Cinema Beyond Territory: Inflight Entertainment and Atmospheres of Globalisation 9781838710217, 9781844576272

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Acknowledgments

This project started with a small grant from the University of Minnesota, through its Graduate Research Partnership Program, which financed a research trip to the Boeing Archive in Bellevue, Washington. A significant portion of this project was organised, planned and written during a Mellon Humanities Postdoctoral Fellowship at Brown University. I also received a grant from George Mason University’s Center for Global Studies Faculty Research Program to spend time immersed in the Pan American Airways archive at the University of Miami. Thanks are due to Mark Frank, Cynthia Fuchs, Keya Ganguly, Alicia Gibson, Alexander Glass, Lindsey Green-Simms, Ron Greene, Eva Groening, William Groening, Josh Guilford, Dan Hassoun, Steve Hersh, Eva Hudecova, Deborah Kaplan, Glen Latta, Carla Marcantonio, Zachary McCune, John Mowitt, Sean Nye, Pooja Rangan, Martin Roberts, Philip Rosen, Maglorza Rymszka-Pavlovska, Eric Sheppard, Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece, John White and Mark Williams. Special thanks to Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson. And eternal gratitude to Andrea Christy.

Acknowledgments

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Introduction

Cinema studies has long struggled with the question of defining its object. What cinema is and what cinema should be are two of the discipline’s animating questions. Contemporary discussions of these questions are inspired by, on the one hand, fears of cinema’s demise in the face of digital technologies and, on the other, new understandings of cinema’s birth brought about by vigorous and revealing research into early cinema history. The pincer movement of these two developments in the discipline is directed at the heart of medium specificity: the idea that film has an intrinsic nature with traits which are not shared by any other medium or cultural form, that a successful film realises these traits, and that film has effects which cannot be realised by other media forms.1 In this book, I take cinema to be more than celluloid strips woven through the gears and wheels of a machine which shines light through a single still photograph, advancing this strip of images in such a way as to produce the illusion of motion. One of the many happy results of the recent work alluded to above is an increased understanding that moving images are produced and exhibited across many technologies and viewing contexts. As Gertrude Koch put it, cinema is a ‘chameleon that escapes by changing the color of its surface, by the illusion of sheer appearances – in short, aesthetically’. For Koch, regardless of its mode of exhibition – mechanical or electronic, digital or analogue, in a theatre or on an airplane – cinema remains based on a particular aesthetics, with ‘illusion as its property and a trajectory that is transferred and interchanged between media’.2 While the notion of illusion and ‘reality effects’ remain important when seeking to understand passengers’ investment in the screens aboard airplanes, I am primarily interested in the fashion in which other institutions have put cinema into use, taking advantage of the ‘chameleon’ so that its skin sinks into the background of a set of pre-existing cultural and social practices. Cinema never operates in isolation. It has always existed in relationship to other cultural, social and economic institutions. Some of these relationships are full-blown partnerships, others short-term dalliances, and still others tense and conflict-ridden rivalries. This book is one chapter in the story of cinema’s promiscuity. Cinema has had many partners, and continues to be in longterm relationships with art museums, natural history museums, schools (as an instructional aid and as an object of study), churches, the military, science and medicine, as well as tourism.3 Inflight entertainment, then, stands as an example of one of cinema’s many partners. Introduction

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Cinema exhibition on airplanes has, at first glance, a linear history with familiar stages. Experiments and innovations began in the 1920s, including the exhibition of a specially commissioned 16mm film as well as the exhibition of feature films. A brief attempt at regularly scheduled exhibition commenced immediately after World War II, and the early 1960s saw the establishment of continuous film exhibition on airplanes. Almost immediately after inflight entertainment entered this established phase, it was subjected to crises regarding its viability, place in the film industry and in the aviation industry. Competition between carriers also manifested, as competition between formats and in-cabin exhibition technologies and arguments over the proper number of screens in the cabin erupted. The 16mm reel gave way to 8mm cartridges in the 1970s, magnetic tape in the 1980s, optical discs in the 1990s, and digital servers in the twenty-first century. But such a linear history smooths over the way in which competing inflight entertainment systems and formats overlapped, not only on different airlines but even within airlines (and, in some cases, within single aircraft), so that screened inflight entertainment has been, for fifty years, ‘transmedial’ – crossing boundaries between media – and has encompassed mechanical, electronic and digital technologies. The partnership between cinema and passenger aviation is structured and determined by outside economic factors, including government subsidies, international trade agreements, the geopolitics of air routes, as well as the output of national film industries, quota laws and ratings systems. As an example, historically, when fuel prices are high, airlines attempt to save money by no longer investing in new inflight entertainment technologies, removing systems (making their airplanes lighter and more fuel efficient), or purchasing cheaper (often older) material to exhibit. This book does not attempt to render cinema autonomous, but takes as its starting point the historical reality of cinema’s embeddedness in other social, cultural and economic practices. Methodologically, then, I am less concerned with formalist and textual analyses of films themselves than with tracing the history of deployments of motion picture exhibition practices within pre-existing spaces and practices. Such an approach entails enumerating and accounting for the effects of exhibition technologies, revealing the fashion in which the airline passenger was imagined as a moviegoer (movie-stayer might be more accurate), and linking these practices to changing sociocultural dynamics of the last 100 years. By focusing on the partnerships between the travel and entertainment industries, I am also concerned with questions of mobility and visuality. I propose that the aspirational identity associated with both these industries is one of motility and visual apprehension. By this I mean conditions under which one has easy access to transportation networks and is both visible and watchful. Or, put another way: always being on the move and always surrounded by images. In order to fully occupy this identity, one must begin to think of oneself in those terms – as a kind of mobile image, or motion picture. On a practical level this might entail being fully versed in and adept at navigating the security screening practices at the airport. The film Up in the Air (2009) exemplifies this identity through a sequence in which the central character, Ryan Bingham (George Clooney), arrays his belongings in a simple and efficient manner so as to smoothly move through the screening process. He has packed his luggage so that a minimum of unzipping and unpacking is necessary for the imaging technologies to look inside. He dresses so as to facilitate image-taking of his own body. In other words, his habits and behaviour 2

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indicate that he thinks of himself in terms of motility – movement defines his potential – and visibility, in that he will be visually apprehended by strangers and machines. This scene, of course, is a fiction (and no such scene occurs in the original novel), but it provides a glimpse into how the air travel industry uses imaging technology to encourage travellers (Bingham is not yet a passenger) to act as images to be processed.4 Such efficiency affords Bingham more time to ‘get things done’, so that another key aspect of this identity is a high level of productivity, which, as we shall see, carries with it its own set of obstacles to be overcome while on board the actual airplane.5 For it is on board that the filmic identity of the traveller is appended onto the spectatorial identity of the passenger. Because of its particular context, inflight cinema has developed a different set of viewing positions from theatrical cinema. The notion of moviegoing is crucial here. As observed in passing above, the term has little purchase in the situation of the airline passenger. The airline passenger is not going to a movie, but is on a vehicle going to a destination. In other words, inflight cinema is not the goal of the passenger, the realisation of a financial transaction or even the fulfilment of a desire to be entertained. Historically, for many airline passengers, inflight entertainment has been involuntary; there has been little agency or choice granted to the passenger. Consequently, the inflight movie has often been associated with dross. The satirical newspaper the Onion has turned this presumed truth about inflight movies into several humorous articles, including one in May 2006 reporting that passengers brought down their plane rather than be forced to watch Big Momma’s House 2 (2006) and one in November 1996 revealing that the real tragedy of a recent airplane crash was that the passengers missed the end of Dragonheart (1996). The assumption that the airplane is the repository for box office and critical failures exists alongside the ‘common knowledge’ that airlines heavily re-edit critically acclaimed and edgy films thereby rendering them nearly incoherent as well as removing their emotional power and resonance. For instance, a colleague told me that she had seen Precious (2009) on a plane and wondered why everyone thought it was so devastating and controversial. A few days later, while discussing the movie with a family member, she realised that a good portion of the movie had been cut out for airplane exhibition. In essence, she had seen a different movie. Many think of inflight movies in this way: heavily redacted, rendered safe, and of little aesthetic value. Passengers watch image screens on planes because they are forced to or there is nothing else to do. Moreover, airlines tend to treat inflight entertainment as but one part of the passenger experience and services provided in-flight: a consideration secondary to comfort (climate control, seating arrangements and legroom), food and drink, speed and punctuality, and branding. INFLIGHT ENTERTAINMENT AND COSMOPOLITANISM To be a passenger is to be moved by something. In the case of the airline passenger, the velocity of the airplane necessitates physical confinement within the fuselage. Motility comes in the form of cultural transportation.6 Books, magazines, newspapers, even conversations with fellow passengers facilitate the achievement of this transport. Imbricated in the traveller identity is accrual and exchange of knowledge. Inflight films Introduction

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can be positioned within the constellation of activities that constitute the air traveller identity. By presenting the passenger with a menu of choices, some unfamiliar or exotic, inflight entertainment finds its analogue in the film festival; both are gathering places for the culturally and financially privileged seeking both to expand their cultural horizons and further establish their own identity as cultural travellers. Here, inflight film is linked to an aspirational cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism has long been, as Ulrich Beck put it, ‘a contested term [since] there is no uniform interpretation in the growing literature’ and may refer to a concept, a mode of being, lifestyle or political order.7 The political dream of world government or a shared polity defines cosmopolitanism as a kind of ‘global citizenship’ that welcomes all without erasing difference.8 This particular version of a global order dependent on a single system of governance has underwritten the globalist visions of an ‘air world’ critiqued in the opening chapters of this book. Alongside (some would say within) these globalist visions is a cosmopolitanism Timothy Brennan described as ‘an enthusiasm for customary differences, but as ethical or aesthetic material for a unified polychromatic culture – a new singularity born of a blending and merging of multiple local constituents’.9 This form of cosmopolitanism, typified as an abiding interest in difference and foreign-ness, represents an important way of understanding air travel and ‘frequent travelers’.10 Travel and tourism depend on maintaining difference, diversity and even a certain amount of chaos for their appeal. Cosmopolitans might define themselves as those who immerse themselves in other cultures and have special knowledge, while tourists merely sample. But, as Ulf Hannerz argued, ‘cosmopolitans can be dilettantes as well as connoisseurs, and are often both, at different times’.11 Nonetheless, a distinction exists between the cosmopolitan, who yearns to go ‘backstage’ and be a participant in the culture of the Other, and the tourist, who is a spectator and exists only in front of the performance of culture.12 In the second chapter of this book, I rely on this particular cosmopolitan variant – ‘an intellectual and aesthetic stance of openness toward divergent cultural experiences, a search for contrasts rather than uniformity’ – when contrasting the inflight entertainment offerings of airlines to international film festivals.13 But cosmopolitanism can also encompass the attitude of the international business traveller, who depends on the global capitalist system and the internationalised management style dubbed ‘scientific’ to provide the terrain for cross-cultural encounters.14 The cosmopolitanism of the business traveller then, is confined to ‘corridors’ of transportation systems, international standard hotels, airport lounges, taxi cabs, conference rooms and the occasional bar and/or night club.15 This type of cosmopolitanism is predicated on access and ease of movement. Sean Cubbitt neatly expressed a critique of the elite position of the cosmopolitan when he commented that ‘the cosmopolitan is at home in the culture of the other, but he does not offer the other the hospitality of his own home’.16 The cosmopolitanism of the frequent flyer, the business traveller and the executive is even more limiting, as those subjects are unlikely to enter ‘the culture of the other’, preferring to remain in the world of what Marc Auge called ‘non-places’.17 This cosmopolitanism, characterised by the frequent crossing of national borders and ‘often tied to transnational job markets’, is articulated to what Leslie Sklair has named the ‘transnational capitalist class’ and looms large in my analysis of the relationship between inflight entertainment and business travel in chapters four and five.18 4

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The conditional line in this survey of the contested terrain of cosmopolitanism is a common dependence on mobility and movement. Cosmopolitanism requires relationships across borders, which in turn require the transportation of people, goods and ideas. Brennan uses movement and travel to distinguish between cosmopolitanism and internationalism, the latter an ‘ideology of the domestically restricted’.19 Akin to this distinction is Zygmunt Bauman’s observation that globalisation has polarised society into a first world of ‘the globally mobile’ and a second world of ‘the locally tied’.20 The emphasis on travel as the defining characteristic for the cosmopolitan also appeared in the work of Hannerz, who commented that the biography of the cosmopolitan is composed of ‘periods of stays in different places’.21 But for all of these scholars, mere movement is not enough; it is the manner of movement and the attitude of the mover that distinguishes the cosmopolitan. Simply taking advantage of what Manuel Castells has called the ‘space of flows’ does not distinguish the cosmopolitan from the global capitalist, for the cosmopolitan still seeks out the ‘space of places’, even if only to assert a special knowledge or a particular attitude towards difference (a quality the ‘space of flows’ seeks to minimise).22 For the most part, the focus of the scholarship I have addressed here has been to analyse the contours of ‘the cosmopolitan condition’ and its consequences, rather than the infrastructure of movement and cultural exchange which sustain cosmopolitanisms.23 While neither anthropological nor sociological, this book still seeks to illuminate the fashion in which transnational movement and cultural transportation form this infrastructure by examining their coalescence in the screen that travels with the cosmopolitan, the transnational capitalist and the tourist on board the airplane. By providing forms of sensory (if not quite bodily) mobility as well as ‘tours’ of different cinema cultures, inflight entertainment participates in the wider networks of cultural transportation that enable what Beck identified as ‘the cosmopolitan condition’ in all its forms. Air travel, like so many modes of transportation dating back to the nineteenth century, requires travellers to confine themselves to small spaces for long periods of time while being moved by technological apparatus. As jet travel moved into a form of mass travel, beginning in 1958, space for the air passenger shrank, particularly in the newly formed economy class. That travelling at unprecedented speed would require bodily stillness and cramped conditions has been a long-time complaint for air travellers. As I show later in the book, inflight entertainment has allowed airlines to place more passengers in the airplane and keep them content. The apotheosis of the sensory experience of bodily confinement with visual expansiveness can be found in Paul Virilio’s figure of the ‘terminal citizen’, an immobile body surrounded by screens who needs only the smallest gesture to change sensory experience, knowledge, stimuli. In this fashion, the terminal citizen is essentially placeless, place no longer matters (and therefore does not exist for the terminal citizen) because the ‘teletopia’ available through networked screens and signals has created extreme accessibility.24 Virilio linked high-speed transportation, specifically air travel, to a ‘desire for inertia, desire for ubiquity, instantaneousness – a will to reduce the world to a single place, a single identity’.25 This kind of techno-catastrophic idealism pervades Virilio’s work, and in a sense follows from the sort of aphoristic media study approach pioneered by Marshall McLuhan. But if we consider the terminal Introduction

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citizen as the logical outcome of the spectatorial form of cosmopolitanism, known colloquially as tourism, in which the world becomes both a performance available through the image and a commodity to be consumed, the ‘single place’ that transportation has reduced the world to is the database from which image screens access their material. Indeed, the contemporary air passenger in business class or first class is, at least temporarily, a terminal citizen, surrounded by screens: the window screen, the curtain screening out the economy cabin and the liquid crystal seatback screen that can present a catalogue of entertainments from around the world, display the position of the airplane itself against a digitised map, show weather information for the plane’s destination and, in some cases, provide access to the world wide web. Sitting in the airplane cabin, then, transforms the traveller into a passenger/spectator, since the airplane cabin itself has been built as cinema. Cinema, in all its forms, presents the physically immobile passenger with what Anne Friedberg has called a ‘mobilized virtual gaze’.26 Friedberg traces the cinema back to a series of technologies in the nineteenth century that ‘changed the relationship between sight and bodily movement’: one could see different things without moving one’s body.27 Through her analysis of the diorama and panorama, she diagnosed a particular ‘notion of the confined place combined with a notion of journey that is present simultaneously in cinematic spectation’.28 For Friedberg, then, there is a chain of transportation technologies (trains, steamships, bicycles, elevators, escalators) and a chain of image technologies (dioramas, panoramas, even the panopticon) that share the sensory experience of conjoined confined place with expansive journey whose ultimate expression can be found in cinema. Lynne Kirby likewise articulated the aesthetics of cinema to confined travel, the experience of shocks and ruptures of the cinema spectator analogous to the experience of a train passenger, ‘being at once immobile and in rapid transit, lulled to sleep and yet capable of being shocked awake’.29 The admixture of proprioceptive movement, bodily stillness, imagined or virtual mobility, is not peculiar to the cinematic; it can be found in multiple technologies of transportation. The cinematic – a culture of visualised movement – has been positioned as the substitute for vehicular transportation and travel.30 Early iterations of cinematic exhibition on vehicles were not in place to further or deepen the contradiction between ‘place’ and ‘journey’, but rather to serve as the solution to the proprioceptive unease such vehicles and transportation technologies engendered. In the 1920s, film exhibition on board ocean liners and airplanes was said to be a cure for seasickness and airsickness, so that the calming and lulling qualities of cinema were set to work against the shocks of jostling vehicles. Of course, film is not the only medium granted these properties; Wolfgang Schivelbusch detailed how reading newspapers and even looking out of the window were similarly positioned as shields against the bodily disturbances of ‘the railway journey’.31 While the work of Friedberg, Kirby and Schivelbusch could be put in service of Leo Charney and Vanessa Schwartz’s teleological argument that ‘modern culture was “cinematic” before’ cinema, this book frames the overlapping practices of cinema and transportation within structuring pressures of the global capitalist system. Yet this is not a unidirectional relationship, as cinema and transportation influence, enable and maintain global capitalism, providing imaginaries of possibility, and both cinema and transportation are often taken up as both globalisation’s greatest potentialities as well as its most unassailable 6

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truths. I do not take inflight entertainment as the inevitable consequence of the confluence of transnational commerce, global capitalism, rapid transportation and cinema. Instead, I seek to exposit the history of inflight entertainment as disorderly and spasmodic, and its technological forms as hybridised jury-rigged contrivances. INFLIGHT ENTERTAINMENT AS TRANSMEDIA Currently, most inflight cinema occurs on multiple screens simultaneously throughout the cabin. Images flicker across these screens unbidden, operating as a kind of visual distraction, akin to the flashing lights and neon signs of an urban shopping district or a fairground. Because the images on the screens within the passenger cabin convey a narrative, they can captivate in a fashion that the flashing lights of an urban night-time environment cannot. Yet these images function similarly, enticing passengers to commit by putting on headphones and becoming immersed in the screen. For inflight film exhibition, listening entails acquiescing to the power of the image itself. Indeed, the classical mode of spectatorship to which Miriam Hansen drew our attention, in which ‘the moviegoer was effectively invited to [leave] behind, like Keaton in Sherlock Jr., an awareness of his or her physical self in the theater space’, is achieved through headphones.32 In Keaton’s silent film, his character’s dream self enters the image screen, exemplifying what Hansen took to be the ideal form of classical spectatorship, in which cinema’s immersive power lies in the image. For the airplane passenger, the auditory stimuli of the plane’s engines, strangers’ conversations and crying babies combined with a screen considerably smaller than the one shown in Sherlock Jr. (1924), reverses the presumed hierarchy in film studies of image over sound by positioning sound as immersive (or at least less vulnerable to distraction and/or requiring more concentration). Voluntary and wilful forgetting of the physical and the theatrical space is of paramount importance to the success of inflight entertainment, which has been put in place to distract, pacify and occupy passenger time. That spectatorial investment in the image screen and divestment from other activities is achieved through headphones is indicative of the particular circumstance and history of inflight cinema, showing how cinema’s relationship with air travel has changed cinema itself, nearly as much as it has altered our notions of air travel. As John Belton has shown, the technological circumstances of film exhibition – widescreen, aspect ratios, surround sound – have affected film content, in that films were made and shot to accentuate the new exhibition technology.33 Belton’s focus on theatrical exhibition has convincingly demonstrated how this primary cinematic exhibition space structures, and is structured by, film content and production. Secondary exhibition spaces, such as classrooms and museums, often had to change to accommodate film exhibition (through the installation of daylight screens, use of portable projectors or even the simple act of turning off the lights) but their loyalty to their own institutional mission greatly shaped the content of films and their reception.34 Likewise, the passenger airplane’s mission to transport passengers quickly and safely has affected both the technology of inflight exhibition and the content of screened entertainments. Introduction

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In short, the meanings of inflight entertainments are structured by a range of circumstances beyond their content: the particular idiosyncrasies of the exhibition apparatus, including the small screen and headphones; the fact that the audience is itself in flux, already engaged in a journey; the peculiar notion of empty or wasted time so central to an aesthetic matrix interlaced by boredom, productivity, distraction and concentration; and, not least, audience expectations regarding the quality and type of material available in the airplane venue. Inflight entertainment’s chief loyalty has been to the priorities of airlines, which are considerably less attentive to debates over aesthetic autonomy and media specificity which animate much of film and media studies. Instead, inflight entertainment is boundary-crossing, converging media forms previously held separate, and offering up systems that incorporated film, television, radio, video games and computing software. Cinema emerges from the nexus of audiovisual content, technological display, the physical arrangement of the exhibition space, marketing and distribution, and audience experience. Each of these has its own vectors and histories, not all of which are complementary. Writing a history of inflight entertainment entails attention to the breaches and discontinuities between the idea of cinema and cinema as actually practised in the airplane. Dudley Andrew has positioned disjunctures and gaps as crucial to understanding cinema. Beyond the time-lag between image-capture and image-projection crucial to film’s aesthetic, Andrew emphasised those films that ‘travel out-of-phase’ as key to understanding cinema as ‘the twentieth century’s genuinely international medium’.35 The time-lag, or ‘décalage’, Andrew argued, is crucial to the formation of national cinemas, a point which I return to when comparing inflight entertainment to the international film festival in the second chapter of this book. But I want to draw attention to the way Andrew’s notion of time-lag distinguishes film aesthetically and institutionally from television, which he positions as a medium of instantaneity that is at once state-controlled (either directly or by proxy) and marked by a globalism enabled through the simultaneous broadcast of the media event.36 For Andrew, the division between film and television is absolute and encompasses aesthetics, institutional mission and even geopolitics (television is never international in the sense that cinema is, according to Andrew). William Urrichio’s media archaeology approach, on the other hand, sees simultaneity as the cultural imaginary underlying both film and television (as well as the telephone and webcam).37 Citing early cinema’s emphasis on sights and slice-of-life scenes as well as the names of various protocinematic technologies and early cinema companies (Vitascope, Bioscope), Urrichio sees a drive towards bringing the distant closer for observation and watching these sights in as close an approximation to instantaneity as technology would allow. Indeed, Natasa Durovicova cited the twin desires to bring the distant closer and make the familiar strange as key to cinema’s mission.38 But, contrary to media archaeology, my approach to the history of inflight entertainment does not seek to subsume the material practices of transportation constituted by cinema and aviation technologies under a unifying and totalising imaginary. Nor do I attempt to draw distinctions between media forms based on the technological apparatus (platform) exclusively. Rather I remain attentive to a dialectic of material practice and imagination. This requires accounting for how the priorities of the global capitalist system and the regulatory tensions between nation states, international treaties and transnational 8

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organisations structure the production of media forms and technologies. Similarly, the encounter between passenger and screen is understood through larger social and cultural forces which seek to nominate certain moving images as television and others as film, even if both are viewed on the same screen using the same interface in the same location (for example, using internet-based streaming video services at home). One of those discursive formations, exemplified by Andrew, is invested in positioning cinema as moving images marked by a lag in time between event and viewing, in short, a form of recording and storing. Television, on the other hand, is marked by flow and ‘liveness’. For Stephen Heath and Gillian Skirrow, the temporal condensation between event, transmission and viewing is key to this aesthetic of liveness, the set of conventions that undergird the televisual images’ claims of authenticity and verisimilitude. By presenting the audiovisual stimuli presented by the television set as direct from the space and time of the television camera, liveness disguises the mediated nature of the television image and sound and makes epistemological claims regarding the veracity of television images and sounds.39 The technical possibility of such seeing-at-a-distance distinguishes television’s temporal mode from film, which must first record and freeze time in individual photographic frames to be developed before projection, creating the ‘décalage’ Andrew identified as cinema’s characteristic difference. In Herbert Zettl’s terms, ‘each television frame is always in a state of becoming. While the film frame is a concrete record of the past, the television frame (when live) is a reflection of the living, constantly changing present.’ Zettl related the temporal flow of life to the temporal flow of television.40 Indeed, television has been considered the great contemporary medium of the everyday; the rhythms of its content, programming and ‘flow’ adhere to the rhythms and flows of the quotidian.41 As Anna McCarthy put it, ‘TV integrates into everyday life so well that we barely notice its presence.’42 The television viewer, until very recently, could not choose the programmes appearing on screen, and, much of the time, programmes were already in progress when the set was turned on. This creates another difference between television and film in regards to the temporal relationship between audiovisual content and spectator. This has led, in part, to the received imaginary of television viewers as passive viewers with little agency. As I show later in the book, early iterations of inflight entertainment share many of television viewing’s characteristics: passengers had little agency over what appeared on the screen, when it appeared on the screen or if anything appeared on the screen. It should surprise no one that television has only become included in the culture of cinephilia after other technologies – magnetic tape and optical disc – made storage of television material possible and resulted in the widespread distribution of such stored materials. Indeed, the collection of television in box sets has allowed certain forms of television to gain the cultural status of film. Airlines have embraced the transference of cinephilia onto made-for-television serials, as Emirates Air’s Andrew Grant put it in 2012: ‘We also see passengers asking for whole series of TV shows so that they can watch them on board like a DVD or video-on-demand box set at home.’43 The proliferation of academic articles, anthologies and monographs on hour-long drama series such as Mad Men (2007–), The Sopranos (1999–2007) and The Wire (2002–8) testify to television’s elevated status in the discipline of cinema studies. This, in turn, has led to the staging of debates regarding the scope and status of cinema studies and Introduction

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the viability of the emergence of media studies.44 That these debates occur with the onset of digitalisation techniques that have allowed for the archiving and storage of television material as well as increased (and on-demand) access via a variety of platforms beside the domestic television set (cellular phones, video game consoles, desktop computers), has meant that the current turbulence within cinema studies and media studies is entangled with the digital. If television has long been the screened entertainment separate from and unequal to film, then it has been digitalisation which threatens this hierarchy. Thomas Elsaesser has pointed to the way that the renewed emphasis within cinema studies on early cinema, both as a sudden rupture or break from previous forms and the more archaeological model of cinema’s long emergence within a milieu of other media forms and amusements, have provided models for understanding the contemporary moment of new digital media.45 Studies of digital media have tended towards one or the other of these views: the digital as rupture or the digital as part of a heterogenous environment of media practices.46 The historical problem with these approaches however, is that they assume a relatively stable, almost ‘classical’ period, between the establishment of the studio system and the introduction of digital technologies, in which cinema was no longer marked by uneven developments and the fact that very divergent conceptions of what the cinema was or could be existed side by side, not to mention the co-presence of different media-forms and practices such as vaudeville, panoramas and dioramas, stereoscopic home entertainment, Hale’s tours and world fairs.47

This period has been treated mostly as a conflict between styles and ‘waves’; that is, between Hollywood and various national cinemas or between avant-gardism and classicism. The coexistence of cinema with other media practices is conceived of as limited to a protracted rivalry with television. Inflight entertainment offers an alternative to these histories (even though the rivalry between film and television is crucial to its very existence). I appropriate the media archaeological inclination to see different forms and technologies working together synchronically which therefore must be analysed as mutually influential. Within the cabin, the co-presence of various media forms and practices makes such an approach unavoidable. During the 1970s, for instance, an airplane might have a large screen paired with a 16mm projector in one section of the plane, while small screens hung overhead in another section. By the 1990s, some airlines handed their passengers in first class handheld media players with preloaded films and television shows to be played at the command of the passenger, while those in economy class might be met with small screens that descended at the command of the flight attendant to play a film chosen by the airline, or perhaps no entertainment system at all. Indeed, from 1964 onward, inflight entertainment has encompassed a panoply of different media forms – 16mm film, closed-circuit television, live television broadcasts, magnetic tape – that indicate a more contentious and variegated media environment than currently accounted for by either ‘New Film History’ or media archaeology.48 Similarly, inflight entertainment’s inspirations came from a range of contexts including theatrical exhibition, the domestic media environment and the business office. Additionally, since the 1920s 10

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airlines have used the non-theatrical cinema culture of exhibitions, fairs, social clubs and even models of airplane cabins that resembled the somatic cinema of the earlier, railway-based, Hale’s Tours to promote aviation and travel. Inflight entertainment then, may be best understood as a transmedial, as airlines have sought to encourage air travel and keep passengers contented through a range of practices utilising multiple media forms and technologies. ORGANISATION AND METHOD Inflight entertainment occupies a marginalised position within film studies, television studies and media studies. Anthony Slide’s valuable reference, Before Video: A History of the Non-theatrical Film, spends two paragraphs on inflight entertainment. Since Slide’s history is of films produced for and exhibited in non-theatrical settings, the presentation of Hollywood productions on aircraft is of little interest. Jack Fay Robinson’s authorised history of Bell & Howell, once the supplier of inflight entertainment systems to airliners, spent barely a page on the development of inflight entertainment technology and the revenue it garnered. More recently, Nitin Govil’s insightful essay, ‘Something Spatial in the Air’, in the MediaSpace anthology, took an industry-centric look at the way inflight entertainment figures in the new spatial configurations of Hollywood. Eric Freedman’s piece, ‘Notes from Economy Class’, written for the online journal Flowtv, focused on the seatback screen and the complex questions of convergence of media technology and furniture, or screens and seats. For his book article, ‘Television, Interrupted: Pollution or Aesthetic?’ Jason Jacobs tellingly used his personal experience of watching an inflight movie to open larger questions regarding digital aesthetics and television.49 That these few pieces on inflight entertainment exist in the periphery of the field testifies to the status of inflight entertainment as ‘bad object’. Indeed, the approach of these last three articles draws attention to the way that inflight entertainments are not discrete texts to be read, but provide ambient and fragmentary morsels of image and sound to be consumed. Inflight entertainment, therefore, is emblematic of the more informal and distracted relationship to screens that characterise the contemporary moment, against the formalised and focused aesthetic of classical cinema. The flickering screens that surround passengers create an atmosphere of images lighting the cabin and permeating the cabin, as if cinema becomes air to breathe. Conventional histories of civil aviation likewise spend very little time, if any, on inflight entertainment; passing mentions are far more common than sustained analyses. Corporate histories focus on route acquisition and development, mergers, fleet turnover and transformation, boardroom strategies and meetings, governmental regulation, labour relations. Occasionally they mention cabin design, food services and livery.50 Numerous volumes published in the past decade on flight attendants have located their research within a constellation of race, class and gender; even as the organising principle changes from labour to safety to transnationalism, entertainment is mentioned only in passing.51 Recent work on space, place and mobility in the fields of sociology and geography addresses air travel as a new sociological phenomenon with Introduction

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ties to globalisation, the compression of space and time, and the forging of new social bonds and groupings; but these also have scant material on watching television and films or listening to music in-flight.52 Therefore, the bulk of my research is based on primary texts. Ephemera such as inflight magazines, memoranda and correspondence, promotional brochures and other materials from the Boeing archive and the Pan American Airlines archive provide valuable evidence and background for this book. Promotional and marketing materials, in the forms of press releases, print and television advertisements, product reviews and industry awards culled from aviation trade journals, such as Flight International, Aviation Daily, World Airline News and Air Transport World, comprise a substantial amount of material under analysis and critique. I do not take these materials as transparent evidence of actual practices and experiences, but rather exemplary of a mode of address that the aviation, consumer electronics and entertainment industries adopted to convince passengers of the appeal and superiority of their products and services. I should also note that a good portion of this material was not aimed at passengers themselves, but also represented attempts to generate free publicity and gain the attention of other companies. The inflight entertainment industry has its own trade association, the Air Passenger Experience Association (APEX), formerly the World Airline Entertainment Association (WAEA). I have relied on these sources for information regarding general trends in the industry as well as specific events and practices. Published materials from international non-governmental organisations such as the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) and the International Air Transport Association (IATA), key players in the regulation and deployment of inflight entertainment as well as the negotiation of agreements between airlines and between airlines and national governments, help contextualise inflight entertainment among larger civil aviation trends and practices, and provide key insights into the inter-airline controversy over the institutionalisation of inflight entertainment detailed in the first and third chapters. This book commences with an examination of the relationship between commercial aviation and its attendant modes of visuality and changing views of the world. The first section, ‘Geographies’, consists of two chapters: the first on the technological production of the category of airspace and the second on the cultural production of the aerial view, a form of visuality enabled by flying machines. ‘Geographies’ places these discourses in a constellation of practices from rapid travel and photographic media, as well as economic practices fostered by globalisation. Networks such as aviation routes reconfigure global space so as to bind one urban area to another, ignoring the intervening territory. Aviatory technologies segment space through the production of routes or channels through which commercial aircraft travel even as they collapse spatial boundaries between metropoles. The technological, juridical and cultural production of airspace enables and structures the new spatial relations endemic to a global system marked by air travel. Inspired by Saskia Sassen’s theories of scale and the global as well as Manuel Castells’s concept of the ‘space of flows’, the initial chapter attests to the manifold ways in which networks of communication and transportation technology converge, coincide and codepend within globalisation processes. As commercial passenger aviation necessitated the production of spatial categories (such as national airspace) 12

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and the segmentation of these categories, cinema, too, relies on strategies of segmenting and analysing space. The iterations of cinematic and aviatory spatial production and segmentation come into contact in practices such as the division of the globe into regions for film distribution, the displacement of national borders to the airport, as well as the introduction of an international fee system for inflight entertainment. The subsequent chapter articulates cosmopolitanism to the aerial view provided by the airplane, in order to demonstrate the connections between visuality and globalisation. The ability to see a ‘borderless’ landscape as an oblique view from the window of a craft thousands of feet in the air coupled with the ability of the craft to traverse space at extreme speeds underpin the discourse under critique in the opening section of the book. The aerial view is presumed to enable the viewer to see through national boundaries, to see the world without division among peoples. The globalising discourse manifest in the aerial view is demonstrated through new forms of cartography, including maps and globes specifically meant to better visualise air travel. Coincident with the new cartography of aviation, a diverse group of film practitioners, critics and marketers articulated a discourse promoting film as the key to international exchange. Film was positioned as a kind universal language that would free humanity from the curse of Babel. If the airplane made the world easier to traverse – some globes even represented the world as made transparent by aviation – then film made the peoples of the world easier to comprehend. However, this globalist form of cosmopolitanism is troubled inside the cabin, where the menu of film choices is often organised around national origin. Inflight entertainment on long-haul international flights, therefore, appeals to the cosmopolitan identity marked by dilettantism and connoisseurship, in which the passenger is attuned to and ready to experience different cultures. Within the inflight entertainment menu, often placed next to the route maps in the inflight magazine, the materials (feature films, television shows, musical recordings) are called upon to represent the national. The entertainment menu thereby frames and fills in notions of national culture and identity for both those who identify with the national community in question and non-nationals who are interested in cultivating a cosmopolitan world view or possess a interest in other nations. Flag carriers, in particular, who are charged with representing the nation, often do so through such cultural activities, not simply advertising the nation as a tourist destination, but offering a taste of the national culture. For instance, Air Canada recently featured a ‘festival’ of shorts funded by Canada’s National Film Board, each of which featured some aspect of Canadian life. Air Pakistan, an early adopter of inflight entertainment, features a preponderance of Urdu dramas, while Air India emphasises Bollywood fare. The various Virgin airlines (Virgin Atlantic, Virgin America, Virgin Blue) attempt to promote a transnational culture of youthfulness and urbanity marked by mood lighting, inflight bars, uncensored films and even the opportunity to flirt with or buy drinks for other passengers through the inflight entertainment system; a form of cosmopolitanism marked by an attachment to lifestyle over nation.53 The second chapter, therefore, is comprised of an analysis of the visuality of the passenger cabin which shows how passengers travel in a tension between a global view, cosmopolitan aspirations, and the consolidation and reinforcement of nationalist imaginaries. Introduction

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The second section of the book, ‘Technologies’, turns to the history of inflight entertainment proper. The book’s third chapter examines how the film industry, particularly Hollywood, accommodated and took advantage of this new exhibition space. Sporadic experiments in film exhibition began in the 1920s, sometimes as publicity gimmicks, other times as attempts to soothe and distract passengers. Inflight film exhibition was instituted as a regular service by Trans World Airlines (TWA) in the 1960s, initiated by a film exhibitor responding to the ascendancy of television. Inflight film exhibition became the subject of international tensions, and in the mid-1960s the International Air Transportation Association passed a resolution in which its members agreed to pay for the elimination of inflight entertainment systems from US carriers, on the basis that inflight exhibition of movies constituted unfair competition. The US Justice Department then intervened, citing the interests of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), and threatened to sue European carriers under the same logic of unfair competition. This successful move by the US government ensured the continuation of inflight entertainment as a part of long-haul travel and led the film industry to accommodate the commercial aviation industry and alter its product to suit this new exhibition space. Built into the structure of cinematic spectatorship is the presumption of immobility and captivation; inflight entertainment, however, is an instance of cinema in which the immobility of the spectator precedes the introduction of the film. That is, rather than carving out a special place for the spectator to remain immobile in front of the screen, the film industry had to construct a special place for the screen in front of already immobile spectators. Here then, we can see cinema as a kind of service that provides distraction. The underlying assumption is that passengers need a way to pass the time. Indeed, this is how airlines treat inflight entertainment: as another amenity in the passenger cabin, alongside food, drinks, magazines, legroom, headrests, lighting, climate control, tray tables and so on. The introduction of screen entertainments in jet planes required changes in practices and procedures on the part of air travellers. The large centralised screen practice common to some airlines from the 1960s to the 1980s often required passengers to close window shades, turn out lights and either plug in headphones and pay attention to the large screen or forego the headphones and concentrate on other activities such as reading, writing, talking and sleeping. In situations with multiple screens – either overhead or in the seatback – the inflight entertainment programming constituted a kind of ambient cinema acting as a constantly distracting background. This environment of screens produces aesthetic conflicts for passengers; tensions between attention and distraction, concentration and immersion, diversion and productivity. The book’s fourth chapter takes these tensions as its central inquiry. Focused on the practices of business travellers and airlines marketing appeals to such travellers, I map out these tensions as a series of overlain priorities between the domestic and the office environment. Within airline promotional and marketing literature, the former was associated with femininity and the latter with masculinity, at least for the period between the 1950s and the 1990s. The values associated with domestic space and work space that came into conflict in the passenger cabin resulted in a fraught position for cabin attendants (both female and male), who were called upon to act as housekeepers, 14

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butlers and bartenders, as well as secretaries, nurses, enforcers of safety regulations and media technicians. Likewise, this tension clouded the status of inflight entertainment technologies. Were these technologies in place as leisure activities for businesspersons, as distraction devices for the novice pleasure-seeking tourist, as collaborators in making empty time productive or as irksome instruments designed to interrupt any task at hand? Not surprisingly, the varied depictions of inflight entertainment in the context of productivity and business were saturated with messages about proper gender roles, and the technologies themselves were represented with gendered characteristics. Because business and first-class passengers provide a significant portion of commercial airlines’ revenues, catering to their perceived tastes, desires and predilections drives the design and renovation of airplane cabins, including inflight entertainment technology. Borrowing from Leslie Sklair’s work on the transnational capitalist class, the fourth chapter attests to the connections between those who promote and maintain the global capitalist system and those propelling the deployment of advanced media technologies in the airline cabin. Here, then, inflight entertainment is taken as both an outgrowth of an already present economic system and part of a cultural force that advances and shapes its discursive organisation. The recent deployment of digital technologies and regular wireless internet access on board passenger planes results from the pressures imposed by this elite group, accustomed to constant connection, on the airline industry. For airlines, the digital represents the ability to resolve the oppositional relationship between distraction and concentration, domesticity and commerce. Digital media bring about a new formation in the aesthetic of inflight entertainment and air travel. No longer tasked with providing specific entertainments to passengers, wireless internet connectivity inflight allows airlines to leave passengers to their own devices. The fifth chapter takes up the history of inflight entertainment as the analogue gives way to the digital. While airlines had already pioneered large menus of choices and variety omnibus line-ups for their inflight programming in the 1970s, digital technology promised an even greater variety of programming, video on demand and greater passenger control over content. Interactive media became the watchword of the inflight entertainment industry during the 1990s. Airlines were encouraged to install systems that gave passengers the ability to start, stop and change their entertainment options, play video games, track the progress of the plane in the air, order food and even, in some cases, to gamble. Portable digital technologies available outside the plane signalled changes for inflight entertainment systems. Passengers began to bring their own entertainment devices on board: portable music players, laptop computers and portable DVD players. While this practice probably began with the introduction of the Sony Walkman in 1979, by the 1990s it had become a business enterprise, with services such as InMotion Entertainment offering portable media devices, films and music for purchase and rental through kiosks in airports. The continuing rollout of internet access in airplanes amplifies the potentials for this practice. While overlapping with the productivity ethic examined in the fourth chapter, the deployment of inflight wireless internet access could presage a new era of inflight entertainment, in which the entire entertainment system is replaced with internet access, requiring passengers to bring their own devices to access entertainment options available through websites Introduction

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and streaming video services. Such a situation would disassemble the national identity associated with carriers and their inflight offerings; the airplane cabin would lose its resemblance to a cosmopolitan film festival and approach a neoliberal cyberspace. The final section of the book, ‘Crises’, examines the link between fear of flying, air disasters and inflight entertainment. The inflight entertainment choices made by airlines have been subjected to a selection process marked by a protocol that aims to avoid screening upsetting material. As a branding and marketing strategy, some airlines have reversed this tactic, providing passengers with uncensored material and, like the strategies inherent with digital media, abdicating the responsibility of choosing material to passengers themselves. Together, the final two chapters trace the history of these practices, placing them alongside similar anxieties regarding screened entertainments in theatrical and domestic contexts. These chapters interrogate incidents in which inflight entertainment systems have played a crucial role in airline catastrophes. This final section takes these incidents as the ground upon which to theorise the emotional link between viewer and screen as a form of distraction from the fact of flight by taking up debates regarding affect and embodiment. Following the work of Paul Virilio on speed and disaster, the penultimate chapter links inflight entertainment and fear of flying. The desirability of air travel is predicated on its speed. The pace and rapidity of air travel present a safety conundrum. On the one hand, fixed-wing aircraft would crash if a certain speed was not achieved (velocity is necessary to lift), and yet it is precisely the speed of the airplane and the rapidity of landings and take-offs that produce dangers in air travel. Speed constitutes a contradiction, both necessary and yet destructive to flight itself. Inflight entertainment also occupies this contradictory position, as safety protocols – often enacted as short videos – remind passengers of their precarious position, while the cinematic content of these systems are chosen or edited to deliberately obscure such dangers. I argue that inflight entertainment attempts to resolve these contradictions by positioning commercial aviation as a kind of thrill ride: a composite of vehicular and perceptual mobility that brings passenger sensation to the brink of catastrophe while simultaneously reassuring the passenger that the ride is perfectly safe. The final chapter furthers this argument connecting inflight entertainment and crisis by examining the applications of live television in the airplane cabin. In the 1930s, television broadcasts to airplanes took on the tasks performed by radar, radio and other communication technologies by serving as navigational aids. Early experimenters hoped that television would help pilots visualise weather not visible to the naked eye from the cockpit or assist in so-called ‘blind’ landings in dense fog or at night. Real-time instantaneous broadcasts were thus crucial to the safety of the aircraft and thus the goal of in-plane television deployment. While these experiments did not make it to the implementation stage (radar and radio managed to perform these functions adequately), the technology necessary for receiving television signals on board an airplane had been introduced. In the 1960s, on the heels of TWA’s introduction of inflight film, live television was included in the entertainment offerings of airlines. The relatively slow speed of airplanes and their routes over urban areas where television signals were broadcast allowed planes to show sporting events such as baseball and football games for short periods during certain flights in the 16

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continental United States. American Airlines, in particular, integrated television technologies in its inflight entertainment system, Astrovision. In addition to the availability of television shows, Astrovision incorporated a closed-circuit system which allowed passengers to watch take-offs and landings through cameras mounted on the airplane’s nose. Here liveness was severed from its relationship with broadcast television and brought into the service of a monitoring and surveillance system. Simultaneously serving as a thrilling and reassuring sight, this component of the Astrovision system mirrored the admixture of crisis and information that characterises television’s presence and liveness.54 Some forty years later, the low-cost carrier JetBlue decided against providing films on its flights (many of which were too short for the exhibition of feature-length films) and decided instead on a satellite-based television technology pioneered by Harris Technologies. The LiveTV system allowed JetBlue planes to receive satellite television signals that could then be displayed audiovisually on small seatback screens and through headphone sets.55 Live television became a cornerstone of JetBlue’s branding strategy, promoting the notion that its passengers were never out of touch with current events, information or even the latest episodes of fictional shows. JetBlue therefore recruited the cultural imaginary of simultaneity into its branding strategy. The relationship between JetBlue’s brand and simultaneity intensified when JetBlue began installing surveillance cameras in its passenger cabins as part of counterterrorism security measures implemented in the wake of 9/11. The monitoring system first pioneered by American Airlines forty years before was turned away from the exterior of the plane and towards the cabin interior, so that passengers became the feature players on television monitors within the cockpit. My investigation of live television in the air thus combines several strands from previous chapters: the connections between safety and distraction, the ethic of constant connection considered indispensable to business travellers and the technological problems involved in making the upper atmosphere habitable and navigable. In addition to offering a critique of liveness in television, this chapter attempts to apprehend the topology of aircraft, satellite, television signal and passenger within the atmosphere under the rubric of suspension. Here, suspension refers to the midair physical co-presence of these objects as well as the predicament of the passenger, suspended between departure and arrival. INFLIGHT ENTERTAINMENT AS GLOBALISATION The metaphor of suspension suggests an alternative understanding of audiovisual media as meteorological. For mechanically exhibited celluloid, the image temporarily takes the form of a beam of light travelling through the air to arrive on a screen. The meteorology of television, radio and wireless internet is also literal, as they depend on waves of energy travelling through the air. In the case of the digital, this has become a promotional and marketing tool, as so-called cloud computing has taken the mantle of rendering communication networks invisible, immaterial and universal. This dream of turning communication into a global network that lacks tactile substance and disappears into air has been a long-standing one for telegraphy, telephony and even Introduction

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cinema.56 Networks of communication were (and are) expected to dissolve boundaries between peoples and nations, between cultures and languages. The exchange between two points is replaced by flow through space, and stability replaced by ephemerality. The techno-fantasy of the universal, immaterial and invisible network of constant communication thus renders globalisation into atmosphere. I use the term quite deliberately to indicate that globalisation itself has a subjective quality ignored by many social scientists and economists while, conversely, cultural theorists too often confuse their own metropolitan and cosmopolitan experiences with structural changes in the economic system. To be sure, globalisation has different significations for the first-class passenger than for the baggage handler. It would be more accurate to consider globalisations rather than a single unitary process of globalisation. Beyond the analytic divisions of financial, cultural, social and juridical, there exist multiple differences in how the utopian project of globalisation itself is conceived even among its proponents (to say nothing of its critics). In addition to site-specific analyses of local responses to globalisation, which seek to ground the abstracted theoretical frameworks so common to globalisation studies by investigating where the local meets the global, we should consider analyses of globalisation that are spatially specific. I have in mind studies of the urban, the rural, the maritime, the railway, the highway, cyberspace or the networks of cabling and wires which enable the systems of signalling, data transmission, even the coordination of movement of labour, goods and services throughout the world. Globalisation is a process of transforming spatial and temporal categories, economic relationships, sovereignties and cultural practices; as such, it is both grounded and ungrounded. By using the term atmosphere, therefore, I suggest that globalisation can be understood if we regard its effects above the ground in addition to on-the-ground transformations. To be on an international flight is to experience globalisation subjectively, even if the full implications of the global are not immediately apparent. Likewise, to fly internationally on a commercial carrier is to participate in the financial, informational and ecological systems that constitute globalisation.57 The sky is occupied by the orchestrators of globalisation: both its human agents and its non-human organisers in the form of data signals. Within the phenomenon of inflight entertainment we find the articulation of these transformations. Cinema itself changes our relationship to space and time: since December 1895, a train could ‘arrive’ anywhere a projector and screen could be set up. That cinema engenders changes in our perceptions is self-evident, yet the fundamental effect of its bewildering (and beguiling) reorientation of spectators’ relationship to space and time should not be underemphasised. Alongside this relatively young technology arose the fixed-wing aircraft, another technology which, also thoroughly embedded in modernity, powerfully altered visions of the world. Both have been recruited into the utopian project of a unitary social scene for humanity, and a presumed destiny for both has been to bring peoples closer together. And yet inflight entertainment reveals the contradictions inherent in the project of globalisation. Its very existence depends on dividing the world: between the mobile and the immobile; between spaces that can be traversed and forbidden zones; between the metropole and the hinterland; between areas of raw materials and centres of design and engineering. The airplane carries inside it the engineers of globalisation, in the form of managers, 18

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financiers, taste-makers, advertising executives, politicians and urban planners, to name but a few. Airline passengers are instructed in the protocols of globalisation inside the plane: the inflight magazine is full of travel articles, tips on negotiating a business deal, advertisements for language-learning software, not to mention the maps of airline route networks and floor plans of airports of different nations and, of course, inflight entertainment menus of movies, television shows, music and talk shows display a cosmopolitan viewpoint. The airplane itself is a harbinger and symbol of globalisation, requiring a global system of data transmission, producing new international and interregional trade routes, as well as enabling off-shore manufacturing and just-in-time inventory. Importantly, the airplane occupies the only globally contiguous spatial category: airspace. The atmosphere envelops the planet much as proponents of globalisation would like to see the world enclosed in a single financial and social system. To reframe globalisation as atmospheric calls attention to globalisation’s aspirations of universality, totality, immateriality and instantaneity.

Introduction

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Imperial Airways exhibition of The Lost World, 1925. Still from ‘Movies’ Above the Clouds! (1925) (Courtesy British Pathé)

1 Global Airspace, Global Cinemaspace

Our postwar world, which will be a shape partly created by global air navigation, will find itself experimenting with some form of a political code, not clearly foreseen now. There may even arrive an era of universal good feeling when it is recognized that all men who fly are brothers. Carl Sandburg, 19431

The film begins with a darkened screen that brightens to reveal the globe of the Earth on a twenty-three-degree axis, rotating towards the east, with the vast blank expanse of the Pacific Ocean in the centre. The chief lighting source is in the north-west, illuminating the Korean peninsula, Japan, Siberia and parts of Alaska. Other smaller light sources are trained on the southern hemisphere, briefly illuminating New Zealand and Australia, and also on the eastern part of the globe, under which southern California passes and eventually parts of south-east Asia and the Indian subcontinent as the globe turns. As these light sources brighten, a biplane appears centred vertically on the left side of the screen, flying, impossibly, above the globe. Starting over the islands of Indonesia, the plane continues its path in a straight line, bisecting the frame, yet turning around the globe, slightly faster than the globe’s rotational speed and maintaining a position that roughly corresponds to the Indonesian archipelago until it disappears behind the eastern horizon on the left side of the frame. Just as the plane is three-quarters of the way across the frame, words begin to appear behind it, emblazoned across and over the globe in a forty-five-degree vertical wipe: ‘A Universal Picture’. The globe never stops turning during this thirteensecond sequence, and the last discernible land mass centred in the frame is Africa, with a bit of South America on the left. The background to the spinning globe is, fantastically, a grouping of clouds, as if the Earth floats in its own sky. The only sounds on the soundtrack are approximations of biplane engine noise. The words ‘A Universal Picture’ are stylised so as to appear warped, as if they are wrapped around the planet’s atmosphere. Like the biplane turning around the globe, the words provide an illusion of three-dimensionality in the two-dimensional plane of the frame, and present a relationship between the world, the airplane and the film studio. This version of the Universal logo, which has featured some variation of a globe since 1914, appears at the start of the 1935 film Bride of Frankenstein. The biplane and globe logo was in use between 1923 and 1936, although the version shown before 1925 had the words ‘Universal Pictures’ appear out of the rear end of the plane, and the post-1925 version was also occasionally used at the end of films, with the words Global Airspace, Global Cinemaspace

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‘The End … It’s a Universal Picture’ appearing as the plane flies west to east. The global reach of film in general and Universal Pictures in particular is made clear through the inclusion of a plane that also has the power to encircle the globe. In order to make the globe visible, its scale needs to be altered, shrunken, so that the representation of the world can fit within the filmic frame. In addition to being a brand differentiation device, the 1925–36 Universal Pictures logo communicates the aspirations of the studio and encapsulates the ideological discourse of globalisation. The words ‘Universal Pictures’ emblazoned over the globe connote the universality and globality of communication via motion pictures and the reach and breadth of Universal Pictures, pointing to the global ambitions of an already transnational corporation. The combination of the Universal Pictures globe with the biplane provides evidence of a different relationship between globality and film, beyond economic conquest and commodity exchange, rooted in a visual culture made possible by aerial technologies. Treating the world in a global sense, as a singularity, requires taking a position outside the globe itself. The Universal Pictures logo positions the viewer extraterrestrially and asks the viewer to contemplate globality. In this imaginary, the biplane and cinema exist above the planet and beyond territory, in regions that transcend political, cultural and social barriers. Above the Earth’s atmosphere, the biplane is actually in orbit, acting as a satellite positioned in outer space. Satellites are crucial to post-World War II globally scaled communication, command and control networks.2 These satellites make the transmission of television signals across the world possible and enable telephone conversations, the global positioning system (GPS) and other forms of data communications. Satellites enable inflight internet access and live television systems, as detailed later in this book, not to mention their role as key contributors to the management of the global aviation system from security to navigation. Still, Universal Pictures probably did not have communication satellites in mind when choosing this logo. The use of satellites for communication systems was not widely anticipated until 1945, when Arthur C. Clarke published ‘Extraterrestrial Relays’ in Wireless World. By then Universal had changed its logo to a spinning transparent globe with no land masses represented on its surface, emanating beams of light as the words ‘A Universal Picture’ spin around it. However, Universal was not alone in promoting globalised media via its branding during this period; the concept of a communicative ray that envelops the world was common to several other Hollywood studio logos, including RKO and Columbia, which also featured giant figures astride the globe.3 The image of the impossibly huge airplane above a globe was widespread for airlines, appearing in various forms in advertisements for American Airlines, Air France, Braniff International Airways, Northwest Airlines, Philippine Airlines, Delta Airlines, Pan American World Airways, Dutch Royal Airlines (KLM), Scandinavian Airline Systems (SAS), Trans World Airlines and British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) in the decade after World War II. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw the twin technological transformations of the atmosphere into airspace and mediatised into a carrier of messages, symbols and imaginaries. It becomes the screen upon which globalist fantasies are projected as well as the site for the realisation of these fantasies. In this chapter, I consider civil aviation and cinema alongside each other as participants and 24

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enablers of globalisation processes dating back 100 years. Cinema and civil aviation have worked in concert as a means for conceiving the world as a global singularity. I primarily bring to light juridical practices of regulation and sovereignty that the ascendancy of these two global industries have contributed to cultural globalisation. By relying on two case studies – the international trade disagreement over inflight entertainment in the 1960s and the standardisation of DVD regions in the 1990s – I argue that inflight entertainment emblematises the fashion in which globalisation articulates the national to an emergent global capitalist system via non-state actors and transnational organisations. The Universal Pictures logo also illustrates one of the main strands of aviation discourse: ‘freedom of the air’. In the cosmopolitan imaginary, aviation, like many communication technologies, has the ability to bring the peoples of the world closer, but only if the development and use of this new-found resource and accompanying technologies are unfettered by interference. In a 1943 speech, Clare Boothe Luce called this new world without geographic obstacles ‘air world’ and exhorted her colleagues in Congress to embrace the future ‘language of the air’.4 Again mirroring rhetorics associated with the telegraph, radio, television and the internet, variants of the ‘freedom of the air’ doctrine proclaim that since the air is already naturally empty of obstacles it is by definition free and open to all. These proclamations linking transportation and communication technologies to freedom and global community ignore, neglect and/or gloss over the fashion in which technical infrastructure – including material structures and expertise – determines the shape of transportation and communication networks: who they serve and who they benefit. Indeed, Luce’s speech invoking an ‘air world’ was meant to end the practice of segmenting airspace according to extant national boundaries, which had been in place since 1919. National governments have further divided their national airspace into blocks and passages. These practices are still in place, limiting travel through the air to certain types of vehicles and usually regulated and enforced by a set of national governmental agencies.5 The global system of civil aviation is predicated on the invisible division of the atmosphere via regulations which depend on the scientific measurement of altitude, distance and speed – in order to access the air, it must first be rationalised and then technologised. The cosmopolitan dreams of ‘freedom of the air’ and of a unified world rely on technology for their realisation. Indeed the new cosmopolitanism of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries counts on the installation of technological infrastructure – the internet, civil aviation – to help usher in a new age of friendly coexistence of difference. The introduction of technological systems into aerial spaces makes possible the cultural imaginary of a transparent and traversable world and, crucially, the production, reproduction and management of these globalist visions become the responsibility of those groups benefiting from those technological systems, be they aircraft manufacturers, business travellers or entertainment companies. The dream of a global cinema is illustrative here. Although some early cinema prognosticators, such as Edward von Zile, envisioned cinema as the carrier of a universal language, cinema’s production, distribution and exhibition patterns have followed paths of pre-existing technical development and financial infrastructure. Numerous histories of cinema as an international, transnational or global enterprise Global Airspace, Global Cinemaspace

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chronicle the fashion in which the concentration of resources drives the global ambitions of film-makers.6 For a globalised Hollywood, the landscapes of Australia, the Philippines and Morocco are treated as the raw material of locations. High-budget film productions also gain financial advantages by exploiting difference within the global economic system. Computer-generated and other special effects may be completed in New Zealand, while the musical soundtrack may be performed by central European orchestras: practices taking advantage of cheaper labour and looser labour laws. Financing for these multi-million-dollar productions is managed in financial hubs like New York, while their cultural administration occurs in southern California. Toby Miller and others have called this process of dividing the labour of manufacturing a high-budget feature film between workers in different nations the New International Division of Cultural Labour.7 Accordingly centred in what Michael Curtin dubbed ‘media capitals’, cinema thus pursues its own logics and interests which may or may not coincide with the national interests of the nation state in which the media capital is located.8 Coordinating such a production process depends on rapid transportation and communication technologies to facilitate face-to-face meetings.9 That the flow of Hollywood films into international markets increased exponentially after World War II may have been due to a confluence of factors, but it was no coincidence that the emergence of Hollywood as a global industry coincided with the jet age. Logistically, the dispersal of production internationally, the shipment of films themselves to theatres, the transnational financing of production projects and the importation of talent depends on aviation networks to transport people and goods rapidly over great distances. In a sense, air travel makes global cinema possible: on the production side it is the mode that enables face-to-face encounters between members of a global cultural workforce; distribution involves the transportation of cans of film via airplane (although the new age of digital projection may further verticalise transnational distribution into outer space via satellite); and air travel enables the transnational film festival circuit, crucial to cultivating an audience for cinema. Like the film festival, global aviation relies on the national and calls it into question. The networks of aviation routes reshape global space so as to bind one urban area to another, ignoring the intervening territory. As a result of their place in transportation and communication networks, urban areas act as spaces of mediation characterised by exchange and flow, rather than being self-contained and autonomous as older modes of political science might have conceived of nation states and city states. The rapid transportation networks that make globalisation possible have progressed from ‘shrinking’ to ‘crumpling’ to ‘shrivelling’ of the globe.10 Due to the networked nature of transportation systems, the gravitational pull of global cities in the centripetal and centrifugal flows which characterise globalisation, the globe does not shrink evenly, but ends up progressively wrinkled, like a dried apple. Eric Sheppard has argued that these radical disjunctures of position open up ‘wormholes’ which connect the previously unconnected and/or unconnectable.11 Aviation creates new space and also changes international and geopolitical categories through its ability to create these wormholes. International commercial aviation creates new borders and thresholds between places and regions that previously did not abut or adjoin one another. International arrival terminals – the nodes of the commercial aviation network – function as the border between nations for international flights. In this way, 26

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a city or town that previously had little or nothing to do with customs inspection, passport control, national security or international relations can be reconfigured as a border town. In other words, the traditional understanding of the geographic boundary of a nation – that it can be mapped onto physical territory and that it is a continuous line between two or more geographic entities (albeit one full of curves, turns and twists) – no longer holds. The network of international aviation has made any town or city with an airstrip part of the national boundary. The boundary line is no longer continuous, but marked by ruptures, gaps, sudden jumps in physical location. For air travellers, international boundaries lose their status as place (the virtually interchangeable customs and passport control operations of major international airports qualify as what Marc Auge calls ‘non-places’) and are experienced as spatial abstractions.12 The kinship with cinema is fairly clear. Writing on the travel film genre, Jeffrey Ruoff made this kinship explicit: ‘the cinema is a machine for constructing relations of space and time’.13 Cinema visualises the world as disjunctive and yet continuous. That is, disparate times and places can be spliced together so that the ‘map’ of celluloid is stitched together to form a continuous strip, thereby producing what V. I. Pudovkin called a ‘creative geography’. Pudovkin found cinema’s ability to visually represent physically disconnected places as contiguous within the filmic representation more intriguing and full of potential than the notion of audiences virtually travelling to the sights depicted in cinema.14 The particular ability of cinema to smooth over radical disjunctures of place through editing and an adherence to internal temporal and spatial logics has, of course, been the subject of film theory and film studies since their inception. As Natasa Durovicova put it in an essay connecting cinema to globalisation, ‘built as it was on the paired desires to bring the distant closer and make the proximate strange enough to be worth seeing, cinema was a superb workshop for … perceptual mismatches’.15 Like tourism itself, cinema has been invested in a dialectic of the familiar and the exotic, the distant and the proximate, which Durovicova connected to ‘spatio-temporalities mismatched in scale and speed’ that characterise the ‘essential features of globalization’.16 For the purposes of my argument, it suffices that in this fashion film and aviation are homologous: the filmic wormholes created through editing mirror the geopolitical wormholes propagated by aviation so that spatiotemporal disjunctures, ruptures, leaps and gaps, characterise the experience of globalisation along axes of mobility and visuality. The technologies of cinema and aviation do not simply compress space and time so much as rearrange spatial and temporal relationships; if we think of civil aviation and cinema as forms of scalar superimposition, then globalisation is the optical printer. Cinema represents the semblance of three-dimensional space on the two-dimensional plane of the screen, thereby manufacturing a new spatial category: cinematic space. Air transportation, similarly, has generated a new juridical regime: airspace. NEW CATEGORIES OF SPACE AND SOVEREIGNTY Airspace originated in the Paris International Conference of Air Navigation in 1910. At the start of the twentieth century, the introduction of aviation technologies such as Global Airspace, Global Cinemaspace

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rigid airships able to cross national boundaries created international crises. European political leaders quickly realised that their territorial and cultural sovereignty could be violated in ways not previously imagined and set about erecting protections. Great Britain and France viewed Germany’s turn-of-the-century development of Zeppelin technology as a threat to national sovereignty. Germany, on the other hand, found the rigid airship was ‘a liberating technology, because of the potential free access to the aerial ocean above all nations’. The Paris Conference broke up when the three countries could not reach an agreement. In 1911, the British parliament passed the British Aerial Navigation Act, which granted Britain sovereignty and property rights over the air above British soil, including the British Empire. Previous to the introduction of longrange German Zeppelins, the question of who controlled the area above the land and sea was irrelevant, if not unthinkable.17 The introduction of the long-range German airship during the early part of the twentieth century dramatically exemplifies the technical production of space and the political consequences of spatial production through transportation technology. The shores of Britain were no longer protected by the English Channel and North Sea; it was as if Germany suddenly adjoined south-east England through a Zeppelin-made ‘wormhole’. British and French fears regarding the ability of airships to travel over their territory with impunity would turn out to be well founded, as the Germans used rigid airships during World War I to bomb parts of England and France, including London and Paris. The airship and its descendants belong in a class of technologies that act on spatial relationships, as if folding a map of the world, bringing previously unconnected points together and binding them in a mutually reliant relationship. This constellation of technologies also includes the telegraph, telephone, television and photographic devices, demonstrating a kinship between transportation and communication. Neglected in this genealogy is the way in which the actual use and deployment of these technologies depends on cooperation between states, private firms and other institutions. Civil aviation may be the prime example of the processes described by Saskia Sassen in which the national acts as a member of a network in the global system, controlling the way in which it is connected to the global system – how it can access the global and how the global can access it.18 Airspace is a transnational space, yet the operability of this spatial category relies on international agreements. Early attempts at aeronautical regulation tried to take maritime law as their basis, including the doctrine of ‘freedom of the seas’. That aviation has borrowed even its language from the maritime model is no accident (pilots, stewards, airports, airships etc.). The significant flaw to this borrowing, as the example of the German Zeppelin demonstrates, is that air vessels could, in theory, access any point within a nation state, whereas sea vessels were usually limited to already designated (and thus defended and regulated) seaports. The postwar Paris Convention Relating to International Air Navigation inaugurated the system of air ‘highways’ or ‘corridors’ through which commercial flights could navigate. These passages in the air were designated and controlled by the nation state that had sovereign control over the airspace in question. The result was that landing rights, air routes and other aspects of commercial aviation were open to negotiation. Because air travel was seen as an extension of state power and therefore a matter of national security, commercial enterprise in this period faced numerous obstacles. Landing and refuelling rights were 28

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particularly onerous in this regard, since the technical characteristics of planes in this period made them only suitable for short flights: transcontinental or transoceanic flights of passenger or cargo planes could not be achieved without refuelling. Britain therefore proceeded along a path of linking up its vast and distant imperial holdings in an airline network, attempting to circumvent the sovereign airspace of other nations in the construction of a global network of aviation.19 At the 1932 Geneva General Disarmament Conference, air power was considered so great a threat to peace and such a powerful war weapon that proposals were considered outlawing national airlines and air forces. In their place a global airline would be organised and operated by an international agency. For a brief moment, it looked as if globalisation could be achieved aeronautically. In effect, the proposal designated airspace as inherently transnational, in that it could not be shown to be attached to the territory of any nation in particular. These proposals failed, due to a multitude of factors that could reductively be characterised as a distrust of Germany, British desire to keep its air power as an imperial police force, and the lack of interest in the conference as a whole on the part of the United States and the Soviet Union.20 The 1944 Chicago Convention on International Civil Aviation was notable in that it established the International Civil Aviation Organization, under the auspices of the United Nations to regulate the interoperability of safety and technical matters; the general right to transit through a nation’s airspace without explicit permission, unless a signatory opts out of this clause; and the state sovereignty of airspace above state territory, the corollary being that all scheduled landings (air traffic) must be conducted with the permission of the state in whose territory the landing is scheduled. Following the Chicago Convention, representatives of major world airlines met in Havana and formed the International Air Transport Association. These agreements and international organisations underline Sassen’s point regarding the relationship between the national and the global: the continued control over national territory exemplified by the maintenance of airspace sovereignty coupled with the liberalisation of airspace via the creation of an international network of air paths for civil aviation indicates an assertion of the nation state while still enhancing the processes of globalisation.21 Between 1946 and 1973, when the United States dominated civil aviation (flying 45 per cent of global passenger miles), the corridors of airspace as well as landing and refuelling rights were governed by a series of bilateral agreements between nation states, fitting the framework agreed in Chicago (although bilateralism was not explicitly set as the only form of agreement) and following the precedent set in the Bermuda agreement between the United Kingdom and the United States in 1946.22 The global network of aviation, therefore, cannot be fully understood without taking into account the power and policies of nation states alongside the actions of private firms, as well as the formation of multinational organisations such as the IATA. Thus it was in the aftermath of World War II that the competing structures governing civil air transport were formed – one an agency of technological standardisation under the aegis of an interstate membership organisation, another made up of an international system of state signatories, and a third a trade cartel of major transnational corporations – setting the stage for the inflight entertainment controversy of the 1960s described below. Global Airspace, Global Cinemaspace

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THE INTERNATIONAL FRAMEWORK FOR INFLIGHT FILM The introduction of inflight entertainment by TWA on flights across the Atlantic in August 1961 provides another example of the way in which the national prepares and alters its institutions in order to embrace or connect to the global. TWA had signed an exclusive contract with InFlight Motion Pictures (IMP), a company founded by Memphis theatrical exhibitor David Flexer. It began showing 16mm films in the firstclass cabin on flights between New York City and Europe, with other routes following, such as between New York and Los Angeles (see Chapter 3). TWA’s market share in the North Atlantic increased as a result of the introduction of inflight films. European carriers claimed that the inclusion of films in the ticket fare constituted a form of unfair competition. Economy class had just been introduced in 1960, so the presence of filmed entertainment in the first-class cabin as a further mark of distinction between the classes was seen as a violation of the agreements signed by members of the IATA. Because one of the main responsibilities of the IATA was price setting, the major issue regularly addressed at IATA meetings was the question of what airlines actually sell or, put from a different perspective, what passengers get for the price of a ticket. For many carriers, the inclusion of inflight films meant that TWA’s flights were in a different product category. The topic was addressed but not resolved at the October 1964 IATA meeting. In a January 1965 meeting of the IATA in Paris, member airlines proposed to ban all films in airplanes, citing TWA’s favourable contract terms with InFlight Motion Pictures and TWA’s inclusion of extra service as a violation of trade agreements. The fact that Philippine Airlines and Pakistan International Airlines were also showing films at the time did not seem to bother any of the other airlines, indicating that the dispute was not about inflight films per se as much as it was about TWA’s rising market share as a result of the inflight films and the European airlines’ inability or unwillingness to introduce systems of their own. At an April meeting, IATA members agreed that inflight films would be banned, and sixteen airlines would pay TWA to remove the inflight film equipment. The US-based Civil Aeronautics Board (USCAB) refused to approve the ban, claiming it violated US antitrust regulations because it discriminated against the US motion picture industry. USCAB based its reasoning on a Justice Department brief which claimed, essentially, that the ban was made by a cartel that unfairly prohibited the film industry from selling its product. As a result, TWA continued to show films on its international and domestic long-haul flights. After USCAB supplied data to the IATA demonstrating that the additional cost of inflight films ranged from a dollar and six cents to a dollar and seventy cents per seat, the IATA compromised with a fee system, which was adopted at the IATA’s November conference in Vienna. The charge was two dollars and fifty cents, thereby circumventing the question of product differentiation. TWA’s ticket fare was exchanged for the same product that every other airline could provide; the additional fee was for the film only. By February 1966 Pan Am and TWA started charging only one dollar to economy-class passengers, and only a few months later started giving headphones free to first-class passengers, leading to another round of IATA and USCAB talks.23 The protracted battles between an organisation of firms with multinational presence and the national governmental bodies that member firms enlisted to their 30

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cause illustrates Sassen’s argument that in globalisation studies, the state should ‘be conceived of as representing a technical administrative capacity enabling the implementation of a corporate global economy’.24 Essentially, the state creates agencies like USCAB as an institutional mechanism for the national to connect to the global network. In order for TWA to continue to profit in the global aviation network, inflight films were necessary. TWA’s increased market share meant an influx of non-US capital into the United States, which in turn was subject to its financial regulatory apparatus. In the case of the inflight entertainment controversy, the national was used strategically by both the US airlines and the US film industry. USCAB does not sit on IATA meetings, partly because technically the IATA is not international, in the sense that there are no national signatories to its agreements; rather individual airlines agree to its terms, even though state representatives may be present at negotiations and meetings. Particularly in the case of so-called flag carriers (which are sponsored or subsidised by national governments and required to carry the national flag on all vessels), the division between the national and the private corporation is fraught, since the private firm is charged with representing the nation. Therefore the national is brought into play because the USCAB (a state agency established in 1939) and the IATA agreements regulate TWA’s operations. USCAB supplies information and a lobbying strategy to TWA (with assistance from the MPAA and the Justice Department) in order to bring about the desired resolution at IATA meetings. Thus the introduction of regularly scheduled inflight films exemplifies the multi-scalar dynamics of globalisation, in which the regional (North Atlantic air travel) and the national (USCAB) interact with the transnational (IATA). While navigation of airspace by aviation technologies was negotiated bilaterally, the international bilateral agreements do not apply in the same way to entertainment and other passenger cabin amenities, which, in the 1960s, were already subject to the dynamics of a globalising economy. Air service agreements depend on notions of corporate citizenship and nationality in a territorial understanding of legal regimes, mainly because airplanes must land on and take off from the ground. The aerial presence of passenger cabins necessarily causes them to be subject to a more fluid and dynamic set of regulatory battles. Thus the debate over inflight entertainment took place within what James Schwoch calls ‘extraterritorial spaces’. Rooted in his history of the Cold War as a global telecommunications project, Schwoch defines extraterritorial space as ‘beyond the traditionally understood borders and perimeters of nation-states’, including (but not limited to) the electromagnetic spectrum, undersea cables, outer space and the upper atmosphere.25 The notion of extraterritorial space furnishes the pivot point from which analyses of the transformation from an imperial era, with its attendant concerns with territory acquisition, to the era of globalisation, in which conflicts proceed upwards from the land into the air and space, can be staged. GLOBALISATION AS FLOW Globalisation relies on a series of juridical regimes, financial arrangements and modes of conceiving the world predicated on rethinking the spatial and temporal constraints of the planet and everyday life within it. The ability to complete financial transactions Global Airspace, Global Cinemaspace

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inter-, multi-, and trans- nationally necessitates the rewriting of legal frameworks governing these transactions. Likewise, the ability to travel from one point to another depends on treaties and legal frameworks (the passport system would be the preeminent example) and the construction of infrastructure to handle travellers and the vehicles that carry them. Although often experienced by travellers as centrifugal, globalisation has a centripetal component as well, in which the infrastructure for motility – transportation hubs and telecommunication networks – are centralised in urban locations. The position of these urban locations within a global lattice of transportation and communication networks nominates them as global cities. As John Kasarda and Greg Lindsay put it, urbanity built around and in support of airports ‘represents the logic of globalization made flesh’.26 Aviation thus calls attention to the multi-scalar nature of globalisation: aircraft take off from one locality and land in another, traverse national boundaries, supply (and are supplied by) multinational corporations, fly routes set by regional treaties and agreements, and navigate via an extraterrestrial network of satellites supplying them with digital information regarding their location. Manuel Castells has called this new social formation defined by high-speed communication and transportation systems the ‘network society’, and demonstrated that the network society carries with it a new spatial logic dominant over the traditional ‘space of places’, a category corresponding to stationary physical locations with distinctive traits. The space of places relies on territorial contiguity and nonnetworked heterogeneity. In other words, the space of places is the spatial logic upon which tourism bases its appeal. Travelling to another place is appealing precisely because the second place is qualitatively different from the first and yet is still reachable, a dialectic of the familiar and exotic endemic to film, tourism and civil aviation. But since, according to Castells, the global information economy requires standardised and homogenised systems and regulations to function properly, a new spatial logic predominates the economic and financial spheres of human society and threatens to dominate the cultural and social spheres as well. This new spatial configuration – the space of flows – is a process of articulating places despite their lack of territorial contiguity and disarticulating territorially contiguous places. The juridical regime of airspace is but one method of producing the space of flows: the division of the atmosphere into blocks and routes, the bilateral agreements between nation states and the technologisation of the atmosphere via beacons, radar and radio communications have all transformed the air into traversable space. Despite the congruence between the commercial aviation network itself and the space of flows, it is the durability of the space of places that causes aviation to exist in the first place. In other words, places must be made to connect through the network, and the reason the global system still needs a network of human transportation (rather than only a network which transports messages and not human bodies) is that physical copresence is still necessary in business to build trust and still necessary in tourism to create wonder and spectacle.27 But when physical co-presence is impossible or unavailable, it can be approximated or simulated. In Castells’s words, the space of flows is ‘the material arrangements that allow for simultaneity of social practices without territorial contiguity’.28 The technologies, institutions, interoperable systems and digitalisation, as well as the 32

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experts and technicians which accompany these ‘material arrangements’ enable longdistance financial transactions and business management. This would include the emergent global image market crystallised within inflight entertainment practices: an Indian tourist in Delhi can embark on an Airbus 340 (assembled in France with British, French and German capital) flown by Cathay Pacific (a Hong Kong-based airline originally founded by an American and Australian in Shanghai) and fly to Bangkok and, while on board, watch the 2013 science fiction special effects extravaganza Gravity (financed by British and US capital, while directed and co-written by Alfonso Caurón, a Mexican citizen and son of a United Nations official) on a nine-inch digital touch screen (designed in Japan and manufactured in Japan and the United States) embedded in the seatback mere months after its premiere at the Venice International Film Festival. In short, the domination of the new spatial logics of globalisation reshapes the world so that loyalty to practice trumps loyalty to place. The imaginary tourist here may be an international cinephile, but it is difficult to establish any of the products and services necessary for the particular form of spectatorship just described as located in a nation or national imaginary. Indeed, as my example shows, status can be attained through the achievement of multiple place-loyalties, so that the cosmopolitan project of identity extends even to the commodity itself (or, put another way, Gravity is ‘at home in the world’). The instruments of mass culture, be they cinema, television or other communication technologies, have initiated new ways of dividing and connecting the world. Production practices are dispersed, making regions across the globe potential sources for labour and materials, as well as turning regions into markets for products manufactured, assembled and designed transnationally.29 Vital to this dispersal of production is the diffusion of the finished product. In many cases, in order to perpetuate social practices despite the lack of territorial contiguity, spatial arrangements are created to both transcend previous geographic and topographic barriers and yet strengthen pre-existing political, linguistic and economic ones. The film industry and its agglomeration of technologies are predicated on precisely this kind of spatial remapping. One such example is the division of the world into region codes by the DVD Forum. This arrangement is designed to prevent piracy by segmenting the global market, thus potentially reducing the flow of pirated DVDs from one region into another; for instance, China is quarantined into a single region. DVD regions exemplify new categories of territoriality in which digital copyright regulations trump previous forms of sovereignty. In order to make visual culture globally available and profitable, the world is segmented into regions that do not adhere to national or linguistic boundaries. The markets for digital technologies, whose attributes make them more open to duplication, sharing, copying and grey market distribution, retain certain national boundaries and also blend and mix territories to create new and unlikely transnational configurations.30 The World Airline Entertainment Association is another such transnational organisation that brings together disparate groups for the management and furtherance of communication and transportation technologies. The WAEA was founded in 1979, bringing together airlines, avionics manufacturers, content producers and distributors in an effort to help standardise inflight entertainment practices and technologies.31 At the time, there were multiple competing technologies Global Airspace, Global Cinemaspace

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– 16mm projection, 8mm cassettes, videotape and closed-circuit television systems – and inflight entertainment had grown from a controversial novelty in 1961 to standard practice on nearly 100 airlines. Because DVD technology offered greater storage for less weight and greater flexibility in the display of content, it was an attractive medium for inflight entertainment in the 1990s. The 1990s had been characterised by the rise of interactive inflight entertainment systems that were enormously complex and plagued by reliability issues. The WAEA’s technical committee worked on writing the specifications for an airline-specific encryption for DVDs, asking DVD manufacturers to produce DVDs that could only be played on equipment found on airplanes. The new region created by this initiative, Region Eight, eventually included airplanes, cruise ships and other passenger vehicles that regularly traversed national borders. The WAEA, a transnational organisation that represents an industry and yet sets standards and rules by which other industries, firms and even nations abide, embodies new forms of sovereignty and the relationships between the local and the global that Sassen argued typify and make way for globalisation. The WAEA technical committee has also been instrumental in creating the standards for inflight satellite television, inflight software applications, content licensing, inflight internet access and, perhaps most importantly, standardising airplane cabin electrical wiring so that electronics manufacturers can design a single system for multiple airlines and multiple aircraft, something which was not possible in the 1960s.32 For Castells, the WAEA is part of the third layer of the space of flows, ‘the spatial organization of dominant, managerial elites’, who in turn structure and shape the other two layers: ‘nodes and hubs’ (e.g. airports, global cities) and the ‘circuit of electronic exchanges’ (e.g. DVD regions).33 Region Eight, reserved for special international venues and a region with the potential to traverse all territories, cannot even appear on a map. The space of flows, as exemplified by DVD region codes, has created extra-cartographic space, in the sense that Region Eight cannot be represented on the same map as the other regions. Because the region is coterminous with transportation vehicles, it can potentially be anywhere and is locatable only as a series of discrete and separated points indicating the location of high-speed vehicles. Region Eight thus represents what Schwoch calls ‘extraterritoriality’ alongside the electromagnetic spectrum and outer space, which formed the basis of the media communication conflict of the Cold War and whose regulation and resolution continue to be subject to the transnational corporate agencies formed through globalisation. At the same time, Region Eight is an institutional acknowledgment of the special case of the inflight movie: a transnational space of cinema exhibition relying on relatively new forms of rapid transportation technologies. Region Eight crystallises the space of flows by demonstrating the institutional structures, expertise and markets that must be deployed and present in order for the processes of cultural globalisation to proceed. CONCLUSION: AIR WORLD Airspace has special status as a spatial category. Unlike other spatial forms, airspace encircles the globe; it is not delimited as partially global. But airspace cannot be occupied by humans without technological assistance; it must be interrupted by 34

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aircraft and other technological intercessions. To the naked eye, air appears homogenous and without boundaries: every bit of air is the same as every other bit, with no characteristic markers. This presented problems to early aviators, who had difficulty navigating without landmarks and flying at night. Airspace had to be rationalised and technologised, allowing aircraft to travel safely. In instances of landscape absence (flying at night, oversea flights and those in cloud cover or above clouds) airspace could only be navigated through a system of invisible signals (radar and other technical applications of the electromagnetic spectrum), so that the navigation of one extraterritoriality required the use of another. The project of making global space habitable is thus a project of colonisation – both in the sense of creating a habitable territory out of a space that was previously thought to be uninhabitable and in the sense of establishing a more or less permanent population in that territory. Airspace is currently realised as a space of control and is occupied by the powerful via technologies at the pinnacle of modern innovation. The ability to navigate and traverse airspace depends not just on the proper technological prowess, but on gaining the permission of those who have already laid claim to the power to fold the map and create wormholes through the technologies of aeromobility. The debate over the power to determine who can fly where and when reached a crisis point in 1943, leading up to the 1944 Chicago Convention. In her 1943 inaugural speech to Congress, Connecticut Representative Clare Boothe Luce, wife of publisher Henry Luce and neighbour to Pan Am founder Juan Trippe, characterised freedom of the skies as the primary and most urgent issue facing the United States after the war. Luce championed freedom of the air, seeing ‘internationalization of all air space by international consent’ as crucial to US postwar interests.34 For Luce, freedom of the skies meant multilateral agreements between all nation states, so that freedom was still determined by the state, not airlines. Luce lost this fight, as the Chicago Convention strengthened and reaffirmed national air sovereignty and bilateral agreements between nation states. National air sovereignty enshrined by the Chicago Convention is therefore part of what John Torpey called the state-held ‘monopoly on the legitimate means of movement’ asserted through a series of juridical regimes and identificatory practices, chief among them the passport.35 Somewhat counterintuitively, though, the notion of national airspace is crucial to economic globalisation and the transnational flow of capital for investment. Timothy Brennan has argued that, ‘the state under globalisation ensures that the heightened mobility of capital is not matched by the mobility of labor’.36 As a form of sovereignty, airspace keeps this role of the state intact by controlling the movement of persons despite the potential for their mobility to match the mobility of capital. As Lucy Budd has pointed out, ‘the oftvaunted “freedom” of the air is largely an illusion, and the space available for different types of flight is restricted. The existing airspace structure requires commercial aircraft to fly along strictly defined airways.’37 The current segmentation of airspace has resulted from the success of the 1911 British doctrine that national sovereignty extends into the atmosphere, coupled with the establishment of aerial trade routes. In essence the contemporary airspace regime extends economic liberalism vertically: the state provides the public good (airspace), some of which is reserved for defence purposes, and grants the use of airspace corridors for those private firms willing to pay the tolls (in the form of tariffs, gate fees and airport usage fees). Global Airspace, Global Cinemaspace

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It is worth examining, though, how Luce’s argument for a global ‘air world’ was founded on local notions of freedom and liberty that Luce wanted to universalise. Luce’s vision for the future air world was based on a heroic vision of American airmen and engineers whose deeds would underwrite individual air liberties. She backed her arguments with rhetoric that thus glossed over state power and promoted a global imaginary based on the technological capabilities of aircraft and the presumed natural characteristics of the atmosphere: [A pilot] looks at the globe, and he does not see as you and I do, a land-and-water world. He sees an air world … . There is only one barrier in the use of the airplane, and that barrier is man’s own inability to breathe and to keep warm in the stratosphere. This is a technological conquest that is not far off.38

According to Luce, the only barrier to the ‘air world’ is the speed of technological innovation on the one hand, and the conservative, backward-looking disposition of policy makers, who still live in the ‘land-and-water world’. Luce chided Congress, saying, ‘Today boys in grammar schools and high schools … are talking the language of tomorrow, the language of the air.’39 That future economic, social and cultural development depended on the technological production and exploitation of airspace is undeniable; but Luce, like so many that romanticise global networks, conveniently neglected the crucial point that control over the products of technology often stays in the hands of those who control the technology in question. Luce’s desire for the creation of an ‘air world’ in this way echoes Brennan’s assertion that, ‘cosmopolitanism is local while denying its local character’.40 Or, put another way, the ‘air world’ of Luce’s imagination is an American ‘air world’ in which the values from a particular portion of the globe determine and structure the governance and regulations of a shared global space. In essence, Luce advocated a particular mode of being in the ‘new aerial age’ which she saw as both unprecedented and offering opportunities to create a ‘purportedly supranational ethos of global cooperation (cosmopolitanism)’.41 And yet there is a contradiction inherent to this notion of cosmopolitanism, since cosmopolitanism, like tourism, air travel and even transnational cinema, depends on immobile locals – those who provide the culture, history and authenticity for the cosmopolitan to explore, discover and share with others. Thus this project of cosmopolitanism relies on ‘the concentration of freedom to move and to act’ that Zygmunt Bauman argued has come to define the contemporary milieu of globalisation, a concentration that did not begin with aeromobility, although aeromobility is currently its highest form.42 If, as Brennan asserted, the discourse of globalisation ‘holds out hope for the creation of new communities and unforeseen solidarities’ such as the pilots, high school boys and aeronautical dreamers who populate Luce’s air world, it also imagines ‘that the world is being reconstituted as a single social space’.43 The cosmopolitan air world of Luce’s vision likewise depended on a shared space in which to practise aeronautical activities. Luce advocated not so much a world citizenship, in which notions of nationality would no longer matter, far from it. Rather, Luce was imagining a new era, in which the materiality of the ground, its gravities and pressures, could be left behind and utopia achieved through a free-floating aerial citizenry that was no 36

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longer beholden to topographical and geographical barriers. Were these barriers to fall, then political boundaries might also disappear, so from Luce’s point of view, it was better that the United States lead the way in this new age than get left behind. Airlines had similar visions of global conquest, and ‘the 1940s and 1950s saw a race between the world’s leading air carriers to be the first to offer, and then to have the best, roundthe-world service’ leading to the iconography of advertisements described at the beginning of the chapter: the impossibly huge airplane superimposed over a globe.44 The visions of a national-sovereignty-free space in the clouds were undone by the Chicago Convention, so that international agreements, treaties and logistics continue to create navigable corridors by segmenting airspace. Within these ‘air blocks’ are a variety of different vehicles that in turn further separate people into groups. The multiplicity of choices and products available in the global capitalist economy may take the appearance of a consumerist freedom, a ‘happy chaos of an infinitely mobile citizenry’, or even a postmodern social order composed of self-creating subjects.45 But freedom and mobility are still managed and administered as transport: humans moved by vehicles both cinematic and physical. A common attachment to media devices makes a community of the air possible; not just the screens in front of passengers, but the screens in front of air traffic controllers, pilots, travel agents, ticketing clerks, as well as the screens of financial institutions that generate and dispense the capital for these activities. Thus the combination of transportation and communication technologies attempts to create a single social space in a global homogenous spatial category. On board the airplane, even without a simultaneity of media experience, the presence of screens is part of an organisational strategy fostering the requisite values of consumerism and productivity which articulate individuals into the global capitalist system. This articulation is often achieved through the formation of distinctive identity formations, for example, the aspirational cosmopolitan identity, in which air travel itself constitutes a prime measure. Indeed, Bauman sees the formation of meaning and status within globalisation as dependent on modes of transport: ‘mobility has become the most powerful and most coveted stratifying factor; the stuff of which the new, increasingly world-wide, social, political, economic and cultural hierarchies are daily built and rebuilt’.46 According to Marc Dierlikx, this process began in the 1920s, since civil aviation, beside being the prime mover of high-value merchandise, such as electrical equipment, jewelry, and international gold shipments between central banks … aircraft were also discovered as ideal vehicles for long-distance transportation of perishable goods, such as fresh flowers, fruits, and various delicacies like gourmet cheeses and ice cream [and for] the affluent few … life acquired a more cosmopolitan touch.47

That this list of merchandise reads like the contents of the SkyMall catalogue is no coincidence. Diversity and cross-cultural contact are rendered familiar and manageable through commoditisation and consumerism. For Sean Cubbitt, cosmopolitanism has become, over recent decades, a commodity, sold through travel guides, consumed as hybrid cooking, branded and attached to cigarettes, soft drinks, alcohol, and perfumes, hotel chains and news networks, and used to entice an increasingly peripatetic Global Airspace, Global Cinemaspace

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managerial class. The consumer of this lifestyle option, to use the marketing cant, was neighbor to the consumer of art house cinema, the refined, urbane inhabitant of other cultures, the incarnation of neoliberalism’s pluralist multiculturalism.48

What is being offered through civil aviation is a variant of globalisation that uses cosmopolitanism as a status marker. That is, a globalisation not interested in universalisation or homogeneity that depends ‘to a very large extent on local and particularistic border crossings’, correlated to an increased ‘range of significant relationships formed across state borders’ (indeed that the amount and intensity of these are both markers of the cosmopolitan and taken as evidence of globalisation), but aided by the creation of familiar spaces, such as ‘frequent-flyer lounges [in which] contemporary cosmopolitans meet others of different backgrounds in spaces that retain familiarity’.49 Inflight entertainment helps achieve all of these: the airplane cabin operates as both a space of luxury and familiarity; it affords the opportunity for pluralistic encounters with difference; it affords the accoutrements of both the tourist, the cosmopolitan, the kinetic elite and the transnational businessperson. These identities are cultivated and managed through the image, and the screens within the cabin provide a ‘festival’ of diverse entertainments thereby fostering cinephilia (the subject of the next chapter), the cinematic technologies and interfaces emulate the familiar spaces of the home or the theatre, rendering the ‘shock’ of these cross-cultural encounters safe; and, in many cases, allow for the condensation and co-performance of wage labour and leisure (in the form of sensory labour), as well as the assuaging of anxieties and other affective discomforts (such as boredom) that threaten the management and administration of aerial globalisation.

38

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Passengers watching a travel film onboard a Pan Am 747, ca. 1971 (Courtesy Special Collections, University of Miami Libraries)

Pan Am’s Theatre-in-the-Air ‘menu’, ca. 1965 (Courtesy Special Collections, University of Miami Libraries)

2 Aerial Perceptions: The Visuality of the Airplane

Air transportation brings all of Mother Earth’s children closely together. There are landlocked nations, but there are no airlocked nations, cities or individuals. The better to visualize what this means, American Airlines introduces Air Globe, a new kind of globe that never can become obsolete … The innumerable boundary and dividing lines found upon maps of the earth’s surface also are omitted, because air, itself, is indivisible, and plays no favorites. American Airlines advertisement, 19461

In August 1943, as the United States carried out aerial bombing raids on Italy, Germany and Japan, the Museum of Modern Art in New York opened an exhibition entitled ‘Airways to Peace’. Even while admitting that aircraft were currently being used in warfare for the destruction of cities and armies, the exhibition programme, penned by former presidential nominee for the Republican Party Wendell Willkie, promoted aviation as a new technology that would bring about a world community and therefore peace. Willkie exhorted exhibition-goers to acknowledge the ‘new realities’ of aviation since, ‘the modern airplane creates a new geographical dimension. A navigable ocean of air blankets the whole surface of the globe. There are no distant places any longer: the world is small and the world is one.’2 Willkie’s formulation, and many others like it, imagined the air above the land and sea – the atmosphere that encircles the globe – as open, free and universal. He based his conviction on the presumed effects of moving people. For Willkie, the technological means to rapidly travel through this newly available space, likened both to the sea and to a comforting and reassuring layer, would bring about social harmony. For the past 200 years, the introduction of new communication and transportation networks capable of increasing the circulation of people, goods and communications have led to these kinds of proclamations of social harmony, world peace and the unity of humanity.3 These claims extended to film. In the 1910s Universal Pictures claimed in early advertisements that, ‘Universal Pictures speak the Universal Language. Universal stories told in pictures need no translation, no interpreter’ and, as detailed in the previous chapter, the company’s logo historically consisted of different variations on a turning globe with the word ‘Universal’ emblazoned across it.4 In 1917, D. W. Griffith told Lillian Gish that, ‘she was working in the universal language that had been predicted in the Bible, which was to make all men brothers because they would understand each other’.5 Early film critics Vachel Lindsay and Hilda Doolittle wrote in a similar vein, espousing cinema as a ‘universal language’ that would bring Aerial Perceptions: The Visuality of the Airplane

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about a global society.6 Although history has proven these predictions to be specious and short-sighted, the logic appears coherent: increased communication leads to increased community, increased knowledge of other peoples leads to greater empathy, and increased knowledge of the world gained through travel leads to greater understanding.7 Armand Mattelart has convincingly argued that these technological networks end up benefiting those groups who control them, keeping the relations of power between the so-called technologically developed regions and developing regions virtually unchanged.8 The fact that the above proclamations originated in the United States and, in particular, from powerful figures in American culture, hints at the limited nature of this universality and the presumed features of the future borderless and harmonious world. The ‘Airways to Peace’ exhibition emphasised the history of aeronautics – from the balloon to the flying fortress – and aviation’s capacity to make the world smaller by defying geographic barriers. Alongside the photographs, drawings and models of flying machines were a series of maps and globes. These maps and globes were used to demonstrate how the airplane reimagines the world and reorganises geography, calling attention to the exhibition’s subtitle: ‘an exhibition of geography for the future’. An ‘outside-in’ globe, in which a map of the world was created on the inside of a fifteen-foot-diameter sphere, dominated one part of the exhibition. Visitors could walk inside the sphere, as if walking inside the planet turned inside out. As the programme states, ‘when the land areas are shown on the inside of a sphere, one can more readily see all the continents in their true relationship at one glance’.9 The introduction of this new transportation technology, the exhibition asserts, causes us to see the world in a new way – the world as united, as one – which in turn requires a new kind of cartographic representation. The notions of world unity and world society are foundational to the discursive formation of globalisation and here are presented as truth; in other words, the underlying so-called truth of the ‘land areas’ is that they are closely related. Intriguingly, the ‘outside-in’ globe insists that the significance of aviation requires taking in the world ‘at one glance’ to come to grips with the new world order created through air navigation. The visual mode of ‘one glance’ may be an attempt to emphasise the plainness of the fact of world unity and shrinkage, but it also creates a relationship of singularity: one glance for one world. Another cartographic novelty displayed during the exhibition at MoMA, the ‘transparent glass antipode globe’, demonstrated another new way of seeing the world: looking at the globe from any angle, one could see through the globe, perceiving what was on the other side.10 No longer opaque, all parts of the world were made visible from any position and perspective. The ‘geography for the future’ emphasised availability and accessibility: the world as spectacle. In both examples the world is conceived as a continuous surface, hollowed out and without centre. The planes of the world were presented in their entirety and contiguity for the human eye.11 These new ways of seeing the world are, of course, subjunctive, indicating both the way the exhibitors wish the world to be (transparent) and the way people should relate to the world (as global citizens, literally living in the globe). Globalisation relies on the ability to conceive of the world – the globe – as a unified whole. By 1943, the vision of a unified world was hardly a new idea. Some of the first illustrations of this mode of thinking about the world occur in nineteenth-century 42

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fairs and exhibitions. William Whewell, one of the organisers of the Great Exhibition of 1851, believed that if all the world’s arts and crafts could be gathered in one place, a person need only apprehend it all at once and progress would be inevitable. Whewell formulated a mode of vision that involved knowledge creation and mastery as well as initiating novelty and innovation in the mind of the observer. This mode of vision meant not simply taking in the present, but forging the present visual information into the basis upon which the future could be imagined. By articulating progress to the visual field, Whewell’s ideas gave sight a temporal component as well as a spatial one. Richard Bellon has called Whewell’s ideological basis for world fairs, exhibitions and expositions a ‘panoramic philosophy’.12 In labelling this particular relationship of sight, knowledge and power ‘panoramic’, Bellon deliberately invoked those technologies of spectacle common to nineteenth-century Europe as well as Robert Barker’s 1787 patent application for the panorama, which Barker first called ‘La Nature à coup d’oeil’ (nature at a glance). Panoramas were designed so that a single observer could apprehend a variety of sights simultaneously. The ‘outside-in’ globe of the MoMA exhibition recalled the 1851 Great Globe of Leicester Square, a forty-foot globe with the continents represented in relief on the inside surface and stars painted on the outside. The interior of the Great Globe also contained exhibition halls to display artefacts from around the world. The Great Globe was itself modelled on the earlier Géorama designed by Delanglard and put on display in 1826 in Paris. A later French version of the Géorama by C. A. Guerin was considered such an achievement in geography that the Institut de France suggested that the offices of the minister of the navy be moved inside a Géorama. Rather than art, or even entertainment, panoramas were thought of as scientific and educative instruments that would promulgate the European bourgeois world view. To be inside the panorama was to be inside bourgeois cosmopolitan ideology, apprehending the world ‘as a picture … to be viewed, investigated, and experienced’.13 To see the world at a glance was both an expression of power and a strategic method. The popularity of panoramas coincided with the introduction of the hot-air balloon and subsequent balloon excursions craze, suggesting a link between the all-encompassing visuality of the panorama (and subsequently cinema) and the views afforded through air travel.14 The dirigible airship bridges these visual modes of the nineteenth century – the panorama and balloon – to the cinematic modes of the twentieth century. Take, for instance, Lieutenant Leo Walmsley’s report on the 1920 trans-African flight undertaken by the British Air Ministry in February and March 1920, in which he concluded that airplanes were not well suited to the task of navigating the continent for commercial purposes. The distance between suitable and supplied landing spots, the unpredictable weather and air conditions, and the changes in altitude necessary for successful navigation seemed obstacles too great in Walmsley’s estimation. He wrote, ‘the only regular air service across Africa would be one of giant airships’, due to their ability to carry more cargo and cover greater distances without stopping (Walmsley’s journey from London to Cape Town, via three airplanes, covered some 7,600 miles in four and a half days). More importantly, rigid airships would work as vast floating sightseeing platforms: ‘If ever a Cairo-to-Cape Town air service is inaugurated, there should be no dearth of sight-seeing passengers; for Africa as seen from the air is one of the most wonderful of all countries.’15 And yet, even that technological colonisation Aerial Perceptions: The Visuality of the Airplane

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of Africa could soon be surpassed: ‘Probably many of these scenes will be filmed, and the public may see them as it has seen the wonders of the Antarctic and the South Sea Islands – in the easy comfort of a plush-backed chair.’16 Here Walmsley equates the tourist gaze from the airship balcony with potential travelogue films; and the discomfort entailed in obtaining a panoramic view from an airship does not compare to the comfort of a movie theatre palace, with its upholstered and cushioned chairs, as opposed to the rigid wicker furniture favoured on airships and airplanes because of weight considerations. If the travelogue is ‘an intrinsic form of cinema’, that ‘played a fundamental role in [cinema’s] conception and earliest configurations’, then the relationship between tourism and cinema is not simply one of economic alliances, but one of a common aesthetic which conceives of the world as image, or picture.17 Tourism relies on both bodily movement and visual apprehension, in which the tourist moves (or is transported) in order to see. Anne Friedberg has argued that, ‘the tourist industry successfully marketed an organized mobility, arrayed prearranged “sights” in narrative sequence … This commoditized combination of voyeurism (sightseeing) and narrative grew in parallel with the industries of telegraphy, photography, and the cinema.’18 And yet, as Walmsley anticipates, the ascension of cinematic forms of visuality meant that, ‘as the gaze became more “virtually” mobile, the spectator becomes more physically immobile’.19 So that the traveller turns into the passenger – one who is physically immobile and yet transported by the vehicle of the travelogue or the airplane. In this chapter I endeavour to demonstrate that the new ways of seeing introduced by aviation and cinema provide underlying structure to the discourse of globalisation. The particular alliance of aviation and cinema known as inflight entertainment is especially crucial to fashioning globalisation’s discursive formation as well as its material implications and practices. Cinema and aviation are quintessentially modern institutions. They share many qualities: aesthetic, technological, political and economic. Both technologies initially relied on complex technological machines that overcame previously held physical and psychological barriers. Jeffrey Ruoff’s assertion that, ‘cinema is a machine for constructing relations of space and time’ could just as easily be attributed to the airplane.20 The control over perception enabled by these technologies allows for an apparent mastery of space and time, in which the dimensions so crucial to existing in the here and now become malleable and unsettled. The mastery of space and time afforded by civil aviation and cinema has been historically put into the service of tourism, a particular form of economic and visual exploitation.21 Inflight entertainment represents an intensification of these practices, by enlisting the potentials of cinematic representation to provide previews of destinations, or pre-tours, as I refer to them. Thus inflight entertainment presents the world as available for consumption. This way of approaching the world is mirrored in the cabins of many jetliners, often decorated with abstracted landscapes or representations of the Earth as a globe. Likewise, the inflight magazines – a form of non-cinematic inflight entertainment – are full of destination guides (acting as preliminary tours) as well as new cartographic forms that present the airline as a global conquistador. And it is within these inflight magazines that the menu of screened entertainment choices can be found. Examining these menus, passengers 44

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flying flag-carrier airlines discover that films are designated and categorised by language and nation. The institution of international civil aviation is also a nationalist project, and the flying cinema of the international jetliner often exhibits a nationalist programme. But, much like the international film festivals that airlines emulate, there is a ‘detachment between “the national” and “the nation.” The national has become a free-floating signifying unit that is used … to market new cinemas.’22 Like international film festivals, the airplane has become a ‘contact zone’ for ‘cinematic exchange’ among other forms of cultural, political and financial exchange that take place within the system of global civil aviation.23 Therefore I use the inflight entertainment menu or guide as an analogue to the festival programme: both are forms of cinephilia and tourism. Finally, I return to the discussion of visuality via the aesthetics of the view from an airplane, referred to as the ‘aerial view’, and its geopolitical implications. These lines of argument ultimately coalesce around the proposal that aviation and cinema have imagined in common a borderless world: a permanently accessible and available world traversable by the passenger/viewer. FROM TOURS TO PRE-TOURS In the early period of civil aviation, the view achieved by flying above the landscape held strong appeal for passengers. Early barnstormers may have been famous for their aerial tricks, but it was the sightseeing tours that ensured their financial stability. Importantly, many of these tours were not of exotic or distant lands, but of the local landscape passengers were accustomed to viewing from the ground. The aerial view operated as a mechanism to exoticise the familiar. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, balloon rides were the most common way to produce the aerial view. By the turn of the twentieth century, the rigid airship became the pre-eminent platform for providing the aerial view. Lantern slides, motion pictures, television and other visual media gave access to the previously inaccessible and granted passage on ‘impossible journeys’. These forms of travel and discovery are mirrored in the rapid transportation technologies of the train, automobile and airplane. What distinguishes these modes of travelling, real or virtual, is how these technologies create environmental bubbles that make travelling safe. These bubbles look outwards onto the landscape, and travel becomes ‘a disembodied journey that makes the visual experiences of tourism akin to the visual experiences of media practices’.24 Tourism and the cinema involve distraction, spectacle and also allow participants to visually experience parts of the world previously hidden and invisible. Lynne Kirby has made clear the similarities between the aesthetic experience of rapid travel and the cinema. Her book Parallel Tracks went beyond the common argument that cinema offers a replacement for travel by affording views of the previously inaccessible and demonstrated that the physical and psychological sensations offered by cinema are exchangeable with the aesthetics of tourism. For Kirby, the railroad passenger car created a proto-cinematic visuality, accustoming an audience to an experience of an ‘instable mobility’, in which the passenger/audience member is ‘at once immobile and in rapid transit, lulled to sleep and yet capable of being shocked awake’.25 Aerial Perceptions: The Visuality of the Airplane

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Early experiments in silent 16mm film exhibition on airplanes openly acknowledge the interchangeability of cinema and sightseeing. Popular Mechanics, reporting on the exhibition of The Lost World (1925) on an Imperial Airways flight in 1925, remarked, ‘the success of the innovation has led to plans for making regular use of the “flying movies” on long trips and when fogs obscure the scenery’.26 In this way, inflight films address the difficulties presented by fixed-wing aircraft not present for rigid airships. Zeppelins, the largest and most successful rigid airships, were equipped like cruise ships with dining rooms, large balconies, piano lounges and passenger cabins appointed to simulate bourgeois apartments. Looking at the landscape (and airscape) from one of these airships was more comfortable than peering through the windows of a fixed-wing aircraft, and when passengers lost interest there existed a range of other possible activities. On the refitted military aircraft used by Imperial Airways, the small planes used by Pan Am, Western Air Express, Deutsche Luft Hansa, or any of the other civilian airlines of the 1920s and 1930s, there was rarely room for passengers to leave their seats, the passenger cabin was often cold, the air thin and the engines loud. The aerodynamics of the postwar jet age meant that fixed-wing aircraft had to fly even higher than the aircraft typically in use prior to 1950. As a new mode of travel, jet travel is marked by its insularity from the traversed environment. Pan American Airlines’ advertisements during the 1950s touted the fact that jet flight was smoother because the planes flew ‘above the weather’. Travelling without the landscape, and without any sights to see means the traveller must find some other source of amusement. As historian Daniel Boorstin commented in 1962: The newest and most popular means of passenger transportation to foreign parts is the most insulating known to man … Recently I boarded a plane at Idlewild airport in New York at 6:30 one evening. The next morning at 11:30 I was in Amsterdam. The flight was routine, at an altitude of about 23,000 feet, far above the clouds, too high to observe landmark or seamark. Nothing to see but the weather; since we had no weather, nothing to see at all. I had flown not through space but through time. My only personal sign that we had gone so far was the discovery on arrival at Amsterdam that I had lost six hours. My only problem en route was to pass the time. My passage through space was unnoticeable and effortless. The plane robbed me of the landscape.27

Boorstin’s complaint has precedent. In The Railway Journey, Wolfgang Schivelbusch detailed a similar mourning process for the lost landscape during 1840s rail travel. John Ruskin, Victor Hugo and others wrote of how the train’s rapid transit through the landscape turned the passing scenery into blurs or indistinct dots.28 With jet travel, particularly long haul or transoceanic flights, even the blurs and indistinct dots can be absent. Ruskin, Hugo and Boorstin compared the view out of rapid transportation vehicles unfavourably with previous landscape aesthetics. But this is not the only reaction available. Even in the jet age, the view out of the window of the airplane can elicit a sense of wonder and amazement. Contemporaneous to Boorstin’s curmudgeonly view of jet travel, Georgia O’Keeffe took her first airplane trip. In her seventies, O’Keeffe was so inspired by what she saw that she produced a series of paintings, ‘Sky above Clouds’. The monumental Sky above Clouds IV was the largest painting of her long 46

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career, over two metres tall and seven metres wide. These paintings transcend the critiques offered by Boorstin and Ruskin. The 1962 painting, Sky with Flat White Cloud, has virtually no discernible figures, consisting of bands of softened colours, from white at the bottom to deep blue at the top, that could just as easily serve as an abstract study of colour. O’Keeffe turned the blurs and indistinct dots bemoaned by Ruskin into a study of colour and abstraction. Moreover, the title of the painting succeeds in drawing attention to the way the airplane inspires passengers to rethink their relationship to the sky and the landscape. In these paintings, the clouds become the ground, forming the horizon above which the sky appears. The realignment of the vertical relationship between ground, cloud and sky is one of the chief insights of this portion of O’Keeffe’s work. In this way, she recognised that landscapes were not missing so much as replaced by cloudscapes. Sky above Clouds IV transforms vaporous and fluffy clouds into flatter objects resembling stepping stones into the sky, presenting the meteoric as telluric.29 The project of transforming the atmosphere into landscape was not limited to the world of high art. As evidenced by the Imperial Airways 1925 experiment, airlines were well aware that the appearance of landscape is contingent on clouds and other meteorological phenomena. Moreover, they were aware that the disappearance of landscape led to passenger boredom and discontentment. As jet planes flew higher, faster and longer, airlines could no longer guarantee the visibility of the landscape. Alongside this change in the speed, altitude and duration of passenger flights was a widening of the cabin, resulting in an increased number of passengers without a window available for apprehending what sights may be available. Beginning in 1964, American Airlines adapted its inflight entertainment system to display images obtained via cameras on the nose and wings of the aircraft. In the 1980s, US avionics company Puritan-Bennet developed closed-circuit television systems for cargo aircraft; surveillance of the cargo hold and the outside of the airplane by the cockpit crew was necessary for safety and security. The system was adapted for commercial aviation: a system of forward- and downward-facing exterior cameras providing a 180-degree view was made available on some British Airways flights in 1996. British Airways called this system ‘World View,’ which leverages synecdoche to confuse the framed and mediated aerial view for the world, furthering the tradition of world-as-image visuality also present in the panorama and Géorama. That same year, the French avionics company Latecoere developed a ‘landscape camera’ which it sold to Airbus to install on Airbus A340s. As an Airbus spokesperson put it, ‘Not everybody gets a window seat. The camera system provides another amusement for the passenger: If you’re talking about four abreast in economy, only one in four passengers now has a view of the outside world.’30 The remediation of the landscape from a framed view of physical objects through the window to the screened view of electronic signals has recently been overtaken by digital virtual reality. Lufthansa Tecnik has introduced a ‘Niceview’ system which renders the view out of the window of the cockpit with ‘a virtual realtime view in 3D … independent of the weather conditions’.31 Spike Aerospace envisions doing away with windows altogether. Since windows create drag and require additional support within the fuselage, the company has proposed an aircraft cabin walled by thin liquid crystal screens that could display ‘breathtaking panoramic views’ as captured by cameras on the exterior of the plane.32 These recent technologies are Aerial Perceptions: The Visuality of the Airplane

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part of a larger project to turn the world into image. And yet, they also speak to the continuation of a visual culture which combines ‘confinement’ and ‘journey’ by providing passengers with simulacra of airspace outside the airplane, attempting to convince passengers that they are travelling through the air rather than being transported, immobile, by the twin vehicles of cinema and aircraft. Not everyone has been pleased by the exposure of the landscape to air passengers. In 2004, the residents of a British village beneath the flight path of jets landing at Gatwick airport sued Emirates Air for invasion of privacy, complaining that the cameras installed on Emirates’ aircraft since 1999 allowed passengers visual access to their backyards, gardens and homes. Emirates Air sought to contextualise the cameras from the airline’s point-of-view: ‘It is part of the inflight entertainment and for passengers it is one of the most popular things. At night, you see the runway and the lights and at 35,000 feet over the Alps, it’s spectacular.’33 Or put another way, the remediation of the landscape is a diversionary tactic on the part of airlines, in concert with other distraction and pacification efforts which transport passengers out of the airplane cabin. A further example of the way in which landscape viewing and stress-reduction overlap in the operation of inflight entertainment can be found in a recent instance of cinema produced especially for airplane travel. Shown on JetBlue flights in 2005, Colorcalm: Skies was produced as a joint venture with Atmos Films and Pantone. The twenty-minute film featured scenes of clouds, without any landmarks or even a horizon. Viewers could choose from a menu of four soundtrack choices (‘electronic mood music, classical orchestrations, nature noises, and absolute silence’) and six colour schemes. Introduced in the wake of inflight yoga exercises, stretching and other techniques designed to reduce physical and mental stress in the air, the film was intended to soothe passengers. According to JetBlue’s press release, in conjunction with the dedicated Colorcalm channel, every seatback on JetBlue aircraft will carry a Colorcalm card designed to explain the proven, calming power of color. The Colorcalm seatback card offers JetBlue customers a fresh perspective on color and life, as well as ways to balance vital energy chakras through colorful visualization, breathing and meditation exercises.34

Citing surveys which demonstrated a correlation between meditation, yoga, prayer, breathing exercises and stress reduction, the film was articulated as part of a relaxation project, presumably to counteract fear of flying (although neither JetBlue nor Atmos mentioned fear of flying or travel anxiety specifically). The title of the press release, ‘JetBlue Offers a Window View at Every Seat’, and the content of the film itself suggest that this piece of electronic visual media attempted to reduce stress via globalist ideologies. The production of cloudscape via the small seatback screen speaks to the claustrophobic environment of the passenger cabin. By positioning the seatback in front of each passenger as a window, JetBlue attempted to curtail feelings of confinement (or seat-envy) by providing ambient distraction that presents the outside world as peaceful, clear and open skies free of obstacles. In this example, the atmosphere through which the airplane travels is turned into a consumer good. Mastery over nature that constituted a key element of the Enlightenment has progressed beyond the expropriation of the physical world for raw materials and 48

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energy to wrapping the use value of nature in shiny packaging so that the nature commodity exists solely as exchange value. For Colorcalm, nature becomes the stage of remote control for the airline passenger. The ability to change the colour of the sky signals the zenith of aesthetic mastery of the atmosphere, just as the ability to traverse the sky without metabolic exertion constitutes the apogee of human conveyance. The sky, representing, after the land and the sea, the last field for traversal, itself becomes the object of fantasies of control and unlimited access. Clouds are of particular import here. Their ephemerality leaves them vulnerable to myriad interpretations by cloud-watchers. Clouds functions as screens: the significance of a cloud or cloud formation depends on the projection of the viewer’s experience and inner thoughts. Likewise, this same ephemerality renders them immaterial, as gaseous agglomerations of water vapour that present no navigable difficulty for airplanes equipped with radar or GPS system technology. Presenting clouds in this fashion – as decorative and harmless – diverts from their meteorological power; as the coalescence of air, water and ionised energy, clouds contain potential thunderstorms, wind shear and turbulence. Thus Colorcalm cooperates with the globalist ideas of open skies, peaceful airways and borderless worlds by transforming obstacles into ornaments.35 A more common form of landscape replacement by cinematic means is the exhibition of travel films through the inflight entertainment system. By the end of the 1960s, TWA ran magazine advertisements declaring, ‘TWA will show you all around Hawaii three hours before you get there.’ TWA realised that they could advertise Hawaii as a destination on the long-haul tourist flights to Hawaii, using inflight film technology. These pre-tour tours have become ubiquitous, currently referred to as destination guides.36 They have the advantage of furnishing an additional revenue stream for the airlines, promoting its partners in the tourist industry (often belonging to the same ‘rewards’ or frequent flier programmes) and, by filling the films with potential sights, making sure that some passengers would want to visit again and again. In this way, inflight entertainment replaces the landscape unseen by passengers below the plane as well as the unseen landscape of the flight’s destination: a kind of window into the passengers’ potential future. The success of these films depends on the audience’s ability to project themselves into the scenery, sights and places in the film. In this way, inflight entertainment further condenses time and space, by presenting passengers with their future destination before they have even arrived. The anticipatory pre-tour transforms the screen into a point of arrival. Noting the coincidence of H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) and the cinematograph, Jeffrey Ruoff has proposed that cinema, beside providing the possibility for ‘creative geography’ examined in the previous chapter, ‘responds to the desire for time travel’ expressed in that novel.37 Air travel with screened entertainments combines two modes of visuality with the seeming intent on making multiple times and places available to the passenger/viewer without the passenger/viewer physically moving. The screen of the airplane window and the cinematic image screen thus work in concert to create a malleable world in which time-space relations can be manipulated through technology. For example, in 1921, Aeromarine Airlines outfitted one of their biplanes to exhibit Howdy Chicago!, a promotional film trumpeting the sights and attractions of the city. As Aerial Age Aerial Perceptions: The Visuality of the Airplane

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Weekly put it, the passengers ‘beheld cinema views of Chicago while flying over Chicago’. This early experiment stands as an odd hybrid: a thrill ride in which views of a city are available out of the window while inside the cabin the same city is presented as a cinematic attraction.38 Pan American Airlines adopted the travelogue approach to promotion early in its history, producing 16mm colour travel films beginning in 1941, declaring ‘it has long been known that one of the most effective instruments for the sale and promotion of tourist air travel is colored motion pictures’. The first of these, Air Gateways of America, was exhibited in support of Bundles for Britain, a charity organisation raising money for war relief; and colour 16mm films such as Wings over Latin America, Wings to Alaska and Weekend in Bermuda were made available to schools, churches and civic organisations in 1945, just a few months before Pan Am began exhibiting 16mm films in the cabins of its transatlantic flights.39 Pan Am had an entire education division dedicated to producing these films, combining the films with teaching aids that included route maps, airport descriptions and sample discussion questions for teachers. In the 1960s, Pan Am had its own film office, called ‘Special Features’, which was in charge of distributing the films to television stations nationwide and to their travel offices worldwide. By 1964, the film library had grown to over fifty titles, and Pan Am was partnered with Pathé, Toho, Universal, British Lion and Warner Brothers for the production of travelogues, while Ideal Pictures was the partnered nontheatrical distributor. Pan Am’s films were also used by the United States Information Agency (a branch of the federal government), which dubbed one Pan Am film into fifteen languages and distributed it to over 100 cities worldwide.40 Pan Am’s brochures invited customers to ‘travel around the world with the color and sound of Pan Am films’, equating the act of viewing the travelogue with travelling to the location. However, since the substitution of physical mobility with virtual mobility ran against Pan Am’s business model, brochures also included ticket office information and advertised group rates, presumably hoping the same groups of students, club members or churchgoers would be inspired to organise a tour and travel together.41 By the 1970s, Pan Am had begun its ‘Theatre-in-the-Air’ inflight entertainment programme, showing several of its travel films as part of the entertainment line-up. More recently these travel promotion programmes have become part of synergistic marketing strategies. For instance, in July of 2003, United Airlines seized upon an opportunity for cross-promotion and featured the film Chicago (2002) in-flight. The city of Chicago is one of United Airlines’s hubs and was the subject of its inflight magazine’s extensive cover story that month. In addition to the feature film, that month United exhibited a behind-the-scenes documentary on the making of the film. This programme was shown on every United Airlines flight in the United States during that month. Thus Chicago could be transformed from a connecting airport – merely the midpoint in a journey and a space of waiting – into an exciting and glamorous hotspot. United Airlines commissioned more of these travel guides, paying independent production companies to film destinations in its network of routes, aligning the financial interests of airlines, the film industry and tourist industries of the networked cities. For the passengers, even as they are isolated from the landscape and sights, these promotional travel shows attempt to connect passengers to the world outside the plane. 50

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As previously described, civil aviation relies on the networked homogeneity of what Manuel Castells calls the ‘space of flows’ for its continued survival and operation, while the financial success of the tourist industry depends on the non-networked heterogeneity of the ‘space of places’.42 As an example of inflight entertainment, the pre-tour travel film repositions the space of places within the space of flows. By rendering Chicago, Bermuda, Hawaii or any other location/tourist hotspot as a twodimensional moving image, the pre-tour film virtualises place, transforming it into flow. A more recent addition to the passenger experience, the digital inflight map, utilising GPS technology to locate the plane in the air, intensifies this transformation of place into flow. Rendering both the world over which the plane flies and the air through which it travels as digital simulation severs the connection between representation and object by taking advantage of the flow of digital code (a point examined in Chapter 5). Imagining place as flow logically extends the panoramic philosophy to the geography of the future, in which locales become digitised commodities and representational maps virtualise into geographic information systems, rendering the globe as a database through which the passenger can navigate through a supersession of the physical confines of the jet. FLAG CARRIERS AND NATIONAL CINEMAS Travel and tourism, which together constitute the largest global industry, need to maintain national borders, because authenticity and the exotic make tourism valuable. The first requires adherence and the continued survival of the ‘space of places’ because of tourism’s constructed relationship between authenticity, place and tradition, while the second requires the ‘space of flows’ that enables the overcoming of real and imagined borders. Airlines have to negotiate the terrain of flows and places carefully. Carriers have always been representative of social groupings beyond themselves, whether it be a nation, the airline industry, the travel/tourism industry or symbolic of technological achievement and progress. The airline itself is caught up in a network of representations including its brand and national origin.43 Early promoters of commercial passenger aviation were quick to assimilate civil aviation into the rhetorics of nationalism and put aviation at the forefront of nationalist projects. Airlines have been dependent on nation states for financial subsidies, as well as assistance in negotiating landing rights and obtaining fly-over rights. National promotion thus became crucial to airlines’ survival. For instance, displaying the national flag on the tail of an airplane was a common post-World War II practice, supplanting the earlier practice of placing a flag in the ground upon landing; territorial claims were transformed into publicity and promotion.44 In 1946, ‘Henri Desbruères, Air France’s managing director, voiced the commonly held opinion in Paris that ‘the radiance of a country can be measured through the importance of its civil air transport’.45 Thus the ability of the airlines to transcend national boundaries reflected the glory of the country of origin, an accomplishment that relied on demonstrating the power of the space of flows to transcend the space of places. Operating alongside the glorification of the nation state’s ability to surpass national boundaries was the establishment of cinema ‘as an optimal machine for projecting an idealized collective self-image of a Aerial Perceptions: The Visuality of the Airplane

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unified national body’, what Jean-Michel Frodon has called ‘projection nationale’.46 In both cases, these space-time altering technologies were put in service of consolidating a tradition, culture and history located within geographic borders, but one which could also be transported outside those borders. In ‘The Concept of National Cinema’, Andrew Higson emphasised the need to account for distribution, circulation, exhibition and audience taste when theorising national cinema. Production-centric analyses, which fetishise the national origin of films’ production funding, are inadequate by themselves, and Higson urges a move away from thinking of films ‘as vehicles for the articulation of nationalist sentiment’ and towards analyses of audience interaction with cultural texts.47 As discussed in the previous chapter, films are now multinational ventures, regardless of the scale of their budget. Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu argued that the category of films known as ‘Chinese’ is always already transnational, in no small part due to the transnationalism of its audiences and the capital used to finance their production.48 However, airlines leverage the origin story of each of these films to present a worldly and cosmopolitan menu of entertainment. This practice is certainly in keeping with the concept of national cinemas, which organise, reproduce and promote myths regarding a particular nation and/or national identity. The idea of national cinema is as much a production of juridical regimes, such as tax incentives or film quotas allowed under the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) beginning in 1947, as it is the creation of taste-making cinephiles who declare a particular group of films to exhibit (or contain) national characteristics. Here airlines follow the lead of international film festivals, in which the ‘citizenship’ of a particular film is often simply pronounced by the organisers of the programme.49 Film festivals insist on dividing films by nation state, a practice based on a series of assumptions. The first is a claim which undergirds much of film studies’ approach to national cinemas: that national characteristics are present in stylistic differences. These differences are emphasised by exhibiting these films outside their national context (in which, in this logic, these stylistic differences would be less visible) and take on the semblance of the exotic via a series of juxtapositions. Thus the international film festival appeals through the same logics as travel and tourism, that authenticity and the exotic are attainable through consumption.50 As Bill Nichols noted, film festivals ‘sustain a “traffic in cinema” that is fully part of a larger economy, aesthetics, and politics’.51 Marijke De Valcke has argued that within international film festivals, ‘films were not treated as mass-produced commodities, but as national accomplishments; as conveyors of cultural identity; as art and as unique artistic creations’, so that international film festivals are central to the formation of national cinemas.52 International film festivals’ ‘traffic in cinema’ very much relies on the production of authenticity which is sustained through a series of assumptions about national character and authenticity, so that ‘the festival circuit allows the local to circulate globally’ and films outside the dominant Hollywood regime are often interpreted solely as somehow demonstrative of national character. International film festivals perform a legitimation function that makes particular cinemas ‘appear’ by exposing European and American audiences to films from outside those regions, and are so reliant on the idea of the national (and national character) that Dudley Andrew argued the international film festival helped to constitute the territorially anchored 52

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‘federalist phase’ of cinema, a model that ‘fosters both equality and difference in artistic expression’, and consolidated different national cinemas to form ‘World Cinema’, in which international film festivals opened to films from outside Europe and North America.53 For example, during the 1990s, the period Nichols was writing in, Iranian films were read only as critiques of a regime that many of the elite in Western Europe and the United States opposed (and this is the plight of much of the Eastern European canon). Senegalese films were seen solely as critiques of colonialism and/or examinations of postcolonialism. Whatever aesthetic merit or textual traits these films might possess are seen as produced by the political conditions that are so often understood through the eyes of the elite cosmopolitan.54 In a sense these films are always read as ‘national allegory’.55 Contemporary inflight entertainment encourages cinephilia resembling that of international film festivals. Within the system of inflight entertainment, overcoming borders is not achieved only via the physical movement of vehicles and their passengers; it is also achieved by the menu of choices provided within the cabin itself (extending to the musical choices as well). Since it is in the surpassing of borders (both cultural and geographic) that the pleasure of travel lies, inflight entertainment is still invested in calling attention to cultural distinction even while it produces ‘the national’ as a commodity experience. Some flag-carrier airlines have responded to the task of representing the national with inflight entertainment offerings that are more ‘local’ than other airlines. Air Canada showcases Canadian productions, JAL features Japanese films, and Pakistan Airlines emphasises Urdu dramas. Airlines thus act as curators, but their mission is not to legitimise particular films as art (like film festivals and museums), rather they attempt to make cosmopolitanism available through cinephilia. Pan Am made this comparison explicit when introducing a new version of its inflight entertainment system in 1971: ‘Every Theatre-in-the-Air flight offers you a choice of movies. Not just a choice but a “flying Film Festival” – film classics, all-time favorites, “Camp” movies, Academy Award winners, internationally produced films never before shown in the United States and first-run Hollywood productions.’56 The consumption of other cultures through cinema that may be considered ‘difficult’ or ‘strange’ acts as the status marker of cosmopolitanism, which, as Ulf Hannerz wrote, ‘must entail relationships to a plurality of cultures understood as distinctive entities’.57 But more than that, Pan Am’s announcement emphasised that it was the variety of films, across genres and types as well as nationality, that made its new ‘Theatre-in-theAir’ a ‘flying Film Festival’. These menus of choices provide yet another way of dividing and envisioning the world and globalised media culture. That is, the array of film choices, found either in the inflight magazine or the interactive entertainment technology itself, should be read as one way that airlines manage cosmopolitanism. For example, Singapore International Airlines (SIA) shows a range of films from what might be called major film industries: the US, India, China, the European Union. How these films are categorised within the menu reveals a particular way of imagining the world and the airline’s passengers. The categories for January 2012 were: Arabic, Asian, Chinese, English, European, Indian, Japanese and Korean, constituting a hodgepodge of overlapping nations, regions and languages. The films categorised as ‘English’, for instance, were Hollywood productions, not British productions. And, technically, Aerial Perceptions: The Visuality of the Airplane

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‘English’ did not even indicate the films’ language, since different language soundtracks were available. Oddly, both films categorised as ‘Asian’ were Japanese productions, even though ‘Japanese’ was already a discrete rubric as were other Asian nations: China, Korea and India. This would seem to indicate a certain ambivalence towards linking the ‘national’ to a nation state and/or language. The wide range of films supports the notion that SIA considers its passengers to be international – in that they could choose films that coincide with their own national identity – and cosmopolitan, in that providing multiple language soundtracks and/or subtitles indicates that passengers are willing and/or eager to see films not produced in the passengers’ native tongue. Indeed, it hardly matters what the film’s actual country of origin is, since ‘national’ is a free-floating signifier within the logic of the programme. What is important to SIA is that the categories named by the programme give the impression of worldliness. Regardless of the transnational properties of any given offering, the inflight entertainment menus themselves serve to assign ‘citizenship’ to films, calling upon particular films to represent the national. Air India makes different assumptions about its passengers. The bulk of its entertainment offerings are south Asian productions. On many long-haul routes, the programme consists of a ‘Modern Classic’ (often Hindi), ‘Hindi Classic’, ‘Hollywood Classic’ and ‘Cartoon Classic’ (Hindi or US) or ‘Mixed Bag’ (a selection of ‘Regional Movies’). The guide is also divided into ‘Hindi Movies (Latest)’, ‘Hindi Movies (Classic)’, ‘Regional Movies’ and ‘Hollywood Movies’. In each category there are roughly thirty, twenty-five, fifty and ten films, respectively. The ‘Regional Movies’ are Tamil, Punjabi, Malayalam, Telugu, Gujarati, Bengali, Marathi or Kannada films. This displays a kind of national emphasis, unlike SIA’s cosmopolitanism, and is closer to the inflight offerings of US carriers, which can usually be counted on to exhibit only Hollywood productions. Air India may be a unique case, since India itself is a polyglot, multiethnic and multicultural nation with a major film industry that (unlike the US) recognises the nation’s multiplicity of languages and cultures in its filmic output. Nonetheless, its inflight entertainment offerings suggest Air India’s concern with producing an image of a multicultural and polylingual nation while still catering to its passenger base. If, following Higson, national cinema is a part of an institutional and ideological project aimed inwards – a kind of ‘internal cultural colonialism’ – the menus of international fare offered via inflight entertainment are part of an institutional and ideological project of cosmopolitanism.58 In other words, the internationalism of the offerings is supposed to appeal to an already diverse audience and to an audience whose members wish to think of themselves as diverse, knowledgeable, worldly and cultured. The designation of a particular film as national can often depend on its reception by audiences and critics from outside that nation; in other words, these are ‘films that enjoy some international reputation: effectively, they display national production at its most exportable’.59 Indeed, some national cinemas seem to exist only outside of the political borders of the nation, as Manthia Diawara argued regarding African films (no matter the national origin): ‘since the best African films are screened [only at international film festivals] African cinema exists in exile’.60 And this can also be the case of certain films exhibited on flag-carrier airlines. Air Canada has shown festivals of short films about Canada from emerging Canadian film directors on its 54

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flights, in order to ‘broadcast them to a large international audience on Air Canada’s inflight entertainment system’.61 Here, the nation is presented in film shot by Canadians funded in part by public monies. But these are not films that Canadians in the main are viewing in theatres, which is why the festival can be seen as a form of national promotion to a privileged minority. In this way, Air Canada has taken advantage of inflight entertainment technology to present the nation to an international audience. The overlap between the international film festival’s ‘traffic in cinema’ and inflight entertainment is not just analogue; both encourage similar attitudes towards film, towards other cultures, and rely on a cosmopolitan attitude. The ideal consumer for inflight entertainment is one who appreciates these differences and is eager to partake of them, perhaps in part because of the widespread assumption that these differences are disappearing due to globalisation.62 As demonstrated in the previous chapter, film and aviation had been promoted as universal technologies that can break down barriers between nations and peoples. Yet the culture produced through the alliance of these two global industries relies on national myths, linguistic difference and cultural diversity for its appeal. As Ulf Hannerz put it, ‘cosmopolitanism can be a matter of competence … there is the aspect of a state of readiness, a personal ability to make one’s way through other cultures, through listening, looking, intuiting and reflecting’. It is not by accident that many inflight entertainment listings appear in the inflight magazines adjacent to the airlines’ route-maps. The regional, international, even global coverage of an airline is underscored by its choice of physical destinations, and also by its menu of cinematic destinations. The imagined community for inflight entertainment is globalised: it is not stateless, since international travellers need recognition by nation states to cross borders, nor is it nationalist, since the ideal viewer is interested in and open to other cultures in other countries. The menu of inflight entertainment offerings encourages a loyalty to the space of flows in general and airspace in particular, since the very notion of cosmopolitanism and national cinemas is based on the dominance of the space of flows over the space of places. THE AERIAL VIEW In her 2003 book Death of a Discipline, Gayatri Spivak offered an alternative to cosmopolitanism and globalisation: planetarity. Planetarity offers a way to acknowledge our collectivity without necessarily subscribing to the logics of domination and marginalisation inherent in cosmopolitanism and globalisation. As Spivak put it, ‘if we imagine ourselves as planetary subjects rather than global agents, planetary creatures rather than global entities, alterity remains underived from us; it is not our dialectical negation, it contains us as much as it flings us away’.63 It is beyond the scope of this chapter to fully engage Spivak’s propositions and arguments. What is pertinent, however, is the inspiration for the idea of planetarity: the view from the window of an airplane. As Spivak wrote: My plane is flying now over the land between Baghdad, Beirut, Haifa, and Tripoli, into Turkey and Romania. I am making a clandestine entry into ‘Europe.’ Yet the land looks the same – Aerial Perceptions: The Visuality of the Airplane

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hilly sand. I know the cartographic markers because of the TV in the arm of my seat. Planetarity cannot deny globalization. But, in search of a springboard for planetarity, I am looking not at [José] Martí’s invocation of the rural but at the figure of land that seems to undergird it. The view of the Earth from the window brings this home to me.64

The view from the plane afforded Spivak the same intersection of visuality and knowledge attributed to the cartographic devices in MoMA’s ‘Airways to Peace’ exhibition and the globe panoramas of the nineteenth century. Rather than difference, Spivak saw similarity. The boundary between ‘Europe’ and ‘not-Europe’ was invisible from the plane. That boundary was only made visible through mapping and discourse, materially manifest as the GPS screen built into the passenger environment Spivak inhabited. In other words, the aerial view provoked Spivak to claim that if we believe what we see (our own direct perception) rather than what we are told (mediated through the map), we can see that ‘Europe’ is not special or different than ‘Africa’ or ‘the Middle East’. Spivak wants us to see for ourselves, rather than rely on machines that see for us. Unacknowledged by Spivak is the special position – within an airplane, flying high above the ground – that provides this glimpse of what Wendell Willkie would call ‘the continents in their true relationship’.65 Similarly, Spivak’s characterisation of the aerial view, which makes visible the land beneath that gives rise to ruralism and thereby prevents planetarity from getting lost in pastoral nostalgia, connects the view out of the window of a plane to an X-ray: each makes the previously invisible underlying structure visible. Thus the view from the plane produces visibility and invisibility. The aerial view makes visible the previous invisibility of the land while making invisible the previous visibility of political boundaries. Like the visual technologies described at the beginning of this chapter, Spivak’s airplane window led to imagining a socially, topographically and politically unified world. However planetarity might differ in its goals and tenets from cosmopolitanism and globalisation, there is a remarkably lasting and durable visual culture structuring and enabling all three. For instance, the airplane window offered Spivak ‘a view of the Earth’; not ‘earth’, which would normally designate the ground or land, but ‘Earth’ capitalised, to denote the planet as a whole. This particular locution seems odd after Spivak has described how she passed over parts of the planet in sequence, rather than always keeping the whole planet in view. Her recollection of this incident demonstrates how the aerial view, necessarily partial, can appear totalising and complete. Air travel and the view out of the window offered the illusion of escape from the world (even escape from society and ideology), but the way in which Spivak employs and promotes the view out of the window remains grounded in ideological discourse that can be traced back to metropolitan and imperialist privilege. The partiality of the aerial view is often obscured by this positionality and the discourses of globalisation. Even the view of the Earth from the Apollo 17 spacecraft on its way to the moon, captured in the NASA photograph 22727 (known as the ‘Blue Marble’ photograph), is partial.66 The totality of the globe cannot be directly experienced; it must be represented through mapping and discourse – the GPS display that, by Spivak’s implication, interferes with a better understanding of the contemporary situation. Spivak is correct in that the representation of the GPS 56

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reiterates and maintains differences, inequalities, divides and borders (ones that she may want to transcend, dissolve or abolish). All maps create boundaries; they do not just portray boundaries. But the aerial view Spivak mobilised as inspiration is also a form of representation that produces its own discourse. It is a discourse of totality, what Donna Haraway called ‘seeing everything from nowhere’, in which the position of distance and power is confused with omniscience.67 Regarding the presumed neutrality that comes with the distance and objectivity of aerial photography, Denis Cosgrove has remarked, ‘aerial photographs did not offer a global view; rather they reinforced the particularising qualities of the conventional topographic map’.68 My point here is not to critique Spivak or planetarity, so much as to demonstrate the pervasiveness of the synecdochic nature of the aerial view. The aerial view is a mode of visuality afforded by aviation and has had profound effects on mapping and cartographic practices, surveillance, military strategies and tactics, urban planning, art, governance and the social imaginary.69 Enabled by the technologies of altitude, the aerial view provides a view of the landscape, the built environment and the land itself that had previously only been imagined or projected. Cosgrove traced this particular view of the world, from Ptolemy through the Renaissance and into modernity. ‘Only the highest flying balloons in the 1930s achieved sufficient altitude to convey even an impression of the Earth’s curvature. The photographic image of the whole Earth thus awaited space rocketry in the period following World War II.’70 Previous to outer-space adventurism, views of the globe had to be achieved through calculations, imaginings (like the Universal Pictures logo) and the unification of fragmentary information. Interpreting the aerial photographs requires specialised training. A view of a house from above is not a quotidian view. The observer must work on the shapes in the photograph in order to understand them as house and not-house. This is not to forget that the mode of looking required for understanding photographs is also a series of techniques, and photographic vision is itself the result of a whole series of technologies and protocols which proceeded and coincided with its invention.71 My point here is that the verticality emphasised in the aerial view is quite unlike the horizontality that has been the obsession of perspectival vision common to the history of vision, visuality and visual representation in Europe. This difference is most intense in the type of aerial view that looks down upon the ground from a great height. Another difference is present in a second type of aerial view, what Mark Dorrian calls the ‘oblique aerial view’ that occurs when one looks out towards the horizon from a great height.72 This oblique aerial view can be achieved from towers, mountains and other lofty places. I want to concentrate on those aerial views that, like Spivak’s, coincide with a sense of movement through space, a form of flying visuality, distinguished from aerial views afforded by technologies such as satellites, reconnaissance planes and cameras, and other forms that rely on a stationary observer. Key factors here include the sense of distance and remove achieved through the experience of flying. Looking at a photograph of a faraway place – a postcard, for instance – can inspire a feeling of distance from the subject of the photograph but rarely from the photograph itself. Looking out of the basket of a hot-air balloon onto the landscape below triggers a different sense of distance. Such an aerial view is a Aerial Perceptions: The Visuality of the Airplane

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perceptual confirmation of the distance between observer and the world itself. The aerial view removes the observer from the milieu in a fashion that approaches an objective perspective. Paradoxically, it is the fashion in which the aerial view envelops the observer that creates these feelings of distance. The view from the balloon has no end. The postcard, the reconnaissance photograph or the tourist’s snapshot have edges, and beyond those edges are more photographable objects. All photographs, including the still photographs that make up motion pictures, are fragments, and thus make the world available as a series of pieces of represented reality. Instead of the fragmentation of photography, the aerial view encourages the observer to draw things together as a singularity. The window of the commercial passenger jet does not offer the same sense of the enveloping panorama available to those travelling on balloons or airships. Like the photograph, the view out of the window of an airplane has edges. Even those passengers who press their faces up to the glass to gain a wider view (and to make the passenger cabin invisible) still find the field of the visible circumscribed by the architecture of the plane itself. Additionally, the view from the window of an airplane can only on rare occasions be directed downwards; often it takes on the characteristics of an oblique aerial view. The enveloping immersion of a sight that extends to the edges of human peripheral vision is missing. The airplane window does create visuality akin to cinema, however. Like panning and mobile framing, the airplane window allows a tracking of the scenery in constant motion. The aerial view blends scenery as homogenous terrain and gives the impression of interconnection due to the invisibility of political boundaries, but also links the scenery in a steady tempo. Like the ‘creative geography’ celebrated by V. I. Pudovkin, the oblique aerial view joins different places together in a temporal flow, interpreted by the observer to offer a unified field of objects.73 The point should also be made that both the aerial view afforded by the airplane and the cinema are forms of perception governed by technology. The apparatus of the airplane fuselage/window/seat and the camera/projector/screen determine what is visible and what is not visible. Simply put, these apparatus organise the scenery for tourists. The visuality of the scenery depends on the vantage point of the tourist. What John Urry calls the ‘tourist gaze’ is the apparatus of techniques and technologies that train the tourist to see some things and not see others.74 When someone travels up in a balloon and exclaims ‘I can see so far!’ this is the result of such training, for it is also true that those in a balloon can also see close; but of course, that is not why people go up in balloons. The appeal to the panoramic – the encompassing and unitary view that brings power to the observer by allowing a possessive gaze as well as making all that is seen seem minor and small – predates the journey to the moon, the airplane flight, even the balloon ride. Key in my discussion of the aerial view is the fashion in which it provides the opportunity to draw things together and invoke feelings of incorporation. That is, it allows for visualising unity where there had previously been fragmentation. The creation of fellowship is crucial to the sustenance of the single world society thesis underlying cosmopolitanism and the rhetoric of globalisation’s promoters. In his analysis of the Apollo ‘whole Earth’ photographs which caused such a sensation in the late 1960s and continue to number among the most reproduced images in history, 58

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Cosgrove concentrates on the way in which these photographs of the entire planet were mobilised in the same kinds of globalising rhetorics I have discussed in this chapter. Near the end of his essay he draws attention to a contrarian viewpoint nearly lost in the overpowering flood of social harmony and planetary unity discourse brought on by those images. Drawing on the comments of Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins, Cosgrove noted, ‘seen from 200,000 miles, Earth showed no signs of brotherhood or common humanity, nor even human agency’.75 The pervasive ‘one world’ imaginary has to work on these images and views in order to make them bear the symbolic meaning and ideological fruit that properly fits in the unitary global view. Humanity must be put back onto the globe. The scale of the globe is such that, in order to render the enormity of the planet, humanity must disappear. The global view, then, is a form of visuality which denies this problem of scale, paradoxically making humanity and the planet simultaneously visible. THE GLOBAL CINEMATIC In 1957, Pan Am partnered with the Irvin Air Chute Company, the US Rubber Company, Spitz Laboratories and the Hayden Planetarium to construct a display for the 1958 World Exposition in Brussels. The display was a 52-foot nylon and vinyl inflated globe that, like Guerin’s Géorama and MoMA’s outside-in globe, visitors could enter into. But unlike its precursors, the ‘Pan American World’ had representations of Earth’s land masses painted on the exterior. On the outside, red lines connected the 143 cities served by Pan Am, representing its global route network. The globe was strategically flattened near the bottom, just below the continent of Africa, to include the southernmost nodes in Pan Am’s network while still providing a flat floor. Pan Am built a circular walkway to let visitors walk around the globe, like satellites in Earth’s orbit, in order to gain a sense of the proportions of the planet and the extent of Pan Am’s reach. The Hayden Planetarium assisted in creating projection technology that Pan Am used to simultaneously project nine ten-by-twelve-foot images from their photo library of ‘Secret Places’. These photos, promoting tourism and the destinations in Pan Am’s route network, also included nature footage of clouds, sunrises, sunsets and stars to simulate the passing of space and time. From the 1940s to the 1970s, Pan Am sponsored or produced dozens of travel films for distribution through its travel agents, displays at local men’s and women’s club meetings, schools and churches. During this period, therefore, a global network of travel film exhibition supplemented Pan Am’s global network of air travel.76 Additionally, ‘The shrinking of the earth as a consequence of increased travel speeds will be dramatised by a 10-minute sound film on RTW [round-the-world] travel covering Magellan’s voyage, Clipper sailing ships, present Pan Am RTW service and RTW flights in the jet age.’77 The Pan Am display appeared in the United States’ pavilion alongside Disney’s Circarama, an eleven-projector, 360-degree film exhibition system. Like Pan Am’s inflatable globe, Circarama presented visitors with an immersive experience by surrounding them with sound and image. Both displays encouraged visitors to contemplate living in the world, perhaps even to consider their status as world citizens, although the world in question was distinctly American. Disney exhibited Aerial Perceptions: The Visuality of the Airplane

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America the Beautiful (1958), made especially for the Circarama process and sponsored by Ford. The United States Information Agency used the film in the 1960s to promote the United States overseas and was part of a concerted propaganda campaign in the US rivalry with the USSR during the Cold War.78 The possessive and exclusive connotations of entitling the display ‘Pan American World’ suggest a neo-imperialist outlook on the part of Pan Am, structured by the Cold War. Indeed, one of Pan Am’s press releases declared that ‘the program will dramatize how US air commerce has pioneered the Latin American, Pacific, and transatlantic air routes of the world through private enterprise’. The US government appealed to Pan Am to display during the 1958 World Exposition, worrying that the US would be overshadowed by the large display and pavilion planned by the USSR. The protracted rivalry between the US and the USSR has been somewhat neglected in accounts of globalisation in favour of narratives of decolonisation. Yet the significance of the global proxy wars between the two so-called superpowers should not be overlooked. The dynamics of these competing visions of the future continue to structure contemporary geopolitics. The concept of a ‘whole Earth’ thus depends on a series of divisions. The ‘Pan American World’ is characterised by a series of bifurcations beside the bipolar Cold War. First is the dichotomy between the interior and exterior of the globe, in which the interior is defined by destination and place, and the exterior by flows and mobilities. More significant (and perhaps more explicit) is the division between places in Pan Am’s network and those not served by the airline. The reach of this network drew attention to Pan Am’s influence, but also drew a stark contrast between the freedom of movement which defined the US and the restriction of movement experienced in the USSR. Access to networks of mobility are of crucial importance to the cosmopolitan globalist outlook, not to mention US global ambitions. In part, this is why the Cold War extended into the atmosphere, as part of the larger struggle over what James Schwoch has called ‘extraterritorial spaces’.79 To be outside the communication/transportation network is to be left behind, indicating a new globalised division between mobiles and immobiles.80 Like the ‘Airways for Peace’ exhibition described at the beginning of this chapter, the ‘Pan American World’ is imbricated in a confluence of discourses regarding globalism, aviation and visual culture. Speed is presumed to trump distance, so that time annihilates space. Motion pictures and still photography are employed to narrativise this process. That a ten-minute film is insufficient to communicate such transformations in spatial and temporal scale is evidenced by the 360-degree projection of a still photography slide show, the scale of these photographs, and the orbital walk. Pan Am constructed a display that encouraged visitor embodiment of globalist discourse. The ‘Pan American World’ offered visitors a chance to see the whole world in a few minutes, to perceive the globe in a single glance, and to virtually travel around the world. That circumnavigation remained central to the display points to Pan Am’s global ambitions and the romance of cosmopolitanism. In the context of a World Exposition, none of these qualities are particularly surprising. Nonetheless, these rhetorics have continued in other immersive technologies of embodiment, including IMAX cinema and cinematic spectacles of globalism such as Baraka (1992) and Powaqqatsi (1988). That these cinematic forms rely heavily on fly-over shots, aerial photography and consistent mobile framing (something they share with This Is 60

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Cinerama), suggests a relationship between cinema, flying and the global at the level of the representational.81 What the ‘Pan American World’ suggests, however, is a literalisation of this constellation of practices and discourse: that the aerial view is the global view. It would not be too much to say that the ‘Pan American World’ contended that without the capacities of jet travel and immersive cinema to make the world accessible and traversable, the world would remain fragmented and divided.

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Pam Am flight attendant operating a 16mm projector in-flight, 1946 (Courtesy Special Collections, University of Miami Libraries)

Pan Am passengers watching a film in-flight, 1946. Screen image is probably simulated (Courtesy Special Collections, University of Miami Libraries)

3 Airborne Cinema: The Emergence of Inflight Entertainment

On 9 October 1929, Transcontinental Air Transport (TAT) joined forces with Universal Pictures to promote air travel and the movies. On board the TAT Ford Trimotor city ofAlbuquerque, six passengers watched a Universal Pictures newsreel, an ‘Oswald the Rabbit’ short, and excerpts from Universal’s new musical, Broadway (1929). The plane was met in Los Angeles by actors under contract with Universal: Barbara Kent, Catherine Crawford and Merna Kennedy, who starred in Broadway.1 The films were projected on a daylight screen using a portable, battery-powered 16mm projector manufactured by Duograph Incorporated. While films had been shown on board aircraft earlier in the decade, this exhibition was part of a larger project for TAT and Universal. TAT was attempting to become a commercially viable airline in the United States without the benefit of airmail contracts, in part by offering in-cabin ‘luxury services’ for passengers. A few months earlier, TAT had served a snack of lemonade and cookies, lunch of salad, cold cuts, hot coffee and fruit, as well as afternoon tea and cookies on a flight from Los Angeles to Waynoka, Oklahoma. TAT also started providing passengers with a map of the route, which doubled as a ‘certificate of flight’.2 By 18 October TAT had institutionalised film exhibition, showing another Universal newsreel on board the cityofindianapolis between Columbus, Ohio and Waynoka, and storing the twenty by twenty-four-inch screen and twenty-four-pound portable projector in the luggage compartment when not showing films. According to news reports, ‘the vibrations of the plane’s three motors had little noticeable effect and the pictures were clear and bright.’3 TAT was probably also eager for some positive publicity on the heels of the controversial crash of one of its planes in New Mexico in September 1929.4 The crash led to a decline in passengers, and TAT was forced to merge with Western Air Express to form Transcontinental and Western Air Express (T&WA) in July 1930, which then shortened its name to TWA in 1934.5 For its part, Universal Pictures, as a ‘minor’ studio, had little in the way of exhibition venues. While Universal did control nearly 300 small neighbourhood theatres by the early 1930s, it was mainly involved in producing and distributing ‘class-B pictures’ for theatres controlled by the major studios. The lack of exhibition venues may have led to Universal’s 1930 announcement of a deal with TAT to show 16mm films in fifty of its planes. But it is as likely that the alliance between these two companies came in the form of Wall Street investment and speculation. John Cheever Cowdin, as one of the founders of TAT and board member of Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company, was heavily involved in the nascent aviation industry, and also showed interest in Hollywood. In 1935, Cowdin’s Standard Capital Company loaned Airborne Cinema: The Emergence of Inflight Entertainment

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$0.75 million to Universal founder Carl Laemmle in exchange for a majority shareholder option price of $5.5 million. Cowdin took over Universal in 1936, right around the time Universal stopped using the globe and biplane logo for its films.6 Film exhibition on TAT planes between Columbus, Waynoka and Los Angeles was more than just a publicity stunt; it marked a tentative beginning to an alliance between the aviation and moving picture industries. This chapter positions inflight entertainment within larger practices of cinematic exhibition and distribution. As the story of TAT and Universal attests, inflight entertainment has never been solely about showing feature-length films in their entirety or as stand-alone products. Rather, from the early experiments onwards, the projection of images on screens in airplanes has been a combination of various formats and genres: news, documentary, travelogues, feature films and television programmes. The range of technologies encompasses both mechanical projection of celluloid film (front and rear) and various forms of the electronic image, from television to digital high-definition liquid crystal displays. As a panoply of cinema practices, inflight entertainment counters the common narrative that cinema itself had coalesced into a period of relative stability between the 1930s and 1990s. This period is often treated as one in which the only technological forms of non-speciality moving picture exhibition were either theatrical exhibition or television. While television had an important role in the establishment of inflight entertainment as a lasting practice for airlines, inflight entertainment has a longer history, dating from the 1920s, which helps to demonstrate that ‘the co-presence of different media-forms and practices’ alongside theatrical exhibition, purportedly absent during the sound era, in fact characterises the history of cinema.7 For airlines, inflight entertainment has arisen from a desire to occupy passengers and to promote travel and tourism.8 For the entertainment industry, the introduction of new screen technologies, including screens on airplanes, allows for a multiplication of exhibition sites and the circulation of moving images into previously inaccessible places and spaces. Cinema’s standing as an essential part of contemporary culture depends on the ability of film exhibition technologies to transform places into movie theatres (or approximations thereof). Inflight entertainment thus exemplifies an intent to produce audiences where previously none existed. Audiences are not extant, waiting to be discovered, but actively created through the transformation of space into sites of cinematic exhibition. Experiments such as the alliance between Universal and TAT at once signalled recognition of an alignment of interests by the film and aviation industries and were also the institutional manifestations of twin priorities of modern life: mobility and visuality. As previously examined, these paired markers of modernity, which structure the valuation of everyday experience, present the framework of ideas undergirding the practices of globalisation. To be able to move anywhere and to be able to see anything, while still being able to choose the level of one’s own visibility, have become the fantasies which rally the kinetic elite and, under the alibi of freedom, induce others to acquiesce to new orders of circulation. Tourism itself could be described in such a fashion, a practice which is impossible without certain freedoms of movement and freedoms of looking that, in turn, transforms other people and places into destinations of authenticity.9 Tourism is not the only form of air travel, and, even during the 66

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interwar period, business travellers formed a substantial and powerful portion of plane passengers. The speed of plane travel was presumed to expedite business transactions, promoting the opportunism that makes capitalism such a dynamic economic system, and saving time continues to be a chief appeal for jet travel. Time on the plane, however, can be experienced as empty or unproductive, particularly for the business traveller. Additionally, the primary problem for the airline industry has been convincing the public of its safety and comfort.10 Time on board a plane, then, may produce boredom and anxiety, which could be countered or diminished through screened entertainments. Inflight entertainment is thus imbricated in a dynamic constellation of forms of mobility and visuality that are tinged with notions of productivity, leisure, authenticity, knowledge and desire. The 1920s was a decade of experimentation for airborne cinematic practices.11 One of the earliest inflight films, on board an Aeromarine Airways sightseeing tour of Chicago, took advantage of DeVry’s ‘Theatre in a Suitcase’ portable projector system to show howdychicago!, produced by Rothacker Film Corporation of Chicago, a promotional/tourist film during Chicago’s 1921 Pageant of Progress. Because the Pageant of Progress took place on the Navy Pier, Aeromarine was able to use its fleet of water-landing biplanes to promote air travel as a futuristic mode of travel that was safe, convenient and thrilling. The Chicago-based DeVry was a camera and projector manufacturing company founded by Herman DeVry, a former camera operator for Rothacker and one-time barnstorming aviator. Inflight entertainment, in this early instance, was a fortuitous partnership, but one that demonstrates that the convergence of these technologies points toward a forward-thinking, future-oriented outlook, in which exhibitors, experimenters and promoters were invested in shaping emergent cultural activities and practices.12 In other ways, during the 1920s, inflight exhibition was a solution in search of a problem. In 1926, ‘a five-reel comedy’ was shown to passengers on board a plane flying over California, and watching films was promoted as a treatment for air-sickness.13 When Imperial Airways exhibited ThelostWorld on board a plane in 1925, plans were announced for repeated showings in the contingency that the landscape was rendered invisible by fog or other meteorological phenomena. In a 1925 story about inflight exhibition, PopularMechanics made sure to emphasise that the practice was safe, reporting that ‘non-inflammable film was used as a precaution against fire’, but failed to mention the name of the film.14 In both cases, the film itself was secondary to the exhibition of moving pictures themselves. In other words, motion pictures were taken as an amusement and time-filling activity that could even calm the nerves or alleviate proprioceptive confusion, not as a main attraction. Even in TAT’s short-lived exhibition practice, film titles were not announced to passengers in advance. Moving pictures, therefore, were presented as a background to the journey; content was neglected in favour of technological novelty and the presumed benefit of film lay in the relief of boredom. ‘MOVIES! 8,000 FEET OVER THE ATLANTIC’ In November 1946, Pan Am took out full-page advertisements in the newYorkherald and the newYorkTimes proclaiming, ‘Movies! 8,000 Feet over the Atlantic’. This Airborne Cinema: The Emergence of Inflight Entertainment

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announced something more than the 1929 experiment by TAT. Essentially the only US-based international carrier, Pan Am had a special interest in occupying passengers during its flights, which tended to be longer than those of domestic US airlines. Pan Am began showing colour sound 16mm films on its route between New York and London, a journey which took fifteen hours in 1945. The airline also announced plans to expand film exhibition to all its routes, starting next with the Hawaii route. The films shown on Pan Am flights were part of a larger project in introducing entertainment media on board, including ‘individual radios [that] will enable a passenger to enjoy his favorite radio program while soaring above the clouds’ as well as television equipment, according to a 1945 press release. Like TAT’s film line-up, Pan Am exhibited a combination of newsreels, feature films and animated shorts as well as adding a travelogue.15 On 15 November 1945, Pan Am showed the Nazi spy thriller, Thehouseon92ndstreet (1945) to journalists as part of a special press preview, on board a Lockheed Constellation that circled above the Atlantic. Screenings for passengers did not get underway until April 1946, when Pan Am exhibited sogoesMylove (1946), two weeks before its New York City release, on a plane flying between Newfoundland and Ireland. Pan Am stewardesses operated the projectors on these transatlantic flights. In August 1946, Pan Am signed a contract for first-run major studio releases and shorts with the 16mm distributor Seven Seas Film Corporation, which had been distributing films for exhibition on cruise ships.16 The impetus for these screenings, according to Pan Am documents, came separately but simultaneously from its traffic and engineering departments. Years earlier, Pan Am had provided games, magazines and newspapers to passengers, as well as drinks and cigarettes, to help pass the time. The traffic department was concerned that the new Lockheed Constellations had ‘less space to move around’ than the Boeing Stratoliners Pan Am had been using since 1940. The consensus was that screened entertainments – movies and television – were the solution to passenger boredom. Meanwhile, a Pan Am engineer, Joe Karpchuk, approached the same problem from a different angle, as he foresaw technical problems with showing films in-flight. The primary obstacle was weight, and Karpchuk worked on obtaining and modifying lightweight equipment to keep the combined projector and screen weight under fifty pounds. But Karpchuk’s chief engineering task was making sure that the image did not shudder (at least not noticeably) and that the sound could be heard throughout the cabin. Pan Am’s engineering department designed ‘vibration-proof’ brackets for mounting the screen and lightweight sound amplifiers for the speakers mounted on the cabin ceiling. Additionally, the twenty-seven by thirty-eight inch screen had to be mounted in such a way that the cabin door could be opened during projection. Pan Am did not attempt to use a ‘daylight screen’; the window curtains had to be shut during projection. While the first installation of film exhibition equipment entailed a floormounted Bell & Howell 16mm projector in the rear of the cabin, Pan Am planned to further reduce the projectors’ weight and mount the projectors on the ceilings so that they presented less of an obstacle to passengers. The installed projectors drew power from the airplanes’ main power supply, unlike TAT’s battery-operated system, since developments in military aviation led to the installation of more powerful and robust electrical system in passenger planes. Bell & Howell began specially designing an 68

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equipment package for airplanes, anticipating that inflight films would be a passenger expectation.17 But regular film exhibition on passenger aircraft did not occur until fifteen years later, the product of an alliance between a theatrical exhibitor faced with declining attendance in the late 1950s and an airline struggling to increase its international passenger traffic. ‘OUR CUSTOMERS LIKE MOVIES, WE LIKE MOVIES AND WE INTEND TO KEEP THEM’18 Two major problems beset postwar Hollywood: runaway productions and runaway audiences. Due to antitrust suits, Hollywood studios were ordered to divest from their theatre holdings in 1948, ending the vertical integration that marked the studio era. The process of divestment took place over a decade, but by 1960, the studios no longer controlled any domestic sites of exhibition. Without the mitigation of risk represented by the theatre chains, the controlling financial interests behind the studios were less willing to invest money in motion picture production. As a result, studios produced their lowest number of feature films in 1961, and the 1960 Screen Actors Guild strike did not help these matters. Although 1961 saw the highest earnings for the studios since 1948, three out of every four films lost money, and half the income came from box office receipts abroad. Because the antitrust rulings did not prohibit studios from owning theatres outside the US, the international box office had increasing importance for studios’ profit and stability. International locations also translated to cheaper production costs while still retaining the production values that preserved Hollywood’s reputation. This had the twin effect of making Hollywood more reliant on non-US production talent and training audiences to value international location shooting, since authenticity in setting and props was one of the appeals of Hollywood product. Conversely, while Hollywood was becoming more cosmopolitan in outlook, the US domestic audience was turning inward. The baby boom and increased emphasis on the domestic sphere coincided with the rise of television and other family-oriented activities, such as camping, bowling, golfing and summer road trips, and therefore less moviegoing than in the prewar era. The decline in theatre attendance starting in the late 1940s meant that the studios would have to somehow capture this ‘runaway audience’.19 The threat of television inspired several reorganisational strategies in Hollywood, including investment in technologies such as widescreen and 3D as well as new forms of exhibition such as the drive-in (which peaked in 1958) and the multiplex. During this period, the studios also sought to capture the runaway audience within nontheatrical spaces, such as the home, in which studio product would be broadcast by television networks. Television’s ascendancy in the United States also began soon after the end of the war. In 1946 television broadcasts reached only 0.02 per cent of households in the United States; by 1955 it was 65 per cent, by 1961, 89 per cent.20 Regularly scheduled inflight screened entertainments have their roots in the rise of domestic television. David Flexer, the owner of a theatrical exhibition chain in Memphis, Tennessee, blamed the downturn in attendance at his theatres on television, and his efforts to capture the runaway audience with activities such as raffles and Airborne Cinema: The Emergence of Inflight Entertainment

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giveaways did not help his business substantially. Flexer realised that films on airplanes could prove a lucrative business venture. On board a plane in 1956, he found himself wondering why airlines did not show films to their passengers and formed a new company, InFlight Motion Pictures (IMP). Flexer decided he could produce film audiences, rather than waiting for people to come to his theatres. He sought to take advantage of the fact that travellers could not leave a plane in mid-flight and started talking to airline companies in 1958, but only TWA was interested enough to let him use their planes to perform an equipment test in front of their executives.21 TWA was excited about the prospect of adding a new passenger attraction to its service, perhaps because of its position in the civil aviation market, where it competed with industry giant Pan Am for transatlantic traffic. Special ‘sneak previews’ of films started in November 1960 on board some of TWA’s Boeing 707s; films shown included inherittheWind (1960), Thegreatimpostor (1961) and TheMarriage-go-Round (1961).22 In January 1961, TWA announced that it would show films in the first-class cabin on transatlantic flights and on flights between New York and California.23 A special preview screening for the press on board a Boeing 707 flying between New York and Miami on 22 January exhibited TheMarriage-go-Round in Cinemascope. Because there was only one projector and one screen for the forty-seat first-class cabin, the press had to be rotated between economy and first class, so the film was screened twice. Paul Friedlander, writing for the newYorkTimes, compared the experience to ‘the small “art” type of cinema, since the passenger-moviegoer will be able to have coffee and even hardier beverages while in the plane-cinema’.24 In addition to luring more passengers, perhaps from other airlines, TWA hoped that the exhibition of screened entertainments would attract more customers interested in paying the firstclass fare. In May 1961 Lockheed Aircraft Services signed a contract with Flexer for exclusive manufacture of the projection systems, and regular screenings on domestic transcontinental flights were announced starting in July, with transatlantic exhibition to commence in August.25 The primary obstacle in expanding inflight film exhibition, according to Flexer, was the difficulty in finding family pictures suitable for children that were also sophisticated enough for adults.26 The TWA offices of sales and public relations previewed the films before they were shown on the aircraft, and took into account the ratings system of the National League of Decency and Parents magazine, cognisant that showing a controversial film could end the whole experiment and bring negative publicity to the airline. To further mitigate against passenger objections, flight attendants gave first-class passengers printed programmes ‘which offer opinions on whether the movie is suitable for adults only or for the whole family’.27 IMP obtained material by signing non-theatrical film rental contracts with distributors; Flexer used the theatrical exhibition practices for his Tennessee theatre chain for inflight movies. In May 1961, IMP contracted with Universal-International to exhibit the 1961 releases TammyTellMeTrue, Thelastsunset, RomanoffandJuliet and comeseptember, with the average cost per film of roughly $50,000. IMP and TWA exhibited four different films each week; a group of planes would show one film, which would cycle off and be replaced by a film that had been showing on a different plane each Wednesday to help ensure that passengers would not see the same film over and over.28 In July and August 1961, the seven features exhibited were all first-run films.29 In 1963, some of 70

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IMP’s films were shown on TWA planes ahead of their theatrical release.30 In the main, these were all light films – comedies, romantic dramas, with the occasional Western or light action drama – setting the stage for inflight entertainment in the decades to come.31 The system, dubbed ‘Strato-Cinema’ by IMP, relied on an automatic projector that was started by a push-button in the cockpit. The two by four-foot lenticular screen was rated for daylight, and TWA did not lower the window shades for film exhibition or ask passengers to turn off reading lights. Flight attendants would distribute ‘sterilized headsets in sealed plastic bags’ to passengers, which were collected after each flight, and the foam ends would be removed, discarded and replaced. Because of the location of the screen, flight attendants had to lean down or bend over to avoid blocking passengers’ view, and passengers in the first two rows of first class had a restricted view of the screen. The projectors had the capacity for about two and a half hours’ worth of film, which was wound on a single large reel. Union projectionists would set up the apparatus, loading the film and checking the equipment at approximately thirty locations worldwide. Flexer claimed the only mechanical difficulties with the system in 1961 stemmed from improper installation of the films at the Rome terminal. Initially, IMP did not want TWA staff interacting with the equipment, but after these incidents Flexer planned to publish a manual ‘so that a pilot or stewardess’ could solve most problems.32 Inflight film exhibition on TWA expanded over the next two years. In May 1963, TWA expanded the inflight entertainment service to the economy section of its international flights, spending roughly $1 million to do so (the same film was shown in each cabin). A year later Strato-Cinema was available in economy class on US flights as well. TWA was spending roughly $1 million a year in film rental costs for slightly over 1,000 screenings. Inflight film exhibition appeared to help TWA’s market share. TWA’s transatlantic passenger traffic in the first seven months of 1964 improved 32 per cent over the same period in 1963, and domestically it improved 25 per cent. TWA attributed a ‘significant’ part of the gains to inflight entertainment, and appointed Charles Zambello director of inflight entertainment, a new position formed in October 1964.33 During this period, IMP signed other airlines to contracts. Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) partnered with IMP to show films in-flight on flights between Pakistan and England as well as between Pakistan and China in late 1962, and those screenings began in 1963.34 In November 1964, United Airlines signed a contract with IMP for inflight film exhibition on its flights from California to Hawaii, calling the service ‘Jetarama Theater’. In early 1965, United expanded Jetarama to coast-to-coast flights, and in the summer expanded the service to shorter-haul flights between the coasts and the Midwest. United estimated costs of the service at roughly $3 million for that first year.35 The growth of inflight film exhibition proved a small but worthwhile source of revenue for Hollywood studios: for film distributors, the estimated revenue from inflight movies in 1965 was $2.5 million. By 1970 it was more than twice that.36 IMP’s success brought controversy and competition. In August 1964, both American Airlines and Continental Airlines introduced inflight entertainment systems, purchased from Sony and Ampex respectively, for domestic flights only. The Airborne Cinema: The Emergence of Inflight Entertainment

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reason that neither airline operated such systems on international flights was because international carriers, particularly the seventeen airlines with transatlantic routes, were opposed to inflight entertainment, an opposition that erupted during annual meetings of the International Air Transportation Association. In 1964, the annual IATA meeting in Athens was primarily intended to re-evaluate the fare rates the ninety-three member airlines charged for travel between the 1,600 airports they served. Ahead of the meeting, the United States Civil Aviation Board declared that it would probably veto any agreement that did not result in lowering fare rates, while many transatlantic carriers entered the meeting saying that the issue of inflight entertainment had to be resolved before any agreement could be made on fare rates. Discussion of the topic was folded into the larger issue of selling services on board aircraft, including duty-free chocolate and perfume. In the wake of Pan Am’s announcement that it would take $5 million to equip its fleet with inflight entertainment technology, airlines cited cost as a major factor against the technology: the first airline to show movies would have a competitive advantage, they allowed, but after every airline had inflight films, they would simply be saddled with additional costs. Although at the time Dutch Royal Airlines and Scandinavian Airlines were testing television-based systems, PIA was the only other international carrier regularly showing films on international flights, and it agreed to end its programme after one year. TWA, presumably because of its increased passenger business, refused to end its inflight entertainment. Thomas McFadden, vicepresident of marketing at TWA, called inflight entertainment, ‘the greatest contribution to passenger relaxation since the advent of pressurized cabins’.37 The issue threatened to bring the IATA meeting to a standstill, and the airlines eventually agreed to table the issue and move on to the larger task of addressing fare rates. McFadden went on to praise inflight entertainment as a boon for the entire industry: Anything that attracts more persons to air travel, that eases the tensions of first time riders and relieves the long flight boredom of experienced travellers has great psychological and therapeutic effects for customers of the airline industry … Our customers like movies, we like movies and we intend to keep them.38

Further, McFadden cited the fact that the aviation industry generated revenue from shipping film across the world, and wondered why airlines would work so assiduously against the ‘motion picture business’.39 It took until the Paris meeting in April 1965 of the seventeen transatlantic carriers of IATA for TWA to agree to discontinue its inflight entertainment service on transatlantic flights, on the condition that other US carriers – American, United and Continental – agreed to discontinue their inflight entertainment service on domestic flights. The seventeen carriers agreed to pay TWA $25,000 per plane equipped for inflight entertainment, up to a maximum of $600,000, and agreed to pay IMP for any damages occurring from the breaking of TWA’s contract with IMP that was signed in January 1963. Other airlines could show films until the end of their contracts with IMP. PIA agreed to March 1966 as the final date for its inflight entertainment, and it further agreed to no longer advertise the feature on its flights. Philippine Airlines had 72

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recently signed a contract with IMP and was showing films on its California– Hawaii–Manila route, but agreed to stop doing so by 1966 even though its contract with IMP went through to 1968. The IATA agreement would not end inflight entertainment on domestic flights in any nation, only on flights whose endpoints were in different nations.40 David Flexer, as might be expected, opposed this ban, and stated: To say that in-flight films have a bearing on air fares is false and misleading. Inflight movies are not a frill, like perfume or flight bags. They are enjoyed not only by experienced passengers but especially by those who are new to flying, or nervous about it … As an acknowledged passenger attraction, they generate new business for the airlines – a matter of great importance to the industry. The airlines have recently ordered more than 400 additional jet transports costing more than $2 billion. How will they fill these new services, new conveniences are the answer and the only answer.41

Flexer went on to reveal some of IMP’s contract terms, noting that the cost per passenger for airlines amounted to twenty-seven cents, that the fee the airline pays is a per-screening fee, and therefore the airline has no investment in the equipment and will not be burdened with obsolete equipment. Nonetheless, the agreement to end inflight entertainment was approved by the IATA and sent to members’ national governments for approval. Pan Am, American Airlines and TWA asked USCAB to approve the ban, but, as detailed in Chapter 1, USCAB rejected the ban, citing restraint of trade. In October 1965, the issue was raised again in IATA’s annual meeting, this time in Vienna. Pan Am’s decision to show inflight entertainment on its transatlantic flights that same month undoubtedly convinced IATA member airlines that inflight entertainment was not going away. The controversy at the Vienna IATA meeting centred on how to charge passengers for this extra service. A resolution to charge passengers $2.50 for headsets was passed by a thirty-six-member committee on 28 October 1965 and passed the full membership the next day.42 Inflight entertainment was set to become a lasting, even permanent, feature of air travel. For IMP and TWA, however, the IATA controversy was but one obstacle; others had been appearing in the form of competing systems since 1964. COMPETING SCREEN SIZES In the summer of 1964, IMP suddenly had two competitors. The first, Sony, contracted with American Airlines to provide a television-based inflight entertainment system for American’s forty-five Boeing 707 and 720 jets. American Airlines had fully embraced the space age in its marketing and promotion and dubbed its new fleet of jet airplanes, ‘Astrojets’, and the new inflight entertainment system, ‘Astrovision’. For its part, Sony spun off a subsidiary, Videoflight Corporation, to handle its inflight entertainment system. American tested the system during two weeks in May 1964, having installed it on a single jet flying on a selection of routes, with Opinion Research Corporation conducting surveys of the plane’s passengers. Astrovision consisted of nine-inch television screens which were connected to a videotape system designed to handle Airborne Cinema: The Emergence of Inflight Entertainment

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slightly more than five hours of entertainment without having to rewind. The television sets were specially made with a thin gold plating to avoid interfering with the jets’ navigation and radar systems. In first class, passengers would look down at a set that was mounted on the armrest between the two seats in front of them. In economy class, sets were suspended from the luggage rack at every three rows, which meant one screen for every nine passengers. Like TWA’s Strato-Cinema, Astrovision required passengers to plug headsets in to listen to the soundtrack accompanying the images. TWA paid Sony $52,000 per plane for the system, renting films at a cost similar to TWA (estimates ranged from $1–2 million a year in film rental costs).43 In addition to feature films, the five-hour tape length allowed American Airlines to add travelogues, television shows and shorts to the entertainment line-up. Additionally, because the system was television-based, it could pick up broadcast television signals when in range, a practice that was usually limited to when the jets were waiting on the tarmac. During take-offs and landings, a camera installed in the nose of the plane would transmit live images of the onrushing landscape to the Astrovision sets in the cabin. During flight, the camera could utilise a telescopic lens to provide passengers with views of the landscape, when not obscured by clouds. Passengers, however, were unable to choose between these cinematic forms. Rather, the controls were operated by a flight attendant in the forward cabin; passenger choice was limited to selecting the sound channel. Initially Astrovision was only installed on transcontinental routes, but by June 1965 Astrovision was on sixty-six domestic flights. That summer, American decided to expand the system to its short-haul flights, adding Astrovision to almost fifty flights, with inflight entertainment programmes ranging from four and half minutes to twenty minutes and live television available on the tarmac.44 American Airlines distinguished Astrovision from Strato-Cinema by emphasising the potential for passenger choice and freedom from the supposedly hypnotic large screen. In an early advertisement, American announced that ‘the first system we considered, in fact, was the traditional big screen. We discarded this, feeling it might make our passengers a captive audience.’ Nearly every advertisement for Astrovision in 1964 mentioned the ability to turn off the sound, reminded potential passengers that their neighbour on the plane could be involved in a different activity, and opined that no one wished to be ‘held captive’ to the large screen. In addition, American ran print advertisements emphasising the variety of content available through its system, several of which featured small vignettes with images of films, sports and musicians. The rhetorical battle over whether passengers were ‘captive’ to the inflight entertainment screens continued until the introduction of the seatback screen in the 1990s. Rather than fight television by creating movie theatres where there previously were none, American embraced television’s culture of choice and domesticity, pronouncing that ‘just as at home, [with Astrovision] you’ll be able to see news, sports, and variety shows’. To add to the approximation of the domestic experience, the best viewing position for the economy-class monitors hung from the luggage racks was relatively close – just one row away – a distance at which images on Strato-Cinema’s screen would have been invisible. The emulation of domestic television rather than theatrical moviegoing was probably due to the fact that, unlike IMP, American’s foray 74

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into inflight entertainment was not motivated by the problem of runaway audiences, but was an effort to compete with TWA for market share. Pan Am, global aviation’s market leader, began testing Sony’s system in late 1964, hesitant over the initial cost of installation and, possibly, waiting for the outcome of the ongoing IATA negotiations. According to IATA bulletins, between 1951 and 1965, Pan Am dominated the world civil air market, responsible for between 16 and 25 per cent of market share, and its adoption of inflight entertainment would make it impossible for other international carriers not to follow suit.45 Save for California to Hawaii flights, Pan Am’s main business was international; therefore its service and fares, like most European carriers, were governed more closely by the IATA than domestic US carriers like American. Pan Am’s plans for inflight entertainment, therefore, would have greater effects outside the US than within it. In May 1965, Pan Am debuted Sony’s system, which Pan Am called ‘Theatre-in-the-Air’, on flights between California and Hawaii at no charge in all classes. At the time, Pan Am ran almost 150 flights a week between California and Honolulu. Pan Am sought to accommodate its international passengers by providing stereo music options in languages other than English, and its printed film programmes were available in Chinese, Japanese and English. By the autumn of 1965, in the wake of the IATA agreement, Pan Am planned to offer Theatre-inthe-Air on all of its flights. But this move was met with protests from European governments, who realised that Theatre-in-the-Air, now permitted by the IATA, would put their flag carriers at a distinct disadvantage. Such was the threat posed by inflight entertainment that some governments threatened to rescind Pan Am’s landing rights. So Pan Am agreed not to show Theatre-in-the-Air on its flights between the US and Prague, Copenhagen, Glasgow, Dublin, Hamburg, Berlin, Dusseldorf, Stuttgart, Munich, Vienna and Belgrade. Pan Am did, however, offer inflight entertainment on flights between the US and Frankfurt, London, Paris, Rome and Shannon (Ireland).46 The other system competing with IMP, manufactured by Ampex, was also a videotape and television system. Continental Airlines purchased two ‘TravelVision’ systems from Ampex in August 1964, which Continental quickly renamed ‘Golden Marquee Theatre’, to match its livery. To head its newly formed inflight entertainment department, Continental hired Edwin Michalove, who had previously worked for Twentieth Century-Fox and TelStar. Unlike American Airlines, whose videotapes were supplied by the Sony subsidiary, Videoflight, Continental contracted its own film rentals and then converted the films to videotape. Where American paid $2 million annually for videotapes, Continental spent $600,000 for ‘entertainment sources’, keeping the cost of conversion in house. Like Sony’s system, Ampex had devised a system of nine-inch television monitors networked to a videotape system; the screens were also suspended fom the luggage rack. In first class, the monitors were seventeen inches on the diagonal. The television and videotape systems pioneered by Sony and Ampex offered more flexibility because multiple films could be shown along with a variety of other programming, and flight attendants could start exhibition of inflight materials wherever in the tape they wished, and even move between programmes in a different order on different flights, to better accommodate flight time, and, presumably, the passenger audience.47 Airborne Cinema: The Emergence of Inflight Entertainment

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The major drawback of this television videotape system was poor image resolution and the fact that the screens only displayed black and white. Mark Robson, director of the Cinemascope film VonRyan’sexpress (1965), a World War II POW thriller with multiple spectacular action sequences, was on a transcontinental flight in 1965 and saw his film on Sony’s system. He complained to DailyVariety, saying: ‘If we wanted “Von Ryan’s Express” to be seen firstrun in 4:3 ratio and in black and white, we would have made it that way.’ For Robson, seeing films this way ‘degrades their value’ and damages word-of-mouth publicity. At the time, virtually all the films shown in-flight were also showing in terrestrial theatres, or about to appear in theatres, and roughly 6,000 passengers saw inflight films daily on coast-to-coast flights.48 TWA adopted a rhetoric of authenticity and fidelity to directorial vision in its advertising campaign against Astrovision. The airline ran full-page print advertisements in newspapers. The advertisements consisted of two drawings, one at the top with the caption, ‘one airline shows you movies like this’, while the image depicted an airplane cabin with small screens hanging from the luggage racks displaying a medium shot of two suited men speaking with a woman. Only the backs of the heads of passengers sedately watching can be seen. The lower image, with the caption, ‘TWA shows you movies like this’, showed a large screen at the front of the passenger cabin displaying a drawn image of Harve Presnell and Debbie Reynolds from TheUnsinkableMollyBrown(1964), with expressions of delight and joy on their faces. Rather than facing the screen, two passengers in the foreground, a man and a woman, face each other across the aisle, smiling, and the woman gestures toward the screen. As a counter to American Airlines campaigning on the notion of freely and actively choosing to partake in inflight entertainment, this advertisement’s clear message was that enjoyment of and absorption in the motion picture experience could only be achieved with the large single common screen. The copy at the bottom of the advertisement read, ‘on TWA movies are to relax with: you don’t have to worry about any picture controls. There’s no fussing with do-it-yourself focusing.’ Strato-Cinema thus promoted a form of spectatorship that carried viewers away emotionally, but required no work on the part of the passenger viewer. This form of effortless activity, TWA claimed, was closer to authentic moviegoing: TWA shows you movies the way Hollywood makes them to be shown. You see them on a wide, theater-proportioned screen, not a television set with a nine-inch screen. If they’re made in color, you see them in color, not in black and white.

The equation between the attributes of the film product – aspect ratio, colour, focus – and the image exhibited on the screen have long been the sinequanon of the moviegoing experience, and that which separates the cinephile from one who watches movies on television (or other exhibition technologies).49 The issue of how the films sound, rather than how they look, was not addressed by TWA or American (or Robson for that matter), although it was of course an issue for passengers (see below). While TWA’s argument regarding image fidelity may have resonated with Robson, it is not clear what passengers and moviegoers thought. During the 1960s, the exact contours of what constituted film and the moviegoing experience were undergoing transformations outside the airplane. The postwar period 76

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in the US was marked by the rise of the drive-in theatre, a different sort of alliance between transportation and cinema, which reached its peak in 1958, with just over 6,000 theatres. While the drive-in screen and image were large and in the proper aspect ratio, the possibility of obstructed views and light pollution from passing cars compromised the enveloping darkness necessary to the ideal of the moviegoing experience. The early 1960s also saw the ascendency of the multiplex, with the formation of Stanley Durwood’s American Multi-Cinema. In many ways, the airplane cabin had more in common with the multiplex than the motion picture palace or even the small screening rooms used by Hollywood professionals. Multiplex theatres, built mostly in shopping centres, were marked by small auditorium size, short throws (the distance between the projector and screen), relatively small screens, a lack of decor, and thin walls marred by sound leakage. Neither of these non-airborne exhibition modes – the drive-in or the multiplex – were ideal for watching VonRyan’sexpress.50 Still, Robson suggested that studios ‘hold back new pix from airlines until played off in key money-making dates’, essentially outlining a plan to delay the inflight exhibition until after theatrical release, arranging the release schedule of films by venue and format, an arrangement currently known as exhibition windows.51 This system was not widely adopted until decades later; during the 1960s the emphasis for IMP and other inflight entertainment companies was on showing first-run feature films, sometimes accompanied by ancillary materials. Still, by the 1970s distributors did not allow airlines to rent films until after their theatrical box office returns had declined. This did not seem to diminish the appeal of inflight entertainment. A 1971 survey of Pan Am’s passengers found that they were more upset by mechanical and other failures in inflight entertainment systems than by the quality or provenance of the films themselves.52 Whatever American Airlines thought about fidelity to directorial intent, the airline did not renew its contract with Sony in 1966. Instead American announced a $3 million contract with Bell & Howell to provide an inflight entertainment system which American called ‘Astrocolor’. Pan Am adopted the same Bell & Howell system in 1969. Fourteen small screens, roughly fifteen inches on the diagonal, hanging from the luggage rack remained, but Bell & Howell devised a system whereby 16mm film was threaded throughout the entire plane and the films were rear projected onto these screens. The film was loaded in the right rear of the luggage rack, and proceeded throughout the cabin on a route that included six ninety-degree turns. On large aircraft, this meant that nearly 300 feet of film was unspooled in the luggage rack, and, due to the routing of the film, passengers at the left rear section of the airplane saw and heard the film seven minutes after the passengers in the right rear section of the plane. Although this system was not without its flaws (it was plagued by mechanical failures and had a success rate of closer to 80 per cent, while IMP’s success rate was near 95 per cent) it managed to retain the colour and aspect ratio of the celluloid, albeit on the small screen.53 When asked in 1964 about his company’s new venture with Ampex’s system, the president of Continental, Robert Six, suggested it represented new directions and opportunities for airlines: ‘There’s no doubt the public wants movies in flight. We think it’s an inducement to get riders … also, the idea is serving as an experiment to get first riders.’54 Six went on to express his desire to convert the Ampex system to a full Airborne Cinema: The Emergence of Inflight Entertainment

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colour and even have Continental move into film production, perhaps as part of a consortium of airlines that would produce films especially for inflight exhibition. IMP did indeed attempt film production, purchasing the rights to the ‘Bulldog Drummond’ series, although the only film to come out of this venture was the 1967 film Deadlierthan theMale. While a foray into film production never materialised for Continental, the airline did expand into terrestrial film exhibition, initiating a joint venture with General Cinemas for a chain of overseas movie theatres. Pierre Salinger, the former press secretary to John F. Kennedy, headed the new company, Fox Overseas Theaters. Asked why Continental was going into the business of terrestrial film exhibition in Latin America, Africa and Asia, a company spokesperson replied, Continental ‘considers it good business to diversify and strengthen its operations in addition to air transportation’.55 General Cinemas, which owned half of Fox Overseas Theaters, was already a leader in a new form of theatrical exhibition taking hold in the United States, the shopping mall theatre, which was also the site for the rapid growth of the multiplex theatre. The multiplex is an important component of the turbulence of the film industry in the 1960s. By offering multiple films in the same location, and often the same location as shopping and other activities, the multiplex allowed and even encouraged a fragmented audience. No longer were films produced for ‘general’ audiences, but now produced to manifest particular demographics, distinguished by age, gender or language. Alongside the mall-based multiplex was a burgeoning cinephilia movement, with art-house theatres opening in urban areas and college towns. The New York Film Festival opened in 1963, inaugurating a new era of cultural cachet for non-Hollywood films in the United States.56 These developments on the ground were mirrored in the air, as airplane cabins were already filled with an audience diverse in age, gender and linguistic background. Inflight film exhibition also had to confront the problem of fragmenting audience tastes and declining film production: as studios began to produce fewer films because of the lack of vertical integration and risk-averse behaviour on the part of its financing partners, the airlines found themselves with fewer and fewer films to choose from, and had a difficult time finding films to show their passengers. TWA probably exhibited one out of every three films produced by Hollywood in the years 1962–7. As described in the previous chapter, the film festival later became the model for inflight entertainment programming, in that many airlines sought to offer screened entertainments designated as originating from a range of nations.57 The multiplex became the model for inflight entertainment exhibition, as airlines looked to the seatback screen as a method to further address diverse passenger tastes and interests. In this sense, inflight entertainment can be seen as an outgrowth of the changes to the film industry brought about by the Paramount decision, which ordered studio divestment of domestic exhibition properties, and the widespread adoption of domestic television. Airplanes represented a new revenue source for distributors, a site full of hard-to-reach consumers. Due to the increased pressure on each individual film to make money for distributors, the international box office took on even greater importance, and international film became a marker of distinction and good taste. Thus US film culture was becoming more cosmopolitan just as film exhibition became normalised during international travel. Additionally, inflight entertainment reopened a debate about which screen size and sound technology represented the true film experience that had been ongoing in terrestrial theatres at 78

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least since the introduction of Cinerama in 1952.58 Because cinema historians have a tendency to focus on style, national cinemas and studio crises during these decades, debates over the ideal form of film exhibition during the 1950s and 1960s have been largely overlooked. Inflight entertainment has been a neglected part of the ongoing existential crisis often thought to have begun with digitalisation. Rather than a stable period bracketed by, on the one hand, the jumble of fairground exhibitors, panoramas and dioramas, and, on the other, a panoply of digital forms, including webcams, streaming video and satellite transmissions, the 1950s through the 1970s were the stage of debates regarding cinema’s nature and intrinsic qualities, fought not just because of competing styles, but because of the co-existence of multiple exhibition technologies and venues. Inflight entertainment, along with widescreen forms, the drive-in and the multiplex acted to redefine the spectator experience during this period. Of these, inflight entertainment was the only exhibition form that combined film and television technologies with headphones, making it a complex hybrid apparatus in which sound was also a crucial point of contention. THE SOUND OF INFLIGHT ENTERTAINMENT Initial reports of inflight entertainment sought to dispel the idea that the passengers on board the plane would be ‘captive’ to the film, forced to watch and listen to something they had not chosen and, perhaps, actively disliked. Numerous newspaper accounts made sure to include the fact that passengers would listen to the films through headsets, and, if they did not wish to hear the film, they did not have to purchase or use the headsets.59 Headsets were taken to be a liberating technology and the guarantee against passenger captivity to the film; thus sound rather than vision became the entry point into the cinematic. Audio and the soundtrack presented as many difficulties, if not more, for inflight entertainment technology manufacturers and the airlines. The background noise of the jet engines was cited as the primary problem, since adjusting the volume high enough to drown out the ambient noise and yet low enough so that dialogue was still comprehensible and sound effects not painfully loud was a struggle for many passengers. Passengers complained that the headsets were uncomfortable or did not provide adequate fidelity or volume. Additionally, since in many cases the headphones were the object exchanged for money, passengers felt entitled to keep them, and carried them off the plane – roughly four were stolen per screening.60 The headsets themselves, pneumatic devices with replaceable sponges on the ends of stalks, were shaped more like stethoscopes than the over-the-head type in use in the cockpit.61 Since the advent of synchronised sound, inflight entertainment has been the only form of exhibition to separate sound from image technologically and make the ‘marriage’ of soundtrack to image the choice of the spectator. This technological idiosyncrasy of inflight entertainment – the equation of hearing the soundtrack with experiencing the cinematic – had repercussions in the adoption of the practice internationally. AviationDaily proposed that the actual reason European transatlantic carriers were reluctant to introduce inflight entertainment was not because of the financial outlay but because of the problem of language. Many of these carriers sought Airborne Cinema: The Emergence of Inflight Entertainment

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to attract US passengers for transatlantic flights and were well aware that US moviegoers were largely unenthusiastic about foreign-language films.62 Travellers from Europe may have been largely loyal to their national airlines, but there was still great potential for a multilingual audience in the cabin of a Western European carrier. Carriers also may have seen potential political and policy obstacles to exhibiting Hollywood fare as European transatlantic airlines were often also the nation’s flag carrier. If films had to be shown inside these cabins, multilingual soundtracks had to be available, and the films probably had to be subtitled as well.63 As an example, Air France, the first international carrier to sign up with IMP after the IATA controversy, offered a choice of French or English soundtracks for the French and US films it started to exhibit in May 1966.64 The situation for US carriers was reversed from European carriers. There was little question what language films would be exhibited in, but the shortage of studio-produced films during the decade also meant that airlines had to look outside Hollywood for film product. Thus inflight entertainment showed potential as an outlet for relatively minor players in the US film industry. For example, Michael Mayer, executive director of the Independent Film Importers & Distributors of America (IFIDA) sent a telegram in April 1965 to the USCAB outlining his organisation’s opposition to the inflight entertainment ban proposed by the IATA. The IFIDA was a consortium of distributors formed in 1953 to combat what they saw as unfair subsidies awarded to European film distributors. During the 1950s and 1960s, IFIDA member distributors brought numerous foreign films to the United States, including works by Roberto Rossellini, Alexander Korda, Federico Fellini, Luis Buñuel, Jacques Tati, Akira Kurosawa, Ingmar Bergman and Satyajit Ray.65 Mayer’s telegram condemned restricting ‘what the public may see and hear when airborne’. He goes on to argue that foreign films do have a place outside theatrical exhibition: ‘as spokesman for a great media which should not be limited to theaters and homes, we resent this effort to ban and boycott our product’. In essence, the IFIDA saw inflight entertainment as yet another venue for the distribution and exhibition of its product, and an expansion of cinema culture.66 The intervention of this group, largely responsible for bringing so much of what is now considered ‘art cinema’ to the US, in the debate over inflight entertainment, often considered the most mediocre of cinematic fare, might seem surprising. Yet at least one distributor, Joseph Levine’s Embassy Pictures, had struck a deal with the airlines. Vittorio De Sica’s Yesterday,TodayandTomorrow (1963) starring Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni, was advertised in the newYorkTimes as ‘Now Playing on American Airlines Astrovision’. A large image of Sophia Loren occupied half the advertisement, while a picture of a string quartet, arranged to be facing the image of Loren, appeared in the lower right corner. This advertisement managed to position inflight entertainment, even the small black and white television screens of Astrovision, as sophisticated artistic fare. Foreign-language film was a way to bring respectability to the practice of inflight entertainment, although this particular film was actually more middle-brow than high art. Levine partially financed a trio of films directed by De Sica and produced by Carlo Ponti, starring Ponti’s second wife Loren: TwoWomen (1960), YesterdayTodayandTomorrow and Marriageitalianstyle(1964). Tino Balio commented that 80

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although the films were released with subtitles, they contained conventional plots and a star who had earlier become an international sensation in Hollywood pictures. As a result, the Loren vehicles had the side effect of diluting the meaning of the terms ‘art film,’ ‘foreign film,’ and ‘art film market.’ They also raised the expectations of art house managers, who wanted to play it safe.67

For the purposes of my argument we can just as easily substitute ‘airlines’ for ‘art house manager’. The cosmopolitan and film festival aesthetic which the previous chapter argued pervades contemporary inflight entertainment choices has this ‘diluted’ art cinema presentation as its precedent. The alliance between airlines and the IFIDA can therefore be seen in the context of tourism, which seeks to retain the thrills and exoticism of travel without any of its risks, dangers and unpredictability. If the Levine–Ponti joint ventures rendered European film safe and familiar (if titillating), excursion fares and package tours did the same for European travel. Indeed, the upfront involvement of US film distributors made these films perfect material for inflight exhibition on US carriers, since they were current first-run films that had all the attributes of exotic foreignness and yet were still accessible via the subtitles. Inflight, however, these films were more often dubbed. Or, more precisely, an additional sound channel with a separate language track was provided – inflight entertainment supplied one set of images for multiple soundtracks. The particular practice of charging to listen but not to see a film caught the attention of the mainstream press. Paul Hofmann, foreign correspondent for the new YorkTimes, wrote a column in which he argued that the practice of not paying for the headphones and making up your own dialogue for inflight entertainment ‘combines snobbery and thrift’, since passengers could exercise their creativity by providing snide remarks, story summaries and imaginary dialogue. Hofmann put this practice squarely in the liminal space between Hollywood and art cinema: while most films explain too much, directors like Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini often tell the viewer too little, even when sound is added to their superb photography. Without the sound, you can transform a fatigued potboiler in-flight movie into your own do-it-yourself Fellini.68

The Austrian-born Hofmann also wrote travel books and was fluent in German, Italian, French and English, embodying the kind of cosmopolitan knowledge worker that has come to be associated with air travel. As a riposte to AviationDaily’s argument that airlines would need to choose one language for their inflight films, his column displayed such a cosmopolitan attitude.69 Hofmann’s column could also be seen as alternative to the debate over subtitling instigated by fellow newYorkTimes columnist Bosley Crowther in 1960.70 In the above passage, Hofmann was, in essence, arguing for the ‘active’ audience, common to the discourse of high art, which maintains that an aesthetic encounter which requires work and reflection on the part of the audience is of the highest type. There is another elitist aspect to Hofmann’s suggestions. As Abé Mark Nornes has shown, during the 1960s, preference for subtitles was considered more cultured and sophisticated. Since most inflight entertainment was dubbed, in the sense that alternate language soundtracks were available through different audio Airborne Cinema: The Emergence of Inflight Entertainment

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channels, the refusal to listen to the dubbed soundtrack was a display of refinement and sophistication. In a sense, Hofmann sought to differentiate his elite cosmopolitan attitude – that of someone who ‘always knew a little place around the corner’ – to that of a tourist cosmopolitanism that the alternate soundtracks appealed to, a cosmopolitanism turned into ‘a commodity, sold through travel guides, consumed as hybrid cooking, branded and attached to cigarettes, soft drinks, alcohol, and perfumes’.71 The films Hofmann mentions watching on his flights to and from Europe – the Ozzie Nelson-directed comedic vehicle for son Ricky Nelson, loveandKisses (1965) and the French spy comedy l’hommedeRio (1964) – epitomise the kinds of safe and diverting choices made by airlines, where even the French film feels like a Hollywood production. Hofmann freely admitted that his practice annoyed other passengers because it interfered with their ability to listen to the soundtrack, remarking that whispers were best for his new game. Such an observation belies the notion that the passengers were not ‘captive’ to the film even if they did not purchase headphones, for it would appear that certain protocols of moviegoing behaviour, such as silence, were enforced by passengers who considered themselves moviegoers against passengers whose relationship to the entertainment was more tangential. As described in the previous chapter, while many had seen the potential for a universal language in silent film, this promise had been thoroughly dashed with the advent of synchronous sound film in the late 1920s. Natasa Durovicova has argued that national cinema ‘was predicated on the congruence of the diegesis, the acoustic space of the movie theatre, and the designated national space outside it’.72 Within the cosmopolitan site of the film festival, the first two stayed congruent (provided the film was subtitled), but often there was no congruence between the national space and the site of exhibition. Inflight entertainment severs the relationship between sound, space and image further, since there is only occasionally a ’national space’ around the theatre of the airplane, and the acoustic space of the cabin is crosscut by multiple languages and sounds not emanating from the diegesis of the film (often from passengers themselves, whether narrating the film as suggested by Hofmann or simply conversing). In this way, inflight entertainment made cosmopolitanism – in the sense of an enthusiasm for cross-cultural encounters – available to anyone on the airplane. Because inflight entertainment ruptured the inviolable relationship between space, sound and diegesis, it furnished gaps through which spectators could access these products of national cultures. Hofmann’s suggestion – to provide a personal and idiosyncratic soundtrack – allows for a kind of co-optation via the division of sound from image, so that the individual passenger can co-produce the screened entertainment and whatever cultural difference may exist can be subsumed via humour and play. By making the soundtrack the primary marker of engagement with cinema, headphone-based inflight entertainment systems turned cinema into a thoroughly private and personal experience. In a sense, headphones have determined the pathway for innovation in inflight entertainment technology, which has generally been towards personalisation and customisation. Even as the entire enterprise is based on chasing and producing audiences, inflight entertainment is marketed as an opt-in activity, in which passengers are faced with an array of choices from a selection curated by the 82

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airline. So while the small-screen, magnetic tape-based system introduced by Sony may have much more in common with contemporary inflight entertainment technology than the large-screen, celluloid-based system introduced by IMP, both still relied on creating personal sonic space and presumed that airline passengers favoured choice and autonomy over shared experience. CONCLUSION: ‘A NECESSARY EVIL’73 The worries of IATA members have proven true. In essence, inflight entertainment has become a service every airline must have in order to stay competitive. Although airlines offer a wide range of different types of systems, many airlines continue to be doubtful that inflight entertainment delivers any competitive advantage. New technological innovations, such as satellite television, video-on-demand or computer applications might lead to temporary customer growth, but in the main, airlines are doubtful that inflight entertainment produces brand loyalty. As one airline executive commented in 1964: We don’t quite understand why the public is so pleased at watching a Hollywood love scene or adventure story and at the same time zipping 550 miles an hour across the country. But the reports indicate it is irresistible right now. With the others going to it – we’ve got to go along and go first class.74

This was apparently the attitude adopted by non-US carriers in the next few years. Between 1966 and 1971, IMP signed contracts with Air France, Olympic Airways, Qantas, Scandinavian Airlines, Japan Air, Sabena Belgian World Airlines, British Overseas Airways Corporation, Iberia Airlines and the French carrier Union de Transports Aériens, which served the South Pacific.75 A US survey of 1,000 passengers in 1971 found ‘that they expect to see movies aboard when they take long flights [and] that they were more comfortable and relaxed when they saw a movie when they were airborne’.76 A vice-president of United Airlines commented a few months later that, ‘we’re never going to get our money out of the movies; you only get about 10 per cent of the cost back when you sell earphones’ and pointed out that United started showing films on airplanes only to remain competitive with other carriers.77 In short, over the period of ten years, inflight entertainment had become an established part of air travel. After the 1960s, it no longer played a central role in distinguishing airlines; although, as the next chapters detail, its integration into passenger seats and the subsequent creation of private suites or ‘pods’ for first-class passengers, complete with larger flatscreens and video libraries, have become the distinctive markers of luxury air travel. Inflight entertainment had become normalised, an expected part of international travel, no longer an extraordinary or novel experience for airline passengers. As a demonstration of this new normalcy, airline advertising either marginalised or neglected to mention inflight entertainment offerings for decades. By 1972, 500 civil aircraft had inflight entertainment equipment, and that year roughly 10 million passengers saw a film in an airplane.78 The introduction of the Boeing 747, designed Airborne Cinema: The Emergence of Inflight Entertainment

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from the outset to accommodate inflight entertainment systems, meant that during the 1970s multiple companies were designing different systems for different types of airplanes, often for the same airline.79 The World Airline Entertainment Association, a consortium of airlines, avionics manufacturers and entertainment firms, was founded in 1979 to help standardise equipment, media format and content, as well as airplane wiring and electrical configurations. The post-1961 airplane cabin, then, demonstrates the difficulties of locating a singular cinema, one bounded by form, technology or spectatorship. Instead, inflight entertainment stands as but one instance of institutions adopting cinema to help further their own practices. Similarly, it evidences the entertainment industry’s readiness to participate in these partnerships and accommodate the priorities, technologies and spatial arrangements of non-theatrical exhibition opportunities. Feature films, television programmes, telefilms, documentaries, recordings of sporting events, travelogues, even commercial advertising all became integrated into this airborne system of screens. But it would be a mistake to reach the conclusion that this alliance between aviation and cinema was unfettered by outside factors and free to move forward according to the internal logics and priorities of the two industries. It should be clear from this chapter that inflight entertainment at least partially owes its existence to the intervention of state actors and non-governmental trade cartels, as well as the initiative and drive of exhibitors, distributors and airlines. As the next chapters will show, these external agents, combined with the structuring forces of a dynamic and changing global capitalist system contributed to (and limited) the development of inflight entertainment as a ‘technology and a cultural form’.80

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Pan Am passengers viewing ‘Theatre-in-the-Air’, ca. 1966 (Courtesy Special Collections, University of Miami Libraries)

4 Executive Flight: Attention, Gender and the Seatback Screen

In April 1953, United Airlines began a special shuttle service between New York City and Chicago, dubbed the ‘Chicago Executive’ going one way, and the ‘New York Executive’ going the other. Meant strictly for business passengers, the flights operated on a schedule corresponding to the evening rush hour: the DC-6 Jetliners would leave each city at five in the evening and arrive nearly three hours later. What distinguished these flights from the other United Airlines flights between the two cities (including a Chicago–New York flight that left at five after five) was the fact that they were ‘for men only’. The flights were advertised as having ‘a club-like atmosphere’ with ‘pipe and cigar smoking’ as well as ‘a steak dinner’. If passengers wanted to work during the flight, closing market stock quotations, business dailies and magazines, and a work table could be provided ‘by the two stewardesses’. According to the Chicago Daily Tribune, the ‘Executive Flights’ carried 17,000 passengers in 1953. The paper described the flights as ‘a strictly masculine environment … En route, passengers can … even take off their shoes.’ By 1954, in addition to the services listed in the 1953 advertisements, the airline decided to provide slippers and a ‘home-town newspaper’, and created a rear lounge ‘for cards’. A 1954 advertisement in the New York Times was headlined, ‘5:00pm and he’s going home at 300 m.p.h.’, associating the flight with a work commute while drawing attention to the executive’s domestic status and still emphasising speed, efficiency, and productivity.1 United’s service reveals many of the structures of meaning which still characterise the cultural imaginary of business travel. First, it points to the importance of business travellers to the airline industry. As a matter of revenue generation, airlines are concerned with catering to this group of passengers above and beyond economy-class passengers.2 Business travel enables the face-to-face interactions that build trust and confidence between firms and their agents and encourages the mobility of capital; transnational business travel materially and corporeally effects the globalist finance and trade practices that constitute globalisation.3 Second, United’s ‘Executive Flights’ draw the fraught gender politics of air travel into sharp relief. The stereotypical notion of flight attendants as quasidomestic help, serving passengers and catering to their every need is still with us; although the gender dynamics encapsulated in the image of productive (and yet relaxed) men enjoying the company of men while being served steak and cigars by young single women partly chosen because they met certain physical requirements may seem satirical and even fictional now. Nonetheless, the ‘Executive Flights’ speak to the fashion in which business travel has been long considered a masculine activity, Executive Flight: Attention, Gender and the Seatback Screen

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while femininity has been associated with distraction and women reduced to auxiliary functions within business itself.4 Third, the juxtaposition of stock quotations with cigars, work spaces with the removal of shoes, and work tables with a ‘club-like atmosphere’ exemplifies the tension between productivity and leisure that pervades and even characterises jet travel. From their introduction by TWA in 1961, inflight entertainment systems were prioritised for first-class and business-class sections in airplanes. The story of inflight entertainment is also a story of business travel. In many cases from the 1960s through the 1980s, airlines only had inflight entertainment in the first- and business-class sections; more recently the systems installed in the first- and business-class sections are marked by amenities unavailable in economy class: electrical outlets, business software, a wider range of entertainment options, and larger screens. For airlines, inflight entertainment also created conflicts that aligned with gendered boundaries: programming content for the presumed male business traveller that would also appeal to the tourist family (particularly one travelling with children) produced a series of dilemmas and crises for airlines, which resulted in a system of voluntary censorship in addition to a drive towards providing more channels and choices. The rise of inflight entertainment within the airline industry coincided with a project of domesticating the cabin as airlines had to negotiate the co-presence of adult male business travellers, adult female stewardesses and families travelling with children. During this period, because airlines imagined their business-class passengers as mostly male (and I will refer to the business traveller as male throughout this chapter), the marketing and promotional strategies for airlines had to negotiate the tension between productivity and distraction that inflight entertainment was thought to represent. In some cases, this was accomplished by associating the systems with femininity, either as distractions themselves or made for those easily distracted. In other cases, the systems were directed towards the business traveller by augmenting the entertainment offerings with business applications. GLOBAL ATTENTION ECONOMY Globalisation presents a theoretical problem for the study of culture and its role in economic transactions and social organisation: how has capitalism become a global system despite place-based loyalties, cultural difference and other geopolitical obstacles? Leslie Sklair has provided one productive answer to this question by abstracting a social group that maintains and helps to spread capitalism through manifesting a ‘culture-ideology of consumerism’; a group he calls the transnational capitalist class (TCC). This elite group consists of those people who see their own interests and/or the interests of their countries of citizenship, as best served by an identification with the interests of the capitalist global system, in particular the interest of the transnational corporations.

The TCC is a managerial class involved in media and advertising industries who sell the consumerist ideology and perform cultural labour to maintain the hegemony of a 88

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consumerist ideology which serves the need of a global capitalist system. If transnational corporations produce airplanes, films and tourism, then the TCC produces an environment in which these products can be successfully sold in various countries, regardless of their origins. Thus, if the TCC is successful, a shopping film like The Lizzie McGuire Movie (2003) can be shown just as easily on Alitalia as British Airways or American Airlines. Developing, tending and negotiating the regulatory structures by which the ‘culture-ideology of consumerism’ can travel is another major function of the TCC, and it is what both necessitates and enables international business travel.5 Business travel, marked by what Claus Lassen has called ‘life in corridors’, is a key element in the contemporary atmosphere of globalisation.6 The image of the besuited and briefcased man walking through an airport, seated in the frequent flier lounge, checking in at the hotel, attending meetings, giving sales presentations and closing deals, is an image pervading popular culture, in television shows, films, advertisements and contemporary literature. What makes this image so crucial to the qualitative experience of globalisation is that so many of these men and their locales seem interchangeable. The airport desks, lounges and boarding gates all appear standardised; the only markers of difference perhaps lie in the written language of the signs (and even those have given way to the language of international symbols). The hotels, particularly those abutting or adjacent to airports, are likewise generic; not to mention the conference rooms, hotel bars and ground transportation. These sites are the ‘non-places’ Marc Auge wrote about in Non-places: An Introduction to Supermodernity, which opens with a vignette of a French business traveller embarking on an Air France flight to Bangkok. Auge lets the vignette serve as the prologue to his book, as if the tale explains his theoretical exposition of supermodernity and non-places in microcosm.7 Crucial to Auge’s notion of the non-place are processes critical to modernity: the dissolution of frontiers, the urbanisation of all human environments (to the point that all places which humans can go to are conceived and structured as extensions of urbanity) and a corresponding loss of place. Here, Auge differentiates between places as sites defined by history and cultural difference(s), whereas non-places are sites defined by function (the airport, the supermarket, the hotel). Indeed, this is how the business traveller largely experiences the world: each physical location he inhabits is defined by function: work space, sleep space, meeting space, transit space, security space and so on. This has much to do with the business traveller’s livelihood depending on productivity, the fulfilment of functions, the completion of tasks and the successful closing of deals. As previously described, the tourist industry relies on balancing the functionality of the non-places of transit to expedite tourists’ journeys to the places of history and cultural difference. As Lassen put it, business travel lacks any of the serendipity, spontaneity or even autonomy that might be associated with tourism: Travelling by aeroplane in corridors is founded in a rationality of ‘clock time’, which means that the employees constantly try to go as efficiently and as fast as possible between aeroplanes, taxis, hotels and places of work. This is considered natural in the corridors and is unquestioned. The corridors offer no room for alternative ways of action. High-speed air movement in the corridors contributes to why employees consider the trips monotonous and boring, because one cannot see much through the plane window, and it leaves no room for experiencing and sensing the places and cultures the employees move through.8 Executive Flight: Attention, Gender and the Seatback Screen

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While the business traveller may be stuck in the corridor, with little control over the journey’s direction and duration, media companies have long seen those ‘monotonous and boring’ trips as opportunities to acquire attention. The installation of screens in these environments, from billboards in subway trains and along moving walkways of airports, to television monitors in the seatbacks of airline seats, to large-screen displays in the airport lobby, and even extended to the now ubiquitous portable digital devices carried by business travellers, shows how highly sought after the attention of this class has been. Jonathan Crary has argued that attention is a relatively new articulation, arising in the late nineteenth century, that carried with it a set of practices and assumptions linked to truth, knowledge and perception.9 Following Crary’s work, I treat attention here as an organisation of perception, which involves the screening out of certain stimuli and thoughts while focusing sensory perception and mental faculties on a specific task and/or set of images and sounds. In the case of ‘life in corridors’, then, attention is a form of labouring and constitutes work, particularly within a milieu that puts a premium on evaluating and analysing visual and sensory information as part of a process of transforming materials into productive capital/commodity form. In concert with Crary’s work is an approach to mass media that suggests that broadcast media channels, particularly in commercial systems like that in the United States, produce a ‘commodity audience’ to be sold to advertisers. Pioneered by Dallas Smythe, this argument suggests that advertisers rely on content producers to provide reasons for viewers to ‘pay’ attention and consent to listening and/or watching spot advertisements and product placement; ultimately getting used as focus groups and test markets. The commodity audience approach accounts for the trade in advertising that has dominated the commercial model of the entertainment industry since the 1920s. This model demonstrates that viewers have little control over content and are being used as a free labour source.10 Following this model, others have advanced the argument that the currency of the new economy is not information, but attention. Economist Michael Goldhaber has gone so far as to suggest that money will become obsolete, and that ‘attention communities’ will become more important than other forms of social abstraction, including the nation state. His argument rests mainly on the rather straightforward observation that economies are based on scarcity, and the so-called information economy is thus a misunderstanding, since information is abundant and attention is scarce.11 One method of procuring and focusing business travellers’ attention is to provide cinematic materials and theatrical spaces along the routes and within the vehicles of transportation systems. While David Flexer and InFlight Motion Pictures began the long-term modification of the airplane cabin into a movie theatre in 1961, the transformation of airspace into a new exhibition window was merely the first step in IMP’s efforts to reconfigure spaces of waiting into spaces of cinema. After successfully bringing movies to airplanes, IMP president David Flexer commenced a series of contracts with hotels for pay-per-view movies in hotel rooms. Catering to travelling salesmen and executives, Flexer felt he had found another captive audience, creating perhaps the first pay-per-view movie service for business travellers (IMP also expanded its services to railroads in 1965). The attraction of showing films to waiting executives – idle and probably bored – lay in their disposable income and potential 90

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decision-making power.12 In the 1960s, on the heels of the widespread introduction of inflight movies, Modern Talking Picture Service (MTPS) embarked on a project entitled ‘Skyport Cinema’. Beginning in 1966, the forty- to fifty-seat Skyport Cinemas opened in airport lounges in New York, Kansas City, Minneapolis, Atlanta, Cleveland and Cincinnati. These theatres were designed to occupy passengers waiting for their flights. Free and open to the public, Skyport Cinemas showed mainly promotional or industrial films. These promotional films were designed to increase investment in companies (which should come as no surprise since MTPS was responsible for the 1957 film Your Share in Tomorrow, promoting the New York Stock Exchange).13 MTPS ran ads in the New York Times that read ‘What can executives do until their plane takes off?’ and ‘We know 4 million hard to reach, decision-making executives who are company film watchers.’ Designed for advertising and industrial promotional films, these small-scale viewing parlours were presumed to be frequented by business travellers: executives who make decisions regarding the finances and investments of the companies which employ them. These films were intended specifically as corporate promotion to other executives and investors. Association Films, another industrial 16mm film distributor, also set up movie theatres in airports in Memphis and Tucson, called TravelCinemas. One of Association Films’ press releases reads ‘the typical air traveller is male, college educated, self-employed or executive, married with children, owns stocks and bonds and is on business travel’.14 The audience commodity these services were trying to produce and sell to advertisers was desirable not simply because of their wealth, but because the executive was presumed to be busy, harried and left shopping to his wife, he was a difficult target for advertisers to otherwise reach. At the airport, however, the executive was suddenly idle, with full pockets and empty time. Left with little to do, his attention was available for capture. In The Branded Male, Mark Tungate contended that, ‘men, particularly, are known to be enthusiastic airport shoppers, as they have time on their hands and are free of the constraints that might prevent them from picking up a tie or a pair of sunglasses during a normal working day’. Tungate went on to describe the deployment of advertising through the business trip, from taxi to airport lounge to airplane cabin (including the inflight entertainment system, inflight magazine and pull-down tray), as a ‘long tunnel of marketing’, an image which echoes Lassen’s corridors.15 Skyport Cinemas and TravelCinemas are early experiments in the decades-long process of transforming the airport from a static site of liminality to something resembling ‘a cinematic movie’, to use Peter Adey’s formulation. The entirety of the airport enclosing passengers has ‘been imagined like the blue screen used to make films, where computer graphics and special effects are added in later’.16 If the airport has become the blank screen of special effects, with the baggage handlers, ticket agents, cashiers and janitorial staff as extras, the business traveller should imagine himself as the ‘hero’, to use film industry parlance. This process, while structured by the codes of advertising, depends in part on the aspirations of the business traveller, and on the ‘special effects’ successfully capturing the traveller’s attention. Spafax, a transnational corporation with offices in the United Kingdom, Canada, Malaysia, Dubai, the United States, Germany and Chile, numbers dozens of airlines as clients, all in an effort to produce the business traveller commodity audience for advertisers such as Dutch Royal Shell, Mercedes-Benz, Intercontinental Hotel Group Executive Flight: Attention, Gender and the Seatback Screen

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and the Royal Bank of Scotland. Spafax, and other companies like it, specialise in capturing the attention of business travellers, a category it has burdened with the neologism ‘transumer’, a portmanteau of ‘consumer in transit’. The seatback inflight entertainment systems remain the central focus but, as Spafax sales manager Nick Hopkins put it, ‘we use the journey corridor to create as many touch points as possible’. A Spafax advertising campaign would involve leaflets, texts, posters and public-address system announcements in addition to the seatback screen.17 Thus the advertising agency provides the special effects on the blue screens of the airport and airplane: beckoning, directing and calling for travellers’ attention. The practices enacted by IMP, Skyport Cinemas and TravelCinemas indicate an understanding of the asymmetry of information and attention. All three installed media technologies in places where attention was presumed to be up for grabs. In airplanes, airport lounges and hotels, business travellers had empty time to fill; presumably with nothing to do but wait, their perceptions could be directed and captured by moving images and sounds. That human perception could be controlled, directed and focused is key to this understanding of attention, and motivates inflight entertainment in addition to the myriad advertising practices that pervade ‘life in corridors’. The competition for business traveller attention provides the backdrop for an ongoing drama in inflight entertainment technology. Film theorist Jonathan Beller has recently elaborated an alternate theory of attention: that cinema produces the attention commodity by managing the sensual labour of its spectators. Beller argued that cinema (and here he includes all imagescreen technologies, from movie theatres to internet browsers) is a ‘deterritorialized factor[y] in which spectators work’. Following this, he proposed to reformulate Marx’s theory of labour value ‘as the attention theory of value’. Rather than limiting the sensual labour of watching images on a screen to focus groups and test marketing, as is implicit in Smythe, Beller suggested that subjectivity itself is formed by labouring in the image. ‘Perception is increasingly bound to production’ of commodities and production of the self.18 In this sense, the visual culture of the TCC is also the site of production for the TCC, in that it produces the culture-ideology of consumerism, the commodity of attention, as well as the subjectivity of the transnational capitalist, whose loyalties and values lie in the furtherance of a global system of consumerism and thus aspire to a cosmopolitan identity. The image, therefore, is deeply imbricated in this system of managing and regulating consumer identity and the production of commodities (airtime, visibility, publicity, celebrity, attention) that have come to characterise the globalist world of advertising, marketing, branding and transnational corporate and capital mobility. Thus, even as the TCC labours to produce the images which flicker across the screens on planes (or those found in the inflight magazine, tray tables and napkins), they too labour in the image, and through the interaction of image, perception, attention and focus, produce value. Sklair has argued that this type of highly managed and administered media output coincides with the interests of the TCC, which manages the global attention economy. The global capitalist system uses place and cultural difference as part of its strategy, selling whatever people are willing to buy, whether Hollywood action films, Bollywood musicals, kung fu, etc.19 Such an approach to the global system of consumerism helps explain the enduring importance of tourism even in an era when ‘place’ is supposed to 92

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be disappearing because of the space-time compression brought about by rapid transportation and communication technologies. Tourism, in general, does not necessarily threaten the ideological control so desired by the TCC. In fact, the management of tourism (and therefore place) to conform to the needs of the cultureideology of consumerism (which has no place-loyalty) is the primary purpose of tourism as an industry and as practice. Tourism performs a contradictory function of heterogenising place and experience through the creation of the exotic; and yet tourism is a homogenising force in which common protocols and conventions must be observed regardless of place origin or destination of the tourist(s).20 PRODUCTIVE EMPTY TIME Inflight entertainment presents an opportunity to travel while travelling, showing images of other times and places, allowing passengers to pass through time and space in a different way. A flight time might be ten hours, but the traversing of international time zones creates another difference in time between embarkation and disembarkation. The differences between the passengers’ corporeally produced circadian rhythms, the astronomically produced daylight rhythms of the geographic place of disembarkation, and the technologically produced time of global standard time very often result in disorientation and/or fatigue, commonly known as jet lag.21 In a sense, jet air travel has compressed time and space to such an extreme that the body of the passenger cannot keep pace with the technological speed of global capitalism. But even as air travel achieves a sort of time travel via space-time compression, passenger experience is often characterised by extreme boredom, and the flight becomes ‘empty time’ waiting to be filled. Airlines have followed the precedent set by Skyport Cinemas and InFlight Motion Pictures and begun to sell the attention of passengers to other firms. Beginning in 1980, Trans Global Films began selling ‘corporate documentaries’ to airlines to exhibit to passengers as part of their inflight entertainment line-ups. Originally conceived as ‘elegant’ and ‘soft-sell’ ‘paid public relations’, these documentaries soon transformed into thirty- and sixty-second spots, which the head of film acquisition at inflight entertainment firm Avicom compared to spot advertising on domestic television, remarking, ‘the audience is used to it’.22 By 1984, American Airways, British Airways, Cathay Pacific, Canadian Pacific, Air Canada, Air France and Aer Lingus were running advertisements as part of their inflight entertainment programmes.23 The lucrative practice of capturing passengers’ attention and selling it to advertisers was not limited to the image screens. Inflight magazines have historically been filled with advertisements, and by the late 1980s, advertisements extended to napkins, airsickness bags and the audio channels. SkyMall, the ubiquitous on-board catalogue of products for those with large amounts of disposable income and large houses, was founded in 1990, demonstrating the increased focus on air travellers as a consumer group.24 The marketing company Stallwords experimented in 1989 with placing advertisements on the inside of lavatory doors on selected TWA flights, reasoning that, ‘people would appreciate having something to read in the lavatory since they don’t bring a magazine along with them as they would at home’.25 The occupation of Executive Flight: Attention, Gender and the Seatback Screen

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these spaces by advertising is not necessarily remarkable given the larger context of the global capitalist system, and yet the justification given by airline executives – that the advertising strategies in the space of the airplane cabin are pursued to deliberately imitate the domestic space – reveals how pervasive the culture-ideology of consumerism has become as well as the depth and breadth of practices performed by the TCC in its name. The installation of personal seatback screens was a component of the growing inflight advertising phenomenon. The seatback screens pioneered by Northwest, Qantas and British Airways in 1988 mirror many of the same qualities of domestic television sets: multiple channels, a range of content (movies, sitcoms, sports) and spot advertisements. The director of marketing for Northwest claimed, ‘people didn’t object to the ads too much, and they really liked the choice of programs’.26 The logics of ‘forced choice’ and ‘free lunch’ content which undergird the revenue-generating potentials of the US commercial television system are apparently also applicable in the passenger cabin.27 The seatback screen, then, offers the simulation of self-directed choice, allowing passengers to choose to watch and listen to something their neighbour has not chosen. Presumably the passenger in question is more engrossed in and attentive to content they have chosen, as opposed to the selections made by the airline for the entire cabin. In both viewing situations – the personal screen or the common screen – the audience of passengers is presumed to be captive, but only captivated in the former situation. The price of the private screen and its capability for passengerselected entertainments, however, is more advertising.28 The presumed focused attention of the passenger in front of the seatback screen, in which the passenger feels more in control and rewarded by making selections, is more valuable to marketers and advertisers, and thus the seatback screen is potentially more lucrative for the airlines.29 The Airline Advertising Bureau points to the highly desirable demographics of frequent fliers: 40 per cent of air travellers are ‘professionals, managers, executives’ and the median annual income for air travellers in 2001 was $93,882. The median annual income for passengers on short-haul ‘shuttle’ services, where television and short subjects are often the only available screened entertainments, was nearly double that figure. Capturing the attention of these fliers is a primary mission for seatback screens, which, in addition to offering passengers choice, are often sponsored by airline partners, carry infomercials prior to allowing access to the system’s menu, present slide-shows of still advertisements while the plane is on the tarmac or, particularly in television content, contain spot advertisements. Delta has experimented with allowing advertisers to create DVDs and CDs that the airline distributes to first- and business-class passengers to view on the entertainment systems in those cabins.30 In some cases, television producers will create a custom magazine-format show in exchange for airlines buying content; for example, Viacom produced an infotainment programme for airlines that contracted to show reruns of Everybody Loves Raymond (1996–2005).31 Because seatback screen systems allow passengers to choose their entertainments, airlines have had to devise systems to track viewership for their advertisers. The further segmentation of the passenger cabin via seatback systems allows for more focused targeting of passengers’ attention, which is more attractive to advertisers, but such customisation of inflight entertainment 94

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presents the additional problem of tracking who is watching what and when. In order to sell attention to advertisers, it first has to be accounted for and measured. Many of these systems currently have system software which allows for tracking of passenger choices and viewing time. JetBlue’s satellite television system, LiveTV, actually transmits information about viewer choices to a database near its Florida headquarters, tracking viewing behaviour as it happens.32 The increasing privatisation of space and media choices in the passenger cabin of an aircraft is inextricable from the domestication of the passenger airplane, and part of the process of blurring the boundaries between business time and leisure time. Inflight entertainment would seem to be aimed at making the time of travel pass more quickly. In other words, the entertaining draws attention away from the long duration of the journey (this is especially the case with transoceanic flights). On the other hand, the presence of a vast array of choices may induce a kind of paralysis in the form of browsing, in which enormous amounts of flight time are spent shuffling through the selection of films, television shows and video shorts within the airplane’s library. The airline passenger is then subject to different modes of time during the flight. In-flight, time has become mediated by a kind of ‘ambient television’. Even though seatback screens are called ‘personal’, it is fairly easy to view your neighbours’ screens or those several rows ahead. The airplane cabin becomes an array of flickering silent images to which your attention can wander.33 Without such mediations, business travellers experience travel time as ‘down time’ or ‘dead time’. A British Airways executive remarked that international travel, in which business travellers could spend twelve to twenty-four hours cut off from the workplace and away from the telephone, was comparable to being jailed or hospitalised.34 Inflight entertainment is part of an apparatus of technologies and practices which seek to resurrect this dead time, unearthing it and elevating these periods into bursts of activity. As an advertising executive put it, ‘Flying is valuable office time to me. If I get the space I need to work and a good seat, I justify the expense by getting a week’s worth of work done on an eight-hour flight.’35 First-class travel is designed specifically for creating longer periods of empty time to be filled. Priority check-in and ticketing lines, priority security screening and priority boarding all act in concert to allow passengers more time. The increased fare for first-and business-class travel is payment for the luxury of extra time. Waiting in ticket lines and security lines is technically not empty time, but it is time that is ‘wasted’ mainly because it is time which the passenger cannot control or develop for their own use. In a sense, these periods of waiting are treated as time taken from passengers by the airlines and the security apparatus, a toll that can be avoided by paying extra fare. In the United States, the federal government-run Transportation Security Agency has implemented a ‘PreCheck’ system, which expedites the security screening process for those passengers willing to submit to a background check and a face-to-face interview with a Customs and Border Patrol agent; a process that carries a $100 fee. The PreCheck programme expedites the security process for this class of travellers by providing dedicated lines and checkpoints and allowing travellers and their luggage to pass through the image-processing apparatus without having to remove any articles of clothing or unpack. The preplanning and management of self crucial to the efficient method of packing and unpacking exhibited by the character Executive Flight: Attention, Gender and the Seatback Screen

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Ray Bingham in the film version of Up in the Air referenced in the introduction to this book are no longer necessary.36 For the business traveller, in contrast to the tourist, the pace of subjective time does not slow during travel and, while travel enables the accomplishment of financial transactions and completion of deals, the journey itself can be construed as an obstacle to the completion of these tasks if not properly capitalised as productive time.37 The rise of international and transoceanic flight in the years following the Chicago Convention on International Civil Aviation meant longer and longer flights. Airlines introduced larger aircraft with longer ranges, such as the DC-6, the Constellation and the Stratocruiser, whose pressurised cabin assured more comfortable flying. Longer flights meant more potential for boredom and, initially, the solution to the problem of boredom lay in seating arrangements: ‘Reclining, adjustable seats were often boxed in pairs of two, facing each other in the fashion of a railway compartment, so that passengers could enjoy polite conversation with those sitting opposite them.’38 Inflight entertainment, arising in the era of mass air travel brought about by the jet, allowed airlines to arrange seats more closely together, all facing the same direction, since boredom and anxiety could be alleviated through screened entertainments, rather than face-to-face conversation. Still, despite the emphasis on congeniality and conviviality seen in the airline services of the 1940s and 1950s, international business continued to be a driving force in airline marketing in the postwar period. A 1946 Pan Am advertisement in Life Magazine exemplified the postwar emphasis on international business and air travel, depicting a man in a grey flannel suit travelling with his wife in England and Ireland on business and pleasure in a series of vignettes. The caption under the first, showing the man armed with a briefcase, his wife stylishly dressed in hat and gloves next to a smiling Pan Am stewardess, reads ‘the time I saved by Clipper has been vital to my business negotiations in England – my wife Jane has been a big help to me as my secretary’. While the small print emphasised that England was still recovering from the war and would soon ‘be ready to welcome visitors on pleasure trips’, it’s clear that Pan Am was promoting speedy international travel to businessmen and their helpful wives. The gendered division of labour (and travel) was widely assumed in promotional materials. TWA, adopting the slogan ‘The Businessman’s Airline’ in 1948, ran an advertisement in the New York Times, titled, ‘A Word from the Wives of Business Travelers about TWA’, which named speed and productivity as major reasons housewives recommended TWA for their husbands. Like the Pan Am advertisement, TWA’s was a story told in a series of vignettes attesting to the physical and domestic consequences of TWA’s speed and efficiency, with captions such as, ‘John spends less time away’, ‘Fred has a bigger paycheck’, and ‘Bill isn’t all tired out any more.’ Another advertisement, which appeared in Fortune, showed a smiling and reclined man in a suit proclaiming, ‘I squeezed a month into a week using the Businessman’s Airline.’39 According to these logics, air travel makes time elastic and, therefore, can allow men to accomplish more with less, as well as spend more time in domestic bliss. Five years later, United Airlines introduced its ‘Executive Flights’, deepening the gendered division of labour between executive and sales work, on the one hand, and service and support, on the other. In 1958, a decade after Pan Am depicted the wife as secretary, the woman’s support role in business travel could be replaced by technology. 96

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Soundscriber Incorporated, a dictation machine manufacturer, introduced its soft vinyl recording disc format and recording machines to American Airlines. The Soundscriber service soon made its way to Pan Am and consisted of a tri-fold brochure with instructions on how to use the device. Inside the brochure was a small disc for recording dictation, and the brochure handily doubled as an envelope so that the disc could be put in the mail and sent back to the office. Although Soundscriber did not wish to limit inflight voice recording to business travellers only, the title over the lines for note writing where the disc was to be placed read, ‘Notes to My Secretary’, indicating that the primary users of the service were presumed to be businessmen. Inflight dictation machines as well as inflight typewriters were early examples of the fashion in which airlines sought to attract business travellers by creating mobile offices in the airplane cabin.40 International business travel conjoined with inflight entertainment in the 1960s, when airlines began offering language lessons via the entertainment systems. In 1967, Pan Am introduced taped Berlitz French and German language lessons on transoceanic flights as part of its ‘Theatre-in-the-Air’ service. By 1971 these were replaced by ‘Celebrity Language Lessons’ with José Ferrer, Marlene Dietrich and Charles Aznavour acting as teachers.41 TWA began its ‘Foreign Accent’ flights in 1968, which offered newspapers, magazines and music in a chosen European language, as well as cuisine to represent a corresponding European country.42 In 1977 Air France began distributing a French ‘language lesson booklet’ and Lufthansa announced ‘an audio program of German language lessons’.43 Language lessons have proven to be a regular offering on international flights: All Nippon Airways offered two hours of Japanese and English lessons via its inflight entertainment system in 1991, and in 2012 the Airline Passenger Experience Association mentioned language lessons in its list of ‘Top Ten Things That Premium Passengers Really Want’, suggesting a continuing emphasis on cosmopolitanism for international business travel.44 The 1980s saw a return to the 1950s ethic of making the airplane cabin a workplace, with all the amenities of the office. Inflight telephones were introduced in 1984, and by 1988 avionics and inflight entertainment companies were working on developing systems compatible with office and personal computers. As Thomas R. Riedinger, director of public policy projects for Boeing, said in 1988, ‘Today’s airplane environment, with its drinks, movies, and dinner is geared to relaxation. If airlines make it a work environment, flying time won’t be lost time and business travellers will pay to stay productive.’45 During the late 1980s and through the 1990s, international carriers (particularly non-US carriers) invested in inflight systems that allowed business travellers greater integration with business software available in terrestrial offices, or at least supplying power outlets so that travellers could work with their portable computers plugged into the airplane seat. One inflight entertainment company’s 1988 advertisement illustrated how the ethos of the office cubicle had gone airborne. With the headline, ‘To Each His Own’, the advertisement featured an image of a space age-looking white plastic module embedded with three screens, one in the armrest and two in front of the seatback, all angled upwards. The copy at the bottom emphasised personalisation for passengers, customisation for airlines and easy access to stereo music, video games, movies, food and beverage ordering – even gate information – through the system. Executive Flight: Attention, Gender and the Seatback Screen

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‘LET US ENTERTAIN YOU’ In the fifty years since the widespread installation of inflight entertainment, airlines have tried to reconcile the presumed need to distract passengers as well as to provide a space conducive to concentration and productivity. A 1965 story, appearing in the Christian Science Monitor, illustrated how Pan Am used its ‘Theatre-in-the-Air’ service to balance these demands: As I type I am listening to stereo classical music over a set of earphones plugged into a seat outlet … There are 10 channels from which to choose a variety of ‘shows.’ There are tunes for teens, for example; children’s hour; a comedy hour; a half hour of travel and shopping tips for the women; and ‘Doing Business Abroad’ for the men.46

American Airlines took a different approach when it introduced the Astrovision system in 1964. The airline took care to differentiate it from large-screen exhibition practices, running an advertisement depicting a passenger hiding under his seat to escape the film. In a series of 1965 advertisements appearing in the travel sections of national papers, American Airlines emphasised the possibility of escaping the film. One 1964 advertisement, with the slogan, ‘One nice thing about Astrovision is, you can ignore it’, showed one business traveller, besuited and bespectacled with a briefcase in his lap, pen in mouth, concentrating on documents in front of him, while the woman seating next to him rests her head in her chin and gazes down at the small screen installed between the first-class seats in front of them, with headphones in her ears and a smile on her face. The copy underneath the photograph reads: Most people think Astrovision’s movies and stereo music are pretty nice on a long flight. But there are some – especially businessmen with work to do – who are just as glad we included an ‘off’ switch. No one likes to be a captive audience anyway.

The division between freedom and productivity, on the one hand, and captivity and distraction, on the other, coalesced along gendered lines. An earlier advertisement shows a woman in mid-laugh, headphones in her ears, looking down at the screen, while the man sitting next to her, also wearing headphones, looks up in the middle distance, away from the screen. The caption reads, ‘They’re flying in two different worlds.’ Other American Airline advertisements emphasised that, ‘Astrovision is a personal entertainment system. It’s inflight entertainment that you control [emphasis in original]’, creating a constellation of personalisation, control, productivity and the businessman. The advertising rhetoric presumes a division within air travellers: between those who want to be distracted, focusing their attention on provided entertainments, and those who want to focus their attention on tasks to be completed and therefore literally left to their own devices. Not all advertisements for Astrovision during 1964–5 manifested such a stark bifurcation between male and female passengers. But in the cases where men were depicted watching Astrovision, they had a female companion by their side also watching. While focused attention and productivity were often associated with masculinity in the promotional and marketing materials of airlines, during this period distraction and entertainment were always associated with femininity. 98

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Female flight attendants occupied a fraught position in this constellation of attention forms and values, since stewardesses were supposed to be both feminine and productive, efficient and distracting.47 From the outset, aviation was considered largely a masculine activity: pilots, mechanics and aircraft designers were all presumed to be male, and later, as civil aviation became a transportation industry starting in the 1930s, passengers were presumed to be largely male as well. Joseph Corn described how, during this period in the United States, women pilots (both actual and aspiring) tried to negotiate the assumption of women’s aerial unsuitability by adopting a rhetoric of ‘aerial domesticity’ which held that for women, piloting aircraft was simply an extension of their traditional role as housekeepers and homemakers. Helping soften the shock of women pilots was the fact that many were already married, and ‘aerial domesticity’ was supported by ‘flying couples’ such as the O’Donnells, Omlies and Lindberghs. Corn argues that the popularisation of flight was assisted in no small part by women pilots campaigning for a role in the field of aviation; this helped create an image of flying as safe, charming and even domestic. In a sense, the success of women pilots in leveraging their ‘domesticity’ during the 1930s brought about their own obsolescence: ‘In only one place since 1940 have women been visible in the business – as stewardesses. In the cabins of airliners women nurtured the passengers while in the cockpit men flew the planes.’ Aerial domesticity was thus co-opted by airlines as part of their campaign to make air travel appear luxurious and safe.48 Boeing Air Transport first introduced white female nurses as part of the cabin service for their air transportation venture in 1930. The presumed ‘devotion to duty’, domestic and nurturing nature, and feminine instincts possessed by this group motivated this choice. The division of labour between men in the cockpit and women in the cabin helped to re-masculinise piloting in particular and aviation in general. The choice of white women had racial aspects as well, as aviation companies sought to distinguish air transportation from railway travel by not hiring African-American men employed by and associated with luxury rail services, such as Pullman cars. Thus airline companies sought to make aviation appear as a ‘higher-class’ form of transportation.49 Race and ethnicity continued to play a role in airlines’ image-creation and promotion for many decades, although a premium could also be placed on exoticness and orientalism, as in the ‘Nisei’ Pan Am stewardess and the ‘Singapore Girl’ of Singapore International Airlines.50 The subsequent reduction in public perception of stewardesses to the role of sexualised ornaments was brought about in part because of labour practices. Airlines chose promotional strategies based on distinguishing their service from other airlines, and stewardesses have been a prominent feature of this strategy. Drew Whitelegg argued that, despite being initially introduced as safety workers (and required to be registered nurses up until 1942), airlines have continued to choose to emphasise the physicality of stewardesses as a way to avoid talking about their safety record (and safety in general), based on the presumption that even mentioning safety makes fliers nervous.51 Thus, stewardesses performed much the same function as inflight entertainment, to soothe and comfort anxious passengers and distract from the fact of flight itself. The traditionally gendered roles first leveraged by women pilots ended up being used against stewardesses, so that ‘marital duties’ were considered a distraction from the work of serving (male) passengers and the long and Executive Flight: Attention, Gender and the Seatback Screen

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irregular work hours were considered the enemy of domestic bliss. Airlines used such reasoning to prohibit stewardesses from being married. Additionally, age, weight and height limitations on stewardesses were in place until the 1970s.52 The sexist logics of airplane executives and airline marketing strategies resulted in a profession marked by glamour, cosmopolitanism, intensive safety training, perspicacious attention to physical appearance, emphasis on nurturance (or ‘mothering’), and an overtly sexualised reputation not helped by salacious ‘tell-all’ books from the 1960s.53 Flight attendants thus became a particularly visible and controversial site for ‘secondwave feminism’ as struggles over sexualisation (and sexuality), workplace inequalities and juridical as well as de facto discrimination were brought forward in the public consciousness.54 While this story has been ably recounted from a variety of positions, my interest lies in the intersection of flight attendants and inflight entertainment. The years following the widespread introduction of inflight entertainment were marked by advertising strategies that attempted to exploit the presumed charms and attractions of young unmarried, single women in the form of stewardesses as well as the novel practice of occupying flight time with distracting and compelling films in order to attract customers. In 1969, Delta Airlines ran a print advertisement with a picture of a smiling blonde stewardess carrying a tray of food down the aisle of the airplane cabin, with the caption, ‘No floor show; just a working girl working.’ None of the passengers in the picture seems to acknowledge the stewardess, save for another conventionally attractive smiling woman, cocktail in hand, gazing up at the stewardess with a wide smile. The small print under the caption explains that, ‘In her new chic outfit, she looks like anything but a stewardess working … Next trip come see our working girls work. It’s no floor show. But it’s funny how you get to feel like a leading man.’ The advertisement thus positions the stewardess as an object of desire, an object to be looked at, with the prerogatives granted to men in postwar US patriarchal culture. But oddly, the male passengers are not distracted; their attention is elsewhere. Only the female passenger looks up to the stewardess. Nonetheless, the woman, ‘in her chic new outfit’ is presented to capture the attention of those leafing through the pages of the Wall Street Journal or Sports Illustrated, two publications in which the advertisement ran.55 That the stewardess is charged with making passengers feel like ‘a leading man’ also gestures toward their presumed romantic (and sexual) availability and status as diversion and distraction, while the businessman is encouraged to imagine himself as a star in a film (or as a ‘hero’ in the cinematic blue-screen environment of air travel more generally). Thus the stewardess acts as an attentiongrabber for male readers, but because male travellers are attentive to their own business, she is not portrayed as distracting (or harassed) within the cabin.56 An advertisement in Pan Am’s inflight Clipper magazine for Instrument Systems Corporation, which designed and installed the multiplexing sound technology for Pan Am’s Theatre-in-the-Air system on board its 747s, showed a group of multiethnic stewardesses standing behind or seated on either side of an airplane seat, holding the headphone wires and smiling at the camera. The headline for the ad, ‘Let Us Entertain You!’ could as easily refer to these four women as to the inflight entertainment technology or Instrument Systems Corporation. As in the Delta advertisement, the women in this ad are dressed relatively demurely, with hemlines around the knee, long sleeves and high collars. Nonetheless, the association of the entertainment technology 1 00

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with stewardesses is plain. The advertisement deliberately uses a group of women, with differing ‘looks’, surrounding a single empty airplane seat chair to equate the multiple channels of sound to multiple women. The small-print copy below the picture emphasises the twelve channels of sound provided by the system, and reads, ‘wondering how all those channels are made available to you simultaneously?’ The plenitude of entertainments furnished via the headphones is thus implicitly linked to the multitude of smiling stewardesses also on board. The equation between looking at stewardesses and looking at screens is made most explicit in a 1965 Continental Airlines advertisement, ‘showing a stewardess’s backside’ from her black pumps up to her waist, cut off about mid-torso so as to prevent her from attaining any subjectivity. The caption to the photo reads, ‘Our first run movies are so interesting we hope you’re not missing the other attractions aboard.’ Here the screen of the stewardess’s skirt corresponds to the movie screen, both surfaces available for the projection of fantasies and narratives. The advertisement presents the body of the stewardess (or more accurately the body parts of the stewardess) as another distraction, an attention-grabber that is in danger of failing to compete with the attention-capturing technology of the inflight movie. For cultural historian Lee Kolm, this advertisement, ‘presented the stewardess as the feminine foil that distinguished a businessman’s gender’, as if he was rendered impotent by the inactivity of passenger air travel, or emasculated through the desk-bound tedium of work, or feminised by watching movies (momentarily transformed into a ‘matinee girl’), and his masculinity could be reclaimed by asserting heterosexual desire through objectifying the female body.57 Like the advertisements run by American Airlines demonstrating how its Astrovision system allowed men to stay focused, concentrated and productive even in the face of screened entertainments, this Continental advertisement assured men that air travel and inflight entertainment were still compatible with a heterosexual masculinity, in which the only sanctioned form of distraction is to gaze at the female body. These advertisements, and many like them, address potential customers through women, using photographs of stewardesses as the way to capture the attention of magazine and newspaper readers. At the time, Continental’s entertainment system was similar to Astrovision: a series of small screens suspended from the luggage rack. Continental may have been playful in its anxiety over the ability of these small screens to sufficiently distract passengers from the fact of flight. A 1965 advertisement from American Airlines, with the banner text ‘Work Your Way to San Francisco’, placed the notion of productivity in an inverse relationship to screen size, while emphasising choice and autonomy: The working conditions on an American Airlines flight are ideal. We have no darkened cabins. And no super-rama screens competing for your attention. So if you have work to do, you can. In First Class, we’ll even lend you a Smith-Corona typewriter, a Dictaphone dictating machine and a stationary portfolio. (Sorry, we can’t lend you a stewardess to take dictation) … And if you feel like doing nothing, you can do that, too. There’s nothing pushy about Astrovision.

In addition to placing productive work in an inverse relationship to screen size, this advertisement explicitly links the stewardess to communication technologies. On the one hand, it admonishes the business traveller against confusing the proper role of the Executive Flight: Attention, Gender and the Seatback Screen

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stewardess by reminding him she’s not a secretary; on the other hand, it reminds the business traveller that there are stewardesses on board who might have qualities similar to secretaries. The dictation machine and the typewriter, communications technologies of work, concentration and productivity can be provided by the stewardess, but only mastered and controlled by the male business traveller (whereas the large screen masters even the male business traveller). Thus even the technologies themselves are gendered, much like the Soundscriber inflight dictation machine that replaced the female travelling secretary. A 1968 full-colour magazine advertisement for American Airlines managed to combine the image of femininity as nurturing and domestic with the sexual availability of the stewardess, using an image of a young woman in an American Airlines uniform in a mid-century modern chair, legs curled underneath her, facing the camera, and the headline ‘Think of her as your mother.’ The advertisement was part of a long history of airlines promoting stewardesses as tending to passengers’ comfort. In the 1930s, when international travel often involved lengthy overnight voyages and airplanes with sleeper coaches or seats that unfolded into beds, stewardesses would be posed as if they were tucking passengers into bed. The 1968 ‘stewardess as mother’ image featured in multiple advertisements by American Airlines, like a two-page one that listed the many achievements of the airline, including its claim to be ‘the first airline to seat everyone within 5 rows of the movie’ (the aforementioned image also served to promote ‘the first stewardess college’). At the time, American’s inflight entertainment system was operated by stewardesses, who were also often called upon if the equipment malfunctioned or passengers needed help. On all airlines, it was the stewardesses’ job to sell (or distribute) headphones for the inflight entertainment, and on some they handed out programmes advising whether the material was suitable for children. Thus the curatorial and supervisory position taken by stewardesses regarding the operation of the inflight entertainment equipment was maternal in nature as much as it overlapped with other financial and technical duties. The technological devices which fill the airplane cabin were therefore gendered: the devices of distraction (screens, catalogues, food service carts) associated with femininity, and the devices which require concentration and enable productivity associated with masculinity. At the same time, the act of supplying these accoutrements for the male business traveller is the role of women, so femininity is not entirely divorced from the instruments of production, but the role of woman was reduced to helpmate. After the transformation of the profession brought about through agitation by flight attendant unions, the subsequent abandonment of age, marriage, height and weight restrictions, and the admission of men into the flight attendant workforce, there has been the occasional retrenchment of sexist imagery and nostalgia for the ‘sexy stew’.58 But, in the main, those attributes associated with the 1960s image of the stewardess have been mapped onto the inflight entertainment systems. Interactive versions of these now allow travellers to order their meals inflight and shop duty free; the selection of games and other activities that occupy children obviate maternal roles for flight attendants; even the menu of video-ondemand choices or the presence of live television on newer systems relieve the flight attendants of the role of distraction. In many cases, even the safety demonstration has been taken over by the entertainment systems.59 In short, even as the association 1 02

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between femininity and inflight entertainment set in motion in the 1960s continues to be a lasting one, it has transformed from one in which women were distractions, distracting, distracted and distractable, to one in which technological distractions were recast as female. CENSORSHIP AND THE CONTESTED SPACE OF THE CABIN Deployments of screen technology within the airplane cabin have displayed a distinct propensity towards greater emulation of the domestic media experience. Aerial domesticity came to be less about running a household and more about emulating the living room equipped with a television set, radio and phonograph. The original systems installed by IMP on TWA planes aspired to a movie theatre experience. Passengers were physically positioned between screen and projector, as in a theatrical setting. For many flights, a large screen hung at the front of the cabin, the cabin lights were turned down and the cabin further darkened by closing window shades. Although there was no seat pitch and sightlines were not optimal, these procedures and the arrangement of the projector and screen meant that IMP merely displaced movie theatre exhibition to the cabin of the airplane. This arrangement signalled a different kind of discrete aesthetic experience, separate from (but accompanying) the flight itself. When the lights were lowered and the flight attendants announced that the film would commence shortly, passengers knew they were in for a special treat. In this technological system, inflight entertainment had a beginning, middle and end, corresponding to the length of the film, but did not necessarily correspond to the length of the journey. Even though the Astrovision system deployed by American Airlines and others in the 1960s and 1970s aspired to a television aesthetic, as opposed to the theatrical experience emulated by the IMP system, the way the television screens themselves were deployed was extraordinary. Either placed between seats, near the armrests or hanging down from the overhead luggage compartment, these sets were placed in such a way that only distinguished them from the console-set of the domestic television arrangement. Additionally, their particular placement in the cabin called attention to the system itself as exceptional. In these arrangements the technology itself may not have been an object of wonder, yet the placement of screens in relationship to the passengers within the space of the cabin marked the televisual experience as separate from the home. Beginning in the late 1980s, with the introduction of seatback screens in airplane cabins, inflight entertainment as exceptional cinema or non-domestic television ended.60 Recalling the console televisions of the 1950s–1970s, the airplane seatback screen is literally a piece of furniture. Or, conversely, the chair has become the screen, the seat a ‘rack for a video system’ – the act of sitting and the act of watching are converged by the inseparability of the seat and screen.61 Rather than the entertainment system existing as a stand-alone object, or a device inelegantly attached to the existing cabin infrastructure, inflight entertainment screens constituted the built environment of the airplane cabin. The migration from the technological showmanship of IMP’s original system and other large-screen systems of the 1970s Executive Flight: Attention, Gender and the Seatback Screen

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and 1980s to smooth and seamless integration with the comfort and support system for passengers indicates a relationship to the installation of the television set in the home. The seatback screen is part of an effort to normalise inflight entertainment within the cabin; that is, to make the screen, moving images and electronic entertainment itself a regular part of a mundane experience. No longer an afterthought or an additional feature, the seatback screen was supposed to be part of the cabin environment, so that the domestication of screens within the airplane cabin followed a trajectory similar to television’s disruption and segmentation of the space of the home during the 1950s and 1960s.62 The airplane cabin is a site contested between business travellers and pleasure travellers; between adults and families travelling with children; between those who wish to look outside the window and those who wish to watch the film on the large screen; not to mention conflicts between those wishing to chat and others wishing to be left alone.63 Airlines have attempted a series of technological solutions for these often incompatible desires, from separate reading lights for each seat, to arranging seats to all face the same direction (thus discouraging socialising), and changes to inflight entertainment technology including personalised screens and menus of choices spanning differing interests. Historically, the division of the airplane cabin into separate spaces organised by fare classes coincided with the introduction of inflight entertainment in the early 1960s. Both were, of course, intimately connected with the rise of mass air travel made possible by jet aircraft. But pressure for a reduced class of fares, then called ‘tourist class’, came from US-based airlines who felt their passengers were more interested in speed than comfort. Experiments in fare reduction and cramped seating arrangements took place in the late 1940s; on those flights, however, the entire aircraft was priced at the same rate. The IATA did not approve fare reductions for international air travel until 1952, and ‘economy class’ was introduced in 1958, just three years before IMP inaugurated inflight films on TWA.64 But it took the crisis of the rating system and passenger complaints for TWA to take advantage of the divided cabin for the purposes of film exhibition. In TWA’s April 1971 brochure for its new Boeing 747 service, the airline explained, ‘two different features are shown in both First Class and Economy/Coach. One for general audiences. The other for mature audiences. Just tell us which you prefer at the time you select your seat.’65 Similar language appeared in its 1970 brochure for the new ‘Ambassador Class’ service for its Boeing 707 planes.66 The division of the cabin into different fare classes ushered in a method for airlines to resolve tensions between different groups of passengers spatially.67 Initially airlines believed that providing filmic material appropriate for children was a relatively straightforward proposition, relying on a list of films approved both by Parents Magazine and the Catholic Legion of Decency. This list proved to be problematic, as both The Birds (1963) and Tomorrow at Ten (1965) were shown on board flights, and passengers complained vehemently of being trapped and forced to watch a harrowing film.68 A 1972 Time Magazine article quoted American Airlines vicepresident of passenger service as saying, At one time we showed only G and PG-rated films, but in the last few years we’ve found fewer and fewer films in these categories that are good enough for our passengers, so we’ve abandoned any hard and fast rules on ratings, sex, and language. 1 04

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This made it sound as if the blame for objectionable content rested on the presumed sophistication of the passengers’ tastes and lack of quality films directed at general audiences produced by the ‘New Hollywood’.69 The timing of TWA’s ‘two theater’ system coincided with the institution of a new ratings system by the Motion Picture Association of America, then headed by Jack Valenti, in 1968. This ratings system replaced the failing Production Code System in 1968, with G, PG, M and R.70 The new ratings system, according to some critics, resulted in ‘movies [becoming] more and more frank in their exposition of sexual and other themes’, the result being that ‘airlines have been finding it tougher to book movies they can show on their flights, which almost always include children’. United Airlines claimed that the new ratings system reduced the number of ‘suitable films’ from fifty-two to thirty-six; other airlines began to request that distributors cut objectionable scenes before agreeing to rent and exhibit the film.71 While some airlines pointed to the diversity of their passengers, it was also clear that children were a major obstacle to booking a wide range of films. Despite the best efforts of airlines, distributors and the studios, objectionable content on airplane screens had already become the subject of lawsuits. In 1969, Paul Valette sued Air France for showing the full version of Michel Deville’s Benjamin (1968), which, under the title Diary of an Innocent Boy, was rated X in the United States. Valette was flying with his ten-year-old daughter between Montreal and Paris and felt the film was inappropriate for her. The case was thrown out in 1973.72 Child passengers presented numerous problems for airlines, as both boredom and distraction take on distinctly different attributes for children than for adults. The problem of boredom seems particularly acute for children, who on board are often denied the amount of bodily movement, tactile activity, proprioceptive play and sensory occupation in which they might otherwise engage. Boeing addressed this issue head-on with its design of the 747. Conjuring the image of a squirming four year old dubbed Johnny, Boeing justified designing its new plane specifically for entertainment systems by pointing out that the range of options would satisfy Mom, Dad and Johnny. Its 1970 press release, ‘Model 747 designers are working on the childhood complaint that there’s nothing to do up here’, concluded that ‘Captain Kangaroo won’t displace coloring books and travel games. But they’ll make Johnny’s 625-mile-per-hour trip seem even faster.’73 The practice of distracting children with image screens and headphones has proven to be a bit of a mixed bag for parents and other passengers, as well as airlines and content providers. Travel tips for parents with children, such as the Boeing press release for the 747, suggested activities other than watching the screen. Nonetheless, parents found that distracting their children from the screen was a difficult task.74 Some airlines have attempted to assist parents wishing to do this, providing more than just child-oriented programming on their inflight entertainment menus. In 1998, American Airlines, British Airways, Cathay Pacific, El Al, United Airlines and Virgin Atlantic all began handing out special ‘kits’ with toys (often merchandising tie-ins to films or model aircraft), magazines or booklets with puzzles and activities, crayons, pencils and jigsaw puzzles. Asiana even had face-painting and magic shows on some trans-Pacific flights.75 By the 1980s, airlines responded to the co-presence of children and screens by selecting films that were, in the words of one executive, ‘pleasant in nature and noncontroversial’, reasoning that, ‘even a mediocre comedy will do better than the Executive Flight: Attention, Gender and the Seatback Screen

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finest drama’.76 However, the notion of what constitutes pleasant and noncontroversial varies by airline and passenger. Saudia Airlines edited out the kiss at the end of The Legend of the Lone Ranger (1981), while Qantas exhibited an unedited version of The Front (1976), but would not book Nine to Five (1980) because of a marijuana scene. Pan Am and many other airlines booked 10 (1979) but only when the costuming in the orgy scene was altered. When Pan Am offered 10 as part of its Theatre-in-the-Air offerings, the sentence ‘edited for airline exhibition’ appeared for the first time in its inflight magazine description of the entertainment.77 Delta refused to book The Seduction of Joe Tynan (1979) and The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1982) because the airline felt those films did not portray the US South in a positive way.78 Airlines, therefore, tried to make films noncontroversial, taking into account generational differences, cultural differences and concerns over negative publicity. Rob Brookler, one-time spokesperson for the World Airline Entertainment Association, claimed that airlines ‘do consider that there are children’ when programming films, and that ‘the genres that work best are light adventure, comedy and particularly romantic comedy. You’ve Got Mail, now that was the perfect inflight movie.’79 At least during the 1990s, airlines seemed to follow this general guideline. In 1993, the top five most-booked films for inflight exhibition were The Bodyguard (1992), Forever Young (1992), Honeymoon in Vegas (1992), The Last of the Mohicans (1992) and Sneakers (1992); while in 1997, the top two were One Fine Day (1996) and Jerry McGuire (1996).80 Nonetheless, conflicts occur. In 1999, Diane Samples founded Parents Against Violent Airline Entertainment, after an airline exhibited Lethal Weapon 4 (1998) on the large screen in front of the cabin despite the fact that her thirty-monthold son was one of the passengers in front of the screen. Samples’s position was that, although in the United States the rhetoric of choice is often advanced as the alternative to censorship (‘don’t buy the kid the record or the movie ticket or the video game’), ‘on an airplane, you have no choice’. Samples claimed that airlines argued that their highest-paying customers (business travellers) wanted action films shown on board.81 Lethal Weapon 4 was a good choice for airlines because, even though there is plenty of violence and many explosions, none of the crashes or explosions involved airplanes. For the airlines, the conflict was between the demands of high-volume, revenue-generating customers who filled out surveys asking for more action films (and mature content) and the occasional tourist family that objects to their child seeing violence (or sexuality) in-flight. Nonetheless, because such conflicts can generate negative publicity for airlines, the solution has been either to programme more ‘family friendly or mainstream content’ or to install individual seatback screens.82 Some five years before Samples started her group, Jeff Klein, the president of the inflight entertainment distributor Jaguar Distribution, suggested that seatback screens were the solution to this conflict, noting that flight attendants could supervise what choices are made by minors, recalling the maternal role earlier played by stewardesses.83 Because the seatback screen solution is capital intensive, it has been most vigorously pursued within the business-class cabin, which does not necessarily solve the problem, since children are less likely to be travelling in business class. As a result, this conflict is ongoing. The problem of children’s attention, which is of limited value to the advertisers interested in business travellers and frequent fliers, 1 06

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requires a different set of inflight entertainment practices. Censorship continues to be a concern for airlines, and the WAEA (now APEX) often negotiated the fashion in which films are edited. While studios can choose how to edit their films, not acquiescing to airlines’ requests means that airlines will not book the film. As a result, the studios’ non-theatrical divisions have departments dedicated to editing content and smoothing over controversy. In the words of Debbie Chariton, who oversaw inflight film editing for Sony Pictures Releasing, she attempted to ‘make the edit very fluent; we don’t want the audience to know that anything has been done’.84 Sometimes shots are cropped, automatic dialogue replacement (ADR) is used, or images are altered and/or re-tinted. For film studios and airlines, these voluntary forms of censorship, which are still under the control of the studios and subject to the approval of airlines, are preferable to legislated regulation. Legislative solutions continue to be introduced, however. In 2007, Jesse Kalisher founded a website, kidsafefilms.org, aimed at petitioning the US Congress to pass legislation regulating what films could be shown in-flight. North Carolina representatives Heath Shuler and Walter B. Jones Jr introduced the ‘Family Friendly Flights Act’, requiring that, in a return to 1980s cabin configurations, airlines set aside sections for families with children under thirteen. Business travellers started their own movement to advocate for child-free flights, or at least family sections on aircraft, arguing that children interfered with productivity and concentration. One passenger won a settlement from Qantas after travelling next to a screaming toddler.85 Ultimately these legislative and juridical proposals have failed. The widespread presence of children on board airplanes, and the subsequent crises brought about by the domestication of the airplane cabin, have instead been met with technological solutions: programming options corresponding to ticket class and cabin space, the installation of seatback screens, and other practices akin to the division of the domestic space via television and other electronic media during the 1950s and 1960s.86 CONCLUSION The turn to individualised seatback screens, I have argued, has arisen from concerns with passenger attention in the cabin. Airlines realised that they had to engage a variety of means to procure passenger attention. Initially inflight entertainments were meant to relieve tedium, boredom and accompanying anxiety. The introduction of the jet airplane meant time spent travelling was no longer a period during which knowledge could be attained, character improved or even sights beheld; rather, because airplane travel required little or no effort on the part of the passenger, travel time became empty time. For the business traveller, the time in-flight could either take the form of a respite from the stresses of work and/or family – in which case attention needed to be refocused on distractions such as magazines, newspapers, music, films or even flight attendants and fellow passengers – or the time in-flight could be a conveniently structured period during which work-related tasks could be performed and completed – in which case technologies needed to be provided for those passengers to support their work, in the form of dictation machines, work tables, power outlets and even sensory exclusion of other passengers. For child travellers, Executive Flight: Attention, Gender and the Seatback Screen

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attention needed to be focused on activities that would not disrupt the flight experience for other passengers, and airlines soon realised that they needed to assist parents in this task, so that games and other activities were provided, and films, music and television programmes were also seen as potential attention foci. The tension between the presumed male business traveller, whose attention was to be focused and concentrated, and the presumed frenetic and uncontrolled attention of the child passenger was resolved through the gendering of the flight attendants as both mother figures and objects of sexual attention. The flight attendants’ gender attributes were later mapped onto the inflight entertainment technology, so that both the attentionfocusing and distracting roles of flight attendants were projected onto image screens. Navigating between these various forms of attention and foci for concentrated mental activity eventually overwhelmed the inflight entertainment technologies of the 1960s and 1970s, particularly when airlines addressed the added financial pressures of installing and maintaining these technologies by the selling of attention via advertisements. Thus, not long after men were allowed to become flight attendants, and the end of prohibition on married female flight attendants, airlines began to install individualised image screens in seatbacks. These installations were concentrated in business and first class, where the problem of attention was particularly acute, as these passengers’ attention is worth more to the airline as a commodity to be sold to other advertisers (and those passengers also comprise a lucrative group of brand-loyal customers). Seatback screens presented a solution to these problems, focusing passengers’ perception and apprehension on content filtered by the airlines and those firms anxious to purchase passenger attention. As we shall see in the next chapter, the rise of digital inflight entertainment increased this trend towards individualisation and customisation of content for passenger attention but ultimately, following the logics of neoliberalism, may provide an altogether different solution to the problem: bring your own device.

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Mainscreen exhibition aboard a Pan Am 747, ca. 1971 (Courtesy Special Collections, University of Miami Libraries)

5 Networked Transport: Neoliberalism and Digital Entertainments

On 6 December 2011, actor Alec Baldwin sat in the first-class section of an American Airlines flight waiting to take off from Los Angeles International airport for New York City, playing the popular video game ‘Words with Friends’ on his cell phone. After refusing to turn off his phone when a flight attendant repeatedly asked him, Baldwin was kicked off the flight. Not surprisingly, given his celebrity status, the incident turned into a public relations squabble, with Baldwin spoofing the incident a week later on Saturday Night Live (1975–) and in CapitalOne creditcard commercials. The bus company Greyhound issued a press release after being mentioned in one of Baldwin’s many sarcastic apologies, and Zynga, the software company behind ‘Words with Friends’, used the incident to publicise its software. Meanwhile the Association of Professional Flight Attendants requested that Baldwin’s television show, 30 Rock (2006–13), be banned from inflight entertainment line-ups, barring a formal apology from Baldwin.1 While this strategy was both novel and, to my knowledge, unprecedented, it drew attention to the role of screened entertainments in the struggle over discipline and behaviour on board passenger airplanes. Since many airlines now offer wireless inflight internet access, had Baldwin merely taken a short break from his phone and played his game while at cruising altitude, there would have been no conflict between passenger and flight attendant. This conflict was brought about partly by the ascendancy of digital technologies and the emergent practice of bring-your-own-device, with passengers bringing their own electronic media devices on board, rather than the airline providing entertainment. Because many of these devices are considered extensions of the self, regulating and limiting their use brings about more passenger dissatisfaction and protest than the already established practice of airlines abruptly ending film exhibition because the plane is about to land, or interrupting the soundtrack (and sometimes image) for an announcement. Baldwin is certainly not the first to argue with a flight attendant over cellular phone use. Neil Whitehouse, a British citizen, was sentenced to twelve months in jail for refusing to turn off his phone and arguing with flight attendants in 1999.2 It has always been technically feasible to make cellular phone calls on board a plane if the plane is sufficiently close to a cell tower, usually during take-off and landing. The ban has been in place because those are precisely the periods during which interference with the plane’s navigation and communication systems have the most potential for disaster. The bans were initiated partly in response to plane crashes. Although use of a cellular phone was never officially implicated in the crash of Crossair Flight 498 in Networked Transport: Neoliberalism and Digital Entertainments

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2000, it became a line of inquiry in the investigation and, coupled with the crash of an Adria Airways flight in 2001, led to several inflight cell phone bans in Europe.3 In the United States, it was the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), not the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which banned the use of wireless communication devices on board planes in 1991, citing conflicts in allocation of the electromagnetic spectrum, which could potentially cause interference in the electromagnetic signalling necessary for airplanes’ communication and navigation technologies.4 Thus, the cell phone ban highlights how the regulatory regimes of state governments are asserted in extraterritorial spaces, and that the air transportation system (and many other transportation systems) are simultaneously communication systems and recognised as such through regulatory structures. Outside the US, Air France began to experiment with inflight cellular phone use in 2008, and by 2009 Emirates Air, Malaysia Airlines, Qantas, Ryanair, Royal Jordanian Airlines and Turkish Airlines had all made cellular phone service available to passengers.5 Within the US, the FAA changed its regulations in November 2013 and allowed for the use of personal electronic devices (PEDs) ‘during all phases of flight’, determining that airlines could test to see if their fleet ‘can tolerate interference signals from PEDs’. Instead of a blanket policy, then, the policy regarding cellular phones, tablets and ebook readers on US carriers is determined by the individual airline. Additionally, ‘the FAA did not consider changing the regulations regarding the use of cell phones for voice communications during flight’, leaving that for the FCC.6 For passengers, whatever rationale may be in play for regulating cellular phones, the controversy over the ban has much in common with the debate over large cabin screens detailed in the previous chapter. The ban conflicts with business travellers who need to remain in contact with work and passengers who wish to remain in touch with family and friends (these are, of course, overlapping categories). Cellular phone use during flights remains a contested issue, not only because its interference with avionics remains unproven, but because of the demands on passengers’ attention that a cabin full of one-sided conversations would create.7 Once again, this debate focuses on the conflicting goals of passengers, some of whom wish to maintain social ties through the phone, while others view air travel as a peaceful respite and escape (and perhaps a chance to sleep); in other words, between those who wish to be left alone and those who wish to stay entertained and entranced by images and sounds.8 A BRIEF HISTORY OF INFLIGHT TELEPHONY The history of the airborne telephone provides fertile ground for understanding the emergence of digital devices within the passenger cabin and the increased reliance of inflight entertainment on satellite communications. Inflight telephony experiments began in the 1930s, with radio telephones in airplanes contacting ground stations, which linked the call to the terrestrial wired telephonic network. In 1930, Herbert Hoover Jr, the head of communications for Western Air Express, spoke with persons in Rome, Berlin, London, Ottawa and Mexico City while flying in a plane above Los Angeles. Although the apparatus was a modification of the 1 12

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already developed air-to-ground and air-to-air radio communication system used by pilots and ground controllers, the experiment demonstrated the potentials and possibilities of civil passenger air-to-ground telephonic communication.9 In 1937, Northwest Airlines temporarily offered air-to-ground telephone service to passengers on board its Chicago to Seattle route,10 but these experiments were soon abandoned.11 The widespread introduction of air-to-ground telephone for commercial airline passengers began some thirty years ago. A small mention in Air Transport World within a larger feature entitled ‘What’s New in Airline Cabin Equipment’ announced that in the autumn of 1983, passengers ‘will have use of a new air-to-ground telephone service designed for commercial airlines’ by Airfone Incorporated.12 Eleven carriers contracted with Airfone for the service, although the system was not actually implemented until October 1984, when TWA installed the Airfone system on three of its planes. A spokesperson for Airfone invoked the same logic of efficient and productive use of time described in the previous chapter: ‘The airlines carry 300 million passengers per year, including 175 million business travellers, so we believe Airfone will prove to be invaluable in making more efficient use of airline time.’13 John Goeken sold Airfone to General Telephone and Electronics Corporation (GTE) in 1986, and Pan Am contracted with GTE to install one phone for every three seats in its passenger planes by 1989, changing the name Airfone to SeatPhone.14 In 1986, Racal Avionics contracted with the British National Space Centre to develop a satellite-based voice communication system for airplanes, envisioning eventual commercial passenger use. The joint venture between Racal, British Airways and British Telecom International, called Skyphone, used ‘advanced digital sound processing’, relied on Inmarsat satellites and was compatible with the Airfone system. Skyphone was installed on British Airways 747s in 1989.15 A 1989 advertisement in Air Transport World, with the banner text ‘The New Way to Communicate Worldwide’ promoted ‘the simple operation and worldwide coverage of Skyphone … for passengers it’s the means to make direct-dial international calls from their seat.’16 In 1992, Singapore Airlines and Japan Airlines installed the Skyphone system on trans-Pacific flights.17 In contrast to Airfone’s system, which relied on immobile ground stations and was limited to the continental US, the British Skyphone system used a satellite fleet for transnational reach and stressed compatibility with other communications systems in its design. The image projected by Skyphone in its promotions thus emphasised the invisible and apparently immaterial radio signals sent from airplane to satellite to ground station and back, creating a global network of communication signals that linked previously disconnected sites of human habitation, bringing the world together through aeriality. A 1993 advertisement depicted a plane flying above the clouds, with text of phone conversations (and a string of ones and zeros) emanating from the plane as arcs, with a banner reading ‘Travel the World by air, fax the world by Skyphone.’18 By 1990, GTE’s Airfone was installed on roughly one out of every three US domestic planes. That same year, four other companies were granted licences by the FCC for air-to-ground telephonic systems: Clairtel, Mobile Telecommunications Technologies, American Skycell and In-Flight Phone Corporation (IFPC). Emergent digital technologies proved crucial to the protean inflight entertainment systems Networked Transport: Neoliberalism and Digital Entertainments

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offered during the decade. GTE’s Airfone system also offered data jacks for passenger access to computers and facsimile machines through its network of ground stations, and the company looked forward to offering live television transmission along the same communications network.19 IFPC was headed by former Airfone founder John Goeken, who touted IFPC’s new digital system as superior to the one favoured by his old company.20 IFPC’s digital service proved particularly versatile. In 1991 it offered in-cabin data connections for computers and facsimile machines so that passengers could send data back to Earth, and applied for an experimental licence to provide live audio broadcasts of news and sports to planes in-flight via satellite.21 GEC-Marconi’s inflight entertainment system, also introduced in 1991, converged the phone with the seatback screen in an early (and limited) precursor to contemporary smartphones: ‘the hand-held controller with its easy operating keypad, credit card reader and built-in telephone allows each passenger to comfortably select 12 tri-lingual videos and 72 digital audio channels’.22 Such digital entertainment systems were crucial to the installation of seatback screens, as digitalisation and data compression allowed for systems to include larger libraries of films, television and audio programmes for passengers to choose from. Inflight phone systems also ushered in an era of ‘interactive’ inflight entertainment technologies: the phone itself was positioned as interactive, and, through its built-in creditcard reader, enabled inflight shopping. IFPC predicted the availability of hotel check-in, rental car reservation, stock market and weather services through telephonic technology.23 The inflight telephone proved not to be a viable long-term project. IFPC filed for bankruptcy in 1997.24 Analysts claimed that, in order not to lose money, GTE’s Airfone would need passengers to make ‘thirty to thirty-five calls per day per aircraft’. This pervasive use never materialised, in part because the phones were only used when travel plans went awry (something airlines tried to avoid), although some attributed the lack of calling to business travellers’ viewing air travel as a respite from conversation, interruptions and even work itself.25 By 2001, passengers made fewer than three calls a day per plane. American Airlines, at the time the world’s largest carrier, removed the American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) phones from over 600 of its planes, as did Southwest Airlines, both citing declining passenger use and attempts to cut weight and therefore fuel costs.26 Airfone pulled its telephones from commercial passenger planes in 2006, citing a desire to concentrate on cellular, data and television services.27 In part, the demise of the inflight seatback phone can be connected to the rise of the cellular phone, since many passengers carry one with them despite the fact that voice calling on planes is severely limited. Since phones on planes were primarily used to inform others of travel delays or for novelty, the approval for cellular phone use on the tarmac obviated the airline-supplied air-to-ground phone. In short, the story of the air-to-ground phone is one in which media devices provided by airlines for shared use by passengers have been supplanted by portable devices that passengers bring on the plane with them; constant connection is presumed to be desirable, even necessary; digitalisation is favoured over analogue; and the geopolitics of civil aviation have given way to an ‘atmopolitics’ of extraterritorial spaces, binding orbiting satellites to the trajectories of airplanes and the itineraries of passenger experience. 1 14

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DIGITAL NEOLIBERALISM Digital technologies have come to dominate inflight entertainment and civil aviation more generally. Digitalisation is crucial to the logistics of the global aviation system and has proven invaluable to the new forms of inflight entertainment initiated in the 1990s. While airlines had already pioneered large menus of choices and variety omnibus line-ups for their inflight programming, digital technology promised an even greater variety of programming, video on demand and greater passenger control over content. In first and business classes, the seatback screen has become an interface for the fulfilment of passenger desires – for films, food, television shows, games, duty-free products, even social networking. Miniaturisation of consumer electronics and the digitalisation of media content meant that greater numbers of passengers started to bring their own devices on board: laptops, portable DVD players, cellular phones and music players. In some cases, airlines have provided passengers with the infrastructure for enhanced operation of these devices through internet access, power supply, even the ability to connect their personal devices to the inflight systems. Undergirding these changes is an emergent political philosophy, neoliberalism, which conceives human life as entrepreneurship and emphasises self-management as the model for the relationship of the individual to society. Most treatments of neoliberalism draw attention to the changing relationship between the state and civil society. Previous forms of liberalism required a ‘strong state’ model, where the state was involved in markets, financial transactions and, in some cases, adopted a quasi-paternal attitude towards citizens. Neoliberalism, as summarised by David Harvey, limits the role of the state to providing ‘an institutional framework characterised by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade’ although it also guarantees these practices through the use of force if necessary.28 In Harvey’s narrative, neoliberalism, as the political philosophy which reduces the state to its barest form and values market exchange above all other types of interpersonal relationships, has enabled the kinds of economic and social transformations known as globalisation, in part because state sovereignty is supplanted by market sovereignty, making it an attractive political philosophy for powerful financial elites, corporate players and elected politicians (if only because their responsibilities are greatly reduced). Thus, if globalisation is an ongoing process of binding together discontinuous places and disjunctive times through space-time compression enabled by technological systems of rapid transportation and communication, neoliberalism is its discursive emissary, so convincing and charming that it has taken on the substance of common sense. Although the dominant narrative is that states have replaced their existing governmental systems with neoliberalism, Aihwa Ong argued that neoliberalism is not a replacement for political systems, but rather is merged with existing orders and works with them: ‘Neoliberalism is conceptualized not as a fixed set of attributes with predetermined outcomes, but as a logic of governing that migrates and is selectively taken up in diverse political contexts.’29 Here neoliberalism is not just a rearrangement of bureaucratic institutions and ‘deregulation’ of industries and markets, but also abdication of responsibility by institutions onto individuals.30 Ong wrote: Networked Transport: Neoliberalism and Digital Entertainments

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In Great Britain and other advanced liberal nations, neoliberalism has been defined as a mode of ‘governing through freedom’ that requires people to be free and self-managing in different spheres of everyday life – health, education, bureaucracy, the professions, etc. There is also a stress on responsibility at the community level, and new requirements of self-responsibility by individual subjects.31

The ‘new requirements of self-responsibility’ characterise the milieu that air passengers inhabit in everyday life outside the airplane cabin. Neoliberalism has also become a business management philosophy, in which self-supervision is expedient, efficient and profitable. Following Ong’s argument that neoliberalism is a mobile technology (a tool for living) adopted by and adapted to various non-state institutions and actors, in this chapter I seek to show how airlines have adopted this selective approach towards neoliberalism in their deployment of digital technologies within the airplane cabin. Digital entertainment technologies were first introduced on board in the early 1990s. Manufacturers promoted these systems to airlines as lighter and more versatile. Both of these qualities were desirable for airlines since lighter systems meant saving on fuel costs, and versatility allowed airlines to customise content and presentation, thereby avoiding the conflicts of attention detailed in the previous chapter. The ability to compress data allowed for airlines to reduce necessary storage and transmission capacity while offering more variety in entertainment choices, as well as ‘interactive’ features such as duty-free catalogues and sales. Coupled with the potentials of fibre optics, infrared transmission and the replacement of cathode-ray tube monitors with liquid crystal display screens, manufacturers promised customisable systems with seatback screens, wireless headphones, telephone handsets and remote controls, all with less mass than previous systems.32 The array of choices (films, television shows, video games and office software) was considered attractive to business travellers and frequent fliers. A major concern for airlines, however, was that the level of complexity in the new interactive systems would confuse passengers. The number of new features threatened to overwhelm passengers. As John Landstrom, president of Sony Trans Com put it, ‘anyone who thinks the average passenger won’t be confused by this system is just kidding himself. The flight attendants will be spending a lot of time explaining how it works.’33 Manufacturers answered this challenge by marketing their systems as software rather than hardware. In 1993, GEC-Marconi ran an advertisement in Air Transport World with the banner text ‘The Best Software … We Deliver’, emphasising that, via the customisation of pre-existing Microsoft applications, its new digital system ‘will keep [passengers] coming back for more’, and that ‘passengers could actually think that their flight is ending too soon!’ The system offered business software (based on Microsoft Office), air-to-ground telephony, an interactive SkyMall catalogue, city tourist guides, flight data and entertainment options. By presenting the digital interactive system as possessing a user-friendly and familiar interface based on preexisting software, GEC-Marconi addressed the issue of passenger confusion directly. Digitalisation, as Lev Manovich has argued, always entails software: the algorithms and protocols which transform the data-as-numbers into visual (and sonic) information to be processed by the user.34 The transition from an analogue system by 1 16

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which images were projected onto a large screen for the entire cabin to a digital system in which passengers controlled or supervised their own entertainments meant that passengers had to be trained to use the systems. In essence, each passenger had become their own projectionist. Under this neoliberal regime, in which the labour (and expertise) of the flight attendant-as-projectionist is abdicated to the individual passenger, passengers still needed to be instructed in the art of self-supervised entertainment. Although GEC-Marconi chose one of the dominant computer operating systems, airlines could not necessarily count on passengers’ familiarity with office or home computing (particularly outside of business class), and airlines would have to rely on flight attendants and/or fellow passengers assisting the ‘confused’. Complexity also threatened to overwhelm technicians, engineers and flight attendants. Matsushita’s initial foray into the interactive digital inflight entertainment systems allowed for a choice of a dozen films, video programmes and video games on personal screens. In 1996, Matsushita supplied airlines with a training programme for the system that, ‘emphasise[d] the similarity between the inflight entertainment systems, with their apparent complexity and novelty, and familiar technology such as cellphones and automated cash dispensers’.35 Manufacturers thus tried to offset the ‘shock of the new’ by comparing the new technologies with pre-existing, everyday or domestic technologies, even in their marketing to airlines and airline employees. In this way, the novel project of initiating and choosing screened materials on board the plane was smoothed over by equating it with existing practices. In essence, the neoliberal regime on board the aircraft was normalised by comparisons to the household. James Hay has identified the 1980s as a crucial period of interplay between media technologies and a ‘neo-liberalized’ domestic sphere. Like Harvey and Ong, Hay described neoliberalism as ‘a mode of governance that decenters the state’, and argued that it is essential to pursue research in spheres of social and cultural existence that do not have a direct relationship to state governance. Hay turns to Raymond Williams’s concept of ‘mobile privatization’, first introduced in Television: Technology and Cultural Form, to demonstrate the relationship between, on the one hand, ‘new regime[s] of mobility and … of privacy’, and, on the other, self-governance and cultural technologies. Williams located television in larger social transformations, including the increased distance between the home and workplace, an increased emphasis on the ability to control forms of social contact, and ‘the convergence of … mobility and privacy’. Here we have neoliberal self-governance in nascent form, as the home becomes ‘privatized’ and yet exists in concert with society and relies on the infrastructure provided by the state for its existence (much like Harvey’s argument that the function of the neoliberal state ends in providing only the means for market relations). Hay goes on to argue that interactive media and programmable technology introduced into the domestic sphere beginning in the late 1970s and then through the 1980s gave an elite group (the ‘professional managerial class’) the means for selfgovernance of the domestic sphere. Increasingly, these interactive technologies were self-monitoring ones, measuring and displaying data on fitness, energy use and leisure practices.36 The comparison made by the airlines between the new interactive entertainment systems on board aircraft and technologies of the home, therefore, is no leap; it is predicated on the notion that passengers were accustomed to self-governance Networked Transport: Neoliberalism and Digital Entertainments

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and self-supervision in the encounter with digital electronic technologies, particularly during periods of ‘empty’ (or unsupervised) time, and used to the notion that ‘interactive’ technologies produced self-sufficiency. But giving passengers their own choice of material was not without problems: airlines could no longer tell which entertainments were popular and which were not. Surprisingly, although many interactive digital systems were available by 1996, only one, TNCi’s AirView, offered airlines the ability to track passenger selections, opening up opportunities for targeted advertising and sponsorship which could help defray the costs of the system and perhaps even generate revenue for the airlines.37 When the AirView system was installed on planes in the fleet of French carrier Fairlines, it had the capability to run business software, provide internet access and live television. The system also allowed passengers to pause, rewind and fast forward the visual material or switch programmes in midstream. AirView could also function ‘as a cabin-management system, allowing crew members to record data such as liquor inventory’, and the system came with creditcard readers so that passengers could order pay-per-view films, play video gambling games and shop from their seats (goods would be shipped to their homes). AirView also came with attention tracking software, so that ‘companies that wish to advertise on a system like this will be able to glean information such as how often a movie was viewed, who viewed it, [and] how many commercials they saw’.38 Sony’s P@ssport project, designed in conjunction with Microsoft, installed on South African Airways 747s in 1997, also had the ability to track passenger choices and demographic information. That same year, Sony introduced a digital interactive system with passenger-tracking capabilities for narrow-body aircraft, and contracted with Continental to install the system on seventy-eight aircraft in 1998. Because other revenue-generating features such as pay-per-view films, video games and on-board video gambling generated less revenue than expected, the tracking of passenger selections and usage became of paramount importance as airlines began to treat their inflight entertainment systems like television networks: tracking viewership and selling passenger attention to sponsors.39 The 1990s was thus a turbulent period of experimentation for airlines and avionics manufacturers as they grappled with the transition from analogue to digital. The steady rise of home computing and the ascendancy of digital devices in the domestic sphere, particularly for the elite group that flies internationally on a regular basis, meant that airlines risked looking antiquated without such equipment in their cabins. If an airline could neither offer business travellers respite from work via the introduction of image screens and a menu of entertainment choices that simulated the domestic situation, nor a continuation of the workplace through networked telecommunications and/or the availability of business software, they risked losing customers to airlines that could. Matsushita ran an advertisement in a 1991 issue of Air Transport World dramatising this fear. The banner text read, ‘Install an inferior in-seat video system and your passengers will notice’, while the image showed businessmen parachuting out of a passenger plane. Still, because so many of these new digital systems were plagued with reliability issues and maintenance problems, airlines were hesitant to make the financial outlay for them. Manufacturers promoted reliability in their trade journal advertisements, but even with 90 per cent reliability, 1 18

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on a 747 that meant thirty-five to forty passengers would be without operating seatback screens.40 Another concern was the rapid obsolescence of the software and hardware for digital interactive systems, as both media storage and user interface technologies were rapidly changing.41 One solution was to forego the seatback screen configuration entirely and offer passengers personal handheld devices. For instance, in 1992 Virgin Atlantic began handing out the Sony Watchman to first-class passengers on some planes, even though it had introduced seatback screens for all class cabins in other planes in 1991.42 In 1996, Japan Airlines, Qantas and United Airlines offered the Sony Watchman to first- or business-class customers on certain flights. Passengers could select from a library of movie titles on 8mm cassettes to play on these personal handheld media devices.43 Sony and the airlines viewed this service as a transitional form between shared screens over which individual passengers had little control and the new digital interactive systems that were still in trial phases for several manufacturers and airlines. Still, this passing form proved popular for airlines and foretold the changes to come. By the end of 1997, Sony Trans Com estimated that 20,000 Watchmans were in use in first-class cabins alone.44 That same year, it introduced a new model with a larger screen (five and a half inches diagonally instead of four) and a multilingual audio system.45 In 2000, after Virgin Atlantic conducted a six-week experiment with personal DVD players, Swissair and American Airlines offered first- and business-class passengers portable DVD systems to play Region Eight-coded DVDs. On American Airlines, the portable DVD players came with Bose noise-cancelling headphones and a choice of twenty films. The technological arrangement of a personal handheld player, a choice of film titles and noise-cancelling headphones provided passengers with a personalised cocoon of audiovisual stimulation, and facilitated isolation from other passengers and the cabin environment more generally.46 The selection of entertainment materials therefore becomes the personal responsibility of each passenger and the technological apparatus itself assists in the creation of privatised space among other passengers who have also created their own media bubbles within the cabin. The presumed appeal of handheld personal media players for air travel has more recently caught the attention of companies not involved in avionics. InMotion Entertainment, founded in 1999, rents DVDs, DVD players, headsets, batteries and other audiovisual technology to passengers through store fronts or kiosks in airports.47 DVDs can be rented for a few dollars and dropped off at a destination airport or mailed back to the company. Hudson Booksellers, a chain that specialises in airport locations and sales, started stocking Flexplay DVDs, disposable DVDs that slowly degrade when exposed to oxygen.48 In 2008, Best Buy, a consumer electronics chain, began deploying vending machines for chargers, headphones, cellphones, MP3 players and portable DVD players in airports.49 In these situations, passengers do not have to rely on the airline to provide access to films, television programmes or music.50 In roughly a decade, the emergent neoliberal regime of inflight entertainment has gone from each passenger acting as his/her own projectionist to each passenger bringing his/her own cinematic apparatus. Airlines have been steadily moving in the direction of supplying infrastructure for this new, do-it-yourself approach to inflight entertainment. The installation of in-seat Networked Transport: Neoliberalism and Digital Entertainments

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electric power outlets is perhaps the best example. As then-WAEA president Joe Leach put it in a 1998 interview, ‘in-seat power … really took off fast and furiously and hasn’t let go … Everybody is getting in line, queuing up to get those orders.’51 By August 1998, in-seat power was installed on aircraft by American Airlines, Canadian Airlines, Delta Airlines, Lufthansa and United Airlines, with nearly twenty other airlines, including Air Canada, Alitalia, Asiana, Austrian Air, Cathay Pacific, Korean Air, Malaysia Airlines, Singapore Airlines, Swissair and Varig all planning to do the same. Despite pushback from engineering and maintenance departments, airlines’ marketing departments saw in-seat power as a way to attract higher-revenue (i.e. business-class) passengers.52 A spokesperson for American Airlines claimed it was the only clear demand from passengers; other technologies such as internet access and live television had less support, according to their surveys.53 Providing in-seat power was an acknowledgment by airlines that passengers were bringing their own devices and media technologies on board the aircraft as well as an encouragement for them to do so. That this trend occurred while airlines were experimenting with digital interactive seatback systems further added to the turbulence that characterised the inflight entertainment industry during the 1990s. Airlines therefore saw the provision of inseat power as more than a means for passengers to power their laptop computers; it was also a way to power the handheld entertainment systems, such as the aforementioned Sony Watchman. Such an arrangement was envisioned as ‘low-cost and reliable’ compared to the much-maligned digital interactive systems promoted by avionics manufacturers.54 Calling the self-selection of audiovisual entertainment by passengers ‘interactive’ obscures the fact that the ‘interaction’ between passenger and system is limited to a referendum on the already curated and selected choice of films, television programmes and music selected through contracts between airlines and distributors. Airlines and manufacturers would therefore tend to use ‘interactive’ and ‘audio-and-video-ondemand’ (A/VOD) interchangeably. The consensus regarding A/VOD systems was that they ‘provide passengers with complete control of their audio and video entertainment’, which was regarded as desirable for passengers, particularly those already trained in self-supervision, accustomed to prioritising their own tasks and used to self-expression through allegiance to media forms.55 A/VOD was often measured in sheer volume of choices: Singapore International Airlines’ system stored roughly 110 hours of video, including twenty-five films, several television programmes, video games and fifty ‘fulllength music albums’.56 Framed as media centres, A/VOD systems were inevitably compared to the domestic media experience. A spokesperson for Malaysia Airlines claimed their A/VOD system was ‘just like having your own personal video and music collection on board’.57 Then-WAEA president Rob Brookler remarked that because ‘many passengers now have satellite dishes and cable and are used to multiple channels, the airlines have had to develop a broad spectrum of entertainment options to meet expectations’.58 Choosing content is no longer the primary concern for airlines (although they still select content from distributors and providers); providing passengers with an approximation of their own media connoisseurship was the driving force behind the installation of these new systems. While it is true that the selections available through A/VOD inflight entertainment systems reflect in part the character of the airline, and can present a particular 1 20

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national or regional identity, airlines and equipment manufacturers turned their attention to the interface itself. Here software governs passengers’ access to entertainment and determines what appears on the seatback screens, often in ‘branching-type interactivity’ by which passengers choose a category (e.g. ‘television shows’) and then from a submenu of titles.59 The interface for some systems was a manual remote control (such as the previously described AirView system), some attempted touch-screen interfaces, while others adopted a hybrid interface. Balancing a straightforward and non-confusing (‘user-friendly’) interface with the appearance of choice and plenty that airlines hoped would encourage customer loyalty was the primary concern. In 2002, Cathay Pacific planned to switch from an analogue system using videotapes to a digital A/VOD system called Studio. Cathay Pacific ran a series of user tests to find an optimal passenger interface for its A/VOD inflight entertainment system, remarking that ‘cramped conditions, low lighting and fatigue, as well as the technical restrictions placed upon the system, such as small screens and limited space for the control panel, are unique to the airline industry’. Cathay Pacific used an in-seat remote control (in first and business class, it could be removed from the armrest but was still tethered with a wire). The airline found that the delay between boarding and when the system is turned on and ready to use was actually productive time since it gave passengers a chance to familiarise themselves with the system guide and the interface. Nonetheless, Cathay Pacific found that passengers got lost or confused because of inconsistencies between the guide and the onscreen system. The airline further found that passengers generally fell into two camps: ‘planners’, who planned their media intake based on their perusal of the guide, and ‘surfers’, who would use the screen to find content.60 In a sense, the A/VOD system allowed the inflight entertainment experience to emulate either the moviegoing experience, in which one chooses a film beforehand to watch at an appointed time, or the flow of television, in which channel-switching and discovery characterises the viewing aesthetic. Steven Shaviro connected the non-anchored viewing experience of television to Foucauldian notions of postmodern power (which Hay, in turn, has linked to neoliberalism), in that the endless choices of television channels, the way in which ‘it invites our participation’ does not ‘constrain us or repress us’; rather television ‘persuades us or cajoles us into doing the work of policing ourselves’.61 A/VOD inflight entertainment systems, by combining the digital interfaces of new media with television and cinematic aesthetics, require ‘self-policing’ on the part of passengers, in that the interface requires participation and choice on the part of the passenger which cannot be given over to a larger institution (i.e. the airline). Even the ‘planners’ in Cathay Pacific’s tests did not turn to flight attendants for advice on which film, television show or video game to access in the database of the system, preferring to make their own choices from the guide presented to them. During the 1990s and 2000s, the dominant viewpoint in the inflight entertainment industry was that air travel should not disrupt the terrestrial experience; passengers should be able to access the same networks and devices in the cabin of an airplane that they could in their home or office. The plenitude of choices was related to previous media experience, so that inflight entertainment was no longer Networked Transport: Neoliberalism and Digital Entertainments

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exceptional, but simply an extension of pre-existing systems. In a 2001 interview, AirTV CEO Phil Larkin justified the move to real-time, satellite-based, interactive systems by arguing that, ‘Today, the airline inflight entertainment sector looks quite similar to cable TV in 1979, which relied on video cassette-delivered content supplied by courier services or in the mail.’62 Larkin then likened the transformation that satellite communications brought to domestic television technology to the coming transformation satellite communications (via AirTV) would bring to the airplane. A representative for Sony Trans Com, commenting on the breadth of choices and multiple forms of entertainment available via A/VOD systems, claimed, ‘you surf our system like you surf the Web’, comparing the inflight A/VOD technology and interaction to the seemingly limitless choices available in cyberspace. As I will argue below, cyberspace, accessed through the internet, is the contemporary habitat for the global aviation network; without the space of flows of the internet, the logistical coordination of planes, to say nothing of aerial navigation, would not be possible at the current scale. By providing internet access to passengers, airlines seek to assist in their migration from airspace to cyberspace, the neoliberal spatial configuration par excellence.63 FLYING THE WEB A/VOD inflight entertainment systems are dependent on the digitalisation of visual materials, encoding culture into numbers to further its interoperability and transnational exchange. As shown above, current inflight entertainment technologies are emblematic of the potentials of digital media, offering digitalised films and television programmes on demand, as well as video games, weather reports, internet access and maps tracking the progress of the flight. Similarly, contemporary aviation itself depends on digitalised technologies and encoding; the global coordination of thousands of flights, millions of passengers and their luggage requires the transformation of material reality into numbers, enabling computerised logistical calculations and precise coordination. Digital technologies enable the ticketing, security, passport control, customs and air traffic control systems essential to the contemporary international aviation industry.64 Each passenger plane, therefore, flies through ‘a fog of signals’ to navigate safely, and, in many cases, to keep passengers entertained and connected to the ground.65 These signals are encoded and decoded by computational technologies, enabling what Manovich calls ‘variability’ in media forms.66 But digitalisation is more than just the encoding of information into numbers in order to submit it to computational order. Digitalisation further enables the dynamics of cultural globalisation and the reorganisation of time-space. As Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchin argue, the relationship between software and space is mutually constitutive: the failure of software means the failure to produce space. In short, airspace, as currently configured, would not exist without digitalisation and encoding software.67 Certainly airplanes could fly without digital communications networks, but such a situation would require a return to the state-centred and heavily regulated skies of the decades following World War II. The massive logistical challenge of coordinating millions of passengers on thousands of flights to and from thousands 1 22

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of airports operated by hundreds of carriers requires the sort of ‘self-governing’ cybernetic systems that can only exist with digitalisation. Put another way, cyberspace provides the habitat for these systems now that state governance has (partially) withdrawn from regulating the infrastructure of the global aviation system under the aegis of neoliberalism. Producing cyberspace within the passenger cabin partly followed the logics of many new inflight entertainment technologies – attempting to emulate the electronic media environment available to passengers in their homes and offices – and was partly an offshoot of these internet-based communications systems already employed by airlines for information processing and logistics. Inflight internet access foretold ‘complete connectivity between the cabin and the outside world’.68 Beginning in 2001, several airlines installed wireless, ‘live’ internet systems in their planes, spurred in part by Boeing’s Connexion service.69 Work on a satellite-based continuous data communication system for airplanes began in the mid-1980s, when Boeing entered a partnership with the US government to develop satellite communication that would interact with electronically steered antennas on airplanes. The Boeing board of directors approved the Connexion project, a commercial venture to bring satellite-based internet access to passenger airplanes, in 2000. Boeing partnered with CNN In-flight Services, CNBC, Mitsubishi Electric, Matsushita Avionics Systems and Loral Skynet to produce the standards and technology.70 Boeing did not build its own satellite network, instead relying on its previous experience to lease transponders on satellites. In order to minimise the amount of data transmitted between planes and satellites, the Connexion system came with its own domain name system (DNS) servers as well as a firewall featuring spam-, virus- and site-blocking software that can be configured by the airline. The DNS servers could also hold data locally, such as information about the plane’s progress along its route, weather at the destination airport, duty-free shopping catalogues and other materials involving the translation of digital data into information which passengers could access via their seatback screens, much like an office or home computer, but do not necessarily require access to the world wide web. These measures aimed to cut back on the data traffic between airplane and satellite, thus enabling greater speeds of information access for passengers. In 2001, American Airlines, Delta and United announced commitments with equity stake in Connexion, and Lufthansa announced plans to implement Connexion in its aircraft. After the financial downturn in late 2001, Boeing released those airlines from their investment obligations. Lufthansa’s three-month trial started in January 2003, on its Frankfurt to Washington, DC route. British Airways began its three-month trial in February of that year, along its London to New York route. Japan Airlines and Scandinavian Airlines System (SAS) planned to offer the service in 2004.71 In late 2000, Air Canada installed a service on five of its planes that allowed passengers to send and receive email on their laptops rather than through the seatback screens and inflight entertainment system. The system utilised pre-existing Inmarsatbased telephony developed by Tenzing Communications, a company emblematic of the transnational corporation. Based outside Seattle, minutes away from Boeing, Tenzing also has offices in Los Angeles, Singapore and London. It is partially owned by Airbus (itself a subsidiary of the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company). Named Networked Transport: Neoliberalism and Digital Entertainments

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after the Sherpa guide who helped Sir Edmund Hillary climb Mount Everest, its very appellation manages to recall altitude, exoticism, adventure and transnational encounter.72 Virgin Atlantic, Cathay Pacific and Singapore Airlines tested the system in 2003.73 Tenzing’s system bundles email and other internet traffic, transmitting only every ten minutes, a ‘narrowband’ internet connection, in contrast to Connexion’s ‘broadband’ service. For the civil aviation industry, providing inflight internet access meant the equipment manufacturers could market and sell new systems to airlines, to replace the non-internet compatible systems they had sold them just a few years earlier. Many of these systems offered email and/or limited internet access through the interface of the system itself, and some supplied ethernet cable jacks for travellers to plug in their laptops. Connexion signed up more clients in 2004 and 2005, including El Al and Etihad, but, despite having a dozen airline clients and being installed on 156 aircraft, Connexion phased out its service in 2006.74 Wireless internet access was initially thought to afford a solution to the weight issues presented by ever more complicated inflight entertainment systems, which added weight to each seat, in addition to the weight of the wires and servers. Additionally, wireless access to the internet meant the obligation for ‘complete connectivity’ became the responsibility of passengers, who had to bring the necessary equipment on board; seats no longer had to be wired for the possibility that a passenger would want to ‘jack-in’ to access the internet. At the same time, the drag of the antenna necessary for these services was ‘equivalent to as many as five additional passengers’ and some studies revealed that wireless systems were actually heavier than wired systems, due to the necessary hardware.75 Still the potential removal of seatback screens was a tempting proposition for an industry with thin profit margins, particularly in the face of rising fuel costs. As early as 2000, some companies were already envisioning internet access bringing about the obsolescence of embedded inflight entertainment systems. California-based inflight entertainment company Intheairnet planned to take advantage of the internet access technology provided by Connexion and Tenzing to furnish ‘a clean sheet of paper’ for passengers to fill with their entertainment choices drawn from the internet.76 The ‘clean sheet of paper’ has been most common in the economy-class section of airplanes. In the bring-your-own-device model, economy sections no longer have ‘embedded’ inflight entertainment systems, and wireless internet access can be rented by passengers expected to provide their own entertainment by using streaming services to access films and television shows. The passenger must then navigate cyberspace in search of entertainment options, transforming the passenger from selfprojectionist to cybernaut. A passenger with laptop, tablet and/or mobile phone – both airborne and online – has reconfigured the airplane seat into a cockpit, as the airlines have sought to reimagine the cabin from a space of captivity and entrapment to a non-place of flow, a node in a cyberspatial network, unmoored from space and time. Airlines can be quite explicit about this desire. An American Airlines television commercial advertising its new on-board wireless internet service in 2011 opens with a shot of a young woman asking a girl about her day at school while stroking her hair. The camera pans around the two, both sitting cross-legged on the floor of a spacious and bright room with a cot behind the girl and two chairs in the background behind 1 24

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the young woman. As the camera continues its circuit, turning around the young woman to look over her shoulder, the background changes and we see that she is in fact sitting in the cabin of a plane, texting the girl, presumably her daughter, via her laptop (which is plugged into the underseat power supply). A voice-over delivers the slogans: ‘Fly without putting your life on pause. Be yourself, nonstop.’ Beyond the message that the airline is family friendly and offers internet access as well as electrical outlets, the commercial suggests that by providing the infrastructure, it allows passengers to realise their identity, accomplish their goals and maintain social bonds with those not physically proximate. At the same time, the apparently simple act of texting requires labour and expertise on the part of the passenger, who must provide their own device, operate the proper software to access the server, rent the internet access, pull up the social networking application and locate a potential conversation partner from a list: a catalogue of tasks that requires non-universal, media-literate skills. Likewise, the emphasis on family friendliness and the recreation of the domestic space through cyberspace positions inflight internet access as a kind of magical engine of time-space convergence: the cabin is interchangeable with an urban loft, the act of texting equated to a face-to-face conversation (to the point that the physical touch of fingers on the keyboard is conflated with stroking another’s hair), and the mother–daughter dyad exists in the same temporal order. Air travel takes passengers away from certain people and places as it delivers passengers to other people and places. In the idealised, imagined use of on-board internet access, cyberspace twists the unidirectional flight path into a multiplicity of vectors chosen by the passenger. When TWA first offered inflight films, air travel was marked by a disconnection from the world outside the plane, and the entertainment was also exceptional, an extraordinary example of theatrical exhibition. By offering wireless internet access, the airlines hope to transform inflight entertainment and flight itself into ‘pure connection’.77 VIRTUAL WEIGHT Cyberspace allows for airplanes to become extensions of the urban environment. As Stephen Graham has argued, ‘cities can be understood as socio-technical constructions supporting mobilities and flow to more or less distant elsewheres’.78 Cities themselves are both hubs in mobility networks as well as complex sorting technologies, producing distinctions in movement between different people and commodities, determining their vectors and immobilising (or incarcerating) those designated as unworthy of movement. Thus, the ‘habitable circulation’ of the city produces ‘intense geographical differentiation’ between the ‘globally mobile’ – those who can easily traverse the ‘real and virtual renditions’ of space via cyberspace which binds transportation and communication networks into a single system – and the ‘locally tied’, whose real movement is forbidden (or at least circumscribed) while being provided with displays of ‘the virtual accessibility’ of space.79 The project by which new digital inflight entertainment systems emulate the home/office environment of the globally mobile has successfully taken the glocal effect of cyberspace, in which the global is accessible through the local site of the screen, and, perhaps more significantly, the global orders Networked Transport: Neoliberalism and Digital Entertainments

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(of neoliberalism, for instance) envelop passengers through the screen. What Paul Virilio called ‘teletopia’ in which place and distance are bound by ‘real time’ is only possible through the infrastructure of cyberspace that manifests on computercontrolled screens, or monitors.80 Many of the divides and inequalities that characterise life on the ground are present in the air as well. As economy-class cabins are gradually transformed into utopian neoliberal cyberspace, the first-class cabins of international long-haul carriers have transformed into gated communities. The new ‘pods’ and ‘suites’ available on these carriers feature lie-flat seats for better sleeping, large embedded flat screens, and curtains or doors to separate passengers from the rest of the cabin. Singapore’s suites, with sliding doors and blinds, ‘leather and wood finishes’, and ‘exclusively designed Givenchy tableware’, also offer a variety of connectivity options, including USB ports, Apple’s proprietary thirty-pin connector, RCA jacks and internet access so passengers can plug their own devices into the system and use the twenty-three-inch screen as their monitor. These options are available in addition to Singapore’s A/VOD selection of eighty feature-length films, video games, music choices and a wealth of television programmes, so that the suite represents a hybrid of the neoliberal systems of the twenty-first century and the interactive systems of the 1990s. Similar suites are offered by All Nippon Airways (ANA), Etihad Airways, Cathay Pacific and Qantas. Emirates first-class suites have twenty-three-inch screens, an electronic sliding door, a mini-bar, mirror, table and wardrobe. The seat can lie flat, but passengers do not have to worry about performing such labour themselves; the flight attendants take care of turning the chair into a bed.81 Many of these recent transformations in inflight entertainment offerings have been heavily marketed and researched, with surveys of business travellers the most common approach. For marketing executives of inflight entertainment companies and airlines, the primary lesson from these surveys has been that passengers desire the same sort of media experience in the plane as they experience on the ground. Surveyed passengers (again the emphasis is on business travellers and frequent fliers) no longer want to experience air travel as exceptional or separate from grounded everyday experience, unlike in the pre-jet era. Rather air travel should be seamlessly integrated with other activities, which in part explains the frustration with security checkpoints, baggage claim and boarding lines. Marketers express this as passengers favouring connection with the ground over isolation: ‘Passengers will become increasingly dissatisfied to be unconnected from the internet during 10 to 12 hours of flight.’82 But it would be more accurate to say that the ability to choose to be connected or isolated is actively sought and desired; such a choice reflects the same kinds of choices over what kinds of links and bonds are mediated by domestic media technologies, such as television, radio, telephone, cellular phone and computer.83 The way in which these media devices act as semipermeable barriers between the individual user and the world at large fits neatly in the neoliberal ethos in which access to markets makes individuals autonomic, and each individual’s identity and self is treated as an entrepreneurial project. Cyberspace puts pressure on the individual to pick and choose forms of sociality as well as cultural forms from a seemingly infinite set of choices: accessing the information market as attention labourers. Already established as pleasurable, normal and liberating in homes and offices, the mode of production in the so-called 1 26

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information economy – media distributors produce an audience commodity whose labour power is realised in the form of attention and sold back to advertisers – was expected in the air and seen as a potential revenue source for airlines. At the same time, firms see personal electronic devices which connect to communication networks as extensions of the office, so that the airplane does not provide respite from formalised labour.84 As a Connexion spokesperson put it: ‘Corporations want to extend communications capability to mobile workers who are traveling. The productivity gains are terrific.’85 The technological infrastructure which enables and constitutes the spaces of flows is, essentially, an urban infrastructure that networks global cities, but because these networks are physically and operationally discontinuous, a new spatial category – cyberspace – provides the enveloping connection between the vehicles that convey people and goods and the physical locations of global cities. To return to a point made in the first chapter of this book, aviation ‘represents the logic of globalization made flesh’.86 Aihwa Ong has noted that the itinerary of neoliberalism is given velocity by leveraging the particular notion that self-empowerment, self-regulation and selfsufficiency are dependent on knowledge. It is no coincidence that the rise of the socalled knowledge or information economy has coincided with the implementation of neoliberalism as a tool for governance. ‘Neoliberalism’s metaphor is knowledge’, Ong asserted, quoting the 1998/9 World Bank Report: ‘Knowledge is like light. Weightless and intangible, it can easily travel the world, enlightening the lives of people everywhere.’87 Echoing the dreams of an immaterial, pervasive and free force that unites all of human society that I critiqued in the opening section of this book, the neoliberal dream of enlightenment binds everyone into market relations; or put in the language of its proponents, the provision of ‘free’ knowledge gives each person equal entrepreneurial standing in the global marketplace. Cyberspace, then, holds solutions to multiple problems. For neoliberalism, it solves the problem of inequality by providing access to knowledge. For communication and transportation systems it solves the problem of speed through instantaneity. For airlines in particular, it solves the problem of gravity and friction through weightlessness. For air passengers, it solves the problem of boredom by rendering digitalised media forms accessible. And yet, the metaphors used in discourses of neoliberalism are similar to those used by early promoters of aviation and cinema. The notion that knowledge is natural, even meteorological (in that it resembles photons travelling through the air), rather than produced by human activity and labour is certainly in keeping with the ahistorical idealist rhetoric and mode of thinking necessary for the maintenance of globalisation. Even further, positioning knowledge as a force that can travel freely and transcend boundaries, but cannot be seen or felt, gives it both a mystical quality and the properties of air itself. Dodge and Kitchin apply similar metaphors to code, the structuring language of software and cyberspace: ‘Code is the lifeblood of the network society, just as steam was at the start of the industrial age. Code, like steam, has the power to shape the material world; it is able to produce space.’88 Choosing steam over coal as the emblematic resource for the early industrial era discloses the seductive power of the imaginary of the intangible.89 New economic orders are also seen as atmospheric orders, capturing and exploiting previously ephemeral and immaterial elements. If air (like knowledge, light, code or steam) is intangible, immaterial and Networked Transport: Neoliberalism and Digital Entertainments

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free, it is also total and omnipresent, or global. Neoliberalism is thus caught in a paradox whereby these metaphors of totalised liberation must be captured and pressured into market relations in order to realise their power (much like steam, in this case). The dominant discourse of cyberspace as structured by elite interests and neoliberal regimes thus relies on obscuring this contradiction, if only because once code/steam and knowledge/light are trapped in a cylinder and efforts to escape are channelled into perpetually lifting a piston, they are no longer intangible, immaterial or free.

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Flight attendant demonstrating the ‘Astrocolour’ system, ca. 1966 (Courtesy Delta Flight Museum Archives)

6 Disastrous Speed: Thrill Rides, Screens and Fear of Flying

To get what is heavier than air to take off in the form of an aeroplane or dirigible is to invent the crash, the air disaster. Paul Virilio, 20051

At the Paris Exposition of 1900 thrill seekers could experience hot-air balloon flights over portions of Africa and Europe without ever getting on a balloon or leaving Paris. The attraction called the Cinéorama was the first motion picture panorama and simulated the ascent, flight and descent of a balloon. Its inventor, Raoul GrimoinSanson, had affixed motion picture cameras to the sides of balloon baskets to film the landscape as seen from an airborne balloon. These images were then projected via ten 70mm projectors onto a cylindrical screen using a filter system to disguise the gaps and/or overlaps between images. The circular floor on which spectators stood was designed to give the appearance of a balloon basket, with ropes strategically tied and hung as they would be for an actual hot air balloon. As an added bit of verisimilitude, an airship captain narrated these virtual flights. To simulate descent, the films were shown in reverse. The operation of the ten projectors in the enclosed space of the centre of the Cinéorama created an environment of extreme heat: temperatures rose to 115 degrees Fahrenheit. However, after the fourth hour of showing, the attraction was closed for safety reasons: not only had the projectionist lost two fingers in an accident, but authorities feared that fire could result from operation of the equipment.2 The combination of physical movement, virtual mobility and thrilling danger afforded by the Cinéorama was not unique among turn-of-the-century attractions. The 1900 Paris Exposition also contained the Mareorama, which simulated a sea voyage and included hydraulic pistons that shook the mock-ship back and forth to produce the sensation of being at sea. The most famous of these turn-of-the-century ride shows, Hale’s Tours, a rail travel simulator, was introduced at the 1904 St Louis Exposition. Like the Cinéorama, Hale’s Tours simulated actual travel by constructing the auditorium to approximate the transportation technology and used cinematic technology to replicate the visual sensations of travelling. Hale’s Tours were soon franchised, and became so successful that by 1908, 500 were in operation in the United States alone.3 In 1921, Charles Holcroft introduced the ‘Holcroft Cinema Aeroplane’, a thrill ride in the shape of an airplane, which, in the words of Flight magazine ‘performs certain motions and gives to the public the benefit of cinema Disastrous Speed: Thrill Rides, Screens and Fear of Flying

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entertainment coupled with the sensation of flying’.4 These novelty amusement rides thus provided the sensations and experience of travelling without any of its dangers. The thrill of the fairground attraction, roller coaster, carnival ride or motion simulation ride is predicated on the disjuncture between the feeling of falling – the proprioceptive illusion of imminent disaster – and the knowledge that one is safe and firmly on the ground. In this sense, the thrill ride is the opposite of the inflight movie. Where the thrill ride simulates travel and near-disaster through the use of moving images (virtual mobility) and the mechanical jostling, rising and falling and/or circling (physical mobility), the virtual mobility of the inflight movie attempts to distract the jet passenger so that the physical mobility of the jet itself is forgotten. Indeed, the commercial airline industry itself has cited fear of flying and the anxiety associated with travel as fundamental to inflight entertainment’s continued existence.5 This act of distraction is part of the project to conquer our collective fear of falling that accompanies flight (even as we may fantasise about flying as a form of freedom and realisation of power). However, as the example of Cinéorama suggests, danger was still present in these ostensibly safe fairground attractions. The threat of fire was a particular concern for municipal authorities charged with public safety. Noël Burch has speculated that the memory of the notorious 1897 Charity Bazaar fire, in which film projection was implicated, led to the closure of the Cinéorama, rather than any actual incident involving the attraction itself.6 Motion picture theatres at the turn of the century were composed of a seemingly deadly combination of flammable nitrate film and acetylene or coal gas lamps within small, badly lit crowded spaces. Lee Grieveson has shown that fire safety was used as a justification to close theatres and regulate cinema itself. Fire codes were mobilised to target particular types of theatres that were seen as morally dangerous. Those concerned with the moral danger of cinema could thus conflate it with physical danger.7 Motion picture exhibition practices and motion picture content indicate a strong connection between fire and film during this period. Fire itself was the subject of many early films, as was fire safety. Alongside the wonder associated with the use of the space-time altering technologies – cinema, aircraft, thrill ride simulacra – is a set of anxieties and fears that may contribute to the pleasure but also constitute an underlying apprehension, or ‘everyday fear’, to use Brian Massumi’s term. Massumi used a 1990 Timex magazine advertisement to illustrate the concept of everyday fear. The advertisement leverages stories of people who fell from great heights – off an eighty-five foot cliff and out a malfunctioning airplane door – to sell watches to the rest of us. The ad claims that these spokespersons are ‘just ordinary people like us who happen to have experienced something extraordinary’.8 Massumi pointed out that the act of falling and surviving in itself is not so extraordinary, and it is this ordinariness that makes these fallers appropriate spokespersons for Timex (which after all wants a customer base consisting of more than just people who fall out of airplanes). Massumi asserted, ‘It would be more precise to say that their generic identity […] is defined by the condition of groundlessness.’9 Or put another way, constant mobility and consistent risk are the building blocks of the contemporary consumer identity. For Massumi, everyday fear is the recognition of the social reality of late capitalism. Liquidity in the capitalist system builds up uncertainty and anxiety. The catastrophes of 1 32

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overproduction and/or labour unrest that the macroeconomic theories of John Maynard Keynes sought to avoid have become normalised under the new forms of intensified displacement and fluidity so that inevitable crashes are reframed as crises of opportunity and profit.10 In this chapter I examine these twin poles of everyday fear in late capitalism – the individual localised fall and the systemic global crash – through the lens of inflight entertainment. For commercial aviation these are one and the same: a fallen airplane is a crashed airplane. The local instance of an air disaster is inevitable given the global culture of speed – so that, in this case, the particular exception of the crash reveals the universal rule of speed. I would argue that the typical airplane passenger feels the same type of ‘low-level fear’ of becoming exceptional or extraordinary as the subjects of the Timex ad. We may not want to put ourselves in a position to fall, but the global economic system requires risk. For Ulrich Beck, ‘global risks activate and connect actors across borders, who otherwise don’t want to have anything to do with one another’. Beck called these connections ‘enforced cosmopolitanism’ in which the response to ‘everyday hazards and insecurities’ is to form bonds and alliances with others across previously held boundaries. This type of ‘cosmopolitanization … opens our eyes to the uncontrollable liabilities that something might happen to us, might befall us, and, which at the same time could stimulate us to make borders transcend new beginnings’.11 The transnational capitalist class (TCC) manages these risks and, seeing risk as opportunity, opens up borders to capital; a process enabled by jet travel and which currently requires jet travel. Flight, in turn, opens us to risk. If falling is inevitable – such are the laws of gravity – those of us who are ordinary can only hope to survive extraordinarily and make it into the next Timex ad. In this scenario fear should be understood as apprehension or anxiety. The fear of flying that manifests itself as abject terror – when an airline passenger begins to panic and act out of paranoid delusion – is not the subject of this chapter. Rather, I am focused on the uneasiness that accompanies all unfamiliar situations. For some, particularly business travellers, air travel occurs as a highly regulated and rationalised form of contemporary everyday life and may seem highly familiar, mundane or banal. Nonetheless, I argue that the speed and altitude of flight are exceptional. This exceptionality is met with a range of coping mechanisms: reading, sleeping, listening to music, alcohol consumption, sleeping pills and screened entertainments.12 In other words, I am interested in the anxiety that accompanies air travel that apprehends the possibility of imminent disaster, rather than the paralysing dread that might prevent someone from flying in the first place (although this is a concern for the aviation industry). The issue that must be addressed at the outset of an examination of the relationship between screened entertainments and commercial aviation is the disproportionate publicity surrounding airplane crashes. According to one study, the New York Times ‘gave 8,000 times more coverage (in terms of deaths per thousand people) to plane crashes than to cancer’.13 Despite numerous factual studies proving that air travel is a safer form of transportation than the automobile, polls show that Americans have exactly the opposite perception.14 Accordingly, many of those involved in the aviation industry and with airplane safety feel as if fear of flying and the anxiety regarding the possibility of crashing is a matter of public relations. That is, when Disastrous Speed: Thrill Rides, Screens and Fear of Flying

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presented with the facts of the number of flights which have been completed without incident and the number of passengers who have travelled safely, especially when compared to other forms of transportation like the automobile, any rational person will want to fly and even conquer their fear of flying. This reasoning seems logical enough, but does not account for the attraction these horrifying spectacles have for media outlets and their audiences. As Paul Virilio stated in The Original Accident: ‘If the print media have always been interested in trains that get derailed rather than those that arrive on time, with the audiovisual we are able to look on, flabbergasted, at the overexposure of accidents, catastrophes of all kinds.’15 The image records of the events that horrify and scare us are the very material of our fascination. It may very well be true that the professional culture of news journalism favours the catastrophic (the single event with a large number of fatalities) over the mundane plodding of the nonspectacular passing away in a bed (which may be why cancer, malaria and HIV/AIDS deaths are always reported as statistics), but that does not fully explain our own captivation or willingness to submit to the logic of catastrophe. THE LOGIC OF SPEED A plane needs extreme speed to fly. In order to take off, a typical passenger jet needs to achieve a runway speed of over 150 miles per hour. While in flight, an airplane needs to maintain a certain speed or else lose altitude. In the air, the safety of the aircraft is guaranteed through speed. For fixed-wing aircraft, extreme speed enables flight. For the jet airplane, the absence of speed is the absence of flight; a still airplane is an airplane on the ground, either parked or crashed. Air travel thus inverts the traditionally presumed relationship between speed and safety, in which reducing the former increases the latter. The very speed that induces apprehension for passengers is essential to air travel and constitutive of its powerful and influential role in modern life. Air travel’s utility in the contemporary global system is its speed. Paul Virilio has theorised that the increased technologisation of the human lifeworld corresponds with increased accidents, not increased safety. The emphasis on increased speed in the name of technological development is enabled by the wilful neglect of the accident so that ‘the technical progress of capitalist societies was to be indexed by the sacrifice of consumers’.16 Deriving his theory of the accident from Aristotle, Virilio asserted that innovation and development in technology correspond to innovation and development in disaster: According to Aristotle, ‘the accident reveals the substance.’ If so, then invention of the ‘substance’ is equally invention of the ‘accident’. The shipwreck is consequently the ‘futurist’ invention of the ship, and the air crash the invention of the supersonic airliner.17

Framing disaster in this way exemplifies Virilio’s approach to technology. Rather than ask what technology does for human beings, Virilio asked what technology does to human beings. This critical approach to technology compels us to pay attention to the exceptional incidents and the negative consequences of technological innovation; at the same time it presents certain analytic problems. 1 34

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Virilio’s essential thesis – that technological reason has come to dominate society at the expense of the human and other non-technological concerns – necessitates a contrived division between humanity and technology. In other words, Virilio posited a human nature previous to and unsullied by technology. Although he never made this basic assumption explicit, it runs throughout much of his writing.18 This division depends on an argument of prelapsarian origin. Alongside the evidence provided by cyberculture theorists that to be human is to be technological, Virilio’s essential premise is difficult to maintain.19 Nonetheless, his observations on the dominance of technological reason become salient when we consider how a series of inventions and technological systems can have profound consequences felt throughout society regardless of individuals coming into direct contact with the technology in question. Consider that even though much of the global population may never ride in an airplane or drive an automobile, those technologies and the technological systems that support them profoundly influence the political, economic and social structuring of the situation in which we all live. Virilio’s questioning of the unforeseen consequences of technology and the way in which innovation in one arena affects another follows the path carved by Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan who sought to demonstrate how media technology effects changes across categories of human existence traditionally held analytically separate.20 A good example would be the dichotomy between ‘real space’ and ‘real time’ that Virilio introduced in his book Open Sky. The persistence of global telecommunication networks that connect urban areas regardless of geography in near instantaneity has created a culture of simultaneity shared by urban denizens and global elites who access the telecommunications networks. Those whose lives (and livelihoods) depend on these networks exist in the culture of ‘real time’ in which the timing of events is more important than the space in which they occur. Stock trading remains the clearest example of this: the trader does not have to be in any particular place but the trade must occur at a certain time. The lives and actions of those who do not have access to these networks are governed by the spatial relationships of their environment more than the temporal. The economic and social activities of a farmer, for instance, are much more likely to be structured by geography and topography (space) than time. On the other hand, a sales representative for Cargill or Monsanto (whose existence is predicated on farming) is more likely to live a ‘life in corridors’, dominated by the timing of meetings, conferences, trade shows, quarterly reports, transportation networks and telecommunication exchanges.21 The networks of telecommunication allow presence at a distance (what Virilio calls ‘telepresence’): transactions and exchanges can occur regardless of physical proximity. In turn, this engenders the prioritisation of simultaneity and the temporal synchronisation of practice above physical proximity. As a result, the instantaneity of the telecommunication networks has resolved into a drive for increased speed in other arenas of life – the conquest of spatial barriers is of no consequence if it does not also involve the temporal unity of those previously distant spaces. In the global capitalist system, physical presence follows telepresence. The ‘empire of real time’ explains why speed is of paramount importance in air travel.22 For those living in real time, speed is valued above all else, even safety. As explained in Chapter 4, the additional cost of first- and business-class tickets is offset Disastrous Speed: Thrill Rides, Screens and Fear of Flying

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by time savings – time is treated as interchangeable with capital. The logic of speed dominates global society because of the increased technologisation of the lifeworld. Aeromobility produces a contradiction of speed. The extreme velocity of aircraft is what keeps them aloft – fixed-wing flight would be impossible without speed – and yet it is airborne velocity that cultivates passenger fear. These anxieties and fears are addressed, in turn, by other technologies, such as inflight entertainments. The speed of one technology – commercial jet aviation – is countered by the speed of another – screened entertainments. The global mobiles, otherwise known as the TCC or kinetic elite, make the most of the rapid transportation technologies that cause disaster, and benefit from rapid travel as well as the conveniences and isolations afforded them through these networks of transportation. But while passengers travel at great speeds through the air, hurtled from one end of the earth to another, they are not unaware of certain consequences: the possibility of catastrophe and crashing. The response to knowledge of these effects is not to slow down, but to introduce another set of techniques whose primary purpose is distraction from impending disaster, but which, in turn, carry their own set of calamitous effects. It may seem absurd to claim that air travel is characterised by a concern for speed over safety. But two examples bear this out. The deadliest accident in aviation history, the so-called Tenerife disaster of 27 March 1977, in which two Boeing 747s collided on a fogbound runway in the Canary Islands, was caused simply because of the impatience of all involved. No one – not the passengers, the pilots or the air traffic controllers – was willing to wait for fog to lift, and both planes insisted on taking off despite the conditions. Rather than waiting to be absolutely sure the runway was clear, the planes were directed to taxi to the runways and prepare for take-off. As a result, one 747 was in the path of another as it was taking off, resulting in 583 deaths. Conceivably, the manoeuvre could have taken place without disastrous results in the fog. Nonetheless, the attempt to do so despite the hazards involved reveals the priority placed on speed and time-saving.23 In normal commercial airport procedure, passenger airplanes wait in line at the end of runways waiting to take off. As soon as one plane is safely in the air, another begins to speed down the runway. The value placed on speed to the neglect of runway conditions caused the 25 July 2000 Concorde crash. The DC-10 departing before the Concorde left behind a small strip of metal that ruptured the Concorde’s tyre, flinging a piece of rubber through its wing, causing electrical sparking in severed wires, stress fracturing of the fuel tank, and an eventual explosion resulting in 109 deaths. In 2001 Henri Perrier, who at the time of the crash was in charge of the Concorde programme, said, ‘Nothing we knew would ever have led us to believe that such a catastrophe could happen’, which may be true insofar as this particular sequence of events seemed highly improbable.24 However, the global culture of speed necessitates the rapid succession of airplane departures from airports with little regard to the potentials of accident. Because of the emphasis on on-time departures and arrivals and quick travel, no consideration is paid to clearing runways between flights, and it was only a matter of time when the accident built into this speed technology produced disaster. To paraphrase Virilio: to invent the Concorde is to invent the Concorde crash, to invent the minimisation of runway wait time is to invent the runway wait time disaster. 1 36

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SCREEN REASSURANCE AND SAFETY ANNOUNCEMENTS In The Railway Journey, Wolfgang Schivelbusch detailed various techniques employed by railway passengers to distract themselves from fear of impending or inevitable crash. For Schivelbusch, the process by which human beings get accustomed to new technical means ‘can be characterized as a process of repression of fear, or, more neutrally, as a diminution of fear’. While accidents may have dominated newspaper coverage, being a rail passenger entailed (and still entails) ignoring the possibility of disaster in favour of other sensory stimuli. As Schivelbusch showed, these techniques included ‘panoramic vision’ and ‘the novel activity of reading while travelling’. Panoramic vision, as defined by Schivelbusch, is a form of perception governed by technology. In Schivelbusch’s account, the railway disallowed vision independent of the motion of the railcar and the machinery of the train itself. Thus, the rail passenger ‘could only see things in motion’, and had to relinquish control of the visual to the train itself. Reading, of course, is a way to regain control over stimuli and allows the passenger to concentrate on an object not governed by the rapid motion of the train. This practice presumably had a greater diminution effect on fear experienced by passengers than panoramic vision.25 Just like rail travel, the experience of rapid physical movement through space, the loss of control, passivity and sometimes immobility are all central to the experience of commercial air travel. Yet in some ways the railway journey is but an extreme quickening of the horse-drawn carriage: the wheels go round along the ground, and it is only when they leave the track and become airborne that it becomes clear something is very wrong. From this perspective, air travel is a much more frightening experience than rail travel. The flying plane is always above the ground and therefore always in danger of falling. Many airplane passengers do not fully understand the physics of aerodynamics and flight, so flying is imbricated in a dialectic of risk and trust.26 Similar to the case of the train, if something catastrophic happened to the plane there is very little passengers could do to prevent or manage such a catastrophe. Fear of flying and anxieties regarding the safety of air travel have long been a problem for the commercial aviation industry. As Roger Bilstein has shown, in the US, a rash of high-profile crashes in the winter of 1936–7 led to a spate of negative publicity. In an effort to preserve the industry, American Airlines took out a series of full-page newspaper advertisements in which the large banner text read ‘Afraid to Fly?’ and then continued with lengthy testimony from American Airlines president C. R. Smith extolling the virtues of air travel.27 Unsurprisingly, speed was marshalled in air travel’s favour: People travel by air for the same reason they use the telephone, send telegrams, and ride in elevators. It is a quicker, more modern, more efficient way to accomplish what they want to do … Whether you fly or not, does not alter the fact that every form of transportation has one thing in common – risk! No form of transportation – on the ground, on the water, or in the air – can guarantee its passengers absolute immunity from danger.28

By putting air travel in context with other forms of transportation regarded as lowrisk or safe, Smith attempted to show that fear of flying has nothing to do with any Disastrous Speed: Thrill Rides, Screens and Fear of Flying

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inherent quality of commercial aviation; rather people fear air travel because it is new and strange. The rhetorical strategy of placing air travel alongside the communication technologies of the telephone and the telegraph depicts air travel as a modern convenience which produces shock and wonder, and is therefore initially adopted only by a few but eventually becomes everyday and domesticated. Smith’s reminder that all forms of transportation present risk may not go as far as Virilio’s observations that technological developments bring with them their own set of accidents waiting to be realised. Nonetheless, Smith’s open letter advertisement demonstrates that the air travel industry recognised that convincing people to fly in the first place is the primary obstacle to commercial success. What became apparent later is that calming those who have chosen to fly and are already in the plane presents a slightly different set of problems which had to be met with a different set of solutions. Unlike Hale’s Tours, the Cinéorama or the Mareorama, jerks, shifts and shocks in the passenger cabin of commercial jet aircraft do not indicate that everything is working as it should. Indeed, the properly functioning jet flight should be smooth and free of incident: it should feel as if there is no movement. The whole point of smooth, seamless flight is to obscure the fact of flight and the possibility of disaster. In order to convince passengers of the safety of flight, all proprioceptive reminders of the plane’s speed, altitude and trajectory must be disguised (which is why take-off and landing remain the most stimulating and terrifying portions of jet travel). Suppressing perception of the physical movement of the airplane creates the illusion of effortless travel, as if the work performed by the engines to generate the thrust needed to hold the plane aloft and hurtling forward at 400–500 miles per hour is but background noise to an otherwise monotonous and bland experience. The imperative of speed necessitates the creation of the illusion of safety, which in turn delivers boredom. Airline executives cite fear of flying as inflight entertainment’s raison d’être. In a 1972 interview, United Airlines former vice-president of external affairs, Robert E. Johnson noted, ‘We’re never going to get our money out of the movies … But longdistance travel becomes monotonous and movies give people something to do, distract them if they’re nervous.’29 This justification for inflight entertainment is regularly repeated, and has more recently taken on new relevance. An article in the Wall Street Journal stated: ‘Following Sept. 11, [WAEA spokesperson Rob] Brookler believes that inflight entertainment increased its importance because jittery passengers needed soothing and entertaining.’30 Inflight films, according to this logic, are a form of pacification. The imperative of alleviating boredom is due to the assumption that idleness breeds anxiety, and so passengers need assistance in the diminution of fear. This assistance has recently taken the form of software downloadable to portable digital devices carried by the mobile elite on their travels. In 2009, Virgin Atlantic partnered with Mental Workout, a software company that creates meditation software, to produce an application for Apple’s iPhone and iPod using the principles of cognitive behavioural psychology to diminish fear in the airline passenger. The software features a video introduction by Virgin Atlantic CEO Richard Branson, as well as an ‘explanation video’, ‘relaxation exercises’ and even a panic button. It also offers audiovisual stimuli to explain the physics of flight; the sounds of flight preparation, take-off and landing; and reassurance that all is well. Purchasing the software results 1 38

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in the acquisition of 2,000 frequent flier miles with Virgin Atlantic, indicating that the Virgin Atlantic/Mental Workout joint venture is interested in creating a new set of frequent fliers whose loyalty is to those who reassure them that flying is safe (akin to American Airlines 1937 ad campaign) or assumes that a substantial portion of already frequent fliers are flying despite their fears. The company’s press releases rely on a 1980 survey sponsored by Boeing that ‘indicates that one of every three adult Americans is either anxious or afraid to fly’.31 Despite C. R. Smith’s 1937 prediction that fear of flying would be conquered as air travel becomes more ubiquitous, it appears that the phobias associated with air travel have not disappeared. What has changed since 1937 is the methods employed to alleviate these fears. The aviation industry’s response to the problems inherent in technological development is to answer them with more technological development: inflight movies have taken the place of reading the newspaper on the train while the new version of Smith’s paternalistic assurance is the virtual presence of Richard Branson. Significantly, these reassurances and attempts to diminish fear operate through the screens of visual communication devices. In a sense, the stimuli on these screens are attempts to transport the viewer outside of the situation of flight. The distraction of the audiovisual on the screen gives the passengers the opportunity to imagine themselves somewhere else – anywhere other than thousands of feet above the Earth in a metal tube. At the same time, airlines are required by international regulations to inform passengers of procedures and protocols in case of an accident, hence the inflight cabin safety demonstration.32 Airlines are thus caught in a bind, as they must remind passengers that accidents are a part of travel (echoing both Virilio and Smith), but somehow reassure them that they are still safe, they should remain on the plane and continue to fly in the future (despite its risks). Indeed it is this ritual – a protocol not required for passenger rail or automobile transport – that may reignite air travellers’ fear of flying and may be an underlying cause for its persistence. The traditional method of the inflight cabin safety demonstration, dating from the 1950s, involves a flight attendant silently enacting the proper method to fasten a seatbelt, how to wear an oxygen mask and pointing to the location of the exits. Meanwhile, another attendant verbally instructs passengers over the public address system of the airplane. The split between the image and sound portions of the demonstration was mainly a practical solution to the problem of cabin noise, much like the use of headphones for inflight entertainment, separating sound from image for inflight films, was introduced to combat engine noise.33 Following a 1985 National Transportation and Safety Board report that found the majority of passengers viewed less than half of the safety presentation, some airlines attempted to increase attentiveness to the presentation by producing it as a video programme as part of the inflight entertainment line-up. The underlying assumption was that the video screen is more interesting than the flight attendant and that passengers are more likely to be absorbed by the video than by the miming performance. In 2001, Northwest Airlines began producing monthly lead-ins to the video safety demonstration, called ‘safety opens’. According to Northwest’s manager of on-board communications, ‘The safety open pulls you away from what you are doing, to the screen, that is what gets everybody started. Most people stay tuned in because the safety demo is a very short piece.’34 In this instance, airlines do not use inflight Disastrous Speed: Thrill Rides, Screens and Fear of Flying

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entertainment to distract passengers from being nervous. Instead, to reassure the passengers of their safety in the event of an emergency, video safety shorts require the focused attention of passengers as well as, in direct contradiction of the classical mode of filmic spectatorship, vigilance over their physical surroundings. Turning passengers into attentive viewers does not happen automatically. Airlines are very much concerned with securing passenger attention, often by playing the sonic stimuli over the public-address system (rather than through individual seats’ headsets), stirring music and eye-catching visuals. Many airlines begin with the corporate logo and mobile framing of an airplane. Some, such as Virgin Atlantic or Delta Airlines, use offbeat humour, whimsical animation or flirtatious representations of flight attendants to capture passengers’ attention. Air New Zealand has featured naked flight attendants in body paint mimicking their uniforms in recent safety videos and promotional material. Such approaches to the safety open subordinate the severity of the dangers – the explicit subject of the video – to titillation and humorous diversion. Successful safety videos combine a mixture of humour and flirtation that are also the key elements of inflight film’s ‘ideal’ genre, the romantic comedy (see below).35 THE LATENT DANGER OF INFLIGHT ENTERTAINMENT Because viewers are asked to imagine themselves as potential survivors of a crash, the inclusion of the safety video as the lead-in to a slate of moving images designed to distract from the inherent riskiness of flight seems contradictory. Employing inflight entertainment to distract passengers from the flight itself takes for granted a kind of absorption on the part of viewers that disconnects them from their physical surroundings, as in the classical mode of spectatorship. Inflight entertainment, therefore, does not simply assume a captive audience; it imagines the viewer of moving images on a screen to be passive and open to suggestion. But this conception of the spectator was not the initial one for airlines and inflight entertainment companies. As is well known, airlines do not choose to show films that include plane crashes, a guideline that has been deemed important enough to alter the production and postproduction of some films.36 What is less well known is that the ‘no crash’ guideline was instituted in the 1960s after TWA received complaints from passengers about films the airline considered suitable, since the Catholic Legion of Decency approved them, but turned out to be too harrowing for the passengers who felt trapped watching the film.37 When inflight films were first instituted, the content of the films shown on planes was a secondary concern for the airlines. The airlines sought to provide a distraction and saw film as a pacifying technology. The possibility that films might instead produce passenger activity was not considered. Editing standards set by the World Airline Entertainment Association confirm this pacifying mission. The WAEA is an industry consortium consisting of commercial airliners, electronics manufacturers and entertainment companies. Its 2007 ‘Industry Fact Sheet’ ended with the following paragraph: In-flight Editing Standards: Varies somewhat by airline and by region, but generally in-flight editing standards (for main-screen exhibition) are similar to, but more conservative than 1 40

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TV-editing standards. No airline crash scenes or references to airline disasters; careful about terrorism or references to terrorism; no nudity/sex scenes (U.S./Asia more conservative than Europe); no profanity; no images of/references to other airlines; no racist comments or denigrating references to culture, religion, or nationality; careful about violence and bloodshed (U.S./Asia less sensitive than Europe); careful about references to guns, drug abuse, physical abuse. Most ideal in-flight film genres: comedy, romantic-comedy, light adventure.38

All of these standards are aimed towards pacification and placation. Content that might provoke anxiety, violence, offence or indeed any strong feeling is discouraged. Air disasters are the first (and only clear) prohibition.39 Other content may be cautioned against (e.g. terrorism) and depend on region (sex and/or violence). But aside from making regional differences in taste explicit, the most revealing part of this paragraph is WAEA’s positioning of the comedy, romantic comedy and light adventure genres as ‘most ideal’. This indicates that the purpose of inflight entertainment is diversion. The technological system of eye-level screens in seatbacks coupled with ‘light’ content constitutes a project of asking passengers to look away, to divert their attention away from their predicament as immobile and yet airborne. The romantic comedy is of special import here. The genre has close associations with the Depression-era studio system of Hollywood, during which it was a part of a body of films that ‘distract[ed] the country through the worst of the Depression years and World War II’ and surprised studio executives with its box office appeal.40 As such, the narrative of the romantic comedy, which focuses on the foibles and entanglements of courtship and romance and often ends with a marriage (sometimes actual, but more often metaphorical), is predictable and mundane (both in its everydayness and lack of serious consequences); therefore it is light and unchallenging. The basis for the comic aspects of the romantic relationship(s) portrayed in romantic comedies, according to Brian Henderson, are predicated on the system of censorship and production codes originating more or less contemporaneously with the genre itself. Henderson claimed that the genre is impossible without a system of censorship and language prohibitions. This may make it less successful in the post-1968 US theatrical setting, and yet perfectly suited for free over-the-air television broadcasts and inflight screens, two exhibition windows which base their legitimacy (in the US) on family-friendliness and censorship. Following Henderson, if the romantic comedy itself relies on transforming that which cannot be named (sex) into a joke, it is a genre well versed in the art of diversion.41 Inflight entertainment thus puts romantic comedies into service of a double denial of sex and crashing. Important to its status as the ideal genre for inflight entertainment is the culture of intimacy upon which the romantic comedy is built. The intimate nature of the story material, the narrative examination of private emotional lives, manifests in proximate camerawork. The reliance on the close-up, the unvaried composition of the frame (usually a two-shot of the couple in question or of one member of the dyad with a best friend), and characters who are defined more by type than by depth makes the genre well-suited for the small screens which populate the airplane cabin. Unlike science fiction, the Western or the epic adventure, the romantic comedy is not invested in visual spectaculars, nor does it rely on special effects and/or stuntwork to involve viewers. Further, the romantic comedy’s articulation of the utopian potential of Disastrous Speed: Thrill Rides, Screens and Fear of Flying

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romance depends on the wish-fulfilment fantasies of the viewer, who must be willing to accept the improbable, even magical, events resulting in the unification of the romantic dyad. In this sense, the narrative of the romantic comedy mirrors the narrative of the plane journey: the seemingly improbable fact of flight must be accepted in order to achieve the happy resolution of arrival. Using inflight entertainment systems as distraction from danger, or as a way to reassure passengers by detailing methods of mitigating risk, disguises the possibility that the systems themselves may prove a threat. On 25 December 2009, during Northwest Flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit, a man ‘tried to ignite the incendiary powder mixture he had taped to his leg’ as the plane began its approach into Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County airport.42 Apparently he set up the device during a visit to the cabin restroom. His actions set off a flurry of new security restrictions for commercial airline passengers. The United States Transportation Security Administration (USTSA) kept many of these regulations secret, apparently in the interest of confusing and surprising potential attackers. But according to reports, for a time the regulations included disabling the in-cabin global positioning system (GPS) display because it was assumed that the attacker meant to blow up the plane over a city, thereby maximising civilian casualties. The logic, if it can be called such, was that disabling the GPS display made it more difficult for potential attackers to know the exact location of the plane. This new regulation, which was only in place for a few days, had an unforeseen consequence. For several airlines, since the GPS programme is installed as part of the inflight entertainment system, disabling GPS meant turning off the entire system.43 This new temporary regulation produced an irony in the relationship between inflight entertainment and safety. The GPS display is one way for passengers to mark their location in the journey and to feel as if progress is being made. In a travel situation in which it feels as if the vehicle is not moving and there is little to see out of the window, one moment of the journey feels like any other moment. The GPS display gives the passengers a feeling of control, as if they are navigating the journey: knowing the location of the plane can serve as a form of reassurance. Additionally, knowledge of the plane’s location encourages marvelling at the technological achievement of jet travel, so that a sense of wonderment can perhaps overtake a sense of fear. For these reasons, the GPS display functions as a minor form of the inflight entertainment system: helping to distract, provide a sensory shield, allay fears and induce a sense of control. By prohibiting operation of the inflight entertainment system, the USTSA removed one of the means through which commercial aviation generates confidence and reduces fear in its passengers. But that very technological apparatus which creates safety – by distracting passengers and by pacifying potentially unruly ones – was seen by the USTSA as producing danger. The incident in 2009 was not the first instance of this role reversal for inflight entertainment, in which it was associated with danger rather than safety. As Virilio might have predicted, the invention of the airborne movie theatre is also the invention of the airborne movie theatre fire. On 2 September 1998, a McDonnell-Douglas MD-11 operated by Swissair crashed into the Atlantic Ocean southwest of Halifax International airport just fifty-three minutes after leaving John F. Kennedy airport in New York City. All 229 people on board died. The ensuing investigation by the 1 42

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Transportation Safety Board of Canada (TSBC) determined that an electrical fire was the primary cause of the crash. How the fire started is still unclear, but the investigation suggested that faulty wiring in the inflight entertainment system might have been to blame. This particular system was supposed to be powered through the cabin electrical buses, but they could not generate enough power for all 275 seats. As a result, roughly a third of the in-seat screens were powered through a secondary electrical bus. This workaround (which TSBC found in other MD-11s) constituted a ‘latent unsafe condition’.44 The crash prompted Swissair to shut off entertainment systems in its planes in the autumn of 1998.45 The system in question was banned a year later. Between 1998 and 2003, sixty incidents of fires and smoking wiring linked to malfunctioning inflight entertainment systems were reported to the Federal Aviation Administration.46 The systems may add more than four miles of extra wiring to an airplane, increasing the chances for electrical fires and system malfunctions (not to mention extra weight). On the heels of the publication of the TSBC report in 2003, an aviation safety expert hired by the families of those who died in the crash called for a ban of all inflight entertainment systems since fire is a possibility inherent in the nature of electrical wiring. The predictable response from a consultant to the aviation industry was: ‘Airlines still feel the need for inflight entertainment to keep people occupied and calm. There are a significant number of nervous fliers, and an entertainment system can keep their minds off the flight.’47 The installation of the inflight entertainment system despite inadequate power indicates how virtual safety, in the form of reassurances and distractions afforded by screened entertainment, is valued over the actual safety that could have been achieved by instead not supplying electrical power to the entertainment system. Pacified, seated, immobile passengers are crucial to the smooth operation of long-haul passenger flights. This is not just a new form of film-fire disaster caused by replacing acetate or mylar film with electrical signals. In essence, the crash of Swissair Flight 111 demonstrates how the global culture of speed requires the pacification of passengers even if it means compromising safety for speed. Multiple groups have financial interests in keeping inflight entertainment in place. But beyond the economic rationale, the fear and anxiety experienced by passengers have material consequences that must be mitigated. The global system relies on speed in the flow of material (commodities, labour, information). To institute a widespread brake on this speed, such as ceasing all air travel, could lead to catastrophe, a systemic global crash. The 2010 eruption of Eyjafjallajökull, a volcano in Iceland, spewed ash dangerous to aircraft into the atmosphere, leading to a global crisis. Tens of thousands of flights had to be grounded, stranding millions of passengers; collectively, airlines lost an estimated $450 million a day.48 At a local level, each air traveller knows that their own financial survival may very well be predicated on rapid travel – to a business meeting, a conference, an interview and back again. This is true even for the leisure traveller, who endeavours to spend as much time away from work while using the smallest amount of vacation time, thus maximising one of the few fringe benefits available to the workforce. Within the contemporary socio-economic system, time pressure must be continually aggravated; in the global capitalist system profit depends on logistical efficiency and the motility of resources. The logic of the Disastrous Speed: Thrill Rides, Screens and Fear of Flying

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culture of speed, then, dictates that those who participate in it – the ones who live in the culture of real time – must diminish their fears and anxieties, buckle up and pretend they cannot fall. ASTROVISION: AMERICAN AIRLINES’ THRILL RIDE In 1966, American Airlines inverted the relationship between inflight entertainment and the thrill ride. The airline built an inflatable dome, dubbed the ‘Astrosphere’, within which they built a simulacrum of the first-class cabin of one of their Astrojets (the name the airline used for their fleet of fan-jet-equipped airplanes). The Astrosphere became a roadshow, featured at shopping malls across the country in the hopes of convincing those who had not yet flown that air travel was sensible, safe and convenient. Entering the Astrosphere, audience members sat in the same seats available in first class, put on headphones and watched a twelve-minute film summarising a trip between New York and Los Angeles. The film of the Astrosphere, like the films featured on Astrovision, then American’s inflight entertainment system, endeavoured to attenuate the duration of long-haul jet travel. In the Astrosphere, the seven-hour, cross-country flight is reduced to twelve minutes of watching a screen. As the New York Times explained, ‘The occupants of those seats will never leave the parking lots of their local shopping centers, but when they get out of the seats they may leave behind some misconceptions and fears about flying.’49 The Astrosphere, in other words, was a kind of pre-emptive inflight film, a cinematic experience that simulated flight and, since the theatre never left the ground, it also simulated safety. But unlike the inflight film that attempts to distract from the fact of flight (and its risks) via the sensory experience of moving pictures, the Astrosphere attempts to distract from the fact of stasis via cinematic sensation. The Astrosphere is therefore a post-World War II example of the diorama and panorama, often associated with the nineteenth century. As Anne Friedberg put it, these types of ‘building-machines [were] designed to transport – rather than confine – the spectator-subject’, and the occupant of the diorama, panorama, Astrosphere and the inflatable globe of the ‘Pan American World’ exhibition referenced in Chapter 2, ‘was deceptively accorded an imaginary illusion of mobility’.50 Like the Astrosphere, Astrovision itself demonstrated a complicated relationship between distraction, thrills and flight. Astrovision was American Airlines’ response to TWA’s Strato-Cinema and consisted of separate black-and-white television monitors installed throughout the cabin. In addition to feature films, short programmes and (on occasion) broadcast television, the system also included a closed-circuit television system. The first iteration of the circuit was composed of a camera mounted on the nose of the plane and later systems included cameras on each wing. The closed-circuit system was most often used during take-offs and landings, but on some daytime flights the system was turned on so that passengers could observe the landscape. During these daytime flights, then, the inflight entertainment system operated as a kind of window through which the landscape could be viewed (albeit in black and white). Thus, Astrovision simulated panoramic vision first instituted in railway travel.51 Because of the architecture of the airplane cabin, in which not everyone is 1 44

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afforded a view through the window, that particular fear-diminution technique left over from the age of rail travel was unavailable to the air travel industry. Understanding that reducing anxiety in passengers was crucial to continued passenger loyalty, public relations and, in the short term, the successful completion of the flight, American Airlines used new media to create a window seat for everyone, incorporating the content of old media into the new. The nose camera, on the other hand, transformed the airplane into a thrill ride. In 1965, newspaper advertisements attempted to describe the sensations created through the closed-circuit system: ‘The runway rushes under you, your “windshield” fills the sky, and you find yourself with a view that used to be strictly for the birdmen.’ One advertisement, with the headline, ‘Now You Can See Your Own Take-Off on Astrovision’ featured a television monitor with the image of a runway dominating the frame, with airplanes and terminals in the background. Such a framing of the road/path/runway on an image screen converges the relationship between cinema/ television/window as expressed by Virilio: ‘what goes on in the windshield is cinema in the strict sense’.52 Speed, movement and sensation combine as virtual mobility, providing the illusion of proprioceptive sensation (unlike the thrill ride, which also moves and jerks the body, achieving a kind of somatic cinema). The extreme foreshortening of the runway on the screen portrayed by the advertisement adheres to the rules of quattrocento perspective: the runway continues to a vanishing point in the horizon, invoking the speed of take-off but also the journey itself as a linear path from a single point of origin (and optical perspective) to a destination somewhere beyond the horizon. The ad thereby positions the destination as a faraway place that cannot yet be seen, calling attention to the fashion in which jet travel rearranges space. Airline passengers know that the destination exists (having heard or read about it, seen it on a map or having previously visited it) but the invisibility of the destination calls attention to the fact that, in jet travel, usually the only two places that can be seen are the urban areas of the departure and arrival airports. Thus the journey seems to magically connect disconnected spaces since there is very often no intervening landscape. Presenting an approximation of the pilot’s optical standpoint may offer another form of reassurance beside distraction. By offering passengers visible evidence of where (and how) the plane is going, the Astrovision system simulated a form of control. For passengers, air travel, like rail travel, means submitting to a routing system created by others. Jet passengers cannot stop and start the plane, they cannot get out to stretch their legs, nor can they choose to alter their destination. Contrast this to the system of automobility, which does allow for stopping and disembarking mid-journey. Despite the routing constraints in the form of roads that do not allow drivers to go wherever they want, the discourse of automobility presents the subject position of the automobile driver as master of destiny. This may be a contributing factor to the underreporting of automobile accidents, since they are often ascribed to the failure of the driver, unlike plane crashes, of which the most terrifying aspect may be the complete helplessness of the passengers. By giving passengers visual stimuli similar to that available to the pilot, Astrovision allowed each passenger to feel as if they might be controlling the plane and therefore have a role in their own safety and the successful completion of the journey. Disastrous Speed: Thrill Rides, Screens and Fear of Flying

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Astrovision managed to both call passengers’ attention to the fact of flight and distract from it. The thrill of witnessing take-off and landing from an optical perspective close to that of the pilot helped turn the most dangerous (and therefore exciting) part of passenger air travel into a contained piece of entertainment, a thrill to witness. Astrovision displayed what amounted to a point-of-view shot from the optical standpoint of the pilot and thus encouraged a kind of disembodied gaze for the passengers, akin to ‘ride films’ at amusement parks and fairgrounds. These on-screen moments of flight, presented as safely contained on the screen, distracted from the real danger passengers faced.53 Thus Astrovision attempted to borrow the feelings of safety that accompany the visual and somatic thrills of amusement parks and roller coasters; perhaps even aligning the take-off and landing sequence would remind passengers of the famed roller coaster sequence in 1952’s This Is Cinerama! Seen in alignment with these other established forms of amusement, Astrovision’s nose or cockpit camera view endeavours to pretend the plane has not left the ground by adhering to the aesthetics of the thrill ride. Alongside the thrill ride aspect of Astrovision’s closed-circuit system is diverting sightseeing. In the case of daytime overland flights in cloudless skies or beneath the cloud layer, the view out of the window can be quite intriguing and even mesmerising. In these instances the aerial view that can provide wonder and epiphany is conferred on every passenger through the closed-circuit system. The novelty of these exterior cameras and closed-circuit television system may be enough to lure customers even today. In the 1990s, some European air carriers experimented with exterior camera systems linked to their inflight entertainment systems. British Airways justified the system on the basis of safety as well as entertainment: ‘We see two positive elements: the passengers get an incredible view of the terrain, and there’s also an added safety factor because the flight crew can scan the underbelly as well as the overwing and underwing areas.’54 Increased visibility of the exterior of the plane to those ensconced in its interior may not always provide reassurance. On 25 May 1979, an American Airlines McDonnell Douglas DC-10, Flight 191, took off from Chicago O’Hare airport en route to Los Angeles. During take-off, the plane’s left engine and a portion of the left wing broke off the airplane and landed on the runway. This cascaded into a series of other difficulties with the left wing, as the plane rolled uncontrollably to the left, turned upside down and crashed. There were no survivors.55 The National Transportation and Safety Board report on the crash traced the cause of the severed engine to maintenance practices at American Airlines. In order to save ‘200 manhours per aircraft’, the company ignored advice from the engine manufacturer and repaired and mounted the engines in a fashion that made the wing more susceptible to the type of wear that resulted in the engine flipping over the wing of the American Airlines DC-10 at Chicago.56 In other words, time-saving practices stemming from the culture of speed and capitalist imperatives of profit resulted in the sacrifice of consumers: experiments in efficiency resulted in disaster. If the pylons holding the engine of this particular plane had not failed, it would most likely have happened to another DC-10. Like every other American Airlines DC-10, Flight 191 was equipped with the Astrovision system. As a spokesperson for American Airlines stated, the passengers 1 46

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‘probably watched their DC-10’s dive toward the ground on closed-circuit television’, since the camera mounted in the cockpit above the shoulder of the pilot gave the passengers a ‘cockpit view’.57 This particular iteration of the Astrovision system also allowed passengers to listen to pilots and air traffic control. By letting passengers in on a hidden, professional world that nonetheless directly affects them, the Astrovision system delivered the reassurance that the pilots were indeed doing their job, following procedure and adhering to professional protocols. In this way, it is akin to the Virgin Atlantic ‘Fear of Flying’ iPhone application. Likewise, the underlying premise of the system – that offering the simulation of the cockpit experience and presenting a kind of telepresent piloting can distract and thrill passengers – calls to mind the simulated balloon ride complete with aeronautical pilot of the Cinéorama. But unlike either of those technologies, Astrovision confused immediacy with power; and it is the elision of electronically mediated experience with control over the situation that produces reassurance. The crash of American Airlines Flight 191 offered a stark reminder that telepresence and agency do not always coincide.58 THE TERMINAL CITIZEN In 1997, Virilio introduced the figure of the ‘terminal citizen’. This is the future of humanity in technologically dominated urban agglomerations. The terminal citizen has traded mobility for motility. The potential for various kinds of movement – physical or virtual – is valued over actual mobility itself. In Virilio’s analysis of the transformations of European urban environments in Open Sky he observed that rather than making cities more accessible to the physically disabled (granting the power of mobility to the immobile) the widespread introduction of telepresence has made it possible for the average urban dweller to experience the urban environment and social relations while immobile. The means of electronic communication – internet, telephone, television – have obviated the goals of physical movement. No longer do we need to traverse the city to learn of recent events, to purchase goods, to interact with strangers (or those familiar to us). Indeed, our movements can be attenuated ‘to a few gestures, a few impulses, like channel-surfing’.59 We can recline in chairs, beds, sofas or cushions and reach the furthest ends of the Earth by tapping a few keys and calling up sights and sounds on image screens. The result of extreme mobility on the part of transportation and communication technology is extreme immobility for people. Virilio’s argument would seem to run counter to the observable rise in air travel and the underlying need for face-to-face interaction in the global system. As Nigel Thrift has shown, face-to-face contact fosters opportunism and competition even as it also engenders trust and teamwork, even in the industry most dependent on the instantaneity of real-time and global communications infrastructure: high finance.60 The practice of face-to-face contact drives global business culture. The veracity of Virilio’s observations, though, becomes clear when we consider the state of the passenger in the high-velocity transport vehicle. Within the steel tube of the jet, the riveted carapace that ensures protection from the elements, people are immobilised. Even during the all-too-brief period of air travel when ‘you are free to move about the Disastrous Speed: Thrill Rides, Screens and Fear of Flying

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cabin’, the traversable space is too small, too narrow, too crowded and often more trouble than it is worth. Left with nowhere to go (while at the same time travelling at fantastic speeds with seeming impunity) passengers adopt the position of Virilio’s terminal citizen. Entranced by screens and telepresence, air travellers are belted into cushioned seats, unable to move save for a few gestures: changing channels, accepting food and drink from the flight attendant, passive-aggressive wars of position over the armrest, and the occasional grope into the seatback pocket for the inflight magazine and/or shopping catalogue. The visual space of the jet passenger constricts to a half-metre diameter. The spatial configuration of the passenger cabin has its analogue in the cubicle arrangements of the contemporary office space. The mobility offered in real space contracts so much that one might as well not exist in real space. In the cubicle it is the computer terminal that offers escape into the telepresent world of real time. In the airplane, it is the seatback screen that renders the immobile passenger motile. The technology of inflight entertainment provides the potentiality of movement. The technology of jet travel that requires human bodies to be transported as rapidly as possible and yet arrive safe and whole necessitates the restriction of movement within the vehicle. Commercial passenger aviation offers screen entertainments as the technological solution to potential claustrophobia. These screens address another effect of the physics of speed: fear. Distracting from the fact of flight, screen entertainments function as a detour within the journey; they divert from the dubious experience of flying. Because jet travel is inherently absurd – it provides no sensation of flying or movement – our own perceptions rebel against the possibility that we travel at hundreds of miles per hour thousands of feet in the air. Screen entertainments thus supply sensation, give passengers something to apprehend beside the possibility of falling to Earth. At the same time, these participate in what Virilio has characterised as a larger aesthetic endeavour: The entire history of Quattrocento perspectives is only ever a story of struggle, of the battle of geometers vying to make us forget the ‘high’ and the ‘low’ by pushing the ‘near’ and the ‘far’, a vanishing point that literally fascinated them.

In Virilio’s aesthetic history, that same horizontal which allows the distinction between close and distant for Renaissance perspective is a line which diverts from the ‘the zenithal perspective’. Since ‘vision is actually determined by our weight and oriented by the pull of earth’s gravity’, the vertical line, the vanishing point in the sky is sight’s original reference point.61 Thus screen entertainments, participating in the structuring of perception and experience in terms of near and far, reliant on the vanishing point emphasised in quattrocento perspective, compel viewers to think about movement forward and backward. Falling is not an option for spectators of inflight entertainment. The kind of falling and flying sensations common to midtwentieth century novelties such as This is Cinerama! and turn-of-the-nineteenthcentury fairground attractions like the Cinéorama thrill because of the disjuncture between the visual perception of being in the air and the rational reassurances that our feet are on the ground. In the jet plane, passengers’ feet are on the floor, but that floor is some 30,000 feet above the ground. So while the thrill ride is invested in stimulating 1 48

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the proprioceptive into believing the virtual is actual, the imperative of inflight entertainment is to convince the proprioceptive that the actual is virtual. In the plane, passengers must forget high and low and concentrate on the near and far. The GPS system, the maps, the constant updating of flight paths, estimated time of arrival and so on are all part of a concerted effort to convince us that the space conquered by our modern space-annihilating technologies is horizontal, not vertical.

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Television image transmitted to a Western Air Express plane, 1932. Photo enhanced by Western Air Express (Courtesy Delta Flight Museum Archives)

7 Live in Air: Aerial Circuits of Television

Television contains (and pleasures) us by contradictions, positing us in a halfway house, a netherland … It materializes reality by simulation; obsesses with time while eradicating it; and repeats catastrophes which tell us that we are safe. Patricia Mellencamp, 19901

In September and October 2005, Peru hosted the under-17 FIFA World Cup, with matches played in Lima, Trujillo, Chiclayo, Piura and Iquitos. At the time, all international flights had to land at Lima’s Aeropuerto Internacional Jorge Chávez for passengers to clear customs and immigration, so World Cup fans had to land in Lima, regardless of where the match was to be played. The Gambian team was set to play the Qatari team on 22 September in Piura, 600 miles north-west of Lima, and 289 Gambian fans chartered a plane to see the match, flying into Peru from Brazil. Radioing the control tower at Piura’s Capitan FAP Guillermo Conch Iberico airport, the plane’s crew claimed to be short of fuel and requested permission to make an emergency landing at the Piura airport. The low fuel claim turned out to be false; the Gambian football fans had realised they would miss the game unless they somehow gained permission to land in Piura. On board a plane subject to international agreements dictating where and when an aerial border exists, the fans concluded that the only way to see the game was to ignore these treaties and violate the regulations governing air travel and emergency landings. In the air, the football fans had knowledge that time was passing on the ground and that the schedule of games was not suspended for the period in which they were in the air: in other words, no one was under any illusion of instantaneous travel despite the radical space-time compression that jet travel enacts. Live television was not an option, so the fans, feeling disconnected from the tournament events and matches, took steps to bridge that gap.2 Beyond demonstrating the lengths that football fans go to for their beloved sport, this incident also exemplifies the uneasy relationship between nationalistic feelings, the international treaties governing border crossings and the transnational regulations administering air travel, with their origins in the Chicago Convention of 1946.3 The faked emergency further accentuates the importance of speed for air travel, in which punctual arrival is valued above all else. Additionally, the actions of the passengers and crew draw attention to the expectation of simultaneity and common experience in a mobilised society. Partly due to restricted agency, passengers cannot very well Live in Air: Aerial Circuits of Television

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intervene or act upon events occurring outside the plane. Flying produces an experience in which passengers know very well that things happen while they are travelling, manifesting as anxiety. The Gambian football fans may very well have acted out of this anxiety – an anxiety of global simultaneity. The global infrastructure of rapid transportation and communication technologies has likewise led to a cognisance of a singular global temporal order, beyond the national temporal order described by Benedict Anderson. Transnational television broadcasts have played an outsized role in creating a cultural consciousness of moving together in time. The ‘global media event’, either catastrophe or celebratory, is perhaps the clearest example.4 Broadcasts of sporting events depend on the illusion of simultaneity between transmission and event for their appeal and, as such, are both media events and one of the few remaining examples of television whose appeal is still dependent on live transmission. Indeed, broadcasts of sporting events to airplanes are a recurring experiment, from American Airlines attempts to show the World Series in 1964 and American-style football games in 1965, to Delta Airlines 1996 experiment in showing Atlanta Braves games. When JetBlue and Frontier airlines installed satellite television in their jets, they negotiated with television providers to make sure that the Super Bowl was available to passengers; a newspaper account then likened flying in one of their planes to being in a ‘sports bar in the sky’.5 Televised sporting events depend on viewer knowledge of the simultaneity of time across distance, so that television serves to bring the distant closer and takes advantage of near-instantaneous transmission. ‘Coordinated universal time’, kept by atomic clocks which detect microwaves emitted from electrons, establishes the ‘real time’ that serves as the global basis for organising, aligning and managing navigable vehicles (airplanes, satellites), financial transactions (day trading), and even television signal frequency.6 Introduced in 1972, this ‘universal time’ enables the logistical simultaneity of the mobility around the globe. Timekeeping has tied transportation and television together, as both rely on the precise scientific measurement of electron energy, and both are emblematic of the way in which the traffic in images, labour and commodities coheres the global capitalist system. In this chapter, I will use the eighty-year history of television on airplanes to map the constellation of relationships between visibility, simultaneity, community, speed and aeriality.7 Television has played a crucial role in the history of aviation: from its origins as a potential two-way communication device and weather alert system, to its current digital configurations of satellite communications, television has long linked aerial vehicles to the terrestrial. Unlike the previous chapter, which emphasised the latent danger of inflight entertainment and the deployment of cinematic technologies to reassure passengers, I argue that the ability of television technology to instantaneously transmit and receive audiovisual information has produced a relationship between the medium of television and air travel based on constant temporal coincidence, tethering the contingencies of airborne vehicles to the stabilities of grounded installations. Metaphorically and literally, then, the defining aesthetic of television – ‘liveness’ – occupies a central position in this constellation, both in its technical capability to produce a sense of immediacy and simultaneity, and metaphorically as a way to keep viewers and passengers safe and alive. Live television images claim a direct temporal relationship to the events they depict by presenting images as a continuous flow. Seeing events ‘as they happen’ 1 52

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positions the television set as a kind of window onto the world so that closed-circuit television systems have become effective modes of surveillance. Operating within the aesthetic of liveness, television watching becomes what Stanley Cavell termed ‘monitoring’: a way of treating television as a view of ongoing events.8 American Airlines took advantage of television’s circuit of event, transmission and reception when flights equipped with the Astrovision system flew low enough over urban areas to pick up television broadcasts of NCAA football bowl games in January 1965. Although weather caused havoc with the signal and reception and other technical difficulties occurred, this reception of a real-time television broadcast of an ongoing event provided temporal (and cultural) connectivity between the planes in the air and events on the ground by allowing passengers to ‘monitor’ the games.9 The ability of television to display events on screen that occur in front of a distant camera in near simultaneity allows the technology to present viewers with the potential to witness distant events as they occur. The sense of immediacy afforded by television has become a fundamental viewer expectation, and inculcates a sense of viewer involvement with the events on screen. In news, sports and talk show programmes, this approximation of viewer involvement is referred to as para-social interaction.10 Conversational speech, studio audiences, direct address to the camera, and references to the ‘viewer at home’ are all ways in which television sound and image collaborate to create the impression of social interaction and viewer involvement. In short, liveness is both a technical performance and a spectatorial belief. The heavy reliance on para-social interaction to achieve the conventions of liveness gives live television a sense of banality and the everyday. The qualities of television talk – informality, spontaneity, ellipses and non-verbal utterances – combined with direct address to the camera and the flow of images, give live television a sense of closeness and lived-ness that feels like community.11 As I shall show below, this definition of community depends on notions of being brought together by technology, but does not necessarily entail participation in the production of this community. My examination of live television in the airplane, therefore, continues my analysis of mediated isolations and connections brought initially through the use of headphone technology in the 1960s, exacerbated by the introduction of the seatback screen in the 1990s and turned into a new political order through the conjunction of cyberspace and neoliberalism. The first television broadcast to an inflight airplane constituted an experiment testing the potentials of monitoring the television screen. On 21 May 1932, the Los Angeles radio station KHJ, in partnership with the television station W6XAO, transmitted a motion picture as a television signal for five minutes to a Western Air Express transport plane nearly ten miles away. Those on board were able to watch nearly five minutes of a film starring Loretta Young.12 The test was successfully conducted with a second plane later in the day. During the early 1930s, the television transmitter and receiver had to share a common power line to ensure synchronisation of the signal. For KHJ engineer Harry Lubcke, the transmission was an important step in severing the connection between television receivers and cabled wires.13 Lubcke had previously worked with Philo Farnsworth to produce the first fully electronic, over-theair television transmission in San Francisco, and the transmission over ten miles from ground to airplane was a further dramatic demonstration of television’s newly Live in Air: Aerial Circuits of Television

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achieved aerial nature. He had earlier pioneered the use of the cathode ray tube, which became central to the development of television, especially in its classic incarnation of the ‘live broadcast’. Explaining the technology in an article a month after the tests, Los Angeles Times science reporter Ransome Sutton wrote, ‘Lubcke’s cathode-ray method is revolutionary in that … it obviates power-line synchronization between transmitters and receivers. Instead of prearranged attunements, you “tune in” by using dials.’14 At the time, capturing television signals from the air rather than through electrical or telephone wires was truly extraordinary. Consider that just a few months previously, in 1931, A. J. Carter, another television pioneer in negotiations with Western Air Express and a supplier of radio telephones to the army and navy air corps, predicted the global broadcast of opera and motion pictures but only via electrical wires, utilising the infrastructure put in place by power companies. The notion of aerial television – wireless transmission of moving images – seemed beyond even Carter’s vision.15 In the United States, the wireless broadcast of television signals was to become the dominant form of television for the next seventy years and, of course, satellite transmission of television signals relies on a similar aeriality of wireless-ness. Transmitting to an airplane demonstrated the omnipresence, invisibility and ethereality of radio waves and calls to mind the fantasies of instantaneous, invisible and universal communication and transportation systems detailed in the first two chapters of this book. The ground-to-plane wireless transmission of a motion picture via television technology attests to the common itinerary of aviation, television and cinema in the long processes of globalisation. For the airlines, the experiment supported a plan to transmit weather information to planes to assist pilots blinded by fog, clouds and other meteorological events. In the United States during the 1920s, fixed-wing aircraft were primarily used for the airmail, and passengers were a secondary concern. Because airmail pilots were pressured to keep to a schedule, night landings and flying in bad weather were routine, and pilot deaths were fairly regular. A series of navigational aids were employed in the 1920s to help ameliorate the risks of flying blind. One of these was a 1928 system in which the Morse code signals for the letters ‘A’ and ‘N’ were transmitted to planes: when the signals formed a continuous tone in the pilot’s headset, that meant the pilot was following the correct path.16 By the end of the 1920s, the aeronautics bureau of the US Department of Commerce required two-way radio on all interstate passenger planes, and in 1930 the airlines founded Aeronautical Radio, Incorporated, headed by Herbert Hoover Jr, for their radio operations.17 These radio practices sought to compensate for the absence of visual information with sonic information. The television experiment was meant to render the invisible visible, and was not invested in ‘seeing at a distance’, which had typified previous experiments with the technology (and of course, its very name). In our own ocularcentric culture, the invisible and unseen are fearsome and terrifying, as they are presumed to be unknown. This extends to flying itself, as passengers cannot see what holds the plane up. Thus the visualisation of the unknown and the monitoring of image screens upon which these visualisations appear are associated with feelings of safety and security.18 Beyond illustrating how media technologies provided the basis for partnerships between the entertainment and air travel industries, in which each had separate yet overlapping goals and desires for these technologies and accompanying infrastructures, 1 54

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this early experiment calls attention to the link between liveness and the aerial.19 The increased reliance on electronic technologies which receive radio waves and translate them into audible sound waves or visible images (radio, radar and television) for safe aerial navigation alters the connotations of liveness from that which appears to reproduce images and sounds of life to that which sustains life. In other words, using television as a technology to forestall catastrophe turns its capabilities of immediacy and presentness away from a ‘window on the world’ and towards an early warning system. Both DuMont and Farnsworth used the phrase ‘window on the world’ in their advertising campaigns of the 1940s, promoting the capacity of television to bring the distant closer, to provide the sense that viewers are looking in, or monitoring events around the world. Some of these ads appeared during World War II, emphasising that technological innovations achieved by these companies were put to use for the armed forces, but promised that after the war the technology would be available for domestic consumption. My purpose in recalling the military applications of television technology is to realign the electronic screen of the domestic set with the electronic screen of the militarised radar system, a system of targeting threats in order to preserve and save lives (the earliest deployments of radar in the war were by the British to assist in foiling bombing raids), a system that relies on a continuous dialogic system of receiving and transmitting electromagnetic waves through the air to detect moving aerial objects. Thus, radar and television become aligned in a common project of aeriality. In the case of aerial navigation, the airplane depends on the proper reception and translation of atmospheric radio waves to stay suspended in the air (or at least reach the ground with limited damage). The aesthetic of liveness, rooted both in the technological ability to instantaneously transmit electronic signals and in the institutional structures of early post-World War II television studios, has a relationship to broadcasting as practice and metaphor. The television signal, travelling under the banner of the broadcast, is both of the air and in the air, available to anyone with the proper technological apparatus to transform the invisible and ephemeral waves into perceptible images and sounds. We might therefore think of live television as meteorological: the signal is suspended in the air, becoming an atmospheric phenomenon. While the origins of the live television broadcast are not strictly due to its facility as a weather reporting device, that such a role is part of television’s origin story is revealing. Television and the airplane are metaphorically linked, through their aeriality and their role in providing the safe conditions for travel. Another fashion in which the airplane and television are metaphorically linked is transportation, and this link appears with frequency in early writings on television’s potentials. I have drawn attention to the way that American Airlines put the airplane in a genealogy of other new technologies of communication and transport in order to assure the public of the safety of air travel. In a 1941 essay, ‘Possible Social Effects of Television’, David Sarnoff, then president of RCA and chairman of NBC, recounted the televised broadcast of the 1940 Republican National Convention: ‘The members of this audience, seated comfortably in their homes and in restaurants or other public places, were aurally, visually, and immediately transported to the distant scene by the modern miracle of television.’ Sarnoff then positioned television at the end of a line of technological innovations that have intensified humanity’s ability to traverse the obstacles of space and time, brought distant groups together and increased knowledge, Live in Air: Aerial Circuits of Television

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a list that included ‘railroads, steamships, and automobiles’. Sarnoff’s discussion of the effects of television thus stands in the rhetorical constellation of cosmopolitanism and global community I have analysed in the first part of this book. Looking to the future, in which the working week is shortened, leisure time increased and home ownership widespread, Sarnoff stated that television, ‘will link together in mind and spirit these vast numbers of individual homes, as the high-speed automobile roads and airways will link them together physically’.20 The linkage provided through broadcasting evinces the experience of simultaneity by relying on the aesthetic and technical achievement of liveness. Thus the transportation metaphor that occurs throughout Sarnoff’s essay describes a kind of virtual mobility in which sounds, images and events travel through the air and arrive home, linking distant places in an interminable present. Rudolf Arnheim’s 1935 essay, ‘A Forecast of Television’, makes this metaphor explicit. Television, he wrote, ‘is a relative of the motorcar and airplane, it is a means of cultural transportation’.21 The first half of Arnheim’s essay addresses questions of how television engages the human senses and how the human sensorium translates these stimuli to recognise a semblance of reality. His analysis of the sights and sounds offered by television offer a proto-theorisation of liveness. The comparison of television with a vehicle of rapid transportation is not an effort on the part of Arnheim to compare the sights out of the window of an airplane to those seen on a television screen. Rather, in keeping with the modern consensus that travel is a mode to greater understanding, Arnheim claimed that television’s ability to transport viewers effects a changed attitude towards knowledge and the world. By calling television a relative of the airplane, Arnheim emphasised its ability to bring viewers to places outside their own familiar surroundings, and that television, makes us know the world better and in particular gives us a feeling for the multiplicity of what happens simultaneously in different places. For the first time in the history of man’s striving for understanding, simultaneity can be experienced as such, not merely as translated into a succession in time. Our slow bodies and nearsighted eyes no longer hamper us.22

In Arnheim’s treatment, television allows viewers to travel without travelling – virtual mobility – and to experience a kind of community by passing through time in concert with others physically distant. These pronouncements seem in line with the type of ‘one world’ rhetoric critiqued in the opening chapters of this book, and have led some television scholars to point to this essay as predictive of television’s role in cultural globalisation. Toby Miller has suggested that Arnheim positioned television as a global montage of sights and sounds, and offered this passage as an early example of the acknowledged role of electronic communication technologies in globalisation. Miller used Arnheim as exemplary of early naïve assumptions regarding the link between global communication systems and global peace.23 Similarly, Mimi White has pointed to this passage as representing an early example of television offering ‘global mobility’.24 The presumed obviousness of the airplane as an engine of globalisation remains unstated in these recent connections made between Arnheim’s early predictions of television’s power and contemporary processes of globalisation. The physical movement of bodies across the globe is treated as an unproblematic indicator of a shrinking world. 1 56

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What remains unexamined are the implications of the equation of the airplane to television: if the media technology of television is also a technology of transportation like the airplane, than the airplane is also a technology of mediation like the television. The airplane has its own visual logics and does not provide transparent views or immediate experience of the world through which it travels. As I argued earlier in this book, mistaking the aerial view with immediacy and objectivity is a classic mistake of globalist ideologies. Likewise, travel is also not an innocent practice that automatically leads to knowledge and understanding.25 As Arnheim points out in his essay, travelling across the world has the possibility of not changing a person, their view of the world or their place in it. We should therefore be cautious when taking Arnheim’s comparison of television to the airplane as evidence towards his investment in the new technology of television as offering unmediated experience, for the airplane, too, acts as a mediator in experience, allowing travellers certain sights and sounds, compelling travel along particular routes at set times and very often limiting the travellers’ understanding of people, places and things to pre-existing narratives about the exotic, the adventurous and the authentic. In fact, a neglected key point is Arnheim’s mention of ‘slow bodies’, which should call our attention away from the rhetorics of global understanding and towards a theory of rapid movement as a crucial marker of modernity. Television, through its ‘celebration of the instantaneous’ allows us to experience global simultaneity to an extent that exceeds the ability of the airplane.26 Jerome Bourdon has argued that liveness as an aesthetic and a privileged technique of television production can be placed in the larger context of ‘a history of communication as speed … the rhythm of printing presses, the use of telegraph by press agencies, the transmission of photographs, the circulation of films (by plane), then the circulation of video signals through transmission and satellites’.27 As discussed across the previous chapters of this book, the global culture of speed, manifested in the global networks of rapid transportation and communication technologies, produces near-instantaneity of experience, a dialectic of (im)mobility, and, ultimately, an existential crisis. But, as I have also argued, the widely felt need for instantaneity of experience arises alongside a sense of connection across spatial distances. This sense of connection assumes a shared global time, in which the temporality of other spaces and places conforms to the temporality of the space of the airplane. Coordinating global flights depends on standardising time – coordinated universal time – and applying that standardisation globally. And yet, the airplane and air travel produce their own set of temporal experiences. The impatience of the boarding process, the thrill of take-off and landing, the period reserved for the food service trolley to slowly make its way down the aisle, the tedium of sitting in a small enclosed space and the frustrations and relief associated with disembarking all contribute to a sense that time in the air is different from time on the ground; not to mention the panoply of alternate temporalities provided through screens. A significant instance of this temporal disjunction occurred in 1992, when President George H. W. Bush flew to Helsinki for a Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe summit in Air Force One. Upon landing, he was greeted by reporters asking questions about the Gulf War, which had recently concluded. President Bush was unprepared for these questions, having missed breaking news Live in Air: Aerial Circuits of Television

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coverage while aboard the plane. Frustrated, he charged the US Defense Department with solving the problem of installing satellite television aboard Air Force One.28 The Gulf War had signalled a significant rise in twenty-four-hour television news coverage and all-news networks such as Cable News Network Incorporated (CNN).29 By itself, the ascendancy of satellite-based, internationally transmitted television channels obsessed with live coverage of events indicates not only an increased attachment to the aesthetic of liveness in the past two decades, but a kind of global simultaneity achieved through transmissions from outer space.30 CNN’s coverage of the Gulf War epitomised a new era of global media connectivity and exemplifies the subjective sense of transnational connection felt by those with access to such networks, including frequent fliers. Satellite television and the achievement of global televisual simultaneity thus creates an atmosphere of globalisation via the teletopological condensation of all places onto the screen. It is not that distance does not matter, but rather that the instantaneous broadcast of images and sounds to television sets in homes, offices and airport lounges worldwide produces a felt togetherness in time. The dream of receiving television broadcasts on an airplane via satellite transmission goes back at least as far as 1956, when in their book, Satellite!, Erik Bergaust and William Beller predicted, ‘tomorrow’s jet air liners will have inflight television. Programs in 3-D and color will be relayed to the airplane from outer space.’31 And in September 1996, Delta Airlines experimented with satellite television on its flights. Partnering with satellite television service DirecTV and avionics supplier Hughes-Avicom, Delta installed satellite television on a single aircraft, which was then scheduled to fly various long-haul and short-haul routes along Delta’s network. This experiment allowed the airline to closely monitor passengers’ viewing choices and habits, although how this monitoring actually occurred is unclear since the airline offered the service on small overhead screens installed in the luggage bins, rather than via individualised seatback screens, and only one channel was available at a time. For long-haul flights, according to Flight International’s account, Delta showed ‘CNN News in the morning, the Discovery channel through mid-day, and Nickelodeon in the evening’. The airline’s rationale for the service was similarly paradoxical, proclaiming on the one hand that, ‘We’re leading the industry in providing passengers with what they want’, and, on the other hand, that, ‘We chose those three because we wanted to test a variety of programming, and this allows us to inform, educate and then entertain.’32 In keeping with the strong relationship between liveness and televised sports, Delta broadcast a game of the 1996 World Series, between the New York Yankees and Atlanta Braves, as part of the month-long experiment.33 That same month, In-Flight Phone Corporation (IFPC) also announced a partnership with DirecTV and a deal to provide twenty channels of live satellite television to Continental Airlines.34 Eventually the US Defense Department subcontracted the project of providing satellite television to a plane in flight to the Harris Corporation, a defence contractor specialising in communication and information technology. The initial form of the live satellite inflight television project began much like television in the 1920s, through the use of pre-existing telephone technology. As detailed in Chapter 5, during the 1990s, commercial airliners had already installed inflight telephones using satellite technology. So Harris partnered with the IFPC and then made a deal with Continental Airlines to install the technology in 1997. When IFPC went bankrupt, its parent 1 58

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company, Microwave Communications Incorporated (MCI), paid Continental Airlines to eventually dismantle the system. Glen Latta, in charge of the project at Harris, found a willing partner in B/E Aerospace to form LiveTV as a joint venture in 1997.35 In essence, the technology allowed vehicles moving rapidly through the atmosphere to receive signals from satellites moving rapidly through outer space, which in turn had received signals from terrestrial stations. The LiveTV system also featured a real-time monitoring of the satellite television system’s operations (and presumably viewer choices) by transmitting data to an operations centre in Florida.36 The itinerary of the television signal – terrestrial-based uplink, satellite reception and retransmission, airplane reception, seatback screen, data transmission back to terrestrial operations centre – creates an invisible, constant and nearly instantaneous connection between ground and plane via outer space. In February 2000, commercial carrier JetBlue airlines began offering live television in the passenger cabins of its airplanes via the LiveTV satellite service. In 2002, JetBlue acquired LiveTV, largely at LiveTV’s behest, making it the first airline to wholly own a television content distributor. The JetBlue system distinguished itself from the Delta and Continental experiments mainly because programming could be accessed through the individual screens in passenger seatbacks, and included sports, travel, weather, finance and news channels. Thus passengers were able to switch channels of their own volition and watch different programming from other passengers. Calling this television programming ‘live’ is unusual in a few basic senses. In this case ‘live’ means whatever programming is transmitted via satellite at that time, and so it is live television only in the sense that any technical difficulties that occur in transmission would be broadcast in real time as well. What appears on the screens of JetBlue’s inflight entertainment systems does not have to contain any of the stylistic, formal or aesthetic conventions that constitute liveness. Under JetBlue’s definition, the programming is considered live even in cases in which the audience knows full well the programme had been filmed, taped or even ‘originally broadcast’ months earlier, such as an episode of Law & Order (1990–) or Lost (2004–10). This seeming contradiction demonstrates how contingent liveness is on context and viewer expectation.37 The ‘live’ of JetBlue’s LiveTV service is an agreed upon fiction between audience and producers which helps give JetBlue’s passengers a feeling of exclusivity. Thus the designation of ‘live’ is meant to differentiate JetBlue’s television programming from that of other airliners who have contracts with ABC, NBC or CBS to play recordings of particular programming according to the schedule of the flight, rather than the schedule of a television channel. As a result, JetBlue’s LiveTV approximates the living room, mirroring the furniture of the domestic television set with the seatback screen, and bringing the experience of television as a ‘flow’ of images and sounds from the domestic setting to the airplane cabin. Here, I am referring to two senses of the term ‘flow’ as introduced by Raymond Williams. First, the way in which television content (particularly in the commercial model with spot advertisements), has none of the characteristics of a discrete, authored and coherent text; rather the content of television is made up of various paratexts, intertexts and interruptions. Second, the unending stream of images and sounds constitutes a flow that drags the viewer along with it and discourages turning the television off, as if the passenger is caught in a stream of images and sounds, much like being swept away by the slipstream of the plane itself.38 Live in Air: Aerial Circuits of Television

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For passengers, part of the appeal of this kind of live television is the ability to monitor events outside of the plane and thus become connected to the terrestrial. By emulating the domestic media experience, watching television on JetBlue can give passengers the sense of a shared experience with a dispersed television audience on the ground and in the air. The temporal co-presence that typifies broadcast networks such as radio and television allows for a sense of collective activity among physically dispersed strangers. The fact that JetBlue’s airplanes capture an ephemeral signal in the sky, interrupting the stream of radio waves transmitted by satellites provides viewers with a sense of participation with a larger community, so that air travel is not experienced as a temporal disjuncture. Crucially, passengers on JetBlue could access inprogress twenty-four-hour news channels like CNN or MSNBC, achieving a midair ‘window on the world’ unavailable to President George H. W. Bush just eight years earlier. While these channels are on, the sense of temporal disjunction between passengers and those on the ground may very well be mitigated. Fictional programming may also foster a sense of community. This sense of community relies on passengers’ ability to imagine others below watching the same television programme at the same time, despite the physical and spatial isolation of the passengers within the metal tube of the airplane fuselage. During 2002, JetBlue installed surveillance cameras in the passenger cabins of its planes, so that those in the cockpit could monitor what was happening in the passenger cabin. This closed-circuit television system does not include recording technology, so the images are ephemeral, present and in real time. In other words, live. In each JetBlue airplane, therefore, there is a doubled monitoring: the passengers monitoring satellite broadcasts and the pilots monitoring the passengers on the closed-circuit television system. In each case, the quality of liveness relies on simultaneous circuit of event, transmission and viewing.39 The installation of CCTV was a security measure put in place after the hijacking of commercial airplanes in September 2001; the ability to look into the cabin meant that pilots would have advance notice of disturbances or unusual behaviour. Much like the other cinematic systems installed in aircraft, the CCTV system of JetBlue relied on the conflation of vision with knowledge and optics with power. Because there is no recording or storage system associated with JetBlue’s CCTV, the system operates on the same temporal assumptions of live satellite television transmissions of LiveTV as well as the communicative infrastructures that enable global aviation. Or, put another way, a CCTV system with a time delay would do the pilots in the cockpit no good whatsoever, as the system is in place to guard against so-called ‘imminent threats’ in the near future. Thus radar, weather maps and CCTV imbricate a network of forecasting cinematic technologies, whose screens are interpreted as possessing information about the immediate present to be extrapolated into the future. As a space of screens, the cockpit of the plane requires pilots to act as ‘terminal citizens’. The instruments of flight – the primary flight display, navigation display and centralised aircraft monitoring system – provide visualisations of the plane’s position in threedimensional space, against a cartographic imagery, and provide the status of the technological system of the airplane itself. These liquid crystal displays exist in the chamber of the cockpit alongside the windows allowing for naked-eye visual apprehension and the television monitors showing the passengers in the cabin behind 1 60

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the cockpit. The cinema of the cockpit then offers inward- and outward-looking displays, and substitutes direct visual representations with metaphorical imagery (e.g. radar), to provide the impossible view from ‘nowhere’ in which the craft is mapped against the topography and positioned in the atmosphere. In each case, however, pilots are called upon to look into the future and interpret the absolute present-ness of these images as predictors and indicators of possible destinies. As the present from outside the cockpit emerges on the screens within the cockpit, the task of the terminal citizen is to use the present to prevent future emergencies. Installed to provide reassurance and fulfil functions of security, safety and aerial navigation, the instantaneous monitoring enabled by television, radar and other cinematic technologies are thus also apparatus preoccupied with crisis and catastrophe.40 ROUTINE EMERGENCIES OF TELEVISION On 22 September 2005 JetBlue Flight 292, scheduled between Burbank and New York City, was forced to make an emergency landing at Los Angeles International airport. The plane’s landing gear malfunctioned and it circled above the airport to burn off excess fuel, amid television and radio news helicopters. Unlike the aviation practices described in Chapter 2, in which aviation’s presumed advantages include rapid travel and the ability to ignore traditional geographic barriers, the flight failed to live up to the promise of modernity and use technology to conquer space and time. In the case of Flight 292, the passengers were always within sight of the 405 freeway and Los Angeles International airport, demonstrating that the promise of modernity to compress space-time is not always realised even for those with access to transportation networks. The potential for drama and suspense in an ongoing emergency made this an attractive story for television news. Cable channels CNN, MSNBC and Fox News Channel interrupted their coverage of the aftermath of hurricanes Katrina and Rita, while local stations broke into their normally scheduled programming to cover the story. And, with JetBlue offering live television in its cabin, the plane’s passengers were able to watch coverage of their own emergency landing on live television. This incident carried many of the attributes common to the media event: a strong visual component, human drama and, of course, the potential for a fiery, violent and tragic end.41 And, like many marathon news events, it was boring. Malfunctioning landing gear falls into that category known to commercial airline pilots as ‘routine emergency’. The plane flew in circles for three hours in order to burn off as much fuel as possible as protection against the possibility of explosion upon landing. The circular path of the airplane called attention to the banality of most live television, so often connected to crisis and catastrophe. In her influential essay, ‘Information, Crisis, Catastrophe’, Mary Ann Doane argued that television seeks to contain catastrophe and manage it in its own terms, ‘surrounding catastrophe with commentary’, and yet the discontinuity of catastrophe is ‘the mirror of television’s own functioning’, so that ‘catastrophe functions as both the exception and the norm of a television practice’.42 Thus, television’s ‘celebration of the instantaneous’ is what makes it able to report on events as they happen and interrupt ‘regularly scheduled programming’, so that the temporal discontinuity of the emergency is already built into its mission of monitoring Live in Air: Aerial Circuits of Television

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and transmitting in real time even as the formal aesthetics of its content are already prepared to be interrupted (by spot advertisements, station identifications and so on). As catastrophes go, though, Flight 292 was a disappointment. Nothing happened until the landing, and the empty time gave commentators, pundits and designated experts the opportunity to speculate on a wide variety of things: from the thoughts, feelings and emotions of the passengers and crew to the myriad ways in which the flight could end badly. Some newscasters speculated as to the possibility of the plane flipping upon landing and others gave the plane a fifty-fifty chance of making a safe landing.43 As Mary Ann Doane put it, ‘In the case of the airplane crash, speculation about causes is almost inevitably a speculation about the limits and breaking points of technology’, suggesting that television’s omnipresence, ubiquity and ability to produce simultaneity is also put into service of proving its technological superiority to other forms of transportation.44 In these disaster marathons, as Tamar Liebes calls them, the appeal lies precisely in that viewers are relatively safe and distant from the event on screen.45 They might be at home, or at a restaurant, a bar or even at work, but, in any case, they are not involved in the event except as audience, as onlookers. Live television relies on the distinction that viewers are safe inside watching the danger outside, ‘safe, at home, perhaps in bed, away from the crowd’.46 But for the passengers on Flight 292, these divisions did not hold; the television coverage positioned passengers as onlookers of their own catastrophe, of their own potential death. What they saw on the screens in the cabin did not remind them of the safety of their viewing environment; rather it served as a reminder of the risks and contingencies of modern life. The event, the television coverage and ensuing speculation regarding their fate caused an existential crisis for some of the passengers; one went so far as to use a video camera to record a goodbye to loved ones. The videotaped farewell constitutes existence confirmed by the camera – through photographic proof – in a moment of crisis, when life previously taken for granted becomes uncertain. The passenger who recorded a farewell message knows the social expectations, repeated ad nauseam in contemporary films and television shows, that the best method to preserve his memory would be through a video recording. As Doane has argued, ‘television deals not with the weight of the dead past but with the potential trauma and explosiveness of the present. And the ultimate drama of the instantaneous – catastrophe – constitutes the very limit of its discourse.’47 During an emergency, a disruption in time, live television serves to fix the temporal order through simultaneity. For Patricia Mellencamp, ‘television promises shock and trauma containment over time via narration of the real’, so that the ‘ontology of liveness’ makes sutures ‘here’ and ‘there’ into the ‘now’.48 By stitching together event, broadcast and viewing, live television mends the tear in the temporal order. Recorded materials, on the other hand, multiply disruptions in time. The videotaped farewell fits into this scheme well – its disruption of time through recording and freezing time is about permanence through memory and death, not life, which is ephemeral and in constant motion. The reception of a broadcast signal is aligned with liveness because the signal has a kind of currency. Surveillance and monitoring are valued in these moments of crisis as a form of life preservation. JetBlue’s in-cabin surveillance cameras, a deployment meant to foil 1 62

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potential hijackings, are an example of how live television is mobilised as an effort to forestall death. The role of the instantaneous television signal has changed from the potential guidance system pioneered above Los Angeles in 1932. That signal was meant to help keep the plane in the air – to help its aerial suspension. The satellite transmission received by the JetBlue plane in 2005 created another form of suspension: deferment. While both could be seen as attempts to forestall death, the crisis of Flight 292 comprised a kind of spatiotemporal suspension. The journey itself could not be realised, since the plane flew in circles and yet neither did the journey end, since the plane stayed in the air for three hours, postponing both arrival at the intended destination and the ability to resume the journey. The crisis of non-travel with the accompanying possibility of disaster produced a kind of subjective temporal caesura, as the passenger cabin transformed into an aerial waiting room. The electromagnetic signals – invisible, ethereal, omnipresent – relied upon to produce and confirm the fate of the passengers stuck in limbo intensified the atmosphere of suspense and, combined with the radar and radio communications systems, illustrate how air travel itself depends on a plethora of invisible and seemingly immaterial signals and waves. The layers of image-making present in the Flight 292 incident – the passengers watching the exterior of their plane as it flies, the pilots watching the passengers watch the plane on television, the passengers filming themselves watching the television coverage – all add to an increasingly looped circuit of monitoring, display and transmission. For the passengers on the plane and the news professionals covering the landing, this loop did not circulate outward – rather it turned inward to introspection. Because the catastrophe was already contained and managed by the pilots and air traffic controllers, television newscasters and reporters who normally function to contain the catastrophe were also left with nothing to do except wait and speculate as the plane circled above the city. Here the positions of the television journalist and the passengers were aligned in boredom, anxiety and suspense. Flight 292 was full of media professionals, including a television graphics specialist (who authors the news tickers which stream across the bottom of newscasts), a professional musician, a reporter for the New York Observer (who called the incident ‘all-too post-modern’), two television actors (including a star of a reality television show), a professional stand-up comedian (who videotaped a farewell message on board), a film actor and two television network executives. The added layer of media self-awareness made this incident particularly fertile for news coverage, which was able to advertise its own ubiquity by interviewing these industry insiders now cast as minor celebrities. For instance, the television graphics specialist appeared the next day on Good Morning America and was interviewed by Diane Sawyer.49 On 24 September, MSNBC broadcast a live segment interviewing the passenger who videotaped the farewell message and asked him to analyse his videotaped performance. MSNBC presented viewers with a split screen of the exterior of the plane landing, the videotape of the interior of the plane and the passenger watching and talking over the footage. The circularity of such coverage, in which the news story is about the news, indicates that the multiplication of new media technologies – the extensive deployment of cameras and screens – brings about a kind of self-absorption.50 The portions of passenger interviews published in newspapers focused almost exclusively on how the passengers felt about the television coverage, and were edited Live in Air: Aerial Circuits of Television

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by newspapers to fit the position taken by the paper as to whether JetBlue should have turned off the seatback screens. For instance, those papers wanting to portray live television as panic-inducing included appropriate quotations, while those wishing to portray the coverage as reassuring found alternate quotations to support that position.51 Intriguingly, these quotations were sometimes from the same passenger – several passengers adopted both positions, often in the same breath. Regardless of the position taken by the newspaper on the question of television in the cabin, it pointed to an ongoing belief in the power of liveness. The underlying presumption in either case – that it is good to have live coverage because it is informative and immediate or that it is bad because its urgency and immediacy induces fear and anxiety – is that live television is an unmediated and direct conduit from event to audience and that the only responsibility of television news is to either turn the camera on or off. Questions of framing the image, the narrative presented by newscasters and experts, and other kinds of mediation present in television news were not addressed. As demonstrated by the media circularity of this situation, television’s liveness is not always outward-looking; it can often be closer to a kind of introversion and selfinspection. In the case of Flight 292, the increased introversion is due to the crisis of imminent death. In these situations, live television confirms the viewer is alive and well. This is why the passengers on Flight 292 were so ambivalent about the live TV broadcasts. On the one hand, it demonstrated that they were in danger. On the other hand, they knew that as long as they were viewers they were still alive. In the conventions of the live, televised emergency, the viewers are always safe and alive, while the status of those on the screen is constantly called into question. Doane succinctly expressed the way in which television functions as a lifeline during catastrophe, even as it relies on the transmission of catastrophe for its legitimacy: ‘Television’s greatest technological prowess is its ability to be there – both on the scene and in your living room (hence the most catastrophic of technological catastrophes is the loss of the signal).’52 The televised catastrophe is never just about the event itself; it provides the viewer with a powerful sense of being alive and supports the attitude that it is safer to watch than to be watched. Rather than encouraging a sense of involvement in exterior events, liveness reinvigorates a concern with projecting the individual interior onto individual exterior screens. In a plane full of strangers, the passengers did not reach out to each other for comfort, but took comfort in the connections afforded by the live television coverage. On Flight 292, with the heightened possibility of a crash, the role of screens as reassuring technologies is thus intensified. Unlike the successfully completed flight with no incidents or failures, in which the inflight entertainment systems act as mere distraction, on Flight 292, the sights and sounds of the world outside the plane operated as companions that affirmed the passengers’ existence. If, for Doane, the catastrophe is an ‘eruption of natural forces’ against ‘progress’ and/or the demonstration of technology’s inadequacy that calls into question the utopian potential of technology and the ‘forward movement’ of progress itself, Flight 292 stands as a demonstration that this analysis does not go far enough.53 In Doane’s treatment, a catastrophe is something which happened in the past and subsequently contained by television and television news discourse. But the catastrophe of Flight 292 never occurred; rather Flight 292 was unrealised catastrophic potential. The 1 64

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television coverage of JetBlue 292 that appeared inside the plane and elsewhere is not so much about present-ness and immediacy as it is about the relationship of the present to the future; the way that the present holds the potential for future catastrophe. The instantaneity of live television both preserves the present as potential, thus forestalling the future, but awaits the future catastrophe anxiously, so that suspense can only be relieved through the crash. As an example of the preservation of the present as potential catastrophe, the JetBlue 292 incident establishes the substantive accident inherent in technology examined in the previous chapter. That procedures were already in place for such an event, and that the entire event was categorised as a ‘routine emergency’, indicates an acknowledgment that built into technology is technological failure. Television and its discourses were left with nothing to contain, and could only try and create crisis ex post facto by interviewing survivors and asking them to relive the incident. Here, the treatment of the past through ‘live’ interviews in the present regarding events in the past reveals television’s complicated relationship to its own enactments of deferral and presentness. If television’s great accomplishment is simultaneity, which it wields against other technological forms, in the absence of an event, television relapses into the décalage that Dudley Andrew associated with film.54 In a sense, television reverts to an earlier form of ‘audiovision’.55 Three hours of non-event meant that television’s ‘celebration of the instantaneous’ turned into an exercise in enduring the repetitive. The plane’s flight was characterised by stasis, in that it never left the airspace above Los Angeles, rather than transformation, like an aerial echo of the automobile traffic jam; or perhaps a perverse version of Aeromarine’s 1921 Howdy Chicago! sightseeing tour. It should be noted that for many of the passengers the trip between Los Angeles and New York had become a special kind of commute; according to the newspaper stories, many travelled back and forth regularly. But perhaps more than the commute, sightseeing tour or traffic jam, Flight 292 resembled the thrill ride. Like the Holcroft Cinema Aeroplane of the 1920s, Flight 292 effectively simulated air travel, and provided screens with images of sights around them, including the airstrip, the surrounding metropolis and television personalities, not to mention the plethora of choices available to passengers on the other channels. And, like roller coaster riders, Flight 292’s passengers went round and round in circles and ended up close to where they started, only to disembark and get back in line to board another plane. If, as argued in the previous chapter, inflight entertainment has been deployed as a set of technologies to distract, divert and pacify so as to lead passengers’ attention away from the plane and the fact of flight, then the failure of Flight 292 to physically transport its passengers is matched by LiveTV’s failure to virtually transport viewers. These failures resulted in a condition of stasis: not motionless in the air, but somehow still suspended in time and space. The fantasies of space-time compression (or even space-time annihilation) that have invested modern technology and progress have little room for these types of incidents. Suspension is merely the hyperbolic extension of the frustrations of modernity: the queue, the bureaucratic obstacle or infrastructure overwhelmed by those anxious to realise these modernity’s potentials. Inflight entertainment has a role in this: a distraction from immobility that substitutes virtual mobility for physical movement. On JetBlue Flight 292, however, the circularity of Live in Air: Aerial Circuits of Television

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liveness broke the illusion of movement perpetrated by the seatback screens. JetBlue’s system of inflight entertainment, based on the notion of immediacy and connection (which would have averted the Gambian football fans’ Peruvian ploy), actually called attention to passengers’ immobility rather than diverting them from their predicament. The closed circuit of event, transmission and viewing was mirrored by the circuit of the airplane in flight, signalling the limits of space-time compression. Live coverage of their own plane in peril meant that the comforts of the virtual are upsettingly actual and the actuality of flying high above the ground (while having no control over the situation) invaded the virtuality of the seatback screen. Flight 292’s passengers then, experienced the implosion of ‘real time’ into ‘real space’, or, put another way, the implosion of the virtual into the actual, a catastrophe of representation which, in our media saturated world, is also an existential catastrophe. But ultimately, television performed its function of preserving the present against the past and the future. If television’s simultaneity elevates an imperialist now into a global present, than the coverage of Flight 292 acted as the echo of the 1932 Western Air Express-KHJ experiment, which foretold the transmission of weather information in order to assist pilots in forestalling catastrophe. Of course, this is not the primary or only function of domestic television viewing, but the relationship of cinematic screens, the transmission of signals through the extraterritoriality of the electromagnetic spectrum, and the coordination of global practices through Coordinated Universal Time, coalesce as the ‘global now’ crucial to keeping airplanes in the air, passengers calm and commerce uninterrupted by crashes. The atmosphere, through which these invisible and yet material signals pass between vehicles in outer space (satellites), vehicles in the stratosphere (airplanes) and towers on the ground, has become the crucial territory for the management of global risk.

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Conclusion: Cinema as Infrastructure

The globalist visions analysed in this book were both inspired by and inspirational to cinema and aviation. They relied on the logics of technological solutionism – the idea that social relations can be transformed, altered and/or fixed by changing the way people relate to technology (and vice versa), rather than how people relate to each other. For proponents of globalist idealism, therefore, the experience of flying high above the ground would convincingly demonstrate the arbitrariness and uselessness of political borders, and the experience of watching cinematic stories and scenes from different parts of the world would convincingly demonstrate the folly of divisions along national, ethnic or geographic boundaries. These are not unique ideas, but rather participate in a much longer project, based mainly in Europe and North America, of creating a cosmopolis through communication and transportation technologies. The idealism of these projects links community and commonality to metaphors of immaterial, ephemeral and invisible forces such as light and air. Ultimately, these globalist projects have run aground as the idealism of atmospherics meets the material realities of globalisation processes, and the production of space follows the logics of the global economic system more closely than the logics of the 1943 MoMA exhibition ‘Airways to Peace’. The presumed ‘freedom of the air’ circumscribed by international crises and treaties that carved the sky into zones, blocks and corridors means that the geopolitics of territorial sovereignty applies just as much to airspace as it does to land. The structures and limits of the global economic system (manifested as globalisation) constrain the idealism that set globalism in motion. The global ‘single-image market’ created through the GATT and WTO has manifested as a network of cinema, in which screens exist as nodes and theatrical settings (including airplanes, universities, art galleries, film festivals) stand as hubs. Distribution of cinema, now achieved through both transportation and communication technologies, is a formation of infrastructure. More than a technological and technical infrastructure – an assemblage of machines and logistics – cinema has become a type of social bond which regulates and produces a social order. As demonstrated by the history of inflight entertainment, cinema has become a set of disciplinary tools for organisations (keeping passengers calm); factories for sensory labour (in which attention is produced and exploited); the metaphorical model for living in contemporary society (we willingly become objects that pass through machines and are photographed); and an experimental zone for new forms of politics (the neoliberalist ethos of bring-your-own-device). At the same time, inflight Conclusion: Cinema as Infrastructure

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entertainment points to the limits and failures of all these utopian projects, including the promises of modernity itself. If the freedom of movement, annihilation of space and time, and the rational individualism of self-sovereignty structure the dreams of modern life, then inflight entertainment stands as the material proof that all of these have yet to be realised, and, perhaps, cannot be realised unless we submit to their opposites – stasis, suspension and captivity – if only temporarily. For passengers the speed and movement of airborne cinematics are a respite from the stasis and tedium of jet flight. For reasons of safety and efficiency, passengers must remain close to immobile during these periods of extreme vehicular mobility; the obverse of space-time annihilation in modernity is the protraction of stillness for individual bodies. This has its corollary in the boredom and anxiety experienced by passengers during what has become a highly routinised and regulated example of submission to international and transnational governance as airplanes fly through aerial corridors. Flight can feel more like suspension, since the jet’s movement can be difficult to sense, and time spent on board becomes tedious and boring; for passengers the aerial journey is often experienced as an extended period of waiting for an inevitable conclusion. In turn, the ‘empty’ or ‘dead’ time of the journey can be filled and resurrected through the focusing of attention on cinematics, so that passengers are both trained in subjectivity by screened media and their perceptual labour is packaged and produced as attention to be sold to content-creators. The labour of audiences produced in airplanes is thus both disguised and subsequently transformed into self-supervision. Inflight entertainment therefore serves as a reward for passengers, something they receive in exchange for agreeing to perform sensuous labour in the forms of attention and passivity (as stillness). Inflight entertainment stands as a continuous use of new media technologies in a particular discrete site. Studying inflight entertainment, then, enables examinations of media transition, emergent media and media failures impossible with other media practices. Rather than following the history (innovations, practices and culture) of particular technology positioned as a precursor to contemporary technologies (the Sony Walkman precedes the mp3 player), relying on ‘fortuitous finds’ in the archive, serendipitously discovering ideas or imaginings of an audiovisual technology, or a meticulous accounting of the history of cinema in non-theatrical spaces, the study of inflight entertainment is the study of a media laboratory.1 Due to the use of headphones dating from the 1960s, what inflight entertainment represents is an ongoing experiment in media practices and new forms of sociality; including separate connections to the same soundtrack, separate connections to different forms of audio (music, talk, film soundtrack), the choice of different audiovisual content from a curated selection, the individualised choice of content on demand from a curated collection, and the individualised choice to bring technology and content on board. Inflight entertainment is both the history of different spectatorial positions and experiences as well as a hybrid confluence of multiple forms of media practices. For those interested in the history of radio, television and film, the airplane is an unusually rich site that I have barely begun to mine in this book. But this is also to risk a narrative of technological progression – media forms moving, inevitably, towards their current incarnation – in other words, a form of presentism. To mitigate against this narrative, I have taken pains to point out how 1 68

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many of the media apparatus in airplanes failed. That is, not only did some of them simply not function, many of them did not work as planned and companies went bankrupt. Passengers were dissatisfied, even outraged, by some systems, and bewildered by others. I would argue that the grand experiment, begun in the 1920s, of a darkened airplane with a single lit screen that bound passengers to a single vision ultimately failed as a form of sociality, passivity and spectatorship. The introduction of seatback screens combined with headphones and a choice of entertainments seems unremarkable now in an era seemingly full of private, portable, personal media devices. But as early as 1961, by making the soundtrack the primary marker of engagement with cinema, headphone-based inflight entertainment systems turned cinema into a private and personal experience. That headphones create a privatised sonic space has been a central argument in sound studies, and, in a sense, headphones have determined the pathway for innovation in inflight entertainment technology (towards personalisation and customisation). Contrary to this common thesis that headphones create private spaces of listeners, IFE systems asked passengers to plug in headsets to participate in a common experience. Even in small-screen applications, until the 1990s, passengers did not control what they watched (that is, it was chosen by the airline, started by flight crew, interrupted by flight crew etc.). Instead, from the 1960s to the 1990s, when seatback screens and video channel-switching were introduced in many cabins, headphones signalled a kind of acquiescence to the film – and an urge to join in with other passengers. The headphones, then, allow passengers to remain separate from each other, choosing sounds to listen to. But if they decide to listen to the film’s soundtrack, the separate headsets allow them to achieve a simultaneity of aesthetic experience. I want to turn, for a moment, to Michael Bull’s work on mobile media, sound and headphones, to further elucidate how this confluence of different modes of spectatorship and media use might work. Bull borrows the notion of a privatised media ‘bubble’ from Jean Baudrillard’s commentary on vision and the automobile in America, and adapts it for private music listening via headsets.2 These personal and portable music players allow users to ‘inscribe “public” space with “private” meaning’.3 But within the airplane, these are not necessarily free-floating bubbles that move through public space, such as Bull’s case studies often involve. Rather, the bubbles are interlocked, connected but separate, the walls of one passenger’s bubble supporting and strengthening the walls of other passengers’ bubbles. So rather than a personal bubble, we have what Peter Sloterdijk calls ‘foam’, a metaphor that I think aptly describes the loosely structured media practices within the cabin and points to the fragility of the boundaries between individual media practices. The image of foam as a model for thinking of the variegated practices of carving out a space for living – an atmosphere – calls attention to the way that the individual production of personal media space is in fact a group project that relies on connections between different forms of isolation and separation. As such, foam indicates the fashion in which systems of media technology – aesthetic systems – are also always systems for sociality and for living.4 With the interconnections of aesthetics, technology and sociality in mind, I propose it is time to reorient away from the question animating the introduction of this book – ‘What is cinema?’ – and towards the question, ‘What makes cinema Conclusion: Cinema as Infrastructure

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possible?’ Rather than an investigation of ideas, messages, ideologies within texts (what Marxists might call superstructure); or the rituals and everyday life of media practices (as in cultural studies or anthropologically inflected studies); or the social relations of exchange that structure media institutions (political economy, or what Marxists might call the base); the question ‘What makes cinema possible?’ is a question of infrastructure. Here we can think of infrastructure as the technologies that operate between the two spheres of base and superstructure (or economy and culture, if you prefer), making the two spheres interlocking and interoperable.5 Another way of thinking about infrastructure is to get away from what Raymond Williams marvellously argued was deeply problematic; the spatial metaphor of base and superstructure (after all, this book is not about ‘the beneath’, but rather about ‘the above’).6 Studying infrastructure requires thinking about concealment, hiddenness, latency and even camouflage, not just the space between. Here we might think of the material that makes cinema possible but goes unnoticed, under-analysed, neglected by scholars of cinema: control over light and air to make the image brilliant, luminous and visible, and sound crisp, clear and audible; control over bodies in the spaces of cinema exhibition, distribution and production; control over capital that enables all of those. In this book, I have endeavoured to reveal what makes cinema possible (light, air, bodily stillness, finance) by studying a limited and specialised case. Because of this trajectory, my pursuit of inflight entertainment entails also a study of the juridical and regulatory regimes which govern and manage global aviation and the traffic in cinema. Similarly, it has to attend to two industries whose priorities do not always coincide. Above all, it has had to examine the very material which projects images on screens in airplanes – the equipment of cinema. And I came to conclude that all of these are forms of sociality – the management of bodies and people – that the experiments on cinema-in-the-air are also experiments on aeronauts, the passengers of high-speed, long-distance vehicles flung through the atmosphere. As the human aerial population expands (according to the IATA, airlines carried 2.8 billion passengers in 2011), so has the intensity of technology within the humanoccupied aerial habitats.7 Beyond those technologies for the provision of air pressure, oxygen level, humidity and nutrition which fulfil the minimum requirements for the physical survival of human passengers, the airplane cabin is also an environment of screens. In perhaps its oldest meaning, a screen is a flat surface or device meant to protect humans from atmospheric changes, either the heat from a fire or cold draughts. Screens are also devices which act as filters, catching certain objects, while letting others pass through. Screens, then, are technologies of protection and warding, which allow humans to survive (and perhaps thrive) in atmospheric conditions that would otherwise prove difficult or impossible. The windscreen of an airplane cockpit serves this dual role, protecting the pilot from wind and other elements, while still allowing certain objects, such as photons, to pass through. The windows in the passenger cabin function as screens in the same fashion, although they offer a different, more oblique, view. The curtains that hang between service classes also operate as screens; permeable for the flight attendants, but not for the passengers, and shielding groups of passengers from fully realising their differences as well as their similarities. The safety/evacuation cards screen risk, shock and chaos by channelling catastrophe into bland, ersatz drawings and figures. The inflight magazine and the 1 70

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SkyMall catalogue likewise function as screens, offering protection from interacting with fellow passengers as well as the fact of flight in the form of distraction. The screens installed as part of inflight entertainment systems explicitly serve as surfaces for the projection of images, but perform other ‘screening’ functions as well. We can think of the image screens placed throughout most cabins as sites of security and safety, protecting passengers from environmental conditions which might otherwise be difficult to bear; as sites of discipline and control, filtering content for passengers; and as sites of projection and fantasy, onto which images and imaginaries are projected. The airplane cabin, then, is a cocoon of screen technologies: some merely moulded and folded materials to protect humans from the exterior environment, some more complex technologies of telecommunication electronics. If screens are the infrastructure of passenger flight, while cinema and air travel furnish the means to achieve cosmopolitanism (so much so that cinephilia and frequent flying are seen as cosmopolitan in themselves), then inflight entertainment constitutes an infrastructure for globalisation. Inflight entertainment provides access to images of culture; it allows passengers to transcend their local-ness and their immobility; it provides channels of inter-cultural communication; it placates and pacifies passengers (thus encouraging long-haul air travel); it delivers information for passengers to process; and it gives transnational capital access to passenger attention. Inflight entertainment crystallises the contradictions between the metaphors shared by globalist visions and the lived experience within the global economic system. If the former relies on atmospherics – immaterial and unseen forces which magically create a global society – the latter are the particles of material and visible practices suspended in these atmospherics, manifesting as obstacles to these immaterial forces and yet somehow confirming that these forces exist because the obstacles themselves are supported and justified by these atmospherics. Idealist visions of communication as instantaneous, invisible and immaterial use ethereal metaphors in their promotion; while these metaphors point to the technical components of the devices and systems in question, their promotional value as fantasy lies in the precision with which they emphasise certain aspects of existing social structures over others. What I suggest in response is a ‘meteorology’ of the media that provides counter-metaphors which could empower a critique of globalisation that does not lapse into contrarianism and negativity, inspiring alternate visions. The term ‘meteor’ denotes something aerial, an atmospheric object, and so meteorology can vouchsafe new modes of understanding and conceptualising media. Media technologies rationalise and technologise the air – the light beam of the projector, the changes in air pressure that constitute sound waves and radio waves are all instances of this – and so media technologies depend on repurposing the air in service of human communication and culture. A meteorology of the media, therefore, can assist media scholars in redirecting media studies towards considering questions of (im)mediacy, (im)materiality and (in)visibility in the context of technical innovation and the human project of altering and augmenting our lived environment. In this way, a meteorology of the media transmutes media studies into ecological criticism, understanding media technology as that which makes the atmosphere habitable, navigable and legible and thereby realigns the history of media devices to a history of technologies for survival.

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Notes

INTRODUCTION 1. These arguments about specificity animate essentially the whole body of film theory. For a sampling of recent work on digital cinema and its implications see Paolo Usai, The Death of Cinema: History, Cultural Memory, and the Digital Dark Age (London: BFI, 2001); Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2001); and David Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007). 2. Gertrude Koch, ‘Carnivore or Chameleon: The Fate of Cinema Studies’, Critical Inquiry 35:4 (Summer 2009), pp. 918–28. 3. The work on these many partners to cinema is too vast to list; a short list would include Haidee Wasson, Museum Movies: The Museum of Modern Art and the Birth of Art Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005) on film and art museums; Alison Griffiths, Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology, and Turn-of-the-Century Visual Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001) on film and natural history museums; Dana Polan, Scenes of Instruction: The Beginnings of U.S. Study of Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007) on film and education; Michael Paris (ed.), The First World War and Popular Cinema, 1914 to the Present (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000) on film  and the military; Lisa Cartwright, Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995) on film and medicine; and Jeffrey Ruoff (ed.), Virtual Voyages: Cinema and Travel (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006) on film and travel. Also see Charles Acland and Haidee Wasson (eds), Useful Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011) for a collection of research on a variety of institutions that sought to make cinema conform to their needs. 4. I do not mean to dismiss the salient issues of security, nationalism, territorial sovereignty and social sorting that structure the security process. These issues of surveillance have rightly taken on the shape of a new field. For example, see David Salter (ed.), Politics at the Airport (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). 5. I am referencing David Allen’s book, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-free Productivity (London: Penguin, 2002), a how-to book on productivity and time management. It has grown into a mini-industry, complete with software, digital applications, websites and other spinoffs. Allen’s work is precisely the type of management consulting and self-help business book critiqued in Walter Kirn’s novel Up in the Air (New York: Doubleday, 2001). 6. I am referring here to the ideas of Rudolf Arnheim, who, in ‘A Forecast of Television’ links together television, automobiles and airplanes as forms of ‘cultural transportation’. Rudolf

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7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

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Arnheim, ‘A Forecast of Television (1935)’, in Film as Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), p. 194. See also Chapter 7. Ulrich Beck, ‘The Cosmopolitan Condition: Why Methodological Nationalism Fails’, Theory, Culture & Society 24:7–8 (2007), p. 286. See Craig Calhoun, ‘The Class Consciousness of Frequent Travelers: Toward a Critique of Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism’, South Atlantic Quarterly 101:4 (Fall 2002), pp. 869–97; and Kwame Anthony Appiah, ‘Cosmopolitan Patriots’, Critical Inquiry 23:3 (Spring 1997), pp. 616–39. Timothy Brennan, ‘Cosmopolitanism and Internationalism’, New Left Review 7 (January–February 2001), p. 76. Calhoun, ‘The Class Consciousness of Frequent Travelers’. Ulf Hannerz, ‘Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture’, Theory, Culture & Society 7 (1990), p. 239. Ibid., pp. 237–51. Ibid., p. 239. Calhoun, ‘The Class Consciousness of Frequent Travelers’, p. 888. Claus Lassen, ‘A Life in Corridors: Social Perspectives on Aeromobility and Work in Knowledge Organizations’, in Saulo Cwerner, Sven Kesserling and John Urry (eds), Aeromobilities (New York: Routledge, 2009), pp. 177–93. Sean Cubbitt, The Cinema Effect (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2005), pp. 337–8. Marc Auge, Non-places: An Introduction to Supermodernity (New York: Verso, 2009). Leslie Sklair, Sociology of the Global System (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). Quotation from Hannerz, ‘Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture’, p. 243. Timothy Brennan, ‘Postcolonial Studies and Globalization Theory’, in Revathi Krishnaswamy and John C. Hawley (eds), The Post-colonial and the Global (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), p. 44. Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 88. Hannerz, ‘Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture’, p. 241. Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1996). Beck, ‘The Cosmopolitan Condition’, p. 287. Paul Virilio, Open Sky, trans. Julie Rose (New York: Verso, 1997). Paul Virilio and Sylvère Lotringer, Pure War: Twenty-five Years Later (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2008), p. 79. Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 2. Ibid., p. 3. Ibid., p. 29. Lynne Kirby, Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), p. 3. Ruoff, Virtual Voyages. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 23. Cinema Beyond Territory

33. John Belton, Widescreen Cinema (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992). 34. See Wasson, Museum Movies; Griffiths, Wondrous Difference; Polan, Scenes of Instruction. 35. Dudley Andrew, ‘Time Zones and Jet Lag: The Flows and Phases of World Cinema’, in Natasa Durovicova and Kathleen Newman (eds), World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2009), p. 59. 36. Ibid., p. 60. 37. William Urrichio, ‘Television, Film and the Struggle for Media Identity’, Film History 10:2 (1998), pp. 118–27. 38. Natasa Durovicova, ‘Vector, Flow, Zone: Towards a History of Cinematic Translation’, in Durovicova and Newman, World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives, pp. 90–120. 39. Stephen Heath and Gillian Skirrow, ‘Television: A World in Action’, Screen 18:2 (Summer 1977), pp. 7–59. 40. As quoted in Jane Feuer, ‘The Concept of Live Television: Ontology as Ideology’, in  E. Ann Kaplan (ed.), Regarding Television: Critical Approaches – An Anthology (Los Angeles:  American Film Institute, 1983), p. 13. 41. See, for instance, Rick Altman, ‘Television, Sound’, in Tania Modleski (ed.), Studies in Entertainment (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), pp. 39–54; Lynn Spigel,  Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Roger Silverstone, Television and Everyday Life (New York: Routledge, 1994). For the notion of ‘flow’ see Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (New York: Routledge, 2003 [1974]). 42. Anna McCarthy, Ambient Television: Visual Culture and Public Place (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), p. 2. 43. Ben Frain, ‘What’s On: We Think We Know What Passengers Want from Their IFE, but Are We Right?’, Airline Entertainment International Showcase 2012, p. 9. 44. See, as examples, ‘The Fate of Disciplines’, a special issue of Critical Inquiry (35:4), edited by James Chandler and Arnold Davidson, and the recent ‘Crosscurrents’ section of Media, Culture and Society (35:8) on media studies as a field. 45. William Urrichio’s ‘Television, Film and the Struggle for Media Identity’ mentioned above is a good example of this approach. See also Anne Friedberg’s Window Shopping. 46. See, for instance, Alexander Galloway’s critique of Lev Manovich, ‘What Is New Media?:  Ten Years after The Language of New Media’, Criticism 53:3 (2011), pp. 377–84. 47. Thomas Elsaesser, ‘The New Film History as Media Archaeology’, Cinemas: Journal of Film Studies 14:2–3 (2004), p. 80. 48. Ibid., pp. 75–117. 49. Anthony Slide, Before Video: A History of the Non-theatrical Film (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1992); Jack Fay Robinson, Bell & Howell Company: A 75 Year History (Chicago: Bell & Howell, 1982); Nitin Govil, ‘Something Spatial in the Air’, in Nick Couldry and Anna McCarthy (eds), MediaSpace: Place, Scale, and Culture in a Media Age (New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 233–52; Eric Freedman, ‘Notes from Economy Class’, Flowtv 6: 5 (9 August 2007); Jason Jacobs, ‘Television, Interrupted: Pollution or Aesthetic?’, in James Bennet and Niki Strange (eds), Television as Digital Media (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011),  pp. 255–80. 50. See R. E. G. Davies, A History of the World’s Airlines (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964); Marc Dierlikx, Clipping the Clouds: How Air Travel Changed the World (Westport: Praeger, 2008); Alan P. Dobson, Peaceful Air Warfare: The United States, Britain, and the Politics of International Notes

175

51.

52.

53. 54.

55. 56. 57.

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Aviation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991); Anthony Sampson, Empire of the Sky (London: Bloomsbury, 2012). Eugene Rodgers’s history of Boeing, Flying High: The Story of Boeing and the Rise of the Jetliner Industry (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1996), has a valuable section on the 747 but barely mentions film projection (p. 281). There are exceptions: James Wynbrant’s book on JetBlue, Flying High: How JetBlue Founder David Neeleman Beats the Competition Even in the World’s Most Turbulent Industry (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2004) has an entire chapter dedicated to its in-flight entertainment and Mahlon Straszheim’s The International Airline Industry (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1969) details the controversy over the introduction of in-flight films by TWA and subsequent discussions during IATA meetings. When first introducing in-flight films in 1961, TWA’s employee newsletter, Skyliner, spent nearly four pages describing the new food service for its ‘Ambassador Class’ and only about a column inch on film exhibition. Skyliner 24:12 (22 June 1961). Kathleen Barry’s trenchant history of labour activism among female flight attendants in the United States, Femininity in Flight: A History of Flight Attendants (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007) spends more energy on fictionalised accounts of stewardess life in film, only mentioning in-flight entertainment briefly as part of the efficiency and ‘Taylorist’ movement within airlines’ labour practices of the 1960s (p. 105). Likewise, while Drew Whitelegg astutely makes the equation between airlines’ emphasis on the physical appearance of its stewardesses and entertainment, a subject I address in Chapter 4, her book Working the Skies is primarily concerned with safety, and never addresses the media technologies of in-flight entertainment. Christine Yano’s Airborne Dreams (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011) is a valuable account of global mobility, ‘elective cosmopolitanism’ and the role of airlines in the creation of glamour and exoticism, but in-flight entertainment is never mentioned. Aeromobilities, a collection of essays edited by Saul Cwerner, Sven Kesserling and John Urry, on air travel and mobility studies, contains several crucial insights, which I refer to throughout the book. Despite being one of the few scholarly books about postwar passenger culture, Mark Gottdiener’s book Life in the Air: Surviving the New Culture of Air Travel (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001) does not mention in-flight entertainments at all; although it contains chapters on issues on food, etiquette, drunkenness and fear of flying. Much of the work on air travel in geography and tourism studies journals focuses on the networks of air routes and the consequences of such networking. Anthony James, ‘Family Affair’, Aircraft Interiors International, March 2009, pp. 34–42. See Mary Ann Doane, ‘Information, Crisis, Catastrophe’, in Patricia Mellencamp (ed.), The Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 222–39. Wynbrandt, Flying High, pp. 139–50. See Armand Mattelart, Networking the World, 1794–2000 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000) for an excellent analysis of this utopian project. For accounts of air transport’s role in globalisation see John D. Kasarda and Greg Lindsay, Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011); Cwerner, Kesserling and Urry, Aeromobilities; Dierlikx, Clipping the Clouds; Gottdiener, Life in the Air; and David A. Smith and Michael F. Timberlake, ‘World City Networks and Hierarchies, 1977–1997: An Empirical Analysis of Global Air Travel Links’, American Behavioral Scientist 44:10 (2001), pp. 1656–78. For work in media studies on the importance of airspace in cultural globalisation see Lisa Parks, Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual (Durham: Cinema Beyond Territory

Duke University Press, 2005) and James Schwoch, Global TV: New Media and the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

1. GLOBAL AIRSPACE, GLOBAL CINEMASPACE 1. Carl Sandburg, ‘Our Flat Maps and Earthbound Concepts of Travel, Transport, Bow to Skyways’, Washington Post, 10 January 1943, p. B4. 2. Parks, Cultures in Orbit. 3. Tom Conley, Cartographic Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). 4. Clare Boothe Luce, ‘America in the Post-war Air World,’ Congressional Record 89:1  (6 January–1 March 1943) (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office), p. 761. 5. Lucy Budd, ‘Air Craft: Producing UK Airspace’, in Cwerner, Kesserling and Urry, Aeromobilities, p. 117. 6. For film as a universal language, see Hansen, Babel and Babylon; Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture (New York: Macmillan Company, 1915); Edward S. Von Zile, That Marvel – The Movie: A Glance at Its Reckless Past, Its Promising Present, and Its Significant Future (New York: Putnam’s, 1923). For global cinemas see, as examples: Charles Acland, Screen Traffic: Movies, Multiplexes, and Global Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); Michael Curtin, Playing to the World’s Biggest Audience: The Globalization of Chinese Film and Television (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Mette Hjort, Small Nation, Global Cinema: The New Danish Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); Toby Miller, Richard Maxwell, Nitin Govil and John McMurria, Global Hollywood (London: BFI, 2005); Kristin Thompson, Exporting Entertainment: America in the World Film Market, 1907–1934 (London: BFI, 1985); John Trumpbour, Selling Hollywood to the World: U.S. and European Struggles for Mastery of the Global Film Industry, 1920–1950 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike, Black African Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 7. Miller, Maxwell, Govil and McMurria, Global Hollywood. 8. Michael Curtin, ‘Media Capital: Towards a Study of Spatial Flows’, International Journal of Cultural Studies 6:2 (2003), pp. 202–28. 9. For instance, a 1968 article in the Pan Am Clipper attributes the growth of the Australian film industry to ‘the jet aircraft and its shrinking world. Before 1958, when the propeller ruled the skies, Hollywood and London were too far from Australia to consider making this country a regular locale except under special circumstances’ (Pan American World Airways Inc., Records). 10. Alain L’Hostis, ‘The Shrivelled USA: Representing Time-space in the Context of Metropolitanization and the Development of High-Speed Transport’, Journal of Transport Geography 17 (2009), p. 433. 11. Eric Sheppard, ‘The Spaces and Times of Globalization: Place, Scale, Networks, and Positionality’, Economic Geography 78.3 (July 2002), pp. 307–30. 12. Auge, Non-places. 13. Jeffrey Ruoff, ‘The Filmic Fourth Dimension: Cinema as Audiovisual Vehicle’, in Virtual Voyages, p. 1. 14. V. I. Pudovkin, Film Technique and Film Acting (New York: Grove Press, 1958). 15. Durovicova, ‘Vector, Flow, Zone’, p. 90. Notes

177

16. Ibid. 17. David Butler, ‘Technogeopolitics and the Struggle for Control of World Air Routes, 1910–1928’, Political Geography 20:5 (2001), p. 642. 18. Saskia Sassen, ‘The Places and Spaces of the Global: An Expanded Analytical Terrain’, in Anthony McGrew and David Held (eds), Globalization Theory: Approaches and Controversies (Malden: Polity, 2007), pp. 79–105. 19. The First World War left Britain’s merchant marine unable to cope with the task of binding together the far-flung set of territories that constituted the British Empire. In contrast,  the Royal Air Force had 23,000 aircraft and almost 300,000 service persons, making it ‘the world’s leading air-power’. See Dobson, Peaceful Air Warfare, p. 9. 20. Ibid. 21. Sassen, ‘The Places and Spaces of the Global’. 22. Dobson, Peaceful Air Warfare. 23. Straszheim, The International Airline Industry, pp. 106, 135, 143, 144; ‘In Flight Movies’, New York Times, 1 February 1966; David Gollan, ‘What’s New in Air Fares?’, New York Times, 29 November 1964, p. XX1; Henry Kamm, ‘Atlantic Planes May End Movies’, New York Times, 1 March 1965, p. 51; Frederic C. Appel, ‘Plan to Ban Films in Flight Decried’, New York Times, 14 April 1965, p. 82; ‘International Airlines Vote to Drop Movies’, New York Times, 18 April 1965, p. XX3; ‘CAB Rejects IATA Ban on Movies Aloft’, New York Times,  6 June 1965, p. XX4; ‘Airlines Unit Votes to Set a $2.50 Fee For Movies Aloft’, New York Times, 28 October 1965, p. 19. 24. Sassen, ‘The Places and Spaces of the Global’, p. 97. 25. Schwoch, Global TV, p. 5. 26. Kasarda and Lindsay, Aerotropolis, p. 6. 27. Castells, The Rise of the Network Society. 28. Ibid., p. 408. 29. Mette Hjort, ‘On the Plurality of Cinematic Transnationalism’, in Durovicova and Newman, World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives, pp. 13–15. 30. Natasa Durovicova points out further that the DVDs coded for particular regions do not always come with subtitles or soundtracks for the languages contained within those regions (‘Vector, Flow, Zone’, p. 112). 31. From 1979–85 WAEA was known as the Airline Entertainment Association (AEA). 32. Emma Kelly, ‘Facing the Future: The WAEA Technical Committee Aims to Ease the Transition of New Technology into IFE, Avoiding Past Problems’, Flight International (7–13 October 1998), p. 36; ‘Task Force Will Take over Standardisation’, Flight International 9–15 June 1999, p. 40; ‘WAEA Finalising Live TV Guidelines’, Flight International (25 April–1 May 2000), p. 35; ‘WAEA Seeks Feedback on New Cabin Task Force’, Flight International (23 April–9 May 2000), p. 26. 33. Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, pp. 442–5. 34. Luce, ‘America in the Post-war Air World’, p. 761. 35. Torpey’s history of the passport constitutes a serious challenge to those who see globalisation as foretelling the demise of the nation state and the rise of a regime of postnational citizenship. Torpey traced how the modern nation state has long been involved in a process of expropriating the means of movement from peoples and instituting a state and interstate system of movement authorisation. The rise of this regime of state-controlled movement renders persons dependent on the state for access to places and spaces. The

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36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

permission to access places and spaces is granted dependent on a state-given identity, often in the form of a passport (although the US is unusually dependent on automobile drivers’ licences). See John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship, and the State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Timothy Brennan, ‘Cosmo-theory’, South Atlantic Quarterly 100:3 (Summer 2001), p. 684, (italics in original). Budd, ‘Air Craft’, p. 118. Luce, ‘America in the Post-war Air World’, p. 761. Ibid., p. 760. Brennan, ‘Cosmo-theory’, p. 660. Ibid., p. 669. Bauman, Globalization, p. 72. Brennan, ‘Postcolonial Studies and Globalization Theory’, p. 39. Dierlikx, Clipping the Clouds, p. 43. Brennan, ‘Postcolonial Studies and Globalization Theory’, p. 40. Bauman, Globalization, p. 9. Dierlikx, Clipping the Clouds, p. 29. Cubbitt, The Cinema Effect, p. 336. Calhoun, ‘The Class Consciousness of Frequent Travelers’, p. 888.

2. AERIAL PERCEPTIONS: THE VISUALITY OF THE AIRPLANE 1. American Airlines, ‘All Mother Earth’s Children Live on the Same Street’ magazine advertisement, 1946. John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising and Marketing History, Duke University. 2. Wendell L. Willkie, ‘Airways to Peace’, Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art 11:1 Airways to Peace: An Exhibition of Geography for the Future (August 1943), p. 3. 3. Mattelart, Networking the World. 4. William K. Everson, American Silent Film (New York: Da Capo Press, 1978), p. 25. 5. Hansen, Babel and Babylon, p. 77. 6. James Donald, Anne Friedberg and Laura Marcus, Close-up, 1927–1933: Cinema and Modernism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 103. 7. As Willkie wrote in the exhibition’s programme, ‘We must realize that narrow nationalism and racial and religious intolerance are suicidal’ (‘Airways to Peace’, p. 20). This may seem like an empty bromide, if not for Willkie’s heartfelt sentiments. He was an anti-racist activist working with the NAACP, and his book One World, which advocated for the establishment of a world government after the war ended, was a bestseller. 8. Mattelart, Networking the World. 9. Willkie, ‘Airways to Peace’, p. 9. 10. Ibid., p. 21. 11. See Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (New York: Verso, 1984). 12. Richard Bellon, ‘George Bentham Visits the Crystal Palace’, History of Science Society talk given 9 November 2001. 13. Timothy Mitchell, ‘The World as Exhibition’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 31:2 (April 1989), p. 220. Notes

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14. Stephan Oettermann, The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium (New York: Zone Books, 1997); see also Mitchell, ‘The World as Exhibition’, pp. 217–36. 15. Leo Walmsley, ‘The Recent Trans-African Flight and Its Lesson’, Geographical Review 9:3 (March 1920), p. 159. 16. Ibid., p. 160. 17. Ruoff, ‘The Filmic Fourth Dimension’, p. 2. 18. Friedberg, Window Shopping, p. 59. 19. Ibid., p. 61. 20. Ruoff, ‘The Filmic Fourth Dimension’, p. 1. 21. See Ruoff, Virtual Voyages. 22. Marijke De Valcke, Film Festivals: From European Geopolitics to Global Cinephilia (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007), p. 72. 23. Kathleen Newman, ‘Notes on Transnational Film Theory: Decentered Subjectivity, Decentered Capitalism’, in Durovicova and Newman, World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives, p. 3. 24. Ellen Strain, ‘E. M. Forster’s Anti-touristic Tourism and the Sightseeing Gaze of Tourism’, in Cristina Degli-Esposti (ed.), Postmodernism in the Cinema (New York: Bergham Books, 1998), pp. 150–1. 25. Kirby, Parallel Tracks, p. 3. 26. ‘Movies for Airplane Tourists Add Variety to Journey’, Popular Mechanics 44:1 (July 1925), p. 53. 27. Daniel Boorstin, The Image, or What Happened to the American Dream (New York: Atheneum, 1962), p. 94. 28. Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, pp. 52–69. 29. Thanks to Shiva Balaghi for calling my attention to O’Keeffe’s paintings. 30. Charles Goldsmith, ‘New Airline Cameras Put All Passengers in Window Seats’, Wall Street Journal, 24 June 1996, p. B11. 31. Izzy Kington, ‘The Winner Is …’, Aircraft Interiors International, June 2009, p. 104. 32. Vik Kachoria, ‘Supersonic Jet to Have Windowless Cabin’, Spike Aerospace press release,  15 February 2014. 33. ‘Privacy Fears over Airplane Cameras’, BBC Online 26 February 2004 (accessed 24 March 2014: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/southern_counties/3489304.stm). 34. ‘JetBlue Offers a Window View at Every Seat’, JetBlue press release, 12 January 2005. 35. These same value-associations inform the contemporary practice of ‘cloud computing’. 36. Destination guides are a multi-million dollar revenue generator for airlines. See Mary Kirby, ‘Destination-specific Programming for IFE Expects to Pay Millions in Revenue Share to Airlines’, APEX Editor’s Blog, 6 December 2012. 37. Ruoff, ‘The Filmic Fourth Dimension’, p. 18. 38. ‘Motion Pictures on the Screen while Flying through the Clouds’, Aerial Age Weekly 13:25  (29 August 1921), p. 584. 39. Pan American World Airways, Inc. Records, Special Collections Division, University of Miami Libraries, Coral Gables, Florida: ‘Motion Pictures’, New Horizons, February 1941; ‘PAA’s Movies Are Colorful’, Clipper, November 1945; ‘Film Premiere on PAA Plane’, Clipper, April 1946. 40. Pan American World Airways, Inc. Records: ‘All the World’s A Stage for Pan Am Travel Films’, press release, 27 October 1964. 41. Pan American World Airways, Inc. Records: ‘Award-Winning Films from Around the World’, brochure, 1963.

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42. Castells, The Rise of the Network Society. 43. For a convincing and fascinating account of airlines and the nation state in south-east Asia, see K. Raguraman, ‘Airlines as Instruments for Nation-building and National Identity’, Journal of Transport Geography 5:4 (1997), pp. 239–56. 44. Dierlikx, Clipping the Clouds, p. 64. 45. Ibid., pp. 49–50. 46. Durovicova, ‘Vector, Flow, Zone’, p. 91. 47. Andrew Higson, ‘The Concept of National Cinema’, Screen 30:4 (1989), p. 45. 48. Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu, Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Identity, Nationhood, Gender (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997). 49. Ian Christie, ‘What Is National Cinema Today (and Do We Still Need It)?’, Film History 25: 1–2 (2013), pp. 19–30. 50. Festival organisers and exhibitors are also keen to market to demographic groups,  including expatriates, exiles or migrants who would be interested in seeing representations of their homeland. The introduction of sound film, which has effectively ended the dreams of the universal language of film referenced in the first chapter, has created a situation  in which the language spoken by the performers in the film has become of paramount importance and must somehow be labelled in the festival programme. See De Valcke, Film Festivals and Cindy H. Wong, Film Festivals: Culture, People, and Power on the Global Screen (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011). 51. Bill Nichols, ‘Global Image Consumption in the Age of Late Capitalism’, East-West Film Journal 8:1 (January 1994), p. 68. 52. De Valcke, Film Festivals, p. 24. 53. Andrew, ‘Time Zones and Jet Lag’, pp. 70–80. 54. Nichols, ‘Global Image Consumption in the Age of Late Capitalism’, pp. 73–5. 55. Fredric Jameson, ‘Third-world Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’, Social Text 15 (Autumn 1986), pp. 65–88. 56. Pan American World Airways, Inc. Records. 57. Hannerz, ‘Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture’, p. 239. 58. Andrew Higson, ‘The Concept of National Cinema’, Screen 30:4 (1989), p. 44. 59. Christie, ‘What Is National Cinema Today?’, p. 26. 60. Manthia Diawara, ‘New York and Ouagadougou: The Homes of African Cinema’, Sight and Sound 3:11 (November 1993), p. 24. 61. Air Canada: http://enroute.aircanada.com/en/film-festival. 62. Christie, ‘What Is National Cinema Today?’, p. 25. 63. Gayatri Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), p. 73. 64. Ibid., p. 93. 65. Willkie, ‘Airways to Peace’, p. 9. 66. Denis Cosgrove, ‘Contested Global Visions: One-World, Whole-Earth, and the Apollo Space Photographs’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 84:2 (June 1994),  pp. 270–94. 67. Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 189. 68. Cosgrove, ‘Contested Global Visions’, p. 273. 69. Stacy Boldrick, ‘A Tool of Explanation, Wonder and Domination; Miniaturising Ourselves, Amplifying the Miniature; Reviewing the Aerial View’, Architecture Research Quarterly 11:1 Notes

181

70. 71. 72. 73.

74. 75. 76.

77. 78. 79. 80. 81.

(2007), pp. 11–14; Denis Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in Western Imagination (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); Mark Dorrian, ‘The Aerial View: Notes for a Cultural History’, Strates 13 (2007), pp. 2–19; Mark Dorrian, ‘The Aerial Image: Vertigo, Transparency and Miniaturization’, Parallax 15:4 (2009), pp. 83–93; Virilio, War and Cinema. Cosgrove, ‘Contested Global Visions’, p. 273. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1990). Dorrian, ‘The Aerial View’, pp. 2–19. Pudovkin attributed the phrase ‘creative geography’ to Kuleshov, although to my knowledge, Kuleshov only used the phrase ‘artificial landscape’ to denote this technique in montage. This may be a translation issue. See Pudovkin, Film Technique, p. 59. John Urry, The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1990). Cosgrove, ‘Contested Global Visions’, p. 286. Pan American World Airways, Inc. Records. Pan Am had its own Educational Film division dating from the 1940s. By 1970, Pan Am’s educational film catalogue was 130 pages, with forty-four destination films and seventy-seven training films (including ‘Pan Am Presents the Boeing 747’, ‘747 Simulated Transit’ and ‘The Airline Stewardess’). Pan American World Airways, Inc. Records: ‘PAA to Have Own Brussels Exhibit’, Sales Clipper December 1957, pp. 7–8. Belton, Widescreen Cinema, pp. 89–90. Schwoch, Global TV. Bauman, Globalization. Charles Acland, ‘IMAX Technology and the Tourist Gaze’, Cultural Studies 12:3 (1998),  pp. 429–45; Martin Roberts, ‘Baraka: World Cinema and the Global Culture Industry’, Cinema Journal 37:3 (1998), pp. 62–82.

3. AIRBORNE CINEMA: THE EMERGENCE OF IN-FLIGHT ENTERTAINMENT 1. ‘Air Travelers See Film Show while en Route’, Los Angeles Times, 10 October 1929, p. A5. ‘Oswald the Rabbit’ was a character originally designed by Walt Disney and Ube Iwerks under contract with Universal Pictures. 2. ‘Air Liner Provides Luxuries of Travel’, New York Times, 16 July 1929, p. 2. 3. ‘Air Entertainment’, Wall Street Journal, 18 October 1929, p. 2; ‘Sky Trippers See Movie Show in Air’, Christian Science Monitor, 9 November 1929, p. 1. 4. ‘Eight Plunged to Death in Air Liner Amid Storm’, Los Angeles Times, 5 September 1929,  p. 1; George E. Hopkins, ‘Transcontinental Air Transport, Inc.’, American Heritage 27:1 (December 1975); ‘Control Asked over Air Lines’, Los Angeles Times, 18 September 1929,  p. 7; ‘Complete Inquiry in Air Liner Crash’, New York Times, 11 September 1929, p. 16. 5. Hopkins, ‘Transcontinental Air Transport, Inc.’; ‘New Transcontinental Air Line’, Wall Street Journal, 25 October 1930, p. 5. 6. Tino Balio, Grand Design: Hollywood as Modern Business Enterprise 1930–1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 7. Elsaesser, ‘The New Film History as Media Archaeology’, p. 80.

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8. Films promoting air travel were shown at the Kansas City meeting of US airlines in 1929 (‘Air Executives to Meet’, Los Angeles Times, 15 September 1929, p. E6) and United Airlines employed ‘ten Bell & Howell Filmo projectors’ to exhibit the film Across America in Twentyseven Hours, a 16mm film shown to schools and civic organisations (‘United Air Lines Show Films’, Educational Screen 11:8 (October 1932), pp. 239, 241). As described in the previous chapters, the first films shown in airplanes were travel-themed. According to Skyliner, TWA exhibited Universal’s 1936 film, Flying Hostess, in a DC-2. See ‘Editor’s Notes’, Skyliner 24:15 (7 August 1961), p. 2. For more on the intersections between Hollywood and aviation during the 1930s, see Rosalie Schwartz, Flying down to Rio: Hollywood, Tourists, and Yankee Clippers (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004). 9. See Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Schocken Books, 1976); Caren Kaplan, ‘Transporting the Subject: Technologies of Mobility and Location in an Era of Globalization’, PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 117:1 (2002), pp. 32–42; Urry, The Tourist Gaze. 10. Roger E. Bilstein, ‘Air Travel and the Travelling Public: The American Experience, 1920–1970’, in William F. Trimble (ed.), From Airships to Airbus: The History of Civil and Commercial Aviation, Volume 2. Pioneers and Operations (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992), pp. 91–111. 11. In a 1965 press release announcing its Theatre-in-the-Air service, Pan Am claimed to have tested showing films on board a flight between Miami and Havana in 1929. I was unable to find direct evidence of this in the Pan Am Archive. This claim got repeated in newspaper reports of Pan Am’s in-flight entertainment announcements in 1965. 12. ‘Motion Pictures on the Screen while Flying through the Clouds’, p. 584; Alan D. Kattelle, Home Movies: A History of the American Industry, 1897–1979 (Nashua: Transition Publishing, 2000), p. 150. 13. ‘Moving Pictures Exhibited on Airplanes’, Popular Mechanics 45:2 (August 1926), p. 255. This comes on the heels of an earlier report that films could treat seasickness (‘Movies for Ship Passengers to Cure Seasickness’, Popular Mechanics 44:2 (August 1925), p. 192. 14. ‘Movies for Airplane Tourists Add Variety to Journey’, Popular Mechanics 44:1 (July 1925), p. 53. 15. Pan American World Airways, Inc. Records. Presumably these travelogues were Pan Am productions, as described in the previous chapter, although unfortunately, no film programmes exist in the archive. 16. Pan American World Airways, Inc. Records: ‘Film Premiere on PAA Plane’, p. 2; ‘PAA to Feature Latest Movies’, Clipper, August 1946, p. 2. Fares for Pan Am’s flights between New York and London were announced at $275 in December 1945, about $3,500 in 2013 dollars (Frederick Graham, ‘Global Air Routes’, New York Times, 9 December 1945, p. 60). 17. Pan American World Airways, Inc. Records: ‘PAA Introduces Flight Movies at Press Party’, Clipper, 22 November 1945, pp. 1, 3. Also see ‘The Theatre’, Wall Street Journal, 12 April 1946, p. 8; ‘Major Airlines to Offer Moving Pictures in Flight’, Wall Street Journal, 14 May 1946, p. 16; ‘Movies on Planes’, New York Times, 3 February 1946, p. X9; ‘Sound Movies Help Pass Time for Passengers on Transatlantic Clipper’, Popular Mechanics 85:3 (March 1946), p. 162. For information on airplane power supply, see ‘Giant Passenger Planes Offer Standard Electrical Gadgets’, Science News-Letter 32:855 (28 August 1937), p. 137. I have yet to find any reference to Pan Am’s in-flight film exhibition after 1948. The only other in-flight motion picture activity during the 1940s appears to have been a 1948 Notes

183

18. 19.

20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31.

32. 33.

34. 35.

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British South American Airways experiment with showing 16mm sound films from a projector mounted in the aisle of an Avro York aircraft. (See ‘Road to Rio’, Flight, 29 January 1948, p. 122.) The 1949 design plans of the never-built Brabazon II aircraft, a gargantuan plane perhaps presaging the 747, featured an upstairs lounge and a twenty-three-seat  cinema theatre in the back of the plane with seats facing an aft-mounted screen, the plans  for which constitute the cover of this volume (‘A Prospect of 1954’, Flight, 29 September 1949, pp. 417–20). Also see John White, ‘A History of In-flight Entertainment’, Avion, 2010. Thomas McFadden, vice-president of marketing, TWA. Quoted in ‘TWA Defends In-flight Movies Following IATA Disagreement’, Aviation Daily 155:11 (17 November 1964), p. 86. Paul Monaco, The Sixties: 1960-1969, History of the American Cinema, vol. 8 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2001), pp. 9–56; Robert Sklar, Movie-made America: A Cultural History of American Movies (New York: Vintage Books, 1994 [1975]), pp. 272–304. Matthew Murray, ‘The Establishment of the US Television Networks’, in Michelle Hilmes (ed.), The Television History Book (London: BFI, 2003), pp. 35–6; Spigel, Make Room for TV,  p. 32; Tino Balio (ed.), Hollywood in the Age of Television (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Christopher Anderson, Hollywood TV: The Studio System in the Fifties (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994). Paul J. C. Friedlander, ‘Movies in the Air: The Rating is $$’, New York Times, 28 October 1973, p. 533. Eugene Archer, ‘TWA Jet Films to Begin July 19’, New York Times, 24 May 1961, p. 47. ‘TWA 707 Flights Will Offer Movies and Popcorn Aloft’, New York Times, 15 January 1961, p. 84. Paul J. C. Friedlander, ‘Stars Shine in the Sky, But Literally’, New York Times, 22 January 1961, p. XX14. ‘Movies in the Sky’, New York Times, 31 May 1961, p. 63. Eugene Archer, ‘Jet “Film Flights” Gain Popularity’, New York Times, 31 August 1961, p. 24. ‘Now Showing: First-run Films on TWA Flights’, Skyliner 24:14 (24 July 1961), p. 1. Archer, ‘TWA Jet Films to Begin July 19’, p. 47. The films were: The Pleasure of His Company, By Love Possessed, Tammy Tell Me True, Romanoff and Juliet, The Naked Edge, Two Rode Together and The Last Time I Saw Archie (Archer, ‘Jet “Film Flights” Gain Popularity’, p. 24). Robert Serling, ‘In-flight Movies Spur Gags – and New Customers’, Chicago Tribune, 21 April 1963, p. H15. In December 1962, InFlight had contracted a similar slate of films: Period of Adjustment (1962), Two for the Seesaw (1962), Who’s Got the Action (1962), Jumbo (1962), Dr. No (1962), Main Attraction (1962) and The Password Is Courage (1962). See Mae Tinee, ‘Seven Top Films Take to the Air’, Chicago Daily Tribune, 2 December 1962, p. F11. Archer, ‘Jet “Film Flights” Gain Popularity’, p. 24; ‘Now Showing’, p. 3; Friedlander, ‘Stars Shine in the Sky, But Literally’, p. XX14; ‘TWA from Washington’, Flight International, 2 July 1964, p. 6. ‘Notes from the Field of Travel’, New York Times, 19 May 1963, p. XX4; Serling, ‘In-Flight Movies Spur Gags’, p. H15; Richard P. Cooke, ‘Hollywood in the Sky: Airlines Worry  about Costs of Movies, TV’, Wall Street Journal, 11 September 1964; Martin Rossman, ‘Carriers Turning to Movies, TV’, Los Angeles Times, 4 October 1964, pp. G1, G5. Eugene Archer, ‘Airline Planning to Expand Movies’, New York Times, 16 May 1963, p. 40. ‘CAB to Examine In-flight Movies’, New York Times, 3 February 1965, p. 70; ‘UAL Begins Transcontinental “Jetarama” Service Sunday’, 5 February 1965, p. 210. Cinema Beyond Territory

36. Although this was far less than the $10 million forecast in 1964. See Peter Bart, ‘Hollywood Aloft: Industry Warily Scans Airborne Films’ Rise’, New York Times, 4 October 1964, p. X7; Friedlander, ‘Movies in the Air’, p. 533. 37. ‘TWA Defends In-flight Movies Following IATA Disagreement’, p. 86; ‘World’s Airlines  Clash over Films’, New York Times, 7 October 1964, p. 93; ‘Air Commerce’, Flight International, 26 November 1964, p. 888; David Gollan, ‘What’s New in Air Fares?’ New York Times, 29 November 1964, pp. 1, 23. 38. ‘TWA Defends In-flight Movies Following IATA Disagreement’, p. 86. 39. Gollan, ‘What’s New in Air Fares?’, p. 23. 40. ‘Attorneys Preparing Strong Defense against IATA In-flight Ban’, Aviation Daily, 15 April 1965, pp. 275–6; ‘International Airlines Vote to Drop Movies’, New York Times, 18 April 1965, p. XX3. 41. ‘In-flight Motion Pictures Hits IATA Proposal’, Aviation Daily 158:33 (14 April 1965),  pp. 267–8. 42. ‘Airlines Unit Votes to Set a $2.50 fee for Movies Aloft’, New York Times, 28 October 1965,  p. 19; David Gollan, ‘IATA Waltzes On’, New York Times, 24 October 1965, p. XX1. 43. Ernie Hudson, ‘2d Airline Plans Movies on Planes’, New York Times, 30 June 1964, p. 66;  ‘In-flight Movies: American Airlines Installing Sony System in Its Jets’, New York Times,  2 August 1964, p. 78; Rossman, ‘Carriers Turning to Movies, TV’, pp. G1, G5; ‘Coffee, Tea or Doris Day’, Time Magazine 84:16 (16 October 1964), p. 111. 44. Hudson, ‘2d Airline Plans Movies on Planes’, p. 66; ‘In-flight Movies’, p. 78; Rossman, ‘Carriers Turning to Movies, TV’, pp. G1, G5; ‘Coffee, Tea or Doris Day’, p. 111; ‘American Air Slates Flight Entertainment on Shorter Routes’, Wall Street Journal, 9 June 1965,  p. 10. 45. Straszheim, The International Airline Industry, p. 49. 46. Pan American World Airways, Inc. Records: ‘Many Flights Now Showing Theatre-in-the-Air’, Clipper 24:11 (1 November 1965), p.1; ‘Pan Am to Air Films, Audio Shows on California– Hawaii Flights’, 5 May 1965 (press release); Edward Hudson, ‘Pan Am Cuts Back Plan for Movies’, New York Times, 16 October 1965, p. 54. 47. ‘Continental Air to Be First User of Ampex In-flight Music, TV’, Wall Street Journal,  14 August 1964; Wayne Thomis, ‘Lines’ Entertaining Decision: TV Via Video Tape or Film?’, Chicago Tribune, 28 September 1964, p. C5; Bart, ‘Hollywood Aloft: Industry Warily Scans Airborne Films’ Rise’, New York Times, p. X7. 48. ‘Mark Robson Hits In-flight “Size” ’, Variety, 27 October 1965, p. 17. Thanks to Mark Frank and Haidee Wasson for bringing this article to my attention. 49. See, for instance, Barbara Klinger, Beyond the Multiplex: Cinema, New Technologies and the Home (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). 50. Monaco, The Sixties, pp. 45–51; Douglas Gomery, Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentation in the United States (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), pp. 96–102. 51. ‘Mark Robson Hits In-flight “Size” ’, p. 17. 52. Pan American World Airways, Inc. Records: ‘Picky about the Films They’ll Show’, Clipper,  26 April 1971, p. 2; James Arey, ‘50 Percent “Give a Hang”: Better In-flight Show’, Clipper,  5 July 1971, p. 3. Currently, the in-flight entertainment window occurs roughly two to three months after theatrical release, but about three months before DVD release. Although the release dates for video-on-demand services, internet streaming services  and DVD are compressing this window, it will probably remain for logistical reasons: Notes

185

53.

54. 55.

56. 57.

58. 59.

60. 61. 62.

63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

74.

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roughly five weeks are needed for language translation, dubbing and subtitling, and another two for content editing. ‘Airline Plans Shift to Movies in Color’, New York Times, 7 February 1967; ‘American Air to Offer In-flight Color Movies on TV-sized Screens’, Wall Street Journal, 7 February 1967;  Pan American World Airways, Inc. Records: ‘Astrocolor’ press release, American Airlines,  6 February 1967; Bill Dreslin, ‘In-flight Movies’ memorandum, 23 May 1969. Rossman, ‘Carriers Turning to Movies, TV’, p. G5. Bart, ‘Hollywood Aloft’, p. X7; A. H. Weiler, ‘ “Bulldog” Reborn’, New York Times, 30 January 1966, pp. X11, X16; Ronald J. Ostrow, ‘Continental Airlines Joins Theater Deal’, Los Angeles Times, 12 August 1965. Monaco, The Sixties, pp. 54–5; Gomery, Shared Pleasures, p. 95–7. As Pan Am (Pan American World Airways, Inc. Records) put it, introducing a new version of Theatre-in-the-Air in 1971, ‘Every Theatre-in-the-Air flight offers you a choice of movies. Not just a choice but a ‘flying Film Festival’ – film classics, all-time favorites, “Camp” movies, Academy Award winners, internationally produced films never before shown in the United States and first-run Hollywood productions.’ See Belton, Widescreen Cinema. This proviso was pervasive from 1961–5. See, as examples: ‘TWA 707 Flights Will Offer Movies and Popcorn Aloft’, New York Times, 15 January 1961, p. 84; Friedlander, ‘Stars Shine in the Sky, But Literally’, p. XX14; Serling, ‘In-flight Movies Spur Gags’, p. H15; Thomis, ‘Lines’ Entertaining Decision’, p. C5. Bart, ‘Hollywood Aloft’, p. X7; ‘Coffee, Tea or Doris Day’, p. 111. Pneumatic headphones were used on airplanes until the 1980s and beyond; electronic headphones were not introduced until 1979, noise-cancelling headphones a decade later. Although the 1960s marked a period in which foreign-language films became associated with art cinema, high culture and elite tastes. See Tino Balio, The Foreign Film Renaissance on American Screens, 1946–1973 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2010). ‘One Major Reason’, Aviation Daily, 28 June 1965, p. 336. ‘Air France to Offer English or French Soundtracks’, New York Times, 1 February 1966,  p. 70. Balio, The Foreign Film Renaissance, pp. 83–5. Pan American World Airways, Inc. Records: ‘IFIDA Assails Restrictions on Movies in Flight’, 30 April 1965. Balio, The Foreign Film Renaissance, p. 13. Paul Hofmann, ‘Fun and Games at 30,000 ft’, New York Times, 20 February 1966, p. XX21. John Tagliabue, ‘Paul Hofmann, Author and Foe of Nazis, Dies at 96’, New York Times, 1 January 2009, p. A23. See Abé Mark Nornes, Cinema Babel: Translating Global Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), pp. 10–16. Cubbitt, The Cinema Effect, pp. 335–6. Durovicova, ‘Vector, Flow, Zone’, p. 93. Robert E. Johnson, vice-president of United Airlines External Relations, expressing his opinion of in-flight entertainment. Quoted in Paul J. C. Friedlander, ‘43 Years of Commercial Aviation’, New York Times, 6 August 1972, p. XX29. Unnamed executive quoted in Wayne Thomis, ‘Air Lines’ New Lure: Coffee, TV, Movies?’, Chicago Tribune, 27 September 1964, p. D4. Cinema Beyond Territory

75. ‘Air France to Offer English or French Soundtracks’, New York Times, 1 February 1966, p. 70; ‘New IMP Systems for Boeing 747’, Interavia, 23 May 1966; ‘French Carrier Contracts with In-flight for Movies’, Aviation Daily, 5 March 1968, p.12; ‘In-flight Motion Pictures on SAS’, Wall Street Journal 29 March 1968, p. 2; ‘In-flight-Japan Air Lines Contract’, Wall Street Journal, 20 August 1969, p. 21; Arthur Reed, ‘In-flight Films for BOAC’, The Times,  5 February 1970, p. 18; ‘In-flight Signs Iberia Contract’, Wall Street Journal, 16 February 1970, p. 22; ‘In-flight Gets Qantas Contract’, Wall Street Journal, 13 April 1971, p. 10;  ‘In-flight Motion Pictures – Sabena’, Wall Street Journal, 25 August 1970, p. 20. 76. Pan American World Airways, Inc. Records: Samuel Krasney Associates, ‘How Do Passengers Feel?’, March 1971. 77. Robert E. Johnson quoted in Friedlander, ‘43 Years of Commercial Aviation’, p. XX29. 78. ‘Flying Flicks’, Time Magazine, 21 August 1972. 79. Pan American World Airways, Inc. Records. 80. I am borrowing from the title of Raymond Williams’s book on television, Television: Technology and Cultural Form in order to call attention to the fashion in which culture and technology work together, providing new opportunities and closing others off; not to mention the way in which Williams’s own account of television attempts to account for the way that no single structuring force, drive or felt need determines or produces technology and culture. See Williams, Television, pp. 1–25.

4. EXECUTIVE FLIGHT: ATTENTION, GENDER AND THE SEATBACK SCREEN 1. ‘Fly “The New York Executive” United’s Nonstop DC-6 Mainliner for Men Only’ (advertisement), Chicago Daily Tribune, 22 April 1953, p. 16; ‘Fly “The New York Executive”’ (advertisement), Chicago Daily Tribune, 21 October 1953, p. 10; ‘United ‘Executive’ Flights Transport 17,000 during ‘53’, Chicago Daily Tribune, 10 January 1954, p. D2; ‘5:00 pm and He’s Going Home at 500 m.p.h.!’ (advertisement), New York Times, 16 March 1954, p. 20. The last mention of this service I could find in New York and Chicago newspapers was in 1956. 2. Jad Mouawad, ‘Taking First-class Coddling Above and Beyond’, New York Times 20 November 2011; Joan M. Feldman, ‘Competitive Pressures Spur Increased Variety in Passenger Cabin Service’, Air Transport World, September 1984, pp. 44–7; ‘Airlines Intensify Battle for Business Class Passengers’, World Airline News 7:20 (16 May 1997), p. 1. 3. See Castells, The Rise of the Network Society; Monika Codourey, ‘Mobile Identities, Technology and the Socio-spatial Relations of Air Travel’, Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research 6:1 (2008), pp. 99–111; Chrystia Freeland, ‘The Rise of the New Global Elite’, Atlantic Monthly, January/February 2011; Pico Iyer, The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home (New York: Vintage, 2000); Kasarda and Lindsay, Aerotropolis; Lassen, ‘A Life in Corridors’, pp. 177–93; Sklair, Sociology of the Global System. 4. See Drew Whitelegg, Working the Skies: The Fast-paced, Disorienting World of the Flight Attendant (New York: New York University Press, 2007); Barry, Femininity in Flight; Yano, Airborne Dreams; Lee Kolm, ‘Stewardesses’ “Psychological Punch”: Gender and Commercial Aviation in the United States, 1930–1978’, in Trimble, From Airships to Airbus, pp. 112–27. 5. Sklair, Sociology of the Global System, p. 8; Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchin, ‘Flying through Code/Space: The Real Virtuality of Air Travel’, Environment and Planning A 36:2 (2004),  p. 208. Notes

187

6. 7. 8. 9.

25.

Lassen, ‘A Life in Corridors’, pp. 177–93. Auge, Non-places, pp. 1–6. Lassen, ‘A Life in Corridors’, p. 181. Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2001). Dallas Smythe, ‘On the Commodity Audience and Its Work’, in Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas Kellner (eds), Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks (Malden: Blackwell, 2001),  pp. 253–79; Eileen Meehan, ‘Why We Don’t Count: The Commodity Audience’, in Mellencamp, The Logics of Television, pp. 117–37; Christian Fuchs, ‘Dallas Smythe Today:  The Audience Commodity, the Digital Labour Debate, Marxist Political Economy and Critical Theory’, Triple C 10:2 (2012), pp. 692–740. Thomas H. Davenport and John C. Beck, The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business (Cambridge: Harvard Business Review Press, 2001); Richard A. Lanham, The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Michael H. Goldhaber, ‘Attention Shoppers!’, Wired 5:12 (December 1997). Stanley Carr, ‘Bed, Board and Free Movie’, New York Times, 26 May 1974, p. 374; ‘Railroad Adds Night Movies’, New York Times, 5 November 1965, p. 73. ‘News and Notes from the Field of Travel’, New York Times, 4 December 1966, p. XX4. ‘Free Skyport Cinema to Open at Kansas City Airport’ and ‘Free Airport Theatre for Minneapolis-St. Paul’, CMN Associates, Inc., 20 January 1966 (Rohama Lee Papers,  Iowa State University Ames, Special Collections); ‘Profile of the Air Traveler Taken at TravelCinema’, Association Films, undated (Rohama Lee Papers, Iowa State University Ames, Special Collections). For its part, Association Films distributed the film, Inc. ‘a study of the organization and operation of American business’ in 1966 (‘Business Film Produced’, New York Times, 15 November 1966). Special thanks to Haidee Wasson for bringing Skyport Cinemas and TravelCinemas to my attention. Mark Tungate, The Branded Male: Marketing to Men (London: Kogan Page, 2008), p. 106. Peter Adey, ‘Getting in the Flow’, in Cwerner, Kesserling and Urry (eds), Aeromobilities,  p. 194. Tungate, The Branded Male, p. 106. Jonathan Beller, The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2006), pp. 1, 28, 3. Sklair, Sociology of the Global System, p. 151–3, 169. Stephen Britton, ‘Tourism, Capital, and Place: Towards a Critical Geography of Tourism’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 9 (1991), pp. 451–78. Dudley Andrew uses ‘jet lag’ as a metaphor for the temporal gap he proposes is key to cinema: ‘Every genuine cinematic experience involves décalage, jet lag’ (‘Time Zones’, p. 60). Denis Kneale, ‘In-flight Movie Ads Are Taking a Leap into a Ripe Market’, Wall Street Journal, 13 July 1982, p. 20. ‘The Cost of Passenger Mishandling’, Air Transport World, September 1984, p. 57. Ronald Alsop, ‘More Ads Bombard Airplane Passengers’, Wall Street Journal, 14 February 1989, p. B1. See Walter Kirn’s novel Up in the Air for an extended critical engagement with SkyMall (called AirMall in the novel) as emblematic of contemporary consumer capitalism and the disorientation created by frequent shopping and flying. Alsop, ‘More Ads Bombard Airplane Passengers’, p. B1.

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10.

11.

12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

26. Ibid. The seatback screen, enabled by liquid crystal display technology, was initially developed by Arn Steventon in the early 1980s and included as an option for airlines in Boeing press materials in 1986. See White, ‘A History of In-flight Entertainment’; Janet Crawley, ‘Care in the Air’, Chicago Tribune, 26 October 1986, p. R6. 27. Smythe, ‘On the Commodity Audience and Its Work’, p. 253–79; Meehan, ‘Why We Don’t Count’, pp. 117–37. 28. Joann Lublin, ‘In-flight TV Commercials Are Booming’, Wall Street Journal, 12 September 1990, p. B6; Lisa Leff, ‘Taking the Video Age to New Heights’, Washington Post,  18 November 1994, p. B1. 29. In 1982, Eastern Airlines recouped enough money from selling advertisements to pay for its in-flight movie programme and Canadian Pacific sold about $1 million worth of commercial time that same year (Al Jean Harmetz, ‘In-flight Movies Update Content and Equipment’, New York Times, 27 April 1982, p. C11). Currently though, as Gary Stoller points out, ‘nobody has exact figures on how much airlines make selling advertising’ (Stoller, ‘Ads Add Up for Airlines’, USA Today, 18 October 2011). 30. Pamela Paul, ‘Advertisers Climb on Board’, Advertising Age, 1 October 2002. 31. Scott McCartney, ‘Airlines Weigh Entertainment Cost’, Wall Street Journal, 6 June 2002,  p. D6. 32. Paul, ‘Advertisers Climb on Board’; Wynbrandt, Flying High, p. 147. 33. See McCarthy, Ambient Television, especially Chapter 6, ‘Television while You Wait’; Stephen Lynch, ‘Anywhere There’s a Wait, Television Looks to Move in’, Orange County Register,  12 April 2002. 34. Arthur Reed, ‘To Make In-flight Amusement Pay’, Air Transport World, December 1991, p. 107. 35. Perry Garfinkel, ‘The Best Seat in the Plane: Some Airlines Drop First Class, while Others Redefine It’, New York Times, 11 March 2008, p. C6. 36. Scott McCartney, ‘Flight Forecast: What Travelers Should Expect Next Year’, Wall Street Journal, 26 December 2012; Jon Hilkevitch, ‘Faster Security Screening Expanded at O’Hare, but Complaints Linger’, Chicago Tribune, 31 July 2012. 37. The pressures to produce seem particularly acute for business travellers and frequent  fliers. In 2012, a survey found that frequent fliers ‘get most stressed from “lost time”’  (Peter Myers, ‘Just How Stressful Is Business Travel?’, Reuters.com, 18 October  2012: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/18/uk-business-travel-stressidUSLNE89H01Q20121018). 38. Dierlikx, Clipping the Clouds, p. 65. 39. These advertisements can be found online at Duke University’s John Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising, and Marketing History. For more on this advertising campaign see Stephen Groening, ‘Aerial Screens’, History and Technology 29:3 (2013), pp. 281–300. 40. Pan American World Airways, Inc. Records: John W. Mifflin, ‘Correspondence to James J. McKeon’; Soundscriber brochure and sample disc. 41. Pan American World Airways, Inc. Records: ‘Passengers Get French, German Lessons on TiTA’, Clipper 27:10 (15 May 1967), p. 8; ‘Even Flying Can Be Boring … Unless’ Clipper 22:10 (10 May 1971), p. 2. 42. Daryl May, ‘America’s Appeal System … Sell Seats on Domestic Services’, Flight International, 26 December 1968, pp. 1058–9; Whitelegg, Working the Skies, p. 47. 43. Frank Riley, ‘Language Lessons: New In-flight Service’, Chicago Tribune, 25 December 1977, p. C2. Notes

189

44. ‘ANA’s Classroom in the Sky’, Air Transport World, November 1991, p. 144; John Walton, ‘Ten Things That Premium Airline Passengers Really Want’, APEX Editor’s Blog, 30 July 2012. 45. ‘Offices That Fly and More Telephones in the Sky’, New York Times, 25 December 1988,  p. F9. 46. Leavitt F. Morris, ‘Heading Home – In Aerial Theater’, Christian Science Monitor,  23 November 1965, p. 15. 47. In fact, as has been asserted elsewhere, from the airline’s perspective, part of stewardesses’ competence lay in their ability to ‘distract’ male travellers. See Kolm, ‘Stewardesses’,  pp. 112–17; Whitelegg, Working the Skies. 48. Joseph J. Corn, ‘Making Flying “Thinkable”: Women Pilots and the Selling of Aviation, 1927–1940’, American Quarterly 31:4 (Autumn 1979), pp. 564, 571; Kolm, ‘Stewardesses’,  p. 112. 49. Kolm, ‘Stewardesses’, pp. 14–23. 50. Yano, Airborne Dreams; Whitelegg, Working the Skies, pp. 135–40. 51. Ibid., p. 105. 52. Kathleen M. Barry provides a succinct summary in Femininity in Flight, p. 25; information on these regulations can also be found in Kolm, ‘Stewardesses’, pp. 112–27 and Whitelegg, Working the Skies. 53. Barry, Femininity in Flight, pp. 144–86. The famed ‘tell-all’ book Coffee, Tea, or Me? was written by a male marketing executive (p. 184). 54. As Yano argued in Airborne Dreams, this debate played out unevenly across ethnic and racial lines. 55. This advertisement probably appeared in other magazines; it is also analysed and critiqued by Kathleen Barry in Femininity in Flight, p. 102. 56. This advertisement does recall an earlier form of in-flight entertainment: fashion shows on board planes in the 1930s and 1940s (some filmed for newsreels). 57. Kolm, ‘Stewardesses’, pp. 120–2. 58. Hooters Air would probably be the best example of this retrenchment. Virgin Atlantic has, in recent years, unveiled a promotional campaign emphasising their ‘red hot’ female flight attendants, and even released a nine-minute promotional spot, ‘Suite and Innocent’ which embodied this type of nostalgia by portraying travelling on Virgin Atlantic as a porn film parody (Stuart Elliot, ‘Advertising’, New York Times, 4 October 2004, p. C10). 59. The safety announcement will be examined in greater detail in Chapter 6; see Whitelegg, Working the Skies, pp. 99–126. 60. Airvision, a joint venture of Warner Communications and Philips, installed seatback screens in some British Airways, Qantas Airways and Northwest Airlines planes in 1988 (Alsop, ‘More Ads Bombard Airplane Passengers’, p. B1). 61. Stephen Groening, ‘Film in Air: Airspace, In-flight Entertainment, and Nontheatrical Exhibition’, Velvet Light Trap 62 (Fall 2008), pp. 4–14; Freedman, ‘Notes from Economy Class’. 62. Spigel, Make Room for TV. 63. The New York Times’ ‘Letters to the Editor’ section has proven to be a fertile ground for such debates. A particularly vociferous debate in 1980 prompted a letter from an exasperated flight attendant, Anne Hanrahan: ‘As an airline stewardess, I have read the letters column with amusement in the past year and judging from the complaints, I would say the public requires special sections for the following categories for air travelers: Smoking, no smoking, pipe and cigar smokers. Movie-watchers and those who prefer to

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64. 65. 66. 67.

68. 69.

70. 71. 72. 73. 74.

gaze out at the clouds. Those who wish to sleep and the non-sleeping card players. People without children and people with children (children to be enclosed in a soundproofed booth for the duration of the flight). Those who wish to sit on the aisle and those who prefer a window seat. Then, of course, we have first-, business-, and sardine-class. Maybe Boeing could come up with a design to satisfy all these people who find the presence of other people in a confined area so utterly repugnant’ (Anne Hanrahan, ‘Letters to the Editor: More on Movies Aloft’, New York Times, 10 August 1980, p. 21). I am arguing that, in light of such impossible arrangements in the cabin, the solution to this apparent ‘repugnance’ for others has been the seatback screen. For examples of conflicting expectations and desires for passing the time in-flight see: ‘Letters to the Editor: Movies Aloft’, New York Times, 18 January 1976, pp. 5, 25; ‘Letters: Movies Aloft’, New York Times, 14 March 1976, p. 39; ‘Letters: On Movies Aloft’, New York Times, 22 April 1979, p. 21; ‘Letters: “Pillow Fight” on Night Flight’, New York Times, 18 February 1979, p. 7; ‘Letters to the Editor: Movies Aloft’, New York Times, 20 July 1980, p. 2; ‘Letters to the Editor: More on Movies Aloft’, New York Times, 24 August 1980, p. 21; ‘Letters on Travel: The View Aloft’, New York Times, 20 April 1997, p. XX16; ‘Letters: Cellphones in Flight: Time to Draw the Line’, New York Times, 7 October 2005, p. A28. Dierlikx, Clipping the Clouds, pp. 58–60. ‘TWA 747’ brochure, 1971, p. 8. ‘TWA Ambassador Service: A Whole New Way to Fly across the United States’, brochure, 1970. The 1980 animated film, Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown contains a scene satirising this division between mature and ‘general’ audiences. En route to France, Charlie, Patti, Marcie, Linus, Snoopy and Woodstock are on board a plane when the stewardess announces over the public-address system, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we are about to start our in-flight film. In the front and rear sections, the film Laughing Bunnies will be shown, plus Naughty Marietta in the center section.’ Patti announces that she is going to the centre section, saying, ‘I’ll leave the kids stuff for the likes of you.’ Charlie and Linus put on their headphones as the animated film, depicting scenes of animated rabbits dancing in circles and chasing each other with pies, comes on. Only the dog, Snoopy, and the bird, Woodstock, are shown laughing at the film, as if the ‘kids stuff’ is not even suitable for children (thanks to Paige Sarlin for bringing this scene to my attention). Robert J. Serling, ‘In-flight Movies: How Did We Do without Them?’, Airliners: The World’s Airline Magazine 16.5.83 (September/October 2003), pp. 66–9. The literature on the ‘New Hollywood’ or ‘New American Cinema’ of the late 1960s and early 1970s is voluminous; Thomas Elsaesser, Alexander Horwath and Noel King (eds),  The Last Great American Picture Show: New American Cinema in the 1970s (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004); and Jon Lewis (ed.), The New American Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998) provide a range of research. Sklar, Movie-made America, pp. 296–7. Robert Lindsey, ‘Airline to Offer “General” and “Mature” Movies’, New York Times,  19 February 1970, p. 49. ‘Air France Aide Cleared on Showing Racy Film’, New York Times, 23 December 1973, p. 52. Boeing Archive, Everett WA: ‘There’s Nothing to Do up Here’, Boeing press release. See ‘Mom Objects to In-flight Movie Violence for Kids’, Chicago Sun-Times, 6 June 1999,  p. T7; Joe Sharkey, ‘Is Flying Scary? Depends on the Film’, New York Times, 7 October 2007, p. 3; Doug Grow, ‘Gory In-flight Films Make Many See Red’, Minneapolis Star Tribune, 

Notes

191

75. 76. 77.

78. 79. 80.

81. 82.

83. 84. 85. 86.

18 December 2000, p. B2; Kristin Jackson, ‘For Children, R-rated Movies Don’t Sit Well at 35,000 Feet’, San Diego Union-Tribune, 12 November 2000, p. D7. ‘Airlines Strive to Make Skies Family-friendly’, World Airline News 8:38 (18 September 1998), p. 1; ‘Virgin Kid’s Stuff’, Air Transport World 35:8 (August 1998), p. 40. Harmetz, ‘In-flight Movies Update Content and Equipment’, p. C11. The description of the film was, ‘10 is a witty sophisticated comedy about the sexual chaos of approaching middle age. Dudley Moore and Julie Andrews star and Bo Derek is discovered!’, Theatre-in-the-Air’, Clipper, April 1980, p. 75. Starting in 1981, for ‘R’-rated films, the in-flight magazine often ran the disclaimer, ‘Although edited for airline use, parental guidance is recommended when renting headsets for children.’ This disclaimer first appeared in July 1980 when Pan Am exhibited The Coal Miner’s Daughter. By 1986, the inflight magazine stopped mentioning the films’ ratings and simply put the disclaimer next to films that had been rated R for theatrical release, such as The Untouchables (1987) and Black Widow (1987) (Pan American World Airways, Inc. Records). Harmetz, ‘In-flight Movies Update Content and Equipment’, p. C11. Joe Sharkey, ‘In the Air, Violence You Can’t Avoid’, New York Times, 16 March 1999, p. WK2. Julie Schmit, Rhonda Richards and John Waggoner, ‘Airlines May Juice up In-flight Movie Options’, USA Today, 11 October 1994, p. 5B; Annie Wu, ‘The Art of Selection – In-flight Movies’, Savvy Traveler: http://savvytraveler.publicradio.org/show/features/1999/ 19990213/movies.shtml. ‘Mom Objects to In-flight Movie Violence for Kids’, p. T7; Sharkey, ‘In the Air, Violence You Can’t Avoid’, p. WK2. Joe Sharkey, ‘Lights, Camera, Action, Now Censor’, New York Times, 28 September 2004,  p. C7; Sharkey, ‘In the Air, Violence You Can’t Avoid’, p. WK2; Bob Tedeschi, ‘Young Fliers See the Film, Be It PG or R’, New York Times, 1 September 1 2007, p. A1. Schmit, Richards and Waggoner, ‘Airlines May Juice up In-flight Movie Options’, p. 5B. Sharkey, ‘Lights, Camera, Action, Now Censor’, p. C7. See also Debbie Chariton, ‘Cut It Out! The Art of Editing Feature Films for the Airline Market’, Avion, 2005, pp. 20–2, 24, 26–7. Douglas Quenqua, ‘Passengers Push for Child-free Flights’, New York Times, 12 November 2010. Spigel, Make Room for TV.

5. NETWORKED TRANSPORT: NEOLIBERALISM AND DIGITAL ENTERTAINMENTS 1. Lauren Schutte, ‘Alec Baldwin Kicked off American Airlines Flight’, Hollywood Reporter 6 December 2011: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/alec-baldwin-americanairlines-kicked-off-twitter-270179; Jane Kellogg, ‘Alec Baldwin Mocks American Airlines Controversy on “Saturday Night Live” ’, Hollywood Reporter, 11 December 2011: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/alec-baldwin-american-airlines-pilot-snl-272197; Lauren Schutte, ‘Alec Baldwin Angers Greyhound in Backhanded American Airlines Apology’, Hollywood Reporter, 8 December 2011: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/ news/alec-baldwin-angers-greyhound-backhanded-271578; ‘ “Words with Friends” Defends Alec Baldwin After He Was Kicked off American Airlines Flight’, Hollywood Reporter,  5 December 2011: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/alec-baldwin-americanairlines-words-with-friends-270309; Michael O’Connell, ‘Flight Attendants Want Alec

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2. 3.

4.

5. 6.

7. 8.

9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

Baldwin and “30 Rock” off American Airlines’, Hollywood Reporter, 13 December 2011: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/alec-baldwin-30-rock-america-airlines-wordswith-friends-272858. ‘In-flight Mobile User Jailed’, BBC News, 21 July 1999: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/ 399932.stm. Ken Belson and Micheline Maynard, ‘Cellphones Aloft: The Inevitable Is Closer’, New York Times, 10 December 2004, p. C1; Fiona Fleck, ‘Mobile May Have Caused Swiss Air Crash’, Daily Telegraph, 11 January 2001, p. 16; Kieren McCarthy, ‘Mobile Phone Brings down Slovenian Airplane’, Register, 11 January 2001: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/01/11/ mobile_phone_brings_down_slovenian/. Chris Cooke, ‘Understanding the In-flight Cell Phone Ban’, Executive Travel, September 2009; although Pan Am, at least, prohibited the use of cellular phones as early as 1986  (Pan American World Airways, Inc. Records). Joe Sharkey, ‘Foreign Airlines ahead of U.S. on Cellphone Use’, New York Times,  29 September 2009, p. B5. Federal Aviation Administration, ‘Press Release – FAA to Allow Airlines to Expand Use of Personal Electronics’: http://www.faa.gov/news/press_releases/news_story.cfm?newsId= 15254&cid=TW189. See, for instance, ‘Cellphones in Flight: Time to Draw the Line’, New York Times, 7 October 2005, p. A28 and ‘The In-flight Menace: Wireless Chatter’, New York Times, 28 September 2009. Cellphones were not the only electronic equipment regulated by airlines. Pan Am’s in-flight magazine, the Clipper, ran the following advisory starting in 1978: ‘If you have a portable radio or television with you, please put it away until we land since its use could interfere with the aircraft’s own electronic systems. Hearing aids, electric shavers, portable dictation or tape recorders and calculators are no problem.’ In September 1986, it was reworded to include cellular phones, ‘Electronic equipment specifically portable radios, television sets, toys with remotely controlled transmitting units and portable videotape recording or playback devices, and cellular telephones may not be used on board as they may interfere  with the aircraft’s electronic systems. Pacemakers, hearing aids, electric shavers, portable dictation machines, tape recorders, calculators and electronic games cause no interference problems’ (emphasis mine) (Pan American World Airways, Inc. Records). ‘Plane Flying a Mile above Los Angeles Talks over Radio Phone with Five Foreign Cities’, New York Times, 30 May 1930, p. 8. ‘Sky-to-Earth Phone Service Offered on Air Liner’, Popular Mechanics 68:3 (September 1937), p. 383. TWA tested out an in-flight air-to-ground telephone system that involved calling an operator on the ground in 1962. ‘In-flight Telephone Service Tested Aboard TWA SuperJet’, Skyliner 25:16 (30 July 1962), p. 1. ‘What’s New in Airline Cabin Equipment’, Air Transport World, September 1982, pp. 71–5. Elizabeth Tucker, ‘Nine Airlines Set to Launch In-flight Phone Service’, Washington Post,  14 October 1984, p. H7. Brett Pulley, ‘Air-to-Ground Phone Field Gains 4 Firms’, Wall Street Journal, 31 December 1990, p. 3; ‘Offices That Fly and More Telephones in the Sky’, p. F9. Arthur Reed, ‘UK Companies Test and Develop Aircraft Telephone Service’, Air Transport World, August 1988, p. 31. ‘The New Way to Communicate Worldwide’, Air Transport World, April 1989, p. 91.

Notes

193

17. Terry Trucco, ‘The State of the Art of Travel: Faster Planes and Trains, Video in the Sky, Smart Hotel Telephones’, New York Times, 12 January 1992, p. XX15. 18. ‘Travel the World by Air. Fax the World by Skyphone’, Air Transport World, January 1993,  p. 73. 19. ‘Communication Goes Digital’, Flight International, 16 October 1991, p. 13. 20. Brett Pulley, ‘Information Age: Digital Phones, Faxes and Games Glow on USAir’s In-flight Video’, Wall Street Journal, 6 October 1992, p. B4. 21. ‘In-flight Phone Seeks to Offer Live News, Sports on Airliners’, Wall Street Journal,  19 September 1991, p. A4. IFPC was involved in the airborne satellite television venture that eventually became LiveTV. See Chapter 7. 22. ‘Quality Software and Services We Deliver’, Air Transport World, October 1991, p. 89. 23. Pulley, ‘Information Age’; ‘Data Compression Increases Available Video Channels’, Flight International, 16 October 1991, p. 13. 24. Brian Steinberg, ‘Air-phone Companies Fail to Take Off as Prices Stay High, Fliers Keep Mum’, Wall Street Journal, 11 May 1998, p. 1. 25. Terry Wiseman quoted in Steinberg, ‘Air-phone Companies Fail to Take Off as Prices Stay High’, p. 1; Matt Richtel, ‘Silence Aloft Is under Threat’, New York Times, 4 October 2005,  pp. C1, C10. 26. Sonoko Setaishi, ‘American Air to Pull out Planes’ Phones’, Wall Street Journal, 13 February 2002, p. B9. 27. Kevin Belson, ‘Verizon to End Airline Telephone Service’, New York Times, 24 June 2006,  p. C3. 28. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005),  p. ii. 29. Aihwa Ong, ‘Neoliberalism as Mobile Technology’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 32:1 (January 2007), p. 3. 30. Zygmunt Bauman analyses neoliberalism in these terms in Society under Siege (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002). 31. Ong, ‘Neoliberalism as Mobile Technology’, p. 4. 32. Pulley, ‘Data Compression Increases Available Video Channels’, p. 13. 33. Quoted in J. R. Wilson, ‘Interactive Options for Passenger Entertainment’, Interavia, September 1992, p. 74. 34. Manovich, The Language of New Media. 35. Bernard Fitzsimons, ‘IFE Vendors Come down to Earth’, Interavia 51:603 (October 1996),  p. 36. 36. James Hay, ‘Un-aided Virtues: The (Neo-)Liberalization of the Domestic Sphere’, Television and New Media 3:1 (2000), pp. 53–73. 37. Fitzsimons, ‘IFE Vendors Come down to Earth’, p. 37. 38. Danna K. Henderson, ‘IFE Goes Digital’, Air Transport World 35:10 (October 1998), p. 99. 39. Danna K. Henderson, ‘The Future Isn’t Now’, Air Transport World 34:11 (November 1997), pp.31–2, 34–5. 40. In 1992, the per-seat cost for airlines was estimated at $4,000–$5,000 (Wilson, ‘Interactive Options for Passenger Entertainment’, p. 74). Northwest spent $1.5 million per plane in 1992 for a system it abandoned in 1994 (Edwin McDowell, ‘Systems at Every Seat, but They Don’t Always Work’, New York Times, 24 September 1994, p. 33). Singapore International Airlines spent $50 million on the Matsushita system for only twenty aircraft (J. R. Wilson,

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41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

‘IFE Systems Take Off’, Interavia 49:582 (September 1994), pp. 53–6). Total industry-wide expenditure on equipment was $400 million in 1992, $800 million in 1994 and $1.2 billion in 1996 (Douglas Nelms, ‘Fix It! IFE Problems Plague Airlines’, Air Transport World 33:11(November 1996), pp. 34–5, 38, 40, 43). British Airways walked away from its $155 million contract with B/E Aerospace, citing problems with B/E Aerospace’s digital interactive seatback system (Henderson, ‘The Future Isn’t Now’, p. 34). ‘Maintaining Maintenance’, Flight International, 22–28 January 1992, pp. 34–6; Nelms, ‘Fix It!’, pp. 34–5, 38, 40, 43; Swissair disconnected its first interactive seatback system after a crash was linked to possible faulty wiring. This incident is detailed in Chapter 6 (Chris Woodyard, ‘Technology Clears Way for Takeoff of In-flight Activities’, USA Today, 24 August 1999, p. B10). Wilson, ‘Interactive Options for Passenger Entertainment’, p. 73. ‘United to Begin Offering Sony Video Players in Flight’, World Airline News, 30 December 1996, p.1; Sony Trans Com developed the 8mm cassette for airline use in 1971. Henderson, ‘The Future Isn’t Now’, p. 34. ‘Sony Trans Com Upgrades In-flight Video Walkmans’, Aviation Daily, 17 July 1997. Rebecca Day, ‘Something Special in the Air’, Popular Mechanics 177:8 (August 2000),  pp. 80–3. Maria Perotin, ‘Don’t Like the In-flight Movie? Rent Your Own’, Orlando Sentinel, 3 March 2001, p. A1. Sarah N. Lynch, ‘This DVD Will Self-Destruct’, Time Magazine, 1 July 2008: http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1817828,00.html. Charlie Sorrel, ‘Best Buy Vending Machines Landing at an Airport Near You’, Wired,  13 August 2008: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2008/08/best-buy-vendin/. Sally Beatty, ‘Are We There Yet? How New Gadgets Can Help You Travel with Kids – and Stay Sane’, Wall Street Journal, 5 March 2002, p. R9. ‘WAEA Preview: One-on-one with WAEA President Joe Leach’, World Airline News 8:40  (2 October 1998), p. 1. Boeing estimated that 70 per cent of business travellers carried a laptop on board (Bill Sweetman, ‘Internet in the Sky’, Air Transport World, August 2000, p. 48). Emma Kelly, ‘Wishful Thinking’, Flight International, 22–28 September 1999, p. 36. ‘In-seat Power Is Taking Flight’, World Airline News 8:32 (7 August 1998), p. 1. Kelly, ‘Wishful Thinking’, p. 35. Woodyard, ‘Technology Clears Way for Takeoff of In-Flight Activities’, p. B10. By 2011, Singapore International Airlines was advertising its ‘Krisworld’ in-flight entertainment system as having ‘over 1,000 on-demand options’. Kelly, ‘Wishful Thinking’, p. 37. Quoted in Joseph Gelmis, ‘Even in Coach, You Can Choose the Entertainment’, Seattle Times, 19 September 1999, p. K5 See Manovich, The Language of New Media, pp. 218–28. Peter Emmet, In Flight Entertainment System Usability Testing (Hong Kong: Cathay Pacific, 2002). Steven Shaviro, Connected: Or What It Means to Live in the Network Society (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), p. 6. ‘AirTV Expects Rapid Growth in Satellite-based Airline Services’, World Airline News 11:45 (30 November 2001), p. 2.

Notes

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63. Hay, ‘Un-aided Virtues’, pp. 53–73. 64. Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchin, ‘Flying through Code/Space: The Real Virtuality of Air Travel’, Environment and Planning A 36:2 (2004), pp. 195–211. 65. Thanks to Lisa Parks for this turn of phrase. 66. Manovich, The Language of New Media, p. 36. 67. Dodge and Kitchin, ‘Flying through Code/Space’, pp. 195–211. 68. Emma Kelly, ‘The Connected Traveller’, Flight International, 17–23 September 2002, p. 42. 69. Edwin McDowell, ‘Putting Wings on Web Access’, New York Times, 11 February 2001,  p. TR7; ‘Web on the Wing’ BBC News: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/ 461705.stm; ‘Virgin to Offer Web Access on All Flights’, Wall Street Journal, 26 March 2001, B6; Boeing Archive: ‘Connexion by Boeing: News Release’, January 2001. 70. Emma Kelly, ‘Spinning an Airborne Web’, Flight International, 12–18 September 2000,  pp. 48–50. 71. Brian Dipert, ‘Fly with the Internet, at Your Seat’, EDN 48:28 (25 December 2003),  pp. 41–3; Joe Sharkey, ‘Internet High-wire Act with an 8-Pound Laptop’, New York Times,  18 February 2003, p. C6. 72. James W. Ramsey, ‘Competition for Connectivity’, Avionics Magazine, 1 November 2001; Kelly, ‘Spinning an Airborne Web’, pp. 48–50. 73. McDowell, ‘Putting Wings on Web Access’, p. TR7. 74. John Croft, ‘Connectivity Post-connexion: Suppliers and Airlines Hope to Learn from the Failure of Connexion by Boeing’, Air Transport World 43:10 (October 2006), pp. 24–31. 75. Tim Farrar, president of Telecom, Media, and Finance Associates, quoted in Croft, ‘Connectivity Post-Connexion’, p. 28; ‘Copper Lighter than Air’, Air Safety Week 19:18  (9 May 2005). 76. Kelly, ‘Spinning an Airborne Web’, p. 50. 77. See Steven Shaviro’s discussion of the phenomenological distinctions between televisionwatching and web-surfing in Connected, p. 7. 78. Stephen Graham, ‘FlowCity: Networked Mobilities and the Contemporary Metropolis’, Journal of Urban Technology 8:1 (2002), pp. 1–20. 79. Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2006), p. 31; Graham, ‘FlowCity’, p. 1; Bauman, Globalization, p. 88. 80. See Virilio, Open Sky. 81. See http://www.singaporeair.com/en_UK/flying-with-us/suites/; http://www.virginatlantic.com/us/en/the-virgin-experience/upperclass/new-upper-class-suite.html; Lisa Loverro, ‘The Emirates A380 First Class Cabin’, Forbes, 5 November 2012. 82. Rockwell Collins director of product marketing Dave Frankenbach quoted in Emma Kelly, ‘Spinning an Airborne Web’, Flight International, 12–18 September 2000. 83. See, for instance, Williams, Television; Rich Ling, New Tech New Ties (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008); Lynn Spigel, Welcome to the Dreamhouse (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001); and Hay, ‘Un-aided Virtues’, pp. 53–73. 84. ‘Mobile Business: Endless Work’, Economist, 3 September 2011. 85. Connexion vice-president Andrew Weisheit quoted in James Ramsey, ‘Competition for Connectivity’.  86. Kasarda and Lindsay, Aerotropolis, p. 6. 87. Ong, ‘Neoliberalism as Mobile Technology’, p. 5. 88. Dodge and Kitchin, ‘Flying through Code/Space’, p. 209.

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89. And I should point out that steam turbines produce much of the world’s electrical power: we are still living in the steam age.

6. DISASTROUS SPEED: THRILL RIDES, SCREENS AND FEAR OF FLYING 1. Paul Virilio, The Original Accident, trans. Julie Rose (Malden: Polity Press, 2007 [2005]), p. 10. 2. Bernard Comment, Panorama (New York: Reaktion Books, 2004), p. 76; Oettermann, The Panorama, pp. 84–7; Siegfried Zielinski, Audiovisions: Cinema and Television as Entr’actes in History (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999), p. 28. 3. Sara Danius, The Senses of Modernism: Technology, Perception, Aesthetics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), p. 127; Lauren Rabinovitz, For the Love of Pleasure: Women, Movies, and Culture in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998), pp. 145–57; Vanessa Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-siècle Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 171–3. 4. ‘The “Movies” in an “Aeroplane”’, Flight, 18 August 1921, p. 563; Holcroft Cinema Aeroplane appeared in the London Gazette’s listings of Joint Stock Companies as late as 1925. 5. Scott McCartney, ‘The Middle Seat: Airlines Weigh Entertainment Cost’, Wall Street Journal, 6 June 2002, p. D6; Friedlander, ‘43 Years of Commercial Aviation’, p. XX29. 6. Noël Burch, Life to Those Shadows (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990),  pp. 39–40. 7. Lee Grieveson, Policing Cinema: Movies and Censorship in Early Twentieth-century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 8. Brian Massumi, ‘Everywhere You Want to Be: Introduction to Fear’, in Brian Massumi (ed.), The Politics of Everyday Fear (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 6. 9. Ibid., p. 6. 10. Ibid., pp. 13–16. 11. Beck, ‘The Cosmopolitan Condition’, p. 288. 12. Vivien Swanson and Iain B. McIntosh, ‘Psychological Stress and Air Travel: An Overview of Psychological Stress Affecting Air Passengers’, in Robert Bor and Todd Hubbard (eds), Aviation Mental Health: Psychological Implications for Air Transportation (Burlington: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 13–25. 13. Roger W. Cobb and David M. Primo, The Plane Truth: Airline Crashes, the Media, and Transportation Policy (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2003), p. 10. 14. Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things (New York: Basic Books, 1999); Cobb and Primo, The Plane Truth. 15. Virilio, The Original Accident, p. 26. 16. Ibid., p. 85. 17. Ibid., p. 5. 18. See, in particular, Virilio and Lotringer, Pure War. 19. See, for instance, Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women; N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Andy Clark, Natural-born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 20. Harold Innis, The Bias of Communication (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1951); Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: Signet, 1964). Notes

197

21. Lassen, ‘A Life in Corridors’, pp. 177–93. 22. Virilio, Open Sky, p. 71. 23. The subsequent investigation also placed responsibility on the poor communication between pilots and air traffic control, which resulted in a movement to establish English as the global language of flight. See ‘Pilot-Controller Mixup Feared’, Los Angeles Times, 28 March 1977, p. A1; ‘Jumbo Jet Crash Is History’s Worst Air Disaster’, Los Angeles Times,  28 March 1977, p. 14; ‘U.S., Dutch Jumbo Jets Crash’, Chicago Tribune, 28 March 1977, p. 1; and Jeremy Mell, ‘Proficiency Requirements in Common English Study Group, Second Meeting’ (Luxembourg: International Civil Aviation Organization, 2001). 24. Contrary to Perrier’s statement, though, the National Transportation and Safety Board, a United States federal agency, issued a letter to the French Civil Aviation Agency in 1981 warning about Concorde tire blowout and failure: ‘The consequences … (hydraulic failure, fire, explosion, landing gear sticking in a retracted mode, etc.) are obvious and could be catastrophic.’ See James B. King, ‘Safety Recommendations A-81-150 through 152’,  9 November 1981 (Washington, DC, National Transportation Safety Board), p. 2. The Perrier quotation is from ‘Ex-Concorde Head Quizzed on Crash’, BBC News Online,  27 September 2005: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/europe/4285832.stm. 25. Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, pp. 160, 64, 161. 26. Indeed, the cause of flight is the subject of a certain amount of debate among pilots and physicists mainly because two apparently competing explanations apply (see K. Weltner,  ‘A Comparison of Explanations of Aerodynamical Lifting Force’, American Journal of Physics 55 (1987), pp. 50–4; David Ison, ‘Bernoulli or Newton: Who’s Right about Lift?’, Plane and Pilot Magazine: www.planeandpilotmag.com/component/zine/article/289.html). 27. Bilstein, ‘Air Travel and the Travelling Public’, pp. 91–111. 28. This quotation is from the version of the advertisement that appeared in the Los Angeles Times. Bilstein references other parts of the advertisement. 29. Friedlander, ‘43 Years of Commercial Aviation’, p. XX29. 30. McCartney, ‘The Middle Seat’, p. D6. 31. This information is available at www.mentalworkout.com. For the fear of flying study, see Robert D. Dean and Kerry M. Whitaker, ‘Fear of Flying: Impact on the U.S. Travel Industry’, Journal of Travel Research 21:1 (1982), pp. 7–17. Of course, the effectiveness of this programme seems dubious given that much of the explanatory material is aimed at the most anxious moments of flying – take-off and landing – which are also those moments when using electronic devices was prohibited. 32. These regulations are authored, in most cases, both by the country in whose territory they are headquartered and the regulations of the International Civil Aviation Organization, the aviation agency of the United Nations. 33. Whitelegg, Working the Skies, pp. 104–5. 34. ‘Listen Up: Creative Methods May Be the Answer to Improving Passengers’ Attention to Safety Briefings before Take-off’, Flight Safety Australia (July–August 2001), p. 37. 35. Bettina Wassener, ‘Airline Has Nothing to Hide. Really’, New York Times, 30 June 2009, p. B6. 36. Hollywood studios have non-theatrical divisions charged with editing their films for release in other venues. For reasons analysed in Chapter 4, distributors edit films for television and airline exhibition similarly, so much so that Sony Pictures Entertainment has a TV/Airline Editorial Department and the editing of films for both venues is supervised by the same person. See Chariton, ‘Cut It Out!’, pp. 20–7.

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37. Serling, ‘In-flight Movies’, p. 67. 38. World Airline Entertainment Association ‘Airline Inflight Entertainment and Communications (IFE) Industry Fact Sheet’, 23 February 2007: http://www.waea.org/Press/ latesttrends.pdf. 39. Virgin America is a notable exception. United 93, the film about the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania on 11 September 2001 was in their IFE line-up for a time. See Sharkey, ‘Is Flying Scary?’, p. 3. 40. Kay Young, ‘Hollywood, 1934: “Inventing” Romantic Comedy’, in Gail Finney (ed.), Look Who’s Laughing: Gender and Comedy (New York: Taylor & Francis, 1994), p. 258. 41. Brian Henderson, ‘Romantic Comedy Today: Semi-tough or Impossible?’, Film Quarterly 31:4 (Summer 1978), p. 22. 42. Scott Shane and Eric Lipton, ‘Passengers’ Quick Action Halted Attack’, New York Times,  27 December 2009, p.A1. 43. Associated Press, ‘Passengers Again Free to Move around Cabin: Strict In-flight Rules Following Failed Bombing Attempt Relaxed, Officials Say’: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/ id/34601479/ns/travel-tips/; Micheline Maynard, ‘For Airline Passengers, Pat-downs, Searches and Restroom Monitors’, New York Times, 28 December 2009, p. A14. 44. Transportation Safety Board of Canada, Aviation Investigation Report: In-flight Fire Leading to Collision with Water: Swissair Transport Limited McDonnell Douglas MD-11 HB-IWF Peggy’s Cove, Nova Scotia 5 nm SW 2 September 1998. Report Number A98H003, 27 March 2003,  p. 239. 45. Anna Wilde Mathews, ‘Swissair’s In-flight Film System Studied’, Wall Street Journal,  30 October 1998, p. A3. 46. Lawrence Donegan, ‘Safety Fears over In-flight Movies as Pilots Report Electrical Fires’, Observer, 20 July 2003, p. 18. 47. Gary Stoller, ‘In-flight Entertainment Systems Linked to Scores of Jet “Difficulties” ’, USA Today, 9 July 2003, A01. 48. Kasarda and Lindsay, Aerotropolis, pp. 17–18. 49. Walter Carlson, ‘Advertising: Parked Plane Seeking Riders’, New York Times, 31 August 1966, p. 66. 50. Friedberg, Window Shopping, p. 20. 51. Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, pp. 52–69. 52. Paul Virilio, ‘The Third Window: An Interview with Paul Virilio’, in Cynthia Schneider and Brian Wallis (eds), Global Television, trans. Yvonne Shafir, with a preface by Jonathan Crary (Cambridge: MIT Press), pp. 185–97.  53. Serling, ‘In-flight Movies’; ‘2d Airline Plans Movies on Planes’; ‘Transport News: In-flight Movies’, New York Times, 2 August 1964, p. 78. 54. Charles Goldsmith, ‘New Airline Cameras Put All Passengers in Window Seats’, Wall Street Journal, 24 June 1996, p. B11. According to Nitin Govil, for a time Air New Zealand also had exterior cameras connected to their in-flight entertainment systems on some flights. See ‘Something Spatial in the Air’, p. 245. 55. Michael Hirsley, ‘Worst U.S. Crash’, Chicago Tribune, 26 May 1979, p. 1. 56. National Transportation Safety Board, NTSB-AAR-79-17: Aircraft Accident Report: American Airlines, Inc., DC-10-10, N1100AA Chicago-O’Hare International Airport Chicago, Illinois May 25, 1979, 21 December 1979 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office), p. 26. The full detailing of the maintenance procedures is on pages 25–31. The Notes

199

57. 58. 59. 60.

61.

abstract of the report states: ‘The National Transportation and Safety Board determines that the probable cause of this accident was the asymmetrical stall and the ensuing roll of the aircraft because of the uncommanded retraction of the left wing outboard leading edge slats and the loss of stall warning and slat disagreement indication systems resulting from maintenance-induced damage leading to the separation of the No. 1 engine and pylon assembly at a critical point during takeoff. The separation resulted from damage by improper maintenance procedures which led to the failure of the pylon’s structure’ (p. ii). ‘Dive May Have Been Televised’, New York Times, 27 May 1979, p. 18; ‘Crash May Have Been on TV in Plane’, Chicago Tribune, 27 May 1979, p. 5. Thanks to Mark Williams for drawing my attention to this incident. Virilio, Open Sky, p. 17. Nigel Thrift, ‘On the Social and Cultural Determinants of International Finance Centers’,  in Simon Corbridge, Nigel Thrift and R. I. Martin (eds), Money, Power, and Space (Malden: Blackwell, 1994), pp. 327–55. Virilio, Open Sky, p. 1.

7. LIVE IN AIR: AERIAL CIRCUITS OF TELEVISION 1. Patricia Mellencamp, ‘TV Time and Catastrophe, or Beyond the Pleasure Principle of Television’, in Mellencamp, The Logics of Television, pp. 261, 262. 2. ‘Gambians “Fake” Emergency Landing’, BBC Sport, 22 September 2002: http://news.bbc.co.uk/ go/pr/fr/-/sport2/hi/football/africa/4271416.stm. 3. See Chapter 1. 4. Nick Couldry, Andreas Hepp and Friedrich Krotz (eds), Media Events in a Global Age (New York: Routledge, 2009). 5. ‘Coffee, Tea or Doris Day’, p. 111; Wayne Thomis, ‘Air Line Shows Bowl Games – or Parts Thereof’, Chicago Tribune, 2 January 1965, p. W2; Jane Levere, ‘Business Travel: Passengers on Jetblue Will Be Able to Watch Live Satellite-television Programming from Their Seats’, New York Times, 21 July 1999, p. C12; Kate Torgovnick, ‘Satellite TV Creates Sports Bar in the Sky’, New York Times, 28 March 2007. 6. James Gleick, Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything (New York: Pantheon, 1999); John Urry, ‘Aeromobilities and the Global’, in Cwerner, Kesserling and Urry, Aeromobilities,  p. 31. 7. I will be limiting my analysis to the reception of television in the airplane cabin. For work on the transmission of television from airplanes, see Allison Perlman, ‘Television up in the Air: The Midwest Program on Airborne Television Instruction, 1959–1971’, Critical Studies in Media Communication 27:5 (December 2010), pp. 477–97. Other notices regarding early instances of television transmission from airplanes appeared in Flight magazine: ‘Television from the Air’, 4 April 1940, p. 310; ‘Stratovision’, 6 September 1945, pp. 258–9; ‘ “Bristol” Freighter Chosen for First Aerial Television Relay [advertisement]’, 16 November 1950.  I have written on the recent practice of airborne military television transmissions in ‘Towards Freedom: Television, Baudrillard and Symbolic Exchanges’, Flowtv, 23 February 2007: http://flowtv.org/2007/02/towards-freedom-television-baudrillard-and-symbolicexchange/.

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8. Cavell argued, ‘the material basis of television is a current of simultaneous event reception’ (emphasis in original) (Stanley Cavell, ‘The Fact of Television’, Daedalus 111:4 (1982),  p. 85). 9. Thomis, ‘Air Line Shows Bowl Games’, p. W2; newspaper advertisements for Astrovision in 1964 read, ‘When possible your stewardess may switch to local television from her control panel. Just as at home, you’ll be able to see news, sports, and variety shows.’ 10. Donald Horton and Richard Wohl, ‘Mass Communication and Para-social Interaction’, Psychiatry 19 (1956), pp. 215–29; Heath and Skirrow, ‘Television’, pp. 7–59. 11. Feuer, ‘The Concept of Live Television’. 12. ‘Radio Flashes Film to Plane’, Los Angeles Times, 22 May 1932, p. 10. 13. David E. Fisher and Marshall Jon Fisher, Tube: The Invention of Television (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 1996), p. 208; Eric Barnouw, Tube of Plenty: The Evolution of American Television, 2nd edn (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 25–50. 14. Ransome Sutton, ‘What’s New in Science: Television in the Skies’, Los Angeles Times, 31 July 1932, p. H17. 15. However, Carter’s other predictions proved prescient, suggesting even a vision for the televisual transmission of newspapers not unlike the system pioneered by USA Today. See ‘Television Era Forecast Near’, Los Angeles Times, 26 January 1931, p. A1. 16. Eric M. Conway, ‘The Politics of Blind Landing’, Technology and Culture 42:1 (January 2001), pp. 81–106. 17. ‘Aeronautics: Aeronautical Radio’, Time Magazine, 14 July 1930; ‘Radio to Bring Safety to Aviation’, Science News-Letter 17: 464 (1 March 1930), pp. 131, 142; John Edwin Hogg, ‘Plane Safety Increased by Radio Advice’, Christian Science Monitor, 3 January 1931, pp. 1, 18. Radio transmission and radio beacons were essentially the foundation of what is now known as air traffic control. 18. Although the Loretta Young film was transmitted without sound, Lubcke argued that only a second transmitter was needed to achieve sound and image transmission, which left open the possibility of using the broadcast system for something other than weather maps, as does the use of a popular feature film as the transmission material. 19. And, of course, aerial is also a term for the television antenna used to tune in to capture the radio waves travelling through the air. 20. David Sarnoff, ‘Possible Social Effects of Television’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 213 (January 1941), pp. 145, 146, 151. 21. Arnheim, ‘A Forecast of Television’, p. 194. 22. Ibid., p. 194. 23. Toby Miller, ‘Introduction’, in Toby Miller (ed.), Television: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies, vol. 1 (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 1–32. 24. Mimi White, ‘Flows and Other Close Encounters with Television’, in Lisa Parks and Shanti Kumar (eds), Planet TV: A Global Television Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2003), pp. 94–112. 25. Kaplan, ‘Transporting the Subject’, pp. 32–42. 26. Doane, ‘Information, Crisis, Catastrophe’, p. 222. 27. Jerome Bourdon, ‘Live Television Is Still Alive: On Television as an Unfulfilled Promise’, Media, Culture & Society 22:5 (September 2000), p. 552. 28. John Hyde, ‘LiveTV – Doing Things Differently’, Avion, 2000: http://www.harris.com/ company-history.html. Notes

201

29. Susan Jeffords and Lauren Rabinovitz (eds), Seeing through the Media: The Persian Gulf War (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994). 30. Parks, Cultures in Orbit. 31. Erik Bergaust and William Beller, Satellite! (New York: Hanover House, 1956), p. 19.  This passage is referenced by James Hay in his essay, ‘The Invention of Air Space,  Outer Space, and Cyberspace’, in Lisa Parks and James Schwoch (eds), Down to Earth: Satellite Technologies, Industries, and Cultures (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press 2012). 32. Judy Jordan, Delta Airlines director of brand management and Joe Leach, Delta Airlines manager of on-board programs and services, quoted in Karen Walker, ‘Behind the Screens’, Flight International, 18–24 September 1996, p. 45. 33. Jane Levere, ‘Business Travel: Passengers on JetBlue will be able to watch live satellitetelevision programming from their seats’, New York Times, 21 July 1999, p. C12. 34. ‘While VOD Gets Attention, Live TV Steals the Show’, World Airline News 6:37  (23 September 1996). 35. Email correspondence with Glen Latta; John Hyde, ‘LiveTV – Doing Things Differently’,  in Wynbrandt, Flying High, pp. 139–50. 36. Ibid., p. 147. 37. Jostein Gripsrud, ‘Television, Broadcasting, Flow: Key Metaphors in TV Theory’, in Christine Geraghty and David Lusted (eds), The Television Studies Book (New York:  Arnold, 1998), p. 19. 38. Williams, Television, pp. 86–96. See also Gripsrud, ‘Television, Broadcasting, Flow’, pp. 26–9; and John Corner, Key Concepts in Television Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 60–9. 39. Email correspondence with Glen Latta; correspondence with Sebastian White; Dennis Blank, ‘Surveillance Cameras Set to Keep Watch in Airliners’, New York Times, 6 April 2002, p. C1. Indeed, the post-9/11 business plan for several in-flight entertainment equipment manufacturers involved the creation and implementation of surveillance systems for airplanes. See ‘Aircraft Security; MAS Sets Its Sights on IFE Equipment for Security’, Flight International, 27 November 2001, p. 4; ‘Smile, Buckle up and Behave: Hidden Cameras Fly Too’, Los Angeles Times, 20 January 2002, p. L3. 40. Doane, ‘Information, Crisis, Catastrophe’, pp. 222–39. 41. Dayan and Katz, Media Events. 42. Doane, ‘Information, Crisis, Catastrophe’, pp. 234, 238. 43. McCartney, ‘The Middle Seat’, p. D7; Alison Roberts, ‘High Anxiety JetBlue Passengers Watched Own Plight on TV’, Sacramento Bee, 23 September 2005, p. A1. 44. Doane, ‘Information, Crisis, Catastrophe’, p. 230. 45. Tamar Liebes, ‘Television’s Disaster Marathons: A Danger for Democratic Processes?’, in Tamar Liebes and James Curran (eds), Media, Ritual and Identity (New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 71–85. 46. Mellencamp, ‘TV Time and Catastrophe’,  p. 262. 47. Doane, ‘Information, Crisis, Catastrophe’, p. 222. 48. Mellencamp, ‘TV Time and Catastrophe’, p. 254; Feuer, ‘The Concept of Live Television’; Kaplan, Regarding Television. 49. Kathleen Carroll, ‘Definitely a Flight to Remember: Onboard TV Rattled Clifton Flier’, Record, 23 September 2005, p. A1.

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50. Susan Douglas has called this phenomenon ‘the turn within’, noting that, rather than creating a ‘global village’, the predominance of communication technology has resulted in its opposite (Susan Douglas, ‘The Turn Within: The Irony of Technology in a Globalized World’, American Quarterly (2006), pp. 619–38). 51. See Carroll, ‘Definitely a Flight to Remember’, p. A1; Maria Elena Fernandez, ‘Stations Stayed Tuned to Jet’s Saga’, Los Angeles Times, 23 September 2005, p. A26; Peter G. Gosselin and Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, ‘JetBlue Drama Plays out on Passengers’ Screens’, Journal Gazette, 23 September 2005, p. A4; Tim Molloy, ‘JetBlue’s Live-TV Horrified Some on Board’, Deseret News, 23 September 2005, p. A2; Roberts, ‘High Anxiety JetBlue Passengers Watched Own Plight on TV’, p. A1. 52. Doane, ‘Information, Crisis, Catastrophe’, p. 238. 53. Ibid., p. 231. 54. Andrew, ‘Time Zones and Jet Lag’, pp. 59–89; see the introduction to this book. 55. Zielinski, Audiovisions.

CONCLUSION: CINEMA AS INFRASTRUCTURE 1. Paul du Gay (ed.), Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Walkman (London: Sage Publications, 1997); Siegfried Zielinski, The Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2006); Acland and Wasson, Useful Cinema. 2. Michael Bull, ‘ “To Each Their Own Bubble”: Mobile Spaces of Sound in the City’, in Couldry and McCarthy, MediaSpace. 3. Michael Bull, ‘Personal Stereos and the Aural Reconfiguration of Representational Space’, in Sally Munt (ed.), Technospaces: Inside the New Media (New York: Continuum, 2001), p. 240. 4. Stuart Elden, ‘Worlds, Engagements, Temperaments’, in Stuart Elden (ed.), Sloterdijk Now (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012), pp. 1–16. See also Sjoerd van Tuinen, ‘Air Conditioning Spaceship Earth: Peter Sloterdijk’s Ethico-aesthetic Paradigm’, Environment and planning D, Society & Space 27:1 (2009), pp. 105–18 and Erik Morse, ‘Something in the Air: Interview with Peter Sloterdijk’, Frieze 127 (November–December 2009): https://www.frieze.com/ issue/article/something_in_the_air/. 5. See Marshall Sahlins, ‘Infrastructuralism’, Critical Inquiry 36 (Spring 2010), pp. 371–85. 6. Raymond Williams, ‘Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory’, New Left Review 82 (November–December 1973), pp. 3–16. 7. IATA Annual Review 2012.

Notes

203

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Archival Sources Boeing Archive, Bellevue, Washington Pan American World Airways, Inc. Records, Special Collections Division, University of Miami Libraries, Coral Gables, Florida Rohama Lee Papers, Special Collections, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa

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Index

16mm 2, 10, 30, 34, 46, 50, 65–8, 77, 91, 183n8, 184n17 aerial view 12–13, 45–8, 55–9, 61, 146, 157 Air Canada 13, 53–5, 93, 120, 123 Air France 24, 51, 80, 83, 89, 93, 97, 105, 112 Air India 13, 54 Airline Passenger Experience Association (APEX) see World Airline Entertainment Association (WAEA) airspace 12, 19, 24–7, 27–9, 32, 34–8, 32, 55, 122, 165, 167, 176–7n57 American Airlines 17, 24, 28, 47, 71, 73–7, 80, 89, 93, 97, 98, 101–3, 105, 111, 114, 119, 120, 123–5, 137–8, 144–7, 152–3, 155 Ampex 71, 75, 77 Astrovision 17, 73–4, 76, 80, 98–103, 144–7, 153 attention 14, 88–93, 93–7, 98–103, 107–8, 118, 126–7, 139–40, 165, 167–8 Bell & Howell 11, 68, 77, 183n8

Index

Boeing 12, 68, 70, 73, 83, 97, 99, 104, 123, 136, 139 boredom 8, 38, 47, 67–8, 72, 93–6, 105, 107, 127, 138, 163, 168 British Airways 47, 89, 93, 94, 95, 105, 113, 123, 146, 190n60 business travel 4, 14–15, 25, 32–3, 67, 87–102, 104–8, 112–14, 116–22, 126, 133, 143, 189n37, 190–1n63, 195n52 Cathay Pacific 33, 93, 105, 120, 121, 124, 126 cellular phones 10, 111–14, 126, 193n4, 193n8 censorship 88, 103–7, 140–4 Chicago Convention on International Civil Aviation 29, 35–7, 96, 151 clouds 23, 35, 46–9, 59, 74, 113, 154 Continental Airlines 71–2, 75, 77–8, 101, 118, 158 cosmopolitanism 4–7, 13, 18–19, 25, 32, 36–8, 43, 52–5, 59–61, 79–82, 92, 97, 133, 156–7, 171

Delta Airlines 24, 94, 100, 106, 120, 123, 140, 152, 158–9 digital media 32–3, 47, 51, 79, 90, 108, 111, 114–22, 125–8, 173n1 digitalisation 10, 15–16, 115–16 DVD 9, 15, 25, 33–4, 94, 115, 119, 178n30, 185n52 Emirates Air 9, 48, 112, 126 fear of flying 16, 48, 132–4, 137–40, 144, 147–9 film festivals 4, 8, 16, 26, 45, 52–5, 78, 81–2, 167, 181n50, 186n57 flight attendants 10, 14–15, 70–1, 74, 75, 87–8, 98–103, 106–8, 111, 116–17, 121, 126, 139–40, 148, 170, 176n51, 190n58, 190–1n63 global positioning system (GPS) 24, 49, 51, 56, 142, 149 globalisation 4–8, 12–13, 15, 17–19, 23–7, 31–8, 41–5, 55–8, 59–61, 66, 87, 88–9, 92, 115, 122–8, 133–6, 143, 147–9, 152,

219

globalisation cont. 154, 156–8, 166, 167, 171, 176n57, 178–9n35, 203n50 headphones 7–8, 14, 17, 30, 71, 73, 74, 79–83, 98, 100, 102, 105, 116, 119, 139–40, 144, 153, 154, 168–9, 186n61, 191n67, 192n77 inflight internet access 15–16, 122–5 InFlight Motion Pictures (IMP) 30, 69–73, 74–8, 80, 83, 90–2, 103–4 International Air Transport Association (IATA) 12, 14, 29, 30–1, 72–3, 75, 80, 104, 170, 176n50 Japan Airlines 53, 83, 113, 119 JetBlue 17, 48–9, 95, 152, 159–66 landscape 13, 35, 45–51, 57, 74, 131, 144–5, 182n73 liveness 9, 17, 152–61, 162–6 Lufthansa 46, 47, 97, 120, 123 motility 2–3, 32, 143, 147 Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) 14, 31, 105 national cinemas 2, 8, 10, 13, 51–5, 79–83

2 20

non-places 4, 27, 89 Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) 13, 30, 53, 71 Pan American Airlines 12, 24, 30, 35, 46, 50, 53, 59–61, 67–9, 70, 72–3, 75, 77, 96–8, 99, 100–1, 106, 113, 182n76, 183n11, 192n77, 193n8 panoramas 6, 10, 43, 47, 56, 58, 79, 131–2, 144 Philippine Airlines 24, 30, 72–3 Qantas 83, 94, 106, 107, 112, 119, 126 satellites 17, 24, 26, 32, 34, 57, 59, 79, 83, 95, 112–14, 120, 122, 123, 152, 154, 157–61, 163, 166 seatback screen 6, 11, 14, 17, 33, 48, 74, 90, 92, 94–5, 97, 103–4, 106, 107–8, 114, 116, 119–22, 141, 148, 153, 158–9, 164–6, 169, 189n26, 191n63 Singapore International Airlines (SIA) 53, 99, 113, 120, 124, 126 Sony 15, 73–7, 83, 107, 116, 118–22, 168 speed 3, 5, 13, 16, 23, 25, 27, 32, 34, 36, 47, 59–61, 67, 87, 89, 93, 96, 104, 123, 127, 133, 134–49, 156–7, 168, 170 Swissair 119, 120, 142–3

temporality 8–9, 27, 43, 46–7, 49, 58, 67, 89, 93–7, 107–8, 121–5, 135–6, 143–4, 147–9, 152–61, 162–6, 168, 188n21 tourism 1, 4, 6, 27, 32, 36, 45–51, 52, 59, 66–7, 81, 89, 92–3 Trans World Airways (TWA) 14, 16, 24, 30–1, 49, 65, 70–8, 88, 96–7, 103–5, 113, 125, 140, 144, 176n50, 183n8, 193n11 transnational capitalist class (TCC) 4–5, 15, 88–9, 92–3, 94, 133, 136 United Airlines 50, 71, 83, 87, 96, 105, 119, 120, 138, 183n8 United States Civil Aviation Board (USCAB) 30–1, 72–3, 80 Universal Pictures 23–5, 41, 50, 57, 65–6, 70, 183n8 Virgin Airlines 13, 105, 119, 124, 138–9, 140, 147, 190n58, 200n39 Western Air Express 46, 65, 112, 153–4, 166 windows 6, 13, 14, 46–50, 55–9, 68, 71, 89, 103–4, 142, 144–6, 153, 155, 156, 160, 170, 190–1n63 World Airline Entertainment Association (WAEA) 12, 33–4, 106, 120, 138, 140–1

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