Do You Like To Watch?
By Gene Goldstein-Plesser, Alice Hines and Ben Hyman
HBO certainly hopes you do. The HBOVoyeur Project, a cross-platform media experiment, is HBO’s attempt to join the “convergence culture” of theorist Henry Jenkins. According to Jenkins, convergence is “the flow of content across multiple media platforms” (2). HBOVoyeur, in attempting to market classic television content within a new media framework, converges fantasy and reality, narrative time and real time, and voyeuristic pleasure and interactivity in a synthesis of old and new media. This convergence demonstrates how different media forms can work together both in synergies and in paradoxes.
HBOVoyeur propagates a TV or cinematic-like narrative under the guise of “real” voyeurism. Its voyeurism draws in part from Mulvey’s cinematic model in "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." In this model, the viewer derives voyeuristic pleasure from both objectifying and identifying with the film’s characters, respectively arresting and developing the narrative. He is absorbed in the linear-narrative temporality of the film’s sealed world. HBOVoyeur adheres in some ways to this model. One character, a housewife, prostitutes herself and dresses up as a cheerleader and a cowgirl in the midst of a larger plot to kill her husband. These individual stories create a film-or-TV-like fantasy world that draws the viewer into both the narrative and the spectacle of the project.
However, there is another form of viewer-identification at play in HBOVoyeur. While in cinema and television, viewer identification comes from filming and editing techniques that create a fantasy world in a fantasy time, in HBOVoyeur these are absent. Whole stories are filmed from one immobile point of view, imitating the position of a real-life voyeur. The viewer identifies with the project not through Mulvey’s narrative-driven ego identification, but through the project’s imitation of real life and real-time. Its tag line is, “See what people do when they think no one is watching.” Though HBOVoyeur is entertainment and is sanctioned as such, it posits itself as real, forbidden voyeurism.
In this sense, HBOVoyeur draws from a Web-cam model of voyeurism. This model’s voyeuristic pleasure is created through an experience of real-time and reality. Virilio writes that real-time is characterized by the “twin phenomena of immediacy and instantaneity,” which create a universal present replacing all local times and making information immediately available (“Speed and Information” 1). JenniCam, for example, is constantly updating and can be accessed at any time. Burgin writes, “JenniCam opens a window in the computer screen that remains open whatever other activity the computer is engaged in” (87). The temporality of the JenniCam world is part of a universal time, coexisting in perpetual simultaneity with everything in “reality.” JenniCam is also completely unconcerned with creating a story, simply representing the real events of Jenni’s life. Similarly, as a whole, HBOVoyeur’s stories have no order or plot, but supposedly occur simultaneously. Stories also intertwine with the “real” artifacts that HBO has planted around the internet—-personal Flickr, Travelerspoint, and MySpace pages for its characters. Stories are given specific times and places (East 84th st at 7:34 AM). All this, of course, is immediately accessible on command. HBOVoyeur goes beyond being a simple film-or-TV like fantasy world in sealed-off narrative time, but gives an impression of “real” voyeurism coexisting in real time with our real lives.
The project occupies a seductive intermediate space between Mulvey’s and JenniCam’s models of voyeurism, converging the appeal of narrative time with real time, and muddling the cinema’s sealed fantasy world with a deliberate impression of reality. This successfully creates a synergy of narrative and realistic appeal—-the “voyeur” identifies with HBOVoyeur’s realism, leading him to believe that he himself could be subject to other’s gazes in real life, while the project’s narrative convinces him that goings-on behind his own walls, and the walls of others, are actually interesting.
HBOVoyeur also converges old and new conceptions of private and public space. In both the web-cam and the cinematic models of voyeurism, the voyeur gazes upon what Mulvey calls “a hermetically sealed world” (201). This is comparable to the “humanist” window in Thomas Keenan’s “Windows of Vulnerability.” The screen is a strict barrier that enables voyeurism by preserving the subject’s sense of privacy. “The subject’s variable status as public or private individual,” he writes, “is defined by its position relative to this window… The window is this possibility of [the subject’s] permeability – into the public” (132). In other words, both Keenan’s humanist window and the cinematic window of voyeurism are sites of one-way transfer. HBOVoyeur seems to position the viewer behind a window where those he watches can not look back. The voyeur interacts with the public from the safety of his private space that cannot be infiltrated.
But Keenan goes on to deconstruct the public/private binary, pointing out that the public is necessarily in us in the form of a language and culture that we have no choice but to be born into. Keenan writes, “For if the window is constitutive of the distinction between public and private it is also the breaching of that distinction itself.” (132). The computer screen is a post-humanist window in that communication is a two-way—-as we interact and communicate with the HBO website, or any website, we allow an exchange of information (for example, via the cookies that HBOVoyeur installs on our browsers when we use its interface). HBOVoyeur uses this information exchange to create interactive pleasure by allowing the Voyeur to freely choose between many different stories, numerous “episodes” within those stories, even a selection of background music. However, what the Voyeur doesn’t know is that as a user of interactive media, he engages in data transfer that, by its very nature, makes him vulnerable and violates his seemingly inviolable subjectivity. (See Footnote 1)
In one sense, HBOVoyeur offers a voyeuristic pleasure where we can enter the public without the public entering us, positioning us as private viewers. However, it also seeks to capitalize on “lean-forward” interactivity and to position us as users. Because interactive digital media inevitably open up two-way windows, allowing an exchange of information, the privacy that makes voyeurism possible ceases to exist, a fact of which the viewer/user is blissfully unaware. In attempting to combine pleasures of old and new media, the project subtly contradicts itself.
Though HBOVoyeur succeeds in converging old and new models of voyeurism, it fails at harmoniously combining old and new models of privacy. Jenkins warns, “Don’t expect the uncertainties surrounding convergences to be resolved anytime soon” (24). HBO wants us to believe that HBOVoyeur pushes the boundaries of old and new media, in effect driving this process of convergence. But how much does HBOVoyeur actually challenge tradition? In many ways, it seems to cling onto aspects of the old media world. Although the stakes are high, perhaps both the successes and the confusions of the Project are inherent to the age of convergence.
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(1)This paradox of digital voyeurism would also exist to an extent for a web cam like JenniCam, simply because of its digital form. However, unlike HBOVoyeur, JenniCam doesn’t posit interactive pleasure as one of its appeals.
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