viz. - Historiography

Desiring Histories in The Wolf Among Us

Scott Garbacz — Sat, 04 Apr 2015 22:34:11 +0000

Earlier this semester, I discussed the way Once Upon a Time, particularly in its first season, played with Disney-inspired costuming to evoke nostalgia for Disney-tinged fairytales even as it valorized the present over the past. As a follow-up, and as Viz moves towards consideration of video games, I want to look at a more recent work with similar themes: the critically acclaimed fairy-tale-noir adventure game, The Wolf Among Us. In this game, the player takes on the role of a reformed Big Bad Wolf (known, now, as Bigby), who solves a series of gruesome mysteries with the help of his potential love-interest, Snow White. Specifically, I will look at three costumes associated with Snow. Like those worn by Once’s Snow White, these costumes each present a different way in which we can view the past. Unlike those in Once, these costumes trouble any clear distinction between our modern lives and the medieval-themed fairy tales that underwrite them. Instead of encouraging us to celebrate our modernity, The Wolf Among Us troubles our neat divisions between the present and the past, asking us how we use the past to think about, or act in, the present. (Content Warning: the discussion below, like the game, deals with prostitution and disturbing sexual power dynamics.)

Image credit: Gamespot

The first—and primary—image of Snow White in The Wolf Among Us balances carefully between the game’s two primary visual referents. Physically, she largely echoes her fairy-tale legends; perhaps more tanned than her namesake, she nonetheless wears white earrings that contrast with her “lips as red as blood” and “hair as black as ebony.” Similarly, her snowflake-decorated blouse coordinates with her blue skirt, perhaps echoing the dramatic blue coloring of the Disney Snow white’s costume, but certainly reminding viewers of her fairy-tale-princess heritage. Over that, however she wears a fitted, short blazer, its tan color and stylings evoking the trench coat of Bogart-era crime films. She thus bears on her body the generic hybrid that plays out over the course of the game’s narrative: fairy-tale characters stuck in a gritty noir universe.

The noir stylings may be incidental, but the snowflake pattern is central to the character’s self-fashioning, since they remind other Fables (fairy-tale creatures) of her high status in their world. Indeed, her relative privilege is one of the game’s central themes. While the game’s backstory posits a general amnesty that allows all New-York dwelling fairy tale characters to live harmonious lives unaffected by past crimes, those of noble birth tend to occupy the town’s upper crust. Snow herself works as the secretary for the town’s mayor, often serving as a gatekeeper determining whose concerns will and will not be heard by the government. Her authority is made more secure by a strict division between those characters whose natural form is nonhuman, and those who can naturally blend in among normal humans. The latter exclusively occupy elected positions, and often demonstrate ignorance of or hostility to the concerns of other characters. Snow’s outfit echoes her status as a recipient of considerable privilege and power, while expressing a continuity between her present position and her fairy-tale nobility.

Image credit: Gizorama.com.

The game’s first image of the medieval Snow White places her in a far less privileged position. Her plain dress hints, perhaps, at a modest income, while her sorrowful gaze at an already-bitten reminds viewers that her original, fairy-tale self is already well-acquainted with evil. Life may have been simpler, the game argues, in the fairy-tale world, but even the pasts evoked in chilrden stories are not immune to violence and sorrow.

The apparent simplicity of the game’s medieval history is closely tied to its portrait of gender. Strikingly, Snow’s outstretched arm serves as a visual echo of the Big Bad Wolf’s snarling mouth. The contrast falls upon stereotypical lines: the Wolf’s powerful, unreflective masculine violence contrasts with Snow’s thoughtful expression. The visually powerful, angry, masculine force of the Wolf is, literally, the flip side of Snow’s contemplative femininity. The modern world, where the Big Bad Wolf wears a collared shirt and Snow is quite capable of playing hardball politics, offers a far more complex vision of gender.

Image credit: fables.wikia.org.

The final costume associated with Snow White offers the darkest interpretation of fairy-tales. In the sort of sordid twist demanded of the game’s noir atmosphere, Snow’s boss (a craven version of Ichabod Crane) has an ongoing relationship with a prostitute, a troll who wears the clothing and (thanks to magic) physical appearance of Snow herself, and who is murdered at the end of Episode 1. The clothing in question is far more complex than Snow’s medieval outfit in the earlier tapestry: its skirts, bodice, corset, and complicated sleeves hint that this is far more the product of sophisticated medieval or renaissance fashion than of an idylic childhood. Yet this dress is explicitly based on an illustrated children’s story found in the hotel where Crane staged his assignations. The third “Snow White” outfit, then, represents the present-day desire of her boss to seduce her, bizarrely re-routed through a children’s book that itself draws on medieval history.

An early interpretation of Snow White by Alexander Zick (1845-1907). Image credit: Wikimedia commons.

If the first two costumes paint a sharp contrast between a fairy-tale prehistory and a relatively muddled, gritty present, this third hints that our real-world uses of the past are similarly more complicated than we might expect. For Crane, childhood fairy-tales and medieval history are not incomplete or innocent ancestors of the present, but rather objects of desire that shape the way he imagines his employee and expresses his sexuality. Crane’s “Snow White” costume is closer to what one might expect of the princess described by the Brothers Grimm, and is very similar to the illustration inserted above, which seeks to evoke medieval aesthetics both in its costume and its mis-en-page. Yet for Crane, historical studies serve not to document the past, but to support the sordid world of his present imagination.

Of course, the game is unapologetic in its insistence that Crane is a despicable coward, and his use of children’s literature is disturbing precisely because it diverges from standard, expected uses of such works. Yet I also wonder how much Crane’s engagement with history reflects that of our own age. On the domestic, premium-cable front, Game of Thrones presents “medieval” female nudity to its audience to great financial success, reinforcing our linkage between the medieval and a male gaze pointed towards female bodies. Abroad, ISIS presents itself as a revival of medieval Islam even as it arguably deploys “profoundly modern” philosophies of statehood and violence. Perhaps the complex interweaving of modern desires and historical imagination that Crane demonstrates, then, is closer to our modern world than we might want to think.

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Historiography

costume

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Telltale Games

Fables

fairy tales

medievalism

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.

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