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COMM 1021 – Introduction to Media Studies
Extra Credit Assignment
Description: Create an annotated bibliography of the following four essays:
Ott, B. L. (2010). The visceral politics of V for Vendetta: On political affect in cinema.
Critical Studies in Media Communication, 27(1), 32-47. doi:
10.1080/15295030903554359
Ott, B. L., & Aoki, E. (2002). The politics of negotiating public tragedy: Media framing of
the Matthew Shepard murder. Rhetoric and Public Affairs, 5(3), 483-505. doi:
10.1353/rap.2002.0060
Ott, B. L., & Keeling, D. M. (2011). Cinema and choric connection: Lost in Translation as
sensual experience. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 97(4), 363-386. doi:
10.1080/00335630.2011.608704
Ott, B. L., & Lazić, G. (2013). The pedagogy and politics of art in postmodernity:
Cognitive mapping and The Bothersome Man. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 99(3),
259-282. doi: 10.1080/00335630.2013.806816
Procedures: (1) use the “doi” number at the end of each citation to search for and download
these articles from the Auraria Library Website: http://library.auraria.edu/; (2) carefully read
each article; and (3) write a two paragraph response in which you (a) summarize the argument
of the essay and (b) present your own personal reflections on the essay.
Format: Include the complete bibliographic citation for each essay (as provided above) before
the corresponding two-paragraph summary and reflection. The summary and reflection
paragraphs should be roughly 100 words each. The paper must be typed and double-spaced.
Use a 12-point font with one inch margins and staple your paper in the upper left-hand corner.
Points: You can receive up to 5 points for each essay you properly annotate. The extra credit
assignment is worth a maximum of 20 points.
Due: The extra credit assignment is due in class on Thursday, December 5.
http://library.auraria.edu/
00335630.2013
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On: 02 December 2013, At: 17:53
Publisher: Routledge
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Quarterly Journal of Speech
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subscription information:
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The Pedagogy and Politics of Art in
Postmodernity: Cognitive Mapping and
The Bothersome Man
Brian L. Ott & Gordana Lazić
Published online: 02 Jul 2013.
To cite this article: Brian L. Ott & Gordana Lazić (2013) The Pedagogy and Politics of Art in
Postmodernity: Cognitive Mapping and The Bothersome Man , Quarterly Journal of Speech, 99:3,
259-282, DOI: 10.1080/00335630.2013.806816
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2013.806816
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The Pedagogy and Politics of Art in
Postmodernity: Cognitive Mapping
and The Bothersome Man
Brian L. Ott and Gordana Lazić
This essay inquires into the pedagogical and political dimensions of art in the
contemporary moment. Specifically, it seeks to reanimate Fredric Jameson’s notion of
‘‘cognitive mapping,’’ which he introduced as a response to the postmodern problem of
representing the social totality. To that end, the essay begins by explicating the twin
impulses of cognitive mapping. It, then, undertakes a sustained rhetorical analysis of Jens
Lien’s award-winning 2006 Norwegian film, The Bothersome Man, demonstrating how
the film employs entropic satire to, at once, map and critique the cultural logic of late
capitalism. The essay concludes by reflecting on the important contributions rhetorical
scholars can make to a renewed interest in cognitive mapping.
Keywords: Fredric Jameson; Cognitive Mapping; Affect; Utopian Impulse; Entropic
Satire
[A]ll contemporary works of art*whether those of high culture and modernism or
of mass culture and [postmodernism]*have as their underlying impulse*albeit in
what is often distorted and repressed, unconscious form*our deepest fantasies
about the nature of social life, both as we live it now, and as we feel in our bones it
ought rather to be lived. To reawaken, in the midst of a privatized and
psychologizing society, obsessed with commodities and bombarded by the
ideological slogans of big business, some sense of the ineradicable drive towards
collectivity that can be detected, no matter how faintly and feebly . . . is surely an
Brian L. Ott and Gordana Lazić are teacher-scholars in the Department of Communication at the University of
Colorado Denver. A version of this paper was delivered as an invited lecture at The 13th Biennial Public Address
Conference at The University of Memphis on September 28, 2012. The authors are grateful for the comments
and suggestions made by Megan Foley, Christina Foust, Nathan Atkinson, and Greg Dickinson on an earlier
draft. The authors also acknowledge the invaluable feedback of Raymie McKerrow and the two anonymous
reviewers. Correspondence to: Brian L. Ott, Department of Communication, University of Colorado Denver,
Denver, CO 80217-3364, USA. Email: brian.ott@ucdenver.edu
ISSN 0033-5630 (print)/ISSN 1479-5779 (online) # 2013 National Communication Association
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2013.806816
Quarterly Journal of Speech
Vol. 99, No. 3, August 2013, pp. 259�282
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2013.806816
indispensable precondition for any meaningful Marxist intervention in contem-
porary culture.*Fredric Jameson1
In 1984, the Marxist literary scholar Fredric Jameson, writing in the New Left Review,
began charting the contours of what he dubbed ‘‘the cultural logic of late capitalism.’’
2
For Jameson, this logic or ‘‘cultural dominant’’ constituted an identifiable shift in the
modes of production that had sustained monopoly capitalism and the sensibility that
had typified high modernism.
3
Though Jameson’s preferred term for this new cultural
logic, ‘‘postmodernism,’’
4
has fallen into disfavor among many scholars in the past few
years,
5
the underlying logic he described has only tightened its grip on culture in both
US and global contexts. Thus, Jameson’s wide-ranging critique of multinational
capitalism and its corresponding sensibility, despite its reframing by some scholars in
terms of ‘‘consumer culture,’’ remains both relevant and incisive. Jameson’s central
thesis was that the commodity form had so thoroughly colonized the cultural sphere in
late capitalism as to eliminate the last remaining enclaves of resistance to capital: the
aesthetic, the Third World, and the Psyche.
6
Not surprisingly, then, Jameson was skeptical about the progressive possibilities of
political art within this cultural milieu. A ‘‘new political art*if it is indeed possible at
all,’’ Jameson concluded, ‘‘will have to hold to the truth of postmodernism, that is, to
say, to its fundamental object*the world space of multinational capital*at the same
time at which it achieves a breakthrough to some as yet unimaginable new mode of
representing this last.’’
7
Toward this end, Jameson called for an ‘‘aesthetic of cognitive
mapping*a pedagogical political culture which seeks to endow the individual
subject with some new heightened sense of its place in the global system.’’
8
In the more than 25 years since Jameson issued his call for an aesthetic of cognitive
mapping and, by extension, a new political art, we have witnessed the rise and fall of
countless aesthetic forms. Such forms, after all, ‘‘live and die according to how well
they stage and . . . resolve the social and cultural anxieties of their time.’’9 In this essay,
we are specifically interested in the emergence of forms that possess strong potential
to, in the words of Jacques Rancière, ‘‘change the cartography of the perceptible, the
thinkable and the feasible,’’ thus allowing ‘‘for new modes of political construction of
common objects and new possibilities for collective enunciation.’’
10
The contempor-
ary moment provides a particularly fecund sociopolitical context for exploring such
forms and for developing a renewed interest in cognitive mapping. The ongoing
forces of globalization, the rapid spread of neoliberal ideology, and the deepening
logics of multinational capitalism all but ensure the emergence of aesthetic forms
addressed to these challenges. One such form, we contend, is reflected in Jens Lien’s
award-winning 2006 Norwegian film, The Bothersome Man (Den Brysomme Mannen).
Thus, we undertake a sustained rhetorical examination of the film, demonstrating
how it mobilizes a contemporary form of satire know as entropic satire,
11
to, at once,
map the broad cultural logic of late capitalism and critique ‘‘the dehumanising effects
of our consumer society,’’
12
thereby instilling the desire for a radical future. In service
of this goal, our essay proceeds in three parts. In Section I, we elaborate upon the
concept of cognitive mapping, situating it within an appropriate intellectual context,
260 B. L. Ott and G. Lazić
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explicating its paired pedagogical and political impulses, and highlighting the key
rhetorical mechanisms that facilitate it. In Section II, we analyze The Bothersome
Man, attending to the ways in which the film employs entropic satire to affectively
map the contours of multinational capitalism and to foster a formal desire for a
radical socialist future. Finally, in Section III, we assess the value of a renewed interest
in cognitive mapping, pointing to the vital role scholars of rhetoric can play in
furthering the progressive potentiality in political art.
I. The Pedagogy and Politics of Cognitive Mapping
What is needed are not better ‘‘maps of the future’’ but more ‘‘adequate maps of the
present,’’ which can inspire the most effective means of activating the desire for a
more humane world.*Rustom Bharucha13
Writing in the Marxist journal, Cultural Logic, in 2005, Tanner Mirrlees described
cognitive mapping as ‘‘the most significant . . . and potentially resistant element’’ in
Jameson’s work.
14
Similarly, Colin MacCabe, in his preface to The Geopolitical
Aesthetic, described cognitive mapping as ‘‘the most crucial of the Jamesonian
categories.’’
15
While both important and central to Jameson’s work, cognitive
mapping is a complex and confounding concept*one that resists simple definition.
One of the challenges involved in understanding cognitive mapping is that the field of
psychology has, since at least the 1940s, employed a concept that bears the same
name.
16
Though Jameson’s conception of cognitive mapping shares some sensibilities
with its counterpart in psychology, there are considerable differences, not least of
which is Jameson’s insistence that cognitive mapping functions politically as well as
pedagogically.
17
Thus, in this section, we aim to delineate what Jameson means by
cognitive mapping by, first, reflecting on the political problem Jameson was
attempting to resolve through its introduction, and, second, by distilling the twin
impulses that animate his version of the concept.
The Decentering of the Political Subject in Multinational Capitalism
For Jameson, the Marxist project requires a political subject capable of locating her or
himself within the capitalist system and developing a class consciousness to struggle
against that system. The problem, according to Jameson, is that the cultural logic of
postmodernism and the corresponding production of postmodern hyperspace have
undermined ‘‘the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize
its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a
mappable external world.’’
18
In this context, the subject is effectively overrun and
overwhelmed by an endless flow of signs, images, and information, resulting in a
decentered, fragmented, schizoid subject.
19
Moreover, postmodern hyperspace, as
reflected in the figure of the global network, has effectively deterritorialized space and
collapsed the difference between the image and the real, thereby eliminating or
suppressing the distance required for representation and political agency.
20
The Bothersome Man 261
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This has not always been the case, however. Postmodernism and postmodern
hyperspace specifically correspond to the current stage of capitalism, which Jameson
calls multinational (or late) capitalism. Market and monopoly capitalism*the two
stages that preceded multinational capitalism*obey different cultural logics and
produce distinctive experiences of social space
21
and, thus, political subjectivities. The
economic mode of market (or industrial) capitalism, to which corresponds the cultural
aesthetic of realism and claims of representational truth, for instance, produced a
structuring and experience of social space governed by the logic of the grid.
22
Reflecting
the spatial figure of the industrial city in the mid to late eighteenth century, the ‘‘logic
of the grid’’ involved, according to Jameson, ‘‘a reorganization of some older sacred
and heterogeneous space into geometrical and Cartesian homogeneity, a space of
infinite equivalence and extension.’’
23
The rational, continuous, and homogenous
social spaces of market capitalism engendered subjects that were relatively unitary,
essential, and fundamentally unchanging.
24
In this context, subjects could mean-
ingfully locate (and artists could mimetically represent)
25
their position within the
capitalist system and, therefore, struggle against it.
But in the passage from market to monopoly (or imperial) capitalism and the
cultural aesthetic of modernism,
26
the experience of social space was, along with the
subject, Jameson argued, transformed and problematized. As a consequence of
imperialism and the whole colonial system, the logic of the grid was replaced by the
logic of the territory. Under this new logic, social space was increasingly hetero-
geneous, discontinuous, and indeterminate, creating a growing contradiction between
‘‘the phenomenological [or lived] experience of the individual subject’’ and ‘‘a more
properly structural model of the conditions of existence of that experience [imperial
capitalism].’’
27
This rift created ‘‘tremendous and crippling problems for art,’’
28
politics, and the modern subject. Within the newly subjective experience of the
territory,
29
space (whether the city or nation-state) could no longer adequately anchor
personal identity. Unmoored from the securities of place, identity became an
existentialist project for each individual.
30
But despite the difficulties posed to art
and politics by the increasingly subjective experience of the territory within monopoly
capitalism, the cultural sphere continued to maintain some degree of autonomy from
the economic base, which allowed for political representation and struggle through
allegory and national narratives, for instance.
31
In the transition from monopoly to multinational or late capitalism, however, the
‘‘‘semi-autonomy’ of the cultural sphere . . . has been destroyed’’ altogether.32 As
the cultural sphere was invaded and colonized by the economic base, the logic of the
territory was replaced by the logic of the network. The current space of multinational
(global) networks abandons the spatial figures of the grid (city) and territory
(imperial nation-state), creating a postmodern hyperspace of total immersion.
33
It is
in response, then, to the historical development of multinational capitalism*to the
endless production of hyperspace and the disappearance or schizophrenic dispersal of
the subject*that Jameson issued his call for an aesthetic of cognitive mapping.
Jameson’s goal was to theorize a revolutionary aesthetic practice that could totalize
capitalism as a global system; re-center a political subject capable of resisting late
262 B. L. Ott and G. Lazić
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capitalism; and promote a political strategy that contributes to a global class
consciousness.
34
In the remainder of this section, we detail the twin impulses that
animate Jameson’s notion of cognitive mapping, attending both to the central aims of
those impulses and to the rhetorical mechanisms that underlie them.
The Orienting and Utopian Impulses in Cognitive Mapping
An aesthetic of cognitive mapping functions both to map and to critique ‘‘the various
forces and flows that shape and constitute our world situation.’’
35
This dual aim reflects
what we take to be cognitive mapping’s two central impulses. The first of these, which
we have dubbed the orienting impulse, is primarily pedagogical in character.
36
It seeks,
in Jameson’s words, to produce a ‘‘rich and elaborated knowledge’’ of the global social
totality, for only consciousness about the Real,
37
i.e., about the social totality itself, can
result in a socialist politics capable of transforming the whole system.
38
While the chief
aim of cognitive mapping’s orienting impulse is relatively straightforward, the
rhetorical mechanism for realizing it is anything but. After all, the desire to know
the structural realities of late capitalism immediately raises the problem of
representability*a recognition that the Real is, strictly speaking, unrepresentable.39
Since the social totality cannot be rendered representationally, for ‘‘‘the real’ will always
remain an ‘absent cause’ for which any representation is inadequate,’’
40
then it must be
apprehended in some other, non-representational manner.
41
For the reasons just outlined, we argue that the orienting impulse is best facilitated
via ‘‘the figural’’*those aesthetic dimensions of art, which while asignifying,42
nevertheless elicit sensory experiences that affectively resonate with ‘‘the tangible
medium of daily life in vivid and experiential ways.’’
43
The figural, as we are employing
it here, is adapted from Discourse, Figure, Jean-François Lyotard’s philosophical work
on art, aesthetics, and psychoanalysis.
44
For Lyotard, the figural refers to art’s material,
expressive, and non-signifying dimensions and their capacity to evoke sensory
experiences. Recent scholarship on the rhetoric of cinema argues that the figural in
art operates on a primary or affective register, generating intensities that appeal
directly to the human sensorium.
45
In other words, the aesthetic qualities of an
artwork arouse sensations and affects,
46
which Shaviro posits can, in some instances,
foster a collective sense of ‘‘what it feels like to live in the early twenty-first century.’’
47
The figural, then, makes it possible to ‘‘know’’ (through sensation and affect) the
system in a non-representational way. To put it in Jamesonian terms, ‘‘The social
totality can be sensed, as it were, from the outside, like a skin at which the Other
somehow looks.’’
48
As important as the orienting impulse is, it reflects only the first of cognitive
mapping’s two major dimensions. Its second dimension, the utopian impulse, is,
according to Jameson, equally crucial to the Marxist project.
49
Whereas the orienting
impulse is primarily pedagogical and seeks to orient one within the social totality, the
utopian impulse is principally political and seeks to reorient one toward the social
totality. Stated another way, the former maps the social totality, while the latter
critiques it, thereby initiating a desire to transform it. Since the utopian impulse is
The Bothersome Man 263
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often misperceived as involving a fanciful, idealized, and romanticized depiction of a
perfect future, it is not customary to think about it chiefly as a mode of critique. But
Jameson is resolute in his insistence that the utopian impulse is first and foremost a
radical negation of the present. Elaborating on this point, Robert Tally notes, ‘‘Before
anything else, the utopian impulse must be a negative one: to identify the problem or
problems that must be fixed. Far from presenting an idyllic, happy, fulfilled world,
Utopias initially must present the root causes of the society’s ills . . . to act as a critique
of the existing system.’’
50
As Jameson illustrates in his analysis of Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, the critique of
the present that inheres in the utopian impulse is often satirical in character*‘‘the
passionate and prophetic onslaught on current conditions and on the wickedness and
stupidity of human beings in the fallen world of the here and now.’’
51
In savagely
denunciating the present, the utopian impulse creates a formal desire for a radically
different future; it calls for a new social order*a process that Marlana Portolano
argues ‘‘is specifically the province of rhetoric.’’
52
The rhetorical workings of the
utopian impulse could be explained through reference to any number of critical
theories, including Kenneth Burke’s conception of form.
53
But we would like to begin
with Ernst Bloch, who explains the utopian impulse in terms of ‘‘anticipatory
consciousness’’ (or not-yet-conscious knowledge), which prepares the way for a
material reality of the future (the not-yet-come-into-being) that can be hoped and
willed-for, but not yet described.
54
Bloch’s account of the utopian impulse suggests
that it is not concerned with depicting an ideal commonwealth, for ‘‘if we can
imagine what the future may look like, then the suspicion arises that it is merely a
repetition of the present, or else its prolongation.’’
55
Thus, the utopian impulse, and
especially its anticipation of a radical future, is to be found not so much in the
content of artworks as in the form in which the content is given shape and finds
expression.
56
Jameson has devoted much of his distinguished career to analyzing the orienting
and utopian impulses in cinematic and literary texts. Indeed, his project has often led
him to study entire genres that reflect one desire or the other. The Geopolitical
Aesthetic, for instance, reveals the recurrence of the orienting impulse in ‘‘the
‘conspiratorial text,’ which, whatever other messages it emits or implies, may also be
taken to constitute an unconscious, collective effort at trying to figure out where we
are and what landscapes and forces confront us in a late twentieth century,’’
57
while
Archaeologies of the Future highlights the presence of the utopian impulse in the
science fiction text, which aims to ‘‘defamiliarize and restructure our experience of
our own present, and to do so in specific ways distinct from all other forms of
defamiliarization.’’
58
But Jameson has yet to find a singular aesthetic that reflects the
twin impulses of cognitive mapping. In the next section, we critically examine The
Bothersome Man, a film whose underlying form*entropic satire*is, we argue,
uniquely suited for mapping the social totality and critiquing the cultural logic of late
capitalism, thus rhetorically enacting both cognitive mapping’s orienting and utopian
impulses.
264 B. L. Ott and G. Lazić
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II. The Form and Function of The Bothersome Man
Commercial film [is] that medium where, if at all, some change in the class
character of social reality ought to be detectable, since social reality and the
stereotypes of our experience of everyday social reality are the raw material with
which commercial film . . . [is] inevitably forced to work.*Fredric Jameson59
Jens Lien’s The Bothersome Man, which critics variously described as a ‘‘satire of
[the] middle class,’’ ‘‘a parable about the consumer paradise,’’ and an ‘‘absurd and
satirical look at everyday life,’’
60
is based on a short radio play by Per Schreiner about
a man who dies and goes to hell. Despite the rather simple premise, it is a difficult
film to summarize. Like most satires, The Bothersome Man privileges description over
story. ‘‘Plot is rarely,’’ notes Leonard Feinberg, ‘‘the most important component of
satire. The satirist’s real purpose is to comment rather than narrate, criticize rather
than recite.’’
61
In fact, the film might better be described as a series of short vignettes
that showcase various dimensions of contemporary life, than as a methodically
plotted story that follows a strict narrative arc. Moreover, in the film version, the
director has strategically removed any explicit references to the afterlife, leaving the
matter of where the action is occurring open-ended.
62
Indeed, as one critic of the film
astutely observed, ‘‘[it] feels more like a slice of life than a nightmarish vision of
purgatory.’’
63
The film’s surreal and satiric look at life is set in motion when its protagonist,
Andreas Ramsfjell (Trond Fausa Aurvåg), arrives by bus to a strange city, where he is
mysteriously provided housing and a job as an accountant. While everyone is friendly
and pleasant toward Andreas, he nevertheless feels ‘‘out-of-place’’ and engages in a
series of disruptive behaviors aimed at testing the limits*both bureaucratic and
metaphysical*of this odd place in which he has inexplicably found himself. At one
point, he makes a concerted effort to ‘‘fit in,’’ dating and moving in with a woman
named Anne Britt (Petronella Barker), whom he has met through his coworkers. But
this effort lasts only a short time, as he finds the relationship predictable and
meaningless. Following a failed attempt at love with a second woman, Ingeborg
(Brigitte Larsen), and a failed suicide, Andreas discovers a strange room in the
basement of an old building where hauntingly beautiful music, the sound of children
playing, and the most delicious scents emanate from a tiny crack in the wall.
Determined to find out what lies on the other side, Andreas spends days tunneling,
only to be captured and eventually exiled to a frozen wasteland by the city’s
caretakers.
At its core, The Bothersome Man is a political satire that ridicules the emotional
emptiness and isolation experienced by many in a world governed by the
monotonous routine of the (post)modern workplace and the hollow pleasures of
commodities. To level this critique, the film utilizes the satiric device of distortion,
which exaggerates and subsequently demystifies various aspects of contemporary
life.
64
In distorting select aspects of the social world, the film invites its audience to
see the world in a novel and instructive way, or, to put it in Burkean terms, the film
fosters perspective by incongruity.
65
Traditionally, perspective by incongruity has
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been treated as a strictly symbolic process in which an artwork intentionally
misnames (misrepresents) its target to alter the audience’s view of the target. But
when the satiric target is the social totality itself, a misnaming*operating
predominantly at a symbolic level*cannot adequately capture a sense of the whole
system.
In The Bothersome Man, however, perspective by incongruity functions on a
material as well symbolic level, eliciting bodily sensations and intensities that resonate
with what it feels like, rather than merely representing what it looks like, to live in late
capitalism. In other words, the intensities evoked throughout the film perform an
orienting impulse; they affectively map the social totality. But these seemingly
isolated moments of intensity are themselves part of a larger form that, in critiquing
the status quo, instills a desire for a radical future. Hence, the various affective
intensities generated over the course of the film function formally to facilitate the
utopian impulse. In short, the affective energies that viewers experience as they watch
the film are converted or organized into an emotional experience (of hope) at the
level of genre,
66
which can then be mobilized for progressive political purposes. In the
analysis of the film that follows, we trace both of these rhetorical processes,
demonstrating both how the film’s aesthetic elements (camera movement, pacing,
editing, color, sound, etc.) foster affective intensities that orient viewers within the
social totality and how the film’s underlying form organizes those affects to reorient
viewers toward the social totality. Though these processes are intricately interwoven,
for purposes of clarity, we treat them in succession.
The Orienting Impulse: ‘‘An Aesthetic of Affective Mapping’’
67
The postmodern condition is staggeringly complex, far too complex for a film to
render comprehensively in 95 minutes. So, in addition to its representational
elements, The Bothersome Man creates a series of sensate experiences that expressively
capture and affectively resonate with the key dimensions of multinational capitalism,
including postmodern hyperspace, a new depthlessness, and the waning of emotion.
Postmodern hyperspace. For Jameson, postmodernism ‘‘ushers in a radically new
experience of space and time’’ that is dislocating and disorienting.
68
The opening
scenes of The Bothersome Man capture this sensory experience, generating an affective
map of postmodern hyperspace. The film opens with a medium length two-shot of a
man and woman kissing, but the vacant looks in their eyes and the nauseating sound
of slurping as their gaping mouths exchange fluids makes the image grotesque rather
than romantic. At 20 seconds in duration, the shot is uncomfortably long, fostering a
visceral feeling of discomfort and disgust. Unlike the opening shot in most films,
which is typically an establishing shot designed to locate viewers in space (and often
in time through the mise-en-scène),
69
the tight framing and shallow focus of the
introductory shot make it impossible to locate oneself spatially. Thus, the shot is
disorienting in both content and form. As the camera cuts to a reverse medium shot
of a man observing this display, viewers’ sense of revulsion is validated by the look of
despair on his face. The third shot in the scene, which reverses the angle again, is
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framed more widely and reveals that the action is taking place in a subway station.
But, strangely, there is no signage on the platform that would identify the city or
country in which these events are occurring. As the couple continues to swap saliva,
viewers again observe the pained expression on the man’s face. A few seconds later,
the man steps off the platform into the path of a speeding train. Though viewers see
neither the train nor the impact, they hear and feel the graphic sound of bones being
crushed.
Following this introductory scene, the screen momentarily flashes to bright white
before slowly dissolving into a panoramic shot of a mountainous desert. The only
visible structure within this bleak and barren landscape is a small, dilapidated, and
desolate gas station and the only audible sound is the repetitive creaking of a rusty
metal sign swaying in the wind. After a few moments, the camera cuts to the roof of
the gas station where a middle-aged man suddenly appears on a ladder to hang a
welcome banner. A few moments later, the camera spies a bus on the horizon. Once
the bus arrives at the station, the driver turns to its sole passenger, the suicidal man
from the train platform, as if to indicate this is his stop. That the man now has a full
beard suggests that the subway scene (in which he was clean shaven and dressed
differently) may not precede this one temporally within the narrative (and viewers
later learn that it does not). The film’s spatial ambiguity or apparent ‘‘no place’’ is
exacerbated, then, by the film’s temporal discontinuity, as reflected by the ‘‘opening’’
scene, which is reproduced from the middle of the film. In the context of these spatial
and temporal uncertainties, which mirror viewers’ daily experiences, the man steps
off the bus, approaches the gas station, greets the middle-aged man who hung the
welcome banner, and introduces himself as Andreas. The two men get into a car and
drive to an unidentified and unidentifiable city, where Andreas is informed of his new
job and given keys to his new apartment.
The welcome sequence in the desert, which is also the film’s title sequence, contains
no more identifiable markers than the introductory sequence on the train platform to
help viewers locate themselves. Indeed, in many ways, this scene is even more
spatially disorienting than the first. Viewers have arrived in this no place*first the
desert and then the city*with Andreas, but with no sense of how they got there or
even where there is. In the city, as in the desert, there are no signs*no municipal or
street signs, no billboards or advertisements, no corporate logos or marques. While
clean and antiseptic, the city is also bland and nondescript. It is, at once, a no place
and an anyplace. In addition to lacking spatial signifiers, the city, like Andreas
himself, has no past or future. The architecture in the city reflects a variety of
different styles and periods, a ‘‘random cannibalization of all the styles of the past, the
play of random stylistic allusion.’’
70
In fact, as subsequent scenes emphasize, Andreas
and the audience are caught in what Jameson has called the ‘‘perpetual present’’ of
consumer society. One clue that the city and its subjects are stuck in temporal limbo
is the total absence of children, who frequently signify the future in film.
In the first few minutes of screen time, Jens Lien introduces a world that captures
the postmodern spatial experience of a vertiginous hyperspace. The manner in which
Lien does this, or rather the manner in which he does not do it, is both ingenious and
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consequential. Instead of bombarding viewers with an endless array of signs and
subjecting them to rapid editing to create a sense of spatial dislocation and
disorientation, as Sophia Coppola does at the outset of Lost in Translation, for
instance,
71
Lien employs a quite different strategy. He merely denies viewers the
signifiers*such as street signs, recognizable landscapes, and famous architecture*
that they would typically use to orient themselves spatially. One advantage of this
approach is that the critique of consumer society that follows is not bound to a
specific locale like Tokyo and can, therefore, operate at a more global, totalizing level.
A second advantage is that it highlights*in this case, through understatement rather
than exaggeration*the endless proliferation of signs that characterize the con-
temporary moment. Here, perspective by incongruity is generated by strategic
absence, rather than amplified presence. Viewers are made aware of the persistent
play of signs that dominate their lives through visual attenuation.
While the film’s deficit of spatial signifiers and lack of historicity generate a sense of
bewilderment and disorientation for Andreas and the audience alike, the strategic
absence of these elements is so noticeable as to facilitate a pedagogical function. At an
aesthetic level, the audience is having a sensory-affective experience*of dislocation
and disorientation*that, if Jameson is correct, resonates strongly with their everyday
lives. But since the ocean of spatial signifiers that actively contribute to this
experience in people’s lives outside of the theater is conspicuously missing within the
film, the absence is intensified, drawing attention to the ways that a culture of
pastiche and semiotic excess fragments culture and subjectivity and undermines
collective articulation. Moreover, the bland and barren landscape affords a neutral
background against which to stage other concerns such as a new depthlessness.
A new depthlessness. According to Jameson, a culture of simulacrum has created a
society of surface and superficiality, which is evident in everything from the literal
flatness of the two-dimensional screens that have come to dominate our lives to
the large, reflective surfaces of skyscrapers. In The Bothersome Man, Lien captures the
pervasive depthlessness of society at both narrative and aesthetic levels. Over the
course of the film, characters variously spend time leafing through magazines,
attending movies, and watching television despite their trivial and shallow content,
which the audience learns includes furniture catalogues, melodramatic films, and
interior design shows. In each instance, Lien shows the audience an unflattering
image of themselves robotically consuming media. But he does not limit his portrayal
of a depthless society to mindless media consumption. Andreas’s job as an
accountant, which accentuates the ever-present flow of capital in postmodernity, is
equally devoid of meaning and significance. He does nothing all day but sit at his
desk, typing figures into a computer spreadsheet. The simple, repetitive nature of his
job suggests that, like so many workers in late capitalism, he is an easily replaceable
cog in an immense financial machine.
The emptiness of Andreas’s job is reinforced by his interactions with his coworkers,
whose conversations are utterly vapid and vacuous. The only thing anyone seems to
care about is the latest styles and designs. As one critic of the film observed, ‘‘it is a
life of bland emptiness where the consumerist drive for a ‘perfect lifestyle’ has
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replaced all other meanings that life might once have had.’’
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The drive to find
meaning and identity in fashion, consumer goods, and other consumer-based lifestyle
choices captures well Jameson’s notion of a new depthlessness, which Simon Malpas
argues is ultimately about ‘‘the transformation of social experience into an
interchangeable flow of commodities.’’
73
Throughout the film, the city’s inhabitants
incessantly chatter about their consumer preferences, no matter how minor or
insignificant they are*a fact that led one critic to conclude, ‘‘The Bothersome Man is
ultimately not about the strange, new environment; rather the film says something
about our own world. We are all zombies, apathetic, resigned in our straightjacket,
charging around in a colourless nightmare with IKEA furnishings and fittings. The
much-feared spiritual and intellectual void of consumer society is omnipresent.’’
74
To
further satirize the depthlessness of postmodern consumer society, Lien depicts a
world in which art is nonexistent, food is tasteless, alcohol has no effect, and sex is
purely mechanical.
Representing society’s depthlessness and capturing what that depthlessness feels
like are not the same thing, however. To achieve the latter, The Bothersome Man
utilizes a strategic color palette that, as reviewers repeatedly noted,
75
is dominated by
cool, muted blues and dull, earthy browns. The result, in which everything adopts a
grayish tint, creates a sense of motionlessness. To the extent that motion imbues film
with vitality and depth,
76
a lack of motion feels lifeless and flat. As Wassily Kandinsky
has noted, ‘‘in gray there is no possibility of movement,’’ thus making it spiritually
dead and void.
77
Visually, the film’s consistent use of grayish blues and browns
emphasizes the depthless character of the society that Andres inhabits. But, at the
level of sensation, it does something more. Color plays a central role in film,
according to Barbara Kennedy, functioning ‘‘as the main modulator of sensation.’’
78
In the case of The Bothersome Man, the near colorlessness of the mise-en-scène allows
viewers not only to see a society that is soulless and superficial, but also to experience
viscerally what such a society feels like. Jameson himself is well aware of the capacity
of color to create extreme moments of intensity, citing the Joseph Conrad’s literary
use of color in his 1903 novel Typoon to ‘‘virtually fashion a new space and a new
perspective, a new sense of depth.’’
79
While Conrad’s use of color creates a sense of depth and the film’s use of color
abolishes it, the principle is the same in both instances: color evokes a sensory
experience. The feeling of emptiness fostered by the film’s grayish tint also initiates a
critique of the pseudo-individualism inherent in consumer culture. Throughout the
film, the city’s inhabitants exhibit a remarkable conformity in thought and behavior.
Individualism, to the extent that it exists at all, is defined exclusively in terms of
consumer choice. But such choices are not really choices at all*a point strikingly
conveyed by the endless variations of gray, blue, and brown that everyone wears. The
distinctions in style are themselves depthless and insignificant. Andreas’s efforts to
resist the status quo and find some meaning in life beyond consumption provide a
counter-point to the normative behavior of the city’s inhabitants, highlighting for
viewers that mindless consumption produces pseudo-individualism. The stark
contrast in perspectives sensitizes viewers to the fact that*in the contemporary
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moment*individuality, as well as contentment, has been reduced to consumption,
and that consumption functions, in turn, as a mode of social control and constraint,
of keeping the elements of society in their place.
The waning of emotion. We begin this section with a note on terminology. While
Jameson argues that postmodernism is characterized by ‘‘the waning of affect,’’
80
we
concur with critics such as Brian Massumi who suggest that emotion better
characterizes the cultural phenomenon Jameson is describing than affect.
81
Clarifying
the distinction, Shaviro explains, ‘‘affect is primary, nonconscious, . . . unqualified,
and intensive, while emotion is derivative, conscious, qualified, . . . a ‘content’ that
can be attributed to an already-constituted subject.’’
82
Building on Massumi’s
argument, Shaviro contends that ‘‘it is precisely subjective emotion that has waned,
but not affect,’’
83
which, on the contrary, has proliferated enormously in late
capitalism.
84
Conveying postmodernism’s loss of emotion was a central objective of
the director, who commented in press materials that, ‘‘This film is to me a portrait of
a society which has lost something. A place where everything works, but where
emotions are absent, forgotten along the way. . . . What makes ‘The Bothersome Man’
special is how it expresses the idea of a society devoid of emotion.’’
85
Lien cleverly captures and critiques the waning of emotion throughout the film by
juxtaposing a lack of character emotion with a surfeit of audience affect. He
accomplishes this, in part, through the use grotesque imagery. While strolling back to
his office following lunch on the first day of his accounting job, Andreas notices a
man who has apparently jumped out of a third story window, impaling himself on a
spiked fence outside the building. While city officials clad in nondescript, gray
uniforms quickly arrive to clean up the scene, none of the business people who pass
by on the street care about or even notice the horror immediately in front of them.
That the scene is especially gruesome and grotesque*with the victim’s entrails
spilling out onto the pavement*functions rhetorically to highlight the lack of
emotion showed by the many people who walk by the incident disinterested and
emotionless. The grotesque is a common device in satire that utilizes ugly or bizarre
distortions of familiar objects to create perspective by incongruity.
86
In this case,
viewers confront the grotesque body, whose exposed and bloody organs pervert the
norms of the classical, clean, and docile body.
87
The image operates on a visceral
level, evoking discomfort and disgust, which emphasizes the emotionless response of
pedestrians. In contrasting viewers’ intensely affective response with pedestrians’
utter lack of emotional response, the film produces incongruity that highlights for
viewers the uncaring and emotionless character of contemporary society.
A second scene that humorously captures the waning of emotion within
postmodernism occurs when Andreas decides to leave his girlfriend Anne Britt for
another woman, Ingeborg. After moving in with Anne Britt, Andreas quickly realizes
that the only thing she cares about is endlessly redecorating their home. Feeling no
emotional connection to her, he begins an illicit affair with Ingeborg, a woman from
work, with whom, after a few dates, he falls in love. When he tells Anne Britt that
there is another woman, she responds simply by asking, ‘‘Why?’’ When Andreas
explains that he has fallen in love, she again responds with, ‘‘Why?’’ And when he
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then tells her he is going to leave her, she very matter-of-factly reminds him, ‘‘We’re
having guests on Saturday.’’ It is clear from Anne Britt’s responses that she neither
understands love nor why someone would disrupt a dinner party on account of it.
For Anne Britt, like virtually everyone else in the film, relationships are entirely
superficial. But having broken off his relationship with Anne Britt, Andreas plans a
romantic dinner with Ingeborg during which he suggests the two of them move in
together. As they talk, Andreas learns Ingeborg is dating several other men, all of
whom she regards as ‘‘very nice.’’
Crushed by the recognition that Ingeborg’s feelings for him are no stronger than
Anne Britt’s, Andreas goes to the subway station, where viewers witness his suicide
attempt for the second time. Viewers, of course, come to the scene with more
narrative information, if not more spatial context, than they had at the start of the
film. The emotionless and grotesque kissing of the couple in the subway, viewers now
understand, is not an aberration but a defining feature of the society Andreas
inhabits. Not wanting to live in a world where people experience only the most
superficial of emotions, Andreas leaps in front of an oncoming train. In what is easily
the film’s most grotesque scene, Andreas is repeatedly run over by multiple trains.
The trains*no doubt a metaphor for his emotions*do not kill him, however.
Bruised and battered beyond recognition, Andreas is taken home by city officials to
Anne Britt, where she calmly asks him if he would like to go ‘‘to the go-cart track on
Saturday.’’ Andreas has learned, as has the audience, that no matter how much he
may wish to, he cannot simply opt out of the dislocating, depthless, and emotionless
society that surrounds him.
The Utopian Impulse: An Aesthetic of Hope
In the previous section, we argued that The Bothersome Man, through its satirical
distortions of postmodern hyperspace, a new depthlessness, and the waning of
emotion, does not, as Shaviro put it, ‘‘just passively trace or represent, but actively
construct[s] and perform[s], the social relations, flows, and feelings that [it is]
ostensibly ‘about.’’’ Specifically, it generates a series of sensory experiences that
affectively resonate with the material realities of life in the contemporary moment.
While affective resonance is vital to an aesthetic of cognitive mapping, it alone is not
sufficient to fulfill the aesthetic’s dual pedagogical and political aims. In addition to
helping viewers orient themselves in the world of multinational capitalism, cognitive
mapping is also fundamentally about promoting a global class consciousness, or as
Jameson explains it, a ‘‘vision of the future that grips the masses’’
88
and leads to
‘‘collective wish-fulfillment.’’
89
In other words, Jameson regards the utopian impulse
as vital to a socialist politics and believes that, without it, ‘‘one cannot imagine any
fundamental change in our social existence.’’
90
As we illustrate in this section, The
Bothersome Man enacts the utopian impulse at a formal level by creating a desire for
social change, instilling hope for a radical future, and implicitly calling upon the
audience to realize that future.
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To illustrate this process, it is instructive to briefly retrace the development of
Andreas’s own impulses and experiences over the course of the film. When Andreas
first arrives in the city, he is disoriented and confused. Nevertheless, wanting to fit in,
he initially attempts to make sense of his new environment. But it is not long before
Andreas senses that something is wrong and begins to engage in small acts of
resistance. A few days after his arrival, desperate to feel something in the emotional
void of the city, he intentionally cuts off his own index finger in the paper cutter at
work. But the system quickly re-assimilates him. Following the incident, two men in
nondescript gray uniforms arrive to transport Andreas back to his apartment. Once
there, Andreas removes the bandage on his hand only to discover his finger has
mysteriously been reattached. So, again, he tries to conform to the system, going to
his tedious job, engaging his coworkers in meaningless small talk, attending dinner
parties, buying furniture, and dating and moving in with his girlfriend. But unable to
emotionally connect with anyone else, Andreas wanders into the subway and
attempts suicide.
Formally, the audience’s experience is similar to Andreas’s. It begins with a sense of
disorientation and dislocation created by nonlinear editing practices and a lack of
spatial and temporal signifiers. This feeling of disorientation stimulates questions
about this new world: where it is, why the food is tasteless, why there are no children,
etc. As the audience struggles to make sense of these oddities, the film’s colorless
mise-en-scène and grotesque imagery generate discomfort and unease, which, in turn,
fuel a desire for respite. Andreas’s temporary conformity relieves the tension created
by the unsettling images of Andreas’s self mutilation and the man impaled on the
fence. But the comfort afforded by Andreas’s conformity is short lived and the
tension rapidly begins to build again as Andreas recognizes the emptiness of his life.
Andreas’s own attempt to escape this world through suicide initiates*through its
abject gruesomeness*the audience’s desire to flee this world as well. It is at this
moment, when the audience’s appetite for a different world is at its most intense, that
Andreas discovers hope in the form of a small crack in the cellar wall of one of the
city’s building. The crack, which emits soaring and emotive music, signifies the
immanence of capitalism, a literal crack in ‘‘the system,’’ an opening up to radical
possibility.
91
So, for several days, Andreas secretly digs, drills, and dredges the crack, seeking to
unearth an alternate world. As he tunnels, he smells the scent of freshly baked goods
and hears the sound of birds chirping, the tide of the ocean, the laughter of a baby,
and children playing*each of which stirs desire for a better world. That the digging
takes several days suggests, at least metaphorically, that the world on the other side is,
like Bloch’s notion of hope, buried deep in the not-yet-conscious. But the time and
effort that Andreas expends on trying to get to this alternate world only formally
increases the audience’s desire to get there, too. When the camera finally cuts to the
other side of the wall, it reveals a quaint, brightly colored kitchen with an abundance
of fresh vegetables and a recently baked cake. Natural light streams into the kitchen
from a doorway that opens to an idyllic setting. It is the image of a simpler life, where
the home (rather than industrial city, imperial nation, or multinational corporation)
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serves as the organizing spatial figure. Just as Andreas pokes his hand through the
wall into the kitchen, where he manages to grab a handful of fresh cake, he is tugged
from the tunnel by city officials, who take him in front of the city’s caretakers. The
caretakers conclude that Andreas cannot be ‘‘helped’’ because he refuses to accept the
status quo*to be content with a shallow consumerist lifestyle. So, the city officials
send Andreas back to the gas station in the desert, where he is forced into the luggage
compartment of the bus and driven away.
In the final scene, as well as throughout, The Bothersome Man critiques an
individualist ideology. Though Andreas attempts at various points to resist the
system, he is ultimately unsuccessful in his attempt to live a more meaningful life (or
to bring about social change) because he is acting alone. Through the imagery of the
kitchen buried deep on the other side of the cellar wall, the film underscores that
while an alternative, less commercial (if, admittedly, romanticized) world/existence is
possible, such a world cannot be realized by one person acting exclusively in their
own self-interest. In the end, the postmodern consumer society that Andreas and, by
extension, the film’s viewers inhabit, yet detest, remains intact and unaltered. This
suggests that lasting, progressive social change requires a sustained, collective effort.
Though the film depicts no such effort, the lack of narrative resolution works
formally to create an appetite for it. Unlike films that impose strong narrative closure,
generating a sense of psychological resolution regarding the political concerns they
raise, films that feature open-ended narratives prompt self-reflection and enjoin the
audience to exercise collective action in the world outside of the theater. As Robert
Kolker has succinctly observed of narrative film, ‘‘Openness demands activity.’’
92
The Bothersome Man calls, at least formally, then, for a socialist politics. It is able to
do this because of its unique generic form, entropic satire. Entropic satire shares much
in common with its modernist forbearer, traditional or normative satire. It ridicules
personal vices or social conditions with the intent of correcting or improving
deficiencies. Its primary rhetorical mode is planned incongruity, which it creates by
holding up a distorted, often exaggerated or intensified, image of society to itself. But
entropic satire differs from normative satire in two crucial ways that make it a
particularly apposite form for realizing the dual impulses of cognitive mapping; it is
unusually vivid and decidedly non-prescriptive. These two traits are closely related to
one another and arise from the fact that, unlike normative satire, entropic satire
‘‘concentrates all its energies on the purely deictic gesture of identification and
demonstration.’’
93
In the case of normative satire, the deictic phase, which identifies the
wrong to be corrected, is only the first of three moments essential to its form; it also
includes the apodeictic, which lays out the necessary correction, and the apotropaic,
which wards off potential threats to the corrected order.
94
Since entropic satire is
exclusively ‘‘descriptive, observational, [and] revelatory,’’ however, it can create a
richer, more vivid sense of its target, which lends itself to cognitive mapping’s orienting
impulse. Moreover, since entropic satire is ‘‘wholly lacking in prescriptive authority,’’
95
its narrative is necessarily left ‘‘provocatively and disturbingly open,’’
96
which is well-
suited to cognitive mapping’s utopian impulse.
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The Bothersome Man, as entropic satire, shifts the responsibility for both imagining
and realizing a radical future*a corrective to the system it skillfully critiques*from
the text to the audience. Whereas normative satire would offer up its alternative
future in full detail, entropic satire offers only the barest of hints*an imaginative
spark. In a 95 minute film, the sole image of an alternative world, the kitchen, lasts a
mere 34 seconds. It does not explicitly show any persons or social relations; it has
almost nothing to say about the economic system, though it does privilege a mode of
production, for food at least, that contrasts starkly with standardization, commerci-
alism, and mass consumption. Taken as a whole, the film generates hope for the ‘‘not-
yet-come-into-being’’ not by depicting a perfect future but by vividly and viscerally
illuminating the shortcomings of a flawed present. Like Bloch’s notion of concrete
utopia, the revolutionary potential of the utopian impulse resides not in an impatient
leap into an ideal beyond, but in an exploration of ‘‘the present situation to discover
real possibilities for radical change.’’
97
Such is the rhetorical work of The Bothersome
Man*a film that affectively maps the social totality, satirically critiques that totality
through planned incongruity, and appeals to collective action via its open-ended
form.
III. Toward the Future
A shift in the way one sees and perceives produces a shift in the way one experiences
and lives in the world. This process also works the other way: a shift in the way one
experiences the world produces a new way of seeing and understanding it.
*Beverley Best98
In 2010, reflecting on Jameson’s Valences of the Dialectic, one of rhetoric’s leading
Marxist scholars, the late James Aune, queried, ‘‘Anyone else reading Jameson out
there these days?’’
99
Aune’s question is suggestively posed, subtly implying that while
Jameson’s work may seem passé, it has ongoing relevance and utility for rhetorical
scholars. Indeed, rhetoricians would do well to honor Aune’s own scholarship
through a renewed engagement with Jameson’s work. As we hope our analysis of The
Bothersome Man has illustrated, not only does Jameson’s work have ongoing
significance for rhetorical scholars, but also rhetorical scholars have significant
contributions to make to Jameson’s work. Indeed, such a dialectic is one we suspect
Jameson would endorse. So, in that spirit, we close by reflecting specifically on what
can be gained from a renewed interest in cognitive mapping and by suggesting a few
of the ways that rhetorical scholars are well poised to enrich such a renewal. We begin
by briefly considering the continuing importance of cognitive mapping.
When Jameson introduced the concept of cognitive mapping, it was with the
specific intent of trying to find a new political art that could render knowable the
global social totality. For years, Jameson pursued this project, struggling to locate an
aesthetic form that fulfilled this challenge. Then, in the late 80s, cognitive mapping
went underground, all but disappearing from Jameson’s work during the decade of
the 1990s. Aside from ‘‘a brief but crucial appearance in The Geopolitical Aesthetic . . .
in 1992,’’ recounts Buchanan, ‘‘the term is rarely if ever used by Jameson except in
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interviews, and then only at the insistence of interviewers, for the next decade or so,
until suddenly it reappears in his work on ‘globalization.’’’
100
The reappearance of
cognitive mapping in Jameson’s scholarship on globalization is hardly coincidental
given that processes of globalization had intensified many of the features of
postmodernism he had so adroitly charted in the 1980s. Moreover, since art forms
endlessly evolve to assist human beings in confronting the demands of their age, an
intensification of the logic animating the de-centered global network of multinational
capitalism all but ensured the emergence of new art forms that counter and contest, if
only unconsciously, this same logic.
This essay examined a particular instance of one such form, entropic satire, but
there are likely others, and cognitive mapping, or at least some modified version of it,
remains among the most sophisticated constructs we have for understanding the
revolutionary impulse that resides in art. It is, concludes Jameson, ‘‘an integral part of
any socialist political project.’’
101
The concept of cognitive mapping has, like the
social totality it strives to grasp and the various aesthetic forms it engenders, mutated
and evolved over time. In fact, Buchanan regards cognitive mapping itself as a
reworking and updating of Freud’s notion of figurability,
102
which Jameson employed
regularly in his dialectical criticism of modernist film and literature before developing
cognitive mapping.
103
But whatever its lineage, cognitive mapping must adapt to the
changing conditions, contexts, and cultural forms of late capitalism. In this respect,
scholars of rhetoric have a valuable role to play in its future. In the limited space
remaining, we draw upon our analysis of The Bothersome Man to sketch three
interventions rhetoricians can and are making that intersect with cognitive mapping.
The first intervention involves the affective turn which, as our essay suggests,
reanimates the project of cognitive mapping by providing a mechanism for under-
standing how texts create a meaningful sense of something that resists, eludes, or
escapes representation. In the past few years, the humanities have developed a
considerable interest in the notion of affect. And while fields such as philosophy,
sociology, political science, and anthropology, among many others, all have interesting
things to say about this concept, rhetoricians are uniquely equipped to examine and
evaluate the suasory character of affect, that is, how it touches and moves bodies.
Studying affect as suasory contributes to our understanding of the ways that rhetoric
works on the body, i.e., that the body is charged and mobilized for political ends. A
number of rhetorical scholars have attended to the affective dimensions of film, for
instance, exploring its capacity to, paraphrasing Gunn, stimulate the bodies of
spectators and deliver them to suggested emotions,
104
which may, in turn, be aimed at
altering beliefs, values, and actions. The Bothersome Man points to precisely such a
relation, one in which a series of affective intensities are given structure within a larger
aesthetic form, allowing them to function politically. This suggests the need for
rhetorical scholars to continue to investigate the ways that aesthetic forms channel and
organize affective energies.
A second and closely related intervention concerns the disciplinary debates around
materialist rhetoric and rhetoric’s materiality. In rhetorical studies, the matter of
materialism is often used, according to Carole Blair, in multiple senses, including ‘‘a
The Bothersome Man 275
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traditional one that insists upon considering the material conditions [and conse-
quences] of discourse . . . [and] another that understands rhetoric as itself material.’’105
While these two perspectives*the first constituting a classical Marxist view and the
second reflecting a phenomenological view*are often treated as unrelated in theory
and practice,
106
our reading of The Bothersome Man suggests that these two perspectives
can complement one another. Cognitive mapping’s orienting impulse, its desire to map
the social totality, is grounded in the Marxist philosophy underlying materialist
rhetoric: the view that ‘‘The mode of production of material life conditions the general
process of social, political and intellectual life.’’
107
Meanwhile, cognitive mapping’s
concern with affect as a means of facilitating the orienting impulse is rooted in the idea
of rhetoric’s materiality: the notion that rhetoric is, in its essential thingness, a concrete,
observable phenomenon that creates sensations and intensities. In our analysis of The
Bothersome Man, these two perspectives mutually inform one another, thereby,
demonstrating the utility of rhetoric’s materiality to Marxist rhetoricians (by providing
a set of critical tools for assessing the material consequentiality suggested by a
materialist rhetoric) and politicizing the work on rhetoric’s materiality (by highlighting
how the affective dimensions of art can inspire socialist struggle).
The third and final intervention entails opening up spaces for thoughts of the
future. To this point in the essay, our analysis of The Bothersome Man has been
generally laudatory. But before closing, we feel compelled to pause and reflect further
on the kitchen scene, which despite its brevity poses some serious difficulties for a
socialist politics. As a radical alternative to the world Andreas inhabits, the image of
the kitchen could just as easily be read as an image of the past as an image of the
future, and a rather nostalgic, implicitly sexist image of the past at that. The film
would, in our judgment, be more compelling politically if it did not explicitly attempt
to depict an alternative world and relied, instead, on its critique of the present and its
open narrative form to awaken the desire for a radical future. That the film succumbs
to an image of an idealized past that never was in attempting to imagine an
alternative world is not all that surprising when one remembers that the film is a
product of the very system it critiques. And this limitation is why we think rhetorical
analysis of art forms that function as cognitive maps is so crucial. If art forms could
do the work of radical politics all on their own, then there would be no need for
critics. Recognizing that critics are subject to the same systemic limitations as art,
they nevertheless aid us, in their better moments, in realizing the radical potential in
art. In this vein, we would like to close by briefly reflecting on the film’s final shot.
As the bus with Andreas tucked in the luggage compartment slowly departs the gas
station in the desert, the camera captures the old, creaky sign out front. It is the first,
last, and only readable signage in the entire film. Its message: ‘‘Standard.’’ The sign
refers to Standard Oil, which was an oil producing, refining, distributing, and
marketing company founded by John D. Rockefeller and his associates in Ohio in
1870. But Standard Oil was not just any oil company; it was a precursor to Exxon
Mobil, which is today ‘‘the largest publicly traded petroleum and petrochemical
enterprise in the world.’’
108
Prior to the emergence of Exxon Mobil though, the
Standard Oil Company was one of the world’s first and largest multinational
276 B. L. Ott and G. Lazić
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corporations. Its name, ‘‘Standard,’’ was selected by its founders to signify ‘‘uniform
quality.’’
109
There is perhaps no better sign of late capitalism than that of a
multinational corporation whose name promises consumer contentment through
uniformity. As the sole marker of our world, this sign poignantly captures what Jean
Baudrillard once called, ‘‘The desert of the real itself,’’ and, thus, the ongoing need for
cognitive mapping.
110
Notes
[1] Fredric Jameson, ‘‘Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,’’ Social Text 1 (1979): 147�48.
[2] Fredric Jameson, ‘‘Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,’’ New Left
Review 146 (1984): 53�92. This essay significantly revises and expands upon ideas Jameson
had published the previous year under the title ‘‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society,’’ in
The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (New York: The New
Press), 111�25. Originally published by Bay Press in 1983.
[3] Borrowing from the economist Ernest Mandel and his monumental work, Late Capitalism,
Jameson identifies three distinct stages of capitalist development: (1) market capitalism,
which refers to the growth of industrial capital in national markets during the eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries; (2) monopoly capitalism, which entails the imperialist
development of world markets organized around nation-states, but depending upon the
exploitative asymmetry of the colonizing nations and the colonized*who provided raw
materials and cheap labor*in the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries; and (3)
multinational or consumer capitalism, which describes the exponential growth of a global
marketplace of images and information that concentrates power in the hands of
multinational corporations rather than nation-states in the present moment. Jameson,
‘‘Postmodernism’’ 78.
[4] Jameson understands postmodernism in primarily historical, rather than stylistic, terms
(‘‘Postmodernism’’ 56, 85). It is ‘‘a periodizing concept whose function is to correlate the
emergence of new formal features in culture with the emergence of a new type of social life
and a new economic order’’ (‘‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’’ 129).
[5] As Mike Featherstone explains, ‘‘postmodernism has dropped out of sight and is no longer
a fashionable term, indeed for many it is decidedly demodé.’’ Mike Featherstone, Consumer
Culture and Postmodernism, 2nd ed. (Los Angeles: Sage, 2007), xiv.
[6] Sean Homer, ‘‘Fredric Jameson,’’ in Postmodernism: The Key Figures, ed. Hans Bertens and
Joseph Natoli (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2002), 185.
[7] Jameson, ‘‘Postmodernism’’ 92.
[8] Jameson, ‘‘Postmodernism’’ 92. Cognitive mapping is a fundamentally rhetorical concept;
as pedagogy, it urges us to see the world one way rather than in others and, as politics, it
urges to act one way rather than in others. It also shares rhetoric’s central concern with
place and, indeed, the classical rhetorical concept of topos derives from the Greek tópow,
meaning ‘‘place.’’
[9] Ian Buchanan, Fredric Jameson: Live Theory (New York: Continuum International
Publishing Group, 2006), 73. Stressing a similar point, Kenneth Burke writes, ‘‘The
conventional forms demanded by one age are as resolutely shunned by another.’’ Kenneth
Burke, Counter-Statement (Los Altos, CA: Hermes Publications, 1931), 139.
[10] Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator (New York: Verso, 2009), 72.
[11] Entropic satire is a subspecies of satire that has proliferated ‘‘exponentially’’ in
postmodernism. It is a ‘‘relatively recent phenomenon’’ or form of humor that is rooted
in the loss of certainty; its ‘‘primary characteristic is its own awareness of its status as
essentially decentered discourse,’’ which is to say, discourse lacking in prescriptive authority.
The Bothersome Man 277
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Consequently, entropic satire shifts the burden of social corrective from narrator to
audience. Patrick O’Neill, The Comedy of Entropy: Humour/Narrative/Reading (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1990), xiii, 143.
[12] David Mattin, ‘‘The Bothersome Man (Den Brysomme Mannen),’’ BBCI*Films, May 22, 2007,
http://www.bbc.co.uk/films/2007/05/21/the_bothersome_man_2007_review.shtml.
[13] Rustom Bharucha, ‘‘Contextualizing Utopias: Reflections on Remapping the Present,’’
Theater 26 (1995): 36�37.
[14] Tanner Mirrlees, ‘‘Cognitive Mapping or, the Resistant Element in the Work of Fredric
Jameson: A Response to Jason Berger,’’ Cultural Logic: An Electronic Journal of Marxist
Theory and Practice 8 (2005), http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/mirrlees.html.
[15] Colin MacCabe, ‘‘Preface,’’ in Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space
in the World System (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), xiv.
[16] For an excellent overview of this concept, see Robert M. Kitchin, ‘‘Cognitive Maps: What
Are They and Why Study Them?’’ Journal of Environmental Psychology 14 (1994): 1�19.
[17] Fredric Jameson, ‘‘Cognitive Mapping,’’ in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed.
Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 353.
[18] Jameson, ‘‘Postmodernism’’ 83. For an overview of this problem, see Tyson E. Lewis, ‘‘Too
Little, Too Late: Reflections on Fredric Jameson’s Pedagogy of Form,’’ Rethinking Marxism
21 (2009): 444.
[19] Elaborating on the consequences of this context, David Harvey explains, ‘‘We can no longer
conceive of the individual as alienated in the classical Marxist sense, because to be alienated
presupposes a coherent rather than a fragmented sense of the self from which to be
alienated . . . . If, as Marx insisted, it takes the alienated individual to pursue the
Enlightenment project with a tenacity and coherence sufficient to bring us to some better
future, then the loss of the alienated subject would seen [sic] to preclude the conscious
construction of alternative social futures.’’ David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity:
An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1989), 53�54.
[20] Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1991), 412.
[21] According to Jameson, ‘‘the three historical stages of capital have each generated a type of
space unique to it.’’ Jameson, ‘‘Cognitive Mapping’’ 348.
[22] Jameson’s grid is, in many respects, homologous with Marshall McLuhan’s notion of visual
space. For McLuhan, visual space is linear, rational, continuous, homogenous, and static.
Marshall McLuhan and Eric McLuhan, Laws of Media: The New Science (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1988), 33.
[23] Jameson, ‘‘Cognitive Mapping’’ 349. As Mark Taylor has elaborated, ‘‘Grids graph Cartesian
space, which is supposed to be completely rational, maximally efficient, and perfectly
transparent.’’ Mark C. Taylor, The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 27�28.
[24] Douglas Kellner, Media Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity and Politics Between the Modern
and the Postmodern (New York: Routledge, 1995), 232. George Hartley, The Abyss of
Representation: Marxism and the Postmodern Sublime (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2003), 138.
[25] In art and literature, ‘‘The term ‘realism’ very often implies that the artist . . . has tried to
include a wider and more representative coverage of social life in his or her work, and in
particular that he or she has extended the coverage of the work to include ‘low life’ and the
experiences of those deemed unworthy of artistic portrayal by other artists.’’ Jeremy
Hawthorn, Studying the Novel: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (London: Hodder/Arnold, 1992), 49.
[26] ‘‘In its most strict meaning ‘modernism’ refers to a many-sided conception of art that
originated in the avant-garde movements . . . The basic features of modernism can be
circumscribed as follows: an esthetical self-awareness and a stylistic purism or formalism;
278 B. L. Ott and G. Lazić
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http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/mirrlees.html
the defense of the autonomy of art and the principle of ‘l’art pour l’art’ [art for art’s
sake]; . . . simultaneity and montage; a rejection of ‘realism’ in favor of the paradoxical,
ambiguous and uncertain nature of subjective reality; emphasis on the alienation and the
demise of the integrated personality.’’ Antoon van den Braembussche, Thinking Art: An
Introduction to Philosophy of Art, trans. Michael Krassilovsky, Rutger H. Cornets de Groot,
and Dick Van Spronsen (Springer, 2009), 283.
[27] Jameson, ‘‘Cognitive Mapping’’ 349.
[28] Jameson, ‘‘Cognitive Mapping’’ 349.
[29] Hartley, Abyss 139.
[30] Kellner, Media Culture 232.
[31] Hartley, Abyss 139.
[32] Jameson, ‘‘Postmodernism’’ 87.
[33] Sue-Ellen Case, The Domain-Matrix: Performing Lesbian at the End of Print Culture
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 43. Jameson’s hyperspace is roughly
analogous to McLuhan’s notion of acoustic space. For more on the homology between
Jameson’s hyperspace and McLuhan’s acoustic space, see Steven Shaviro, Connected, or
What It Means to Live in the Network Society (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2003), 188�89.
[34] Mirrlees, ‘‘Cultural Mapping.’’
[35] Buchanan, Live Theory 109.
[36] Jameson, ‘‘Postmodernism’’ 89. ‘‘‘To teach, to move, to delight’: of these traditional
formulations of the uses of the work of art, the first has virtually been eclipsed from
contemporary criticism and theory. Yet the pedagogical function of a work of art seems in
various forms to have been an inescapable parameter of any conceivable Marxist aesthetic.’’
Jameson, ‘‘Cognitive Mapping’’ 347.
[37] Though Jameson’s conception of the Real as ‘‘simply history itself ’’ or the social totality is
based upon his reading of Jacques Lacan, it does not align precisely with Lacan’s
conception. For more on Jameson’s view of the Real, see Fredric Jameson, The Ideologies of
Theory, Essays 1971�1986, vol. 1 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 104
and Adam Roberts, Fredric Jameson (New York: Routledge, 2000), 80. For more on Lacan’s
view of the Real, see Christian Lundberg, Lacan in Public: Psychoanalysis and the Science of
Rhetoric (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012), 25�33.
[38] Fredric Jameson, ‘‘Cognitive Mapping’’ 355.
[39] While Jameson recognizes that the Real is unrepresentable, he does not think the Real is
unknowable. Jameson, ‘‘Postmodernism’’ 91. Some scholars are critical of the distinction between
representing and knowing, arguing that ‘‘Jameson’s insistence on cognitive mapping seems to be
. . . an attempt . . . to submit the Real to some new symbolic system.’’ Hartley, Abyss 233.
[40] Robert T. Tally, Jr., ‘‘Jameson’s Project of Cognitive Mapping: A Critical Engagement,’’ in
Social Cartography: Mapping Ways of Seeing Social and Educational Change, ed. Rolland G.
Paulston (New York: Garland Publishing, 1996), 407.
[41] On this point, see Steven Shaviro, Post-Cinematic Affect (Washington, DC: 0-Books, 2010), 5.
[42] Aesthetic activity is, according to Debra Hawhee, ‘‘always and everywhere rhetorical*that
is, productive of effects*and crucially, these effects are produced on and through the live
and lively bodies in the audience.’’ Debra Hawhee, Moving Bodies: Kenneth Burke at the
Edges of Language (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009), 13.
[43] Fredric Jameson, ‘‘Class and Allegory in Contemporary Mass Culture: Dog Day Afternoon as
a Political Film,’’ College English 38 (1977): 845.
[44] Jean-François Lyotard, Discourse, Figure, trans. Anthony Hudek and Mary Lydon
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).
[45] Brian L. Ott, ‘‘The Visceral Politics of V for Vendetta: On Political Affect in Cinema,’’
Critical Studies in Media Communication 27 (2010): 42.
The Bothersome Man 279
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[46] Best argues that because ‘‘sensation is social, or historical’’ then ‘‘affect is a social and
collective event.’’ Beverley Best, ‘‘‘Fredric Jameson Notwithstanding’: The Dialectic of
Affect,’’ Rethinking Marxism 23 (2011): 72, 80.
[47] Shaviro, Post-Cinematic 2.
[48] Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic 114.
[49] See Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science
Fictions (New York: Verso, 2005), xiii and Fredric Jameson, ‘‘The Politics of Utopia,’’ New
Left Review 25 (2004): 36. Though Jameson never explicitly identifies the utopian impulse
as a dimension of cognitive mapping, we are compelled that the two cannot be understood
independent of one another. ‘‘These two concepts,’’ argues Buchanan, ‘‘should not be seen
as . . . separate enterprises; they are at the core of Jameson’s thought and practice as a critic.’’
Buchanan, Live Theory 106. Similarly, Best explains, ‘‘The goal of the exercise [cognitive
mapping] . . . is common to all utopian thought in the Marxian tradition.’’ Beverley Best,
‘‘The Problem of Utopia: Capitalism, Depression, and Representation,’’ Canadian Journal of
Communication 35 (2010): 498.
[50] Robert T. Tally, Jr., ‘‘Radical Alternatives: The Persistence of Utopia in the Postmodern,’’ in
New Essays on the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, ed. Alfred J. Drake (Newcastle:
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), 115.
[51] Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future 23.
[52] Marlana Portolano, ‘‘The Rhetorical Function of Utopia: An Exploration of the Concept of
Utopia in Rhetorical Theory,’’ Utopian Studies 23 (2012): 115.
[53] Burke variously defines form as ‘‘the psychology of the audience’’ and ‘‘an arousing and
fulfillment of desires,’’ adding that ‘‘A form is a way of experiencing; and such a form is
made available in art when, by the use of specific subject-matter, it enables us to experience
in this way.’’ Burke, Counter-Statement 31, 124, 143.
[54] Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vol. 1, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul
Knight (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995). See also Douglas Kellner and Harry
O’Hara, ‘‘Utopia and Marxism in Ernst Bloch,’’ New German Critique 9 (1976): 24 and
Krishan Kumar, ‘‘The Ends of Utopia,’’ New Literary History 41 (2010): 562.
[55] Buchanan, Live Theory 115.
[56] Roberts, Fredric Jameson 88. Elaborating on this view, Jameson writes, ‘‘Utopia is not what
can be positively imagined and proposed, but rather what is not imaginable and not
conceivable. Utopia, I argue, is not a representation but an operation calculated to disclose
the limits of our own imagination of the future, the lines beyond which we do not seem able
to go in imagining changes in our own society and world.’’ Fredric Jameson, Valences of the
Dialectic (New York: Verso, 2009), 413.
[57] Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic 3.
[58] Fredric Jameson, ‘‘Progress versus Utopia; Or, Can We Imagine the Future?’’ Science Fiction
Studies 9 (1982): 151.
[59] Jameson, ‘‘Class and Allegory’’ 845�46.
[60] Haley Roe, ‘‘The Bothersome Man,’’ digyorkshire.com, November 18, 2010, http://www.
digyorkshire.com/HighlightDetails.aspx?Article�1008&AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport�
1. James Bowman, ‘‘Lost Between Heaven and Hell,’’ The New York Sun, August 24, 2007,
http://www.nysun.com/arts/lost-between-heaven-and-hell/61224/. Annika Pham, ‘‘The
Dark Side of ‘the Ikea Life’: Interview with Jens Lien,’’ Cineurope, March 14, 2007, http://
cineuropa.org/ffocusinterview.aspx?lang�en&treeID�1352&documentID�74956.
[61] Leonard Feinberg, Introduction to Satire (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1967), 226.
[62] Pham, ‘‘The Dark Side.’’
[63] Noel Murray, ‘‘The Bothersome Man,’’ A.V. Club, August 24, 2007, http://www.avclub.com/
articles/the-bothersome-man,3331/.
[64] Feinberg, Introduction to Satire 86, 105.
280 B. L. Ott and G. Lazić
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[65] Burke described ‘‘perspective by incongruity’’ as a ‘‘methodical misnaming.’’ Kenneth
Burke, Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose, 3rd ed. (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1984), 69.
[66] Our use of the word genre here corresponds to what Burke calls ‘‘conventional form.’’
Burke, Counter-Statement, 139. In this view, genres are based not on shared substantive and
stylistic features, but on what they do for audiences, on the action they perform in response
to recurring situations. See Carolyn R. Miller, ‘‘Genre as Social Action,’’ Quarterly Journal of
Speech 70 (1984): 151.
[67] This phrase is borrowed from Shaviro, Post-Cinematic 5.
[68] Homer, Frederic Jameson 182.
[69] ‘‘Normally the first shot of a film is an establishing shot, situating the audience in a defined
space that the characters inhabit.’’ Robert Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Stone,
Kubrick, Scorsese, Spielberg, Altman, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 32.
[70] Jameson, ‘‘Postmodernism’’ 65�66.
[71] Brian L. Ott and Diane M. Keeling, ‘‘Cinema and Choric Connection: Lost in Translation as
Sensual Experience,’’ Quarterly Journal of Speech 97 (2011): 369�71.
[72] Jonathan McCalmont, ‘‘Review: The Bothersome Man (2006),’’ Ruthless Culture, April 14,
2009, http://ruthlessculture.com/2009/04/14/review-the-bothersome-man-2006/.
[73] Simon Malpas, The Postmodern (New York: Routledge, 2005), 120.
[74] ‘‘Films: The Bothersome Man,’’ AFFR, http://affr.nl/films/the_bothersome_man.html.
[75] See Bowman, ‘‘Lost Between’’; Leslie Felperin, ‘‘The Bothersome Man,’’ Variety 403, no. 2
(2006), 39; Jen Johans, ‘‘The Bothersome Man,’’ Film Intuition, May 7, 2007, http://reviews.
filmintuition.com/2007/05/bothersome-man.html; Mattin, ‘‘Bothersome Man’’; and Roe,
‘‘The Bothersome.’’
[76] Christian Metz, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema, trans. Michael Taylor (University
of Chicago Press, 1974), 12.
[77] Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, trans. M. T. H. Sadler (New York: Dover
Publications, Inc., 1977), 37.
[78] Barbara M. Kennedy, Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2002), 115.
[79] Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1981), 231. Jameson makes a similar argument about Vincent Van
Gogh’s painting, ‘‘A Pair of Boots,’’ in which he interprets ‘‘the most glorious materializa-
tion of pure color in oil paint . . . as a Utopian gesture, an act of compensation which ends
up producing a whole new realm of the senses.’’ Jameson, Postmodernism 7.
[80] Jameson, ‘‘Postmodernism’’ 61.
[81] Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2002), 27�28.
[82] Shaviro, Post-Cinematic 3.
[83] Shaviro, Post-Cinematic 4.
[84] The increase in affect in late capitalism may be related to the rise of electronic media, which
privilege a kind of direct sensory involvement. See Joshua Meyrowitz, ‘‘Medium Theory,’’ in
Communication Theory Today, ed. David Crowley and David Mitchell (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1994), 58.
[85] Rebeca Conget (distributor), The Bothersome Man Press Kit (New York: Film Movement,
2006), http://www.filmmovement.com/downloads/press/BOTHERSOME_MAN_FM_Press_
Kit_revised .
[86] See Feinberg, Introduction to Satire 63�72 and Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four
Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), 224.
The Bothersome Man 281
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http://affr.nl/films/the_bothersome_man.html
http://reviews.filmintuition.com/2007/05/bothersome-man.html
http://reviews.filmintuition.com/2007/05/bothersome-man.html
http://www.filmmovement.com/downloads/press/BOTHERSOME_MAN_FM_Press_Kit_revised
http://www.filmmovement.com/downloads/press/BOTHERSOME_MAN_FM_Press_Kit_revised
[87] For an extended discussion of the distinction between the grotesque and classical body, see
Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press), 1986.
[88] Jameson, ‘‘Cognitive Mapping’’ 355.
[89] Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future xiii.
[90] Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future xii.
[91] ‘‘Marx demonstrated . . . that what is always immanent to capital is the structural possibility
of its transformation*a potential way out of capital. Capital has built into it the possibility
of turning into something else.’’ Best, ‘‘‘Fredric Jameson Notwithstanding’’’ 67.
[92] Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness 142.
[93] O’Neill, The Comedy of Entropy 143.
[94] O’Neill, The Comedy of Entropy 142.
[95] O’Neill, The Comedy of Entropy 142.
[96] O’Neill, The Comedy of Entropy 143.
[97] Kellner and O’Hara, ‘‘Utopia and Marxism’’ 30.
[98] Best, ‘‘‘Fredric Jameson Notwithstanding’’’ 81.
[99] Jim Aune, ‘‘Figuring with Fredric Jameson,’’ The Blogora (blog), Rhetoric Society of
America, April 17, 2010, http://rsa.cwrl.utexas.edu/node/3639.
[100] Buchanan, Live Theory 107.
[101] Jameson, Postmodernism 416.
[102] Buchanan, Live Theory 108�9.
[103] See, for instance, Jameson, ‘‘Class and Allegory.’’
[104] For more on the aligning of form with affect and genre with emotion, see Joshua Gunn,
‘‘Maranatha,’’ Quarterly Journal of Speech 98 (2012): 365. See also Ott, ‘‘The Visceral’’; Ott
and Keeling, ‘‘Cinema’’; and Christian Lundberg, ‘‘Enjoying God’s Death: The Passion of
the Christ and the Practices of an Evangelical Public,’’ The Quarterly Journal of Speech 95
(2009): 387�411.
[105] Carole Blair, ‘‘Reflections on Criticism and Bodies: Parables from Public Places,’’ Western
Journal of Communication 65 (2001): 288.
[106] On the first view and its various iterations, consult Michael Calvin McGee, ‘‘A Materialist’s
Conception of Rhetoric,’’ in Explorations in Rhetoric: Studies in Honor of Douglas Ehninger,
ed. Ray E. McKerrow (Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman and Company, 1982), 23�48; Dana L.
Cloud, ‘‘The Materiality of Discourse: A Challenge to Critical Rhetoric,’’ Western Journal of
Communication 58 (1994): 141�63; and Ronald Walter Greene, ‘‘Another Materialist
Rhetoric,’’ Critical Studies in Mass Communication 15 (1998): 21�41. On the latter view, see
Blair, ‘‘Reflections’’; Ott and Keeling, ‘‘Cinema’’; and Greg Dickinson, ‘‘Joe’s Rhetoric:
Finding Authenticity at Starbucks,’’ Rhetoric Society Quarterly 32 (2002): 5�27.
[107] Karl Marx, Selected Writings, ed. by Lawrence H. Simon (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett
Publishing Company, 1994), 211.
[108] ‘‘Our History,’’ exxonmobil.com, June 24, 2011, http://www.exxonmobil.com/Corporate/
history/about_who_history_alt.aspx.
[109] ‘‘Our History’’
[110] Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1994), 1.
282 B. L. Ott and G. Lazić
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http://rsa.cwrl.utexas.edu/node/3639
http://www.exxonmobil.com/Corporate/history/about_who_history_alt.aspx
http://www.exxonmobil.com/Corporate/history/about_who_history_alt.aspx
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The Visceral Politics of V for Vendetta:
On Political Affect in Cinema
Brian L. Ott
Published online: 03 Mar 2010.
To cite this article: Brian L. Ott (2010) The Visceral Politics of V for Vendetta: On Political Affect in
Cinema, Critical Studies in Media Communication, 27:1, 39-54, DOI: 10.1080/15295030903554359
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15295030903554359
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The Visceral Politics of V for Vendetta:
On Political Affect in Cinema
Brian L. Ott
This essay concerns the role of political affect in cinema. As a case study, I analyze the
2006 film V for Vendetta as cinematic rhetoric. Adopting a multi-modal approach that
focuses on the interplay of discourse, figure, and ground, I contend that the film mobilizes
viewers at a visceral level to reject a politics of apathy in favor of a politics of democratic
struggle. Based on the analysis, I draw conclusions related to the evaluation of cinematic
rhetoric, the political import of mass art, and the character and role of affect in politics.
This manuscript is included in a special issue titled, Space, Matter, Mediation, and
the Prospects of Democracy, Vol. 27, No. 1, 2010.
Keywords: Visceral; Political affect; Cinematic rhetoric; Embodied experience; V for
Vendetta
What is important in a text is not its meaning, what it is trying to say, but what it
does and causes to be done. What it does: the affective change it contains and
communicates; what it causes to be done: the transformation of these potential
energies into something else . . . political actions. Jean-François Lyotard1
On March 17, 2006, the much hyped film, V for Vendetta, opened in theaters
worldwide. Although the film, which is based on Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s
graphic novel of the same name, represented James McTeigue’s directorial debut, it
was far from a novice enterprise. The Wachowski Brothers*whose résumé included
writing and directing The Matrix (1999), which garnered academy awards for best
sound, film editing, sound effects editing, and visual effects*co-wrote the screenplay
for Vendetta and, along with Joel Silver of Die Hard (1988, 1990) and Lethal Weapon
(1987, 1989, 1992, 1998) fame, served as the film’s producers. With such an
impressive pedigree, and as the Wachowski Brothers’ first major undertaking since
Brian L. Ott is visiting Professor of Rhetorical and Media Studies at the University of Colorado Denver.
An earlier version of this manuscript was presented as the Keynote Address at the 2009 Undergraduate
Communication Research Conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The author thanks Greg Dickinson, Donovan
Conley, Bernard Armada, Carl Burgchardt, Robert Mack, Barbara Biesecker, and Ronald Greene for their helpful
conversations and comments on earlier drafts. Correspondence to: Department of Communication, University
of Colorado Denver, Denver, CO, USA. Email: Brian.Ott@ucdenver.edu
ISSN 1529-5036 (print)/ISSN 1479-5809 (online) # 2010 National Communication Association
DOI: 10.1080/15295030903554359
Critical Studies in Media Communication
Vol. 27, No. 1, March 2010, pp. 39�54
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completing their epic Matrix trilogy in 2003, Vendetta was highly anticipated by
critics and the public alike. Despite its impressive showing at the box-office, however,
critical response to Vendetta was decidedly split.
On one side of the aisle were critics who praised the film as stirring, calling it ‘‘bold
and thought-provoking’’ (Puig, 2006, p. 6) and ‘‘compelling, rousing and at times
strangely moving’’ (Kenny, 2006, p. 1). On the other side of the aisle were critics who
panned it as shallow, labeling it ‘‘a piece of pulp claptrap’’ (Hunter, 2006, p. 4) and ‘‘a
dunderheaded pop fantasia that celebrates terrorism and destruction’’ (Denby, 2006,
p. 1). The intensely polarized response to the film was hardly surprising given its
explicit political themes and inspiration. Indeed, one critic accurately predicted such
a response in his own review of the film:
It’s quite likely that Vendetta will split the opinions in some parts of the country.
The unflinching message may be too much for some people to accept. Like it or
not, this is a film that will not leave you upon exiting the theater. It sticks with you
and makes you think. It brings up points that are worth thinking about. The best
political films are the ones that fuel debate afterwards and Vendetta should do that
in spades. (Otto, 2006, p. 11)
Although critics were intensely divided on the film’s merit, they were strikingly
unified in their interpretation of the film’s message. V for Vendetta, critics agreed, was
an allegory for life in George W. Bush’s America, and an unwavering critique of his
administration and its policies (both domestic and foreign) surrounding the war on
terror.
2
This message was confirmed by James McTeigue, the film’s director, who
publically noted, ‘‘We felt the [graphic] novel was very prescient to how the political
climate is at the moment. It really showed what can happen when society is ruled by
government, rather than the government being run as a voice of the people.’’
3
But
merely identifying the film’s central message tells us little about how the film works
rhetorically.
My own interest in the film*following Lyotard’s lead in the opening epigraph*
lies less in what the film says or means, and more in what the film does and how it
does it. On that basis, I argue that V for Vendetta enlists and mobilizes viewers at a
visceral level to reject political apathy and to enact a democratic politics of resistance
and revolt against any state that would seek to silence dissent. In service of this
argument, the essay unfolds in three parts. The first section sketches an appropriate
framework for understanding how cinema marshals and moves viewers by engaging
them in a fully embodied experience.
4
The second section offers a brief overview of
the film’s plot before turning to an analysis of its triptych narrative and affective
development. The third and final section considers the methodological, critical, and
theoretical implications suggested by the preceding analysis.
A Multi-Modal Approach to Cinematic Rhetoric
The notion that film functions rhetorically is hardly novel, and, indeed, there is a long
tradition of film criticism within rhetorical studies.
5
Historically, the rhetorical
criticism of film has tended to focus on the representational aspects of cinema,
40 B. L. Ott
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attending to how films compel audiences at a cognitive rather than corporeal level.
But more recently, scholars in an array of fields (Kennedy, 2000; MacDougall, 2006;
Massumi, 2002; Shaviro, 1993; Sobchack, 1995, 2004) have begun to consider how
cinema appeals directly to the senses, how it sways viewers somatically as well as
symbolically. Attention to the body corresponds closely to the affective (re)turn in
rhetorical studies,
6
for conceptualizing rhetoric as embodied necessarily ‘‘reflects a
merger of reason and emotion’’ (McKerrow, 1998, p. 322; see also Johnson, 2007).
Rhetorical appeals are, of course, always enacted by means of particular commu-
nication media. Since it is the medium that makes rhetoric material, it is vital that
critics examine not just the symbolic and sensory aspects of messages, but the very
technologies of communication that underlie them. Thus, in this essay, I advocate a
multi-modal approach to the rhetorical study of cinema (see Figure 1), an approach
that attends to the complex relations among discourse, figure, and ground.
Before discussing each of these modes in greater depth, I wish to stress that I take
them up separately for purposes of conceptual clarity only; they are, in practice,
intensely interwoven and interdependent.
Discourse
Discourse and figure,
7
the first two dimensions of a multi-modal approach to
cinematic rhetoric, are derived from Lyotard’s Discours, figure (1971), in which he
probes the stabilizing structures and destabilizing energies that animate art. In the
case of cinema, discourse describes those rule-governed movements or elements,
namely narrative and language (i.e., shot selection, sequencing, and editing), that
compose an orderly whole. ‘‘Cinematography,’’ observes Lyotard (1989a), ‘‘is . . .
conceived and practised as an incessant organizing of movements following the
rules of representation’’ (p. 170) in which any movements that do not make ‘‘sense’’
are excluded or cut. In psychoanalytic terms, cinematic discourse is a ‘‘secondary’’
process or activity because it presupposes an all-perceiving subject (already
constituted in/through language), the spectator, who is separate(d) from the
cinematic spectacle (Metz, 1986, p. 46).
In classical narrative cinema, or for Lyotard (1989a) any mainstream, realist
cinema, the spectator is always on the side of perceiving (subject), not the perceived
Mode Level Entails Enacted
Discourse representational
signification &
identification
language &
narrative
Figure experiential sensation & affect
aesthetics &
erotics
Ground environmental space & presence
medium &
technology
Figure 1. A multi-modal approach to cinematic rhetoric
Visceral Politics 41
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(object), thus making signification and identification possible. It is the spectator who
constitutes the ‘‘imaginary signifier,’’ and creates the film, in effect, by organizing its
fragments into a coherent and unified narrative (Metz, 1986, p. 48).
8
Moreover,
the spectator, motivated by narcissistic tendencies of the ego, seeks to identify with
the object(s)*characters and stories*on the screen (Mulvey, 2006, p. 346). Since the
spectator is absent from the screen, however, she identifies not with herself as an
object (as in Lacan’s mirror stage), but with the process of viewing itself (and the look
of the camera). Consequently, identification determines ‘‘the audience member’s
basic position vis-à-vis the text, a position . . . from which his or her emotional and
cognitive disposition toward the characters and the text develop’’ (Cohen, 2001,
p. 250). Discursive structures involving narrative and identification are but one mode
by which cinema moves audiences, however.
Figure
For Lyotard, discourse is always accompanied by figure*the unbounded energies and
forces expressed and experienced through the aesthetic and erotic dimensions of art
(Lash, 1990, p. 176; Rodowick, 2001, p. 18).
9
Whereas discourse closes down or fixes
meaning, the figural explodes it, exceeding both rationality and representation.
10
As Tomiche (1994) explains, ‘‘The figural is the name of an unspeakable other
necessarily at work within and against discourse’’ (p. 48). Although both are always
present (the figure infecting discourse and discourse colonizing the figure),
11
the ratio
of discourse to figure varies according to art form and iteration. Because of its
hybridized mode of expression involving music, sound, speech, and moving images,
cinema is among the most figural and thus sensual of the arts (Lash, 1990, p. 186;
Rodowick, 2001, p. 82; Sobchack, 1994, p. 37). ‘‘Films,’’ elaborates MacDougall
(2006), ‘‘appeal in an even more direct way [than writing] to the human sensorium,
in part because of the senses they address and the fact that they address them
simultaneously’’ (p. 57). Unlike discourse, which entails distance and separation, the
figural involves immersion and immediacy, appealing directly to the senses.
Because the figural operates at the level of the unconscious, which Lyotard insists is
not (contrary to Lacan) structured like a language (Rodowick, 2001, p. 9; Tomiche,
1994, p. 48), it is a primary process and therefore does not signify.
12
The responses it
evokes from audiences, then, are not easily quantifiable. Since the figural can only be
felt or experienced, rather than read or interpreted (like discourse), the rhetoricity of
cinematic figures is best approached on an affective register. Affect has variously been
defined as ‘‘the intensity that allows us to feel’’ (DeChaine, 2002, p. 86) and the
‘‘immediate modes of sensual responsiveness to the world characterized by an
accompanying imaginative dimension’’ (Altieri, 2003, p. 2). In keeping with these
definitions, I understand affect as direct sensory experiences (of color, light, sound,
movement, rhythm, and texture), along with the feelings, moods, emotions, and/or
passions they elicit. Together, discourse and figure allow the critic to approach film as
a ‘‘mind/body/machine meld’’ (Kennedy, 2000, p. 5) in which ‘‘[t]here is a continuous
42 B. L. Ott
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interplay among its varied forms of address*the aural with the visual, the sensory
with the verbal, the narrative with the pictorial’’ (MacDougall, 2006, p. 52).
Ground
Attending to cinema as a fully embodied experience necessitates looking not only at
discourse and figure, but also at ground.
13
The term ground comes from the work of
Marshall McLuhan, who argued that media create the very contexts in and through
which people process their world (both cognitively and sensorily). McLuhan’s
recognition that media are environments was based his observation that different
media produce different kinds of space.
14
In Laws of Media, for instance, McLuhan
(1988) distinguishes between the ‘‘visual space’’ of print media and the ‘‘acoustic
space’’ of electronic media. He, then, proceeds to demonstrate how visual space,
which is fixed, uniform, and sequential/linear, produces an experiential environment
that is detached, objective, analytic, and individualistic, while acoustic space, which is
dynamic, discontinuous, and simultaneous, creates an experience that is involving,
resonant, intuitive, and communal. For McLuhan, visual space favors a world of
observation and reflection, while acoustic space favors one of immersion and
sensation (Schafer, 2007, p. 84).
Though it may seem strange to suggest that cinema*a medium so obviously
visual*produces acoustic space, McLuhan is using the term ‘‘acoustic’’ in a very
particular way. For him, it designates an experiential environment that is
simultaneously penetrated by multiple senses: auditory, visual, and tactile (McLuhan,
1988, p. 33). The acoustic space fashioned by cinema is characterized first and
foremost by presence,
15
which Lee (2004) defines as, ‘‘a psychological state in which
the virtuality of experience is unnoticed’’ (p. 32). Given the strong sense of presence
elicited by cinema, spectators lose sight of their physical surrounding (i.e., the
theater) and are transported into the world of the film (Green & Brock, 2002, p. 317).
Films, in other words, invite audiences to forget they are watching a film. This means
that one’s cognitive and sensory processes are responding to the world within the film
as though its objects and entities were immediate and unmediated (Lombard et al.,
2000, p. 77; see also Shaviro, 1993, p. 54). In addition to its obvious visual and
auditory aspects, cinema is a highly tactile medium in which the eyes, perceiving
haptically, function as organs of touch (Marks, 2002, pp. 2, 3, 9; see also MacDougall,
2006, pp. 22, 57). The (acoustic) space of cinema, then, requires that critics explore
how films ‘‘touch’’ as well as move us.
There is, unfortunately, no precise procedure, no proper proportion,
16
for
analyzing the interplay of discourse, figure, and ground. The fact is*and it is a
fact too frequently forgotten or ignored*that rhetorical criticism is an art, not a
science. Criticism is, like the objects it studies, process and performance. At its worst,
it rather flatly describes that which it engages; at its best, it creatively (re)creates a
compelling sense of that which inspires it. So, discourse, figure, and ground are not so
much a method for uncovering some essential ‘‘textual truth,’’ as they are a set of
critical prompts for appreciating cinematic rhetoric as embodied experience. In the
Visceral Politics 43
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following section, I draw upon them in an effort to (re)produce a general ‘‘sense’’ of V
for Vendetta.
A Film in Three A(ffe)cts
Set in Britain in the not-too-distant future, V for Vendetta tells the story of a masked
vigilante known as ‘‘V,’’ who seeks to inspire the country’s citizens to rebel against
their fascist government. Near the outset of the film, V (Hugo Weaving) rescues Evey
Hammond (Natalie Portman) from several Fingermen (secret police) intent on
raping her. Later that evening (with Evey by his side), V blows up the Old Bailey
courtrooms to commemorate Guy Fawkes Day
17
and awaken the local citizenry from
their political stupor. Not wanting to appear vulnerable or lacking control, the
government attempts to spin V’s terrorist act as a planned demolition. But V
commandeers the BTN (London’s sole TV network), claims responsibility for the
bombing, and promises the city’s dispirited citizens that he will destroy the Houses of
Parliament in exactly one year. V then begins to systematically exact revenge against
various government officials who had tortured him or authorized his torture during
his imprisonment at the Larkhill Medical Research Institute years earlier. A somewhat
reluctant ally in these acts of retribution, Evey is captured and repeatedly tortured for
information about V. But she remains defiant even under the threat of death, at
which point V reveals himself as her captor and torturer, a role he assumed to help
her overcome her fears. The film concludes with the citizens marching defiantly
against the totalitarian government, and Evey carrying out V’s plan to destroy
Parliament.
V for Vendetta is more than just a story, however; it is a multi-modal composition
whose rhetoricity depends upon the distinctive interplay of its narrative content,
18
its
formal structures, its aesthetic dimensions, and its underlying technological
apparatus. As with any analysis, this one will necessarily be selective and
reductionistic. Hence, my critical aim is not to account for every element and aspect
of the film, but to suggest how its basic tenor and temperature function rhetorically.
Toward that end, my analysis proceeds in three parts, organized sequentially around
what I take to be V for Vendetta’s key cognitive-emotive a(ffe)cts: repression and fear,
resistance and excitation, and rebellion and release.
Repression and Fear
The general affect evoked by V for Vendetta throughout the first half of the film is one
of repression and fear. This sense/sensation is expressed and stimulated through both
narrative and aesthetic means. At the level of story, audiences are invited to identify
principally with Evey, who serves as viewers’ proxy (DeFore, 2005, p. 6). Indeed, her
transformation over the course of the film from frightened victim to engaged and
emboldened citizen functions symbolically as our own. Early in the narrative, Evey is
attacked and nearly raped by government Fingermen for being out after curfew, itself
a signifier of government repression. In watching Evey terrorized, quite literally at the
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‘‘hands’’ of the government, the audience participates in her fear, a fear that is infused
with disgust and revulsion by close-up shots of one Fingerman’s black-stained teeth
and the unbuckling and dropping of his pants. The chilling character of the scene is
heightened by its location in a dark, shadowy, and confining London alleyway.
Importantly, audiences are not invited to identify with V, who dramatically rescues
her. Thus, the audience is as helpless as Evey to stop the attack, and indeed, her rescue
by V (who viewers are repeatedly reminded represents an idea) constitutes our rescue
as well. The audience is, like Evey, ultimately freed by this idea, an idea succinctly
stated by the film’s tagline, ‘‘People should not be afraid of their governments.
Governments should be afraid of their people.’’
But this freedom from fear does not come until much later in the narrative. At the
outset, Evey is reluctant to become involved, to stand up to the government, for she
has been disciplined by its repressive regime to suffer in silence and consequently to
conform. Aesthetically, Vendetta works to produce a similar experience in viewers.
Much of the film, for instance, takes place in V’s underground hideout and other
cramped subterranean spaces. Thus, through its consistent framing of tight spaces,
the film fosters a sense of confinement, restriction, and repression. As McTeigue
explained in an interview, ‘‘a lot of Vendetta was filmed to feel completely interior: to
give a sense of claustrophobia’’ (quoted in Lamm, 2006, p. 172). This aesthetic of
confinement is often combined with one of surveillance in the film. Shots of
Chancellor Sutler (John Hurt), for instance, typically show him on an over-sized
video screen from an extreme low angle; this has the dual effect/affect of associating
him with power and subjecting the audience to his panoptic gaze. As Barry (1997)
explains, ‘‘The language of camera angles is . . . highly manipulative emotionally . . . .
If the angle is extreme, the attitude becomes emphatic. Low angles (shot from
beneath with the camera looking up at a subject) give the subject a sense of
importance, power’’ (p. 134). The low-angle shots of the Chancellor are also shot in
extreme close-up, making his worn, wrinkled face unnervingly immediate. ‘‘In
exaggerating proximity,’’ MacDougall (2006) observes, ‘‘the close-up brings to cinema
a quasi-tactility absent in ordinary human relations. When we meet others in day-
today exchanges we do not explore their faces with our fingertips, but in the cinema
we come close to doing this’’ (p. 22). Because of Sutler’s visual framing, which is
made possible by a uniquely cinematic ground, the audience can virtually touch the
sweat oozing from his pores, which reinforces viewers’ earlier disgust at the teeth of
the Fingerman and hence the government.
Resistance and Excitation
The most explicit sense of confinement, repression, and fear created by the film
comes, of course, with Evey’s abduction and gruesome torture, which is visually told
through alternating point-of-view and objectivist shots that suture the viewer into the
narrative at a discursive level. But at the very moment in the film when Evey’s (and
therefore the audience’s) distress is at its highest and most unbearable point, the
viewer experiences (enjoys) several liberating acts of resistance. Since the audience’s
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loyalties lie with Evey rather than V, his violent and vengeful acts earlier in the film
contribute to, rather than offer symbolic relief from, the film’s mounting tension and
‘‘sense of growing dread’’ (Puig, 2006, p. 7). During her incarceration, Evey defiantly
refuses to disclose any information about V, for which she endures even more abuse.
Her resolve is sustained by an emotional bond she forms with the prisoner in the
adjacent cell who passes her letters through a tiny crack in the prison’s thick concrete
walls. In reading the letters, Evey learns the life story of a woman named Valerie
(Natasha Wightman), a story that is told to the audience through voiceover and
visual flashback. Not only do the flashbacks disrupt the temporality of the film,
offering temporary affective reprieves from the graphic images of torture, they also
convey a sense of hope and excitement. The scenes of Valerie’s life are the most
brightly lit in the film, and they are framed to emphasize spaciousness. In one
flashback, Valerie is on a film set surrounded by rolling green hills, stunningly draped
by hundreds of billowing orange linens. To fully appreciate the emotional valence of
this scene, it is important to consider the more figural dimension of color in the film.
The most prominent color in Vendetta is a dark olive, but it is repeatedly
contrasted with a brilliant orange. In addition to recurring throughout the film, these
two colors are featured in the original graphic novel and promotional posters for the
film. The ability of color to impact mood is well established in psychological
(Hemphill, 1996; Jacobs & Suess, 1975) and media scholarship (Detenber, Simons, &
Reiss, 2000; Lichtlé, 2007; Valdez & Mehrabian, 1994). In fact, as Kennedy (2000)
notes, ‘‘Colour functions as the main modulator of sensation’’ (p. 115). This is
because ‘‘color tends to be a subconscious element in film. It’s strongly emotional in
its appeal, expressive, and atmospheric rather than conspicuous or intellectual’’
(Giannetti, 1987, p. 21). The dark shades of olive and blaze oranges in Vendetta work
not against one another, but in concert. As the olive undertones foster feelings of
dismay and hopelessness, the bursts of orange stimulate and arouse excitement. Thus,
in an atmosphere colored by fear, anxiety, and distress, the film also manages to
incite, provoke, and call to action. Indeed, to the extent that Evey stands in for the
audience, her bright orange prison garb invites strong affective identification; viewers
internalize the color, its emotional texture and feel, and consequently the
revolutionary politics embodied in Evey’s transformation from conformist citizen
to social dissident.
Rebellion and Release
After weeks of torture, Evey’s captor informs her that she has been convicted by a
special tribunal and that she will be executed unless she cooperates. Evey refuses and
is sentenced to death by firing squad. As she is about to be escorted to her certain
death, she is pressed a final time to supply just ‘‘one little piece of information . . .
anything’’ about V. When she calmly replies that she would ‘‘rather die,’’ she is
immediately set free. As she makes her way through the prison hallway and into V’s
Shadow Gallery, Evey begins to realize that V was her captor. Stunned by this
revelation, she stumbles, barely able to breathe. So, V accompanies her to the
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building’s rooftop for fresh air; standing there in the cool, driving rain, Evey is
reborn, her baptism by water intercut with V’s baptism by fire years earlier. In that
moment, she realizes that*for the first time in her life*she is truly free because she
no longer fears her government. The scene is wrenching for viewers, who learn, along
with Evey, that willingly sacrificing one’s freedoms in the name of nationalism is its
own kind of imprisonment. The rebellious energy that has been stirred up in Evey
and, by extension, the audience must be released. To fully appreciate this desire for
release, I turn finally to the film’s aural experience: its sonic affect(s).
One of Vendetta’s most compelling figural dimensions is its use of sound, for sound
is particularly influential in creating an absorptive ‘‘acoustic space.’’ A film’s musical
score, argues Donnelly (2005), ‘‘envelopes the audience, bathing it in affect’’ (p. 13).
It carnally cues viewers how to feel about particular characters and narrative events.
In the lead up to Vendetta’s final climactic scene,
19
Tchaikowsky’s inspirational 1812
Overture*‘‘a reminder of America’s own national origin in terrorism against the
British crown’’ and ‘‘a traditional piece of music in the celebration of our national
independence on the 4
th
of July’’ (Keller, 2008, p. 43)*blares over the city’s public
broadcast system, its roaring canons rousing citizens to descend on Parliament in
spite of the curfew and inviting viewers to cheer their defiance. By the time the throng
of people, each donning their Fawkesian masks, has marched down Whitehall to
Parliament, the audience stands (emotionally) with them eagerly awaiting its
destruction. It is not music alone, however, that has brought us to the brink.
The aural aesthetic of Vendetta is perhaps best captured by V’s voice, the very
tempo, texture, and rhythm of which calls the audience to action (as much as his
words). The oral dimension of speech*what Barthes (1977) would call ‘‘the grain of
the voice’’ (p. 181)*‘‘is powerful because of its ability to elicit a somatic response’’
(Lunceford, 2007, p. 83). As Puig (2006) observed in USA Today, V*despite being
hidden behind an immobile mask*is ‘‘able to convey volumes [of emotion] with
subtle, fluid gestures and expressive vocal cadences’’ (p. 8). The rhythmic grain of V’s
voice, always building in intensity, always swelling in exigency, generates the desire for
ecstatic release precisely because its escapes and exceeds all (rational) meaning. The
sound of V’s voice does not represent anything; it simply offers the promises of
explosion, of jouissance, of the coming undone of the subject and its subjugation.
Vendetta propels the audience ineluctably toward this moment of total expenditure
and abandon with panoramic shots of London, and, finally, the film’s visual and aural
climax*the stunning and booming explosion of Parliament.
Emotional Currents: The Implications of V for Vendetta
In the preceding analysis, I have attempted to (re)create a general sense of how V for
Vendetta moves audiences. Adopting a multi-modal approach to cinematic rhetoric
that focuses on the interplay of discourse, figure, and ground, I specifically argued
that Vendetta*through an array of visceral resonances, pulsations, intensities, and
sensations*invites viewers to reject a politics of apathy in favor of a politics of
democratic struggle. As with any film, not all viewers will respond to Vendetta’s
Visceral Politics 47
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rhetoric*its invitations to action*in the same way. Audience responses to rhetorical
experiences
20
are as complex as those experiences themselves and are, at a minimum,
influenced, constrained, and enabled by audiences’ personal politics, background,
and previous (rhetorical) experiences. As reviews of the film cited in the introduction
to this essay indicate, audiences did, in fact, respond variously to V for Vendetta.
What, then, can be learned from an analysis of the sort I have undertaken? In the
remainder of this essay, I probe what I see as the three primary implications of this
study.
The first implication is on the order of method. That audiences can and do
respond differently to particular rhetorical experiences such as a film does not in any
way obviate the fact that a given rhetorical experience functions in a particular way.
I can, for instance, urge readers to accept the claim made in the previous sentence
(which I have already done through argument), but I cannot force them to. That
some readers will choose not to accept the claim does not alter what the claim urges
or how it urges it. Consequently, the task of the rhetorical critic is to show how a
particular rhetorical experience works, and that requires developing and implement-
ing critical tools appropriate to the experience under investigation. In this essay,
I have proposed that to more fully understand the rhetorical experience of a film,
critics should attend to cinema in all its complexity by adopting a multi-modal
approach involving discourse, figure, and ground.
A second implication has to do with the relation between politics and mass or ‘‘pop’’
art. An analysis of V for Vendetta suggests that mainstream mass art can be politically
progressive and counter-hegemonic. Since the Frankfurt scholars first began
theorizing the ‘‘culture industry’’ (Horkheimer & Adorno, 2001), critics have tended
to regard mass culture as an instrument of ideological reproduction and hegemonic
domination, locating resistance mostly in elite or avant-garde art, what Lyotard
(1989a), in the case of film, has called ‘‘acinema.’’ In those instances in which popular
cultural products have been heralded as transgressive, the emphasis has typically been
on either the individual, fleeting, and tactical character of the resistance (in the
tradition of de Certeau [1984]) or its relation to a specific subculture (in the tradition
of Hebdige [1979]). Commenting on Vendetta’s politics though, Keller (2008) notes:
Seldom do films make as heavy-handed an effort to intervene in complicated social
process that have the capacity to impact the disposition, direction, and duration of
political policy as does V for Vendetta, which warns its audience that a population
should never trust its government to restore freedoms once they have been
undermined in the interests of national security. (pp. 58�59)
It’s easy, even fashionable, today to retrospectively critique the Bush administration
for its unilateral efforts to expand executive powers, for its use of torture (Abu
Ghraib), for its program of domestic eavesdropping and surveillance (FBI and NSA
wire tapping), for its infringement on personal privacy by conducting unwarranted
searches and seizures, and for its trampling of basic civil liberties by denying due
process and habeas corpus at detention camps (Guantánamo Bay) and secret CIA
black sites. But V for Vendetta rendered these same critiques in early 2006 while the
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vast majority of Americans held their tongues. As political rhetoric, V for Vendetta
urged viewers not to passively sit by as their rights and liberties were being curtailed,
and empowered viewers to question and speak out against their government.
A third, and perhaps the most important, implication of this study concerns the
affective dimensions of politics, how bodies are mobilized (called to action) at a
material level. Reflecting on this point in relation to cinema, Shaviro (1993) writes:
Film is a vivid medium, and it is important to talk about how it arouses corporeal
reactions of desire and fear, pleasure and disgust, fascination and shame. . . .[S]uch
affective experiences directly and urgently involve a politics. Power works in the
depths and on the surfaces of the body, and not just in the disembodied realm of
‘representation’ or of ‘discourse’. (p. vii)
Based on an analysis V for Vendetta, Shaviro’s point can be extended and refined in
two important ways. One way involves how we think about the relation of affect to
bodies. That Vendetta evoked strong affective responses from viewers is certain (as even
those who disliked it, disliked it intensely), but different bodies had different affective
responses. Why? I want to suggest it is because of what those bodies brought to the film.
Affects involve a corporeal continuum, which ranges, on one end, from the
experiencing body (i.e., immediate sensations of movement, color, and sound, for
instance) to, on the other end, our body of experience (i.e., our body’s memory of
previous sensations). Upon entering a room, one can immediately sense the mood or
atmosphere because one’s body is responding directly to the sensory stimuli in that
environment (the experiencing body) and to previous environments that felt similar
(our body of experience). Films function much like rooms do in this example. In
experiencing a film, one’s body both (1) responds to the discursive and figural
elements of the film and (2) recalls previous cinematic and non-cinematic
experiences, which in combination evoke affective responses.
For those who came to the film with memories of repression already inscribed on
their bodies by life in George W. Bush’s America, their body of experience resonated
strongly with their experiencing body in the theater. In other words, since how
‘‘feelings feel in the first place may be tied to a past history of readings, in the sense
that the process of recognition (of this feeling, or that feeling) is bound up with what
we already know’’ (Ahmed, 2004, p. 25), for some the social climate of the U.S. and
the general mood of Vendetta could be said to participate in an affective embrace.
21
It would be naı̈ve, however, to think that everyone’s experience of Bush’s America was
repressive. For many, Bush’s politics and policies made them feel safer and more
comfortable, in which case there was a vast gulf between their existing body of
experience and their experiencing body in the theater. In this scenario, the result
would likely be more akin to an affective repulsion than embrace.
Another way to refine Shaviro’s point is to reflect on how affect operates politically.
The great twentieth-century theorist of symbolic action, Kenneth Burke (1969),
maintains that an ‘‘attitude’’ is often an incipient action, an orientation or
predisposition toward the world and thus ‘‘the first step towards an act’’ (p. 236).
And attitudes, as this study has demonstrated, entail fully embodied experiences.
Visceral Politics 49
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Affect, as well as (and in combination with) reason, inclines us to form and adopt
some attitudes and not others. ‘‘Affect,’’ explains Tomkins (1981), ‘‘can determine
cognition’’ (p. 324), for ‘‘motivation itself . . . is the business of the affect system’’
(Sedgwick, 2003, p. 20). Thus, we might begin to think of affects, and in particular
the affective dimensions of embodied experience, as incipient attitudes, as energies,
intensities, and sensations that function as the first step towards an evolving attitude.
Indeed, it is through the intersection of affect, attitude, and action that Vendetta
moves viewers at a material, bodily level to enact a politics of resistance and revolt*a
politics that is, in a word, visceral.
Notes
[1] Quoted in Seidler, 2001, p. 133. A different, though equally instructive translation of this
passage appears in Driftworks: ‘‘What is important in a text is not what it means, but what it
does and incites to do. What it does: the charge of affect it contains and transmits. What it
incites to do: the metamorphoses of this potential energy into other things*other texts, but
also . . . political actions’’ (Lyotard, 1984, pp. 9�10).
[2] V for Vendetta, explains Keller (2008), ‘‘signifies outside of its own context, serving as a
caution to the actual governments of post-9/11 America and Britain that . . . [t]he surrender
of civil liberties in the interests of national security is an ill-founded enterprise’’ (p. 34). See
also Burr (2006), Chocano (2006), Corliss (2006), Holleran (2006), Smith (2006), and
Vonder Haar (2006).
[3] ‘‘About the Story,’’ V for Vendetta at WarnerBrothers.com, http://vforvendetta.warnerbros.
com/cmp/prod_notes_ch_02.html (accessed May 11, 2009).
[4] ‘‘[E]mbodiment,’’ explains Sobchack (2004), ‘‘is a radically material condition of human
being that necessarily entails both the body and consciousness, objectivity and subjectivity, in
an irreducible ensemble. Thus we matter and mean through processes and logics of sense-
making that owe as much to our carnal existence as they do to our conscious thought’’ (p. 4).
[5] For an overview of this scholarship, see Blakesley (2003).
[6] As Gunn and Rice (2009) note, the ‘‘the ‘affective turn’ in communication studies is more
properly described as (an) ‘about face’’’ (p. 215).
[7] Discourse and figure closely parallel Kristeva’s (2001) distinction between ‘‘the symbolic,’’
which entails signification, and ‘‘the semiotic,’’ which entails bodily drives and desires
(pp. 36�37).
[8] See also Eleftheriotis, 1995, p. 104, and MacDougal, 2006, pp. 24�25.
[9] ‘‘Aesthetic rhetoric,’’ clarify Whitson and Poulakos (1993), ‘‘focuses on the human body as an
excitable entity . . . it forgoes the attempt to communicate a particular message exactly, and
strives to convey an impulse’’ (p. 141). Elsewhere, they (Poulakos & Whitson, 1995) add,
‘‘An aesthetic rhetoric counts on, attends to, and takes into account the body and its senses’’
(p. 382).
[10] On this point, see Readings, 1991, p. 4, and Slaughter, 2004, p. 236.
[11] According to Lyotard (1989b), ‘‘the figure dwells in discourse like a phantasm while discourse
dwells in the figure like a dream’’ (p. 33). As Rodowick (2001) elaborates, ‘‘figure and
discourse cannot be opposed. . . . in Lyotard’s view, figure and discourse are divided not by a
bar but rather by only the slightest of commas. . . . Lyotard finds that the figural resides in
discourse as the intractable opacity of the visible’’ (pp. 5, 6). For further elaboration on this
point, see Lydon, 2001, p. 24; Slaughter, 2004, p. 233; Trahair, 2005, p. 177.
[12] ‘‘Lyotard’s ‘discursive’ is the Freudian secondary process, the ego operating in terms of the
reality principle. The figural, by contrast, is the primary process of the unconscious which
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http://vforvendetta.warnerbros.com/cmp/prod_notes_ch_02.html
http://vforvendetta.warnerbros.com/cmp/prod_notes_ch_02.html
operates according to the pleasure principle (Lyotard, 1971, 1984). Lyotard’s notion of the
figural is formulated partly as a critique of Lacan’s dictum that the unconscious is structured
like a language’’ (Lash, 1990, p. 177). See also Featherstone, 2007, p. 38.
[13] It is worth noting that figure and ground as I (along with Lyotard and McLuhan) am using
them differs markedly from Lakoff and Johnson’s (1999) use of them. For Lakoff and
Johnson, figure/ground concerns an observer’s cognitive perception of the spatial relation-
ship among objects in visual schemas (i.e., which one is perceived to be in front of the other).
[14] Space, according to Hall (1959), ‘‘not only communicates in the most basic sense, but . . .
also organizes virtually everything in life’’ (p. viii).
[15] Presence has long been recognized as an important dimension of rhetoric because it ‘‘acts
directly on our sensibility’’ (Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1969, p. 116).
[16] I am attempting to resist the crystallization of discourse, figure, and ground into a rigid
method, for as Barthes (1977) so eloquently notes, ‘‘The invariable fact is that a piece of work
which ceaselessly proclaims its determination for method is ultimately sterile: everything has
been put into the method, nothing is left for writing . . . No surer way to kill a piece of
research and send it to join the great waste of abandoned projects than Method’’ (p. 201).
[17] Guy Fawkes was a Catholic fanatic, who along with cabal of co-conspirators, tried to blow up
the Houses of Parliament in 1605 by placing 36 barrels of explosive beneath the building.
Although the plot, known today as the ‘‘Gunpowder Plot,’’ was thwarted by the British
government, the event is ‘‘commemorated’’ every November 5 in the U.K. with firework
displays. The film’s first spoken line is: ‘‘Remember, remember, the Fifth of November, the
Gunpowder Treason and Plot. I know of no reason why the Gunpowder Treason should ever
be forgot.’’
[18] The film’s intertextual gestures alone, which range from George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous
Huxley’s Brave New World to Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and Rowland Lee’s 1934 film
adaption of Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo, have already been the subject of a
book-length study (Keller, 2008).
[19] As Travers (2006) observed in Rolling Stone, ‘‘Setting indelible images to a deft score by Dario
Marianelli . . . speeds us along to a thunderous climax at Parliament’’ (p. 10).
[20] I am strategically avoiding the word ‘‘text’’ here, as it brings with it the metaphorical baggage
of reading and interpretation. A film is not a text; it is an embodied, cognitive-emotive
experience arising from the unique interplay of discourse, figure, and ground at/in a
particular space and time.
[21] I am specifically thinking here of the sensation Deleuze and Guattari (1994) call ‘‘the clinch,’’
which occurs ‘‘when two sensations resonate in each other by embracing each other so tightly
in a clinch of what are no more than ‘energies’’’ (p. 168). What I am calling an ‘‘affective
embrace’’ might also be thought in Burkean terms. Kimberling’s (1982) reading of Burkean
form is instructive in this regard:
If form is a set of analogs to inner states of being (Burke mentions both the
‘‘concrete’’ functions such as the rhythm of the human heartbeat and the
‘‘ineffable’’ ones such as love, guilt, sorrow, etc.), then the task of the critical
theorist must be to demonstrate how these analogs actually are developed in
works of art involving different media of communication. (p. 45)
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Media extra credit
The Politics of Negotiating Public Tragedy: Media Framing of
the Matthew Shepard Murder
Brian L. Ott, Eric Aoki
Rhetoric & Public Affairs, Volume 5, Number 3, Fall 2002, pp. 483-505
(Article)
Published by Michigan State University Press
DOI: 10.1353/rap.2002.0060
For additional information about this article
Access provided by Auraria Library (UC Denver, Metro State, CCD) (2 Dec 2013 20:48 GMT)
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/rap/summary/v005/5.3ott.html
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/rap/summary/v005/5.3ott.html
This essay undertakes a detailed frame analysis of print media coverage of the Matthew
Shepard murder in three nationally influential newspapers as well as Time magazine
and The Advocate. We contend that the media’s tragic framing of the event, with an
emphasis on the scapegoat process, functioned rhetorically to alleviate the public’s guilt
concerning anti-gay hate crimes and to excuse the public of any social culpability. It
also functioned ideologically to reaffirm a dominant set of discourses that socially stig-
matizes gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered persons and to hamper efforts to cre-
ate and enact a social policy that would prevent this type of violence in the future. A
concluding section considers Burke’s notion of the “comic frame” as a potential correc-
tive for the media’s coverage of public tragedies.
Even before Matt died, he underwent a strange, American transubstantiation, seized,
filtered, and fixed as an icon by the national news media dedicated to swift and con-
sumable tragedy and by a national politics convulsed by gay rights.
—Beth Loffreda, Losing Matt Shepard1
I n the blustery evening hours of Tuesday, October 6, 1998, Aaron McKinney andRussell Henderson lured 21-year-old Matthew Shepard from the Fireside Bar in
Laramie, Wyoming, to a desolate field on the edge of town. There the two high
school dropouts bound the frail, youthful Shepard to a split-rail fence, viciously
bludgeoned him 18 times with the butt of a .357 magnum, stole his shoes and wal-
let, and left him to die in the darkness and near-freezing temperatures. It was not
until the evening of the next day that Aaron Kreifel, a passing mountain biker, dis-
covered Shepard—his face so horribly disfigured that Kreifel told police he thought
THE POLITICS OF NEGOTIATING PUBLIC TRAGEDY:
MEDIA FRAMING OF THE
MATTHEW SHEPARD MURDER
BRIAN L. OTT AND ERIC AOKI
Brian L. Ott and Eric Aoki are Assistant Professors of Speech Communication at Colorado State
University in Fort Collins, Colorado. They contributed equally to this essay. The authors wish to thank
Matthew Petrunia for his extensive research assistance and Drs. Karrin Anderson, Greg Dickinson, and
Kirsten Pullen for their insightful comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript.
© Rhetoric & Public Affairs
Vol. 5, No. 3, 2002, pp. 483-505
ISSN 1094-8392
at first it was a scarecrow. The only portions of his face not covered in blood were
those that had been streaked clean by his tears. Unconscious, hypothermic, and suf-
fering from severe brain trauma, Shepard was astonishingly still alive. He was
rushed to Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins, Colorado, where he would die five
days later without ever having regained consciousness. McKinney and Henderson
had been apprehended prior to his death, and as the gruesome details of that night
began to unfold, it became clear that Matthew Shepard was brutally murdered for
being gay. In the weeks that followed, Shepard became a symbol of the deep preju-
dice, hatred, and violence directed at homosexuals. Indeed, news of the event
spawned vigils across the country and a nationwide debate about hate-crimes legis-
lation. Shortly more than a year later, Henderson pled guilty and McKinney was
convicted of murder. Both men are currently serving life sentences in the Wyoming
State Penitentiary.
The basic contours of this story remain vividly etched in our memories—mem-
ories that have permanently altered our personal and public lives. Perhaps this event
so profoundly affected both of us because, as educators in Colorado, we were less
than five miles from the hospital where Matthew Shepard clung to life for five days
in October 1998. Perhaps the memory still burns brightly for us because several stu-
dents at our university mocked the event with a scarecrow and anti-gay epithets on
a homecoming float even as Shepard lay comatose in the hospital across town.
Perhaps the memory serves as a survival instinct, reminding us that being “out” in
the community drastically alters the relation of our bodies to the landscape, and
that cultural politics, discourse, and violence are intricately intertwined. Or per-
haps, just perhaps, we fear the consequences of forgetting. We cling to the memory
of Matthew Shepard because we sense that the nation has already forgotten, or
worse, reconciled these events.2 How has an event that sparked so much interest,
concern, and public discussion seeped from the collective consciousness of a nation
and its citizenry? Why is hate-crimes legislation no longer a “hot” political issue?
The answers to these questions we believe reside, at least in large part, in the man-
ner in which the news media told this story.
We also believe that the underlying form of the Matthew Shepard story may have
resonance with the news media’s framing of other public traumas, from the shoot-
ings at Columbine High School to the terrorist attacks in New York and
Washington, D.C., on September 11, 2001. Our aim in this essay, then, is to identify
the underlying symbolic process and to analyze how it functions to construct and
position citizens relative to the political process, and how it assists them in con-
fronting and resolving public trauma. With regard to the Matthew Shepard murder,
we contend that the news media’s tragic framing of that event works rhetorically
and ideologically to relieve the public of its social complicity and culpability; to
reaffirm a dominant set of discourses that socially stigmatizes gay, lesbian, bisexual,
and transgendered (GLBT) persons; and to hamper efforts to create and enact a
484 RHETORIC & PUBLIC AFFAIRS
progressive GLBT social policy. To advance this argument, we begin by examining
the literature on media framing.
SYMBOLIC ACTION, FRAME ANALYSIS, AND THE NEWS MEDIA
In The Philosophy of Literary Form, Kenneth Burke argues that art forms function as
equipments for living, by which he means that discursive forms such as comedy,
tragedy, satire, and epic furnish individuals and collectives with the symbolic
resources and strategies for addressing and resolving the given historical and per-
sonal problems they face.3 When there is a traumatic event such as the Matthew
Shepard murder, then, discourse—and especially the public discourse of the news
media—aids people in “coming to terms” with the event. For Burke, different dis-
cursive forms equip persons to confront and resolve problems in different ways.
“[E]ach of the great poetic forms,” he contends, “stresses its own peculiar way of
building the mental equipment (meanings, attitudes, character) by which one han-
dles the significant factors of his time.”4 That different discursive forms offer differ-
ent mental equipments is significant because it frames what constitutes acceptable
political and social action. Identifying prevailing discursive forms is a never-ending
critical task, as symbolic forming is linked to the environment in which it occurs
and new discursive forms are continually emerging. In Burke’s words, “the conven-
tional forms demanded by one age are as resolutely shunned by another.”5 Thus, to
understand how the public made sense of and responded to the Shepard murder,
one must attend to the underlying symbolic form of the discourse surrounding it.
One approach to analyzing discursive forms and the attendant attitudes (incip-
ient actions) they foster toward a situation is by examining what Burke has called
“terministic screens”6 and media critics—drawing on a sociological perspective—
have called “frame analysis.”7 Frame analysis looks to see how a situation or event
is named/defined, and how that naming shapes public opinion. It accomplishes
this analysis by highlighting the inherent biases in all storytelling, namely selectiv-
ity (what is included and excluded in the story?), partiality (what is emphasized
and downplayed in the story?), and structure (how does the story formally play
out?). One example of framing in the news media is the distinction between
“episodic” stories and “thematic” stories. “The episodic frame,” according to
Shanto Iyengar and Adam Simon, “depicts public issues in terms of concrete
instances or public events . . . [and] makes for ‘good pictures.’ The thematic news
frame, by contrast, places public issues in some general or abstract context . . .
[and] takes the form of a ‘takeout’ or ‘backgrounder’ report directed at general out-
comes.”8 Though few news reports are exclusively episodic or thematic, the domi-
nance of episodic frames in the news has been established in multiple studies.9
How a story is framed in the news affects both how the public assigns responsibil-
ity for a traumatic event and “how people following the debate think about policy
THE MEDIA FRAMING OF THE MATTHEW SHEPARD MURDER 485
options and preferred outcomes.”10 To appreciate fully the political and ideologi-
cal implications of framing, however, the critic must do more than simply classify
a news story as episodic or thematic.
The subtle ebb and flow of symbolic forms is crucial to how they interpellate
subjects and do the work of ideology. To get after these subtleties, we undertook a
detailed frame analysis of the news coverage of the Matthew Shepard murder in the
Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times—three “large,
nationally influential newspapers.”11 Since we were curious about how this story has
been framed over time, we examined the news coverage from October 10, 1998
(when the story was first reported nationally), to December 2001 (roughly two years
after McKinney was convicted). This approach generated a sample containing 71
news articles. Wanting to see if the coverage varied in publications with notably dif-
ferent politics, we also analyzed the news coverage in Time magazine and The
Advocate over the same period. These magazines allowed us to compare and con-
trast the coverage of the event in a mainstream weekly with the coverage in an alter-
native news source specifically committed to issues affecting the GLBT community.
Based on an analysis of these five news outlets, we identified four phases in the print
media’s framing of the Matthew Shepard story: naming the event, making a politi-
cal symbol, expunging the evil within, and restoring the social order. In the follow-
ing section, we describe each of these phases and the symbolic processes they entail.
THE MATTHEW SHEPARD STORY
All stories have form, which is to say they are temporally structured—creating and
fulfilling appetites as they unfold.12 As C. Allen Carter notes:
When the narrative strategy is working as intended, the culmination of each episode
sets the stage for the next . . . The story relieves its audience of the burden of having
to ‘choose between’ different phases of its unfolding and, simply by taking them
through one phase, prepares them for the next. Each successive step of the plot leads
into the next, whether or not it leads its audience astray.13
Naming the Event
Given the formal characteristics of narrative, how a story begins is crucial to how a
story develops. In this section, we examine how the Matthew Shepard story is
framed in initial news reports and analyze how that framing functions rhetorically.
To fully appreciate how this story begins, however, we must first look at when it
begins. The Washington Post, New York Times, and Los Angeles Times did not run
feature articles on Matthew Shepard until October 10, 1998, three days after he was
discovered. The reason for the media’s delay in treating the story as a national news
486 RHETORIC & PUBLIC AFFAIRS
item likely has to do with how the news is made. An event is selected to become a
major news story based on its potential for drama. As W. Lance Bennett notes, “It is
no secret that reporters and editors search for events with dramatic properties and
then emphasize those properties in their reporting.”14 Prior to October 8, little was
known about the details of the attack outside the Albany County sheriff ’s depart-
ment. During a local press conference on that day, Sheriff Gary Puls told reporters
that, “[Matthew] may have been beaten because he was gay . . . [and that he] was
found by a mountain biker, tied to a fence like a scarecrow.”15 Local reporters cov-
ering the story immediately seized on the anti-gay aspect of the crime and the cru-
cifix symbolism of the scarecrow image—two dramatic elements that quickly drew
the attention of the national press.16
Matthew Shepard was officially “good melodrama” and the reports in the main-
stream media that followed focused almost exclusively on two elements, the
deplorable motives of Henderson and McKinney and the gruesome character of the
scene. Indeed, these aspects of the story are evident in the initial headlines from all
three papers we analyzed: “Gay Man Beaten and Left For Dead; 2 Are Charged,”17
“Gay Student Brutally Beaten; 4 Arrested,”18 and “Gay Man Near Death After
Beating, Burning; Three Held in Wyoming Attack Near Campus; Hate Crimes
Suspected.”19 The qualifier “gay” that begins each headline constructs the victim’s
sexuality as the focal point of the story, despite Laramie Police Commander
O’Dalley’s public claim at the time that “robbery was the chief motive.”20
The news media’s devotion to drama virtually insured that sensationalistic
descriptions of Matthew Shepard’s body would lead every story. In its first feature
article, the Washington Post emphasized the savage and dehumanizing aspects of the
crime, reporting that “Matthew Shepard, slight of stature, gentle of demeanor . . .
was tied to a fence like a dead coyote . . . [with] his head badly battered and burn
marks on his body.”21 Likewise, the New York Times began, “At first, the passing
bicyclist thought the crumpled form lashed to a ranch fence was a scarecrow. But
when he stopped, he found the burned, battered and nearly lifeless body of
Matthew Shepard, an openly gay college student.”22 The “scarecrow” image was also
referenced in the Los Angeles Times, which began, “A gay University of Wyoming
student was brutally beaten, burned and left tied to a wooden fence like a scarecrow,
with grave injuries including a smashed skull.”23 The graphic and gruesome images
of violence visited upon Shepard’s body were shocking and traumatic, and they
begged the question, “How could something like this happen?” As unthinkable and
unimaginable as the act seemed, the basic outline of the story already portrayed an
answer—hatred fueled by homophobia. The naming of the attack as a “vicious . . .
anti-gay hate crime”24 would prove pivotal in the heated political discussion to
ensue.
Key details, terms, and structures were already setting the stage for how the
story must unfold. For instance, the near exclusive focus in early press reports on
THE MEDIA FRAMING OF THE MATTHEW SHEPARD MURDER 487
the brutality done to Matthew Shepard’s body functioned in two interrelated ways.
First, it personalized the event, making Shepard the center of the story. This was not,
and never would become, a story about hate crimes in which Matthew Shepard was
simply an example. It was a story about Shepard, in which hate was the motive for
violence. One consequence of personalized news, according to Bennett, “[is that it]
gives preference to the individual actors and human-interest angles in events while
downplaying institutional and political considerations that establish the social con-
text for those events.”25 In the Matthew Shepard story, hatred and homophobia—as
we will demonstrate shortly—would come to be framed primarily as character flaws
of the chief antagonists, rather than as wide-scale social prejudices that routinely
result in violence toward gays and lesbians. Second, the repeated emphasis on the
hideousness of the crime in both its barbarity and motivation profoundly disrupted
the moral and social order. The images and descriptions were not only traumatic,
they were traumatizing; they functioned to unsettle and even undermine the public’s
faith in basic civility and humanity. So great was the disruption to the social order
that even at this early stage it fostered a desire for resolution.26 For this story, for
Matthew Shepard’s story, to end (as all news stories must), responsibility had to be
assigned and order had to be restored. Since this story centered on Shepard, respon-
sibility had a face, or rather two faces, Russell Henderson and Aaron McKinney. But
before they would come into focus, Shepard would be transformed into a national
political symbol.
Making a Political Symbol
Even before his death, Shepard had become “a national symbol for the campaign
against hate crimes and anti-gay violence.”27 A website created by Poudre Valley
Hospital to provide updates on his condition “drew over 815,000 hits from around
the world.”28 On Saturday, October 10, students, faculty, and community members
from Laramie gathered for the University of Wyoming’s homecoming parade,
where “amid the usual hoopla . . . hundreds of people donned yellow arm bands and
marched in tribute to Shepard and the belief that intolerance has no place in the
Equality State.”29 Throughout the weekend, candlelight vigils for Shepard would be
held across the country, with a Los Angeles memorial attracting an estimated 5,000
concerned citizens. Then, in the early morning hours of Monday, October 12, 1998,
one day after National Coming Out Day, Matthew Shepard passed away with his
parents at his beside.
With the news of Shepard’s death, a nation already stricken with grief was
plunged even deeper into emotional turmoil. As Reverend Anne Kitch asked in her
homily at Shepard’s funeral, “How can we not let our hearts be deeply, deeply trou-
bled? How can we not be immersed in despair, how can we not cry out against this?
This is not the way it is supposed to be. A son has died, a brother has been lost, a
488 RHETORIC & PUBLIC AFFAIRS
child has been broken, torn, abandoned.”30 The Matthew Shepard story had struck
a chord. It had “electrified gay America,”31 and it had done much more. As Post
reporters Justin Gillis and Patrice Gaines noted:
For the first time, in cities across the United States and Canada, straight people . . .
marched by the thousands to protest anti-gay violence. More than 60 marches and vigils
have taken place since his death, and others are scheduled for today. People rallied in New
York, Atlanta and Miami—and in West Lafayette, Ind., Fort Collins, Colo., and Corner
Brook, Newfoundland. Under an indigo sky, on the steps of the Capitol, a crowd of sev-
eral thousand gathered last week to hold candles aloft, celebrate Shepard’s life and
demand that Congress pass legislation to battle hate crimes. “Now!” they cried.32
Among the thousands at the candlelight vigil on the Capitol steps in Washington
were actresses Ellen DeGeneres and Kristen Johnson, and numerous congressional
representatives, who not only condemned the beating death of Shepard but also
urged immediate passage of a federal hate crimes bill.33 Earlier in the week,
President Clinton had also pushed “Congress to pass the Hate Crimes Prevention
Act . . . [which] would broaden the definition of hate crimes to include assaults on
gays as well as women and the disabled.”34 As The Advocate would report a year
later, there was little doubt that “Matthew Shepard’s murder turned equal rights and
protections for gays and lesbians into topics of nationwide debate.”35
But how had Shepard been transformed into a martyr—“the most recognizable
symbol of antigay violence in America”36—and what did that transformation mean
for the political debate taking place? The previous year had seen “at least 27 gay peo-
ple murdered in apparent hate crimes. . . . And the murders are only the extreme
end of the spectrum of anti-gay attacks. A coalition that monitors anti-gay violence
and harassment documented 2,445 episodes last year in American cities.”37 Though
the motive for Shepard’s murder was hardly an isolated incident, two aspects of this
story made it unique and especially well suited for seizing the public’s imagination.
The first factor, of course, was the figure at its center. As Brian Levin, director of the
Center on Hate and Extremism at Richard Stockton College in Pomona, New Jersey,
told the Washington Post, “You can’t get a more sympathetic person to face such a
brutal attack than Matt Shepard. He looked like an all-American nice kid next door
who’d look after your grandmother if you went out of town. He looked like a sweet
kid and he was.”38 Shepard was “white and middle-class,” “barely on the threshold
of adulthood,” and “frail [in] appearance.”39 Because of his slight stature, a mere
5’2”, and “cherubic face” even those uncomfortable with homosexuality saw him as
an innocent (that is, sexually nonthreatening) victim. The public identified with
Shepard, viewing him as friend and son.
The second factor that contributed to the emerging mythology was the dramatic
structure of the narrative. Jack Levin, professor of sociology and criminology at
THE MEDIA FRAMING OF THE MATTHEW SHEPARD MURDER 489
Northeastern University, speculates that, “If Matthew had died instantly of a gun-
shot wound to the head, his death may not have gotten as much publicity.”40 That
Shepard lay comatose in a hospital for several days while people around the coun-
try prayed and stood vigil for him functioned to heighten the public’s investment in
the story. Moreover, it was during those days of vigil that the “heinous” and
“morose” details of the crime were repeated over and over again in the news media.
The juxtaposition of Shepard’s ability to evoke identification with the crime’s
incomprehensibility shattered society’s “‘veneer of congeniality,’ and prompted a
collective self-examination.”41 In other words, the public’s inability to quickly and
easily reconcile Matthew Shepard’s innocence (unlike most gay men, he didn’t have
this coming to him) with his “lynching” was a significant source of shame for the
country and created wide-scale public guilt. As Steve Lopez wrote in Time maga-
zine, “Shepard has ignited a national town hall meeting on the enduring hatred that
shames this country” (emphasis added).42 But guilt demands redemption, for as
Burke reminds, “who would not be cleansed!” and redemption needs a redeemer,
“which is to say, a Victim!”43 Though guilt can be resolved symbolically in a variety
of ways, ranging from transcendence to mortification, the tragic framing of the
Matthew Shepard story foretold that purification would be achieved through vic-
timage and the scapegoat process.
Expunging the Evil Within
In A Grammar of Motives, Burke contends that, “Criminals either actual or imagi-
nary may . . . serve as [curative] scapegoats in a society that ‘purifies itself ’ by ‘moral
indignation’ in condemning them.”44 This is not to suggest, however, that those
seeking to “ritualistically cleanse themselves” of guilt can simply blame a chosen
party. The “scapegoat mechanism” is a complex process that entails three distinctive
stages: “(1) an original state of merger, in that the iniquities are shared by both the
iniquitous and their chosen vessel; (2) a principle of division, in that elements
shared in common are being ritualistically alienated; (3) a new principle of merger,
this time in the unification of those whose purified identity is defined in dialectical
opposition to the sacrificial offering.”45 For a “sacrificial vessel” to perform the role
of “vicarious atonement,” it must be, at first, “profoundly consubstantial with . . .
those who would be cured by attacking it.”46 It must represent their iniquities,
because symbolic forms that manage guilt can only be “successful if the audience is
guilty of the sins portrayed in the discourse.”47 Though the very earliest news
reports about the hatred and violence directed at Shepard had identified Aaron
McKinney and Russell Henderson as the main perpetrators, those same news
reports cast the two as representative of both their local and national communities.
As McKinney and Henderson were being arraigned, a significant amount of dis-
course was being generated about the state of Wyoming and the “cowboy culture”
490 RHETORIC & PUBLIC AFFAIRS
that had nurtured them.48 It was widely reported, for instance, that Wyoming was
one of only nine U.S. states to “have no hate-crime laws.”49 Another report noted
that, “Although Wyoming often bills itself as the ‘equality state,’ the state Legislature
has repeatedly voted down hate crime legislation”; the article subsequently quotes
Marv Johnson, executive director of the Wyoming chapter of the American Civil
Liberties Union, as saying, “Wyoming is not really gay friendly. . . . The best way to
characterize that is by a comment a legislator made a few years back, when he
likened homosexuals to gay bulls as worthless and should be sent to the packing
plant.”50 Similarly, Susanna Goodin, the University of Wyoming’s Ethics Center
director, told the Washington Post, “the beating [would] . . . prompt Wyoming resi-
dents to ponder the price of intolerance and indifference” (emphasis added).51 In
routinely referencing the “homophobia in the Wyoming legislature”52 and noting
that, in light of the attack, Laramie, Wyoming, “wrestled with its attitudes toward
gay men” (emphasis added),53 the news media initially framed the community’s
attitudes as consistent with the perpetrators’ attitudes. In fact, when jury selection
began for the trial of Henderson in March 1999, his defense attorney, Wyatt Skaggs,
was rather reflective about this association and told potential jurors, “[The media]
. . . has literally injected into our community a feeling of guilt. The press wants us
to think that we are somehow responsible for what went on October 6. Are any of
you here going to judge this case because you feel guilty and want to make a state-
ment to the nation?”54
Nor was Wyoming alone in being identified with the perpetrators’ attitudes and
motives. As Lopez observed in Time magazine, “The cowboy state has its rednecks
and yahoos, for sure, but there are no more bigots per capita in Wyoming than in
New York, Florida or California.”55 In the first few days after the attack, the public
was forced, if only temporarily, to confess the prevalence of homophobic attitudes
around the country. First was the incident involving the scarecrow on a homecom-
ing float at Colorado State University, which was reportedly painted with anti-gay
epithets.56 “While the papers were reluctant to report the full range of insults,”
Loffreda notes, “I heard that the signs read ‘I’m Gay’ and ‘Up My Ass.’”57 This inci-
dent prompted a number of reports about the prevalence of homophobic attitudes
in schools around the country.58 Additionally, there were widely circulated news
stories about the protestors at Shepard’s funeral. Shortly before he was eulogized,
Tom Kenworthy writes, “a dozen anti-gay protestors from Texas and Kansas staged
a demonstration across from St. Mark’s, carrying signs saying ‘No Fags in Heaven’
and ‘No Tears for Queers.’ . . . [including] a young girl carrying a sign that read
‘Fag=Anal Sex.’”59 In light of these stories, it was hardly surprising that a Time/CNN
poll found that “68 percent [of respondents] said attacks like the one against
Shepard could happen in their community” (emphasis added).60 For a few weeks
following the attack, the message in the media was that McKinney and Henderson
shared much in common with the country. But all of that was about to change.
THE MEDIA FRAMING OF THE MATTHEW SHEPARD MURDER 491
“At one moment the chosen [party] is a part of the clan, being one of their num-
ber,” explains Carter; “a moment later it symbolizes something apart from them,
being the curse they wish to lift from themselves.”61 Division or the “casting out” of
the vessel of unwanted evils is accomplished through vilification and through a
redrawing of boundaries that excludes the scapegoat. Slowly, almost unnoticeably,
discourse in the news media was shifting from the country’s homophobia to that of
the perpetrators, where it was being recoded as a character flaw rather than a wide-
scale institutional prejudice. In a statement demarcating the new communal
boundaries, Wyoming governor Jim Geringer told the Washington Post, “Wyoming
people are discouraged that all of us could be unfairly stereotyped by the actions of
two very sick and twisted people.”62 Accounts were also now suggesting that the two
perpetrators were uniquely ignorant. Time magazine noted that the two men were
“high school dropouts,” adding that, “In addition to being an unspeakably grue-
some crime, it was a profoundly dumb one.”63 After all, McKinney and Henderson
had drawn undue attention to themselves by getting into a fistfight with two other
men after beating Shepard. Reports such as this one functioned not only to cast the
men as especially dull-witted, but also to highlight a pattern of violence and crimi-
nality—one that would be further reinforced in subsequent reports about their pre-
vious run-ins with the law, including convictions for felony burglary and drunk
driving. Additionally, there was the matter of deception, premeditation, and merci-
less cruelty. The news media were now reporting that, according to law enforce-
ment, the two men had pretended to be gay to lure Shepard out of the bar and into
their pickup truck, and that they had continued to beat him as he begged for his
life.64
As time passed, Shepard’s attackers became ever more alienated from the public.
They were uneducated, drug addicted, career criminals, who had maliciously sought
out their victim because he was gay, and they now “found themselves called ‘subhu-
man’ and ‘monsters.’”65 In an uncharacteristic moment of reflective journalism, a Los
Angeles Times staff writer comments on Henderson and McKinney’s vilification:
In the six months since Shepard’s gruesome death, the protagonists have become
dehumanized . . . transmuted by the American compulsion for fashioning moral
lessons out of tragedy. This morality play staged in a Western prairie town has
demanded simplistic roles: Shepard, the earnest college student who was targeted
because he was gay and gave his life to advance a social cause. Henderson and
McKinney, the high school dropouts accused of beating Shepard to death, have been
cast as remorseless killers. 66
The symbolic distance between the public and McKinney and Henderson grew
even wider during McKinney’s trial in October 1999, where gruesome new details
from the night of the beating were revealed. The news media seized on one detail in
492 RHETORIC & PUBLIC AFFAIRS
particular, in which McKinney stopped beating Shepard to ask if he could read the
license plate on his truck. When Shepard replied, “yes” and recited the plate’s num-
bers, McKinney resumed the attack despite Shepard’s repeated pleas for mercy. The
story embodied the view that McKinney was not quite human, and prosecuting
attorney Cal Rerucha retold it in his closing arguments, calling McKinney a “savage
and a ‘wolf ’ who preyed on the lamb-like Shepard.”67 As if to further distinguish
McKinney from the public, following his conviction the news media widely
reported that various national, leading gay rights groups had, along with the
Shepard family, publicly condemned the death penalty in this case. As Matthew
Shepard’s father, Dennis Shepard, would tell the court in a written statement fol-
lowing the trial, “this is a time to begin the healing process. To show mercy to some-
one who refused to show any mercy.”68 Mr. Shepard’s statement captured the
essence of how the media was naming the difference between the public and the
perpetrators, one human and the other not quite.
Restoring the Social Order
With the surrogate of evil driven from the community, all that remains for creating
symbolic closure is the punishment of evil and the reaffirmation of the social and
moral order. “Tragedy,” explains Barry Brummett, “subjects the erring [figure] to
trial, finds him or her to be criminal, and demands condemnation and penance.”69
In March 1999, Russell Henderson pled guilty, leaving only McKinney to stand trial.
The significance of the trial to the outcome of the story was evident before it even
began. “The trial will,” wrote Kenworthy in the Washington Post, “close the book on
an ugly crime that grabbed the nation by the shoulders and forced it to confront the
price of hate and intolerance—and then served as a rallying point . . . for gay rights”
(emphasis added).70 During the case, McKinney’s lawyers attempted to advance a
“gay panic defense,” which claimed the victim’s sexual advances triggered panic and
led to the beating. But Judge Barton Voigt ruled it “inadmissible . . . based on
Wyoming law,” and on November 3, 1999—shortly more than a year after Matthew
Shepard’s death—Aaron McKinney was convicted of murder and sentenced to two
consecutive life terms with no chance of parole. “The trial,” observed Phil Curtis in
The Advocate, “delivered an emotionally satisfying vindication for Shepard’s death
and brought closure to the Shepard family and to the public, who had followed the
grim case for the past year” (emphasis added).71 As odd, perhaps even unbelievable,
as it seems, the verdict did deliver both symbolic satisfaction and closure for some.
Explains Robert Heath, “As a dynamic progression of an idea, each work [that is,
story] leads toward some resolution. If it is achieved, reader and author experience
a release, the sheer pleasure of having gone through the process.”72 To the extent
that the story began with the brutal beating of Matthew Shepard, the conviction
and punishment of his assailants signals its close.
THE MEDIA FRAMING OF THE MATTHEW SHEPARD MURDER 493
But the conviction of McKinney had an additional and important side effect. In
performing a cathartic function for the public (that is, purging them of their guilt
through victimage) and bringing closure to the story, it also brought a sense of res-
olution to the debate about gay rights and hate-crimes legislation that Shepard’s
death had initiated. Since these issues had been framed in relation to the story about
Matthew Shepard’s murder, the story’s conclusion functioned to bring closure to
them as well. The national public debate over hate crimes and gay politics dissipated
almost as quickly as it had emerged. Two weeks following Shepard’s death in
October 1998, a Time/CNN poll asked respondents, “Federal law mandates
increased penalties for people who commit hate crimes against racial minorities. Do
you favor or oppose the same treatment for people who commit hate crimes against
homosexuals?”73 At that time, 76 percent of the public favored hate-crimes legisla-
tion that protected homosexuals and 19 percent opposed it.74 In the months fol-
lowing his death, legislation to increase the penalty for hate crimes against gays and
lesbians was introduced in 26 states. By the time these bills came up for vote, how-
ever, the Matthew Shepard story was winding toward narrative conclusion, and only
one state, Missouri, passed new legislation.75 Perhaps even more telling, The
Advocate reports that, “After McKinney’s conviction Judy and Dennis Shepard . . .
traveled to Washington, D.C., to lobby for federal hate-crimes legislation. Their
effort failed. A hate-crimes measure was removed from a budget bill in congres-
sional committee just weeks after the trial.”76 In fostering symbolic resolution
through narrative closure, the news media’s coverage of the story re-imposed order
and eliminated the self-reflective space that might serve as the basis for social and
political change.
FRAMING AND REFRAMING
Having described the news media’s framing of the Matthew Shepard story and hav-
ing analyzed how those frames functioned rhetorically to absolve the public of its
guilt associated with the motives of the murder, we will now take a step back and
pose the question, “What difference do the frames make for the larger world?”77
That is, how does the news media’s framing of that event also function ideologi-
cally? How does it invite the public to view the world, social relations, and GLBT
identities? How does it affirm, challenge, and negotiate centers, margins, and rela-
tionships of power? To get after these questions, we propose to look at the way in
which the story works to naturalize particular sets of social relations at both the
level of language (microscopic) and the level of symbolic form (macroscopic).78
With regard to the linguistic level, we are specifically interested in the consequences
of the media’s “naming” of the victim’s body and the perpetrators’ motives.
Prejudice and discrimination against GLBT persons have historically been con-
nected to the stigmatization of the body as different or abnormal.79 In fact, Erving
494 RHETORIC & PUBLIC AFFAIRS
Goffman notes that, “The Greeks, who were apparently strong on visual aids, origi-
nated the term stigma to refer to bodily signs designed to expose something unusual
and bad about the moral status of the signifier.”80 The homosexual body has tradi-
tionally been stigmatized or marked as abnormal in a wide variety of ways; it has var-
iously been coded as dirty and unclean, effeminate and queer, and threatening and
predatory to suit the needs of those in power.81 One way the bodies of gay men have
been stigmatized as threatening and predatory, for instance, is “with the allegation
that they are disproportionately responsible for child sexual abuse.”82 The obvious
ridiculousness of this claim has not stopped the media from perpetuating it, and a
1998 study of Newsweek found that 60 percent of stories about child molestation
involved homosexuals.83 This pattern of naming in the media raises an important
question about the Matthew Shepard story: “Would Shepard have received the atten-
tion he did had his body not so easily been coded as unthreatening?”
Though there is no way to answer this question with certainty, one thing that is
clear is that Shepard’s body was coded as unthreatening and his story captured
national headlines. Writing in The Progressive, JoAnn Wypijewski speculated that
one reason people uncomfortable with homosexuality may have sympathized with
this case is because for them, “Shepard is the perfect queer: young, pretty, and
dead.”84 Indeed, it is difficult not to wonder how this story might have been told dif-
ferently, if at all, had the victim been a minority, especially when the murder of Fred
Martinez, a 16-year-old transgendered Navajo in Colorado hardly raised an eye-
brow,85 as did the murder of Arthur Warren, a gay black man, in rural West
Virginia,86 and the murder of five black gay men in Washington “by someone
authorities believe to be an antigay serial killer.”87 The media’s double standard here
would seem to suggest that an anti-gay murder is tragic so long as the victim is not
too gay, which is to say, too different. The issue of Shepard’s small, non-threatening
stature raises still more questions about the intersection of stigmatization and the
gay male body.
In McKinney’s trial, the defense attempted to shift responsibility for the beating
back to the victim by claiming that Shepard’s homosexuality had evoked fear and
panic. Though Judge Voight ruled this line of argument and testimony “inadmissi-
ble,” he cautiously reminded the media that his ruling was “not intended to send a
social or political commentary, [and rather] was based on Wyoming law.”88 In other
anti-gay hate crimes where the victim was not as outwardly innocent (that is, frail,
youthful, white, middle-class) as Matthew Shepard, the “gay panic” defense has
been allowed.89 The use of such a defense is not all that surprising, however, when
one considers its ideological consistency with the term used to name the motive in
such cases, “homophobia.” According to Byrne Fone, “The term ‘homophobia’ is
now popularly construed to mean fear and dislike of homosexuality and of those
who practice it” or an “extreme rage and fear reaction to homosexuals.”90 Both def-
initions “place the onus on the oppressed rather than on the agents of oppression,”91
THE MEDIA FRAMING OF THE MATTHEW SHEPARD MURDER 495
effectively revictimizing the victim by making the oppressed the source, the instiga-
tor, of fear and disruption. The popularity of the term “homophobia” to describe
anti-gay attitudes is just one example of how public discourse regarding GLBT per-
sons continues to construct homosexuality as abnormal (in this case, “fear-produc-
ing”). In the Matt Shepard story, homosexuality was further marked as different
and hence deviant by the media’s consistent and ubiquitous references to Shepard’s
“gay” sexuality. There were no headlines that reported, “Man Killed by Straight
Attackers,” and no articles that named Henderson or McKinney’s sexuality. In treat-
ing heterosexuality as invisible, the media both privilege it as the norm and as nor-
mal. At the level of language, then, the media’s telling of the Matthew Shepard story
functions to reproduce a hegemonic set of sociocultural categories in which homo-
sexuality is marginal and Other. Until the unspoken assumptions that frame the
dominant discourses about GLBT persons are questioned and interrogated, hatred
and the violence it begets are likely to remain prominent features of our cultural
landscape.
Like the linguistic particularities, we believe that the underlying symbolic form
of the story matters ideologically, and so we turn now to the “big picture,” to, as
Burke explains, the various typical ways that the most basic of attitudes (that is, yes,
no, maybe) are “grandly symbolized.”92 Symbolic forms can be, according to Burke,
loosely grouped into “frames of acceptance” and “frames of rejection” based on the
general orientation they adopt in “the face of anguish, injustice, disease, and
death.”93 Literary forms such as epic, tragedy, and comedy are frames of acceptance
because they equip persons to “come to terms” with an event and their place in the
world. Precisely how they “come to terms” varies according to the symbolic form
(that is, epic, tragedy, comedy, and so forth) at work, and influences, in turn, where
they and the world can go with those terms. In shaping attitudes, symbolic forms
serve as a basis for programmatic action. Our analysis of the Matthew Shepard story
suggests that it was framed primarily in tragic terms, in which the public, through
the scapegoat mechanism, cleansed itself of the guilt associated with prejudice,
hatred, violence, and their intersection. The shortcoming of tragic framing is that it
brings about symbolic resolution without turning the event into a lesson for those
involved. By projecting its iniquity upon McKinney and Henderson and attacking
them, the public achieves resolution in this instance, but does not substantively alter
its character as to insure that future instances are less likely. On the contrary, this
mode aggressively perpetuates the status quo, cloaking but not erasing the public’s
homophobia (and we do mean the politically loaded term “homophobia”) so that
it can return another day.
So what are the alternatives? The media could adopt frames of rejection such as
those found in the literary forms of elegy, satire, burlesque, and the grotesque.94
The difficulty here is that “frames stressing the ingredient of rejection tend to lack
the well-rounded quality of a complete here-and-now philosophy. They make for
496 RHETORIC & PUBLIC AFFAIRS
fanaticism, the singling-out of one factor above others in the charting of human
relationships.”95 By “coming to terms” with an event primarily by saying “no,”
frames of rejection are unable to equip individuals and groups to take program-
matic action. A discourse that is wholly debunking is, at least in isolation, ill suited
for bringing about social change.96
A second and preferable alternative, according to Burke, is adopting a “comic
frame,” which is “neither wholly euphemistic [as is tragedy], nor wholly debunk-
ing.”97 As numerous scholars have noted, the comic frame is not about seeing
humor in everything;98 it is about maximum consciousness—“self-awareness and
social responsibility at the same time.”99 The comic frame is one of “ambivalence,”
a flexible, adaptive, charitable frame that enables “people to be observers of them-
selves, while acting.”100 In shifting the emphasis “from crime to stupidity,” Brummett
maintains that the comic frame provides motives that “teach the fool—and vicari-
ously the audience—about error so that it may be corrected rather than punished”
(emphasis added).101 “The progress of humane enlightenment,” explains Burke,
“can go no further than in picturing people not as vicious, but as mistaken.”102
When social injustices such as the anti-gay beating of Matthew Shepard are framed
in tragic terms, naming McKinney and Henderson as vicious, the public finds expi-
ation externally in the punishment of those identified as responsible. Framed in
comic terms, however, one can identify with the mistaken, become a student of
her/himself, “‘transcend’ himself by noting his own foibles,” and learn from the
experience.103 The comic frame “promotes integrative, socializing knowledge”104 by
emphasizing humility (the recognition that we are all sometimes wrong) over
humiliation (the desire to victimize others).
CRITICAL REFLECTIONS
A frame analysis of the print media’s coverage of the Matthew Shepard murder rein-
forces a number of previous findings about how the news is made. The manner in
which this story, for instance, gained national prominence testifies to the link
between the dramatic qualities of an event and its perceived newsworthiness.105
Since drama increases ratings and “[n]ews content is influenced by the fact that . . .
media corporations have a profit orientation,”106 news outlets both seek out stories
with dramatic properties and emphasize those properties in their reporting. The
profit-driven focus on a story’s dramatic elements accounts, at least partially, for the
striking consistency among news reports in the Matthew Shepard case. All three of
the national newspapers we analyzed named the event as a vicious anti-gay hate
crime, constructed Shepard as a political symbol of gay rights, and transferred the
public’s guilt onto McKinney and Henderson. Even Time and The Advocate, publi-
cations with varied political perspectives, framed the story in comparable ways.
Though The Advocate offered more extensive coverage, particularly with regard to
THE MEDIA FRAMING OF THE MATTHEW SHEPARD MURDER 497
Matthew Shepard and his family, the basic contours of the story remained the same.
Consistency among news reports is also a product of traditional journalistic rou-
tines and practices. Both the New York Times and the Washington Post assigned a
primary reporter to the story, while the Los Angeles Times pulled the vast majority
of its stories from the Associated Press. The homogeneity of the reports, then,
reflects fewer voices gathering data from the same experts and highlighting the
same dramatic properties.107
In addition to these broad findings, our analysis points to some specific conclu-
sions about how the news media report on public traumas and the attendant social
consequences of such reporting. The news media’s fascination with personalities
and drama over institutional and social problems contributes to the “tragic fram-
ing” of public disasters and events. Since tragic frames ultimately alleviate the social
guilt associated with a disaster through victimage, they tend to bring both closure
and resolution to the larger social issues they raise. As such, tragic frames do not
serve the public well as a basis for social and political action. Though media
research on agenda setting has clearly established that the news media influence
which political issues are on the public’s mind,108 few studies have looked at how
changes in the public agenda may be linked to the piggybacking of social issues onto
specific dramatic stories. Future research on agenda setting should attend carefully
to the connection between symbolic forms such as the tragic frame and shifts in the
public agenda. Our analysis of news coverage of the Matthew Shepard murder
found that hate-crimes legislation and gay rights were central public concerns until
Shepard’s story came to a close. In light of this finding, it would be worth examin-
ing how declining coverage of the Columbine shootings may have contributed sim-
ilarly to the dissipation of national public discourse on youth violence. The
implications of our analysis extend beyond the matter of the media’s role in estab-
lishing a public agenda. Since “frames are fundamental aspects of human con-
sciousness and shape our attitudes toward the world and each other,”109 media
frames function ideologically. In Matthew Shepard’s case, we believe that news
media reproduced a discursive system of prejudice that contributed to Shepard’s
death. We can, however, learn from this event and the media’s coverage of it. To
introduce this essay, we attempted to provide an outline of the Matthew Shepard
story that accurately captured the news media’s tragic framing of that event. To con-
clude, we return to that story and adopt an alternative, more comic frame.
Despite commitments to both diversity and equality, the nation continued its
painful struggle with tolerance today, as Laramie, Wyoming, became the most
recent in a long list of U.S. towns and cities to witness, experience, and participate
in violence motivated by culturally constructed notions of difference. In an all-too-
familiar scene, two young men, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, foolishly
allowed their actions to be guided by social ignorance. Goaded, like a vast majority
of people, by a deep desire to feel accepted and acceptable, Aaron and Russell
498 RHETORIC & PUBLIC AFFAIRS
assaulted Matthew Shepard, a University of Wyoming student, for what they per-
ceived to be an intolerable difference, homosexuality. The assault, which resulted in
Matthew’s death, highlights a pattern of behavior in which individuals seek com-
munal identification and the comfort and security that accompanies it through the
expulsion of difference. Such an impulse is, of course, profoundly misguided as it
reduces community to sameness, while ignoring the fact that difference is always a
matter of perspective and depends upon who is naming it. Aaron and Russell’s
actions serve as a powerful reminder that if we truly hope to build healthy and
humane communities, then we must aim to bridge the very differences we create.
When we cast out others, the attitude is one of superiority and humiliation, and the
act is one of violence. For us to curb violence like that seen most recently in
Wyoming, we must all begin to erase the “battle lines” that are drawn again and
again when we exalt ourselves over others.
NOTES
1. Beth Loffreda, Losing Matt Shepard: Life and Politics in the Aftermath of Anti-Gay Murder
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), x.
2. We are using “memory” in a somewhat more general sense than rhetorical and media
scholars who study “public memory.” Our concern is not with how the news media con-
struct invitations to a shared sense of the past or with the politics of commemoration, but
with how the “life” of a political issue—its birth, growth, and death—is related to its fram-
ing in the news media. For an overview of the literature on public memory in rhetorical
studies, see Stephen H. Browne, “Reading, Rhetoric, and the Texture of Public Memory,”
Quarterly Journal of Speech 81 (1995): 237–65. For variations on this theme, see also Carole
Blair, Marsha S. Jeppeson, and Enrico Pucci, Jr., “Public Memorializing in Postmodernity:
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial as Prototype,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 77 (1991):
263–88; John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism
in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992); James E.
Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1993). For an overview of the literature on public memory in media stud-
ies, see Barbie Zelizer, “Reading the Past Against the Grain: The Shape of Memory Studies,”
Critical Studies in Mass Communication 12 (1995): 214–39. For variations on this theme,
see also Martin J. Medhurst, “The Rhetorical Structure of Oliver Stone’s JFK,” Critical
Studies in Mass Communication 10 (1993): 128–43; Thomas W. Benson, “Thinking
through Film: Hollywood Remembers the Blacklist,” in Rhetoric and Community: Studies
in Unity and Fragmentation, ed. J. Michael Hogan (Columbia: University of South
Carolina Press, 1988), 217-55.
3. Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action (Louisiana State
University Press, 1941), 302–4.
4. Kenneth Burke, Attitudes Toward History, 3d ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1984), 34.
5. Kenneth Burke, Counter-Statement, 2d ed. (Los Altos, Calif.: Hermes Publications, 1953),
139.
THE MEDIA FRAMING OF THE MATTHEW SHEPARD MURDER 499
6. Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 44–45.
7. In media studies, “frames analysis” derives from the work of Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis:
An Essay on the Organization of Experience (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974). See
W. Lance Bennett, News: The Politics of Illusion, 2d ed. (New York: Longman, 1988); W. Lance
Bennett, “The News about Foreign Policy,” in Taken by Storm: The Media, Public Opinion, and
U.S. Foreign Policy in the Gulf War, ed. W. Lance Bennett and David L. Paletz (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1994), 12–40; Todd Gitlin, “The Whole World is Watching,” in
Transmission: Toward a Post-Television Culture, 2d ed., ed. Peter d’Agostine and David Tafler
(Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1995), 91–103; Shanto Iyengar, Is Anyone
Responsible? How Television Frames Political Issues (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1991); and Shanto Iyengar and Adam Simon, “News Coverage of the Gulf Crisis and Public
Opinion: A Study of Agenda-Setting, Priming, and Framing,” in Taken by Storm, 167–85.
8. Iyengar and Simon, “News Coverage,” 171.
9. Iyengar, Is Anyone Responsible?, 14.
10. Bennett, “News about Foreign Policy,” 31.
11. Everette Dennis et al., Covering the Presidential Primaries (New York: The Freedom Forum
Media Studies Center, 1992), 59.
12. Burke, Counter-Statement, 31, 124.
13. C. Allen Carter, Kenneth Burke and the Scapegoat Process (Norman: University of Oklahoma
Press, 1996), 40.
14. Bennett, News, 35.
15. Quoted in Loffreda, Losing Matt Shepard, 5.
16. Though the “scarecrow” image would appear in news reports repeatedly and even in poetry
long after the event, “Matt hadn’t actually been tied like a scarecrow; when he was
approached first by the mountain biker, Aaron Kreifels, and then by Reggie Fluty, the sher-
iff ’s deputy who answered Kreifels’s emergency call, Matt lay on his back, head propped
against the fence, legs outstretched. His hands were lashed behind him and tied barely four
inches off the ground to a fencepost” (Loffreda, Losing Matt Shepard, 5).
17. James Brooke, “Gay Man Beaten and Left For Dead; 2 Are Charged,” New York Times,
October 10, 1998, sec. A09.
18. “Gay Student Brutally Beaten; 4 Arrested,” Los Angeles Times, October 10, 1998, 16.
19. Tom Kenworthy, “Gay Man Near Death after Beating, Burning; Three Held in Wyoming
Attack Near Campus; Hate Crimes Suspected,” Washington Post, October 10, 1998, sec. A01.
20. “Gay Student Brutally Beaten,” 16.
21. Kenworthy, “Gay Man Near Death,” sec. A01.
22. Brooke, “Gay Man Beaten,” sec. A09.
23. “Gay Student Brutally Beaten,” 16.
24. Tom Kenworthy, “In Wyoming, Homecoming Infused with Hard Lesson on Intolerance,”
Washington Post, October 11, 1998, sec. A02.
25. Bennett, News, 26.
26. As Wyoming governor Jim Geringer told the Washington Post shortly after Shepard’s death,
“[we all] feel a sense of tragedy and disbelief that a human life could be taken in such a bru-
tal way. We must now find closure.” (Tom Kenworthy, “Gay Wyoming Student Succumbs to
Injuries,” Washington Post, October 13, 1998, sec. A07).
500 RHETORIC & PUBLIC AFFAIRS
27. Tom Kenworthy, “Hundreds Gather to Remember Slain Man as ‘Light to the World’; Anti-
Gay Forces Incite Shouting Match at Wyoming Funeral,” Washington Post, October 17, 1998,
sec. A03.
28. Loffreda, Losing Matt Shepard, 13.
29. Kenworthy, “In Wyoming,” sec. A02.
30. Kenworthy, “Hundreds Gather,” sec. A03.
31. Justin Gillis and Patrice Gaines, “Pattern of Hate Emerges on a Fence in Laramie; Gay
Victims’ Killers Say They Saw an Easy Crime Target,” Washington Post, October 18, 1998, sec.
A01.
32. Gillis and Gaines, “Pattern of Hate,” sec. A01.
33. Allan Lengel, “Thousands Mourn Student’s Death; Beating in Wyoming Sparks New Push
for Hate-Crimes Laws,” Washington Post, October 15, 1998, sec. A07.
34. Richard Lacayo, “The New Gay Struggle,” Time, October 26, 1998, 34. President Clinton con-
tinued to use the Matthew Shepard murder as a rallying cry for the passage of a federal hate-
crimes bill over the course of the next year. See “Clinton Urges Expanding Federal Hate
Crimes Law,” Los Angeles Times, April 7, 1999, home edition, 4; “White House to Host
Meeting on Tougher U.S. Hate Crime Law,” Los Angeles Times, July 10, 1999, valley edition,
13B; Charles Babington, “Clinton Urges Congress to Toughen Laws on Hate Crimes, Guns,”
Washington Post, October 16, 1999, sec. A11.
35. Lisa Neff, “The Best Defense: Activists Plan Demonstrations in 50 States to Fight for Basic
Human Rights,” The Advocate, March 16, 1999, 40. Shepard’s centrality to the national
debate surrounding gay rights and hate-crimes legislation is evident in press reports from
the time of his death until the conviction of McKinney. “Shepard’s brutal murder put a spot-
light on hate crimes” (“Nation in Brief/Wyoming,” Los Angeles Times, May 22, 1999, home
edition, 12). “The crime galvanized the gay and lesbian community and became a rallying
point in the push for hate crime laws” (John L. Mitchell, “Vigil Marks Anniversary of Slaying
of Gay Student,” Los Angeles Times, October 13, 1999, home edition, 3). “The death of
Shepard focused public attention on violence against homosexuals and stimulated at-times
feverish debate about hate crimes legislation” (Julie Cart, “Defense Says Homosexual
Advance Triggered Slaying, Los Angeles Times, October 26, 1999, home edition, 20). “[Matt
Shepard’s] death galvanized those seeking to expand the nation’s hate-crime laws” (“Attack
on Gay Was Planned, Witness Says,” Los Angeles Times, October 29, 1999, valley edition,
23A). “The death of the college student [Matt Shepard] ignited national debate over hate
crimes and violence against homosexuals” (Julie Cart, “Man Guilty in Shepard Slaying,
Could Get Death,” Los Angeles Times, November 4, 1999, home edition, 37). “The brutal
murder of the wholesome-looking Shepard struck a chord across America. It spurred calls
for the enactment of hate crime legislation” (Julie Cart, “Killer of Gay Student Is Spared
Death Penalty,” Los Angeles Times, November 5, 1999, home edition, 1). “The murder [of
Matt Shepard] last October gained nationwide publicity and spurred calls by gay and lesbian
activists for enactment of tough anti-hate crime legislation nationally” (Tom Kenworthy,
“2nd Man is Convicted of Killing Gay Student,” Washington Post, November 4, 1999, sec.
A1). “The case [of Matt Shepard] became a rallying cry for states and the Federal
Government to pass and expand hate-crime measures” (Michael Janofsky, “A Defense to
Avoid Execution,” New York Times, October 26, 1999, sec. A18). See also Carl Ingram,
“California and the West,” Los Angeles Times, October 3, 1999, home edition, 24; “Families of
Hate Crime Victims Unite at Rally,” Los Angeles Times, October 10, 1999, home edition, 12;
Tom Kenworthy, “‘Gay Panic’ Defense Stirs Wyo. Trial,” Washington Post, October 26, 1999,
THE MEDIA FRAMING OF THE MATTHEW SHEPARD MURDER 501
sec. A2; Tom Kenworthy, “Wyo. Jury to Weigh Motives in Gay Killing,” Washington Post,
November 3, 1999, sec. A3; Bill Carter, “Shepard’s Parents,” New York Times, February 3,
1999, sec. E7.
36. Bruce Shenitz, “Laramie’s Legacy,” Out, October 2001, 76, 110.
37. Gillis and Gaines, “Pattern of Hate,” sec. A01; A second article reported that “in 1996, 21 men
and women were killed in the United States because of their sexual orientation, according to
the Southern Poverty Law Center, an Alabama group that tracks violence against minorities.
According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, sexual orientation was a factor in 11.6 per-
cent of the 8,759 hate crimes recorded in 1996.” (James Brooke, “Gay Man Dies from Attack,
Fanning Outrage and Debate,” New York Times, October 13, 1998, sec. A17). Sexual orienta-
tion ranks third behind race and religion as the motive for (reported) hate crimes. See “2000
FBI Hate Crime Statistics,” Human Rights Campaign, retrieved April 20, 2002, from
38. Gillis and Gaines, “Pattern of Hate,” sec. A01.
39. Shenitz, “Laramie’s Legacy,” 76, 110.
40. Quoted in Shenitz, “Laramie’s Legacy,” 77.
41. Kenworthy, “In Wyoming,” sec. A02.
42. Steve Lopez, “To Be Young and Gay in Wyoming,” Time, October 26, 1998, 38.
43. Kenneth Burke, The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 5.
44. Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (New York: Prentice Hall, 1945), 406.
45. Burke, A Grammar of Motives, 406.
46. Burke, A Grammar of Motives, 406.
47. Barry Brummett, “Burkean Comedy and Tragedy, Illustrated in Reactions to the Arrest of
John Delorean,” Central States Speech Journal 35 (1984): 218.
48. Lopez, “To Be Young,” 38.
49. Brooke, “Gay Man Dies,” sec. A17. See also “2 Suspects in Gay’s Killing to Face Death,” Los
Angeles Times, December 29, 1998, home edition, 14; “Death Penalty Asked in Gay Man’s
Murder,” Washington Post, December 29, 1998; sec. A6; “Wyo. Governor Backs Bill on Hate
Crimes,” Washington Post, January 19, 1999, sec. A9.
50. Brooke, “Gay Man Beaten,” sec. A09.
51. Kenworthy, “In Wyoming,” sec. A02.
52. Lopez, “To Be Young,” 39.
53. James Brooke, “After Beating of Gay Man, Town Looks at Its Attitudes,” New York Times,
October 12, 1998, sec. A12.
54. “Jury Selection Starts in Wyoming Hate-Crime Trial,” Washington Post, March 25, 1999, sec.
A15. “Laramie, Wyo.—This small city on the high plains of southeast Wyoming has looked
upon itself as a peaceful, law-abiding community ever since 1868. . . . Those images became
blurred last fall with the brutal beating death of Matthew Shepard, a gay university student:
To the outside world, Laramie suddenly became the place where a vicious hate crime took
place, where below the patina of tolerance lurked a deep streak of cowboy intolerance” (Tom
Kenworthy, “After Slaying, Community Takes a Punishing Look at Itself,” Washington Post,
April 5, 1999, sec. A3). See also James Brooke, “Wyoming City Braces for Gay Murder Trial,”
New York Times, April 4, 1999, sec. 14.
55. Lopez, “To Be Young,” 38.
502 RHETORIC & PUBLIC AFFAIRS
56. In one of our classrooms, a year after the murder, a student connected to individuals held
accountable for the dehumanizing event in the Colorado State University parade would con-
firm, under the promise of anonymity, the use of the anti-gay epithets “I’m Gay” and “Up
My Ass.”
57. Loffreda, Losing Matt Shepard, 10.
58. James Brooke, “Homophobia often Found in Schools, Data Show,” New York Times, October
14, 1998, sec. A19.
59. Kenworthy, “Hundreds Gather,” sec. A03.
60. Gillis and Gaines, “Pattern of Hate,” sec. A01.
61. Carter, Kenneth Burke, 18.
62. The Wyoming governor went on to say, “[We] feel a sense of tragedy and disbelief that a
human life could be taken in such a way. We must now find closure” (Kenworthy, “Gay
Wyoming Student Succumbs,” sec. A07).
63. Lopez, “To Be Young,” 39.
64. “Brutal Beating of Gay Student is Condemned,” Los Angeles Times, October 11, 1998, 16.
News reports repeatedly emphasized that Matt Shepard was deceived into going with his
attackers—that Henderson and McKinney “posed as homosexuals and lured Shepard from
the bar” (Tom Kenworthy, “‘I’m Going to Grant You Life,’” Washington Post, February 5,
1999, sec. A2). See also Julie Cart, “Gay’s Slaying Spawns Morality Play,” Los Angeles Times,
March 24, 1999, home edition, 11; Julie Cart, “Plea Averts 1st Trial in Slaying of Gay
Student,” Los Angeles Times, April 6, 1999, home edition, 1; “Attack on Gay,” 23A; Tom
Kenworthy, “Gay Student’s Attacker Pleads Guilty, Gets Two Life Terms,” Washington Post,
April 6, 1999, sec. A2; “Wyoming Judge Bars ‘Gay Panic’ Defense, Washington Post,
November 2, 1999, sec. A7; Kenworthy, “2nd Man Is Convicted,” sec. A1; James Brooke, “Gay
Murder Trial Ends with Guilty Plea,” New York Times, April 6, 1999, sec. A20.
65. Chris Bull, “A Matter of Life and Death,” The Advocate, March 16, 1999, 38.
66. Cart, “Gay’s Slaying Spawns,” 11.
67. Kenworthy, “‘Gay Panic’ Defense,” sec. A2; Cart, “Man Guilty,” 37.
68. Phil Curtis, “Hate Crimes: More than a Verdict,” The Advocate, January 18, 2000, 36. See also
Cart, “Killer of Gay Student,” 1; Michael Janofsky, “Parents of Gay Obtain Mercy for His
Killer,” New York Times, November 5, 1999, sec. A1.
69. Brummett, “Burkean Comedy,” 219.
70. Tom Kenworthy, “Slain Gay Man’s Mother Tries to Show Hate’s ‘Real’ Cost,” Washington Post,
October 10, 1999, sec. A2.
71. Curtis, “Hate Crimes,” 34–35. The notion that McKinney’s conviction signaled the end for
more than just the trial was evident in other news reports as well. “For the citizens of
Wyoming, who often felt that their state’s Western philosophies were on trial, the end of the
yearlong ordeal was welcome” (Cart, “Killer of Gay Student,” 1). “The verdict, which came
after 10 hours of deliberations over two days, brought a swift end to a case that has been
watched closely because of the brutality of the crime and the sexual orientation of the vic-
tim” (Michael Janofsky, “Man is Convicted of Killing of Gay Student,” New York Times,
November 4, 1999, sec. A14).
72. Robert L. Heath, Realism and Relativism: A Perspective on Kenneth Burke (Macon, Ga.:
Mercer University Press, 1986), 246.
73. In Lopez, “To Be Young,” 38.
THE MEDIA FRAMING OF THE MATTHEW SHEPARD MURDER 503
74. What is significant about this poll is not the distribution, which was likely a product of how
the questions were asked, but that the poll was published in a news report at all. The inclu-
sion of the poll contributes to the perception that this issue is significant. After McKinney’s
conviction, polls like this one disappeared from the public eye.
75. Curtis, “Hate Crimes,” 38. Since January 2000, four states have passed hate-crimes legisla-
tion, including Texas, which approved a hate-crimes bill in 2001. A similar bill, however, was
suppressed two years earlier in Texas because it specifically included protection for gays. See
Ross E. Milloy, “Texas Senate Passes Hate Crimes Bill that Bush’s Allies Killed,” New York
Times, May 8, 2001, sec. A16. The five states, as of April 16, 2002, that still have no hate-
crimes laws are Arkansas, Indiana, New Mexico, South Carolina, and Wyoming. Of the 45
states with hate-crimes laws, 18 states have laws that do not explicitly include sexual orien-
tation. See “Does Your State’s Hate Crimes Law Include Sexual Orientation and Gender
Identity?” Human Rights Campaign, retrieved April 16, 2002, from
76. Curtis, “Hate Crimes,” 38.
77. Gitlin, “The Whole World,” 96.
78. We are suggesting that there are multiple layers of framing. A picture frame, for instance,
shapes how viewers perceive a picture, but so too does the picture’s presence in a larger struc-
ture such as the frame of a building. Indeed, individuals respond very differently to pictures
hanging in a private home than to those hanging in a museum.
79. See George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male
World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 13.
80. Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (Englewood Cliffs,
N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963), 1.
81. Byrne Fone, Homophobia: A History (New York: Picador USA, 2000), 5.
82. Gerhard Falk, Stigma: How We Treat Outsiders (New York: Prometheus Books, 2001), 74.
83. See Falk, Stigma, 73–74.
84. Quoted in Shenitz, “Laramie’s Legacy,” 110.
85. See Shenitz, “Laramie’s Legacy,” 111.
86. Tracey A. Reeves, “A Town Searches its Soul: After Gay Black Man is Slain, W. VA. Residents
Ask Why,” Washington Post, July 20, 2000, sec. A01.
87. Fone, Homophobia, 413.
88. Curtis, “Hate Crimes,” 35.
89. One of many cases where the “gay panic defense” was allowed is that of Michael Auker, who
was stomped and beaten by Todd Clinger, 18, and Troy Clinger, 20, in Pennsylvania. “After
rendering Auker unconscious, the two allegedly transported him to his home where he was
found comatose two days later” (Barbara Dozetos, “Brothers Claim ‘Gay Panic’ after Beating
that Left Man in Coma,” The Gay.com Network, retrieved December 13, 2001, from
this example especially intriguing because of how closely the crime mirrored the Matthew
Shepard beating.
90. Fone, Homophobia, 5.
91. Warren J. Blumenfeld, introduction to Homophobia: How We All Pay the Price, ed. Warren J.
Blumenfeld (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), 15.
92. Burke, Attitudes, introduction.
504 RHETORIC & PUBLIC AFFAIRS
93. Burke, Attitudes, 3.
94. “‘Rejection’ is a by-product of ‘acceptance’ . . . It is the heretical aspect of an orthodoxy—and
as such, it has much in common with the ‘frame of acceptance’ that it rejects” (Burke,
Attitudes, 21). Burke also posits, “Could we not say that all symbolic structures are designed
to produce such ‘acceptance’ in one form or another?” (emphasis added, Attitudes, 19–20).
95. Burke, Attitudes, 28–29.
96. Burke, Attitudes, 92; see also William H. Rueckert, Encounters with Kenneth Burke (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1994), 118.
97. Burke, Attitudes, 166.
98. Stanley Edgar Hyman, “Kenneth Burke and the Criticism of Symbolic Action,” in Landmark
Essays on Kenneth Burke, ed. Barry Brummett (Davis, Calif.: Hermagoras Press, 1993), 29;
Timothy N. Thompson and Anthony J. Palmeri, “Attitudes toward Counternature (with
Notes on Nurturing a Poetic Psychosis),” in Extensions of the Burkean System, ed. James W.
Chesebro (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993), 276.
99. Rueckert, Encounters, 121.
100. Burke, Attitudes, 171.
101. Brummett, “Burkean Comedy,” 219.
102. Burke, Attitudes, 41.
103. Burke, Attitudes, 171.
104. Rueckert, Encounters, 117–18.
105. For extended discussion, see Bennett, News; Herbert J. Gans, Deciding What’s News: A Study
of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek and Time (New York: Pantheon, 1979).
106. David Croteau and William Hoynes, Media/Society: Industries, Images, and Audiences, 2d ed.
(Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Pine Forge Press, 2000), 241.
107. Gans, Deciding What’s News, 138–42.
108. See Croteau and Hoynes, Media/Society, 239–41.
109. Mark Lawrence McPhail, “Coherence as Representative Anecdote in the Rhetorics of
Kenneth Burke and Ernesto Grassi,” in Kenneth Burke and Contemporary European Thought:
Rhetoric in Transition, ed. Bernard L. Brock (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press), 85.
THE MEDIA FRAMING OF THE MATTHEW SHEPARD MURDER 505
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Cinema and Choric Connection: Lost in
Translation as Sensual Experience
Brian L. Ott & Diane Marie Keeling
Published online: 06 Oct 2011.
To cite this article: Brian L. Ott & Diane Marie Keeling (2011) Cinema and Choric Connection:
Lost in Translation as Sensual Experience, Quarterly Journal of Speech, 97:4, 363-386, DOI:
10.1080/00335630.2011.608704
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Cinema and Choric Connection: Lost in
Translation as Sensual Experience
Brian L. Ott & Diane Marie Keeling
The rise of the new information technologies, and corresponding proliferation of signs,
images, and information, has contributed to a growing sense of alienation and dis-
location. For many, the contemporary moment is an unending and disorienting sea of
sensory-symbolic excesses. Lost in Translation is a film addressed to these anxieties.
Engaging the film as a sensual experience, we argue that Lost in Translation equips
viewers to confront the feelings of alienation and dislocation brought on by the sensory-
symbolic excesses of (post)modernity by fostering a sense of choric connection. This sense,
we demonstrate, is elicited primarily by the film’s material (nonsymbolic, aesthetic)
dimensions. Drawing on an analysis of the film’s aesthetic elements, we conclude by
reflecting on the implications for film studies, rhetorical studies, and everyday life.
Keywords: Materiality; Semiotic Chōra; Sensual Experience; Affect; Lost in Translation
Every work of art is the child of its age and, in many cases, the mother of our
emotions.*Wassily Kandinsky1
The most fundamental fear and terrifying truth of the human condition is that each of
us is alone. The fear of and, consequently, the anxiety over being (alone)*over
alienation*arises from our existence as ‘‘discontinuous beings.’’2 If death affords the
ultimate confirmation of this discontinuity (one’s death is decidedly one’s own), then
life entails the unremitting desire to create a profound sense of connection, continuity,
and consubstantiality.
3
‘‘[Life] is marked by a yearning for wholeness,’’ explains Janice
Brian L. Ott is a teacher-scholar of media and rhetorical studies in the Department of Communication at the
University of Colorado Denver. Diane Marie Keeling is a doctoral candidate in the Department of
Communication at the University of Colorado Boulder. The authors gratefully acknowledge the assistance,
insight, and expertise of Raymie McKerrow, Thomas Frentz, Greg Dickinson, Thomas Rickert, and the two
anonymous reviewers. An earlier version of this essay was presented at the Western States Communication
Association annual convention in Phoenix, AZ, February 2009. The essay also benefited from our participation
in a panel on the chora at the National Communication Association annual convention in San Francisco, CA,
November 2010. Correspondence to: Brian L. Ott, Department of Communication, University of Colorado
Denver, Denver, CO 80217-3364, USA. Email: brian.ott@ucdenver.edu
ISSN 0033-5630 (print)/ISSN 1479-5779 (online) # 2011 National Communication Association
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2011.608704
Quarterly Journal of Speech
Vol. 97, No. 4, November 2011, pp. 363�386
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2011.608704
Rushing, ‘‘[for humans] feel an undeniable, if unspoken, sense of fragmentation,
and separation*from their world, their fellow human beings, and themselves.’’4
For human beings, as symbol-using animals, rhetoric is the essential means by which
we both affirm and avow our discontinuity (division) and seek to negate or overcome
it (identification).
5
The study of rhetoric, then, is above all else, at least for the
Burkean critic, an unending exploration of the paradoxical ways that human beings
repeatedly identify with and separate themselves from Others. The precise contours of
identification and division vary considerably, of course, by cultural and historical
context, making it the task of critics to evaluate and assess the situational vagaries of
these rhetorical enactments so that we might learn to live more humanely.
The contemporary moment, like many that have preceded it, is an intensely
alienating one. But unlike prior historical moments, which have accentuated our
discontinuity chiefly through industrialization, rationalization, and cultural differ-
ence, the sense of separation at the start of the twenty-first century is fueled in large
measure by the development and spread of new information technologies.
6
The rapid
adoption of cell phones, video games, MP3 players, and the Internet, along with the
corresponding proliferation of signs, images, and information, all contribute, for
instance, to feelings of alienation and fragmentation by isolating and enveloping us in
technological bubbles (or to paraphrase Kenneth Burke, by separating us from our
natural conditions by instruments of our own making).
7
Consider, for example, how
MP3 or cell phone users are routinely oblivious of others and their surroundings.
8
But even as many twenty-first-century gadgets and their messages divide and
dislocate us, others provide resources for bridging the gulf.
In the Philosophy of Literary Form, Burke stresses that literature, and discourse
more generally, equips readers with symbolic strategies or stylistic medicines for
sizing up and thus addressing recurring situations or social anxieties.
9
Since its initial
formulation, Burke’s theory of ‘‘literature as equipment for living’’ has been expanded
by media and cultural critics to explain the resources that film and television furnish
viewers for confronting the unique challenges of our time.
10
Cinema, as Barry
Brummett explains, ‘‘serves people as equipment for living (1) insofar as it
articulates, explicitly or formally, the concerns, fears, and hopes of a people . . .
and (2) insofar as the discourse provides explicit or formal resolution of situations or
experiences similar to those which people actually confront, thus providing people
with motives to address their dilemmas in life.’’
11
To date, analysis of how specific
films and television series function as equipments for living has focused almost
exclusively on the symbolic dimensions of rhetoric (form, narrative, myth, and
dialogue). But symbols*be they linguistic, imagistic, acoustic, or tactile*are
material as well as symbolic,
12
and this study seeks to illuminate how the very
materiality of rhetoric (rhythm, sound, texture) may also equip audiences to deal
with the fear and anxiety surrounding alienation and disconnection.
Toward that end, this essay undertakes an analysis of Sophia Coppola’s award-
winning 2003 film, Lost in Translation (hereafter ‘‘Lost’’), which she explains is about
‘‘things being disconnected’’ and our desire to find ‘‘moments of connection.’’
13
Though certainly not the only message or even film concerned with contemporary
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anxieties surrounding discontinuity,
14
it is an especially instructive one. In addition
to the appropriateness of Lost’s central theme,
15
its execution of that theme privileges
rhetoric’s materiality over, though certainly not to the exclusion of, its symbolicity.
As such, Lost lends itself to a careful consideration of how film, as rhetoric, moves us
materially, sways us somatically. Our argument, then, is that Lost in Translation
equips viewers to cope with the feelings of alienation and dislocation fueled by the
rise of the new information technologies by (re)staging a sensual experience of choric
connection*a profound sense of oneness with the world. In support of this thesis,
our essay unfolds in four stages: the elaboration of a critical approach for evaluating
the material appeal of cinematic rhetoric; a consideration of the film’s unique
suitability to this approach; an analysis of the film’s tripartite mediation of mood;
and a reflection on the theoretical and practical implications of our analysis.
The Sensual Experience of Cinema
Attention to the symbolic or representational dimensions of cinema, though
invaluable, has tended to overlook the ways film also operates on a material or
nonrepresentational level that appeals directly to spectators’ senses. This is a
significant oversight, for as Vivian Sobchack insists, cinema mobilizes ‘‘modes of
embodied existence (seeing, hearing, physical and reflective movement) as the vehicle,
the ‘stuff,’ the substance of its language.’’
16
Though numerous film scholars have
engaged cinema on a more material, bodily register,
17
the treatment of this register, at
least with regard to film, as explicitly rhetorical is relatively recent.
18
Historically, the
suasory, communicative character of films has been treated almost exclusively in
terms of symbolic (representational) structures and tropes (metaphor, metonymy,
synecdoche, allegory, etc.). Because such an approach obfuscates that ‘‘film is a
powerful sensual medium . . . primarily apprehended through nonlinguistic channels
of communication,’’
19
we turn to the work of Julia Kristeva for a model more attuned
to the materiality of rhetoric and an ‘‘embodied understanding of signification.’’
20
For Kristeva, signification or the signifying process entails two modalities; she refers
to the first modality*the one involving syntax and semantics*as the symbolic.21 But
there is a second, transverbal modality, the semiotic, which involves bodily drives
and energies that gives rise to the ‘‘other side of ‘meaning.’ ’’
22
Elaborating on the
distinction, Kristeva explains, ‘‘The semiotic is not independent of language, but
underpins language [along with visual, acoustic, and tactile signs], and, under the
control of language, it articulates other aspects of ‘meaning’ which are more than
mere ‘significations,’ such as rhythmical and melodic inflections.’’
23
So, whereas the
symbolic concerns ‘‘mere ‘significations’ ’’ (referential symbolism), the semiotic is
about signifiance (note the absent ‘‘c’’) or nonsignfying processes, ephemeral
pulsations and intensities, and the bodily sensations they generate.
24
According to
Kristeva, the symbolic and the semiotic always function dialectically, for ‘‘the dialectic
between them determines the type of discourse (narrative, metalanguage, theory,
poetry, etc.) involved.’’
25
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Kristeva’s distinction between the symbolic and the semiotic is a challenging one,
not least of all because the semiotic lies outside of language proper. To help clarify
this distinction, we turn to the concept of the chōra, which Kristeva treats in tandem
with the semiotic. The concept of the chōra finds its roots in the Greek Khôra (xvra);
it originates with Plato who, in the Timaeus, treats it as a formless, fluctuating, and
generative place or receptacle. Adapting Plato’s conception, Kristeva understands the
chōra as the undifferentiated state between mother and infant prior to the acquisition
of language and paternal law. It is a womb-like enclosure*a sonorous envelope in
which the prenatal and newborn infant feels at one with the sounds and sensations of
the mother. Somewhat loosely stated, the chōra is the space of instinctual drives, the
realm where rhythms, vibrations, and other material, embodied experiences that
exceed the symbolic are registered.
26
For Kristeva, the chōra corresponds to and
enables the semiotic (or nonreferential) dimensions of rhetoric.
27
‘‘The chōra is of
rhetorical interest,’’ explains Thomas Rickert, ‘‘because it transforms our sense of
what is available as means for . . . rhetorical generation, in line with an expanded
notion of spatiality that complexifies traditional divisions among discourses, minds,
bodies, and circumambient environs.’’
28
Because Kristeva’s notion of the semiotic chōra*with its invocation of the
maternal*provides an explicit challenge to Jacques Lacan’s model of psycho-social
development in which subjectivity is tied to language and entry into the Symbolic
(the Law of the Father), it is often interpreted as a feminist intervention. But as
Kristeva herself has stressed: ‘‘The distinction I have set up between the semiotic and
the symbolic has no political or feminist connotation.’’
29
So, while film scholars such
as Kaja Silverman have appropriated Kristeva’s work in the name of feminism,
30
Kristeva’s aim was simply to develop a set of critical tools for examining rhetoric’s
material dimensions.
Like the symbolic, Kristeva maintains that the semiotic chōra is ‘‘textualized’’
(discharged) in acoustic, visual, and tactile signs;
31
to clarify the ways in which these
modalities are textualized, she distinguishes between the phenotext and genotext.
32
Since the phenotext, which denotes all the codes and features belonging to the
structure of discourse that allow it to express and communicate, has long been the
object of rhetorical criticism, our focus will be on the genotext*the semiotic
dimensions of textuality, or as Roland Barthes describes it, ‘‘the space where
significations germinate.’’
33
Engaging the genotext entails examining the transfers of
drive energy (sensations and affects
34
) elicited by a text’s aesthetic elements.
35
With
regard to cinema, this means attending to the ways that elements such as pacing,
movement, color, lighting, sound, and tactility invite particular affects or ‘‘immediate
modes of sensual responsiveness to the world characterized by an accompanying
imaginative dimension.’’
36
Though the aesthetic is not, strictly speaking, symbolic, it
is, as Deborah Hawhee observes, ‘‘always and everywhere rhetorical*that is,
productive of effects*and crucially, these effects are produced on and through the
live and lively bodies in audiences.’’
37
Our analysis of Lost concentrates on how the
aesthetic elements of the film foster sensual, affective experiences that cannot be
adequately accounted for by reference to the symbolic elements alone.
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Since a genotextual approach to the semiotic chōra is rooted in textuality, it
necessarily poses some of the same difficulties of interpretive validity that have long
haunted rhetorical critics concerned with more traditional texts such as oratory and
literature. While no textual critic can claim with certainty how an audience member
will respond to the symbolic or material dimensions of a text, the rhetorical critic can
investigate how films as social constructions invite shared experiences; as Thomas
Benson and Carolyn Anderson explain, ‘‘The rhetorical critic inquires into that shared
experience, not by surveying audience response, and not simply by reporting the critic’s
subjective, impressionistic responses, but by interrogating the film itself, regarding the
film as a constructed invitation to a complex experience of thoughts and feelings.’’
38
Aesthetics and Affect in Lost in Translation
All rhetorical forms are, at once, symbolic and material. Whereas the symbolicity of
rhetoric elicits primarily ‘‘meaning effects,’’ the materiality of rhetoric induces
principally ‘‘presence effects’’*effects that touch and move bodies in sensory-emotive
ways.
39
Though both types of effects are always present in texts, different rhetorical
forms vary greatly in the degree to which they privilege either symbolicity
(phenotext) or materiality (genotext).
40
As rhetorical scholars of music are well
aware, for instance, music’s material dimensions such as melody, tone, and rhythm
are typically more compelling and consequential to how audiences feel and respond
to a musical composition than the lyrical content.
41
As we are specifically interested
in the material dimensions of cinema and how they function rhetorically, we have
strategically selected a film in which presence effects (sensation and affect) are
particularly salient.
42
Unlike classical Hollywood cinema, which relies primarily upon narrational
principles and procedures to constitute ‘‘a particular configuration of normalized
options for representing the story and manipulating composition and style,’’
43
Lost in
Translation is, explained one critic, ‘‘longer on atmosphere and observation than
story.’’
44
Repeatedly described by reviewers as a ‘‘mood piece,’’
45
another critic
remarked of the film, ‘‘While most directors use structure, plot and dialogue as their
storytelling building blocks, Coppola seems to work through her material by feel . . .
[H]er movies . . . zero in on emotions and moods, making them uncannily vivid.’’46
Indeed, not only is there a remarkable absence of dialogue in the film (the shooting
script was only 70 pages long),
47
but the words exchanged by the two leading
characters in the film’s climactic scene are inaudible. This lack of dialogue led one
critic to conclude that, ‘‘[Lost’s] resonance . . . comes from its visual images, not its
too spare writing.’’
48
Lynn Hirschberg agreed, noting, ‘‘[with] its strange, luminous
pictorial beauty (especially in its distillation of Tokyo) . . . and its dreamy intimacy,
the film summons place and sustains mood as few contemporary films do.’’
49
But it is
not the stunning visuals alone that give the film its uncommon affective appeal.
50
As a critic for the San Francisco Chronicle noted, ‘‘the aural palette of ‘Lost in
Translation’ is equally important as its visual scheme. Apart from knowing when
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quiet is necessary, Coppola has impeccable taste in music and stocks her soundtrack
with moody pieces that recall Brian Eno.’’
51
Lost in Translation provides an especially appropriate and profitable (geno)text to
begin examining the materiality of cinema (sensual experience), as it privileges the
semiotic chōra (aesthetic elements) over more traditional symbolic structures
(narration and dialogue). Though our analysis concentrates on the film’s material
dimensions, we recognize and appreciate that they do not operate in isolation, and
thus, we begin our analysis with a brief plot synopsis as a context for understanding
the visual, aural, and tactile elements to which we refer.
Mood and Atmosphere in Lost in Translation
The basic plot of Lost in Translation is set in motion by a series of serendipitous
meetings between two disparate strangers in the decentered metropolis of Tokyo. Bill
Murray plays Bob Harris, an aging American movie star, who comes to Tokyo to
promote Suntory, a Japanese whisky. He is emotionally estranged from his wife, who
seems to be more concerned about carpet samples for the den than him, and from his
children, whose birthdays he tends to forget. His well-aged features are contrasted by
his youthful counter-part Charlotte, played by Scarlett Johansson. A 25-year-old Yale
philosophy graduate, Charlotte is in Tokyo with her frenetic and self-absorbed showbiz
photographer husband John (Giovanni Ribisi), who is regularly away on assignments.
Charlotte is disenchanted with her two-year-old marriage and uncertain about what to
do with her life. Both Bob and Charlotte are bored and suffering from loneliness and
insomnia when they discover each other. Their bond emerges casually after noticing
one another around the hotel on several occasions. Their initial attraction seems to be
based on recognizing ‘‘their pain in each other’s eyes.’’
52
Although the characters have
little in common, they enjoy the novelty of each other’s company and a friendship
rapidly develops. Bob’s mock-suave antics complement Charlotte’s cool demeanor as
they dawdle in restaurants, clubs, karaoke bars, and hospitals to pass the time.
It is a minimalist story. But what Lost in Translation lacks in story, it more than
makes up for in mood*‘‘those affective states that are said to lack a specific object
and to be more lasting and diffuse than emotions.’’
53
Coppola is ‘‘not interested,’’
explained David Denby in The New Yorker, ‘‘in tension leading to a climax but in
moods and states of being.’’
54
As we demonstrate, Lost unfolds not by way of cause-
and-effect, but through its successive creation of three moods or states of being:
55
alienation and dislocation, immersion and intensity, and choric connection. These
general moods are established and reinforced at a number of levels beyond narration
and dialogue, including pacing and camera movement (through shot selection,
framing, and editing), color and lighting, and sound and tactility.
Alienation and Dislocation
The mood that dominates the first third of the film is one of alienation and
dislocation. This portion of the film is structured around a series of uneventful scenes
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whose focus alternates between Bob and Charlotte.
56
Though the characters do not
meet in these initial scenes,
57
they both experience isolation, insomnia, and a
profound sense of dislocation.
58
As Stuart Klawans noted in The Nation, ‘‘Lost in
Translation is about the dislocation of these two people*in Tokyo, but also in the
course of their lives.’’
59
Given the unusual paucity of action in these early scenes, they
feel uncomfortably long*a feeling that is enhanced by the apparent lack of plot
progression. The length of the scenes, as well as the fact that they do not appear
formally to be leading anywhere, is disorienting for viewers. In denying viewers clear
temporal (and spatial) coordinates, the film and consequently the audience is invited
to feel directionless. The film’s early scenes, then, are isolated and isolating, providing
glimpses into the characters’ emotional states of being without tying those states to
narrative kernels.
60
As we demonstrate throughout this section, the affective
experiences elicited by the film are homologous to those of the characters, thus
encouraging spectators to share in (rather than merely identify with) Bob and
Charlotte’s states of being.
The capacity of films to create strong identification with (and sympathy for)
characters and to suture spectators into the narrative through point-of-view editing is
well established in film theory. ‘‘Point-of-view editing is one of the most widely used
film devices,’’ notes Noel Carroll, for it ‘‘provide[s] a means for advancing the story
line, as well as for informing the audience of the emotional responses of the
characters to what they encounter.’’
61
Though this device is prevalent throughout Lost
and does foster identification with the characters, our concern is less with the
audience’s affective sympathies for Bob and Charlotte, which are rooted in depictions
of their experiences, and more in the direct affective experiences of spectators. Like
the melody and rhythm of music, the pacing, camera work (shot distance, duration,
and angle), and editing of a film are nonrepresentational, but often elicit powerful
emotional responses.
62
A sudden, direct cut in a horror film, for instance, may arouse
fear, but it does not referentially signify fear. Indeed, the same edit, in a different
context, could be humorous and prompt laughter. All of this suggests that spectator
responses to visual aesthetic devices are neither purely cognitive (learned) nor
instinctual (natural), but intertextual; they arise from the structured interplay of
signifiers. To understand how this process works, we undertake a close examination
of several key scenes.
The film’s second scene, ‘‘Welcome to Tokyo,’’ which spans nearly five minutes,
opens with Bob traveling in a limousine from the Tokyo airport to the posh Park
Hyatt hotel in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district. Bob’s arrival at the hotel inaugurates an
alienating and disorienting experience for spectators that will extend over the first
third of the film (and return briefly just before the climax). The sequence begins with
a long, wide-angle establishing shot of the building’s entrance.
63
After the limousine
transporting Bob enters the frame and comes to a complete stop, the camera cuts
abruptly to a close-up shot of a middle-aged Japanese woman; she greets Bob and
introduces him to a number of other hosts who present him with their business cards
and an assortment of gifts. Though Bob appears exhausted in this scene, he does not
appear disoriented. So, how then, are spectators invited to feel this way?
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According to Susan Feagin, ‘‘certain temporal features in a film*the duration of
and the durational relationships between and among images in a film*can affect
spectators’ emotional or feeling responses to a film in ways that enrich their
experiences of it.’’
64
The lobby interaction, which lasts a mere 31 seconds onscreen,
consists of 14 separate shots. The rapid succession of shots, none of which are point-
of-view shots, mixes close-up images of the Japanese hosts, medium-length images of
Bob, and extreme close-up images of the exchange of cards and gifts. Though the
overall pacing of the film’s first third is slow, steady, and methodical, the brevity and
varying distances of the shots in this scene, along with the absence of a fixed
(subjective) perspective, produces an intensely jolting visual experience. So, while
Bob’s experience is one of tiredness, the aesthetic character of the editing fosters an
experience of disorientation in viewers. This sensate experience, albeit brief,
emotionally primes the audience for a series of upcoming narrative vignettes in
which Bob feels alienated and disconnected.
Following the introductions in the lobby, a hotel employee hands Bob a fax from
his wife, Lydia, informing him that he has forgotten his son’s birthday. The extreme
close-up, point-of-view shot of the fax printout holds far longer than is needed for
viewers to read it. The camera’s lingering gaze, in combination with nearby but
indistinct and indecipherable Japanese voices, charges the frame with feelings of
discomfort and unease. This sense of discomfort is diffused, if only temporarily, by
the ensuing shot of Bob standing in the elevator surrounded by nine uniformly
dressed and considerably shorter Japanese businessmen.
65
The shot*a visual
synecdoche for Bob’s alienating experiences throughout the first third of the film*
suggests he is out of place, ‘‘a stranger in a strange land.’’
66
Subsequent scenes
reinforce, often comically, Bob’s sense of isolation and placelessness along with the
audience’s feeling of discomfort. While shooting the Suntory whisky commercial, for
instance, he is unable to understand the stage directions of the all-too-intense
director (Diamond Yukai), leading to several humorous takes.
67
Similarly, in one of
the film’s most famous scenes, a premium fantasy woman (Nao Asuka)*arranged by
one of the Japanese hosts*shows up unexpectedly at Bob’s hotel room. As in the
Suntory scene, cultural and linguistic differences leave Bob baffled by the interaction.
These scenes foster a feeling of awkwardness in viewers not simply because they
depict awkward interactions, but also because Coppola allows such moments to
linger onscreen well past the point of comfort.
68
While Bob deals with ‘‘insomnia,
culture shock and Tokyo’s disorienting riot of sounds and images,’’
69
all of which
exacerbate his alienation and amplify the audience’s discomfort, Charlotte struggles
to find meaning and purpose in her life.
The opening shot of scene 5, ‘‘Charlotte Wanders,’’ could scarcely be a more
explicit symbolic representation of Charlotte’s affective state. She stands in the Tokyo
subway in front of a large and elaborate map of the subway system trying to
determine where to go. Seeing a character who is emotionally lost and having the
feeling of being lost are two different things, however. So, as with the sequence of
shots of Bob in the hotel lobby, Coppola employs creative camera framing and
editing in this scene to generate a sense of disorientation in the audience. The camera
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cuts suddenly to a wide-angle shot of Charlotte standing on the platform waiting for
a train; she is at a distance, physically and psychically separated from viewers by the
depth of the shot. But before the audience can orient themselves, a subway train
barrels through the frame, leaving the audience (with)in a blur. The image of the
speeding train is replaced just as quickly by a shot from inside a train among the
other passengers. Then a shot exiting the train, being jostled by the crowd, followed
by a shot moving up the escalator, and finally a non-subjective shot at street level,
looking anxiously about. The entire sequence of shots (from subway platform to
street level) last only 30 seconds, and though it utilizes only half as many shots
(seven) as the lobby sequence with Bob, it is no less disorienting.
Like the lobby sequence, the subway sequence employs no point-of-view shots,
favoring a montage of objectivist shots, each of varying depth, distance, and angle of
elevation. But in contrast to the lobby sequence, in which a feeling of disorientation
arises primarily from rapid editing and assorted shot types, the subway sequence also
utilizes the movement of the camera to elicit feelings of disorientation. While the
lobby sequence employs a static camera in which the action and movement develop
in the frame, the action in the subway is shot in a naturalistic, cinéma vérité style
using handheld cameras.
70
Here, the audience identifies with the look of the camera,
which moves through its surroundings*all the while being bumped, squeezed, and
shoved by fellow travelers. The camera locates the audience in the scene not as a
spectator, but as a participant.
Consequently, when Charlotte visits a Buddhist temple in the ensuing sequence
and the editing style switches to alternating point-of-view and objectivist shots, the
audience already feels an embodied sense of her isolation and dislocation, making it
easier to identify with her alienating experience. Like her counterpart Bob, Charlotte
seems unable to understand or relate to the culture around her, leading to an extreme
state of ennui. Her dispirited boredom arises largely out of her relation to the city,
which is perpetually shot in a detached manner. In the sequence of shots at the
temple, Coppola employs no close-up shots of the chanting monks, which would risk
making them interesting and important to viewers.
71
They, like the city, are held at a
distance by the camera. Tellingly, the sequence ends with a direct cut to Charlotte’s
hotel room and a point-of-view shot looking down upon Tokyo. Reflecting on this
shot, Jeffery Overstreet wrote, ‘‘Dislocated and despairing, she [Charlotte] stares
down on Tokyo and weeps.’’
72
The long, high angle shot of the city, one of many in
the first third of the film, homogenizes Japanese culture and walls it off as the foreign
Other. Throughout the film’s early going, then, the visual othering of Tokyo functions
rhetorically to foster a general mood of alienation and dislocation. This mood is
amplified by Coppola’s use of film stock rather than digital video, which gives Tokyo
‘‘the seductive sheen of something exotic [and] just out of reach.’’
73
Immersion and Intensity
After two brief encounters in the hotel bar, Bob and Charlotte cross paths a third time
outside the hotel sauna where they make their first plans to leave the hotel together.
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This scene, ‘‘Night Out With Charlie,’’ constitutes an important shift in the film’s
central mood. The sense of alienation and dislocation that dominates the first third of
the film is replaced by a feeling of intensity, energy, electricity, and engagement,
which is sustained by total sensory immersion (envelopment). Though this mood,
which lasts only about 20 minutes, is the shortest of the film’s three moods, it is
central to the overall rhythmic and affective development of the film. In juxtaposition
to the generally slow pacing, lingering shots, lack of action, and interiority up to this
point, the film suddenly becomes fast paced, action-packed, and exterior. This key
transition involves the introduction of what film critics described as ‘‘Lost in
Translation’s third significant character . . . Tokyo itself.’’74 Thus far, the city has been
framed primarily from a distance and often out of focus*a technique that also
disorients and unsettles*behind/beyond a glass window; it has been treated as inert,
as a lifeless and alienating backdrop.
75
In this sense, Tokyo has functioned not so
much as a setting (and even less so as a character) in the film, but as a metaphor for
modern life,
76
for the way in which we are alienated and dislocated by an endless
array of signs
77*many of which are unfamiliar and indecipherable.
But as Charlotte and Bob set off together to experience the city, Tokyo is
transformed from a social metaphor into a pulsating environment*a universe
teeming with life, diversity, intrigue, and attraction. Rather than being held at a
distance, the audience is immersed in the city. ‘‘Coppola lets the neon lights and ever-
present LCD screens, the cacophony of street noises and overall electric energy,’’
explained Mark Caro in the Chicago Tribune, ‘‘seep into your psyche. In a way you lose
consciousness that you’re watching a movie and instead feel you’ve been immersed in
the wondrous, chaotic environment that the protagonists are trying to navigate.’’
78
Consequently, for one critic, this scene was ‘‘Lost in Translation’s most extraordinary
sequence . . . a midnight odyssey through Tokyo’s bars and karaoke parlors*a
sequence in which Tokyo comes to life onscreen in a way that it never quite has in a
movie, and in which the scenes and the performances seem to be developing
spontaneously right before our eyes.’’
79
To account for the city’s transformation and its
role in establishing a new cinematic mood, we explore a number of aesthetic elements,
namely color and sound, used throughout this portion of the film.
Though rarely studied from a rhetorical perspective, color is, argue Anne Richards
and Carol David, ‘‘a complex rhetorical phenomenon . . . eliciting sensory feelings
and emotional reactions.’’
80
In the case of film, according to Barbara Kennedy,
‘‘Colour functions as the main modulator of sensation.’’
81
Among the most com-
prehensive treatments of the capacity of color to influence and move viewers is
Wassily Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art.
82
From the outset, Kandinsky
acknowledges that the affective dimension of color is contextual; it is influenced by
form, the nature of the composition, the presence of and relation to other colors, hue,
saturation, and brightness, and the cultural associations one has internalized.
83
Thus,
it is important to situate color carefully when trying to understand how it evokes
affective responses. Before looking at specific scenes, we first consider the palette of
colors that broadly frame the film.
372 B. L. Ott & D. M. Keeling
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Lost in Translation is a film of stark contrasts, such as slow and fast pacing,
soothing and stimulating sound, and interior and exterior spaces. In general, the
background in interior spaces is dominated by muted greens, browns, and grays.
According to Kandinsky, all three of these colors are disinclined toward movement,
meaning that they neither recede from the spectator nor reach out to the spectator.
84
Consequently, they tend to be silent and passive, eliciting weariness and even
boredom.
85
The interior spaces of the hotel, which dominate the first third of the
film, function to establish a mood that resonates strongly with Bob and Charlotte’s
individual experiences. The exterior spaces of the city, by contrast, are consistently
bathed throughout the film in bluish hues. Blue, unlike the earthly greens and browns
of the Park Hyatt, is inclined toward movement and draws away from the viewer,
creating a strong sense of depth. As a cool color, blue typically induces a sense of calm
and relaxation.
86
But in the scenes ‘‘Night Out with Charlie’’ and ‘‘Karaoke Time,’’
dazzling yellows, oranges, and reds abundantly spring from the deep blue ocean that
is Tokyo.
Bob, for instance, is wearing a bright yellow shirt, which, framed against the blue
background, seizes the viewer’s attention and approaches the spectator, seemingly
reaching out of the screen. The frequent juxtaposition of blue and yellow, which is not
limited to Bob’s shirt in these two scenes, heightens the sense of depth onscreen,
breathing dimension and life into the city. Alternatively, the interior spaces of the hotel
are relatively flat and lifeless. Movement toward the spectator is one of yellow’s two
basic movements. The other, Kandinsky explains, is ‘‘that of overspreading the
boundaries,’’ which has ‘‘a material parallel in the human energy which assails every
object blindly, and bursts forth aimlessly in every direction.’’
87
This second movement,
this bursting forth, in combination with the myriad of orange lanterns, street signs,
and tail lights that populate the city, electrifies the scene, stimulates and arouses
spectators, and charges the frame with a creative, playful intensity. ‘‘In this sequence,’’
writes Alice Lovejoy, ‘‘atmosphere simply takes over*conversations are half-heard,
lights throb around the characters.’’
88
The energy and mood elicited by the colors in these scenes is reinforced by fast-
paced, upbeat pop songs such as the French band Phoenix’s ‘‘Too Young.’’ Much of
the music in this sequence is diegetic; so, the characters and audience are having the
same aural experience*one of total immersion. Taking turns at karaoke, Bob and
Charlotte soulfully belt out their renditions of Elvis Costello’s version of ‘‘(What’s So
Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding,’’ The Pretenders’ ‘‘Brass in Pocket,’’
and Roxy Music’s ‘‘More Than This.’’ When the interaction of images and music in a
film is such that the latter heightens the effect of the former, it generates affective
congruence.
89
In these scenes, the dynamic intensity of the musical soundscape, like
the vibrant use of color, contrasts starkly with the ‘‘hushed interiors of a luxury
hotel,’’
90
exciting the audience and raising expectations for the emerging bond
between Bob and Charlotte. Music does not simply suggest emotional states however;
it reproduces those states.
91
The kinetic energy developed in this scene is shared by
the audience, and it injects, in the words of one critic, ‘‘the longing for human
connection into your bloodstream.’’
92
Cinema and Choric Connection 373
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Choric Connection
For over an hour, Lost in Translation instills a deep desire for connection, for
communion, by first fostering an affective experience of alienation and dislocation,
and then heightening anticipation for overcoming such isolation and anxiety through
an electrifying and intense experience of involvement and immersion.
93
Scene 16,
‘‘Are You Awake?’’ sets in motion the resolution of these feelings through its
introduction of the film’s third major mood, choric connection. But to understand
this mood and how it functions rhetorically requires a short detour through
psychoanalytic theory. For psychoanalysts such as Freud and Lacan, human babies are
born prematurely. Not only do they lack basic motor control and the ability to care
for themselves, but they also and more fundamentally lack a sense of Self (the ‘‘I’’),
for they have no sense of Other (a symbolic ‘‘not-me’’).
94
Prior to and following
birth, infants exist in a state of completeness or undifferentiated wholeness. Over
time, babies slowly develop a sense of Self through the process of abjection*the
casting out of the symbolic (m)Other.
95
Kristeva refers to the abjecting of the
maternal as the thetic phase,
96
and for her, it marks a threshold between the semiotic
chōra and the symbolic.
Kristeva’s thetic phase is important for two reasons. First, from the moment of
rupture or separation (recognition of Self ), humans both forever desire and dread a
return to the engulfing place/state of completeness and (contin)unity that existed
prior to entry into language (Lacan’s Symbolic).
97
Humans desire such continuity
because they are inherently alienated by their existence as discontinuous beings, but
they fear it because they recognize that to return to such a place/state, or at least
to return to it in any lasting way, requires death.
98
Second, humans’ link to that
place/state has been imprinted on them and continues to make itself felt (materially
and affectively) through the semiotic chōra. In other words, the semiotic chōra is
both the locality (undifferentiated place/state) to which humans wish to return and
the modality (genotext) that allows them to experience the fantasy of such a return
in their lives.
99
Returning to the sonorous envelope*the locality of the semiotic
chōra*is necessarily in the realm of fantasy because, as David Schwarz has noted, ‘‘all
presymbolic experiences are retrospective reconstructions from within the symbolic
order.’’
100
Our final analytical section demonstrates how Lost in Translation works to elicit a
sense of choric connection*our phrase for the overwhelming feeling of wholeness that
is experienced through the choric fantasy or the (re)staging of the sonorous envelope
(the place/state of oneness with the mother’s sounds, touch, warmth, and bodily
rhythms). As with the other moods elicited by the film, this affective experience
depends crucially upon the modality of the semiotic chōra. There are, of course, life
experiences in which humans enjoy the fleeting sensation of continuity, communion,
and wholeness. The most obvious of these is orgasm*what Georges Bataille
famously refers to as la petit mort or ‘‘the little death’’
101*because one, in sexual
climax, violently, spasmodically comes undone, trembles and quivers with excess,
loses themself in another. Such experiences, as Bataille examines in The Tears of Eros,
374 B. L. Ott & D. M. Keeling
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can also arise in relation to certain works of art.
102
The remainder of our analysis
focuses on how Lost works to foster a sensual experience of total expenditure in which
meaning and Self dissolves into an enveloping mood of choric connection. As a
sensual experience, we consider visual, aural, and, in particular, tactile aspects of the
film. But we begin by demonstrating how a sense of choric connection is facilitated,
at least in part, by the allures of cinema itself.
The traditional view of cinema from a psychoanalytic perspective posits that
spectatorship is male and that the pleasure of viewing is linked to the Oedipal origins
of sadism and the desire to dominate the Other.
103
This perspective, which is
grounded in Freudian and Lacanian theory, has been challenged by feminist film
scholar Gaylyn Studlar, however, who argues that cinema engages a masochistic
impulse for self-dissolution that originates from the subject’s pre-Oedipal desire to
reunite with the mother.
104
For Studlar, who draws on the work of Gilles Deleuze, the
pleasure of cinema arises from the symbiotic bond between child and mother rather
than from the sadistic pleasure of a dominating gaze. Such is the case with Lost, which
downplays sadistic regimes of looking in favor of primary processes and engulfment
in a state of selfless absorption.
Spectators’ return to the polymorphous, womb-like state of the semiotic chōra is
initiated in the film’s opening shot.
105
The ‘‘Main Titles’’ scene begins with a black
screen, which gradually fades into a close-up of Charlotte’s derrière barely covered
in sheer pink underpants. Lying in bed in a fetal position, she shifts almost
imperceptibly as the noises of the city faintly resonate in the background. Though
various critics have observed the similarity of this shot to the image of Bridgette
Bardot’s naked backside in the opening scene of Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (1963),
they have also noted that it invokes none of the voyeuristic tendencies of Godard’s
shot.
106
Coppola’s shot, which is still rather than panning, lacks context and elicits
not an objectifying gaze but a state of being with (not merely in) the world. The
image of Charlotte fades to black and then to an image of Bob asleep in the limousine
on his way to the hotel. Bob slowly awakens to a cacophony of flashing neon signs
and brightly lit billboards buzzing by his window. The visual array of Tokyo’s foreign,
semiotic-laden cityscape offers endless sensory stimulation. Meanwhile, the film’s
‘‘dream-pop score, produced by Brian Reitzell’’ and variously described as ‘‘melodic’’
and ‘‘hypnotic,’’
107
along with the ambient noise of the city and the sound of Japanese
voices in the background, generate an all-encompassing atmosphere not unlike that
of the pre-Oedipal infant who ‘‘bathes non-verbally and uncomprehendingly in a
flow of word-sounds that are alien and strange.’’
108
As the limousine navigates the wonderland of color, light, and sound, Bob notices
a Suntory whisky billboard with his image on it. He rubs his eyes as if trying to
understand what he has just seen, his double, his other. Hence, in the first few
minutes of Lost in Translation, Coppola has transitioned spectators from Lacan’s
prelinguistic, pre-Oedipal Imaginary and into the Symbolic, quite literally passing
through the ‘‘mirror stage’’ along the way. Indeed, it is precisely this entry into the
Symbolic that initiates the mood of alienation, dislocation, and otherness
experienced by the characters and the audience. The first few moments of screen
Cinema and Choric Connection 375
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time, then, are a taunt, a tease, a transitory taste of the continuity to which viewers
wish to return not only in their lives, but also throughout the film. Kristeva argues
that the semiotic chōra never fully dissipates with the entry into the Symbolic; rather,
it exists as a radical alterity always threatening to return and destabilize the subject.
How it returns in Lost is the question to which we devote the remainder of our
analysis.
‘‘Are You Awake?’’ opens in Charlotte’s darkened hotel room with her still unable
sleep when she notices a note being slipped under her door. An equally sleepless Bob
has had the note, which inquires, ‘‘Are you awake,’’ sent to Charlotte’s room. A point-
of-view shot in which she reads the note is followed by a direct cut to Bob’s hotel
room, where the two are watching a movie together. As the scene unfolds, the duo
ends up lying next to one another in bed, meditating on life, marriage, and children.
The exchange, which at four minutes is the longest and only substantive conversation
in the film, is surprisingly uninvolving and unemotional for viewers. But in the final
few seconds of the scene, as Bob and Charlotte are both drifting off to sleep (the first
time viewers have seen either of them sleep since the opening shots of the film), Bob
slowly extends his hand and gently touches Charlotte’s foot (she is, once again, in a
fetal position). This touch, this visceral connection shudders through the body of the
spectator, who experiences the sensation of skin touching skin. But how is it that film
can elicit such a potent tactile sensation and corresponding affective response?
As film scholars have increasingly begun to acknowledge, visual media can appeal to
a sense of touch through haptic visuality in which ‘‘the eyes themselves function like
organs of touch.’’
109
Unlike optical visuality, which imposes distance between viewer
and viewed, haptic visuality collapses this distance, allowing film ‘‘to ‘touch’ its viewer
in physical and emotional ways.’’
110
Haptic visuality, Laura Marks elaborates, is erotic
because it ‘‘constructs a particular kind of intersubjective relationship between
beholder and image’’ in which ‘‘images encourage a bodily relation to the screen itself
before the point at which the viewer is pulled into the figures of the image and the
exhortation of the narrative.’’
111
In light of its minimalist narration and dialogue, Lost
in Translation is uniquely suited for touching images. Bob’s caress of Charlotte’s foot
functions erotically for both the characters and the audience, for as it dissolves the
distance between Bob and Charlotte, it also dissolves the distance between viewer and
viewed. In inviting viewers to feel the caress with their eyes, the film fosters ‘‘an ecstatic
loss of the subject in a sexual or textual coming*a textasy.’’112
The pleasure of the touch*‘‘a pleasure without separation’’113*lasts only a few
seconds before fading to black. The camera then cuts abruptly to a point-of-view shot
(Charlotte’s) of Mt. Fuji and the Japanese landscape seen through the window of a
fast moving train. Spectators, too, are rushing forward. But the identificatory nature
of this shot creates a distancing effect (between spectator and image) that severs the
sense of continuity created by the previous scene and reminds viewers of their innate
discontinuity. The next two scenes, ‘‘Kyoto’’ and ‘‘Matthew’s Best Hit TV,’’ track
Charlotte and Bob’s (newly alienating) experiences separately, returning them and the
audience to the film’s early mood of isolation. The unfolding form is typical of
Hollywood cinema: create tension (alienation and dislocation), heighten desire for
376 B. L. Ott & D. M. Keeling
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release (intensity and immersion), provide partial release (a brief moment of
connection), and introduce an obstacle prior to full resolution. In the case of Lost,
this obstacle comes in the form of the second-rate jazz singer (played by Catherine
Lambert) from the New York Bar in the Park Hyatt Tokyo. After a series of
particularly isolating experiences, Bob ends up sleeping with the singer, which
Charlotte learns about the next morning when she knocks on Bob’s hotel door to
invite him to lunch. By briefly delivering the continuity the audience so deeply desires
only to temporarily suspend it again, the film further intensifies the audience’s
longing for connection.
Final fulfillment and release will not come until the film’s final scene, ‘‘Hey, You!’’
after a disastrous lunch and a disappointing goodbye between Bob and Charlotte. As
Bob travels in a taxi to the Tokyo airport, he spies Charlotte walking down a crowded
Tokyo street. He instructs the cab driver to stop and chases after her. The noises of the
crowd and the bustle of the city are at their most pronounced points in the film as
Bob approaches Charlotte. But as he hails her, she turns, they embrace, and he
whispers (inaudibly) in her ear, the city noise dissipates or, more accurately, their
separation from it and one another dissolves. There is no longer time or place, scene
or setting, viewer or viewed*only an indescribable sensation of completeness toward
which the whole film has been moving (us) rhythmically, ineluctably. If speech is the
stuff of the Symbolic, of Self and Other, then its opposite–not writing, as is often
supposed, but silence–is the stuff of the semiotic chōra, for silence is the language of
the body, the word activated as flesh, the mutiny of the (m)Other tongue.
114
On Sensing Rhetoric
The anxiety of alienation, the ‘‘undeniable, if unspoken, sense of fragmentation and
separation*from their world, their fellow human beings, and themselves,’’115
brought on by humans’ existence as discontinuous beings and repeatedly affirmed
through the Symbolic and hence language is anything but new. What changes over
time are the rhetorical modes and messages by which we negotiate this primal
anxiety. Ever transforming technologies of communication are, at once, at the heart
of the varying articulation of this anxiety as well the means by which we address it. As
a way of understanding the contours of the contemporary moment and the rhetorical
resources available to us for negotiating that moment, we undertook an analysis of
Sophia Coppola’s film Lost in Translation. We selected this film for its unique
modality (primarily material) of delivering those resources, and indeed we did not
quote (or analyze the meaning of ) a single line of dialogue. Based upon an analysis of
the film’s genotext, the sensual and affective experiences fostered by its aesthetic
dimensions, we argued that Lost in Translation equips viewers to confront the
alienating and dislocating character of (post)modernity by returning viewers to a
rapturous state of choric connection. In this concluding section, we reflect on what
an analysis of this sort stands to teach scholars of film, students of rhetoric, and
practioners of everyday life.
Cinema and Choric Connection 377
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With regard to the study of film, our analysis suggests three modest implications.
First, it provides additional support for Studlar’s view that cinematic pleasure arises
from a masochistic aesthetic associated with the pre-Oedipal phase of infancy (rather
than a sadistic mechanism rooted in the figuration of genital sexuality)
116
by
demonstrating how that aesthetic is materially affirmed. Second, it highlights that the
relation of spectator to image can vary greatly within the same film depending upon
how haptic visuality is mobilized. Affective involvement (material appeals) and
identification (symbolic appeals) interact in complex, and sometimes contradictory,
ways. Identification with characters onscreen is never total, and thus viewers may feel
quite differently than characters. More attention needs to be paid to the ways in
which viewers’ and characters’ affective states converge, diverge, and interact.
Third, and most critical for our purposes, attention to Lost’s material dimensions
suggests that rhetorical scholars have a unique and valuable contribution to make to
film studies. Utilizing Kristeva’s understanding of the semiotic chōra, this essay has
demonstrated that the aesthetic elements in film function rhetorically to elicit
identifiable sensual and affective experiences. Since, as rhetorical scholars are well
aware, rhetoric is a fundamentally public and political activity, rhetoricians are well
positioned to help film scholars appreciate and assess how the affectivity of cinema
operates in the public sphere, shaping policy, constituting publics and counter-
publics, enabling or disenabling civic engagement, and equipping humans to live
their lives. In the case of Lost, for instance, we have shown how the material
dimensions of cinema can be mobilized to assist viewers in addressing the alienating
aspects of (post)modernity.
Though this essay focuses on cinema, the implications of our analysis extend far
beyond film. For students of rhetoric, our analysis signals two important interven-
tions. First, it urges rhetoricians to take seriously the ‘‘other side of ‘meaning,’’’ to
attend to the material (semiotic) as well as the representational (symbolic) dimensions
of rhetoric. It may seem odd that an essay so concerned with materiality opens with
the theories of Kenneth Burke, who perhaps more than any other twentieth-century
rhetorical theorist has been association with ‘‘symbolic action.’’ But recall Burke’s own
(re)definition of rhetoric and the stress he places on consubstantiality, which is rooted
in shared substance, in ‘‘common sensations, concepts, images, ideas, attitudes.’’
117
For
Burke, rhetoric is material, and not just in the Marxist sense that Michael McGee
makes this claim (it constructs our reality),
118
but in the phenomenological sense that
rhetoric itself (not merely what it does) has concrete, observable, physical facets.
119
Rhetoric directly engages our senses; we can see (images), hear (speech and music),
and touch (memorials and museums) it. And when the way rhetoric looks or sounds or
feels to one person is similar to the way it looks or sounds or feels to others, it creates
common sensations*embodied rhythms, resonances, and energies*and thus con-
substantiality. Despite decades of public address scholarship, few scholars of oral
rhetoric have attended not just to the content and form of the speaker’s message, but
also to the very sound of the speaker’s voice.
120
Voices are more than just pleasing or
displeasing, however. The rhythm, tone, and timbre of a voice are sensual experiences
that, like a film’s aesthetics, elicit affective responses, which are themselves rhetorical.
378 B. L. Ott & D. M. Keeling
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Taking seriously rhetoric’s materiality necessitates engaging the semiotic chōra,
without which ‘‘the symbolic would lack any form of materiality.’’
121
In this essay, we
approached the semiotic side of rhetoric through the genotext. Though useful, this
approach is not without its limitations*limitations that suggest a second key
intervention. The treatment of cinema as ‘‘text,’’ even genotext, continues*despite
our best intentions*to subtly privilege interpretive processes (‘‘reading’’) over
sensory experiences (‘‘perception’’),
122
potentially constraining a full understanding
of rhetoric’s materiality. For us, thinking about rhetoric’s materiality in terms of the
genotext is an intermediate step between interpretive knowing and experiential
knowing, and we urge rhetorical critics interested in materiality to continue
developing critical practices that attend to how sensory systems such as sight,
hearing, smell, taste, and touch operate experientially. One potential avenue in this
regard is to abandon the interpretive practice of reading, which involves distance,
passivity, consumption, and disembodied ways of knowing, in favor of the perceptual
practice of sensing, which entails immediate, engaged, producerly, and fully embodied
ways of knowing. Regardless of what terminology and techniques are employed,
however, critics need to insist on an understanding of rhetoric’s essential materiality
and of its (revolutionary) capacity to destabilize subjectivity.
123
As useful as we hope
these interventions are, the most important lesson to arise from a sensual analysis of
Lost in Translation concerns daily living.
Lost in Translation ends by returning viewers to a state of choric connection, to a
unified sense of oneness with the world. But what of viewers when the credits roll and
the lights come up? What happens to spectators after they exit the theater and
face the warmth and brilliance of sunlight? Lost is a temporary medicine for (release
from) the alienation and dislocation of our contemporary moment. But does it offer
viewers anything more? We believe it does, at least if viewers are willing to see, hear,
and feel their world anew. Lost presents a map, a model, a mode of being-in-the-
world that need not be restricted to one’s time with the film. It admonishes us that
the path to connection*to an overpowering feeling of continuity*requires only one
thing: a willingness to lose ourselves (our sense of Self ) in others and to give in to
being ‘‘lost’’ in translation.
Notes
[1] Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, trans. M. T. H. Sadler (Mineola, NY:
Dover, 1977), 1.
[2] Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood (San Francisco: City
Light Books, 1986), 12.
[3] As Deborah Caslav Covina elaborates, ‘‘Identification is most usefully understood in terms
established by Kenneth Burke, as motivated by the desire for consubstantiality, or ‘shared
substance.’ Consubstantiality is, for Burke, a ‘compensatory’ motive that arises out of the
human aversion to division.’’ Deborah Caslav Covina, Amending the Abject Body: Aesthetic
Makeovers in Medicine and Culture (State University of New York Press, 2004), 33.
[4] Janice Rushing, ‘‘ET as Rhetorical Transcendence,’’ Quarterly Journal of Speech 71 (1985):
188.
Cinema and Choric Connection 379
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[5] Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969),
19�23.
[6] See Lauren Langman and Devorah Kalekin-Fishman, ed., The Evolution of Alienation:
Trauma, Promise, and the Millennium (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.,
2006).
[7] Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 13.
[8] See Joshua Gunn and Mirko M. Hall, ‘‘Stick it in Your Ear: The Psychodynamics of iPod
Enjoyment,’’ Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 5 (2008): 136.
[9] Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University,
1941), 64, 293�304.
[10] Regarding film, see Barry Brummett, ‘‘Electric Literature as Equipment for Living: Haunted
House Films,’’ Critical Studies in Mass Communication 2 (1985): 247�61, and Brian L. Ott
and Beth Bonnstetter, ‘‘‘We’re at Now, Now’: Spaceballs as Parodic Tourism,’’ Southern
Communication Journal 72 (2007): 309�27. Regarding television, see Brian L. Ott, The Small
Screen: How Television Equips Us to Live in the Information Age (Malden, MA: Blackwell
Publishing, 2007); Brian L. Ott, ‘‘(Re)Framing Fear: Equipment for Living in a Post-9/11
World,’’ in Cylons in America: Critical Studies in Battlestar Galactica, ed. Tiffany Potter and
C. W. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 2008), 13�26; and Daniel J. Lair, ‘‘Surviving the
Corporate Jungle: The Apprentice as Equipment for Living in the Contemporary Work
World,’’ Western Journal of Communication, 75 (2011): 75�94.
[11] Brummett, ‘‘Electric Literature,’’ 248.
[12] Claiming that rhetoric is material as well as symbolic is quite fashionable today. But despite
its fashionableness, there are surprisingly few examples of criticism that actually analyze
rhetoric’s materiality. In fact, many of the scholars who make this claim then proceed to
analyze symbolicity. The few critical examples that do exist mostly concern the built
environment (museums, memorials, shopping centers, coffee shops), not media. So, while
highlighting rhetoric’s materiality is hardly novel, carefully attending to its materiality,
especially with regard to cinema, most assuredly is.
[13] Quoted in Anne Thompson, ‘‘Tokyo Story,’’ Filmmaker: The Magazine of Independent Film,
Fall 2003, http://www.filmmakermagazine.com/issues/fall2003/features/tokyo_story.php, 4.
The characters, elaborates Turan, ‘‘definitely yearn for something . . . essential: simple
human connection.’’ Kenneth Turan, ‘‘Movie Review: ‘Lost in Translation,’ ’’ Los Angeles
Times, September, 12, 2003, http://www.calendarlive.com/movies/reviews/cl-et-turan12sep12,
2,5245235.story, 16. Lost in Translation was nominated for four Academy Awards: Best
Picture, Best Director, Best Actor in a Leading Role, and Original Screen Play. It received the
Oscar for Original Screen Play.
[14] Other recent films to take up the alienating and dislocating character of technology include
Jonathan Mostow’s Surrogates (2009) and James Cameron’s Avatar (2009).
[15] Observed one critic: ‘‘Though the year is 2003 and the world is, in so many ways, at its
smallest, with cell phones and e-mail binding us inextricably to one another, we are, this
extraordinary new movie reminds us, ever more diffused, ever less able to make meaningful
connections.’’ Scott Foundas, ‘‘More Than This: The Road Unexpectedly Taken in Lost in
Translation,’’ LA Weekly, September 18, 2003, http://www.laweekly.com/2003-09-18/news/
more-than-this/, 2.
[16] Vivian Sobchack, ‘‘Phenomenology and Film Experience’’ in Viewing Positions: Ways of
Seeing Film, ed. Linda Williams (Piscataway: Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey,
1995), 37.
[17] Barbara M. Kennedy, Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2000); David MacDougall, The Corporeal Image: Film,
Ethnography, and the Senses (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006); Brian
380 B. L. Ott & D. M. Keeling
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http://www.filmmakermagazine.com/issues/fall2003/features/tokyo_story.php
http://www.calendarlive.com/movies/reviews/cl-et-turan12sep12,2,5245235.story
http://www.calendarlive.com/movies/reviews/cl-et-turan12sep12,2,5245235.story
http://www.laweekly.com/2003-09-18/news/more-than-this/
http://www.laweekly.com/2003-09-18/news/more-than-this/
Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2002); Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image
Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).
[18] One of the few recent examples is Brian L. Ott, ‘‘The Visceral Politics of V for
Vendetta: On Political Affect in Cinema,’’ Critical Studies in Media Communication 27
(2010): 39�54. For a notable, though older example, see Martin J. Medhurst and Thomas
W. Benson, ‘‘The City: The Rhetoric of Rhythm,’’ Communication Monographs 48 (1981):
54�72.
[19] Carl Plantinga, Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectator’s Experience (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2009), 112.
[20] John Lechte and Maria Margaroni, Julia Kristeva: Live Theory (New York: Continuum,
2004), 11�12.
[21] Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. M. Waller (New York: Columbia,
1984), 24.
[22] Julia Kristeva, ‘‘Europhilia, Europhobia,’’ in French Theory in America, ed. Sylvère Lotringer
and Sande Cohen (New York: Routledge, 2001), 36. Kristeva is using ‘‘semiotic’’ in a very
idiosyncratic way that differs from more familiar uses of the term (to mean the science of
signs) by linguists such as Charles Sanders Peirce and Ferdinand de Saussure.
[23] Kristeva, ‘‘Europhilia, Europhobia,’’ 36�37.
[24] The term signifiance ‘‘has the advantage of referring to the field of the signifier (and not just
signification) and of approaching, along the trail blazed by Julia Kristeva, who proposed the
term, a semiotics of the text.’’ Roland Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on
Music, Art, and Representation, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1985), 43.
[25] Kristeva, Revolution, 24.
[26] Rickert describes the chōra as ‘‘the matrix or mother of all becoming.’’ Thomas Rickert,
‘‘Toward the Chōra: Kristeva, Derrida, and Ulmer on Emplaced Invention,’’ Philosophy and
Rhetoric 40 (2007): 255.
[27] Julia Kristeva, Revolution, 25�27.
[28] Rickert, ‘‘Toward the Chōra,’’ 253.
[29] Kristeva, ‘‘Europhilia, Europhobia,’’ 36.
[30] Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988). That Silverman and Kristeva are
working at cross purposes*a point that Silverman appears to recognize*explains why
Silverman’s own film critiques are primarily concerned with symbolicity.
[31] In keeping with Kristeva, we utilize the metaphor of textuality here, but we do so somewhat
reluctantly, as we recognize that this metaphor has contributed to the dominance
of hermeneutics over phenomenology in contemporary cultural theory. See Thomas
J. Csordas, ‘‘Introduction: The Body as Representation and Being-in-the-World,’’ in
Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and Self, ed. Thomas J.
Csordas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 11.
[32] Kristeva, Revolution, 86�87.
[33] Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977),
182.
[34] We understand affects to be extra-discursive ‘‘moments of intensity, a reaction in/on the
body at the level of matter. We might even say that affects are immanent to matter. They are
certainly immanent to experience.’’ Simon O’Sullivan, ‘‘The Aesthetics of Affect: Thinking
Art Beyond Representation,’’ Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 6 (2001): 126.
‘‘Affect refers to the manifestation of the inner drives and energy that psychoanalytic theory
identifies at work within the subject.’’ Noëlle McAffee, Julia Kristeva (New York: Routledge,
2004), 23.
Cinema and Choric Connection 381
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[35] Kristeva, Revolution, 86. We understand aesthetics to refer to those artistic practices that
make themselves present to sensual or sensory-emotive experience.
[36] Charles Altieri, The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2003), 2.
[37] Debra Hawhee, Moving Bodies: Kenneth Burke At the Edges of Language (Columbia:
University of South Carolina Press, 2009): 13.
[38] Thomas W. Benson and Carolyn Anderson, Reality Fictions: The Films of Frederick Wiseman
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989), 2�3. Our own interrogation of Lost’s
‘‘constructed experience’’ is further buttressed by the responses of other critics of the film.
[39] Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford,
CA: Standford University Press, 2004). Note that ‘‘touch’’ and ‘‘move(ment)’’ are terms that
refer to affect as well as sensation (e.g., ‘‘That film was especially touching’’ or ‘‘I was
profoundly moved by that film.’’).
[40] Gumbrecht, Production of Presence, 109.
[41] Deanna Sellnow and Timothy Sellnow, ‘‘The ‘‘Illusion of Life’’ Rhetorical Perspective: An
Integrated Approach to the Study of Music as Communication,’’ Critical Studies in Mass
Communication 18 (2001): 395�415, and D. Robert DeChaine, ‘‘Affect and Embodied
Understanding in Musical Experience,’’ Text and Performance Quarterly 22.2 (2002): 79�98.
See also Medhurst and Benson, ‘‘The City,’’ 63, and Gumbrecht, Production of Presence,
108�9.
[42] Affects (understood as moments of intensity), no matter how closely allied with linguistic
expression, exist on a nonsymbolic level. See Brian Massumi, ‘‘The Autonomy of Affect,’’
Cultural Critique 31 (1995), 83�109. In Burkean terms, there is no (symbolic) action
without (nonsymbolic) motion, which ‘‘names, among other things, the realm of sensory
perception’’ (Hawhee, Moving Bodies, 157). We are more than a little bit skeptical of any
attempt in the field to ‘‘read’’ or ‘‘interpret’’ (already problematic concepts) affect without
careful attention to the material dimensions of rhetoric.
[43] David Bordwell, ‘‘Classical Hollywood Cinema: Narrational Principles and Procedures,’’ in
Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press,
1986), 17.
[44] Ty Burr, ‘‘In ‘Lost,’ dislocated, lonely lives merge in a lovely limbo,’’ The Boston Globe,
September 12, 2003, http://www.boston.com/movies/display?display �movie&id �2795, 6.
[45] See, for instance, David Edelstein, ‘‘Prisoner of Japan: Bill Murray Opens up in Lost in
Translation,’’ Slate, September 11, 2003, http://www.slate.com/id/2088215/, 2, and David
Rooney, ‘‘Lost in Translation’’ Variety, August 31, 2003, http://www.variety.com/index.asp?
layout �review&reviewid �VE1117921663&categoryid �31&cs �1, 8.
[46] Mark Caro, ‘‘Movie Review: ‘Lost in Translation,’ ’’ Chicago Tribune, September 11,
2003, http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/movies/mmx-030911movies-review-
mc-lostintranslation,0,5755934.story, 1.
[47] Thompson, ‘‘Tokyo Story,’’ 9. A typical film script is 120 pages. See Tony Bill, Movie
Speak: How to Talk Like You Belong on a Film Set (New York: Workman Publishing, 2008),
204.
[48] Dan Schneider, ‘‘DVD Review of Lost in Translation,’’ Hackwriters.com: The International
Writers Magazine, June 2004, http://www.hackwriters.com/Lostintransit.htm, 2.
[49] Lynn Hirschberg, ‘‘The Coppola Smart Mob,’’ The New York Times, August 31, 2003, http://
www.nytimes.com/2003/08/31/magazine/31COPPOLA.html?pagewanted �1, 2.
[50] By ‘‘visuals,’’ we are referring not to the content of the images so much as to the experience
of visuality*to the rhythm and pacing of the shots/editing. As Medhurst and Benson
explain, ‘‘the meaning of an image in the film is constructed by the viewer not only from
the ‘content’ of the shot but also from the situation, the structural relation of shots to one
another and to other dimensions of the film, and from the rhythm of the cutting’’ (58).
382 B. L. Ott & D. M. Keeling
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http://www.boston.com/movies/display?display=movieid=2795
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http://www.boston.com/movies/display?display=movieid=2795
http://www.boston.com/movies/display?display=movieid=2795
http://www.boston.com/movies/display?display=movieid=2795
http://www.boston.com/movies/display?display=movieid=2795
http://www.boston.com/movies/display?display=movieid=2795
http://www.boston.com/movies/display?display=movieid=2795
http://www.boston.com/movies/display?display=movieid=2795
http://www.slate.com/id/2088215/
http://www.variety.com/index.asp?layout=reviewreviewid=VE1117921663categoryid=31cs=1
http://www.variety.com/index.asp?layout=reviewreviewid=VE1117921663categoryid=31cs=1
http://www.variety.com/index.asp?layout=reviewreviewid=VE1117921663categoryid=31cs=1
http://www.variety.com/index.asp?layout=reviewreviewid=VE1117921663categoryid=31cs=1
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http://www.variety.com/index.asp?layout=reviewreviewid=VE1117921663categoryid=31cs=1
http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/movies/mmx-030911movies-review-mc-lostintranslation,0,5755934.story
http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/movies/mmx-030911movies-review-mc-lostintranslation,0,5755934.story
http://www.hackwriters.com/Lostintransit.htm
[51] Edward Guthmann, ‘‘The message is loud and clear in ‘Lost in Translation’: Director Sofia
Coppola knows what she’s doing, and Bill Murray’s performance is a subtle miracle,’’
SFGate.com, September 12, 2003, http://articles.sfgate.com/2003-09-12/entertainment/
17506814_1_sofia-coppola-translation-scarlett-johansson, 8.
[52] Edelstein, ‘‘Prisoner of Japan,’’ 4.
[53] Plantinga, Moving Viewers, 131. ‘‘Moods are modes of feeling where the sense of subjectivity
becomes diffuse and sensation merges into something close to atmosphere, something that
seems to pervade an entire scene or situation’’ (Altieri, ‘‘The Particulars of Rapture,’’ 2).
[54] David Denby, ‘‘The Heartbreak Hotels,’’ The New Yorker 79 (September 15, 2003): 100.
[55] ‘‘The links in the story are indeed there, only they’re not typical cause-and-effect
connections. They’re formed by the emotions that gather at the end of one episode and
pour into the next.’’ Steve Vineberg, ‘‘Jet lag,’’ Christian Century (October 18, 2003): 60.
[56] ‘‘Coppola has no fear of being undramatic in showing these two characters alone,’’ Peter
Travers, ‘‘Lost in Translation,’’ Rolling Stone, October 3, 2003, http://www.rollingstone.com/
movies/reviews/8550/49463, 4.
[57] Bob and Charlotte do not meet for the first time until more than 30 minutes into the film,
and it is several days after that initial encounter (about 41 minutes into the 102 minute
film)*following a happenstance meeting outside the hotel’s sauna*that the unlikely pair
decides to venture into the city together.
[58] ‘‘Locating her American characters as visitors to Tokyo, Coppola is able to depict a sense of
alienation that is highlighted by existence in a ‘foreign’ land. The two protagonists find
themselves in a different time zone, dislocated in time as well as space. Their temporal
dislocation is emphasised by Charlotte and Bob’s jet lag and insomnia, conditions that
ensure that they are out of step with their surroundings.’’ Wendy Haslem, ‘‘Neon Gothic:
Lost in Translation,’’ Senses of Cinema 31 (April�June 2004): 9. Another critic put it this way,
‘‘As the title indicates, ‘Lost in Translation’ is a film about dislocations and disorientations.’’
Turan, ‘‘Movie Review,’’ 4.
[59] Stuart Klawans, ‘‘Tokyo Story,’’ The Nation (September 29, 2003), 34.
[60] Kernels are those plot events that actively contribute to the story’s progression, while
satellites are the more minor and routine events (see Seymour Chatman, Story and
Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978,
53�54). The first third of Lost in Translation is made up almost entirely of satellites.
[61] Noel Carroll, Engaging the Moving Image (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003),
45, 46.
[62] Ann Marie Seward Barry, Visual Intelligence: Perception, Image, and Manipulation in Visual
Communication (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 134�37.
[63] The building is the Shinjuku Park Tower, of which the Park Hyatt Tokyo occupies the top 14
floors. Much of the film is shot in the hotel’s famed New York Bar on the 52nd floor
overlooking the city.
[64] Susan L. Feagin, ‘‘Time and Timing,’’ in Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion, ed.
Carl Plantinga and Greg M. Smith (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999),
168.
[65] ‘‘Towering over an elevator full of salary men, Bob is a one-man alienation effect.’’ Jim
Hoberman, ‘‘After Sunset,’’ The Village Voice, September 9, 2003, http://www.villagevoice.
com/2003-09-09/film/after-sunset/1, 4.
[66] Hoberman, ‘‘After Sunset,’’ 2; Travers, ‘‘Lost in Translation,’’ 4.
[67] Joe Queenan, ‘‘A Yen for Romance,’’ The Guardian, January 10. 2004, http://www.guardian.
co.uk/film/2004/jan/10/features.joequeenan, 4.
[68] Maria San Filippo, ‘‘Lost in Translation,’’ Cineaste 29.1 (Winter 2003): 27.
[69] Ken Fox, ‘‘Lost in Translation: Review,’’ TV Guide, 2003, http://movies.tvguide.com/lost-
translation/review/136955, 1.
Cinema and Choric Connection 383
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http://articles.sfgate.com/2003-09-12/entertainment/17506814_1_sofia-coppola-translation-scarlett-johansson
http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/reviews/8550/49463
http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/reviews/8550/49463
http://www.villagevoice.com/2003-09-09/film/after-sunset/1
http://www.villagevoice.com/2003-09-09/film/after-sunset/1
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2004/jan/10/features.joequeenan
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2004/jan/10/features.joequeenan
http://movies.tvguide.com/lost-translation/review/136955
http://movies.tvguide.com/lost-translation/review/136955
[70] Cinematographer Lance Acord used an Aaton 35. ‘‘With the lightweight camera Acord was
able to shoot in locations that would otherwise prove to be impossible. Lost in Translation
gives Charlotte’s journey the feeling of a personal documentary travelogue (almost guerilla
filmmaking) by following her throughout Japan, across the crowded Shibuya Crossing,
underground in the Tokyo subway and along the shinkansen track to visit temples in
Kyoto’’ (Haslem, ‘‘Neon Gothic,’’ 15).
[71] See Barry, Visual Intelligence, 137.
[72] Jeffery Overstreet, ‘‘Lost in Translation,’’ Pastemagazine, December 1, 2003, http://www.
pastemagazine.com/articles/2003/12/lost-in-translation.html, 3.
[73] Travers, ‘‘Lost in Translation,’’ 4. Despite the growing popularity of digital video, Lost in
Translation was shot on high-speed film stock (Kodak’s 5263).
[74] Filippo, ‘‘Lost in Translation,’’ 28. See also S. Brent Plate, ‘‘Film Review: Lost in
Translation,’’ The Journal of Religion and Film 8.1 (April 2004): 4.
[75] ‘‘Japan is not Japan itself, but rather a canvas onto which these American’s emotions
are mapped,’’ Alice Lovejoy, ‘‘Two Lost Souls Adrift in Tokyo Forge an Unlikely Bond
in Sophia Coppola’s 21st Century Brief Encounter,’’ Film Comment 39 (July�August
2003): 11.
[76] ‘‘Coppola has hit on a metaphor for modern alienation.’’ Peter Rainer, ‘‘Sleepless in Tokyo,’’
New York Magazine, September 15, 2003, http://nymag.com/nymetro/movies/reviews/n_
9178/, 3.
[77] See Jim Collins, Architectures of Excess: Cultural Life in the Information Age (New York:
Routledge, 1995).
[78] Caro, ‘‘Movie Review,’’ 9.
[79] Foundas, ‘‘More Than This,’’ 4.
[80] Anne R. Richards and Carol David, ‘‘Decorative Color as a Rhetorical Enhancement on the
World Wide Web,’’ Technical Communication Quarterly 14 (2005) 31, 38.
[81] Kennedy, Deleuze and Cinema, 115.
[82] Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual, 24.
[83] Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual, 28�29. See also Richards and David, ‘‘Decorative
Color,’’ 39 and Barry, Visual Intelligence, 128, 130.
[84] Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual, 38�40.
[85] Richards and David, ‘‘Decorative Color,’’ 39.
[86] Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual, 37. Barry, Visual Intelligence, 132.
[87] Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual, 37.
[88] Lovejoy, ‘‘Two Lost Souls, 11.
[89] Jeff Smith, ‘‘Movie Music as Moving Music: Emotion, Cognition, and the Film Score,’’ in
Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion, ed. Carl Plantinga and Greg M. Smith
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 162.
[90] Filippo, ‘‘Lost in Translation,’’ 28.
[91] Maureen McCarty Draper, The Nature of Music: Beauty, Sound, and Healing (New York:
Riverhead Books, 2001), 11.
[92] Edelstein, ‘‘Prisoner of Japan,’’ 5. ‘‘Importantly, this confluence of speeds, lights and sounds
do not affect the protagonist or viewer as an ‘ego,’ a person with sharply delineated, stable
characteristics, but, rather, they combine as a body of affects that impact on the anonymous
human body. These affects speak to the body through sensation before being recognised
rationally. It is a primordial connection with the world that is shown and felt here.’’ Anna
Rogers, ‘‘Sophia Coppola,’’ Senses of Cinema 45 (October�December 2007): 16.
[93] This movement is indicative of Burke’s notion of form or the arousing of an appetite. For
Burke, the appeal of form is not just a symbolic process, but also one ‘‘closely allied with
‘bodily’ processes’’ that are ‘‘exemplified in rhythm.’’ Kenneth Burke, Counter-Statement,
2nd ed. (Los Altos, CA: Hermes Publications, 1953), 140�41.
384 B. L. Ott & D. M. Keeling
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http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2003/12/lost-in-translation.html
http://nymag.com/nymetro/movies/reviews/n_9178/
http://nymag.com/nymetro/movies/reviews/n_9178/
[94] See Joshua Gunn, ‘‘Refitting Fantasy: Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity, and Talking to the Dead,’’
Quarterly Journal of Speech 90 (2004): 5.
[95] Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1982), 12�13.
[96] The thetic stage corresponds loosely to Freud’s Oedipal stage and Lacan’mirror stage.
Regardless of their terminological differences, Kristeva*like Freud and Lacan*believes
that awareness of self depends upon separation. ‘‘Thus we view the thetic phase,’’ explains
Kristeva, ‘‘as the place of the Other, as the precondition for signification, i.e., the
precondition for the positing of language.’’ Kristeva, Revolution, 48.
[97] Lacan’s ‘‘Symbolic’’ (with a capital ‘‘S’’) is the outcome of the dialectic between Kristeva’s
‘‘semiotic’’ and ‘‘symbolic’’ modalities (Lechte and Margoroni, Julie Kristeva, 14).
[98] ‘‘Continuity is what we are after,’’ explains Bataille, ‘‘but generally only if that continuity
which the death of discontinuous beings can alone establish is not the victor in the long
run’’ (Erotism, 18�19).
[99] For more on this dual meaning of the semiotic chōra, see Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror,
102.
[100] David Schwarz, ‘‘Listening Subjects: Semiotics, Psychoanalysis, and the Music of John
Adams and Steve Reich,’’ Perspectives of New Music 31 (1993): 27.
[101] Bataille, Erotism, 239.
[102] Georges Bataille, The Tears of Eros, trans. Peter Connor (San Francisco: City Light Books,
1989).
[103] Laura Mulvey, ‘‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,’’ Screen 16 (1975): 6�18.
[104] Gaylyn Studlar, In the Realm of Pleasure: Von Sternberg, Dietrich, and the Masochistic
Aesthetic (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 39�40.
[105] This state corresponds loosely to Lacan’s notion of the Imaginary. But ‘‘in contrast to Lacan,
for whom the imaginary order functions only on a visual register, Kristeva stresses all the
sensory registers. The imaginary is not only a visual order, it is also, Kristeva claims,
organized by voice, touch, taste and smell.’’ Madan Sarup, An Introductory Guide to Post-
Structuralism and Postmodernism, 2nd ed., (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993),
122�23.
[106] See Filippo, ‘‘Lost in Translation,’’ 26, and Haslem, ‘‘Neon Gothic,’’ 3.
[107] Travers, ‘‘Lost in Translation,’’ 1; Rooney, ‘‘Lost in Translation,’’ 12; Paul Julian Smith,
‘‘Tokyo Drifters,’’ Sight and Sound 14.1 (January 2004): 13.
[108] Charles D. Minahen, ‘‘Specular Reflections: Rimbaud (Lacan, Kristeva) and ‘Le Stade Du
Miroir’ in ‘Enfance,’ ’’ Neophilogus 89 (2005): 222.
[109] Laura U. Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2002), 2; see also Jennifer M. Barker, The Tactile Eye: Touch and the
Cinematic Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), Mark Paterson, The
Senses of Touch: Haptics, Affects and Technologies (New York: Oxford, 2007), and Steven
Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 50�55.
[110] Barker, The Tactile Eye, 31.
[111] Marks, Touch, 13, 17.
[112] Robert Young, ed., Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader (Boston: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1981), 32.
[113] Barthes, Image, Music, Text, 164. The pleasure of the Text is not the pleasure of con-
sumption, for the text is bound to jouissance, which unlike plaisir, ‘‘is marked by loss of
cultural identity.’’ Sharon Meagher, ‘‘Spinning Ethics in Its Grave: Tradition and Rupture in
the Theory of Roland Barthes,’’ in Signs of Change: Premodern–�Modern–�Postmodern,
ed. Stephen Barker (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 212.
[114] See Hwa Yal Jung, ‘‘Writing the Body as Social Discourse: Prolegomena to Carnal
Hermeneutics,’’ in Signs of Change: Premodern– � Modern– � Postmodern, ed. Stephen
Cinema and Choric Connection 385
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Barker (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 264�65. By silence, we mean the
absence of communication, not the total absence of sound (or ambient noise). In silence,
one becomes (at)tuned to the pounding of the heart and other bodily rhythms. ‘‘We have a
strong tendency to imagine Silence as the absence of sound. This imagination deprives
silence of being anything in itself and makes it an emptiness, a void in what should be the
norm. But silence was here before anything else, and it envelops everything else. It is the
most primary phenomenon of existence, both palpably something and seemingly nothing.
Silence is prior to sound, not the cessation of sound.’’ Robert Sardello, Silence: The Mystery
of Wholeness (Berkeley, CA: Goldenstone Press, 2008), 7�8.
[115] Hocker Rushing, ‘‘E.T. as Rhetorical Transcendence,’’ 188.
[116] Bill Nichols, Movies and Methods: Volume II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985),
602.
[117] Emphasis added. Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives, 21.
[118] Michael Calvin McGee, ‘‘A Materialist’s Conception of Rhetoric,’’ in Explorations in
Rhetoric: Studies in Honor of Douglas Ehninger, ed. Ray E. McKerrow (Glenview, IL: Scott,
Foresman, 1982), 25.
[119] On this distinction, see Richard A. Engell, ‘‘Materiality, Symbolicity, and the Rhetoric of
Order: ‘Dialectic Biologism’ as Motive in Burke,’’ Western Journal of Communication 62
(1998): 1�26, and Joan Faber McAlister, ‘‘Material Aesthetics in Middle America: Simone
Weil, the Problem of Roots, and the Pantopic Suburb,’’ in Rhetoric, Materiality, and Politics,
ed. Barbara A. Biesecker and John Louis Lucaites (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), 101�2.
[120] Roland Barthes, ‘‘The Grain of the Voice’’ in Image, Music, Text, 179�89.
[121] John Lechte, Julia Kristeva (New York: Routledge, 1990), 130.
[122] See David Howes, Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Cultural and Social Theory
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 17�28.
[123] See, for instance, DeChaine, ‘‘Affect and Embodied Understanding.’’
386 B. L. Ott & D. M. Keeling
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