viz. - costumes

Fashioning Modernity in Once's Urban Fairy-Tale

Scott Garbacz — Tue, 24 Feb 2015 20:25:02 +0000

Image screen captured from abc.go.com.

Fantasy is in vogue these days; even sometimes finding its way to the fashion runway. Admittedly, its big-screen run is nearing the end. The decade-long Harry Potter series came to an end in 2011, while the latest Hobbit movie marks the end of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings decade (extended cut, 2001-2014). Yet while big-budget blockbusters has been taken over by superhero movies or science-fiction dystopias, 2011 saw the advent of two small-screen franchises: the HBO epic fantasy series Game of Thrones and the network hit that is currently Netflix’s second most popular show, the fairy-tale drama Once Upon a Time. Game of Thrones, of course, has been the subject of many academic discussions and controversies; here, it has already been covered excellently on this site from the perspective of visual narrative theory, internet-enabled reader-response “marginalia," and even the tradition of opening films and television episodes with horses, and has had an excellent write-up of the ways its fashion stages culturally situated arguments about gender. Expanding upon Deb's comment yesterday that costumes are always making an argument, I want to look at the way that Once Upon a Time uses costumes to navigate the tension between our sense of the vibrancy of our present day lives and our collective desires for the past, especially as filtered through the lens of childhood memories.

In terms of costumes, Once is more frequently in dialog with Disney than with traditional versions of the fairy tale. Characters such as Maleficent dramatically echo the costumes of their animated versions, and Disney characters such as Mulan, Cruella De Ville, and even Frozen’s Anna, appear despite lacking a traditional fairy-tale pedigree. The show’s treatment of Snow White, however, creates a more subtle visual argument. While the animated Snow White wore this dress:

The first feature-length Disney Princess; nearly as iconic as Mickey Mouse. Image credit: Disney.com.

Once recreates the scene, with what initially appears to be the Worst Fairy-Tale Dress Ever:

Image screen captured from abc.go.com.

While the prince of Once wears an even more decorative version of his cartoon forebearer’s crimson duds, Snow White’s costume is literally bleached of color. Her wedding gown, presumably the same dress, compares very poorly to the dramatic blue, red, and white of her original costume:

Even the priest knows her dress is a terrible idea. Image screen captured from abc.go.com.

The blues remembered from childhood, however, return in the costume of Mary Margaret Blanchard, a version of Snow White who has been denied her happily-ever-after and trapped in the dismal world of America’s suburbs.

Screen captured from abc.go.com.

Here, as in her wardrobe throughout season 1, the modern Snow White avoids the animated queen’s vibrant reds (among the heroes, red is reserved for Emma, the modern investigator who serves as the show’s protagonists), but carries the trademark white-and-blue color scheme from the Disney original. In fact, the epic wardrobe battle between the blues that echo her Disney forebear and the whites that parallel her televised queenship in her wardrobe determines much of the plot of her Season 1 costumes. White clothing generally signals her passivity, her submission to society's expectations, and her unwillingness to pursue her own identity. In the last episode, at the character's nadir, she wears a thick white coat that almost, but not quite entirely, covers up her blue blouse. In the language of the film, it signals the nearly complete loss of her fairy-tale identity--the death, essentially, of her personality.

Screen captured from abc.go.com.

Of course, thanks to the show's fairy-tale promise, we know that her blue blouse, barely glimpsed in this image, and the blue jeans she wears beneath her coat, will win out. In the first season's climax, all is set to rights and she finds her lost love (along with the fairy-tale promise of a happily-ever-after.) Yet the way her fashion decisions play upon her earlier, fairy-tale self is complex. On one hand, her fairy-tale past is a colorless place, as devoid of vibrancy as it is alien to the reader’s experiences. On the other, nostalgia for the past--specifically, the past as her audience remembers it from their childhood Disney films--lives on in hidden patches of blue. The show about fairy-tale characters in a modern-day setting thus manages to have its cake and eat it, too: we can revel in our modernity even as we yearn for childhood visions of our medieval past.

Tags:

Once

costumes

Disney

Historiography

Modernity

(White) Men Behaving Badly, or, Why I'll Be Staying Home This Halloween

wiedner — Fri, 24 Oct 2014 20:12:13 +0000

Image Credit: Google Image Search

These are truly tough times for white males in America.

Every Halloween, I have trouble coming up with a creative, relevant costume. What I have found over the years, however, is that- along with my severely limited creative capacities- my costume options are greatly curtailed by my gender and race (I'm a white guy).

Granted, I am fully aware that the number of costumes falling within the realm of that which is acceptable is diminishing for everybody, not just folks in the aforementioned demographic. Now that old standbys like a mental patient with straight jacket and messy hair, a hobo with stick and bindle, or a “'fat' anything” are no longer socially acceptable for anybody, we all need to treat goofy costumes as serious business.

Time was, Halloween was simply an excuse for guys to dress like girls and for girls to dress like sluts. That is, women have always been able to fall back on the “sexy [anything at all]” as a totally passable costume. (Aside: I really do mean anything at all; - you can be a sexy ear of corn, for God's sake!)

As for us guys and our storied tradition of falling back on cross-dressing for Halloween, it goes without saying that “sexy [anything at all]” really doesn't work for us, aesthetically speaking (as this article illustrates quite well). This is nothing new. What is a more recent development is that, in our increasingly “enlightened” culture, any man who's dressing as a woman for Halloween is treading on shaky ground in terms of rubbing someone the wrong way. If I put on a less-than-flattering flattering ladies' pantsuit and go as Sen. Clinton, I might be construed as a sexist, rather than as the unwavering Hil-Dog fan that I am. So, the ol' cross-dressing option is out.

So what are some other options? Well, I'm not big on dressing like superheros, and I don't watch enough “E!” to know what clothes I would need to don in order to look like anyone of Hollywood fame. With all of these factors in mind, I thought I'd go as a politician or other public figure who had shamed themselves in the spotlight over the past year. Since any such public figure I might choose would be one that had "brought it upon themselves" by doing some legally or ethically dubious, nobody could really misconstrue my intent to satirize someone who deserves it!

Easy, right?

Not if you're a white dude.

As for the individuals among the group that fall within the category of shamed public figures, I need to make damn sure that the person I'd be satirizing is the same color as me, otherwise I'd be perceived as racist. Generally, I am OK with risking irking the easily offended with a costume of questionable propriety, but one need not be a dedicated fighter for racial equality to be offended by a white guy dressed in blackface; I think any culturally literate person would be able to see why that would be inappropriate (myself included). So, that limits the white dude even further in his costume options.

Now, at first blush, this all might not seem limiting at all. God knows there's no shortage of white guys breaking the law or otherwise inviting public disdain. But here's the problem:

They all look exactly the same.

Whether I want to be an overzealous neighborhood watchman, a racist basketball team owner, or any other sort of white guy making headlines for screwing up, the costume is the same: a dark, traditional suit, almost invariably coupled with a “power tie.”

I put it to you, good reader: What could possibly make for a more boring and unidentifible Halloween costume? ("Is he supposed to be George Zimmerman? Maybe Rick Perry? I don't know.")

Come on, white guys! Can't we mix it up a little?! I realize that wearing a balaclava and carrying a sack with a dollar sign on it might be asking too much, but how about getting arrested at home in your Fruit of the Looms for disturbing the piece, or getting pinched with an 8-ball whilst out on the town in some flamboyant nightclub garb? Hell, even a cardigan and an overdue library book would be a welcomed bit of variety! Jeez!

Where does all of this leave me? I don't want to be an anonymous white guy in a suit for Halloween. Dressing up in costume is just not as much fun when it entails wearing clothes strikingly similar to those that you wear every other day of the year. I also don't want to offend anybody, so I need to steer clear of anything with race- or gender-based implications. Nor do I have the time/money/creative energy required to put together some prize-worthy costume that would make me the belle of the ball. And I sure as hell don't want to go as a goddamn Ninja Turtle. So, it would appear as though Jim will be settling into a Hulu marathon this Halloween.

Oh well. At least that means there will be one less white dude in a suit out on the town getting himself in trouble.

Tags:

media representations

We Should Maybe Stop Putting Babies in Pumpkins

Aubri Plourde — Wed, 22 Oct 2014 17:01:02 +0000

As a child, I dressed up for Halloween only once.

It looked like this:

Image Credit: Aubri's Mom

My best friend Al and I were put in matching clown costumes (notice whose parents got into it, and whose found a wig from Grandma's basement...). Our fathers towed us around the neighborhood in a little red wagon, and we ate apple slices while I cowered in fear. We visited a haunted house, my first and last.

This image has a lot of power for me. On one hand, it carries memories of my very oldest friend, a woman whose wedding I witnessed and with whose children will call me “aunt.” On the other [viz] hand, it looks a little like the ghostly grandfather of Pinterest Halloween boards. Right? If Al and I had been born in 2009 instead of 1989, we might have been one of these girls:

Image Credit: Kia Gregory Photography

Image Credit: Creating Really Awesome Free Things

Not to knock my mother's costuming ideas, but who doesn't look at these Pinterest-perfect little costumes and go awwwwwwwwww!

They're almost as cute as Carl from Up:

Image Credit: Huffington Post

Do any web search for children's Halloween costumes, and you'll find a slew of brightly-colored, allusive costume ideas meant for infants, toddlers, and pre-teens. The cute factor is off. the. charts.

Image Credit: Simply Kierste

It's enough to make me spend time with actual children. Almost.

But Halloween, as it's currently practiced in America (to say nothing of its relation to All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day) is a holiday of consumption. In fact, it has always surprised me that the Hallmark Holiday Haters of Valentine's Day and its ilk haven't yet gone after October 31st. It is, after all, equally commercialized, equally perverted from its original intent, and equally run by corporations like Hershey's, Cadbury, and Victoria's Secret.

What I'm interested in is the way that these images all ask us to view children's bodies. I don't mean to imply that we shouldn't be dressing up our kids for Halloween. I have no baby in that pumpkin, so to speak. I do wonder, though, what kind of consumption these images are asking us to engage. Children's bodies, here on display, now seem to form an entire sub-genre of Halloween consumption. These images are cute because they make some kind of joke or rhetorical point. Carl is darling because the munchkin looks so perfectly like the cartoon character who represents age, the other end of the dependency spectrum; the dozens of babies-in-pumpkins are being associated with growth, with fertility and harvest, at the same time we're reminded that they cannot get out of their pumpkins.

These images remind me of Anne Geddes, this unabashedly creepy photographer who takes pictures of sleeping babies in flowers. Perhaps Anne Higgonet's book Pictures of Innocence, which examines the ways that images of children have been used to figure them as paradoxically pure and, lately, what she calls "knowing," is too far on the forefront of my mind. (Higgonet interrogates the visual depictions of children's costumes, associations with pastoral spaces, flowers, and harvests, and their sexualization.) And sure, there's an obvious and tedious rant about the sexual objectification of pre-teens in Halloween culture somewhere in here. Without going too far down that well-travelled hayride, though, I think it may be useful to examine the lengths to which we're willing to go to get that cute picture, especially because it seems to be the children in the picture, and not the "holiday" itself, that seem to be up for consumption.

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