Acephalous

Claustrophobia, as Wolfgang Petersen recognizes, is a cumulative effect.

2012-01-24T16:19:59-08:00

(The continuation of the previous post which, like this one, is yet another one of those posts.)

I was going to jump right into the episode of Doctor Who I'm teaching tomorrow, but due to a non-Whovian coup, I'm going to prove my point differently first. To that end, I asked my however many Facebook friends I have the following:

Please name the five most claustrophobic films and/or episodes of a television show you've ever seen. If your nominee is chosen, I'll honor you by naming you by name in the post I'm going to write this afternoon. (Not much of an honor, but hey, it's better than nothing.)

Patrick Slaven, Kyler Kuehn, Carrie Shanafelt and Gary Farber all recommended Das Boot, and since I own a copy of said film, Das Boot it is. Short plot summary: back when Wolfgang Petersen had talent, he directed a film about a German U-boat and its discontents, and because the majority of the film took place on the boat, it had plenty of shots that approximate the "coffin shots" I discussed yesterday. (Being stuck in a metal tube leagues and leagues below the sea is roughly equivalent to being buried alive.) But unlike the frames discussed yesterday—in particular, the awkward image of Reynolds in his coffin—Petersen relies on standard scaled shots to create a claustrophobic atmosphere for his audience. So long as the audience grants him the conceit that the men in his film live precariously in a long metal cylinder, he need not 1) employ conventional "coffin shots" nor 2) improve upon convention or go whole hog (as Rodrigo Cortés did in Buried).

Petersen's audience knows that these men are confined behind a brittle shell of metal and will miles below the sea, so the enclosed atmosphere of the film is implicit. But that's not enough. As I mentioned yesterday, audiences key in to conventions in ways that subvert their effectiveness. A director can put a person in a closed coffin, but because so many have done so previously, the effect is merely communicative. The simple fact of being entrapped comes across, but the sympathetic feeling of entrapment doesn't. Das Boot is different. It lacks any of the obviously constricted shots and opts instead for a directorial ethos of tight framing (much as I discussed in my counterfactual Bones yesterday):

That'd be a typical dinner shot. It lacks the ostentation of Reynolds in a coffin, but by framing this medium close-up as he did, Petersen's use of shallow focus indicates that there's little more to the room than what's seen here. Typically, shallow focus emphasizes a face (or faces) and blurs the unimportant background into a hazy nothing; here, however, the shallow focus reveals that the walls behind these folks abut them so closely that they can't be excluded from the shot. There's simply no way for them to be in focus and the walls around them not, which an audience will realize (even if it doesn't consciously understand) means that these men are very close to their walls. (Or vice versa.) It's not a "coffin shot," merely a medium close-up with a depth of field that reveals, in its entirety, how little there is to see. Stack a few hundred similar shots together and the claustrophobic intent of every director who's ever buried an actor for effect can actually be realized. Just to prove my point, here are some other shots from the film:

That shot of the living quarters need not be perfectly centered in such a way as to create a frame whose composition is so damn mathematical as to be oppressive, but Petersen's got an agenda. Also:

There are many ways to depict a man amongst his crew, but framing his head as Petersen has (in a close-up) and situating it in the composition against many other similarly framed heads limits the scope of the frame to this head and these other ones. The face, again, is in shallow focus and yet because every other head's within the depth of field the constricted effect is only heightened. Imagine watching a film composed thus for 209 minutes (if you spring for the director's cut): the knowledge of the predicament of the crew is augmented, visually and viscerally, by the manner in which Petersen frames them.

All of which is only to say that a claustrophobic effect isn't bound to a claustrophobic situation. Certainly, both coffins and U-boats lend themselves to a claustrophobic treatment, but the reason Das Boot succeeds where yesterday's episodes and films failed has nothing to do with the narrative situation. It's all about the mechanics of how such a situation is filmed.

Tomorrow, I promise, I'll address this within the dictates of my class and discuss Andrew Gunn's direction of "The Victory of the Daleks."

Claustrophobia is a cumulative effect.

2012-01-23T18:06:08-08:00

(Yet another one of those posts.)

Representing claustrophobic situations on screen should be simple enough: you take a person, put them in a confined space, and then you bury them alive. Doesn't matter if they're Buffy (in "Bargaining"):

Or Bones (in "Aliens in a Spaceship"):

Or some character played by Ryan Reynolds (in a dull film I wish I hadn't seen):

Each of those cramped shots communicates to the audience that, like Everett in O Brother, Where Art Thou, someone's in a tight spot. But that's the problem: it communicates the narrow confines in which the characters find themselves, but because the "coffin shot" has become so clichéd, it does so the same way that a sequence of reverse shots inside a car communicates that the participants of a given conversation are driving. Only the oblique angle of the shot of Reynolds comes close to doing what a "coffin shot" is intended to do: duplicate in the audience the claustrophobia felt by the character. (And it only does so because of the odd angle. Most the film uses more conventional "coffin angles" and is as enervated as the other shots above.) Point being: filmmakers are quite proficient at representing people in enclosed spaces and communicating that said people are feeling claustrophobic, but they're not nearly as accomplished at making the audience feel the confinement represented the on screen.

From the examples above, it's obvious that two techniques don't work: 1) placing characters in an enclosed space for a short duration and 2) placing characters in an enclosed space for a long duration. The first falls victim to convention, whereas the second flirts dangerously with boredom. (I disagree vehemently with Ebert on the effectiveness of Buried.) But if acclimation to convention has vitiated the tools with which a director could cajole claustrophobia from the audience (and if said director's not interested in making a tedious stunt of a film), how can an episode or a film be claustrophobic?

The answer is: holistically. By which I mean, burying characters for X-amount-of-claustrophobic-time won't cut it, because that still leaves Y-amount-of-non-claustrophobic-time acting as an atmospheric counterweight. The entire episode or film must be shot with claustrophobia in mind. To use the episode of Bones as an example, too many shots in the episode are scaled too long:

Does this long shot feel claustrophobic to you? Of course not. It's a brightly lit long shot: the lighting (and depth of field) allows the audience to observe details in the fore-, mid- and background, while the scale assures the audience that there's plenty to observe in all those grounds. To think counterfactually for a moment, it's not that shot couldn't be made more claustrophobic. Had the director cropped out some unnecessary visual information:

Still a long shot, but by focusing more narrowly on Agent Booth and the lab technician, the space on-screen seems more cramped. If those officers in the back were to scoot a few feet to the left, the composition of the shot would be more structured, creating an impression in the audience that the characters are bookended or boxed in. Tweak every shot in the episode thus and it'd be possible to create an atmosphere that would inspire claustophobic identification in the audience. ("Sympathetic identification with characters feeling claustrophobic" sounded like too much of a mouthful, but that's essentially what I mean here.)

All of which I write as preface to a post about Andrew Gunn's direction of the Doctor Who episode "Victory of the Daleks," because unlike the above, Gunn seems to understand that claustrophobia is a cumulative effect. More on that in the next post.

What we talk about when we talk about hands.

2012-01-23T12:32:56-08:00

As I was writing and writing and writing and writing about Jack London in my dissertation, I noticed something I was never able to fully incorporate into my argument: the man's obsession with hands. He not only wrote about them regularly in his fiction, but his letters are heavily peppered with references to his own "deformed" mitts. I scare-quote "deformed" because history has no record as to whether his hands were as he believed them to be—the scarred and calloused collection of fingers that his life of hard labor had created. That a leading voice for the working class was embarrassed by the signs that he'd once and long been a member of the same is one of those historical ironies that's better left for braver souls to judge. I'm more interested in the evidence. For example, were you a photographer taking a profile picture of London, he would present you with this:

Or this:

Decent shots, no doubt, but ones in which the palms of his hands have been deliberately obscured. If you were a different sort of photographer entirely—one who wanted to take pictures of famous authors in diapers, for example—London would oblige thus:

All of which is only to say that, for obvious reasons, my eye's been trained to seek out and find meaning in hands. Hands, as I noted in my post on "The Van Gogh Job," do things. Directors and artists—perhaps especially comic artists—focus on hands because they're humanity's native tools. Any other tool we have, for the most part, is either an actual or imaginative extension of our hands. So when I teach Craig Thompson's Blankets, I begin with a tailored introduction to McCloud and comic theory, then I move on to the hands. Why import a tic I noticed in London to a book written a century later? Consider the evidence:

Thompson's rough but fluid style is meant to be evocative, not realistic, otherwise Craig and Phil (the boys pictured in the bed) would be like shih tzus unto their father. More significantly, measure it out and you'll realize that their father's hand is the same length as his head, which isn't an impossibility—the NBA does exist, after all—but is very much an improbability. Point being: Craig and Phil's father has a gigantic hand, one capable of doing many things, some of which may be horrible. For example:

That'd be a close-up of Phil being manhandled from his bed by his father. Note how the close-up emphasizes the size of Phil's head relative to his father's fist. Note also the emblem on Phil's pajama top, as the irony's by all means intended. Continuing:

Phil's being dragged into an attic space of composed of pure darkness. All the light in this panel originates in the room behind Phil and his father. The implication is that as soon as that hand—and only that hand, as the hand's replaced the father's face in the iconography of this scene—as soon as that hand slams shut that door, that darkness will overtake Phil. That hand'll be responsible for both the present and lifetime of fear Phil will have to cope with, because according to Craig's memory of the events, it's the hand, not the man, that did the deed. The significance of hands throughout the book can't be understated, but because students will be writing essays on topics like this, I'll understate it a bit: my evidence for the importance of hands come in an early flashforward:

Here, again, is Phil being manhandled. Not by his father this time, but by another, and without ruining anything for anyone who hasn't read the book, Phil would've been better off having been locked in the cubby hole again. Because the way that anonymous hand completely consumes Phil's tiny fingers?

Never a good sign.

Who does Newt want to kill?

2012-01-17T18:08:47-08:00

Last night's debate provided yet another example of Gingrich's firm grasp of history:

We’re in South Carolina. South Carolina in the Revolutionary War had a young 13-year-old named Andrew Jackson. He was sabred by a British officer and wore a scar his whole life. Andrew Jackson had a pretty clear-cut idea about America’s enemies: Kill them.

He was in South Carolina and had just related an anecdote about Andrew Jackson, so I can see why he'd quote Andrew as the Jacksonian source of the "Kill them!" quotation. Only Andrew Jackson didn't say it—Stonewall Jackson did. Accounts as to who he said it to vary, but the circumstances in which he said it don't. Union forces greatly outnumbered Southern forces at theBattle of Fredericksburg, and shortly after the death of Brigadier General Maxcy Gregg, someone asked Jackson how the Confederate forces could win. He responded

Kill them, sir! Kill every man!

Which, of course, refers to the Union soldiers. So America's enemies are, by Gingrich's account, other Americans. (Most likely Democrats.) There's the possibility that his error represents an eleventh dimensional dog-whistle blown for the benefit of the strong neo-Confederate presence in South Carolina, but I somehow doubt it.

Follow that thought!

2012-01-16T14:27:45-08:00

(Yet another one of those posts.)

The opening credit sequence in Fight Club is a nifty little reverse-literalization of a common directorial device for representing thought on screen. The technique typically works in the manner it does at the end of the film's first scene. Start with a medium close-up of a face:

Note that the narrator indicates that he's had a revelation. The camera supports his claim by zooming into a close-up:

Then into an extreme close-up:

By zooming in on his face, David Fincher indicates that the audience is about to enter his mind. It's as if the camera's going to continue through his eyes and into his memory, which is why—as is the case here—such zooms are so often followed by a flashback:

Call it an abuse of frontality—that feature of a frame that allows the audience to drink deeply of a character's eyes and acquire sympathy with or knowledge of what lies behind them—but it's really just an arbitrary convention. There's no logical reason zooming in on a face should signal the beginning of a flashback. But it frequently does. What's interesting about the opening title sequence of Fight Club is that it reverses the convention. Via CGI, the audience sees an idea—represented by an electric flash of blue light—form:

The idea then travels around the brain:

Until it punctures the skin on Edward Norton's forehead:

And travels down the barrel of the gun Brad Pitt's holding in Norton's mouth before stopping at the sights:

At which point Fincher racks the focus and provides the audience with an extreme close-up of Norton's face:

Instead of zooming into an extreme close-up to flash back to a memory, Fincher opens the film by following a thought from its origin to an extreme close-up. Meaning that the title sequence and first scene work in tandem—thought-goes-out-to-camera and thought-goes-in-from-camera—to bookend that opening scene.

Is this in any way significant or just Fincher being fancy to be fancy? Considering that the tandem of the opening sequence and the first scene structurely suggests that this is all in Edward Norton's head, I'm tempted to argue the former. That said, the signal that weaves through the opening credits is an untranslated thought: it can be any neuronal transmission relevant to Norton's current predicament. The audience can only infer its content from its timing, which means it could be, to name but two examples, Norton's decision to stick the gun in his mouth or the fear of what he'll do with it once there. In short, Fincher's credit sequence undermines the logic of the very convention he employs to transition from the first scene to the flashback.

I'm a woman?

2012-01-15T16:46:13-08:00

Caitlin Flanagan seems to think so:

The second reason Metcalf was left flat by this line of reasoning is that he isn’t a woman, and to really love Joan Didion—to have been blown over by things like the smell of jasmine and the packing list she kept by her suitcase—you have to be female.

Admittedly, I don’t find Didion’s discussions of jasmine and packing lists to be the strongest features of her work. Even if I did, I wouldn’t have to be a woman to do so. Flanagan should know better than to argue from a gender essentialist position so intellectually vapid it can be refuted by the existence of stereotypical gay males.

She clearly doesn’t. Her failure to recognize that she’s diminishing Didion by praising her thus leads her to statements like:

Didion’s genius is that she understands what it is to be a girl on the cusp of womanhood, in that fragile, fleeting, emotional time that she explored in a way no one else ever has. Didion is, depending on the reader’s point of view, either an extraordinarily introspective or an extraordinarily narcissistic writer. As such, she is very much like her readers themselves.

Calling the woman who wrote “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” a “girl” does her disservice. Calling her a narcissist and suggesting that any females who read her are similarly narcissistic does them a disservice. That Flanagan does this in an attempt to praise Didion renders it all the more appalling because, in the end, Flanagan doesn’t believe that Didion’s actually a writer:

I can tell you this for certain: anything you have ever read by Didion about the shyness that plagued her in her youth, and about her inarticulateness in those days, in the face of even the most banal questions, was not a writer’s exaggeration of a minor character trait for literary effect. The contemporary diagnosis for the young woman at our dinner table would be profound—crippling—social-anxiety disorder.

Didion emoted her prose onto the page. She didn’t perform an excruciating self-analysis in the service of a journalistic ethos, she was shy so she wrote shyly. The dinner party Flanagan recounts in the article happened after the publication ofSlouching Towards Bethlehem, a collection whose titular essay is renowned for its shy lyric:

We were seeing the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vaccum. Once we had seen these children, we could no longer overlook the vacuum, no longer pretend that society’s atomization could be reveresed …. As it happens I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one’s self depends upon one’s mastery of language, and I am not optimistic about children who will settle for saying, to indicate that their mother and father do not live together, that they come from “a broken home.” They are sixteen, fifteen, fourteen years old, younger all the time, an army of children waiting to be given the words.

Except there’s nothing shy about that passage. There’s nothing demure. There’s no mention of flowers or curtains or clothes, but there is a demonstration that the “mastery of language” she applauds is one she possesses. But the worst feature of reducing Didion to her sex is that it compels Flanagan to judge her work by the most sexist of standards:

Ultimately Joan Didion’s crime—artistic and personal—is the one of which all of us will eventually be convicted: she got old.

Because we all know woman become fungible as they age. She may have been the Joan Didion in the yellow bikini, but now she’s just another old woman in an ill-fitting suit fretting about her mortality and reminding us of the younger, more attractive writer she used to be. “Her words are clichés—her sentences and her rhythms and her tics are clichés,” Flanagan twice quotes Katie Roiphe as “rightly” saying. Neither has the right to until they write something as worn and enervated asthis:

As a child I thought a great deal about meaninglessness, which seemed at the time the most prominent negative feature on the horizon. After a few years of failing to find meaning in the more commonly recommended venues I learned that I could find it in geology, so I did. This in turn enabled me to find meaning in the Episcopal litany, most acutely in the words “as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end,” which I interpreted as a literal description of the constant changing of the earth, the unending erosion of the shores and mountains, the inexorable shifting of the geological structures that could throw up mountains and islands and could just as reliably take them away. I found earthquakes, even when I was in them, deeply satisfying, abruptly revealed evidence of the scheme in action. That the scheme could destroy the works of man might be a personal regret but remained, in the larger picture I had come to recognize, a matter of abiding indifference.

“Not suffering like starving 19th-century Norwegian immigrants”

2012-01-13T17:16:32-08:00

That, according to Victor David Hanson, is the contemporary version of “the good life.” From a man who compulsively reminds anyone in earshot that “for 20 years I taught classics,” defining “the good life” as the absence of suffering is surprising. I always thought it had something to do with one of those Greek words Hanson loves so much—but I only studied classics for a couple semesters as an undergraduate and am probably misremembering. That said, Hanson’s certainly correct about one thing: no one suffers quite as poignantly as white people. It’s no coincidence that his first complaint about people who complain about class is:

Meanwhile we see the “poor” near rioting over buying the first few pairs of Michael Jordan $200 sneakers[.]

His argument is entirely about class. Consider the impoverished people at one of those near-riots:

Not a single one of them looks to be a starving Norwegian. That’s because Hanson is talking about class here:

In the car today, I heard the usual con ads on the radio. Got problems with the IRS? No problem, we can renegotiate that away. Too much credit card borrowing? No problem, we can settle it at half what you owe … Lately I heard ads from the Department of Agriculture, reminding me that if I belong to some such minority group, I can sue if I felt I was discriminated against.

Class:

My point again is not to object to magnanimity, but to object mightily to those who slander a system that is more egalitarian and generous than any in civilization’s history. Race-based quotas help as well.

What do they help? They help poor people acquire what Hanson calls “the simulacra of equality.” Here’s the actual example he uses to “prove” that the simulacra of equality is a good thing:

I also say simulacra because few in Selma vacation in Tuscany. But sitting in front of a big-screen TV, with some Italian music on, while watching Rick Steves (with TV sound off) touring Florence seems not all that different from the 28-hour hassle of flying to rural Italy. The former is free; the latter “rich” people alone afford.

Sitting in front of a television isn’t all that different from going to Italy? The mind reels. Hanson’s new definition of “the good life” entails not starving and not having to deal with the hassle of flying overseas. So if you see someone in expensive sneakers who’s neither starving nor vacationing overseas and you still think that class exists in America, you’re probably one of those people trying to “get tenure by writing obscure, clever little essays that few read on insidious class differences.”

And if you’re one of those people, your mother’s most likely a Mexican.

On Teaching Fight Club to Students Inclined to Love It

2012-01-11T16:12:15-08:00

(This be yet another one of them posts.)

Fight Club, like its latter-day counterpart Inception, is the sum total of its wasted talent. Unlike Christopher Nolan, for whom Inception represented his personal white whale chased, captured, and carved, Fincher can't be held to accountable for the many weaknesses of Fight Club. That can be blamed on his source material: the singular novel Chuck Palahniuk's been writing for the better part of the past two decades—Fight Club is merely an early incarnation. Read in isolation, it's possible to believe than any one of Palahniuk's books contains the potential to be more than it is—that its strengths, few though they are, may augur the arrival of a more sophisticated writer. Unfortunately, Palahniuk's development as an author could never eclipse the logic behind shampoo: He lathers. He rinses. He repeats. So if I seem particularly annoyed with any isolated moment in Fight Club, know that I'm not merely annoyed with that particular moment, but with its many kin. All of which is merely a long preface to a fairly simple argument:

David Fincher's film far outstrips its source material. He accomplishes this not by altering fundamental elements of the plot, but by filming those elements in a way that undercuts, for example, explosive statements or implications of masculinity. For example, when charged to locate and lose a fight with a stranger, Fincher presents the scene comically:

He uses a long shot to emphasize how unnecessary this altercation is. That priest can turn his other cheek and exist the mise-en-scène without being goaded by the mechanic and his hose a second time. The priest isn't, to paraphrase the narrator, doing just about anything he can to avoid a fight. He's walking away. It's not until the mechanic steals and waters his Bible that the priest becomes disturbed enough to muster a shove. The ensuing "fight" consists of the priest slapping the mechanic twice before running away. Moreover, the goofy non-diegetic sound playing throughout this sequence undercuts the bravery of all involved. The priest doesn't embrace his masculinity when he confronts the mechanic, nor is the mechanic's masculinity challenged by the priest's feeble attempt to confront him. Compare the Keystone Kops routine above with Palahniuk's description of the same in the novel:

By this time next week, each guy on the Assault Committee has to pick a fight where he won't come out a hero. And not in fight club. This is harder than it sounds. A man on the street will do anything not to fight.

The idea is to take some Joe on the street who's never been in a fight and recruit him. Let him experience winning for the first time in his life. Get him to explode. Give him permission to beat the crap out of you.

You can take it. If you win, you screwed up.

"What we have to do, people," Tyler told the committee, "is remind these guys what kind of power they still have."

Fincher took what had, in the novel, been a call to male empowerment and castrated it. Combined with the punctuated humdruming of the non-diegetic track, the long and extreme long shots Fincher uses throughout that scene undermine Palahniuk's insistence, voiced by Tyler, that the purpose behind this random violence "is to remind these guys what kind of power they still have." Fincher disagrees. In addition to the altercation with the priest above, he presents two more:

The first he shoots from quite a distance—one might even call it a safe distance. Moreover, the level of framing is so high above its subjects that the angle of framing is necessarily high too. The camera looks down upon the members of the Assault Committee, that is, it diminishes them by emphasizing their smallness. Nothing so small could exist independently, and the fact that this assignment's called "homework" hammers home that point. Fully fledged adults may have to take work home, but they're not assigned "homework." Only children are. Speaking of which:

Here's the audience's vantage point for the third "homework" assignment. Instead of being safely across the street, as we were with the priest, or ensconced two stories above the action, as we were in the lobby, Fincher shoots this fight sequence from behind what appear to be the bars of a crib. Whatever happens in that parking lot, the audience need not fear. If even those tiny men in the distance were to traverse the deep space between their current location and ours, Fincher provides us protection in the form of an infantalizing set of iron bars. The lesson Palahniuk's Tyler would have all men learn? Fincher's actively working against the possibility that his Tyler might communicate it to his audience.

That's not to say it didn't (and doesn't continue to) happen, only that those who fail to pay attention end up reading Palahniuk's book through Fincher's film, which would be all well and good if the former weren't so simplistic. Treating film as the sum total of the words spoken by characters in it denies the medium its unique ability, for example, to ironize any phrase by means of its delivery. Such irony is lost to the majority of the film's fans because they find the subculture depicted in it (and the novel) as too seductive. These are the boys Robert Stacy McCain fears won't grow into men:

In much the same way as the Bolsheviks claimed to speak for the workers and peasants, feminists nowadays claim to represent the interests of all women. On the basis of that usurped authority, feminists wield the awful fury of revolutionary terror against their enemies, so that even Jeff Goldstein seems afraid to openly oppose them.

Am I alone in seeing this? Is there no one else who recognizes the dictatorial ambitions of feminism, the steel fist inside the velvet glove? Do you not understand that you can no more placate these would-be tyrants with soft words of reasonable compromise than you can negotiate with a ravenous shark?

This is the world Palahniuk's readers believe they inhabit. Hemmed in on all sides by distaff-wielding forces, the only alternative is to reembrace a violent and muscular culture of masculinity. Society has let these boys become men unworthy of the word, and Fight Club taught them how to do something about. The fact that it taught them that doing so entailed acquiring the radically bicameral image of a self that can only communicate with its parts through flagellation (temporary) or mass destruction (permanently) is lost on these literalists.

Fincher's film appeals to uncritical viewers because they fail to understand it as a film. They read it. They take from it the notion that there was once a Golden Age of Masculinity and they assign themselves homework designed to bring it back. Critical viewers appreciate a film that undermines and undercuts everything their uncritical compatriots take from it. In short, Fight Club bears the same relation to its source material as I argued Kick-Ass did to its.

On Leverage ("The Van Gogh Job")

2012-01-10T13:57:49-08:00

(This be yet another one of them posts.)

Before analyzing a sequence from the "Van Gogh Job" episode of Leverage, I need to discuss a little something about color and continuity. First, you may be familiar with Vincent Van Gogh, but if not, all you need to know is the man loved his yellows:

If you're thinking those yellows are a little brown, you're not wrong. But that's the fault of history and chemistry, not intent, so imagine those yellows are as vibrant as they were the day he painted them. This is important. So too is another of his paintings with which you're probably familiar:

What's significant here is the contrast between the once-vibrant yellows and the rich swirls of blue that these lights fail to illuminate. The stars and moon exist independently of the night sky, which has always struck me as a visualization of a menacing thought: things can hide in the presence of all this light. Light can not only fail to illuminate, it can be swept up and away by raging torrents of darkness. (Which invariably contain monsters, because darkness light can't penetrate always contains monsters.)

That I'm going on about Van Gogh in a post about the "Van Gogh Job" should be fairly self-evident, but it's not just that the director of this episode/author-of-the-challenge-to-write-this-post, John Rogers, employs a palette similar to that of his subject. More significant is how he employs it, which is both 1) often to the same end and 2) create continuity between his parallel narratives. In the modern narrative, Charlie Lawson (Danny Glover) sits in a hospital bed recounting the events of the World War II narrative to Parker (Beth Riesgraf):

Note the color of her hospital gown. (And her hair, for that matter.) In the flashback, Riesgraf plays Lawson's love interest, Dorothy Ross:

That would be her doing her best "Starry Night" impersonation. I'm normally reluctant to put too much stock in the analysis of color—such analyses usually end up sounding like impressionistic pseudo-psychoanalytic shtick—but in the frame above you don't even have to know what the episode's about to realize that this isn't a case in which a bright color's emerging from a deep dark as a visual representation of hope. Instead, Rogers captures an image of a bright color about to be overwhelmed by a pervasive and pernicious darkness. (Which, again, most likely contains monsters.) All of which is a belabored way of making a simple point: the color yellow is doing double-duty in this episode: 1) creating narrative continuity between the two historical periods and 2) suggesting a connection between the earlier narrative and its content (the loneliness and isolation evident in the stolen Van Gogh).

One last note about continuity, in particular, the decision to use the Leverage team in both narratives: it may seem like a strange decision, one designed to cause confusion, but it actually makes perfect sense. After all, in the modern narrative, Lawson's narrating his experience to Parker, the result of which is the WWII narrative, which comes from Parker. We all do this when we're being told stories. When I taught journalism, one exercise I used to emphasize the importance of detail was to give my students a description of a man, e.g. "He is short and squat with brown hair and wears clothing typical of workers," then have them describe him in more detail. Invariably, the Asian-American students described an Asian-American man in a white shirt and cheap khakis, the white students described an overweight man in a hard-hat, etc. Point being, we all draw on our own experience when constructing narratives, and Parker's "decision" to cast her friends in the historical narrative is simply another example of this logic.

Why did I spend all this time talking about continuity? Because Leverage is, in the end, a heist show. Rogers describes it as a show about "punching rich guys in the neck [b]ecause they have Sinned, and Deserve It," but I'd go one further: it's a show about sucker-punching those who deserve it. They're not supposed to see the punch coming—or if they are, it's only to distract them from the one they don't. So a number of the shots in any episode are functional not in the deragotory sense, but in that they exist in the service of a shot later in the episode. A number of examples of these service shots occur as Historical Parker (H.Parker from here on out) aims to escape to France with Historical Hardison (H.Hardison). H.Parker is about to start playing an old organ at a skating rink as a performance begins:

First, note the colors: H.Parker's in yellow and framed by it. This is before she makes the escape depicted in the previous frame, so more than a little hope is allowed to creep in. After all, this is a heist show in which the Leverage team typically pulls off successful heists, so the audience expectation is that she'll successfully escape, and Rogers' palette plays to that expectation here. As she leaves to take her place at the organ, the camera reverses but stays on her father, the villain of the piece:

That awkward, empty space on the left side of the frame makes an audience uncomfortable. We want balanced shot composition, and those blurry folks in the background don't qualify. This isn't poorly shot, it's the only way to make an absence visible on screen: you have a character vacate an occupied space without altering the shot's length or its angle or level of framing. Everything's the same, except that one element's absence is suddenly pronounced. Moreover, it's a moment in which the audience feels, however fleetingly, what the character does (or believes he soon will): the absence of H.Parker. Because he's about to do something about his forthcoming loss, Rogers then balances the shot by having the camera and the father move to the left:

And by having a henchmen immediately enter the space vacated by the father:

Everything may not be right with the world, but everything in shot is going according to plan. H.Parker's father is setting his world aright, which means that he's the one who suddenly has the Yellow Light of Hope:

Which is predicated on, we soon learn, the Blue Light of Despair:

The angle and level of framing are significant here, as both indicate that the audience occupies a position in space they'd rather not: the underside of a speeding freight train. Rogers then cuts to the tunnel beneath the tracks, where H.Hardison leans against a wall writing the times the trains pass:

Two elements are being established here: the first, crucial to any heist, is to provide the audience with an understanding of what's to come. In this case, we know that the timing of the trains will be crucial to any escape. The second element is spatial: this isn't just an ordinary tunnel, which is why Rogers uses a long shot instead of just the close-up on H.Hardison's face he'll cut to momentarily. He needs to establish the importance of this space (which attentive readers will recognize as the same one H.Parker stands in above). The long shot allows him to do that; moreover, the fact that it's off-balance brings some of the same unease as the scene with H.Parker and her father, only moreso, because in that scene the shot was unbalanced by an element leaving the frame, whereas in this one it's unbalanced because something's going to enter it. Could be H.Parker, but it could also be something else. (Monsters?) Rogers then cuts back to the skating rink as 1) the performance begins and 2) H.Parker begins to play:

The second frame is strangely balanced by H.Parker and the element on the right, but there's still an empty space in the central portion of the screen. Instead of filling it, Rogers cuts to her hands:

Often times such shots are merely ornamental, i.e. proof that the something that seems to be being done is being done. Not so here, but more on that in a minute. Rogers cuts back to the oddly balanced medium shot:

Only now the empty space is occupied by Historical Sophie (H.Sophie). What's she doing there? SQUIRREL!

The audience will get to see why crowd at the skating rink is being distracted, but first they're made to understand that this performance is a distraction. As long as the room's dark and everyone's focused on the skater in the spotlight, they won't see this:

The purpose of showing the hands earlier is, in part, to point to the technical flawlessness of the switch. Neither the performer nor the crowd can tell that H.Sophie has replaced H.Parker, which means that we, the viewing audience, think everything's going according to plan. Which, so far, it is. At least until the performance ends and the scene transitions:

Note the continuity in the lighting: we're blinded by the spotlight as it shines directly at the camera, then transitioned to a dark scene in which the light source seems be similarly located (the upper-right corner of the frame) but ominously dimmed. Again, the off-balance shot creates a little anxiety, as there's no telling what might come to occupy it. Actually, there is telling:

Only not really. Like the spotlight moments earlier—not to mention "Starry Night"—these lights don't illuminate anything. They're the kind of lights that hide their source, suggesting that they're being held by people who'd rather not be seen doing what they're doing. And they barely can be:

There's just enough light to recognize that that's H.Parker's father, and the fact that he's there means all the Yellow Light of Hope we've seen so far has been so much misdirection. Or has it? In the following shot-reverse sequence, the domination of the frame shifts from what is typical of this episode (H.Parker's father lording over his domain):

To what's typical of the series (H.Hardison controlling his environment):

This dynamic works for regular viewers of the series—because they strongly believe in the eventual success of the Leverage crew—even though it defies the laws of physics regarding hills. H.Hardison can't be both below and above H.Parker's father, which seems to indicate that Rogers specifically wanted to toy with his audience's expectations about the eventual success of this escape. Because if the angle of framing is a little lower when on H.Hardison, it's only a very little lower. Rogers isn't toying with us the way, say, Toby Haynes did here. In terms of composition, H.Hardison's advantage is, literally, the tip of a cap. Cut back to the rink, below it, if I'm not mistaken:

And even if I am—it could be behind or around as well as beneath—it's still a highly confined space. The formal elements of this shot militate to make H.Parker seem entrapped. She's escaping down a tunnel that's both brightly lit but yet still dark. The lines of the brickwork appear to stream seamlessly to a vanishing point except that they're abruptly terminated by a door. That everything's pointing at the door makes her escape seem contingent. It's a door, certainly, and doors are perfectly fine vehicles for egress, but it's not an open door, nor is it a brightly lit hall. Combined with the previous scene on the hill with H.Hardison, this shot of a tiny woman rushing down an over-long hall seems an indication of imminent failure. And, sure enough, she's quickly stopped by that door-that's-not-an-open-door:

What's stopped her?

Someone who's emerged from the dimly lit empty space she just traversed. Is it one of her father's henchmen?

Nope. It's Historical Nate (H.Nate). All is well. He's yelling at her for involving his wife, H.Sophie, in her plans, but despite the H. he's still Nate. Hope can be restored! Cue its Yellow Light!

That hall is only dimly lit in medium and long shots. H.Parker seems to receive the classic three-point treatment the very moment H.Nate agrees to aid in her escape. Things are looking up!

But still only by the tip of a cap. Or maybe not:

H.Hardison both occupies the central portion of the frame and physically dominates—by a head—every other character on screen. How can the tide have turned so quickly? Rogers incorporates a flashback within his flashback:

As the Saving Private Ryan palette indicates, this isn't a flashback to the WWII era, but to a moment in Occupied France in which H.Hardison acquired a handgrenade. You can guess what's in that rucksack being rummaged through in the previous frame, and why H.Hardison is suddenly in control of the situation. Not that he still doesn't do the smart thing and run:

He runs through the same tunnel he'd been in earlier, only from the opposite direction, and in that previously established space he finds:

Hope? She seems to be occupying the space from the earlier shot, but she's not centrally positioned. She's slightly to the left of center, which leaves a little room for:

More bad lights. Only this time, the identities that're trying to hide behind them have been established, so it seems like these bad lights in this bad tunnel will lead to a bad result. Except!

Medium close-up on our resident hero, H.Nate, shooting at the bad lights. There's a long-established righteousness to these medium and medium close-up of sheriffs in hats shooting at slight angles off-screen. (For example.) They can't shoot directly at the camera without being off-putting to the audience—no one enjoys being shot at—and it needs to be a close-up of some sort because the steeled quality of his face is crucial to establishing the justness of his violence. Rogers didn't need to have H.Nate speak a word, as the composition of this shot speaks to the justice of his cause. Speaking of which:

H.Nate put down the cover fire, and H.Parker and H.Hardison took advantage of it. Everything seems to be coming together just as it does when the Leverage team pulls a heist: perfectly timed. They bolt for the train just as it arrives through the upper right portion of the frame, and Rogers' shot indicates that they'll collide, in the good way, somewhere in the upper left. Freedom is at hand! Everything went according to plan! Or did it?

I won't spoil the episode for those who haven't seen it.

Some jokes just tell themselves.

2012-01-06T15:43:48-08:00

And for my first post from the new desktop — for which I can’t thank you enough — I present an image unworthy of it:

Now if you'll excuse me, I still need to reinstall everything I own. Thank you so much, though, for coming through for me. Who says conservatives have a monopoly on charity? (Besides themselves, of course.)

Prove your love, you've got to prove your love...

2012-01-04T11:32:14-08:00

As those of you on Facebook already know, I'm in a situation similar to the Great Library Entanglement of October 2007. Point being, a number of you have written asking why I haven't been blogging more frequently, and the short answer is that I haven't really had a computer for the past two months. I've got a laptop that can't open documents and was birthday gifted a Kindle which, also, can't open documents (much less display the visuals I need to do my work on, you know, visual rhetoric).

So I'm going to take the patented Goldstein route of utter classnesses and ask for some help. If the university un-pays me as planned, I won't be able to afford a new computer for at least another few months. So if you'd like to see me back blogging sooner — that is, if you value what I write and want to read more of it — chip in and help my legs find some feet to stand on.

I'm already headless, after all.

Here's a donation button, if you'd like to pitch in, just send it to scotterickaufman (at) gmail (dot) com:

*Especially if you're a fan of any of these posts, which are labor- and resource-intensive to write. I just need the tools of my trade, basically:

Films:

Television Shows:

Comics:

In praise of Hitchens

2011-12-16T09:32:03-08:00

Perhaps because I teach in one of the reddest counties in the country — Orange — but every quarter, I make it clear to my students that I’m not interested in indoctrinating them. I’m left of liberal in my politics, but when I’m in the classroom, I’m interested in one thing and one thing alone: teaching these students how to construct a stronger argument. When I argue with conservatives online, I’m arguing with people who don’t know how to argue (or whose idea of arguing involves suing people who disagree with them). I tell my students I’m looking to create a better class of opponents. That I’d rather disagree with people who can state their beliefs forcefully, so that I didn’t always feel like I’m beating candy from a baby.

Since 2001, in the back of my mind, I always imagined I wanted to train my conservative students into being a wee Hitchens.

I know I’ll take flack for this, but honestly, the reason the left reviled Hitchens as strongly as it did was because it realized that it had a formidable opponent. For the most part, the left argues with the likes of Grover Norquist, whose influence is undeniable but whose skills are very much comparable.

To everybody.

Who argues.

About anything.

Hitchens was different. We can turn a phrase, but he could cant and pirouette it. As I wrote after learning he died:

He’s basically our generation’s G.K. Chesterton: wrong about it all, but beautifully so.

I stand by it. He attacked Mother Teresa, and justifiably so, when he felt it necessary. And he embraced an unjust war, unjustifiably so, when he felt it necessary. But he also waterboarded himself, to justify himself, because he felt it was necessary, and he backed down. He was the opposition we should hate, because he makes his case so strongly; but he was also the opposition we should love, because he challenged us to make our argument in its strongest form and changed his mind to fit the facts.

Would that we always had opponents so eloquent and wrong.

UPDATE: Because it was brought up in the comments, I thought I'd at least shed a little light on how I deal with other "leading thinkers" in the conservative movement. I just don't want anybody confused about the issue here, which is argumentative integrity, not correctness.

UPDATE II: Because someone brought up that I'd said it better before, here's "Liberal Fascism: Two Words Next To Each Other."

I keep giving conservative cultural criticism a chance, and I keep getting burned.

2011-12-07T12:06:36-08:00

This post is about a book review I do not understand, but as it appeals to conservatives and I've committed myself to trying to understand conservatives, I'm going to try to make sense of it.

Those who are familiar with [Stephen Hunter] will understand, and those who are not–well, what are you doing reading a book review by me when there is writing out there carved by a master?

The man carves his books? A little Old Testament for my taste, but to each his own.

“Soft Target” is the new Hunter thriller that takes place in a thriller writer’s fantasy land: America, the Mall. Appropriately, it combines the two things America loves the most: shopping and violence.

If I wrote that the author of this review would number me among the terrorists. That said, the fact that he puts quotation marks around the title can only mean he aspires to write for the New Yorker, which is fortuitous given his obvious hatred of America. (He doesn't even mention Jesus among America's favorite things, which means he's obviously at war with Christmas.)

Ray Cruz is Hunter’s new John Wayne ... The novel fleshes out so many characters and tells the story in such a thorough way that Tarantino would be jealous.

The best advice about what books to read comes from people who only watch movies.

Hunter’s greatest gift is his style, his prose. He’s been called the “populist Faulkner” and for good reason.

I have no idea what that means. Perhaps the sentences that follow that one will illuminate.

He’s no Vince Flynn and he’s no Tom Clancy. His characters inhabit a harsh world that is unforgiving and follows no set code of good wins over evil. His characters inhabit a place called reality where Hunter’s simple yet delicate and violent prose comes alive. His heroes are not perfect and his villains are never black and white.

Nothing about prose there. Maybe further on in the review?

Hunter’s novels also appeal because of their visual style, and this one is no different ... He feeds us the exact images and verbs our inner beasts need to gobble up in order to be completely consumed by the story. Hunter has perfected the craft of the thriller by keeping his prose simple a la Hemingway and giving us the details other writers shy away from, all while providing these in the context of a visually striking world only a man who reviewed films for decades could give us.

This book is like a movie! You should watch it in your brain! It's like Hemingway only also Faulknerian! They were both writers I am name-dropping!

Lying by example.

2011-12-06T11:54:40-08:00

According to Leon Cooperman, in his widely circulated open letter to Obama, Wall Street complaints about Obama concern not the substance of his response to the financial crisis these complainers created — and from which they continue to profit — but “the divisive, polarizing tone of [the President's] rhetoric.” Color me skeptical, but I don’t think Wall Street much cares about the rhetoric being directed at it, given its embrace of characterizations intended to vilify it. (“Greed is good,” anybody?) The most galling aspect of Cooperman’s letter, however, isn’t its tone-deafness to the larger political climate so much as its utter lack of understanding of what the President has done.

Cooperman begins by setting the tone: “It is with a great sense of disappointment that I write this.” So, from the first, readers know that the author considers himself qualified to pass judgment on the President. Fair enough, but the next sentence shows that he clearly isn’t: “I hoped your election would bring a salutary change of direction to the country[.]” That undefined “salutary” hangs Damocles-like over the rest of the essay. He thought things would change for the better, but he can’t be bothered to define what those “things” are or how they might be “bettered.” That he follows this by admonishing the President for his rhetoric isn’t unsurprising — it’s all he’s got. “Just to be clear,” he writes, when he’s been nothing of the sort. He’s written a template upon which any reader can foist any objection they have to Obama’s management of anything. How clueless is he?

He contends that he’s been “richly rewarded by a life of hard work (and a great deal of luck),” but like most powerful people who appeal to their humble roots, that luck matters less than the hard work. They take to heart the cliché about making your own luck, so this perfunctory invocation of the humility trope is even more perfunctory than most. It’s evident in the way he later extols the virtues of capitalists who, for him, function as benevolent overlords whose sole purpose is to “fill store shelves at Christmas.” The actual people who fill those shelves — not to mention those who make the products placed upon them — may work hard, but they’ve been terribly unlucky. Of course, Cooperman doesn’t say that. Instead, after praising the virtues of he and his, he chastises the President for doing exactly what he’s been doing all this time:

Rather than assume that the wealthy are a monolithic, selfish and unfeeling lot who musts be subjugated by the force of the state, set a tone that encourages people of good will to meet in the middle.

See what he did there? He and his are “people of good will,” and if the President would only stop describing their behavior in a factual manner and start pretending that they’re other than they are, they would be more than happy to continue doing what they were going to do anyway. Because this “middle” of which Cooperman speaks? Obama’s been there for quite some time, but Cooperman would rather the rest of us not know that.

He’d much rather Obama stop talking about his past compromises, because it’s going to make future ones much more difficult.

The [Impossible] Conservatism of [the Flirtatious] Pauline Kael…

2011-12-04T12:08:48-08:00

…can only exist in Ron Capshaw’s head, and only then because he really wants it to. Case in point:

Kael herself had briefly flirted with Stalinism while in college, but soon rejected it because of her lifelong aversion to dogma. She tried its leftist alternative of Trotskyism but this, too, failed her.

Just substitute “Kael” with “Obama”:

[Obama himself] had briefly flirted with Stalinism while in college, but soon rejected it because of [his] lifelong aversion to dogma. [He] tried its leftist alternative of Trotskyism but this, too, failed [him].

By the logic of contemporary conservative thought, the next sentence now becomes an impossibility:

In the new biography, close friends are quoted as seeing her as an “Adlai Stevenson liberal,” in love with the establishment.

Sorry, Ron, but that’s not how it works now. She once “flirted with Stalinism,” which means her ideology forever bears the stain of this early “flirtation.” Consider the language there: say you “flirt” with someone at a party in 1996 and, years later, this person develops a mental illness that convinces him or her to commit an act of domestic terrorism. Should your current political ideology be determined on the basis of that two-decade-old “flirtation”? Unless I’m so old that “flirtation” doesn’t just signify a home run, but a thirteen-year-long career as a slugger for the same team, I don’t think so.

Then again, I’m not a conservative, so I don’t think Obama’s “flirtation” with Bill Ayers is all that significant to his career as a slightly-if-even-and-not-even-anymore-left-of-center politician. For conservatives, you are who you once — no matter how many years ago — flirted with. In other words, Ron, leave Kael alone. She’s ours, and unless you’re willing to ditch the foundational logic of contemporary conservatism, you can’t have her.*

*If you are, though, by all means please do so. Start a movement and you can have her and, let me think, I’ll throw in Rosenbaum too.

The perils of Googling on the wall.

2011-11-30T18:02:04-08:00

In one of my classes yesterday, I was trying to make a point about the use of space in Last Tango in Paris but could not, for the life of me, remember who directed it. Because it maddens me when information's on the tip of my brain, and I can't be able to pay attention to anything until I figure out what I'm just barely not remembering, I walked over the lecturn to quickly Google the film. Unfortunately, I was currently using the lecturn to display images from another film, and this was what popped up:

Ever wondered what's really high on my list of "Things I Never Wanted to Discuss in Class"?

Now you know.

(It's not that I’m averse to discussing rape in class—I do so when I teach Blowup—it’s just that that’s a discussion that needs to be carefully moderated and respectfully handled, i.e.not the sort of thing you want to be surprised by in class.)

Just in case you need to bluff your way out of a war.

2011-11-28T20:38:39-08:00

(This be yet another one of them posts. The direct sequel to this one, in fact.)

In the previous post, we learned that the Doctor can accomplish quite a bit by yelling at things. Admonishment, it could be said, is his only consistent source of power. He has the uncanny ability to be clever at precisely the right moment, and if he lacks the tools required to bring his clever plan to fruition, he possesses an improvisonal knack for making do with whatever's at hands. As a list of powers go, the Doctor fares quite favorably to no known hero—though he could be compared to a Malthussian Lex Luthor. (He did steal the TARDIS, after all.) Point being, by the time the Doctor regenerates into his Matt Smith incarnation, his reputation is such that he can stand on a rooftop, unkempt and in other people's clothes, and stare down the very same spaceship that, moments earlier, was going to incinerate the entire planet.

Quite the reputation, that is, but what has he done to deserve it? "Been very clever with stuff on multiple occasions" covers it, but inadequately. Unlike Superman, the Doctor possesses no singular power that would require him to face a particular kind of foe in a particular type of manner. He can stand alone against an alien armada precisely because he lacks any clearly defined (or plausible) method of doing so. To quote the man himself in "The Pandorica Opens," in which the Doctor finds himself trapped beneath Stonehenge and the Earth surrounded by an alien armada:

Note how director Toby Haynes monkeys around with the shots in this short sequence. In the first frame, the Doctor is looking out the door, the locked Pandorica behind him, and he looks sheepish not only because of his slumped shoulders and pathetic frown, but because he's being oppressed by the compositional elements of the frame. Amy Pond and River Song flank him, and even though the shot scale is medium close-up—meaning the camera captures him from the waist to the top of his head—Haynes uses an unusually high level of framing, which creates an awkward amount of space between the top of the Doctor's head and the upper limit of the frame. This unusual level of framing makes it so the compositional oppressiveness parallels the narrative—or vice versa, as the relation between the narrative and composition is interdependent in film. In other words, it's as if Haynes squished the Doctor but left the camera in the same position it occupied pre-squishing.

But wait! There is a second frame in which the Doctor has one of his brilliant ideas!

Haynes cuts quickly from the Doctor staring out the door with his back to the Pandorica in a medium close-up to a medium long shot of the Doctor twirling around to address River and Amy. The oppressiveness of the previous frame is lifted by pulling the camera back—the Doctor has been freed by dint of his brilliant idea! Except there's a third frame, in which the spastic Doctor walks toward the camera, effectively entrapping himself in the very medium close-up from which he'd just escaped. Why is he re-oppressing himself?

Because his brilliant idea is actually a terrible one, so it makes sense that he should be no more free of the oppressive framing than he'd been before he had his terrible idea. But take a look at that fourth frame: something has changed. The camera swung back to keep frontality with the spinning Doctor, but it also zoomed out from the medium close-up of the first frame to the medium long shot of the second. The fourth frame is a combination of the first two: his knowledge that his brilliant idea will result in certain death is reflected in the composition. Before, he had nothing; now, he has something, terrible though it may be, and a terrible something is less oppressive than an empty nothing.

Why am I going on and on about compositional oppressiveness while the Doctor whirls about free as all can-do? Because as I mentioned in my post on "Time of Angels":

The entire series is predicated on an escapist conceit, which is why "it's bigger on the inside" is so critical to the show's appeal—not to mention why a box that isn't bigger on the inside is such a terrifying concept to this audience. To return to my point: this is a bad box. A confining box. Only bad things can happen in a confining box, and [the director, Adam Smith] is framing these shots in order to heighten the impression of confinement.

That big box behind the Doctor in the first and fourth frames there? Like the shipping container in "Time of Angels," it's a bad box. The answer to the Doctor's own question about it is right there in the composition of the shot in which he first asks it:

Only the kind of person who can shout down an alien armada can inspire that level of fear, and there's only one of those kind of people around anymore: the Doctor. Since he's currently bereft of any idea powerful enough to keep that armada from putting him in that bad box, he does the next best thing: he decides to yell at the people who want to put him in it. He runs out of the cave beneath Stonehenge and into the center of it. The long shot typically suggests a type of freedom:

It would here, too, if the Doctor didn't proceed to run directly toward the camera and entrap himself in a medium close-up:

For those in the audience wondering what a single man about to slug it out with an entire armada looks like, Haynes obliges:

The low angle of framing makes the armada appear just as impressive as it is, only more so, because making things look impressive is what a low angle of framing always does. (The difference here being that the impressive thing is genuinely impressive.) After some plot machinations that aren't relevant at the moment, the antsy armada decides to stop whirring and thrumming and start

Armed with (and emboldened by) another terrible idea—he now plans to defeat the armada with a single Roman legion—the Doctor rushes to the center of the circle, climbs atop a fallen stone and informs the fleet that whoever controls the Pandorica controls the universe, and can you guess who controls the Pandorica?

The Doctor controls the Pandorica. The low angle of framing indicates his power and importance, but remember, his new terrible idea is no less terrible now than it was ten seconds ago, which means this angle of framing is ironic. The actual odds look something more like this:

The low angle of framing here makes the Doctor seem imposing, certainly, but it also makes the impressive fleet he's admonishing appear even more so. Why does the Doctor want them to stop distracting him? He provides an answer in a frame whose angle is doubly ironic:

The Doctor is big enough to shush an invasion force, but the high angle of framing is literally diminishing him. His words assert his importance at the very moment the camera robs him of having the appearance of any. Except the entire universe is only here in the first place because he actually is as important as he thinks he is—only in this frame, Haynes shoots from the optimistic perspective of how important the universe wants to make him. Ironies within ironies, and all reflective of the Doctor's only decent plan to date: bluffing. Low angle of framing to indicate feigned importance? Check:

Blocking that allows the Doctor to dominate the frame by dictating what it can and can't contain? Check:

Ironic low angle of framing to increase the Doctor's importance but also suggests, compositionally speaking, that he's bluffing? Check:

Low angle of framing with a shallow focus that wipes the armada from the frame and suggests, against all odds, that the Doctor might not be bluffing? Check:

Cut to another low angle of framing followed by a sequence which does everything the preceding five frames did, only really quickly and in a way that suggests that the real victim of the Doctor's bluff is actually the audience? Check check check check check:

Zoom in from this absurdly high angle of framing to make it appear as if the power of the man the shot actively diminishes is actually increasing? Check:

Issue one last threat from this ironic angle? Check:

What next? Gloat?

Check. I would write "checkmate," but the Doctor's idea here is still no different than it was before he put on his little show:

Something something something Romans something something something I win.

Not the sort of reputation-establishing heroism Americans expect from their heroes, but then again, the Doctor's not exactly an American type of hero.

Scott Eric Kaufman's Visual Rhetoric Compendium (as of 1/24/2012)

2011-11-28T13:01:55-08:00

Just keeping it current. (I tend to lose things in my archives. This way, I won't.) (Or not so often, at least.)

Films:

Television Shows:

Comics:

Themes:

How the great and mighty dress themselves.

2011-11-28T12:57:09-08:00

(This be another one of them posts.)

Remember that post I wrote at the beginning of the quarter about the first episode of the fifth season of Doctor Who? Of course you don't: it's still in my draft folder. The whole point of that post—which I'll briefly recapitulate here—is that there's something unusual about a man sporting tweed and bowtie playing the cultural equivalent of Superman. Spandex and tights? That's American. But tweed and a bowtie? That's academic, and surely no one wants the weight of the world resting on academic shoulders.

Unless, of course, you're English. In which case it makes perfect sense. So, to begin that post I never posted, here's Superman coming out of the closet and into his own:

Note that Richard Donner's American version of making manifest the hero's heroism involves stripping in public, entering a random office building, and emerging in jammies and a cape. The English version of this scene maps particularly well onto its American equivalent, with the one exception that director Adam Smith attempts to out-America America and film it in the sort of long tracking shot Scorsese favors. I'm only going to show the end of the first (Fig. 1) and the end of the second (Fig. 7) tracking shot, because the reaction shots in between are actually more crucial:

What are the point of the tracking shots? First, watching men get changed isn't an inherently interesting activity, so the long tracking shots add some dynamism to an otherwise static scene. The fact that the shots are long hammers this home: a long shot holds the whole body in frame, so even if something interesting's going to happen, the audience'll already be privy to it—which is precisely why Smith interrupts the long take with a series of close-ups and reverse shots on the Doctor and Amy. Note that in the Fig. 2 Amy's aghast expression is purely a function of the Doctor's insanity: the Doctor's vanquished the alien Atraxi and won the day, so she's understandably surprised he decided to star-sixty-nine them. Smith kept the focus shallow so Amy's bewilderment occupies the entire frame—at least until the Doctor pops back into the foreground (Fig. 3) being very naked. What had been a close-up on her becomes a close-up on him—presumably the BBC has standards and practices—and she and Rory dissolve into the blur.

But only momentarily. Smith then cuts to a medium close-up whose sole purpose is to put the clean minds of the audience into Amy's prurient state (Fig. 4). Amy's eyeline match corresponds with the naked body of the Doctor, whereas Rory's terminates somewhere down and left there on the floor. Smith then returns to the close-up on the Doctor that previously blurred Rory and Amy, but there's a difference:

Amy is no doubt still blurry, but she now occupies the dead center of the frame. Don't take my word for it:

If not the dead center, then, close enough. Let me explain: as Michael Land and Benjamin Tatler in Looking and Acting: Vision and Eye Movements in Natural Behavior, humans have "a bias towards looking at and near the centre of screens and monitors rather than their margins [and] because photographers tend to place objects of interest at the centre of the viewfinder ... salience will tend to be higher in the centre of the scenes used in many eye movement experiments" (39). Such "experiments," for our present purposes, being "television episodes" and "films." Viewers fixate, in Land and Tatler's sense of the term, on the center of the screen because they've been trained to do so. So strong is this training that if David Bordwell wants to be a bastard and introduce a string of continuity errors in the margins of a shot sequence, he can do so without anybody noticing. In short, we fixate on the center of the frame because we're barely mindful film-viewing automata, but what mindfulness we have, as David Bordwell argues, is face-mindfulness:

[H]uman faces are a special case. We are sublimely sensitive to them. Faces are recognized even in low-resolution images, they are detected faster than other configurations, and we readily project them into ambiguous patterns. Hence we see the Man in the Moon and the Savior on a Cheeto. Naturally, artists realize the power of faces and gestures to attract our attention.

Even though Amy's is a blurry face, the combination of our filmic fixation on centers and our generalized face-mindfulness leads to this being, in the end, an eyeline match. Smith forces the audience to watch Amy watch the Doctor change, and just on the off chance that some member of the audience missed it (or her attitude towards it), I re-present Fig. 6:

Only that's not Fig. 6, that's what I'll call Fig. 7. It's a slight zoom in from Fig. 6 and its purpose is to communicate to anyone who missed the point of Amy staring down the half-naked Doctor Fig. 5. (Note also that Rory's been shuffled out of this shot. He's there, in the diegetic sense, to her immediate right, but for some reason Smith is making this sequence all about Amy and the Doctor.) The subtle zoom from close-up to an extreme close-up works, in film terms, to get the audience "into her head" because it is, literally, being injected into her head. Smith used the same technique more dramatically earlier in the episode, when he had the Doctor enter Amy's mind via his zoomed-in-on-hands:

The above scene, because of its science-fictional nature, is more obvious, but only because it has to be. Audiences aren't accustomed to having characters literally enter each other's memories; however, in the Fig. 7 the subtle zoom and her tightened eyes allow the audience to know what she's thinking without having to literally enter her head. (Naughty thoughts about the Doctor, obviously. I hope it didn't take you this long to figure it out.) Point being, this entire post is about the dressing of heroic figures and the manner in which said dressings are shot, except that it actually isn't. The point—the actual one—is that unlike Superman, the Doctor is just a man sporting tweed and a bowtie who is, nevertheless, able to saunter onto a rooftop and do this:

In case you're wondering, yes, the Doctor is threatening a giant eyeball of a spaceship with tweed and a bowtie. Because this post is becoming unwieldy, I'll put the rest of the lesson-plan for tomorrow in a subsequent post and just note, for the record, that the significance of this final scene from the first Matt Smith episode will become apparent when compared with what could his final scene in the penultimate episode of this season. About which, more very shortly. (I teach tomorrow, after all.)

Via a student who, it seems, is happy that I'm teaching "Hush" this quarter:

2011-11-02T16:06:56-07:00

This is about as much thought as I'm capable of on a Wednesday. I make no apologies. (Except for this one, obviously.)

"YOU HATE THE CROW JUST DIE"

2011-10-31T11:44:03-07:00

Such was the entirety of an email I received, presumably as a result of someone searching for an awesome Crow costume and landing on this post. I'm going to take it as a badge of honor and remain aloof and amused.

The gold's gonna be good.

2011-10-31T11:20:36-07:00

UCI recommends that one or twice a year every instructor should record him- or herself teaching and sit down with a pedagogical counselor and go over the results. It's a harrowing experience, but useful in the extreme because it helps temper some habits that've become so fixed they don't register as extreme anymore. It's an exercise in becoming painfully self-aware of how one behaves in a classroom, and I'd recommend it to anyone who teaches ... and Rick Perry. Because there was this one time I was all hopped up on the caffeine before my session and I came into class and it went something like this:

You start with a bang, hitting your buzz words, but you slowly peter out, start checking your notes, and begin rambling before rousing yourself momentarily as you prepare to crash again. It's a poor performance, hilariously so, but I can sympathize. It must be tiring trying to remember all that tripe.

Holy Terror, Frank Miller!

2011-10-24T13:06:15-07:00

In 2006, Frank Miller announced a forthcoming publication called Holy Terror, Batman! in which the Dark Knight would go to Afghanistan and get in a fistfight with Osama bin Laden. He claimed it would hark back to an earlier era in comics history when, for example, Superman would marshal his many powers to annoy Hitler:

All well and good, except DC didn't think the Batman brand would be enhanced by being aggressively associated with the worst elements of the Bush administration, and so the world was spared Holy Terror, Batman! Until a few weeks ago, that is, when Miller published Holy Terror, a book about a Batman-type vigilante who teams with a Catwoman-type theif and a Commissioner Gordon-type chief to defeat a series of terrorist attacks against a Gotham-type Empire City. (Miller's roman à clef is so obvious I believe DC might be able to sue for copyright infringement.) Let me begin by warning you:

This book is more terrible than I'm leading you to believe it is. It's Batman as written by Pam Geller after she and Glenn Reynolds split a box of wine. Only worse. Where the art isn't muddled it's obscured by a dense bank of unnecessary Eisner spritz. Human proportions—especially female proportions—remind anyone who may've forgotten of his directions to Jim Lee on All-Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder:

If you thought his sexism was shameless, you should see his xenophobia:

At least he acknowledges that Muslims belong to the human race. Generally speaking, that is, because it's not like he can tell them apart:

So these terrorists, all of whom are named Mohammed, are attacking Empire City because it stands as a shining beacon of democracy and freedom. Which means, as we all learned during the early years of the War on Terror, that we're "down with" torture:

As well we should be, after all, because we're fighting a new enemy now and have no choice but to engage in "postmodern diplomacy":

It seems strange for Miller to play jihad for a joke when he obviously believes it necessitates his adolescent diplomatic fantasy, but that's just another symptom of his declining mind. Considering this: the man who wrote and pencilled The Dark Knight Returns in 1986 decides to write and pencil another book about another Batman-type figure going to war against an invading army of blinkered idiots, only in 2006, he lacks the imagination required to have this Batman-type figure fend them off with anything short of an arsenal. What would Batman say to that?

Moreover, what would Batman do with a horde of poor kids whose misdirected aggression has left them vulnerable to persuasion by a radical ideology? He would provide an alternative:

Before you ask: that is Batman, on a horse, leading until-very-recently mindless terror-proxies in an attempt to save Gotham. Frank Miller in 1986 believed that the enemy wasn't only human, but capable of being redeemed; his 2006 counterpart, however, is having none of it.

After all, 9/11 Q.E.D.

Less human than human.

2011-10-24T10:34:55-07:00

Alyssa's post on the sentimental core of Grant Morrison's All-Star Superman is spot on:

I was surprised by how incredibly sweet the comic is. I wasn’t really expecting that. The basic premise, for those not in the know, is Lex Luthor finds a way to essentially give Superman fast-developing cancer, leaving Superman to do a lot of bucket-list things: give Lois Lane the chance to experience his powers for the day; nail one last scoop for the Daily Planet; go back and visit the grave of Jonathan Kent, his adopted father; save the world one last time.

However, the hallmarks of Morrison's work, according to renowned comic scholar (and Alyssa's occasional interlocutor) Douglas Wolk, are:

reality-bending metaphysical freakouts dressed up in action-adventure drag; metaphors that make visible the process by which language creates an image that in turn becomes narrative; a touch of feel-good self-improvement rhetoric; faith in the the power of pop and popularity to do magic; and skinny bald men who are stand-ins for Morrison himself, heroically conquering sadness and making the world evolve. (Reading Comics 258)

If those two descriptions seem at odds, that's because they are. Morrison is a talented but unintegrated artist. What do I mean? He can be as aggressively annoying as Wolk's flattering account of him suggests. Incorporating proxies of himself into narratives about the nature of narratives and claiming that magic makes these metaphorical selves visible? That is, to quote my advisor, pure "postmodern gee-whiz wankery." It's cleverness for the sake of being hailed as King Clever, and it grates on my every last nerve because it's so clinical and intellectualized.

AND YET.

I came to graduate school to study the works of James Joyce, whose complex wankery far outstrips anything Morrison's attempted, much less accomplished. So why does Morrison bother me in a manner Joyce doesn't? The short answer is that, at his best, Morrison doesn't bother me at all. When is he at his best? As Alyssa notes, it's when he's stripped a story to its emotional core and presented its complexities not as worthy subjects in and of themselves, but as natural consequences of a human narrative. Of course, the protagonists of these "human" narratives are rarely human: in All-Star Superman, it's Superman; in We3, it's a trio of weaponized house-pets.

That is to say: Morrison seems to have a problem elevating actual humans to a position worthy of simple human sympathy. A kidnapped pet or an orphaned alien are worthy of sympathy because they aspire to be more than their outsider status allows them to be. But an average human being? He or she is what he or she is—short of a magical authorial intervention that's as likely to land him or her in Sade's castle as provide anything resembling hope or help. The only transcendence average people can acquire is by proxy, e.g. Lois's "acquisition" of Superman's powers on her birthday.

In short, I don't find in Morrison much in the way of human sympathy for ordinary humans. This is where—their shared love of verbal and narrative pyrotechnics aside—I find Morrison lacking what Joyce possessed in abundance: because behind the modernist wankery that is Ulysses is a simple story about a man dealing (poorly) with a crisis he knew was coming but couldn't avert. It's a powerful story because of its fundamental humanity, not, as would be the case with Morrison, despite it.

It's just a book about Indian history.

2011-10-19T17:20:49-07:00

Earlier this week, Salman Rusdie told Haaretz:

Everybody loves The Wire and I think it's okay, but in the end it's just a police series. I love The Sopranos. Deadwood, which didn't last long, was a series I liked a lot; it had more filthy language than I've ever heard on television anywhere in my life, but it was brilliantly written. I like some of what is on now, like Breaking Bad and Dexter.

Ever since then, his Twitter feed's been mighty entertaining. In particular, he implicitly claims that The Wire is "just a police series" but Entourage is something more. (I'm not sure exactly what that something is, but it must have to do with the fact that, as a celebrity himself, he could relate to the Vince and his crew on a profound level inaccessible to those of us who found the show and its characters vapid and humorless.) Rushdie's dismissal of The Wire as "mere" genre fiction couldn't be more poorly timed, coming as it does on the tail end of Colson Whitehead's dismissal of genre fiction as an operative category in contemporary literature. Genre only matters, Whitehead argues, to people incapable of seeing past it. One would assume that a magic realist like Rushdie would understand that.

But no.

He'll watch Game of Thrones, but only because it qualifies as research:

I watched all that because if I am going to work in this field, I need to know what it is going on. I have been making myself have whole-series marathons to get the point of how it goes. I will soon start writing my little series.

What's his "little series" about?

It's a sort of paranoid science-fiction series, people disappearing and being replaced by other people.

Sounds like just another science fiction series to me.

Form and Content in Grant Morrison's All-Star Superman

2011-10-17T16:52:50-07:00

Before I begin, I would like to re-admit that I don't "get" Grant Morrison. I understand and, to some extent, can appreciate what others find interesting about his work, but for me reading Morrison is akin to arguing with someone who believes that, after death, we enter "the Supercontext ... a fifth-dimensional, informational continuum where things that we don't quite understand go on." (Because that's exactly what it is.) In other words, I don't disapprove of Morrison's grand scheme so much as I think its philosophical underpinnings are as sound and stable as those of anyone else who drops too much acid and claims communion with unseen entities of vast esoteric power. They—being the philosophical underpinnings, not the unseen entities of vast esoteric power—are there, certainly, but they're there to be accepted as revelation, not to be argued with.

That said, I decided to teach All-Star Superman anyway and will attempt to do it justice. Fortunately for me, that's not too difficult to do if I concentrate on the opening pages of the first issue. To wit:

Absent from these four panels is any hint that "[t]hat 'S' is the radiant emblem of divinity we reveal when we rip off our stuffy shirts, our social masks, our neuroses, our constructed selves, and become who we truly are." (We're not, truly or otherwise, anything we see on that page.) Instead, Morrison presents the familiar origin of Superman with a narrative economy as impressive as it is moving. (Or because, despite its familiarity, it is moving.) In eight words evenly distributed over four panels, Morrison captures the oft-forgotten pathos of the character.

How does Morrison effect this? By creating an alternating rhythm to the panels. The first depicts a world-historical catastrophe; the second, a medium close-up of two people caught in it; the third, the catastrophe again; the fourth, a first-person extreme close-up of two people whose lives are changed by it. The balance created by alternating between the catastrophic scale in the first and third panels emphasizes, by putting into relief, the personal scale evident in the second and fourth. Put differently: the pained faces in the second panel are both magnified and humanized by the events depicted in the panels bookending it. Similarly, the inquisitive faces in the fourth panel are made meaningful both by the third and the splash page that follows:

The second and third pages aren't typically considered part of the opening sequence, but they seem to me vital to understanding the rhythm Morrison establishes. It's almost as if the Kents' curiosity on the previous page is answered by the magnificance depicted on the two subsequent ones. (The visual impact of the second and third pages is diminished by the necessities of blog-columns, but if you click on the images they should open in their original sizes.) In short, the book opens with symmetry (page one) and transitions to sublime grace (pages two and three), which perfectly prepares the reader for this:

I'm going to avoid plot-points I don't entirely understand and stick with the visuals, beginning with the basics: which panel is the first panel? The page. But in conventional superhero comics, pages rarely function as panels, because conventional superhero comics are orderly and the job of being panels belongs to the panels. (The exception being fights splashed onto pages, but even in those cases rarely do other panels tumble down the side as these do here.) The point being: the symmetry and grace of the preceding pages is disrupted by a page that can't even control its own panels. The calamity befalling the characters in the second through fourth panels doesn't belong to or in the harmonious universe previously described. They're "falling into a sunspot the size of South America" precisely as the pilot in the first panels describes. Like much of Morrison's work, they're performing their own meaning. So too are the panels on the next page:

The page again functions as the first panel, but in this case, the panels it contains are orderly. They may not fit a convention 9- or 6-panel scheme, but they're equidistant from both edges of the page and neatly organized in its central area. Did I say neatly? I meant obsessively: if we were to draw lines up from each panel it becomes evident that Frank Quitely has placed them in such a manner as to frame her face:

The second panel occupies the same width on the page as her hair. The third stops at the inward edge of her right nostril and the fourth begins at the inward edge of her left. The fifth frames the outside of her left ear and extends to the edge of her hair. (I alternated the line on the right edge of the second panel and the left edge of the fifth because it's impossible to see the ears they're framing beneath the lines otherwise.) This orderly composition of this page counterpoises the disorderly tumbling of the previous, and with good reason: that's what Superman does. He restores order when the universe threatens to upset it. Morrison again has his form mirror his content (and vice versa). He wants the reader to both see and understand Superman's function in his fictional universe.

The only way to make that argument convincing is not to.

2011-10-12T17:34:35-07:00

Scott’s already addressed this nonsense, but since I’m the visual rhetoric guy, I thought I’d take a whack at the Erick Erickson’s contribution to We Are The 53%:

First and foremost, Erickson’s point is that he works three jobs, and then something, something, something, and something else. Whatever his point is, he doesn’t particularly care whether or not he communicates it. An illegible image of some scribbles isn’t likely to inspire a movement. It’s akin to a child screaming for attention for attention’s sake, because without legible words the only message Erickson can communicate is that he wants to communicate a message. His incompetence has rendered his point beside itself—because his point is that he is making a point, damn it, and he is making it on the Internet.

He actually states his argument over at Red State, but I think he had a better chance garnering sympathy with his non-message:

[A critic] wants you to fixate on the new house and ignore the old house. My wife and I bought it for $110,000.00 in March of 2001. It is appraised, for taxes, at $119,000.00. We’re having a tough time selling it. My student loans payments are more each month than the mortgage. But with the new house? It was originally for sale for over $600,000.00 and we benefited from the misery of others in the market downturn. It was tasty misery at that.

The man owns two homes—one of which is worth upward of half a million dollars—and clearly enjoys exploiting the market conditions he and his fellow-travelers created. Revels in it. Hence the significance of the non-message he communicates: when he tells people what he truly believes, they’ll understand that Erickson is as odious as the policies he supports. Your average human being tends to be better than the worst consequences of his or her political beliefs. For example, most conservatives champion the free market, but when they meet someone who lost everything when the housing bubble burst, they respond sympathetically because, for them, the consequences of their belief are systemic. They take no personal joy in someone else’s homelessness.

Erick Erickson, however, is not an average human being. He’s a spoiled man-child devoted to an ideology so despicable not even he can bring himself to communicate it directly. Yet he feels compelled to because he knows there are other terrible people out there who share the-sentiments-that-shall-not-shared and genuinely seeks their approval. So what does he do?

He artfully arranges some books on the desk behind him, takes off his shirt and scribbles his foul screed. He performs the very act (“whining”) he condemns in blissful ignorance of his unintentionally ironic statement. The man can do nothing but whine—and he proves as much by whining an unintelligible criticism of whining. If there’s a market for shirtless men who loudly say nothing, I suppose we ought to thank Erickson for cornering it for us. Somebody had to, and far better him than us.

Heroic Abeyance (On Donner's Superman)

2011-09-26T13:06:29-07:00

[The complete list of my visual rhetoric posts can be found here.]

Richard Donner knew that Superman needed a powerful entrance in Superman (1978), but he also knew that the one element that it would necessarily lack was surprise. The audience knows who Clark Kent is and knows that Lois Lane won't actually plummet to her death, and Donner knows that the audience knows that. Because he can't rely on the narrative to carry the weight of the scene, he must resort to using spectacle to carry the weight of the narrative. The scene begins innocently enough, with an extreme long shot (in deep focus) of Lois Lane approaching a helicopter parked on a skyscraper:

Why go with the extreme long shot? Because he needs to establish the relation of the helicopter to this mischievous cable:

How do we know it's mischievous? Because he cut to a close-up of it. The audience may not know why they are being asked to pay attention to this cable, but they know it will play some role in the narrative about to transpire. Donner then cuts back to the original shot to show Lane entering the helicopter:

Note the deep focus here: even though the camera remains positioned exactly as it had been in the first shot, the scale of this would be considered medium long. Why? Because the most important element of a shot helps define what a shot is. It could be argued that the helicopter is more important in the first shot, in which case it would have been a medium shot of a helicopter with Lane visible in the background. But I'm going to argue that Lane is more significant than the helicopter 1) because she occupies the central position in both shots and 2) because her yellow jacket contrasts both the black to the left and the red to the right. Besides, if Donner wanted the helicopter to be the central element, he would've just done this:

An even more extreme long shot of the helicopter pad works as a re-establishing shot. Because of its scale and the lack of on-screen movement, this shot imparts a calmness to the proceedings. Everything is going according to plan. It is now safer for the audience to join Lane in the helicopter:

Donner situates the audience immediately behind Lane, but the shallow depth of field results in the back of her head being out of focus. This shot is uncomfortable because it's contradictory: her centrality indicates the very same importance the focus diminishes. Everything may not be going according to plan:

By cutting from the cockpit shot to this close-up of the cable, Donner is momentarily disorienting the audience in a manner that mimcks the disorientation about to be felt by Lane and the pilots. Where is that cable? Where is moving? What is snapping? Maybe these guys know:

Probably not. From that distance, a black cable on a black helipad would be well-night invisible. At least until it snaps and snags the bright white foot of a helicopter:

Now, via this close-up, the audience can finally see what the problem is. Donner then pans back so the audience can better see its consequences:

Notice the significance of Lane's yellow jacket: that wardrobe decision was not made lightly. It is a vital element in the staging of this scene. Who's in danger? Lois is. Why?

A cable. One tiny cable. The first time the world will meet Superman is because of one tiny cable. Now, if ever there were a time where almost imperceptibly quick edits were warranted, it would be filming a helicopter spinning out of control. Donner obliges:

I've turned the subtitles on as a means of identifying how quickly Donner cycles through these shots. Extreme close-ups on the pilot's face, then Lane's, then his hands on the control. Note that all these shots are within the helicopter. The audience is being momentarily denied the same information Lane is: they both want to know "What's happening?" This quick cutting continues for a full thirty seconds before Donner finally answers the question:

This second re-establishing shot is even longer than the last, but more important is the angle of framing: switching from level to a high angle of framing makes the helicopter appear small and vulnerable. The framing is also canted, which creates the impression of instability and chaos. Although this shot would have worked on its own, it is all the more effective when paired with the earlier one. Donner then spends the next three minutes 1) cutting very quickly inside the cockpit and 2) hanging the helicopter off the side of the building. As above, all of the reverse shots inside the cockpit are shot from within the cockpit (if not from Lane or the pilot's point of view, then something very close to it). One the plane comes to a stop, Donner pulls the camera out of the cockpit:

The camera's perspective is now looking in through the open cockpit door. Because audiences have an implicit sense of where a camera is in space, this shot is slightly disturbing. Why? Because of where the cameraman's standing:

Of course, there is one person who could comfortably shoot atop fifty stories of thin air, but he hasn't arrived yet. As the camera focuses on her panicked face, Donner starts jumping between shots that emphasize her panic:

There's no compelling reason to do a reverse close-up on her face other than the fact that it's not something that's ordinarily done: the speed with he effects it combined with the rarity with which the camera reverses on the same person creates a disorienting sequence. And why shouldn't it be? Vertigo is plenty disorienting. At this point, Donner begins editing the scenes in the helicopter and the scene on the ground in parallel. Every one of the disorienting sequences above is paired with a scene of chaos on the street:

Those shots are then followed by an eyeline match of the helicopter:

Which Donner uses to transition back into the helicopter:

The extreme close-up on Lane's seatbelt is a grace note. The last thing someone hanging out of a helicopter which is itself hanging off a building should do is unbuckle her seatbelt. But! If Lois doesn't, she's not in an adequate amount of jeopardy. It might lead to this:

After cycling through the cockpit/ground/eyeline match sequence for two minutes, Donner's frenetic editing suddenly slows. He holds a long shot of a man exiting a building:

The man calmly picks up a yellow hat:

Then his eyes follow everyone elses and we get a point of view shot from the ground:

The camera calmly cuts back to a long shot of the man, who proceeds to shoot a phone kiosk the stink eye:

Meanwhile:

The close-up on her hands slipping heightens the suspense. But is it really suspense that's been created in this rather long scene? Is she really in jeopardy? I would argue that Donner is amping up anticipation. The audience knows how this will end, they just want to see the spectacle of it. They want to hear the horns pump and see the man in the pajamas rescue the lady in the yellow jacket.

And they will. But you won't. (At least not until the next post.)

Some days I love my job.

2011-09-20T14:27:57-07:00

For example, today, as I've been given permission to teach a course I'm calling "Alien Saviors," whose syllabus looks like this:

Action Comics #1
Superman (1978)
Superman Returns (2006)
Umberto Eco, "The Myth of Superman"
Doctor Who, "The Eleventh Hour"
Doctor Who, "The Beast Below"
Doctor Who, "The Victory of the Daleks"
Doctor Who, "Don't Blink"
Doctor Who, "Time of Angels"
Doctor Who, "Flesh and Stone"
Doctor Who, "The Vampires of Venice"
Doctor Who, "The Fires of Pompeii"
Fiona Hobden, "History Meets Fiction in Doctor Who, 'The Fires of Pompeii'"
Doctor Who, "Amy's Choice"
Doctor Who, "The Hungry Earth"
Doctor Who, "Cold Blood"
Doctor Who, "Tooth and Claw"
Torchwood: Children of Earth

I'm tackling historical context with the explicitly historical episodes, but if anyone can suggest some Baker-era episodes that would make sense to teach alongside the Smith, I'd be obliged.

An Auspicious Beginning to the New School Year

2011-09-18T18:22:53-07:00

SEK is departing from an undisclosed location in the Pacific Northwest. He saunters up to the Alaska Airlines counter.

SEK: Hi! I'm four-and-a-half hours early for my flight to Orange County.

TICKET AGENT: Can I see your ID? (SEK hands it to her.) Here you go sir, enjoy your time in Seattle.

SEK: Seattle?

TICKET AGENT: You better hurry up, sir. Your flight's already started boarding.

SEK: But I'm not going to Seattle. (Checks his boarding pass.) Why am I going to Seattle?

TICKET AGENT: Your flight was overbooked, sir.

SEK: So you're sending me to Seattle?

TICKET AGENT: Yes sir.

SEK: You realize that's in the opposite direction of Orange County, don't you?

TICKET AGENT: I'm sorry, sir, but you need to hurry or you'll miss your flight.

SEK stands there, dazed, in front of the Alaska Airlines counter. Right there, completely flabbergasted, in front of the Alaska Airlines counter.

SEK: Will I be able to find a flight to Orange County from Seattle?

TICKET AGENT: It will cost $100 to transfer the ticket, but you can take care of that when you get there.

SEK: You can't just send someone somewhere and then charge them a transfer fee. What kind of airline is Alaska Airlines anyway?

TICKET AGENT: Sir, if you miss your flight, you'll need to transfer two tickets.

SEK considers his options. The flight to Orange County from his undisclosed location is overbooked four-and-a-half hours before check-in. Seattle has a more robust airport ... so he rushes to and through security and boards a tin-can-of-death to Seattle, where he currently sits typing this on free Google wifi. Will he make it home? Only time will tell.

There is something so very, very wrong with this image:

2011-09-14T00:55:30-07:00

Baby steps to return to blogging. Here's to hoping it sticks.

London, My London

2011-08-13T16:59:27-07:00

I’ve stayed my pen about the riots in London because they’re happening in what I consider to be my London. What I mean is: when that Eyjafjallajoekull erupted andtrapped me in England, I spent about 80 percent of the time staying with a friend in Crouch End, and while my friend taught or held office hours or sat through faculty meetings, I would wander the streets of North London. So strong is my affinity for the area that I ended up supporting Tottenham—and you can see where this is going. I’ve invested in the area in the way that only an idle victim of circumstance can: fully cognizant of the illegitimacy of his claim upon it, but feeling an abiding connection to it anyway. Knowing this, Michael Sayeau—who wrote eloquently about his experience for n+1—recommended I follow the riots via Twitter, and so I spent an anxious evening reading about the destruction of a place I have no right to care for as greatly as I do.

One of the most surreal aspects of watching the riots unfold on Twitter and a grid of Twitpics was that it quickly became apparent that people weren’t simply commenting on the looting, they were actively coordinating it. ”We should hit this shop next,” one person would write, only to be shouted down by a group of people who thought it more prudent to hit another shop instead. It quickly became apparent that an unusual organization had emerged through the clutter of social media: it operated openly and encouraged criminality, all while imposing order on a what otherwise would’ve appeared to be the random development of a conflagration.

This use of technology to outwit and outstrip a government’s ability to react to escalating unrest should have immediately struck me as familiar, being that it’s the premise of Adam Roberts‘s novel New Model Army—a book in which I’m not only thanked in the acknowledgments, but in which I believe I make an appearance. (Adam denies it, but if the crazy academic in a brown suit and a Watchmen t-shirt isn’t me, he at least belongs to my tribe.) Point being: the connection between the acephalous organization of Adam’s radically democratic military organizations and what I was witnessed on Twitter last week speaks to the power of speculative fiction and, more frighteningly, the pace at which contemporary society makes good on its speculations.

No one would attend them if I could.

2011-07-18T17:48:42-07:00

SEK is meeting with a FORMER STUDENT at his apartment complex to discuss a letter of recommendation. Because SEK's porch occupies his office while his complex paints his porch, the student and SEK decide to take advantage of the weather and discuss medical applications out by the pool.

SEK: Med school won't be easy blah blah blah you need to demonstrate your work ethic blah blah bl—

POLICE CAR: WHOOP WHOOP!

SEK: I recognize that voice.

Indeed he does. Three POLICE CARS pull up next to the pool, followed by a FIRE TRUCK and an AMBULANCE. He and his student watch as the POLICE rush into an upstairs apartment while the FIREFIGHTERS remain by the ground with a stretcher.

FORMER STUDENT: That happen a lot here?

SEK: First time since I've moved in. Wonder what happened?

A group of CHILDREN approach the FIREFIGHTERS down by the stairs for autographs. SEK didn't know FIREFIGHTERS gave out autographs.

SEK: I didn't know firefighters gave out autographs.

The FIREFIGHTERS each take out a business card, autograph the back, and hand them to the CHILDREN. The CHILDREN exit.

SEK: But they obviously do.

The FIREFIGHTERS grab the strecher and carry it up the stairs. SEK and his former student sit transfixed. More POLICE begin to mull about the bottom of the stairs. Ten minutes pass. Suddenly, the door of the apartment slams open and the FIREFIGHTERS carry the stretcher back down. On it is a WOMAN HANDCUFFED TO THE STRETCHER.

WOMAN HANDCUFFED TO THE STRETCHER: But! But! But!

That is all SEK and FORMER STUDENT can hear from their position. The POLICE and FIREFIGHTERS escort her to an ambulance, and as quickly as they all arrived, they're gone.

FORMER STUDENT: What just happened?

SEK: I have no clue.

FORMER STUDENT: But it did. We just saw that.

SEK: That we did.

FORMER STUDENT: You just can't hold "normal" office hours, can you?

Rumors of the reason behind my "demise" have been greatly exaggerated.

2011-07-17T22:54:11-07:00

Sorry to lapse into silence again, but this time, I have reasons unrelated to untimely deaths:

I'm revising two dissertation chapters for publication/future job talks, as I'm hitting the market hard at the MLA this year.
I'm still working on Seeing Rhetoric, but as the material I'm currently working on consists of revisions of the lesson plans I've already posted, I'm bereft of new material to post. As soon as I'm finished revising and back into the production of new material, I'll be posting it.
Like everyone with a doctorate in English, I believe I have a novel in me, and the only time I can indulge in that fancy is during the summer.

Those are the only three reasons posting has slowed to a crawl here and elsewhere, and anyone who says otherwise is engaging in what Twain once called "wrong and damnable conjecture."

I Hear the Noise about Thy Keel*

2011-07-06T16:15:10-07:00

Apologies for the silence, but it's been a long, very long, year capped off by a tragedy, and I've had difficulty getting the motor going again. The words burn to write them, but about a month ago my friend Alan died. This is him, at a party, wearing a stupid shirt back in 1992:

When a friend posted this photograph on Facebook, I joked that I remembered that party—and I do—but that I must've been fourteen when it was taken, and turns out I was a year off:

Because there's Alan shooting me a dirty look for some wise-ass comment I must've just made and I didn't have a beard until I was fifteen. The thing of it is, I knew Alan primarily online: we met on a BBS, corresponded through early iterations of the Internet, and reconnected on Facebook a few years back. Much has been written about online culture and the nature of "friendships" that're maintained solely online, but none of them quite get what it was like in those first days.

I've been trying for more than a month now to find some way to capture just that, and have failed miserably, miserably, and miserably again. Nor will I find success here. But that look on Alan's face and that shot from across the room as I cover my mouth to hide whatever words just escaped it, that's a bit of it.

I'm not the best at being human—by all conventional standards, I'm an abject failure—but I always could find a place with words, and that place has been, for most of my life, online. I ended up teaching literature for much the same reason, obviously, but I wanted, and have wanted, to acknowledge this debt to our shared pioneer frivolity for some time now.

And now, maybe, just maybe, I'll find my words again, because as anyone who knew him knows, the last thing Alan would've wanted was for his death to shut me up.

*Alan would've smacked me for titling this post thus—or for even using the word "thus," or perhaps for not using "thusly"—but this time, I get the last words. (Even if they're not my own.)

This must be the world's way of telling me it's time to rejoin it.

2011-06-23T10:43:14-07:00

They made this just for me, put it on in Los Angeles and everything, yet somehow I missed it:

Via Scott McCloud.

That's right: The Doctor as Batman via Scott McCloud.

And I missed it.

This is why, in an ideal world, they provide teachers with three month's paid vacation.

2011-06-12T19:17:29-07:00

A STUDENT who disappeared in Week Four appears during the office hours SEK is holding in Week Ten.

STUDENT: Hi Scott!

SEK: Do I know you?

STUDENT: I'm from your afternoon class!

SEK: I know everyone in my afternoon class.

STUDENT: I may not have been there in a while.

SEK: Define "while"?

STUDENT: Some stuff that happened. Also things.

SEK: How many classes did stuff and things cause you to miss?

STUDENT: I was there for that class about how cameras work.

SEK: Which one?

STUDENT: The directors'?

SEK: Which one's?

STUDENT: Camera?

SEK: Is that a quesiton?

SEK can feel it coming in the air tonight, oh Lord, he only wishes he couldn't. It's just that some complaints are as inevitable as Phil Collins bringing bombast to fanfare, and this particular complaint most certainly pulls a pure Phil Collins.

STUDENT: I don't know. I'm confused.

SEK: As am I. Who are you again?

STUDENT: I'm in your afternoon class!

SEK: Then why don't I know you?

STUDENT: Because some stuff and things happened and I stopped attending in Week Four.

SEK: I'm sorry you had to go through stuff and things. Life is tough. What can I help you with now?

STUDENT: What do I need to do to pass the class?

SEK: Which one?

STUDENT: Yours.

SEK: The one you didn't attend?

STUDENT: But I have a draft of my Rhetorical Analysis that I wrote to make it up to you.

SEK: Make it up to me? This isn't about you making it up to me. It's about—

STUDENT: Can you at least take a look at my draft?

STUDENT hands SEK a draft of her "Rhetorical Analysis." As he thought, it was a "Rhetorical Analysis" as performed by someone who had no idea what a rhetorical analysis is.

SEK: This isn't a rhetorical analysis.

STUDENT: It's about a horror movie.

SEK: That wasn't really the focus of the class.

STUDENT: It was called a horror class.

SEK: The emphasis was on the creation of suspense.

STUDENT: Saw II was suspenseful.

SEK: Suspenseful torture porn, which if you were paying attention during the few classes you actually attended, you'd have remembered that that's a genre I repeatedly specified we'd be avoiding.

STUDENT: But I heard you talking about it so it still meets your requirements.

SEK: No, it doesn't.

STUDENT: Yes, it does.

SEK: How?

STUDENT: I analyze the effect of a horror film.

SEK: One I explicitly banned.

STUDENT: That was the assignment.

SEK: That was not the assignment.

STUDENT: But it was!

SEK: Then how come no one else in this class produced a similar document?

STUDENT: You'd have to ask them.

SEK: But they're not here now, so I'm asking you: how did twenty-four students aim their arrows at the same side of the same barn and strike it (with varying degrees of thump and wobble)?

STUDENT: Some teachers don't push 'em hard enough. Who has 'em aiming at barns and all when they could be shooting at aliens and shit?

SEK: Just so I have this straight: in Week Four you decided to up the rhetorical ante by chasing aliens and what you captured were the barely legible fears of a child forced to rewatch SAW II until someone produced an essay you deemded "college enough" to turn in. Am I missing something here?

STUDENT: But is there still something I could to do pass the cl—

SEK: No.

STUDENT: But what if I—

SEK: No.

STUDENT: I have a friend—

SEK: You're going to need one—

STUDENT: And she said when you do this two quarters in a row they have to pass you. She said I'm on "Bemusement Leave" now and can only—

SEK: You're on "Bemusement Leave"? I suggest you take it. Now.

CAR vs. OFFICE HOURS, ROUND ONE

2011-06-02T04:58:30-07:00

SEK is driving CAR up a dangerous hill you no doubt remember at a rate of 70 miles per hour. He is on his way to office hours.

CAR: YAAAAAAWN!

All of the electricity in CAR disappears and now SEK and SLEEPING CAR are coasting uphill at the speed of impending panic. SEK depresses the gas pedal and wakes CAR up.

CAR: Did you say something?

SEK: What was that back there?

CAR: What was what back where?

SEK: That yawn and—

CAR: You mean CAR's micronap? CAR does that now. Micronaps are cool.

SEK: Micronaps are not co—

CAR: YAAAAAAWN!

All of the electricity in CAR vanishes again and again SEK and SLEEPING CAR are coasting uphill at the speed of impending panic. SEK depresses the gas pedal and wakes CAR up. Again.

SEK: You did it again!

CAR: Did what?

SEK: Fell asleep!

CAR: Did not!

SEK: One more word from you and I'm pulling you over!

CAR: But—

SEK: Enough!

SEK pulls CAR over and looks at it sternly. After a few minutes, SEK reenters CAR and looks at its lying dashboard with a crooked eye.

CAR: You know you're gonna be late for office hours.

SEK: I know that. Shut up.

CAR: Those kids are gonna think you let them down.

SEK: I KNOW.

CAR: Go ahead. Turn CAR on.

SEK: I'm not turning you on.

CAR: Just slip your key in CAR's ignition and—

SEK: SHUT UP.

CAR: You know you wan—

SEK caves to CAR's inappropriately expressed demands and carefully drives to campus. Once there, he locates a mechanic who can set CAR straight and informs his students that office hours will be delayed until 2 p.m. It is now 2:30 p.m. and SEK is talking with a MECHANIC.

SEK: I thought you said CAR would be ready by 2 p.m.

MECHANIC: CAR? No, CAR needed a part, so I had it towed to Riverside.

In the background, unseen by SEK, CAR moves across the stage from right-to-left, emphatically waving goodbye to everbody.

SEK: You towed CAR to Riverside?

MECHANIC: We thought it'd be more convenient for you, since you live in Corona.

SEK: How am I supposed to get back to class?

MECHANIC: We can call you a cab.

SEK: And what about after class?

MECHANIC: Just get your wife to pick you up.

SEK: But CAR is our only car.

MECHANIC: CAR is your only car?

SEK: CAR is.

MECHANIC: You want I should tow CAR back now?

SEK: Very much so, thank you.

In the background, unseen by SEK, CAR moves across the stage from left-to-right, emphatically waving hello to everybody.

MECHANIC: Here CAR is, good as exactly the same! Try not to drive CAR up steep incline between now and tomorrow when part from Riverside arrive.

CAR: (to SEK) CAR was gonna go on a field trip!

SEK: Your services were needed elsewhere.

CAR: (despondently) Back to campus then, are we?

SEK shoots CAR a wilting look, and CAR deflates as best as 3 tons of metal can. SEK returns to office hours late, commits to making up the three lost hours by staying an hour late on Wednesday and Thursday and coming in an hour early on Thursday. SEK's not sure how CAR will feel about getting to campus at 9 a.m. on Thursday without employing the toll roads, but from the steely look on his face, it seems he really doesn't consider CAR's feelings to be relevant at the moment.

Busted!

2011-05-25T16:50:48-07:00

[The following post was written for mature audiences. Reader discretion is advised.]

The Donalde caught me cursing, which as we all know I never do. Well, actually, the Donalde caught my student cursing, which as we all know they never do either. Then he proved I've cursed before by linking to an unformatted comment in a post that deemed me "insufferable" for writing those visual rhetoric posts you love—or at least the ones that receive the most random positive feedback. Because he's the Donalde, he fails to realize that I was being purposely insufferable because I'd been called "insufferable," and that I sarcastically answered the question "What the fucking fuck?" with "Q.F.E.F.D." But alas! It is not in the Donalde to recognize such things.

However, it is in the Donalde to end a post in which he castigates me for cursing by calling me an "asshat." He does as well with irony as he does sarcasm and Google: he suggests that I use the word "cocksucker" in private, when I not only use it quite publicly, I think it can be fucking poetry.

I have just received a very "disturbing" email from a very "prominent" conservative blogger...

2011-05-17T00:19:24-07:00

...who informs me that my "true" identity is Batman John Casper. I kid you not: I'm now accused of being the very same John Casper who, a few years ago, tried to destroy my academic career. I'm not currently privy to the "evidence" against "me," but I look forward to confronting it with great gusto, if only to have the opportunity to reprint this letter from an African-American scholar, because I enjoy white-hot displays of scorn as much as the next historian.

I've got a tremendously busy week ahead of me, so please feel free to update me about future "developments" in comments, via email, or through Facebook. Because this should be entertaining.

UPDATE: As far as anyone can tell, something like this or this happened. What either or those things may be, your guess is as good as mine.