CFP: Transformative Works and Cultures

Posted on February 2, 2008 by Bob Rehak

I’m happy to announce a new journal on creative fan and media culture. The editors, Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson, have kindly invited me to participate on the editorial review board; I accepted with pleasure. Over the last year, I’ve strongly reconnected to my early academic interest in fandom. My first real “read” as an academic was Henry Jenkins’s Textual Poachers, which I devoured during long afternoons in the air-conditioned sanctuary of the Chapel Hill Public Library, the summer before my first year of graduate school at the University of North Carolina in 1998. Now, ten years later, I’ve made a number of good new friends in the fan studies community and am pleased to be launching a course on Fan Culture at Swarthmore. I’m very eager to see where this exciting and innovative new publication will take us. Please pass the word along!

Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC) is a Gold Open Access international peer-reviewed journal published by the Organization for Transformative Works edited by Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson.

TWC publishes articles about popular media, fan communities, and transformative works, broadly conceived. We invite papers on all related topics, including but not limited to fan fiction, fan vids, mashups, machinima, film, TV, anime, comic books, video games, and any and all aspects of the communities of practice that surround them. TWC’s aim is twofold: to provide a publishing outlet that welcomes fan-related topics, and to promote dialogue between the academic community and the fan community.

We encourage innovative works that situate these topics within contemporary culture via a variety of critical approaches, including but not limited to feminism, queer theory, critical race studies, political economy, ethnography, reception theory, literary criticism, film studies, and media studies. We also encourage authors to consider writing personal essays integrated with scholarship, hypertext articles, or other forms that embrace the technical possibilities of the Web and test the limits of the genre of academic writing. TWC copyrights under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Theory accepts blind peer-reviewed essays that are often interdisciplinary, with a conceptual focus and a theoretical frame that offers expansive interventions in the field of fan studies (5,000-8,000 words).

Praxis analyzes the particular, in contrast to Theory’s broader vantage. Essays are blind peer reviewed and may apply a specific theory to a formation or artifact; explicate fan practice; perform a detailed reading of a specific text; or otherwise relate transformative phenomena to social, literary, technological, and/or historical frameworks (4,000-7,000 words).

Symposium is a section of editorially reviewed concise, thematically contained short essays that provide insight into current developments and debates surrounding any topic related to fandom or transformative media and cultures (1,500-2,500 words).

Reviews offer critical summaries of items of interest in the fields of fan and media studies, including books, new journals, and Web sites. Reviews incorporate a description of the item’s content, an assessment of its likely audience, and an evaluation of its importance in a larger context (1,500–2,500 words). Review submissions undergo editorial review; submit inquiries first to review@transformativeworks.org.

TWC has rolling submissions. Contributors should submit online through the Web site (http://journal.transformativeworks.org). Inquiries may be sent to the editors (editor@transformativeworks.org).

The call for papers is available as a .pdf download sized for U.S. Letter (http://journal.transformativeworks.org/docs/twc-flyer-US-letter.pdf) or European A4 (http://journal.transformativeworks.org/docs/twc-flyer-A4.pdf). Please feel free to link, download, print, distribute, or post.

No Stopping the Terminator’s Serial Return

Posted on January 31, 2008 by Bob Rehak

I’m enjoying Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles in the same three-quarters, semi-committed way I enjoyed Star Trek Voyager (the other show I’m catching up on via iPod during the writer’s strike): it ain’t Shakespeare, but it’ll do. The FOX network’s new program reinvents the venerable Terminator franchise by serializing it, retrofitting the premise into yet another of television’s narrative deli slicers. Now, instead of giant cinematic slabs of Termination every decade or so (The Terminator in 1984; Terminator 2: Judgment Day in 1991; Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines in 2003), we get wafer-thin weekly slices, peeled from the block of a setup almost mathematically pristine in its triangulation of force and counterforce: Sarah Connor, mother of a future leader of a rebellion against sentient, world-ending AI; John Connor, her teenaged son who will eventually grow into that man; and an endless procession of Terminators, silvery machine skeletons cloaked in human flesh, whose variations on the theme of lethally-unstoppable-yet-childishly-innocent are as simultaneously charming, pathetic, and horrifying as Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein monster.

The fact that these cyborgs are sent back in time to our present day to menace the Connors a priori is what lends the story its relentless urgency — it’s an almost perfect chase structure — as well as allowing it to encompass nearly any conceivable narrative permutation. Science fiction’s most productive conceit (at least in terms of storytelling), time travel and its even zanier offshoot, parallel universes, grant drama a toolkit of feints, substitutions, and surprises otherwise acceptable only in avant-garde experimentation (the cryptic as art) and tales of pure subjectivity (it was all a dream). When characters are bopping back and forth along the timespace continuum, in other words, it’s possible to stretch continuity to the breaking point, risking the storyworld’s implosion into absurdity, only to save it at the last minute by revealing each seeming reversal of cause and effect to be part of a larger logic of temporal shenanigans.

Hence the concept of the narrative reset button — a staple of Star Trek‘s many dips into the time-travel well — and the freedom of the Chronicles to recast its leads in a trendy, demographic-friendly makeover. Lena Headey takes over the role of Sarah from the movies’ Linda Hamilton; John, played in T2 by Edward Furlong and T3 by Nick Stahl, here is played by Thomas Dekker, Claire’s nerdy videographer friend in the first season of Heroes. It kind of all makes sense if you squint, turn your head sideways, and tell yourself that maybe this is all some parallel reality splintered off from the one James Cameron created (as indeed it is, industrially). More galvanizing is the recasting of the key Terminator — a “good” one, we presume, though its origin and nature are one of the series’ close-kept secrets — as a beautiful young woman, approximately John’s age.

As Cameron (get it?), Summer Glau plays the Terminator with a sort of detached glaze; think Zooey Deschanel with the power to bend steel and survive an eight-story fall. Though her ability to convincingly mimic human social behavior fluctuates alarmingly, the character is great, and her presence at one node of the Connor triangle remaps gender and sexual relationships in a way that is both jarring and absolutely plausible. In T2 the “good” Terminator (played by Arnold Schwarzenegger) had the square, inert reliability of John Wayne’s taxidermied corpse, and the absence of romantic chemistry between him and Hamilton’s Sarah seemed natural. (If he was a Dad-figure, it was a 50’s sitcom Dad — patriarchal but neutered.) Things are very different between Cameron and John, at least in subtext, and for that matter between Cameron and Sarah. If only because it seems such a ripe matrix for fannish invention, Chronicles marks the first time in a while I’ve been curious to seek out some slash.

As far as plotting goes, the new series seems primed to run for a while, if it can find its audience. The time-travel motif has already enabled our three protagonists to fast-forward from 1999 to 2007, introducing a fun fish-out-of-water counterpoint to the predictable (but very satisfying) setpieces of superpowerful beings throwing each other through walls, firing automatic weapons into each other, and getting mowed down by SUVs. I’m sure if things get dull, or when Sweeps loom, we’ll be treated to glimpses of the future (when the human-Skynet war is at its visual-FX-budget-busting peak) or the distant past (anyone for a Civil-War-era Terminator hunt?).

Overall I’m pleased with how gracefully this franchise has found a fresh point of generation for new content — how felicitously the premise has fitted itself to the domain of serial TV, with its unique grammar of cliffhangers, season-arcs, and long-simmering mysteries of origins, destinations, and desires. If they last, the Chronicles promise to be far more rewarding than the projected live-action Star Wars series (an experience I expect to be like having my soul strip-mined in between commercial interludes). Notwithstanding the cosmic expense of the second and third feature films, there’s always been something visceral and pleasingly cheap about the Terminator fantasy, remnant of its shoestring-budget 1984 origins; Terminator‘s simplified structure of feeling seems appropriate to the spiritual dimensions of televised SF. Like those robots that keep coming back to dog our steps, the franchise has found an ideal way to to insinuate itself into the timeline of our weekly viewing.

Local celebrity and the dangers of TMI

Posted on January 27, 2008 by Bob Rehak

Last week I had the honor of being featured in an article for Swarthmore’s student newspaper, the Phoenix, entitled “Swat Professors Log In.” Along with my colleague Tim Burke, whose Easily Distracted is one of the cooler blogs out there (and a key inspiration to me in starting Graphic Engine), the article focuses on professors who maintain academic but personal blogs, how they view their online publishing, and what issues arise when students encounter a professor in the blogosophere.

The latter topic surprised me a little; it hadn’t previously dawned on me that it might be a little, well, weird to come across a blog written by one of your teachers, just as it might feel odd to cross their path in some real-life situation well outside the familiar forum of the classroom. (In the immortal words of Tina Fey’s Mean Girls, catching your teacher shopping at the mall is “like seeing a dog walk on its hind legs.”) Although I value easygoing spontaneity in my teaching and consider myself fairly approachable as an authority figure, the truth is that instructional interactions are of necessity highly structured and scripted. There’s comfort for all of us in knowing what roles to expect in the classroom — I stand here, behind the lectern, you sit there, taking notes — and blogs, by their very in-between nature, complicate those expectations.

The tension between private, public, and professional spheres for the educator is particularly heightened in Web 2.0 environments, where the desire to take part in social networking (especially if you presume to teach about such phenomena, or use them as pedagogical tools) must be weighed against the risk of revealing too much information about yourself. When I first set up a Facebook account, I listed my political preference; now I simply leave that line blank. I’d rather err on the side of neutrality than risk students feeling awkward about expressing a viewpoint which they worry will conflict with my own. On the other hand, that concern didn’t stop me from posting a caustic comparison of George W. Bush and Britney Spears some months back, and I imagine the coming year’s presidential campaign will offer similar temptations toward TMI.

In any case, since the Phoenix chose not to use all of my answers — and with good reason; as readers of this blog are aware, I’m sort of long-winded — I thought I’d post the full text of my email interview (with reporter Liana Katz) here. It goes into more detail on the points I’ve touched on, as well as giving credit where credit is due to folks like Temple’s Chris Cagle, who provided the great phrase “diaristic sketchpad” to describe the function of blogs for academics who like to think out loud.

> 1. When did you start blogging?

My first post was on July 26, 2007, so I’ve been doing this for about six
months now.

> 2. What motivated you to start a blog? What literary/vocal platform did a
> blog offer that you did not have before?

I held off on blogging for a long time, though a few friends encouraged me
to try my hand at it. I was posting long-winded mini-essays to the various
discussion groups and email lists I frequent (mostly academic stuff
involving videogame research), and once in a while someone would
essentially say, “Dude, seems like you want your own soapbox to stand on
…”

More seriously, I began reading a number of academic and media-oriented
blogs after taking part in the Media In Transition conference at MIT in
April 2007. Along with my Swarthmore colleague Tim Burke’s excellent blog
Easily Distracted, these inspired me to throw my hat in the ring.

In terms of the platform that blogging offers, I’m still figuring that
out; I believe everyone responds differently to the opportunities and
challenges such a space presents. My friend Chris Cagle, a professor at
Temple, describes his blog (Category D) as a “diaristic sketchpad,” which
I think is perfect. Graphic Engine is certainly personal in tone, and I
feel free to indulge there my likes and dislikes, fannish excitement and
grouchy kvetching. But it’s also a sketchpad for roughing out ideas and
arguments — about media, culture, and technology — any of which I might
later develop into full-fledged essays. Finally, the ability to get
feedback in the form of comments from interested and intelligent readers
is invaluable!

> 3. After reading some of your entries, it seemed to me like you maintain a
> serious but personal tone. Are your writing and teaching styles comparable
> or does having a blog allow you to address subjects in a different way
> than
> you would in the classroom?

I always keep in mind that, as a professional whose work involves public
performance (in teaching) and the building of strong collegial
relationships, I need to observe a certain decorum in my tone and
sensibility in my choice of topics. While I love and celebrate the freedom
of expression that blogging allows, it would be foolhardy of me to
intentionally say things that might offend or upset friends, colleagues,
or students. To some extent, these same codes govern the way I teach and
interact in “real life.” At the same time, however, the blog allows me to
argue (and sometimes rant) to a degree that I wouldn’t in RL. I guess my
operating assumption is that people can choose — or not — to read what I
write at Graphic Engine, while in the classroom, students are sort of
trapped with me. So I try not to abuse the privilege of their patience and
attention.

> 4. Who reads your blog and has this readership changed over time? In
> particular, have more students started to read it?

I’ve had one student post a comment (which made me very happy), and a few
others have mentioned they read it. For the most part, though, the people
who post are either friends or other academics (or both). This doesn’t
seem to have changed much over time. I lack hard numbers on who’s visiting
and reading, but it does gratify me when someone links to one of my posts,
or reviews the blog overall, as Henry Jenkins at MIT did back in August.

> 5. Have you told your students about your blog or have they stumbled
> across
> it on their own?

There’s a link to Graphic Engine on my faculty profile, and of course it
comes up in a Google search for Bob Rehak (yes, I confess to being a
self-Googler). Other than that, I don’t trumpet the blog’s existence to
students; it’s not mentioned on my syllabi or in my email sig file.

> 6. Have you ever had a discussion with a student (in or outside of the
> classroom) about something that you wrote on your blog?

No specific memories here, though I’m sure it’s come up in casual
conversation (e.g. “You play Halo 3? I just wrote about that game on my
blog!”). More often, I think, I’ll mention something I read on someone
else’s blog. As I said earlier, I have had one student post, taking me
quite knowledgably to task on one of my assertions, which I really enjoyed
— college, perhaps Swarthmore in particular, is a place to develop your
voice and hone critical thinking skills, so I’m always happy when I can
exchange ideas with someone.

> 7. In your opinion, what purpose do blogs serve for students and
> professor?

We haven’t addressed the use of blogs as a component of coursework,
something I’ve experimented with (and will do so again this term in Fan
Culture, FMST 85). In that forum, blogs are a great way of encouraging
collective conversation on course topics outside the classroom, as well as
in getting students to pool knowledge and share resources. The ability to
post links to YouTube videos and news stories, for example, turned out to
be a great bonus in last spring’s course on TV and New Media (FMST 84).

> Do they help build a closer relationship or should professors’ blogs be
> considered outside the world of college academics?

I’m not quite sure what you mean, but I’d say that what’s interesting
about academic blogs is that they aren’t completely in one place or
another. They’re tools for sharing thoughts, sharing resources, and
disseminating information, but they’re also interlocutory and
conversational. Profession by profession, their uses differ greatly, even
if their underlying dynamics are consistent. I see Graphic Engine as an
academically-informed blog, but not only, or primarily, academic in
“function.” For this reason, it’s still up for grabs to what degree
blogging should be considered part of one’s professional development or
publications; those rules are still being hammered out. But I’m really
glad to be part of the adventure!

Always Under Construction

Posted on January 22, 2008 by Bob Rehak

The teaser for J. J. Abrams’s Star Trek reboot, previously playing only to privileged viewers of Cloverfield, is now available for global consumption and scrutiny on Paramount’s official movie site. My own attention — and imagination — are captured less by the teaser’s aural invocations of real and virtual history (oratory by John F. Kennedy and Leonard Nimoy, the opening strains of Alexander Courage’s Trek score, even a weird snippet of the transporter sound effect) and more by the big eyeball-kick of a reveal that arrives at the end: the Enterprise itself, “under construction” (screen grab above).

Those two words close out the teaser and also adorn the website, clearly inviting us to indulge in the metaphorical collapse of film and starship. In Trek‘s calculus of the imaginary, this is nothing new; from the franchise’s 1966 “launch” onward, a happy equation — perhaps homology is the better term — has existed between the various televisual and filmic incarnations of Trek and the spacefaring vessel that is its primary characters’ means of exploration. The Enterprise, in other words, has always served as something akin to the gun-gripping hand at the bottom of the screen in a first-person shooter: an interface between our world and fictive future history, a graphic conceit easing us over the screen border that separates living room from starship bridge. (It’s not an original insight on my part to point out that Kirk and crew seek out strange new worlds while essentially sitting on comfy recliners and watching a big-screen TV.) Befitting their status as new textual “technologies,” each installment of the franchise has redesigned the Enterprise slightly, even given us new ships in which to take our weekly voyages: the Voyager, the Defiant, and all those goofy runabouts on Deep Space Nine.

In recent weeks I’ve grown weary of contemplating the ingenious, demonic ways in which Abrams builds interest in his projects, using feints and dead-ends to set us buzzing with anticipation and antagonism toward experiences that lie buried in our future (what the Cloverfield monster looks like, what’s really going on on Lost, and so forth). Every dissection of the Abrams effect, it now seems to me, just adds to the Abrams effect; the name of the game in a transmedia age is the viral replication of text, cultivation of mind-share expertly timed to the release calendar. In the end it doesn’t really matter whether our chatter is in the service of bunking or debunking. It’s all, in the eyes of the media industries, good.

So I think I’ll sidestep the argumentative bait offered by the teaser image, namely the degree to which Abrams’s Enterprise is faithful — or not — to the Enterprise(s) of history. Suffice to say that the ship hasn’t been reinvented to the egregious extent of the Jupiter II’s makeover in the 1998 film version of Lost in Space (a sin against science fiction for which Akiva Goldsman has partly compensated with the impressive I Am Legend). From the head-on view we’re given, the new Enterprise maintains the classic saucer-and-twin-nacelles configuration of Walter “Matt” Jefferies’s 60s design, which is good enough for me.

What I will point out is how insistently the “under construction” trope has recurred in Star Trek‘s big picture — its diegesis, metatext, or whatever we’re calling the giant mass of still and moving images, documents and data, that constitute its 42-year-old corpus. Scenes where the ship is in drydock abound in the movies and more recent TV series. 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the first viable expansion of the franchise and proof of its ability to endlessly regenerate itself, contains an extended sequence in which Kirk and Scotty circle the under-construction Enterprise-A.

This rhapsodic interlude, derided by many critics and even some fans as evidence of ST:TMP‘s visual-effects metastasis — the elephantine marriage of budgetary excess and narcissistic self-indulgence — seems, over the years, to have undergone a kind of greening, emerging as the film’s kernel of authentic Trek, the powerfully beating heart (throbbing dilithium crystal?) of what is otherwise a rather gray and inert film.

And this image, from the 2005 Ships of the Line calendar, even more succinctly pinpoints the lovely lure of a starship under construction. “Christopher Pike, Commanding” and the class of favored images it exemplifies are like Star Trek‘s primal scenes. Often generated by nonprofessionals using 3D rendering programs, they are what inspired me to write a dissertation chapter about Star Trek‘s “hardware fandom” — those who spend their time buying blueprints of Constitution-class starships, doodling D7 Klingon cruisers and Romulan Birds of Prey, building model kits of the Galileo-7 shuttlecraft, and taping together cardboard-tube and cereal-box mockups of phasers, communicators, and tricorders.

All of those objects were imperfect, and none quite measured up to the onscreen ideal. But it was their very imperfections — their under-constructedness — that marked them as ours, as real and full of possibility. Better the dream of what might come to be then the grim result of its arrival. When it comes right down to it, the Enterprise is always being built, always under construction. I don’t mind waiting another year with the partial version that Abrams has given us.

Four-Leaf “Clover”

Posted on January 18, 2008 by Bob Rehak

Like the Manhattan-demolishing leviathan at its center — sometimes only a distant, crashing presence, sometimes terrifyingly close and looming — Cloverfield is an enigma built of striking contrasts. At once epic and intimate, the film seems utterly familiar in some ways and breathtakingly new in others. At its best (and there is a lot of “best” in its 84-minute running time), Cloverfield takes an almost unbearably cliched monster-movie premise and reinvents it whole, deftly stripping away the audience’s ability to anticipate what will happen next — even if, moments later, we realize that we saw the twists and shocks coming a mile away.

In this sense, the new film from producer and concept author J. J. Abrams, screenwriter Drew Goddard, and director Matt Reeves accomplishes what any good movie must: find a new, temporarily convincing way to obey the established rules of its genre and yet package them in a manner that seems fresh and original. I say “temporarily” because, of course, it’s a zero-sum game: assuming Cloverfield is the box-office phenomenon its makers and marketers clearly expect it to be, we’re in for any number of B, C, and D-grade knockoffs. We’ll quickly tire of the Cloverfield effect, just as we tired of the Matrix‘s bullet time, CG films featuring wisecracking animals in an urban setting, or — next on the block for burnout — the recent boomlet of pregnancy comedies like Knocked Up and Juno.

For the moment, though, we’re in the sweet spot. Cloverfield works beautifully as a lean, scary, and occasionally awe-inspiring fusion of science fiction and horror. Its impact seems inseparable from the promotional campaign leading up to its release, though what strikes me in retrospect (now that the quantum function of collective anticipation has collapsed, the wave of our wanting condensed into a hard particle of finished film) is how trickily non-promotional the publicity turned out to be. From its first teaser onwards, Cloverfield was sold to us more on the basis of what we didn’t know than what we did.

By the old logic of movie marketing, the more we were fed about an upcoming film, the better. Even in cases where a structuring piece of narrative information was withheld, as in The Crying Game, the absence itself became a lure, with reviewers falling all over themselves not to give away the Secret So Shocking You Won’t Believe Your Eyes! Not so Cloverfield, whose central mystery — the monster’s nature and appearance — became an object of extended forensic investigation by fans and, for many, the primary reason to turn up on opening day to see the film. Speculative images like the one at the top of this article (not, let me add, an accurate representation) abounded as fans scoured Quicktime files frame-by-frame and read clues Rorschach-like into promotional artwork. This was accompanied by much skepticism about the prospect of our ever actually seeing the monster; many felt we were in for another bait-and-switch of the Blair Witch variety.

It’s probably no spoiler at this point to announce that there is a monster, and a very satisfying one at that. What’s great, though, is how our fear and fascination toward the thing is mostly generated through the human activity around it, in particular the reactions of the quartet of young actors whom we follow throughout the movie. None is a well-known performer, for obvious reasons. Encountering a familiar movie face amid the frenzy and pathos of Cloverfield would destroy the film’s precarious conceit of being “real” footage captured by “real” people as the attack “really” happens.

The filmic pursuit of realism has a long and storied history — almost as long as the list of ways that Hollywood has put that realism to cynical use to sell its fictions. In staying within the boundaries of its metaphor, Cloverfield is endlessly gimmicky, finding ways to frame traditional dramatic setpieces and character beats while entirely avoiding artful compositions or anything resembling continuity editing. (As a side note, the visual effects are particularly impressive for the way in which digital elements have been added to jouncing camera work; the production’s match-movers deserve a special technical Oscar of their own.)

For Cloverfield‘s interwoven illusions — not just the spectacle of invented monsters, but affective phantasms like suspense and empathy — to work, everything must seem unplanned, contingent, or (my favorite word from graduate school) aleatory. That term means “dependent on chance or luck,” and it’s entirely appropriate in this context. Abrams and company have stumbled upon a way to put an electrifying new spin on a comfortable old story, and as fans of the genre, we are lucky indeed.

American Idolatry

Posted on January 16, 2008 by Bob Rehak

It’s back, somehow seeming simultaneously like manna from heaven and a plague of fire descending to destroy us all.

My wife and I readied ourselves for last night’s premiere of American Idol‘s seventh season by cooking a delicious dinner and timing it so that we sat down to eat just as Ryan Seacrest appeared onscreen, accompanied by the chords of that theme song — so much like the revving of an enormous engine. That this engine has churned to life six times previously does not at all diminish its impact: on the contrary, its sweet electronic throb was a song of salvation, delivering us from our long trek through the dramaless desert of the writer’s strike.

OK, maybe that’s a bit strong: the last several months have certainly not been devoid of drama, whether in the kooky kaleidoscope of the presidential race or (ironically, tautologically) the writer’s strike itself, which has provided us all an opportunity to catch up on our viewing backlog as well as to reflect on what it means to have writers writing television at all. (Random observation: since new commercials keep coming out, does this mean that the creative content of advertising and marketing isn’t considered writing?) And as always, the concentric circles of collective fascination in the United States, with TV at the center of the conceptual bullseye, stop well short of encompassing the large and very real dramas experienced by the rest of the world; in other words, we should take a moment to remember that not everybody on Earth cares so passionately about what Simon, Paula, and Randy think, or about who will succeed Jordin Sparks.

For my wife and me, the excitement was multiplied by the fact that Idol‘s first round of auditions took place in Philadelphia, the city we now live a shocking 15 minutes away from. As the camera panned across the familiar skyline, it was hard not to succumb to Idol‘s implicit ideological address: I see you! Louis Althusser defined interpellation as the moment when, walking down a street, a cop calls out “Hey you!” and you turn around, believing yourself (mistakenly) to be the subject of the law’s address. For me, it’s all summed up in Ryan Seacrest’s direct gaze into the camera.

And then, of course, there are the crowds of hopefuls. Finally I see the point of high-def TV; the mass ornament of naked ambition, in all its variegated poppy-field glory, never looked so good as when rendered in HD. And at the other pole of specular mastery, the bad hair, flop sweat, and glazed eyeballs of the doomed auditioners has never seemed more squirm-inducingly intimate. Yes, the opening rounds of the new Idol promise to be as relentlessly mean as the previous seasons; nowhere is the long take used with more calculated cruelty than in the expertly extended coverage of contestants’ caterwauling, or the deadtime of waiting for the judges to drop the ax. Indeed, part of the pleasure of the coming months is knowing that out of this primordial, cannibalistic muck, we will ritualistically pull ourselves onto the shores of civilization, narrowing the field to the truly “worthy” singers, casting out the misfits until we arrive at the golden calf, er, One True Talent. On American Idol, cultural ontology recapitulates phylogeny; we replay, each season, the millennial-scale process by which our species learned to stop eating each other and got around to more important things, like popularity contests. (Come to think of it, Idol is also a lot like high school.)

The other nice thing about Idol is that there’s so freaking much of it; the two hours shown last night were but a skimming of the hundreds of hours of footage shot by the production. Assuming the brand continues its juggernaut profitability (and hey, now that TV is all reality n’ reruns, what’s to stop it?), we may someday see an entire channel devoted to nothing but Idol. That said, it was with something of a pop-culture hangover that I awoke this morning and realized that tonight brings yet more auditions, this time from Dallas.

My wife and I will be right there/here, watching. Will you?

Cloverfield and the Mystery Box of Abrams’s Authorship

Posted on January 11, 2008 by Bob Rehak

I expected a little more from J. J. Abrams’s talk at TED.com. My first disappointment was in realizing that the presentation is almost a year old: he gave it in March 2007, and waiting till now to air it smacks of a publicity push for Cloverfield, the new monster movie produced by Abrams and directed by Matt Reeves, set for release one week from now (or as teaser images like the one above would have it — striving for 9/11-like gravitas — 1.18.08).

The second disappointment came from the disconnect between the content of the talk and the mental picture I’d formed based on the blurb:

There’s a moment in J.J. Abrams’ amazing new TEDTalk, on the mysteries of life and the mysteries of storytelling, where he makes a great point: Filmmaking as an art has become much more democratic in the past 10 years. Technology is letting more and more people tell their own stories, share their own mysteries. Abrams shows some examples of high-quality films made on home computers, and shares his love of the small, emotional moments inside even the biggest blockbusters.

Somehow I took these innocuous words as promise of some major revelation from Abrams, a writer-producer-director-showrunner on whose bandwagon I’ve been all to happy to hop. Alias was a great show for its first couple of seasons, Lost continues to be blissful mind candy, and I quite liked Mission Impossible III (though I seem to be one of the few who did). My reservations about Abrams’s Star Trek reboot aside, I’ll follow the man anywhere at this point. But I found his talk a frustrating ramble, full of half-told jokes and half-completed insights, shifting more or less randomly from his childhood love of magic tricks to the power of special effects to “do anything.” Along the way he shows a few movie clips, makes a lot of people laugh and applaud, essentially charming his way through a loosely-organized scramble of ideas that feel pulled from his back pocket.

More fool me for projecting so helplessly my own hunger for insider knowledge. What I wanted, I now realize, was stories about Cloverfield. Like many genre fans, I’m endlessly intrigued by the film, about which little is known except that little is known about it. The basic outline is clear enough: giant monster attacks New York City. What distinguishes Cloverfield from classic kaiju eiga like Toho’s Godzilla films — and this is what’s got interested parties both excited and dismayed — is the storytelling conceit: consisting entirely of “found footage,” Cloverfield shows the attack from ground level, in jumpy snatches of handheld shots supposedly retrieved from consumer video cameras and cell phones. Like The Blair Witch Project, which attempted to breathe new life into the horror genre by stripping it of its tried-and-true (and trite) conventions of narrative and cinematography, Cloverfield, for those who accept its experimental approach, may pack an exhilarating punch.

For those who don’t, however, the film will stand as merely the latest reiteration of the Emperor’s New Clothes, another media “product” failing to live up to its hype. And that’s what is ultimately so interesting about Abrams’s talk at TED: it embodies the very effect that Abrams is so good at injecting into the stories he oversees. In the manner of M. Night Shyamalan, who struggles ever more unconvincingly with each new film to brand himself a master of the twist surprise, Abrams’s authorship has become associated with a sense of unfolding mystery, enigmatic tapestries glimpsed one tantalizing thread at a time. One doesn’t watch a series like Lost so much as decipher it; the pleasure comes from a complex interplay of continuity and surprise, the marvelous sense of teetering eternally at the brink of chaos even as new symmetries and patterns become legible.

Abrams’s stories are like magic tricks, full of misdirection and sleight of hand. It drives some people crazy — they see it as nothing more than a shell game, and they ask, with some justification, when we’ll finally get to the truth, the Big Reveal. But as his talk at TED demonstrates, Abrams has always been more about the agile foreshadowing than the final result. It’s a style built paradoxically on the deferral, really the denial, of pleasure — a curious and almost masochistic structure of feeling in our pop culture of instant gratification.

Perhaps that’s where the TED talk’s value really resides. Gabbing about the “mystery box” — a metaphor promiscuously encompassing everything from a good suspense story to bargain-basement digital visual effects to the blank page awaiting an author’s pen — Abrams delivers no substantive content. But he does provide the promise of it: the sense that a breakthrough is just around the corner. It’s an authorial style suited to the rhythms and structure of serial television, which can give closure only through opening up new mysteries. Whether it will work within the bounded length of Cloverfield, that risky mystery box that will open for our inspection next Friday, remains to be seen.

Smut in 1080p

Posted on January 10, 2008 by Bob Rehak

This article on the porn industry’s response to the HD DVD / Blu-Ray format wars caught my eye, reminding me that changing technological standards are an equal-opportunity disrupter. It’s not only the big movie studios (like Warner Brothers, which made headlines last week by throwing its weight behind Blu-Ray) that must adapt to the sensory promise and commercial peril of HD, but porn providers, television networks, and videogame makers: up and down and all around the messy scape of contemporary media, its brightly-lit and family-friendly spaces as well as its more shadowy and stigmatized precincts.

The prospect of HD pornography is interesting, of course, because it’s such a natural evolution of this omnipresent yet disavowed form. The employment of media to stimulate, arouse, and drive to climax the apparatus of pleasure hard-wired into our brains and bodies is as old as, well, any medium you care to name. From painted scrolls to printed fiction, stag reels to feature films, comic books to KiSS dolls, porn has always been with us: the dirty little secret (dirty big secret, really, since very few are unaware of it) of a species whose unique co-evolution of optical acuity, symbolic play, and recording and playback instrumentalities has granted us the ability — the curse, some would say — to script and immerse ourselves in virtual realities on page and screen. That porn is now making the leap to a technology promising higher-fidelity imaging and increased storage capacity is hardly surprising.

The news also reminds us of the central, integral role of porn in the economic fortunes of a given medium. I remember discovering, as a teenager in the 1980s, that the mom-and-pop video stores springing up in my home town invariably contained a back room (often, for some reason, accessed through swinging wooden doors like those in an old-time saloon) of “adult” videocassettes. In the 1990s a friend of mine, manager of one of the chain video places that replaced the standalone stores, let me in on the fact that something like 60% of their revenues came from rentals of porn. The same “XXX factor” also structures the internet, providing a vastly profitable armature of explicit websites and chat rooms — to say nothing of the free and anonymous fora of newsgroups, imageboards, torrents, and file-sharing networks — atop which the allegedly dominant presence of Yahoo, Amazon, Google, etc. seem like a thin veneer of respectable masquerade, as flimsy a gateway as those swinging saloon doors.

The inevitable and ironic question facing HD porn is whether it will show too much, a worry deliciously summarized in the article’s mention of “concern about how much the camera would capture in high-definition.” The piece goes on to quote Albert Lazarito, vice president of Silver Sinema, as saying that “Imperfections are modified” by the format. (I suspect that Lazarito actually said, or meant, that imperfections are magnified.) The fact is that porn is frequently a grim, almost grisly, affair in its clinical precision. Unlike the soft-core content of what’s often labeled “erotica,” the blunt capture of sexual congress in porn tends to unfold in ghoulishly long takes, more akin to footage from a surveillance camera or weather satellite than the suturing, storytelling grammar of classical Hollywood. Traditional continuity editing is reserved for the talky interludes between sexual “numbers,” resulting in a binary structure something like the alternation of cut-scenes and interactive play in many videogames. (And here let’s not forget the words attributed to id Software’s John Carmack, Edison of the 3D graphics engine, that “Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie. It’s expected to be there, but it’s not that important.”)

As an industry that sometimes thrives on the paired physical and economic exploitation of its onscreen workers, porn imagery contains its share of bruises, needle marks, botched plastic surgeries, and poorly-concealed grimaces of boredom (at best) or pain (at worst). How will viewers respond to the pathos and suffering at the industry’s core — of capitalism’s antihumanism writ large across the bodies offered up for consumers’ pleasure-at-a-distance — when those excesses are rendered in resolutions of 1920×1080?

Top Ten

Posted on January 4, 2008 by Bob Rehak

The New York Times’s roundup of the top box-office earners from 2007 mentions something that I found interesting: with the exception of The Bourne Ultimatum, “nine of the Top 10 grossing films were science fiction, fantasy or animation.” Within that techno-generic triangulation, it’s not entirely clear where something like Zack Snyder and Frank Miller’s 300 (at #7) would fall; the film isn’t SF or fantasy – the Times labels it “mock-historical” – and its mise-en-scene is almost entirely digital, bringing 300 as close to animation as live action can become without imploding into absolute Pixarity. Below are the rankings; more thorough information can be found here.

Spider-Man 3: $336,530,303
Shrek the Third: $322,719,944
Transformers: $319,246,193
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End: $309,420,425
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: $292,004,738
The Bourne Ultimatum: $227,471,070
300: $210,614,939
I Am Legend: $209,506,903
Ratatouille: $206,445,654
The Simpsons Movie: $183,135,014

As a student and fan of special effects and new media, I’m struck by the completeness with which the top 10 encapsulate an evolving mode of high-tech production in serial media. While some might see as obvious the correlation of huge budgets, high-volume special and visual effects, and the SF/fantasy/animation triad, to me their confluence at this moment in history deserves some attention. A few observations:

Most of the movies on the list are of a type I’d call “culturally suspect”; even if releases like Ratatouille (#9) and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (#5) won praise from critics, the accolades often seemed qualified, even grudging; Ratatouille was not “just” a cute-animal movie, Order of the Phoenix was “comparatively dark and mature” for a film aimed at children. The air of disreputability echoes the low standing of science fiction and fantasy as genres, and of animation as a form. The films’ enormous profitability stands in striking contrast to their devalued cultural status.

Four of the movies were entries in a sequel chain, and one (Transformers, at #3) is, as the Times points out, a likely launchpad for a new franchise. I point this out not to repeat the lame lament that “no one makes original movies anymore,” but to highlight the degree to which serialization and adaptation are increasingly evident in LSMPs (Large-Scale Media Productions). There is enormous profit in transmedia systems.

A majority of the titles are marked by state-of-the-art visual effects; they are, in short, special-effects films. Again, the standard complaint here is that flashy FX are responsible for the metastasis of production and marketing budgets in recent decades or that FX have crowded out good storytelling; but I find those objections rather reactionary and pointless. It’s more interesting to consider how these megabudget productions serve as R&D labs for visual effects methodologies – here understood not simply in terms of resultant onscreen spectacles, but the whole offstage infrastructure of previsualization and pipelining that subtends and coordinates the production of those spectacles. I speculate that methods of manufacturing spectacle (and of faking less “marked” elements of filmic realism) trickle down from the megaproductions, becoming available to films that are smaller in scale and arguably more subtle and sophisticated in their employment of FX.

Movie-a-Day: September-October 2007

Posted on January 1, 2008 by Bob Rehak

It might seem odd to kick off the new year by looking back at last fall, but that’s the kind of guy I am: whether engaging in moody retrospection and fatuous nostalgia, I prefer to live in the past. Plus we’re talking about movies, which remain — at least until Sony releases its Tachyon-CCD FutureLook Imaging System — recordings of history, offering us hitchhikers a ride along a one-lane highway marked with a backwards-pointing time’s arrow.

In any case, my mission to watch a movie per day, which began midway through 2007 (prior lists here, here, and here), continued to unravel throughout a busy autumn. Teaching, writing, and moving into a new house took their predictable toll. Hence the 27 titles listed below, reflecting an increasingly desultory viewing practice, extend over two months, September and October. I cheated a bit by including movies I screened for my Intro to Film class — touchstones like Singin’ in the Rain and Psycho — as well as a number of films for my Animation and Cinema course, including Wizards, Perfect Blue, and Happy Feet. Anything I happened to grab at the video store is on the list, though I tended to watch these items with pen and paper determinedly not in hand; sometimes you just want to look, not think. That said, I was pleasantly surprised by at least one piece of recreational viewing, 28 Weeks Later, which kept me wide-awake and riveted to the screen after the endless bellowing blur of Transformers put me to sleep.

28 Weeks Later is marked with an asterisk, as is any film that made a powerful impression on me. The asterisk for The Blob, you might be interested to know, was almost entirely earned by Aneta Corsault, who occupies the girlfriend-of-hero structural position opposite Steve McQueen. One holdover from my misspent youth (there’s that preoccupation with the past again) is a tendency toward crushes on movie actresses; Corsault’s eyebrows alone ensnared me as irresistably as the glutinous alien invader of the title.

Movie-a-Day: September-October 2007

Assault on Precinct 13 (John Carpenter, 1976)
The Last Detail (Hal Ashby,1973)*
Monsoon Wedding (Mira Nair, 2002)
The Passenger (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1975)*
The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949)
Singin’ in the Rain (Stanley Donen & Gene Kelley, 1952)
Perfect Blue (Satoshi Kon, 1998)
Wizards (Ralph Bakshi, 1977)
Happy Feet (George Miller & Warren Coleman, 2006)
Death Race 2000 (Paul Bartel, 1975)
Mrs. Miniver (William Wyler, 1942)
New York, New York (Martin Scorsese, 1977)
Blackboard Jungle (Richard Brooks, 1955)*
Metropolis (Rintaro, 2002)
Hot Fuzz (Edgar Wright, 2007)
My Darling Clementine (John Ford, 1946)
Transformers (Michael Bay, 2007)
28 Weeks Later (Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, 2007)*
L’Avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960)
The Kid Stays in the Picture (Nanette Burstein & Brett Morgen, 2002)
Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (Alex Gibney, 2006)
Near Dark (Kathryn Bigelow, 1987)
A Letter to Three Wives (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1949)
The Blob (Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr., 1958)*
M*A*S*H (Robert Altman, 1970)*
The Darjeeling Limited (Wes Anderson, 2007)
Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)

Happy new year, everyone, and here’s to good watching in 2008!

Graphic Engine

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