The Aesthetics of Nostalgia TV by Alex Bevan

Author:Alex Bevan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA

Figure 4.3 “Pilot,” September 29, 2013, Masters of Sex.

Figures 4.4–4.5 “All Together Now,” November 10, 2013, Masters of Sex.

Thus, other examples of nostalgia television besides Mad Men position pre-digital media as documenters of gender progress and regress. In Masters of Sex, the connection is as much an aesthetic curiosity as a narrative theme. When Masters and Virginia are ready to develop their films capturing female orgasm, they have no other recourse but to go to a sex shop. During their visit, they come across a hand-cranked kinetoscope from the 1880s and they take turns watching this outmoded form of celluloid pornography while waiting for their own research-directed “porno” to be developed. This example shows a popular interest in pre-digital media technologies, but it also solidifies the larger thesis of the series, which is that technology, medicine, and social constructions of sexuality are always connected: an advance in one means a shift in the other two.

A less obvious example of props-driven television nostalgia comes in the form of Penny Dreadful (Showtime, 2014–16), a fantasy-drama series that integrates iconic monsters and fables into the same storyworld, which centers on paranormal investigators working in the early 1900s. While the stories and characters themselves are quite fantastic (most have supernatural powers), the production design endeavors to be historically accurate and, like other examples discussed here, the design invests in pre-digital media and issues of gender equity. Penny Dreadful’s female investigator, Vanessa, is a spiritual medium who becomes possessed by dark forces in the second and third seasons. She sees a female psychologist who uses hypnosis in an effort to find the source of her ailments (“Good and Evil Braided Be,” May 15, 2016 and “A Blade of Grass,” May 22, 2016). During hypnotherapy, the doctor uses a wax cylinder phonograph to record the session. The doctor’s dialogue leading Vanessa in and out of hypnosis emphasizes the sound of the wax while the camerawork intercuts scenes from Vanessa’s dreams with shots of the phonograph as an object of visual historical interest. The phonograph is also the main documenter of Vanessa’s experience. It is revealed that Vanessa was brutalized and tortured during her stay at a mental asylum years before, during which she also encounters the dark forces that are a part of the series’ fantasy world. However, the revelation has as much to do with the medical history of hysteria in women in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as the “dark forces” that pursue Vanessa.9 The episodes show historically accurate medical treatments for female hysterics, including isolation, ice water baths, and restraints. The history of hysteria shows that the pathology was a crude misdiagnosis for a host of other disorders in women (depression, anxiety, dysmenorrhea, and epilepsy among others).10 Moreover, research shows the interdependent emergence of the disorder alongside celluloid media like photography and the phonograph, suggesting that the disorder and its documentation informed each other.11 Penny Dreadful alludes to the interconnected histories of American spiritualism, psychology, and media technology elsewhere in the series through

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