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.

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).

Star Trek

Harry Potter

Less related

As a Comic 1

As a Comic 2 - note the text at the bottom of it.

Annnnd now for things I just like.

New Moon in lolcats.

Fern Gully/Avatar trailer mash up.

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.

"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)

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.

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)