Category: Film

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I have decided not to watch Denis Villeneuve’s upcoming film Dune.
 
It’s not because I don’t like Villeneuve’s work. Arrival is an amazing movie and one I use in the classroom as an example of masterful storytelling. Bladerunner 2049 was an incredible cinematic experience.
 
It’s also not because I am a literary traditionalist that eschews all cinematic adaptions. Arrival, for example, is an adaptation of  Ted Chiang’s short story “Story of Your Life”. Both expressions of the story are excellent.
 
I am also not arguing for a boycott of the film. I have no moral or ethical qualms with it. In fact, I love that Hollywood is giving attention to a serious science fiction masterpiece. Go watch it!
But.
 
If you are at all inclined to pick up a book, I beg you to read the book first.
I don’t make this request because I think that “the book is always better”. In fact, I cringe every time I find myself in another version of the “which was better” conversation. These discussions are the equivalent of the classic comparison of apples to oranges. They’re different.
 
While you may have a personal preference or strong opinions about the filmmaker’s or author’s story decisions, designating one or the other as “better” is a largely meaningless assertion. This is a bit like when my students or colleagues describe something as “interesting” — the intellectual version of an “um”. (Which is why I usually start my classes by making them watch this great little clip from Captain Fantastic.)

Let me back up a little and talk a bit about the process of adaptation.
 
Adaptation is always a practice of interpretation and translation, and every time someone tells a story, they are also engaged in the practice of interpretation and translation.
 
When the author sits down to write, they are taking an experience they had or an idea in their head or a historical account, and they are translating it into a particular new assemblage of words. No story springs into existence ex nihilo, out of nothing. There are always little (or big) things that come together to inform the story that finally gets told, whether or not the writer is fully conscious of their ideas’ inspirations or origins.
 
The process of filmmaking is similar, but here the storyteller must translate the story into a combined language of words, images and sound — with a time limit. Every story must take form within the possibilities and limitations of the particular medium chosen. Every telling is a retelling, an interpretation and translation, a decoding and an encoding anew using new materials.
 
As a result, I am hesitant to query whether a cinematic adaptation of a literary narrative is “true to the original or not”. Which original? How does one define “trueness” to this ongoing process of interpretation?
 
Instead I am more intrigued with thinking about adaptation as conversation. How does an adaptation respond to the text that inspired it? What choices does the storyteller make in order to weave their own narrative inspired by the previous? In this way, I can prefer the experience of reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?  but nevertheless thoroughly enjoy Ridley Scott’s cinematic interpretation and recognize that it is doing something quite different to the book. Scott didn’t try to repeat the book; he allowed himself to be inspired and then to tell a story best suited for his medium and his own creative inclinations.
 
Nevertheless, I want to also suggest that there is a one-way street embedded in the process of adaptation. This isn’t so much about the process of adaptation itself as it is about the particular media involved and their affordances.
 
The written word relies on the reader’s imagination as co-creator of the narrative. Even the most precise or poetic blocks of text need the reader to take those words as a sort of recipe that they use to bring the story to life in their minds. This is why reading a book can feel like such an intimate experience.
 
Audio narratives (such as podcasts, narrated books, or radio stories) have also been described as intimate (Ong, 2002). While they offer a bit more information through the use of soundtrack, voice actors, and sonic-scapes, they still allow the listener to visualise the story for themselves.
 
However, by their nature, cinematic and televised adaptations communicate stories through rich visuals. This narrative experience is often immersive and transformative for the audience member; some have even likened movies to dreamscapes. Audience members infuse these stories with their own emotions and personal experiences, so there is still a sense of co-creation between producer and spectator but this relationship is significantly different than the relationship between author and reader.
 
So this leads us back to Dune. In essence, the reason I will not see the film is this: Once I have seen Villeneuve’s interpretation of Dune, I can never un-see it.
 
Frank Herbert’s book invites readers into a complex and strange world that requires one’s imagination to work hard to envision landscapes, characters, and scenarios that bear minimal semblance to our own world. The strangeness becomes a foundation for the philosophical ideas that he introduces–the ideas that transformed the book from simply a great story to a literary masterpiece. Books like these leave a visceral imprint on the body and mind. I vividly remember my experience of first setting foot on the planet of Arrakis. In a similar fashion, I remember spotting Strider mysteriously obscured in the shadowed interior of The Prancing Pony. That moment was two decades ago, and yet I can easily bring to mind my first reading of Lord of the Rings as if it were last week.
 
I have strong, fond memories of reading a number of books, but for books that involve extensive world-building, particularly in fantastic or science-fictional contexts, I think the experience of co-creation is especially intimate and unique. I treasure my first encounter with Middle-earth, but once I watched Peter Jackson’s trilogy, something changed. My Strider now found himself in battle with Viggo Mortensen over who got to occupy the visual icon of Aragorn in my mind. Now if anyone was to replace my image of Strider, I’m happy it happened to be Viggo (less happy about Elijah’s usurpation of Frodo). Nevertheless, my imagination suffered a tremendous loss.
 
Of course, I can’t get away from the film’s PR campaigns, so I do have new images of Dune’s occupants floating in my mind. But my objective is to minimize their power as much as I can. Thus, I choose to not watch the film.
 
For you, I am excited that you will get to experience Villeneuve & his production crew’s imaginations brought to life. That is a gift. But I encourage you to consider letting your imagination have first dibs on Arrakis. Accept Frank Herbert’s invitation to co-create this world with him. Maybe even read a few of the sequels. Then by all means, turn to Villeneuve and take a peek at how he interprets and has translated Dune onto the screen.

This post’s featured image is by Francesco Ungaro on Unsplash

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In my last post, I reflected on why we should care about how women are represented on the screen. I drew attention to the fact that women constitute a majority of the humans on earth, but numbers alone should not dictate how we portray people in our media. In a democratic and liberal society, we hold all of humanity to be equally valuable and, as such, equally deserving of being portrayed realistically and robustly. What I only briefly noted before was that beyond women, misrepresentation (or lack of representation entirely) also affects a number of other demographics, particularly minority groups. For example, the lack of African-American representation in Hollywood was a concern raised a few years ago with the #OscarsSoWhite campaign.

Addressing representation on the screen is an important and worthy task; however, over the past semester, I have come to realize how a focus on visual representation can distract us from deeper, more insidious dysfunctions in our media. It is those, often invisible, factors that I want to address in this post. 

To do so, we first need to take a brief detour into a book I had to read for my class on Digital Games & Society this past fall semester. The book by Ian Bogost, a scholar and game designer, is called Persuasive Games but before we talk about games (which we will!), I want to look at an idea he proposes in his opening chapter: procedural rhetoric.Bogost writes:

Procedural rhetoric is the practice of using processes persuasively, just as verbal rhetoric is the practice of using oratory persuasively and visual rhetoric is the practice of using images persuasively (28).Ian Bogost

When we talk about issues of visual representation in cinema, we are thus focusing on visual rhetoric. We are thinking about how what we see on-screen makes an argument for how we should view and understand the world. 

If we were to focus on a film’s dialogue, then we would be considering its verbal rhetoric. We would be exploring how what a character says and how they say it might make an argument for how we should view and understand the world.

But Bogost wants us to think about this new form of rhetoric that is based not on images or words but on procedures.

Procedural rhetoric is a general name for the practice of authoring arguments through processes. . . . its arguments are made not through the construction of words or images, but through the authorship of rules of behavior, the construction of dynamic models. Ian Bogost

Bogost is wanting us to think about how things are made to work. In a cinematic narrative, what arguments do the filmmakers make about how the world-at-large works through the world that they create within their film? For instance, The Matrix introduces us to a version of the world in which our daily realities are actually lies: what we see is a false facade. Thus, The Matrix makes a procedural argument about the nature of reality and about our capacity for knowledge.

The Matrix

 

In computation, those rules are authored in code, through the practice of programming.Ian Bogost

Bogost’s concept of procedural rhetoric is easier to understand within the context of the digital realm. Computer code is a very tangible means by which individuals can construct new worlds, programming certain ideas and procedures into their infrastructures. However, computer code is also not an ideal example since most of us are illiterate in that regard. (Another topic to address in the coming days.) Instead this is where I will turn to video games as a more accessible example, which allows us to think about procedural logic through the mechanics of how the game works, i.e. how the game is coded.

In a paper I wrote this semester, I looked at a game called Uncharted: The Lost Legacy. The game is part of a larger franchise in which gamers play as Nathan Drake, an intrepid explorer and supposed descendant of Sir Francis Drake. The Lost Legacy, however, did not feature Nathan Drake and rather told its story through the eyes of two popular female characters from the franchise: Chloe, the Indian-Australian thief and occasional ally to Nathan Drake, and Nadine, the South African mercenary who was Nathan’s opponent in Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End. The game does a fantastic job in terms of representation. Both main characters are women of color, and they talk about many things without referencing a man (i.e. passing the Bechdel Test). Chloe and Nadine are not sexualized; they are capable, witty, and intelligent. Much of the game dialogue is actually dedicated to critiquing the male-centric nature of the previous Uncharted games, which was unexpected and quite enjoyable, especially for me as a female gamer. 

I appreciated Uncharted: The Lost Legacy on so many levels, yet I couldn’t fully embrace the game–because of its procedural rhetoric.

In my paper I wrote:

Despite positive representation, the game continued the same exploitative game mechanics of the previous Uncharted games. Besides the absence of an interminable appearance of crates that need to be pushed off cliffs, the game is still a mixture of combat and puzzle solving in a foreign, exotic land whose treasures have yet to be uncovered.

The Lost Legacy does attempt to justify the treasure hunting in the character of Chloe, who is ostensibly also on a mission to deepen her knowledge of her heritage and provide the country of India with access to a hidden part of its history. In addition, both Chloe and Nadine are not only women, they are also women of color, so the narrative is no longer one of white men invading and plundering.

However, once one peels back the narrative layer of the story and examines the game’s mechanics, one still finds an inherently imperialistic game, where killing and raiding ancient monuments is framed as not only acceptable but also pleasurable. Nadine’s ethnic identity also does not change the fact that she is helping Chloe not for altruistic reasons but for the payout.Rachel Lara Watson

It can be easy with games like Uncharted: The Lost Legacy to recognize the positive representations and laud the game developers for their commitment to progress. But these representations interact with the procedural logics to construct new meanings. What does it mean that the game developers at Naughty Dog replaced Nathan Drake with two women of color who perform the same exploitative (and often destructive) actions that he used to perform? My stomach actually turns when I think about this. That isn’t progress!

Uncharted: The Lost Legacy Screen Capture

Though cinema does not require its audience to engage with and play out a set of mechanics, there are still procedural rhetorics built into cinematic worlds that necessarily also interact with a film’s visual (and verbal) rhetorics. A similar cinematic example to Uncharted: The Lost Legacy is the film The Help. The Help is a film whose main characters are all women, several of whom are also women of color, and it passes the Bechdel Test. However, if you pay attention to the procedural rhetorics of the film, the narrative is essentially one of white women “saving” helpless black women while trying to work through their white guilt. In addition, Skeeter, the main character and a white woman, ultimately reaps a financial benefit from the whole situation by writing a book in which she takes it upon herself to tell the stories of “the help”. (To read a more comprehensive argument about why The Help is problematic, check out this article.)

My argument in this post is not that we should disregard visual rhetoric and questions of representation. My argument, rather, is that when we focus on those elements and fail to consider the procedural rhetoric, we fail to understand how the visual representations are worked out in the film. 

In conclusion, I want us to be more attentive to the arguments in cinema, video games, and other forms of media that are made “through the authorship of rules of behavior, the construction of dynamic models.” What is being modeled to us on-screen? What arguments are being made about how the world works? And how do those logics then shape how we must read and interpret the visual representations?

What are your thoughts? I’d love to hear your responses in the comment section below. And please, as always, remember to subscribe!

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2017 was an exhausting year.

Academically and personally, my 2017 was filled with a number of significant challenges, but on a societal level, both internationally and nationally, we all experienced a number of difficult or exacting events, revelations, and conversations. No matter our distinct backgrounds and positionalities, 2017 demanded that we all embrace some discomfort and do some serious self-reflection. Hard but, no doubt, valuable.

One of the big “revelations” of 2017 was the Harvey Weinstein scandal, followed by the #MeToo campaign that prompted the disclosure of numerous accounts of sexual misconduct across the workforce. I place revelation in quotations because, while the details may have been shocking and disappointing, the larger reality of male misuse of power comes as no surprise to most women. We all have stories of harassment, whether small or big.

Within the context of Hollywood, the scandal once again drew attention to the male-dominated nature of the industry. One ramification of this male-domination is toxic work environments for the minority of female colleagues, but the prevalence of men in the industry also ends up shaping the narratives that are told on-screen. Back in 1985, cartoonist Alison Bechdel popularized a simple test (created by her friend Liz Wallace) to evaluate how women were represented in movies. The test has just 3 questions:

  1. Does the movie have at least two women in it?
  2. Do those women have a conversation with each other?
  3. Do they talk about something other than a man?

The Bechdel Test proposes a fairly low standard for films, and one that doesn’t take into account other factors such as race and ethnicity. But it is a helpful start, especially when you realize that:

Approximately 69% of IMDB’s top 250 films fail the Bechdel Test.

Some beloved films that fail this test include: 

  • Casablanca (1942)

  • Vertigo (1958)
    • (And most of Hitchcock’s films)
  • Star Wars (1977)

  • Blade Runner (1982)
  • The Princess Bride (1987)
  • Forrest Gump (1994)

  • Toy Story (1995)
  • The Truman Show (1998)
  • Magnolia (1999)
  • The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (2001)
  • Finding Nemo (2003)

 

In 2016, 1/3 of the highest grossing films completely failed the test and roughly 50% passed, so we are making some progress. However, even those films that technically passed the test are not necessarily exemplary figures. For example, DC Comic’s Suicide Squad technically passes the Bechdel Test but, as Kristen Santer points out, the female characters “are depicted poorly, defined by their relationships with men and are often greatly mistreated.” Many critics drew attention to the film’s troubling portrayal of The Joker’s abusive and manipulative treatment of Harley Quinn, which she continually accepts and even embraces.

But, why does any of this matter? If those movies I listed above were good, are we not simply splitting hairs by trying to count the female characters and pick apart their topics of conversation? 

I want to be clear here that I am not proposing that a movie can’t be aesthetically or narratively good if women are not adequately represented in that movie. I am also not suggesting that movies focused on male stories should be avoided. Some of my favorite films are films that fail or barely pass the Bechdel Test, such as Before Sunrise and Before Sunset.

What I do want to draw attention to, however, is the fact that over 50% of the world’s population are women, yet our movies do not reflect this reality. Stories focus on men’s struggles, and women tend to be portrayed in relation to the men in their lives. When movies do concentrate on female characters, too often those films are marketed towards female audiences. This perpetuates the unspoken expectation that women find pleasure in watching male-driven films, such as action-driven thrillers like the Bourne films or war films like Saving Private Ryan or even quiet, thoughtful films like Good Will Hunting, while men are less likely to find pleasure in watching female-driven narratives. 

I don’t think this assumption reflects any true reality. What it does reflect is the assumptions being constructed and perpetuated by those individuals producing and distributing our media. This brings us back to where I began–with the Weinstein scandal and #MeToo. When you have an industry controlled by misogynistic, powerful men, then it is no surprise when our media and entertainment reflect the ideals held by those individuals. And then those beliefs trickle down into society and shape the way that men and women see themselves and each other.

Hollywood is not solely responsible for the circulation of such ideas, but as a media scholar, it is one of my responsibilities to call them out for the part that it plays. It is also my responsibility to bring awareness to the larger public so that we can all be attentive to our media consumption and hold Hollywood accountable for its actions.

The Bechdel Test is limited and flawed, but it is a place to start as we think about media representation. In my next post, however, I want to step beyond the Bechdel Test. This past semester, I have been thinking quite a bit about how questions of representation can actually fail us when we interrogate our media. Keep an eye out for that proposal in the next week, and if you want to make sure you never miss a post, be sure to subscribe below.

Curious about the Bechdel Test? Want to learn more? Here are some helpful links!



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