As a burgeoning field of audiovisual analysis, videographic criticism allows film and screen studies scholars to analyze, dissect, and reimagine screen media in ways that promote insights previously limited by traditional modes of scholarship. Just as literary scholars produce written scholarship, film and screen studies scholars have begun producing scholarship in the same medium as their primary sources, through the use of editing software. As English PhD candidates with research interests in film and game studies, we (Samuel Santiago, Jacob Reese, and Meg Healy), formed a videographic working group to familiarize ourselves with the tools and techniques of video editing with the goal of uncovering the potential of this quickly growing mode of scholarly inquiry.

An obvious starting point was the Scholarship in Sound & Image workshop. Held annually at Middlebury College in Vermont, this renowned workshop promises to introduce scholars to the tools necessary to produce videographic work. Our working group sought to emulate the exercises and collaborative process of the Middlebury workshop, albeit closer to home. Using essays and examples available through the online text The Videographic Essay: Practice and Pedagogy by Christian Keathley, Jason Mittell, and Catherine Grant, we worked through various constraint-based exercises that honed our editing skills, deepened our understanding of videographic techniques, and provided new insights into films we felt that we already knew well. 

Below, we include the results of our “multiscreen composition” exercises. This exercise tasks participants with pairing their own text with that of another group member, prompting the films to “speak” to one another by placing their imagery side by side within one frame. In effect, this exercise asked us to look “for ways in which the movies might show their potential for positive valence, echoing one another through visuals, sound, or dramatic intensity” (Keathley, et. al.). Incidentally, we all chose sci-fi films: Santiago working with Blade Runner 2049 (Denis Villeneuve, 2017), Reese working with Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1982), and Healy working with 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968). As a result, there were a myriad of opportunities for potential overlap and valence, and, as we would find upon viewing each other’s works, plenty of opportunity for originality despite the use of the same texts.

Sam Santiago – Blade Runner 2049 and 2001: A Space Odyssey

I’ve been obsessed with the “baseline test” sequences of Blade Runner 2049 since I first saw the movie. They’re a fascinating escalation in tone from the first (1982) film’s more subdued Voight-Kampff tests. Where the first film’s Voigt-Kampff tests framed interrogation as an interview, 2049’s baseline test is loud and demanding. With this multiscreen composition, I wanted to compare the baseline test device and HAL 9000, from Healy’s text, 2001. The juxtaposition of the scenes’ light and dark colors was a serendipitous bonus, providing stark visual contrast between the films while I otherwise explored their similarities—namely their depictions of callous and intense machinelike voices projecting from wall-mounted devices with watchful lenses. Both films use slow moving and static cameras to keep the devices centered while they uncannily project human speech. What I found most interesting was both films’ tendency to present these devices in extremely flat, head-on shots that kind of phase them into the walls; the lack of depth in the shots compliments the machines’ shallow views of their human counterparts—HAL conceives of Dave as an obstacle to be rid of, and the baseline test aims to maintain the suppression of Agent K’s emotions.

These observations arose from chopping up and reorganizing bits of the films, finding visuals that paired interestingly and fiddling with timing to synchronize or juxtapose them in ways that felt interesting and meaningful. Although Meg, Jacob, and I all worked with 2049, our three multiscreen compositions elicit divergent tones and focus on different details despite our overlapping subject matter. I found it interesting that all three of our videos, despite the differences of scene selection and accompanying background music, are paced with a kind of lurching motion. The burst of violence at the midpoint of Healy’s video gets bookended by slower shots that more slowly emphasize the direction actors’ gazes. Meanwhile, Reese’s video focuses on the combined cinematic motion of human bodies and of water. These videos are more exercise than essay, allowing us to experiment with editing tools more so than to offer specific filmic critique. Nevertheless, it’s clear that thinking through film(s) with editing tools unlocks a great deal of perspective on how we can engage with them not only by discussing their contents, but by interacting with the way that film captures time, space, and sound.

Jacob Reese – Stalker and Blade Runner 2049

I often approach scholarship by working with texts individually, so putting two films in direct conversation with one another was a novel challenge—particularly with the constraint of using only their audiovisual components. Comparative viewings of Stalker and Blade Runner 2049, however, led me to discover unexpected resonances between not only the films’ visual qualities and kinetic movements, but also their thematic harmonies. Water, light, and movement became the framing elements that led me to think about life, death, and the inter-personal moments between. As I began assembling my project, the editing timeline enabled me to construct a dialogue between concurrent clips in ways that made visible these thematic harmonies and helped me think about comparative critical analysis in a new way. Using only the films’ audiovisual language required that I let go of my reliance on words to provide a clear argument about the project—and that I learn to trust the films to speak for themselves. 

This new understanding was reaffirmed as I watched the others’ projects. Healy’s composition highlighted, for me, the intersection between the technological and the biological in both films, and the resulting tensions between knowledge and violence. In dealing with the same films, Santiago calls similar clips into question, but with an entirely different effect, aligning moments of interrogation and fear between the autonomous and the rational, blurring the lines between the two. In both creating and viewing works of videographic criticism, I’ve come to appreciate how this novel approach to screen and media scholarship can be used not only to communicate one’s ideas through the language of the films themselves, but also to facilitate modes of viewing and thinking that are generative and potent for new observations.

Meg Healy – 2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Runner 2049

When first approaching this exercise, my initial idea was to focus on shots and sequences that stood out as visually similar between 2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Runner 2049. Upon reviewing scenes from the latter, however, I was struck by both the visual and thematic symmetry of the monolith from 2001 and the tree from Blade Runner 2049. Both the monolith and the tree act not only as points of revelation for key characters, but also as precursors to violence. As a result, my multiscreen composition explores these themes of revelation and violence as they appear across both films by pairing similar shots, sequences, and dialogue. 

In viewing Santiago’s and Reese’s multiscreen compositions, I was pleased to find that despite using the same films, we each produced quite different work. Reese’s video, with its emphasis on overlapping moments of community, care, and weather, paired with melancholic music, highlighted the somber and atmospheric elements that pervade both Tarkovsky’s Stalker and Villeneuve’s Blade Runner. Although we used the same two films, Santiago’s use of dialogue to cue shifts to new sequences in both fullscreen and multiscreen moments evoked a sense of anxiety present in both 2001 and Blade Runner 2049, especially anxieties around the boundaries being crossed between humans and technology. Together, all three videos highlight the potential of videographic work to convey complex and original ideas about audiovisual texts without sacrificing the medium itself. Through a literal reframing of media objects, videographic criticism opens up space for reconsidering how screen studies scholars watch, read, interact, and think through our work.

Author Bios:

Samuel Santiago currently studies visual rhetoric and performance in video games, with a particular focus upon how interactive experiences of cyberpunk science fiction provide avenues to reevaluate and reimagine conceptions of consciousness and personhood. He often studies texts prominent within gaming popular culture, and aims to form a critical understanding of digital play as a transformative experience wherein diegetic and nondiegetic identities converge. Other interests include Early Modern literature and theater, adaptation studies, media studies, and film studies.

Jacob Reese is a PhD candidate in English at Syracuse University whose research focuses on the intersections between slow media and the environmental humanities, with a particular emphasis on how “slow” video games function in conversation with broader cultural sustainability movements. He has taught courses on American literature, popular culture, and environmental rhetoric, and has served as a teaching assistant for courses on the Western humanities, video games, and film.

Meg Healy is an English PhD candidate whose work explores the relationship between cinematic and literary science fiction. She seeks to understand how science fiction became a cultural dominant by focusing on how the genre is discussed, defined, and redefined among contingents from varied sectors of the social world that produce, distribute, and consume science fiction.

References:

Keathley, Christian, Jason Mittell, and Catherine Grant. The Videographic Essay: Practice and Pedagogy. 2019, videographicessay.org. Accessed on 16 September 2025.

Kubrick, Stanley, director. 2001: A Space Odyssey. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1968.

Scholarship in Sound & Image. Middlebury U, sites.middlebury.edu/videoworkshop/. Accessed on 16 September 2025.

Tarkovsky, Andrei, director. Stalker, Goskino, 1979.

Villeneuve, Denis, director. Blade Runner 2049. Warner Brothers Pictures, 2017.

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Cyberpunk’s penchant for representing wealth and poverty as a matter of “up versus down” generally results in the depiction of lofty spaces such as high-rises as bastions of security, while lower spaces like city streets carry countless dangers. However, while cyberpunk media almost always foregrounds the societal violences of extreme inequality, those violences are not always neatly contained to the streets. An early scene in RoboCop (1987) presents a example wherein cyberpunk’s thematic concerns of corporate greed and government privatization give rise to violence within a supposedly secure space of an upper-class corporate high-rise. As I’ll unpack below, RoboCop’s depiction of the violent killing of a wealthy bureaucrat during a boardroom meeting can add nuance to our understanding of the spatial arguments in cyberpunk’s representations of urban design: namely that cyberpunk does not relegate the violence of its necroscapes to the lowly realm of the streets—in fact, this scene from RoboCop insists that necroscapes envelop society as a whole, including the socioeconomic elite.

In the RoboCop scene, a scaled down model of the utopian urban revitalization project known as Delta City occupies the foreground of the frame (fig. 1) before the scene shifts toward what would now be referred to as a “big tech takeover” of Detroit’s local police force. Executives and business partners of Omni Consumer Products (OCP) listen while the company’s unnamed CEO remarks that “Although shifts in tax structure have created an economy ideal for corporate growth, community services, in this case law enforcement, have suffered.” Infused with irony and foreshadowing the upcoming moment of gory satire, the CEO states “I think it’s time we gave something back” before another businessman, Dick Jones, introduces a bipedal tank-like robot called ED-209, a “24-hour-a-day police officer” that needs neither sleep nor meals. A handgun disarming demonstration with the robot goes awry and the hesitant volunteer who held the gun to ED-209, Mr. Kinney, gets shot repeatedly as the boardroom watches in horror and technicians fail to disable the robot (fig. 2). Excessive spurts of blood and chunks of flesh fly about the room in the film’s unrated director’s cut, but even in the toned-down theatrical release, the thoroughly bloodied Mr. Kinney gets thrown back by the gunfire, landing upon the table displaying the model of Delta City, literally shattering OCP’s corporate-utopian visions of future Detroit, staining its white plastics with his viscera. During his presentation before this incident, Dick Jones had noted that while policing generally functions as a public service, OCP often successfully “gambled in markets traditionally regarded as nonprofit. Hospitals, prisons, space exploration.” He continues, “I say good business is where you find it.”

Within cyberpunk’s necroscapes, everyone and everything is good business, or at least a resource for good business. After some initial gasps, several businessmen present in the boardroom resume discussions as usual, one making a successful pitch to the CEO to forego the now-embarrassed ED-209 project to instead fund the film’s eponymous RoboCop program. The ED-209 crisis makes RoboCop appear ever more the opportunity. The fatal malfunctions just witnessed signify to OCP executives only that they need to innovate policing with a new product, rather than prompting consideration of their involvement in and militarization of policing to begin with. The terrible irony that permeates this scene stems from its satirical reinforcement of corporate hubris in the face of a shocking event that should cause dispute; the CEO’s remarks about “an economy ideal for corporate growth” echo the deregulatory policies of the Reagan administration contemporary to the film. With public services in disrepair both in RoboCop’s fiction and the realities it reflects, corporations posture as saviors to communities facing crises of crime and poverty, but pose solutions through profit-driven systems, as opposed to the nonprofit systems of social benefit that OCP declares it has successfully dominated.

While Mr. Kinney’s bloody crash upon the Delta City model shatters the allure of technologized business solutions for socioeconomic problems only momentarily for the characters in the scene, this incident confronts audiences with a striking representation of the “infrastructural brutalism” that Truscello discusses in his book of the same name. He says the term describes “the historical context in which industrial capitalism has met the limits of its expansion and domination, and yet continues to press for unprecedented commitments to build more” (Truscello 4). The bloodied, shattered Delta City model illustrates that even when such violent tragedies transpire on the human level, the broader systems undergirding corporatism keep ticking along, keep pressing for those “unprecedented commitments” by constructing naïve aspirations such as utopian future cities rather than attempts to resolve the issues already at hand. Infrastructural brutalism—in other words, capitalism’s overextensions—actualizes frequently in the form of “exciting” new products (such as Delta City, ED-209, or RoboCop himself) that corporations successfully market as solutions regardless of their actual viability when deployed within the communities that they will affect.

Just before the shooting, in an over-the-shoulder shot that aligns the robot’s gun barrels, Mr. Kinney, Delta City, and Detroit itself through the floor-to-ceiling windows of the high-rise boardroom, the many businesspeople scatter about in fear and surprise (fig. 3). However, opposite to Mr. Kinney’s rightward presence on the screen, the OCP CEO appears calm in the background of the upper left, sitting at the head of the conference table whereas the others have all sprung up in fear, resting his chin upon his hands with haunting indifference. Unnamed, referred to by others simply as “the Old Man,” the CEO functions less as a character and more as a figurative representation of the institutional drive and will of OCP as a corporation. Though an employee of OCP, Mr. Kinney remained expendable. As Carlen Lavigne explains, cyberpunk is “closely associated with North American economic and labor concerns of the 1980s; its citizens, devalued as interchangeable and easily replaceable assets within corporate society” (12). Illustrated by the abundance of his suited coworkers in the scene, within a necroscape even those who have climbed the corporate ladder often function as surplus populations, described by Marx as “a relatively redundant working population . . . superfluous to capital’s average requirements for its own valorization” (782). Alphin attests that present day neoliberal capitalist governments “eliminate surplus bodies that fail to function in the production of value” (1). With Mr. Kinney, it becomes apparent that even those ostensibly contributing to the production of value remain expendable within the full systemic scope of a corporation like OCP.

Alongside this scene’s visual foregrounding of the Delta City model, the prominently featured floor-to-ceiling windows maintain the presence of actual Detroit[1] in the background as members of the boardroom rather nonchalantly make investment and technological development decisions in a corporate space vertically removed from the populace of the city itself. Furthermore, the exaggerated verticality pictured by the central towers of Delta City declare an intent for an even further distancing between this controlling class of corporate executives and the Detroit citizenry. ED-209 targeting Mr. Kinney depicts not only malfunction, but disregard for collateral damage—satirical in the self-destructive crushing of Delta City, and symbolic in its taking aim upon Detroit in the distance.

In addressing cyberpunk’s imaginary worlds, I suggest that the capitalist overextensions that Truscello terms as “infrastructural brutalism” drive the elimination of the surplus bodies that this kind of societal organization kills “in subtle and overt ways” (Alphin 93). Tendencies toward deregulatory policy, alongside incentives for continuous corporate growth that disincentivize sustainable planning, establish conditions that devalue lives—not only the lives of the lower classes who in the RoboCop example would be policed by the violent machines onscreen, but even the lives of those integrated into corporate hegemony, like Mr. Kinney. Thus, infrastructural brutalism permits indiscriminate brutality.

Notes

[1] The “actual Detroit” of the fiction, at least. In reality, the window featured in figs. 8 and 9 overlooks Dallas, Texas, the film’s boardroom set located on the 54th floor of the city’s Rennaisance Tower (Maschino and Gallagher).

Works Cited

AKIRA. Directed by Katsuhiro Otomo, Toho, 1988.

Alphin, Caroline. Neoliberalism and Cyberpunk Science Fiction: Living on the Edge of Burnout. Routledge, 2021.

Blade Runner. Directed by Ridley Scott. Warner Brothers, 1982. The Final Cut, 2007.

Maschino, Brian, and Danny Gallagher. “RoboCop Versus Reality: Looking at Dallas Locations of the Film’s Scenes.” Dallas Observer, 11 July 2017, https://www.dallasobserver.com/slideshow/robocop-versus-reality-looking-at-dallas-locations-of-the-films-scenes-9647490/9647497. Accessed 8 Apr. 2025.

RoboCop. Directed by Peter Weller, Orion Pictures, 1987. Director’s Cut, 1995.

Truscello, Michael. Infrastructural Brutalism: Art and the Necropolitics of Infrastructure. MIT P, 2020.

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The story kicks off with two trespassers tagging “I Came By,” in a posh London flat. The message is meant to highlight the vulnerabilities of human existence regardless of racial or class status. The taggers, Jay, and Toby, gain notoriety in London’s underground scene. Jay soon learns he’s to be a father and opts out of tagging for good while Toby persists and tries to convince Jay, a Black man, to remain committed despite Jay’s fears of drawing police attention. Unable to convince Jay, Toby, on a solo tagging project, discovers a disturbing secret in the home of a prominent UK judge: Hector Blake.

Breaking into the home of Hector Blake, Toby follows sounds that lead him into the basement. It is here that Toby discovers the presence of a prisoner and jumps back in alarm before fleeing in panic. As the story unfolds, audiences learn about Hector Blake’s troubled childhood, his wealth coming from the spoils of war, turning a history of violence and theft into a benefit. Hector Blake’s rise to government conceals a life of profound loneliness and inability to form healthy bonds. The brutality of colonialism, in this case, has backfired on its beneficiaries, leaving a profound mark on Blake’s psyche, in an apparent parallel to the larger pathologies characterizing modern, neocolonial societies built on theft and never-ending war.

Toby explains what he saw to Jay and proposes they free the prisoner. Jay, however, remains committed to his family and wary of stepping out of line. Evidently, Hector Blake is known for supporting immigrants and minorities and has a reputation in professional and academic circles as ‘Saint Blake’ an advocate on behalf of the underprivileged. Left to his own wits, and blundering through the story, Toby first notifies the police who, it turns out, are led by a sergeant who plays tennis with Blake at the local health club. Realizing the futility of alerting authorities, Toby’s second attempt to free the prisoner, by brute force this time, also fails when Blake simply overpowers him. Left missing, his distraught mother, Liz, also starts looking for him and goes missing, leaving the reluctant Jay with a new resolve to find answers.

While I Came By is a story about struggle against the wealthy elite, it also provides an account of the possible effects of colonialism on social organization structures, interpersonal dynamics, and human bonds in the context of advanced industrial societies.^[1] Out of this larger environment of hyper-efficiency, the pursuit of excellence, individualism, and unceasing wars, emerges the child of an ethnic elite family raised with resources and access to opportunity yet lacking any of the normal care and affection from his caregivers. It is important to note here that while Toby, Liz, and Jay are ‘good guys’ in this story and Blake is the ostensible ‘bad guy,’ Liz, Toby, and Blake all have several things in common. As members of the dominant ethnic group in Britain, they share a common thread of isolation, loneliness, and unearned advantage. The film weaves together these personal stories with broader themes related to the consequences of benefiting from colonial violence, theft, and war. For instance, Toby lives in his mother’s attic, doesn’t work, and waits for the release of his father’s inheritance while his relationship with his mother is strained, marked by sarcasm, and mutual disapproval. They spar over trivial things. In contrast, however, Jay lives with his partner, Naz, in a modest flat while both work and look forward to the arrival of their first child.

Blake, after eliminating two different people who discovered his secret, moves to a new, remote country home where he maintains his prisoner. Here, Jay finds him and confronts him asking about the whereabouts of Toby and Liz. In the ensuing struggle, viewers see what is perhaps the most telling scene in the film: an injured Jay repeatedly punching Blake and shouting the words “what did you do to them, Hector? Where are they?” while the camera slowly focuses on an image of Blake, as a child, all alone and smiling sadly, behind shattered glass. Afterward, and with a noticeable limp, Jay exits the scene while police lights illuminate the area. Police find Blake tied up next to the moniker, “I Came By.”

Like Intrusion and The Lie, I Came By considers the effects of war, colonialism, the rise of industrial society, and the ideals that come with these transformations on the lives of ordinary people, families, and children. Privilege, in this case, is paradoxical: it feeds and it poisons. To bridge the gap left by his fractured upbringing, Hector Blake seeks solace in unhealthy relationships and violent bonds.

The story of Jay, Liz, Toby, and Hector serves as a poignant reminder that unearned advantages can confer material advantages but do not shield their beneficiaries from the emotional and psychological costs that come from war and theft. Hector’s journey highlights the interplay between personal history, societal organizations structures, and the human need for connection and belonging, shedding light on the complexities of privilege in the context of colonialism’s legacy.

^[1] I’m borrowing the phrasing “advanced industrial societies” from Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man.

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Upon the release of Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz’s Antebellum (2020), the film was met with mixed reception. Antebellum follows a young Black woman author, Veronica Henley (Janelle Monaé), who, after leaving her home and family to complete her book tour, “wakes up” to find herself enslaved on what appears to be a cotton plantation in the antebellum south. In the film, viewers watch as Veronica is forced to assume the role of a slave named Eve, navigate the dynamics of the plantation, and find a way to escape her mysterious circumstances. The film’s pre-release trailer framed the film’s narrative as containing all the conventions of an action-packed horror film. In response to the initial announcement trailer for Antebellum, some people expressed excitement for a film that possessed promising similarities to Jordan Peele’s very popular, Academy Award-winning film Get Out (2017). The trailer even highlights Peele as one of the film’s producers. However, there was also a contingent of critics hesitant to show excitement for yet another film depicting Black enslavement. For these critics, films about slavery are an excuse for filmmakers to display and circulate more images of Black trauma. In her article for The Atlantic aptly titled, “Who Wants to Watch Black Pain,” Hannah Giorgis notes the gratuitous onslaught of violence to which Black characters are subject in Antebellum. This include scenes of physical and psychological abuse, beatings, whippings, and sexual assault. Ultimately, the article asks: “Who is this for?”^[1]

The mixed response to Antebellum raises a number of questions about the role of contemporary films depicting enslavement. Given the strong resistance to “Black trauma films,” why, then, do we continue to make films about slavery?

Film scholars suggest that the answer to this question is due to more than a simple fascination with slavery. In their book Afterimages of Slavery (2012), Marlene Allen and Seretha Williams write that the “peculiar institution” has always been the subject of American narrative and is itself foundational to our literary tradition. Moreover, they argue that film and the history of enslavement share a unique relationship: “Film has become a powerful medium for representing slavery visually, allowing a viewing audience to connect with the experiences of slave characters onscreen and requiring an emotional investment in these experiences that is harder to present in the pages of a book.”^[2] According to film scholar Rudyard Alcocer, part of the appeal of films depicting enslavement is the way in which they respond to a visual absence in the historical record. He writes that “slavery films take us back to the scene of the crime, as it were: a crime that involved to a significant degree of physical, visible transgressions against the enslaved. In other words…slavery films allow viewers to see the crime (or to have the sensation of doing so) in a way that is closer to a real-life experience than reading about the same events in a book.”^[3] Slavery films show us what slavery was like in a way that fills a gap in our historical record, and as Alcocer suggests, the films provide viewers visual “evidence” of its utter brutality.

 I don’t think it is an exaggeration to claim that the way present day Americans — living nearly 160 years post-emancipation — “imagine” slavery largely through its filmic representations. Think about how one of Hollywood’s first blockbusters, Gone with the Wind (1939), provided its viewers along with future films distinctive imagery of American plantation life. Similarly, we might draw upon films such as Steven Spielberg’s Amistad (1997) to imagine the ships that crossed the middle passage. Biopics like Harriet (2019) invite us to peer into the lives of Black historical figures who experienced the institution themselves. Many of these films, and others like 12 Years A Slave (2013) & Lincoln (2012), have won awards for their depictions of slavery. Given the sheer amount of films that have been made about enslavement and the filmmakers, actors, and actresses who have been recognized for their roles in these films, we could even claim that slavery is foundational not only to American history, but also to American film history.

Film is one of the primary avenues through which viewers attempt to understand what slavery was like, yet, if the relatively recent responses to Antebellum are any indication, the sheer volume of these films have produced a certain level of fatigue – one that is particularly experienced by Black viewers. In a time where viewing audiences are constantly inundated with images of Black death on the news and videos depicting police brutality on social media, I often see the question asked: Do we need even more films depicting slavery?

While I’m not advocating for more films about slavery over anything else, I do think that films about slavery still need to be made. In many ways, American film doesn’t exist without depictions of slavery onscreen. I do agree that films about Black trauma can not only be difficult to stomach but can also run the risk of replicating the very structures of violence they represent. However, I think that the films we do make about enslavement should seek to challenge the assumptions that slavery is long over. Films about slavery have the potential to operate as pedagogical tools, instructing viewers on the ways that slavery’s affects are still felt in the present.

I’m intrigued by the way Christina Sharpe compares Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991) and Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave. She claims that the trace of slavery — in “whip-scarred backs, brands, or other familiar marks” — is perhaps too visible in 12 Years a Slave. The film is notable for its long takes and the camera’s unwillingness to cut away from the brutality it depicts. However, Sharpe recognizes the ways in which those gratuitous, aesthetic representations of enslavement run the risk of offering no relief. In 12 Years a Slave “The long time/the long shot, the residence time of Black life always on the verge of death and in death, goes on.”^[4] Instead, Sharpe is interested in films that aesthetically engage with slavery’s “long-time.” Julie Dash’s independent film, Daughters of the Dust, is a film set in 1902 and follows three generations of the Peazant family, direct descendants of enslaved Gullah peoples. The film depicts the family’s final day on St. Helena Island before migrating north to the continent. According to Sharpe, slavery is felt in the film through indigo blue — Dash’s decision to “show the traces of slavery as the indigo blue that remains on the hands of the formerly enslaved people who labored and died over the poisonous indigo pits on the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina.”^[5] Indigo has a presence in the film not only on Nana Peasant’s hands, but in other aspects of the film’s mise-en-scene and cinematography. Indigo extends to accents in the film’s costuming, in the film’s lighting, post-production tinting, and in the color of the Island’s ever present sea and sky. In Daughters of the Dust, slavery is still very much felt and has an undeniable presence throughout the film, but avoids the violent imagery with which our present day representations are overrun. 

Perhaps, then, films depicting enslavement could avoid being “trauma films” by finding aesthetic strategies that align with the central thesis of the New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project.^[6] That placing slavery at the center of our examinations of American history in some ways allows us to understand the ongoing nature of anti-blackness. While more slavery films could still be hard to stomach, I strongly believe that visual depictions of enslavement have the potential to reorient our understanding of an essential part of our history. They could also provide us strategies for actively resisting the ongoing racial violences of today. Moving forward, we should be wary of how slavery films contribute to the “Black trauma genre,” but continue to look out for and advocate for films that instruct us on the ways slavery has been an integral part of our history and our present, lest we forget.

^[1] Giorgis, Hannah. “Who Wants to Watch Black Pain?” The Atlantic, April 17, 2021. https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2021/04/black-horror-racism-them/618632/.

^[2] Allen, Marlene and Seretha Williams. Afterimages of Slavery: Essays on Appearances in Recent American Films, Literature, Television and Other Media. Jefferson, N.C: McFarland, 2012. p.2.

^[3] Alcocer, Rudyard J, Kristen Block, and Dawn Duke. Celluloid Chains: Slavery in the Americas Through Film. p. xxxix.

^[4] Sharpe, Christina Elizabeth. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Book, Whole. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. p.126.

^[5] Ibid.

^[6] Hannah-Jones, Nikole. Hannah-Jones, Nikole. “America Wasn’t a Democracy, Until Black Americans Made It One (Published 2019).” The New York Times, August 14, 2019, sec. Magazine. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619-america-slavery.html

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Perhaps it’s silly to expect a multi-billion dollar platform such as Fortnite to be capable of doing truly progressive work around Black social movement. Even so, I’m drawn to the centrality of the archive in this attempt to educate players on civil rights. March Through Time recognizes that archival images play a significant role in informing our relationship to the past, even if the way in which Fortnite integrates those images into its project falls short. This is not to say that there are only “appropriate” or “inappropriate” ways to engage the civil rights archive. I’m not attempting to delineate what counts as “misuse.” I simply want to ask: if we wish to educate by way of archival images, how should our experience of those images be curated? What visual and sonic arrangements invite viewers to ask new questions about the civil rights movement rather than restricting or delimiting our understanding of that history? What uses of the civil rights archive can aid viewers in comprehending the struggle of civil rights as ongoing rather than distant?

I believe that Rauol Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro (2016) and Arthur Jafa’s Dreams are Colder than Death (2014)are two documentary film texts that imbue the civil rights archive with an urgency that is lost in Fortnite’s March Through Time. Both films accomplish this urgent and active relationship to history through careful aesthetic and sonic curation.

Raoul Peck’s 2016 film, I Am Not Your Negro, is a documentary film based on James Baldwin’s unfinished manuscript, Remember this House. The film’s essay style narration, performed by Samuel L. Jackson, recounts Baldwin’s relationship to assassinated Black movement leaders and friends, Medgar Evars, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King^[2]. One of the film’s biggest accomplishments is its vast collection of repurposed archival imagery. The footage and photographs included in the documentary not only originate from and depict events from the civil rights era, but this archive is also inclusive of Hollywood film footage, photographs of Black lives lost to police violence, Black Lives Matter protest footage, and dreamlike tracking shots through contemporary environments. In imagining what James Baldwin would write about his friends in this unfinished manuscript, the film very deliberately moves between past and present, drawing critical comparisons between the concerns of nearly 60 years ago and those of today.

In her own essay on the film, scholar and historian Ellen Scott writes that Peck “achieves a curatorial feat in his selection and pairing of images and Baldwin’s words.”^[3]I think one of the best demonstrations of Peck’s curatorial capacities happens in a sequence that tackles the effects of white violence and white supremacy. In this section of the film, we view stunning technicolor footage from the late 1950s. We view white people, armed with picket signs and baseball bats, passionately protesting integration. The white protestors angrily chant “We want King!” and this footage is intercut with rare, up-close technicolor footage of Martin Luther King Jr. ducking through an unruly crowd. Given that so much of the visual archive of civil rights imagery is rendered in black-and-white, this vibrant color footage of King instantly troubles our assumed relationship to the past with shocking immediacy. Peck reinforces this unsettling temporal experience by juxtaposing these vibrant, full color images with black-and-white footage from the 2014 uprising in Ferguson, Missouri. In this footage, state violence is on full display. Police officers move through the city streets in armored tanks, they carry military grade weapons, and assault unarmed protestors. The meaning of this curatorial choice is made known in the clip that follows from James Baldwin’s 1963 interview with Kenneth Clark. When Baldwin voices his terror of the “moral apathy” of the “vast, heedless, unthinking, cruel white majority,” viewers must reconcile the similarities between the technicolor footage of white protestors and the black-and-white footage of the Ferguson police. Not only does “white cruelty” remain consistent in the present, but it is also thoroughly integrated into the systems that proclaim to protect all of its citizens.

Jafa’s Dreams are Colder than Death is an experimental essay film that has been described as a visual “tapestry.” The film is interwoven with interviews featuring prominent Black studies scholars, images from the archive of slavery, photographs from the civil rights and Black power movements, renderings of deep space, and contemporary slow-motion footage of Black people simply living, walking, talking, and moving through their everyday lives. The film moves “across scale, from the minute to the cosmological, from the familial to the collective” with what Alessandra Raengo dubs a “aesthetic liquidity.”^[4] As such, the film is afforded a temporal liquidity: it traffics from past to present in a manner similar to Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro, but does so at an even larger scale in the spirit of contemplating Blackness and its meanings in the afterlife of slavery.

Despite this larger conceptual scale, Jafa’s film begins as a “lyrical meditation” on the legacy of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech^[5]. This film takes on the legacy of King, not by memorializing him through images, but instead by prefacing the film with a central question: Has King’s dream been achieved in the present? The question remains throughout the film as an audible motif. Passages from the “I Have a Dream Speech” are interwoven into the film’s sonic layers. As interviewees such as Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, and Fred Moten philosophize on the meanings of Blackness, King’s intentionally slowed voice echoes and resonates underneath the scholars’ voices, enhancing the “dreamlike” quality of the slow-moving tapestry of images that appear on the surface.

In her examination of Arthur Jafa’s visual aesthetics, Tina Campt suggests that Jafa’s use of slow-motion, or more precisely “still-moving-images,” are a Black visual aesthetic of refusal. According to Campt, Still-moving-images are “images that hover between still and moving images; animated still images, slowed or still images in motion or visual renderings that blur the distinctions between the multiple genres; images that require the labor of feeling with or through them.”^[6] In Dreams are Colder Than Death, Jafa’s still-moving-images of Black life “refuse” both stillness and movement in a way that insist on the presence and humanity of their subjects. The sonic incorporation of Martin Luther King’s speech similarly insists on its own presence as present,  refusing to be rendered “past.” In this film, the “I Have A Dream” speech acts not as a passive soundtrack for the film, but instead becomes an active catalyst for exploring questions about what Blackness means and does in the present.

Dreams are Colder than Death and I Am Not Your Negro are exemplars of active engagement with the civil rights archive, and in this post I’ve provided brief illustrations of how these films carefully curate archival footage, photographs, and audio in a manner that challenges the passive curation inside Fortnite’s March Through Time. It is not lost on me that Peck and Jafa’s films, two experimental documentaries, are the exact kind of media that we would expect to tackle history in ways that ask new questions rather than presume answers. However, in placing these texts in conversation with one another, what occurs to me is that Fortnite is the most accessible of the three. I Am Not Your Negro is available to view on streaming platforms such as Netflix and Kanopy by those who are able to pay the necessary fee, but Dreams are Colder than Death has not been distributed to any streaming services. Jafa’s film has been screened in very limited viewing contexts such as in film festivals or university talks. In contrast, Fortnite is free and available on several platforms. Despite the game’s seeming incompatibility with the subject matter, I don’t think that TIME Studios was entirely off the mark in their desire to collaborate with Epic Games given the company’s reach. If reworked and rethought, could Fortnite’s March Through Time provide an engagement with civil rights history that not only closes the distance, but could also reach a very large audience of active players ? Or, are mainstream texts inherently incapable of challenging our relationship to the history of social movement? While I’m not sure how to answer these questions, I do think that our evolving media landscape will continue to force filmmakers and archivists to weigh questions of access moving forward.

^[1]https://broadlytextual.com/2021/11/20/march-through-time-fortnites-passive-engagement-with-the-photographic-archive-of-civil-rights/

^[2] http://www.iamnotyournegrofilm.com/synopsis

^[3] Ellen Scott, “‘Some One of Us Should Have Been There with Her’: Gender, Race, and Sexuality in I Am Not Your Negro and Contemporary Black Experimental Documentary,” Jaimie Bron and Kristen Fuhs. I Am Not Your Negro: A Docalogue. (New York, NY;: Routledge, 2021), p.39

^[4] Alessandra Raengo, “Close-Up: #BlackLivesMatter and Media: Dreams are Colder than Death and the Gathering of Black Sociality” Black Camera: An International Film Journal 8, no.2 (Spring 2017) p.120.

^[5] https://liquidblackness.com/arthur-jafa-dreams-are-colder-than-death

^[6] Tina Campt, “Black Visuality and the Practice of Refusal”, Women and Performance a Journal of Feminist Theory, p.80

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Here’s a link to the opening moments of Us — go ahead and give it a watch. I’m only going to be talking about the lessons we can learn from the first two and a half minutes, but feel free to watch the whole thing. I’m keeping this intro spoiler-free, but if you haven’t seen Us, you really should.

I could easily spend pages ranting and raving about how Us exemplifies the tendencies from last week: how the rhythmic sound of waves dominating the first few seconds are simultaneously made to allude to the rushing of subterranean subway cars, the eerily hypnotic scraping of porcelain from Peele’s previous film, and even possibly the dreamlike beauty of Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight; how the epigraph about “thousands of miles of tunnels beneath the United States” perfectly contextualizes the dark mystery at the center of the film; how the sound of waves (above us now) literally immerses audiences in the plot as these words rise out of the darkness to make themselves known; and how all of this foreshadows elements in the rest of the film …

In the interest of time, however, I want to focus on the next shot of the film: a slow zoom on a “Hands Across America” commercial playing on an old TV. As I see it, the staging of this scene embodies the next tendency for interesting introductions I want to look at:

3. An interesting introduction makes its audience start to think.

Initially, the “Hands Across America” commercial (sandwiched as it is between a news teaser and an ad for the Santa Cruz Board Walk) seems completely bizarre. This goes beyond circumscribing the film’s subject – it initially has no discernible relation to the plot at all. And that, along with the claustrophobic nature of the tight shot, gets viewers to start asking questions. Where and when are we? Why aren’t they showing the rest of the house? What does any of this have to do with a horror film?

The agonizingly slow zoom on the relatively static screen also encourages viewers to explore the objects in the periphery in a desperate search for meaning. Isn’t C.H.U.D. about subterranean monsters? Wasn’t there a part in The Goonies about abandoned tunnels? Taken together, the commercial and the props lying around give viewers plenty of chances to make connections and form theories from the scraps of information they already have. This primes viewers to start paying attention and later rewards them for doing so when the connections are made clear.

Attentive viewers may also notice something strange about the screen itself, especially in the moment between commercials: it contains a reflection. Maybe it’s just me, but this moment really gripped me, and I think I now know why:

4. An interesting introduction recognizes its audience.

When I watched this on the plane, it took me a moment to realize the reflection in the screen wasn’t my own, despite the impossibility of that angle or proportion from where I was sitting. I was so used to seeing my own reflection on screens — or, alternatively, not seeing direct reflections of this sort depicted in movies due to the need for hiding cameras and lighting — that I immediately identified with this double.

Uncanny doublings like this are, of course, depicted in Us to an obsessive degree – they are the engine that drives its horror. But to introduce the motif in this way is to show an awareness of the audience’s position, to reach out past the wall separating the world of the story from the real world and address the audience as they sit in their chairs. In some ways, this frames the text as a conversation between the audience and the director and — just like when you’re addressed by an instructor during lecture — it makes you pay attention.

Perhaps the biggest takeaway from these observations is simple: whether it’s through a seemingly off-topic anecdote that gets people making connections or through a conversational tone that addresses the audience as they are, interesting introductions grab your attention. The trick, as always, is how to achieve that in writing. If you’re stuck, maybe try writing an anecdote that is two degrees removed from your subject. The task of trying to connect to it, if nothing else, will give you a better idea of what you’re trying to say.

It will be interesting to see how all of this applies to video games — the medium which I am perhaps most familiar with — but I will leave that for next week.

John Sanders is a PhD Candidate in the Syracuse University English Department where he studies film, new media, and adaptation. He is currently working on a dissertation about digital and analog games based on literary works, and hopes that no one recalls his library books.

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The exploration of queer representation in Hannibal allows for a greater understanding of the conventions of gender and sexuality within the thriller genre. Highly-fictionalized thrillers such as Hannibal thrive on extreme relationships, but also rely heavily on non-traditional erotic relationships to further depict the extremes of personalities in its central characters. The cop-vs-serial killer subset of the thriller genre adds an element of intense, personal desire to what would otherwise be a genre categorized by rote sleuthing. So it is in Hannibal, where the main draw of the series (besides its stunning visuals) is the eroticly-charged cat-and-mouse game between FBI agent Will Graham and cunning killer Hannibal Lecter. Several characters of the series equate the furious obsession the two men share for each other to love. This suggestion troubles the relationship between the two men, indicating that their painful, self-destructive relationship is based simultaneously in love and hate. They are unable to pull away from each other, just as they are unable to completely become one. Instead, their relationship serves to complicate the viewer’s understanding of desire and the desire to kill.

HTo fully understand the complexity of Hannibal and Will’s relationship, we must return to one of the first incarnations of this relationship in the 2002 thriller Red Dragon.^[1] What is unique about the Silence of the Lambs trilogy is that no one film depicts Hannibal’s time before prison in great detail.^[2] Hannibal’s crimes are defined largely through rumor and his own description; Hannibal is the arbiter of his own mythos. However, there is a significant gap in the viewer’s understanding of the relationship between Hannibal and Will. This is deftly remedied in the opening scene of Red Dragon. Over the opening credits, Will Graham, here played by Edward Norton, comes to the shuddering realization that the mysterious killer is eating his victims — and that the killer is none other than his close confidante. At the crescendo of Will’s understanding, signified by the drawing of his gun, Hannibal sinks his knife into Will’s stomach. Despite the violence of the action, there is unmistakable tenderness as well. The stabbing mirrors a lover’s embrace; Hannibal rests his chin on Will’s shoulder, hushing him gently. In this scene, Hannibal gains no visible pleasure from hurting Will. Instead, he is careful, tender. “Remarkable boy,” he says. “I think I’ll eat your heart.” The reverent, intimate delivery of the line, coupled with the way Hannibal holds the fallen Will around the waist like a dance partner suggests a fond tenderness that goes beyond the bounds of homosocial friendship. Their intimacy serves to hint at a homoerotic bond that is only briefly touched upon in Red Dragon.

HThis highly-charged bond is given far more screen time and consideration in Hannibal. The two men are far closer in age, diminishing the mentor/pupil relationship present in Red Dragon^[3] and emphasizing a more equal footing. Furthermore, the first two seasons of Hannibal take place prior to the moment of understanding in Red Dragon that culminates in Will’s stabbing. The challenge of Hannibal then is to balance the painful anticipation of this “breakup” with the pleasure of watching the budding relationship between two fascinating, electric men. And a pleasure it is. Hannibal and Will have a powerful chemistry that obsesses the narrative. They share intense, longing looks, have little regard for each other’s personal space, and have many moments of strangely endearing domesticity. Hannibal is always cooking for Will, seeking to impress him with increasingly elaborate presentations. Food in Hannibal is always a matter of seduction and charm, a way for Hannibal to exert power over his guests (Will most frequently) while simultaneously providing them with nourishment and artistic pleasure.

The homoeroticism of food and eating crescendos in Hannibal’s second season, when Hannibal and Will share a meal of songbirds eaten whole. In an interview with Logo, director Bryan Fuller comments on this feast below:

We really want to explore the intimacy of these two men in an unexpected way without sexualizing them, but including a perception of sexuality that the cinema is actually portraying to the audience more than the characters are. There’s a scene at dinner where we were tackling in the edit bay because it was so transparently homoerotic. They were doing something that was not sex or anywhere near sex, but it was shot so suggestively that they may as well have been …

This scene lingers lovingly over open mouths, swallowing throats, and blissful expressions. In mood, framing, and aesthetic, it is a sexual scene. And yet, everyone’s clothes remain on. The evident homoeroticism of the scene is tempered by its modesty. There is power and seduction, but the lack of sexual acts and romantic physical gestures such as kissing leaves it clear that the relationship is not a traditionally romantic one.

For LGBT audiences, representation in film and television is an obstacle course of flirtation with canon. This battle with on-screen depictions of queer couples is often waylaid by a phenomenon known as queerbaiting. Queerbaiting teases the viewer with hints to a homosexual relationship in order to entice LGBTQ viewers, but this potential relationship ultimately remains unfulfilled. (Shows such as Supernatural are notorious for queerbaiting its fans.) Despite accusations of queerbaiting when it became apparent that central characters Will and Hannibal’s relationship would never be a physical one, queer fans nonetheless rejoiced at Hannibal. While Will and Hannibal would not explore a homosexual relationship on-screen, which frustrated some fans, many others were content in the highly-aesthetic, subtext-heavy portrayal of Hannibal and Will’s relationship.

Fans of this relationship, which is affectionately dubbed “Hannigram,” are quick to admit that the relationship between the two men is certainly an abusive one. For all of the intimacies between Will and Hannibal, their relationship is one built on manipulation, violence, and entrapment. However, for many, this is part of the attraction. The intensity and darkness is appealing, especially with two lead actors with significant fanbases. Many elements of “Hannigram” are aesthetic; there are large sects of fanworks dedicated to the sheer beauty of the show and its actors. However, the appeal of “Hannigram” is not wholly artistic. The cat-and-mouse element of their relationship, emphasized by a history of serial killer/cop films with similar relationships, is characterized by danger and seduction. In a show about the art of violence, “Hannigram” dances alongside the violence, rather than shying away from it. The honesty of the appeal of “Hannigram” in (largely female) fans allows for a deeper exploration of the intimacy of violence between Will and Hannibal.

This violence culminates in a stabbing, just as in Red Dragon. In Red Dragon, the stabbing is presented as a shock. In Hannibal, however, there is great anticipation for the moment. While this could be, in part, due to lingering audience familiarity with the source material, it is more likely a reading of the tone of the scene. Red Dragon amplified the shocking element, playing off of Will’s horrified revelation about Hannibal’s guilt. In Hannibal, however, we anticipate the betrayal. Will has spent the season desperately, obsessively working to prove Hannibal’s guilt. And yet, when the time comes to make the arrest, Will balks; he reveals the ploy to Hannibal. When he finds that Hannibal has not run but instead done grave violence to Jack and Alana, Will is heartbroken. “You were supposed to leave,” he says, his voice low and devastated. Hannibal responds by touching the side of Will’s, and stabs Will like an apology, like a betrayal.

The embrace that Will and Hannibal fall into speaks to the unsustainable nature of their relationship. They are so deeply caught up in each other’s obsession that they are desperately linked. They are fated to trap each other. While their romance departs from traditional depictions, Will and Hannibal are still star-crossed, their mutual erotic obsession only just beginning.

^[1] There is also an adaptation of Red Dragon even before Silence of the Lambs, a thriller titled Manhunter released in 1986. However, this did not enjoy the same popularity as the later Harris-based film trilogy.

^[2] A later film, Hannibal Rising (2007) attempts to remedy this, but it is considered separate from the trilogy.

^[3] This is not to say that mentor/pupil relationships lack homoeroticism. Rather, this particular relationship is strengthened by a different power dynamic.

Molly Cavanaugh received an MA in English Literature with a focus on Game Studies and New Media. She uses these fields to explore her additional interests of race, gender, sexuality, and LGBT representation. She has also studied Victorian literature, the Gothic, and 19th century American literature. Her teaching interests include film, graphic novels, and popular culture.

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In a 1986 New York Times interview regarding My Beautiful Launderette (1985), director Stephen Frears notes, “It’s a completely ironic film, isn’t it? We wanted people to have a wonderful time, but to make the film provocative, turning everything on its head.” Indeed, the made-for-TV movie highlights a topsy-turvy–like ’80s Britain.

The film’s irony comes from the portrayal of a Pakistani immigrant family at the center of a Thatcher-era story of “rich get richer, poor get poorer.” In contrast to classic images of corporate greed or poor immigrants, My Beautiful Launderette stars immigrants as greedy and corrupt, while the poor are represented by the British working class. Omar (Gordon Warnecke) is an unemployed young man taking care of his alcoholic father, a leftist ex-journalist who acts as the foil to Omar’s uncle, Nasser Ali (Saeed Jaffrey), a successful businessman who is best exemplified by the advice he gives to Omar, “In this damn country which we hate and love you can get anything you want … you [only] have to know how to squeeze the tits of the system.” Nasser and his family are decadent with their wealth: hosting lavish parties, and, at one moment, literally throwing money around.

Taking a job with his uncle, Omar’s own ’80s-inspired greed and ambition earns him a shot in the family business turning over one of his Uncle’s many properties, a destitute launderette in a poor neighborhood of London. Meanwhile, Omar’s childhood friend Johnny (Daniel Day-Lewis), exemplifies the poor English working class as a homeless kid whose punk gang resorts to crime and squatting for survival. These two worlds merge at the site of the launderette, owned and exploited by Nasser, whose revenue comes from his English working-class patrons. Omar and Johnny’s queer relationship and Nasser and his British mistress Rachel’s (Shirley Anne Field) infidelity represent aberrations in the film’s familial structure: where business and wealth are insulated and grown within Nasser’s vast family, Johnny and Rachel stand on the outside. They are the “dirty laundry” kept secret from the successful family. Renamed “Powders” (how gay is that?), the launderette becomes the symbol of the film’s tensions: anti-immigrant sentiment, greed, gentrification, and economic inequality play out as lovers Omar and Johnny renovate and run the launderette together.

Highly acclaimed, the film moved to theaters in Britain and America, where it received an Oscar nomination for the best original screenplay (beaten by Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters). This ability to move from British television to American theatrical distribution reflects the film’s reach and makes it a prime subject for analysis on queer representation.

In terms of queer relationships, we arrive at Johnny and Omar’s intimacy quite late. The first time we see them together on screen is a serendipitous reunion (we learn later they were very close childhood friends). We enter their relationship not at its conception but in a revival; we encounter them without experiencing their romantic past. This positioning may seem trivial but it does important work: it muddles the spectacle of queer intimacy. With much LGBT media centered around dating and romance, a potentially damaging and myopic structure emerges around these representations: What does queer love look like? What is queer love supposed to look like?

By denying us identifications with the beginnings of Johnny and Omar’s intimacy, we must find other ways to love their relationship. This makes us focus on what their love does, rather than what it looks like. We watch the two literally build a business together. Yes, it is a business that does indeed make money for Omar’s corrupt uncle and feeds Omar’s greed. But it is also a business that allows Johnny to break out of his cycle of crime for survival, and one that allows Omar and Johnny’s love to blossom.

At the height of the film, the aberrant relationships challenge the divisive theme of anti-immigrant London, showing the intersectional and connective power behind “queer” love. On the opening day of the launderette, Omar is nervous. Johnny — seeming to want to help him relax — pulls Omar into the back to fool around. However, with Johnny sitting on his lap, Omar reveals that he knows Johnny participated in anti-immigrant marches, and how xenophobia took part in his father’s alcoholism and his mother’s suicide. While Omar confesses, Johnny is sympathetic, sitting close to Omar, undressing him and caressing his chest. Johnny apologizes as Omar starts to strip Johnny in turn. Their intimacy is mirrored by Rachel and Nasser entering the launderette together. Flirting and laughing, the two seem to be truly in love. As they marvel at the beauty of the renovated launderette, Rachel says to Nasser, “Dance with me … we are learning.” They begin to waltz across the launderette as Johnny and Omar share champagne and make out behind the two-way mirror.

These two couples, whose love is immoral in structures of monogamy and heteronormativity, are actually the only characters who suture a racially and economically divided London. They kiss and dance at the very site that will connect these two sides for the benefit of both.

Looking deeper, Johnny and Omar’s queer love is actually intertwined with challenging London’s racial and economic divisiveness. In another example, queer love acts as comic relief, aimed at the audience to subvert the tension between Johnny’s anti-immigrant punk gang and Omar’s greedy drug-dealing uncle Salim (Derrick Branche). Omar exits the launderette to pay Johnny for his work, sharing glares with Johnny’s gang who are loitering at the entrance. As Salim drives by to check on the business, we look through his side-mirror, his hand in the shot, as both he and the gang observe Johnny and Omar.

The tensions of the film build and center themselves as “all eyes” are on Omar and Johnny. But the tension calms, as the audience is privileged with a shot from the opposite viewpoint: Omar hugs Johnny for a job well done, and we see a close up of Johnny’s head next to Omar’s. Playfully, he sticks his tongue out and licks Omar’s neck, a recognition of their love that eases the tension from these encroaching forces.

Other cute, quirky, and hilarious moments mingle with the queer love of these two characters and recall a specific moment that encapsulates — for me — the beauty of this film: in Nasser’s house, Salim makes a snide comment to Omar when discussing the launderette, “You haven’t fucked your uncle’s launderette, you little fool?” Omar, smug, lifts his head from his chair to meet Salim’s eyes and responds, “In my small opinion, much good can come of fucking.”

Mark Muster is a master’s candidate at Syracuse University studying the relationship between time and alternative kinship formations in American film and literature.

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Recently, there has been an uptick in the amount of “gay-centric” media created by the mainstream film and television industry. Movies like Call Me by Your Name (2017), Moonlight (2016), Carol (2015), Bohemian Rhapsody (2018), etc. mark a notable shift in LGBT narratives to being not only more mainstream—more desired—but actively produced for recognition among the Hollywood award circuit. In the wake of Moonlight’s win (or perhaps earlier with Dallas Buyers Club (2013) and the snubbed Brokeback Mountain (2005)), LGBT narratives were solidified in the slew of dramas that catch Oscar-esque attention; though notably, these narratives remain a majority gay, white, and male-centered. With multiple queer and gay narratives watchable in theaters, stream-able online, and available on network TV, there is an ostensible perception of a surplus.

With waxing LGBT representation, queer-identified people — long erased and caricatured in television and film or marginalized to the edges of the screen — finally find themselves at the center of these narratives, finally up for best-actress and actor as opposed to being ossified as the side-kick, the friend, the best supporting actress/actor. But even after the recognition of films like Moonlight, a brilliant tale of queer intimacy and intersectionality in Miami, my desire for queer media only increases. I begin to reject these new pristine studio-made representations of queer lives; I feel a guilty disappointment. They are simply not enough.

Unpacking these feelings unveils the larger and multi-tiered problem of popular queer representations in film and television — tiers that build on each other and consequently narrow the multiplicity of queer narratives. Part of this homogenized representation comes from the infrastructure of the American entertainment industry. Run mainly on viewership, products appealing to the lowest common denominator will always thrive in contrast to media that attempts to be unique. Even in the age of Netflix, Amazon, and other streaming services where competition allows viewers to demand more creativity from television, “LGBT” shows and movies must constantly compete with straight media that statistically annihilates even the strongest queer fan base.

Beyond this economic obstacle, there is a problem with the very identifier of “Gay” as a genre in film and TV. Based solely on classification by the sexual binary, Gay TV as a genre becomes a sweeping conglomeration for any kind of media whose narrative crucially involves or revolves around a queer character. The trap of Gay TV then lies in being classified by a heteronormative industry, a label which itself invites a lens of tunnel vision, reducing shows to the characters’ sexual object choice rather than classifying the show as a drama, romance, comedy, game-show etc. This tunnel vision hails a specific audience that on the one hand is useful for those queer-identified people seeking representation but weakens the agency and reach with which some media have the potential to cause. Instead of exposure to these shows and movies, the algorithms of streaming services that recommend based on genre choices will never promote queer media to a wider audience, consequently stifling the ability of queer narratives to challenge heteronormative structures of intimacy, social formations, even story-telling.

The third tier, and the issue where I want to dwell, lies in my own conundrum when desiring queer representation. By scouring history for queer-leaning figures we create our own queer historiography, forge a lineage, and construct a model for future queer people. However, when binging queer photography, queer art exhibitions, queer film and TV I am also consuming in an attempt to connect: as if to say, “Ah! There I am, that’s me.” This desire may originate from the first moment one notices their asynchrony with heteronormative sexuality: the need to find oneself in a world full of images that represent a very specific type of person, relationship, body, family, etc. When I watch a gay TV show like Looking or a film like Call Me by Your Name, I am looking to recognize and connect with aspects of my queerness. In other words, when I consume these medias, I am trying to feel closer to the represented identity of “gay.”

But, the endeavor to identify with these narratives inevitably fails. No matter how close I want to connect to a character like Patrick (Johnathon Groff) in Looking, he is not me, and his queer experience is not my queer experience. Therefore, I wonder how we might envision alternative ways to consume LGBT representations that relocates this desire? Instead of focusing energy on how I might recognize parts of myself in these characters, it might be better to look for queerness in content, form, or style. How do certain aesthetic choices reflect queer experience and queer life in a heteronormative time and space?

This set of posts is deeply inspired by José Muñoz’s Disidentifications, in which he traces a cogent methodology of disidentifying with harmful or problematic representations and discourses in order to utilize aspects of these works for minoritarian subjects as a matter of survival and a method of resistance. These posts work alongside Muñoz within the process of identification attempting to reconfigure the moment of connection within these representations from the characters or works, to acts and techniques. For the next three weeks I will explore three different queer representations. Focusing on aesthetics, I hope to show how these films and TV connect with us by commenting on contemporary queer experience. Tune in next week for my thoughts on My Beautiful Launderette.

Mark Muster is a master’s candidate at Syracuse University studying the relationship between time and alternative kinship formations in American film and literature.

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In this month’s posts on Metathesis, I have discussed the metaphorical uses of contagious disease and examined the figure of the zombie in some popular late twentieth and twenty-first-century texts. In my final post of the month, I would like to turn to a unique sub-genre of the zombie narrative that unsettles the survivor-centered perspective of zombie outbreaks: the eco- zombie.

Zombies present an interesting study in the metaphor of contagion because they embody contradictions and create questions that disturb our sense of self and communal identity. The most obvious of these contradictions, of course, is that zombies are the “living dead”: two oft-mutually exclusive terms in the human experience. One is generally alive or dead, but not both simultaneously. The biological science of how zombies actually work is often left somewhat fuzzy in zombie science-fiction, which tends to give more emphasis to the latter portion of the hyphenated genre, rather than the former. These complex biological questions are typically subsumed by the drama and urgency of the survival story. One stunning example of this is in the 2105 film World War Z, when the viewer is introduced to a brilliant young epidemiologist who only minutes later slips unceremoniously in the rain and accidentally blows his own head off.

In terms of popular story-telling, this emphasis makes sense: the redemption narrative of survivors makes for a more emotionally engaging and compelling drama with which readers, viewers, and players can identify. Part of the power of the survivor’s narrative is that we can imagine ourselves in their shoes. This perspective aligns with the zombie’s function to horrify and disgust the reader, viewer, or player in an act of dis-identification with the dead. In short, the horror of the zombie is centered upon the fact that nobody wants to become one! In fact, it is impossible to even imagine what it is like to be a zombie, given the way zombies embody a complete lack of supposedly distinct human capacities – including a sense of individuality, empathy, personality, and sociality. This narrative dynamic makes thinking outside of the standard human vs zombie conflict relationship difficult.

However, two recent zombie narratives have given us a new spin on the zombie narrative by taking inspiration from biology, and imagining the dead living in symbiosis with the natural world. In both The Last of Us (2013), a highly-cinematic survivor horror videogame from developer Naughty Dog, and The Girl With All the Gifts (2016), a novel and feature-length film developed from M.R. Carey’s short story “Iphigenia In Aulis,” a rampant fungal infection of Ophiocordyceps Unilateralis infests the human population. Known colloquially as the “Zombie Fungus,” Cordyceps is a true-to-life fungus that consumes and takes control over the bodies of ants and wasps. It manipulates genetically determined behavioral patterns of the ants it infects, compelling them to climb high above the forest floor, where they then clamp their jaws on a leaf, and remain as the fungus grotesquely protrudes from their body.

A “zombie ant” infested with Ophiocordyceps Unilateralis

Joel battles an “infected” human from The Last of Us

The Cordyceps-infected humans in these stories aren’t specifically identified as “zombies” in either text – they are referred to as the “infected” in The Last of Us and as “hungries” in Carey’s story and its film adaptation – but they can be easily identified as such by their appearance and behavior, especially their cannibalistic rage. Because the “zombie ants” that host the Cordyceps fungus in real life are, if anything, less violent than their healthy counterparts, the violence of the human Cordyceps victims in these texts can be interpreted as making reference to “genetically determined behavioral patterns” recognizable in the aggressive human species.

Melanie and a group of “hungries” in The Girl With all the Gifts

A very zombie-like “Infected” human from The Last of Us

In both texts, the symbiotic relationship between the infected humans and the Cordyceps fungus allows the infected to maintain a scientifically stable relationship to the natural world. This relationship is also markedly distinct from the fuzzy biological uncertainty of most zombie films. Cordyceps really exists, and it only takes a small logical leap to envision humans under the organism’s control. Rather than being presented as monstrous doubles of humanity, these versions of Cordyceps zombies represent an ecological and biological world which is rebounding against human civilization and industrialization. In both The Last of Us and the film adaptation of Carey’s story, visuals which depict the overgrowth of nature into formerly urban spaces play an important role in signifying how the viewer and player should interpret their monsters.

Overgrown London in The Girl With All the Gifts

Overgrown Salt Lake City in The Last of Us

The encroaching vegetation in these scenes infests the urban landscape and reclaims the landscape for nature, turning the city into a space both uncanny and sublime. The vegetation subsuming the metropolis transforms it into a dilapidated, ivy-embossed maze filled with ghostly relics. Similarly, the Cordyceps infection presents itself on the human body through grotesque, bubbly growths, signifying a biological excess overtaking both the human body and society. The overgrowth of nature on the infrastructure of the city and the Cordyceps fungus on the human body call attention to the material excesses of human cities and urban life. By reclaiming the city and the human body for the natural world, these infestation suggest that humanity has also overgrown, and as a result disrupted biological homeostasis and ecological balance.

Melanie and survivors navigate overgrown London in The Girl With All the Gifts

(SPOILERS AHEAD)

Interestingly, in both The Last of Us and The Girl With All the Gifts, the Cordyceps infestation creates a scenario in which a young woman with a unique resistance to the infection presents an opportunity for a “cure.” However, in order to process the cure, she must be sacrificed. In both texts, characters must weigh the life of the innocent individual against eradication of the human species. In the dramatic conclusion of the narrative arc in The Last of Us, the player must decide if they will save Ellie, the young girl that they have spent hours of gameplay guiding and protecting through a maze of zombies, with the knowledge that her survival means the end of the world. In The Girl With All the Gifts, Melanie makes this choice herself, choosing to transform the whole world with Cordyceps and found a new zombie society based on the teachings of Miss Justinaeu, the only person who treated her sympathetically.

A doctor attempts to convince Joel (the player) to sacrifice Ellie for the greater good of mankind in The Last of Us

By using biological science to reimagine the biological impact of the fungus among us, these texts break the mold of the standard zombie narrative. The Last of Us and The Girl with All the Gifts imagine zombies through a perspective of biological symbiosis and ecological balance, rather than racialized contagion or scientific terrorism. In doing so, these texts reshape how the metaphor of the zombie can be interpreted in an age when an excess of humanity and human impact threatens to push the ecosystem out of balance.

Zombies are harbingers of an inverted natural order and the embodiment of the redistribution of power. While this disruption of the order of life and death is violently disturbing for survivors, there are signs in many zombie narratives that the collapse of human society might actually be to the benefit of nature and the organic world that zombies inhabit. If we begin to reimagine zombies not as a gross corruption of humanity, but as organisms that are a balancing force of an interconnected biological world moving towards homeostasis, we begin to get a different picture of zombies and their relation to the metaphor of contagion. Eventually, they come to represent not a teleological progression from life to death, but a seasonal, circular, progression reflecting a desire for environmental balance, and a commitment to imagining the world through the changes and returns of life and death on a larger and longer scale.

The post The Eco-Zombie: Using Biology to Imagine Zombies Beyond the Human appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.