Monthly Archives: February 2009

Counting Down Galactica (1 of 4)

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One advantage to serialized narrative of the type I’ve been discussing with my class on TV & New Media this term is the way such stories occasionally align with the flocking of audiences to make a kind of collective reading ritual: conjoined at the internets, we witness each new installment together, previewing, receiving, discussing, digesting in happy cacophony. I remember the thrill of discovering this phenomenon back in the 90s with The X-Files, my first experience with “appointment television,” finding in the nascent USENET newsgroups next day more conversation, concentration, and conspiracy than I could handle. Till then, my pleasures had been too cultishly isolated (Red Dwarf, Mystery Science Theater 3000) or too relegated to reruns and the dislocated arrhythmia of syndication (the original Star Trek and its rebirth — in retrospect, a brilliant piece of franchise engineering — in Next Generation) to coalesce socially.

Nowadays, of course, fannish modes of attentiveness have become the rule rather than the exception, and Battlestar Galactica (followed closely by Lost) is perhaps the most mainstream subcultural artifact going. BSG is winding down, its four-season run drawing to a finish three episodes from tonight’s, and I’ve decided to mark the occasion with my own serial contribution: a set of four blog posts, one each Friday, to count down the end of the series. (I’ve written previously about BSG, and readers hungry for background might wish to check out my Flow essay.)

Even as I invoke the idea of some solid ending, it sounds hollow: for in confronting Galactica in its true multiplicity, one has to acknowledge that BSG has achieved critical mass for franchise immortality, its storyworld spinning off into extensions via TV, film, videogames, and on and on. A new series, Caprica, will be airing soon, along with a telefilm, The Plan, which together shift us into a period of history preceding the events of the current series. Prequelization — that odd retrograde movement into primal scenery — is the first symptom that a property has hit its transmedia singularity, backing and filling the fractal nooks and crannies of its narrative terrain. Let’s be honest, though. It won’t really be about narrative anymore, but instead a kind of rhizomatic self-historicization, an ongoing enterprise of mapping diegetic spacetime in all directions at once. On the textual side, it’s about generating more stories; on the industrial and commercial axis, it’s about maximizing profit returns, strip-mining the concept down to its bedrock. We saw what happened when George Lucas did this to Star Wars; let’s hope BSG doesn’t disappear quite so frictionlessly up its own asshole.

All that said, BSG has had a great run, arguably among the finest science-fiction TV series ever, up there with the best sustained stretches of Trek and Doctor Who. It’s mature, dark, intelligent, twisty, devoted to its own premise, and brilliantly cast and filmed. It’s wrapping up this particular incarnation long before series senility sets in — that creeping cancer that overwhelmed The X-Files around season seven and seems to long ago have sapped The Simpsons of its essence — and there is a genuine sense of drama, of something at stake, as the final episodes tick away.

Beyond these generalizations, though, and my eagerness to remain glued to my ringside seat, I don’t have much desire to review the show. Another aspect of serial narrative is that, while it’s unfurling in the realtime of broadcast, it’s like a train rushing by: each episode blurs past, delivering its individual punch, but the ultimate destination (and meaning/quality of the journey) is impossible to discern. There will be time for that, all the time in the world, when the series has concluded and we begin our long scholarship using DVD box sets and the Battlestar Wiki, canonizing favorite characters, arcs, and episodes, remixing our vids and building our model kits. The show will live on, that is, in our vernacular study and reverence of it, and if the franchise does go sour, at least we’ll always have Adama as singularly embodied by Edward James Olmos from 2004-2009. In these “countdown” posts, I’ll focus instead on more global aspects of BSG, from its place in science-fiction history to the aesthetics of its visual effects.

The image at the top of this post is from Ralph McQuarrie’s concept art for the 1970s series that launched Galactica (both ship and franchise) on its starlost voyage. In next week’s post, I’ll speak more about that incarnation of BSG and my own encounter with it in the shadows of that larger inspiration — from which Galactica gleefully cannibalized — Star Wars.

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The fund drives that biannually interrupt the flow of intelligent goodness from my local NPR station like to trumpet the power of “driveway moments” — stories so called because when they come on the radio, you stay in your car, unable to tear yourself away until they’re finished. The term has always interested me because it so bluntly merges the experience of listening with the act of driving: treating the radio as synecdoche for the car, or maybe the other way around (I can never keep my metonymies straight).

Anyway, I had my own driveway moment tonight, when All Things Considered broadcast a story on the vidding movement. Of course, fans have been remixing and editing cult TV content into new, idiosyncratically pleasurable/perverse configurations for decades, and the fact that mainstream media are only now picking up on these wonderful grassroots creations and the subcultural communities through which they circulate is sad proof of a dictum I learned from my long-ago undergraduate journalism professor: by the time a cultural phenomenon ends up on the cover of Newsweek, it’s already six months out of date.

Credit to ATC, though, for doing the story, and for avoiding the trap of talking about vidding as though it were, in fact, something new. I did tense up when the reporter Neda Ulaby used male pronouns to refer to one CSI vidder — “the vidder wants to say something about the dangers faced by cops on the show, and he’s saying it by cutting existing scenes together” — thinking it surely incorrect, since the vidding community is dominantly female. Oh, great, I thought: yet another rewriting of history in which a pointedly masculine narrative of innovation and authorship retroactively simplifies a longer and more complex tradition developed by women. (Yes, I do occasionally think in long sentences like that.)

But then the piece brought in Francesca Coppa, and everything was OK again. Coppa, an associate professor of English and the director of film studies at Muhlenberg College, is herself a vidder as well as an accomplished scholar of fandom; I had the pleasure of hearing her work at MIT’s Media in Transition conference in 2007. With her input, the NPR story manages to compress a smart and fairly accurate picture of vidding and fandom into a little under six minutes — an impressive feat.

The funny thing is that the little flash of anxiety and defensiveness I felt when it seemed like NPR would “get it wrong” was like a guilty echo of the way I’ve “gotten it wrong” over the years. My own work on Star Trek fandom focuses on a variety of fan creativity based on strict allegience to canon, in particular the designed objects and invented technologies that constitute the series’ setting and chronology. I call it, variously, hardware fandom or blueprint culture, and I’ve always conceptualized it as a specifically male mode of fandom. It’s the kind of fan I once was — hell, still am — and in my initial exuberance to explore the subject years ago, I remember thinking and writing as though feminine modes of fandom were mere stepping stones toward, really a pale adjunct to, some more substantive, engaged, and commercially complicit fandom practiced by men. I’ve learned better since, largely through interactions with female friends and colleagues in dialogues like the gender-in-fandom debates staged by Henry Jenkins in summer 2007.

For fear of caricaturing my own and others’ positions, I’ll spare you further mea culpas. Suffice to say that my thinking on fandom has evolved (let’s hope it continues to do so!). I am learning to prize voices like Coppa’s for prompting me to revisit and reassess my own too-easy understandings of fan practices as something I can map and intepret based solely on my own experience: valid enough as individual evidence, I suppose, but curdling into something more insidious when generalized — a male subject’s unthinking colonization of territory already capably inhabited.

Quick Thoughts on the Oscars

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Last night’s Academy Awards ceremony was more enjoyable than I expected, though it’s always this way: each year I watch with a kind of low-level awe, impressed not only by the show’s general lack of suckiness but by how the pageantry, with its weird mix of cheesy spectacle and syrupy sentimentality, manages to distill that specific tincture of pleasure that is the movies’ signature structure of feeling. Mind you, I’m not talking about the cinematic medium’s larger essence (its extremes of Godardian play and Tarkovskian tedium) but its particular, peculiar manifestation via the churning industrial engine of Hollywood, so helplessly eager to please and entertain that it puts us in the position of that poor guy in Brainstorm (Douglas Trumbull, 1983) — the one hooked up to an orgasm machine that nearly lands him in a coma.

Next day, the script is always the same: I listen to NPR and read the Times and discover that, in fact, the show was a big, boring disappointment, full of the same old lame old. (Here too the ceremony replicates the experience of filmgoing, the light of day too often revealing the seams and strings that ruin the previous night’s magic.) So before I proceed to my necessary disillusionment, that temporary discharge of cynicism by which I prepare the poles of my pleasure centers for their next jolt, a few points of interest I noticed in the 81st Awards:

1. Popularity and its discontents. At several points during the broadcast — Hugh Jackman’s great opening number, Will Smith’s comments following the action-movie montage — we were reminded that the movies everyone went to see (Iron Man, The Dark Knight) were not necessarily the ones that received critical accolades and, by definition, Academy attention. In fact, an allergically inverse relation seems to apply: the more popular a film is, the less likely it is to receive any kind of respect, save for its technical components. That’s why crowdpleasers are so often relegated to categories like Editing, Sound Mixing, and, of course, Visual Effects. (The one place where popular, profitable movies are granted the privilege of existing as feature-length artworks, rather than Frankensteinian assemblages of FX proficiency, is in the category of Animated Feature, where Bolt, WALL-E, and Kung-Fu Panda are rightly celebrated as marvels.) Last night, the Academy got called on its strange standards, with Jackman asking why Dark Knight hadn’t been nominated and Smith dryly remarking that action movies actually have audiences. Only he called them “fans” — and this year, it seems, fans are realizing that they are audiences, perhaps the only real audiences, and they’re rising up to demand equal representation at the spotlit top of the cultural hierarchy.

2. Mashups and remixes. Others, I’m sure, will have much to say about Slumdog Millionaire‘s sweep of the major awards and what this indicates about the globalization of Hollywood. The mingling of film traditions and industries seems to me an epiphenomenal manifestation of a more atomistic and pervasive transformation, over the last few years, into remix culture: we live in the era of mashup and migration, a mixing and matching that produced the wonderful, boundary-crossing hybrid of Slumdog (a media artifact, let us note, that is as much about television and film’s mutual remediation as it is about Bollywood and Hollywood). This was apparent at a formal level in the composition of the Awards’ Best Original Song performances, which garishly and excitingly wrapped the melodies of “Down to Earth,” “O Saya,” and “Jai Ho” around each other.

3. The Curious Case of Brad Pitt. Although he didn’t win, Pitt’s nomination for Best Actor in a Leading Role marks the continuing erosion of prejudices against — and concomitant trend toward full acceptance of — what I have elsewhere termed blended performance: the creation of dramatic characters through special and visual effects. More precisely, blended performance involves acting that depends vitally on visual machination: think Christopher Reeve in Superman, Jeremy Irons in Dead Ringers, Andy Serkis in The Lord of the Rings (and for that matter, Serkis as the big ape in King Kong). Each of these characters came alive not simply through their anchoring in particular bodies, faces, voices, and dramatic chops, but the augmentation of those traits with VFX methods, from bluescreen traveling mattes to motion capture and animation. I’m not saying there’s a strict dividing line here between “real” and “altered” performance; every star turn is a spectacular technology in its own right. But good acting is also a category that prizes authenticity; we do not want to be reminded that we are being tricked. Blended performances don’t often get Oscar attention, but when they do, there’s a historical bias toward special (on-camera) effects versus postproduction contributions: John Hurt received a Best Actor nomination for The Elephant Man (1980), a film he spent buried in pounds of prosthetic devices. In Benjamin Button, of course, Pitt wore plenty of makeup; but a large portion of his performance came about through an intricate choreography of matchmoving and CG modeling. As digital phenomenologies become the inescapable norm, we’ll see more and more legitimacy accorded to blended performance, a trend that will dovetail, I expect, with the threshold moment at which a CG animated film gets nominated for best live-action feature. Don’t laugh: many thought it would happen with WALL-E, and it’s in the taxonomies of AMPAS that such profound distinctions about the ontologies of cinema and technology get hammered out.

Visible Evidence

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From the Department of Incongruous Juxtapositions, this pair of items: on the right, the photograph of Rihanna following her beating by Chris Brown; on the left, the supposed image of Atlantis culled from Google Earth.

Let me immediately make clear that I am in no way calling into question the fact of Rihanna’s assault or equating its visual trace — its documentary and moral significance — with the seeming signs of ancient civilization read into a tracework of lines on the ocean floor. The former is evidence of a vicious crime, brutal as any forensic artifact; the latter a fanciful projection, like the crisscrossing canals that generations of hopeful astronomers imagined onto the surface of Mars.

If there is a connection between these images, it is not in their ontological status, which is as clean an opposition as one could hope for, but in their epistemological status: the way they localize larger dialectics of belief and uncertainty, demonstrating the power of freely circulating images to focus, lenslike, the structures of “knowledge” with which our culture navigates by day and sings itself to sleep at night.

In LA a legal investigation rages over who leaked the photo of Rihanna, while across the nation a million splinter investigations twease out the rights and wrongs of TMZ’s going public with it. Does one person’s privacy outweigh the galvanizing, possibly progressive impact of the crime photo’s appearance? Does the fight against domestic and gendered violence become that much more energized with each media screen to which Rihanna’s battered face travels? What happens now to Rihanna, who (as my wife points out) faces the Hobson’s choice of disavowing what has happened and going on with her career in the doomed fashion of Whitney Houston, or speaking out and risking the simultaneous celebration and stigmatization we attach to celebrities whose real lives ground the glitter of their fame? If nothing else, Rihanna has been forcefully resignified in the public eye; whatever position she now adopts relative to the assault will bring judgment upon her — perhaps the most unfair outcome of all.

Meanwhile, the purported image of Atlantis manifests a familiar way of seeing and knowing the unseeable and unknowable. It joins, that is, a long list of media artifacts poised at the edge of the possible, tantalizing with their promise of rendering in understandable terms the tidal forces of our unruly cultural imaginary: snapshots of the Loch Ness Monster, plaster castings of Bigfoot’s big footprints, grainy images of UFOs glimpsed over backyard treelines, Abraham Zapruder’s flickering footage of JFK’s execution, blown-up photos of the jets hitting the World Trade Centers (bearing circles and arrows to indicate why the wrongly-shaped fuselages disprove the “official story”). From creatures to conspiracies, it’s a real-world game of Where’s Waldo, based on fanatically close readings of evidence produced through scientific means that pervert science’s very tenets. Fictions like Lost provide sanitized, playful versions of the same Pynchonean vertigo: the spiraling, paranoid sense that nothing is as it seems — a point ironically proved with recourse to cameras as objective witnesses. In the case of Google’s Atlantis, that “camera” happens to be a virtual construct, an extrapolated map of the ocean floor. The submerged city itself, Google says, is an artifact of compositing and compression: the lossy posing as the lofty, a high-tech updating of lens flares, cosmic rays, and weather balloons too distant for the lens to resolve into their true natures.

In both cases, something submerged has been brought to light, touching off new rounds of old debates about what really happened, what’s really out there. With depressing speed, internet message boards filled with derisive reactions to Rihanna’s photo. “She looks better that way”; “That’s what happens when a woman won’t shut her mouth”; and perhaps most disheartening, “It’s not that bad.” A chorus of voices singing a ragged melody of sexism, racism, and simple hard-heartedness. Let’s hope we have the collective sense to respond correctly to these two images, separating tragic fact from escapist fiction.

Digital Dogsbodies

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It’s funny — and perhaps, in the contagious-episteme fashion of Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell filing patents for the telephone on the very same date, a bit creepy — that Dan North of Spectacular Attractions should write on the topic of dog movies while I was preparing my own post about Space Buddies. This Disney film, which pornlike skipped theaters to go straight to DVD and Blu-Ray, is one of a spate of dog-centered films that have become a crowdpleasing filmic staple of late. Dan poses the question, “What is it about today that people need so many dog movies?” and goes on to speculate that we’re collectively drowning our sorrows at the world’s ugliness with a massive infusion of cute: puppyism as cultural anodyne.

Maybe so. It seems to me, though, that another dynamic is in operation here — and with all due respect to my follow scholar of visual effects, Dan may be letting the grumbly echoes of the Frankfurt School distract him from a fascinating nexus of technology, economics, and codes of expressive aesthetics driving the current crop of cinematic canines. Simply put, dogs make excellent cyberstars.

Think about it. Nowadays we’re used to high-profile turns by hybrids of human and digital performance: Angelina Jolie as Grendel’s goldplated mother in Beowulf, Brad Pitt as the wizened baby in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. (Hmm, it only now strikes me that this intertextual madonna-and-child are married in real life; perhaps the nuclear family is giving way to the mo-capped one?) Such top-billed performances are based on elaborate rendering pipelines, to be sure, but their celebrity/notoriety is at least as much about the uniquely sexy and identifiable star personae attached to these magic mannequins: a higher order of compositing, a discursive special effect. It takes a ton of processing power to paint the sutured stars onto the screen, and an equivalent amount of marketing and promotion — those other, Foucauldian technologies — to situate them as a specific case of the more general Steady March Toward Viable Synthespianism. Which means, in terms of labor and capital, they’re bloody expensive. Mountains of data are moved in service of the smallest details of realism, and even then, nobody can get the eyes right.

But what of the humble cur and the scaled-down VFX needed to sell its blended performance? The five puppy stars of Space Buddies are real, indexically photographed dogs with digitally-retouched jaw movements and eyebrow expressions; child voice actors supply the final, intangible, irreplaceable proof of character and personality. (To hell with subsurface skin scatter and other appeals to our pathetically seducible eyes; the real threshold of completely virtual performance remains believable speech synthesis.) The canine cast of Beverly Hills Chihuahua, while built on similar principles, are ontologically closer to the army of Agent Smiths in The Matrix Reloaded’s burly brawl — U-Capped fur wrapped over 3D doll armatures and arrayed in Busby-Berkeleyish mass ornament. They are, in short, digital dogsbodies, and as we wring our hands over the resurrection of Fred Astaire in vacuum-cleaner ads and debate whether Ben Burtt’s sound design in Wall-E adds up to a best-actor Oscar, our screens are slowly filling with animals’ special-effects-driven stardom. How strange that we’re not treating them as the landmarks they are — despite their immense profitability, popularity, and paradoxical common-placeness. It’s like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, only cuddly!

I don’t mean to sound alarmist — though writing about the digital’s supposed incursion into the real always seems to bring out the edge in my voice. In truth, the whole thing seems rather wonderful to me, not just because I really dug Space Buddies, but because the dogsbody has been around a long time, selling audiences on the dramatic “realism” of talking animals. From Pluto to Astro, Scooby Doo to Rowlf, Lady and the Tramp to K-9, Dynomutt, and Gromit, dogs have always been animated beyond their biological station by technologies of the screen; we accept them as narrative players far more easily than we do more elaborate and singular constructions of the monstrous and exotic. The latest digital tools for imparting expression to dogs’ mouths and muzzles were developed, of all places, in pet-food ads: clumsy stepping stones that now look as dated as poor LBJ’s posthumous lipsynching in Forrest Gump.

These days it’s the rare dog (or cat, bear, and fish) onscreen whose face hasn’t been partially augmented with virtual prosthetics. Ultimately, this is less about technological capability than the legal and monetary bottom line: unlike human actors, animal actors can’t go ballistic on the lighting guy, or write cumbersome provisions into their contracts to copyright their “aura” in the age of mechanical reproduction. Our showbiz beasts exist near the bottom of the labor pool: just below that other mass of bodies slowly being fed into the meat-grinder of digitization, stuntpeople, and just above the nameless hoardes of Orcs jam-packing the horizon shots of Lord of the Rings. I think it was Jean Baudrillard, in The System of Objects, who observed that pets hold a unique status, poised perfectly between people and things. It’s a quality they happen to share with FX bodies, and for this reason I expect we’ll see menageries in the multiplex for years to come.

Requiem for a Craptop

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Today I said goodbye to the MacBook that served me and my wife for almost three years — served us tirelessly, loyally, without ever judging the uses to which we put it. It was part of our household and our daily routines, funneling reams of virtual paper past our eyeballs, taking our email dictation, connecting us with friends through Facebook and family through Skype. (Many was the Sunday afternoon I’d walk the MacBook around our house to show my parents the place; I faced into its camera as the bedrooms and staircases and kitchens scrolled behind me like a mutated first-person shooter or a Kubrickian steadicam.) We called it, affectionately, the Craptop; but there was nothing crappy about its animal purity.

It’s odd, I know, to speak this way about a machine, but then again it isn’t: I’m far too respectful of the lessons of science fiction (not to mention those of Foucault, Latour, and Haraway) to draw confident and watertight distinctions between our technologies and ourselves. My sadness about the Craptop’s departure is in part a sadness about my own limitations, including, of course, the ultimate limit: mortality. Even on a more mundane scale, the clock of days, I was unworthy of the Craptop’s unquestioning service, as I am unworthy of all the machines that surround and support me, starting up at the press of a button, the turn of a key.

The Craptop was not just a machine for the home, but for work: purchased by Swarthmore to assist me in teaching, it played many a movie clip and Powerpoint presentation to my students, flew many miles by airplane and rode in the back seat of many a car. It passes from my world now because the generous College has bought me a new unit, aluminum-cased and free of the little glitches and slownesses that were starting to make the Craptop unusable. It’s a mystery to me why and how machines grow old and unreliable — but no more, I suppose, than the mystery of why we do.

What happens to the Craptop now? Swarthmore’s an enlightened place, and so, the brand assures me, is Apple: I assume a recycling program exists to deconstruct the Craptop into ecologically-neutral components or repurpose its parts into new devices. In his article “Out with the Trash: On the Future of New Media” (Residual Media, Ed. Charles R. Acland, University of Minnesota Press, 2007), Jonathan Sterne writes eloquently and sardonically of the phenomenon of obsolete computer junk, and curious readers are well advised to seek out his words. For my part, I’ll just note my gratitude to the humble Craptop, and try not to resent the newer model on which, ironically, I write its elegy: soon enough, for it and for all of us, the end will come, so let us celebrate the devices of here and now.