The limitation of the bottle episode: Hegel in Community

ABSTRACTIn recent years, television has undergone an artistic and critical reevaluation. This essay aims to add to the study of television aesthetics by examining a form particular to American television: the bottle episode. The bottle episode first arose as a solution to the budgeting ‘bottlenecks’ experienced by U.S. television series in the 1950s and 60s. I find that this form presents a logic of the limit, establishing a formal, narrative, and existential aesthetic that is unique to television. Far from simply being cheap TV, a close study of the bottle episode shows that what began as a financially necessary production format works through the dialectical method of thought that unfurls in G.W.F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. I turn to NBC’s Community (2009–15), a series replete with bottle episodes, to show that by pushing through bottled confinement, the new and transformative take place. Ultimately, I argue that bottle episodes show how dynamic collectivity forms through isolation.KEYWORDS: Television studiesHegelbottle episodenarrativeaesthetic form Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1. ‘Bottle Episode’, TV Tropes.2. Ted Nannicelli foregrounds the ‘saving money’ aspect of bottle episodes and focuses on how the typical spatial constraint of bottle episodes participates in the Naturalist theater tradition (Nannicelli Citation2014).3. Gilles Deleuze (Citation1994) may be the strongest advocate of this reading of Hegel. Deleuze begins a representative section of Difference & Repetition, by writing that, ‘according to Hegel, “contradiction” poses very few problems’ (44). Deleuze’s reading of Hegel may be too close to Kant, particularly when he writes, ‘Hegel determines difference by the opposition of extremes or of contraries’ (44). Hegel’s departure from Kant occurs at precisely this point: there are not antinomies of reason (something and then its extreme), rather reason is this encounter with its own contradiction. As will be discussed later, the dialectic for Hegel is held together through the interdependence of things on their own opposition.4. In some ways, this essay tries to answer Sarah Cardwell’s call, in ‘Television Aesthetics: Stylistic Analysis and Beyond’, for a philosophical aesthetics of television. Where Cardwell’s tradition stems more from the analytic side of philosophical engagement, this essay approaches aesthetics through the German Idealism of continental philosophy, specifically that of Hegel, arguing that the dialect constitutes a narrative aesthetic (Cardwell Citation2013, 42).5. This point is indebted to the work of McGowan (Citation2019).6. The show does not diagnose Abed as having a specific social or communicative disorder (despite the common understanding of him as a character on the autism spectrum) but suggests that Abed, as he says in ‘Cooperative Calligraphy’, has difficulty understanding group dynamics and the affective state of others. In the first episode of the series, Jeff diagnoses Abed as having Asperger’s syndrome. In the third episode of the series, Abed’s father says that his son is ‘hard to understand’. In ‘Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas’, Abed has a ‘nervous breakdown’ (Jeff’s diagnosis in a later episode) and can only see the world as a stop-motion animated Christmas special. In ‘Geothermal Escapism’, Donald Glover’s final episode, the shock of Troy leaving causes Abed to see the floor as lava. Abed announces a campus-wide ‘Floor is Lava’ game with the prize a comic-book worth $50,000. With Troy leaving, Abed’s social link to the rest of the world leaves with him. The lava is real to Abed, so he arranges and organizes this game so that ‘everybody [else] can see what I see’.7. Absolutes Wissen is an infinitive that is sometimes translated as Absolute Knowledge.8. Hegel (13; translation modified). Translations differ, but the most evocative formulation can be reached by remedying the J.B. Baillie translation of Phenomenology of Mind with the more proper translation of Geist as spirit instead of mind. The Baillie translation of this famous line helps preserve Hegel as a thinker of contradiction and negativity. Internal opposition, or self-division, splits what Hegel thinks of as substance. The subject, or the knower, is likewise split, which is why Hegel thinks substance as subject.9. In fact, Hegel is actually quite clear that it is wrong to say that ‘in every falsehood there is a grain of truth is to treat the two like oil and water, which cannot be mixed and are only externally combined’ (Hegel Citation1977, 23).10. As Hegel puts it, ‘The self-knowing Spirit knows not only itself but also the negative of itself, or its limit: to know one’s limit is to know how to sacrifice oneself’ (Hegel Citation1977, 492).11. I am here making oblique reference to one of Hegel’s contemporaries, J.G. Fichte and his term Anstoss. As Slavoj Žižek explains in The Ticklish Subject: ‘the two primary meanings of Anstoss in German [are] check, obstacle, hindrance, something that resists the boundless expansion of our striving; and an impetus, a stimulus, something that incites our activity’ (49).12. Lynn Spigel (Citation1992) exhaustively catalogs just these kinds of popular suspicions of television in Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America. Spigel also presents a teasing materialist homology regarding a collective forming through alienation: the DuMont Duoscope – a television manufactured in the mid-1950s that could allow two people to watch different television programs from the same TV set at the same time – marketed its capacity to create togetherness through division (209).13. Three of The Ringer’s Top 10 best episodes of the 21st century are bottle episodes (‘The Suitcase’, Mad Men; ‘Pine Barrens’, The Sopranos; ‘The Constant’, Lost). Two more episodes, True Detective’s ‘Who Goes There’ and Game of Thrones’s ‘The Rains of Castamere’, make the top ten largely based on exceptional sequences of lengthy spatial and temporal constraint (in other words, two of the primary features of the bottle episode form).14. See, for example, Justin Peters, ‘The 13 Kinds of Pandemic Ads’. Peters sees the cynical frame of ‘pandemic advertising’ but misses the opportunity to reclaim the genuine sentiment that is being distorted (despite the author noting his developing ‘strong emotional connection’ with his local meteorologist. Slate, May 21, 2020. https://slate.com/business/2020/05/coronavirus-ads-tv-commercials.html.15. See for example Jason Mittell, ‘Phineas & Ferb: Children’s Television’, in How to Watch Television, 56–64.16. This would be my answer to Sarah Cardwell’s well-founded observation that ‘Television’s commercial basis and its social function niggle the scholar committed to an aesthetic approach’ (29). The two cannot be separated and must be thought through at the level of constitutive contradiction.Additional informationNotes on contributorsRyan EngleyRyan Engley is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Pomona College. His recent work has appeared in journals including Comparative Literature and Culture and Continental Thought & Theory, as well as in the edited collections Can Philosophy Love? Reflections and Encounters, The Serial Podcast and Storytelling in the Digital Age, and Cinematic Cuts: Theorizing Film Endings. Along with Todd McGowan, Ryan co-hosts the podcast Why Theory, which brings Continental philosophy and psychoanalytic theory together to examine contemporary phenomena. His current book manuscript is tentatively titled Seriality: The Existential Form of Modern Life.