“So tonight, get ready to fly
‘Cuz we’re gonna live it on up in the
sky (whoo-oh!)
Virgin America knows all the places
you wanna be
Fly away with me, fly away with me,
yeah” is the verse sung in the Virgin America Safety video, which resembles a
fun, high tech, music video. The song is an upbeat pop song, set to impressive
dance moves and expressive performers. For frequent flyers on Virgin, it is
often the highlight of the flight experience. I enjoy watching it, getting
excited for my travel time. I have seen instagram stories and snap chats from
friends getting pumped on the plane to this song. This video has its own life
on social media, making the waiting for take-off a personal yet social
experience. McCarthy says, “to
think so deeply about television as an apparatus of waiting, and the waiting
spectator as a subject position deeply imbricated in the social organization of
public space, invites consideration of the possibility that waiting is an
affective state bound up, on a deeper level, with television viewing in
general” (McCarthy, p. 218). The
safety video harkens back to TV as a genre, presenting itself as music video,
the kind that used to be played on TRL on MTV back in the day. McCarthy states a “Marxist analyses of
the functional position of leisure in capitalist relations of production to
suggest that TV viewing is, at base, a way of managing the passage of time from
one workday to the next. This proposition can help us understand spectatorship
as a commodity experience within the temporal organization of capitalism”
(McCarthy, p. 219). The Virgin America safety video is a clear manifestation of
this concept. Passengers are on the plane, waiting to take off, waiting for the
flight attendants to give their safety “schpeel,” and Virgin, has even branded
its own waiting time. Whether one is flying for work, or for leisure, both
types of passengers are depicted in the safety music video. Passengers have
paid money to the Virgin brand for an experience. Part of that experience is
the in-flight entertainment. What is unique about Virgin, is that it expands
beyond the in-flight movies discussed by McCarthy. Every aspect of the
“waiting” experience is turned into screen, capitalistic, brand entertainment.
The song plays on the individual screens at each seat while the plane taxis
before takeoff. Once in-flight, Virgin TV becomes available. This includes
movies the brand has paid the rights to show, some selected “live” TV stations,
and Virgin’s own branded content. This further emphasizes the Marxist function
of leisure. I have not flown Virgin since Alaska bought the company, and I
would be curious to see how this merger has affected the screens and branded
entertainment.
I would also
want to consider planes, and this specific Virgin America example in terms of
the Morse piece. Morse says, “freeways, malls, and television are the locus of
an attenuated fiction effect, that
is, a partial loss of touch with the here and now, dubbed here as distraction” (Morse, p. 193). Virgin’s
content seems to create this fiction
effect. The safety video creates is own “ride” type atmosphere, and the
screen in front of each seat not only provides entertainment, but touch screen
ordering of food and beverages. It feels like a futuristic nightclub.
Transportation is not only literally taking place, but figuratively, to the
extent that the travelers “partial loss of the here and now” is bolstered
through Virgin’s use of screens.
This is really interesting, because it brings up a tension that had been floating around in my head after reading McCarthy's article, but I hadn't quite put words to. Much of McCarthy's detailed explanations are, in some sense, about boredom and banality. There's no hint anywhere in the piece that the content on the screens is actually entertaining — instead, it's largely advertising content created by an external entity (not quite always, but all the major examples, at least). It feels to me like there a difference in kind between externally created content and content that is, like you note here, part of the experience itself. Maybe the reality is there's only minimal difference, but it does seem to speak to a number of major changes in the ways that public screens are approached: not as something you're forced to see while you wait, but something that needs to be engaging so that you actually watch that screen rather than your own.
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