Acephalous

TIME TO WORK! (SAY WORK BIRDS!)

They eye you cautiously:

THEN SOUND THE ALARUM!

REINFORCEMENTS ARRIVE!

THEY TAKE YOU DOWN!

START TYPING!  START TYPING!

Scott Eric Kaufman's Visual Rhetoric Compendium (as of 11/28/2011)

By request, below are the links to all of the visual rhetoric exegeses (a.k.a. McCloud or Bordwell-inspired "lecture notes") I've produced in the past few years.  I would say I'm surprised there aren't more of them, but then I remember 1) how labor-intensive they are to compose and 2) the number of drafts I've deemed insufficient for public consumption that linger unfinished in assorted folders.  So here goes:

Films:

• Batman Begins (classic horror) - Christopher Nolan
• Blow-Up (I) - Michelangelo Antonioni 
• Blow-Up (II)- Michelangelo Antonioni
• The Dark Knight (I) - Christopher Nolan
• The Dark Knight (II) - Christopher Nolan
• Fight Club - David Fincher
• Ghost World - Terry Zwigof
• Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind - Hayao Miyazaki
• Superman - Richard Donner
• Superman Returns - Bryan Singer
• 30 Days of Night - David Slade

Television Shows:

• Avatar: The Last Airbender - "The Ember Island Players"
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer - "Hush"
• Doctor Who - "Time of Angels"
• Doctor Who - "The Eleventh Hour"
• Mad Men - "The Grown-Ups"
• Mad Men - "Shut the Door.  Have a seat."
• Mad Men (I) - "The Rejected"
• Mad Men (II) - "The Rejected"
• Mad Men (I) - "The Chrysanthemum and the Sword"
• Mad Men (II) - "The Chrysanthemum and the Sword"
• Mad Men (I) - "The Suitcase"
• Mad Men (II) - "The Suitcase"
• The Walking Dead - "Days Gone Bye"

Comics:

• American Born Chinese - Gene Luen Yang
• Blankets - Craig Thompson
• Fun Home - Alison Bechdel
• Ghost World - Daniel Clowes
• Kick-Ass (I) - Mark Millar
• Kick-Ass (II) - Mark Millar
• Planetary/Batman: Night on Earth - Warren Ellis
• 30 Days of Night - Steve Niles
• The Walking Dead (word-specific panels)
• The Walking Dead (picture-specific panels) - Robert Kirkman
• Watchmen (panel construction) (I) - Alan Moore
• Watchmen (panel construction) (II) - Alan Moore
• Watchmen (responsible film criticism) - Anthony Lane
• Watchmen (unfilmable film filmed) - Zak Snyder vs. Alan Moore
• Watchmen (students as murderers) - Alan Moore
• Watchmen (Dr. Manhattan as a figure of the reader) - Alan Moore

 

Check out that face! (Being lecture notes on the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "Hush")

After re-watching the infamous silent episode from the fourth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, "Hush," I am compelled to conclude that Joss Whedon loves him some tracking shots.  Unless the camera is tightly framed on someone's face, it's either panning or tilting or both.  If this were my only encounter with his work, I'd probably draw the conclusion that because the majority of the episode contains no spoken dialogue, Whedon felt the camera work had to be dynamic enough to sustain audience interest.  But that's not the case: Whedon's camera is consistently active, only a bit hyper in "Hush."  For example, when Buffy finishes her ablutions and enters the hallway, the camera pans with her:

Concerning those elections and their consequences

It seems impossible for a conservative to write anything about Wisconsin without noting, for their records, that elections have consequences.  The original context of Obama’s statement, you’ll remember, is a conversation he had with Eric Cantor on his third day office.  Having been handed a helpful list of deficit-reductions suggestions by the Representative, the newly minted President responded “Elections have consequences, and at the end of the day, I won.”  At which point, as you well know, the Republican faithful graciously bowed out of public life and allowed the President to impose his will on the nation, which is why Guantanamo is now closed; the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are now over; single-payer healthcare is the law of the land; and the Caliphate is nearly installed.

Because that’s how conservatives are using this phrase: “Union members of Wisconsin,” they say, “Scott Walker was elected, and elections have consequences, so quit bitching and go home.  We won, and now we’re going to do whatever we want.  You lost the right to complain when you lost.”  The problem with their rhetoric is plain to anyone who noticed—which includes all those linked above—that the Tea Party held a counter-protest yesterday, i.e. the Tea Party exists precisely because they didn’t accept the very same logic they’re launching at the protesters.  ”Elections have consequences” doesn’t mean, as they’re currently construing it, “Roll over and die.”  It means what they thought it meant two years ago, which is that they’re in for a political fight.

There is, of course, one more crucial difference: conservatives protested over fictional abuses of authority—czars, death panels, long-form birth certificates, etc.—whereas the protesters in Wisconsin are fighting against the bill as stated both by the person who drafted it and every conservative cheering on the union busting.

 

Reifying memory in Alison Bechdel's Fun Home

Alison Bechdel's Fun Home fits neatly into the last third of my "Confessional Narratives" course for all the obvious reasons: it's intensely autobiographical; it's told from an emotional and temporal remove from the events narrated; those events are of indisputable significance to the life of the confessor; etc.  In particular, it resembles Craig Thomspon's Blankets and Art Spiegelman's Maus in that its focus is on the narrator's relationship with someone particular; however, unlike Thompson's relationship with God or Spiegelman's with his father, Vladek, Bechdel's interested in a fundamental reconcilation with her closeted father.  

I'm not claiming that Spiegelman was uninterested in understanding his father better, only that his attempt was doomed to failure because the unknowable horror of the Holocaust made it impossible for him to either share that experience or even understand the gravity of its effects on his father, e.g. these non-consecutive panels from "And Here My Troubles Began":  

There is something non-universal about the way in which the Holocaust altered Vladek Spiegelman, and as much as Art attempts to divine the particular from the universal or vice versa, he never succeeds.  The nightmare of history is such that his father's story can only ever be that: his father's story.  The same doesn't logic doesn't hold for Bechdel's Fun Home, not only because the horrors of discovering you're gay aren't comparable to finding yourself in Aushwitz, but because Bechdel's lament is that her father, Bruce, didn't live long enough to experience life outside the closet.  It's no coincidence that Bechdel has "a hallucinogenic memory" of accompanying her closeted father to retreive her mother from the city:

The irony of this memory occupying an hallucinogenic space "a few weeks since the Stonewall Riots" in Bechdel's memory should be obvious.  I'm not saying she's lying or even misremembering, only that she's making history meaningful in a way that's similar to what Vladek performed on the first-order and Art did on the second.  The difference between her performance and Art's is that she's doing so in order to make sense of his life in a way Art could never duplicate.  

Again, not faulting anyone for anything here, merely acknowledging what Art himself does above: the inability to understand, however tenuously vicariously, someone else's experience will prevent you from ever sympathizing with or being able to offer anything but sympathy to this other person.  That's not the case in Fun Home, which is less concerned with communicating the attempt to reach an inreconciable understanding than the act of coming to an understanding you can live with.

Put in the starkest possible terms: Art fails to understand Vladek because he can't comprehend the Holocaust, whereas Bechdel tries to understand herself through her father's life and succeeds because the attempt is a thing in itself, e.g. the book's Proustian returns to Proust:

Fun Home reifies memory via narrative, but it does so in a way that reminds readers that human beings aren't made of words.  Granted, the above panel is about as word-specific as word-picture relations come, but in a graphic novel it's panels like this one that are intruding on the conventions of the medium.  People typically think of their memories as feelings and images punctuated by what others said, but outside of graphic novels the only means of communicating them without recourse to someone else's interpretation of them is through words.  This difference is figured in the book as the relation between Gatsby in the novel and Redford's portrayal of him onscreen: the former remains closer to Fitzgerald's vision of him because there's no other mind translating, via performance, Gatsby for the audience.

A Better, Purer Science

As someone who wrote a dissertation entitled “Maximal Diversity: Non-Darwinian Evolutionary Theory in American Fiction, 1895-1910,” I can’t help but lend my full support to this bill:

Oklahoma state Rep. Sally Kern wants to make it clear that her new legislation protecting the rights of science teachers to “teach all science instead of just the Darwin model” is in no way an attempt to introduce creationism or Intelligent Design into the classroom. It is, in fact, just an attempt to let teachers teach “pure science” about “all of evolution”

No student in Oklahoma can possibly understand the modern world without a firm grasp of heterogenesis, Lamarkian inheritance, kinetogenesis, orthogenesis, metakinesis, geographic isolation, biologic isolation, the Baldwin effect, organic selection, and orthoplasty, to name but a few. To stick to those strains of evolutionary theory that Morse Peckham called “Darwinisticistic” is a travesty against science and democracy that can only be rectified by the State of Oklahoma commissioning to write a textbook for many moneys.

How, exactly, do you film someone being stalked by a statue? (Being lecture notes on the Doctor Who episode "Time of Angels," obviously.)

Something lumbering as quickly as a zombie wouldn't seem to pose much of a threat, so it goes without saying that turning them into something threatening would entail speeding them up or increasing their numbers unto ubiquity.  In the former case, their uniqueness is reduced and they become just another movie monster; in the latter, they're horrifying because our inability to grasp the greatness of their numbers approaches the sublime.  But how would they pose a threat if they were unable to move at all?  I'm teaching the episode of Doctor Who entitled "Time of Angels" because the answer to that question is that they move via film cliché.  More on that in a moment.  First, let me introduce you to the Doctor:

He is a funny old man with a magic blue blox whose Wikipedia entry is longer than New Hampshire's, so I'm not sure I'll be able to briefly sum up who and what he is.  Suffice it to say he's the English equivalent of Superman, only intellectualized instead of strong.  You don't really need to understand the Doctor to understand this episode or my post, though; more important for the present are the Weeping Angels, a malevolent race of statues created by the current show-runner, Steven Moffatt.  Let me say it again: they are a malevolent race of statues.  How do they demonstrate their malevolence?  When you're not looking.

There's a purity to the concept of creating a monster whose movements perfectly (and can only, because they must) match the cinematographic vocabulary of horror.  Every time the camera is on them, they must be statues, meaning the audience must actively infer their off-screen movement.  The audience must be attentive because they won't be able to sit back and observe the proceedings (and because if they do there won't be any proceedings to sit back and observe).  The challenge for Moffat and director Adam Smith is to take this ingenious metaphor for horror films and turn it into something genuinely horrifying.  What follows is how they do it in the beginning of the episode. 

First, they place the Doctor's companion, Amy Pond, in an enclosed space:

This is a fairly long shot, the purpose of which is to provide the audience with a sense of both a character and that character's status relative to his or her environment.  It's also uses deep focus ironically, keeping everything in focus so that the audience can see just how much of it there isn't.  Additionally, the tight framing of the shot is similar to this scene from Mad Men, except here those lines are both imagined and actual because she's in a metal tube.  The result is a claustrophic atmosphere, but a bit menacing, too, because the audience knows the cheat cut is effected from the position on the wall occupied by the recorded image of an Angel:

Note that Smith eschews a point-of-view shot and instead places the camera equidistant between the recording and Pond.  The previous shot established that these are extremely tight quarters, and zooming in to this eyeline match makes them feel even tighter.  This is espeically true because the series often consists of the camera following the Doctor as he whirls about in his magic blue box, which is itself whirling about through space and time.  The entire series is predicated on an escapist conceit, which is why "it's bigger on the inside" is so critical to the show's appeal—not to mention why a box that isn't bigger on the inside is such a terrifying concept to this audience.  To return to my point: this is a bad box.  A confining box.  Only bad things can happen in a confining box, and Smith is framing these shots in order to heighten the impression of confinement.  Both shots above are impressively framed themselves, but more significantly, the shots and reverse shots within the bunker use the same angle of framing.  The level of framing shifts as Pond approaches the image, but not the angle, which results in the scene feeling very constricted: can't look up, can't look down, only straight ahead:

Note that the camera seems to have zoomed slightly when it reversed, resulting in aggressive frontality as Pond's eyes directly address the audience's.  But not only does she not see us, she sees straight through us.  She's staring at the image behind the audience, and there's an unsettling disconnect between the directness of her address and the audience's knowledge of its actual recepient.  It's also disorienting because shot sequences of this sort often signal that a character is paying more attention to an element in the scene, as the next shot, a close-up of the Angel, seems to suggest:

As Pond becomes more interested in the image, the camera zooms in to communicate that interest to the audience.  Why is the next shot disturbing?

Because it suggests that the image is staring back, and images shouldn't be capable of staring back.  Moreover, the zooming in suggests that the image is paying an increasing amount of attention to her, and images ought not be able to express increasing interest.  It's almost as if the audience becoming uncomfortable because the episode is telling them, in filmic terms, something they know can't be true.  Pond then leaves for a moment to ask the Doctor a question, and when she returns so too does the camera, first to its original position:

Dave Sim's relationship to literary modernism and Dear Lord whose prose is that?

I'm revising the paper for the Cerebus collection I mentioned earlier and, to be frank, I'm not sure I recognize myself.  Too much blogging and writing a pedagogy book instead of revising the dissertation must do that, I suppose, because this doesn't even sound like me:

Linking Sim to Pound by reference to their similarly developing relationship to form and to Joyce by their analogous material circumstances may seem like an attempt to shoehorn Sim into a canon in which he does not properly belong.  However, Sim's inclusion and ventriloquism of another notable Irish modernist, Oscar Wilde, in Jaka's Story requires at the very least that the book be considered an homage to, or possibly a parody of, Wilde's high modern aesthetic.  Whether the book partakes of that high modern aesthetic depends upon an estimation of the success of the ventriloquism, but even if it is unsuccessful, the inclusion alone is enough to warrant numbering Sim among academic modernists like Pound and Joyce.  Because there exist as many definitions of “modernism” as scholars of it, for the purposes of the current argument—not to mention general relevance—these competing modernisms will be defined specifically by the attitude they strike to history.  In this respect, the high modernism of Wilde can be characterized by its rejection of mimesis and the attendant distancing from history that that rejection entails, whereas the academic modernism of Joyce and Pound seeks to, as the latter urged, “make it new,” with the “it” in question being the nightmare of history from which the former struggled to awake. 

That Sim lifts Wilde from history and employs him as a narrator in Jaka's Story is not merely an irony seemingly designed to irritate the author of The Decay of Lying, but in “making Wilde new,” Sim demonstrates a formal and aesthetic solidarity with the academic modernists.  The highest irony of Wilde operating as a narrator is that he is not narrating Sim's book, Jaka's Story, but one that exists within Sim's titled Daughter of Palnu—meaning, in short, that not only does Sim's imitation of Wilde violate the principles of high modernism, but he employs the imitation to write a book which itself violates the principles of high modernism by relating the actual story of an exiled princess named Jaka.  The word “actual” is not meant to imply that Daughter of Palnu is factually accurate, merely that because her story is related to Oscar by her husband, Rick, no matter how fantastically Oscar embellished the novel would still be one in which, to paraphrase Wilde in The Decay of Lying, art would be imitating life.

I feel like, I maybe need, a few more, commas.  Also, this is, or may be, my most boring, post ever.