Abstract
Despite televised sports being a non-fiction event, the gap that separates a sporting event’s live unfolding from its televisual transmission ensures that it has all the aesthetic dynamism of a dramatic series. This essay argues that the sense of liveness that undergirds a televised sports broadcast operates on the side of the viewing subject rather in the object itself. It is the psyche that makes sport live—not the broadcast. This essay looks to Freudian and Lacanian concepts and ideas from television studies to concretize its theoretical intervention.
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Introduction
Screens mediate our engagement with professional sports. Even when attending a live sporting event of any kind, there are moments where we are watching a screen at the stadium to catch a replay, learn the final decision of an official review, or check the kiss cam.Footnote 1 The most common mediating screen by far, however, is the television screen. Psychoanalytic theory has been influential in the way film studies have conceptualized the screen, particularly in terms of the gaze being on the side of the screen rather than on the side of the spectator.Footnote 2 Curiously, its impact on television studies has not occasioned the development of a similar concept. This essay will take two concepts unique to television studies—liveness and flow—and show not only how a psychoanalytic approach both expands and clarifies these ideas but how they have always already been psychoanalytic. Such an intervention is necessary to understand the divided temporality of live sports. A division occurs materially in the broadcast and it is important to understand how and why this evident split is mediated and smoothed out by the viewing subject’s psyche. The implications for understanding the relationship between screened media and the viewing subject’s psyche from this combined position of psychoanalytic theory and television studies are ultimately the focus of this essay.
Delay on the field
In 2019, Hulu unveiled an ad campaign designed to sway cord cutters: “Hulu Has Live Sports.” Ads featuring North American professional athletes including Joel Embiid and Damian Lillard ran on terrestrial and cable television. The appeal of the ad campaign is easy to discern. Users can get the best of streaming—access to a wide variety of video-on-demand—and the best of network television—live sports. There is a fascinating sleight of hand happening with the slogan, however. How “live” are Hulu’s live sports broadcasts? A quick Google search shows that Hulu’s live stream is anywhere from 15 to 90 seconds behind a terrestrial or cable broadcast. This does not mean, however, that Hulu is not live or that it lacks authenticity. It means that “liveness” has moved from aesthetic to form. What is live is not simultaneous. Hulu is demonstrably not live if we define “liveness” as simultaneous, real-time feed of a television sports event without interruption, segmentation, or delay. What Hulu’s “live” sports points to is not that it fails the test of being “truly” live. Rather, it suggests the importance of “liveness”—the general formal qualities of a television event deemed live—to live sports.
To be clear, Hulu is not alone in failing to offer truly simultaneous or synchronous live television. Traditional television networks do not even offer this. While radio broadcasts may be more commonly known to feature a seven-second profanity delay, live television employs a similar kind of intentional delay for live events. A PBS mini-documentary credits Richard Pryor with inspiring a five-second delay for television broadcasts in the United States (Flynn et al., 2014). One of the justifications given for the intentional delay of a live television broadcast is that it allows producers to quickly edit out objectionable content, referred to in industry shorthand as “dumping.” One need only to think back to the now-infamous moment in 2004 when Justin Timberlake caused Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” during the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show. Timberlake’s error instituted a now familiar production delay between a live sporting event’s simultaneous unfolding and its broadcast transmission. This delay has further increased as technology has moved away from traditional over-the-air and cable broadcasts to the point where a streaming service like Hulu can claim to have “live sports” despite those productions carrying with them a sizeable delay. The delay allows the curation of a live event through video editing, as well as the narrativizing of an otherwise non-narrative event such as live sports.
Intentional broadcast delay, however minimal, is the anstoss at the heart of live television, the German philosopher Fichte’s term meaning both “obstacle” and “impetus.” As Slavoj Žižek explains, “It is important to bear in mind the two primary meanings of Anstoss in German: check, obstacle, hindrance, something that resists the boundless expansion of our striving; and an impetus, a stimulus, something that incites our activity” (2009b, p. 49). The paradox at the heart of Fichte’s anstoss—the logic that the thing that acts as an obstacle is the precise thing that acts as the impetus for the thing in the first place—has a profound analog in a theory of liveness.
There have been many scholarly attempts to wrangle an understanding of liveness. Philip Auslander has written that “liveness is not an ontologically defined condition but a historically variable effect of mediatization” (2012, p. 3). Nick Couldry has influentially posited “online liveness” and “group liveness” (2004, pp. 356–357). Inge Ejbye Sørensen (2015) has looked at how live broadcasts are often available across multiplatforms with exclusive or ad hoc content (such as live tweeting) viewable on two or more screens at once. Perhaps the most recent and most comprehensive survey of approaches to liveness comes from Karin van Es’s “Liveness redux: on media and their claim to be live.” Van Es catalogs scholarly attempts to theorize liveness, which she identifies as having three primary valences: the ontological approach that positions technology as the “source of liveness,” the phenomenological approach that relates a live broadcast to “human experience,” and the rhetorical approach of a scholar such as Elana Levine, who is interested in how “liveness is used to create hierarchies of value” (van Es, 2017, pp. 1246–1247). What distinguishes van Es’s approach is the claim that liveness is defined and takes shape through the social, which is what pushes her to bring more recent developments in live social media (Periscope and Facebook Live, especially) to bear on live broadcast of culturally important events. Indeed, van Es is keen to note that, despite the well-publicized death of traditional television, “the broadcast of Super Bowl XLIX by NBC in 2015 was the most watched show in US television history” (2017, p. 1251). As she puts it a few times in her paper, liveness is best understood as a “constellation” that brings together various media (2017, p. 1254).
With respect to van Es’s position on how developments in streaming media have shifted the axis of what live means away from traditional broadcast television, I want to further move away from thinking of liveness as that which captures anything “live.” Liveness is not a transient property that disappears by way of a broadcast’s delay. If this were true, Hulu simply could not claim to “have live sports.” Advertisers and would-be consumers would have rejected the assertion out of hand. The reason why Hulu’s advertising campaign carried the whiff of truth is because liveness is not captured simultaneity. It is curated. However, existing in almost paradoxical relation to the previous point, liveness is not a quality that broadcasters have total control over. In fact, in the attempt to completely curate an ongoing and unfolding event as though it were a film in postproduction, broadcasters slip. We can name and see the liveness of a broadcast more easily in absence and negation than in presence. In other words, a boring American football game can glaze over our eyes, but we can see what is clearly at stake in the live form when it breaks down—such as the abrupt cut to commercial after the infamous “wardrobe malfunction”—when there is some parapraxis that exposes the failure of mastery inherent to a live production. We understand that a live sporting event is live due to the way it is produced. We also need to feel as though the spontaneous and excessive can happen. We see here another obstacle that is also an impetus: liveness has a crafted and professionally produced look to it and liveness exceeds the capacity of producers to produce it. This obliges us to confront the following: liveness is a form of psychically sustained fiction.
The delay is, of course, an obstacle to considering live sports as a simultaneous chronicling of an ongoing event. That same delay, however, is the very impetus for considering live sports a form. Social media platforms such as Periscope, Facebook Live, Twitch, and Snapchat may offer seemingly unmediated and simultaneous access to ordinary or extraordinary events (with the proviso that, of course, everything is mediated through a screen, device, or some minimal delay), but what each is missing is the attempt to master a live event through production. That production, which is sometimes seen as the barrier to direct access to the live event—the sometimes lamented “seven-second delay”—is actually constitutive of it. However, I am not claiming that it is technology which is determinative or primary in what makes something “live.” It is the site of failure—the inability to fully capture perfectly a live event—that allows us to see the form itself. Using broadcasts of live sports as a nodal point, this essay argues that the curation of a live event is, in a meaningful sense, what makes something live. It is only because live sports are a televisual form first and not a factual synchronous broadcast of a “live” event that Hulu can claim that it carries live sports. In other words, it is because of—not in spite of—Hulu’s “non-liveness” that we may begin to understand liveness as a formal concept.
Liveness: form of fiction and fetishistic disavowal
When I say that liveness is a form of psychically sustained fiction, I am not claiming that live sports are rigged or scripted.Footnote 3 It is not fictional in that sense. Rather, live sports document the spontaneous unfolding of a non-fiction event. The broadcast delay that separates the live event from its televisual transmission, however, ensures that it has all the aesthetic dynamism of a dramatic series. Halle Berry, for example, narrated a pre-produced introduction to Super Bowl LVI making explicit the tie between live sports and fiction. Seizing on the Super Bowl taking place in Los Angeles for the first time, Berry made continual references to great “stories” and the “movie” about to take place. Rather than being jarring, this Hollywood inflected introduction set the stakes for the game and for the Super Bowl as a singular event.
Before we get to a discussion of flow, or the psychic glue of the live broadcast, we need to look at the aesthetics of the live sports broadcast. The cuts of a live sports broadcast and the constant concern with building a narrative around an ongoing event give shape to live sports as form. Due to its staccato pacing, no sport lends itself to the cut better than the NFL. In looking at just the first five cuts of the NFL game below and paying attention to the accompanying narrativizing, we can see how the fictional aspect of the live form takes its shape.
Let us take, for example, the 2006 AFC Championship game played between the New England Patriots and the Indianapolis Colts. The NFL has very infrequently re-released full broadcasts of classic games online using the now defunct hashtag #FreeGameFriday, but this example will serve as paradigmatic of the fiction making that grants consistency to live sports. This game featured New England quarterback Tom Brady and Indianapolis quarterback Peyton Manning at the height of their early career narratives. Tom Brady and the Patriots had won three of the previous five Super Bowls, with Manning and the Colts emerging as the Patriots’ clearest rivals. Manning entered the game with a terrible record against Brady, giving the proceedings the stakes of a Sergio Leone Western, where rival gunslingers arrive to a town that is not big enough for both of them. The game even opens with a wide establishing shot characteristic of a Western.
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The game does not, however, begin with teasing a bloody Wild West conflict but rather with another kind of intrigue often at the center of Westerns: “The New Sheriff in Town” or, depending on your perspective, “The Traitor” (the bad guy who used to be good).
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Adam Vinatieri, who began his career with the New England Patriots and famously kicked the game winning field goal in two of their Super Bowl victories, went from hero to traitorous villain in New England after signing for Indianapolis as free agent in the 2006 off-season. This personnel move heightened the tensions that already existed between Patriots fans and Colts fans: Manning was, at the time, widely regarded as the superior quarterback; Brady, at the time, was regarded as the superior winner. (Brady would, eventually, settle this argument by being widely regarded as both the best quarterback and the best winner, but in 2006 this was still a viable debate.)
The camera then cuts to Ellis Hobbs who is about to receive the opening kickoff from Vinatieri, as Jim Nantz, the game’s play-by-play announcer, tells the listening audience that Vinatieri was seen talking to his old teammates on the Patriots before the game. Hobbs stands-in for Vinatieri’s new villains: his former friends.
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After seeing Hobbs we are given a field level shot of the opening kickoff. This turns into a Steadicam tracking shot and we are, again, obliged to note the parallels to fiction film and—again—the parallels to the wide shot with deep focus characteristic of the opening sequence of a Western genre film.Footnote 4
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While the first shot in this opening sequence was a pan across the crowd, the middle two shots were largely stationary—close ups of individuals. This Steadicam shot brings motion back into the broadcast, preparing the viewer (visually) for both the action of the game and the pacing. There will be breaks, narrative still shots where the announcers reassert and recontextualize the stakes of the game, and there will be sweeping action sequences that tell their own stories, like the opening kickoff return seen here.
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I have done this analysis with specific reference to the 2006 AFC Championship game, but it could be done in reference to any NFL game. The content will change the narrative, but the point remains consistent in form: liveness’s fundamental fiction lies in its production. Liveness is a curated form that carries aesthetic and narrative expectations. The interruption is constitutive of the frame and for that reason it is constitutive of the form. We have an opportunity here to separate live sports (and live television in general) from the growth of live social media and clarify the liveness of television through negation. The appeal of content generated by apps such as TikTok, Snapchat, Periscope, Facebook Live, and Twitch is rooted in the idea that there is little to no editing done whatsoever or—in the case of TikTok—the editing is done well after the fact of the live occurrence. The fundamental fantasy of these apps is that they offer unmediated, raw, and uncut video. This is not to say, for example, that popular Twitch channels such as Critical Role are not produced—they are. Critical Role, a Dungeons & Dragons video and podcast series, release video recordings of live “one-shots,” best understood as self-contained role-playing game experiences completed beginning to end by a group of players. These videos are routinely over four hours long. There may be some editing done in the set-up to the video (establishing shots, etc.) but the point is to make as few cuts as possible, giving the impression of an unmediated and unedited experience, which one can see from the way these videos are framed.
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The “dungeon master” leading the players through the game is located in the top left corner with the players displayed “Last Supper” style on the right along a 180-degree plane. The affordance here is that there does not need to be several cameras cutting to people as they speak or act. This is wholly separate from the liveness of television, seen most often in sports broadcasts, which, by comparison, would seem overproduced and inauthentic. Making “live broadcast” a big tent by which to include both social media live streams, as well as traditional television, aggregates everything on the axis of liveness as a supposed “captured simultaneity” and fails to meaningfully interrogate the psychical investment in a fundamental fiction that stabilizes the form.
The insistence of the cut—the interruption to a smooth flowing video broadcast of a live event—indicates the “failure” of live sports to rise to the level of “simultaneous capture.” This, however, is the point. This failure guarantees liveness as form. When the production inevitably fails, as in our examples, we should not view this as seeing “behind the curtain” and glimpsing the artifice of a false project (as Baudrillard might have said, that live sports do not occur). Rather, what we see is that the hold that live sports has over viewers comes straight from the willing suspension of disbelief. It ensures, at a fundamental level, a viewer’s investment in any visual fiction including film, television, and YouTube video. Freud’s notion of fetishistic disavowal emerges here as a crucial explanation for how liveness lives in the psyche. For Freud, the formula for disavowal works like so: “I know very well _____ but just the same _____.” I know very well that the live sports broadcast is not an instantaneous transmission of a spontaneously unfolding event, that some minimal delay has made possible the cinematic re-presentation of the sporting event itself, but just the same I watch as though my viewing is simultaneous with the event’s unfolding. A filmic example will help to play out this logic: I know very well that, when I watch Disney-Pixar’s Wall-E that I am literally seeing computer animated robots who have never existed, but even still for the film to work I have to believe that it is real. To put it another way, if one cries during a particularly emotional moment in a film, it does not help one to have their partner lean over to them and point out: “Hey. Those are actors. This isn’t real.” They would be literally correct, but in a fundamental way they are totally and utterly wrong. This is precisely how live sports works as form. We know very well that it is not simultaneous. We know very well that we are not seeing “the whole event,” just whatever the camera shows us. But just the same, we imagine that it is real (as in actual) and simultaneous.
The five-second delay for live broadcasts was initially conceived as a production gap primarily used to protect networks from airing profanity in speech or image but has become central for how television makes meaning. In the context of live sports, this delay allows for production to take place and for retroactivity to seep in. To tell a story retroactively is to tell with cut, attesting to a lack at the heart of the live sports broadcast that is covered up not by the many camera angles and ancillary game content but by our investment in it. Live sports are made consistent only through our investment in the fundamental fiction of liveness, the same fiction that allows Hulu to say that it has live sports. Crucially, this aspect of liveness is on the side of the viewer. It is in the psyche. It is not in the object itself. The precise psychic mechanism that smooths out the bumps in a live broadcast is called flow.
Flow: interruption and the non-duped
Television producers are doubtlessly aware of the psychic fiction that acts as support for the live sports event. In 1967, during the broadcast of the first ever Super Bowl, the second half kickoff occurred twice. Due to the airing of a slightly longer than expected on-field interview, television cameras missed the opening kick. Rather than resuming the live event in progress, the kickoff was ordered to be redone. To viewers, the second half kick happened only once. To the players and the fans in the stadium, it happened twice. What the league and producers understood clearly in 1967 was that sustaining the psychic fiction of the game’s liveness was paramount and far outweighed any concerns about sporting fairness or the integrity of the game as a contest due to restarting the second half of the game as though it had not already occurred. In other words, had the game resumed after the interview, everybody watching at home would have thought, “Wait, what happened?” Suddenly, the glue of fetishistic disavowal becomes unstuck. Rather than investing in the fiction of the coverage of the game, viewers would cynically—but justifiably, in this case—say to themselves, “Well if we didn’t see the second half kickoff what else are we missing?”
Today, the Super Bowl broadcast overwhelms viewers with its scope. The goal is, seemingly, to make it impossible for the viewer to think that they are missing anything. In fact, we are treated to so many camera angles, inserts, cutaways to celebrities and the like that the game itself can feel like a sidecar to the event of its own coverage. Despite all these myriad interruptions unique to the Super Bowl broadcast, it is still a coherent production. This is a fact that should shock us but which it requires work to find strange. More so than the broadcast of any regular season football game, the Super Bowl broadcast injunction of providing a comprehensive viewing experience should feel alienating and strange throughout. No doubt it does at times when compared to a regular game, but as ardent viewers of football know the Super Bowl is a separate occasion. Psychically, viewers give the fragmentation of this specific game wider latitude due to it attempting to capture the interest of a wider audience. Indeed, whereas a highly rated regular season game with playoff implications will see around 23 million viewers, such as 2022’s Week 18 game between the Detroit Lions and Green Bay Packers, the most recent Super Bowl was watched by 118 million people. The pervasive and palpable sense of a grander occasion smoothing out the strangeness of the Super Bowl broadcast relative to any other game is an excellent starting place for understanding the concept of flow and its psychical resonance.
Raymond Williams coined the term flow and was the first to develop it as a television-specific concept. For Williams, television becomes a continuous, never-ending sequence in which it is impossible to separate out individual texts, as “What is being offered is not, in older terms, a program of discrete units with particular insertions, but a planned flow, in which the true series is not the published sequence of program items but this sequence transformed by another kind of sequence” (Williams, 2004, p. 91). This “other sequence” is what Williams influentially terms flow. Flow is not the quantitative result of a preplanned broadcast flowchart dictating program X be followed by program Y and in between commercials from brands A, B, and C. Like “Hollywood movie magic,” flow is what transforms this sequence into the smoothed-out broadcast television as we know it.Footnote 5
Jane Feuer pushes Williams’s idea, writing “‘flow’ as Williams describes it is pure illusion. It would be more accurate to say that television is constituted by a dialectic of segmentation and flow” (Feuer, 1983, p. 15). One extrapolation we can make from Feuer’s argument is that Williams’s idea gives too much agency to television producers and advertisers and far less agency to viewers. For Feuer, the issue lies entirely with Williams’s idea constituting something of a televisual content unity, for, as she concludes her discussion of the concept, “Williams should more accurately say that television possesses segmentation without closure, for this is what he really means by ‘flow’” (Feuer, 1983, pp. 15–16). Feuer stresses that, because television doesn’t end (gone are the days when there was quite literally nothing on television at any hour of any day) this is why we can perceive flow and why advertisers can plan a content flowchart.
More recently, Ethan Thompson has argued that flow in the contemporary television media landscape is less dependent on a linear sequence of programming and is more focused on building brand cohesion. In other words, advertising is even more important but not just for creating a sense of flow in a programming sequence but in evincing a network’s identity. In his example of Onion News Network and the Independent Film Channel, he talks about IFC’s brand identity as “Always On. Slightly off” being represented in both the content of Onion News Network episodes and its advertisements (Thompson, 2013, p. 287). For fledgling cable networks there is a greater emphasis on having content and advertisement work in fusion to tell a cumulative story about what the channel considers its unique selling point.Footnote 6
As we can see, since its inception, flow has been a concept thought to be a quality or effect of the television broadcast itself. For this reason, its psychical dimension has not been fully observed. What we are looking for is an idea of flow that cuts through these different formulations. Building off of them through sublating them. Feuer gets us closest through her notion that television, as a medium distinct from film, is premised on a dialectic of segmentation and flow but only if we understand dialectics as constitutive contradiction, as anstoss—the obstacle that is also an impetus. Proceeding with this understanding means that segmentation (i.e., how a live sports broadcast is cut up into commercials, live gameplay, replay, commentary, commercials, etc.) and flow are not separate concepts but must be thought of as interdependent. Flow is not an antidote to the segmentation of TV. It is because of the fractured and segmented form of TV that flow exists.
For flow to work—for the remarkably cut up and fragmented form of broadcast television to even be the least bit sensible—it requires an initial psychical investment on our part as viewers. Live sports, with all its cuts, reproduces the intimate metonymic associations of the psyche. To understand the psychic life of flow we need to build on our understanding of how liveness and psyche work and add Lacan’s idea of “the non-duped err.”Footnote 7 For Lacan, to say “the non-duped err” means those who claim to be too clever to be “duped” by, say, an advertising campaign, a salesperson, or a social media influencer are duping themselves. This imagines that one occupies a position of metalanguage or, in other words, a position outside the symbolic order. To think that one exists at a remove from the way the rest of the world works is the fundamental gesture of the cynic. To imagine oneself outside discourse, politics, or ideology is to adopt a cynical position. Cynicism is best understood thus: where pessimism is the gesture of expecting the worst to happen, cynicism is needing the worst to happen. “I’d love for there to be a socialist president of the United States, but it simply can’t happen,” is an example of a distressingly common trope of American politics—one I have been guilty of partaking in many, many times. The most common defense of an idea such as this is that one is “just being realistic.” This view absolves one of having to reckon with the core structural problem of their position. In order for one’s cynical position to remain solvent one needs the present political situation to remain immovable. Cynicism is often mistaken as a fundamental critical step, one that creates necessary distance between oneself and an object. For a recent example of this phenomena occurring within the realm of live television, I want to take us back to Ricky Gervais and his opening monolog at the Golden Globes in 2020. There Gervais excoriated the hypocrisy of Hollywood elitism.Footnote 8 Nothing Gervais said in his criticism of Hollywood was inaccurate or wrong. The problem is that he emerged from that situation looking spotless because nowhere in Gervais’s criticism was Gervais himself. To critique widespread abuse in any field or institution and not include oneself as part of the problem is perhaps the most tantalizing appeal of cynicism. A Lacanian formulation against the idea shows that, to put it bluntly, one needs to see oneself within politics to be able to critique it. One cannot abscond to a “non-political” space and be able to participate meaningfully in political discourse. One has to see where, perhaps, one is part of the problem. In other words, Gervais imagined himself to be outside Hollywood while critiquing it which, of course, is a position difficult to sustain while speaking in front of the assembled Hollywood foreign press at their request. This is why Slavoj Žižek has classed cynicism as a position that delights in upholding ideology as it imagines itself opposed to it (2009a, pp. 24–27). It exchanges a detached “too cool for school” posture for a genuine threat to the status quo symbolic situation. What is more, it releases one from responsibility. When one is cynical, one effectively removes themselves from needing to pay any debt to the thing they are being cynical about.
Take, for example, the yellow line indicating the first down marker in an NFL broadcast. First introduced by Fox in 1998, the yellow line (shown below) is a fixture of the live sports aesthetic (Fong et al., 2019).
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The yellow line does not disappear into the background of a telecast. It does not leave the picture unless a play goes far behind or far beyond it. The yellow line almost yells at us, begging for attention, loudly testifying about the production gap in the live broadcast. It would be pointless to cynically remark to a friend during a tense moment in an important game that, “you know, the yellow line is basically a postproduction addition to the telecast, meaning whatever we are watching already happened. You shouldn’t get too excited or too upset with the result of this play since it already occurred.” Again, the non-duped err. We have to invest in the fiction of liveness for it to work, not point at the gap in transmission and locate a supposed lie or trick. What is more, we need to see how something as fundamental to the NFL broadcast as the yellow line is, effectively, an on-screen interruption testifying to the fragmented production of the live event in front of us. And yet, since its introduction, the yellow line has hardly seemed to interrupt anything. This ad hoc aesthetic addition to the broadcast is pure produced fiction and it is because it interrupts the image—placing a yellow scar across the screen—that it enhances the live sports spectacle and serves as an example par excellence of flow. This is how flow works. It depends on us seeing the broadcast interruption and, through the anstoss of psyche, that the broadcast interruption becomes the very site for interruption to be smoothed out.
Live sports even re-presents the aesthetics of everyday life. During the pandemic altered 2020–2021 season, Fox debuted a new camera in its broadcasts. At the time, many popular outlets focused on how sharp the image appeared.Footnote 9 The effect below is achieved using a mirrorless Sony camera not typically used to shoot live video (Costa, 2020).
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What we notice here is that players in the foreground of these shots stand in sharp high-definition contrast to the background, which appears blurry. During the 2020–2021 season, fans were not allowed to attend most games due to the season taking place before the widespread availability of Covid-19 vaccines. The appeal of sports is oftentimes viewed popularly (and derisively) as an escape from the harsh realities of everyday life. What are these shots, however, other than re-presentations of the pandemic? Social distancing, shelter-in-place, and the emptiness of shopping centers is reproduced here. Where many of the camera angles in the Western-style five set sequence analyzed above focused heavily on the crowd, the specter of empty stadiums muted the occasion during the 20–21 season, such that fake crowd noise became part of pandemic live sports production. We would be committing the error of the non-duped if we said that these images masked the horror of the pandemic with vainglorious depictions of mindless sport. In a production sense, these images only exist in this way because of the pandemic but, as I have been arguing, flow is produced through a dialectic of contradiction, the obstacle that is its own impetus. Fan-less stadia provided an obstacle to production that occasioned a literal refocusing of the event on the players. In other words, the two shots using the Sony mirrorless camera blur the background making the players themselves the occasion.
Conclusion
I bring up this final example to say that even during a period where business as usual sports broadcasts were severely interrupted, their success or failure depended not on broadcast tricks nor the viewer repressing the pandemic but on how invested they could be in the sporting event because of it. The strangeness of the Super Bowl broadcast relative to a regular season game and the strangeness of the fan-less pandemic broadcasts to a non-pandemic broadcast are not so far apart. (As an aside, is fake crowd noise substantially weirder than redoing the second half kickoff because TV cameras did not catch it?) We might usefully reframe the question implicitly posed by Raymond Williams: how does live sports overcome its own extreme fragmentation? How does it account for wide variance in broadcast convention? This work is not done strictly by producers behind the scenes. It is not even done by the series of screen images. This bricolage of cuts, camera techniques, and postproduction flourishes is made sensible through the mediation of the psyche. One never watches television passively. Focusing on live sports shows how even in the most passive glance at the screen a whole web of psychical processes produce sense. Live sports is as much a television broadcast format as it is a psychical form. Liveness is on the side of fetishistic disavowal. Flow is on the side of the duped. Understood this way, live sports have always already been a site to see the fusion of fetishistic disavowal and the non-duped err. The concepts must be yoked together to understand the a priori psychical investment that coheres live sports.
Data availability
Not applicable.
Notes
The “kiss cam,” first thought to be used at a Los Angeles Dodgers baseball game in the 1970s, is an American and Canadian sport tradition. During the game, a camera selects a couple in the crowd to show on a large stadium video screen. The display is intended to encourage the couple to kiss, which is followed by cheers from the crowd. Typically, these moments are not reproduced during the telecast unless something especially noteworthy or amusing happens. The event is often used to fill downtime during sporting events for the fans in attendance (Siegel, 2014).
Joan Copjec (2015, pp. 15–38) makes this case definitively in “The Orthopsychic Subject” from Read My Desire.
Former NFL running back Arian Foster, in a now-infamous interview, declared that NFL games were scripted in a way similar to professional wrestling. The claim sparked no shortage of injured NFL players remarking jokingly that they “hated the script for this year.” It also led to a tongue-in-cheek 2023 NFL advertising campaign with comedian Keegan-Michael Key that leaned into the idea, depicting how games were scripted in a writer’s room.
Film scholars have frequently been drawn to write about how the genre film has disappeared in Hollywood, specifically the film noir and the Western. Mark Bould (2013) has a paradigmatic essay that argues against the notion of “genre purity.” I offer less than half-kiddingly that perhaps the Western just became American football.
The role of the commercial or advertising exists also in the sport the rest of the world (rightly) refers to as football. While there are far fewer advertising breaks in broadcast coverage of football in Europe and the UK (apart from halftime) than there are in the NFL, the commercial is still present. It is integrated into the sport itself, both on player jerseys and on the advertisements wrapping around the touchline. The effect of the commercial being, in effect, on the field and on the players themselves is the same as the commercial interruptions that mark an NFL game: to the seriously and psychically invested supporter, these commercial interruptions appear to be no interruption at all.
We can safely extend his idea to new streaming subscription services with a twist. For streaming service providers, the user interface is where we encounter flow most prominently. It is well known that Amazon has a poor user interface and that Netflix established a template for what a serviceable user interface should be. Of course, a streaming service such as Paramount+ needs to establish what its forte is in much the same way that HBO as a cable network once did.
Freud (1938/1964) develops the formula for disavowal in “Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence.” Slavoj Žižek uses the formula throughout his oeuvre but an example can be found in Looking Awry (1992, p. 32). Lacan develops “the non-duped err,” which I argue is a formula against cynicism, in book XXI of his seminar.
The Daily Mail is not good for much, but they can be relied upon to capture and recapitulate the most salacious aspects of any story (Buckland, 2020). By contrast, in covering the Golden Globes speech, The New York Times (Salam, 2020) ran with two moments where Gervais’s monolog was “bleeped” as its lead. The importance of the broadcast delay is, as ever, crucial.
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RE is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Pomona College. His work has appeared in New Review of Film and Television Studies, Comparative Literature and Culture, Continental Thought & Theory, and International Journal of Žižek Studies. Along with Todd McGowan, Ryan co-hosts the podcast Why Theory, which brings together continental philosophy and psychoanalytic theory to examine contemporary phenomena.
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Engley, R. Being and timeouts: live sports in the psyche. Psychoanal Cult Soc 29, 177–190 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41282-024-00427-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41282-024-00427-7