Rachel Schneider's blog

Reaction Shots and Reader Response at the Purple Wedding

Rachel Schneider — Fri, 18 Apr 2014 21:37:54 +0000

[Note: Spoilers below the cut.]

As a Game of Thrones fan, I was pretty excited to watch this last week’s episode. It’d been a while since I’d watched, and the wedding of Joffrey Baratheon and Margaery Tyrell gathered together many of the show’s beloved characters.

More importantly, it also meant the end of the show’s most-hated character, Joffrey, whose poisoning ended the episode. What intrigues me today, however, is the fan reaction to his death, recorded in GIFs, fan art, and videos. What does it mean to celebrate Joffrey’s death? What value does the reaction video have for audiences? and how does visual communication change the idea of reader-response?

Readers have long found ways to record their reactions to texts, whether in letters to friends or in the books themselves. Marginalia, as described by H. J. Jackson in her book Marginalia, reflects the visual structures of the book itself: “A tour of the annotated book from front to back, whether we consider conventional use or idiosyncratic variations, reveals that our customs and expectations, constant over time, are based on the conventional format of the book itself. In more ways than one, marginalia mirror the texts they supplement" (41). Thus, as footnotes go at the page's bottom, so does supplemental marginalia. For example, a recent reader found the following marginalia in a 1528 manuscript:

Image Credit: Superlinguo, via io9

Whether or not the reader was commenting on the abbot’s sexual practices or expressing disgust at the text, the reader leaving the marginalia communicates his reaction to others long after his death. During my own dissertation research at Harvard’s Houghton Library, I found some interesting marginalia in this copy of the 1765 edition of the satirical poet Charles Churchill’s Works:

Image Credit: Rachel Schneider / Houghton Library

As one reader responds indignantly to Churchill’s “An Epistle to William Hogarth,” another mocks and subverts that reaction. We readers following them can not only enjoy the text but their mutual exchange. Readers today need not limit their reactions to the page’s margin, however, but can spread them over places like Twitter and YouTube, where websites like Buzzfeed and io9 curate them for other fans to read and enjoy:

Image Credit: Screenshot from io9

These responders use humor to comment on the show, responding not just to the details of one scene but the whole episode and series at large. Also, their writing participates and relies on other internet memes to be intelligible, as when Ol’ Qwerty Bastard adapt the Kanye West meme to apply to Game of Thrones. Just as book-readers use marginal comments in a similar fashion to print commentary, these reaction tweets are written for an Internet-literate audience and partake of its themes.

Image Credit: brienneoftarth

H/T: Brianna Hyslop

Likewise, GIFs and LOLCAT-like images are created to comment on the character and react to him based on the popular perception. For example, if one Tweeter compares the spoiled King Joffrey to the popstar Justin Bieber, one fan makes a Tumblr remixing images of both to write the comparison visually. Another fan comments on Joffrey’s cruelty by presenting Out-of-Context Joffrey, taking a line used to mock his uncle Tyrion and presenting it as a self-affirming bromide. These visuals don’t create new readings, but instead rely on an understood reading of Joffrey as terrible to make a joke. We can imagine Joffrey’s biological father Jaime running thus towards his dying son, but towards the wedding pie. Other fans will reblog GIFs of Joffrey dying alongside celebratory GIFs to represent their reactions.

Image Credit: Screenshot from Twitter

Still others record their reactions on video rather than through remediated pictures or text. The reaction video is a genre which shows people watching some sort of media event (from Auburn’s surprising kick return against Alabama or the 2 Girls 1 Cup video) and responding to it. Fans of Game of Thrones have recorded their reactions to major events like the Red Wedding, in which several members of the Stark family are killed by Lannister agents, and this week’s Purple Wedding. Some of the reactions are NSFW, so at least put on your headphones first:

The viewers’ visible excitement contrasts oddly with the Joffrey’s audible choking and his mother’s raging grief, but these videos provide solidarity between the audience within and without the screen. There is a tension in some of the videos about how aware the person in the video is of being filmed: sometimes the video’s subject acknowledges the camera, sometimes they just react. We as an audience can also be cognizant of the person doing the filming, who understands what’s coming and wants to record it. Whereas marginalia is a semi-private act—one person reading alone and recording that reading—these reactions are performed for their viewing companions and the room and the wider YouTube audience. A whole bar breaking into applause at the critical moment shares solidarity in their reaction, and the viewer joins them in their joy. Yet the viewers’ enthusiasm—like the man who responds to Oleanna Tyrell saying “Help the poor boy!” with “No!”—seems not to be in doubt, as he stares at the TV and not the camera filming him. There’s a sense in which we are engaging with individuals in an unguarded moment, framed so by the knowing person holding the camera. The emotional exposure creates intimacy, even if it is highly mediated.

Image Credit: The Independent

I’d like to consider here how these videos also replicate the common film technique of the reaction shot, where within a movie the camera will scan other characters within the scene to see what they make of what’s happening. The Purple Wedding itself features many reactions, like Joffrey and the actors responding to Tyrion’s speech, or the people reacting to Joffrey’s death itself. The goal of a reaction shot is to reveal or obscure something about the character, depending whether or not their reaction appears onscreen. In a show where subterfuge and outright scheming are required—“when you play the game of thrones, you win or you die”—no characters are allowed to react visibly with strong emotion. Only Cersei does so. That very tension may be why the reaction videos are so popular—they supply the place of what must be hidden, what cannot be expressed in Westeros. The film medium thus produces both reactions, and the means for viewers to react.

State-Craft or The Art of Leadership in George W. Bush's Paintings

Rachel Schneider — Mon, 07 Apr 2014 04:17:13 +0000

Image Credit: Kim Leeson / George W. Bush Presidential Center

Last year, an adventurous hacker found and leaked pictures of paintings made by former President George W. Bush, including two revealing self-portraits from the shower. Now, the private hobby has been made public by President Bush himself. The George W. Bush Presidential Library, up the road in Dallas, has just opened an exhibit, The Art of Leadership: A President's Personal Diplomacy, which features portraits Bush painted of the world leaders he once encountered as President, paired alongside mementos from his travels and his musings about statecraft. However, what makes these paintings remarkable for viewers?

Image Credit: Grant Miller / George W. Bush Presidential Center

It’s not their particular styling, for one. Look at the portrait of Tony Blair above: the pose (facing forward, including head and shoulders) is fairly standard. His formal outfit—blue jacket, blue shirt, red tie—belongs in a professional headshot. If his artistic intention was, as he told his daughter in a Today interview, to capture “the unique personalities with whom he served,” his art perhaps fails to rise to this level. The art itself is fairly generic. These portraits are something like outsider art, as painted by the ultimate insider.

Rather, here, the interest comes not from the art, but the artist. If, as hinted in the exhibit’s copy, “this exhibit tells the story of his relationships with these leaders,” it comes from Bush’s presentation of his work. The exhibit frames the art as the result of personal diplomacy in practice; displayed above various gifts he received from these officials, the portraits become another kind of tribute. His interview with his daughter Jenna Bush Hager focuses significantly on his intentionality—what he felt as he painted the works and what he feels about the individuals.

Image Credit: Grant Miller / George W. Bush Presidential Center

For example, Bush and his daughter discuss at length his portrait of Vladimir Putin. Bush recounts a story about when Putin “dissed” the Bush family dog Barney, and explains that “Vladimir is a person who views the US as an enemy. I felt that he viewed the world as US benefits and Russia loses, or vice versa.” This binaristic attitude might well be reflected in what Alexandra Petri of the Washington Post described as Putin’s “creepy scabs of eyebrows” and “the murky mud-mask of the rest of the face.” But any personality the viewer might find in the portrait might come more from the viewer than the art. Because we know about President Bush, because this art might reflect his own insight, we can read into the art some meaning. Even if the craft is not high, the art is there, in the viewer’s mind.

Image Credit: Grant Miller / George W. Bush Presidential Center

These portraits, like outsider art more generally, raise interesting questions about interpretation. What can we read into such work? What attention should we pay to the artist’s intentions? If this gallery seeks to instruct its viewers in the art of leadership, that art is one that is difficult to visualize. But these self-expressions on Bush’s part might in fact suggest legitimate insights about statecraft: the tenuousness of personal connections, the struggle to engage, to produce real intimacy, to turn it to public good. Portraiture is often judged based on the likeness—does this portrait of President G.H.W. Bush, done by his son, capture him? What it does preserve, however unskilled, is the son’s engagement with his own father’s legacy, and presents it for the public view. At least there’s some interesting vulnerability there to enjoy. I for one can’t wait for Barack Obama’s post-presidential poetry chapbook.

Convicting Capital Punishment in Art

Rachel Schneider — Fri, 28 Feb 2014 15:00:00 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot from Tiny Subversions

When you live in Texas, you get used to people asking you to verify certain popular stereotypes: cowboy boots, country music, ten-gallon hats, and conservative politics. And—a belief in the capital punishment. The facts are bleak: Texas leads the nation in executions, with 510 since the death penalty was reinstated in Gregg v. Georgia in 1976. To compare, the next closest state, Virginia, has only executed 110 people. While the number of death penalty sentences have declined since 1999, organizations like The StandDown Texas Project and The Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty have advocated to either suspend or completely end the death penalty in the state. Numerous problems have been cited, from the shortage of drugs for lethal injections to protests about foreign nationals not being given their proper consular rights. While such logos-based arguments commonly circulate, another kind of ethos-based argument works through various art projects which seek to remind viewers of the humanity of the convicted.

Image Credit: Amy Elkins

H/T: Huffington Post

These online art projects work to reconstruct the ethos of these violent offenders. For example, Amy Elkins’s series Parting Words uses the final statements of the executed to construct their mug shots. For an example, see Elliot Johnson’s. The face is relatively obscured, but the grayscale type conveying the message—“I hope you find it in your heart to forgive me. Try not to worry too much about me. Remember one thing, Mother, I love you.”—becomes the man’s face. These tender words serve as a stark contrast to the dehumanized headshot, providing a new view of the violent criminal.

Image Credit: Huffington Post

Another man, Robert Black Junior, quotes from John Gillespie Magee’s poem “High Flight,” but his recitation trails off at the suggestive lines “— and done a hundred things / You have not dreamed of.” A poem written about flight during World War II becomes a man’s death-cry, an autobiographical narrative. Matched with the illegible portrait, the effect is eerie.

Image Credit: Amy Elkins

Samuel Hawkins’s portrait manages to touch the viewer through a different strategy. The absence of a final statement—here represented as “None”—reminders its audience of how depersonalized the industrial prison complex is. That there is probably more than Hawkins said in life, or could have said in the moment is put into relief by the fact that nothing was said here.

Image Credit: Screenshot from Tiny Subversions

Last Words, an art project by programmer Darius Kazemi, flashes lines from these last statements which include the word “love” in them, presented in white sans serif typeface against a black background. While Elkins’s portraits are in part powerful because they highlight the individuality of each inmate, these try to communicate the shared humanity between the prisoners and their audience through this shared emotion. The bleakness of the screen underlines the point also that these are last words, that while these people killed others, their lives are now over, available for mourning as well. If you sit and watch the page for several minutes, you’re likely to see certain repetitions: different spellings of “I love y’all,” gratitude for love and support, empathy with the victims’ families. Because these statements are all online, the viewer can choose to try and find out who said what, but the work relies on removing the statements from their specific individual context.

Image Credit: Screenshot from Tiny Subversions

The gradual appearance and disappearance of the text as shown here runs similar to a movie credit sequence, giving you a minute to consider an individual sentence before it gradually fades, to be replaced by another. The effect is somewhat mournful, and gives a completely different context and feeling to the language than something like this Wordle, which highlights in a different way how prominent the word “love” is in these final statements.

What strikes me as interesting about these different pieces is that all rely on the visual impact of the physical word to perform their plea for empathy or understanding. While the final statement is clearly an important rhetorical act for these individuals, the presentation and recontextualization of their words in visual forms turns these moments into an implicit critique of a dehumanizing process, even if only rarely do the inmates themselves protest the processes entrapping them.

Casino's Law: Defending American Liberties in Personal Injury Attorney Advertisements

Rachel Schneider — Fri, 07 Feb 2014 22:37:01 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot from Vimeo

The Super Bowl, with an audience of 111.5 million people, tends to be a place where the definition of “American” is equally invoked and contested. Not only do the hard hits and pick-sixes play out America’s strength, but also the commercials display American ingenuity and self-expression. After all, what could be more American than Bob Dylan in a Chrysler commercial, a cowboy driving a Chevy Silverado, a multilingual performance of “America the Beautiful” over a bottle of coke? At this year’s Super Bowl, only a personal injury attorney ad could top these greats.

The epic spectacle of Jamie Casino’s advertisement for his Savannah-based Casino Law Group not only invokes an All-American superhero origin myths but also adheres remarkably well to the personal injury attorney ad genre. Considering all the ad’s buzz, what makes this one so great? What makes attorney ads so arresting?

For one, it uses visual and verbal rhetorics of the action flick to portray Jamie Casino as a superhero fighting the villains:

H/T: Deadspin

There’s so much about this commercial that belongs to the Hollywood revenge flick: the “based on a true story” disclosure, the horrific tragedy of his brother’s death, the injustice of the crooked police, and the graveside scenes. The throbbing metal beat comes in at the turning point: “At some point, a man must ask why God created him.” The transition from clean-shaven lawyer to bearded badass who wields the sledgehammer labeled for his brother “Michael” against a shadowy, fiery background, slamming apart the gravestone, plays out in the lyrics as well as the visuals: “When you fall down on your knees / Beg for mercy: ‘mister, please—’ / The time has come to make things right / There ain’t no judge for pleadin’ to / We done convicted you / The Devil gets your soul tonight.” This ad perfectly fits its Super Bowl time slot: it’s as over-the-top as Joe Namath’s fur coat, as high drama as the safety the Seahawks scored in the game’s first play, and focuses on an all-American warrior who “speak[s] for innocent victims who cannot speak for themselves.”

Image Credit: Screenshot from Vimeo

I wasn’t surprised to learn from interviews with Casino himself and the commercial’s editor that they intentionally used a cinematic narrative style to draw the audience in. As Stephen Withers, the commercial’s editor put it:

He had a pretty solid idea of what he wanted. He used his storyboards to set up the edits the way he wanted. It was really like an ‘80s action movie, Terminator kind of feel when he brought it in, and he wanted to get away from that. Plus, we had to reconcile this gunslinger image from his previous ads with this family man idea.

Watching his previous commercial, it’s clear that the sledgehammer/song are used to help construct that continuity. The narrative also works for his commercial purposes: to engage his local audiences to trust him for legal services. If you want your attorney to be as a justice-seeking warrior, this commercial locates those traits within familiar action-flick imagery. Taking on the personae of the “gunslinger” and the vigilante makes for good drama: but how is this credible in a lawyer?

Image Credit: Screenshot from Vimeo

There’s a reason the commercial is so over-the-top: it seems to be part of the attorney ad genre, especially as covered by blogs like Above the Law. Breaking Bad’s sleazy lawyer Sal Goodman has similarly dramatic commercials, featuring the character in front of a Constitution-filled background invoking the tagline “Better Call Saul!”:

Locally here in Austin, we have several equally colorful attorneys who seem to take the city’s unofficial “Keep It Weird” logo as part of their ethos. One such attorney, David Komie of Komie & Morrow, has billboards around Austin that celebrate the fact that he is “the attorney that rocks.”

Image Credit: Austin Chronicle

His dreadlocked visage and leather jacket here perform a rock-and-roll image to appeal to the residents of the Live Music Capital of the World; even though the banner on his firm’s website puts him in a more traditional blue button-up, his biography mentions the name of his band. As Austin sketch comedy group Hustle Show puts it,

At least as far as the ads are concerned, David Komie combines two fun archetypes: the “Better call Saul!”-style billboard lawyer, who’s just trying to make his name and number more memorable than the next guy, and the middle-aged Austin rocker dude who has a square day job but, because it's Austin, wants to let you know that after he punches that clock, things are going get a little crazy.

Another local attorney, Adam Reposa, uses a more traditionally Texan image for his commercials:

The self-proclaimed DWI Badass here relies on a fabulous biker mustache, black cowboy hat, and gruff demeanor to convey that not only is he a lawyer, but one to be feared when you try and stop Americans from enjoying their freedoms. Here, he drives a monstrously large truck and repeatedly slams it into the smaller economy car, to emblematize his approach to the legal system. It’s not a little scary and, as my attorney friend informed me, against the rules of the State Bar of Texas to advertise in such an undignified fashion. (Perhaps it's no accident that Reposa has been held in contempt of court for lewd handgestures.)

Image Credit: Vice Magazine

Why are videos/images like these so prevalent within the genre? Perhaps it’s just to attract Hollywood deals and reality show producers. But not all of these characters actually become entertainment characters. In part, these videos get made because they draw attention, they work. There seems to me to be a classist angle to this: if you’re not familiar with the legal system or without financial means, you’re likely to find out about attorneys through popular media. You might be suspicious of a lawyer with “decorum,” because you want an attorney who can identify with your experiences and needs. If you have access to money or are of a certain class, you want a “tasteful” lawyer, the kind you might find in a biglaw firm who doesn’t need to advertise for business. If you find yourself mocking Jamie Casino, perhaps it’s a sign you don’t actually need legal representation. If you have been injured by your interactions with a corporate entity, you probably do want a legal superhero to save you.

In that case: rock on, David Komie. Rock on.

Winning Humility at Awards Shows

Rachel Schneider — Tue, 28 Jan 2014 03:15:06 +0000

Image Credit: Huffington Post/Getty Images

The Grammys provided plenty of viz bait: Beyoncé twerking with Jay-Z, unlikely performing duos like Robin Thicke and the band Chicago, Pharrell’s be-memed hat, and Taylor Swift’s GIF-able dancing. However, what I want to discuss is something that occurred after the Grammys: Macklemore, who won awards for Best New Artist, Best Rap Song, Best Rap Performance, and Best Rap Album, acknowledged another victor after the fact.

On his Instagram, Macklemore not only tweeted a picture of a text he sent to his fellow nominee Kendrick Lamar, whose album good kid, m.A.A.d. city was also nominated for Best Rap Album, but also explained the image to his readers:

Image Credit: Screenshot from Instagram

It seems like Macklemore may have anticipated some haters here, who would agree with his assessment. But to privately send Kendrick Lamar his sympathy is one thing; to show it to others on the Internet is quite a different act. If rap is a genre known for battling, here Macklemore displays how “honored” and “completely blown away to win anything much less 4 Grammys” he is. Instead of asserting his talent, he gives his thanks to his fans and bluntly tells Lamar, “You got robbed.” Saying “That’s what this is about. Progress and art,” Macklemore plays the part of a liberal do-gooder, conscious of his humility. If he failed to show respect in his acceptance speech, he does so here. How does this rhetoric also work alongside the Grammys’ performance of his hit “Same Love”?

The enormous spectacle—the song is taken over by Madonna’s “Open Your Heart” and Queen Latifah marrying 33 couples, many of whom were gay/lesbian—moves Macklemore away from center stage, literally. This may be necessarily, considering that Macklemore has been critiqued as a straight white man for speaking on behalf of GLBT rights in “Same Love” in place of queer black performers, as well as directing critiques to a largely African-American hip-hop community without acknowledging his cultural privilege. Writing about this particular Instagram, the New York Times’s Jon Caramanica frames it as “a cleansing and an admission of guilt” for succeeding in rap without proper street cred:

So when Macklemore bests Mr. Lamar — and Jay Z, Drake and Kanye West — for a rap award, he makes sure that he kisses the ring. “I robbed you” is a strikingly powerful phrase in this context: a white artist’s muscling into a historically black genre, essentially uninvited, and taking its laurel. In a nutshell, this is the entire cycle of racial borrowing in an environment of white privilege: black art, white appropriation, white guilt, repeat until there’s nothing left to appropriate.

It’s interesting to read this moment against other award acceptance speeches, as the genre requires artists to show gratitude and humility in their moment of triumph. Witness, for example, Sally Field’s tearful declaration that “you like me, right now, you like me” for the 1985 Best Actress Oscar:

Yet if Sally Field musters this earnest thanks for her second Oscar win, the extremely talented and frequently-nominated Meryl Streep playfully mocks the genre in such moments as when she stated at the 2004 Emmys, “There are some days when I myself think I’m overrated … but not today.” As The New Yorker’s Michael Schulman says, “The Meryl Streep acceptance speech is an art unto itself: elegant, loopy, cunningly self-aware, and impeccably delivered—in short, everything you expect from a Meryl Streep performance, condensed to three minutes. Where else can you see fake humility, fake gratitude, and fake spontaneity delivered with such aplomb?”

Image Credit: Know Your Meme

Though, perhaps the most infamous awards speech came at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, where Kanye West interrupted Taylor Swift’s speech to praise Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies” video: “Yo Taylor, I’m really happy for you, I’ll let you finish, but Beyoncé has one of the best videos of all time. One of the best videos of all time!” Considering that Beyoncé’s husband Jay-Z and West are close friends, it makes sense he’d speak up for her. It’s also interesting that West wasn’t advocating for his own excellence—he interrupted the speech to praise another—but hijacking Swift’s speech got him called a “jackass” by the President. The moment turned into a major meme that even Jay-Z had to imitate, interrupting Kanye at a different awards ceremony. In fact, after that outburst, Kanye himself had to perform humility by publicly apologizing:

Image Credit: The Los Angeles Times

In fact, part of Kanye’s explanation involves an assertion of his character, he’s “a fan of real pop culture!!!” so much so that “I gave my awards to OutKast when they deserved it over me ... that’s what it is.” If not humble for Beyoncé on the stage, he later insists that he bows to the greats too.

Kind of like how Macklemore did, too. It might be interesting to consider what kinds of humility can be possible within moments of triumph. How can you be authentically humble or a gracious winner, especially depending on your position within the community? For many of his fans, Macklemore’s text was him showing he was a good sport. For others like Jon Caramanica, Macklemore’s appeal failed:

In his effort to be gracious, Macklemore was uncomfortably splitting hairs. As has so often happened in the year or so since he emerged as a pop force, an act that was presumably meant to be selfless and open-minded instead came off as one of self-congratulatory magnanimity.

In such large venues as nationally televised programming, it may be hard to win over all audiences. But perhaps #respect never hurts.

Beyonce's ***Flawless Feminism

Rachel Schneider — Mon, 20 Jan 2014 23:46:19 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot from "***Flawless" video

I’m so glad to be back on viz again after some time away, especially as having to write posts again gives me the chance to discuss Beyoncé Knowles’s newest record, Beyoncé, which was released without any press or preview in late December as a “visual album.” The album has 14 songs and 17 videos included in it. While critics had things to say about Jay-Z’s verse on “Drunk in Love” and the remixed audio from the 1986 Challenger disaster in “XO,” the most noticeable song was “***Flawless,” which features an excerpt from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED talk on feminism. Paste Magazine’s review of the album noted the album’s feminist thematics, which others have discussed as well. Since I’d like to add to this conversation about Beyoncé’s feminism, I thought I’d take up how Beyoncé’s visuals, especially in “***Flawless,” depict those concerns.

Image Credit: Beyonce's SoundCloud

Some necessary backstory for the song, however: the major verses actually were first previewed in May 2013 in a track called “Bow Down/I Been On.” The cover depicts the singer wearing a pretty pink dress while surrounded by trophies; yet the proud young girl’s visage is contrasted by the song’s bridge:

Bow down bitches, bow bow down bitches
Bow down bitches, bow bow down bitches
H-town vicious, h-h-town vicious
I’m so crown, bow bow down bitches

The rough vocals emphasize the “H-town vicious” identity she’s claiming here as she announces her superiority; the “crown” imagery links to her husband’s own assertions of power as it also reinforces her position as Queen Bey. The heavily modulated vocal pitches her braggadocio into masculine tones, juxtaposing her aggression here with the girl power rhetoric of her earlier song catalogue. Critiquing Beyoncé’s language here, Rahiel Tesfamariam notes, “While intentionally deciding to have an all-woman band was a cutting-edge and progressive decision for Beyoncé to make, why would she undermine it by releasing a song that says she reigns supreme over other women?” How can we reconcile the female slur with the empowerment that Beyoncé purports to offer as a declared feminist?

The song’s remix into “***Flawless,” which pairs these lines with both Adichie’s discourse and video from Beyoncé’s 1993 appearance on Star Search, turns Beyoncé’s declaration of superiority into an invitation for other women to join her in accepting themselves as “flawless.” Even as the framing video points out a less successful moment (her group loses out to the generic metal band Skeleton Crew) for the star, we read it within her larger career arc as an incredibly successful performer. The Beyoncé who confronts the camera here is familiar: tiny shorts, beautiful wavy long hair, heavy jewelry. However, her plaid shirt and wide eyes are tougher and more aggressive from, say, the Beyoncé of “XO.” The camera weaves back and forth towards her as if in battle and the dancing at the video’s end where she’s surrounded by four dancers seems to remix the famous “Single Ladies” dance—the hands here more back and forth faster, the movements are jerkier.

Image Credit: Perez Hilton

The shift into the Adichie excerpt in the song’s middle creates a visual and aural correction to these earlier moments. If Beyoncé dominates the screen early on, we see punk-looking men and women moshing and Beyoncé is only occasionally visible within the crowd. Other women present the same confident direct gaze to the camera as Adichie declares, “We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls: ‘You can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful, but not too successful. Otherwise, you will threaten the man.’” Reading this in contrast with the earlier lyrics, it’s as if Beyoncé is responding to her critics. In other words, when Beyoncé asks women to “bow down, bitches,” she’s not demeaning other women. She’s just repping her own greatness, and in so doing, encouraging other women to see that as being possible for them, too. Likewise, when Adichie mentions that “We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way that boys are,” the album’s other songs like “Rocket,” “Blow,” and “Drunk in Love” show Beyoncé as sexually aggressive in the marital bed, “graining on that wood.” The kind of feminism that Beyoncé constructs within “***Flawless” unapologetically claims visual, verbal, and sexual equality with men.

Image Credit: Screenshot from "Drunk in Love" video

If the early song declares her own process, the hook where she croons, “I woke up like this, I woke up like this / We flawless, ladies tell ‘em,” shifts into the inclusive “we.” All the ladies (single or not) are flawless, too. The title’s three asterisks perhaps don’t just stand in for the three-star rating Girls’ Tyme received. They also serve as an ellipsis for listeners to read into: do the asterisks acknowledge how woman’s flawlessness is always conditional, represent Beyoncé’s humility, or note her own work-in-progress as a black feminist?

Image Credit: Screenshot from "***Flawless" video

However, as I’ve been writing this blog post today, I’ve been following some of the commentary on Richard Sherman’s boasts at the NFC title game, where an amazing play on his part prevented a San Francisco 49ers touchdown. Sherman, a cornerback for the Super Bowl-bound Seattle Seahawks, declared himself “the best corner in the game” in an interview with ESPN’s Erin Andrews, and talked some trash about the 49ers’ Michael Crabtree. Many media personalities have been hand-wringing about Sherman’s “classlessness.” An intersectional reading of “***Flawless” might also point out how the title’s asterisks note the problems of African-American success: to demand your competitors to acknowledge your greatness and to “bow down” invites heavy criticism. Perhaps Beyoncé’s visual and verbal immodesty might then be true feminism: asserting equality of excellence across race and gender.

Framing Subjects: Arnold Newman’s Editorial Practice

Rachel Schneider — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 06:18:36 +0000

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

Walking through the Harry Ransom Center’s Arnold Newman: Masterclass exhibit with a photographer friend helped me notice more than Newman’s numerous famous subjects. Creating a portrait requires more than just telling someone to smile or to stand in fair light; good photographers must understand how composition affects the final product. Framing matters, whether that’s done by putting wood around a picture or deciding where and how you crop the shot. The exhibit allows visitors to examine Newman’s artistic process, showing the evidence of how he edited his raw photographs into finished portraits. I want to look at in this post both his famous shot of Igor Stravinsky and his created “portrait” of Marilyn Monroe to think more about what we can learn about visual and non-visual editorial practice.

As the exhibit’s catalog states, Newman’s photography was often put into the category of “environmental portraiture.” As William Ewing defines the term, this meant that Newman

would usually situate the person in their library, living room, laboratory, studio or office. But he himself was never comfortable with the term (which is just as well, since today its ecological connotations ring jarringly in our ears). He thought the “environmental” label did not give enough credit to what he termed his “symbolic portraits” [...] Newman also complained that the label was simply too restrictive: “People started calling me the father of the environmental portrait,” he explained, “[but] the moment you put a label on something there is no room to move. And I never thought in such terms, and I refuse to think in terms of labels…” (17)

His famous portrait of Igor Stravinsky, which was taken in 1946 when he was commissioned by Harper’s Bazaar’s Alexey Brodovitch to photograph the composer, actually took on a significant afterlife as one of his most famous works, endlessly included in retrospectives of his career. However, it’s worth looking at the negatives to see how this portrait came to be.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

The contact sheet on display in the exhibit shows four different versions of Stravinsky posed with the grand piano; each contains a different pose, whether it’s him standing with his hand on his chin, or his head tilted back as he sits before the piano. The one Newman marks to use has Stravinsky posing with his left hand against his head and his right hand holding onto the piano, his face posed straight towards the camera. The picture reaches from below the piano to the high ceilings’ crown molding above. Within the photograph’s overall composition, Stravinsky is dwarfed by his surroundings. Yet Newman’s final print makes an even more dramatic cut, choosing to locate Stravinsky in the very far left bottom corner of the picture. The framing here highlights the instrument’s centrality to understanding and representing Stravinsky, as the piano’s highly geometric lid dominates the space, but the picture’s sharp angles draw the eye back to the subject. In other words, by cropping his original picture, Newman creates a more striking portrait, one that lets the viewer feel both Stravinsky’s awe-inspiring musical talent and his gentle humanity.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

As Jim pointed out in his post, the 1962 Marilyn Monroe series is striking as well, though perhaps more so because Marilyn herself has frequently been the artist’s subject. In his series of photographs with her and Carl Sandberg, viewers can better see how Newman constructs his subject through cropping. William Ewing explains the circumstances surrounding this shoot thus:

The frame itself is one from several rolls of film exposed at a private party ... The actress is shown across the series as relaxed and playful, though a little tired, and the intimate relationship she enjoyed with Sandburg is evident and touching. However, none of this is shown in the selected fragment. One can easily imagine a magnificent Monroe portrait by Newman—one that would have become a famed icon—but the photographer never succeeded in getting the star to pose for him. (101)

The contact sheet for this series shows a variety of Monroe’s playful postures, as well as Newman’s choice of how to crop her for the finished product:

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

Newman’s framing here takes even more dramatic shape than in his Stravinsky portrait, which merely chooses within a composed shot a more striking slice. Here, Newman actually cuts out another person, focusing instead just on Monroe’s face. Ewing’s following commentary on the result is entirely disapproving:

The blow-up was not a portrait in the classic sense. It was not reciprocal; it was not an exchange. Where, in Newman’s approach, the legitimacy of cropping from a 4 × 5 or 8 × 10-inch format was implicit, the same cannot be said of cropping from a casual 35mm negative. The close-up is uncharacteristically grainy and bears no resemblance to the studied compositions of all Newman’s other works. Here, we may have evidence of the corrupting influence of celebrity. Newman could not pin Monroe down, so he took his opportunity to fabricate a “portrait” from the scant materials at hand. (101)

Celebrity may have in fact influenced this creation, if only in how well the portrait’s graininess and Monroe’s pensive expression fit within her larger iconography.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

Her expression, highlighted by the close crop on her face, invites viewers to see her as isolated, contemplative, or mournful. As created here, the Marilyn we see does not reflect the intimate, relaxed surroundings within the original pictures—recontextualized, it takes on a different, constructed meaning. The insistent "MUST CROP OUT" of the proof sheet emphaiszes that construction as it puts her in a new frame.

Newman’s playful self-portrait of himself posed with the Stravinsky portrait that I opened this post with I think suggests some of what framing does and allows artists, both those who work in visual and written mediums. The contexts and surroundings and cuts you make as author focus the audience’s attention for your own interpretive point—because, if portraits are meant to reveal the subject, what gets revealed is the photographer’s choice, not the subject’s.

The opinions expressed herein are solely those of viz. blog, and are not the product of the Harry Ransom Center.

What Pride and Prejudice Tells Us About The Future of the Book

Rachel Schneider — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 22:02:15 +0000

Image Credit: The Independent

While Caroline Bingley enumerates the accomplishments of elegant females in Pride and Prejudice, Mr. Darcy makes one significant addition: “to all this she must yet add something more substantial, in the improvement of her mind by extensive reading.” This pivotal scene, in which Darcy hints at the attraction to Elizabeth Bennet that blindsides her later, may charm audiences in part because Jane Austen, like her readers, cares about the written word. Austen parodied the sentimental and the gothic novels respectively in Love and Freindship and Northanger Abbey, defended the novel as a genre in Northanger Abbey, and showed her characters equally interested in reading. Fanny Price rhapsodizes as she joins a circulating library and becomes “a chooser of books” in Mansfield Park, Anne Elliot discusses poetry and prose with Captain Benwick in Persuasion, and Sanditon’s proto-villain Sir Edward Denham fancies himself “quite in the line of the Lovelaces.” Yet reading practices today are not the same as they were ten years ago, let alone as they were when Pride and Prejudice was first published on 28 January 1813.

I’d like to take the opportunity of this 200th anniversary to examine how we read Pride and Prejudice in the twenty-first century, and how changes in the reading practices surrounding the book help us answer the questions we have about the future of reading and the book as a physical object.

Image Credit: Digital Writing and Research Lab

Several possible answers arose for me while listening to the DWRL’s Zeugma Podcast. In the recent Reading episode, group members Eric Detweiler, Lisa Gulesserian, Hala Herbly, and Michael Roberts think through the relationship between technology and reading by discussing “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” interviewing Bob Stein from the Institute for the Future of the Book, and describing virtual reading and writing processes. While at first questions like “Is print dying? and if so, what will happen to reading? How does toggling between Internet tabs change the way we think about reading? How does crowdsourcing?” might not seem related to Austen’s extremely popular text, Pride and Prejudice demonstrates how technology has affected reading practices, as well as how technology has changed the reception of Austen’s “darling child.”

Image Credit: The Atlantic Wire

While we might not think of the printed book as a technology, it evolved to store texts. Likewise, its forms and design have changed significantly. One example of this is the binding: during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, books were commonly sold in temporary boards, and were bound by owners later for decorative purposes. The Atlantic’s article on 200 years of Pride and Prejudice covers suggests that we can we read something of the work’s reception in the ways the text has been packaged. For example, the peacocks in Hugh Thomson’s design, repeated over the next century, first serve to visually represent the theme of “pride,” but then become self-reflexive and incorporated into the text’s iconography, similar now to Darcy’s wet shirt. Likewise, C.E. Brock’s illustrations, produced for an 1895 edition of the text, now appear on postcards distributed by the Jane Austen Centre of Bath. These pictures, with their pastel colors and delicate-featured figures, reinforce readings of Pride and Prejudice that highlight the book’s romantic relationships over its more satirical underpinnings.

Image Credit: The Republic of Pemberley

Electronic technology has allowed for individual readers to share their experiences more widely than before. During the period in which Austen wrote, as described eloquently by Heather Jackson, marginalia written in texts began to record emotional reactions to texts as well as noting interesting passages. Individual readers might write in their copy of the book, then share it with another friend who could not only read the marginalia but also add to it. Now websites like Rap Genius, plugins like the Institute for the Future of the Book’s CommentPress, and e-readers like the Kindle or the Nook allow readers to store and share marginal commentary with a broad, unknown audience. These experiences not only allow readers to share affective experiences, but offer critics the opportunity to learn more about how texts are consumed and interpreted.

Image Credit: Screenshot from Kindle website

Visiting the Kindle website allows people to browse through the numerous highlights and comments left by readers of this edition of Pride and Prejudice. While many of these seem to reflect personal responses, as J. Keime notes that “I am loving this even more than I remember!”, others like love me hate me, who writes that “I love this book it is so well detailed. I love this book and I am only 9,” seem to be about constructing and sharing an identity with a reading community. This can also be seen in video book reviews on YouTube. E-readers both allow for this greater shared experience of text, but also enable new kinds of private reading—for example, no one except the person next to you can see what exactly it is you are reading.

Image Credit: Gathering Bones

Readings can also be enacted through visual texts that readers can create and share with others online. This includes fan-created works like comics, music videos, GIFs, memes, and other visual tributes that comment on other interpretations. While the BBC’s adaptation of Pride and Prejudice itself presents an interpretation of Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet, readers of that text can comment on it with pictures like the one above, which offers a reading of Darcy’s character. While probably no man in 1813 referred to himself as “Cucumber McCool,” the language situates Darcy’s motivations and feelings within contemporary discourse. It also connects back to the eighteenth-century novel’s own rich practices of mediation: Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa contains not only decorative frontispieces but also mad letters and music sheets, whereas Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy contains black, marbled, and blank pages, each of which encourage different kinds of textual engagement. Pride and Prejudice’s third-person narrative is interrupted by Mr. Darcy’s “two sheets of letter paper, written quite through, in a very close hand,” which he gives Elizabeth to read in order so she might understand his motivations through the novel’s first half.

These early attempts at combining media are thus reduplicated today in transmedia projects like The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, which embeds a 24-year old communications major named Lizzie Bennet in a world of Twitter, Tumblr, and William Darcys. Her video blogs, like the one above, involve not just her interactions with her fellow characters, but also Q&As with her audience. Readers can not only follow her tweets, but tweet at her, leaving comments on her videos and Facebook posts. What this suggests is that while active engagement in reading has remained constant over the centuries, technology shapes how the reading experience directs that attention.

The LA Review of Books recently posted several thoughtful reviews of critical works on Pride and Prejudice and Austen's oeuvre to honor her most famous novel’s anniversary. In one of the reviews, Audrey Bilger and Susan Celia Greenfield note how central interpretive acts are to Pride and Prejudice:

Austen encourages us to read people the way we ought to read books: wary of our first impressions, ready to search for the good in others, willing to recognize our own lack of self-knowledge.

The sheer number of reviews alone suggests the power of Austen's hold on our contemporary imagination: we read and re-read Austen to find the truths she may offer us, whether those truths are about eighteenth or twenty-first century culture. Perhaps the best tribute any of us can offer her is to always keep reading in this way, no matter through what medium.

Wild Horses and Bayonets Couldn’t Drag My Binders Full of Women Away: Political Satire on Web 2.0

Rachel Schneider — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 14:13:58 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot from Twitter

Inauguration officials estimate that about one million people crowded the National Mall this weekend to watch Barack Obama be sworn in as President. While this crowd was smaller than the 1.8 million who attended his first inauguration in 2008, a number of luminaries were present: Beyoncé, Stevie Wonder, and Invisible Obama. Apparently Invisible Obama had a busy day planning his inaugural ball outfit, surprising Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, and acting as a “seat filler.”

In case you’re wondering who Invisible Obama is, he is a parodic Twitter feed started during the 2012 Republican National Convention. As Clint Eastwood lectured an empty chair occupied by an imaginary Obama, Invisible Obama tweeted his responses back. Over the course of this last year’s presidential campaign, a number of individuals used new media platforms to satirically comment on the election and the debate. Yet despite the fact that the election is over, however, Invisible Obama persists in commenting on political developments and other invisibility-related issues (like Lennay Kekua). As I spent two weeks of December in Boston reviewing myriad eighteenth-century political satires for my dissertation, this moment finds me thinking about satire’s evolution from the eighteenth century to our present age. New forms of media—and the new possibilities for remediation that they offer—create different opportunities for rhetors. In other words, as the 1662 Licensing Act’s lapse and evolving engraving practices enabled satire’s rise during the eighteenth century, new media platforms like Twitter and Tumblr expand satire’s spread today. However, it seems worth asking whether or not the various proliferating political memes truly function as satire. Can we compare Twitter’s Paul Ryan Gosling to Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal? And what insights does the comparison provide? What kinds of political impact can satire make? And in what ways does it persist within the popular political discourse?

Image Credit: Eighteenth-Century Collections Online

Eighteenth-century satire took various forms, from text and image to performance. Whereas Alexander Pope multiplied footnotes upon footnotes in his 1729 Dunciad Variorum to mock Grub Street figures like Lewis Theobald, Edmund Curll, and Eliza Haywood alongside Grub Street writing conventions, John Gay’s 1728 Beggar’s Opera turned political corruption and popular depictions of criminal life into comic melodies. The period also saw the development of a rich visual satire tradition, as caricaturists like William Hogarth, James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson, and George Cruikshank satirized eighteenth-century society at large. If satire is meant to enact critique, eighteenth-century satire aimed itself at many different objects. For example, James Gillray’s 1792 print A Voluptuary under the horrors of Digestion directs its ire at the spendthrift Prince Regent, who was known for his excessive eating, drinking, and gambling.

Image Credit: The British Museum

The satire here lies in the careful background details. The feathers and candles surround what should be Prinny’s crest, which here has been changed into a fork and knife crossed across a plate. His bulging gut contrasts with his carefully curled hair and elegant fob. Dice lie on the floor as a dripping pot sits behind him, both signs of his conspicuous consumption. The print hanging on the wall depicts Luigi Cornaro, a Venetian nobleman who famously wrote The Sure and Certain Method of Attaining and Long and Healthful Life, a text reprinted multiple times during the eighteenth century. Gillray juxtaposes the two gentlemen not only to contrast the wastefulness of “prince of whales” with Cornaro’s sobriety, but also to generally indict upper-crust voluptuaries. If other satirists openly critiqued the fop and the macaroni as cultural types, Gillray took on the most famous and powerful example of them all.

Today’s satire groups around similar topics, but its different forms enable different effects. For example, the Binders Full of Women meme consists of images which sprung up on Facebook and Tumblr quickly after Romney answered a question about gendered pay inequity during the second presidential debate with a story of how he chose women for his gubernatorial cabinet from “whole binders full of women.” Like all memes, the visual requires popular cultural knowledge to interpret.

Image Credit: Binders Full of Women

This example takes a screen still from the 1987 movie Dirty Dancing and overlays on top of it a rewritten line from the film: “No one puts Baby in a corner” is now updated to “No one puts Baby in a binder.” The reinterpretation works insofar as the viewer recognizes the original context, where Patrick Swayze’s Johnny Castle shows up at the movie’s conclusion to encourage the character Baby to dance with him, and thus rebel against her family’s attempts to enforce gendered and class-based restrictions. Thus, by juxtaposing Romney’s statement with this image, the meme connects Romney with similar forces of gendered oppression.

But what are the meme’s uses? The Democratic Party quickly adopted and employed the meme to articulate arguments against many of Romney’s policy stances, co-opting the popular response for political purposes of their own. Yet commentators like Amanda Marcotte have argued that Romney’s earlier attempts to seek out qualified women for political positions are good policy, if oddly expressed. In other words, while the meme works to satirize the popular image of Romney as a patriarchal figure—and the language of restraint inherent in the word “binders”—its cultural extensions may in fact work to ridicule policies that do benefit women.

Image Credit: The Daily What

The Horses and Bayonets meme, which developed after a comment by President Obama during the last debate in which he criticized Romney’s comments on defense cuts, likewise overlays text and image to make a pointed statement. In this case, the meme gets reimagined into a Romney/Ryan slogan where Civil War re-enactors with rifles are “leading the charge” for the Republican team. The obvious Photoshopped rifles included not only suggest a link to the NRA, but also an underlying violence within the political debate.

Image Credit: Screenshot from Twitter

Similarly, many satirists enacted political commentary by creating parodic Twitter accounts. Taking advantage of the first-person expressive mode of the platform, individuals as varied as Paul Ryan Gosling, Diamond Joe Biden, Bane Capital, Big Bird, Rafalca Romney, and Mexican Mitt Romney began to comment on the election both in and through the persona of political actors. As Bane Capital, playing off Rush Limbaugh’s comment that The Dark Knight Rises was attempting to smear Romney because the movie’s villain was named Bane, tweets as a pathological venture capital firm ready to “free Gotham’s people… from taxes on income above $250,000 per year,” the feed played on public perceptions about Romney’s morally-dubious business ethics. On the other side, Obama Translated juxtaposes Obama’s celebrated coolness with the popular imagination of what an angry black man would say. In the picture above, we see how Obama's anger translator Luther reads Obama's inaugural address. This feed, however, differs from many of the other Tumblr or Twitter-based satire of the election in that it is still ongoing—and created by Key & Peele, a comedy duo with a Comedy Central show.

Looking back upon the variety of political memes, it’s easier to see how they functioned and what they could do. An account like Obama Translated in part continues to have life not only because Key & Peele have branded the idea, but also because Obama remains a powerful figure. Something like Binders Full of Women may still be able to comment on sexism, but Romney’s fall means that he is no longer the most useful means through which to do so. However, perhaps the difference between something like Paul Ryan Gosling and Gulliver’s Travels has much to do with the medium. While Gulliver responded to a political moment, its method of publication provided the kind of narrative and conclusion that new media platforms don’t, without specifically building towards it (as in the case with Mayor Emanuel). It may also have to do with the status attendant the book as an object that new media has not yet had the chance to obtain—in other words, we see A Modest Proposal as something worth preserving, but not Bane Capital. Yet as I’ve read through eighteenth-century satires that attack the Duke of Newcastle’s 1750 election to Cambridge’s chancellorship, I have to work hard to reconstruct the moment. If eighteenth-century satire favors only slightly-veiled characterizations that make identification a guessing game for readers, new media satire retains all the same karotic specificity, but builds through repacking cultural products in new ways. I’ll be interesting to see what afterlives new media satire finds in the time to come.

New Forms for Old Needs in Norman Bel Geddes’s "House of Tomorrow"

Rachel Schneider — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 08:43:11 +0000

Image Credit: Metropolis Magazine

Walking through the Harry Ransom Center’s excellent Norman Bel Geddes exhibit, one thing that struck me is that while Bel Geddes is particularly famous for his large industrial designs—radios, cars, cities, and stadiums, for example—he also directed his talents towards the intimate spaces of the American home. Before Bel Geddes designed prefabricated homes for the Housing Corporation for America in 1939, or published his 1932 book Horizons, he wrote an article called “The House of Tomorrow” for the April 1931 issue of the Ladies Home Journal. The “twentieth-century style” he describes is one that he sees uniting form and function anew for the needs of the twentieth-century individual—or rather, what he imagines the twentieth-century individual to be.

Image Credit: Screenshot from Norman Bel Geddes's Horizons

Bel Geddes’ design philosophy is evident both within the article and in his manifesto Horizons, published the following year. As Bel Geddes and others saw himself principally as a set designer, he reframes his interest in industrial design as a kind of art for the modern era, where design has greater importance than ever before:

We are entering an era which, notably, shall be characterized by design in four specific phases: Design in social structure to insure the organization of people, work, wealth, leisure. Design in machines that shall improve working conditions by eliminating drudgery. Design in all objects of daily use that shall make them economical, durable, convenient, congenial to every one. Design in the arts, painting, sculpture, music, literature, and architecture, that shall inspire the new era. (4-5)

Bel Geddes here presents himself as an artist, who, like all others, “is sensitive to his environment” (6). He carefully notes the circumstances of life in 1930s America—post-industry, mid-Depression—and argues that they require new approaches to design in all these four phrases. He also works to break down the divisions between these different areas when he argues that “in the point of view of the artist who fails to see an aesthetic appeal in such objects of contemporary life as a railway train, a suspension bridge, a grain elevator, a dynamo, there is an inconsistency” (11). Bel Geddes argues that as modern life has centered increasingly around work, there is a greater need for conveniences, objects that function to promote ease and efficiency. Thus, while late nineteenth century art defined itself through Walter Pater’s formulation of “art for art’s sake,” Bel Geddes sees art in the perfect union of form and function

Visual design is concerned with form, space, color; with the proportioning of solids and voids and the rhythmic spacings of these elements. The governing factor as to what is pleasing to the eye is the idea, which is of an emotional nature—an emotion of pleasure, satisfaction, excitement, exhilaration, stimulation. (18)

What’s interesting here is how much emphasis Bel Geddes in this quotation places on the emotions of the artist. Elsewhere in Horizons, when he predicts that twentieth-century art will detach itself from galleries and statuary, he describes what he sees as the continuity between the art of the past and tomorrow: “The work of the artist always has been, and will be, a distinctly individual product—the antithesis of ‘machine-made.’ Fundamentally, the artist is an emotional person in that he relies more upon his feelings and intuitions than upon reasoning” (11). It’s easy to think that functional design must be based upon reasoning, but Bel Geddes flips the script to emphasize emotion, feeling, and intuition—language typically associated with the feminine.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

However, does publishing “The House of Tomorrow” in Ladies Home Journal necessarily imply that the twentieth-century figure he imagines is a feminine one? There could be a reading of the article that would point out the fact that the house is pink, that would consider the intertextual relationship between the drawings and discussion of design with the inset poem, “Hunches” by Elizabeth Boyd Borie, that would connect Bel Geddes’ intuitive designs with feminine thinking and feminine spaces. Yet such a reading might be incongruous with the Ladies Home Journal’s history, a magazine which published not only the muckraking work of Jane Addams but also Frank Lloyd Wright’s architectural designs. This widely-read magazine, like Bel Geddes himself, often contemplated questions of function, questions Bel Geddes emphasizes in “The House of Tomorrow.”

In fact, Bel Geddes quickly establishes the reasons he sees for a change in home planning and design: “The keynote of all the good contemporary work is that it must perfectly suit its ultimate purpose. We have returned to simplicity because we have realized in this age that the overornamentation and elaboration of the past are not in keeping with us today. We are more forthright people than were our forefathers, we bother less with forms and conventions, and so it is surely fitting that we carry our ideas into our homes.” This description of the modern American individual is one perhaps that sounds suited equally to our age as to the 1930s; he neatly transitions from thinking about the people to the houses that should shelter such folks.

Image Credit: Alcade / The Harry Ransom Center

His solutions include moving the bedrooms from the front of the house to the back, nearer to the sunshine and expansive yards that are beautiful to behold. Even as he proposes to build more with steel girders and concrete, which might sound ugly, he notes that “in pursuit of light and air, since we are not bound down by any arbitrary limits, we can make our windows stretch the whole length of our rooms,” and likewise turn our roofs into flat spaces suitable for gardens. The emphasis he places on light, convenience, and the unity between interior and exterior design all bespeak his interest in making the home a place that does not trap its inhabitants but allows them “to take full advantage of all the innumerable aids to more convenient living that have been evolved in the past few years.” This emphasis on function is much in line with the kinds of rhetoric used in 1940s and 1950s advertising that encourages women to buy appliances to help with their domestic labor, but what’s refreshing is how ungendered his language is throughout the piece. If Bel Geddes expects the modern house “to assure complete satisfaction of every material and psychic need of the owner” (138-9), it seems that ownership is shared equally between the men and women in the space. Women have since the Victorian period been seen as the domestic goddesses, but Bel Geddes contemplates a twentieth century where their needs and interests extend beyond the interiors outward. Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising, considering that Bel Geddes changed his name to include the “Bel” when he published his early writings alongside his first wife and collaborator Helen Belle Sneider, but Bel Geddes’s futurism offers new forms for old needs for women as well as men.

The opinions expressed herein are solely those of viz. blog, and are not the product of the Harry Ransom Center.

The Artist's Speech

Rachel Schneider — Thu, 03 May 2012 05:11:13 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

H/T: Emily Friedman

The audience hears violins sawing tensely as they watch a man scream on screen; only, he is mute. He moves his mouth, but we only learn his words through intertitles: “I won’t talk! I won’t say a word!!!” So opens the 2011 Academy Award-winning film The Artist.

Medium and message here easily coordinate as The Artist uses the techniques of silent film to tell the story of protagonist George Valentin, who refuses to speak.

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

But why won’t he talk? David Haglund speculates that Valentin cannot act in talkies because his heavy French accent obscures his speech for American audiences; Marika Rose suggests that the film’s silence comments on changing gender roles. Both of these answers point towards interesting concerns that The Artist pursues. However, I’d like to think more about how The Artist privileges alternative forms of speech and how the film’s visual rhetorics comment on reality and representation.

Image Credit: The Northwest Trail

One obvious place where this comes into contention is the film’s return to portraits and images of George Valentin. We see his face reflected back to us—and to him—on magazine covers, front pages, film screens, and even full-length portraits. These images not only demonstrate Valentin’s popularity but show us a successful, charming, and talented artist. But his fall becomes visible as his angry wife repeatedly defaces his pictures and movie patrons step on them as they lay discarded on a wet street.

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

The image stands in so completely for Valentin that speech is unnecessary. As he later drunkenly stares at his shadow and castigates himself for being a “loser,” the shadow walks off, leaving George to destroy all of his films. Saved by the young ingénue Peppy Miller, Valentin himself runs away when he discovers that Peppy has purchased and saved his dapper portrait. When he walks up to a store window and stands in front of a tuxedo, seeing his face reflected above it, we see George alienated from himself. He can confront his image and almost recognizes himself as he used to look, but is pulled out of the moment by a chatty cop. His inability to recognize himself leads to the final climax where he attempts suicide, his burnt-out apartment mirroring his own despair, but the intertitle “BANG!” followed by the image of Peppy’s crashed car punctures the high drama. It is this visualized noise that then opens up his other possibilities for speech.

In fact, The Artist relies not only on the expressive power of the silent image, but also the moving picture. The Artist acts as a pastiche of silent film (specifically referencing its greatest star Rudolph Valentino) and the backstage musicals that comment on them. Certain scenes and plots—like Peppy and George’s scene in A German Affair and Peppy’s rise to leading lady—mirror movies like A Star is Born and Singin' in the Rain. Valentin’s slicked-back hair and overall physique resemble Gene Kelly’s, and The Artist underlines the similarity by making George Valentin a talented dancer whose comeback comes through a final showstopping number. Dance is the language through which Valentin may fluently express himself—he uses it to entertain his audiences, to express his growing affections for Peppy, and to sell himself to Hollywood mogul Al Zimmer. The language of dance, though, is clearly a heightened one, taking us outside of realism. Along with George’s images, the lingering shots of dancing celebrate non-mimetic rhetorics. Sound is too real in George’s nightmare; it threatens humiliation, alienation, and can deafen. Art and artistic expression happen through the visual medium, and can move us beyond speech. Peppy models the ideal viewer experience of Valentin’s film Tears of Love as she weeps over his slow sinking in quicksand.

Image Credit: The Fine Art Diner

While Peppy initially mocks “old actors mugging at the camera to be understood,” she here recognizes the power of melodrama. The scene where Peppy goes into George's dressing room and pretends that he is his coat actually shows characters thinking in the movie clichés that The Artist itself adapts. In fact, as Overthinking It further argues, the film does as well by embracing Jean Dujardin’s overexaggerated physical performance. The website traces through Dujardin’s career as a parodist to show how he uses his “proportionally large face, with big, expressive features” and his “nimble physical energy” to be larger than life, to “perform in a style,” to “imitate other actors who have performed in that style, and “to comment, though his imitation, on what that style means.”

Image Credit: Theiapolis

In The Artist’s case, Dujardin comments on the very silent acting style he embraces and so well embodies. By looking like Valentino and Kelly, he “look[s] backward, making a precursor of the present and commenting on what present movie stars are like by comparing them to a remanifestation of the past.” I might here suggest that his comment is to point out how our present in fact shares similar anxieties with the 1920s and 1930s about realism and representation. Websites like Pinterest and technologies like Photoshop allow for heightened self-representation, just as Peppy's film celebrity starts with a fake mole. While our culture may we recognize that they’re not perfectly mimetic, it’s easy to accept the reality of these unreal representations. In other words, when you live within media, it’s easy to forget the medium. The Artist and Dujardin’s performance ask us to confront this. By refusing traditional filmic speech and reverting to older styles, The Artist asks us to pay attention to these styles, these other forms of speech. By embracing the obviously unreal, we can—like Valentin—learn to speak again, and even find pleasure within it.

I Turn My Camera On, Then My Photoshop

Rachel Schneider — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 05:51:58 +0000

Image Credit: Everett Hiller

H/T: Crushable

While I’ve done some recent fangirling over Ryan Gosling and Benjamin Franklin, I would have never imagined I could be in a photograph with them. At least, not until I saw Everett Hiller’s holiday party photographs, into which he Photoshopped various celebrities.

Image Credit: Everett Hiller

According to Hiller, “Every year my wife and I throw a party and when I send out the photos I add famous people.” The results are extremely entertaining and include some amazing guests: everyone from The Rock and Tom Cruise to George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

Image Credit: Everett Hiller

Hiller’s photographs represent an unusual extension of the kind of fan culture in which Gosling, Whitney Houston, and I Made America participate. While the joke lies in the juxtaposition of major Hollywood celebrities with the homely setting, these recontextualizations act like fan fiction. For example, if Shia LaBeouf is known for his alcohol-fueled antics, placing a bleary-eyed picture of him next to a smirking man builds new stories from established canon. Having an impeccably besuited Neal Patrick Harris amidst drunken revelers winks at his How I Met Your Mother character Barney Stinson, who always takes perfect photographs. Positioning Ryan Gosling among everyday partygoers expands on established Gosling meme fanon, in which Gosling is happy to talk feminism and typography with you.

Image Credit: Everett Hiller

However, these kinds of images also build or serve to make arguments about the nature of the celebrities included. For example, many Republicans accused Obama in 2008 of being a “celebrity” who was out-of-touch with Americans because he was “worr[ied] about the price of arugula”—and they’re still making that argument today. The above image, which integrates Obama in the middle of a middle-class (and otherwise white) party, visually argues that Obama is a Regular Joe who exists on the same level as his fellow citizens. The surprise of the guy in the green hat behind him even naturalizes him into the setting insofar as it would probably be a huge shock for most of us to meet Obama in some guy’s living room.

Image Credit: Everett Hiller

Outside of a political context, however, picturing Tom Cruise cackling while posed on a piñata reinforces the narrative of Cruise as a crazed Scientologist, a narrative that has been used to criticize Scientology’s practices. These photographs work based on an idea of celebrity that is simultaneously near and far: celebrities are both just like us and stand out in the crowd. Hiller’s Photoshopping makes the famous blend in naturally and unnoticeably with their surroundings but also invites viewers to play a game of Where’s Waldo, looking to see how many late-night comedians stand in the background. As Joseph Roach defines celebrity as the possession of “it” or “the arresting, charismatic power of celebrities,” these photographs arrest the celebrities within a visual frame and encourage the viewers to sympathetically merge themselves with them.

Image Credit: Newsweek

This seems like a pretty benign use of Photoshopping technology; however, the placement (and displacement, in the case of Hillary Clinton) of celebrities in new contexts can have the power to shock and disgust. The above image created by Newsweek to grace their magazine cover drew outrage from those who thought Tina Brown was tasteless to put a dead Princess Diana next to the daughter-in-law she will never know. The accompany story, which imagines how Diana might have been at 50, is a kind of fanfiction, but the picture’s power meant that more people focused on it. What we can see from this is that while anybody with the money can create any sort of fictionalized image, Photoshop’s rhetoric is governed by decorum. Using the technology to make funny pictures is fine, but it’s not allowed to pervert truth—probably because it’s so easy to do just that. If perception is reality, Photoshop is a powerful actor in the war of words—and a valuable tool for retooling actors.

I Made America, You're All Welcome!

Rachel Schneider — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 00:00:08 +0000

Image Credit: I Made America

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one person to distract herself from work, Facebook provides. Through the The Second City Network I found a video entitled “Founding Fathers History Pick-Up Lines.” Clearly, I couldn’t resist. I was deeply amused to watch Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, George Washington, and John Adams seduce modern women with such lines as “It’s not the Louisiana Purchase, but it will double in size,” “Never leave for tomorrow what you can screw today,” and “I take the virgin out of Virginia.” The full video below features many more salacious lines, some of which might not be SFW:

More delightful than the video itself was discovering that it is part of a much larger undertaking. I Made America is a transmedia project that relies on multiple media to tell one story: how Franklin, Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, Washington, and John Adams were kidnapped from the past, brought to 2012 Chicago, and the adventures that followed. Transmedia, as described by Henry Jenkins, “represents a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience. Ideally, each medium makes its own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story.” This scattered content then “offers backstory, maps the world, offers us other character’s perspectives on the action, or deepens audience engagement.”

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

In I Made America’s case, a series of videos shows how the Founding Fathers adapt to their new circumstances after being abandoned by the American Revolutionaries for Freedom and Family Super PAC, who brought them to the present to endorse conservative causes. Their modern lives include keg stands, romantic intrigues, drunken bar brawls, open mic nights, and even enhanced science-fiction dioramas. Yet the videos can’t contain the whole story—as the Founders wander about Chicago, their activities are recorded on various social media platforms, which are collated and archived on the series’ website. Fans can thus follow their favorites from Facebook and Twitter into real life interactions with the characters at birthday parties and Cubs games.

Image Credit: Screenshot from It is better to be alone than in bad company

Transmedia thus makes possible new kinds of personalized fan experience. An I Made America fan can watch the first episode, then check out Franklin’s video blogs, read Hamilton’s Tumblr, download Jefferson’s music, and follow Madison’s Twitter feed. The series’ heavy social media presence, however, means that fans can not only produce fanart but also share it with the objects of that art directly.

Image Credit: Polks

Their interactions even have the power to solicit new content: as Benjamin Franklin often eats Pop-Tarts during the episodes, one fan texted Franklin to ask if he had ever put a whole Pop-Tart in his mouth. He then attempted to do so on video, challenged others to respond, and then George Washington posted video of his officemate Caroline attempting the feat. The audience can move from passive reception to active participation.

Image Credit: @GoingMadison

However, what is the purpose of such transmedia projects? If transmedia allows audiences greater interactivity with texts, what kinds of experiences does this make possible? And what distinguishes I Made America from earlier (and more conventionally produced) projects like The Blair Witch Project? According to the original video pitch, I Made America is “not about selling a product, but about telling a story. A story of fiction, reality, comedy, politics, and America.” While comedy predominates, its bent is frequently satirical; we can laugh at the sheer silliness of Benjamin Franklin saying “You’re welcome for French ladies,” but Hamilton demanding “Why don’t you vote?” points out the consistent failure of Americans to participate in the political process.

As the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence remain central to American political discourse, remediating and reimagining the Founders through embodied performance calls into question what we understand America to be. Right now, it’s not just fictional groups like A.R.F.F. who feel like they best understanding the Founding Fathers, it’s also political movements like the Tea Party and legal practitioners of originalism that imagine 2012 America should be governed like its 1788 counterpart. I Made America challenges this by imagining how Thomas Jefferson might answer Newt Gingrich’s assertions of what Jefferson might do, as well as suggesting how inadequately the Founders might be prepared to deal with twenty-first century realities.

At the first season’s end, I Made America’s initial light plot turns serious as John Adams begins a presidential re-election campaign and as viewers learn that A.R.F.F. holds Madison captive. What will happen next can only be predicted through another founder’s words: in this case, I Made America’s creator Mark Muszynski, who planned the series to run “alongside the upcoming election so it can respond in real time to things that are actually happening in our world.” So far, Adams has made a campaign stop at Occupy Chicago and received his former Vice President’s musical endorsement. As fans continue to spread the word about I Made America, I can only wait to see what happens next. Perhaps Hamilton, Adams’s campaign manager, can learn some Chicago-style savvy from @mayoremanuel. I don’t think he needs help with the cursing, though.

Keeping It Weird: Leslie as Austin’s Icon

Rachel Schneider — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 03:12:33 +0000

Image Credit: Austin Culture Map

H/T: Noel Radley

Austin’s Thirteenth Annual East Pet Parade, held just last Saturday, not only celebrated “family, friends, and of course our furry friends,” but also Austin resident Leslie Cochran, who passed away a month before. The organizers encouraged owners to dress their dogs in drag in Cochran’s honor, so Chris Perez dressed her dog Leslie in traditional Leslie garb: a pink bra and a feather boa.

(NSFW after the jump.)

While dogs in drag make an interesting sight, the parade memorialized Leslie not only for his unique fashion but also his status as one of Austin’s most famous residents. The impact of his recent illness and subsequent death stretched from gossip blogs to The New York Times, from Twitter feeds and Facebook posts to City Hall, where Austin’s Mayor Lee Leffingwell declared March 8, the day of his passing, Leslie Cochran Day. When Mayor Leffingwell recognized Leslie in his proclamation as “an icon in the Keep Austin Weird scene for many years,” he indirectly acknowledged that Leslie was an Austin icon because Austin, like Leslie, has been known for being “weird.” Yet his passing seemed to put this into question, as The Huffington Post asked, “Can Austin Stay Weird?” I’d like to take the opportunity here to think through not only Leslie’s status as an Austin icon, but also how Austin’s “weirdness” is put under continual contention.

Image Credit: Austin-American Statesman

One other reason that Leffingwell’s proclamation gives for naming March 8 Leslie Cochran Day is that “many Austin visitors and tourists over the years have an indelible image in their minds of Leslie as a reminder of their trip to our fair city.” Leslie represented Austin in part through his own enacted visibility. His outfits, which often involved high heels, hose, tiaras, and thongs, made him notorious in the South Congress neighborhood and through downtown Austin. This image translated into refrigerator magnet sets in which you could dress Leslie in various costumes, including naughty and nice Santa suits. If Leslie represented Austin, the Austin he displayed was aggressively non-normative. While Leslie himself was friendly, his self-chosen homelessness and clothing directly opposed him to traditional suburban ideas of normal.

Image Credit: Austin-American Statesman

Leslie, though, was not just a fashion plate. While his three mayoral campaigns certainly protested against politics as usual like Screaming Lord Sutch and the Official Monster Raving Loony Party, Leslie also demonstrated an Austinite political activism. The video for his 2000 mayoral campaign shows a man interested in smart growth, transportation, and environmental conservation. However, Leslie also advocated for Austin’s homeless population and, later, police accountability:

One noticeable point that his supporters make is that “Leslie is here for everybody … he’s for the people. He’s here for the homeless.” The video’s evidence for this claim is the images of Leslie holding the baby at Barton Springs, walking around and talking to people outside Waterloo Records, near the Starbucks on Sixth and Congress, people jogging on the Town Lake Trail. As Leslie says, the problem with government is that we’ve got “a whole lot of politicians and very few statesmen.” Leslie never became a member of the state, but his state became tied to Austin’s status as a “weird” city.

Image Credit: Austin-American Statesman

What, however, makes Austin “weird”? While its weirdness has been tied up in things like Eeyore’s Birthday and Hippie Hollow, the slogan’s origins were in supporting local businesses. It was, in Red Wassenich’s words, “a small attempt to counter Austin's descent into rampant commercialism and over-development.” However, Austin’s weirdness has been continually challenged over the last few years. Landmarks like the Cathedral of Junk, Emo’s, and SXSW have disappeared or been corporatized. The city’s east side has undergone significant gentrification. “Keep Austin Weird” was trademarked not by the slogan’s originator, but by a group who uses it to market coffee mugs and bumper stickers. Before his death, Leslie was planning to move from Austin back to Colorado. Austinist even declared that NPR was "so over Austin". In short, when the Dallas Observer can write articles about Austin’s lost cool, you know the city’s cred is in trouble.

Image Credit: Keep Austin Weird

However, what might make Austin Austin is not just its lack of rain or the prevalence of breakfast tacos, but Austinites’ disdain for a changing Austin. In other words, South By is always already uncool, because it always was better before—just like South Congress, the music scene, and everything else. As Austin Culture Map recommends:

“To all the listmakers and smart people calling Austin the greatest, smartest, funnest, most awesomest place ever laid on the earth by God: STOP. Those of us who saw the light emanating from Austin and walked toward it back in the 70s and 80s would like to put up the gates and love our city to death before we lose yet another awesome Austin-tatious cool place like Liberty Lunch or the Armadillo.”

In short, Austin has always been a site for cultural contention between those who treasure Austin as it is and outsiders who want to take part in Austin's unique culture. While Leslie’s death may have motivated much hand-wringing over whether or not Austin is, can be, or still is weird, I’d like to think Austin’s weirdness can never die as long as those here adopt it. In other words: if Austin is going to the dogs, as long as they're wearing pink boas, I think Austin’s weirdness (and Leslie’s) will live on in our hearts.

Form, Function, and Fonts: Eric Gill’s Branding Type

Rachel Schneider — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 06:03:09 +0000

Image Credit: The Library of Congress

Eric Gill’s illustrated 1931 The Four Gospels of the Lord Jesus Christ According to the Authorized Version of King James I may be the most beautiful text in the Harry Ransom Center’s King James Bible exhibition. Gill, who was a graphic designer, a sculptor, and a firm Catholic, melded his minimalist design aesthetics with Catholic art’s gilded tradition to make what the Library of Congress calls “a modern homage to the tradition of illuminated text.” Gill’s black and white figures, however, dance around the elegant typeface to create a Catholicism aesthetically rebranded for the twentieth century: sparse but still striking.

(Slightly NSFW after the break.)

Image Credit: Wandering the Dream Space

The rationale for Gill’s design choices can perhaps be understood in his Essay on Typography, which was first published the same year as the Four Gospels:

It is now clearly understood that modern building must not rely upon ornament, it must rely simply upon grandeur, that is integrity and size. There are things which can be measured; with these alone can the modern architect, employing the modern workman, concern himself. Of beauty there need be no lack, for the beautiful is that which pleases being seen, and those things are pleasing when seen which are as nearly perfect as may be in their adaptation to function. Such is the beauty of bones, of beetles, of well-built railway arches, of factory chimneys (when they have the sense to leave out the ornamental frills at the top), of the new concrete bridge across the Rhine at Cologne, of plain brick walls. (8-9)

Reading this against the Gospels, what strikes me is Gill’s interest in form and function. He writes here that beauty comes not from ornament but from forms adapted best to function—thus, why “plain brick walls” may be beautiful, but perhaps not jewel-encrusted objet d’art. Typography, however, has different functions than a chimney. As Christopher Micklethwait has previously discussed on viz, graphic design concerns itself with typography, layout, and chromatics. The New Typography, represented by Jan Tschichold as well as Eric Gill, concerned itself with clarity instead of beauty. If text’s designed function is clarity and legibility, Gill’s designs do not get in the way of reading—in fact, they enhance and draw attention to text as his characters sometimes seem to perch over the letters. The iconographic figures resonate with a medieval religious tradition, but the design avoids being overly florid.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

This illustration is particularly interesting as the major figure’s alignment with the downstroke of the N draws our attention to the word—both the one on the page and The Word of the Gospels. Also running parallel is the squiggly line of the snake, climbing towards the innocent Adam and Eve, who almost seem to greet the fall awaiting them. In this way, Gill’s design highlights the function of the text: to bring the reader to a greater appreciation of Christianity.

Image Credit: Wandering the Dream Space

However, Gill’s designs are not without art. As a Catholic in the mode of Hilaire Belloc, Gill’s designs also provide an interpretive gloss. The starkness of Jesus being taken from the cross invokes not the Second Vatican Council but a much more medieval tradition. It also doesn’t seem coincidental that Gill’s famous Gill Sans typeface has effectively served to brand other organizations, like Penguin Books’ famous paperback designs.

Image Credit: William Wu Books

Gill Sans also has power as a nationalistic British brand, as the BBC has used Gill Sans in its logo since 1997.

Image Credit: The BBC

Martin Lambie-Nairn, the designer responsible for the new logo, redesigned the BBC logo not only because the slanted letters used previously did not transfer well to pixels, but because “by choosing a typeface that has stood the test of time, we avoid the trap of going down a modish route that might look outdated in several years’ time.” As a brand that attempts to be associated with solidity and seeks the trust of its viewers, it seems a good choice on the BBC’s part. However, it leaves me to wonder how the University of Texas at Austin's and the Harry Ransom Center’s type brands them.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

The Harry Ransom Center’s classic logo not only conveys a certain stylish solidity but also includes its windows and its materials as a design element alongside the font. By putting Gill’s lettering not only in its exhibitions but also on their windows, the Harry Ransom Center nods to Gill’s design legacy and its value for research institutions today.

The opinions expressed herein are solely those of viz. blog, and are not the product of the Harry Ransom Center.

The Composition of Popular Romance: Gone with the Wind's Storyboards

Rachel Schneider — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 21:23:57 +0000

Image Credit: Rachel Schneider

After a crash of cymbals, the bright brass instruments build to a climax until the violins enter: so begins “Tara’s Theme” from Gone with the Wind. Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 Pulitzer-prize winning novel was a legitimate phenomenon before the movie, but the 1939 film is an artistic achievement on its own merits. Gone with the Wind was one of the first movies chosen for preservation by the National Film Registry in part because of its rich history. Gone with the Wind not only holds the record for the highest box office ever (when adjusted for inflation), but also held the rest for most Academy Awards (10) until 1960. Numerous books and documentaries recount the tangled history of the film’s production, which was plagued with cast battles, multiple directors, expensive delays, screenplay revisions, and a battle with the Hays Office to preserve an infamous final line. Much of the material for this work comes from the Harry Ransom Center’s extensive David O. Selznick Collection, which contains not only the producer’s numerous papers but also various production materials from his films.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

The Harry Ransom Center not only features this collection in past and future exhibitions, but also displays its contents on its windows, which show several of the film’s storyboards on the Center’s north and northeast walls. What the storyboards can tell us both about film history and Gone with the Wind itself is something I want to briefly examine here.

As discussed by Alan David Vertrees in his book Selznick’s Vision: Gone with the Wind and Hollywood Filmmaking, David Selznick and Gone with the Wind are central to the history of cinematic production design. Selznick created the title “production designer” for William Cameron Menzies, the man who drew Gone with the Wind’s storyboards—drawings which suggested the flow and look of each scene. Gone with the Wind was one of the first live action pictures to be entirely storyboarded. Thus, while production designers were originally responsible for scenic design only, Menzies influenced Gone with the Wind’s entire look, including color, lighting, composition, and camera movement. His achievement garnered him a special Academy Award for “outstanding achievement in the use of color for the enhancement of dramatic mood in the production of Gone with the Wind.” The film’s original trailer gives some sense of what Menzies accomplished:

The Harry Ransom Center’s windows show storyboards depicting the film’s fire sequence, which a Gallup poll of North American audience members deemed its most memorable episode. However, the Ransom Center’s archives also include storyboards of other sequences, and I took this opportunity to delve into the Selznick Collection’s storyboards to learn more about what storyboarding in Hollywood’s golden age entailed, and what effects these visuals might have.

Searching through several boxes of Gone with the Wind storyboards held within the Selznick Collection, I was interested to note their variety. Some of the boards (like the ones for the fire scene) were relatively compact squares; others, like the ones I found portraying the Twelve Oaks barbecue that takes place early in the movie, are more substantial: made entirely of wood, at least a foot across in length, and reasonably heavy. My photograph here tries to capture what these storyboards actually look like.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

Despite their age, their colors are quite striking, as the storyboard depicting the O’Hara family’s arrival at Twelve Oaks shows.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

Menzies incorporates various color palettes into the film to visually highlight the differences among the film’s early antebellum scenes, the later stark Civil War sequence, and the bleak Reconstruction period. However, Menzies often doubles the heroine’s fiery personality with reds: Scarlett’s flight from Atlanta is illuminates by the flaming buildings around her; a burning sky backlights her defiant declaration that she’ll “never be hungry again”; the burgundy ball gown she wears to Ashley’s birthday party after being caught embracing him marks her as a scarlet woman.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

The color palette also is distinguished from particularly difficult scenes where Scarlett shoots a Union officer, or faces assault from men in the Shantytown near her mills. The storyboards do not illustrate the scenes in detail, but provide a sketch for what it should look like. Pencil lines are still visible among the color.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

These storyboards are uniquely valuable not only for their place in film history, but also for thinking more about how artists like Menzies and Selznick visually composed Gone with the Wind’s epic romance. The “sketchness” of the storyboards conveys some of the sense of fragility inherent in the film’s narrative. By movie’s end, Scarlett is forced to rethink all her ambitions and desires, to recognize both the fragility of her world and her own mistaken understandings of Rhett and Ashley. Her narrative resembles the mental acts of revision that Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy undergo in Pride and Prejudice, but with a more complicated finale: instead of uniting, she and Rhett part. Gone with the Wind perverts conventional romance by denying love at the close.

Yet, the film’s last shots complicate the trailer’s claim that “the screen has never known a love story to compare with this, when Rhett Butler meets Scarlett O’Hara.” Instead of despairing when she loses Melanie and Rhett, the people who loved and supported her, Scarlett’s face and the music express hope as she and the viewer both realize her truest love: Tara, her family’s home. It is Tara that provides her the strength to assert that “tomorrow is another day,” and the final shot of Scarlett standing outside her family home, posed against a sky filled with red clouds takes the viewer back to her refusal to give up in the face of poverty, hunger, and despair. Menzies’s visual logic makes Gone with the Wind more than a love story between a man and a woman; it is instead a love letter to America, written to Americans shaken by the Great Depression. Gone with the Wind celebrates both a defiant land and the hopes of the people who populated it. In representing the film through Scarlett’s escape from a burning Atlanta on their windows, the Harry Ransom Center embraces Gone with the Wind as an American narrative worthy of further study.

The opinions expressed herein are solely those of viz. blog, and are not the product of the Harry Ransom Center.

Wandering Christians and Illustration in the Biblical Tradition

Rachel Schneider — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 18:27:48 +0000

Image Credit: Posters 555

All those who wander are not lost—in fact, wandering is sometimes the point. I did a little of this while touring the Harry Ransom Center’s new exhibit on The King James Bible: Its History and Influences. I particularly enjoyed examining the numerous visuals on display: exquisite Jacob Lawrence and William Blake illustrations, colorful posters for The Ten Commandments and David and Bathsheba, and patterns for Robert DeNiro’s Biblical tattoos in Cape Fear. While some might oppose word and image, the Harry Ransom Center’s combination of both in a single exhibit highlights illustration’s importance within the King James Bible and the wider biblical tradition. Visual illustrations, which once served to transmit biblical stories before widespread literacy or vernacular bibles, work hand in hand with the Bible’s narrative techniques—specifically, Jesus’s parables in the Gospels. In this post, I’d like to briefly consider how one major biblically-inspired text—John Bunyan’s novel Pilgrim’s Progress—incorporates visual illustration to complement its narrative parable, and how tropes of wandering in particular reoccur in both kinds of illustration.

Image Credit: Strawdogs

The image above (of which a slightly larger version is available here) is a frontispiece for the 1833 edition of The Pilgrim’s Progress, to which is prefixed the Life of the Author, with a Key to the Allegory, and a Critique on its Beauties. The Pilgrim’s Progress, an allegory originally printed in 1678, tells the story of Christian, a man who leaves home for a journey to the Celestial City. On the way there, he gets waylaid in variously places—mostly famously, Vanity Fair. According to the University of Texas’s library catalog entry for the book, the frontispiece was tipped in, which means that the illustration was a loose page incorporated into a bound volume. The image, called “Plan of the road from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City,” was originally published by George Virtue, who made his reputation producing illustrated books. While frontispieces generally depict specific incidents or characters from the text (like the frontispiece to Gulliver’s Travels, which presents Lemuel Gulliver to his readers), the “Plan” does not merely serve as précis for the text. This picture, like the Key to the Allegory and the Critique on its Beauties, glosses the Progress’ meaning.

The “Plan of the road” presents a visual representation of Christian’s path to salvation. It shows all of his stops along the way, including the Slough of Despond and the Hill of Difficulty. Yet the illustrator does not draw the path as a straight line—he instead illustrates it as a spiral. But here, the spiral’s direction moves inward, not outward. As Christian wanders in his journey, even at moments when he feels lost, he continually draws closer to his intended destination. Bunyan’s allegory and the accompanying illustration suggest that all Christians approach salvation, even if they stray off the preferred path. This message appears several times in the Bible, specifically in Luke 15 where Jesus recounts the parables of the lost sheep and the prodigal son.

As recorded in the King James Bible, the prodigal son leaves his father’s house and “waste[s] his substance in riotous living. When he is in need, however, he remembers his father’s beneficence:

“I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee, And am no more worthy to be called thy son: make me as one of thy hired servants. And he arose, and came to his father. But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him. … the father said to his servants, Bring forth the best robe, and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet: And bring hither the fatted calf, and kill it; and let us eat, and be merry: For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found. And they began to be merry.” (Luke 15:18-24)

When the Pharisees object to Jesus’s communion with sinners, he uses this parable to illustrate the message that God accepts those who return to him, even if they might spend all before then. God’s compassion celebrates the return of the wasteful son: “he was lost, and is found.” This language, transformed by a late eighteenth-century poet into a famous English hymn, directly sets the two states in relation—being lost doesn’t mean you can become found. While the King James Bible contains no visual illustrations, embedded in the text are images in words that have the same effect. Jesus argues his meaning through recourse to illustrations, just like the owner of this copy of Pilgrim’s Progress.

Image Credit: The Blake Archive

What this exhibit highlights for me is that while there is a rich tradition of images in the biblical tradition—as the exhibition carefully demonstrates with hieroglyphic Bibles and frontispieces like the “Plan,” the King James Bible appears within the rise of a hard-line Protestant movement, in which particularly strict sects like the Puritans interpreted the Bible’s commandment against worshipping false idols as critiquing practices of visual representation. Eamon Duffy’s excellent histories The Stripping of the Altars and The Voices of Morebath record how the Henrician Reformation removed artistic aspects of worship—including altar pieces and stained-glass windows—from churches to implement Protestantism. Duffy’s work explains how worshippers adapted Catholic traditions to new religious dictates which threatened communal forms of worship like feast days. While the Bible embeds illustration within its text, it has often been perversely read as against the visual. Perhaps what the Harry Ransom Center’s exhibit shows best is that binaries of word and image collapse into each other—while images of word are not processed by the brain in the same way, both kinds of illustration carry powerful rhetorical effects.

The opinions expressed herein are solely those of viz. blog, and are not the product of the Harry Ransom Center.

Unmarking Death

Rachel Schneider — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 00:47:35 +0000

Image Credit: Stephen Chalmers

H/T: Lauren Gantz

Death is often in the news, whether it involves major singers, local Austin celebrities, or Twitter death hoaxes. Yet when we visualize death, it’s typically in memorials, not actual pictures of dead bodies. We’ve come some ways from the Victorian memento mori photographs which attempted to render the corpse vital and to serve, as Jamie Fraser notes, “as a keepsake to remember the deceased.” While traditional burial practices, which use embalming fluids to delay putrefaction and decomposition, likewise make the corpse appear as lifelike as possible, most people don’t make hair rings or take pictures of the dead to remember them. In this way, we remember the dead as not dead—as lively. In his photography series Unmarked, Stephen Chalmers presents an alternative way to represent death.

Image Credit: Stephen Chalmers

In a recent NPR article, Chalmers discusses Unmarked’s origins in a hiking trip that went past one of Ted Bundy’s dumpsites. As he says, “[J]ust that little kernel of information really changed how I felt about what was otherwise a really fantastic early date. I was struck by how my experience of this place was so changed by knowing the history of the location.” Thus, the series features the locations in which serial killers disposed of their victims’ bodies. Each photograph is named for the victim left in the place.

Image Credit: Stephen Chalmers

In photographs like the one above, Jennifer Joseph, Chalmers uses focus to direct the viewer’s attention to the specific place where the body once lay. The placid pastoral scene contrasts dramatically with the idea of violence that murder contains, but there is no dramatic visual tension in the photograph. As Chalmers tells NPR, “I kind of like the absence of spectacle. I’m a quiet person. I like for the images I make to be quiet.” The images are quiet in their lack of subjects and their rural backgrounds. The tetherball in Debra Estes hints at a more suburban setting, but the photo’s only dynamism occurs in the contrast of the yellow tetherball set against the browns and greens. However, Chalmers also explicitly states on his website that the images are meant not only to refuse “clichés of prefabricated sentimentality,” but also to “convey the original sense of shock at arriving at these sites of trauma and also that the self-conscious refusal of information and emptiness of the images and conveys our distance from this sense of shock to demonstrate the essential inaccessibility of these traumatic events and degrading deaths.” If the Victorian image is a “prefabricated sentimentality,” Unmarked works differently.

Image Credit: Stephen Chalmers

Unmarked represents death in this “absence of spectacle,” the still scenes set against the media circus surrounding serial killers and their victims. Because we cannot hope to either represent or fully comprehend the victims’ traumatic deaths, the only way to do so is through its visual opposite. However, while such a series seems deeply respectful of the victims, it only displays death in its lack of display. Chalmers’ visual logic suggests that the only true way to represent murder victims is by refusing to represent them—a treatment that is provocative and beautiful, but may only reinforce the victims’ absence. Where is the space in which mourners can represent the dead, between too much and too little presence? Is the only way our culture can show death is by unmarking it?

Sex Sells?: Reading Romance Over the Covers

Rachel Schneider — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 07:28:28 +0000

Image Credit: Screencap from Vimeo

H/T: Andrew Sullivan

I thought after my last post on Ryan Gosling that I’d be able to move on to more academic subjects, but when I saw Andrew Sullivan’s post on “The Market for Romance” I couldn’t let it pass. In my Women’s Popular Genres literature class last year I taught Fay Weldon’s wickedly funny novel The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, which tells the story of Ruth, a woman who gets revenge on her husband after he leaves her for a romance novelist. I wanted to pair it with an actual romance novel, but wasn’t sure I could find something that would sustain close reading. However, I think a rhetorical approach to the romance novel—especially its cover—reveals some interesting things.

TIME Magazine produced this interesting video that takes viewers to a romance cover photoshoot. I enjoyed not only inspecting the goods on display, but also hearing from Kensington Publishing Corporation’s Creative Director Kristine Mills-Noble on what she looks for in these poses:

Mills-Noble, after giving some directions to the model, explains the goal of these covers thus:

The fantasy is that this is the man who’s going to jump out of planes to rescue me in any situation. You know, we want to be seduced; we don’t want to be overcome. We don’t want to be abused. We don’t want to be taken advantage of.

Image Credit: Anne Marsh

She further notes that, to create this fantasy, the model must carefully manage the placement of his hands, the look in his eyes, and the amount of muscle he shows. Too much muscle makes him look more Hulkish than heroic; a hand wrong might come across as threatening rather than protective. The picture above shows the shoot’s final product—and Marcus appears strong and confident as he meets the viewer’s eye. The expression just misses stern; the hands almost suggest that he’s about to remove the jumpsuit, but the full exposure he might offer is rather physical than emotional. Yet it isn’t extremely lurid—his chest is mostly covered, only hinting at the body beneath.

Image Credit: Kensington Publishing Corporation

Despite the popular image of the bare-chested Fabio covers, this is actually consistent with what many romance readers say they want. When the blog Smart Bitches, Trashy Books critiqued an article that attempts to perpetuate reader shame for consuming romances, commenter Hannah E. notes that “While I can agree that I wish the covers of my favorite books didn’t sport naked male torsos (these aids to my imagination simply aren’t necessary), I’m never afraid to admit that I love romance novels.” Hannah’s contrast here juxtaposes a pride in reading romance with a dislike of traditional cover art. If there’s shame, it’s in the ways the cover art represents her romance. While contemporary romance novels contain even more erotic content than you’d find in a Georgette Heyer romance, displaying that content seems to create a dissonance for readers. The naked male chest seems to reduce these works to mere porn, whereas readers like Maria Bustillos see this as an imaginative space for women to discuss real-life problems and work out what they want in men:

The second purpose of romance novels is the exercise of imagination. This may sound paradoxical, given that there is a definite formula to these stories. But they are indeed vehicles for the imagination; each one a love rollercoaster, if you like, to tempt our fantasies. To idealize. What would a really wonderful man be like? What are the very best characteristics that men and women can have? What would the most exciting possible moment in a love affair be like; how would the tenderest lover behave?

Thus, while the title’s pun suggests Anne Marsh wants her readers to be Burning Up, the cover art offers readers one way to imagine what a sensitive smoke jumper might look like. Looking through other titles published by Kensington Publishing Corporation, I was struck that for every Hot Rain or Smooth Play that focuses on the naked muscled chest, there are works like Lutisha Lovely’s Taking Care of Business which suggests other fantasies.

Image Credit: Kensington Publishing Corporation

The two men on this cover are well-dressed and broad-shouldered. Their hands in their pockets suggest confidence as much as their eye contact. The slight smile worn by the gentleman on the right hints that he can “take care of business” as the reader requires and makes the reader complicit in the insinuation. The punning nature of the titles and taglines, I’d suggest, directs these images to an aware audience who imagine themselves as active readers and sexual agents. Instead of celebrating rape, the contemporary romance today markets itself to a readership that can appreciate Fay Weldon alongside Anne Marsh.

Hey Girl, I Made This Meme For You

Rachel Schneider — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 14:00:00 +0000

Image Credit: F--- Yeah Ryan Gosling

Some recent procrastinating led me to Jezebel and thus Joey Thompson’s recent YouTube video, in which he teaches men how to look like actor Ryan Gosling. I was intrigued because I have been following the proliferating Ryan Gosling memes for a while—which have gone on long enough that they’ve been accused of jumping the shark. Still, I’d like to take some time to think a little bit about what their newest evolutions might tell us about memes, form, and feminine desire.

Image Credit: Poli Sci Ryan Gosling

In case you don’t know what a meme is, Richard Dawkins first defined it in The Selfish Gene (1976) as “a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation.” The Internet has lead to the proliferation of memes, from "all your base are belong to us,” to Xzibit Yo Dawg, to the most prolific of them all, the LOLcat. What many memes share is a consistent form: a picture with humorous text superimposed over it. Frequently the memes—like the LOLcat—even use the same fonts to create a visually consistent appearance. What these memes do is to create communities through the shared humor and enjoyment of the same structure. Thus, the LOLcat meme developed certainly consistent cat characters like Ceiling Cat, and further iterations would feature new references to Ceiling Cat.

Image Credit: Rhet/Comp Ryan Gosling

The earliest Ryan Gosling meme started with a humble blog named Fuck Yeah Ryan Gosling, which gained notoriety when Ryan Gosling read several posts from it during two separate MTV interviews. What followed were numerous other Tumblr blogs, including Feminist Ryan Gosling, Typography Ryan Gosling, Silicon Valley Ryan Gosling, Campaign Staff Ryan Gosling, and of course Rhet/Comp Ryan Gosling. The Goslimania culminated in protests against Bradley Cooper when People declared him the Sexiest Man Alive over Ryan. While People will go on to find more sexy men and Gosling more work, I’m left wondering what this decidedly symbolic protest represents.

Image Credit: Feminist Ryan Gosling

Anne Helen Peterson’s excellent post on the topic argues that the Gosling meme only works as long as the pictures support what he says. When it came to versions like Feminist Ryan Gosling, “you could actually imagine Ryan Gosling saying the very phrases that adoring bloggers were photoshopping into his mouth.” However, she argues that versions like Biostatistics Ryan Gosling go too far because they don’t fit the meme. She reads the meme’s appeal in the juxtaposition of star and text, creating connections between Gosling and his fans:

Pairing star images with dense theory is funny. Every scholar wants to think that an object of their desire would be interested in the things they’re interested in — would have a discussion in which you share a secret language familiar to a select few (and then, after you’ve had a good debate, you go to the Farmer’s Market and snuggle). I wish Ryan Gosling’s image wanted to get his PhD in media studies with me. But it doesn’t — he fell in with the gender studies people long ago. That’s where his image belongs. That’s where it works. To take it beyond can be funny……but, if we’re honest with ourselves, misses the point. It’s a meme built on a meme, and thus evacuated of its core.

I agree with Peterson that the attraction lies in projecting shared values onto Gosling, particularly feminist ones. We female academics would like to think (and perhaps have reason to suspect) that Gosling shares our values, and that we could talk Laura Mulvey with him—or Susan Jarrett, or any other topic we enjoy. However, I also suspect that the Gosling meme works best on women of this type: political liberal, feminist, and educated. These viewers appreciates how Gosling’s mild, non-threatening appearance can be endlessly appropriated to fit their desires—which is why the meme’s life has extended so far beyond its original appearance. The Ryan Gosling meme's core lies not in Ryan Gosling, but in his audience.

Image Credit: Hey girl. I like the library too.

Thus, Steve Kolowich’s suggestion that “it is unclear whether the blogs are intended as pure irony or as a genuine experiment to test whether the following gambits stand a chance of working even under optimal conditions” is a complete misreading. None of these women are suggesting that the pickup lines attributed to Gosling in the images would work. Rather, Gosling is a space in which women can vocalize desire. I think this is why the meme has been adapted to include variants like Gael García-Bernal Feminista, Academic Coach Taylor and Fuck No Rick Santorum. If Gael García-Bernal Feminista adds social justice overtones and sensitive floppy hair, Academic Coach Taylor embodies a more authoritative—though equally feminist—intellectual male. Fuck No Rick Santorum explicitly flips Fuck Yeah Ryan Gosling to protest Santorum's sexist political policies. When so much Internet culture is explicitly sexist, the Ryan Gosling Tumblr memes constitute a safe space for feminist—and female heterosexual—discourse.

#IWillAlwaysLoveYou: Whitney Houston and Rhetorics of Tribute

Rachel Schneider — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 22:51:43 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

By this point most people—at least the ones reading blogs or The New York Times—have heard about Whitney Houston’s death last Saturday. As it so happened, Houston passed away the night before the Grammys, turning that celebration into a kairoitic moment of mourning. Singer LL Cool J opened the Grammys with a prayer for Whitney and Jennifer Hudson performed her most famous hit, “I Will Always Love You.” Since then, LeAnn Rimes and the television show Glee have offered performances of this song in tribute to Whitney. Likewise, her family is allowing her funeral to be streamed on the Internet. I’d like here to consider further the function of these institutionalized tributes. How can (or should) we remember the dead?

The Jennifer Hudson performance occurred after the Grammys showed video of Houston singing her hit “Saving All My Love For You” at the 1986 Grammys. Hudson sang part of the song while placed under images of the vibrant young Houston in red.

The performance’s visual rhetoric of mourning is clear: the blue light behind her encodes the seriousness of the moment; her black dress makes visual the grief she expresses through the song. The styled hairdo might almost be an allusion to Houston’s hair in the video. Hudson’s voice has some of the same gospel sound that Houston was herself trained in, but her register and tone are lower and deeper than Houston’s, both turning what in Houston’s performance was a divaesque number into something sadder. She ends her performance not in a repetition, “Darling, I will always / I will always / I will always / Love you,” but in “I will always / Love you / Whitney, we love / we love you.” The choice to sing “I Will Always Love You” is a natural one, not only because it’s Whitney Houston’s greatest hit, but also because the song is about saying goodbye to a loved one.

Originally written by Dolly Parton about her split from a partner, Houston’s performance of “I Will Always Love You” for the movie The Bodyguard changed in into a parting from the man who saved her life (as played by Kevin Costner). The music video made for the song, which featured scenes from the movie, showed a lone Houston in an empty theater, singing as she recollected her experiences with Costner. It is thus not just a song of parting in her voice, but one of departure.

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

Her performance of the song, described by Joe Levy, is “monumental, undeniable and, as many of her recordings were, a triumph of vocal ability that presents itself as human indomitability.” In fact, memorializing her through reference to her most famous and popular performance is to remember Whitney at her best.

Image Credit: The Mirror

However, Whitney Houston, like the deceased singer Michael Jackson, lived a life of controversy. As her personal struggles with drugs overtook her musical career, she took part in the reality show Being Bobby Brown. Certain phrases she said on the show—like “hell to the no,” “kiss my ass!,” and the infamous “crack is whack” from a Diane Sawyer 2002 interview—gave her a secondary notoriety. She became the subject of humor for comics, with Maya Rudolph doing imitations of her on Saturday Night Live. However, what Whitney can be remembered at this time? As Rudolph is preparing to host Saturday Night Live this weekend, a number of websites are speculating whether she’ll attempt to do her impersonation again. Many suggest it’s “too soon” to remember her such—but who has the right to memorialize her? Her family and friends, like Rev. Marvin Winans, are “seriously grieving” and “want to do this with dignity.” The Whitney they remember is as much a young girl as a famous singer. Her fans and the music world at large pay tribute to her vocal gifts. Others might treasure her almost-campy afterlife on Bravo and The Soup. Decorum suggests that the dignified or proper thing is to preserve her in an orderly—and ordered—fashion. Yet fans on Twitter connect to her death through hashtags varying from #iwillalwaysloveyou to #crackiswhack as they attempt to come to terms with her death. In such case, the public’s memory and public memorializing practices can’t be disciplined, though hopefully all such actions are done out of fondness and love.

The City upon a Hill at Halftime: Detroit, Unions, and the USA

Rachel Schneider — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 22:43:30 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

While baseball is more my sport, I haven’t missed watching the Super Bowl for the last couple of years. If nothing else, I enjoy analyzing the Super Bowl commercials—and this year’s Chrysler commercial featuring Clint Eastwood presents an irresistible opportunity to discuss some interesting controversies. Both conservative critics like Karl Rove and the Wall Street Journal’s Steve Goldstein and liberal ones like Michael Moore and Charles Mudede have read the commercial as promoting Obama’s reelection campaign. The ad’s copy and visuals directly connect the fates of Detroit and the auto industry with larger economic and political trends, as you can see:

One of the commercial’s early phrases, “It’s halftime in America,” sounds very similar to the phrase from Reagan’s famous ad, “It’s morning again in America.” However, the commercial’s tone is not nearly as triumphal. While both ads feature morning scenes, Chrysler’s surrounds theirs with images of a grizzled Clint Eastwood walking down a dark alley, his face only visible at the commercial’s end. The bright daylight surrounding a man sitting on the edge of his bed is juxtaposed with a commentary track that declares, “People are out of work and they’re hurting, and they’re all wondering what they’re going to do to make a comeback.” The commercial attempts to play on the kairos of both the Super Bowl halftime and America’s economic recovery. And while the Giants and Eli Manning managed to come back after the football game resumed, I want to think about how both the commercial and the conversation surrounding it think through the “comebacks” of Detroit and the American automotive industry at large.

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

The Chrysler ad’s argument invites America, in the midst of economic crisis, to look to Detroit and companies like Chrysler for inspiration. The commercial’s copy makes the argument explicit:

The people of Detroit know a little something about this. They almost lost everything. But we all pulled together. Now Motor City is fighting again. I’ve seen a lot of tough eras, a lot of downturns in my life, times when we didn’t understand each other. It seems that we’ve lost our heart at times. The fog of division, discord, and blame made it hard to see what lies ahead. But after those trials, we all rallied around what was right and acted as one, because that’s what we do. We find a way through tough times—and if we can’t find a way, then we make one. All that matters know is what’s ahead: how do we come from behind? How do we come together, and how do we win? Detroit’s showing us it can be done. And what’s true about them is true about all of us.

The visuals double the words: instead of a waving American flag, we see a flag for the city of Detroit. The images of happy industry are those of African-American men in a plant, wearing safety goggles and manufacturing shiny cars. At the commercial’s end, we see all of the people who were getting ready for the day now relying on Chrysler cars to transport wood to construction sites or children to school.

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

While both Eastwood himself and Chrysler’s marketing chief Olivier Francois have explicitly denied that the commercial promotes Obama, the copy and accompanying video do implicitly argue that Detroit’s rebirth—enabled by the auto industry bailout—presents a good model for the rest of the country. The warmly-lit unionized auto plants are directly contrasted with images of television news talking heads and protesting Wisconsin union members, in which cold colors predominate. Even the black-and-white pictures of families and firemen visually set these people apart from the others, turning them into models for the rest of us. Detroit thus takes from the rest of America its role as “the city upon a hill.” It is the reborn economy that America can follow, through the purchase and support of American labor and American-built cars.

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

However, this message contrasts strongly with common images of Detroit as a ruined and ruin-city, and conservatives are reacting strongly against it. Clint Eastwood, the paragon of a rugged, silent conservative American masculinity, is now being attacked as “a spokesman for welfare queen Chrysler.” While Chrysler’s slogan, “imported from Detroit,” attempts to play with the stereotype that imported cars like Toyota and Honda are superior, some commentators are reading it as “the signature Obama haughtiness” which prefers a European socialism to American capitalism. In a political moment where Republicans reject unions as anti-American (despite a long history to the contrary), this commercial directly challenges these scripts.

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

It’s interesting to contrast this year’s commercial with the 2011 Chrysler Super Bowl commercial featuring Eminem, which also embraced this slogan, incorporated some of the same images of Detroit’s ruin, and also boldly proclaimed Detroit’s identity as “the Motor City” where “this is what we do.”

The important difference here, I speculate, is that the older commercial merely tries to reverse an association between Detroit and cheap cars—pairing the language of “luxury” with images of grand old Detroit buildings—this year’s commercial dares to proclaim Detroit more than just “a town that’s been to hell and back,” but a model for America’s future progress. The language of American exceptionalism is frequently and commonly invoked in advertisements, but what makes American exceptional and what parts of America can be exceptional or “American” is always heavily negotiated and contested during an election year. This commercial and its connected visuals (like the map on YouTube which shows people watching the ad across the country, drawing lines of connection between the viewer and the USA) argue powerfully for “the values we hold in Detroit … and the values we think our customers identify with,” but those values implicit can’t be uncritically accepted during an election year when Republicans are campaigning against a President they call “almost un-American.” Likewise, a commercial that seeks to conflate the “they” of Detroit with the “we” of America can’t be accepted by politicians who explicitly rejected the auto industry bailout. This commercial—unintentionally or not—signals the beginning of not just the Super Bowl’s second half, but also the contentious election season ahead.

The Power of Sympathy: Perspective Shifting, Visual Argumentation, and the Gay Marriage Debate

Rachel Schneider — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 19:16:50 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

I was delighted to hear that the Washington State Senate passed a bill Wednesday legalizing same-sex marriage in the state. The Seattle alt-weekly The Stranger has been closely following the bill’s progress for several weeks, not only liveblogging the debate but also posting numerous excellent speeches on behalf of the bill. Eli Sanders highlighted Republican Senator Cheryl Pflug’s speech as the best of the night, which she ended with the following words:

“And so I commend this bill to you today because it is part of our struggle to recognize that everybody, whether they look like us or believe like us, has an opportunity—should have an opportunity to enjoy those personal freedoms we hold dear.”

The essential argument Pflug makes here—that gay citizens should enjoy rights equal to those of heterosexuals—relies on straight individuals being brought to recognize their commonality with gays. Harvey Milk long ago made this argument when he urged gays to come out, to represent themselves publicly as gay to “destroy the lies and distortions.” More recently, the Australian “independent, grass-roots community advocacy organization” GetUp! posted an ad on YouTube on behalf of same-sex marriage in that country. This beautiful, moving ad works because its visuals work in concert with old-school persuasive tools.

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

The distinguished philosopher (and originally professor of logic at Glasgow) Adam Smith briefly explains persuasion in his treatise The Theory of Moral Sentiments thus:

“To approve of another man’s opinions is to adopt those opinions, and to adopt them is to approve of them. If the same arguments which convince you convince me likewise, I necessarily approve of your conviction; and if they do not, I necessarily disapprove of it.”

In other words, effective argumentation exists when two individuals share common opinions and the arguments used by one speaker are found convincing by both of them. This doesn’t quite work as the 1759 version of How to Win Friends and Influence People because Smith doesn’t explain what arguments are equally efficacious for you and your audience, but he does present a non-agonistic tool for persuasion: sympathy.

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

Sympathy, as Smith defines it, “may now, however, without much impropriety, be made use of to denote our fellow-feeling with any passion whatever” (5). The purpose of sympathy is to bring individuals together in mutual understanding. While we cannot literally feel the emotions of others, Smith explains that we can use our imaginations to bridge the gap:

“As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation. Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They never did and never can carry us beyond our own persons, and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations. … By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body and become in some measure him, and thence form some idea of his sensation, and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them.” (2)

Smith may seem to be a bit-outdated by about 250 years, but recent studies in cognitive science and social psychology offer some evidence for his views. Studies in affect like Teresa Brennan’s suggest that emotions can travel between individuals within social environments; more relevant, however, is the formulation by cognitive scientists like Alvin Goldman of “perspective shifting,” which is a state in which we “imagin[e] being in that other person’s position, and thus us[e] our imagined thoughts and feelings and decisions to determine what the other will think and feel and decide” (Coplan and Goldie xxxiii). In short, what the GetUp! ad does is to use visuals to create a moment of perspective shifting; watching the ad here will give you a sense of how this works

The ad notably puts the viewer right in the middle of a romantic comedy—there’s a meet-cute on a boat where a handsome man named Paul gives the viewer his number, and then the progress of the relationship follows all the way through fun in the sun, domestic disputes, personal tragedies, all the way to a marriage proposal. The ad beautifully subverts the Hollywood script, however, when the camera turns and reveals that the viewer has not been looking from the perspective of a straight woman, but a gay man.

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

However, the ad does not deal in the extraordinary. While there are breathtaking views of riding on boats and rollercoasters, most of what is shown is extremely banal: grocery shopping, moving furniture, meeting parents, and even fights about driving directions. Yet it uses poignant images like a hand on a shoulder to invite the viewer to think about the experience of sympathizing with a partner losing his mother. These gestures taken out of any context read as truly loving, and the viewer is brought to see that this relationship, no matter the parties involved, is like any other romantic partnership.

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

In 2010 the New York Times reported on a study conducted by the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation “that looked at the reasons behind society's evolving tolerance for gay people. It found that the reason cited most frequently by people who reported having more favorable views—by far—was knowing someone who is gay.” By using these images, GetUp! attempts to reach out to individuals who may not know a gay or lesbian person by inviting them to place themselves in the position of a gay or lesbian individual. The building violins at the ad’s end, in which the camera’s perspective performs the critical shift, create the kairotic moment that the only words in the ad echo: “It’s time. End marriage discrimination.” Hopefully, more ads like this one will bring that time closer.

Let’s Stay Together, America: Obama’s Viral Campaigns

Rachel Schneider — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 07:25:28 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot from Youtube

While ostensibly Tuesday’s State of the Union address was President Obama’s most important speech of the week, his performance at an Apollo Theater fundraiser last Thursday stole the spotlight. The reason for this, of course, was because he sang a few bars from Al Green’s classic song “Let’s Stay Together.”

While Obama’s presidency thus far has not avoided criticism, his singing seems to have garnered him praise from far and wide. Many individuals—from one linker at BuzzFeed who commented on “Barack’s sick falsetto!” to Reverend Green himself, who thought that Obama “nailed it”—enjoyed seeing their very serious President sound a softer note. A search on Twitter for “Obama Al Green” pulls up a number of results, including tweets like these:

Image Credit: Screenshot from Twitter

Indeed, if tweets like LeVar Burton’s can be taken as general, Obama’s tune seduced an audience beyond the screaming supporters at the fundraiser. The choice of song, which Obama chalked up to Rev. Green being in the audience, might have been intention—a parallel can easily be drawn between the song’s narrative and Obama’s situation. Like the singer of “Let’s Stay Together,” Obama is attempting to retain the affections of a lover ready to leave. If Obama’s popularity decreased over the last few years, he’d like his union with America to last “whether / Times are good or bad, happy or sad.” What might be different between now and 2008—among many things—is that here Obama actually is making his own viral video instead of being the subject of them. Back in 2008 on this blog Jillian Sayre noted the numerous songs and videos posted online about Obama and concluded that “Obama's participatory rhetoric seems to elicit a creative response that belies an identification (perhaps over-identification) with the candidate.”

The Atlantic writer Ta-Naheisi Coates comes to a similar conclusion in his post on Obama’s relationship with the black community. And while some elements of this moment—like the Apollo Theater, the reference to the Sandman, and the choice of Al Green—might strike African-American voters in a particular way, Coates notes that the desire to turn Obama into a symbol is shared by all:

One way to think about this is remember that black people are people, and that all people turn human beings into symbols, whatever the person's actions. It's worth thinking about why we -- as humans -- do this. What need are we fulfilling? What ache are we ministering to? What is this need -- among us all -- to represent for our team?

Obama’s musical moment is an intentional appeal, but we the people are the audience who makes it viral. (In fact, audiences read texts looking for Obama, as when Gawker suggested Obama was in the Tag Team's 1993 video for "Whoomp (There It Is)") What is it about this President Obama that makes us want to vote for him, or put him in musical viral videos? Is this his equivalent of the prior President’s Bushisms? One difference between Bush and Obama, however, is that Bush never inspired anything like the Obama Girl or caused anyone to Tweet anything like: "Watched Obama sing Al Green. I'm pregnant now." Obama, more so than any other modern President (with the possible exception of Bill Clinton) is subject to objectification (like when paparazzi photographed him shirtless in Hawaii). I'm not sure if this is a result of his participatory rhetoric, which encourages identification, or whether the public is turning Obama into yet another symbol of something we need. This, at least, seems far more benign than Republicans turning him into a communist Muslim.

Calendar Boys, Beefcake Girls: Photographing the Bodies We Want

Rachel Schneider — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 13:00:00 +0000

Image Credit: Rion Sabean

H/T: Melanie Haupt

My favorite way to take a break from dissertation research is to visit Facebook. Some days, I’m lucky enough to be entertained by my friends, as when Melanie Haupt posted a provocative link to an article about male pin-ups.

As linked by websites like The Huffington Post, The Daily Dish, and Jezebel, photographer Rion Sabean has captured a series of men in pin-up poses similar to those captured by photographers like Alberto Vargas and models like Bettie Page. The pin-up, as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, is “a photograph or poster of a glamorous or attractive person.” However, pin-ups historically have been women, and women engaged in poses like the one below.

Image Credit: Fine Books and Collections

Sabean’s intent appears to have been to play with the gender roles here by making men adopt these kinds of poses, as he said in an interview with Jezebel:

"The imagery of showcasing the feminine/masculine ideals in one single image just struck me as something that could really work. Hilariously enough, and beyond my fascination with gender binaries and their inherent nature to be completely incomprehensible to me, I first began tinkering with the idea, because I will at any given moment strike very specific poses that would be defined as feminine by society; more specifically, the pointed toe. Haha. From there, it was completely obvious that pin-ups and all the associations with them would be the right choice in moving forward."

Comparing the images above already reveals similarities; both guy and gal have pursed lips and are posed in ways which are probably uncomfortable to hold but which highlight aspects of the physical form like the shapely leg and curvy body. The sporty paraphernalia in each scene only contrasts the deliberately inactive pointing fingers and splayed hands. Another group of images, this time in nearly the same pose, points out what Melanie acknowledged: these poses are very ridiculous and not a little degrading.

Image Credit: Acidcow.com / Rion Sabean

In these pictures again we see the juxtaposition of the masculine objects (the shovel, the military hat) and the highly feminized pose. The placement of the hands not only allows the subject to stay nearly vertical but also draws attention to the model’s assets. The reveal of undergarments (the underwear, the stockings) tantalizes the viewer. While these images serve to comically point out the problematics of the pin-up pose, I find myself as a viewer wondering if these can be read in a different way—can these men be sexy, too? Or can we find poses for women that wouldn’t be degrading?

To keep thinking about the sexualized posed body, I’d like to think about two other image collections I’ve seen this last week: the Men of the Stacks calendar and ESPN The Magazine’s just-released Body Issue.

Image Credit: The Men of the Stacks

In the case of the Men of the Stacks calendar, these gentlemen have collected together to rebrand the idea of the librarian:

"We know what people think: Dewey, glasses, shushing, books, hairbuns, Party Girl and card catalogs. Yes, we know what people think. We know that the American library profession is approximately 80% White and 72% female; and we know that tens of thousands of librarians are expected to reach age 65 in the next 5 years. We also know that this is not us.
"There is an entire population of professional librarians out there who disagree with the way the library profession is perceived in contemporary media outlets and in the historical consciousness of the American mind. Different people and different associations will use different means to try to change those perceptions. This is ours."

While not all of the photographs are as revealing as Mr. January’s, several of them use shirtless (or shirtless in aprons) men to spice up visuals of a profession whose sexualization in pornography stands in stark contrast to how it is perceived in popular culture. While the various poses—doing yoga, on a beach, cooking—attempt to make the idea of the male librarian as a lived experience palpable to the viewer, the fact that several pictures feature shirtless men makes it very similar to a straight beefcake calendar like the yearly NYFD Calendar of Heroes, which features actual New York firemen posed provocatively with hoses and other paraphernalia, or even the beefcake magazines of the 40s-60s. In other words, if the female form has frequently been sexualized by artful poses, the male has experienced the same treatment, though one with more arm-flexing.

Image Credit: ESPN The Magazine

However, if both The Men of the Stacks at Sabean’s Man-Ups are engaging in social commentary, ESPN the Magazine’s Body Issue appears to be a marketing ploy. While Ryan Kesler here is posed next to a block of ice to nod to his sport, this pose does more to show off his physique than his athletic skills. On the other side, Julie Chu's pose harkens less to the pinup and more to Greek statuary.

Image Credit: ESPN The Magazine

While this pose hints at her feminine features, it's also fairly aggressive—the eye wanders as much to her muscular arms as the breasts her pose conceals. The tensed shoulder and stomach also make it clear that what is (at least nominally) on display here is her strength. Julie Chu isn’t a pin-up, she's a warrior. However, it’s also legitimate to ask if we can see a naked female form without sexualizing it. The tagline, "Bodies We Want," can be read ambiguously either as the desire to have a muscular physique, or to have a partner so built.

As I’m thinking about these different poses together, I'm left questioning what kinds of viewers are being imagined here. ESPN the Magazine clearly offers some titillating interest for a straight male readership, but the photographs of individuals like Apolo Ohno and José Reyes are either intended for a gay male readership, or a straight female one. The audience for the Man-Ups is one that knows and has reflected on the original pin-ups that have inspired the poses; it’s an audience who gets the joke and can return the wink. However, can man-ups be as sexy as these other poses? If we understand the female body to be always sexualized, is there room for a female gaze to re-read these poses?

Of course, I don’t want to argue that women’s sexuality looks any different from men’s sexuality. I remember here the xkcd cartoon that responded to the Porn for Women book, where the female character asserts: “I wanted to clarify: in my porn, people fuck.” Women or men can be titillated by all sorts of different things, and we can’t essentialize that. Sexy is definitely in the eye—or the brain—of the beholder. Perhaps I just want to invite further discussion considering how we think or choose to think about the gendered body in photography. Theory has much to say about the power of the subject viewing the object/body—but how are the powers of the viewer limited by hegemonies? And how can we talk about bodies while allowing and acknowledging all various forms of sexuality that might approach them?

Coding Class Identity and Friendship in The Social Network

Rachel Schneider — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 16:58:18 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot from Youtube

If you’re a member of the so-called “Facebook generation,” it’s probably been pretty hard to ignore the recent coverage of David Fincher’s The Social Network, the movie that purports to tell the story of Facebook’s founding in a Harvard dorm-room circa 2003-4. Websites like Jezebel have critiqued the movie’s treatment of women, writers on Slate have criticized the movie’s portrayal both of Harvard, and others have questioned whether it accurately represents the website's creator Mark Zuckerberg. When I saw the movie, I was more struck by the ways in which Sorkin uses conventional tropes of class and gender dynamics to ask questions about how Facebook has potentially rewritten these issues, as well as changing identity, social interaction, and the idea of the public sphere.

I’d like to decode here for viz in the ways in which it not only pictures a different kind of class warfare, but also helps visualize friendship in its competing images of Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Sean Parker, and the (fictional) Erica Albright.

For those of you who haven’t seen the movie yet, the story is pretty simple: Mark Zuckerberg, a borderline Asperger’s Harvard sophomore, is rejected both by his girlfriend Erica and the final clubs to which he longs to belong. When two WASP-y brothers, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, ask him to help them create a dating website called Harvard Connection, Zuckerberg decides to create a different website based around social interaction: “People want to go on the Internet and check out their friends, so why not build a website that offers that? … I’m talking about taking the whole social experience of college and putting it online.”

What follows is his quest to make this dream a reality, while fending off lawsuits from the Winklevoss twins and his co-founder/friend Eduardo.

The movie risks portraying Zuckerberg as unsympathetic, but watching the trailer above helps viewers find points of connection with him. As it begins, we see what look like screenshots from Facebook of its users sharing pictures of their tattoos, their parties, and their children, commenting on their friends’ profiles, overlaid by Scala and Kolacny Brothers’ cover of Radiohead’s “Creep.” These images eventually dissolve into a picture of the man who links all these profiles together, Mark Zuckerberg, who appears just as the vocal track angelically sings, “You’re so very special.” The juxtaposition of image and word here creates an eerie effect—the Facebook users and Mark are all linked through the lyrics that describe them:

I don’t care if it hurts,
I want to have control.
I want a perfect body,
I want a perfect soul.
I want you to notice,
when I'm not around.
You're so very special,
I wish I was special.

While perhaps this opening distinguishes between the users longing to be perfect and the “special” Zuckerberg, the rest of the trailer draws the two together. Zuckerberg here is presented as an outsider without real friends. The movie opens with him struggling to have a conversation with his girlfriend Erica; she has trouble keeping up with him as he jumps between topics:

However, the scene concludes when Erica finally gets mad at Mark for implying that she’s slept with the bar’s door guy and that she goes to an inferior school. Her words to him closing the scene, implies Sorkin, motivate Mark for the rest of the movie: “Listen. You’re going to be rich and successful. But you’re going to go through life thinking that girls don’t like you because you’re a geek. And I want you to know, from the bottom of my heart, that that won’t be true. It’ll be because you’re an asshole.” Viewers spend the rest of the movie following Mark and his actions, left to judge at the end along with Rashida Jones whether or not Mark is an asshole, or just trying to be one. Is Mark—and is the viewer with him—a creep? How are we to read Mark, and how is Mark left to read the social codes surrounding him?

Image Credit: Screenshot from The Social Network

The movie helps us do this in part through its costuming and visual rhetoric, setting Mark against both his friend Eduardo and the Winklevii. Mark dresses throughout the movie in something like a uniform: exchangeable grey hoodies or North Face black jackets, jeans or shorts, and ever-present t-shirts. His cluelessness about how to talk to Erica is visually mirrored by shots of him running through the snow in Adidas sport sandals, unaware of the cold. His hacker-mentality appears in the pajamas he wears to a meeting with a venture capital firm. His clothes mark him as young, but still advertise an educated background; he appears in Phillips Exeter Academy shirts several times (the prep school the real Zuckerberg did attend).

Image Credit: The Social Network

The Winklevoss twins, on the other hand, visually represent the traditional Harvard elite. They wear suits so dressy that Larry Summers jokes that they’re trying to sell him a Brooks Brothers franchise. Armie Hammer’s bland good looks complement both his pastel tie and the wood-paneled rooms of the Porcellian in which he stands. He looks like the kind of “gentleman of Harvard” that Cameron Winklevoss claims to be. While Zuckerberg has similarly elite connections that separate him from many of the movie’s viewers, the costumers make the Winklevoss twins look different enough to set up the binary between the two groups. Eduardo’s suits throughout hint that while he might want to be Mark’s friend, ultimately he’s closer to being the enemy.

This visual dynamic plays over into the characters’ interactions in the script: not just how the friends are visually portrayed, but the way in which The Social Network pictures friendship at large. Competing visions of friendship are offered by Mark, Eduardo, and Sean. Mark’s friendships with these two men play out homosocially (which helps explain why the women seem so unnecessary at times), and their abilities to relate to Mark drive the website’s development. When Eduardo first appears in the movie, he’s ready to comfort Mark after reading Mark’s LiveJournal entry that describes his breakup with Erica; what Mark wants from Eduardo isn’t emotional support, but the mathematical codes that will help him create the website Facemash.

As Eduardo is punched by the final club The Phoenix, Mark derides him at every turn in (apparent) envy at not being included. Eduardo’s vow to protect Mark from what he sees to be Sean’s bad influence leads him to sign the stock restructuring agreement that effectively phases him out of the company, ending his friendship with Mark. Yet Mark warns Eduardo that he might be left behind if he doesn’t come out to Palo Alto to help out with the company’s development there, a warning Eduardo fails to heed. Sean seduces Mark over drinks and a shared vision for the company, but he gets forced out when caught snorting coke off Facebook interns at the end of the film.

While the movie makes frequent use of classic Sedgwick’s homosocial triangles, the movie’s energy primarily emerges from Mark’s continued and ongoing attempts to keep a friendship with the one person in the movie who rejects him constantly: Erica Albright. At three points in the movie Mark confronts Erica with friendship on the line. When she breaks up with him, they have a heated exchange:

Erica: I think we should just be friends.
Mark: I don’t need friends.
Erica: I was being polite, I had no intention of being friends with you.

Mark here rejects the idea of needing friends, but when he spots her again in a bar he feels compelled to go up to her to try and have a conversation. She refuses to follow him, explaining, “I don’t want to be rude to my friends.” Finally, the movie closes with him finding her profile on Facebook and sending her a friend request; the screen fades to black on the image of him refreshing the page over and over to see if she’s responded yet. Mark has helped to redefine friendship through Facebook—where users call relative strangers and close companions alike “friends”—but the viewer is left to feel superior to Mark because the one friend he wants is the one he never can have.

Facebook allows its 500 million users to join groups, make friends, and establish a public identity for all to see, but it also creates the kinds of out-groups with which Mark identifies in the end. If Zuckerberg and Facebook potentially allow for the breaking down of certain kinds of class through technology, both also work to reify classes of users and non-users, people with access and those without. I think a part of the reason I left the movie feeling a bit disturbed was because while I might feel a certain schadenfreude in Mark’s failed friendships, by making friends with Facebook back in 2004 I helped to create the monster.

(Not that it stopped me from going home and posting my reaction to the movie on Facebook.)

"Putting the 'Man' in 'Manifest Destiny!'": Making Populist Iconography and Queer Historiography in Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson

Rachel Schneider — Sun, 26 Sep 2010 02:24:07 +0000

Image Credit: Theatre is Easy

Even though my Rhetoric of the Musical class has finished up, I can’t quit musicals. When I heard that Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, a musical I’d discovered when I was preparing my class, was moving to Broadway, I decided that it was the perfect karotic moment to tackle this rich topic. The musical’s Gothic visuals, emo music, and satirical presentation of American politics combine to bring audiences to consider not only American populism but also the act of history making itself.

Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson covers the career of Andrew Jackson: America’s seventh president, a military hero, a virulent racist, and the first President to claim he was born in a log cabin. However, it doesn’t try to tell the story straight in the way 1776 shows the writing of the Declaration of Independence. The musical’s opening lines set the tone for the evening as irreverent, profane, and visceral: “I’m wearing some tight tight jeans and tonight we’re delving into some serious, serious shit. I’m Andrew Jackson. I’m your President. Let’s go!” The song that follows, “Populism Yea Yea,” establishes the musical’s major concerns: the role of the President as Celebrity-in-Chief, America’s complicated relationship with power and populism, and how these concerns connect to the present day:

The rocking beat, along with the choreographed hip swivels and raised fists, don’t just help draw our attention to lead actor Ben Walker’s sexy Jackson and his tight t-shirt. They also attempt to capture the energy of populist sentiment, as strong today as it was in the 1830s when Jackson was elected. The lyrics blend the concerns of then with now, as the show’s cowboys and cowgirls offer to “take this country back / For people like us / Who don’t just think about things, / People who make things happen.” This language—emphasizing us versus them, action versus thought—could have come as easily from Bush’s western-inflected mouth as from a Tea Party pamphlet. What’s also remarkable here in the way that populist energy is associated with teenage angst: “Why wouldn’t you ever go out with me in school? / You always went out with those guys / Who thought they were so cool / And I was just nobody to you.” Here, the writers indirectly connect populist disaffection with the rebellion of lonely youth, left out by the “elite” who will be forced to “eat our dust.” This might seem a stretch, but the political nature of the musical hasn’t just been noted by New York Times review Ben Brantley, but has also been acknowledged by the show’s lead, the show's co-creator Alex Timbers, and the show's composer-lyricist Michael Friedman:

“Alex [Timbers, the show’s co-creator] and I had both been interested in historical figures and in ways of looking through a contemporary lens at history. And I think we found that Andrew Jackson - and this was five years ago - really spoke to the moment that we were living in and planted the seeds of so much of what we see now. And I think in recent politics, we've seen even more of that.”

However, the connection between the musical and politics is one of long-standing tradition, as has the connection between music and politics. Politicians have used songs to brand themselves, as Obama did with U2’s “City of Blinding Lights,” as Jackson himself did in “The Hunters of Kentucky” (the song that closes the show), and as Reagan famously tried to do with Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.,” a heritage the show’s poster directly alludes to:

Image Credit: SpotCo

The tag line “History just got all sexypants” points out the musical’s willingness to appeal to audiences through tight pants and guyliner, but the reference to Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. cover also connects the show to the song’s dubious political legacy. Though Springsteen meant his song as a critique of Reagan, others read it against the grain as a populist song celebrating America. Writers Friedman and Timbers don’t shy away from critiquing this populist legacy. When discussing the musical’s end, Friedman stated that

“I think it ends trying to force the audience of having - giving them, I think, a lot of laughs along the way, something to really think about, which is, for me, how much responsibility we take for the people we elect, and how much responsibility we take for what the people we elect end up doing.”

This comes out in the way the show doesn’t shy away from depicting Jackson’s negative aspects. Both Jackson and his wife Rachel take slavery for granted, as she sings in “The Great Compromise” that “I always thought I’d live in a house / With a dog and some kids and some slaves.” The show also rewrites the song “Ten Little Indians” to highlight Jackson’s violence against the Native American population: “Ten little Indians / Standing in a line / One got executed / And then there were nine.” And as the song “Crisis Averted” shows citizens reacting to Jackson’s removal of the Seminoles from Florida, it also invites us to critique the public’s willingness to overlook the bad done by politicians on behalf of the citizens:

Florida Woman: I mean, I think it’s a real tragedy that Jackson moved all the Indians from here to Florida.

Florida Man: Me too. A real tragedy.

Florida Woman: And that’s why we hesitated to move here. Absolutely. I mean, we didn’t want it to seem like we were endorsing that kind of behavior.

Florida Man: No. Of course not. But, then we were like… it is nice that it doesn’t snow.

Florida Woman: Um, yes. It is. So, it’s like, it’s great that he did that. But we definitely don’t condone it.

The audience knows that the Trail of Tears was cruel, but like the torture of prisoners at Guantanamo, Americans have been brought to condone it through silent consent.

Image Credit: Gothamist

What I find to be most interesting about the musical is the ways in which its re-mythologizing of Andrew Jackson as emo rock star brings to the forefront the question of history and writing history. The musical includes a designated Storyteller who undertakes to narrate Jackson’s life story, but Jackson shoots the Storyteller in the face before the show’s fourth song, “I’m So That Guy,” in order to take charge of the action and to “make his own story.” In “Rock Star” Jackson narrates his own version of history where “Adams tried to be an American idol / Jefferson tried to be a rock star / Madison tried to make the presidency vital / And James Monroe was a douchebag!” He then claims the mantle of being “a celebrity of the first rank.” After his wife’s complaint in “The Great Compromise” that she is being left behind by his campaigning, he sings after her death in “Public Life” that he will “give my life to the people now” in her honor. He turns tragedy into mythology, the public man sacrificing himself for a dedicated public.

History and the musical have been connected for a while, as my friend Michelle Dvoskin wrote about in her dissertation “‘Listen to the Stories, Hear It in the Songs’: Musical Theatre as Queer Historiography.” As she put it:

“This project argues that not only can musicals ‘do’ history, they offer an excellent genre for theorizing what I call ‘queer historiography.’ While sexuality remains one category of analysis, I use ‘queer’ to signify opposition, not simply to heterosexuality, but to heteronormativity, and normativity more broadly. Musicals' queer historiography, then, is a way of engaging past events that challenges normativity in form as well as content; a way of productively challenging not only what we think we know about the past, but how we come to know it.”

I would argue here that Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson engages in similar acts of queer historiography as its rock style rejects normativity as plainly as its overall treatment of Jackson asks its audience to question the ways in which we think about executive power, political celebrity, and populist sentiment. It draws us to think about the past not just as distant history, but as lived experience and recurrent theme. We may know one Andrew Jackson through high-school textbooks, but the musical forces its audience to rethink that idea—by presenting us with “populajism” and some tight tight sexypants.

Under Their Spell: An Interview with Michelle Dvoskin and Shelley Manis

Rachel Schneider — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 03:12:38 +0000

Image Credit: Small Screen Scoop

I know that this post is a bit belated, but my excitement in posting this fabulous interview makes me unable to resist the potentially corny title. (And no, while these actresses are not my actual interview subjects, both of them love musicals as much as I do, and one has even written about the musical episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, from which this pictures comes.)

I had the lucky opportunity to interview Michelle Dvoskin and Shelley Manis, recent graduates from the PhD program in Performance as Public Practice from the Department of Theatre and Dance at The University of Texas at Austin, at the end of May. The initial reason that I asked to interview these ladies was that both include musicals as a part of their research interests and that each worked with Stacy Wolf, a former UT professor whose book A Problem Like Maria made its way into my own syllabus this past year; however, both ladies were eloquent on the challenges of teaching students to enact visual analysis and to think critically about musicals. The lively and interesting conversation we shared can be found either on the views page or directly here.

Visualizing (Post-)Racial Protest and Politics

Rachel Schneider — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 21:25:18 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot from Towleroad

H/T: Hampton Finger

It’s been hard to miss the recent media coverage of the new Arizona immigration law SB 1070, which allows police to stop individuals and require them to show legal papers proving their citizenship upon “reasonable suspicion.” Many have interpreted this as legalizing racial profiling, which has caused protests to spring up against this, most recently the one pictured above where individuals smeared refried beans in the shape of a swastika to point out the potentially fascist implications of the bill. What makes me curious is how racial tensions have been visually deployed during the theoretically post-racial Obama presidency.

I was fortunate to recently attend a talk at the University of Texas’s John L. Warfield Center for African & African American Studies given by Dr. Soyini Madison on the topic of “White Anger, Crazy Patriotism, and (Post) Black Performativity.” In this talk, Dr. Madison discussed how what she refers to as “crazy patriotism,” which she accounts for as something like a sacred belief in nationalist ideology, first projected their frustrations onto Michelle Obama to portray her as an angry black woman who hates America (as seen on a New Yorker cover previously discussed on viz.), then re-appropriated it as a righteous anger that seeks to preserve American values. This discussion seemed relevant for viz. readers if only because Dr. Madison constantly referred to the visual “momification” of Michelle Obama on newspaper stands nationwide.

Image Credit: Jezebel

Jezebel’s recent post on her magazine covers notes how frequently she likes to pose with her hands clasped:

Why do so many Mobama covers feature the First Lady with her hands demurely clasped? Deliberate signaling of her approachability? Or is it just how she likes to pose? What does it all mean?

Jezebel is clearly onto something here: the pearls she wears, along with her clasped hands, her manicured nails, and the apple on the table all serve to portray the First Lady as a suburban middle-class mom whose causes and views are all as wholesome as the organic foods she grows in her home garden. Yet while some have criticized her for this momification, Madison points out how this particular post-black identity allows the Obamas to displace crazy patriotism yet still maintain race as a part of the discussion. (It’s interesting to consider how her image helps sell magazines as a note, though—she helps sell magazines directed at African-Americans, but “doesn’t produce more than an occasional lift” for general-interest publications.)

The question that I think can come from pairing together what seems like two different discourses is to see how the visuals of post-raciality still lean on racially encoded signifiers. Just as refried beans serve as shorthand to identity an angry Hispanic speaker, Michelle is dressed and posed to present a nonthreatening blackness to viewers.

William Faulkner once wrote that “the past is never dead, it’s not even past.” We can see in these images that while some commentators and Tea Partiers might argue that this law doesn’t involve racial profiling and that Obama is not subject to racist attacks, racism and its legacy remain problems with which we must cope—especially when people are already being arrested according to this law's logic.

Remember Me: Iconic Photography and Representations of 9/11

Rachel Schneider — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 18:24:36 +0000

2010 film Remember Me" width="548" height="292">

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

When my friend Lauren pointed out to me the following TED video on “photos that changed the world,” I thought that it would be good material for viz. What I hadn’t realized was where Jonathan Klein’s claims would take my thinking.

In his talk, Klein talks about the potential political effects of what he refers to as “iconic” images: “We're looking for images that shine an uncompromising light on crucial issues, images that transcend borders, that transcend religions, images that provoke us to step up and do something, in other words, to act.”

H/T: Lauren Gantz

While I did question how an iconic picture like “V-J day in Times Square,” also included in his talk, has changed the world, this argument seems to hold up better when he points out how photographs of Earth have helped encourage the environmental movement. As someone who has spent the last year writing about the power of images, I am willing to agree with this point. However, this discussion reminded me of a viewing experience that I meant to discuss on viz. after spring break, but had forgotten to recount: the new Robert Pattinson movie Remember Me.

Remember Me tells the story of a young man named Tyler, whose relationship with his father has suffered in the wake of his brother’s suicide, and a girl named Ally, whose mother died in a robbery when she was young. The two end up in a romantic relationship while struggling to reconcile themselves both to their fathers and to their tragic pasts. However, just as the audience begins to anticipate a happy ending, the moment of reconciliation is interrupted by tragedy: namely, the events of September 11, 2001.

The movie does set up this difficulty from the beginning: the movie opens with viewers taken back ten years before the story’s major events to actually see the young Ally with her mother, and shows her being shot in front of her young daughter by the thieves who take her purse. Also, it’s not long into either the film or its trailer that Tyler frames our experience with the following insight: “Gandhi said that whatever you do in life will be insignificant, but it’s very important that you do it; I tend to agree with the first part.” The movie’s overall message seems to be that life is unpredictable and that one must be able to recover from disaster to live life—however, as this lesson culminates Tyler’s death, it unsettles the audience by associating the characters’ private tragedies with a national one.

Perhaps one reason why I didn’t write about this movie initially was because I did cry at the end as I realized what was coming. The movie makes the 2001 setting clear in the beginning, but only once you see the date written on a blackboard towards the end does the audience begin to anticipate what might happen. Tyler’s death becomes clear as the camera moves to his profile in his father’s office to a wider shot of the World Trade Center.

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

Predictably, there was much controversy about this movie’s ending. As summed up in a post by Bryan Reesman, “many critics and some audience members have found the use of the World Trade Center attacks to be offensive and exploitative, while many people … found the ending moving as the central themes of the films are coping with grief, making amends with those close to you, moving forward with life and learning to embrace the simple joys and to live in the moment.” Even other responses were possible: my ten year old sister was unaffected by the ending that I found so moving. I actually was in more shock that she could be so blithe, and found it hard to explain my reaction to her. The best I could come up with was a situational context: while I experienced 9/11 as a girl attending college in Virginia two hours south of DC, she was only two years old when it happened.

Newsweek’s coverage of the controversy explains why this disjointed reaction might be the movie’s intent: “Now we have the biggest star in the tween world building a memorial dedicated to September 11. When it's taught in classrooms, September 11 is presented as a historical atrocity. The key word: historical. … Remember Me exposes a new generation to what happened in American nearly—can you believe it?—a decade ago. The title isn't a request. It's a command.” In other words, Remember Me attempts to make that tragedy a part of a shared American past for the growing generations who did not powerfully experience it.

It also carefully does so to avoid exploiting the events: note the picture that opens this post. The skyline behind the words “Remember Me” is clearly New York; an aware audience can be aware that the words cover the place where the Twin Towers once stood. The image thus suggests without explicitly making clear its content. Similarly, the movie avoids actually showing the attacks beyond a shot of Tyler’s dad, played by Pierce Brosnan, coming out of his car and seeing ash falling around him. As someone interested in visual rhetoric, it’s a careful choice not to show this event onscreen.

Jonathan Klein points out in his video why this might be: “Some very important images are deemed too graphic or disturbing for us to see them.” Clearly, the producers and writer of Remember Me seem to agree with this sentiment; my friend Shelley Manis in her dissertation, "More than Memory": Haunted Performance in Post-9/11 Popular American Culture, discusses how popular media works like Tony Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul, the musical Wicked, and the television show Lost deal with representing the tragedy and the mourning and melancholia that followed in its wake. For example, Wicked begins with a song declaring that “No One Mourns the Wicked,” who in this case is the Wicked Witch Elphaba, treated unjustly as a terrorist by the Ozians and not by the audience. Listening to her defend her dissertation yesterday helped me understand how to think about Remember Me. This movie serves to help its audience reevaluate the event outside of heated political debate and teaches them to learn to mourn those events over again. While the viewing experience was painful, my tears provided some measure of catharsis unavailable to me at another point. I wonder now whether my first reaction that the movie was inappropriate relates to a restricting political debate about what kinds of reactions to 9/11 are “appropriate,” and that we should encourage artists to take up the question of 9/11 in popular media more than ever today.