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Jim Berkley: Weather Porn Star
interviewed by Emma Taylor on June 3, 1996
The Weather Channel ... is not quite nature, it's not simply technology, it's more the articulation of a new kind of "techno-nature".
Okay, so he's not a weather porn star, but Jim Berkley is a bit of a weather buff. Back in 1991, he delivered a paper on "The Weather Channel and Virtual Culture" in the Williams College Technology and Politics Lecture Series, and ever since has kept a keen eye on the virtual community that surrounds weather-watching.
Tripod: A CNN Interactive headline a week ago asked, "Has Mother Nature Gone Mad?" To quote the first paragraph, "Earthquakes. Fires. Floods. Tornadoes. Heat waves. It seems like North America has been plagued with weird weather lately. Does Mother Nature need some Prozac?" Well, does she?
JB: I'm not sure if Mother Nature needs some Prozac, but I do think there's a deep cultural resonance somewhere between the current psychopharmaceutical boom -- the idea that we simply need to fine-tune our brain chemistries, or that we need only "listen to Prozac"-- and our current obsession with "earth chemistry," that is, with weather and meteorology.
Media concern about "weird weather" is one way we can express our cultural anxiety.
Both our minds and the weather are examples of enormously complex, unpredictable systems, and the late twentieth century is a time when these kinds of systems have become the dominant metaphor for how the world works in general. The new mood-drugs like Prozac assure us that we can cybernetically tinker with our brains and make these systems work better; on the other hand, media concern about "weird weather" is one way we can express our cultural anxiety about complex systems that might be too massive and too complicated for us to control.
Tripod: It's an interesting notion, that we are "plagued" with bad weather. Is it due to media sensationalism, that we view weather as an evil force, or have humans always viewed weather in this way?
JB: Well first off, I think humans have always had something of an adversarial relationship with the weather. I mean, floods, droughts, and hailstorms happened in biblical times too, and seem to have gotten a fair amount of press. In recent years, however, we see something quite new made possible by the media and by mass communications: this is the promotion of weather phenomena into what I like to call "spectacular events."
Television and now the internet take highly localized events and promote them to a global scale, allowing them to be consumed (and rather perversely enjoyed) by people who may be thousands of miles a way from where the action is. People in the media may say that this is just "reporting," but I think turning on CNN to see live footage of something going on halfway around the world fundamentally changes our relationship with nature, and changes our very notion of what constitutes an "event" in the first place.
Tripod: Why do people want to "know" the weather? Is it morbid curiosity? Do they want to know what to wear? Or does knowledge lead to understanding, then prediction, and finally control?
JB: People want to know the weather for different reasons. Some people really just want to know whether they need to bring an umbrella to work. On the other hand, I also believe that there are a host of more subtle reasons why people turn to the weather. I always like to cite the character from Don DeLillo's hilarious satiric novel "White Noise," a German teacher who talks about how becoming a weather-buff helped him to overcome the grief of his mother's death: there was a sense of comfort, of security and predictability in being able to see the multicolored satellite photos and jet stream patterns, a sense that he was part of a larger system.
Of course, part of our current fascination with the weather also has to do with an ongoing passion for dominating and controlling nature, for indulging the fantasy that we humans actually run the show -- but this is never the whole story, since caring about the weather can take on an astounding number of functions in a contemporary world where the very status of "nature" has become increasingly problematic.
Tripod: You wrote that "The Weather Channel is not really about predicting the weather, it's about mapping the present ... and creating national identity through a kind of virtual system." Why is this -- because it breaks down so easily into charts and maps and numbers?
JB: The Weather Channel occupies a very significant position in American culture. It was founded during the early 1980s, at the same time that there was a nationwide political sense that there was a need to "reinvent America" and to rethink the relationship between "big government" and local American regionalism.
In short, I'm basically talking about the Reagan era. The Weather Channel, I think, was part of the overall political and cultural process of this time: through new technologies, it gave us a new way to envision the relationship between the part and the whole, between our hometown weather and the national picture.
America might have been becoming more and more fragmented in "real life," but the Weather Channel gave us a convenient and powerful way of conceptualizing it as a natural totality, even if this totality only existed on our TV screen. I refer to this sense of national community as a "virtual system" because, in fact, it's not based on actual relations between people but instead on the technological staging of a kind of make-believe.
There are some specific things in American society that contribute to weather obsession.
Tripod: Is weather obsession an American trait? Do we suffer from weather sensationalism more than other countries?
JB: I think there are some specific things in American society that contribute to weather obsession, but I don't by any means think we have the market cornered on it. To begin with, we're a fantastically diverse nation -- both meteorologically and culturally. With all this diversity, there's a serious issue of how all the different pieces fit together, and the weather map can be a primary site on which this issue can be worked out or negotiated. America's mythical status as a "natural society" also plays into weather obsession, by somehow bounding up our sense of democracy with the workings of atmospheric phenomena. And of course, America is arguably the home of the global media spectacle, which makes our weather sensationalism almost a foregone conclusion.
Tripod: What did you think about the coverage and reaction to the Blizzard of 96? Did we exaggerate the importance of the storm? Or did the storm become important because of the role it played?
JB: One thing that amazes me -- and this goes along with what I've already said about the place of the "spectacular event" in American society -- is the way that these kind of named storms -- the Blizzard of 96, Superstorm 93 -- seem to be occurring with suspiciously increasing frequency. Now, I don't want to downplay the intensity of the Blizzard of 96; I personally was in Los Angeles at the time and was very upset not to have been in my parents house in New Jersey to witness it. There was more snow in many east coast cities than there has been since the big storm of December 1947. At the same time, however, there is definitely a media need to create and promote these "named storms" for purposes other than mere meteorological accuracy. From what I've read, anyone who witnessed the incredible Blizzard of 1888 would have laughed at the idea of putting this year's blizzard in anywhere near the same category, or even to memorialize it with a name in the first place.
Tripod: How can a 24 hour cable channel devoted to weather survive? Do you think that it will always have an audience?
JB: A 24-hour cable weather service can survive because it's fascinating on multiple levels and because it's good, cheap entertainment. I make no guarantees, but I think it's going to be with us for a while. I for one certainly hope so.
Tripod: You've talked about weather's "opposition of nature to technological society," and how this has altered weather's status as an "object of cultural desire." Is weather a complement to technology, or an escape from it?
JB: The argument I like to make is that, at least unconsciously, weather is understood differently now in our culture than it used to say forty or fifty years ago. In the past, there has always been this rigid opposition between the natural world and the technological world: no one was going to confuse a natural object like a tree with a technological one like a radio; they were just entirely different kinds of things.
In the last twenty-five years, however, we've moved more and more into a situation where the lines between nature and technology are blurred. Things like biotechnology, like Prozac, like the popularity of the "cyborg" in books and movies -- these have all confused the old easy distinctions between what is natural and what is artificial. We live in a world of hybrid objects, as is very clear if you watch the Weather Channel even for a few minutes: what you're watching is not quite nature, it's not simply technology, it's more the articulation of a new kind of "techno-nature."
In this kind of world, the old kind of choices -- embrace technology vs. escape technology -- no longer make very much sense. What's more crucial is making the practical (and also very political) decisions about on what grounds "the natural" can even be invoked as a category in the first place.
There's so much latent anxiety about the strange intersection of technology and the environment that movies like "Twister" really speak to the cultural moment.
Tripod: In the movie "Twister," the tornadoes get 25 minutes of screen time -- the director Jan DeBont called the tornado "the film's main character." Do you think there's more of this to come? Is there a difference between Weather Channel addiction and the current spate of movies/TV shows about weather?
JB: I'm always fascinated about the conditions under which inanimate objects can become protagonists of works of fiction. One situation in which this happens, I think, is when books and movies are trying to address the inherently spectacular and "specular" nature of certain objects, often in a way that has everything to do with media and consumer culture.
I'm reminded of this great nineteenth-century French novel by Zola called "The Ladies' Paradise," about an enormous Parisian department store that swallows up all the small shopkeepers in the neighborhood and dazzles customers with its blinding displays of goods for sale. Although there are all kinds of human characters in the book, modern critics have pointed out that the department store is the real protagonist, and that the human characters basically pale in comparison to this fantastic machine of consumer culture -- it's the store we want to look at, not the people.
I think it's the same thing with a movie like "Twister," although in the late twentieth-century the frontiers of cultural interest have moved from things like department stores to things like tornadoes, for reasons I've already hinted at. I do think there's a lot more of this to come: there's so much latent anxiety about the strange intersection of technology and the environment that such movies really speak to the cultural moment.
Last year's movie "Outbreak," for example, about a hypothetical outbreak of an Ebola-like virus in the U.S., could be seen as being in this same tradition: even Dustin Hoffman was no match for the acting talents of the deadly virus itself. As for the difference between this kind of entertainment and the Weather Channel, well, yes, there certainly is one: The Weather Channel is quite good at conveying wild spectacle and sensation, but it also has its kinder, gentler side too. One can pick up a kind of blissful, Zen-like vibe by watching the Weather Channel's procession of colorful maps and information, and while this is certainly part of today's overall "weather spectacle," it's sure a lot more relaxing than watching "Twister" in a Dolby-rigged theater.
Tripod: Did you hear about the tornado in Ontario last week that struck a drive-in theater playing "Twister"? (There is actually a scene in "Twister" where a tornado hits a drive in). Coincidence?
JB: Ah, the revenge of the real! The tornado was probably dissatisfied with the on-screen performance by Industrial Light and Magic and decided to set things straight. In all seriousness, the confrontation of simulation with real-life can be a very scary thing, but every now and then I think it can provide a healthy jolt of medicine -- it helps to remind us just who's really in charge.
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