Why Television Burns:
The Poems of Daphne Gottlieb

If the essays in this collection lean towards the positive side of feminist television studies, focusing primarily on the new gender scripts HBO makes possible in mainstream media, the following poems by Daphne Gottlieb sound a different note. I am drawn to them as well. Gottlieb's most recent book of poems explores the concept of the "final girl" in horror films, creatively interacting with Carol Clover's work in Men, Women, and Chainsaws, an analysis of the heroine in splatter films, whom Clover presents as a transgendered figure, a masculinized girl with whom male and female spectators can identify. Gottlieb expands this figure into a wide context of American culture, imagining a range of situations in which girls face horrific social conditions in the media and in real life, and she pushes this point beyond horror films into interpersonal dynamics (see "Her Submissive Streak," from Why Things Burn, in which the female persona goes down on her boyfriend in a leather barcalounger, her back to the television screen, a figure of subservience and self-denial). I want to end the collection with these reprinted poems by Gottlieb basically to keep us all honest, to remember the horror of the media (sluts die first) and the blowjobs in the glow of late-night television—all the ways our pleasure in popular culture is undeniably intertwined with our learned submission to existing power structures and limited female imagery.

For me, a third wave feminist media theory must be able to accommodate both the joyful, playful exuberance women feel when we see Claire Fisher stare open-mouthed at her loser therapist as he labels her behavior and desire inaccurately, as well as the angry, incendiary refusals and revisions women mouth off with in the face of the media as captivity narrative (see Gottlieb's "Final Girl II: The Frame"). The discontinuity readers might feel in moving from the essays in this collection to the poems is precisely the point of third wave feminist media theory; the pleasure and danger of women's relationships to television have yet to be reconciled. And yet even in the angry voice, the feminist spectator can imagine her way into a more powerful position, not the one on her knees sucking off some guy holding a remote control in one hand and a beer in the other, but the one facing the television and calling up the images she desires:

the whisky is open
the vcr is on.
I'm running
the film backwards
and one by one

you come back to me

(from "Gone to Static")

Rather than watching the women walk one by one into the slaughterhouse of film history, in this issue we are calling them back to us, pausing at the line break between "I'm running"—the flight response, the fear, the urge to turn off the television—and "I'm running the film backwards"—an image of control and desire and the rewriting of history, a "writing beyond the ending" that transforms the arc of these captivity narratives so that all the girls come back to us. Post-horror, post-static, post-frame—where "everything / is electric projection"—we might consider the feminist spectator as a sort of "final girl" and feminist television studies as a space of camaraderie and survival: "it's just you and me / and the bourbon and movie / flickering together." Gottlieb's poems evoke a much-needed intellectual environment where the sensations of entrapment and escape can coexist.