viz. - popular culture

Who Wore it Better? Kimye Edition

Laura Thain — Mon, 06 May 2013 17:33:04 +0000

Celebrity fashion is a no-holds-barred spectators’ sport, and, like the fashion industry itself, it features and targets women as its primary audience. Free Thought blogger Greta Christina described the language of fashion succinctly in her recent post “Fashion is a Feminist Issue”, arguing that if we interpret fashion as a “language of sorts…an art form, even,” we can begin to view fashion as “one of the very few forms of expression in which women have more freedom than men.” But, she continues, “it’s [no] accident that it’s typically seen as shallow, trivial, and vain. It is the height of irony that women are valued for our looks, encouraged to make ourselves beautiful and ornamental… and are then derided as shallow and vain for doing so. Like it or not, fashion and style are primarily a women’s art form. And I think it gets treated as trivial because women get treated as trivial.”

This post seeks to read the rhetoric of celebrity fashion coverage in light of remarks like those of Greta Christina. How can we read celebrity fashion as an arena that in principle grants women more freedom than men, but in practice consistently limits the freedom of both men and women to express themselves? How do the voyeuristic, hypercritical impulses of celebrity media intersect and inform the world of fashion, particularly women’s fashion? I take as my case study here the much-photographed couple Kim Kardashian and Kanye West, sometimes known as a couple by their nickname “Kimye.”

Image Source: Kendall and Kylie

I’ll begin my examination with a convention of celebrity fashion coverage—the “who wore it better” genre. In its most serious iteration, the formula encourages competition among fashionable women of means by enlisting an audience of fashionable women without means as judges. Most often, the comparison is inspired by two celebrities wearing an identical piece of fashion, usually from a premiere designer’s current season. In the race to consume runway fashion, celebrities are pitted against one another to not only be the first to sport a fresh-off-the-runway look, but to also wear it better than the competition that will inevitably follow. And anyone who’s done their homework on fashion marketing knows that, while the choices offered by mass-market or “commercial” fashion are vast, high-end designers promote their brand by strategically limiting supply and in order to create an illusion of exclusivity. Celebrity stylists must compete viciously to bring the runway to the red carpet as quickly as possible, but because of the particular way in which exclusivity and reproduction oppose each other in the market of high-end fashion, repeat-fashion choices are granted to audiences to sort out—a mechanism that also helps assuage the ordinary audience’s feelings of exclusion. Only one woman can “own” the look—so who wore it better?

Image Source: Us Magazine

Of course, as much as tabloids present photographs as hard evidence, many factors matter in how an audience responds to the choice between two celebrities in the same outfit. Besides the unstable nature of the content itself (lighting, pose, position, composition, etc.), context also matters. Kim, for instance, is often matched up against one of her sisters (as are Kylie and Khloe in the larger spread above), making an intertextual argument about Kardashian fashion and celebrity status as a separate category from other A-listers. Kim is paired with her sisters to highlight behaviors that exclude them from mainstream celebrity status: they (gasp!) share clothes; they are reality show stars and not movie stars; they prefer Louis Vuitton and Gucci to Marchesa and Chanel.

Tabloids don’t only use Kim’s fashion choices as evidence that she doesn’t belong with other A-list celebrities. Tabloid media often uses them as to openly mock her, as well.

Image Source: We Know Memes

Image Source: College Humor

Image Source: Robin Williams' Twitter

All of these examples lambast Kim for her weight gain during pregnancy or her refusal to wear conventional maternity clothes. Kim’s signature, curve-hugging style becomes the greatest source of tabloid fixation and ridicule, rather than praise. Because Kim’s curvy body can no longer be sexualized and consumed, she becomes as a ridiculed, mocked commodity instead.

Interestingly, we can trace this shift well before Kim’s pregnancy. When the reality star began dated Kanye West in March of 2012, celebrity media speculated over how Kanye’s reputation for dressing his girlfriends might affect Kim, who rarely strayed far from her signature, curve-hugging, leather-and-spandex style. Kardashian’s reality show even featured an episode in which West loaned Kim his stylist and gave her closet a makeover.

As soon as Kim started stepping out in looser, more daring, more “editorial” or “high fashion” clothing, she received harsher criticism in the fashion press than ever before. Kim had made her mark by wearing body-conscious status-designer clothes (that is, mass-marketed and expensive but readily available designer fodder like Vuitton, D&G, Gucci, Versace); her transition into high-end, couture fashion (like the Riccardo Tisci for Givenchy dress above) was met with resistance by tabloid press and audiences alike. What was sexy, leather studs-and-animal print Kardashian doing trying to wear sleek, demure French designers?

But Kim can’t win no matter what she wears--if she meets expectations in hip-hugging, cleavage-bearing LBDs, the tabloids commodify her sexuality but call her trashy or tasteless; if she defies expectations in loose silhouettes or bolder colors, the tabloids instead portray her as inauthentic, posturing, a parvenu.

Image Source: NY Daily News

Image Credit: Loop 21

Now that I have demonstrated some potential strictures placed upon women in an arena that claims to privilege expression and artistry, I’d like to extend those arguments to Kanye West and suggest how issues of class and gender affect men’s forays into fashion, as well.

Kanye West, the self-proclaimed “Louis Vuitton Don”, is himself no stranger to fashion controversy. But while, as I’ve argued above, Kim struggles against classicism in her efforts to establish a powerful fashion ethos, Kanye must battle much more stringent gender norms in his pursuit of fashion superstardom.

Image Source: Red Carpet Fashion Awards

Below, Rihanna wears a mensware jacket to the notice of no one but a minor fashion blog. Women wearing menswear is about as subversive as a puppy in a kitten costume—far from the controversial political and anti-establishment statement androgyny made in the fashion world of the 1960s, elements of menswear in women’s fashion are accepted and, to an extent, expected in 2013.

Image Source: The Telegraph

Not so for men's fashion. When Kanye West donned a kilt-style skirt for a Hurricane Sandy benefit concert last fall, he received so much flack from both the press and fellow hip-hop artist and MC Lord Jamar that he asked that Getty Images remove all photos of him performing in the skirt. Lord Jamar released a biting criticism of West’s dress in the song “Lift up Your Skirt,” which he heavily annotated on the rap annotation site RapGenius.

Verse 1 from Lord Jamar's song. Image Source: Screencapture from Rap Genius

Lord Jamar's personal annotations on Rap Genius. Image Source: Rap Genius

It’s not only Kanye’s fashion choices, but his interest in fashion, that feminizes him in the eyes of elements of the hip-hop community and the fashion tabloid media. Yet, just as Kim’s recent fashion choices increasingly buck her “bod-icon” status and experiment with self-expression, Kanye asserts his interest and his choices subversively, even when (or especially when?) those fashion choices fail to enhance his reputation as a fashion icon. I’d like to close with one last “who wore it better?” to drive this point home:

Image Source: Fashion Bomb Daily

Kanye West may be wearing the same women’s wear shirt as Jessica Simpson, but damn it, he’s wearing it better!

Girl Power: Taylor Swift beyond The Waves

Laura Thain — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 14:00:00 +0000

Image Credit: Harper’s Bazaar

This blog post started as a conversation in the break room here at the DWRL. After a discussion of the subversive, alternative female artists of the 90s—not only in band formulation like Riot Grrl or Bikini Kill but especially the singer/songwriters who dominated top 40 radio: Alanis Morissette, Melissa Etheridge, Fiona Apple—someone mused, “Where have all the angry girls gone?”

I can’t say I like the answer. The angry girls have been billed as terrorists (MIA) or criminals (Fiona Apple). Some girls perform anger in a way that only weakly resonates with the general public (Miley Cyrus). But the angry girl has also been rebranded. The inevitable subsumption of alternative culture by the mainstream has cloaked our angry girl in airy dresses with flowing tresses and the voice of an angel to deliver the proverbial “fuck you.” I am, of course, referring to the girl who’s on the cover of every magazine this week as she promotes her new album Red. So hey girl hey, Taylor Swift—this week’s post goes out to you as I explore the paradoxical relationship between the underground and the mainstream, which emerge and subsume and emerge again in a cycle as endless as the couple on the verge of reconciliation (really! I think so!) in “We are Never Ever Getting Back Together.”

So how do we get from Courtney Love to Taylor Swift? Perhaps we might take a look at one of my favorite pieces of concert memorabilia—the sparkly heart barrette sold during Hole’s Live Through This tour.

Image Credit: Tastingsin's Tumblr

Live Through This dropped merely four days after the death of Love’s husband Kurt Cobain, an event many music critics identify as crucial to Nirvana’s transition from underground to mainstream popularity. Certainly we can read Barthes’ Death of the Author into the cultural narrative here, but let us defer that question and focus on the larger movement of grunge and punk rock into what I will call the “stadium rock” sphere in the mid ‘90s—that is, that the initial countercultural impulses of grunge and punk become incorporated into the sphere of mass culture. Hole’s second album serves as an important piece of rhetorical evidence for this. It is drastically more accessible than the first and received acclaim from popular and alternative music critics alike.

There are two ways we might read the heart, which was sold in large quantities throughout the Live Through This tour. We might read it as an ironic statement on Love’s part; that is, that Love is attempting to show her distaste for traditional cultural mores of gender and femininity by expressing her identity in an exaggeratingly feminine object. (The more popular version of the barrette came in hot pink.) The cover of Live Through This seems to affirm this reading:

Image Credit: Amazon

But the mechanism is not purely ironic. As Erika Reinstein famously said in what has come to be known as the Riot Grrrl Manifesto (published in a ‘zine in ’92)

“BECAUSE we girls want to create mediums that speak to US. We are tired of boy band after boy band, boy zine after boy zine, boy punk after boy punk after boy… BECAUSE we need to talk to each other. Communication/inclusion is the key. We will never know if we don’t break the code of silence… BECAUSE in every form of media we see us/myself slapped, decapitated, laughed at, objectified, raped, trivialized, pushed, ignored, stereotyped, kicked, scorned, molested, silenced, invalidated, knifed, shot, choked and killed. BECAUSE a safe space needs to be created for girls where we can open our eyes and reach out to each other without being threatened by this sexist society and our day to day bullshit.”

Love’s incorporation of the barrette can be seen, I think, as a reclaiming of femininity on women’s own terms; that women should feel free to take back the domestic or the feminine as a willing and willful act, not as an act of subversion of subservience. The precondition for this, as Reinstein argues, is a self-designated, self-created feminine space.

But as that space became defined by powerful, “angry” female vocalists of the ‘90s, the line between ironic or self-designated participation in the feminine and the feminine space as inferior or restrictive (i.e. a patriarchally defined feminine space) became, in my view, increasingly blurred. Once female-defined, female-inhabited spaces became available for mass consumption, the mechanisms of popular culture transformed Hole’s barrette into a face-value gesture. The anger regarding and demand for social justice, especially for women, transforms into a more palatable “women scorned” motif. Thus, the danger of female anger is contained by means of isolation; by individualizing it (Swift’s endless parade of breakup songs) rather than generalizing it. A breakup, after all, is something we “get over.”

So finally, I’d like make some particular comments on Taylor Swift’s visit to Ellen:

The video has earned Swift some heat for being “humorless,” especially about the central theme of her songwriting—her breakups. (An ecard recently made the internet rounds, expressing “Taylor Swift, maybe you’re the problem.”) But as much as I might object to a particular brand of singer/songwriter that I think Swift represents—the woman who, despite the plethora of social injustices against women that exist, chooses to use her potentially empowering anger to wax generic on winning at breakups—the idea that Swift is obligated to make her personal life available for public consumption for daring to aestheticize her feelings is the worse offense. So although I think we might read Swift as complicit in a tired out old narrative that sanitizes “girl power” into something ultimately less threatening than the demand for social justice, complicit with patriarchal ideas of femininity or not, she can never deserve to be subject to them.

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?

I Turn My Camera On, Then My Photoshop

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

Image Credit: Everett Hiller

H/T: Crushable

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

Image Credit: Everett Hiller

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

Image Credit: Everett Hiller

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

Image Credit: Everett Hiller

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

Image Credit: Everett Hiller

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

Image Credit: Newsweek

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

Panem et Circenses: The Hunger Games and Kony2012

David A. Harper — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 03:31:21 +0000

Image Credit: BookDrum.com

I suspect I was one of very few people thinking of the First Earl of Shaftesbury, Anthony Cooper, as I watched The Hunger Games with my family last weekend. In particular, I was recalling how Shaftesbury lamented in 1711 that the English theater had come to resemble the “popular circus or bear-garden.”

It is no wonder we hear such applause resounded on the victories of Almanzor, when the same parties had possibly no later than the day before bestowed their applause as freely on the victorious butcher, the hero of another stage, where amid various frays, bestial and human blood, promiscuous wounds and slaughter, [both sexes] are… pleased spectators, and sometimes not spectators only, but actors in the gladiatorian parts.[1]

I found myself watching The Hunger Games at the urgent behest of my eldest daughter, a staunch tween member of “Team Peeta.” Before the movie, we had made a bargain that I would read the entire Hunger Games series and take her to the film if she would read Golding’s Lord of the Flies. It seemed like a good deal at the time. While The Hunger Games movie didn’t put her in mind of Shaftesbury, she did direct me to the image below:

Image Credit: iFunny.mobi

Like the best jokes, this one works on several levels. Suzanne Collins, author of the Hunger Games series, makes the Roman “bread and circuses” connection explicit in the third novel when Katniss is informed that “in the Capitol, all they’ve known is Panem et Circenses.”[2] Indeed, “Panem” is the name of the fictional nation that uses the annual Hunger Games as a strategy of control. My initial assessment after reading the series was that Shirley Jackson’s famous 1948 short story “The Lottery” had mated with Stephen King’s prescient 1982 sci-fi novel The Running Man and produced dubious offspring. But I left the movie musing that it is somehow too easy to assess The Hunger Games as a commentary on a culture obsessed with cheap, voyeuristic reality TV. In a way the books never could, the movie takes advantage of the social and visual experience of going to the movies to breathe new life into the “bread and circuses” paradigm.

In an article for Huffington Post, Greg Garrett noted that The Hunger Game’s dystopia evokes both 1930’s Depression-era America and the Roman “bread and circuses” tradition. Garrett writes, “So long as we are distracted… we may forget for a moment about our own lives, our own hunger. We may forget that we live in a nation that is less free than it was a decade ago, a nation with fewer societal safety nets, a nation with fewer opportunities for young people.”[3] Well said. But let’s face it; the majority of Americans have never known anything more than metaphorical hunger. Turning our gaze toward our own very real problems is a start, but only a start. To do only that is to become a Panem Capitol dweller who realizes she lacks freedom. Breaking free of the thralldom imposed by our own enticing bread and circuses requires we turn our gaze outward and recognize responsibilities extending beyond the borders of self, town, state, or nation.

The theater where my family viewed The Hunger Games was a trendy one that serves meals during the show. While we waited for our group to be seated, the people in front of us consumed two pitchers of the theater’s own microbrew. Once inside, we were treated to a menu mimicking foods found in the books. No, not squirrel, berries, or any other survival food found in the impoverished districts or the arena. This was high-end Capitol fare, like lamb stew with plumbs and some purple melon wrapped in prosciutto. In typical American fashion, the portions were huge. All told, my family probably spent over $100.00 to sit in stadium seats watching a decadent society watch starving children kill each other for sport.

Image Credit: People.com

That purple prosciutto melon was a tip off to what sets The Hunger Games phenomenon apart. It casts the movie audience in the role of Panem Capitol dwellers watching the games. The effect is emphasized by how rarely the movie shows Capitol citizens reacting to the action in the arena. Instead, we stand in for that audience, watching the carnage directly or through the mediation of the charismatic game show host, Caesar. The outlandish Capitol fashion (think Eighteenth-century meets Lady Gaga) may be meant to distance these people from us, even dehumanize them, but as the movie rolls on we become them.

Shaftesbury recognized that the difference between being a “spectator” or an “actor” is perhaps only one of degree. The Hunger Games has us watch colonial children kill one another while we participate in our own consumer culture of excess. God forbid you were out refilling your eight-dollar popcorn tub and missed Thresh bashing little Clove’s head in against a giant metal cornucopia.

Image Credit: Netroots Foundation

The tricky thing about a movie about bread and circuses is that it can become simply another circus, particularly if the audience remains unaware of their complicity. What are we forgetting – what are we being distracted from – by this particular circus and by the more ubiquitous barrage of media white noise? I couldn’t help but reflect that only about a week prior to the release of The Hunger Games the viral social media campaign “Kony2012” had filled our feeds and prompted anxious articles in The Atlantic,[4] The New York Times,[5] ForiegnPolicy.com,[6] and in other mainstream media outlets. The rapidity with which critiques of Kony2012 surfaced revealed a deep mistrust for new social-media fueled activism, as well hinting at even less savory reasons for lashing out at the video.

For a moment, Kony2012 brought our attention to the plight of child soldiers, real starving children who kill one another. Of particular impact is the moment nine minutes into the film, where the filmmaker attempts to explain Joseph Kony to his own five-year old son. The moment has power precisely because, in order to expose the exploitation of children, the filmmaker exploits his own son. It is uncomfortable, but it is meant to be. When we watch fictional children fight in the Hunger Games arena, however, we are partaking in an entertaining diversion, both within the framework of the fiction that makes us a Capitol citizen, and in our role as real consumers of media. A little more discomfort might be in order.

Shaftesbury wasn’t arguing for the abolishment of the theater in 1711, no more than I am denying the value of entertainment. I study Renaissance and Eighteenth-century literature for most of my day, so for me to take such a stance would be absurd. But I do think we should reflect upon what it means to be identified not with the rebellious underdogs of District 11, but with the effete, privileged citizens of the Capitol who move from one distraction to the next as children kill each other and the temperature rises.

Works Cited

[1] Anthony Ashley Cooper. Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times. Edited by Lawrence E. Klein. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999), 447.

[2] Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay. (New York: Scholastic, 2010), 223.

[3] Greg Garrett, "The Hunger Games: Why It Matters"

[4] Max Fisher, "The Soft Bigotry of Kony 2012"

[5] Josh Kron and J. David Goodman, "Online, a Distant Conflict Soars to Topic No.1"

[6] Joshua Keating, "Guest Post: Joseph Kony is not in Uganda (and other complicated things)

Abraham Lincoln is Watching Over You: The Strange World of Victorian Spirit Photography

Jake Ptacek — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 16:28:25 +0000

For my first viz. post ever, I thought I’d take a look at the Victorian phenomenon of spirit photography. Truly timely, right? But in the wake of Errol Morris’s new book on photography, Believing is Seeing, which is concerned with sussing out the relationship between objective truth and the photograph, thinking about this mid-Victorian malarkey suddenly seems more culturally relevant to me than it did, say, a week ago. After all, the controversy over spirit photographs represents the first serious sustained debate about photography’s truth-telling powers. But more importantly, spirit photography remains, if you’ll pardon the obvious pun, visually haunting: at its most basic rhetorical level, its wish-fulfilling nature provides access to powerful cultural fantasies. Read more after the break.

Probably the single most (in)famous spirit photographer, William Mumler is a prime example of sheer American hucksterism. Born in 1832, he worked as a jewel engraver until 1861, when “spirits” began appearing in Mumler’s amateur photographs. Capitalizing on the nascent rage for Spiritualism and a powerful sentimentality engendered by the mass casualties of the American Civil War, Mumler set up shop as the nation’s chief spirit photographer. Mumler’s career skyrocketed until 1869, when a trial for fraud, initiated in New York City, made him notorious. One of the events of the season, Mumler’s trial represents a key moment in the history of photography, as for the first time the medium’s relationship to truth was being brought into the legal arena. The trial saw P. T. Barnum testify against Mumler, where Barnum (prophetically?) circulated a photograph of himself with the blurry head of Abraham Lincoln in the background as evidence that spirit photographs could be faked. Though William Mumler was found not guilty, the trial effectively ended the first portion of his career. After 1869, Mumler continued to circulate spirit photographs—including some of his most famous—but biographical information becomes much more scarce.[1]

William Mumler’s most famous spirit photograph, shown above, captures a beatific, almost Christ-like Abraham Lincoln resting his transparent hands on the shoulders of Mary Todd Lincoln (harder to discern in all digital copies I’ve examined is the faint presence of Thaddeus Lincoln in the upper left-hand corner). Mumler claims in his autobiography not to have known the subject was Mary Todd Lincoln—though he had previously photographed her (without spirits) in 1865—but instead thought she was a “Mrs. Lindall.” His surprise when he learned the “true” identity of his illustrious sitters may be imagined. Though even by Mumler’s standards the 1872 photograph isn’t a particularly convincing piece of work—Lincoln’s head seems strangely posed and stiff—it’s an audacious piece of mythmaking. The photograph collapses the distinction between the national and the familial. Mary Todd Lincoln, still dressed in black, still mourning her loss, stares out directly at the viewer, not challengingly, but with the beginning of a smile. Behind her the iconic face of Lincoln looks downward, evading the viewer’s gaze, but he is smiling. The viewer is encouraged to identify with Mary Todd—the grieving survivor—as she comes to realize a sense of security and protection in the ghostly hands of the great American myth, Abraham Lincoln.

Not every spirit photographer was—or could be—as audacious as Mumler, yet all spirit photographs work by fulfilling a complicated set of desires. On a personal level, they allow their subjects one more chance to see, whether in a cloudy mist or transparent blotch, loved ones thought gone. Edouard Buguet, a Parisian spirit photographer, confessed during his trial to a number of fraudulent practices. Yet, as Martyn Jolly puts it in his excellent 2006 book, Faces of the Living Dead, “witness after witness—journalist, photographic expert, musician, merchant, man of letters, optician, ex-professor of history, and colonel of artillery—came forward to testify in his defense…. One after another they left the witness box protesting that they chose to believe the evidence of their own eyes, rather than Buguet’s confession.” There’s something deeper at work here than a basic fear of being exposed as a “gullible dupe,” as Jolly puts it, though that’s a part of it, of course.

Spirit photographs touch on matters of serious belief. They provide seemingly objective proof that identity continues on after death in a reassuring, even comforting form. These aren’t generic ghosts or tormented souls—these are people we can identify: family members, departed lovers, former schoolteachers, or even, as above, old assistants. The desire to recognize is paramount in spirit photography. Buguet testified that many of his frauds relied on dummies with false beards or studio assistants wearing drapes, with a collection of 300 or so heads that could be swapped out and exposed onto the plates. Yet his clients would identify the same head as different people: “the mother of one sitter, the sister of a second, and the friend of a third” (Jolly 22). Along with the ability to be recognized, the spirits in these photographs share another common trait—they are frequently quotidian. Though they sometimes appear swathed and veiled in drapery, often they show up in normal dress. Perhaps they look at us, or at the sitter, or rest hands or arms on them. But mostly they just seem to be around, hanging out on the margins of our experience. Rather than being upsetting, the most powerful spirit photographs suggest that there’s no break or discontinuity between the reality the living experience and that which the dead experience. We go on, even if life doesn’t.

Of course there’s an incredible comfort in this idea, especially for Western audiences after the 1850’s—and spirit photography seems to be almost entirely a phenomenon of France, Great Britain, and America. Decimated by war, famine, and social upheaval, while simultaneously undergoing the first serious pangs of religious doubt, early spirit photography promised the West that modernity didn’t have to be as unsettling as it seemed. Underlying the phenomenon of spirit photography is a persistent faith in technology. It’s a weird paradox: on the one hand, spirit photographs act as a “Take that!” to materialists, confirming the existence of an unseen spiritual existence; on the other, the photographs strengthen the claims of technology to impartially and fully document material reality.

Today, of course, it seems naïve to put so much faith into the photograph, which we now know is an infinitely manipulable medium. Except, of course, that we still do. The recent success of Paranormal Activity and its sequel—a third is on the way this October—only caps a decade which saw a return to a belief in photography and film as central media for the inscription and dispersal of “spirit.” Films like The Ring series and White Noise, the increased interest in “electronic voice phenomena” (EVP), and (pseudo)scientific television programs like the History Channel’s MonsterQuest and MysteryQuest, all point to a continued cultural fascination with the possibilities of visual “proof” of continued, non-corporeal existence. (That all the examples I’ve cited construct that existence negatively, as something malevolent or horrifying—very much unlike spirit photography—you may discuss amongst yourselves….) The ghosts in the machine, it seems, are very much still among us.

Communal Remembering - The Johnny Cash Project

Cate Blouke — Sat, 12 Feb 2011 14:17:23 +0000

Screen Shot of the video opening in The Johnny Cash Project

Cyber memorials are interesting beasts. A new, more publicly available way to mourn, they are often sites of controversy - raising questions about representation, curation and the appropriation of tragedy. But what happens when a multimedia memorial invites visitors to actively participate in the creation and curation of the content? A hyper-mediated explosion of awesome (among other things).

Screen shot of frame contribution from Bobby Latham, McKinney, Texas

The Johnny Cash Project is a virtual space better explored than explained, but I'll do my best to give you an idea. Visitors are invited to contribute drawings of Cash to be included in a sort of hybrid rotoscope music video, the frames of which flash by in a psychedelic flurry of grayscale images. You can pause the video at any point to explore the frames individually, and you can even watch the"drawing session" in which the image was created.

Screen shot of the filtered viewing options

Visitors are also encouraged to rate the drawings, and the video can then be viewed from a variety of perspectives - the highest rated frames, the director curated frames, the most recent frames, and more. The project is incredibly malleable and interactive. It gives visitors an extreme sense of agency in both controlling their own experience and contributing to the experience of the memorial as a whole.

Screen shot of rame contribution from Marc Verhaegen, Merksem, Belgium

The project bills itself as a "living," "communal" work, and the language is interesting in terms of its push towards vitality, especially given the song selection - "Ain't No Grave." The idea is that the project will continue to grow, creating "a living, moving, and ever changing portrait of the man in black." It encourages a sense of assimilation and immortality. People can become a part of Cash himself (or at least the remembrance of him) by contributing an image to the collection, and the "portrait" will continue to live on.

All in all, the project raises interesting questions about mourning, memorial, agency and ownership. Aside from being a pretty amazing piece of hyper-mediated content, it's certainly a very democratic approach to memorial.

Meat is Couture? - Lady Gaga's Meaty Message

Cate Blouke — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 06:38:12 +0000

Image Credit: Lady Gaga at the VMAs, Designer Franc Fernandez

I realize that I may be a bit behind the times to be addressing (ha!) Lady Gaga's fashion stunt of last fall, but meat's been on my mind this week as I'm about to embark on 30 days of eating vegetarian - largely as a result of the text we're teaching in our introductory rhetoric classes here at UT: Colin Beavan's No Impact Man. But that's another story. Gaga's appearance at the Mtv Video Music Awards sparked controversy that dissipated rather quickly, and though this may have been due to the singer's own inability to adequately (or logically) explain the reasons behind her wardrobe choice, the images left behind offer a really interesting opportunity for varying and disparate interpretations.

While I was surprised (and a bit disappointed) to discover that Jezebel didn't have much to say about the dress, my immediate reaction was to think of the outfit as a commentary on female objectification. The dress literalizes an all too familiar trope - that women are just pieces of meat - and the contrast between the female body and the hunks of beef strewn about it seemingly negates the metaphor by calling attention to it. Yet considering Gaga's videos and her ethos in general, it could also easily be argued that the outfit does just the opposite (reenforcing the trope/idea/attitude instead of negating it), especially considering the precursor to the dress - her appearance on the cover of the Japanese Men's Vogue in a meat bikini. They say we are what we eat, perhaps we are what we wear, too?

Image Credit: Vogue Hommes Japan

Now, while Gaga argued that she meant no disrespect to vegetarians, that didn't prevent a backlash from animal right's activists and environmental groups. PETA was predictably outraged by her VMA outfit, though their response was surprisingly brief. Ecouterre.com, a website devoted to sustainable fashion, instead used the dress as a conversation point, exploring the environmental impact of designer Franc Fernandez's 50 lb. creation. I'm sure both organizations would disagree with me, and perhaps this is a bit of a stretch, but I can see how one might argue that the dress is in fact an argument for vegetarianism and animal rights.

Image Credit: Designer Franc Fernandez

For one thing, looking closely at the dress certainly doesn't make me want to run out and eat a steak. But it also opens up space for an argument through analogy - how is wearing leather any different from wearing pieces of beef? Vegetarians are often critical of those who abstain from meat but still wear animal products, and the dress seems to call attention to this complaint. It also calls into question what constitutes acceptable use - if we can eat it, why can't/shouldn't/don't we wear it? And vice versa? Would the fur trade somehow be more palatable if we ate all the animals we wore?

Gaga's dress wasn't the most appetizing wardrobe choice, but it certainly got some attention. Everyone should be please to note, however, that the dress won't be going to waist - according to People Magazine, the dress is slowly turning into beef jerky that will be preserved for posterity (not eaten).

(Apologies for the rampant puns in this post, but I simply couldn't resist).

The Inner Life of Toys - The Art of Jason Freeny

Cate Blouke — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 13:18:33 +0000

Image Credit: Jason Freeny Moist Productions

Elieen's viz. post from a few weeks ago on Justine Cooper's photo-documentation of the American Museum of Natural History in New York has been bouncing around in my head ever since. It (re)kindled a long-standing interest I've had in both natural history museums and slightly morbid kinds of art. In both digital images and sculpture, artist Jason Freeny invests familiar children's toys with anatomical interiors, suggesting an inner life/death that both unsettles and intrigues.

Along the lines of natural history displays, this Mickey Mouse figure in particular speaks to an archival and archeological interior. The iconic Disney character has been a part of American culture for nearly 80 years now, and, as such, has gone through a series of evolutions and "lives." By granting Mickey an inter anatomy, replete with full-color intestines and other innards, Freeny argues for a life outside our imaginations. Mickey is a living, breathing (even though we can't see his lungs) figment of our imaginations. Animated by humans in both senses of the word, Mickey exists as an entity both different from and similar to ourselves.

Image Credit: Jason Freeny Moist Productions

Despite his three eyes, toes, and fingers, the Alien's skeleton also seems familiar. This Toy Story figurine literalizes the conceit of the film where toys come to life in the absence of humans. The 3-dimensional medium of action-figure turned sculpture adds to the "liveness" of the figure. While recent studies on Tyrannosaurus rex fossils have led scientists to conclude the dinosaur may have been cannibalistic, one wonders what this skeleton might indicate about its vessel. If we can create a fictional world for him to live in, what would this intertior tell us about that world?

Image Credit: Jason Freeny Moist Productions

Though as a child, this image of a My Little Pony might have horrified me, my adult self finds it both amusing and fascinating. The statue gives the doll an inner life that I certainly dreamed of in my youth, and might not have been surprised to discover. I remember feeling that dolls and toys could be hurt and could heal, that I had to be careful with them, and that though they may possess magical powers (like the ability to fly) they otherwise operated on the same principles as I did. Maybe that was just me.

Image Credit: Jason Freeny Moist Productions

Freeny's digital work mimics traditional anatomical charts hung in doctor's offices and classrooms. I particularly like the dissonance created by a balloon animal with a skeleton. The instructions at the bottom of the image demonstrate how to create a balloon-animal dog, and this strikes me as paralell to the evolution of a zygote. The poster suggests that we can call these creatures into being, and through their creation, invest them with life.

I wonder if the anatomical charts would be a useful tool for teaching anatomy to kids? I can't decide if they would disturb or delight. Biology never interested me much, but maybe it would have if interiors were more fictive and imaginative.

Accessorizing Surveillance - Barbie Video Girl

Cate Blouke — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 13:03:14 +0000

Image Credit: screen shot from barbie.com

H/T: Noel

From coloring books to glitter to unicorns, my viz. posts seem to be revolving around adult repurposing of the trappings of youth. Naturally, we'll have to throw Barbie into the mix. While she has certainly seen her share of fashion updates over her 50-year reign as fantasy icon extraordinaire, this creepy 21st-century update to Barbie's accessory collection reverses the gaze and turns Barbie’s body into a tool for surveillance.

The doll is marketed and designed for video sharing. The website encourages girls to take video, upload it on the computer, and share it with their friends. The chord plugs right into Barbie’s spine, and for just $49.99, you too can have a cyborg girl gadget!

Image Credit: screen shot from barbie.com

With a video camera “hidden” in her necklace, Video Barbie ostensibly allows young girls to “record movies from Barbie’s point of view.” However, masking technology in the doll’s bosom opens the door for less appropriate kinds of video-taping and raises questions about children and technology.

Aside from my instinctual reaction – that this is the perfect new toy for pedophiles (the jacket looks like it could easily be replaced with one that would conceal the video interface) – I’m dismayed by the message this sends. For one thing, the placement of the camera reinforces fetishization of the female chest. Though the location may have been strictly due to technological constraint, to make eye-contact with the camera, little girls have to gaze directly at a biologically impossible female form.

Image Credit: screen shot from barbie.com

The language used to sell the doll blurs the lines between fantasy and reality. Barbie explains to us, “I am a real working video camera.” In a weird way, she ends up objectifying herself – selling both herself and her camera within. For all Barbie’s associations with female objectification, this doll flips that, and you become the filmed object.

And why are we teaching little girls to tape themselves in the first place? Let alone with a hidden camera? The recent internet incidents with 11-year-old “Jessi Slaughter” should be enough to have parents kicking their kids off computers, let alone buying them toys to broadcast with.

Image Credit: screen shot from barbie.com

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

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

Image Credit: Theatre is Easy

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

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

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

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

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

Image Credit: SpotCo

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

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

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

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

Florida Man: Me too. A real tragedy.

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

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

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

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

Image Credit: Gothamist

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

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

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

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

New Theory Page: Visual Literacy and Solidarity

fc — Wed, 05 May 2010 16:38:58 +0000

Image Credit: AmericanTeenMovie.com

I recently posted a new page on "Visual Literacy and Solidarity" to the "Theory" section of VIZ. It passes back over some of the material from my posts this semester on food, food culture and food policy, but I also couldn't resist encroaching on Rachel's pop-culture territory with a few references to The Breakfast Club and Kanye West (to be fair, though, the movie is named after the most important meal of the day).

My main goal was to illustrate that no one is "literate" in general, that visual literacy (or cultural literacy, etc.) does not exist in a vacuum. Literacy implies a set of skills and a range of knowledge, and, since the criteria for assessing literacy are set by particular groups of people in particular times and places, demonstrating literacy is often a substantial claim of solidarity, a performative presentation of evidence that we belong to the group because we "know our stuff." Such a performance can, in turn, be a powerful rhetorical tool: instant ethos, just add water.

So, if you know why the picture at the top of this post is funny, then you're one of the cool kids. If not, you could click over and read the theory post, or (if you're one of the smart kids) you can probably figure it out with the picture below.

Image Credit: IMDB.com

And remember to eat a good breakfast, for your mother's sake (Mother's Day is Sunday, May 9).

Image Credit: Flickr.com

Remember Me: Iconic Photography and Representations of 9/11

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

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

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

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

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

H/T: Lauren Gantz

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

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

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

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

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

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

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

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

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

Girls Just Want to Party in the USA (and Boys, Too!)

Rachel Schneider — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 19:21:09 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

As everyone reading this blog knows, I love random bits and pieces of pop culture. Jezebel is one of the websites I visit to indulge this love, and they did not let me down last week. I’ve been saving this since then, and though I know it may be a bit late to write on this, I couldn’t resist bringing this to everyone’s attention as a kind of alternative archive in its own right.

Marisa Meltzer, in a blog post called “Video Vixens: Spice Boys and Barbie Men,” groups together several YouTube clips that feature young men lip-synching to songs made by women. Meltzer wrote a book called Girl Power: The Nineties Revolution in Music, which claims that bands like the Spice Girls helped popularize the empowering message of riot grrrls for both men and women. Speaking of clips that include covers of artists like Shakira, Taylor Swift, and Aqua, she writes:

There's something very joyous and celebratory about girlhood in all of these songs. They can express, in a kind of candy-colored way, excitement, heartache, and pride of being a girl. I don't think boys who film themselves lipsynching are making fun of us girls, though. I think this is a way of expressing some kind of homage to us and our music. I'm not sure there's an equivalent for boys—that is, music marketed to boys expressly about the state of being a teen boy, which is perhaps why so many guys are so happy to post themselves singing along.

Watching the clip of the young men lip-synching to “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” does make me feel quite a bit of joy:

However, I’m not sure I can totally accept Meltzer’s reading here. Homage may be a part of the Taylor Swift cover, for example, but this version isn’t acknowledging Lauper’s popular song (and its own memorable video) so much as re-envisioning it. The shirtless male bodies rolling around in the bed enact a kind of queer performance of which the gay icon Lauper would probably approve. We as an audience see the singer hump a car and a friend put a whole banana in his mouth to perform a sexuality that the song insists is for “girls,” but which the male performers co-opt for themselves. The men here look manly, but not manly in the heterosexual way of the Abercrombie-attired boys who lipsync and dance their way through Aqua’s “Barbie Girl.”

The same queer aesthetic seems to be part of the semi-famous lip-synch cover of Miley Cyrus’ “Party in the USA,” which Meltzer did not include in her post:

These men here lay on the beach here in their highly colored bathing trunks to purposefully camp up their performance of the Disney teen’s song. As they try to surf in their blow-up swimming pool while wearing colorful Ray-Bans, I can’t help but want to take part in their fun. The fact that they tag it as “Party in the FIP” makes the queer connection explicit (as Fire Island is a notorious gay vacation spot) as well as its intent to be a transformative performance.

The homemade aesthetic that these videos share, whether filmed on Flip cameras or in front of iMacs, incorporates a call for authenticity of a particular kind. Each of these artists attempts to construct himself for his YouTube audiences by following the common models of other viral videos, but in these works each works to condition that performance through girl’s pop music. This isn’t to say that this qualifies the kind of masculinity, but draws our attention to the process of its construction in lo-fi and high-fi ways.

I can agree with Meltzer that this is all in good fun, but this seems to be more than just tribute. There may not be “music marketed to boys expressly about the state of being a teen boy,” but it’s not like popular culture lacks an attention to teen boys (see: Harry Potter). These clips instead seem to be doing another kind of cultural work, hopefully one in which we can all join in.

Square America

LaurenMitchell — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 07:10:49 +0000

If you're interested in amateur photography or early twentieth century life in the U.S., check out this site Square America. The site consists of collections of photographs found at garage sales and flea markets of American life during the first three quarters of the twentieth century. Interestingly, there are two collections of photographs of what was on television: one of the TV coverage of JFK's death, another of women on TV (the person who took these liked to take photos of women in soap operas and movies). There's also a collection of biracial and homosexual couples in the 70's, one entirely of wedding photos, and one titled "Guns! Guns! Guns!" It's a great peek into the reality of everyday American life, as well as a look at homemade images of the major themes of American culture.