Thing Theory and Awkward Family Photos

I was very interested in Bernstein's description of thing theory in her article, "Dances with Things," and I've been looking for a way to apply it to my ideas about medievalism that have been fermenting these past several weeks. Bernstein's use of photos led me to a favorite site of mine, Awkward Family Photos, and I found several examples of medieval-themed awkwardness. Like the  cosplay and reenactment photos I posted earlier, these pictures all involve props and costumes, and I'd like to look at a few of them with thing theory in mind.

Bernstein explains the theory briefly in her article: "Things, but not objects, script actions. Martin Heidegger and more recent scholars of 'thing theory' define an object as a chunk of matter that one looks through or beyond to understand something human. A thing, in contrast, asserts itself within a field of matter . . . The difference between objects and things, then, is not essential but situational and subjective . . . An object becomes a thing when it invites a person to dance." (69-70)

In this photo, the obvious and awkward 'thing' is the chain mail. The family has responded to the thing's invitation to dance with great enthusiasm, but the different ways they have employed it speak to their separate reactions to the thing. The man wears the chain mail in a very typical way, a way that medieval soldiers might have actually worn it. The woman, however, wears hers like a metal bikini. In fact, it immediately reminded me of Princess Leia's infamous metal bikini in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi. The baby's chain mail shows that the parents are interested in their child one day responding to the thing as they have. 

I'll call this photo medieval because it seems from the tags on the website that the people in the photo considered it to be so. The things in this picture include costumes, props, and set. The costumes are notably gendered, just as in the chain mail photo, with the man wearing a 'period' costume and the girls wearing sexualized costumes of dubious historical origin. The woman in the back seems to be wearing a 'barmaid' kind of outfit that is slightly more historical-ish than the girls' clothes. The props they are holding also invite this kind of gendered performance--the man holds a sword and the girls hold tamborines.

This photo is my favorite. I don't know the circumstances in which it was taken, but I'm tempted to guess that it took place at a gathering like the Society for Creative Anachronism. It has a specific date and location, indicating some kind of public social event, and the title "Friends of the Realm" sounds very like the kind of language the SCA uses. I would also guess that the picture was taken in front of a screen and the background was added afterward. Thus the key things here are the costumes and the prop weapons. Here the costumes are both fairly appropriate to their use in medieval period, unlike the chain mail bikini and the harem girl costumes. The woman's outfit doesn't veer toward the overtly sexualized, and the weapons also invite her to depart from a traditionally gendered role. I wonder how the girls in the photo above would have posed if they had been handed battle axes instead of tamborines.

What I notice most in these pictures is the way that costumes and props from the medieval era tend to script gender. While the men in these pictures are performing fairly literal roles from what they imagine to be the Middle Ages, the women are often adopting highly sexualized and anachronistic roles. The medieval era simply has more to offer male performers, and the women are creating their performances based on an assumption of a male world. This could also be said of race--I didn't find any photos of awkward black families posing in chain mail. In these photos, scriptive things form an essential part of the performance of medievalism, and these things tend to imply a white male performer.

Don Giovanni: Not the kind of transport Cavell experienced

I hated Don Giovanni. Almost from the moment I met him, I was anxiously awaiting his death, partly so that I could go home and partly because he disgusted me. Some of that was probably an intended effect of the opera, but a lot of it had to do with the way the female characters were presented and interacted with, and the way that Don Giovanni's behavior was played as an obvious joke.

Things were kind of hard to see from my seat, and I didn't read the program notes before it started, so I wasn't quite sure what was going on during the opening scene. It seemed like Don Giovanni was having an awkward liaison with Donna Anna. Maybe they had a quarrel, because she turns away from him, then calls him back, then he turns away from her, and then wins her back. Then she follows him out into the street and clings to him, and he sings a remark about this one being hard to get rid of or something like that. Then when Donna Anna tells her fiance she was raped, I went back and read the program notes, which said that Don Giovanni seduced her. Yet the libretto and Donna Anna's actions throughout the play seemed to clearly show that Mozart thought it was rape. I was confused and annoyed that the production had muddied that distinction without explanation. Later on, Don Giovanni carries the protesting Zerlina offstage and she cries out, which I saw as a second rape. Between these possible rapes and the general attitude that Don Giovanni was just a very good joke, I was out for his blood.

Cavell described the experience of wanting to save Desdemona and not being able to as an emblem of our separation from each other in the real world. In a dark reversal of Cavell's joke about the yokel, at the end of Act One, I wanted to take the gun from the incompetent would-be assassins onstage and shoot Don Giovanni myself. The etiquette and conventions of the theater created a separateness in hatred just as it did for Cavell in empathy. In the end, even Don Giovanni being dragged down to hell didn't completely satisfy me because the music made it seem like even though he was foolish, he was still brave. The production invited me to admire Don Giovanni even when he was lying to women, even when he lugged them offstage to rape them, even when he brutally kicks Masetto lying on the ground, even when he was dragged down to hell by a statue and seven grim reapers. If I the anger that I felt toward Don Giovanni had been invited or recognized in this production, then transport might have been possible through hatred rather than identification.

In which Auslander meets up with Klingons, Confederates, and Jousters

I'd like to start drawing together a few threads from this blog and moving toward an idea I've been thinking about this semester-- particularly as my blog will be viewed and reported on this week, and Kelly will want to know where all these discussions are going.

As a medievalist who reads science fiction in her spare time, when I started into this performance studies course, I was immediately interested in the question of popular medievalism in modern culture, particularly conventions and reenactments.

Auslander's concept of the persona is a useful tool for evaluating what exactly is happening in these situations. His understanding of persona is divided into three layers: the real person, the performance persona, and the character. These layers function differently for the cosplayer than they do for the actor or for the glam rocker, and the key difference is that the cosplayer is simultaneously performer and audience. The dynamics change depending on the specific situation, so I will look at three similar situations of role play or reenactment. We might as well start with the Klingons.

via g4tv.com

The stereotypical staple of sci-fi conventions everywhere, Klingon cosplayers seem like a good place to start. This group attended Comic-Con 2012 along with other fans of all breeds. Since they won't be mingling just with other Star Trek fans, the costumes are as much about projecting the real person as they are about the performance persona or the character. They are identifying themselves with a particular group in a very visible way, and they might act gruff and stomp around Comic-Con grunting and yelling "Qapla,'" but I doubt they put together a permanent, unique character for themselves and spent the whole day without breaking character. In this performance dynamic, the real person is in the ascendant, despite the rubber foreheads. They are making a statement of allegiance to their culture of choice.

http://joseherworld.blogspot.com/2009/06/civil-war-reenactments.html 

Here is another type of costumed performance, but this one is very different from the Comic-Con cosplay. I would argue that in this situation, the performance persona is the most important aspect of the trinity, just as it is for Auslander's glam rockers. The real person and the character are both faintly present, but the overall persona is more important than either. To participate, the real person must have reasons for choosing to play Confederate (their great-great-grandfather was a Rebel, they live in the South, they like a lost cause, they're secretly racist, etc.), and some of them might have a specific character that they are choosing to portray. But the most important aspect of this performance seems to be the broad persona. You choose either Union or Confederate. You join up with the group of your choice, and you act like a civil war soldier for an afternoon.

via sca.org

Finally, here is the situation that most interests me. The Society for Creative Anachronism is one of the largest organized groups for medieval-themed role play, but there are many others like it. Local chapters host several annual events ranging from sword-fighting tournaments to demonstrations of medieval crafts. Then all the local groups gather for a national meeting once a year, engage in a massive mock-battle, and crown the winner as king. Character is the important element of persona here, as members of the society create their own names and construct a history for the character they play. However, it is a social outlet, where many members form their primary friendships and romantic relationships, so the real person must also come into play for many of the participants. In this situation, a complex relationship exists between archive and repetoire, person and persona, absorption and theatricality, audience and spectator. I want to explore these relationships further this semester.

To Kill A Mockingbird, book and play

This class is necessarily mostly about drama in various forms and not about books, and while I'm interested in all the new forms and theory we've been gathering this term, I'm still a book person at heart. When I went to see Mockingbird, it made me feel overwhelmingly sentimental, not just in sympathy with the character of the play, which is firmly fixed in the past, but also for my own childhood when I read To Kill A Mockingbird. One of the chief sources of pleasure in watching the play was remembering the book. It made it difficult for me to think analytically about the play as a play. I liked Adult Scout because having her as a narrator allowed them to quote long passages from the book, but I can see how a less literal interpretation of the book could have been a more powerful experience for the audience. Here are a few quotes that were in my mind as I watched, but were left out of the play:

After the death of Mrs. Dubose, Atticus tells Jem that she was a great lady:

"She was. She had her own views about things, a lot different from mine, maybe . . . son, I told you that if you hadn't lost your head, I'd have made you go read to her. I wanted you to see something about her--I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do. Mrs. Dubose won, all ninety-eight pounds of her. According to her views, she died beholden to nothing and nobody. She was the bravest person I ever knew."

From the children's visit to Calpurnia's church:

That Calpurnia lead a modest double life never dawned on me. The idea that she had a separate existence outside our household was a novel one, to say nothing of her having command of two languages.

When Dill runs away to come visit them:

"Beautiful things floated around in his dreamy head. He could read two books to my one, but he preferred the magic of his own inventions. He could add and subtract faster than lightning, but he preferred his own twilight world, a world where babies slept, waiting to be gathered like morning lilies. He was slowly taking himself to sleep and me with him, but in the quietness of his foggy island there rose the faded image of a gray house with sad brown doors."

When Atticus and Calpurnia tell Helen Robinson that Tom is dead:

"Sam was trotting behind his mother when they came up. Dill said Helen said, 'Evenin', Mr. Finch, won't you have a seat?' But she didn't say any more. Neither did Atticus.

'Scout,' said Dill, 'she just tell down in the dirt. Just fell down in the dirt, like a giant with a big foot just came along and stepped on her.'"

The Werner Herzog Lecture, or One Consequence of Studying Performance

Image from Lessons in Darkness via screenjunkies.com

http://www.123rf.com

Whitney and I went to the second Werner Herzog lecture last Thursday in the Auditorium and found it illuminating on several different levels, not all of them pretty.

The lecture focused on the use of music in film, and after an introduction of himself and his complex relationship to music, Herzog spent the evening showing us a series of clips and then commenting on them. The clips showed many different ways that music alters our perception of an image or enriches our experience of an event, and they came from his own films as well as other sources.

He defended his love of Fred Astaire with a clip that he said was the best possible use of film because it is only light and shadow and movement. In the black and white clip, Astaire dances in a small open room, and two shadowed silhouettes dance in unison behind him. As the song progresses, Astaire dances sometimes in unison and sometimes in opposition to the shadows.

We saw everything from an upside down image of a burning oil rig in Kuwait to a dancing chicken. I was very moved and intrigued by both the clips and Herzog’s commentary on them. The last clip was of a skier leaping from a high bank of snow out into empty space in slow motion. His movement was as beautiful and serene as a bird’s, and the music was a lyrical orchestral piece. But by the time the clip played, my attention had been drawn by something else.

In the row behind us, there was a man who began having some kind of medical emergency. At first there were a few noises, like coughing or groaning, and they got louder. Herzog didn’t know that the man was in trouble, so he continued with his lecture and his clips. Paramedics came and the man was lowered down into the aisle while they put on an oxygen mask and tried to help him. I felt very uncomfortable. Many of the stories and images that Herzog had been showing us were achingly human and even difficult to watch, but they were difficult in a grand and beautiful and meaningful way. That state of mind was suddenly interrupted by a very different kind of small human pain that was not at all beautiful, and the collision was part of what made me uncomfortable. I could see other people reacting the same way, not knowing whether to look at the stage or the man in the aisle.

I was also a bit unnerved by the way I began to look at the situation through the lens of performance studies that we have been discussing this term. Whitney and I talked afterward about it, and she said she had thought and felt similarly. As it was happening, I wished there was something I could do for the man, but I also thought, “What an interesting moment. I can write about this on my blog,” which doesn’t strike me as a very ethical response. But it was an interesting moment.

The Exonerated and Chicago

After our discussion of The Exonerated on Thursday, I was reminded of a performance that shares some intriguing similarities and differences with that play—the musical Chicago. The tone of these two pieces is clearly very different, and as an audience we react to them in very different ways. Chicago is entertainment rather than activism, but they both point out some of the flaws in the judicial system and the way some people can work it to their advantage and others cannot. They both have an implied opposition to the death penalty, although in the musical it is perhaps a bit less intentional than in the play. Regardless of their significant differences in tone, genre, and theme, I walked away from both of them with increased skepticism about the courts and an increased sympathy for those who are imprisoned for serious crimes.

In some ways, Chicago is more successful than The Exonerated at drawing attention to the problems of the judicial system and the death penalty because it removes the melodramatic lines of good and evil. In the play, we know that the characters are innocent, and we pity them because of the injustice of what they suffered. But in the musical, almost all the characters are guilty, and we empathize with them anyway. One particular musical number stands out to me for its clear contrast with the play. In “Cell Block Tango,” each of the six women accused of murder step forward and tell why they killed the men in their lives, and why they were justified in doing so. The chorus is a direct invitation for the audience to take their side: “If you’d have been there, if you’d have seen it, I betcha you would’ve done the same.”

The staging and effects of the musical draw attention to the theatricality of the court, and the women who go free are the ones who know how to perform for the public to create sympathy and interest. Interestingly, the only woman who is executed in the musical is also the only one who was innocent, and that scene gives the rest of the musical a greater seriousness. The women on trial may be playing up their roles with song and dance, but they are facing a real threat, and the audience feels that with them.

It’s hard to say which one of these performances is more successful at drawing negative attention to the judicial system, and the death penalty in particular. In “Uses of Empathy,” Blank and Jensen recalled hearing an inmate speak and thinking that they were the wrong audience for that speech, and so they wrote a play. In class we touched on the qualities of the typical play-going audience and wondered if that was still the wrong audience in some ways. Chicago reaches an audience of a different kind, especially the film version, which is available for mass-consumption by a broader group of people. Similarly, its message is more diluted that that of The Exonerated. However, it might provide a better reason to fight the death penalty by pointing out the flaws in the system without resorting to clear labels of innocent and guilty.

"Where were you when"

http://www.sflistteamhouse.com/Misc/Pearl%20Harbor/original.htm

It occurred to me yesterday during our class discussion of 9/11 how many similarities exist between the way we publicly remember and memorialize September 11 and the attack on Pearl Harbor, and how this similarity might account for many people's reactions on that day eleven years ago.

That day is a little hazy for me now, and it's hard to separate what I experienced from what I was told or learned later. Maybe the situation is complicated for me because I never witnessed the events live, either in person or on TV. I was told what happened by a teacher hours after the attacks occurred, and by then an official narrative was already developing.

I'm pretty sure I heard comparisons to Pearl Harbor start popping up almost immediately, though. As the death toll started coming in, people noted that it was more people than had died at Pearl Harbor. The attack surprised us and seemed initially incomprehensible. I think of the line from the movie Pearl Harbor when the first bombs are falling and someone says, "I didn't even know the Japs were sore at us!" The terrorists flew planes, like the Japanese bombers in Hawaii, and they were quickly identified with a racial other.

I'm also pretty sure that at some point someone said to me that now my generation had a "where were you when" moment. For my parents it was Kennedy's assassination, for my grandparents it was Pearl Harbor. I don't remember being especially surprised when we went to war less than a month later, although I did have a clear sense that it was a historic event and now things would be different. I wrote in my journal that World War 3 had started, making a connection between the War on Terror and America's war against Hitler. I had no doubt that we were doing right.

Carlson's contribution to the forum on 9/11 asserts that we use genre to construct a narrative around seemingly chaotic and meaningless violence, and I agree that the genre Americans most often reach for is melodrama. But I would argue that there is a more specific paradigm that was applied to 9/11, less a genre than a modern myth. The myth says that every generation has its defining moment, a tragedy that results in a loss of innocence and a renewed sense of national purpose and identity. Maybe this myth was originally spawned by Pearl Harbor, World War 2, and the Greatest Generation. The circumstances of 9/11 invited comparison to Pearl Harbor, and so we patterned our response accordingly.

In his post on the course blog, Kelly talked about the lack of empathy he felt as he watched the towers fall on TV. Looking back, I don't think my own response was based on empathy or sympathy with the victims as much as a feeling that my life had changed and I was now living in a world less safe and more important. History was happening all around me! America would awaken and take up a role as defender of justice once more! I must do my part! It was a sobering and ennobling feeling, and I think a lot of people felt it along with me. We have to hang on to that perception of the events of 9/11 and the war that followed, because we want to hang on to that feeling. We want 9/11 to have been Pearl Harbor so that it will mean something.

http://dailybail.com/home/new-aerial-photos-of-911-world-trade-center-collapse.html

Can we be changed by being absorbed?

"Through being spectators to the theatrum mundi of civil society, engaged but not absorbed watchers, we bring our whole experience to bear on what is seen without insisting on sameness as a criterion of worth." -Davis, "Theatricality and Civil Society"

Via fanpop.com, original image from Studio Ghibli's Tales from Earthsea

For me, one of the great qualities of art, especially narrative art, is that it sometimes allows you to leave yourself and become wholly absorbed in experiences and personalities that are alien to your own. Nowhere is this more true than in the realms of science fiction and fantasy, where the experience of otherness can be more pure. You can briefly see through the eyes of someone whose experiences and being are truly alien to your own.

In Ursula K. Le Guin's young adult Earthsea novels, an absorbed watcher catches a glimpse of this great and beautiful otherness when the character Ged speaks of dragons, who are substantially different beings than humans:

"The dragons! The dragons are avaricious, insatiable, treacherous; without pity, without remorse. But are they evil? Who am I, to judge the acts of dragons? . . . They are wiser than men are. It is with them as with dreams, Arren. We men dream dreams, we work magic, we do good, we do evil. The dragons do not dream. They are dreams. They do not work magic: it is their substance, their being. They do not do; they are." -The Farthest Shore, p. 48

Ged has a profound respect and awe of this otherness:

"He was silent for a while and then went on, 'And though I came to forget or regret all I have ever done, yet would I remember that once I saw the dragons aloft on the wind at sunset above the western isles; and I would be content.'" -The Farthest Shore, p. 49

Davis' article suggests that is only through my recognition of theatricality in this work that I am able to appreciate this otherness and allow it to change my experience. If I am wholly absorbed, I lose my autonomy and agency to change. I'm not sure yet how I think about Davis' argument, but I think that often we are not changed by a rational Brechtian decision, but by an Artaudian visceral experience, and I have most often felt myself changed after I was most absorbed.

When were you most affected by a work of art or drama or literature, and how do you perceive that change taking place within yourself?

Washington Post, via Youtube

After watching Michelle Obama's address to the Democratic National Convention, I went back to reread some of Debord's The Society of the Spectacle. I was deeply moved by her speech, and from trends on Twitter and posts of friends on Facebook, I saw that many others had been similarly affected.

My reaction to the speech (which I watched after the fact through Youtube) reminded me of our discussion in class Tuesday on point number 4:

"The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images." (Debord, 12)

Obama is presenting a complex image to her audience. She manages to effectively unite sets of opposites, delicately balancing what is expected and demanded of a first lady in her situation. She appears physically powerful and yet feminine--I observed as many comments about her arm muscles as comments about her dress. She touched on several key political messages without directly attacking any of her political opponents. Her speech was as powerful and effective as any presidential candidate's, but she stays strictly in the realm of First Lady and extolls motherhood as her greatest achievement. She appears capable and intelligent but does not mention her own career as a lawyer.

These images and their combination is powerful, but it is the social relationship she constructs between herself and the audience that gives the speech its real resonance. When I watched the clip, I felt connected to Obama and her experiences, and as a result I felt emotion when her speech reached its peak in statements about the views of her husband and the path to the future. Maybe I reacted so strongly because her speech and the images that accompanied it created a specific social relationship between me and her. I associated myself with her experiences, and I looked up to her as someone who has achieved as I would like to achieve.

The national conventions and their accompaniments are spectacle on a large scale, and this speech is perhaps the strongest single spectacle within them, at least partly because it successfully uses image to create an affecting social relationship between speaker and audience.

This video came from the Washington Post via Youtube.