viz. - violence

Laura Palmer, wrapped in plastic

Jenn Shapland — Thu, 07 Nov 2013 20:10:32 +0000

Image still from Twin Peaks episode two.

Inspired by Casey's Halloween post on gender in the horror genre, I'm continuing to riff on the same theme; I'll talk about boredom and violence, truck stop killers, and, of course, Laura Palmer.

So I just finished watching Twin Peaks. I'm behind the times in tackling this one, but now the show is up there on my list of favorites. That said, while watching over the past few months, I couldn’t help but notice that the underlying message seems to be: Young Women who display independence and/or sexual curiosity will probably be murdered by a deep woods demon. Laura Palmer is only the first casualty. By the series’ end—no serious spoilers here—we have to wonder what will become of our various other heroines. Audrey Horne, Donna Hayward, Shelly Johnson. And of course there remains the question of questions: How’s Annie?

Twin Peaks is a slow, small town with a toxic heart; like most small towns, you might say. In depicting this fictional Washington community, the show flips back and forth between scenes of boredom and scenes of violence. Sometimes everyone is sitting around talking about how great the pie is, or they’re eating donuts from perfectly organized stacks. And then sometimes they’re beating one another with bars of soap, trying to garrote one another in bed, or shooting each other point plank. And isn’t this the way with any good horror scenario or urban legend? Things have to start out a bit too quiet, and that’s when terror comes to roost.

Plenty has been written about Twin Peaks, specifically about the use of the mutilated female body in the show. Why is Laura Palmer’s plastic-wrapped body in the pilot episode so chilling and so beguiling? (Remember that Lynch found a local girl to play Laura, claiming he hired her "just to play a dead girl"; "But no one—not Mark, me, anyone—had any idea that she could act, or that she was going to be so powerful just being dead.") The fact that this wholesome-seeming, community fixture from a wealthy family, who happened to be played by a beautiful young woman, presents a haunting image once murdered and thrown in the lake? Not all that surprising.

Image still from Twin Peaks pilot episode.

But I’m thinking now of other kinds of violence toward women that tend to go unseen, unnoticed, or unremembered. Vanessa Veselka’s "The Highway of Lost Girls," published in GQ and collected in the 2013 Best American Essays, describes hitchhiking as a teenaged female runaway in the 1980s, taking rides from commercial drivers from truck stop to truck stop. Veselka has a run-in with a truck driver she will suspect, years later, is famous serial killer Robert Ben Rhoades, whose “trucking logs place him in the area of fifty unsolved murders in the three years prior to his arrest alone.” Veselka argues that Rhoades was able to get away with these murders—“at his peak he was killing one to three women a month”—because the victims he chose weren’t a part of any group that the community valued. As Veselka continues to search for evidence of other women Rhoades likely killed, everyone she asks, from local law enforcement to truck stop owners, denies ever having heard of the dead women. Despite the fact that the body was found in their dumpster, for example.

Veselka writes, “our profound fascination with serial killers is matched by an equally profound lack of interest in their victims.” This is the case when the victims are drifters, women who don’t belong to any clear family or community, or women who have removed themselves from such communities, especially through engagement in the sex industry. Or, as the FBI's Highway Serial Killings Initiative describes them, "The victims in these cases are primarily women who are living high-risk, transient lifestyles, often involving substance abuse and prostitution." While the fictional Laura Palmer’s death brings in a full-on FBI investigation (conducted by an all-male team of investigators and local law enforcement officers), hundreds of real women meet the same fate along the interstate daily and, as Veselka’s piece illustrates, can never even be properly identified (The Highway Serial Killings Initiative, started in 2009, took an initial count of over five hundred bodies around truck stops and rest areas alone.)

To bring this back to the context of fictional Twin Peaks, here's the question on my mind: does anybody really care about Ronette Pulaski?

Violent Encounters

Laura Thain — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 22:39:42 +0000

Louisville Cardinal players react to Kevin Ware's leg injury during March Madness. Image Credit: Yahoo Sports

I’ll admit, I stayed up way past my bedtime last night listening to the Boston police scanner, following as closely as I could the developments in the Boston Marathon bombing. In the wee hours of this morning, I thought about documenting the dozens of news items (as well as widespread speculation across message boards and social media) to take a tally of how much of the information proliferating in the uncertainty of Friday morning would be disproved by Friday afternoon.

As I began the project, it soon proved futile—there was far too much information and I ran into (as I might have anticipated) problems discerning journalistic fact from fiction right from the get go. It was only when I stopped documenting and trying to quantify the evidence that I began to think about the relationship between violence and speculative practice and assemble a quite different archive. [GORE WARNING: the images beyond this cut are NSFW and may shock and disturb some viewers. Discretion is advised.]

What appears here is a somewhat experimental exercise in assembling and reading images of violence and gore. The images below all represent some intersection of sport, violence, and speculative practice. Let me explain why I’ve picked them.

Image Credit: Tumblr

Sporting events are ritualized violence.

Sporting events contain and set limits on the violent impulses of society, translating violence into spectacle for mass consumption and participation. It is for this reason that when violence occurs outside of the set script of the sporting event, the results are often traumatic for both the participants and the audience. Non-scripted displays of violence bring attention to the unstable nature of “appropriate” and “inappropriate” displays of violence. They also cause us to question the ethics of our consumption of violence by juxtaposing structural and non-structural violence; the pleasure of one is interrupted by the horror of another when we witness violence on the playing field.

Let’s look at an example of unscripted violence before the age of the internet:

The video above shows goaltender Clint Malarchuk during a 1989 Sabres game against the St Louis Blues. In a freak accident, the Blues’ right wing slashes Malarchuk’s throat with his skate, severing his jugular vein and very nearly killing him.

Note that the announcers demand the camera pan away from the accident and immediately begin to play a radio ad for Buick over the noice of the crowd’s reaction. Those present in the stands witnessed “many spectators physically sickened by the sight [of Malarchuk’s injury]. 11 fans fainted, 2 more suffered heart attacks and 3 players vomited on the ice.”

Present-day broadcast media is far less likely to pan away from injury in this manner. Kevin Ware’s NCAA March Madness injury, for instance, was replayed several times as they carried Ware away in a stretcher. How can we account for the dramatic difference in the way violence is portrayed and mediated now?

Speculative practice can help assuage anxiety about the unstable line between scripted and non-scripted violence.

When audiences engage in speculative practice about violence that occurs outside the realm of accepted social practice, they are asserting their own boundaries between appropriate and inappropriate engagements in violent behavior. In this way, speculative practice can help create a crowd-sourced discursive boundary where institutional boundaries fail—that is, these institutional boundaries are either inadequate or are subverted by violent offenders.

Speculative practice in response to violence is multi-faceted; it can pursue a variety of solutions to the breach of the code of institutionalized violence.

Tactical approaches can seek to bring violent offenders to justice, but they just as often can seek to levy judgment and punishment independent of institutional authority (i.e. vigilantism). Speculative practice is not, however, always tactical. Speculative practice can happen in sustained, maintained alternative media outlets (reddit, 4chan, conspiracy theory hubs, etc.). Often, speculation serves as a tool to process trauma among online communities that have established relationships with each other (reddit), although it can also happen in settings in which users operate in anonymity (4chan).

With these three principles in mind, let’s turn first to the case of Kevin Ware, the Louisville guard who suffered a dramatic compound leg fracture during March Madness.

Note, as I’ve mentioned earlier, the repeated replay of the injury, as well as the announcer’s focus on the absolute horror of Ware’s Louisville teammates. Spectators reported seeing his teammates vomit and other audience members lose consciousness at the sight of Ware’s injury.

Image Source: Imgur

High-resolution pictures of Ware’s injury were posted to Reddit immediately after Ware sustained his injury, and in a 2,000 long comment chain, redditors weighed in on the injury.

The top-ranked comments on Reddit regarding Ware’s injury were, strangely, not the ones that relished/disgusted in the gore of the injury. Instead, the top comments speculated on Ware’s medical prognosis. Redditors with a wide variety of medical experience made predictions about Ware’s ability to play again, why the wound bled so little, how the wound might be best healed, etc. Commentors also praised Ware for remaining stoic—for “performing” away the injury.

Though the image was clearly posted and became viral because of its gruesome nature, we can see from the example of Reddit that the audience’s speculation attempted to “heal” the wound discursively. The practice of speculation also helps us understand the extreme viral interest in and disgust about Ware’s wound as somehow reflective of a hierarchy of trauma. In general, as exhibited in the case of Ware, twisted or maimed bodies, especially limb injuries, rank higher on the gore scale than mere blood, head injuries, or dead bodies. Why? Because while we might reconstruct a maimed limb with speculative practice—be disturbed by its “inside out nature,” but comforted by the ability to right the inversion—we cannot repair blood spilt or life lost. The horror of seeing a body disarticulated from itself is more immediate but less final than a whole body stripped not of limbs but of life.

The extreme reaction to a Ware’s ghastly injury resembled a similar discussion on Reddit about the following victim of the Boston Marathon bombings:

Image Credit: Imgur

The disarticulation of this man’s legs became the most viewed and commented on image from the carnage following the bombing. And although photos in the same series (also posted to the same /wtf/ board on Reddit as the Ware photos) capture dead or nearly dead bodies, viewers find the spectre of dismemberment far more disturbing.

Image Source: Hug-a-Leg

Again, the top comments speculate on healing—they individualize each victim and speak of their chances for survival, the techniques they hope the paramedics used, the treatment they hope the victims are receiving, etc. In displaying medical knowledge (credible or otherwise), users attempt to, from their computer screens, heal the broken bodies of the victims of the bombing.

Speculative practice can also have very real effects on how a population deals with the aftermath of a trauma. On Thursday, 4chan’s /b/ board released detailed interpretations of FBI-released footage and claimed that the board on the whole had identified the “most likely” (that is, “99% confirmed) suspect. 4chan’s attempt at vigilante justice arguably created only more chaos (as parodied by The Onion here) and, despite claims of 99% accuracy, it took only 24 hours for the /b/ board’s claims to be disproved.

Perhaps I can end by suggesting that 4chan’s speculative practice may demonstrate an important issue for further discussion: that while a shift in the distance between violent act and viewer might result in different responses to that violence, the only way to decrease violent acts in society is to address candidly the disjunction between what constitutes state sponsored, socially-sanctioned violence and non-state sponsored, non-socially sanctioned violence.

Image Source: Designation Systems

Maybe we can start by ditching the drones.

Part II: Suspense is Better than Action

Chris Ortiz y Prentice — Sat, 15 Sep 2012 15:31:11 +0000

Image Credit: National Archives image (208-N-43888)

Part II: An Objection is Entertained

Last week I argued that suspense makes for more arresting visual effect than does what passes for “action” in Hollywood these days. My main point was that human frailty creates suspense and that psychological realism will do much to improve action cinema. Bigger visuals are not necessarily better at creating an emotional response in the viewer.

Now, you may say to me: Chris, you are not taking into sufficient account how big real visual events have become.

You act as if we lived in the forties still; you seem to want an action cinema which would treat destructive action as if it rarely happened. But it happens every day, and has happened diurnally for some time now, and a few times on a grand scale.

Admittedly, the world has gotten a lot more frightening; it is indeed, as Cormac McCarthy found a way to express it, no country for old men. All the more reason to adhere to psychological realism! When “death looks gigantically down” (Poe), we feel it more gigantically, I would argue, when it is measure against something like sanity, or just plain safety. Sheriff Bell provides that measure, in McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men (2005). The Coen brothers, who adapted McCarthy’s novel into the best action/suspense thriller of which I am aware, never lose sight of it either.

Note, for instance, how the camera “eyes” firearms in the scene excerpted below from the film version of No Country (2007). (Warning, the violence in this scene, unlike that of many action movies, is disturbing.)

Courtesy: No Country For Old Men (2007)

The viewer does not see the firearm until the penultimate moments. Instead, we see Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson) eyeing something very uneasily. When a firearm discharges, it is a very frightful thing, even when you are certain you will not be shot. The vast majority of action movie makers have forgotten this, and they are to be blamed for their lapse. The Coen brothers and McCarthy, by contrast, eye a gun in the way that you would if it were in the room with you.

Hollywood, do you want to arrest the viewer’s attention: then treat guns as the awful instruments of destruction and nihilism that they are. A person is made of most supplicating flesh, and a bullet of the most indifferent lead.

It is true -- and this is our tragedy -- that very many of the world’s suffering denizens live intimately with the continual threat of firearms and even massive explosives. Weapons are not less frightening for being ubiquitous; they are all the more terrifying for that. As William Faulkner could say by 1950: “There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one question: When will I be blown up?” What McCarthy and the Coen brothers have shown is how this question becomes a problem of the spirit. You cannot show this, I think, with visual effect alone, hence the crucial importance to No Country of Sheriff Bell’s narrated monologues.

Hollywood, I believe you are well aware of the Faulknerian condition; but I think you are going about exorcising our demons all the wrong way. Observe this scene from the highly entertaining but all too scopophilic Independence Day (1996):

Courtesy: Independence Day (1996)

What are we doing when we imagine the total destruction of famous buildings? We are warding off the evil spirits.

“But alas,” writes Mike Davis (Dead Cities and Other Tales, 2003) “they have come after all; brandishing box-cutters. Although movies, like kites and women’s faces, were banned in the Hindu Kush version of utopia, the attacks on New York and Washington D.C. (on September 11, 2001) were organized as epic horror cinema with meticulous attention to mise-en-scène.” The U.S., in Davis’s view, has responded to cinematic terrorism cinematically: “The ‘Attack on America,’ and its sequels, ‘America Fights Back’ and ‘America Freaks Out,’ has continued to unspool as a succession of celluloid hallucinations, each of which can be rented from the corner video shop: The Siege, Independence Day, Executive Action, Outbreak, The Sum of All Fears, and so on.”

The dog which escapes the destruction in the scene excerpted from Independence Day (1996) says it all. Blow-em-up action cinema is every bit as much a response to the Faulknerian condition as is No Country For Old Men. But where that movie presents a problem of spirit, the blow-em-ups are trying to make us laugh it off; or are they trying to immunize us against our fears. Faulkner again: “Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it.”

Please, Hollywood -- I do not plea with but beg of you -- do not compete with reality for grandiosity of visual effect! We are sick to death with the visual reality of unimaginable events, and the way to heal is not to match on the silver screen, in super high definition, each new cataclysm.

Juarez the Video Game?

ebfrye — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 16:02:38 +0000

Image credit: screenshot via YouTube

Last week I posted a link to the much discussed Great Gatsby video game that's making the rounds. It's not like me to turn my attention to video games for two weeks in a row--no offense to anyone--but this story on NPR's "Morning Edition" caught my attention. This summer, the French gaming company Ubisoft will release a game they call Call of Juarez: The Cartel. As you might expect, the game is generating a lot of controversy due to the real-life situation of the border city. This news comes on the heels of the bloodiest weekend in recent memory, in which 53 people were killed (as reported by The Houston Chronicle).

Image credit: screenshot via YouTube

It's an understatement to say that Juarez has been in dire straits for a few years now. Sure, I agree with the critics who argue that the game makes light of a terrible situation, but I also wonder if the span and duration of the "war" helps facilitate the decision to make a game such as this. At what point do wars, whether waged by nation-states or gangs, become attractive to those who create games (and, for that matter, films and other forms of representation)?

It's also worth noting that Call of Juarez: The Cartel is the third installment of the series, a point to which many media outlets are not alluding. Two other games, Call of Juarez and Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood, feature the kind of Wild West imagery more familiar to Clint Eastwood fans, as illustrated by these screenshots on amazon.com.

Image credit: screenshot via amazon

It's a provocative link between the more old-fashioned, romanticized violence of the past and the kind that still shocks many in the present. Yet, is it also expected?

When It Can't Be Clever - Domestic Violence PSAs (part two)

Cate Blouke — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 05:26:43 +0000

In many of the ads, the abuse tends to occur off camera, subjecting the viewer/auditor to the sounds of violence without the spectacle (this French ad, for example, and this British one). These ads tend to be aimed at the "innocent bystanders," those who are surrounded by abuse but who do nothing to stop it. While I've been fortunate enough to be spared such an experience, I imagine that the commercials cause the target audience to re-live the experience and reflect on their own passivity.

Image Credit: Screenshot from Pond's Ad on YouTube

Other ads depict the effects of abuse without showing the causes. These tend to be aimed at women who may be the victims of abuse. This Pond's commercial (the lotion company) shows images of battered women next to a quoted excuse such as, in the above image, "Fell off the bed." This ad for the Family Justice Center shows us a wedding in which the woman vows to "make excuses when you humiliate me in public" and "to blame myself when you hit me."

As a woman, I bristle at the way these ads seem to implicate the victim for not speaking up. They strike me as more accusatory than supportive, and one wonders if shame is really an effective means to reach victims of domestic violence. Perhaps. In the Jezebel post I cited last week, the author explains how most people involved in abusive relationships don't actually see themselves as villains or victims.

That issue is quite poignantly addressed by this British advertisement directed at teenagers:

Image Credit: UK Home Office via YouTube

H/T again to Rachel

This is one of the few ads I found that targets the perpetrators of abuse specifically, and it's interesting that the target audience is young men. It asks the teenage boy to look at himself and his actions from an outside perspective - arguing that if he could "only see" himself, he wouldn't be behaving that way.

When adult abusers are targeted, children are often invoked, using the argument that children learn from their parents. In this ad, the violence is acted out by children, though we only see their feet in oversized (parental) shoes. This poignant Australian ad is aimed at a variety of parental misbehaviors, pairing adults with children who mimic their actions.

I wish I had something profound to end with, but wading back through these commercials has just left me disheartened. While the David Arquette ad that I talked about last week may not have been serious enough, it also wasn't as depressing. And so I wonder if it's actually possible to find ways to raise awareness without making people feel lousy?

Beauty and the Bomb

Megan Eatman — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 16:43:29 +0000

Image: Peter Kuran, How to Photograph an Atomic Bomb, via The New York Times

Inspired by Eileen's post, I focus this week on a fascinating image. If it weren't for the title of this post, or the image's caption, you might not be able to identify this image. Even with context, I spent a moment staring, attempting to understand how this could be what its caption claimed it was: the beginning stages of a nuclear blast, captured by a special camera placed two miles away from ground zero. In its deviance from the typical mushroom cloud, the image argues for an even more complex understanding of the massive destruction that humans create.

Technically speaking, this image is a close-up; it was captured with a special camera that was placed much closer than a regular camera (or a photographer) could be. But one of the provocative qualities of this image is the way it mimics a much closer close-up. Black and white, with darkness in the background, the image looks like something you might see through an electron microscope. While this aesthetic complicates perception of the actual scale of destruction, it also invokes the incredibly small action from which the massive explosion stems.

For me, the image also invokes the intersection of humanity and technology. The ball, filled with light, exudes a potentiality with no immediate point of origin; it grows on its own, as if alive.

Image: Peter Kuran, How to Photograph an Atomic Bomb, via The New York Times

This image is particularly explicit in invoking growth and reproduction. The bomb looks as if it is giving birth, but to what? A caption indicates that this image shows a fireball "begin[ning] to destroy the tower that holds the weapon aloft." While the first image, taken at a later stage of the explosion, shows no indication of the weapon's beginning, this image shows the destruction of the support structure, the development of the explosion as an independent entity, and thus hints again at growth. While biological creatures are certainly not the only entities that grow independently, the birthing image seems in particular to invoke human and non-human animal reproduction, providing a stark contrast to the elimination of human life that accompanies such an explosion.

The significance of these biological visual tropes might lead us to a somewhat overtrodden message: nuclear technology destroys its maker, humans are their own worst enemy, etc. I like to think that they can do more than that. If nothing else, they force us to think about an almost unimaginable scale of destruction in a different way, considering its processes and products anew. But there is also a beauty, one that I think complicates the concerns visual scholars have long held about the aestheticization of violence. The combination of beautiful image and historical knowledge might enable the viewer to both appreciate the glories of technology and its very serious consequences.

Reboot: DADT and Public Sacrifice

Megan Eatman — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 17:51:33 +0000

Image credit: Chan Lowe, The Lowe Down

The above cartoon, republished yesterday on the artist’s blog, makes a very effective argument against Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. The use of flag-draped coffins, signifying shared tragedy, suggests that dying for one’s country has little to do with sexual orientation and that is rather the work that an individual does—in this case, sacrificing his/her life for the United States—that matters. In this kind of public sacrifice, the image suggests, everything individual is erased. However, this message seems more complicated when considered in relation to one of Tim Turner's earlier posts and the wider cache of meanings that these coffins suggest.

Image credit: thememoryhole.org, via Associated Press, NYT,2/15/2009

Last year, Tim discussed speculation as to whether President Obama would change Pentagon policy and allow the publication of photographs of flag-draped coffins returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Tim suggested that this debate was in large part about the tension between public and private sacrifice (a difficulty that the eventual solution addressed), although there are obvious issues of information control as well.

When thought of in the context of public/private tension, Lowe’s cartoon could also be translated as an argument for making these coffins visible, as the coffins signify an act of public sacrifice, the death of a soldier, rather than a man or woman. The suggested erasure here could also be troubling in the debate on DADT. Lowe’s image’s suggestion that being a soldier is an overriding identity seems like it could actually be appropriated as an argument for DADT, suggesting that, in the military, you are a soldier above all else and can therefore be told to conform to gender and sexuality standards. Obviously,that argument is problematic (why these standards?) and extremely discriminatory, but it makes visible some of the complications that arise in the public/private tension around soldiers’ bodies.

Tim’s original piece is below, and here. For more discussion of images and DADT, see this recent post on No Caption Needed.

Start of Tim's post:

At his first televised press conference last week, President Obama received a question about a controversy that, though once debated quite energetically, had seemed for a time to recede into the background as the casualty rate for U.S. soldiers has fallen. The questioner wanted to know whether the new administration would order the Pentagon to reverse its policy of forbidding the publication of photographs showing the return of fallen soldiers from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. (President Obama responded by not commenting, since the policy is currently "under review.")Image credit: thememoryhole.org, via Associated Press, NYT, 2/15/2009

The question, and the issue, were covered yesterday by The New York Times in a story and an editorial urging the President to overturn the policy. As the author of the former summarizes the issue, "Part of the debate that has developed turns on whether the return of soldiers is a private or public matter. While families have registered a range of opinions about allowing the news media at Dover, many have maintained that the return of a body is so deeply personal that they should be able to decide whether to keep it private." Above and beyond the questions raised by the difficult question of how to treat the images of what is essentially both a public and a private sacrifice (a soldier dying for his or her country is also lost to his or her family), the debate itself is simply a reminder of the power of images to move arguments.

Documenting Crime, Yesterday and Today

Megan Eatman — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 13:19:33 +0000

Image: Ángel Franco

Via Lens Blog, New York Times

The above image is a part of a series by photographer Ángel Franco that documents the aftermath of violence, but not in the way you might expect. The series, which is published weekly on Lens, the New York Times documentary photography blog, is filled with images that are haunting in large part because of what is not shown.

The images in Franco's series, At the Sirens' End, are all shot in New York City. Each is accompanied by a minimalist caption; the image above, for example, is captioned, "A woman fell--or was pushed--from a 15th floor window in the Mitchel Houses" (Lens). These captions provide context for what might otherwise be a mysterious, if unsettling, scene. Because this image is a close-up shot that eliminates any surrounding officers or crime scene tape, the gravity of the situation may only set in after careful observation. Rather than focusing on the spectacle of a deceased or grieving body, Franco draws out a strange emptiness by portraying a stranger's relation to the event. The image below, which captures a young girl moving toward the scene of a fatal car accident, has a similar effect.

Image: Ángel Franco, via Lens

"A young girl tries to catch a glimpse of the scene of a fatal car accident."

In obscuring the identities of both police officer and child, the images place the observer in an even more distant relation: a stranger watching strangers. The violence that the images allude to plays out not on the bodies of victims, but on the bodies of bystanders who encounter the event through daily life, and thus observers access the event through its traces.

Image: Ángel Franco, via Lens

"Left behind after a shooting July 21 on East 132nd Street in Manhattan."

These images are especially interesting when considered in relation to one of Franco's previous projects. From 1979 to 1984, Franco worked with the officers of the 46th Precinct in the Bronx, where, at the time, "a murder occurred every five days on average" (Lens). These images often show victims and perpetrators, and their grittier aesthetic reflects a different relation between bystander and crime.

Image: Ángel Franco, via Lens

"An officer holding a gun to a man who had been stopped in his car."

While this image, like Franco's more recent work, withholds eye-to-eye engagement, it is frighteningly intimate. With the officer and suspect dominating the frame, there is little outside space with which to contextualize the violence of the officer's gesture. The image also suggests that this violence is strangely routine; the officer's posture hints at disengagement, as he appears to be using the gun as a management tool to keep the suspect under control while he or someone else investigates.

Image: Ángel Franco, via Lens

"Officers carrying a boy who was caught in a gun fight while riding his bike. Shot in the chest, he survived."

These images could be useful for teaching students about both image analysis and rhetorical situation. You might ask, how are the arguments that the earlier images make specific to a 1970s/1980s crime-ridden neighborhood? How might we explain the visual changes in the later photographs? How can this shift be read as an argument about our changing relationship to violence? In seeing the way this artist's work has changed, students may be able to better grasp the importance of context in argument.

American Gothic on Mad Men

Rachel Schneider — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 23:32:55 +0000

Image Credit: Chicago Tribune

Mad Men, AMC's popular television show, has long garnered the attention of visual designers based on its subject matter (the advertising world of Madison Avenue in the early 1960s) and on its careful attention to authentic period detail. (The show's few missteps, as when it featured a 1987 Compact Edition of the OED, were widely reported on the Internet.) The show’s creator, Matthew Weiner, deliberately chose to set the show on Madison Avenue because advertising is "a great way to talk about the image we have of ourselves, versus who we really are." Since starting to watch the show, I've been fascinated with how the design elements, the character’s actions, and dialogue all work to construct a claim to authenticity about what the 1960s were that some immediately rush to challenge.

Image Credit: Flikr

Last night's episode, "Guy Walks into an Advertising Office," significantly upset the show’s claims to ultra-realism in the sequence where the invading future boss and Brit Guy McKendrick loses his foot in a lawn mower accident in the Sterling Cooper offices. The reaction shot featuring several of the ad men covered in blood made such an impression on my friends that we had to use the DVR to re-watch the horror several times over. While this might be due to our lack of disgust, I think it also had to do with a different kind of argument that the show wants to make about the reality of life in the 1960s.

War has come up several times during this season in conversations between Don Draper, the show's protagonist, and his father-in-law Gene. In this episode Smitty (the man who first drove the John Deere lawn mower into the party) discusses the Vietnam War draft before the accident. While this season is set in 1963, and so well before the major opposition to Vietnam, the blood spatter also rehearses the Kennedy Assassination to occur later this year.

This show has not shied away from presenting culturally complex or challenging moment (as when the boss Roger Sterling performed in blackface earlier this season for his guests), but this show seems to be using visuals very carefully to define what kind of 1960s it describes. While the Slate in particular has offered great coverage of this, I look forward to seeing what other visual arguments the show might offer in the future.

Visual Rhetoric and Violence I

timturner — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 17:24:28 +0000

By Tim Turner (Contact)
See also Propaganda and Visual Rhetoric

What is the relationship between rhetoric and violence? Are they mutually exclusive?
Is violence only conceivable as a failure of rhetoric? Can rhetoric itself be violent?
Isn't violence often employed as a means of persuasion?

These questions may pose challenges to the prevailing pedagogical models employed in introductory rhetoric classes, which tend to be organized around the "common ground" model of civic or "civil" discourse. As I have suggested elsewhere, while this model is desirable for many reasons, it may also be challenged by the uncivil or unethical modes of persuasion with which we are often confronted in the public and/or private sphere, including, for example, propaganda. In other words, when the "common ground" model privileges or presumes arguments made in "good faith," it may do a disservice to students, who will frequently be confronted by arguments made in "bad faith," that is, arguments that do not adhere to some presumed or assumed notion of what constitutes "good argument" in the public sphere.

The very notion of "good argument" raises questions about what is at stake in the teaching of rhetoric, however. In theory, "good argument" is argument that is persuasive. Taken in this sense, the theoretical and practical concerns of an introductory rhetoric course coincide: instructors teach students how to recognize effective, persuasive arguments written by others ("rhetoric" conceived as a theory of persuasion) and encourage students to model these techniques of effective persuasion in their own writing ("rhetoric" conceived as a practicum in writing). "Goodness" in this context is nonetheless complicated by the ethical stakes of persuasion. People are often persuaded by ethically suspect arguments: arguments that are dishonest, demagogic, or that persuade the listener to engage in morally untenable acts. (Of course, the definition of what constitutes "moral" is itself open to interpretation and, therefore, argumentation; moral critique may be subjected to rhetorical critique.)

Yet there is also a connection between ethics and rhetoric in that both "disciplines" insist that one be responsive to the needs of someone else: in rhetoric, this means listening to what the other person has to say (as in the "common ground" model) and responding, sometimes by making concessions, and in ethics, for example, in considering how one's actions will impact others or those situations in which one ought to act to give assistance to others. In both cases, what is implied is a certain claim that the other person makes on me, or that I, in my turn (when I make my argument or when I act in the public sphere) make on them. Both revolve around a certain susceptibility, and this is one reason why the common ground model is attractive: it insists on notions of responsibility, or response-ability, in public, civic life. At the same time, this susceptibility potentially has what we might think of simply as a "dark side": or rather, the abstract susceptibility we have in thinking, in argument and debate, has a physical corollary in our susceptibility to bodily violence--this is susceptibility as vulnerability.

In thinking about pedagogical strategies for teaching rhetoric in the past, I have tried to allow these considerations to impact the content in my courses. Most often, this means I have asked students to think about the relationship of violence to rhetoric; about texts that encourage violence; whether, as is sometimes said, violence is what happens when rhetoric fails; and even whether rhetoric itself, the forms of an argument, can be violent. To consider these questions, I have often relied on depictions of violence to conduct such arguments. In my RHE 309 course, the Rhetoric of War and Peace (a topic chosen with many of these questions in mind), these included images of violence including war films, documentaries, and photography. Including such images was not only a way to introduce some of the ethical questions at stake in the teaching of rhetoric. They also had the effect of introducing, often in uncomfortable ways, the visceral into our discussions in a non-gratuitous way. I saw such a strategy as integral to teaching rhetoric in part because persuasion itself is not always only about thought/thinking; it is usually persuasion to action.

A survey of some of my fellow instructors indicates that while violent images and imagery often form part of the 309 curriculum, the role played by depictions of violence in pedagogical strategy may remain undertheorized. However, the prevalance of such imagery (which may simply be related to the overall prevalence of violence in forms of popular culture) in 309 courses indicates that instructors recognize the pedagogical uses to which violent imagery may be put. One instructor writes, for example, that "Students actually seem drawn to the most violent imagery; it illicits a real response from them. I think that when they see violent imagery they feel compelled to respond." This notion is echoed in the response of another instructor, who writes,

Many of them reacted physically to this violence [in the course materials] (turning away, burying face in hands, squirming, covering eyes, etc.) and we got to discuss revulsion as a claim made on behalf of a larger argument about violence against the body (it's wrong, it shouldn't be seen, etc.). Of course this has a lot to do with breaking down of socially enforced barriers (inside/outside, public/private, self/other - my favorite one to point out - when they literally feel for the person they are watching with tingling hands and aching arms) that allows us to understand the political projects of such performances.

Like many of the rhetorical strategies discussed in rhetoric classes, depictions of violence may be said (in general terms) to "move," both literally and figuratively, the audiences to which they are shown or at which they are aimed. Depictions or representations of violence may be deployed as rhetorical strategies, and this point complicates an easy sense that violence and rhetoric are mutually exclusive or that violence is only conceivable as a failure of rhetoric or in the absence of rhetoric.

Finally, the status of violence in rhetoric classes is further complicated by the potential disruptions of meaning it may impose. More straightforwardly, this analysis begs an important question: what is violence? This may well be a question for definitional argument: how do we, or even how can we, think about, discuss, represent, or understand violence? Recently, for example, this question has especially been an issue in discussions of the Holocaust (as I have discussed in an earlier blog entry). In Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Giorgio Agamben argues that it is politically untenable to "lend a sacraficial aura to the extermination of the Jews by means of the term 'Holocaust'" (114) because treating these events as a matter of what he calls "religion" obscures the mechanisms which led to the unfolding of such events in the first place. Agamben's work confronts the view, widely prevalent, that the violence of the Holocaust is essentially unrepresentable or untranslatable in ordinary terms. Perhaps relying on the simple axiom that those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it, Agamben urges engagement and confrontation with an issue to which, as he argues, insufficient attention has been paid.

Agamben's arguments are well worth consideration, but it remains an open question whether such forms of violence are ultimately reducible to purely intellectual analysis. Two issues seem to be at stake here. First, Agamben's work has the benefit of reminding us that violence is sometimes an inescapable part of the public sphere (in popular culture or in political life). He asks us to think critically and carefully about the work of violence, about its meaning and status in everyday life. In short, he asks us to think about what violence is and how it works. He asks us to see its political/civic dimension. At the same time, the potentially affective dimensions of depictions of violence challenge, in useful, productive ways, the notion that violence and rhetoric are "opposites" or mutually exclusive. While the "common ground" model of rhetorical pedagogy privileges or presumes the existence of a civil public sphere, approaches to the teaching of rhetoric that incorporate some discussion of violence offer a "rhetoric-from-the-margins" approach. Incorporating attention to violence, to the visual rhetoric of violence or to violence as visual rhetoric, asks students and instructors to think critically about the constitution of a public sphere in which, ultimately, we are asking our students to responsibly (and response-ably) participate.

Questions for assessing the status of violence in the rhetoric curriculum

What materials, if any, did you include on your syllabus that you consider "violent"?
Did you include any kind of disclaimer on your syllabus or policy statement letting students know that the class would include violent materials?
To what extent did you foreground violence as a topic for discussion or a subject for critical scrutiny?
Did your class include any assignments that asked students to reflect on, write about, or critique depictions of violence?
In what ways, if at all, did you ask students to respond to the violence of your course's materials?
Was the inclusion of violent material in your syllabus incidental to your topic, or did you specifically choose your course topic with rhetoric and violence in mind?
How do you think about the relationship of violence and/or representations to the teaching of rhetoric and persuasion?
What role do these materials play in terms of pedagogical strategy?
How successful were your efforts to incorporate violent material into the teaching of rhetoric in your course?
How did your students respond?

Image credits

Upper-right: Francis Bacon, Painting (1946; Museum of Modern Art, New York City)
Middle-left: One of Zbigniew Libera's concentration camp faux-Lego sets
Lower-right: John Galliano's most recent collection was influenced by a "torture aesthetic" (Photo by Marcio Madeira, for men.style.com)

You've never seen sports bras like these.

erinhurt — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 03:16:03 +0000

I ran across this via Feministing.com, and thought these almost-ads needed to be on the website. The backstory for these ads is that an ad agency pitched them to a running company, which passed on them. They are advertising sports bras, supposedly in a humorous way. They seem menacing to me:

See the other two ads after the jump:

Here are the others:

For me, the blood on these women's faces has overtones of violence, especially domestic violence. Furthermore, I find it hard to imagine that an advertising agency wouldn't be aware of these connotations.

Shirts deemed in bad taste because of "Animal rights, stuff like that"

Jillian Sayre — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 01:21:31 +0000

Earlier this month, a Texas Tech fraternity found themselves victims of their school's solicitation section of the code of conduct. One of the students in the fraternity was selling t-shirts to raise school spirits for the A&M game. The shirts echoed the (strange) A&M motto "Gig 'Em!" with the more timely "Vick 'Em!" The back of the shirt had a football player wearing the number 7 (Vick's number) hanging the Aggie mascot Reveille by a rope:
Texas Tech halted the sale of the t-shirts; citing the code of conduct, the school said it doesn't allow the sale of material that is "derogatory, inflammatory, insensitive, or in such bad taste." The student in question argued that he planned to donate part of the profits a local animal defense league because of "Animal Rights, stuff like that." I guess when it comes to obscenity, like Justice Stewart, those administers "know it when they see it."

This reminds me of the Aggie's "Saw 'Em Off" campaign, ended by a UT lawsuit alleging copyright infringement and solved by the following alteration:

and then there's UT's reprisal:

I think the "Vick 'Em" case is an interesting move in the string of violence against mascots because the case is the first one that deemed truly offensive. Fed by this cartoon violence, this shirt crossed the line in referencing the very real abuse documented in the Vick case. The threat indicated in the other shirts reference real animals (Bevo and Reveille) but somehow the mascots themselves remain at the level of representation. It is the Vick in Vick Em that has everybody in an uproar.

viz. - violence

Laura Palmer, wrapped in plastic

Violent Encounters

Part II: Suspense is Better than Action

Juarez the Video Game?

When It Can't Be Clever - Domestic Violence PSAs (part two)

Beauty and the Bomb

Reboot: DADT and Public Sacrifice

Documenting Crime, Yesterday and Today

American Gothic on Mad Men

Visual Rhetoric and Violence I

Questions for assessing the status of violence in the rhetoric curriculum

Further Reading

Image credits

You've never seen sports bras like these.

Shirts deemed in bad taste because of "Animal rights, stuff like that"