Rootable, Relatable, Promotable Docudrama:

The MOW Mantra as Rhetorical Practice

1. Alan Rosenthal confirms that in 1991, 43 out of 115 TV movies were

docudramas (Writing 9). See also appendix 1 for the percentages of docudramas shown during prime time over the last two years.

2. There are literally hundreds of examples of these films, with warranted credibility because they are based on events rooted in the news; my personal fa-vorite remains The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom (1993), in which, as described by my local cable guide, “A Texas mother hires a killer to off her daughter’s rival.”

3. See appendix 2 for an example of an annotated script page from Princess in Love. In this case, “BBC” refers to a transcript of an interview with Princess Diana that aired on the BBC in the United Kingdom, and “Dimbleby” is the author of a book on Prince Charles referenced in a key to the script. Numbers noted on the page refer to a bibliography of newspaper and magazine articles. The script page is provided by Victoria Bazely from the script by Cynthia Cherbak.

4. One writer (Tom Cook) explained it this way:

You want to know what the archetypal TV movie is, particularly the NBC movie? We describe it as, “She was just like us, until . . .” You plug in what was unusual about her life. There’s several things implicit in the first part of that. The first word, “she,” means that most of the focus of these TV mov-ies is about women and women’s issues. And most of the network’s divisions are run by women. The consensus is that that’s the segment of the popula-tion that’s watching them. They’re programming to half the planet, basically.

Ever wonder why men don’t watch? The second part of it, “she was just like us,” who’s “us”? “Us” is upper-middle-class white women, living in the sub-urbs of the cities. It’s not rural, full of black folks. So we have a distinct fil-ter, here, on the American experience.

5. The network vice president (of movies and miniseries) in turn reports to the vice president of programming.

6. See appendix 1 for the statistics for the Kalamazoo, Michigan, area cable market for this period.

7. Elayne Rapping, for example, in a book-length study of made-for-televi-sion movies, considers the movie-of-the-week itself to be a “genre that tells a story about the family” (xl). There are, however, subclassifications, since later she states that there are “woman-in-danger TV films” (113).

8. See George Custen, Bio/Pics (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1992):

18–22.

9. The titles in the sample include The Positively True Adventures of the Al-leged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom (1993); Victim of Love: The Shannon Mohr Story (1993); Miracle Landing (1990); Voices Within: The Lives of Truddi Chase (1990); A Nightmare in Columbia County (1991); Beyond Control: The Amy Fisher Story (1993); Stay the Night (1992), and Desperate Rescue: The Cathy Mahone Story (1993).

10. Writer/producer Cynthia Cherbak explains that she tries to find a “core concept” to focus her thinking in any project she writes because it is “something the audience can relate to,” something that makes the purpose of the work ac-cessible by making it “relatable to you and me.”

11. Compare with the following observation from George Custen: “Viewers expect TV to present them with a dramatically engrossing explanation of a life recently in the news. The life need not be meritorious or instructive, as in the film biopic; it only has to be known” (Bio/Pics 220).

12. Jacques Lacan, The Language of the Self, trans. Anthony Wilden (New York: Dell, 1968). Here “identification” is the means of “internalization of the other” (160). Further, “Identification” is a fundamental component of Freudian theory, the

operation itself whereby the human subject is constituted. This evolution is correlated chiefly, in the first place, with the coming to the fore of the Oedi-pus complex viewed in the light of its structural consequences, and secondly, with the revision effected by the second theory of the psychical apparatus, according to which those agencies that become differentiated from the id are given their specific characters by the identifications of which they are the outcome. (Laplanche and Pontalis 206)

13. Identification might best be thought of as “sympathy” rather than “em-pathy” with a character. Identification through sympathy allows us to feel com-monality with a character without having to “become” that character entirely.

For example, Carl Plantinga applies Murray Smith’s notions of “alignment” and

“allegiance” to explain the way Unforgiven allows a viewer to maintain an am-bivalent relationship—to feel sympathetic toward and also distanced from—the violence of the film’s main character, William Munny (“Spectacles” 70).

14. Identification is necessary for persuasion to occur; identification is a prod-uct of “consubstantiality,” the ways we “ally ourselves with various properties of substances” so as to “share substance with whatever or whomever we associate”

(Foss 158).

15. According to Bordwell, a “mode” is a means of presentation tied to “con-ventional or habitual usage” and “a historically distinct set of norms of narra-tional construction and comprehension” (150).

16. Besides Bordwell’s Classic Hollywood Cinema and Narration in the Fiction Film, see Gomery. Gomery applies the defining characteristics of classic Holly-wood narrative film form to the movie-of-the-week (207).

17. Throughout Inside Prime Time, Gitlin remarks on the political safety—

the lack of risk taking—involved in telling victim stories. See his discussion of the cancellation of the Lou Grant series, for example (10). Subject matter is lev-eled out, made less risky, in order to avoid alienating any part of the target audi-ence (181, 186).

18. The other victim here is Blanche, who, in order to exonerate her son, must force herself in full view of her family and friends to become a best friend to her son’s seducer, the woman she hates most in the world.

19. Mike Kettman and Amy Fisher, for example, are given cars by their par-ents as demonstrations of love and trust, despite the problematic behavior of both children.

20. A character’s movement through “jeopardy” in MOW “women in jeop-ardy” stories arguably entails “testing” as characters endure risk, transgress norms, and, as a result, undergo literal and figurative trials.

21. Stay the Night is the exception. This narrative uses straightforward chronol-ogy; however, it shifts its narrative viewpoint, halfway through, from son to mother.

The question is not one of understanding what happened, as in the case of Shan-non Mohr, but one of seeing what will happen as a result of Blanche’s efforts.

22. The flashback clarifies the status of the present and looks forward as well.

As Marcia Landy writes:

The flashback serves to communicate information about the past—chronol-ogy, genealpast—chronol-ogy, motive, and the like—and this information can serve proleptically and teleologically to underscore determinism. Flashbacks, espe-cially in biopics, often serve to create an organic sense of unfolding events and especially a sense of inevitability. (20–21)

23. The Miracle Landing passengers are the exception to this rule of transgres-sion and trial. They simply have had the bad luck to be on a plane that begins to disintegrate in mid-flight. The trial they undergo tests their courage and abili-ties to cope with this extraordinary adversity.

24. “Headline concept” can be “high concept” and at the same time affords safety of subject in covering real events. See Gitlin 79.

25. George Custen suggests that trials

lay bare the specific messages of the biopic, encasing one narrative within another on a parallel level of commentary. The presence of trials suggests the purpose of the biopic is to offer up a lesson or judgment in the form of a movie.

(Bio/Pics 186)

26. A detailed synopsis of the film appears in appendix 3.

27. We learn that Davis has told Jeri, his girlfriend before and after Shannon’s death, that he is a secret government agent, and that he has other women in his life call him “Cappy.” The name becomes a way of eventually identifying and capturing him.

28. Restoring the moral order here involves an implicit return to the balance that was disrupted at the beginning of the narration, when Dave Davis entered their lives. The film ends with Bob and Lucille Mohr visiting Shannon’s grave.

The name on the stone has been changed from “Shannon Davis” to “Shannon Mohr.” Bob Mohr takes his wife’s arm and suggests that now they can “go home.”

29. “Wanda Holloway puts all her energy into promotion, instead of putting it into skill. With you, I emphasize skill, that’s why you’re so successful,” Verna tells her daughter, while Wanda is advising Shanna, “People like that, you’ve got to pity them.”

30. The idea that the medium of television is inherently “postmodern” is not new. Jane Feuer, for example, has suggested that “what is postmodern in televi-sion is textuality generally” (9). Part of what Feuer sees as important about the textual referentiality of late-1980s/early-1990s MOW docudrama will also be relevant here: The foregrounding of text(s) becomes integral to arguments for empowerment that the works advocate. Similarly, John Caldwell points to texts as the “vernacular” of television (5).

31. Bill Nichols argues that the sense of communal information imparted by reality TV programming is illusory. Recreation produces de-authentication:

Reality TV offers communion drawn from atomized, dissociated figures who remain so; a sense of engagement, empathy, charity, and hope built on a dis-engaged, detached simulation of face-to-face encounter; and a sense of coher-ence and continuity, if not suspended animation, at a time when ideas and values feel worn, ineffective, abused, and bandied about. (Boundaries 56–57) 32. These include recreated interview sessions with Bob and Lucille Mohr, Dick Britton and his wife (the Davis’s neighbors), and Tracy Lien, Shannon Mohr’s cousin.