Battlestar Galactica

The television show “Battlestar Galactica” ended in 2009, but I never had cable, so I’m catching up now on Netflix. I’m watching it a lot. In fact, it’s the only thing I’ve been watching over the past month, a behavior that, in a mysterious coincidence pointed out by my friend David Ressel, was recently parodied on the brilliant comedy show “Portlandia.”

I’ve been making the argument to my family that “Battlestar Galactica” is extraordinary television, that the writing and characterization is amazing, that you have to absorb yourself in the episodes in order to understand the multiple levels of meaning, that Edward James Olmos is in it, that it’s not really cheesy science fiction like the original series in the 1970s but rather a profound commentary on the War in Iraq, etc., etc. Reality, of course, is that I used the same intensity to watch “Mary Tyler Moore” reruns in high school and, later, “The Young and Restless,” “China Beach,” and others. In fact, I’ve done this all my life. I have never really just “watched television,” simply doing the act of sitting and seeing whatever was on. I “get into” a show and watch it with focus and enthusiasm. Talk about being on the "edge of your seat"--sometimes I can't help but stand near the screen while a favorite show is on. (Actually, that started because the antenna reception on our TV used to be really bad for certain stations, and you had to get close to hear and make out the shapes in the periodic fuzziness, but still....). I suppose I have what you might call a fan-approach to viewing.

Two things that have come from my recent BG fandom:

1. Non-fans may find this odd, but the characters and plot-lines of these shows have affected me; they have become a part of my thinking and somehow woven into my accumulation of experiences. They crop up at different moments and shape how I understand things. Recently, for instance, biotechnologist Juan Enriquez visited RISD and gave a scintillating talk on the human genome and the ways in which cloning and manipulation of genetic code might aid medical science. When the discussion turned to ethics, I immediately thought, “Just look at what happened with the Cylons!” Sure, that’s the nerdiest thing you might hear today. But it was there.

2. I'm not sure what I think anymore about spoilers. During the days of the “LOST” broadcast, I wholeheartedly embraced the online world of Lostpedia and avidly moved around on discussion boards, like The Fuselage or DarkUFO, before and after every episode to try and crack the mysteries of LOST’s mythology. This time around, though, with "Battlestar Galactica," I have resisted. With "LOST," there was a sense of camaraderie and engagement in spoiling the series as it was happening. As Jonathan Gray and Jason Mittell have suggested, spoiler culture was very much a part of Lost’s “operational aesthetics.” That may have been true, too, of "Battlestar Galactica," but in my engagement with it, now--after the fact of its broadcast serialization and with the answers to its mysteries readily available online--I feel the need to protect myself from those who have already watched it or know about it. When family members teasingly said that they had gone online and knew how the series ended, I covered my ears and fled. I don’t want to know how it ends, or who betrays whom next. This is not so much about eschewing extra-textual pleasures but seems instead about the deferred timing of my viewing experience. The series is functioning differently for me now, as a lone viewer, than it might have if I had watched it with others across the world when it originally aired. Or, maybe it’s just because I’m less interested in the “puzzle” of human-cylon history than in its characters’ developing relationships. I don't know.

I’m not big on extended self-examination, especially on a blog, so I’ll just stop now and say that this has me thinking. What are the various ways in which fans are managing their viewing experiences in this new age of media access? Are there real generational differences (broadcast/post-broadcast TV) that govern how we understand a series, or is it more appropriate to locate diverse engagement as more deeply rooted in individual preference? (After all, there has always been the divide between those who, say, read the conclusion of a mystery novel first and those who prefer to read with naivete). More broadly, what kinds of historical and personal circumstances govern how a person might choose to engage a text?

Obsession Has a History

There are a number of books that I’d like to highlight on this blog which explore the historical and cultural understandings of behaviors that are associated with the phenomenon we call “fandom.” One example is Lennard J. Davis’s Obsession: A History (U. of Chicago Pr., 2008). I first encountered Davis’s book after I had already done a year’s worth of research and reading on monomania, a medical “condition” of the 19th century, and also on enthusiasm, an associated and equally controversial behavior that goes back to Plato, Martin Luther, and the Earl of Shaftesbury. In that context, Davis recounted a familiar story of people in modern Western society attempting to control excessive non-rational behavior--what Philip Ennis has called the “institutionalization of ecstasy.”

Davis nicely summarizes some of the diverse ways that artists, philosophers, doctors, and others have thought about obsessive behavior since the 18th century, suggesting that, while it can certainly be debilitating, say, in the form of obsessive-compulsive disorder, we nevertheless need to understand obsession as historical. That is, modern Western society has arrived at a set of medicalized understandings about obsession; the extent to which obsession is a “problem” has been rather dynamic over time, dependent on changing assumptions and values about normalcy. We need to think of obsession not simply as a universally biological disease, he writes, but—borrowing a term from David Morris—as a “disease entity,” a bio-cultural phenomenon.

Davis shows that what was described plainly as "madness" before the 18th century slowly became recalibrated as a condition of varying degree beginning in the mid-1700s. By the early 19th century, some people were understood to be more obsessive and compulsive than others; for some it was a matter of agony and paralysis, and for others it led to valuable kinds of expression and discovery. In particular, obsession seemed to connect madness and genius. Some thinkers allowed that the frequent exercise of the imagination distorted one’s mental equilibrium, but suggested that, in the case of great artists and writers, madness might be okay as long as that imbalance was temporary or isolated. (Not coincidentally, the mid-1700s was also a time when enlightenment philosophers were rescuing “enthusiasm” as a concept from its religious connotations of possession or zealotry and remaking it into a secular concept of avidity, a move that was not altogether successful—see Jon Mee’s work for a nuanced reading).

Most important for the new thinking about obsession was the advent of the idea of “partial insanity,” or “monomania,” to which Davis devotes three chapters. The diagnosis was formulated by French doctor Etienne Esquirol in 1810 to refer to “a disease of the sensibility,” where someone could function normally in most aspects of life while also suffering from a fixation characterized by “maniacal excitement.”  While Esquirol created the diagnosis for legal purposes, to explain “crimes of passion,” Davis explains that monomania nevertheless “opened the doors to a wide-ranging application of the idea of insanity to the general population.” In fact, the idea of monomania became a “mania” in the middle of the 19th century. It appeared widely in works of literature (the protagonist of Edgar Allen Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart” suffers from monomania, as does Herman Melville’s Ahab in Moby Dick), as well as serving to describe the approach to writing of a number of authors, such as Emile Zola or Gustave Flaubert. It accounted, too, for various kinds of fixations, like bibliomania, and later, Sigmund Freud’s elucidation of “neurosis.” In all of this, Davis provocatively juxtaposes instances of mania in medicine, art, and human relationships to suggest the extent to which there was considerable public debate among doctors, artists, philosophers, writers, critics, and monomaniacs themselves about which kinds of mania were acceptable or valuable, and which were not.

The link between obsession and fandom is a strong one. However, as I have suggested I think there is actually a broader history of “maniacal excitement” than the one presented here; it would be useful to compare and contrast the history of obsession with the histories of enthusiasm, devotion, and fanaticism. Debates about ecstasy and attraction from art, religion, philosophy, and medicine operate in very different realms but also seem to be connected together in their concern for defining the personal, social, and, ultimately, political meanings of emotional connection. Most immediately, for me, Obsession: A History offers a helpful methodological framework for thinking about the emergence of cultural behavior. As he writes, “I’m trying retrospectively to see how a space opens in a cultural field. One could easily object that what I am doing is based on a fallacy of trying to find in the past structures for things that don’t yet exist….On the other hand, there is, I think I’ve shown, sufficient historical and archival evidence that a major shift occurs.” (51) Figuring out that apparent contradiction is one of the main problems of studying fandom’s history.