Catharine Lumby,
Gotcha: Life in a Tabloid World.
St Leonards, Allen & Unwin, 1999.
ISBN 1 86508 073 X
280pp
AU$16.95 (paper)
(Review copy supplied by Allen & Unwin)

Uploaded 1 March 2000

I first read Gotcha swanning round a swimming pool somewhere in Queensland – the perfect book for holiday indulgence … just taxing enough to remind me of work and the great metropolis of Melbourne I’d left behind. I wasn’t in the mood to think – having a pulse was enough. Back then, in the Queensland swelter of ’99, I was out to soak up those Goss/Hanson county rays … primed for Lumby to strut her celebrity stuff before my ridiculously expensive LA “Guess” sunglasses. I was feeling pretentious and uncritical … hell my bathing suit wasn’t even black. I read and read and read and finally collapsed in a satisfied “I’ll have what she’s having” kind’a way. That was another time and another place. Back in Melbourne 2000 and first person singular has to go. Lumby is re-read. Analysis can’t be ignored. The textural experience is not the same.

Lumby writes in a fluid, descriptive style that bolts off the page. She attacks the imagination by forcing us to down-load a mixture of recent and distant tabloid memories from our post-modern psyches. She absolves those us who HAVE to know (or die) by finger wagging at those who cringe at such epistemophillic fixations: “I argue that the contemporary media sphere constitutes a highly diverse and inclusive forum in which a host of important social issues once deemed apolitical, trivial or personal are now being aired” (xiii). The importance of celebrity, gossip and tabloid excess is right up there with the broadsheet and its pretensions of newsworthiness. Lumby posits that meaning is all about reader response — how we absorb media messages (no matter the content of the information) then filter those messages into our understanding of culture and self. This form of respect for audience pleasure is nothing new, in fact while reading Gotcha it’s quite easy to slip into a Patricia Mellencamp flash back or two (or three or four etc.). Although Lumby’s text lacks the scalpel like precision of Mellencamp’s High Anxiety: Catastrophe, Scandal, Age and Comedy (1992), it’s refreshing to see this treatment of the popular media in an Australian and global, rather than a purely American, context.

While Gotcha claims to stamp on some pretty scared cultural/media cows, it is ultimately (unlike the Mellencamp prototype) reprocessed food for the brain. Lumby’s style is journalistic at the expense of analysis. She serves up example after example to justify the existence of a particular topic (say the bleeding of the private into the public) but fails to make any substantial conclusions about the significance of this in terms of the development of Western culture, expression or thought. There is nothing much to grip onto in the book. Like the daily print and electronic media, Gotcha spreads its tentacles into many crannies but doesn’t stay long enough to satisfactorily examine the spaces it moves through. In true journalistic bravado, broad generalisations are made on behalf of the audience without any substantially supportive research. Each incident described is superbly interwoven (Lumby is a great story teller) but this is not the voice she seems to want to effect. Her analysis is far too slight to make an impact and when searching for more depth she is reduced to the already well documented theories of academics like David Marshall, Robert Hughes, Mellencamp, Michel Foucault and (surprise, surprise) McKenzie Wark. Where are Lumby’s great theoretical breakthroughs – where are her ideas that make a difference to the way we look at contemporary media?

Lumby makes it clear that she’s “necessarily shaped this book differently to an academic text” and has “avoided engaging in detailed arguments with other academics”(xv) … all well and good, but because Gotcha cries out for more engaging analysis (which doesn’t have to be expressed in the constipated jargon of academia) this proviso doesn’t quite cut it. What’s really puzzling is her often repeated anti-uni attitude (pages 63, 218-19, 230, 232, 234, 240, 243, 253 – for example). “Academics” (who blah, blah, blah), “highbrow media practitioners”, or those who engage in “rational educated discourse” are positioned as the opponents of popular media pleasures. Who are these academics? Who engages in this type of rational educated discourse? Which highbrow media practitioners are being referred to? It all reeks a bit of that journalistic code of conduct which seems to go something like “find the omnipresent, generalised, faceless enemy, but for God’s sake don’t be too specific because you might get someone off side”. Lumby’s use of academics to generate the best ideas in the book and the fact that she herself is the director of Media and Communications at Sydney University seems oddly out of kilter with Gotcha‘s anti-academic affectation. There are many snippets of Gotcha that function as a finger holds, nothing else, but the section on Diana has grip. Lumby is best when she writes from the distanced heart; when she is less detached and more committed to subtextual subtleties. It is interesting to compare her passionate critique of the Diana phenomenon — what this woman meant to audiences and how she reflected contemporary feminisms – with the icy cynicism of Miriam Cosic’s rationale for including Diana in her collection of “Millennium Women”. Here’s Cosic’s blurb for the Australian Magazine:

100 Princess Diana (1961-1997)

As controversial a figure as Mother Teresa (who died only a week after Diana), the Princess of Wales was to the British Royal Family what the great stars of the silver screen were to Hollywood in its heyday. Her fans thought her beauty symbolic of her goodness; her detractors saw a silly girl with a craving for celebrity. An icon – and one of the savviest manipulators – of the media age, her ubiquity in Western lives was extraordinary. The Princess and the mass media formed one of the greatest marriages of our era and when she died, violently and tragically young, there was a spontaneous outpouring of grief.(Miriam Cosic “Millennium Women”, the Australian Magazine, 18-19 December, 1999, p. 29)

It is difficult to have experienced Diana as a cultural “event”, been confronted with so many different feelings/images/meanings and then read such a frosty epitaph that presumes to encapsulate the complexity of all those global projections. Perhaps this is the kind of “rational educated discourse” spewing from the mouths of “highbrow media practitioners” that Gotcha tries to locate … boorish commentary that assumes the homogeneity of we sheep-like masses. Throughout Gotcha Lumby successfully distances herself from these inflated media mouths — she is on the reader’s side because as a self confessed print and audio-visual consumer she speaks from within the body of the audience, rarely above it.

Lumby winds down with an afterword dedicated to the symbolism of Uluru (Ayers Rock or the belly-button of Australia) – for her, this is a site where history, culture and future possibilities merge … much like Gotcha really (I think). This inclusion of Uluru and the spirituality that contributes to its majesty and a-temporal ambience seems oddly out of place, even token, as Lumby’s text up to this point has steered clear of any discussion of Aboriginality. Comparing Uluru, “a potent symbol of how apparently incommensurable histories and cultures can work together without one viewpoint defining the terms on which everyone cooperates”(252) to the thrust of Gotcha (however tacit) is a little pretentious. Then again pretension is post-modernity’s middle name and what is cultural studies if not a pretentiously post-modern discipline?

It is testament to the fast moving nature of the media and its obsessions that Gotcha, only six months in print, already seems a little dated. The debates are now a tad over-exposed and rapidly seeping into much current thinking. Still, Lumby’s position is helpful to those (and there are many of them) way behind the cultural/media studies eight-ball. Gotcha is a great read and should be gobbled up – but remember that this glossy feed will leave you hungry.

“Every month a new media event or scandal results in a fresh rash of senior ink slingers and talking-heads groping for explanations.” (Lumby, xii)

Unintentional self reflection?

Terrie Waddell