Two weeks ago, my son and I flew to Newark, New Jersey to attend Wrestlemania 29. My son first became interested in professional wrestling when he was nine, and I ended up accompanying him to a range of local and national events. Together, we saw some of the great performers of the 1980s – from Hulk Hogan to Andre the Giant, from Jake the Snake Roberts to Hacksaw Jim Duggan and Rowdy Roddy Piper; we also saw early matches by then-emerging performers, such as The Undertaker, Shawn Michaels, Bret “The Hitman” Hart, and Triple H; and as he grew older, we even made it to a live ECW event (a rival league that has since taken on a mythic reputation). I wrote an essay about the ways that professional wrestling constituted a site of masculine melodrama, “Never Trust a Snake,” and my son published his own account of his experiences as a young wrestling fan for Nick Sammond’s Steel Chair to the Head: The Pleasures and Pain of Professional Wrestling. My son has remained actively interested in wrestling through the years; my interests have shifted elsewhere, but when my son asked if I would travel with him to Wrestlemania, I jumped at the opportunity.

My son brought me up to speed for several weeks before we left, even preparing a PowerPoint to help me keep the various characters and their storylines straight. We bought into the whole package – the Hall of Fame induction ceremony at Madison Square Gardens, the fan Axxess event at the Izod Center, and floor seats for Wrestlemania 29 itself at Met Life Stadium. What follows is an exchange which the two of us wrote reflecting on what we saw and what we feel are some of the defining traits of the contemporary wrestling world. Here, we hope to share some insights the WWE’s often-feisty relationship with its hardcore fans.

Since many of my readers may know you best from the wrestling article we co-wrote ten years ago, would you like to update them on your life since then?

I graduated from The University of Arizona and immediately interviewed to become an assistant staff writer with the WWE. I got to submit a short script, which Stephanie McMahon and the writing team read out loud and discussed. I wrote a scene in which “The Rated R Superstar” Edge, who was known for his reckless lifestyle, found out he had a teenage daughter and had to reevaluate his life choices.

I didn’t get the job, so I moved to the one-stoplight town of Alamance, North Carolina and became an apprentice promoter for an independent wrestling federation. It was my crazy way of showing I had the gumption to go for my dreams. I got to hear a lot of wrestling’s trade secrets from the athletes themselves and I got to know the real people behind the gimmicks. Mostly I spent a lot of time lugging brutally heavy steel poles and wooden planks around in order to build the wrestling ring at each venue. But I had a really bad time overall, for reasons it wouldn’t be polite to go into here, and I ended up deciding that I didn’t want to work in wrestling.

I became a transmedia writer and content producer instead. I now work for The Alchemists, a Hollywood transmedia production company. Most recently I was the primary author of an elaborate second screen experience for the CW television series Cult. Despite going in a different direction professionally I’ve stayed a fan.

One of the great things about growing up is that you get to make your own dreams come true. Specifically, I’ve made attending Wrestlemania and Comic-Con my two annual traditions. I’ve now followed the WWE around to seven Manias (in Boston, Orlando, Houston, Phoenix, Atlanta, Miami and North Jersey.) I always spend weeks making signs, which almost never actually end up being very visible on TV. I’ve gone with friends, girlfriends and a professor. But I’ve never forgotten how much it meant to me to go to the shows at The Garden with you when I was a kid. I really wanted to go to one more show with you.

Why don’t you set the scene for us? You’ve written about the periodic shifts in the core vision of the WWE and especially its ongoing attempts to balance its hardcore fans with the family trade. What do you see as the current state of the WWE and how did this help to shape what was in the program in New Jersey?

Fans describe the current moment in wrestling as the PG Era. The McMahon family, who runs the WWE, has become consumed by the desire to become a respectable corporate brand. ‘Rasslin has always resided in the cultural ghetto, just a little more respectable than monster truck racing but not as respectable as NASCAR. The WWE achieved its highest ratings in the late 90s and early 2000s when they fully embraced their wild image. The major pro wrestling series were rated PG-14. Characters cursed like sailors. Women’s wrestlers dressed like cheerleaders, Catholic school girls or French maids. They swatted each other on the butt with paddles. Male and female wrestlers alike performed death-defying stunts. The soap opera storylines took a dark turn. Triple H infamously raped his opponent Kane’s dead girlfriend’s corpse in her coffin. Wrestling became mainstream among 20-somethings precisely because it irresponsible and excessive. It provided a carnal thrill you couldn’t find anywhere else on television.

The company reigned in their crude content because they wanted to have their cake and eat it too. They wanted to be ultra-cool, but they didn’t want to be seedy. Vince McMahon saw the WWE as a publicly-traded entertainment studio on the level of Marvel or LucasArts. He produced theatrical films starring their performers; he opened a restaurant in Times Square; he founded a pro football league to compete with the NFL; he even cut rap albums.

All of that went off the rails in 2007 when one of the stars, Chris Benoit, murdered his family and hung himself. The most common theory is that his insanity was brain damage he suffered headbutting opponents during his career. Other past and current stars, such as Eddie Guerrero, Mister Perfect, Miss Elizabeth, Sensational Sherri, Bam Bam Bigelow, The British Bulldog, Pitbull #2, Road Warrior Hawk, Demolition Crush, Crash Holly, Test and Umaga – all died of overdoses and drug-induced heart attacks over a seven year span. Big corporate sponsors dropped their support. Local athletic commissions refused to grant the WWE the licenses necessary to perform in certain markets unless they adopted tougher drug testing. Ratings dropped. I was one of the many long time viewers who stopped watching. It was getting downright difficult to give these people my money. I felt like I was supporting something evil.

The WWE has been obsessed with cleaning up its image ever since. All of their shows are now rated PG. The company does a substantial amount of charity work. This weekend’s Wrestlemania broadcast alone included tributes to Hurricane Sandy relief, the Be A Star anti-bullying campaign, the Special Olympics, Make-a-Wish kids and saluting America’s troops – all campaigns the WWE consistently promotes throughout the year. As a result, top sponsors have returned, and a host of respected figures ranging from Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to Arnold Schwarzenegger, Hugh Jackman, Sean “Puffy” Combs and The Muppets have appeared on WWE television.

Fans who started watching because they loved wrestling’s rebellious excesses have become alienated. Many continue to watch because they love what wrestling was, or what they believe it could be again, but they hate what wrestling is today, and they understandably feel like they didn’t change. Wrestling did. They don’t want to be preached to. They find the anti-bullying PSAs hollow coming from a company that allows wrestlers to make homophobic comments. They want the best athletes and biggest personalities to be successful, not the performers who present the cleanest corporate image.

I basically agree with those fans, even if I feel like they can sometimes paint things as more black and white than they are. As I wrote in Steel Chair to the Head wrestling tried so hard to be shocking in those days that it just got gross. But the energy was much rawer then. I liked how wrestling let its hair down. I will still maintain that both from a creative standpoint and a business standpoint the blood, sex and sock puppets weren’t the problem. The rash of drug related deaths were caused by the relentless 320 day a year work schedule and the lack of company health care, which prevented people from recovering naturally from injuries without abusing pain killers. Management has also always had an expectation that wrestlers achieve unrealistic body shapes, which led the stars to abuse steroids. None of that has really changed. Going PG did help the WWE attract more sponsors and celebrity involvement, which was good for their bottom line. But it also made them a lot less cool, and their ratings are now half of what they used to be. Sanitized wrestling is a buzz kill.

Today’s viewers feel that they are the custodians of wrestling. They still remember what wrestling used to be about – what made them fall in love with it – and they intend to keep booing the good guys, chanting “boring” and sitting in stony silence at live events until they force the WWE to change. But the WWE is seemingly willing to lose those fans if it means they can stay respectable. The gulf that separates the viewers and the corporate executives was never more obvious than at Wrestlemania this weekend.

I’ll say! We observed some real tensions all weekend.

Take the Hall of Fame ceremony. Before the event even started, the WWE announced that late 90s star Mick Foley’s Hall of Fame speech would not air on their trimmed-down television broadcast. He would be cut for time. Instead viewers would see Vince McMahon honor Donald Trump, who owned the buildings that several past Wrestlemanias had taken place in. It was a recognition that most of the web fans saw as politically and commercially motivated. After some behind-the-scenes discussion, the WWE extended the broadcast to allow Foley’s lifetime achievement award to be broadcast.

When Foley went onto the stage, the auditorium went wild and Mick seemed genuinely touched by the fan response. His remarks were playful and funny, telling stories of his blood and glory days in the ring, He emphasized the match where he lost a sizable chunk of his ear, and he ended by staging a few moments of rough-housing with Chris Jericho, who he had always wanted to beat in the ring, heinous villain CM Punk broke character in order to referee the fight.

When The Donald entered, he was resoundingly booed and the relentless jeers continued throughout his remarks. The Donald got booed again when the Hall of Famers were reintroduced at Wrestlemania.

The fans also jeered, booed, and hissed when former Today show host Maria Menounos went into an overly-long and overly-flattering introduction of Bob Backlund, another featured part of the program that went terribly wrong. Backlund came out and seemed to be shouting at the fans. Then the fans shouted back. After a while, it seemed like Backlund was trying to perform as the heel character he adopted upon his return to the WWE late in his career (a senile man in a bathrobe who believed he was running for president), but by that point, no one was quite clear what was going on, as the speaker was raspy and red in the face, and telling people to shut up.

We were both struck when they showed a segment from the Hall of Fame ceremony during the Wrestlemania broadcast which had been carefully edited to suggest a much saner, more sentimental Backlund, and it looked like it was redubbed to strip out the audience response. Then, Backlund got on the stage and went bat shit crazy all over again, making it even less clear than before if he was trying to perform in character or simply outraged over the fan response. Maria Menounos also chastised the fans in a blog post about the event.

By contrast, the fans seemed to sit on their hands during the heavily billed matched between the Rock and Cena….

The Rock and John Cena epitomize corporatized wrestling. I have been watching since January of 1991 and I can’t remember ever seeing this kind of across-the-board nerd rage towards a Wrestlemania main event. The Rock left wrestling in the prime of his career years ago to focus on his movie career. He claimed that his return to wrestling three years ago was motivated by an enduring love for his fans, but it just happened to be timed to coincide with the marketing push for the movie Fast 5.

Since then he has left several more times, only returning on occasions when he has another movie to promote. Yet the WWE has now pushed aside all of the wrestlers who work for them day in and day out in order to let The Rock main event the biggest show of the year the past three years in a row. Fans see it as a soullessly calculated bit of corporate back scratching arranged by Hollywood agents and executives who aren’t overwhelmingly concerned with what the core audience would most like to see.

John Cena has won 13 world championships since the PG era began, which makes him the face of the moment. He’s constantly seen shaking hands with politicians or ringing the bell at the New York Stock Exchange. But those aren’t credentials fans care about. They’re liabilities, because they make him look like a square, a corporate puppet. Apologists say that Cena is the most popular wrestler on the planet with casual fans, families, women and children, who simply aren’t as rowdy as the adult men in the audience. But he gets booed out of almost every stadium he performs in. Fans verbally rip him to shreds with chants like “You’re a loser” and “Fuck, you, Cena!” They’re not playing around. They hate him.

Last year’s Wrestlemania main event was The Rock vs. John Cena, and the marketing tagline was “Once in a Lifetime.” But the writers knew the whole time that it was false advertising. They were setting the stage for a rematch, which fans dubbed “Twice in a Lifetime.” They’ve been chanting “Same old shit” every time it’s promoted.

I thought the match itself was thoroughly mediocre. I purposefully didn’t make any noise for it, because I think the WWE management even perceives booing as a passionate response. I didn’t even pay that close attention. I just didn’t care. But from what I observed, The Rock is out of shape. No sooner had they started than he got exhausted and needed to rest. That’s been the case with every time he’s wrestled since he came back. It’s hard to keep up with the younger wrestlers when you only get in the ring once or twice a year.

The outcome of this year’s Mania main event was utterly predictable to most fans, with Cena winning and The Rock raising his hand. I rolled my eyes. The WWE hopes that if The Rock tells the audience to respect Cena we’ll all do as he says. I do respect Cena, but not because The Rock shilled for him.

In many ways, getting a glimpse into WWE fan culture through your eyes was the most interesting aspect of the trip for me. As I see it, we are watching a collision between fans and corporations that is unfolding across multiple media. The WWE has fully and obsessively embraced social media, with constant prods throughout their broadcasts to follow along on Twitter, and even recommended hash tags. The fans have also long used a diverse range of blogs, podcasts, and other online forums to coalesce their own opinions, to share insider knowledge, to formulate their opinions – often in ways, as we are seeing here, which run contrary to the dominant narrative the WWE wants to construct.

At the same time, the WWE seeks to stage a spectacular broadcast, that reaches viewers all over the planet. As a scripted program (i.e. “sports entertainment”), they have enormous control over what happens in the ring, yet they have far less control over what the fans do at ringside. Some of the first generation of scholars writing about the WWE stressed the nature of this fan performance – the ways fans perform for each other and for the cameras in ways that help everyone to suspend disbelief and lend credibility to the staged spectacle. When wrestling fans resist, they do so in a highly public manner: they chant, they shout, they hold up signs, they often become so loud that they get heard on the broadcast even if the management doesn’t like what they have to say.

Yes, the announcers have some ability to re-narrate the fan pushback, to re-inscribe it into the narrative. As you say, above all, the WWE wants to generate “heat.” They want to provoke strong emotions, and so, they can always describe the fans as “rowdy” or “raucous” or “out of control” or “going crazy”, even when the response does not seem to support the preferred storyline. Wrestlemania and Raw are going out via a live feed so they can only do so much to control the fan reaction. We saw with the Hall of Fame ceremony, which was taped for later broadcast, that they were almost Orwellian in re-sculpting the experience, cutting out awkward moments, reducing the sound of the crowd so you can’t quite understand what they are shouting, editing it so that it looks like one happy family. Bob Backlund comes across as sentimental in the edit for television, but he came across as crazed and angry for those of us at the live event.

And, of course, the fan’s engagement with the events can shift pretty dramatically from match to match. My nostalgia draws me back to the generation of wrestlers who were performing when you were little, the ones I wrote about in my original “Never Trust a Snake” essay. So, I was perhaps most engaged by the Undertaker/C.M. Punk match. We saw the Undertaker fight some of his early matches and now, he has a 21-0 lifetime record at Wrestlemania. He is an aging lion, who only rarely fights, and who has been rumored for several years to be on the verge of retirement. Yet, the guy knows how to sell the melodramatic dimensions of the storyline. Leading into this match, they did everything they could to make Punk a despicable figure. Paul Bearer, the Undertaker’s long-time friend and supporter, had passed away, in real life. The Undertaker was paying tribute to him on Raw when Punk snuck into the ring and stole the urn which, for storyline purposes, held Bearer’s ashes. We saw broadcasts where he was casually tossing the urn around and then, on the eve of Wrestlemania, he dumped the ashes in the Undertaker’s face and bathed in them himself.

What they delivered at Wrestlemania was an old fashioned “slobberknocker,” full of melodramatic twists in fortune, two counts and kick outs.

My sense is that the fans were eating it up. Sure, there were plenty of people rooting for Punk, who has a strong cult following, but they were also being earnest when they chanted “this is awesome” at several points during the match. And it was fun to me to see that the WWE still knows how to play upon those classic elements in their performances.

It was awesome. Most of the blogs I follow gave the match 4 ½ to 5 stars, and I agree. It was the highlight of the night. In that instance, yes, at least ½ the fans were rooting for the bad guy, CM Punk, but the point wasn’t to disrupt the broadcast. It was to show their love for a great performer. Chanting Punk’s name is very different from chanting “same old shit” towards John Cena and The Rock.

In baseball they would call Punk a five-tool player. He’s a charismatic speaker. He can emote very nuanced reactions for the TV close-ups. He can gesture broadly to get a response from the live audience in the balcony. He’s graceful in the ring, and he knows a broad variety of tactics to make each match feel unique. He can play an identifiable good guy or a despicable bad guy more or less equally well. He’s just got the total package.

Two other wrestlers, Dolph Ziggler and Daniel Bryan, lose more often than they win, but the decibel level for their brief appearances can often exceed those for the better promoted stars. Fans create elaborate signs on poster board and fabric to waive in tribute to them. I think in all fairness they’re probably not quite as charismatic as guys like The Rock or Cena, but they’re better natural athletes and great performers just the same. The fact that they so often draw the short straw when it comes to wins and losses just makes fans respect them more for paying their dues.

(MORE TO COME)

Your central premise is that the logics of branding are now complexly interwoven with all aspects of our everyday lives, that we adopt its principles in shaping our social relationships with each other and defining our identities in the world, and that notions of “authenticity” are less and less meaningful for describing our culture at a time when politics, religion, self-esteem, personal expression, are all bound up with the logics of branding. So, how are you defining branding?




In the book, I’m actually more concerned with what I call “brand culture” than practices of branding (i.e. the design and implementation of specific brand campaigns). For me, brand culture refers to the relationships between consumers and the commercial world, and the way in which these types of relationships have increasingly become cultural contexts for everyday living, individual identity, and affective relationships. Of course, there are different brand cultures, that at times overlap and compete with each other, so in the book I talk about the brand culture of street art in urban spaces, religious brand cultures, the culture of green branding with its focus on the environment, and so on. The practice of branding is typically understood as a complex economic tool, a method of attaching social or cultural meaning to a commodity as a means to make the commodity more personally resonant with an individual consumer. But I’m arguing that, in the contemporary era, brands are about culture as much as they are about economics.

So I try to show this transition in the book, and I argue that we need to think about differences between commodification and branding in order to understand some of the cultural dynamics occurring right now. That is, because a brand’s value extends beyond a tangible product, the process of branding—if successful—is different from commodification: it is a cultural phenomenon more than an economic strategy. Commodification implies the literal transformation of things into commodities; branding is a much more deeply interrelated and diffused set of dynamics. To commodify something means to turn it into, or treat it as, a commodity; it means to make commercial something that wasn’t previously thought of as a product, such as music or racial identity. Commodification is a marketing strategy, a monetization of different spheres of life, a transformation of social and cultural life into something that can be bought and sold. In contrast, the process of branding impacts the way we understand who we are, how we organize ourselves in the world, what stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.

So, I’m trying to make an intervention in the conversations about commodification, branding and identity. Again, I’m not making the argument that we just apply a business model onto the ways we construct our personal identities—it is not the case that business strategies merely get plucked from the realm of economics and mapped onto the realm of culture.

But I’m also not using “economy” or “market” as mere metaphors. In the book, I think about a more nuanced adoption of the logics and moralities of both economics and culture as a way to understand how we are constructing identities within brand culture, and to think about what is at stake in this kind of construction. What’s at stake for individuals and for culture in adopting brand logics and moralities?

In both Authentic and your new anthology, you talk about “commodity activism.” Explain this concept. To what degree does commodity activism still represent a meaningful form of activism? How has our notion of commodity needed to change to incorporate activism into the branding process?
 I’ve struggled a bit to think about the similarities and differences between what you are calling “commodity activism”, what I am calling in my current work “fan activism,” and what our mutual friend Stephen Duncombe would discuss as “ethical spectacle.” For me, there are some core differences between “purchasing Starbucks coffee to support Fair Trade,” tapping into the collective identity of Harry Potter fans in order to push Warner Brothers to move their chocolate contracts to Fair Trade Countries, and using the Guy Fawkes mask for Occupy Wall Street, yet from a certain frame of reference, all might be described as using “branding” to promote their political agendas. So, can we make meaningful distinctions in terms of how activists deploy brands in their efforts to promote change?



Roopali Mukherjee and I, in our co-edited volume, Commodity Activism: Cultural Resistance in Neoliberal Times, define commodity activism as the process by which social action is increasingly understood through the ways it is mapped onto merchandising practices, market incentives, and corporate profits. We look at different forms of commodity activism—the Dove RealBeauty campaign, the branding of green activists, the work of celebrities for progressive causes such as development and the diamond trade, and so on— and think through what social action and cultural resistance mean in a context that is increasingly defined by ideas about self-branding, entrepreneurial individualism, and economic responsibility.

I think that commodity activism can be an important form of social activism, if the goals of such activism are not primarily organized around the accumulation of profit or building a corporate brand (so, for example, consumers may act politically by buying, say, green products, but we need to also attend to the ways in which consumer behavior builds brands by buying products, etc.). In lots of forms of commodity activism, the goal is the identity of the consumer or brand of the corporation, not the activism itself or what it might yield. So much commodity activism, rather than challenge existing structures in the social, economic and cultural realms, those structures that create and sustain inequalities, is dedicated to furthering the recognition of the corporation, its self-brand. This then often becomes the end goal of the activism, and it is this that I think we should challenge as “activism.”

So, to answer your question: yes, we can make meaningful distinctions in terms of how activists deploy brands. We can also make meaningful distinctions in terms of different kinds of activism. So, for example, activism about girls’ self-esteem is hot right now—a whole industry has been built around it. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t an important context for activism, but it does mean that we need to carefully attend to what sort of politics aren’t so easily branded, and thus made visible.

Your first extended example is Dove’s “Real Women” campaign, which Unilever very much wanted us to experience as a break with the ways women had been marketed “beauty products” in the past. To what degree did this embody the new branding logic you are describing? Yet, you are also arguing that it needs to be understood as part of a larger history of Dove’s alternative marketing to women. What might we learn by placing this ad into this expanded historical context?




Well, I think that all cultural forms of activism need to be understood historically, as dynamics of power that shift and become something new, but also because we need to attend to the ways in which historical forms of power continue to be crucial in how we structure our lives and our politics. This is important because history matters—in my work I try, in every chapter, to historicize the specific brand culture I’m examining, so that we can see how there are cultural dynamics that seem quite new and different share similarities with historical processes and patterns. At the same time, there is something shifted at this moment, for some of the reasons I’ve detailed here: the rise of commodity activism, the difference between commodification and branding, the way consumers interact on multiple media platforms, etc. So with the Dove case, the RealBeauty campaign, it is the case that the company encouraged a sort of “co-production” with consumers, and did call attention to the exclusionary (and often racist and classist) norms of beauty culture.

It also has a history of helping to create that very same beauty culture. One doesn’t cancel the other out, nor is this a simple case of hypocrisy. Rather, this kind of contradiction defines brand culture, and also defines how consumer culture can be the site for a kind of activism. The power of capitalism, as we know, has been in its capacity to not just protect existing markets but to be expansive, to create new markets. This happens, though, in the context of a relationship to activism and resistance, and it is this hard-to-define terrain, where we think about what counts as activism, that comprises brand culture.

Sarah Banet-Weiser is a Professor in the School of Communication at USC Annenberg and the department of American Studies and Ethnicity. She had two books published in 2012, most recently Authentic™: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture (New York University Press), which examines brand culture, youth, and political possibility through an investigation of self-branding, creativity, politics, and religion. Also published in 2012 was Commodity Activism: Cultural Resistance in Neoliberal Times (New York University Press), co-edited with Roopali Muhkerjee. Her first book, The Most Beautiful Girl in the World: Beauty Pageants and National Identity (University of California Press, 1999), explores a popular cultural ritual, the beauty pageant, as a space in which national identities, desires, and anxieties about race and gender are played out. She has also authored a book on consumer citizenship and the children’s cable network: Kids Rule! Nickelodeon and Consumer Citizenship (Duke University Press, 2007), in addition to her co-edited book, Cable Visions: Television Beyond Broadcasting, co-edited with Cynthia Chris and Anthony Freitas (New York University Press, 2007). She co-edits, with Kent Ono, a book series with New York University Press, “Critical Cultural Communication,” and is the editor of American Quarterly.

I am just back from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference, held this year in Chicago, where for the first time, we were able to display on the New York University Press table the books which we are publishing as part of the Postmillenial Pop book series, which I co-edit with my USC colleague Karen Tongson. Here’s how we describe the series on its website:

This series strives to publish work that reimagines scholarship on popular culture in the age of transnationalism, convergence and globalization. How does “spreadable” content, as well as media innovations and practices still in formation, reanimate critical approaches to a vast array of popular forms like music, television, video games, comics and movies, as well as emergent forms of popular discourse like blogs, micro-blogs and social networking sites? Conversely, how does the analog (in form and concept) persist, resurface and reinvent itself despite the fascination for “the new” or the “not yet”?

While the series focuses on contemporary popular cultures, the designation “postmillennial” is not meant to be a historical proscription. Instead, Postmillenial Pop encourages approaches that considers contemporary forms and popular practices within a broader matrix of political, cultural and affective histories of race, sexuality, gender and class. Furthermore, the series seeks to publish work that engages the ephemeral and interstitial archives of previous forms of global “re-structuring” and domination, including work that contextualizes the effects of empire, immigration, diaspora and labor movements on popular cultures.

For us, Post-millenial refers to a specific moment in time (and the cultural materials that come out from that moment) but it also describes an intellectual stance — one which is conscious of the multiple identities that we occupy as critics at this particular cultural moment, one which is committed, for example, to bridging across media and across disciplines, one which sees the importance of engaging in conversations that extend beyond the academy, and one which is aware of the importance of linking together different cultural communities in a conversation that looks towards future possibilities.

As the series has taken shape, it has come at the intersection between the different networks through which Karen and I travel, and as such, it is marked by what we hope are provocative and unexpected juxtapositions of different critical and theoretical traditions. We have, as of now, four books published in the series with more coming out in the current year. I hope to feature interviews through the blog with the series contributors as their books start to appear. Today, we are featuring an interview that Karen did with Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns, the author of the series’s first book, Puro Arte: Filipinos on the Stage of Empire.

The other books in the series so far are:

Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green, Spreadable Media: Creating Meaning and Value in a Networked Culture.

Michael Serazio, Your Ad Here: The Cool Seel of Guerilla Marketing

Derek Johnson, Media Franchising: Creative Licensing and Collaboration in the Culture Industries

And forthcoming books include:

Aswin Punathambekar, From Bombay to Bollywood: The Making of a Global Media Industry

Mark Anthony Neal, Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities

And there are more in the pipeline.

Puro Arte explores the emergence of Filipino American theater and performance from the early 20th century to the present. It stresses the Filipino performing body’s location as it conjoins colonial histories of the Philippines with U.S. race relations and discourses of globalization.

KT: First and foremost, we’re thrilled to have published Puro Arte: Filipinos on the Stages of Empire as our debut title in the Postmillennial Pop series at NYU Press. I think the book does tremendous work in reconfiguring how we define “performance” in a contemporary, purportedly “post-imperial” age, at the same time that it taps into archives that may be more broadly understood in Filipino Studies, American Studies and Filipino American Studies, but not as widely considered when it comes to discussions of representation and embodiment in other popular and national contexts–though they are most certainly relevant to other transnational notions of “theatrics,” as you call them. I’m wondering if you could begin our conversation by sharing more about the origins and different implications of the book’s organizing phrase “puro arte” (literally, “pure art,” but in Tagalog, used as a way to describe “putting on a show” in many senses of the expression)?

LB: Thank you for having the vision to include this book as part of the new book series.  I didn’t realize this book is the first in your series. I feel honored.

 The book’s organizing concept, “puro arte,” finds its inspiration in several sources: through vernacular usage, through creative interpretations of Filipino languages by Filipino artists, and last but not least, through the tireless work of Filipino American artists struggling to create a community for themselves. I draw also on a poem by joel b. tan that plays with a series of Spanish words, including “puro arte” and “seguro,” whose meanings shift as they became part of spoken Filipino. From Spanish puro arte’s pure art moves to Filipino’s pure theatrics; from Spanish “seguro’s” surely shifts to Filipino’s “maybe.” I was really inspired by this creative “flippin” (to reference a collection of Filipino creative writing anthology Flippin, specifically as it foregrounds the play of the vernacular even as it embodies colonial histories.

I also owe much to my co-organizers of Puro Arte, a gathering of artists, community organizers, and academics in San Francisco focusing on the relationship between artists and community-based organizations. Alleluia Panis of Kul Arts, Inc, Professor Christine Balance (UCI, Asian American Studies), joel b tan (community liason, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts), and Olivia Malabuyo (Gerbode Foundation), were my kulaborators back in 2003 and have since then continued to help me explore these linkages.

Most importantly, I am particularly drawn to the worlds of potentiality within forms of puro arte, as places  of radical transformation and creativity, despite or because of colonial/postcolonial histories of violence..

KT: You do some wonderful work with photographs of Filipinos taken for, and made available on display at, the 1904 World’s Fair and other “exhibition” contexts. I’ve always been very moved by the work you’ve done with Filipino Taxi Dancers in central California and beyond, most noticeably as a means of crafting a historical genealogy for why Filipinos are regarded as “splendid dancers” specifically, and as consummate entertainers in a more general sense. Of interest to various media scholars who read this blog will be how you, as a scholar, transpose these images that proliferated globally in various mediated and colonial forms into an account of the “Filipino performing body’s” status as a moving archive of colonial relations, influence and discipline. Could you tell us more about your own process in choosing these images, and reconsidering them through the trope of “puro arte?”

LB: You’re right that the US colonial archive is replete with such provocative images. Equally invested in archiving these materials are Filipino/American communities. The images I discuss in the book are in some ways hegemonic images. The spectacularized photographs of Filipino performing bodies, of Filipino men dancing with white women in the chapter you’re referring to, have been made to represent this kind of social contact as one that transcends colonial violence and racism. I was definitely interested in choosing iconic images because part of what I work through in the book are the ways in which Filipino Studies/Filipino American Studies grapple with the rich afterlife of U.S. empire. Specifically, the images of white women and Filipino men at the 1904 World’s Fair are reproduced (in function and performance) in the photograph of a Filipino taxi dancehall patron and a white taxi dancer. By staging these two sets of representations side by side, I was attempting to gesture to the connections between the project of Filipino masculinity and the struggle for suffrage and emancipation of white women and migrant women.

KT: Martial Law was such a defining event for the production of Filipino art and performance; paradoxically, as you argue, the regimes of discipline and control that emerged in that dictatorial moment of Marcos’ extended reign became an incredibly generative, oppositional one, for numerous artists in literature, performance, and digital art. In this chapter, you also tackle the stage adaptation of Jessica Hagedorn’s celebrated novel, Dogeaters. Could you tell us a little more about how you decided to re-frame previous discussions of Martial Law and art through an adaptation like Dogeaters? What were your own encounters with the different productions of Dogeaters like? And to what extent did you, as a dramaturge as well as a scholar, become involved in that process or other productions related to this topic?

LB: Where to begin with Martial Law? It’s probably one of those moments I’ll keep returning to since I’m one of those Martial Law babies—I was born just as Marcos was conceiving Martial Law and I left the Philippines just as the Marcos regime was desperately crumbling, and the martial regime was lifted.

 

Here, I wanted to put in conversation theatrical projects that engage robustly and even belligerently with the violence of Martial Law. The chapter first looks at the social protest plays staged by a U.S.-based radical Filipino American political organization, the Katipunan ng mga Demokratikong Pilipino (KDP/Union of Democratic Filipinos). Through plays performed in various community settings, KDP grappled with its anti-Marcos political agenda and its anti-racist politics in solidarity with other people of color in the U.S. By juxtaposing the work of Sining Bayan with Dogeaters, I wanted to highlight histories of anti-Martial Law activism by Filipino Americans through cultural work, especially because culture was such a battleground during the Martial Law.

 

Salamats to Jessica Hagedorn’s generosity and friendship, I had the opportunity to sit in on the first (and only thus far) production of Dogeaters in the Philippines, in Manila, in 2007. Because I was able to sit in during the creative process through the opening performances, I had the privilege of talking with the cast and the rest of the creative production team. I asked them directly what they thought of the play, what they think it brings to stories about the Martial Law. Some of them have created their own Martial Law performances, including a performer who is an Imelda impersonator. Of course all of them lived through the Martial Law. In many ways, it was these difficult and yet energizing conversations as well as the experience of going back to the Philippines through the writing of this book that compelled me to ask questions that push from a different set of concerns than ones that have previously framed Dogeaters productions in the U.S.

 

As I mentioned earlier, this is a period in Philippine history I will keep returning to, for personal reasons. Just this past summer I co-curated two nights of performance for Kul Arts, Inc. entitled “Make Your Own Revolution.” This event featured staging fiction and performance works engaging with state violence. I had the opportunity to translate a Martial Law classic protest performance, Ilokula II,, a Filipino street play written by UP Peryante (anti-Martial Law theater group in the Philippines). 

 

KT: Finally, I think one of the signature “crossover” chapters of your book is the final section on the musical smash, Miss Saigon, especially with all of they hype and hullabaloo surrounding the cinematic adaptation of the same French songwriting duo, Boubil and Schoenberg’s best known musical, Les Miserables. Audiences will be keen to learn more about how something like a stage musical fostered an entirely new set of economies, as well as performance practices in the Philippine provinces[lb1] . Could you share more with this audience about the “Saigonistas” and “Saigonista” training programs in the Philippines, and perhaps even speculate, at the end of your comments about how we might contextualize what happened with and through Miss Saigon in the Philippines, as a potential transmedia phenomenon now?

LB: Like any colonial undertaking, the search for Kim is well-documented, and ironically by the (colonial!) enterprise itself. The search for the lead Kim brought out many Filipino musical performer hopefuls not just in the Philippines, but also in cities in Canada and the U.S. The training programs, in varying formal and informal capacities, were set up to prepare Filipinos for the performance demands of a eight to nine shows per week, including two shows on some days. Though the Philippines has a long history of theater-making, it does not have the same economy that can support 8-9 performances per week, in a run that could last for ten years.

Miss Saigon produced a community of performers, who refer to themselves as Saigonistas, those who have been part of Miss Saigon productions world-wide. They attribute their skills that cross over to the global entertainment complex to their training as Saigonistas. In puro arte fashion, I consider this phenomenon as a site where dreams of the Filipino nation and dreams of the Filipino people converge and diverge.

Charice Pempengco, Arnel Pineda, and others may be more recent “discoveries,” but like any other “discovery” narratives, once you look into them, it’s not quite as original and isolated as claims make them out to be. I imagine such kinds of phenomenon will continue as various technologies of social media provide more opportunities to come into being, to seek out intimacy, and to express one’s dreams. Our friend Christine Balance’s forthcoming manuscript (Tropical Renditions) is really the source to go to for the kind of speculation of transmedia phenomenon you are looking for.

What is most interesting to me about these artists are the choices they make after having been a part of the global entertainment complex. I think about someone like Monique Wilson, one of the first Saigonistas, who has been head of an acting training program in England, who started New Voices, a feminist theater company in Manila, and is a vocal advocate of Filipina women’s rights. She comes to mind because even though she is not visible in the mainstream entertainment industry as some of her peers and even those who came after her, the choices she continues to make as an artist I find refreshing and inspiring.

 

Two decades ago, many of us were pushing for a more historically grounded account of film comedy, one which moved beyond the texts themselves to focus on the contexts of their production and consumption, one which might be grounded in notions of historical poetics. What progress has been made towards these goals in recent research on film comedy?

Rob King: I never fail to remind my students that the history of laughter is the history of the changing social patterns that produce and permit laughter. This to me is a watchword.

Still, if we are to insist on the value of historicization, we need to be aware of what that value is. Nothing is to be gained simply by insisting on history for history’s sake, nor in turning historicization into an exercise in comedic relativity (i.e., the banal lesson that what people laughed at then is different because society was different then).

To my mind the value of history is this: that it is only through a close, historical analysis of the contexts of comedy’s production, circulation, and reception that we approach a sense of comedy’s promise as a mode of social and cultural practice. That it is only through a historical reading of the whos, wheres, and whys of comedic expression that we can understand humor a mode of innovative reasoning that tends to thrive in conditions of social crisis. Comedy’s transformative promise is not often realized, true; but, without history, we can’t even begin to comprehend its conditions of possibility.

Leger Grindon: I applaud the effort to offer a more historically grounded understanding of film comedy. I have tried to contribute to such an understanding in chapter 2 of Hollywood Romantic Comedy, “History, Cycles and Society” pp. 25-66 in which I argue that the Hollywood romantic comedy genre can be understood as going through 9 cycles or clusters from the coming of sound until the present. These cycles and clusters are grounded in the particular historical circumstances, both in the film industry and society at large. For a further consideration of such an approach see my essay, “Cycles and Clusters: The Shape of Film Genre History” pp. 42-59 in Film Genre Reader IV (2012) edited by Barry Keith Grant.

I noticed across a number of these essays an increased emphasis on the impact of the soundtrack (both dialogue and noise) on the nature of film comedy. The term, slapstick, itself, refers to a noise-making device. So, how central is sound to film comedy?

Celestino Deleyto: Obviously very important, but I also think that we are also learning to accept the importance of dialogues in comedy. In the past, purist film critics and theorists would discard anything that was not visual as “uncinematic” and this attitude did a particular disservice to comedy. The combination of the scripted dialogue and actor performance is central to any account of comedy and it seems to me that we have moved a great deal in that general direction, a shift that can only be welcome.

Leger Grindon:Sound is very central to film comedy and has been since sound film was introduced. Obviously dialogue is central to the romantic comedy genre. Before Sunset, for example, is nearly one long conversation. Of course, noise and music are also key factors.

David R. Shumway: It is odd that the name we give to the dominant genre of silent comedy comes from a device that makes noise. Of course, sound, in the form of musical accompaniment was essential to silent comedy, but the coming of recorded sound changed film comedy radically, ushering in the dominance of romantic comedy, including its subgenres, screwball and farce. At this point, dialogue is much less often the chief source of laughs in film comedy, but sound remains indispensable, if only because the we no longer have performers who are able to carry the film by their physical performance alone the way Chaplin and Keaton could.

How do you assess the current state of screen comedy? Who do you see as important contemporary figures working in this space and why?

Rob King: I think we’re currently experiencing one of the most significant upheavals in comedy as a mode of representation in some time. The odd thing is: none of this is really originating in film, at least not in English-language film comedy.

In my opinion, all of the truly significant transformations in comedic representation seem to be generated either online or in the continuing mutations of the twenty-first-century sitcom. Take such “comedy verité” sitcoms as The Office (UK and US) or Curb Your Enthusiasm; or consider the new “auteur” sitcom, as spearheaded by Louis CK’s Louie and subsequently Lena Dunham’s Girls. These are shows that refuse the “vaudeville aesthetic” that has defined the sitcom since its earliest days in favor of a more realist mode – including some notable examples of shows that exploit the docusoap as a new comedic format, e.g., The Office and Parks and Rec.

On many fronts, there is, then, an impulse these days to relocate comedy within reality. In fact, this is true not only of the changing aesthetic of the sitcom, but also of all those shows in which the comedian stages direct interventions in reality: the interviews of an Ali G or a Borat, of a Stephen Colbert or Jon Stewart; c.f., also the reenvisioning of Candid Camera in the UK’s Trigger-Happy TV or, more recently, NBC’s Off Their Rockers. Viral humor counts here, too, since virality more readily accrues to a kind of “found-footage” sensibility (e.g., “Charlie Bit My Finger,” “Double Rainbow,” etc.) than to the more formalized sketches circulated at funnyordie.com.

These, at any rate, seem to me the really interesting trends in contemporary comedy. And they’re really not happening in film.

Leger Grindon: Certainly film comedy remains one of the central contemporary genres both in terms of box office income and critical attention. Talent discussed in this book like Woody Allen, David O. Russell and Charlie Kaufman are good examples of important filmmakers working in this genre.

Claire Mortimer: In Britain Chris Morris made a searing satire of post 9/11 British culture in Four Lions – this low budget film was radical and provocative in terms of balancing empathy, horror and stupidity. It seemed an incredibly brave attempt to take on the taboo and actually engage provocatively with the issues faced by our society. This was brave and intelligent comedy, which really challenges the audience.

David R. Shumway: The current state of Hollywood comedy is very bad. While the occasional well-made comedy still appears–e.g., Friends with Benefits (2012)–most of the stuff released by major studios is designed to capture the same mentality as most other Hollywood product, that of the 14 year-old male. Even apparently intelligent filmmakers such as Judd Apatow still have to build their laughs around bathroom humor and adolescent attitudes toward sex.

Despite some work that deals with the movement of stage performers into film or more recently, the interplay between live action and animated comedy, we still have limited amount of scholarship that looks at comedy across media. What impact do you think television, recorded sound, or digital media, to cite a few examples, have had on contemporary screen comedy?

Celestino Deleyto: Apart from input from all these new media, contemporary animated comedy has not received much serious scholarly attention, in spite of its obvious cultural and industrial importance. Even though comedy theorists are well used to working with a frowned-upon genre, it seems that we ourselves still frown upon certain popular comic forms.

Leger Grindon: I would draw attention to the influence of stand-up comedy and stand-up comics on motion pictures. Certainly I’m one of many to note this influence which must go back at least to Woody Allen if not to Bob Hope and W.C. Fields. But it seems one of the most important cross media influences on contemporary film comedy.

Andrew Horton is the Jeanne H. Smith Professor of Film and Media Stuies at the University of Oklahoma, an award-winning screenwriter, and the author of 24 books on film, screenwriting, and cultural studies, including A Companion to Film Comedy, which he co-edited with Joanna E. Rapf.

Celestino Deleyto is Professor of Film and English Literature at the Universidad de Zaragoza (Spain). He is the author of The Secret Life of Romantic Comedy (2009). His essay in Companion is “Humor and Erotic Utopia: The Intimate Scenarios of Romantic Comedy.”

Leger Grindon is Professor of Film and Media Culture at Middlebury College. He is the author of Hollywood Romantic Comedy: Conventions, History and Controversy (2011). He wrote “Taking Romantic Comedy Seriously in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) and Before Sunset (2004).”

Rob King is an assistant professor at the University of Toronto’s Cinema Studies Institute and Department of History, where he is currently working on a study of early sound slapstick and Depression-era mass culture. With Tom Paulus, he wrote Slapstick Comedy (2011). He contributed “‘Sound Came Along and Out Went the Pies’: The American Slapstick Short and the Coming of Sound.”

Claire Mortimer teaches film and media studies at Colchester Sixth Form College and his written Romantic Comedy (2010). Her essay is “Alexander Mackendrick: Dreams, Nightmares, and Myths in Ealing Comedy.”

David R. Shumway is Professor of English and Literary and Cultural Studies and Director of the Humanities Center at Carnegie Mellon University. His most recent book is John Sayles (2012). He contributed “Woody Allen: Charlie Chaplin of New Hollywood.”

You write in the opening of the book that animation created a new kind of film performance, and you suggest throughout that it may seem radical or counterintuitive to discuss animation as a kind of performance. In what ways must performance studies be rethought in order to apply to animated film? And conversely, what might the study of film animation contribute to our understanding of live action performance in films?

So many questions, Henry! Good ones, too. I maintain that theatrical animation is a version of cinema and not some completely different form of expression or medium. As you know, it’s trendy now to claim that all cinema is a subset of animation and now that cinema’s dead, animation has made a phoenix-like return as digital fx and CGI.^[1] I don’t think so. There have always been uses of animation techniques outside of cinema—for instruction, for avant-garde expression, scientific imaging, advertising, etc.—but for me “cinema” is a constellation of things. Things like a social experience (especially in the twentieth century), an entertainment enterprise (in the business sense of the word), storytelling and spectacle, a cultural barometer, and potentially an art, to name the most obvious. Borrowing an excellent term from Thomas Lamarre, cinema has always been a multilectical performance, capable of many readings and participating in various social orders. CGI may be subsumed inside that performance in films like The Life of Pi, or it may enable performances outside the cinematic experience as a video game, Internet avatar, or whatever. I really don’t see a conflict here.

 

The discipline known as performance studies is almost unknown to most film studies specialists. And most performance studies scholars seem to be oblivious to or in denial of the possibility that movies, television, video games, virtual reality, etc. are also performances. (There are some enlightened exceptions, like Noël Carroll.) One of the devious schemes in Shadow of a Mouse is to break down the disciplinary walls between these two pursuits of knowledge. I’d like us to consider media performances and stage performances using the same tools and criteria. For example, I insist that human actors on stage or on film and toon actors in media are all fictive and imaginative constructions, and whatever can be said about one class of performer may be said about the other. I provocatively claim that toons are as “live” as any other movie actor. After you read it, I know you’ll be convinced!

In Before Mickey, you suggest that the trope of the hand of the animator played important roles in explaining and foregrounding the process of animation for early film audiences. Yet, your examples throughout the book suggest that the relationship between the animator and his characters remains a central concern well in the 1930s. What kinds of meanings get attached to this relationship in these studio era works?

When I first conceived of animated cinema as a performance art (it was in a talk I gave at DreamWorks Animation about a dozen years ago), it became clear to me that the “hand of the animator” trope was much more pervasive and persistent than the rather short shelf life I originally had ascribed to it, and that it was best understood as a performative gesture and not some vague anthropological or psychological expression (although those are performances too). Actually, “the hand of the artist” is a figurative performance because it casts the animator or artist as a conventional symbol of the act of creation that is manifested in all cultures and times. Although the image of the hand endowing its creation with “life” has religious connotations, the trope doesn’t have to be mystical or theological. Usually it’s just a convenient artistic device, a stock way of starting a film. As a performance it serves two functions. It says, “I, the animator, am creating this toon being for your edification and so you should assume that I have godlike or artistic mojo.” And it says, “Imagine that you, the movie watcher, are also an animator and you are bringing this being to life.”

 

In the earliest films the hand of the artist-animator or his performing body often was shown literally making the film. Think of Winsor McCay and his Gertie, or Max Fleischer and Ko-Ko the clown. But this seldom happened during the classicizing of the cartoon that I mentioned earlier—although the literal hand motif never went away altogether. Instead the interventionist filmmaker became either an implied absence (invisible but making us aware of him/her) or a symbolic creative presence in the narrative. Quick examples would be the adaptation of the mainstream cinema convention of voice-over narration, as when the animator-narrator explains the faux-travelogue locales in Avery’s The Isle of Pingo Pongo, or Bug’s off-screen hanky panky in Duck Amuck.

As I read your book, I found myself thinking about the role of personification and anthropomorphization in 1930s animation. There are scenes in the Fleischer Brothers films where it seems every element on the screen has agency. How might our inability to separate figure from field impact an understanding of animation as performance?

 

This is very perceptive. As I think about it, your idea of universal agency in cartoons is another reason for regarding these films as performative. Unlike a non-animated film shot with actors before a camera, in animation nothing is an accident. Everything is motivated, even if its motive is to create the impression that it’s unmotivated or accidental. The jokes in cartoons that the frame has slipped in the projector or that there’s a hair in the film gate are carefully scripted and executed “accidents.” So yes, everything has agency and participates in the show, even the reporter’s pen in Betty Boop’s Rise to Fame that grows a butt and starts dancing the hula along with Betty. That also suggests that everything has the potential to be anthropomorphic, which is another way of saying to perform as if human.

 

There is non-anthropomorphic animation to be sure, like industrial films showing how to assemble a motor let’s say. But it’s hard to imagine what a non-anthropomorphic cartoon or animated feature would look like, isn’t it? As the great Robert Benchley short The Sex Life of the Polyp shows, even simple animated squiggles can be personified as human.

 

You write, “If Hollywood cartoons have a soul, it is vaudeville.” What does screen animation take from vaudeville? Why do you think vaudeville images were so pervasive in studio-era animation?

 

My historical research revealed that vaudeville and studio animation were deeply intertwined. There were material connections. Cartoons, especially Paul Terry’s Aesop’s Fables series (which were funded by a vaudeville circuit), were regularly screened as “acts” on live programs. And vaudeville acts were frequently represented within cartoons. Mickey’s early appearances often depict him as a stage entertainer. And the Fleischers filmed actual vaud performers such as Cab Calloway and the Royal Samoans.

But the connection also extends to animation’s adherence to a vaudevillesque aesthetic (a concept I borrowed from you when you discussed early sound comedy. Thanks!). The short films pack a punch, they are structured like stage business (sometimes but not necessarily on an actual drawn stage), with repartee between figurative character types, slapstick, singing and dancing, and a “wow finish.” The films assume that their viewers had either contemporary experience with vaudeville forms or a memory of them (perpetuated by the movies and radio as much as by studio cartoons).

A specialist in film history and visual culture, Donald Crafton earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan, his master’s degree from the University of Iowa, and a master’s and doctorate from Yale University. He was the founding director of the Yale Film Study Center, and served as director of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research. Crafton chaired the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre at Notre Dame from 1997 to 2002 and 2008-2010, and the Department of Music from 2004-2007.

Crafton’s research interests are in film history and visual culture. His most recent publications are Shadow of a Mouse: Performance, Belief, and World-Making in Animation (2013) and The Talkies: American Cinema’s Transition to Sound, 1926-1931 (California, 1999). He was named Academy Film Scholar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2000 and was the recipient of an NEH Fellowship for 2003-04. The World Festival of Animation presented him in 2004 with an award for his contributions to animation theory. He received the University of Notre Dame’s Presidential Award in 2007.

Tell us more about the distinction you draw in the book between figurative and embodied performance. What assumptions about the nature of acting and spectatorship are implicit in these different styles of animated performance? What accounts for the shifting popularity of these different models over time?

 

Whether a performance is figurative or embodied stems from how the behaviors were intended by the animators and understood by the viewers (which often are not the same experience). They aren’t opposites; they are registers that may overlap, like bass and treble adjustments. Figurative performances are given by cartoon characters (which I call toons, as used in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?) whose interest derives mainly from their exaggerated physical traits. These could be a funny walk, caricatural references outside the film, or a distinctive way of talking (like Goofy’s “Uh-hyult, uh-hyult”).

Think of early Mickey or early Bugs. They were beings who were types (small-town boy and slick trickster, respectively). Their behavior was hostage to the collections of attributes, quirks and attitudes that constituted their actions. So Mickey was a caricature that blended recognizable traits borrowed from Charles Lindbergh and Buster Keaton; Bugs was hyperactive and nutty. Several have pointed out that he’s a schnorer, a friend or guest who takes excessive liberties. The repetition of their singular mannerisms was part of the humor. The figurative performance mode wasn’t limited to animation. Comedians like Harry Langdon, Jacques Tati, Roberto Benigni, Jerry Lewis, and Woody Allen in his first films exploited it too.

 

Embodied performance reflects animators’ Stanislavskian goals and their expectations (or hopes) that viewers’ empathetic understanding and belief in the temperament and uniqueness of the character would understand, accept, and “complete” it. The later ‘thirties Mickey, say in Moose Hunters, integrates him into a believable environment. He responds to it as the viewer or any individual might, with some degree of unpredictability. He engages in banter and give-and-take with Donald and Goofy, who are foils with their own individuality. The animators and we spectators readily imbue them with characteristics that go beyond their simple existence. We care about the fate of the chums and the outcome of the story.

 

It may be too complicated to explain the mechanics of the change here, but the figurative and embodied modes complemented and competed all through the 1930s and 40s. Although Disney took his filmmaking far in the embodied direction, Langer shows that the figurative New York style could intrude even in that studio, as in the “Pink Elephants on Parade” number in Dumbo. Most of the Disney princes are figurative too—necessary placeholders in the plots in need of some “princeness” to redeem the princesses.

 

For various reasons, the public and critics grew tired of the embodied approach. The popularity of films from Warner Bros., MGM, and later from UPA avoided the embodied style or actively parodied it (Avery’s Screwy Squirrel, Jones’ What’s Opera, Doc?).

It also became clear that the enormous investment in hardware (such as multiplane cameras) and the immense animation infrastructure of the Disney studio was not necessary to achieve empathetic characters. There’s Wile E. Coyote, naturally, but UPA’s Gerald McBoing Boing might be the best example. Jones’ geometric romance in The Dot and the Line, seen in this light, tested the minimal graphic investment needed to “embody” character.

 

Today there are plenty of examples of embodied acting in animation—Disney/Pixar’s Up or Brave, for instance, which have a retro feel because of it, and despite their sleek digital surfaces.

The vast majority of animation, though, is figurative and exists in work for television and video games. These are stock characters in conventional roles doing conventional things. The personality is supplied imaginatively by the viewer/user, or programmed as a combination of preselected attributes.

Your titles call attention to the degree to which Walt Disney has dominated our understanding of American animation, even as your books make a concerted effort to discuss a much broader range of animators and studios. Why do you think animation history still remains so deeply under the shadow of the Mouse?

 

Having just done some holiday shopping at the Disney store, I’m inclined to say that it’s all about character. The Disney formula for “toons” always has and continues to emphasize a certain definition of personality. There’s limited individuality, meaning that certain expressive behaviors are allowed—let’s say Ariel’s rebellious actions—but never exceed the tightly enclosed limits of the character as a figure—those defining the role of “princess” in the mermaid’s case. Another aspect that makes Disney characters eternal, to borrow the marketing lingo for a moment, is that they are believable versions of people, acting out childlike behaviors. We all know (or maybe are) someone like that. Peter Pan is one of those types. Disney films also are full of adolescent folks playing at being grownup—Ariel, Tiana, Wendy, and Snow White (and Remy, if rats have adolescence). But even that is regressive, since their behaviors are clearly childish. They’re playing house. They are not believable performances of adulthood (which can be relatively boring).

 

Cartoon characters, Disney’s especially, succeed because they are designed to invite consumers to complete them imaginatively and to fully embody them. These characters often are diminutive versions of imagined selves. The possibilities are endless—aggressive, passive, maternal/paternal, sexy, smart, and even plush avatars. There was a stuffed Pumbaa in the store that I found particularly sympathetic…. Now conglomerate Disney enters our lives at some level almost daily, and whether these entertainment commodities are cinematic, or athletic in the case of ESPN, or the transcendental fantasies of the theme parks and cruises, or the plastic princesses, the company’s in the business of selling mediatized bodies performing, whether real, simulated or virtual.

 

Of course, Mouse, as Variety calls Disney, has been perfecting the machinery for bringing this concept to consumers by way of various points of retail merchandizing for about 80 years. As for the animated films, the studio during its successful periods has been adept at anticipating and reacting to consumer interests. The immediate embrace of Winnie the Pooh as a collectible object and then the gradual acceptance of “Princess” as a desired existential category. On the contrary, we could cite the lack of traction for other franchises like Merlin and King Arthur (The Sword in the Stone), or “Kevin Flynn” (Tron). This suggests that animated filmmaking is like other Hollywood enterprises in the sense that box office trends ultimately are unfathomable because consumer response remains largely unpredictable.

A specialist in film history and visual culture, Donald Crafton earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan, his master’s degree from the University of Iowa, and a master’s and doctorate from Yale University. He was the founding director of the Yale Film Study Center, and served as director of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research. Crafton chaired the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre at Notre Dame from 1997 to 2002 and 2008-2010, and the Department of Music from 2004-2007.

Crafton’s research interests are in film history and visual culture. His most recent publications are Shadow of a Mouse: Performance, Belief, and World-Making in Animation (2013) and The Talkies: American Cinema’s Transition to Sound, 1926-1931 (California, 1999). He was named Academy Film Scholar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2000 and was the recipient of an NEH Fellowship for 2003-04. The World Festival of Animation presented him in 2004 with an award for his contributions to animation theory. He received the University of Notre Dame’s Presidential Award in 2007.

Reclaiming historic models of fan practices has proven challenging, so I am hoping we might take some methodological insights from the ways you each approached this project. What were some of the challenges and opportunities in reconstructing monster fandom as a historical phenomenon?

Matt:  I found it essential to foreground the nature by which FM presented and remediated fan practices.  As such, FM offers a wonderful model of how fandom can be presented to itself.  This was, of course, key to my analysis of Ackerman as an intermediary who would liberally revise letters sent to the magazine, speak for the fan, and shape fan desires.  Ideally, I would have liked to include in my essay examinations of fan films that could not be represented in the magazine outside of stills.  There are a couple of very good compilations of “monster kid” amateur films available on DVD that would be a very good resource for this work (even if one cannot make a direct connection to FM in all cases).  Bob’s essay in particular did a good job of considering the actual film production in very productive ways.

Bob: I never think of myself as practicing anything so organized as a methodology, but certainly this project’s method hinged on having access to the text and texture of Famous Monsters itself, in particular the Captain Company advertising pages where so much of monster culture’s material practices were on explicit display. To today’s eye, FM’s ads might seem like simple commercial hype (as Mark mentions below), secondary to the editorial content. But along with other fixtures of the magazine like contests, fan clubs, and classifieds, FM’s ads were extremely busy sites of social and material exchange — invitations to participate, nodes of interactivity in the magazine’s paper network of publishing and the U.S. Postal Service. And excitingly, through those pages thread names, titles, products that connect to larger histories of fan creativity and cult media, like Jim Danforth and Dennis Muren and their movie Equinox. My “archive,” by the way, was a DVD containing the entire run of FM in the comics-reader .CBR format, purchased online. No libraries nearby have FM in their holdings, and my personal collection is a handful of favorites cherry-picked over the years from eBay. Admittedly, then, that “texture” I mentioned earlier is a pallid, pixelated ghost of the weighty stacks of beautiful pulpy newsprint and vivid covers that constitute FM’s own material being. But without the digital archive’s ease of access, comprehensiveness of content, and ability to do screen captures, I wouldn’t have been able to write the essay.

Mark: I’m particularly interested in diachronic studies of fan responses to celebrities, and methodologically this means lots of time spent reading through letters to the editor of various old publications, hoping to stumble across those little gems that communicate something about audience reactions and responses in their historical contexts. For this essay, I wanted to chart the continuities and discrepancies of reception of Lon Chaney’s star image from the 1920s to the present. I find it fascinating that Chaney was one of the biggest stars of the silent era, but at some point in time interest in him became something “specialized,” and he also became an idol for boys rather than a star appreciated by a broader audience. FM is a really valuable source for researching this shift–in part because of Ackerman’s much-proclaimed love for Chaney, but even more because of the ways, as Matt put it, that FM presented and modelled fandom to fans. Primarily, though, FM is fairly unique in the sheer amount of reader-generated content, which at least theoretically provides greater access to “the people” in their own words. But this also raises a caution as far as methodology. I hadn’t realized that, as Matt mentioned, Ackerman would tinker with readers’ letters before they were printed. It just goes to show, with historic reception studies one always has to be on guard, both in granting too much credence to the evidence, and in being alert to ways in which you might be making presumptions or “thinking for” the historical audience through a 21st-century mindset.

 

Natasha: Like Bob, my primary archive consisted of a DVD (purchased online) that contained the entire run of FM.  Access to every issue of the magazine in a digital format was crucial in allowing me the opportunity to trace a female fan presence in the magazine spanning 25 years.   I was able to borrow a sampling of paper issues of FM from the 50s, 60s, and 70s, however, echoing Bob’s point,  it would have been impossible for me to write this essay without access to the entire digital archive.  Being able to access a comprehensive collection of the magazine was essential in conducting a diachronic study and tracing Ackerman’s steadfast and consistent support for a female fan presence in the pages of F.M. Digital access to a whole range of historical documents that used to demand time-consuming and expensive visits to archives provides a rich ground for re-examining cultural assumptions, generalizations and creating a more nuanced and multidimensional understanding of historic fan practices.

 

Most work in fan studies has centered around mostly female-centered forms of fan culture. In what ways does studying Famous Monsters give us a way into talking about the relationship of fandom to masculinity?

Matt:  Of course, Mark’s essay is an excellent model for this and Natasha’s essay offers an exemplary model of how to consider female fandom in the context of male fandom.  For me, both of these essays have inspired much thought and reflection on the gender politics of superhero fandom.

Mark: I think FM is very useful in the ways it complicates what we think we might know about childhood and adolescence in the 1950s and 60s, in that it provides a historical record of things not “spoken” elsewhere–or at least not spoken as directly. You can find readers talking about feeling alienated from their peers, or of paying some price for non-conformity, which often means not conforming to normative masculinity. For another project, I spent quite a bit of time looking at old Boy’s Life magazines, and the contrast between the stereotypically uncomplicated, all-American, Leave it to Beaver image of 1950s/60s boyhood found therein and the more fraught relationship to masculinity evident in FM is pretty remarkable (although I must add I love Leave it to Beaver). I also want to voice my admiration for Natasha’s essay–not just for her valuable work, but for those girls and young women who sent their letters and photos in to FM, which in the 1950s was probably a pretty daring, brave move for many of them. They were pioneers!

Bob: I’m definitely interested in the boy culture reflected in FM’s pages, and the magazine’s larger function as a kind of primer in certain modes of fandom (the “affirmational” as it’s sometimes called, to distinguish it from the “transformative”) conventionally associated with the male gender. However, I take seriously the caveat that no fannish activity or orientation is exclusively the province of one gender or another, and that FM’s readership was a diverse collection of boys, girls, and presumably transgendered individuals outside that limiting binary. But the skills and predilections we discover as children are the roots of those we take into adulthood, so certainly I see FM as an important player in the acculturation and encouragement of behaviors that later come to seem “innate” or “essential” aspects of fanboys — in particular, the accumulation of knowledge about make-up and visual effects that marked my own fascination with FM and most subsequent fan objects. So in short, while boys aren’t a priori horror fans who build model kits or collect action figures, being a horror fan who builds and collects arguably seeds the kind of subjectivities later associated, if only through self-identification, with being a boy/man.

 

Natasha, you turn the lens in the other direction, identifying the ways women were included or excluded from this fan culture which had historically been male-dominated. What roles do you think Ackerman and his magazine played in this process? What kinds of evidence did you find that helped you to reconstruct the history of female participation in monster fandom?

Natasha: Ackerman was extremely influential in creating an inclusive fan culture around his magazine.  As Matt’s interview with Ackerman reaffirms, he had total control over the content of F.M.  Not only did Ackerman strategically print captions such as “Guys and Gals Behind the Ghouls’ and ‘Girls will be Ghouls’ on the covers of the earliest issues of F. M., but he also insured that women held a variety of key roles in the magazine’s production.  Ackerman was highly aware of the way horror and science fiction fan cultures historically structured themselves as exclusive boyzones.  In 1946, Ackerman proposed an all-female guest-of-honour list for the Fourth World Science Fiction Convention, the Pacificon. This proposition was immediately shot down by his colleagues.  Ackerman used his agency at FM as a way to showcase that monster fandom wasn’t just for boys.  Pictures and letters by female fans were incorporated into the magazine’s regular features such as ‘Fiendom’s Finest’ or ‘Fan Mail.” With a circulation of 2.4 million in the 1970s, FM made a significant impact on American culture.  Ackerman’s influence on female monster/horror fans is still evident today.  Jovanka Vuckovic, director of The Captured Bird (2012) and editor-in-chief of Rue Morgue counts Ackerman as one of her key inspirations for pursuing her career path.

There’s a strong focus throughout these essays on the ways fandom translated into material cultural practices. What are some of the practices Famous Monsters inspired and supported? And what might the study of such practices contribute to a fuller understanding of the nature of participatory culture?

Matt: I’m intrigued by the notion of curatorial consumption.  I recently came across a fan’s posting of his FM collection that was quite detailed in terms of how he catalogued and stored his issues.  It was a museum level of archival care that provoked some counter-responses from other FM readers about denying the pleasure of simply reading your old FMs.   Further along these lines, a lot of these middle-aged ‘monster kids’ have transformed their homes into modest facsimiles of the Ackermansion.  Again, the notion of being a curator for a museum of one’s childhood passions is fascinating.  Such spaces are interesting because they typically remain these abstractions presented visually on the web and in competition with each other.

Mark: It’s a blast to look at the copious advertisements in those old issues, with all the “Scare your parents! Amaze your friends!” hype, for what turned out to be tawdry cardboard bats or “ghosts” made of vinyl sheeting (I know, for I was a victim of the come-on). Matt and Bob both have done really interesting work on fan consumption as a form of identity work, and as a form of archiving. I think it’s worth re-emphasizing that a lot of the material cultural practices prompted by the magazine were of a DIY nature–putting together and painting models, making films, using creating monster makeups, etc., and of consuming supplies in the interest of making a finished product.

Bob: I have little to add to Matt and Mark’s excellent thoughts, except to say that I’m increasingly dubious that fandom exists except in material cultural practices — that is, fandom manifests in activities, objects, and spaces — and that fan studies has traditionally been a bit narrow in approaching fandom primarily through what we might call its textual technologies and traces, such as reading, writing, rereading and rewriting, poaching, etc. While these are material practices as well, the temptation is to elevate them over the more bluntly material “things” of fan culture, since those things are so often damned through ties to commercialism or their positioning as amateurish, crude, or flawed. In future projects I hope to focus on the object forms of fandom as dynamically expressive practices, simultaneously social and private, that intersect with the commercial and the mass-produced in messy but significant ways.

Mark Hain is a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University, and is currently working on his dissertation, which is a historical reception study looking at star image and how audiences interpret and find use for these images, with a specific focus on Theda Bara.

Bob Rehak is an Assistant Professor in the Film and Media Studies Program at Swarthmore College. His research interests include special effects and the material practices of fandom.

Natashia Ritsma is a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University. Her research interests focus on documentary, experimental and educational film and television.

Matt Yockey is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theater and Film at the University of Toledo. His research interest is on the reception of Hollywood genre films.

I periodically get a chance to teach classes on comics and graphic storytelling. I was able to teach such a subject in Spring 2012 at USC and hope to teach it again here next year. I shared my syllabus for the class at the time. Early on in the class, the challenge is to get students to think more deeply about the range of different devices which comics artists might use to communicate meaning. We were lucky this most recent time to have a really rich essay on this topic which Randy Duncan wrote for Critical Approaches to Comics, which was our principal textbook. Duncan’s essay uses David Mazzuchelli, Asterios Polyp as its primary example. This book turned out to be an eye-opener for many of my students, because of its diverse range of visual symbols, its expressive use of color, and its diverse ways of deploying typefaces to capture the different communication styles of the various characters. Mikhail Skoptsov, then a Cinema School graduate student who was taking the class, was inspired to dig deeper into David Mazzuchelli’s work and developed an argument about the persistent interest throughout many of his stories in exploring the challenges characters face in communicating with each other. Skoptsov, now a student in the Media and Cultures program at Brown, has continued to revise this essay and I am delighted to have a chance to share it with you today.  My own sense is that it sheds some important light both on Mazzuchelli and on the “language” of comics more generally. Enjoy.

The Visual Linguistics of David Mazzuchelli

by Mikhail Skoptsov

After working on a number of high-profile projects, such as Batman: Year One and Daredevil: Born Again, David Mazzuchelli broke away from superhero comics to self-publish the magazine Rubber Blanket. Despite lasting only three issues, the publication showcased works that Mazzuchelli had fully scripted and illustrated all by himself, forming some of the recurring techniques, themes and motifs he would later apply to his co-adaptation of Paul Auster’s City of Glass (1994) with Paul Karasik and his original masterpiece Asterios Polyp (2009). I would argue that these three works evince that Mazzuchelli is a modern graphic novel auteur, who repeatedly explores issues of language and communication. To prove this, I will examine the aforementioned two novels and the short story Big Man from Rubber Blanket #3.

I will begin by analyzing a scene from Big Man, whose titular character is a mysterious giant that washes up on a riverbank, one day, to the consternation of a rural farming community. When Peter, a farmer, tries to unsuccessfully speak with Big Man, he realizes that the giant doesn’t understand English. In the first of the two bottom panels on page 23, Peter says to Big Man: “If you can understand me, we want to know where you come from.” (23). In the next panel, Peter tries to use hand gestures to clarify the meaning of his words. This time he speaks slowly, placing pauses between his words: “Where… do you… come from?” On the first panel of page 24, the Big Man responds with the sound “Hhhn?”, while mimicking with his hands the action of writing. By doing this, he physically expresses a desire to have something to write with.

Subsequently, we see Peter hand him a file clipper and a pencil in the next couple of panels, evincing that he understood the gesture. Big Man then begins to write. When panel 6 reveals the Big Man’s text, it turns out that Big Man’s writing is indecipherable, as it appears in the form of signs that resemble hieroglyphics, which Peter, the other farmers and the readers cannot understand. This establishes that Big Man normally speaks and writes in a language that is unfamiliar to normal people.

Thus, this series of panels juxtaposes the Big Man’s ability to communicate physically through gesture with his inability to communicate verbally and through writing. Through the juxtaposition, Mazzuchelli proposes the idea that language can be physical, that it does not necessarily have to consist of spoken words and written text. In other words, he espouses an alternate way of communicating. Supporting this idea is the fact that Big Man never utters a word via ‘speech balloons’ or ‘word bubbles’, which represent the traditional means of visualizing dialogue between characters in comics. This is clearly visible in panel 8 on page 34 and panel 2 on page 35, where the little speech-impaired girl Rebecca successfully communicates with Big Man without verbally forming words and sentences.

Instead, as we can see in panels 3 and 4 on page 35, both of them utilize the nasal sound “Snrrt!” to speak to each other. Though they pronounce the same noise, Rebecca’s appears within white speech balloons, designating it as ‘dialogue’, while the Big Man’s “Snrrt” appears outside of a balloon, placing it in line with other noises such as the “THUD” in panel 6. The fact that “Snrrt” appears as both dialogue and noise illustrates that noise can have the same communicative function as dialogue. This positions noise as a viable means of communication, an alternative to speech and writing.  Another possible interpretation could be that noise functions as a language, where a single sound can stand in for entire words or sentences.

One could construe the fact that Big Man and Rebecca converse using only “Snrrt” as them speaking a language only they understand. One doesn’t know exactly what Big Man and Rebecca mean by pronouncing “Snrrt!”, but the two apparently understand one another, as they use the sound repeatedly. As such, language becomes intrinsic not just to the plot and story of Big Man, but also to the perception of the titular character by the other characters and by the readers. Language essentially defines Big Man as a character, portraying him as an ‘other’ to the farmers and a familiar to Rebecca.

Language similarly defines the character of Peter Stillman, the reclusive billionaire of City of Glass, who hires main character Daniel Quinn to investigate Peter’s abusive and insane father. Quinn learns that Stillman Senior’s insanity apparently came about as a result of his research on language and religion. As Quinn’s narration indicates, Stillman believed that the fall of man from Paradise brought about the fall of language. After the fall, language “…had been severed from God.” (Karasik and Mazzuchelli 39) The idea of creating a new language or recovering the old language became a driving force for Stillman Sr., which he confirms to Quinn in a park conversation in the last panel on page 69. Thus, Mazzuchelli portrays language in City of Glass as part of one’s identity, as well as a source of character motivation. It can function not just as a means of communication, but as an extension of the characters.

Strengthening this view is the author’s visualization and foregrounding of communi-cation though an expressive utilization of text and word balloons, as well as the combination of words with abstract images. City of Glass first creates the impression that it abides by the traditional visualization of dialogue in graphic novels, wherein all the letters appear in the same font and the same size. For example, in the second panel of page 28, Quinn asks Stillman’s wife Virginia: “How was Peter finally discovered?” Virginia responds: “There was a fire”. Both lines of dialogue appear in spherical speech balloons with all letters in uppercase and in the same font. The majority of conversations within the novel utilize this style.

On the one hand, this establishes the font and speech balloon format Quinn and Virginia speak in as the ‘common’ format of the novel. On the other, this serves to distinguish the sequences, where conversations diverge from this format, which the scene that introduces Stillman Jr illustrates perfectly. When he begins to talk on page 15, the reader should immediately notice that Peter’s dialogue is visually different from that of the other characters. For one thing, his words mix lower and uppercase letters. The word “Peter” for example, capitalizes the “P” and the “T” while leaving the rest of the letters in lowercase. Such an amalgamation suggests that Peter speaks in an inconsistent, disorderly manner, in comparison to the other characters, who speak normally.

For another, Peter’s word balloon reaches deeply into his mouth, in stark contrast to the previous word balloons in the book, all of which appear at a distance from the mouth of the character, whose words they are conveying. This distinct visual presentation gives the impression that the balloon is a part of Peter himself, a natural extension of his character. Compounding this impression are the subsequent panels, which continue to display the word balloons literally emerging from inside Peter, each new panel closing the distance between Peter’s mouth and the frame. The second panel moves towards a medium close-up, the third to a close-up. This continues until the ninth and final panel has literally entered deep inside the throat of Stillman, which resembles an endless black-and-white spiral.

The word balloon continues to emerge from inside the spiral, the pattern making it appear, as if the panels have been following the spiral to its source. This continues in the 3×3 panels from pages 16-23, which display various surreal and abstract images, including a puddle of water (16), a gondolier (17), a grate (19), a bird (20) and a guitar (21). Multiple panels sometimes display the same image, only at different angles, with the gondolier occupying 15 panels from pages 16 and 17. All of the panels feature Peter’s word balloon emerging from the image and resuming his dialogue.

For example, Peter says in panel 9 of page 15: “…They say mother died.” On the next page, the frame displays the word balloon, reaching below the frame, continuing: “I say what they say because I know nothing.” The next panel shows the balloon coming from a puddle, continuing: “There was this. Dark. Very dark…” This combination of images signifies that Peter is the one speaking at all times. He remains the source of the dialogue. However, the reader sees different visual representations of the source/Peter. Thus, the use of multiple visual sources implies a continuous shift in Peter’s manner of speaking. The order of the images seems random and the lack of an identifiable pattern indicates that Peter has no control over what he says, his words essentially transmitting a stream of consciousness.

Additionally, Peter’s sentences can come off as incoherent, full of sudden changes of subject without a logical reason. As the aforementioned three lines of dialogue attest, after talking about the death of his mother, he suddenly and inexplicably shifts towards speaking about the dark room he was in as a child. Altogether, the mixing of uppercase and lowercase letters, the incoherent sentences and the different visual representations of Peter speaking express the idea that Peter is mentally unstable. He himself confirms his instability when he says: “I know that all is not right in my head” (21) As such, Mazzuchelli ultimately depicts communication expressionistically to visualize a character’s interiority to the reader.

Peter’s unique way of speaking/communicating distinguishes him from everyone else within the context of the novel. Thus, the image of the word balloon reaching literally inside him connotes that language is a part of him, an extension of his self. The plot confirms this by positioning Stillman Sr.’s search for language as the cause of his insanity. It compelled him to lock his son alone in a room for 9 years (Karasik and Mazzuchelli 27), ultimately leading to Peter’s mental instability.

Mazzuchelli expands on the idea of language functioning as one’s extension in Asterios Polyp by depicting every single character with a particular text font and speech balloon. To illustrate this, I present Figure 1, which features a sequence from the book between Asterios and his wife Hana, as they try to tell a story to a group of unseen interlocutors in a restaurant. Asterios’ text appears in all six panels in rectangular polygons, while his words are always uppercase, never lowercase, italicized or bold. The rectangular form of his speech balloons reflects his status as a professor of architecture and his preference for, as well his interest solids and rectangular flats. Meanwhile, while the use of solely uppercase letters reflects his aversion to change and his preference for rigid order and structure.

Hana, by contrast, speaks in spherical word balloons and her dialogue uses both uppercase and lowercase letters. This places her in direct opposition to Asterios visually, reflecting her down-to-Earth personality, her openness to change and her interest in non-rectangular figures, such as circles and straight lines, as she herself mentions towards the end of the book. Like in City of Glass, the text frame also functions in an expressive manner. For instance, the third panel portrays Asterios’ hexagonal speech box in the foreground, relegating Hana’s spherical speech bubble to the background.

As Hana describes how “…this one big guy tries to push…”, Asterios interjects with his addition: “Before that though, a couple of women squeezed in front of him.” Instead of telling the viewers via narration that Asterios interrupts Hana, Mazzuchelli depicts this through image and composition by visualizing Asterios’ box over Hana’s bubble. Through this, he additionally conveys Asterios’ egocentrism, his belief that he knows better than Hana. Hence, the text font and the text frame visually define and contrast the characters’ personalities, as well as convey how the characters speak, as opposed to just what they say.

By portraying everyone in the novel with his/her own particular text font and/or frame, Mazzuchelli illustrates that every person has an individual manner of speaking. Thus, the manner of speech becomes an extension of the character. This goes in hand with how the author describes language in Figures 2 and 3. Figure 2 opens with a narration. It states: “What if reality (as perceived) were simply an extension of the self? Wouldn’t that color the way each individual experiences the world?” The images on Figure 2 depict numerous people in a variety of art styles. Thus, the association of word and image indicates that the art styles all represent the different ways that individuals can experience the world.

If one’s perception of reality is an extension of one’s self and one’s manner of speaking is an extension of the self, then, by illustrating how every individual has a distinct manner of speaking, Mazzuchelli conveys that every individual has a different manner of perceiving reality. In Figure 3, the narration continues: “That might explain why some people get along so effortlessly…”. Images of men and women, drawn in an identical art style, appear next to it. In conjunction with the previous figure, the identical art style indicates that these men and women experience the world in a similar manner. The narration indicates that the images represent the people that get along easily, evincing that people who have similar perceptions of reality can effortlessly get along with one another.

Conversely, the characters in the next two images appear in different styles and the narration concludes with: “…while others don’t.” The association of these words with the images signifies that these characters perceive the world differently. So, they do not get along easily. Finally, the author presents two different characters speaking in one overlapping speech bubble. The words inside all say “Hello” in three different languages: English, Hawaiian and Hebrew. The narration below the image refers to the previous statement of people getting along: “Although people do keep trying.” Mazzuchelli associates the act of speaking, the act of verbal communication with individuals getting along or finding a common way of experiencing the world, as the overlapping speech bubble indicates.

This means that if language is key to verbal communication between different individuals, then language can be a means for people to find a common way of experiencing the world. While every character in the novel possesses a distinct style of speech and a unique perception of reality, the English language remains the one constant between them all. So, language becomes an extension of every single character within Asterios Polyp, functioning as an intermediary bet-ween the various individuals’ different perceptions of reality, allowing them to arrive at a unified perception. Together with the examples from Big Man and City of Glass, this proves that Mazzu-chelli is an auteur that visually foregrounds language and communication in comic form.

Overall, we can see that Mazzuchelli emphasizes language and communication throughout his body of work. By expressively using the text, the author helps define his characters through their manner of speech and their use of language. In addition, he raises various questions about how and why people communicate, about what language is and what its functions are. If communication is usually an unobtrusive and inexpressive element of mainstream graphic novels, it is a visible and distinguishing characteristic of the oeuvre of Mazzuchelli. So it isn’t surprising that Mazzuchelli and co-author Paul Karasik compared the adaptation of the novel City of Glass into a graphic novel to “… a translation from one language to another” (Kartalou-polos). In this regard, one could consider Mazzuchelli a graphic novel linguist.

Citations

Karasik, Paul and Mazzuchelli, David. City of Glass, The Graphic Novel. Picador, New York 2004. Revised version of Neon Lit: Paul Auster’s City of Glass, Avon Books, 1994. Based on the novel City of Glass by Paul Auster, Sun and Moon Press, 1985.

Kartaloupolos, Bill. “Three Questions for David Mazzucchelli” in Indy Magazine, Spring 2004. http://www.indyworld.com/indy/spring_2004/mazzucchelli_interview/index.html

Mazzuchelli, David. Asterios Polyp. Pantheon Books, New York, 2009

Mazzuchelli, David. “Big Man” in Rubber Blanket #3. Ed. David Mazzuchelli and Richmond Lewis, Rubber Blanket Press, Hoboken NJ, 1993, 17-64

Mikhail Leonidovich Skoptsov is currently a second semester PHD student at Brown University’s department of Modern Culture and Media. He has a BA in Cinema Studies from New York University and an MA in Film Studies from the University of Southern California. His current research interests include: postmodernism in cinema, media piracy, fan productions, serialization in cinema and television, as well as trans-media storytelling.

In many ways, iCue was also designed to respond to some of the challenges confronting contemporary journalism. What insights did you take from this project about the difficulties of engaging young news consumers and the challenges of reforming current journalism practices?

This challenge was part of the original vision, but NBC was quite wary of what students might do with their media if left to their own devices, or what they might report on if they were the ones doing the reporting.  The remix ideas were quite limited through the games.  And the participatory journalism was a successful small scale experiment that was cut from the larger rollout.

You frame this book as an account of a “failure,” yet you end with some hope that the lessons learned through iCue have informed subsequent initiatives by NBC News. In what ways?

NBC has learned a lot about what it takes to make something for the education market in terms of design, marketing and messaging.  Many of the same staffers remain in their NBC Learn department. They can now use that knowledge to do some interesting things.  They are certainly taking an incremental approach to making such change though, starting from the place that they know teachers are interested in and then slowly pushing those boundaries.  They have told us they want to bring back games and social media in their project.  The market is certainly more ready now than it was six years ago – we hope that they take that risk.

To its credit, NBC has also elevated the public conversation around education through the annual Education Nation summit and its associated workshops and presentations around the country.  To see a major network devote its “A Team” and multiple channels to shine a spotlight on important issues is perhaps one of the greatest outcomes of the “failures” that their project team encountered early on.  As we said, many of the core team, including the senior producers who believed in the initial project enough to leave the safety of their traditional roles, are still fully engaged in NBC Learn.  Their commitment to improving education is laudable and should be recognized.  They are warriors for the cause.

Many academic projects proceed with the assumption that “if we build it, they will come.” What might be a better approach for academic researchers wanting to establish a community around their educational interventions?

Marketing.  Academic projects don’t think enough about this and often funders don’t provide for this portion of the project.  But academic projects need marketing too in order to get out there.  Yes, there are viral successes that have foregone this step, but those are few and far between.  We have seen marketing work in our project Vanished, which got thousands of kids playing an alternate reality game about science over the course of 6 weeks, and we have also seen in with our recent Lure of the Labyrinth challenge, which attracted tens of thousands

How did the iCue project contribute to the development of the Learning Games Network? What new model have you adopted for promoting innovation in education around games-based learning?

The challenges we confronted in getting the NBC team to understand the research and then apply it in design inspired us to start a non-profit that would help bridge the gap between research and practice.  We realized we could be better advocates for change as partners with a wide variety of stakeholders, supporting their efforts through the entire game-based learning pipeline, from design and production to implementation and student assessment.  Coming to understand the myriad challenges that are both shared and unique to textbook publishers, national broadcasters, and international technology companies as they strive to innovate in the education market has helped us explore better, we think, strategies to support their business goals.  We want to enable market leaders to succeed because those victories, small and large, ultimately raise the awareness of the power and potential game-based learning products and services. In turn, this enables our colleagues in academia to raise the level of scholarship they pursue.

What do you see as the biggest successes so far to come out of the work of the Learning Games Network team? How do you define success in this space? what factors do you feel contributed to their success?

Our biggest success is a somewhat personal one.  Having been working together for the better part of 12 years, first as colleagues at MIT and now as a group with our hands (and feet) in different organizations, our core team is still intact.  The fact that the four founders of Learning Games Network bring such different perspectives in scholarship, creative design, and business makes us uniquely strong and effective.  We each trust what the others bring to the table in solving challenges, which is really unique and especially necessary since game-based learning is such an interdisciplinary enterprise.

That trust manifests in the culture that’s emerged in our Cambridge and Madison studios.  We are developing professionals who are strengthening skills that are a hybrid of academic, technical, and commercial backgrounds, as well as encouraging that kind of cultivation with our partners.  Over the past few years, our efforts have been rewarded by grants from major foundations and contracts with market leaders.  Our most recent success came at this year’s Meaningful Play conference, where Quandary, a game we produced in our Cambridge studio to support ethical thinking among young people, and Fair Play, a game produced in our Madison studio that sensitizes players to the challenges of race and equity in science, both won awards among a very competitive field of submissions.

 

 

 

Eric Klopfer is Professor and Director of the Scheller Teacher Education Program and The Education Arcade at MIT.  Klopfer’s research focuses on the development and use of computer games and simulations for building understanding of science and complex systems. He is the co-author of the book, Adventures in Modeling: Exploring Complex, Dynamic Systems with StarLogo, and author of Augmented Learning: Research and Design of Mobile Educational Games from MIT Press.  Klopfer is also the co-founder and President of the non-profit Learning Games Network.

Jason Haas is Graduate Research Assistant in the Media Lab and in The Education Arcade at MIT. His research focuses on the design and efficacy of learning games. Recent research and design has been for The Radix Endeavor, a Gates Foundation-funded MMORPG for science and math learning. Previous research has involved the role of narrative in learning in the casual physics games Woosh, Waker, and Poikilia and in large-scale collective intelligence gaming  in Vanished.

Alex Chisholm is Co-Founder and Executive Director of Learning Games Network, a non-profit organization bridging the gap between research and practice in game-based learning.  He has collaborated on product and program development with Microsoft, LeapFrog, NBC Universal, BrainPOP, Federal Reserve Bank-New York, and the Hewlett and Gates Foundations, among others.

Today, I am using my blog space to share announcements of two upcoming events which may be of interest to some of my readers

Transmedia Lab Competition at RioContentMarket 2013

The Transmedia Lab is one of the activities of the RioContentMarket, an international event on multiplatform content production open to the audiovisual and digital media industry. The Transmedia Lab aims to promote professional training and project improvement.

In the last edition of RioContentMarket, in 2012, more than 100 projects from all of Latin America were submitted and 12 transmedia projects were selected to participate in the Transmedia Lab, which lasted 4 days. The project’s authors and representatives consulted with market experts; were presented in pitching sessions to buyers, co-producers and television channels; and participated in meetings with domestic and international market players.

Besides creating opportunities for all participating projects, three awards were given and chosen by three different groups of judges:

(i)            Reed MIDEM Award (participation and pitching at MIPCube): Buenaventura Mon Amour project (Colombia);

(ii)           PETROBRAS/The Alchemists Award (participation in Transmedia Hollywood): Contatos project (Brazil), and

(iii)          Turner Broadcasting Award (USD 10,000 for project development): Contatos project (Brazil).

In the 2013 edition of RioContentMarket, the Transmedia Lab will focus on transmedia projects for TV series and 30 projects will be selected: 10 international and 20 Brazilian projects. The Transmedia Lab – Series will be held from February 17 through 22, 2013 in two steps (I) Capacitating from February 17th to 19th, and (II)Pitching and Panels, February 20th to 22nd. The Capacitating step will be held following the training of the projects’ authors for pitching and the scheduling of meetings between consultants and creative producers of the selected projects. The Pitching and Panels will be held during the RioContentMarket 2013 with keynotes and panels related to transmedia topics and pitching projects for industry and market professionals.

The Transmedia Lab objectives for 2013 are:

·                enhance television series narratives, through specialized consulting with market experts;

·                improve the transmedia projects for television series to qualify them for the audiovisual market nationally and internationally;

·                bring players together, encouraging the dialogue between independent producers and channel executives;

·                create business opportunities for the development of high quality TV series; and

·                give visibility to selected projects.

For more information, visit this site. 

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Media in Transition 8: Public Media, Private Media

Conference dates: May 3-5 (Fri.-Sun.), 2013 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.

An archive of previous Media in Transition conferences, 1999-2011.

CALL FOR PAPERS

Submissions accepted on a rolling basis until Friday, March 1, 2013 (evaluations begin in November). Please see the end of this call for papers for submission instructions.

The distinction between public and private – where the line is drawn and how it is sometimes inverted, the ways that it is embraced or contested – says much about a culture. Media have been used to enable, define and police the shifting line between the two, so it is not surprising that the history of media change to some extent maps the history of these domains. Media in Transition 8 takes up the question of the shifting nature of the public and private at a moment of unparalleled connectivity, enabling new notions of the socially mediated public and unequalled levels of data extraction thanks to the quiet demands of our Kindles, iPhones, televisions and computers.  While this forces us to think in new ways about these long established categories, in fact the underlying concerns are rooted in deep historical practice.  MiT8 considers the ways in which specific media challenge or reinforce certain notions of the public or the private and especially the ways in which specific “texts” dramatize or imagine the public, the private and the boundary between them.  It takes as its foci three broad domains: personal identity, the civic (the public sphere) and intellectual property.

Reality television and confessional journalism have done much to invert the relations between private and public. But the borders have long been malleable. Historically, we know that camera-armed Kodakers and telephone party lines threatened the status quo of the private; that the media were complicit in keeping from the public FDR’s disability and the foibles of the ruling elite; and that paparazzi and celebrities are strategically intertwined in the game of publicity. How have the various media played these roles (and represented them), and how is the issue changing at a moment when most of our mediated transactions leave data traces that not only redefine the borders of the private, but that serve as commodities in their own right?

The public, too, is a contested space. Edmund Burke’s late 18th century invocation of the fourth estate linked information flow and political order, anticipating aspects of Habermas’s public sphere. From this perspective, trends such as a siege on public service broadcasting, a press in decline, and media fragmentation on the rise, all ring alarm bells. Yet WikiLeaks and innovative civic uses of media suggest a sharp countertrend. What are the fault lines in this struggle? How have they been represented in media texts, enacted through participants and given form in media policy? And what are we to make of the fate of a public culture in a world whose media representations are increasingly on-demand, personalized and algorithmically-designed to please?

Finally, MiT8 is also concerned with the private-public rift that appears most frequently in struggles over intellectual property (IP). Ever-longer terms of IP protection combined with a shift from media artifacts (like paper books) to services (like e-journals) threaten long-standing practices such as book lending (libraries) and raise thorny questions about cultural access. Social media sites, powered by users, often remain the private property of corporations, akin to the public square’s replacement by the mall, and once-public media texts, like certain photographic and film collections, have been re-privatized by an array of institutions. These undulations in the private and public have implications for our texts (remix culture), our access to them, and our activities as audiences; but they also have a rich history of contestation, evidenced in the copybook and scrapbook, compilation film, popular song and the open source and creative commons movement.

MiT8 encourages a broad approach to these issues, with specific attention to textual practice, users, policy and cultural implications. As usual, we encourage work from across media forms and across historical periods and cultural regions.

Possible topics include: