Scott Garbacz's blog

Processing Extraordinary Tragedy in Ordinary Days

Scott Garbacz — Mon, 14 Apr 2014 13:00:00 +0000

[Spoiler alert: if you are fortunate enough to have the opportunity of attending Ordinary Days, know that the following describes much of the play’s ending.]

Manalive, the novel by G.K. Chesterton, opens with miraculous gust of wind, a meterological phenomenon described as “the good wind that blows nobody harm.” I always found something particularly memorable about that image of a moment of impossible happiness, and it gusted into my mind once more when I attended the recent Austin production of the chamber musical, Ordinary Days.

Ordinary Days offers more than a miraculous gust of wind. Instead, its climax brings all four of the play’s cast members into contact by a single, bizarre spectacle. The image is explicitly identified not with nature, however, but with one of the greatest recent tragedies of our nation: the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11. I’m not sure that the play’s treatment of 9/11 is necessarily its most brilliant moment—but it does offer an interesting example of one artist’s attempt to use visual and narrative imagination to recontextualize the image that has driven so much of America’s foreign and domestic policy over the last ten years.

The play starts off, it seems, as about as unpolitical as a story could. Jason is moving in with his girlfriend Claire, wondering whether he can find a place for himself in her apartment and heart. Meanwhile, cheerfully optimistic (if profoundly unambitious) artist Warren finds the dissertation notes of neurotic grad-student (but I repeat myself) Deb, starting a delightful odd-couple friendship. Everyone, naturally, has his or her own problem. Claire struggles to clean out the clutter of her past in order to make room for Jason. Deb is still running away from her childhood in “like, a suburb of a suburb,” but finding that the overwhelming anonymity of New York (not to mention the inflexibility of her dissertation advisor) don’t live up to her big-town imagination. The male characters are simpler: Jason yearns to move forward in his relationship with Claire, while Warren finds a simple pleasure in trying (mostly unsuccessfully) to hand out flyers covered with motivational sayings.

Warren and Deb. Ahh, what delicious awkwardness. Image credit: Kimberly Mead

The events on 9/11 are evoked near the end of the musical, after Claire rejected Jason’s marriage proposal. Deb and Warren are contemplating the city from a friend’s high-rise apartment, contemplating their insignificance, the fact that they will “never stand as tall as these buildings.” On a whim, Warren decides to cast his flyers to the street below. Reeling from a disastrous meeting with her dissertation advisor, Deb adds pages from her dissertation to the impromptu confetti. New Yorkers gather, with quite understandable anxiety to see their day disrupted by a sight no one could have predicted. Walking beneath the paper explosion, Claire sees “this storm cloud of papers fall down from the sky,” triggering her (and the audience) to re-live her own traumatic memories. Claire calls Jason and, in perhaps the show’s most powerful number, recounts her whirlwind romance with her first husband. This love story ended, as so many stories did, on September 11, 2001.

Image credit: Kimberly Mead

The reaction to 9/11 involved many responses: anger, fear, the sort of “quiet, unyielding anger” that I shared with George W. Bush and that lead us to two perhaps ill-advised wars, unimaginable abridgment of our civil liberties, and a drone program where Americans and foreigners are systematically killed with very little in the way of due process or civilian oversight. But Ordinary Days, for a moment, brought out other memories of the day: the sense of helplessness, the sense that everything has changed, the sense of horrified vertigo of looking up, and feeling like the bottom of my life had dropped out.

There is something appropriate, then, to seeing two characters throw their obsessions out the window of a skyscraper. If Ordinary Days is, as Warren puts it, “an almost, not-quite, New York sort of fairy-tale,” the scene functions as a through-the-looking-glass echo of the disaster that inspired it. Yes, Deb and Warren see their plans, their imagined careers, and much of their identities swirl away. Yet watching words drift to the ground like shards of glass and steel, Claire hallucinates her previous husband’s voice: “hey, you’re allowed to move on. It’s okay.” That is all the permission she needs to accept Jason’s proposal, and accept the hopeful ending we want from our musicals. But maybe, just perhaps, Ordinary Days offers a way of simultaneously recognizing the events of our recent history, and developing a healthier reaction to the tragedy. Maybe then we can cross, as Jason sings in the play’s third song, “all this space between / the moment we’re in and what’s lying ahead.”

Generic Branding and our Culture's Values

Scott Garbacz — Mon, 31 Mar 2014 13:00:00 +0000

Image source: Dissolve.com

Branding and corporate marketing can be bizarre. Sure, there are the big brands, the Disney’s or Budweisers or Coca-Colas, whose very names evoke our day-to-day experience of the products they market. For those of us who like to think about how visual rhetoric interacts with pop culture, these iconic multinationals can provide endless streams of data. Watching how such companies endlessly race to reflect or mold global and American cultures so as to increase visibility may sometimes be a depressing project, but it is always fascinating. But what about the guys who we don’t interact with on a daily basis?

I’ve never had an opportunity to purchase anything advertising itself as a British Petroleum product, yet I’ve been saturated with billboards and advertisements seeking to win my good-will for the company. Similarly, I grew up watching striking ad after striking ad for the chemical company BASF, even though their tagline explicitly reminded me that “we don’t make a lot of the products you buy.” I will probably never make any purchasing decision that affects BASF’s bottom-line, yet they seem to have been quite passionate about convincing me that “we make a lot of the products you buy better.”

Companies whose work only indirectly affect our lives find themselves in a rather comical rhetorical situation. How can you attract a following as large as possible, made up of people who don’t know what you do, without offending anyone in the process? The answer, at least according to Kendra Eash’s satirical poem, is to throw a bunch of incoherent yet iconic images together, targeting as many different audiences as possible, while always remembering the importance of committing to nothing. “We think first,” Eash’s poem begins, “of vague words that are synonyms for progress / And pair them with footage of a high-speed train.” Her description of the video passes through a sea of carefully calculated images and ends with inanity. “Did we put a baby in here?” she asks. “What about an ethinic old man whose wrinkled smile represents / the happiness and wisdom of the poor? / Yep.” If a corporation has nothing to sell you directly, there’s always the old standby: instead of selling a product, sell people back their own cliches.

The poem took an interesting turn when read by someone at Dissolve, a company that provides stock footage. Since Dissolve already had vivid film clips to match each of Eash’s described scenes, they stitched them together to create the ultimate, and ultimately generic, brand video. It’s worth a watch. It maps, in vivid detail, the moral and aesthetic universe advertisers imagine when trying to attract mass-media viewers to their cause.

Image source: Dissolve.com

The website upon which Dissolve posted the piece adds two layers of irony to the whole experience. On the right, the makers praise Eash’s article and inform the reader that “we knew it was our moral imperative to make that generic brand video so. No surprise, we had all the footage.” Why Dissolve might feel a Categorical Imperative to mock one of its prime markets is, of course, left humorously vague. Less vague, of course, is the icons that take up the bottom of the screen: every clip from the trailer, conveniently laid out in rows, waiting for the filmmaker willing to invest $50 per short HD clip of emotional manipulation.

The LEGO Movie, Narrative, and Children's Play

Scott Garbacz — Mon, 17 Mar 2014 13:00:00 +0000

1978 LEGOS Ad. "a toy that stimulates creativity and imagination for years." Source: Ourlifeintoronto.com

Sometimes, it’s hard to separate a film from the circumstances in which you watch it. In my case, I saw it as a father of a 1-year-old, sitting at the Alamo Drafthouse, following a preshow that included one of the early advertisements for LEGOs, then a European import newly reaching America’s shores. On multiple levels, I kept thinking of how much The LEGO Movie might represent a low point in both how we imagine children’s entertainment, and how we imagine children themselves.

2014 The Lego Movie: Explosions, Lens Flares, and Desperate Running. Source: IMDB.com

That isn’t to say that The LEGO Movie isn’t interesting. In fact, one of the things that makes it most noteworthy is that the film actually tries to say something. Rather than just attempting to sell LEGO’s, the show presents a dialectic between two conflicting (yet enthusiastically childlike) phrases: “everything is awesome” and “you are special.” “Awesomeness,” in this movie, is tied to conformity, but also cooperation; as the opening song has it, “everything is cool when you’re part of a team.” “Specialness,” on the other hand, is explicitly presented as the movie’s central theme. As multiple characters put it throughout the film, “you are the most talented, the most interesting, and most extraordinary person in the universe. And you are capable of amazing things.”

1955 ad for Lego System Image credit: Youtube.com

Perhaps it’s hard not to feel special when playing with LEGO’s; where the original advertisement for Lego Universal System emphasized the ability to build individual objects, LEGO sets do give children the sense of having godlike powers, of creating a world that answers to them and them alone. At its best, The LEGO Movie's visuals echo the anarchic pleasure of building with LEGO blocks, celebrating ugly juxtapositions (“special!”) rather than frozen perfection (instruction-following “awesome”). When the movie does encourage such anarchic construction, it evokes the childlike pleasures of a LEGO's aesthetic: conflicting colors jarred together in defiance of mature adult tastes.

1981: Yet Another LEGO builder who needs no instruction manual. Image source: womenyoushouldknow.net

However, I was more disturbed by what The LEGO Movie seems to think it means to be an individual, or "special." We start with the same character as almost every Hollywood epic: a white, normal-looking straight man who just can’t fit in. The film’s story, then, runs down a checklist of “epic movie conventions” so hackneyed I can recite them in my sleep. We have

1) The aforementioned white protagonist, who

The middle-class looking nerdy boy is the first to train dragons! Who would've thought? Image source: imdb.com

2) meets the immaculate, superlatively competent girl who falls inexplicably in love with him,

Even the most creative of films rely on old stereotypes. Image source: imdb.com

2) finds himself among a group of people who seem to be pretty special themselves, but ultimately will give heartfelt speeches about how much better he is than them,

He may be foreign to their culture and have little understanding of their situation, but all the Na'vi look to the human Jake Sully for guidance. Image source: avatarmovie.com

3) and of course is aided by the death of the Magical Negro, played by Morgan Freeman, the most magical and godlike of all black side characters to throw himself beneath a bus for his white heroes.

Guess which of these guys gets to die not once but twice so that his fellow ex-CIA killers may live and have a sequel? Image source: comingsoon.net

4) Finally, as seems to be the case in all kids movies these days, the hero slaughters a horde or two of mundane, drab-looking folk simply to prove his own awesomeness; no one cares about how many policemen get lasered, drowned, crushed, or otherwise slaughtered in The LEGO Movie.

Gandalf: True courage is found in knowing not when to take a life, but when to spare one. Bilbo: Did you really just say that with a straight face? Have you even read the script for this movie? Image source: lotr.wikia.com

Sure, some of the details do satirize the film’s color-in-the-lines Epic Movie construction. It’s nice to see a woman reject Batman as a boyfriend, for instance. (Batman is the boyfriend that no one deserves, and no one needs.) Freeman’s joke at the end does give him access to the most whitest of white cultural positions, the hipster. Yet why does the movie’s only female lead continue to be a cookie-cutter idealization of our current domestic ideal (the badass competent human being who can provide for our hero’s security in an economically-fragile world, but also the swoony fem who needs to be attached to the main character, and serves as his ultimate prize)? Why is there no living black character by the end of the movie?

Each of the stereotypes that The LEGO Movie uses is, perhaps, useful from both a marketing and a creative standpoint, yet The LEGO Movie's insistance that children's imagination is made up of nothing but these well-trod cliches is disturbing. Real children's imaginations tend to be discontinuous. jarring, confounding to adult sensibilities. Children are clever at picking up on our clches and narratives (sometimes when we don't want them to), but they are also capable of combining bits and pieces of stories they've heard into new wholes with all the enthusiasm of a young girl slamming together discordant blocks in hopes of creating a LEGO masterpiece. But of course, such free play has nothing to do with the mechanical repitition of Hollywood formulae running in our theaters. Nor is frewheeling creativity something that recent LEGO marketing wants to encourage, especially for girls.

Recent LEGO models targeted to a female consumer-base are specifically designed not to interact with normal Lego sets, clearly implying that the pieces featured in The LEGO Movie are off limits to girls. As the very girl featured in the 1981 ad points out, “in 1981, LEGOs were simple and gender-neutral, and the creativity of the child produced the message. In 2014, it’s the reverse: the toy delivers a message to the child, and the message is weirdly about gender.” Of course, there are financial incentives for doing so; not only are parents unable to re-use LEGOS for children of different genders, but girls and boys are each encouraged to buy the latest pre-made sets. LEGOs becomes less and less about creativity and exploration, and more and more about following the narrative laid down by Hollywood scriptwriters and advertisment execs.

I left The LEGO Movie humming “Everything is Awesome,” and it’s been the background to much of my headspace for the past week or so. But I also left wondering who it is that we allow to be seen as special in our society, and how we encourage our kids to think about the idea of “specialness.” I am also confused by how very eagerly critics seem to take the movie at its face value, or even praise it for demonstrating “how the weight of ‘adult concerns’ conspires to kill the child in all of us." But the thing is, children don't tell stories as uninspired and predictable as that found in The LEGO Movie--unless, of course, they receive enough signals that these are the only stories worth considering. If LEGO was once "a toy that stimulates creativity and imagination for years," The LEGO Movie seems to be just the opposite; a love-song to the death of creativity wrapped in clever-yet-superficial satire and a thoroughly disingenuous claim that "everyone is special."

Journey and Non-Referential Iconography

Scott Garbacz — Mon, 24 Feb 2014 14:00:00 +0000

Image source: Thatgamecompany.

Probably all illustrations, and certainly the animated images I’ve discussed in Frozen and Lilo and Stitch, come freighted with a vast history of associations. Striking images can literally provide worldviews—complex perspectives from which to view matters ranging from gender roles to cultural identities to ideal body types. Frozen’s visual aesthetic offers a triumphantalist account of traditional images put to new uses, while Lilo and Stitch offers a harder-edged criticism of our lazy, self-indulgent ways of looking at the world, for instance. Yet both deliberately and meaningfully comment upon the mediating power of their own iconography. Both films are, in short, particularly focused on understanding how images have worked in the past, and how they can be made to work differently in the future.

Journey is a video game whose cartoon-like visual aesthetic draws strongly from the same animated tradition as the first two films, yet its aims are quite different. In both its gameplay and its visual design, I will argue, Journey is not focused on what it means, but rather on the raw experiences it can provide. The game reminds us, in short, that while images have deep and rich rhetorical histories, they are also something more than mere arguments.

At first glance, Journey seems yet another participant in the iconographic tradition of Disney-style heroic adventure. The game's unnamed protagonist wears yet another variant of the cape worn by Sleeping Beauty's Prince Phillip or Frozen's Anna: a red, flowing cloak whose bold coloration differentiates him or her from the various backgrounds he will visit. Fittingly, this character will go on his own quest, making his or her way through dozens of different landscapes and ruins in order to reach a distant mountain peak. Not surprisingly, the primary figure this character finds among the ruins is dressed in a pure white gown that carries at least two markedly female associations: that of a helpful nun, and that of a bride on her wedding day. Her beak-like face, on the other hand, nearly literalizes the cultural ideal of a woman as a "mother hen."

Flowing, red clothing for adventurers: the one unchanging truth of the fashion world. Image source: Youtube.

Yet while one could perform a gender analysis (or, for that matter, a cultural analysis) of Journey's treatment of archetypes of a lone adventurer in an exotic foreign place, to do so would be to miss one of the most notable and immediately striking features of the game: its insistant attempt to minimize or obscure any ability of its images to refer to anything outside of themselves. This design aesthetic stretches from the game's costume design (just ornate enough to defamiliarize the reader and yet not ornate enough to betray any one particular origin) to its art style (frequently, the game presents such clean lines and well-defined spaces as to make the background seem neutral), to its narrative (a serious of wordless, simply-illustrated cut scenes hint at a deep religious subtext to the journey, but provide no clarity as to what the significance might be), to its very protagonist (all gender, race, and class markers are obscured beneath his or her robe, and any distinctive voice is replaced by a small variety of musical notes.) For the most part, the game goes out of its way to limit the degree to which it reflects the world outside itself.

The landscape, like the character is often a nearly blank canvas. Image source: Thatgamecompany.

Two things, however, receive much more focus than in a traditional video game. The first is light. Not only are all the game's various locations carefully differentiated by their color palate (as is common in video games), but the use of light and tonality is often taken to dramatic extremes. One segment of the game takes place in a harsh, snow-and-wind haunted mountain pass, where the screen is at times almost entirely white. On the other hand, an early visit to a sun-drenched temple demonstrates the game's lighting effects at their most impressive; the sun reflects vibrantly off the golden sand, an effect dazzling in itself yet made more impactful when suddenly encountered within a game otherwise willing to stick with relatively bland backgrounds.

Image source: Forbes

At such moments, the game becomes a meditation on the power and significance of light and vision; while architectural details may be visible, much more powerful is the play of light and shadow, gold and brown. The relatively desaturated and low-contrast images before this climactic relevation of light, for instance, only serve to de-sensitize the mind of gamers, so that what could be a merely standout moment in another game is transformed into a revelation.

Yet the game's most powerful use of constraints involves not images themselves, but rather PS3's multiplayer functionality. Amid the loneliness of the game's single-player campaign, the game randomly brings two human-controlled players together in a single universe. As with the game's visual presentation, this interaction takes place within strictly-enforced limits. Communication comes from watching what the other person does, or pressing a single button that (depending on how hard or quickly you press it) triggers one of a small number of musical notes. Cooperation is limited to the ability to assist each other in making higher than normal jumps.

Image source: Thatgamecompany.

As with the visuals, the game's careful limitations provide an intense focus. These interactions obviously lack many of the hallmarks of day-to-day encounters: human voice, facial expressions, language, posture, distinctive clothing, and so forth. Yet the knowledge of that the character accompanying you is played by a fellow human being makes all the difference in the world. Indeed, the very difficulty of communication only increases the wonder when communication does emerge, as when two players spontaneously develop a quick two-note call-and-response to check in, or when a new player is greeted with a sudden shower of notes that serve as an unmisible signifier of welcome. In these multiplayer sections, the game became less about the designed narrative than about the experiences it enabled: experiences of recognizing, working with, and above all communicating with a fellow human.

Both the game's presentation of light and its treatment of human interactions signal that the game is not being "about" something so much as it is interested in creating something. The glorious sunset walk is not "about" the power of beauty in the way that Lilo and Stitch is about the danger of mis-read stories; nor is it (like Frozen) "about" the revision of the Disney adventurer narrative in order to include women (and sisters) as protagonists. Instead, the most significant thing that Journey does is to provide us with carefully cultivated experiences, where a simple iconography allows players to focus on certain aspects of life while ignoring others. The final effect is very different from that of other forms of visual narrative, and arguably significantly less rhetorical. Yet it is no less real for all of that, and no less worthy of consideration and analysis.

Lilo & Stitch: The Danger of Beautiful Stories

Scott Garbacz — Mon, 10 Feb 2014 14:00:00 +0000

Image credit: captured from Netflix.com

If Frozen (as my previous blog argues) gleefully revises Disney’s traditional iconography, Lilo and Stitch does something far more interesting. Both are, in their ways, re-telling of fairy tales, but Lilo and Stitch proves far weirder, as well as far more intelligent, than its visually-immaculate descendent. We have already discussed Lilo and Stitch once at the Viz blog, praising it for its ability to subvert the “prince charming” narrative. Yet Lilo and Stitch is certainly worth at least one more look. The film is, in fact, both far more critical, and far more thoughtful, than Frozen is. Indeed, the film (despite its rough spots) is sophisticated and thoughtful in a lot of ways that Frozen never dreams of being, and may have something quite important to say about the way we engage with popular children’s stories.

The scene at the heart of the film—and I am aware this may be a contentious statement—involves neither of the female leads, but rather Stitch, Lilo’s hyperactive, destructive, pet alien “dog.” Near the climax of the film, when Stitch is finally coming to be accepted by his nontraditional adoptive family, he uncharacteristically runs away. Taking Lilo’s beautiful picture-book of The Ugly Duckling, he vanishes into the woods; there, in the rain (of course), he expresses a sorrow previously alien to his nature. “I’m lost,” he cries, before the scene fades to black.

Image credit: captured from Netflix.com

The scene would be puzzling, and seems to break with the film’s otherwise-reasonable plotting. Stitch has a lot of deficiencies, to put it mildly, but a lack of directional sense is not one of them. Nor is he particularly prone to deploy creative metaphors, or to express heartfelt narratives of any sort. Helpfully, however, the film gives us a key image to let us understand Stitch’s plight. Moments before, the camera showed us the page Stitch was reading; an image of the Ugly Duckling, alone, wishing for his family to be reunited with him. Stitch, in fact, emulates the Ugly Duckling’s pose as he mimics the story’s dialog, while the virtual camera floats to the proper height to cement the visual similarity.

Image credit: captured from Netflix.com

The moment has a cruel brilliance to it. Stitch misses the point of the narrative even as he re-enacts its climactic scene. Already, he had found his kind—Lilo loved him unconditionally from the first, and even her older sister Nani was forced to accept that he counts as ohana, part of a family where “nobody gets left behind and forgotten.” In any other Disney movie, Stitch would have come to a saccharine realization that the story of “The Ugly Duckling” is about his relationship with Lilo and Nani, and would have come to a happy ending then and there. Instead, he is unable to see the two orphaned sisters, who yell at each other and inhabit a house full of unmade dishes and filth-covered stoves, as part of the same world as an elegant swan and her children. So he waits, in the woods, repeating the phrase “I’m lost” while hoping that such mimicry will automatically generate the happy ending that the fairy-tale promised. A fairy tale that many people see as beautiful and true becomes, for Stitch, an elegant lie that keeps him from embracing his true family.

Indeed, in the film’s portrait of Kaua’i, a magnificient island whose tourist industry never seems to generate enough money to provide security, beautiful and polished stories can only be the enemy of practical wisdom. Lilo’s friends, for instance, each are equipped with Barbies, all modeled after their own complexion yet impossibly thin, tall, and elegant.

Image credit: captured from Netflix.com

Lilo, however, is bored with simple stories. Her doll is an adorable, muppet-like monster named Scrump whose life is soon to come to a gory end. “Her head’s too big,” Lilo says, “so I pretend a bug laid eggs in her ears, and she’s upset because she only has a few days to—.” Delivered in her cheerful, indomitable voice, the line doesn’t feel particularly morbid but rather testifies to Lilo’s vibrant inner life, filled with life-and-death struggles whose fantastic SF elements insulate them from the concerns of her fragile daily existence. Her friends, on the other hand, are bored, if not grossed out, by Lilo's ability to love a doll that isn't manufactured to demonstrate an artificial perfection. They leave the scene before she can even finish the sentence.

Poor Scrump. Everyone's afraid of him! Image credit: captured from Netflix.com

If that early scene wasn't enough to emphasize Lilo's distaste for conventional narratives, another comic scene (recorded, but sadly never animated) drives home the point. Hearing one too many rich, grotesque, continental-American tourist repeat the same boring question ("where is the beach?") Lilo launches her own poetic revenge. Using her local connections, she makes sure that a siren is going to be tested, then convinces the tourists that the test actually heralds a tsunami that moves "faster than the speed of sound." Lacking any sense of curiosity or independent thought, the Lemming-like tourists flee in a panicked herd. The local CPS officer doesn't share their morbid glee, but Lilo lets him in on a secret. "If you lived here," she says, "you'd understand." Lilo's love for the morbid and bizarre has, it turns out, some specific roots: a bitter frustration of dealing with insensitive outsiders who refuse to recognize the humanity of the natives.

Older sister Nani seems too busy for stories; she’s constantly scrambling to get a job and prove to the local Child Protective Services officer that she can function as a decent mother. Even so, she shares with Lilo an ability to inhabit a world of dark fantasy and a distaste for conventional narratives. When she’s fired from her waitress job, her first reaction is to call it a “stupid fakey Luau.” Her second is to tell Lilo that “The master’s a vampire, and he wants me to join his leigon of the undead.”

The obsession that Lilo and Nani have for rough-hewn narratives also applies to rough-hewn people. Lilo and Stitch probably features more diversity than any Disney movie not starring animals, and Lilo, at least, loves it. She collects photos of people—all obese, all living rich and fulfilling lives. Looking up at these people whose body types prohibit their participation in any other Disney movie, she draws only one conclusion. “They’re beautiful,” she says. Such courageous vision is probably the reason she can tell her own horrific story without flinching; looking at a photo taken before her parents died, she speaks simply and plainly. “That’s us, before. It was rainy, and they went for a drive.” Then she turns her attention back to Stitch. “What happened to yours? I hear you cry at night. Do you dream about them? I know that’s why you wreck things, and push me.”

"They're Beautiful!" Image credit: captured from Netflix.com

I have a harder time loving the movie as a whole than I do its characters, themes, and often shockingly-precise dialog. Stitch brings with him a lot of space-opera insanity that would be joyous in another movie, but here seems an unwelcome violation of the film’s otherwise gentle and thoughtful tone. I’m not sure how the audience is supposed to feel, for instance, when Snitch takes a chainsaw to Lilo and Nani’s house. It’s wacky fun at the time, but then we have to face a distraught Nani, who races home in anguish just as she’d finally found a decent job, and has to watch in despair as her sister is carted off by the sorrowful CPS officer.

Despite its rough edges, Lilo and Stitch pulled in nearly $150 million at the domestic box office, not quite the blockbuster numbers of Frozen, but a decent profit for a film with a budget of only $80 million. Sadly, while the success of Lilo and Stitch may speak well of the average American moviegoer, only Pixar has come close to producing the same sort of thoughtful, emotionally-complex storytelling, and they have had much more success with boys than girls as protagonists. Lilo and Stitch remains, then, as a unique, flawed masterpiece—and above all a warning about the stories we tell, the images we show, and the damage done when people are sold a pristine image of life whose glamor they will never be able to equal.

Frozen: The Anatomy of a Gaze

Scott Garbacz — Wed, 29 Jan 2014 14:00:00 +0000

Image credit: The Guardian

The first song composed for (but ultimately cut from) the recent Disney blockbuster Frozen explicitly engages with Disney's presentation of female characters. In the song, entitled "We Know Better," young princesses Elsa and Anna lay out a laundry list of objections to the traditional idea of a "Disney Princess." The film's two heroes refuse to be the sort of princess who "always knows her place," insist that a real princess “laughs and snorts milk out her nose," and maintain their right to mention “underwear.” Though whimsical, the film sets out its heroines' priorities: the only things they take seriously are their sisterly friendship and the political demands of ruling the realm. In climactic two-part harmony, the girls promise to "take care of our people and they will love / Me and you." If films like Tangled and Brave taught Disney that their princesses can (quite profitably) take center stage without dressing up as boys, Frozen insists that its female leads will be more concerned with national policy than with the clothes they wear.

The film's feminist aims were reflected in early reviews. NPR discussed the film's hit single, and the message of empowerment that many tweens heard in its lyrics. Social media exploded with a list of "7 Moments that Made Frozen the Most Progressive Disney Movie Ever." On the other hand, Frozen came under fire for perpetuating some of the worst tropes of the very "Disney Princess" genre it mocks. From critiques of Elsa's embodiment of Disney's Madonna-whore dichotomy to concern over the ridiculous gender dimorphism of its CGI character-models, the movie collected criticism as well as praise from feminists. Frozen was often compared unfavorably to Lilo & Stitch, a movie with its own fascinating treatment of social narratives.

In this post, however, I'm not particularly interested in praising or condemning Frozen so much as in understanding how it works. In particular, I want to draw attention to a visual contradiction that I see energizing much of Frozen. On the one hand, the the film claims to be a reversal of what we expect from a Disney film. On the other hand, in its meticulous computer animation actually displays a deep reliance on the sorts of traditional, emotional-powerful images created by Disney and other culture-makers over the years.

Take, for instance, the following freeze-frame, an image featured in various promotional materials, including (as seen below) Disney.com's website for the film:

Image credit: Disney.com

This image is particularly powerful because, in its essence, we have already seen it a million times in previous fantasy films and cartoons (though never, perhaps, executed with such icy beauty or complexity.) A young protagonist gazes upon an exotic, striking location, while the viewer's gaze is drawn along the explorer's eyeline through careful image composition. At the top of the image is a distant, female beauty, more of an icon than a person; Elsa's face is an indistinguishable blur, looking over her elegantly-clad shoulder as her dress swirls about her.

Such an image announces its continuity with previous riffs on the same motif, such as the scene where Prince Phillip hacks his way towards his future wife's magical castle in Sleeping Beauty, or the scene where Alladin's titular hero looks out at the city of Agrabah while dreaming of the life lead by its princess, Jasmine. Indeed, the parallels from the former seem particularly striking. Frozen is the first "ultra-widescreen" Disney fairytale since Sleeping Beauty, and Eyvind Earle's detailed, decorative background work on Sleeping Beauty stands as a predecessor for the elaborately ornate (yet often-threatening) nature of Frozen's arctic scenes.

The two protagonists' red, flowing capes are also suspiciously similar. Image credit: Evensi.com

If Frozen shares much in common with Sleeping Beauty, it also follows T.S. Eliot's dictum that "immature poets imitate; mature poets steal." The most obvious shift is one in the characters' gender and motivation. Where Prince Phillip seeks merely to rescue his love and obtain the obligatory "happy ever after" of marriage, Anna's goals are doubled--even doubled against each other. She seeks to be reunited with her sister and thereby restore their family bond, but she also wants to save the realm from her sister's magic, a political task that places the two of them in a (potentially) adversarial relationship. Within this freeze-frame, then, it is fitting that Anna herself is duplicated. While Elsa's body faces away from the reader and seems ready to confront Anna, her reflected gaze points vaguely to the right of the image, her mouth slightly open in uncertainty. This doubling might also be seen to echo Anna's larger character-arc, in which she longs to be the heroic masculine figure capable of saving the realm from Elsa's sorcery, but also wants to be the beautiful ingenue, "Fetchingly draped against the wall / The picture of sophisticated grace." Anna is no prince charming--but she sure can dress for the role.

One thing is certain. In aligning the viewer with Anna, Frozen both re-creates and revises one of Disney's most oft-repeated images. Whether this hybridity represents a feminist deconstruction of a powerful gender stereotype or a hypocritical "feminist" gesture in a story mired by inherited images and old forms is a philosophical question beyond the scope of this blog. That such a question might emerge from a single freeze-frame in a popular Disney film, however, is a testament to the power and complexity of images, even those images that flash momentarily on the screen in one of the year's many blockbuster entertainments.