On Pomona College Week: Did you binge-watch last weekend?
Ryan Engley, assistant professor of media studies, examines why we stay up to keep watching.
Faculty Bio:
Ryan Engley researches the intersection of psychoanalytic theory and media studies. His current book manuscript, Seriality: Media and the Psychic Form of Everyday Life, casts the notion of seriality as a social and cultural formation, claiming that the serial has a primary place in psychic life. The book explores this by looking to varied forms of serial media, from Victorian serials to video games, podcasts to streaming television’s binge culture, to film serials past and present, and to social media. Along with Todd McGowan, Engley co-hosts the podcast Why Theory, which brings Continental philosophy and psychoanalytic theory together to examine contemporary phenomena.
Transcript:
It’s late—but not too late—and you’re watching your favorite TV show. You’re sure you can finish the episode you’re on and get to bed at a reasonable hour. But then the unexpected happens: there’s a cliffhanger. Now you don’t know what to do. If you try to go to sleep, you’ll just be thinking about what might happen, so maybe you should watch just one more episode. But what if that one ends with another cliffhanger? Suddenly, the clock reads 3am. What just happened? You have encountered what research calls the serial form.
The serial is an enduring form of literature and media characterized by the segmented release of books, newspapers, comic books, radio plays, film and television. It arose in 1836 as seen first in the narrative fiction of Charles Dickens in England and Honoré de Balzac in France, and it has developed in complexity ever since. My research investigates how the storytelling form of the serial collides with the ordinary inner workings of our minds.
We late-night television viewers know what Dickens’s 19th century readers also knew, which is that serials hook us. Cliffhangers and the sometimes agonizing weeklong or months long break between episodes and seasons, create psychic disturbance. We want the comfort of closure, but cannot have it. It is precisely that disturbance that makes the serial form so maddeningly intoxicating.
My research shows a correspondence between how a serial makes meaning and how our minds do: through breaks, interruptions, and returns. Viewing the serial this way means seeing the interruption itself as the link between one thought and the next. The serial is both an external and yet a most intimate narrative form, paradoxically powered by interruption. Now try to imagine how upset you’d be if this ended…in mid-sentence.
Read More:
[Spotify] – Why Theory podcast
[Apple Podcasts] – Why Theory podcast
