This close examination of the ordering and framing of shots in the kitchen scene shows how important characters’ looks—that is, whom they look at rather than how they look to others—are to this episode, the program, and television drama in general. And this dance of looks is achieved largely through editing, as in the eye-line match cut from Sally to Betty. Multiple-camera programs can also be fundamentally about looks, but this single-camera scene contains shots that would be too time-consuming or troublesome to capture during a multiple-camera shoot. Specifically, the camera has been moved to several positions well inside a four-walled set, showing us the Draper kitchen from virtually every angle. Multiple-camera shows, with their three-walled sets, cannot bring the camera as close to the characters’ perspectives as Mad Men does. A seemingly simple shot such as the low-angle, medium close-up of Betty with a camera positioned deep inside the set would be nearly impossible to achieve in a multiple-camera production, whether that production be As the World Turns in 1963 or a twenty-first-century multiple-camera program such as Two and a Half Men.
FIGURE 5.5. Cinematography is used throughout Mad Men to build mood and add to characterization rather than to mimic the visual style of the multicamera dramas of the day.
Much like Douglas Sirk’s melodramas in the 1950s, Mad Men makes sophisticated use of visual style—mise-en-scène, cinematography, and editing—to mount a critique of American consumer culture. The mise-en-scène of “The Grown-Ups,” in particular, is about the significance of objects and about characters gazing at them and at each other. Built around looks at television sets, the episode provides an implicit commentary upon the medium’s increasing social significance in the 1960s and the terrors that it would bring into our living rooms. Betty’s horrified gaze as she watches the killing of Oswald from her suburban couch can be extrapolated to the viewing of televised violence of the Vietnam War and the assassinations to come in the later 1960s. On a personal level, the emotional and narrative power of looks—both returned and unreturned—is featured repeatedly in Mad Men. And its mode of production allows the program’s crew to maximize that power through creative cinematography and editing. The sleek look of Mad Men and its reproduction of 1960s modernity might initially draw us to the program, but it is the characters’ looks at one another that weave the emotional fabric of its stories. By dissecting the program’s style, we can better understand Mad Men’s affective impact and its astute visual critique of mid-century America.
FURTHER READING
Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thompson. Film Art: An Introduction. 12th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2019.
Butler, Jeremy G. Television Style. New York: Routledge, 2010.
Edgerton, Gary R. Mad Men: Dream Come True TV. London: Tauris, 2010.
NOTES
1 1. The Japanese woodcut is Hokusai’s The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife, and the abstract painting is an untitled one by Mark Rothko.
6
Nip/Tuck
Popular Music
BEN ASLINGER
Abstract: Most analyses of television programs focus on a program’s visual and narrative construction but neglect the vital element of sound that is crucial to any show’s style and meaning. Ben Aslinger listens closely to the use of music in the FX series Nip/Tuck, exploring how it helps shape the program’s aesthetics and cultural representations.
Nip/Tuck’s pilot episode featured an extended sequence in which The Rolling Stones’ “Paint It Black” plays as Sean McNamara and Christian Troy perform a facial reconstruction on a man who they find out later is a child molester trying to mask his identity. Most reviewers of the pilot drew attention to the importance of popular music to the program’s style, noting “the eerie use of The Rolling Stones’ ‘Paint it Black’ to dramatize a facial reconstruction even before mentioning the plot or the performances.”1 Nip/Tuck’s emphasis on surgery, style, and music was even reinforced in promotional materials, most notably the flash-based “Can you cut like a rock star?” game on the FX website. The uses of popular music in Nip/Tuck distinguish the series from older medical dramas such as Dr. Kildare and more recent series such as ER, as well as pointing to the ways that industrial imperatives surrounding popular music licensing affect the formal properties of contemporary television texts.
Some critics have argued that the tracks used in Nip/Tuck are perfect sonic illustrations of the skin-deep, youth-obsessed, superficial Miami culture chronicled by the program. However, television scholars should be skeptical of critical commentaries that sum up popular music licensing and scoring practices in broad strokes but fail to pay sufficient attention to specific production practices. While such trade and popular press pieces might work to get at a superficial sense of a show’s use of music, they fail to address the complex ways that popular music interacts with visual elements to convey meanings, and the multiple ways that producers and music supervisors use licenses to strategically add weight to key plot points, visual sequences, and dialogue exchanges.
FIGURE 6.1. The fundamental link between music and Nip/Tuck’s “edgy” style was reinforced in promotional materials such as this game on the show’s website.
Feminist media scholars have analyzed the ways that Nip/Tuck works to define beauty in dominant terms that privilege whiteness and an unattainable size and shape.2 These scholars have analyzed gender performances in Nip/Tuck and makeover shows that enlist the medical gaze in order to create aspirational narratives and police beauty standards; however, analyses of television textuality must take into account not just visual elements and scriptwriting practices, but also the ways that television sound is constructed for meaning-making effects. By addressing the popular music soundtrack in Nip/Tuck, I add to previous analyses centering on the visual culture of the program and further explore how program producers imagined surgical and embodied aesthetics in the series. Popular music tracks work in Nip/Tuck to initiate surgical sequences, to “soften” surgical sequences by aestheticizing the penetration of the body, and to bridge Nip/Tuck’s focus on appearance with psychological interiority and character identifications. In order to connect industrial imperatives to textual outcomes, I begin by discussing how executive producer Ryan Murphy’s collaboration with music supervisor P. J. Bloom created strategies for deploying popular music tracks. I then draw on existing scholarly work on the soundtrack in order to analyze how specific examples of licensing work to complicate viewer perceptions of Nip/Tuck’s narrative and diegesis (the storyworld it creates and inhabits).
Critical to establishing Nip/Tuck’s “edge” was the way the series used popular music and editing strategies to turn surgeries into televisual spectacles.3 Murphy had previously produced Popular for The WB, a network that was influential in establishing the importance of popular music to 1990s definitions of “quality” production practices and strategies for targeting niche demographics. By drafting P. J. Bloom as the series music supervisor, Murphy worked to make the series edgy and to emphasize the meaning-making capacity of the popular music soundtrack.4
According to Bloom, music supervision typically abides by certain norms and conventions that are defined by the producer and are specific to a particular series. Given the timeline needed to secure music licenses, prepare temp tracks, and create a final, polished soundtrack, a clear sonic palette expedites decision-making and the production process.
Bloom