viz. - television

Scopophilia in A Game of Thrones

clsloan — Mon, 17 Feb 2014 14:05:06 +0000

Image Credit: Fanpop.com

An incessant struggle for dominance. A never-ending vigil against opposition. A fierce match of razor-sharp wits. A game, one might say, of thrones. Wait, no. I meant a game of feminism.

Bloggers, journalists and internet activists galore have flocked to bloody forum battlefields contesting sexism, feminism and gender politics in HBO's adaptation of George R.R. Martin's bestselling fantasy saga A Song of Ice and Fire . The show, preparing to air its fourth season in April, has attracted supporters who argue that the series sympathetically illustrates the struggles of politically vulnerable women, along with others who suggest that HBO has even made feminist-friendly improvements to Martin's sometimes questionable vision. In the other camp, opposition asserts point-blank that the show treats women as sex objects and glorifies sexual abuse. One clever response to HBO's obsession with softcore pornography has cataloged 10 Unnecessary Sex Scenesand explores their irrelevance to character development and plot progression.

The sides seem to skirmish on two main fronts: 1) can the female protagonists be classified as “feminist” depictions of women? and 2) can the show's dependence on excessive sex be reconciled to a “feminist” agenda? I put the term “feminism” in quotation marks and therefore under careful scrutiny here since the definition can be quite slippery. For example, if one critic defines a “feminist” character portrayal as reliant on agency/ accessibility to power/ an erasure of gender politics, she might have a tough time coming to terms with the split between the masculine and feminine spheres in A Song of Ice and Fire . Another critic, however, posits that “feminist” depictions involve illustrating how marginalized groups respond to hegemony and manipulate systems of power. The conversations about whether or not Arya, Sansa, Cat e lyn, Daenerys, Brienne and Cersei help or hinder the feminist thrust of the series are many and multifaceted. When it comes to what viewers of the show actually see of women's bodies, the argument that HBO has somehow broken the feminist mold becomes exponentially more difficult to maintain.

Laura Mulvey's 1975 essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” describes the general pervasiveness of a gendered scopophilia in films. Mulvey explains ho w camera angles ca n encourage the male-coded viewer to v oyeuristically enjoy passive, often female, figures on the screen . The “male gaze” has been the fruitful topic of debate in several disciplines. Scholars have asked whether or not the gender coding might be too simplistic and challenged Mulvey's theory to provide examples of what non-heteronormative “viewing” might look like. For HBO's A Song of Ice and Fire, however, the 1975 version of “male gaze” fetishism seems to fit the bill quite nicely.

Image Credit: Omega-level.net

Even when the show attempts to use sex to make interesting comments about characters, themes, and even its own medium, these moments are muted by their own content. For example, e pisode two of season two, “The Night Lands,” includes an interesting scene encapsulating one of the show's major themes: we are all objects of someone's intrusive gaz e. A ll of the secrets, all of the spying, constructs a dense web of lies, knowledge and power, and there's no guarantee that the watchers are not being watched. The scene begins in Littlefinger's brothel. A prostitute has sex with a client in an (apparently) private room. A pan back from the camera, however, reveals another client, a voyeur, watching the two have sex while another prostitute performs fellatio on him. Yet another pan back from the camera reveals Littlefinger himself, watching the voyeur. The pattern asks the viewer to mentally “pan back” yet again and question his/her own participation in this culture of voyeurism. The less visible messages of smart, self-referential scenes like this, though, are threatened by their own content. Can visual stimulation be too pleasurable, too satisfactory, to result in an effective criticism of networks of voyeurism?

It's certainly difficult to ignore the abundance of female nudity in the show, and the gratuitous sex scenes tend to distract from the (more important) driving forces of the plot. While sex certainly features prominently in Martin's original novels, it's harder to think of it as a selling point the way it often see ms to work for show. In addition to the sensual, consensual lit-erotica, Martin's novels include references to rape and sexual assault (which are treated as horrifying realities in the harsh cultures Martin has created) but these “scenes” are generally removed from the reader by the consciousness of a third-person narrator, so that the implication of viewer pleasure generally isn't there. The issue, then, isn't about lots of sex in the show; it's about using sex to stimulate your audience instead of for any larger thematic purpose. The frequent appearance of sexualized bodies, along with the impressive amount of screen time given to sex acts, makes the show seem much more comfortable using visuals of a highly oppressive, abusive gender system to arouse its viewers than the novels. This is definitely not to say that Martin's books do not exploit explorations of (typically female) sexuality to titillate readers , but the visual prominence of nude women in the HBO adaptation stands out in ways text-based sex scenes can't. Of course, I'm quite uncomfortable with that statement even as I make it, and there is now a conversation to be had about mediums of pornography, specifically comparing literary versus visual erotica, but I'm lacking the space to tackle that fascinating subject.

Nudity, My Dear Watson: Sherlock and The Woman

clsloan — Fri, 14 Feb 2014 14:35:27 +0000

Image Credit: Personal Screen Capture from Amazon Prime

BBC's ongoing show Sherlock is a present-day adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle's nineteenth-century detective stories, and it gleefully delights in its modernity by incorporating new technology and polishing up old visual tropes associated with the rationally-minded crime solver. Whether it's confronting viewers with just how resistant Sherlock himself is towards the popularity of his infamous deerstalker or transforming a first-person narrator's short stories into fodder for a personal blog , Sherlock 's self-referentiality invites its fans to think about the implications of these alterations. The alteration of the media used to tell the tales of the Great Detective Sherlock Holmes also introduces some arresting issues. If Sherlock's deductions were shrouded in mystery or only available to readers through Holmes's own explanations, the show actually allows viewers to “see” the detective's thought processes by stylistically superimpos i ng text onto the show's images.

Generally, the camera will helpfully zoom in on an item, suggesting the microscopic power of Holmes's vision, and neatly tag it with the conclusion Holmes draws from miniscule clues. In some cases, the viewer is able to n eatly follow the chain of logic. Wisps of short white hairs adorning a suit leads to the tag “Dog Owner,” for instance. In others, however, the magic is enhanced by a tagged conclusion that seems several steps removed from the image, or even fairly unrelated to the item in question. Holmes's penetrating observation yields information, data, facts that can then be presented in the manner of a conjuring trick to an awe-struck public.

In the Sherlock episode “Scandal in Belgravia,” Sherlock actually encounters a visual that yields absolutely no data. Not only is Holmes stumped, but the viewer is invited to experience his perplexity with several images accompanied, not by the coolly confident array of labels and conclusions, but with impotent strings of question marks. So what baffles the Great Sher l ock Holmes? A naked woman.

Image Credit: Personal Screen Capture from Amazon Prime

Holmes's failure to “deduce” anything about Adler suggests that a nude female body simply does not exist in the trac e able, reasonable world of causation. Unlike the attired bodies Holmes frequently analyzes for information, bodies that present information in terms of clothing choices, mud accumulated on particular brands of shoes, for instance, a naked female body is a complete and utter blank, a string of question marks. It is an indicator of nothing but its own immanence. Even before Holmes's confrontation with Adler, Sherlock has taken great pains to make the cunning blackmailer a veritable avatar or ideal for female sexuality. Her chosen profession, high-class dominatrix, couples with some cross-cut scenes before her meeting with Holmes to emphasize her sensuality. The scenes in question capture the “preparation” of both parties for their confrontation. Holmes attempts to pick a disguise that will help him infiltrate Adler's home (he ultimately settles on a clergyman). Adler sashays into a closet full of clothes wearing only a skimpy negligee. Holmes asks Watson to punch him in the face to contribute to his disguise. The camera zooms in on Adler putting on makeup (she chooses “blood” as her shade of lipstick). Finally, Adler tells her assistant that she will greet Holmes in her “battle dress.”

Image Credit: Personal Screen Capture from Amazon Prime

As Irene Adler boasts, it becomes quickly apparent to the viewer that her sensuality is indeed her weapon of choice. Throughout their confrontation, she seems gracefully in control of the situation, elegantly quipping to Holmes that any “disguise” is inevitably a “self-portrait” and jeeringly asking Dr. Watson, when he evinces discomfort with her nakedness, if he's “feeling exposed.” Adler's comfort with her own sensuality neatly contrasts Holmes's extreme discomfort with his. Adler's sexual power, clearly a comment on a woman's ability to manipulate masculine expectations and desire for her personal ends, certainly deserves its own conversation, and many writers on the internet have already tackled the sexism, or feminist empowerment, of Irene Adler as a character. Holmes's inability to glean any information from her nudity, though, seems particularly troubling and perhaps even inconsistent. First and foremost, the nude woman as a transparent marker of sexuality, is a popular conception that desperately needs to be challenged. For Holmes, there is simply no information to be obtained from Adler. She has made no clothing choices that would reveal personal quirks, individual experiences, taste, education, etc. She has “removed” all referents. Holmes does, however, take away her “measurements,” a combination of numbers that turn out to be the code to Adler's safe. Her physical fitness, her makeup, her hair style, apparently reveal nothing. I'm certainly not arguing that Sherlock should endorse the idea that an individual's “visual” bodily identity is somehow a completely reliable marker for “deeper,” perhaps essential, truths, but the idea that the female body communicate s only its own immanence is a notion that's disturbing in its own right. Along these lines, Holmes's insistence that she is “THE Woman” looks less like a compliment elevating her to eminence within her gender and more like an admission that Adler's inaccessibility makes her a perfect ideal of what woman really means: mystery, sex, embodiment, and, implicitly, anti-rationalism.

Despite Adler's cleverness, sexual potency, and air of mystery, Holmes does ultimately win the day. This point, incidentally, is a stark departure from Doyle's original story, “Scandal in Bohemia.” In the original, Adler absconds with the photographs, essentially besting the Great Detective, evinces no sentiment for Holmes, and requires no ultimate rescue. Admittedly, the show does play out this plot. It ends about thirty-five minutes into the episode, and the remainder is a creative extension of Adler's story. In Sherlock 's version of the tale, Holmes figures out the 4-letter password that unlocks Adler's “ SHER”-locked camera phone thanks to information he has gleaned from her body. Instead of the solid obstacle to rational discourse her body once was , Adler's dil a ted pupils and elevated pulse during an intimate moment with Holmes yields a piece of crucial information : love. Perhaps unintentionally, the show enacts a lesson in “reading” a woman's body, a lesson that ultimately gives Holmes the ability to outsmart Adler, to use her sensuality against her.

Gifs, gags, and digital nostalgia--the long wait for Breaking Bad season 5.2

Laura Thain — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 22:39:25 +0000

Image Credit: Breaking Gifs

I simply cannot resist a good topical tumblr. Of course, the orienting rhetorical principle of tumblrs like textsfromhillary (inspired by a single Reuters photo of the Secretary of State checking her smartphone on a C-17) or geraldoinahoodie (created in response to Geraldo Rivera's comments on the Trayvon Martin case) is undoubtedly kairos, and, as we might expect, these sites are often abandoned as quickly as they are generated, leaving nothing but a flurry of self-referential entries that lose their meaning the further they become removed from their rhetorical moment. As the creators of textsfromhillary assert in their final post, "As far as memes go – it has gone as far as it can go. Is it really possible to top a submission from the Secretary herself?"

Image credit: Reuters

Still, the lifespan of many other tumblrs increases considerably as the content within expands its field of references—surisburnbook, for instance, has become a celebrity blog of sorts, and fakecriterions has grown into a community art project that has even been offered its own gallery showings. Tumblr itself is a more sophisticated iteration of its precursors (like the short-lived Pownce) that, by differentiating itself from social media giant Twitter in terms of the user’s ability to integrate the visual and the audiovisual, has come to occupy a distinct space in the digital world.

Image Credit: XKCD

The latter category—those topical tumblrs which expand, rather than exhaust, their own possibilities—are of greater interest to me, particularly because the ways in which such expansion happens are often unpredictable and usually collaborative. The television actor and comedian Paul Sheer began breakinggifs—gifs inspired by the AMC hit tv show Breaking Bad—in April of 2012 during the long interlude between the fourth and fifth seasons. Sheer’s 8-bit color palette simultaneously evoked nostalgia for a long-abandoned digital interface and, I’d like to suggest, a show that had been off the air (and perhaps, off of viewer’s minds) for over six months.

Image Credit: Breaking Gifs

The tumblr went viral, and within months Sheer was able to coordinate a further outlet for fan-inspired Breaking Bad art. Capitalizing on the fan anticipation for the long-awaited fifth season, in May of 2012 Sheer announced the Breaking Bad Art Project via Breaking Bad actor Giancarlo Esposito (Gus Fring). The BBAP featured and distributed limited edition prints of Breaking Bad fan art throughout the summer, culminating in a wildly successful art show in Los Angeles last month. The project was managed through breakinggifs.com, a new website Sheer launched to help a community of artists share in his newfound tumblr fame.

While the website adapts with little variation creator Vince Gilligan’s “dark chemistry” aesthetic, few of the featured pieces take such little creative liberty. Here is my favorite from the Gallery 1988 showing of all 17 pieces in Los Angeles:

Image Credit: Gallery 1988

What is it about Breaking Bad that inspires this nostalgic return to 8-bit graphics and Saturday morning television? On a very superficial level, it certainly qualifies as simple juxtaposition, that is, that the print represents the (arguably) darkest show on network television translated into the register of childhood. That kind of juxtaposition produces, of course, humor, as artist Ian Glaubinger and Paul Sheer certainly recognize. Part of that we might attribute to an internet audience constantly inundated with information—this creates a disinterested sort of hostility easily dispelled by humor. (To put it simply, funny stuff gets the most hits.) But in examining Glaubinger’s print and Sheer’s tumblr together, perhaps we can read this juxtaposition of childhood and Breaking Bad with a more careful eye—is there something about the show and its disturbing refusal to set limitations on the darkness of its own contents that can be read as a militant stance of the id over the ego? In such terms, might we more closely associate Walter’s role as the anti-hero with the impulses, psychoanalytically speaking, of our own childhoods?

Real World Metropolis, Future City on Film: The Image of Vancouver in Battlestar Galactica

Lisa Gulesserian — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 14:00:00 +0000

Image Credit: Pat Suwalski

To continue my discussion of real cities represented as futurescapes on film, this week I’ll be talking about the much-loved sci-fi TV series Battlestar Galactica. The series, a “reboot” of the less critically-acclaimed series of the same name from 1978, was filmed and aired from 2003 to 2009. Instead of solely relying on special effects to create a future city called Caprica in the show, the series’ creator, Ronald D. Moore, decided to use a real-life glittering city on a bay. In Battlestar Galactica, Vancouver is the future. And the future is now.

What’s the image of Vancouver in Moore’s series? It is all glass surfaces, shimmering waves, soaring skyscrapers, geometric shapes, verdant shrubs. Light shines, unencumbered by opaque surfaces. Buildings blossom and are surrounded by trees threatening blooms. Everything is stripped clean of any identifying markings. A few CGI flourishes are added. This is the future city par excellence—unknown, yet slightly familiar.

Image Credit: "Daybreak Part 1" Screenshot

And that’s the way that future cities (of the real world variety) are supposed to work. They are simultaneously somewhere and nowhere. A recognizable Vancouver of today wouldn’t be a convincing future city—we’d be able to pick out landmarks and our disbelief would no longer be suspended. Does the fact that Moore used Vancouver as his setting for the future mean that Vancouver is devoid of landmarks? That it’s an amalgam of all cities?

Writer Douglas Coupland has waxed poetic about Vancouver in his book, City of Glass, and he’s not so sure that Vancouver is landmarkless. For Coupland, although Vancouver is Chinatown and Wreck Beach, it also is “Backlot North,” a cheap alternative for filming a variety of urban scenes no matter where they are supposed to be set. Vancouver has been Berkeley, Auckland, New York City, and now, Caprica City.

Imaginary/Filmed Vancouver Map Credit: Douglas Coupland

So, what does this malleability do for the image of Vancouver? After urban planner Kevin Lynch published his seminal book, The Image of the City, in 1960, “imageability” became a buzzword in planning circles all over the US. Every planner wondered what a city could do to create a unique image for its residents and for its outside audiences. David Harvey, a contemporary Marxist geographer, sees the end result of “imageability” as the production of cities for consumption (which eventually runs the risk of planners producing cookie-cutter cities that lose all uniqueness). Instead of losing all landmarks, with Moore’s use of Vancouver in Battlestar Galactica, Vancouver’s residents can see the image of their city more clearly.

Image Credit: Frak That

The image of Vancouver is remade as urban chroniclers traipse about the city looking for landmarks they saw in Moore’s version of the future. An entire website—Battlestar Locations—is dedicated to documenting Vancouver sites used when filming the series. The creators of the site, Anne and Mo, admit that they are “a couple of fans who like to travel and get together. Searching out locations has given [them] the chance to do both.” They often post side-by-side comparisons of the TV version of Vancouver with their own images of the same site. The images of Anne or Mo reenacting scenes while exploring their fine city are what “imageability” should be about—use. Yes, Vancouver is the “everycity” (Coupland, again) on film, but to its residents, it’s a magical place where the future comes to life.

Image Credit: Battlestar Locations

Literature on Television?

Matthew Reilly — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 14:00:00 +0000

Video Credit: Youtube.com

I recently encountered Annenberg Media’s program series, entitled “Invitation to World Literature,” and was pleased to find a television show dealing with literary texts. This presentation of the Odyssey (one episode within a series ranging from the Epic of Gilgamesh to the 1,001 Nights) is surprisingly rare on television—a medium relatively resistant to literature (if we discount the tested format for 19^th c. novels and the "mini-series"). While much of the literature studied in colleges never ends up on television, Salman Rushdie has recently explained to the UK Telegraph that the writing in contemporary television far exceeds that in film (where literary themes are currently in vogue). As an instructor and consumer of English literature, I wondered— how might television possibly adapt or introduce a literary 'canon'?

Video Credit: Youtube.com

Annenberg media’s “Invitation to World Literature” summarizes famous texts from the perspective of several commentators, who each represent a different way of approaching the printed book. In the initial clip above, we hear the Odyssey likened to a comic book (“Superman”), a movie (“Wizard of Oz”), and even a script for comedic interpolation (this one is interesting). This “remediation” of literature seems to employ a tactic media theorists refer to as “hypermediation,” in which “the artist (or multimedia programmer or web designer) strives to make the viewer acknowledge the medium as a medium and to delight in that acknowledgment. . . . the logic of hypermediacy expresses the tension between regarding a visual space as mediated and as a ‘real’ space that lies beyond mediation” (Bolter & Grusin 41–42). By employing several different windows for consuming the Odyssey, “Invitation to World Literature” compels a conscious engagement with medium in hopes of rendering content “transparent” to a range of potential “readers.” We are most familiar with hypermediated environments via internet “windows” or television formats of windowed audience/pundit participation. To what extent might hypermediacy enable more complex presentations of literary texts, authors, or contexts in the future? The National Library of Ireland’s interactive online W.B. Yeats exhibit offers such a “hypermediated” format that balances general overview with narrower frames of interest. As television and internet increasingly cross over and share more in common, how might we adapt interactive, finely-tuned presentations of the "literary tradition"?

Video Credit: Youtube.com

The video above is one of my favorite examples of literary history on the small screen. The original run of Richard Curtis and Rowan Atkinson’s Blackadder aired on the BBC between 1983 and 1989. This sitcom differs from the “didactic” shows I have been considering. It expects viewers to have some basic literary and cultural familiarity, but one can understand the jokes even without thorough research. Through comedy and pastiche, Blackadder includes content otherwise unpalatable to television.

Video Credit: Youtube.com

The video above represents an example of the possible limitations to remaking literature on the television. The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb (1993) adapts a story popularized in old English ballads and eighteenth-century stage performances. This 1993 stop-motion animation first aired on BBC as a ten-minute short, before being banned for its dark content. After this controversial prohibition from television, The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb enjoyed acclaim and cult status as a film. Intriguingly, only one year after Secret Adventures was banned from television, Warner Brothers released Thumbelina as a blockbuster animated film cartoon. While this is the context in which most people know of “Tom Thumb,” the Secret Adventures has a good deal more in common with the baroque literary original. Perhaps there are many cases in which literature doesn’t translate well to television because it is actually too controversial—not because it is boring or outdated. Since "respectable" writers are no longer averse to admitting television as a space for literary engagement, we might start thinking about how this changing media environment might bring audiences into contact with the diverse array of texts in the literary tradition.

Video Credit: Youtube.com

Super Bowl Car Commercials and the Uses of the Past

Michael Widner — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 02:21:03 +0000

Now that our national gladiatorial spectacle has ended, we turn to the obligatory analysis of the major media event. How many Packers can get injured in a single season? Why, exactly, are the Black Eyed Peas popular? And, most importantly, what about the commercials? Rather than discuss which ones are the funniest, depict the most animal cruelty, or objectify women the worst, I'd like to discuss what seems like an odd coincidence: many of the car commercials use different visions of the past to sell their product.

<a href="http://msn.foxsports.com/video?vid=47cff490-1225-4e91-97b3-579cdcccdc98" target="_new" title="">Mercedes: Diddy</a>

Mercedes: Diddy

In the Mercedes commercial, we see new car models joining the family. The commercial starts in a barn with an older model car. Its radio turns on and we hear Janis Joplin sing "Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz". The setting, the scratchiness of the sound, and the song's throwback country style all make the song sound older than it really is, establishing a past in the country. Near the middle, around the 33 second mark, we see a futuristic car drive past something akin to a Model T prototype. Presumably both are Mercedes. These and several hundred other cars from many eras converge to welcome the 4 new models. Mercedes thus constructs a continuous history, an unbroken line of Diddy-endorsed quality and luxury, that continues with these new cars.

Hyundai Sonata: Don't Settle

The Hyundai Sonata commercial takes a slightly different approach. Rather than just cars, the emphasis is on technology of many sorts: bicycles, cell phones, portable music players, and video games, among others. A voice-over asks what the world would be like if we settled for the first thing that came along. Here the technological past intrudes upon the present to build a teleological narrative that places the Sonata as the ultimate goal. The visual contrast between the modern car and ancient technologies also implies a similar distance between the Sonata and other vehicles.

Chevy Volt: Make History

In this Chevy Volt ad, on the other hand, we have a history of technology defined by moments of brilliance. Rather than an antiquated past or a proud history, we see a series of great discoveries and inventions: electricity, the lightbulb, television, space flight, electric guitar amplifiers, and others. Chevy places their new electric car in the pantheon of technological inventions, giving us both a progress narrative and a muted teleology like the Hyundai and Mercedes commercials. Moreover, the Chevy spot seems to combine the sense of historical greatness of the Mercedes ad with the technological fetishism of the Hyundai one. History, Chevy tells us, is told through the great moments in technology.

<a href="http://msn.foxsports.com/video?vid=1fa2d8a2-2ed0-419a-b60c-d2c39014d912" target="_new" title="">BMW: Changes</a>

BMW: Changes

BMW, however, tells us that the past was dirty, inefficient, slow, and noisy. Their new diesel-powered vehicle represents cleanliness, speed, efficiency, and power. The noise is not a clanking, but a baritone engine hum. The dirty cars struggling along the streets and spewing thick, black smoke make the blue, immaculately polished sports car even more appealing. The car represents not continuous progress, but a clear break with the bad ol' days.

<a href="http://msn.foxsports.com/video?vid=f2db3bd3-0a4c-4681-ae0e-5d8897d5519e" target="_new" title="">Carmax.com: Gas Station</a>

Carmax.com: Gas Station

Unlike BMW, Carmax caricatures the Leave it to Beaver 1950s of unbearable cheerfulness and unrealistic levels of service. A modern driver pulls into a gas station and is suddenly barraged by attendants cleaning his windows, checking his oil, filling his tank. He assumes he's being attacked and runs off screaming. But, as the closing tag tells us, CarMax provides this type of service, informed by a nostalgic creation of the past. The clean-cut, uniformed, and smiling workers contrast with the paranoid, stressed, and unkempt modern driver. CarMax, the ad argues, returns us to a more wholesome time.

While these were certainly not always the best or most interesting of the Super Bowl commercials, the ties among them struck me. They almost all rely upon cliched visions of imagined pasts that fetishize technology. Is it the revolving door of automotive invention--a new model every year--that demands we abandon the obsolete while retaining what progress has been made? Are other products are so insistently linked to the past?

Hell-O?: Glee’s Karotic Appeals

Rachel Schneider — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 19:24:34 +0000

Image Credit: Hulu

Glee’s return last night to television with their new episode “Hell-O” not only served to get my students excited this morning before class, but also demonstrated the utility of using rhetorical concepts to analyze the musical genre. In this unit of my class my students are considering how kairos informs musical performances.

Kairos, defined by Sharon Crowley and Debra Hawhee as “situational kind of time, something close to what we call ‘opportunity’ (as in ‘the time is ripe’),” is a concept that works well for thinking through musicals as it asks students to complicate their ideas of context and audience. What appeals may work for one group at one particular time and place might not serve as well in another time. Arguments about, say, feminism receive a different reception today than they did in 1960, so an analysis of Bye Bye Birdie would want to take that into account. Because students can often assume that audiences’ dispositions are constant, looking at a contemporary cultural example like Glee can show students how kairos is both situational and can be created by careful rhetors.

In the case of this episode, which just aired yesterday, “Hell-O” seeks to draw viewers back into the world of Glee over four months after the previous episode, “Sectionals,” which showed New Directions winning their glee club sectionals competition. “Hell-O” also has to establish the new conflict between the club and their regionals rival Vocal Adrenalin as well as the new romantic developments between Finn, Rachel, and Rachel’s new suitor Jesse St. James. Thus the show takes advantage of this moment of re-introduction by incorporating a number of songs into the show that contain the word “Hello” in their title, as by including Lionel Richie’s famous number:

What makes this number successful is not only the charm of Lea Michele and Jonathan Groff (former co-stars in Spring Awakening) but also the winking inclusion of the number into the plot. This song sets up the lonely Rachel Berry to fall in love with the successful senior St. James as it simultaneously introduces him and his vocal abilities to the show’s viewers. The violinists who pop up in the background ready to accompany them acknowledge the musical genre’s falsity while also drawing attention to the moment’s created “magic.” After this scene, the teenage Rachel is ready to think of herself as “in love” with a man she barely knows, and the music sets the audience up to believe this. Likewise, the show’s closing number “Hello Goodbye” works towards a similar goal:

The titular hello and goodbye demonstrate the complex division and development in the Rachel and Finn relationship: while the episode started with Rachel assuming that she and the reluctant Finn were dating, it ends with Finn interested in Rachel, while she is pursing a secret relationship with Jesse. In other words, as she says goodbye, he says hello. Their body language as they move back and forth reverses the dynamic of the first thirteen episodes: now he is the pursuer, and she the pursued. However, coming at the end of the episode, this number sets up their new romantic conflict for this season’s remaining eight episodes. The show says goodbye for the evening, but lets us know that this is far from permanent. Here, Glee takes advantage of the kairotic moment to not only maintain its meta-discourse by winking to the audience but also to set up dramatic arcs and create narrative tension between the New Directions group and Vocal Adrenaline; the road to hell is paved with hello, in other words. While the reviews have been mixed about certain other elements in this episode, I only wish my students could grasp kairos as easily as Glee does here.

Cook Something!

fc — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 16:51:39 +0000

Image Credit: Screen Capture from JamieOliver.com

Most Americans who recognize Jamie Oliver (most of whom are probably foodies or Food Network fans) remember him as the hip, charming, engergetic host of "The Naked Chef" at the end of the last decade. The intervening ten years have not noticeably reduced his energy, charm or verve, but they did bring him a wife, four children and a cause. I mention his family because families--first in the UK and now in the US-- are at the heart of the telegenic Brit's adopted cause. Oliver's new show (officially premiering tonight under the name "Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution") is part of a broader, trans-atlantic, multi-platform effort to change the way children and families eat. Oliver targets school lunch programs and home cooking as key sites of potentially revolutionary practices. His advice can (somewhat reductively) be boiled down to two words: cook something. More about food, families, schools, television, the internet and boyishly-handsome good looks after the jump.

Image Credit: Screen Capture from ABC.com

Full disclosure: I'm not sure that I, personally, will be able to sit through entire episodes of this show. I watched the "preview" episode last week, and the producers/editors at ABC appear to be crafting is as a mash-up of "Extreme Makeover Home Edition" and Gordon Ramsey's "Kitchen Nightmares." The overwrought music and abusive eiditing techniques strain my nerves, but I'm going to try watching anyways. Why? Because Oliver is much more than a pretty face. Oliver has been an active advocate of healthful school lunches ("proper school dinners," in UK parlance) in Britain for the last seven years, and his campaign (along with a BBC 4 program that ABC has largely copied for its "Food Revolution") played an importatnt part in meaningful shool lunch reform in the UK (here and here). While it is cerainly an uphill battle against the USDA and the agribusiness/food industry, Oliver hopes that he can add to the momentum currently building in the States (Michelle Obama's Let's Move campaign, for example) and help Americans live longer and healthier lives. For those of us who prefer reasoned (and impassioned) discourse over dramatic musical scores, Oliver's TED prize speech provides a short (20 minute) rundown of his project. (For an even shorter version, you can read this interview from, of all places, TV Guide.)

As Oliver points out, our schools are currently feeding and educating the first generation of Americans whose life expectancy will be shorter than that of their parents. Let that sink in. The "food landscape" (as Oliver calls it in his TED speech) of America incubates childhood obesity, diabetes and other diet-related diseases that will shorten the lives of today's children by years if not decades. These early deaths are entirely preventable. While Oliver does not pretent (and we shouldn't believe) that there is any single panacea that will immediately turn this trend around, he does point to an imminently achievable goal that can have dramatic (perhaps even "revolutionary") consequences: cook real food. If industrial food (often mislabled "conventional") and its mammoth doses of salt, fat and sugar are sending an entire generation to an early grave, then "proper food" (as Oliver calls it) has to be part of the solution. His two-pronged pincer movement sets its sights on school lunches and the home kitchen. (I want hold off on an extended discussion of programs aimed at reforming school lunches until next week: Ann Cooper has been fighting the good fight for years on this front, and her efforts online and in the lunch room deserve their own post.)

The home kitchen is the front line in Oliver's (and America's) battle against diet-related morbidity and early death. As he points out in his TED speech, many of the children (and their mothers, and their mother's mothers) were never taught how to cook at home. This knowledge gap forces families to rely on pre-packaged, salt-fat-and-sugar-laden, industrial food products to feed their children. Oliver wants home cooks in America to have five or six recipes they know how to cook, are comfortable making and enjoy eating. In essence, this project is about empowerment. He wants to return the means of production to families (the carrot- and celery-clenching fist in the logo-- long a staple of workers-movement iconography-- is spot-on appropriate).

Oliver is by no means the only person to have this revelation. Another notable exaple is provided by cookbook author Mollie Katzen. In an interview with Civil Eats, Katzen says, "The very basic act of cooking is becoming a radical necessity. That’s why I wrote Get Cooking, because people asked me to lay out the simple basics of how to cook. I wanted to give people the tools they need to make easy recipes, four to five things you can cook well. It sounds simple, but that’s the key to people digging their way out of bad food. They need to know how to shop and how to make food in their busy day and in a small kitchen. I wish
cooking was required in school, but until then, we’ve got to teach
simple lessons." Katzen also set up a companion site for Get Cooking through which she provides free cooking instruction and recipes. While it is, to some degree, also aimed at publicizing the book (otherwise a publisher wouldn't hear of it), the site provides people with the basic knowledge necessary to begin mastering four or five dishes and making themselves food independent.

Oliver's website, JamieOliver.com, performs a similar balancing act. While his site has all the bells and whistles we would expect from a celebrity chef's home page-- promotion of books and shows, advanced techniques and "posh" (as Oliver would say) recipes-- it also has a valuable store of simple, easily matered and delicious recipes aimed at getting home cooks cooking real ("proper") food. Niether Oliver nor Katzen are what we might call "health food" advocates (Oliver explicitly rejects the word); they aren't advocating gimmicks, fads or a 1990's version of Graham Kerr (no applesauce-for-oil substitutions here). They do make a compelling case for the importance of cooking, simply cooking. So, watch him or not, listen to Jamie and get in the kitchen.

[Correction 4/2/10: I previously misidentified the USDA as the FDA.]

Teenage Wasteland

Rachel Schneider — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 17:46:18 +0000

Image Credit: Spring Awakening

This weekend I happened to attend a performance from the Broadway Across America’s tour of Spring Awakening, which was incredibly enjoyable. The show, based on Wedekind’s 1890s play, deals with issues of teenage sexuality, rebellion, depression, and even abortion. Spring Awakening does a very good job in its staging and design of making the connection between teens of the 1890s with teens of the 2000s.

The costumes on the National Tour in particular help make this connection: the young Moritz wears shoes that strongly resemble Converse All-Stars along with his knickerbockers, and Georg styles his hair in a fauxhawk. The set mixes over-aestheticized Victorian pictures of angels with neon lighting, and the lyrics also reflect a contemporary sensibility, with songs like “Totally Fucked” and “The Bitch of Living.” However, while Spring Awakening has uniquely seized the attention of its largely youthful audience, it seems to be part of a particular phenomenon.

I had an interesting conversation with my friend Amanda after watching Spring Awakening about our mutual love of Fox’s new musical television show Glee, in which it occurred to me that one thing the musical does very well is express teenage angst. Off the top of my head, some popular musicals set among high schoolers include Bye Bye Birdie, Grease, High School Musical, and Hairspray. While organic form is a more Coleridgean concept than rhetorical, perhaps there is something about the way in which this genre involves visual rhetoric that is particularly appropriate for the “drama” of teenage life.

Image Credit: Photobucket

While Glee is about teens, it directs itself towards a slightly different audience than Spring Awakening. The advertising for the show uses the L hand sign for loser as a part of its logo, which has been a part of teen movie rhetoric as far back as Clueless, if not further. However, over the summer Fox built up its teen audience by advertising the show over an extended mall tour. The musical selections however reflect a desire to appeal to a wide audience, with such choices as Bel Biv Devoe’s “Poison,” Kanye West’s “Golddigger,” and “Maybe This Time” from Cabaret. Glee’s audience is expected to be in the know, and to enjoy the irony of its extremely stereotypical characters (such as the gay kid who enjoys dancing to Beyonce’s “Single Ladies”), but at the same time to feel a wholesome glee in its colorful costumes and slick marketing. This heightened reality in which characters sing works particularly well for characters like the dramatic Rachel Berry who dreams of Grammy awards and popular boyfriends, but also for the hapless Mr. Schuster who is trying to relive his glee club youth through his students.

Maybe what is interesting about these works is that teen years work well with musicals because both are about heightened realities, but both work as metaphors for life in general. Joss Whedon mined high school and tropes of high school life in order to make larger arguments about the world in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and what Glee and Spring Awakening can do works along similar lines. All of these texts require multigenerational audiences that can read their visuals at different levels of allusive comprehension.

Mad Men: Anatomy of an ad campaign

John Jones — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 14:09:59 +0000

Mad Men, AMC’s show about the advertising industry in the early sixties, returns for its second season this Sunday. If you haven’t seen the show, it’s a fascinating look into the way in which products are packaged and sold to consumers, as well as the racist, sexist advertising culture of the time.

In conjunction with the premiere, AMC has described the process behind the ad campaign for this new season.

The Wire and Cities That Matter

erinhurt — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 19:19:29 +0000

I just finished reading an article in The New Yorker about HBO's The Wire, a gritty drama set in the city of Baltimore. Each season the show focuses on a different aspect of the city, beginning with drug dealers on the streets and gradually moving outwards to include the labor unions at the docks, the politicans, and in its fifth and final season, the news and those who cover it. More often than not, the shows paints an image of the city that is grim and hopeless.

At the end of the article, David Simon, the show's creator, explains a new show he is working on that will be set in New Orleans. He says, "This [new] show will be a way of making a visual argument that cities matter. ‘The Wire’ has not really done that. I certainly never said or wanted to say that Baltimore is not worth saving, or that it can’t be saved. But I think some people watching the show think, Why don’t they just move away?” The article' author adds, "Indeed, the City Council of Baltimore once nearly passed a resolution that proposed steps to counter the bad image of Baltimore propagated by “The Wire.” In 2005, the Sun quoted a report by an image-consulting company that the city had hired. 'Baltimore is plagued by negative press and harmful characterizations in the media, resulting in an inferiority complex,' it said. 'The perception of Baltimore is ‘The Wire,’ ‘The Corner,’ ‘Homicide’ . . . a hopeless, depressed, unemployed, crackaddicted city.' And, under the headline “NO WAY TO TREAT A TOWN,” a reviewer for the New York Post quipped, “I don’t know this Simon guy, but he doesn’t seem to like Baltimore very much, although he makes a very good living writing about it.”

The whole point of the show, however, is to demonstrate not only that Baltimore and its residents are frequently shortchanged by those with the power to do so, but to show the terrible results. Therefore, I find Simon's statement confusing because, in fact, his show does seem to make an argument that cities matter.