Acephalous

This interview would've been right up my alley back when I co-edited a successful literary theory blog

I suppose you could say Jeff VanderMeer was generous with his time when he agreed to do what turned into a 3,000 word-long interview about his new novel, Annihilation. A sample:

SEK: The novel reads very much like the world it describes—utterly familiar, yet slightly off at all points. Was that your intent? (For example, on 59, you describe “Something like a body or a person,” which makes perfect sense, yet is incredibly disturbing. What is like a body or a person that’s not a body or a person?)

JV: I hike a lot in North Florida, and from a distance, things look like other things. A bat can metamorph into a bird when seen closer. A creature on a log becomes just a stubby branch. A seeming tree trunk is actually a bear. You think you are going north, but suddenly, through some daydream of lapse of attention, you get turned around.

These are, in a sense, reminders to us that the real world is stranger than we usually think. Imagine being able to spy on the processes going on around you while even walking down the sidewalk on your street—the plants employing photosynthesis and speaking to each other in chemical emissions, the ants with their pheromone trails, the fungi with their spores. Why, there’s still crowded and noisy cosmopolitan situation all around you, but you can’t experience any of it because your senses are these stunted, incomplete systems.

You’ve got eyes that can’t see the whole spectrum. A cat would laugh at your stupid sense of smell. Your sense of taste is pathetic compared to many creatures. Your sense of touch is put to shame by your average gecko. So the world is in a sense laughing at you anyway, or on some level ignoring you completely, and your sole contribution is the ability to tread too heavily on a dandelion and break its stem. So if we’re honest the world should feel slightly off at times. The world should at times reveal some glint or glimmer of greater processes ongoing. Something like a body or a person. Something like a shadow or a creature. Something like a sudden clue…

SEK: On page 111, you note that the pile of journals describing Area X will soon become Area X itself. This strikes me as a literal version of “contact narratives,” in which what an explorer writes about an area he discovers becomes how future generations understand it. (Describing cities of gold in the “New World” leading explorers to “discover” such cities, even though they only ever existed in print.) Are these books [in "the Southern Reach" trilogy] an exercise in, call it, “creative geography”? Re-shaping the world by describing it?

JV: I must admit my minor in college was Latin American history, and I’m sure there’s a sedimentary layer in the back of my brain that, in soaking all of that conflicted and difficult chronology, has peeked out through some of the observations in Annihilation. I guess I was also thinking of the journals from the prior expeditions as almost being like the bones of the explorers, in word form. This is where they washed up, their instruments useless, all logic revealed as merely construct to push them through the day.

And, yes, there is perhaps a parallel: explorers and exploiters who are culturally so different and from such a different landscape that the very land seems to reject them, even when they seem to have conquered it. I’m not particularly fond of missionaries or of conquerors or empires, all of which strike me as examples of dreaming poorly but, alas, doing so across a vast continuum of human endeavor, to the brutal detriment of all who push back with perhaps a more sustainable and humane vision of the world…

Read the entire interview here.

I'm a fraud!

I don’t want to steal anyone’s thunder or appear to be piling on, but one aspect of Hugo Schyzer’s “confession” strikes me as especially problematic, especially at a time in which the humanities are under assault from well-funded conservative forces: his claim of academic fraudulence.

He’s clearly not a fraud in the traditional sense, i.e. he didn’t falsify his credentials or publish papers on data he knew to be cooked. He claims that when he was in graduate school, “there was no such thing as porn studies,” so he lacked the credentials to teach it. Which, I suppose, is technically true. But he also claims to have “do[ne] the reading,” which in practice is all that’s required of scholars who work in a field that didn’t exist when they earned their doctorates.

The other “fraud” he believes he committed is that he spoke about feminism but “never published in any serious academic journal [because he] wanted to write for a popular audience.” Anyone familiar with the current state of academic journals knows about the incestuous nature of “blind” review: your name’s not on your submission, but if you’ve spoken at a conference or to another scholar in the field, you’re a known quantity. Your work whispers your name to the person who reviews it and that, as much as any independent factors, determines whether it’ll be published. (Why yes, I am that cynical.) But I haven’t come here to bury humanities journals—their “style” secures them a place in the deepest recesses of empty libraries—only to note that failure to publish in a discipline or subdiscipline doesn’t disqualify a person from teaching in it if they’ve done the reading. That’s all that’s required. If Schwyzer convinced his colleagues that he’d done the reading, he was qualified to teach a course in whatever it was he’d read.

Does this system require trust and lend itself to abuse? I suppose. But as someone who spent 13 years teaching at one of the best universities in the country, I can assure you that when you stand in front of a classroom of bright, motivated students you always feel like a fraud. You’ve never read enough, and you never will have. Your shelves will always be lined with books you should’ve already read. You feel like a fraud because you’ve only read thirty books on X, but your students consider you an authority for the very same reason.

Was I a hypocrite when I taught a literary journalism course after only having casually read Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe, and John McPhee? What if I told you I’d also had a subscription to The New Yorker for a decade? How much literary journalism did I need to read to be able to teach it? How familiar with its style and conventions did I need to be? I can’t answer those questions, so instead I’ll say what every teacher knows to be true: I wasn’t qualified to teach the material until I’d already taught it a few times.

That doesn’t make me a fraud—it makes me a teacher.

Here’s a hypothetical: an academic writes a dissertation about, say, evolutionary theory in fin de siècle American popular culture, but later starts reading and writing about a subject in which he’d received absolutely no graduate level training. Like, I don’t know, film theory. He reads the seminal texts, then writes about it online, for a popular audience instead of an academic one, for the better part of six years. Would this academic be qualified to open an “Internet Film School” at the Onion A.V. Club? Would he be a fraud if he did?

Has neoliberalism made geeks of us all?

 

Original image by Paul Hadsall

In “On Geek Culture,” Ian Williams collapses geek and sport cultures into each other by claiming both are tribal manifestations of brand loyalty:

 

In my beloved roleplaying game circles, doxing and threats of violence over the internet occur regularly over which edition of Dungeons and Dragons people prefer. Go to any video game forum and one can see pages of arguments about which console is the “right” one to enjoy. On and on it goes, across intellectual properties and hobbies, right down to nearly breaking out in actual physical violence.

This is remarkably similar to diehard sports fan culture. It’s not merely that a disagreement exists over which consumed product is superior; it’s that the fan of the other team is an Other. This, again, blurs the lines between what we think of as geek fandom and non-geek.

On its face, the idea that geek-love for a particular franchise is the psychological equivalent of devotion to a particular athletic team makes sense: both are characterized by an over-identification with the central figures in an ongoing drama, be it the trials of a fictional protagonist or the tribulations of a team seemingly committed to never cracking .500. And in both cases, these figures are representatives of corporate media, such that it doesn’t matter to the BBC who plays the Doctor, so long as the show itself is successful, anymore than it matters to the NFL who wins the Super Bowl, so long as the game itself is an obscene encomium to American capitalism.

For Williams, the corporate nature of the objects of fandom overrides the differences between how those objects are related to. “Neoliberalism,” he claims, “has made geeks of us all: jocks, nerds, and dweebs alike,” and so he suggests that we make “a concerted effort to free the media being consumed from the corporate realm.” As sentiments go, that’s a lovely one; but as statements about reality go, it indicates that Williams isn’t remotely familiar with geek culture. That should’ve been apparent when he linked to a fight at a Star Wars club and claimed “[t]his is remarkably similar to diehard sports fan culture.”

His entire argument relies on that analogy, but his diction betrays that he lacks confidence in it. Depending on how remarkable you prefer your similarities, a honey badger is “remarkably similar” to the least chipmunk. They share a kingdom, phylum, and class, which any 19th Century naturalist will tell you means that they’re more similar than not. Ask the same 19th Century naturalist which one he’d rather be locked in a small box with, however, and you’d quickly learn that the differences between them are more significant than their similarities are remarkable. (Only one, for example, is a vainglorious carnivore.) Point being, the rare instance of verbal arguments leading to physical altercations in geek culture shouldn’t be the basis of an analogy to a sport culture in which such an escalation is common.

So, Williams’s argument on the corporate nature of geek culture relies on an analogy that only works from a logical remove so distant as to be useless. Which isn’t to say that there isn’t a corporate component to geek culture, as there certainly is, but that component operates in a vastly different way than its correlate in sport culture. If you’re a Mets fan, you watch them play on SNY or at Citifield and you purchase uniforms and gear from officially licensed MLB manufacturers. With a few notable exceptions—homemade posters or creepy homespun Mr. Met costumes—your participation in the team culture is mediated through corporate entities. You don’t often witness the melting visage of a paper-mache Mr. Met roaming the stands of Citifield, but you can’t attend a comic conference without seeing twenty Wolverines sporting alarmingly sharp-looking claws. That’s because the participatory nature of geek culture is expansive—the object originates in a corporate entity but isn’t limited to it—whereas the more you participate in sport culture, the more money you deposit in the pockets of the corporations that own it.

This is a basic fact of geek culture: while a person can participate it by buying a Batman costume officially licensed by DC Comics, he or she can also—and for the most part does—participate in it by purchasing ceramic plates and blackout drapes and transforming them into something resembling a Batsuit. I understand the desire to vilify corporations for their pernicious effect on contemporary culture, but I don’t think such condemnations require us to minimize the differences between subcultures in what, to my eyes, seems like an attempt to create a monolithic subculture. I’m not sure what good a united front of geeks and sport fans would have on American society at large, especially if the bond between them is a weak analogy based on violent tribalist tendencies.

A MOOC Primer by SEK

Once upon a time I did one of these that proved so popular Insider Higher Ed promised to pay me $125 to reprint it at their place. And they did reprint it yes they did. But I digress: last night I was avoiding things I couldn't change, but lacked the courage required to change the things I could, so instead I decided to write a primer summarizing my feelings about the MOOC phenomenon I've been reading so much about lately. It goes something like this:

A is for affordable, you too can attend!

B, the boredom of the automated emails that they send.

C is for the crowd-sourced marks you never can protest,

D, the comments you receive from Dr. Dispossessed.

E is for efficiency, you'll learn much more and faster;

F, the mark you'll earn from your anonymous headmaster.

G is for goals you'll meet, should fleeting time permit;

H, the honey badger, who doesn't give a shit.

I's for innovation, as the Internet is used;

J's the campus jobs "human appliances" will lose.

K is for "the kids," for whom all this is done;

L, the learning process, endless lectures on re-run.

M is for the money that will soon begin to rain,

O for the obscenity of pipe dreams, most profane.

O's also for objectives and assessments by machines,

C, "collaboration," 'cross seas of dim-lit screens.

Q is for the questions never answered in a MOOC,

R for "really thoughtful answers" copied from a book.

S, the rare impoverished souls, who care enough to try,

T, the time spent wasted, "learning" from a turned blind eye.

U's for universities, who seek to monetize,

V, the vastness of the campus they've lobotomized.

W's for the wallet, slit wide and fit to pad,

X is the amount slipped in, the bills that feed the fad.

Y is for the questions time and space do not permit,

Z, the honey badger, who doesn't give a shit.

NOTE: Editorial advice is always welcome, as deaf scansion tends to emphasize rhythm at the expense of everything else.

Representations of rape in comic books

[I'm re-posting this because I received an email on my earlier post inquiring as to whether "cartoons" are capable of tackling difficult social issues responsibly. I think this old post demonstrates how something as ostensibly slight as a "cartoon" can have a profound impact on a person's moral development.]

The year was 1988. I was a recent transplant to Louisiana and a tad on the introverted side. (What with being deaf and all.) So I spent endless hours reading comic books. I may have “like ‘em liked” some girls at this point, but can find no evidence of it in my fourth grade yearbook. Not only did I know nothing about girls, I distinctly remember not even knowing what this “rape” thing I heard about on the news was. But I mowed my lawn every day—my father having decided to instill the value of hard work by allowing me to earn $4 whenever I wanted by re-mowing what my new work ethic transformed into a hilariously mangy lawn—and so I had plenty of money to blow on X-books. Meaning I spent most afternoons blissfully unaware of anything that didn’t involve the X-Men or X-Factor or The New Mutants or, if I was desperate enough, Alpha Flight.

One late October afternoon, I purchase a copy of X-Men #236. On the cover Wolverine and Rogue are hung by their feet from a scaffold, flanked on both sides by grinning fools in military garb. (This image disturbs me more now than it did then.) What had happened? The X-Men had sacrificed themselves to save the world, only in the end they were granted a reprieve: they would be dead to the world but would live undetected and undetectable in the Australian outback. They were invisible to all forms of electronic recording devices. They were able to move throughout the world invisible to all by the naked eye. Or so they thought until a fascist state called “Genosha” declared war on them. To make a long story short: shit hit fans. Wolverine and Rogue were captured.

For those unfamiliar with the comics or the films, Rogue has the power to absorb the memories and/or mutant powers of whomever she touches. So, naturally, she doesn’t touch anyone for fear of knocking them unconscious and draining them of their “life energy.” Her entire life Rogue has wanted nothing more than to touch someone without hurting them. To be loved. But she’d come to accept the fact that this would never happen. This self-sacrifice moved my fourth-grade mind. I sympathized with her despite having no clue as to what she sacrificed or why. I only knew that it pained her and, being the good sympathetic identifier that I was, I felt her pain by proxy. So without really knowing why, I wanted Rogue to be able to touch people.

And after she’s captured by the Genoshans, she’s stripped of her mutant powers. Now she can touch people without having to worry about killing them. For a moment, I’m happy for her. If only she can get out of this jam she’ll be able to touch someone! That’s all she ever wanted! Then I hit this panel:

And I was confused. That’s Rogue huddled there in the corner. She’s traumatized. Over the next few issues she’ll disappear. Another personality—and I mean that literally—will emerge. Rogue will be so hurt by whatever “liberties [were] taken when she was being processed” that she’ll cede control of her psyche to Carol Danvers. (Read the link.  It’s too complicated to explain briefly.) Needless to say, despite not knowing quite what those “liberties” were, countless data points began to constellate for me. I saw “touching” and “forced” and “fascism” and “liberties” circle the pained figure in the panel above and I was confused. Angry. Upset. I didn’t know why, but I knew that I was. My sympathies had identified with something they couldn’t comprehend.

When I was hit by that car and pain plus medication turned my mind to cottage cheese, the most “intellectual” material I could stomach were comics. Re-reading this one, I stumbled into a realization: my feminist sympathies were first marshaled while reading a comic back in the Autumn of ’88. The medium is far from perfect, but it’s not wholly without value.  I’m not defending myself here so much as describing a stage in my development. So please don’t read this and think “Scott think spandex is progressive?” I don’t. Only once upon a time, it inadvertently was.

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: "Lord Snow," you're no bigger than a half-man*

Since I have two classes to devote to "Lord Snow," the third episode in the first season of Game of Thrones, I thought I'd divide them between the characters. In this post and the next we'll hie to the Wall with Jon Snow and Tyrion Lannister; in the final one, we'll churn through the Dothraki Sea with Daenerys Targaryen. I'm pairing Jon and Tyrion not simply because of the odd bond they form on the way to the Wall, but because they present similar problems to director Brian Kirk: both must be built up, knocked down, and rebuilt. As you recall, in the first episode of the series Jon Snow's the victim of Catelyn Starks's redirected aggression: she can't stop Ned from taking Bran to an execution, but she can glower at her husband's bastard from above.

Then he decides to take a position in the Night's Watch, which means leaving Winterfell and joining his "black brothers" on the Wall. So lowly Jon Snow arrives at the Wall and finds himself a trained fighter among thieves and rapists and people who believe they deserve the nickname "Ser Piggy." In this lot, lowly Jon Snow isn't nearly so lowly. Director Kirk establishes that when in a prolonged training sequence early in the episode:

Everyone in this long shot is diminished by its dimensions: Ser Alliser Thorne, who likes Jon not one whit, is the closest to occupying frame-center, but the scale's so small that his figure can hardly be said to "dominate" the shot:

My patented yellow-line-technology demonstrates that frame center's about a foot above his head, but it also reveals something else about the Wall's intended scale: all of the sparring combatants are in the bottom triangle, and all of the spectators are in the the one on the right, which leaves the top and left triangles empty of people. (Note: I'm officiating the next two frames like a football ref with a sketchy understanding of what constitutes an offside position.) The compositional weight of the left and top frames seems to bear down on the tiny figure in bottom one, such that even the foremost among them, Alliser, cedes center-frame to a weathered baluster. All of which is only to say that, initially, Kirk continues shooting Jon with the same disdain that came from Catelyn's eyes. Until:

He cuts to a medium shot in which a weathered baluster still occupies center frame—except in this case it creates a telling vertical element that divides the frame between Alliser and Jon like so:

It's close enough for government work—which might cause those who have finished the novels to chuckle—but the basic point is that the purpose of this scene is for Alliser to break Jon, but that frame speaks to his inevitable failure. They each occupy the central position of their respective sides, but the importance of each is tempered by the unusally high level of framing:

As noted previously, unusally high levels of framing—by which I mean shots in which the characters who should occupy the entire vertical space in the frame don't—creates the impression that the world the characters occupy is pressing down on them. It communicates to the audience that the circumstances in the frame are, in this case, at least one-third as important as the characters who aren't even central to it. If I wanted to be really clever I'd skew the vertical line from the frame-before-last and claim that the most important element of this shot seems to be the baluster's weathered head:

But I won't, because the baluster's head being elevated is less important than Alliser and Jon's being humbled by the composition. Alliser considers himself Jon's superior, but the shot says otherwise. Alliser's words directly harken back to Snow and Catelyn's encounter in "Winter Is Coming," meaning the audience should remember that Jon's not the spitter but the spat upon. All of which adds up to Ser Alliser putting on airs and Jon being right about where he should be in the social scheme of things. At least until he begins to fight. He glowers to the left:

He growls to the right:

He owns those medium close-ups. He beats down every person from the bottom triangle above because he is the Big Man on the Wall. Or not:

Cutting away from the scene of Jon's successive victories to Mormont and Tyrion simultaneously accomplishes two things: first, it puts both Alliser and Jon back in the below-place, beneath the betters whose lowly subjects they are no matter how skillfully they fight; second, it places Jon beneath Tyrion in a manner that, again, reminds the audience of Catelyn's earlier disdain. Except unlike Catelyn, who has the luxury of despising her husband's bastard, there's no condescension in Tyrion's positioning. Is this because he's a "half-man"? (A term I use because it's what the novels and series do, not because I endorse it entering the common tongue.) I don't think so ... and I don't think so because that shot of Tyrion dominates him and Mormont as thoroughly as the earlier one oppressed Alliser and Jon. Feel free to draw your own yellow lines on it, but by now pointing out that the characters are off-center and that the spaces above and beneath them make this long shot feel longer than it is.

Which isn't to say the low angle of framing is unimportant: Mormont and Tyrion are supposed to appear superior to Alliser and Jon, but the scale of the shot indicates that "superior" is a relative term here because everyone is dwarfed by the wall.** In sum, this short scene re-establishes Jon's unimportance, establishes his potential significance, then re-re-establishes his unimportance as a function of everyone's insignificance compared to the Wall. "Everyone" is, of course, a group that includes Tyrion, whose building-ups and tearing-downs I'll cover tomorrow.

*The logic of this post and the next isn't entirely different from that of this one, about "Blackwater," except that I can't teach the "Blackwater" post because I'm working through the first season and it's in the second.

**No pun intended. I just couldn't bear to type the word "diminish" again.

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:

“We were told to ride out the storm, but it seems we were lied to[.]”

That's a handsome quotation from the Inside Higher Ed article about the Colorado State University ad discussed yesterday. From the article:

Louann Reid, chair of English at Colorado State, sees it differently. When asked if the ad discriminated against adjuncts, she said her department is seeking an entry-level professor with an entry-level salary and expectations, and added that the posting was approved by the university’s office of equal opportunity.

There's a strange disconnect because the question—does the ad discriminate against adjuncts?—and Reid's answer—the department wants to hire an entry-level professor with an entry-level salary and expectations. Do adjuncts not have entry-level salary expectations? Because I'm a short step above an adjunct and I can assure you that my salary expectations are entry-level. In a response Chad Black's email, Reid made clear the reasoning behind that disconnect:

By specifying "between 2010 and time of appointment" we indicated that we are interested in applicants with up to three years in a tenure-track position as well as those who are just beginning their careers.

So they want their pool of applicants to consist of (1) the fortunate few who landed a tenure-track position between 2005 and 2009 and (2) those people who happened to finish their doctorate after 2010. Notice who's absent from their ideal pool? Everyone who wasn't fortunate enough to land a tenure-track position in the worst academic job market in recent memory. It seems like Colorado State wants to punish undeserving scholars for the crimes of having to pay rent and eat during an economic downturn. But it's doubly cruel considering the fact that the hiring committees whose lines were plucked out from under them told applicants that the disappearance of the positions to which they'd applied wouldn't have any impact on their future in the profession. Because as this callous ad demonstrates, it clearly did. Colorado State thinks the fact that schools didn't have jobs to offer from 2005 to 2009 speaks poorly of applicants who failed to land non-existent jobs.

To which I can only say nothing because we're in polite company.

UPDATE: Turns out sending pesky emails to the President of my professional organziation pays dividends:

In the Q&A, Bérubé said the CSU ad issue has been put on the MLA Exec Com agenda, and the MLA is un-approving the ad. @scottekaufman

— Chad Black (@parezcoydigo) September 11, 2012

What's the academese for "no fatties"? Why do I need to know? No reason, no reason.

[My response to the Inside Higher Ed article can be found here.]

It has come to my attention that I’m now too old and too experienced to be hired to do my job. Consider the “Required Qualifications” of this listing for a position at Colorado State University:

1. Ph.D. in English or American Studies or closely related area awarded between 2010 and time of appointment.
2. A promising record of scholarship/research in pre-1900 American literature and culture.
3. Ability to teach a range of subjects in American literature and culture between 1600 and 1900.

For years our “betters” have told those of up who earned our degrees between 2005 and 2010 that we needed to do whatever we could to survive—adjunct or lecture or accept positions at community colleges—and that when the market turned around we wouldn’t be punished for having done so. Seems we were lied to. If institutions require candidates who earned their doctorate after 2010, it indicates that they’ve embraced the idea that there’s a Lost Generation of scholars out there. A Generation so embittered by the paucity of prospects and the years spent toiling in academic recesses that its members can’t ever be reintegrated into a functioning department. We—I earned my doctorate in 2008—have been tainted by market forces beyond our control, but instead of bucking the inherently flawed system as they do in words and print, these aggressively benevolent "betters" are conceding that they’re powerless to do anything for this Generation in deeds.

“It’s not up to us,” they say.  (Only it is.)

“There’s nothing we can do about it,” they say. (Only they can.)

“If you’d landed a job in 2009 this wouldn’t have been a problem,” they say. (Only there weren’t any jobs in 2009 and they damn well know that.)

In short: the jobs promised to the Lost Generation are being outsourced to younger and prettier scholars for no particularly compelling reason, except that the younger and prettier scholars are younger and prettier. As Chad Black noted in the linked post, it’s not that there hasn’t always been a bias against those who don’t land a tenure track job after three years, it’s just depressing to see it codified in an advertisement—especially in light of what our "betters" have been telling about what will happen when the market turns around.

Is there a blog in this course?

As most of you know, my brand of film theory is heavily indebted to David Bordwell and neoformalism. So it should come as no surprise that I believe Bordwell's compilation of posts from 2012 could very well function as an online film theory textbook, especially when read in tandem with similar compilations from 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011. If you ever have to teach a course in film or film theory—or if you've ever wanted to take a seminar on film or film theory—now you have the material you need to do so.

New syllabus: Game of Thrones: Bold Plan or Blasphemy?

The university's revamped the curriculum to emphasize the written word, so now I have to teach a traditional novel alongside my visual works. (Which I almost always did anyway but no matter.) I've decided to teach Game of Thrones, but there's one problem: I've decided to teach Game of Thrones. In a freshmen composition class. That's only ten weeks long. The quarter will look something like this:

• Week 1: Introduction to the genre. Watch Fellowship of the Ring. Read secondary material about fantasy.
• Weeks 2-5: Read Game of Thrones. Read secondary material about the novel. Write 4 blog posts and 1 short essay about it.
• Weeks 6-9: Watch Game of Thrones. Read secondary material about the series. Write 4 blog posts and 1 long essay about it.
• Week 10: Final project.

You see the problem: the novel's 675 pages long, meaning that from Week 2 until Week 5 they'll be reading 169 pages of the novel and approximately 15 pages of secondary material per week. Experience suggests that having freshmen non-majors read 184 pages per week while also asking them to produce 10 of their own pages may be too much for them to handle. So here's my bold (or blasphemous) plan:

I let them skip the Daenerys chapters (3, 11, 23, 36, 46, 54, 61, 64, 68, and 72). Because I read the novel on a Kindle, I'm not exactly sure how many pages that will save them. But it makes narrative sense: they'll spend all their time on the island of Westeros and we'll spend all our classtime discussing its affairs in Weeks 2-5. When we shift to the series in Week 6, we'll focus our attention on Daenerys and the events happening on Essos. That means the majority of the visual rhetorical analysis will involve horses, but it could be worse.

Another idea, floated by Gerry Canavan, would be to force the students to read one chapter from each of the point-of-view characters and allow them to decide which two they wanted to ignore. They'd have to justify their decision via a rhetorical analysis in a blog post, meaning that they would write that the Daenerys chapters don't provide them with significant information about the context of conversations within the novel, or that they don't believe they're receiving accurate information from Tyrion because of his ethos. I like that from a pedagogical point of view, but I'm not sure about the classroom mechanics. Take a vote and ignore the two characters with the fewest proponents? I don't know.

Any other suggestions are welcome.

Thomas Meyer's Beowulf

Via Eileen Joy and the outstanding number of medievalists I know on Facebook, I see that Thomas Meyer's translation of Beowulf is now available. For free. It possesses a striking cover:

And though I haven't had a chance to read it yet—this translation, I mean, because I've obviously read Beowulf before—the excerpt from the publisher accords neatly with my recent obsession on the relation of form to content in film:

The eyes of Hygelac’s kin watched the wicked raider
execute his quick attack:
without delay,
snatching his first chance,
a sleeping warrior,
he tore him in two,
chomped muscle, sucked veins’
gushing blood,
gulped down his morsel, the dead man,
chunk by chunk,
hands, feet & all. & then

footstephandclawfiendreachmanbedquicktrick
beastarmpainclampnewnotknownheartrunflesho
feargetawaygonowrunrun

never before had
sinherd feared anything so.

As the publisher notes, "the reader is confronted with the words themselves running together, as if in panic, in much the same way that the original passage seems in such a rush to tell the story of the battle that bodies become confused." This is a readerly experimental mode, in which the formal experimentation is meant to assist the reader in understanding the content of the poem by replicating the experience being described. The fact that that it's not easy to parse that second stanza is the point. (I've read it about twenty times now I still keep seeing the word "dreach," if only because it sounds like a word that belongs in Beowulf.) Point being, there are far worse ways to spend your Saturday night than reading a poem in which "hot gore pour[s] upon whirlpools."

Or with supporting an endeavor which, to quote Eileen, 

Every book we make, we will give away for free in electronic form, because we believe in the richest possible artistic-intellectual para-university commons in which everyone has access to whatever they need and want, whenever they need and want it, and so that authors can have the widest possible readership. But we also believe in the printed book: as work of art, as a stylish object for one’s cabinet of curiosities, as a material comfort [or bracing cocktail] to hold in one’s hands, as something that takes up weight and space in the world and adds something of beauty to the thoughts, images, and narratives we hold in common.

Breaking Bad is the worst show in the history of television.*

I've just now finally caught up with Breaking Bad, which I just started watching last week.** Amazing how a show about meth has the same effect on its viewers as its subject does on its victims. But as I start to catch up on the years of episode breakdowns and critical analyses, I can't help but be a little annoyed by the repeated claim about the show's "realism." Joe Kugelmass wrote about this  vis-a-vis The Wire, and though I can't seem to find the post, I want to give credit where it's due, because I'm no Zakaria. Joe's point, in brief, is that people always claim that The Wire is a realistic portrayal of the tangled mess of conflicting interests that is the great city of Baltimore, except that isn't realistic in the least. Consider one of the infamous "Omar's coming!" scenes: it's a classic Western sequence whose sole post-modern twist is that it's a shoot-out within a shoot-out. I'm not saying it's not clever or well-executed, only that it's highly stylized, i.e. not realistic and not attempting to be so.

Breaking Bad is equally unrealistic, except unlike The Wire, whose overarching narrative does actually embrace a realistic ethos, Breaking Bad is a thoroughly naturalist narrative. What do I mean by "naturalist"? Even I'm not entirely sure. But a decent (if stripped) working definition might be that a naturalist work is any in which a person's character is determined by the restrictions of the social environment in which it operates. No matter what its author claims a naturalist narrative isn't a realistic project: it's a thought experiment that amounts to "If I place Person A into Environment B how will he or she react?" It may aim for realism but its logic is beholden only to itself. (Which is why naturalist novels often begin with a dentist winning a lottery ticket but end with a man handcuffed to a corpse in Death Valley.) Breaking Bad clearly fits into this tradition.

A high school chemistry teacher learns he has cancer. He can't afford to pay for the treatment. What will he do? He'll make meth. How will inserting a tidy high school teacher into the seedy world of meth production and dealing change this man's character? The show's spent five seasons answering that question, and the answer, as is always the case with naturalist narratives, is astoundingly unpleasant. If you win the lottery, you kill your wife before dying alone in the desert cuffed to a stranger. If you win the cancer lottery, you can't afford treatment and estrange your wife such that she's counting down the days until your cancer can mount a comeback. In short:

There is no good here. But there's no realism either. Naturalist narratives are necessarily and aggressively pessimistic. When presented with a choice between a creating a disturbing tableau and presenting the likely consequences of a particular course of actions, naturalist narratives opt for:

Without giving away too much game, that's an image of a man who's just had half his brain blown into a cavity and he's fixing his tie. Is he about to die? Of course he is. The life expectancy of people in his situation is dire beyond the telling. But it's a powerful image of a man who risked everything with composure and is determined to die as subdued and dignified as he lived. Can a man actually take a pipe-bomb to the face and ablute himself? Of course not. Then why do people insist that Breaking Bad is a realistic portrayal of the perils of the methamphetamine trade? Because of scenes like what I'll call "The Story of Jesse and the Beans."

You'll remember that I praised Louie for its commitment to the two shot. The two shot is one that has two people in the frame. (Can you guess what a three shot is?) The purpose of a two shot is create a connection between the characters through the process of accumulation. If you include two subjects in the same frame for an inordinate amount of screen-time the audience will consider them partnered regardless of whatever their actual relationship is. Playing against this instinct is why Bergman films create such discomfort.  The same logic appears in Breaking Bad, except the sequences aren't nearly so staged as Bergman's. A typical conversation on Breaking Bad isn't a two shot. It looks like "Walter, what do you have to say?"

And "Jesse, how do you feel about that?"

Their psychological and sociological differences are accentuated by filming them in a series of perpetual shot and reverse shots. They don't share the frame because they're not friends and barely even co-workers. Which brings us to the scene in which Walter invites Jesse over for dinner with his wife. The sudden shift to the two and three shots is glaring because it's painfully oblique to the status of their current relationships. So:

"The Story of Jesse and the Beans" opens with a half-empty long shot. (Just compare it to a very similar scene in Kick-Ass.) All three half-occupy the bottom half of frame that's fronted by an empty chair. Moreover, the dominant diegetic light source pulls our eyes up to the chandelier, which means that when we search the frame for meaning we're incredibly aware of all the empty unlit space in the top half of the frame. These are three diminished people sharing a table with Elijah.

The composition of the shot further distances them: the white inner curtains flank Jesse and cut him off, compositionally speaking, from Skyler and Walter, who sit before the dark outer curtains. (I know: I need to figure out what curtains are called. Feel free to point me in the right direction.) The frame's split in three and each of these characters occupies their own bit of the triptych. This isn't a realistic shot. It's a carefully staged psychological reflection of the character's current relations to each other. This shot only seems realistic because it's ostensibly conventional: we're accustomed to watching families eat dinner together and that's what we seem to have here. Only we don't. There's a tension between the compositional elements in the frame and the narrative being communicated through it, and that tension mirrors that being felt by the characters.

About which more in the next post, which will be arriving shortly.

*Clearly I'm kidding. I just covered too much ground to come up with a snappy title.

**And before you ask why it took me so long to watch a critically acclaimed show about an educator who his cancer from his wife, I've already been over that. Does this resemblance make me look tough?

Would someone please teach these people how to plagiarize?

Every quarter I tell my students a joke. I tell them that I’ll let them plagiarize so long as they paraphrase their source material and attribute the original idea to its author or put it between quotation marks and identify where they found it. They usually stare at me agog for a seconds before what I’ve said sinks in. But it usually sinks in. It’s a shame I didn’t teach Fareed Zakaria, who’s not only a plagiarist, but one of the most stunningly untalented plagiarists I’ve ever encountered. Another thing I tell my students is that if they’re going to plagiarize well, they need to find source materials specific to the argument they want to parrot, which means that they can’t just type “visual rhetoric Blowup” into Google because the first few links will direct them to stuff I’ve written. Only an idiot would quote my only words back to me. I encourage them to find obscure material—like academic essays on Antonioni or Italian New Wave—and pluck their attributed paraphrases or quotations from there. So what’s so stunning about Zakaria’s plagiarism?

He plagiarized from one of Jill Lepore’s articles in The New Yorker. The New Yorker. I know most people only read it for the cartoons, but I promise you that Google has access to the words as well as the pictures. But Zakaria’s even dumber than that. He plagiarized from a recent New Yorker article in the pages of Time magazine. It’d be one thing to plagiarize a recent New Yorker article in an essay that only one person, your professor, will ever read. It’s dumber thing entirely to publish material lifted from one national publication in another national publication. He should have known that anyone interested in the material he quoted would pop onto Google and see that it appears in two different places in a very nearly identical context. But wait! It gets even better!

It seems as if Lepore herself might have a problem with plagiarism, which if true means it’s possible that Zakaria second-order plagiarized the work of an undergraduate at Harvard. And we let this man talk to president and kings? To coin a phrase: Why oh why can’t we have a better press corps?

What we don't know we know, aren't quite sure how we missed...

...and are disappointed that none of you lot pointed out. Namely, that when I wrote this post a month ago, it never occurred to me that I was unconsciously admitting to a desire to be bossed around by handsome bald black men:

But apparently I do. Regular posting to resume shortly, now that I've got the majority of the lesson-planning for my new course–which I'm currently teaching, so I'm scripting class-by-class instead of working from previously devised material–completed. 

Don't be surprised if this is the last time you see Lance Reddick on this blog either. (Or Benedict Cumberbatch or Hugh Laurie or Matt Smith for that matter.) 

The Ballad of Peter and Peggy, Redux, in "A Little Kiss"

(It goes without saying that this is another one of those posts.)

Poor self-defeating Pete, trying his best to become the very Draper whose misery's invisible to him. Remember when Pete had hope, and director John Slattery hammered the possibility of it home via reverse shots? How Pete saw Peggy longing for him:

Returned her implicit, medium long offer in kind:

And was returned in kind:

And again:

And again, an almost final invitaiton?

Of course, between them in each reverse shot is the not-insignificant–and increasingly significant, given the racial aspects entering the series in future episodes–glass door separating the firm from the world it claims to represent. As I wrote in the post linked above:

The viewer is looking at Peter looking at Peggy in the first medium close up in the scene.  (There is a slight unreality to this point of view shot: it zooms in on the pair in a way only cameras can.  The zooming seems to act as a cinematic proxy for attention or concentration.)  Slattery made sure the nearly invisible wall separating them remained visible, which creates a tension between the intimacy of the close up and the reality of the glass walls separating them.  That he chooses a more intimate when these two are in different rooms is, for obvious reasons, significant.  She sees him peering at her and, by its positioning, the camera acknowledges the bond that will remain despite the increasing distance between them: the baby they had together.

But now Peter's a father, only not of Peggy's baby, but of his own. Who's screen presence exists as such:

See the baby? The one he had so he could be more like Draper? It's sitting there, frame central, hovering invisible in that tacky chair he should've had the decency to replace if he'd had any sense of style. He's becoming Draper–disappearing into the life he mistakenly believed he wanted. No children to greet him, just cold dinner and a warm shot of whisky. Don't believe me? Let's rewrind to the first season and remind you of a similarly framed shot:

In this case, however, Betty's lying about going to the community center to watch them film the pool–she's off to watch pretty things die, as per the episode's title, for"Sport." But there's something more than sport to her deliberations. She wants to savor the experience of watching something die. First she feeds the children, then she does the laundry:

Then the camera acknowledges that she's had an idea and zooms into a close-up to reiterate that fact:

Note the joy on her face. Knowing that her idea is one that–whatever joy it might bring her, society would disapprove of, she ponders her decision for a moment:

Moments are fleeting:

Her decision has been made. Cut to exterior:

Relief. Betty's just a central figure staring at the sky in wonderment at all God's creations:

Look at those birds? The fact that they're incapable of being centrally staged only emphasizes their freedom. The frame can't constrain them! They're free! If only Betty had an equivalently symbolic emblem of relinquishing societal constraints:

She does. Her feelings of entrapment are nothing a healthy dose of nicotine can't cure. Except why has she shifted stage-left? She had occupied the central portion of the screen, but now it's as if she's making room for something else. Whatever could that be?

Of course, she being an American, the only thing she can do with her symbol of freedom is shoot it with ... another symbol of her freedom. I wasn't able to capture her aiming the gun, which is why the space on the right side of the frame had to be cleared, but that's why it was. Oddly, her cigarette still occupies the central portion of the frame, as if, like the nicotine it delivers into her blood, is calming her down, making her transgressive violence possible. Can't be sure. However, visually speaking, the indication is that Draper's created/creating a sociopath, and the implication is that Peter's following a similar path. He began his morning commutes in "A Little Kiss," you'll remember, alone and engrossed in a paper:

 

His loneliness is highlighted by both the empty chair beside him and the man with the solitaire board across from him. By episode's end, things seem a bit different, though:

Wonder why that might be? Couldn't have anything to do with, say, this:

Nothing at all there. Not between Peggy and Pete. Not with a viable baby hanging out right there in a carriage. 

Filming the sausage being made is very, very expensive, my friends.

My promised follow up post about Peter's sad descent into the trappings of Draper's life is nearly half-complete, but I wanted to address something that's come up in the comments first, because I encounter variations of it every time I teach. Uncle Ebeneezer
March 27, 2012 wrote

On a tangent–a friend of mine read your post and remarked that they doubt that THAT much thought really goes into it. I disagree, but I’m sure you must hear that sort of sentiment all the time and I’m just curious how you usually respond.

He's correct in that I encounter this all the time–frequently as a back-handed compliment about me putting more thought into the show than the people who made it–but it's usually the person doing the slapping that has no clue what they're talking example. For example, in an interview I can't relocate, Christopher Nolan was discussing the logistics of using an IMAX camera to capture Christian Bale hanging off of a skyscraper in Hong Kong. The joke of it was that between the helicopter, its pilot, safety equipment, those equipped to use it, Nolan and Bale's salaries, the insurance policy on Bale, the rental cost of the IMAX camera and its crew, every single syllable was costing Warner Brothers $300,000, "so if everyone would quit fucking cursing they could fucking film this fucking shot for under three million dollars."

And that's pre-production. So do I occasionally hazard into a situation in which I over-read some last minute practicality? No doubt. But should the wizards with the duct tape see my analysis and note that I missed their wizardry, don't you think they'd be proud that they'd done their job so well I couldn't imagine it having been done differently? But if your friends are still unconvinced–and if my students are any indication, many of them will be, send them to the "full credits" listing of a show like Mad Men. John Rogers—friend of the blog and showrunner of Leverage—can add to any of the many things I’ve forgotten, but keep in mind that all of the following people must be paid, eat, have their equipment plugged in and powered up, etc., and remember as your friend’s scrolling down that very, very long list, there are a number of unusual positions, such as:

1. hair stylist/background hair stylist
2. hair stylist/key hair stylist
3. hair department head
4. special effects makup artist
5. on-set dresser
6. art department coordinator
7. greensman
8. set decoration buyer
9. second assistant camera “a” cameria/ second assistant camera “b” camera
10. best boy rigging electrician
11. genny operator
12. post-post production assistant coordinator
13. colorist dailies
14. final colorist

I’ve chosen that list a little randomly, but it’s also a little representative of the collaborate work involved in any significant production. Odd as it may seem, the burden of proof that something isn’t in a particular scene should fall to the casual viewer, who thinks television is magic and all you need is a camera, some costumes, and a few pretty pictures to make it work. Granted, that’s true of some reality television — it wear its cheap production for all to see — but for quality, scripted television, each minute of which costs thousands to film, there’s a reason why certain mediocre actors are come to be called “character actors” as they age. It’s not that Benjamin Bratt — and I’m not picking on him — is a good actor, but there’s a reason why people want to work with him. To my knowledge, he’s polite, shows up on time, knows his lines, and is forgo having a potentially short or taller stand-in sit for him in the rehearsals and run-throughs. (That’s anecdotal evidence, but I trust the source, and if I’m wrong, there are a million others I could substitute for him.) Point being:

Shooting quality film/television is very expensive, so it’s all planned out in advance, then modified, script-color-change-by-script-color-change, then ideally handed to actors who behave professionally. In short, the implicit answer to why there aren’t more great television shows is sort of the same as why they aren’t more perfect storms.

 

Shake your meaning-maker

So I've mentioned before that the final project in my class is a creative one in which students must occupy the position they've been analyzing all quarter–that of the meaning-making rhetor communicating something or other to a particular audience. Because I'm working with graphic novels, one of the ways I get them to think like a meaning-maker is ask them to find a song that epitomizes a particular book they've read. This exercise is far more difficult than it sounds, because it forces them to reflect upon (likely for the first time) what the lyric of their proposed song means and how that lyric relates to a book whose rhetorical and thematic complexity we've been discussing for weeks. It's the perfect exercise:

It starts simple then turns fractal.

This quarter, I went with Craig Thompson's Blankets as inspiration, which means the song needs to include equal parts evangelical Christianity, teenage infatuation, Künstlerroman, etc. No single song will perfectly reflect either Craig Thompson's understanding of his own development or any of my students' relation to that understanding, but the act of thinking through that mess will help them discover how they'd like their final projects to resonate with their intended audience.

All of which is merely a preface to my declaration that the song I thought best epitomized Thompson's intent–in both lyrical intent and its relation to traditional form–was this one. (The lyrics can be found here.) I'm obviously playing a rigged game, what with me being the teacher and all, but the point is that I can make a very strong argument about how the thematic elements of that song communicate something very similar to the message of Thompson's novel ... and that I dare any of my students to proffer another case for a different song that's stronger than the one they think I'll make for mine. (Which means they'll have to anticipate a critical response and plan their feints and parries in advance.)

Game on?

 

On notebooks–and the thirty seconds of narrative time I can squeeze into them. (On Doctor Who, "The Impossible Astronaut.")

(I hadn't planned on writing another rhetorical analysis of Doctor Who until next quarter, but my Wednesday night class is composed of nerds and whiners who insist we keep on pushing through the Sixth Season even though the quarter's nearly over. Adding to the difficulty is the fact that the Sixth Season is infinitely more complicated than its fairy-tale precursor. In short, imagine an English seminar full of committed Jamesians who demand to read late-James even though every sane person knows that–outside of the hilariously foreshortened "year" you spent preparing for qualifying exams–it's damn well impossible to do anything with The Golden Bowl, The Wings of the Dove, and The Ambassadors in two weeks. That's what this feels like.)

First let me tell you about how the sausage is made: I watch a film or an episode and I either enjoy it or I don't. If I enjoy a film, I'll watch it again to figure out what I enjoyed it. If I enjoy an episode, I'll usually wait for the next episode and then enjoy the season once it comes on DVD. I typically don't have the depth and complexity–such as they are–evident in these visual rhetoric posts when I'm watching them for the first time. Unless some detail is particularly compelling or some technical mistake particularly galling, I watch like a normal human being. It's only on those second watchings that I pull out the notebook and begin to figure out what I don't know. So what don't I know? 

Judging by the number of notebooks I've burned through since Christmas, the empirical answer would be that I don't know a damn thing. That I'm constantly confused by everything in the world and have begun to hoard the finer points of other peoples' narratives on the off chance they or I forget them. The obvious stuff is obvious and mentioned just in case its obviousness becomes important subsequently. Consider the opening sequence of the premier episode of the Sixth Season of Doctor Who ("The Impossible Astronaut"), in which director Toby Haynes begins by showing the audience some paint:

Paint can be important in this series, I think to myself, so I scribble "H. op w/ c-u paint & brushes." (That's "Haynes opens with a close-up of paint and brushes" for those who can't read my ideoletic shorthand.) I pause here because I want to remember what could be at play. Clearly there is a reason Haynes introduces the Sixth Season via the artistic tools the audience most closely associates with Vincent Van Gogh, but given that Gogh met his beastly death shortly after drawing an exploding TARDIS in the penultimate episode of Season Five ("The Pandorica Opens"), this likely has nothing to do with him. Then it occurs to me that Haynes directed and Steven Moffat wrote "The Pandorica Opens," "The Big Bang," and "The Impossible Astronaut," so the presence of meaningful continuity–even if that's not what I spy here–is more likely than not. I take a note to remind myself to take similar notes later and move on to the next frame:

Look who was wrong? That painting there has as much to do with Vincent's narrative as his style. It's the Doctor, which I could've imagined Vincent getting around to, but it's the Doctor in the nude. There's nothing wrong with a nude painting of a man–or wouldn't be a few decades later after Charles II dies and England rejoices by stripping off the gloom of their imported Flemish masters and then their clothes. (To be followed quickly by a intense desire to live in a world in which flat surfaces and solid colors were anathema.) Point being:

Mathilda's painting of the Doctor is too Rococo for its time–because it's not of its time. He's encouraged her to paint not in the departing style of the Flemish Masters, nor in the coming style of French Baroque or endemic Neoclassicism, and why would he? He doesn't need live time in order, and Mathilda, his companion at the moment, is herself learning a little morality lesson about the knowledge the Time Lord grants: more often than not the world isn't ready for it. Not that she minds:

She looks quite please with her anachronistic creation. Her benefactor seems less so:

Note that even though the shots of Mathilda and King Charles II are both medium long shots, she and the image of her Doctor are both bathed in natural light, as if they belong to the world beyond the window's grilles. King Charles II and his men are exactly where they ought to be: the King in the middle and lackeys at both flanks. They have come for the Doctor for reasons unknown–but their tone implies that whatever those reasons may be, the Doctor needs a grand entrance and the sooner the better.

Perhaps not that soon. Appearing from beneath the swaths of Mathilda's skirts suggests that King Charles's haste and j'accuse-face may be warranted. The high angle of framing here is completely warranted. The Doctor may not be physically powerless, but his given that his moral code only seems to allow him to significantly alter history when its in need of a significant alteration, the consequence of him having lost his social stature which much more likely lead to lots and lots of running. Which is exactly what Haynes has him do in the opening bits–and they are comedic "bits" in no uncertain terms–they establish both that he's no longer traveling with Amy and Rory but that he's no longer done with them (even when they fail to see him):

 

 

That's Rory's head you can't see failing to notice the Doctor trying to catch his attention. As I started watching these first few minutes–and keeping in mind I've seen the entire Sixth Season–I found it difficult not to see these as the Season's narrative arc written small. Bear with me: 

1. The Doctor's there, like the Silence, but Amy and Rory can't see him.
2. The Doctor's always been there, like the Silence, but nobody can see them.
3. The Doctor's happy not because he's alive–though I've little doubt that pleases him–but because his plan to redeem himself worked. Perhaps not in full, but fully enough for him to embark, alone, on a series of adventures through human time seemingly designed to taunt Amy and Rory. (The last time the Doctor went on walkabout the results were far darker, so much so I contend that the darkness left in the Tenth's wake is what the Eleventh's had to deal with throughout Season Six.)
4. The Doctor's no longer afraid of what he'll do, because he can't do any more damage to the universe than gambling that he could extinguish it back to life would somehow work. 
5. That it did is what allows him not only accept, but to crave the attention and flattery in oil of the otherwise insignificant Mathilda. Her ability to stand there, insignificantly, is a direct result of his actions, so whatever pleasure he gains from their interaction is because she exists, not because she exists in any particularly pleasing way. 
6. Other stuff you can suss out in the comments while I cook my wife and I dinner.

I could go, but as aforementioned, it's dinner time and much as I would like sharing my notebook with you, I need food. Also, I wonder whether some of you wouldn't rather toss my notebook at me, in which case, slinking away to make some hash is still a solid idea.