Category Archives: Scribbles

Going mobile

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A few weeks ago, I had a conversation with the incomparable Henry Jenkins about the difficulty of knowing what media to bring when traveling, especially when one is cut off from the cloud. In my case, the cloud is local to my home — the wireless ecosystem that knits together the media content stored on several terabytes of external hard drives and my iPad, which is also, thanks to the Air Video app and an HDMI dongle, my flatscreen, high-def TV. For the next few days, while I’m in Michigan, I will be forced to function more or less nomadically, which means preloading content.

So here’s what I’m bringing with me: grading. Course prep for next week — two movies: Color Adjustment and Catfish, the former on DVD, the latter a digital file — and a PDF excerpt of Ken Hillis’s Online A Lot of the Time. The first season of Bob’s Burgers, also digital. The movie Valhalla Rising and two episodes of the BBC’s Sherlock. Two print books: Ina Rae Hark’s recent short monograph on Star Trek, and Matt Hills’s Triumph of a Time Lord, on Doctor Who.

Will I get through it all? Certainly not, especially given the family business I am on, which is likely to occupy most of my time. But in my traveling bubble of media, what Raymond Williams would call my mobile privatization, I want to preserve at least a trace of the freedom of choice my home hotspot would otherwise provide.

Precisely

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Excited to dig into The Values of Precision, edited by M. Norton Wise (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). Most of this collection from the history and philosophy of science delves into the development of precision measuring instruments in science and manufacturing from the late eighteenth century to the present, and I will admit that much of it has little to do with my current research interest in fantastic-media objects and 3D printing. But what does resonate is Wise’s observation, in his Introduction, that precision and accuracy are critical pieces of standardization, or in Wise’s words, “establishing uniformity by agreement” (9).

Problems of establishing precision thereby become simultaneously questions of establishing agreement among a community. Precision requires standardization. (8)

I’ve been thinking about standardization in relation not just to the fantastic-media object’s shape (its resemblance to an ideal, a fictional entity given visual form in film, television, comics, or gaming) but its scale, a quality that becomes important when we think of these objects are part of a set, array, or collection. Particularly important to fantasy wargaming, the scale of the fantastic-media object dictates the mise-en-scene of battle, those tabletop spaces on which metal and plastic armies arrange themselves in tactical orientation to one another. The history of organized wargaming is in large part a history of the standardization of scales for fighting figurines, and these shared scalar qualities are even more important for fantasy wargaming, the dimensions of whose objects (dragons, cyborgs, superheroes, and so on) can be stabilized only through the establishment of conventions and product lines to feed them.

Monday

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Nearing the end of today’s work bubble: a precious afternoon spent in the warm womb of my office, getting stuff done. Since becoming a father some seven months ago, work has inverted its affective sign: formerly the thing I dreaded doing, I now rush to it, motivated both by the promise of uninterrupted hours and by the knowledge that, when I’ve finished for the day, I can go home to Zach and just be with him. Parenthood has forced compartmentalization on me, and I like the new boundaries in my life.

What I’ve done today: a smattering of course prep. This week in TV & New Media the topic is “Spaces and Screens,” and we’re reading a chapter from Newman and Levine’s Legitimizing Television; Daniel Chamberlin’s “Media Interfaces, Networked Media Spaces, and the Mass Customization of Everyday Life” from the FlowTV collection; and William Boddy’s “Is It TV Yet? The Dislocated Screens of Television in a Mobile Digital Culture,” from Bennett and Strange’s Television as Digital Media. A solid collection of essays that surprised me with their focus on the industrial side of things rather than the user/viewer’s experience of small screens; together the pieces paint a picture of media corporations in unpleasant throes of transformation, writhing in survival agonies like mammoths stuck in La Brea tar.

Although we haven’t spend a lot of time looking at advertising, based on prior conversations with the students, I suspect I know which way their reactions will go — they’ll be horrified at the predatory practices outlined in Boddy’s essay especially, which charts a range of obnoxious strategies for putting ads — the more customized and first-personal the better — in front of people at grocery stores, bus depots, medical waiting rooms, and gas stations. This morning I was assaulted by a gas station monitor blaring Chase Freedom commercials at me as I stood in the chill wind. Pinned between the car and the gas pump, I felt like an idling, pinging machine myself, a tank getting topped off with messages I didn’t ask for.

Copyright on the Fabrication Frontier

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This post from the New York Times Bits blog is one of the first I’ve seen to address the problems — and opportunities — likely to be created by personal-fabrication technology, aka 3D printing, when it encounters copyright law designed for an earlier era. As Nick Bilton points out, having a box on your desktop that manufactures solid objects from data files opens the door to the physical reproduction not just of objects you have designed yourself, but objects that already exist:

Not only will it change the nature of manufacturing, but it will further challenge our concept of ownership and copyright. Suppose you covet a lovely new mug at a friend’s house. So you snap a few pictures of it. Software renders those photos into designs that you use to print copies of the mug on your home 3-D printer. Did you break the law by doing this? You might think so, but surprisingly, you didn’t.

Bilton goes on to explain that while copyright law protects one kind of object — the aesthetic — from being replicated without permission of the owner, another class of item — the utilitarian — is fair game. “If an object is purely aesthetic it will be protected by copyright, but if the object does something, it is not the kind of thing that can be protected,” Bilton quotes attorney Michael Weinberg as saying. The logic goes something like this: if you could conceivably have made your own version of the mug in, say, a pottery class, it wouldn’t be illegal; so employing a hardware intermediary to accomplish the same goal is similarly allowed.

The apparently tidy distinction between the artful and the useful suggests that there is more at stake here than simply case law and precedent, the glacial patching of traditional legislation to apply to nontraditional processes and products. (Lawrence Lessig’s remix culture might here be understood as replication culture.) In addition to foregrounding the question of how we name and assign value to the things around us, personal fabrication foregrounds new kinds of objects that fall somewhere between the pretty and the practical, neither toy nor tool but something in between, with branded identities and iconographic affordances that make them the powerful focus of manufacturing and collecting, as well as performative and procedural, activity both at the subcultural and “supercultural” level.

I’ve been interested in 3D printing since 2007, when I came across Neil Gershenfeld’s book Fab: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop. (Gershenfeld is the director of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms and perhaps the key proselytizer of what the Times has labeled the Industrial Revolution 2.0.) For me, as a theorist and fan of popular culture and fantastic media franchises in particular, the profound shakeup promised by 3D printing is less about designing new kinds of widgets or copying existing ones than about the way that fantasy-media objects and the practices around them will be reshaped. Spaceship models, superhero collectible busts, even fantasy-wargaming miniatures — the colorful statuary on display in any comic-book store, materialized forms of what otherwise exists only on paper — will inevitably find their place within the personal-fabrication movement. Most of these objects are licensed, of course, and provided by artists under contract with companies like Sideshow Collectibles and McFarlane Toys. But to adapt the question that Bilton poses, what will happen when I can snap several photos of a friend’s Green Lantern maquette or Warhammer 40K mini, stitch them together on my iPhone (you can bet there’ll be an app for that), send the resulting shape file to my 3D printer, and produce my own instance?

Surely then the intellectual-property hammer will come down — under current codes, there’s no way to justify a Captain Kirk figurine or the Doctor’s Sonic Screwdriver as a practical rather than an aesthetic object — and we’ll witness not the elimination of unlicensed fantasy-media objects, but their migration to the anarchic wilds of piracy, newsgroups, and torrents, just as current “flat” media content like television, movies, and ebooks circulate free for the taking. To date I’ve found little discussion of the role of such objects and their probable audiences, i.e. tech-savvy scofflaws, in the 3D printing literature, which focuses instead on the rapid-prototyping function of these emerging technologies: testing out new inventions or generating workaday things like flashlights and doorknobs. But it’s precisely this dividing line, between the things we use and the things we enjoy because they connect us to vast transmedia entertainment systems, that will dictate 3D printing’s future as the commercial and cultural juggernaut I suspect it will be.

What All the Foss Is About

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Here’s a smart writeup on a new book collecting the artwork of Chris Foss, the distinctive and influential British artist whose paintings have graced the cover of many a science-fiction novel while circulating independently as quanta of outré visualization on their own. Growing up in the 1970s, I was aware of Foss more through the latter channel: glimpses of futurism in the pages of magazines like Omni and Starlog, often accompanying features on computer games (whose simple 8-bit graphics expanded logarithmically in my imagination thanks to their association with Foss’s billowing, rainbowed vistas and sensuously rounded mechanisma) or SF films then in production: Foss was one of the many artists conscripted to visualize Ridley Scott’s 1979 landmark Alien.

Among the same cohort was Ron Cobb, who, like Foss and the great but neglected John Harris, had a knack for visualizing structures of indeterminate purpose and scale, suspended against the clouds of alien worlds, the neon gasfields of nebulae, the onyx depths of outer space. Simultaneously conveying gigantic mass — humans merely implied as unobservable specks — and toylike containment within the filmed frame or printed page, the future machines envisioned by Foss and his peers were both fanciful and functional. Or as Simon Gallagher elegantly puts it:

Foss’s work is defined by that jarring oxymoron: his iconic spaceships are almost biological, and certainly monstrous, and yet, unlike anything that came before them, they are intricate in their mechanical realism. They are the convergence of fantasy and precision, and there is a fundamental contradiction within the designs that suggests both a hopeful futurism and an ominous sense of dread in the sheer size and scale of the machine monsters he creates.

The new Foss book joins a growing section of my shelf devoted to SF illustration as a form of production technology, assisting the transmedial flow of content, bridging the gaps between screenplays and feature films, design docs and finished video games, word and image and object.

Ron Cobb: Initial Thoughts

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A spontaneous enthusiasm, eruption of unvoiced nerd-love that has been simmering in my soul since I was twelve or thirteen, prompts this quick reflection on Ron Cobb. As an artist, Cobb contributed plentifully to how I understood and visualized the science fiction with which I grew up; as a concept artist specifically his drawings and paintings played a generative role in films like Star Wars (1977) and Alien (1979) — movies we now recognize as classics in part because of their rich, world-creating visual design.

To judge from the catalog of his work featured in Colorvision (1981), Cobb’s influence on the production of these films appears to have been both piecemeal and foundational: a handful of his bizarre creatures populate the Mos Eisley cantina, and his designs for Alien were limited to the interior and exterior of the Nostromo, with H. R. Giger’s biomechanics providing the movie’s black and glistening core. But in another way, Cobb’s work reflects an animating spirit of cinematic science fiction in the 1970s, which increasingly in the wake of Star Trek (1966-1969) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) demanded an engineer’s and architect’s eye to lend their futuristic worlds the fascination of function.

I’ve been studying concept artists like Cobb — Brian Froud is a cognate, as are Syd Mead and in a previous age Chesley Bonestell — as part of a broader research project on illustration. I hope to have more to say about this shortly, but for now I will simply note the archeological pleasure of paging through Cobb’s designs (like the one above, “Tug,” an early version of Alien‘s Nostromo) to find, not the final object as recorded on film, but — like the panda’s thumb — an evolutionary step toward it. The special property of cinematic concept art is not just that it exists prior to the film we later come to know, but that it serves as a “draft,” freezing for our later study a dialogue among director, crew, consultants as they move toward consensus. Cobb’s visualization does not just visualize an artifact of production; it is such an artifact, and as such it offers us, alongside the creation of a beloved film, the genesis of our own imaginary.

More on Cobb and the Nostromo here.

What is … Watson?

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We have always loved making our computers perform. I don’t say “machines” — brute mechanization is too broad a category, our history with industrialization too long (and full of skeletons). Too many technological agents reside below the threshold of our consciousness: the dumb yet surgically precise robots of the assembly line, the scrolling tarmac of the grocery-store checkout counter that delivers our purchases to another unnoticed workhorse, the cash register. The comfortable trance of capitalism depends on labor’s invisibility, and if social protocols command the human beings on either side of transactions to at least minimally acknowledge each other — in polite quanta of eye contact, murmured pleasantries — we face no such obligation with the machines to whom we have delegated so much of the work of maintaining this modern age.

But computers have always been stars, and we their anxious stage parents. In 1961 an IBM 704 was taught to sing “Daisy Bell” (inspiring a surreal passage during HAL’s death scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey), and in 1975 Steve Dompier made his hand-built Altair 8800 do the same, buzzing tunes through a radio speaker at a meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club, an early collective of personal-computing enthusiasts. I was neither old enough nor skilled enough to take part in that initial storm surge of the microcomputer movement, but like many born in the late 1960s, was perfectly poised to catch the waves that crashed through our lives in the late 70s and early 80s: the TRS-80, Apple II, and Commodore PET; video arcades; consoles and cartridges for playing at home, hooked to the TV in a primitive convergence between established and emerging technologies, conjoined by their to-be-looked-at-ness.

Arcade cabinets are meant to be clustered around, joysticks passed around an appreciative couchbound audience. Videogames of any era show off the computer’s properties and power, brightly blipping messages whose content, reversing McLuhan, is new media, presenting an irresistible call both spectacular and interactive to any nerds within sensory range. MIT’s Spacewar worked both as game and graphics demo, proof of what the state of the art in 1962 could do: fifty years later, the flatscreens of Best Buy are wired to Wiis and PlayStation 3s, beckoning consumers in endless come-on (which might be one reason why the games in so many franchises have become advertisements for themselves).

But the popular allure of computers isn’t only in their graphics and zing. We desire from them not just explorable digital worlds but minds and souls themselves: another sentient presence here on earth, observing, asking questions, offering commentary. We want, in short, company.

Watson, the IBM artifact currently competing against champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter on Jeopardy, is the latest digital ingenue to be prodded into the spotlight by its earnest creators (a group that in reaction shots of the audience appears diverse, but whose public face in B-roll filler sums to the predictable type: white, bespectacled, bearded, male). Positioned between Jennings and Rutter, Watson is a black slab adorned with a cheerful logo, er, avatar, conveying through chance or design an uneasy blend of 2001‘s monolith and an iPad. In a nearby non-space hums the UNIVAC-recalling bulk of his actual corpus, affixed to a pushbutton whose humble solenoid — to ring in for answers — is both a cute nod to our own evolution-designed hardware and a sad reminder that we still need to even the playing field when fighting Frankenstein’s Monster.

There are two important things about Watson, and despite the technical clarifications provided by the informational segments that periodically and annoyingly interrupt the contest’s flow, I find it almost impossible to separate them in my mind. Watson knows a lot; and Watson talks. Yeats asked, “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” Watson makes me wonder how much of the Turing Test can be passed by a well-designed interface, like a good-looking kid in high school charming teachers into raising his grades. Certainly, it is easy to invest the AI with a basic identity and emotional range based on his voice, whose phonemes are supplied by audiobook narrator Jeff Woodman but whose particular, peculiar rhythms and mispronunciations — the foreign accent of speech synthesis, as quaint as my father’s Czech-inflected English — are the quirky epiphenomena of vast algorithmic contortions.

Another factor in the folksiness of Watson is that he sounds like a typical Jeopardy contestant — chirpy, nervous, a little full of himself — and so highlights the vaguely androidish quality of the human players. IBM has not just built a brain in a box; they’ve built a contestant on a TV game show, and it was an act of genius to embed this odd cybernetic celebrity, half quick-change artist, half data-mining savant, in the parasocial matrix of Alex Trebek and his chronotypic stage set: a reality already half-virtual. Though I doubt the marketing forces at IBM worried much about doomsday fears of runaway AIs, the most remarkable thing about Watson may be how benign he seems: an expert, and expertly unthreatening, system. (In this respect, it’s significant that the computer was named not for the brilliant and erratic Sherlock Holmes, but his perpetually one-step-behind assistant.)

Before the competition started, I hadn’t thought much about natural-language processing and its relationship to the strange syntactic microgenre that is the Jeopardy question. But as I watched Watson do his weird thing, mixing moronic stumbles with driving sprints of unstoppable accuracy, tears welled in my eyes at the beautiful simplicity of the breakthrough. Not, of course, the engineering part — which would take me several more Ph.D.s (and a whole lotta B-roll) to understand — but the idea of turning Watson into one of TV’s limited social beings, a plausible participant in established telerituals, an interlocutor I could imagine as a guest on Letterman, a relay in the quick-moving call-and-response of the one quiz show that has come to define, for a mass audience, high-level cognition, constituted through a discourse of cocky yet self-effacing brilliance.

Our vantage point on Watson’s problem-solving process (a window of text showing his top three answers and level of confidence in each) deromanticizes his abilities somewhat: he can seem less like a thinking agent than an overgrown search engine, a better-behaved version of those braying “search overload” victims in the very obnoxious Bing ads. (Tip to Microsoft: stop selling your products by reminding us how much it is possible to hate them.) But maybe that’s all we are, in the end: social interfaces to our own stores of internal information and experience, talkative filters customized over time (by constant interaction with other filters) to mistake ourselves for ensouled humans.

At the end of the first game on Tuesday night, Watson was ahead by a mile. We’ll see how he does in the concluding round tonight. For the life of me, I can’t say whether I want him to win or to lose.

Oscar Notes 2011: Black Swan

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This week, busy with a writing project, I barely poked my head from the Man Cave except to eat, sleep, or watch iCarly; into the confines of my cocoon the massive changes taking place in the world were filtered to a distant rumble, tremulous but implacable. Today, deadline met, I emerged to find a peoples’ revolution in Cairo, the protesters’ din of dissatisfaction turned to cheers. I am pleased by this apparent triumph of the democratic spirit, as well as by a victory for more peaceful, if passionate, tactics of overthrow. (I am, after all, half-Czech.) But something limits my happiness. I have learned to be cautious of my attraction to feel-good narratives in fiction, which, finding its unhealthy ally in the spin mechanisms of news and politics, makes me susceptible to feel-good metanarratives. Would that I find in myself an iota of the Egyptians’ courage and faith!

Also delayed by the week’s work: the next in my series of notes on this year’s Best Picture nominees. Beware of spoilers; other posts can be found here.

Black Swan

Natalie Portman is surrounded by a powerful force field of genre that clouds my mind, the result of her early starring role in Luc Besson’s gold-tinged fairy tale of a father-assassin, Leon: The Professional (1994) and — crucially — playing Padmé Amidala in the three Star Wars prequels (1999-2005). There in his mad but pedestrian fantasies George Lucas doomed Portman to the same plasticification he inflicted on Ewan McGregor, as though the director were showing off his ability to convert vital young actors into synthespians avant la lettre. Apart from these two mythically-overdetermined roles, Portman hasn’t really jumped out at me; certainly I wasn’t prepared for the vicious, wincing beauty of her performance in Black Swan.

Darren Aronofsky I also find something of an indirect object. His first film, Pi (1998), seemed almost untoppable in its perfection: minimal yet cosmic in the manner of the Twilight Zone and Outer Limits episodes that supplied its black-and-white grain and shoestring-budget nerd-horror. But we went our separate ways with the assaultive Requiem for A Dream (2000), whose blunt moralizing coarsened and corrupted the elan of its editing and cinematography. No fan of being brutalized, I ignored The Fountain (2006) and suspected The Wrestler‘s (2008) self-effacing warmth was just a tactic to get close enough to hurt me again.

Black Swan doesn’t need to line up neatly on some chart of my fears and fixations, of course; it’s allowed to be what it is, an exercise in style as broad as Sirk in its swoony melodrama and as slender as a surgical needle in its excitation of our nerves. Maybe the reason I want to graph it is because it so unerringly pinpoints a certain set of cinematic intersections — Alfred Hitchcock, Dario Argento, Brian DePalma, with a sprinkling of David Cronenberg and a side of Fritz Lang — pinning Portman to their nexus like a butterfly. It could be the most misogynistic film since True Lies (1994), that insufferably jovial Abu Ghraib of an action movie, but like James Cameron, Aronofsky has a way of turning the suffering of his women inside out, building up their vulnerability only to reverse it into (often deadly) toughness: female body become Swiss Army knife.

The movie’s narrative of possession — as in being possessed — encourages us to cheer for Portman’s character, Nina, even as she devolves into an ever more unhinged and unsettling state; she’s more than a little like Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion (Roman Polanski, 1965). Is Black Swan simply another story about a beautiful monster, whom we pity even as we recoil from her? By the film’s very design, it’s impossible to say: the closing moments made me laugh like I was finally getting a joke, but as in The Game (David Fincher, 1997), I couldn’t tell you what the punchline meant.

Oscar Notes 2011: 127 Hours

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More thoughts on this year’s Best Picture nominees. I’m writing with the assumption that readers have seen the films in question, so please beware of spoilers. Other posts in the series can be found here.

127 Hours

If The King’s Speech is a castration run in reverse — the restoration of potency after a lifelong absence — 127 Hours offers up this most basic of phallic dramas in its correct, fated order: a gathering dread that culminates in a foundational wounding. (As in most psychodynamics, of course, time’s arrow is rarely straightforward: castration, like the primal scene, can only ever be retroactively experienced, trauma reconstructed in phantasy.) Knowledge of what is to come colors the entire film; the self-amputation performed by Aron Ralston (James Franco) awaits us at the end of the narrative like Shelob in her lair, and the sunny boisterousness of the rest of the movie (at least as it’s been shot and edited) seems like a long innoculation against those inevitable minutes of agony.

And what beautifully rendered agony it is! Movies are getting good at this lately — the stimulation of our pain centers via optical and audio channels, torture at a distance. (I blame, and thank, pornography.) The Passion of the Christ (Mel Gibson, 2004) still holds the record for the most lovingly conceptualized and rhapsodically paced destruction of an onscreen body, a four-course feast of suffering served up in more efficient form by the Saw franchise (2003-present) with the reliable abundance of fast-food burgers sliding down their stainless-steel troughs. Japanese guinea-pig films worked out much of the cinematic algebra involved, but it is in the French “new extreme” movement, specifically À l’intérieur (Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo, 2007) and Martyrs (Pascal Laugier, 2008), that we find this movie’s closest conceptual cousins, exploring the ways in which the visitation of unspeakable violence upon an avatarial stand-in for the spectator results in a kind of mutual apotheosis. As Aron, starved, dehydrated, and bleeding, stumbles out of his death trap, so we leave the theater cleansed, reborn. Having seen ourselves torn apart in the mirror of the movie, we appreciate anew the intactness of our limbs.

Being antisocial myself, I resent the way in which Ralston’s trials have been framed as a kind of punitive purgatorial isolation — the price of his disconnection from society. Ten years after 9/11, apparently, it’s become a bad thing to be a hero (the term used more than once not to praise but to chastise the self-sufficient outdoorsman), and the paneled montages of bustling crowds that open and close the movie read not as condemnations but celebrations of what I can only, in my own grumpy solitude, label herd security: endorsement of the arrival-gate fuzzies of Love Actually (Richard Curtis, 2003) over the misanthropic kaleidoscope of Koyaanisqatsi (Godfrey Reggio, 1982).

I have come to expect surprises from Danny Boyle, which when you think about it is a bit of a paradox. It’s the same way I feel about Quentin Tarantino and the Coen Brothers — the sense that they are minting, with each new film, fresh and highly-specific genres — though Boyle tends to work territory for which I’m more of a sucker, like 28 Days Later (2002) and Sunshine (2007), the latter being one of the most sublimely gorgeous science-fiction films ever made, exceptforitslastthirdwhichsucks. Boyle is showy in all the right ways, setting himself crazy storytelling challenges and then using style to sucker-punch them into submission. But his game in 127 Hours might finally be too similar to that of his previous film, Slumdog Millionaire (2008), another passion play about a young man in mortal danger whose backstory is parceled out in advent-calendar glimpses.

As for James Franco: as far as I’m concerned, this and Freaks and Geeks (1999) more than make up for his turn in the Spider-Man films.

Oscar Notes 2011: The King’s Speech

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Over the past week I’ve been doing my homework for the Academy Awards, working my way through the Best Picture nominees. I have enough old-school lead in my shoes to still drag my feet when it comes to the list’s expansion to ten titles: since 2009, the lineup has seemed a little less … elite. On the other hand, I’m new-school enough to recognize that, in this context, “elite” is just another word for “canon fodder,” and if there’s more room in the pool, the diversity of our celebrated archives can only increase. (Unless we adopt the cynical view that it’s all the same brand of sausage, in which case, I suggest skipping the media middleman and just eating some sausage.) With this round of nominations, at least, I savored the grab-bag effect, the ten films up for Best Picture a satisfyingly strange mixture of tastes. Leading up to the Oscars, I will post some quick thoughts on the nominees.

The King’s Speech

On Facebook I called this film “Lacanian,” triggering a long chain of comments — proof less of my throwaway profundity, I know, than of the internet’s global function as a text generator, an explosive growth medium for words compared to which the linkless and un-live petri dish of the prior epoch, Gutenberg’s, now looks a limited arena indeed. (Funny, just a few decades ago it seemed the size of the universe.) As a friend pointed out recently on this very blog, the invocation of Lacan is itself another kind of lexical kudzu, and even if you threatened me with captation, I couldn’t name a specific teaching of the Master’s that applies to The King’s Speech.

Yet a Lacanian thing it remains, and here is why: it is explicit, clinical, and unsparing in its knotting of language, (royal) authority, and fathers – its title in French could be Nom du pere. Watching Colin Firth struggle, strangle, to find his voice, one is reminded that whether or not the subaltern speaks, “superaltern” status is determined first by the seizing of language. The triumphant surge of jouissance generated by the new King’s successful navigation of his radio address has a phallic rush to it — the story is a castration in reverse — but it is a tragic trap George VI finds himself in at the end, subject of a discourse inherited from his father as surely as the British are subjects of him.

Having watched a few episodes of the HBO miniseries John Adams directed by Tom Hooper, I notice the director has a characteristic way of shooting dialogue: shot-reverse-shot constructions in which the interlocutors’ heads are positioned to far right and left of their respective frames, so that if you superimposed them you would get a two-shot. Edited together, the sequences have a lovely rhythm, the back-and-forth of the conversation built on a seesawing center of visual gravity. With Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush playing two halves of what is essentially a single, sundered subjectivity, the effect is as though Bergman’s Persona had been recast with men, its splitscreen compositions opened out in time.

It would make a great screening for a course on new media — especially one whose syllabus takes seriously the axiom that all media are new in the time of their introduction. Fascinated to an almost Cronenbergian degree by the alien apparatus of the microphone and radio dial, The King’s Speech flirts with science-fictional status in its dissection of the transformative cultural and political impact of emergent information technologies and the social protocols in which they are swaddled. Like Gunga Din (George Stevens, 1939), whose plot is set in motion by the disruption and repair of a telegraph line in India through which colonial British messages travel, The King’s Speech understands that power and communication find their inextricable nexus in the media machines that distribute that other machine, language.