viz. - memes

Memes, Nostalgia, and Mourning: the Case of Leonard Nimoy

Scott Garbacz — Tue, 03 Mar 2015 23:43:02 +0000

Last Friday, Leonard Nimoy, the actor who played Spock in countless Star Trek episodes, movies, and cartoons, passed away. As with all celebrities, grief among his fans tends to be expressed in memes—simple visual icons collaboratively authored, passed on through social media, and anthologized in sites like Buzzfeed. These reactions testify to the wide array of meanings given to one celebrity, and bring up some interesting questions about the nature of nostalgia, mourning, and televised celebrities.

First there is Nimoy's own contribution, the last tweet made before he passed away:

Image credit: Twitter.

And, most appropriately, a Vulcan salute from the Final Frontier itself:

Image credit: The Huffington Post.

Other memes reposted by Nimoy’s fans were generally heartfelt, but not necessarily so somber. The Kermit image at the top of this article is one example, testifying to the role Spock played in countless childhoods. But then there's this combination of retro-cool and nerd-cool, where Nimoy takes up a pose reminiscent of Steve McQueen:

Image credit: Motley News.

Similarly, fans posted a recreation of an iconic Beatles album, with Spock being beamed up, presumably, to whatever best afterlife the reader imagines:

Image credit: Motley News.

Other reactions express a more aggressive form of nostalgia, such as this protest the Abrams’ reboot of Star Trek:

Image credit: Motley News.

Then, because this is the internet, we have the silly responses, such as the Canadian trend of defacing currency so that it bears a remarkable resemblance to the iconic Vulcan:

Image credit: Twitter.

Less visually oriented was the 1968 article “Spock: Teenage Outcast,” now re-circulating furiously as a Buzzfeed article, in which Leonard Nimoy took time to respond to a biracial teenage girl via an extended discussion of Spock’s fictional struggles with both Vulcan and human racism:

Image Credit: Buzzfeed. Of course.

But perhaps the most moving image of the weekend, at least to this lifelong fan of science fiction television, abandoned words altogether:

Image Source: Facebook.

The image is fascinating in its starkness. In the top frame, Bones (DeForest Kelley), Kirk (William Shatner), Spock, and Scotty (James Doohan) laugh and drink together. In the bottom frame, only Kirk is left. While the scene is drawn from early Star Trek, the message drives home just how much work time and death have done. Doohan, Kelley, and now Nimoy have passed away. The celluloid Kirk remains, looking the same as he always did (if not better, thanks to digital image remastering), yet somehow signifying an old age in which his friends are dead, and his glory years are behind him.

The image is foremost a reminder of the reality that even those who live long and prosper will inevitably watch as their friends precede them to the grave. Yet its use of only youthful faces also seems a commentary on the weird power of images to create the illusion of immortality. Kirk will always be, for those who have Amazon Prime accounts or DVDs of Star Trek, a captain in his mid 30’s, surrounded by an ever-young and ever-courageous crew, determined to boldly go where no man has gone before. Yet these actors, too, are human; Kirk’s companions, and soon Kirk himself, will survive on earth only as ghosts: recordings and memories. If adventures seem to promise an eternal voyage through the vastness of the universe, this image reminds us that such immortality is illusory. Even Spock dies—and so does every other human we know and love.

I am struck, in fact, by how often religion and nostalgia are twined together in so many of these these memes. Thoughts of the afterlife naturally tend to accompany death, but for a celebrity like Nimoy, known to generations of his fans through childhood exposure to Star Trek, the crisis is particularly poignant. Nimoy’s death is a challenge to our earliest intimations of immortality, marring childhood adventure with death, but it is also an opportunity to defy death and re-assert the eternal value of the many things Spock represented. Thus we imagine Nimoy in Heaven, beamed up, or glowing; or, simultaneously, we can argue that his spirit is immortally entwined with the civil rights movement, the quest to explore the cosmos, or other metanarratives. But I can’t get the last image out of my head—probably because it resonates so well with my own religious faith, and its ambiguous treatment of nostalgia. The history and rhetoric of Christianity is saturated with calls to remember our mortality, to know that earthly achievements are ultimately prey to the ravages of time and forgetfulness. “Dust you are,” as the Genesis narrative has it, “and to dust you shall return.” This phrase applies to celluloid demigods, it turns out, as well as to the rest of us.

Mostly, though, I am struck by the way that so many of these responses seem tied together in Nimoy’s last tweet: “A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP.” As much as our nostalgia tries to preserve the Edenic experience of staring at adventure stories in wide-eyed wonder, we can no more recreate our childhood than we can bring Nimoy back from the dead. All that is left is memory, recapitulation, inscription in the cultural consciousness: a process that, we hope, may provide a certain wisdom and help us to live long and prosper.

Tags:

memes

Mourning

nostalgia

religion

Leonard Nimoy

Star Trek

The Super Bowl, Visual Rhetoric, and Marshawn's Mask

Scott Garbacz — Mon, 02 Feb 2015 20:38:45 +0000

Note: the following blog was slated to be published last week, but due to technical difficulties got pushed back a week. While I considered going with more topical material this week, I decided ultimately that it would be tragic if the Viz blog ignored the wonders of Left Shark, not to mention Marshawn Lynch's ironic relation to the culture of extreme fitness.

Ah, the Super Bowl. For those of us studying visual rhetoric, it’s always a treat. This year alone brought issues ranging from a remarkable (and new) emphasis on fatherhood advertisements, to a traumatic short film about kids dying preventable deaths, to the on-field brawls, unforced penalties, and poor decision-making that make this perhaps the perfect recapitulation of the NFL’s most shameful season in recent memory. (And that’s not to mention the Halftime Show, which brought us not only the internet sensation Left Shark, but also a quite nice performance by Missy Elliott.)

There will always be a soft spot in my heart for Left Shark. He marches to the beat of his own drummer! Also, his drummer has no sense of rhythm and is possibly drunk.

Image credit: SB Nation

However, we’re kicking this year off with a discussion of fitness, so one thing I kept thinking about was the fascinating spectacle of Marshawn Lynch, a.k.a. Beast Mode, a.k.a. “I’m Here So I Don’t Get Fined,” a.k.a. the guy any non-lunatic uses when you’re on the half yard line and the game’s at stake. But I wasn’t necessarily thinking about his financial, social, or super-bowl newsworthiness, so much as his most iconic bit of apparel (besides the Beast-mode clothing line), the “Bane-like mask” he wears in training and just before games. I also couldn’t stop thinking about our recent economic fears, and the general trend of extreme fitness.

Marshawn and his mask.

Image credit: SI.com

So next week I’ll try to answer a question that keeps running through my mind: could Marshawn, dressed as a sort of Jamaican Bane, be the very thing that Batman clainmed to be: not the hero we deserve but the hero we need? Stay tuned next week: same beast-time, same beast-channel.

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Nailed It: Pinterest Food Fails and Envy on Social Media

Deb Streusand — Wed, 19 Nov 2014 14:01:17 +0000

Image Credit: Bless This Mess Please

We’re all familiar with the genre of food porn, those delectable treats that show up on Instagram and Pinterest, tempting us with food that is as beautiful as it is (presumably) delicious. Articles such as “The 35 Most Heartbreaking Food Fails of 2013” and “21 People Who Prove Your Baking Could Be Worse” demonstrate the difficulty people have in replicating the lovely pictures they see on the site. If one searches Pinterest for “food fails,” one gets a barrage of paired images. Each features the original Pinterest picture and the result of someone’s attempt to make it, often with the ironic phrase “nailed it” written across the second picture in the white text used for internet memes. In the era of food porn, food doesn’t just have to be tasty; it has to look just right, too.

The “food fails” usually result from an attempt to replicate a complex image, often a food item that is supposed to look like something else, like this shark:

Image Credit: Alanna Okun

Though the watermelon and grapes probably tasted perfectly good, the cook failed to make the watermelon appear like the healthy and voracious-looking shark in the upper picture. Instead, it looks like a cross between a jack-o-lantern and a creature with eyestalks. Similarly, the skeleton on the right seems to have been through some sort of nuclear meltdown:

Image Credit: Arielle Calderon

It only takes a few touches for something that was supposed to have been cute to turn creepy. But it’s not merely the hubris of trying to make your food into representative art that results in food fails. Food can collapse, crumble, melt, or burn. While the first three calamities, at least, do not affect the taste of the food, they prevent the appearance of the food from fulfilling what was in the cook’s mind and before the cook’s eyes on Pinterest.

Image Credit: Plowing Through Life

I would be perfectly happy to eat either of the cakes pictured above, but if I were to try to make the former, I couldn’t help but be disappointed if it turned out like the latter. In the era before food porn, I half-remember and half-imagine, one would make recipes from cookbooks or those handed down from one’s relatives or neighbors, aiming only for them to taste and look as good as they did when other people one knew made them. That classic I grew up with, The Joy of Cooking, has no photographs. Now that we have photographic social media, however, we have more to aspire to, and consequently, farther to fall.

The juxtaposed images may at first seem to be arguing for the inadequacy of the cooks attempting the Pinterest recipes. However, it was presumably those cooks who posted the images of their “fails,” and perhaps even they who put the meme text on them. For this reason, I think the posts also argue that Pinterest and Instagram pictures of food create unrealistic expectations. Like Facebook, these sites can be used to create envy of the person posting the picture, forcing the viewer to compare themselves to a fictionalized ideal life. The original baker or cook did not post the images of a series of trial runs, just as most people’s Facebook posts do not share their failures but focus on their successes and satisfactions instead.

The “food fail” articles are written to amuse readers, or, in the case of the baking article, to make them feel better about their own efforts. Despite their humorous nature, however, the food fails are reflective of a larger social phenomenon. We are in the habit of comparing our lives unfavorably to those of others as reflected on social media. Though we may know deep down that they probably have just as many failures and bad days as we have, all we see on many social media accounts is evidence of an unremittingly successful life. So we try to shape our own social media presences to reflect our successes as well. This effort may not fail quite as tangibly as the "food fails," but like them, it represents an attempt to reach for something that is unrealistic for most of us. The juxtaposed Pinterest images are a reminder that other people, too, are merely human.

Tags:

Food

Social Media

memes