Popular Pleasures: An Introduction to the Aesthetics of Popular Visual Culture 2021000716, 2021000717, 9781350193390, 9781350193406, 9781350193413, 9781350193420

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Popular Pleasures

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ALSO BY PAUL DUNCUM AND ALSO PUBLISHED BY BLOOMSBURY Picture Pedagogy: Visual Culture Concepts to Enhance the Curriculum

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Popular Pleasures An Introduction to the Aesthetics of Popular Visual Culture Paul Duncum

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BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2021 Copyright © Paul Duncum, 2021 Paul Duncum has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Copyright Key on p. xiii constitutes an extension of this copyright page. Cover Image: iStock Photos All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Duncum, Paul, author. Title: Popular pleasures : an introduction to the aesthetics of popular visual culture / Paul Duncum. Description: London ; New York : Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021000716 (print) | LCCN 2021000717 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350193390 (paperback) | ISBN 9781350193406 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350193413 (pdf) | ISBN 9781350193420 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Art and popular culture. | Aesthetics. Classification: LCC N72.S6 D777 2021 (print) | LCC N72.S6 (ebook) | DDC 701/.03—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021000716 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021000717 ISBN:

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Contents

List of Illustrations xii

Introduction 1 But What is Aesthetics? 2 And What is Popular? 2 Popular Pleasures and Politics 3 Previous Attempts 4 So What’s Different Here? 5 The Mind/Body Context 7 Scope and Outline 7

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A Realistic Style 9 What is Realism? 9 Idolatry and Ideology 10 The Search for Realism 11 Painting 11 Printing and Photography 13 Screen Imagery 14 The Pleasures of Realism 15 Making Comparisons 16 Appreciating the Skill 16 Evaluating Realism is Easy 17 Pulling Back the Curtain 17 Realism and Reality 18 When Too Much Realism is Bad 18 When Seeing Shouldn’t be Believing 18 Fake versus the Bona Fide 19 Veridical, Virtual, and Verifiable 19

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The Illusionistic 21 Illusion versus Realism 21 Magic, Miracles, and the Devil 22

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The Persistence of Illusion 22 Trompe l’oeil 22 Three-Dimensional Movies 24 Optical Illusion Devices 24 Stage Magic 26 Magic, Wonder, and Mischief 26 Being Deceived 26 Being in the Know 27 Conflating Realism with Illusion 27 Illusion and Delusion 29 Illusion and Life 29

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The Bright and Busy 31 Terms and Taste 32 The Doctrine of Decorum 33 Reason and Restraint 35 Modernist Minimalism 36 The Relativity of Restraint 37 Serious versus Superficial Purpose 39 Brightness and Business 40 Delighting the Eye 41 Enhancing the Ordinary 41 Resisting Restraint 42 Bright, Busy, and Biology 43 The Seriousness of Selling 44 Bright, Busy, and Business 44

4 The Highly Emotional 45 An Empire of Emotions 46 Emotion versus Emotionalism 47 The Rhetoric of Emotions versus the Aesthetics of Emotions 48 The Theory of Emotional Rhetoric 48 The Pictorial Practice of Rhetoric 49 The Rise of Sentiment 51 Rejecting Rhetoric 52 The Rise of Romanticism 53 Expression versus Imitation 53 Fine Art and Popular Entertainment 54 What Arouses Emotion? 54 Why Do Emotional Lures Work? 55 Catharsis versus Cognitive Coping 56

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Escaping 56 Identifying 57 Searching for Authenticity 58 Seeking Attachment 59 Participating 60 For Better or Worse 61

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The Sentimental 63 Surveying Sentimentality 63 A Discourse of Abuse 64 A Sentimental Journey 65 The Sugar of Sentimentality 67 The Comfort of an Aestheticized Sanctuary 67 Longing for a Past as Pleasant 69 Love and Compassion as their Own Rewards 71 The Ironic Distance of Camp and Kitsch 71 Social Progress 72 Exercising Power 73 The Sins of Sentimentality 73 Disempowering and Harming Sentimentality’s Subjects 74 Disempowering and Infantilizing Viewers 74 Falsification 74 Poor Public Policy 75 Sense and Sentimentality 76

6 The Vulgar 77 Vulgarity and its Variants 78 Vulgarity and Fine Art 78 A Historical Perspective 79 Grotesques and Carnival 79 Vulgar Porn 81 Scatology 81 Vulgarity and Reform 82 Viva Vulgarity! 85 Disgust and Delight 85 Transgression 87 Social Bonding 87 Joyful Resistance 88 Haunting and Humanness 88 Vile Vulgarity 89 Transgression and Suppression 89

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Ridicule and Reaction 90 Vexing Vulgarity 90

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The Violent 91 Violence and its Variants 91 A Violent Present 93 A Violent Past 93 Explaining Violent Entertainment 96 Making Moral Judgments 97 Excitation Transfer 97 Simultaneous Emotional Pleasures 98 Fear and Mastery 98 Seeking Stimulus 99 Everything But Violence 99 Algorithmic Allure 100 The Problems of Violence 101 Purgation Does Not Work 102 Diminishing Returns 103 Mental Scripts of a Hostile World 104 A Cycle of Violence 104 An End to Violence? 105

8 The Horrific 107 Horror, Terror, and Dread 107 Sublime Terror versus Popular Horror 108 Horror Hedonism 110 Performative Pleasures 110 Escape and Stimulation 111 Transfixed Fascination 112 Making Moral Judgments 113 Wish Fulfillment and/or Recognition 114 Transgressive Liberation 115 Repetition 116 Horror and Humor 116 Horror, Hostility, and Hate 117 Repression 117 Unleashing Hatred 118 Uncanny Uncertainty 118

9 The Miraculous 121 Miracles and Marvels 121

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The Skeptical Discourse 122 An Enchanted Universe of Miracles 123 The Many Lures of the Miraculous 125 Wonder 125 Curiosity 126 Creating Social Identity 126 Finding Patterns and Purpose 127 Debunking Absurdities 128 Parodying Absurdities 128 Escaping into Fantasy 129 Being Confounded 130 Spectacles of Wonder 131 Miracles and Mirage 131 Rejecting Rationality 131 Vulnerability and Vultures 132 The Wonder of it All 132

10 The Exotic 133 Exoticism Explored 133 The Exotic Discourse 134 Exotic Enchantment 134 Wonder 135 Spice Seasoning 135 Cultural Renewal 137 Defining Difference 137 Gaining Prestige by Association 139 Feeling Culturally Superior 139 Taking Symbolic Possession 141 Being Reassured 141 Distortion, Disparagement, and Denigration 142 Selectivity and Distortion 142 Inferiority Complexes 143 Superiority Complexes 144 Denial and Projection 145 Exiting the Exotic 146

11 The Erotic 147 Exploring the Erotic 147 Sexual Discourse 148 The High Culture Alibi 149

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Enjoying the Erotic 152 Voyeurism 152 Fetishism 153 Sadism, Masochism, and Sadomasochism 154 Identification 155 Exhibitionism 156 Queer and Queering 156 Prohibition, Permission, and Perfection 158 Permissiveness and Perfection 158 Pornification 158 Selling Sex 159 Sex, Sin, and Suppression 159

12 The Spectacular 161 Sizing Up the Spectacular 161 The Spectacular versus Sensationalism 163 Size Matters 163 Wonder 164 Thrills and Spills 164 Immersion 165 Ego Loss 166 Humor 167 Making Might Right 167 Requiring Submission 168 Failing to See/Failing to Feel 169 Ignoring the Unspectacular 169 Tedium 170 Summarizing the Spectacular 170

13 The Narrative 171 The Nature of Narrative 171 The Modernist Rejection of Narrative 172 Narrative Norms 172 Narrative’s Gratifications 175 Organizing Complexity 175 Satisfying Curiosity 177 Escaping into Alternative Realities 177 Emotional Identification 178 Everything Else 180 The Stories We Tell 180 The End 181

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14 The Formulaic 183 Recipes and Road Maps 183 General versus Particular 184 Formulaic Fine Art 185 Formulae and Form 187 Why Formulas Work 188 Easy Communication 188 Reducing Complexity Further 191 Ongoing Comfort and Anxiety 192 Innovation 192 Reading Complexly 193 Formulae and their Challenges 193 Boredom 193 Formulae and Falsity 193 Finishing with Formulae 194

15 The Humorous 195 Humor and Mirth 195 Humor and the Haughty 196 Humor versus Gravitas 198 Why We Smile, Snigger, and Snort 199 Feeling Superior 199 Descending Incongruity 202 Emotional Release 203 Humor’s Disciplinary and Dark Side 205 Anesthesia of the Heart 205 Imposing Social Discipline 205 Ridicule and Repression 206 Humor and Hate 207 Humor and Hostility 208

References 209 Index 227

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Illustrations

1.1 1.2 2.1 2.2 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 4.1 4.2 4.3 5.1 5.2 6.1 6.2 6.3 7.1 7.2 8.1 8.2 8.3 9.1 9.2 10.1 10.2 10.3 11.1 11.2 12.1 12.2 13.1

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Giotto di Bondone, Scenes from the Life of Mary: 7. Nativity of the God Bearer, 1303–5. (a) Los Bionicos, Sci-Fi D Character Prop for Augmented Reality and Video Games, 2016. (b) Samuel Walter, Detail of Trompe l’oeil Painting after the style of William Michael Harnett, 2019. (b) Étienne-Gaspart Robert, Detail of Phantasmagoria, Paris in 1797, 1831. (a) Thomas Del Coro, Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada, 2019. (c) Miaow Miaow, Adolf Loos’s Villa Müller, Prague, 1930, 2007. (d) Johann Nilson, Neues Caffehaus, 1756. Rijksmuseum. (a) Johann Nilson, Tearing Up the Rocaille, c. 1770. (a) Russell-Morgan, Lost in the Desert Theatrical Poster, 1900. (a) Gilbert Austin, Chironomia, or a Treatise on Rhetorical Delivery, Plate 9, 1806. (a) Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Spoiled Child, early 1760s. Hermitage Museum. (a) Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Diana and Endymion, c. 1753/6. Milwaukee Art Museum. (a) Unknown, Sacred Heart of Jesus, 19th century. (a) Poliphilo, Sheela-na-gig, Church of St. Mary and St. David, Kilpeck, c. 1140. (e) Brandon Oliver, Falla Bahh, 2018. (c) Unknown, A Jesuit Inspects Buttocks of a Urinating Woman, 1735. (a) Unknown, The Execution of Pirates in Hamburg, 1573. (a) Unknown, Iraqi Soldiers and Bombing, 2007. (g) Caravaggio, Judith Beheading Holofernes,1598. National Gallery of Ancient Art. (a) Coppo di Marcovaldo, Inferno, c. 1225. (a) Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare, 1782. Detroit Museum of Art. (a) Phgcom, Reliquary Holding the Holy Crown of Jesus Christ, Notre Dame, Paris, c. 19th century. (b) Daniel X. O’Neil, Salt Stain Mary, Chicago, 2007. (c) Lobozpics, Swiss Guard at the Vatican, 2013. (e) Jodocus Hondius, Blemmyae, Headless People of Guiana, 1599. (a) Unknown, Plate with Chinoiserie Decoration, c. 1725–50. Rijksmuseum. (e) Albert von Keller, The Judgement of Paris, 1891. Kunstmuseum Basel. (a) Micadew, White Lingerie Worn by Beautiful Caucasian Woman, 2019. (c) Blarandion, Leshan Giant Buddha from Below, c. 713–803 CE. (b) Laika, The View from the Top of Burj Khalifa with Its Shadow, 2015. (c) Israhel van Meckenem, The Annunciation, from the Life of the Virgin, c. late 1400s. Metropolitan Museum of Art. (e)

12 15 23 25 32 37 38 39 46 50 52 66 69 80 82 86 95 101 109 114 119 124 129 136 138 140 151 157 162 165 174

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13.2 Masaccio, The Tribute Money, 1427. (a) 14.1 Heinrich Lautensack, Skeleton Front View, and Sterometric Figure of a Man, From Geometry, Proportion and Person, 1610. Saxon State Library. (a) 14.2 Leonardo da Vinci, Annunciation, 1492–5. Uffizi Museum. (b) 14.3 George Seurat, Circus Sideshow, 1887–8. Metropolitan Museum of Art. (a) 14.4 Yemima Calistra, Human Puppets—The Love Story of Sita and Rama, 2020. (d) 15.1 Adriaen van Ostade, A Sense of Taste, 1635. Hermitage Museum. (a) 15.2 James Gillray, A Voluptuary Under the Horrors of Digestion, 1792. Library of Congress. (a)

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Copyright Key

(a) Public Domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author’s life plus 100 years or fewer. (b) Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International. (c) Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic. (d) I, the copyright holder of this work, release this work into the public domain. This applies worldwide. (e) Creative Commons 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication. (f) Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported. (g) This work is in the public domain in the United States because it is a work prepared by an officer or employee of the United States Government as part of that person’s official duties under the terms of Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 105 of the US Code.

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Introduction Chapter Outline But What is Aesthetics? And What is Popular? Popular Pleasures and Politics Previous Attempts So What’s Different Here? The Mind/Body Context Scope and Outline

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For modernist aesthetic theorists, the term popular aesthetics was an oxymoron. When they bothered to consider popular aesthetics at all, the word popular implied the masses and the debasement of taste, whereas aesthetics referred to a quasi-spiritual experience associated with the fine arts. Popular meant crassness, tackiness, or vulgarity; aesthetics involved refinement and good taste and spoke to noble aspirations. Fine art celebrated what was indisputably human—love, passion, and an appreciation of beauty—and it was set apart from all mundane considerations, an autonomous realm unto itself, while popular imagery was motivated by nothing but grubby monetary gain. For Immanuel Kant ([1790] 1952), who more than anyone else laid the foundations of modernist aesthetics, aesthetic experience was uncontaminated by concerns beyond itself. We were to delight in aesthetic pleasure entirely for its own sake, or as he put it, “the delight which determines judgements of taste is independent of all intent” (42). He advised that in order to judge in matters of taste one “must preserve complete indifference” (43). Objects viewed as beautiful or sublime neither relied upon nor created utilitarian interest; they simply were. While useful things please as a means to an end, things that please on their own account are good in themselves. By contrast, in the pages that follow it is assumed that when we experience cultural sites like theme parks, shopping malls, and casinos, we experience them aesthetically. When we enter fastfood restaurants, attend football matches, drive past billboards along the highway, collect souvenirs, surf the net, watch movies, and play video games we are subject to aesthetic appeals no less than in the presence of fine art. For the most part, most people enjoy such appeals because they satisfy what Miron (2002) calls the “human greed for pleasure” (458). 1

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But What is Aesthetics? Aesthetics commonly refers both to a particular kind of experience and a branch of philosophy dedicated to the study of that experience. This book is concerned with both; it is a study in what people commonly experience with popular imagery. The word aesthetics is derived from the ancient Greek term aesthesis, which meant sensation or sense data. Aesthesis pertained to things perceptible by the senses, things material, as opposed to things only thinkable or immaterial (Dickie 1997). It was used to distinguish between things that could be perceived through the senses and things that could only be imagined. Aesthesis referred to both pleasant and unpleasant sensations. Its opposite was anaesthetic—the lack of sensation—so that to experience aesthesis simply meant being awake and aware of one’s surroundings. By contrast to the narrow, modernist focus on only uplifting, ennobling experience, it is the original, highly inclusive definition of aesthetics that informs current, popular usage, and it is this broad definition that informs this book. Aesthetics here refers to the specifically visual features of imagery as well as the psychological intensities associated with them. A range of experiences is engaged: the desires we bring to images; conscious, cognitive reflection; and sensory and emotional responses—often as densely woven entanglements with each other. And often how we are affected need not be entirely conscious. Affects can include the ineffable, miniscule, visceral intensities that operate beneath consciousness (Anable 2018). At times, images cause us primarily to think, sometimes to feel something specific, and sometimes our responses are so subtle they defy naming. Popular aesthetics include the body’s and the embodied mind’s ongoing immersion in all that is going on when viewing imagery: the affective, psychological states as responses to, and desires associated with, popular culture.

And What is Popular? Popular culture is what appeals to a broad cross section of people, produced by trained professionals on their behalf, or alternatively, imagery produced by ordinary untrained people for their own enjoyment (Williams 1976). The latter is often called vernacular culture. In this book the primary concern is with the first kind: professionally produced mass culture. Mass culture is our dominant culture, partly, because there is more of it than any other kind; partly, because its production is closely tied to the dominant economic arrangements of our society, namely consumer capitalism; and, partly, because it mostly embodies mainstream social views and values (Williams 1977). Today, most mass popular culture is produced by global corporations as a capitalist enterprise and linked closely to, and reliant upon, other capitalist enterprises. Additionally, and significantly, mass popular culture typically reproduces the widely shared beliefs and major preoccupations of a society. Mass popular culture is top-down; vernacular culture is bottom-up, although there is some convergence where one influences the other (Firestone and Clark 2018). The specific social arrangements associated with the production of popular culture have changed over the years. Yet the basic distinction made above between an officially sanctioned culture for

Introduction

people and an unofficial culture of people is perennial. It is often proposed that popular culture emerged during the nineteenth century as a consequence of new, mass technologies and newly created class distinctions (Storey 2003), but the position taken here is that the lures of popular culture are of much greater long-standing. Many of the attractions to premodern fine art conform to popular preferences. This is not to equate premodern fine art with the popular culture of its day—fine art was often used to distinguish between it and the popular—but premodern fine art appears to have excited many of the same pleasures that have been popular over millennia. Often demarcations between the fine and the popular appear to be more a matter of minor distinctions than substantive differences. Popular culture is at once entirely dependent upon its specific time and place, and also to be what Gilroy (2000) calls the “changing same,” not an “invariant essence” but something that is “ceaselessly reprocessed” (129). Being substantially located in the body, popular lures have proven perennial.

Popular Pleasures and Politics The significance of popular imagery lies not only in the pleasures it affords, but in its power to influence and inculcate ideas of a sociopolitical nature. Making sense of our senses is important because the seemingly most innocent of aesthetic experiences have ethical and political consequences. As Ranciere (2004) claims, aesthetics is “at the core of politics” (13). As Walker and Chaplin (1997) argue, “pleasure is a crucial ingredient of the subjective experience of visual culture but . . . it is never innocent” (122–3). The political right condemns popular imagery for undermining traditional values, and the political left condemns it for maintaining an oppressive, inequitable social structure (Storey 2003). On the one hand, consumer culture promotes the acquisition of material goods as the source of happiness rather than through loyalty to traditional sources of authority. On the other hand, in order to activate consumer markets, popular imagery reproduces as common sense the values of sexism, racism, classism, and so on. As Karl Marx (1932) claimed, capitalism simultaneously creates, breaks, and creates anew, but inequalities remain. Irrespective of one’s politics, popular imagery is often politically incorrect. Popular imagery arouses interest equally from the political right and left because both recognize its power to both inform and form minds. To a large degree, it is the aesthetic attractions of popular culture that are used to make ideas, values, and beliefs acceptable. Ideas, values, and beliefs—in a word, ideology—are inculcated by being endlessly repeated, but also by being offered in highly pleasurable forms. Rejecting, or even questioning, problematic ideology is made that much more difficult because ideology comes packaged in aesthetic pleasure. To reject the ideology on offer means either to reject the pleasure offered by attractive packaging or the creation of cognitive dissonance. Thus, the power of aesthetic attraction is often insidious. Yuriko Saito (2007) notes that aesthetic lures frequently operate at a low level of awareness yet frequently help determine social policies with sometimes disastrous consequences. She rightly warns that the power of aesthetics can be very dangerous. Affect theory takes this further, suggesting that it is in the utterly ineffable affects that do not even rise to the level of consciousness that ideology is grounded, in feelings and moods

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that function beneath the threshold of conscious recognition as inarticulate subliminal sensations (Anable 2018). Although aesthetics as sensory, emotional lure has always been used to inculcate ideology, its reach today is unprecedented. Aesthetics is now center stage, a major player of consumer culture. Media images circulate globally and make up much of our localized daily lives, constituting much of our shared experience of society as well as our own, private imaginings. Sometimes the profusion of images is overwhelming, disorientating, and dislocating, though much of the time images simply appear as a ubiquitous backdrop to our daily lives, as if in the nature of things. In a consumer culture, everyday life is aestheticized to a historically unprecedented extent. Decades ago, Welsch (1997) claimed that daily life had reached the point of “hyperaesthetization” in which aesthetic styling had become “the main currency of society,” where even advocacy of social policies and political campaigns had become aestheticized (25, 4). Welsch complained of “sugar coating the real with aesthetic flair,” where “the cosmetics of reality” had become a central element in “an expanding culture of festivals and fun” (3). His observations appear even more apparent today. More than ever before, the economy is dependent upon aesthetic lures. Where early capitalism relied upon the production of relatively stable goods, consumer capitalism relies upon the consumption of ephemeral services and easily cannibalized goods like electronic images. With the safety of most consumer goods guaranteed today, and where prices are competitive, it is aesthetic styling and packaging that makes the difference between financial success or loss (Alvarez del Blanco 2020). Considering the aesthetic appeals of popular culture is therefore central to understanding contemporary society. Popular aesthetics provides many kinds of pleasure while also being the means of inculcating ideologies, often in beguiling ways that have very unhappy consequences. Aesthetics and ideology operate together. Apart from repeated exposure to ideology, it is aesthetics as a sensory, emotional lure that inculcates ideology. Aesthetic experience is the servant of ideology. Consequently, evaluation needs to be addressed not in terms of taste, but in terms of sociopolitical function. In what follows, critique is not directed at the aesthetic lures themselves, but the purposes they are harnessed to serve. Aesthetic lures are treated descriptively, neither inherently praiseworthy nor damnably, but with the potential for both positive good and serious harm. There is nothing inherently wrong with highly emotional images, for example; while they can be employed for diabolical purposes they also often serve as valuable sources of community bonding. The purposes to which aesthetic lures are applied can be benign, or virtuous, or vile, but the appeals themselves are treated here as value neutral. It is the causes that aesthetic lures serve that mark particular instances as harmless, commendable, or damnable. This view differs, not only from modernist aesthetics, but also from notable previous attempts to re-evaluate popular imagery in a sympathetic light.

Previous Attempts Seemingly numerous books on popular genres such as B grade movies and trash talk TV as well as specific, popular sites like Buffy the Vampire Killer describe their topic in aesthetic terms (Duncum 2010). Some aesthetic philosophers have also contributed general observations that, at least ostensibly,

Introduction

have been framed as descriptions rather than the common, prejudicial judgments. Popular culture is described as intense though formalistically conservative (Shusterman 1992), and notable for its emotion, action, and simplicity (Gans 1999; Novitz 1992) as well as pictorial realism, easy-to-follow narratives, formulas, repetition, and use of near universal emotions such as fear, anger, disgust, and happiness (Carroll 1998). Children’s commercial culture is described in terms of an aesthetics of the cool and the cute (Cross 2004), and a more inclusive aesthetics of consumerism adds quaintness, the romantic, zaniness, the futuristic, deliciousness, glamorousness, and cleanness (Harris 2000). However, although professing sympathy for popular culture, apologists for popular culture typically fail to consider it on its own terms, but instead judge it according to the criteria of good taste as prescribed by high culture. While professing to defend popular imagery against modernist critics, they continue to regard it, albeit implicitly, as inferior to fine art. They do so in a number of ways. First, they expand the scope of what is to be regarded as legitimate art by calling popular imagery popular art (Carroll 1998; Shusterman 1992). But if popular art shares a family resemblance with real art it is only as a poor relation. While no longer the evil twin to fine art, popular art remains the black sheep. As Storey (2003) asks, why do they bother to call it popular art? “Why not simply art? To use the term popular art is to affirm the very reality and status of art—the very institution that would insist on the qualifying term popular” (101). The terms used in this book are images or pictures. Secondly, apologists continue to make prejudicial comparisons. Trenchant critics of popular imagery have typically used comparisons to make their case against it, drawing upon high-end examples of fine art and low-end examples of popular culture. Reversing this practice, Shusterman (1992) and Novitz (1992) draw their comparisons from the low end of fine art and the high end of popular art. For them, popular culture apparently consists of particular examples that have risen above their origins but are, in effect, the exception rather than the rule. They ignore run-of-themill popular imagery, thus undermining their stated agenda. Third, apologists describe popular imagery in terms that are widely acknowledged to be prejudicial yet they do no rebut the prejudice. Characteristics such as emotional and formulaic are used to contrast popular imagery with fine art without recognizing that these lures often play worthwhile social roles. Comparing popular culture with high culture, Gans (1999) describes how typical characteristics of popular culture serves its audience less well in dealing with life issues. Similarly, for Carroll (1998), the character of popular imagery is explained by the commercial requirement that it appeal to the largest number of people; given its commercial restraints, it cannot help but be inferior. Harris (2000) is even more explicit. While acknowledging the pleasure popular culture brings to many people, he denigrates each of the lures he describes; for example, he claims that sentimental images “trigger, with Pavlovian predictability, maternal feeling for a mythical condition of enduring naïveté” (2).

So What’s Different Here? The approach adopted here is different in four significant ways. First, as mentioned earlier, the approach is consistently descriptive rather than evaluative of aesthetic lures. The ends that aesthetic pleasures serve are viewed as often deeply problematic but not the pleasures themselves.

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Aesthetic categories are treated as ethically neutral by directing critique not to aesthetic qualities, but to their social consequences. Popular pictures are often sentimental, are typically less demanding of the intellect than some fine art, and so on, but this does not cast them as inherently inferior. Secondly, popular culture is often considered to be a relatively recent development having emerged as a consequence of mass production and distribution during the nineteenth century (Storey 2003). Yet, popular culture existed long before it was put onto an industrial basis (Gowans 1981) and, in response to its attractions, it has a long history of critical abuse, starting with Plato. Although the modernist discourse on popular culture has often been especially hysterical, popular culture has long been accused of dumbing down society, eroding civil standards, and the ruin of us all. A historical approach acts as a crucial counter to the often ahistorical criticism of popular culture. It indicates that the aesthetic pleasures of today’s popular culture are long-standing and, moreover, apparently without the disastrous consequences frequently predicted. While the contemporary uses to which popular imagery are put may not offer grounds for optimism, nor do they justify pessimism. Third, where previous attempts to characterize popular aesthetics drew upon fine art criteria, the contrary approach is adopted here. A great deal of fine art is considered in terms of popular aesthetic appeals. This is possible because, until modernism, images that are now regarded as fine art often appealed to the popular taste of their time. Only subsequently were they adopted by fine art historians and aesthetic philosophers as exemplars of good taste and spiritual elevation. Most members of the social elites for which most fine art was produced evidently shared a taste for violence, sex, sentimentality, horror, the formulaic, and so on, that people do today. From the time of the Renaissance onwards, artists may have aspired to a higher calling, and along with art theorists, historians, and critics, justified their efforts with elevated prose, but as most artists were jobbing tradespeople with families to support, they labored to produce whatever their patrons required (Williams 1976). For the most part, what their patrons were evidently prepared to pay for is what has proven in every era to be popular. This holds true whether the patrons were religious, secular, aristocratic, or middle class. This is not to claim that premodern fine art was simply the popular culture of its time. The distinction between elite and the popular was frequently used to demarcate levels of society on the basis of taste. But as described in the following chapters, these demarcations were often distinctions without a difference. Patrons of fine art often betrayed a preference for lures that are indistinguishable from those of popular culture. So-called high and low culture have always existed, perceived as one beneath the other, yet high culture, though often in denial, has frequently catered to the same pleasures as low culture. Fourth, a major reason for treating fine art and popular culture as equals is the rejection of the common practice of treating images as mere texts unrelated to context. To grasp the meaning of images it is necessary to consider them in the context of the lives of the people who appreciate them. Images are conceived here as texts within the contexts of their viewing and use. Adopting this approach often means that images that appear to elite critics as simple appear as anything but simple to their actual audiences, and the same disjunction between critics and actual audiences applies to many of the different lures offered by popular culture.

Introduction

The Mind/Body Context The separation of fine art from popular culture is a specific example of an age-old split between the mind and the body, fine art emphasizing the mind and popular imagery stressing the body. This mind/body split has been foundational to Western philosophy since Plato (Westphal 2016). It has taken many forms, including a separation between the intellect and the emotions, between reason and unreason, with the former invariably cast as superior to the latter. The split was developed by many philosophers, fine-tuned by theologians, promoted by moral reformers, and assumed by early capitalists. Modernist aesthetics, although dealing with sensory, emotional experience, and set against propositional knowledge, was nevertheless framed by this fundamental split between the body and the mind (Eagleton 1990). For modernist aestheticians, fine art represented the rational, reasoning mind, whereas popular aesthetics represented an indulgence in bodily excess, and the irrational unreason of the emotions. Fine art evoked emotion, but popular culture was overly emotional. Fine art evoked sentiment, but was never sentimental. Fine art was always mindful to be in good taste. The struggle between the intellect and popular taste has been a very long and hard-fought one, and on the side of the reasoning mind the struggle has enjoyed prestigious guardians. The critics of popular imagery have included many prominent names of impressive credentials. Yet one of the prime reasons the struggle has been so hard fought is that in every era those who railed against the popular were in the minority (Gans 1999). The great majority of the critics’ own contemporaries were drawn to what was popular. For most people, the contrast between the mind and the body, the intellect and the emotions, appears never to have been so decided as critics of popular pleasures desired. Only in the minds of elite critics has the distinction been so clear; in the practice of both making and viewing images, evidently it always has been blurred.

Scope and Outline Each of the popular aesthetic attractions discussed in the following chapters is multifaceted, not one thing but many. Given this diversity no single theoretical position is adopted; it would be false to do so. Any study of popular culture invariably draws upon multiple disciplines, and this book is informed by Philosophical Aesthetics, Art History, Cultural Studies, Psychoanalytic theory, and Media Studies. Insights are drawn from ancient philosophers as much as contemporary theory and the findings of recent research. As illustrative, historical as well as contemporary, cross-cultural examples are also employed. Each chapter addresses a particular aesthetic, although inevitably there is some overlap. A high degree of illusion can appear miraculous, for example. The exotic and the erotic are often indistinguishable as is violence from horror, and so on, and in what follows many connections are made. Also, the lures are of different kinds. Most lures involve a theme or topic such as violence and humor, but a realistic style and illusion address visual appearance, while the formulaic and narration deal with structure.

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Chapters follow a generally similar pattern. Each begins with introductory examples. A description of the lure follows, surveying its different forms and associated psychological and physiological effects. This is followed by the historical, critical discourse of the particular aesthetic. The question is then posed: What is the attraction? The lures are described with examples, and finally problematic, sociopolitical issues are addressed. Throughout, the aim is to counter the condemnation of popular pleasures by conceiving them as legitimate in themselves. Popular pleasures are celebrated for the joy they offer and the beneficial social roles they play, but at the same time warnings are posted about how often they are used in the pursuit of reactionary sociopolitical agendas.

1 A Realistic Style Chapter Outline What is Realism? Idolatry and Ideology The Search for Realism The Pleasures of Realism Realism and Reality Veridical, Virtual, and Verifiable

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The Pokémon Go phenomenon of recent years brought augmented reality into the mainstream. Throughout much of the world, people delighted at being able to superimpose a computergenerated image on the real world. Yet augmented reality is only the most recent example in a long history of attempts to create either new levels or different kinds of visual realism. Among painters and sculptors, the attempt is clearly evident in ancient Greece and Rome, and while it later declined under the influence of early Christianity, in the West it was rediscovered in the twelfth century. It has continued unabated ever since. Toward the end of the nineteenth century modernist, avantgarde artists turned their backs on the then centuries-old tradition of pictorial realism, but popular taste has remained decidedly grounded in faithful representation.

What is Realism? Realistic images mimic, imitate, or copy the appearance of things. They simulate or resemble closely in such a way that viewers are happy to make believe that the imitation stands in for the thing represented (Chilvers 2012). This is verisimilitude, a faithful rendering of the appearance of something without any intent to confuse reality with representation. As viewers, we pretend in the reality of the representation. Unlike illusionistic images discussed in the next chapter—images that intentionally attempt to conflate images with reality—realistic-style pictures do not fool us. We may be drawn in, but we are not taken in. 9

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Cinema audiences know that a giant ape or a dinosaur involves a deception. They cannot always know that they are looking at a fabricated set or a computer-generated backdrop, but they know they are looking at a film. A duel consciousness is evoked by realism in which viewers simultaneously accept the picture as real while always remaining aware that a picture is a picture. Paintings are framed and thus bracketed off from their surroundings, and with many, even highly realistic paintings their material surface is not entirely transparent. Their surfaces reflect light, and as soon as a viewer moves it is clear that the view a painting offers does not move with them. Photographs of lost loved ones are sufficiently real to bring them to mind, but also sufficiently unreal to remind us that they are gone (Hirsch 1997). Violent and horrific images are each sufficiently real to arouse anxiety while safe enough to enjoy. There is no deliberate attempt actually to deceive on the part of the image-makers, and on the part of viewers no mistaking realism for reality. We are delighted, not deceived. The skills of realism can astonish and mystify. In the past, they have been equated with witchcraft or at least believed to be magical. For two centuries prior to the invention of “movie magic” people watched projected images by means of magic lanterns, and today the special effects company of George Lucas is called “Industrial Light and Magic.” Even now, living in an age of photographic realism, we can still be dumbstruck at an even more vivid rendering of reality than previous experience had led us to expect.

Idolatry and Ideology Yet such pleasures have long been subject to sharp criticism. To begin at the beginning: writing in the early fourth century BCE, Plato held a low opinion of the visual arts in general, due partly to their being imitative and partly because they offered pleasure without a serious purpose. Setting himself against the visual arts of his day, that were seeking to satisfy the pleasures of imitation, he argued that realism ignored the spiritual ideals of which things were mere manifestations. Imitating only obvious, external appearances, pandered to base, popular taste and, more importantly, it was dangerous because realistic images were unreliable as sources of knowledge. Knowledge was only to be found by penetrating to the soul of a thing. The mere likeness of things was “a man-made dream for waking eyes,” and dreams were notorious for their distortions of the true state of things (cited in Gilbert and Kuhn 1953: 33). Plato wrote, “Mimetic art . . . is an inferior thing cohabitating with inferior” (cited: 36). Imitation provided pleasure for its own sake, and pleasure alone could never be justified. Imitation was both trivial and dangerous. Of the ten categories of human beings he generated and arranged in descending order according to their worth, he categorized visual artists as sixth. It could have been worse. The Hebrew Bible also condemned realism not because it was trivial but because it was akin to idolatry, of conflating images for the things God had created and thereby reducing God’s own work to mere representations (Fumaroli 2011). The biblical injunction against realistic images is nothing less than a legal contract between God and the Hebrews: “You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth” (Exodus 20:4).

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It was only by gradually rejecting the idea of realism as inherently evil that realistic imagery became possible, though a fear of realism remains active today. Today, much of the criticism leveled against popular imagery has at its heart the assumption that realistic representations are powerful for being realistic. They hail us by seeming to represent the real and therefore to be true, wherein lies their power to influence (Mirzoeff 2005). They are dangerous because false ideas and suspect values are the more easily conveyed by them to a gullible public. As literary theorist Roland Barthes (1977) says of photographic images, they appear a “lustral bath of innocence” (49). If danger does not lie with idolatry, it lies with false ideology. Because realism helps signify ideas, beliefs, and values for the largest number of people, totalitarian regimes have uniformly insisted on realistic styles in their attempt to propagate their ideologies to the broadest possible number of citizens (Golomstock 2011). Similarly, commercial enterprises employ pictorial realism to relate to the broadest possible range of consumers, thus encouraging an ideology of consumption where the good life becomes a goods’ life. On the other hand, photographic illusion was dismissed by modernist artists for showing nothing but the obvious surface of things. It was rejected as unimaginative and trivial. The French poet Charles Baudelaire declared that the publics thirst for “the exact reproduction of nature” spelt the ruin of “whatever is left of the divine” (cited in Turner 1987: 60, 59). Compared to modernist fine art, with its aspiration to express innermost feelings and reveal hidden truths, the camera was simply a recording device and photographs mere trifles. Moreover, echoing Plato, more recent pessimistic, postmodern critics conclude that the current plethora of imagery ends up signifying nothing. In the “Evil Demon of Images,” French philosopher Jean Baudrillard (1987) claims that because we now see everything we see nothing; we see only surface, not significance. Thus, from ancient to recent times realistic images have been accused of being either too unimportant to take seriously or dangerous. They are either trifles or terrors. Yet despite the longevity and harshness of the criticisms leveled against realistic style imagery, none appear to have affected their popularity.

The Search for Realism Ernst Gombrich’s (1972) classic text The Story of Art, the history of premodern art, from the twelfth century to the nineteenth century, appears as largely a sequence of attempts to create either evergreater levels and/or different kinds of realism. And the attempts have not been confined to painting. As different media were developed, they each took up the challenge: printing, photography, the cinema, television, and computer games. From today’s perspective, the initial appearance of realism in each of these media produced poor results, yet our current expectations for realism are due to subsequent developments in these media. Each of these media trended toward a higher level of realism or some new kind of realism.

Painting Giotto di Bondone, working in twelfth-century Italy, is usually credited with the first major shift from the medieval focus on spirituality expressed through abstraction to a more material-based

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Figure 1.1 Giotto di Bondone, Scenes from the Life of Mary: 7. Nativity of the God Bearer, 1303–5.

view of the world explored thorough the close observation of nature. Giotto resurrected a longdiscarded sense of solidity for his figures, and although his figures do not strike us today as overly realistic, they wowed his contemporaries. He established a new goal for artists, and a new expectation for patrons and public. Henceforth artists would need to satisfy a desire for realism if they were to succeed. The drive for verisimilitude was often frustrated by artistic ability, the expense of materials and processes, as well as available technologies, but the direction of development was set. The essential nature of painting was imitation; imitation was both its single defining characteristic and its primary value. Whatever ideas and values artists expressed, or truths they revealed, they did so by means of a realistic style. Artists imitated the spirit of things by imitating their appearance in physical matter, and the better the imitation, the better the art (Dickie 1997). Paintings were like open windows through which the subject was seen, or a veil drawn to reveal the scene behind it (Alberti [1435] 1972). The material surface on which paint was applied was a transparent membrane behind which scenes were created. In the business of pleasing private patrons, and later the public, artists were always in competition with each other, and competition drove artists in search of different and better ways to achieve lifelikeness. Artists corrected their previous habits of working from age-old schema with what their

A Realistic Style

eyes told them, a process Gombrich (1960) called “schema and correction” or “formulae and experience” (64, 126–52). They corrected their inherited schema for depicting things on the basis of their perceptual experience, going beyond what they thought they knew by what they trained themselves to see. During the nineteenth century, artists split into two main camps. Academic artists maintained the mimetic tradition, but avant-garde artists, explored in Chapter 4, broke away in favor of expressing their own subjective experience. Modernist art historians and aestheticians sidelined the former group, regarding them as pandering to low, popular taste (Clay 1978). By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the position of mimetic painting as the dominant form of popular imagery had already been relinquished to high-resolution print media and photography.

Printing and Photography The illustration of books began in the fourteenth century with the crudity of woodcut, but it was soon superseded by etching and engraving, both of which enabled far finer detail (Ivins 1953). Engraving produced better results than etching but etching, being a simpler and far less expensive process, prevailed, and, in turn, was overtaken by lithography. Aquatint, which offered fine graduations of tone, was developed, and then color aquatint was soon introduced, which was then superseded by half-tone printing with its even more subtle graduation of tone. Ivins (1953) comments: “Always the exactly repeatable image that gave the most detail in the same space won out” (123). By the 1920s most magazines and newspapers were regularly reproducing photographs. Similar to modern print media, the development of photography was the culmination of many technical developments. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries many devices were either refined or introduced that created realistic images, or at least attempts thereof (Mannoni, Nekes, and Warner 2004). They proved exceptionally popular in an emerging commercial economy based on appealing to a broad public. For the first time in human history a large proportion of the population was able to participate in the economy as serious players, and they immediately gravitated to the magic of realistic imagery. The rising middle class of the early nineteenth century, materialists to the bone, wanted their likenesses made. The stage was set for the invention, simultaneously in 1839, of daguerreotypes, an early form of photography, and photography as we know it today, “photogenic drawings,” as they were originally known (Warner 2014). Unlike anything hand-drawn, photographs appeared to represent the way things actually looked. Promoters of photography claimed that because it was a “chemical and physical process,” photography was “not merely an instrument that serves to draw nature; it gives her the ability to reproduce herself ” (cited in Nunberg 2007: 9). The truth of photography seemed self-evident; it was the pencil of nature. The poet Edgar Allan Poe declared, “If we examine a work of art by means of a powerful microscope, all traces of resemblance to nature disappear—but the closest scrutiny of the photographic drawing discloses only a more accurate truth, a more perfect identity” (12). The days of painting as the preferred medium of visual realism were numbered, and the development of photographic technology has never stopped. Today, digital cameras are sold partly on the basis of their megapixel count and ever higher resolution.

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Screen Imagery One of the many forerunners of the cinema were the appropriately called magic lanterns. Though denounced by some as “the devil’s mischief,” they were immediately and immensely popular in the eighteenth century (Warner 2004: 14). They projected images at a short distance in darkened rooms by the use of candles placed behind painted glass slides (Gunning 2007). Numerous other devices were invented to help create a suggestion of movement. They were popular throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as fairground attractions and magician’s props. Just as cinema is today, they were all based on the persistence of perception whereby the mind momentarily retains an image after its source has gone. The illusion of realistic movement is created by a series of still images only slightly different from each other shown in rapid succession. At first, cinema was not primarily a medium for telling stories as it is today (Leeder 2017). For a decade, cinema remained largely a delightful toy, the pleasure being to see the realism of photographic images combined with the reproduction of realistic movement. It was enough to watch people leaving a factory, people dancing, or Niagara Falls in motion. Some films consisted entirely of a single shot taken from a moving train or riding up and down an outdoor elevator. One film consisted entirely of a person sneezing. The primary draw for early audiences lay in the illusion of reality, and many films were advertised according to the technology used, not their story titles. Until the mid 1900s, a full decade after its invention, cinema remained primarily concerned with realism itself; it was a cinema of display and exhibition, not storytelling. In keeping with how the films were shown—slotted in between vaudeville acts—this was a cinema of attractions (Gunning 2007). Films often involved a direct solicitation of the spectator’s attention with performers frequently acknowledging the audience with a smile or a wink. They equate to a showman presenting an act. Focusing on surprise and shock, they fascinated through the medium’s wholly new imitative power. By the mid 1900s, narrative forms began to dominate as they have ever since, but the appeal of the purely realistic remained either to compete with or compliment the narrative. In the 1920s, Hollywood studios established separate special effects units. Their primary function then, as now, was to insert into the narrative increasingly sophisticated monsters and spectacles of disaster that were intended to astonish (Miller 2006). Digitalization has revolutionized special effects, making them significantly crisper as well as seamlessly integrated with the narrative. So called “synthetic realism” uses computer-generated imagery, digital touch-up for actors, extensive use of green screen instead of locations, and completely digitalized backdrops (Dixon 2019). The boundary between realism and illusion is blurred with 3D, as discussed in the following chapter, and motion capture, which is commonly used in combination with 3D, has radically changed animation from flat, hand-drawn cartoons to something resembling real life (Miller 2006). The development of television was also the culmination of many inventions and many years of effort (Abramson 1987). From the first successful broadcast in 1936 with screens measuring only a few inches, and offering fuzzy, grey images, screens now come in many sizes and offer highdefinition digital clarity and 3D.

A Realistic Style

Figure 1.2 Los Bionicos, Sci-Fi D Character Prop for Augmented Reality and Video Games, 2016.

In fifty years computer games have gone from using highly pixilated abstractions to the same clarity as high-definition digital movies and television (Hansen 2016). The history of computer games is told in terms of successive generations, each generation being measured in the technological advances that have achieved ever greater realism. As with each of the media previously discussed, the only thing holding back a higher level of realism from computer games was the available technology and market cost. Today’s computer games are reviewed by professionals and users alike partly in terms of how accurately they are able to represent something as specific as sweat on a brow, a fine hair floating in the breeze, or the glint in a monster’s eye (Wills 2019). No matter the medium, since the twelfth century, there has been a steady, singular search for ever greater and different kinds of realism.

The Pleasures of Realism Why should a realistic style be so attractive? Although photography and film ensure that realism is now the dominant style of picture-making worldwide, for most of human history realism was not even considered desirable: in most human societies forms of abstraction have served well. Wherein lie the pleasures of realism?

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Making Comparisons By contrast to Plato’s condemnation of realism, Aristotle ([335 BCE] 1981) extolled the virtues of realism partly because it not only offered the opportunity to make comparisons with reality but because it was pleasurable to do so. A young contemporary of Plato, Aristotle believed that pleasure could be achieved by the gratification of the lower impulses and, unlike Plato, he was cautious about dismissing them out of hand. Where Plato interpreted a life of pleasure as brutish and an obstacle to reason, Aristotle made pleasure an ally of reason. Pleasure, he thought, could certainly be asinine or rapacious, but pleasure could also accord with right reason and therefore be virtuous. Consequently, he was slower than Plato to pass unfavorable moral judgments upon popular entertainment. For Aristotle, the pleasures to be derived from cultural forms were based on their particular characteristics, so that the pleasures of the visual arts were specific to the visual arts. Each cultural form had its own unique pleasures to offer based on their distinctive characteristics that set a form apart from other forms. Where Plato had dismissed the visual arts because they were imitative, Aristotle extolled the value of the visual arts precisely because of their unique ability to imitate visual appearances. He claimed that it was natural to delight in works of imitation because, although the objects may be painful to see, we delight to view the most realistic representation of them. In enjoying the likeness of a portrait, for example, the reason we delight is that we make comparisons between what is real and what is represented. For eighteenth-century aestheticians, nature could be either sublime or beautiful but only art provided the pleasure of discerning how faithful nature was rendered. For these premodern theorists, the pleasure of art was based on its verisimilitude. Alexander Gerard wrote that there is “among mankind a strong tendency to comparison” which “involves a gentle exertion of the mind . . . [and] is on that account agreeable” (cited in Hipple 1957: 77). Echoing Aristotle, he claimed that we delight in “discovering the original by the copy” (cited: 77). When the subjects of images are terrifying they are nevertheless pleasurable because they are imitations and not the real thing. We may, he says, “be greatly agitated while at the same time our implicit knowledge that the occasion is remote or fictitious, enables the pleasure of imitation to relieve the pure torment which would attend their primary operation” (77).

Appreciating the Skill Comparisons are made possible because of the skills involved. And as mentioned earlier, realism has often been equated with magic. To evoke magic is a way of speaking. We are captivated by a picture that, although few today believe unnatural forces are at work, to speak of magic is to register surprise and a sense of wonder, of astonished delight at what confounds us. This is highlighted by stories of exceptional ability among child prodigies that seem to make their later careers as artists preordained. A 10-year-old Thomas Gainsborough was reported to be sketching in his father’s orchard when a robber appeared, but seeing the boy he ran way, though not before young Gainsborough had included him in his sketch. The next morning, he showed the

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drawing to his father. “The likeness was immediately recognized, and led to the conviction of the thief, who, when it was shown him, at once ceased his protestations of innocence and pleaded for mercy” (Bell 1897: 11). Young John Everett Millais drew a scene so admired by soldiers they took it back to their barracks (Millais 1899). Their fellow soldiers refused to believe “it was by a boy of six so bets were taken all around” (11). Millais was summoned and required to draw. “In fear and trembling he came and showed them he had really done the drawing” and those who had disbelieved lost their wager (11). The first-century Roman historian Pliny the Elder ([77 CE] 1934) related several stories among the ancient Greeks as if they were entirely reliable. The stories are based on the extraordinary skill for fine detail achieved by some artists and also what astonishing things such skills can be used for. He wrote, [Apelles] painted portraits so absolutely lifelike that, incredible as it sounds, the grammarian Apio has left it on record that one of those persons called “physiognomists” who prophesy people’s future by their countenance, pronounces from their portraits either the year of the subject’s death hereafter or the number of years they had already lived. 327

Evaluating Realism is Easy It is easy to judge a highly realistic image. Anyone with normal vision can evaluate a realistic image in terms of its degree of faithfulness to what it represents. Realistic images do not require specialist training to appreciate as do the abstract and non-representational styles of modernist art. For Renaissance artist Albrecht Durer, “The more closely thy work abideth by life in its form, so much the better will it appear” (cited in Beardsley 1966: 128). His contemporary Leonardo da Vinci advised, “The painting is most praiseworthy which conforms most to the object portrayed. . . . The mirror, above all, should be taken as your master” (126). For eighteenth-century aesthetic theorist Hugh Blair, the value of imitation was that it “is understood by all” (cited: 131). In this sense, a realistic style is democratic.

Pulling Back the Curtain Baroque paintings often included a curtain partly pulled back to reveal a scene beyond, and the public has always wanted to pull back the curtain on the magic of realism. For centuries, the artist’s studio was a minor painting genre that let the public in on something of the artistic process. Back in the days of full movie programs, shorts were sometimes shown prior to the main feature that revealed how Hollywood operated behind the camera. To this day, a popular theme park attraction is visiting old studio backlots to see how realistic cinematic images are constructed. The increasing level of on-screen realism that audiences have come to expect has gone hand in hand with a keen interest in how even what appears entirely real is in fact manufactured. Making of a movie’s “bonus extra” is only a more recent digital version of this phenomenon. The pleasure in allowing pictures

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to stand in for what they represent keeps pace with the pleasure of knowing how pictures are made to work, and the one is ceaselessly trying to outpace the other.

Realism and Reality As a curious footnote to a realistic style, under certain circumstances it is possible for images to be simultaneously too realistic and not sufficiently realistic. At the same time, the dangers identified by the ancients of conflating realistic images with reality, far from being a quaint footnote from history, is one of the most critical issues we now face.

When Too Much Realism is Bad In the case of animation using motion capture, humans can look too real. The effect is not pleasurable at all; it is quite repulsive. This is the “uncanny valley” phenomenon. For an image of humans to be experienced as pleasurable it must either be misunderstood as real or understood as a picture. For an image that appears to fall somewhere in between realism and reality, the experience is decidedly unpleasant, as was the case with the 2007 animated film The Polar Express. It was a box office flop, the human characters being described as “eerie” and “creepy” (Kelly 2012). This is different from the uncanny of trompe l’oeil discussed in the following chapter. With trompe l’oeil one is at first mistaken into thinking a painting is real, a doubt arises, and then one seeks verification by getting up close and/or touching and finding one has been tricked. By contrast, the unpleasant strangeness of the unhappy valley appears to be evoked because it does not involve this kind of resolution but rather it continues to haunt. That the development of ever-more realistic animated pictures of human beings in movement should lead not to pleasure but to repulsion is surely ironic.

When Seeing Shouldn’t be Believing Far more serious is the conflation of naive realism with photographic realism. Naive realism is the belief that what we see of the world is objectively true and not directed by our desires, not influenced by our biases, not a matter of interpretation. This is a widely shared, common-sense view but it is seriously mistaken. In one way or another, all visual perception is agenda-driven and subject to imperfect memories. When naive realism is extended to the evidential truth of photography, it means that photographs are trusted as objective proof. Perhaps when photography first appeared, this mistake was understandable, but hardly today. We should know better. Using Photoshop and other programs like iMovie demonstrates the constructed nature of photographic realism. They illustrate in practical ways how photographs are constructed to make meaning. Through selectivity, juxtaposition, and words and music to anchor meaning, such

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programs demonstrate how easy it is to manipulate photographs to suggest a wide variety of ideas. Yet studies suggest that we are often not nearly as skeptical as we should be. Consider that adding a photograph to a story lends validity to the story even when the picture provides no supportive evidence; in short, an idea offered by a photograph may not be right, but it makes the idea feel right. For example, giraffes do not jump, but add a photograph of giraffes not jumping to a story claiming that giraffes do jump leads to more people accepting the story than without the photograph (Hayne 2018). And people appear unaware of how much they are influenced by pictures. This is especially dangerous with social media where many viewers glance at a heading with an accompanying photograph and, without reading the text, share it as though it is true even though the photograph does not support the heading. Between images and reason, our biological inheritance is pitted against reason. We favor our eyes over both what we are told and our ability to reason. Our visual perceptual apparatus is over 400 million years old, while our prefrontal cortex—the part of our brain that comprehends and is able to develop arguments—is perhaps only 2.5 million years, which in evolutionary terms is brand new (Gilbert 2007).

Fake versus the Bona Fide Taking advantage of the apparent truth of photography is the proliferation of news (McManus 2017). It is now possible for journalists not only to call in a story but to suggest what kind of photograph should be created to accompany the story. Legitimate journalism rejects this practice, but not so the numerous social media activists whose agendas override a concern with truth. Detecting fakery is now an ongoing struggle, made even more difficult with digitalization. With analogue photography there always existed an original that could, at least in principle, be examined to determine if it had been altered. With digital photography, originals and reproductions are often indistinguishable making the concept of an original obsolete and the ability to verify impossible. This problem is especially acute when relying upon digital images to verify compliance with arms agreements. Seeing should not be believing.

Veridical, Virtual, and Verifiable Realism has been considered as either treacherous or trivial, as magic akin to idolatry or a mere toy, but its history points to both persistent joys and difficulties. As a popular aesthetic, ever higher levels of realism, or different kinds, have been consistently greeted as wondrous. And today the search continues with the current development of both augmented reality and virtual reality. Augmented reality is now being used in advertising, on magazine covers, and computer games. Some forms merely add information to an existing picture, but other forms like the example with which this chapter began, create an illusion in three dimensions by means of a PC or smartphone. Virtual reality immerses the viewer, the more so with increasingly sophisticated realism. And as an alternative to motion capture, animators are now also developing entirely synthetic worlds in

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which the computer generates realistic, moving figures without the need for motion capture (Kelly 2012). Yet our biology biases us to believe in realistic images when it is not safe to do so. Being able to verify the veridity of an image is one of the major challenges of our times. A further problem, the repeated exposure to realistic-style stereotypes that help frame perceptions of real life, is taken up in later chapters.

2 The Illusionistic Chapter Outline Illusion versus Realism Magic, Miracles, and the Devil The Persistence of Illusion Magic, Wonder, and Mischief Illusion and Life

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Children love to catch out people with plastic spiders, snakes, scorpions, and the like, watching them do a double take, perhaps even shriek. Spiders appear even more alarming when placed on fake but optically life-like webs. Amazon sells a wide range, with one child commenting, “Great spider prank. Took out 10 years of my friend’s growth. Now I am waiting for his revenge.” Optical amusements form part of the culture of childhood. Two-way pictures, flick books, and puzzle pictures are reproduced in many current books for juveniles, the very same kind of optical illusions that once delighted adults in their parlors and in arcades (Sarcone and Waeber 2018). Other kinds of illusion, like fake sky inside some casinos and stage magic, witness the continuing pleasure of illusion for adults. It is pleasurable to fool people, and also fun to be fooled.

Illusion versus Realism By contrast to realistic-style images, illusionistic images deceive by producing a false impression, such as mistaking a picture for the real thing. An illusionist is like a conjurer or magician who creates a false impression by sleight of hand. In deceiving, such illusion is the opposite of illumination, which means to throw light upon, to enlighten. Realism involves mimicry; illusion involves trickery. As described in the previous chapter, contrary to Plato, realistic images are often used for serious purposes, but the point of illusionism is entirely based on its quality as an illusion. Most illusions do not signify anything beyond themselves. Illusions involving alleged paranormal phenomena, such as apparitions (Tomkins 2019). are addressed in Chapter 9 on the miraculous. This chapter focuses on human-made, optical trickeries. 21

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Magic, Miracles, and the Devil The Bible repeatedly makes a distinction between visual magic and what it claims to be genuine, supernatural interventions. It is a necessary distinction since to an ordinary observer what are referred to as true miracles would appear to be indistinguishable from magic tricks well known at the time; for example, Moses turning his staff into a snake and back again into a staff was the sort of thing commonly practiced by Egyptian magicians. The Bible implies that magic tricks are all very well, but not serious stuff. The medieval church though was not as dismissive. As described in the previous chapter, during the Middle Ages, realistic-style imagery evoked fears of idolatry, and in large measure this was because realism was frequently conflated with illusion. Illusion was the work of the devil and his intimates, witches and demons (Warner 2004). God alone created what was real, whereas the devil created illusions that led people into error and made sinners of them. The devil could not perform real, supernatural miracles or alter reality, but he could conjure false visions. He was the master of lies, of imitation, simulation, and pretense, and his medium was illusion. Alternatively, illusions have long been regarded as playthings, momentary amusements assigned to carnivals, fairs, and seaside resorts (Nekes 2004). Plato’s condemnation of realism as serving no serious purpose does usually apply to illusion. They are largely frivolous, a thing of the moment. Even when artists took optical illusions seriously, critics were largely unimpressed. The Op Art of the 1960s exploited after-images and consecutive movement; line interference; the effect of dazzle; ambiguous figures and reversible perspective; color contrasts and chromatic vibrations. Op Art was quite popular with the public, but critically it was often dismissed as mere tricks (Sesin 2008). Like realism, illusions have been either dangerous or trivial.

The Persistence of Illusion Fooling people with visual images was practiced in antiquity and has been a minor but doggedly persistent pleasure of images ever since. Its diverting, inconsequential nature is a large part of its attraction.

Trompe l’oeil Trompe l’oeil—French for “deceiving the eye”—is a technique that creates the optical illusion that a two-dimensional painting exists in three dimensions. Its whole aim is to confound the unwary viewers’ powers of observation, undermining belief in what they see. It has never been more than a minor genre of painting, but it has recurred many times, and is still a favorite on the side of buildings and footpaths. Trompe l’oeil was practiced by the ancient Greeks and Romans and revised late in the fifteenth century. It reached the height of its popularity in the seventeenth century, though it never

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disappeared (Giusti 2009). All sorts of subjects were represented, almost all of them everyday items: crumpled paper, still-life ensembles, money, broken glass, trophies, bas-relief and sculpture, pictures within pictures, and all kinds of surfaces such as marble, fur, and linen. To succeed, trompe l’oeil follows a number of rules. The subjects must be inanimate, life-size, perfectly blended into their surroundings, not cut off at the edges of the painting, and with no sign whatsoever of brush strokes. Additionally, since the illusion will fail if the observer moves their position only marginally, neither deep recesses nor pronounced projection are possible (Milman 2009). The practice continues. With realism, a scene is placed behind the surface of the picture, the picture plane: a wall, canvas, paper, or screen. As described in Chapter 1, realistic images are like a window on the world, or a veil drawn aside revealing the scene behind it. By contrast, a trompe l’oeil illusion also appears to come forward, standing out from the material surface of the image, projecting out into real space. With realism, the physical membrane is more or less transparent; with trompe l’oeil, it is opaque. An especially confounding example is when trompe l’oeil is used in combination with ordinary realism; for example, when a painting of a scene that is clearly situated behind its material surface appears to have a fly resting upon it and the fly is only revealed to be painted when on attempting to brush it off the fly refuses to move (Schiffman 1997).

Figure 2.1 Samuel Walter, Detail of Trompe l’oeil Painting after the style of William Michael Harnett, 2019.

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Three-Dimensional Movies The same illusion of three dimensions on a two-dimensional surface continues to fascinate with 3D movies. The image not only appears to recede into the distance but also to come forward, out toward the theater audience. A notable, early, and playful example was used in the 1953 film House of Wax. It involved a sideshow hustler repeatedly throwing a paddleball, ostensibly toward those gathered around him on screen, but, breaking the screen surface, equally at the audience. As he throws the paddleball, he says, “There’s someone with a bag of popcorn . . . it’s your bag I’m aiming at, not your tonsils . . . here it comes” (De Toth 1953). Until recently 3D films remained a minor niche in theme parks and IMAX theaters. Bubbles would appear to float into space and whole audiences would wave hands trying to catch them but now 3D films are creating yet another level of cinematic illusion.

Optical Illusion Devices Prior to the invention of photography and cinema, a wide assortment of optical illusion devices developed were popular among adults (Nekes 2004). They surprised by means of unexpected reversals and appearances, still images that appeared to move, or moving images that appeared to stay still. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there was a fashion for anthropomorphic and zoomorphic landscapes. An ordinary-looking landscape when rotated 90 degrees turned into a human or an animal figure. Upside-down puzzle pictures involved a reversal where, for example, a picture of a young woman when turned 180 degrees turned into a skull, or a picture of a happy young courting couple turned into an image of unhappy matrimony. These playthings can thus be said to signify common conceptions about life, but they are the exception to the rule. Typically, illusions do not signify—other than our fascination with them. Two-way pictures first appeared in the seventeenth century when they were made of accordionpleaded card. Seen from one angle they showed a scene, and when turned to another angle they showed a related but completely different scene. Often, they showed a sad face from one angle and from another angle the same face smiling or winking. Then as now, they often represent religious subjects where Mary morphs into Jesus, or Jesus with a serene face that then appears to cry. Many other amusements were first developed during the nineteenth century. Phantasmagoria remained popular until the invention of cinema. Phantasmagoria used elaborate combinations of multiple, illuminated, colored images projected onto screens and accompanied with sound. Images would suddenly loom up close to the audience and then as abruptly disappear. Using projections of mirror reflections of actors out of an audience’s view, and projecting onto smoke, it was common to represent animated ghosts and other supernatural apparitions onstage (Leeder 2017). While some illusionistic amusements proved to be forerunners of photography and/or the cinema, they were all “light hearted eye-twisters and visual jokes” (Warner 2004: 15). The Myriorama consisted of a selection of cards that could be combined in any sequence and still create a continuous, coherent scene. The Thaumatrope, or “turning wonder,” consisted of a round disc threaded with string with different pictures on each side that when spun appeared to merge into one picture; for example, a picture of a bird and a picture of an empty cage would appear as if the

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Figure 2.2 Étienne-Gaspart Robert, Detail of Phantasmagoria in Paris in 1797, 1831.

bird was in the cage. Many of these popular devices fascinated because they created an illusion of movement. Anorthoscopes managed the opposite; they used a moving image that appeared to stay stationary. It consisted of two discs fixed to a single axis but made to rotate in opposite directions. One disc had an anamorphous drawing; the other was black with four slits. When rotated at four times the speed of the slit disc, the anaorthographic image appeared not only no longer distorted but standing still. Today, holograms feature in theme parks where they are sometimes used to represent ghosts or spirits much in the way that Phantasmagoria did in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Holography involves recording light from an object that is later reconstructed so that when a camera

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or an eye is placed in the reconstructed beam of light an image of the object is seen in 3D although the object is not present. Unlike 3D cinema, most holograms create their illusion with an unaided eye.

Stage Magic Realistic-style imagery may evoke magic, but only as a way of speaking, a way to express wonder. Stage magic, which is practically synonymous with optical illusion, also evokes wonder but through intentional deceit. Stage magic uses sleight of hand and/or deceptive devices. Magicians have relied on basically the same repertoire for millennia: surprising appearances and disappearances, things being destroyed and then reincarnated as whole, inexhaustible supplies of something from a small container, and defiance of gravity through levitation. Magicians typically employ a combination of misdirection, showmanship, and hardwired features of human perception. They mislead viewers to look where they want them to look while not looking at something else. Consider the elementary trick the “French Drop” where a magician throws a ball from one hand to another that then inexplicably reappears in the original hand (Fitzkee 1987). The trick is managed by misdirecting the observer’s attention. It relies upon two human instincts: to follow the direction of movement and to follow the direction of someone else’s gaze, in this case the magician’s own eye movements. Effectively, the magician interprets the action for the observer. Even knowing that the trick is managed by the ball never having left the first hand is not enough to destroy either the illusion or the pleasure of it because when practiced well the experience is like trompe l’oeil; however hard one looks, it still appears to defy the rules of nature. The same technique of misdirecting audience attention is used in the bodily illusion of mime; again, a theatrical genre of great longevity. A performer can appear to pull on an invisible rope or to appear to move forward while staying in the same spot. The effect is achieved through the misdirection of a countermovement whereby part of the body moves in the direction that the performer has an audience focus upon while the other half of their body moves in the opposite direction (Schiffman 1997).

Magic, Wonder, and Mischief If illusion is inherently confounding, why is it pleasurable? Ordinarily, people do not like to be fooled, so why have optical illusions entertained children and adults alike for millennia?

Being Deceived The pleasure of trompe l’oeil is entirely derived from the fact that viewers find their powers of observation to be utterly at fault. Instead of knowingly agreeing to accept the illusion as fact, the beholder is actually fooled into believing the illusion is part of their natural surroundings. And yet, not quite fooled, because if trompe l’oeil was entirely integrated into the real world it would pass unnoticed. At first glance trompe l’oeil deceives, but on further consideration doubts arise and an

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observer typically puts out a hand to touch for verification only to find that they indeed have been hoodwinked. Trompe l’oeil confounds the real with appearance; it creates an ambiguity between life and artifice that invokes Sigmund Freud’s concept of the uncanny, the in-between, the not quite this and the not quite that (Giusti 2009). Trompe l’oeil makes an observer doubt their own powers of perception, but the cognitive dissonance is rewarded with a feeling of gratification. Once understood as a two-dimensional image, the observer invariably appreciates the work’s exquisite skill. Trompe l’oeil is a practical joke, a “gotcha game,” the pleasure of it being to find one its victim. Much of the pleasure in a magic show also lies in thinking one knows how a trick is or could be managed and then being bewildered when what one imagines is shown to be impossible. Knowing that an audience is looking to see behind the magic, magicians often misdirect by showing nothing is up their sleeves, or by having an audience volunteer testify that they have had no prior experience with the performer. When the illusion is managed in spite of these “proofs” the pleasure of amazement is that much greater. The wonder lies in not quite being able to believe one’s own eyes. Chicanery confounds even when one knows it is chicanery.

Being in the Know Counter to the delight in deception is the joy of being in the know about how illusions are created, like knowing how realistic images are made except that this is greatly enhanced by the magical nature of illusion. Yet many of the tricks of illusion have been long known. In the first century CE the Greek engineer Heron of Alexandria wrote exposing the mechanisms of Egyptian magic; for example, how fire could be made to suddenly appear and disappear with the use of certain chemicals, and how things could be made to appear and disappear using rods, pulleys, and trapdoors (Sorcar 1970). Using his knowledge of engineering, Heron also created tricks himself, the basic principles of which thereafter became standard and remain to this day. His tricks included a fountain with an apparently endless supply of water, and a horse’s head that despite having been decapitated before everyone’s eyes was able to drink water and later to reappear on its body. These and similar deceits are now available in the numerous books that take readers behind the magic and illustrate how tricks are accomplished (Schiffman 1997). And the books invariably justify letting the secrets out on the ground that the basic mechanisms are already widely known. Similarly, television programs like Masters of Illusion, now in its tenth season, typically present an illusion as it would appear onstage and then, usually after a station break for advertisements, demonstrate how it was orchestrated. It is hard not to be impressed at how elaborate, elegant, and, once the secret is out, how obvious was the set-up.

Conflating Realism with Illusion Such is the pleasure of being fooled and/or fooling others, illusion and ordinary realism are often conflated. Due to such conflation realism has been afforded a mythic status. Even when we are not deceived, there is the pleasure in believing that others are.

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The fourteenth-century Italian poet Boccaccio claimed of Giotto that “whatever he depicted has the appearance, not of a reproduction, but the thing itself . . . people’s eyes are deceived and they mistake the picture for the real thing” (cited in Ebert-Schifferer 2009: 38). It was even claimed that his remarkable skill was already apparent as a youngster. As an apprentice, Giotto “painted flies that fooled his master Cimabue who believed they were alive” (cited: 35). He was not the only one. As mentioned in the previous chapter, stories are told of children’s prodigious abilities to produce an exceptional degree of realism at an early age. But other stories, like the one about young Giotto, go further, morphing realism with actual deception. No one would be fooled today by Giotto’s figures, and it is impossible to say whether people were truly deceived at the time. But it appears likely that enthusiastic advocates conflated actual deception with a greater degree of realism than was hitherto common. Popular tales of prodigious ability were reworked for centuries. George Moreland, an eighteenth-century English painter, is said at 4 years old to have drawn likenesses of his toys so realistically that his father would step around them, mistaking them for the real thing (Dawe 1904). These stories had deep roots. In the previous chapter Pliny the Elder ([77 CE] 1934) identified the pleasure of realism as lying in the artist’s skill, but Pliny also went further, morphing realism with the illusionism of tromp l’oeil: Parrahasius, as recorded, entered into a competition with Zeuxis who produced a picture of grapes so successfully represented that birds flew up to the stage buildings; whereupon Parrahasius himself produced such a realistic picture of a curtain that Zeuxis, as proof of the verdict of the birds, requested that the curtain should now be drawn and the picture displayed, and when he realized his mistake, with a modesty that did him honor he yielded up his prize, saying that whereas he had deceived birds, Parrahasius had deceived him, an artist. 309–11

Pliny also tells us that horses began neighing when presented with pictures of horses, and that a sculptor carved his own likeness in such a way that his dogs would not realize the absence of their master (Sukla 1977: 19). This latter story was among those compiled by Leonardo da Vinci who, using the authority of his own voice, wrote: “I have seen a picture that deceived a dog because of its likeness to its master . . . likewise I have seen a monkey that did an infinite number of foolish things with another pictured monkey” (cited in Mitchell 1995: 332). These animal stories suggest that humans should not think themselves stupid for having been deceived, for the illusion is so good that it even overrides the superior sense of smell of animals. It is also legend that an 1890s movie audience screamed at the approach of a train thinking themselves about to be run down (Gunning 2007). And one writer claims in 1925: “When scenes from The Lost World were shown at a meeting of scientists, many of them believed they were looking at film of real, living dinosaurs!” (Miller 2006: 18). Perhaps these stories illustrate a cultural variation in the perception of illusion, or perhaps they are simply unreliable folktales exaggerated in the retelling. Early movie audiences certainly appear to have accepted a level of illusion that we would not accept today; even so, these stories appear fantastical. No 4-year-old has ever drawn so realistically as to make the above story credible (Feldman and Goldsmith 1991). Reports of the first film audiences appear to have been exaggerated

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(Gunning 2007), and the least said the better regarding the story of the gullible scientists. To accept the quality of an illusion in a particular medium because one has no prior experience of a better attempt is understandable. To do a surprised double take, or to be dumbfounded over how an illusion is managed are also common experiences. It is quite another matter to take the deceptive quality of trompe l’oeil as representative of realistic imagery.

Illusion and Delusion It is noteworthy that each of these stories appears motivated by particular social issues and debates. Pliny appears to have wanted to demonstrate that the art of his own time was in decline, and as evidence he offered the alleged power images once held by comparison with his own. Leonardo used his examples as proof of the superiority of painting over sculpture, a controversial issue in his day in which he was highly partisan (Mitchell 1995). Other legends of this kind, especially those related to animals, have been used to support a view that vision is a natural phenomenon and not a learned, signifying practice. Stories of audiences fleeing from an approaching train appear to have been used as evidence by urban audiences of the gullibility of rural folk (Gunning 2007). The stories do not suggest that pictures have the power to deceive oneself, but that pictures have this power over others. Pictures lead people into error and are therefore dangerous. In short, the suggestion that the initial, genuine deception of which trompe l’oeil is capable applies to all other kinds of illusion appears always to have been agenda-driven. Ironically, the stories involve a deception of their own. Significantly, almost all the reports are second-hand, some having been recorded centuries after the alleged event. No doubt, the tales have proved the more persuasive because they are grounded in the pleasure they afford. They evoke the excitement of something that seems too good to be true but just might be true. They are as wondrous as trompe l’oeil itself. The stories conflate trompe l’oeil with other kinds of representational imagery, and they ignore the double consciousness with which people view ordinary pictorial realism. Apocryphal they may be, but the stories are of great longevity, and they help to underscore the popularity of pictorial illusion.

Illusion and Life Since the illusionistic is rarely, and then only marginally, a signifying practice, it is an unproblematic pleasure. Unlike all the other pleasures described in this book, it appears to have no negative associations. But like all the other pleasures described here, it is a pleasure of great long-standing. And we continue to find it pleasurable to be tricked, to be confounded by the ambiguity between illusion and real life.

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3 The Bright and Busy Chapter Outline Terms and Taste The Doctrine of Decorum Reason and Restraint Modernist Minimalism The Relativity of Restraint Serious versus Superficial Purpose Brightness and Business The Seriousness of Selling Bright, Busy, and Business

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The quintessentially modernist architect Ludwick Mies van der Rohe’s maxim “less is more” (Blake 1976: 206) is flipped by an advertisement for a Las Vegas strip club: “The only place in Las Vegas where less is more.” Van der Rohe and his contemporaries, architects and designers alike, advocated a severe, elemental, and geometric style of which Las Vegas is its abrasive, in-your-face challenge. Las Vegas represents a bright and busy aesthetic, one that characterizes much of popular taste. Think of shopping malls with their spectacular, kaleidoscopic stimuli or the experience of moving through a casino with all its glitter, shine, sparkle, and flashing lights. Think of Chinese dragons and Bollywood movies, each with their multi-colors and constant movement (Bhutto 2019). Fine artists have often employed a bright and busy aesthetic, but for many cultural critics distinguishing between the worthy and unworthy has always been a matter of how bright, how busy, and to what purpose? Such critics have consistently considered popular imagery too bright, too busy, as well as lacking in serious intent, and frequently these aesthetic distinctions have been used to make sociopolitical distinctions about people.

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Figure 3.1 Thomas Del Coro, Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada, 2019.

Terms and Taste Bright and busy are used here as neutral descriptors, but for apologists of fine art these terms are either terms of appreciation or condemnation depending upon what cultural forms are being addressed. Bright means radiant or splendid, radiating or reflecting light; it is a synonym of luminous or brilliant, but these qualities are easily turned into either positives or negatives. Bright colors can be strong, vivid, or brilliant, or they can be considered garish, gaudy, and lurid. A brilliant image can shine brightly, sparkle, glitter, or be lustrous, but it can shine too brightly, and sparkle and glitter to no purpose other than to attract the eye. A busy image means ornate or characterized by activity, full of action and interest, but seen in a negative light these same qualities are over-ornate, fussy, or cluttered with unharmonious, trivial details. These are just a few of the words frequently used to distinguish between good and bad taste, but there are many others. Vivid, meaning intense, lively, strong, and full of life, contrasts with lurid, meaning ghastly, sensationalist, or excessively dramatic. An image can be powerful, graphic, or intense, or it can be flashy, gaudy, or garish, all the latter words meaning strikingly conspicuous and indicating poor taste. Flashy suggests a glaring brightness and vulgar display. Gaudy implies the cheap cost of materials. Garish means excessively bright, as well as crude and tasteless.

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Descriptive or appreciative terms are commonly flipped into a term of abuse: vivid versus vulgar, ornate versus ostentatious, sumptuous versus showy, and each positive characteristic can be taken too far so that something is overly, unduly, or crudely colored, or unwarrantedly or excessively decorated. One image is bright; another is overly bright. One is richly colorful; the other, crudely colorful. The felt need to make such distinctions is age-old. Although modernist architects and designers took ascetic minimalism to an extreme, their aesthetic preferences owe their origins to the ancients.

The Doctrine of Decorum In the first century BCE the Roman philosopher Cicero called for visual restraint in what has been known as the doctrine of decorum and has been ever since used in battles against perceived excess (Gombrich 1979). Cicero formalized a view earlier proposed by Plato: visual imagery should only serve serious purposes. Plato approved of abstract geometric forms such as circles, straight lines, and pure colors but only when they served a purpose beyond the pleasure they afforded. Raising children among pleasing forms was legitimate, because pleasing forms helped to provide an ideal environment for healthy development and instruction, but when pictures existed merely to amuse, Plato was not. He condemned them as contemptible and even dangerous, for pleasure without purpose weakened resistance to base instincts. For Plato, pleasure should attend only purposeful activity such as eating and drinking; it could never be a legitimate end unto itself. When pleasure was uncontrolled by wisdom it withered the reason by which we realized our higher selves (Gilbert and Kuhn 1953). Like Plato, Cicero decried the use of artifice, considering it both a wasteful indulgence and an offense against reason. Unlike Plato, Cicero proposed that a certain amount of artifice was admissible when held in check by a sense of good taste. With taste as the arbitrator, he urged a simple, unadorned style, dignified and noble. Cicero’s advice was directed toward spoken rhetoric, but his metaphors were visual, and they have proved highly influential, being repeated many times over the past two millennia. He wrote: For just as some women are said to be more beautiful when unadorned, because this suits them, so the plain style delights, even though it lacks embellishment . . . In a ship, what is so indispensable as the sides, the hold, the bow, the stern, the yards, the sails and the mast? Yet they all have such a graceful appearance that they appear to have been invented not only for the purpose of safety but also for the sake of giving pleasure. cited in Gombrich 1979: 19–20

It was not as though Cicero objected to all ornament. Ornament was usually unnecessary, but where it was employed, it should be restrained. His fellow Roman and near contemporary Vitruvius applied Cicero’s dictums to architecture, and Vitruvius’ own dictums became standard for classical architecture. Vitruvius attacked wall murals that seemed to him capricious and irrational. While he approved of trompe l’oeil that sought to create an illusion of real things and architectural motifs, he was incensed by decorations that

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bore no relationship to reality. Of the murals that affronted, he wrote: “On the stucco are monsters rather than definite representations taken from definite things. Instead of columns there rise up stalks; instead of gables, stripped panels with curled leaves and volutes” (cited in Gombrich 1979: 20). Like Cicero, Vitruvius did not condemn all decoration, only what he regarded as fanciful and excessive. Over a millennium later, the then prevailing Gothic style was attacked by some as superfluous and silly for reasons identical to those used by Vitruvius. Writing in twelfth-century France, St. Bernard of Clairvaux ridiculed the “ridiculous monsters” decorating the then new Gothic cathedrals. What was the point of such absurdities as half-men/half-animal motifs, bodies with many heads, and heads with many bodies? He could see only waste, frivolity, and distraction. “There is such a variety and such a diversity of strange shapes everywhere that we [monks] may prefer to read the marbles rather than the books” (cited: 255). In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries Vitruvius’ views were employed to laud the virtues of Renaissance classicism. The sixteenth-century art historian Vasari described the Gothic as barbarous, and thankfully a thing of the past. The Renaissance he praised for its revival of what he considered the classical ideal of decorous simplicity. Where Gothic architecture was an irregular muddle of gables, pinnacles, finials, balustrades, statues, and statuettes, Renaissance architecture was rationally ordered, symmetrical, and well proportioned. It was the same for Renaissance sculpture. Where Gothic sculpture in wood was typically painted in bright colors, Renaissance artists lauded the virtues of the white, unpainted marble they found among Roman sculpture and Roman copies of earlier Greek sculpture. The naked appearance of the statues seemed to emphasize form over color. Since Renaissance artists equated form with the intellect and color with the emotions, and since they held aspirations to being more than mere artisans, on a par with philosophers pursuing truth, they took the ancient sculptures as the model for their own work. What was then unknown was that in their original state these Greek and Roman icons of sobriety were nothing of the kind; they had been elaborately decorated with bright, often complimentary colors (Panzanelli 2008). In the mid 1700s, Pompeii and nearby Herculaneum were discovered revealing, to the surprise and shock of the elite critics, that the Romans reveled in wall murals that were highly decorated and brilliantly colored. However, instead of revising their aesthetic preferences, they reframed Roman art as a debased decline from the model of restraint offered by Greek architecture and sculpture. The influential eighteenth-century art historian Winckelmann dismissed painted sculptures as a “barbaric custom” and wrote of the noble simplicity and quiet grandeur of Greek art (cited: 26). He claimed to understand why Vitruvius had condemned the murals of his time, and henceforth only Greek art could serve as the classical ideal. Regretfully, he wrote, “true art was only to found among the Greeks” (cited: 26). Alas, by the middle of the nineteenth century it had become apparent that both Greek statues and buildings also had been originally either partially or fully covered in fully saturated, often complimentary, colors, and also often decorated with busy patterns. As with the Roman statues, it was only the march of time that had stripped them of their original color. Up until the mid fifth century BCE, Greek artists even incised the outlines of motifs to guide the painter. But once again artistic elites dismissed these revelations as examples of regrettable taste. Polychrome statues were

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“quirky and not quite true to the essence of sculpture,” and “aesthetically offensive” (2). Their loss of color was viewed as an improvement, and where small traces of color remained they were sometimes deliberately washed off. Given the doctrine of decorum, color was the culprit of poor taste. It was more important to preserve the perceived purity of Greek art than broaden their taste. The philosopher George Hegel, so revolutionary in other matters, declared: “sculpture avails itself not of a painter’s colors but only of the spatial forms” (cited: 10). Even the frieze of the Parthenon, an icon of classical perfection, had not been spared (Neils 2001). The frieze had been painted and ornamented with gleaming metallic attachments, including shinny bronze stirrups and gold wreaths. The figures had been painted in flesh colors and striking reds and yellows, and a strong blue background helped to make the figures appear more threedimensional than otherwise.

Reason and Restraint For eighteenth- and nineteenth-century aestheticians what mattered most was good taste, which was variously expressed in terms of gender, nationalistic pride, aesthetics, and class. Ornamentation was identified with feminine taste, which, in turn, was identified with the ephemerality of fashion, and thus marked as inherently inferior to a masculine identification with reason and simplicity (Gombrich 1979). Feminine taste was identified with the frilly and silly; masculine taste with simplicity and seriousness. Additionally, English and German critics condemned a preference for decoration as not only a mere fashion, but a French fashion, all things French being understood as synonymous with triviality and moral decadence. One German critic wrote: “the decline of good taste . . . is coupled with the decline in decency of manners” (cited: 40). Good taste was equally expressed through the rational nature of the two primary aesthetic categories of the eighteenth century: the beautiful and the sublime, which, while distinctly different, were each framed by the rationality of the doctrine of decorum. The artistic elites were especially motivated to establish the grounds of taste appropriate to their class and to contrast this with that of the peasantry and, by the nineteenth century, the emerging proletariat. As will prove so often the case in this book, the distinction between restraint and excess, decorum and revelry, was driven in part by the desire of the emerging middle class to distinguish itself from the lower classes (Eagleton 1990). The beautiful was considered small, domesticated, and pleasant (Beardsley 1982). It was agreeableness, giving rise to inward joy, cheerfulness, and delight. For some, form referred to specific agreeable proportions; for others, form was a more general balance between unity and variation. Too much unity in a composition was tedious; too much variation and a composition fell into chaos. For a form to be beautiful, it needed to strike a perfect balance between the two. Edmund Burke listed the following as the sensible qualities of beauty: “comparatively small . . . smooth, . . . parts not angular, but melted as it were into each other . . . delicate . . . without any remarkable appearance of strength . . . colours bright, but not strong and glaring (cited in Carritt 1966: 92).

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By contrast, the sublime involved quite different visual characteristics and psychological effects, but it, too, observed the doctrine of decorum (Beardsley 1982). Unlike beauty, the sublime was overwhelming, but since human beings were essentially sensible creatures, it was possible to remain rational and master experiences that greatly stirred the passions. For Burke, the sublime could even be terrifying because it evoked fear, and among Kant’s ([1764] 1965) many descriptions of the sublime are greatness and fearsome. Yet no matter the intensity of sublime experiences, the mind could transcend the thought of danger and thus demonstrate the moral dignity of humankind. Unlike beauty that had definite boundaries, the sublime was boundlessness, yet even it was able to be grasped intellectually. The sublime was superior to beauty because it required a greater exertion of reason to master it and thus better illustrated the mindful control under which proper taste was exercised. Besides, the sublime, being closer to God, it was only men who were capable of appreciating it; women could only appreciate the beautiful.

Modernist Minimalism This was the intellectual background against which modernist architects and designers set themselves against a popular taste for the bright and busy. Their buildings were intentionally free from the “ornamental excrescences and accumulated barnacles of past art” (Scharf 1974: 161), and interior and product design was similarly stripped of decoration. Modernist interiors typically featured spare white walls, steel-rimmed windows, shiny chrome, and mirror-polished steel, all arranged within strict geometric grids. A severe sobriety saw simple straight lines replace elaborately curved lines, the use of minimum detail, and a subdued or limited use of color. Minimalism echoed industrial, machine processes characteristic of modern production. Van Der Rohe called for “skin and bones” architecture (Blake 1976: 243), and Adolf Loos called for “nude buildings” (Scharf 1974: 161). In his 1929 article Ornament and Crime, Loos (1998) wrote: “the evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornamentation from objects of everyday use” (167). He sought to liberate humankind who “strain under the yoke of ornament,” claiming that ornament was “a waste of human labor, money and materials,” and a “symptom of backwardness or degeneracy”; ornamental artists were “pathological” and even “criminals” (16, 169, 170, 171). Le Corbusier designed apartment houses as if they were factories and claimed that in the new industrial age people would have to get used to the idea that “The house is a machine for living in” (cited in Blake 1976: 243). The idea that buildings should provide a sympathetic sounding board for human feeling, a resource for people’s inner lives, was dismissed as nothing but a lingering adherence to the “pathetic fallacy” of a bygone Romantic era (Bann 1974: xix). Instead, these modernists saw themselves as visionaries creating a new visual order that embodied the new realities of stripped-down, smoothrunning efficiency. The degree of aesthetic severity they demanded was historically unprecedented; yet a historical survey indicates that there have been many degrees of decorum; restraint has always been relative; and what modernists attacked as popular was often no different from fine art styles of the past.

The Bright and Busy

The Relativity of Restraint To contemporary eyes what has been considered restrained in the past might easily be considered today as frivolously playful and excessive. Consider the variability of a restrained aesthetic taste by considering two engravings produced by Johann Nilson, one from 1756 and another from 1770 (Gombrich 1979). The first image is a riot of curved lines and fanciful scenes, a typical Rocaille fancy—an exceptionally elaborate style—in which the eye refuses to settle on any particular place but runs on quickly to the next thing. The second engraving, having come under the dictums of neoclassicism, reduced the curved lines and introduces strong, straight lines. It is intended as an aesthetic declaration, indicated by both the title and a figure tearing up sheets of paper, one of which refers to Rocaille. Yet it still manages to include elaborate vases, fanciful half creatures such as half women/half lions, elaborate patterns, and lots of decorative foliage. Additionally, consider the following inconsistency—to our eyes—between espousing an aesthetic of restrained tastefulness and actual practice. The designers of a publication from 1812 declare as their first principle: “To do everything for a reason and to make that reason apparent” (cited: 32). To emphasize their intention they condemn mere fashion in favor of unchanging values. Yet they reproduce as an exemplar of their principle a chair that includes multiple tassels, numerous

Figure 3.2 Miaow Miaow, Adolf Loos’s Villa Müller, Prague, 1930, 2007.

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Figure 3.3 Johann Nilson, Neues Caffehaus, 1756.

plant and animal motifs covering every surface, small portraits, and arms held up by yet another pair of half lion/half women, in this case with the addition of elaborate wings. A restrained taste is clearly no absolute, or manifest as a particular style, but rather a sensibility that reacts to prevailing taste. To contemporary eyes, even champions of restraint have approved decorative surfaces almost as bright and busy as their predecessor. Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling provides another example. Long admired for its sculptural form and restrained use of color, when in the 1980s it underwent extensive restoration it was revealed as a riotous celebration of color. Although known to have grown dirty from centuries of carbon from candles, and more recently from cars, its restoration back to its original state shocked many. The restoration was expected to brighten the fresco, but many were surprised at just how bright it was, and some critics claimed a major mistake had been made. Critics denounced the restoration. The genius of Michelangelo could not possibly have intended his masterpiece to be so vivid. Instead of considering that Michelangelo might not have been as averse to bright colors as themselves, they attacked the restorers’ methods. The restorers responded by arguing that the fresco was not actually nearly so bright as the critics asserted. The Sistine Chapel now had more natural light than in Michelangelo’s day and that viewing the original from the considerable distance of the floor was quite different from viewing it in print from photographs that had been taken up close (Shearman 1994). Thus, were the restorers equally indebted to the doctrine of decorum as their critics; for the restorers Michelangelo’s genius remained intact because, while he had used a brighter palette than anyone had expected, he had not gone too far.

The Bright and Busy

Figure 3.4 Johann Nilson, Tearing Up the Rocaille, c. 1770.

Serious versus Superficial Purpose Taste varies over time. What has not changed is the accusation that bright and busy imagery often has either superficial or no purpose at all. This is the real crux of the doctrine of decorum. Although frequently expressed purely in terms of visual qualities, the doctrine is primarily based on a perceived seriousness of purpose. Recall that Plato did not object to brightly colored images, only those that served no serious purpose, and St. Bernard objected to the fancies of Gothic grotesques primarily because they distracted the monks from their studies.

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The distinction between serious versus superficial purpose is especially striking with the medieval concept of claritas, which is variously translated as clarity, brightness, light, or luster (Leddy 1997). Bright, luminous light, whether colored or not, signified the mysteries of the divine realm. Claritas revealed invisible beauty through visible beauty (Beardsley 1982). With stained-glass windows partly in mind, St. Thomas Aquinas, writing in the thirteenth century, defined beauty as both a harmony of proportions and by claritus, yet only when it served a spiritual function. Eighteenth-century aestheticians were equally concerned with high seriousness. Kant ([1790] 1952) argued that the intrinsic value of aesthetic qualities was their reason for being. They simultaneously elevated minds and conquered the passions, especially the sublime. Being the common ground of all human beings—or at least for men—the sublime nature of human dignity provided the glue that bound together in a unified whole the great diversity of human experience and expression. Thus, for the single most influential aesthetician of modernism, aesthetic qualities affected the most serious of purposes. Consequently, while some styles of modernist painting celebrate a profusion of bright color and others are characteristically busy, modernists justified such artworks by their seriousness of purpose. Impressionists investigated the nature of vision, Fauves had sociopolitical or religious goals, Expressionists explored the recesses of the human heart and spirit, and the Futurists envisaged a wholly new kind of society (Gombrich 1972). As in the past, the issue for modernists was whether the purposes they served were sufficiently serious. Fine art styles that employed the bright and busy had an important underlying purpose whereas popular taste was dismissed as mere spectacle, mere surface show, a theme developed in Chapter 13 on the spectacular. Visual qualities condemned in popular images were lauded in fine art. As Gombrich (1979) comments, “Few civilizations were disposed to deny that inner worth should be acknowledged by an appropriate display of outward show. . . . No contemporary member of the culture criticized . . . a Spanish Baroque Church . . . as over-ornate. The concept did not exist” (17). The keyword here is appropriate. Gombrich continues: “When decoration is seen as a form of celebration it can only become objectionable when it is inappropriate. Pomp becomes pomposity, decoration mere gaudiness when the pretension of decoration is unfounded” (17). The judgment that an image is too bright or too busy is often no more than another way of saying either that its purpose is superficial or that it fails entirely to signify beyond itself. However, the criterion of purpose is not only a way to demarcate good from bad taste. It has been consistently employed to distinguish between people who claim to enjoy good taste, and people who evidently do not, and by further extension between those who can be trusted with power and influence because they share restrained tastes, and all others who cannot be trusted. The doctrine of decorum distinguishes in order to exclude.

Brightness and Business If most people in the past were aware of the doctrine of decorum, it appears that most have not cared for it. The tastes of the people who lived in Le Corbusier’s apartment buildings were strikingly

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different from his elemental and geometric, machine production aesthetic. In what he would have regarded as the worst of taste, occupants filled their apartments with all kinds of ornaments, elaborate furnishings, and wallpaper with intricate patterns. When one of his buildings was detonated in 1972, Jencks (1984) hailed the event as marking the end of modernism and the arrival of the postmodern as a triumph of ordinary people’s tastes for color and clutter over aesthetic austerity. But what is it that draws people to the bright and busy? What is it that champions of decorum since ancient times have had to contend with? What is it about fully saturated color, and things that sparkle and shine, that delights us? And what is the lure of highly complex, busy displays?

Delighting the Eye Firework displays, torchlight parades, flashing disco lights, a street strip with neon signs one after another, each signal excitement, the time and place to be, now, in the moment. The cacophonous clutter of souvenir shops and market stalls, with each bright and shiny trinket competing for attention, signal a seemingly infinite wealth of purchasing possibilities. Color; lots of color; luminescent, glowing color; shining, intense, dazzling lights; intricate, complex patterns; highly elaborate displays, each and every one appears to have delighted people for millennia. As noted above, one of the principal reasons that art historians opposed a bright and busy aesthetic was that they looked back, albeit selectively, to what they honestly believed to be paradigms of restraint. But in defiance of Plato, Cicero, Vitruvius, and the like, the ancients apparently thought there was inherent value in delighting the eye, and Michelangelo apparently thought so, too. He could have chosen a far more subdued palette than he did, but he chose to achieve with tempera paint the maximum luminosity the medium allowed. It is noteworthy that among the reasons oil painting was even then the more common visual medium was its ability to achieve much greater luminosity than could be attempted with tempera. Artists could even create the illusion of sparkle and shine. For centuries, the power of illusionistic images often relied heavily on whether they included surfaces that sparkled and shone (Leddy 1997). Because things in nature are hard to catch on canvas with paint, capturing shining and sparkling surfaces was a matter of special pride among painters, and patrons were prepared to pay for it. Portrait painters strove to capture the shine of hair, and the sparkle of teeth and eyes. Landscape painters stove to capture the sparkle of waves, bright light filtering through trees, and the shine of a pool of water. Still-life painters strove to achieve the same effect: the glint on metal weapons, silver plates, porcelain bowls, and glass cups. Mass-produced original paintings sold in department stores today employ exactly these same qualities of sparkle and shine (Leddy 1997).

Enhancing the Ordinary A bright and busy aesthetic is frequently employed to enhance what would otherwise be ordinary, to embellish (Gowans 1981). Homo Sapiens are also Homo Aesheticus (Dissanayake 1991); but using whatever was at hand to enhance through color even predates the development of modern humans. Around 60,000 BCE in modern-day Turkey, a Neanderthaler was buried atop of evergreen

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boughs heaped with flowers, including hollyhocks, which because they grow separately could not have been there by accident. “Some person or persons once ranged the mountainside collecting these flowers one by one” (Campbell 1988: 53). Millennia later, the Puritans railed against the excesses of the Catholic Church’s love of luxurious imagery, creating churches that almost rival the austerity of modernist buildings and industrial design. Puritans based their beliefs on the Bible, yet consider how Moses reported God’s expectations for his temple: “gold, silver, and bronze; blue and purple and scarlet stuff and fine twined linen; goats’ hair, tanned rams’ skins, and goat skins; acacia wood . . . and onyx stones and stones for setting . . .” (Exodus 35:5–9). As noted above, the idea of being over-ornate in the celebration of a serious purpose did not exist. Enhancing one’s body has always been important to the serious business of self-efficacy and signifying status (Dissanayake 1991). Today, to enhance the sparkle of the eyes, women—and some men—use eyeliner, and to enhance their lips, lipgloss and lipstick, and on their faces, glitter. Jewelry around the neck and earrings at the side of the head are used to frame the face. Clothes use metallic thread, small mirrors, shiny buttons, sequins, and bling. Bling, a term intended to evoke the “sound” of light hitting silver, platinum, or diamonds, is worn as jewelry or attached to accessories like handbags or cell phones, or even as tooth caps. The shine of a new car is part of its attraction, and they are often regularly washed and waxed to maintain a highly polished look. The shine signifies care, but many things are enhanced if they sparkle and shine. And many household products promise to do just this, including Mr. Sheen floor cleaner, Spic and Span all-purpose cleaner, and Ultrabrite and Gleem toothpaste.

Resisting Restraint Just as sober restraint has been lauded by cultural elites as a marker of good taste, it is intriguing to speculate that those who have a taste for the unrestrained use it as a mark of social resistance. Could the bright and busy be attractive precisely because it is used to marginalize? For some people, consciously or unconsciously, is it part of a resistant and even transgressive identity? Finding their tastes denigrated, are their tastes adopted as a badge of honor? Such a strategy of social distinction is suggested by children’s embrace of a “ket aesthetic” (Thompson 2006). The word ket was originally used by adults to mean rubbish, an assortment of useless things, but in the 1980s British children appropriated the term to refer to lollies they purchased for themselves with their weekly allowance. While their parents also consumed lollies, they would rarely if ever purchase the vividly colored and graphically named lollies favored by their children. With names like Warheads and Gummy Worms, and especially bright colors, the consumption of these lollies served as a way for children to assert their own cultural identity, one separate from the culture of adults. Children’s culture is notoriously one of resistance; celebrating the scatological and inane, it is highly transgressive of an adult culture of restrictions and appeals to reason. Between children and their parents, the age-old, broad social tension between reason and unreason is fought out daily within the domestic sphere, and an aesthetic preference for bright, vivid colors plays its part. On a wider, social canvas, a bright and busy aesthetic was adopted by the hippies of the 1960s in

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revolt against mainstream society, and more specifically in the 1960s by the use of psychedelic colors, so much in revolt against the drab, grey of the 1950s. And is it only a coincidence that today all the colors of the rainbow are adopted by coalitions of marginalized groups, including the LGBTQI community?

Bright, Busy, and Biology To speculate further, is it possible that a taste for the bright and busy is grounded in the evolutionary history of our species, that it once served the foundational purpose of human survival? Could a taste for busy detail have its origins in our ancestor’s need to pick out essential detail from a complex pattern of stimuli? Failure to perceive danger in the distant approach of a predator in an otherwise benign visual field would have been disastrous, as would the failure to discern danger in the smallest detail of a predator in foliage close by. Consider, too, that there is a universal association of glossy surfaces with wetness, an association children make as early as 6 months, the significance of which is a further association of wet with water (Coss 2003). The dispersal of early hominids would have been restricted to areas and climatic conditions that offered regular supplies of water. Preventing dehydration by the ability to find drinking water on a daily basis would have sensitized our forebears to both the static and dynamic optical properties of water. Still water can act as a natural mirror, a glassy surface reflecting the overhead environment. Turbulent water is foamy and luminous. The glinting properties of the smooth rippling surface of a pond or stream would also have attracted attention as would the glittering dew on leaves in the early morning. In short, the sparkling properties of water constitute a historically consistent recognition cue that was easily detected at a distance both in full view and when partly occluded (Coss 2003). While this is only suggestive, it is a fact that our early ancestors were drawn to items that were shiny and sparkled or could be polished to be so, and many of the items they chose were also brilliantly colorful (Rapp 2009). The very first precious stones were probably polished pebbles found in streams and rivers or heavily weathered aggregates. During Paleolithic times, amber, a fossil resin, would have delighted with its golden yellow, orange, red, green, and violet varieties. The first Neolithic peoples chose malleable materials like copper for jewelry, and later gold and silver. Precious gemstones, metals, and shells of many kinds were used for beads, headdresses, necklaces and sewn into clothing, as they continue to be among indigenous peoples living a traditional lifestyle. Predynastic Egypt employed many materials: bright blue and apple green turquoise, the many shades of emerald green quartz, amethyst with its various shades of purple or violet, and deep blue lapis lazuli. Some of these materials were carved to enhance their optical properties by hollowing out the back of items to encourage the transmission of light. Perhaps the cues for water were so critical for our earliest ancestors’ survival that they were reflected in a desire for gleaming, lustrous surfaces. While this must remain speculative, it is striking how many of Kant’s ([1764] 1965) particular examples of the sublime relate to things that sparkle or shine: reflections on the sea, waterfalls, fire, dew on a spider’s web, sunsets, rainbows, and stars.

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The Seriousness of Selling Perhaps, as Coss (2003) suggests, today’s continuing love of glinting, glistening surface finishes in product design, and their simulation in advertising and computer graphics, has its origins in our ancestors’ quest for water. Thus, the current consumer aesthetic of lustrous, gleaming surfaces with vivid, fully saturated colors may not be so much a matter of taste, but grounded in our evolutionary inheritance. Supermarket shelves are stacked with numerous competing products almost all employing the emotive element of fully saturated color, producing what Moya (2017) calls our “delirious consumption.” Most people report that they do buy items in supermarkets that they never had any intention of buying upon entering, so that among the many other means of enticing people to purchase, a hardwired attraction to the bright and busy seems cunningly exploited by commercial interests. Color and clutter has the distinct purpose of selling goods. Far from being superficial, a matter of mere surface, the economy partly relies on a bright and busy aesthetic for its survival, making a bright and busy aesthetic highly problematic insofar as so much of what we buy ends up as litter, killing animals that consume plastics, in landfill and polluting the oceans. The production and consumption of consumer goods creates environmental hazards such as making toxic water, the air, and the earth, and it contributes to global warming.

Bright, Busy, and Business The battle between the doctrine of decorum and a bright and busy aesthetic has been fought for thousands of years, being grounded in reason and restraint versus exuberance and resistance. It continues unabated as those excluded by an insistence on restraint have adopted the lure of cacophony and color as a marker of identity. While possibly grounded in our biology, having once served the foundationally important function of daily survival, today the bright and busy aesthetic is used to both resist mainstream values and to mobilize markets, to both resist and ensure the maintenance of the status quo.

4 The Highly Emotional Chapter Outline An Empire of Emotions Emotion versus Emotionalism The Rhetoric of Emotions versus the Aesthetics of Emotions Fine Art and Popular Entertainment What Arouses Emotion? Why Do Emotional Lures Work? For Better or Worse

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“Of all the slipshod, debasing, superficial, ignoble and utterly nonsensical forms of dramatic nonart, the melodrama is the worst. . . . I hope [it] is gone forever, knocked down on its head, shoveled up, dumped into a basket, and carried out to the ash heap” (cited in Singer 2001: 2). So wrote a critic in 1912 a few years after stage melodrama had been killed off by its transference to the cinema. The most popular form of stage entertainment during the nineteenth century, melodrama was often condemned for its emotional exaggeration, sentimentality, sensationalism, and artificial happy endings. It was ridiculed as a poor imitation of the real thing, as mere “would be tragedy” (Gallagher 1965: 215). Today, although melodrama has shed the flamboyant acting style of its early years, its basic elements of pathos and action are a staple of television soap operas, and many other kinds of popular fare, including westerns, detective, horror, fantasy, and action genres (Mercer and Shingler 2004). In this chapter, the lure of emotion is addressed. Later chapters take up particular emotional lures.

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Figure 4.1 Russell-Morgan, Lost in the Desert Theatrical Poster, 1900.

An Empire of Emotions A general definition of emotion is that it is a conscious mental state experienced as a strong feeling directed toward a specific object and typically accompanied by physiological and behavioral changes in the body (Niedenthal and Ric 2017). Emotions are coping mechanisms for situations that have trigged the emotion; they help us appraise the significance of an event to our own wellbeing. Emotions also help determine how we view the world. When sad, everything around us looks grey and it is difficult to focus; when in love, the whole world seems to be in love. Emotions are closely related to feelings, but usually feelings are considered milder than emotions, more diffuse, and less publicly expressed. However, the line between emotions and feelings is often unclear, as the above definition indicates, in which emotion is defined in part as a strong feeling. Consequently, most discussions of emotion use feeling as a synonym, and this practice will be followed here. Emotions motivate action. It is sometimes claimed that at the root of all our numerous motivations there are only two emotions: love and fear (Jampolsky and Cirincione 2011). Yet we commonly experience love, hate, joy, and sorrow, and there are many others beside. For example, just listing from the letter A, ablaze means highly excited, charged, or passionate; arching, deeply

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or acutely felt; and affect, a mental state, mood, or emotion. Arrah is a common expletive expressing strong emotion. There is also is affection, angst, anguish, annoyance, anxiety, awe, and anger. Aristotle poetically called anger “a boiling of the blood, and hot stuff around the heart” (cited in Robinson 2005: 29). Some psychologists claim that physiological changes cause emotions; others claim that emotions cause physiological changes; and others still believe that emotions and physiological changes provide feedback to each other (Keltner, Oatley, and Jenkins 2018). What is certain is that emotional reactions are made apparent to both ourselves and others through a very wide range of physical changes, and they can occur in numerous combinations. Just a few include heart pounding, trembling, laughing, frowning, and lots of S words; for example, smirking, sniggering, smiling, snarling, striking, and sweating. There are even many ways to cry, including cackling, bleating, braying, howling, screeching, shrilling, sobbing, weeping, and wailing. One can cry quietly, out loud, bitterly, or with joy. Emotions play a major part in ruling our lives. Recent neuroscientific research indicates that emotion is not a single and separate system of our brains, but rather emotions activate neural circuits across our entire brain (Niedenthal and Ric 2017). Contrary to the long-held separation between the head and the heart, emotions cannot be separated from cognition. We use emotions to help us think and we use cognition to help us feel (Brooks 2011). In examining voting patterns, it is apparent that people do not make rational choices based upon their economic interests, but how candidates affirm their emotional lives. Successful candidates are not those who are necessarily expected to deliver on promises but those who make voters feel as though they are understood by them because they share similar emotional responses. “I feel your pain,” as Bill Clinton famously said in a televised presidential debate in 1992.

Emotion versus Emotionalism It is hardly surprising that pictures often represent emotions or that they often arouse an emotional response in us. We have an inherited, instinctual habit of paying attention to the emotional state of others, and often of involuntarily responding (Hirdman 2011). Critics of popular culture do not object to emotion. Indeed, as explored below, one of the most influential theories of fine art is based on emotional expression (Dickie 1971). What they object to is emotionalism, an exaggerated, unwarranted display of emotion. Emotions are fine; emotionalism is not. Moreover, while fine art is alleged to exemplify subtlety and a wide range of emotions, popular culture is accused of a limited range of predictable emotions. Fine art induces authentic tears; popular culture induces only crocodile tears. For Elkins (2001) it is entirely appropriate to shed tears in front of paintings, but the emotional stimulation of popular media triggers little more than a reflex reaction and should be resisted. In crying over fine art we exhibit an entirely meditative consciousness, but in crying at the screen we are reduced to animal conditioning. Similarly, for Carroll (1998) fine art individualizes emotion; popular culture deals only with the most common,

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generalized emotions. Popular culture “mobilizes innate responses” to qualities that are “virtually immediately accessible to untutored audiences” (203, 192). Such dismissive critique is often cast in gendered terms. Fine art is seen as masculine and popular culture as feminine (Hollows 2000). Just as men’s tears are stereotypically considered infrequent and “manly” and women’s tears come too readily, so fine art is considered emotional with good reason and popular imagery is emotional without reason. Usually, this distinction relies for its exemplars on popular genres that are specifically intended for women. They are dismissed with such monikers as “women’s weepies,” and “five-handkerchief movies,” and dissing women’s genres is then used to dismiss popular imagery as a whole (Warhol 2003). The gendering of the arguments against popular culture is especially marked with the tender emotions of love and affection, as explored in the following chapter, but it applies to emotions per se.

The Rhetoric of Emotions versus the Aesthetics of Emotions The lauding of emotional expression in fine art and the damnation of emotions in popular culture is best understood in terms of the rhetoric of emotion, which informs premodern art, and continues to inform popular culture, and an aesthetics of emotion which informs modernist fine art (Poulakos 2007). A rhetoric of emotion carefully calculates how best to use emotion to persuade an audience on behalf of powerful patrons. By contrast, the modernist aesthetic of emotion champions individual artists’ responses to their particular circumstances.

The Theory of Emotional Rhetoric To begin at the beginning, rhetoric, the art of persuasion, was first theorized by the ancient Greeks, being defined by Aristotle ([350 BCE] 2007) as “the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion” (1355b). Aristotle optimistically assumed that emotion—pathos— could be married to ethos, emotion with ethics, and he instructed the rhetorician to use emotional appeals in the cause of virtue and wisdom. In unethical hands, rhetoric was dangerous, as Plato believed; it could be used in pursuit of bad causes and to argue cases that were patently false. But Aristotle believed that by exercising magnanimity and self-control rhetoric could be used in the service of justice and good governance. He therefore advised speakers to appeal to an audience in terms of what pleased its members and what they desired to hear. Rhetoric involved the deliberate manipulation of an audience. To produce a desired outcome, it was necessary to understand what would move a particular audience, so that the first task was to grasp what emotional causes lay behind the concerns of an audience and then to adapt rhetoric accordingly. By working on the emotions of an audience in this way, it was possible to change opinions. One should amplify, even exaggerate, points in favor of one’s argument, and minimize and depreciate those against, always moving an audience into emotional reactions. Use metaphor and simile, he advised, especially

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visual metaphor because it aided learning, but avoid excess. Reject hyperbole, signs of superfluity, and ambiguity. Everything should be as clear, simple, and direct as possible. For Aristotle, rhetoric and the arts were similar. Both offered arguments that needed to be internally consistent, used emotion to help secure their arguments, and relied upon the eloquence of the delivery. (The latter two, we call aesthetics). The only difference between rhetoric and the arts was that whereas rhetoric told, the arts showed. Rhetoric made a case through direct argumentation; the arts argued indirectly through representing ideas, values, and beliefs as givens. Some early Christian theologians distrusted such “pagan” learning, but St. Augustine ([426 CE] 1958) wrote: “the faculty of eloquence, which is of great value in urging either evil or justice . . . why should it not be obtained for the uses of the good in the service of the truth . . .?” (118–19). Augustine won the argument.

The Pictorial Practice of Rhetoric The medieval church felt justified in employing the most savage of emotional appeals to maintain and subjugate their flock. The patronage of sadomasochistic frescoes of hell described in Chapter 8 on the horrific became a primary tool of the Christian message of salvation. Frescos were used to scare congregations into mute submission. At the same time, the production of devotional images for home as well as public use formed the mainstay of many an artists’ guild. Turning out near identical Madonna and Child and Christ Crucified images were staple subjects of artists’ workshops for hundreds of years. Medieval images of Christ hanging from the cross with bleeding open wounds provoked a mixture of horror and pity from believers as well as gratitude for his suffering on their behalf (Elkins 2001). Taking as an authoritative pretext the many passages in the Bible where people weep, crying was an officially sanctioned form of worship. Believers were urged to weep with the joy and sorrow of God. Tears were taken as better proof than words of remorse for one’s sins and one’s love of God. With a mixture of love and fear, the two emotions often regarded as the most primary, the church sought to consolidate its community of the faithful, prevent backsliding, and deter heretics. Centuries later, the Catholic Church found itself challenged by the Protestant Reformation. Forced to fight the Counter-Reformation, it encouraged a new style that nevertheless returned to the previous use of extreme emotions. The Baroque of the seventeenth century was a direct style that appealed to the greatest number of people through theatrical exhibitions of intense emotions. Death and dying, piteous suffering, and religious ecstasy were adopted with relish. The goal was to reaffirm the true faith, and, to succeed, the appeal was unequivocally to the emotions. Baroque artists relied on the rediscovered advice of ancient rhetoricians, which proved indispensable to drawing spectators into worlds of ecstatic religious joy, suffering, and pain. Specifically, they employed such devices as the mutual gaze, in which a figure in a painting looks out to directly engage the viewer, and they arranged their figures so as to incorporate the viewer within the space of a painting rather than having them appear autonomous and separate from the viewer (Minor 2006). They also created scenes without a fixed point of reference so that everything appears in movement. By such means viewers were situated within paintings as “primed exercitants” (24).

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Figure 4.2 Gilbert Austin, Chironomia, or a Treatise on Rhetorical Delivery, Plate 9, 1806.

Additionally, Baroque artists relied upon manuals called chironomia that categorized body positions, facial expressions, and hand gestures in terms of their emotional meaning. Originally the bodily positions were devised for stage actors, and the hand gestures were originally devised for the deaf and mute, but almost all seventeenth-century artists also relied upon them. Numerous manuals illustrated a great variety of hand and body gestures, their emotional import being well understood by their intended audience. Whether it was images of horrifying, decapitated heads, violent murders, or classical and biblical stories involving vulnerable, naked flesh, the appeal was unequivocally emotional. It was visceral, and the more extreme the better to effect faith and obedience.

The Highly Emotional

In time, the Baroque gave way to other styles. But emotions, though less extreme, not only continued to be represented, their representation was extended to ordinary people. And chironomia manuals continued to be published into the nineteenth century.

The Rise of Sentiment During the eighteenth century there developed a widespread recognition regarding the value of human sentiments among all classes. In philosophy, the arts, and in social life generally, the eighteenth century witnessed an increasing awareness of the value of an internal life unique to each individual. Aestheticians began to consider that instead of emotions serving the church, flattering the aristocracy, or doing the bidding of the state, human sentiments were valuable in and for themselves (Fried 1980). Consistent with these developments, the then dominant school of philosophy known as Rationalism, wherein the reasoning mind reigned supreme, was challenged by an acknowledgment of the value of the affective, emotional life. Descartes’s rationalist credo of the previous century, “I think therefore I am,” was challenged by the credo, “The more vividly I feel, the more I feel that I am” (cited in Feilla 2010: 165). It is no accident that it was precisely at this time that the discipline of Philosophical Aesthetics emerged with its own distinctive subject and agenda. In the exact middle of the eighteenth century—1750—Alexander Baumgarten brought into being what he called “the sensuous discourse” of aesthetics as a separate and distinct branch of philosophy (cited in Gilbert and Kuhn 1953: 293). He was responding to developments in philosophy in which reason alone was being called into question as an inadequate means to arrive at truth. He realized that a full grasp of what there was to know could only be achieved by recognizing the contribution to reason of human imagination, the senses, and the emotions. Baumgarten’s reason showed him that reason was not enough. In his 1750 book Aesthetica he staked out a claim for the philosophical study of the “deliverances of the senses . . .[and] the stirrings of the passions” (cited: 290). Baumgarten’s proposal for aesthetics was part of a broad social development increasingly given to democratic impulses. Uneven, confined to the middle class, and mostly held in check by traditional hierarchies of power, the ideology of individual rights was both sociopolitical and personal. Ordinary people were recognized as possessing an internal life, so much so that, unlike our own time when tears are often viewed as a sign of weakness, the eighteenth century viewed tears as a sign of moral strength (Elkins 2001). Tears were an indication of empathy, an essential quality in a civilized and moral person. Artists played their part. No longer confining emotions to the aristocracy and religious figures, painters depicted the middle and lower social orders as if they too possessed an internal life. Believing that the secrets of the heart could be read on the body, and that the language of the body was more truthful than any words, artists represented ordinary people sighing, swooning, exclaiming, and, above all, weeping. Artists as unlike as Jacques-Louis David with his high theatricality and JeanBaptiste Greuze with his domestic scenes of piety and familial affection responded to the influential French critic Denis Diderot, who summoned artists to “First touch me, astonish me, tear me apart, startle me, make me cry, shudder, arouse my indignation” (cited in Fried 1980: 79–80).

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Figure 4.3 Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Spoiled Child, early 1760s.

Rejecting Rhetoric One important consequence of this democratization of emotional expression was the rejection by aesthetic theorists of the long-standing use of rhetoric. It was now conceived as inauthentic, a betrayal of emotions that artists did not necessarily feel themselves. Kant ([1790] 1952) described rhetoric as merely the “machinery of persuasion” that exists only to deceive. Rhetoric exists “for the purpose of putting a fine gloss or cloak upon vice and error.” It is the means by which one is “artfully hoodwinked” (193). By contrast, he advocated an aesthetic of emotion in which real art

The Highly Emotional

came from individual artists expressing their own unique response to their conditions of life. Art offered “a wealth of thought to which no verbal expression is completely adequate.” Art “invigorates the mind by letting it feel it’s faculty-free, spontaneous, and independent” (191–2). It went beyond all intent and all rules. Furthermore, real artists did not make arguments as Aristotle had claimed. Artists were geniuses who intuited the divine. For fellow German aesthetician Arthur Schopenhauer, artistic geniuses followed no determinate rules, only their own unique ideas, imagination, and understanding. Artists intuited eternity: “to the ordinary man his faculty of knowledge is a lamp to lighten his path; to the man of genius, it is the sun which reveals the world” (cited in Gilbert and Kuhn: 468).

The Rise of Romanticism Informed by such high ideals, the Romantic artists of the early nineteenth century sought to express their own, unique emotional responses to their subjects. With Romanticism, emotional truth lay not with its imitation, but its expression. Romanticism celebrated the individual, emotional response of artists to the life around them (Dickie 1970). The English Romantic poet William Wordsworth wrote that art was either the outcome of “a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” or “emotions recollected in tranquility” (cited in Khatchadourian 1965: 335, 340). The whole point of painting and sculpture was to express the central emotional core of experience. Later in the nineteenth century avant-garde artists—the Realists and Impressionists and PostImpressionists—broke entirely with pandering to public taste. Rejecting the academic artists who continued in the mimetic tradition, the avant-garde expressed their individuality through a series of increasingly abstract and non-representational styles that increasingly cut them off from the general public.

Expression versus Imitation These developments saw a shift in the way fine art was defined. Since antiquity the essential nature of fine art had been imitation. Whether it was representing nature faithfully or attempting to represent the spirit of material things, art imitated. Now art was defined as expression; moreover, as the emotional expression of individual artists, and even today this probably remains the most popular understanding of fine art. One of the most influential proponents of art as expression was the English aesthetic theorist, R. G. Collingwood (1938). Drawing upon the concept of artistic genius as advanced by Kant and others, Collingwood distinguished what he called “art properly so-called” from art that was only “conventionally so-called,” and the latter he claimed included almost all the art of the past. Real artists expressed their own, unique emotional responses; what the public saw was a record of their emotional journey. And, since such artists came to understand their feelings at particular times and in response to particular circumstances, their emotions were particularly fitted to the circumstances that gave rise to them. Consequently, their expressed emotions were highly

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individualized. For a real artist, an expression of anger was not merely an instance of anger, but a particularized anger. All real artistic expressions of emotion were differentiated from every other emotion of the same sort. He distinguished such expression of emotion from the mere exhibition or betrayal of emotion, as well as emotional arousal. With a deliberate attempt to arouse emotion in others, most premodern artists had merely followed tried and true conventions well known to produce emotional affects. Genuine expression was not to be confused with exhibiting the symptoms or signs of emotion. Most artists of the past were like actors who typically show visible signs of emotion without necessarily feeling the emotion they display. Thus, Collingwood disqualified most of the history of fine art as not the real thing. For most of human history imagemaking had meant making images that were largely undifferentiated from many others, and whose intended affects upon viewers were carefully predetermined. As a consequence, most premodern fine art had been a form of amusement. By contrast, most art historians revisioned the history of fine art in modernist terms, celebrating the unique expressions of exceptional, individual artists. They downplayed the utilitarian purposes that art had always served and damned popular culture for its subservience to commercial interests. Collingwood’s views on the history of premodern fine art looked not to the exceptional but to the general rule.

Fine Art and Popular Entertainment Collingwood rightly acknowledged that almost all fine art has involved the attempt to create emotional scenes with the deliberate intention of arousing emotions in viewers. In these respects, both in intention and affect, most fine art is indistinguishable from popular art. Most fine art was produced to order, in the same way a cabinet-maker produces a cabinet for a client, a work of a certain kind, in a well-defined style, and for a particular purpose. With rare exceptions, and despite their aspirations to a higher calling, artists were treated as tradespeople, fulfilling a service on behalf of their clients (Williams 1976). They worked much like popular artists do today. In the long history of human picture-making, the aesthetic of emotions was an aberration. For most of human history, and continuing today with popular culture, the principal way of conceptualizing imagery was not in terms of an aesthetic of emotion, but as a rhetoric of emotions in which emotions were, and are, deliberately aroused by well-known means.

What Arouses Emotion? Irrespective of what kinds of images are viewed, an emotional response is frequently elicited by love vanquishing evil, good triumphing over bad, self-sacrifice, heroism, patriotism, disease, and death (Masson 2010). We are especially moved when we are taken somewhere we do not expect; and when characters are unable to articulate their own feelings, they unsettle us, making us shift through our own personal histories knowing that they hint at feelings we ourselves may not be able

The Highly Emotional

to name. We cheer, loath, feel the pain of, and weep for characters like us, or who we recognize we have become, or not become, may never become, or fear we might become (Nathan-Garner 2010). We cry with characters that remind us of the relationships in our lives we lack, and we are filled with gratitude for the relationships we do have. Moreover, we can sometimes be deeply moved, even cry extensively, at imagery we know to be manipulative, even while resenting the affect (Elkins 2001). As described in Chapter 12 on the formulaic, the stalest formulae can sometimes work havoc on the heart (Nelson 2005). This is epitomized by early forms of melodrama in which the narrative elements were presented in a stripped-down, naked fashion. On the nineteenth-century stage and in silent movies, characters were clearly marked from the outset as either a heroine in distress, a fearless hero, a comic figure, or a villain. With its highly flamboyant acting style, early melodrama employed a very emotional address with plots that invariably revolved around love and murder. It consisted of sentiment, thrilling action, and extremes of good and bad characters. Typically, protagonists were subject to unjustified harm of some kind, their motives were misunderstood, or their good character was unrecognized. Due to their good nature, good characters were unable to counter their evil antagonists by underhanded means and so became victims to villainy. The injustice aroused pity for the protagonist and anger at the antagonist, but when all seemed futile, the tables turned and all was set right (Stedman 1977). The theatrical acting, which strikes us today as ludicrous, has given way to something much more realistic, but both the plots and the emotional register remain essentially the same, especially in action films. As a sensibility, rather than just a particular genre, melodrama is just as pervasive as it ever was (Mercer and Schingler 2005). The early melodramas did not pretend to be realistic, and neither do their numerous contemporary successors that employ only specific elements of realism. The basic idea of suffering virtue remains. Exactly when and how will the tables turn and the worthiness of the protagonist be recognized remains the primary tension.

Why Do Emotional Lures Work? None of the above answers the question: Why are we attracted to images that arouse our emotions, including emotions we may not fully recognize or understand, or, in recognizing them, wish we did not? It is the question St. Augustine agonized over: “. . . why does a man like to be made sad by viewing something doleful and tragic scenes, which he himself could not by any means endure? . . . What is this wretched madness?” (cited in Elkins 2001: 130). It makes intuitive sense that we seek entertainment that maximizes pleasure and minimizes pain, but what sense is there in choosing entertainment with counter-hedonistic emotions like fear and sadness (Olivia 2003)? Why is it pleasant to feel unpleasant emotions like fear, sadness, and grief? And this is not the only puzzle. In watching a narrative unfold, how can we be all joyful one minute and profoundly sad the next? Why can the same event make us feel simultaneously joyful and sad? Why do some images evoke emotions and not others? And why are different people moved so differently by the same imagery?

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Catharsis versus Cognitive Coping Attempts to answer these questions again begin with Aristotle ([335 BCE] 1981). His central idea was catharsis. He began by noting the heady mixture of Greek tragic drama: violence, horror, and fear, on the one hand, and grief, suffering, and pity, on the other. He famously wrote that tragedy “achieves, through representation of pitiable and fearful incidents, the catharsis of such pitiable and fearful incidents” (11). He is usually interpreted to mean that pity and fear were purged by pity driving out pity, and fear expunging fear. For this to work the purged pity or fear were not the same pity or fear responsible for the purging. One was either excessive or deficient but always it was indiscriminate; the other was considered and reasonable. An excess of unreflective, indiscriminate emotion was poisonous to body and soul, but it could be purged by exposure to a well-organized, considered experience of these same emotions. For Aristotle, disease and cure were two sides of the same coin. Pity worked on pity, fear on fear, ill humor on ill humor, and so on. Dramatic performances made otherwise incoherent emotions reasonable, and by such means audiences purged their emotions. Whether he understood purging being affected by a massive dose of the emotion in question or by a homeopathic dose is unclear. But the general idea of purging unhealthy emotions to gain a healthy balance of body and soul has been enormously influential. A cathartic release has appeared to explain why people are attracted to cultural forms that one would not expect to be pleasurable. Freud revived the idea of catharsis as sublimation. For Freud, potentially destructive psychic forces were sublimated into socially acceptable, productive forms. Pent-up rage, anxiety, and fear were transformed through exposure to cultural forms. With such cultural cachet, it is not surprising that catharsis is frequently employed by both media critics (Tamborini 2003) and aestheticians (Carroll 1990). However, a substantial body of empirical research suggests that catharsis is problematic (Tamborini 2003). While it may be useful in relation to sadness (Nelson 2005), as explored in Chapter 7 on violence, it does not appear to operate with regard to fear, hate, or anxiety. Numerous studies indicate that exposure to violent scenes raises anxiety rather than purging it. On the other hand, catharsis appears to operate with emotions that are more susceptible to cognitive coping mechanisms (Nelson 2005). We may learn to cope by relabeling our fears or our sadness. This is possible because emotions are always subject to cognitive appraisal. As described earlier, emotions and thought work together; emotions work on thought but also thoughts work on emotions. By relabeling what initially appear as negative emotions as positive emotions, the experience is transformed into something that is gratifying.

Escaping Highly emotional mediated experience can also act as an escape from one’s actual circumstances. We may seek to experience pain that is about, yet not about, our own losses, “the pain of love lost, roads not taken, secure if sparkless marriages endured, or romances kindled and floundered” (215). We may even use popular media to sustain feeling blue in the belief that by such means we

The Highly Emotional

will learn from the experience, thus avoiding immediate pleasure for the sake of longer-term positive outcomes (Olivia 2003). Or perhaps there is a need to escape either physical or psychic pain. As Lutz (1999) says, “One’s world can be dissolved in tears and virtually disappear. . . . Tears are a luxurious respite, even for many who suffer” (235, 237). This is where the concept of aesthetic distance is valuable (Nelson 2005). To effect escape, we strike a balance between being both a participant and an observer of mediated experience. Too much distance and no emotion is felt; too little distance and the experience remains overwhelming. By establishing an optimum distance, we simultaneously retain our own identity yet also identify.

Identifying It is commonplace that pictures offer the opportunity to imagine ourselves in them. We project ourselves onto figures. While fictional characters are known to be constructed, to be products of writers and realized by actors, we follow them as if they were real people and feel able to imaginatively enter into their worlds. It is comforting to realize that others experience similar things and respond with similar emotions as ourselves. We often cultivate emotional experiences in order to have our emotional attachment about the world confirmed. For example, many people believe that justice ultimately prevails, and numerous popular narrative fare reinforces this view by ending happily. Viewers suffer along with the protagonist with the understanding that eventually the tables will turn (Olivia 2003). On the other hand, many current US television dramas like Law & Order and the CSI series usually end ambiguously, which appears to echo the now pervasive pessimism and lack of certainty that characterizes the postmodern condition. Either way, whether seeing the world in terms of the ultimate triumph of justice or of uncertainty, there is comfort in having one’s worldview confirmed. Consider soap operas. Women are the primary audience, and surveys suggest that many women tend to regard the most realistic narratives as those that contain events similar to their own lives, and, further, narratives that evoke the strongest emotions are those that replicate their own family dynamics (Masson 2010). Soaps are a major television genre, with many countries producing their own indigenous kinds, but despite national differences soaps typically employ the same tropes: multiple, convoluted plots involving romance, secret relationships, extra-marital affairs, real love, chance meetings, coincidences, mysterious strangers, unexpected calamities, crime, and last-minute rescues, each having their own emotional charge (Levin 2020). Viewers identify with the characters by seeing in them something of themselves. And viewers participate in the fictional characters’ lives by making ongoing decisions about their behavior. Has a character made the right decision? Should he or she have left the relationship? made that offer? taken that job? started that affair? Around the world, TV wrestling is a soap opera for men (Jenkins 2007). While known to its audience to be faked, it nevertheless provides profoundly affective identification. Wrestlers spend a minimum of nine months training before appearing on television learning not only how to move without hurting either themselves or others, but how to emote for the camera (Jeffries 2019). They must learn how to communicate the effects of torture, abasement, outraged fury, abjection, cowardice, triumph, and contempt. Like women’s soaps, TV wrestling tells complexly plotted

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narratives of personal suffering, friendships, alliances, betrayals, and reverses of fortune, for which there is no better snapshot than as often happens with a tag team: one wrestler is beaten to a pulp and is unable to manage without help. As Jenkins (2007) writes, “Struggling to the ropes, he must admit that he needs another man. His partner reaches out to him while he crawls along the floor, inching towards that embrace” (94). One fan claimed: “It’s not about motion, it’s about emotion,” or more graphically, “Moves without the proper psychology mean SHIT ALL!” (Chang 2012). The US audience demographic for TV wrestling is largely adolescent males, and among young adults, poorly educated whites and African Americans and Hispanics (Indeed Wrestling 2019). This demographic of working-class and ethnic minorities finds an echo of their own experience in the determination of fate through physical rather than intellectual trails, and, moreover, the defeat of good guy wrestlers and the ineffectiveness of referees further reflects their own lives (Campbell 1996). For the losers of society, TV wresting represents their own lived experience. Understanding that they have little chance of ever being respected by the winners in society, they don’t necessarily admire the winners. TV wrestling offers an opportunity to demonstrate who they are through a celebration of a resistant cultural form. It is no coincidence that the bad guys of wrestling often win; the audience identifies with the “baddies.” Like women’s soap operas, the narratives of TV wrestling are multiple and overlapping and so, while individual narratives have some degree of closure, as a whole the structure is open-ended. There is no end to either the desire for emotional identification or its gratification. The above examples apply to whole demographics, but identification can also be highly personal. Crying over popular media is often inexplicable. Initially, there may appear to be no relationship between particular images and a strong emotional response, and it is only on reflection that there emerges a connection. For some people, such links are to scenes of death and departure, specifically members of families saying goodbye; for others the link is the determination to live (Nelson 2005). Having suffered and survived trauma, the trigger for tears can be the determined choice to remain part of life. For others, the link is the pain experienced by those left behind. Also, while viewers are accustomed to the demise of peripheral characters, the death of a central figure, especially a beloved one, ruptures expectations (Byers and Lavery 2010). The latter was repeatedly exploited in Game of Thrones. Today, melodrama appears in many forms: soap operas, TV wrestling, and numerous dramas on television and in the cinema. They are each based on their audience recognizing the dilemmas faced by fictional characters. The location of authenticity lies in the situation faced by the characters and the appropriateness of their expression of emotion.

Searching for Authenticity Even so, in the search for authenticity fictional dramas are challenged by so-called Reality TV that ostensibly locates authenticity in the genuine corporeal reactions of real people (Hirdman 2011). Tears and other involuntary bodily behaviors are made to indicate the truthfulness of the emotions on display. Reality TV claims to present real emotions, their authenticity residing in what is considered to be our raw, emotional core.

The Highly Emotional

This is despite the fact that Reality TV constructs artificial situations that practically guarantee an emotional display, and to this extent it conforms to the rhetoric of emotional exhibitionism. Reality TV is a complex hybrid of what it claims to be—reality—and what Collingwood called the betrayal of manufactured emotions. It combines the high-strung emotions of classic melodrama with a display of authentic emotions by ordinary people. Since the mid 1990s many forms of Reality TV have developed, but they all have in common the one-person, confessional interview. Onstage the monologue is the traditional single-person speech that reveals the inner life, the secret thoughts and feelings of a character. Reality TV has reintroduced this largely out-of-date stage talk of emotional self-confession. In close-up, so that audiences can see every nuance of facial gesture, contestants reflect on how important being on the show is to them and how it could change their lives. How did it feel to date that person, be accepted or rejected, achieve or fail to achieve their goal, being voted to stay or voted off? Whether participants turn out to be winners or losers they often attempt to suppress their emotions with a forced smile or emit involuntary disgust sounds, in what Ekman and Friesen (1969) call “nonverbal leakage” (88). Just as often participants cry, and the audience gets to observe the extraordinary range of emotional expression that the forty-three muscles of the human face are able to produce. Contestants cry because they couldn’t lose weight, they did lose weight, met the right partner, won the competition. The most notable of these “money shots” are then reused in promotional advertisements. Yet as popular and pervasive as Reality TV has become, it is only part of what Hirdman (2011) calls “the authenticity industry” (20). As in medieval times and during the eighteenth century, tears are the litmus of what is real. People now cry on television news, in documentary interviews, talk shows, even sports programs, in a bodily inscribed understanding of authenticity.

Seeking Attachment Emotional expression is not only an individual behavior; it is also reciprocal. Emoting is often intended to call forth a response from others and usually it succeeds (Nelson 2005). Emotions, being critically important to our species every bit as much as logical reasoning, and perhaps more so, means that showing emotion is part of an inherited, inborn method of establishing and maintaining bonds between people. Crying, for example, helps develop child/parent bonds, and this symbiotic relationship thereafter continues throughout our lives by means of shedding tears. The hardwired cry of infants finds its adult counterpart in calling out to friends and family for support, and the corresponding response of caregivers to an infant’s cry is replayed in adult empathy toward others. We are highly dependent on the support of others, not only at birth, but also throughout our lives, so it is biologically sensible that in healthy humans closeness is pleasurable and separation is painful. We rely on behaviors that incline us toward each other and keep us there. Or alternatively, considering this idea from a hedonistic perspective, feeling compassionate for a suffering victim or empathizing at another’s loss means being able to feel a desirable social trait (Olivia 2003). Although almost anything can make us cry, like other emotional expressions, crying is almost always related to attachment, either gaining it or losing it (Nelson 2005). People cry over

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images, that are either too full or too empty of emotion (Elkins 2001). Either images overflow with emotion and overwhelm us, or there is a deficit of emotion and we feel bereft. In today’s rationally ordered society, one of the few places it is socially permissible to cry is in front of media. Crying helps establish bonds of community through a mutual recognition of love and loss. Classic melodrama worked on alternating between these polar opposites; one minute characters were connected with each other and the next minute they were torn apart, and often just as quickly they were reunited. In the many forms that melodrama takes today, this oscillation continues to work because it dramatizes attachment and its lack, the foundation of our very being, the basic tension that structures our lives as both individuals and as social animals.

Participating Emotional scenes dramatize our own need for attachment but they also call forth an emotional reciprocity. The reciprocal relationship between characters represented in pictures is repeated between them and ourselves as viewers. We fall into imagery; we participate in what Feilla (2010) calls an “‘aesthetics’ of absorption,” watching “a moving scene slips into acting in a moving scene” (166, 167). Pictures welcome the participation of viewers, and, in turn, viewers play an active part, entering into the emotional reality of pictures. Narratives are often structured with the spectator in mind. Just as with Baroque paintings, a space is deliberately left open for viewers to enter in and participate in screen narratives. Sometimes fictional characters engage us with a mutual gaze, though in the same way that Greuze’s paintings did, more often figures appear self-absorbed in their own lives. Fried (1980) refers to the latter as a “supreme fiction” since their self-absorption acts as an invitation to empathically join a scene and engage with its characters with our own emotions (71). This is why a textual analysis of melodramas and other forms of explicit emotional expression is never adequate. While it is easy to dismiss the hyper-emotional register of melodramatic forms as simplistic and manipulative, understanding of what they call forth in viewers is needed. When audience response is considered, melodrama invariably turns out to be infinitely more complex, ambiguous, and multilayered than one would gather from a purely textual study. Warhol (2003) found that the emotions expressed in daytime soaps were not necessarily those the audience experienced. Where the emotions expressed by the soaps were often simplistic, the audience’s response was often multilayered. She described soaps as following a wave pattern, building affective peaks, followed by an undertow, but although the emotions of the audience also typically followed a wave structure, they were often quite different waves. A typical response to characters expressing angst was irritation, impatience, or annoyance, not empathy. While the programs structured the affective responses of the audience, the programs did not dictate them. The same emotional participation is evident with Reality TV. Much of the audience’s pleasure in Reality TV lies in attempting to evaluate participants’ feelings by judging whether their body language accords with the feelings they express verbally (Hirdman 2011). Audiences ask: Are they faking? Are they for real? And if the emotions are deemed real, to what degree are they due to having internalized the conventions of the genre? With such questioning involvement, Reality TV is more than an emotional text; for its audience, it is a multilayered emotional interaction with

The Highly Emotional

a text. Viewers are not passive observers, but active participants entering into situations and connecting with characters as invited guests. No matter what form melodrama takes today, it is at root an excessive mode that articulates moral conflicts in a “post-sacred” society (Brooks 1976: 43). A specifically modern sensibility, melodrama represents a lack of faith in a divine order that has been replaced by a “moral occult” where the private and personal spheres have become the entire realm of personal significance (6). Yet long before the invention of melodrama as a genre, the essential idea of the genre, suffering virtue, had been employed for millennia. Numerous paintings and narratives have been based on innocents betrayed, undeserved pain, unrecognized worthiness, and so on, including many exemplars of high culture, Greek tragic drama and much of Shakespeare among them. As Diderot observed in 1767, in fiction we reverse the values we hold in life: in fiction “we prefer to see the righteous man suffering rather than the wicked man punished . . . the spectacle of virtue undergoing great ordeals is a beautiful one; the most dreadful efforts directed against virtue do not displease us” (cited in Fried 1980: 80–1). For centuries, the suffering virtue of martyred saints was a staple subject for European painters, and the martyrdom of saints is still lauded by the Catholic Church as exemplars of virtue (Salisbury 2004). The original suffering virtue narrative of Christianity is even called “the passion.” In painting and sculpture, the narrative continues to adorn every Catholic church, and it is annually re-enacted in many parts of the world. Many feature on YouTube. And until 2019 the Holy Land Experience theme park in Orlando, Florida, featured the crucifixion re-enacted with live actors at 4 p.m. every day. Although today’s numerous melodramatic forms in popular media have largely replaced the emotional expression of religious fervor, they rely upon very much the same appeals.

For Better or Worse Ever since the rise of Romanticism, the authentic self has been grounded in human emotions. Reality has been measured by emotional connection, the affective life being the very cornerstone of the authentic self. Soap operas, TV wrestling, and all other contemporary forms of melodrama are enjoyed despite not equating to real life. Their attraction is not that they perfectly echo ordinary life, but that they pull upon key emotional chords. Storylines are often fantastical and sometimes nonsensical, but they seem emotionally real. Audiences feel they know what fictional characters feel. Even when emotional expressions are judged inappropriate, they indicate the depth of our desire to connect with others of like minds and hearts. Since we think with our emotions, for good or ill, highly emotional images show us who we are. As further chapters indicate, particular emotions show us that we can be everything from monsters filled with hate to the most sentimental softies. Emotions are powerful and thereby make us vulnerable to arguments wrapped in their appeals. Emotions work for us, but also they can be used against us. Crafting arguments with emotional appeal makes it the more difficult to think issues through. As Plato feared and Aristotle acknowledged, arguments wrapped in emotional pleasure are the better to circumvent reason.

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5 The Sentimental Chapter Outline Surveying Sentimentality A Discourse of Abuse A Sentimental Journey The Sugar of Sentimentality The Sins of Sentimentality Sense and Sentimentality

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Hello Kitty, the perpetual third-grade fictional girl, with a red bow and no mouth, is embraced by fans everywhere as an expression of the tender emotions of sentimentality. Originating in Japan, she is a worldwide media franchise (Alt 2020). She has a pet cat called Charmmy Kitty and a twin sister called Mimmy, and she loves apple pie. Still exceptionally popular in Japan, she is a dim sum restaurant in Hong Kong and cafes in South Korea, Thailand, and China, and she appears on airplanes in Taiwan. While especially beloved in Asia, Hello Kitty has long been a worldwide marketing franchise in the “pink globalization” of the cute aesthetic (Yano 2013). While the last chapter dealt with sentimentality as one among many emotions, a separate chapter is needed to deal with sentimentality. If emotions in general are suspect, the tender emotions of sentimentality are especially so. Attacks are ferocious.

Surveying Sentimentality Originally, the word sentimentality was without pejorative connotations as simply “pertaining to or characterized by sentiment” with the word sentiment referring to “one’s own feeling” (Online Etymology Dictionary, or OED). In order to turn it into a negative and thus render its modern meaning, it was necessary to add an adjective as with “sickly sentimental,” “foolishly sentimental,” or “having too much sentiment.” Today, however the OED, while retaining a descriptive definition of sentimentality, also immediately includes a pejorative definition, the previously employed 63

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qualifying adjective no longer being necessary: “1 deriving from or prone to feelings of tenderness, sadness, or nostalgia. 2 having or arousing such feelings in an exaggerated and self-indulgent way.” Common synonyms for the sentimental include mawkish, maudlin, mushy, sappy, syrupy, schmaltzy, gushy, corny, weepy, and, simply, over-emotional, all of which are made to stand in opposition to an alleged rational norm, or at least to an appropriately restrained emotional response. Indeed, it is difficult to think of sentimentality in positive terms when the common words used in association with it are almost all prejudicial. The contemporary iconography of sentimentality is extensive: soft, furry animals (especially puppies and kittens); wide-eyed children both naughty and nice; flowers; sunny, idealized landscapes; hearts; decorative borders; cherubs; angels; cute figurines; Victorian-inspired mementos, babies, children of all ages, old men, old women, mothers, motherhood itself, apple pie, and God and country (Reyes 2011). Births, christenings, birthdays, weddings, Mother’s Day, Valentine’s Day, illness and deaths—all the major events of one’s life are celebrated today with cards, floral decorations, or mementos. Each play on the emotions of love, sympathy, and happiness; the desire for beauty, comfort, and security; the presumption of innocence; and the bittersweet melancholy of nostalgia (Solomon 2004). In formal terms, today’s sentimental imagery typically employs a pastel or sepia palette, with an intimate scale, and with much use made of repetition, pattern, and decorative intricacy. Surfaces are typically soft or shiny, and in addition to the normal materials of paint, pencil, and paper, extensive use is often made of fake fur and feathers, linens, needle cloth, and wallpaper. Traditional ideas of beauty prevail. Sentimental aesthetics typically value clarity, cleanliness, purity, harmony, symmetry, and a highly skillful finish. Technical perfection is prized (Solomon 2004). Physical reactions to sentimentality are often manifest in tears and sighing, and “ooohing” and “awing” are typical auditory responses. Sentimentality though is not just a style. It is also a sensibility marked by compassion, sympathy, empathy, and love. It is gentle, benevolent, and kind, and it casts an entirely pleasing perspective on its subject matter. Everything is viewed through rose-tinted glasses even when the subject matter is sad. Indeed, melancholy is one of its principal attributes. Sadness and sentimentality are sometimes synonymous.

A Discourse of Abuse Condemning sentimentality as both a style and a sensibility has been and remains remorseless. It is variously condemned as a tearful, emotional exaggeration, a false coloring of its subjects. Because sentimental emotions are a fabrication, merely an affectation, of real emotion, sentimentality is “a specifically aesthetic form of lying” (Calinescu 1987: 229). Sentimentality is “toxic” (Darlrymple 2011), with the subtitle of one book on sentimentality calling it “modern humanity’s greatest psychological problem” (Ranete 2020). It “misrepresents the world in order to feel unconditionally warm-hearted about bits of it” and so undermines rationality (Jefferson 1983: 524). Sentimentality is a “manipulative aesthetic” which relies on pity for “loveable inferiors” that “trigger, with Pavlovian

The Sentimental

predictability, maternal feeling for a mythical condition of enduring naïveté” (Harris 2000: 2). And on and on. Sentimentality is used to marginalize women, the lower classes, foreigners, and children, casting each group as childish. Where reason is equated with men, the middle class, Westerners, and adults, quintessentially white, middle-class, male adults, their counterparts are invariably denigrated. Being considered to be overly prone to emotionalism, women are equated with soft-heartedness, which, in turn, is equated with soft-mindedness. Alternatively, sentimentality as female is feared because it is overly powerful. “Sentimentality is a womanish—and at the end of the day, a sluttish— attitude” (Knight 1990: 418). “Sentimentality is a femme fatale, only she wields a contagion rather than a gun” (418). By masquerading as an innocent and “working on the inside, it is the undoing of the rational self ” (418). Having it both ways, sentimentality is either too weak as feminine or, as a femme fatale, too powerful. The same all-purpose means of condemning others is apparent when criticism is class-based because the criticism operates both up and down the class hierarchy (Solomon 2004). The word cheap is used to describe the mass-produced nature of sentimental images that appeal to the lower classes, but it is also applied to the nouveau riche who are condemned for having more money than taste. People prone to sentimental imagery are thereby accused of having either too little or too much money (Knight 1999). Either way, they are considered morally deficient, sharing in all the defects alleged against the sentimental images themselves. These views were echoed by modernist art. With the notable exception of Renoir, the modernist avant-garde artists of the nineteenth century resolutely set themselves against all forms of sentimentality (Novina 2005). The Impressionists pursued optical investigations and the Expressionists were fully angst-ridden. None of the twentieth-century art movements, from Cubism to Abstract Expressionism, were notably cheerful. While sentimentality sometimes made cameo appearances in Dada, Surrealism, and Pop Art, it was always as the object of derision, satire, or irony (Capasso 2005). Under modernism, sentimentalism was employed as a primary feature to distinguish fine art from popular art and by extension cultural elites from the masses (Eagleton 1990). Yet sentimentality “is a recent newcomer in the vocabulary of abuse” (Jefferson 1983: 519). If a longer view is taken of the historical narrative of Western art, the modernist disavowal of sentimentality is of relatively recent origin.

A Sentimental Journey During the eighteenth century philosophical rationalism dominated, but it was counterbalanced by expressions of sentiment that were taken to indicate a benevolent nature (Reyes 2011). To be a sentimentalist was to show heightened sensitivity to things delicate and fragile. Men as well as women were apt to express themselves in the most heartfelt terms, including crying openly. This was not considered self-indulgent but a sign of moral strength and its cultivation necessary for civil life. The art of the eighteenth century was correspondingly renowned for its sentiment. Whereas the art of previous centuries had dealt with the emotions of heroic and noble lives, during the course

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of the eighteenth century the visual arts stressed the internal life of ordinary individuals. One group, who were actually called The Sentimental Painters, focused on conflict and loss among ordinary families in domestic situations (Barker 2005). Deathbed scenes showed distraught relatives wailing; relatives overcome with joy at the return of a long-lost family member; young, simple country girls, presumed to have fallen victim to aristocratic seducers, wear plaintive, melancholic expressions; and young girls lovingly cradle their pet rabbits and kittens, sometimes with their eyes lifted heavenward in gratitude. The rhetorical means of emotional expression, employed since ancient times, were intentionally marshaled by the sentimental painters to arouse viewers’ sympathies. Contemporaneously, Rococo artists similarly stressed amiability and the triumph of virtue. The Rococo was an opulent, graceful style, preferring delicate, shell-like curves, pastel colors and vague, atmospheric effects. If today’s sentimental imagery has a principal stylistic European precursor it is the Rococo. Artists painted scenes of a carefree aristocracy playing at romance in idyllic, flowerstrewn landscapes, or, drawing upon classical mythology, innumerable, playfully cheerful putti. Picnics and musical parties in fairy parks proliferated. It never rained, all the women had perfect, beautiful skin, all the men were handsome, and all the lovers were elegant. Everyone was dressed in sparkling silk, and “the life of shepherd and shepherdess seems to be a succession of minuets” (Gombrich 1972: 358). The Rococo was lighthearted, optimistic, and charming.

Figure 5.1 Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Diana and Endymion, c. 1753/6.

The Sentimental

If the eighteenth century was the age of sentiments, it prefigured the Romanticism and Academic art of the nineteenth which witnessed an ever-greater emphasis on the domestic sphere that idealized young women as otherworldly, viewed children as pure innocents, and celebrated rural life. As counter to ugly cities and dehumanizing working and living conditions, there arose in active opposition the desire for calm spaces where indisputably human qualities could still be cherished. Wholly new emotional investments were placed on tender human feelings. Children are pictured as purity itself (Cunningham 2020). While everything else seemed to be in turmoil, children were imagined to be untouched, uncontaminated, innocent. As the mid-nineteenthcentury Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones wrote, children echo “a beautiful romantic dream of something that never was, never will be—in a better light than any light that ever shone— in a land no one can define or remember, only desire” (cited in Time Life Editors 1971: 39).

The Sugar of Sentimentality Sentimentality remains powerfully attractive, and the degree to which it is condemned appears in direct proportion to its popularity. Pervading popular culture and political discourse (Reyes 2011), it is used to sell everything from telecommunications to political programs, soap, soup, and social programs. What then is the sugar of sentimentality? With so many complaints against it, wherein lies its attraction?

The Comfort of an Aestheticized Sanctuary Sentimentality is accused of beautifying lies, but there are times when escape into an “aestheticized sanctuary” is entirely beneficial for our mental health (Newman 1995: 233). Consider the continuing emotional investment in childhood as a time of untrammeled purity. This is despite the knowledge that some children are abused, that there are hundreds of thousands of child soldiers in the world, hundreds of thousands of child slaves, and that none of these children can have escaped emotionally unscarred. We are outraged when children are exploited and abused precisely because we continue to equate the vulnerability of children with their innocence. According to psychoanalytic theory, the world of our unconscious is the world of childhood, not actual childhood, but a rich repository of infantile pleasures, including free play, spontaneity, and imagination (Plastow 2015). As adults, we frequently deny ourselves what we assume are these essential characteristics of childhood. We curtail a sense of wonder, awe, and excitement in the face of new things, of limitless horizons stretching out before us. We still possess these qualities and they can still be played out during leisure time, but mostly the pressures of a working life in rationally ordered, highly competitive societies devalue these qualities in ourselves. Consequently, we often construct ideal childhoods for ourselves that are viewed through the lens of a warm nostalgic glow. Where one’s childhood has involved abuse or deprivation the construction of childhood as an ideal is oftentimes especially invested. Childhood becomes a mythical time when the characteristics adults deny themselves, or were denied in actual childhood, are lived out as in a

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dream. What is denied the adult still seems achievable through childhood. Childhood becomes a homage to the imaginary, a metaphor for all the qualities we adults desire but feel we cannot indulge in for ourselves. Such ideas about childhood are not then altogether about actual children or even our concepts of childhood; rather, they tell us about ourselves as adults (Plastow 2015). Where we insist that childhood belongs to actual children, childhood is also a framework that fulfills a need to place fantasies and desires somewhere out there in reality. No wonder that pictures of sweet, unblemished children continue to be a mainstay of popular culture. The standout popular photographer of children today is Australian Anne Geddes. Her work appears on cards, calendars, date books, posters, and even wrapping paper. A small child with bright eyes and chubby cheeks squats among lily pads framed by exotic flowers. A smiling, naked baby rolls about on a bed of pink rose petals; another lies in a bowl of cherries. Babies peak out from geranium pots, sporting hats in the form of colorful flowers. Naked newborns wear wings, sleep in pea pods, and curl up amid strings of pearls on oyster beds. Many photographs call upon common metaphors: peas in a pod, a bed of roses, a bowl of cherries, sleeping like an angel. Geddes photographs are a liminal fancy of children as nothing but adorably cute, yet all representations offer a carefully edited view of their subject. This is as true of images of angst, pain, and terror as it is of images of love and joy. Critics of sentimentality often assume that there is a true reality of which sentimental representations are a distortion. But there exists no fixed and true reality separate from its interpretations, only many interpretations some of which are more complete, balanced, or nuanced than others. Who wants always to be confronted with the butchery of war, the leaky bodies of actual children, or the intractable complexities of poverty? Why single out the tender emotions for failing to show unpleasant interpretations when other images show only unpleasant ones? Instead of there being something inherently wrong with falsification, there is virtue in not always telling the whole truth in every circumstance (Newman 1995). There are times when compassion and kindness demand falsity. Circumstances may override the need for truth-telling; sometimes saccharine is just what is needed (Jamison 2014). The idealization of a subject may help rather than hinder coming to terms with painful realities; for example, when recalling a full account of an experience may be so painful it would otherwise be completely avoided. Seeing a subject through rose-tinted lenses may help, piecemeal or in part, to recall what would otherwise be met with absolute suppression. Sentimental religious imagery continues to offer sanctuary for some. Consider devotional pictures of a meek and mild Jesus looking benignly upon adoring children and small animals. Also consider the equally sentimental Scared Heart pictures of a dewy-eyed Jesus or of the Virgin Mary holding a flaming heart shining with divine light, an icon of benevolence. In largely post-religious societies solace is sought elsewhere. AIDS and breast cancer campaigns now produce a cornucopia of comforting items: ribbons, candles, pins, broaches, scarves, and coffee mugs. Marketing breast cancer awareness, Mattel produces Pink Ribbon Barbie. Forms of public grief are now spontaneously commemorated with icons of sentiment; soft toys, poems, hearts, and flowers. The sites of roadside fatalities and shootings are routinely festooned with such icons. Deeply saddened by such inexplicable events, offering up icons of

The Sentimental

Figure 5.2 Unknown, Sacred Heart of Jesus, 19th century.

tender sentiment is a gesture of love that in turn offers some comfort in finding that one is not alone in one’s grief.

Longing for a Past as Pleasant Comfort is also often sought in a pleasant past, an agreeable time devoid of present difficulties as well as the challenging difficulties of the past. History is replete with inconvenient truths, but reworked as pleasant, history becomes heritage, history as sweet sentiment located in the past; for

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example, wars long past are typically whitewashed of their atrocities (Lowenthal 1997). Heritage is history seen through a prism in which disagreeable facts are downplayed or ignored in favor of what is uplifting, wholesome, and efficacious. It is history as a narrative of noble and brave deeds, idealistic visions, and heroic actions. Where history is loaded heavy with despicable motives and atrocious acts, heritage is nostalgic. In recoiling from present challenges and fending off a fearful future, we long for a past envisioned as benign. History is opaque—a foreign country—but heritage serve our present purposes. National flags, war memorials, statues of heroes, re-enactments, iconic buildings, paintings, family photographs and heirlooms, all play a part in maintaining present-day emotional attachments, both personal and public. Lowenthal (1997) comments, “heritage consoles us with tradition . . . it links us with ancestors and offspring, bonds neighbors and patriots, certifies identity, roots us in time honored ways” (ix). This is showcased by myths of national origin. They tend to garner mythological status, taking on a life of their own by fusing fact with fiction. They contain accounts of general psychological, cultural, or societal truths rather than accurate, historical accounts. One of the main annual celebrations in the United States is Thanksgiving. It commemorates the first thanksgiving in 1621 when the first pilgrims offered their gratitude for their survival one year on from their landing on the American continent. Many paintings recreate this event as scenes of happy co-operation between the Puritans and the Indians. They are typically shown shaking hands and eating together as if the Indians were as happy the Puritans survived as the Puritans were themselves. In the 1915 painting by Gerome Ferris, The First Thanksgiving 1621, the historical relationship between the Indians and settlers is reversed with the settlers feeding the Indians. The settlers busy themselves, while the Indians sit, like children, happy to receive the bounty the settlers provide. Though false to the historical record, such images help to reinforce the view Americans have of themselves as decent, generous, honorable people. The origin story of Communist China is the story of the Long March, which is similarly a fusion of verifiable facts and arguable falsehoods (Shuyun 2010). The Long March took place between October 1934 and October 1935. It was a military retreat by the Red Army to avoid certain annihilation by the far superior pursuing army of the Nationalist Party that had encircled it. The route passed through exceptionally difficult terrain, requiring negotiation with local warlords, but also gaining the respect and support of the peasants to whom the Communists promised land reform. It required great physical endurance, and they overcame great odds to survive. The Long March resulted in a huge human toll, but as a narrative of great emotional depth it serves to bind people together. However, some of the most popular and heroic events of the Long March, notably the battles, are disputed by historians. The battle for Luding Bridge has been long viewed as a glorious, heroic event with volunteers from the Red Army fighting across a dangerous chain bridge against vastly superior forces. In the face of a hail of bullets the Red Army volunteers secured the bridge for the army to cross and escape certain annihilation. However, witness accounts vary from the official view. Some say that local people led the assault; others say that there was little resistance and that the enemy panicked and ran away. But the battle for Luding Bridge is still celebrated in many prints, paintings, and films, an indispensable part of the narrative of national origin.

The Sentimental

A sentimental longing for the past is age-old. For the Romans, the idea of a better time placed somewhere in the past was expressed as the Golden Age; in the Bible, it is Eden before the Fall; and for many Western scholars it has been democratic ancient Greece (Williams 1973). Since the nineteenth century this time has often been imagined as prior to the Industrial Revolution in which most people lived in small rural communities, a time before alienation from work, class struggle, and—horror of horror—popular mass culture. In each case, the past was viewed as an organic unity when all was right with the world, when people lived harmoniously with nature and with one another. Much of heritage is fabricated, some of it delusionary, yet by means of heritage “we tell ourselves who we are, where we came from, and to what we belong” (Lowenthal 1997: xiii). There is comfort in a pleasant past, and there is the pleasure of melancholy in longing for it.

Love and Compassion as their Own Rewards Emotions connect us to each other, and this is no more evident than in sharing the tender emotions. Sentimentality evokes loving, compassionate relationships, and love and compassion are their own rewards. By offering love and showing compassion we give of ourselves and in giving we receive the comfort of knowing that we are profoundly and positively connected to others. We are reminded that we are not alone but part of a community capable of feeling as we do. Such emotions, no less than negative ones, are grounded in our biological inheritance. We are genetically programmed to care for babies with their large heads, large eyes, and small mouths (Glocker et al. 2008). This appears to extend to some animals with their big eyes, and to baby animals with their big heads (Saito 2007). Environmental campaigns attempting to protect endangered species focus on baby or young animals, not adult animals, and, moreover, they are highly selective with the animals they employ (Saito 2007). Their advertisements use soft, furry animals, not ones with scales. Advertisements show baby bears cavorting happily in snow, bunnies rubbing noses, fluffy ducklings tentatively taking their first swim.

The Ironic Distance of Camp and Kitsch Sentimentality can also be approached with the ironic detachment of camp and kitsch aesthetics. For many fans, Hello Kitty is not just cute but cute-cool, meaning fans have it both ways, consciously relishing cute sentimentality but with inverted commas (Yano 2013). Not all sentimental imagery lends itself to a taste either for camp or kitsch, but much of it does. Viewed with a camp sensibility, sentimental images are loveable precisely because they are ludicrous, ostentatious, affected, and theatrical. Consider the porcelain ornaments and memorabilia marketed as Precious Moments. Sold as limited editions they draw on the cachet of high art, but they employ the tropes of sentimentality with their soft, pastel colors and subject matter. Small children with oversized eyes sit on soft sofas reading to cats; chihuahuas peek from teacups emblazed with hearts; and droopy-eyed dachshunds wear pearl necklaces and oversized hats with

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cascades of flowers. All the animals engage the viewer with eyes that say, “Love me, and I will love you back.” Camp celebrates a perverse sophistication that relishes the wildly exaggerated, or as cultural critic Susan Sontag (1966) wrote, “the ‘off ’ of things-being-what-they-are-not” (279). Camp rejoices in the difference between the real thing and pure artifice. Camp is “a private zany experience of the thing” (281). As camp, sentimental images are good because they are awful. The related concept of sentimental kitsch—tasteless, poor, and pretentious art—Henry (1979) argues is to “fill odd corners of our lives with oddities” (206). As with camp, not all kitsch items are sentimental, but “sweet kitsch” is characterized by an expression of tender sentiments considered over the top (Solomon 2004). In celebrating “the curious, the bizarre, the unbelievable . . . the stupefying,” Henry claims that it is sentimentality’s “heroic quest to give cachet—effortlessly— to our lives” (206). What is wrong, at times, with what is easy? Why should easy emotions be rejected from the broad tapestry of life? As Henry says, the Mona Lisa is so much more moving when her eyes are made actually to move. It is a cheap and easy trick, designed to illicit a cheap and easy response, but that is the point. What the critics condemn can be enjoyed as ironic humor.

Social Progress Sentimentality is often used as a sociopolitical strategy in a good cause. It is attractive to campaigners because its use promises to change social conditions through empathy (Jamison 2014). During the nineteenth century many Academic artists evoked sentimentality by painting pictures of poor, penniless children. Homeless and bedraggled, these pathetic little mites beg, limp on crutches, shelter from the cold, and huddle together for comfort (Rosenblum and Janson 2005). The intention was to pull heartstrings and, as the ideology of childhood innocence was so pervasive, it was a significant factor in gradually abolishing child labor. All the paintings and mass-produced images of dewy-eyed children played a part (Cunningham 2020). Being the most vulnerable members of society, the most easily victimized, and the least able to defend themselves, children continue to be employed in the service of social reparation. Aid relief agencies attract Western donors, initially through advertisements that include photographs of young, appealing children. Individual children are either pictured alone or, as in some advertisements, a child appears with a celebrity from the First World who represents the face of a caring, white, First World. The children are usually well fed and cheerful, presumably the beneficiaries of aid. They reassure that, with the support of the donor, a real difference can be made. Pictures of starving, emaciated children always evoke the question: Can a financial donation really make a difference? Instead, aid agencies banish the idea that the Third World is a frightening place behind the image of the seemingly universal appeal of a young child. Donors receive a picture of their child, the child’s name, a few personal details, an annual Christmas report, and limited correspondence is encouraged. They are informed in the written text that their donation is spent on the general well-being of the child’s community—on a school building, a dam, a well—and it seems possible that most of the money is so spent, but the

The Sentimental

initial and primary appeal is made through the image of an innocent, vulnerable child. For the donor, the rewards of extending compassion are supplemented by being placed in a position of power. The children look to donors as surrogate parents, as their source of help and succor, a relationship that is reinforced by never showing the child’s actual parents or even siblings. With the exception of the advertisements that include a celebrity, children are presented alone. Real parents are not allowed to confuse the special relationship developed by foster parents. In this way, the normal dependency of children on adults is reproduced and, by extension, to the dependency of the Third World on the First World.

Exercising Power The power of adults over vulnerable children is also made clear by the practice of dressing children as adults. In a craze on gift cards during the 1990s, young boys were dressed in miniature suits while young girls were dressed in evening gowns or wedding dresses (Holland 1992). Such was the incongruity between the adult-style clothes and the children’s small, underdeveloped bodies that their vulnerability and dependency were made patently clear. The ironic stance of camp and kitsch also involves exercising power; it establishes a critical, humorous, even dismissive, distance. Exercising power is equally part of the pleasure in condemning sentimentality. Either in condemning sentimentality because it is viewed as dreadful or professing it good because it is dreadful, there is pleasure in distancing oneself from it, and, by inference, imagining oneself superior to those who relish sentimentality without such criticality. Managing to feel some sense of personal power is especially important when traumatized. Sturken (2007) observed that snow globes have a special place among the many consumer items that proliferate following traumatic events. Following the 9/11 terrorist attack on New York in 2001, the city appeared in snow globes with everything still in place. When shaken, the globes were enlivened with snow or stars, which offered “a kind of celebratory flurry” that settled and offered a sense of time returned (2). They offered a sense of comfort that derived from the expectation that things will return to their original state, but also the power inherent in being able to look into a miniature world from a god-like position.

The Sins of Sentimentality Among the criticisms of sentimentality many are based on taste and are premised on marginalizing women, foreigners, the lower classes, and children, and they should not be entertained. But while the single common feature of sentimentality is assumed innocence, sentimentality is not innocent. At election time, and with the cameras rolling, politicians of every party run to the nearest baby, lift it into the air, and kiss it as if it was their own. That the sentimental aesthetic is the lingua franca of politicians should immediately give pause (Kundara 1984).

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Disempowering and Harming Sentimentality’s Subjects Seeing children as simply sweet innocents in need of adult protection can rob them of the rights they might otherwise be thought to possess (Holland 1992). To acknowledge that children have rights undermines our privileged position as adults to extend our protection on our own terms. To maintain our position, it is necessary to sentimentalize them and thereby disempower them. Viewing children as utterly innocent can also beget in response an equally distorted, opposite view of children. It can provoke a crude reaction when other realities intrude (Holland 1992). Casting children as perfect angels helps generate its binary opposite, namely children as devils. For example, in the press child murderers tend to be viewed as more terrible because they are children, not less so. In the folk religion of childhood—childhood as adult fantasy—real children are unable to match up, which leads to disappointment at best and may at worst be associated with abuse. Kitzinger (1990) argues that “the notion of childhood innocence is itself a source of titillation for abusers. . . . As one child abuser wrote, ‘It was so exciting, she was so young, so pure and clean’ ” (160). The ideology of innocence stigmatizes the knowing child and violating “a knowing child becomes a lesser offence than violating an ‘innocent’ child” (161). The bifurcation of stereotypes is also apparent with ethnicities (Racial and Racist 2012). Sentimental stereotypes offer a patronizing and disempowering perspective. American Indians appear as noble savages, masters of stoic self-sufficiency who hunt, fish, and know the secrets of their tribe. AfricanAmerican stereotypes include the Sambo character who is happy, usually laughing, lazy, and, while intellectually deficient, loves to dance. Being stereotyped as sweet and harmless, even cute, strips people of their complex humanity and encourages patronizing and disempowering public policies.

Disempowering and Infantilizing Viewers Sentimentality can equally disempower viewers (Kupfer 1996). It can involve no more than an indulgence of emotional sympathy that otherwise might be directed to taking action to address the issue over which sympathy is directed. It is always easier, and certainly safer, to shed a tear than confront injustice. Sentimentality can be a way of feeling good about oneself as a sympathetic, sensitive soul without any expense, a mere emotional self-indulgence (Knight 1999). Oscar Wilde commented, “A sentimentalist is simply one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it” (cited in Newman 1995: 235–6). When cancer sufferers embrace their status as survivors by purchasing teddy bears and similar items, their fear and rage are negated (Sturken 2007). Thus do trauma victims embrace sentimentality, which simultaneously acts to comfort them while encouraging their infantilization.

Falsification The above example of the celebration of Thanksgiving offers a sense of efficacy, but it is utterly false. When reinforced by other myths of goodness it makes facing present realities difficult. Disney’s

The Sentimental

view of American history is remarkable for its selectivity and distortion. The American Adventure at Epscot (2012) in Orlando, Florida, is history filtered through the lens of Disney. Its central attraction is a half-hour show presented in a theatre-like auditorium with the aid of movies and animatronic figures that act as narrators. The early history of the United States is shown by interspersing events with a map of the United States. The first time the map is shown it represents the mid 1600s, and it is completely covered by clouds except for a small settlement on the east coast. As events unfold over the next three centuries, the map is shown several times with the cloud receding each time to mark the progress of European settlements across the continent. United States history begins with the arrival of Europeans and its subsequent narrative arc is entirely that of white settlement. The first reference to the Indians comes in 1872 when an Indian chief in the form of an animatronic figure rises from the floor to declare that he is sad for his people and that he will fight no more. The fate of the Indians is cast as historically inevitable, and for which we may be sorry, but whatever difficulties once existed are now resolved, and for which Indians need not be, and are not, mentioned again. Disney’s animated movie Pocahontas (1995) tells the popular, heartwarming but historically untrue story of a romance between a young Indian girl, Pocahontas, and a white settler with the unlikely, though factually correct, name of John Smith. The film climaxes with a war between the Indians and the Puritan settlers, which the film alleges to be due to nothing more than a failure to get along together. A clash of cultures that later saw the ideology of manifest destiny justifying the forced removal of Indians and multiple attempts at genocide is thereby reduced to the domestic sphere in which siblings fight or neighbors bicker.

Poor Public Policy Used in the service of political and social causes, the effects of sentimentality can be grave. When people have responded to sentimental appeals rather than all the relevant facts, countless millions have died in wars. And the mischaracterization of something as sweetness and light results in an equally brutish mischaracterization that too often ends in violence and oppression (Kupfer 1996). Citizens of the United States who readily accepted their own history as wholesome, family-friendly fare, and consequently cast themselves as innocent victims when attacked on 9/11, 2001, had neither the motive nor any basis for self-reflection. Constructing themselves as innocent, many placed all the blame on others with what are now widely considered demonstratively disastrous consequences (Sturken 2007). A culture of fear and trauma begets a culture of comfort that is necessary for healing its trauma, but also helps evade culpability. A comfort culture undermines hardheaded self-examination. Constructing a sweet fantasy strengthens contemporary social bonds, but it also ignores harsher realities that, if acknowledged, suggest that our own times represent a different but not necessarily worse time than in the past. Cultural historian Raymond Williams (1973) claims that the idea of a better society located in the past can be traced back in every generation to Roman times, when even then it was thought to have passed. If there is one thing certain about the organic society, it is that it has always past, suggesting that the past was never the past. Ancient Greece was

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demonstratively undemocratic by contemporary standards. Pre-industrial, rural life was one of long hours of hard physical labor and short lives. Sentimentalizing the past not only distorts the past, it circuitously undermines confidence in the present where it is essential to believe that current problems can be solved. Not even our sentimental attachment to soft and furry, cute animals is entirely innocent. While our love of such animals helps to protect them against eradication, it also means the neglect of other less alluring animals with equally significant ecological roles to play. Baby polar bears get protected; lizards and snakes do not. Conversely, what Saito (2007) calls “the Bambi syndrome” means that the ecologically justified culling of deer can be obstructed (70). Whether in under- or overprotecting these animals, our sentimental preferences stand in the way of environmental sustainability.

Sense and Sentimentality Sentimentality has a long and prestigious history in fine art. It can be a harmless joy, freely and even reflexively entered upon, and as such it is a matter of taste, no more than an aesthetic preference. Herein lies its life-enhancing potential. But in viewing everything as essentially uncontaminated, as pure and good, it also has the potential not only for self-deception on the part of viewers, but also for harming its subjects. In evading facts and undermining reason, it can have dire sociopolitical and environmental consequences. While the servant of politics, it frequently masquerades as mere taste. The hallmark of sentimentality is innocence but it is not innocent.

6 The Vulgar Chapter Outline Vulgarity and its Variants Vulgarity and Fine Art A Historical Perspective Viva Vulgarity! Vile Vulgarity Vexing Vulgarity

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Mr. Hankey, a character from the highly popular animated cartoon series South Park is a turd, literally, or at least an animated one. The following is an extract from a song he sang to the tune of Santa Claus is Coming to Town: Mr. Hankey the Christmas poo, Small and brown, he comes from you. Sit on the toilet, here he comes, Squeeze and tween your festive buns, A present from down below, Spread the joy with a howdy ho, . . . He can be brown or greenish brown, But if you eat fiber on Christmas Eve, He might come to your town. South Park 1999

Aired in an episode from 1999, the song also appeared on a DVD, Mr. Hankey’s Christmas Classics, in which Mr. Hankey, sitting in his sewer home, acts as the host of a variety show that features other South Park regulars singing songs with similar lyrics. South Park vividly illustrates the vulgarity of base, bodily humor. It self-consciously transgresses the norms of decency and decorum. In a 2005 episode entitled Bloody Mary, a statue of the Virgin released copious amounts of menstrual blood from its rectum. The South Park characters declared it a miracle, and when the Pope inspected the anal and vaginal regions of the statue he was showered with the blood. 77

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Whether scatological or sexual, playing with poo or penises, South Park’s humor continues a long if inglorious tradition in which the normal niceties of polite society are cast aside in a celebration of our most animal, bodily nature. The fifth-century BCE Greek historian Herodotus wrote, “The Egyptians celebrate the festival of Dionysus in much the same way as the Greeks, except that instead of a phallus they use puppets whose genitals are as big as the puppet and are made to move” (cited in Turner 2011: 50). From ancient Dionysian festivals to today’s novelty shops that sell penis pasta, a taste for the vulgar is perennial.

Vulgarity and its Variants Ordinary-language dictionaries define vulgarity in several ways: lacking in cultivation, perception, or taste; gross, crude, or obscene; pretentious or ostentatious; morally underdeveloped or unregenerate; common or ordinary; and the common view, tellingly, the common people. There is a lot of slippage between these meanings so that uncultivated and lacking in taste is easily applied to common or ordinary people as gross, crude, ostentatious, and morally unregenerate. The particular kind of vulgarity focused on in this chapter has its basis in extreme bodies, body parts, and body functions. Vulgarity refers here to the earthy, to the lewdly or profanely indecent that at best involves innuendo but also involves what is gross, abject, and obscene. It is used as synonymous with what Bakhtin (1994) identified as the carnivalesque body. Bakhtin contrasted the closed, smooth body of classical fine art with the open, grotesque body celebrated by medieval carnival. The grotesque, carnivalesque body comprised four qualities: general, corporeal bulk; body parts, which are invariably either too large or two small; body openings, as in the mouth, nostrils, and anus; and body functions such as vomiting, defecating, urinating, and copulation. The lower part of the body is emphasized, principally the belly, the buttocks, and the genitals. The abject qualities of the body, those that it emits, are also implicated: blood, puss, semen, vomit, urine, and faeces (Kristiva 1982). This is what Bakhtin (1994) called “the material bodily lower stratum” (212) and what Stallybrass and White (1986) called, perhaps punning, “the rock bottom of symbolic form” (3). Such vulgarity involves a self-conscious transgression of social norms, an indulgence in what is known to be offensive to others, of knowingly stepping over the line of officially approved discourse. It represents a deliberate affront to all that is considered right and respectable by both religious and secular authorities, as well as high-minded, modernist views of fine art.

Vulgarity and Fine Art Kant ([1764] 1965), the single most important forerunner of modernism, introduced his first work on aesthetics by stating that, while he was aware of vulgar and crude tastes, he would not be discussing them. They belonged to “stout persons, whose favorite authors are their cooks and whose words of fine taste are in their cellars” (45). Such people “thrive on vulgar obscenities and on

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a coarse jest and . . . to that kind of feeling, which can take place without any thought whatever, I shall pay no attention” (46). Kant’s ([1790] 1952) focus was entirely on the finer feelings to be found in fine art. Fine art can make ugly things in nature appear beautiful, he said, but “[o]ne kind of ugliness alone is incapable of being represented conformably to nature without destroying all aesthetic delight and consequent artistic beauty, namely that which excites disgust” (173–4). This is the heart of the opposition between modernist conceptions of fine art and the vulgarity of popular culture, because disgust is central to the complex attraction of vulgarity. At the time Kant wrote, the English working class were actually called The Vulgar. It helped their so-called betters to define themselves by contrast, as either The Middle Sort, what we call the middle class, or The Quality, meaning the aristocracy. Vulgar was a byword for the common people, akin to the views and uncultivated tastes of the mob, a mob being an unruly crowd governed by base instincts. The word mob is the forerunner of the word mass, and its legacy remains active as in mass media as a derogatory term for low, base entertainment (Williams 1976). Ever since the emergence of mass media in the nineteenth century, it has been accused of lowering cultural standards (Gans 1999). Long before the highly popular 1994 film Dumb and Dumber—a heady mixture of stupidity, sex, and scatology—critics had condemned society for being dumbed down to its most base, vulgar elements (Storey 2003). But this is an ahistorical evaluation. A brief historical account quickly puts paid to the idea that ours is a uniquely vulgar culture. Indeed, contemporary culture is comparatively decorous.

A Historical Perspective A historical perspective reveals that one of the principal ways in which the tension between elite culture and popular culture has been played out over time is through the opposition of the mind versus the body, especially of the vulgar body. Also, Norbert Elias ([1939] 2000) in his book The Civilizing Process, which traced developments since the twelfth century until the middle of the twenty-first century claims that we are like choir boys compared to people of the past.

Grotesques and Carnival Consider Sheela-na-gigs. Common in the early Gothic period, Sheela-na-gigs were wood or stone statues of nude, squatting old women who directly face the viewer, their legs wide apart, their hands often emphasizing their greatly exaggerated genitalia (Goode 2017). With heads greatly enlarged in proportion to their bodies, they have staring, owl-like eyes, gaping mouths, sometimes with irregular teeth, and a prominent nose and ears. They explicitly emphasize the open vagina. Whatever their original intent, by the 1600s, Sheela-na-gigs were viewed by the clergy as both hideous and obscene and destroyed on this account, hacked away from church walls, buried or thrown into rivers. Considered disgusting, they threatened pollution by their extreme, specific of women’s, sexuality.

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Figure 6.1 Poliphilo, Sheela-na-gig, Church of St. Mary and St. David, Kilpeck, c. 1140.

Contemporaneously however, medieval carnivals were tolerated, even at times encouraged, by the church, and they were the epitome of vulgarity (Bakhtin 1994). Renowned for their obscene, licentious, and scandalous plays, comedies, and farces, they celebrated unlawfulness and drunkenness. Performers included giants, midgets, albinos, Siamese twins, and improbabilities like a calf with a pig’s head. Lewd behavior and scatological humor were common (Stallybrass and White 1986). Of the scatological humor, Bakhtin (1994) commented that excrement “is the most suitable substance of the degrading of all that is exalted” (212). The medieval yearly calendar was punctuated with periods—sometimes weeks—where all the normal rules and obligations owed to landlord and church were set aside and carnival

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was given free rein. Both secular and religious authorities joined in the topsy-turvy festivities. In France from the eleventh century until the sixteenth century, licentious ceremonies were actually performed inside cathedrals. They included The Feast of Fools and The Holy Innocents, which involved electing a pope or archbishop to whom everyone danced riotously in honor, grotesque and impious masquerades, singing obscene songs, and even eating sausages on the high altar. Priests, disguised in grotesque masks and sometimes as women, danced in the choir. In The Festival of the Ass, an ass was ridden into the cathedral, fed and watered, and then taken to the nave where the congregation danced around the beast while braying like asses (Bridaham 1930: xi).

Vulgar Porn Until the nineteenth century, pornography was often used as much as a political weapon as it was for sexual stimulation, and it was suppressed primarily not on moral grounds but the threat it posed to church and state (Hunt 1993a). It was used as a weapon against one’s enemies. Pictures of people performing base sexual acts allegedly revealed their true, wanton nature, and so ridiculed their political legitimacy. By linking despotism with debauchery, and in a spirit that was simultaneously condemnatory and indulgent, pornography allegedly demonstrated private perversions behind the public mask. Sexual acts between clergy, politicians, aristocrats, and royalty were not only explicit, they acquired an excessive, grotesque quality where “penises are always large, vaginas multiply in number and sexual coupling takes place in a kind of frenzy” (38). Often figures were shown as voyeurs. A banqueting scene from 1748 shows monks feasting, drinking, and toasting a priest having sex with a woman while another priest sodomizes him (Hunt 1993c: 186). In another print devils watch as a Jesuit sodomizes a young and apparently asleep woman, and in yet another print a group of aristocratic ladies are depicted having sex with a donkey (Hunt 1993b: 336). During the eighteenth century, as criticism of the monarch increased in France, pornographic pamphlets attacked the court and eventually even the king and queen, especially the queen. Marie Antoinette was singled out for special treatment. Illustrated pamphlets denounced her for allegedly owning a brothel and they provided lurid, detailed images of her presumed orgies with any number of aristocrats and clergymen. They also questioned the paternity of her children. The point was to undermine the legitimacy of the crown; if the king could not control his own wife, how could he lay claim to control the country. Even when the queen was imprisoned the pornographers insisted that she was sexually available to everyone, including her valet, even her own son.

Scatology Some of this propaganda was also scatological whereby clergy were associated, literally, with filth, the direct opposite of the spiritual purity they preached. In a 1735 print a bespectacled Jesuit priest inspects the buttocks of a young urinating woman. The Pope is shown serving faeces: Jews are shown eating faeces (Stallybrass and White 1986: 54). The scatological strategy was the same as the sexual: to show the degenerate and hypocritical nature of those in power or, in the case of the Jews, also to denigrate those who were even more marginalized than the normative viewer.

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This was a culture whose sociopolitical discourse was commonly expressed through bodily functions, bodily desires, and the vulnerability of the body. It was a carnal culture, a culture of flesh (Stallybrass and White 1986).

Vulgarity and Reform In the long struggle between the mind and the body, with rationality, reason, and order on the one hand, and the unruly, ungovernable body on the other, the progress of the former was negligible, but all that changed during the nineteenth century. What had long existed as marginalized voices calling for restraint took to center stage, and elements of popular culture that had persisted for millennia were fundamentally changed. There was a marked reduction of eroticism, violence, and bodily humor, developments discussed in their respective chapters. Broadly, there was a severe repression of the body, including vulgar, bodily excess. Although vulgar material continued to be printed, the general trend was one of suppression. Increasingly, the revelry of carnivals and fairs was suppressed, curtailed by laws intent on rationalizing society and a consequent domesticating of cultural and leisure activities (Fiske 2007). The demands of industrial capitalism, the influence of Puritanism on mainstream churches, and the rise of a middle-class culture of respectability each worked to suppress vulgarity.

Figure 6.2 Brandon Oliver, Falla Bahh, 2018.

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Industrialists waged war on all popular pursuits they felt impeded the discipline necessary for industrial production. Efficient production was all they cared for and consequently they extolled the moral virtues of gratification delayed. For nineteenth-century capitalists the entire purpose of life was narrowed to the further accumulation of capital. So preoccupied were they by work, they preferred the term recreation to leisure as better implying only a temporary respite from productive activity (Williams 1976). At the same time, religious reformers attempted to make people more godly—by which they meant reticent, sober, and thrifty—and reformers influenced by the Enlightenment strove to make people more rational. Even political agitators, whose resistance had previously taken ribald and rowdy means, now cleaned up. To gain credibility meant emulating respectabilty (Storch 1982). Over the span of the nineteenth century, laws were introduced to curtail behavior newly conceived as inappropriate, and modern police forces were developed to enforce them (Golby and Purdue 1984). Respectability became the single most important definition of social value (Ashby 2006). The shift in the word taste charts this development. Taste, which had meant something people possessed—one of the traditional senses—became, under the regulatory obsession of the middle class, a matter of acquiring certain habits and internalizing the accepted rules of social etiquette (Williams 1976). The following extract from a typical advice book on the etiquette appropriate to the ballroom captures the flavor of these regulatory impositions: Every thing there is regulated according to the strictest code of good-breeding, and as any departure from this code becomes a grave offence, it is indispensable that the etiquette should be thoroughly mastered. This etiquette dictates the forms of invitation and the forms in which they are to be accepted; the appointments of the room, the toilets proper to it; the demeanour of those assembled; and the manner in which the implied amusement shall be conducted. Beadles 1868: 5

Popular culture both responded to and contributed to these developments, especially through three closely related developments that resonate even today: the domestication, commercialization, and the mediation of popular culture. Generally speaking, domestication and commercialization were responses to the broad social developments of industrial capital and the culture of respectability, and mediation was enabled by the adoption of new technologies. Domestication was spurred on by ever-greater class divisions and the rise of the middle class. While the eighteenth century closed with members of all classes, as distinct as they were in other respects, reveling in the same popular pleasures, the nineteenth century saw a gradual specialization of popular pleasures along class lines. The working class continued to be drawn to vulgar, bodily pleasures while the middle class sought to distinguish themselves with more genteel amusements. As owners of the means of production, the middle class were positioned to determine what cultural forms were produced, and as they grew more numerous and powerful they increasingly asserted their standards through legislation. Overwhelmingly, the momentum was to curtail the body. Public executions, which had been riotous affairs and previously the most popular form of entertainment, moved into private, controlled spaces. And blood sports such as cock fighting and dog throwing were banned (Stallybrass and White 1986). The wild was tamed, the explicit made implicit, and a millennium and more of carnival pleasures were marginalized, sent underground, or disappeared

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altogether. Perhaps the most striking example of domestication was the reconfiguration of Christmas celebrations. It was only during the early decades of the nineteenth century that Christmas customs ceased to be disorderly affairs and a cause of fear and loathing among respectable people and became the family gatherings they remain to this day (Storch 1982). The reforming zeal of authorities, secular and religious alike, had significant impact, but the domestication of popular culture was equally due to the introduction of new technologies that enabled an unprecedented commercialization of culture. From a culture substantially created by people for themselves and enjoyed face to face, a new culture emerged that was based on mass circulation. Folk culture gave way to mass culture (Storey 2003). In order to reap the largest profits, mass culture was designed to appeal to the broadest possible audience, meaning both the working and middle classes, as well as both men and women. Since the means of producing mass culture lay in the hands of the middle class, mass culture communicated and reinforced their values, and made them appear normative. Mass culture was middle-of-the-road culture where appeals to the body were always kept in check by middle-class expectations of respectability and the demands of a rationally ordered society based on an increasingly industrialized economy. The introduction of new technologies also enabled for the first time in human history for popular culture to be mediated rather than performed live. Bodily participation gave way to vicarious participation and the spontaneous response to a more measured one. Mediated experience was far less visceral and contained no real threat; everything being simulated, everything was safe. With a public hanging, for example, the accused might stare at the spectator, but with a photograph there is an unbridgeable, material gulf. The spectator can look; the condemned can only appear to look. The same is true of actors or dancers. In the theater footlights separated spectators from those onstage, but performers and audience shared the same space in real time; in mediated forms spectators are left to use their imaginations to enter into the same space and time as the performers. Immediacy and intimacy are significantly reduced. The thrill of burlesque, for example, lay in part in provocatively dancing near-naked women meeting and returning the male spectator’s gaze (Allen 1991). But in photographs—either the cartes de visite or the stereographs that became popular—such sexual fission was reduced to a frozen, silent consumable. The always-present potential for being unsettled by a live performance was eliminated. Notwithstanding these developments the cruder pleasures of the carnivalesque continued as impropriety moved from one form to another (Fiske 2007). Moving peep shows known as “penny vaudeville” allowed viewers to watch such risqué fare as young women undressing, and the first movies attracted a predominately working-class audience, their standard fare being melodrama and sexual titillation. But unlike the public, out-of-door carnivals and fairs of the past that had always been accompanied by drunkenness and debauchery, these amusements were conducted semi-privately or within confined spaces that required civil behavior. Today it can be annoying to watch movies in a theater with people who talk or interrupt with their cell-phone ring, but this is a far cry from typical live performances in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when prostitutes plied their trade in the top stalls and it was common to throw things at weak performers (Allen 1991). One portrayal of Richard III was deemed so bad people threw “cabbages, carrots, pumpkins, potatoes, a sack of flour and one of soot” (57). Mediation has had a profound effect on bodily participation.

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Viva Vulgarity! Relatively marginal as vulgarity might be today, as well as comparatively tame, the attraction of it lives on. The lure of vulgarity is based in the body, and more often than not those aspects of the body that cause disgust, the expelled, abject qualities of the body that are both us and not us. Chapter 8 on horror examines the disgust we may feel with the body as gore and guts, the body turned inside out. Here the focus is on the attraction of disgusting materials and activities that we mostly deal with through humor.

Disgust and Delight Since vulgarity is based on aspects of the body that are normally repressed in polite society, its lure originates in those aspects of the body that simultaneously disgust and delight, in what Kristiva (1982) calls “a vortex of summons and repulsion” (1). While there are many sources of bodily disgust, they fall into only two basic categories (Miller 1997). First, there is disgust that acts to limit contact with what causes disgust, unclean orifices and bodily wastes, “the oozy, mucky, gooey, slimy, clammy, sticky, tacky, dank, squishy or filmy things” that cause us to smile or laugh uncomfortably (110). This kind of disgust acts as a prohibition on immediate behavior: don’t touch, don’t smell, don’t look. Miller assigns this disgust “to hardly admitted fascinations, to furtive curiosities” (110). Body wastes repel, but even as we turn away, repulsion can also draw us in by raising resentment for having been repulsed. Having been told no, there is “a consequent desire to regain lost territory” (111). Examples include tabloid newspapers that frequently feature photographs of the decaying bodies of aging celebrities with unsightly nose hair, watery eyes, and blotchy, sagging skin; the tragic misadventures of celebrities with plastic surgery; and the ravaged faces and bodies of stars battling cancer or drug or alcohol addiction. To highlight the contrast, such photographs are often juxtaposed with others when the celebrities were young and healthy. Disgust also results from overindulgence, typically of food or sex, where having too much of a good thing is nauseating (Carroll and Contesi 2019). Something once desired is satiated and now sickens as a form of punishment after the fact. It acts to prohibit subsequent behavior, as in don’t do this again. Consider the corporeal bulk of the massive and grotesque physiques of TV wrestlers, enhanced by their outlandish costumes and over-the-top behavior, such as the wrestler who based his character on the alleged size of his penis (Leyland 1998). And out-of-control, abject bodies are a specialty of the tabloid newspapers. Consider the following liberally illustrated headlines: “World’s Biggest Butt” and “Man Butt Dials God” (Weekly World News 2020). The first kind of disgust involves the pleasure of transgressing a pre-existing taboo on something normally unmentionable, something kept out of the way, yet of having what should not be had; the second involves something that is socially approved until taken to excess. Both kinds act to prohibit behavior, one at the point of potential contact and the other on subsequent behavior. However, unlike the other major prohibition on behavior, shame, which causes only pain and regret, disgust is also frequently humorous. Unlike shame, disgust is both repellent and pleasurable.

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Figure 6.3 Unknown, A Jesuit Inspects Buttocks of a Urinating Woman, 1735.

The following example combines both kinds of disgust: The wrestler called Mr. Ass—he suffered from a bottom fetish—brought an “extremely fat woman” with him to ringside and threatened his opponent with having to “kiss her ass,” though in the end Mr. Ass was defeated and his opponent saw to it that “Mr. Ass got a full face of ass” (Sexual 1999). Here the woman’s excessive body is combined with the potential contaminant involved in getting way too up-close and personal with another person’s anus. Whether it is from contaminants or excess, things that disgust both repel and attract. They may not lend themselves to being made beautiful in any sense that Kant understood beauty, but disgusting things fascinate. Disgusting things may not charm, but they do captivate.

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Transgression Such fascination appears intimately tied to the near irresistible attraction of transgression. Vulgarity is knowingly transgressive. We find disgusting things funny because we understand them to be in some degree prohibited. Children’s “poop” jokes are among the very first they acquire, though smutty sex jokes follow later (Livingston 2019). Freud said that prohibitions like disgust are not in place only to forbid pleasure, but also to heighten it. What is forbidden is automatically attractive for being forbidden. This is what Barthes (1975) calls jouissance, the thrill of something illicit. We may not break rules ourselves—often the consequences would be too grave—but cultural forms are populated by both heroes and criminals whose status is largely based on their transgressions. Vicarious transgression lies at the heart of many aspects of popular culture, which is especially true of vulgarity.

Social Bonding Bakhtin (1994) argued that carnivalesque celebrations create social bonds based on what we all have in common, and to this extent carnival embraces the existential dimensions of death and decay. He called this “grotesque realism,” which referred not only to extreme and exaggerated bodies, but what he claimed were their profound social significance. He believed that grotesque bodies were deeply positive insofar as they evoked laughter and were derived from age-old rural cycles of life that, in turn, were as much about regeneration as death. Vulgar bodies laughed at what we universally share, our poor bodily selves and our most basic, corporeal functions. Vulgarity represented a sharing-in of our common humanity. It allowed us a way to laugh at our common human experience of death and degeneration. For Bakhtin, it was through carnivalesque vulgarity that “people play with terror and laugh at it; the awesome becomes a ‘comic monster’ ” (209). In effect Bakhtin proposed an addition to philosopher Huizinga’s (1996) proposal that there were only three basic ways human beings had learnt to deal with the calamities of life and mortality, its terror and its tedium. Huizinga’s survival strategies were religion, the acquisition of material possessions, and the pursuit of beauty. Bakhtin effectively proposed a fourth method—laughter, in particular the humor at the gross body that reduces everyone to the same animal level. In this sense, vulgarity is deeply democratic. We laugh because we are all in this life together, dying and decaying, and there is nothing we can do about it. It is noteworthy that vulgar cultural sites often actively engage the whole body, not just the eyes, and, equally, they are not consumed individually but collectively. They are both participatory and performative. Medieval carnivals were dialogical in the sense that audiences were as much part of the show as those onstage (Bahktin 1994). Audiences and performers worked off each other such that it is more correct to say that audiences were also performers. Although mediated, the above examples of television watching are also social events. Men typically watch TV wrestling in the company of other men who, encouraged by alcoholic intake, establish rapport through sexually laced innuendo sports talk that helps to distinguish them from women (Langman 2003). The equivalent for a predominantly female audience could be trash talk TV like the Jerry Springer

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program in which couples shout at one another over who has been unfaithful and questions of paternity are settled with DNA tests. Women viewers often physically act out their views in front of the television screen, gesturing and making comments, becoming part of the action, and afterwards when comparing notes about the program with fellow fans their talk is punctuated by gestures (Manga 2003). Group identity is formed by participation being embodied.

Joyful Resistance Group bonding is equally generated because, reflecting the transgressive nature of vulgarity, participation takes the form of resistance. Groups bond in opposition to dominant values. The carnivalesque operates by means of a symbolic inversion with vulgarity existing in a binary opposition to all that is not vulgar. To the extent to which vulgarity is effective in giving deep offense, it operates outside the terms understood by elevated and intellectual culture. As Stallybrass and White (1986) write, “It is one of the most powerful ruses of the dominant to pretend that critique can only ever exist in the language of ‘reason’, ‘pure knowledge’ and ‘seriousness’ ” (43). Vulgarity is deeply unsettling to rational discourse because it uses its own logic. And it is precisely because it does not use reason, but its visceral opposite, that it is so effective in calling down upon itself condemnation and censure. In other words, the aesthetic of vulgarity is a resistance aesthetic that critiques the rules that include, exclude, and dominate the social order. And as defined here, vulgar cultural forms are typically embraced by people who are marginalized culturally, educationally, or politically, typically the less educated and less well paid (Manga 2003).

Haunting and Humanness With TV trash talk shows specifically in mind, Manga (2003) suggests that the lure of vulgarity is a kind of spiritual haunting, where viewers are taken over, possessed. She argues that vulgarity involves a loss of ego, a giving up of the self that is akin to an ecstatic experience. As Bakhtin writes, “While carnival lasts, there is no other life outside it” (cited in Hutcheon 2000: 74). The participatory aspect of today’s vulgar cultural forms can be seen in terms of the long-held opposition in Western thought between chaos and order, where an aesthetics of vulgarity represents the Dionysian impulse to communal revelry rather than Apollonian restraint, a shared experience, not that of the individual ego. Thus conceived, vulgarity is part of a major strand of Western consciousness that is routinely denied, marginalized, and censored, often in ourselves as much as in society at large. This loss of the ego, of giving oneself over to something larger than oneself, brings us back to the existential dimension mentioned earlier where, if only temporarily, terror is kept at bay. Manga (2003) argues that acknowledging the existential nature of vulgarity alerts us to an often-undervalued dimension of society and humanness, and that instead of condemning vulgarity for what it allegedly says about how society has gone bad, “Perhaps, what’s wrong is that we deny ourselves access to a sociality that is fundamental to our being human” (204).

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Vile Vulgarity To acknowledge that vulgarity has virtues is not to suggest it is unproblematic.

Transgression and Suppression First, vulgarity is not nearly so transgressive as it can initially appear. Transgression is not transformation; jouissance is not justice. Vulgarity always involves a recognition that the dominant value system is indeed dominant and not likely to change soon; its power to disrupt dominant value systems is highly restricted. It is never purely an inversion as if by some means it belongs to a different world. It always exists with reference to the wider dominant world, a knowing indulgence, representing only a temporary suspension of social norms. Vulgarity’s very existence is dependent upon the social norms transgressed (Hutcheon 1985). For example, regular viewers of trash television regarded it as “exploitive,” “disgusting,” or “trash” (Manga 2002: 166). In other words, they adopted the mainstream, middle-class values the programs invert, or, better said, they moved in and out of revelry and critique. The high and low always peer at one another up-close. Consider that the medieval carnival was always a licensed affair. There was a predictable, seasonally based alternation between periods of carnival and ordinary life and labor. Temporarily lifting the norms of ordinary life only to reimpose them meant that the norms were made even more apparent than they would otherwise have been. Norms were suspended, not eradicated. Carnival was double directed, pointing equally to transgression and the rules transgressed. Today, as with every other kind of popular culture, examples of carnivalesque vulgarity are accessible at any time, but they are just as regulated, being produced by the very same cultural producers and within the very same legislative framework that produce all other mainstream forms of culture (Hutcheon 1985). Serious violations of social norms, those that have the actual potential to make real change, are criminalized or marginalized as madness. By contrast, vulgarity allows people to play at violating norms in carefully restricted, authorized ways. Furthermore, by comparison to criminal or heroic action, breaking the rules of polite society amounts to playing “for rather low stakes” (Miller 1997: 117). As Shakespeare has Olivia comment in Twelfth Night, “There is no slander in an allowed fool” (cited: 117–18). Why then should authorized transgressions amuse? How do people trick themselves into thinking they are transgressing the social order when such transgressions are sanctioned? Is it because the norms that are mocked have such a powerful grip that even playing at transgression is sufficient to energize an amused reaction; that is, people realize but laugh anyway? Or perhaps people do not always draw the dots between the pleasures they enjoy and who provides them. In any event, as discussed further in Chapter 15 on humor, the transgressive power of vulgar humor is highly prescribed.

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Ridicule and Reaction Furthermore, as explored in more detail in Chapter 15, humor not only fails to seriously undermine the status quo, it often supports the most retrograde aspects of it, and this is especially true of vulgar humor. Despite Bakhtin’s (1994) tendency to turn negatives into positives, death into a return to life, obscenity into an affirmation of the vital body, carnival also involves abuse. Vulgarity is often accompanied by savage and utterly unacceptable denigration of marginal groups, being frequently used in the service of sexism, racism, homophobia, and violence. As noted earlier, vulgarity is often linked to class, gender, sex, and race in a way that invites ridicule. Vulgarity is an especially powerful way to ridicule others. It not only ranks people according to their worthiness; in many cases, it assigns people an absolute value, one beneath contempt, one where they are considered disgusting. By either proximity or contact, others are made to appear contaminating, infecting, or polluting. They appear to defile our own innocence. Moral judgments are often made in these terms, and Miller (1997) argues that it is often easier to condemn by means of disgust than to make positive judgments because disgust has the feel of veracity. Being low and without pretence, it is experienced as trustworthy: “the disgust idiom puts our body behind our words, pledges it as security” (181). Disgust provides certainty to moral judgments. Medieval carnival empowered the socially suppressed, but, as Miller asks, what of the Jews murdered during carnival, the women raped, the animals tortured and set on fire? Mocking pompous and repressive officialdom is one thing, abusing those even lower on the social hierarchy than oneself is another. It is impossible to justify, for example, the anti-Semitism that saw Jews in the 1600s pictured as eating excrement (Stallybrass and White 1986), or reduce other genders, races, religious believers, and sexualities to nothing but foul, abject bodies. Humor can be provocative and progressive but it can also be reactionary, “mocking novelty in the hope of precipitating its destruction” (Hutcheon 1985: 76). Vulgarity often defends social norms, ridiculing deviations in order to bring them into line.

Vexing Vulgarity Vulgarity is often fun, and it is able to create human bonds that remind us that whatever else we are, and just like everyone else, we are bodies. To be vulgar about it: we all shit the same. But an aesthetics of vulgarity, which draws upon and celebrates our common humanity, is deeply contradictory. Vulgarity illustrates what we all share, but also it is used to deny what we have in common by making absolute distinctions between ourselves and others: we pure, they disgusting; we innocent, they contaminating. Laughing at our base selves is one thing, but it is quite another to see others only in terms of their base selves. This is especially true when vulgarity is used to denigrate already marginalized and vulnerable groups, and doubly so when it helps to form a pseudo-Dionysian community intent on such denigration.

7 The Violent Chapter Outline Violence and its Variants A Violent Present A Violent Past Explaining Violent Entertainment The Problems of Violence An End to Violence?

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Due to the technical limitations of ancient Greek theatres, mass slaughter always took place offstage either by means of sound effects or detailed graphic descriptions, but individual murders and visceral acts were regularly depicted onstage. In The Suppliants, Aeschylus ([c. 460 BCE] 1961) has fifty women threaten mass suicide whereby they would “soak the earth in blood” (477). His play Agamemnon begins with a narrator standing before a palace describing its bloody history as a human “slaughterhouse” (1092). One murder after another is detailed, most striking of which is the killing of children by their uncle who then serves up their flesh as a meal. This atrocity then sets off a series of bloody revenges that constitutes the rest of the production. In another play, The Bacchae by Euripides, a character summarizes much of the play as a “banquet of raw flesh” (cited in Farnell 1909: 238). Recently, real-life violent protests, terrorist attacks, suicides, and executions have been live-streamed on social media (Studer 2017).

Violence and its Variants The word violence is now often used to refer to psychological damage, but violence is defined here as intentional physical harm; the exercise of physical force to inflict injury or damage to persons or property. Such violence comes in many variants that also often overlap. Violent entertainment can be comic, transgressive, retaliatory, or gratuitous; sanitized or visceral; and realistic or stylized.

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Moreover, viewers tend to define violence in ways that are not always obvious from an examination of the imagery itself or in conformity with the above basic definition. Viewers do not necessarily define all intentional physical assaults that inflict harm as violent (Morrison and Millwood 2007). Many viewers consider physical action to be violent only when a conflict is unfair and appears real. Applying a moral code involving fairness, physical action is deemed violent only where there is an unequal use of force; for example, when a weapon is introduced by a participant or when a participant possesses greater strength than the other. Additionally, the degree to which an action is deemed violent is determined by how real the violence appears. Even when violence involves blood and gore it may be deemed mild if it appears unreal; alternatively, a relatively mild assault can be considered very violent when it does seem real. Comedic violence is rarely considered violent. Children’s cartoons, where characters are relentlessly pounded by their opponents, is usually considered, even by children, not to be violent because it is used in the service of comedy (Morrison and Millwood 2007). Likewise with the knockdown antics of comedians, trash talk television programs where guests routinely end up in a brawl (Manga 2003), and the cartoon theatrics of TV wrestlers. Wrestlers of recent memory have had names like The Undertaker, Sargent Slaughter, The Anvil, and Junkyard Dog (Edwards 2020). Some have claimed to be serial killers, cannibals, or even the risen dead. In retaliation for being fired, one wrestler hospitalized his manager and then clobbered him with a bedpan. Everyone knows it is faked and it is easy to laugh. Transgressive and retaliatory violence work together as trusty plot devices. Whether onstage, in the cinema, the focus of video games, or contained within a rectangle, narratives often involve the transgressive violence of antagonists and the retaliatory violence of protagonists. As described in Chapter 13 on narrative, the transgressive violence of villains ruptures the peaceful status quo while the retaliatory violence of heroes re-establishes the status quo. The harm inflicted on the hero by the villain has the hero seeking retribution. This sequence of often ongoing transgressions and retaliations is the very stuff of both the euphemistically called action genre and shoot-’em-up video games. The narrative is often merely a structuring device for a series of violent scenes (Kendrick 2019). Gratuitous violence is violence for its own sake, violence that has no narrative relevance, violence that is mere spectacle and enjoyed without regard to moral questions or the fate of the protagonist. On prime-time TV it is common for transgressive violence to go unpunished (Cantor 2003) or even uncondemned; “nine times out of ten violence just happens” (Lichter, Lichter, and Rothman 2002: 90). Of classic splatter/spatter films mutilation is the message, the goal appearing to be not so much to scare audiences, or even to keep them in suspense, but to mortify them (Stevens 2017). Violence can also be sanitized or visceral as well as realistic or stylized (Prince 2004). Sanitized violence dominated US cinema and then television until the late 1960s in which the bodies of victims remained whole. Victims merely clutched their chests, covered where they had been shot, and keeled over. They whispered farewell words, their bodies slackened, and their eyes closed peacefully. Visceral violence refers to both a kind of representation and a common physiological response. As described in the following chapter on horror, seeing internal organs spill out from a body’s cavity often causes a gut-level, precognitive, instinctive response; it is a reaction to abject gore that seems hardwired.

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Realistic violence refers to violence that is legitimated by a strong narrative and filmic techniques that attempt to capture the intimate and incomprehensibly arbitrary nature of violent conflict. Today’s cinematography typically relies upon montages of quick edits from multiple viewpoints and contrasts of speed, slow motion abruptly interspersed with action, rapid cycling shots, both subjective and objective. Accompanied by soundtracks of low-frequency droning and heartbeats rudely interrupted by shouts and explosions, the intention is to convey a sense of being there (Muller 2017). By contrast, stylized violence involves obvious artifice, often achieved with special effects, and includes utterly impossible excess (Prince 2004). For example, TV wrestling is highly artificial, as is the violence of numerous action films that consist primarily of a series of violent actions only minimally held together by an utterly fantastic plot. Today’s screen bodies routinely explode, spurt blood, and spew guts, but the typical, frenetic paced editing of contemporary screen media renders many such scenes quite divorced from anything plausibly life-like, and thus for many viewers are not even considered violent.

A Violent Present Decades ago aesthetician Kupfer (1983) claimed that violent entertainment had become so commonplace he described everyday life in terms of an aesthetic of violence.: “the sights and sounds of human destruction; the tearing of flesh, mashing of bone, letting of blood” (52). Audiences, he claimed, appreciated violence for “its sensational content, its aesthesis [where] death is but the climax of a sensually rewarding attack . . . a gory process in which a whole, living person is transformed into his or her sensually striking components” (52). And this was well before the penetration of infotainment violence into our daily experience of social media where clicking on violent imagery, or having it shared, ensures that algorithms will direct users to more violent imagery whether they want it or not (Riyanto 2018). Our current media is viscerally violent but it nevertheless requires perspective.

A Violent Past As a warrior state, violent amusements were an essential part of the Roman Empire. During a 123day period in 108 CE the Emperor Trajan celebrated a victory with the slaughter of 10,000 gladiators and 11,000 animals (Meijer 2004). Although on a smaller scale such games were for centuries an integral part of life throughout most of the vast Roman Empire. Consider, too, that while many early Christians were torn apart in these games, some Christians were also willing audience members. Late in the second century CE Bishop Tertullian thundered against his fellow Christians for attending the games, imploring them to reject a “passion for murderous pleasure” and warning them against the “madness, bile, anger, pain” of the games (cited in Bok 1998: 20). Three centuries later, St. Augustine was still railing against his brethren for their attendance (Meijer 2004). He ([c. 400 CE] 1944) related how a figure he calls Alypius was dragged by his friends to a gladiatorial contest, and covered his eyes to protect his spirit from being degraded by the carnage. But the screams of the

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bloodthirsty crowd piqued his curiosity and he unlocked his fingers and shortly drank in the madness of the mob, becoming one with them. The games continued even under Christian emperors well into the fifth century CE. While Tertullian abhorred the gladiatorial games he nevertheless allowed a vivid imagination to conjure violent horrors awaiting those who opposed Christianity. On the Day of Judgment Christians would be able to look down from heaven and watch violent horrors far worse than those of the earthly games, horrors that would, moreover, last for all eternity. All the then enemies of Christianity would “liquefy in fiercer flames than they kindled in their rage against the Christians” (cited in Bok 1998: 21). “How vast the spectacle that day and how wide! What sight shall wake my wonder, what laughter, my joy, and exultation?” (20–1). In the second-century text, The Apocalypse of Peter, Jesus takes the reader on a tour of hell and describes in lurid fashion the torments of the damned (Ehrman 2003). Blasphemers are hung by their tongues; females by their hair over a bubbling mire; male adulterers by their testicles; and women who have had abortions are placed up to their necks in a lake of blood and gore. Even among the books of the Bible there is a great deal of violent imagery. Wells (2010) compiled a list of the killings God is said to have undertaken himself or carried out with his express approval. Wells used the exact numbers mentioned in the Bible itself or, where the Bible mentions no precise number, what he claims is his conservative estimation. Wells compiled a count for each book of the Bible, his total for the whole Bible being 24,634,205 deaths (367). This retributional worldview was inherited by the medieval period whose entertainment was also notably violent, with dismembered bodies playing a considerable part in dramatized folk traditions (Enders 1999). Bakhtin (1994) described medieval carnival as characterized by images “of particularly large amounts of torn flesh . . . a combination of the battlefield with the kitchen or butcher shop” (224). Medieval games often resembled war, and war resembled games such that it is difficult to tell them apart (McGlynn 2010). Common tropes of the games included wounded organs, broken bones and joints, cracked ribs, flattened noses, knocked-out eyes, crushed jaws, dislocated shoulder blades, and teeth sent rattling down gullets. Thighs were regularly reduced to pulp, hips wrenched, and genitals severely injured (Golby and Purdue 1984). War can even be considered the primary sport of the Middle Ages, with the tournament, the joust, and the duel its adjuncts. Far from the ordered and chivalrous affairs of today’s popular imagination, these spectacles were largely unregulated with combat apt to be fatal. While papal edicts repeatedly condemned these games, priests not only continued to attend, in 1471 a tournament was held within St. Peter’s Square itself (Bok 1988). Premodern painting also included numerous violent representations. Many paintings represented mass slaughter. Albrecht Durer’s 1508 painting, The Torment of Ten Thousand Christians, represents a legendary execution on orders from the Emperor Trajan of an entire army who had converted to Christianity. Figures fall from a cliff to form a pile of naked bodies, a head is about to be bashed in with a wooden mallet, and in the forefront a blindfolded man is about to have his head severed by a sword. Until the early decades of the nineteenth century public torture and execution were a common part of European culture (Foucault 1977). They were among the most popular of entertainments. Officially they were justified as a deterrent to crime, but the public turned them into celebratory entertainments usually accompanied by drinking, gambling, and riot. In England in 1807, 45,000 gathered to see two men hanged, and twenty-seven spectators died in the crush (Golby and Purdue

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Figure 7.1 Unknown, The Execution of Pirates in Hamburg, 1573.

1984). A contemporary wrote, “We have seen every execution for the last ten years, and boast how on one day we saw one man hung at Newgate, and took a cab and got to Horsemonger-lane in time to see another” (83). It was the same in the United States. Of an 1827 hanging in Massachusetts a newspaper reported “scenes of the most disgraceful drunkenness, gambling, profanity, and almost all kinds of debauchery, even at the very time the culprit was suffering” (Essig 2003: 78). In Europe blood sports were practiced with animals, including baiting any number of different animals, dog fighting, cock fighting, and cock throwing, the latter consisting of throwing missiles at the tethered animal until it was dead (Golby and Purdue 1984). Another popular practice, baiting, consisted of forcing an animal to fight a succession of dogs, usually until the animal’s death. But beginning in the first decades of the nineteenth century, violent entertainment was increasingly muted. The same social developments that curtailed vulgarity and explicit eroticism discussed in Chapters 6 and 11 equally impacted violent entertainment. Under the influence of social rationalization and a middle-class culture of respectability, the same mix of mediation, domestication, and commercialization that repressed vulgar and sexual imagery equally suppressed the more visceral of violent entertainments. Physical punishment gave way to attempts to discipline the mind and executions moved into private, controlled spaces out of the public eye (Foucault 1977). Against fierce opposition, blood sports, if never eradicated, were at least curtailed through animal cruelty laws (Golby and Purdue 1984). The public had to be content with viewing engravings of torture and slaughter. While from their inception movies included plenty of violence, nothing gross was allowed to offend the middle-

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class paying public. Violence was domesticated. Shots were fired, smoke discharged, and people were wounded, but they died in someone’s arms rather than pools of blood. When television entered people’s living rooms and replaced cinema as the dominant cultural form in the 1950s, violent death continued to be sanitized. However, visceral violence returned via cinema screens in the late 1960s, and with a vengeance. A spate of films offered shocking, wet deaths. In Bonny and Clyde (1967) the principals died in a hail of bullets; in Clockwork Orange (1971) the lead character viciously beat innocents to a pulp just for the fun of it; and in Mash (1970) the operating room of a wartime field hospital resembled Bakhtin’s butcher’s shop. Since then screen violence has only increased in frequency and viciousness. Moreover, although violent entertainment is now mediated, its tropes are continually being reworked for the screen. We no longer attend gladiatorial games, but biblical epics that included gladiatorial combat to the death were popular in the 1950s, and the 2000 film Gladiator was hugely successful. Executions are no longer public, but they are commonplace on screen. Most people today have never been to war but war films are “cinema par excellence” in that they are “fundamentally a machine for emotions; the visceral experience of excitement, risk and dread” (Burgoyne 2012: 3, 14). To feel real, what Bronfen (2012) calls the “authenticity effect,” and to gain something of “the ungraspable intensity of war” (8, 20), contemporary war films now juxtapose the cool efficiency of drone warfare with the unpredictablity on the ground where actual flesh, entirely prone to risk, is torn apart. Few people experience actual combat but first shooter video games enable a simulation where players frenetically kill, literally, left, right, and center. Representing the horrors of hell is no longer common, but there are many films about Nazi atrocities. Torture is no longer practiced in public squares, but the 2012 box office smash Zero Dark Thirty began with a highly visceral torture scene that lasted for 20 minutes.

Explaining Violent Entertainment Why should seeing bodies being blown apart be pleasurable? Why should barbarous torture and slaughter elicit excitement and not repugnance, delight rather than outrage? Since there are qualitatively different kinds of violence, are there different attractions? And why has visceral violence returned with such force? Is the attraction, as Tom Wolfe argues, akin to pornography, what he calls “pornoviolence,” an inbuilt response as basic as the programming of our genes (cited in Hoberman 1988: 120). Are we hardwired to enjoy violence? Is it part of our archaic makeup, left over from our evolutionary history (Zillmann 1998)? Or, as Wolfe also suggests, is violent imagery an ingredient of “radical chic,” a matter of cultural fashion, a matter of choice (134). After all, not everyone is attracted to mediated violence, some people recoil from it, and the most popular forms of entertainment are not violent (Sparks and Sparks 2002). Yet there is no gainsaying the popularity of violence among many, or that its attraction is long-standing. Like the philosophers Marquis de Sade and Nietzsche who celebrated violence, many people appear to relish “the joy of cruelty, the thrill of horror” (Klaven 2002: 138). Some explanations for the allure of violence are covered in more depth in Chapter 8 on horror. They overlap because some violence is also horrifying.

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Making Moral Judgments As noted earlier, viewers tend to define physical assault as violent in terms of a moral code grounded in their perception of fairness and justice. Audiences tend to make moral judgments about the characters represented, and this is especially marked when protagonists unjustly suffer physical harm. According to Zillmann (1998), viewers adopt “a witness perspective” (200), and respond to fictional characters, cognitively and emotionally, much as they do in real life. Viewers adopt the position of observers, who, as third parties, allow them to succumb to the illusion of watching real events unfold before them. This is not so much to identify with characters, empathizing with their predicament, as it is to adopt dispositions toward them. As in real life, we assume favorable and unfavorable positions toward different characters depending upon our interpretation of their appearance and behavior. When a character toward whom one adopts a positive disposition is threatened with violence, especially when it is utterly undeserved, we suffer as we would in real life, though with this difference: it is experienced as pleasurable because the experience occurs within a safe, protected zone. Additionally, when a first impression of a fictional person is confirmed by subsequent experience, the confirmation is pleasurable, again as it is in real life. The first impression sets up an anticipation about a character’s moral worth and likely behavior and, in fiction, the fate they deserve. While the antagonist has the upper hand, we nevertheless anticipate a just resolution. We feel anxiety on behalf of the protagonist yet know from previous experience of narrative structures that the tables will turn, no matter how unlikely it is sometimes made to appear. We experience “forepleasure” (Miron 2002: 464). As Klavan (2002) says of a Sylvester Stallone film, “I could . . . get off on the cruelty of the villains insofar as it fired my anticipation of the moment when Sly would cut those suckers down” (139). With just resolutions, such as the death of the villain, there is also vindication of our moral disposition. The more acute the hopes and fears held concerning the fate of characters, the more that the moral dispositions we adopt determine what we feel they have coming to them. What pity one might feel for bad characters is typically swept away by moral dispositions (Tamborini 2002). A strong negative disposition toward an antagonist sets many people free to enjoy retribution. Since revenge is among the most basic of human motivations, the hero’s “devastatingly thorough housecleaning” is applauded as poetic justice (Zillmann 1998: 206). Just as in real life, the reaction of some people to severe punitive action is nothing short of festive, so in fictional violence some people react euphorically when the villain is destroyed. This is especially marked when people’s personal disposition is to consider issues in clear-cut moral terms of right and wrong. It requires only that justice be seen as black and white for retaliatory violence to be thoroughly enjoyed.

Excitation Transfer According to the theory of excitation transfer, the excitement created by retaliation is due in part to what Zillman (1998) calls excitation transfer in which one state of excitement transfers to another. Emotional arousal often lingers after the cause of it has ceased and one has adjusted cognitively to a new situation. Emotional reactions lag behind cognitive reactions; the head moves forwards but the body does not immediately follow. Furthermore, emotional experience is

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determined partially by the level of arousal at the time, so that if there remain residues of the initial emotional response at the time of a second emotional stimulus, the second response will be greater than if the residue did not exit. In short, an arousal residue from prior distress intensifies enjoyment, making gruesome, transgressive violence an essential prelude to the joy from the emotional override of retaliatory violence. Film directors have long known how to take advantage of this phenomenon. In the cinema, transgressive violence is frequently played out at great length, so that when the moment is reached when the protagonist turns the tables the excitation from earlier anxiety fuels a euphoric reaction. The more people suffer through an early round of transgressive violence, the greater the euphoria (Zillmann 1998).

Simultaneous Emotional Pleasures Aristotle appears to have been right to believe that the combination of “pity and fear” was a major attraction to violent imagery (23). Today most people self-report that watching violence is exciting, and, pressed further, they report that violence is simultaneously horrible and fascinating (Klavan 2002). But how is it possible to experience anxiety and fear as pleasurable when we do not ordinarily do so in real life? Part of the answer presumably lies in the safety of mediation discussed in the next chapter. Part of it may lie in the emotions aroused not being quite of the same order as aroused in real life, as discussed in Chapter 4. And part of it may lie in the need to consider pleasure and pain not as opposites but, at least when viewing fictional violence, as equally pleasurable (Miron 2002). Pleasure and pain are experienced simultaneously, or at least in rapid-fire succession, which sets up an internal conflict that is nevertheless pleasurable because, when deliberately exposing oneself to tension-raising experiences, the tension is experienced pleasurably. Perhaps this is due to the fact that pleasure and pain are activated in the same regions of the brain. While different constellations of neurons make use of this same part of the brain in different ways, the experience of them is closely related. The brain is generally hardwired for pleasure (Carter 2019), and since those areas of the brain assigned to pleasure evolved to co-ordinate the basic survival functions, perhaps all normal behavior is directed at evoking electrical activity in the pleasure areas of the brain. Either way, the idea of guilty pleasures suggests a bivalent model rather than a bipolar model of media violence, that is, two things derived from the same source rather than two opposite things.

Fear and Mastery According to Bakhtin (2004) medieval carnival violence was an aspect of the grotesquely exaggerated carnivalesque body, where, in a spirit of general good humor, all aspects of the body were taken to extremes. This applied not only to eating, defecation, and sexual exploits, but also to violence, the real purpose of which was to laugh at the vicissitudes of life and the terror of existence. Carnival violence represented a ritualistic spilling of blood, “a body sowing, or more correctly speaking, a bodily harvest,” though where there was death there was also new life (223).

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Conducted in a spirit of comic, free play, one of the serious purposes of carnival was to master fear, if only temporarily. Such violence was integral to the grand cycle of life and death, where everything was always in the process of becoming and every death foreshadowed rebirth. Depicting violence was part of a philosophy of “sober optimism” (224). Seen in the light of Bakhtin’s analysis, a great deal of today’s media violence, which is decidedly carnivalesque in its stylized exaggeration and humor, also appears to represent an attempt to conquer fear and anxiety. Vicarious violence allows viewers to test their reactions without running actual risks. Viewers are able to engage indirectly with experiences from which they ordinarily shield themselves (Bok 1998). Entering into the thrill of violence, people simultaneously confront their fears. This appears to apply especially to certain adolescent males, who are the only major demographic who report enjoying gratuitous violence (Slater 2003). By viewing high levels of violence, they may appear to master their fears and are consequently enabled to play their socially assigned, gendered role as emotionally detached and fearless (Sparks and Sparks 2002). They are typically in search of a social identity where watching violent entertainment enables bonding with peers. It acts as a rite of passage.

Seeking Stimulus Violent imagery can also be used for mood management, to regulate levels of excitement or arousal. Media violence allows people to live on what Apter (1992) calls “the dangerous edge of things,” to enjoy the high that goes with violence, of “being wild for its own sake” (3, 5). This appears to apply particularly to those adolescent males who are most attracted to violent spectacles (Slater 2003). They tend not to be high risk-takers who tend to watch less media than most people and seek their risks in real life. Rather, they tend to be alienated adolescent males who are high sensation-seekers. Impulsive and non-conforming, often referred to as disinhibited, they are also attracted to other norm-breaking behaviors such as crime and drug use. For these youth contemporary society is not too violent, certainly not too stimulating, but understimulating. However, stimulus-seeking applies to all of us today living within the limits imposed by the orderly arrangements created by the institutions of government, education, law, medicine, and so on, by all the minutiae of bureaucracies that curtail individual expression. In societies that often fail to provide sufficient stimulation, the transgressive but also safe excesses of carnivalesque violence appear as liberation. As discussed in several other chapters, a highly structured, rationally ordered society makes people vulnerable to the appeal of the unstructured, irrationality of bodily excess. In a highly regulated society, wild, carnivalesque indulgence offers welcome relief. Killing, maiming, and the smashing up of things on screen is liberatory joy. It is jouissance.

Everything But Violence Many other aspects of violent fare have been identified as attractive. They seem to include almost everything but the violence itself: music, editing, setting, exaggeration or distortion of reality,

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sexually explicit imagery, comedy (Sparks and Sparks 2002), patterning, coloration, movement, energy, and novelty (Allen and Greenberger 1978). In particular, violent video games are said to be attractive because they involve special effects (Zillmann 1998), fantasy, challenge, stimulation, scorekeeping, feedback, graphics, and sound effects (Goldstein 1998), freedom of movement, the sensation of speed, and the exhilaration of hurtling through infinite space (Keegan 2002). They also frequently involve a combination of competition and collaboration (Rigby and Ryan 2011). With single-player games players must acquire points to achieve a higher level of attainment in which players compete against time. With multiple-player games like Starcraft and Final Fantasy XIV many people, often from many countries, not only compete with other teams but also collaborate with their own team members. Starcraft intentionally incorporates camaraderie as a key element. In a game with a do-or-die ethos, players must trade stories and work together to be successful. Such games provide a virtual space in which players meet, hang out together, and share experiences, and by celebrating triumphs and commiserating over failures, players come to feel that they matter to one another. In this way, playing at mediated violence attracts because it helps build social identities and social competence.

Algorithmic Allure The multiple attractions of violence have been lately combined with the multiple attractions of social media. In 2016, Facebook added a live-streaming application which has allowed partisan parties to live-stream brutal terrorist attacks, and even suicides and executions for the world to witness what Studer (2017) calls “the full scope of humanity” (623). Recognizing the highly provocative nature of this violence, attempts are made to take it down as quickly as possible, but what is now widespread is that a great deal of other violent imagery is viewed in the context of the addictive, bubble-like, immediate, and intimate nature of social media. It is commonplace that many users tend to visit sites that largely confirm their pre-existing views while blocking out other perspectives. The algorithms of social media are engineered to provide just such socially meaningful interactions. Social media has a sense of immediacy and personal intimacy. Typically, shared material is new to a user and footage of police brutality or terrorist attacks comes raw and undiluted. In receiving such posts users tend to respond spontaneously without pausing to contest the validity of the material in the way people often do when reading or watching traditional media. Social media is already highly alluring—indeed, for many it is addictive—and when highly sensual, impactful violent imagery is presented, especially when relevant to a user’s own concerns, the enmity created is typically shared by the recipient with other like-minded users. Once this activity is detected by the relevant algorithms, users are presented with further violent imagery which encourages users to connect to yet more users, thus both expanding the network and, when receiving feedback, reinforcing the views of the initial sharers (Riyanto 2018). A bubble is created of users sharing violent images. At a minimum, the immediacy of social media short-circuits questioning the validity of the imagery (Naher and Minar 2018). Reinforcement is pleasurable, but it is clearly problematic.

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Figure 7.2 Unknown, Iraqi Soldiers and Bombing, 2007.

The Problems of Violence Researchers reject the idea that exposure to violent material causes people to act violently themselves. A large body of research has simply failed to establish a causal connection (Anderson and Bushman 2018). Only those few who are predisposed to act violently are triggered by watching violent media. However, this does not mean that no consequences exist for everyone else. Rather,

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prolonged exposure to violent entertainment appears to have far-reaching and deeply serious consequences in the real world (Krish 2012). From a theoretical perspective, it could not be otherwise. Images are not separate from the rest of society, a mere passive expression or reflection of an otherwise constituted reality; images are an integral part of the real world, both a reflection of it and a lively contributor to it (Williams 1977). Images help to frame our beliefs and values, drawing upon our existing views and, in turn, creating powerful mental maps to understand the world. Such mental maps provide scripts for real-world behavior. Visual images thereby play an active role in helping to determine the nature of the real world. This is true of images generally and research indicates it is true of violent imagery.

Purgation Does Not Work The oldest of the theories advanced to not only account for the lure of violent entertainment but to advocate it as a healthy occupation is the theory of catharsis as purgation. The theory claims that exposure to violent imagery has the effect of reducing or even eliminating aggressive thoughts and behavior. But it does not work (Gentile 2013). A very large body of research concludes that exposure to violent imagery has the opposite effect; it increases fear, anxiety, and aggressive thoughts and behavior (Anderson and Bushman 2018). As mentioned in Chapter 4 on the highly emotional, the theory of catharsis was first advanced by Aristotle ([c. 335 BCE] 1981), and ever since a cathartic release has been used to explain why people are attracted to cultural forms that prima facie do not appear praiseworthy and contrary to high-minded purposes. Being adopted and popularized by both Freud and Carl Jung (Zillmann 1998), as well as repeated ad infinitum by media critics and film makers, catharsis has been used to sanction exposure to violent entertainment as a good thing. As mentioned in Chapter 4, Aristotle famously wrote that tragedy both aroused pity and fear and effected their resolution through catharsis. Aristotle appreciated the pleasures of cultural forms being derived from their distinctive characteristics and, as indicated in the introduction to this chapter, the kind of cultural form he wrote most about—stage plays—were notably violent. There is some doubt around what Aristotle meant by catharsis, but it is usually interpreted to mean that exposure to violent entertainment purges aggressive, destructive emotions. For Aristotle, disease and cure were two sides of the same coin where pity worked on pity, fear on fear, ill-humor on ill-humor, and so on, so that just as the heat of wine quenched the heat of the natural body so watching violence onstage was able to quench an audience’s violent emotions. However, despite both the cultural pedigree and this popular understanding of catharsis, volumes of empirical evidence demonstrate that exposure to violent dramatic performances results in audiences being more anxious, fearful, and aggressive, not less so (Anderson and Bushman 2018). The American film director Sam Peckinpah observed the same thing (Prince 2004). His 1960s films helped shift screen violence from sanitized to visceral, brutal, and bloody. The Wild Bunch from 1967, for example, is notable for two ferocious gunfights, a suicidal attack, and torture. In the

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context of the ongoing body count of the Vietnam War, his intention was to offer a critique of the horrors of violence, but Peckinpah found that spectacles of violence undermined his critical intent (Williams 2004). Instead of audience revulsion to the violence, he witnessed audiences reacting with exhilaration and aggression. The persistence of the popular view of catharsis as purgation can be explained in part because in enjoying violent imagery who would want to admit that it could be harmful (Gentile 2013)? To avoid cognitive dissonance it is easier to dismiss the possibility of potential harm than change one’s habits. Also, purgation conforms to our phenomenological experience. Playing a violent video game, for example, can offer short-term enjoyment because of the adrenaline, cortisol, and testosterone that is released into the bloodstream. But this is an acute response. The acute response turns on to immediate danger; it was not designed to be switched on for hours at a time. Once a player stops they feel tired or spent from the increases in heart rate, blood pressure, and stress hormone levels. They may feel they have purged their aggression, but the opposite is true. If challenged they are more likely to act aggressively because they have spent time priming aggressive thoughts, feelings, and attitudes, and having them reinforced by the game. Although physically they may feel exhausted, their anxiety levels have increased (Anderson and Bushman 2018). Anxiety and aggression levels are raised, which does not equate to being violent, but, as discussed below, exposure to violent imagery develops violent mental scripts that are deeply problematic.

Diminishing Returns The thrill of violent entertainment has diminishing returns, necessitating that the violence be continually ramped up. The once repressed visceral violence is back, driven in part by a fiercely competitive market economy. The shock induced by gut-wrenching violence is used to break through both our cynicism about the media as well as the sheer number of media messages. The most extreme, visceral experiences are employed. As discussed in Chapters 8 and 11, sex and horror are two such experiences. Violence is another. In each case the appeal is made straight to the spinal column. When competing against numerous other images, what grabs attention are appeals to the precognitive nervous system. However, the thrill people derive from viewing violence diminishes with repeated exposure (Anderson and Bushman 2018). People are easily primed for violence, but habituation has diminishing returns. Initial strong reactions to violence soon fade in intensity, and with massive exposure may even lead to complete desensitization. A process begins with the brain first simply ceasing to pay attention to what causes pain (Carter 2019). The neural constellations involving pain are lost and viewers give way to maximizing pleasure. But then a point comes when that pleasure, too, cannot be maximized. Habitation leads to being blasé. In this context, Wolfe’s characterization of violence as “radical chic,” no more than a harmless matter of style, makes sense; violence becomes cool. And today an audience’s ho-hum reaction is mirrored in the off-hand, detached way violence is often portrayed. Filmmakers and audiences alike have become emotionally disengaged (Anderson and Bushman 2018). Violence is represented with such a casual air that the distinction between protagonist and antagonist violence,

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between transgressive and retaliatory violence, is blurred. TV wrestling, for example was once based on clearly defined moral distinctions, but now good wrestlers, once pushed “too far,” commonly seek massive retaliation so that it is hard to distinguish between good-guy and bad-guy violence. As one commentator on wrestling put it years ago, “Everyone’s a psychopath now” (cited in Leyland 1988: 60). Violence is offered as ever more unreal, stylized, and unconnected to real experience. Habituated to violence, some audiences delight in the audacity of a film or video that greatly exceeds their expectations for violence. This seems to apply especially to anti-war films where the message is often overwhelmed by the vicarious thrill of widescreen battle scenes. As Peckinpah found, the spectacle fails to inflect the action to a point beyond itself. Not only do some audiences reject the anti-violence message, even those who accept it can feel ambivalent, simultaneously rejecting violence but also pleasurably excited by it (Young 2019). A film in which the narrative carries an anti-violence message punctuated by scenes of carnage caters to two different pleasures. It alternatively offers audiences the pleasure of a moral high ground in rejecting violence combined with its thrill. What is intended as critical condemnation can be undermined by its celebration, even revelry. Where audiences have become blasé about artificial violence, films intended to show the shocking reality of violence may actually offer more thrills than condemnation.

Mental Scripts of a Hostile World As mentioned above, exposure to violent imagery not only arouses anxiety, repeated exposure creates hostile scripts in which the world is seen as filled with threats (Anderson and Bushman 2018). Viewers come to believe that the world is a hostile place and other people are out to get them. They attribute hostile intentions to the ambiguous actions of others. Anxiety causes people to split other people into two opposite halves, to bifigurate, in which people like themselves are viewed as good and innocent and others as evildoers. Thinking in black and white terms, others are viewed as potential threats. This also has the effect of lowering empathy for the fate of bad people. Who cares if they suffer? Fearful of being victims of violence, people are drawn toward retaliatory violence (Miron 2002). Again, this does not mean that people will be violent themselves; instead, they are the more willing to allow the police and armed services to use violence on their behalf. People who would never themselves harm another person are prepared to sanction violence on their behalf (Gitlin 2001), such violence being justified as legal violence. Perpetrated by the state, legal violence is considered necessary for the common good (Zillmann 1998).

A Cycle of Violence With such hostile worldviews, a cycle of violence is created (Anderson and Bushman 2018). Violent media fantasies raise levels of fear and anxiety that create a view of the real world in terms of actual threats, that leads people to sanction real violence on their behalf, that leads to real-world violence, that is then echoed in violent media fantasies, and so on. Thus, popular media violence and real-life violence feed off each other, the one folding into the other.

The Violent

Paradoxically, it is the desire to live in a safe, stable, and predictable world, especially when feeling threatened, that influences the acceptance of violence to secure safety. This dynamic is repeated ad nauseam in popular media fantasies. Antagonists invariably threaten the status quo while protagonists re-establish the status quo. Horsley (2002) points out that despite the often sociopathic tendencies of media protagonists, they defend the sanctioned way of life, the basic unit of which is almost always the rock bed of traditional values, the family. Horsley equates heroic protagonists with the state, the antagonists he equates with the forces of instability—communism, anarchy, subversion, crime, and now terrorism—and those who are threatened he equates with the family. In one violent spectacle after another, the state, represented by the hero, defends the family unit against the forces that threaten it. This formula not only justifies the violence perpetrated by the hero, but also, ultimately, popularizes it as family entertainment. In Horsley’s words, “The family that slays together stays together” (151). In short, popular media violence is the means through which the cornerstone of social cohesion is maintained and in its defense any amount or kind of violence is justified. It is noteworthy that on prime-time US television, violence is nearly one third more often perpetrated by the hero than the villain (Lichter, Lichter, and Rothman 2002). Social stability is defended by violence more often than threatened by it.

An End to Violence? Violence in popular entertainment is exceedingly complex, and the following concluding remarks are made only for the purpose of coming to the end of this chapter. There are many kinds of violent entertainment and much of it is probably benign. Violence is often humorous, and some of it might be necessary in a generally mediated and rationalized society for stimulation. Some is undoubtedly legitimized by serious narrative purposes. Yet a society that routinely indulges itself in massive and visceral violence that is only nominally required by a plot cannot be wholly healthy. A fundamental right in democratic societies is the freedom to dissent, and such freedom is threatened when popular media generate unwarranted fears about health and safety (Church 2004). Since fear is a universal and easy to arouse, and since “symbolic violence may be the cheapest way to cultivate it effectively,” a violence-saturated media can be considered “the established religion of the industrial order relating to governance as the Church did in earlier times” (cited in Zillmann 1988: 186). Like the early Christians who, fearful for their lives, turned their fear into fantasies of revenge, so people today, fearful of terrorism, anxious over their prospects, feeling frustrated about the limits to their freedom in an overly rationalized society, turn to media fantasies of violent retribution. Violent media helps create and maintain a culture of fear and anxiety, which, in turn, serves the socioeconomic and sociopolitical status quo because a pervasive sense of fear and anxiety has the effect of quelling dissent. It is perhaps a shocking idea, that popular media violence is a critical aspect in the maintenance of the social fabric, that violence today is not unlike Roman and medieval times when violence was integral to life, real and fantasized. Banning violent media, or even toning it down, however, appears not to be an adequate response because it is not the violent images alone that are the root problem of a violent society. As Church

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notes (2004), fear, once generated, is more likely to move trouble from one burner to another than turn down the flame. The issues go as deep as a pre-existing world of real violence, fear being a prime human motivator, and a fiercely competitive consumer market intent on capitalizing on each. While not alone in being responsible for real-world violence, mediated violence appears to be at least a contributing factor. Media violence is not disconnected from these symbiotic influences; rather, as a constitutive element of society it both draws upon social realities and contributes to them as part of an ongoing, ever-evolving process. Violent imagery is both a mirror and an active contributor to society. Popular media violence is a deeply serious issue precisely because by engendering fear and anxiety it contributes to the dissipation of the mind and heart as well as the bifiguration of people into good and bad that has profound real-world consequences.

8 The Horrific Chapter Outline Horror, Terror, and Dread Sublime Terror versus Popular Horror Horror Hedonism Horror, Hostility, and Hate Uncanny Uncertainty

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Thomas Edison’s 18-second film from 1895, Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, showed a public decapitation. Audiences were treated to a shot of a falling axe followed by a head rolling into a basket. In George Melies’s 1903 Terrible Turkish Executioner many heads are chopped off and bodies are cut in half. At the very outset of film history, horror was a staple, and it has remained so ever since. Only Sherlock Holmes has appeared more often than Dracula, and vampire movies outnumber all other cinematic genres (Marriott and Newman 2013). Yet horrifying images have a much longer history than cinema. As discussed in the previous chapter, violent horror was a staple of Greek theater and, as discussed in this chapter, demonic, supernatural horror was a staple of medieval Christian Europe and Muslim Asia. Today, whether it is shambling, flesh-eating zombies or vampires sucking blood, the lure of the horrific is as strong as ever. Zombies and vampires may be undead, but in the imagination of the horrific they are as alive today as similar figures have been since ancient times.

Horror, Terror, and Dread The horrific is whatever excites a sense of horror, common synonyms being terror and dread. Terror is a sharp, intense, overmastering fear. Terror causes a shock, a sudden and violent disturbance of the mind, emotions, or sensibilities. Dread is an apprehension of something terrifying in the future. While today the most common form of mediated horror is found on screen, all its basic characteristics can be found in previous visual media, as well as the theater, literature, and folk tales (Bloom 2010). 107

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Moreover, horror is not confined to a specific screen genre. The horrific probably appears more often as a brief interlude in screen dramas than it does in the horror genres where horror is the primary focus (Hills 2005). As Morgan (2002) says, “horror categories bleed into one another” (10). There are also many kinds of horror, from the delightfully scary to the utterly terrifying. Hollywood’s Starline Tours (2018) advertise, “See where Sharon Tate was murdered, where John Belushi’s body was found . . .” Cities and towns all over the world offer ghost tours, and hardly a sideshow is without a ghost ride. On the other hand, in the 1990s, fashion spreads sought to catch the eye with horrid, heroin chic, skeletal models (Gross 2014), and stalk and slash movies specialize in gore (Leeder 2018). Horror is able to engage our primal fears, our worst nightmares, what Sontag (1965) calls all our “unassimilable terrors” (48). Some fears are personal and perennial; others are social, and while the latter take specific forms at particular times in particular places they invariably arise from a fear of social upheaval and anarchy. The iconic Universal Studios horror films of the 1930s echoed the fears of the Great Depression. Hollywood science fiction horror films of the 1950s variously addressed the fear of nuclear annihilation, communism, and the influence of science and technology. Horror films of the 1960s dealt with the breakdown of sexual taboos, the assertiveness of women, and the consequent diminution of men’s power. More recently, horror has been haunted by terrorism with a renewed interest in the nature of evil and the vulnerability of ordinary living and working places (Duncan and Muller 2019). Perennial personal fears aroused by horror include a fear of the dark, bodily deterioration, death, dismemberment, loss of identity, the non-human, mental and physical deviance, and sexual dysfunction. Whether arising from social issues or from our inescapable condition as human bodies and minds, horrified responses are typically triggered by a violation of cultural categories, entities that inspire revulsion and disgust, and entities that cue a sense of threat (Hills 2005). Often our reactions to horror are marked by physical affects, our psychological fears realized in physical terms (Morgan 2002). Horror confronts us with images of the body in extremis that impacts our own bodies, reaching down into our glands, skin, muscles, and circulatory system. We may squirm, shudder, shiver, shout, scream, quake, tremble, stop breathing, and suddenly intake or exhale air. Our skin may crawl, the hair on the back of our neck may bristle, and we may involuntarily avert our eyes. We may be transfixed, meaning rendered motionless by fear, or we may be petrified, meaning rigid with fear. Metaphorically, our blood may curdle. Adolescent audiences for horror genre films variously report “feeling physically nauseous, crying, sweating and sitting up very tense, feeling as if going to faint, and breaking into tears” (Cantor and Oliver 1996: 64).

Sublime Terror versus Popular Horror For aestheticians of the eighteenth century terror was an aspect of the sublime, something simultaneously shocking and pleasurable. Burke ([1757] 2015) wrote: “Whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime” (36). In his first formulation of the sublime, Kant ([1764] 1965) wrote of the

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Figure 8.1 Caravaggio, Judith Beheading Holofernes, 1598.

“terrifying sublime” (48) which included something fearsome, a certain dread, horror, a bold acceptance of danger, and transfixed wonder. For Burke the sublime engendered pain; for Kant, the sublime engendered pleasure through pain (Kaplan 2007). These aestheticians may have had in mind paintings of saints tortured, beheadings, rape, and grisly murder, or perhaps Caravaggio’s multiple paintings of David triumphantly holding up Goliath’s decapitated, bleeding head, or his Judith Beheading Holofernes (1598), which shows blood shooting from the victim’s neck. Kant and Burke used the terms horror and terror interchangeably; not so other aesthetic theorists who were aghast at the emergence of the gothic. They made a sharp distinction between sublime terror and horror as mere popular distraction. The period coincided with the rise of the art academies whose annual exhibitions catered to both high-minded patrons and the general public. As the elite were forced to mingle with the general public, which included the so-called lower orders, the distinction between terror and horror was a way for the elite to distance themselves from the rabble (Frayling 2006). They proposed that sublime terror caused us to rise above ourselves, to reflect upon our place in the universe; it was a rational, cognitive matter by which we were able to realize our full humanity, whereas horror was simply frightening, a mere shock, as irrational as an overexcited imagination. One helped to integrate the psyche; the other caused disintegration.

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The English poet Samuel Coleridge wrote in 1797 of gothic horror: “Figures that shock the imagination, and narratives that mangle the feelings, . . . always betrays a low and vulgar taste . . . a poison for youth and a provocation for the debauchee” (cited in Bloom 2010: 123). However, the works that excited this controversy suggest a case of a distinction without a difference, and one clearly based on a textual reading rather than how images are received in practice by actual viewers. Today, horror is considered in two complimentary, interdependent ways in which the actual experience of horror combines cognitive experience with a visceral response. While specific examples of horror enable more of one than the other, even the most visceral kinds mirror personal and social issues in a way that invites reflection. As Bishop (2006) says of zombie films, they have “the ability to make audiences think while they shriek” (196). In dramatically unsettling our ordinary assumptions about people and the world in general, horror forces reflection upon our normative ways of being (Fahy 2010). Morgan (2002) even claims that horror is capable of delivering not only “wisdom” but “transcendence” (11). Since this amounts to a definition of the sublime as advanced during the eighteenth century, the attempt to distinguish between terror as reflective and horror as mere fright falls apart. Reflection and fright are part of the same experience of horror because the kind of reflection involved is reliant on being frightened. Horror, like the more general concept of the sublime, tests the limits of human reason. We are forced to consider how little is certain. Without fright the kind of reflection that fright engenders—a sense of ontological uncertainty—is not possible. Today, following Kant and Burke, the terms horror and terror are often used synonymously (Pinedo 1997), the distinction between them being just one more example of how elite culture attempted to distance itself from what was essentially the same thing as enjoyed in popular culture.

Horror Hedonism What then is it about horror, what Tallon (2007) calls “the most unpleasant of artistic genres,” that is in fact, at least for many people, pleasurable? (35) Tallon writes: “Horror doesn’t like you. Horror doesn’t care if it causes you to lose sleep” (35). So, why do many people deliberately place themselves in a position in which they experience high levels of apprehension, feel dread, and suffer panic?

Performative Pleasures Some of the pleasures of horror are similar to the pleasures of violent imagery discussed in the previous chapter. In part, horror’s delight lies in contextual, social cues that enable audiences to enjoy horrific events that they would find deeply distressing in real life. Cinema-goers pay for a ticket, sit in a theater with many others, drink soda, munch popcorn, and contribute to the choruses of delighted screams. Each social cue is preceded by previous experience of the horror genre and the informed decision to go again. An awareness of the music, special effects, and acting and editing skills also all contribute to a film being intertextual with other films rather than reality. Audiences do not just watch Hannibal Lecter, they watch Anthony Hopkins play Hannibal Lecter (Hills 2005). Audiences know themselves to be in both a safe environment and one given over to fantasy. Such distancing from

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reality is sometimes known as the Nero complex (Keane 1995). Like the Emperor Nero who purportedly fiddled while Rome burned, audiences sit back and let the recreational terror unfold. Horror films, like violent action discussed in the previous chapter, have particular appeal among male youth for whom they provide a means of both mastering their fears and demonstrating mastery of their gender role. This accords with the ancient Roman view that the gladiatorial arena acculturated spectators to the requirements of a warrior state (Goldstein 1998). Today’s horror films provide ideal conditions for male youth to routinely confront fear and thereby learn to fulfill their socially assigned gender function. The films are an endurance test, and sharing it in the company of other males also engenders male bonding. Furthermore, when adolescent males and females watch horror movies together, the movies enable age-old, gender-specific role play. While adolescent males teach themselves to be unfazed by horror, females are socialized to display discomfort. In watching horror films adolescent males demonstrate their manliness and females their vulnerability so that both genders feel equally empowered (Zillmann and Weaver 1996). Additionally, males enjoy horror films the more the films enable them to extend comfort to their partners, and while females typically like horror films far less than their male companions, they like them the more the more their partners play the role of gallant protector (Tamborini 2002). The ancient Roman poet Ovid observed the same phenomenon: the more terrified women were of the mayhem in the gladiatorial arena, the more they sought comfort from their male companions (Mundorf and Mundorf 2002). Adolescent males are more attracted to females, and females to males, when the gender-specific roles are successfully enacted (Tamborini 2002). Ironically, this occurs at least partly through misattribution. Females routinely attribute greater mastery to males than they actually feel, and males routinely attribute more distress to females than they actually feel. Both genders also misattribute their liking for each other to the films themselves so that horror films provide an opportunity for both genders to not only play their respective gender-specific roles, but to derive deep pleasure from doing so (Zillmann 1988). No wonder that these observations of today’s dating behavior are known as the “snuggle theory” of horror (McCauley 1998: 151).

Escape and Stimulation Horror provides escape from boring reality like no other aesthetic experience. Its many specific threats deliver an emotional wallop, a series of “yell out moments” (Sumner 2010: 8). Splatter/ slasher films especially are a thrill ride in which audiences shriek from one moment to the next. Horror focuses the mind. Zinoman (2011) writes: “When you experience extreme fear you forget the rest of the world. The intensity fixes you in the present time. . . . good horror movies make you think: great ones make you stop” (10). Consequently, no form of entertainment is as successful as horror at providing an escape from reality. As discussed in the previous chapter on the lure of violence, we now live in such regulated societies we may be protected too well. Famed horror film director Alfred Hitchcock claimed: “The only way to remove the numbness [of civilization] and revive our moral equilibrium is to use artificial means to bring about the shock” (cited in Marriott 2004: 2).

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Perhaps the attraction to the shock of horror has evolutionary origins associated with protective vigilance and curiosity (Tamborini 2002). We are hardwired to focus our attention on cues to danger such as horrific events, and our emotional reactions have not significantly changed since our hunter-gatherer days. If so, the cognitive and physiological mechanisms that evolved to serve us on the savannah are activated in watching horror movies, and fictional horror acts as a substitute for real-life challenges (Zillmann 1998). But not just any challenges.

Transfixed Fascination Horror specifically challenges our tolerance for rotting flesh, and decaying corpses, and death. This is what Morgan (2002) calls “macabre aesthetics” (67). Horror revels especially in what Pinedo (1997) calls “wet death,” death in all its disgusting, loathsome, leaky details, a reality that has been largely eradicated from public life (51). Greatly extended life expectancy, the abolition of public execution as entertainment, and the removal of dying behind hospital walls and nursing homes, and even death itself from many funerals, means that most of us have little immediate knowledge of death. And now that we live longer than our forebears, have we become more attached to life and fear death more? Does the more we expect from life mean the more dreadful appears its end? Perhaps sidelining actual death has made us more anxious about it, but also the more fascinated by its grimmest aspects (Goldberg 1998). However, graphic depictions of gruesome deaths have been a trope of horror for millennia. A fear of death is surely perennial, and perhaps our current fascination with it is more to do with commercial competition than a major change of human sensibilities. To punch through the onslaught of media messages as well as our cynicism about them, commercial media resorts to the same body blows it does with violence and sex. But a corpse, for example, surely, has always been abject. Like all abject things it is something that is neither one thing nor the other, an unnerving ambiguous state of being, something that is human but no longer human (Kristiva 1982). And the abject finds its home in horror (Creed 1993). Abject things disgust. As described in Chapter 6 on vulgarity, abject things can make us laugh, but as an aspect of horror they make us recoil in revulsion. Menstrual blood, faeces, urine, vomit, snot, puss, and semen, as well as the body turned inside out as in vivisection and disembowelment, trigger the knee-jerk emotion of disgust, an immediate, straight-to-the-nervous-system response. Although specific instances of disgust are culturally determined, disgust exists in all societies (Miller 1997). It is a biological, universal human response, a repugnance, the very opposite of the cleanliness that resides next to godliness. During the Middle Ages disgust was literally the domain of the Devil. In ordinary life disgust is most commonly experienced through the senses of taste, touch, and smell. With visual representations causing disgust, vision piggybacks on these proximal senses (Carroll and Contesi 2019). The sight of loathsome material repels by the power of suggestion; even the prospect of unnerving touches, nauseating tastes, or foul odors causes involuntary negative reactions. But vision also works to horrify independent of the other senses. Ugly, deformed, or mutilated bodies also repulse. They shatter complacency about the normative order of things. They

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tear away the trust we ordinarily place in everyday life. Things that cause disgust undermine the pretensions and pieties we try to maintain about human dignity. As discussed in Chapter 6 on vulgarity, what ordinarily disgusts also disgusts when mediated, though we are fascinated nevertheless. Disgust is paradoxical. It is what Creed (1993) refers to as the “pleasure of perversity” (13). It returns us to the condition of a young child, before the assimilation of social taboos, to a time before shame and embarrassment. We return to a state when we found pleasure in wet and slimy bodily wastes. Whether pleasurable or not, disgust attracts as much as it repels, and no more so than by monstrosity. Monstrosity takes many forms. In gothic horror, mysterious stains appear on walls, inanimate objects move around as if by themselves, and particular places possess an ambiance of dread. Monstrosity is abject in that it reminds us that barely under the surface of daily life there lurks the unknown (Creed 1993). Monstrosity represents the ontological uncertainty of the abject. Nothing is entirely as it seems. Actual monsters are the abject made flesh, not just because so many monsters are disgusting, but also because they exist somewhere between alive and dead, or somewhere between human and not human, or sometimes their gender and sexual orientation is unclear. That part of them that is not human and also dead threatens our fundamental identities as alive and human. Ambiguity in any form threatens our common desire for identifiable boundaries. Some monsters are demonically supernatural: ghosts, vampires, werewolves, and zombies. And all the undead creatures return to wreak havoc on the living. Ghosts, whether in a visible, invisible, or partially visible form, haunt houses with malevolent intent. Vampires sleep during the day and by night they suck human blood turning victims into vampires like themselves. During the full moon werewolves shapeshift from human to animal and as wolves rip humans apart. Zombies devour flesh and especially brains. Some monsters appear in the form of demon possession; others are the product of laboratory experiments gone wrong. Some monsters are visibly insane, with crazed, rolling eyes and bizarre behavior; others are like the appropriately named Norman in Psycho whose surface normality masks deep psychosis (Duncan and Muller 2019). The monstrous manifests itself in many physical forms, has many origins, and behaves in a wide variety of ways. Our relationships with monstrosity are equally diverse. But one thing remains constant: monstrosity dramatically highlights the vulnerability of everyday existence, raising doubts about the safety and security of ordinary people and places (Carroll and Contesi 2019).

Making Moral Judgments Like violent entertainment, horror offers permission to make moral judgments. The medieval Christian church reveled in violent horror. Between the biblical book of Revelation, The Divine Comedy, and older classical tales, including those of Dionysus, medieval artists were furnished with a highly detailed repertoire of horror from which to draw (Hughes 1968). Medieval Muslim artists similarly conjured horrific punishments for the damned in hell. For hundreds of years Christian and Muslim artists documented how every sin was remorselessly punished: the proud are strung up by their hair and adulterers by their genitals; perjurers bite their own lips and tongues; murderers are eaten by snakes; usurers are forced to eat faeces, their own and the devil’s. In one

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Figure 8.2 Coppo di Marcovaldo, Inferno, c. 1225.

image a sodomite is impaled on a stake from anus to mouth. Other sinners face strappado, flaying alive, or immersion to the genitals in molten lead, burning sulfur, or hot mud. Others still are forced to roll spiked rocks up and down a red-hot iron hill, broken on the wheel, strangled, impaled, disemboweled, or their orifices invaded by toads, worms, and newts. Though ostensibly for the edification of those tempted to waiver from the faith, the images are nothing if not sadomasochistic fantasies. Hughes (1968) calls this “an aesthetics of evil” (156). The images declare: behave well, but also enjoy what happens to those who stray from the straight and narrow. Today’s horror movies provide something of the same opportunity. As Sontag (1965) notes, one of the major lures of horror, like violence, is that it permits “moral simplification” (45). With horror though, the stakes are often higher; conflicts are presented as normative goodness versus evil incarnate, often literally as agents of the devil or even as the devil’s own seed. When the conflict is this stark, normal, social restraints are abandoned. Fury is unleashed and the most massive, gory retaliation is legitimized. A moral code that rejects both ambiguity and relativity justifies breaking all manner of social taboos.

Wish Fulfillment and/or Recognition Either explicitly or covertly, the lingua franca of horror is the socially taboo, including cannibalism, incest, torture, murder, sadism, masochism, and necrophilia. Various psychoanalytical perspectives

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have been offered to account for this socially deviant nature of horror, although because they deal with the unconscious they must necessarily remain speculative. For Freud, mediated horror was an attempt to deal with repressed desires. He argued that, although we may protest that we are horrified by abjection and monstrosity, this is a dodge. As Carroll (1990) puts it, “revulsion is the ticket that allows the pleasure of wish fulfillment to be enacted” (170). Jung regarded the depiction of despicable acts as projections of a collective, universal subconscious. They are concrete manifestations of the archetypes, principal of which was the shadow self, in Jung’s words, “our sinister and frightful brother” (cited in Connolly 2008: 129). Jacques Lacan’s view is even more dramatic. Mediated horror is nothing more than the unconscious writ large (Žižek 1991). The unconscious was not an unknowable territory forever hidden, but made manifest in dramatic form in all its complex and powerful darkness, and in our unconscious we are all sadists and murderers. We normally think of ourselves as civilized, decent people, who on entering a movie theater are entering into a dream and on leaving the theater that we are waking from the dream to resume our everyday lives as civil and moral. On the contrary, it is in watching horror that we confront our real desires, and it is when we leave the theater to resume thinking of ourselves as being decent that we are dreaming. The pleasure of horror lies in recognizing those very real and powerful parts of ourselves we normally repress or ignore.

Transgressive Liberation Whatever we are to make of these psychoanalytic explanations, it is clear that horror sanctions regression to an infantile state, to a life of unconstrained desire. As the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein observed, a baby crying involves “terrible forces different from anything commonly assumed. Profound rage, pain and lust for destruction” (cited in Morgan 2002: 5). And horror opens the door to the liberatory joy of transgression. Horror is a hedonistic indulgence, though not only of our individual, dark shadow self, but in what is commonly repressed, denied, marginalized, or ignored in society. Wood (1986) writes: “the true subject of the horror genre is the struggle for recognition of all that our civilization represses or oppresses, its re-emergence dramatized” (75). Wood (1986) distinguishes between necessary repressions for civil life and those that are unnecessary. Sadism and cruelty are necessarily repressed because their free rein would make civil life impossible, but culturally specific repressions such as monogamy, heterosexuality, patriarchy, and capitalist relationships are unnecessarily repressive. For Wood, horror’s appeal lies in offering liberatory alternatives to each of these elements of mainstream life. Horror offers a glimpse of alternative, even oppositional, ways of life. Horror challenges the status quo in ways that otherwise go unexpressed. For example, the lesbian vampires of the early 1970s, while arising from a fear of women’s emancipation and alternative sexualities, could also be read as role models of strong, independent women (Williamson 2005). To a culturally disenfranchised audience, monsters act as a kind of superhero wielding power in their name, which includes women and alternative sexualities, but also the economically marginal, minority ethnic cultures, and alternative political systems (Shaw 2001). As representation of these marginalized forces, monsters are heroes wielding the power to destroy the status quo.

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Repetition The tropes of horror are highly consistent across both media and time. Twenty-first-century horrid entertainment recycles tropes from 1950s comic books that reveled in explicit depictions of dismemberment and disembowelment, festering wounds, rotting flesh, and putrification (Sadowski 2010). Victims were boiled in oil or hacked to death. Monsters slobbered, ghouls rampaged. Decomposing corpses emerged from their graves, characters held up their own bleeding, decapitated heads. In turn, the comics drew upon tropes of the nineteenth-century stage, which recycled eighteenth-century gothic novels, that revisioned tropes of seventeenth-century paintings, that repackaged medieval imagery, that took their cue from the biblical book of Revelation and ancient Greek theater. Whether it is decapitated heads, walking dead, hideous monsters, or cannibalism, the tropes are identical from century to century. Some horror genres, especially stalk and slash films, even make a virtue of repetition by an obsessive compulsion to repeat one horror after another. Similarly, horror genre narratives follow similar sequences; despite numerous variations, plot structures follow a predictable order. As Salomon (2002) writes, horror “is an eternal return to the site of unmodulated shock” (8). Freud says of children at play that they are involuntarily caught up in repetitive acts that evidence an instinct for mastery over the conflicts and anxieties that has given rise to the play (Plastow 2015). Like children’s repetitive play that is at the same time pleasurable and indicative of the persistence of anxiety, horror is a dramatization that is part pleasure and part trauma. The incentive for repeatedly exposing oneself to mediated horror of essentially the same kind is then an ongoing mixture of pleasure and anxiety.

Horror and Humor On the other hand, horror as entertainment often plays with being horrid, and where it takes itself seriously we are often only amused. Because horror deals with extreme situations it sometimes lends itself to being viewed with a camp sensibility, to be appreciated for its stylized, theatrical, over-the-top exaggeration. Failing to be terrorized by horrid entertainment, we may smile, giggle, or laugh out loud. This is horror only in quotation marks. Horror has often been parodied. The first distinctive horror genre was the gothic, and no sooner had gothic authors and playwrights put pen to paper than their work was widely satirized, including by Jane Austen in her novel Northanger Abbey. As early as 1797 an anonymous writer, though commonly believed to be Coleridge, wrote an extensive and widely circulated satire of which the following is a brief extract: . . . you must take care that the battlements and towers are remarkably populous in owls and bats. The hooting of one, and the flitting of the other, are excellent engines in the system of terror, particularly if the candle goes out, which is often the case . . . cited in Bloom 2010: 22

Humor has also always been an intentional trope of horror. At a social gathering early in the iconic 1931 film Dracula, the vampire insinuatingly comments: “I don’t drink . . . wine” (cited in Connolly

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2008: 135). And many movies deliberately parody others. The Attack of the 50 Foot Woman from 1958, as if the title wasn’t parody enough, was followed by the 1995 film Attack of the 60 Foot Centerfold.

Horror, Hostility, and Hate Even so, the use of horror is more often than not, to use Jung’s word, sinister. In ways that only horror can, it has been used to repress dissent as well as unleash hatred.

Repression While many forms of horror transgress social norms, others operate to reinstate the normative order and, depending upon one’s predisposition, pleasure can be taken from either the return of the repressed or its re-repression (Wood 1986). We can take pleasure either by identifying with the challenge to the status quo or seeing it reaffirmed, thrilled by the chaos or comforted by the return to order. Most commonly, horror narratives manage both by first allowing viewers to revel in the transgression and then seeing it closed down (Hills 2005). The previously repressed is unleashed, which is then followed by re-repressing whatever had been let loose. Dracula is killed with a silver stake. Brain-dead zombies disintegrate or are blown up. Any return of the repressed is temporary, allowing no more than a glimpse of an alternative way of being. In this sense, as described in Chapters 13 and 14, horror narratives operate no differently from other narrative structures, dislocating the status quo only to see it re-established, and differing only in that the dislocation is the more extreme. Any challenge to patriarchy suggested by the lesbian vampires of the 1970s is undercut by other potential readings: the danger of women’s emancipation and alternative sexualities or simply as male sexual fantasy (Williamson 2005). Horror is capable of shutting down political dissent and maintaining despotic powers, and has done so since ancient times. Like other forms of popular culture, horror recycles visual stereotypes of women, the poor, and ethnicities and so on, as if in the nature of things (Pinedo 1997). But horror goes beyond mere disenfranchising the normative other because it employs our automatic disgust response. As Miller (1997) writes of disgust, “It marks out moral matters for which we can have no compromise. . . . It carries with it the notion of its own indisputability . . . disgust is processed so particularly via offence to the senses. It argues for the visibility . . . the sheer obviousness of its claim” (194). During the Middle Ages, the horrors of hell were used to suppress dissent and maintain order. And in real life the Romans used the public execution of crucifixion, where after days of being nailed to an elevated crossbeam the condemned suffered a heart attack and was then cut down to be eaten by dogs and crows. Medieval authorities, both civil and religious, proved far more inventive (Donnelly and Diehl 2012). Torture was commonly understood to be widely practiced in dungeons, and execution torture was publicly displayed. Both were pictured in print and paintings for those not present. Bodies were broken on the wheel, disemboweled, beheaded, drawn and quartered,

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burnt at the stake, and roasted alive over fire. For centuries heads were displayed on pikes along major roads. Each method was intended to mortify spectators with the consequences of dissent.

Unleashing Hatred Horror also has been used to generate despicable actions toward others, to unleash hate, the most devastating of all emotions (Cameron 2009). During World War I the Allies marshaled support with posters of Germans as barbaric, as fearsome gorillas, dirty swine, and as mad dogs killing babies (James 2009). The 1940 Nazi film The Eternal Jew drew on centuries of imagery in which Jews were associated with squalor as well as the classic 1922 horror film Nosferatu in which the vampire is likened to a rat. The Eternal Jew juxtaposes images of Jews with images of rats and cockroaches, and the voiceover claims that rats “spread disease, plague, leprosy, typhoid fever, cholera, dysentery, and so on . . . just like the Jews among human beings” (cited in Livingston Smith 2011: 139). On seeing the film, Joseph Goebbels, the Minister for Propaganda and under whose direction the film was made, wrote in his diary that the Jews were “so dreadful and brutal in their details that one’s blood freezes. One pulls back in horror. . . . This Jewry must be exterminated” (cited: 138). In the waging of twenty-first-century war, the terror of unannounced, indiscriminate, and multiple deaths is now a principal tactic in many parts of the world and horror is used by both governments and terrorists to garner support. Repeated showing of the shocking images of 9/11 were employed to wage wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and, in turn, terrorists have used pictures of tortured and defiled prisoners in US custody to maintain their own rage (Hoffman 2017). Such horrid images are used to both sanction hateful thoughts and to motivate and justify the most dreadful of deeds. Either to suppress dissent or to incite action, horror has been used as a tool of despicable forces. It is effective because the shock of horror is able to reach down into our nervous system as no other aesthetic form.

Uncanny Uncertainty Horror can be used for the worst of causes. Yet its attractions are many and varied. Horror can be escapist entertainment, a stimulant in an unstimulating society, and a means to reflect on the unpredictable vicissitudes of life. It simulates, excites, and thrills, arouses our curiosity and holds us captive as its fascinated victims. It permits indulgence in unsavory feelings and in transgressing social taboos. But fully accounting for the lures of horror must remain open. To use Freud’s term, it is uncanny. It is unsettlingly inexplicable, no better illustration of which is Freud’s relationship with Henry Fuseli’s Nightmare from 1782, an icon of horror. The painting depicts a woman swooning on a couch behind which a black horse thrusts its head, staring at her with bulging, pupil-less eyes. On the woman’s chest and stomach sits an incubus that looks quizzically at the viewer with the eyes of a goblin. Fuseli refused to explain the picture, and its meaning has remained a mystery ever since.

The Horrific

Figure 8.3 Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare, 1782.

Freud kept a copy of it on a wall in his counseling room, but instead of irritating Freud to write about it, to help explain it, he ignored it. Bloom (2010) writes: “Freud’s print brooded over the inexplicable, reminding the psychoanalyst of his limits” (112). Much has been written on horror since Freud, but the massive proliferation of writing from many perspectives is testimony that horror’s attractions continue to unsettle the public and cultural critics alike. To the extent to which horror arises from the unconscious and its workings remain impenetrable, fully understanding the lures of horror remains a matter of fascinated speculation.

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9 The Miraculous Chapter Outline Miracles and Marvels The Skeptical Discourse An Enchanted Universe of Miracles The Many Lures of the Miraculous Spectacles of Wonder Miracles and Mirage The Wonder of It All

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World celebrity televangelist Benny Hinn asks viewers to receive healings by touching their television sets and send him their money; the Japanese purchase paper slips as votive offerings to pass exams; millions of people purchase miracle books; the visage of Jesus appears in a cheeseburger and brings fame to its owner; comic superheroes possess superhuman powers that save the planet; and advertisers promise miraculous results with vacuum cleaners, shampoo, and exercise equipment. A belief in miraculous forces at work in everyday human affairs remains very much alive.

Miracles and Marvels In defining the miraculous, today’s ordinary-language dictionaries follow the three-part categorization first proposed in the thirteenth century by St. Aquinas (Daston 1991). Stripped of its original, medieval garb, the miraculous is first considered something not explainable by natural law, something that appears supernatural, the result of nothing less than divine intervention. The miraculous can also be something so remarkable or astonishing that, although conforming to natural law, it resembles the supernatural. In the past, this has often meant the appearance of a comet, a volcanic explosion, or an animal or a person with striking physical abnormalities. And the miraculous can also refer to something that occurs regularly such as a sunset or the birth of a baby 121

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but is experienced as marvelous. As the poet Ralph Waldo Emerson ([1836] 2009) remarked, “The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common” (32). Among believers, the first kind of miracles are commonplace; the world of objects and events remains enchanted. Witness the phenomenal worldwide growth of charismatic and Pentecostal churches (Christerson and Flory 2017) as well as the growth of New Age followers (Bancarz and Peck 2018) for whom miracles occur as a common part of everyday experience (Singleton 2001). Consider today’s many miracle books that relate stories about contemporary divine interventions, healings, prayers answered, and communication with angels (Bessey 2019). Consider that the Virgin Mary is reported to have repeatedly appeared to large crowds from 1930 to 1980 (Christian 1981), as well as in 1989 in Lubbock, Texas, and in Denver, Colorado, in 1992 (Nickell 1993). In each case, the invisible is made visible; the desired unseen is manifest as spectral.

The Skeptical Discourse Belief in supernatural forces intervening into material reality stands in marked contrast to the Enlightenment. Inaugurated during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Enlightenment rejected supernatural explanations in favor of logic and scientific explanations to be found in the workings of natural laws. Enlightenment philosopher and skeptic David Hume ([1748] 1985) wrote in Of Miracles, when “the spirit of religion joins itself to the love of wonder, there is an end to common sense; and human testimony, in these circumstances, loses all pretensions to authority” (35). Before Enlightenment skepticism, church authorities had sought to determine what should count as evidence of miracles. By contrast, Hume focused on what could possibly count as evidence for miracles. He pointed to our common predilection to gossip and to hoaxes, writing of “forged miracles, and prophesies, and supernatural events, which in all ages, have either been detected by contrary evidence, or which detect themselves by their absurdity, prove sufficiently the strong propensity of mankind to the extraordinary and marvelous” (35). Hume was at pains to understand the universe without divine intervention, much like his near contemporary, the third US president, Thomas Jefferson, who created his own account of Jesus’s life by eliminating all references to miracles (Jefferson [1819] 2006). Representatives of Enlightenment rationality, Hume, Jefferson, and their like were intent on distinguishing between natural law and the superstition in which they believed all previous periods had been mired. The Enlightenment oversaw the disenchantment of the universe. Unusual, even unique objects and events, and no matter how surprising or wondrous, were merely objects and events. They neither signified supernatural energies at work nor offered any kind of divine message. But for believers in the supernatural, the universe never ceased to be enchanted. And as explored below, among the different kinds of miracles believed to exist prior to the Enlightenment, whatever the form, each have their contemporary manifestations. For devout believers, hungry to see the divine at work in their daily lives, miracles continue to be “God’s oratory” (Daston 1991: 97). The Enlightenment remains an incomplete project; for many people, many aspects of the world remain enchanted.

The Miraculous

An Enchanted Universe of Miracles Prior to the Enlightenment, belief in miracles was as common among intellectual elites as it was among the general population. To people of the Middle Ages, God was not a distant being who had created once upon a time and then abandoned the world for things to work out on their own; rather, along with angels and demons, God was an everyday reality operating in the most ordinary aspects of life. Far from being an absentee landlord, God was ever present. Theirs was a universe of miracles, an extraordinary universe, where the stress was on the extra rather than the ordinary. Saintly people were conferred with such consecrated powers as luminosity, the ability to levitate, and the ability to appear in two places at once (Nickell 1993). They often received the wounds of Jesus on their own bodies—the stigmata—and after their death their bodies were believed not to decompose. Many miracles involved celestial sightings, both astronomical and meteorological. Others involved abnormal offspring, mostly human though also of plants and animals; a cycloptic pig, for example, a pig with two snouts and just one eye. Whether understood as the work of God, the Devil, or their agents—angels and demons—these events were usually interpreted as omens. Thus most of the woodcut illustrations of these marvels were accompanied with prayers and passages from scripture. All levels of society saw monsters, murder, and political events as intimately connected and equally the work of supernatural forces (Arnold 2017). Miracles were not only wondrous, they held a message. A person recently killed from being thrown from a horse would be considered to have suffered divine retribution for wrongdoing. The birth of Siamese twins could be interpreted as foretelling a political unification. Even the discovery of an old religious statue or painting behind a wall or in a crypt could be seen as a portent (Christian 1981). Everyday events were slotted into a wider cosmic framework in which the sinful were neither able to resist the Devil’s temptations nor to avoid God’s punishment (Arnold 2017). Relics, literally meaning remains, were carefully preserved. They were associated with a venerated person, often being part of their actual body. Relics included St. Paul’s toenails, St. Michael’s sweat, St. Peter’s tooth, Doubting Thomas’s finger, as well as Jesus’s multiple foreskins—he had at least six—and John the Baptist’s multiple skulls—the most remarkable being one of him as a child. Relics functioned as a tangible memorial, but they were also endowed with mystical, healing powers, and a huge trade existed in discovering, displaying, as well as fabricating them (Nickell 1993). Nor were relics confined to Christianity. Revered even today, there are any number of the Buddha’s teeth, hair, and fragments of his skull, as well as footprints in dried mud and the beard hair of Muhammad. Even images could have talismanic effects (Hutchinson 2004). Woodcut visages of saints were promoted as particularly helpful. St. Denis helped with insanity, St. Erasmus with intestinal problems, and St. Vitus with epilepsy and dog bites. One woodcut purported to calculate “the true length of Christ’s corpse,” as well as the wound on his side (7). It also possessed the not inconsiderable side benefit of protecting its owners from plague and seven years’ release from purgatory. Many people reported seeing materializations, never of God, but commonly of Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and a whole host of saints. These occurred either as visions or through an intermediary such as a painting or a statue. A statue of Mary would weep or sweat; a painting of Jesus would bleed. Supernaturally produced portraits of Jesus were accepted as fact, and it was also not uncommon

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Figure 9.1 Phgcom, Reliquary Holding the Holy Crown of Jesus Christ, Notre Dame, Paris, c. 19th century.

to see saints in clouds in the sky and take it as an omen (Christian 1981). This is the pareidolia phenomenon, the recognition of images in random visual patterns, not a matter of pattern recognition so much as a projection of a pattern. But in the Middle Ages all kinds of wonders were taken as certain proof of supernatural forces operating in people’s lives. The uncritical acceptance of miracles during the Middle Ages is understandable in light of a literal interpretation of the Bible in which events of all kinds were understood as God’s direct intervention into history (Arnold 2017). The Red Sea parts, the walls of Jericho fall down, Lot’s wife turns into a pillar of salt, Daniel walks through fire, and Jonah survives in the belly of a whale.

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Until the Enlightenment impacted the East, belief in the supernatural was as commonplace as in the West. This is evident from numerous folk superstitions. In Japan, cutting your nails at night was thought to lead to a quick death because the sound was similar to the word death. Various numbers portended either good or bad luck. In Korea, writing someone’s name in red ink could lead to their death, eating sticky food would help stick information in students’ minds and help with exams, but leaving a mirror in front of a front door would deflect good luck from entering. In Indonesia whistling at night could attract ghosts, and girls who stand in their front doorway would not find a husband (McElroy 2020).

The Many Lures of the Miraculous For skeptics miracles strain credibility, but for believers the miraculous continues to offer a variety of powerful lures. And skepticism, too, has its own pleasures.

Wonder As a noun wonder means astonishment, amazement, or awe. It is a highly pleasurable, serene state of being and akin to eighteenth-century descriptions by aesthetic theorists of the sublime as an overwhelming though elevating experience, a boundless experience by which we may contemplate eternity (Beardsley 1982). While the origins of the miraculous are diverse, and attitudes toward divine intervention range from firm belief to outright denial, miracles evoke a similar psychological response. As Aquinas wrote, “wonder is the hallmark of the miraculous” (cited in Daston 1991: 97). While Aquinas’s tripartite categorization of miracles, noted earlier, was neatly logical, from the outset it proved difficult to maintain in practice, especially the distinction between the first two kinds, between the truly supernatural and the rare but natural. The problem lay in the psychological response being indistinguishable. Whether something miraculous was considered the work of God or a rare natural marvel, the effect was the evocation of wonder. Acknowledging the difficulty, Aquinas wrote: “We humans are hard put to separate the supernatural wheat from the preternatural chaff, for both excite wonder when we are ignorant of the causes” (97). Following Aquinas, the Catholic Church established elaborate procedures to determine whether something was a genuine miracle, that is, one involving divine intervention, but in the popular imagination of lay believers all manner of things were, and for many continue to be, taken as God performing for an audience. Consider the following excerpts from just one of the numerous, contemporary miracle books. In the first excerpt, a woman is offered the opportunity to attend a dance workshop. She writes: “But there was one major obstacle . . . it was financially prohibitive. I prayed, ‘Lord, if it is Your Will for me to learn more about the arts in church, I need financial assistance.’ Within the week I received unexpected checks that provided the total sum of all expenses” (Canfield, Hansen, and Thieman 2010: 4–5). Or consider this scene: A woman, whose young son died some years before, is out fishing. “I wondered if Josh could communicate with us from where he was. So I called out to him several times, ‘Josh if you’re with us, please send us a yellow butterfly’ . . . Then all of sudden, out of

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nowhere, a large yellow butterfly with rounded wings, flew right in front of my face not three inches away!” (2).

Curiosity Wonder is also a verb as in to wonder about. Faced with the miraculous, the question is not only of its causes but also its significance. What could a miraculous event mean? Does it signify or portend something? The miraculous arouses both amazement and curiosity. For believers in the supernatural its cause is obvious, though working out its import is often hard; what supernatural forces are saying can be difficult to discern. Miracles simultaneously awe, fascinate, and beg for an explanation of their importance. By contrast, for skeptics the miraculous may signify nothing, but its cause is often a fascination: it is also a cause for wondering about. For skeptics who believe in natural laws, miraculous events may have no significance other than confirming randomness and the complexity of nature, but discovering the cause or combination of causes in the realm of nature can be an enthralling pursuit. For believers, the miraculous motivates the desire to understand the meaning of unseen forces for their lives; for skeptics, it motivates the desire for rational explanations. Whether we are believers or skeptics, the miraculous evokes curiosity.

Creating Social Identity Belief creates identity, both personal and social. The stories that charismatic Christian groups tell to account for the supernatural nature of healings invariably begin with the failure of modern medicine, and often continue with the failure of prior religious appeals (Singleton 2001). The stories differentiate a particular group not only from the world of modern science, but also from other religious groups and thereby strengthen the group’s own identity. In both seeing connections between things, and in connecting with people who see similar connections, supernatural beliefs act as social glue. While defying logic, the supernatural has the binding force of faith. Today, as in the past, social cohesion benefits from seeing supernatural connections and divine purpose. Just as miraculous healings act to help the healed survive, so they act as a survival strategy for whole communities. They also bring notoriety to the healer as someone prized for being an especially chosen vehicle both of and by holy powers. Apparitions typically act in similar ways (Christian 1981). Apparitions appear to reveal the deepest preoccupations of a community. Even skeptics agree that individuals who see the Virgin Mary or some other revered figure often appear to honestly report what they believe they have experienced, especially when they specifically reject financial opportunities. But skeptics also note that in a deeply religious community the status of seer has obvious advantages (Nickell 1993). To be considered by one’s community to have been chosen as a messenger is to acquire a powerful, sanctified, identity. For the community, the apparition acts to confirm faith and through the establishment or revival of a shrine it also enhances local pride in attracting notoriety as well as financial gain from pilgrims. The whole community also shares the wondrous experience vicariously. Thus, while just one or two people may see an apparition, apparitions have significant, socially shared benefits.

The Miraculous

Finding Patterns and Purpose From a skeptical, psychological perspective, belief in supernatural forces is akin to both wishful thinking and magical thinking. Wishes are invariably reinforced intermittently, and positive, intermittent reinforcement is the strongest kind of psychological reinforcement. Confusing an occasional correlation with causation, a belief in miracles is therefore self-fulfilling, and if people believe that supernatural forces are at work then they will find the evidence (Thomas 2001). Magical thinking operates whenever the distinction between mind and matter is blurred, where internal associations are treated as if they actually exist out in the world (Hood 2009). Magical thinking is associated with children, and there is a common expectation that as we grow up to be adults it is left behind. Santa Claus and the tooth fairy are put behind us. But as child psychologist Bruce Hood (2009) argues, many adults profess beliefs based on unseen, supernatural forces at work that often have nothing to do with formal religion. He argues that magical thinking is so widely practiced among adults it is more appropriate to see magical thinking as a natural, intuitive way of thinking than to decry it as aberrant. Our minds are designed to connect dots. We are hardwired to fill in missing information, to see patterns and purpose in the patterns, even when others see nothing but random data. In a complex and confusing world, where there is so much we do not understand, seeing patterns is central to our personal well-being. It is a survival mechanism. Hood (2009) writes: “we are primed for religious belief because our mind design is biased to supernatural reasoning as a byproduct of rational thinking” (23). If maintaining good mental health is a rational pursuit, then supernatural thinking is rational. Hood cites Roman Catholic author G. K. Chesterton who said of people who reject God’s existence, it is not as if they believe in nothing; rather, they will believe in anything. Hood builds on this claim to distinguish between religious supernatural beliefs and secular supernatural beliefs. According to Hood, people who reject religious supernatural beliefs almost always hold a variety of secular supernatural beliefs such as in telepathy, astrology, numerology, and homeopathy that similarly seek patterns and purpose in equally invisible forces as God at work. With astrology and numerology, whatever happens to an individual, good or bad, is endowed with cosmic significance; one is not alone but at home with the universe, a player in a grand scheme, albeit one that remains incomprehensible. And as with homeopathy, New Age adherents attribute well-being to unseen forces. They evoke Prana or kundalini energy as well as mysterious entities such as ghosts, fairies, and even aliens (Bancarz and Peck 2018). The only significant difference between the lure of the religious and the secular supernatural is that whereas the former assumes the operation of an outside force or forces, the latter assumes the forces to be a natural part of the world that have simply yet to be recognized (Hood 2009). In both cases, supernatural beliefs involve the assumption that things are connected and that ultimately everything is connected. Magical or supernatural thinking is complementary to, not inconsistent with, rationality, being part of our makeup as human beings, part of our mind’s design. Some form of supernatural belief is almost inevitable The same magical thinking lies behind fans who collect celebrity memorabilia; for example, a fan paid 1,000 pounds sterling for a swatch of the cloth taken from Princess Diana’s wedding dress and then refused to have it washed (Hood 2009). Like medieval relics, like any fetish object, there

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is a conflation between the symbol and its referent where, somehow, real power is believed to flow between them. Physical objects are invested with invisible properties that are believed to be unique and irreplaceable. Hood concludes: “We are a sacred species” (256).

Debunking Absurdities On the other hand, skeptics take great pleasure in debunking claims of miraculous events and objects. Commenting on relics, the Renaissance humanist Desiderius Erasmus quipped that across Europe there were so many pieces of the Crucifixion cross, “Jesus must have been crucified on a whole forest” (46). For centuries exposing false relics was almost as common an activity as fabricating them. Over the past few centuries the monsters of medieval fairs and the freaks of nineteenth-century sideshows have been re-evaluated as physical abnormalities, while apparitions have been shown to be consistent with a variety of mental pathologies such as schizophrenia and psychosis, as well as drug use, sleep deprivation, and numerous neurological disorders (Casey and Kelly 2019). It is equally noteworthy that apparitions appear to reveal the deepest preoccupations of a community (Christian 1981). What recipients see and hear usually refers to the need to reconfirm faith, warnings of dire consequences if faith is not confirmed, and reference to horrendous end times. Skeptics note that some apparitions serve specific contemporary events. The best-known recipient of apparitions is Joan of Arc, who in 1424, at the age of 13, began communicating with St. Michael and St. Catherine. At the time, she was a mere peasant girl, but through conversations with her saintly guides she became convinced it was her God-given duty to rid France of foreign armies, a conviction that the French king was prepared to accept until it no longer served his purposes. The famous apparition at Lourdes, in 1858, of the Virgin Mary confirmed the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. It was a timely appearance for the dogma that she had been born without original sin had been proclaimed only four years before and it had aroused considerable controversy. For its part, the equally famous apparition at Fatima in 1917 was interpreted as resisting the spread of secularism and especially Bolshevism then ascendant in Russia (Christian 1981). While investigations often reveal that the original recipient of an apparition is not suspect, in other cases perhaps it is also as Hume ([1748] 1985) believed: religious people are sometimes prepared to give evidence that they know to be false “with the best intentions in the world, for the sake of promoting so holy a cause” (93). Whether the recipient of an apparition is genuine or merely motivated by good intentions, others have been keen to take advantage, using the reported apparitions to further their own causes.

Parodying Absurdities So seemingly absurd are some claims that skeptics parody the claims. Continuance of the pareidolia phenomena, which operates across belief systems—Christian, Islamic, communist, and commercial—has proven ripe for parody (Charon and Charon 2010; Poole 2007; Stollznow 2008). Recent examples include Mother Teresa in a cinnamon roll, Pope John Paul II in a pancake, Arabic

The Miraculous

Figure 9.2 Daniel X. O’Neil, Salt Stain Mary, Chicago, 2007.

calligraphy for Allah and a symbol of Muhammad among the scales of a fish, Lenin in a shower curtain, and Bob Hope and Yogi Bear in potato chips. Jesus has appeared in the wood grain of a mandolin, in frozen dumplings, and in a fried tortilla. Playing her part, the Virgin Mary has appeared amid salt stains on a wall beside an expressway near Chicago (McGreevy 2001). The stains drew thousands of pilgrims who kept vigils that disrupted traffic. Not surprisingly these sightings have gained dismissive monikers; for example, the Pope Pancake, the Nun Bun, and Jesus of the Fried Tortilla. Begging to be parodied, they have been taken up by commercial interests. Fred and Friends (2020) sells The Holy Toast Bread Stamp that impresses an image of the Madonna onto a slice of bread that darkens on toasting. Another entrepreneur sells iron skillets that produce an image on grilled sandwiches of Jesus from the Shroud of Turin. Others still have branched out to make celebrities appear on toast, including Elvis, once a not unfamiliar figure for miraculous sightings.

Escaping into Fantasy The miraculous can morph into magic and mystery where there is less belief in miraculous powers so much as a desire for them. Magic plays a central role in fiction, especially of fantasy and science fiction genres. Spells, vanishings, levitations, and clairvoyance are the very stuff of fantasy fiction, Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings being only the most notable of recent examples. In both

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fantasy and science fiction, heroes and villains alike often possess super powers. Superman flies, has X-ray vision to see through walls, and leaps tall buildings with a single bound. The Green Lantern has his power ring, Wonder Woman her lasso and bracelets, Spiderman shoots webs from his fingers (Rosenberg and Canzoneri 2008), and miracles frequently provide dramatic, climatic twists to their narratives (Singleton 2001). Fantasy and science fiction narratives inhabit a sacred space because both are characterized by a quest for transcendence from ordinary, corporeal life (Cowan 2010). Of course, audiences know the miracles are fictitious, but by suspending disbelief and identifying with the fictional characters and situations, miracles offer simple and immediate solutions that real life fails to deliver. The great popularity of these genres is testimony to the desire for miraculous solutions, which also applies to modern advertising. In the words of cultural theorist Raymond Williams (1980), modern advertising is “a system of magical inducements and satisfactions, functioning very similarly to magical systems in simpler societies” (185). Hyperbolic appeals, originally employed to sell patent medicines, have long ago been extended to all manner of goods. Williams writes: “The attempt is made by magic, to ascribe to human consumption desires to which there is no real reference. You do not only buy an object; you buy social respect, discrimination, health, beauty, power to control your environment” (189). While modern advertising is commonly criticized for its obvious absurdities, advertising is not concerned with material matter; its raison d’être is fantasy.

Being Confounded Among the many miracles offered by commercial purveyors, from medieval times to this day, there has been a great deal of quite remarkable chicanery. In the United States the most infamous purveyor during the nineteenth century was B. T. Barnum. Among the earliest of his many hoaxes was the Feejee Mermaid purported to be the mummified body of a mermaid (Wilson 2019). He was most notorious for continuing the medieval tradition of featuring bizarre human exhibits: a twoheaded man, a woman with no head, and a half man/half woman. There was Turtle Boy, the MuleFaced Woman, the Lobster Boy, the Lion Woman, and the Alligator Man. Some of them were genuine, being due to rare congenital deformities, others were enhanced, and others were outright fakes. Additionally, nineteenth-century world fairs, museums of oddities, cabinets of curiosity, and sideshows were never short of such human curiosities as sword swallowers, snake charmers, fireeaters, blockheads (who hammer nails into their heads), and electric ladies (who send sparks flying from their fingers and turn on light bulbs) (Nickell 2005). The tradition continues today with the Ripley’s Believe it or Not phenomenon in the form of television shows, annual books, websites, and museums all over the world (Gaines 2002). Like Barnum’s, Ripley’s bizarre collections do not require faith. Ripley’s 2018 annual includes stories of a man slicing noodles with a meter-long knife, a mummified hand with the claim that artists once ground mummies into power to make “mummified brown” paint, and a mummified human figure 6½ inches tall (Ripley 2017). Each is accompanied by a photograph, presumably as proof. Like Barnum’s exhibits, Ripley’s are deliberately constructed as ambiguous. Barnum’s exhibits were often accompanied with the question “What is it?” and Ripley’s are framed from the outset

The Miraculous

with the choice to believe or not to believe. Closure is deliberately avoided, for hoaxes are appealing in their own right. To determine the authenticity or otherwise of a display is to exercise competence. Offering a questionable miscellany with a straight face, as if the diverse exhibits belong to the same category, leaves it up to paying customers to exercise the pleasure of using their own judgment. The sales pitch is premised on what Gaines (2002) calls “the pleasure of vacillation between doubt and belief ” (790), as well as a sense of superiority in determining what is not for real. Similarly, if something is determined to be a hoax there is the fascination in trying to discover how the deception is managed. Even not being able to resolve the tension between whether something is real or fake is wondrous, the pleasure lying just as much in not knowing as believing one does know. It is this lack of certainty, the intriguing mystery, that is often so appealing, for the curious spectator is above all else seeking to be astonished (Gaines 2002). Pettit (2006) calls this “Humbuggery as a form of entertainment and commercial epistemology” (662).

Spectacles of Wonder Miracles are seductive because they are wondrous, but also because they are spectacles of wonder. To see is to believe that otherwise random events are connected, and moreover, connected to oneself. The spectacle of miracles is the proof of their authenticity. Seeing is not only believing; believing is seeing. For believers, the connection between these physical manifestations and unseen forces is a matter of faith, but the spectral form that miracles take works as proof that the unseen exists. The visible stands in for the invisible; it proves the existence of the invisible. It is not even necessary for believers to see for themselves in order to believe; it is enough that someone who is trusted claims to have first-hand experience or even second-hand or third-hand. From a skeptical point of view the miracle is that many people are willing to accept a severalhands-removed account of visual phenomena as proof of the miraculous. Yet not only do believers see what for skeptics is absent, they find deep personal significance in what for skeptics does not, and cannot, even exist.

Miracles and Mirage Despite the benefits of the miraculous to both individuals and communities of belief, as well as the fun of debunking and parodying the miraculous, there can be grave downsides to the entertainment of supernatural forces at work. Many purported miracles are more like mirages, false illusions, nothing but hoaxes or fake news.

Rejecting Rationality Rejecting rational explanations is coupled today with the rejection of expert opinion, notably of the science of climate change and medical practice. It has led to conspiracy theories flourishing not only

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on the fringes of the Internet but in some mainstream, so-called news, outlets. They are peddled as fact, or at least as alternative facts, and consequently real-world problems are neglected or even actively made worse by policies based on misinformation. Some conservative Christians feel no need to worry about climate change, either refusing to believe it or considering that, as the elect, they will be saved; come the Rapture they will be raised to heaven. Jehovah’s Witnesses refuse blood transfusions for themselves and risk death, and anti-vaxxers put large populations at risk of infection and potential death. And whole countries whose leaders were skeptical of expert medical advice, and consequently did not move swiftly to counter the Covid-19 virus, paid a very heavy price.

Vulnerability and Vultures Rejecting rationality also leaves people open to exploitation. By favoring their gut over their mind, people easily fall prey to unscrupulous actors. In the past, commercial interests and a desire for miraculous powers combined to create a vast trade in fake religious relics. Today commercial scammers and religious hucksters alike offer the promise of easy money, romance, healing, and social advancement. Televangelists who peddle the prosperity gospel claim certainty that viewers who send in money will have their prayers answered in the form of financial reward, romance, or social advancement, whatever the viewer desires (Hunt 2009). Quoting such passages as, “I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly” and “ask and it will be given to you” (John 10:10; Matthew 7:7), Benny Hinn leans forward toward the camera, hands outstretched, and with a mellifluous voice, says, “right now, someone’s muscle problems have stopped. Right now, a person suffering from migraine headaches has been relieved.” “Your miracle is on its way” (Howley 2001: 31, 30). If one believes, truly believes, anything is possible: riches will be received, the loveless will find love, the jobless will find jobs, in any way the worshiper desires their prayers for material advancement will be answered (Hinn 2019). Given the plush baroque furnishings that he and other promoters of the prosperity gospel surround themselves with on television, their fine clothes, immaculate appearance, luxury cars, and private planes, the appeal evidently works for themselves.

The Wonder of it All Unlike most of the pleasures discussed in other chapters, views on the miraculous are not based on a mind/body binary but on diverse cognition, faulty cognition from a skeptical perspective. Whether the miraculous is understood as the hand of divine providence or explained in secular terms as physical, psychological, or social phenomena, its lures remain powerful. For believers, miracles offer spectral proof that behind otherwise seemingly random events there are unseen forces at work. The miraculous continues unabated. As well as offering realms of fantasy, it offers glimpses of otherwise difficult to discern patterns and purposes. Wrapped in the lure of wonder, the miraculous provides comfort and security in an unpredictable world. On the negative side, however, a belief in unseen miraculous energies can lead to public policies of great danger and leave people vulnerable to exploitation.

10 The Exotic Chapter Outline Exoticism Explored The Exotic Discourse Exotic Enchantment Distortion, Disparagement, and Denigration Exiting the Exotic

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The highly successful, massive multiplayer online role-playing game Final Fantasy XIV, now with over 18 million registered players worldwide, is set in a futuristic-feel, mashed-up version of the past. It includes fire-eating dragons, warriors who fight with swords, eighteenth-century sailing ships that float in the air, and fortified castles that echo Europe, the Middle East, and Asia from centuries ago. Characters include some with pixie ears, giant wings, and large and small hybrid animal creatures. The Moogle, for example, are miniature anthropomorphized rabbits with blond tufts of hair and antennae-like protuberances. Like numerous other games, movies, and television series, the game’s exotic fantastic future is the past.

Exoticism Explored Whether from some other time or place, the exotic is always foreign, something at least a little alien. It is experienced as strikingly exciting, mysteriously different, or unusual. Synonyms include strange, bizarre, fantastic, glamorous, marvelous, and outlandish. While introduced from elsewhere, it is never fully naturalized or acclimatized; it always remains the other. But that is its fascination, its difference from one’s own, accepted norms (Surd 2019). The exotic can involve almost anything: people, animals, plants, buildings, landscapes, locations, objects, and situations. In Segalen’s (2002) phrase, it is “an aesthetic of diversity.” Primarily, the exotic operates in three ways. Either the exotic, foreign element is heightened to make it more exciting than it would otherwise appear, the foreign element is made less foreign in 133

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order to make it acceptable, or the foreign element is entirely fabricated. In each case, the exotic is highly selective of the other culture. It is a “a fetish for the foreign” (Surd 2019). And whether the foreign element is exaggerated or downplayed, heightened or domesticated, or altogether a fiction, the exotic is appropriated to serve one’s own cultural norms. Exaggerating the foreign elements of another culture helps define a culture by how it is different from one’s own. It also helps to rejuvenate the dominant culture. On the other hand, downplaying the difference renders non-threatening what might otherwise be considered too foreign to be pleasurable. While exaggeration and domestication are very different from one another, they often operate hand in hand. The lure of the exotic is always a mix of something unusual but not too unusual, something distanced enough to be marginal yet close enough to be desired (Schmidt 2015). Exoticism always involves decontextualizing artifacts from one culture and recontextualizing them in another, ripping them out of the way of life of which they are constitutive and then planting them elsewhere. Something belonging to the other culture is appropriated, either willingly offered up by the other culture for sale or simply taken. Although both exaggeration and domestication involve a degree of invention, the exotic is also sometimes a matter of pure make-believe. Mostly, the exotic shades fact and fabrication, but some are entirely fanciful. Some instances involve for the dominant culture only a superficial, snapshot note to the referenced culture, while others are deeply inscribed within the dominant culture as a way to define itself by way of contrast. In every case the exotic involves a construction of the other for members of the dominant culture’s own felt needs. Always the exotic says more about the desires of the dominant culture than the nature of the referenced culture (Pratt 2008).

The Exotic Discourse Unlike all the other pleasures discussed in this book, there appears to be no negative discourse on the exotic from the position of taste. Eighteenth-century aestheticians did not decry it. Rather, they endorsed the Grand Tour which saw upper-class Europeans traveling, especially to Italy, for cultural edification, and elsewhere for sublime natural vistas. It was considered an essential part of one’s education (Gelleri 2020). They visited museums of classical antiquity and the Renaissance, and armed with pencil and paper, watercolors and easel, they attempted to capture what eighteenthcentury aestheticians like Burke and Kant assured them were icons of both beauty and the sublime in art and nature. A more recent discourse on the negative sociopolitical impact of exoticism concludes this chapter.

Exotic Enchantment The lure of the exotic often involves the erotic, but since this has its own chapter the erotic is dealt with in this chapter but lightly. The exotic has long been a subject of great fascination, of enchantment, and even without its association with eroticism, the exotic proves to offer multilayered attractions.

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Wonder Like some other popular pleasures, the simplest and most innocent lure of the exotic is wonder. On first arriving in the Middle East, the nineteenth-century French author Gustave Flaubert wrote: “Each detail reaches out to grip you, it pinches you . . . it is such a bewildering chaos of colors that your poor imagination is dazzled as though by continuous fireworks” (cited in Haldrup and Larsen 2010: 102). The nineteenth-century French painter Eugène Fromentin similarly wrote: “This is an order of beauty which, having no precedents in either ancient literature or art, immediately strikes us as appearing bizarre . . . [It] inverts everything, it reverses the harmonies which have organized landscape for centuries . . .” (cited in Benjamin 1997: 12, 13). Painters represented the Orient as a place of striking, colorful costumes and unfamiliar customs: men smoking with a hookah, riding on camels, and charming snakes; and women carrying large jugs on their heads or shoulders. They emphasized the luxurious clothes and dazzling jewelry worn by wealthy inhabitants as well as the highly intricate Islamic decorations found on wall hangings, carpets, and buildings. Entranced, they captured the brilliant sun as it hit buildings and created deep shadows, so unlike the soft light of Europe, the spectacle of the desert landscape, and the excitement of marketplaces.

Spice Seasoning But the artists were more than dazzled by what they saw. They offered up the Orient in what hooks (1992) calls the “spice seasoning that can liven up the dull dish” of mainstream culture (424). They created what Said (1978) calls an “imaginative geography” of the Orient as a compelling place “of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes and remarkable experiences” (49, 1). French Post-Impressionist painter Paul Gauguin offered a similarly rich concoction with his late-nineteenth-century paintings of Tahitian beauties. In fin-de-siècle France, a time of widespread dissatisfaction with civilized life, the evocation of an apparently more authentic way of life was highly appealing. In painting South Sea beauties in traditional costumes among lush tropical vegetation who lived only to sing and make love, he presented the French public with an image of an entirely different culture on the other side of the globe. He used a palette of brilliant, complimentary colors and Japanese-influenced compositions—both equally foreign to the conventional art of the time—to offer up Tahiti as a primitive paradise of voluptuous Tahitian women, an Eden before the Fall (Walther 2020). Today, tourism similarly provides an escape from the mundane routine of home, “a no-work, nocare, no-thrift situation” in which the emphasis is squarely on the otherness of other places and people (Haldrup and Larsen 2010: 20). Tourists, however, are not concerned with all aspects of otherness. The tourist experience is largely visual. Tourism engages a much greater sensitivity to visual elements of landscape and township than in ordinary life. Moreover, the tourist experience is mostly of iconic images, frequently of older buildings and colorful traditional costumes, costumes that may no longer be widely worn. Tourist brochures for package tours make this clear. England is commonly represented by the Houses of Parliament, France by Notre Dame Cathedral, Italy by the Leaning Tower of Pisa,

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Figure 10.1 Lobozpics, Swiss Guard at the Vatican, 2013.

Greece by the Parthenon, and Russia by the domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral on Red Square. Modern structures are also included where they have become iconic through their uniqueness: England by the London Eye, Spain by the Guggenheim Art Museum Bilbao, and Australia by the Sydney Opera House. But as a rule the buildings are historical and costumes are traditional. England is signposted by beefeaters, Scotland by kilted bagpipers, Italy by Swiss Guards, Spain by flamenco dancers. China typically features the 3,000-year-old Great Wall, the fifteenth-century Forbidden City, and the Terracotta Army from three centuries BCE. With the same longing for a nostalgic past, India is illustrated with the seventeenth-century Taj Mahal, and Egypt with pyramids and camels. North Americans not inclined to travel far are able to visit Las Vegas where they can gamble in

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casinos that echo foreign destinations: the Venetian with its winding canals, the Paris with its scaled version of the Eiffel Tower, and the Luxor built as a reproduction of a pyramid and a colorful restoration of the Sphinx. Better still, in Orlando, Florida, one can visit Walt Disney’s Epcot World Showcase, which features the pavilions of eleven countries, each offered by means of traditional architecture and iconic food (DIS 2019). Morocco is showcased with a minaret from a twelfthcentury mosque, winding alleyways, and stuccoed archways. Mexico features a pre-Colombian pyramid, jungle, and smoking volcanoes. Norway is represented by a fourteenth-century fortress, a Viking boat ride, and an encounter with trolls. Japan features a replica of a seventh-century pagoda. In Mexico you can drink tequila; in Italy, wine; in Germany, beer. Like actual foreign travel, Epscot offers a smorgasbord of cultural difference to help enliven one’s ordinary, vanilla life.

Cultural Renewal The exotic can spice up individual lives but it can also revitalize one’s culture. Hollywood has been adept at appropriating other cultures at will; for example, drawing upon German film tropes in the 1930s, Latin American tropes in the 1940s, and Asian tropes in the 1990s. What Hollywood has felt was lacking within US culture, it has appropriated for its own entertainment. It has always been thus with dominant cultures. Dominant cultures have always been able to absorb other cultures without their own sense of identity being threatened. The willingness to appropriate “lesser” cultures is viewed by the dominant cultures as demonstrating their openheartedness while also manifesting their power. Consider the attraction of Sasanian Persia for the Romans of the late fifth century CE (Gonosova 2007). In Antioch, in present-day Turkey, Roman artists created a floor mosaic of a lion that incorporated elements from Persia, especially the fluttering ribbons that surround the lion. The Roman Empire of the fifth century was still the dominant Mediterranean power but by the fifth century the power of Rome was waning, and its appropriation of Persian art points to a desire for renewal. The Persian lion was emblematic of a culture viewed as distinctly separate from Rome, but similar enough to be incorporated. The Persian-like lion signified the power of Rome over its rival, but also of Rome’s need for renewal. Cultural renewal and a sense of identity went hand in hand.

Defining Difference Sometimes, the exotic combines fascination with defining difference. Final Fantasy XIV is inhabited by half-human, half-animal creatures with bizarre behaviors that help distinguish between human and non-human, simultaneously arousing curiosity and offering by contrast a better sense of our own identity as human. In this regard, the game employs a common trope of science fiction fantasy. Successive Star Trek crews have variously fought or befriended creatures from the furthest places of the universe, included the Borg, shapeshifters who live on nothing but salt; the Melkot who have telepathic brains, reptile features, and light-bulb eyes; and the Excalbian, sedentary rock people who, inexplicably, turn into Abraham Lincoln (Ruditis 2016). Star Wars and Dr Who, and any number of other science fiction books, films, and television programs, are populated by similarly

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exotic creatures, each with dedicated fans on numerous websites cataloging the creatures’ distant localities, weird physical attributes, and bizarre behavior. The creatures are known by their audiences to be fictional, yet they are part of a long history of exotic “races” whose existence appears to have been accepted as fact (Mason 1990). Pliny the Elder of the first century CE, following earlier, now lost, Greek accounts, described an encyclopedic list of bizarre races of what were considered to be humans. He began by describing those on the borders of the then Roman Empire and then his account traveled outwards. To the north he found Hippododes, a human race with horse feet, and the Phanesu whose naked bodies were covered by their very long ears. To the south he found Trogodytae, cave dwellers who squeaked like bats and lived on snakes; the Blemmyae, headless creatures whose mouth and eyes were on their chests; and the Himantopodes, who crawled on their bellies like snakes. Other tribes had no noses, or no upper lips, and still others were without tongues. One tribe, without either noses or mouths, had only a single opening through which they breathed and drank with the aid of straws. In the most remote regions, Pliny catalogued creatures that variously had only one eye, the heads of dogs, or four feet, or who lived by eating locusts. Numerous other accounts of this kind appeared in the centuries following Pliny. St. Augustine from the fifth century CE argued that all the creatures he described testified to the creativity of God though he was less certain that they were all descended from the biblical Adam and Eve. In the thirteenth century the Italian explorer Marco Polo recorded meeting men who had faces “of big mastiffs” (cited in Mason 1990: 83) and in the fifteenth century Christopher Columbus recorded reports of people born with tails, others without hair, sirens, and men with dog heads. Woodcuts

Figure 10.2 Jodocus Hondius, Blemmyae, Headless People of Guiana, 1599.

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at the time depicted races without mouths, massive feet, with multiple arms and multiple heads, with ears half the length of their body, and the heads of a variety of animals. With the European conquest of South America, indigenous peoples were catalogued according to this fanciful understanding. Etchings, purportedly scientific in intention, include a headless Indian race whose faces, once again, are found on their chests. Despite the enormous diversity of these accounts, as well as their separation in time, they are consistent on several matters. In every case, the accounts described creatures geographically close to their origin as only moderately different—pigmies, for example—yet as the lands in which the creatures lived were progressively found further and further from the center so the creatures become increasingly bizarre. Operating in roughly concentric circles the further one traveled from the center, the weirder the inhabitants became. Also, the locality of these distant lands was consistently described in vague or contradictory terms, proof, if proof were needed, that we are dealing with human creativity, Augustine’s view of them being God’s own handiwork notwithstanding. The accounts demonstrate that where distinctions do not exist, or exist insufficient to needs, distinctions will be invented.

Gaining Prestige by Association Sometimes revitalization of a culture is achieved by associating one’s culture with another assumed to possess a higher status. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the power and wealth of the Ottoman sultan so impressed the English that they adopted Turkish clothes and furnishings in a style known as turquerie. The style emphasized bright colors and rich decoration, tented boudoirs, palm trees, and camels (Williams 2014). A similar development occurred with chinoiserie, a style that adopted aspects of Chinese imagery. Chinoiserie featured willow trees, pagodas, snow-capped peaks, and figures in traditional costumes floating about in shimmering white space with whimsical contrasts of scale. Painted in brilliant cobalt blue, these tropes defied both the gravity and perspective that were the hallmark of Western art, but like turquerie were entirely compatible with the then contemporary European Rococo style of surface elegance (Porter 2010). For England early in the eighteenth century, China represented an empire with far greater historical lineage and power than its own, and one especially notable for its stability. For the British aristocracy, feeling even then that contemporary life was changing rapidly, Chinese goods represented stable and ancient traditions. It was not as though the tropes of chinoiserie were intelligible to the English—they were not—but there was pleasure to be had in their cultural illegibility, in artifacts perceived to be no doubt resplendent in meaning in their original context but utterly incomprehensible in their new setting (Porter 2010). It did not matter that the Chinese artifacts meant little because China itself meant a great deal.

Feeling Culturally Superior By contrast, the exotic also offers the opportunity to feel superior to another culture. By the nineteenth century, Chinese wares no longer represented envy, but pride in the economic and military might of the British Empire. Chinese emblems of authority were trivialized. Plump,

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Figure 10.3 Unknown, Plate with Chinoiserie Decoration, c. 1725–50.

laughing Buddhas, figurines of Confucius, and the Chinese emperor were treated alike as figures of fun (Porter 2010). The same sense of entitled superiority informed Europe’s view of the Middle East. The sultan’s wealth was something to admire but not the Middle East as a whole. In myriad ways, the Orient was viewed as clearly inferior and could do nothing but benefit from contact with the self-evidently more advanced societies of Europe. The Orient was a place of social decay, moral decadence, and with an unaccountable legal system to which European colonizers were bringing progress and order. More recently, practicing reverse orientalism, the Orient has been striking back (Hendry 2000). Theme parks have been built in Asia for locals to view aspects of “westernness.” Additionally, today, many in the Middle East exercise “westophobia.” Supporting the traditional family values and religious loyalties of Islam, many see the fragmentation of family in the West, as well as the secularization and sexualization, as evidence of Western decadence and decay (Machart, Dervin, and Gao 2016). The same sense of superiority is expressed by many tourists who complain about cultures other than their own for not having the amenities with which they are familiar, for being less efficient, and more dangerous than home. They complain that foreign places are a rip-off, a tourist trap, or simply incomprehensible. Foreign countries are thereby rendered less evolved and less honest than one’s own, and thus on a moral scale less worthy. As travel shrinks as well as expands the mind, there is pleasure in complaint.

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Taking Symbolic Possession Irrespective of all other considerations, the exotic is always a form of symbolic possession. Often this takes the form of artifacts or pictures that reproduce the materiality of the referenced culture. From the very start of photography in 1839, photographers photographed whatever was nonEuropean, non-cosmopolitan, and non-middle class as if presenting the facts, though also dressing the facts in fantasies of adventure, travel, and sexual availability, European authority, nationalism, and scientific management. Scientific classification put people in their place. The effort was part of what Pratt (2008) calls “a utopian innocent version of European global authority” (7). Photographers climbed the sublime peaks of the Himalayas, rode across the outback deserts of Australia, and witnessed the spectacle of Niagara Falls, and so on. They photographed indigenous people wearing traditional costumes: American Indians, Africans, Chinese, and Australian Aborigines (Hight and Sampson 2002). The photographs provided what seemed like documentary proof of the progress and achievement of European empires. The empires were centralized in England, France, Germany, Holland, and Spain, where there appeared to be an obsessive need to present the possessions of the periphery to itself, as if the center was dependent upon others to know itself. And throughout the nineteenth century, painters, photographers, and travel writers were organized to serve this need. They were a critical part of “Europe’s planetary consciousness” (15). Today, tourism similarly involves taking home something of the other’s culture in the form of snapshots and souvenirs. Tourist brochures act as pedagogy. Photographs of iconic sights supplement photographs of tourists photographing such sights and being photographed posing in front of them. These photographs invite one to acquire possession, to take pictures and thereby capture their subject. The interest in being a tourist is primarily about seeing the sites/sights and taking home the memories, or sharing the sites/sights on social media. The point of tourism is to be there oneself or, anticipating the memory, to have been there oneself, in that very spot (Haldrup and Larsen 2010). The photographs are proof of the trip. They act as mnemonics of the sights, sounds, smell, taste, and touch of a place. Unable to bring back the place itself, tourists take virtual possession.

Being Reassured The exotic is never too exotic to be uncomfortable. Disorientation is always ameliorated by reorientation; otherwise the exotic ceases to be pleasant. While tourism offers the excitement of faraway places, tour companies, in what they call “destination management,” attempt to ensure the experience is agreeable (Kozak and Kozak 2019). Tourism domesticates the exotic by making it controllable, manageable, and easily consumable. Tourists tread well-worn paths according to finely co-ordinated schedules. They experience the exotic by taking photographs at predetermined stops often enabled by specially constructed viewing platforms. Tourist brochures for well-heeled tourists are illustrated with pictures of plush hotel rooms, lavish dining rooms, and modern, comfortable transport that assure them that the exotic remains safe, not risky, engagement. Always the tour guide is ready with helpful suggestions on what to look out for, where to eat and drink, where to shop, what’s considered a bargain, and how to haggle. One of the principal ways of experiencing the exotic

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rather than just seeing it behind a camera is shopping. Even here, stepping out into the exotic to engage locals is mediated through one of the most familiar of everyday activities. The exotic was ever domesticated, as illustrated above by the introduction of Persian influences to Roman lions.

Distortion, Disparagement, and Denigration Establishing difference between cultures is very different from disparagement, but as already illustrated above, the former often easily morphs into the latter, and disparagement can then equally shade into denigration.

Selectivity and Distortion The selectivity of exoticism is always distorting. Tourism is primarily about seeing sites, not understanding them. It involves only a snapshot view of the other, mostly a matter of a succession of iconic sites. The tourist gaze is a perpetual moving on from one thing to another, often literally while moving in a vehicle, a bus, a train, or a car (Urry and Larson 2011). Often, too, what tourists experience, especially with dance performances, is manufactured exoticism, a kind of artificial authenticity. The same applies to the use of the exotic in advertising for any number of products (Barker 2017). Advertisements offer the one thing, or at most the few things, that the public might know about another culture; it is a quickly glimpsed view of the other that uses a pre-existing association: wildlife in Africa; paddy fields in Asia, the desert or beaches of Australia. While products may have been produced in sweatshops in China or Bangladesh, it is the association with the enchanting exoticism of otherness that helps the sales of numerous, especially high-end, consumables. Whether it is luxury foreign cars, expensive perfumes, or designer handbags, the exotic association lends cultural cachet, an allure that sets the consumer apart from others. Manuals advise salespeople on how to use exoticism to help the bottom line (e.g., Walle 2001), and taking heed, Vogue on Location promises “fashion shoots in far flung locales” for “a sense of fantasy and flight” and goes on to list a long list of countries through which one can combine fashion with foreign fantasies (Schama 2019). In a world of fast capitalism, the lure of the exotic is quixotic, an obsessive quick-bite cannibalizing of one culture after another. The precedent with advertising was set with the very first kind of modern advertisements. The promotion during the nineteenth century of patent medicines buttressed the promise of miraculous cures with the suggestion of exotic origins. The mystique of faraway places was used to validate the claims of cure (Young 1961). Distance helped to generate sales. Whether it was the excitement of far-flung places or ancient times, or a combination of both, it was common for quacks to employ the enticement of the exotic (Young 1961). While sometimes nostrums were mixed in a bathtub the night before a sale, the list of foreign lands from which they were said to derive reads like a map of the world. They included

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Bragg’s Arctic Ointment, Haynes Arabian Balsam, Bavarian Malt Extract, Good Hope Bitters, and Hoofland’s German Tonic. The invented origins of these potions were as false as their claims to cure. The recipe for one remedy was publicized as having been deciphered from hieroglyphics on a papyrus scroll discovered under the mummified body of an Egyptian pharaoh. Druid Ointment was touted as “handed down from . . . mystic days when Stonehenge was a busy temple” (175–6). Where patent medicines led the way, others continue to follow. Advertisers employ the exotic as a tool to sell products whose relation to the other is utterly tangential, as much a matter of manufacture as the products they promote. This is the exotic without a reference; or, rather, the exotic as a sign of itself, so selective that they are mere signs of exoticism, signs untethered to cultures as ways of life.

Inferiority Complexes Allowing another culture to appear superior to one’s own takes different forms. Members of colonized cultures sometimes come to feel their culture is inferior to the colonizing. A cultural cringe is created in which characteristics of the indigenous culture are downplayed, and the culture of the colonizing power is internalized as normative. This process of internalization serves the dominate powers’ interests in maintaining control and perpetuating colonization. In some cases, usually for financial reasons, a culture is willing to offer itself up as exotic. As global finance is increasingly aggregated to large cities, many parts of the world are now either significantly or even entirely dependent upon tourist income. Otherwise unable to survive financially, they are willing to promote themselves as tourist locations with exotic costumes and customs, exotic animals and plants, exotic food, music, and dance. Local communities exoticize themselves for others by emphasizing whatever is unusual or unique about them, and this is true of the West as it is for the rest. Whether it is the unique flora and fauna of Australia; the bubbling mud of Rotorua, New Zealand; the cathedrals and castles of Europe; or Native Indians wrestling alligators in Florida, the drive is the same: to sustain local economies by offering what motivates the tourist dollar. Equally, marginalized cultures that have long been ignored, and rendered invisible to anyone but themselves, are sometimes easily seduced by the promise of recognition and reconciliation. And this applies even when, in order to gain attention, the other must deny their own everyday reality and concoct themselves as exotic. In the early 1980s, Hong Kong revitalized its ailing film industry by producing Kung Fu movies, which established a taste in the West for Chinese films, though only insofar as they mixed Hollywood narratives, breathtaking action and were set in China’s exotic, distant past. It was better to get something recognized and appreciated in the United States than not at all (Kei 2001). The East has long been willing to play the piper to Western taste. The first artifacts imported from China to England in the eighteenth century were genuine insofar as they had not yet been modified along lines acceptable to English taste. But over time, as the trade increased, chinoiserie became a completely hybrid style developed specifically for the European market. It came to bear little or no resemblance to anything produced in China for its own home market. Chinese craftsmen produced wallpapers, furniture, and porcelain sets to order from European designs that were European conceptions of Chineseness that no one in China would have recognized as Chinese (Porter 2010).

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Superiority Complexes By the nineteenth century, the English used Chinese wares to distinguish what had come to be considered uniquely English, an increasingly important concern with the rise of nationalism in Europe. Qualities common to both cultures were acknowledged—social reserve, brevity of wit, a love of ceremony—but whereas the Chinese were accused of taking each to extremes, the English prided themselves on their good sense in seeking each in moderation. Though at the time fortune telling was a common practice in England, the Chinese were mired in superstition; where the English revered tradition, the Chinese cult of dead ancestors was repellent (169). Patrons of chinoiserie saw themselves as innocents, yet chinoiserie had become no more than “an aesthetic mask for the lust of Empire” (24). By the nineteenth century, patrons were deeply implicated witnesses to the unsentimental calculations of material advantage pursued by an alliance between political, commercial, and military leaders who were determined on geographic acquisition. The public desired the power and material advantages that an aggressive foreign policy brought and simultaneously felt comfortable that the colonized others appeared to assent to their idea of themselves as good, innocent, and worthy. Informed by Social Darwinism, Europeans were assured of their superiority and that it was their moral duty to bring civilization to the foreign regions (Rothenberg 2007). Similarly, the Orient. The Orient was represented in terms of sloth, violence, and sex, each seen as evidence of its inferiority and, by sharp contrast, the superiority of the West. Costumed and bejeweled men pass the time lying on luxurious sofas, smoking, reading, or doing nothing at all but lounging. Women also lounge on sofas surrounded by plush cushions, attended by black servants or slaves. By contrast to these images of sloth, numerous paintings represented violent conflicts between men and between men and wild animals. Common themes included despotic rule as the natural order, violence linked to sex, bloodletting, and sensuous excess. Numerous paintings depicted slave or marriage markets in which naked slave girls are sold at auction. Despite evidence that harem women were clothed head to foot, and even wore veils (Benjamin 1997), they were represented as fully nude and posing provocatively. The denigration of the Middle East continued well into the twentieth century with the same visual tropes merely adapted to different technologies. First used in painting, the tropes were reworked in photography and then reworked again in the movies in what Shaheen (2009) calls “Reel Bad Arabs”—movie Arabs. Arabs continued to be represented as slothful, sexualized, and violent. Sheiks continued to appear as oversexed lecherous curs who, disregarding the numerous scantily clad Arab women, force their attentions on the Western heroine. Updating the idea of Arabs as slothful, they have been more recently represented as dark sunglass-wearing terrorists intent on killing Westerners. All Arabs are falsely represented as Muslim and all Muslims as Arabs, and Western protagonists use uncontested slurs about Arabs such as jackals, camel-dicks, rag-heads, devilworshipers, son-of-dogs, son-of-unnamed-goats, sons-of-she-camels (11). Arabs are still frequently referred to using the word Ayrab, a derogatory epitaph comparable to dago, nigger, or gook. As buffoons, Arabs are forever stumbling over themselves, as oversexed they consistently take a licentious interest in blonde, white, Western women, and as violent they have fought and killed every sort of foe: Americans, Europeans, Israelis, and fellow Arabs. They are represented as quintessentially evil, a framework that has had the most devastating consequences.

The Exotic

A further textbook case of a superiority complex is offered by the ostensibly scientific approach to indigenous peoples spearheaded by the US publication National Geographic Magazine. First published in 1888, from the outset its stock-in-trade was a popular, although an espoused scientific, approach to exotic people and places (Lutz and Collins 1993). Europeans had for centuries looked to the Near and Far East; North American subscribers looked to the entire world as a place of distinction (Rothenberg 2007). The magazine’s first editor wrote of its mission by evoking the concept of manifest destiny in which it was the divine destiny of the United States to expand and conquer as part of what he called the “the Law of Human Progress” and in which the United States was the self-evident, self-appointed initiator (cited: 30). Writing a decade after the magazine began, he asserted: “Territorial acquisitions most contribute towards the extension of enlightenment, towards the elevation of humanity, towards the ultimate peace and welfare of the world” (cited: 30). Subscribers were encouraged to think of their fascination with the exotic other as improving not only their own minds but advancing the cause of humanity. The magazine brought knowledge to subscribers as part of what Rothenberg (2007) calls “discourses of virtuousness” (6). Though constructed as scientific documentary, the magazine has at times combined many fantasies with facts. Photographers have employed the same representational strategies of exaggeration and domestication that characterize the exotic lure elsewhere. Sometimes they encouraged their subjects to change their clothes because they considered them too drab, and sometimes photographs have been manipulated to imply a darker skin. While no white women ever appeared bare-breasted, bare-breasted indigenous women were common (Rothenberg 2007). Like Gauguin’s painting of indigenous women without reference to the changes taking place in Tahiti, the success of National Geographic Magazine was fueled by what Lutz and Collins (1993) call “imperialist nostalgia” (69). Where the other culture has been colonized, the dominant culture often mourns the passing of what they themselves have transformed. They yearn for what has been destroyed, turning it into a myth of a golden past (Rosaldo 2007). Overall, the magazine has presented a benign view of other cultures, although the United States has been always assumed to be culturally and technologically superior. Indigenous peoples everywhere are naturalized, by contrast to the cultured, civilized, and technologically advanced status of white North Americans (Rothenberg 2007).

Denial and Projection Simultaneous with the denigration of another culture, the exotic other has at times acted as a repository for the pent-up frustrations, anxiety, and fears of the dominant culture. Assuming that one’s own culture represents an innocent norm, casting the exotic other as morally inferior establishes the other as a place into which to project one’s own moral deficiencies. Europeans used the Orient not only to spice up their own culture and to assert their cultural superiority, but also to project their dark dreams upon it. For example, consider all the paintings of submissive maidens attending bored, greedy potentates, and all the pictures of sensual harem maidens, snake charmers, and belly dancers each wearing transparent pantaloons with jewels in their navels in what Shaheen

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(2009) calls the ubiquitous “instant Ali Baba kit” (14). Especially during the nineteenth century, a time when prostitutes hung around street corners and alleyways in every major European city, but whose reality was denied in public, their reality was projected onto the Middle East. These and many other images project European fantasies with little or no relation to evidence (Benjamin 1997). They are like mirages. Like actual mirages in the desert, in which a viewer sees something at a distance that does not really exist and disappears on closer inspection, orientalism is an exotic construction. But for centuries image-makers have known how to turn the mirage into gold. Denigrating others by imagining them as degenerate seems characteristic of societies deeply troubled by their own bad dreams. It is far more pleasurable to enjoy the monster in others than to recognize it in oneself. What cannot be admitted as the desire of the dominant culture is cast as the transgression of another. This is further illustrated by the Hollywood career of Mexican actress Dolores del Rio (Hershfield 2000). In Flying Down to Rio from 1933 she plays the beautiful daughter of a wealthy Euro-Latin American family entangled in an affair with a white “Yankee.” With such a lineage, and further enabled with a lightened skin tone, the romance was not only acceptable but viewed as desirable. Yet a year before in the film Bird of Paradise, Del Rio played a Polynesian woman as a wild and exotic creature who, finding her romance with a white man forbidden, throws herself into a volcano. In the former role, she was anglicized; in the latter, she was hyperexoticized. In both cases her roles acted to reinforce the contemporary social norms of miscegenation and monogamy: the marriage partner, cornerstone of social stability, versus the threatening other who had to be destroyed. Here, as elsewhere, what cannot be admitted as the desire of the dominant culture is cast as the transgression of another.

Exiting the Exotic The exotic is many things. It enchants, spices up one’s humdrum life, revitalizes culture, and defines difference, but also it can be used to make another culture appear either inferior or superior to one’s own as well as using the other as a depository for the problems of one’s own. The exotic other can be nothing more than a projection of all that is loathsome in one’s own culture. Yet establishing difference is a basic human trait, although one increasingly problematic under the homogenizing influence of globalization that brings distance and differences ever closer. Tourists move through countries ever faster, sometimes one per day, and when driving fast the world can appear flat. Consequently, to heighten the exotic ever more, like capitalism generally, tourism penetrates ever further into previously uncharted territories. Tourist companies now include concentration camps on their itinerary (Urry and Larson 2011). The ever-increasing growth of the modern tourist industry is testament to the fact that the lure of the exotic, even when manufactured, remains as powerful as ever. The exotic is a source both of endless fascination and complications.

11 The Erotic Chapter Outline Exploring the Erotic Sexual Discourse Enjoying the Erotic Prohibition, Permission, and Perfection Sex, Sin, and Suppression

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Japan’s adult movie industry is among the most extensive in the world. Its range of pornographic manga alone is eclectic and ubiquitous, and while genital penetration is often pixelated, not so its Edo-era (1603–1868) predecessor, the subgenre of woodcut prints, Shunga. Erotic imagery in Japan began in the eighteenth century as paintings reserved for the upper classes, but once woodblock printing enabled mass production, they were embraced by all classes. Explicit sexual escapades involving both couples and groups were depicted inside brothels, inns, teahouses, and even Buddhist temples. Considered at the time of their making to celebrate human sexuality as just a normal part of life, they include heterosexual, homosexual, and even bestial acts—involving octopuses—mostly performed by ordinary people with greatly enlarged genitals (Buckland 2013). It was very different in the West.

Exploring the Erotic Eroticism comes from the Greek eros, meaning sexual desire or passionate love, although today the term is commonly defined as a state of sexual arousal or interest (Hyde and DeLamater 2019). Its imagery comes in many forms, from explicit displays to coy, oblique references. Sexual activity may be alluded to by means of metaphors of waves crashing and fires burning or allegories to fate and harmony. Such obliqueness may titillate by conjuring up mental images of what is left unpictured. Explicit representations include nude bodies, normally private body parts, and sexual activity. Erotically charged figures may perform as if unaware of the viewer’s presence, or, alternatively, 147

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directly engaging viewers with a mutual gaze. They may appear as seemingly chaste, the interest lying in their purity. They may appear coy by artfully affecting innocence, or flirting or teasing in a lighthearted way they may appear coquettish. Other figures are to be found in varying degrees of lasciviousness and attract through their promiscuousness, their imagined sexual availability. They may appear dissolute in seeming to be indifferent to moral restraint, dissipated in being excessively devoted to pleasure, or wanton in being sexually lawless. Erotic imagery without any intention other than sexual arousal is commonly regarded as pornographic, either soft core or hard core, although these categories are often blurred (Watson 2017). In soft-core pornography figures typically appear in the nude or semi-nude and are suggestive of their own sexuality. There may also be inexplicit simulations of sexual activity, but always figures are posed so as to offer the viewer the most alluring view. Hard core typically refers to the explicit depiction of sexual actions, often including penetration and orgasm. Erotic imagery need not necessarily stimulate the sexual organs to be considered erotic. It is enough for images to arouse erotic interest, and for interest to be a matter of fantasy. In short, eroticism can be defined in terms of content and/or viewer response. Like violence and abject aspects of horror and vulgarity, discussed in Chapters 6, 7, and 8, sexual imagery bypasses cognitive control and triggers the central nervous system. We are hardwired for erotic representations to hail us, a phenomenon that is now thought to apply equally to women as much as to men (Crooks and Baur 2016). Today, sexuality is commonly used to refer not just to the state of being sexual, but also to sexual orientation, which is falsely understood in binary terms (Hyde and DeLamater 2019). While heterosexuality remains normative, other forms of sexual orientation, as well as the fluid nature of sexuality, are now widely accepted as natural. Human sexuality involves a host of desires and activities in what Foucault (1990) calls our “polymorphous sexuality” or our “sexual heterogeneities” (12, 37). Sampling the Internet, numerous practices are displayed, as well as fantasies, including sex with aliens, ghosts, and androids (Griffiths 2016). In acknowledgment of such a wide variety of practices, and moreover engaged in by people who identify themselves as gay, straight, or bisexual, theorists of sexuality employ the descriptor queer to refer to all sexualities that by comparison to normative, straight heterosexuality appear odd or strangely different (Hyde and DeLamater 2019). In this sense, many images are either queer or can be read as queer. Images may ostensibly appeal to the norm of heterosexual desire, but also flirt with other sexualities. Even when images are clearly intended as a source of heterosexual desire, they can be adopted as sources of homosexual desire (Lewis 2002). They can be queered.

Sexual Discourse Perhaps more than any other kind of popular aesthetic, eroticism attracts heated debate. Erotic images have been viewed as offensive, obscene, and filthy, and by contrast lauded as the divine remade in human form (Clark 1959). Often the very same images have been subject to such diametrically opposed positions. Additionally, erotic images have often been tolerated with an

The Erotic

uncomfortable ambivalence or enjoyed as merely naughty, mischievous but benign, a source of titillation, what Foucault (1990) calls a “tolerant familiarly with the illicit” (3). Defenders of erotic imagery have attacked those who would censor it as straight-laced, priggish, and puritanical, while critics have been a great deal more creative. Employing words that do double duty for both the pictures and their viewers, critics have generated what Foucault (1990) calls “the whole emphatic vocabulary of abomination” (36). Many of their descriptors are “L” words: lustful, lewd, lecherous, lascivious, libidinous, licentious, lubricious, and anyone for whom one of these words might apply are damned as a libertine. Additionally, there is satyrical, immoral, indecent, and the “D” words: decadent, debauched, and depraved. The consequence of such damnation is that more than any other kind of imagery, erotic images are subject to social censorship. More than any other kind of image, they still largely fall into public and private domains. Public acceptance of erotic imagery has often hung on whether images were considered to be art or pornography, the two categories frequently being understood as mutually exclusive. However, a common definition of pornography is obscenity with “little artistic interest” (Kieran 2003: 466). This does little to clarify partly because this definition of pornography permits the possibility that it may have at least some artistic value, and partly because identifying artistic value is also problematic, the more so now that postmodern art has become highly visceral in its explicit representation of sexuality (PIE 2018). Today, a new definition of obscenity has emerged that stresses obscenity as an abuse of power. Cultural theorist Kupher (1983) describes sex in the mass media, like violence, to be just part of “everyday aesthetics.” In the West it was not always like this. In the East eroticism was represented explicitly; in the West even soft-core sexual imagery was long suppressed, though it flourished nonetheless, disguised in clear view as fine art. A great deal of premodern fine art was no less than what today is commonly considered soft-core pornography (Berger 1972).

The High Culture Alibi Of all the pleasures shared by premodern fine art and today’s popular culture, perhaps the erotic has caused the most anxiety among apologists for fine art. To reconcile the nudity represented in so much premodern fine art with the idea of fine art as spiritual, akin to an asexual divine, eroticism was disguised as moral instruction. Drawing upon scenes and figures from ancient pagan sources, as well as the Bible and early Christianity, nudes appeared in a variety of premodern art genres (Clark 1959), and almost always justified in terms of classical learning and moral injunctions to a virtuous life. Evoking the moral authority of the Bible and trading on the cultural cachet of ancient Greek and Roman sources, sexual desire found ready decoys in “the traditional high-status alibi” (Waugh 2002: 644). This is despite the fact Greek art of the classical period represented petting between boys and older men as well as explicit scenes of anal intercourse (Tannahill 1992). At the time, Plato favored intimate friendships, ever since known as Platonic love, but the ancient Greeks were evidently interested in much more. From the Renaissance to the end of academic art early in the twentieth century, nudes were theorized as the most perfect vehicle for appreciating the spiritual in nature. Numerous mythological

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female figures were commonly represented nude as well as nude figures intended as allegories of idealized, romantic love or such abstractions as fate, peace, or harmony. Venus, for example, goddess of love, either nude or semi-nude, arises from the sea, lies asleep watched over by Cupid, kisses Cupid, bathes, undresses, or just lies on a couch. Titian’s 1538 Venus of Urbino, one of many versions he painted, is iconic. His Venus is meant to signal chastity by virtue of her prudish gesture in covering her vulva with her hand, her purity by means of her wearing a small pearl earring, and fidelity due to the inclusion of a small dog at her feet (Mahon 2005). It is not as though she cannot be viewed for her beauty alone, the contour, shape, and color of her body, but it seems entirely false to suggest she is not offered up for viewing as an object of sexual pleasure. Her fully naked body lies stretched out on a couch, and she even engages the viewer with a mutual, submissive gaze. She is a woman for the taking. From the Catholic Bible, the obscure text Susanna and the Elders—that is not even included in Protestant Bibles—was made familiar by numerous paintings that show two men gazing upon a young woman bathing. Similarly common from pagan sources were paintings of men inspecting women in various stages of undress. Paris choosing from the three graces was the most common. This was essentially a beauty contest in which three goddesses attempted to win the favor of the hero Paris by offering themselves to him nude and desirable. Different literary sources have the goddesses variously volunteering to undress, Paris requesting they do so, or only one disrobing, but artists invariably chose to paint all three nude. They were inspired by Apuleius’ ([c. 180 BCE] 1951) account, which reads in part: “To show their perfect figure to the fullest advantage she wore nothing at all except a thin gauze apron which inquisitive little winds kept blowing aside for an amorous peep at her downy thighs, or pressing tight so as to reveal their voluptuous contours” (257). Going further, in Edwin Long’s The Chosen Five of 1885, a painter attempts to capture the legendary beauty of Helen of Troy by choosing from the best bits of five women. The painting was exhibited to a select audience for a shilling while a large engraving was published to capitalize on its popularity (Smith 1996). For men, the normative gender at the time, homoerotic desire is equally evident in numerous muscular male nudes. David from the Bible, and from ancient mythology Pan, Hercules, and Mars were frequently represented where their nudity was cast as heroic. “It was possible to read a man’s worth from every delineated abdominal muscle, meaty thigh, or bulging pectoral muscle” (Blanshard 2011: 15). Apologists for fine art followed Kant’s distinction that whereas agreeable art concerned itself with the immediately pleasurable, true art looked beyond itself to the divine. Schopenhauer recommended that “No object transports us so quickly into the pure aesthetic contemplation as the most beautiful human countenance and form” (cited in Gilbert and Kuhn 1953: 470). Nudity was a springboard to the divine not to sexuality. Art historian Kenneth Clark (1959) similarly claimed that art looked beyond itself to evoke reflection, so that nudes acted as signs of, but not as participant in, sexual desire. Nude bodies were not sexually arousing, though they may cause us to think about sexuality as one part of our broad human experience. Thus emerges the same separation between the mind and the body that informed the discourse of other popular pleasures with the mind good and the body bad. But too many nudes adorned the walls and often the ceilings of the aristocracy, and later the walls of the academies, to be without either salacious intent or interest. Moreover, toward the end of the nineteenth century many nudes dispensed with high culture references. This

The Erotic

Figure 11.1 Albert von Keller, The Judgement of Paris, 1891.

is especially striking with pictures consisting of nothing but cavalcades of naked sirens, sprites, and nubile nymphs. There were sea nymphs, river nymphs, cave nymphs, and mountain nymphs. The most renowned of such painters was the Frenchman William-Adolphe Bouguereau. No one achieved a greater sense of the silkiness of skin. He, not any member of the avant garde, was the highest paid painter of the nineteenth century. He was in such demand, and his work was so expensive, he would complain, “I lose five francs every time I piss” (cited in Clay 1978: 6). Clay (1978) characterized late-nineteenth-century academic painting “as a butcher’s stall, the body as merchandise, and the Salon as a brothel” (7). Supporting this point, the tropes of Western fine art nudes, either under the cover of the classical alibi or not, compare directly with photographic pornography (Berger 1972). The same gazes and poses are used, as well as the same attempt to establish an intimate relationship between pictures and viewers. In both pornography and traditions of Western painting, women not only display their bodies for the viewer’s gaze, but also engage the viewer with a mutually desiring gaze. Alas for the apologists of fine art, the body will not be denied. The traditional, high culture alibi is exposed on a number of counts. The ancient Greeks evidently did not ascribe to it; the sheer number of premodern fine art nudes, not to mention the exceptionally obscure sources from which they were drawn, belies it; during the nineteenth century all pretense to classical authority was relinquished; and, finally, the tropes of fine art nudes are identical to contemporary pornography.

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In our highly sexualized culture it may seem quaint that people once felt the need for such alibis. But there were powerful reasons for such recourse. The predominance of Christianity for most of the past two millennia and the industrial capitalism that emerged two centuries ago were united in suppressing erotic desire (Turner 1984). The early church fathers set the official tone, if not always the practice, for millennia. For Arnobius, intercourse was filthy and degrading; for Methodius, unseemly; for Jerome, unclean; for Tertullian, shameful; for Ambrose, a defilement; and for Augustine, the single most influential of all Christian theologians, an evil necessary to ensure “having His flock regularly augmented by new lambs” (Tannahill 1992: 147). During the nineteenth century religious asceticism, which had been based on renunciation, was supplemented by the asceticism of capitalism which was founded on its utility (Turner 1984). If an ascetic way of life no longer led to heaven, it served the capitalist cause of ever greater productivity. The carnal, desiring body was supplanted by a rational body fit for capitalist production. The middle class adopted respectability as their creed, and pornography, as discussed in Chapter 6 on vulgarity, ceased to be used primarily as a political weapon and became a moral scourge. However, with the shift from productive capitalism to consumer capitalism an altogether different approach to erotic imagery emerged and now dominates many societies around the world. In consumer societies, no longer concerned with the suppression of pleasure, but rather with its activation, all appeals are employed to motivate markets, and none more so than the erotic. Without a trace of a classical decoy, even tropes of soft-core pornography are mainstream, and though not publicly on show hard-core pornography is freely available, as close as the click of a button. Worldwide, the porn industry dwarfs the economy of mainstream movie production. In the United States alone the industry is worth $16.9 billion annually; 25 percent of search engine requests are related to sex, 35 percent of downloads are pornographic, with 33 percent being by women (Hull 2020).

Enjoying the Erotic Enjoying the erotic involves various pleasures, none of which can be understood from simply looking at erotic material; they must be understood in terms of who is doing the looking and how they are looking. Equally, although the pleasures of eroticism are described here separately, they are often experienced concurrently.

Voyeurism Voyeurism is taking pleasure in watching people unaware that they are being watched. It combines scopophilia, the simple love of looking, with the pleasure of being in a position of power. Voyeurism turns the subjects of a gaze into objects, and in the case of erotic imagery into objects of sexual interest, arousal, and/or fantasy. Since the subject of representation can never speak to the viewer, but forever remains mute, viewing images often seems inherently voyeuristic. The power of a viewer is maintained even where a figure engages the viewer with a mutual gaze for it is not the

The Erotic

person who looks back but their representation. The figure can do nothing; the figure’s eyes that look cannot actually see (Olin 1996). As already noted, voyeurism is the very subject of many erotic images where men gaze upon nude women thus justifying the viewer gazing upon these same women (Berger 1972). The very first movies, appropriately called “peep shows,” were risqué shorts like Peeping Tom (1897) and One Girl Swinging (1897), the latter showing a woman revealing her undergarments (Ashby 2006). Ever since, the cinema and sex have often been synonymous. Voyeurism is even inscribed into the very nature of the cinema experience of a darkened theater in which members of the audience are privileged as “invisible guests” (Mulvey 1988: 68).

Fetishism The voyeuristic power of objectification is taken further with fetishism, where only one part of a body is shown or emphasized. For Freud fetishizing a woman’s body represented “a token of triumph over the threat” that women posed (cited in Williams 1989: 104). For Freud, fetishism was a strategy of control. By viewing women as a collection of body parts the normative male viewer turned women into something reassuring rather than dangerous. Fetishism was employed by moviemakers from the earliest days. The Gay Shoe Clerk of 1903 shows a close up of what then was an illicit, enticing view, a woman’s foot and ankle (Williams 1989). The cinema employed editing patterns that broke down bodies into close-ups of individual parts, and typically they intercut them with shots of characters looking at those parts. Over the decades Hollywood alternated its particular fetishes. In the 1920s it was legs, with any number of movies involving lines of dancing chorus girls, and in the 1930s it was breasts with actresses forgetting to wear bras and so enabling their nipples to show (Semonche 2007). In the 1940s legs returned, and in the 1950s breasts made a comeback with displays of ample cleavage, tight-fitting sweaters, and torpedo-like bras (Benshoff and Griffin 2009). Probably the clearest examples of fetishism from Hollywood history are the musical numbers choreographed and directed by Busby Berkley in the early 1930s. Chorus girls performed in perfect synchronization to form elaborate, abstract patterns, often with the camera focusing on rows and rows of individual body parts. Dozens of disembodied legs regularly performed as patterns. Consider today’s advertising in which a body or body parts are turned into the advertised product (Kilbourne 2010). Michelob ran a series of print advertisements that turned female models into beer cans, and in a television advertisement competitor Heineken turned a woman’s body into a beer keg. In a Gucci print advertisement a woman’s pubic hair was shaved into the Gucci logo; her face hidden, she stood against a wall while a man, grasping her thigh, knelt before her crotch in an act of worship. Other print advertisements show nothing but legs, breasts, or bottoms for products totally unrelated to the products on sale. An advertisement for fishing line shows the product used to hold up a bra whose strap has mysteriously broken. Advertisements for jeans show women in underwear without a shred of denim anywhere in sight (Roberts Forde 2009). The most extreme form of visual fetishism is found in pornography, a visual form that specializes in making visible body parts that are usually hidden from view (Williams 1989). Whereas for

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classic-era Hollywood eroticism was largely the art of concealment, pornography deals with the “revelation of the sexual organs in their maximum aperture” (Walters 1976: 12). The title of the 1927 porn film Wonders of the Unseen World suitably describes this singular focus. For decades, the primary “climatic” shot of heterosexual hard-core pornography was a close-up of penetration known alternatively as the “meat” or “money” shot (Williams 1989: 93). During the 1970s it became a close-up of premature withdrawal and male ejaculation. The fetishism of softer forms of pornography have been taken up by music videos (Arnold et al. 2017). Cameras pan over women’s bodies, exploring every detail. Overhead shots emphasize breasts and shots from below emphasize bottoms. Women wearing low-cut dresses bend over, and they spread their legs to frame the action beyond. They are repeatedly shown as individual parts.

Sadism, Masochism, and Sadomasochism Sadism involves sexual gratification obtained by the infliction of physical or mental pain, of cruelty to others; masochism is the pleasure derived from receiving pain, deprivation, or humiliation, and sadomasochism involves both (Hyde and DeLamater 2019). Most people would not actually enjoy such pain in real life and they would be conscious-stricken to cause real pain to others, but they can relish both in fantasy. The source of pleasure in viewing images of sadomasochism varies among individuals. Viewers who identify with a compliant victim may obtain a therapeutic escape from the stresses of life, responsibility, or guilt; others may feel a sense safety and protection. Others still may readily identify with the power and authority of the dominant role and take pleasure in the suffering of others in a way they would never permit themselves in real life. Once considered pathological, sadomasochism is today considered harmless so long as masochists are willing participants, but in the corpus of sadomasochistic images willing participation often appears to be at best unlikely. Women’s bodies in particular have been the subject of sadomasochistic fantasies, typically legitimized as just punishment for immorality. Consider all the bondage imagery of premodern painting. Nineteenth-century European paintings with titles like Bondage, The Babylonian Marriage Market, and The Greek Slave show women bound and up for sale. The women are no more than chattel, at the mercy of the men who buy and sell them, but also in appearing erotically, nude and shamed, they are cast as participants in their own subjugation; they deserve their violation, or where they appear innocent, pleasure lies in their defilement (Nochlin1989). Consider the paintings of nude Christians about to be devoured by lions, presumably virginal although incongruently voluptuous. They appear as temptation which, because it must be denied, is expressed as violation, even as misogyny, a contempt for, even hatred of, women (Smith 2001). Many contemporary music videos, especially of black hip-hop, are explicitly misogynous (Jhally 2007). Frequently referred to as “hoes,” women are subject to humiliation and violence. In one video a woman rejects Snoop Dog only later to succumb to his charms at which point Snoop Dog declares, “Mission accomplished. Another bitch broke.”

The Erotic

However, the tables are turned by the figure of the femme fatale, powerful seductresses who lure and destroy men body and soul. The femme fatale combines traditional femininity and masculine power (Hanson and O’Rawe 2010). They threaten not only by their sexual allure, but by using their appearance aggressively, securing power over men by acting like men. Premodern painters frequently chose such powerful, castrating, and murderous women as their subjects. Salome and Judith of the Bible were favorites. Salome sometimes appeared with John the Baptist’s severed head, and while there is no biblical pretext, sometimes nude (Smith 2001). Judith Beheading Holofernes appears as Figure 8.1. The very first Hollywood star, Theda Bara, was the first in a long line of women who played femme fatales on screen (Walker 1966). Known as “The Vamp” (after vampire), Bara not only played a series of castrating women, she was fabricated by the studio as being one. She stared in films such as The Serpent, and She-Devil, and was promoted as having been weaned on serpent’s blood, taught the secrets of love in the Orient, and as a pastime enjoyed driving men mad. In the 1930s and 1940s the femme fatale lived on as a trope of film noir and continues today as a dominatrix, a central trope of pornography, leathered up and armed with spurs and whips. Yet femme fatales are almost invariably brought down, destroyed by their own ambitions and deceit. They are frequently killed off, but not before offering a variety of pleasures: sexual excitement, exhilaration because dangerous, and the sadomasochistic pleasures of identifying with them as perpetrator, victim, or both.

Identification However, many forms of identification are innocent of such suspect associations. With identification spectators project themselves onto a figure. Inhabiting a character, viewers imagine themselves to be a character within an image. As discussed in Chapter 4, perhaps this is because we are social creatures who readily empathize with others. Or perhaps, as Lacan claims, it is because, unable to find wholeness within ourselves, we develop a desire for completeness through identification with others (Rose 2016). Either way, the foundations are laid for what Mulvey (1988) calls “the long love affair/despair between image and self-image which has found such intensity and expression in film and such joyous recognition in the cinema audience” (61). The pleasures of voyeurism and identification often go hand in hand. A heterosexual male viewer may use the male figure as a surrogate for his own pleasure; in order to objectify her he first identifies with the male figure in the picture so that he gazes with both the gaze of the surrogate and his own (Berger 1972). A heterosexual male viewer could identify with Paris viewing three nude goddesses, the two elders spying on Susanna, or the artist choosing between five women to capture the beauty of Helen of Troy. The same combination of identifying and viewing occurs for heterosexual males when men are present in pornography (Williams 1989). Voyeurism and identification may also exist, of course, for the homosexual gaze (Waugh 2002). Pictures that offer a desirable male may evoke identification with the male plus desire for him as an erotic object. Similarly, lesbians may inhabit the figure of a fashion model, for example, imagining

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themselves wearing such clothes, striking such a pose, and simultaneously enjoy the pleasure of looking at erotically charged imagery (Lewis 2002).

Exhibitionism As noted earlier, in both premodern painting and pornography, women often engage the presumed male viewer with a mutually desiring gaze. It is as if they find the viewer attractive. Pleasure can then be derived from fantasizing that the desirable erotic subject of a picture desires them. Through the power of a mutual, desiring gaze, plus fantasy, the viewer and the sexual figure in the picture lock into recognition of each other in which both enjoy both the pleasures of looking and exhibiting themselves. Of her lesbian gaze, Lewis (2002) writes: “I simultaneously at a fantasy level desire to be her, and desire to have her and, moreover, desire to be her, as she is the recipient of another woman’s desiring gaze” (656). Today’s sexting also combines the pleasures of exhibitionism and spectatorship. Couples send sexually laced photographs of themselves to each other, most commonly by teens on hand held devices (Walrave et al. 2018). By means of programs such as Snapchat the sender limits the time the image stays on the screen of their partner, often only 10 seconds, to help preserve privacy.

Queer and Queering Echoing the multiple and fragmented nature of sexuality, none of the associated pleasures described above are strictly dictated by one’s own gender or sexual orientation. Images can be queered. Male and female homosexuals gain pleasure from erotically charged representations of their own gender. Presumably this was frequently the case with homosexual patrons of premodern art. People who once viewed erotic imagery under the social pretense of classical learning and moral uplift no doubt experienced an extra erotic charge because their voyeurism was illicit. Today, people who adopt an alternative sexual gaze may gain heightened pleasure for being against the grain. Consider, as Lewis (2002) says, there are two kinds of homosexual gazes: “the overt remit” of intentional homosexual imagery and “a clandestine pleasure obtained through a transgressive reading of dominant cultural imagery” (654). For example, lesbians may get more pleasure from viewing women in straight, mainstream fashion magazines than they do from the fashion magazines now specifically targeted to them because viewing straight magazines offers the added pleasure of transgression. It is an ironic twist that the social injunctions against queer pleasures may only increase them. The pleasure of queering images has long been a feature of cinema audiences. Understanding that homosexuality could not be openly represented in the cinema, only alluded to as either the butt of jokes or as evil, homosexual audience members grew expert at identifying a queer subtext. What could not be denoted explicitly could be, or at least thought to be, alluded to in what Benshoff and Griffin (2006) call “connotative homosexuality” (65). Today the term “coming out” means publicly acknowledging one’s homosexuality whereas previously it meant being adept at reading queer subtexts, bending straight culture to serve homosexual identities and desires (68). Homosexuals

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Figure 11.2 Micadew, White Lingerie Worn by Beautiful Caucasian Woman, 2019.

found evidence of a queer subtext in all manner of things: a lingering look between members of the same gender, a flick of the wrists, stroking a walking stick, putting a gun to one’s mouth, a woman’s broad shoulders. A lineup of leggy chorus girls, ostensibly a feast for male viewers, was read by lesbians as the “sensuous pleasures of a tropical lesbian paradise” (72–3). Ironically, biblical epics were once a favorite of gay men due to the many beefcake actors who bared their chests and muscular arms and legs. What heterosexual audiences gave not a second thought to, homosexuals zeroed in on. Even homosocial activities were sometimes queered, in which men fighting in the trenches or women supporting one another were read in sexual terms. Even musicals were claimed as queer

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because of their highly theatrical performative nature. They were seen as “‘cinematic revenge’ upon heterosexuality” (77). As Doty (1993) remarks in Making Things Perfectly Queer, “I’ve got news for straight culture; your readings of texts are usually ‘alternative’ ones for me, and they often seem like desperate attempts to deny the queerness that is so clearly a part of mass culture” (xii).

Prohibition, Permission, and Perfection Compared to only a few decades ago, our times are characterized by a highly sexualized media; but, would it be a mistake to believe that we are now finally liberated? Have we, as Foucault (1990) argued decades ago, only imposed upon ourselves “a more devious and discrete form of power” (11). Having thrown off the repression first of religion and then the rationalism required of productive capitalism, have we foisted upon ourselves the repression of consumer capitalism? And if problems of permissiveness are different from prohibition, are they just as consequential?

Permissiveness and Perfection Advertising presents women based on an ideal of absolute flawlessness, of skin without wrinkles, blemishes, or even pores. The practice of the painter selecting from five women to capture the beauty of Helen of Troy is now a common digital practice. With digital enhancement, celebrities are “perfected to death” (Kilbourne 2010). Advertising has reinvented the smooth perfection of the closed bodies of fine art nudes and also, like fine art nudes, pornography has now eliminated pubic hair (Rosen 2012). Unable to meet such impossible standards of popular media, women are shamed and disgusted by their own appearance, leading to eating disorders to become or stay slim, depression, sexual dysfunction, and the trivialization of intimacy (Kilbourne 2010). Men as well as women are now also influenced by such perfect representations, causing them to beef up in a form of “reverse anorexia” (Roberts Forde 2009: 122). Judged by the standards of the perfect sexual bodies of mainstream media, the bodies of partners almost invariably fall short, and judged by the techniques of pornography, the sex skills of partners are also often found wanting (Paul 2005). Thus media perfection has an adverse effect upon real-life relationships.

Pornification So everyday is sexual imagery now, some refer to the pornification of society (Mulholland 2013), especially now that the tropes of soft-core pornography have entered the mainstream. Music videos engage in what Jhally (2007) calls “the pornographic gaze” of the “pornographic imagination.” Women are shown as already sexually aroused. Ravenous for satisfaction, they perform provocatively for the viewer, engaging in prolonged come-hither looks, as if their sexual desire is excited by the viewer. By exhibiting themselves with an unmistakable, take-me attitude they offer viewers the fantasy of believing in their own sexual desirability. With such images as models, sexting is now

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commonplace among teens and young adults, some of it willing, some of it coerced (Walrave 2018). For Jhally (2007), highly sexualized imagery is not of concern because they are too sexy. To represent bodies as sexual is no more problematic than acknowledging that we are sexual beings. The problem is that some media, especially advertising, music videos, and fashion, have been so influenced by pornography that they often represent people as no more than sexual commodities. And this repeats itself with some cases of sexting. Both genders not only sometimes feel pressure to self-present sexually but are then slut-shamed for not being sufficiently sexually attractive (Walrave et al. 2018). Other observers are more troubled by the media’s sexualization of children, what some call “corporate pedophilia,” which exemplifies the ever-insatiable need of the media to cut through all the other media messages (Faulkner 2010: 107). Yet pedophiliac imagery may have been long masked as fine art. For example, many of Bouguereau’s images of young, naked children are unmistakably sensual.

Selling Sex To simulate markets nothing attracts attention like sex. In overcoming the prudery of the past, the media casts the sexualization of society as socially progressive, a triumph of civil liberties (Paul 2005). Championing free speech, eroticization is positioned as a war against the prudery of the past and simultaneously the politically correct, liberal, and feminist police. It is therefore deeply ironic that it is hard to find anything more retrograde and repressive than the sexual clichés offered by a sexualized media (Jhally 2007). And the porn industry, far from being in revolt against past repressions, is a fantasy world populated by virgins and whores shamed for their sexual availability, and where sex often evokes disgust, something to be done quickly and disposed of, something cheap and dirty. The pornography industry, with its low costs, large profit margins, cheap labor force, broad market base, target niches, and multiple distribution platforms, is perhaps “the ultimate capitalist enterprise” (Paul 2005: 247).

Sex, Sin, and Suppression While child pornographers are prosecuted, a lead Hollywood actor can have intercourse with an apple pie in a popular teen movie (Semonche 2007). We have thrown off the prudery of the past that saw sex as sinful and pleasure generally as an impediment to industrial capitalism. Now we celebrate the hedonism necessary to fuel market turnover in an economy based on consumption. If erotic images do not always sell, they do grab our attention. We are hardwired to respond according to our, often-fluid, sexual orientations and we are largely free to do so, albeit not always in publicly acknowledged ways. But have we substituted previous forms of suppression for the limitations imposed by the demands of the mass media marketplace? Is an abundance of sexual imagery damaging real-life intimate relationships?

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12 The Spectacular Chapter Outline Sizing Up the Spectacular The Spectacular versus Sensationalism Size Matters Making Might Right Summarizing the Spectacular

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At 71 meters tall, the Leshan Giant Buddha in China is the largest premodern sculpture in the world. Carved out of a cliff face of red-bed sandstone between 713 and 803 CE, it is now a major tourist site, attracting over 3 million tourists a year. The Buddha’s head, which measures 14 meters high, is covered with 1,021 spiral curls. At 7 meters long, his ears are large enough to hold two people inside. His fingers are 8.3 meters long; his nose, 5.6 meters long; and each of his eyes are 3.3 meters wide. Sitting, he is 10 stories high but if he stood he would rival the Statue of Liberty at 93 meters. As impressive as these dimensions are, the statue is smaller than the Big Buddha of Thailand completed in 2008. Made of concrete but covered in gold, it is 93 meters high and 63 meters wide (Wikipedia). Each of these spectaculars serve to awe believers and tourists alike, both the experience of their sheer size and the listing of their statistics.

Sizing Up the Spectacular The spectacular refers to spectacles on an exceptionally large scale. It is a striking or imposing display. To stress the size of a spectacle that is spectacular adjectives are used as in a grand, lavish, magnificent, astonishing, or astounding spectacle. The spectacular can also be breathtaking and staggering, both terms indicating a physical reaction. It comes in many forms, including paintings, buildings, fireworks, parades, ceremonies, sporting events, and natural vistas. Spectaculars are colossal, something huge, gigantic, immense, or vast in size, extent, or scope. A pyrotechnic display is reminiscent of fireworks, a brilliant, sparkling display; a razzle-dazzle display is fast 161

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Figure 12.1 Blarandion, Leshan Giant Buddha from Below, c. 713–803 CE.

paced or very lively. The single, essential factor is sheer size. The spectacular makes us stop and stare. In Chapter 8 on horror, the concept of the sublime was introduced in reference to terror, but the sublime equally applies to the spectacular. According to Longinus, the ancient literary critic from whom the concept of the sublime is derived, the effect of the sublime is “vehement emotion,” that puts one into “a fine frenzy” (cited in Beardsley 1982: 77). In Kant’s ([1790] 1952) later formulation of the sublime, he identified two kinds, the mathematical and the dynamic. Illustrating both, he wrote of mountain peaks rearing themselves to heaven, deep chasms, and raging streams. The mathematical sublime, like the experience of the (unpolluted) night sky, or mountain peaks, is vast, stretching up and out, seemingly forever. The dynamic sublime, like raging rivers or a volcano, can be equally large but also full of force. Massive mountains can be appreciated in quiet contemplation; raging rivers can cause terror. Depending on whether the spectacular is something very large but static, or both very large and of great force, the response can be meditative or thrilling, introspection or agitation. Either way, the affect is to remind ourselves of things far larger than our “skin-encapsulated ego” (Watts, cited in Grof 1988: 30). The spectacular takes us out of ourselves. Equally significant is that the sublime goes beyond our full rational comprehension. Although we attempt to grasp the sublime by comparing something huge to something else known to be huge, it resists our intellectual capacity to fully comprehend it.

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European painters of Kant’s time competed to produce paintings that were not only supersized but depicted vast vistas of untamed nature. By contrast to picturesque landscapes of pleasant, controlled natural vistas, with sublime landscapes mountain ranges rose heroically, waterfalls cascaded threateningly, dark storms gathered, and lightning flashed. Human figures were dwarfed, as insignificant as they were small or, alternatively, they struggled valiantly to survive the cataclysms of natural forces. For eighteenth-century aestheticians like Kant, most examples of the sublime came from nature. During the nineteenth century new technological marvels of the Industrial Revolution were added to the canon of the sublime as both very large and monuments of human ingenuity: canals, tunnels, steam engines, and bridges. In the twentieth century, sublime spectaculars broadened again to include human-made wonders that either matched or even exceeded those of the past. Huge paintings were superseded by cinemascope, massive ceiling paintings by Imax domes, mountains peaks by skyscrapers, the god-like view from mountain tops by the view from skyscrapers and airplane windows, and the tumult of natural catastrophes by rocket launches and disaster movies. Sadly, the wonder of the night sky, having in most places lost its power through pollution, must now be enjoyed in the scaled-down environments of planetariums, although there not only the night sky but the entire solar system is displayed as popular infotainment.

The Spectacular versus Sensationalism The spectacular is often understood in a negative light. Like the bright and busy, it has often been accused of being devoid of serious purpose, a mere thing to delight the eye, to impress but not to carry the burden of anything important. The spectacular is viewed as merely sensationalism, sensation without good purpose. It is dismissed as theatrical or glitzy. A theatrical spectacular is an extravagant or irrelevantly histrionic display, a calculated and/or showy display, while a glitzy spectacular is an extravagant, ostentatious, or glamorous display. In both cases, they in are poor taste. The spectacular is constantly on a knife edge between wowing and being silly: of pomp turned into pompous; grand into grandiosity; glorious into vainglory, and gigantic into gargantuan, in which the former impresses and the latter appears a vacuous overextension. Along these lines, the spectacular is often criticized in movies as a cosmetic thrill, offering scale over subtlety, eliminating character development, and reducing narrative to a succession of spills and thrills (Keane 2006). Each of these criticisms relates to taste, the determining factor of bad taste being overreach.

Size Matters Yet the spectacular, like other popular pleasures, is popular for good reason. The spectacular inspires wonder, thrills, immersion, ego loss, and humor. And overreach is often what is so attractive.

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Wonder Each of the seven wonders of the world—ancient, modern, and natural—are wonders because they are spectacular. The seven natural wonders include the Grand Canyon of the United States and the Great Barrier Reef off the east coast of Australia. The seven wonders of the ancient world include the Giant Pyramid of Giza in Egypt and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. The seven wonders of the modern world include the Great Wall of China and the Taj Mahal in India. Today, each of the remaining wonders are major tourist attractions precisely because they are spectacular. Each of them feature prominently on tourist brochures as the things to see, and once on-site tourist guides impress with an avalanche of statistics about how many years were spent building, or developing them, how many workers were employed, how far away materials were required to come from, and so on. As above with the example of the giant Buddhas, the visual evidence of magnitude is reinforced by the statistics, although the statistics frequently make no sense by themselves. Comparisons are necessary, as above, with the Statue of Liberty. From the earliest years of the cinema, going to the movies was always a matter of “pay and display” and, for some kinds of movies, the bigger the better (Keane 2006: 5). In contrast to images of small-scale, domestic activity, massed armies and cities destroyed offered a large-scale, objective overview. Hollywood director Cecile B. DeMille was especially renowned. His 1924 The Ten Commandments opened with a set that included four 11-meter statues of pharaohs, 21 sphinxes, and gates 33 meters high that took 14,000 workers to construct (Hall and Neale 2010). During the 1950s, cinemascope was introduced in an attempt to compete with television’s small screen. Cinemascope doubled the width of the then standard screen thus greatly expanding the ability of the camera to impress with sweeping panning shots over armies, cities, and natural vistas. Television could tell stories; cinemascope offered wonders of scale. Today, television screens are both so large and widescreen they are called home cinema. And whereas movies were once billed with casts of thousands, and some films actually did involve thousands of extras, today digitalization enables even greater spectacles than ever before. Where the cinema went wide to impress, buildings have gone ever higher. The Egyptian pyramids, Gothic cathedrals, and skyscrapers are alike in celebrating height, each taller than the other. When first built the Giant Pyramid of Giza was 146.75 meters high, when first built the tallest ever Gothic cathedral, at Lincoln in England, stood at 160 meters. Currently, the tallest building in the world is Burj Khalifa in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. It stands at 829.8 meters dwarfing the Empire State Building in New York at a mere 381 meters (Wikipedia).

Thrills and Spills If mathematical sublime spectacles induce what Kant ([1790] 1952) called “a state of joy” (110), dynamic sublime spectacles offer, again in his words, a mild horror, a bold acceptance of danger; they are fearsome. Again, for eighteenth-century aesthetic theorists the examples were mostly natural, for nature was the greatest of all artists: “thunderclouds piled up the vault to heaven, borne along with flashes and peals, volcanoes in all their violence of destruction, hurricanes leaving

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Figure 12.2 Laika, The View from the Top of Burj Khalifa with Its Shadow, 2015.

desolation in their track, the boundless ocean rising with rebellious force, the high waterfall of some mighty river, and the like” (110). Today, each of these scenes is mediated on large screens, as well as other natural events like tsunamis, raging fires, earthquakes, and the impact of meteors. For centuries, paintings of the destruction of Pompeii were a popular topic, and it did not take long for early filmmakers to re-enact it on screen. The 1908 Italian film The Last Days of Pompeii was so popular it not only spawned numerous remakes, it is credited with starting the genre of large historical epics that continues to this day (Keane 2006).

Immersion Some kinds of the spectacular are immersive; they enclose, becoming not only sights but an environment, and in which viewers also become participants. Kant ([1790] 1952) described the

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effect of entering St. Peter’s in Rome as one of “bewilderment, a sort of perplexity” (100). Like the Gothic cathedrals that preceded St. Peter’s, it combines elaborate detail with masses of space. The same is true of many mosques, the largest of which is the Great Mosque of Mecca in Saudi Arabia. Dating from the middle of the seventh century it has undergone many additions to the point that it now covers an area of 365,000 square meters—over fifty football fields—and can now accommodate 1.5 million worshipers. Nor is it the only mosque of such dimensions. The Imam Reza Shrine in Iran accommodates a similar number of worshipers and is even larger by area. While these two mosques are exceptional, many mosques in many parts of the world are spacious enough to accommodate upwards of 20,000 worshipers (Uluhanli 2017). If not affecting holy awe, panoramas wrap around viewers to offer a far more immersive experience than the usual viewer—object relationship. First devised by the Romans—there are examples from Pompeii—their heyday was the nineteenth century when panoramic paintings and models were a popular way to represent landscapes, topographic views, and historical events. Audiences were thrilled by the aspect of illusion, immersed in a winding 360-degree panorama and given the impression of standing in a new environment. One of the few surviving examples of the genre is the 1894 Racałwice Panorama in Wrocław, Poland. Housed in a purpose-built rotunda, and measuring 15 x 114 meters, the painting depicts a battle for independence from Russia (National Museum of Wrocław 2020). With the aid of lighting and diorama-like terrain in front of the painting, it depicts different scenes from the battle. Immensely popular at the time of its opening, it remains a major tourist attraction. For many years panoramas were a feature of Disneyland. Alternatively called Cinerama or Circle Vision, they showed scenes from the United States and later from China. Visitors stood in a large circular room to watch a film projected onto the nine large, contiguous screens that surrounded them (Shaffer 2010). Immersion is especially pronounced when experienced as part of a crowd. Consider a professional football crowd with tens of thousands of fans packed together into a steeped and panoramic grandstand with flags waving, chanting, and singing as one, “exploding into a delirious roar of noise” (Hancox 2020). This is a grand sight but also a highly participatory immersive experience in which, typically, the individual is at least partly lost. Identifying with the crowd, the individual loses a sense of responsibility and gains a sense of collective awareness that increases with an increase in the size of the crowd. This is what Hancox (2020) calls an “alchemy of congregation when your brain pulses with validation of being with so many people who have chosen the same path.” As individuals identify with the crowd behavior, allowing themselves to be magnified by the crowd, paradoxically, as they allow their personal boundaries to weaken, they feel stronger. As their control system loosens, at least temporarily, their sense of self morphs in favor of identifying with the crowd. This is ego loss.

Ego Loss For eighteenth-century aesthetic theorists, the sublime, no matter the kind, was transfixing because one was unable to take it all in at once, and feeling inadequate we are overcome. The sublime

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transported one to another state; the viewer was carried away. “The true sublime, by virtue of its nature elevates us; uplifted with a sense of proud possession, we are filled with joyful pride.” The sublime is “too big for our comprehension, they fill and overbear the mind with their Excess, and cast it into a pleasing kind of stupor and admiration” (Kant [1790] 1952: 182). Kant and others of his time wrote of the sublime in quasi-religious terms, using phrases like “evoking disdain for the ordinary worldly matters by glimpsing eternity.” The sublime was transcendental. That the spectacular sublime was framed in terms of spiritual transcendence is clear from a note from an awestruck traveler in 1739: “Not a precipice, not a torrent, not a cliff, but is pregnant with religion and poetry. There are certain scenes that would awe an atheist into belief, without the help of other argument” (cited in Wilson 1998: 517). Such sentiments drove the exodus of the English to Scotland and across the channel to Europe throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries on the so-called Grand Tour. What began as the privilege of the leisured, upper class and involved months away, slowly spread downwards to include the middle class as a major form of popular pursuit where, with the emergence of travel agencies, notably Thomas Cook’s, the Tour became tourism. As indicated above, today’s horizon-challenging skyscrapers can induce the same kind of euphoria, although today framing the experience is more likely to be made in terms of a loss of ego or ego death than spiritual transcendence (Grof 1988). With ego loss, our sense of ourselves as an individual is effaced. There is a loss of attachment to a sense of a separate self, a merging of oneself with the spectacle itself, or with others. Being taken out of ourselves is one of the oldest and persistent human desires, the common goal of psychedelic drug-taking and mysticism.

Humor Australia has long celebrated large things; some as commercial roadside attractions, some as markers of local identity. Although diminutive compared to the structures described above, they nevertheless greatly exceed normal expectations for size and consequently amuse. Most are made of concrete over wire mesh. Subjects include fruit such as the large apple, the large avocado, the large banana, the big potato, and the big pineapple; animals such as the big mosquito, the big prawn, the big swan, the big sheep, and the big jumping crocodile; as well as miscellanea like the big wine bottle, the big can of beer, the big golf ball, and the big golden gumboot. There are many more of each category. Some are large enough to walk through or climb up into. The big potato is 10 x 4 meters, the big sheep is 15 x 18 meters (Clarke 2004). Some people take road trips to visit as many as possible. None of these examples of the spectacular are in any sense sublime but each says in a lighthearted way, look at me, and either come and consume or this is who we are.

Making Might Right For Kant, even when the sublime provoked a mild horror it was entirely pleasurable and morally unproblematic. By contrast, his contemporary Burke found more to the sublime than mere pleasure (Beardsley 1982). He wrote of two kinds of sublime: the pathetic (meaning affecting the emotions)

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and the rhetorical. The pathetic sublime referred to the pleasures of the sublime being solely for their own purpose. It was the self-sufficient pleasure of the pathetic sublime that concerned Kant and the modernists who followed him, and which is explored above in terms of an unproblematic pleasure. However, for Burke, who was also a politician, the sublime could also be used for rhetorical purposes where the emotions were stirred for political, social, or religious purposes. The intent of the rhetorical sublime was invariably to promote submission to authority, the effect being the eradication of individual thought and feeling.

Requiring Submission Sublime spectacles have long been synonymous with hierarchy and power; it is one of power’s most important strategies. As such, spectaculars imply that might makes right. That scale matters when setting out to impress was known to the distinctly hierarchical civilizations of the ancient world. The ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Mayans, Aztecs, and Chinese each built on a grand scale. Consider the colossus of totalitarian rulers from the Roman Emperor Constantine whose seated, enthroned figure stood about 13 meters high. The dimensions of the pyramids, cathedrals, and mosques have already been mentioned. The power of spectacular displays has been equally employed by more recent totalitarian states. Numerous gigantic statues of Lenin and Stalin were once scattered across the former Soviet Union. Nazi sculpture was also gigantic, most notably produced by Joseph Thorak. His figures were so large that once, in an echo of the Leshan Giant Buddha, a visitor to his studio is said to have asked about the whereabouts of the artist, to which an assistant replied, “Up in the left ear of the horse” (cited in Lehmann-Haupt 1954: 98). Stalin envisaged the tallest buildings in the world while Hitler compensated by envisaging the largest dome, four times the size of Michelangelo’s atop St. Peter’s, so large that in inclement weather clouds would form inside it (Golmstock 1990). The Nazis’ projected buildings were as gigantic as they were vacuous, but as a political statement it would not have mattered that they did not please because they effectively said, we will crush you. It mattered little that their buildings were unatractive, it was enough that they were sufficiently intimidating to squash dissent. Albert Speer, the chief Nazi architect, referred to the regime’s “architectural megalomania,” the purpose being “to order the people, to subordinate, to eliminate their personalities, so that they order themselves to the totality” (cited in Hagan and Ostergren 2019: 1, 2). Hitler used architecture, along with all the arts, as a means of fulfilling his goal of an Aryan state. His vision was to be realized in both cultural forms and in politics: culture was both the end to which power aspired and the means of achieving it. To achieve his aims, he used both terror and the seduction of size (Spotts 2009). In 2019, the Chinese Communist Party annual parade celebrated its seventy years in office. It lasted 80 minutes and included 15,000 meticulously orchestrated troops, 160 planes flying overhead streaming multicolored trails, 580 tanks, missiles, and other military equipment. 70,000 white doves were released along with a similar number of colorful balloons. The message to foreign adversaries was clear—confront China at your peril—although the primary audience was domestic. It reminded ordinary Chinese that it is the party that is all powerful; it also promoted the narrative

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of advancement under communist rule. Since not everyone could attend the parade, over 620,000 32-inch television sets were given to poor households so they could marvel (Wikipedia). Elsewhere, capitalism’s most triumphant statement is made by the skyscraper. Skyscrapers are capitalism materialized in steel and glass, machines to extract rents from the skies, with city skylines like bar codes of property values. As Parker (2014) argues, “as the tall building’s shadow turns streets into darkened canyons, [their] arrogant erection demands that everyone pays attention.” Even the experience of walking into a large city court house or large city bank can both astonish and intimidate; that at least is the intention. The interior of opera houses, large art galleries, university courtyards, any grand public building, can take your breath away while also implying that you are meant to acknowledge official culture. Whether the buildings house finance, higher learning, the law, or the arts, they signal elite status as well as their insistence on your accommodation to their norms. Size squashes resistance.

Failing to See/Failing to Feel In some instances, the spectacular creates such distance from the details of a scene, viewers fail to see, and in failing to see, fail to feel. In nineteenth-century buildings prior to the invention of escalators, corporate executives were housed on the first floor, one up from the ground floor (Nye 2005). There they would open their windows to let in air, and so let in the unavoidable life of the street outside them. By contrast, corporate executives today work on the top floors, and with air conditioning they never need to open their windows. From their Olympian heights, they stare down at people where “one does not merely escape the clasp of the street; one enters the panopticon of corporate power” (265). They look out at the city, both its immense vistas aloft and the insect life way beneath them. Both seems to validate corporate power. The experience is not so much a humbling awe before divine nature, but the triumph of human entrepreneurship. The views afforded from such penthouse offices represent “the conquest of nature, the triumph of science, the rationalization of the modern city, the certainty of progress, the apotheosis of corporate will” (267). What the captains of corporate capitalism do not see, both literarily and figuratively, are the people on the streets far below them. Nor perhaps do tourists think about the often-exploitative conditions under which workers once toiled to construct the marvels they seek out. While it is now known that the pyramids were not built by slave labor, and neither were the cathedrals of Europe, even today there is considerable socioeconomic disparity between the workers who construct present-day wonders and the tourists who travel to see them.

Ignoring the Unspectacular When the spectacular takes the limelight, it invariably marginalizes other more modest interests. The eighteenth-century aestheticians taught the public to appreciate the spectacular in nature which, beginning in the nineteenth century, led to legislation to preserve selected kinds of natural vistas as national parks. If we were to lack this historical memory, the eighteenth-century aesthetics of sublime landscapes would now seem to arise as natural.

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But an aesthetic preference for spectacular scenery can impact environmental sustainability (Saito 2007). Spectacular landscapes that conform to the eighteenth-century aesthetic of the sublime sees some landscapes protected, and others deemed as boring or ugly and consequently unworthy of protection. Wetlands and prairie have historically had little chance over mountain ranges and waterfalls. Our aesthetic sensibilities act to marginalize geographic areas that lack the awe-inspiring wonderment of the spectacular but that nevertheless serve critical ecological functions. The protection of non-scenic, unspectacular environments on ecological grounds is often met with derision. We form emotional attachments with what we find aesthetically pleasing, but conversely what we consider dreary or just ugly we are prepared to see destroyed.

Tedium When in the 1950s cinemascope attempted to compete with television through scale, it developed epics that included so many extras and such large-scale sets that directors, not wanting to waste the money spent, suppressed narrative in favor of spectacle. Cameras held steady as vast armies marched past and lingered over the vast expensive sets and so interrupted narrative thrust. The effect was to bore audiences, the films flopped and epic filmmaking all but ceased for the next thirty years (Hall and Neale 2010). When epics returned with Star Wars in 1977, director George Lucas had learned the lesson: spectacle and narrative need to be threaded together. The spectacular alone can become tedious. The spectacular arrests attention, but it does not necessarily hold it. There is good reason why even the most spectacular firework displays rarely last longer than 15 minutes.

Summarizing the Spectacular There are many forms of the spectacular: natural and human-produced; of great heights and perilous depths; measured statistically and by sheer force; viewed from a distance, up close, and from inside; as well as conceived as akin to the divine or as purely secular. Even when it is trivial, like a big potato, what matters most is size that, in not only greatly exceeding expectations, confounds expectations. The spectacular demands attention. It can even take us out of ourselves, a matter of wonder, of awe. The spectacular can also overreach, be used to manipulate, and work against environments that are not spectacular. From ancient times, highly hierarchical societies and more recent totalitarian regimes have used spectacular displays to suppress dissent by creating a sense of the collective in which individualism disappears. Ironically, corporate capitalism champions the ideology of individualism, yet the view from the executive office of a skyscraper offers a metaphor of capitalism. It offers a view of industrial progress laid out in concrete and glass while not being able to see ordinary individuals toiling away below.

13 The Narrative Chapter Outline The Nature of Narrative The Modernist Rejection of Narrative Narrative Norms Narrative’s Gratifications The Stories We Tell The End

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Astro Boy, an android from the future, fights crime, evil, and injustice. He takes down robot-hating humans, robots gone berserk, and alien invaders. He is ably assisted by remarkable powers: a 100K horsepower strength, jet flight, high-intensity lights in his eyes, adjustable hearing, instantaneous language translation, a retractable machine gun in his hips, and an IQ capable of identifying a person as good or evil. Astro Boy is among the most successful of Manga figures. Originating in Japan as mostly black-and-white comics, Manga is now a worldwide phenomenon, having migrated to movies, television series, and webtoon apps on smartphones and tablets. Meanwhile, in Japan, the original Manga format remains highly popular. Read by all ages, thousand-page magazines cover all narrative genres (Schodt 2007).

The Nature of Narrative We humans are storytellers. Narrative is a human universal, our principal instrument in organizing time. While clocks measure time in seconds and its multitudes, stories organize events or incidents so that they acquire meaning (Abbott 2008). Psychologist Jerome Bruner (1991) contends that narrative is one of the two major ways in which we understand the world. There is logical, scientific knowledge that relies upon empirical verification as well as the requirements of logic to test for falsity. And there is narrative construction that is verified by its truth to our experience of life. We use logical reason to make arguments, and the episodes of our lives we turn into narratives so that 171

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they have a meaningful shape. Stories do not just happen; they are constructed in our heads, a matter of continual interpretation and reinterpretation. It is only by means of storytelling that we have any sense of “lived time” (692). While there is no such thing as life itself, there are any number of stories about life. We each tell stories about our own lives, the range of possible stories limited only by the stories available within a culture. Luckily, cultures are a rich reservoir of canonical life stories, plus numerous combinations, from which we can each construct our own life narrative, our autobiography. Canonical narratives constitute something like a culture’s toolkit for understanding itself (Bruner 1991). As Barthes (1975) writes of narrative, “Like life itself, it is there, international, transhistorical, transcultural” (237). Since the days our species painted on cave walls, we have used narrative pictures not only to entertain but also to communicate our ideas, beliefs, and values. These are especially important functions in largely illiterate societies. Narrative pictures have instructed the young and reminded adults of their culture’s norms for millennia. And whether in print or on screen, pictorial narratives are now more than ever an instrument of cultural induction and reinforcement.

The Modernist Rejection of Narrative Storytelling was a major function of premodern fine art. European art gave pictorial form to the stories from both the Bible and antiquity. In Asia, lengthy scrolls illustrated events from the life stories of Confucius and the Buddha, tales of court intrigue, and moral fables (Murray 1998). In both the East and the West, narrative pictures illustrated books, decorated pottery, and adorned churches, temples, castles, and public buildings. Yet the avant garde of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries relinquished this traditional function. Like realistic representation, the other major function that pictures had played for centuries, storytelling was abandoned in favor of artists expressing their own individual insights. Fine artists fought to express their unique painterly contribution and the idea that picture making should be the servant of a literacy source was an anathema. Striving to assert their autonomy, they relinquished storytelling to the then new mass media of print and, later, of the cinema. Besides, painters, and sculptors even more, were limited in how they could tell stories. Narratives are inherently temporal, and until the use of film to tell stories most images were forced to freeze stories at just a moment in time. As described in Chapter 2 on illusion, there had been technologies that made images move, but these were mere toys.

Narrative Norms Until film began to be exploited for its narrative potential around 1905, pictures mostly showed a single scene or at best a few related scenes. Painters, printers, and sculptors found ways to compensate, but the variety of narrative conventions they developed always remained inherently limited.

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Ancient civilizations carved narratives of battle triumphs into stone that required viewers to move their gaze or to walk beside the imagery. In the East long handscrolls were developed. As the scroll was unrolled a scene was revealed only to be rolled out of sight as the viewer unrolled a further section. The whole image was thereby experienced sequentially. This method could encompass a cast of hundreds, numerous locations, and a well-developed plot (Chen 1995). However, when narrative content is confined within a single frame, the limits to narrative are obvious. Both European medieval and ancient Chinese artists told stories in a series of separate panels, though unlike a comic strip they were rarely in sequential order. Sometimes they need to be read left to right, or right to left, or top to bottom, or bottom to top, and sometimes the sequence is diagonal. Often a particularly significant scene is placed in the middle. And often these panels are not true narratives. They frequently consist of discrete episodes rather than different moments of the same episode; effectively, they consist more as spatial arrangements than as a narrative (Barolsky 2010). Both Eastern and Western artists also represented different parts of a story within the one frame; for example, a scene taking place inside a room might include a window through which another part of the narrative can be seen taking place. Another approach was to show multiple events within the one overall scene, such as early Italian Renaissance painter Masaccio’s 1427 The Tribute Money that illustrates a biblical parable. In the center of the picture a tax collector demands payment and Jesus instructs his disciple Peter to give twice the amount. On one side of this scene, Peter is shown retrieving the money, and on the other side giving the money to the tax collector. Both approaches required the viewer to interpret the intended sequence; yet while artists could suggest a sequence they could never guarantee that a viewer would or could follow. Nineteenth-century academic, narrative paintings such as Figure 11.1 have been called a novel in a rectangle (Clay 1978), though this is misleading. Like many paintings from previous centuries—see Figures 4.3 and 8.1—they only show one episode of a story and so are dependent for interpretation upon prior familiarity with their literary source. Many so-called narrative paintings drew upon religious stories, mythological tales, and historical accounts well known to viewers at the time; rather than retelling the story, they evoke only a memory of it. Still other pictures show events in action and exist without a literary source, and they merely show something happening such as Figure 5.1 (Sitwell 1969). Better described as acts of narration than as narrative pictures, they do not involve an ongoing sequence of events, let alone a plot. They leave it to the viewer’s imagination to speculate what might have occurred beforehand and/or what is likely to follow. They rely upon the fact that with a picture where something is happening, however minor, it is almost impossible for us not to develop a before and/or after scenario (Abbott 2008). By contrast, comic strips use a sequential series of separate panels, especially when they include text. Until the development of the movies, visualizing complicated stories was left to live drama. Once live drama was wedded to the technology of film, the traditional function of the visual arts of storytelling continued. Pictures that literally move are ideal for storytelling; storytelling

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Figure 13.1 Israhel van Meckenem, The Annunciation, from the Life of the Virgin, c. late 1400s.

can unfold in a sequence as if simulating real time. At first the movies were silent and the imagery needed to be constantly interspersed with written texts to make sense of the pictures and drive the narrative forward. Musical accompaniments could set the emotional tone of a scene but not its precise, intended meaning. With the advent of the “talkies,” multimodal, multisense communication was created, and ever since it has been our preferred means of cultural transmission.

The Narrative

Figure 13.2 Masaccio, The Tribute Money, 1427.

Narrative’s Gratifications By providing a structure, narratives allow all the other pleasures of imagery to be realized.

Organizing Complexity Narrative structures organize the complexity of life. They provide an arc with a beginning, a middle, and an end that brings closure. They eliminate inessentials and focus on what is meaningful. Although there are an infinite number of specific stories, and even many genres, there exist only a limited number of basic plot structures. Rudimentary plots consist of just four steps—a status quo, an action, a reaction, and a resolution. Even more simply, a plot can begin with an action in such a way as to assume a status quo, thus consisting of only three steps (Leondar 1977). Hardly any more complicated than three or four steps, Booker (2004) claims that all the stories ever told can be reduced to just nine basic plots, though a particular story may have elements of more than one. His nine plots are: overcoming the monster; rages to riches; the quest; voyage and return; comedy; tragedy; rebirth; mystery; and rebellion of the one. For example, in the overcoming the monster plot the protagonist sets out to defeat an antagonistic, often an evil force that threatens the protagonist and/or their territory. Recent examples include the Harry Potter films and all the James Bond films. A rags to riches plot sees the protagonist acquiring power, wealth, or a partner. The Cinderella story is synonymous with this plot, but it is also used in Disney’s popular classic Aladdin. A quest plot involves the protagonist setting out to acquire something important or to travel to a location and face many trails along the way. A popular recent example is the Lord of the Rings trilogy. A comedic plot involves light and humorous characters where the protagonist

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triumphs over adversity leading to a happy conclusion. As explored in the following chapter, this includes almost all Hollywood romantic comedies. With voyage and return plots a protagonist ventures out to overcome adversity and returns wiser. Examples include The Lion King, The Hobbit, and the Back to the Future movies. Tragedy involves a hero with a major character flaw that proves to be their undoing; for example, the lead character in the film Wolf of Wall Street, a stockbroker, whose obsession with making money at all costs leads him to cut corners with the law that eventually leads to his professional and personal downfall. A rebirth plot involves a character changing their ways, usually for the better due to an important event. Examples include Beauty and the Beast and Groundhog Day. The rebellion of the one plot involves a solitary hero who either eventually succumbs to an all-powerful force, joining it, or wins and transforms the world. This is what eventually happens in the Hunger Games trilogy. While the examples above are contemporary and popular, each of the plots is age-old. The biblical tale of David and Goliath is the classic example of the overcoming the monster plot, and Homer’s Odyssey from the eighth century BCE, the second oldest work of Western literature, uses the voyage and return plot. Another way of understanding the parsimonious nature of narrative is to consider the limited number of basic conflicts that drive plots. Thompson (2018) suggests six basic conflicts. They include human versus human in which, typically, heroes and villains are pitted against one another; human versus nature in which the protagonist must battle an inhospitable environment like a desert, jungle, or terrible weather; human versus society where the protagonist is forced to make a moral choice between their own desires and the demands of society; and human versus technology, of which Astro Boy is an exemplar. Horror movies are often based on yet another basic, external conflict, that of human versus the supernatural. In each case the conflict is external. By contrast, conflicts involving human versus self occur when the protagonist deals with an internal conflict such as addressing a dilemma or competing priorities, making hard decisions, or overcoming fear. Again, each of these basic conflicts are found in both classic literature and contemporary visual culture. For example, conflict between human and self is illustrated not only by recent Batman and James Bond movies but Shakespeare’s Hamlet; the human versus nature, not only by all the disaster movies involving pandemics, tsunamis, and earthquakes, but Robinson Crusoe and Moby Dick. The human versus society conflict is the basis of all the movies about journalists exposing corruption, but also the biblical story of Jesus standing firm against the religious and political leaders of his time. News reports are also constructed as narratives; they are even called news stories. Typically, over several days a story will be introduced and then developed as new information comes to light and/ or different angles are canvased. The basic narrative arc is the same as with fiction: introduction, development, and conclusion. Some news stories resemble the short story fiction format by lasting only a few days; others are like soap operas that go on for years. Some involve only a few people, some involve a large cast. At any one time news outlets offer a constant stream of stories, some beginning, some developing, some concluding. What news outlets do not do is attempt to cover everything that is happening in the world; rather, they limit themselves to a range of stories and then allow their readers/viewers to select which stories they will follow. Thus, the infinite complexity of the world’s events are organized at the point of news construction and also by the public at the point of consumption.

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No matter how story structures are considered, and the descriptions above overlap and complement one another, there are only so many structures. Life is messy but constructed in terms of narrative, life’s mess is reduced to a manageable and comfortably familiar pattern.

Satisfying Curiosity Irrespective of the kind of plot or conflict, the animating point of every narrative is trouble. And with every narrative it is curiosity that motivates us to follow where trouble leads. Even during dull passages, and even when the general outcome is suspected well in advance, the question as to how exactly the trouble will be resolved keeps us watching. We suspend disbelief in the narrative, willing it to be real, and in return we are rewarded by being held in suspense. Curiosity is both an innate passion for knowledge, evident in even very young children, and a social incentive that is aroused by what we find in the world. Curiosity is the impetus behind exploration and narratives exploit it (Hamilton 2018). For curiosity to be triggered there must always be some level of uncertainty, so while narratives help simplify the complexity of the world and so provide comfort, they must equally offer a degree of insecurity, ambiguity, or unfamiliarity. In this way narratives are particularly suited to offer pleasure; they fulfill both our appetite for knowing, and the reward of finding something out, both the pleasure of suspense and of resolution.

Escaping into Alternative Realities Narratives address the question: What if? What if our lives were not dull, we were not ordinary, and life was not predictable? What if we were brave enough to go well beyond our comfort zone? What would we accomplish if we were powerful? What would life be like if problems were resolved? The use of narratives to address such questions is perhaps best illustrated by narratives that retell the hero’s journey, retell because according to mythologist Joseph Campbell (2012) the hero’s journey underlies numerous stories both epic and domestic. Furthermore, this basic narrative structure is found in every culture, indigenous and modern alike. Campbell calls the hero’s journey a monomyth, a myth that underlies numerous other myths, which again points to the limited nature of basic narrative structures. In one form or the other, whether consisting of the entire journey or only part of it, the hero’s journey underlies narratives as diverse as ancient Greek stories about their gods; Norse sagas; American Indian tales; and the lives of Moses, Jesus, and the Buddha. It is the story of Superman, Batman, Star Wars, and the entire Marvel and DC universes. The hero’s journey begins in the ordinary world with the protagonist oblivious to the adventure to come. He or she appears to be like us and therefore relatable. But then there is a call to action: a phone call, a conversation, or something more dramatic like an accident. The protagonist initially resists the call because it disrupts their comfortable ordinary life. And are they up to the challenge? Needing guidance, the protagonist meets with a mentor who offers insight into the dilemma to be faced and who often also provides practical training. With an infusion of self-confidence, initial doubts and fears may be dispelled, at least for the time being. Either willingly or pushed, the hero now crosses a threshold from the ordinary, everyday world into an unfamiliar world of new possibilities and

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potential danger. This may be merely leaving home or undertaking something until now thought impossible, but the hero is finally committed to endure whatever is in store. Now out of their comfort zone, the hero is confronted with a series of tests, physical and/or psychic, and to meet these challenges the hero may seek allies who in their different ways help prepare for yet greater ordeals to come. The hero’s skills and powers are tested and, with every obstacle overcome, more insight into the hero’s character is gained. The hero then approaches either an actual location of great danger or an internal conflict which the hero has not until now had to face. Early doubts and fears may resurface and time may be required to reflect before summoning the courage to press forward. For the audience, this respite acts to help understand the significance of the issues at stake as well as escalating the tension in anticipation of the greater tests to follow. Whether dealing with inner demons or physical threat, the hero must now draw upon all their skills and knowledge acquired along the journey so far. During this ordeal, it is only through undergoing some form of death that they are granted the greater power or insight required to fulfill their destiny and/or reach their journey’s end. Everything is put on the line; nothing now will ever be the same. In meeting the ultimate threat, defeating their enemy, surviving death, and/or facing their greatest fear, the hero is transformed into a new state of awareness. They may be rewarded with great power, granted secret or greater knowledge, or reconciled with a loved one or ally. Whatever the reward, the hero is now ready to return to their ordinary world. In returning, danger is replaced with acclaim, vindication, absolution, or exoneration. However, in many stories the journey is not yet over. The hero may still have to choose between personal desires and a higher cause. In the final battle the stakes are now raised beyond the hero’s own existence to far-reaching consequences for the lives of those left behind in the ordinary world. If the hero fails, others will suffer; yet, ultimately, the hero does triumph. In the final stage of the journey, the hero returns to the ordinary world but significantly different from the person who first set out on the journey. The hero will have learned many things. Having faced and overcome many dangers, the hero looks forward to a new and better life. Whether the final reward is cause for celebration, selfrealization, or an end to strife, three things are evident: change, success, and vindication of having taken the journey. The hero’s detractors are sidelined, enemies punished, and allies rewarded. The hero returns where the journey started, but both circumstances and people are now transformed. Not every story contains each of these stages; some stories compress or eliminate stages or focus on only a few stages. What is critical to note is that the journey begins in the ordinary world, enters the realm of the imagination, and returns to the ordinary world. Psychically, the story begins in the ordinary, conscious world, enters the world of unconscious dreams and desires, and returns to consciousness. The hero’s journey, one that underlines so many stories, is a dialogue between reality and fantasy, between what is and what we crave. The protagonist starts off as similar to us, someone with whom we can identify but then becomes someone with whom we wish to identify. It is a negotiation between the real and the unreal, reality and desire.

Emotional Identification Narratives take us on an emotional journey. Many narratives console because they comfort with a happy ending, neatly tidying up complex issues with a bright ribbon, but many narratives do not

The Narrative

end happily. Even so, as discussed in Chapter 4 on the highly emotional, having investigated a troubled issue, we can be consoled at least by having the issue interpreted for us so that the issue becomes bearable. Aristotle ([335 BCE] 1981) long ago noted that narratives are driven by the emotion generated by turnarounds, discoveries, and the occasional catastrophe. Turnarounds typically occur when a hard heart is suddenly softened, where a character who has displayed nothing but resistance finally relents, or where something is revealed about characters that makes their actions explicable. Much as we are in real life, we are shocked when there is an unexpected death of a sympathetic figure, and we rejoice when we are led to expect death and there is a recovery. Audiences recognize the essential goodness of certain characters and must therefore suffer along with them because the characters’ worth goes unrecognized by other characters. Due to their goodness, protagonists cannot use the underhanded means to save themselves employed by their antagonists, and the audience has to wait to see how, when, and even if, the goodness of protagonists will be made clear and the guilty exposed. Emotion is aroused when the revelation comes too late or, providing there is sufficient delay and the possibility of failure, just in the nick of time. When this happens one of two things follows. There is either what Williams (1988) calls “a paroxysm of pathos” as in domestic melodrama, or the pathos is directed into action—a chase, a rescue, or a fight—as in action-orientated genres (58). Either characters tear up or they tear away to tear down their enemy. They either find resolution in crying, hugging, and laughter, or they find they must take action such as taking revenge or seeking justice. Often, they tear up and then tear down. In this way, an excess of emotion applies equally to male- as to female-orientated genres, not only to “women’s weepies” but also to “guy cry” genres (84). Even in the Terminator series of films, with their fantastically muscled bodies, plots primarily pivot on moments of masculine pathos. The more active alternative of taking action is equally illustrated by TV wrestling as analogous not only to soap opera but to an action movie (Chang 2012). The scenario begins with the babyface (hero) and the heel (villain) being introduced to each other as well as the cause of the conflict. The plot develops as the heel obstructs the babyface in his goal, and the babyface fights back only to be cut down by the villainy of the heel. Love and sympathy is evoked for the hero and contempt is evoked for the villain, plus the desire to see the hero’s final comeback. Crowds cheer as the hero overcomes insurmountable odds and destroys the villain. Alternatively, and in keeping with the episodic structure of soap operas, the heel wins by cheating, and the outraged crowd, determined on revenge, pay to come back the following week. Aristotle would not be surprised to learn that politicians today love to tell stories intended to arouse emotion. When introducing themselves to the voting public candidates tell stories about themselves. In the United States, the stories are usually rags to riches stories, about starting at the bottom socially and economically and rising through their own true grit. Candidates may also use overcoming the monster narratives as in overcoming poverty, gender or racial bias, family dysfunction, and/or alcoholism, whatever it might be that arouses both identification and admiration. Politicians also tell emotionally charged stories about the impact on ordinary people of social policies. Better still if they show pictures of the people impacted. Politicians know that if they talk about policies in abstract terms using statistics, their audience’s eyes glaze over, but if they ground

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the points they seek to make in emotionally laced stories about how a policy will, or has, impacted the personal lives of just one or two people, everyone will identify and understand.

Everything Else As central to narrative as emotional identification is, narrative is the instrument of so much more. Narrative pictures combine our curiosity about what will happen next, with most of the other pleasures explored in this book. To mention only a few, according to genre, our dominant cultural forms offer the anesthetized, nostalgic sanctuary of the sentimental; the wonder of the spectacular; the thrill ride and moralizing of violence; the play, parody, shock, and fascination of horror; the romance and symbolic possession of the exotic; the voyeurism, fetishism, sadomasochism, and queering of the erotic; the transgressive joy of vulgarity; and the mystery and wonder of the miraculous. And to be discussed in the two subsequent chapters, narrative formulae offer both familiarity and surprise, and comedic narratives offer emotional release and a sense of power. Narrative is “the train engine which pulls with it the freight of cars of tension and relief, emotions and feelings, repressions and sublimations, symbolizations, and expanding aspects of reality” (Wilson and Wilson 1976: 4).

The Stories We Tell In the 2012 film Life of Pi, the protagonist is an adolescent obsessed with religious belief. When the ship he is sailing in sinks he is left stranded in a small boat where he is forced to endure a series of horrible, life-threatening experiences. He recounts these experiences in a form that, while pulling no punches, manages to be more affirmative than it could have been. As a mature man, a journalist asks him, given all that he has been through, if he still believes in God. He answers, “It depends on what story you tell.” The implication is that we each have a choice to tell stories that are life-affirming or that are diminishing, open to possibilities that sustain us, or close us down. Each culture has the same choice. Narratives weave together all the strengths of a society and all the positive benefits offered by popular culture, but also all the vices of society. Narratives lace each together into pleasurable forms. As described in Chapter 7 on violence, narratives frequently oscillate between rejecting violence and relishing it. In popular movies protagonists initially take the high moral position that social norms ostensibly demand, yet pushed they then execute a far greater degree of violence upon their enemy than was perpetrated on them. Similarly, as discussed in Chapter 10 on the erotic, numerous popular movies ostensibly find a sexualized society, especially among the young, utterly abhorrent, yet they also offer sexualized imagery. The same can be said for the other pleasures. Issues are addressed without resolution, made to appear taboo while equally placed on offer. Our culture typically tells stories, for example, that are peppered with throat slashing, disembowelment, and rape, rather than the love of family, friends, and the natural world. Stories typically turn on revenge rather than reconciliation where conflicts are routinely resolved through violence not negotiation. It matters. Canonical stories help frame our world; they construct our

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realities. They tell us who we are, could be, could not be. Narratives both frame the limits to our agency and our possibilities.

The End The technologies of storytelling have changed, though the basic plots and conflicts of narratives have not changed. They continue as they have always done, to thread together our deepest fears and anxieties, our aspirations and desires. Whether based on reality or fiction, storytelling remains one of the primary functions of pictures and one of the most ubiquitous of popular pleasures. Prior to the advent of the avant garde, the fine arts of painting and sculpture told stories for millennia but these media were inherently limited. Comics, graphic novels, cinema, television, and video games tell stories better.

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14 The Formulaic Chapter Outline Recipes and Road Maps General versus Particular Formulaic Fine Art Why Formulas Work Formulae and their Challenges Finishing with Formulae

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Of the 29 James Bond films that have been made since 1962, the plots have remained essentially the same. Despite the franchise being over 60 years old, and having had six actors playing the main role, from film to film the sequencing of the action is almost identical. Villains change, locations vary, and the earlier sexism has been either downplayed or eliminated as the women have gained agency. Some iterations have played the formula for laughs, others have been mock serious, and more recent ones have gone to dark places of the psyche. Yet the storyline has remained constant: a major threat is identified; Bond is assigned to overcome the threat; after an initial defeat he acquires powerful weapons and gadgets; there are further setbacks; but just when all appears lost he saves the world; and typically there is a happy ending (Hugo and Lawrence 2020).

Recipes and Road Maps James Bond films are formulaic. Like all formulaic films they follow a prescription in order to achieve a predictable result. Formulae are like cooking recipes that contain all the ingredients that must be used, and which to be successful are then mixed in a step-by-step process. They are highly conventional. Both premodern fine art and today’s mass media are largely formulaic and perhaps the best example of how they are similar is that they are both broken down into subcategories that are easily recognized and enjoyed. Both are divided according to subject matter called genres. Painting 183

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genres have included historical, landscape, portraiture, still life, and everyday life, the latter confusingly also being known as genre paintings. Popular movies and television genres include action, adventure, animation, comedy, crime, fantasy, horror, magical musicals, mystery, romance, science fiction, thriller, and western. Video game genres include action, action adventure, roleplay, first player shoot-em-ups, simulation, sand play, strategy, and sports. Each genre is recognized as such because its characters and tropes are widely recognized by their audiences. And narrative genres are also known by their plots. Narrative formulae are like road maps in which one is able to tell not only where the roads are located but also where they lead. While in the previous chapter, narratives were described as largely following a standard sequence of events, formula narratives take standardization further. Formulaic movies rely upon plots to drive their stories rather than the idiosyncrasies of individual characters. They are plot- rather than character-driven, characters being used primarily to serve the plot. They even divide their story sequences into predicable amounts of time. And the turning points in genre narratives also always occupy the same positions in the story (Hauge 2020). What happens at the 25-percent point of a 90-minute romantic comedy will be similar to what happens at the same percentage point of a 3-hour action adventure epic. The first 10 percent of a story involves the setup. The challenge to be faced or the opportunity on offer is presented. The next 15 percent is taken up with negotiating that. The next 25 percent will involve progress, and at 50 percent into the story a further turning point involves a point of no return. The next 25 percent involves complications and high stakes that culminate in a major setback. The final 25 percent is spent on the climax. This is broken into two roughly similar amounts of time, the first being a final push and the second being the aftermath. Many books, articles, and blogs offer advice on how to write a movie or television script according to these basic guidelines. As a further guide, some even indicate the number of words or how many pages of a script should be devoted to each stage

General versus Particular Formulae are frequently ridiculed, being condemned as comprised of clichés and associated with a lack of originality. It is one of the main charges made against popular culture. Characters are accused of being no more than cardboard cutouts lacking any of the complexity of real people, and formulaic plots are damned as nothing but laziness. Fine art modernists saw formulae as an abomination. Formulae were evidence of a lack of imagination on the part of both image-makers and viewers. For aesthetic theorist Clement Greenburg (1973), popular culture employed formulae because it used “the methods of industrialism,” and was “turned out mechanically” (11). Bruner (1991) updated the technological analogy but with the same intent. He compared formula narratives “to the default settings of a computer: merely an economical, time-and-effort saving way of dealing with knowledge” (10). He considered them mindless. Likewise, Barthes (1991) distinguished between non-formulaic narratives that engage the imagination and challenge the intellect to think of alternative meanings, and formulaic narratives that are so simplistic that alternative ways of

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interpreting them do not exist. For Barthes, audiences for formulaic material were entirely passive; the narratives themselves and our response to them so well rehearsed that only one meaning was possible. As explored in Chapter 4 on the highly emotional, modernists considered that art expressed the unique response of artists to particular circumstances. Popular culture consisted of clichés and platitudes; meaningless, prosaic statements; banalities and commonplaces. It lacked the complexity and subtlety of real life, opting for the general rather than the specificity of actual situations and personalized responses to them. In addressing popular media producers Collingwood (1938) claimed that “all you need do is to put before your audience a representation of the typical features belonging to the kind of thing that produces it: make your kings very royal, your soldiers very soldierly, your women very feminine . . . and so on” (46). Collingwood distinguished between real art and traditional crafts like pottery and quilting. For Collingwood, real artists avoided rules to produce unique objects derived from personal experience; crafts followed well-understood rules to produce predictable products that looked like many similar examples of the same kind of thing. Most modernists happily ignored the rule that governed the craft-like approach of most premodern art, but not Collingwood. Instead, he distinguished between what he called art conventionally so-called and art properly so-called. Most premodern art was only conventionally called art. Thus he effectively assigned all but rare exceptions in the history of premodern art to craft and/or to popular culture. As described in Chapter 4, he was right to do so.

Formulaic Fine Art The indisputable fact is that what is conventionally known as fine art has relied heavily on formulae for millennia. Chapter 4 describes—and Figure 4.2 demonstrates—how for centuries European artists used chironomia manuals to convey emotions though gestures and body positions. But following formulae did not stop there. In both Europe and the East artists also used pattern books to learn how to represent basic subjects, their proportions, appropriate shading, and even how to proceed one step after another. In China, the process of painting was highly ritualized. Consider the advice from a seventeenthcentury standard textbook where learning to paint was seen as analogous to writing; artists were to paint one stroke at a time, building up from simple to more complicated strokes. Advising on how to paint orchids, the text reads: “First draw four leaves. They should vary in length. A fifth crosses them . . . Ink tones should be varied. Old and young leaves should mingle. Petals should be light, stamens and calyx dark” (cited in Gombrich 1960: 129). Another pattern book advises that in drawing a bird, artists should consider that since birds come from eggs their bodies should first be drawn as an egg shape with beak, tail, and wings added later. In Europe, similar kinds of precise instruction were offered by the numerous pattern books that were printed and widely used by artists from the mid sixteenth century until the mid nineteenth century. The pattern books included detailed exemplar drawings of all manner of subjects, though

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mostly of the human body and its parts. Typically, the pattern books devoted many pages to drawings of the head, feet, hands, eyes, noses, ears, and so on, each in many different positions. Many drawings show the body in movement. Some pattern books indicate mathematical formulae for the body; others opt to show how to block the body or body parts into squares to make it easier for artists to estimate proportions. Others, like the Chinese pattern books above, include greatly simplified schema to provide essential proportions, showing the body or body parts as a combination of circles or squares. As discussed in Chapter 1 on a realistic style, the history of Western art, from the twelfth to the nineteenth century, is a history of ever greater and different kinds of realism. To achieve this goal, artists proceeded by means of a combination of formulae and innovation (Gombrich 1960). Most artists slavishly followed formulae, and even those that innovated, like Leonardo and Michelangelo, invariably began by studying the pattern books and/or making a close study of their masters. Prior to the introduction of pattern books, the 1,000-year tradition of medieval European art was entirely reliant upon apprentices learning by copying their masters. Early medieval art, Gombrich (1960) writes, “is an art of copyists” (130). With few exceptions, there was no attempt to represent particulars, only generalizations: a man, not a specific man, a bird, not a specific bird. Inspired by the idea of Platonic forms being not only the sum of all particulars but of a higher nature than particulars, artists sought to deliberately ignore particulars in favor of what they

Figure 14.1 Heinrich Lautensack, Skeleton, Front View, and Sterometic Figure of a Man, from Geometry, Proportion and Person, 1610.

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considered universals. The whole point of representing a subject was to convey its spiritual essence, and this was only ensured by adhering closely to the pre-existing formulae. The formulae was guaranteed to capture the universal. Even this 1,000-year old medieval practice is short compared to the tradition of ancient Egyptian art in which a unique formula for the human body remained virtually unchanged for 3,000 years. In the whole history of picture-making, innovation existed and even occasional originality, but the norm has been the following of formulae (Gombrich 1960). The modernist valorization of artists as uniquely inspired individuals who follow their muse rather than rules is an historical aberration.

Formulae and Form Even modernists followed rules. Many modern fine art paintings adhere to compositional formulae. Any number of paintings conform to the rule of thirds by which a picture is divided into three equal sections at which point significant items are placed. This can be done horizontally, or vertically, or both, in which case the picture is divided into nine sections. Today, introductory books and articles on how to take photographs recommend beginners use this formulae as a surefire way to achieve compositional success. Painters knew the rule of thirds as the golden ratio or golden section, or in the words of the fifteenth-century mathematician Pacioli, the “divine proportion” because of its allegedly divine simplicity. The rule of thirds is a simplified version of the golden section whose exact measurements are 1:1.618. Many painters have used it more as a guide than a rule, but such innovative as well as such different painters as Leonardo da Vinci and George Seurat used its exact proportions. During the 1880s, artists like Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh, exemplars of modernism, turned to Japanese art and found items not placed according to the golden section. For example,

Figure 14.2 Leonardo da Vinci, Annunciation, 1492–5.

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Figure 14.3 George Seurat, Circus Sideshow, 1887–8.

they found items placed up against the edges of the frame; yet in following their new model they simply substituted one set of conventions for another.

Why Formulas Work With so much repetition, why do formulas remain so popular? If we know what to expect with a genre movie, television program, or video game, why do we still choose to participate? With so many media options to choose from, where is the interest in what seems like the same old thing? Why don’t we get bored?

Easy Communication The great virtue of formulaic imagery is that it is easily understood because its figures, tropes, and, in the case of formulaic narratives, plots, are widely recognized. This is important where either the audience is illiterate or the time to develop characters and situations is limited. How else to communicate on electronic platforms with numerous free-to-air and subscription options all competing for attention? In both cases it is enormously helpful to both image-makers and the public to immediately recognize stock characters.

The Formulaic

Stock characters, or archetypical figures, represent a whole class of people by means of a single prominent trait. In ancient Greece, the term archetype meant original pattern. The Greek playwright Theophrastus, a student of Aristotle, was the first to conceive of the idea of stock characters. He introduced thirty character types; for example, the garrulous man, the hapless man, the man of petty ambition, the coward, the greedy person, the stingy man, the insincere show-off, and the fault-finder. Others included characters known principally for being suspicious, absent-minded, repulsive, offensive, complacent, and shamelessly greedy. As these characters are mostly negative, Theophrastus presumably had another list of positive characters that is now lost (Bennett and Hammond 2018). Today’s genre movies similarly rely upon a range of stock characters, each of which are readily recognizable. For example, the wise old man, an elderly character who provides wisdom to the protagonist; the absent-minded professor; the mad scientist, an insane or highly eccentric and often villainous crackpot; the jock, a muscular not very intelligent male athlete; a femme fatale, a beautiful but mischievous and traitorous woman; the nerd, a socially impaired, obsessive, and overly intellectual person; the boy next door, an average nice guy; and the girl next door, an average girl with a wholesome outlook (Wikipedia Contributors 2018b). Many of today’s stock characters have impressive pedigrees both from the West and the rest. Consider the damsel in distress figure familiar to contemporary viewers from iterations of the King Kong movies as well being a staple of many video games, the rescue of the damsel being the whole

Figure 14.4 Yemima Calistra, Human Puppets—The Love Story of Sita and Rama, 2020.

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object of some games (Skolnick 2014). Such damsels inform ancient Greek tales which tell of helpless maidens facing sacrifice before being saved. Numerous European paintings represent St. George saving a maiden from a dragon. The ancient Indian damsel Sita is kidnapped by the villainous Ravana but rescued by her husband Rama, and dance re-enactments of the story continue to enchant contemporary audiences in Indonesia. Consider, too, how Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet as moonstruck lovers from the wrong side of the tracks are reworked by almost all romantic comedies; and in an example of how storytelling is similar from culture to culture, the story of Sita and Rama is also closely related to Romeo and Juliet. Other reworkings include romanticized folk tales of Robin Hood as an outlaw fighting for the good of the people reappearing not only as movies of Robin Hood but also as the basis of the Batman and Terminator movies. Vain, mischievous, and coquettish soubrettes feature in paintings of Salome and reappear in movies like Mean Girls (2004). A shrew, a comedic, scolding, nagging woman, a staple of European folklore, is similarly reworked, for example, by Wilma Flintstone. Yokels, uncomplicated country folk, appear in numerous domestic paintings of happy, inebriated peasants, and are re-presented by the iterations of The Beverly Hillbillies (Friedman et al. 2014). Premodern fine art and today’s popular genres also rely upon widely understood tropes. For centuries, religious figures in Western art were recognizable primarily by the conventions of their dress and attributes. The Virgin Mary invariably wore a blue cloak and a red dress. Joseph, her husband, was usually represented as an older man with a staff. All the major Christian saints were as readily identifiable through similar kinds of attributes: St. John the Evangelist with a book, St. Peter with keys, and so on (Apostolos-Cappadona 1994). For a largely illiterate population such conventional signs acted as a readily recognizable language. Traditional Chinese art is arguably even a richer source of tropes. Cranes signified peace; turtles, long life; lions, good fortune and prosperity; deer, long life and wealth; and horses and monkeys, success. Among fruit, an orange symbolized happiness; pomegranates, fertility; apples, peace; and peaches, long life. Colors were also symbolic: red, gold, and green signified good luck; white, purity, death, and mourning; yellow, heaven; and green, harmony (Hays 2016). Among the common tropes of action/adventure movies and video games are extensive property damage, physical danger, extended fights, explosions, vehicles crashing, run-away vehicles— usually buses or trains—high-speed chases, ticking bombs, and last-second rescues. Science fiction tropes include killer aliens, long-abandoned alien technology, parallel worlds, time travel, intelligent robots, murderous machines, clones, genetic mutations, and warp speed and wormholes used for transportation (Johnson 2019). Westerns tropes are extensive, including semi-nomadic lone drifters, cattle rustlers, bounty hunters, and quick-draw gunslingers located in isolated homesteads, the desert, and small frontier towns, and involving cattle drives, bank robberies, coach hold-ups, cattle rustling, and fighting Indians. Rifles and handguns are obligatory (Matheson 2017). The tropes of movie westerns are largely based on nineteenth-century pulp fiction. As described in Chapter 8, the tropes of today’s horror genre have a much longer pedigree. Means of dismemberment have changed since ancient times—grinding machines and chainsaws today—but not dismemberment itself. And the all-devouring Hellmouth of medieval depictions of hell—the gaping mouth of a huge monster—are reproduced today as cannibalism, mutilation, and torture. Standard Hollywood fare is filled with tropes, though none are more fantastical than those of

The Formulaic

Bollywood musicals. Like horror tropes, the magical tropes of Bollywood are age-old, having their origins in ancient Indian folklore. They include dramatic but absurd entrances no matter what characters are doing, women’s hair blowing in the wind even indoors, everyone moving in perfect synchronization, frequent walking in slow motion, handling emotional confrontations by singing and dancing, and transporting to a foreign location for a quick song and dance routine. Additionally, plots are often advanced by someone sensing something, getting a message from a divinity, or the one person no one would want listening located within earshot (Kishore, Sarwal, and Patra 2016).

Reducing Complexity Further In the previous chapter narratives were characterized as organizing complexity, reducing it so that it is both meaningful and manageable. With formulaic narratives complexity is much further reduced into neat, predictable patterns. Knowing what we are about to see we can anticipate the pleasures to come, so much so that we may feel frustrated when our expectations are not realized. Real life is invariably complicated, often nasty, and utterly unpredictable, but formulaic narratives compress it all into foreseeable conclusions. By the end of the setup it is usually possible to predict, at least in general terms, what will happen. The exact development remains unknown, as does the precise nature of the conclusion, but with sitcoms we know the boy and girl get together, and with action movies that evil is overcome, the monster destroyed. Consider just how familiar the following summary of the romantic comedy genre feels. Romcoms fall into the standard three-part division of stories in which boy meets girl, boy and girl fall out, and boy and girl get back together again; or more simply: meet, lose, and get (Mernit 2020). No matter how varied the setting, however far-fetched the complication is that has them falling out, or however implausible the reason they reconnect, romantic comedies follow this simple, three-step structure. As mentioned earlier, the bare bones of the story are plotted with mathematical precision. We first learn something about each of the love interest’s separate lives and goals, and then the love interests meet. This acts as the catalyst for everything that follows. Sparks fly, especially if from the start one or both start off on the wrong foot, such as making a social faux pas that causes dislike or embarrassment. Tension is raised as there is some suggestion of a looming conflict, usually introduced by conflicting goals or the intervention of preexisting significant others. Both have friends who comment on the primary action and who introduce most of the comedy but may also meddle. At the midpoint of the story, one or both of the lovers realize that their burgeoning emotions conflict with their personal goals. Often one or both lovers will feel guilty. But the relationship develops despite misgivings on the part of one or both partners. This culminates in a kiss or sleepover, which appears to cement the relationship but then a major conflict arises. With hurtful words and tears, the lovers break up and go their separate ways. Now they each reassess their goals. Do they really want their own lives or to be together? One of them often decides that they must immediately leave whatever location they are in. The other realizes they have been idiotic and makes a mad dash to stop them leaving. Catching up with their run-away lover, the chaser makes a speech and all is forgiven. The only very rare variant on this is where they do go their separate ways. All the complexity of actual relationships is drastically reduced. Whatever happens, however dreadful, resolutions are provided; moreover, with genre stories resolutions are often happy.

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Ongoing Comfort and Anxiety Formulae reassure, and given the ongoing complexities of the world and our anxious responses, narrative formulae provide repeated reassurance. Just as children want to hear the same story over and over in order to fully assimilate lessons and to feel safe, adults also seek security through repetition. As described in Chapter 8 on the horrific, Freud believed that people are often obliged to repeat experiences from their early lives not by remembering them as something that happened in the past but to act them out as contemporary experience, and, further, that this can take mediated forms such as watching horror movies. Yet repeated exposure to other genres like sitcoms do not appear to arise from early deep and abiding trauma. More recent attachment theories, described in Chapter 4 on the highly emotional, emphasize that people consistently choose their most familiar experiences as a means to deal with problems of the past, believing that new experiences will be more painful than their present situation or too new and untested to imagine (Niedenthal and Ric 2017). Children’s play is involuntarily caught up in repetitive acts that demonstrate an instinct for mastery over the conflicts and anxieties that give rise to their play. Their repetitive play is at the same time pleasurable and indicative of the persistence of anxiety. Formula fiction is a dramatization that is similarly part pleasure and part disturbance. The incentive for repeatedly exposing ourselves to stories of essentially the same kind is an ongoing mixture of pleasure and anxiety. The fact that romantic comedies repeatedly end happily suggests that we know relationships do not always end this way, but we prefer to return to, or look forward to, a time during courtship which, despite its own complications, is a giddy time filled with possibilities. The action genre with its stories of unstoppable heroes, or with superhero stories with invincible heroes, suggests we acknowledge that we are rarely heroic, but we desire to feel heroic. Additionally, protagonists are often outlaws who in the process of righting wrongs create a lot of havoc. Who does not enjoy transgressing, indulging the thrill, at least vicariously, of breaking the law and creating mayhem?

Innovation Yet however comforting we find formulae, we equally enjoy innovation. We enjoy finding out how a new film reinterprets a formula. Consider the single most famous rags to riches story, the tale of Cinderella. Disney’s 2015 remake of its animated 1942 version used live actors, but this was not the only significant change. Although the new version used similar costumes and followed the older one almost scene for scene, scenes were also added that made Cinderella appear more complex and powerful than her previous incarnation. The earlier version portrayed a demure Cinderella who quietly accepted her fate, a figure that would not be welcome today. We enjoy seeing how current values are positively acknowledged and incorporated. With formulae, convention and innovation go hand in hand. Finally, some movies and television programs go further than updating formulae; they deliberately work against formulae, where interest is peaked by seeing the familiar determinedly turned on its head. This happened with westerns. As the formula grew stale, new westerns were made that re-envisioned the genre; heroes became anti-heroes, Indians were humanized, clearly

The Formulaic

defined conflicts between good versus bad were blurred, and so on. The pleasure lay in the surprise of greater complexity. Westerns proved to be a very flexible genre, able to be reinvented. The James Bond franchise remains relevant for the same reason; within the restraints of the action genre, it has been reinvented several times. Similarly, comedic spoofs are formulae turned upside down; they offer the pleasure we gain in being in on the joke.

Reading Complexly As noted earlier, formulae are attacked for being mindless and their reception considered to be passive. But in Chapter 4 on the highly emotional, it was noted that while television soap operas can appear simplistic and formulaic their fans find them complex. Long-term viewers interpret the text of a soap opera in far more complex ways than a mere examination of its plot structure, character development, and tropes. What appears as predictably formulaic is often viewed in multilayered ways. Outsiders or newbies to any cultural form may see nothing but simplicity and sameness, but insiders learn to notice and appreciate variation and complexity. As always with interpreting forms of cultural production, it is essential to look not only at the form itself, but to the nature of its reception, and since people are comprised of multilayered complexities, so it is with interpretation.

Formulae and their Challenges Boredom Formulae can become boring. When formulae are not spiced up with novel interpretations, they soon lose their value. Conventions become clichés. What was originally striking becomes overused to the point of losing its original meaning, and certainly its original affect; it has become trite and irritatingly predictable. The modernist valorization of art as a unique expression of individual artists during the nineteenth century was due in large measure because it was widely felt that the formulae that had served for centuries had lost their power to persuade. The same has occurred with the western genre of movies and television series. They once outnumbered all other Hollywood genres, and despite their many reinventions, they eventually wore out their welcome. At the present time, the genre appears exhausted (Matheson 2017). Presumably the same will eventually happen to all the detective programs and the so-called reality shows that are now a staple of television in many countries.

Formulae and Falsity Some stock figures are benign or even positive; for example, the boy and the girl next door and the wise man and wise woman. Others are negative. But as long as they are not associated with a minority group they, too, can remain harmless enough. A mad scientist is unlikely either to be

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taken seriously or cause offense because viewers understand that most scientists are unlikely to be mad. But when a negative characteristic is coupled with a minority group, there is a three-fold problem: offense is caused to the minority group; the majority group frames the minority group in terms of their negative representation; and the minority group may adopt the negative portrayal as their self-image. These conditions are especially likely if the stock figure is repeated ad infinitum and never countered. As discussed in Chapter 10 on the exotic, centuries of stereotyping of Arabs as terrorists, oversexed, violent, and cruel has had serious consequences. Hollywood’s past is notorious for almost invariably stereotyping African Americans as lazy good-for-nothings, of value only when serving white folk, or when singing and dancing. Until the early 1990s, male homosexuals were almost always portrayed as effeminate, indicated by the tropes of a high-pitched voice, emotional instability, a love of shopping and fashion, and a limp wrist. In general, the LBGTQI community was portrayed as violent and murderous, and often as pedophiles, always as threats to social norms. Complicating matters, homosexual Asian men were represented as both oversexed as homosexuals and undersexed as Asians (Leong 2014). Formulae repress complexity, and in this case their sometimes absurdity is exposed.

Finishing with Formulae Formulae have been a prominent feature of cultural production for millennia. They reassure. They profoundly reduce the unwanted complexity of real life, and their repetition addresses an ongoing need for reassurance. Yet the pleasure of the familiar goes hand in hand with the pleasure of what is new or innovative, and when formulae wear out, become clichéd and trite, they must be either reinvented or die. More significantly, as explored in more detail in previous chapters, relying on stock characters that negatively stereotype minorities causes real-life damage.

15 The Humorous Chapter Outline Humor and Mirth Humor and the Haughty Humor versus Gravitas Why We Smile, Snigger, and Snort Humor’s Disciplinary and Dark Side Humor and Hostility

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Can one conceive without sexual intercourse? Can one get fat without eating? MacHovec 1988: 161

This and many other such riddles appear on a 3,500-year-old clay tablet from Sumer, a civilization from southern Mesopotamia that predates the Babylonians. Could this be the oldest dirty joke? Possibly not. Much earlier, around 10,000 BCE, fools were first associated with merrymaking, eating and drinking at feasts, winning the laughter of the guests by their idiocy or deformity (Wells 1932). Millennia later, at the time of writing this chapter, typing the words internet humor into Google rendered 147 million sites. The first site contained a photograph of a shocked boy at his terminal accompanied by the words, “Look hard enough on the Internet and you’ll find your mum naked.”

Humor and Mirth No known culture has been without a sense of humor (Martin and Ford 2018). Humor is a universal, as is mirth, and though often confused they are not the same thing. Mirth is natural; humor is learned. Mirth refers to observable expressions of gaiety, happiness, or joy, including laughter. Charles Darwin described humans as “the laughing animal” but laughter can exist without humor (cited in Billig 2005: 7). Babies and young children laugh a great deal because they are happy, but 195

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they do not yet have the mental equipment to have acquired a sense of humor. Moreover, adults sometimes laugh in social situations because it eases strained relationships, not because they are amused but precisely because they are not amused. There are many kinds of humor; for example, clowning, irony, jests, jokes, kidding, mockery, puns, repartee, riddles, ridicule, satire, slapstick, teasing, and wit. Caricature involves the ludicrous exaggeration of characteristic features of a subject; burlesque involves mockery and exaggeration; parody involves exaggerated imitation intended to destroy an illusion; and travesty involves a ludicrous incongruity of style or subject matter. Much visual humor is found in an incongruity between speech and visual appearance as well as ineffable facial expressions and bodily movements that cannot be scripted (Martin and Ford 2018). Many attempts have been made to compile examples of humor, notably by Aristotle (Temple and Temple 1998) and Leonardo Da Vinci (MacHovec 1988). Many attempts have also been made to classify the topics of humor, including by Freud ([1905] 1960) who compiled fifteen kinds. But since what is deemed funny differs from culture to culture, and even from person to person, such categorizations can never be definitive. Reflecting its great variety, humor is also associated with a wide variety of physical manifestations. This is when mirth does derive from humor. Observable behavior includes smiling and smirking, and, in more extreme forms, slapping one’s sides, holding one’s stomach, and even rolling around helplessly. Auditory responses include laughing, chuckling, sniggering, and snorting. Wit may raise little more than a smile, while a pratfall can cause a prolonged belly laugh. Both popular self-help literature (Fiorentino 2020) and academic researchers laud the positive benefits of humor to those both physically and psychologically ill (Martin and Ford 2018). Pedagogues laud its value in creating an atmosphere conducive to learning, and business managers recommend it to ease relationships in the workplace (Scheel and Gockel 2017). A sense of humor is now regarded as a vital human quality; someone without a sense of humor is thought of as boring, even suspect. Humor is part of an optimistic, can-do outlook in which no matter what happens to people, they are encouraged to accentuate the positive. Who could object to humor? And yet many have.

Humor and the Haughty As with other popular pleasures, the history of condemning humor begins with Plato. Plato argued that laughter needed to be tightly controlled, especially the kind of laughter that mocks authority, though he did not oppose all forms of humor or all kinds of laughter (Billig 2005). The guardians of his ideal state were permitted to use mockery to keep people in line. They could laugh in the serious pursuit of morality, truth, and discipline. As in other matters, Aristotle was more benign than Plato, being more concerned to categorize different kinds of humor than to condemn certain kinds. He did condemn “buffoons or vulgar fellows” who laugh too much and who “are more concerned to raise a laugh than to keep within the bounds of decorum” (cited: 44). For Aristotle, the problem was not with laughter per se but with

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showing poor taste in laughing crudely at the ugly and misshapen. He recommended a middle path, between being “too fond of fun and raillery” and showing tact and respecting propriety. One could use wit, irony, and innuendo, but not obscenity and above all not “buffoonery” (cited: 45). His primary concern was to prescribe appropriate behavior for members of his own class, who should say only the sort of things that are suitable to “a virtuous man and gentleman” (cited: 45). At stake for these ancient philosophers was the maintenance of class distinctions based on good taste, and as with many other pleasures, class distinction was based on a mind-versusbody binary. For most early Christians the mind/body distinction was equally at play, although the stakes for them were much higher than for the philosophers, nothing less than the possibility of divine retribution. God preferred serious minds and disciplined bodies. Early church fathers preached against laughter, especially mimes and their jests. With few exceptions, the focus of Christian piety was asceticism, atonement, humility, and remorse. Martin Luther was an exception. He believed in the redemptive power of laughter, and possessing a keen sense of the bawdy, he extensively employed what he believed to be the derision of God in his fight against Catholicism. On the other hand, Puritans have been described as living in mortal fear that someone somewhere might be happy (Summerville 1989). As one pious, low churchman wrote in the middle of the nineteenth century, “it is scarcely worthwhile to say that boisterous laughter does not comport with Christian gravity” (cited in Billig 2005: 49). Like the views of the ancient philosophers, Christian pietism did not seek to abolish humor altogether. As with the ancients, derision could be used so long as it was in the service of guiding others along the true path. Ridicule was the servant of righteousness. The more secular aestheticians of the eighteenth century were less concerned with dour devotion than with determining what kinds of humor facilitated productive, convivial conversation (Billig 2005). They were the heirs of Plato and Aristotle, for their overriding concern was similarly with prescribing the humor appropriate to their class, and for them this meant restricting humor to the judicious use of wit and irony. Bawdy, carnivalesque humor was a deliberate affront to tasteful moderation, and had no place in a civil society. The fairground comedian whose first jest was to prove his cleanliness by blowing his nose upon his audience was an anathema (Stallybrass and White 1986). So far was bodily humor from their concerns, it was barely ever mentioned. Humor should be used with care. Amiable humor was a matter of morality to which moderation was the key. Whereas anyone could appreciate a physical pratfall, to appreciate the incongruities of wit and irony, mental dexterity was necessary, and laughing at others was permissible only so long as people laughed with clever wit in a convivial manner. This was a genteel discourse. The slapstick, pants-down buffoonery of the clown was utterly inadmissible. For these eighteenth-century aestheticians laughter suggested freedom of rancour; it was a sign of social sophistication, but, echoing Plato, for the supposedly pious to be attacked for their piety was utterly unacceptable. They used the humor of wit and irony, and even gentle ridicule among their own class, to help establish bonds between people like them, but a merciless comedic attack on their own class from the lower classes was intolerable. Joseph Addison wrote of those who gave “stabs to a man of reputation” as a “Race of Vermin,” and another outraged critic described them as:

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Like maggots hatched in summer’s noontide hour The filth, which gives them being, they devour . . . Donald 1996: 23

Subsequent to these restrictive views on humor, modernist art that attempted humor typically requires footnotes. It is usually of an erudite kind. Consider René Magritte’s surrealist painting The Treachery of Images (1928). It consists of a picture of a pipe with the words underneath “This is not a pipe.” It may cause a knowing smile, but it is unlikely to evoke a belly laugh. Modernist art employs either wit or irony, the humor of the quick and clever mind. It is preoccupied by serious matters, not fun or the funny. The closest thing most modernist art comes to humor is being ridiculed by cartoonists for being incomprehensible. For a good laugh we must turn to popular culture where all kinds of humor are plentiful.

Humor versus Gravitas However, there has always been a problem with humor itself, not just with the risible kind. Comedy has always played second fiddle to tragedy. Even when considered to be art, comic imagery has been equated with the lowly. Aristotle considered that, unlike the representation of tragic events in which people and their deeds are portrayed as better than they are, painters of humorous scenes made “an imitation of men worse than the average, not indeed as regards every sort of vice, but only as regards the Ridiculous, which is a species of the ugly . . . a mistake or deformity” (cited in Donald 1996: 29). Further equating their subject matter with the painters themselves, he viewed comic painters in possession of mean dispositions, and moreover to belong to the lower social classes. Comedy was the consequence of base, mean preoccupations, comic painters being motivated either by malice or insufficient ability to do something more elevated. While painters of heroic deeds enter into the emotions of their characters, comedy relies upon a failure of emphatic imagination. Some painters chose comedy because they could do no better. Although comedy offers pleasure, it is always of a lesser kind than the pleasure of tragedy. The distinction was reiterated during the eighteenth century. Dutch and Flemish painting of scenes of raillery among peasants was admired, but by comparison to the lofty ideals of heroic and tragic art they were regarded as mean and vulgar. As the English painter Joshua Reynolds declared, “The painters who have applied themselves to low and vulgar characters . . . deserve great praise, but as their genius has been employed on low and confined subjects, the praise which we give must be limited as to its object” (cited in Donald 1996: 29). The epic and heroic evoked the beautiful and the sublime, while comedy, in dealing with people’s deformed natures, was a species of the ugly. During the nineteenth century, the distinction still held fast as history painting was placed at the apex of the genre hierarchy and comic scenes at the bottom. History painting evoked universal human values, timeless and noble sentiments, whereas comedy dealt with ephemeral and lowly particulars. As to the artists this distinction was expressed as generosity of spirit versus meanness, empathic imagination versus insensitivity, ability versus a lack of ability, and idealistic versus pecuniary motives.

The Humorous

Figure 15.1 Adriaen van Ostade, A Sense of Taste, 1635.

Even today, an echo of these distinctions remain. More comic movies are made than any other genre, yet movie awards to drama and epics greatly outnumber awards for comedies. Consider the kind of films that are nominated for, and win, Academy Awards. From their inception in 1927 to 2001, 59 percent of nominations went to drama and epics and only 18 percent to comedies. Drama and epics won 55 percent compared to 14 percent won by comedies. Since these statistics were taken, the trend is now even stronger. From 2002 to 2014 comedy nominations dropped to 7 percent with no winners (Stokes 2015). It appears that there is a long-standing, and also continuing, ranking of cultural forms that refuses to take comedy as seriously as dramas are taken.

Why We Smile, Snigger, and Snort Unlike violence or horror, it may at first seem peculiar even to ask why we are attracted to humor. The current popular fashion is to regard humor in entirely positive and innocent terms. Yet humor is not one thing but many, and particular kinds of humor appear to offer different kinds of pleasure.

Feeling Superior The earliest theories of humor, those developed by Plato and Aristotle, emphasize how humor denigrates a victim. Plato wrote of the “pleasure of seeing other people humiliated,” and Aristotle

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wrote of humor as the “enjoyment of the misfortune of others due to a momentary feeling of superiority or gratified vanity that we ourselves are not in the predicament observed” (cited in MacHavoc 1988: 30). By means of ridicule and mockery we are enabled to feel superior to whatever we ridicule or mock. Similarly, the seventeenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes argued that humor was rooted in “the apprehension of some deformed thing in comparison whereof we applaud ourselves” (cited in Carroll 1999: 153). Humor positions us as superior to those we ridicule or mock. We laugh down at others. We humiliate, subjugate, disparage; the tone is aggressive, hostile, and negative. It was common among ancient peoples to create separate ceremonies in which their deities were alternatively worshiped and mocked and, despite disapproval, insulting and derisive humor continued under Christianity (Bakhtin 1994). As discussed in Chapter 6 on vulgarity, the intolerant seriousness of the official church appears to have made it necessary to legitimize humor during carnival time. Almost all the official rituals, feasts, literature, and speeches employed by the church had their counter in comic travesties. Sermons, prayers, hymns, legends of the saints, eulogies, miracle plays, and theological debates all enjoyed a second life as parodies. Spending much of their time confined to their cells, it was often the monks who produced them. Carnival humor was lewd and visual, with freaks—human, animal, and vegetable—each the subject of derisive humor. Carnival also included what Bakhtin (1994) calls billingsgate, a term derived from the vituperative language of medieval marketplaces. Billingsgate is a long diatribe of abuse consisting of outrageous, violent curses and oaths. It was a form of speech filled with invective, the principal aim of which was to utterly degrade an opponent. Consider the following extract from the prologue of a book by the sixteenth-century French monk and scholar Rabelais who liberally drew on the language of the carnival: “[M]ay the festers, ulcers and chancres of every purulent pox infect, scathe, mangle and rend you, entering your bumgut as tenuously as mercuralized cow’s hair . . . and may you vanish into an abyss of brimstone and fire . . . if you do not believe implicitly what I am about to relate in the present Chronicles” (216). Today, the tradition of billingsgate is maintained by US television’s World Federation Wrestling. Wrestlers deliver threats and badmouth each other in obnoxious and outrageous terms. They specialize in take-no-prisoner taunts and put-downs. As wrestlers pounce around the stage, their faces either contorted in anger or smiling broadly, they taunt their opponents with insults: “You sound like a human vacuum cleaner, managing to both suck and blow at the same time.” “I’d love to slap you across your face, but it looks like God already beat me to it” (Basu 2018). Their insults also take a more visual display such as rude gestures and stamping derisively on the national flag of an opponent. Just as ridiculing one’s enemies is of great long-standing, so ridiculing prominent people has been consistently a feature of societies with even a minimum of social license. Aristophanes, the Greek playwright and a contemporary of Socrates, satirized the distinguished philosopher by portraying him as a comic figure. In Clouds a student of Socrates relates how the great man was studying the moon, staring up open-mouthed, when a gecko on the roof defecated onto him. Audiences are said to have loved it (Billig 2005). The kind of mockery suffered by Socrates was a major feature of the English political cartoonists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Their merciless derision of prominent politicians and royalty attracted large, enthusiastic audiences. Crowds pressed hard against the glass panes of shop windows to see the latest engravings. Among the most common targets was the Prince Regent,

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Figure 15.2 James Gillray, A Voluptuary Under the Horrors of Digestion, 1792.

later George IV, who was widely known to be profligate, promiscuous, and a glutton. In A Voluptuary Under the Horrors of Digestion (1792) James Gillray depicted him as a hung-over, languid sybarite surrounded by evidence of his gross carnality. His fashionable waistcoat strains over his huge belly, and contrary to all precepts of eighteenth-century manners, he cleans his teeth with a fork. He sits legs apart, surrounded by a coat of arms consisting of a knife and fork, a plate of stripped meat bones, empty wine bottles, a pile of unpaid bills, nostrums for venereal disease, and positioned just behind his buttocks Gillray added an overflowing chamber pot.

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Descending Incongruity Many kinds of humor are gentler than ridicule; for example, we enjoy ridiculous errors and utterly preposterous things. As Kant claimed, laughter is “an affective reaction that is evoked by the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing” (cited in King 2003: 358). The ludicrous, he said, always gives us pleasure. The cause of such humor usually arises from surprising juxtaposition of unlike, incongruent things, though usually not just any incongruity. We find humorous incongruent things involving high and low status, where typically the high is brought low or the low gets above itself. We laugh when someone acting haughty is found to be clumsy or stupid, and, conversely, where someone known to be stupid attempts to act smart. Humor arises, in Kant’s words, when “a banal incident is compared to a heroic one” (cited in Telfer 1995: 363). This is a descending incongruity. Descending incongruity occurs when the sublime is juxtaposed with the ridiculous, the elevated with the petty, the great with the insignificant, in which the latter mocks the former. There is a transfer from big and important matters to the small and trivial. A genteel example would be Thomas De Quincy’s comment that while Kant was a great man, he was so blind to the niceties of language that his sentences, being so long, must be measured with a carpenter’s rule (Billig 2005). Readers of Kant will smile knowingly. Numerous less genteel examples are found in the exceptionally popular engravings by English cartoonists and caricaturists mentioned above. In the Gillray example ridicule is achieved through incongruity. The Prince’s superficial elegance of bearing is inconsistent with his obviously wasted condition, and every item he is surrounded by is at odds with his social position. The tradition of cartoonists pulling down the pants of politicians continues today unabated. During the 1930s and 1940s it was common for Hollywood studios to produce cartoons that parodied their own serious features (Crafton 1998). Today, with the easy availability of electronic technology, even young children are producing narrative parodies. YouTube features numerous short parodies on blockbuster films. Sometimes they involve mash-ups where the heroes of one film fights the villains of another accompanied by an inane, unrelated soundtrack. Movies, television programs, pop songs, music videos, and toys are grist to the mill of amateur productions (Duncum 2014). There are now numerous genres, subgenres, and hybrid genres of youth-generated material. The tip of the iceberg includes music video mash-ups, movie mash-ups, Lego animations, short comedy sketches, rants to camera, and karaoke performances. Among Barbie videos, examples include many with the following titles and many others with similar titles: Barbie Torture, Barbie Lego, Gay Barbie, and Gossip Girl Barbie. These videos cross over to videos with titles such as Gossip Girl Parody, Gossip Girl Lego, and Gossip Girl Finger Puppets. Parody is based on the incongruity between the original and the send-up, on the delight of seeing a serious issue twisted into humor. Whether popular in the sense of top-down corporateproduced parodies, or bottom-up productions by ordinary, untrained people, many cultural forms today are experienced in two ways, one as serious and one as humorous. Cultural forms enjoy a double life, where one mocks the other. The extent to which new technologies have enabled amateur parody may be unprecedented, but as mentioned above, parody has an impressive history. Parody was a major feature of medieval carnival, which, in turn, had its origins in the religious cults of ancient times where deities were both worshiped and mocked.

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Incongruity also helps explain both why movie monsters can be either horrifying or unintentionally funny. As described in Chapter 8 on the horrific, monsters that appear incongruent with the intent to horrify appear as merely ridiculous (Carroll 1999).

Emotional Release Humor is also an emotional relief. As such, it has benefits for our mental health. Humor helps to regulate nervous energy, providing anxiety with an outlet. Cultural producers of serious material have long understood the need for emotional release, and they have readily obliged by offering comic relief. As mentioned in Chapter 8 on horror, comic relief is an essential element of both melodrama and horror films. Horror oppresses, while comedy liberates; horror turns the screw and comedy releases it (Carroll 1999). Freud ([1905] 1960) took the idea of emotional release further by relating it to social constraints. For Freud, humor acted as relief from the repressions of the social order. Humor was a momentary mutiny against social taboos. It was an eruption of rebellion against decorum, even against constraints that are necessary for civil life in which one takes particular pleasure in mocking what should not be mocked. For Freud, jokes acted by condensing and substituting pent-up aggressive energies. Humor was a form of mood repair, substituting what would otherwise be expressed in physical violence, and rebellious humor was a defense against authority wherein the pleasure lay in momentary liberation. Humor was especially thrilling when it was transgressive. Humor as release is also Bahktin’s (1994) view of carnivalesque humor. And given the repressive culture imposed by the medieval church and feudal authorities, is it any wonder that a highly transgressive culture of misrule developed? In large European cities up to three months of the year were devoted to carnival. Medieval people lived in two worlds, the official world of church and state repression and a second, unofficial, transgressive world of folk humor. Where people were commanded to be clean, they were dirty; where chaste, promiscuous; where restrained, outlandish. Where they were expected to be civil, they were offensive. Yet no matter how vulgar their humor and however violent their language, Bakhtin maintains that carnival laughter was essentially positive. In turning authority upside down, for a time at least, otherwise powerless people could feel powerful. Everyone participated, even the aristocracy, for while the lower classes had no access to elite culture, the higher classes indulged in the culture of their social inferiors (Golby and Purdue 1984). Everyone engaged in the humor of carnival. The carnival barkers called out to the crowd, indulging in outrageously abusive terms, but the ridicule was understood as outrageous and the more outrageous the better. Bakhtin (1994) claimed that Rabelais’s diatribe above was not laughing at its audience, but with it. Consider the following passage in the same prologue that precedes the above quote. Rabelais testifies to his own virtue in terms as equally ludicrous as his threats: “I hereby deliver myself up body and soul, belly and bowels, to a hundred thousand basketfuls of raving demons, if I have lied so much as once throughout this book” (216). Whether he is proclaiming his own worth or denouncing others, everyone is in on the joke. Carnival humor reminded everyone of their essential humanity, partly because everyone joined in and partly because the humor dealt substantially with the body parts and bodily functions that

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everyone had in common. Carnival laughter was part of what Bahktin called “grotesque realism,” a droll, tongue-in-cheek attitude toward life, a view that is simultaneously serious and ridiculously funny (195). He wrote: “Carnival laughter is life itself but shaped according to the certain patterns of play” (198). The bawdy, scatological, and outrageous humor of carnival represented “the victory of laughter over fear” (209). Given that medieval life was, to use Hobbes’s ([1651] 2009) phrase, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short,” carnival humor offered at least temporary release (57). As explored in Chapter 6 on vulgarity, while for most people life today in the affluent First World is not nearly so miserable, living in highly regulated, rationalist societies requires considerable repression. Today, there are no months-long periods set aside for transgressive, grotesque humor, but instead we are able to indulge in the thrill of transgression at any time by simply accessing screen media. The very corporations that rely upon rationality to operate also produce consumable products to effect momentary transgression which are available day and night. In the 1990s, the traditional US sitcom was turned on its head with the introduction of the animated program The Simpsons (Wikipedia Contributors 2018a). It was a long way from 1950s sitcoms like Father Knows Best and Leave it to Beaver in which family life was wholesome and lines of authority were both clear and benevolent. Homer Simpson guzzles beer, gorges food, is primarily motivated by a desire for leisure, takes pride in his ignorance, and frequently throttles his mischievous son Bart. This dysfunction is taken much further in other animated programs, South Park and Family Guy. South Park follows the adventures of four third-graders who use foul language to abuse each other and make racist, homophobic, and politically incorrect references. They constantly refer to flatulence and excretion, and Stan vomits every time he sees his would-be girlfriend. Other characters conform to the worst stereotypes; their dog is homosexual; and in every episode Kenny is horribly killed, to which the other characters respond in only mock horror. Much of the pleasure of the program is in waiting to see when and how Kenny will be killed this time. The children’s parents are ignorant, repressed, and frantic. With tropes like alien abductions, anal probes, flaming farts and faeces, South Park is jubilantly offensive and exceptionally silly, cute and crude, and utterly juvenile. In Family Guy, the father Peter Griffin, like Homer Simpson, is overweight, utterly irresponsible, and spends much of his time avoiding work and watching television. The daughter Meg is forever put down by her parents and their son is overweight and remarkably stupid. The 1-year-old baby Stewie has paranoid fantasies about his mother who he believes is plotting to kill him. Nothing is out of bounds. Where The Simpsons parodies religious do-gooders, Family Guy regularly parodies Jesus himself. In each of these programs, authority figures—be they parents, school principals, bosses, or politicians—are represented as inept, irresponsible and hypocritical, and many episodes revolve around opposing them. These programs offer temporary respite from the demands of a highly organized, rationally ordered society. Where reason, taste, and morality demand logic, decorum, and rules, liberatory humor legitimizes inanity, outrageousness, and chaos. Consider the continuing success of the Apple mobile device, the iFart (Dawson 2010). First released in 2008, it offered twenty-five different sounds; for example, Air Biscuit, Burrito Maximo, and the Brown Mosquito. For three weeks, it was Apple’s number one bestselling application, and within three months it had sold over a million copies despite by then having many competitors in what one blogger referred to as the “app fart niche” and another calls the “fart universe.” From a psychological perspective, such transgressive humor is felt to be liberatory. From a social perspective, it is anything but.

The Humorous

Humor’s Disciplinary and Dark Side Humor brings the mighty low, relieves stress, and the history of its condemnation is easily dismissed as nothing but the nonsense of nose-in-the-air, self-appointed arbitrators of taste. So obvious are its pleasures positive that even to suggest humor is problematic is to appear a churlish killjoy. Yet humor is not innocent.

Anesthesia of the Heart While playing the role of rebellious child, humor frequently requires a suspension of compassion toward its victim. Even mild forms of humor necessitate at least a temporary postponement of empathy. The nineteenth-century French philosopher Henri Bergson referred to humor as “a momentary anaesthesia of the heart” (cited in Billig 2005: 120). When we laugh, he wrote, “we must, for the moment, put our affections out of court and impose silence upon our pity” (120). This is obvious with ridicule, but even with incongruities ridicule is present. The Scottish philosopher George Campbell confessed that, since the main topic of humor was foibles of character, as a rule laughter “is, doubtless, accompanied by some degree of contempt” (71). Though often disguised as warmhearted and innocent, humor invariably involves a streak of malice, an element of degradation. The anti-social and malign nature of humor, however, is frequently denied, made acceptable by some kindly concoction. It is ironic that the aesthetic of humor involves its exact opposite. The sensory experience of humor is enabled only by a partial anesthesia.

Imposing Social Discipline Humor, especially ridicule, exists in all human societies because it plays a critical role in teaching and imposing the disciplinary codes of social life (Billig 2005). As such, humor is a form of rhetoric in the sense of being simultaneously instructive and persuasive. Humor imparts the normative values of society, and by means of the pleasure it offers, it helps persuade recipients to accept such values. Freud ([1905] 1960) explains this insight by reference to jokes. With jokes, ideas come wrapped in the pleasure of humor in such a way that the ideas recommend themselves to our attention. We are inclined to give the ideas the benefit of what has pleased us in the form in which the ideas are offered; and thus, we are no longer inclined to find anything wrong in what has given us enjoyment because that would be to spoil the source of our pleasure. Finding pleasure in a joke, and not wishing to reject its pleasure, it is harder than it would be otherwise to refuse the idea that the joke contains. If a joke is directed at a minority to which we do not belong, and especially if the joke is clever, it may be hard not to find some pleasure in it. At the very least, cognitive dissonance is established between rejecting the idea and still enjoying the joke. Put simply, the problem with humor is that it is pleasurable. Of course, this is the same problem with all aesthetic pleasures. As rhetoric, humor is a pedagogic tool in the service of social norms. The history of US television sitcoms provides a clear example. Since their inception in the early 1950s they have charted many

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of the social conflicts in US society (Westengard and Barlow 2017). Civil rights, women’s rights in the home and in the workplace, children’s rights, immigration, and multiculturalism, as well as evolving conceptions of the family, have each been addressed through humor in a way that has helped to make each more acceptable than hitherto. Often a character, usually someone marked as a bigot, resisted one or more of these developments and was then made to appear ridiculous. They were cut down either through their own stupidity, the one-liner chiding of others, or both. In this way, the humor of sitcoms has acted as a cost-effective means of maintaining the social order while also facilitating its development. The universality of humor, especially ridicule, is evident in the universal need of parents to discipline their children and parents’ frequent, almost instinctive, employment of mockery as a disciplinary tool (Billig 2005). Ridicule is part of many a parent’s repertoire of both their pedagogic techniques and control mechanisms. Smiling knowingly, teasing, and laughing at a child’s mistakes are a standard part of the parental toolkit of instruction and discipline. In learning what is funny and not funny, children also learn what is deemed more generally appropriate and appreciated as well as what is inappropriate and to be avoided. Being the subject of other people’s humor, children learn how to think and behave toward others. The lessons can be genteel as in teasing, or aggressive in the form of unsympathetic sarcasm. Depending upon context, tone of voice, and facial expression, the question, “Cat got your tongue?” can be either gentle or hostile. By such means children also learn how to mock themselves, their siblings, friends, and even their toys. In 1711, English aesthetic theorist Lord Shaftsbury wrote: “tis the persecuting spirit has raised the bantering one” (cited in MacHovec 1988: 41). Being ridiculed teaches one self-defense though also to ridicule in turn. As rhetoric, humor can be powerfully persuasive, and as pedagogy it may have no more powerful peer. Ridicule can be deeply hurtful and cause not only an immediate flood of tears; it can scar for life. Sometimes being laughed at feels worse than death. People prefer to be hated rather than the target of ridicule for it is easier to hate back than to ridicule in return (Billig 2005). Thus does humor help bind people together into social groups while also dividing them one from another. Often, as with other popular pleasures, it does both simultaneously. On the one hand, disciplinary humor mocks those who transgress social codes, and it is used to maintain the social order. On the other hand, rebellious humor mocks social codes and lays a claim to challenge the social order. The former is intrinsically conservative and repressive; the latter appears on the side of social progress. However, rebellious, socially progressive humor does not equate to a politics of social progress.

Ridicule and Repression As described in Chapter 6 on vulgarity, rebellion can make us feel good, but its consequences are limited because a carefully curtailed, authorized rebellion acts to reproduce the status quo. Watching The Simpsons and its predecessors offers the thrill of transgression, an opportunity to thumb our nose at authority, but no avenue to act against it. Nor should we expect such programs to do so. They are produced by the same global corporations that make transgression so desirable. Media corporations are closely tied to other enterprises that make armaments and apply pressure to

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governments to increasingly reduce the social contract between governments and the governed so that there are less limits to pursue their own pecuniary goals. The more we laugh at mass-marketed rebellious humor and imagine ourselves free from social constraints the more we are held captive by them (Golby and Purdue 1984). Rebellious humor directly aids the inequitable economic structures and processes that produce it. The Simpsons and Family Guy both appear on Fox Television, which is renowned for its right-wing political bias. Producers of professional movies and products permit them to be parodied on YouTube because they are regarded as assisting their promotion, but any amateur productions that go beyond parody to criticize these productions are censored (Gillespie 2018). In short, liberation is carefully curtailed. Resistance to professional productions is allowed to take the form of humor but not to anything that would lead to social action. Moreover, those who ridicule in the name of rebellion are not always on the side of social progress. In sitcoms, a character who habitually resists social progress can be read not as ridiculous but right, a character with whom to be identified. Transgressive pleasure is not confined to social rebellion; it is equally at home with social repression. Today, reactionary forces frequently mock in the name of rebelling against political correctness. When a college student complained before the US Congress that her insurance company did not cover contraception, the radio shock jocks called her a slut and lampooned her claiming that she expected her sex life to be paid by taxpayers. Rush Limbaugh, one-time king of the reactionary US jocks, even joked that as a taxpayer he should be allowed to watch (Media Matters Staff 2012).

Humor and Hate Often the anesthesia of the heart is not momentary but a deep predisposition toward people of another race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, differently abled, and so on (King 2003). How else to explain the numerous websites of humor directed toward Jews, Arabs, the LGBTQI communities, and so on? These websites contain thousands of jokes, often reworked from one target to another. Consider the numerous sexist and misogynist memes (Drakett et al. 2018). Some merely reinforce patriarchal gender roles; for example, the photograph of a male looking bewildered and asking, “If lesbians are in a relationship who makes the sandwiches?” or a father confused because his wife is not in the kitchen (120). This is “hipster sexism” where literary devices such as mockery, quotation marks, and paradox are used as a distancing mechanism (120). Claiming to be ironic—so obviously sexist it is not possible to take them seriously—they flatter viewers by letting them feel they are sufficiently sophisticated not to be really sexist; they can enjoy the joke while snickering about others too unsophisticated to be in on the joke. Thus misogyny and sexism flourish because it is cast as irony. Could this also be true of domestic violence memes? Redneck Randal, a white North American male wearing a pride vest claims: “I like my violence like I like my beer—domestic.” With the use of family photographs, Vengeance Dad claims: “My family is a treasure—they can be found with a shovel and map” (121). A great deal of comedy comes from some terribly depressing places, from unadulterated, horrific pain, and, in turn, is determined to inflict pain upon others (Sedita 2006). Humor can take very ugly forms.

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In examining the many different views that have been advanced to explain what motivated Adolf Hitler, historian Ron Rosenbaum (1998) came to the deeply troubling conclusion that Hitler’s evil toward the Jews was due neither to being a lunatic nor a monster, but resided in his sense of mockery. According to Joseph Goebbels’s diaries, Hitler’s chief of propaganda, he and Hitler frequently shared laughter at the fate of their enemies, and it is clear from transcripts of private conversations that he indulged in charades suggesting, for example, that all he was doing was “park[ing] the Jews in the marshy parts of Russia” (cited: 214–15). He also repeatedly referred to the Jews as once having laughed at him, but are no longer laughing. Rosenbaum writes: The laughter Hitler incessantly conjures up dying in the Jews’ throats is reborn in his own. The laughter suffusing those passages is not the Jews laughing, but Hitler laughing . . . It is the laugher of someone who knows what he’s doing and relishes it to the bone, relishes the coded way he speaks of it, relishes the fact that the relish of the joke is only shared by an esoteric few . . . It is the laughter of someone savouring triumph, whose pleasure is clearly enhanced by an awareness of its profoundly illicit nature. 388

Hitler laughed not only at the exquisite joy of revenge for perceived insults, the Holocaust itself, but also at how deeply transgressive he and his partner in crime were being. Is this the ultimate transgression, the ultimate jouissance, of knowingly indulging in atrocity? This is a shocking idea, though only because today we normally think of humor merely as benign.

Humor and Hostility The idea of bigots and tyrants enjoying a sense of humor at others’ expense is undoubtedly disturbing, yet no one has a monopoly on what they consider funny. Humor does not pick sides; or rather, it picks all sides. In this, humor is just like all the other popular pleasures: it serves whoever uses it. Even so, this book concludes with humor because humor is possibly the most problematic, the most insidious, of all popular pleasures. It is a universal, and it is used daily in the most ordinary of exchanges. Like most of the popular pleasures in this book, humor is riddled with contradictions. Humor is highly social, helping to bind people together, relieve stress, and support mental health, but, through mockery and ridicule, it can also be among the most exclusionary of aesthetic pleasures. While humor provides an uplift, not just for some people but for everyone, the most lifesustaining of popular pleasures, helping people to survive in dire circumstances, it can also be profoundly destructive of others. While commonly viewed in entirely positive terms, humor can also be ugly, denigrate, and destroy. Wrapped in pleasure, it can annihilate. Yet who would be without it?

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abject 57, 78, 85, 90, 92, 112–13, 115, 148, 218 adolescent 58, 99, 108, 111, 180, 218, 223 advertising 19, 44, 130, 142, 153, 158–9, 217, 221 aesthetics 35, 78, 88, 210, 211 of absorption 60 aesthetic distance 57, 71 of consumerism 44 of cute 63 defined 1–8 of emotions 48–9 of the everyday 149 of evil 114 of kitsch and camp 71 of the macabre 122 of marketing 209 modernist 4, 7 philosophical 2, 51 of sentiment 64 of the sublime 169 of vulgarity 90 anaesthetic 2, 205 Aristotle 16, 47–9, 53, 56, 61, 98, 102, 179, 189–99, 209 ascetic 33, 152, 197 Bakhtin, Mikhail 78, 80, 88, 90, 94, 96, 98–9, 200, 203, 209 Baroque 17, 40, 49–51, 60, 132, 219 Barthes, Roland 11, 87, 172, 184, 185, 210 Baumgarten, Alexander 51 beauty 1, 35–6, 40, 64, 79, 86–7, 130, 134–5, 150, 155, 176, 209, 215, 217, 223 Bergson, Henri 205 Bible 10, 22, 42, 49, 71, 94, 124, 149–50, 155, 172, 217, 224, 225 biblical 10, 50, 96, 113, 116, 138, 155, 157, 173, 176 Billingsgate 200 biology 19–20, 43–4, 59, 71, 112, 220

body 2–3, 7, 26–7, 42, 46, 50–1, 56, 60, 78–9, 82–7, 90, 92, 97–8, 101–3, 108, 112, 123, 130, 139, 143, 147, 150–3, 155, 185 Bollywood 31, 191, 210 Bruner, Jerome 171–2, 184, 211 Burke, Edmund 35, 36, 108–10, 134, 167, 168, 211 burlesque 84, 196, 209 Campbell, Joseph 42, 177, 205, 211 capitalism 3, 82, 146, 152, 158–9, 169, 170, 218, 220, 221 caricature 196, 212 carnivalesque 78, 84, 87–9, 98–9, 197, 203 catharsis 56, 102–3, 214 children 5, 21, 26, 28, 33, 42–3, 64–5, 67–8, 70–4, 81, 87, 91–2, 116, 127, 159, 177, 192, 195, 202, 204, 206, 212–13, 217–18, 224 chinoiserie 139–40, 143–4 Christianity 9, 61, 94, 123, 149, 152, 200, 209, 212 Cicero 33–4, 41 claritus 40 class 3, 6, 13, 35, 58, 65, 71, 73, 79, 82–4, 89–90, 95–6, 134, 141, 147, 152, 167, 197–8, 203, 210 Coleridge, Samuel 110, 116 Collingwood, R. G. 53–4, 59, 185, 212 colonization 143 comedy 92, 100, 113, 175, 184, 191, 198–9, 202–3, 207, 219, 222 comics 116, 171, 181, 222 consumer 2, 152, 158 consumerism 5, 21, 223 cute 5, 63–4, 68, 71, 74, 76, 204, 212, 214, 215 Da Vinci, Leonardo 17, 28–9, 186, 187, 196 Darwin, Charles 144, 195 Descartes, René 51 desire 2, 12, 18, 68, 82, 115, 130, 147–2, 152, 155–6, 158, 167, 176, 178, 181, 217–18 227

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Index disgust 5, 59, 79, 85–7, 89–90, 108, 112–13, 117, 158–9, 211, 219 Dionysian 78, 88, 90, 113 Disney 74–5, 137, 166, 175, 192, 222 doctrine of decorum 31, 33, 35–6, 38–40, 44 dread 96, 107, 109–10, 113 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 122, 213 enlightenment 83, 122–3, 125, 145 environment 33, 43, 71, 76, 110, 130, 163, 165–6, 170, 176 evolution 19, 43–4, 96, 112, 212 fantasy 45, 74–5, 100, 110, 117, 129–30, 132–3, 137, 142, 148, 152, 154, 156, 156, 158–9, 178, 184, 225 fear 5, 11, 17, 22, 36, 46, 49, 55–6, 74–5, 84, 98–9, 102, 104–9, 111–12, 115, 164, 176–8, 181, 204, 212, 217, 222 femme fatal 65, 155, 189, 215 fetish 86, 127, 134, 153–4, 180, 213, 221, 224 Freud, Sigmund 27, 56, 87, 102, 115–19, 153, 192, 196, 203, 204, 214 gaze 26, 49, 60, 84, 142, 148, 150–3, 155–6, 158, 173, 218, 221, 224 gender 35, 48, 90, 99, 111, 113, 150, 156–7, 159, 179, 207, 210, 213, 220, 225–6 genre 4, 17, 22, 26, 45, 48, 55, 57, 60–1, 92, 107–8, 110, 115–16, 129–30, 147, 149, 165–6, 171, 175, 179–80, 183–4, 188–93, 198–9, 202, 214, 221, 223, 225 global 2, 4, 44, 63, 141, 143, 146, 206, 210, 215, 218–22, 225 Goebbels, Joseph 118, 208 Gothic 34, 39, 79, 109–10, 113, 116, 164, 166, 210, 213, 220 Greeks 17, 22, 34, 48, 78, 142, 151 Greenburg, Clement 184, 215 grotesque 39, 78–9, 81, 85, 87, 98, 204, 210 Hegel, George 35 heroes 70, 87, 92, 115, 130, 176, 192, 202, 222 Hitler, Adolf 168, 208, 222–3 Hobbes, Thomas 200, 204, 216 Hollywood 14, 17, 108, 137, 143, 146, 153–5, 159, 164, 176, 190, 193–4, 202, 210, 215, 222–3, 225–6 Hood, Brian 127–8, 190, 216

ideology 3, 4, 9–11, 51, 72, 74–5, 170, 213 idolatry 9–11, 19, 22, 214 internet 132, 148, 195, 213–15 Islam 128, 135, 140, 224 James Bond 175–6, 183, 193, 216 Jung, Carl 102, 115, 117, 137, 176, 212 Kant, Immanuel 36, 40, 43, 53–4, 78–9, 86, 108–10, 134, 150, 162–5, 167–8, 202, 217 Lacan, Jacques 115, 155, 226 Longinus 162 love, 1, 46, 48–9, 54–7, 60, 64, 68–9, 71–2, 132, 135, 147, 149–50, 152, 155, 179, 189, 191, 210, 212 magic 10, 13, 16–17, 19, 21–2, 26–7, 129–30, 213, 219, 222–4 magical thinking 127 manifest destiny 75, 145 Marx, Karl 3, 219 melodrama 45, 55, 58–61, 84, 179, 203, 211, 214, 222–3, 225 Michelangelo 38, 41, 168, 186, 223 Middle Ages 22, 94, 112, 117, 216 mind/body 5, 7, 79, 82, 132, 150, 197, 225 Muslim 107, 113, 144 myth 66, 70, 74, 145, 150, 173, 177, 211, 219, 223 obscenity 90, 149, 197, 216 Orient 135, 140, 144–6, 155, 210, 215, 218, 222–4 parody 117, 128, 131, 180, 196, 202, 207, 212, 216 pathetic fallacy 36 picturesque 163, 216 Plato 6–7, 10, 11, 16, 21–2, 33, 39, 41, 48, 61, 149, 186, 196–7, 199 plot 55, 57, 92–3, 105, 116, 173, 175–7, 179, 181, 183–4, 188, 191, 193, 204, 210, 218 Pompeii 34, 165–6 pornography 81, 96, 148–9, 151–6, 158–9, 216, 221–2 queer 148, 156–8, 180 Rabelais, Francois 200, 203 race 90, 138–9, 197, 210, 212–16 rationalism 51, 65, 158

Index Reality TV 59–60, 211 renaissance 6, 17, 34, 128, 134, 149, 173, 212 repression 82, 115, 117, 158–9, 180, 203–4, 206–7 rhetoric 33, 45, 48–50, 52, 54, 59, 66, 168, 205–6, 209–10, 213, 219, 221 Romans 22, 34, 71, 117, 137, 166 romanticism 53, 61, 67 St. Aquinas 40, 121, 125 St. Augustine 49, 55, 93, 138–9, 152, 209 Schopenhauer, Arthur 53, 150 science fiction 108, 129–30, 137, 184, 190, 212, 217 sex/sexuality 6, 78–9, 81, 84, 85, 87, 90, 95, 98, 100, 103, 108, 112–13, 115, 117, 140–1, 144, 147–50, 152–9, 180, 194–5, 204, 207, 209–10, 212–13, 215–18, 221–2, 224 sexism 3, 90, 183 Shaftsbury, Lord 206 soap opera 45, 57–8, 61, 176, 179, 193, 218 Social Darwinism 144 social media 19, 91 Socrates 200, 211 Sontag, Susan 72, 108, 114, 223 stock characters 188–9, 194, 225 sublime 1, 16, 35–6, 40, 43, 107–10, 125, 134, 141, 162–4, 167–70, 198, 202, 213, 216–17, 220–1, 225 superheroes 121, 222

tears 47–9, 51, 57–9, 64, 108, 191, 206, 211, 213, 216, 218–21 terror 68, 87–8, 98, 107–11, 166, 162, 168, 210, 221 terrorism 105, 216 terrorist 73, 91, 100, 118, 144, 194 tourism 135, 141, 142, 146, 167, 215 tragedy 45, 56, 102, 175–6, 198, 214 tropes 57, 71, 94, 96, 116, 137, 139, 144, 151–2, 158, 184, 188, 190–1, 193–4, 204, 217 turquerie 139, 225 TV wrestling 57–8, 61, 85, 87, 92–3, 104, 179, 216, 219, 223 uncanny 18, 27, 118, 217 Vasari 34 video games 1, 15, 92, 96, 100, 181, 189190, 2019, 215, 217, 221 Vitruvius 33, 34, 41 voyeurism 152–3, 155–6, 180 Williams, Raymond 2, 6, 54, 71, 75, 79, 83, 102, 103, 130, 225 wonder 16, 21, 24, 26–7, 67–8, 94, 109, 111, 121, 124–6, 130–2, 135, 164, 169–70, 180, 203

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