I don’t much like Fox, but I have to say: they get football right. ABC’s Monday Night graphics muddy up the bottom half of the screen, and CBS is even worse in its Sunday coverage that places silly 1998-style brushed-metal medallions and bars over all corners of the screen — but Fox, with its use of translucency and a single top-of-the-screen bar or icon gets it right.
Beyond that, though, the cinematography angle fascinates me. CBS is clearly the most naturalistic, doing the least image filtering of the three networks, and their CGI projection of the first-down line seems almost embarassed in its self-effacement. ABC’s Monday Night franchise this year is sort of in the middle, with some obvious on-the-fly video image enhancement in its balancing of black and white levels, and I can’t tell how much sharpening they’re doing. But Fox: man, Fox is shameless, and I can’t help but love them for the way in which they’re spinning the game into sheer spectacle, almost to the point where it might as well be a video game. Compare a Fox game to a CBS game: visually speaking, what you see from Fox is (1) an equalized image adjustment, heightening the strong blacks and strong whites in any image, reducing the range of lightness values and so increasing the contrast, (2) a posterization of color values, so that similar hues merge into one another, and (3) a sharpening of edges, so that differences in color and hue and value seem more sharply defined.
The net result? The NFL on Fox is far easier to follow in the way in which they dumb down all of the information that the game presents. And that’s a good thing. So what we’re seeing is something beyond the rhetoric of naturalism: we’re seeing a favorable public visual rhetoric that happily reduces the information available.
A filtered rhetoric.
You know what I miss? The “gimmicky camera angles” of the XFL.
But I don’t mean to deface your thoughtful analysis.
I really enjoyed this analysis, Mike. Your comment on my blog about the greater context in which the Bill Bennett controversy takes place really got me thinking, and this entry got me thinking even more. Since my training is literary, I tend to focus first and foremost on the written word, and not so much on the contexts in which the word was written and received. When I’m talking about drama, I think I do a good job of keeping those contexts in mind, but the impostor syndrome that grips me when I teach poetry tends to make me retreat into a decontextualized new criticism. But then I hit ’em with grammar and formalism — what is the subject of this sentence? Since there isn’t a comma at the end of that line, how does that affect the way you should read it aloud? Since the first three stanzas all start with “if”, what happens when you read the final stanza as the “then”?
I’m impressed by your ability to read visual and information rhetoric so efficiently. I’m not a sports fan, but I learned something today. Thanks.
Thanks likewise, Dennis. In some ways, what you’re talking about here and over at your blog’s discussion of the Bill Bennett controversy (where I’ve left a follow-up comment, as well) mirrors the debate over “the social turn” in English studies; the shift from the New-Critical attention to the concrete particulars of what goes on in the text as a whole to the Social-Epistemic attention to all the relationships of politics and difference swirling around the text. And the funny thing is, for all the bashing Jacques Derrida takes as an icon of the latter camp, he’s a shockingly careful and precise reader of texts in that old-school New-Critical mode.
Which makes me wonder about your comment, Clancy. “Deface”? Nope, I don’t see any “defacing” — but, hmm, much as Tacitus uses a misquote of Cicero to call attention to the fact that the speaker in his dialogue who is most effusive in his praise of imperium is also the least reliable, you seem to be using a purposely problematic example (the XFL, which I never watched, but I love the discovery that it’s a football league without a signifier, or — more properly — an “X” that is a sign without a referent) to give your comment a quality by which its internal oppositions effectively unseam its meaning — yes?
Hmmm. Very clever, Ms. Ratliff. 🙂