Ideas about Photography, part 2: the practical space

On the heels of my last post about photography, I've thought a bit about modeling the relationship between photographer, camera, and subject, and I took a shot at plotting it in classic two-dimensional space. I wish I could make some exciting claim... like, this is the decisive way to model the photographer's art, and all other theories can be reduced to this structure... but obviously none of those things are true. This is just one theoretical shot in the dark, the type of thing that Marshall McLuhan might have called a probe... which is the most creative and least rigorous way of doing theory and analysis.

I've perused some of the key literature on photography, like Flusser's Towards a Philosophy of Photography and Susan Sontag's On Photography. I know that the former theorist really emphasized the black-box nature of the camera itself, claiming that the essence of photography was to be found in the photographer's relative ignorance of the physics and optics that actually capture his image. Sontag seems to take the idea of "capturing" the subject more literally, claiming that photographs possess an inherent aggression, and that photographing a subject is appropriating it, certifying it, collecting it, and at the same time protecting the photographer from its full psychological force.

My own ideas are a riff on my last post, that in photography, the key issues are 1) choosing our subjects, and 2) determining our final products, whether by composing the images or by carefully curating them. These are the two axes of the conceptual space. The vertical axis is the choice of subjects: we either find subjects by discovering them out in the world, or we create subjects on our own terms, employing craft and artifice within a controlled space. The second axis, the determination of the image, is centered around the idea of CAPTURING, and it's split between composing images before the shot, or curating them after the shot.

Here's the basic quad:

Interesting to note: the spectrum that goes from "curate" to "compose" correlates to the shift from film photography to digital photography. When you only had 36 shots in a roll of film, it was extremely important to frame your composition carefully, and manage your exposure with precision, so you didn't waste a shot. Those were the days of Ansel Adams, zones, and the rule of thirds. Most of the image-determination took place before you clicked the shutter button.

The inverse of that is the curation model that's come to prominence in the era of infinite storage, crowd-sourced galleries, and snapshot Polaroid kitsch. These days, you shoot as many photos as you can, using a few loose rules of composition... know your aperture and shutter speed, experiment with exposure, and try to isolate and differentiate your subject. Once you take hundreds of exposures, you've got a new job: go back with a severe critical eye and figure out which ones are actually worth further attention. Intensive curation (and post-processing) has taken the place of obsessive composition, rendering the latter an anachronistic fetish.

I think the various traditional "types" of photography can be differentiated by their position within this space. I've plotted them, below, and it makes for a nice little constellation of techniques and approaches. Here they are:

There are some exemplary types, mapping to each of the four quadrants. Landscapes are the ideal case for the traditional craft of film photography: you, the photographer/explorer, go out into nature to discover a stunning vista or a sublime subset, and then you put all your technical skills and craftsmanship into composing a single perfect photo, captured in your 35mm frame.

Fashion portraits are essentially the opposite: instead of discovering the landscape in its natural state, you create a scene and sculpt your models, and you direct them in their gestures and positions. Then, like a vigilant moon, you orbit around them, trying to capture a natural moment or a sharp glance, taking as many shots as you possibly can (as a fashion photographer, you should always max out your camera's capacity). You'll depend on your curatorial skills to select the best exposure after the session is over.

The most artificial type of photography is the food photograph, in which the photographer creates a perfect sculpture of the food (often inedible) and then painstakingly composes the shot to bring out the shapes and textures, with grave attention to depth of field and isolation of the subject. In the opposite quadrant -- discover and curate -- is the street photographer and photojournalist, the visual scavenger who scrounges for the perfect, fleeting moment, and then pursues it like a hunter, hoping beyond hope to catch it and harvest a perfect exposure in the heat of the moment.

Last time I wrote about photography, I said something rather silly, which went like this:

"Street photography has a sort of visceral thrill, and a sense of purity, the very honest and unadorned ethos of aestheticizing the gestures and postures and details of everyday life. At times, it feels like this is what other types of photography (especially Fashion Photography, the most glamorous of the photographic disciplines) aspires to."

This was an honest sentiment, but it was also the result of my recent interest in street photography, so it's a bit self-validating. It completely short-sells the creative and compositional aspects of photography... the act of arranging a scene to be shot, and the act of composing the actual picture within the frame, both of which were part of photography long before ye olde point-and-snap. Oddly, looking back at my quadrant, I've decided that there is a different type of photography that really exemplifies the spirit of the medium, and it's not one that I expected. It's actually the high-speed photograph, like those amazing shots of bullets going through light bulbs! Imagine that!

After all, it's both an exercise in perfect composition (choose the right light, arrange the elements, organize the frame) and an exercise in perfect timing, which can only be achieved by sifting through thousands of imperfect exposures produced by the experiment. It's also a triumph of both discovery and creativity: the photographer creates a perfect scene, but then has to discover an elusive fraction of a millisecond within the physical unfolding of the action.

Also, it's aggressive, per Sontag: the photographer is forcibly extracting a cross-section from the middle of a lightning-fast burst of movement. And it's highly mechanized, as per Flusser: it's so precise, it can rarely be managed manually by the photographer, and usually requires an extended mechanical apparatus to initiate the action and release the shutter.

This is the essence of photography. Who knew?

Or maybe this is a great example of how rational over-analysis can lead an intellectual douchebag into a totally misguided conclusion. Contrary to the evidence, I still take all my claims with a grain of salt.

In conclusion, I leave you with two of the only high-speed captures I've ever personally attempted, which I think resulted in some of my better photographs. Thank you for reading this rumination on photography. Jesse out.

EDIT: Paragraph 3: That is obviously not the horizontal axis, it is the vertical axis.

Genre attack: Spaghetti Westerns

I have been watching spaghetti westerns. These have included For a Few Dollars More (the last of the Dollars trilogy I hadn't seen), Duck You Sucker, Death Rides a Horse, The Great Silence, and Django. It's a worthwhile exercise in genre exploration... this is an amazingly homogeneous body of films, all drawing on the same tropes and archetypes, and after three or four, they all start to blur together. Incidentally, it helps me see why Leone is considered such a master of the genre: he brought the loner anti-hero to its apex in Eastwood (he's a stronger protagonist than Django, Silence, and Bill combined) and he also created some of the most distinctive entries in the genre. Duck, You Sucker breaks down the style Leone had established and rebuilds it in service of a revolution movie, a film whose characters inhabit a completely different ethical space from his earlier amoral Westerns. John, the Irish expat cum professional revolutionary, is an incredible hero, a unique voice among all these silent gunslingers.

I'm going to discuss Eastwood's character and Corbucci's directing a bit more, but first, a chart. In an effort to disentangle the undifferentiated heroes of the Spaghetti Western genre, I've broken them down into their essential character tropes, and I've charted them below. They all seem to have facial hair that's either scruffy and untamed, or perfectly clean-cut mustachioed. And most of the mustachioed heroes are played by Lee Van Cleef. Also, they generally seem to be working through some abandonment issues -- either taking revenge for the death of their family, or for the death of a lover. And despite their cracked cynicism, some of them manage to soften up and find love in the course of the stories. Obviously, for those who don't, I'm assuming their epic struggles have made them entirely incapable of it.

Let's compare our heroes.


Now, here's an important technicality... when a character once had a true love, but seems to be crippled by loss, do I count them as "Capable of Love" because they once managed it? Or do I call them "Incapable" because the possibility is henceforth ruined for them? I think I'm going to put them in the latter category. Thus, if the character has a check next to "Capable of Love," it means they find love in the course of their movie. If they have an "X," it means it's clear that love isn't really on their current agenda, whether it's because they've lost it (I'm looking at you, John Mallory!) or because they're just a cold-hearted bastard (*coughEastwoodcough*). If they seem nice enough but the topic just doesn't come up, they get a question mark.

It's notable that The Man With No Name is the only character with two red check marks, indicating in a roundabout way that he's the hero we learn the least about... despite the fact that he's in the most movies! This, among other things, indicates Leone's brilliance. He gave us one of the most interesting spaghetti western heroes, and one of the most compelling amoral cowboys, and he built the character from scratch, right there within the films. He didn't need a profound backstory or a tragic tale. He's a phantom, a thunderbolt, a ghost of the desert. He's inhuman, the fastest shot and the shrewdest player in every game. If he had psychology or personal motivation, he would be too human.

And he's not human. He's an outsider, through and through, the spitting image of the mythological trickster. He's obviously always after the money (those titular Dollars), but he seems to take just as much pleasure in confounding and confusing the people he interacts with, upsetting their images and undermining their assumptions. Whenever he's called upon to perform, whether by a frontier town tyrant or a comrade extending an open hand, he accepts and subverts, reverses the decision and its conditions, and generally screws up everyone's plans.

Sergio Corbucci is considered one of the masters of the genre, and though I wouldn't put him above Leone -- his plots are a little too fixated on the central theme of facile love and the revenge instinct -- I give him credit for pushing some aspects of the genre far beyond Leone. In particular, I'm impressed with Corbucci's riffs on setting. Django takes place in a mud-soaked alternative to the dry, dusty desert, a swampy wallow where the prostitutes mud-wrestle and stench and decay invades every safe space. This is interesting in itself, bringing a more tactile sense of incurable filth, but it's nothing compared to the stark tundra of The Great Silence, which was a bold film if ever I've seen one. At the same time that it participates in the spaghetti western genre tropes, it also confronts them, replacing the Mexican/Italian villain with an Aryan opportunist and substituting a stark, naked, frozen landscape for the dirt and sweat that gives the genre its archetypal tone.

The Great Silence is a harsh and beautiful movie, and before I finish my current entry, I'd like to praise it for a moment. The snow and titular silence pervades every relationship in the film. They all look at each other with a sort of frigid dispassion, and even the daring sexual relationship between Silence and Pauline feels vaguely strained and sterilized, though this gives it a razor-sharp intensity. The Great Silence also creates a strong, effective contrast between shelter and exposure... the snowy landscapes evoke the anxiety of coldness and emptiness, and the dark stony interiors feel temporarily safe, though always under siege. Silence isn't just the hero's rather cheesy moniker -- it's also a command that reverberates through the film. It's a movie about the forbidden corners of conscience and instinct, unspeakable acts committed in distant and echoic voids that stifle cries for help -- a fascinating cinematic achievement.

By the way, that crazy pistol Silence uses... that definitely exists. It's called a Mauser.

My final film in my spaghetti western series will be Once Upon a Time in the West, and after I check that out, I'll write a final blog entry about it.

Inception: Genealogy of a Poster

Nothing really deep here, but I noticed that Inception's poster is a combination of some of the previous design (I guess the studio is using the same people for print advertising, huh?), plus the work of one of my favorite photographers (i.e. photomontageists), Scott Mutter. Hope this minor moment of recognition brightens your day.

Gritty February: The Wolfman (2010) review and analysis

My review of Johnston's new film The Wolfman can be found here at BlogCritics.

While my review was negative (I couldn't call this a successful film, I'm afraid), it doesn't preclude me from digging into it a little more, and in doing so, discovering its minor triumphs. One of these was definitely its reimagining of the original Wolfman backstory, replicating a few key characters but wisely tightening the screws considerably.

After all, if you look at Lon Chaney Jr's 1941 film, the family history was pretty sparse. Lawrence Talbot was visiting his father, who acts the wise skeptic, and he's grappling with his brother's death, which isn't explained. Their mother is gone, also with no explanation, and Gwen Conliffe is just an engaged local girl who catches the creepy Lawrence's eye. This backdrop renders the main plot events - the bite, the transformation, the guilt, and the loss of humanity - mere workings of circumstance. The family and the estate were contexts, and nothing more.

Johnston's The Wolfman takes some serious liberties with this arrangement, overlaying a complex, intertwined heredity. First of all, Gwen isn't just a local vixen... she's Ben Talbot's widow, making her an honorary part of the family. Lawrence's family issues include tortured memories of his mother's death and a strained relationship with his father, but as we come to learn, they don't end there. The Talbot family and estate are afflicted with layers upon layers of misfortune, and it takes no time at all for us to get caught up in their web of dysfunction.

Here's a failed tangent: it occurred to me, as I was reconsidering this movie, that the core emotional dynamic is made up of five players: Lawrence Talbot, his brother Ben Talbot, their father Sir John Talbot, their dead mother Solana, and Gwen Conliffe, the brothers' shared romantic interest. This seemed to relate, in some mystical way, to the five points of a pentagram... it's not mentioned in Johnston's version, but in the original Wolfman, the pentagram was the symbol for the werewolf, marking his next victim. I even tried mapping out the love, paternity, and marriage relationships between the five characters, to see if I could get a pentagram out of it. My semi-successful but ultimately irrelevant attempt accompanies this paragraph.

It's rather miraculous that this familial mess eventually distills into a sort of Hamlet retelling, the story of a son carrying out vengeance upon a father figure who has destroyed the household from within. Gwen may have initiated Lawrence's homecoming, but by the time he has been turned into a wolf and undergone "treatment" in an asylum, he's ready to set aside his low-key love affair with her in order to undertake his patricidal mission. She is an Ophelia, the scorned lover cast aside by a son with revenge in his eyes. Also note the theme of misconstrued madness which unites the two tales: two sons, each harboring a particular breed of quiet rage, each condemned as a madman while they search for a road to redemption.

And Lawrence has changed, too, between 1941 and The Year of Our Lord 2010. In 1941, he was the whipping boy of a cruel destiny, terrified of himself and adrift in the throes of his affliction. In Johnston's 2010 picture, though, Lawrence comes to terms with his uncontrollable rages and bestial nature... most fully, and most clearly, when he bristles to the assembly of doctors: "I ... WILL KILL ... ALL OF YOU!" It's a raw, dangerous, compelling moment, a surprising pinprick in a generally blunt film. It also resonates with a beautifully ambiguous note of self-awareness, hovering somewhere between a helpless warning and a beastly promise.

And Lawrence does kill. A lot. But as with all noble barbarians, he finally redirects his rage back into the darkness, toward the source of these troubles that he helps perpetrate. Lawrence's confrontation with his father is not only a departure from the 1941 text... it's actually a reversal, with the son turning a murderous hand upon the father that once killed him with a silver cane. In these 69 years, Lawrence has gained control of his body and his mind, and John has lost his compassion and control. In 1941, Lawrence was put down by his father, so in 2010, he returns and wreaks vengeance, not merely for the deaths of his mother and brother, but for his own murder, as well.

And so, even if Johnston failed in many of his key directorial duties, he should get credit for the romance and mystery he's squeezed into the margins of an old tale.

Grittiness: 8.5

This lacks the authenticity of a gritty cop, drug, and/or war movie, but it makes up for it in intimacy and intensity. It's a film at the intersection of horror and noir, packed tight with textures and fluids and reminders of the flimsy cohesion of our bodies. There's something especially degenerate about the old Victorian asylum to which Lawrence is consigned... The Wolfman takes place in a twisted, dirty world that may renew your appreciation for your sanitized 21st century.

The three poles of TERROR: Have a structural Halloween

I was thinking a lot about horror and scary stories tonight, and it occurred to me that fear-inducing entities in storytelling typically have three essential sources. These are very abstract, of course, and they probably leave some outliers that I'm not thinking about, but still, it was an interesting little exercise to look at how they relate, and plot all the major studio monsters I could think of onto a field of horror concept.

I broke it down to three categories:

1) NATURAL: this includes anything with an explanation in plausible, real-world terms. Head-cases and psychological abominations... anything that represents an abberration of nature or humanity... that goes in this category. This category is driven by fear of disorder and lack of control.

2) SUPERNATURAL: supernatural is anything that completely refuses to be explained or justified in terms of physical or psychological laws. Supernatural forces come from other worlds, and the reason these worlds are "other" is that we don't have any way of understanding them. This is driven by fear of otherness and the unknown.

3) THE DEAD: A necessary third category, because it represents so much fiction. Apparently we're in constant fear of having to face an incarnation of mortality, which is where the unknown looms in all our lives. This is driven by fear of death (duh).

All objects of anxiety in horror and "tales of the strange" represent some combination of these essential anxieties. I put them all into a cool little graph, so we can discuss their various roles. Here it is... click for a huge version:



By the way, congratulations to Freddy Krueger, who gets the central spot. He's an insane child molester, murdered by an angry mob, who now inhabits the "other world" of dreams, a common focal point for myths of the supernatural. He's pretty much the best of all three horror worlds, which is why I'll never watch a Nightmare On Elm Street (revision LOL) movie by myself, or after dark, or without being physically forced to do so.

Also, it's worth noting some other little insights here. Dracula is clearly down on the line between "dead" and "supernatural," because he traded his humanity for his immortality, and died a symbolic death in the process. However, other vampires may inhabit other locations on this little graph. Some are the products of science, or a blood disease, like the crazy beasties in I Am Legend. Some don't really die in order to become Vampires, like the gothy teenagers in Vampire: The Masquerade.

It's worth contrasting Dracula with the Zombie myth... zombies are embodiments of death, much like vampires, but unlike vampires, they're usually explained scientifically, rather than supernaturally.

I've placed all "demonic" presences down by "supernatural," with a little nudge toward "dead," because even though they themselves were never human, and therefore never died human deaths, they still preside over the land of the dead, and death is their explicit domain. Lovecraft's Great Old Ones are the only creatures I can think of that are absolutely, completely otherworldly, in a non-scientific way, and aren't somehow related to human mortality.

So that's today's structuralist musing on horror, and a new addition to my list of cute little graphical gestures in this bloggy-blog. I wonder if you'd get more out of it by adding another variable, like original release/appearance date for each villain? You could code that into colors for the dots, and maybe you'd discover that horror has been moving from more supernatural to more natural over time.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN EVERYBODY

Wes Anderson and Peter Greenaway: Discovering a strong influence

Wes Anderson has a unique vision. His aesthetic is one of banality, and yet it's severely aesthetic, emphasizing composition and symmetry. His characters are markedly underdramatic, but his films still have a strong undercurrent of sentimentality. He emanates a sense of detachedness and sterility, but his films are about messy, confused family and romantic relationships. His aesthetic seems such an island unto itself that it can be hard to form a sensible reaction to him. However, this past week, I've discovered that Mr. Anderson DOES have precursors in cinema... I found one of them, and I sensed an overwhelming kinship. This kindred movie was Drowning By Numbers, a twisted little opus by celluloid artiste Peter Greenaway.

You should really see Drowning By Numbers. I can't pretend it isn't weird, and it's bleakly pessimistic, but it's also such a fascinating mental puzzle of a film, full of interlocking curiousities and remarkable characters. It has the stamp of British humor upon it -- the witticisms that simply slip past, the exchanges of understated mockery and absurdity -- but its real appeal is thoroughly universal.

The film revolves around three women, all named Sissy, who undertake the murders of their respective husbands. They have an unsettling sense of solidarity, and though they seem motivated by sexual frustration at first, it eventually starts to seem like they commit murder simply because they were tired of not committing murder. During this cynical and subversive process, they manipulate the local coroner into covering up their evidence. The story is the coroner's, as much as the womens'... he is a goofy and susceptible man who spends most of the film explaining the rules of strange, folkish games he has invented, and taking care of his son Smut, who has a similar fascination with games, but whose preoccupation is noticably more morbid. The film is a cracked unity, a fragmented braid of woven themes.

Does this sound like Wes Anderson? Not really. Murder and morbidity aren't themes central to his work, and his plots don't have the complex opacity of Drowning By Numbers. However, if you go and watch Drowning By Numbers right now, you'll sense the influence it's had on Anderson. I'll go ahead and try to articulate this influence, real quick like.

The camerawork and composition of shots in Greenaway's film are a direct precursor to Anderson's unconventional style. Greenaway likes long takes and a stable camera; any motion is usually slow pans, following a character's movement through a landscape. His frames are decidedly distant and minimally expressive, with a range of medium and occasional long shots, but few close-ups. The effect of his compositions is often to flatten the background and present the action in another flat plane in front of it, and he'll remain in this position and let a series of events or a conversation unfold in front of the lens. Like Anderson, Greenaway favors symmetry in his frames, and strong foreground/background gestalt. There's another shot of Greenaway's that Anderson shares: the unadorned, straight-on shot of a face showing understated signs of emotion (a single tear, a twitch of the cheek).

I've included a bunch of frames to compare the two styles. They're a pretty good illustration of the similarities I'm talking about... you can find them at the bottom of the post.

Add to this a penchant for quirky characters whose quirks are represented simply as the texture of everyday life... and a portrayal of family relationships that suggest underlying affection, even though they're caught up in a world of awkwardness and disconnection... and you start to see why these two filmmakers are so similar.

Interestingly enough, although Greenaway is less recognized than Wes Indie-darling Anderson, Drowning By Numbers could actually be seen as more marketable than something like Life Aquatic. It's certainly a strange movie, but it doesn't have Anderson's ironic tendencies (intentionally bad special effects on the fish, high-intensity spy music during a comically awkward rescue scene). Drowning By Numbers may have been a weird aesthetic and experimental exercise, but it felt dramatized, and the characters and plot were certainly engaging.

Greenaway's work is both more symbolically complex (the counting, the stars, things happening in three's, etc) and more dramatically conventional (it's an honest crime drama, at least) than Anderson's. As postmodern cinephiles looking back at Greenaway, we can see how he developed his experiment, and how Wes Anderson took that detached aesthetic and made it evolve. In a sense, Anderson's movies are a purification of Greenaway's aesthetic banal -- it's the same tone, but Anderson's movies don't have all the opacity and symbolism to get in the way. His stories are purely about the characters, and the plots and dialogue all fit into the quirky, banal, humanistic aesthetic, which he brings into a unity.

So in that sense, seeing Greenaway's work has given me a new appreciation for Wes Anderson's. I hope some of you Anderson fans out there will try to rent Drowning By Numbers. See if you see the influence as clearly as I did.

Frame comparisons, with Drowning By Numbers on top and The Royal Tenenbaums on the bottom:

Faces at despairing moments

Hapless patriarchs

Preoccupation with symmetry

Horizontal movement on a flattened background

Slow pan, following characters in conversation

Fixation on a significant gesture

Credibility Against Time: who gets the Benefit of the Doubt?

Okay, so this blog I just started reading -- Cinematical -- recently posted a little piece on which filmmakers should get the benefit of the doubt. As you may or may not know, that speaks directly to the purpose of this blog, and to my philosophy on media consumption, as well. So I thought I should provide some sort of response.

It seems like cinematical's talking about our willingness to assume, going in, that a film is going to be good, which will prompt us to work a little harder to validate this expectation. It's amazing how much of film culture is a big mess of unsubstantiated opinions and conjectures... "It's an [insert director], you know it'll be good"... "Man, I can't believe [insert director] would take a project like this"... "He's been so disappointing lately"... "His early stuff was SO good"... etc etc etc. It's a whole cultural preoccupation -- estimating the value of movies, and then measuring each film we see against our expectations for it.

It just so happens that a lot of these expectations are historically accountable, increasing after big Oscar wins or impressive debuts, and decreasing when a director loses his novelty, or takes some bad projects. So I figured, why not give this phenomenon -- which, for convenience sake, I'll call "artistic credibility" -- a graphical treatment? Why not look at a few directors who have gained, maintained, and lost the fickle favor of public opinion, and see how things changed along the length of their career?

I graphed my own totally personal perceptions of a few filmmakers' credibility. I treated each movie as a chronological unit (rather than using years, etc) because I think that's how it works in the heads of fans... we measure periods in terms of "first/second/third movie," unless the director is massively prolific and there isn't a clear shape to their career. In this graph, I cover Michael Moore (a big nexus of credibility issues), the Cohen Brothers (in honor of the article that inspired this post), Oliver Stone (an interesting case of changing assumptions of quality), Ang Lee, and M. Night Shyamalan. Check them out... click for a huge version of the image.



Okay, a couple interesting things. The directors with big debuts (Oliver Stone and M. Night) are the ones whose credibility eventually trailed off (rather quickly in M. Night's case). In contrast, Ang Lee and The Cohen Brothers are still going strong, despite some duds in their movie careers (The Hulk? And yet we still love him!) Their trick seems to be a combination of award-winning features (Fargo, Brokeback Mountain), plus cult hits (Big Lebowski, Crouching Tiger) by which these filmmakers leverage both the broad public perception and the esteem of critics and educated taste-makers.

Also note that the directors who have lost credibility are the ones with very consistent styles (aka gimmicks)... M. Night, who creates end-twisting thrillers, Michael Moore, who creates provocative leftist documentaries, and Oliver Stone, who creates serious, politically-themed dramas. Stone has done a little better, overall, because he leans more on a style than on a gimmick. This contrasts with the enduring credibility darlings, Ang Lee and the Cohen Brothers, both of whom exhibit a wide range of film output.

I think, if I go back to this, I need to add some more. Kevin Smith is an ideal case for this kind of graph, having gone through a sudden complete drop in credibility when he renounced the Askewniverse. I wouldn't mind including the Wachowski brothers, either, since their Matrix movies were met with such volatile public reactions.

In honor of Marvel and Disney's unholy union

I struggled to write about Marvel and Disney for a while. I couldn't come up with anything concise... I think I had too much to say, seeing as I wanted to talk about Warner Bros, Nintendo, Capcom, continuity, Kermit the Frog, universe building, multiple authorship, narrative tropes of soap opera, crossover complications, managing histories, economics of fiction, video games, and Natalie Portman.

So instead of composing a messy statement on the consolidation of the key properties of my childhood imagination, I decided to create an elaborate chart.

Here's the gist... this is a diagram of important universes, organized by ownership. That's the organizing principle for fiction, after all... settings, used as organizational nets for intellectual property owners to their manage characters. In honor of Disney's buyout of Marvel, I focused on universes containing multiple franchises, created by multiple authors, under umbrellas of particular media companies. And of course, there's a bit of a Jesse-bias in there. If I'd had more time, I might have included the Star Wars universe, Sesame Street, and the Final Fantasy multiverse. I know there are a thousand million others... but I had to maintain some perspective here.

Enjoy. Click for larger view.



You think creating, collecting, and maintaining universes is difficult... try being a fanboy, amassing universes over a childhood of media exposure, and having to keep them all straight!

Partisan philosophies according to National Convention Web Pages

I know this is a bad day to post about political things. We're probably all tired of hearing about the parties and their delegates and their constituencies and their districts. Still, something very interesting was brought to my attention today, and I thought I should at least mention it.

Compare the Democratic National Committee page and the Republican National Committee page.





Okay, so the Dems don't have a "Favorites" icon. Egregious, but forgivable. But what about the fact that the GOP's page has been displaying attack ads against the Democrats all day, even on Super Tuesday, whereas the Democratic National Committee's page has been keeping tallies of votes, urging people to get involved, and generally running non-partisan ads?

Seriously, who has the perspective here? Who is really in support of a cooperative democracy? Setting aside the slippery slope between nationalist and patriot, who is real Patriotic here, working for the good of a nation, rather than for the good of a partisan ideology? Seeing these two side-by-side is almost like a political punchline. The philosophies embodied in these two visions are so different, and the right-leaning one has become such a caricature of itself, that we're basically all voting on a bedrock of stereotypes.

Maybe that's why McCain is winning for the GOP... he embodies, on some level, a backpedal from that slope of narcissistic politics (after all, he did vote against the Bush tax cuts). Still, there's no real end in sight... this desperation for conflict and sensation, rather than debate and compromise and pluralism, is still ingrained in the right wing. When will people get tired of groundless, useless, ineffective internal hostility and just build a platform on the basis of their own merits?

I'd like to pause, before I finish, and apologize that this became such a rant. I'm aware that a politics of meta-aggression... being hostile at people because they're hostile... may ultimately be counterproductive. This is something that I'm counting on the current presidential candidates to transcend, although they've only been marginally effective so far. Still, Barack Obama's platforms of campaign reform and transparency, McCain's commitment to restraint and civility, and even Hillary Clinton's tough realism could all help break up this poisonous political climate. Unfortunately, I'm here contributing to it, along with the Republicans. I suppose it's just a function of saying what I think.

Well, at least this whole thing reminds me why I'm proud to be a fucking leftist liberal pussy democrat.

Free Culture: Lessig and Frozen Yogurt

It's hard to find an authentic example of irony in pseudoironic postmodern culture, but this might be it. The other day, I was on the train when I saw a familiar type treatment on the back of a newspaper (and in this case, by type treatment, I mean both the words themselves and the way in which they were designed). It said "Free Culture," which is the name of a book I really liked by Lawrence Lessig.

The book is about creating a free environment for art and innovation, and it sketches a very convincing argument about the dangers of runaway copyright law. It's a refreshingly non-partisan take on the subject, and the discussion is rooted heavily in the realm of fact, history, and measured argument. Lessig argues that within any media environment, innovation has to feed off itself, and if intellectual property laws are too strictly enforced, the society will become closed and stagnant, and growth will be discouraged.

It was a great book, but I never expected to see it in a full-page ad on a daily newspaper. I took a closer look to figure out what was going on. Turns out it was an ad for Bloomingdales' free carrot frozen yogurt giveaway. The arrangement of the text isn't quite the same (the ad headline is on two lines), but both are in all caps, and they're in a similar, highly geometrical, sans-serif font. More importantly, it's the SAME PHRASE.

My intention here is not to cry plagiarism. Jesus, plagiarism wouldn't even make sense... there's no way for Bloomingdales to profit off a reference to Lessig's book. Outside the academic/economist/technologist circle, this book isn't exactly a world-renown piece of literature, and I doubt it's a demographic that Boomingdales is targeting right now. Oddly, the ad heading doesn't make a whole lot of sense on its own. "Free Culture" is a little too awkward a phrase to be useful if it's only being taken totally literally. So whether or not you assume their innocence, the advertisement doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense.

My assumption is that some designer saw Lessig's book on a shelf, or had read it a while ago, and they had the phrase "Free Culture" lingering in their head. I've seen it happen... a designer, writer, artist, marketer, etc. assumes they're pulling a line from their imagination, but they're actually peeling it directly from something they've seen or read recently. I've done it myself, in fact.

Of course, there's the irony that a phrase got pulled directly from a book whose mission is to allow appropriation to happen. It's a little fragment of postmodern poetry.

But there's also the little bit of insight here: Bloomingdales has proven Lessig's point, that media feeds on itself, and it only works because there's a rich, sometimes overwhelming space to draw from. Who know... maybe Lessig has helped Bloomingdales to sell some frozen yogurt? If so, I'd like to think he approves.

Good call, Dove

Dove's released this here video, which shows the dizzying process that a normal person undergoes to become a billboard spectacle. It's a pretty cool video for a pretty amazing campaign... not directed at an issue that too far away to comprehend, like world hunger, or too abstract to really care about, like globalization. This is a campaign that's directed at the everyday lives of men and women, who pass from mass media experiences to lives in the home and the office, carrying around the baggage of confused standards and unrealistic self-images. We all do it, people... men and women... and Dove's right. It's stupid.

I think, at ten years old, a lot of us males generated a sort of ideal fantasy woman who we imagined seducing us as we got more comfortable with masturbation. TMI? Too bad. She looked a lot like the women in fashion magazines and hair product commercials, and she was an internal experience that the advertising world has spent years manipulating and trying to capture. Girl X, the unrealizable perfect woman, stands as a theoretical limit for a scale of beauty that we all carry around with us, men and women alike, and it's perpetuated by the old boys of fashion and advertising, who still think their popularity depends on approaching this limit as closely as possible.

Here's my abstract representation of the scale, as we tend to culturally understand it. Don't read too much into this... it's subconscious, and a lot of us spend tons of time trying to fight it, but it's still a ubiquitous cultural model that infects our thinking.

And I've noticed something strange. Almost every woman I've ever been intimate with, whether sexually or emotionally, from the shy to the sexually-secure, sees herself as part of the "Normal" section of the scale, but every one sees herself as being at the bottom of that section... like, right where "average" turns into "mediocre."

And it's not because I tend to like women with low self-esteem. This is also true of female friends who were smart and aggressive, and who are more than capable of well-informed reflection. Somehow, by taking away our control of our criteria for attractiveness, the media has caused a universal self-image pandemic. Every woman looks around her and sees the world teeming with girls who are prettier than she is. Maybe it's the ubiquitous "neurotic mom" syndrome... that's another trend I've noticed. All moms inadvertently transmit their habitual neuroses to their daughters in their earliest years.

At any rate, women have to realize something about the people who fantasize about them (I include in this category straight men, gay women, and all varieties of bisexual). First, we've given up on... no, in fact, we've literally lost interest in Girl X. We've realized she's as flat as the billboards she adorns, and if she were real, and we were dating her, she would probably ditch us to go to the gym and the tanning salon. We don't think about her when we masturbate any more. We think about our girlfriends and strangers we saw on the subway, because Girl X got REALLY BORING.

Second, even though we tend to see this scale as universal, it takes on a unique hue in every person's head. There are no identical scales of attractiveness... one gentleman prefers women in size 11 to 15, another likes girls with really strong cheekbones, a girl likes women with big thighs that taper down to small feet. A few select people, like Miss Amp, understand this, and she says it with a lot more attitude than I can muster.

Any self-respecting girl can, and WILL, find somebody who places them toward the "very attractive" end of the spectrum, and who will be overjoyed to date them, especially when they find out about the awesome personality that goes with that great body.

I don't know who I've really been writing this to, so I'll assume it's to everybody. Here goes...

GUYS: Don't be ashamed to like whatever it is you like in a woman. If you really like skinny girls with bags under their eyes, then go to the fucking Calvin Klein studio. But if you're like me, and you find a girl attractive because she's got fucking brilliant curves and a warm smile, then make it clear to everyone around you. Idle man-talk is standing squarely in the way of anybody having any perspective, because in idle man-talk, everyone is supposed to agree that the skinny chick with blonde hair is totally bangin'. More often than not, it's a goddamn lie that only one in twenty of us actually believe.

GIRLS: I know it's hard, but don't get suckered into this body-image shit. Whether something is listed as being "healthy" or not, whether it's talking about "self-image" or not, if it's telling you to lose weight or smooth out your skin tone, ignore it. When you look at other women, try to look directly in their eyes before you decide that they're too chubby, or overdressed, or boring-looking. We need to extract "health" and "self-esteem" from "looking your best" and "fitting" into anything, because we're at a point in history where improving your looks is directly at odds with improving your emotional health. There is no open space between indifference and neurosis... when you force your belt one hole tighter, the judgement train has already left the station.