viz. - religion

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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television

visual culture

religion

female gaze

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

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

Image credit: Motley News

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.

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Veggie Tales Tackles Body Diversity

Aubri Plourde — Tue, 24 Feb 2015 17:38:31 +0000

For those of you who did not grow up with the unparalleled glory that is VeggieTales, I give you Bob the Tomato and Larry the Cucumber.

Image Credit: Big Idea, via business wire

These figures were such a staple of my childhood that I sometimes forget that they weren’t as commonly watched as Disney’s Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty. Big Idea, the company behind Bob and Larry, began producing these videos in 1993, to spread moral tales of Christianity through anthropomorphized vegetables. Until that point, Christian children’s media had simply retold Bible tales on an archaic loop. For whatever reason, the veggie idea worked, and Tales became one of the most successful Christian franchises within only a few years. Now, Big Idea has partnerships with DreamWorks and Netflix, and has produced over fifty videos.

I do not recommend VeggieTales for the voice acting. In fact, the dulcet tones of Junior the Asparagus will probably haunt your dreams. As highly visual children’s media, though, the video vegetables have clearly surpassed themselves. Each episode centers on a theme—consumerism, lying, greed, gossip, and (in the focus of this post) negative body images. The videos open with a letter or a videogram from a child viewer, usually asking a question with moral undertones. Then co-hosts Bob and Larry tell a tale meant to dramatize the moral through costumed vegetables and elaborate scenes.

In Sweetpea Beauty, the veggies take on fairy tale culture, shamelessly adapting Cinderella and Snow White—I would argue, Disney’s versions of the tales in particular—to redirect body image concerns toward a focus on God. The amalgamated animation here is a veritable circus of influences. The veggies are dressed in a sort of pseudo-French style—a nod to Perrault’s versions of the tale?—and the narration is inarguable Dr. Suessian. The parade of produce mimics the look of any piece of princess culture: lots of pink and purple, sparkles, amalgamated “fairy tale” costuming that obscures historicity, tiny waists (where we can see them), gaudy jewelry, and of course, crowns. The visual presentation—with the possible exception of the vegetables—tries to blend in with more mainstream girls’ culture.

Image Credit: Veggie Tales

Big Idea even produced a collection of “Princess Stories,” not unlike Disney’s.

Image Credit: Veggie Tales

In fact, the religious story’s aim in some way aligns with the feminist goals of mitigating the devastation of girls’ body images through different kinds of media. In a rare convergence of goals, this video joins us in wanting to rid adolescent girls of ridiculous and unattainable image goals. In “Snoodlerella,” for example, the squashes and asparagus parody “Cinderella” to emphasize that the mystical change of appearance enacted by a Berry Godmother is actually not essential, because the King (God) loves Snoodlerella for her internal qualities. The episode ends with no romantic reunion, and Snoodlerella continues to look like a gangly teenager.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

The problem with this episode is that it cannot directly address the sexuality of the beauty industry. Prince Charming is converted to the King—a painfully obvious Dumbledorian God-figure, who echoes highly-repeated Bible verses—“You were wonderfully made,” “I knew you before you were born,” and so on—to quite literally dance around the topic of puberty.

Image Credit: Sweet Posh Baby

Anthropomorphizing the vegetables, in this case, has taken the sting out of the satire. Because VeggieTales is committed Christian media, which cannot appropriately address the sexualization of girls that I mentioned in my last post, and because the vegetables themselves can be makeupped and made over but never fully made into young female bodies, these images of “awkward” vegetables who do not fit some kind of standard of beauty get lost in the other colors, shapes, and novel details. What could be a savvy take on princess culture, the Lolita Effect, or on fairy tale adaptations’ presentations of female body image becomes a sanitized but empty lesson for prepubescent girls.

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