Special Issue: Digital Cartography: Screening Space

edited by Wendy Haslem & Athena Bellas

1. Reaching for the Screen in Nine Inch Nails’ Lights in the Sky – Katheryn Wright

2. I See You: the Posthuman Subject and Spaces of Virtuality – Rebecca Bishop

3. Cartographic City: Mobile Mapping as a Contemporary Urban Practice – Clancy Wilmott

4. Moving Through The Narrative: Spatial Form Theory and the Space of Electronic Literature – Lai-Tze Fan

5. The Digital Gesture: Rediscovering Cinematic Movement through Gifs – Hampus Hagman

6. Digital Memories: The McCoy’s Electronic Sculptures – Wendy Haslem

7. Red Riding Hood (2011): The Heroine’s Journey Into the Forest – Athena Bellas

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Geoff Ryman’s 253.

The way that a narrative unravels has traditionally been understood to occur over time: the time that it takes to read words on a page and to process meaning, and the time frame of events as depicted in the narrative. As we increasingly encounter electronic literature, which are narratives that operate on the computer and through computer systems, it becomes necessary to examine how the facilities of new media offer different methods of communication and therefore different methods of storytelling. We must account for qualities unique to new media: the screen, for example, is a space in which the status of text is subordinated by the image.[1] In fact, the screen can hold a variety of representational modes that may be utilized in electronic literature, causing a reader to move among narrative spaces. This possibility raises the question: what does it mean to navigate through these spaces in storytelling? To answer this, my paper offers an understanding of how space operates in the electronic narrative and how it may be mediated through the electronic narrative in a self-reflexive, metanarrational manner.

One approach that can be used to inform an understanding is an examination of how space has been described in a branch of narratology related to reader-response theory. Spatial form theory is the perception that “a degree of spatiality may be achieved [in narrative] through leitmotifs or extended webs of interrelated images.”[2] The structures and modes of operation described in spatial form theory are directly aligned with how they occur in electronic literature. For example, a person reading a hypertext must explore a network of webpages in order to generate enough content for a narrative. So too in spatial form narratives is the reader “confronted with an open-ended array of thematically interrelated factors he must weld into a picture – into a ‘spatial form.’”[3] I will use spatial form theory to examine electronic literature as a spatial reading experience as well as a temporal experience. Following a theoretical exploration of reading literature on the computer, I will demonstrate the execution and mediation of spatial reading through a pioneering hypertext, Geoff Ryman’s 253.[4]

Reading into the “Jump” of Electronic Literature

To begin, I will examine how the spatial qualities of hypertext can be approached by reader-response theory, particularly by spatial form theory. Hypertext differs from print text in its incorporation of hyperlinks, which are embedded upon each webpage, and through which a reader may jump from page to page. These jumps point toward aspects of digital media that dictate the production and execution of digital communication. That is, through the novelty of electronic literature, we recognize that as digital media operate in an ephemeral medium, they inevitably possess unique characteristics of time and space.

In order to better understand these characteristics, I turn to new media theorist Lev Manovich, whose foundational text The Language of New Media proposes five principles of new media.[5] In attempting to distinguish new media from old media, these principles describe methods of communication that are identified in computer-based media. Of concern to my argument are the second and fourth principles: modularity and variability. The principle of modularity describes how the structure of new media is formed through separate parts: as each part is stored independently, the deletion, substitution, and addition of new parts is made simple.[6] The principle of variability explains that, in correlation with modularity, new media artefacts possess branches in their programming; with regards to new media, a user must navigate through these branches to operate the media.[7] As hyperlinks allow a hypertext to operate through branching-type interactivity, Manovich states that a hypertext reader must follow links to retrieve a version of the document.[8] The phenomenon that he identifies is multilinearity, a style that is not common in the traditional narrative. The narrative as defined by print culture has followed the customs of linear storytelling: whether a story begins in the beginning, middle, or end of a narrative, all facets of the story are revealed to the reader. A multilinear narrative, however, possesses more than one narrative trajectory, and the interweaving of these trajectories is what Espen J. Aarseth calls a multicursory narrative.[9] Multicursory storytelling adds an element of interactivity to reading that can be found in hypertext, digital film, and video games.[10] A reader must choose which sections to read first or which to read at all, thereby changing the reader’s experience of the story so that he or she is indeed left with a version rather than a whole.

Therefore, hypertext is unlike print because it is has a modular structure and is prone to variability. Also, it does not possess a material form except in the technological machine within which it operates. Despite these unique structural and operative techniques, “hypertext theorists frequently employ spatial imagery to describe the relations made possible by links and textons … This rhetoric fails to hide the fact that the main feature of hypertext is discontinuity – the jump – the sudden displacement of the user’s position in the text.”[11] The jump must be accounted for, as it is inherent in the hypertext form; with adequate understanding, the jump of the hyperlink provides for hypertext fiction a claim to being a literary genre in its own right.

The jump has in fact been identified as an important element of reader-response theory. The mental processing of a jump in literary narratives has been explored by Wolfgang Iser, who posits that in any given text, meaning is not derived solely from the explicit statement, “but aims at something beyond what it actually says. This is true of all sentences in literary works, and it is through the interaction of these sentences that their common aim is fulfilled.”[12] Iser proposes a theory of the Implied Reader, whose act of reading is “a dynamic, transcendent, meaning-making activity negotiated through the gaps or indeterminacies of a text by the reader.”[13] We may situate Iser’s readerly gaps by recognizing that, in the context of computer-based media, they are reified as hyperlinks. Through the selection of hyperlinks, a reader is able to jump between Iser’s gaps – or the cyberspace between webpages – in order to fill in the text’s meaning.

Manovich’s alignment of new media operations with cinematic principles allows us to examine aspects of film under the terms of modularity and variability,[14] and by extension, under the terms of Iser’s Implied Reader. The cinematic technique of montage follows that elements are also organized in separate sections, each with its own meaning and figurative agency for meaning-making. While variability does not exist for traditional cinema in the way that it may for new media, one may argue that digital cinema, in engaging a viewer with different trajectories of a film narrative, operates in a multicursory manner. Digital film can be understood as interactive because the Implied Reader must, as over the space of celluloid, fill in a text’s meaning frame by frame, shot by shot. The possibility of the digital montage’s direction, however, has now been multiplied over cyberspace.

The Implied Reader also becomes the writer of the hypertext, so that readers of hypertext fiction may also be referred to as “users,” in that they control the sequence of the narrative through the activation of hyperlinks. This paper will hereafter refer to hypertext readers as reader-users. Sarah Sloane explores the way in which hyperlink gaps are filled by re-assessing the act of reading in the face of hypertext. Drawing from Andrea Lunsford and Lisa Ede’s theory of “writing types,” Sloane considers the readerly counterparts to these types. Reading up is how she describes content-based reading, the process of cramming and regurgitating information.[15] Reading out and back are akin to reading aloud or to repeating information to an audience, thus engaging a reader with others.[16] When reading into and between, one reads into a text and between the lines;[17] that is, to read into and between is to have a deep engagement with and absorption of the text. From an internal mediation of content, a deeper meaning can be extrapolated. From each of these types of reading, there occurs the reader’s externalization of him or herself towards the text – a uni-directional movement.

Conversely, hypertext fiction functions in a medium with its own operative logic and is therefore able to engage with the reader-user. We concern ourselves with a different type of reading: reading across, whereby the reader and text reciprocate each other’s actions. There exists a permeable border of which reader-users are the gatekeepers and the decision-makers of how a text unfolds, and these decisions are executed as hyperlinks are chosen. I liken reading across to media guru Marshall McLuhan’s aphorism, process over product, as, in a reader-user’s process of interaction with a text through hyperlinks, he or she will execute the imagination and make mental connections between webpages.

Spatial Form Theory and the Implied Reader-User of Hypertext

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Hypertext

Spatial form theorist David Mickelsen describes the reading of spatial form narratives in a way that could be interchangeable with the exploration of a hypertext: “Transitions are perfunctory or entirely ignored, and the arrangement of episodes is apparently not governed by a developmental principle. The chapters are blocks that might have been arranged at random without significantly altering the outcome – either for the protagonist or the reader.”[18] Regardless of the outcome of transitions, the human mind is able to configure elements of a text (whether static or fluid, whether print or hypertext) into a larger whole. The formation of this “whole” is the product of the act of reading, where

to complete the process of telling a story – of exchanging a narrative – the receiver must be constructive and produce or reproduce a coherent understanding of the message. Meaning is never contained or guaranteed by the text alone but requires the reader’s engagement and creative relationship to the text. The user relates to the given parts and generates a whole that makes sense in the receiving context.[19]

Mickelsen draws upon the Implied Reader’s style of reading for the purpose of articulating the act of reading spatial form narratives, as, “the reader’s collaboration and involvement, his interpretation [to fill in the gaps]. If ‘exploration’ is to be winnowed to ‘assertion,’ the reader must do it. Thus the ‘implied reader,’ in Wolfgang Iser’s phrase, in spatial form is more active, perhaps even more sophisticated, than that implied by most traditional fiction.”[20] The eagerness of spatial form theory to adopt Iser’s notion of the Implied Reader mirrors that of hypertext theory, and both have turned to metanarrative theory to describe the reader-user’s experience of interacting with a text.

Metanarratives, as described by Ann Daghistany and J.J. Johnson, are especially sensitive to relationships of fragmentation, which encourage reference and connection:

The reader of a spatial-form narrative cannot perceive the characters of their actions as he does in a traditional narrative – that is, he does not perceive separate, individual characters developing and interacting in a linear time frame, because this linear temporal development is largely missing. Instead, as he grasps the relationships between the parts through reflexive reference, the attentive reader of spatial form begins to perceive a pattern or whole form.[21]

By appropriating the notion and discourse of the Implied Reader, hypertext theorists may explain the self-reflexive processes by which the reader-user is able to make sense of the text. Other hypertexts that may also be examined through spatial form theory include Mary Flanagan’s theHouse, which simulates a three-dimensional space in which text can appear, and Lance Olsen and Tim Guthrie’s 10:01, which is a multimodal narrative utilizing images, text, sound, and multilinearity in its methods of storytelling.

253’s Self-Reflexivity of Spatial Movement

In this section, I will offer an example to demonstrate how electronic literature and hypertext operate through and are reflexive of digital space. I have chosen 253 because it is widely considered a pioneering hypertext. Published online in 1996 by Geoff Ryman, the hypertext demonstrates self-referentiality of the digital medium’s use of time and space.

253 is a hypertext that takes the form of a website with constituent webpages. 253 tells the story of a London Underground subway train travelling on the Bakerloo line and heading toward its destination of Elephant and Castle station. The reader-user is told that the train will not brake at Elephant and Castle, but instead, will hurtle past the station and crash in 7.5 minutes. The title of the hypertext refers to the fact that at full capacity, an Underground train carries two-hundred-fifty-two passengers across seven carriages – two-hundred-fifty-three including the driver. The “narrative” of the text consists of two-hundred-fifty-three passenger profiles, which reveal the following information about each passenger: “outward appearance: does this seem to be someone you would like to read about?”; “inside information: sadly, people are not always what they seem”; and “what they are doing or thinking: many passengers are doing or thinking interesting things. Many are not.”[22]

Each profile contains hyperlinks that reveal relationships between and among passengers, thereby allowing reader-users of 253 to form mental connections – figurative links – between people, and these links are explicit, provoked by Ryman, or arbitrarily conceived by the reader-user. In this way, 253’s theme of linking exists in its two related types of reading: reading through webpages as a reader-user explores links and jumps from page to page, and reading relationships between passengers. As such, linking exists in both the text’s form and content. In order to draw the reader-user’s attention to the theme of linking in form and content, the profiles are coupled with a series of false advertisements and explanatory hyperlinks, which the reader-user may access at any time, providing the possibility that these advertisements and explanations may also become part of the narrative. These additional links accompany and frame the profiles, making tongue-in-cheek references to the theme of linking in form and content, and referring back to the interactive style of reading 253. Whether the advertisements and explanatory links are accessed prior to, during, or after reading the passenger profiles, they serve as self-reflexive commentary on Ryman’s theme.

Self-Reflexivity of Medium

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Geoff Ryman’s 253.

First, 253 is self-referential of its structure by calling attention to the medium in which it operates. In the text’s introduction, “253? Why 253?” Ryman states, “Numbers [sic] are reliable. So that the illusion of an orderly universe can be maintained, all text in this novel, less headings, will number 253 words.”[23] The illusion of 253 as an orderly, static, and autonomous object is not actually maintained, as Ryman illustrates the artificiality of the text’s structure through its rigid numerical structure. The “End of the Line” page refers to the temporal novelty available to 253 as a hypertext, as one may choose this option at any point of the narrative. Should a reader-user tire of reading profiles, he or she may go the route of “sensationalism and violence,”[24] and discover the fate of all seven cars. This section has the opposite temporal effect of the majority of the text, as, rather than expand 7.5 minutes of travel into the time it takes to read two-hundred-fifty-three passenger profiles, the reader-user may instead skip to the ending, jumping from A to B, and engaging in a temporal ellipsis. In this way, the linearity of a traditional narrative is shattered as the reader-user is allowed to explore different spaces and times of the narrative.

Self-Reflexivity of Structure and Operation

The advertisements are perhaps the most self-referential aspect of the 253 reading experience, as they call attention to the structure- and content-based linking of the text, while at the same time presenting both as “natural.” Advertisement 7 encourages the reader-user to make connections between passengers, whether they are explicitly stated or need to be arbitrarily created by the reader-user. The text becomes self-reflexive of the branching-type interactivity offered through new media structure when Advertisement 7 promotes the binary-based Ascii Code as a way of forming relationships between passengers. Ascii Code – American Standard Code for Information Interchange – is a numerical code system that uses the numbers one and zero to represent letters on computers. Whether the reader-user realizes it or not, 253 as a text is an exercise in using Ascii Code to form relationships, as all computer data – including hypertext and hyperlinks – are composed of binary code. When a reader-user jumps from page to page, he or she does so through binary code. His or her exploration of passengers and consequent relationships are formed through the use of code, and what appears to be a random means of association is in fact integral to the process of reading a hypertext.

Ryman suggests using Ascii Code in order to select a profile, so that a reader-user may begin the process of forming relationships. He suggests flipping a coin repeatedly to generate the numbers one and zero into a pattern, landing at a number that will dictate which passenger the user considers reading about next. In titling this webpage “The 253 Way of Knowledge,” it is suggested that, like the Ascii Code system, the “knowledge” that the reader-user gains of passengers may be as arbitrary as flipping a coin. The knowledge is based on chance, on the likelihood of the reader-user choosing a particular hyperlink and arriving at its specific code. Unless a reader-user explores the entirety of 253, those passengers whom he or she gets to learn about is based on chance as well. Chance, then, is a subtheme of how one explores the space of the hypertext.

Self-Reflexivity of User-Generated Content

Following the logic of filling in Iser’s informational gaps, the reader-user similarly makes connections between and across profiles in 253. The text becomes self-reflexive of the act of reading in hypertext, and especially of the role of the reader-user, which 253 likens to that of a Godlike observer. New media studies have long emphasized user-generated content as having a huge stake in the production of online information. By calling the reader-user a Godlike observer, Ryman reveals two things: first, that the reader-user’s choices of links will shape the outcome of the text, and second, that in this series of choices, the reader-user moves through the narrative, from subway car to car, from character to character. The reader-user weaves through different elements of the text.

On the first link of the hypertext, Ryman explains the position of the reader-user: “do you sometimes wonder who the strangers around you are? This novel will give you the illusion that you can know. Indeed, it can make you feel omniscient, Godlike.”[25] The illusion offered is one of omniscient power over a text; the reader-user is situated as an observer of the passengers. The role can be best described using literary critic William Spanos’ formalist treatment of metanarrativity: “the critical act begins for the formalist not at the beginning … but only after the reading or perceptual process terminates; at the vantage point, that is, from which, like an omniscient god.”[26] The omniscient Godlike role is reiterated on a second webpage, in which Ryman describes a hypothetical situation in which the reader-user has an omniscient knowledge of others. This webpage functions as a reminder of the reader-user’s “vantage point” in the space of 253, where, similarly to spatial form narratives, “the reader is encouraged to identify not as a particular human being with particular characters but as a human mind experiencing a form, such as a square or a labyrinth, created by the interaction of fictional beings with one another and with their environment.”[27]

Interestingly, the agency of the reader-user in directing the time and space of the hypertext is also counterbalanced by Ryman when he urges, “Please remember that once you leave 253, you are no longer Godlike. The author, of course, is.”[28] While he ascribes to the reader-user a seemingly powerful role, in fact, the reader-user is only “user” insofar as he or she may activate preordained links. The non-diegetic reader-user of 253 has no control over the direction of the links, which all lurch, temporally and spatially, towards the inevitable ending.

Concluding Statements

As reader-users of hypertext, what we encounter is a literary form that may play off of expectations of print narrative, and then invert them so to upset expectations of genre and medium. When asked by journalist Leo Winson, “Do you think hypertext fiction has to break away from traditional concepts to be effective in this new form?” Ryman responded, “Sure do. I’m not sure the word is effective, though. Justified is more like it. Why waste time and energy if the same thing could be done in print?”.[29] With the intention of justifying the hypertext as a unique method of storytelling, Ryman sets out to teach the reader-user as much about the “new form” as possible. The communication is different, the exploration of plotline or plotlines are different, the execution is original, and the reader navigates through the narrative in more than one way. Therefore 253 reveals its own underbelly: the text is conscious of what it and its genre offers the reader-user. It is not the passenger profiles of the text that mediate the hypertext’s form and style, but everything that couples those profiles: the additional links, which shake the reader-user into awareness – awareness of the novelty of digital space. By engaging with this space through electronic literature, the reader-user may recognize that the hypertext engages actively, and forces him or her to make choices and read in a different way. In drawing attention to its interactive nature, hyperlinks and the readerly jump become their own instruction manual. 253 is thus a crash course on hypertext fiction, where the reader-user learns the genre by doing the genre.

References

Aarseth, Espen J. “Nonlinearity and Literary Theory.” Hyper/Text/Theory, 51-86. Edited byGeorge P. Landow. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.

Aarseth, Espen J. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.

Daghistany, Ann, and J.J. Johnson. “Romantic Irony, Spatial Form, and Joyce’s Ulysses.” Spatial Form in Narrative, 48-60. Edited by Jeffrey R. Smitten and Ann Daghistany. New York Cornell University Press, 1981.

Iser, Wolfgang. “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach.” New Literary History Vol. 2 (1972): 279-299.

Jewitt, Carey, and Gunther Kress. “Introduction.” In Multimodal Literacy, 1-18. New York; Berlin: Peter Lang Publishing, 2003.

Liestøl, Gunnar. “Wittgenstein, Genette, and the Reader’s Narrative in Hypertext.” In Hyper/Text/Theory, 87-120. Edited by George P. Landow. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1994.

Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2001.

Mickelsen, David. “Types of Spatial Structure in Narrative.” In Spatial Form in Narrative, 63-78. Edited by Jeffrey R. Smitten and Ann Daghistany. New York: Cornell University Press, 1981.

Page, Adrian. “Constructing Xanadu: towards a poetics of hypertext fiction.” The Question of Literature: The Place of the Literary in Contemporary Theory, 174-189. Edited by Elizabeth Beaumont Bissell. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002.

Ryman, Geoff. 253. 1996. http://www.ryman-novel.com

Sloane, Sarah. “The Materials of Digital Fiction.” Digital Fictions: Storytelling in a Material World, 65-106. Connecticut: Ablex Publishing Corporation, 2000.

—. “Muddy Readers, Malestreams, and Splitting the Atom of “I”: Locating the Reader in Digital Fiction.” In Digital Fictions: Storytelling in a Material World, 147-184. Connecticut: Ablex Publishing Corporation, 2000.

Smitten, Jeffrey R., and Ann Daghistany. Spatial Form in Narrative. New York: Cornell University Press, 1981.

Winson, Leo J. “A Reactive Interview with Geoff Ryman author of 253.” Dark Lethe. Reactive Writing. Web. 10 June 2012. http://www.leo.mistral.co.uk/hyper/253.htm

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Norman in Psycho.

An animated gif uses the Graphics Interchange Format to create movement from still images. The outcome is a short clip with jerky motion that has been described, quite aptly, as a “digital flip book”.[1] The device has been around since the 1980s, but due to its bite-size format, the ease of circulating it, and the availability of tools for creating one, the gif has in the last few years returned to become a widely popular item on blogs and tumblrs. Content-wise, animated gifs frequently consist of a few frames culled from a pre-existing movie. This brief moment is then looped in order to give the impression of a (somewhat) continuous movement. What is noteworthy about these mini movies is that they, quite often, focus on the “minor” moments of a film, such as, for instance, scenes from Gone With the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939) with Hattie McDaniel rather than the more memorable scenes of, say, the “Frankly, dear, I don’t give a damn” caliber.[2] Of course, the more iconic scenes get heavily referenced as well, but due to the brevity of the format, gifs are more suitable for mannerisms and gestures than “big” dramatic moments. The gifs that work the best are therefore those that manage to withdraw themselves from being representative of the films from which they are sourced in order to create a logic and economy of motion wholly their own.

It has been suggested that the compressed nature of the gif is ideal for our contemporary culture of distraction.[3] According to this view, the “video-shorthand” of the format corresponds to a cultural tendency toward ever-increasing abbreviation of information output and decreased temporal commitment.[4] Are we to believe, then, that gifs are part of the same contemporary logic that makes us prefer the quickness of twittering to the more time consuming activity of writing a blog post? Considering that gifs appear frequently on microblogging platforms such as Tumblr, maybe so.

But I think we miss something crucial about the attraction of the gif if we only take it to be a cultural symptom of our hectic times. The gif is more than just an easy means to share clips from favorite TV shows or movies in unaltered form. That the gif would be little more than a less time consuming, shorthanded replacement for the movie that it references is contradicted by the fact that, more often than not, the technology is used to alter the content of the original, sometimes beyond recognition. The gif, in other words, is more a matter of creation than recycling. At the heart of this creative intervention lies a recognition of cinematic movement as a force of differentiation and metamorphosis. As I will argue, the impetus behind the animated gif is as old as cinema itself.

Some historians and theorists of the moving image have pointed out that before film was organized into narrative sequences and stories, what enthralled filmmakers and spectators alike was the sheer fact that the images moved.[5] The central procedure of the gif consists in the restitution of fascination with the fundamental element of cinema: movement. It thus reveals a commitment to cinema rather than a devaluation of it. The animated gif is characterized by the attempt to make movement strange again, to assert a power of movement all its own, liberated from the responsibility of making it mean and carry out narrative goals. This inclination can be stressed by viewing the animated gif as a form of gesture.

In his short essay “Notes on Gesture” philosopher Giorgio Agamben argues that “the element of cinema is gesture and not image”.[6] A true gesture, suggests Agamben, is neither a means to an end nor an end without means, it is means as such, the manifestation of pure mediality. Cinema¾at least in its earliest manifestation and the chronophotographic experiments that paved the way for it¾liberates human movement from being purposeful, it is the exhibition of the medium of movement for and by itself. Stephen Crocker lucidly brings forth this point:

The effect of Muybridge’s photographic and filmic experiments such as Man Walking at Normal Speed was to take recognized gestures and, through the technical capacity of film, to remove them from the sensory motor schemas and purposes in which they are usually embedded. Early film and photography revealed the sheer taking place, or the “means” of human embodiment. The arm swinging is no longer part of a march. It is simply an arm swinging, arrested in its being toward some completed activity. If it were allowed to continue in its stride, the swing would be a means to carrying out some ambulatory goal. Removed from its terminal point, however, it is simply a gesture, a means of moving the human body in a yet to be determined pattern. This decontextualization of movement allowed a new understanding of human embodiment, which spread into psychology, physiology and other sciences. For Agamben, it suggests that cinema is not defined by the image and the dialectic of reality/representation, so much as its ability to display the “pure mediality” of our actions.[7]

However, it should be noted that narrative cinema tends to subordinate the gesture to the larger whole in which it is embedded and through which it receives its meaning. Hereby, the gesture is not allowed to stand by itself “decontextualized”, in the word of Crocker’s elucidation but becomes goal-oriented and causal in nature. As Benjamin Noys points out, Agamben is quite hostile to narrative cinema. His sympathies rather lie with avant-garde cinema since it more prominently exhibits the medium as such. Appropriately enough for our purposes, Agamben regards repetition of images as a way to “free the gestures within them”.[8] When gesture is liberated, its pure mediality manifests itself as potential, and because of this, Agamben sees in the gesture a political and ethical dimension.

As noted above, the gif, too, employs repetition not as a principle of sameness but as a principle of difference. By virtue of its looped repetition, movement is displaced from the circumscribed meaning it had in its original context and never reaches its narrative telos. When this happens, one is able to see beyond the representative content of movement and instead become aware of the altering force of movement to produce other meanings. I would like to argue, therefore, that the animated gif emerges in recognition of this pure potentiality of the gestural motion of cinema. By liberating a moment from its hosting narrative, the gif restores to cinema the gestural quality that has been veiled by its causal embeddedness. The gif can be said to perform the sort of decontextualization that Crocker writes of, and thereby cinematic movement is rebooted—given a second life as it were—outside the strictures of the narratives from which they originate. Hereby, the original meaning of a movement or gesture counts for little. Rather, it is the potential of movement to be put to other purposes that is asserted. Can we not, then, see the gif as a means to salvage the gesture from a cinema that has rendered it merely a means to an end and values it mainly for its accomplishment of narrative goals? A great many gifs are based on films with strong linear and causal structures. But what they do is to take hold of the excess inherent to them, to the effect that their original meanings are subverted, or at least opened up to recontextualizations.

The site GIFuniverse revels in this excessive power of movement.[9] The principle of repetition is here not only deployed temporally, but also spatially. Combining the successive repetitiveness of the gif with the spatial juxtaposition of the split screen, the whole screen is here filled with row upon row of pulsating, rhythmic and dancing imagery, all set to an accompanying musical soundtrack. The images displayed are of decidedly varied origin and content (amateur home videos appear next to clips from films and television; animation next to live action; scientific models next to low-brow visual gags) but their musical setting makes the visual field less chaotic than one might imagine. It is rather as if all the images were interacting components in a common rhythm: as if one were witness to some heterogeneous balletic choreography. Before the contemplation of specific content or the identification of visual forms can take place here, what strikes the viewer is the sheer excess of movement.

Cinematic culture has always been fascinated with the transformative and autonomous powers of movement. In his essay, “Loïe Fuller and the Art of Motion”, Tom Gunning relates how the invention of cinema was welcomed by the changing aesthetic ideas of movement in the late 19^th and early 20^th century. Spearheading a lot of the new thoughts on movement was philosopher Henri Bergson, whom Gunning approvingly quotes: “In reality, the body is changing form at every moment; or rather, there is no form, since form is immobile and the reality is movement. What is real is the change of form: form is only a snapshot view of transition.”[10] In line with such thinking, the Symbolists and the Futurists saw “motion as force in itself, a plasmatic energy that creates form rather than simply moves them about”.[11] Gunning takes Loïe Fuller’s serpentine dances as the exemplary demonstration of this metamorphic dimension of movement, but early cinema too celebrated movement for its own sake, with little or no narrative concerns. This leads Gunning to speak of movement as a matrix of meaning rather than meaning itself.[12]

So, is this detour through early cinema meant to imply that the animated gif heralds a return to a more “pure” state of the moving image? Blogger Kelli Marshall suggests something along these lines.[13] Indeed, as Marshall points out, on a technical and receptive level gifs do bear striking similarities to early cinema, or even proto-cinema: they are silent, they are viewed in private (Marshall is here making a comparison to the Kinetoscope in particular and how it allowed for viewing by only one person at a time) and they run on a loop. But, in addition to Marshall’s account, what is most striking about many gifs is their almost fetishistic fascination with pure movement, something they share with early cinema. The capacity of movement to transform is celebrated in many gifs. Through the circular continuity of the loop, a familiar bodily activity is rendered strange and bereft of regular sensorimotor causality. Through such forces of repetition and extension, the gif seems to tap into the matrix of movement that Gunning writes about. Gunning’s account leads us to recognize the excessive character of cinematic movement, which entails that it can take on meanings different from the one that it has reified into by serving as an agency of causal structures. Viewing the gif through the lens of Agamben’s gesture underscores this matrixial quality of movement, its dimension of pure mediality. As we shall see, however¾and this is where the digital component enters the equation¾the gif carries the gesture of movement to an ethical level beyond mere subjective cinephilia. The main difference from earlier cinema is that the gif makes our fascination with movement communicable and shareable, rather than just being the source of private consumption.

But before the gif can enter into circulation we must shed light on the logic that produces it in the first place. We must, in other words, explore what aspects of the film experience may count as “gestural”, and how these may be allowed to stand by themselves even in the face of films that work to neutralize them.

Methods of extraction: cinephilia and excess

One of the fundamental dictates of textual analysis is that the part is interpreted in light of the whole. For the cinephile, on the other hand, it is of little concern how something may or may not fit into the objective structures of meaning. Christian Keathley, quoting Paul Willeman, defines cinephilia as ”what is seen [that] is in excess of what is shown.”[14] Cinephilia is hence a stance of dissociation; of taking a detail from a movie and extracting it from the flow into which it is embedded. It is, as Keathley argues, a form of fetishism. The “cinephiliac moment” has nothing to do with those scenes inscribed into our collective memory banks, which is to say moments that are designed to be memorable, such as, for instance, the shower scene in Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960). It is on the contrary those moments of purely subjective enjoyment, whose precise appeal may be difficult to communicate to others. The gif can be regarded as a way of visualizing this subjective fetishism for a wider public. The animated gifs that are encountered all over the internet very seldom tell a story: on the contrary they seize hold of those purely excessive moments that carry little to no narrative purpose.

There exists a minor tradition in film theory that seeks to shed light on those moments of films that are not contained by more dominant signifying structures, but that are, simply, excessive. In the essay “The Third Meaning”, Roland Barthes ponders a collection of stills from Eisenstein’s films and wonders just what it is that affects him about them. He reaches the conclusion that beyond the “obvious meaning” contained in the informational and symbolic levels of a film there exists a third meaning that is not as easy to pin down. He attempts to capture this dimension by writing about how different stylistic elements in the mise-en-scene interact with one another. There is one still in particular that attracts Barthes’ attention. It is of an old woman from Battleship Potemkin (1925), and in it, Barthes finds that there is something striking about the purely formal relation between the lines of the woman’s headdress, her closed eyelids, and the shape of her mouth. To the scientific mind, Barthes ruminations may appear completely arbitrary, but this is exactly the point. The obtuse meaning escapes objective determination, it has its base in subjective reaction. Despite his assertions to the contrary, Barthes appears a proper cinephile when writing: “I believe that the obtuse meaning carries a certain emotion. […][This] emotion is never sticky, it is an emotion that simply designates what one loves, what one wants to defend: an emotion-value, an evaluation.”[15]

Barthes points out that the “third meaning” might only be accessible through the film still, the fragment. In the normal course of watching a film, the third meaning is drowned in the flow of images. However, as we can see from Keathley’s text, the cinephile knows how to cling onto these fleeting moments and details, even in the process of viewing a film. One reason that s/he is able to do so is because the cinephile is prone to repeat viewings.

Kristin Thompson has built upon Barthes’s discussion of the third meaning in order to develop a “concept of cinematic excess”. Excess is that which is not contained by a film’s unifying structures: “At that point where motivation fails, excess begins.”[16] Thompson suggests that one way to become aware of excess is through experimental films that examine already existing films, rearranging and repeating their components and bringing forth other qualities than those relating to narrative. After discussing films that have proceeded along these lines, such as Ken Jabob’s Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son (1969) and Joseph Cornell’s Rose Hobart (late 1930s), Thompson disclaims that she “mean[s] to imply that the spectator or critic will be led to aesthetic creations of their own as a result of watching for excess.”[17] And yet, this is precisely what has happened. A gif do not require particularly sophisticated technology. Anyone can make one: software is available for free online and there is an app on the iPhone.[18] The availability of means to intervene into a movie¾to dissect and reconfigure its components¾has entailed that the excessive details from movies that were previously stored in the private memory banks of individual cinephiles have now become public property. By intensifying the excessive moments through repetitive looping and posting them online, viewer has now become purveyor of cinephiliac moments.

Some sites manifestly thrive on the excessive details of cinema. The blog If We Don’t, Remember Me wears its cinephile tastes on its sleeve.[19] Originator Gustav Mantel here posts shots from classic films such as The Seventh Seal (Ingmar Bergman, 1957), Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), Full Metal Jacket (Stanley Kubrick, 1987), 8 ½ (Federico Fellini, 1963), and Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, 1960) to mention but a few. The technique he uses to present them is called “cinemagraph”, which makes use of the gif format, but is visually different from traditional animation uses of it in that it can more properly be described as a combination of still photography and video. The results are “living movie stills”, as Mantel calls them: images that are essentially still but for a small part. Many of the images collected on the blog appear, at a casual glance, completely still. But attending to them long enough, something suddenly jolts into motion.

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Fightclub

In an emblematic image, Edward Norton from Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999) sits with his eyes closed in an airplane chair—as if frozen in a dream—for what appears to be a quite significant amount of time. Suddenly, the image springs into motion the very same moment that he opens his eyes to directly face the viewer.[20] The effect is not unlike the moment in Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962) when, in the midst of a film composed of still images, there is a sudden eruption of movement as the girl opens her eyes. The coinciding of the opening of eyes with the moment of animation makes the sequence resonate with symbolic implications in regard to the gif’s repurposing of cinematic movement. According to one of the founding stories of cinema, the first exhibition of the Lumière brothers’ film L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat in 1896 started with a still image. Only after a while was it jolted into motion to render the impact of movement all the more striking. Similarly the cinemagraph explores the relation and difference between stillness and movement in order to let the viewer see movement anew with, as it were, freshly awakened eyes.

Even though the creators of the technique of the cinemagraph states that it was “born out of a need to tell a story in a fast digital age”[21] it is used more frequently to intensify a moment that may have little to no narrative purpose. The animated gif can therefore be seen as a properly cinephiliac gesture, underscoring minor moments that are lost in the more regular circumstances of viewing a film. Consider, for example, two gifs of Marlon Brando, the first from A Streetcar Named Desire (Elia Kazan, 1951), the second from On The Waterfront (Elia Kazan, 1954). The first intervenes in a flirtatious scene between Stanley Kowalski (Marlon Brando) and Blanche DuBois (Vivien Leigh). Brando leans toward Leigh and cracks a little smile. Decontextualized and looped, the original meaning of these gestures never reaches their assigned destination. Instead, Brando here takes on an almost vampyric quality, appearing as if about to take a bite out of Leigh.[22] In the clip from On the Waterfront, Brando points to his nose while chewing gum and arching his eyebrows.[23] Nothing more significant than that. Here meaning is drained from the image to the extent that it is difficult to make any sort of determinations or analogies as to the proper content of these gestures whatsoever. Rather, it’s all about the gestural interplay of the lines and shapes of the image: the way Brando’s profile lines up with the angle of his finger and the way that his arched eyebrows serves as an exclamation mark to this little fugue of movement.

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“The third meaning: Brando demonstrating the excess of movement”

That it is Marlon Brando that appears in these clips is therefore highly symptomatic from the viewpoint of excess. His method acting offers a gallery of eccentric mannerisms and excessive gestures, all ripe for cinephiliac appropriation. Originally, of course, Brando’s technique was developed in view of lending psychological depth to his characters, and hence meant to be deployed in the service of narrative. But as Kristin Thompson notes a propos excess, “stylistic elements may serve at once to contribute to the narrative and to distract our perception from it.”[24] Once we are consumed by the excessive detail it parts way with the (objective) story and enters into another (more subjectively defined) story. This is why Thompson regards excess as counter-narrative.

Trying to describe the strange, twitching movements contained in these clips I find myself struggling to find words. This is not exactly the stuff of high drama, which is why it is quite hard to capture the exact appeal of the gif, or even offer an adequate description of it. Their reconfiguration of human embodiment by technical means places them in the Freudian category of the “uncanny”: they are both familiar and unfamiliar. The meaning they communicate is indeed “obtuse”, to use Barthes’ word. Barthes suggests that the obtuse third meaning cannot be described, that it resists meta-language. It is a “signifier without a signified” and, as such, can only be indicated by “pointing” to it rather that representing it in words.[25] This is why, according to Barthes, the third meaning is where the specifically “filmic” resides. The third meaning accentuates what language is not: the part in a film which escapes the grasp of words and therefore asserts itself as a wholly different medium. This returns us to Agamben’s gesture. The gesture displays nothing more than its own potentiality, it has no meaningful content. The gesture displays nothing more than its own potentiality, it has no meaningful content. Gesture is about suspending and supporting, about “enduring” rather than accomplishing and carrying through.[26] The gif asserts this supportive power of movement through its presentation of looping as a method of continuation.

Looping as enduring

Most gifs do not offer closure. As I have suggested above, their purpose is not to capture an event in its entirety, where beginning and end are clearly marked, and the loop is just a way to show the sequence all over again. The point is rather to make the looping structure enter into the perception of the content. The challenge of the gif is to isolate a moment from a film that is compatible with the technique’s looping structure. To this end, the most successful gifs make use of the repetitive or circular motions already present in the original source. It is no coincidence that animated gifs are frequently used for porn. The repetitiveness of the thrusting motions in porn makes the intervention of looping nearly indistinguishable from the original content. In these cases, the gif carves a slice out of a fleeting moment of movement and extends it to a hypothetical infinity that is already a logical possibility of the activity inherent in the original source. The satisfaction is that of isolating a moment of motion that appears self-sustaining, closed in on itself in a perfect loop. They can hereby be said to employ excess as a method of suspension and continuation. Through this logic we are presented with, for instance, Jeff Bridges as “the Dude” stirring his White Russian in The Big Lebowski (Joel Coen, 1998),[27] or Charles Foster Kane’s resolute clapping in a scene from Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)[28] extended, hypothetically, ad infinitum. The natural repetitiveness and circularity of these kinds of activities puts them in close proximity to the artificial manipulation of looping. What is striking about these extensions of movement is their excessively useless character. Their purpose is not to represent anything or carry some point across. It is simply to sustain a basic motion for as long as possible.

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“Motion as sustaining force: The Dude locked in a perfect loop”

There are, of course, “punch-line” gifs that carry a more explicit purpose. In these cases, a movement is altered by the structure of the loop in order to suggest a repetitive action with a meaning that subverts the original content. It is popular, for instance, to loop a hip movement in order to give it a sexual connotation that it does not have in original form.[29] But in both its extending and altering modes of movement the gif can be said to explore movement as nothing more or less than a sustaining force. The motions produced by these gifs are not inherent to the original sources. Nevertheless, we are able to read them as continuous activities. But the movement is neither a means to achieve goals beyond itself (it is not employed to carry out narrative goals), nor is it an end (to be quite literal about it, the looped gif does not come to an end: as is evidenced by the examples above, movement can here be extended to a hypothetical infinity). Agamben writes: “What characterizes gesture is that in it nothing is being produced or acted, but rather something is being endured and supported.”[30]

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“The punch-line gif: the altering power of movement: Twilight”

Gesture as circulation

This is what the gif does: it shows movement as pure support; as the medium that carries actions and events. It is not a matter of communicating a particular content, but of showing movement as a medium of communicability as such. In itself, it is pure becoming and process, and this is key to understanding its success as an item of networked circulation. Through its decontextualized status as pure medium, it is free to enter into many different contexts. Gifs are frequently used to answer a question from a follower on a blog. In these contexts the gif can be supplied with a more definite meaning. When the gif is recontextualized as a response to a question, the excess set free at the first stage is “sutured”, given a home as part of discourse, and is hence supplied with a more definite meaning. [31] We might say that in these cases, the empty signifier of the gif is completed with a signified with the consequence that pure gesture is reified into image. But the reason it can do so is that it is recognized in its pure mediality in the first place. Recontextualization is hence only a by-product of a preceding decontextualization of movement. And it is this momentary suspension of movement that makes it resonate in many different contexts and hence spurs on its circulation. The gif presents movement not as a vehicle for achieving a particular goal (for instance narrative closure) but as pure mediality and communicability.

If we may so bold as to call the art of the gif an ethics of cinema, it is because it emerges in recognition of movement as a medium of support and circulation. The gif is gestural not only in the sense that it, in a cinephiliac manner, feeds off and liberates the gestures of cinema, but also in the sense that the gif itself gestures toward further use. The distributive chain of movement as gesture that the gif performs, and which I have here attempted to sketch, can be summarized thusly: a (cinephiliac) viewer recognizes an element of excess in a movie. By “giffing” it, this element is detached from its original meaning, but not, necessarily, in order for it to take on another definite meaning. What is released at this creative stage is simply movement as a deterritorialized force. Posted online, another viewer recognizes the strange and altered form a (possibly) familiar moment from a film has taken, and hence becomes aware of movement as pure potential. Quite literally, it gestures to him or her. Maybe this viewer has a blog and decides to use the gif for his or her own purposes. Now, integrated into a personal discourse, it can receive a temporary meaning. But another viewer can put it to other purposes. Hence, the gif can achieve many different closures in many different contexts rather than one absolute, determinate meaning. Hereby the gif asserts the generalizable character of gesture, its status as example. As Stephen Crocker writes: “to stand out as an example, the phenomenon must be able to suspend its own functionality and purpose, because only then can it show how it belongs to the set. What it displays in that case is not only its own singularity, but also the thing in its medium of activity.”[32]

Showing the thing in the “medium of activity” demonstrates a potential and can hence instigate further activity. This is why Agamben attributes to gesture an ethical and political dimension. The gif can in accordance with this be considered an ethical gesture not only in the sense that it liberates and re-potentializes cinematic movement, but also in the sense that it gestures toward further circulation and sharing of the moments of cinema.

References

Agamben, Giorgio. “Notes on Gesture” (1992), in Means Without End: Notes on Politics, trans. V. Binetti and C. Casarino, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.

Barthes, Roland. “The Third Meaning” (1970), in Image-Music-Text, transl. by Stephen Heath, New York: Hill and Wang, 1977.

Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell, Boston: University Press of America, 1983.

Cubitt, Sean. The Cinema Effect, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005.

Gunning, Tom. “Loïe Fuller and the Art of Motion: Body, Light, Electricity, and the Origins of Cinema”, in Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida: Essays in Honor of Annette Michelson, eds. Richard Allen and Malcolm Turvey, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003.

Keathley, Christian. The Cinephiliac Moment”, in Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, issue 42, 2000.

Oudart, Jean-Pierre. “Cinema and Suture”, in Screen, 18 (4), 1977.

Thompson, Kristin. “The Concept of Cinematic Excess” (1981), in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen, New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.

Online References

Alexander, Leigh. “Why We Love Animated Gifs”, posted May 24, 2011 on thoughtcatalog.com

Crocker, Stephen. “Noises and Exceptions: Pure Mediality in Serres and Agamben” published 3/28/2007 on ctheory.net.

Marshall, Kelli. “Animated Gifs, Cinemagraphs, and our Return to Early  Cinema”, posted on June 8, 2011 on kellimarshall.net.

Nelson, Noah J. “So Long Animated GIFs, Hello Cinemagraph”, posted  April 20 2011, on turnstylenews.com

Noys, Benjamin. “Gestural Cinema: Giorgio Agamben on Film” in Film-Philosophy Journal, Vol. 8, No. 22, July 2004 on film-philosophy.com

Wortham, Jenna. “Instant Loops of Images, From an iPhone App”, posted  April 7, 2011, on the New York Times blog, bits.blogs.nytimes.com

Blogs and Tumblrs

3 Frames: http://3fram.es/iphone

A Pebble in my Shoe: http://bellecs.tumblr.com

Bye Gurl, Bye: http://fuckyeahreactions.tumblr.com/

Everything You Love to Hate: http://everythingyoulovetohate.tumblr.com

Fuck Yeah Reactions: http://fuckyeahreactions.tumblr.com/

GIF Party: http://gifparty.tumblr.com

GIFuniverse: http://gifuniverse.tumblr.com/

Gif World: http://gifworld.tumblr.com/

If We Don’t, Remember Me: http://iwdrm.tumblr.com/

Reaction Gif: http://reactiongif.tumblr.com/

Tea, Earl Grey, Hot: http://hugatreeortwo.tumblr.com

Notes

Abstract: This article investigates the connections between history and new forms of memory that are produced, configured and mapped with the tools of digital media. Digital memories are contained within, and inspired by Jennifer and Kevin McCoy’s electronic sculptures. The article explores the potential for new media technologies to re-imagine the intersection between history and memory as digital ‘lieu de mémoire’, a version of Pierre Nora’s memory sites that block the possibility of forgetting by remembering for us.

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The Eternal Return – The McCoys (2003)

The explosion and expansion of digital tools and communication transforms definitions of memory and refines the intersection of memory and history. Digital natives and digitally literate adopters have tools at hand to practice as cartographers, genealogists, archivists, and chroniclers, even historians. This results in the creation of new connections and communities, archives that become virtual as well as material, histories that might be both real and imagined. Image and text based sites like You Tube, Vimeo, Flickr, Wikipedia, Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook and the range of pervasive blogging sites across the Internet provide new ways to produce and disseminate digitally configured histories and memories. The influence of the virtual on material sites of exhibition, particularly galleries, museums, cinematheques and public sites is evidenced by an increased reliance on digital tools, particularly digital screens, to reconfigure memory and history. Digital technologies enable myriad approaches to history, expanding definitions beyond the dominance of the empirical or sequential, bringing memory into contact with history. The obsession with the present in status updates, uploads, new blog posts and the seemingly immediate availability of content brings memory into the present. Exceeding the acceleration of history characteristic of Fredric Jameson’s definition of postmodern culture (1991), the present is rapidly superseded by an immediate future/past or the past eternally returning. Concurrently, definitions of memory produced, distributed and exhibited by digital technologies result in the proliferation of innovative forms of remembering and new ways to imagine histories by prioritizing memory. The electronic sculptures produced by Jennifer and Kevin McCoy that reveals how digital technologies can be used to reflect processes of memory and to map new connections. Installations produced by the McCoys frame and direct memories, they don’t remember for us, but instead, they reveal how memories are indebted to, provoked by and shaped by aspects drawn from the archive of visual cultures. But this interrelationship between memory and history, mapped and imagined through digital technologies was not always perceived as entwined, let alone contingent.

The historian Pierre Nora argues that history and memory exist in violent opposition (1989, p. 8). He describes history as a static, incomplete attempt to reconstruct a past that no longer exists, whilst memory is more fluid, involved in a process of rediscovery that “remains in permanent evolution” (Nora 1989, p. 8). In Nora’s words, “history is perpetually suspicious of memory, and its true mission is to suppress and destroy it” (1989, p. 9). This dynamic collision between history and memory is the result of the acceleration of history at a time that Nora defines as: “a turning point where consciousness of a break with the past is bound up with the sense that memory has been torn-but torn in such a way as to pose the problem of the embodiment of memory in certain sites where a sense of historical continuity persists” (1989, p. 7). The notion of memory as ‘torn’, no longer complete, singular, trusted, no longer emanating from a defined date, moment or time, provides impetus for memory as imagined, embodied and defined in sites beyond the scope of the traditional archive. Nora identifies memory as fluid and transformed by its passage through history. “Memory remains in permanent evolution open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of its successive deformations, vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation, susceptible to being long dormant and periodically revived” (Nora, 1989, p. 8).  In Nora’s words, memory’s vocation is to record and whilst delegating to the archive the responsibility of remembering, “it sheds its signs upon depositing them there, as a snake sheds its skin” (13). Nora perceives modern memory as above all, archival, relying on the materiality of the trace, the immediacy of the recording, the visibility of the image (1989, p. 13). Whilst Nora’s argument focuses predominantly on French national identity and politics, his discussion of the transformation of history and memory offers a particularly pertinent approach for an investigation of the impact of digital media on remembering. New forms of communications media provide increased access to memory, creating very specific structures for sites of remembering and producing an illusion of memory as immediate, reflexive and interconnected. The digital reshapes the production, distribution, dissemination and exhibition of memory producing innovative approaches to mapping, interacting with memory, and new sites of remembrance. Once captured, memory may contribute another strand of history.

For Nora, lieux de mémoire are sites where “memory crystallizes and secretes itself”, memory sites that block the possibility of forgetting and act to remember for us (1989, p. 7). Nora writes that the “most fundamental purpose of the lieu de mémoire is to stop time, to block the work of forgetting… all of this in order to capture a maximum of meaning in the fewest of signs” (1989, p. 19). In these sites history besieges memory as, “moments of history torn away from the movement of history, then returned” (Nora 1989, p. 12). Memory sites can be actual spatial forms like archives, exhibitions, personal shrines, and they can be tangible objects: collections of photographs, objects, diary entries, notes, tickets and souvenirs. They can also be more ephemeral, taking the form of thoughts, reminiscences and spoken word stories. Lieux de mémoire originate with the sense that “there is no spontaneous memory, that we must deliberately create archives, maintain anniversaries, organize celebrations, pronounce eulogies, and notarize bills because such activities no longer occur naturally” (Nora 1989, p. 12). Nora’s conception of lieux de mémoire arises from the acceleration of history. He writes that: “if history did not besiege memory, deforming and transforming it, penetrating and petrifying it there would be no lieux de mémoire” (Nora, 1989, p. 12).

Extending Nora’s lieu de mémoire into the realm of the visual historical archive, these sites can be reimagined as electronic databases, multimedia projections, or interactive exhibits, sites that preserve, but also revise, reshape, and inspire new memories. Electronic lieux de mémoire are used to construct and deconstruct memory in the multimedia artworks produced by the American artists Jennifer and Kevin McCoy. Across their oeuvre, the artworks build on and complicate definitions of memory, situating it in relation to an archive of recent popular cultural history. Laura U. Marks describes the McCoy’s web based work Airworld.net (1999) as noophagic – sucking in, eating information from other sites, reprocessing images and text and emerging with the advertising, branding and even the special offers of a new, artificial, corporation mined from corporate language on the web (2002, p. 189). Airworld.net is a web-based artwork that trawls commercial sites and creates networks of text, jargon, still images and footage from security cameras in the workplace. Lev Manovich defined Jennifer and Kevin McCoy as postmodern media artists who “accept the impossibility of an original, unmediated vision of reality; their subject matter is not reality itself, but a representation of reality by media, and the world of media itself” (2002a, np). Manovich develops the notion of soft cinema as database art, a specific type of new media art that is indebted to the archive, but reverses the opposition traditionally associated with the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic (2002b, pp. 230-231). For Manovich, database art values the paradigmatic, the tangible range of possible choices, options or possibilities over the syntagmatic, the virtual flow of words and images. Producing art that prioritizes memory, but refuses to narrativize it in classical form, the early installations can be understood as offering a matrix of impressionistic sequences, reflecting the illogical, sensuous workings of memory. In their database art installations, the McCoy’s work opposes rigidity and linearity, even when it is derived from the delay-filled, repetitious parallelisms characteristic of serial narrative form. Instead, the installations offer multiple possibilities and perspectives, splitting and fracturing spectatorship, creating new ways to map memories and a diverse range of possible narrative forms. The ‘electronic sculptures’ created by the McCoys rely on paradigmatic contingency to complicate the notion of memory as personal and individual by reworking and interweaving popular visual histories into their artwork. The resulting new media art reinvent Nora’s lieux de mémoire using miniaturized cinematic technologies, database narration and electronic sculptural dioramas.

The expansion of cinema towards the digital and into the art gallery, produces new ways of mapping, engaging and exhibiting memory. Anne Friedberg identifies the transition towards the digital resulting in an increasingly mobilized, virtual experience of visual cultures (2006). Jennifer and Kevin McCoy’s collaboration creates art that juxtaposes personal with collective memories, offering viewers an interactive experience in encouraging an intervention by the deconstruction and reconstruction of popular narrative. Their art creates a matrix of reference points drawn from some very recognizable popular iconography to exhibit an inextricable connection between individual and collective memory. The installations that were created at the turn of the millennium combine the interactive potential of the database with the seemingly endless array of visual motifs, generic tropes and narrative threads recognizable from popular televisual serials. Every Shot, Every Episode (2001) is a deconstruction and recreation of the Starsky and Hutch (1975-1979) series resulting in a new taxonomy consisting of two hundred and seventy-eight categories. Individual shots and scenes from the series were excised and reorganized to feature new paradigmatic, aesthetic and cinematographic categories including: ‘Every Bloody Clothing’, ‘Every Yellow Volkswagen’, ‘Every Sexy Outfit’, ‘Every Stabbing’, ‘Every Character Looks Left’, ‘Every Insult’, ‘Every Speculation’, ‘Every Extreme Close Up’, ‘Every Pan Right’, ‘Every Tilt Down’, ‘Every Zoom In’ and ‘Every Reaction Shot’. This approach reveals the degree of repetition and the importance of generic tropes and conventions, the foundations of serial television. The shelves of DVDs mounted on the gallery wall positioned next to a suitcase containing the small DVD player and screen offers an impression of open access to secretive imagery. Every Shot, Every Episode reconstructs imagery that blurs the division between individual and collective memory. Viewing and re-viewing sequences, visitors become interactive cartographers, mapping and re-mapping as they select and view paradigmatic sequences from Starsky and Hutch. Nora’s description of memory as “intensely retinal and powerfully televisual”(1989, p. 17) is resonant in the ways that these sequences reflect the fragmented, impressionistic workings of memory. The linearity of television series is here reconceptualised by prioritizing the elements that comprise narrative form. Every Shot, Every Episode points to the tendency to prioritise moments, sensations, effects, color, action or gesture in recalling the larger structure. Paradigmatic selection parallels the ways that specific impressions might be remembered whilst larger narrative structures are forgotten. In turn, the archive of images and narrative that forms the referent – in this case Starsky and Hutch – is modified and transformed by Every Shot, Every Episode.

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Every Shot, Every Episode (2001)

This approach was elaborated in Every Anvil (2001). In this interactive installation Looney Tunes (1942-1969) cartoons are deconstructed and reimagined according to generic tropes and violent themes including: ‘Every Explosion’, ‘Every Poisoning’, ‘Every Whacking’, ‘Every Evil Genius’, ‘Every Beg and Plead’, ‘Every Kiss’, ‘Every Slipping and Sliding’, ‘Every Sneaking’, ‘Every Flattening Character’, ‘Every Cooking a Character’ and ‘Every Tornado Spin’. The individual action, aesthetic and cinematographic sign is excised from the animated series, altering the temporal framework to highlight the preeminence of the moment over continuity across the series. Every Anvil, Every Shot, Every Episode along with a further installation, 448 Is Enough (2002), a deconstruction of episodes of Eight Is Enough (1977-1981) displays the McCoy’s interest in dissecting syntagmatic logic whilst recombining the imagery to highlight paradigmatic selection. The use of the new media database helps to develop incursions into conventional narrative form, resulting in sequences that are reconfigured according to impressionistic structures more common to dreams or memories. The McCoy’s subsequent installations use miniature forms to interrogate the exhibition of time, space, narrative, scale and identity. All installations situate popular culture as pivotal in the production of memory.

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Every Anvil (2001)

Memory, according to Maurice Halbwachs exists unconsciously in the mind as psychic states of recollection where each act of recollection involves the reconstruction of the memory in the context of the present (1992, p. 24). Memories are constructed and facilitated in association with (or in contrast to) other individuals. Memories as a reconstruction, rather than a faithful recreation of the past are the crucial element in this context. Halbwachs argues that, paradoxically, an individual remembers by placing himself in the perspective of the group, but, by contrast, the memory of a group realizes and manifests itself in individual memories. (1992, p. 22). The McCoy’s practice involves accessing, researching and deconstructing large sources, provoking memories contingent upon popular culture. In an interview, Jennifer McCoy reveals the focus on interactivity and connection between visual culture and memory in their artwork when she suggests that: “one’s memory of a show are placed next to real memories and become part of your mental collection” (2006, np)

Soft Rains (2003-2004) is a serialized collection of six installations that use miniature figures and diorama as the base of these electronic sculptures. The miniature static sets appear as single fragments of time, or frames of film. These tiny sculptures freeze time into instances with the miniature figures representing a single instant, without an indication of the preceding or succeeding events. These instants are resonant. The conflation of the narrative, or genre into instants reiterates the selectivity of memory. In On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, Susan Stewart writes that, “miniature time transcends the duration of everyday life” (2003, p. 66). Miniatures, for Stewart, offer “a narrativity and history outside the given field of perception – is a constant daydream that the miniature presents. This is the daydream of the microscope: the daydream of life inside life, of significance multiplied infinitely within significance” (2003, p. 54). Each of the six installations that comprise Soft Rains has its own thematic focus.

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Soft Rains (2003-2004)

In Soft Rains #6: Suburban Horror (2004), the miniature imagery becomes decidedly Gothic. A diorama built on the melodramatic iconography of a 1950s scene imagined through a dark cinematic aesthetic reveals suburban settings and suggests the surrounding menace. A woman stares longingly out of a kitchen window, suggesting entrapment and her desire for escape. A car traveling down a road indicates travel to a remote cabin, but the scene at the cabin contains details of blood and dismemberment, revealing a couple that had been murdered with an axe. This installation incorporates fragmented imagery signifying isolation, alienation, multiple time frames and the darker side of the imagination. Screens display low-resolution imagery, where colors are blocked and blurred, drawing from the aesthetic of colorized postcards, or perhaps the saturation and low definition imagery characteristic of 8mm film projections. Soft Rains was inspired by a David Lynchian surrealist aesthetic, and the gruesome imagery also recalls slasher films like the Friday the 13th series. Each diorama is surrounded by lights and tiny cameras suspended and directed onto the scenes via flexible metal arms. Shots are illuminated and filmed by the miniature technologies surrounding the tiny scene. These shots are then projected onto an adjacent screen in the gallery. Exposing sets, lights and cameras, alongside the fantasy projected on the screen deconstructs the illusion, defamiliarizing and reinventing the contemporary Gothic narrative. Suburban Horror draws from the archive of familiar Gothic tropes and imagery to produce disarming miniature fragments, moments that resonate with memorable sequences within the history of cinema. This series of installations rely on tropes of the Gothic and horror genres, impressionistic, distilled, miniaturized and deconstructed. The scale reflects how scale is often distorted by memory, miniature objects are enlarged on screen. In its allusions to iconic cinematic tropes, genres and aesthetics Suburban Horror mimics the potential for memory (and the database) to create a dialogue across time.

How We Met was originally exhibited at Postmaster’s Gallery and then very briefly shown in a decommissioned terminal at JFK Airport in 2004. How We Met is an elaborate series of miniature sculptural dioramas, each representing a moment in time. At first glance the platforms seem to depict aspects of the memory of Jennifer and Kevin’s first meeting as both reach for the same suitcase as it circles a carousel at an airport in France. The dioramas that form the base of How We Met are constellations of small gestures and figures, actions suspended in time with their stillness highlighted by the revolving carousel. These fragmented moments are reminiscent of Nora’s description of ‘true memory’ as comprised of gestures, habits, unspoken knowledge and unstudied reflexes (1989, p. 18). On one platform a miniature figure of Jennifer waits for her bag to emerge whilst Kevin stands to her left, seemingly distracted by a mysterious blonde woman in a red dress. At the edge of the diorama, their moment of connection is depicted through a simple gesture as two disembodied hands reach for the same suitcase. On another platform, a cab waits outside the airport terminal, offering a hint of a transition towards a new space. One camera that is positioned to shoot within the actual airport space incorporates impressions of human sized viewers alongside the miniatures. Customized computer software receives and connects the ‘live’ images, projecting a seemingly random range of sequences onto the screen. This combination of the static miniature diorama with the spectator entwines past with present. Further, baring the device for illumination, recording and projection produces a fractured, but all encompassing vision of moving image and apparatus. The result is that the memory depicted is deconstructed and reconstructed, expanding time into instants and exploding space across the dioramas. Reconstructing the experience in miniature renders the projected sequence dreamlike and impressionistic.

Whilst the title, How We Met, promises a cause and effect sequence, the constellation of images that emerge from the pivotal central gesture, opens up a matrix of connections. Mary Ann Doane perceives cinematic time as diachronic and contingent (2002). She writes about divergent temporal registers that are linked by chance and contingency, a relationship that is characteristic of the cinema.  Chance and coincidence become powerful forces in How We Met, however, this avowal of memory (from the title, from the reconstruction, from the autobiographic presence of the artists in miniature) is playfully recontextualised with the revelation of the extent that this artwork is indebted to the cinema. How We Met consciously references and remixes the bag swapping sequence from Peter Bogdanovich’s screwball comedy What’s Up Doc? (1972). What appears coincidental is in fact memory depicted through the prism of popular film. The slippage between intimate, personal memories and popular visual histories is no more evident throughout the McCoy’s oeuvre than in How We Met. In this electronic sculpture, sequences from film history are inextricably entwined with personal memory.

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How We Met – detail (2004)

The recreation of real and imaginary spaces plays an important role in the function of memory. Spaces that include airports, taxi ranks, the cinema, the dance hall and the gallery become actual and imagined sites of remembrance in the McCoy’s installations. These very public, transitory spaces are described by Marc Augè as ‘non-place’, a location created through the excessive logic, space and information of ‘supermodernity’ (1995). Supermodernity arises through excess and extension of time, and in spaces that result from the shift in global scale where distance is reduced by immediate and effective communications technologies. Non-places are essentially empty spaces, locations of solitude, even when they are full of people. These are places of movement and transit where there is little sense of community or connection. The non-place exists as an urban space of little or no distinct identity or particular history. These are temporary, sometimes provisional spaces. Non-places can also be generic spaces of consumption like airports, transit lounges, supermarkets or petrol stations. However, in the installations produced by the McCoy’s, non-places become sites of memory.

Our Second Date (2004) also interweaves the McCoy’s memories with iconic sequences from the history of film. Memory here is contingent upon French New Wave cinema. This electronic sculpture presents an imagination of personal histories as sequences from film, creating a memory site that reveals the influence of film in both content and form. In Our Second Date miniature scenes are positioned at various points on a large tabletop diorama. Each of these scenes blurs the distinction between memory and film particularly when miniature models of Jennifer and Kevin appear inside a tiny cinema watching Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend (1967). Weekend becomes the key visual source for the remembrance of their second date. The table also features a large, slowly spinning disc, a recreation of the traffic jam, complete with carnage, from the film. As the road revolves, the illusion of movement is projected onto the screen. The heightened colors combined with the now familiar use of a soft focus that blurs outlines, produces a dreamlike sequence of moving images. Memories are expressed through screen memories in these exhibits. Digital technologies are used to capture celluloid and possibly personal memories, highlighting the non-linearity crucial to the film, to the exhibit and to the McCoy’s memories. Our Second Date uses cinematic processes like narration, projection and exhibition to provide the framework for and signifiers of memory. Like Godard’s cinema, the McCoy’s Date series defamiliarizes processes of narration, reconfiguring the counter-narrative experiments of the French New Wave, producing a beginning, middle and an end, just not in that order.

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Our Second Date (2004)

The McCoy’s create electronic lieux de mémoire by interweaving public, collective and personal, individual memories within the history of visual culture. It is the blurring of public and private, individual and collective memory that distinguishes their new media art. The memories exhibited by the electronic sculptures need not have an actual referent in the viewer’s memory, or even in the McCoy’s experience. Alison Landsberg describes ‘prosthetic memory’ as a link to those histories that do not originate from direct and lived experiences (2004 p. 26). Prosthetic memories are derived from media engagement and arise through a direct connection to screen imagery. Landsberg defines prosthetic memories as: “memories that circulate publicly, that are not organically based, but that are nonetheless experienced with one’s own body – by means of a wide range of cultural technologies” (2004 p. 25-26). Prosthetic memories are direct and indirect – direct in their audio-visual presentation as images, and indirect in that they always refer to another spatio-temporal realm. They are collective, but also individual in that they become part of a specific range of experiences, virtual and real. Prosthetic memories produce an experiential relationship based on a virtual world rather than a ‘real’ world experience. They are created, produced, received and shared via technologies that consciously construct memories in processes of presentation and representation. Echoing the description provided by Jennifer McCoy, Landsberg suggests that prosthetic memories, “become part of one’s personal archive of experience” and that the memories that cinema affords might be as significant for the viewer in constructing, or deconstructing, the spectator’s identity, as any lived experience (2004 p. 26). The McCoy’s installations position memory as contingent on the history of visual cultures. In the case of How We Met, the artwork is indebted to popular film. In this artwork the difference between embodied and prosthetic memory is indistinct. It is possible that the bag sequence, heavy with the romantic tropes of chance and coincidence from What’s Up Doc? stands in for, and could even be entirely unrelated to, the memory of how Jennifer and Kevin McCoy actually met. Accordingly, whilst referencing cinema, exposing the machinations of the apparatus and reworking counter-narrative, Our Second Date may well also define memory as selective, constructed and prosthetic.

The power of the fragmentary detail within photography is well known in the writing on the ‘punctum’, by Roland Barthes (1984, p. 25-62). Writing during the 1950s, Barthes defines history as outside of his lived experience, but inextricably linked to his maternal bloodline. He explores the importance of subjectivity and emotion – eidos – in his encounter with history via photography. Barthes conceptualizes photography working according to a dual system of representation. He perceives the ‘studium’ as those coded, recognizable signs that are open to everyone, whilst the punctum is specific and subjective (Barthes 1984, p. 27). Barthes argues that the apprehension of the punctum is a sudden recognition of meaning that exceeds normal boundaries. This excess becomes an encounter with the self and history. Barthes’ punctum refers to the fragmentary detail of the photograph, the detail that holds significance, so much so, that it overwhelms the context. Barthes describes the effect of the punctum as akin to a sting, a recognition that he feels with a visceral physical intensity. It is this focus on detail, those smaller memory fragments, miniature signs or metonymic symbols that open out to more expansive revelations of the interconnection between memory and history, that structure the McCoy’s electronic sculptures. Whilst Barthes’ punctum refers to a detail within a photograph that linked him to his blood relations, prosthetic memories can provide a similar affective ‘pinch’, by provoking memories arising from his/her visual literacy of the popular culture archive. Prosthetic memories can also link viewers across cultures and across histories. These media images allow identification, perhaps even a visceral response from the virtual or the imagined. In a larger, perhaps more utopian context, prosthetic memories can forge the ground for new identifications, new political realignments through recognition, identification and empathy. Landsberg argues, “prosthetic memories have the potential to generate something like public spheres of memory” (2004, p. 21). The potential for cinema to generate and disseminate memories is highlighted in the work of Marita Sturken who argues that films contribute to the development of ‘technologies of memory’ where memories are shared, produced, archived and given meaning by new communications media (1997).

Eternal Return (2003) inspires the creation of prosthetic memories by situating anonymous miniature figures caught up in the rapture of dance. The presence of Jennifer and Kevin McCoy is less visible in this exhibit, but perhaps evident in the forms and concepts that spin out of the installation. Featuring a nostalgic, black, white and sepia toned dancehall; this elaborate sculptural diorama depicts a scenario set entirely within a distant past. The emphasis on cyclic rotation and repetition performed by unidentified miniature figures adorned in formal ball gowns and tuxedos, create invitations to become swept up in the nostalgia and romance of the exhibit. The wedding cake couples dance and spin in a wistful symbolization of the wheel of time. More than any other electronic sculpture, Eternal Return offers numerous entry points into the past. Encompassing imagined scenes from the 1930s dancehall, iconography and choreography akin to the films of Busby Berkeley, all mirrored in reflective surfaces, Eternal Return, as the title suggests, is a pure fantasy of another time and space. This ‘pure’ memory site renders its temporality cyclic by the repetition of movements and gestures, enhanced by the revolutions of the dioramas and giddy miniature figures. There is no identifiable narrative in this installation, no recognizable characters, endpoint or closure, just endless cycles of repetition.

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Eternal Return (2003)

Common to all other projected sequences, images of the diorama are filmed, edited and they repeat and return in a combination ordered by the bespoke computer software. More than any other exhibit, the complexities of the apparatus on display in Eternal Return become part of the spectacle. Exhibiting the intricacies of the technologies involved, demystifies, but its partial concealment also re-mystifies the exhibition. Such a kinetic spectacle, featuring unidentified dancers, imagined spaces and distant past points to history and memory, but also incorporates the present amid the swirl of contingent temporalities. Quoting Gilles Deleuze’s third synthesis of time in the title of the installation, the Eternal Return refers to the complex return of difference, one that may not have existed previously (1985). This installation also manifests Walter Benjamin’s achronological history imagined in The Arcades Project. In this incomplete work Benjamin visualised history by creating a collage of quotes and reassembling fragments through montage, defining history as connection, rather than a linear taxonomy (1999), Eternal Return is built on endless repetition and eternally returning fragments of projected pasts and futures. Quotes from early film history inspire a montage of prosthetic memories, external memories that may not have materialized previously.

The notion of artist or auteur is insufficient to account for the McCoy’s oeuvre. Whilst Jennifer and Kevin McCoy create an impression of quite intimate work in installations like How We Met and Our Second Date, the idea of an individual, coherent worldview expressed across a body of work is not enough to account for the dual dioramas presented back to back in Double Fantasy (2005). Double Fantasy identifies the differences in childhood dreams by using miniature models where images from each are randomly selected and projected onto a screen. There are two contrasting impulses in Double Fantasy. The doubled diorama emphasizes difference, but the screened stills juxtapose and interweave projections of disparate dreams. Dream Sequence (2006) extends this doubling and splitting further, projecting dual visions of dream imagery emanating from two revolving dioramas onto adjacent screens and by incorporating impressions of the miniature dreamers below their dreams. Dream, fantasies and memories are individual, shared and collective.

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Dream Sequence (2006)

The McCoy’s lieux de mémoire inspire new ways to perceive and imagine history and memory. Miniature scenes and narrative forms expand the realm of memory by highlighting connections to film, television, nostalgic fantasies and projected histories. The conflation of real and imaginary spaces reflects the potential for locations to provoke memories. Airports, taxi ranks, the cinema, the dancehall and the gallery become sites of remembrance in the McCoy’s exhibitions. Non-places like the airport represent the location of a first meeting, a miniature cinema becomes the place of a second date and the revolving imagined space of the dance hall distills memories using movement, gesture and sound and reproduces them as memory sites.

Their electronic sculptures and database art revise and exhibit memory by incorporating intertextual references to the history of cinema and visual culture. The re-vision of memory through multimedia technologies can instill a sense of hyper-engagement, connecting viewers with personal or public histories. It can also blur the distinction between prosthetic and embodied memories. Whilst many of these works emerge from archives of popular culture and are exhibited in art galleries, they are also made accessible via the McCoy’s website (mccoyspace.com) and Flickr which includes views of the documentation and images of the live feed of their installations. Such multiple forms of exhibition extend the scope and lifetime of each artwork and, simultaneously, feed the imagery back into the database. In the gallery space and in the virtual world, the McCoy’s art situates the viewer centrally and actively within a matrix of visual references, paradigmatic associations and generic conventions, highlighting the strength of the currents connecting popular iconography with personal memory.

The memories exhibited and inspired by the work of Jennifer and Kevin McCoy have the potential to tease out the hard edges of ‘true’ memory (Nora 1989, p. 13). The electronic sculptures display memory “in permanent evolution” (Nora 1989, p. 8). Furthermore, these artworks display memory as not exclusively linked to an individual, but instead linked by association, or contingency. The McCoy’s electronic sculptures actively exhibit memories as evidence of Nora’s description of recent shifts in history and memory as he describes it “from the idea of a visible past to an invisible one; from a solid and steady past to our fractured past; from a history sought in the continuity of memory to a memory cast in the discontinuity of history (1989, p. 17). Memory is inspired, produced and exhibited according to images outside of the self, popular visual histories. Nora suggests that, “the lieu de mémoire is double: a site of excess closed upon itself, concentrated in its own name, but also forever open to the full range of possible significations” (1989, p. 24). With new and multiple forms of digital technologies, the McCoy’s electronic sculptures illustrate precisely such a doubling whilst emphasizing the increasingly intimate proximity between memory, screen memories and the history of visual culture.

This is an extended and expanded version of ‘Exhibiting Miniature Memories: The McCoy’s Electronic Sculptures’, AntiThesis, March, 2009, pp. 7-11.

References

Augè, M 1995 Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, London, Verso.

Barthes, R 1980 Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, translated by Richard Howard, London, Flamingo.

Benjamin, W 1999 The Arcades Project, Cambridge, Mass, Harvard University Press.

Deleuze, G 1989 [c1985] Cinema 2: The Time Image, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.

Doane, MA 2002 The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive, Cambridge, Harvard University Press.

Frieberg, A 2009 The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft, Cambridge, Mass, MIT Press.

Halbwachs, M 1992 On Collective Memory, edited, translated and with an introduction by Lewis A. Coser, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

Himmelsbach, S 2006 ‘Interview With Jennifer and Kevin McCoy’, Automatic Update: MOMA, Viewed 1^st of February, 2009 http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2007/automatic_update/subs_wrapper.php?section=mccoy_interview.html

Jameson, F (1991) Postmodernism, Or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham, Duke University Press.

Landsberg, A 2004 Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture, New York, Columbia University Press.

Manovich, L 2002a ‘Generation Flash’, Viewed 1^st of February, 2009 www.manovich.net/DOCS/generation_flash.doc

Manovich, L 2002b The Language of New Media, Boston, MIT Press.

Marks, LU 2002 Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.

Nora, P 1989 ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Representations, 26, Spring, pp. 7-24.

Sturken, M, Thomas D, Ball-Rokeach, SJ 2004 Technological Visions: The Hopes and Fears that Shape New Technologies, Philadelphia, Temple University Press.

Stewart, S 2003 On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, Durham, NC, Duke University Press.

A/V:

Airworld.net (Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, 1999)

Double Fantasy (Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, 2005)

Dream Sequence (Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, 2006)

Eternal Return (Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, 2003)

Every Shot, Every Episode (Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, 2001)

Every Anvil (Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, 2001)

How We Met (Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, 2004)

Our Second Date (Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, 2004)

Soft Rains (Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, 2003-2004)

Weekend (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967)

What’s Up Doc? (Peter Bogdanovich, 1972).

Bio

Wendy Haslem is a lecturer in Screen Studies & Cultural Management and Director of Undergraduate Studies at the University of Melbourne. She is currently involved in researching and writing Gothic Projections: From Méliès to New Media an investigation of the evolution of the Gothic narrative and aesthetic from silent film to digital media.

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Figure 1: Red Riding Hood as powerful hunter, armed with a weapon in Catherine Hardwicke’s Red Riding Hood

In the closing scenes of Catherine Hardwicke’s recent teen film Red Riding Hood (2011), heroine Valerie, armed with a dagger, journeys into the forest to hunt and kill the big bad wolf. After slaying the beast in a bloody battle, Valerie does not return home to be chastised by the traditional well-known moral of the tale: ‘do not stray from the path’.[1] No such moral exists at the end of this particular ‘Red Riding Hood’ retelling. Instead, Valerie rejects her family home and takes up residence in the forest with another wolf, her lover Peter, and the film closes on the blissful contentment of their (paranormal) romance. This article charts how, in this contemporary teen film, the trope of the female adolescent’s voyage into the forest represents an empowering entry into personal freedom, power, and self-definition. At the same time, the film displays the contemporary teen media landscape’s obsession with fairy tale and paranormal romance, with its emphasis on the pleasures of heterosexual romance between the desiring heroine and her ‘dark lover.’ The journey into the forest in contemporary teen films and television is significant to chart, because it is through the journey into this space, and the magical transformations that she undergoes there, that provides the heroine with a unique opportunity to shift into a position of power and liberty.

Hardwicke’s Red Riding Hood emerges in a current teen screen media landscape obsessed with this aspect of the fairy tale and the paranormal romance. Interestingly, many of these texts, including blockbuster films like Twilight (Catherine Hardwicke 2008), The Hunger Games (Gary Ross 2012), and Snow White and the Huntsman (Rupert Sanders 2012), as well as television series like The Vampire Diaries (Julie Plec and Kevin Williamson 2009-) and The Secret Circle (Andrew Miller 2011-2012), situate their heroine’s journey centrally within a forest space. As she journeys into the forest, the heroine undergoes an often supernatural transformation into a beast or beast-like creature such as a werewolf or vampire. During this metamorphosis, the heroine develops physical strength and prowess, bravery and fearlessness. The journey into the forest is the catalyst for the heroine’s beastly transformation, and her evolution into an empowered position in the world. In these teen screen texts, the enchanted forest space has become an imaginative horizon on which to explore and celebrate female mobility, agency and even aggression.

But at the same time, the heroines of these texts also encounter and fall in love with a magical male creature in the forest – werewolves, vampires, warlocks, and ghosts are particularly popular. In television series The Vampire Diaries, for example, heroine Elena becomes a vampire and as she discovers her extraordinary physical strength and her lust for blood, she also enjoys a romantic relationship with vampire boyfriend Stefan (as well as potential lover Damon). Similarly, in Hardwicke’s film previous to Red Riding Hood, the wildly successful teen blockbuster Twilight (2008), grounds the paranormal romance between vampire Edward Cullen and human Bella Swan in the lush geography of the woods.

In this way, these texts enact postfeminist rewritings of the fairy tale – retaining a focus on the pleasures of romance but also incorporating new elements like the female-as-hunter and the celebration of her agency, aggression and power. The representation of strength, freedom and mobility, coupled with an emphasis on the heterosexual romantic union, is particularly inflected by the postfeminist sensibility that surrounds much of contemporary teen screen media today. The postfeminist signifies a ‘move away from easy categorisations and binaries, including the dualistic patterns of (male) power and (female) oppression on which much feminist thought and politics are built.’[2] Rather than representing the heroine’s empowerment and agency in conflict with the romance narrative of the ‘dangerous lover’, the postfeminist text often unites these elements, allowing both to exist in a non-binaristic way, and not having to give up one element for the other.[3] In Red Riding Hood, for example, the story emphasises the importance and power of independent female mobility through the figure of Valerie as a powerful lone hunter journeying into the forest to slay the beast. But at the same time, it also emphasises the theme of escape through romance with the prioritisation of the heterosexual relationship. So this postfeminist fairy tale film wants, and has it, both ways; it navigates both paths through the fairy tale forest at the same time. On the one hand, it champions Valerie as an independent hunter but on the other hand it also promotes an image of fulfilment through love and a heterosexual romantic coupling. This film promotes an image of mobility across spaces but also across identities, for Valerie is both violent hunter and romantic lover in the forest. She is not locked into either identity, but rather is able to occupy both.

Fairy tale scholar Cristina Bacchilega writes that in contemporary retellings of the ‘Red Riding Hood’ tale, ‘straying from the path is necessary’.[4] Red Riding Hood constructs this necessary straying across the filmic landscape to celebrate the errant journey of heroine Valerie. Rebelling against the strictures of her daily life, Valerie escapes into the forest and is rewarded with knowledge, agency, power and the fulfilment of her desire. The film utilises the geography of the fairy tale forest to tell a story of female mobility and agency. Hardwicke’s film rewrites and revalues Red Riding Hood’s wayward journey in the forest – straying from the path is represented as not only necessary, but also positive, satisfying, and empowering for the heroine. This journey leads her to traverse broad new horizons of independence and transformation.

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Figure 2: Snow White battles against fearsome creatures in ‘The Dark Forest’ in Snow White and the Huntsman. Like many heroines of contemporary fairy tale teen films, this Snow White discovers strength, power and bravery within herself in the forest space.

The moral of the tale, ‘don’t stray from the path’ dissipates in many contemporary revisions in favour of errant travel, and indeed, it is nowhere to be seen in Hardwicke’s retelling of the tale. No longer a didactic emblem[5], the path through the forest is presented as a positive opportunity for the heroine’s independent travel, which allows for a rebellion against the strictures imposed upon her as well as a transformation into a mobile, empowered position in the world.

Red Riding Hood: Pursuing An Errant Path

In both the Perrault and Grimm versions of ‘Red Riding Hood’, the heroines’ straying from the path has negative consequences – in the former she is killed, and in the latter she is devoured and only narrowly escapes death when the huntsman rescues her from the belly of the beast. Bacchilega reads these gruesome endings as punishments for heroines who have acted up and disobeyed orders[6], writing that ‘[t]he girl has learned her lesson: obey your mother and don’t give in to errant desires’.[7] In her extensive study of the evolution of the ‘Red Riding Hood’ tale in popular culture, Red Riding Hood Uncloaked (2002), Catherine Orenstein similarly points out that these endings functioned as ‘warnings’ for young girls to not disobey authority.[8] The admonishing warning ‘do not stray from the path,’ coupled with the heroine’s death at the end of the story highlight the negativity in which this forest voyage has been shrouded. However, in postfeminist cinematic retellings like Hardwicke’s, the heroine is not punished for her errant travel into the forest; her journey is not represented as a shocking transgression that must be corrected. Rather, the journey comes to represent the heroine’s agency and empowerment and the film celebrates this by allowing her to defeat the wolf, and rewarding her with the pleasures of an alternative path outside of her everyday life.

Marilyn C. Wesley points out that often ‘women’s travel serves as a trope of female agency.’[9] To undertake a journey, beyond the limits of what is familiar and set, is to expand into spaces of ‘alternative possibility.’[10] Contemporary retellings of the ‘Red Riding Hood’ tale, including those seen in the teen film genre, have revised the tale to tell stories of female mobility and agency. In contemporary teen films like Red Riding Hood, Ginger Snaps (John Fawcett 2000), Ella Enchanted (Tommy O’Haver 2004) and Snow White and the Huntsman the fairy tale forest is invoked as the grounds for female travel where ‘alternative possibilities’ of identity, experience and desire can come into play. In these films, the heroine journeys from the limiting boundaries of her home and into the forest where she not only finds escape from these limits, but also undergoes empowering and powerful personal transformations.

The wide-open spaces of the forest in these teen films are liminal zones for adolescent transformations. Anthropologist Victor Turner writes that the liminal, the ambiguous territory of ‘betwixt-and-between’, provides a ‘time of enchantment when anything might, even should, happen.’[11] This ‘time of enchantment’ provides room for play, experimentation with multiple identities, and purposefully breaking rules.[12] Adrian Martin has applied Turner’s observation of liminality to teen cinema. He writes that ‘teen stories are about…the liminal experience: that intense, suspended moment between yesterday and tomorrow, between childhood and adulthood, between being a nobody and being a somebody, when everything is in question, and anything is possible.’[13] Catherine Driscoll similarly remarks that this is a utopian space for teen film, providing a ‘fantasy of freedom.’[14] This utopian sense of expanded possibilities and freedom in the teen fairy tale film is particularly embodied in the space of the forest, where magical transformations can occur (for example, Ginger’s transformation into a wolf in Ginger Snaps), magical powers can be accessed (for example, the teen witches who perform spells in the forest in The Craft [Andrew Fleming 1996] and in The Secret Circle) and encounters with paranormal or magical creatures take place.

This encounter with the magical and the supernatural in the fairy tale forest announces this space as one of potential to go beyond the structures and strictures of daily life, displaying the fairy tale’s ability to provide ‘open spaces for dreaming alternatives…announcing what might be.’[15] What is particularly interesting about these contemporary cinematic rewritings of ‘Red Riding Hood’ is how the heroines’ straying from the path is positively valued, and her encounter with the wolf or other magical being is empowering rather than victimising. Indeed, as Catherine Orenstein notes, the heroine is now often reclaimed ‘from the belly of the beast and put in the place, and even in the fur, of the wolf.’[16] Orenstein goes on to assert that this contemporary shift in the dynamics of the tale ‘has turned out to be one of the most fertile and surprisingly recurrent themes [in contemporary fairy tale revisions]: the power of the wolf’s pelt to transform the heroine.’[17] These teen films mobilise ‘witch and werewolf identities to symbolise forbidden emotions such as power, lust, and rage.’[18] Sue Short notes ‘what is remarkable about The Craft and Ginger Snaps’, and indeed, I would add Red Riding Hood, is that ‘the female outsiders willingly embrace these castigated images [of wolf and witch] as an alternative to existing norms, adopting them as a measure of dissatisfaction and refusal.’[19] This subversion of expectation and movement into another territory altogether is what precipitates change and transformation, magic and enchantment, pleasure and power, for Valerie in Red Riding Hood.

The scenes set in the town are shot in often claustrophobic close-ups, and lit low-key to shroud figures in darkness. These tightly framed, darkened shots of the town, along with multiple scenes set in prison cells and tiny attics create a lack of space and freedom to move. Valerie is literally cramped in in the town, her movements and gestures restricted and made small by a lack of space. Set in vaguely medieval times – though the date is never specified – Valerie lives in a culture ruled by the severe strictures dictated by fathers and lawmen. She has been betrothed to a man she does not desire to marry, and has no choice in the matter. She is forbidden from speaking her mind, making plans for her own life, or even venturing out of the town and into the forest. Fred Botting writes that in the female Gothic, the heroine must often flee her home and enter the forest in order to escape from a ‘cruel and tyrannical familial order’.[20] Into the forest she goes, where her ‘desire wanders, off course, flying to “wild zones” where femininity encounters the possibility of becoming something other: the ruins and forests that are uncharted places of darkness and danger are also loci free from the restraints of law.’[21] However, Botting also points out that the heroine’s journey is often circumvented at the end of the novel when she is brought out of the forest, and she is re-domesticated.[22]

However, in Red Riding Hood, no such re-domestication occurs. Valerie violates all of these bans and decides to travel a forbidden path into the forest as a permanent escape, as a refusal of these expectations. She does not return home but rather permanently situates herself on the forbidden path. Traveling this forbidden path is a subversive move for Red Riding Hood. Her resistance to the limitations imposed upon her begins when she sets out on her journey into the woods, unsatisfied by the terms that limit her life set by her parents. The further into the forest that Valerie travels, the more expansive and panoramic her views and paths become. In contrast to the cramped, suffocated spatiality of the town, in the wide-open space of the forest, her strides are long, fluid, and assured. She shakes off these restrictions and is released into wide-ranging spaces open to errant traversals and multiple unbounded routes.

It is here that she finds a measure of freedom that she does not want to relinquish. In Red Riding Hood, the forest expands beyond the limits of the town Valerie lives in. When Valerie enters the forest, going beyond the barriers of the town, she is able to express anger, power, and desire – emotions ordinarily considered taboo for young women to express.[23] Mapping herself into this geography through errant travel, Valerie expresses anger and violence, and claims her power when she kills the wolf.

She declares in her voice-over narration that ‘I could no longer live there [in the town]. I felt more freedom in the shadows of the forest. To live apart carries its own dangers, but of those I am less afraid.’ While Valerie does not literally become a wolf as in other recent teen films like Ginger Snaps, she does nevertheless adopt a wolf-like identity. Valerie not only discovers that she has the potential to become a wolf – she is descended from ancestors who were wolves and thus has wolf blood coursing through her veins – and one bite from another wolf would activate her own becoming-wolf process. While this is not a process she chooses to undergo, she does decide to reside in the ‘shadows of the forest’ with the wolves whose language she is able to speak as a result of her lupine lineage, and she chooses this outside space as her residence. But rather than being punished with death, as in Perrault’s and the Grimm’s popular versions of the tale, Hardwicke’s Red Riding Hood is actually rewarded. Having undertaken this subversive secret journey away from the familiar strictures of daily life, Valerie attains a space of her own and a lover of her choosing.

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Figure 2: Snow White battles against fearsome creatures in ‘The Dark Forest’ in Snow White and the Huntsman. Like many heroines of contemporary fairy tale teen films, this Snow White discovers strength, power and bravery within herself in the forest space.

Deborah Lutz observes that this decision to reside on the outside with a ‘dangerous lover’ constitutes an overwhelmingly dominant trajectory for contemporary romances.[24] Recent teen-girl films inflect their fairy tale forests with this overtone of romance, particularly of the Gothic variety, and Red Riding Hood, along with other popular films like Snow White and the Huntsman and Twilight, displays this inflection. Landscape unleashes romantic pleasures as the heroines of teen cinema navigate the tender geographies of the forest. The liminal movement from civilisation to forest is announced as an amorous, tender passage. Mapping herself into this geography, the heroine permanently situates herself on the edge, refusing to return to the orderly and the civilised. This decision to permanently occupy this outside-space registers dissatisfaction with what the civilised has to offer. Turning to the wilderness, the girl finds that it unfolds as the fabric of her desire. Remarkably, this is not a fleeting interval to be pursued before returning to the regimented world; it constitutes a real escape from it.

In these films, the girl’s passage through the wilderness is driven by a quest for knowledge. Valerie undertakes a journey into the forest in order to discover who the wolf is. Bound up with this knowledge quest is Valerie’s path towards romantic love with her gentle wolf-lover Peter.[25] Escape through love is, as Deborah Lutz points out, the dominant trope of many contemporary romances,[26] and films like Red Riding Hood follow suit. Escaping the regimented world by entering the fairy-tale forest with a beast-lover, a romantic map of tender exploration unfolds before the heroine. Some contemporary teen films like Red Riding Hood and Twilight, as well as popular teen television series like The Vampire Diaries celebrate the male wolf or beast as a romantic, gentle figure who brings out the latent wildness of the heroine. The teen girl journeys into the forest to hunt down and encounter magical creatures like vampires and werewolves; she then chooses them as lovers. Her desire is at the forefront of the rite-of-passage journey, and it becomes the very texture of the fairy-tale forest space.

Indeed, Marina Warner comments that postmodern rewritings of the fairy tale are overwhelmingly dominated by the idea that ‘Beauty stands in need of the Beast’ and that ‘He no longer stands outside her, the threat of male sexuality in bodily form…but he holds up a mirror to the force of nature within her, which she is invited to accept and allow to grow.’[27] In these rewritings, the beast is not a deadly, dreaded danger to the innocent heroine; rather, his gentle beastliness is attractive to the heroine and she pursues him as a romantic partner. Cristina Bacchilega comments that this romantic reconfiguration of the physical dynamic between wolf and girl is particularly potent: ‘By acting out her [sexual] desires the girl offers herself as flesh, not meat. The “carnivorous” nature of their encounter is transformed’ into a tender embrace.[28] This transit has become a mode of transformation, both for the hero and heroine. In this postfeminist retelling of ‘Red Riding Hood’, the heroine journeys into the forest and is transformed: she is given the space to act out violence and anger, but also desire and romance. In undertaking this journey, Valerie’s agency is activated and her desire mobilised.

The Fairy Tale’s Mobile Map: Errant Views, Expansive Vistas

In Red Riding Hood, the heroine’s physical mobility and liberty is echoed by the camera as it moves across the filmic landscape, and as the viewer’s eyes also move across this screened space, the mobility of the film’s cartography is revealed. It is significant that the teen viewer is so strongly aligned with the heroine’s mobility in this way, for this mode of filmic travel acts as an invitation to explore imaginative horizons and locations in which female liberty and agency is prioritised. This invitation to errant visual travel aligns the viewer with the active, empowered heroine and her mobile perspective.

The film’s and viewer’s movements across this landscape can be considered via Giuliana Bruno’s ‘moving theory of site.’ As the camera navigates its way through cinematic space, it becomes ‘a vehicle of travel.’ When ‘the movie camera becomes a moving camera’ it can literally become ‘a means of transport’ for the viewer.[29] Bruno is particularly discussing the mobile camera in urban spaces and scenes, but her moving theory of site is useful in this instance of fairy tale forest geography too. From the very beginning of Red Riding Hood, during the opening credits, the forest is announced as a map designed for errant travel, motion, and wide-ranging journeying. This opening scene provides the viewer with a moving map of the fairy tale forest space that will be navigated throughout the rest of the film: we are given an elaborately extensive visual itinerary of rushing rivers, jagged precipices, emerald green thrushes of trees, and soft snow-covered expanses. Each point on the map is lingered on and recorded in turn, creating a detailed itinerary of the fairy tale forest’s landmarks. In this way, the viewer is presented with a cinematic map of this space right from the outset of the film, situating attention in this geography and creating a map that we are invited to traverse throughout the rest of the film.

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Figure 4: Venturing far from the limits of the town, Valerie finds beautifully expansive landscapes to traverse and vistas to behold

In panoramic aerial views, the camera pans and glides across these expansive locations throughout the film. This continuous, fluid, gliding motion of the camera across this topography highlights the mobility of this map. The viewer offered many multiple views of different points on the map to visually discover: rivers and rocks, trees and sky, snow and mountains. In being offered so many multiple places and vistas to visually contemplate, the viewer is invited to move their attention from location to location, perspective to perspective, across sweeping panoramas, encouraging us to encounter this map through transitory motion. As the viewer visually explores these vistas, the camera is always in motion, panning and moving across this geography to create a moving map of the fairy tale forest. This motion of the camera across the forest allows the viewer to explore and visually roam about this filmic map, visiting many points on its itinerary and exploring them from many angles, distances and perspectives.

This wide-ranging, roaming camera across open spaces presents an invitation for wandering, exploring, voyaging on an unbound map, echoing Valerie’s own freewheeling traversal of this open space. Viewers are invited to travel across this dynamic panorama of the forest in a similar way to Valerie, and it becomes a visually traversable geography. Aligned with Valerie’s point of view in this way allows the teen viewer to explore and consider the heroine’s unique position of liberty, mobility and agency. Conley asserts that the landscape in film ‘propels narrative but also, dividing our attention, prompts reverie and causes our eyes to look both inward, at our own geographies, and outward, to rove about the frame and to engage, however we wish, the space of the film.’[30] The wide shots of landscape, and the constantly moving camera across these stunning vistas, promotes a viewing of the film that is mobile. Conley writes that this mobility of vision can be thought of as ‘applied distraction’ and ‘free attention’, ‘being errant but available to fix upon and discern different mental and physical sites.’[31] The mobility of vision across this cinematic geography of the fairy tale forest can be considered an inherently errant process: it invites vision to roam across moving panoramas freely, and to explore the map in an unruly way. This errant roaming provides an invitation for the viewer to explore expansive imaginative horizons on which female mobility and agency are prioritised.

The forest emerges as a geography through which to explore female power and liberty in this film. As the heroine journeys into this space, as she travels deeper into the forest, her supernatural powers are gradually revealed to her and then exercised and enjoyed. The errant journey into the forest signifies a journey into power and freedom for the heroine undergoing a beastly becoming or a beast-like becoming. This geography provides an itinerary of the heroine’s transformations, and the viewer is invited to travel that itinerary of her evolution.

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Figure 5: Aerial views of the forest geography in Red Riding Hood provide the viewer with a mobile map of the enchanted forest space during the opening credits

The cartographic encounter with the fairy tale forest, both for the heroine and the viewer, is an unruly one in Hardwicke’s Red Riding Hood. For Red Riding Hood, this unruliness is expressed through the forest journey. She ventures into the forest as a measure of her dissatisfaction with what everyday life has to offer, and refusing the terms it sets, she escapes into the wild. In the forest, she is able to access and express anger, violence and desire – actions and emotions ordinarily deemed taboo for the young girl to express. But rather than being punished for expressing these taboo emotions, and violating the restrictions that forbid her going into the forest, Hardwicke’s fairy tale rewards its heroine with a romantic union. Choosing a wolf as a romantic partner, and deciding to live in the wolf-inhabited woods, Valerie finds herself in a wide-open space that she can navigate as she pleases. Hardwicke’s cinematographic representation of the forest invites the viewer, too, to navigate this space in a similarly errant fashion. The viewer is presented with a map of expansive vistas and panoramas with a mobile camera, a detailed, sprawling, moving geography of the enchanted fairy tale forest. Given such mobile, extensive views, the audience is given the opportunity to visually explore and roam about this map, enacting an errant visual voyage across the image which allows for an imaginative exploration of a space defined by female mobility, agency, and liberty. The film celebrates such unruly travel, as not only a necessary act for Valerie to undertake to discover and kill the big bad wolf; it is also represented as a pleasurable journey, for she finds an independent space to inhabit and chooses the wolf lover that she wants. She has strayed from the path, and having found both agency and romance on the fringe of the forest, this Red Riding Hood stakes her claim on it as her own.

References

Bacchilega, Cristina, Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997

Botting, Fred, ‘The Flight of the Heroine’. Postfeminist Gothic: Critical Interventions in Contemporary Culture. Eds. Genz, Stephanie and Brabon, Benjamin A, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007

Bruno, Giuliana, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film. New York: Verso, 2002

Conley, Tom, Cartographic Cinema. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2007

Driscoll, Catherine, Teen Film: A Critical Introduction. Oxford and New York: Berg, 2011

Genz, Stephanie, Postfemininities in Popular Culture, UK: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009

Lutz, Deborah, The Dangerous Lover: Gothic Villains, Byronism, and the Nineteenth-Century Seduction Narrative, Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006

Lutz, Deborah, ‘The Haunted Space of the Mind: The Revival of the Gothic Romance in the Twenty-First Century’. Empowerment Versus Oppression: Twenty-First Century Views of Popular Romance Novels. Ed. Goade, Sally, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007

Martin, Adrian, Phantasms: The Dreams and Desires at the Heart of our Popular Culture. Victoria: McPhee Gribble, 1994

Orenstein, Catherine, Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked: Sex, Morality, and the Evolution of a Fairy Tale. New York: Basic Books, 2002

Short, Sue, Misfit Sisters: Screen Horror as Female Rites of Passage. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006

Sweeney, Kathleen, Maiden USA: Girl Icons Come of Age. New York: Peter Lang, 2008

Turner, Victor, Process, Performance and Pilgrimage: A Study in Comparative Symbology. New Delhi: Concept Publishing, 1979

Warner, Marina, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and their Tellers. London: Vintage, 1994

Wesley, Marilyn C, Secret Journeys: The Trope of Women’s Travel in American Literature, New York: State University of New York Press, 1999

Filmography

The Craft. Dir. Andrew Fleming. 1996

Ella Enchanted. Dir. Tommy O’Haver. 2004

Ginger Snaps. Dir. John Fawcett. 2000

The Hunger Games. Dir. Gary Ross. 2012

Red Riding Hood. Dir. Catherine Hardwicke. 2011

The Secret Circle. Exec Producer Andrew Miller. 2011-2012

Snow White and the Huntsman. Dir. Rupert Sanders. 2012

Twilight. Dir. Catherine Hardwicke. 2008

The Vampire Diaries. Exec. Producers Julie Plec and Kevin Williamson. 2009-

Notes

In 2008, Steven Spielberg received a DVD screener of Oren Peli’s micro-budget horror film Paranormal Activity; after watching it, Spielberg claims his bedroom door mysteriously locked from the inside, forcing the director to call a locksmith. [1] He quickly returned his copy of the film to his DreamWorks offices, wrapped carefully in a plastic garbage bag, terrified that it was haunted.^[2]  Whether this Hollywood urban legend was a publicity stunt or not, it highlights the ways the Paranormal Activity phenomenon, from its inception, infused our everyday media objects – and the spaces where we use them – with fear.  The incredible success of the first film (thanks or no thanks to Spielberg) spawned three more sequels and prequels, with more on the way, and while each film is cheaply made and has a set and devoted fan base, it is the franchise’s translation of its haunted-house narrative into digital marketing campaigns that continues to feed its popularity. The franchise’s marketing campaign expanded the world of each film to various digital platforms, including Easter-egg filled trailers, demon-finding apps, and “haunted” websites, revealing the way contemporary horror must rely on sophisticated transmedia storytelling techniques to stay both relevant and frightening. While the monster of the PA franchise is supposedly a demon haunting generations of young home-owners, I argue the real horror of the films exists in the boundaries that both connect and separate the frightening events from the audiences – the technologies recording each narrative and the digital platforms used to market each film, and what those technologies suggest about our constantly shifting relationship to domesticity, security, and surveillance.

On the surface, the Paranormal Activity (PA) franchise is a series of gimmick films that combine “old” horror conventions such as haunted houses and demonic possession with a variety of “new” home recording technologies and gadgets.  Alongside the franchise’s investment in a larger, multi-part narrative arc involving witches and demons, each film adds to the franchise’s transmedia universe by multiplying the number and kinds of home surveillance technologies used to film and market each installment.  As Emanuelle Wessels argues in her study of post 9/11 transmedia branding, a science fiction/horror film such as Cloverfield (Matt Reeves, 2008), for example, expresses “one sense in which post-9/11 protocols of security-citizenship, particularly utilizing consumer recording technologies to remain on ‘high alert’ for terrorist activity, can manifest in popular film as a form of cultural pedagogy.”^[3]   Similarly, the PA films raise questions about the uses and abuses of these same technologies to monitor domestic spaces, extending the reach of “security-citizenship” into the more intimate spaces of suburban homes. Each film begins by endorsing the way individuals use home recording devices as means to securing domestic spaces, yet ultimately uses the conventions of horror to call attention to the ways these devices can both fail and terrify us. The failure of these technologies to protect suburban domesticity taps into contemporary anxieties about home ownership in light of the current economic and housing crises, highlighting the limits of individuality and individual security in the face of greater terrors.^[4]

The constant multiplication of devices in and outside of each film also relies heavily on an audience awareness of the franchise’s aesthetics and mythology, a central tenet of transmedia storytelling that scholars such as Henry Jenkins have argued defines contemporary Hollywood.^[5]  The emphasis on audience knowledge of a film’s transmedia universe has an odd relationship to horror as a genre, which often depends on a slow, suspenseful release of knowledge and information to create and maintain fear; as the PA franchise reveals, building fear across new technologies and platforms keeps the informed transmedia consumer scared.  I begin this essay by looking briefly at the PA franchise’s stylistic and thematic predecessor, The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, 1999), and then examine the ways each installment of the PA franchise uses technology within and outside of its narrative.   Alongside efforts to involve audiences in the promotion and exhibition of the franchise, the films turn interactive technologies into frightening entities, calling attention to our ambivalent relationship to the increasingly sophisticated technology that governs everyday life.  As post-9/11 surveillance culture continues to manifest itself in myriad ways in popular culture, the PA franchise, its use of technology as both source of and protection against outside horrors, and its transmedia reach reveal the ideological cracks in the idea that technology – and its ability to document, record and monitor – guarantees safety and security in and outside the home.

The Blair Witch Effect

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Figure 1. The Blair Witch Project, 1999.

In 1999, The Blair Witch Project began the now-ubiquitous trend of the “found-footage” horror film and shifted paradigms of film marketing, independent film, and the generic conventions of 21^st century horror.  The film relied on the then-new phenomenon of viral Internet marketing to create early anticipation among its young audiences, subsequently becoming one of the most profitable films in history.  As Jane Roscoe describes, Internet rumors about the film’s veracity came from the filmmakers, the studios, and curious audience members: “Initially there was no conscious decision to set the film up as a hoax, but because of the early responses to the film, this uncertainty over its ontological status was capitalized on by the filmmakers, who refused to confirm or deny that it was a true story.”^[6] Roscoe goes on to explain that the Internet became a place to advertise the film, communicate with other filmgoers, and create and view spoof trailers and videos; most importantly, though, it also became an integral part of Blair Witch’s transmedia approach to horror in the new millennium.

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Figure 2. The Blair Witch Cult, 1999.

As Jenkins has argued, transmedia storytelling is about world-creation across multiple platforms, allowing viewers/consumers to explore and piece together the fictional universes that make up their favorite entertainment franchises; it also provides media conglomerates with the opportunity to pursue synergy across various media outlets.^[7]    The Blair Witch Project’s website, for example, provides a timeline of pseudo-historical events related to the film – a picture of a rare book from 1809 describing the town’s curse, current pictures of the sites where disappearances occurred – which round out the mythology surrounding both the filmmakers’ disappearance and the film’s mysterious, unseen witch.  The proliferation of websites that add bits and pieces to the film’s mythology works particularly well with horror as a genre, as horror franchises, like science fiction and fantasy, are built around uncertain and intricate histories – who and what the monsters are, how long they have been plaguing us, and the long list of victims foolish enough to try and vanquish them.

The Blair Witch phenomenon traded heavily on this uncertainty to foster curiosity about its subject, yet equally crucial to its popularity and mystique was its style.  The film’s mock documentary aesthetic with shaky video and film cameras, improvised footage and on-location shooting lent itself well to an Internet-based marketing campaign; in 1999, both documentary and the Internet traded on their uncertain relationship to the “real.” As Roscoe argues, Blair Witch’s use of documentary codes self-consciously raised questions about the film’s subject, the status of the students filming it, and the ontological claims of documentary itself. Such uncertainty, I find, travels to and through the websites used to speculate and spread rumors about the film’s veracity to tap into our ontological distrust of the Internet itself – where does this knowledge exist?  Who is putting it out there? J.P. Telotte says in his analysis of the film’s Internet presence: “Or more precisely, [Blair Witch’s] project is to blur some common discrimination, to suggest, in effect, that this particular film is as much a part of everyday life as the Internet, that it extends the sort of unfettered knowledge access that the Internet seems to offer, and that its pleasures, in fact, closely resemble those of the electronic medium with which its core audience is so familiar.”^[8]   Rumors about the film proliferated across the Internet in one of the first examples of “viral” film marketing, and the spread of information hinted at the negative implications inherent in the word “viral,” as information spreading like a disease could not possibly be trustworthy, yet it commanded the attention of both audiences and film studios.

While Blair Witch instigated a shift in horror film style and marketing, horror films of the early 21^st century manifested a more thematic obsession with film, television and the Internet as potential sites of horror.  Chuck Tryon describes films such as Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (Joe Berlinger, 2000), The Ring (Gore Verbinski, 2002), FeardotCom (William Malone, 2002), White Noise (Geoffrey Sax, 2005) and Cloverfield as “imply[ing] that electronic media will lead to fragmented social relationships because of their illusion of authenticity and their potential to further isolate people from a larger community.”^[9] As Tryon argues, these films are, on the one hand, “media-savvy” in their recognition of the constantly evolving “practices of watching horror movies,”^[10] and, on the other hand, ultimately critical of the technological advances accompanying these practices as threatening to the stability of the nuclear family and home.  In the American version of The Ring, for example, a deadly videotape circulates among teenagers, and the film’s adult protagonist attempts to solve the tape’s mystery in order to protect her young son; as Tryon argues, the film “implicitly links the dangers of TV and video spectatorship to parental fears about protecting their children from dangerous or harmful images.”^[11] In some ways, the PA franchise fits into Tryon’s argument, as the transmedia texts used to advertise the films as well as their unique, static-camera aesthetic emphasize the act of watching as integral to the horror experience. In addition, the PA films, all set in comfortable, upper-middle class suburban homes, represent recording technology as an extension of the many appliances that regulate and monitor everyday suburban life – ranging from computers to automated pool cleaners – documenting supernatural activity but also standing in for the viewer’s voyeuristic experience of seemingly mundane domestic spaces and activities. But in contrast to the films that Tryon mentions which ultimately suggest that technology (videos, cameras and computers) is a threat to private, domestic life, the PA films make no direct connections between technology and family strife, but in fact figure technology as a means initially to ensure the safety of each household. The films and their paratexts are less about demonizing technology, so to speak, and more about using that technology to document, catalog and personalize fear, both in and outside the world of the films, building a franchise brand based on watching and experiencing horror rather than on the horror itself. In addition, the PA franchise’s efforts to extend its brand into social media presents an extension of its central theme – the way electronic media has insinuated itself into domestic space – and the way transmedia horror and branding can often unwittingly call attention to the way we engage with consumer technology in our daily lives.

PA 1: Static Cameras and Screen Space

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Figure 3. Paranormal Activity, 2007.

As the recording devices multiply from film to film, so too does the PA franchise’s narrative arc, which involves multiple generations of one family being haunted by a demon trying to capture the family’s first-born son; the continuation of the storyline across multiple texts is inextricable from the technology being used to capture it.  The films are seen primarily from the perspective of static cameras, and these various recording technologies form the thematic and narrative center of each film, providing characters and viewers with visual evidence of the house’s strange activities as well as revealing crucial pieces of the franchise’s backstory.  The cameras – digital camcorders that record through the night in PA 1, security cameras in PA 2 (Tod Williams, 2008), clunky VHS cameras in PA 3 (Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, 2011), and webcams and Xbox Kinect cameras in PA 4 (Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, 2012) – generally remain in one place, not guided by human hands, a marked distinction from the shaky faux-verite footage produced by the amateur filmmakers of Blair Witch or more recently Quarantine (John Erick Dowdle, 2008) and The Last Exorcism (Daniel Stamm, 2010).  PA 1-4 are about houses and families haunted by demonic forces, yet they are also about the technology we use to mediate our daily lives; the grainy, static-camera footage of seemingly innocuous suburban domestic spaces points to our fascination with and fear of the increasingly mundane nature of surveillance technology.

The first film, made on a shoestring budget by video game designer Oren Peli, surprised film studios with its runaway success, fueled in large part by Internet marketing tactics focusing on the audience’s control of its distribution.  Early articles about the film in the trade and popular press focused primarily, like Blair Witch, on the production and distribution aspects of the film rather than content alone and praised Paramount’s forward-thinking digital marketing campaign.  The campaign was two-fold – one, cameras were installed in theaters to capture audience’s reactions to the film, and two, the studio used the website eventful.com to encourage people to demand the film to play in their towns, what EW’s Owen Gleiberman called “old school, groundswell marketing.”^[12] The dual emphasis on the viewer – viewers’ reactions and seeming control over the film’s distribution – personalized the horror experience in a way that set the stage for the franchise’s transmedia development.  The trailer featured images of the film playing in the theater intercut with the green-hued shots of the audience in night vision; as the film builds tension, the audience’s reactions get more and more extreme as they gasp, hide their eyes, and jump in their seats.  The trailer ends with the movie’s title, complete with slight blips to again replicate the experience of watching the amateur footage of the film.  The trailer brings the film’s audience and the space of the theater into its world, previewing the franchise’s efforts to extend the spaces and technologies of each film into the personal spaces, technologies and experiences of the viewer.

The first PA film’s main attraction was its use of the static camera, which became the film’s main selling point and what invited discussion and imitation among fans. As Tryon points out, The Blair Witch Project’s use of handheld video “correlates video with subjective vision rather than the objective, impersonal shots associated with a standard film,”^[13] and PA 1 makes an effort to distinguish handheld footage from static footage, or the point of view of the young couple trying to capture what’s haunting them from that of the camera alone.  The film begins with the boyfriend Micah (Micah Sloat) playing with his new, professional camera, filming himself and then his girlfriend Katie (Katie Featherston) as she pulls up to the house and interrogates him about how much he spent on it. The opening scenes alternate between handheld and static footage as the couple prepares dinner and tests out the camera’s capabilities; through shaky footage and strange angles, we get a sense of the spacious, comfortable kitchen, dining and living rooms of the couple’s suburban home.  We see them later setting up the camera on a tripod and figuring out exactly where to place it in the bedroom, and the first title, “Night 1: September 18, 2006” comes on screen. Through a series of fades, we watch footage of the couple sleeping that is marked by successive time stamps.  The static camera’s objectivity is interrupted by the fades and fast-forwards of the night footage, emphasizing a central question of the mock found-footage film – who found the footage, and who is watching it?  The use of edits within this footage points to these films’ artificiality, for someone has put the pieces together to form a narrative, but the question of who is watching also helps build a transmedia world of sequels and paratexts. In the case of Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, the original film’s footage motivates a group of curious horror enthusiasts who then suffer a similar fate.  In the case of the PA franchise, the status of the footage from 1, 2 and 4 remains unknown, but the question of “who is watching” is shifted outside the world of the film, to the viewer and his or her ability to explore PA mythology and characters on DVD players, computers and even phones, again explicitly incorporating the viewer into a transmedia experience of the PA universe.

The static camera aesthetic in particular lent itself to a viewing experience focused less on plot and more on the viewer’s relationship to the spaces on screen and to the various recording devices used in each film, forging a connection between space, viewer and device that the franchise would eventually extend into the digital. Hahner, Varda and Wilson argue that the juxtaposition of haunted house conventions and minimalist style of the first and second film produce an ambivalent relationship to the idea of consumption in and around each film:

While the films ask the audience to enjoy the suffering of indulgent main characters, the protracted tempo and claustrophobic visual space simultaneously induce viewers to surveil the films ravenously.  In this way, consumption becomes abject insofar as the audience is enticed to consume the screen as the film punishes the homeowners for the same appetite.^[14]

The static camera footage in the PA franchise, in contrast to the handheld footage of outside spaces in Cloverfield and The Blair Witch Project, immobilized and domesticated what Wessels calls the “surveilling gaze,” locating it specifically in the intimate spaces of suburban domesticity and encouraging audiences to “consume” the spaces they saw on screen.^[15] At the beginning of PA 1, the nights are marked a relative lack of activity, and while audiences are cued to watch for these slight movements by the fast-forwarding, there is still a relatively long period of waiting and watching (which gets shorter when the middle-of-the-night episodes become increasingly bizarre and ominous).  The handheld footage captures Katie and Micah’s conversations about the hauntings, alternating between each one’s point of view, but the static camera is the one that captures the objective proof of a supernatural presence without any human intervention.    The lack of a human hand and first-person perspective guiding the camera in these moments of the film make us strikingly aware of the space being filmed and any movement within that space. Within the horror narratives of the PA franchise, this is of course ideal as we as viewers are encouraged to participate – to rewatch and discuss – seemingly insignificant events that eventually add up to a bigger and more terrifying picture.  The static camera taps into the frightening notion that cameras can have an uncanny ability to know and see what we do not; the PA brand builds itself on the eerie nature of machine intelligence by increasing the number of seemingly sentient devices inside and outside each film.

The first film not only invited more intense viewer response through its static camera aesthetic, but also left its narrative unresolved; the theatrical version ended with Katie, now fully possessed by the demon, killing Micah and escaping.  Attempting to translate the film’s surprising success to a new medium, the producers began a transmedia branding campaign featuring short digital comic entitled “Paranormal Activity: The Search for Katie,” which was available for download on the iPhone.  The use of a handheld device was the franchise’s first attempt to tease out transmedia narrative strands on a digital platform, but ultimately the comic’s more conventional format did not capitalize on the film’s distinct technological aesthetic.^[16]  The comic follows a demonologist mentioned in the first film, Dr. Johann Averys, who unfortunately goes out of town as the horrors intensify and is unable to help Katie and Micah when they most need it.   The last scene of the film had demon-Katie lunging towards the camera, nearly consuming it before the screen goes black, a marked departure from the camera’s unobstrusive presence throughout the rest of the film.  The comic picks up right where the first film ends, as Averys regretfully informs us alongside an illustrated close-up of Katie’s demonically possessed face: “[Katie] was desperate for my help.  I arrived too late.  Now her boyfriend is dead at the hands of something inexplicable.”  While this first panel taps into the shock of seeing Katie’s demonically possessed face in extreme close-up, the rest of the comic does not imitate or refer back to the film’s static camera aesthetic, merely following Averys’ initial investigation into a larger demonic conspiracy and teasing out the potential for a combination horror/crime procedural narrative.  There were no further issues of the comic, though, suggesting that the PA audience was not interested in the kind of transmedia approach to horror undertaken by the Blair Witch team; instead, the demonic presence that Dr. Averys begins to investigate relocates firmly in the technologically mediated domestic spaces of the second, third and fourth installments of the franchise.

PA 2: Building the Mythology On and Off screen

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Figure 4. Paranormal Activity 2, 2010.

The second film in the franchise not only teases out more details of Katie’s supernatural family history by focusing on her sister Kristi’s (Sprague Grayden’s) family, but also amplified the franchise’s emphasis on domestic surveillance by increasing the number of static cameras used throughout Kristi’s suburban home.  PA 2 also began to further shift the film’s technologically-oriented fear to the viewer’s private spaces and devices via an Easter-Egg filled trailer.  The official trailer on the film’s website featured vague footage from security cameras in a suburban home, yet hidden underneath were “Easter Eggs” that unlocked other, mysterious clips and stills if the viewer dragged the video progress bar backwards at specific points.  While the Easter Eggs do not reveal any clear story information, they appear to come from old, disintegrated footage and photographs.  Allowing the user to access these via a web trailer sets up a disconcerting juxtaposition between “old” and “new” media (and in many ways anticipates PA 3’s central conceit) while also suggesting Katie and her sister Kristi’s mysterious history.  Although in a different vein than PA 1’s trailer, PA 2’s web trailer also emphasizes the experiential facet of contemporary horror films via a digital platform – the idea, outlined by Tryon, that 21^st century horror draws attention to the act of watching and experiencing the films in a new media saturated market.  The viewer, acting as virtual detective, navigates the footage and unlocks secrets, a logical extension of the franchises’ play on voyeurism and haunting, activating the web as a site where the film’s demon mythology unfolds and where the user/viewer experiences horror at his or her fingertips in the seemingly private spaces of the home.

The idea of fear pervading the intimate spaces and technology of the home structures the narrative of PA 2, which is told predominantly from the point of view of security cameras around the house.  PA 2 was unique in its placement on the franchise timeline in that it begins before the first film and ends after it, expanding on Kristi’s role within the family’s demonic history while also following up on the ending of the first film’s narrative (somewhat answering the question of “Where is Katie” that the comic book also attempted to explore).  Like the first film, each night of the haunting is labeled, and the strange activity increases in intensity until Night 19, after which Kristi’s husband Dan (Brian Boland) and his teenage daughter Ali (Molly Ephraim) are forced to perform a kind of spell that transfers the possessing demon to Katie.  The security cameras capture multiple rooms and spaces throughout the house, and each night scene goes through the same cycle of rooms, showing a few seconds of footage of the front path, the pool, the kitchen, living room, front hall, and the nursery, in that order.  The footage is filmed from a high angle, capturing the rooms in their entirety, and for the first half of the film, not much happens in these rooms except for small, seemingly inconsequential movements.  When I first viewed this film during its initial theatrical release, the audience giggled throughout these scenes, presumably amused by the absurdity of staring at empty domestic spaces. What I find revealing about this experience in the theater is how the uncomfortable nature of these scenes, as with PA 1, involves a spectatorial identification with/alienation from the camera itself.  The cameras are merely appliances within a seemingly mundane suburban milieu and capture a great deal of domestic inactivity, yet the audience and the film’s characters rely heavily on these appliances for crucial information and “clues.”  Locked into whatever position the camera is, we read each scene closely for any disruption of domestic space, including doors moving, lights flickering, pots and pans shaking, nursery mobiles slowly turning, or automated pool cleaners malfunctioning. Through such unrelenting observation of inanimate everyday objects turned “possessed,” the PA franchise provides a tongue-in-cheek representation of the true horrors of suburban domesticity – having out of control appliances disturb a comfortable and privileged existence.  Yet the cameras remain steadfast, constant and unrelenting, providing us and the family the only documented evidence of the house’s demonic presence although ultimately failing to save them by the end of the film.

The destruction of the family in PA 2 despite their increased visual security re-emphasizes the connections the franchise consistently makes between domestic (in)security and technology, as increasing the amount and sophistication of the cameras  fails to protect domestic space from outside threats. The notion of security and domesticity via technology are heavily gendered in the first and second film; Hahner, et al argue that the large, affluent houses in the first two films, as well as the futile attempts of the male protagonists to save these houses from destruction via expensive technology, “positions the main characters as worthy of punishment” because of their excessive investment in consumption.^[17]  Dan installs security cameras in the house after the family suffers an alleged break-in, and like Micah, he believes that technology will not only reveal what is rational (a.k.a. seeable), but will also provide some degree of protection for his family.  His foil in this endeavor is the family’s housekeeper Martine (Vivis Colombetti), a woman of Hispanic origin who senses the demon in the house and attempts to convince the family of its danger.^[18] Dan dismisses Martine’s belief and fires her, only to call on her later for help when Kristi becomes fully possessed.  Martine of course represents the tired cliché of the domestic helper of color who has a mystical/psychic connection to spiritual forces, yet she also proves to be a somewhat worthy opponent to the demon and an intriguing alternative to Dan’s male and technologically supported domestic authority.^[19]  Similarly, Dan’s teenage daughter embraces technology, including a handheld camcorder and her computer, as a means for investigation, which provides the film’s teenage audiences with a point of identification that adds a tech-savvy facet to the teen rebellion present in many horror films. The daughter moves through domestic space via her handheld camera, filming her family and the housekeeper jokingly at first and then using the camera to try to document the horrifying events; in contrast, her father appears predominantly from the vantage point of the static security cameras, stuck in the spaces of his own domestic fortress and more symbolically immobilized by his inability to acknowledge the unknown. In the franchise’s fourth installment, this notion of the power of technologically-motivated teenage girl consumption provides a heavily brand-oriented addition to the series’ transmedia universe, but it also re-asserts the franchise’s emphasis on the ways each family’s patriarch fails to protect domestic space even with the most “secure” technology.

PA 3-4: Ghosts in the Transmedia Machines

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Figure 5. Paranormal Activity 3, 2011.

The third and fourth films of the franchise engage even more specifically with viewer consumption by promoting and expanding the PA storyline across more personal gadgets and devices. As Hahner, et al argue, the open-ended nature of each film – the unresolved endings and suggestions of complex backstories – invites viewers to participate further in the franchise’s ambivalent take on consumption: “the films work to disgust viewers with the overconsumption of the main characters,” to ask “the audience to consume the films by scrutinizing the screen,” and, of course, to keep them returning to the theaters to quench their curiosity.^[20] Yet as the devices multiple in and around each film, the consumption that is punished in the narratives of the first two films becomes more explicitly linked to the individual viewer’s acts of consumption, specifically through the failure of these consumer technologies to keep the unseen horror of the films at bay.  The third film in the franchise, a prequel that explains some of Katie and Kristi’s haunted backstory, was the most financially and critically successful of all four films.  Set in 1988, the film is made up of VHS footage of Kristi and Katie’s odd interactions with an invisible friend named Toby, later of course revealed to be the demon.  It is structured the same way as the first two films with increasingly strange activity happening over the course of a few weeks, yet added two elements that increased its appeal – the use of haunted/haunting children and a retro VHS-aesthetic, the latter of which several reviewers commented elevated the film past its two predecessors; recalling the use of mysterious VHS tapes to promote The Ring, the production team passed out vaguely labeled copies of PA 3’s trailer on VHS at festivals.  The second marketing technique PA 3 used was also somewhat delightfully retro, yet, crucial to its transmedia reach, staged as an iPhone or Android phone application called “Demon Summoner.”  Referencing a scene in the film when the sisters and their babysitter play the “Bloody Mary” game in front of a bathroom mirror, the app prompts the user to “Go to a dark room with a mirror” and then “hold the phone upright at eye level.” A flickering candle appears, and then the words “Turn the phone around so the candle faces the mirror and say Bloody Mary 3 times.”  The app then snaps a picture of the user in the mirror, superimposing a strange silhouette over the picture to show photographic proof of a demonic presence alongside the user’s face. PA 1-3 all set up contrasts between classic horror movie props and conventions such as Ouija boards, purification rituals and exorcists and their digital/video aesthetics, and using a phone or mobile device to play a nostalgic parlor game represents a continuation of this tongue-in-cheek clash of horror moments.  Even further, though, the phone app continues the franchise’s attempt to call attention to the multiple devices and gadgets that we use in various spaces, in this case by having users actually carry their devices into their own bathrooms, bedrooms, etc., adding an even more personal and intimate communication device to its transmedia reach. Wessels argues that the explicit use of cell phone camera footage in films like Cloverfield, as well as its use outside of the film in studio sponsored fan-videos, “demonstrate(s) usage of goods integral to the performance of citizenship” that are then “integrated into consumer regimes of self-governance,”^[21] feeding into post 9/11 surveillance culture’s emphasis on individuals as protectors of national security.  The PA franchise’s emphasis on consumer recording devices is not directly tied to political context the way Cloverfield’s is, yet performs a similar kind of corporate-sponsored endorsement of watching and protecting domestic spaces and the nuclear family.  That said, those same recording devices are linked explicitly to fear – capturing events out of the ordinary – and using a cell phone to capture demonic activity in your own home, for example, seems to invite domestic disturbance rather than prevent it.

The third film in the franchise was also the first one to utilize Twitter fully as a marketing platform, encouraging fans to “Tweet To See it First” to bring early premieres of the film to their cities, echoing the franchise’s early attempts to harness fans’ curiosity as a publicity tactic.  The official twitter handle of the franchise, TweetYourScream, soon served a variety of capacities, including marketing and publicity for the fourth film, a news feed for upcoming releases, and a means for fans to continue their conversations about the franchise.  In 2012, the fourth film of the franchise not only utilized Twitter for advertising purposes, tweeting pictures of fans lined up for early screenings and re-tweeting excited, anticipating fans, but the studio also incorporated Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Youtube and Google Plus into a viral campaign creating an additional character in the PA world, a divorced dad named Jacob Degloshi.  About two weeks before the premiere of the fourth film, Mr. Degloshi showed up on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, with pictures and videos of his daughter Sarah coming to live at his house.  At some point Jacob finds a VHS tape in Sarah’s suitcase, with a scratched off symbol of the coven from PA 3, and, after struggling to procure a VCR, watches the tape, which contains footage from 1988 of Katie and Kristi talking with their grandmother.  Katie play-acts being pregnant with a boy named “Hunter,” of course referring to the little boy who is kidnapped in PA 2 and who reappears in PA 4.  Strange events begin plaguing Jacob and his daughter after he watches the tape (which breaks before he can watch all of it), which prompts him to set up cameras to begin documenting the activity.  As with the films, things heat up quickly, leading to his mysterious death, captured on video with his daughter stonily looking on.

While Degloshi’s videos, pictures and messages intersect with the PA world in certain places – the symbol and more VHS footage from PA 3, mentioning the names Hunter and Toby from the entire franchise, his daughter’s friendship with Alex (Kathryn Newton), the main character in PA 4 – what was more interesting was his documentation of the haunting in real time via social media. The studio aimed to reproduce the experience of watching the footage of the films via Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and YouTube, interspersing Degloshi’s descriptions of what was happening with pictures and videos made in the handheld/static footage style of the films.  Degloshi’s story echoes that of the other films – a male homeowner attempting and failing to protect his family via recording technology – yet the use of social media to document the invasion of Degloshi’s private spaces also invades the viewer’s more intimate technological spaces (Twitter, Facebook), continuing the franchise’s blurred boundaries between “outside” (demonic, unseen terrors) and “inside” (domestic spaces, both technological and not).  Degloshi’s existence itself is a phantom in some unseen machine, and while the film’s fans realized early on that Degloshi was the franchise’s creation, there was something unsettling about how easy it was to create, develop and insinuate this character into one’s mundane techno-existence.  Building on this extension of horror into the everyday, the film’s official website also featured a “chat with Alex” link that turns the viewer’s computer screen into a Skype conversation with PA 4’s teen protagonist, Alex, and allows the viewer to witness, via the computer’s camera, frightening scenes involving Hunter and Katie.  As you are chatting (or, rather, listening to Alex chat), the computer screen fills with pop-ups of various cameras placed around the house.  Taken together, the Jacob Degloshi campaign and the “chat with Alex” feature produce small narrative tidbits for the franchise’s expanding storyline yet continue to shift its focus to the immediacy of horror experienced via household technology, specifically in the case of PA 4, computers and video game consoles.

PA 1 and 2 used cameras explicitly as devices meant to protect domestic space, but PA 4’s use of recording technology is more insidious, calling attention to the fact that more individualized consumer devices can “watch” us in unexpected ways. The fourth film is a true sequel, taking place about 5 years after the end of PA 2, where Katie and her strange son Robbie (Brady Allen) have moved across the street from a family in a Henderson, Nevada suburb.  The family’s teenage daughter, Alex, begins to notice strange interactions between Robbie and her brother Wyatt (Aiden Lovekamp), which she and her friend Ben (Matt Shively) begin to document via various recording devices.  The fourth film uses the same combinations of handheld and static footage, yet its primary technological conceits were the family’s Xbox Kinect and the webcams on the family’s laptops, rigged by Ben to capture footage in various rooms. While filming with the laptops’ cameras merely replicates camcorder footage, we become aware of the computer interface when Alex “Skypes” with Ben on her laptop and his image pops up on the lower right side of the screen. As filmmaker Henry Joost says of the choice of webcam, “When you’re video chatting with someone, you can’t see behind you, but the audience watching this can. That plays a pretty big role in the movie.”^[22] Joost takes the horror convention of the audience seeing something creeping behind the protagonist and transfers it to an everyday communication device, drawing attention to the ways we position ourselves in relation to those devices in domestic space and the ways these devices appear to “watch” us back. The Xbox Kinect, set up in the family’s living room, is also a device that we do not associate with recording footage, but it unwittingly records strange events in the green, pixilated footage of the Kinect’s motion-capture feature.  Unlike the cameras in the other films, the Kinect does not reveal any crucial events in the film’s narrative but instead hides eerie faces and shapes for effect alone, prompting critics to deride its use as pure Microsoft product integration. That said, both the laptops and the Kinect translated well into the franchise’s most developed transmedia marketing campaign, a full-blown Twitter campaign that continued after the film’s release on DVD. The franchise’s Twitter account encouraged viewers to play with their own Kinect motion-capture footage, to tweet pictures of themselves watching the film (preferably on an Xbox) to enter an Xbox sweepstakes (#PA4onXbox), and to tweet pictures of “demon signs” in their own houses to win a DVD prize package (#DemonSigns).  While the pictures themselves were humorous and tongue-in-cheek (haunted pets was a particularly goofy trend), these campaigns encouraged viewers and fans yet again to focus on the experiential aspects of watching and re-watching the films. Hahner, et. al claim that “Tweeting or posting one’s experience with the films allows the ambiguity of consumption to move further beyond the space of the films proper,”^[23] and asking fans to document their experiences watching the DVD on various devices and in different rooms of their houses encourages the continuing consumption and promotion of the franchise via various platforms. Jenkins says that films inviting intense audience involvement (i.e. that ones that can lead to a plethora of transmedia strands) “must provide resources consumers can use in constructing their own fantasies,”^[24] and the sheer simplicity and mundaneness of the static camera, the Xbox, and the webcam, along with the extension of the franchise into social media, prompt viewers to imitate and parody the franchise’s style and content on multiple platforms.  That said, the imitations also emphasize the interactions between camera, space and body that the franchise foregrounds, and locating and documenting fear in these intimate, mundane spaces and devices unwittingly calls attention to the limits of technology to capture and protect us from the unknown.

Conclusion

In this essay, I have attempted to trace the transmedia branding campaign of the Paranormal Activity franchise through its four installments, focusing specifically on the franchise’s use of various recording technologies to create a viewer-centered horror experience that translates to a variety of personal devices.  I argue that the use of a static camera aesthetic and haunted websites, iPhone apps and Twitter campaigns ultimately draws attention to the ways that what Wessels calls “security-citizenship,” or the use of personal recording devices for safety and protection, fails.  There is a disjuncture between the ways that the families in each film make futile attempts to protect their homes using technology and the ways the franchise promotes itself through that same technology, asking fans, by the fourth film, to document their own experiences with fear in ways similar to those of the possessed, dead and otherwise disenfranchised characters of the four films.  The PA franchise has been read against the Great Recession and Housing Crises of recent years in its punishment of white, wealthy homeowners, yet its use of technology also recalls the way surveillance culture in recent years has become increasingly individualized, from the FBI’s request for cell phone footage of the April 2013 Boston Marathon bombings to the ongoing allegations of the NSA’s spying on private phone and Internet use.  To “Tweet Your Scream,” then, is to participate in a brand campaign, but perhaps also to consider – for a split second, even – that neither the device you are using nor the space you are using it in is “safe” from the prying eyes of whatever and whomever is watching.  The PA franchise has successfully extended its reach into the personal spaces and devices of its fans, yet its use of transmedia horror reveals a deep ambivalence about how and why we use technology in our everyday lives.

References

Carvell, Tim. “How The Blair Witch Project Built Up So Much Buzz: Movie Moguldum on a Shoestring.” Fortune Magazine. August 16, 1999. http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1999/08/16/264276/.

Cornet, Ruth. “Interview: ‘Paranormal Activity’ director Oren Peli in ‘Paranormal Activity 3.’” Screen Rant. October 20, 2011. http://screenrant.com/paranormal-activity-3-oren-peli-interview-rothc-137180/.

Gleiberman, Owen. “‘Paranormal Activity’: A marketing campaign so ingenious it’s scary.” Entertainment Weekly. October 7, 2009. http://insidemovies.ew.com/2009/10/07/paranormal-activity-marketing-campaign/.

Hahner, Leslie A., Scott J. Varda and Nathan A. Wilson. “Paranormal Activity and the Horror of Abject Consumption.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 30, no. 5 (2012): 362-376.

Horn, John. “The Haunted History of Paranormal Activity.” The Los Angeles Times. September 20, 2009. http://articles.latimes.com/2009/sep/20/entertainment/ca-paranormal20/1.

Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press, 2006.

Jenkins, Henry. “Transmedia Storytelling 101.” Confessions of an Aca-Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins. March 22, 2007. http://henryjenkins.org/2007/03/transmedia_storytelling_101.html.

Lobdell, Scott (writer) and Mark Badger (artist). Paranormal Activity: The Search for Katie, IDW Publishing (December 2009). iTunes.

Roscoe, Jane. “The Blair Witch Project: Mock documentary goes mainstream.” Jump Cut 43 (2000). http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC43folder/BlairWitch.html.

Sullivan, Kevin P. “‘Paranormal Activity 4: Five Secrets Revealed.” MTV.com. August 29, 2012. http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1692810/paranormal-activity-4.jhtml.

Telotte, J.P.  “The Blair Witch Project Project: Film and the Internet.” In Nothing that Is: Millennial Cinema and the Blair Witch Controversies, edited by Sarah Lynn Higley and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, 37-51. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2004.

Tryon, Chuck. “Video from the Void: Video Spectatorship, Domestic Film Cultures and Contemporary Horror Film.” Journal of Film and Video 61, no. 3 (2009). 40-51.

Wessels, Emmanuelle. “’Where were you when the monster hit?’ Media convergence, branded security citizenship and the trans-media phenomenon of Cloverfield.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 17, no. 1 (2011): 69-83.

The Ring Franchise

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Figure 1. Publicity poster for Sadako 3D (2012).

The circuits of transnational production sparked by Ringu (Hideo Nakata, 1998)[1] — which remains Japan’s most commercially successful domestic horror film ever released — are polyvalent and anfractuous, constituted of almost unprecedented levels of cross-cultural exchange, regeneration, and diversification across multiple mediums and platforms.  The Ring films[2] have become such a powerful cultural phenomenon that a varied range of insightful criticism about them exists[3], most of which concentrates on the first Japanese film and the equally influential American remake, The Ring (Gore Verbinski, 2002).[4] Yet considering that the Ring texts’ mythos of an uncontainable transmedia virus increasingly extends beyond the fictional diegesis to underpin the real life mechanics of the franchise, I suggest that their evocation of contagious transmediation has not yet been adequately examined. This is hardly surprising considering that the extent to which this contagion would creep into the real could barely be appreciated until recently: the newest film additions to the Ring franchise, Sadako 3D[5] and Sadako 3D 2[6] (Tsutomu Hanabusa, 2012 and 2013), have been surrounded by a swirl of visceral and engaging promotional texts which destabilise the traditional dichotomy between the films as ‘main events’ and the secondary media that promote them. Considered instead as a multiplicitous array of texts offering variegated modes of embodied participation and engagement, I suggest that in Japan the recent additions to the Ring franchise (subsequently referred to collectively as ‘Ring’) have augmented trans- and cross-media mechanics to such an extent that Ring is becoming less a film franchise and more like a disembodied theme park. Just as the thematic locus of the Ring series is a monstrous eruption through media boundaries, the film series that is Ring increasingly mutates and extends its tendrils beyond the cinematic frame.

Partly as a result of this intense media saturation in Japan, the basic narrative framework underlying the Ring franchise has reached the status of almost universally recognizable cultural fairy tale.[7]  The mythemic nucleus of Ring’s plot —which remains in some form across the vast web of Ring texts — is that a young girl with vague supernatural powers (called Sadako in the Japanese versions) is brutally murdered after being thrown down a well and left to die.  Her vengeance festers while her spirit remains trapped in the well, and she uses her psychic powers to implant her thoughts, a series of surreal images which eerily undermine any conception of narrative coherence, onto a videotape or another optical media apparatus. When her images are viewed, the spectator becomes ‘infected’ by them and is doomed to die within a week unless they copy and pass them on. The culmination of Sadako’s curse involves her eruption through the screen on which her image appears, killing the reluctant spectator. Ultimately, the anxieties projected by Ring constellate around the capacity of mediated images for uncontainable, contagious proliferation, and the resultant threat that media technologies may infect and overcome the human subject.

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Figure 2. Sadako emerges from the television. Ringu (1998).

Tracing the movements of the Ring texts demonstrates that, in parallel to the thematic core of the Ring universe itself, the franchise has propagated like an infectious virus: constructing linear models of progress from originals to remakes and reboots is largely a fruitless task.  A brief outline of the emergence of the franchise at the turn of the millennium in Japan illustrates this condition. The first film Ringu was based on the bestselling novel Ring (1991) by Koji Suzuki, who is commonly known as the “Japanese Stephen King” (Suzuki has also suggested that he was inspired by Poltergeist (Tobe Hooper, 1982)[8]). While the movement from Suzuki’s book to Nakata’s wildly successful film has been much discussed, elided in current discourse on the Ring franchise is the fact that Nakata and his screenwriter Hiroshi Takahashi were also informed by a made-for-television movie version of Suzuki’s novel titled Ring: Kanzenban (Ring: The Complete Edition, Fuji Television, 1995).[9] A sequel to Ringu was produced concurrently with Nakata’s film featuring the same cast, but with a different crew: Rasen (Spiral, 1998), directed by Jôji Iida, who also wrote the screenplay for Kanzenban. This film, which closely followed the plot of Suzuki’s book sequel of the same name, performed poorly at the box office in comparison to smash hit Ringu, so the production company, Omega Project, rapidly developed a new sequel which deviated from the plot of Suzuki’s books, Ringu 2 (Nakata, 1999), which was a moderate success.

The same year, another television series was produced by Fuji, Ringu: Saishûshô (Ring: The Final Chapter – like the previous “Complete Edition”, a rather ironic title). The series consisted of twelve hour long episodes, and would be followed by a second, ‘sequel’ series (which in fact diverged greatly from the first), Rasen, constituted of thirteen hour long episodes. In 2000, a prequel to Nakata’s Ringu was released, Ringu 0: Bāsudei (Birthday, Norio Tsuruta, 2000), a year which also saw the release of two Ring videogames, The Ring: Terror’s Realm (Asmik Ace Entertainment) for the Sega Dreamcast and Ring: Infinity (Kadakowa Shorten) for the Bandai WonderSwan, a Japanese handheld gaming device.  In parallel to this vast array of texts, multiple manga volumes have been produced (eleven to date), all of which both re-imagine and extend Ringu’s story to varying degrees. Suzuki also continues to add new additions to his Ring series, which currently is constituted of three novels and one collection of short stories. Suzuki’s subsequent books have been strongly influenced by the myriad of other texts ‘based’ on his original novel. There has also been a Korean remake of Ringu, The Ring Virus (Dong-bin Kim, 1999). In addition, the aforementioned American remake, The Ring, was successful both with critics and at the box office, and spawned a sequel directed by Ringu’s Nakata (The Ring Two, 2005). The focus of this essay, Sadako 3D[10], has been termed a reboot in English language media coverage, but it in fact stems from the story of the first three films, while building on the 1999 television series Ring: The Final Chapter and Suzuki’s Ring sequels Loop (1999) and S (2012, as yet unpublished in English).

Clearly, the Ring franchise is an unruly beast, extending into a multiplicity of rhizomatic mutations which distort the boundaries between specific mediums and narrative worlds. In fact, as both Chika Kinoshita and Thy Phu have pointed out, the term “J-horror”, used transnationally to denote “Japanese horror”, does not necessarily signify a nationalized film genre, but, to use Kinoshita’s term, more of a “movement.”[11] As Phu observes “the prefix [J] functions as a floating signifier aptly capturing the relative fluidity with which these films [and, I would add, non-filmic texts] circulate….The term anticipates and allows for its adaptability.”[12] While the Ring franchise undoubtedly represents a constellation of both trans- and cross-media texts in functional terms, it in turn unsettles clear delineations between these two categories, and in fact the chaotic transgression of media boundaries is central to both the aesthetics and uncanny affects of the franchise.

In fact, this disruption of the borders between texts, screens and mediums and the underpinning disturbance of the distinction between ‘real life’ and ‘mediated artificiality’ ultimately overpowers (or perhaps defies the possibility of) any hermetic notion of narrative coherence across the franchise. In this sense transmedia contagion — conceived as a mutation between platforms as opposed to a coherent cross-media retelling or extension of narrative — has become the ideo-aesthetic core of the franchise, and is not just an extra-diegetic condition of its delivery.  This contagion occurs because Sadako functions as a transmediated being who infects the real. Her viral curse reduces humanity and technology to the same function by using both as vessels for the proliferation of her image, which in turn works to fuse audiences into this monstrous incarnation of a transmedia universe. In so doing, Sadako also embodies a collapse in the boundaries between reality and its signification, exposing what Jean Baudrillard refers to as the “tactical hallucination”[13] involved in maintaining outmoded dichotomies between authenticity and artifice, signifier and signified in a simulacral, postmodern society.

While Ring extends beyond national boundaries as a result of both the transnational success of the original Japanese film and through subsequent remakes in the US and Korea, this article narrows its focus to the Japanese Ring tradition because it is within the context of its cultural homeland that the franchise has been the most enduring and influential. I suggest that this is largely because the franchise works through particular anxieties about the over-determined relationship between national progress, technology and cultural authenticity in Japan. In particular, this article explores the ways in which the Ring franchise increasingly expresses anxieties surrounding the theme park — an important symbol of troubled progress in Japan.

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Figure 3. One of the screen crawling shots of Sadako from Ringu (1998).

The Ring Sensorium

The Ring texts have always implicated audiences in the horror of their fictional universes: they imply that as a result of being subjected to Sadako’s cursed video in the process of watching the film, the viewer, mirroring the on-screen victims, has become infected by Sadako’s curse. Thus, a central component of the mythos is a monstrous form of transmediation in which the human viewer becomes just another machinic conduit for Sadako’s image. As Anthony Enns states: “Ringu takes the logic of the mind-machine interface [to extremes] by suggesting that … processes of psychic transference can actually work in both directions: [Sadako’s] mind is certainly capable of transmitting and storing images directly onto optical media, but such stored images can also imprint themselves onto the perceiver’s psychic apparatus.”[14] That Sadako’s cursed images extra-diegetically infect the viewer’s mind is invoked with further potency by the conceit that Sadako has the ability to erupt through the screen which projects her image and enter the real space of the spectator. Such a mechanism impels the spectator to become a participant within the narrative, instead of an observer outside of the on-screen universe.

I suggest that this visceral mode of ‘spectatorship’[15] can be explicated through the lens of Angela Ndalianis’ “horror sensorium”, a concept which illuminates the “kind of experiences the senses mediate and give meaning to in our encounter with contemporary horror cinema.”[16] Ndalianis’ sensorium denotes the indissoluble fusion of cognition, emotion and sensation involved in audience engagement with horror films. Thus, the sensorium provides a model for the relations between film and audience which allows consideration of the deep entwining of the cognitive and the visceral that constitutes the Ring franchise’s mechanics. The texts under discussion foreground and revolve around the manner by which they interface with audiences, accentuating our conscious acknowledgement of the space where “the medium and the human body collide.”[17] This visceral collision of medium and body in turn enunciates the collapsing together of mediated images/corporeality and artificial signs/reality that underpins the increasingly theme park-esque dynamics of the franchise. In addition, as will be shown, the Ring franchise employs theme park aesthetics to express deep cultural anxieties associated with national progress in Japan. The analytical framework provided by the sensorium helps to uncover how the Ring franchise’s mediation on complicated cultural tensions is intertwined with the texts’ aesthetics and visceral affects, and not by any means separate from them.

In compliment to Ndalianis’ concept of the horror sensorium, I will draw on insights garnered from Scott Lukas’ astute analysis of the theme park and its increasingly ubiquitous position within contemporary culture — the effects of which I suggest are particularly prominent within the Japanese cultural consciousness. In parallel, I refer to the anxieties raised in particular by Baudrillard about the theme park as the apex of simulacral illusion, a space which fosters the misapprehension that in our contemporary hyperreal society there remains a clear distinction between signs and reality. The presence of the theme park is not only increasingly rendered in the Ring franchise through the visceral affects of the films (which are in themselves ever drawing closer to theme park attractions), but because the anxieties raised by Sadako and her media-proliferated virus echo those surrounding the sinister invasion of the theme park space into the very core of reality. As Lukas explains, critics from Alan Bryman to Baudrillard “are concerned that [the] movement of the theme park form [from an enclosed space to a cultural mode] will result in a loss of the authenticity of life. Like a virus, a terrorist or a moral panic, the theme park threatens everyday life itself.”[18] Anxieties constellating around the theme park thus parallel those central to the Ring: that media technologies have staged an insidious take-over of the real.

The Ring media enact this invasion by impelling audiences to interact with Sadako’s universe and the tensions it expresses in participatory and embodied ways. As Jackson observes of the first film, “the viewer’s feeling that she, too, may have been “infected” by the film’s images situates the horror of the experience in the body. This disallows the purging experience that the horror movie . . . could provide, and instead leaves an anxious trace behind it.”[19] In the last few years in particular, the Ring franchise has started to play with this distortion between mediated artificiality and reality by extending Sadako’s reach into the physical world via theme park-like spectacles, attractions and events which insist on the primacy of embodied participation rather than passive ‘viewing’.

For instance, to promote the release of Sadako 3D, a walk-through maze attraction was established at the indoor theme park Sega Joypolis in Tokyo — a tradition which has been in place since the release of Ringu, ensuring that Ring has had a near constant presence at Joypolis for over a decade. The maze reproduced the narrative of the film in micro-form, placing participants ‘inside’ Sadako’s world by echoing the media hybridity of theme park attractions, layering brief clips from the film with simple audio-visual effects and a real life ‘tour guide’, playing the part of a computer technician, who mediated the participants’ interface with the attraction. He led us through different rooms featuring computer and television screens which reacted to our presence in mysterious ways. Predictably, the final room contained a mossy well. Throughout the attraction, “Sadako” (a person in costume) would emerge from unexpected spaces in each room and stagger towards us, and the experience culminated with her chasing us out of the attraction.

Also in conjunction with Sadako 3D, on the main street in Tokyo’s Shibuya (in fact, at the world’s busiest intersection, Shibuya crossing) a “Sadako parade” was held, in which fifty “Sadakos” (people dressed as Sadako-emerging-through-the-screen) marched up and down the street, interacting with spectators. The parade culminated in a large float, akin to those featured in theme park character parades, featuring a giant Sadako dragging herself through a screen and reaching out towards onlookers. Sadako also became a part of the pre-game entertainment at a major baseball game at Tokyo Dome, throwing the first pitch, as seen in the video below.[20]

Sadako throws the first pitch, Tokyo Dome, 2012

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Figure 4. Sadako 3D Parade, japanator.com, 2012.

This trend of the theme park-like attraction or spectacle began early in the franchise with ‘pranks’ on Japanese television programs (such as the video below, which aptly went viral on youtube), in which “Sadako” physically emerges from some space ‘behind’ the television screen at the climactic moment in the film. This constitutes a fourfold layering of spectatorship — viewers of such pranks watch people watch Ringu, who are in turn watching fictional character Ryuji watch Sadako’s monstrous emergence from the television screen. Such mise-en-abyme mirrors the stacking up of media experiences and layers of engagement central to the theme park. Pranks like this one encourage a form of active, playful spectatorship, in which we enjoy the vicarious thrill involved in watching others in modes of extreme sensorial engagement.

Japanese Pop Group ‘Morning Musume’ fall prey to a Sadako prank.

The experience of watching others screaming out of terrified delight on rollercoasters and similar thrill rides is sewed into the spatial and experiential geography of the theme park. Thus like the Ring franchise, theme parks revolve around a temporally plural mode of spectatorship, fostering anticipation, and perhaps exhilarating dread, for our own future engagement with thrill rides, and also re-invoking our experience from the recent past. Such theme park-esque incitement of the sensorium deepens the implication in Ring that our fusion with optical media is disruptive to our own subjective wholeness, placing the human body frighteningly at the mercy of media technologies even as we willingly conflate and engage with them. At the core of many theme park rides is the thrilling realization that we are placing our comparatively fragile bodies under the control of formidable machines, which draw us to the extreme limits of sensorial engagement; we are rendered powerless when fused to such machines, before being thrust into a realm of exhilarating simulated danger.

The aesthetics that have come to dominate the Ring franchise in recent years thus allow a playful engagement with the hybridization and layering of different mediums, technologies and experiences that similarly constitute the theme park. Ndalianis explains that:

contemporary horror is marked by an excess of self-referentiality and remediation that is as multifarious as the conglomerate structure that produces it. It gives rise to a hybrid logic that has significant ramifications for genres and the critical models used to analyse them and, in the case of the theme park attractions, this is all the more so because of the excess media hybridity.[21]

As the Ring franchise develops beyond the first decade of the new millennium, the play on this media hybridity and transgression between boundaries of technologically-mediated artificial world and the ‘real’ has become central to its mechanics — exceeding any specific focus on character or narrative. The locus of Sadako’s monstrosity is in fact her inscrutable lack of a subjective core, leaving it impossible for audiences to discern where she is placed on the human-machine continuum. Yet as well as being central to her eerie affects, this lack of a coherent character paradoxically ensures  that Sadako can be a very adaptable media darling, as her image is rendered endlessly re-locatable across Japanese media. For instance, Sadako recently appeared as “Hello Kitty” in Sanrio’s Sadako 3D—Hello Kitty tie-in, which featured stickers, mugs, and notebooks available for purchase at film-screenings and at the Joypolis park. Evidently, Sadako’s inescapable hybridity and penchant for disseminating her cursed image across multiple mediums has far exceeded the confines of a unitary fictional narrative.

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Figure 5. Sadako 3D/Hello Kitty tie-in, alafista.com, 2013.

Lost Decades and Cursed VHS Tapes: Sadako and the Collapse of Technological Progress

Sadako’s indiscriminate incursion of Japanese media texts, and the comingling of fear and playfulness that underlies it, relates to her resonant embodiment of the collapse of secure narratives of technological progress in Japan.  Technology has been central to Japan’s hyper-accelerated transition to modernity since the Meiji Restoration of 1868 – 1912, a rapid socio-cultural shift undergirded by what Susan Napier refers to as “highly conscious ideology of national progress”[22]: in pursuit of global agency after opening to Western trade, Japan’s feudal structure was replaced with a market economy and the country underwent a rapid process of industrialization. From the Meiji period onwards, fixations on futurity became mediated through the sparkling horizons promised by technological advances. Following Japan’s traumatic defeat in World War II and the subsequent Allied Occupation (1945-1952), this fixation with progress was resurrected with deepened exigency and impetus, albeit set along new axes: the quest for progress became anxiously determined as the means by which Japan could overcome its victim status and reconfigure a sense of national identity.

Yet even before the War, beneath preoccupations with national progress lurked a series of tensions. The ambivalence is summed up in the saying wakon-yosai (Japanese spirit, Western technology), which became something of a mantra pre-war, but continues to characterise Japanese attitudes towards technology. From the time of the Meiji Restoration onwards the quest for modernity, while overtly successful, was underpinned by an unstable series of dichotomies. As Kevin Doak elucidates, “modernity was defined in a variety of ways (and therefore tended toward obscurity): at times it represented a foreign influence — the West; at other times it referred to the Meiji state and its ideology of ‘civilization and enlightenment.’”[23] Narratives of rapid technological progress attempted to reconcile this discordant constellation of principles, and in some ways served to uneasily suppress them.

Throughout the Meiji period strong emphasis was placed on ‘catching up’ with the West through technological and industrial development, and in some cases this process included the conscious disavowal of ancient Japanese traditions.  Both Gerald Figal[24] and Ramie Tateishi suggest that one of the most prominent reforms of the Meiji education system was Tetsujiro Inoue’s discourse on “monsterology”, which emerged in the late 1890s and attempted to eliminate any reference to supernatural folklore in favour of a more ‘rational’, Western-style ideology. As Tateishi explains, “coded as illogical and chaotic, and thus antithetical to the project of modernisation, such elements were targeted as the embodiments of those qualities that needed to be eliminated in the name of progress.”[25] ‘National progress’ became even more anxiously determined after the War: a condition of the Allied Occupation was that Japan must abandon important tenets of its traditional culture, such as the sacred power of the Emperor and state Shinto, enforcing the wholesale re-modelling of Japanese cultural identity. The resolute quest for rapid economic and technological progress once again became the way in which the Japanese negotiated this cultural upheaval.

Japan’s extremely rapid, and, under the circumstances, rather astonishing economic and technological progress following WWII has long been held up as an example to be emulated and respected, and promptly became central to the rebuilding of the nation’s sense of pride in overcoming traumatic defeat. In fact Napier suggests that “post-war Japan has become something of a myth if not a full-blown fantasy.”[26] Yet despite being  extremely successful, this was an investment in technological progress that was always to be somewhat fraught, especially considering the uneasy repression of Japan’s pre-modern past that became a necessary (and at the time of the Occupation, enforced) side-effect of this progress.

As galvanized by the postwar constitution imposed on Japan — which includes a provision that Japan must forever renounce war and global conflict — much of the emphasis of Japan’s post-war economic advancement was placed upon leisure technologies, which rapidly became central to the way in which the nation projected its image both domestically and globally.  At the pinnacle of Japan’s rapid economic progress from the 1970s to the late 1980s, one such technology was the VHS video tape — the eerie conduit for Sadako’s curse in Ringu — invented by the (at that time) independent Victor Company of Japan.  As Phu explains, the VHS tape sealed in “its victories with competing developments such as Betamax, the laserdisc and electronic disc, Japan’s much envied stature as a technological superpower” and became associated with the “dominance of a ‘national’ innovation.”[27] VHS was the unlikely success story of an independent Japanese company which won the hard fought battle for technological domination of the home entertainment sector at that time.

At the time of Ringu’s domestic release in late 1998, VHS was still ubiquitous, but the DVD had been introduced in America only a year before; subsequently, VHS was faced with a swift obsolescence. By the time Ringu and its sequels were marketed heavily overseas by DreamWorks and Universal Studios in the early to mid-2000s (particularly with the release of the box-set Ringu Anthology of Terror in 2005), the films were largely released on DVD. The aesthetics of Sadako’s curse amplify the temporal lag and liminality underlying the Ring franchise’s global emergence at the fold between analogue and digital video storage. Sadako’s VHS curse is presented entirely in grainy black and white, consisting of images constructed using frontal lighting which produces an extremely flat and thin spatial aesthetic, recalling the frontal lighting and resultant flattened aesthetics of very early Japanese film (which was in turn mimetic of Kabuki theatre).[28]  Sadako’s tattered long white gown and angular movements are evocative of even more distant pasts: emerging as she does from a well in a forest clearing, Sadako appears like one of the vengeful female ghosts of pre-modern Kabuki, Noh and ukiyo-e (woodblock prints) centred on kaidan, or ancient ghost folklore.  Thus at the brink of the millennial turn, Sadako, a monstrous remnant of both prior stages of technological development and Japan’s ‘chaotic’ spiritual past, infected a device which symbolized Japanese technological supremacy at the very moment when it was tipped to be overcome by the new, ‘purer’ digital technology.[29]

Enhancing this eerie sense of the past reinstating itself in a disturbance of technological progress, Ringu was released in the midst of the collapse of Japan’s bubble economy. This sudden breakdown in economic progress proved extremely hard to overcome, and the period of economic stagnation from the mid-1990s into the new millennium became known as the “lost decade.”[30] As indicated by the terminology, the lost decade figured a sweeping ideological rupture to narratives of unbridled national progress — a phenomenon that had not occurred on such a scale since WWII. As Fletcher and von Staden elucidate, “the experience of the lost decade has been traumatic for Japan ….Observers no longer claimed that Japan was ‘number one’…. [T]he effects of the economic stagnation linger as the nation has not found a way out of its economic purgatory of slow growth over the past two decades.”[31]  Emerging as it did in this milieu of collapsed progress, Ringu’s raising of a pre-modern spectre who possesses supposedly ‘current’ VHS technology just as it was faced with impending obsolescence — harnessing this technology to project images redolent of the earliest stages of Japanese film history — held a disruptively asynchronous power.

Despite the fact that VHS is now obsolete, the VHS tape curse of the original film remains deeply uncanny in its raising of a premature, but seemingly prescient, ‘analogue nostalgia’ for the fitful, grainy qualities of the VHS. In fact, even in 1998, Nakata consciously endeavoured to enhance the imperfection of the analogue image by passing it through a computer and applying a special effect to enhance the washed-out, snowy quality.  It is as if the unruly, repressed elements of Japan’s cultural history are rendered by the snowy aesthetic of Sadako’s cursed tape. In fact audio-visual static heralds Sadako’s imminent appearance in Ringu, while posing a threat to the protagonists by obscuring the already enigmatic images and audio contained on the tape — images that the characters are tasked with decoding in their attempts to ‘solve’ the mysteries of Sadako’s curse. These efforts to penetrate the static and decipher the cursed video are ultimately doomed, because Sadako’s curse is buttressed not by humanistic reason but by her mechanistic impulse to reproduce and disseminate the grainy images. Sadako’s curse, it seems, works to deconstruct linear models of progress, reducing coherent images of national identity into a meaningless swarm of seething pixels.

Sadako’s Cursed Video, Ringu, 1998

[Abandoned] Theme Parks

As the Ring franchise develops and the VHS tape becomes increasingly culturally extraneous, the franchise has gradually ungrounded its ties to any one particular technology by instead adopting the mechanics of the theme park: less a singular media technology than a technologically-mediated realm, in both a physical and immaterial sense. As Lukas suggests, “as architectural objects theme parks are solidified forms, but as imaginative objects they are ephemeral, gaseous, rhizomatic”[32], and Baudrillard, using Disneyland as a metonym, suggests that the theme park “is a perfect model of all entangled orders of simulation.”[33]  In this realm, as in the Ring universe, humans willingly become sutured into an asymmetrical relationship with a dizzying array of mediated images and machines. Unlike the VHS tape, the theme park remains culturally relevant not only through the wispy tendrils of nostalgia for something lost— although in many ways, as will be shown, the Japanese theme park is also steeped in a nostalgia for the past rendered unsettling — but as a prominent spatial and cultural presence in Japan. Like Sadako herself, the theme park is a domain which mutates in accordance with technological developments, yet at the same time draws attention to the constructed-ness of teleological, linear models of progress.

In his discussion of Disneyland, Umberto Eco contends that the theme park represents a space in which “absolute unreality is offered as real presence”[34] as the artificial sign unashamedly lays itself bare as the real thing. For this reason, Eco describes the theme park as the “Absolute Fake” borne “of the unhappy awareness of a present without depth.”[35] Contemporary Japan can be considered as such a depthless present, characterized by the falling away of the master-narrative of technological progress which had previously buttressed conceptions of cultural identity, a future-fixated model which also reconciled the concomitant displacement of traditional cultural modes inherent in Japan’s shift to modernity. In fact, anxieties about the loss of cultural authenticity had seethed beneath this model of progress from the earliest decades of the 20^th century, yet are disconcertingly exposed in the wake of the lost decade. As Tetsuo Najita explains, writing soon before the collapse of the economy, since the Meiji Restoration “technology as a system of knowledge and production belonged to the Western Other, and had been directly imported into the native historical stream rendering much of that history artificial.”[36]  Especially when considered alongside the spectre of the abandoned theme park — a ubiquitous and eerie presence throughout Japan — the theme park can be seen as a receptacle for the anxieties surrounding technological progress and cultural authenticity which have come to haunt contemporary Japan.

The theme park amalgamates all of the ambivalence surrounding the wakon-yosai formulation writ large and in feverishly neo-baroque form.[37]  Spaces akin to early amusement parks, such as America’s Coney Island, began to emerge in Japan in direct coincidence with the opening of Japan for Western trade in the final years of the Edo period. The first, Hanayashiki Amusement park in Asakusa, Tokyo, was opened in 1853, soon after the arrival of Matthew Perry’s US Naval fleet. It was first designed as an attractive commodification of traditional Japanese customs and to showcase Japan’s natural beauty to the Western interlopers: Hanayashiki means “flower viewing place.” Yet during the Meiji period, it gradually transformed into something of an exhibition space for ever more advanced attractions and rides, extravagantly expanding on ideas borrowed from the West, such as the Ferris Wheel and the roller coaster. Hanayashiki is still in existence, and throughout its over 160 year life span increasingly advanced rides and attractions have been stacked into what is quite a tiny space. Baudrillard suggests that “when the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning,”[38] as the simulated reconstruction of the past — a tangible yet artificial (re)construction of “pastness” — comes to stand in for the past itself. He suggests that nostalgic images of “pastness” become anxiously over-determined in post-modern, simulacral societies because “our entire linear and accumulative culture would collapse if we could not stockpile the past in plain view.”[39] Evidently Hanayashiki plays such a cultural function, attempting to conceal the cultural hollowness of the present by frantically amassing remnants of a lost past even as it projects a narrative of continual progress.

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Figure 6. Hanayashiki Amusement Park in Asakusa, Tokyo, Tallon4.com, 2013.

The maintenance of the past’s visibility is a particularly important yet precarious exercise in Japan, for, as the example of Hanayashiki demonstrates, narratives of Japanese cultural identity attempt to balance an ideology of rapid national progress — both an import of and reaction to Western cultural imperialism —with traditional Japanese customs. At Hanayashiki, the spectres of the park’s historical purpose as a flower viewing garden remain in simulated form: at the centre of the park is an artificial mountain which contains a flower viewing area, and there is also a man-made lake surrounded by kitschy incarnations of traditional Japanese shrines and artefacts. Even the entrance ticket visualises the park’s existence as thread to the past, depicting a faded, black-and-white image of the park as it was in the 1850s bordered by a technicoloured, neo-baroque frame which stands in for the frenetic Hanayashiki of the present. The park ultimately crumbles any distinction between ‘authentic’ cultural history and the artificial reconstruction of it in the present: the convoluted space presents a disorienting simulacral archaeology of national progress. Notably, Hanayashiki makes a brief appearance in failed Ringu sequel Rasen, reflected as an eerie space in which protagonist Ando engages in a moment of haunted nostalgia for his dead son, the memory of the dead child and the retro theme park united in their evocation of troubled progress.

While Hanayashiki has been active since 1853, many Japanese theme parks have in fact had a strangely transitory existence. Throughout the period of Japan’s immense economic strength from the late 1970s to the late 1980s, a great number of theme parks were built all over the country. Theodore Gilman explains that “theme parks were a popular economic development tool in the 1980s in Japan, and the spread of these facilities to the most rural regions is due entirely to policy diffusion supported by both local and national governments.”[40] These spaces have often been held up as peculiar incarnations of the wakon-yosai formulation due to their specific themes, many of which offer warped simulacra of Western cultural modes or spaces. Such parks have included Gulliver’s Kingdom (a space at the base of Mount Fuji which incarnated the world of Gulliver’s Travels), Western Village (a Wild West park in Tochigi, complete with animatronic cowboys and a miniature Mount Rushmore), and Nara Dreamland, a Nara park modelled on Disneyland (yet without the necessary copyright permissions), complete with a magic castle and spatially identical main street.  With the sudden bursting of the economic bubble and subsequent economic downturn of the late 1990s which continues to loom over contemporary Japan, many of these extravagant theme parks have been forced to close down.

Without the economic support to either sustain or completely remove them, there are now many abandoned theme parks dotted around Japan in various states of disrepair, including each of those listed above. While many of them have been vandalised or damaged extensively (which, in the case of Gulliver’s Kingdom did eventually lead to the removal of most of the larger structures), some sit largely intact on the edges of cities concealed beneath overgrowth and rust, or in the case of Nara Dreamland, locked up and patrolled by a single security guard. The decaying remnants of such parks, which were nostalgic for imaginary pasts even in their prime, are eerie incarnations of nostalgia at the interface between the personal and the cultural, representing times of joy and sanguinity both within the personal lives of many Japanese and as a cultural symbol of the boom period of the 1970s and 1980s. The utopian models of the theme park have thus broken down in these spaces; representative of a feverish optimism that is now overcome by melancholic silence, inertia and decay, these ex-parks linger as spectres of the period of rapid economic growth and technological development that has since been lost, while embodying the present economic stagnation.

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Figure 7. Robotic John Wayne at the abandoned “Western Village” in Tochigi, MichaelGrist.com, 2013. “Gulliver’s Kingdom” at the base of Mount Fuji, weburbanist.com, 2011.

While the abandoned theme park retains a haunting presence within Japan’s socio-cultural and physical landscape, the few major theme parks which have withstood the lost decade and attained some level of permanence are prominent components of contemporary Japanese culture. The Japanese version of Universal Studios is the most lucrative tourist attraction in Osaka, while Tokyo is home to a number of hugely popular theme parks: Tokyo Disneyland was the first Disney park to be built outside of the US and has long been the third most visited theme park in the world behind the Magic Kingdom in Florida and Disneyland in California, while the nearby Tokyo DisneySea is the fourth most visited.[41] Tokyo is also home to Fuji-Q Highland at the base of Mount Fuji, which recalls Hanayashiki in its harnessing of Japan’s environmental iconography to create a technologically mediated, tourist friendly fantasy space.

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Figure 8. Abandoned Nara Dreamland, ralphmirebs.livejournal.com/konbini.com, 2013.

The dialogic relationship between the active and the abandoned theme park — the former representing the successful continuation of the national narrative while the latter signifies its dark underside and failure — invokes on a grand scale the aesthetic of distorted progress previously outlined as a condition of Sadako’s cursed videotape. This mechanism is particularly potent when considering the extent to which theme park aesthetics seep into the Japanese every day. Baudrillard suggests that in an American context:

Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact …America [is] no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality… but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.[42]

However in Japan, it seems that acknowledgement of the hyperreal register of society can barely be suppressed any longer, so ubiquitous are processes of imitation and simulation: as Donald Richie quips, “looking at Tokyo one …wonders why the Japanese went to all the trouble of franchising a Disneyland in the suburbs when the capital itself is so superior a version.”[43] Theme park aesthetics have found their way into the very core of everyday architecture and practices — from elaborate themed shopping malls (such as Odaiba’s “Venus Fort”, styled after 17^th century Venice), restaurants (like the “Robot Restaurant” in Shinjuku) and Love Hotels (for instance the Jurassic Park themed “Hotel Jzauruss” in Beppu), down to the ubiquitous plastic food models which stand in for menus in the shopfronts of many Japanese restaurants. Even city main streets, such as Dotonbori in Osaka, adopt the conditions and aesthetics of a theme park: in addition to a giant Ferris Wheel, Dotonbori’s defining signifier is its huge animatronic crab, and it is a frenzy of lights, sounds, screens and hyperbolic performative architecture.  Thus in Japan, the borders between the overtly hyperreal zone of the theme park and ‘reality’ are by no means clear or fixed, suggesting that the ‘reality principle’ Baudrillard refers to has long been unstable in Japanese culture.

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Figure 9. Dotonbori, Osaka – Main Street as Theme Park, JKT-c/cecilleephotography.com/dreamstime.com, 2013.

Sadako 3D

Drawing on Baudrillard’s concern that the theme park space undermines the dichotomy between reality and hyperreality even as it seems to reinforce it, Lukas explains that “the performance of architecture … is based on a definitive crime against reality”[44] as imagined fantasy features indistinguishably intermingle with those imitating ‘real’ buildings or places, destabilizing attempts to locate a reference point based in reality.  This process is akin to what Baudrillard refers to as “the murderous capacity of images” [45], the ‘perfect crime’ in which the artificial murders the real without the perpetrators or the ‘corpse’ of the real ever being traced. Baudrillard characterises this condition as the third-order of simulation, as we exist in the realm of hyperreality while deluding ourselves of its solidity and reality.[46] The suggestion here is that the real has been replaced by simulations before we were even aware that it was missing: a mechanism which characterizes Sadako herself. In fact, the threat that reality has already long disappeared even as the characters strive to maintain a ‘real’ existence forms the underlying core of Sadako 3D: the film enacts the failure of the reality principle, as the characters come to the uncanny realization that they exist within an endless realm of artificial simulations which cannot be distinguished from ‘originals’.  A minor character in the film twice repeats the rhetorical suggestion, “Isn’t everything in this world artificial?”; long gone are the days when Sadako’s mediated realm was contained within the cavity of a videotape.

The film depicts in carnivalesque form the revelation that while Sadako may have once been limited to the TV screen in your living room, now that screens, signs and images have become ubiquitous in the contemporary theme park of Japan, nowhere is safe. Throughout the development of the franchise Sadako has displayed an adept litheness in response to technological change, shifting her curse from video tapes to cameras, floppy disks and computers, and in Sadako 3D she infects the internet, a pervasive presence in Japan. In so doing, Sadako crumbles illusions of progress, as each new technological development is reduced to the same function: to relentlessly proliferate Sadako’s image. Sadako 3D further collapses the distinction between Sadako’s mediated realm and the real by suggesting that victims no longer even have to watch her video to be subject to her curse, they merely need to stumble upon one of the internet webpages where the video was once embedded, rendering the simple “404: Page Removed” error life-threatening. Multiple characters are killed after Sadako bursts through their cell phone screens, and one man is killed via his tablet screen as he waits for a bus. Towards the end of the film, a central character runs out onto the street in an attempt to escape the screens that surround him in his home, and presses his body against a truck in relief, as this comfortably tangible, quotidian object seems to reinstate the primacy of the real. Yet, unbeknownst to him, it is an ‘advertruck’ which carries a huge video billboard, and Sadako drags him beyond it. This moment of course parallels the aforementioned ‘real life’ Sadako advertruck which was driven around the streets of Shibuya to promote the film’s release.

The implication in Sadako 3D that Sadako’s virus may have already insidiously taken over the real resonates strongly with the contagious proliferation of theme park aesthetics in Japan, an anxiety that is also expressed by Sadako’s eerie lack of a coherent subjective core. Like the ring imagery which is metonymic of the franchise and evokes Sadako’s endless cycle of contagion, the Ring increasingly side-steps the need for a discernible centre, freely proliferating without extending any particular or unitary narrative thread. The horrors of this lack of a narrative core are central to the first film, Ringu. The protagonists spend the duration of the film frantically trying to solve the mystery of Sadako’s videotape in order to appease her and lift her curse, as realized through a quest to uncover the secrets of her death and locate her corpse, and to subsequently provide her with proper burial rights. Yet in the final moments the protagonists learn that this quest has proved fruitless, as Sadako does not operate according to humanistic motivations. Despite the fact that Ryuji helped to exhume Sadako’s remains from the well, she erupts through his television screen and murders him in his living room, mechanistically enacting her curse — Ryuji may have attempted to honour her memory, but he did not copy her videotape and pass it on to another. Recalling Baudrilllard’s discussion of the “murderous capacity of images”, this twist entails the uncanny realization that the corpse of the ‘real’ girl can never be found and perhaps never really existed.

Sadako 3D further extends this centre-less device, offering not a horrifying glimpse of a Japan devoid of literal referents as in Ringu, but instead plunging audiences full-throttle into the abyss. The theme park aesthetics which dominate the film — and in fact overwhelm any coherent sense of character or plot — serve to enunciate this rejection of a discernible narrative nucleus. Like the dark rides featured in theme parks (indoor roller coasters/track-based rides which combine animatronics and audio-visual effects), Sadako 3D foregrounds the visceral 3D effects over the threadbare plot[47], which, like that of a dark ride, exists only to provide the movement from one spectacle to the next. The dark ride aesthetic is crystallized during the climactic scene, when a swarm of mutated Sadakos attack the central character. That there is now a multiplicity of Sadakos as opposed to a single character embellishes on a grand scale the suggestion that she is not grounded by a discernible core, and instead represents a heterogeneous process of viral reproduction— much like the franchise as a whole. This Sadako 2.0 is rendered through a combination of puppetry, stop-motion and computer graphics: she is a towering, rust-hued creature who bears down on her victims by pivoting back and forth on inverted frog-like legs (which also resemble metal A-frames) while emitting a repetitive metallic howl. The newly imagined Sadako thus fetishizes the jerky, recurrent movements of outdated theme park animatronics and their hydraulics. That this final showdown takes place in a huge abandoned building further evokes the aesthetics of spatial and technological decay epitomized by the abandoned theme park.

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Figure 10. Sadako 2.0 as abandoned theme park attraction (Sadako 3D, 2012).

The film endeavours to employ its 3D effects to thrust viewers inside Sadako’s world through a theme park-esque overload of the sensorium. The opening scene positions the audience at the bottom of the well in which Sadako died as a man peers over the edge, a claustrophobic engagement of the senses which simultaneously entails a cognitive plunge into a web of associations with prior Ring texts, an effect enhanced by the lack of explanatory preamble.  As we watch from the bottom of the well, ‘Sadako’s’ corpse plummets down towards us — inciting the sensation of free-fall — before the camera angle shifts downwards to depict the body splashing into the well’s murky water amongst a floating pile of identical looking corpses (a shot which also signals to the audience that we have been positioned in amongst this pile of bodies). Angling upwards once more, the camera rapidly ascends towards the well’s opening, inciting a sense of vertigo enhanced by the 3D effects. Much of the film is constituted of rapidly edited sequences in which Sadako reaches out through screens ‘towards’ the viewer, either via her arms or her monstrously strong hair. The protagonist, Akane, is able to scream at a pitch and volume that breaks glass, a device which facilitates numerous scenes depicting shards of glass flying ominously towards the viewer, provoking sensory, instinctual processes of fear and avoidance. In addition, Akane’s ability to smash the screen through which Sadako emerges (with inconsistent results) also works to break down the illusion of ‘screen as border’: drawing back to the film’s suggestion that “everything is artificial”, it seems that the ‘artifice’ was that we ever used the screen to make a distinction.

The threat that this all-encompassing artificiality poses to our sensorium is entangled with Sadako’s deconstruction of linear temporal structures. A number of analyses of the Ring franchise assert that Sadako’s eerie power is constellated in her evocation of post-humanity[48], yet this suggests a progressive movement from one stage of human evolution to the next. I contend instead that Sadako is uncanny in powerfully subversive ways primarily because she is asynchronous: she is at once atavistic and futuristic — as exemplified by her appearance in Sadako 3D, formed using a mix of outmoded and ‘cutting-edge’ visual effects techniques— realigning temporal stages that are diametrically opposed on a linear continuum to become a heterogeneous simultaneity.  In some ways, Sadako represents in monstrous form the “Japanese Spirit” of the wakon-yosai formulation, ensuring that the technologies that signify Japan’s over-determined relationship with ‘Westernised’ ideologies of national progress become home to an irrepressible spectre redolent of Japan’s pre-modern past. In doing so Sadako makes circularity out of progress, as each new technology becomes the vessel for the same tensions between the archaic and the post-modern, rather than functioning as a sign of national advancement.

The uncanny affects of this temporal looping reverberate throughout Sadako 3D, in ways that mirror the spatial and sensorial geography of the theme park. Lukas explains that “in many contemporary theme parks the feeling of geographic disassociation is used to create thrill in the patron and generate profits in the company.”[49] Yet after visitors have traversed the theme park, propelled by the seemingly endless array of sensory delights, “in most cases this feeling is [revealed to be] illusionary since the patron soon discovers that she has been walking in a loop.”[50] This is ultimately the rather disorienting affect of Sadako 3D, which hints at an array of plot strands before ultimately diverting from almost all of them, leaving the audience spiralling aimlessly between a range of different characters as they approach their demise at the hands of Sadako. Instead of following a unitary linear narrative to its end point, the audience is caught in a visceral loop as each scene builds to an inevitable sensorial attack, usually enacted by Sadako’s image simultaneously puncturing both the diegetic screen on which it appears and the ‘real’ screen on which the audience watches the film, via the 3D protrusion of grasping arms and shattering glass. The film thus functions as Tom Gunning’s “cinema of attraction”, denoting “early cinema’s fascination with novelty and its foregrounding of the act of display”[51] over narrative and character development — a reinstatement of early cinematic techniques and priorities which evokes temporal looping on a grand scale, echoing the antiquated aesthetics of the cursed tape in Ringu. Yet in contrast to Ringu, in which Sadako’s tape is embedded within a relatively conventional horror narrative presented via coherent cinematic syntax, in Sadako 3D the audience is completely enfolded within this carnivalesque cinema of attraction (the attractions of which, paradoxically, are rendered through the film’s 3D effects, which constitute the most extensive use of current special effects technologies seen in the franchise to date).  Thus mirroring the mechanics of Sadako herself, the film folds both the diegetic narrative and broader trajectories of historical development back onto themselves, contorting linear time into a loop.

That Sadako 3D functions primarily as cinema of attraction is further reinforced by the novel marketing techniques accompanying the film’s release, ‘attractions’ which were just as central to the experience of Sadako 3D as the film itself. For the release of Sadako 3D, the cinema-space itself became akin to a theme park: for major screenings in large multiplexes, artificial wells were placed inside the cinema, fog effects were used throughout the film, certain cinema chairs would suddenly jolt or viewers would be ‘grabbed’ from beneath, and Velcro was placed on some armrests to give the effect that the viewers’ arms were being pulled by Sadako. In addition, at the climax when dozens of monstrous Sadako mutations attack the film’s protagonist onscreen, a horde of real-life “Sadakos” (people in costume) invaded the cinema.[52] Here, the audience’s participation and active performance of fear and pleasure becomes central to the experience, as in the theme park ride. The recently released Sadako 3D 2 endeavours to extend this theme park mode of embodied engagement for even those audiences who are not lucky enough to attend a special screening: the film is accompanied by a downloadable mobile phone application which viewers can activate during the film, which vibrates, shows clips and plays sound effects to coincide with certain moments in the film to invoke the affect that viewers are being ‘attacked’ by Sadako via their own cell phones. The promoters have even suggested that the mobile phone effects may not cease once the film has ended, implying that patrons will be subject to Sadako’s curse long after they ‘escape’ the theatre.[53]

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Figure 11. Sadako Attacks! Promotional Image for Sadako 3D 2 and its companion mobile phone app.

Evidently, the ludic transgression of boundaries between ‘reality’ and ‘artificiality’ — and a concomitant collapse in linear models of temporal progress — has overtly become the theme of the Ring franchise, a preoccupation which is rendered with particular effectiveness because the viral proliferation of this fictional universe is ungrounded from any specific geographic space, to which the architectural theme park is bound. Lukas suggests that “to be able to deal with the contradictions of the artificial and the real … is an essence of understanding the nature of any theme park”,[54] and in their playful interfacing with the viewer’s sensorium, the latest additions to the Ring franchise draw forth and work through the deep cultural anxieties surrounding what has long been an unstable dichotomy in Japan. There is currently a new Sadako attraction at Sega Joypolis to accompany the release of Sadako 3D 2, in which participants walk through a haunted maze-like structure similar to that of 2012. Yet in this incarnation, participants take on an active role in the narrative, playing reporters who take photographs of certain events that occur within the attraction, constructing an ever more recursive droste effect through the layering of reality and artificiality.

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Figure 12. Sadako’s ‘Hair-dog’ and ‘well juice’, Sony Joypolis, 2013.

The theme park is also offering menu items to accompany the attraction, including the Sadako ‘hair-dog’ and Sadako’s ‘well-juice’, complete with a candy worm clinging to the straw. Now patrons can literally eat (artificial) components of Sadako’s (artificial) being, so that she can become incorporated within their own body. The gleeful approach to this collapse in boundaries between signification, artificiality and reality demonstrates the sense of pleasurable catharsis derived from this process. In the cultural theme park that is Sadako’s world, participants are offered the opportunity to fully acknowledge and play with the tensions which are usually submerged beneath conceptions of contemporary Japanese identity: to plunge into the deep well between authenticity and artifice with the eerie possibility that one may never again crawl back out for air.

Audio Visual Sources:

Poltergeist. DVD. Directed by Tobe Hooper. Atlanta: Turner Home Entertainment, 2000.

Rasen. DVD. Directed by Jôji Iida. California: DreamWorks Home Entertainment, 2007.

Rasen. Television Series. Directed by Yoshihiro Kitayama. Tokyo: Fuji TV, 1999.

The Ring. Blu-ray DVD. Directed by Gore Verbinski. California: Paramount, 2012.

Ring: Infinity. WonderSwan Videogame. Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten, 2000.

Ring: Kanzenban. Television Series. Directed by Chisui Takigawa. Tokyo: Fuji Television, 1995.

The Ring: Terror’s Realm. Dreamcast Videogame. San Jose: Infogrames, 2000.

The Ring Two. DVD. Directed by Hideo Nakata. California: DreamWorks Home Entertainment, 2005.

The Ring Virus. DVD. Directed by Dong-bin Kim. San Francisco: Tai Seng, 2004.

Ringu. DVD. Directed by Hideo Nakata. Richmond, Victoria: Madman Entertainment, 2000.

Ringu 0: Bâsudei. DVD. Directed by Norio Tsuruta. California: DreamWorks Home Entertainment, 2007.

Ringu Anthology of Terror. DVD Box set. Directed by Hideo Nakata, Jôji Iida and Norio Tsuruta. California: DreamWorks/Universal Studios, 2005.

Ringu: Saishûshô. Television Series. Directed by Fukumoto Yoshito. Tokyo: Fuji TV, 1999.

Sadako 3D. Film. Directed by Tsutomu Hanabusa. Tokyo: Kadokawa Pictures, 2012.

Sadako 3D 2. Film. Directed by Tsutomu Hanabusa. Tokyo: Kadokawa Pictures, 2013.

References:

Balmain, Colette. Introduction to Japanese Horror Film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008.

Baudrillard, Jean. “The Precession of Simulacra.” In The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (Volume One), edited by Vincent B. Leitch, William E. Cain, Laura A. Finke, Barbara E. Johnson, John McGowan and Jeffrey J. Williams, 1732-1740. New York City: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001.

Baudrillard, Jean. “The Orders of Simulacra.” In Simulations, translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Phillip Beitchman, 81-159.  New York: Semiotext(e), 1983.

Choi, Jinhee and Wada-Marciano, Mitsuya. Horror to the Extreme: Changing Boundaries in Asian Cinema. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009.

Doak, Kevin. Dreams of Difference: The Japan Romantic School and the Crisis of Modernity. California: University of California Press, 1994.

Eco, Umberto. Travels in Hyperreality. London: Pan Books, 1987.

Enns, Anthony. “The Horror of Media: Technology and Spirituality in the Ringu Films.” In The Scary Screen: Media Anxiety in the Ring, edited by Kristen Lacefield, 30-44. Surrey: Ashgate Publishing, 2010.

Figal, Gerald. Civilization and Monsters: Spirits of Modernity in Meiji Japan. North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2000.

Fletcher III, W. Miles and von Staden, Peter W. “Epilogue: retrospect and prospects: the significance of the ‘lost decades’ in Japan.” Asia Pacific Business Review. 18 (2): April 2012. 275-279.

Gilman, Theodore J. No Miracles Here: Fighting Urban Decline in Japan and the United States. New York: State University of New York Press, 2001.

Gunning, Tom. “‘Now you see it, now you don’t: the temporality of the cinema of attractions.” Velvet Light Trap Fall: 1993. 3-26.

Jackson, Kimberly. “Techno-Human Infancy in Gore Verbinski’s The Ring.” In The Scary Screen: Media Anxiety in the Ring, edited by Kristen Lacefield,  161-175. Surrey: Ashgate Publishing, 2010.

Jeffers, Gene. “Global Attractions Attendance Report”. Burbank, CA: Themed Entertainment Association, 2012.

Kinoshita, Chika. “The Mummy Complex: Kurosawa’s Loft and J-Horror.” In Horror to the Extreme: Changing Boundaries in Asian Cinema, edited by Jinhee Choi and Mitsuya Wada-Marciano, 103-123.  Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009.

Lacefield, Kristen. The Scary Screen: Media Anxiety in the Ring. Surrey: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2010.

Lukas, Scott A. Theme Park. London: Reaktion Books, 2008.

McRoy, Jay. Nightmare Japan: Contemporary Japanese Horror Film. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008.

Miyao, Daisuke. The Aesthetics of Shadow: Lighting and Japanese Film. North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2013.

Najita, Tetsuo. Visions of Virtue in Tokugawa Japan. Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 1987.

Napier, Susan. The Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature. London: Routledge, 1996.

Ndalianis, Angela. The Horror Sensorium: Media and the Senses. North Carolina: McFarland, 2012.

Ndalianis, Angela. Neo-Baroque Aesthetics in Contemporary Entertainment. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005.

Phu, Thy. “Horrifying adaptations: Ringu, The Ring, and the cultural contexts of copying.” Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance 3, no 1 (2010): 43-58.

Richie, Donald. “The ‘Real’ Disneyland.” In The Donald Richie Reader: 50 Years of Writing On Japan, edited by Arturo Silva, 169-173.  Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press, 2001.

Suzuki, Koji. Ring. Translated by Robert B. Rohmer and Glynne Walley. New York: Vertical Inc., 2004.

Suzuki, Koji. S. Tokyo: Kadokawa Corporation, 2012.

Suzuki, Koji. Loop. Translated by Glynne Walley. New York: Vertical Inc., 2006.

Tateishi, Ramie. “The Japanese Horror Film Series: Ring and Eko Eko Azarak.” In Fear without Frontiers: Horror Cinema Across the Globe, edited by Steven Jay Schneider, 295-305. Surrey: FAB Press, 2003.

The Tokyo Times. “Sadako 3D 2 will use smartphone app to scare audiences.” The Tokyo Times, http://www.tokyotimes.com/2013/sadako-3d-2-will-use-smartphone-app-to-scare-cinema-audience/ (accessed 30 October, 2013).

Wee, Valerie. Japanese Horror Films and their American Remakes. London: Routledge, 2013.

White, Eric. “Case Study: Nakata Hideo’s Ringu and Ringu 2.” In Japanese Horror Cinema, edited by Jay McRoy, 38-51. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006.

Yu, Eric K.W. “A Traditional Vengeful Ghost or the Machine in the Ghost? Narrative Dynamic, Horror Effects and the Posthuman in Ringu.” In Fear Itself: Reasoning the Unreasonable, edited by Stephen Hessel and Michele Huppert, 109-123. New York: Rodopi, 2009.

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Figure 1. Laurell K Hamilton’s Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series is one of the pioneering fiction series of urban fantasy and paranormal romance.

The Emergence of Paranormal Romance and Urban Fantasy

Although it emerged only in the 1990s, the urban fantasy and paranormal romance genre now exerts a powerful influence on representations of monsters and the supernatural in popular culture.  Over the last 25 years or so, urban fantasy and paranormal romance (hereafter abbreviated as UF/PR) has developed into a new, easily recognisable genre formula: sympathetic vampires (and/or other monsters) join magic-wielding (often leather-clad) heroines to solve mysteries and/or consummate transgressive romances. This genre is now prevalent not only in popular fiction, but in broader popular culture including television, film, comics, RPG, and pop culture and scifi conventions.

Academics, members of the publishing industry and readers alike have noted the prevalence and the commercial success of this new genre. For example, Angela Ndalianis suggests in The Horror Sensorium: Media and the Senses that “paranormal romance erupted as a runaway success in the 1990s.”[1] And in the years since 2000, UF/PR has continued to rise meteorically in popularity. In “P is for Paranormal – Still,” Lucinda Dyer of Publisher’s Weekly professed in 2010 that “Paranormal is le dernier cri in the romance category—its hold on readers and publishers alike defies any logic or explanation. In its first year it was a phase, then it became a definite trend. Now, it’s a sea change, with no evidence that the tide’s waning.”[2] And book critic and online reviewer Paul Goat Allen has argued that “the last ten years, specifically, in genre fiction have been nothing short of landscape-changing,” suggesting that from 2000 to the present time constitutes “a glorious Golden Age of paranormal fantasy.”[3] Further data from the publishing industry and online reviewers and fans clearly and unequivocally demonstrates the strong impact this new genre on the popular fiction industry and its consumers. [4]

Yet UF/PR remains surprisingly under-appreciated as a coherent body of genre texts. The primary difficulty in studying UF/PR as a genre is that although UF/PR has developed its own set of recognisable genre conventions (including character types, literary motifs and specific themes), these conventions have not been adequately defined or outlined critically. Pop culture industries have proliferated and even parodied[5] a successful genre formula, yet confusion remains for both fans and academics over distinctions between genre labels, distinctions between genres and sub-genres, and consequently over the inclusion or exclusion of particular texts as urban fantasy, paranormal romance, or something else altogether.

Critical confusion over the parameters of UF/PR is suggested by an over-abundance of new genre labels: should we properly label this genre “urban fantasy,” “dark fantasy,” “paranormal romance,” “paranormal thriller,” or “paranormal procedural”? An online search for genre labels such as “urban fantasy” and “paranormal romance” reveals a plethora of author- and fan-based blogs and websites debating the merits and niceties of using each genre categorisation. As Lenny Picker notes in Publisher’s Weekly, developing “a universally accepted definition of the boundaries of paranormal fiction” is a serious challenge. Picker further laments that “there’s just nothing even remotely resembling a consensus, even among some of the top authors with works included in the genre.”[6] Picker here highlights that it is difficult to define the limits of what is included as UF/PR, even for those who write this fiction. Critical analyses similarly have not reached  a clear consensus on how this genre is to be labelled and defined.

The relationship between UF/PR and other popular genres of fiction is also unclear. In Fang-tastic Fiction, Patricia O’Brien Matthews suggests there is also a critical confusion over how this newly-emerged genre relates to other, pre-existing categories of genre. O’Brien Matthews observes, “whether you search online, at a bookstore, or in a library, you will find no consensus as to where paranormal fiction titles are shelved.”[7] Angela Ndalianis similarly observes that “anyone can now walk into a bookshop” and find paranormal titles “in their very own paranormal romance section, but also under romance, horror, science fiction and fantasy, and crime – all in one store!”[8] If UF/PR is shelved in multiple sections in libraries and bookstores, do we understand this fiction as a genre, a subgenre, or a hybrid genre?

Given the newness of UF/PR and these confusions over what UF/PR itself actually constitutes (or is constituted by), it is unsurprising that to date few critics have provided a truly comprehensive and clear history of this genre. But (as will be discussed below) when critics analyse individual UF/PR texts, unless framed by a history of the genre, their analyses too often remain disconnected from significant intertextual and pop-cultural influences. Such intertextual influences extend across different forms in different media (for example, from novel to film, or novel to television). But studies of UF/PR in one textual medium do not often expand their inquiry to transmedia adaptations and iterations. Consequently, they do not recognise which conventions of this genre are transmedia; nor how different media formats may actually influence the conventions and content of UF/PR. The result is a general critical failure to recognise or analyse the significant textual influences of generic hybridity and transmedia formats in UF/PR. Critics subsequently fail to address how individual UF/PR texts operate as iterations that both uphold and subvert the strictures of genre. It is thus difficult to analyse the broader significance of how this popular genre trend is both inflected by and used to explore our own contemporary culture.

A broader history of urban fantasy and paranormal romance is needed. This article aims to provide a definition and history of UF/PR. In doing so, it will provide a platform from which we can better analyse and understand how individual UF/PR texts may generate and contest this genre’s formal and thematic boundaries. With this in mind, my definition of urban fantasy seeks to be specific, delimiting some of the key parameters and conventions of UF/PR, while also being inclusive, allowing for alternative approaches, histories and readings.  First, this article will establish a methodological framework for its genre study of UF/PR. Next, the article will critique several extant approaches to this genre. It will then offer my own original and complementary genre history and definition. Most significantly, this article argues UF/PR is defined in part by generic hybridity. It further argues that UF/PR is both formally and thematically concerned with destabilising boundaries – boundaries of genre, of media, of self and the monstrous Other.  Finally, the article will conclude that understanding how UF/PR transgresses the boundaries of both genre and media is crucial to understanding its current popularity and commercial success.

Genre Theory: A Methodological Framework for Defining A Genre

Before offering a history and definition of UF/PR, it is useful to critically summarise how this genre has previously been defined by academics, the publishing industry, and the fans who consume UF/PR texts. Critically assessing competing genre histories of UF/PR will better position this article to suggest a more comprehensive definition and history below. As Altman suggests, the work of the genre theorist is “to adjudicate among conflicting approaches, not so much by dismissing unsatisfactory positions, but by constructing a model which reveals the relationship between differing critical claims and their function within a broader cultural context.”[9] By critically assessing extant definitions of urban fantasy and paranormal romance, this article is better positioned to reveal and consequently provide evidence to confirm or dispute the conventions of this genre that have been heretofore proposed.

Considering previous genre definitions and histories of UF/PR also highlights (and better positions this article to avoid) two key problems prevalent in performing any genre study. First, there is a problematic critical tendency to view genre as existing in a perfect form at a fixed point in time. Altman suggests these critical problems stem from a traditional, “synchronic” approach to genre theory: “Genres were always – and continue to be – treated as if they spring full-blown from the head of Zeus.” They are analysed, Altman continues, as though they are “fundamentally ahistorical in nature,” existing in an abstract, perfect form that he likens to “platonic categories.”[10] Without an ideal model for a genre, it is difficult to decide whether individual texts uphold or subvert generic conventions. And yet such models are misleading because they suggest the structures of any given genre are “ahistorical” and static.

Second, there is a problematic critical tendency to construct genre history as an inevitable and linear development of what will become a fixed set of conventions. In contrast, Altman suggests that a diachronic approach to genre history ought to focus instead on “on chronicling the development, deployment, and disappearance of this same structure” of genre.[11] In other words, genre history should suggest that what may seem at a particular point in time to be a fixed generic structure is always a dynamic interplay of conventions. As Altman writes in Film/Genre, genre is not a static state but a “process of genre creation,” a “process of genrification” which is “continuous” and “ongoing.”[12] A diachronic approach therefore demands that critics understand genre as a developing set of structures which evolve, cohere and dissolve over time. Moreover, genre history should not tell of the straightforward development of a form of genre, followed by a number of variations on that form: instead, it must allow for the recognition that alternative histories and alternative developments in genre structures are always possible.

In addition to a tendency to ignore how genres continually undergo a process of formation and/or disintegration, previous critical attempts to define UF/PR ignore that this process is what Altman terms “a transactional process whereby conflict and negotiation among user groups constantly transform generic designations.” Altman highlights that the formation of a genre is a process that is engaged in by “user groups,” groups which influence both the “production” of texts and their “reception”: in other words, groups which include members of industry, popular and academic critics, and general audiences.[13] While Altman focuses on the film and television industry, in Popular Fiction Ken Gelder emphasises the importance of considering both production and reception when analysing popular fiction. Gelder argues that genre fiction is “not just a matter of texts-in-themselves, but of an entire apparatus of production, distribution . . . and consumption.”[14] He thus suggests that the process of commercial development and consumption also plays an important role in developing genre. Taking into account the “transactional” nature of the process whereby genre emerges through an “apparatus of production,” my genre definition and history differs sharply from previous critical attempts to define UF/PR because it also seeks to include the observations and analyses of various significant “user groups”: academic critics, authors, members of the publishing industry, and the audiences who consume these texts.

Problems in Defining UF/PR: Competing Histories and Definitions

There are several critical problems that recur in extant histories and definitions of UF/PR. By highlighting these recurring problems here, this article may then avoid them in the history and definition of UF/PR to follow. These recurring critical problems are as follows. First, critics tend to approach UF/PR as a subgenre that has been influenced by a single “parent” genre. Related to this, both critics and fans often exhibit a genre bias, filtering their genre history and definition through the lens of the genre that they perceive to be the primary influence on UF/PR. In attempting to define UF/PR as the generic offspring of another genre, these studies often incorrectly imply that UF/PR is primarily influenced by one other genre in particular: fantasy or romance or Gothic and horror. For example, Ndalianis offers an excellent analysis of “what happens when romance and horror meet” in the paranormal romance genre.[15] However, Ndalianis primarily approaches paranormal romance as a “subcategory” of the broader category of romance fiction (78), thereby disregarding significant influences on UF/PR from other genres such as fantasy or crime fiction. In their critical fan discussion of romance in Beyond Heaving Bosoms, Wendell and Tan also suggest that UF/PR is a “subgenre” of paranormal romance.[16] Conversely, The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature includes “urban fantasy” and “paranormal romance” as genre categories in its study of fantasy fiction, suggesting that one might consider urban fantasy and/or paranormal romance primarily as fantasy genre texts.[17]

In one example of how genre bias may influence definitions of UF/PR, in “Dark Fantasy and Paranormal Romance,” Kaveney gives a definition of a genre she categorises as “dark fantasy,” which includes paranormal romance as one of its subcategories.^[18] However, her broad definition of dark fantasy literature fails to distinguish dark fantasy from Gothic and horror fictions more broadly;^[19] and her more specific definition of popular dark fantasy relies on invoking conventions from another genre entirely, that of detective and crime fiction.^[20] Moreover, Kaveney maintains that paranormal romance is a subcategory of dark fantasy, defined by “the extent to which its plot is determined by its erotic dimensions.”^[21] This definition, however, problematically conflates “erotic” fiction with romance fiction, a distinction that is in fact highly significant.^[22] Kaveney’s bias toward fantasy fiction in a critical anthology for that genre nonetheless limits her analysis of the significant influences of Gothic/horror, romance and crime genres on UF/PR.[23] Her categorisations of “dark fantasy,” “template dark fantasy” (urban fantasy) and “paranormal romance” are thus unconvincing.

The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature also offers an example of the second problem common to extant critical assessments of UF/PR: critical academic definitions of UF/PR may be alarmingly disconnected from industry and consumer definitions of the same texts. This Cambridge Companion broadly and inexcusably disregards the ways in which the terms “urban fantasy” and “paranormal romance” are used by those who produce and consume UF/PR texts.[24] For example, Kaveney’s use of “dark fantasy” as a genre label is highly problematic because “dark fantasy” is no longer a term popularly used or even recognised by current fans of UF/PR.[25] Irvine’s chapter “Urban Fantasy” similarly disregards the popular usage of this genre label. Irvine offers a very precise definition of this urban fantasy as “a group of texts . . . in which the tropes of pastoral or heroic fantasy were brought into an urban setting,” noting that the genre “quickly grew to encompass historical novels and overlap with . . . new wave fabulism or the New Weird.” Irvine emphasises heavily the role of the city in urban fantasy as both setting and actor in the narrative. But Irvine laments that “the writers of ‘paranormal romance’ have all but co-opted the term” urban fantasy, using it for an entirely different set of texts. In this respect, his focus on fabulist and “weird” urban fictions is starkly at odds with consumer definitions of UF/PR.[26] In fact, Kaveney’s “template dark fantasy” better aligns with the popular conception of “urban fantasy” as a genre category.

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Figure 2. Laurell K Hamilton’s Narcissus in Chains (2001) marks a shift in Hamilton’s series from mystery-oriented horror to paranormal erotica.

The third critical problem common to extant critical definitions of UF/PR is the way that these definitions consistently attempt to establish urban fantasy and paranormal romance as separate taxonomic categories. For example, by separating urban fantasy and paranormal romance taxonomically, the editors of the Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Fiction strongly suggest that urban fantasy and paranormal romance are distinct modes of popular fiction. Fan outrage over a perceived misuse of these terms also suggests that a distinction can be made between “urban fantasy” and “paranormal romance.” For example, Laurell K Hamilton is controversial among readers of UF/PR for abruptly transforming her Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series (1993-present) from urban fantasy into paranormal erotica in the series’ tenth novel, Narcissus in Chains. For more than a decade, Hamilton has endured significant criticism from fans and anti-fans whose genre expectations are disappointed by the genre shift within her series.[27]

One commonly-accepted distinction between urban fantasy and paranormal romance is whether action/mystery or romance act as the primary narrative drive in the plot. For example, Gwenda Bond notes that in the publishing industry, “the terms urban fantasy and paranormal romance are often used interchangeably. But . . . while the two frequently cross over among audiences, there is a key distinction.” In support of her argument, she quotes Avon Publications’ executive editor Erika Tsang: “In paranormal romance the relationship between the couple is the focus of the main plot. In urban fantasy, the world that the couple exists in is the focus.” In other words, the extent to which the romance constitutes the primary narrative of the text determines whether or not it can be categorised as “paranormal romance”; texts in which a horror- or mystery-based narrative take priority may be more properly considered “urban fantasy.”

In the same article, Bond also quotes Heather Osborn, a romance editor at Tor Books, in another attempt to distinguish urban fantasy from paranormal romance. Osborn determines a genre distinction between urban fantasy and paranormal romance dependent on what romance fans such as Wendell and Tan commonly term the “Happily Ever After” convention:[28] “My number one consideration is if there’s a resolution of the romance at the end of the book. If there’s no resolution of the romance, and it’s in the romance section, readers will let their anger be known.” Bond suggests that for readers, a high content of romance and a romantic resolution play a crucial role in defining a genre text as paranormal romance and not urban fantasy. Bond’s article thus highlights how definitions of genre must negotiate between competing influences from consumers and the publishing industry.[29]

The above examples demonstrate how critics, authors and fans may offer differing and competing histories and definitions of UF/PR as a genre. Though these histories and definitions have been critiqued here, it is important to recognise that such definitions are not necessarily incorrect. Rather, they fail to be comprehensive. Moreover, they are misleading in that they privilege a genre model which understands UF/PR as a subgenre, or even as two distinct genres, which have evolved in a straightforward fashion from one or two parent genres. By attempting to categorise and understand UF/PR as subgenre of horror or fantasy or mystery or romance, and by distinguishing between urban fantasy and paranormal romance as separate subgenres, these definitions obscure the complex generic interplay which actually constitutes UF/PR.

A Genre History of Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance

Rather than attempting to distinguish between urban fantasy and paranormal romance, or trace a genre history through one specific parent genre, this article instead offers a genre history that focuses on how UF/PR has developed as a hybrid genre. In this way, it provides a complementary history to those definitions critiqued above. “Urban fantasy” first emerged as a genre label in the early 1980s. The term categorised a new form of popular fantasy fiction which dramatised a magical incursion into a fictional version of the contemporary, urban world. In this fiction, a human protagonist confronts fairies and elves from an alternative, magical world. In the 1980s and early 1990s, this early urban fantasy was produced by North American writers such as Charles de Lint, Terri Windling,, Emma Bull, and Mercedes Lackey.  In addition to a shared narrative plot, the early urban fantasy texts of these authors also share thematic conventions. First and foremost, early urban fantasy destabilises the boundaries between reality/fantasy and self/Other. Consequently, the protagonist in the text is forced to question his or her own identity and social role in relation to those boundaries. In effect, the protagonist must decide to reject the fantastic Other and maintain conventional binaries and boundaries, or to embrace the possibilities of a multiplicitous identity in new worlds no longer constrained by such binaries and boundaries.^[30]

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Figure 3. Terri Windling’s Borderland (1986) and Bordertown (1986) are two examples of early urban fantasy series in which the real world and fantasy fairylands collide.

Over time, however, the term “urban fantasy” has been more broadly applied (sometimes retro-actively) to describe other popular speculative fictions.^[31] Today it is also commonly used to categorise “weird fiction” by authors such as China Miéville, contemporary fantasy by authors such as Neil Gaiman, and steampunk fiction by authors such as Tim Powers, Scott Westerfield, and Gail Carriger. It is also commonly used to categorise much popular fiction centred on supernatural beings, including werewolves, witches, angels, and the seemingly omnipresent vampire.

Certain examples of vampire fiction in particular had already begun to merge into urban fantasy in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Many texts from this period can be retroactively labelled as UF/PR due to their generic blending of fantasy, horror, mystery and action conventions – for example, Lee Killough’s Blood Hunt and Bloodlinks, P.N. Elrod’s Vampire Files series, television series Forever Knight, Tanya Huff’s Blood series, and Laurell K Hamilton’s early Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter novels.[32] Early versions of vampire-centred urban fantasy (including novels by Killough and Elrod, and television series Forever Knight) typically follow a male human protagonist who is transformed into a vampire and subsequently struggles to solve a series of mysteries.

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Figure 4. Mercedes Lackey’s Knight of Ghosts and Shadows begins another early urban fantasy series in which the boundaries between the contemporary real world and an alternate fantasy realm dissolve. On its cover, two elves battle in front of the Chinese Theatre in Hollywood.

To date, few academics have adequately accounted for the connection between fairy-centred early urban fantasy by authors such as de Lint, Bull, Windling and Lackey, and this early vampire crime fiction. Instead, critics tend to separate the two kinds of fiction into “traditional urban fantasy” and “contemporary urban fantasy,”[33] or suggest that the labels have been “co-opted” and incorrectly applied.[34] But if we consider formal and thematic hybridity and the transgression of boundaries to be the distinguishing elements of UF/PR texts, this explains how two apparently disparate trends in popular fiction (elves and vampires) merged into the broader category of “urban fantasy” after the year 2000.^[35] For example, in early urban fantasy fiction, a human protagonist from the contemporary world is confronted with supernatural knowledge that challenges his or her understanding of reality and identity; similarly, in vampire crime fiction, a human protagonist who discovers the existence of vampires faces a similar challenge to his or her ideological worldview . The presence of a specific supernatural character trope (such as elves or vampires) is less significant than its combination with the broader generic structure of hybridity, a structure which inflects both form (transgressing genre conventions) and content (challenging the power structures of self/Other).[36]

Vampire literature in the 1980s and 1990s primarily explores the destabilisation between the boundaries of fantasy and reality, and self and Other, through the trope of the “humanised” or “good” vampire. The figure of the humanised, ethically and spiritually self-conscious vampire first emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s, in fictions by Fred Saberhagen, Anne Rice, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Suzy McKee Charnas, and George R. R. Martin. David Punter and Glennis Byron summarise how the vampire’s role in representing the social Other has changed over the last century due to “the modern humanisation of the vampire.”[37] They define how “in nineteenth-century fiction, the representation of the vampire as monstrous, evil and other serves to guarantee the existence of good, reinforcing . . . formally dichotomized structures of belief which . . . still constituted the dominant world view.”[38] But in vampire fiction in the late twentieth century, the vampire becomes “more sympathetic, closer to the human and much less radically the ‘other’”[39] as “the oppositions between good and evil are increasingly problematized.”^[40] The vampires and other “humanised” monsters of UF/PR develop from this earlier trend begun in the vampire literature of the 1970s.

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Figure 5. Detective Nicholas Knight from Forever Knight (1992-1996) exemplifies a trend from the late 1980s and early 1990s in which vampire detectives struggle to reject their vampiric nature and behave as “good” humans.

UF/PR in the 1980s and 1990s likewise destabilises the assumed connections between monstrosity, evil and Otherness. For example, vampires like Killough’s Garreth Mikaelian, Huff’s Henry Fitzroy and Forever Knight’s Nicholas Knight struggle against their monstrous ontologies in order to be “good people.” Many of these protagonists face torturous ethical struggles similar to those of Anne Rice’s well-known vampire aesthetes in Interview with the Vampire.[41] However, unlike Rice’s Lestat and Louis, who must drink human blood, vampires in 1990s urban fantasy differ on one important point: to be good vampires, they must refuse to drink human blood. Through their determined abstinence, the vampires of these early urban fantasy texts become the first truly “good” vampires in fiction, television and film. For the first time, vampire fiction in the 1990s broadly explored the concept of vampires who want to do and be good in the human world by acting as human as possible. Throughout this decade, the convention of the abstaining vampire remained popular.

Also in the 1990s, Laurell K Hamilton’s Anita Blake series and Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer follow this same humanist conception that to be a good vampire means to abstain from vampirism and behave as much like a human as possible. In the early 1990s, Hamilton’s vampire-hunting, crime-solving heroine Anita Blake feels conflicted in her attraction to vampires, believing that vampires must be evil if they want to feed from her.[42] Similarly, Joss Whedon’s titular heroine in Buffy the Vampire Slayer can only become romantically entangled with “good” monsters who refuse to feed on humans (for example, the vampire Angel, who possessed his soul; and later the vampire Spike, who was forced to stop feeding on humans).[43]

Anita Blake and Buffy are also exemplary UF/PR texts of the 1990s because they introduce arguably the most significant new genre convention to emerge in UF/PR in this decade: a strong female protagonist in the role of an investigator and action heroine. Characters like Huff’s Vicki Nelson, Hamilton’s Anita Blake and Whedon’s Buffy Summers manifest the contemporary cultural significance of girl-power, and post- and third-wave feminism that emerged the 1990s.[44] These heroines refuse the traditional position of victim in the horror genre. In UF/PR, they instead embrace the agentive role of the heroine.[45]

But in new fictional worlds that challenge the boundaries between fantasy and reality, these heroines struggle in new ways with the destabilisation of boundaries between the self and the Other. As Elaine Graham states in Representations of the Post/Human, “that which is different becomes pathologised as ‘monstrous’ and thus inhuman, disposable and dangerous …. So women . . . are designated inhuman by virtue of their non-identity to the white, male reasoning able-bodied subject.”[46] Graham here explains how women in a patriarchal society are constructed as socially Other, and this Otherness may be framed as monstrosity. Speaking of the role of the heroine in the horror text, Linda Williams argues, in “When the Woman Looks,” that the female protagonist in a horror text experiences “fear of the monster’s freakishness, but also recognizes the sense in which this freakishness is similar to her own difference,”^[47] the difference of female Otherness in patriarchal culture. Williams thus suggests that recognition of a shared Otherness can lead to new affinities between monsters and heroines. Female protagonists in UF/PR texts of the 1990s struggle with tensions between their role as heroines who must defeat monstrous Others, their romantic and sexual attraction to monstrous Others, and the recognition that they too are Othered in their role as feminist or post-feminist agents in a patriarchal society.

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Figure 6. This season four (2011) poster for True Blood (2008-2014) emphasises the centrality of part-fairy female protagonist Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin). Playing with the gaze, the poster represents Sookie simultaneously as a sexually empowered subject and an object of the monstrous male desire.

In the years since 2000, female protagonists have dominated UF/PR, typically narrating their own adventures from the first person perspective. In this era, the boundaries between self and Other, human and monster, and good and evil become further blurred. Protagonists no longer simply fight monsters, but themselves become increasingly monstrous. Heroines who began as mostly human in the 1990s become increasing supernatural. For example, beyond 2000 Hamilton’s Anita Blake develops from a mostly-human necromancer to a mostly-monstrous carrier of the lycanthropy virus and a succubus who feeds on sexual activity. And the heroine of Charlaine Harris’ Southern Vampire Mysteries, Sookie Stackhouse, begins as a mostly-human telepath but learns she is actually an entirely different monstrous species, a fairy.[48]  In the twenty-first century, many other heroines also begin their series as supernatural creatures outright: for example, Kelley Armstrong’s werewolf heroine Elena Michaels,[49] and Patricia Briggs’ Mercy Thompson, a shapeshifting Native American skinwalker.[50]

As UF/PR has further developed after 2000, the now-supernatural protagonists of UF/PR often live in an innovative new supernatural, fictional world. Prior to 2000, monstrous horror texts generally depicted a protagonist who stumbled onto the secret existence of a supernatural being or even a secret, underground supernatural world. But since 2000, a new kind of fictional world has emerged in which the supernatural is openly acknowledged as a part of the everyday. In this supernatural-yet-everyday world, vampires, werewolves and other supernatural beings live openly in human society, framed as social and cultural minority groups. Laurell K Hamilton pioneered the concept of the everyday-supernatural as a new setting in her Anita Blake series in the 1990s. Since 2000, the everyday-supernatural has become increasingly popular as a fictional setting and is now utilised in series by many popular authors including Jim Butcher, Charlaine Harris, Kim Harrison, Carrie Vaughn, Patricia Briggs, Illona Andrews, Chloe Neill, Kelly Gay and Faith Hunter.

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Figure 7. Viral marketing for True Blood (2008-2014) drew on its “everyday supernatural” world model to play with the boundaries between reality and fantasy. A poster campaign here advertises the “Vampire Rights Amendment,” a fictional amendment to the US Constitution which would grant vampires rights as citizens in the human world.

In the everyday-supernatural world, monster hunters and slayers lose their moral certainty as protagonists, further destabilising the binaries of real/fantastic, human/Other and good/evil. As Graham writes, “One of the ways in particular in which the boundaries between humans and almost-humans have been asserted is through the discourse of ‘monstrosity.’ Monsters serve both to mark the fault-lines but also, subversively, to signal the fragility of such boundaries.”[51]  In texts which use everyday-supernatural settings, humans and monsters must constantly renegotiate the boundaries between self and Other in order to co-exist successfully. In these fictional worlds, heroines are no longer able to uphold human law and protect the innocent, because human law can no longer adequately account for cultural and ethical differences between the monstrous and the human inhabitants of society.

At the same time, in many UF/PR texts produced after the year 2000, vampires and other monsters are no longer required to abstain from their predatory hungers (both literal and sexual) to be considered ethically “good.” Instead, they now seek fulfilling, posthuman interconnections with others. Paranormal romances challenge the boundaries between self and the monstrous Other when a romantic attraction causes two potential lovers to re-evaluate their identities and philosophies. And, as Helen Bailie writes in “Blood Ties: The Vampire Lover in the Popular Romance,” in paranormal romance “the taking of blood . . . becomes a necessary element of the sexual relationship” and the vampiric bite “is an affirmation of . . . acceptance of the vampire lover and his environment.”[52] In UF/PR beyond 2000, vampiric feeding is no longer inherently evil. Instead, the vampiric exchange of blood becomes repositioned as a positive act of interconnection which also demonstrates acceptance of the lover’s Otherness.

The popularity of these new genre conventions in the years since 2000 suggests a significant posthuman shift in UF/PR as a genre. David Held has suggested “reason[ing] from the point of view of others” is a significant necessity in the “overlapping communities of fate” created by modern globalisation.[53] Such overlapping communities are geographic and social, but they are also cultural, technological, and ecological. These communities exist in posthuman worlds: worlds which necessitate, in the worlds of Neil Badmington, “a careful, ongoing . . . rethinking of the dominant humanist (or anthropocentric) account of who ‘we’ are as human beings. In the light of posthumanist theory and culture, ‘we’ are not who ‘we’ once believed ourselves to be. And neither are ‘our’ others.”[54] Posthumanist theory argues that the differences between the (white, patriarchal, dominant) humanist self and the (raced, gendered, queer, animal, technological, monstrous) Other have become destabilised in the contemporary world. Since 2000, UF/PR increasingly explores the possibilities and the difficulties of thriving in iterations of contemporary, global, monstrous and post-human worlds. In the twenty-first century, UF/PR uses its communities of monsters to suggest that as we are increasingly enabled and required to see the world from the point of view of the Other in the global world, we are increasingly unable to maintain clear boundaries between what is self and what is Other, who to include and who to exclude, and what is right and what is wrong.

A Definition for Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance

As indicated by this history of UF/PR, the primary elements of this genre can be articulated in a variety of ways. The foregoing chronological history of UF/PR can be combined with Rick Altman’s syntactic and semantic framework for genre in order to give a more functional and specific set of definitions for UF/PR. Altman suggests that genre can be defined both syntactically and semantically to build a more complex picture of how particular genres develop and operate. He argues that

we can as a whole distinguish between generic definitions which depend on a list of common traits, attitudes, characters, shots, locations, sets, and the like – thus stressing the semantic elements which make up the genre – and definitions which play up instead certain constitutive relationships between undesignated and variable placeholders – relationships which might be called the genre’s fundamental syntax. The semantic approach thus stresses the genre’s building blocks, while the syntactic view privileges the structures into which they are arranged.[55]

In other words, a syntactic definition of genre outlines a narrative structure that broadly repeats within a genre, and a semantic definition refers to its recognizable conventions, tropes and motifs. Syntactic and semantic elements interact to create a specific genre text.

This model allows us to define UF/PR as follows. In terms of its syntax, or its basic narrative paradigm: UF/PR combines elements of romance, horror, mystery and/or thriller narratives to tell the story of a conflict and/or an alliance between a human (or human faction) and a supernatural monster (or supernatural faction). This story occurs in a world in which the boundaries between reality and the supernatural fantastic have been destabilised or re-ordered entirely. As the plot progresses, the conflict and/or alliance between factions destabilises the boundaries that define and distinguish self from Other and good from evil within this world. This definition is necessarily broad because UF/PR texts are highly flexible and may articulate this semantic structure in many different ways, hybridising it with a wide variety of conventions from other genre fiction.

A more specific paradigm for UF/PR as a genre can be established by identifying its most prominent semantic elements. These are as follows:

1. UF/PR is paranormal fiction. Its stories contain paranormal, supernatural, fantastic and monstrous entities. This paranormal element is usually found in excess: UF/PR narratives usually contain not one kind of monster or magic, but many kinds.
2. UF/PR constructs a specific setting for its fictional worlds. The fictional worlds UF/PR closely mimic our contemporary reality but contain additional supernatural content. Moreover, there are two significant variants of this setting. In one, the supernatural elements of the world are secret, underground and hidden from mainstream society. In the other, there the supernatural is an accepted part of the everyday, existing openly as part of contemporary society.
3. UF/PR commonly follows a monster-hunter, investigator or detective as a protagonist, utilising a mystery or thriller plotline. Thus, the protagonist must typically work to resolve a conflict, crime or other mysterious event.
4. The UF/PR protagonist generally possesses a supernatural power or monstrous nature, and often becomes increasingly supernaturally powerful or monstrous as the narrative progresses.
5. The majority of protagonists in UF/PR are female.
6. The majority of protagonists in UF/PR also narrate their adventures from the first person perspective.
7. UF/PR is a hybrid and transmedia genre, utilising elements from many other genres and formats. In this respect, in transgressing the boundaries of genre and media, the form of UF/PR complements its content, which thematically transgresses the boundaries between reality and the fantastic and the self and Other.

Over time the particular elements which are blended in UF/PR from various popular genres have become formulaic. However, not all UF/PR texts use all of these semantic elements of genre all the time. And not all UF/PR series blend these conventions in the same proportions. This is where confusion typically arises over the distinction between urban fantasy and paranormal romance.  This specific yet flexible definition of UF/PR suggests, however, that the significance of a distinction between urban fantasy and paranormal romance has been over-emphasised.

For example, even in an apparently straightforward “urban fantasy” text with a male protagonist, such as Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files,[56] we encounter a romance subplot. And even the texts most commonly categorised as “paranormal romance” may utilise elements typically found in urban fantasy. For example, Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga bolsters its primary narrative of a love triangle between human Bella Swan, vampire Edward Cullen and werewolf Jacob Black with other semantic and syntactic elements common to urban fantasy. Typical of most UF/PR protagonists, Bella acquires her own monstrous and supernatural powers when she eventually becomes a powerful vampire herself. And the Twilight Saga includes detailed supernatural world-building, such as supernatural social conflicts which its heroine must resolve. Bella must mediate the broader supernatural feud between the vampires and werewolves of her world; she must also mediate between her good vampire family, and the dangerous vampiric political hierarchy of the Volturi.[57]

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Figure 8.  The poster for Breaking Dawn: Part 2 (2012) shows protagonist Bella Swan, now transformed into a vampire, as she runs toward battle against the Volturi, the ruling vampire council. Even though the Twilight Saga is primarily romance, it thus utilises key conventions of urban fantasy.

It is for this reason I suggest the distinction between urban fantasy and paranormal romance is unnecessary, and prefer to refer to the genre under the umbrella term “urban fantasy and paranormal romance.” Rather than imagining these two modes of fiction as distinct genres, or as distinct subgenres, it is more helpful to consider urban fantasy and paranormal romance as two ends of a broader genre continuum. The model of a genre spectrum allows a broad range of both urban fantasy and paranormal romance texts to be analysed in relation to the same syntactic and semantic elements of genre. Where exactly to place historical paranormal fiction[58] or fairytale retellings[59] on this spectrum is a matter for further analysis. It is almost impossible to account for all possible iterations, combinations and subversions of genre convention in one genre model. However, a conception of UF/PR as a genre continuum allows for a more comprehensive understanding of the relationship between urban fantasy and paranormal romance, and the hybridisation of other generic conventions in texts which are considered UF/PR.

Crossing Boundaries: UF/PR as a Thematically Transgressive, Hybrid and Transmedia Genre

In understanding UF/PR as primarily influenced by one or two other genres, critics, authors and fans alike fail to consider the extent to which UF/PR is constructed through and characterised by genre hybridity. UF/PR transgresses traditional boundaries of genre by simultaneously hybridising, cannibalising and parodying generic structures from other numerous genres.[60] For example, from fantasy fiction, UF/PR may borrow conventions such as extensive serialised world-building, a quest narrative, and a band of unlikely companions as key characters. From the Gothic, it may borrow a vulnerable, emotionally sensible heroine. From American Gothic specifically, it borrows its fictional geographic locations, the challenge of puritan values through sexual deviance, and anxiety about the government of society. Drawing from monstrous horror, UF/PR explores the taboo and abject, the spread of contagion and the loss of self control. The prevalence of vampires in UF/PR also results in texts that invoke conventions of vampire literature, such as the late twentieth century convention of the morally conscientious vampire protagonist or lover. From romance, UF/PR borrows the conventions of a forbidden love (interracial, interspecies and across socio-economic class) and/or the love triangle. Borrowing from chick lit, female protagonists in UF/PR may explore gendered tensions between career and romance, or draw on the convention of the urban affective family. From detective and crime fiction, UF/PR frequently borrows the generic structure of a mystery format, as well as detailed descriptive attention to procedures and forensics, to violent action, and to guns and other weaponry. Like the noir detective, UF/PR protagonists are often social outcasts or loners; they emphasise the significance of toughness in the face of adversity; and they usually uphold a personal moral code that does not necessarily mesh with conventional morality. And UF/PR also draws on science fiction in its speculative nature, its use of advanced technologies and new medical procedures, and even in the construction of futuristic, post-cataclysmic and post-apocalyptic societies.

Kim Harrison’s Hollows series[61] provides a specific example of how these various conventions may blend together in one UF/PR series. Harrison’s protagonist Rachel Morgan combines character tropes from the horror and detective genres: she is a witch/demon who uses her supernatural powers to work as a tough-talking private investigator. Harrison’s fictional world model is a speculative alternative reality that is post-cataclysmic: Rachel lives in a fictional version of Cincinnati that exists after “the Turn,” a historical event in which a batch of genetically modified tomatoes generated a virus that wiped out a large percentage of the human population. The Turn also exposed the existence of supernatural species such as witches, werewolves, vampires, elves, pixies who were immune to this virus. Harrison’s world-model thus draws on conventions of science fiction, fantasy and horror, creating a speculative alternate reality in which creatures from fantasy and horror mingle with advanced medical and scientific knowledge. Rachel forms a detective agency with Ivy, a lesbian vampire, and Jenks, a pixy. As well as following a mystery format, the series also follows the quest narrative of high fantasy fiction when this band of unlikely companions work together not only to solve crimes but to save the city and/or the world from magical threats. Rachel’s band of unlikely companions is also another form of the urban affective family: Rachel, Ivy and Jenks live together and gradually welcome other friends into their close-knit and trusted family group. Harrison’s series also includes a number of romance subplots in which Rachel repeatedly falls for the wrong man – in mystery parlance, an homme fatal. Rachel also experiments with a same-sex relationship with Ivy, pushing the boundaries of heterosexual romance fiction. Harrison’s titles (for example, The Good, the Bad and the Undead and For a Few Demons More)[62] also parody titles in the Western genre. Harrison uses intertextual reference in her titles to position her heroine as a reworking of the Western outlaw-hero. Thus, Harrison’s series is a complex blend of conventions from horror, fantasy, vampire literature, science fiction, crime fiction, romance, chick lit and even the Western.

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Figure 9. Kim Harrison’s Hollows series (2004-2014) exemplifies how UF/PR series blend genres.

These examples are not intended as a comprehensive catalogue of the various conventions utilised in UF/PR: rather, the various conventions listed are intended to demonstrate that far from simply being a subgenre of fantasy, horror and/or romance, UF/PR is truly a hybrid genre. It draws broadly from the structures of a number of other genres and subgenres to both reinforce and subvert certain genre expectations. Individual UF/PR texts and series may not utilise all of these structures, but across the UF/PR genre, all these conventions and more are available for analysis. Genre hybridity is so prominent in UF/PR that it should be considered one of the most significant distinguishing factors of this genre.

In addition to crossing the boundaries of popular genres, UF/PR also crosses the boundaries of media. And in addition to a general critical failure to give adequate attention to UF/PR as a hybrid genre fiction, there has also been a general critical failure to analyse how UF/PR operates as a transmedia genre. UF/PR is most prolific as a category of popular fiction, usually formatted as serialised novels. But it also crosses into short story collections, world and series guides with exclusive new materials, ebook-only novellas and short stories (and other materials available via author websites), television, film, RPGs, graphic novels, web series, and even viral marketing and transmedia branding of consumer products.  Yet critics often fail to consider how cross-media adaptation and transmedia storytelling might impact the content and reception of UF/PR texts.

Henry Jenkins writes extensively on transmedia narratives in Convergence Culture[63] and on his blog, Confessions of an Aca-fan.[64] He defines “transmedia storytelling” as “a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience.”[65] He further suggests that transmedia storytelling encourages “the production and circulation of knowledge within a networked society.”[66] In addition to this circulation of knowledge, Jenkins suggests that “the encyclopaedic ambitions of transmedia texts often results [sic] in what might be seen as gaps or excesses in the unfolding of the story… Readers, thus, have a strong incentive to continue to elaborate on these story elements.”[67] In this respect, transmedia texts are both participatory and performative. Such texts encourage ongoing audience speculation and discussion, and allow for audience participation and performance in media such as fanfiction and social media.

Jenkins distinguishes transmedia texts from those which are simply adapted from one medium to another, arguing that “we need to distinguish between adaptation, which reproduces the original narrative with minimum changes into a new medium and is essentially redundant to the original work, and extension, which expands our understanding of the original by introducing new elements into the fiction.”[68]  However, he also emphasises the concept of multiplicity, “the possibility of alternative versions of the characters or parallel universe versions of the stories” that emerge as texts develop between media. Jenkins suggests that “Multiplicity allows fans to take pleasure in alternative retellings, seeing the characters and events from fresh perspectives.”[69] The pleasure found in this multiplicity is also possible from more straightforward adaptations between media. If we consider UF/PR as a genre rife with this multiplicity, an understanding of UF/PR as both highly adaptive and transmedia becomes more clear.

It may seem at first as though UF/PR involves primarily straightforward adaptations in which texts are translated from one medium to another. However, UF/PR actually blurs the distinction between adaptation and transmedia storytelling, revelling in the possibilities of multiplicity for its characters and fictional worlds. For example, L.J. Smith’s The Vampire Diaries trilogy has been adapted to a popular television series of the same name.[70] As adaptation, the television series drastically changes the narrative plot and characters of the original series. Far from being a straightforward adaptation of fiction to television, the popularity of the tv series has resulted in the publication of a number of new novels in the series.[71] Moreover, the success of the television series has led to the publication of online-only, tie-in short stories on L J Smith’s official website.[72] Even more surprisingly, as Smith, the series’ original author, no longer writes official Vampire Diaries tie-in novels, she recently began publishing her own “fanfiction” on Kindle Worlds, an Amazon.com fanfiction publishing platform. Through the Kindle format, Smith thus offers fans yet another alternative version of the broader Vampire Diaries narrative.[73] Numerous other UF/PR authors have also produced a range of works that span novels, short story anthologies, world guides, online-only e-books and e-novellas, and graphic novels (for example, Laurell K Hamilton, Kim Harrison, Marjorie Liu, Patricia Briggs and Kelley Armstrong have produced texts across these media).

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Figure 10. True Blood offers an example of a transmedia UF/PR text. Beginning as Charlaine Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse novel series (2001-2013), this text extends across novellas, short stories, companion world guides, as well as the television series True Blood (2008-2014), tie-in graphic novels, and True Blood’s viral and transmedia marketing campaign. Shown here is a viral billboard campaign.

Charlaine Harris’ Southern Vampire Mysteries series provides an even more dramatic example of how one UF/PR text can function as a transmedia text.[74] Harris’ series traverses various fictional genres: novels, short stories, novellas, a Sookie Stackhouse Companion including new “facts” about Harris’ fictional world (and even recipes mentioned in her fiction!), and an encyclopaedic series coda.[75] But Harris’ series also crosses into other media. Most prominently, it has been adapted as True Blood.[76] True Blood adapts material from Harris’ series, but it also contributes substantial new characters, plotlines and world-building to the series. True Blood itself has also crossed into ebooks and graphic novels. In 2008, a graphic novel prequel was released online only,[77]  and a number of tie-in graphic novels depict characters drawn after the corresponding actors in spin-off adventure narratives.[78] True Blood also has a wide transmedia viral marketing campaign that extends beyond the boundaries of traditional narrative media. The True Blood viral campaign includes extensive poster campaigns, tie-in advertising from real companies, functional websites promoting fictional settings and organisations from the series, social media campaigns, audience competitions, behind the scenes footage and bonus scenes made available online (and on dvd), and even a character blog supposedly produced by teen vampire Jessica Hamby.[79]

In The Horror Sensorium, Ndalianis provides a useful analysis of True Blood’s transmedia viral marketing. Ndalianis writes that as a transmedia text, True Blood “participates in a performance that’s about meta-horror – we take delight in the playful fiction that insists that, like the series, vampires are a part of our community . . . the transmedia fictions invite responses of amusement and cognitive play.”[80] Ndalianis suggests here that meta-textuality allows consumers to find pleasure in the blurred boundaries between reality and the fantastic. This suggestion also resonates with the way that UF/PR as a paranormal and hybrid genre also generally blurs these distinctions. For example, UF/PR juxtaposes fantastic conventions from horror with the gritty realism of detective and crime fiction, or treats as mundane the fantastic, supernatural and sometimes absurd hurdles that interfere with romantic relationship-building. This generic hybridity thus also invites “amusement” and “cognitive play.”

An understanding of UF/PR as a genre that crosses boundaries of both genre and media provides a crucial insight to understanding this genre thematically. The boundary-crossing form of UF/PR is echoed in the thematic transgression of boundaries and binary configurations prevalent in its content. As these highly speculative texts transgress the boundaries between mystery, horror, fantasy and romance, and between various media, they also transgress the boundaries between the broader category of the real and the fantastic. In unsettling normative reality to explore the non-normative supernatural worlds, they unsettle established social categories such as self/Other.

Conclusion

Over approximately the past 25 years, urban fantasy has developed into a coherent and recognisable genre of popular fiction. It is likely that the popularity of this genre in this era partially stems from its potential to register and reflect contemporary socio-cultural anxieties, such as the shifts in post- and third-wave feminism, globalisation, and posthumanist shifts in technology, environment and community briefly registered in this article. However, a comprehensive analysis of UF/PR must also offer a commercial and industrial explanation for its popularity.

The serialised, hybrid-genre, adaptive and transmedia formats of UF/PR are essential to its success in popular culture industries. First, as a hybrid-genre, UF/PR becomes accessible to a broad number of fiction readers who may typically read fantasy, or romance, or crime fiction, and may become interested in how these genres blend with elements of the paranormal. Second, the seriality of UF/PR texts defers conclusions, inviting continued consumption over a number of years and sometimes decades. As Jenkins writes, the open end of the serialised text creates “a strong enigma which drives the reader to continue to consume the story even though our satisfaction has been deferred.”[81] Third, both seriality and a transmedia format invite consumers to become invested and to participate in the open spaces of a narrative, spaces which Jenkins describes as “gaps or excesses in the unfolding of the story.”[82] Fourth, as a highly adaptive and transmedia genre, UF/PR is also highly accessible to consumers: Jenkins suggests that transmedia storytelling “reflects the economics of media consolidation” and as such “may expand the potential market for a property by creating different points of entry for different audience segments.”[83] In addition to a strong emphasis on extensive fictional world-building, the deferred conclusions and other open spaces of the narrative invite consumers to seek out other points of accessibility to the broader narrative. In short, the serial, hybrid-genre, adaptive, and transmedia formats of UF/PR contribute strongly to its popular success as a new genre, creating a number of points of accessibility for a broad range of audience members from various other genres and media, and inviting continued playful and participatory consumption.

Since the 1980s, urban fantasy and paranormal romance has developed into a fully coherent and extremely popular new genre. By identifying the destabilisation of boundaries as a broadly recurring thematic element in UF/PR, it becomes possible to consider how this genre might register real, contemporary social anxieties about unstable boundaries. And by identifying UF/PR as a hybrid, serial, adaptive and transmedia genre, we may better understand more generally how genre structures can be invoked in broad yet highly complex ways. UF/PR now predominantly shapes our representations of monsters and the supernatural in popular culture. But only time will tell how long UF/PR may remain popular in its current form and content before it further develops or disintegrates into something new again.

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FILMOGRAPHY

Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Created by Joss Whedon. 1997-2003.

Death Valley. Created by Spider One, Eric Weinberg and Curtis Gwinn. 2011.

Forever Knight. Created by Barney Cohen and James D. Parriott. 1992-1996.

Ghost Ghirls. Created by Maria Blasucci, Jeremy Konner and Amanda Lund. http://screen.yahoo.com/ghost-ghirls/. 2013.

Once Upon a Time. Created by Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz. 2011-present.

The Vampire Diaries. Created by Julie Plec and Kevin Williamson. 2009-present.

True Blood. Created by Alan Ball. 2008-2014 (projected end date)

When The Exorcist hit theaters in 1973, televangelist Billy Graham was widely rumored to have said that evil resided in the very celluloid of that film.^[1] Scott Derrickson’s Sinister (2012) derives horror from a similarly perverse faith in film stock as a vehicle for evil. Although a digital production, Sinister incorporates digitized Super 8 footage and foregrounds analog as the medium of choice for an ancient child-eating pagan deity named Bagul.^[2] Under Bagul’s power, and equipped with camera, film, and tripod, children are transformed into homicidal auteurs who document their families and then murder them on Super 8 before disappearing into the demon’s archive of horror. Echoing Graham, Derrickson explains, “Evil resides in the very celluloid of these Super 8 films”—a statement that recasts the televangelist’s 1970s warning as a twenty-first century horror director’s aspiration.^[3] Whether as a denunciation of a horror movie or as its premise, the notion that evil can inhabit film stems from a gothic belief that media forms that are in decline, like decrepit houses, make better dwellings for malefic spirits.

Despite its morally conservative message, Graham’s rumored reaction to The Exorcist is technologically progressive. At a time when theater owners were turning to grindhouse and exploitation movies to fill their empty seats, the televised gospel and the gospel of television formed a happy alliance. In contrast, Sinister’s retrogressive premise suggests a crisis of faith in emerging technologies. For while the film’s protagonist owns all the latest Apple products, Derrickson himself seems conflicted about the place of analog horror in a digital era. Sinister’s crisis, and perhaps that of all modern horror films that engage the current media climate, is not which side to take in a battle of new vs. old media, but rather how to cope with the transmediative détente that guarantees their mutual coexistence.

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Figure 1

Sinister emerged from the unconscious of co-writer C. Robert Cargill, who, after viewing the analog media-centric remake The Ring (2002), dreamed that he found a film in his attic depicting the hanging of a family.^[4] In Cargill’s script, true-crime author Ellison Oswalt (Ethan Hawke) moves into a house that, unbeknownst to his wife and two children, is the murder site of the family hanging that Oswalt has chosen as the subject of his next book. In the process of unpacking, the writer discovers a box of Super 8 home movies in the otherwise empty attic, and conveniently, a projector, which soon have him transforming his home office into a makeshift screening room. [figure 1] After tacking a sheet to the wall and figuring out how to thread the machine, Oswalt runs the first reel: “Family Hanging Out.” The grainy, nostalgic footage depicts a family of five picnicking in the yard, father and son throwing a football, girl playing on a tire swing that hangs from the large branch of an old tree. Suddenly, the reel cuts to footage of four of the five family members hanging, burlap sacks over their heads, from the same tree that held the tire swing.

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Figure 2

In one reel, Oswalt has encountered two opposing extremes associated with the Super 8 medium: the first, the nostalgic home movie, and the second, the sinister snuff film.^[5]  [figure 2] Derrickson predisposes the moviegoer to the horrific reading of the medium by projecting the hanging in “Family Hanging Out” in lieu of opening credits. In place of Oswalt’s linear encounter of nostalgia followed by horror, the audience’s viewing sequence is cyclical—a loop rather than a line. The difference between the protagonist’s linear view and the audience’s looped view serves not only as an effective strategy to create a horror-inflected brand of nostalgia, but it also signals a broader theme of linearity and looping in the context of horror, media, and nostalgia.

“This is a film about film,” says Derrickson.^[6] Or, to be more precise: Sinister is a digital film about Super 8 analog film that gets digitized. This is a film about interaction with material film in a world where a person may never have physical contact with celluloid unless a demon leaves reels of it in their attic. Critics have questioned why a story set in the present would use such an improbable medium. After all, if you are an ancient Babylonian demon who feasts on the souls of children, it stands to reason that Snapchat, Vine, Youtube, and their ilk might serve as more efficient vehicles for disseminating evil than 1960s film stock. Movie critic Peter Howell, of the Toronto Star, blames budgetary concerns for the anachronistic media.  He writes: “Sinister is a low-budget horror film trying for old-school shocks. But the production can’t afford a pre-Internet setting.”^[7] Although Howell is correct that at $3 million, the film qualifies as low-budget by Hollywood standards, his critique otherwise misses the key point that Sinister’s return-of-repressed analog media theme would not have been possible in a pre-internet setting. In fact, for better or worse, the film would not have had the same resonance in a pre-Instagram setting.

The ten-year lag between Cargill’s Ring-induced analog nightmare and Derrickson’s digital production results in a work that engages a different brand of media anxiety than the film that indirectly inspired the script. As Michael Fisch contends in his analysis of Ringu (1998) and its American remake, The Ring (2002), a delay of even a few years can vastly impact technology-driven narratives.^[8] Old nightmares must adapt to new media. According to Fisch, the crucial change from Ringu to The Ring is that the newer film depicts digital media as a threat to a temporal structure inherent to analog recordings. “If in Ringu the temporality of analog media provides the haunting premise, in The Ring it is the perceived disappearance of this temporality in the anticipated obsolescence of the videotape that is horrific.”^[9] Digitally extracted from its privileged indexical relation to time and reality, the analog ghost is a fish out of water. That is not to say that the supernatural is no longer possible amid what Fisch calls the “algorithmic irregularity of the digital,” but rather that twenty-first century ghosts “cannot be the same kind of ghosts that have been haunting us for over the last century.”^[10] For a film that is inspired by, but also produced ten years after, The Ring the question becomes: how are representations of the supernatural adapting to the current media environment?

As visual norms and technologies change, so do the presuppositions of the viewing public. Derrickson, for example, assumes that Super 8 movies are “just inherently creepy”—a belief most likely informed by the snuff film aesthetic in which inexpensive, grainy film stock and poor production quality connote grisly authenticity. But one person’s evil celluloid might be another’s hipster nostalgia. Newsday critic Rafer Guzman faults the retro technology for being too warm and fuzzy. “[C]elluloid is such a warm, friendly old format that it seems unlikely to contain the spirit of, say, a child-eating demon. It’s like imagining Satan hiding in your cassette deck.”^[11] Indeed, Sinister’s home movies are meant to evoke the warmth of Kodak moments with titles such as “Pool Party ’66,” “BBQ, ’79,” “Lawn Work, ’86,” “Sleepy Time, ’98,” and “Family Hanging Out, ’11,”; each label captures a dull archival domesticity that acquires a menacing irony as Oswalt screens each reel. Clearly, Derrickson relies on nostalgic associations to heighten the shock effect of the sudden shift in content. In that regard, nostalgia is at the heart of his strategy to evoke horror. The risk, as seen in Guzman’s critique, is that the message of the medium has the potential to remain in the “warm” mode even after the content has shifted to cold-blooded murder. The clash between friendly celluloid and creepy celluloid stems from textural signifiers (i.e. the grain and other properties of analog film stock) that are currently in a volatile state of semiotic flux, vulnerable to constant reinterpretation across media forms. The demonically uncanny specter of celluloid that haunts Derrickson’s film risks impotence in a society that fetishizes rather than fears dead media.^[12]

Complicating the meaning of grain in all digital forms is the now ubiquitous faux analog aesthetic best exemplified by Instagram. Kevin Systrom, the company’s co-founder, has stated that early adopters downloaded the app not because they were looking to join a photo-based social network, but because they wanted a filter to remedy the “uninspiring” look of cell phone photos.^[13] During the developmental phase of Instagram, Systrom noticed that the top ten free photography apps on the iTunes charts were “all filter apps of some kind.”^[14] Systrom simply capitalized on the fact that the image-making public had already adopted a nostalgic strategy to legitimize and correct the perceived shortcomings of iPhonography. Replicated as “filters,” the noise, contrast, and chromatic properties associated with emulsions and papers served as camouflage for the noise of sensors and compression that plagued early cell phone cameras. The fetishized flaws of photography, such as vignetting and unstable pigmentation, helped to socialize snapshots within a recognizable tradition.

Since that time, the digital imitation of retro film imperfections has become so pervasive that it has met with a defiantly filter-free backlash. Increasingly, Instagram users are rejecting the digital veneer of historicity provided by filters as a superfluous affectation, much in the same way that Modernist photographers of the last century rejected the heavily manipulated and painterly photographs of the Pictorialists.^[15] The hashtag “nofilter” is now routinely tacked on to millions of photos as a badge of honor, making #nofilter the 25^th most popular hashtag in January 2013.^[16] In short, the nostalgic strategy that socializes new media falls victim to its own success. The brush strokes and blur of a pictorialist photograph that once connected the camera to the canvas, or the faded colors and soft focus of an “Earlybird” filter that once gave digital images the cachet of a time-worn family album, lose their relevance when the disruptive technologies they help to legitimize are no longer viewed as disruptive. Formerly a sign of authenticity, the noise imported from earlier media is progressively dismissed as superfluous artifice. The implications of twenty-first-century insta-pictorialism and its #nofilter backlash bleed over into all forms of digital representation, including moving images. By the time that the mimicry of analog as a stylistic mode saturates digital forms, even the direct digitization of bona fide vintage media (such as the non-simulated Super 8 in Sinister) is subject to disdain, or at best, associations with a certain precious mannerism. Consequently, an entire horror aesthetic so heavily indebted to the grit and gristle of its analog past finds itself in danger of connoting a filter rather than a temporal reference or a physical medium.^[17]

In Sinister, the use of Super 8 footage within a digital film engages the theme of “remediation,” broadly defined by Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin as “the representation of one medium in another.”^[18] Bolter and Grusin note that one of the goals of remediation is the rehabilitation or improvement of another medium, as indicated by its Latin root, the verb remederi—to restore to health, to heal.^[19] Almost without fail, the rhetoric surrounding new media is based on reform. High definition television, for example, supposedly brings the viewer closer to reality than lower definition. The low-to-high model of new media takes part in a teleological narrative that views screens and noise as obstacles to be overcome. For the sake of clarity, I will call the low-to-high model a “linear remediation,” as opposed to Instagram’s strategy of looping new technology back through the noise of the past, which I will refer to as “nostalgic remediation.”

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Figure 3

The linear remediation fantasy is typified by the Esper photo analysis machine in Blade Runner (1982)[figure 3], with its near infinite information retrieval from a single analog snapshot, or more recently, by the ubiquitous portrayals of computer-aided image enhancement in televised crime dramas.^[20] Sinister creates tension through the competing strategies of linear and nostalgic remediation. As the film’s director, Derrickson hopes to infuse his digital horror with “inherent” creepiness by remediating analog film. His protagonist, also in search of a winning horror narrative, uses digitization as part of a linear rehabilitation of the analog footage. While viewing the reel, “Pool Party,” which depicts a family being drowned in their swimming pool, Oswalt notices a strange masked figure lurking under water.

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Figure 4

He pauses the projector and approaches the screen to examine the presence more closely, but the heat from the bulb ignites the celluloid, and as flames burst from the machine, the image dissolves before his eyes.^[21] [figure 4]In response, Oswalt turns to his laptop and googles “how to edit super 8 films.” In no time, he has recut the footage, digitized the projection by setting up a camcorder on a tripod, and opened the digital file as a window on his laptop.

The incendiary celluloid represents a technological denial of user-centered control; a fiery reminder that motion pictures are not made to be paused. The burning also foreshadows the threat to celluloid within the destructive logic of linear remediation. Oswalt’s digital camcorder, complete with its own flip-out screen, displaces his former perspective, and moves him from the position of projectionist/spectator to that of remediator and editor. Now digitized, the filmed projection takes on a                                                               separate life as a QuickTime movie. The original is no longer necessary.

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Figure 5

Where once he could only briefly pause the projector and approach the screen for a closer view, Oswalt now has access to QuickTime A/V controls that can adjust contrast, color, brightness, and tint. [figure 5] The move to the laptop introduces what Bolter and Grusin call “the logic of hypermediacy”—the multiplicity that characterizes the windowed world of the graphical user interface.^[22] The digitized recording of his analog projection, relegated to a window within the screen of a laptop, is now subject to the software-driven editing environment that promises to remedy the technical limitations of the analog projection and to attenuate the aggression of the cinematic screen.

The screen of television, video, and film, is aggressive, or “dynamic,” according to Media theorist Lev Manovich, because it attempts “to take over, rendering nonexistent whatever is outside its frame.”^[23] To move “Pool Party” from the cinematic screen to the computer screen, therefore, is to engage in a battle with the tyranny of the dynamic screen. Or, if we accept as fait accompli Manovich’s pronouncement in 2001 that the “era of the dynamic screen that began with cinema is now ending,” the scene of film digitization is in essence a battle reenactment.^[24] In place of the dynamic screen, we see a “splitting into many windows” or far less frequently, a “complete takeover of the visual field in VR” in new media.^[25] We cannot, however, simply declare Oswalt the victor in a master-slave media dialectic.

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Figure 6

Rather, he occupies a middle ground between media forms, visually and conceptually framed between the new laptop in the foreground and the old film projector in the background.[figure 6] To his right, hangs the sheet he has repurposed as a screen, tacked between bookshelves designed to have the appearance of filmstrips (another reminder of the continuing cycle of remediation). To his left, a bulletin board collage of notes, articles, and photos provides an analog parallel to the desktop environment of his laptop. [figure 7] The proliferating media that surround Oswalt work in concert to resist simple linear remediation. Although the window-bound digitization asserts Oswalt’s control, he must now contend with the consequent multiplication of the object of horror across media.

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Figure 7

The fantasy of a purely linear remediation requires a repression or destruction of the former media object (i.e. the celluloid) that Oswalt fails to achieve. Even lighter fluid and a barbecue grill, as we will see later in the film, prove no match for the persistence of old media. Instead of replacing the old with the new, he is left to grapple with transmediative simultaneity. Derrickson literally depicts the simulcast representation of remediated horror after Oswalt awakens in the middle of the night to the telltale whirring sounds and flickering lights of the projector. The writer follows the sound and light to his office where he sees the “Family Hanging Out” film projected onto the sheet on the wall. [figure 8] He turns to see his laptop playing the digital version of the film in perfect synchronization with the projector [figure 9], and then glances at the bulletin board with its printed screen grabs of the digitized projection [figures 10-11]. Accentuated by a percussive sound cue, the shot cuts back to the sheet-screen [figure 12] and then pans quickly to the identical scene simulcast on the laptop. [figure 13]

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Figures 8-19

More slowly now, the camera pans a final time from one screen to the other, one remediation to the next, and then follows Oswalt as he shuts down the projection in the same order. After flipping the “off” switch on the projector, Oswalt proceeds to his laptop to stop the moving image. [figure 14] As he does so, the video zooms [figure 15] to the same still frame that is tacked to the bulletin board as an inkjet print [figure 16], once again offering a simultaneous representation of the same image across media. Oswalt advances to the bulletin board, and untacks the noise-riddled print that seems to depict a face or a masked figure peering from the bushes just outside the window. He then approaches the window, printout in hand [figure 17], and extends the image at arm’s length between himself and his view of the real bushes just outside. The camera cuts to Oswalt’s point-of-view, so that we see the printout nearly full screen, like a movie frame severed from context. [figure 18] Instinctively, we try to focus on the face, when suddenly Oswalt lowers the print and reveals the demonic face, now outside the house in the bushes exactly where its fuzzy form appeared in ink on paper. [figure 19] Despite noise and imperfections, the multiplication of the signifier has had an incantatory effect. Thus, access to the supernatural is achieved (albeit momentarily) through transmediative simultaneity and looping rather than through the complete replacement of old media.

To those familiar with Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966), the still image of the demonic face in the bushes is uncannily familiar. In fact, there are striking visual and thematic similarities between Sinister and Blow-Up, both highly process-driven contemplations of media wrapped in a plot about an amateur crime investigation. Each film deals with a scrutiny of images across forms, although in different temporal, technological, and generic contexts. As media theorist Garrett Stewart has remarked, Blow-Up is not simply a film about film, but rather a film about photography’s relation to film.^[26] In Blow-Up, a photographer dives into ever increasing graininess (the opposite of the hi-res linear remediation fantasy) and existential uncertainty as he magnifies a series of still photos and arranges them as if piecing together frames in a film. After Thomas, the photographer, has created a proto-cinematic storyboard sequence on the wall of his studio, Antonioni further cinematizes the images by presenting them full screen in succession at a pace that evokes the movement of film without losing the frozen character of each frame.

Stewart uses the term “photogram” to refer to the discrete units that make up the illusion of continuity and movement created by film projection. That single frame that flies by faster than the eye can seize it becomes the “specular unconscious” of film apparitions.^[27] Stewart’s “specular unconscious” should not be confused with Walter Benjamin’s celebration of “unconscious optics,” although the two are connected. Benjamin famously refers to photography’s power to freeze time and to reveal hidden or uncanny aspects of otherwise fluid movement.^[28] In contrast, Stewart’s “specular unconscious” is what is produced when static images pass through a projector at 24 frames per second, repressing their fixed nature in order to convey movement. Benjamin’s unconscious optics seek to turn movement into a corpse-like image that one can dissect, whereas Stewart’s specular unconscious reanimates the image-corpse through endless deferral.

Both Blow-Up and Sinister construct a murder-narrative through the process of remediation. In Blow-Up, still photos are cropped, enlarged, re-photographed, and organized until they resemble cinema. In Sinister, moving film is captured digitally, analyzed frame-by-frame, and then reduced to a few stills that are sent to a home printer. In a general sense, one could say that Blow-Up leads from photography to film and Sinister from film to photography, but such oversimplification ignores the fact that a printed screen capture is not a photograph. Neither is it a photogram. More accurately, we might say that a printed screen capture is to photography what a QuickTime file is to cinema: a visually familiar replication masking a radically altered logic. In spite of its similarities to Blow-Up, Sinister’s essential conflict is not between a filmic conscious and a specular photogrammatic unconscious. In Stewart’s reading of Blow-Up, the “slippery ellipsis of presence” that obstructs Thomas’ investigation becomes a technological allegory of cinema’s fundamental ontological paradox: motion through rapidly discarded still images.^[29] In linguistic terms, the photogram is the phoneme of filmic speech. Thus, Blow-Up’s preoccupation with revealing that structure is in essence a structural analysis of the language of film. Sinister represents instead a dialogue between two different languages, each with its own logic: that of film and that of computerized media. The one is not the component of the other in the way that a still image is a component of film’s illusory movement. A more nuanced reading of Sinister must account for the differences between those two languages.

The most visible distinction between film and its computerized double is the loss of the dynamic screen emphasized by Manovich and other media theorists. Anne Friedberg, for example, remarks that window is but “a subset of its screen surface: an inset screen within the screen of the computer, one of many nested on its “desktop.””^[30] By nature, the computerized mediascape perpetuates a multi-windowed coexistence of variable, navigable, and scalable image and text formats that are no longer anchored by a static viewpoint. Accordingly, the desktop space negates the dynamic screen, even if its “full screen” mode is capable of impersonating it. Reduced to, or split across, “one of many” windows, the media object appears to suffer the same postmodern fate as human subjects. This pervasive but ultimately misleading narrative is summarize by media historian Jeffrey Sconce as follows:

Where there was once stable human consciousness, there are now only the ghosts of fragmented, decentered, and increasingly schizophrenic subjectivities. Where there once was “depth” and “affect,” there is now only “surface.” Where there was once “meaning,” “history,” and a solid realm of signifiers,” there is now only a haunted landscape of vacant and shifting signifiers.^[31]

Sconce cautions that the “postmodern occult” tales of a soul-destroying electronic netherworld are merely the recycled and amplified views that have accompanied nearly every advance in communications technology since the nineteenth-century fantasy of a spiritual telegraph.^[32] Depending on context, the prospect of an electronic realm has been alternately described as liberating or terrifying. Whatever the effects of the “postmodern occult” on the human psyche, the corollary danger of that view is the assumption that the multiplied, fractured subject corresponds to a multiplied, fractured media object.

Even if we accept that remediation splinters the human subject, we cannot assume that the same is true for non-humans. More accurate is the counter-intuitive proposition that the heterogeneity of the windowed world is superficial. That is, if we dig into the strata of Oswalt’s MacBook in Sinister, we will find that beneath the screenshots, the movie files, and the documents of its Cocao (application) layer (to use media developer terminology) there lies a unified media layer. Beneath the media layer, the core services. Beneath the core services, the core OS, until finally, we arrive at the Kernal. Within the media object’s logical framework, Oswalt’s digitization of the film reels is therefore a move away from the fractured specular unconscious that haunts film. In its remediated form, the Super 8 footage becomes part of an environment undergirded by numeric unity. Thus, even if new media divide the human subject, the effect of analog-to-digital remediation on the film itself is anything but schizophrenic.

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Figure 20

As Oswalt’s investigation advances, windows pile up and overlap on his computer screen: drawings from the attic digitally captured on his iPhone share space with remediated tape, stills, video chats (with a professor who holds prints up to his webcam), and footage of Oswalt falling, iPhone in hand, through the weakened attic floorboards. [figure 20] The treacherously permeable attic—the architectural unconscious of the home—is the space where analog resides, and to which it returns once Oswalt has digitized it. The attic serves as a screening room where the ghosts of young children watch the demon Bagul in ritualistic silence. Oswalt discovers the retro-media-obsessed ghosts the night following the simultaneous projections in his study. He awakes, as before, to the flickering light and hum of the projector down a hallway. He first enters his office—the site of the earlier film and computer synchronous displays—and runs his hand across the empty spot where the projector once stood. He exits to the hallway and sees the attic ladder extended to the floor, its rungs animated like frames of film in a projector’s flickering light.The effect of the illuminated ladder in the darkened hallway visually conveys Oswalt’s ascent to the attic as a retrogressive draw toward a repressed, haunted medium. [figure 21]

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Figure 21

Oswalt walks up ladder where he witnesses the ghostly attic screening. Oswalt’s intrusion into the attic projection leads to the climax of the film’s second act: a series of four jump scares that place analog film in the role of the supernatural slasher figure that refuses to die. The first of the four scares is the face of Bagul, whose sudden appearance makes Oswalt fall back down the attic ladder. The following three jump scares are of old media. With a sudden thud, the archival home movies box drops from the attic. One second later, the projector crashes to the floor.

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Figure 22

Finally, the reels of film drop and push Oswalt into a state of utter terror that Derrickson frames to evoke Shelly Duvall’s reaction to the “Here’s Johnny” moment in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980).^[33] [figure 22]

Like Jack Torrance breaking through the door with his axe, old media burst from the ceiling with violent force. Clearly, the medium itself is as dreaded as the demon. In fact, not once does Oswalt fight the demon in the course of the film. Neither does he physically take on any human foe. Instead, he battles reels of celluloid as one might try to defeat Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees—and with equally futile results. After the climactic series of jump scares, Oswalt recovers enough to grab the film and heap it onto his backyard grill for incineration.

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Figure 23

A close-up of the burning celluloid closes the scene, and Oswalt and family drive to their former residence assured that the worst is over.[figure 23] The viewer, of course, knows better.

The palatial old house is a suitable setting for a gothic haunting, complete with a thunderstorm and a cavernous fireplace crackling with fire. Despite his destruction of the films, Oswalt has not yet deleted any of the digital files on the desktop of his MacBook. When he opens his computer, he finds an email with three scanned images of Bagul. He immediately contacts Professor Jonas, the expert he has previously consulted via iChat, and soon his monitor is displaying the three image scans in overlapping windows, as well as a video chat window of the professor. [figure 24]

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Figure 24

Behind the windows, we see a partial view of the QuickTime files and clippings on his desktop. “There’s been so little written on Bagul that nobody has ever bothered to scan any of this material before,” explains the professor. “You’re looking at an engraving, an old sketch from the Dark Ages, and fragments of a deteriorated fresco.” The video chat allows Derrickson to establish the mythology of his demon creation. We learn that early Christians believed the demon lived in images— gateways into his realm—and that the demon could possess the viewer, impel them to commit acts of violence, and then abduct them into the image. Children, he says, were especially vulnerable.

The quick exposition of Bagul’s mythology also lets Derrickson reintroduce, and more importantly, discard with very little ceremony or resistance, the windowed digisphere of hypermediacy. Oswalt’s deletion of all the Bagul files is uneventful. The cavernous room and the storm raging outside the physical window try in vain to heighten the drama. A series of procedural shots show Oswalt close the video window, quit Preview, select, and then trash the files—a very dull horror battle compared to the hellfire spectacle of burning celluloid. Although Bagul can inhabit any image, be it engraving, fresco, film, or computer, we have no doubt which format Derrickson’s demon prefers.

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Figure 25

Next, follows a trip to the attic, a series of joltingly loud audio cues as Oswalt finds the box, opens the lid, and sees the reels, not only unscathed, but with envelopes of additional footage for the “extended cut endings.” Once unsure of how to thread a projector, Oswalt now assembles, splices, and edits film like a pro. [figure 25] He is no longer the empowered remediator digitizing analog film; he has returned to old school editing of film pure and simple. The demon of celluloid has already won.

Although Sinister shares similarities to Blow-Up, the ending has more in common with the bittersweet longing of Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso (1988). Oswalt’s compilation of extended-cut footage might well be the infernal counterpart to Cinema Paradiso’s touching montage of redacted kissing scenes. In Tornatore’s homage to the silver screen, a world-weary film director regains his faith in the power of good old-fashioned movies with the help of film clips spliced together by a projectionist from his village. Sinister’s ending, though disturbing, is equally nostalgic. Spooling past the flickering lens from a single edited reel flow the snuff films of each homicidal child director. One by one, each child disappears in an editorial blip (not unlike the disappearance of Thomas at the end of Blow-Up), forever to remain in a world of communal analog screenings, long after their living peers have moved on from YouTube to the next big thing.

Once Oswalt has viewed the reel that he has been complicit in compiling, he too will be “edited” along with his family, by his daughter who wields an axe in one hand (another reference to The Shining) and a vintage 8mm camera in the other.

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Figure 26

[figure 26] The violent dismemberment of her family (which is not depicted) is almost incidental to their capture on film— another form of dismemberment. Just as the axe descends to behead the father, the film cuts to the analog footage captured by the daughter for her addition to the horrific boxed set. A flash of noise from a crudely taped edit severs the scene and indicates the return of the dynamic screen with a vengeance. “House Painting” now fills the theater just as “Family Hanging Out” did at the beginning of the film. The noise of the projector and the visual noise of 8mm overtake our field of vision as we watch the daughter drag her axe down a long blood-spattered hallway.

In the ultimate act of retrogression, Derrickson grounds film in humankind’s earliest form of analog expression: cave painting. As the daughter walks down the hall, we see her gruesome artwork finger-painted in blood. Most striking among her mural depictions are the horse heads that are nearly identical to 31,000 year-old drawings in the Chauvet Cave in southern France. [figure 27]

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Figure 27

As nostalgic remediations go, a journey back to Paleolithic art is about as big a loop as one can get. In the end, there is no doubt that Bagul intends to keep his movie collection in its analog form. He abducts the girl into his netherworld, and “House Painting” takes its place alongside the other reels in the archival box, ready and waiting for the sequel.

The eternal return to Super 8 in Sinister puts transmediation in the service of haunted, nostalgic media. Celluloid becomes the center around which new and ancient forms of representation orbit. The supernatural is therefore amplified not by linearity, but through a looping process that mimics the feed of film reels through a projector. Sinister is not alone in its proposition that occult narratives, even when they engage the latest technology, are enhanced by the gothic housing of analog forms. Other current horror films, most notably, V/H/S  (2012) and V/H/S/2 (2013), suggest that cycles of remediation best reflect our archeological relation to media. The need to depict the excavation of dead forms is nothing new. Finding film reels in one’s attic or VHS tapes in a basement might be the current equivalent of unearthing a supernatural force from an ancient tomb. What best characterizes the state of remediative cycles in contemporary horror is not our desire to excavate old forms, nor an intent to kill them, but rather our impulse to rebury them so we can dig them up, and in the process, find something new. Whether Sinister’s celluloid seems quaint or reassuringly frightening is ultimately a matter of faith.

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Figure 1. Victor Surge’s Slender Man, 2009.

It is fundamental when seeking an understanding of the Slender Man that one takes into account his marginality and the communal nature of his canon. I cannot give a comprehensive understanding of his mythology, and attempting would curtail his significance: what merits study is that he is uncategoriseable and in a constant state of development. There is no authoritative version of the Slender Man, but an outline of his more popular incarnations follows. The Slender Man first appeared during a horror Photoshop competition on the Something Awful Internet forums in 2009.^[3] Two black-and-white photographs, allegedly taken sometime in the late 20th century, display groups of children playing outdoors. Photoshopped in the background of each is a tall humanoid in a suit, with white tentacle-like arms emerging from its sleeves. Each photograph comes with a fictional caption, describing how these are theorised as appearances of the ‘Slender Man,’ who caused these children and many others to disappear.^[4] From these photographs, three things are already apparent: that the Slender Man discourse is framed as ‘real’ urban legends, that he exists on the interlinked media of text and photograph, and that the Slender Man can transfer into other platforms or spaces, in this case being retroactively mythologised in the 20th century.

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Figure 2.Victor Surge’s Slender Man, 2009.

Since the Something Awful phenomenon, many more photographs and written urban legends have circulated from different sources. Two of the most popular Slender Man stories are Marble Hornets, a film project hosted on Youtube, and Slender Game, a short horror video game, which I will use as case studies later in the paper.^[5] Material such as this has has been collected and curated on a number of websites – literally sites in the polycentric sense – such as slendermanmythos and Villains Wiki.^[6] The former discusses how various users contribute to the mythos, framing the activity as an ARG. The latter is one of the many examples in which the Slender Man is framed as real: like the Something Awful pictures, the Villains Wiki page uses a real-life ‘retrospective continuity,’ documenting appearances of the Slender Man in medieval mythology. This site alleges that Something Awful was not the myth’s genesis, and that the Slender Man has existed, either in reality or folklore, for centuries. A list like Villains Wiki suggests that there is no outward limit to what can be included in the Slender Man universe: he can comfortably infiltrate the ‘real’ world of history. These collections file Slender Man along with mythical and ‘real’ monsters alike, collapsing his exclusive categorisation in either.

Slender Man is one of the more popular examples of an Internet trend of horror storytelling. Following the sensations of hyperlink storytelling and user-edited wiki pages, websites such as Villains Wiki, creepypasta, and SCP have become popular loci for horror narratives.^[7] Such sites often have verisimilitudes that users obey or play with: SCP uses pseudo-institutional jargon, complete with fake censored omissions, to portray itself as the database for monsters and evil phenomena that must be Secured, Contained, and Protected. The Slender Man is one myth from this field that went ‘viral,’ I suggest in part because his transferability is endemic to his monstrosity.

As a multi-platform, multi-authored ‘text’, the Slender Man makes an excellent study for transmedia narratives. For the Slender Man, there is no workable medium from which he transitioned: all Slender Man media is transmedia. Multiple texts or canons must be considered to give a proper understanding of the Slender Man. There are edited photographs, games, videos, illustrations, short stories, costume role-play ‘cosplays’, and the aforementioned lists and wikis themselves. The Slender Man shifts with ease between these many platforms, without any ‘base’ necessary, transferring himself like a virus. To track the Slender Man, the spectator must make shifts in accordance with his: Stephen Dinehart’s viewer/user/player or VUP becomes a more workable term for those in the Slender Man’s world as they view photographs, use wikis, and play games with him.^[8] These different approaches and platforms often compromise his fictionality. Levels of verisimilitude and realness, compounded by his appearance in a range of reputable-appearing sources, give the Slender Man an ‘edge’ of horror. If he can virally slip from a game to that story on Facebook about a disappeared friend-of-a-friend, can he slip into the real world?

Even the physicality of the Slender Man contributes to this fear. When he appears in a frame, whether fictional or ‘authentic’, he corrupts it. In his most terrifying incarnations, he is not immediately apparent: he defies centrism so much he cannot even appear central within his diegesis. He appears at the edges; in the background; and in the corner of one’s eye. In the Marble Hornets film series he makes random appearances stalking the film’s characters. When watching the short episodes of footage it can be a challenge to spot him outside a window or tucked in a corner. Later in the series he walks directly into the frame, causing the camera to malfunction badly. It is as though the medium itself cannot centralise him, with a horrific and aggressive adherence to his liminal territory.

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Figure 3. One of the notes found in the Slender game.

In Slender Game, one must wander in first-person perspective through woods, collecting notes on the Slender Man. The notes urge the player away with messages such as ‘don’t look or it takes you.’^[9] He gradually stalks a player, and if he is seen following you the only way to escape is to turn away and run. To stay and look at him causes him to approach rapidly, and one’s game quality deteriorates as he gets closer until the speakers are screeching and the screen has turned blank, at which point the game is lost. Put literally, the point of Slender Game is that you can never look directly at the Slender Man.

In still images, this defiance of visualisation is manifested by his facelessness: he has no facial features that can be seen, only a blank space. His physical slenderness enhances his ability to slip away and reappear. He defies visual capture as much as he defies narrative or medium capture. By literally occupying the margin of frames, he is poised to slip into the margins of other frames, whether that is another medium or the frame of the real.

The Slender Man’s intangibility gives him power as a contemporary horror monster. His name is only a basic descriptor, and without face, accurate imagery, or authoritative canon, he constantly evades what familiarity might reduce his frightfulness. The marginality that obscures him from this point of frame is complemented by the implication that he is always in a margin: he might appear in a game, or in a video, or in a picture, barely within the frame, and as his media slips closer to the real, he may be right behind you.

This transgression from the fictional spaces of screen media into the ‘real’ space is endemic to the media ecology of the 2010s. This is the age of media hybridity, viral marketing, and the Alternative Reality Game. As the various screens through which we frame and mediate the world proliferate, so do the ways in which we understand narrative as it moves through those spaces. The convergence of media collapses the ‘real’ space into another host for viral storytelling. According to Angela Ndalianis:

[...] in the fictional expansion that occurs across media the sensorium turns its attention to an intensive cognitive and sensorial immersion into fictions that are dispersed across multiple media environments, which also include the “spectator’s” actual geographical landscape.^[10]

This actual geographical landscape becomes another medium amongst the multiple ones through which we view, use, and play with characters such as the Slender Man. The Slender Man makes a number of appearances – and disappearances – in the physical world. Due to his liminality, his seeming absence is as noticeable as his presence. The most obvious case of tangible Slender Men is in the activity of cosplay, where enthusiasts dress up in Slender Man costumes to role-play as the character in the real world; usually at pop culture conventions and the like. While cosplay is a common practice in fan subcultures, it is notable that the Slender Man canon does not exclude the possibility of running into him on the street. I use this example to illustrate how, as the ‘real’ becomes a medium, so does media become more ‘real.’

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Figure 4. A Slender Man image found on the crappypasta site.

Žižek calls this symptomatic of the post-9/11 century, noting that ‘we begin to experience the ‘real reality’ itself as a virtual entity.’^[11] This origin point, the anchor of reality, must be let go to understand the Slender Man: we have, as Žižek states, lost interest in the ‘hard kernel of the Real’ – ‘which we are able to sustain only if we fictionalize it.’^[12] As the Slender Man slips between our margins of a realised fiction and  a fictionalised real, showing how quickly we follow from frame to frame, his greatest weapon is his verisimilitude.

As these central texts, media, or spaces become marginalised, the focus on the marginal centres gains significance. If one counts the ‘official’ genesis of Slender Man as the Something Awful pictures, then the incarnations that follow are, accordingly, paratexts. Jonathan Gray’s study of paratexts suggest that they are fundamental in understanding a contemporary text. How paratexts exist across media realities, unlike a contained ‘text’ such as a Hollywood film, is discussed by Gray:

[...] media growth and saturation can only be measured in small part by the number of films or television shows–or books, games, blogs, magazines, or songs for that matter–as each and every media text is accompanied by textual proliferation at the level of hype, synergy, promos, and peripherals. As film and television viewers, we are all part-time residents of the highly populated cities of Time Warner, DirecTV, AMC, Sky, Comcast, ABC, Odeon, and so forth, and yet not all of these cities’ architecture is televisual or cinematic by nature. Rather, these cities are also made up of all manner of ads, previews, trailers, interviews with creative personnel, Internet discussion, entertainment news, reviews, merchandising, guerrilla marketing campaigns, fan creations, posters, games, DVDs, CDs, and spinoffs.^[13]

In the case of Slender Man, it is apparent that these interconnected paratexts are instrumental to understanding the monster and its social significance. From the pictures’ captions to the reaction videos of Slender Game players, the paratexts form what Gray calls a ‘city’ of narrative. Connected loosely and distributed socially online, these paratexts operate virally, as has become a popular promotional tool for horror texts in the 21st century.

As a viral collection of paratexts masquerading to some degree as reality, the Slender Man can be categorised as an Alternative Reality Game or ARG. Gray’s definition is as follows: ‘The ARG, a relatively new addition to the roster of games, is a multi-site, multimedia puzzle or game, often associated with a television program or film.’^[14] Successful ARGs are often horror-oriented, such as those marketing campaigns devised by 42 entertainment for The Dark Knight (Nolan, 2008) and Cloverfield (Reeves, 2008). Ndalianis notes that the viral campaign has a natural partner in horror:

In fact, horror cinema is one of the most prolific in terms of adopting viral-marketing strategies, which isn’t surprising given that the most effective campaigns have played on the blurring of boundaries between reality and fiction – a key tactic favoured by horror.^[15]

In anticipation of these ARG films, fans become players that collect material distributed virally with no apparent locus. The materials – the paratexts – masquerades within the narrative reality of the film being promoted. The hype, and the extended narrative world of the story, become fundamental when studying these texts: the paratexts subsume the importance of the text itself, as the case is often made by Gray. The same is argued by Gray for an early horror ARG promoting The Blair Witch Project, in which various paratexts suggested the actors were real people, and dead: ‘The Blair Witch Project has arguably remained as famous (if not more so) for its creative and masterful promotion as for the film itself, since in many ways, the horror began online and in front of the television, not simply in a movie theatre.’^[16] For the Slender Man, we can take this hypothesis of the ARG subsuming the text a step further: in this case, there is no text.

The Slender Man is an outstanding example of the ARG, because it performs what campaigns such as 42 have only pretended to perform. Usually, an ARG is collected around a central text, the commodity being sold, with the paratexts being authored from this singular point for marketing purposes. While fans do engage on a more collaborative level for the average ARG, there is still a central text with one author distributing material. For Slender Man, fans take further what Daniel North describes in promotional ARGs:

[viral marketing] distributes the task of publicizing the film by urging spectators to become active participants, entering into the narrative space of the film, and drawing others in with them in order to collaboratively construct its meaning.^[17]

The collaboratively constructed meaning of Slender Man is genuinely organic. It is polycentric in that there are no authoritative or comprehensive Slender Man sources. There is no product being promoted or sold, and no identifiable author or text. Every text is a paratext, and the narrative reality has no official canon. In this sense, the Slender Man steps up our former understanding of the viral Alternative Reality Game. The Slender Man’s mythological status is more authentic; it is more real.

The lack of an authoritative text or author is part of what makes Slender Man so fearsome. No media company owns him, and there is no ‘official’ Slender Man: a rare feat for a pop culture phenomenon. A lack of centrality is a lack of containment. I have been told rumours that the creators of the original pictures, Marble Hornets, and Slender Game are actually one person attempting to virally diffuse their idea. This insistence suggests a fundamental struggle with – even a fear of – a monster that has not been sanctioned by a definable source. That a single author only exists as a rumour exemplifies the Slender Man’s inability to be contained. This echoes the claim by Rick Altman: ‘[...] critics have never taken seriously the ability of audiences to generate their own texts and thus to become intenders, mappers and owners in their own right.’^[18] As the only ARG of its size to be organically generated, this makes Slender Man a groundbreaking text. This enhances and undermines the horror of Slender Man: without an author, he has no anchor in the world of fiction.

The malleable and collaborative monster is hardly a new phenomenon, excepting its new media technologies. Approaching the Slender Man requires a similar framework to those used to study fairy tale and other premodern movements, which I suggest contort and confuse his fictional containment. There are distinctly contemporary aspects to the Slender Man which develop from these earlier frameworks: what makes this monster so curious is that while being symptomatic of the 21st-century mediascape, he also draws upon trends developed outside the dominant 20th-century Western storytelling model of Hollywood and its ilk. The polycentric collections of fairy tale; the disturbance of the frame in the baroque and neo-baroque; and the mise-en-abyme of the ARG are all applicable to the Slender Man. Each of these underpin his horror, as they break Slender mythology’s temporality and associate him with formidably long storytelling traditions.

As in fairy tale, there is no way to accurately capture or replicate an authoritative version of the Slender Man. These are stories, often horror stories, which develop organically and through communal retelling. Their subjects often concern uncanny monsters snatching children, retold in recent generations as aliens and child predators. These creatures shift in their guises, adapting to new stories, but their monstrous function is timeless. Just as there is no essential big bad wolf, we cannot distill Slender Man. The viral nature of ARGs, like fairy tales, are deliberately decentralised, as discussed by North:

Viral campaigns [...] depend on relinquishing control: releasing key pieces of information in carefully chosen places, in the hope and expectation that it will spread organically by through [sic] the target audience, as a virus spreads from person to person within a population. A viral campaign is thus, by nature, difficult to study. It is too diffuse to be comprehensively catalogued, and too dependent on ephemeral forms of communication that leave few traces and no official documentation.^[19]

North’s work suggests something uncannily primal about the Slender Man’s effectiveness. The monsters of folklore have a timeless ability to frighten, in part because they are so diffused within social spheres. I suggest that the Slender Man operates much as a contemporary fairy tale would: a child-eating monster that exists only in transient narratives, with an echo of realism to underpin his horror.

The placement of the viral campaign and the ARG in the history of storytelling is also theorised by Henry Jenkins. Jenkins observes the following resonance:

Alternative reality gaming could be seen as a 21st century equivalent of a much older literary form – epistolary fiction. Many early novels, including Pamela (1740) Les Liaisons Dangereuse (1782) or The Sorrows of Young Werther (1815), consisted of fictional letters, journals, diaries, and newspaper accounts, which were presented by the authors with little acknowledgement of their fictional status. The authors often claimed to have found the materials in an old trunk or to have received them anonymously in the mail.^[20]

Most interesting here is how the author, and thus the fiction, is deliberately misdirected. In the case of the epistolary work, it enhances authenticity and worth: for the Slender Man, it also brings the element of fear.

The liminality that enables Slender Man’s transmedia nature can be likened to a baroque and neo-baroque style. Researched in detail by Ndalianis, the neo-baroque has a history with horror, especially horror which exceeds confinement in a single platform or frame. Ndalianis illustrates the significance of this neo-baroque trend in her work:

It is specifically neo-baroque spatial logic that is embedded within the postmodern that remains the primary point of reference. This central characteristic of the neo-baroque that informs the analysis that follows is the lack of respect for the limits of the frame.^[21]

This characteristic is also what allows the Slender Man to be fearsome, and to be real: he does not only disrespect the frame but at times damages it. In Marble Hornets and Slender Game, the Slender Man’s presence actively corrupts the footage, and in less literal cases he does not remain framed within one author, narrative, or platform. One of the grossest violations of the frame occurs in a way that contextualises these historical movements within the realm of the Slender Man is continued from his ‘original’ incarnation: the violation of time, and with it truth.

From the ‘first’ Something Awful pictures, the Slender Man has been retroactively inserted in our cultural history. The captions for the pictures claim that the photographs are taken in the 1980s, rather than created in 2009. Reaching further back, the Villains Wiki page displays a woodcut supposedly from 1540 depicting the Slender Man.^[22] Written ‘in-universe’ style, the Villains Wiki page suggests that the Slender Man is to be feared because he is known across cultures and histories in a number of guises. To participate in this kind of narrative indicates a recognition that the Slender Man has an element of timelessness, and is ‘real’ folklore, while situating the transmedia format of Internet storytelling in a long cultural tradition.

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Figure 5. ‘Der Ritter,’ 2011.

Two cases will be discussed in this paper in relation to the media slips of the Slender Man that generate his authenticity: the Marble Hornets film and Slender Game. Both employ popular 21st-century horror tropes to generate for the VUP a mise-en-abyme. The mise-en-abyme is an apt metaphor for the virtualised real and polycentric story. Its literal translation is an abyss, in this case an abyss that operates as the antithesis of the ‘kernel.’ The functional translation is the phrase used for two mirrors aligned: in this case, everything is a frame of endless reflections. When we observe the medium inside another medium, we cannot but notice that our own world, reflected endlessly, might likewise be contained in a larger frame: thus, we must consider reality as a medium. Cinematically speaking, the mise-en-abyme refers to a story-within-a-story, a common technique used in horror. In the case of the Slender Man, the narratives framing the various media – the photographs already discussed, and forthcoming the film and video game – operate under the verisimilitude of the ‘real’ world. When trapped between these many frames of reference, centres of narrative, and different media platforms, following a monster that deals in border territories, the ‘real’ slips away.

Marble Hornets is a film series made by a group of students that popularised the Slender Man to a wider audience, attracting millions of views. Uploaded as ten-minute episodes on Youtube, the film is recorded in the ‘found footage’ style that gained popularity in 21st-century horror cinema. The trend began with The Blair Witch Project, and experienced a boom in the mid 2000s as handheld recording technology and media distribution channels made this narrative style familiar. The Paranormal Activity films (Peli, 2007) are a flagship series, with Cloverfield (Reeves, 2008) and [rec] (Balagueró and Plaza, 2008) in the same vein. Like Marble Hornets, these films are presented as ‘real’ footage, found usually after the character/filmmakers’ demise. They have all the tics and flaws of homemade footage, with a diegetic acknowledgement of the camera in the story. Found footage has a particular verisimilitude, being scary because it seems ‘real.’ When these films have cinematic release, audiences approach on a dual level: one in which the paratexts such as cinema tickets and studio logos present it as narrative cinema, and one in which the format, and often supplementary material online in the form of ARGs, claim that the story is true and that monsters actually killed the characters/filmmakers. North explains that the nesting of the authentic footage within a fictional context: ‘This creates the pretext of an alternative ownership, and thus, creates a framework within which all subsequent images will be interpreted as a chronicle of actual events – testimony from an eyewitness.’^[23] This entertainment of the subsequent images as authentic is substantiated often by ARGs and by the technology itself. Peg Aloi claims of The Blair Witch Project: ‘The accompanying web-based publicity campaign generated rumors of the film’s ‘authenticity’ (i.e. that the ‘found footage’ was indeed real), prompting some audience members to visit the film’s location in search of ‘what really happened.’’^[24]

Within the films, Amy West discusses how the use of handheld cinematography mimics the real frame of reference we recognise for the lack of fictional ‘slickness’:

The hand-held handycam is the embodiment of human point-of-view image capture, resonating as it so often does with the physiological responses of the operator. In contrast, the unblinking, mechanical eye of the wall-mounted surveillance camera betrays no investment in the recorded scene. The construction of reality necessarily occurs differently within these contrasting modes of image production. The first ‘feels real’ because it fulfils a ‘powerful urge for a sense of contact with the real’, as it ‘inscribes’ this physiological contact on the recorded text (Fetveit 2002: 130).

This is a kind of real which is heightened by evidence of human error – the swoops and slips of a running, dancing, laughing, crying camera – which testifies to the amateur authenticity of the production. On the other hand, the second model ‘feels real’ because its inflexible recording position signifies its infallible and impartial omniscience, recording whatever occurs within its range 24/7 without preference or participation.’^[25]

This is taken further with Marble Hornets, a film possessing all that handheld realness and engaging in a particular narrative that confuses reality and fiction. This is actual amateur film, with no cinematic affectations – it has no official distribution. Its effectiveness is in its ability to make a VUP forget that the footage is fictional. There are at least three levels to Marble Hornets: the first being the Youtube user marblehornets, who uploads clips between one and ten minutes long of ‘raw footage excerpts from [the fictionalised] Alex Kralie. A college friend of mine.’^[26] The user marblehornets claims that Kralie’s footage is for a student film – also titled “Marble Hornets” – that marblehornets uploads unedited after Kralie disappeared ‘in 2006.’^[27] The subsequent level of fiction, the one purporting to be Kralie’s real raw footage, is the one in which the Slender Man appears: ‘Kralie’ and his ‘cast’ and ‘crew’ have their shooting interrupted as they are stalked by the monster. The third level is the actual “Marble Hornets” movie, the aborted film that we see being created. The “Marble Hornets” movie is a fiction made by the fictional Kralie uploaded by the fictional marblehornets user. That all three levels are referred to by the same name – typeset here as marblehornets, Marble Hornets, and “Marble Hornets” – creates quite a mise-en-abyme.

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Figure 6. Marble Hornets, 2009.

As a creature of liminality and obscurity, the Slender Man’s real-world presence is defined in ways by absence. Alex Kralie is such an absence. It is no exaggeration to say that after marblehornets claimed that Kralie disappeared, indeed no trace of Alex Kralie can be found. It is almost beside the point that Kralie was invented as a character for Marble Hornets. User marblehornets claims, with no indication that this is fiction, that Kralie is gone, and this is true. Whether he was taken by the Slender Man or never existed in the first place, the absence of an Alex Kralie falls within our working definition of ‘real.’

The VUP role becomes particularly salient when applied to Slender Game. Slender Game, also called Slender or Slendergame, is a short horror video game for computer platforms. In it, the player must wander through the woods, only able to control the direction, the running speed, and the use of a flashlight. The objective is to collect eight pieces of paper stuck to various landmarks, each with a written note warning the player about the Slender Man’s approach. At some point, he appears in the distance behind the player. One may escape if one runs away, but to look at him only quickens his advance. The game ends when he comes close enough that the graphic and sound quality deteriorates completely into white noise, and he attacks.

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Figure 7. Slender Game, 2012.

A complementary part of Slender Man gaming culture also makes the Slender Game players into a medium of their own. As always, it is not only the text of the game itself that is of significance: it is the game’s paratexts that create the Slender Man’s mise-en-abyme. On the Slender Game’s most popular fansite is a banner with a number of pertinent links, amongst which one may navigate to ‘The Legend’ and ‘Reaction Videos.’^[29] The former engages in the usual folkloric style, giving a brief biography that is often confusingly semi-fictional: ‘[...] created at the Something Awful forums [...] no specific information has been found about his origins [...].’^[30] The latter is of great interest for my discussion of Slender Man and mise-en-abyme. Almost as popular as the game itself are the recordings of other players playing, from which one can draw great schadenfreude watching players become terrified when the Slender Man catches them. In these videos, one becomes a viewer, as other users upload webcam or game footage with sound recordings of their reactions as they play: a solid example of the interchangeability of the VUP relationship. It suggests that by entertaining levels of realism, collating information from a cohort of paratexts, and taking on multiple spectatorial and participatory roles, fans have an astonishingly complex approach to the new media environment.

On the one hand, the reaction videos create a level of distance between the viewer and the Slender Man himself. On the other, it exacerbates the mise-en-abyme and plays into his world of mediated realities. This is some of the rawest, most realistic media pertaining to the Slender Man. Players feeling the need to record their games echoes the popular discourse that everything must be mediated and recorded for social media before it is truly ‘real.’ Chuck Tryon’s discussion of The Blair Witch Project suggests that the ploy for realism read with flaunting of unrealism should be seen in the context of the transmedia narrative:

Because of these two potential readings I see the film as inseparable from the promotional materials that framed its reception arguing that the film appeared as simultaneously hypermediated and unmediated. Thus, instead of merely returning to or contributing to an unmediated imagination of real horror, the film actually became a complex, if somewhat ambivalent, critique of electronic media.^[31]

In Tryon’s example, the unrealism of The Blair Witch Project is the noticeably bad film quality. For the Slender Game reaction videos, the removal from the ‘real’ takes place watching other players playing the game. The reaction videos could be considered their own transmedia articulation, or they could exist as an extra framing paratext to the game: in either case, the issue of mediation and multiple framing echoes through the Slender Man lore. What gives the Slender Game its realist edge is that unlike the other texts, in this instance are we watching real people being afraid of the Slender Man. It is a case in which, as we viewers gaze into the abyss, those players recording their gameplay know that the abyss gazes back.

Now I will turn to a slightly harder kernel of the Real. From this paper’s discussion of how we approach a ‘real’ Slender Man, we may step forward to understand how the contentious role of the ‘real’ is a politicised, post-9/11 issue. It may seem abstract to connect the Slender Man to an event as catastrophic as 9/11, but the Slender Man is an excellent articulation of concerns that have plagued cultural theorists and demonstrates that a decade on, these are still deeply relevant. These questions – of mediated realities and the function of fear – are political questions that cannot be avoided in the 21st century. The ways in which we view, use, and play with transmedia horror suggests that we are equipped, philosophically and politically, to navigate the dangers of our contemporary mediascape.

To Žižek, the concept of a core ‘real’ in the world – the hard kernel – is marginalised by 9/11.^[32] A few suggestions as to why are put forth, and echoed in post-9/11 discourse; whether because to most the event was experienced not in the real world but through a screen media; or because the era became defined by the absence of towers and the fear of an omnipresent but invisible terror; or perhaps, according to Žižek, what is ‘real’ simply is not as relevant.^[33] When so much of our world is perceived through screen media, and all reality can only be understood when it is framed, the pursuit of a hard kernel falls to the wayside. Reality as an intangible, refracted medium is directly related to how 9/11 comes to shape the 21st-century West, as discussed by Žižek in the following:

We should therefore invert the standard reading according to which the WTC explosions were the intrusion of the Real which shattered our illusory Sphere: quite the reverse – it was before the WTC collapse that we lived in our reality, […] – and what happened on September 11 was that this fantasmatic screen apparition entered our reality. It is not that reality entered our image: the image entered and shattered our reality (i.e. the symbolic coordinates which determine what we experience as reality).’^[34]

This idea of shattering is absolutely key to understanding the Slender Man. Slender Man is a shattered text: there is no ‘hard kernel’ of the Slender Man, only the prolific media through which we might follow his story. Underpinned by fear of terror, or fear of monsters, the real world becomes another medium. The way in which we navigate the Slender Man demands that we negotiate the realistic and fictional fears that are presented to us through media.

The Slender Man is a monster of terror. As an emblem of the shattered, decentralised realities that we live in, and as a monster that haunts our media. We can take this literally, and discuss his resemblance to the never-quite-identifiable ‘suits’ or ‘men in black’ that are often alluded to in 9/11 discourse. We might claim that his facelessness is also the facelessness of terrorism, always threatening but never quite identifiable. We might note that he is a scary story presented as real to us through news media, an issue that has fallen under heavy criticism in post-9/11 political media. The Slender Man truly belongs in this time and this place, where politics and technology have converged to create a culture deeply responsive to a monster that is a media fractal, one that demands we challenge how we think about reality.

As the politics of 9/11 ebb away with time, its impact on media becomes the event’s great legacy. Much has been written on the development of 21st-century media technology as complementary to terror. Web 2.0; handheld recording devices; and media convergence all have a symbiotic relationship with the politics of the real. Rather than interrogate deeply in this paper the background of these developments, I will succinctly suggest that smart technology require smart users. We are a society that has become accustomed to watching the news framed by the same device upon which we can play games. As a result, we have learned to transition between viewer, user, and player, maintaining an active and dynamic relationship with the media use daily. As news journalism relies more heavily on citizen-recorded data, we learn to unpack the fabrications and authenticities of particular frames – whether sourced through a blog or through NewsCorp. We learn to recognise the multiple fictional frames through a story like Marble Hornets. The problems of being recorded, whether as a monster, an actor playing an actor, a victim of violence, or a player of a video game, are demonstrated to us. We learn to search for a broader understanding of a phenomenon like Slender Man by collaboratively collecting information. We can watch layers and levels of storytelling, engaging in them as simultaneously realistic and fictional. We begin to focus on a world that exists through endless margins, frames, fragments, and liminal realities. If we were not capable of doing this, the Slender Man would simply be ineffective.

The Slender Man is a slippery creature, but he has a slippery following. To be a part of the Slender Man’s world, one must be an adept viewer, user, and player. A working knowledge of media, and there is the requisite ability to follow a narrative as it fragments through frames more and less fictional. The Slender Man is created by a generation that understands liminality and knows that the most dangerous monsters are those that can’t quite be seen. Even to have followed the Slender Man through this paper is to understand the abyssal nature of contemporary media and the malleability of time and space for a horror narrative. The Slender Man demonstrates how transmedia horror promotes a critical understanding of the real. What is terrifying, then, is not that the Slender Man might be real, but that the world is not.

References:

Aloi, Peg. ‘Beyond the Blair Witch: A New Horror Aesthetic?’ In The Spectacle of the Real: from Hollywood to ‘reality’ TV and beyond, edited by Geoff King, 187-200. Bristol, UK; Portland, OR: Intellect, 2005.

Altman, Rick. Film/Genre. London: BFI, 1999.

Goddard, Drew. Cloverfield. DVD. Directed by Matt Reeves. [Australia]: Paramount, 2008.

‘CREEPYPASTA.COM – Scary Paranormal Stories & Short Horror Microfiction.’ creepypasta. Accessed 20 October, 2013. http://www.creepypasta.com/.

Gray, Jonathan. Show sold separately: promos, spoilers, and other media paratexts. New York: New York University Press, c2009.

Jenkins, Henry. ‘Chasing Bees, Without The Hive Mind.’ MIT Technology Review. 3 December, 2004. http://www.technologyreview.com/news/403444/chasing-bees-without-the-hive-mind/.

‘Introduction.’ Youtube video, 2:00. Posted by ‘marblehornets,’ 20th June 2009. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wmhfn3mgWUI.

Ndalianis, Angela. ‘Television and the neo-baroque.’ In The contemporary television serial, ed. Michael Hammond and Lucy Mazdon, 83-101. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005.

Ndalianis, Angela. The Horror Sensorium: Media and the Senses. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2012.

North, Daniel. ‘Evidence of Things Not Quite Seen: Cloverfield’s Obstructed Spectacle.’ Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies 40.1 (2010): 75-92.

Paranormal Activity. DVD. Directed by Oren Peli. [Australia]: Icon Film Distribution Pty Ltd, 2007.

 [rec]. DVD. Directed by Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza. [Australia]: Asylum, 2007.

‘The SCP Foundation.’ SCP. Accessed 20 October, 2013. http://www.scp-wiki.net/.

‘Slender Fansite.’ slendergame. Accessed 20 October, 2013. http://slendergame.com/.

‘Slender Man.’ Villains Wiki. Accessed 20 October, 2013. http://villains.wikia.com/wiki/Slender_Man.

‘The Slender Man Mythos.’ slendermanmythos Accessed 20 October, 2013.. http://www.slendermanmythos.com/.

The Dark Knight. DVD. Directed by Christopher Nolan. [Australia]: Warner Home Video, 2008.

Tryon, Chuck. ‘Video from the Void: Video Spectatorship, Domestic Film Cultures, and Contemporary Horror Film.’ Journal of Film and Video 61.3 (2009): 40-51.

Victor Surge. ‘Create Paranormal Images.’ Something Awful. 10 June, 2009. http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3150591&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=3.

West, Amy. ‘Caught on Tape: A Legacy of Low-tech Reality.’ In The Spectacle of the Real: from Hollywood to ‘reality’ TV and beyond, ed. Geoff King, 83-92. Bristol, UK; Portland, OR: Intellect, 2005.

Žižek, Slavoj. Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates. London, New York: Verso, 2002.

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(Figure 1, Image from ‘Zombie campaign’, U.S. Centers for Disease Control, 2011)

On May 16, 2011, the Director of the Office of Public Health Preparedness and Response for the United States Centers for Disease Control, Dr. Ali S. Khan, did something unusual. He did something that irrevocably changed the ways in which public health agencies around the world communicate to the public about pandemic preparedness. He titled his blog post of that day “Zombie Apocalypse” and discussed within it, the ways in which Americans could prepare for a zombie attack, his favourite zombie film (Resident Evil), and what actions the CDC would be taking “if zombies did start roaming the streets.”[1] The post was accompanied by a disturbing sepia-toned, photo-realist image of a young (female?) zombie, with dark smudges around its eyes and dirty fingernails, gazing malevolently at the reader over what might be laundry on a clothesline.

America was clearly startled that its foremost authority on communicable disease – typically somewhat stodgy in its communications — would be trafficking in a popular horror trope. The campaign arrested the attention of the public, the press, analysts, and other public health agencies around the world.

The original post received three million views and garnered more than five hundred comments. Posted on Monday, the CDC server crashed on Wednesday because of all of the traffic, and by Thursday, both “CDC” and “Zombie Apocalypse” were top ten Twitter trends.[2] Along with the blog post, the CDC released a graphic novel entitled, Preparedness 101: Zombie Pandemic which follows the adventures of Todd, his sister Julie, and their dog Max as a zombie outbreak occurs in their city.[3] The comic concludes with an “All Hazards Emergency Kit” checklist. The campaign also included posters, a video contest, education packages for teachers, “zombie task force” t-shirts, badges, and widgets for use on personal webpages and social media. Subsequent blog posts by CDC staff followed suit, pulling preparedness advice out of AMC’s hit television series, The Walking Dead,[4] and providing stories about the “Zombie Nation.”[5] The CDC’s foray into the horror genre generated copycat initiatives by other public health bodies in the United Kingdom, Canada and New Zealand, as well as in various states within the United States.[6]

In this paper, we consider why the CDC adopted the zombie as its favoured preparedness figure and what work the zombie does in the campaign. We suggest that the deployment of the zombie by the CDC (and other public health agencies) is not surprising and cannot be adequately explained solely as a savvy borrowing of popular culture by expert discourse. We situate the CDC tactic in the broader context of the general proliferation of zombies in contemporary culture, suggesting that there are particular reasons for ‘why the zombie’ and ‘why now.’ Further, we argue that within what we are calling, pandemic culture, the zombie does very specific work to articulate and manage our collective concerns about disease, the diseased, and our own disease-ability.

The Work of the Zombie in the CDC Campaign

Disease and disaster preparedness discourse is not currently popular with the public or with government funders. Public health preparedness dollars in the U.S. have been cut by more than 30% since 2005.[7] With more than $100 million cut from public health preparedness programs in recent years, public education has taken on a greater importance as responsibility for readiness is being downloaded onto the public. And yet, research has shown that, despite these efforts of public health agencies, only 10-15% of the public is “aware of the need for preparedness.”[8] This was the context in which the CDC was exploring more effective mechanisms to communicate to the public and, in particular, to capture the attention of a younger demographic.

In many ways, the CDC zombie campaign is a narrative of the CDC’s social media coming-of-age. Interestingly, the catalyst for the embrace of the zombie apocalypse trope was crowd-generated. The CDC was hosting a Twitter discussion focused on radiation leaks related to the meltdown at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant and how to ramp up its information programs around hurricane season preparation when a participant asked about zombies. The topic of ‘zombies’ ignited the discussion, leading CDC staff person, David Daigle, to approach Khan with the idea. According to the CDC, Khan immediately saw the potential of this “light hearted” project, and embraced it, writing the post himself.[9] This initiated the CDC’s first venture into the use of Twitter and Facebook to launch a preparedness campaign that was not connected with, or responding to, a specific disaster. The CDC clearly conceived of the zombie as a ‘hook’. As another spokesperson put it, “You pull them [the public] in with zombies and they stay to check out your other content.”[10]

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Figure 2. ‘Zombie campaign’ poster, U.S. Centers for Disease Control, 2011.

And the hook worked. The representation of the zombie was dark and ominous, a clear contrast to other CDC imagery such as their preparedness e-cards, where smiling families gather around their emergency evacuation plan. The campaign resonated with the widespread circulation of zombies in popular film, television, fiction, board, mobile and video games, and even events such as ‘zombie walks’ and ‘zombie runs.’ It was a playful message about a serious topic to engage new audiences and grab attention. Khan’s post is transparent about this logic: “You may laugh now, but when it happens you’ll be happy you read this, and hey, maybe you’ll even learn a thing or two about how to prepare for a real emergency.”[11] We suggest that there are traces of caution visible in the CDC’s adoption of the zombie. The risks of such a campaign are articulated well by Bill Gentry, the Director of the Community Preparedness and Disaster Management Program at the University of North Carolina’s School of Public Health: “The CDC is the most credible source out there for public health information. You don’t want to risk demeaning that.”[12]

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(Figure 3, Preparedness poster, U.S. Centers for Disease Control, no date)

He reproduces the typical dismissal of science fiction and horror by those engaged in science communication: “… that doesn’t mean the agency should start using vampires to promote vaccinations or space aliens to warn about the dangers of smoking.”[13] The CDC is patently aware of such possible critiques. Khan’s ‘cool-quotient’ as a boss who would take such a risk without seeking the pre-approval of his superiors, who is a fan of zombie film and fiction, who appears in the graphic novel as a character, and who would be willing to promote the graphic novel at comic conventions, is frequently countered with his identity as a famous “disease detective” and his position as an Assistant Surgeon General for the United States. When interviewed in the early days of the campaign, CDC staff were quick to point out that the materials were all produced in-house by their creative team and that no additional funds were spent on the initiative. They are clearly worried about a potential public backlash over ‘frivolous’ spending.

Despite potential concerns, the dominant narrative of the American press coverage of the campaign, consistent with the frame promulgated by the CDC itself, is that the zombie apocalypse project was an unmitigated success. Both the trope and the media of its circulation are understood as contemporary, edgy, and hip, and are therefore assumed to be clearly more effective in speaking to young people. The CDC is represented as ‘finally’ adopting the successful strategies of using popular tropes, pushing them out through social media and calling for public participation in the form of user-generated content.[14] Thus, we suggest that, within the CDC zombie apocalypse campaign, both the zombie and social media are assumed to, and thus operate, in tandem, as technologies of viral communication.

While we do not disagree that the CDC campaign is an insightful use of popular culture and social media to render a potentially dull public message more eye-catching in an increasingly cluttered information environment, we suggest that there is a lot more that we can see in this campaign. We suggest that it is not at all surprising that out of all the possible popular culture tropes available to the CDC, it was the zombie that was suggested by the public and taken up by staff. The zombie means in particular ways in our contemporary cultural moment and the campaign benefits from, and capitalizes upon, this pre-existing cultural circulation thereby also serving to reproduce those meanings. In the following section, we explore some of those meanings.

The Proliferation and Play of Zombies

We are currently experiencing a renaissance in zombie narratives in film, fiction, and games.[15] Because of the timing of this zombie resurgence, a number of commentators have linked its reappearance, after a relative absence between the late 1980s and the early 2000s, to contemporary social, political, and economic events. In his much-cited article, Peter Dendle, for example, points out that,

[i]t is not without some justice, then, that the resurgence of zombie movie popularity in the early 2000s has been linked with the events of September 11, 2001…. The possibility of wide-scale destruction and devastation which 9-11 brought once again into the communal consciousness found a ready narrative expression in the zombie apocalypses which over thirty years had honed images of desperation subsistence and amoral survivalism to a fine edge.[16]

Dendle goes on to argue that the zombie has evolved since George Romero’s mass horde of slow-moving undead flesh was first introduced in the 1960s. Today, we have fast-moving, feral zombies who seem enraged, frantic, and insatiable. It is no longer homogeneity that scares us, but a lack of control, dignity, and direction.[17]

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Figure 4. Night of the Living Dead (Dir: George A Romero, 1968).

Other writers have taken up these themes and analyze the zombie as an engagement with social issues. From this perspective, George Romero’s original Night of the Living Dead (1968) is a commentary on the violence of the Vietnam War.[18] It is also a reflection of “America devouring itself” during the Red Scare and the tensions and violence surrounding the civil rights movement.[19] Its sequel, Dawn of the Dead (George Romero, 1978), is a critique of contemporary consumerism and this analysis has been commonly employed to think of zombie films as critical of the soulless forms of subjectivity produced through capitalist relations.[20] Zombie films of the 2000s are linked to fears of terrorism after 9/11 and the movements of displaced peoples from around the world who are forced to endure conditions of bare life. These people form an exogenous group that appears threatening to social order and territorial control.[21] As a result, zombie films of the 2000s mark a shift in the type of fear that is foregrounded in the narratives – no longer primarily a critique of consumer capitalism, but rather an expression of fear of the failure of Western military, political, economic, and social security systems in the face of the pressures of globalization. The horror of the zombie is the way it reveals the fragility of our ‘civilization.’

A second theme that emerges from academic zombie analysis is its implications for subjectivity in increasingly posthuman times. Sarah Lauro and Karen Embry argue that unlike the liberating figure of the cyborg advocated by Donna Haraway in 1985, representations of the zombie expose the limits of posthumanism and assert that posthumanism can only be achieved with the death of the subject.[22] Zombies are manifestations of our anxiety about losing our consciousness as we become increasingly immersed in technology and complicated capitalist relations. We risk becoming bodies without minds and humans without agency. The zombie is both of these. It inhabits a liminal zone between binaries of life/death, centre/margin, conscious/unconscious, technology/nature, human/animal. These are the spaces inhabited by monsters and are the awkward spaces of indeterminacy that are always problematic in Western culture.[23] Not everyone views this position of indeterminacy in a negative light. Natasha Patterson, for example, echoes Haraway (1985) by arguing that from a feminist perspective, the viewing space of zombie films is one of self-annihilation: the female viewer experiences an ideological destruction of the self as a woman and a feminist because these categories become meaningless in a zombie pandemic. Consequently, zombie films restore pleasure to the female viewer because of the ambivalence of gender. The man/woman binary is also breached in zombie films and becomes largely meaningless, at least among the zombies.[24]

As a once human, but now dehumanized creature, the zombie shares certain features with other monsters of horror fiction such as the body snatcher/pod person where an alien parasite comes to inhabit a human host. In the process of this possession, the human individual is dehumanized, losing his or her identity, memories, knowledge, emotions, ambitions, and/or will to power.[25] Unlike narratives involving ‘pod people,’ however, zombie stories do not involve paranoia; there is no issue about who is ‘one of them.’ The zombie cannot ‘pass.’ The survivors retain their identities, memories, knowledge, passions, and search for power but these things often manifest in conflictual ways – the negative effects of individual freedom.

Linking zombies to contemporary global issues and to questions of identity and subjectivity in the twenty-first century take the zombie to a high level of metaphoric abstraction. More immediately and fundamentally, viral zombies are about apocalyptic levels of disease and contagion. Viewed in this way, zombie tales have a venerable historical tradition dating back to the Book of Revelation, through Medieval Black Death writings, to Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826), Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague (1912), and onward to today’s popular culture thrillers. What these stories have in common is the experience of apocalypse as bodily suffering and the discerning of the damned and the saved through disease. However, pandemic, as a modality of apocalypse, also undermines the millennial promise of the utopia to follow by blurring the boundary between the elect and the non-elect. That line is always imprecise because everyone is potentially a victim of disease and the plague usually lingers on, becoming part of the background context of living.[26] The resulting narrative pattern is one of “panic, dissolution of socioeconomic structures, and despair, succeeded by a makeshift return to normality once the disease has run its course.”[27]

From the early modern period to today, plague and pandemic narratives can be seen as arising in response to the changes brought about by modernity and the spread of capitalism, with each historical period expressing its own particular economic, political, and social anxieties in and through stories of infection. Stephanie Boluk and Wylie Lenz, for example, examine Ben Jonson’s play The Alchemist and Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year within the context of the end of mercantilism and the beginnings of capitalist accumulation within the developing free market of seventeenth and early eighteenth century England.[28] This they compare to the recent zombie films Shaun of the Dead (Edgar Wright, 2004) and 28 Days Later (Danny Boyle, 2002) which they read as expressions of anxiety around the viral spread of global capitalism. One of the particularities of viral zombie stories is the denial of the haven of a potential return to normality. In most zombie narratives, the pandemic continues to spread and it becomes difficult to imagine how the few remaining survivors could possibly survive for any length of time, let alone return to some kind of (humanist) normality. In this sense, zombie stories reject millenarianism and offer only a bleak view of a future of perpetual disease and probable annihilation.[29]

Zombie narratives also throw into doubt the discourse of security that currently links health and social regulation. There is a considerable amount of scholarship examining the relationship between public health and security regimes. Altheia Cook examines how HIV/AIDS, SARS, and influenza have all been subject to securitization processes, which involve defining them as potential national and international security issues and developing plans for quarantines, and economic and political infrastructure maintenance in the case of a pandemic outbreak.[30] Concurrent with the securitization of pandemic disease outbreak has been the development of security regimes targeted at bioterrorism.[31] In 2004, the U.S. federal government passed the Project Bioshield Act, which authorized a $5.6 billion expenditure for stockpiling vaccines and initiating research programs that integrate disease and vaccine research into the defence establishment. Official public health statements pointed out that bioterrorism and disease outbreaks should be treated as the same thing, conflating health and defence within a militarized language.[32] The result has been the development of more and more extensive systems of technological control and surveillance from the level of the hospital to the level of international health security regimes.[33] However, despite these developments, there is a significant level of ontological insecurity, largely due to the porosity of borders and the ease of air travel.[34]

Zombie stories trouble faith in these biosecurity regimes. Jeremy Youde analyzes how the World Health Organization’s International Health Regulations of 2005 would operate in the case of a zombie outbreak. He concludes that while they are an improvement over the earlier 1969 version, they allow for greater levels of surveillance. Further, although there are provisions for respecting human rights, there are no enforcement mechanisms. Consequently, in addition to dealing with the zombie outbreak, survivors would also have to navigate state authoritarianism.[35] Another common theme in thinking about pandemic is the ‘accident.’ Bill Albertini (2008) points out that popular outbreak stories involving viruses and/or zombies often involve accidental releases of a plague virus. This common trope is indicative of the inevitability of surveillance and containment system failures. While the biocontainment laboratory is often portrayed as a site of mastery over illness, it is a space where disease, complex technologies, and human bodies come into interaction and is, therefore, also always a site for the possibilities of containment failure.[36]

If we combine fears about subjectivity in a world overtaken by rapid technological change, with anxieties about unpredictable global political and economic processes, and insecurity about our ability to control infectious diseases within a globalized world of high mobility, we have a recipe for defining contemporary global society through an emergent master metaphor of contagion and pandemic. The most common popular culture vehicle for expressing this fear today is the figure of the zombie, which is a representation of concerns over the fragility of our security systems. Arguably, despite the 1960s optimism that followed the near-eradication of a number of devastating communicable diseases due to vaccination programs, after the plethora of recent outbreaks that threaten pandemic level contagion, there is an increasing sense that we are once again surrounded by disease. Confidence in our scientific, technological, and public health systems has been shaken in the face of potential contamination that comes from our exposure to the ideas, bodies, and diseases of the larger world around us.

Theorizing Pandemic Culture

Zombies operate, we argue, as a visual synecdoche for viral disease within pandemic culture. Pandemic culture is the shared experience of living in a society where we are regularly advised by trusted institutions and experts that we are indiscriminately vulnerable to the viral spread of disease. Indeed, we argue that pandemic culture is constituted, not in the proliferation of pandemics as medical phenomena, but in the explosion of communication about imagined, potential pandemics. Pandemic culture is produced, therefore, in the stories we tell about our vulnerability – as bodies and as societies – to deadly and devastating contemporary modes of disease.

Since the recognition of the pandemic nature of HIV/AIDS, we suggest that the rise in frequency, intensity and normalcy of potential pandemic events – Ebola, West Nile Virus, SARS, Avian Flu, H1N1, H5N1, H7N9, Coronavirus – has produced conditions such that we live in a symbolic and governmental state of perpetual pandemic threat. We agree with Mika Aaltola that these “pandemic scares” have had, and continue to have, significant social and governmental impacts; they are as important to study as the much rarer pandemics themselves.[37] Much is done in the name of pandemic risk. Western nations constitute specialized agencies to monitor communication about outbreaks, develop technical systems and forms of expertise to model disaster, endorse para-military global emergency response teams, reorganize health management systems to deal with mass outbreaks, and reshape relations between pharmaceutical corporations and governments. Yet, pandemic scares also have an affective dimension: “[w]aking up to a world that is experiencing a mysterious disease said to be extremely serious and deadly, instantiates a relationship of worry that is bound to have more than fleeting influence.”[38] It is the affective dimension of pandemic culture that we will focus on here, positing that the zombie serves as a divining rod, focusing disease anxiety in very particular ways. It is this anxiety that the CDC is implicitly invoking and assuaging in its zombie apocalypse campaign.

Various thinkers have posited that we live in anxious times.[39] Anxiety can be understood as the “tense anticipation of a threatening but vague event” or “uneasy suspense” in contrast with fear, characterized as a reaction “to a threat that is identifiable.”[40] Anxiety is less localized than fear; it is continuous; it is a dull throb. It becomes attached to different types of objects and object worlds, produces different subjects, circulates in, and is productive of, different affective economies, and therefore, invites different coping mechanisms. We adopt Wilkinson’s definition of anxiety as “a symbolic form of culture representing a state of mind and emotion by which we are made to be convinced that we are in a situation of threatening uncertainty.”[41] In pandemic culture, anxiety is about our understanding of our selves in relation to our future existence – the threat lies in the future at the same time that it threatens our future.

Brian Massumi claims that in the early 21^st century, we live, not only in an epistemology of uncertainty, but also in what he calls, an ontology of “indeterminate potentiality.” The threat may never even emerge. It is amorphous, unanchored, and unpredictable. It is all around us, all the time. “The global situation is not so much threatening, as threat-generating.”[42] Dangers are notable in their “proximity to pleasure” and in their “intertwining with the necessary functions of body, self, family, economy.”[43] This ontological state is productive of what he calls “low-level fear” operating as “a background radiation saturating existence.”[44] Mika Aaltola links a similar generalized notion of anxiety inspired by general social decline specifically to pandemics, claiming that, “it is in this anxious affective climate of global insecurity, stemming from vanishing borders that pandemic scares have been epochally comprehensible.”[45] Penelope Ironstone-Catterall names this “anticipatory anxiety.”[46] We argue that the constancy of the threat is key: anxiety has become part of the environment rather than a response to an environment. Like Massumi, Aaltola, and Nick Muntean[47], we recognize that this ambient anxious context enables specific anxiety-causing agents (global warming, ‘terrorism,’ pandemic) to be linked in governmental performances of crisis management and in the public imagination, contributing we suggest, to the intertextual traffic in, and ease of circulation of, tropes of disease – such as the zombie – from one site of discourse to another. For this reason, the CDC embrace of the zombie apocalypse verges on the predictable.

Risk theorists (e.g. Beck 1992; Giddens 1990, 1991) have long argued that there is increasing public reflexivity towards forms of scientific knowledge as a result of various technoscience-authored disasters over the course of the 20^th century. In a sense, our argument supplements and succeeds risk theory, asking what happens when the ideal of science being able to control risk is largely abandoned and we are left only with hopes for ‘acceptable’ damage control. Pandemic culture recognizes our always partial and inadequate knowledge of ‘nature.’ We no longer expect science to insulate us; we know that it cannot do so. Viruses will inevitably escape or exceed the lab, the hospital quarantine, or the South.

Following Massumi, we argue that the governing logic within pandemic culture has shifted from one of prevention to preemption. Prevention assumes a reliable, causal, knowable world and employs the logics of expert knowledge to react to knowable threats.[48] Preemption, in contrast, is a response to uncertainty where the threat has not yet fully emerged. It is strictly a potential and its nature cannot be fully specified. As a result, the threat becomes amorphous – it could manifest anytime, anywhere, when least expected, or at least unpredicted. The global situation is increasingly defined by our capacity to generate new potential threats to produce a condition of objective uncertainty. We find ourselves proliferating distinct organizations dedicated to monitoring and planning for unpredictable possibilities and re-ordering our social practices accordingly.[49] Since the threat is indeterminate, it remains undetectable until it moves. The logic of pre-emption, however, is offensive rather than defensive – you must move first to be secure.[50] Consequently, security agencies are involved in producing the threat in order to make it visible. For example, we must produce and reproduce pandemic viruses in our laboratories and in our imaginations in order to combat them through vaccines, thereby opening up the possibility of containment breaches or terrorist uses.[51] Within this pre-emptive rationality, viral disease is a compelling and resonant figure for understanding threats of all sorts in our current global situatedness. Viruses are uncertain, adaptive, and unpredictable just like terrorists, hurricanes, technologies, and ideas. They can appear anywhere and move in unusual ways. No one is safe.

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Figure 5. ‘Zombie Pandemic’. This image released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows a public service poster on Preparedness 101: Zombie Pandemic. “The zombies are coming!” says the Homeland Security Department. Tongue firmly in cheek, the U.S. government urged citizens Thursday, Sept. 6, 2012, to prepare for a zombie apocalypse, part of a public health campaign to encourage better preparation for genuine disasters and emergencies. The theory: If you’re prepared for a zombie attack, the same preparations will help you during a hurricane, pandemic, earthquake or terrorist attack. (AP Photo/ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)

This endemic vulnerability invites and (re)produces a specific form of anxiety particular to pandemic culture – diseaseability. Diseaseability is an affective state resulting from living in conditions of constant vulnerability to infection, or feeling as though one is. This sense of vulnerability is ever-present in the social and physical environments and must quickly become part of the mechanisms and structures of adaptation for us as not-yet-infected subjects. It invites “politico-somatic techniques” at the level of the individual subject.[52] We engage in a variety of ritualistic coping behaviours, each of which simultaneously fetishizes and pathologizes our embodiment – from frequent hand washing, to our annual flu shot, to refraining from shaking hands in greeting. And yet we know, in a ‘real’ pandemic, our anti-bacterial hand wash will not save us, and vaccines are only effective against last year’s flu strain.

In addition to producing our body selves as already pathologized, diseaseability is productive of social borders. When a pandemic scare occurs, we look to, erect, and value borders – borders of communicability, of community, of containment. Yet at the same time, diseasability – unlike previous coping mechanisms such as quarantines or vaccines – reflects the sick realization that the quest for borders (and thus safe havens) is always, already a false and futile project. Diseaseability is also intimately entangled with the consumer economy of generalized (and generalizable) prudence. Our anxiety can be reduced, we are advised, through engaging in a program of purchasing and specific comportment that generates a range of new products, a pathologization of touch, and a reticence to be in public. Some of these become habits; some are abandoned as too demanding to maintain continually. Diseasability is simultaneously a profoundly anxious and ambivalent affective state, both terrifying and tiresome. Within pandemic culture, we are invited to self-manage our anxiety, rather than significantly address our risk, as the risk of viral disease is constituted in global economic practices that are outside of our control.

We argue that the traces of diseaseability are most easily recognized in the stories we tell ourselves about contagion and our relationship with it. These stories, much to the ongoing chagrin of epidemiologists and public health officials, are almost inevitably drawn from, produced in, and circulate in the domain of, popular culture. In particular, we argue, diseaseability is most clearly articulated in what has emerged as the model pandemic narrative, the viral zombie story.

We are inspired in this argument by Priscilla Wald’s claims that Western understandings of contagion over the course of the late 19^th and 20^th centuries were characterized by a meaning making frame she calls the “outbreak narrative.”[53] The 1995 film, Outbreak (Wolfgang Petersen, 1995) is archetypical she suggests. A previously unknown disease emerges in a primordial region; travels to and threatens the United States; scientists frantically work to find a vaccine; and the politico-military response oscillates between containment and purification. At the end of the day, humanist scientific knowledge triumphs over militarism and the disease is contained. Such outbreak narratives produce, Wald argues, boundaries between nations, subjects as healthy carriers and ‘patients zero,’ certain forms of expertise, and particular imaginings of the nation.

We suggest that in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries, this dominant narrative of contagion has shifted to what we are calling, the “pandemic narrative.”[54] It is in the viral zombie film that we see an emergent archetype of the pandemic narrative. Contemporary zombies are faster moving, their hunger seems marked by rage, and zombieism is virally caused. This genre includes films such as 28 Days Later (Danny Boyle, 2002), 28 Weeks Later (Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, 2007), I am Legend (Francis Lawrence, 2007), the Resident Evil franchise (Paul W.S. Anderson, 2002 ongoing), Zombieland (Ruben Fleischer, 2009), the remake of Dawn of the Dead (Zack Snyder, 2004), and the recent World War Z (Marc Forster, 2013). The viral zombie is also found in the zombie-mainstreaming television series, The Walking Dead (Frank Darabont, 2010 ongoing) and its graphic novel forerunner. Fiction has followed suit with a series of books and novelizations, including Max Brooks’ The Zombie Survival Handbook (2003) and World War Z (2006), Brian Keene’s The Rising (2004), and David Wellington’s Monster Island (2006) to name a few. We can sketch the emergent narrative structure: a deadly virus is developed, either by a military-industrial-scientific complex or a social outsider; the virus escapes containment due to scientific negligence or malice; global agencies struggle to contain the threat but it spreads across national borders, putting populations from both North and South in jeopardy; international attempts to control the spread of the disease fail and strategies begin to focus on containing the diseased instead of the disease itself; death tolls are in the millions; social infrastructures collapse; and viewer attention shifts to a small group of survivors struggling to preserve both their lives and their civility, often failing. The vaccine, if any is in fact discovered, is typically produced outside of the political and health infrastructures there to protect the population. If there is life after the pandemic, it is forever altered.

Pandemic narratives differ from outbreak narratives, we suggest, in three main ways. First, the spaces of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ are shifting and are no longer defined by national boundaries. Othering divisions of ‘West’ and ‘East’ and ‘North’ and ‘South,’ are irrelevant to disease spread and its threat. The governmental problem thus transforms from one of regional containment to one of survival. Quarantine is no longer an effective tactic. Pandemic is a product of globalization, frightening in its easy mobility across national boundaries and its capacity to disrupt Western assumptions of invulnerability. The pandemic narrative manifests Western anxiety about the seeming irrelevance of the nation and its social institutions in the maintenance of ‘our’ safety.

Second, pandemic narratives are much more reflexive towards humanism than were outbreak narratives, figuring a turn to posthumanism. Posthumanism is a way of rethinking the values and ideals of humanism that characterized modernity and of reimagining the human in relation to technology.[55] In pandemic narratives, characteristic humanist ideals of truth, justice, goodness, reason and the search for an ultimate form of being are shown to be unattainable metanarratives. The threat of widespread disease cannot be contained through human goodness, ingenuity, or solidarity. Pandemic stories are populated by posthuman figures – amalgams of biotechnology and human, breaching the boundaries of consciousness and form by which we distinguish ourselves as centred subjects and as a species. In their most extreme forms, pandemic stories ask us to question whether or not the human race should survive.

The third element that distinguishes pandemic narratives from their outbreak story predecessors, is their specific apocalyptic tone. Drawing on the work of Elizabeth Rosen and Lee Quinby[56], we suggest a three-part typology of apocalyptic types: Judeo-Christian, Humanist, and Nihilist. The Judeo-Christian understanding of apocalypse is characterized by the judgment of an angry deity, who destroys the social order, punishes the ‘guilty,’ and rewards those meriting salvation with a ‘new Jerusalem.’ Humanist apocalypse is a modernist perspective that recognizes that humanity has produced the conditions of its own elimination, but offers a slim hope that the species will survive and rebuild. In these tales, technology is often the immediate cause of apocalypse, but its ultimate cause is the irrationality of a segment of the population. Therefore, technology can still be a source of redemption and rebuilding a just society if we can retain our rationality.

We suggest that pandemic stories are increasingly demonstrating elements of nihilist apocalypticism. The nihilist apocalypse posits humanity as having produced the conditions of its own elimination and as beyond redemption. No distinction is made between who deserves to be infected and who does not, between those who are culpable in pandemic creation or transmission, and those who are innocent. All are equally as likely to fall victim. Our species membership renders us simultaneously responsible and damned. We are all part of the system that produced this outcome. Unlike the other two types of apocalypse, nihilist apocalyptic narratives are not cautionary tales intended to turn us away from our current path toward redemption. It is too late for that. As a result, there is no promise of a better world after the apocalypse; nihilist apocalyptic tales are not prescriptive. This means there will be no rebuilding. History will end with the likely end of humanity and there will be no prospect for a utopian aftermath. The main difference between nihilist and other forms of apocalypse is the bleak outlook for the survivability of humanity and the lack of faith in a reified force – God or Science/Technology – that can save us. It is not so much a warning of things to avoid but rather a narrative of final judgment.

Zombies in Pandemic Culture

Viral zombie texts are currently the dominant form of pandemic narrative, and are increasingly nihilist in tone. The zombie, as a figure, does very particular work in pandemic narratives, whether found in the latest Hollywood film or the posters of the CDC’s zombie apocalypse campaign. Zombies work on three levels: as disease, as the diseased, and most importantly, to signal ‘disease-ability.’

As disease, viruses are invisible to the naked eye and yet, they pose a potentially deadly threat. Zombies operate to make visible the threat of the virus. In this way, in the CDC campaign, the zombie can be analogous to everything from hurricanes to influenza, as a generalized manifestation of the anxiety producing threat. In the case of pandemic, we realize how we can contract the disease – namely from being scratched or bitten by a zombie. We can verify for ourselves that a person has been infected; they wear the violence of infection on their body, and later in their comportment and loss of rationality. We do not need a microscope or expert medical confirmation. The fear of the zombie in contemporary pandemic narratives has shifted from being eaten (or killed) to being infected. For example, many viral zombie stories feature a character who realizes that they have been, or might have been infected, and she or he tries, for a short time, to disguise this fact from friends, family or colleagues. These characters are either killed by a friend in an act of mercy, commit suicide through self-sacrifice for the greater good (knowing they are doomed anyway), or are with much relief, revealed not to be infected.

Within viral zombie stories, the figure of the collective zombie horde works to represent the diseased, the plague-infested population. Zombieism (or disease more broadly) produces a mass of beings no longer guided by reason. Authorities cannot appeal to them to wear masks, wash their hands, or avoid human contact in order to self-manage their contaminated status. Containing the disease, therefore seems futile and accordingly, containment strategies must focus on containing the bodies of the diseased. The diseased become the threat in the pandemic narrative, replacing the disease as the object of governance. A variety of containment techniques are typically employed, on a continuum from quarantine to extermination. Much action in the pandemic narrative is driven by increasingly more extreme measures being taken to manage, control and contain the diseased. Dr. Khan’s blog advised that the CDC would be involved in tactics of “infection control” such as isolation and quarantine and in the graphic novel, security forces guarding the school where the protagonists are holed up with others of the uninfected are reluctant to shoot the zombie horde swarming the school: “We can’t just shoot them. These are our fellow citizens!” (emphasis in the original; CDC, 2011). There is an (inevitable) failure of containment of the diseased and the school is overrun.

Finally, we argue that the viral zombie as a theoretical construct operates as a visual synecdoche for the mode of anxiety particular to pandemic culture, diseaseability. In adopting the zombie as a master metaphor for a generalized sense of threatening-ness, the CDC is trading in and on the anxieties of pandemic culture, our sense of vulnerability to disease threat, despite our privileged geopolitical location, coupled with the implicit acknowledgement of inevitable systemic failure. In this way, the zombie apocalypse stands in for any emergency. As noted above, Khan’s blog post stated, “… maybe you’ll even learn a thing or two about how to prepare for a real emergency.” Our anxiety can only be reduced by preparation. In the graphic novel, even though the CDC discovers a vaccine in record time, hospitals are overrun, armed guards patrol shelters, and citizens are encouraged via radio to remain isolated. Only those who can be self-sufficient can survive until the social infrastructure rebounds. Prudent citizens who have a disaster/emergency kit are best poised to survive the zombie apocalypse – they have embraced their responsibilization. Even in the CDC’s graphic novel, the shelter is overrun, threatening a nihilist apocalypse. However, the apocalyptic scenario is undermined in the final pages of the comic book when Todd realizes that it was only a horror-movie-induced nightmare. However, the dream operates as a cautionary tale to lead him and his sister to prepare an emergency kit and plan, “in case something happened.” The book concludes with the following counsel:

We hope you enjoyed reading this fictional story. It’s meant to be both educational and entertaining. Now that you’ve seen the importance of being prepared, take the time to put together an emergency kit with the items included in the checklist on the following page. You’ll be ready for any kind of disaster, even zombies.

The checklist is entitled, tellingly, “All-Hazards Emergency Kit.” The zombie is proferred as a generalizable trope of impending but uncertain and unspecified threat.

Our argument does not ultimately rest on the details of how the CDC used the zombie in its preparedness campaign of 2011, but rather on the fact that it did so. The coupling of zombies with an express language of apocalypse is a striking and powerful articulation of the norms and normality of pandemic culture. Pandemic narratives have replaced outbreak narratives as the dominant mode of disease risk story-telling, placing the zombie in high relief in all domains of communication. Pandemic culture constitutes us as diseaseable subjects easily located in an economy of preparedness practice, involving everything from militarized health security regimes to Todd and Julie’s stash of bottled water and hand-crank-operated radio. It is pandemic culture that renders both legible and likely the CDC’s zombie apocalypse preparedness campaign.

References

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Filmography

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Romero, George A. (1968). Dawn of the Dead. USA: Laurel Group.

Snyder, Zack. (2004). Dawn of the Dead. USA: Strike Entertainment.

Wright, Edgar. (2004). Shaun of the Dead. UK: Universal Pictures.

Notes:

Themed Issue: Transmedia Horror

Edited by Jessica Balanzategui & Naja Later

Contents

1. The Comfort and Disquiet of Transmedia Horror in Higurashi: When They Cry (Higurashi no naku koro ni) – Brian Ruh

2. Jodi Arias in the Public Sphere: Rhetorics of Horror and the Monstrous Feminine – Elizabeth Lowry

3. Candid Cameras: Transmedia Haunting and the Paranormal Activity Franchise – Janani Subramanian

4. Everything in this World is Artificial:  Media Contagion, Theme Parks and the Ring Franchise – Jessica Balanzategui

5. Defining Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance: Crossing Boundaries of Genre, Media, Self and Other in New Supernatural Worlds – Leigh M. McLennon

6. Sinister Celluloid in the Age of Instagram – Marc Olivier

7. Who is the Slender Man? – Naja Later

8. Trafficking in the Zombie:  The CDC Zombie Apocalypse Campaign, Diseaseability and Pandemic Culture - Neil Gerlach & Sheryl N. Hamilton

This special issue developed out the Intermediations symposium held at the University of Otago on May 31, 2013,[1] and on the invitation of keynote speaker and Refractory Editor, Angela Ndalianis. Presenters at this symposium who have contributed essays here include Kirsten Moana Thomson (the other keynote speaker), John Farnsworth, Kevin Fisher, and Miriam Ross. Topics at the symposium ranged across the terrain of intermedia and transmedia theory, provoking new lines of inquiry on both fronts, and drawing into question the complex relationships between the two emerging paradigms. It is from the extended conversations during and following the symposium that the issue expanded to include essays by Anne Cranny Francis, Rosemary Overell, and Holly Randell-Moon. Some of these essays directly engage the intermedia/transmedia relationship. Kirsten Moana Thompson explores the affinities between animation and more ephemeral forms of theatrical exhibition at Disney theme parks in terms of the sensual dimensions of colour. Rosemary Overell considers the affective intermedial dimensions of the reception and blogging practices surrounding the rehab-based reality TV show Intervention (A&E Network, 2005-2013). Anne Cranny Francis analyses the development of the Sherlock Holmes story world within the convergence culture of transmedia.

Other essays, while working more decisively on one side of the inter/trans spectrum, challenge or expand upon existing approaches in ways that suggest new dialogues. Miriam Ross’s essay investigates sociotechnical debates around vertical framing that issue from the convergence of video and cell phone technologies, and explores their implications within her own media practices. John Farnsworth combines psychological theories of ‘attachment’ with affect studies to suggest how mobile devices simultaneously augment and substitute for social relations. Kevin Fisher describes how the use of 3D imagery in the documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams (Werner Herzog, 2010)stages the intermedial encounter between a human and pre-human consciousness. Holly Randell-Moon analyses how allusions to civil rights advocacy and debate in True Blood (HBO, 2008-2014) work in the service of the biopolitical management of difference under the aegis of transmedia consumer participation. Together, the essays constitute a critical inquiry into the emergence of inter- and transmedia in the disciplines of media, cultural and film studies and how these terms both illustrate and re-ignite sociotechnical forces and debates in digital media and convergence culture. In the following section, we offer a brief genealogy of inter/trans media analysis, focusing specifically on the terms’ phenomenological and ideological valences in scholarly reception and utility.

In between and among: a brief tracing of inter/trans media analysis

Over the past two decades academic discussions of intermediality and transmediation have undergone a parallel development within the context of what Henry Jenkins describes as digital convergence culture. However, the exponents of each have, with few exceptions, tended to talk past one another. This is paradoxical insofar as the phenomena they respectively describe are often intertwined in the media examples they differently engage. While transmedia analysis has been primarily concerned with the distribution of narrative across media platforms, intermedial analysis has interrogated the internal singularity and ‘specificity’ of those same medialities. The experience of transmediation involves the participation of interpretive communities in the co-creation of stories and the enactment of story worlds. By contrast, intermedial experience unfolds within the heterogeneous spaces generated along the various intersections of medial forms and traces within a given medium.

The subject of transmedia combines the active viewer of cultural studies and the social media user within an expanded understanding of narrative as an irreducible component of human experience, cognition and social activity. This anthropological notion of homo narrativus is shared by the academic methods of transmedia analysis as well as creative methods of transmedia storytelling co-emergent with commercial practices such as viral marketing. Scholarly interest in this ‘new’ form of storytelling can be traced to Alvin Toffler’s development of the term ‘prosumer’, coined to describe a shift in audience and consumer activity that was more self-directed, individualised and selective than the traditional mass media model of consumption and production (1980). Following on from this work, Axel Bruns (2008) and Henry Jenkins (2006) have explored how the ‘produser’ repositions the production and communication flows of media content from media companies and creators to the consumer/user. As Jenkins explains, “Reading across the media sustains a depth of experience that motivates consumption” (2003) and “A good transmedia franchise attracts a wider audience by pitching the content differently in the different media” (2003). Audiences can read media texts with an awareness of their transmedial dimensions or they can consume different media forms in isolation whilst still being interpellated into a broader transmedia story. Jenkins’ development of transmedia is thus an attempt to capture the new specificities of medial engagement that have emerged from digital convergence and new media formats. He identifies a number of transmedia modes of communication which include: transmedia storytelling, transmedia branding, transmedia performance, transmedia ritual, transmedia play, transmedia activism, and transmedia spectacle (2011).[2]

There are two important implications to be drawn from this type of cross-media communication. The first is that transmedia forms of communication require an explicit appreciation of the intertextual (though not necessarily intermedial) elements of storytelling on the part of media producers. The second is that this type of media storytelling and communication recognises the social character of narrative and textual construction. Writing about transmedia fan activity, Jenkins speaks of “a new kind of cultural power emerging as fans bond together within larger communities, pool their information, shape each other’s opinions, and develop a greater self-consciousness about their shared agendas and common interests” (2007, 362-363). Kaarina Nikunen also suggests that fan activities reveal “the institutional and technological spaces of shaping the pleasures of media” which also “possibly reshape[…] audience practises more widely” (2007, 111). What this type of media engagement does is shift political and ideological discussion of audiences’ (pleasurable and social) involvement in meaning making from the passive/active consumer debate to questions of the audience’s role in the economy of media production and consumption.

It is this seeming incorporation of fan and audience desire into the narratives of media production that has generated scepticism about the extent to which produsage challenges or subverts existing media structures. S. Elizabeth Bird for example, points out that “True produsers are a reality, but they are not the norm, and can often seem to be so in thrall to big media and technological ‘coolness’ that they accept the disciplining of their creative activities” (2011, 512). Indeed, the end goal of transmedia branding according to social media marketer Rick Liebling is “creating an environment that is so authentic and compelling that when consumers do generate their own content that utilizes your brand, they do so in a way that is in line with your existing messaging” (2011; emphasis in original). For this reason, fan activity as a form of produsage qua consumer action (or more idealistically, resistance) may also be understood as “a form of market-sanctioned cultural experimentation through which the market rejuvenates itself” (Holt, as cited in Kline 2009, 32). The critical distance between a marketing approach to transmedia activity and a more scholarly one is the extent to which audience activity can instantiate resistance or subversion to existing media and communication hierarchies. Indeed, such concerns as they relate to media’s enmeshment in other political institutions specifically inform Randell-Moon’s essay in this issue.

One of the more salient critiques of transmedia analysis is that medial specificity is subsumed within the overall importance of the story, even if as Jenkins argues, transmedia storytelling relies neither on the continuity nor homogeneity of its narrative. Still, according to Jenkins, “Most discussions of transmedia place a high emphasis on continuity—assuming that transmedia requires a high level of coordination and creative control and that all of the pieces have to cohere into a consistent narrative or world” (2011). For Ndalianis it is the “holes” within transmedia stories that create opportunities for audience co-creation and performance, and that these types of co-creation are among the most successful examples of transmedia campaigns (2012, 174). Yet, even with its emphasis on the cross-media processes of audience engagement, transmedia still implies a substrate of medial relations where there is an experiential sameness across platforms. As Bernd Herzogenrath notes, the transmedial version of intermediality “is built on the concept that there are formal structures (such as narrative structures) that are not specific to one medium but can be found (perhaps differently instantiated) in different media” (2012, 4). Consequently, transmedia analysis “has the problem that ‘media specificity’ cannot be conceptualized within it” (4). By contrast, the issue of media specificity takes centre stage in Francesco Casetti’s analysis of the “relocation of cinema” as medial form beyond its traditional substrate (2011), which also animates Ross’s examination of the convergence of video and mobile telephony in this issue. This centrifugal thrust of intermedial analysis against the internal coherence and specificity of medialities within what Rosalind Krauss terms “the post medium condition” (1999) provides a counterpoint to the centripetal force of narrative implied in Jenkins’ convergence culture.

In this issue, Cranny-Francis traces the term intermediality back to Roland Barthes, where he appeals to the interdisciplinarity required by new cultural objects that defy prevailing codes and classifications. She argues that intertextuality, in Mikhail Bakhtin’s sense of “heteroglossia”, provides the methodological link between intermedial and transmedial analysis. Transmedia storytelling is, in important ways, an inherently intermedial phenomenon because it depends on and generates engagement with media texts as multiple and heterogeneous. The forms of reading and engagement across transmedia stories, as outlined by Jenkins, have similarities with intermedia defined by Herzogenrath as “between the between” (2012, 2) in the sense that “we can only refer to media using other media” (3). In relation to what Cranny-Francis describes as a process of endless intertextual deferral, Herzongenrath observes: “Individual media do not exist in isolation, to be suddenly taken into intermedial relations. Intermediality is rather the ontological condition sine qua non, which is always before ‘pure’ and specific media, which have to be extracted from the arch-intermediality” (4). The intermedial thus constitutes “the quicksand out of which specific media emerge” as well as “the various interconnections” made possible between the audience and different types of media (3).

Other contemporary theorists, such as Ágnes Pethő (2011) and Joachim Paech (2011), insist that intermediality is altogether distinct from intertextuality, which reproduces the privileging of narrative characteristic of transmedia, conflating relations between stories with intersections between medialities. Pethő, for example, describes intermedial experience as extra-narrative, extra-representational, and a-signifying. Hence, “it cannot be read” (2011, 67). Rather, as an encounter with the ‘in-between’ generated along the interstices of different medial forms and traces, intermediality makes itself felt on the prereflective level of embodied sensation. Hence, for Pethő, and contributors Moana-Thomson as well as Fisher, intermediality is an irreducibly phenomenological experience. Other essays, such as those by Farnsworth and Overell draw upon affect studies and non-representational theory to approach the embodied aspects of intermediality that escape both medium-specific and hermeneutic containment of media texts. For example, Farnsworth explores the affective and psychoanalytical dimensions of attachment as a constituent feature of embodiment and sociality that become augmented or constrained through mobile technologies.

However, the emphasis of the intermedial on embodiment and affect over interpretation has also informed some strains of transmedia theory, in particular Ndalianis’ work on transmedia horror as predicated on affective participation in a particular “sensorium” (2012). The focus of intermedial analysis on the heterogeneous spaces and experiences between medialities also complements the methodological and historiographical projects of media archaeology (Elsaesser 2005, 2009; Huhtamo and Parikka2011; Parikka 2012) and remediation (Bolter and Grusin 1999). Paech, for example, echoes Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s logic of remediation by arguing that film has always been intermedial, though its experience as such becomes more pronounced or “hypermediated” during historical periods characterised by intensified sociotechnical change (1999). At this moment in time, renewed interest in medial co-creation is heightened by the shifting economies of convergence culture and the post-medium environment, in whose context the paradigms of intermedial and transmedial analysis will continue to be subject to the same exchanges and mutations as the medialities they describe. Such mutations occur, we would argue, as intermediations between audience, text, screen and body as a constitutive feature of medial meaning and sensation.

In this issue, we offer some intermediations on the changing dynamics of mediality in relation to embodiment, media specificity, and audience participation in and performance of textuality. We hope you enjoy reading the essays.

References

Bird, Elizabeth S. 2011. “Are We All Produsers Now? Convergence and Media Audience Practices.” Cultural Studies 25 (4-5): 502-516.

Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. 1999. Remediation: Understanding New Media.Cambridge: MIT Press.

Bruns, Alex. 2008. Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc.

Casetti, Francesco. 2011. “Back to the Motherland: The Film Theatre in the Postmedia Age.” Screen 52 (1): 1-12.

Elsaesser, Thomas. 2005. “The New Film History as Media Archaeology.” Cinemas 14 (2-3 Spring): 75-117.

Elsaesser, Thomas. 2009. “Archaeologies of Interactivity: Early Cinema, Narrative and Spectatorship.” In Film 1900: Technology, Perception, Culture, edited by Klaus Kreimeier and Annemone Ligensa, 9-22. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Herzogenrath, Bernd. 2012. “Travels in Intermedia[lity]: An Introduction.” In Travels in Intermedia[lity]: ReBlurring the Boundaries, edited by Bernd Herzogenrath: 1-14. Lebanon, NH: Dartmouth College Press.

Huhtamo, Erkki and Jussi Parikka, editors. 2011. Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Jenkins, Henry. 2003. “Transmedia Storytelling.” Technology Review, January 15. Accessed June 28, 2014. http://www.technologyreview.com/news/401760/transmedia-storytelling/.

Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. New York: New York University Press.

Jenkins, Henry. 2007. “Afterword: the future of fandom.” In Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, edited by Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss and C. Lee Harrington, 357-364. New York: New York University Press.

Jenkins, Henry. 2011. “Transmedia 202: Further Reflections.” Confessions of an Aca-Fan, August 1. Accessed April 28, 2014. http://henryjenkins.org/2011/08/defining_transmedia_further_re.html.

Kline, Stephen. 2009. “Ronald’s New Dance: A Case Study of Corporate Rebranding in the Age of Integrated Communication.” In The Advertising Handbook (3^rd edition), edited by Helen Powell, Jonathan Hardy, Sarah Hawkin and Iain MacRury, 24-33. London: Routledge.

Krauss, Rosalind. 1999. “A Voyage on the North Sea”: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition. New York: Thames & Hudson.

Liebling, Rick. 2011. “Intermedia—The Next Phase in Consumer Engagement.” How Soon is Now?: Culture in a 24/7 World, September 11. Accessed April 28, 2014. http://www.rickliebling.com/2011/09/11/intermedia-the-next-phase-in-consumer-engagement/.

Ndalianis, Angela. 2012. The Horror Sensorium: Media and the Senses. Jefferson: McFarland Publishing.

Nikunen, Kaarina. 2007. “The Intermedial Practises of Fandom.” Nordicom Review 28 (2): 111-128.

Paech, Joachim. 2011. “The Intermediality of Film.” Acta Univ. Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies 4: 7-21. Accessed May 7, 2014. http://www.acta.sapientia.ro/acta-film/C4/Film4-1.pdf.

Parikka, Jussi. 2012. What is Media Archaeology? Cambridge: Polity Press.

Pethő, Ágnes. 2011. Cinema and Intermediality: The Passion for the In-Between. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Toffler, Alvin. 1980. The Third Wave. New York: Bantam Books.

Filmography

Ball, Alan. True Blood. 2008-2014. USA: HBO.

Herzog, Werner. 2010. Cave of Forgotten Dreams. USA: Sundance Selects.

Mettler, Sam. Intervention.2005-2013. USA: A&E Network.

Notes

[1] The “Intermediations” Symposium was organised by Catherine Fowler and Paul Ramaeker in conjunction with the Screen Cultures Research Group and the Department of Media, Film and Communication at the University of Otago.

[2] Of these types of transmedia communication, transmedia storytelling and branding appear to have captured scholarly and popular interest above the other significant and no less interesting forms of transmedia identified by Jenkins.

Abstract: This paper examines the unusual theatrical and exhibition dimensions of Disney’s World of Color, an outdoor night time entertainment spectacle which screens animated films on ephemeral materials: the water spray and light produced by fountains, water, mist and fire. It considers how this show innovates a new form of theatrical exhibition, combining older art forms from fireworks to pyrodramas, with contemporary computer-controlled light and colour design and immersive effects. It will suggest structural and aesthetic connections between this animated attraction and recent technological innovations such as Google Glass™ in which mobile computer interfaces combine transparency and opacity as an essential part of their formal structure and tactile pleasure. Theorising that the relationship between animation and the ephemeral is also situated in these tensions between the transparent and opaque, I go on to suggest that Disney’s World of Color is a particular instantiation of the ways in which “animation” can be understood not only as a specific technical process, but also as a form of corporeal transformation in which movement, light and colour enlivens individual bodies and screen spaces.

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Figure 1. Top Image, frame grab from Tree of Souls sequence in Avatar. Dir. James Cameron, 2009. ©20th Century Fox, and bottom images, frame grabs from Dewdrops Fairies, in Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies, Nutcracker Suite sequence, Fantasia. Dir. Wilfred Jackson, 1940. ©Walt Disney Productions.

Disney’s World of Color is a night time entertainment spectacle combining water, fire, projected light and colour that takes up the delicate play of the transitory, foregrounding the material and aesthetic relationship of transparency and opacity. From fireworks to hydraulically engineered musical fountains and pyrodramas, the show’s innovations in theatrical exhibition hybridise older entertainment forms with digital-controlled light and colour design and immersive effects, blending tourism, the amusement park and cinematic projection. World of Color’s ephemeral media literally materialise the affective fuzziness and softness of our nostalgic memories and desire for that which is past and lost—Disney films, our own childhood—promising, if only for the duration of the show, that these desires can be momentarily recaptured and relived. Theorising that the relationship between animation and the ephemeral is connected to the tensions between the transparent and opaque in classical cel animation, together with their persistence in new media forms like digital animation or Google Glass, this paper suggests we must expand our understanding of what it means to animate our real and virtual environments today.

Part I: Cel Animation, Translucence and Bubbles

In classical cel animation the dialectical relationship between translucency, transparency and opacity was key. Cel animation’s production was inherently palimpsestic, depending on light to shine through layers of transparent nitrate or acetate cels, made partially opaque with painted characters, props or backgrounds, all of which were layered together to create the illusion of depth. The use of cels was part of the Taylorisation of the industry in the twenties to minimise time in a labour-intensive production process. Light joined with glass when individual cels were photographed sequentially frame-by-frame under transparent sheets of glass that were clamped down to keep dust from the cel. The greater the layers of cels, the less light penetrated through to the deepest layer and the more blurry was the resultant composite image, with generally five cels as the maximum number of layers possible (Furniss 2007, 74). In the contemporary era this problem has been obviated by digital compositing’s capacity for greater integration of planar layers of data, without loss of sharpness or light. If the clarity or translucency of the image in cel animation was shaped by its palimpsestic structure, the choice of different materials from pastels to watercolours, oils or pencils also mediated the degree to which light passed through the cels.

A translucent object allows light to pass through it, but depending on its materials, diffuses or scatters that light, whereas a transparent object allows the direct transmission of light without scattering or diffusion. Glass and clean water are optically transparent media through which most of the light passes directly. By contrast, our own bodies are translucent, and depending on pigment and the right light conditions, we can see the bones through our skin. Light permeates our bodies and enters our brain cells where it is converted from light waves into electrical charges by the optic nerve. On the level of perception, our bodies literally mediate light, to which “our eyes are drawn … which impels the reflex adjustments of our irises” (Powell 2007, 87). In other words, just like the transmission of light, the perception of light is always materially embodied through relations of penetration, mediation and transformation.

Not only is the dialectical relationship between opacity and transparency, or more accurately, the translucent, crucial at a material level in animation, it is also frequently present at the level of representation to spotlight luminosity, colour and delicacy of design, showing the oscillating starburst at the arrival of the blue fairy in Pinocchio (Ben Sharpsteen and Hamilton Luske, 1940) or the airbrushed translucency of her shimmering blue gown. From the gleam of a Grinch’s heart as it grew “three sizes bigger” in How the Grinch Stole Christmas (Chuck Jones, 1966) to the effect of the Blue Fairy’s wand as she changes Pinocchio from a wooden puppet into a boy, twinkling stars, sparkles, fairy dust and other scintillating or radiating gradients of luminosity are traditional signifiers of transformation effected by alternating opaque or transparent cels with translucent overlays of luminous objects like painted stars. More than merely representing transformation, what I call starburst animation epistemologically embodies the nature of change through its intervallic alternations of light and dark stimuli and durational manipulation of luminous intensities. As Norman McLaren reminds us: “What happens between each frame is more important than what happens on each frame,”[1] which is to say, this stuttering control of light interpenetrates diegetic and extra-diegetic bodies and objects alike. Like Times Square advertising, some of which was designed by animators,[2] these sparkling starbursts (with their on-off-on blinking process) are visual stimuli that organise our attention, affecting our bodies and our brains and creating a sensual experience. In addition to scintillating light enabled by the alternation of opacity and transparency, both classical and digital animation have repeatedly returned to the luminous as subject of sensual fascination. Compare, for example the bioluminescent aquatic jellies in Life of Pi (Ang Lee, 2012) or the seeds of the Tree of Souls on Pandora in Avatar (James Cameron, 2009)with the Dewdrop Fairies in the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy sequence in Disney’s Fantasia (Wilfred Jackson, 1940) (see Figure 1). Despite the material differences in the production process (Fantasia’s effects were achieved through airbrushing and light pencil and pastel shading as opposed to digital effects), commonalities in the treatment of colour, luminosity and detail continue to link classical and digital animation.

Animation’s structural engagement with scintillation or luminosity also enables it to showcase the sensual pleasures of colour. As I’ve argued in a previous paper, the representation of test tubes, pipettes, beakers, flasks, bottles or other transparent or translucent glass objects that appear in laboratory or transformation sequences like the Mickey Mouse cartoon The Worm Turns (Wilfred Jackson, 1937) allow for the segmentation of colour into tubular, rectangular or spherical form, offering up Technicolor as a novelty production value, which is also dazzlingly spectacularised (Thompson 2013, 6). As the cartoon opens, Mickey is in a laboratory creating a potion that will turn underdogs into top dogs. Called the “Courage Builder,” it sets triumphant flies against spiders and cats against dogs. Certainly colour and line in the laboratory scene illustrate Disney’s pioneering innovations in the special effects department in the late thirties, as the animators who specialised in drawing light, water, fire and other atmospheric effects were so named. It is they who use colour to simulate a richly textured dimensional mise-en-scène, with chiaroscuro lighting effects of Mickey’s shadow cast behind him, an unseen light source shining through meticulously detailed glassware and white paint simulating light bouncing against the edges of the beakers and flasks, while highlights and light coloured blue, green, purple and red bubbles indicate the volumetric mass of the liquid colour within. But the media of the laboratory, the transparent glassware and translucent liquid, also offer the pure pleasure and novelty of rich saturated hues, of colour as segmented forms. As Mickey mixes his ingredients, the colour bubbles, splashes and pops. Accompanied by coughs, splutters and backfiring automobile sounds, the diegetic liquid erupts from the test tube becoming pure spectacular excess. As Brian Price has suggested of abstract colour sequences in the films of Claire Denis and Paul Thomas Anderson, “liquidity is but another way of describing the bleeding of color across line” (2006, 85). And as Rosalind Krauss has suggested, when colour disrupts the line, as it does in this Mickey cartoon, it has two principal effects: eroticising the surface, and enjoining a perceptual multiplicity (cited in Price 2006, 85), that accentuates fluidity, process and transformation.

The relationship of the translucent and the opaque also come together in the frequent visual figure of the iridescent bubble in animation. Like the eye, a bubble is a sphere with a reflective surface like a screen and can be transparent or semi-transparent like a cel. The bubble is a liminal temporal and spatial figure—it is a pellicle or thin diaphanous surface of colour with an iridescent sheen, suspended between atmospheric air, and the air within it. As colour was for Goethe, the bubble is a boundary condition, of inside and outside (2006, 16). Like the arrival of Glinda the Good Witch as a bubble of pure pink who becomes the pinky ‘goodness’ of whiteness in The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939), a bubble is also a colour skin, an example of the second type of light condition that Goethe called the dioptrical in his Theory of Colors (2006, 33)where colour is produced by passing though a light transmitting or transparent body such as atmospheric haze, water, or glass. Sam Raimi’s Oz: The Great and Powerful (2013) also emphasises the mobile and fugitive nature of the bubble in a mise-en scène in which luminosity and colour populate the crystalline surfaces of Emerald City, with its jewel-like flowers and iridescent butterflies. Bubbles enable both the representational and affective interplay of scale between large and small as well as our wondrous response to this scale, and together with toys are a frequent visual figure in animation for the playfulness and joy of childhood. Part of the fascination of the bubble is its structural and temporal evanescence—the iridescent surface, say of a soap bubble is only possible for a brief period before it snaps or is popped, which produces in us an orientation of wonder at its fragility, and suspense in anticipation of that inevitable pop. Benjamin reminds us in his essay, “On Fantasy” that colour is transition, the passing away of the mortal symbolised in the green halo of rotting meat or the iridescence of a blowfly (cited in Leslie 2004, 265). I’ll come back to the bubble when I turn to Google Glass. But what I want to point out here is that the luminosity, colour and delicate transitory nature of the bubble foreground what I’ve been illustrating in these prefatory remarks on classical cel animation: that is, that animation’s formal and representational concerns with opacity, translucency and transparency are the material embodiments of memory and desire and form centre stage in World of Color, to which I’ll now turn.

Part II: Disney’s World of Color

World of Color world premiere at the Disney California Adventure theme park.

Reportedly constructed for $75 million with the aim of reviving Disney’s financially struggling California Adventure theme parks, the 28 minute World of Color show premiered on June 10, 2010 and has screened nightly there and at Disneyworld since then (Barnes 2010) (See Figure 2). It projects sequences from many of Disney’s best known classical and contemporary animated films on ephemeral materials: the bubbles, water spray, fog and light produced by nearly 1200 variable fountains, each of which are illuminated a different colour with an LED ring light and choreographed in time to music and alternating jets of fire. Its ephemerality is of course nominal, as at the level of both production and exhibition the World of Color is an intensely programmed repeatable event operated by an underground control room (see Figure 3). Five years in the planning, the show was developed by Walt Disney Imagineering in association with its Animation and Pixar companies and technical specialists in laser, projection and fountain design.[3] On 3.5 acres in Paradise Bay Lagoon the show features eight different types of fountains that shoot up to 200 feet and 18,000 computer-controlled elements of colour intensity, water angle and height, arranged on a huge football field size platform which raises itself at the beginning of the show. What is interesting is the show’s unusual combination of structurally fixed digital and hydraulic effects and ephemeral, insubstantial mist screens, some 50 feet tall and 380 feet wide produced by 28 projectors, of which 14 are fully submersible (Disneyland 2010).

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Figure 2. World of Color view of Ferris wheel and Paradise Park. ©Walt Disney Productions. This promotional photo is licensed under Creative CommonsAttribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

The mist screens are the appropriately aquatic surface for a show which self-reflexively begins with Ariel singing ‘Part of Your World’in The Little Mermaid (Ron Clements and John Musker, 1989), followed by Sebastian’s rendition of ‘Under the Sea’ (See Figure 4). The show is a pastiche musical theatre bildungsroman, where emotional yearning is born from spatial disaffection. Animated sequences from Aladdin (Ron Clements, 1992), Up (Peter Docter, 2009), Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995)and Wall-E (Andrew Stanton, 2008) move from under the sea into sky and space, with sequences using colour and vertical water movement isomorphically to articulate upward spatial aspiration and affective longing of the characters (and by extension, audience) such as when Ariel sings of her desire to go up “out of the sea/ wish I could be/ part of that world.”Heightened by Mussorgsky’s ‘Night on Bald Mountain’ score, the World of Color’s dramatic middle section features Chernobog’s massive devil from Fantasia (Wilfred Jackson, 1940), along with other emotionally intense Disney sequences, from The Old Mill’s storm (Wilfred Jackson, 1937) to the stampede in The Lion King (Rob Minkoff and Roger Allers, 1994) and the ghost ship in Pirates of the Caribbean (Gore Verbinski, 2003). This dramatic climax is followed by quieter musical sequences of paternal and maternal reassurance from Bambi (Dave Hand, 1942), Dumbo(Ben Sharpsteen, 1941) and other features, concluding with a reprise of the title song ‘The World is a Carousel of Color.’

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Figure 3: World of Color Control Room. ©Walt Disney Productions. This promotional photo is licensed under the Creative CommonsAttribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

Continuing a long Disney tradition of using water as a key design aesthetic, the show’s innovative projection onto differently textured two and three-dimensional surfaces and spaces created by transparent sprays, walls, columns and reflections of water, light and fire, is a collage of shifting displays and painterly inscriptions, and one whose blurriness, hybridity and dimensionality marks out its difference from the source animation from which it takes or simulates.[4] Over 100,000 animated images make up the show including newly created sequences in sand animation by artist Corrie Francis, as well as 12 foot high paper cut-out characters created by Megan Brain which were then animated (Sukovaty 2010).

Steven Davison, Disney’s vice president for parades and spectaculars, described a Pocahontas segment this way: “[She] was animated in one spot. You had to paint her with a brand new CGI river and get her to come in and out of it at 10 different points” (Slate 2010). New animation was needed because long takes of individual characters could not always be found in the original source material of the feature films. Paradoxically, Disney’s new animation recreates its classic films in the service of a show that addresses or manufactures our nostalgia for these films. Not only is the novelty of the show’s ephemeral medium emphasised in its marketing, so too is the Heraclitian flux of its aquatic medium both visual subject and musical theme. As Pocahontas sings, “What I most love about rivers is you can’t step into the same river twice. The water’s always changing, always flowing.” More than that, the water is affective extension, pure wish fulfilment, for as Pocahontas continues, “People I guess, can’t live like that. We all must pay a price to be safe.” The constant flux and unending transformation of the show’s aquatic medium embodies the impossibility of the desire for a return to one’s childhood, even as it seems to offer paradoxical satiation through its symphonic tour of the Disney canon.

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Figure 4. Aquatic self–reflexivity with Ariel from The Little Mermaid. ©Walt Disney Productions. This file is licensed under Creative CommonsAttribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic License

Playing with appearance and disappearance, and epitomised by an ever-dissolving Cheshire Cat, the mutable layers and variable vertical heights of the fountains are a moving sculpture, which prompt both expectation and surprise. Bellagio-like, upthrusting fountains juxtapose with a second layer of lazier and slow arcing brushwork (see Figure 5). However, unlike the famous fountains of Las Vegas’ Bellagio Resort, the colour ring and lasers intensify the spectacular dimensions of the choreography by offering a density to the water, while the animated image is reflected and refracted creating a three dimensional image. Davison describes it as “painting with water” elaborating, “We wanted to take fountain technology—varied planes of water, different textures of water—and use it to tell stories in a new way” (Barnes 2010).[5] The projection of an animated image that is essentially softer than normal, because of its aquatic screen surface, is sidestepped in company promotional videos, which emphasise the transparent sharpness and clarity of the coloured line presented by columns of illuminated water. As Davison reiterated in an early preview of the show in 2009, “the clarity of it is beautiful” (2009, part 1).[6] Indeed the latest incarnation of the show World of Color-Winter Dreams, recently unveiled for the 2013 holiday season, promised an image four times sharper than the original show with a new HD projection system (Disneyland 2013). This emphasis on crispness also highlights the show’s marketing of nostalgia, in which the misty screens and ephemeral surfaces seem to externalise and materialise the audience’s memories and desires for the Disney films of childhood.

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Figure 5: View of Fountains. ©Walt Disney Productions. This file is licensed under the Creative CommonsAttribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic License

Davison’s claims of technological innovation link the show to a longstanding company tradition as an early adopter of colour technologies, as the first company in the film industry to use three strip Technicolor in its pioneering Silly Symphonies (1932-1935), to its early shift to colour television for NBC in September 1961. Opening with Dick Wesson’s voice-over and an updated version of the Sherman Bros’ famous song ‘The World is a Carousel of Color’, the show is an homage to Disney’s original television series The Wonderful World of Color (1961-1969). The spectral array of fountain and laser columns that serve as the show’s spectacular leitmotifs also recall Disney’s repeated recourse to the rainbow as an iconic attraction in cartoons like Funny Little Bunnies (Wilfred Jackson, 1934).[7] As a recurring image, the rainbow offers a central metaphor for the show’s nostalgic promise: proffered, yet never fulfilled, as tricks of light and colour, the rainbow can never be reached.[8] The World of Color performs the prowess of the company’s technological innovations with a nostalgia for its own corporate history and one that we have always been invited to regard as an extension of our own personal history.

Of course the World of Color’s technological innovations rest on a longer history of Renaissance and Baroque fountain design, themselves dependent on Greek, Roman and Persian engineering, and whose theatricality, display and monumentality, in the work of Renaissance artists like Tommaso Francini’s fountain designs for Henry IV of France could be considered antecedents of Disney’s aesthetics.[9] They borrow from the discursive playfulness of water and music or giochi d’acqua (water tricks) such as the Villa d’Este’s Fountain of the Dragons or the Pratolino’s Grotto of Cupid, which surprised visitors with water squirts. Baroque fountains like those built for Louis XIV at Versailles sculpted water as emotional movement, also combining fireworks and music (Attlee 2008, 51ff). The nineteenth century brought with it the mechanically illuminated fountain, such as the American Bartholdi fountain of 1876 that first used coloured lights fuelled by gas, adding a luminosity to water (Smithsonian Institution Research Information System). The invention of steam pumps meant that fountains no longer depended on gravity for their propulsion, allowing water to become ever more extravagantly decorative. This capacity enabled our own era’s large-scale performative fountains which, in addition to the enormous heights of Las Vegas’ Bellagio and Geneva’s Jet d’eau, include the Dubai fountains, those in Efteling Theme Park in the Netherlands, and King Fahd’s fountain in Saudi Arabia, the tallest in the world at 312 metres (or 1023.62 feet). From Rimington’s colour organs to the Son et Lumière light shows, World of Color’s scale, playfulness and sculptural expressivity are situated within longer intermedial traditions in which the control of light, colour and music awe, dazzle and emotionally manipulate.[10]

World of Color’s physical location within Disney amusement parks also historically situates it within what one may call the second golden era of the amusement park, or more particularly the theme park marked as beginning in the postwar era with Santa Claus Land in 1946, paradigmatically with Disneyland in 1955, followed by Six Flags in 1961, and many others, from Universal Studios to Dollywood.[11] Lauren Rabinowitz’s recent study of amusement parks tells us of the first wave of construction which resulted in 2000 parks built between 1893 and 1915, and whose most famous exemplars were Coney Island’s Dreamland, Luna Park and Steeplechase and Chicago’s Riverview Park (2012, 1-35). Her close study of the postcard photography of these parks (in which crispness and clarity are also key) show scenes that could be taken today at Disney’s show, with the Ferris wheel and jetting fountain dominant visual elements (96ff). These parks helped define a new concept of urban modernism: the celebration of motion and speed, the beauty of industrial design, and the experiential interaction of spectator and surrounding crowd (26). Their modernity lay not only in their architecture but also in their sensorial address: a visual stimulation of electrified spectacle and sound and an embodied kinesthesia of rides and dynamic crowds.

Like the amusement park in which it is situated and of which it is a spectacular extension, World of Color relies upon a similar bodily address, linking the technological construction of spectacular vision and motion across different modes of entertainment (Rabinowitz 2012, 59). The huge wall of water advancing to the spectator in the show’s dramatic middle section was calculated to “put you in the middle of the [Lion King’s] stampede” (Davison 2009) just as the heat jets make you feel the fire of Chernobog’s inferno. The show has genealogical affinities to the nineteenth century amusement park’s largest spectacle, the pyrodrama and the disaster genres. The pyrodrama was an intermedial fusion of theatre and fireworks, ornately painted sets and panoramas orchestrated by auteurs like James Pain, while the disaster genre blended theatre, circus, panorama and magic tricks. Like the World of Color, audiences in their thousands gathered around lagoons, which acted as both protective safety layer and reflective surface (Rabinowitz 2012, 52-59). Not unlike Disney’s Fantasmic show and Epcot’s Fountains of Nations, precursors to World of Color that fused theatrical performance along with fireworks and fountain displays, audiences at the nineteenth century disaster genre would gather to watch large theatrical casts reenacting historical events, from the Fall of Pompeii to the Great Fire of London to Civil War battles. Unlike the Fantasmic and its nineteenth century precursors, World of Color offers no human actors, although Disney Imagineers refer to the fountains as ‘actors’, even naming a small orange fountain ‘Little Squirt’ to memorialise the energy and spirit of the company’s founder. Davison describes the fountains’ role this way, “They become the emotion and the energy and the drama” (2009, part two).[12]

Despite the undeniable sentimentality of Disney’s musical theatre traditions, the show’s choreography of sound, light and colour stimuli in elaborate rhythmic patterns of movement produces a transitory yet hypnotic spectacle. Light and water effects combined transform the spectator’s sense of space through their extensive qualities or ability to shift, fill and colour space and their durational intensity, or metrical rise and fall in space. The synaesthetic combinations of visual, auditory and haptic elements immerse the spectator in constantly transforming, propulsive, surging worlds, or what child psychologist Daniel Stern has described as “vitality effects,” whereby rising and falling movement exemplified by tunnelling, radiating or oscillating light, in conjunction with three dimensional vertical and horizontal display and sensorial address produce an affective charge of intense pleasure and wonder (1993, 54). Pulsating lights around the Ferris wheel are accompanied by rapid horizontal sweeps of fountains in circular or oval patterns around the spectator’s field of vision, which enhance a sense of the show’s immersive proximity. Water and its cooling spray or the heat of fire jets fills the air with dynamic energy. Viewer responses to the show express ecstatic delight in the show’s colour patterns and iconic characters, mixed with physical exhaustion at the culmination of a day’s activities. For example, Amanda L. of San Diego posted on Yelp: “This show blew me away! With the water pyrotechnics, the FIRE, and the projection of Disney classics on water mist. Breathtaking! Maybe I was delusional because of the long day that I had just endured but I was so amazed! It was literally the perfect way to end a long day at the park! And made me feel all sorts of warm and tingly nostalgia.”[13]

Part III: New Media and Google Glass

With 2012’s introduction of ‘Glow with the Show’, or programmable translucent Mickey Mouse Ears worn by spectators which change colours through infrared signals (see Figure 6), the immersive dimensions of the World of Color are intensified (Disneyland 2012). Extending and enfolding the 4000 spectators into the exhibition space, the spectator’s body becomes an additional pulsing and affective modular unit in a light and colour spectacle in which colour becomes ever more sculptural. Interestingly, YouTube video of the Mickey ears in the show makes clear the audience’s embodied responses: with bobbing ears showing spectators dancing in time to the songs, as well as frequent rotation as people turn around and look at their fellow audience members and the changing colours of their ears (“Glow With the Show” 2012).

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Figure 6. Glow with the Show Ears. ©Walt Disney Productions. Frame Grab from Promotional Video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVe93Vhbpxk

Blending the projector and the body, the screen with the spectator, Disney’s instrumentalisation of the body as site of both exhibition and reception in World of Color is shared with new wearable digital devices that combine transparency and opacity as an essential part of their tactile pleasure. Apple, Google, Samsung and Microsoft are all currently working on mobile interfaces from headsets to watches that connect screens on our wrists or our eyes to smartphones, and that allow us to surf the Internet, take photos or videos and post them online.[14] Through augmented reality, wearable devices like Vuzix M100 Smart Glasses (which work with Android phones) animate our worlds by combining transparent headsets with translucent commands or opaque data of specific interest to a particular location. Google Glass is a wearable headset, which uses a transparent LCoS (Liquid Crystal on Silicon) display to put information in front of our eyeballs, and according to its promotional material, uses the bones in our skull to conduct sound “into your inner ear.”[15] It responds to commands prefaced with “OK Glass” to record a video, take a photo, translate a word, or look up something, and can also be operated through taps on a touch sensitive bar on the side of the eyeglass frame. The gestural economy of strokes, wipes and pinches that animate our movement through our iPads and iPhones, Androids, Surfaces and other tablets has transformed our relationship with new media devices, and with Google Glass can now be expanded to include new gestures, such as the wink and the nod.[16]

In its mimicry of Apple’s clean white and titanium aesthetics, Google Glass’ graphic design exemplifies a bubble aesthetic, with its translucent circular menus that ‘pop’ up on the screen (with attendant bubble sound effects) and then float upwards out of sight, which appeared in Google’s early concept videos in 2012. This aesthetic choice does more than connote the playfulness and wonder of childhood, for Google’s 2013 promotional video even shows a child blowing a giant bubble, suggesting that wearing Glass means that the evanescent can always be captured, always archived (“How It Feels”, 2013). Although the 2012 menu design has now changed, 2014 Google videos retain the bubble’s light and playful associations with childhood, and invite us to “live lighter.”

Glass’ augmented reality depends upon a palimpsestic construction of the world in which overlays of virtual data, menus or icons are superimposed on our surrounding reality, such as Glass’ promotional video in which the wearer activates a language translation from Mandarin to English, with “OK glass, Google ‘say half a pound in Chinese’.”[17] Mike Cohan of VR Total Immersion has criticised Google’s claims of augmented reality, recently arguing, “There [has been] very little understanding of what Augmented Reality really is and what it requires. I would describe it as mixing real and virtual on a screen in real time. Just having a video overlay like Google Glass is not Augmented Reality” (Smith 2013). If Cohan’s critique is correct and Glass is merely a superficial overlay on our world, Google’s invocation of bubble aesthetics claims something else: that being in the Google Bubble is a magical, indeed transformative mediation of the everyday.

Two last points about Google Glass before we return to Disney’s World of Color. Since Google launched its initial advertisements in 2012 and with its recent announcement that it will be rolling out its first consumer devices in 2014, the first Glass spoofs emerged (Zeevi 2012). In these parodies, two principal problems of the device are circulating, with the first problem being opacity. Rather than the transparent, clean interface promised in Google marketing, the visual proliferation of commands, symbols, screens and ads will so clutter and impede our vision that the interface becomes a hazard—we will burn our hands while pouring coffee because our depth perception is altered, and we will walk out into traffic or bump into people, all because we have placed an interface between ourselves and the world. A related concern is the need for the eyes to continually adjust focus between the translucent interface or commands and objects in the outer world in a variety of different fields of vision. As commentator Adam Greenfield describes it, “there is a vaguely autistic note to what they are talking about with Google Glass” (Martin 2013). Dashburst has sixteen Glass videos and comic parodies, including # 11 “A New Way to Hurt Yourself” and # 13 “Project Dangerous Glasses” in which simulated Glass POV videos show how web advertising will inevitably appropriate our visual real estate and endanger our safety (Zeevi 2012). Indeed, so widespread have these parodies been that Google has felt the need to respond, emphasising that the viewer’s field of vision is designed to be in the upper right part of the headset, and that impeded vision will not be an issue (Solomon 2013).

If one problem is that Google’s interface is dangerously opaque, a second set of parodies suggest that Glass is dangerously transparent, or both invisible and hypervisible. Invisible, because Google Glass’ archiving capacity to record, photograph and post to the internet can be activated, not only through voice commands but nominally through socially invisible hand gestures, head nods or winks. But as Saturday Night Live’s ‘Google Glass Sketch’ suggests, and as the exaggerated head jerks and other tic-like motions of Fred Armisen as fictional tech blogger ‘Randall Meeks’ show, the user interface can be hypervisible too (Seifert 2013). In Saturday Night Live’s parody, the hyperbolic depiction of technical bugs and the awkward physical interactions between Google user and social observer resituates the problem of Google Glass’ threat to privacy as safely within the socially visible realm (at least for the time being), yet of course also marks a future where the headset becomes as ubiquitous as our smart phones are now, and where we can, and always will be recorded without our knowledge. As Edward Soja has put it, where the illusion of opacity inflates space to a universal ‘given,’ the illusion of transparency reduces it to a subjective condition. While the former illusion tends to reify space, the latter tends to dematerialise it (Soja 1989, 124-127).

So far, in my examination of Google and World of Color I have been playing with two meanings of the word transparent. The first, meaning ‘conducive to the uninterrupted passage of light’ and suggested by the wearer’s Glass interface is one in which space is first dematerialised, only to be re-enlivened through instantaneous archiving. It is one which Google wants us to see as a ‘reanimation,’ indeed spectacularisation of the everyday, and that collapses the temporal and spatial relationships between experiencing and recording, between seeing and wearing. The second meaning of transparency, as ‘easy to see or recognise’ is not only the social problem of that collapse, but also of the invisible structures such as data mining and algorithmic marketing, which are produced by a corporation like Google deeply invested in maintaining the invisibility of its internal operations. For Disney’s World of Color, the night time spectacle dematerialises exhibition space as well as screen surface, only to re-project and re-animate it as an immersive, tactile experience, where our field of vision is filled with light, just as our bodies become modular light elements in the show. Where Google Glass wants to draw the world into us, transforming it into depthless 2D, World of Color wants to extend the display outwards to us as curving multiplanar layers. Where Google Glass’s boundaries are indeterminate with our own bodies, collapsing inside and outside, so too does World of Color challenge perceptual boundaries with its colour baths, reflected light, water spray and heat effects, and, in the case of “Glow with the Show” collapsing reception with exhibition.

The structural persistence of material, conceptual, and aesthetic relationships between transparency, translucency and opacity in new media forms like digital animation or Google Glass exemplify what Richard Grusin has recently named as atavistic cinema. That is, “outmoded cinematic traits that appear to have gone extinct” yet which reappear in the era of new media (2013, 2). By remediating older attractions such as the pyrodrama and disaster genre, the mechanical musical fountain and the light show with projected classical and digital animation, World of Color shows how the structural relationships between transparency and opacity persist, indeed especially at that historical moment in which computer animation has replaced cel animation and when celluloid cinema’s death knell has sounded. Building on older theatrical traditions of spectacular design World of Color showcases transitory yet atavistic pleasures in their elemental forms: air, fire, light, water. By incorporating us into the show, Disney’s World of Color suggests that ‘animation’ can be understood not only as specific technical and material processes, but also as a perceptual and corporeal transformation in which movement, light and colour enlivens, indeed ‘animates’ individual bodies even as it reifies us as part of the spectacle. Paradoxically, through its projection effects and misty surfaces it reminds us again of cel animation’s materiality, glimpsed in and alongside its digital replacement. Yet most of all, World of Color wants us to believe with our very bodies that the iconicity of Disney’s characters lives in, but always transcends the transparent, the (cel)luloid and the ephemeral.

Acknowledgements

This paper is a revised version of a keynote address delivered May 31, 2013, at the ‘Intermediations’ Symposium, Otago University, New Zealand. Its examination of issues that bridge classical cel animation and the contemporary digital era forms an epilogue tomy current research project Color and Classical Cel Animation. I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of this paper, which helped me draw out certain nascent issues.

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Notes

[1] As both Suzanne Buchan and Maureen Furniss (2013) have noted the provenance for this varies. It has variously been reported as delivered by McLaren in a Lecture in 1961. See Ernest Callenbach (1962-1963). Maureen Furniss reports a letter exchange between Georges Sifianos and Norman McLaren in 1986 in which the meaning of this statement is discussed (1998, 12, n. 8). McLaren’s statement is also published in André Martin (n.d.) and in Cinema (1957). Both McLaren and Len Lye used direct animation, or scratching or painting directly onto the filmstrip, in which relationships of light, transparency and opacity are central.

[2] For example Otto Messmer’s Epok advertising of the forties. See Moana Thompson (2014), Tell (2007) and Canemaker (1996).

[3] The Fountain People developed eight different fountains for Disney, which included grid, chaser, single water whips, dual water whips, flower spouts, dancers, butterflies and geysers. See Anon, “Fanciful Fountains Take Center Stage in Spectacular World of Color Show at DCA,” at Mouseinfo.com at http://www.mouseinfo.com/forums/dlr-news-info/91956-fanciful-fountains-take-center-stage-spectacular-world-colora-show-dca.html for detailed descriptions of these fountains. According to Libby Slate the specifications included the following, “The fountain control system was devised via a partnership between Disney, MA Lighting, and Fisher Technical Services, Inc. (FTSI), using inputs from grandMA 2 consoles using MA-Net protocol and outputs EtherCAT industrial machine protocol to the fountain systems. The system was conceived by technical producer Chuck Davis and fountain programmer and designer Jason Badger. The entire operator interface comprises four grandMA 2 consoles, seven NPUs, and a replay unit. Special LED lights were developed for each fountain, and laser effects were designed by Claude Lifante, with 4 Phaenon 15500 RGB diode-pumped lasers that mix for 13W of light” (2010).

[4] As Robin Allan (1996) has noted, water has been a frequent subject in Disney animated films and a key design element in Disneyland.

[5] The Bellagio fountains were designed by WET or Water Entertainment Technologies. Co-founded in 1983 by Disney Imagineers Mark Fuller, Melanie Simon and Alan Robinson (who were involved in fountain design for Walt Disney World and the Fountain of Nations for Epcot), it illustrates the interconnections between Disney and the wider world of innovative water design.

[6] The team described the technology necessary to produce the high definition projection of the images with “twenty-eight Christie Roadster S+20K projectors served by 12 Green Hippo Hippotizers routed via a Vista Spyder to blend and setup the large multi-projector screens” (Slate 2010).

[7] For more on Disney’s innovations in colour cinematography, see Telotte (2008) and Neupert (1985, 1990, 1999). For further reading on Disney colour and its relationship to space, see Telotte (2010, 76-77).

[8] I thank my anonymous reviewer for these and other connections.

[9] For further reading on the technology, engineering and aesthetics of fountain design, see Adams (1979), Attlee (2008) and Symmes (1998).

[10] For more on Rimington’s colour organs, see Yumibe (2009, 2012, 33-36, 39). For Son et Lumiere see entry at Encyclopedia Britannica, http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/554172/son-et-lumiere.

[11] For more information on Santa Claus Land see RoadsideAmerica.com (n.d.) and Adams (1991).

[12] Mouseinfo.com describes the World of Color’s eight types of fountains as the show’s ‘breakthrough stars’: “These eight versatile performers made their debut June 11. While they are apt to respond to applause with grateful encores, no autographs, please” (2011). See also Davison (2010).

[13] Yvonne L. of La Jolla posted on Yelp, “Fifteen minutes in and I’m weeping at the beauty of the show and the passing of my childhood and all the emotions I didn’t know I could feel. I’ve seen it three times and I am more amazed each time” (August 31, 2013). Accessed November 18, 2013. http://www.yelp.co.nz/biz/disneys-world-of-color-anaheim.

[14] See Solomon (2013), Rougeau (2013a, 2013b). L. Frank Baum, author of The Wizard of Oz series, wrote a short story for boys called “The Master Key” that premediated a number of futuristic inventions in its narrative of a boy who inadvertently summons a Demon of Electricity. Along with the taser, a wireless phone and a number of other gifts, the boy is given a pair of electrical spectacles called the Character Marker. Handily, the spectacles superimpose letters on the people around him, whether G for ‘good’, F for ‘foolish’, E for ‘evil’ etc., and are a proto form of augmented reality. Available at Project Gutenberg. http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/436/pg436.txt.

[15] Google Glass.com, http://www.google.com/glass/start/.

[16] The Apple iPhone’s famous incorporation of Corning’s Gorilla Glass was motivated by the aesthetic superiority and tactile pleasure of glass as an interactive surface (Walter Isaacson 2011, 471-72). After privacy concerns about Mike Giovanni’s app ‘Winky’ were raised, Google removed this app and also stated that Glass will not use facial recognition software. It has attempted to reassure the public that operation of Google Glass will be socially visible, “We have built explicit signals in Glass to make others aware of what’s happening … In each case, the illuminated screen, voice command or gesture all make it clear to those around the device what the user is doing” (Solomon 2013).

[17] I use the term palimpsestic, not only because of its historical significance in cel animation, but also because the trace left by Google Glass is in the form of the archived audio or video recording.

Bio: Kirsten Moana Thompson is Professor of Film Studies and Director of the Film Programme at Victoria University, in Wellington, New Zealand, and previously Associate Professor and Director of the Film Program at Wayne State University in Detroit. She teaches and writes on animation and colour studies, as well as classical Hollywood cinema, German, New Zealand and Pacific studies. She is the author of Apocalyptic Dread: American Cinema at the Turn of the Millennium (SUNY Press, 2007); Crime Films: Investigating the Scene (Wallflower: 2007), and is currently working on a new book on Colour, Visual Culture and Animation.

Abstract: In recent years there has been much focus on the opportunities that mobile media devices (phones, tablets) offer for user-generated audio-video production. Most often this focus has concentrated on content with emphasis on new citizen journalism and YouTube home videos. Less attention has been given to the negotiations of aesthetic parameters that mark a departure from traditional filmmaking modes. In particular, the tendency for a new generation of filmmakers to shoot on mobile phones has led to a number of works produced in a vertical (portrait format). Initially dismissed as content “shot the wrong way”, vertical videos have proliferated in the exhibition platforms provided by YouTube, Facebook and other social media sites. This article examines the trend for shooting in a vertical mode, the material markers of ‘authenticity’ this mode appears to lend to its audio-visual content, and the effect of circulating this material in a context where other users can ‘police’ videos for bad practice. It will focus, in particular on how these aspects interact with the different mediations of authenticity that emerge from new screen technologies amongst the ongoing contingency of media forms.

The “CAUGHT ON CAMERA: Fertilizer Plant Explosion Near Waco, Texas” video on YouTube

In 2013, a video entitled “CAUGHT ON CAMERA: Fertilizer Plant Explosion Near Waco, Texas” was uploaded to YouTube. It records the 17^th April ammonium nitrate explosion at the West Fertilizer Company Storage and Distribution Facility from the perspective of an observer who is seated in a car beyond the perimeter of the plant. One of the aesthetic considerations that most clearly signals that it was recorded by an ‘everyday’ user is its use of vertical framing (the production of moving images in a portrait mode). Due in part to the proliferation of mobile phone cameras, which record in a vertical mode when the phone is held upright, vertical videos have begun to circulate widely on YouTube and other social media sites. Because they depart from the professional standard of horizontal composition, vertical videos are commonly perceived to be shot by amateur users rather than professional filmmakers. They tend to become known to a wider audience only when distributed as viral videos and/or they are picked up by traditional news channels as alternatives to professional news footage.[1] Similar to many newsworthy vertical videos, the vertical framing in the “Fertilizer Plant” iterates a sense of authenticity: the vertical mode’s association with amateur users suggests an everyday user providing unmediated witness to events as they occur rather than a professional filmmaker involved in staging and careful composition.[2] Although the relationship between authenticity and aesthetic configurations is always contingent upon historical, social and cultural uses of media, in cases such as this, vertical framing emphasises the potential for new media technologies to be used for capturing the ‘moment’ and emphasising the object of observation rather than traditional aesthetic concerns. At the same time that the “Fertilizer Plant” video breaks with a hundred year plus tradition of displaying moving-images in a horizontal, or landscape, format, it signals some interlinked debates around authenticity, aesthetics and new media technologies that are currently being worked through in the context of a new media backdrop where moving image screens proliferate to a greater extent than ever before and in increasingly diverse configurations (for example, Manovich 2001, 94; Friedberg 2009, 6; Verhoeff 2012; Casetti 2011). Within this context, I will discuss how vertical media generates possibilities for a new, increasingly flexible audio-visual environment in the early twenty-first century and how the use of a seemingly ‘amateur’ mode of framing raises issues around concepts of authenticity and aesthetic norms.[3]

Although YouTube has an idiosyncratic and diverse range of material on its site (that ranges from HD video and 3D enabled films to stop motion animation and pixelated phone videos) the “Fertilizer Plant” video exemplifies what has become known as the YouTube video aesthetic: an audiovisual object that expresses user-generated content through an amateur rather than professional appearance (Cubitt 2008, 45; Burgess and Green 2009a, 90; Müller 2009, 136).[4] This particular video’s affective power lies in the way that it combines its amateur appearance with an explosive event that is more akin to the pyrotechnic effects of a blockbuster action film. The spontaneity of the blast combines with the realisation that there are observers in the car who are perilously close to the fireball at the Plant. It is not unique in this regard as various YouTube videos capture spectacular ‘real life’ events but it is distinct from the many mundane domestic amateur films that circulate on YouTube.[5] At the same time, the shocking impact of the video’s events are not wholly due to its content but are also supported by aesthetic configurations that indicate to the viewer the events were not staged and the observers in the car were ‘true’ witnesses to the explosion. In no preferred order, these aesthetic configurations operate in the following ways: the slight shake from the hand held position indicates a human observer and, in this particular video, the observer is evident through the display of the filmmaker in the car’s side mirror; the view of the filmmaker makes it clear the video is filmed on a mobile phone, an amateur recording device notable for its spontaneous filming potential; the lack of staged lighting or artificial sets combines with a lack of cuts to express a type of ‘unmediated witness’ to the events that unfold; the wind buffering the microphone on the mobile camera reminds us of a recording device that is present; the lack of closure at the end of the film (as we struggle to know whether the invisible but presumably present members of the car are okay[6]) colludes with a number of open media texts that circulate somewhat anonymously online.[7]

Additional to all of these factors is the use of vertical framing. Beyond merely suggesting an amateur user, the vertical video gestures powerfully to a subjective human observer behind the camera. It suggests a person who has a mobile phone, close to hand, and has initiated the camera without changing their normal bodily hold upon that technological device. Even though mobile phones such as the Nokia C6were designed to encourage users to hold them in a horizontal alignment, most camera-enabled phones, particularly the new generation of iPhone and Android-based smart phones, are configured to operate primarily in a vertical alignment. In this way, use of a vertical filming mode reinforces the filmmakers’ personal touch as well as a sense of immediacy and presence within the act of filming. These components contrast with the seemingly impersonal viewpoints created by virtual cameras in CGI compositions, in which no filmmaker could be present such as shots high above Earth or shots passing through the walls of buildings (Brooker 2009; Jones 2013; Purse 2013). At a time when visual manipulation tools make it increasingly impossible to identify which visual objects are a ‘faithful’ record of an event and which are staged, vertical framing suggests (whether truthfully or not[8]) that no such manipulation has taken place.[9]

This type of aesthetic positioning of a real life event is not without historical precedence. In his discussion of the use of camcorder footage in documentary and news broadcasts towards the end of the twentieth century, Jon Dovey notes that

the low grade video image has become the privileged form of TV ‘truth telling’, signifying authenticity and an indexical reproduction of the real world; indexical in the sense of presuming a direct and transparent correspondence between what is in front of the camera lens and its taped representation. Secondly, the camcorder text has become the form that most relentlessly insists upon a localised, subjective and embodied account of experience. Finally, the video text has become the form that represents better than any other the shifting perimeters of the public and the private. Video texts shot on lightweight camcorders uniquely patrol, re-produce and penetrate the boundaries between the individual subject and the public, material world. (2000, 55)

Mobile phone footage offers the most recent iteration of this context, demonstrating, on the one hand, historical continuity whereby technology serves rather than creates desires for seemingly authentic material that mixes the public and the private and, on the other hand, the potential for new technologies to reinforce and renew the embodied relationship between filmmaker, text and viewer (Hjorth 2006, 2). It is in this context that Max Schleser has discussed the way in which the mobile phone, operating as a hand-held recording device, presents opportunities to “construct personal narratives and representations of self” (2012, 400; see also Hjorth 2006). Similarly, Gavin Wilson notes “such films repeatedly reference the body and sensory perception, evoking the sense of what objects feel like as we look at them, as objects and as images” (2012, 68). In each case, these possibilities are contingent upon the extent to which the mobile technology continues to reiterate the presence of its user and the extent to which the technology is upgraded so that its images are no longer discernible from professional footage. In an era in which YouTube offers to stabilise uploaded videos, phones increasingly offer HD settings, and readily available editing software allows the addition of professional levels of colour grading and sound mixes, it is not always possible to view the traces of an amateur and/or embodied user within the footage. However, in its current manifestation, a vertical framing mode cannot be subsumed within professional filmmaking practice. Apart from the fact that there is not a body of professional vertical works for the new vertical piece to join, few professional screens exist for its exhibition and so YouTube and mobile screens remain its natural home.

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Figure 1. YouTube offers a range of configurations to help professionalise the appearance of videos

When exhibited on the mobile screen, it is possible to see that the vertical mode articulates a conflation of audiovisual technologies: the distinction between capture and display devices (Wilson 2012). Since the earliest motion-picture cameras, which had the dual function of capturing images on film and then replaying that film in a projector mode, there has been the ability to use cameras as both recording and display devices. Nonetheless, the speed with which digital devices such as the mobile phone (and increasingly the tablet) can replay images recorded by the camera leads to a sense of immediacy which couples the camera device to its screening function. Immediate playback can lead to forms of intimate encounters between the device, text and viewer. At the same time, the current novelty of vertical framing emphasises how the coupling of mobile filming/display device with filmmaker/viewer create unique convergences that are not available in traditional media.

While this framing mode can be understood productively as a new iteration of digital vernacular practice, unease with its appropriation of moving image capture/screen technology has appeared. Vertical videos operate in a context whereby new technologies and their users do not function in isolation but are, instead, conditioned by networked, discursive, peer practice that is highly visible in contemporary, Internet-oriented, society:

The instant and permanent visibility and availability of social peers (and the permanent exposure of their content-related activities) enable the instant and permanent social control of exposed activities and connect the semipublic-mediated space with the private place of home. In addition, the convergent nature of the platform (i.e. the permanent and straightforward possibility to receive, post and repost various media) lowers barriers for the participation in content and at the same time brings the text right next to the negotiations of its value. (Macek 2013, 298-9)

The negotiation of the value of vertical videos has been particularly prevalent on YouTube, one of the main exhibition platforms for vertical media. The most visible debate on this topic has been conducted through and in relation to a video that appeared in June 2012, “Vertical Video Syndrome—A PSA.”  The video uses a highly comic parody of United States style Public Service Announcements (PSA) to explain to audiences why shooting in a vertical mode is incorrect. It makes statements ranging from the technical, “vertical videos happen when you hold your camera the wrong way,” to the technological, “while you can turn a picture, you can’t really turn a video … Motion pictures have always been horizontal. Televisions are horizontal. Computer screens are horizontal” and the biological “People’s eyes are horizontal.” It has gathered a significant number of views (4.3 million at the time of writing) and pages of comments on YouTube as well as repeated ‘shares’ throughout social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook.

“Vertical Video Syndrome—A PSA”

Other, similar videos have been produced such as “Turn Your Phone! (Vertical Video PSA)” in July 2013 and “Turn Your Phone! (‘No Scrubs’ parody with Andrew Huang, DailyGrace, Hannah Hart, Soundlyawake)” in June 2013. Both are set to music: the former portrays a young man, showing various people filming on their mobile phones, how to turn their camera “the correct way” and the latter shows a female singer explaining why videos should be shot in a landscape mode. The videos are entertaining and light-hearted but perpetuate a number of aesthetic ideas surrounding the way in which new camera technologies, particularly the camera phone, should be regulated.

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Figure 2. “Turn Your Phone! (‘No Scrubs’ parody with Andrew Huang, DailyGrace, Hannah Hart, Soundlyawake)”

Foremost in their claims is a normalisation of the landscape format as somehow biologically informed and historically pervasive. With regards to the biological argument, originally initiated in the “Vertical Video Syndrome” video, the claim that “people’s eyes are horizontal [sic]” has had a particular resonance with viewers providing comments on YouTube and has been repeated regularly in other Internet discussion sites such as Twitter. In the first instance, this statement ignores a lengthy history of recorded images with roots in the camera obscura whereby “the camera obscura, with its monocular aperture, became a more prefect terminus for a cone of vision, a more perfect incarnation of a single point than the awkward binocular body of the human subject” (Crary 1992, 53; see also Friedberg). Efforts in the nineteenth century to overcome this problem resulted in obsessive attempts by stereoscopic photographers such as David Brewster and John F. Mascher to create two-camera apparatuses that would exactly mimic the eyes’ relations and retinas (Silverman 1993; Pietrobruno 2011). Similarly, a number of twentieth century stereoscopic filmmakers have been equally determined to provide orthoscopic views that exactly replicate the human field of perception (Lipton 1982, 134). The failure for their experiments to take hold as the dominant way of producing photographic images points to the extent to which biological determinism and photographic reproduction have only limited interest for audiences. Even IMAX screens that are designed to exceed the boundaries of human peripheral vision operate within a rectangular frame that is distinct from the seemingly unbounded scope of human vision, particularly with the eye’s ability to focus on and narrow in on a range of different fields. Moreover, there is the problematic assumption embedded in the statement about horizontal eyes that a person must have full vision in both eyes in order to appreciate moving images.

The extent to which horizontal moving-images are historically pervasive is also often emphasised in discussions of vertical framing to the detriment of a more nuanced historical approach that takes in to account the lengthy history of diverse visual culture. Although visual culture has produced art in a variety of forms (square, circular, oval, portrait rectangle, landscape rectangle) and across different media, moving-image production has been mainly confined to a landscape rectangular format that is most commonly found in either a 4:3 or 16:9aspect ratio. Yet, as John Belton notes, even when W. K. L Dickson and the Lumière Brothers popularised the 4:3 35mm film format during cinema’s development, there was no obvious technological precedent for this standard. Photography in the nineteenth century had a range of aspect ratios and shapes (square, circular, rectangular) and was not standardised into a similar 4:3 aspect ratio until the twentieth century, after the development of cinema. Similarly, nineteenth century hand-painted lanternslides came in a variety of shapes and sizes. Thus,

there is nothing “natural” about these formats. They do not seem to have grown ‘organically’ out of some prior medium of representation. Nor do they initially appear to be automatic consequences of the invention process. At the same time, they were not quite arrived at arbitrarily. (Belton 1992, 18)

The technological conditions that demanded effective ease of reproduction during cinema’s global development means it is hardly surprising that a rectangular, landscape format was arrived at but it is, paradoxically, the non-arbitrary nature of technological development that gave rise to alternatives to the landscape mode. One such alternative arose during the development of stereoscopic (3D) cameras. An early problem was that the desire to produce separate left and right eve views for stereoscopic footage resulted in the need for two cameras and two projectors in order to film and display footage. The added expense and difficulty in synchronising footage meant that it was desirable to develop cameras that could simultaneously record the left and right eye image on one filmstrip. The result was cameras such as the16mm Bolex camera which split the horizontal frame in two and recorded left and right eye images on each half of the frame. When played back, the projector was focused using a projection lens with polarising filters in order to overlay the two halves of the frame into a singular, vertical, stereoscopic image on a vertical screen. Unsurprisingly, the need for a vertical screen at a time when standard screens were horizontal meant that this technology reached an end point in amateur users while professional 3D filmmakers developed systems that would work in a traditional landscape mode (Hayes 1989; Zone 2007). Nonetheless, important stereoscopic documentation of the twentieth century did take place in a vertical mode, such as the Co-operative Wholesale Society’s documentary on 1950s Britain in Co-op 3-D Film (1952).[10]

More recently advertising displays in transport facilities such as underground stations and airports have begun displaying moving-image content on vertical screens. In the London Underground, for example, the numerous escalators carrying passengers from platforms to exits, and vice versa, have vertical screens placed on their walls. Similarly, in Glasgow airport there are a number of vertical screens next to the arrivals and departures screens that show moving-image advertisements in a vertical frame. The architecture of these spaces means that horizontal screens would be inappropriate and so advertisers have developed vertical moving-image content (often in the form of short animations or brief live action scenes, for example “Clarins Vertical LED TV.”  In each of the aforementioned examples of vertical filmmaking and display, there is nothing arbitrary about the decision to place or view moving-images in a portrait format. Instead, they remain tentative examples of what new screen cultures might be able to offer in terms of aesthetic experimentation. While fixed screens will always require that content is created in order to match its intended display, the greatest change in twenty-first century screen culture is the portability and malleability of screens on offer. At this time tablets, mobile phones and other portable screens are limited to rectangular frames but the ability to turn this frame into either portrait or landscape mode means that moving image content can be configured depending on which framing possibility best suits the subject being filmed.[11]

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Figure 3. Departure and advertisement screens at Glasgow Airport

Attention to how vertical framing suits the ergonomic conditions of the filming device andthe subject matter means that vertical videos can be understood more as a form of vernacular creativity than an aesthetic error in filmmaking modes. Examples of vertical videos that have been posted on YouTube and Facebook often suggest a hasty reach for the camera and opportunistic filming decision (adding to the sense that they reproduce unmediated, ‘authentic’ moments in the filmmakers life). This accounts, in part, for how the embodied hold on a mobile device translates into the framing mode. However, this practice does not mean that the filmmaker is inconsiderate of the visual field that the vertical mode will capture. Instead, certain subjects encourage a vertical mode. For example when a single human is the focus of the video, they are often framed to take up the central sections of the screen as is the case of the Irish dancer performing on top of a train’s table in “Incredible Set Dancing & Trad Session on Dublin Train to Galway”  or the man jumping on a trampoline in “Epic trampoline flip FAIL dog attack.”  A type of portrait framing for subjects directly addressing the camera is also seen. This is evident in the New Zealand Red Cross’ addressthestress.com website where, amongst others, Olympic rower Mahé Drysdale speaks about how to deal with stressful situations in a vertical video aimed at New Zealand youths.  When the architecture of space means that a vertical corridor of action predominates, portrait framing is also used. For example, the interiors of trains, subway cars and other carriages or building corridors and stairways are frequently framed in a portrait format. This can be seen in the interior of a light rail car during “Light Rail Bushido Blade! It’s all fun and games until someone pulls out a sword”  and during a shot of dogs descending down a staircase in “Puppy teaching Puppy to go down stairs! SO cute!—ORIGINAL VIDEO!.”  Unprofessional videos such as the series of students performing trapeze moves on the Aerial Edge Facebook page unashamedly use a portrait format in order to provide as much detail of the moving bodies as possible in videos that are both celebratory of the students’ skills and informative for those trying to see how the moves are undertaken.

Finally, a number of smart phone applications, such as Talking Tom Cat, present characters in a portrait format that users can animate and share on sites such as YouTube, resulting in numerous vertical videos such as “Talking Ben and Talking Tom” that has had over 9 million views.  In each case, the vertical mode frames events in ways that suit the subject matter.

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Figure 4. From left to right: “Incredible Set Dancing & Trad Session on Dublin Train to Galway,” “Epic trampoline flip FAIL dog attack,” “Puppy teaching Puppy to go down stairs! SO cute!—ORIGINAL VIDEO!” and “Talking Ben and Talking Tom”

The extent to which this mode, and its revelation of a new type of digital vernacular, will be accepted is dependent upon the mechanisms of highly scrutinised exhibition environments. Although many mobile phone videos are made to be viewed only by the filmmaker or distributed only to personal contacts, the new ‘sharing’ features on most smart phones means that filmmakers are encouraged to distribute videos immediately via Internet platforms. By returning to Jakub Macek’s point that the visibility and connectivity of peers mediates the production of content in online spaces, it is possible to recognise the ways in which a negotiation of vertical media’s newfound place is occurring through and beyond that of the Vertical Video PSA videos. Not only are the PSAs highly visible on YouTube, they also reflect and contribute to comments that spread across a range of Internet forums, websites and social media sites. In the first instance, commentators often repeat the main claims in the “Vertical Video Syndrome” video: vertical videos happen when you hold your camera the wrong way/while you can turn a picture, you can’t really turn a video/motion pictures have always been horizontal/ televisions are horizontal/ computer screens are horizontal/people’s eyes are horizontal. In the second instance, they frequently provide links to the “Vertical Video Syndrome” video (that has outpaced the other PSA videos in terms of popularity) which further increases the visibility of the claims in the original video. Examples of this taking place can be seen in websites such as Provideocontent where a post reiterates that “the screens we watch video on are horizontal” followed by the Vertical Video Syndrome video in an embedded link.  Similarly, a search of Twitter on 30 October 2013 found more than a dozen tweets, within a 24-hour time period, in different languages, posting links to the Vertical Video Syndrome video with comments such as “protect yourself! Keep yourself from shooting vertical,” “shooting vertical video on a smartphone? You’re doing it wrong” and “a very serious problem: Vertical Video Syndrome.” When one user, Mike Griffith, started a thread on Twitter saying “there should be a global campaign to get people shooting video on a smartphone to hold it in landscape” the reply was “why don’t the cool phone maker peeps just do a pop-up alert telling you ‘Turn it round, turn it round’.” Subsequent tweets noted that YouTube and Google’s capture applications have functions that already do so. Further addressing this issue, an app for the Apple Store called Horizon was developed that would similarly discourage users from filming in a vertical mode (Liszewski 2014).

This type of technological reminder can be considered in light of Michel de Certeau’s (1988) description of strategies and tactics, whereby institutions and figures of authority put in place strategies for the correct use of consumer products while users often perform tactics that negotiate and change this intended use. The introduction of software that conditions how users may film content on mobile cameras suggests a reiteration of strategy in the face of vertical video tactics. However, there is not merely a simple division between those who control products and everyday users. Instead, there is a complex interplay at work between technology manufacturers, everyday users, and their peer networks. Following Pierre Bourdieu, Jakub Macek notes that

through participation, we establish our common interest in shared content and so we ensure that our cultural capital (and thus our values, preferences, tastes and opinions) and that of those included in our social circles are compatible, that we are surrounded by ‘proper people’ with ‘proper interests’ and that our textual interests and pleasures are consistent with the rest of our habitus. (2013, 298)

In the vertical video context, filmmakers are often operating within peer networks that are attuned to performing correct consumer operation of filming equipment that has been embedded in and reinforced by traditional media. Yet a tension emerges between the cultural habitus in which users are expected to conform to standard horizontal norms and a parallel, embodied technological habitus which encourages users to hold their phone in the vertical position that non-video applications and other content encourages.[12]Although these different habitus represent the meeting of contradictory strategies (media institutions indicating the horizontal framing is correct, hardware manufacturing that encourages a vertical display), their incongruence is overlooked in discussions of vertical video. Instead of recognising the way users are tactically engaging with media technology in new ways, the assumption in the Vertical Video PSAs and related comments on social network sites is that filmmakers shooting in a vertical mode do so because they are amateur users who do not know better and/or do not have the skills and training to conform to professional norms. Paradoxically, by distancing vertical videos as amateur, commentators reiterate the likely authenticity of vertical videos as unmediated documentation. In contexts where authenticity is favoured, such as news sites and certain realms of social media, vertical videos are thus given additional value.

The vertical videos discussed thus far include many or all of the traits discussed in relation to the “Fertilizer Plant” video and in this way demonstrate amateur practice. At the same time, their successful circulation (23.3 million views for the “Fertilizer Plant” video at the time of writing) means that they are often able to gain more exposure and recognition than the wide variety of professional filmmaking practitioners who put portions of their work on YouTube. It is not surprising, then, that tensions arise when these two groups operate within a shared exhibition platform. Significant to this context is the extent to which blogs, posts, tweets and videos calling for an end to vertical video are often from non-professional filmmakers or otherwise liminal media practitioners. With regards to this type of behaviour amongst filmmakers on YouTube, Eggo Müller notes that similar processes take place when amateur and professional filmmakers interact through videos and forums dedicated to ‘upskilling’ the average YouTube user. He notes that a quality discourse prevails whereby relatively conservative adherence to traditional filmmaking norms is upheld but he also states that it is impossible to delineate a clear boundary between amateurs and professionals within this process. Instead,

users with different backgrounds and interests in YouTube contribute to and maintain this quality discourse. Full, semi-, pre- and post-professionals use YouTube to share and promote their knowledge, and dabblers, novices and amateurs contribute to the same discourse through their questions and comments. As opposed to the era of mass media—with producers on the one side and consumers on the other – there is a diverse field of positions in the space of participation YouTube creates. (2009, 136)

In this context, the efforts to police a portrait framing practice become a means for some users to distinguish themselves as knowledgeable and attuned to the importance of visual aesthetics at a time when sites such as YouTube offer a type of anarchic free-for-all. Thus, conformity to a perceived set of professional norms is “exposed, articulated and reproduced in a performative interaction” (Macek 2013, 299).

However, for every desire to be valued by and incorporated into a social milieu there are often antithetical desires to be visibly unique (Macek 2013, 299). This means that, aside from advertising professionals who have been contracted to produce vertical moving-images for billboard display, there are a small, but growing number of media practitioners advocating a portrait mode in order to produce distinct aesthetic effects. As will be discussed, their work is supported by digital viewing platforms, but there are antecedents for their work in experimental filmmaking practice such as Paolo Gioli’s vertical Film Stenopeico (1973/81/89), Commutazione con mutazione (1969) and L’operatore perforato (1979) (Bordwell 2009) andBill Viola’s “The Messenger” and “The Crossing” (Young 1997).[13]Building on the challenges these experimental films pose to an understanding of traditional compositional strategies, some groups of digitally oriented filmmakers are using the exhibition platform Vimeo to showcase experiments in vertical framing.[14] Started in 2010, the main focal point for this activity is the Tallscreen group that provides a space to upload short vertical films. Although not directly stated, it is implied that there is a concern with distinguishing these works from the amateur efforts being produced elsewhere and to this end there are calls to use High Definition SLR cameras or equivalents in order to “avoid the non aesthetic Jello Effect.”

Elsewhere on Vimeo, artist Gregory Gutenko has uploaded versions of his work such as “Rail Poem” (2012) and “Orientation Video” (2012) that have been exhibited in a portrait aspect ratio in gallery space.  The former focuses on motion through landscapes, often with an emphasis on movement that follow the narrow borders of railway tracks. Careful editing and manipulation of images means that various parts of what the camera has captured are morphed together and laid over one another within individual shots. The latter uses an upside down camera to produced “upside down” images that then frame media devices such as a television displaying their own images “upside down” which in turn appear the correct way up to viewers. In each case, portrait formatting concentrates attention on movement and objects in the screen space that would no longer be central in the same way were the frame to be widened. In a similar manner, Christoph A. Geiseler’s documentary Curry Power (2012) (http://www.verticalvideos.com/index.html) experiments with vertical framing. Like the Vimeo Tallscreen group, Geiseler narrates his reasons for using the portrait format. “Musicians on a stage, runway models, train-tracks disappearing into the distance, close-up portraits, skyscrapers and trees beg for a vertical video to capture their inherent beauty: the essence of their form, flow and function is vertical.” Like the filmmakers mentioned before, the attention given to his practice sets his work apart from the vertical videos that are deemed and contextualised as amateur content. In this way, discourses of authenticity are less apparent but bridging the artistic and unmediated documentation contexts for vertical filming is a film by musician Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips group. In 2013 he produced A Year In The Life Of Wayne’s Phone, a film that premiered at the SXSW festival in March of that year. Filmed on his iPhone, A Year in the Life of Wayne, took vertical moving-images shot by Coyne and displayed them three at a time, side by side on an horizontal screen. Noted as a somewhat jumbled assemblage of footage from Coyne’s personal and professional life, the film captured the unruly nature of unplanned and hastily thrown together YouTube videos while simultaneously elevating them to a status worthy of a film festival audience (even though reviews of the festival screening were not always complimentary [Miller 2013; Saldana 2013]).

Heaven (2013)

In my own experiments with colleagues at Victoria University of Wellington, I have been able to contribute to short films that take into consideration these vertical concerns as well as how our films can be exhibited. In our first short film “Heaven” (2013),  we wanted to make use of new DIY media technologies and so we shot the film on an HTC mobile phone and in a portrait format. This process posited its own creative possibilities that enriched our sense of aesthetic experience.

In my own experiments with colleagues at Victoria University of Wellington, I have been able to contribute to short films that take into consideration these vertical concerns as well as how our films can be exhibited. In our first short film “Heaven” (2013),  we wanted to make use of new DIY media technologies and so we shot the film on an HTC mobile phone and in a portrait format. This process posited its own creative possibilities that enriched our sense of aesthetic experience.

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Figure 5: Poster for Christoph A. Geiseler’s Curry Power (2012)

We often found ourselves visualising sequences in a horizontal format as we were accustomed to working within that framing but then had to recalibrate our mental images as we composed individual shots. However, we found that the focus on human subjects within our script (essentially a story of two idiosyncratic male characters portrayed over a week’s timeframe in Wellington, New Zealand) was supported by vertical framing and we were able to utilise space in ways that we hadn’t previously conceived of. For example, the opening shot is of a plane flying overhead on its way to land at Wellington airport. The vertical framing allows the underbelly of the plane to take up the majority of screen space, intonating the visceral and dizzying feeling that occurs when one watches a plane fly overhead. At various points in the film a two-shot is constructed between the male characters. They do not speak to one another and so it was useful to frame their bodies vertically in a way that emphasised the subtle interactions between them that take place through whole body positioning. While the film could have been shot with horizontal framing and the essence of the story would have remained, the details of our composition and the way in which this framed the relationship between the characters would have been altered. Knowing that the eventual distribution for the film would take place on YouTube and the film would ideally be viewed on portable vertical screens such as smart phones and tablets, we also took into consideration Andreas Treske’s questions concerning developing visual work for small screens: “how does the development of smaller screens and online video influence how we compose and create images? How is the reproduction of images influenced by its assumed viewing environment? How is it related to the viewing situations of its audience if these are not the cinema theatre or the television set with its attached couch?” (2008, 215). For this reason we attempted to compose bold dynamic shots that suited vertical framing for small screen viewing.

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Figure 6: “Heaven” (2013)

While the aforementioned vertical works have mainly used live action footage, there have also been experiments with other media. The Alicewinks (alicewinks.com) project created by David Neal originated in a desire to animate the various illustrations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) that appeared in different publications of the text around the beginning of the twentieth century. Because these illustrations were mainly in a portrait format, the animation was conceived of in this way and Alicewinks follows a variety of different visual versions of Alice as she moves through the narrative of the original book, all within a vertical framing. The story of the work’s journey from production to exhibition is illustrative of the changing landscape of screen technologies and the way in which traditional formats retain a hold on the way new media works can be conceived and distributed. Due to its feature film length, Neal initially approached Apple’s iTunes in order to distribute it through their Movie store but because of its vertical format Apple responded that it could not be distributed as a movie but might be better distributed through their App Store. The App Store stated that the piece was not sufficiently interactive and suggested returning to the Movie Store. Unable to resolve the issue between either of these stores, Neal eventually found a place for Alicewink’s distribution in Apple’s iBookstore. For many viewers, its placement here means that it will initially be perceived as a book yet its ability to provide vertical moving images in tablets and e-book means that its audiences will be exposed to portrait format moving images.

In 2008, Lev Manovich asked: “given that the significant percentage of user-generated content either follows the templates and conventions set up by professional entertainment industry, or directly re-uses professionally produced content … does this mean that people’s identities and imagination are now even more firmly colonized by commercial media than in the twentieth century?” (36; see also van Dijck 2009) On the one hand, the continued policing of vertical videos and the desires to prove that there are correct, inflexible ways of framing content confirms the extent to which media traditions retain a stronghold on aesthetic practice. On the other hand, the proliferation of user-filmed vertical videos on YouTube and social networking sites suggests vertical framing may find its place as part of a new digital vernacular. Furthermore, the small but steady uptake of digital vertical content in animation, advertising billboards, gallery works and short films on Vimeo, suggests that new screen environments are creating new aesthetic practice. Manovich goes on to draw upon Michel de Certeau to suggest

a city’s layout, signage, driving and parking rules and maps are strategies created by governmental and corporate interests. The ways an individual is moving through the city, taking shortcuts, wandering aimlessly, navigating through favourite routes and adopting others are tactics. In other words, an individual can’t physically reorganize the city but she can adopt itself to her needs by choosing how she moves through it. (2008, 37)

I would suggest that, within this analogy, vertical framing is more akin to squatting: it is the occupation of a space and a way of undertaking habitation that is related to the normal use of this space but in new, unauthorised ways.

As this article has sought to prove, there is no inherent technological determinant that means moving-images must be displayed in a horizontal format yet there are technological concerns that make portrait and landscape modes more or less advantageous depending, firstly, on the screen environment in which they are to be exhibited, and secondly, on the type of content that filmmakers wish to portray. To return to the “Fertilizer Plant” video, its vertical framing acts as a signifier of authenticity which is useful in its claim to represent a real-time, non-manipulated event. Other videos are able to use the same framing in order to tactically present their own version of events. This mode is, of course, open to be co-opted by commercial media in order to simulate a visual signifier of legitimate amateur content (in much the same way the shaky camera and camcorder-style white-balance were co-opted by The Blair Witch Project [Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, 1999] and Cloverfield [Matt Reeves, 2008]). To exemplify this potential, comedian Ricky Gervais produces popular comedy shows (mainly for television) in traditional horizontal framing. At the same time, he maintains a Facebook page which frequently hosts vertical videos filmed in his home space such as video of him in his bath  or a video of his cat. The vertical framing suggests these are unmediated moments in his domestic life but their playful nature also suggests that Gervais is using them to blur the boundary between his real-life and on-screen persona in a way that is typical of his comedy work. In this case, there is a highly media-literate public personality drawing upon an amateur framing technique in order to add value to the videos that he produces.

In the contexts discussed in this article, the diversity in filming possibilities has not really changed, as it has always been possible for a filmmaker to turn a camera on its side for dramatic effect and the vertical mode is already appearing amongst traditional media when, for example, television news programs insert vertical footage of an event in a way that suggests everyday persons were present to witness it. What have changed are exhibition possibilities. In the first instance, readily available digital projectors and large digital monitors make it possible for the art gallery film and advertising content to exhibit vertical images. In the second instance, the hand held screening devices make the possibility for filming vertically ubiquitous. Detractors of a vertical format are right to note that vertical footage will normally default to a small image within a larger screen when displayed on horizontal televisions and computer monitors but these thoughts fail to foresee the present and the future of new screen technologies in which “a variety of screens—long and wide and square, large and small, flat and fat, composed of grains composed of pixels, lit by projected light, cathode-ray tube, plasma, LCD—all compete for our attention without any convincing arguments about hegemony” (Friedberg 2009, 7).[15] In this environment there will likely be the continuation of amateurs producing vertical works as a type of vernacular practice while there are also open possibilities for media professionals to engage with this framing mode in new and dynamic ways.

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