One must report, with great regret, that television studies for Latin America remain significantly weak and thin. The majority of work that has been done is to be found in social science registries. Most of it is excellent research, of course, within established research protocols. But it gives us only what those protocols are designed to provide, which is statistical information, focus analyses of production actors (as much, say, directors and their projects as audiences and their reception of their projects), and, most of all, content analyses that provide categories of thematic interest, often correlated with sociohistoric phenomena, with interesting breakdowns into types of programming and how it has been received.
Social science analysis does not, however, offer much toward approximating the way in which television, as an important venue of cultural production and one that is virtually universal in Latin America, interacts with viewers’ lives within purviews such as the ideological analysis of plot construction or affect theory. This sort of textual analysis, so crucial to understanding how culture interacts with and impacts daily lives, is most exemplarily found in humanities research. But humanities research, as though reluctant to take on as vast, complex, and multitudinous a cultural genre such as television, has routinely shied away from the genre. After all, it is far “neater” to deal with a self-contained novel than a 20-part television series. It is not so much that humanistic scholarship has abandoned television to the social scientists. Rather, it appears that humanists have yet to catch their stride with television studies and find ways to emphasize the contributions of their fields to understanding the dynamic of the genre.
Carter's approach to his segment of Brazilian television is, precisely and definitively, humanistically oriented, as he chooses to examine production through the creative genius of a particular individual. Television, somewhat like performance theater, lends itself to this sort of approach: an individual who, on the basis of personal biography and the self-awareness of his or her roles in the creative process (Method or otherwise), is able to create a uniquely dense and extensive array of texts, ones in which autobiographical materials play a significant role. It is not a question of the mere translation of the autobiographical into art (for example, a lesbian performer “merely” enacting lesbian scripts), but rather a complex calculus of aspects of the artist's lived human experience and the multiplicity of narrations—complementary, contradictory, or wholly fictitious—that can be generated from that experience in the spectrum of performed utterance that any such artist represents.
Carter focuses on Luiz Fernando Carvalho, one of Brazil's creative geniuses in this regard and a signal example of this performative dimension of the television genre, one in which the artist is as much a fictive creation in his daily life as he is when before a camera. In this sense, some very important questions of humanistic scholarship arise, questions that social science scholarship cannot even begin to access, among them questions of who and what the author is, what the authorial centers of a production record are, and how authorial function proliferates in the creation of specific performative texts. Think of the episodes of a series or specific incarnations of the basic narratological combinations, which might include a persona like Carvalho who is associated with multiple personalities who may play off each other.
By the same token, the extent to which a particular “personality” is the center of a narrative production allows for some sort of systematic conjugation of particular or specific ideological or sociohistorical principles. An artist like Carvalho represents a particular understanding of the parameters of narrative fiction (Carter stresses Carvalho's work as a response to the predominance of the soap-opera mode, which in itself is a highly creative Brazilian subgenre). Thus, the attention paid by Carter to production details is no different from that of the literary critic who attends closely to the material organization of a literary text in pursuing the dynamics of created meaning and interpretive values of the human experience.
Carter has provided us with an exemplary study of how humanistic scholarship can provide vital service to television criticism, characterizing in very sympathetic detail one major performance artist's contribution to the best of the genre in Brazil.
