tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-51607831130190313922024-03-12T21:51:48.183-07:00Television Book ReviewsSouthwest Journal of CulturesBridget Cowlishaw, Ph.D.http://www.blogger.com/profile/13990580353645654390noreply@blogger.comBlogger11125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5160783113019031392.post-73719294526290314102010-07-29T12:02:00.000-07:002010-07-29T12:11:59.069-07:00SW/TX PCA/ACA Conference Paper by Samira Nadkarni, University of Aberdeen, Scotland<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_MeaQFKuzvXc/TAlOArNefkI/AAAAAAAAC0w/lAPP4_W4GC8/s1600/300drhorrible.png" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5478996195179134530" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_MeaQFKuzvXc/TAlOArNefkI/AAAAAAAAC0w/lAPP4_W4GC8/s400/300drhorrible.png" style="cursor: hand; display: block; height: 300px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 300px;" /></a><br />
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">“Is that a footnote, or are you just happy to see me?”: Examining Meta-narrative in </span></b></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog</span></b></span></i></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"></span></span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">“All that matters: taking matters into your own hands,” sings Dr. Horrible in the 2008 web series </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">. The show, a social satire in three acts, seems to rely on certain established narratives to constitute itself, working through the audience's participation within an established framework, a media-savvy community that is able to understand throwaway comments and asides and the layering they are intended to provide. Yet the series and its associated musical commentary subverts and destabilizes these dominant ideologies, re-appropriating them to a new purpose, and thus this paper aims to discuss the presence and subversion of these meta-narratives. However the events of the actual “making-of” commentary itself, included only in the DVD edition, will be ignored in favour of focusing on the framework established by the scripted performance and its potential effects upon a media-fandom community.</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">The social satire contained within the series is simultaneously both, remarkably multi-faceted and yet almost simplistic in its depiction. </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"> is based upon the premise of a world filled with heroes and villains, focusing on Dr. Horrible and his nemesis Captain Hammer and their mutual love interest, Penny. In doing so, the show borrows from a number of stereotypes within the established universe of superhero comics; for example Dr. Horrible comments at the start of the series that he has hired a vocal coach because:</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 35.45pt;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Dr. Horrible: A lot of guys ignore the laugh, and that's about standards. I mean, if you're going to get into the Evil League of Evil you have to have a memorable laugh. What, do you think Bad Horse didn't work on his whinny? His terrible death whinny.</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Further examples include the self-proclaimed hero, Captain Hammer's invulnerability, his ability to continually best his nemesis, Dr. Horrible in battle, and as per established guidelines, that the hero ends up with the girl - in this case, do-gooder Penny. The audience's understanding of the series's underlying satire is predicated upon their knowledge of these stereotypes and the manipulation they undergo within the confines of the series. The viewer is compelled to place the events within a narrative that presumes the triumph of good over evil, i.e. within a dominant meta-narrative that is informed not only by the genre of the superhero universe, but also by a moral narrative propounded within society. Arguably, the series destabilizes these by revealing Captain Hammer to be the “corporate tool” of Dr. Horrible's early claims, whereas Dr. Horrible himself, while claiming to have “a PhD in horribleness,” is shown far more sympathetically. The audience realizes, as we are meant to, that Dr. Horrible (or Billy, his alter-ego) is in fact the (anti)hero of the piece. As in previous works such as </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Buffy the Vampire Slayer</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">, </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Angel</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">, </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Firefly, Serenity</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"> and </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Dollhouse</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">, co-writer and director Joss Whedon challenges these tropes and demonstrates that they are not as rigid as one might think; good and evil are simply matters of interpretation.</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">The term “meta-narrative” is used here with specific reference to Jean-Francois Lyotard’s assumption that there is in fact a representation of universal truth, one commonly but not exclusively associated with a positive ethico-political end, which, once communicated between a sender and an addressee would then be intellectually binding for all rational minds. This notion of</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">meta-narratives was commonly associated with modernism, and it is possible to argue that in part by adopting the superhero genre, the golden age of which was considered to be in the 1930s and 40s, and placing it within a field that is almost aggressively post-modern, the show implies a continuing presence of meta-narratives, the old order challenged by Dr. Horrible. As he states, he is “destroying the status quo, because the status is </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">not</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"> quo. The world is a mess and I just need to rule it.”</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">It is interesting to note that Lyotard believed that meta-narratives no longer had a legitimate place in the post-modern world, laying credence instead with micro-narratives, an argument he formulated based on Wittgenstein's theory of “language games.” This theory then argues that while there are no broad over-arching narratives, there are a number of smaller narratives or micro-narratives that society uses to regulate itself through linguistic conduct. Thus, in order to establish what one might term a certain ruling system, a unified narrative which consolidates people into a community, there is the requirement that there be a sense of shared understanding, that certain words be taken for certain things. Identity in this community is grounded around the “throwaways” in language, the agreed-upon clichés and commonplaces that are taken for granted. And it is that which is taken for commonplace, for unsaid, that allows for the formation of links between individuals and the formation of a community. What one encounters in this manner is the unsaid, a truth represented in pure form that will inevitably provoke a response. There remains no doubt about them; rationality and a shared sense of understanding ensure a reaction.</span></span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=257809809595259021&postID=4787169582412771815#_ftn1" name="_ftnref" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">[1]</span></span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"></span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">However, it seems possible to argue that with the onset of a global culture and the amalgamation of a global community, there is once more the possibility of narratives that can no longer fall merely within the space of a micro-narrative. Rather, these narratives are assumed to be fact, enforced by a shared knowledge or shared history; a fact that when coupled with the globalizing influence of the media allows for the possibility of unified narratives or meta-narratives. Thus, within the global phenomenon that is television and the internet there is the propagation of an over-arching set of narratives, what one might term a media culture that compels certain common narratives among its viewers who use the same to validate themselves as part of an ongoing society, a community alive and responsive to these selves.</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog</span></span></span></i><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"> then functions not merely within the space of a well-established narrative - the superhero genre - but also within a space where the viewer's own global culture is incorporated. The series is framed such that the audience is provided a certain amount of information through the recordings Dr. Horrible creates for his video blog, drawing the viewer into the events occurring and placing him or her among Dr. Horrible’s online followers, a list that includes not only other viewers within the audience of this film, but also fictional members such as Captain Hammer and the story-bound LAPD. In this manner, the lines between reality and fiction appear to blur. Moreover, this effect is propounded by the associated musical commentary which, while meant to provide what one might term “real” information such as the history of the show, the artistic process involved, anecdotes involving the cast and crew, or a deeper insight into the characters portrayed, instead displays a continued fictional confine, a scripted performance. This applies largely to the characterization of the actors involved, with this performance often blurring the lines between their character in the series and the supposed reality of themselves that they perform:</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt 30pt;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Nathan Fillion: Look there Felicia goes/ Another deal you couldn't close, yeah. ... I'm better/ Better than Neil/ At - where do I start?/ Romantic appeal./ We both went for Penny/ And who copped a feel?/ The true man of steel./ I'm better than Neil.</span></span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=257809809595259021&postID=4787169582412771815#_ftn2" name="_ftnref" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">[2]</span></span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"></span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">It could be argued that the viewer is not only drawn into the patently fictional confine of the show, but that the commentary – elucidating real-time events such as the strike held by the Writer’s Guild of America (2007-08), Maurissa Tancharoen’s writing of Penny’s lines, and the cast and crews’ supposed fascination with the game of Ninja Ropes – also places the film within a reality external to itself. The viewer is led into a space within which the ideological discourse by which they navigate cannot be said to be informed merely by the narrative presented to them; the cultural discourse and basic social patterns that surround them will also play a role in the means of interpretation.</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;"><span lang="EN-GB"></span></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"></span></span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">The show's attempts to establish itself within certain fields of narrative then seems to prioritize an analysis of the various communities depicted within its frame, as well as the series's own effects upon a media-fandom community both within and outside of this narrative. Arguably, by placing the series within the confines of the superhero genre, the viewer's attention is drawn not merely to the established social mores and the conventions of law and order, but also to the transgressions of, and ambivalence towards, these mores and conventions, the latter usually depicted by the villain in question. However, the show raises certain pivotal questions with regard to these transgressions, inquiring into the communities depicted and the transgressed social norms in question. It seems clear that both heroes and villains (represented by Captain Hammer and Dr. Horrible respectively) can be seen to be members of differing communities, each with its own social norms, hierarchy, and strictures. And while Captain Hammer adheres to the basic social patterns applied by “normal people” or society at large, Dr. Horrible in turn is merely adhering to the behavioral blueprint for his own community of evil-doers. This theory seems borne out by Dr. Horrible's attempts to advance to a higher status of villainy by entering the Evil League of Evil, and being unable to do so until passing an evaluation by Bad Horse, “the thoroughbred of sin,” in which he is ordered to perform “A heinous crime, a show of force/ (A murder would be nice, of course.)” Thus, while convention within this genre would dictate that the villain in question represent a force of anarchy, Dr. Horrible's efforts are still merely an attempt to conform.</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Notably, unlike traditional formulations within the superhero comic genre, the villain in this case is not constituted within a Freudian parable as the id, nor is the hero representative of either the ego [as per the character of Batman] or the superego [as per the portrayal of Superman]. Rather, if one attempts to place the main characters within this formulation, it would appear that Captain Hammer, the supposed hero of the piece would represent the id, Dr. Horrible, the self-proclaimed villain would depict the ego, and finally, Penny, the moralistic do-gooder would take the place of the superego. Thus, we see Dr. Horrible agonize over his entry into the Evil League of Evil, an entry predicated upon the immoral act of murder:</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt 35.45pt;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Moist: Kill someone?</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt 35.45pt;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Dr. Horrible: Would you do it? To get into the Evil League of Evil?</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt 35.45pt;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Moist: Look at me, man. I’m Moist. At my most bad-ass I make people feel like they want to take a shower. I’m not E.L.E material.</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt 35.45pt;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Dr. Horrible: Killing’s not elegant or creative. It’s not my style.</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt 35.45pt;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Moist: You’ve got more than enough evil hours to get into the Henchman’s Union.</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt 35.45pt;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Dr. Horrible: Pshaw. I’m not a henchman. I’m Dr. Horrible. I have a P.H.D. in horribleness.</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt 35.45pt;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Moist: Is that the new catch phrase?</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt 35.45pt;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Dr. Horrible: I deserve to get in. You know I do. But killing? Really?</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt 35.45pt;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Moist: Hourglass says she knows a kid in Iowa that grows up to become president. That’d be big.</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt 35.45pt;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Dr. Horrible: I’m not gonna kill a little kid.</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt 35.45pt;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Moist: Smother an old lady.</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt 35.45pt;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Dr. Horrible: Do I even know you?</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Meanwhile, Captain Hammer baits Dr. Horrible at the laundromat, informing him of his intent to sleep with the woman of his dreams purely because Dr. Horrible cares for her:</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt 35.45pt;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Captain Hammer: You got a little crush, don’t you Doc? Well that’s gonna make this hard to hear. See, later I’m gonna take little Penny back to my place, show her the Command Center, Hammer Cycle, maybe even the Ham-Jet. You think she likes me now? I’m gonna give Penny the night of her life. Just because you want her, and I get what you want. See, Penny’s giving it up. She’s givin’ it up hard, ‘cause she’s with Captain Hammer. And these (indicating his fists) are not the hammer. [Pause] The hammer is my penis.</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Moreover, the characters of Dr. Horrible, a.k.a. Billy and Captain Hammer, seem to be closely associated with each other, so much so that the characterization of each appears curiously dependent upon the other. The viewer is first presented with this connection in the first act during “A Man's Gotta Do,” a song begun by Billy and yet, immediately after the first verse appropriated by Captain Hammer with the same refrain. This original co-dependency is then underlined by the fact that Captain Hammer decides to woo Penny beyond his usual seduction routines due to Dr. Horrible's crush on her, keeping her far longer than his other conquests simply because, as he says, he gets what Dr. Horrible wants. And most notably, at the climax of the series, at the very moment that Captain Hammer cannot help but feel, cannot help but be placed in a situation where he experiences real feeling for the first time, Billy claims that he no longer can.</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"></span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">It seems clear that the terms “hero” and “villain” within the series are not without a certain irony, and that in this particular case, the terms have then ceased their association with the traditional meanings. Rather, the destabilization of these signifiers within the field of the show appears to create what one might term a “pure signifier,” one that is freed from its previous associations at this point to be bound through the field of shared understanding to a new meaning within the media-fandom community that observes these fictional events. Thus, within this community of viewers, these terms and associations have taken on new meanings in the context of the series, i.e. a micro-narrative that is applicable within the context of a shared understanding.</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Whedon's use of the superhero genre employs a further irony. Traditionally, superhero comics, especially those in the 1930s and 40s, were largely associated with the propaganda inherent in a war-torn and immediately post-war world. To accommodate their propagandistic function, communication was made as simple as possible with comics relying on rudimentary phrasing and formulaic plots. Whedon's representation of this genre, however, lacks this simplicity, with communication within and between various communities in the show being problematized, albeit for satiric or comic effect. For example in the case of Dr. Horrible (a.k.a. Billy) and Penny, the problem seems to arise either from his romantic interest in her:</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Dr. Horrible: Love your hair.</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Penny: What?</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Dr. Horrible: No – I... love the... air.</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">or from his need to protect his identity as an evil villain; the need for subterfuge arising from his need to keep this side of himself hidden away from the</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">moralistic do-gooder of his dreams:</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt 35.45pt;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Dr. Horrible: I wanna do great things, you know? I wanna be an achiever. Like Bad Horse…</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Penny: The thoroughbred of sin?</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Dr. Horrible: I meant Gandhi.</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Subsequently, the viewer is given to note that this lack of communication is not restricted purely to the disparate communities of supposed good (or “normal”) and evil, as Captain Hammer also finds himself unable to effectively communicate with Penny due to excessive use of his signature metaphor:</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt 35.45pt;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Captain Hammer: Who wants to know what the Mayor is doing behind closed doors? He's signing over a certain building to a Caring Hands Group as a new homeless shelter.</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt 35.45pt;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Penny: Oh my God!</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt 35.45pt;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Captain Hammer: Yep. Apparently the only signature he needed was my fist. But with a pen in it. That I was signing with.</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">He also appears to fumble during his speech to the assembled crowd gathered to witness the opening of the shelter, pausing inappropriately during the opening to his speech:</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt 35.45pt;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Captain Hammer: I hate the homeless... ness problem that plagues our city.</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">The viewer is not exempt from this attempt at failed communication either. As previously stated, the viewer is drawn into the confines of the fictional space itself, made to assume the place of the audience. Thus, the viewer is included in the failure to communicate demonstrated both, by Dr. Horrible in his stuttering video blog entries, as well as the newscasters who announce:</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt 35.45pt;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Newscaster (female): It's a good day to be homeless.</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt 35.45pt;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Newscaster (male): [laughs] That it is.</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">This problematization of communication, while intended for satiric effect, then also simultaneously performs the function of interrupting any attempts to posit the series and its associations with the superhero genre as mere propaganda. The narrative undermines itself, its interruptions or effects revealing the ludicrous nature of modern communication, both within the series and in the viewer's own reality that relies so heavily on standardized phrasing and pithy metaphors.</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Furthermore, it is possible to view </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"> itself, along with </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Commentary! The Musical</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">, as informing a meta-narrative of media by contrasting the relatively controlled media environment of television with the readily accessible broadcast media of the internet and its potential as a site for independent cinema.</span></span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=257809809595259021&postID=4787169582412771815#_ftn3" name="_ftnref" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">[3]</span></span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"> The viewer's own knowledge of Joss Whedon's work with television, and his well-documented concerns regarding the creative constraints and lack of artistic control afforded to him lend credence to this theory.</span></span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=257809809595259021&postID=4787169582412771815#_ftn4" name="_ftnref" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">[4]</span></span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"> There can be no doubt that the internet is currently one of the largest up and coming arenas for media with various web-series gaining rapid popularity such as </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">The Guild </span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">(2007), </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">We Need Girlfriends </span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">(2006), </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">The Legend of </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Neil</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"> (2008), </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Dorm Life</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"> (2008) and many more. And as Carolyn Marvin presciently notes in her book </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">When Old Technologies were New</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"> (1988):</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">For if it is the case, as it is fashionable to assert, that media give shape to the imaginative boundaries of modern communities, then the introduction of new media is a special historical occasion when patterns anchored in older media that have provided stable currency of social exchange are re-examined, challenged and defended.</span></span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=257809809595259021&postID=4787169582412771815#_ftn5" name="_ftnref" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">[5]</span></span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"></span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Thus, while television’s current meta-discourse is specific to modes of production, associated commercialism and viewership, it is possible that the growing popularity of the internet as a viable site for independent cinema would then place it in a position to challenge some of these discourses. For example, Dr. Horrible’s video blog can be seen to depict not only a means by which to propound individual cinema at costs far below those conventionally associated with works for television, but also a production that is free to view and available to a global audience. This would also mirror the production of </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"> which was marketed via Hulu.com, and was originally available free to viewers in its online format.</span></span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=257809809595259021&postID=4787169582412771815#_ftn6" name="_ftnref" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">[6]</span></span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"> In this manner, it seems that while the web-series might have been written and produced in an effort to respond to the issues being raised by the strike held by the Writer’s Guild of America (2007-08), which affected television production, it also worked to disrupt the dominant meta-discourse of television. This entry into web-based production and distribution is an incursion that destabilizes television’s current monopoly.</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">All: As the fall turns into winter/ There appears a bunch of splinter / Groups who wonder what this inter -/ net is like.</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">While the tide is turning tepid/ And while the town is feeling trepi -/ datious time for us to step up/ to the mic.</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">We’ve got all these dynamite plots to use/ It’s time to light the fuse or lose/ The Strike.</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Television’s ideological discourse is inextricably interwoven with commercial and promotional rationale, and it is clear that in order to succeed, where success is measured in terms of viewing figures and sales, one is forced to play to particular assumptions. As the chorus so clearly notes in the opening track “Commentary!”:</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">All: Everyone loves these “making-ofs”/ The story behind the scenes./ The way that we got that one cool shot./ And what it all means.</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">We’ll talk about the writing./ We’ll probably say “It’s great!”/ And the acting – so exciting./ Except for Nate.</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">…</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Cast: Bring back the cast, we’ll have a blast/ Discussing the days of yore./ Moments like these sell DVDs.</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Writers: We need to sell more./ We’ve only sold four.</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">It seems that the musical commentary’s clear mocking of these assumptions appears to adhere to the promotional logic so associated with current media culture, while simultaneously avoiding placing itself completely within this field. The performance both inhabits this commercial space, its intention clearly to appeal to the audience, while its satiric element seeks to disrupt. It mocks from this privileged yet dissenting position, playing both to and against the dominant meta-narrative of promotional culture so entrenched in film and television, forcing the audience to constantly re-assess.</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">As a result, the commentary acts as a footnote to the show itself, but not as convention would dictate. Instead, it inhabits the edge, the margins, and speaks with impunity from this position, its mockery all the more powerful for the fact that it speaks in response to an unasked question. The commentary presumes that “everyone loves these ‘making ofs’” and that “moments like these sell DVDs,” but what the audience is in fact confronted with is not the true making of, or even a proper discussion of the writing process. Instead, one encounters what one might almost term “throw away” tracks such as “10 Dollar Solo,” “Zack’s Rap,” “Ninja Ropes,” and “Steve’s Song.” Moreover, songs such as “All About Me,” “Nobody’s Asian in the Movies” and “Heart, Broken” all seem to undermine meta-narratives propounded by or within the media, dealing with issues as diverse as the urge for fame, potential racial discrimination, and the constant need for clarification of the artistic process.</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Having discussed the commercial and promotional rationale so entrenched in current media culture, it then seems prudent to call particular attention to “Heart, Broken,” the eleventh track on </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Commentary! The Musical</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">. Written primarily as a solo for Joss Whedon, it explores his despair at constantly being called upon to explain the narrative in question, the commentary expressing a castigation of the commodification of art and the artistic process. The song is arguably a classic example of a satiric attack on present day meta-narratives of fame and mass-production:</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Joss Whedon: …[My heart’s] broken by the endless loads/ Of making-ofs and mobisodes/ The tie-ins, prequels, games and codes/ The audience buys/ The narrative dies/ Stretched and torn./ Hey, spoiler warning:</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">We’re gonna pick, pick/ Pick, pick, pick it apart./ Open it up to find the/ Tick, tick, tick of a heart./ A heart, broken.</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Jed: Joss, why do you rail against the biz?/ You know that’s just the way it is/ You’re making everybody mis-</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Zack: These out-of-date philosophies/ are for the dinner table, please./ We have to sell some DVDs.</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Jed, Maurissa, Zack: Without these things you spit upon/ You’d find your fame and fanbase gone.</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Maurissa: You’d be ignored at Comic-Con.</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Joss: I sang some things I didn’t mean./ Okay, let’s talk about this scene./ I think it’s great how Ryan Green – / Oh no, this is no good./ I thought J-Mo would back my play/ Now Zack and they all say –</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">All: We’re gonna pick, pick/ Pick, pick, pick you apart./ Open you up and stop the/ tick, tick, tick of a heart./ A heart…</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin-bottom: 5pt;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">It seems that at this point, Whedon is not merely addressing the production houses and television syndicates that would place emphasis on the need for mass production, although these are no doubt represented within the song by the voices of Maurissa Tancharoen, Jed, and Zack Whedon. Potentially, Whedon is addressing the viewer, the audience at large. “Heart, Broken” is all but a call to arms against this commodification, albeit one firmly entrenched in irony.</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin-bottom: 5pt;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Finally, the series seems to suggest, the choice lies with the viewer. Whedon’s subversive argument echoes Dr. Horrible’s own words - all that matters is taking matters into your own hands. It is possible to view </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"> as Whedon's challenge to the authoritarian narratives that popular culture has set in place, the global phenomenon presenting us not only with the presence of these potential meta-narratives, but also the ability to evaluate and perhaps reject them. As Mila Bongco notes:</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin-left: 35.45pt;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">The world is very different from that of thirty years ago: the bases of power have shifted, and so have ways of understanding them. Old certainties have gone, though new and perhaps equally repressive authoritarianisms have emerged. These, in their turn, must be challenged.</span></span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=257809809595259021&postID=4787169582412771815#_ftn7" name="_ftnref" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">[7]</span></span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"></span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText"><b><span lang="EN-GB"></span></b></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"></span></span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoBodyText"><b><u><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Notes:</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"></span></span></span></u></b></div><br />
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin-left: 0in; text-indent: 0in;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">1.</span></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"> </span></span></span></span><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">All song lyrics referenced from </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"> (2008) have been obtained from the official website: Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog (Soundtrack from the Motion Picture)</span></span></span><a href="http://www.drhorrible.com/linernotes.html"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">http://www.drhorrible.com/linernotes.htm</span></span></a><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">l [accessed on 28 December, 2009].</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin-left: 0in; text-indent: 0in;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">2.</span></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"> </span></span></span></span><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">All song lyrics referenced from </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Commentary! The Musical</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">, an additional feature of </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"> (2008), have been obtained from the official website: Commentary! The Musical</span></span><a href="http://www.drhorrible.com/commentary.html"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">http://www.drhorrible.com/commentary.html</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"> [accessed on 28 December, 2009].</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText"><b><u><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Bibliography:</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"></span></span></span></u></b></div><br />
<div class="MsoBodyText"><b><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Primary Sources:</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"></span></span></span></b></div><br />
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-left: 0in; text-indent: 0in;"><i><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog</span></span></span></i><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">, Dir. Joss Whedon (Hulu.com, 2008).</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"></span></span></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-left: 0in; text-indent: 0in;"><span lang="EN-GB"></span></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"></span></span><br />
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<div class="MsoBodyText"><b><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Secondary Sources:</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"></span></span></span></b></div><br />
<div class="MsoBodyText"><b><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Books:</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"></span></span></span></b></div><br />
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-left: 0in; text-indent: 0in;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Bongco, Mila, </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Reading Comics: Language, Culture, and the Concept of the Superhero in Comic Books</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">(New York: Garland Publishing Inc, 2000).</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"></span></span></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoBodyText"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Lyotard, Jean-Francois, </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge </span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984; reprinted and translated from Les Editions de Minuit, 1979).</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-left: 0in; text-indent: 0in;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Marvin, Carolyn, </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">When Old Technologies Were New</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"> (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"></span></span></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-left: 0in; text-indent: 0in;"><span lang="EN-GB"></span></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"></span></span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoBodyText"><b><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Essays:</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"></span></span></span></b></div><br />
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-left: 0in; text-indent: 0in;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Anna-Louse Milne, 'The Power of Dissimulation: “When You Are Only Three White Men...”, in </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Yale French Studies</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">, No 106, The Power of Rhetoric, the Rhetoric of Power: Jean Paulhan's Fiction, Criticism and Editorial Activity (2004), pp. 109 – 124.</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"></span></span></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-left: 0in; text-indent: 0in;"><span lang="EN-GB"></span></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"></span></span><br />
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<div class="MsoBodyText"><b><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Online Content:</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"></span></span></span></b></div><br />
<div class="MsoBodyText"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Commentary! The Musical </span></span><a href="http://www.drhorrible.com/commentary.html"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">http://www.drhorrible.com/commentary.html</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"> [accessed on 28 December, 2009].</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog (Soundtrack from the Motion Picture)</span></span><a href="http://www.drhorrible.com/linernotes.html"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">http://www.drhorrible.com/linernotes.htm</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">l [accessed on 28 December, 2009].</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-left: 0in; text-indent: 0in;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Kushner, David, 'Joss Whedon Goes Where No TV Man Has Gone Before', in RollingStone.com</span></span></span><span lang="EN-GB"><a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/25951789/joss_whedon_goes_where_no_tv_man_has_gone_before"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/25951789/joss_whedon_goes_where_no_tv_man_has_gone_before</span></span></a></span><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">[accessed on 12 January, 2010].</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"></span></span></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">PEOPLE Magazine, ‘Exclusive: Neil Patrick Harris tells PEOPLE he’s Gay’,</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">http://www.people.com/people/article/0,26334,1554852,00.html</span></span><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"> [accessed on 30 December, 2009].</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-left: 0in; text-indent: 0in;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Whedon, Joss, in </span></span></span><span lang="EN-GB"><a href="http://www.whedon.info/Joss-Whedon-s-Reaction-About-Angel.html"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">http://www.whedon.info/Joss-Whedon-s-Reaction-About-Angel.html</span></span></a></span><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"> [accessed 12 January, 2010].</span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"><br />
</span></span><br />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /><div id="ftn"><div class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=257809809595259021&postID=4787169582412771815#_ftnref" name="_ftn1" title=""><span class="FootnoteCharacters"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">[1]</span></span></span></span></a><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Anna-Louse Milne, 'The Power of Dissimulation: “When You Are Only Three White Men...”, in </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Yale French Studies</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">, No 106, The Power of Rhetoric, the Rhetoric of Power: Jean Paulhan's Fiction, Criticism and Editorial Activity (2004), p. 120. Although Milne's argument is based on Jean Paulhan's fiction and criticism, the context of Milne's theory of the formulation of a community seems more than related to Wittgenstein's theory of “language games.”</span></span></span></div></div><div id="ftn"><div class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=257809809595259021&postID=4787169582412771815#_ftnref" name="_ftn2" title=""><span class="FootnoteCharacters"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">[2]</span></span></span></span></a><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">'Better than Neil', </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Commentary! The Musical</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">, in </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">, Dir. Joss Whedon (Hulu.com, 2008). Nathan Fillion's lyrics here refer in the same manner to both Felicia Day as well as her character Penny, overlapping the two into a single entity. Furthermore, the viewer would also be aware that Neil Patrick Harris, having openly declared his homosexuality in People Magazine (Nov 3, 2006)</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">would be unlikely to be interested in any pursuit of Felicia Day, unlike his fictional counterpart Dr. Horrible.</span></span><a href="http://www.people.com/people/article/0,26334,1554852,00.html"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">http://www.people.com/people/article/0,26334,1554852,00.html</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"> [accessed on 30 December, 2009].</span></span></span></div></div><div id="ftn"><div class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=257809809595259021&postID=4787169582412771815#_ftnref" name="_ftn3" title=""><span class="FootnoteCharacters"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">[3]</span></span></span></span></a><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">David Kushner, 'Joss Whedon Goes Where No TV Man Has Gone Before', in RollingStone.com</span></span><a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/25951789/joss_whedon_goes_where_no_tv_man_has_gone_before"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/25951789/joss_whedon_goes_where_no_tv_man_has_gone_before</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">[accessed on 12 January, 2010].</span></span></span></div></div><div id="ftn"><div class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=257809809595259021&postID=4787169582412771815#_ftnref" name="_ftn4" title=""><span class="FootnoteCharacters"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">[4]</span></span></span></span></a><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">While Joss Whedon's blog is no longer available online, certain websites have copies of his entries. I've chosen to access these instead in order to provide evidence for the statement I've chosen to make.</span></span><a href="http://www.whedon.info/Joss-Whedon-s-Reaction-About-Angel.html"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">http://www.whedon.info/Joss-Whedon-s-Reaction-About-Angel.html</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"> [accessed 12 January, 2010].</span></span></span></div></div><div id="ftn"><div class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=257809809595259021&postID=4787169582412771815#_ftnref" name="_ftn5" title=""><span class="FootnoteCharacters"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">[5]</span></span></span></span></a><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Carolyn Marvin, </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">When Old Technologies Were New</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"> (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 4.</span></span></span></div></div><div id="ftn"><div class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=257809809595259021&postID=4787169582412771815#_ftnref" name="_ftn6" title=""><span class="FootnoteCharacters"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">[6]</span></span></span></span></a><i><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog</span></span></span></i><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"> was initially ad-supported and available to viewers free of charge via Hulu.com. However, the series is no longer available for free view outside of the United States of America and must be purchased in individual acts via iTunes or as a DVD.</span></span></span></div></div><div id="ftn"><div class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=257809809595259021&postID=4787169582412771815#_ftnref" name="_ftn7" title=""><span class="FootnoteCharacters"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">[7]</span></span></span></span></a><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Mila Bongco, </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Reading Comics: Language, Culture, and the Concept of the Superhero in Comic Books</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">(New York: Garland Publishing Inc, 2000), p. 94.</span></span></span></div></div></div>Bridget Cowlishaw, Ph.D.http://www.blogger.com/profile/13990580353645654390noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5160783113019031392.post-7877635864189879252010-07-28T17:55:00.002-07:002010-07-28T17:55:37.630-07:00SW/TX PCA/ACA Conference Paper by Mary Ellen Iatropoulos, SUNY New Paltz<div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: medium; white-space: pre;">"Look Where Free Will Has Gotten You": <i>Brave New World</i></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: medium; white-space: pre;"><i></i>and <i>Angel</i>’s Body Jasmine</span></div><div class="MsoNormal">In the foreword to the twentieth-anniversary edition of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Brave New World</i><u>,</u> author Aldous Huxley states that “a really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which...slaves do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude” (xv). What tyrants face, according to Huxley, is “the problem of happiness;” that is, the challenge of manufacturing the illusion of utopian paradise under which oppression operates undetected as people are conditioned to feel comforted by the very society that oppresses them (xv). Jasmine, an arguably dystopian despot, appears in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Angel’s</i> season four and meets Huxley’s definition of efficient dictator by enthralling all whom she encounters into blissful subservience. The Jasmine arc bears striking resemblance to Huxley’s vision of dystopia, interacting with the literary model in ways that at first seem to subvert dystopian conventions. Yet, the seemingly subversive depiction of literary dystopia the Jasmine arc offers us ultimately retreats into containment and convention, concluding (just as Huxley did over 70 years ago) with an ominous warning about the nature of free will and the human tendency to prefer control to chaos.</div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"></span>In order to establish fictive landscapes as dystopian, critic Peter Edgerly Firchow relates, the world must feel undesirable in relation to contemporary society (10). Towards this end, the dystopian genre depicts characters as sincerely oblivious to absurdly oppressive conditions. For example, as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Brave New World</i> opens, the platitudinous “Director of Hatcheries” escorts students through what readers recognize as a eugenics laboratory, describing the fertilization processes for different castes within the “social body” – including growth-inhibitors for the underclass Epsilon embryos so that they never develop beyond simian intelligence and remain complacent workers (3-15). “What an enormous saving to the community!” smiles the Director (15). Of course, the discord between his loving words and the horrific “progress” he describes alerts readers to the nightmarish underbelly of this brave new world.<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">We see a similar sort of irony contextualizing the introduction of the Jasmine arc, the final six episodes of the fourth season: "Players" (4.17), "Shiny Happy People (4.18), “The Magic Bullet” (4.19), “Sacrifice” (4.20),<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Peace Out” (4.21), and “Home” (4.22). Early on in “Shiny Happy People,” for example, when the mystically impregnated Cordelia gives birth to the mysterious goddess Jasmine, Angel and Connor gaze upon her but momentarily and, united in worship and wonder, immediately cease fighting each other and fall to their knees. This sudden camaraderie in reverence comes off as troubling and absurd – mere moments before, they’d been locked in mortal combat – and their devotion to Jasmine is so comically sudden and absolute that the audience immediately recognizes it to be an illusion, a brainwashing tool wielded by dystopian power seeking to mask its insidious agenda. Team Angel reinforces this irony in the following scene as well. While an anxious Team Angel awaits their hero’s return while he’s off fighting Connor and Cordy, they speculate over the status of his mission, whether Cordelia’s given birth to a monster, whether she’s still alive.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As the Jasmine-struck Angel and Connor wistfully wander back into the team’s home base, the team rallies around them, assuming the estranged father and son are beaten and bruised from fighting Cordelia’s progeny. But as the team prepares to hunt and kill the unknown entity that’d been controlling Cordy from within her womb, Connor protests that killing is out of the question. “Since when?” questions Gunn. “Since we’ve all been saved,” rejoins Angel, in language reminiscent of religious epiphany and spiritual conversion (4.18). Fred replies in disbelief: “Um....well, that’s just....<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">crazy</i> talk,” confirming for the audience that Angel and Connor appear deluded from their perspective in the show as well as our perspective from without. Yet Angel, smiling and serene, takes the team’s weapons away from them, saying “We don’t want to kill her. We just want to find her. So we can worship her. That’s all” (4.18).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Team Angel continues to express astonishment that Angel and Connor could be deluded by something so obviously false, and persist in attempting to convince Angel and Connor that their bliss is an enchantment. Wesley even explicitly urges them to remember the horrors Jasmine caused even while in her mothers womb, reminding them: “it’s a spell. It’s evil” (4.18). Yet Wesley’s appeal is in vain, for literally seconds later, Jasmine enters, bedazzling the rest of Team Angel and causing them to fall silently to the ground in reverence. Even after acknowledging the dystopian power lurking behind the veil, Team Angel assumes the same ludicrous devotion they themselves had been criticizing mere moments before, underscoring the irony and securing the show’s landscape under Jasmine as dystopian.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">A second element of Huxley’s that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Angel</i> revisits is a protagonist who shares with the audience disgust for and disenchantment with dystopian society, and who undergoes what I call the “anagnoristic arc:” the successive occurrence of four narrative events. The first event, anagnorisis, is the clear recognition of oppression behind the charade of utopia– another way to think of it, it’s when you realize “To Serve Man” is a cookbook, or that, gasp, “Soylent Green is people!” The second event, excursion, is a journey taken beyond the reaches of dystopian society, from which they return equipped with information to threaten the system. The third event, moral negotiation, features the protagonist deliberating whether to sacrifice safety and happiness, and the fourth is attempted subversion, in which the protagonist attempts to overthrow the dystopian system.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">As <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Brave New World </i>unfolds<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">,</i> the character Bernard moves along an anagnoristic arc, becoming aware that the social body robs individuals of crucial freedoms.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">He exhibits discontent, wishing he were “not just a cell in the social body” (88). He wants to escape, and escape he does, to a degree. He journeys to the so-called “savage land,” an American Indian reservation unaffected by social body governance. Here, Bernard discovers Linda, who was stranded there twenty years ago by the Director of Hatcheries, and her son, John, who was born on the reservation. Returning with these two “savages” in tow, Bernard exposes the Director’s past and gets him fired for imposing the horror of natural childbirth on Linda (since children are engineered in test tubes, natural childbirth is considered obscene). Yet, as Bernard negotiates how much farther to push his discovery, he moves away from anagnoristic conviction and ends up bartering his specimens for more privilege under the dystopian regime. When John the savage attempts to galvanize a riot, Bernard meekly watches, and later, when he’s informed that he’s going to be exiled, he’s dragged away, screaming – “I haven’t done anything! It was the others! I promise I’ll do what I ought to do, give me another chance” (232). Bernard’s inability to sacrifice his newfound celebrity cause him to retreat into complacency, and the social body continues its utopian illusion undeterred.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Angel</i> we see not one, but three interrelated anagnoristic arcs, each showcasing a resolve to subvert dystopia that Huxley’s protagonist never achieves: Fred, Team Angel, and Angel himself. To begin, Fred undergoes anagnorisis when she gets her blood mixed with Jasmine’s, breaking the spell and glimpsing the reality behind Jasmine’s illusion. Unlike Bernard’s tepid, hesitant misgivings that stretch out over time,</div><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5456858772871001682" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_MeaQFKuzvXc/S7qoJGpzNlI/AAAAAAAACww/Dq771dfUZmo/s400/978-0-7864-4661-2.jpg" style="cursor: hand; float: left; height: 250px; margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px; width: 167px;" /><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Fred instantly rebels, attempting to warn her friends even as they turn on her, forcing her to flee into the sewers. Fred’s flight amounts to excursion in that she, just like Bernard, seeks solutions beyond the borders of dystopian power, yet <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Angel</i> reconfigures Huxley's convention to feature not self-imposed exile, but rather a fugitive being hunted. This revision serves to characterize Jasmine's spell as malicious and vindictive, further demonstrating to the audience the dystopian reality operating behind her enchantment. Fred further mirrors Bernard as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Angel</i> revisits a trope found in Huxley, the ritualistic handholding circle, during Fred’s period of flight. In Huxley, this convention takes the shape of the Solidarity Service, at which 12 people hold hands in a circle– “twelve of them ready to be made one, waiting to come together, to be fused, to lose their twelve separate identities into a larger being” (80). The twelve beat out a rhythm on their own bodies, going around the circle reciting platitudes as the beat grows and swells and erupts into an orgasmic collective cry lauding the social body. Yet Bernard feels nothing, and afterwards, “he was as miserably isolated now as he was when the service began – more isolated” (86). Thus the ritual circle, intended to physically connect members of the social body, serves Bernard only to reinforce his alienation from society.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Jasmine leads the enthralled Team Angel in a similar sort of ritual in “The Magic Bullet” (4.19).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While the liberated Fred manages to elude the ever-increasing mass of Jasmine’s followers, Jasmine remains unperturbed. She calls Team Angel to her, and informs them that they’re “all becoming connected...we’re going to find Fred.” She commands all of them to hold hands and close their eyes. Here, Jasmine participates in Huxley’s model, employing the ritual circle with the same holding of hands in concentration, the same channeling of energies towards furthering dystopian agenda, even similar rhetoric as Jasmine’s language of connectivity parallels Huxley’s depiction of the circle as single bodies waiting to be fused into a single body. The camera focuses in closely on Jasmine as she says, “I want you to picture Fred.” The camera begins panning right, a smooth, fluid shot circling round the Team Member’s faces bent in closed-eyed concentrated as they picture Fred, “what she looks like, her face, her big brown eyes, the way she styles her hair” (4.19). As the team’s energies unite on visualizing Fred,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the camera pan picks up speed as the music swells, cinematographically echoing Huxley’s narration of the circle of Twelve. “Where are you, Fred?” asks Jasmine as the camera settles back on her face, still in close up. “I’m looking for you” (4.19). Meanwhile, somewhere in Los Angeles, a fugitive Fred wanders past an old woman lackadaisically smoking a cigarette. As Fred passes, something visibly jolts through the woman, as she snaps her head to give Fred a harrowing, purposeful stare. The camera cuts back to Jasmine’s handholding circle, as Jasmine smiles: “I see her. I see Fred.” By virtue of the handholding circle, Jasmine channels herself into the bodies of all of her followers, effectively using her followers as so many decentralized surveillance cameras. Just like Huxley, Jasmine’s ritual circle serves to solidify her absolute control of the bodies of her followers, and just like Huxley, the groupthink of the circle isolates the story’s independently minded individual. Yet whereas in Huxley, the ritual marks Bernard’s anomalous individuality within the circle, in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Angel</i> Jasmine uses the traits that individuate Fred to locate and attack her while she’s outside of the circle, using her followers as so many decentralized surveillance cameras. Jasmine’s weaponizing of her social-body power underscores the social body’s deep fear of individual will.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Angel</i>, however, we see not one, but three interrelated anagnoristic arcs, each showcasing a resolve to subvert dystopia that Huxley’s protagonist never achieves. Fred, as mentioned above, is first to undergo anagnorisis when she gets her blood mixed with Jasmine’s, breaking the spell and glimpsing the reality behind Jasmine’s illusion. Unlike Bernard’s tepid, hesitant misgivings that stretch out over time, Fred instantly rebels, attempting to warn her friends even as they turn on her, forcing her to flee into the sewers and again featuring Huxley's trope of excursion. Yet <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Angel</i> reconfigures the convention to feature not self-imposed exile, but rather a fugitive being hunted. This revision serves to characterize Jasmine's spell as malicious and vindictive, further demonstrating to the audience the dystopian reality operating behind her enchantment.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Though Fred’s anagnoristic arc concludes with the subversive action she takes towards Jasmine in freeing Angel from the insidious enchantment, she succeeds in catalyzing anagnoristic arcs for Angel as well as Team Angel as a whole. Like Fred, once Angel, Lorne, Wes, and Gunn undergo anagnorisis, there is no attempt to bargain for celebrity or power under the system – it’s not a question of whether to rebel, only how, and when. True, as they undertake excursion and go on the lam, they all mourn the loss of the peace and bliss felt under Jasmine’s influence. Yet, the ensuing period of moral negotiation results in Team Angel collectively concluding that they prefer this misery to the deluded complacency of Jasmine’s thrall – better to be miserable and free than happily enslaved. Wesley discovers a creature from an alien dimension that Jasmine used to rule, and with the knowledge gleaned from conversing with the creature, realizes that Jasmine’s power can be undone by learning her true name. Wesley’s discovery enables Angel to voyage to the alien dimension in order to learn Jasmine’s name and destroy her illusory enthrallment. When Angel eventually returns from this excursion, he immediately takes subversive action, revealing the dystopian horrors lurking beneath her magnificent facade to the world. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Perhaps the strongest point of comparison between Huxley and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Angel</i> lies in the concept of the social body. In Huxley, all society’s efforts go towards maintaining the social body by making people love their subjugation. Jasmine’s reign employs similar strategies. She performs her benevolence by removing suffering, bringing eternal bliss. “My love is all around you” is the refrain of her regime. Yet, in contrast to the faceless, figurative “social body” governing Huxley, Jasmine’s power is very noticeably rooted in her actual physicality. Jasmine embodies both utopian illusion and underlying dystopian power. It’s looking upon Jasmine’s form that initially enchants Connor and Angel, and she propagates her spell through visual contact, enthralling the world by exhibiting her physical self - going for a walk, appearing on the news, etc. Fred also admiringly stammers about Jasmine’s “holy bodiness” (4.18), and Angel and Lorne fondly call her their “mocha” and “cocoa-colored queen” (4.18, 4.19), foregrounding Jasmine’s physicality rendering her body a text on which is writ dystopian rule.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">These qualifying quips exhibit a preoccupation with Jasmine’s body that only becomes more pronounced as Jasmine’s power grows. She becomes able to physically possess her followers’ bodies for her own agenda. She tells Connor that she can feel all of her followers fusing together “like the cells of a single body.... my eyes, my skin, my limbs, and if need be, my fists.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Jasmine eventually is able to manipulate her follower’s bodies, creating an army of satellite slaves all bent on eliminating dissidence. For example, in “Sacrifice” (4.20), as the fleeing Team Angel stops to replenish their supplies, several passersby (all of whom clearly are physically possessed by Jasmine) form a menacing squad and close in on the heroes. “You’re a disease in the Body Jasmine,” sneers one such attacker in Jasmine’s actual voice, as he takes a swing at Angel’s face. Here, Jasmine explicitly engages Huxley’s rhetoric, articulating her status as the “Body Jasmine,” inserting herself into the social body paradigm just as she inserts herself into the bodies of her followers. Later on, as Connor and a team of Jasmine-worshipping soldiers attack Team Angel in the sewers, a gleeful and maniacal Jasmine holds her arms aloft, her flesh being ripped and shredded by invisible swords, her body receiving the wounds of her followers being slashed in the sewers, miles away. Jasmine, then, is literally the embodiment of Huxley’s social system, a centralized carnal command center pulling the strings of so many meat puppet minions. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">However, the Body Jasmine also problematizes Huxley’s social body metaphor by portraying an individual woman of color embodying the traditionally white patriarchal dystopia. Placing a woman of color at the top of the dystopian chain would seem to reverse Huxley’s vision, wherein the Epsilon underclass is dark skinned. And yet, while in general the placement of women of color in positions of power theoretically subverts <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Brave New World’s</i> racial paradigm, Jasmine is portrayed as insidious and false (not to mention covered in maggot-infested rotting flesh) and must be defeated in order for the protagonists to emerge victorious. As it’s Connor who actually lands the killing blow, we see a white male triumphing over a woman of color, a fact that detracts from a reading of the Jasmine arc as empowering.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">The final dystopic element Huxley and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Angel</i> share is the exploration of the question of happiness vs. free will. Following Bernard’s forfeit of subversive action, he is taken to the office of Mustapha Mond, who explains that the social body eliminates messy, inconvenient, and often painful concepts like beauty and truth. The social body paradigm “hasn’t been very good for truth, of course.. but it’s been very good for happiness...happiness has got to be paid for,” In Huxley, the price is free will, and John the savage ultimately illustrates this point when he claims “the right to be unhappy,” committing suicide (232). <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ange</i>l’s Jasmine arc similarly concludes with dystopian power articulating this tradeoff. When Team Angel finally succeeds in revealing the dystopian horror behind Jasmine’s spell, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Angel</i>’s L.A. tumbles into riotous hysteria, and the defeated and furious Jasmine accuses Angel of making a terrible mistake. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?” hurls the dethroned despot at Angel over the roar of the riots. Angel, steadfast in his resolve, replies “what I had to do.” Jasmine, in her lunacy, shrieks “there are no absolutes, no right and wrong....there are only choices!” She pauses, as her words sink in. She gestures to the chaos around her, and continues: “I offered paradise! You chose this!” Angel jumps on her phrasing, righteously reaffirming his choice to take subversive action against her regime: “Because I could. Because that’s what you took away from us. Choice.” Jasmine rejoins, with a malicious sneer: “And look where free will has gotten you. This world is doomed to drown in its own blood now” (4.21). The frenzied hysteria and wailing sirens in the blurred background of these shots reinforce the threads of truth woven through Jasmine’s words: the world without Jasmine does indeed seem brutal and bloody in comparison to her utopian illusion. Although Angel (and the audience along with him) deeply wants to believe that the world is better off without Jasmine, her rebuttal causes him to falter, and defend himself: “Hey, I didn’t say we were smart, I said it’s our right. It’s what makes us human” (4.21). Here, Angel asserts that same viewpoint espoused through the character of John the Savage, that which Huxley’s aims to inspire in readers; namely, that miserable reality is preferable to happy slavery, and that being unhappy and feeling the full spectrum of human emotion is a human right. And if the show ended there, with the assertion that it’s better to be miserable and free than to be happily oppressed, the show would indeed appear to subvert the dystopian literary model on which it builds.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Yet <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Angel</i> extends the dystopian narrative; rather than ending with the certainty of Angel’s assertion, Jasmine continues to argue her point. When Angel accuses her of murdering people, she reminds him that, as a vampire, he also possesses a violent and bloodthirsty past – violence that didn’t carry with it the pleasant side effect of promoting peace on earth. Angel persists, declaiming “thousands of people are dead because of what you’ve done,” yet Jasmine quickly replies “and how many people will die because of you? I could have stopped it... war, disease, poverty...how many precious lives could have been saved in just a handful of years?” (4.21).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Jasmine’s equation causes Angel to falter in his righteousness. As a champion of the helpless, Angel knows firsthand the misery and suffering that exist beyond his power to help, the feeling of futility at fighting a wave of evil one drop at a time. As he seems to reconsider the merit of his subversive action, the show once again addresses Mustapha Mond’s assertion that free will leads to chaos.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Further, as he heads to home base with the rest of the team, a posthumous Lilah Morgan visits them, offering Team Angel ownership and control of the LA branch of Wolfram and Hart as a reward for destroying Jasmine’s “world peace” (4.22). Their certainty shaken by this phrase, Team Angel insists that what Jasmine offered wasn’t world peace, but a slave state. Echoing both Mond in Huxley and Jasmine before her, Lilah states that “world peace comes at a price. Jasmine knew that. She consumed... what, a few dozen souls a day? Now weight that against the suffering of millions” (4.22). In echoing Jasmine’s equation, Lilah compounds Team Angel’s uncertainty. Once she’s left them to consider the offer, the team collectively questions their actions: did they really end world peace? The emphasis placed on Team Angel’s reconsideration of their subversion reveals a sub-textual, Huxley-like cynicism that wonders if humanity may be better off happily enslaved. To further complicate the issue, Connor begins to parallel John the Savage as he undertakes a suicidal terrorist plot,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>arming himself and innocent bystanders with bombs, as well as the unconscious Cordelia (who’s been in a coma ever since Jasmine’s mystical birth). Connor’s violent plan enacts a sort of existential rebellion, fully exercising his freedom to be miserable and destructive and illustrating the horrific underbelly of that spectrum of human emotion which Jasmine supplanted with blissful complacency and which Team Angel fought to preserve. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">In Angel’s reaction to Connor’s behavior, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Angel</i> as a show retreats away from its subversive depiction of dystopian narrative and moves back into the containment of Huxley’s pessimistic model. While the rest of Team Angel rationalizes that they could reform Wolfram and Hart and use the firm’s resources for good, they seem on the brink of accepting the deal. Yet before the team can reach consensus, Angel sees news footage of Connor’s terrorist-hostage situation in progress, and negotiates with Wolfram and Hart to create a false, happy life for Connor and revert the world to how it was before Jasmine’s reign. He accepts the morally suspect offer on the condition that firm mystically tampers with his friends’ minds and memories, and<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>in doing so, Angel’s deal enacts the same tyrannical cloaking of dystopian reality in a veil of utopian illusion against which he so adamantly fought.. Not only does Angel remove Connor’s right to choose misery and suicide, he alters his friends’ minds without their consent, and moreover, he does so in the context of becoming part of the institutionalized evil he’s been fighting for four seasons. Free will, then, has gotten <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Angel</i> into exactly the same project of masking undesirable reality in paradisiacal illusion, suggesting that free will leads to choosing safety over subversion.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Two ways to interpret this troubling conclusion present themselves. On the one hand, a pessimistic reading suggests that Angel’s decision evinces corruption, that Huxley’s axiom remains true – people would rather be happily enslaved than suffer the unpredictable extremes that go along with free will. Yet (as I argue in an expanded version of this paper’s in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Literary </i>Angel<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">, </i>forthcoming from McFarland, and as I will argue in my presentation at the Slayage conference this June),<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>I prefer a more optimistic interpretation. By taking control of Wolfram and Hart, Team Angel positions themselves to defy Wolfram and Hart’s senior partners in the season five finale, eventually taking decisive subversive action on a much larger scale. </div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">Works Cited</div><div class="MsoNormal"></div>Booker, Keith M. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature: Fiction as Social <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Criticism</i>. Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1994.</span></i><br />
<div class="MsoNormal"></div>Firchow, Peter Edgerly. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Modern Utopian Fictions from H.G. Wells to Iris Murdoch. </i>Washington, D. C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2007.<br />
<div class="MsoNormal"></div><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"></span>“Home,” <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Angel</i><u>.</u> Creat. Joss Whedon, David Greenwalt. Dir., Writ. Tim Minear. DVD. 1999. 20<sup>th</sup> Century Fox Home Video, 2003.<br />
<div class="MsoNormal"></div>Huxley, Alduous. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Brave New World</i><u>.</u> 1932. Reprint.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>New York: Harper & Row, 1989.<br />
<div class="MsoNormal"></div>Jowett, Lorna. “Angel as Critical Dystopia.” <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Critical Studies in Television 2</i> (Spring 2007) 74-89.<br />
<div class="MsoNormal"></div>“Peace Out.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Angel</i>. Creat. Joss Whedon, David Greenwalt. Dir. Jefferson Kibbee. Writ. David Fury. DVD. 1999. 20<sup>th</sup> Century Fox Home Video, 2003.<br />
<div class="MsoNormal"></div>“Sacrifice.” <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Angel</i>. Creat. Joss Whedon, David Greenwalt. Dir. David Straiton. Writ. Ben Edlund. DVD. 1999. 20<sup>th</sup> Century Fox Home Video, 2003.<br />
<div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"></span>“Shiny Happy People.” <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Angel</i>. Creat. Joss Whedon, David Greenwalt. Writ. Elizabeth Craft and Sarah Fain. Dir. Maria Grabiak. 1999. DVD. 20<sup>th</sup> Century Fox Home Video, 2003.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"></span>“The Magic Bullet.” <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Angel</i>. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"></span>Creat. Joss Whedon, David Greenwalt. Dir., Writ. Jeffrey Bell. 1999. DVD.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>20<sup>th</sup> Century Fox Home Video, 2003.</div>Bridget Cowlishaw, Ph.D.http://www.blogger.com/profile/13990580353645654390noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5160783113019031392.post-49490316818846844962010-07-28T17:55:00.001-07:002010-07-28T17:55:27.528-07:00<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_MeaQFKuzvXc/S7qFxmxm4aI/AAAAAAAACwI/b9QeZDscIU8/s1600/41NVvLQCSVL._SX106_.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5456820985781477794" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_MeaQFKuzvXc/S7qFxmxm4aI/AAAAAAAACwI/b9QeZDscIU8/s400/41NVvLQCSVL._SX106_.jpg" style="cursor: hand; float: left; height: 159px; margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px; width: 106px;" /></a><br />
<div class="MsoNormal"><i><span lang="EN-AU"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">Stories of Oprah: The Oprahfication of American Culture</span></b></span></i><span lang="EN-AU"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">.</span></b><b> </b><b>Edited by Trystan T. Cotton and Kimberly Springer.</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, December 2009.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Cloth: ISBN 978-1-60473-407-2, $50.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>240 pages.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU"></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">Review by Katie Ellis, University of Western Australia</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU"></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">Trystan Cotton and Kimberly Springer’s edited collection <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Stories of Oprah</i> starts with the very simple question “What would Oprah do?” (vii). This is a popular question amongst both journalists and bloggers who’ve noticed the pervasiveness of her favorite things and book club and their increasing influence on American and international culture. Even as Oprah’s influence over contemporary American culture increases, this volume shows us that there is no universal Oprah despite what we may think (xi).</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">The term “Oprahfication,” often invoked throughout this collection, was first used during the 1990s to denounce TV sensationalism (133). The online <a href="http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=oprahfication">urban dictionary</a> defines it in several ways: highlighting constructions of masculinity and femininity, the division between public and private spheres, and becoming a “better person” by following Oprah’s advice regarding her favorite things and people (doctors, celebrities, etc). The essays compiled in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Stories of Oprah</i> investigate these aspects of the so-called Oprah Winfrey Cultural Industry to present an important and timely contribution to “Oprah Studies” (xiii). Yes, Oprah Studies really exist—academics have investigated the impact of Oprah on culture for a number of years. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">This collection distinguishes itself from others via a focus on “interdisciplinary methods and interpretative frameworks” (xiii) and is divided into three sections. Part I, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Oprah the Woman, Oprah the Empire</i>, looks at the ways Oprah selectively foregrounds certain aspects of her upbringing and beliefs to appeal to a certain type of audience. Part II, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Contesting the Oprah Experts</i>, examines a variety of topics favored by the Oprah show as they and she highlight personal agency as crucial to success. This section also considers sections of Oprah’s audience and how she influences them. Part III, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Oprahfication of the Media</i>, outlines Oprah’s influence on news media, politics, and the movie industry again through her depoliticized focus on personal agency.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">Oprah’s personality and life story are key aspects of her success. Viewers of her day time talk show are familiar with the sexual abuse she suffered in her early life, as well as her belief in the importance of teachers and hard work, as she refers to these events and values often during interviews with guests on her show. Part I opens with an essay by John Howard which argues that Oprah’s back story is a careful construction that fits into the American myth of success. For Howard, Oprah’s story is depoliticized and deracialized and ignores the structural inequalities experienced by black Americans. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">Likewise, in her chapter “Oprah Winfrey and Feminist Identification,” Jennifer Rexroat argues that Oprah rejects any association with radicalism. Rexroat invokes Patricia Misciagno’s framework of de facto feminism to analyse where Oprah fits in relation to feminism. De facto feminists such as Oprah agree with the goal of feminism but do not identify as feminists themselves. By removing her goal of “empowering women” from the rhetoric of feminism, Oprah’s project is more comfortable to Americans who may reject the feminist label. Rextroat encourages the reader to decide for themselves whether Oprah promotes feminist ideology and practice. While I’m not sure that this chapter is as open-ended as it purports to be, it does raises an important point about the limits of feminism for everyday women and whether de facto feminism is the logical outcome of the women’s movement. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">Throughout this section, all of the authors critique Oprah’s personal solutions to political problems as problematic, and the final chapter, “Gendered Translation of New Age Spirituality” by Karlyn Crowley, details the ways Oprah repackages new-age spirituality within a neoliberal rubric by invoking the rhetoric of both race and gender. Crowley argues that Oprah positions herself both as “one of the girls” and a leader in a church of her own making. As an everywoman she again seeks to heal her audience from trauma without addressing systemic oppression.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">Part II moves more towards audience participation and begins with an essay by Sherra Schick which examines Oprah’s message board online community as an elastic, not essentialized metaphor of the ways women use the web. As Schick asserts, without the internet, that interactive global community of Oprah’s audience would not exist. Following from Crowley’s chapter, Schick concentrates on <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Soul Stories</i> as an example of the internet increasing the complexity of culture by allowing women a voice. After the message board was hacked—subjected to a “male intrusion” and closed down—Schick argues that women were driven further into the margins.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">While Oprah’s message board appeared to have a positive impact on the lives of the women participating in this forum and prompted them to create a community outside the designated Oprah space, Adriana Katzew and Lilia De Katzew surveyed a sample of Chicana women and, interestingly, most saw Oprah as having little impact. For Katzew and Katzew, Oprah is successful in both a white and man’s world with the potential to reach an international or global audience with the assumption that women’s issues are universal. All those surveyed knew who she was, some value her independence, and most see her as “whitewashed.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">In her examination of the ways Oprah constructs female teenaged heterosexuality, Katherine Gregory argues that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Oprah Winfrey Show</i> has shifted from a carnivalesque to an individual orientation to a more recent focus on changing your life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Teen sex is constructed as detrimental to self-improvement on <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Oprah Winfrey Show</i>. The result is a moral panic which pathologizes teen sexuality and for Gregory doesn’t teach teen women how to negotiate their physical and emotional needs. This topic, popular throughout Oprah’s television history, continues to subject the female teenager to regulatory forces.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">Heather Talley and Monica Casper then shift the focus to Oprah’s philanthropic work in Africa, considering it as part of a tradition of celebrity causes. Although Oprah’s work in Africa can be seen as being all about Oprah (p.107), the authors encourage us not to just write it off. After discussing how philanthropy in Africa can distract from the real issues, do more harm than good, and neglect to acknowledge what happens after the celebrity leaves, the authors then use Oprah’s work in Africa to invite a consideration of how philanthropic consumption facilitating agency can work.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">The final section consists of four chapters which consider Oprah as a media brand which permeates news, literature, cinema, and global politics. Like the chapters in Part I, Kathleen Dixon and Kacie Jossart’s chapter <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Oprah and the News Media</i> argues that Oprah maintains a political distance and relies on melodrama. The Oprah Show repackages news as entertainment with narrative structure and drama. Through her political distance, Oprah is mildly reformist and again foregrounds personal agency. For Jaap Kooijman, this is problematic particularly in relation to Oprah’s treatment of 9/11 and the war in Iraq. In his chapter, Kooijam argues that by emphasizing personal agency Oprah translates international political issues into personal experiences. This in turn leaves little room for a dissenting voice and likewise assumes American values are universal. This chapter demonstrates the ways Oprah’s persona has reshaped politics and news media to draw in a previously neglected (female) perspective. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">The final two chapters of the book extend this discussion to consider the ways Oprah’s literary favorites are repackaged—interpreted through her—for a broader audience. Edith Frampton focuses on Toni Morrison’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Song of Solomon</i> to argue that while Oprah’s book club has been criticized for depoliticising a number of texts, these critiques may in fact be born from a limited conception of the political. As a number of other writers in this collection note, Oprah emphasises the importance of personal experiences in political ways (although never overtly). For Frampton the book club’s focus on the centrality of breast feeding in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Song of Solomon</i> subverts the hegemony, particularly as this central aspect of the book was critically ignored.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">Throughout the collection, writers often refer to Oprah as whitewashing certain issues for her predominately white audience, and Trytan Cotton’s examination of the Harpo produced screen adaptation of Zora Neale Hurston’s 1937 novel <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Their Eyes Were Watching God</i> expands on this idea. He argues that by emphasizing romance at the expense of race, Oprah’s production company, Harpo, neutralizes the novel’s social commentary. In addition, the filmic narrative promotes Oprah’s ideology that self initiative and hard work bring success (167).</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">Each chapter in this collection successfully contributes to the overall argument that Oprah has created an ideology that emphasizes personal solutions to political problems. This ideology is communicated through Oprah’s widely encompassing cultural industry and infiltrates understandings of race, sexuality, gender, spirituality, politics, and class, but without interrogating systemic oppression too closely.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none;"><span lang="EN-AU">This collection sets its self apart from previous writing on Oprah’s cultural impact, which tends to concentrate the ways Oprah panders to a white audience and/or contributes to a marginalization of fat people. While <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Stories of Oprah</i> acknowledges these areas, its focus on Oprah as a cultural industry encompassing television, magazines, film, literary publishing, and international philanthropy offers a unique, in-depth and interdisciplinary perspective.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Stories of Oprah</i> covers a huge range of ideas and issues arising in the face of Oprah’s reach across media and cultural industries. In light of Oprah’s recent overt political backing of Barack Obama and her<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>announcement that she will end her talk show, it will be interesting to see whether the Oprahfication of American (indeed global) culture will remain when her cultural output no longer includes the confessional mode of a daily talk show.</span></div>Bridget Cowlishaw, Ph.D.http://www.blogger.com/profile/13990580353645654390noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5160783113019031392.post-84505206181408878292010-07-28T17:55:00.000-07:002010-07-28T17:55:18.969-07:00<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_MeaQFKuzvXc/S7qHkYCeTAI/AAAAAAAACwY/IGGtXvg2d8o/s1600/9780813125534.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5456822957510642690" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_MeaQFKuzvXc/S7qHkYCeTAI/AAAAAAAACwY/IGGtXvg2d8o/s400/9780813125534.jpg" style="float: left; height: 400px; margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px; width: 267px;" /></a><br />
<div class="MsoNormal"><i><span lang="EN-AU"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">The Tube Has Spoken: Reality TV and History</span></b></span></i><span lang="EN-AU"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">.</span></b><b> </b><b>Edited by Julie Anne Taddeo and Ken Dvorak.</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, November 2009.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Cloth: ISBN: 978-8131-2553-4, $40.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>275 pages.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU"></span></div>Review by Katie Ellis, University of Western Australia<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-AU"></span></b></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">Popular debates around reality TV often center on the longevity of the genre, the potential for audience fatigue, and whether the participants are really being themselves. Academic analyses of this genre are growing but, as Julie Anne Taddeo and Ken Dvorak, the co-editors of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Tube has Spoken</i> argue, most often come from a media or communications studies framework. Taddeo and Dvorak bring together an eclectic collection of essays in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Tube Has Spoken </i>in an attempt to investigate the genre from an historical view point through an examination of the social, political, and cultural forces that influence the production and reception of this hybrid format.</span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">The book is divided into three sections: Reality TV as Social Experiment, which looks at the origins of this format in social experiment; Class, Gender and Reimaging of Family Life, which examines reality TV along social lines and the ways the family is invoked as a boundary between the public and the private (a line reality TV often blurs); and a final section on Living History as a subset of reality TV that attempts to return the genre to its documentary roots through historical manipulations.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">Part I explores the somewhat innocent motivations of early reality TV as a social experiment documenting how it has evolved in order to prevent audience fatigue of the format. Fred Nadis in his opening chapter argues that reality TV can be traced back to Cold War programming such as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Candid Microphone</i> (on radio) and the television equivalent <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Candid Camera</i>. This format, which questioned public conformity, emerged out of a changing technological environment and advances in the area of psychology, yet Allan Funt (creator of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Candid</i>) quickly realised that real drama and entertainment surfaced not through observing but through directly influencing the course of action. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">Similarly, Barron, and Leggott and Hochscherf, examine the producer’s manipulating influence in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Big Brother</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Jamie’s School Dinners</i> respectively. While these programs open a space for the investigation of social problems, they often invoke and perpetuate stereotypes of race, class and gender while directing the course of the “celebritising” process. Cassandra Jones’s investigation of the ways <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Biggest Loser</i> draws on the American Frontier myth to advance the notion that a patriotic American is thin was my favorite chapter in this section, yet it did not examine why patriotism was particularly important to the American psyche in 2006.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">The second section on class, gender, and the family begins with an interesting piece by Laurie Rupert and Sayanti Ganguly Puckett which argues that the 1973 PBS produced “thesis-documentary” <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">An American Family</i> had a significant impact on the reality TV format. For the authors, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">An American Family</i> emerged during a time of social change and advanced the producer’s agenda that the American dream was turning into a nightmare and that the institution of marriage was dying. This is an important piece that reveals the ways both reality TV and documentaries manipulate everything, a concept that is picked up in later chapters. Following the success of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">An American Family</i>,<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>the BBC created <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Family</i> for British audiences in 1974.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">Rather than focus on a wealthy family in the same vein as the American production, the British producers were influenced by the political and social context to follow an extended working-class family living together in one small council flat. This is the subject of Holmes’s chapter as she investigates the ways individuals are used to stand in for society at large and the cultural anxiety of being on display. Through admissions of infidelity, premarital teenaged sex and interracial marriage, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Family</i> was perceived by some to be not truly representative of its time. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">The next chapter, which investigates the Canadian example of makeover reality TV, like the first two chapters of this section, encourage the reader to interpret the programs of this genre as not simply reinforcing the hegemony. Via an examination of the carnivalesque aspects of humor invoked by the Canadian hosts of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Plastic Makes Perfect</i>, Matheson argues that Canadian productions disrupt dominant discourses of gender and nation by invoking the pleasure derived from American style makeover formats in a way that provokes a rethinking of the discourse. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">Up to this point, the collection distinguishes itself from other discussions on the topic by considering the social and historical influences of reality TV formats and productions without dismissing the genre as the worst television has to offer. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"></span>This focus shifts quite dramatically in Olson’s investigation of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kid Nation</i> as a commodification of childhood. Olson notes that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kid Nation</i> reconstructs childhood in a mediated space and then destroys it by forcing children to take on adult qualities. Although one of the strongest entries in this collection due to its rigorous content analysis, something surprisingly absent from a number of the other chapters, the social and cultural construction of childhood was not considered in this paper, with twenty-first-century ideals of childhood described as “natural.” </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">The final section consists of three papers which consider the living history subgenre of reality TV, whereby participants are taken back in time and encouraged to live with historical authenticity. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"></span>Taddeo and Dvorak’s analysis of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">1900 House</i> explores the idea of historical inaccuracy to revisit the notion that reality is not as important as drama in this genre. The program reinforces idealized images of family togetherness, gender, and class, and uses fictional artefacts (such as Jane Austen novels) as points of reference rather than pursuing historical accuracy which contemporary participants would likely struggle with.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">In the next two chapters, which deal with Australian programming including <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Colony</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Outback House</i>, the authors explore the ways national myths and realities are forgotten and remembered in an attempt to rehabilitate a shameful colonial history. Each chapter in this section reveals the ways a social memory of the past is learned through books, movies, and other media. Thus, every participant in reality TV is influenced by what they already know about social identities, something that becomes particularly important when producers attempt to reconstruct history. In Schellings’s analysis of her frustrating attempt to produce a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Making of</i> documentary of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Colony</i>, we are reminded that in the attempt to make history accessible, manipulation is inevitable. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">Throughout the collection, writers often invoke the discourse of documentary theorization to situate the criteria for a social and historical investigation of reality TV beyond the notion of a “cultural wasteland.” <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"></span>The analysis of older forms and trends successfully address the political and social contexts, but the newer formats are not as illuminating. While I was encouraged by the readings that prompted critics to interpret this genre beyond the hegemonic, I did find myself yearning for more of a content analysis of the texts themselves. However perhaps that is not the aim of the book. The tools of historical analysis offered throughout the collection are important and provide a way to consider the intertextual influence of this genre and the texts themselves as historical documents.</span></div>Bridget Cowlishaw, Ph.D.http://www.blogger.com/profile/13990580353645654390noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5160783113019031392.post-51057970214834738512010-02-28T13:31:00.000-08:002010-02-28T13:35:14.487-08:00<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_MeaQFKuzvXc/S4rhQ2xh3BI/AAAAAAAACsw/a_ZzfPyCjh8/s1600-h/bueat2.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 171px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 244px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5443410779328076818" border="0" alt="" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_MeaQFKuzvXc/S4rhQ2xh3BI/AAAAAAAACsw/a_ZzfPyCjh8/s400/bueat2.jpg" /></a><br /><div><br /><div class="MsoNormal"><i><b><span style="font-size:x-large;">Attack Politics: Negativity in Presidential Campaigns Since 1960</span></b></i><b><span style="font-size:x-large;">.</span></b> <b>By </b></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Emmett H. Buell, Jr. and Lee Sigelman.</b><br /></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal">Second Edition, revised and updated. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, September 2009. Cloth: ISBN 978-0700616794, $39.95; paper: ISBN 978-0-7006-1680-0, $19.95. 392 pages.<br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /> </div><div class="MsoNormal">Review by Derek Charles Catsam, <span style="color:black;">University of Texas of the Permian Basin</span><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /> </div><div class="MsoNormal">Elections continue to get nastier and nastier even as the campaign seasons grow longer and longer. The next Presidential election will be more negative than the last, which was more negative than the one that preceded it. Millions of Americans would likely embrace these seeming truisms. Yet is it the case that presidential elections get more negative with each passing quadrennial? This is the fundamental question at the heart of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">Attack Politics</i>.<br /></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal">Buell and Sigelman actually pursue two goals in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">Attack Politics</i>. One is to provide something of a synthetic overview of American presidential elections since 1960, albeit not ordered chronologically and without ever really explaining why they choose 1960 as their earliest election. The second of their aims is the titular goal of the book—to discern the nature of negative campaigns since Kennedy and Nixon faced off in their down-to-the-wire 1960 race. Arguably they accomplish the first goal better than the second despite their putative purpose.<br /></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal">After a general introductory chapter on “Negativity and Presidential Campaigns,” rather than follow a chronological path, Buell and Sigelman organize their chapters based on how closely contested particular elections were. They thus group the elections of 1964, 1972, and 1984 together as “Runaway races.” 1988, 1992, and 1996 fall under “Somewhat Competitive.” 1968 and 1976 were “Comeback Races.” 1960 and 1980 each warrant their own chapter as “Dead Heat” races while the authors bundle 2000 and 2004 into another “dead heat” chapter. 2008’s “Dead Heat <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">and </i>Somewhat Competitive” race occupies the last election-focused chapter, making this an especially timely book. They close with a chapter of summary and synthesis, though they also include a somewhat inexplicable appendix on the “Cold War Background to 1960 Presidential Context,” as if the 1960 campaign was the only one that fell against a backdrop in which the Cold War or other major events played a significant role.<br /></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal">The overviews of each election are fantastic. Clear and concise, balancing analysis and description, the summaries are the strongest element of the book and will be especially welcome in classes. Buell and Sigelman include fine assessments of the major players, prevailing issues, the dynamics, and the trends in each campaign while providing sound historical context. They make the elections come alive and provide a useful reference and overview even for specialists.<br /></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal">But the book’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">raison d’etre</i> is its investigation of negative campaigning, and on this issue the results are mixed. Part of the problem is inherent to the effort. Political scientists seem to believe that all things can be quantified and that quantitative analysis is better than its qualitative equivalent (even though the best parts of this book, by far, are the qualitative sections). They also tend to place tremendous faith in models. But human activity is not a math problem, the world does not adhere to models, and models rarely explain the world as it is lived.<br /></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal">The problem of quantification in this case is not one of high-level mathematics, to be sure. But there is something perplexing about Buell’s and Sigelman’s decision simply to add up all moments of negative campaigning in ads and speeches and to have them all count equally. I would imagine that the number of negative campaign moments tells us something, but it is far from certain that those numbers tells us all that much about tone and intensity, about which negative ads or sound bytes stick and which do not, and perhaps most significantly, which qualify as being dirtier than the others, and thus more poisonous. For when most people think about negative campaigning, they are not simply referring to candidates’ criticisms of one another. They are also referring to a noxious air of personal attacks and misrepresentations. There is a difference between saying that Barack Obama “pals around with terrorists” and saying that he is too inexperienced for office. Buell and Sigelman do not make that differentiation, to the detriment of their analysis.<br /></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal">The problem with modeling in the book is slightly different. The authors do not freight their argument with their own model. Instead they rely on someone else’s model and test to see if it applies in presidential campaigns since 1960. This reactive methodology may well be of some use to other political scientists, and that could prove important in pushing the scholarship forward, but given the accessibility of the election summaries, this book ends up being a peculiar hybrid of specialist scholarship and generalist accessibility.<br /></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal">Buell and Sigelman want to test one of the prevailing theories, the “Skaperdas-Grofman Model,” which asserts that candidates choose to go negative when the benefits outweigh the potential drawbacks. This seemingly obvious conclusion provides a series of circumstances as to when a candidate is likely to go negative, with the most prevalent being that a candidate is most likely to engage in negative campaigning if they are behind in the polls. Using Skaperdas-Grofman as their springboard, Buell and Sigelman assess the presidential elections since 1960 in their various configurations of closeness. And their conclusion is: Skaperdas-Grofman is sometimes accurate. Except when it is not.<br /></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal">This seems like a pretty apt, if unintended, summation of predictive models as a whole: They work except for when they do not. This seems an argument for steering clear of models and for trusting more subjective but also more humble analytical approaches. Buell and Sigelman are at their strongest when they steer clear of models and when they simply describe and analyze the presidential campaigns themselves. Their book is weakest where the interpretive framework is seemingly more rigorous.<br /></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal">Nonetheless, despite its shortcomings <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">Attack Politics</i> represents an important contribution to our understanding of negative campaigning in American presidential elections in the last half century. Students will welcome the treatment of the individual elections and practitioners will appreciate another contribution to our understanding of modern electoral politics. Perhaps future scholars will draw from Buell and Sigelman but will learn to trust their own interpretations, shorn of the artifice of creating models that can only statically (and thus falsely) capture the dynamic and theory-defying world of politics.<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal"><?XML:NAMESPACE PREFIX = O /><o:p></o:p></i> </div></div>Bridget Cowlishaw, Ph.D.http://www.blogger.com/profile/13990580353645654390noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5160783113019031392.post-31080534557238890032009-11-29T15:37:00.000-08:002009-11-29T15:38:03.347-08:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_MeaQFKuzvXc/SxMFSMPljqI/AAAAAAAACnk/jq5pof-JyC4/s1600/1405161248.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; cssfloat: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_MeaQFKuzvXc/SxMFSMPljqI/AAAAAAAACnk/jq5pof-JyC4/s320/1405161248.jpg" yr="true" /></a><br />
</div><em><span style="font-size: large;">Beyond the Box: Television and the Internet.</span></em><br />
<br />
By Sharon Marie Ross.<br />
<br />
Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell Publishers, September 2008. Cloth: ISBN 978-1405161237, $84.95; paper: ISBN 978-1405161244, $26.95. 280 pages.<br />
<br />
Review by Novotny Lawrence, Southern Illinois University<br />
<br />
In Beyond the Box: Television and the Internet, Sharon Marie Ross examines tele-participation, an emergent trend in which viewers are utilizing the Internet to become more actively engaged with television programs. Significantly, Ross goes beyond an exploration centrally focused on merely watching a program and includes discussions of fandom, save the show campaigns, and how network executives are now taking the tele-participating audience into consideration when developing new content. The introduction of the book effectively outlines the methodology utilized throughout the study explaining the styles of “invitations” or calls that encourage tele-participation: 1) overt, or situations in which writers’ and producers’ intent to activate viewer participation is easily discernable within the text of the series; 2) organic, a completely natural style designed carefully to appear as if the show (or in some cases the network) is not asking the viewer overtly to extend the text; and 3) obscured, which suggests that any invitation to participate resides primarily in the narrative structure and content [sic] of the show itself through a certain “messiness” that demands viewer unraveling (8-9). Used in conjunction with scholarly discourse and data collected from bloggers and industry executives, Ross examines the ways in which the “invitations” operate in popular TV programs throughout the book which is organized into four primary chapters: “Fascinated with Fandom: Cautiously Aware Viewers of Xena and Buffy,” “Power to the People, or the Industry: American Idol Voting, Adult Swim Bumping, and Viral Videoing,” “Managing Millennials: Teen Expectations of Tele-Participation,” and “No Network Is an Island: Lost’s Tele-Participation and ABC’s Return to Industry Legitimacy.”<br />
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In “Fascinated with Fandom,” Ross explores “the relationship between notions of taste and quality in terms of fandom/cult fandom” (36) and “the role that the Internet played in the enjoyment of Xena and Buffy” (36). Ross makes valid assertions in this chapter, contending that Xena contains organic invitations, featuring several episodes that offered storylines that focused on the existence of Xena fans (39). She provides solid examples to validate this claim discussing two episodes in particular, “You are There” and “Send in the Clones,” both of which allude to fans’ curiosity regarding the true nature of the relationship between Xena and Gabrielle. In contrast, the discussion of Buffy is not quite as effective. While Ross establishes the fact that the producers of the series often visited fansites to “listen in” on discussions of the show, “The Wish” and “Dopplegangland,” two episodes from Buffy’s third season, used as examples to illustrate their reaction to the chatter are thin. Both episodes center on a character named Willow who becomes a “sort of gay vampire” which Ross explains that online fans who had been engaged in fiction writing centering on similar themes, saw the storyline as a direct response to their narratives. Unfortunately, the argument is speculative, making it difficult to fully engage in the material offered in the remainder of the chapter. <br />
<br />
Although chapter 1 is a bit problematic, chapter 2, “Power to the People, or the Industry,” more than makes up for its shortcomings. This chapter “explores more specifically, television viewer’s experiences with and thoughts about tele-participation, focusing on . . . overt invitations” (71). Ross blends the discussions of Idol, “Swim” programming, and viral videoing together, examining issues of authenticity, community, and the complexities that can potentially arise for networks when extending overt invitations. For instance, the discussion of viewer in-fighting about “true” fandom and websites such as VotefortheWorst.com which seemed to interrupt the invitation extended to audiences by America Idol are critical to understanding the drawbacks of tele-participation.<br />
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As the Box evolves, it becomes increasingly apparent that an additional strength of the text is Ross’s examination of peripheral questions intersecting with socioeconomic and cultural issues which include but are not limited to, race, class, and gender. This is most obvious in chapter 3, which is perhaps the strongest in the text. Here Ross’s primary focus is on two teen-oriented shows— FOX‘s The O.C. and the Canadian produced series Degrassi: The Next Generation. The author effectively correlates the “Millennials” upbringing in a more technologically advanced environment with media producers, who in order to make programming that relates to them, must create TV products that can cross-platform or “thrive in different media forms, most crucially television and via the Internet, the cell phone, and the iPod/MP3 player” (127). Ross thoroughly explains that The O.C., and Degrassi depict characters frequently utilizing new media technology and that producers of both series created sites where fans could discuss the shows. Although significant, the strength of this chapter lies in the questions that Ross raises in regard to The O.C. and Degrassi’s depictions of pressing social concerns such as school shootings and underage drinking, as well as the representation, or lack thereof, of race and class in U.S. programming versus Canadian TV. Significantly, Ross challenges U.S. television by juxtaposing the lily-white cast of The O.C. (which mirrors the majority of America TV) with Degrassi’s multicultural cast. Thus, the text also addresses a pressing concern that U.S. television has struggled with since its emergence as a form of popular entertainment.<br />
<br />
Beyond the Box is a significant contribution to the existing and growing discourse on new media which continues to profoundly affect the media landscape. Ross’s research is thorough, and the inclusion of blogger responses adds tremendous insight into the fact that viewers are tele-participating as well as the ownership that they take over their programming. Of equal importance is the fact that Ross blends a number of other elements into the examination and concludes by detailing some of the implications that tele-participation may have on the TV industry. While the conclusion goes on a little too long and relies too heavily on feedback from industry executives, it presents an array of potential directions for future research on the topic. Indeed Box demonstrates that the industry has taken a dramatic shift from traditional broadcast TV and includes pertinent information for fans, industry executives, and scholars alike.Bridget Cowlishaw, Ph.D.http://www.blogger.com/profile/13990580353645654390noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5160783113019031392.post-30574435598717418862009-10-30T12:54:00.000-07:002009-10-30T12:55:01.641-07:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_MeaQFKuzvXc/SutETJBu4AI/AAAAAAAACj8/E6sxe4DVaOs/s1600-h/Firefly_%26_Serenity.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; cssfloat: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_MeaQFKuzvXc/SutETJBu4AI/AAAAAAAACj8/E6sxe4DVaOs/s320/Firefly_%26_Serenity.jpg" vr="true" /></a><br />
</div><span style="font-size: large;"><em>Investigating Firefly and Serenity: Science Fiction on the Frontier.</em></span><br />
<br />
Edited by Rhonda V. Wilcox and Tanya R. Cochran.<br />
<br />
London and New York: I.B. Tauris, October 2008. Paper: ISBN 978-1845116545, $22.50. 304 pages.<br />
<br />
Review by Madeline Muntersbjorn, University of Toledo<br />
<br />
“Yes. Yes, this a fertile land, and we will thrive” (Serenity 1.1). This line from the first episode of the short-lived television series Firefly (2002-2003) opens this review, as this anthology demonstrates the scope of scholarly discourse on both the television series and the movie Serenity (2005). When Wash, the pilot, speaks this line, he plays with plastic dinosaurs on a spaceship dashboard, saying much with few words. Joss Whedon, writer and director, does not play on a ship, but on a soundstage, feeding his lines to beautiful talent. Whedon’s space-western features nine outcasts and heroes just trying to keep flying on the edge of civilization. Carey Meyer designed the 10th character of the show, the Firefly class spaceship called Serenity; just as there are fourteen Firefly episodes, there’s only one Serenity film. Whedon and his gifted crew bring our fond ambitions and fraught anxieties to life in a post-apocalyptic future wherein alien planets are rendered suitable for human habitation by mining, farming, terra-forming and civil war. While much changes in the next 500 years, people are still human. Well, most of them are: some of them might be monsters! In any case, “Earth That Was” is just a history lesson for the kids, a creation myth of dubious relevance.<br />
<br />
“Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!” The dinosaurs fight, misled by greed only to be swept aside, their fertile land destroyed by forces beyond their control. Who could have known, when the scene was first shot, of the FOX network betrayal that would cancel the series, loose ends of narrative thread waiting to be woven into the rest of the story? Could anyone have predicted that fan support, from DVD sales to online activism, would be so voluble and vociferous that Universal Studios would help Whedon produce the film? (Serenity: Those Left Behind, a Dark Horse comic published in 2006, bridges narrative gaps between the series and the movie.) The story behind the story calls for further inquiry into this science fiction on the frontier. Given the eclectic academic community that coalesced around Whedon’s most famous series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, complete with peer-reviewed journal, Slayage, this anthology is inevitable if not altogether sudden.<br />
<br />
Wilcox and Cochran quote the pilot near the end of the beginning of their book and at the close of their introduction to the special issue of Slayage. For just as the show is one story in two formats, small screen and silver screen, their editorial project yielded two texts. The twenty-fifth issue of Slayage features five articles, while this installment in I. B. Tauris’ Investigating Cult TV series presents nineteen essays. Yet these contributions represent less than 17% of submissions received in response to the call for papers. The integrity of these collections is explained, in part, by the quantity of discussion these shows have inspired among educated viewers. The editors chose writers from diverse disciplines yet generated a coherent whole wherein lines of dialog, images, episodes, and characters are examined from several points of view: theology, ethnomusicology, aesthetics, anthropology, and gender studies, among others. Firefly and Serenity do not come to us ex nihilo. They descend from the Star Trek series, and the 1939 film Stage Coach, both of which were subject to subsequent remakes. These essays reveal meaningful connections between these direct ancestors as well as Plato’s Symposium, Shakespeare’s Tempest, Orwell’s Citizen Kane, and Sartre’s Nausea, to cite but a few more distant relations.<br />
<br />
The word “reveal” is important. People like stories with pretty girls, scary monsters and explosions. Firefly and Serenity have gorgeous girls, terrifying monsters and awesome explosions—enough said? Yet the writers in this collection are not so much piling it on as peeling it back, exposing layers of meaning and depth. They challenge questionable elements of the show including legalized prostitution, racialized villainy, and summary execution. Since no one who reads this volume will have expertise in all of the disciplines, everyone will have to look something up. Perhaps future editions could follow the lead of Cricket magazine for children, wherein vocabulary is defined as marginalia. What would be lost in convenience at the press would be gained in accessibility. Reader effort is rewarded: The code-switching of the characters between English and Chinese is an abrogation of a monolingual form of discourse (Mandala 38). When “competing but co-existent status systems…arise when independent hierarchies from different cultures interact” tensions are bound to mount between high-class hookers and working-stiff cowboys (Aberdein 70). The inconclusive dichotomy between brute pragmatism and blind faith teaches the value of pluralistic approaches to humanity as, “Meaning is not in things…but between them, in the interplay, the connections, the empty space” (Erickson 179). Mayhem abounds but, “the film is able to dazzle its audience with a beautifully conceived and thrilling space battle…and to provide them with a more intimate struggle as the crew fights on the surface of the planet to reveal the truth” (Abbott 232).<br />
<br />
The truth? Really? What role could such an old-school notion play in this postmodern post-mortem of a polysemic post-colonial pastiche? Why, the premise of the show is “nine people looking into the blackness of space and seeing nine different things” (Whedon quoted on 168). Well, maybe the truth is not out there; it’s just a plot device, a cheap plastic toy that’s swept away when the complex danger of the real world bears down upon us. But perhaps, “Firefly is effective because it uses science fiction without losing sight of the human and embodied concerns that are unlikely to be swept away by technology, even if we become more scientifically advanced and cyborg as a species” (Bussolini 140). Maybe the truth is not something we assign to any one view but something relational that emerges from the intimate struggle between people “who trust each other, who do for each other and ain’t always lookin’ for the advantage” (“Our Mrs. Reynolds,” 1.6; quoted on 59). Neither the characters nor the critics see the same things—but that’s an asset, not a liability, for our ability to thrive may depend more on how we do for each other than whether we are right or come out ahead. To investigate Firefly and Serenity closely is to see many things in this fertile future myth of resonant relevance.Bridget Cowlishaw, Ph.D.http://www.blogger.com/profile/13990580353645654390noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5160783113019031392.post-45793898105081716792009-02-12T19:53:00.001-08:002009-02-12T19:54:16.092-08:00<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_kqolPo9i8RM/SZTu3nU7ESI/AAAAAAAAADs/qQW89khAuQA/s1600-h/conspiracy_theory.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5302125300538872098" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 135px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 205px" alt="" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_kqolPo9i8RM/SZTu3nU7ESI/AAAAAAAAADs/qQW89khAuQA/s320/conspiracy_theory.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><em><strong><span style="font-size:130%;">Conspiracy Theory in Film, Television and Politics</span></strong></em></div><br /><div></div><br /><div>By Gordon B. Arnold. Westport, CT: Praeger, September 2008. Cloth: ISBN 978-0275994624, $44.95. 189 pages.</div><br /><div></div><br /><div>Review by Laurence Raw, Baskent University, Ankara, Turkey</div><br /><div></div><br /><div>This book considers how notions of conspiracy theory have remained ever-present in American popular culture since the Cold War. Partly this is due to events – the anticommunist witch-hunts of the 50s, the Kennedy assassination, 9/11 – but the ideas have also been widely disseminated through film and television. Arnold combines political and historical narrative with analyses of several films including Suddenly (1954), Advise and Consent (1962), Chinatown (1974) and Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) to show how conspiracies shape some events, hide others, and ultimately dictate the course of American history since the 1940s. The first chapter – “Conspiracy Theory in the American Imagination” – argues that the theory explains “the reality of the modern world” for many people (2). Many people suspect that major institutions pay little or no heed to the individual, preferring instead to feather their own nests and seek governmental assistance if they run into trouble. This arguably caused the recent financial crisis both in America and elsewhere. Arnold contends that this belief gained currency at the end of World War II, as “Americans exhibited a new apprehension about [the power of] the Soviet Union,” and the destructive potential of the atomic bomb (13). This gave rise to the so-called “Domino Theory” which held that “if many nations succumbed to communist rule, in the not-too-distant future the United States would be surrounded by an angry sea of malicious communist countries” (17-18). Arnold continues by examining some of the films produced at that time, including Red Menace and Conspirator (both 1949), as well as Suddenly, Lewis Allen’s 1954 melodrama starring Frank Sinatra about a foiled attempt to assassinate the president. The chapter concludes with an analysis of late 50s conspiracy films including North By Northwest (1959). Arnold’s choice of films is certainly eclectic: certain overtly anticommunist works such as High Noon (1952) have been ignored, while attention could have also been given to Roman and/or Biblical epics of the period, such as Quo Vadis (1951) and Spartacus (1959), that feature an all-American hero battling against the conspiratorial forces threatening to overwhelm him. This omission highlights one of the book’s major flaws: Arnold does not offer a working definition of conspiracy theory – what it includes and omits, and whether our understanding of the term has changed over time. For example, I do not subscribe to the idea that recent fears of a so-called “Middle East plot” are in any way similar to those expressed during the McCarthy era. A glance at the ways in which both events have been reported in the media can confirm this. Nonetheless, if one treats the book as a selective account of the ways in which specific films deal with the idea of conspiracy, then there is much to recommend it. I liked Arnold’s comparison between the original Manchurian Candidate (1962) and Dr. No (also 1962). The earlier film follows Suddenly in showing how a brainwashed ex-prisoner of war (Laurence Harvey) is involved in a plot to assassinate a politician. The entire conspiracy is attributed to the communists, “an enemy that can deceive and control the people” (52). While Dr. No deals with similar themes, its tone “is not cynical. . . the problems [posed by the communists] can and will be solved and. . . potentially destructive technologies can be harnessed for the greater good” (57). Likewise, Arnold draws a suggestive link between Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974) and Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax View (also 1974) as responses to the Watergate crisis. Coppola reflects “the growing sense of alienation that Americans came to feel in the wake of a divisive and sometimes violent decade” (94). Pakula returns to the theme of assassination and how the finger of suspicion can be pointed at anyone, particularly if they dare to question the system (96). Arnold subsequently shows how Chinatown, ostensibly a 1970s film noir, shows how “unknowing people can be manipulated and become involved in conspiratorial schemes they know nothing about” (99). In a concluding paragraph to the book, Arnold suggests that while the conspiracy theory metaphor continues to influence American life, it is no longer shocking to suggest that “complex forces . . . influence and shape the world” (172). This, he believes, is due to the frequency with which the metaphor has been used in the media, which has denuded it of significance. The book left me feeling much the same: while analyses of individual films are often interesting, the lack of an overall theoretical framework left me wondering why conspiracy theory should have remained so fundamental to American popular culture in the past six decades.</div>Alana Hatleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07006211600219601627noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5160783113019031392.post-47158441347191905702009-02-11T14:43:00.000-08:002009-02-12T18:45:06.581-08:00<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_kqolPo9i8RM/SZTep54ZZgI/AAAAAAAAABY/-J-fDRfrXh0/s1600-h/true_west.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5302107472815285762" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 240px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 240px" alt="" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_kqolPo9i8RM/SZTep54ZZgI/AAAAAAAAABY/-J-fDRfrXh0/s320/true_west.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><em><strong><span style="font-size:130%;">True West: An Illustrated Guide to the Heyday of the Western</span></strong></em><br /><br />By Michael Barson. Forth Worth: Texas Christian University Press, November 2008. Paper: ISBN 978-0-87595-379-2, $29.95. 178 pages.<br /><br />Review by Laurence Raw, Baskent University, Ankara, Turkey<br /><br />This is a true aficionado’s book—the product of an author who grew up in New England but developed a liking for the West as represented on television and in the movie theatre. Barson recalls how he experienced firsthand the craze for Davy Crockett that swept America during the mid-1950s; like millions of other American kids, he bought one of Crockett’s coonskin caps. Other role models included Rowdy Yates (Rawhide), Sugarfoot, and Mark McCain (The Riflemen). As he grew up, Barson realized that while the West as portrayed on television might differ significantly from the “real” West--Texas, Colorado, California—it provided a means for him to reflect on “the sources of our native pluck and resilience. They [television Westerns] were part of the […] process by which Americans define—and revise, and define again—a national self-image” (21).<br /><br />True West tells the story of the West as represented in films, television series, pulp fiction, music, comic books, and other souvenirs. It begins in the 1920s, when stars such as William S. Hart and Tom Mix produced a steady stream of silent films for admiring audiences; by 1929 Mix had made nearly 330 films. In the era of the talkies A-list stars such as John Wayne made classics like Stagecoach, while William Boyd, Gene Autry, and Roy Rogers turned out a steady stream of B pictures. Barson demonstrates just how powerful a hold these stars exerted on the American public, with their images being reproduced on sheet music, paperback books, posters, and other goods. I especially liked the advertisement produced under Boyd’s name offering his young fans the chance to “win a Hoppy [Hopalong Cassidy] bike, or cowboy outfit, or shootin’ irons, absolutely free” (22).<br /><br />In the early 1950s the vogue for B-pictures subsided with the growth of television. Both Autry and Rogers responded by creating their own series: The Gene Autry Show debuted on CBS in July 1950, with The Roy Rogers Show following a year later. Both ran until the middle of the decade, when the aging stars hung up their spurs and lived on their royalties.<br /><br />Barson offers a personal choice of one hundred favorite Western films ranging from Stagecoach (1939) to comedies such as The Paleface (1940) and Oklahoma! (1955), but excludes modern Westerns such as Blazing Saddles (1974) and more recently The Assassination of Jesse James (2007). The author concentrates instead on the television series that dominated the screens during the 1950s and 1960s—Wyatt Earp, Gunsmoke, Rawhide, and Bonanza. He argues quite rightly that the genre lost its popularity during the 80s, but expresses the hope that contemporary miniseries such as Comanche Moon (2007) might signal a revival of interest: “[I]t [is] possible to capture the epic scope of the best Western films even on television, given a good script, top-shelf acting, and quality directing” (109).<br /><br />The book’s concluding chapters cover classics of Western literature, music, and comic books. Featured authors range from pulp-fiction specialists such as Elmer Kelton and James Warren Bellah, to modern authors such as Cormac McCarthy. The songsters include Bing Crosby, Frankie Laine, and Johnny Cash. Barson’s fondness for Western themes is obvious; he even provides the lyrics to the theme from Rawhide, described as “three minutes of two-fisted gumption” (134). The song has affected legions of filmmakers; it provides the basis for one of the most memorable sequences in The Blues Brothers (1980), where the eponymous heroes perform it (repeatedly) in front of an audience of rowdy hillbillies.<br /><br />True West might not be a very scholarly work, but it provides an entertaining read. The beautifully reproduced color plates give an idea of the sheer range of artistic talent than went into producing posters, comic books, and other ephemera. If nothing else, this should render the book appealing to anyone interested in Westerns and their influence over twentieth-century American popular culture.</div>Alana Hatleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07006211600219601627noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5160783113019031392.post-34373908505287077962008-08-19T18:55:00.000-07:002008-08-19T18:57:02.297-07:00<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_MeaQFKuzvXc/SKt5wNTexoI/AAAAAAAAAog/aufhqqrSpbU/s1600-h/homer+simpson+goes+to+washington.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5236412860860384898" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_MeaQFKuzvXc/SKt5wNTexoI/AAAAAAAAAog/aufhqqrSpbU/s400/homer+simpson+goes+to+washington.jpg" border="0" /></a>from University Press of Kentucky<br /><div><em><strong><span style="font-size:130%;">Homer Simpson Goes to Washington: American Politics through Popular Culture</span></strong></em> </div><div>by Stanley K. Schultz and Joseph J. Foy </div><div>under review by Charlene Etkind, Ph.D</div>Bridget Cowlishaw, Ph.D.http://www.blogger.com/profile/13990580353645654390noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5160783113019031392.post-49871957192851137712008-08-19T18:48:00.001-07:002008-08-19T18:51:06.726-07:00<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_MeaQFKuzvXc/SKt4c5GAzgI/AAAAAAAAAoY/wyIz94pOeAk/s1600-h/television+cult.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5236411429506043394" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_MeaQFKuzvXc/SKt4c5GAzgI/AAAAAAAAAoY/wyIz94pOeAk/s400/television+cult.jpg" border="0" /></a>from A Hodder Arnold Publication<br /><div><em><strong><span style="font-size:130%;">Television, Cult, and the Fantastic</span></strong></em> </div><div>by Sara Gwenllian Jones </div><div>under review by Gregory Thompson, Rogers State University, Oklahoma </div>Bridget Cowlishaw, Ph.D.http://www.blogger.com/profile/13990580353645654390noreply@blogger.com0