The Medium is the Message
Steven Fielding, A State of Play: British Politics on Screen, Stage and Page, from Anthony Trollope to The Thick of It
Bloomsbury, 312pp, £18.99, ISBN 9781780933160
reviewed by Alexis Forss
The third series of The Thick of It aired late in 2009, as Twitter neared its fourth birthday. Notice how, in the third episode, when Malcolm Tucker broaches the matter of another character’s ‘tweets ... on Twitter’ as the potential source of a leak, it sounds like he’s talking Estonian (earlier in the episode, Nicola Murray also needed to have the microblogging service explained to her). Nearly five years later Tucker’s bemusement threatens to date the show. At the time of writing this review, David Cameron’s most recent tweet was posted seven hours ago, declaring his support for the Missing People charity. Rounding up on the replies, user @mancalledczar rather understates the case when he observes that ‘There are no positive comments at all. The PM is considered a bit of a twat by the public.’ I quote three, picked more or less at random:
be good if you went missing! #twat
Are you? that's nice Dishface. now fuck off.
My family have lost their feeling of self worth because of you, Dave ... we all miss the time when you weren't here.
As Peter Mannion has it when reading the comments on his blog in the 2007 Christmas Special: ‘This is the shit room! You've opened the shit room door. This is the trouble with the public, they're fucking horrible!’ A State of Play is political academic Steven Fielding’s attempt to explore the relationship between fictions like Armando Iannucci’s scabrous televised satire – which he situates in a genealogy reaching back to the novels of Anthony Trollope – and the political processes they depict. Fielding’s thesis, such as it intermittently appears throughout the text, is that these popular fictions often shape, rather than merely articulate, how the public view politics. While he succeeds in sculpting a long narrative of the public’s increasing alienation from the hermetically sealed Westminster sphere, Fielding’s failure is his inability to grasp that the medium is the message, and his undifferentiated approaches to his chosen remits of ‘screen, stage and page’ results in a book that casts its net too widely without digging deep enough.
Fielding marshals his vast research in chronological order, but he is all at sea until the advent of cinema and later television provide him with box office gross and viewing figures with which to anchor his argumentation. For this reason his first chapter, on ‘Parliament Worship’ in the novels of Trollope, Disraeli, and other forgotten authors, is his weakest. Absent any thesis on how the novel functions as an artefact of cultural discourse, we are instead treated to the spectacle of Fielding spinning his wheels deeper and deeper into the muck of his bibliography. Instead of an analysis of the shifting position occupied by the novel in an increasingly literate society we’re given a series of capsule summaries that make for gruelling and occasionally confusing reading as Fielding darts backwards and forwards through the 1860s to the 1910s, demanding that the reader keep pace with his maddeningly ahistorical juggling of obscure authors and forgotten tomes.
Whilst the hard data that is an adjunct of cinema and television eventually help guide Fielding’s finger to the public pulse as he settles into the 20th century, he doesn’t even attempt to offer anything resembling an individual phenomenology for each of these technologies and media. Thus, when comparing Michael Dobbs’ House of Cards novels to their televised adaptations by Andrew Davies, all he can do is note their differences at the level of plot. While he acknowledges that Francis Urquhart’s addresses to the viewer are Davies’ innovation – one taken up by Beau Willimon in his 2013 American adaptation for Netflix – he merely describes them as ‘unusual’ with recourse to the naïve cliché that they ‘implicate’ the viewer in the antihero’s transgressions. (This is whilst failing to point out that the novel is written in the third person past tense – evidence of Fielding’s deafness to even the most basic elements of style). If the viewer is implicated in anything it is in television itself, and the particular frisson of Ian Richardson addressing the millions who tuned in to watch the original broadcast in 1990 cannot be replicated by the more atomising experience of Kevin Spacey being available on demand. This is not to denigrate Spacey’s acting, Willimon’s writing, or David Fincher’s direction, but simply to say that when Frank Underwood first addresses the viewer – whether they’re watching on their computer, phone, or wireless enabled television – the frisson is that of a new medium announcing its own inception and the death of the television schedule and the captive audience at 7.30 on Tuesday nights. The medium is the message, not Underwood’s cynical bons mots, nor Urquhart’s 23 years previously.
Because Fielding cannot grasp this distinction between a story and its delivery system his narrative analysis often fails even on its own meagre terms. One of his most egregious passages is one of his most casual: when he calls V for Vendetta ‘hopeful’, stating that ‘both print and screen versions conclude with the people possibly ready to assume responsibility for their governance’ it seems that he can scarcely have read either the Alan Moore-penned graphic novel nor seen the loose Wachowski Siblings-scripted adaptation sired upon it. What’s demonstrated is not only Fielding’s tonal insensitivity, but also his failings as an historian to correctly conceive of how Moore’s espousal of anarchism, pitched against the backdrop of Thatcherism, becomes co-opted into an American-helmed parable of the War on Terror, the latter’s triumphant ending seeming particularly juvenile compared to the graphic novel’s disturbing ambivalence. One is left wondering at the extent to which he has similarly mischaracterised the lesser-known texts surveyed.
From the preponderantly dull and occasionally maladroit prose to the chapter conclusions that merely add new information rather than provide summary, this book’s vices outweigh what little insight it can offer. It’s most fundamental failure may be on the conceptual level: Fielding’s definitions of both politics and fiction are too rigid and too literal, limited as they respectively are to the formal Westminster process and their representation by the trinity of the screen, stage and page. Consider this as a final thought: in Malcolm Tucker’s 2009 cinematic In the Loop, the truculent spin doctor threatens a Minister who refuses to toe the party line with ‘If you want to try and turn this into some anti-war protest expect to hear your “Mountain of Conflict” sound bite everywhere, from ringtones to a dance mix on YouTube.’ It hints at the bedlam of our modern, technologised society in which we’re all involved in continually broadcasting and shaping a narrative of the incompetence of politicians – a strange state of affairs indeed, and one that Fielding doesn’t even begin to engage with.
be good if you went missing! #twat
Are you? that's nice Dishface. now fuck off.
My family have lost their feeling of self worth because of you, Dave ... we all miss the time when you weren't here.
As Peter Mannion has it when reading the comments on his blog in the 2007 Christmas Special: ‘This is the shit room! You've opened the shit room door. This is the trouble with the public, they're fucking horrible!’ A State of Play is political academic Steven Fielding’s attempt to explore the relationship between fictions like Armando Iannucci’s scabrous televised satire – which he situates in a genealogy reaching back to the novels of Anthony Trollope – and the political processes they depict. Fielding’s thesis, such as it intermittently appears throughout the text, is that these popular fictions often shape, rather than merely articulate, how the public view politics. While he succeeds in sculpting a long narrative of the public’s increasing alienation from the hermetically sealed Westminster sphere, Fielding’s failure is his inability to grasp that the medium is the message, and his undifferentiated approaches to his chosen remits of ‘screen, stage and page’ results in a book that casts its net too widely without digging deep enough.
Fielding marshals his vast research in chronological order, but he is all at sea until the advent of cinema and later television provide him with box office gross and viewing figures with which to anchor his argumentation. For this reason his first chapter, on ‘Parliament Worship’ in the novels of Trollope, Disraeli, and other forgotten authors, is his weakest. Absent any thesis on how the novel functions as an artefact of cultural discourse, we are instead treated to the spectacle of Fielding spinning his wheels deeper and deeper into the muck of his bibliography. Instead of an analysis of the shifting position occupied by the novel in an increasingly literate society we’re given a series of capsule summaries that make for gruelling and occasionally confusing reading as Fielding darts backwards and forwards through the 1860s to the 1910s, demanding that the reader keep pace with his maddeningly ahistorical juggling of obscure authors and forgotten tomes.
Whilst the hard data that is an adjunct of cinema and television eventually help guide Fielding’s finger to the public pulse as he settles into the 20th century, he doesn’t even attempt to offer anything resembling an individual phenomenology for each of these technologies and media. Thus, when comparing Michael Dobbs’ House of Cards novels to their televised adaptations by Andrew Davies, all he can do is note their differences at the level of plot. While he acknowledges that Francis Urquhart’s addresses to the viewer are Davies’ innovation – one taken up by Beau Willimon in his 2013 American adaptation for Netflix – he merely describes them as ‘unusual’ with recourse to the naïve cliché that they ‘implicate’ the viewer in the antihero’s transgressions. (This is whilst failing to point out that the novel is written in the third person past tense – evidence of Fielding’s deafness to even the most basic elements of style). If the viewer is implicated in anything it is in television itself, and the particular frisson of Ian Richardson addressing the millions who tuned in to watch the original broadcast in 1990 cannot be replicated by the more atomising experience of Kevin Spacey being available on demand. This is not to denigrate Spacey’s acting, Willimon’s writing, or David Fincher’s direction, but simply to say that when Frank Underwood first addresses the viewer – whether they’re watching on their computer, phone, or wireless enabled television – the frisson is that of a new medium announcing its own inception and the death of the television schedule and the captive audience at 7.30 on Tuesday nights. The medium is the message, not Underwood’s cynical bons mots, nor Urquhart’s 23 years previously.
Because Fielding cannot grasp this distinction between a story and its delivery system his narrative analysis often fails even on its own meagre terms. One of his most egregious passages is one of his most casual: when he calls V for Vendetta ‘hopeful’, stating that ‘both print and screen versions conclude with the people possibly ready to assume responsibility for their governance’ it seems that he can scarcely have read either the Alan Moore-penned graphic novel nor seen the loose Wachowski Siblings-scripted adaptation sired upon it. What’s demonstrated is not only Fielding’s tonal insensitivity, but also his failings as an historian to correctly conceive of how Moore’s espousal of anarchism, pitched against the backdrop of Thatcherism, becomes co-opted into an American-helmed parable of the War on Terror, the latter’s triumphant ending seeming particularly juvenile compared to the graphic novel’s disturbing ambivalence. One is left wondering at the extent to which he has similarly mischaracterised the lesser-known texts surveyed.
From the preponderantly dull and occasionally maladroit prose to the chapter conclusions that merely add new information rather than provide summary, this book’s vices outweigh what little insight it can offer. It’s most fundamental failure may be on the conceptual level: Fielding’s definitions of both politics and fiction are too rigid and too literal, limited as they respectively are to the formal Westminster process and their representation by the trinity of the screen, stage and page. Consider this as a final thought: in Malcolm Tucker’s 2009 cinematic In the Loop, the truculent spin doctor threatens a Minister who refuses to toe the party line with ‘If you want to try and turn this into some anti-war protest expect to hear your “Mountain of Conflict” sound bite everywhere, from ringtones to a dance mix on YouTube.’ It hints at the bedlam of our modern, technologised society in which we’re all involved in continually broadcasting and shaping a narrative of the incompetence of politicians – a strange state of affairs indeed, and one that Fielding doesn’t even begin to engage with.