viz. - nostalgia

Year's Recap

Aubri Plourde — Wed, 29 Apr 2015 19:22:19 +0000

My colleagues have listed their own top picks from this year's array of insights an analyses. You'll notice a few repeats on my list--a sure sign of their success--but I'll admit, choosing a representative sample is a hard task. We should all go back and reread the blog, just in case...

Without further preamble, then, here are my favorite posts of 2014-2015:

Rhiannon's "Taste vs. Enjoyment." I'm sure any grad student will identify with Rhiannon's opening observation that books on her nightstand fall into two piles: "those which we should read and those which we want to read." As someone who also works on less-canonized texts, the "taste vs. enjoyment" tension is particularly fraught--especially because, as Rhiannon says, most of our opinions about "good taste" are really just thin perceptions.

Casey Sloan's "Moving Targets: Player Choice and the Politics of Bioshock: Infinite." Casey guest-wrote this post for me, and I'm delighted to be able to endorse it again. I don't know a lot about video games, but I was totally sold by Casey's reading, which looks at the scripting of the game to explicate "an unwillingness on the part of game's designers to commit to any single motivation for the character." Omitting the nuance in the game's racial politics, she writes, also ignores "the idea that racism in its most insidious form is less about villainy and more about institutionalized, systemic, and normalized violence. Paying attention to how games interpellate players and direct player experience through game elements like choice and decision making can yield rich readings inaccessible through purely literary or cinematic criticism."

Deb Streusand's "Alice or Wonderland: How Visual Representations of a Story Change Over Time." I'll freely admit, Deb's post on Alice cover arts has all the ingredients for catching my attention: children's literature, a current exhibit at the Harry Ransom Center, and a lovely analyis of how cover art reflects the changing values of parents and publishers.

My favorite post to write this year is a tie. I had a great time writing my "Food Porn Roundup: The Seven Deadly Desserts" which explores the dialogue over guilt and sweets. It isn't particularly insightful, but I loved thinking about the seven deadly sins almsot as much as I enjoyed committing all of the food sins on that list. And, as I mentioned above, I'm a sucker for analyses that use the Harry Ransom Center and children's culture, so my other favorite is my very first post for viz., "The Serpent Was a Creeper: Religious Representations of Animals and Humanity in Children's Literature." Any chance I get to expound upon religious adaptation, children's books, or creepy illustrations!

That's all, folks. Thanks for reading, and keep an eye out for the next set of viz. posts in the fall!

Tags:

nostalgia

Visual Rhetoric

appreciation

video games

adaptations

Wrapping Up the Year

Deb Streusand — Tue, 28 Apr 2015 12:41:20 +0000

It’s almost the end of the year for viz.! Over the next few days, we’ll be wrapping up with each writer getting a chance to list and discuss their top five favorite posts from the past year. Here are mine.

Scott Garbacz on Guardians of the Galaxy: Scott’s analysis of images from the film gets at sci-fi’s ability to convey not merely excitement and adventure, but the beauty that can be found in the unfamiliar. He shows how the film creates a rhetoric of compassion in the midst of entertainment.

Aubri Plourde on childhood sexualization: our resident expert on childhood takes down the idea that sexualizing a young person like Miley Cyrus is anything new. Analyzing images of toddlers pictured as adults and the adult Madonna pictured as a child, she demonstrates that the phenomenon is both widespread and time-honored.

Emily Lederman on the Chipotle “Scarecrow” ad: Emily examines the holes in the messaging of Chipotle’s much-watched ad. She asks incisive questions about how friendly to the environment and to animals Chipotle’s food sourcing really is.

My post on a new cover for the Jungle Book: I like it when I get to get a little political on viz. In this case, I enjoyed getting to the root of the problems with the visual message conveyed by this children’s book cover.

My favorite post to work on this year was on the visual rhetoric of girly drinks and its relationship to heteronormativity. I examined the implications of calling particular types of drinks “girly” and what that convention says about conceptions of gender in modern American culture.

That’s it! Thank you for your readership this year and for exploring visual rhetoric with us.

Tags:

Visual Rhetoric

nostalgia

appreciation

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.

Tags: