Savant of Screens
Virginia Heffernan's literary-critical approach to TV and on-line video
Not long ago, Virginia Heffernan, Ph.D. ’02, who writes about television and on-line media for the New York Times, got an e-mail from her boss, culture editor Sam Sifton ’88. Heffernan had submitted a draft that contained the word chthonic, a term from classical mythology that refers to deities and other spirits living in the underworld. As a smiling Heffernan recalls, Sifton reminded her that “you can’t use words that would stop a reader on the A train.”
Heffernan is no lightweight: her hip, funny pieces bristle with fresh ideas. In the fall of 2004, for example, she began her review of the hit nighttime soap opera Desperate Housewives with a synopsis of a 1958 John Cheever short story, “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill,” a dark tale about a suburbanite who loses his job and eventually turns to burglarizing his neighbors’ homes. Heffernan then segued into Housewives, which had “bold ly flung off prime-time’s imperative to topicality, and embraced an overtly literary mode. It is not an innovation, but a clever throwback, a work of thoroughgoing nostalgia and a tribute to Cheever’s war horse, the suburban gothic.” Later, she noted that “Desperate Housewives has succeeded because, like the best of reality television, it derives suspense by threatening its characters with banishment. All of the characters look as though they belong—but only for now.”
Photograph by Robert Adam Mayer
Virginia Heffernan in her home with a few tools of her trade: notebook computer, flat-screen television, DVDs, remote control
Heffernan says her doctoral training in English literature definitely affects her analyses of the video realm. “In the 1990s, we were taught that all texts—from self-help books to Tolstoy—are susceptible to critical methodology,” she says. “That became an article of faith with me. I bring everything I learned from [Harvard professors] Helen Vendler, Philip Fisher, and Marc Shell to television.” The gossipy, celebrity-tracking Manhattan-based website Gawker has labeled Heffernan’s columns “pretentious,” but she remains undeterred. “Sometimes I hesitate over a word or a reference because I know it contributes to that effect,” she admits. “But I can’t help myself.”
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