cold...

Hello everyone... I hate to say that I can't make it to class today. My allergies and/or cold has my entire face swollen up and flat out really gross. I'm running by the Health Center to see if something can be done to un-swell me. I just wanted to say good luck to those presenting today!

This class has been amazing, and I learned so much from the whole group. Thanks Patrick, everything was really awesome and thanks for all of the great inspiration!!!

Extra Post

Just wanted to post a little something extra... As I was driving home to my parents last night, in my sleepy little mountain town, I noticed that there was hardly any Helvetica font! I have to wonder if towns that aren't so "with the times" have less of this newer, cooler font? Just wondering...

Helvetica

This documentary was so helpful in putting my cultural analysis into perspective. The history of Helvetica explored through its predecessors and successors told a complete story of the impact something like a type face can make.
Strong links to the few readings on marketing and its visual impact on the culture around it.
I appreciated seeing the framework used to explore the subcultures of type face and how differing opinions can be on the subject of analysis.
The ranges of extreme affection toward the object, Helvetica, to the extreme disdain of the object, even accusations of "causing the Vietnam War" evokes thoughts toward the effects media makes on society.
While this was a very dry film about an obscure subject I have come to realize the strong links to our framework and analytical practices.

Helvetica

I thought it was interesting they way that they suggested the influence of the font. I had never thought about it. I never thought about the font choice, as a historian, I like a box that has times new roman, which is familiar to me because of the books that I research from. It is a jump for me to use helvetica and notice the font that I use.

Ever since watching this film, I have been way more aware of the typeface and everywhere that it shows up. I have been taking all the signs in, and I have noticed that stores can italicise it, make it bigger, bolder, smaller, thinner, but they are still helvetica. In an age where we like individualization, we find comfort in being similar. Even with globalization, where choice defines everything, we like similarity. It is funny to me that even with the Macs and design technology available, we like the comfort of the font.

Helvetica

I thought, in my little black/white world, that it was really interesting to hear someone in the film say that "just because something is legible doesn't mean it communicates." In my notes this quote comes right after the statement "Postmodernism is a disease." Granted, I don't think this quote was necessarily meant the way I took it, but that's besides the point. Both of these are quite possibly two of my favorite moments in the film. I am working in a seriously gray area with my object, so I'm feeling withdrawal from my black/white comfort zone. That's really the only explanation I can find for being so totally overjoyed that someone else gets my frustration and confusion with Postmodernism. Sometimes, the simplest, cleanest, clearest way of communicating is the best because it ACTUALLY communicates to the majority of the people who read/hear/see it. I often felt the same way about literature; if the author wanted to make a point, why muddle it with incomprehensible babbling. Some of the postmodern fonts that were shown in the film seemed to make things more difficult to read than the pre-Helvetica fonts. Doesn't that negate the purpose of writing something? In an undergrad communications class, I was told that communication is receiver based. If the receiver of the communication doesn't understand it, then there is "a failure to communicate." If the font/design is too convoluted for the reader to understand, then there is no communication and the font/design has failed...right?

Helvetica

Ok, so since we watched this film, I have not been able to stop noticing the Helvetica type face. I had no idea how influential something as simple as a font could be. It made me wonder how many other things that I glaze over without paying enough attention to, or what other small things influence me without my direct knowledge.

As far as the film goes, I found it interesting. But in my opinion, it was a bit choppy and disjointed. Even though it was able the Helvetica font, a brief history on fonts and their influence in general would have been a bit more helpful in creating a larger cultural fabric to understand the huge influence of this new hip font.

To be perfectly honest, I don't love the Helvetica font. I think its great for certain things. The film helped me realize that yes, it is a comforting font for certain things like federal wording and signage, and sure, in the Subway I do feel like I know where I'm going after looking at the signs. But my personal opinion is that this supposed "sleek and new" font is almost lacking in personality. And maybe the modernity of it is a personality in itself, but I don't think it is the answer to "all things advertising".

The store American Apparel uses Helvetica as their font. Which I find interesting. The whole idea behind this store is to be unique and individualistic which is ironic because they sell an idea of mix-and-match fashion in a one-stop-shop store. For a store that desires to be one-of-a-kind and full of self-expression, they certainly use a plain type fact to express their brand. One could argue that because Helvetica is sleek and "classic" in its design, it appeals to all users and customers. Personally, I feel like a store that sells neon latex capris pants and tube socks may want to change things up a little.

Why do most designers think that this font is the end all be all?

"We are all prompted in subliminal ways"

I am going to just start off by saying I honestly had NO idea that there were people in the world who's job it was to design fonts. I mean it makes sense now of course but I guess I never really thought about it. Very, very interesting.

I don't even know where to begin about Helvetica. I actually enjoyed the documentary more than I thought I would. My question after watching it is does this typeface represent capitalism or socialism...because we all know it has to be one or the other!! (sarcasm) The title of my blog is a quote from the movie that I deemed important to write down...it was stated in reference to the secretive spell casted over the public by typeface. We have talked all semester about forms of media, and if I recall correctly, the first class we even discussed the text on the covers of our books...and what they might mean or why they were chosen. There was a divide in the movie about the expressiveness of the Helvetica font. One contributor stated that it was neutral and "shouldn't have a meaning in itself". Another said that just because helvetica is "legible doesn't mean it communicates". I guess after this class I believe everything communicates something...even if it's supposed to be neutral. I can wear a white polo shirt with khaki pants and sperry's and I KNOW that communicates something to someone who may see me.

The encoding/decoding article and the medium is the message all discuss these ideas and queries. We all chose our fonts for presentations on our preferences...doesn't that say something about us? I sure think it does. It was stated multiple times in the film that designers have responsibilities...I don't think they ever explicitly stated what those were...I would think designers have the responsibilty to do work as they deem appropriate. Isn't that the great thing about art? That artists have the free will to express themselves or specific subjects any way they feel? Isn't that the point of art?

Using this to segway into Leonardo Drew's exhibit that we visited. To many people...that may not seem like art or they may not get it. But it definitely speaks about our world...in many ways. his art is very structured, yet chaotic...isn't that how our world is? Can helvetica be both capitalist and socialist? or maybe even neither...

I don't know if I just got way too deep, but these are just some things I thought about after class...

Helvetica and Art

Similar to what has already been commented upon, it is interesting how the room is almost split down the middle when it come to font preference, channeling the documentary itself. I prefer Times New Roman, mainly out of habit; many of professors have required my papers to be in Times New Roman, and it simply became route after that. However, other fonts such as Arial, appear to be too loose and helter skelter. Similar to when the class toured the Drew exhibit, several of us history majors seemed to travel in packs, almost as if that would protect us from the terrifying abstract art and the horrifying fact that the information texts were sparse.

It is no surprise that there was a need for a font like Helvetica. As demonstrated in the readings by Marling, the late 1940’s and early 1950’s was a time of excess and glitz, there is no wonder that a need for basic and simpler type font would emerge. Although I think the gentleman who was critiquing the fonts in display in the Life Magazine, went a little too far. That magazine must be analyzed in the context, not on the personal whims of an individual. Helvetica is a symbol, harkening back to the readings, of the medium is the message. Helvetica represents utilitarian and practicality. A rejection of the old. However it is interesting, that some designers got tired of the crisp and clean line of Helvetica. Helvetica when it was first developed, was new and revolutionary, yet now it is consider old and conservative. The font decorated everything from Gap stores to bathrooms, expressing its wide appeal. The documentary is also a message itself, it is an example of how something previously thought of as mundane (a font) and shows the evolution and impact of a font, and it’s multiple uses and views.

I liked the concept that Claire brought up on Facebook vs. Myspace. In the beginning one of the enticing features of Myspace, was the availability to change and customize. Yet, now when most people have switches over to Facebook, there is massive uproar whenever Facebook updates itself, or when it tries to copy Myspace. Are designs and preferences even circular in the digital age?

Helvetica

I found this movie (and the discussion) very interesting. The views from the different majors in the class seemed to represent their area of study. The history students liked the traditional fonts while the design students liked the more modern fonts. Personally, I love modern, I love clean and simple lines, I love sans-serif. I don’t love, but I like Helvetica. I enjoyed watching the video and seeing the way people reacted to this font becoming so popular. The movie itself was an intense form of media. The people interviewed were so adamant about the font and what it stood for. Their views were powerful and strong. Those who appreciated the font stood for clarity and a sense of newness, while those who did not appreciate the font enjoyed tradition. However, I agree with Micah, when he mentioned a neutral voice would have been helpful. The only voices on the movie were from the extremes, and not everyone has an extreme view on Helvetica. The neutral voice might have made it more relatable to the audience as a whole.

The images in the movie, flashing of the screen showing the repetitive use of Helvetica, throughout the world, made me believe (even more so then I did before) that Helvetica is a powerful font and the font itself portrays clarity and simplicity. However, what I found ironic was the development of Helvetica was to create a typeface that was neutral, had no intrinsic meaning, and was clear to read. Granted, it is clear to read, it is simple, but when it was produced it did have a huge meaning behind it. Some people associated it with war and conformity, probably not exactly the feelings they expected. Obviously, some people did not see how this font was trying to make a simple, neutral statement.

Helvetica

Probably not surprisingly, Helvetica very quickly brought to mind McLuhan’s “The Medium is the Message”. He writes that “the message of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs” (108). The film certainly emphasized the ways in which the typeface changed the visual nature of a multiplicity of communications on an international scale. As the many designers in the film testified, Helvetica became associated with a variety of meanings quite apart from, or at least only tangentially related to, the content of the messages the words actually convey. I think the film raises questions about what kinds of implicit assumptions might go in to interacting with a medium so ubiquitous as to remain unnoticed by much of the general public. If on the one hand it has been seen as the font of modernism, wherein meaning is stable and perfection is possible, its very grounded associations might influence people’s responses to communication. One of the implicit meanings of the font, particularly when it is used in contexts geared toward mass communication, might then be that communication can be a stable egalitarian process. At the same time though, the film demonstrates the ways in which even the message of the medium is contested. I think Hall’s “Encoding/Decoding” speaks to some of the contention in the film, as it suggests all of the stages in communication during which a message can become changed or unstable (164). In the film, perfect form doesn’t necessarily equate to perfect communication. Indeed, the apparent asceticism of the font seemed to be part of the reason a number of people didn’t trust it; for many it began to be read as advancing normative ideas of social organization and power. Whatever else messages in Helvetica might be saying, these objectors saw the font as endorsing the primacy of “the man,” as it were. Even in cases where the institutional affiliations of the font were not a major concern, the film shows that a number of designers rejected it on the basis that in fact it could not communicate ideally, because of its symmetry and visual balance. This school of designers espoused the idea that the form could communicate best if it somehow reflected the emotive content of the message that it spelled out. Both the episodes of rejection and adoration of the font in the film then seem to suggest that even when the medium has a message, the changes it creates are not necessarily uniform and certain. Rather, its effects are multiple, unstable, and, if this documentary is any example, hotly contested.

"we must breathe so we must use Helvetica"

The film Helvetica presented the typeface, and namesake for the film, as a very pivotal--if not controversial--part of media and culture. For the film maker and the people interviewed, Helvetica, or any typeface used, is crucial to the message it is portraying. The movie included views of the type face witch ranged from borderline psychotic admiration for the font to u the film dder disgust. The distinction between the "hate it" camp and the "love it camp" was generated by a broader loving or hating of organization. For the people who loved the font, helvetica represented a pentacle of order and efficiency. They praised the font as being practical and ascetically attractive. The dissenting side urged that the font idealized conformity and represented the evils of capitalism.
Leonardo Drew's work seemed to embody both side of opinion on helvetica. Things in and out of boxes resonated in his work. Existing in a box can be seen as order or conformity while existing out of a box can be both disorderly or freeing. The filmmakers could have benefited from Drew's work because, unlike the film, there was much in his art that was either in or out of a box, or was in between boxes or both in and out of boxes. The movie presented opinion on helvetica to be black or white. There is no way that this can be true because many people lack a strong opinion on the font and the movie would have been better if a neutral voice was heard, as they certainly exist.

Helvetica

The documentary had people who argued that Helvetica is everywhere, lasting, "socialist" (because it is democratic). The presence of it everywhere was developed through the lens of the videographers who highlighted the presence of the font on street signs, advertisements from the sides of buses to American Apparel stores, and a host of other places. This connected back to the introduction of Part VI in the Media and Cultural Studies book. There is a debate about globalization as being "simply a synomym of 'Westernization'" (p. 580). As much as this font is present, the entirety of the people in the documentary were Western whites. What if you don't live in western Europe or North America? Take these scenes: Tokyo, Beijing, Manzhouli?

I do not find it surprising that the font developed in the late 1950s in a world obsessed with modernism. A goal of the modernists was to reject tradition, which in advertising had been the multiplicity of font types as seen in this (probably) antebellum advertisement here, this circa 1890 advertisement here, and these 1945 advertisements here. The streamlining was seen in art, in the make of cars, and in the construction of televisions.

One of the comments I found interesting was that the font was to be "neutral." That I find difficult to put faith in. Everything is constructed, even "neutral" Switzerland. The passion that the one man who was angry with the 19th and first half of the 20th century illustrates it is not "neutral." The font is intended to be modern, to streamline, and to attempt to make words legible for all who are literate. Therefore it communicates a message that modern is better than the older manner of typefaces.

Helvetica and a field trip...

I was a little bit disappointed with Helvetica because I felt that every time an interesting conversation began, it was edited to a designer ranting or more shots of the font, so I will try and expand on some of the points that I was interested to hear more about. One of the designers claimed that “the meaning is in the context of the text and not in the type face;” however watching an hour and half about a single type face suggests that there is some cultural meaning behind the design of the text. After taking this class, I am inclined to believe that the two people who designed the typeface endowed it with cultural meaning. I am not sure what that meaning is exactly, but it reflects its time period with its simplicity and clarity, which say something about the changes that were occurring in the culture in which it was created. I know the designer who thought it was the typeface of the Vietnam and Iraq wars may have been a little crazy, but I think she made a good point. That typeface was associated with supporters of the wars, and its use for those companies impacted the meaning of Helvetica. The same designer also alluded to two cultures of design, but she only talked about the corporate culture and its use of Helvetica. She obviously associates with the other culture of design, a subculture, if you will. My perception of design is this constant ebb and flow between subculture and corporate culture, as what the corporate culture adopts the aesthetics of the subcultures, which then turn around and recreate their aesthetic to remain a subculture. This scenario reminds me of Hebdige’s discussion of punk, which constantly reinvents itself to remain a subculture. I also found it interested that Helvetica was associated with capitalism, socialism, and democracy, and one designer called it the typeface of the city. It has become more than a corporate design aesthetic, it has become the face of governments and wars, and its meanings continue to deepen with these associations. The last segment really started to get to some ideas I really wished they had pushed further. One designer fleetingly mentioned it being evidence of globalization, and I think this is definitely true – it predates computers but still lives on; it traveled from a small Swiss foundry; it is now used in the Western world by designers, corporations, and governments. I also really wished they had pushed the digital age piece at the end A LOT further. One of the designers suggested that now we create our identity through not only consumer choices but also visual communication on the Internet. Myspace was briefly discussed because users have the ability to manipulate their pages extensively, but now that facebook has seemingly taken over, I wonder what it means that we cannot really personalize our facebook profiles…we are all put in a white and blue box and told to stay there…

I think I will leave that open-ended, but two final thoughts on Helvetica: I am officially a convert, and I LOVED when one designer said “don’t confuse legibility with communication.”

Some thoughts on Leonardo Drew…

My own biases and subjectivity led me to see his work as a critique or reflection of urban life. There is stuff everywhere. It is messy and dirty. It is semi-controlled chaos. But despite all of that, there can be beauty and delicacy in urban life just as there is in his work. My two favorites: the grouping of smaller pieces in shadow boxes and the white paper in the glass boxes. The smaller pieces are probably in a favorite because I tend to like tiny, small, delicate things, but I like the paper-and-glass piece because it had a similar quality as the other pieces in that it invites you to come discover the details without letting you see them all but also provided a juxtaposition from the heavy, dark, rust-laden pieces in its airiness and lightness. The body of work as a whole seems to be in limbo, waiting to fall apart or be put back together.

The World of Wall-E

This was probably my 32nd time watching this movie. Ok, maybe not that many... But still, I have seen this film many times. However never before have I paid so much attention to the small material culture details. I was struck by how big a role the sound played in getting points across about the film. All the small pops and whistles made the movie engaging. I kept thinking of the reading, "Why We Need Things" and how all of the things in the movie said so much about where we are in this design cycle.

There was a specific scene in the movie where Wall-E is on the spaceship and he is chasing Eve and he bumps into a lady named Mary. Her interactive screen vanishes, and for the first time she is free from this seemingly engaging world to actually see what is going on around her. This struck me as very interesting, because it made me think that all of the things that we have been researching and reading about in a way, keep us distracted. My cultural analysis on my BlackBerry relates to this idea and scene too.

Wall-E

This was my second viewing of Wall-E and I still enjoyed the second time around. Like many of the previous posts, I also notified similarities between Wall-E and Everything Is Illuminated. Both Wall-E and Jonathan, are collectors, and they collect not because of a monetary value, but because they need to. An amusing scene in Wall-E is when, Wall-E finds a diamond ring in the box, but throws out the ring, and keeps the box. It makes one wonder, why did we shudder when Wall-E throw the ring? The character is a clean slate, the diamond ring has no meaning, and it does not mean love or money. To Wall-E the box was simply a more interesting object. Wall-E needs things, much as we do. According to Cszikszenytmihayli, objects are the continuity of the self (Lubar/Kingery 25). For example it is through Hello Dolly! that Wall-E expressed his need for companionship. All the various objects that are shown in the film are shown to represent Wall-E, and an extension of himself. Yet, the movie also shows that companionship ranks above these objects. For none of his objects could revert Wall-E back to his normal self at the end of the film but rather it was Eve who brought him back.

Wall-e

It caught my attention that the channels of communication had changed very little in Wall-E's proposed future. In a world in which the Earth has been exhausted of relevant necessity and life exists only aboard a self-piloted space station/city/luxury cruise/mall/universe, the people, although faceted to 23rd century flying chairs, still rely on 20th and 21st century communication. The main difference in the way people in Wall-e-World receive information from how we receive it today is that they are constantly barraged with information, while we are only seemingly constantly barraged with it. the medium is the message seemed to apply to this, as the fact that the people were completely engulfed by their TV sets had more importance than the information that their TV sets were offering. As seen on TV also had relevance to Wall-e. Although I did not entirely buy Marling's thesis, given that a history of the 1950s in America neglected to mention the Cold War, the legacy of Bretton Woods, Immigration legislation, or African Americans with the exception of Chuck Berry and (albeit indirect) Ike Turner, the world presented in Wall-e (aboard the space ship) echoed the Marling's presentation of the 1950s in that the information received by people influenced, if not controlled, every aspect of their lives.

Wall-E

I was surprised that we would be viewing Wall-E in a material culture class thinking back on my initial interpretation of the movie. After seeing Wall-E through the lens of material and media culture articles, the movie was given a new meaning for me. Our most recent readings about technology's effect on our culture and what this may mean for out future seems the most relevant link to Wall-E. The most prominent subject of Wall-E is the overtaking of Buy n' Large. Not only was everything in the "future" sponsored by the big box store, much like our Wal-Marts and Sam's Clubs, but they are even portrayed in a position of power as if they were a governmental power!
Their tools of manipulation link strongly to Baudrillard, Poster, and Jenkins. Using media, in this case personal televisions, Buy n' Large alters the lives of the modern Americans on board.
Try blue, it's the new red" is an announcement being made aboard the ship. The passengers unawareness of life outside of their chairs, "I didn't know there was a pool!" and other comments that lead to the recognition of their fellow passengers further exemplify their absorption into a technology lead life. The Captain of the space ship is an even strong exaggeration of how dependant humans have become on technology. His inability to read a "manual" without "Otto/Auto" is not that far off from where Baudrillard and the others are suggesting we may be with our continued reliance on technology!
Seen through fresh eyes, the allusions in Wall-E are innumerable and all the while paint an eye-opening, somewhat sickening and horrifying, picture of where we may be heading.

Everything is Illiuminated

Our viewing of Everything is Illuminated alluded to many class readigins and discussions. The stringest link in my mind was brought on by JOnathan's collecting. It was discussed after the movie that he saved random, and somewhat odd, objects that would reminf him of the person or place he was afraid of forgetting one day. In one article we are left with the thought, are our objects remembered as we want them to be remembered or do we alter their lifetime's reality? Jonathan's cllections are reminders to him of special people and places nit without his commentary what reality would an outsider attach to these items? A glimpse into the home of the old woman's home may be a flash forward into Jonathan's collection's future. Her collections, while nearly organized, would be indecipherable to an outsider, perhaps even to Jonathan, a fellow collector.
My hopes of my memories staying attached to my beliingis have become less since examining Everything is Illiminated and articles such as this. I can even see how I have attached new meanings to objects left behind in my family and this raises a personal question, what do they really represnt?

Wall E and Everything Illuminated

Wall E:

The main thing about this movie that I noticed was the lack of diversity within the people. I guess this is a way of displaying the American attitude in terms of globalization. I also agree with what Melanie said in class about how the entire first part of the movie is related to the viewer through sound. I think that is relating the spectacle of the trash covered earth in a way that makes the viewer think about and translate in their own way, rather then a character telling you in dialog. To me, while the movie is entertaining for children, there are also messages for adults. The Buy n' Large reminds me of all the super centers that we have now, where everything is in one place, you can buy everything in bulk. Where as these stores are great for convenience, are they so great for the environment? I think Disney is trying to get on the Green Movement with this movie, and trying to get us to let go of all those material things we thought we needed. This thought led me to when we discussed in class why we need things and collectors.

This also is a connection between Wall E and Everything Illuminated. The collectors in both movies are concerned not with the monetary value of the item collected, but with the memory. This reminded me of Soutter's article on the tortoiseshell locket that was a family heirloom. The value was not in how much it was worth, but the memories that it reminded her family of and the resource it provided Soutter to discover more about the time in which the item was created. Everything Illuminated, the items that are collected have a primary memory attached to them, but the research that has to be done to find the true meaning of the item leads to the discovery of family roots that may have been lost had Jonathan not gone on the trip to find who Augustine was. Augustine, in turn, knew that she needed to leave behind a 'In Case' box, to enable those who may search for answers to find them.

Wall E

This movie reminded me chiefly of Dorfman and Mattelart's "Instructions on How to become a General in the Disneyland Club."

The authors propose that "Adult values are projected onto the child, as if childhood was a special domaine where these values could be protected uncritically (p.126, Media and Culture Studies)." The movie was highly critical of issues that adults are discussing in the first decade of the 21st century and as we begin the second. Rising lethargic and obese people, reliance on machines to do everything from toast bread to move around in space without human interaction with planets, and environmental declination. In the film, the mechanized convenience is illustrated through the advertisement at the beginning of the film, in the people moving only thanks to a flying lounge, and even having gotten down to consuming liquified foods (which was gross, btw).

However, are these really issues that a child would think about without their interactions with adults? I would say no. There seems to be plenty of centuries where children do not seem to have been concerned with obesity, mechanized convenience (at least before the introduction in the 19th century of machines in households, generally still requiring intense human interaction), or the future health of the planet long after they have become adults or even after their deaths.

Disney also conveys this adult concern of romantic love. Children want to be loved (according to numerous observations by family and strangers and psychologists) but every Disney movie involves a intimate, romantic love and passion which can always overcome anything. That is to my mind not a "child fantasy" (language coming from the article) but an adult fantasy. It simply just does not hold up to reality that passionate, romantic love will conquer evil or that it will survive forever in a timeless tale. While Wall-E has strong presentist values (which I'm in agreement with but I am an adult), the timeless tale of this love comes from other fairy tales which Disney has succeeded in creating a multibillion dollar empire (Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, etc.).

Wall-E

I know I mentioned some of these things in class, but I'm going to repeat them anyway! I had never seen this movie before and I really loved it! It fits perfectly in with what we have been talking about in class. Wall-E, as mentioned before, is a collector. He is cleaning up after the humans that left Earth, and finding all sorts of interesting objects. Wall-E is placing value upon these objects...he doesn't know what their original purpose was, but he decides to keep certain items. Like the diamond ring...he flings the diamond into the trash pile but keeps the box it was in. He has no concept that diamonds are considered valuable and the box has really no worth at all...he just values the box more than the diamond, and that's okay. This reminds me of a discussion in my Native American History course where we discussed trade between colonists and the Natives. Many people believe that the natives were ignorant for valuing worthless items that the colonists would trade with them (in order to take advantage of lands, etc.) But these Natives did fine worth for these so-called "worthless" objects. Very frequently it was a spiritual worth, they believed that their spirits were giving them these items for a purpose, so they would adopt the items into their culture. Who has the power to put worth on objects?

Gender, of course, was at the forefront of my mind while watching this movie. Can robots be assigned a gender? One would assume watching the movie that Wall-E was male and Eva-female? But are they? Why would we assume this? These are just some of the questions I had...

I also found it fascinating how the images from the computer about how Earth is supposed to look and be like. These mediated images provided the captain with expectations of what would be found when they returned to Earth. When the humans returned it was not like this at all. But, the captain was still hopeful and positive that they could grow things there...I could go on and on about other things but I think I'll stop here...

Posts for this week and last week

Wall E
Having never seen this film before, at first glance I was somewhat surprised by its apparent critique of an uninhibited economy. Its plot and setting revolve around an imagining of an exacerbated trend in global capitalism, with a contingent concern about political power in an increasingly economically driven society. With its invocation of the political/corporate president figure, it suggests that the state has become basically indistinguishable from the reigning economic conglomerates. In this way the film reflects some of the anxieties that the Herman/Chomsky article gave voice to: the idea that mass media is implicated in the politics of both the state and the economic system to such a degree that there is nothing free about the press, either economically or ideologically (Durham/Kneller, 257). The film certainly reflects this notion, with the proliferation of advertising and behavior modifying media it portrays.

The film also points to how these possible results are also products of a kind of imperialist logic, though I think it runs up against some limitation in how it plays this idea out. The Schiller article notes that "media cultural imperialism is a subset of the general system of imperialism. It is not freestanding; the media cultural component is a developed corporate economy supports the economic objectives of the decisive industrial financial sectors" (Durham/Kneller, 296). Media in the world of the film does seem to reflect this framework; the media presents the frontier as boundless, while everything within it is property for humans to possess or consume. The imperialist slant of this social structure is reflected not only by the attitudes toward space and things, but also by the social hierarchy that operates between humans and non humans. The media in the film reflects the social place of the rouge robots, as it clearly parallels a police 'wanted' broadcast. Wall E and Eve are social undesirables because they break the normative protocol wherein robots obey and serve humans. Yet I think the film ends up reifying the logic of this social hierarchy more than it challenges it. We are looking at a system of forced labor here, and the idea that this is the robots' only purpose doesn't seem to totally hold up, since at several points in the film we see robots defying their primary directive in favor of something more personal; this is the apparent emergence of a kind of free will. What they do with this free will is telling; both Wall E and Eve are glorified as the heroes of the film because they help redeem the humans, at great risk to themselves. It would seem then, that even if the return to earth might upset the organization of the labor system, the overall hierarchy that keeps the empire (which is after all trying to recolonize) running may remain fairly untroubled at film's end.

At the beginning of the film, I was pretty excited by the prospect of what robot love might look like. Seeing that media was creating Wall E's desire for friendship, I thought about how cool it would be to see that narrative play out with robots, where I thought that human gender roles wouldn't need to operate in the same way. I was hoping the film would do something with a model of love more based on companionship than romance. Clearly I forgot who made the film when I was thinking this. But, Disney's illustriously heteronormative history aside, I realized that of course my expectations wouldn't hold up because of the fact that both the robots themselves and the media which shapes their desires are made by humans, and therefor already imbued with gender. I'm thinking of Prown's notion that gender binaries are subconsciously embedded in the formal construction of objects here (Prown/Haltman 20). While I'm inclined to see more ambiguity, it does seem clear that in the film the robots, particularly Eve, are clearly marked as gendered. The humans on the ship even refer to her as "she," and the name carries the ultimate gendered genesis reference. In this sense then it would seem that the creations of humans couldn't totally avoid taking on gender scripts, though I think it's also significant that those genders only really take on meaning for the robots relative to the media model they encounter- the humans imbue notions of gendered characteristics but their meaning is constructed through the ways the robots interact with one another and with media.


Everything is Illuminated
I thought that Csikszemtmihalyi's idea about the purpose of things spoke to this film well. He notes that objects serve to anchor people in identity, to provide tangible reminders of the life and sense of self they have had and continue to have (Lubar/KIngery, 23). The film points to the importance of objects by using them to characterize the two main protagonists. Jonathan has a map of his entire life made up of things, which represent important times, places and people for him. In some ways then he is the ultimate embodiment of this idea of the importance of things; he is "the collector" because that is how he constructs the narrative of his life. Though Jonathan is the most apparent example of this, the film also shows how Alex constructs his identity through the things he surrounds himself with. At the film's beginning, he prizes American style clothing as a sign of his generationally distinct and transnational cultural identity, but by the end of the film he has also adopted wearing a yarmulke, as a physical acknowledgment of the Jewish identity he has discovered.

In the film, the objects do not have innate significance for the characters, though. Rather, their meaning must be constructed through experience and memory. As the William's piece suggested, it is in lived relations that social structures are made and experienced; meaning comes from the interactions of the base rather than the finished product (Durham/Kneller, 130). In the film then, the meaning of most of the objects is created only through some kind of linguistic or personal mediation. Augustine's wedding ring is meaningful for Jonathan because he learns its story from her sister. Without that interaction, its significance would be arbitrary. Similarly, when the grandfather sees the remnants of german tanks in the field, they have a great and terrible meaning for him because they evoke a certain set of memories of his own past. This necessity of context and interaction in the making of meaning also reminds me of Haltman's introduction to our material culture book. Any explanation of an object's meaning almost certainly relies on language (Prown/Haltman, 4). I think this film points to both the importance and the instability of language in the discovery of meaning for objects. On the one hand, the need for a narrative that explains the objects is clearly a huge driving force for the characters. Jonathan needs to understand what the necklace and picture of his grandfather and Augustine mean, and for that he has to make his journey. Similarly, the best way that Alex can think of to make sense of the value and meaning of his experience of the journey is to write it all down, making a story that gives clarification, illumination as it were, to the meaning of all of these things. Yet at the same time the film points to all of what can be lost in translation. The fairly comical grandson/ grandfather translations to english demonstrate this instability, but so do the accounts that the older characters in the film give, or don't give, about their experience of the war. This is not only because of the translation barrier, for even with Alex there is a sense that Augustine's and his grandfather's explanations of the past cannot entirely evoke even the staged images that the audience is privy to. I like that the film plays with this set of ideas about meaning, pointing to the subjective, never finished but continually meaningful process through which identity is constructed and altered with things and words.

Wall-E

Continuing with Serena's comment about the Encoding/Decoding reading I found it was interesting the references the movie made to Mac and PC. Viewing the relationship between Wall-E and Eva was amusing to me because in Interior Architecture I use both windows and mac features differently. I noticed different features of each company's products in Eva and Wall-E (good and bad).

Also I thought this movie put a different spin on analyzing material objects mainly because these objects had personalities. The other objects we have seen in the previous movies and books have not been animated, but now we are introduced to one that has its own movement and personality. These things add to how we can understand the object and figure out the relationship it has with the environment around it.

My last thought about Wall-E is in relation to Everything is Illuminated. In both movies there were characters collecting objects, however they were for different reasons. In Everything Is Illuminated they were collected to remember specific events, but in Wall-E they were collected because the objects themselves were interesting. It reminded me of how I thought about random objects before I took this class. Some objects appealed to me because they looked cool or moved in a unique way, but now I have noticed that every object has a meaning and a purpose, and regardless if I cherish that meaning, I should respect it.

And the Disney spectacle continues...

Honestly, I think this critique on our growing dependence on things, production of trash, and destruction of the environment is a pretty bold move on Disney's part because, as Marling's book suggested, Disney participated in the culture of the things. Disneyland celebrated the car, and it played a part in creating an thing-obsessed culture. That was only the beginning. Disney World followed, and Disney promoted its media through things - stuffed animals, barbies, clothes, souvenirs, etc. That tradition did not stop with Wall E. On disney.com, you can buy a U Control Wall E, a Wall E rash guard, and even a cup with a snow globe at its base. Disney had an opportunity to convey its message through medium - only the media rather than continuing the dependence on things.

Also, continuing in a similar vein as Serena, not only are the place we live and work represented by trash but also we [the humans] had to be taught about love, relationships, and earth from computers, robots, and tv. And as I was saying before, if this is Disney's warning that we are becoming to dependent on technology and media, isn't it facilitating and perpetuating this dependence that it helped to create?

Ok, I think I am on the same cynical streak as Serena today.

On a more positive note, I did enjoy the connections between Pleasantville, Everything Is Illuminated, and Wall E, as I said in class. And, I absolutely loved the character and relationship development that happened between Wall E and EVA and among the "rogue robots."

Wall-E

Stuart Hall says in "Encoding/Decoding" that producers encode messages within advertisements, and audiences decode these messages based on cultural and personal histories. In Wall-E, I was struck by the first commercial for Axiom. It played on the billboards while Wall-E worked. First, the presence of perfectly healthy-looking humans lounging around a pool, enjoy a meal cooked by a robot, and otherwise having fun makes the Axiom seem more like a vacation than a new place to live. (Last I checked life was not always a vacation.) Second, the CEO of BnL is named "Forthright," suggesting that everything this guy says is absolutely truthful. You can trust him!
One thing I love about this movie is the fact that it is a strong commentary on the presence of things in our lives. The opening sequence that scans the surface of the earth eventually leads us to the area where Wall-E is. (I want to assume this is NYC, but I don't know.) It looks like desolate buildings line the landscape, but in reality these "buildings" are the trash that Wall-E has built up. Isn't it interesting that the movie uses piles of crap to represent the places we live and work? (I think I'm having a cynical day today.)

Everything is Illuminated

"The medium shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action." In "The Medium is the Message" McLuhan recognizes the power of media to impact how people associate and interact with things and with each other. In Everything is Illuminated, objects dictate human action and interaction. Would Jonathan (a.k.a. Jonfen) have gone in search of his grandfather's past if not for the objects he'd collected (especially the picture and the pendant)? I don't think he would. The picture especially influenced not only Jonathan but also the older woman (whose name I can't remember) by bringing back memories, but the photo also influences the audience because it tells us about that moment without any kind of cinematic flashback. That medium explains the past and, as McLuhan says, is an "extension of ourselves." It is an extension of the people in the photo, the person who took it, the person who possesses it, and the people who see it.
Another object that offers a great message is the ring that Augustine buried. It exists as proof that she existed. Is there any greater purpose in saving objects than to prove that someone else lived?

It is amazing how much I love this movie. It is also amazing how it effects my mood after watching it. The music, lighting, dialogue, narration, and visuals all work together awkwardly yet seamlessly. Objects define who we are in many different senses. There are a few of us in this class who attended Meredith College. We all proudly wear the onyx we were presented with our junior year. Does the onyx define us, or do we define the onyx? I think this is the main philosophical question when nit comes to objects and their owners. I am at my parents house now and I can look around at all of the "things" surrounding me here and each holds a special memory from my past, but also outwardly could represent things about me to the outside world. By looking around my room one could learn that I love the Atlanta Braves, books, and clothes. But only to me and a select few who really know me, the memories associated with the objects come out. Every year growing up my family and I traveled to Atlanta, all six of us, for a week to go to Braves games and enjoy the city. I learned to read when I was 3 and was never caught without a book in my hand. Clothes make me feel special and unique and are my way of representing myself outwardly. Objects are important, but its the context that goes with them that is the richest most valuable of anything. I think this was represented in the movie quite well. To Jonathan, the amber was just soemthing that connected him to his grandfather, until he learned the true story behind it and then was able to let it go...

Everything is Illuminated

I rented Everything is Illuminated again, over Easter break and watched it with my mom and dad. I must say, it is even better the second time around. I noticed so many more things. As far as connecting to the readings... I can't help but see a little bit in each one. I feel as though both movies that we have watched so far call the viewer to look at their own life a little bit. For EIL (Everything is Illuminated), I was curious to see what objects I associate when my own life and those that are in it. Do I define or classify people according to the objects that I associate with them? And what objects will I leave behind that describe or classify me?

As far as media culture goes, the movie was visually very stimulating. The lighting has significance, and the camera shots and colors did as well. I found this movie interesting (in the best sense) as far as material culture goes. I'm so glad that Jonathan "Jonfen" didn't have a GPS to help them through the country side. And I noticed a lack of a lot of modern electronics in general, which I found refreshing.

I think this movie calls each of us to look at what we are holding on to, objects that we may cling to in order to try and make sense of our own lives. But how freeing for Jonathan to go on a quest and learn where he came from, and he was only then able to let go of those objects to find inner peace. Indeed, a good lesson for us all.

Similar to what has already been stated, there are similarities between Pleasantville and Everything is Illuminated. One of the things that I noticed is that objects have important symbolic meaning. Similar to McLuhan, ‘that the medium is the message.’ The medium in this case can be the objects themselves (or if one wishes to migrate more into grey, the film itself.) Just as in Pleasantville the T.V is the medium for the 1950’s and everything that it stood for, so are the objects in Everything is Illuminated. They have different meanings for each of the characters. They represent Grandfathers and Lista’s past, Jonathan’s desire to find himself and Alex’s future. They exist because of the object. I think also to what Emanuel stated, that Alex has the imaginary version of America, much as David had the imaginary version of 1950’s America. That both Alex and David rely on perceptions to create on their identity, which eventually shatters. Of course when illumination is received by each of the characters, a faded out sun or light appears behind them, signifying illumination has been found. It is also interesting to note, that illumination is not found in the harsh and eroded sections of Ukraine, but in the countryside. However it would be dismissive to say that the countryside is innocent, as witnessed by the flashbacks.

Connections for Everything is Illuminated

I was also reminded of the same reading as Claire. So I won't get into that.

However, I saw similarities with Alex's life and the people of Pleasantville...(again) the article on simulation. Simulations, like Disney (from that article), are only possible because people actively manipulate their life to fit the mold. Alex's grandfather was oppressed by memory of the most tragic event in modern history. Thus he succeeded for many years in denying his personal narrative with the past. Alex created his own simulation in his adoption of American hip hop culture. Alex thought he knew life, like people in Pleasantville thought they knew life. However, in both cases the people had to confront a difficult reality.

[Why] Everything Is Illuminated [(through) Things]

As I said in class, the first connection I made between our readings and Everything Is Illuminated was Csikszentmihalyi’s essay, Why We Need Things. Jonathan is piecing himself and his relationships together by collecting material evidence of his identity. The objects he collects “reveal the continuity of the self through time, by providing foci of involvement in the present, mementos and souvenirs of the past, and signposts of future goals” (23). This quote explains Jonathan’s collecting perfectly – his collection allows him to focus on the present as he picks up things to save, and those mementos of the present then become reminders of his past. The amber pendant, photo, and chain represent his future goal (at the beginning of the movie) of trying to understand his grandfather’s past, which is also his own. Jonathan’s collection also gives him “concrete evidence of [his] place in a social network as symbols of valued relationships” (23). He builds an understanding of his relationships by collecting evidence of them. In the same way, Augustine’s sister uses objects to remind herself of her own past and the relationships she lost in the war, and her “Just In Case” box gave her a future as she waited to understand what Augustine meant by that phrase and saving her ring. Once Jonathan understood his past, he was able to give up the objects that symbolized his goal of reaching that understanding. He leaves the pendant, which becomes evidence of Augustine’s sister’s past rather Jonathan’s future, and he leaves the photograph and chain with Alex. I think that Jonathan’s leaving the pendant with Alex is very revealing because it symbolizes that Jonathan and Alex share a similar past, and Jonathan has reached peace with his past while Alex is only just beginning to understand his past. I know there are more parallels and connections that could be drawn with our reading and this movie, but I just loved this essay when I first read it, and I loved its manifestation in this movie.

Pleasantville...Post-Comps Bluuuur

Excuse me if this post seems out there or hard to understand...it's been a very long week and a half...

So I just want to start out with the irony of Barney Fife being a part of a movie about the 50s...ohhh I loved it...Moving on...Marling Marling Marling...we all know the connections with that...the mention of the automobile, the Mamie Eisenhower style of dresses, Elvis music...the list goes on and on. That book fit perfectly into this movie. A book that I read for comps called Homeward Bound, was about how the Cold War affected the domestic sphere and created the 50s culture...I recommend it, loved it! And found many connections but I will spare you right now.

The scene with Jen (Reese Witherspoon) trying to come to terms with the 50s undergarments made me think of Leslie Shannon Miller's essay "The Many Figures of Eve: Styles of Womanhood Embodied in a Late 19th Century Corset" Of course because it's women's underwear but also in realizing how it's changed and the different shapes it makes on women's bodies...etc.

All of the articles on globalization also came to mind...Pleasantville was an isolated entity...the streets didn't go anywhere outside of the town, that is until the big change then it and the population is opened up to the outside world, which offers many opportunities and diversity.

The nesxt reading it relates to is bell hook's "Eating the Other: Desire and Resistence" which focuses on the attractiveness of the exotic. When people started becoming colored this whole sexual revolution takes place. They are consumed by "the other" it's new and exciting, but then of course there are those that still don't think so...

It also reminds be of "Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory" by Raymond Williams...about the residual and emergent cultures...the "colored ones' start out as the minority but then like in "From Culture to Hegemony: Subculture The Unnatureal Break" this subculture then rises up to become part of the dominant. Everyone becomes colored...

The list of references could go on and on but I am going to stop there before completely not making any sense! See you Thursday!

Unfortunately the dash to comps prep and a too busy weekend to post then will force me to post now. So excuse the lack of page numerations.

Pleasantville certainly (as everyone else has mentioned) sits nicely with Marling's book. I particularly thought about this first wit the dichotomy between everything being "nice" (which is a cultural construct) in Pleasantville in contrast with Jen who was a "bad girl" from her selfish attitude, teenage smoking culture, and her sexual image. Compared to the 1950s girl who was not supposed to be sexual and that supposedly Skip for example, would not notice her breasts because people generally were less sexual in the 1950s according to the mythology of the decade.

Another area that I thought fit in nicely with Marling's book is the teenagers' uses of automobiles to buck parental authority. This is less evident when we first see Skip with the car than after Jen gets her hands on him and starts telling everyone else about the fun to be had in the back seat of a car. The town in fact begins to be obsessed with what is going on in the cars at the place (sorry can't remember name of the place right now) where the teenagers would hang out.

As others before me in this blog have pointed out the movie addressed simulation vs. reality dichotomy examined by Baudrillard. What I find particularly fascinating about simulation is that ultimately reality enters the simulated world. In Plesantville that happened immediately for Jen. She was not interested in being Bobby Sue and thought the whole town was not living in reality. David wanted Jen to conform until they found someway out of their situation. However, slowly and then abruptly, David absorbed the disgust for this imagined way of life. He became so engulfed in change he could not distinguish when it happened (he forgot the eating of the fruit...I don't know how many more Adam's will fall for forbidden fruit).

Lastly, I thought about the article regarding exotic women and white males' obsession with them. The white males began chasing the "colored" mother in the streets when the town began discriminatory practices toward those not "black and white." Lucky for her she was able to have someone come to her defense unlike many others who were not so lucky.

Pleasantville

Oh my, well where to begin.

I know that the whole movie seemed as if it should be a part of Marlings book, but I am trying to include the other readings as well. The movie was a wonderful media visualization after reading Marling though.

The first thing that jumped out at me was nostalgia of the whole beginning of the movie through Toby's characters eyes. This lead me to Jean Baudrillard's article and his discuss on simulation. The idea of Pleasantville being a simulation is similar to how he describes Disneyland as a simulation. Disneyland was the 'reality' that American's wanted. They wanted to believe a place like that existed. Toby's character, wanted to believe that a Pleasantville existed, he needed that escape from reality. When they first become a part of Pleasantville, he is so apt to conforming to their life because that is what he always thought he wanted, however, as the movie progresses he realizes that it was a simulation and reality must change the way Pleasantville looks. Poster's article on virtual realities also seemed to fit in wonderfully here at this moment when Bud, wanted this idea of Pleasantville to be a true reality.

In the movie, Betty Sue, makes reference to the amount of undergarment she is wearing, which brought me straight to Leslie Shannon Miller's article on the corset. The confinement of women through undergarments is seen in the amount of them worn by the character to preserve her wholesomeness.

Werbel's essay on the Foley Food Mill, also got me thinking about the mother's role in the movie at the beginning. The scene that stood out to me the most about the mother as the nurturer, was their first morning in Pleasantville and the amount of food that was on the breakfast table. Even though her children were almost grown and their were only four of them in the house, the mother made enough food to serve an all you can eat buffet and still have left overs. This connected nicely with the idea of Werbel's essay as women as the central nurturer for the family.

Towards the end of the movie, roads lead to places outside Pleasantville. This made me think of our last big week of readings and globalization. They are globalizing in their own way, including parts of the world that were not originally a part of the town. Appaduri's work, seemed to relate to this. With his example of the Fillipino's living our past as their present. Pleasantville seemed to be living our past as their present once they joined the road toward globalization.

Pleasantville...

Oh the joys of going home for the weekend, and having a tree fall in your yard, knocking out the power. Haha. But thinking about the material culture that is simply steeped in the movie Pleasantville will certainly be extra exciting today.

I have seen this movie several times before, but never have I thought so critically about the material and media aspects of the film. When watching it, I kind of kept thinking of the "Industry, Nature, and Identity in an Iron Footbridge" article by Carlo Rotella. He talks about the bridge being a structure that bridges not only people to a physical environment, but also people to their emotions past and present. Similarly in the movie, the TV transports David and Jennifer to another place and time and reconnects them with emotions and situations from the past. "Even as a object of analysis, the bridge serves its traditional function: it allows us to distinguish each term from its opposite, like two banks of a river, but it gives us a way to understand the pair together as a single terrain" p. 191. The whole experience that the two siblings have in this movie bridge the gap (pun intended) to a new way of thinking that was learned from the almost primeval way in the town of Pleasantville.

The whole movies screams "I should be a part of the Marling book, especially since I'm about TV". The set design (or should I say design of pleasant Pleasantville) struck me as an example of Marling's chapter called "Disneyland, 1955". Not that the town of Pleasantville is like Disneyland in the fact that Disneyland "was commercial, a roadside money machine, cynically exploiting the innocent dreams of childhood" p. 90 Marling. But the design of Pleasantville is campy and almost a parody of real 1950s towns. The seemingly picture perfect homes, manicured lawns, and layout is portrayed that way to entice someone like David to feel as though this is a perfect place where life is happy and cheery. Disneyland is similarly designed, to entice a false sense of perfection and calm. The clothing design in the film (again, or should I say the real not-so-real lives of the Pleasantvillians?) does a similar thing that the set/home design does. When seeing Betty's character in the clearly "Mamie Eisenhower" looks, its so obvious to see that 1950s mentality! It also made me wonder how the history of women's wear has gone from the corset to the Mamie look. The clothes worn by Mary Sue/Jennifer and Betty were totally of the time period. But were they comfortable? Were they any more 'liberating' than the corset? Leslie Shannon Miller, in her article called "Styles of Womanhood Embodied in a Late-Nineteeth-Century Corset" says that "Granted, not many women were killed by their corsets; the majority of women merely lost the spirit and energy of youth even as they attained its physical shape" p. 138. Did the same thing happen or not in the Mamie Eisenhower look that Marling talks about in her chapter called "Mamie Eisenhower's New Look"?

I think that you could have a whole semester long class on this movie. There is just so much to look at, and each thing seems to have a deeper meaning!

Pleasantville

Debord says “The spectacle presents itself as something enormously positive, indisputable and inaccessible…The attitude which it demands in principle is passive acceptance which in fact it already obtained by its manner of appearing without reply, by its monopoly of appearance” (Durham/Kellner 119). First, the Pleasantville citizenry is somewhat hypnotized by its own spectacle nature. The people are engrossed in what their society has become that they fail to see that anything could be different and/or better. Also, David (Tobey Maguire’s character) is a victim of the Pleasantville spectacle. He sees his own reality as “unreal, unglamorous, and boring…while the spectacle is exciting and enthralling” (Durham/Keller 93) to the point that the spectacle regulates much of his real life (e.g. his lunchtime Pleasantville trivia game). In the creation of this spectacle, the Dorfman/Mattelart article about Disneyland comes to mind. Ideas about the way life “should” be and how people “should” behave were embedded into the Pleasantville society and broken only by the arrival of two outsiders. Just as Dorfman and Mattelart insisted that embedded messages created a cycle of ideologies, the rules of the home, school, and general life were embedded into Pleasantville society such as the daily routine of coming home, putting down the briefcase, saying “Honey, I’m home,” and having a warm dinner ready to eat (Durham/Kellner 122-129). Pleasantville as a spectacle containing embedded messages of ideal views about life also fits into Baudrillard’s conception of a “hyperreal model of the United States that is more-real-than-real, generating role models, ideals, and an image of a perfect world” (Durham/Kellner 447). While Baudrillard is discussing the role of Disneyland in the simulation of a real world, the concept applies to the presentation of Pleasantville as a model 1950s America and also ties into Marling’s decision to use 1950s icons as representatives of that cultural era.

When David and Jennifer arrive in Pleasantville, though, life begins to change for the town. Hebdige says that “violations of the authorized codes through which the social world is organized and experienced have considerable power to provoke and disturb. They are generally condemned…” (Durham/Kellner 153). When many people in Pleasantville begin to change into color, they represent the breaking of certain codes and ideals; they are a subculture. But just as Hebdige predicts, the concepts of the subculture become embedded within the dominant groups when the reluctant town leaders literally change their colors (Durham/Kellner 158). This “colored” subculture becomes for some Pleasantville citizens comparable to bell hooks’s “Others”. Hooks discusses ethnicity and race as commodity, spicing up mainstream white culture to the point that the “other” becomes an object of desire. Hooks points out that American culture creates the ideas “that racial difference marks one as Other and the assumption that sexual agency expressed within the context of racialized sexual encounter is a conversion experience that alters one’s place…” (Durham/Kellner 367). These ideas are presented in Pleasantville through the portrayal of “colored” townspeople in connection with sexual activity and eventually as different from the rest of the townspeople. The most obvious character who falls into hooks’s view of “desire and resistance” of the Other is Skip, who has no problem having sex with Mary Sue/Jennifer but also participates in the book burning activities. He is intrigued by the activities associated with the “coloreds” in private but to the rest of the town he struggles against the rise of the subculture…he both desires and resists.

Material, Media, and Pleasantville

One element of the film that I found striking was its use of the material aspects of food and cooking to discuss the ideal of domesticity in 1950s culture. As in Werbel's Foley Food Mill analysis, the film is working with the idea that women are the center of the household-- processing the raw materials of everyday life to make them palatable and pleasant for the family unit (Prown/Haltman 240). It seems no accident that the first really major destabilization of Pleasantville society comes with the mother's transformation to color and her changed relationship to food. The breakfast scene, when the teenagers are newly introduced to Pleasantville, makes the link between the mother and food production as an accepted social norm. She reveals stacks of perfect pancakes and waffles, a veritable feast presented as just another morning's nourishing breakfast. Yet the film also makes this production disturbing, as the piles of caloric foods pressed upon the modern teenagers seems excessively heavy and caloric, producing a sense of disgust with the bounty. Thus the film both reveals and troubles the ideal of domestic plenty as evidenced through food. As Marling suggested, food production in the 1950s was tied to a display of feminine competence. Thus, the fictive Betty Crocker had to be attached to a logo that suggested her abilities and her endorsement of culinary products for women. Cake, along with other foods, came to evidence a woman's ability to manage and control her sphere of influence (Marling 239). In the film, when the mother leaves the home, the question of color becomes one of central importance to the community. When the husband comes home to find the kitchen empty of both his wife and his expected meal, the question of change in Pleasantville is taken up and challenged by a large group within the town. The middle aged white men in the town come to understand the absence of dinner as a major threat to their way of life, because it indicates the possibility of changing gender and labor relations. The film points to the media devaluation of women's labor by suggesting that food production isn't valued until it stops-- unitl the appliance ridden kitchen is empty of the person who knows how to use those tools to create a stable domestic space. Meehan's argument that television has traditionally privleged male veiwership as more valuable than female veiwership can help illuminte this assumption (Durham/Kellner, 310). It follows that in shows geared more toward pleasing a male audience, women's labor can be taken as a given. The film challenges the complacency of this attitude by showing just how much food, and all of the objects and actions involved in its production, actually did constitute a notion of stability in the domestic space in the popular narratives of the time period.

This concern over women's labor is also tied to larger questions about the necesity of labor in the world of Pleasantville. The introduction of color disrupts routine, and this discontinutiy makes people in the town start questioning thier jobs. The film shows how disruptions in the base of a production/consumption driven society are a real threat to the dominant social order, speaking to Williams' point that the lived relations of the base are primary in the maintenance or disruption of an economic order (Durham/Kellner 130). When his boss questions why he should keep on working despite the fact that he no longer sees the importance of the job, David exclaims that it is so "the people can have their cheesburgers!" When labor stops, consumption is stopped, and throughout the film charecters express anxiety about this fact because they sense that a change in those labor and consumer relations would be far more socially profound than simply the lost ability to readily obtain cheesburgers (which are yet another instance of the importance of stable everday culinary relations to larger social interactions and power relations).

The film also makes use of a discussion of racial dynamics, both overt and subtle. On the one hand, the eventual imposed divisions in the community based on color become a way in which the film can discuss the racial politics of the 1950s which remain somewhat veiled in most television of the time. The segregation based on color draws attention to the monolithic whiteness of the cast, even as it tries to trouble the unity of the racial culture. The town council button, for instance, becomes an ironic illusion to these racial politics, as the two clasped hands it depicts are both obviously the same shade of white. Yet at the same time the material and media props that the film uses to cue the transformation from uniformity to diversity and color also reference as less visible set of racial relations. Music is one of the first indicators that change is happening in Pleasantville; as more teens become colorized the soundtrack is either rock 'n roll or jazz. Among the first objects that show up in color are the soda shop jukebox and a car radio. Thus American music born out of black culture comes to denote the revitalization of white culture. With respect to literature too, the first of the books that catalyzed transformation is Huckleberry Finn-- another allusion to the US's racial history made into a medium for white intellectual diversity. In this way the film seems to fall back on the sentiment bell hooks discusses, that media portrayals often treat encounters with blackness as ways of improving one dimensional (or gray scale) white culture (Durham/Kellner 366). So even though the film does try to deal with racial politics, the technicolor analogy can only carry it so far in its reflections on cultural diversity.

Television according to Pierre Bourdieu “suits everybody because it confirms that they already knew and above all leaves their mental structures intact” (On Television, Durham & Keller, 329). This could perhaps explain David’s attachment to Pleasantville. The film is careful to shown that David and Jennifer live in a ‘broken’ environment compared to the relative safety of Pleasantville. takes comfort from the familiarly of Pleasantville, he does not have to change any notions, it also helps that Pleasantville is on repeats further emphasizing the comforting nature of the format. Pleasantville and by extensions the TV represents comfort. Pleasantville is seen as comforting because it represents the 1950’s an era traditionally seen as innocent. The film makers were careful to paint Pleasantville as the extreme. Much like Main Street USA, as in Disneyland, the television show takes place in a town where only pleasant things happen, “A t.v. sitcom better than reality had been” (Marling 115). The creators are careful to show the dichotomy between 1950’s of Pleasantville and the ‘real’ world. The 50’s are extreme, the most risqué behavior that appears in Lover’s Lane is hand holding, sex is non-existent, and clothing is demure. Everything is perfect and pleasant. The 1950’s that was displayed in the film was a myth which arose attempting to create a falsified version of history. The 1950’s displayed in Pleasantville was a myth that arose to fit the stereotype. According to Barthes, Pleasantville could be seen as a myth because the viewer refuses to dig deeper and uncover the mystery, this could possibly ruin the preconceived innocence of the 1950’s and force society to scrutinize its history. The film forces the viewer to take what they think they know of history and reanalyze and possibly that the 1950s was not as wholesome as previously thought (Durham Keller, 106).
“The medium is the message” (Durham Keller, 107) .In the film, the television is the anchor between the real world and the world of Pleasantville. The TV is the medium in which not only the show is broadcasted and symbolizing the world of the 1950’s, but through David and Jennifer the television also broadcasts the message of the modern world. In Pleasantville the TV does not offer a connection to the outside world, but keeps the town community isolated. The TV is not a tool to access the outside world, but rather reinforce the world of Pleasantville. The symbol of the TV becomes lost in translation. According to McLuhan the message of any medium or technology is change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs (Durham, Keller 108). The TV becomes this message with the introduction of David and Jennifer. The introduction of David and Jennifer cause a spectacle in Pleasantville. Pleasantville takes place in 1958, yet no direct mention is made of the chaos that is surrounding the country at the time. Yet, is obviously seen, McCarthyism is evident with the restriction of actions and speech. One of the first colors to appear in Pleasantville is red, not only associated with passion and desire, but with communism as well. Racism is apparent everywhere, with signs declaring “no colors allowed” as well as the absence of African Americans. According to Debord, a “spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people mediated by images.“ (Durham Keller, 118). Pleasantville is quickly hammered by the chaos of the 1950’s and as a result, their society quickly turned on it’s head trying to rapidly adjust to changing environment.

Pleasantville

Pleasantville and As Seen on TV relate to each other in several ways and provide critique on the same decade, the 1950s. However, the technology that Marling focuses on – the TV, the car, kitchen appliances – take a backseat to the greater issue in Pleasantville: change. Although the presence of the TV in the living room, teenagers in cars, and even the stove and refrigerator play importance roles in the film, they are not the catalysts, as they seem to be in Marling’s book. Mary Sue’s unwillingness to conform to the television version of life in the 50s ultimately results in the people of Pleasantville realizing their emotions and exploding into color. Color plays and interesting role in this movie because it symbolizes the change happening in the town, but it also relates to the change happening in the 1950s. Marling discusses color frequently; cars, stoves, and refrigerators came in new, exciting colors, and offered consumers a way of personalizing their suburban homes and commutes to work. However, as noted in the class discussion, the civil rights movement is absent from Marling’s discussion, and the color in Pleasantville applied to more than just cars and appliances and symbolized more than a change in technology. The segregation of black-and-whites and coloreds corresponds to the oppression African Americans experienced, and the scene in the courtroom was very reminiscent of the scene in To Kill a Mockingbird, which addresses racial inequality during the Depression era. The pop culture that Marling discusses takes a supporting role in Pleasantville in order to provide critique on racial issues as well as globalization and change as a result of technology.

In addition to Marling’s book, Pleasantville relates to several other sources on material and media culture. While still in the 90s, David’s life revolves around the TV, and his escape from reality is watching the quaint, perfect lifestyle of a “typical” American family in the 1950s. However, this “real” depiction of life in the 50s is merely a simulation of reality, and as Baudrillard suggests, simulation has no relation to reality. Because a simulation is not pretending, David’s original plan to pretend to fit in goes awry as Jennifer decides to make her life in this simulation her reality. She embraces her power as an outsider in this virtual world, and by deciding to stay in Pleasantville, she makes her virtual identity her real identity (Poster). Her acting out against the pure and perfect lifestyles of Pleasantville residents starts a subculture of residents who rebel against conformity and seek to feel their emotions. This color subculture becomes embraced by the dominant black-and-white culture in the courtroom when Bud/David reveals his father’s love for his mother and Big Bob’s anger and rage towards Bud (Hebdige). David and Jennifer bring their experience from the 90s to their simulated life in the 50s, bridging the cultures of these two decades and their real selves with their simulated selves, creating a hybrid culture. Globalization is evident in their lives in the 90s in the scene from classrooms in which topics such as HIV and global warming are the objects of discussion. Pleasantville, while benefiting from technologies that imply globalization (the TV and radio), has yet to experience the social effects of globalization because the presence of technology is merely a simulation of it – the books have no words, the radio only plays certain music, and no one seems to ever actually watch the television in the living room. It is Jennifer’s actions that start the process of globalization and a hybridization of Pleasantville in which the culture of Pleasantville is not turned upside down but, rather, influenced by outside sources – David, Jennifer, music, art, books, and even emotions (Naderveen Piterse). Although Pleasantville focuses on the influence of media – TV, books, music – those technologies would not exist without their material selves, and similarly, Pleasantville provides a critique on technology’s influence on both the 90s and the 50s that comes to us through the technology of film – the medium is the message (McLuhan).

Pleasantville

          Pleasantville presented an interesting perspective of simulated life in the 1950s which related to several of the previously assigned readings. The world presented in the movie was one that was not reality, but pure spectacle, as the TV show was created to be an exaggerated stereotype of 50s life. Just as Dorfman and Matterlart state that media created for children by adults is built with what the creators see as idealized childhood, thus inventing childhood for the child,¹ Pleasantville (the TV show within the film) is created with the producers ideas, which have a tremendous impact on the two protagonists. In the plot of the film, the two protagonists end up inside the TV show. This is similar to the commodity becoming the spectacle through the actions of the consuming class. ² Another theme that arose from the film was the media can be a part of the message. The fact that the film presents a “real” life and a TV show that becomes a “reality” allows the plot to be carried out through different mediations. The segments of the film in the current time present a different message than the segments in the TV show. This relates to McLuhan‘s “The Medium is the Message.” ³

          Marling’s book also related greatly to the film. Marling claims that the visual culture of everyday life in the 1950’s was a byproduct of the color, style and motion presented by television. ⁴ The TV was a major character in the Pleasantville. At the beginning of the film, the two main characters had conflicting plans for the evening, both of which revolved around TV. It was made clear in scenes that took place in the school that the TV had a huge effect on the lives of both characters, rendering one a social outcast and one a member of the “in crowd” a la MTV circa 1998. Obviously, the television went on to have a huge effect as the characters get sucked in to Pleasantville-world, but the most interesting aspect of television comes in the form of the television repair guy. This character is the reason the two kids get sucked into TV and is in total control of the situation. The interesting aspect of this character is that he communicates to the children thought TV. The protagonists paradoxically look into the television as their only link to the “real world,” with the existence of reality depending on TV. This mimics the circle of spectacle and commodity seen by Guy Debord. ⁵




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1 Ariel dorfman and Armand Matterlart. "Introduction: Instruction on How to Become a General in the Disney Club." Media and cultural Studies: Keyworks (2006): 122
2 Guy Debord. "The commodity as spectacle." Media and cultural Studies: Keyworks (2006): 117.
3 McLuhan, Marshall. "The Medium is the Message." Media and cultural Studies: Key works (2006): 107.
4 Marling, Karal Ann. As seen on TV. Cambridge MA: Harvard University press, 1994. p6
5 Guy Debord. "The commodity as spectacle." Media and cultural Studies: Keyworks (2006): 119.

Pleasantville

While Pleasantville is seeping in links to our semester’s readings, these five points of the movie were first to make pen to paper. As the wholesomeness of the our ideal selves meets the universally accessible manipulation of society we all discover our “TechniColor” reality.

Poster’s article of virtual realities is brought to mind as the main characters of Pleasantville are expierencing a virtual reality of their 1990’s life. As Jennifer decies to stay in her new reality and embrace her new identity, I am reminded of class discussion on choosing the profile we out, virtually, per Poster’s article.

Early in the kids’ experience in Pleasantville, the mother won’t let her children leave with out a disgustingly large breakfast. This immedialty brought me to the Folly Food Mill article. As marketing played off of the fears of mothers and their ability to provide wholesome nutrition for their families, Pleasantville mothers felt pressured to stuff their families before a day of school/work.

“Mary Sue and Bud” prepare for a night out as Mary Sue makes note of her unnatural undergarmet. Moments of the Corset article flooded my mind. The unnatural shape of women and Bud’s assurance that “they don’t notice things like that”. Just as the corset was meant to make women subtly more attractive, Mary Sue’s 1950’s garment was meant to make her subtly more feminine.

As the citizens of Pleasantville acted out, they discovered new mediums to express their new values. Appadurai points out a similar practice as globalization has found a new medium. While Appadurai is wondering if westernization is losing is potency because of the widening availability of mediums, the citizens of Pleasantville could experience a loss of continuity with the widening of the message of new values.

Similarly, the citizens’ demonstrations link to Marling’s research of the 1950’s. 1958 is a poienette year in Marling’s work as this is when the Elvis shift occurred, as the shift in Pleasantville took place this same year. Marling pints on the changing of society from “perfection” as the wholesomeness of youth began to diminish, just as the youth of Pleasantville discovered their attraction toward one another.

Pleasantville

It was pretty obvious how the movie Pleasantville related to our previous readings, especially Marling. One distinct connection I made was how media has such a powerful influence over people. In the movie, David was so infatuated with the TV show Pleasantville. He enjoyed the lifestyle of the 1950’s so much that when he was placed into the TV show directly, his first instinct (which he thoroughly enjoyed) was to be like everyone else in the town. This makes me think of, in general, how people desire to be like what the media shows them. Bourdieu addressed the power of television in his essay On Television. He was speaking of the influence of television shows on the general public saying “[these] programs serve the establishment and ever-more obsequiously promote social conformity”. David was a direct representative of this social conformity and “sameness” that media has the potential to increase. When George Parker (the father in the movie) was given the Chamber of Commerce button, he felt like he fit in and was part of an important group. This relates to Marling writing about Mamia Eisenhower’s “New Look”. She stated, “The newest “New Look” dramatized the American woman as an eternal American girl, as Maime’s younger sister in spirit…” Her new look was seen in catalogues, on TV, and in person. Women desired to have that same essence of Maime, and they would achieve it by dressing and carrying themselves like her. These women were “sisters” to Maime, which was just the same type of relationship George Parker gained when receiving the pin.

The material world in this movie was one of the most important in portraying the culture of the 1950’s. When things began changing in the movie, color started appearing and people began breaking their routine, I was reminded of how the first interpretation of something can be wrong, and further investigation is needed to show the “true colors” of the object. When some people began changing colors, the ones that didn’t looked negatively at those that were, and assumed it meant one thing. But when everyone ended up turning colors, and experiencing that deep emotion, the change of color was associated with something else. I was reminded of the Haitian moneybox written about by McLane in American Artifacts. McLane initially thought the box was only made for a tourist’s enjoyment, but came to later discover the true meaning of the moneybox used by Haitian women at the markets. This idea that there is always something more to an object or a media broadcast can also be seen in Pleasantville when Bill Johnson (the ice cream parlor worker) discovered the color paints and painted the entire window of his store. It was a symbol of change; he created a media within the media of the movie. This type of profound media, that designates a big change in lifestyle goes along with the change appliances, TVs, and TV dinners made within families. Marling addressed how all these things changed the dynamics of the family. The housewife would move away from using the appliances for cooking casseroles to bring the family together, but would now pant all the family members in front the of the TV with their TV dinners. This was a big change in family routine, and was a kick off for the idea of constant mobility in the 1950’s

I thought it was clever how the movie addressed the idea of racism by using colored vs. non-colored. The courtroom in the last seen was a clear definitive of this idea, the colored people were seated in the balcony, while the non-colored people were on the main floor. Marling seemed to dance around racism (and other happenings in the 1950’s) as well. Pleasantville and Marling both focused on the typical white American family; desiring the cars, the outfits, and the appliances, but at the same time were able to portray what was going on the in the 1950’s but not actually referencing them at all.