Diital Cubism.com - "The Peep Show; A Critical Analysis" by James Addicott

The Peep Show; A Critical Analysis
Author: James Addicott
Email: james@spatialmontage.com

The award winning Channel 4 television comedy entitled ‘Peep Show’, staring David Mitchell and Robert Webb as flatmates; Dave and Jeremy. Unlike conventional television comedy, Peep Show has a narrative that is constructed by the combination of two separate monologues. The show is filmed and edited with a unique multi-perspective point of view (POV) created by placing cameras on the foreheads of the leading characters. Peep Show differs from most modern television in that it also includes the ‘inner’’ thoughts of both actors to construct another layer of meaning for the viewer

My interest in Peep Show as a cultural text is its re-presentation of a much wider social issue, my thesis is that Peep Show constructs meaning by appealing to the audiences anxiety’s over a newly constructed post-modern social order; the subjective consciousness versus the objective consciousness of the internet and the re-negotiation of the boundaries that divide the public / private, inner / outer spheres. To achieve this I am going analyse Peep Show as a cultural text by applying the Lévi-Strauss / Will Wright’s model of structural narrative analysis because I want to unearth the ‘deeper’ meaning within the narrative structure of the show to establish the grounds for my argument. Then, I will apply to the findings the cultural theory of Michele Foucault’s metaphorical ‘Panopticon’ and Theodore Rozacks theory of the ‘Technocracy’ and expand upon the theory’s of the ‘objective consciousness’. I will establish a link between the structure of the Peep Show and its relationship to a shift in contemporary Western computer literate society, focusing specifically on relationship between the Peep Show and the contemporary phenomenon of Internet ‘Blogging’.

The Peep Show plots are often thick and fast and provide the audience with a constant bombardment of outrageous social taboos to produce a farcical form humour for the audience, dealing with themes such as homosexuality, pornography, dioreah, paedophilia etc. I have chosen to focus on the plot of the first episode in the first series because it forms a structural narrative that continues as a theme throughout the series;

Jeremy and Mark in a state of ‘normality’.
Both men desire next-door neighbour ‘Tony’.
Relationship with next-door neighbour and Mark upsets Jeremy.
Mark and Jeremy argue and make up.
Mark and Jeremy attend Tony’s’ party.
Jeremy leaves with Tony’s’ sister.
Mark upstaged by stronger ‘man’.
Jeremy offends Tony sister and other guests at party.
Mark and Jeremy are asked to leave social group.

We can see from the plot that the object of desire, or the trophy, is Tony who is viewed monologlically, and discussed, by both characters as a potential next-door ‘fuck buddy’. The inauguration of Tony into the plot causes the disruption; hence we can see that the state of male ‘normality’ is subject to disruption by the intersecting female. Both leading characters are finally upstaged by the ideological or discursively formed figure of a ‘man’, which calls into question the gender performance of masculinity. It is at this point that I could draw upon the theory of gender ‘performativity’ and the ‘stylisation of the body’ by Judith Butler. However I am specifically interested the relations of subjectivity and objectivity, private and public, and as we can see from this narrative structure we can see the true enemy is the ‘self’ against the public sphere. Consequently, we need take into consideration the dual prespectivism of the leading characters, which offers another new and unique dimension to the show and offers subversion to the conventional codes of television, to understand how this works we need to consider the personality traits of each character as binary opposites that constantly conflict to produce another level of meaning;

Mark	Jeremy
Conservatism	Liberalism
Right wing	Left wing
Pessimistic	Optimistic
Employed	Unemployed
Organised	Disorganised

Unlike Wright’s cyclical analysis of the western, where the conflicts between the individual subject against the object of society provide a deeper meaning, the conflicts in the dual perspective outlook towards the problematic objects or obstacles in the form of social taboos provide the binary oppositions in Peep Show. If we refer back to the trophy, or obstacle, of ‘Tony’, we are given both Mark and Jeremy’s’ hidden inner thoughts upon their individual wilful conspiracy to obtain ‘Tony’, the object of sexual desire. In this particular scenario the dishonest trickery of both characters leads them to make fools of themselves within the social sphere which prompts them to be outcast from that same social sphere. The oppositional binary constructs meaning within the given situation where the audience can anticipate the influence of Marks’ conservative or Jeremy’s liberal values in their judgments to each social obstacle or taboo. It is this anticipation that I want to analyse further; unfortunately the narrative structure fails to take into consideration this newer form of multi-perspective television gaze. We should therefore consider here that Will Wrights’ analysis of the western film genre has been outdated since the advancement of film technologies have caused the hegemonic media sources of 1975 to become more fragmented and fluid with the introduction of a multiplicity of various media sources available to the viewer today. Therefore my analysis show that Peep Show represents this dissimulation of ‘a’ hegemonic camera gaze and develops a ‘multi-perspective’ gaze that stays in tune with the times. This however is a theme that runs deeper than the multiplicity of the gaze; we also need to call into question the multiplicity of moral perspectives. On a website interview actor David Mitchell mentioned about Peep Show that;

“The way it’s shot and the fact that you can hear the character’s inner monologues allows things to be expressed that you couldn’t easily put into dialogue. I really hope that everyone will acknowledge that they have awful murderous and completely self-doubting thoughts all the time as well, too.”

(Mitchell, http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/collective/A1292032)

In the introduction to the book ‘we’ve got blog’, Rebecca Blood states that;

"Every weblog has a point of view and even those that contain no personal information reveal over time, detailed maps of their creators’ minds. It is captivating to see the biases, interests and judgments of an individual reveal themselves so clearly."

(Blood, 2002, p.xii)

As the owner of a successful bloging website ‘Rebecca’s pocket’ It would be understandable why Bloods words take onboard such a cyber-optimistic outlook to the cultural activity of blogging, however, if we are to acknowledge Mitchell’s argument that we all; ‘have awful murderous and completely self-doubting thoughts’, then the prospect of having ones mind displayed as a ‘detailed map’ upon the internet, and inviting the public to post comments upon our inner thoughts, may not be such a delightful prospect. The Peep Show farcically toys with the anxieties over the public revealing of the private ‘creators mind’ that Blood speaks about, in a way that no other programme has done before. Therefore, the form of the text and its relation to web blogging enables me to apply the principals of utilitarian philosophers Jeremy Benthams design of Panopticon, which is used by Foucault to alert us to the negative empowerment the authoritative ‘Evil eye’

"Panopticism is the general principle of a new ‘political anatomy’ whose object and end are not the relations of sovereignty but the relations of discipline."

(Foucault, P. 208, 1976)

The omnipresence of the Peep Show camera gaze, which also mimics the voyeuristic mechanism of a pornographic peepshow, and the shows moral perspectivism, allows the viewers to experience the internalized voice of self-surveillance that restrains, disciplines and enforces a political autonomy over the power of individuals will, the fear of course is punishment; and the fear of being socially outcast constantly redefines the Peep Show narrative. Furthermore, the show calls for the audience to take onboard the roles of those central to the panoptic schema, and take the active role of morally condemning, applauding or relating to the central characters judgements from a distanced moral perspective. In a society that deploys the panoptic schema, such as an online social network, and encourages the public airing of the inner self – which has become the cultural practice of webbloging – some of us, like David and Jeremy, are starting to rediscover the importance of having a private sphere. This splits the panoptic society into two, and can be seen if we compare the popular reality television shows such as Big Brother, X-factor and Shipwrecked, which ideologically highlight the benefits of a panopticism, such an active democratic audience participation, the Peep Show on the other hand, with an modest audience of one million viewers, highlights the darker and more disturbing aspects of this panoptic mechanism; the public airing of the tabooed private sphere, as a subverted counter cultural approach that challenges the dominate ideology.

I want to leave for now the multiplicity aspect of Peep Show and return again to the binary opposition between the two main characters to consider the possibility of a ‘objective consciousness’ and relate it to the cultural theory of Theodore Roszak, who believed that;

"if we probe the technocracy in search of the particular power it holds over us we arrive at the myth of objective consciousness… "

(Roszak, p 216, 1970.

By using the term ‘objective consciousness’ Rozak was of course referring to the myth of a ‘conventional scientific world view’ that is defined by the elite within a technocratic society. But I want to revisit this concept of ‘objective consciousness’ because the meaning produced by the continual clash of personality traits in Peep Show because it mimics the Enlightenments tradition of rational debate, reason and objective thinking. The viewer is offered this contrasting dual perspective outlook to the objects, obstacles, trophy’s and taboos in a way that compliments the Enlightenments scientific and philosophical progression towards an objectification of understanding or an an ultimate ‘truth’. Like Foucault, Roszak is pessimistic about such a state of objective truth or fact being achieved and claims that;

"Even if it is not, indeed, possible to be objective, it is possible so to shape the personality that it will feel and act as if one were an objective observer and to treat everything that experience presents to the person in accordance with what objectivity would seem to demand".

(Roszak, p 216, 1970.)

It is this amalgamation and balance between the left and right, or what is referred to as ‘Digital democracy’ (Powazek, ed.Rodzilla, P.3, 2002), that produces a newfound political ability,is what provides us the object of a thinking democratic consciousness. By using Wright’s formula of structural analysis I can extend the underlying principles of Peep Show to a much wider scale, we could consider that social obstacles manifest themselves as geopolitical issues such as the Iraq war, carbon admission and global uneven development. Since Roszak’s proposed his notion of the technocracy, the ‘objective consciousness’, as a myth or a phenomenon, has been achieved in the creation of the Internet, and we internalise it as an artificial extension of our inner consciousness and knowledge. The computer literate, like the technocratic elite, work democratically as nodes within this global social organism, which has been embodied in the world as the continually changing object of ongoing global group praxis, and actively influence the decisions of the digital mind. As a multiplicity of interconnecting computer literate nodes, we are now welcome to divide ourselves into binary opposites to help navigate the world into the future, and only the future will judge the wisdom of such a global pursuit. It is the individuals struggle against this massive object, and the uncertainty about its functioning, the manner in which it intercepts into the private sphere, that is represented in the Peep Show.

Bibliography;

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BBC 4. (2007). Blog Wars: Storyville 17-Jan-07.
Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity. London: Routledge.
Ed. Rodzilla, J. (2002). We’ve got Blog. New York: Basic Books.
Foucault, M. (1976). The Will to Knowledge: The History of Sexuality: 1. London:Penguin Books.
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