. How could it not?

Or maybe interesting dialog is something like the crouton in a Caesar salad, there merely to add variety, texture, novelty. It’s not really essential, but it adds something to the pleasure of the programming.

But there’s another possibility: that even a form as well defined as the police procedure is evolving out of its traditional tough talk form.

But in fact the pun is apt.  When consumers slow down and begin to concentrate on the here and now, the what and the where of their activity is often the home. Dwelling is what consumers do instead of buying. 

And in a sense this reverses the Scitovsky effect.  You will remember Scitovsky's book The Joyless Economy and his argument that the trouble with a consumer society is that the pleasure of ownership soon degrades into mere comfort.  It's not long before we  take our new possessions for granted. 

What the consumer does in a down economy is roll back the Scitovsky effect.  We begin to treasure things.  We re-engineer the comfort to get back to pleasure.  We begin to savor things again.

One of the things we especially savor is the home.  Home, and hearth and heart, this becomes the new geographical center of our lives. 

Some brands have always taken an interest in home.  Ikea is one of these.  Here's a lovely little ad that captures the tone of dwelling creativity and it may well work a path for future marketing.

References Scitovsky, Tibor.  1976.  The Joyless Economy.  New York: Basic Books

See the Ikea campaign here.

For another Ikea campaign, see a brilliant piece of work by Max Hattler for Beattie McGuinness Bungay here.  (The homeyness offers up lots of creative options.)

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Katie Rook again for the conversation in which the aptness Scitovsky notion occurred to me and to Edward Cotton for telling me about the Ikea campaign.

Credits for the second spot Director – Max Hattler Client – IKEA Production Company – Bermuda Shorts Producer – Lisa Hill Agency – Beattie McGuinness Bungay Creatives – Trevor Beattie & Simon Bere Agency Producer – Jane Oak

In the surging modality,  consumers have momentum.  We have a vivid sense of forward motion.  Life is getting better.  Each purchase is an improvement onthe last one.  Clothes change with fashion.  The material world teems with new features, new things, new opportunities, new excitement.  We look ahead constantly, keeping one foot in the present, putting one in the future.  The good life is America is always a better life. That’s the fundamental promise of the consumer society. 

In the dwelling modality, the consumer is not forward looking, but concentrated on the here and now.  Now most of life’s pleasure comes from counting one’s blessings.  This is a dwelling modality, because the individual is no longer in transit, racing towards a better tomorrow.  Now the consumer is focused on what is good about what one has.  The consumer stops anticipating and starts savoring. 

We have to move from a surging modality to a dwelling modality when the economy suddenly "softens" and "goes south."  And there is no gear box.  There is no single or simple way of gearing down from "in motion" to "in place."  It’s one of those deals where the consumer must perform his own "interrupt" (to steal a term from Information Processing), see that the world has changed, see that something new is called, identify what is called for, embrace it fast, and hold it tight. 

It’s weird that in our economy/culture we go through the surging-modality transition something like once a decade, and you would think this would be enough to prompt us to formalize the transition.  I mean, shouldn’t we have a ritual or something?  But no. We leave to the individual to figure this out for him or herself. (Those who do not see that the world has changed, may get the news from Donny Deutsche or Suzi Orman.)

But there is a culture form that works especially while as a set of instructions for how to dwell.  It’s called "homeyness."  This is the set of instructions in an American’s head, the one that helps show them how to turn houses into homes.  As culture codes go, it is an amazingly detailed and helpful as a set of instructions.  I wrote about this in Culture and Consumption II.  Those who are interested in further details are urged to consult this essay. 

References

McCracken, Grant.  2005.  Homeyness: a cultural account of one constellation of consumer goods and meanings.  Culture and Consumption II: Markets, meanings, and brand management.  Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 22-47.  Available from Amazon.com here.   

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Katie Rook for the question. 

I was home for the weekend, time to ransack my DVR for shows I’d missed in a week away.

Life on Mars was interesting. It feels like a companion piece to Madmen. Together, they are archaeological recoveries of the near past. (Life on Mars is set in 1973; Madmen in 1960.)

The similarities end there. After all, Madmen captures the stark simplicities of mid century modernism, that hustle economy driven by postwar prosperity and the upward mobility it made possible.

Life on Mars give us the great repudiation that followed the Madmen era, as the children of privilege embraced the experimental, alternative, egalitarian, and mystical.

If the two periods had something in common, it was that both treated women badly. In the place of the abused secretaries of Madmen, Life on Mars gives us a police-woman named Annie Norris. The guys in the station house call her “No Nuts Norris,” lest anyone fail to understand she does not belong there.

These shows take advantage of how much we have changed in the last 48 and 35 years (respectively). There is a certain amount of finger pointing. Look! They smoke! They drank! They ignored civil liberties! Our present circumstances may fill us with trepidation, but, in prime time, we’re free to indulge in scorn and self congratulation.

Life on Mars is a police procedural with a twist. The detective in question is a time traveler from the present day. This sort of twist is now standard in TV land. Life has a guy just returned from 12 years in prison. Raines (of sainted memory) featured a guy who talked with the dead. The police procedural has a new procedure. The Jack Webb character now always seems to consort with something other than the facts.

There is some really good writing in Life on Mars. Thanks to my DVR, I can report this wonderful snippet that takes place between stars Jason O’Mara as Detective Sam Tyler and Michael Imperioli as Detective Ray Carling.

Detective Tyler objects to bad treatment of a suspect.

What was that! That money wasn’t from the check cashing robberies!”

Detective Carling replies,

Yeah, and Roe vs. Wade aren’t really options when you find yourself on a river.

Tyler:   What does that even mean?

Carling:  It’s an analogy.

Tyler:  No, I don’t think it is.

Carling (somewhat hopefully): It’s like an analogy.

I laughed and laughed. It is impossible to imagine Jack Webb and his pal having an exchange like this. Steven Johnson is right. TV is getting better. (Hats off to writer, Bryan Oh.)

Then there’s the performance by Harvey Keitel as Lieutenant Gene Hunt.  You want authenticity, Keitel is your man.  This is bullet proof plausibility.  Keitel occupied his character so deeply, it’s hard to imagine how he finds his way home at night. 

Midcentury modernism took a blood oath never to repeat itself.  Fifty years later, popular culture dwells lovingly upon its recent past.  How interesting. 

We have no clear idea of what’s happening to us in the present day.  Even without the banking crisis, we are in the throes of ferocious change.  I guess it’s nice to the end the day with a trip through our collective photo album.  We may not know what we’re doing, but at least we don’t look anything like those losers drinking at their desks or wandering around in bell bottoms.  Call it serial superiority. 

References

For more on the show, go to the ABC website here.   

For more on the English origins of the show and the machinations it survived in Hollywood, go to the excellent story by Scott Collins in the Los Angeles Times here. 

The quote above is from the second episode of the series, The Real Adventures of the Unreal Sam Tyler.

 Post script

I am sorry not to have posted more often and more regularly. Loyal readers deserve an explanation.  The loss of my sister has taken something out of me. We were not close in any conventional sense.  We did not talk often or confidingly.  But I am reeling without her.  Not to worry.  It’s jut taking awhile to get back on pace.   

Or so I thought.  In fact, there are a couple of moments when I thought to myself "can’t we just take this as read, please?"  For instance, the lads gather their "bank heist equipment" and start working on the "bank heist tunnel," and you think to yourself, "Got it.  Got it.  Let’s move on." 

Normally, we soak the details up.  And the CSI franchise has us fascinated with scientific apparati and technical processes.  Normally, this is (mysteriously) absorbing.  But in this case, it was a little tedious.  I wasn’t sure I really needed to see the van racing through the streets of London. 

Clearly, TV and movies are predicated on taking things as read.  I mean, if The Bank Job were obliged to offer a record of all of the events and people that let up to that bank job (a true story, apparently), it would take many hundreds, perhaps thousands of hours of film.  (Not to mention the agony it would bring to philosophically minded film makers, with the scrupulous ones building out the back story until we had exhaustive accounts of British politics and banking.  And no one wants that, I think we can agree of that.) 

So taking things as read is an essential part of the film maker’s craft.  TV and movies are dedicated to giving us only the "good parts," the parts that draw us into the film, that jack up our emotions, that give us purchase enough for acts of identification, and excising all the rest, taking it as read.

But here’s the thing, the more your audience knows the genre, the more you can take things as read.  And at the limit, you should be able to show the star, the car, the girl, the stunt and the "climax," and Bob is, as the English say, your uncle.  You’re done.  You take the rest of the film as read, and we can all go home.  Whew.  Think of the time we’d save. 

And, yes, Professor Postrel, as our powers of assimilation get better even this should be possible.  And this is a nice test actually of the Woody Allen proposition (that speed reading would tell us only that War and Peace "was about Russia".  I am devoutly fond of this joke, thanks for the memory.)  Give me a dedicated film goer who hasn’t see The Bank Job and I guarantee you that if we gave her the the star, the car, the girl, the stunt, the "climax," and of course the title, and she could give us an amazingly accurate account of how the film must go.  This despite the fact that this film is pulled out of genre by the fact that it must honor the "real facts" of a "true story.")  But I digress.  (This paragraph refers to a comment that Steven Postrel was kind enough to leave on my post Wednesday.)

Here’s what I mean to say: If we are as Henry Jenkins argues we are getting better at reading contemporary culture, and especially generic film, the ratio of things left out to things kept in should be changing.  We should be getting more telegraphic.  Less should be more, a lot more.

Which brings me to voice over.  Pam, my wife, says she thinks she is hearing more voice over on TV these days and I think she’s right.  It’s there in any thing with Noir origins and there is quite a lot of this.  And it’s even there in the police procedural (In Plain Sight) and the spy procedural (Burn Notice). 

I think Voice Over (VO, hereafter) is about putting things in.  It lets us add complexity, motive, background, depth and subtlety or simple exposition.  The VO is always an intelligent, authorial voice.  It doesn’t stumble.  It never says stupid things.  It is always astute, observant, and helpful.  (I, for one, would love a movie that used a completely straight VO even as the stuff on the screen began ever so subtlety and then increasingly to depart from the what the VO thinks is going on.)

Perhaps this is a cultural moment where we are taking things out (by treating them as read) and putting things in (by way of the VO).  Are these related?  It’s as if we are getting so good at contemporary culture that lots can be removed.  And this leaves Hollywood with a problem and an opportunity.  There is now a big hole in the narrative machinery, one that every self respecting writer and director is eager to fill with good writing and directing. 

On the whole, this shift is a good thing for popular culture.  After all, the stuff that typically come from VO is the human stuff.  And what is got rid of when we take things as read are all of the laborious details supplied by genre.  In effect, this may be the end of a certain Hollywood era.  After all, this is a cultural industry famous for taking the human out of films and replacing it with special effects, spectacle and starlets.  VO may mark a departure from all of this.

I mean, isn’t this is what we mean by "procedural."  It’s the literary machinery into which we can drop human beings without much more attention to their complexity as human beings.  They are really there just as machine operators.  Their job is to make the procedural go.  If we are now prepared to take this as read, if we are getting rid of the procedure, we are free and forced to pay more attention to what is human about the human.  And voice over feels perfect for this, at least as a short term intervention. 

In sum, it feels like things are changing in Hollywood, and we may take the rise of Voice Over is a leading indicator of this new trend.  Unless of course you saw this coming years ago, in which case please just take this post as read. 

Then we all took turns on the high horse: The rabble have broken into the castle of broadcasting!  This is the end of civilization as we know it!   This is a ferocious attack on taste, discernment and elites!  Run for your lives!

I get the argument, and I especially like the phrase that calls RP the "theater of humiliation."  There is a lot of gratuitous cruelty.  I take Hell’s Kitchen to be exhibit A.  The Joe Schmo Show is exhibit B. 

But there are other things to say about this cultural form:

1)  Reality programming is instructive.  Pam and I watch Project Runway.  I see a new design come down the runway, I take my money and I place my bet.  Out loud, so that Pam can hear, I say what I think.  And eventually I discover whether my judgment bore any resemblance to the experts who eventually hold forth. 

It’s clear that some education is taking place.  My judgments diverge less and less. This means that this kind of reality programming is actually making me a more discerning observer of the world of fashion.  It is helping me internalize my own modest mastery of the code. 

2) Reality programming also serves as a way for a divergent culture to stay in touch.  Now that things have become more various and more diverse, divergence is a real problem.  It is hard for any one part of other culture to remain within shouting distance with any other part. Common ground is scarce. 

Reality programming gives the culture of plentitude a chance to phone home.  The Real Housewives of Orange County is ethnographic gold. Horrifying, yes.  Gold, yes. Cougars are glimpsed in Age of Love, kids in Kid Nation, 16 year olds in My Super Sweet 16, gays in Boy Meets Boy. child rearing in The Baby Borrowers.  (It is very hard to know what the Flavor of Love helps us see, but the boys in the lab are working on it.)  Of course we would not want to make these programs authoritative sources of information, but for a culture that is an exploding star,  it does help us stay apprised of one another’s movements.

3) Reality programming is not just cheap TV, it is responsive TV. Surely, one of the most sensible way for the programming executive to get back in touch with contemporary culture is to turn the show offer to untrained actors who have no choice but to live on screen, in the process importing aspects of contemporary culture that would otherwise have to be bagged and tagged and brought kicking and screaming into the studio and prime time.  Reality programming is contemporary culture on tap.  It is by no means a "raw feed."  That is YouTube’s job.  But it is fresher than anything many executives could hope to manage by their own efforts.  In effect, reality programming is "stealing signals" from an ambient culture, helping TV remain in orbit.  (Mixed metaphor alert.  Darn it, too late.) 

This is an era in which we are inclined to issue lots of brave talk about cocreation, open source, and dynamic institutions.  We speak of breaking down the citadel that separate the corporation from the real world. Well, this is actually what it looks like (for certain purposes).  And funny old TV may in fact be one of the first meaning makers to figure out how we solve this particularly thorny problem.  This, in turn, would make reality programming not the end of civilization as we know it, but a test case in what comes next. 

Yes, of course, in every case, the reality program insists on a preposterous pretext, and this in turn misshapes the behavior that gets on the screen.  I wonder if there are options here.

References

The 08/08 issue of Entertainment Weekly has several goods pieces on Reality programming.  It was the inspiration for this piece.