Infested Television
So first, the basics: what are we including in INFESTED TELEVISION? The marquee entry is Peter Weir’s 1979 TV movie The Plumber, along with the DDT-promoting apocalyptic phantasia of Doomsday for Bugs, a survey of pest control advertising throughout television history, and perhaps some other televised treats and terrors as well.
Next question: Why INFESTED TELEVISION? This is the third in our series of explorations into experiments with the broadcast medium, after last year’s ECSTATIC TELEVISION and DEMOLISHED TELEVISION. I was thinking, in light of the theme of Infest Fest, about television being a sort of digital hole that lets in a different type of pestilence, an ideological pestilence broadcast over the airwaves. If the physical holes in our domestic spaces allow in the biological pests of the insect and vermin sort, the creatures that reset, break down, and potentially reinforce our relationship and/or separation from the natural world (“I am not the rat that occupies my house, I belong to be here and enjoy the fruits and warmth of this space and the rat does not”), then television often operates on a similar throughline, but by bringing into our homes the cultural figure of the pest that reasserts our own selfhood, our own proud mediocrity. I have been looking towards Andrew Ross’s No Respect: Intellectuals & Popular Culture in this approach, as he traces television’s role in progenating and exporting a sense of the middle class as a site that can aim mockery at both the elite, the too intellectual, and the so-called unrefined nature of the lower class. Examining the role of the pest in PSAs and advertising focused on pest control, it is shocking how thin the veneer is in depicting roaches and rats as a sort of lascivious, ideologically dangerous figure that not only threatens to undo the physical sanctuary of one’s home, but also break down the cultural hegemony of the home space as well. Why else would at least one prominent ad campaign have a human-sized cockroach threatening to cuckold the man of the house? INFESTED TELEVISION explores the overlapping function of broadcast in conjuring fear for the biological and the societal other.
I also really wanted to return the favor to Stefan by making a selection for the screening series that flips the script and centers on humans being the pest we are infested with, as they did when we were putting together Ape-ril earlier this year and Stefan contributed Fires on the Plain, which presented humans as the apes in question. After all, as Michel Serres writes in his philosophical treatise on pestilent relationships, The Parasite, “History hides the fact that man is the universal parasite, that everything and everyone around him is a hospitable space… Always taking, never giving. He bends the logic of exchange and of giving in his favor when he is dealing with nature as a whole. When he is dealing with his kind, he continues to do so.” Peter Weir’s The Plumber approaches this in a deliciously unnerving way. It could be described as a home invasion thriller, sure, but one that is couched in dismantling a modern sense of propriety. Put simply, it’s the tale of a professorial couple living in university housing who call upon a plumber, a rather jocular Aussie bogan sort, who just keeps coming back to fix ever-escalating utilities problems that may or may not be of his own design. The Plumber bifurcates the role of the pest to both human and non-sentient levels, unsettling the viewer both with the possibilities of dysfunction with the humans we allow into our domestic spaces and the possible breakdowns and entropy of the forces that keep our domestic spaces feeling safe and sufficient (running water, electricity, and built structures). In line with the core hypothesis of INFESTED TELEVISION, The Plumber also triangulates the viewer ideologically between the brutish, lower-class plumber character and the hifalutin, incapable pair of collegiate elites, effectively and unsettlingly setting the so-called normal between these two extremes.
Fearfully Flipping Channels,
Charlie, Stefan, Stark