viz. - television

New Girl's New Man

Aubri Plourde — Fri, 24 Apr 2015 02:15:46 +0000

Fox’s New Girl could never have avoided the question of gender. The very title isolates gender issues by framing protagonist Jessica Day within the male-dominated apartment she joins. The sexual politics of New Girl are mostly wrapped up in Zooey Deschanel’s character. My friend Mike, for example, has written about Jess as a postfeminist figure here, and the show creator herself has more than once addressed the gender politics of the Nick-and-Jess coupledom. I’d like to acknowledge that the “adorkable” appeal of Deschanel’s character positions her strangely between feminist and postfeminist positions, but, for the purpose of considering the visual appeal of the show, I’m more drawn to the way the show represents the masculinity of lovable douchebag, Schmit.

Most of Schmidt’s best and worst qualities are verbal, not visual. For example, entire reels of one-liners, like this one and this one show off the snappy writing of New Girl’s staff. Still, the character’s arch depends heavily on the transition between the days when he was obese and the fit version we see weekly.

Schmidt's story begins like this:

Image Credit: E!online

So, Schmidt’s role becomes something of a dramatized before-and-after shot. Most of these flashbacks are meant to assure us that while Nick and Schmidt’s friendship was founded during this time period, Schmidt himself was desperately unhappy. His smiles are generally self-deprecating, or at the very least unaware that others are mocking him.

After having lost a whole bunch of weight, Schmidt looks more like the fit and handsome Max Greenfield:

Image Credit: Us Weekly

On the show, though, Schmidt’s body is still the site of spectacle. He’s the character we’re most likely to see in a costume, and his body has started to function like a paper doll for the writers’ various getups:

Image Credit: UnderScoopFire

Image Credit: Entertainment Weekly

Image Credit: Hollywood.com

What strikes me is that this outlandish behavior is so often associated with Schmidt’s trying-too-hard enthusiasm for his new body. In other words, thinness has corrupted him into the cartoon we (I, at least) love to laugh at. So, this brings up interesting questions for masculinity. Are we viewers in for a more nuanced and sensitive treatment of male body image issues? Also, how does “metrosexuality” get figured in visual terms?

I’m interested in the way the show positions Schmidt’s morality. Nick describes him as a sweet boy in college, yelling, “What happened to you?…You didn’t used to be like this, Schmidt!” when Schmidt insists on wearing this kimono:

Image Credit: Lifehack

The costume, then, dramatizes Schmidt’s deteriorated morality and his self-image. Similarly, the Douchebag Jar hints that Schmidt lost weight and sensitivity at the same time. This, too, is a sort of strange system of morality. Does the Douchebag jar make us think that his casually racist-misogynist-classist behavior is acceptable, because he can afford the “toll”? Or is this behavior excused by the show (and by Jess, the show’s moral compass) because of his previously-fat past? In a cultural backdrop all too aware of fat shaming, body image issues, and materialism, how are we meant to deal with Schmidt’s transition? We don’t quite love to hate him, since most fans find him endearing. Still, we can’t deny that the lines he spouts to earn himself more Douchebag Jar deposits have more than earned some censure. "I just found a Groupon for hypnosis lessons!” he says to Jess. "Think about what you could do with that...sex stuff!” (s01e10). Or, upon Winston’s failure at a trivia night: "Don't worry about it, man, it's your public school education - you'll catch up!” (s01e17). The show suggests that a fat Schmidt would never say such terrible things. What is it about thinness that has corrupted him? How are we meant to view Schmidt’s excessive performance of masculinity?

I have no answer to this kind of question, so I’ll just leave this here:

Image Credit: Walk in Beauty

"Your caveman ideas about manhood are so over. Manhood today is about exfoliation, cheese courses, emotional honesty, and Paxil. And yes, cutting peppers in teh classic style de Julienne. You may have bested me in a competition of pre-Clinton manhood, but I am Schmidt, a refined and enlightened pescatarian, 90% of the time." (s02e08).

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masculinity

television

Visual Rhetoric

costume

body image

Daredevil and Urban Backgrounds

Scott Garbacz — Tue, 21 Apr 2015 21:42:55 +0000

Image credit: The Guardian

One of the interesting (and, at least initially, disappointing) promises made by Daredevil is that it will feature not just a superhero, but also the city in which he dwells. This would be more or less a new thing in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Characters may represent regions or ideologies (Thor lands in the American Midwest, Black Widow deals with Russian trauma, Iron Man models a form of urban masculinity), but they never seem to be from a specific, real place. Even in the DC Universe, where the Dark Knight trilogy obsessed over the relationship between Batman and the city he served, takes place in fictional Gotham City, recognizably akin to New York but made bizarre and larger-than-life by its iconography and events.

Daredevil, on the other hand, lives in Hell’s Kitchen, a quite specific location within Manhattan. Admittedly, his Hell’s Kitchen differs from that of modern America, since the events of Avengers: Assemble have de-urbanized the region and transformed it into the “dark, gritty” environment so beloved of contemporary superhero franchises. Still, the real-world environment leaves one with hope that, even in a Marvel film, one might hear a bit of the city’s voice speaking as something other than an echo chamber for the hero’s antics.

Unfortunately, at least with Daredevil’s first episode, this wasn’t the case. After a brief father-son scene establishing the blindness of Matt Murdock (i.e. Daredevil), and a visually-striking opening montage imagining a city (and statue of justice) made of congealed blood, and an scene in a confessional that emphasizes the hero’s alienation from the comforts of religion, the show proceeded to introduce two victims of the city’s criminality. The first victims are an utterly passive group of women who are about to be sold into slavery, the second a beautiful damsel named Karen Page who is framed for the death of her co-worker. Both play along well-trod narrative conventions: the city’s (mostly female) victims are seen as relatively powerless (though Karen, at least, defends herself against a jail-cell attack), and everyone needs Daredevil, the lone hero, to step in.

This ties in rather well with the iconography promoting television superheroes discussed by Deb, with its focus on individual characters abstracted from their environments. But by shifting the focus to the one costumed hero, it silences the rest of the city.

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Not Sorry: Orange is the New Black and Guilt

Aubri Plourde — Thu, 16 Apr 2015 02:52:34 +0000

“I always think of her as a spider,” Laura Prepon says of her Orange is the New Black character, Alex Vause, in an interview for Elle magazine. Or, we might say, a snake. The show certainly presents Alex Vause as a temptress, the piece of fruit that convinced good-girl Piper Chapman to jump from grace.

Image Credit: Elle

This narrative is echoed in Elle Magazine’s photo shoot for second season of OitNB, a beautifully-produced, stunning take on the show itself. On one hand, the spread of photos glams up the all-female cast, showing us what they “really” look like outside their prison uniforms—a strange bit of rhetoric in itself, as these images are equally as well-lit, positioned, and directed as the show itself. Still, they’re telling a parallel but different story.

Here, Piper and Alex (or Taylor Schilling and Laura Prepon? hard to say) recline in a prison bunk, surrounded by edenic-looking fruit and flowers. Together, they clasp a piece of fruit between them, while Piper looks angelic and Alex looks scheming. If the Biblical story of the Fall can be said to essentially punish female sexuality, this image takes that morality and runs with it. Here, it’s not simply female sexuality, but disobedience being celebrated. The prison bunk in the background has been remade into a love nest, renovated for the purpose of acting out the age-old script. The disobedience was no accident, it suggests, and no one is sorry.

The show, then, and by extension this image, hopes to offer us a diverse, nuanced femininity. What strikes me, though, is that the women in this image are still surrounded by the prison. A hint at the limits to this female utopia? Or a nod to the guilt culture associated with falling from grace? The show gives Piper a healthy amount of guilt. She blames Alex (mostly) for her youthful, drug-muling mistake. Still, she takes up with Alex all over again, seemingly unable to resist the lure of the spider woman: “I hate that she has this hold over me,” Piper says in “Little Mustachioed Shit” (s02e10). Piper didn’t eat the fruit; she was hypnotized.

Although none of the show’s text or subtext (that I can recall, anyway, after my two viewings) casts Piper as an Eve-figure, this image works as a kind of visual commentary, asking us to interrogate the mechanism of guilt. In a world where every woman is guilty, new standards of morality pop up. “Girl, I am the criminal element, and so are you,” snorts an angry Watson in It Was the Change (s02e12). Poussey, reprimanding Watson for dealing drugs, seems not to consider herself or Watson the “real” criminals, despite the fact that she herself was convicted for dealing marijuana. Her infraction hasn’t resulted in true guilt; the assignation of real guilt falls on serious offenders, like Vee. I'm interested in how a show that does so much work to humanize criminals dramatizes guilt. Is the show dividing the women into temptresses and temptees? How does morality operate in an institution for rule-breakers? What is the show saying about honor among thieves, so to speak? (Oh, and what do we make of those books under Alex’s bed?)

Furthermore, what do these images of guilt do for the gender politics of a show that has been criticized for its portrayal of men? What do these glammed-up Elle images offer to the progress of feminism? The women are certainly made more conventionally beautiful here, with Alex and Piper beautifully staged for the consumption of the male gaze. Still, I wonder if the manipulation of the function of guilt in both the show and this photograph have any subversive purpose. What is the use of the edenic twist? Is the vaguely MRA-sounding critique of the men in Orange valid, or is the show giving us a limited but productive female gaze?

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