Naoki Urasawa's manga "Monster," the source of that "The Monster with No Name" short we watched earlier this year, deals with trauma left by the divided and reunified Germany in a way which is relevant to our discussion of "Goodbye Lenin!" Having finally finished the 74-episode anime series based on the manga, I think I can talk a little bit more about what lessons "The Monster with No Name" imparts as a fable invented for Urasawa's story. I will try and be concise.
"Monster" takes place over the course of a decade, straddling 1989 on both sides. The main narrative follows a young Japanese brain surgeon living in Munich. He saves the life of a 10 year old boy (Johan) who has been shot in the head. His twin sister, Anna, is in a state of shock. Johan disappears from the hospital and Anna is placed into the care of a kind West German family, where she assumes a different name. Johan resurfaces a decade later as a sociopath and murderer who becomes a doppelganger of sorts for the good-hearted Japanese surgeon.
We find out that Johan and Anna were the children of a Czech prostitute who, before fleeing to West Germany, were placed into a series of orphanages designed to brainwash the children into soldiers. Anna suffered at the hands of a particularly traumatic experiment (long-term solitary confinement). She tells Johan of the experience, which the brother assumes (and consumes, connecting back to the fairy tale), transforming it into his own memory and his own impetus for murder. Anna suppresses the memory, fooling herself into thinking that it was actually Johan who was the subject of that experiment. As an adult, Johan plays with his own identity quite a bit, assuming different names, personalities and, at one point, even dressing as his sister. The lines from the fairy tale, "Look at me! Look at how big this monster inside me has become!" become a motif for Johan and eventually come to stand for the idea that the evil inside him was planted by his experiences with Urasawa's interesting vision of Communist mad science. His identity is constructed by his experiences with a particularly cinematic (and Western) vision of the Eastern Bloc. The monster inside of him finds an identity, the kind young boy Johan, and coexists with the boy until consuming his personality from the inside out. Anna--the monster who eventually goes West in the fairy tale--also has her identity consumed by Johan as a means to identify himself with a particularly traumatic event as justification for his murderous tendencies.
"Monster" is particularly engaging because it was written by a Japanese author from an outsiders perspective. The story deals with numerous themes beyond the East-West identity crisis, including the lingering remnants of Nazism and how they impact Germany's large Turkish population. The hero, a Japanese immigrant, factors into these issues as well. How well Urasawa examines these issues would be an interesting research topic for someone who knows a lot more about German history than me.
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Communist Nostalgia in China
After watching Goodbye Lenin, I cannot help but compare the nostalgia to Chinese's long established sentiments to Chairman Mao Zedong. Although China has evolved from a communist country to more of a socialist (or even some cities or provinces, capitalist - even though they won't admit it), Chairman Mao's status in the nation has never seized to be less important in the modern society. In fact, several studies have found that as People Republic of China goes through global crisis, Chinese turn to develop a sense of nostalgia towards Mao. A sign that shows this nostalgic comeback is Mao's Little Red Book. While this was a must-have item among youth during Mao's Cultural Revolution, the book was later on considered a touchy topic as Mao and his revolution died. But in recent years, Little Red Book has gained popularity, that it was widely published and translated into different languages, readily available to people from all over the world (in fact I bought one from a street vendor for 50 cents several years ago).
To reference from Jonathan Bach's article "The Taste Remains," there is a certain degree of nostalgia as style in the national (or sometimes even global) sentiment over communist China. Mao's images and ideologies are frequently used as tools to market and advertise products in modern world. In the West, we have Andy Warhol's famous painting "Mao" printed on t-shirts and posters. In China, people compare President Obama to Mao Zedong, making products that uses Mao's signature punch line and resembles the artistic style of Mao's era.
I just find it really interesting that Chinese government has relaxed its attitude towards their founding history by actually allowing people to make money off of the association between Mao and the ultimate capitalist icon - the American president! The MAObama phenomenon is certainly something very captivating to me. Yet I find similarities between the rise of communist nostalgia in Germany and that in China. There is, indeed, a sense of disorientation as both countries move towards the Western ideologies, thus there is also a sense of longing for "intangible material world across the border." Perhaps an interview with a student from an university in China best describes why they develop a desire towards Mao's sentiments while we move towards a more modern China:
To reference from Jonathan Bach's article "The Taste Remains," there is a certain degree of nostalgia as style in the national (or sometimes even global) sentiment over communist China. Mao's images and ideologies are frequently used as tools to market and advertise products in modern world. In the West, we have Andy Warhol's famous painting "Mao" printed on t-shirts and posters. In China, people compare President Obama to Mao Zedong, making products that uses Mao's signature punch line and resembles the artistic style of Mao's era.
I just find it really interesting that Chinese government has relaxed its attitude towards their founding history by actually allowing people to make money off of the association between Mao and the ultimate capitalist icon - the American president! The MAObama phenomenon is certainly something very captivating to me. Yet I find similarities between the rise of communist nostalgia in Germany and that in China. There is, indeed, a sense of disorientation as both countries move towards the Western ideologies, thus there is also a sense of longing for "intangible material world across the border." Perhaps an interview with a student from an university in China best describes why they develop a desire towards Mao's sentiments while we move towards a more modern China:"I have spent so much money in going to university to study," 22-year-old student Yang Lu was quoted as saying on the France24 report. "I will graduate next June, but I don't know if I will be able to find work. In this kind of situation, how could we not feel nostalgic for the Mao era, when all students were guaranteed work?"It is debatable whether or not Communism has helped the development of the Republic of China in early years. But the nostalgia towards communist China has certainly shown that, even though communism is close to being collapse in China, it still represents an Utopia that envisions a collective dream among Chinese working class.
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
A German Orientalism
"This sudden switch in the perception of western goods from real to fake is partially a result of eastern Germans behaving too much like the ideal consumer. They fell for advertisements and felt at once betrayed and wiser as they came to understand that guile is part of advertising. But of course the whole idea of packaging is motivated by the supposition of consumer gullibility. In the West consumers hover between giving into the seduction of commercials and an awareness that the inside of the package never looks like the picture on the cover. East Germans, however, had to undergo a certain learning process in order to acquire the necessary “cultural fluency,” as Berdahl (1999: 137) felicitously phrases it, in their practices of consumption."
-Jonathan Bach, “ ‘The Taste Remains’: Consumption, (N)ostalgia, and the Production of East Germany,” 252
Does this strike anyone else as naively condescending? It’s not as though East Germans lived in a world completely void of consumption, or even of selling. Certainly there was a different mode of consumption that they were apprehending, and certainly this required adjustment, but this passage talks about East Germans like ignorant savages being introduced to civilization for the first time. Or, alternatively, it casts them as children who have not yet learned the harsh realities of the world. In both cases, there is an assumption that East Germans are incapable of rhetorical or figurative interpretation – they can only think concretely (a product will look exactly how it does in the advertisement…when a commercial claims a product is the best in the world, it really will be the best in the world, etc.). This is a fundamentally infantilizing, and, frankly, exoticizing assumption. It’s nearly colonialist (even if we could say that the unification of Germany actually amounted to a certain kind of colonialism). Those silly East Germans! They’ve just now learned how to wear clothes and use forks! Good thing we were here to teach them how to be civilized, because the poor buggers just didn’t know any better!
This position can be echoed in the obsession of many West Germans (the “Wossis”) with the “authenticity” and “nostalgia” of East German products. Is this very far off from the characters in Turistas who are looking for the “authentic” experience (a desire that is ultimately cast as condescending, colonialist, exoticizing, and oppressive)? Is this very far off from the American obsession with “authentically” ethnic restaurants, or “authentically” crude art and souvenirs? In this context, “authentic” means aboriginal, old fashioned, kept comfortably in a manageable past – delightfully anti-modern, anti-progressive.
sorry, more fandom stuff
I'm sort of going to travel back to last week and the week on fandom and write down some things I forgot to because I think there are some similarities between fandom in anime/manga and consuming places. Specifically when Jenkins outlines some criticisms people have made of anime fans ie: Asiaphilia where people fetishize Asian products. And as this relates to tourism:
If you go to the Akihabara district of Tokyo (essentially, the center of otaku) you can get taken on a tour by a "guidol," Japanese girls in cosplay. Or if you want, by:
a guy from Alaska dressed up as Goku. Patrick Galbraith (the guy in the picture) serves as a spectacle to both Tokyo inhabitants and tourists.
Akihabara is a major shopping center for electronics, computers, video games and anime/otaku goods that sort of boomed in the 1990's when the anime craze took off. It's a haven for otaku's who are generally frowned upon in Japan. This in part has led to Japan's tourist campaign (which is government affiliated) that has been trying to change the image of Akihabara away from the otkau image but has largely failed.
The popularity of the aforementioned tours and Akihabara itself depends on the fetishization of Japanese pop culture. Depending on your point of view, this could be a good or bad thing. Are Akihabara and people like Patrick Galbraith detrimental to Japanese culture? Tourists will go from experiencing a Japanese tea ceremony to the weirdness that is Akihabara. In my mind, going to a tea ceremony is about as culturally significant to a tourist as the International Day at an elementary school is to a third grader. But the impression I get from criticism of Akihabara is that it is sort of a patronizing practice, for a tourist to go visit Akihabara and look at the cosplay cafes and the hypersexualized images of cartoon girls or as a tour guide (ie: Galbraith) take advantage of the perception of this culture being "weird." Although not as extreme as the sort of exploitation that was talked about in the Jamaica excerpts, but there are definitely Japanese who are embarrassed/annoyed with tourists coming to visit this place and in a sense suffer because of how their culture is then perceived (but that may be too much...)
Anyways, I think this is sort of interesting because there are definitely Japanese people who participate in otaku culture and Americans who love manga/anime and the weirdness of Japanese pop culture, but would not see this interest as patronizing.
If you go to the Akihabara district of Tokyo (essentially, the center of otaku) you can get taken on a tour by a "guidol," Japanese girls in cosplay. Or if you want, by:
a guy from Alaska dressed up as Goku. Patrick Galbraith (the guy in the picture) serves as a spectacle to both Tokyo inhabitants and tourists. Akihabara is a major shopping center for electronics, computers, video games and anime/otaku goods that sort of boomed in the 1990's when the anime craze took off. It's a haven for otaku's who are generally frowned upon in Japan. This in part has led to Japan's tourist campaign (which is government affiliated) that has been trying to change the image of Akihabara away from the otkau image but has largely failed.
The popularity of the aforementioned tours and Akihabara itself depends on the fetishization of Japanese pop culture. Depending on your point of view, this could be a good or bad thing. Are Akihabara and people like Patrick Galbraith detrimental to Japanese culture? Tourists will go from experiencing a Japanese tea ceremony to the weirdness that is Akihabara. In my mind, going to a tea ceremony is about as culturally significant to a tourist as the International Day at an elementary school is to a third grader. But the impression I get from criticism of Akihabara is that it is sort of a patronizing practice, for a tourist to go visit Akihabara and look at the cosplay cafes and the hypersexualized images of cartoon girls or as a tour guide (ie: Galbraith) take advantage of the perception of this culture being "weird." Although not as extreme as the sort of exploitation that was talked about in the Jamaica excerpts, but there are definitely Japanese who are embarrassed/annoyed with tourists coming to visit this place and in a sense suffer because of how their culture is then perceived (but that may be too much...)
Anyways, I think this is sort of interesting because there are definitely Japanese people who participate in otaku culture and Americans who love manga/anime and the weirdness of Japanese pop culture, but would not see this interest as patronizing.
Fandom: Realizing True Needs?
I know we've since moved on from our discussion of Fandom a few weeks ago, but I've been thinking about the subject a lot recently and had a few ideas I'd like to add to our debate.
While surfing the hundreds of fan-made Harry Potter videos on YouTube, it dawned on me just how much the Internet and similar digital technologies have completely revolutionized the culture producing industry. While the vast majority of creative content today is controlled by an increasingly limited number of multinational media conglomerates, the Internet represents a democratized space where users can easily manipulate, reproduce, and produce their own content and upload it to a mass audience. In this regard, the Internet empowers the "receivers" of culture in a way that wouldn't have been possible at the beginning of the 20th century, say for the Frankfurt School scholars who viewed the mass culture industry as essentially a vehicle for propaganda and brainwashing.
The myriad of electronic tools that have been designed for the very purpose of re-imagining or manipulating pre-existing content, Adobe Photoshop being one obvious example of many, have essentially changed the landscape of Fandom forever. I want to cite Stuart Hall's essay "Encoding Decoding" where he describes the creation and reception of pop culture as a cyclical process of distinctive but linked "moments" that are discursive, or shifting, in nature. It seems to me that the empowered Fandom encouraged by the Internet represents a complication of this traditional cycle. Culture Producers still encode pop culture with meaning for audiences to decode; but thanks to the Internet, fans are able to repeat this cycle by re-encoding the original product with an entirely new set of meanings meant to be endlessly decoded and the re-encoded by other users. One example of this is the phenomenon of YouTube users posting endless "response" videos as offshoots from an original video. In this newly democratized cycle, consumer-fans use pop culture as the raw materials to start an entirely new cycle of production, distribution, and interpretation.
This is a pleasantly surprising phenomenon, and perhaps reinforces aspects of Adorno's concept of false vs. true needs. According to Adorno, people have real needs to be creatively autonomous individuals, which are masked by the false needs of consumerism that capitalism fosters in order to survive. In this respect, the newly liberated realm of online Fandom represents a way for consumers to actually participate in culture rather than simply being brainwashed by it. For this reason, I think that there needs to be some kind of legal protection for amateur-generated content. As the "Studio Executive" from our class role-play, I understand that this kind of legislation will be difficult to pass due to strict copyright laws. However, I feel optimistic that this Fandom phenomenon might encourage people to become more critically discerning consumers of pop culture.
While surfing the hundreds of fan-made Harry Potter videos on YouTube, it dawned on me just how much the Internet and similar digital technologies have completely revolutionized the culture producing industry. While the vast majority of creative content today is controlled by an increasingly limited number of multinational media conglomerates, the Internet represents a democratized space where users can easily manipulate, reproduce, and produce their own content and upload it to a mass audience. In this regard, the Internet empowers the "receivers" of culture in a way that wouldn't have been possible at the beginning of the 20th century, say for the Frankfurt School scholars who viewed the mass culture industry as essentially a vehicle for propaganda and brainwashing.
The myriad of electronic tools that have been designed for the very purpose of re-imagining or manipulating pre-existing content, Adobe Photoshop being one obvious example of many, have essentially changed the landscape of Fandom forever. I want to cite Stuart Hall's essay "Encoding Decoding" where he describes the creation and reception of pop culture as a cyclical process of distinctive but linked "moments" that are discursive, or shifting, in nature. It seems to me that the empowered Fandom encouraged by the Internet represents a complication of this traditional cycle. Culture Producers still encode pop culture with meaning for audiences to decode; but thanks to the Internet, fans are able to repeat this cycle by re-encoding the original product with an entirely new set of meanings meant to be endlessly decoded and the re-encoded by other users. One example of this is the phenomenon of YouTube users posting endless "response" videos as offshoots from an original video. In this newly democratized cycle, consumer-fans use pop culture as the raw materials to start an entirely new cycle of production, distribution, and interpretation.
This is a pleasantly surprising phenomenon, and perhaps reinforces aspects of Adorno's concept of false vs. true needs. According to Adorno, people have real needs to be creatively autonomous individuals, which are masked by the false needs of consumerism that capitalism fosters in order to survive. In this respect, the newly liberated realm of online Fandom represents a way for consumers to actually participate in culture rather than simply being brainwashed by it. For this reason, I think that there needs to be some kind of legal protection for amateur-generated content. As the "Studio Executive" from our class role-play, I understand that this kind of legislation will be difficult to pass due to strict copyright laws. However, I feel optimistic that this Fandom phenomenon might encourage people to become more critically discerning consumers of pop culture.
Monday, March 29, 2010
Abstract: American consumption of Japanese culture
I swear I wrote this before reading Misa's abstract, but I'm also interested in looking at American interaction with Japanese culture.
I am interested in writing about the fetish-izing of Japan in American culture. While I’m not entirely sure where research would take my argument, I want to look both at how Japan is presented in Western media and how Japanese culture is imported and branded. The way Japanese popular culture is presented to Americans now is far different from the deodorization that took place in the ’80s, so an argument might spring from looking into why the American media’s importation and branding of Japanese culture has changed. It will be important to look into the degree to which different American subcultures consume Japanese media, and how those segments are marketed to and what they produce as fans should reveal interesting things about the natures of their fetishes.
My paper will first look at anecdotal evidence of American fan interaction with Japanese culture, and simultaneously at how the culture is marketed and branded to those fans. Then I will bring in larger questions of cultural consumption and fetish-ization. I will look at Sophia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003) as a specific example of that fetish-ization of Japanese culture by American filmmakers. Hopefully combining all these elements will lead me to an argument about the varying levels of depth and shallowness that occurs with American consumption of Japanese culture, and how those levels relate to the ways in which the culture is branded.
Coppola’s Lost in Translation is an example of how American films present Japan as very romantic in its extreme otherness. Coppola’s film inspired an entire generation of Japan-philes, and it will be interesting to see if the images it presents endure in our culture perception of Japan (and Tokyo in particular). I will reexamine the readings by Jenkins and van Zoonen on fan cultures, as well as some of the readings on consuming places and tourism as consumption. I also want to reread bell hooks’ “Eating the Other” and other similar articles, as well as works on Orientalism. It is interesting that a sort of neo-Orientalism has come about, referring to stereotyping of the Islamic world, so it would be necessary to limit myself to texts analyzing the older, colonial form of Orientalism and perhaps how it relates to Western consumption of Japanese culture. It would also be necessary to look at other studies of forms and levels of consumption of Japanese culture in America.
I don’t know how much has been written on this subject, but just from the survey last class three or four people said they wanted to go to Japan. This is a subject very close to me, as Japanese popular culture has been a major focus in both my personal and academic life. I hope that writing this paper will give me a better understanding of my own interests, and that it would appeal to others reading it for those reasons. The conflict between whether or not fan consumption leads to fetish-ization or a genuine understanding of another culture comes up a lot in readings on fan cultures and multicultural consumption, so I hope that my paper offers some useful analysis on the points where those ideas converge and diverge. A lot of people who write about Japanese culture are, like me, fans of the culture, so I think these kinds of questions are sometimes dismissed much in the same way McRobbie accuses feminist scholars of dismissing criticisms of Sex and the City. In order to write about Japanese pop culture credibly, we must be aware of how we and others interact with it.
I am interested in writing about the fetish-izing of Japan in American culture. While I’m not entirely sure where research would take my argument, I want to look both at how Japan is presented in Western media and how Japanese culture is imported and branded. The way Japanese popular culture is presented to Americans now is far different from the deodorization that took place in the ’80s, so an argument might spring from looking into why the American media’s importation and branding of Japanese culture has changed. It will be important to look into the degree to which different American subcultures consume Japanese media, and how those segments are marketed to and what they produce as fans should reveal interesting things about the natures of their fetishes.
My paper will first look at anecdotal evidence of American fan interaction with Japanese culture, and simultaneously at how the culture is marketed and branded to those fans. Then I will bring in larger questions of cultural consumption and fetish-ization. I will look at Sophia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003) as a specific example of that fetish-ization of Japanese culture by American filmmakers. Hopefully combining all these elements will lead me to an argument about the varying levels of depth and shallowness that occurs with American consumption of Japanese culture, and how those levels relate to the ways in which the culture is branded.
Coppola’s Lost in Translation is an example of how American films present Japan as very romantic in its extreme otherness. Coppola’s film inspired an entire generation of Japan-philes, and it will be interesting to see if the images it presents endure in our culture perception of Japan (and Tokyo in particular). I will reexamine the readings by Jenkins and van Zoonen on fan cultures, as well as some of the readings on consuming places and tourism as consumption. I also want to reread bell hooks’ “Eating the Other” and other similar articles, as well as works on Orientalism. It is interesting that a sort of neo-Orientalism has come about, referring to stereotyping of the Islamic world, so it would be necessary to limit myself to texts analyzing the older, colonial form of Orientalism and perhaps how it relates to Western consumption of Japanese culture. It would also be necessary to look at other studies of forms and levels of consumption of Japanese culture in America.
I don’t know how much has been written on this subject, but just from the survey last class three or four people said they wanted to go to Japan. This is a subject very close to me, as Japanese popular culture has been a major focus in both my personal and academic life. I hope that writing this paper will give me a better understanding of my own interests, and that it would appeal to others reading it for those reasons. The conflict between whether or not fan consumption leads to fetish-ization or a genuine understanding of another culture comes up a lot in readings on fan cultures and multicultural consumption, so I hope that my paper offers some useful analysis on the points where those ideas converge and diverge. A lot of people who write about Japanese culture are, like me, fans of the culture, so I think these kinds of questions are sometimes dismissed much in the same way McRobbie accuses feminist scholars of dismissing criticisms of Sex and the City. In order to write about Japanese pop culture credibly, we must be aware of how we and others interact with it.
Sunday, March 28, 2010
Logorama
Winner of the best animated short film award at the Oscars this year:
Logorama from Marc Altshuler - Human Music on Vimeo.
Inspiration for final projects/papers?
Gourmet Drama: A Tasty Case of Narrating the Nation
Jiwon Ahn / Keene State College
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Psychological Tourism?
Ritzer and Liska discuss the "McDisneyization" of different spaces and locations. When discussing post-modernism and tourism, they mention the simulated world tourism has become. A lack of authenticity is seen in the "fake" worlds replicas different tourist attractions offer. However, the converse of this is when tourist attractions attempt to make unreality real. Specifically I am referring to "Screen Tours," a NYC tour company offering bus tours of different locations in NYC where television shows have been filmed. The slogan on their website is, "Escape reality with On Location Tours, New York City's only TV and movie tour company!" Their most notable and popular tour is the Sex and the City tour, which stops at different restaurants, bars, and stores where the Sex and the City girls have gone. So here, instead of making real places (like an Indian village) fake, this company has turned a fictional television show into reality, while at the same time proclaiming the tour as an escape from reality. Yet the places they visit are real. I think this type of tourism is "psychological tourism." Really this tour is in the participants' mind. Additionally, it is very simple for anyone to find out where they go on Sex and the City and just visit these places without paying for someone else to show them. Nevertheless, the popularity of such a tour continues.
http://www.screentours.com/
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Abstract: Tokyo/Pop Culture/Anime
I think for this paper I want to look at how Japan and Japanese culture in Western media is often presented in opposition to American/Western culture and is shown in ways that highlight the extreme differences between the Japanese and foreigners. Encounters with Japan are experienced by protagonists with what I see as feelings of culture shock, ethnocentrism or isolation. Japanese pop culture is portrayed as inauthentic, shallow and strange, but the redemptive qualities of traditional culture are usually nothing more than a spectacle (watching a Shinto ceremony, arranging Ikebana without understanding the underlying principles.) However, I feel like this is something Japanese pop culture, specifically anime, touches on as well: the superficiality and strange consumer driven culture that it is a part of that can be pretty isolating.
I’d like to investigate Japanese pop culture as it is represented in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation and then compare it to the anime series Nana, looking at how Japanese culture (through the lack of understanding and culture shock as seen in Lost in Translation and participation in the culture as seen in Nana through its main characters lives and the medium itself) is set up as sort of an alienating experience and why that is. I realize that what I’ve proposed is extremely broad/vague and that I don’t have a clear argument, but I’m hoping to narrow my research down in the next few days when I reexamine the texts.
Although one Translation is an American product and Nana is Japanese, I think they share some relevant themes about how people connect to the world around and would be interesting to compare.A significant portion of the paper will be textual analyses of Translation and Nana where I will focus on the ways the texts engage with Japanese pop culture and their representations of pop culture. I also plan on giving background on anime (and manga) and its role in Japanese society (which is pretty pervasive.)
I will be looking at Henry Jenkin’s “Pop Cosmopolitan” as well as the Ritzer and Liska essay “McDisneyization and Post-Tourism.” I think there is a link between critiques of people who consume Japanese pop culture and do not engage with the “authentic folk culture” of Japan and critiques of “post tourism” and the idea of “fake” experiences being preferred over “real” experiences. I will also be looking at Susan Napier’s work. One essay I have in mind is “ ‘Excuse Me, Who Are You?’ Performance, the Gaze and the Females in the Works of Kon Satoshi” to examine the female protagonists in Nana (and possibly in Lost in Translation) but also to examine how anime can be very self-conscious and aware of the images it creates and in doing so, critiques itself. Essentially, I think my paper will be looking at critiques of pop cultural (is this a word?) consumption that come from within and outside the culture.
I’d like to investigate Japanese pop culture as it is represented in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation and then compare it to the anime series Nana, looking at how Japanese culture (through the lack of understanding and culture shock as seen in Lost in Translation and participation in the culture as seen in Nana through its main characters lives and the medium itself) is set up as sort of an alienating experience and why that is. I realize that what I’ve proposed is extremely broad/vague and that I don’t have a clear argument, but I’m hoping to narrow my research down in the next few days when I reexamine the texts.
Although one Translation is an American product and Nana is Japanese, I think they share some relevant themes about how people connect to the world around and would be interesting to compare.A significant portion of the paper will be textual analyses of Translation and Nana where I will focus on the ways the texts engage with Japanese pop culture and their representations of pop culture. I also plan on giving background on anime (and manga) and its role in Japanese society (which is pretty pervasive.)
I will be looking at Henry Jenkin’s “Pop Cosmopolitan” as well as the Ritzer and Liska essay “McDisneyization and Post-Tourism.” I think there is a link between critiques of people who consume Japanese pop culture and do not engage with the “authentic folk culture” of Japan and critiques of “post tourism” and the idea of “fake” experiences being preferred over “real” experiences. I will also be looking at Susan Napier’s work. One essay I have in mind is “ ‘Excuse Me, Who Are You?’ Performance, the Gaze and the Females in the Works of Kon Satoshi” to examine the female protagonists in Nana (and possibly in Lost in Translation) but also to examine how anime can be very self-conscious and aware of the images it creates and in doing so, critiques itself. Essentially, I think my paper will be looking at critiques of pop cultural (is this a word?) consumption that come from within and outside the culture.
Abstract: Sims Online and Neoliberal Citizenship
This paper will seek to investigate the utopian rhetoric surrounding digital interactivity and its relationship to neoliberal citizenship, specifically in regards to the massively multiplayer online (MMO) game, The Sims Online. Tentatively, I want to organize this argument into two sections. First, I intend to look at how common phrases used to describe video games, like “freedom of choice” and “player empowerment,” relate to the illusion of choice and empowerment produced by the gameplay mechanic itself. For theoretical inspiration, Baudrillard’s notion of the consumer who is “free to make the choice imposed on him (sic)”, as well as Celia Lurie’s notion of the new media object’s “dynamic unity,” seem to be particularly germane to this idea. Also, Alex Galloway’s essay on Deleuzian “societies of control” in video games could be useful to my argument.
In this section, I am interested in how the loosely structured “rules of the game” instantiate an American Dream-like view of individual and collective progress in which structural inequalities and relations of power are glossed over. During this section of my paper, I intend to look at both how the individual user’s effort of play-labor directly correlates to career progress, status, and social mobility, without regards to how race/class/gender/age/etc might give players a certain “handicap” (despite the superficial “customizability” of an avatar) and how consumption of virtual goods and services is the necessary means by which players gain rewards.
In the second half of my paper, I intend to take my analysis beyond discussions of the core game mechanic and look at specific instances surrounding the Sims’ virtual (and virtually) free markets, their real-estate/entrepreneurial ventures, and how their simulated government is run. Although I have not yet read the readings for our unit on “Consumption and Citizenship,” I am sure that these works will provide me with a sound theoretical framework for how to more specifically conceptualize the relationship between virtual public spaces and neoliberal citizenship.
P.S. for Aniko: I have a professor who suggested Ernesto Laclau as a good source for writings on liberal democracy, but did not point to any specific readings. I was wondering if you had any specific suggestions for texts by this writer as it relates to my project.
In this section, I am interested in how the loosely structured “rules of the game” instantiate an American Dream-like view of individual and collective progress in which structural inequalities and relations of power are glossed over. During this section of my paper, I intend to look at both how the individual user’s effort of play-labor directly correlates to career progress, status, and social mobility, without regards to how race/class/gender/age/etc might give players a certain “handicap” (despite the superficial “customizability” of an avatar) and how consumption of virtual goods and services is the necessary means by which players gain rewards.
In the second half of my paper, I intend to take my analysis beyond discussions of the core game mechanic and look at specific instances surrounding the Sims’ virtual (and virtually) free markets, their real-estate/entrepreneurial ventures, and how their simulated government is run. Although I have not yet read the readings for our unit on “Consumption and Citizenship,” I am sure that these works will provide me with a sound theoretical framework for how to more specifically conceptualize the relationship between virtual public spaces and neoliberal citizenship.
P.S. for Aniko: I have a professor who suggested Ernesto Laclau as a good source for writings on liberal democracy, but did not point to any specific readings. I was wondering if you had any specific suggestions for texts by this writer as it relates to my project.
Consuming Marketing
I intend to use this paper to discuss how marketing has changed in the media platform and what makes them successful in the past decades. Is there any implicit message or a secret formula hidden in all of these marketing efforts? I am particularly interested in how product placement has affected the way we consume media in recent years, how the role of product placement has changed in the past few decades and how, as young audience, we have learnt to read product placement in a different way (in other words, how young people have been affected by these seamless marketing efforts) I am also interested in how marketing efforts are used differently in different countries, specifically comparing US to Asian countries. Seeing that Asian countries like China (which traditionally almost never spent money on marketing) are beginning to follow the Western model of promotion and advertising, I would like to see how marketing has also influenced Chinese movie industry, possibly in a different way. Knowing that so much money has been spent on marketing in recent years, I also intend to look at the box office statistics, and determine whether or not these marketing moves were indeed successful. My main argument would be that product placement and some traditional marketing efforts are getting saturated, and at the end of my paper, I would like to make suggestion, or even predict where movie marketing is going to go in the future.
In terms of structure, I think I am going to first talk about the history of marketing in media by introducing some important marketing campaigns. Then I would talk about how this has evolved into a seamless integration such as product placement, how product placement is effectively used in many media, how it has influenced the way we read media and how our tastes have changed because of them. Next, I am going to compare the marketing in US media to media in Asia, and see how they have possibly influenced one another. And lastly my argument would proceed to see if these new marketing efforts have been effective lately and if the market has actually responded to them.
I am mostly going to rely on Internet sources such as moviemarketingmadness.com, movieindustrymarketing.com and some other individual blogs such as vgbm.blogspot.com (Video Games Business and Marketing). Movie Marketing Asia (by Kinema Junpōsha) and A Proposal for the production, marketing and distribution of a theatrical motion picture “Pop Movie” (by Aaron Spiegeland) would be a great resource to me too.
I hope to find statistics that would support my idea that marketing in media has almost reached a dead end and a new way of advertising and promotion has to be found. Although I hope to conclude that marketing has severely affected the way we consume media, I do not want to give a stand on whether it is beneficial to the society or not. I wish to use my paper to discuss the future possibilities of marketing in media, especially seeing the saturated markets, what would future marketing lead to.
In terms of structure, I think I am going to first talk about the history of marketing in media by introducing some important marketing campaigns. Then I would talk about how this has evolved into a seamless integration such as product placement, how product placement is effectively used in many media, how it has influenced the way we read media and how our tastes have changed because of them. Next, I am going to compare the marketing in US media to media in Asia, and see how they have possibly influenced one another. And lastly my argument would proceed to see if these new marketing efforts have been effective lately and if the market has actually responded to them.
I am mostly going to rely on Internet sources such as moviemarketingmadness.com, movieindustrymarketing.com and some other individual blogs such as vgbm.blogspot.com (Video Games Business and Marketing). Movie Marketing Asia (by Kinema Junpōsha) and A Proposal for the production, marketing and distribution of a theatrical motion picture “Pop Movie” (by Aaron Spiegeland) would be a great resource to me too.
I hope to find statistics that would support my idea that marketing in media has almost reached a dead end and a new way of advertising and promotion has to be found. Although I hope to conclude that marketing has severely affected the way we consume media, I do not want to give a stand on whether it is beneficial to the society or not. I wish to use my paper to discuss the future possibilities of marketing in media, especially seeing the saturated markets, what would future marketing lead to.
Two abstracts
I'm unsure which of these I want to pursue, so I wrote up abstracts on both, and would love any help on deciding between the two.
FANDUBBING.
While many products multiply signify their geographic or ethnic roots, it is not uncommon for these marks to be dulled when prepared for export, whether by recutting, rewriting, or dubbing the original piece. At the same time, given the increasingly global media market where products are frequently created with the intent of being internationally successful, many properties are created bearing few cultural markers. As Koichi Iwabuchi put it, "It is no accident that Japan has become a major exporter of culturally odorless products. Japanese media industries seem to think that the suppression of Japanese cultural odor is imperative if they are to make inroads into international markets” (90).
Given these two trends, I'm interested in examining audiences who choose to consume things that are produced in a different cultural environment and how they react when the property is deodorized before being presented to them. Thus, I intend to begin both my research and my argument with a background look into trends of deodorization as well as media globalization. In particular, I'm going to be looking at texts by Koichi Iwabuchi (Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism, and a book of essays he edited, Rogue Flows: Trans-asian Cultural Traffic) and Anne Allison (Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination) to delve into the idea of deodorization. From there, I plan on looking at various discussions of fan engagement with texts - most particularly Henry Jenkins' Textual Poachers and the writing of Matt Hill on semiotic solidarity.
The material I am most interested in are fan-dubs where groups go so far as to take the images of the source text and re-record the dialogue with their own voice actors. While I may use a number of different anime as examples, I intend to focus most on Project Yu-Gi-Oh!, which is not only currently being done (and is around episode 90), but also holds podcast interviews with the show's voice actors and has a rich background of fan engagement.
Deodorization has tended to be looked at from the production side or from the reception side, though it does not seem that much research has been done into the recuperation that is done by receivers of the text. Thus I feel this paper looks to extend the scope of the literature on deodorization into the realm of fan interaction, rather than production-dominated models of reception.
LIFESTYLE ACTIVISM
Though activism has long existed in various forms, in recent years it seems the most widespread form is lifestyle activism, where the purchasing of products is the way people make their main contribution (whether monetary or symbolic) to groups and movements trying to solve social ills (whether environmental, medical, or political). Not only has this led to widespread cause-washing of products (greenwashing, pinkwashing, etc.), but it has also meant that many charities have taken to using simple purchasable products as a way to solicit donations. In particular, I want to talk about how the products surrounding cancer research (whether pink-washed products or Livestrong bracelets) embody the movement towards consumption as a, if not the, primary means of social contribution and what ramifications that has on society both socially and economically.
Given that I plan on looking at the way commodities interact with belief systems in modern capitalist societies, I will begin with a discussion of how consumer society structures desires. From there, I will explain lifestyle activism and discuss various ways that cancer causes interact with products within the society - both when products partner with cancer causes and when the cancer causes sell products themselves. This section will also include a discussion of charities generally and how these developments differ from things such as phone drives. Once these background portions have been set up, I plan on looking at what effects these consumptive habits have and what they signify as having already occurred (both of these mostly in terms of mindset shifts) - and finally what kernels of hope lie within these practices.
For the initial section, I plan on looking at the works of Jean Baudrillard (Consumer Society and some of his later works), as well as Guy DeBord, and perhaps Hart and Negri (as well as critiques thereof). For the later sections about lifestyle activism and consumption of beliefs, causes, and ideologies, I have been a bit lost. I am still in the process of finding scholarly works on the topic and have not found a whole lot (though there are a few investigative reports on pink-washing). Any help in this area would be really appreciated.
I hope to be able to further criticism of product-based ideological beliefs and what they mean in the context of a capitalist society by not only examining their uncritical or false elements, but also what it means for the state of modern capitalism and the consumers role therein. Further, I hope to be able to bring not only new criticisms to lifestyle activism that go beyond issues of authenticity, as well as reveal latent possibilities/positive elements that come out of these economic developments.
FANDUBBING.
While many products multiply signify their geographic or ethnic roots, it is not uncommon for these marks to be dulled when prepared for export, whether by recutting, rewriting, or dubbing the original piece. At the same time, given the increasingly global media market where products are frequently created with the intent of being internationally successful, many properties are created bearing few cultural markers. As Koichi Iwabuchi put it, "It is no accident that Japan has become a major exporter of culturally odorless products. Japanese media industries seem to think that the suppression of Japanese cultural odor is imperative if they are to make inroads into international markets” (90).
Given these two trends, I'm interested in examining audiences who choose to consume things that are produced in a different cultural environment and how they react when the property is deodorized before being presented to them. Thus, I intend to begin both my research and my argument with a background look into trends of deodorization as well as media globalization. In particular, I'm going to be looking at texts by Koichi Iwabuchi (Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism, and a book of essays he edited, Rogue Flows: Trans-asian Cultural Traffic) and Anne Allison (Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination) to delve into the idea of deodorization. From there, I plan on looking at various discussions of fan engagement with texts - most particularly Henry Jenkins' Textual Poachers and the writing of Matt Hill on semiotic solidarity.
The material I am most interested in are fan-dubs where groups go so far as to take the images of the source text and re-record the dialogue with their own voice actors. While I may use a number of different anime as examples, I intend to focus most on Project Yu-Gi-Oh!, which is not only currently being done (and is around episode 90), but also holds podcast interviews with the show's voice actors and has a rich background of fan engagement.
Deodorization has tended to be looked at from the production side or from the reception side, though it does not seem that much research has been done into the recuperation that is done by receivers of the text. Thus I feel this paper looks to extend the scope of the literature on deodorization into the realm of fan interaction, rather than production-dominated models of reception.
LIFESTYLE ACTIVISM
Though activism has long existed in various forms, in recent years it seems the most widespread form is lifestyle activism, where the purchasing of products is the way people make their main contribution (whether monetary or symbolic) to groups and movements trying to solve social ills (whether environmental, medical, or political). Not only has this led to widespread cause-washing of products (greenwashing, pinkwashing, etc.), but it has also meant that many charities have taken to using simple purchasable products as a way to solicit donations. In particular, I want to talk about how the products surrounding cancer research (whether pink-washed products or Livestrong bracelets) embody the movement towards consumption as a, if not the, primary means of social contribution and what ramifications that has on society both socially and economically.
Given that I plan on looking at the way commodities interact with belief systems in modern capitalist societies, I will begin with a discussion of how consumer society structures desires. From there, I will explain lifestyle activism and discuss various ways that cancer causes interact with products within the society - both when products partner with cancer causes and when the cancer causes sell products themselves. This section will also include a discussion of charities generally and how these developments differ from things such as phone drives. Once these background portions have been set up, I plan on looking at what effects these consumptive habits have and what they signify as having already occurred (both of these mostly in terms of mindset shifts) - and finally what kernels of hope lie within these practices.
For the initial section, I plan on looking at the works of Jean Baudrillard (Consumer Society and some of his later works), as well as Guy DeBord, and perhaps Hart and Negri (as well as critiques thereof). For the later sections about lifestyle activism and consumption of beliefs, causes, and ideologies, I have been a bit lost. I am still in the process of finding scholarly works on the topic and have not found a whole lot (though there are a few investigative reports on pink-washing). Any help in this area would be really appreciated.
I hope to be able to further criticism of product-based ideological beliefs and what they mean in the context of a capitalist society by not only examining their uncritical or false elements, but also what it means for the state of modern capitalism and the consumers role therein. Further, I hope to be able to bring not only new criticisms to lifestyle activism that go beyond issues of authenticity, as well as reveal latent possibilities/positive elements that come out of these economic developments.
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
At last!
So I know this is really long past when we talked about it, but I found Cannibal Holocaust online. It's not so explicitly tourism or consumption of a place, but I don't think documentary is very far removed from the idea of tourism. Anyway, here is, for your viewing pleasure, Cannibal Holocaust uncut.
Yelp: Simultaneously Making a Culture Visible and Invisible
Yelp.com has become cultural scripture for urbanites around the country. Yelp simultaneously acts as a resource in rebelling against the homogenization of retail and restaurant space while disguising the social-economic differences within a city. Furthermore Yelp foreground's craftsmanship in a post-Marxist culture, while simultaneously concealing the labor or exploitation of labor. Yelp imagines a cosmopolitan community where cultural commodities become accessible through the review format and cyber-democracy. Furthermore Yelp users and reviewers elevate their social currency by evaluating and reviewing cities and the cultures inhabiting their city. Yelp empowers the consumer while marginalizing the producer.It is important to examine how the Yelp user has been branded as urban, young, hip, and technologically savvy. The implication is that the user is economically relevant to the businesses highlighted on Yelp. This site imagines the urban space as a space for leisure, abundance, and style. Authenticity is privileged and idealized, thus making previously undesirable neighborhoods desirable and subject to gentrification and the residents subject to exclusion.
I purpose to focus primarily on the highest rated Mexican restaurants in Los Angeles and how the comments and reviews of these restaurants imagine the Los Angeles community. I will be examining the presence and/ or absence of references to immigration, labor, or the Latino community in Los Angeles.
I will rely on texts examining cosmopolitanism, tourism, and representation to guide me through my argument that Yelp disempowers underprivileged communities through their business practices and review process as seen through the representation of Mexican culture and laborers in Los Angeles.
Abstract: Female Sports Fans
Sports fandom continues to change as new technologies emerge. Fans are now able to interact with athletes, sports writers, sports casters, and sports media via the Internet and increasingly personal ways. With the phenomenon of fantasy sports, sports fandom continues to change as fans become more involved in sports and become virtual managers of their own teams. Internet message boards, blogs, and fan sites further allow fans to voice their opinions, possibly even affecting decisions made by sports organizations. Yet in all of these outlets, the image of the sports fan remains as a masculine male. But is this changing? Are female sports fans becoming more visible? How are female sports fans portrayed in the media? What affect, if any, do these female sports fans have on sports media? I believe female sports fans are an increasing group of untapped sports media consumers. Though consistently ignored, they can be highly profitable if marketed to correctly. This paper proposes female sports fans are a small, but growing force threatening to undermine gender stereotypes, while contending with the sexist portrayal of female athletes and sports casters.
This paper will begin with a brief history of females entering male dominated sports, followed by an examination of the current portrayal of female athletes, specifically the highly visible Danica Patrick, a paradox who continues to break gender barriers while adhering to overly sexualized images of female athletes. An examination of sports’ direct marketing to men will show how sports media excludes women and prevents them from entering the male dominated world of sports fans. Following this will be a discussion of how female sports are becoming more visible, especially via the internet, concluding with an argument as to why and how female sports fans should be marketed to by dominant sports media. It is important to note that this paper will only focus on female fans of mainstream male sports.
Sources used will be historical accounts of females in sports, as well as multiple journalistic materials regarding female athletes and their male fans. A look at print and television sports advertising and marketing will be used along with multiple Internet blogs and fan sites produced by females. Theoretical writings on the female consumer will also be consulted. There is also hope for obtaining interviews with sports marketers and media producers.
This paper hopes to open up a larger discussion on the affect of female sports fans on sports media and marketing. The goal is for companies to recognize this large consumer group while also breaking down gender stereotypes and allowing for multiple images of females in sports to be produced.
Abstract - Devil's Kettle: Sex, Consumption, and the Teenage Girl in the Work of Diablo Cody
Diablo Cody has a particular history with the commodification of female sexuality, which she discusses in “Pussy Ranch,” a weblog chronicling her life as a stripper in Minneapolis. This point of view is discernible in her screenwriting, even if it is not overtly the topic at hand. Her work both addresses and mocks the moral panic spurred by the pubescent and young adult female body – even as said body is vigorously commodified and ravenously consumed. This panic seems to stem from a fear of an endowed female sexuality – one that controls and manipulates, and one that the consumer is ultimately “consumed with” and “consumed by.”
I will focus on Jennifer’s Body (2009), a horror film about a popular high school girl who literally eats men (and boys) alive. Her body is a highly fetishized commodity that tempts her peers with indulgence, only to destroy them. Jennifer embodies the mythical vagina dentata almost literally, as her succubal appetite for male flesh is directly entwined with her sexual behavior. Moreover, her popular status, and, indeed, her very survival, are directly dependent on continued consumption – she is a consumer-citizen in the economy of high school politics. Ultimately, Jennifer’s body must be destroyed so that its effects might be controlled. Supplementing this close-reading with material from Cody’s other produced screenplays and teleplays – Juno (2007) and “The United States of Tara” (2009-) – as well as her blog “Pussy Ranch,” I will trace a portrait of the ways in which Cody discusses female sexuality in terms of performance, consumption, and discipline.
I will draw on several of the readings from class to discuss consumption and consumerism, including Crystal Bartolovich (“Consumerism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”), Jean Baudrillard (Consumer Society), and Karl Marx (“The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret”). Additionally, I will draw on the work of Linda Williams on body genres, Janet Staiger on “bad women,” Carol J. Clover on gender and sexuality in the horror film, etc.
Cody’s work stands as a provocative voice in the discourse of sex and consumption. She walks a delicate tightrope of exploitation and activism, and this orientation is ripe for analysis, even if it is not wholly satisfying to a staunch liberal feminist ideology. Her work serves to hyperbolize, and often allegorize, the cultural panic associated with young female sexuality. Even as the female sex organs must be defended, they must also be defended against, let they cause ruin to the body and body politic. Cody’s tongue-in-cheek acknowledgement of this anxiety lies in her choice of setting for Jennifer’s Body – Devil’s Kettle, Minnesota. The (fictional) town is named for a (real-life) waterfall formation in which river water disappears into a hole but, mysteriously, does not seem to exit again anywhere. Certainly the significance of this sinister all-consuming hole (that is also a tourist trap) cannot be underestimated in the landscape of the film, and it reflects Cody’s particular attention to the simultaneous commodification and anxious disciplining of female sexuality.
A New Political Party...
So I know our week on fandom has come and gone, but I still think this is pretty interesting, especially with regards to our discussions on copyright:
"The Pirate Party Manifesto"
"The Pirate Party Manifesto"
Paper Abstract: Consuming Celebrity
The mythology of Fame as an honorable way to distinguish extraordinary achievement has been an integral part of history and cultural storytelling for centuries, dating back as early as Alexander the Great. Modern conceptualizations and representations of Celebrity, however, claim more of the public’s cultural consciousness than ever before, energized by the various technological developments of the twenty-first century and an increasingly advertising-based culture industry that blurs the line between journalism and tabloid gossip. While the branding of Celebrity promotes societal discourses and provides fodder for discussion, debate, and critique, the proliferation of the cult of stardom has also radically reshaped of our notions of personal identity, collective values, and success in a neoliberal society.
I intend to begin my paper by performing a structural analysis of the Public Relations industry, whose sole aim is to create carefully constructed and pre-meditated “personas” for a public figure. As cogs of the culture industry, these personas draw upon and reinforce the dominant hegemonic ideals of the society as it wishes to be seen. The inherently unstable “performance” aspect of maintaining and cultivating celebrity illuminates how these mechanisms create idealistic representations that often have little or no bearing on lived reality. One example, Nike and the branding of sports, uses athletes to construct very specific ideals about athleticism, honor, determination, and physical prowess. Another example compares and contrasts Tiger Woods’s meticulously constructed image with reality.
Next, I will use principles of psychoanalysis to explore how Celebrity has become an integral part of the collective debate surrounding personal identity, collective, values, and definitions of capitalistic success. Celebrity in its modern iteration represents a manifestation of Freud’s ego ideal, whereby audiences project their interior desires onto public figures as a method of understanding their lives. Celebrity has also contributed to a shifting understanding of the American Dream as dependent on fame and notoriety rather than wealth. This is evident through the democratization of stardom through reality television shows like Big Brother and competitions like American Idol.
The culmination of these two forces, structural premeditation and audience interpretations, is not only detrimental to audiences, but also to celebrities themselves, who essentially act as vacant receptacles for dominant hegemony. The fanatical fandom encouraged by these structures makes the spectator vulnerable to emotional manipulation by Celebrity that is based on inherently meaningless and constructed values. Fandom not only distracts from more pressing global issues, but also brings out a wide spectrum of human emotions ranging from adoration to obsession. For celebrities themselves, it is an enormous burden to stand in for a concept, as in the case of pop singer Britney Spears where a lack of self-awareness led to a very public and humiliating mental breakdown.
Lastly, the importance of Celebrity is stressed through corporate endorsements on a global scale. Because celebrities are posited as trustworthy, they are able to incentive action. While this power is sometimes used for good, as with the We Are the World initiative for Haiti, celebrity endorsements are most frequently used to encourage consumers to purchase frivolous goods. While corporations often benefit from celebrity name recognition, they are also put in the precarious position of equating their corporate brands with unstable Celebrity constructions. International Celebrity advertisements in countries where American stars have name recognition contribute to cultural homogenization.
I intend to demonstrate that although the cult of celebrity has been constructed as mindless and frivolous entertainment, the increasing force with which these representations have come to dominate societal discourse will inevitably have lasting repercussions. Collective discourses based on distorted celebrity images ultimately draw attention away from global problems and instead redirect these energies towards encouraging consumption through endorsements. In this way, celebrity perpetuates the capitalist economic base that produces it while contributing to the increasing atomization of society that has characterized post-modernity. As for the celebrities themselves, they will continue to act as sacrificial lambs on the zeitgeist’s altar.
Proposed Sources:
• Adorno, Theodore. The Culture Industry. London: Routledge, 2002.
• Bourdieu, Pierre. “The Aesthetic Sense as the Sense of Distinction” in Juliet Schor ed., The Consumer Society Reader
• Braudy, Leo. The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.
• Dyer, Richard. Stars. London: BFI, 1998.
• Giles, David. Illusions of Immortality: A Psychology of Fame and Celebrity. New York: St. Martin’s, 2000.
• Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. London: Routledge, 1992.
• Klein, Naomi. No Logo, Ch. 2: “The Brand Expands”
• Marshall, P. David. Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
• Monaco, James. Celebrity: The Media as Image Makers. New York: Delta, 1978.
• van Zoonen, Liesbet. Entertaining the Citizen: When Politics and Popular Culture Converge. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005.
I intend to begin my paper by performing a structural analysis of the Public Relations industry, whose sole aim is to create carefully constructed and pre-meditated “personas” for a public figure. As cogs of the culture industry, these personas draw upon and reinforce the dominant hegemonic ideals of the society as it wishes to be seen. The inherently unstable “performance” aspect of maintaining and cultivating celebrity illuminates how these mechanisms create idealistic representations that often have little or no bearing on lived reality. One example, Nike and the branding of sports, uses athletes to construct very specific ideals about athleticism, honor, determination, and physical prowess. Another example compares and contrasts Tiger Woods’s meticulously constructed image with reality.
Next, I will use principles of psychoanalysis to explore how Celebrity has become an integral part of the collective debate surrounding personal identity, collective, values, and definitions of capitalistic success. Celebrity in its modern iteration represents a manifestation of Freud’s ego ideal, whereby audiences project their interior desires onto public figures as a method of understanding their lives. Celebrity has also contributed to a shifting understanding of the American Dream as dependent on fame and notoriety rather than wealth. This is evident through the democratization of stardom through reality television shows like Big Brother and competitions like American Idol.
The culmination of these two forces, structural premeditation and audience interpretations, is not only detrimental to audiences, but also to celebrities themselves, who essentially act as vacant receptacles for dominant hegemony. The fanatical fandom encouraged by these structures makes the spectator vulnerable to emotional manipulation by Celebrity that is based on inherently meaningless and constructed values. Fandom not only distracts from more pressing global issues, but also brings out a wide spectrum of human emotions ranging from adoration to obsession. For celebrities themselves, it is an enormous burden to stand in for a concept, as in the case of pop singer Britney Spears where a lack of self-awareness led to a very public and humiliating mental breakdown.
Lastly, the importance of Celebrity is stressed through corporate endorsements on a global scale. Because celebrities are posited as trustworthy, they are able to incentive action. While this power is sometimes used for good, as with the We Are the World initiative for Haiti, celebrity endorsements are most frequently used to encourage consumers to purchase frivolous goods. While corporations often benefit from celebrity name recognition, they are also put in the precarious position of equating their corporate brands with unstable Celebrity constructions. International Celebrity advertisements in countries where American stars have name recognition contribute to cultural homogenization.
I intend to demonstrate that although the cult of celebrity has been constructed as mindless and frivolous entertainment, the increasing force with which these representations have come to dominate societal discourse will inevitably have lasting repercussions. Collective discourses based on distorted celebrity images ultimately draw attention away from global problems and instead redirect these energies towards encouraging consumption through endorsements. In this way, celebrity perpetuates the capitalist economic base that produces it while contributing to the increasing atomization of society that has characterized post-modernity. As for the celebrities themselves, they will continue to act as sacrificial lambs on the zeitgeist’s altar.
Proposed Sources:
• Adorno, Theodore. The Culture Industry. London: Routledge, 2002.
• Bourdieu, Pierre. “The Aesthetic Sense as the Sense of Distinction” in Juliet Schor ed., The Consumer Society Reader
• Braudy, Leo. The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.
• Dyer, Richard. Stars. London: BFI, 1998.
• Giles, David. Illusions of Immortality: A Psychology of Fame and Celebrity. New York: St. Martin’s, 2000.
• Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. London: Routledge, 1992.
• Klein, Naomi. No Logo, Ch. 2: “The Brand Expands”
• Marshall, P. David. Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
• Monaco, James. Celebrity: The Media as Image Makers. New York: Delta, 1978.
• van Zoonen, Liesbet. Entertaining the Citizen: When Politics and Popular Culture Converge. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005.
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Tourism and Anachronistic Space
“…being frightened is paradoxically a sign of empowerment.”
- Aviva Briefel and Sianne Ngai*
Although I certainly think that there is some truth to Ritzer and Liska’s contention that contemporary tourism thrives on sameness rather than difference (I tend to lean more towards Bauman’s notion of “extraterritorialization” in which there is a more nuanced blending of the two), I definitely think that there is something to be said about the persistent, yet ambivalent search for “authentically different” experiences in the American popular imaginary. To me, this is an important aspect of what touristic horror films like Turistas (as well as Hostel/Hostel 2 and The Descent, among others) are all about.
In her essay “The Lay of the Land: Genealogies of Imperialism,”** Anne McClintock employs the very useful notion of “anachronistic space” to help explain the relationship between perceptions of time and space in the colonial imaginary. In her conceptualization, she argues that the modern adventurer’s journey involves not only a traversal of space, but also a traversal back through time to the “pre-industrial past.” Such a double movement allows for the emergence of contradictions from both psychoanalytic and historical perspectives: to the adventurer hailing from the modern, repressive society, the pre-Oedipal, colonial space comes to signify both a nostalgic return to a romanticized “natural” or “real” world, but also an anxiety surrounding the dangerous and savage unknown. And as many feminist, psychoanalytic critics have pointed out, this simultaneously idyllic and “terrible place” is often coded as feminine. (References are often made to dark, cavernous spaces, bleeding/crying, feminized monsters, etc.)
This historical and analytic framework is useful in helping to explain the impetus behind Turistas’ group of horny, twentysomething tourists and their love-hate relationship with their vacation space. On the one hand, it is a tropical paradise in which encounters with difference amount to consuming exotic food and having intercourse with Brazillian prostitutes. On the other hand, these tourists pay for their infatuation with more “authentic experiences” by encountering the dangers of the other’s uncivilized space: poverty, drug and human trafficking, violence, irrationalism, and a (very strange) third world revenge fantasy. More along the lines of Bauman, I would argue that a touristic conception of space strikes a “balance between the security of the familiar and the adventure of the strange,” and that global capitalism and its ubiquitous branding practices help to ensure much of this “security.” Maybe we can read this film as a cautionary tale that plays on colonial fantasies of the authentically different experience within the safe space of the screen, while simultaneously suggesting that straying beyond the boundaries of the souvenir-laden, guided tour is a dangerous prospect.
Footnotes:
*Briefel, Aviva and Sianne Ngai. “How much did you pay for this place?: Fear, Entitlement, and Urban Space in Bernard Rose’s Candyman” in Horror Film Reader. Ed. Alain Silver and James Ursini. Limelight Editions, 1991, p. 281.
**McClintock, Anne. “The Lay of the Land: Genealogies of Imperialism” in Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Context. New York: Routledge, Inc., 1995, pp.40-42.
- Aviva Briefel and Sianne Ngai*
Although I certainly think that there is some truth to Ritzer and Liska’s contention that contemporary tourism thrives on sameness rather than difference (I tend to lean more towards Bauman’s notion of “extraterritorialization” in which there is a more nuanced blending of the two), I definitely think that there is something to be said about the persistent, yet ambivalent search for “authentically different” experiences in the American popular imaginary. To me, this is an important aspect of what touristic horror films like Turistas (as well as Hostel/Hostel 2 and The Descent, among others) are all about.
In her essay “The Lay of the Land: Genealogies of Imperialism,”** Anne McClintock employs the very useful notion of “anachronistic space” to help explain the relationship between perceptions of time and space in the colonial imaginary. In her conceptualization, she argues that the modern adventurer’s journey involves not only a traversal of space, but also a traversal back through time to the “pre-industrial past.” Such a double movement allows for the emergence of contradictions from both psychoanalytic and historical perspectives: to the adventurer hailing from the modern, repressive society, the pre-Oedipal, colonial space comes to signify both a nostalgic return to a romanticized “natural” or “real” world, but also an anxiety surrounding the dangerous and savage unknown. And as many feminist, psychoanalytic critics have pointed out, this simultaneously idyllic and “terrible place” is often coded as feminine. (References are often made to dark, cavernous spaces, bleeding/crying, feminized monsters, etc.)
This historical and analytic framework is useful in helping to explain the impetus behind Turistas’ group of horny, twentysomething tourists and their love-hate relationship with their vacation space. On the one hand, it is a tropical paradise in which encounters with difference amount to consuming exotic food and having intercourse with Brazillian prostitutes. On the other hand, these tourists pay for their infatuation with more “authentic experiences” by encountering the dangers of the other’s uncivilized space: poverty, drug and human trafficking, violence, irrationalism, and a (very strange) third world revenge fantasy. More along the lines of Bauman, I would argue that a touristic conception of space strikes a “balance between the security of the familiar and the adventure of the strange,” and that global capitalism and its ubiquitous branding practices help to ensure much of this “security.” Maybe we can read this film as a cautionary tale that plays on colonial fantasies of the authentically different experience within the safe space of the screen, while simultaneously suggesting that straying beyond the boundaries of the souvenir-laden, guided tour is a dangerous prospect.
Footnotes:
*Briefel, Aviva and Sianne Ngai. “How much did you pay for this place?: Fear, Entitlement, and Urban Space in Bernard Rose’s Candyman” in Horror Film Reader. Ed. Alain Silver and James Ursini. Limelight Editions, 1991, p. 281.
**McClintock, Anne. “The Lay of the Land: Genealogies of Imperialism” in Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Context. New York: Routledge, Inc., 1995, pp.40-42.
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
There are a few major tropes of fandom that aren't covered in the articles that I feel like deserve a bit of attention giving their increasing prevalence.
The first is corrective sorts of fandom. There is a brief reference in it in "Why Heather Can Write," but it's more for what a particular writer does NOT do (190). This is of course not faulting the article for this, as Jenkins has written a number of other works that cover exactly that, but I just want to bring it up in the context of this class. Now, this article talks a lot about carving out a space for one's self within the context of a immersive world that is largely possible because of a "ticket to play." In many cases, however, people or entire groups feel like they lack this ticket, and so work through various channels to feel more involved. Some of the best examples of this are the Gaylaxians who sought to get a homosexual character onto Star Trek, arguing that it wasn't about addressing the issue of homosexuality since in the 24th century it wouldn't be an issue (didn't happen), and the campaign for a female Boba Fett. Currently, there is an entire campaign going on called Aang Ain't White, protesting the whitewashing (de-odorization) of the cast of The Last Airbender. This last one is particularly interesting since it is not ignoring a group's interests but rather taking away a "ticket to play" from a very, very large number of people who loved the franchise for its representation of other cultures.
The other type of fandom I think is really interesting is anti-fandom. In "Why Heather Can Write," Jenkins mentions a number of different responses to the books. I think one response that also comes up is using one fandom to criticize or belittle another's quality. And I think everyone knows what's coming now... a bunch of examples involving Twilight (but I think these are actually really interesting because it shows a level of evaluation of quality between fandoms by the fans and the mobilization of images from their series/film/world to attack another).
Less related
As a Comic 2 - note the text at the bottom of it.
Annnnd now for things I just like.
Trailer for the Hunt for Gollum - A fully done film, not just stopping at the trailer.
Star Wars Uncut is an amazing project to re-film all of Star Wars in various styles by fans, utilizing how iconic the images are to make it so they can be radically displaced and still coherent.
The first episode of Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series, which not only mocks the show, but also the way it was imported to the US by 4Kids! Entertainment (which also dubbed Pokemon)
Machinima - Red vs Blue - I can't believe I forgot this. The use of footage captured from a game to create entire stories. It's pretty fascinating to me how fans of a particular game (though they don't have to be fans, I suppose) use games as a pre-built animation software to create stories - in this case, somewhat mocking the multiplayer battles in Halo (among other things).
House/Dead Poets Society - An amazing use of characters from across multiple films to create a single character arc.
Closer is a great fan video that not only brings out different meanings from a text, but is also interesting proof of the very different readings people may get from the same thing.
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
"Us" by blimvisible
Link to Youtube version.
Self-described by the filmmaker as a "multifandom metavid," this video deals (quite eloquently, in my opinion) with the plight of fan creativity in relation to recent firestorms over fair-use and copyright. However, in my mind, this is interesting not just from a legal standpoint, but also because it allows us to rethink how we have traditionally thought of individual creativity and authorship.
As with so many fan videos, this one appropriates the lyrics of a popular song, Regina Spektor’s “Us,” in order to recontextualize the meaning of the remixed images under a new unity. The lyrics here seem instructive: the refrain “it’s contagious” could be taken to refer to the viral nature of Web 2.0 participation; the line about “living in a den of thieves” played over the image of Jack Sparrow is obviously a reference to the pejorative labeling of fans as pirates; and the line “tourists come to stare at us” could be taken as a jab at academics who take an ‘anthropological’ approach to studying fans as specimens (although the way the filmmaker inserts Henry Jenkins at this point may be a little harsh, as he is a self-confessed Aca-Fan.) The video’s inclusion of many pop cultural texts commonly appropriated by fans (including Star Trek, The Matrix, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, The X Files, etc.) situates it within a larger, community practices of fan creativity.
The video’s end seems to be a metaphorical call to arms for fans to take off their masks of anonymity, and V for Vandetta style, incite a revolution. Whether political activity through fandom is possible in the way that Van Zoonen and Jenkins conceptualize it is, of course, very much up for grabs, but as I alluded to earlier I think that there is definitely something to be said about the politics of collective creativity.
This politicized notion of collective creativity, of course, has a rich theoretical history. In the 1930s, Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” told us that the mystifying “aura” and monetary value surrounding the original piece of art would be destroyed as the work was mechanically reproduced, allowing it to be appropriated, added to, and recreated by anyone according to their subjectivity and context. Off his model, we can conceive of copyright and intellectual property in the following way: as an institution built on particular notions of the Romantic, individual genius and “original ideas” which are totally ahistorical, and which have historically been shown to limit, rather than “protect,” the progress of creativity and knowledge. As RiP: A Remix Manifesto recounts (drawing on Benjamin), you can’t truly own an idea or call it your own or original, because ideas always posit a relationship between tradition and innovation, the past and the future. Likewise, the artistic work is never a piece of original genius, but an amalgamation of choices from a distinct set of languages or codes, with novel or even subversive juxtapositions producing the impression of what we call “originality.”
Of course, Jenkins saw many of these same aspects in the activities of fans working within the Web 2.0 context of the internet. Terming them “prosumers” (a hybrid producer-consumer), he later expanded the breadth of the concept to describe the current “fan-ification” of the general audience that we have today. From Harry/Malfoy slash videos on Youtube to a DJ’s mash-up of her favorite songs to Shepard Fairey’s infamous appropriation of an AP photo as fodder for his Obama Hope poster, there are numerous examples of everyday consumers (not just fan subcultures) taking the “found objects” of pop culture and the ideas of the public domain, and creatively using them as elements of their self expression.
But then again, isn’t all creativity appropriation? How is this practice any different from the pastiche of any Quentin Tarantino film, or the tropes of any genre film for that matter? Or Picasso paying homage to African art, and making it a paradigm of modernist painting? Or even a student citing the ideas of an author as the building blocks for the rhetorical argument of her paper, much as I have done here? It would seem that, when it comes to the visual, aural, or artistic, people have a tendency to think of these works as if they were thought up out of thin air. Thus, I would argue that what these fan works begin to point to is part of a bigger shift in our conceptions of creativity: not as whole pieces of raw, original expression issuing forth from the unconscious of an artist, but as texts consisting of historical tropes or codes juxtaposed in novel or interesting ways. If we can just get away from this romantic notion that every thought or art work is somehow the product of one individual, we might just realize that we are building on the foundations of our histories and each other, and that a language exists for anyone and everyone to use –not just as the rarified artist of essential genius, or indeed, as the intellectual property of a corporation. Perhaps too, if it is acknowledged that we speak through images and music just as we speak with words, we couldn’t brand a group that has finally taken a hold of their culture with the pejorative label of pirates or thieves… Even if their "parts are slightly used." :)
Transmedia, Hollywood: S/Telling The Story event next Tuesday!
A UCLA/USC/Industry Symposium
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Registration begins at 9:15 A.M., Opening Remarks at 9:45 A.M.
The Ray Stark Family Theatre, SCA 108
George Lucas Building, School of Cinematic Arts Complex
900 W. 34th Street, Los Angeles, CA 90007
Sponsored by the UCLA Producers Program, UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television, USC Annenberg School of Communication & USC School of Cinematic Arts.
View the Official Website at http://www.tft.ucla.edu/transmedia-conference
Event Co-Directors:
Denise Mann, Associate Professor, Producers Program, UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television (dmann@tft.ucla.edu)
Henry Jenkins, Provost's Professor of Communication, Journalism and Cinematic Arts, USC Annenberg School of Communication (hjenkins@usc.edu)
Sponsored by the UCLA Producers Program, UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television, USC Annenberg School of Communication & USC School of Cinematic Arts.
View the Official Website at http://www.tft.ucla.edu/transmedia-conference
Event Co-Directors:
Denise Mann, Associate Professor, Producers Program, UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television (dmann@tft.ucla.edu)
Henry Jenkins, Provost's Professor of Communication, Journalism and Cinematic Arts, USC Annenberg School of Communication (hjenkins@usc.edu)
Monday, March 8, 2010
Snakes on a Plane
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/search/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002234847
http://www.snakesonablog.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amYzBQMT4VI&feature=related
Snakes on a Plane, otherwise known as the first and last time movie executives ever listened to fans on the internet, was released in the Summer of 2006. To make a not very long story short, the internet world got word of a new New Line Cinema movie in production called Snakes on a Plane. The title of the film mixed with the charismatic Samuel L. Jackson created an unheard of amount of internet buzz. Such buzz was odd since the movie did not come from another source with a pre-established fan base. Yet a huge cult following began. Fan sites and blogs (including the above snakesonablog) began sprouting up. One fan created a trailer with a fake Samuel L. Jackson saying the now infamous line "I want these motherf*cking snakes off this motherf*cking plane." Shockingly, because of the internet hype from fans, the producers went back and shot 5 extra days of footage, of course adding the famous line and changing the film from a PG-13 rating to R. So now these executives thought they were very hip and smart for listening to the internet fans who would now be so happy they would flood the theaters to see the film. Of course that did not happen. The film was a box office failure ($34 million domestic). Hollywood learned to never again trust random fans on the internet. I'm not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing. Although that Samuel L. Jackson line is still pretty priceless. Nevertheless, the power of fans and the internet was shown to the world.
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
Consuming Difference?
taken from: http://jrsrules.blogspot.com/
JJJJound is a photo blog that I found a while ago where this guy from Montreal just posts pictures of things he likes and thinks are cool. His images mainly consist of naked women, leather goods, models, skaters, and mostly European things...but among these he also likes to put in imagery of the gangster lifestyle plus Michael Jordan pics. When I was reading the David Crockett article, especially the part about "Black Style, Vernacular and the Cool Pose," I thought about the images on this blog. I didn't really like the Crockett article or find his arguments very compelling, but I think there is something to say about the use of black images and whatever cultural capital these images hold.
I know there was another post about tourism in South Central (by Katherine?) who wrote that "by marking the other as primitive, dangerous, and exciting the other becomes fetishized as a reparation to the sterility that is whiteness" and this can definitely be seen in the blog. The author of the blog publishes these photos he finds to show the world that he is cool and hip and gains some kind of cultural capital. All the images from this blog are fetishes of the blogs author, and that seems to be similar to what Crockett tries to describe in advertisements featuring Blackness but the consequences of this fetishization is unclear. Is it something even worth discussing? Is consuming these images somehow problematic?
While the form of consumption that goes on in gang tourism is very problematic and full of many issues concerning class differences and status , I don't really see any of the same issues from the examples Crockett gives. The example of the mom in McDonalds using Black vernacular English when she says "good" instead of "well"...Maybe someone in class can tell me the significance of ads like those.
Racial Stereotypes in Disney Movies
Reading Arlene Davila's article about how racial minority reacts to mainstream media in focus groups, I almost immediately associated that with Disney. After all, what could be more mainstream and directly influential to young people than Disney? I found it really interesting that while Americans are so concerned about this notion of political correctness and that race becomes such a touchy topic to discuss, Disney continues to make movies that are based on these stereotypical images that Americans have. I looked online and found a short essay by Libby Brunette, Claudette Mattory and Shannon Wood. They gave a few examples of how Disney exploits racial stereotypes in many of their movies: bad Arabs in Aladdin speak with accent whereas Aladdin himself, who also happens to be a street beggar, speaks perfectly Americanized English; In Lion King, the hyenas talk in heavy inner city African American dialect. Not to mention Asians always have slanted eyes, darker skinned characters almost always portrayed negatively. (I found it particularly striking that the leader of the circus in Dumbo was not only black, but also named Jim Crow!) Although Disney, in recent years, has been actively trying to incorporate multiculturalism in their cartoons (such as placing Pocahontas and Mulan as two of the Disney princesses), there are these subliminal racial conventions that exist in Disney's pictures and possibly in their audience's mind. Interestingly, growing up watching so many Disney movies, I never thought of not being able to associate myself with the characters because of differences in races and ethnicities. Even as an Asian who was born and raised in Asia, I played with blonde Barbie dolls instead of Dolls that try way to hard to sell their Asian-ness. Several weeks ago, Charlie mentioned that Disneyland is the idealized America that never existed. There is obviously an extremely heavy sense of racial awareness in America. The question is Disney trying to create a world of fantasia that excludes non-white people? or are American being too sensitive towards racial issues? (because honestly, before coming to US, I never thought of race as a societal issue, even though I grew up in an ethnically diverse community)
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