Perfect Man Play-Off

[imomus]

Japanese television is proving a continuing enigma to our good friend Marxy. "My brain fails to build up a fourth wall around the actors under the standard conditions of Japanese audio and video quality," he told us yesterday, admitting he only watched one show regularly and complaining that they didn't "filter the colors down to more "attractive" or film-like settings", and that "you can hear the same hums and buzzes that populate real life".

Marxy is quite explicit about what constitutes good TV. It's stuff on Rupert Murdoch's Fox network back home in the US: The Simpsons, 24, Get a Life and Arrested Development.

Enlisting some academics to help him answer the question of why Japanese TV is so much "worse" than Fox, Marxy quotes Japan and the Internet Revolution by business-friendly academics Coates and Holroyd as they explain "the gap between Western and Japanese television production".

"Production values are mediocre by western standards," opine the academics, "and there is little evidence of the availability and use of advanced digital technologies and computerized production techniques... The television companies have substantial revenues (and a captive market, as cable services have made few inroads in the country) and very large audiences. It is choice," they conclude, "rather than resources or ability, which results in the low-key, low-tech television programming."



Are Coates and Holroyd right that Japanese TV is "low-key, low-tech"? Marxy goes with their judgement: if it's not lack of money or technological backwardness that makes it so, it must be a conscious choice on the part of the production companies.

"No question that our moral anthropologist superiors" (that's meant to be the Neomarxisme "culturalists" -- me and Alin and Dzima) "will automatically [say] that television stations are directly responding to a consumer need for low-tech programming -- because they believe all products to be a perfect reflection of tribe desires. Surely, the fact that the viewing public in Japan is generally Japan's least sophisticated demographics (old folks, stay-at-home spouses, teenagers, boring people) means a mass of viewers comfortable complacent with low-tech TV."

But who says we on the cultural team even agree that J-TV is low-key, low-tech and lacking in innovation? Let's not even go into the cultural arguments -- the view, for instance, that Japanese TV isn't a crappy version of the cinema, but an electronic izakaya. Let's look at something very specific -- a screenshot from a show aimed at some of the "unsophisticated" people Marxy disdains: stay-at-home spouses.



This is from a Japanese TV show I happened to be watching yesterday (I was at Smart Deli in Friedrichshain, where they pipe in J-TV for us cosmopolitan unsophisticates); TV Asahi's "Perfect Man Play-Off".

Now, in addition to the TV picture you'll notice that there are three different text areas on the screen, an inset reaction monitor, and a scoreboard. These aren't just digital effects, they're also interactive feedback devices, monitoring how participants in the scene reacted afterwards, and how the studio audience and an invited panel of judges is feeling about the situation.

The theme is "20 beautiful women choose the perfect man". The situation being illustrated is a hypothetical scenario in which a man (Kusanagi Tsuyoshi from Smap) comes home to discover his wife is having an affair. Kusanagi reacts in a super-casual, empathetic way by saying "Hey, let's go out for dinner!!" 20 of the beautiful women on the judging panel approve of this cool-headed reaction.

Now, all this complex information about the situation and the reactions to it can be gleaned from a single screenshot. I find that terribly interesting. It's very Japanese to want to cram that much information onto a screen. It's also not "low resolution" at all if you consider resolution to be a matter of information-per-frame. What's more, the information here is much more semantic and contextual than it would be in a single frame from the American shows Marxy is championing as self-evidently superior. It allows latecomers to grasp the show's concept, it allows people to watch TV with the sound down, it allows you to catch up quickly if you've been zapping, looking away or talking to someone in the room, and so on.

So it's over to you, the Click Opera studio audience. Is this really low-res TV? Is this TV that fails to use digital effects? Is it made by, and aimed at, unsophisticates? And how about the ethics and morals on display here? If this were on Rupert Murdoch's exemplary American TV wouldn't somebody be getting applauded for pulling somebody else's hair out? Wouldn't there be a murderer onscreen describing how he would've murdered his wife, had she been having the affair she was in fact having?

Comments

Re: For kids

[qscrisp.livejournal.com]

Well... For what my opinion is worth, I still like the music he's producing now. I don't know much about the whole cunt question. I've never met Morrissey, but I suppose some people I've never met do appear cuntlike to me. He doesn't particularly. He seems quite straightforward. He's misanthropic and protects his own interests but seems serious about artistic integrity.

Re: For kids

[charleshatcher.livejournal.com]

He's misanthropic and protects his own interests but seems serious about artistic integrity.

Isn't that the Oxbridge definition? Some, like Germaine Greer, insist that "cunt" should define something lovely and darling -- like Stephen Fry -- but I've never much gone in for that myself. But then, cunts aren't really my thing.

Re: For kids

[qscrisp.livejournal.com]

Well, you seem to know more about cunts than I do, so I'm not confident of giving an appropriate response.

But if you're talking about someone being a selfish bastard/politically dodgy/unkind to his girlfriend etc. being some kind of artistic disqualification, in other words, if you mean that someone being unpleasant in some way, or generally perceived as unpleasant, invalidates their work, it's an interesting point. It's something I have thought about, and, if I took the idea seriously, I'd certainly have to throw away much of my music and my book collection. I think it's generally agreed that Kate Bush is a nice person, so at least I'd be okay there.

But some of the artists who fascinate me are some of those who are most politically dubious or just reviled because they didn't do what people around them wanted to do. In certain moods, the more reviled an artist is, the more inclined I feel to trust them, since I have some experience of how these popular opinions function and spread. But ultimately it comes down to my own personal relation to the work of art and to various reflections on the old saw that says you should never meet your heroes.

Re: For kids

[charleshatcher.livejournal.com]

I do not, in any sense, relate art to its artist. The fact that Lewis Carroll and Joe Orton were paedophiles, or that Wagner and Momus ha(d/ve) racist tendencies does not mar my opinion of their respective works.

The fact that I find Boreissey to be a cunt doesn't get in the way of my enjoyment of This Charming Man, but it does cause me to doubt the merit of his opinion of American television.

Re: For kids

[qscrisp.livejournal.com]

Hello again.

Well, I'm not sure about your 'facts', but I think I understand where you're coming from now.

Well, no, of course, the mere fact that Morrissey doesn't like American TV is no more persuasive than the mere fact that you don't like Morrissey. It was a fairly lightweight contribution to this TV theme.

Personally, I know American television almost exclusively through British imports. On the whole, they irritate me, but I don't spend much time thinking about it. I can see how my posting of that YouTube clip with the comment I gave might have given the impression that I've really got it in for American TV. I don't actually care that much. Maybe I would if I was forced to watch much of it.

I did very much enjoy Six Feet Under though.