Acephalous

"Ebert's dead? About time. Two thumbs WAY up!"

In lieu of memorializing Roger Ebert myself, I thought I'd instead collect comments about his death that would've made him smile. Like this one:

Ironic that he had a "gift"( his job as a movie-goer/critic"....would that not be a fun job????!!!)...then started bashing those who had a different "thought than his". He continued to bash while he was silenced with cancer......some people never "get it"...never "shut up"...never focus on The Lesson.

Had I been given the "gift" of such an insipid job (which made millions for him)....I would be grateful. I would not be bashing the Country nor the Conservative Founder's philosophy which made it all so possible. I would be GRATE-FILLED!!

Had I been given a cancer which would silence me, I would reflect on the purpose of that.

"BE STILL AND KNOW THAT I AM!".....Psalm 46:10

Suffering...perhaps due to his lack of recognition of the Divine Master of OUR Country...and gratitude for his fellow American and the RIGHTS given to us by our Creator.

I do not call his stubborn clinging to life as "brave".....what are the options?...limited, at best...

He would've loved someone turning his cancer into signs from an "[UN]GRATE-FILLED" God that he should shut up. This one too:

In spite of the multitude of naive "film lovers" who wouldn't be able to recognize an effectively entertaining and well-crafted film, without a critic's advice, Ebert's reviews were, for the most part, foolish and off-the-mark.

He was famous [= worthy of respect??] because of his early exposure on nationally syndicated AT THE MOVIES TV show. Like "Laugh-In," "Ray Harryhausen," "CNN," being first doesn't always make one the best, merely famous to the masses who are unaware of the subject matter.

Every week Siskel would remind the nation the Ebert was an idiot, leaving Ebert to stare dumbly with his mouth open. Unfortunate that Siskel died first. Fortunate for Ebert. Conspiracy anyone?

To be accused of putting out a hit on Siskel because Gene was the better film critic? He would have treasured that. This too:

Ebert’s opinions have produced torture for as long as I can remember. Look on his death as a late term abortion...many years too late.

All this unnecessary punctuation to punch the "abortion" line? He would've adored it. As well as this:

I will NOT have ANYTHING good to say about him for Him, His “Industry” and the “Industry” that he reported on accelerated the ROT of our once-GREAT Country. He will stand before the “Great White Throne” to give an account of his life and receive JUDGEMENT!

They say a person's life can be judged by the enemies he's made. As a pristine able-bodied specimen in perfect health, I don't know what it's like to face death, but if ever the day comes that I must, I only hope to be remembered so ungraciously by illiterate Christian bigots sporting tongues impervious to teeth.

Because I'd like to know that I led a life worth living and, as Ebert's enemies make it abundantly clear, he did just that.

Game of Thrones: "Valar Dohaeris," indeed. But who? Where? To what end?

(It goes without saying that this is one those visual rhetoric posts.)

The title of the third season premier of Game of Thrones comes from the traditional Braavosi exchange: one meets the chipper greeting, "Valar Morghulis [all men must die]" with the equally cheery response, "Valar Dohaeris [all men must serve]." Given that the last episode of the second season was named "Valar Morghulis" and the first episode of the third season is "Valar Dohaeris," it seems sensible to consider these two episodes together because they are, if only ritually, conversing with each other. What are they saying? "Valar Morghulis" would be saying "I may not be a liar, but I'm not telling the whole truth," because the episode's final shots demonstrate that all men must die except for the ones that don't stay dead:

Combine that with the man who was Jaqen H'ghar becoming another man after advising Arya and it becomes clear that the certitude of the Braavosi greeting is a comforting ruse. All men must not be anything—not absolutely—if they can also be both one thing and another. What can change its face isn't a man and what can't stay dead can't be trusted. Meaning I'm not sure how much I want to invest in "Valar Morghulis" as a title tied to its theme; in "Valar Dohaeris," however, the theme that "all men must serve" manifests repeatedly, beginning with the opening sequence. This sequence ties the two episodes together almost comically, as the change in scale from the first two close-ups (from "Valar Morghulis") to the extreme long-shot (from "Valar Dohaeris") resembles the kind of fear-realizing and mad-scrambling often found in cartoons:

Sam Tarly's service is twofold here: first, his general service as a man of the Night's Watch; second, his particular service as a member of a scouting party, which was to tend to and dispatch distress-ravens. That he failed to do so during his epic flight from the White Walker only indicates that he failed to meet the terms of his service, not that he escaped the responsibility of serving altogether. The episode's director, Daniel Minahan, could have foregrounded the humiliation written on Sam's face when his Lord Commander upbraids him by using a close-up, which would've captured every mortified muscle trying not to twitch with shame; instead, Minahan decided to shoot Sam in a medium close-up with his Lord Commander in an off-center two-shot that suggests both the bonds these two share and the precariousness of their situation:

But it is not just these two, bound by service though they may be, who are in a tight spot. The reverse to the long shot—which is even more unbalanced than the one from which it reverses—heightens Sam's humiliation by including the presence of everyone he failed to serve:

Point being, the opening sequence strongly suggests that service (and its terms) will be a thematic element of this episode in a way that death (in its finality) was not in "Valar Morghulis." In truth, saying that service "strongly suggests" itself as a theme is an understatement so grave as to almost be a lie: from Jon Snow and Ser Barristan pledging their respective fealty to Mance Rayder and Daenerys, to Tyrion and Davos bemoaning their father and father-figure's reluctance to recognize their commitment to the cause, and did I mention the Unsullied? The elite band of warrior-eunuchs who have been on their feet for nearly two days just waiting for someone to slice off their nipples? These are examples of the meaning of "service" to which the phrase "Valar Dohaeris" conventionally applies, so connecting the visual rhetoric to iterations of this theme would be a bore.

More interesting is the visual pun on another meaning of the word "serve" that worms its way into the episode. Consider the scene in which Cersei comes to talk to Tyrion, who is still convalescing in his new quarters. Tyrion hears her knock, pulls a stool to the door and greets his sister through the bars:

He is not a prisoner in King's Landing any more than his sister is:

And yet Minahan chooses to shot both through the bars. The tightness of the framing on Tyrion makes him seem the more imprisoned one, because this shot is, debatably, from Cersei's point-of-view. Despite having an entire door to look at, she focuses her attention (via the camera's close-up) on the one section of the door that emphasizes the bars between her and her brother. (She could just look at the door, after all.) The reverse shot from Cersei, however, isn't even debatable: it's clearly a point-of-view shot from Tyrion's perspective. He's looking at his sister as if he is serving time, and and for what? For successfully defending King's Landing at Blackwater? Tywin will answer those questions later, but for the moment I want to focus on Minahan's decision to imprison, visually at the very least, members of the Lannister family. Because they aren't serving—they're serving time.

It's not just Cersei and Tyrion who find themselves behind or speaking between bars. When Joffrey and his newly betrothed, Margaery Tyrell, venture into the city, here is the perspective the young king has of his subjects:

Those bars framing the shot? They're bars:

This medium shot is almost too precious. Look at little King Joffrey peeping at his bride-to-be through the bars of his processional. He doesn't occupy the center of the shot, nor does his tiny blue carriage, the size of which suggests that peeking out requires he kneel before his subjects. The bars quadrisect his face into a giant ear, an eyeball, another eyeball, and another giant ear.:

He's less of a person than an assemblage of odd-looking sense-organs seemingly on display for all and sundry. He may think he looks regal as he jealously peers out the rear of his cage, but Minahan's framing suggests that Joffrey misunderstands what's meant by "the trappings" of royalty here. Who is free to move as they please and who is serving time in a gilded hot box?

Which brings me to my point: what do all of these characters have in common? They're all serving time in Tywin Lannister's royal scheme. Much as you admire Tyrion or detest Cersei and Joffrey, this episode erases all doubts about who has agency in the House Lannister: it's Tywin and Tywin alone. His children and grandchildren are pawns imprisoned by the moves Tywin plays. Just look at the poor bastards.

But maybe it's a coincidence that the Lannister brood is shot in a manner suggestive of imprisonment, and maybe other characters with claims to the throne are also shot in a similar fashion. It would be nice if Minahan provided some sort of direct reference for the sake of comparison. Maybe something like this?

In both shots, a claimant to the throne is surrounded by a repetitive vertical element that meets slightly to the right of frame-center. By structuring the shots the same, Minahan invites the audience to pay attention to the differences: Joffrey's vertical elements terminate at hard wooden walls and ceiling, creating a claustrophobic effect amplified by his retracted posturing, as if he wished there were more wall for him to cower before; Dany's vertical elements extend into open sky, and she stands with her dragon before her and her friends beside her, resulting in a shot as expansive as Joffrey's is confining. Same structure, similarly stationed subjects, but these shots convey vastly different messages about the "service" required by the throne.

"Without edits, it's not a film."

I'm watching the BBC documentary The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector, and you can too, for free:

It's interesting more for the historical anecdotes than the Nancy Grace-style murder-narrative at its core—and I say that before reaching the point where they'll talk about Spector threatening Leonard Cohen, Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan with a crossbow over the final mix of "Don't Go Home With Your Hard-on. For example, the notion that Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro's careers could have killed by an injunction, and that only special pleading by John Lennon saved them intrigues me as a film scholar (40:40). But even more interesting is Spector's discussion of "Be My Baby," Brian Wilson and an "edit record" (44:28), which for him means a song that suffers because its seams are showing. "Good Vibrations" isn't a good song because it's

got a lot of edits in it, like Pyscho, which is a great film, but an "edit film." Without edits, it's not a film. With edits, it's a great film. But it's not Rebecca, it's not a great story the way Alfred Hitchcock could make a great story.

I suppose this would make Rope Spector's favorite Hitchcock film, what with all its invisible edits—or maybe that would make Rope Spector's least favorite Hitchcock film, being that it'd be his most dishonest. Which is another way of saying that Spector seems to believe that a work in which a professional can ascertain the hand of an auteur is less valuable than one in which an amateur can. Because anyone can see the edits in Psycho, whereas it takes a trained eye to find them in Rope. At least that's how I'm reading Spector's aesthetic philosophy here: Wilson's production of "Good Vibrations" is lacking because Spector can hear tracks end or overlap that the average person can't. Except that doesn't make any sense, because he's basically arguing for his own insignificance, i.e. the greatest artists are the ones whose labor is imperceptible to the audience.

But this criteria strikes me as counterproductive if you're trying to claim that producers are artists. Just consider this excellent video about the production of The Beach Boy's "Sloop John B." I've queued it up to where Wilson's editorial oversight becomes evident instrument-by-instrument, and I'll admit that it's clearly a highly edited song, but why would that make it less interesting to a producer than one like "Be My Baby," which was recorded in a take, pumped into an echo chamber and transmitted into a studio? Spector seems to be arguing at cross-purposes here, fetishizing the act of capturing a sound in a moment instead of valuing the artistry required to combine various sources in order to match some ideal a composer only hears in his head. To muddy the waters further by introducing another medium, this seems like the equivalent of valuing Dubliners over Ulysses because the artistry is more evident in the latter than the former even though it abounds in both.

This may be one of those simple matters that only confuse me because I've studied aesthetic theory—only the learned can be so easily confounded—but I'm having a difficult time understanding what Spector means here. Because he seems to be saying that the best producers are really just building Rube Goldberg machines and recording the results, but that can't be right, can it?

Poor Skyfall, it deserved better

Sam Mendes is the Don Delillo of contemporary cinema, in that he’s as beloved as he’s banal and otherwise right-thinking people seem incapable of recognizing him as such. A few years ago I wrote of my hatred of the flat affect (or affected flatness) that characterizes Delillo’s prose, and I’m going to be making a similar argument about Mendes. I can make that argument directly, in that both blame the postmodern condition for the flattening and both think that finding meaning in meaninglessness is the proper aesthetic response to it. To wit:

To understand all this. To penetrate this secret. The mountain was here, unconcealed, but no one saw it or thought about it, no one knew it existed except the engineers … a unique cultural deposit … and he saw himself for the first time as a member of an esoteric order, they were adepts and seers, crafting the future, the city planners, the waste managers, the compost technicians, the landscapers who would build hanging gardens here, make a park one day out of every kind of used and eroded object of desire.

To understand Delillo. To penetrate his secret. The appeal is there, everyone sees it when they think about it, everyone knows it is “a unique cultural deposit,” taken by Delillo on the chest of Americans who want to believe they belong to an esoteric order, that they are the adepts and seers of literature. Only they aren’t. They read a big book full of moments, as above, in which characters look at “garbage” and are struck by an epiphanic bolt named “recycling.” Don Delillo writes “deep” thoughts for stupid people. Mendes traffics in similar crap:

I don’t care if it could be mistaken for a two-shot of people in a museum, that thing they’re looking at is still a plastic bag, not a reminder that everything is connected. Or if it is a reminder that everything’s connected we’re back to the profundity that it is modern recycling. It’s not evidence that there’s “this entire life behind things, and this incredibly benevolent force that wanted me to know that there was no reason to be afraid.” It’s not an ontological proof of the existence of a non-denominational Kindness that communicates through gusts of trash. It’s a fucking plastic bag. But it gets worse. It’s a plastic bag “that was just, dancing with [Ricky], like a little kid begging [for him] to play with it—for fifteen minutes,” meaning that it’s a plastic bag that Ricky didn’t recycle. He befriended it in the name of the non-denominational Kindness who speaks through trash and filmed the encounter so we all could meet said Kindness through Art. It’s first-order Art in the film, when Ricky shows it to Jane, but it’s second-order Art when Mendes presents us Ricky showing it to Jane, so we experience their experience of Art because in the postmodern world one can never experience The Thing Itself only mediated versions of It through Art. This is a Baudrillard-bruised insight from ’70s masquerading as profundity and everyone fell for it. The Academy declared it the Most Unique Cultural Deposit of 1999 and Mendes the Most Unique Cultural Depositor of the same.

Which brings us to Skyfall. I watched it last night and thought it a fine little Bond film. But it was not the Art it thought it was. Mendes comes from a theatrical background and directs his movies like old episodes of Masterpiece Theater: he positions the camera at some distance from the action, checks that every element of the frame is in focus, then walks away. The result is a reliance on shots that are longer than they need to be:

He seems not to know that when every element of a shot is in focus, the result is a flatter looking shot. There is foreground only in the literal sense that some people are closer to the camera, but because the people in the background as are crisp those in the foreground, the frame feels short and flat, like someone learned how to stage a scene in a theater. Just so you don’t think I’m unfairly knocking filmed versions of theatrical productions, here is a screen capture from something you know I’m inclined to love:

The Doctor and Captain Picard in Hamlet. Brilliant! Marvel at the spectacular set design! Glory in the deftly composed theatrical lighting! Are you done yet? Good. Now look at the shot itself: the spectacular acting and stunning design and artful lighting are all undermined by the manner in which they appear on film. That’s not a criticism, just an acknowledgment of difference. Plays must be filmed at this scale (an extreme long shot here)  because the alternative is that the performance is halted every time an in-frame element or the camera needed adjusting. In which case the play would cease being a play and become a movie. Saying that Tennant and Stewart’s Hamlet looks like a play isn’t an insult, merely an acknowledgment of what it is. But Skyfall is not a play. It’s a film too often shot like one. Even the action scenes:

That’s an establishing shot, so I can forgive Mendes its scale and depth because he needs to indicate the important elements of the scene. Now that we know where the Bond element is in relation to the others we’ll probably cut to a close-up:

The close-up allows the audience to see both the mental focus and physical toll that this chase is having on the Bond element. The establishing shot informs us where he is and the close-up tells us how he’s coping with the chase. Where to next?

A re-establishing shot that’s more extreme than the initial one? The charitable reading of this decision would be that Mendes wants to communicate the confusion rooftop-motorbiking necessarily entails, but such a reading would be pre-undermined by the close-up he just cut from, in which Bond looks like he’s facing down danger with the unperturbed cool with which Bonds face down dangers. The decision to increase the scale from extreme-long to extreme-longer combined with the one to keep the entire frame in focus results in flat shot in which no elements—not even the Bond one—are afforded more significance than any other. Just as the audience of the Tennant Hamlet know they should be paying more attention to Tennant as Hamlet, the audience of Skyfall knows that Bond is most important element in that frame. But thanks to Mendes they can’t see him well enough to care.

Someone seems to have informed Mendes that his propensity for deep shots only makes them seem all the more flat and shallow, but because he’s as talented a director as he is a thinker, he responded to this criticism by overcompensating. The shots in the film that aren’t made shallow by the depth of their focus are deliberately shallow when they need not be, as when Bond home-invades M’s apartment:

Given that M and Bond are the only two people in this shot, there’s no need to add shallow focus to this one-shot to remind the audience who’s important here. It’s gratuitous. The odds of anyone in the audience focusing on a non-central and non-facial element are slim because her face is right in ours and it’s a face. Humans seek out faces. They see them in clouds and oil slicks and burnt toast. Put a face in front of a person and they’ll pay attention. But at least there’s some real depth to this shot: the warm lighting makes her (and Bond in the reverses) appear human, even as the slight shadow on her face makes her look less than entirely trustworthy. But Mendes’s greatest sin may be against the palette. The first shot from the film above is representative of every work-related shot in the film in that it’s tinted blue. Work is tinted blue. Because Bond is blue:

Get the feeling Mendes likes that shot? Me too. Bond is always some shade of blue because work is blue:

But didn’t I just say that Bond was talking to M above? And wasn’t that scene warmly lit? Yes I did and yes it was. Because there was a woman in it. Women change the color of the world, you see, as in that last shot above. Bond is blue, but the woman he’s looking at?

She takes his blues away. Not really, since when the shot reverses it’s to the blue room the blue Bond just vacated, but you see my point. I don’t mind aggressive palettes—I’m a huge fan of Kieslowski’s work—but Mendes’s seems to verge on sexist here. Or they’re just stupid in the Bond-is-blue-without-a-woman-in-life, which still verges on sexist, being that woman are reduced to things-that-make-Bond-not-blue.

Peter Jackson and "Competitive Realism"

January 28, 2013 | SEK

An old (and far more talented) friend of mine responded to the discussion Rob and I had about frame rate:

The choice to go from 24 fps to 48 fps was that some filmmakers really hated the strobing effect when the camera pans in 3-D versions of movies. Their solution was to up the frame rate—giving the filmmaker more information to play around with. Honestly, the 24 fps strobing never bothered me, cause if you are telling your story right, little nitpicks like the don’t enter the mind of your audience.

For reasons unclear even to me, I responded to his gentle correction with A Brief and Inadequate History of Special Effects:

I didn’t want to get too technical in the podcast, but I was hinting at that: 3-D created a problem that didn’t previously exist, and the solution is worse than the original problem. No more strobing, but now the effects are so obviously “special” that we may as well be watching the original Clash of the Titans. An incredible film, don’t get me wrong, it just required a superhuman suspension of disbelief. Which at the time was fine, because “special effects” like George Reeves flashing across the sky were meant to be “special,” outside of the ordinary, and didn’t need to look as if they were of this world or obeyed its laws of physics.

I tend to think George Lucas ruined this fantastical acceptance of the specialness of “special” effects when he married recognizably modernist styles with space stations and star ships—the Millennium Falcon could’ve been a Le Corbusier, the stormtroopers come from the mind of an Italian fascist, and half the scenery consisted of the same brutalist style that litters my campus. Point being, his realist aesthetic made “special” effects look quaint, the people who loved them rubes, and that’s where we’ve been ever since. Realism or naught! Realism or naught! (With a few exceptions, Del Toro notably among them.)

So I could understand why Jackson wanted The Hobbit to accede to the demands of the regnant style, but in doing so he utterly ruined his film. I mentioned in the podcast that the best scene in the film, Bilbo’s encounter with Gollum, looked like exactly what it was: Martin Freeman in front of a green screen talking to a man in ping-pong ball covered suit. (I know that’s not how they do it anymore but you know what I mean.) It looked like Jackson had decided to avoid the uncanny valley by introducing its monstrous child to an actual human being and hoping the audience wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. I’m not going to say it made me want to cry, but I’m not going to deny I teared up a bit at the sheer waste of it all.

Like you, I’m more interested in the story, so if the technological advances can be integrated into it—like the conference tables in Avatar—I’m fine with that because it complements the narrative. But I don’t even think we need 3-D. It took us millions of years to develop the particular sort of stereoscopic vision we have, and our brains react to an “occupied periphery” the same way now as they did before: by flooding our bodies with hormones that make us nervous, tense, excited, afraid, etc. Since our eyes still point forward, you don’t need anything more fancy than an IMAX to occupy our peripheries, and I’m fine with that.

I thought I was talking about special effects and their more cloyingly “special” forbears, but the real sore spot for me here is the blind lionization of a limited definition of “realism.” Don’t misunderstand me: I find relocating fantastic narratives to a world that resembles ours an admirable endeavor. Heath Ledger’s interpretation of the “Joker” outstrips Jack Nicholson’s because we don’t need a vat of quasi-mystical chemical slurry to believe that a child of neglect and poverty might come to resent those he believes kicked him down to choke him out. I’m all for grounding narratives that occur in fictional worlds in ones that mostly obey the rules of ours. I’m on board with Battlestar Galactica and (though I’ll never admit it) I even watch Arrow. But the “reality” of “realism” has to amount to more than a little extra grease smeared on the walls of some backlot “Brooklyn.” Because when “competitive realism” becomes a sport the audience always loses. Embracing filth for love of the slop as an ethos would be one thing, but embracing it as an aesthetic out of devotion to an empty notion of what constitutes “realism” is more than just a thing:

Game of Thrones: Swords! Swords! Swords! in "Baelor"

Earlier in the quarter, I introduced my students to the anything-that's-longer-than-it-is-wide mode of psychoanalytic criticism. Not very sophisticated, I know, but it helps explain the historical context of certain rhetorical tropes.* Given that this class is based on Game of Thrones, the discussion inevitably landed on the subject of swords as phallic symbols, and I noted that while there's nothing necessary or natural about that connection, it is one of long-standing and therefore might have influenced how George R.R. Martin employed them in his narrative. Which the students took to mean "SWORDS EQUAL PENISES," a not altogether unfortunate development given how the Arya and Needle string undermines conventional gender assumptions. It did, however, make teaching the ninth episode, "Baelor," a little difficult. The episode opens with Lord Commander Mormont gifting a sword, Longclaw, meant for his son, Jorah Mormont, to Jon Snow. Snow proceeds down the stairs and is immediately accosted by his Wall-fellows:

Keeping in mind what my students think swords equal, consider the eyeline match in this shot. Not explicit enough? Fine:

That man seems a little too excited to see Jon's sword.

They all seem a little too excited to see Jon's sword.

And Jon seems a little too happy at how excited they all are to see his sword. But he obliges:

If you think I'm being juvenile and sword-blinkered, consider this scene in which a captured Jaime Lannister throws himself before the mercy of Lady Stark:

Nothing emasculating about that. The same can't be said for this:

Even skipping over the scene in which Daenerys demands that the previously de-sworded Jorah Mormount draw his sword for her, it's clear that this episode is very much about swords. Remember how it ends?

I mean after Arya considers drawing the symbol of male empowerment she's appropriated for herself before realizing the inevitable futility of doing so:

There you go. The point of all this is that anyone analyzing this episode needs to account for its economy of swords: they're distributed, re-distributed, lost, stolen, and finally wielded by a masked man at a sham of an execution. This execution, by the by, neatly parallels the scene in the first episode in a manner that highlights their differences: in both instances a man is being executed, only in "Baelor" the beheader has become the beheadee, the trial isn't just, and the Stark child witnessing it is commanded not to look.

So, as I was saying, swords! Swords! Swords! Swords!

*As an example of psychoanalytic criticism, I use an explication of The Castle circa 1950, in which the tall lanky K. and his short round assistants, Artur and Jeremias, are reduced to the walking-talking male genitalia  Kafka clearly intended them to be.

Game of Thrones: Learning to use "The Pointy End"

As I noted in my first post about this course, one of the signal elements of high fantasy as a genre is the presence of a coming-of-age narrative, and Game of Thrones is clearly no exception. "The Pointy End," in fact, delivers three distinct moments in which a character is provided an opportunity to take a significant step in his or her maturation process. (It actually contains more than three, but only three of the characters take advantage of the opportunity provided and I want to focus on them.) We'll begin with Arya Stark, who as the episode opens is literally practicing at life:

The balanced long shot employed by director Daniel Minihan has the effect of bringing a sense of calm to this fencing lesson. Arya and her instructor, Syrio Forel, are playing at combat in a manner as elegant as this shot is composed. Note that Arya moves between the third arch from frame-left, while Syrio strikes at her from the third arch from frame-right. If this is fighting, it is unlike the brutal art being performed outside this very room at this very point in time:

This violence is sloppily composed, with the elements of the background functioning as mere backdrop to the slaughter before them. The characters rush into and out of focus as jagged edits push and pull the viewer from one point in the mise-en-scene to another seemingly without reason. I say "seemingly" because the disorientation is clearly the point. Not being able to tell who is and isn't on "the pointy end" is why Minihan cuts from the above to:

To here only after this skirmish concludes. The Lannister guards have a dispatched a man who lies helpless, dying if not already dead, and Minihan makes his suffering seem insignificant by shooting it from a high angle with canted framing. The canted framing is important because it keeps the shot uncomfortable even after the initial confusion is resolved. ("So that is who was on the pointy end.") The deliberately awkward composition of the previous two frames and the frantic editing that transitioned one to the next leads to a clash not just between characters in the show but the formal elements of its direction. When the Lannister guards confront Syrio and Arya, the shot maintains most of its initial balance:

It is slightly altered because the circumstances of the characters it had framed has altered. The fight that follows, then, will be between both the characters and their attendent compositions. Here, it seems as if Syrio and Arya have the upper hand: they occupy the center of the frame and the slightly low angle of framing makes them appear slightly more dominant than the figures in the background. (Who are the same height, relative to the frame, as Arya at this point.) This is Arya's moment—the point in her coming-of-age narrative in which she puts her training into practice—or it would be if not for the fact that

Game of Thrones: Table-setting and brain-burning in "You Win or You Die"

My close-reading instincts typically compel me to focus on scenes more than structure, and that's not necessarily a good thing. So let's talk about structure from the point of view of someone who went to film school before the advent of DVDs and Netflix, by which I mean before we could finish one episode and jet right into the next. Traditional dramatic structure in serial narratives involves table-setting and brain-burning. In "You Win or You Die," here's how the table's set:

Jaime Lannister enters the tent of his father, Tywin, but he does so out of focus and in the midground. In the foreground, shot in shallow focus, is a big dead stag-looking beast, which creates a connection in our heads between whatever it is Jaime's talking about and big dead beasts. (That stags are affiliated with House Baratheon isn't immaterial either. Especially when you consider that when introduced to Tywin, he's elbow deep in a dead stag, suggesting his role in Baratheon's demise.) This is significant because it's not just that beast is big and dead—as we're fine with that when such heads are hung on walls—but that it's in the process of being broken down:

As everyone knows, if you want to make the majority of Americans uncomfortable, ask them where their meat comes from. Tell them that it wasn't born shrink-wrapped on a styrofoam plate and that it had a sad face when it was dispatched. Point out that the meat department in their favorite grocery store is a literal wall of death befitting of a serial killer's trophy closet. Or not. You don't have to do that: seeing Tywin going to town on that beast has already made them uncomfortable enough. The writers and directors know this, which is why they shot this conversation, which could have occurred anywhere, in a room in which Tywin Lannister was butchering his kill. Moreover, it's significant that Twyin is butchering the beast himself, because as is noted in the "Prologue," being suckled at your mother's teat is a sign of being low-born, so surely he someone in his employ who could butcher this beast for him. The fact that he's doing it himself is somewhat admirable, in that hunterly way, but it also suggests that he enjoys it, i.e. he enjoys doing something that the majority of Americans can't even bear thinking about, which makes them dislike him.

Not that they didn't already, mind you, because the show has long since marshaled our sympathies against the Lannisters, but this is the opening scene in the episode—the lens through which all the events that occur in it will be seen. And there's a lot going on there. There's not just the beast on the table, there's the deliberate arrangement of dialogue and imagery, e.g.

A brief (and oversimplified) cultural history of pornography and profanity on American television

In 1993, the American Family Association convinced 57 ABC affiliates not to air the series premier of NYPD Blue because it contained the word "asshole." A few years later, many conservative groups called for a boycott of the show when news that Dennis Franz's ass would be shown in an episode. Which isn't to say that the '90s were a quaint time in which profanity and pornography only existed on the cultural margins, only that there existed a consensus among network television producers to behave as if they did. Television audiences in the '90s weren't shocked by the profane or pornographic content, only that it was appearing on networks during primetime—but they were shocked, as the producers of NYPD Blue intended them to be.

And it was a superficially quainter time: the ability to be shocked by hearing a character curse is completely lost on people whose knowledge of televisual culture can be characterized as post-September 11th. I know because I teach them. Here's the thing: in order to shock people whose baseline includes all the colors of George Carlin's rainbow something more extreme must be endeavored. Something like Deadwood. I brought up that sentence in class on Thursday and read it aloud:

Ellsworth: I’ll tell you what: I may have fucked my life up flatter than hammered shit, but I stand here before you today beholden to no human cocksucker.

After discussing its literary quality for a moment, I asked them why their jaded faces had blanched when I read it. The answer, in the end, is because David Milch, who'd outraged audiences in the '90s with "assholes" and asses on NYPD Blue had found a way to reinvest profanity with its ability to shock. How? When South Park reveled in "shit" in 2001, it became clear that repeating a word robs it of its offensive intent. So Milch went literal: the phrase "hammered shit" offends not because of the presence of the word "shit," but because "shit" actually signifies shit, and the image of what happens when someone hammers actual shit is disturbing.

Then he introduced an implicit comparison: "human cocksucker." Ellsworth is "beholden to no human cocksucker," a qualification with disturbing implications: is he beholden to an inhuman cocksucker? What is an inhuman cocksucker? Why are we even talking about human versus inhuman cocksuckers? The answer to that last one is easy: because David Milch planted that thought in our heads. We didn't want it there—we would rather have never had to think about it—but it can't be unthought anymore than certain images can be unseen. Milch recuperated profanity for a generation whose ears would otherwise be dead to it.

A similar dynamic is at work in Game of Thrones, only this time it relates to the pornographic instead of the profane. Contemporary culture is steeped in pornography: if someone traveled back to 1996 with an episode of Jersey Shore they might be arrested for transporting it across state lines, but if they actually managed to air it? The amount of incidental nudity in a single episode of Jersey Shore would drop jaws and make eyes bleed. Remember what happened with Dennis Franz's ass? One old white ass had conservatives screaming about Nero and his fiddle. How effective would an old white ass be today? Would it shock?

Absolutely not. It would seem neither more nor less appropriate than half the ads on mainstream news sites, much less what college-aged people actually read online. In order to reinvest nudity with its ability to discomfit, Game of Thrones treats sexual situations with the same attitude Milch brought to pornography. Imagine watching a scene in which Littlefinger was Littlefingering with your mother? Pornography may be ubiquitous in contemporary American culture, but it still has its place—and that place is typically a private one that bears little resemblance to you and your mother sitting on a couch. Point being:

You can't divorce rhetorical effect from historical context. What worked in 1996 fails to offend in 2012. This is a blindingly obvious fact to most people of drinking age, but most of the people I teach aren't of drinking age. I share this with you because most of the emails I've received since the "Littlefinger" post concerned how I deal with the pornography in the classroom when I'm not being flip about it. The answer, as should be clear, is that I contextualize it.

Game of Thrones: How circular is "A Golden Crown"?

Very. I know you're tired of hearing me talk about circles, but it's not my fault: the series is making me do it. Consider the set design of the Eyrie:

Circles within circles—and significantly, the Moon Door, which had been in a wall in the novel, was shifted to the center of the circular audience chamber for the series:

I mentioned in the previous post that I wouldn't talk about "empty centers," but this one is too significant not to. At the center of the seat of power in the Vale is, literally, nothing. A hole. (An execution hole.) An absence that, should someone step into it, well:

The writers and producers of the show moved the Moon Door so it would occupy the same place in the audience chamber that Jon, Tyrion, Jaime and Bronn did previous episodes: in the center of a circle, surrounded and imperiled. Only this center is pure peril, not possible, and an absence of power that is absolute instead of merely hypothetical. Put differently: it's a powerful absence.

On the one hand this makes perfect sense: in a contest for a throne that only a single person can hold, the position of power is inherently fraught. Visualizing it in circular terms, as the Game of Thrones team does, replicates that tension on-screen: Jon was in no more danger in "Lord Snow" than Jaime was in "The Wolf and the Lion" in their central positions, but they were still in some danger, as were those describing the circle around them. Capturing the precariousness of the central position is crucial to understanding the stakes of playing the game of thrones. Consider Dany in this episode:

She needs to eat that stallion heart, and she needs to keep it down. In the oddly egalitarian Dothraki society, her husband sits on the rim of the circle. Only because she is currently undergoing a trial-by-carpaccio is she allowed to occupy the central position. When the hoard is regularly arrayed, she sits beside her husband on the rim:

At the center is not a person but a communal meal, which says quite about their society but I'm not going to address that here. I'm more interested in what happens when a person steps into the center of the circle and says

Why, they give him one, of course:

A golden crown that, surprisingly, isn't a circle so much as a molten bowl. Point being, this isn't an episode in which one really wants to occupy the central position, and that's not surprisingly, given the run of the narrative: the Lannisters are making their move against Baratheon and Stark, creating a vacuum that undermines the formerly inherent power of the central position, which will remain unoccupied and contested for the remainder of the season.

That said, the next post will only mention circles in passing, I promise.

Visual Studies 401: Films You Can't Unsee

Futzing around on Facebook last night, I had an idea—which turned into a very interesting thread—about teaching a class on “films that can’t be unseen.” My suggestions were Requiem for a Dream, Happiness and Aguirre, the Wrath of God, but a number of horrifying suggestions followed, including: Dead Ringers, Oldboy, Irreversible, Dancer in the Dark, Blue Velvet, and Gummo, among others.

Obviously, this is a terrible idea for a class—or a fine way to find myself fired—but those of us not disturbed enough by the prospect of a Romney presidency need something to foreclose the possibility of ever sleeping again. So I wonder what would find its way onto your syllabus, were you to teach this course?

[Comments piling up at LGM.]

Fellowship of the Ring: Conventions of film, conventions of genre

(One of the visual rhetoric posts born of this course. If it seems a little more basic than the rest of those posts, that’s because it’s the first real day of class and I have to start somewhere.)

I have one goal here: to define "high fantasy" as a genre through Fellowship of the Ring. There will no doubt be academic arguments about the particulars—the true extent of Tolkien's influence, for example, or the necessity of orcs—but I want to sketch out the basic generic qualities of high fantasy in a portable manner, i.e. one that will also apply to Game of Thrones. Meaning the most commonly argued generic feature to qualify as unnecessary baggage is this one:

Works of fantasy exist in a world utterly unrelated to the one in which we live and are therefore purely escapist.

Because, at the very least, whatever work I do with Fellowship also needs to apply to Game of Thrones. That and it's just wrong. Anything written by a human being in a particular historical moment belongs to that particular historical moment even if it depicts a different or invented historical moment. The rest of the generic features of high fantasy I want to pull from Fellowship via an immanent analysis of the film itself, and what better place to begin than with maps?

Maps are important because 1) sentences like "Go north until you hit Chicago and hook a left and you'll end up California" don't make intuitive sense in fantastic worlds, and 2) the most common plot elements in fantastic works, quests and wars, are map-driven affairs. You need to know who's where and in relation to what in an invented world, and that requires special attention be paid to maps. Though the visual presentation and manipulation of maps is prevalent in high fantasy—as is evidenced both above, viewing Peter Jackson's zooming around the map of Middle Earth, or in the opening credits of Games of Thrones—it should be noted that as a film convention, it predates high fantasy as a genre. (Spielberg's clearly referencing something here.) Another common element in high fantasy would be a token of power:

Like one of those. In the case of Fellowship, the ring functions as both a token and embodiment of power, whereas in Game of Thrones, the Iron Throne will merely be the token awarded to the winner of the game, but in both cases there's an item whose acquisition is certral to the plot. In Fellowship, Jackson establishes and maintains the significance of the ring by constantly zooming in on it. The frame above, for example, belongs to a sustained zoom:

But Jackson's always zooming in on the ring. To wit:

That's Frodo at The Prancing Pony, but note the difference between the sustained zoom on Sauron's hand and the interrupted zoom on Frodo's fingers. Jackson's taking advantage of our implicit understanding of filmic convention when he zooms in on Sauron's hand: he knows that such zooms are sometimes intended to convey a thought process-in-process, so by sustaining the zoom it appears as if the ring itself is thinking. The edit from the extreme close-up of the ring to Frodo's face and back to an even more extreme close-up on the ring breaks up the continuity of the zoom, meaning the ring doesn't appear to be thinking so much as conversing with Frodo. It's asking Frodo to put it on, and from one shot to the next is becoming more insistence, hence the increasing extremity of the zoom. That's a literalization of the typically figurative allure of a token of power. Who falls victim to this allure?

Depends on what you mean by "victim." In one sense, the victims are a few singularly important people through whom the narrative will be focalized; in another, it's the anonymous hordes whose fates will be decided by which of those singularly important people acquire the token of power. For example, here's a singularly important person surrounded by his anonymous horde:

You can tell Elrond's important both because of the central framing and the difference in costume: it's not just that he's not wearing a helmet, but that not wearing a helmet makes his full face available to the audience. (See here for a preview of why that's important.) It goes without saying that in terms of genre it's the singularly important people who undertake quests and the anonymous hordes that go to war. It's also worth noting the color of Elrond and his anonymous hordes, which for historical reasons typically fight against anonymous hordes that look like this:

I'm not saying that dark skin and unconventional jewelry decisions necessarily indicate that a character in a high fantasy will be less-than-noble, but neither am I denying it. (There's a reason that conversations like this one happen, and about Peter Jackson, no less.) But more on that later, because at this point it would behoove us to unify the generic conventions I've identified as succinctly as possible:

High fantasy consists of narratives in which singularly important people go on quests for tokens of power in order to facilitate or forestall wars between anonymous hordes and all of that can be tracked on maps.

That seems like a fair assessment of the genre, as established in Fellowship, don't you think? If you don't, what essential features do you think I've missed?

Game of Thrones: "Winter Is Coming" for Will and Bran

(This is yet another one of those visual rhetoric posts that's born of this frightenining imminent course.)

You'll recall that according to the first post, Van Patten made Will a sympathetic deserter and oath breaker; according to the second, Van Patten established the family dynamic through Bran's perspective; according to the third, Bran remained the focal point because everyone believed themselves to be acting in his best interest; and according to the fourth and final post in this series, which would be this one, we'll finally witness the "punchline" of the preceding scenes. To begin:

The scene shifts from inside Winterfell to somewhere outside it. It's difficult to tell exactly where because there's a notched log occupying the majority of the frame. Why the log? Because Will's world is now the size of its notch. His world closes in on him as his death nears, so it makes sense that his purview, visually speaking, follows suit. It momentarily expands into an extreme long shot when he believes he's found an excuse that might could maybe save him:

But only momentarily:

Note contrast between these two shots: in the first, the camera is at a distance and captures a large swath of the highlands that are bright despite the mist blanketing them; in the second, the camera tightens in and centers on Will in a medium close-up, and the compositional structure is oppressive: he is flanked on both sides by armed guard and the hill behind doesn't, as the one in previous shot did, suggest freedom so much as unscaleable-rock-that-might-as-well-be-a-wall. He's trapped within the structure of the shot, and the medium close-up reminds us of the fear and pain we saw on his face when he was captured:

The irony of being imprisoned on an open field is more apparent in the above because the framing is looser, but it's essentially the same shot as the one in which he confesses his oath-breaking with one important exception: when he confesses to have broken his oath, he knows all hope is lost. In the shot above, the possibility of escape still exists, if not on that field, then possibly through pardon—hence his mentioning the white walkers two frames previous. But by the time he enters that structurally oppressive medium close-up, he knows his fate.

As do the other characters in the scene, and more importantly, the extent to which they sympathize with is indicated by the distance of the camera from their faces. This may seem like a simple means of identifying a complex emotional response, but it has a long history in film theory, the short version of it goes something like this:

Films used to be silent. Because actors couldn't tell us what they were thinking and many directors found intertitles aesthetically unappealing, the close-up on actors' faces became the preferred means of communicating their emotions. The heightened expressiveness evident in the close-up compelled audiences to pay more attention to the micro-expressions written upon the actors' faces, which made directors pay more attention to directing their actors to wear particular micro-expressions to communicate particular emotions, and so began the vicious cycle that led to the conventions of the modern close-up. Also, there's the fact that we're so hard-wired to pay close attention to faces that we'll "see" the face of Satan in a cloud formation, Saint Mary slumming on some toast, or this Martian fellow looking at whatever it is he's looking at. We want to see faces, and when we see them, we want them to communicate something to us. Just look at my cat. Can't you see the wonder in his eyes? Of course you can't. Whatever emotion Finnegan's feeling might be the feline equivalent of curiosity, but it's inhuman. Its humanity is merely imputed, drawn on his mug by our brain's intense desire to find meaning in anything structured like a face.

All of which is a long way of saying that conventional close-ups have been building on extant brain architecture for more than a century now, which is why the simple act of reversing from long shots of some characters to close-ups of others will make it seem as if the narrative's being focused through the latter. Let's continue with the scene:

Game of Thrones: "Winter Is Coming" for Catelyn and Jon Snow

(This is another one of those visual rhetoric posts that's born of this upcoming course ... which now has its own website that's only a demo at the moment so don't judge.)

To recap: in the first post, I demonstrated how Van Patten turned Will into a sympathetic character. In the second post, I established that the scenes in Winterfell that weren't in the novel were designed to establish a perspective on Will's coming execution that's focalized through Bran, but which also introduces the audience to the larger Stark family dynamics. (I also, as Julia Grey pointed out, inadvertantly indicated how Arya's character would develop over the course of the season. I'll let Julia's analysis carry the weight of that interpretative thread for now and return to it when it comes to fore later.) Before I can yoke those arguments together, though, it would behoove us to see what happens when Bran steps off-stage, as it were, beginning with the announcement of Will's capture:

Those smiles are residual: for one of the only time in the series, Ned and Catelyn have watched Arya and Bran engaging in what we might call "play." She hits his target and he's encouraged by his brothers, bastard and true, as well as his parents, to take off after her:

Every time I have this dream I want to kill myself.

Thank you Louie for the reminder:

My nightmare typically ends there. But this one?

Lynch wants to start the interview. Lynch will not stop yelling. There is no one in that chair.

Start the interview.

Lynch will not stop yelling. There is no one in that chair.

Lynch will not stop yelling. Start the interview. There is no one in that chair.

Start the interview.

Start the interview.

Start the interview.

There is no one in that chair.

Game of Thrones: "Winter Is Coming" for Bran

(This is another one of those visual rhetoric posts that's born of this upcoming course. The next post in this series can be found here. The course blog, which is currently still in the demo stage so don't judge, is here.)

In the previous post we established that the director of "Winter Is Coming," Tim Van Patten, went to great lengths to transform Will into a sympathetic character. He can choose immediate death at the cold hands of the white walker or run back to Winterfell and face immediate death for having deserted his post on the wall. He chose the latter, which in terms of prolonging his life was the correct choice, but eventually his decision caught up with him:

As hinted in the previous post, this shot is almost a graphic match that straddles the opening credits. Will's forlorn face as he decides to run to this death rather than face the other resembles, in a compositional sense, this medium long shot of his capture. The difference is one of scale, and it's an understandable one, as the previous medium close-up highlighted his pained indecision, whereas this medium long shot diminishes him to the "proper" height of one about to be beheaded.

But as I noted in the previous post, Will is but a directorial tool—a means to a sympathy-creating ends. The deep focus in the shot above emphasizes the fact that despite the fact that Will's in the middle of an open field, he's surrounded and escape is impossible. Unlike when he was north of the wall and the danger was effectively hidden in plain sight and shallow focus, south of the wall, easily spotted threats arrive from all directions. Hence, the look of resignation on Will's face. Not that Will matters.

He doesn't. He's but a means to an end, and that end is the introduction of the rigorously structured points of view present in the novel. This episode, "Winter Is Coming," translates nine chapters of Game of Thrones from the page to the screen. Ignoring, for the moment, Daenerys I and II, which cover happenings an ocean away, the episode must introduce the perspectives presented in Bran I, Catelyn I, Eddard I, Jon I, Catelyn II and Bran II. Without going full-Rashomon, how can Van Patten accomplish this? By introducing their internal thoughts and feelings via their reactions to Poor Will's unfortunate fate. The shot above follows some of the riders to an establishing shot of Winterfell:

Without knowing anything else about what's going on here, what has Van Patten communicated? Unlike the inhumanely scaled wall presented in the Prologue, this castle is imposing but clearly of human design and repair. It's also clearly a castle, which creates in the audience the expectation that they'll be meeting the groomers and smithies and kitchen wards. Of course not: if Van Patten had cut to a crack in the castle wall large enough for someone half-starved to slip through, that might be the case, but he cut to a majestic extreme long shot of a castle lording over its domain, so of course we're about to be introduced to royalty:

Or people with pretentions of royalty. That's Bran—of Bran I and Bran II—along with his half-brother Jon Snow and the next Lord of Winterfell, Robb Stark. (Who I initially mistook for Theon Greyjoy, because I need new glasses, but which is an interesting mistake.) Snow and Stark will eventually have chapters of their own, but at this point Van Patten is more interested in introducing Bran's perspective because that's who narrates the chapters in the novel. That said, the introductory image of Bran is telling: Jon Snow, the Lord's bastard son, dominates the center of the frame with what I'd call a pedagogical calm. He's instructing the Lord's legitimate heir, Bran, in the niceties of hitting what one aims at, and Bran's clearly trying to impress him. Bran and Robb flank Jon, but because the movement in the shot belongs to Bran, Robb's position is akin to not insignificant backdrop, but backdrop nonetheless. From this shot, then, it's apparent that Bran wants to impress Jon and isn't unaware of Robb, which is just as it is in the novel.

Game of Thrones: "Winter Is Coming" for Poor Will

(I think it goes without saying that this is another one of those visual rhetoric posts.)

As this is to be the first of many posts breaking down the visual rhetoric of Game of Thrones, I want to tell you either "You're welcome!" or "I'm sorry!" I need to write them for my class this quarter so they will written. Regular blogging will continue as usual. (See?) Now on to "Winter Is Coming."

For those of you who haven't read George R.R. Martin's Games of Thrones, it's important to note that there are twenty-four characters through whose perspective the narrative is occasionally focalized, meaning that the writers and directors of the television series needed to go full-Rashomon or find another way to imbue each episode with the feel of perspectival diversity. Which makes the decision to open "Winter Is Coming" with the Prologue odd but instructive. On the one hand, beginning where the novel begins is a simple decision: Martin placed the Prologue where he did because he wanted to set the mood for the scenes to come and director Tim Van Patten followed suit. On the other hand, in an episode that can only be 52 minutes long and in which numerous perspectives must be introduced, devoting 11 minutes to the quick end of the short life of Will, the Prologue's narrator, seems excessive. I'm going to argue otherwise: what the material contained in the Prologue provides the audience is a means of sympathizing with the different perspectives on Will's life and death, and in so doing begins to recreate the structure of the novel. But I'm getting ahead of myself here. First we need to be introduced to Will:

He's one of those little black dots on horseback in this extreme long or establishing shot, the purpose of which is establish the scale of the wall by providing us with an identifiable reference and the state of the environment by showing us an unimaginably large wall made of ice and a cover of snow that follows the wall to the vanishing point. Before we even meet Will, then, Van Patten informs us that he is a small man beholden to powers great enough to build and maintain that wall, and that he is likely in peril, because no one who isn't builds and lives behind a wall like that. Moreover, the contrast between the blue-white snow and the black riders suggests that not only is Will in peril, he's conspicuously so, which means he's all the more likely to meet a sad end. And Van Patten's communicated all of this in a single shot.

He cuts to another establishing shot that works much like the first: in what we'll call a very long shot, the world is still white and empty of all but some men and trees. This is the classic Russian technique of turning a forest into the cinematic equivalent of a barren desert: the only life visible is either human or snow-coated evergreen. These riders aren't as tiny as they were in the opening shot, but the scale still makes them appear vulnerable because they're still dominated by the other elements of the frame. The deep focus suggests that all of the elements in the scene may be of equal importance, which is strange because the only visible elements are the people and the trees. Combined with the relatively high-key lighting, which should allow us to see everything in the scene, the deep focus creates the conflicting impression that we can see everything in the scene, but that there's something in it that we're still not seeing. But if it's there why can't we see it?

It could be because we are the something we can't see and we're watching the riders approach from our point-of-view. Intimating that camera's perspective belongs to something monstrous is quite common in horror films and series. For example, the first episode of The Walking Dead, "Days Gone By," fiddled with this suggested perspective for nearly five minutes before dispensing with the conceit. Van Patten only plays with it momentarily, but the effect is unsettling enough because as the riders move closer to the camera, their faces become more distinct, and the more we can distinguish about them from their faces, the more likely we are sympathize with them. In the long shot above, the rider's face betrays a wariness about what's behind the trees, and well he should, because it might be us and we might be a monster. We're not. However!

Breaking Bad: "Gliding Over All" I've written

Someone asked if I’d published the final post in my wrap-up of the mid-season finale and I mentioned that I had—on Saturday evening when 90 percent of our readers aren’t reading. So here’s a convenient wrap-up of my posts on the subject:

• Part I: In which we learn the value of staring.
• Part II: In which we learn about invisible lines and the value of staring at paintings.
• Part III: In which we learn about the color blue and that sometimes looking is important too.

I also wrote a post about Walter White and white supremacism but it’s only tangentially related to “Gliding Over All.” So there it is: three posts about a single episode that don’t even begin to do it justice. There may be one more on the horizon, but for now the bulk of my visual rhetoric-related work will consist of readings of the first season of Game of Thrones for my Fall course. I should have the first (of many) posts up tomorrow.

Breaking Bad: "Gliding Over All" until you're not

(This being another one of those visual rhetoric posts.)

At this point my point should be staring you in the face: the mid-season finale of Breaking Bad is all about staring and what it means to stare. Staring can signify the acquisition of knowledge (the fly and the painting) or suggest intimacy (the cafe) or indicate an experience with the ineffable (the money pile). That it functions so differently in a single episode prevents the audience from being able to predict how a particular stare will influence the narrative. (Unlike a stare in a generic gangster film, for example, which the audience can safely assume will lead to the death of the person being stared at or being thought about while the staring occurs.) This is why the final scene in the episode works so well: its simplicity. But before I get to that, I should set up the narrative at this particular moment. Walter and his extended family, including his DEA-employed brother-in-law Hank, are having a dinner beside the White's pool. It's worth noting that this is a significant pool: Walter spent the time in which Mike's men were being murdered alternating between staring at it and his watch:

Given that the palette of Walter's depravity skews as blue as his meth, it's not surprising that the face of his watch is blue. Nor is it surprising that after he learns that the synchronized hits went down successfully, MacLaren returns to the "scene" of the crime and shots Walter thus:

There's bad Walter bathed in blue and staring at the pool. He knows he's crossed a line: it was one thing to murder Fring or Mike in what he could justify to himself as self-defense. It's another entirely to remove Mike's crew from the world because their continued existence posed a potential threat to his empire. He's cooked for three consecutive months and only could have done so by taking out Mike's men. (Otherwise one of them would've talked and Walter would've been arrested.) As he sits by the side of his pool, ignorant of the exact amount of money he's earned during his months long cooking binge, the serene look on his face may come from an exhausted sense of pride in work well-done, but it also hides the fact that he knows that work couldn't have been done had he not arranged the murders of Mike's men. The ends have justified his means. Then he's introduced to the money pile, the experience of which so muddles his immoral calculus and leads to him informing Skyler that he's retiring from the trade and bringing his family back into the fold. Which is only to say that regardless of Walter's state of mind prior to meeting the money pile, its existence alters him in such a way that he believes himself capable of recapturing the life he's lost.

The penultimate scene next to the pool is the first step in resumption of normalcy. His wife and children have returned home. His sister- and brother-in-law have come over for dinner. Everything is right in the universe. The river's flowing:

Breaking Bad: "Gliding Over All" the invisible lines and immaterial connections

(This being another one of those visual rhetoric posts.)

In the previous post, I claimed that the titular reference to Whitman's "Passage to India" suggests that the central concerns of "Gliding Over All" were related to connectedness. I outlined the way in which the camerawork allows the audience to peer into Walter's mind and observe him connecting the fly to Mike's body by the power of intently staring. In retrospect I realize my claim is based on a manner of reading a visual text that's not intuitive, and that I only do it because I've trained myself to. The full version of this argument can be found here, but for now a single image from it should suffice:

That yellow arrow obviously isn't painted on "The Calling of Saint Matthew." (I can personally attest to that.) I put it there to describe the eyeline match between the man at the table and Jesus. When we look at his eyes, we see that he's looking at something and follow his line-of-sight. Is that line-of-sight in the painting? I would argue that it's an invisible element that exists in the painting. Our eyes aren't inventing that line-of-sight, they're merely following it. The practical effect of this argument is that I see invisible lines all over my television. When a character stares at something I see the line shoot from his or her eyes and follow its trajectory. The longer the character the stares, the greater the intensity of the line, and the more thoughtful the act of staring seems to become. The classic example of this are the scenes in Antonioni's Blowup in which Thomas uses his photographs to recreate the geography of the park in his apartment. Here's the fence on the back wall:

Here's Thomas staring at the unidentified man on the right wall:

What happens next?

Thomas follows the unidentified man's eyes to the photographs of the fence on the back wall. Staring at the unidentified man led Thomas to follow the invisible lines shooting from his eyes which in turn compelled him to further "blow up" the image of the fence. In this sense Thomas is a figure of the audience: we share his desire to know what the man is staring at. This is an elaborate way of making a simple point: I see invisible lines and you do too. (You just didn't know you did.)

The particular significance of those lines for "Gliding Over All" is that—as in Blowup—they function as tangible evidence of otherwise intangible thought processes. The staring is the physical equivalent of the technology Whitman celebrates in "Passage to India": it is the canal through which ships can pass, the train tracks upon which locomatives can traverse, the underground cables through which messages can travel. It's an invisible medium with the potential to be made meaningful because of what can move through it. In this episode it seems as if director MacLaren is intent on making Whitman's point in as many ways as possible. On the one hand you have the kinds of connections discussed in the previous post and above. On the other hand you have discussions about creating a network of literal connections of the sort Whitman celebrated. Consider the scene of Walter and Lydia in the diner:

The fact that both of them are in-frame here is significant: sharing a frame creates the impression that characters are connected. This is especially true in a series like Breaking Bad which, as I noted earlier, the majority of conversational sequences are a series of reversed one-shots. What is the nature of their connection? The technological descendents of the invisible connections of which Whitman wrote: the telephone signals and airline routes that facilitate the movement of Walter's product halfway across the globe. Lydia is offering Walter connections. When he balks MacLaren severs the implicit connection of the two-shot and switches to a series of profiles:

The more she convinces him the more connected they become:

The irony here is that the invisible connections I discussed in the previous post and the first half of this one are absent from the scene in which characters are literally forging a network of invisible connections. Until his sublime experience with the pile of money, Walter becomes—and is depicted by MacLaren as becoming—increasingly obsessed with abstract connections. Consider the scene in which he meets Todd's uncle to put hits on Mike's men:

As is hilariously evident when we follow all those eyelines, this shot is obscenely disconnected. But as with the scene in Blowup, MacLaren creates in the audience a desire to see whatever it is Walter is looking at. She lets the scene unfold for nearly two minutes before gratifying our curiosity:

But Walter isn't just staring at a painting any more than he was just staring at the fly. He's attempting to stare through the this particular painting to all of its other iterations. After being told that coordinating the murders of Mike's men is tantamount to killing bin Laden, Walter starts talking to no one in particular: "Where do you suppose these come from? I've seen this one before. I wonder, are they all in some giant warehouse someplace?" His first and third questions indicates that he wants to understand the deeper connection between all of these paintings. His second statement is simply one of fact:

That's from "Bit by a Dead Bee," the third episode of the second season, and that's Walter staring at it from his hospital bed. There's no visible flashback in "Gliding Over All," but the suggestion is that Walter remembers where he's seen it before. Or even if he doesn't, he's trying to remember by staring at it more intently than he has before, which means that's another invisible line that's functioning as a tangible representation of a thought process. Before moving on I should note that, as with the fly, the object being stared at is important. Just as the fly connected Walter to Mike's dead body, this painting connects Walter to his family. It's a painting, after all, of a woman and two children bidding a man farewell. That this family has a dog and Walter's doesn't is immaterial: studying that particular painting immediately before putting out a hit on eight imprisoned men reminds him of something. Maybe it's why he's doing it in the first place or maybe it's how far at sea his life's drifted. Doesn't matter: both interpretations adequately serve as preparation for his decision to quit the business after the pile of money breaks him.

Tomorrow I'll discuss the episode's final scene, in which Walt Whitman helps Hank make the episode's most significant connection.