...Ned Schantz This essay considers the recurring problem of plot alternatives in Alfred Hitchcock, of powerful shadow scenes that overwhelm the manifest plot and demand a critical account of their own. Confronting such shadow scenes, the viewer takes up a social position in a long chain of failed...

... that the popularity of Mary Hartman reveals viewers' frustrations with television in the 1970s and, furthermore, that the show was uniquely able to integrate a nationwide audience, even as executives envisioned it as a series of discrete markets divided by gender and class. The show, which at times verged...

...Alexia Smit Critical accounts of plastic surgery television tend to explain women viewers' engagement with it either through comparisons to pornography and in terms of visual pleasure or by figuring the viewer as a docile, disciplined subject who reproduces the values espoused by the format...

...Tison Pugh Despite the progressive ambitions announced in its title, the sitcom Modern Family (ABC, 2009–) has been excoriated by many viewers for its purported conservatism and reactionary politics. In particular, the program’s treatment of homosexuality, evident in the story line of gay couple...

... illusion of the cinema and disrupt the viewer's identification with the screen—especially the male spectator's—and the construction of his (or her) coherent subjectivity. This “wounding” of the cinematic apparatus leads to the traumatization of viewers, who are forced to confront what they would prefer...

...Niels Niessen Rosetta (dir. Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, France/Belgium, 1999) teases the viewer into a spiritual mind game. At first viewing, the film appears to be about a young woman’s quest for a job. On very close analysis, though, Rosetta turns out to be encrypted with the holy spirit...

.... Particularly significant here is the program's emphasis on female friendship. Yet such “gynocentric” qualities and the series' affinity with young viewers might have been eroded in recent episodes. This is partly through the incorporation of more masculine genres, but also in the increasing address of the show...

... of a demographic of classed viewers who find themselves and their values reflected in the Pritchetts of Modern Family . Figure 1. Dr. Miura (Suzy Nakamura) holding Lily in “Fears” (Modern Family) Diversity Times Three: The “Modern Family Effect” and the Privatization of Diversity...

... more surprising—and more recent—promise of the medium: that TV can in fact keep the viewer alive by helping her lose weight. While the proliferation of reality TV formats and lifestyle programming has marked the increased visibility of corpulent bodies on television, how is it that a medium once...

... is instrumental to theorizing addictive spectatorship, a concept that takes seriously the notion that television may act affectively as a drug. Recovery television, it claims, helps viewers negotiate their own relationship to television consumption. Furthermore, such a negotiation augments notions of neoliberal...

... unpredictable antisocial affective engagement among cast members. These scenes generate a thrilling anxiety that encourages serialized watching and potentially endless interpretation by viewers, creating a ratings economy out of an affective one. Through a reading of The Real Housewives of Atlanta (2008...

..., viewers are awakened to the unfortunate history of Japanese colonialism and thus experience a feeling of regret or melancholy for the past. This cinematic encounter with the past also resonates with cultural imagery of Seoul as a forgotten colonial city that has reemerged across Korean society, especially...

... in relation to feminist politics, on one hand, and popular culture, on the other? When does self-representation overstep the boundary between sexual valorization and prurient commodification? How, in turn, should a female viewer respond to erotic visual material produced by a woman? In order to understand...

... but then rewritten, as Jeff Bridge's “Dude” comes to abjure both the imaginary and the symbolic dimensions of paternity in favor of more material and yet less oppressive and monolithic construals of paternity and masculinity. Third, I examine the consequences of the Dude's refusal of phallic mastery for the viewer...

... representations they seek. The facettes de la petite mort featured on Beautiful Agony are drawn from amateur video submissions of the faces of women and men experiencing orgasm, or so the viewer is meant to presume. While the site may be conceptually innovative in the realm of adult Web sites for its lack...

...,” viewers and critics are unaware of the extent to which the film draws on Bollywood's affective economy, generic idioms, and performance traditions. Few would recognize that the heroine Satine's transformation from conniving showgirl to tragic heroine recalls the tawaif (courtesan) figure in popular Hindi...

...” Michelle, and the limits of what it can convey to its audience. Maitra shows how the diffused, “middling” presence of Hima's camera locates Lopez in the middle of her contradictory emotions, and gives viewers a sense of her statelessness, of the unnerving position of being both contained and dispossessed...

... in the present about the “impoverished” tableaus of sexploitation films is the shunted melancholia of obsolescence. Sexploitation maintains a hold on contemporary viewers precisely through the films' constriction by history, by their seeming containment within their own historical moment and inability...