Figure 1: Texturally rich costuming of Matt Murdock character in Daredevil.

Post by Piers Britton, University of Redlands.

How far are Marvel Studios’ film and television franchises visually coded for homogeneity? How insistently, that is to say, is brand identity maintained at the levels of design, cinematography, editing and post-production processing? This question seems worth pursuing in relation to Marvel’s Daredevil (Netflix, 2015), which has already been critically positioned as divergent from prior entries in the “Marvel Cinematic Universe” super-franchise. All the MCU films since 2008 have been rated PG-13, while the ABC television series Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (2013–) and Marvel’s Agent Carter (2014-15) are consistently anodyne, even at their darkest. Daredevil, by contrast, is already notorious for its frequent and intensely graphic violence, which earned it a TVMA certification, and for the conflicted nature of its anti-heroic protagonist. This shift in tone is not the only departure from the prior Marvel norm. Much more assertively than Agent Carter, and even more than the DC offerings on the CW, the new show emphasizes that its protagonist is one of Marvel’s “street-level” superheroes, with the action never straying beyond Hell’s Kitchen and the narrative focusing heavily on the socially disadvantaged and marginalized. While it is not the first Marvel property to introduce comic-book characters without their familiar costume trappings and idiosyncrasies of grooming, Daredevil has arguably gone further than its predecessors in this regard. For example, the series reduces the comics’ hirsute, flamboyantly coiffed and green-ulster-clad Leland Owlsley (Bob Gunton) to a deceptively avuncular elderly man with thinning hair and a short back and sides, dressed in earth-toned tweeds. Indeed, Daredevil even deprives Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) of his red superhero suit until the climax of the final episode.

Showrunner Steven DeKnight has underscored the ways in which Daredevil differs visually from network series like Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., noting that he and his D.P., Matt Lloyd, “wanted to be able to do a show that was literally darker than what you would see on a network,” where series tend to be “very bright, very evenly lit,” and further that they “wanted to take more of the color palette of the classic movies of the ’70s, the Dog Day Afternoon and French Connection and Taxi Driver.” The series’ production designer, Loren Weeks, also emphasizes Daredevil’s departure from the sleek, well-appointed and technology-rich environments that typify Marvel’s cinematic tales of billionaire playboys, demigods and super-soldiers. Tellingly, Weeks claims: “We’re more The Wire than other Marvel movies. It’s not the stuff you see in Agents of SHIELD, it’s the stuff you see every day.”

Stress on the quotidian, invocation of the ultra-realist Wire, insistence on chiaroscuro lighting (with its inevitable noir associations), and reference to the subdued palette of dour seventies thrillers all serve to distance Daredevil not only from other Marvel properties but also from other broadly cognate television shows. They rhetorically position the series as something “grittier” than the quasi-realist narratives of street-level superheroes in Arrow (CW, 2012–) and The Flash (CW, 2014–). Indeed, if there is a DC comparison to be made, it is with the notoriously tenebrous and bleak Dark Knight films. So, if we are to take Weeks’ and DeKnight’s remarks at face value, how does the visual style of Daredevil fulfill the branding imperative of offering variety within identity and novelty within continuity?

A number of recurrent or repeated visual motifs both in Daredevil’s paratextual materials—posters, publicity stills, and so on—and in the episodes themselves serve to weld strongly to Marvel’s other film and television, and to its comic-book lineage. Use of strong color in Daredevil represents the most interesting variation on established Marvel brand elements. MCU style in toto is defined by chromatic intensity and richness (in contradistinction to the DC film and television “multiverse” that has gradually developed since Batman Begins). Dominant color values have varied, with Phase Two movies and the second series of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. frequently exhibiting lower values and lower-key lighting than Phase One. Even so, selective, punctuative use of high-intensity colors is endemic to Marvel’s television and film offerings. Only the environments and personnel of S.H.I.E.L.D. are stripped of high value and saturated color; otherwise, the heroes and villains and their worlds are as bright as the Marvel logo, and the comic-book pages we glimpse in the animated version of that logo that heads each film and television show from the MCU. In most cases, focal points of vibrant color are typically located one way or another on the bodies of the protagonists, from Iron Man’s scarlet and gold livery to Peggy Carter’s blue suit, white blouse and red hat (used so extensively in publicity materials for Agent Carter), and from Thor’s flaxen hair to the Hulk’s green skin.

Figure 2: Superficially neutral costuming of Wilson Fisk character in Daredevil

Daredevil largely displaces intense color from bodies, except in the case of the saturated red costume worn by the “ninja” villain, Nobu (Peter Shinkoda), in a watershed fight scene. As befits a faux-realist television series, and especially one that unfolds over thirteen instantly reviewable episodes, the devil is in the details in Stephanie Maslansky’s costumes; bold gestures are correspondingly few and far between. Thus Matt Murdock’s suits are mostly mid-value monochrome but his clothes are texturally rich—shirts, for example, are nubby oxford rather than smooth poplin—suggesting the blind man’s heightened reliance on tactility (Fig. 1). By the same token, wisecracking Foggy Nelson (Eldon Hensen) is also superficially neutral in his dress, but the printed shirt fabrics and animal-motif ties reward leisurely, close inspection and add a “quirky but not flamboyant” note – and so on. Unmodified strong color is eschewed in inverse proportion to the dominance of all these surface nuances, a choice that is most notable in the reimagining of principal antagonist Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio). The white suits and ascot of the comic book Kingpin are relegated to an “Easter egg” joke in the fifth episode, while Fisk’s open-necked silk shirts and mohair-tonic, three-piece suits for the series are either black, gray or muted blue, the surface of the latter sometimes broken up with self-stripes that further mitigate saturation (Fig. 2).

Figure 3: Vivid lighting in Daredevil.

Vivid color is mainly a property of environments, and more specifically the illumination of environments, in Daredevil. Murdock speaks of experiencing “a world on fire,” and in addition to a couple of livid-red POV shots simulating this for the audience, the idea is echoed each episode in the opening credits, which show New York landmarks and finally Daredevil himself forming viscously out of a red haze. A no-less insistent leitmotiv is the acid yellow and green light suffusing the panes of the picture windows that are endemic to the various warehouse and loft spaces in which so much of the nocturnal action takes place — including Murdock’s own apartment (Fig. 3). This sickly glow can in most cases be rationalized as light pollution from neon signage and street lamps (the now celebrated hallway fight from the second episode is one of the exceptions), but this is ultimately beside the point. The device is surely used chiefly because the grid of glazing bars in these windows provides a strong, stylized, quasi-graphic backdrop to action – and perhaps because both the strong color fields and insistent linearity recall the simplified backgrounds beloved of comic-book inkers and colorists (Fig. 4).

Figure 4: Example of simplified backgrounds of classic comic books.

Figure 5: Netflix’s posters for Daredevil.

Very little of this disembodied color creates as potent an effect as Netflix’s Hopperesque banner and posters for Daredevil (Fig. 5), which feature a cityscape bathed in the super-intense blue that hyperbolically represents nighttime in screen media as well as some comic strips. It is in these paratextual images that the “Marvelness” of Daredevil is perhaps most economically and powerfully expressed. Even so, and notwithstanding analogies with The Wire and Dog Day Afternoon, Daredevil’s imagery consistently reflects the fact that, as Loren Weeks puts it: “We didn’t want to be too literal with the real. It is the Marvel universe, after all.”

In particular, I want to reflect on the fact that when we talk of the aesthetic of a particular text or textual set—e.g. “the Mad Men aesthetic,” or “the Sherlock aesthetic”—the word aesthetic is really just a conventionalized alternative to the term style. Looking back on recent scholarship on television aesthetics (including my own work), I find unacknowledged tensions between the adjectival form of “aesthetic”—used in formations such as aesthetic judgment, aesthetic attitude, aesthetic object and aesthetic category—and the singular nounal form, which connotes the cluster of formal and stylistic properties that define a particular text or textual set.  These two usages are now routinely yoked to one another in the literature of television studies—as in the recent collection Television Aesthetics and Style—in spite of the fact that they represent very different kinds of engagement with texts, and have very different academic histories and profiles. In television studies and elsewhere, the adjectival form of “aesthetic” almost invariably points to an evaluative project that has its roots in Enlightenment debates about the nature of taste and the ontological status of art.  Such debates, which not only address the difference between categories (such as the beautiful and the sublime), but also account for the pleasures of art and distinguish art from non-art, have had considerable influence.  Over the last two hundred years, Enlightenment aesthetics has profoundly affected the critical study of literature, music and the fine arts in the academy, as well as journalistic artistic criticism and the rhetoric of the art markets.  One of its most enduring effects has been the formation of artistic canons – and corresponding exclusions.  Of late, scholars such as Jason Mittell, Jason Jacobs, and Sarah Cardwell have championed this kind of evaluative approach in television studies.[1]  Thus, Cardwell feels able to claim that certain television programs “are more likely than others to proffer aesthetic qualities valuable to the television aesthetician,”[2] while Mittell more bluntly speaks of identifying a given program not only as “great” but also “better than others.”[3]  This approach has inevitably been controversial in a discipline historically driven by the imperatives of cultural studies, which does not recognize absolute or transcendental values and always seeks to locate value judgments in discursively specific contexts.

The nounal form of “aesthetic,” on the other hand, tends to be used in analyses of different formal and stylistic elements within a given medium and text, not in arguments concerning excellence or its absence.  Engagement with “an aesthetic” in this sense ought to be less contentious for television studies than evaluative aesthetics à la Cardwell and Mittell.  Articulating elements and principles of design and style, and considering how or why they might be discernible in a given text or cluster of texts, does not per se constitute a value judgment about that text’s relative status.  Indeed, I would argue that formal analysis should not be considered a function of aesthetics at all: connections between formal analysis and aesthetic judgment were only ever historically contingent, not inherent, in humanistic disciplines such as art history and literary studies.  My initial academic formation was in art history, where analysis of form and style has always been a crucial disciplinary tool.  Its usefulness as such has not dwindled as old models privileging connoisseurship, narratives of “great men,” and the autonomous history of style have given place over the last half-century to studies informed by Marxist social history, feminism, semiotics, reception theory, and so on.  At no point, from the time of Wölfflin and Riegl to the present, has formal or stylistic analysis in art history required aesthetics as a justificatory prop.

“Judgement of Paris,” Joseph Hauber (1819, Neue Pinakothek, Munich)

So why do some scholars of television feel the need to invoke aesthetics, rather than being content with the less portentous terms form and style?  I wonder if the urge does not stem from a collective desire to lend gravitas to a project that for some is still a questionable distraction from the “real” work of television studies.  Perhaps we are too used to the now-automatic legitimation conferred by the politically informed, latently activist ethos of cultural studies, and feel exposed when we fear we are operating outside its ambit.  If so, the irony is that by taking refuge under the aegis of aesthetics, scholars of television risk creating a false dichotomy.  When formal and stylistic analysis are lumped with aesthetics, as opposed to being understood as tools in their own right, it is easy to lose sight of the fact they can inform a wide array of interpretive engagements with television – including the work done by those of us whom Cardwell would class as “aesthetics skeptics.”  In other words, unlike aesthetics-as-evaluation, formal and stylistic analysis need not cut and cross with the longstanding concerns of television studies.

I’m grateful to Eliza Rodriguez y Gibson and Paul Booth for the conversations, critique and suggestions that helped shape this post.

[1]  See, for example, the introduction and the chapters by Cardwell and Mittell in Jacobs and Peacock. [2] Jacobs and Peacock, p. 38. [3] Ibid., pp. 3-4.

Part of this, of course, has to do with the stiffness of Gordon; McKenzie lends a measure of gravitas and almost deadening seriousness to the future police commissioner.  While this allows him to, for the most part, maintain a measure of moral certitude that may appeal to the more conservative members of the audience, it also makes his plotlines somewhat plodding and predictable at times.  And poor Bruce.  While Mazouz invests the future Batman with a certain pristine appeal–slightly nuanced by his recent attempts to wrest control of his company from the obviously-villainous Board–he is overshadowed not only by the major villains, but also by his own child co-star Selina Kyle (Camren Bicondova).

It is also a matter of space. The police station is, unsurprisingly, painted in grim colors, rendering it a stultifying space that lacks a sense of liveliness or energy. Compare this to Fish Mooney’s bar, which is always full of lush, saturated colors and musical performers who, while perhaps not talented, nevertheless provide a bit of local color (and who could ever forget Carol Kane’s atrociously wonderful performance)?  The bar serves as a world of color and barely restrained sensual energy, a welcome relief from the bleak and grimy cityscapes that show us a Gotham crumbling under the weight of urban decay and the organized crime that permeates every corner of the metropolis. Mooney’s bar also sits at the center of almost of all of the major plots that have emerged among the various crime elements of the city.  Whether under the control of Mooney or of Penguin, the bar is the epicenter of the criminal life of this grimy city.

It’s probably no accident, then, that between them, Jada Pinkett Smith and Robin Lord Taylor get the best lines of the series.  The appeal of Fish Mooney, however, goes beyond her quips; it seeps into every aspect of her persona. It might be going too far to suggest that Smith is a scenery-chewer, but there is something decidedly lush about the ways in which she delivers her lines, even when faced with the imprisonment and torture that have characterized her more recent storylines. It’s thus more than just being interesting. Fish Mooney is compelling; we as viewers actually care about what happens to her.

Like the other powerful women of color that have appeared on television in recent years (most notably, Viola Davis as Annalise Keating in How to Get Away with Murder), Jada Pinkett Smith as Fish Mooney has elevated being an understandable and compelling anti-heroine into an art.  Just as importantly, she also contains a great deal of queer potential, the pleasures of her performance gathering just as much significance as the actions that she takes within the drama.

When it comes to queer pleasures, however, no character provides as many as the Penguin.  From his kooky mother (Carol Kane), to whom he remains steadfastly loyal to his own penchant for the theatrically excessive, Penguin has emerged as one the queerest characters currently on television. Largely eschewing the tough-as-nails, hard-boiled male personae of Gordon and the world-weary patriarchal authority of Don Falcone (John Doman), Penguin succeeds precisely because everyone assumes that simply because he does not perform hegemonic masculinity as well as his fellow male characters. He succeeds because, like any queer, ludic trickster, he knows exactly the places where the dominant rules don’t or can’t hold up, and he exploits them to the fullest.

Through its aesthetic choices, Gotham encourages its viewers to confront the uncomfortable thought that evil, chaos, and queerness are infinitely more interesting, compelling, and even believable than the forces of good, law, and the boring straight world.  For a series that started out as a backstory for Batman and Jim Gordon, it seems to have fully embraced the idea that people really want to see, and what they really enjoy, are the villains who steal the show every week.

My own interest in writing this piece was sparked when I read Fred E. H. Schroeder’s 1973 essay “Video Aesthetics and Serial Art,” in the first edition of Horace Newcomb’s edited anthology Television: The Critical View (1976). The articles contemplating television aesthetics, such as Schroeder’s and Newcomb’s “Toward a Television Aesthetic,” disappear in later editions of this book. As Jonathan Gray and Amanda Lotz note in their book Television Studies, “the contents of the volume shifted considerably from journalists to academics over the first few editions” (18). Indeed, Gray and Lotz make a “gentle call” for a “more successful reintegration of aesthetics and critical analysis” as a “key frontier” for the future of television studies (53). This type of work exists, even if it does not explicitly call itself that: Julie D’Acci’s Defining Women: Television and the Case of Cagney & Lacey, Jeremy Butler’s Television Style, and a whole section of essays in Ethan Thompson and Jason Mittell’s How to Watch Television. But why hasn’t there been a bigger return to this analytical area?

I think there are a few factors that complicate this issue. For one, in the last decade there has been a clear shift in the public perception of television from the denigrated also-ran to a medium taken seriously by viewers as a prominent art form, a reputation that films and filmmakers have enjoyed for several decades. Likewise, aesthetics seems more clearly or naturally articulated in discussion of film than it does with television. Does this speak to a tension in television studies and television scholars, who may want to continue to distance themselves from film studies in regards to carving out its own disciplinary boundaries?

From another perspective, David Thorburn writes about this issue, rooting the problem less in the medium and more in terms of language. In his 1987 paper “Television as an Aesthetic Medium” he writes that “the adjective ‘aesthetic’ is problematic, I realize. But I know no other word to use for the qualities I wish to identify in our popular culture and specifically in our television system” (162). Despite the complicated nature of this term, he notes that he wants to employ it not as “a valuing of aesthetic objects” but rather for use as “a designation of their chief defining feature—their membership in a class of cultural experiences understood to be fictional or imaginary, understood to occur in a symbolic, culturally agreed upon imaginative space” (162).

In yet another way perhaps the early writing set the stage for a complicated relationship between television studies and aesthetics. Some articles from the 1960s and 1970s focus more on what television in this era couldn’t do rather than what it could do. Schroeder writes at length about the smallness of television image and television’s inability to transform “televised” arts within its at-the-time technological parameters. Evelina Tarroni’s article “The Aesthetics of Television” spends considerable time debating whether television is “art” or “merely a technical means of transmission which adds nothing to, and introduces no change, in the subject matter transmitted” (437). These aesthetic contemplations, while worthy of continued examination, are very much products of their time. Articles like this at their core were defensive arguments that had to first convince readers that television is art, and that television isn’t film. Since this line of thinking is less necessary for contemporary audiences, there is no longer a need to differentiate between the ideas that were at the center of these early television aesthetic discussions. These lines have been largely erased, between television actors and film actors, or between television texts and film texts.

From my perspective, what makes the conversation about aesthetics so productive, and instructive, is the reconnection of analyses that consider the form, content, and context of television programs, and relinking cultural studies and television aesthetics in a multitude of texts: old and new television programs; cult, popular, or unpopular programs; particular seasons or series as a whole; special episodes; mythology or monster-of-the week episodes; serial or episodic programs; groups of programs on networks or cable channels; “online” television, etc. In this regard, writers might also want to consider the ways in which different modes of distribution, reception, availability of texts, and their historical trajectories might inform aesthetic analysis.

From my own teaching perspective, I came to these questions and concerns from reading television studies research from the 1970s, but also from what felt like a classroom problem: why is it so easy for my students to talk about the form and content of films I show in class, when they have such difficulties connecting form and content in our analysis of television programs? Is it because television programs are devoid of form? Of course not, so let’s figure this out together.

This is the sixth post in Antenna’s series The Aesthetic Turn, which examines questions of cultural studies and media aesthetics. If you missed any of the earlier posts in the series, they can be read here.

In my first post in the “The Aesthetic Turn” series, I spoke of the part of “our experience of a media object [that] exists prior to and outside of language.” I asked whether we could use language to describe it without denaturing the experience itself, and I concluded we can’t, at least not directly. But that doesn’t mean we can’t describe it at all, and in this post, I’d like to suggest how to approach it obliquely, through metaphor and translation. (This post began as a “Digital Lightning” talk I gave as part of a series put on by the University of North Dakota’s Working Group on Digital Humanities. As I spoke, I played Casino Royale in the background.)

I’m a sucker for a good chase scene. I love the elegant excess of the parkour chase at the beginning of Casino Royale, where James Bond (Daniel Craig) pursues a criminal who careens off walls and catapults through improbably small windows.

I love the silly excess of the freeway chase in The Matrix Reloaded, where one pursuit is layered on top of another (in cars, on top of cars, and in motorcycles on top of cars). My favorite right now is the four-deep chase-within-a-chase (and dream-within-a-dream) that marks the climax of Inception.

I want to ask a question about chase scenes that is really a question about something else. In a sense, I want to force two things together in an unlikely metaphor. What do chase scenes reveal about media and translation? I mean “translation” in a broader sense than linguistic recoding, although I mean that, too. The English word translate derives from the Latin transferre, meaning “to carry across.” It implies movement. Other languages (such as Finnish and Japanese) use words that emphasize mediation and transformation, rather than movement. Both, I think, are key: movement implies transformation as signs leave one sphere to become meaningful in another.

How do media shape the phenomenon of movement-transformation? What happens when, say, a TV show travels from one geographic or technological space to another? Few questions are more fundamental in media studies, and few have been asked as often, although we tend not to phrase questions in terms of translation. In the era of “new media” (whatever we mean by that), we frequently speak in terms of remediation: what happens when we view newer media through the habits of thought instilled by older media? This question has grown ever more urgent as media converge. What happens when a fan remixes a show, which then goes through YouTube, and then through a link on Facebook, before it gets to us? I want to shift the focus, however, from the media platforms and technologies to the “through,” the movement-transformation.

What happens at the point of “through”? Is there a logic to “through-ness”? Can we see everything that is happening, or are things hidden from sight? Here is my initial answer: In the process of transformation, a gap opens up between a sign before its movement and after. The original sign and its “translation”—the sign we substitute for it—do not evoke the same things. They might evoke similar things; in fact, translation as we have traditionally understood it—a form of rewriting in a different language—is premised on that appearance of equivalence. But we need to pay attention to the gap, which is a place of doubt and ambiguity. It is also a place where we can observe an experience of a media object that is prior to language. Still, our observation is oblique: how does it feel to enter this place of doubt? Does this ambiguity provoke unease? Something else?

So what does this have to do with chase scenes? I’m forcing a metaphor here, which is to say, I’m transposing a sign—chase scenes—from one context (movies) to another (translation and media). (Not for nothing does metaphor derive from the Greek μεταφέρω, meaning “to carry across.”) Through that metaphor, I’m opening a gap we experience (in part) by asking, why this weird juxtaposition? My purpose is to provoke a reaction—an “aha!” would be great, but a “what the hell” will do perfectly fine, too. The point is to use translation and metaphor to turn our attention away from the object (the chase scenes, the media platforms, the texts) toward our experience of the object. The move is admittedly quite “meta” (μετα?), but it is also potentially quite valuable, too.

This is the second post in Antenna’s new series The Aesthetic Turn, which examines questions of cultural studies and media aesthetics. If you missed guest editor Kyle Conway’s inaugural post last month, you can read it here. Look out for regular posts in the series (most) every other Wednesday into the new year.

One of cultural studies’ preoccupations—and really, this goes without saying—is the audience. Works as early as Richard Hoggart’s Uses of Literacy (1957) emphasized the value of asking what readers do with what they read (or listeners with what they hear, or viewers with what they see), rather than presuming to deduce their reactions from the texts themselves. From Hoggart to the CCCS to encoding/decoding to the Nationwide project to textual poaching to acafandom to spreadability—the through-line is clear.

In this context, I want to ask a pointed question about aesthetics. I have been teaching a graduate seminar this semester on production culture and aesthetics, a topic that was inspired in part by Shawn VanCour’s excellent Antenna post on the aesthetic turn in media studies. He argues for “the value of a specifically production-oriented approach,” and although I agree, I was more struck by his description of how the media effects researchers from radio’s early years were asking questions about aesthetics. They were concerned with media’s experiential dimensions, and thus they brought “aesthetics” back to its Greek roots (it derives from αἰσθάνομαι, which refers to perception or experience).

Indeed, this question of experience is not new. Aristotle posed it in his Poetics, where he was concerned with tragedy’s ability to lead an audience to a point of catharsis. Rudolf Arnheim posed it in his book on radio, where he asked about the psychology of the listener, whom he assumed to be passive. David Bordwell posed it in the first section of The Classical Hollywood Cinema, where he proposed that people watching a film make and test a series of hypotheses as a way to make sense of its plot and structure. This list is far from complete—in fact, it’s really just a reflection of the syllabus from my media aesthetics seminar.

But there is at least one aspect of this experiential dimension that cultural studies scholars have largely neglected. It seems to me (and I’m hedging for a reason) that part of our experience of a media object exists prior to and outside of language. Let’s call it a “gut reaction,” but let’s take that metaphor at face value—it’s a moment when our body registers a response that we can’t quite capture in words. Language here does both too little and too much—too little in that we don’t have words to describe what we feel in our gut (at least not completely), and too much in that the words we do have always mean more than we intend. (When we use a word, we must account for how the people we are responding to used it, just as that they accounted for its prior uses. The effect is additive: words accumulate meaning in ways beyond any individual’s control.) We must translate from our gut to our mind (that is, from raw experience to an account that’s mediated by language) and we lose something in the translation.

So why do I hedge above? Why “it seems to me”? Even my assertion that we experience media this way is subject to the double bind of language, its simultaneous deficiency and excess. This is an idea we can intuit, but—it seems to me—we can’t describe it without denaturing the experience itself. So what is the analytical value of this intuition? Are there ways to observe this experience directly or indirectly? What insight can it provide into the broader range of phenomena related to audiences? What insight can it provide into the moment of production VanCour highlights? Finally, what does cultural studies stand to gain from examining the aesthetic experience of the media?

*****

I’d like to invite other Antenna contributors to continue this discussion. I’ve contacted a handful of potential contributors already, but I want to extend the invitation more broadly. If you are interested, please feel free to email me (conway dot kyle at gmail dot com) or the editors. You needn’t respond to the questions I’ve posed here, although I’d love to hear others’ thoughts. I’m eager to encourage as rich and wide-ranging a discussion as possible.

With respect to its mixing capabilities, the Atmos system can send discreet sounds to up to 61 individual speakers and 3 low-frequency subwoofers. This updates Dolby’s recent 7.1 configuration (color-coded below), which consists of three full-range speakers behind the screen, a channel for each side wall, and a left and right channel for the rear wall. Additionally, 7.1 can feed low-frequency effects to an LFE or “.1” channel located behind the screen.

Atmos essentially keeps this 7.1 configuration but adds two more speakers behind the screen, two channels for ceiling speakers, and two additional LFE channels for the theater’s rear corners, creating ostensibly an 11.3 foundation. Generally, this foundation might contain the film’s music, ambient and background sounds, and — in the front speakers — the onscreen dialog and sound effects.

Most importantly, Atmos can send up to 128 sound effect “objects” to any single speaker in the auditorium. Whereas an offscreen bird might emanate from the entire left wall of speakers in 7.1, filmmakers can now mix the soundtrack so the bird emanates first from only the far speaker on the left, then from a front ceiling speaker, then from an adjacent speaker, and so forth if the filmmakers wish to recreate a bird’s circuitous flight through an auditorium. Further, because not every theater wired for Atmos will have the exact same number of speakers, the system can modify where it mixes its sound objects in order for that bird to journey identically through a 37- and 61-channel space.

This new means of mixing sound effects is known as a “pan through array,” and—as Dolby argues—the capability is an extensive improvement over the panning limitations of previous formats. Take for instance this early fly-over effect from the 5.1 mix of Broken Arrow (1996). As the airplane travels through the image from the background to the foreground, the sound pans from the front channels into the rear channels (circled in red below), creating the illusion that the plane is also traveling through the theater.

In Atmos these effects still exist, but the added channels on the sides and ceiling allow filmmakers more control over a pan’s speed and intensity. For example, as we crane toward the tornado in Disney’s Oz: The Great and Powerful (2013; pictured below), the storm’s howls slowly engulf one row of speakers at a time in order to create a more foreboding atmosphere and pace.

However, we should not assume that these chill-inducing aesthetics are how practitioners will continue to mix in Atmos once this introductory period is over. To offer some historical context, when Hollywood first introduced digital surround sound to audiences in the early 1990s, films utilizing these new technologies were also sporting aggressive sound designs. For instance, during the final gun battle from Carlito’s Way (1993) we hear screams, gunfire, and other sound effects, yet when we listen to just the two rear surround channels we hear only guns and bullets.  The inclusion of only these sounds in the surround speakers would seem to create the illusion that bullets are actually whizzing by the heads of filmgoers.

(Here is an excerpt from the battle with every channel activated…

… and here is the excerpt again with only the rear surround channels activated.)

While Carlito’s Way typifies how 5.1 systems sounded during their first few years, such aggressive and kitschy mixes seemed to become passé by the end of the decade, with these more sensory experiences mainly quarantined for science-fiction or war films, and with most panning effects reserved for interplay between only the front speakers. I suspect a similar stylistic trajectory might also happen with Dolby Atmos.

So in lieu of treating aggressive sound mixing as essential to the Atmos aesthetic, we might conceive of the technology’s long-term appeal in two other ways. First, Atmos replaces each theater’s surrounds with higher-quality speakers that are capable of carrying wider frequency ranges. As opposed to previous soundtracks that were stored on 35mm, the increase in data space afforded to Atmos on DCP hard drives can then allow for more audio information and greater textural detail to emanate from these newer speakers. Second, and perhaps more interestingly, there are the ceiling channels. DreamWorks’s The Croods (2013) noticeably utilizes these new locations through its fabrication of reverberation and echo. During the film’s opening egg chase, the filmmakers mix Alan Silvestri’s A-TEAM-esque score so that it “bounces” off the ceiling like it would in a concert hall or indoor stadium. In addition, both The Croods (pictured below) and Rise of the Guardians (2012) feature fireworks and other elevated actions that take advantage of the ceiling’s speakers.

Ceiling channels and more detailed sonic textures are pleasurable additions, but they may pale in comparison to some of the more chill-inducing moments currently offered by filmmakers. If you are curious about experiencing these aggressive sound mixes firsthand then you may want to plan a trip to your closest Atmos theater before this type of aesthetic once again becomes passé.

On (the) Wisconsin Discourses, Part Two (Part One,

What political investments are written into discursive analysis?

The previous post in this series looked at how “discourse” became a foundational concept for Media and Cultural Studies at Wisconsin. Concisely stated, the term “discourse” is used as an abbreviation for how cultural groups adjudicate upon and incorporate information into frameworks of belief over time. Central to this approach is the supposition that the most sustainable opportunity for organizational change occurs during the formation of consciousness. In Emeritus Professor John Fiske’s work, reference to the term discourse carries several political assumptions indebted to the Birmingham School regarding the agenda of media and cultural studies research:

1) Social and political change occurs most sustainably in the superstructural sphere, among belief systems and within conditions of identity formation; 2) Identity formation is subject to what codes and meanings are available in cultural circulation, be it through media, education, politics, or the popular; and 3) Cultural messages can be collected and then assessed, or mapped, among other coherent belief systems for the purpose of strategic intervention.

Put differently, media analysis for John Fiske consists of identifying how coded messages circulate and correspond to other meanings. Central to this orientation, it is assumed that social change can be observed in cultural circulation before it has taken the status of official knowledge or institutional precedent. If a specific practice has become dominant, it will still resist ossification and can be addressed through appropriate tactics. With reference to study of the effects macro-conditions such as regulation and industry ownership, discursive analysis favors evaluation of the everyday practices, meanings, and strategies reflective of consciousness and perspective. “Mapping” is a bottom-up method developed for the purpose of empirically identifying traces of dominant and emergent consciousness in information, opinion, and intention. A cultural studies project is fundamentally based in the hope that researcher literacy of this selection process be utilized for political mobilization.

What is the relationship between media literacy and aesthetic analysis?

Perhaps the most misunderstood element of Fiske’s work is his contention that aesthetic and political domains are never mutually exclusive. Aesthetic construction is, for Fiske, a fundamentally deliberative process directed at circulation. Since screen, image, text, and interpretation are filtered through discursive lenses, aesthetics cannot be divorced from ethical and political considerations. Representations are in the first place constructed with conceptual concerns, be it profit, advocacy, or depiction. And he believes that there are tools for tracing how those concepts become tangible practices and consequent reference points for social engagement.

Fiske argues that political will can be viewed in part among contours of discursive circulation, such as television, popular culture, etc. He claims that traces of consciousness can be seen both implicitly and overtly within how information is conceived, created, and positioned. Groups identify with, resist, or attempt to affect flows of cultural circulation within circulation itself. And in this way, the “understanding” of media adds a tool for political planning.

Which information has the capacity to infiltrate hybrid circulating spheres of political investment relies heavily upon how perceived confluence is interpreted by the internal “sense” of a discursive formation. That pleasure is taken in the consumption of media, for example, depends upon the quality of the artifice of communicative or representational impact, and to how many different outlets, messages, and interpretative channels information is received.

Discursive analysis of media is directed at mechanisms beyond ordered discipline or ideological reproduction at varied productive and interpretive processes. Analysis begins with tangible codes, methods of production of those codes, and distributive practices. To account for the complex processes surrounding media, Fiske proposes something like Richard Hoggart’s concept of “drift” literacy. Fiskean media literacy evaluates how different cultural information is filtered and comes into contact among public and popular spheres.

An act of production can be evaluated for the quality of its creative use of technology, performance, and affect. But for Fiske aesthetics refers to the way that content design serves as a façade for political will. He’s much closer to Bourdieu’s notion that aesthetic evaluation is indicative of one’s place in a social field, than say Kant’s argument that aesthetics are synthetic judgments based in a priori cognitive structures. Either position would be quite different than the assumption that Fiske advocates for a low media effect framework. An audience is not automatically or merely “active”; cultural analysis requires that a discursive formation carry historical engagement with cultural logic and hold coherent views for how to reconcile social contradictions. A discourse cannot spontaneously materialize out of shared habits of consumptive reflection, regardless of the degree of reciprocation between audience members or content manufacturer.

Hence Fiske’s “literacy of media aesthetics” may be thought about as critical evaluation of the artifice and strategies of discursive circulation. For a discourse to sustain, it must be recognized among a social field. And a social field is always embedded within future-directed political struggles over perspective, belief, and material relations. Research into “discourses” includes evaluation of how groups, industries, and individuals develop and interpret coherent codes of framed perspective. Since information is coded by methods of production while inflected with conditions of interpretation, developing tactics for political intervention requires sophisticated literacy of cultural institutional practices.

The next post in this series will look at how the concept ‘discourse’ has been examined by several faculty approaches to research into ‘circulation’.

So where are the relationship-invested “shipping” fandoms in Mad Men? Where are the communities devoted to recuperating Don as a guiltless, misunderstood character? Hell, where are the alternative universes that place Peggy and Don (or Don and Pete, or, apparently, based on last night’s episode, Don and Lane) in a Shop Around the Corner/You’ve Got Mail type scenario? Why this lack of what we’d usually identify as fandom for Mad Men? And what do these absences tell us about Mad Men, about fandom, or perhaps about fan studies?

Is it that programs posited as “quality TV” instigate different modes of engagement than TV positioned as cult or teen? Or is it that Mad Men doesn’t tap into the same fannish infrastructures—the ready to go networks of community that we’ve seen launch and deploy for Sherlock at record speed these past weeks? Or is it that Mad Men doesn’t offer the same genre structures–most especially, it doesn’t depend on romance or buddy narratives (last night’s unusually heartfelt New Year’s episode notwithstanding)–but rather sets up relationships as destructive forces that threatens already deeply compromised characters? Or is it that Mad Men doesn’t include fantasy elements or familiar character archetype that tap into long-standing fandom traditions?

Some shows (perhaps for the above reasons, among others) just don’t inspire massive, dynamic fandoms, or at least, not fandoms that are visible in the way we often think of and expect to see, recognize, and label as fandom. The Wire comes to mind as an example: yes, many people expressed their deep appreciation and critical devotion to The Wire, and you can find a few vids here and there (apparently, two actually debuted at Vividcon this past weekend). But there’s no Wire fandom-as-entity visible like there is for Supernatural, Merlin, Gossip Girl, and Dr. Who, to name a few.

But Mad Men has a highly visible fandom, if we look past standard expectations of fannishness and fan community. And not only that, but the fannishness on display is both socially-networked and transformative. We could start with the Mad Men twitterverse, We Are Sterling Cooper, which has received attention both for its breadth and dynamism and for its role in demonstrating how television networks can either reject or embrace collective, transformative fan creativity. But we certainly don’t need to stop with the Mad Men twitterverse. For another prime example, there’s the fan turned official artist Dyna Moe, whose episode wallpapers evolved into the Mad Men Yourself transmedia tool, where you can create images of yourself in Dyna Moe’s Mad Men animated aesthetic. And if we dig deeper, and to some less expected places, the network of Mad Men fan expression and community grows. Search for “Mad Men” on flickr. In addition to the many personal and wardrobe remix photos bearing the tag or description “Mad Men,” there’s the “Mad Men” group dedicated to “creating new vintage ads, and Costumes and pictures reminiscent of the show Mad Men.” And there’s the Mad Men Yourself community, where people share their results from AMC’s/Dyna Moe’s interface.

Now, search for Mad Men on the crafts marketplace, Etsy.com, in either the handmade or vintage categories. 1960s dresses, pencil necklaces, ephemera, deadstock bags, mid century modern office furniture, item after item includes reference to Mad Men in its description or tags, and come together via the search function. Yes, these are evidence of artists and sellers (and online marketplaces) capitalizing on Mad Men’s popularity to sell products, but they’re also evidence of the way in which Mad Men has both helped propel and become shorthand for fandom as cultural/aesthetic movement, one that we see play out not only in the spaces of Flickr and Etsy but in the craft, fashion, and cooking blogosphere.

So Mad Men fandom may not look like the expected framework that we see so impressively put into place with the airing of Sherlock, but it’s extensive, its reach is spreading, and it is arguably having a larger influence on cultural/aesthetic movements beyond the series itself. Is this embrace of these characters’ style and aesthetic a simple nostalgia or a more complex negotiation and remediation of a 60s aesthetic? And what are the politics of this embrace of hourglass figures and skinny ties? These are questions that exceed the capacity of this small post, but that bear much thought, and that I hope we can explore in the comments.