(Ben)Jamin' with Dr. Phil: part 2?

In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin asserts that “even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.” (Illuminations 220). Benjamin goes further, pointing out that reproduction through mechanical processes also removes itself from the original and places the subsequent copies “into situations which would be out of reach for the original.” (Ibid). In the case of Dr. Phil episodes, this is particularly true. Imagine a guest sitting down and watching the show they appeared on during a repeat, a year or so later. If symptoms and psychoses have intensified, it is easy to see how the patient would feel manipulated, abandoned, and like a failure. If the condition originally complained of has improved, it is likewise easy to comprehend how a repeat could retrigger or reshape a latent disorder. This is, of course, not exactly replicated when an average viewer watches a repeat, or a first-run example of mechanical reproduction. Benjamin is adamant, however, that this is as true for a spectator as it is for a participant. It is what he calls the “aura” withering, becoming alienated, and losing its uniqueness (222). While this idea has comprehensive implications for all arts and communicative media, Benjamin is focusing on film. Just as film loses ritualistic value and the ability to interact with an audience, Dr. Phil’s program—as compared to a heretofore non-existent live theatre version of Dr. Phil—is embroiled in difficulties since Dr. Phil is psychoanalyzing and performing, not for real live people, but to a camera. The audience, as Benjamin points out, is put in the position of the critic, identifying with the unseen cameraman, seeing Dr. Phil only through his mechanical, impersonal eyes (228). While Dr. Phil claims that his show aims to help viewers at home (particularly children) as much as he tries to help guests, this is of course impossible in a true psychoanalytical sense. Dr. Phil has the most powerful and oppressive bodyguard conceivable in the camera, taking away the audience’s freedom and preventing two-way communication. Benjamin describes a consequence by positing that “the aura that envelops the actor disappears, and with it the aura of the figure he portrays.” (229). The mechanical reproduction inherent in the television industry seems to analogously extinguish the aura to the person, the real humanness, of Dr. Phil. What is left? According to Benjamin it is the “spell of the personality” and “the phony spell of a commodity.” (231). The difference between a person and a star has nothing to do with their ability to communicate artistically and everything to do with whether or not they are being filmed. Film’s salvation is that it changes the methods of participation in a way that has positive, as well as negative, effects. It can be personal in a new, mechanical way in the sense that it is perhaps better adapted than any artistic medium to “mobilize the masses.” (240). If the Dr. Phil show is unsuccessful, then, it may have less to do with the capabilities and disabilities that follow the camera, and more to do with the limits of psychoanalysis. Unless one is speaking of a mass psychosis, a public and communal therapy is useless by its very nature. Benjamin ends his essay with a rather curious epilogue. Thinking of the essay as a quarreling over semantics or an arcane argument about aesthetics is shown to be completely false. In fact, as Benjamin makes clear, what is at stakes is far more serious: fascism, modern society, and war. Benjamin (a Marxist, of course) has a simple solution: “politicizing art.” (242). Dr. Phil’s politics are about as personal and overt as is his contact with the television audience. Following Benjamin’s model, Dr. Phil’s vague and cautious political aesthetic—“children are important!” and “craziness is bad!”—is the perfect fodder for a war-mongering fascist. The only question remaining is whether the aggressive Fascist of the future is today’s Dr. Phil or the viewers of his enduring repeats.