Theorizing Stupid Media

De-Naturalizing Story Structures in the Cinematic, Televisual, and Videogames

Aaron Kerner, Julian Hoxter

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9783030281755
• eBook ISBN: 9783030281762
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This book explores the stupid as it manifests in media—the cinema, television and streamed content, and videogames. The stupid is theorized not as a pejorative term but to address media that "fails" to conform to established narrative conventions, often surfacing at evolutionary moments. The Transformers franchise is often dismissed as being stupid because its stylistic vernacular privileges kinetic qualities over conventional narration. Similarly, the stupid is often present in genre fails like mother!, or in instances of narrative dissonance—joyously in Adventure Time; more controversially in Gone Home — where a story "feels off" It also manifests in "ludonarrative dissonance" when gameplay and narrative seemingly run counter to one another in videogames like Undertale and Bioshock. This book is addressed to those interested in media that is quirky, spectacle-driven, or generally hard to place—stupid!

© The Author(s) 2019

A. Kerner, J. HoxterTheorizing Stupid Mediahttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28176-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. The Stupider the Better

Aaron Kerner¹ and Julian Hoxter¹

(1)

School of Cinema, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA, USA

Aaron Kerner (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Julian Hoxter

End Abstract

Introduction: No Really, the Stupider the Better

During the course of a conversation with my colleague and co-writer trying to recall a title I said, “You know, that movie with the women in anime cosplay outfits and zeppelins.” Immediately, he knew exactly what I was talking about, “Oh, right, Sucker Punch.” Not a shred of narrative information to speak of really, rather the identifying markers that I offered fell squarely in the realm of spectacle—the fetishistic exhibition of the female form and fantastical airships. Zack Snyder’s 2011 film Sucker Punch makes little effort to adhere to conventional narrative devices, this is not to say that narrative is absent, but rather the film is driven by its continual promise to deliver a compendium of audio/visual marvels. Sucker Punch is a pastiche of spectacle tropes: it draws heavily on exploitation cinema, specifically women in prison films from the 1970s, chambara and martial art films, the fetishistic rendering of the female body drawn explicitly from the pornographic genre, spectacular dystopic landscapes with no shortage of apocalyptic carnage, strongly influenced both by fantasy films and videogames, and elements of torture and humiliation indicative of the post-9/11 horror genre that David Edelstein dubbed “torture porn.” It is safe to say that, in commonsense terms at least, Sucker Punch is stupid. But how is it stupid? Let us concede first that the plot is eye-rollingly inane—an institutionalized young woman finds her inner strength in vivid (male-)fantasy worlds. But there are also novel formal elements in Sucker Punch that prompt us to read it as stupid.

This is precisely what we are concerned with here: charting the terrain of stupid media at a particular, convergent moment in the history of those media. Let us be abundantly clear, our use of the term “stupid” is not necessarily intended to disparage, in fact in many instances we use it in quite the opposite sense. We appropriate the term “stupid” from a passage in Julia Kristeva’s essay, “Fantasy and Cinema.” Kristeva observes that counter to our preconceived notions otherwise, films that emphasize form over content—even films that we might consider in poor taste—might offer a well-spring of affect, and this harbors cathartic potential. And so while this might seem counterintuitive, Kristeva insists that “the stupider it is, the better, for the filmic image does not need to be intelligent: what counts is that the specular presents the drive—aggression—through its directed signified (the object or situation represented) and encodes it through its plastic rhythm (the network of lektonic elements: sounds, tone, colors, space, figures), which can come back to us from the other without response and which consequently has remained uncaptured, unsymbolized, unconsumed.”¹ In other words, what is at stake here are those things that exceed, or ooze out of the narrative, but are not necessarily a component of narrative. A lekton—a signifier without a signified—an audio source that straddles the boundaries between diegetic and non-diegetic registers, an extreme close-up that effectively obliterates what it purports to represent, compositions overwhelmed by scale (sublime), color, and so on. These things do not necessarily serve the narrative (i.e., they do not directly advance the plot), but rather exalt in the spectacle of excess, which for all intents and purposes has “no meaning.”

The stupid, for instance, might be found in narratives that experiment with and/or throw off the yoke of storytelling conventions, eliciting from the spectator a sense of “disappointment” in the face of an unexpected, or unresolved narrative. Facing stupidity in this way invites us to rethink categories altogether, to break free of long-established regimes of storytelling, and reimagine storytelling modes (e.g., videogames). The media under consideration here might also be deeply embellished, intended to elicit an affective response in the spectator. While it may present as vapid, or lacking any discernible “meaning” as such, what we hope to address are the ways in which the cinematic might speak to our “sensorial intelligence.” Moreover, the embellishments in their excessiveness have the potential, on the one hand, to leave the spectator in a stupefied awe, and perhaps even simultaneously call attention to the very fabric that constitutes the cinematic. Sion Sono’s 2016 film Antiporno , for instance, discussed at length in Chap. 3, self-consciously undercuts its own narrative progression and places a premium on spectacle. Sono’s usurpation of narrative progression and incorporation of overwrought flourishes challenge even the liberal bounds of the softcore erotic genre, of which it is ostensibly situated. Antiporno places a strain upon the narrative and genre conventions, and in so doing invites the spectator to reflect upon the limits of a genre and the general qualities of what narrative cinema is.

Rather than take the term “narrative” for granted, let us offer our general understanding of what narrative is. Narrative is in short, a set of storytelling conventions. Whether we are addressing documentary films, the latest Hollywood blockbuster, or even a videogame, a narrative typically involves a character, or set of characters, that confronts some sort of conflict that is typically resolved by the conclusion of the plot. The primary character in the process of resolving that conflict usually undertakes some sort of transformation—for example, they “grow up,” or acknowledge a wrong that they have committed and rectify it. Regardless, the internal story-arc typically arrives at a denouement and a modified form of catharsis.

Even the champion of classical narrative conventions, David Bordwell, recognizes the changes in recent cinematic storytelling in what he terms “intensified continuity.” And this idea shares some affinities with the stupid. Bordwell suggests that “Intensified continuity is traditional continuity amped up, raised to a higher pitch of emphasis. It is the dominant style of American mass-audience films today.”² Similarly, Steven Shaviro referred to this disregard for conventional editing regimes as “post-continuity,” which is preoccupied “with immediate effects” rather than attending to “broader continuity—whether on the immediate shot-by-shot level, or on that of the overall narrative.”³ Shaviro pushes Bordwell’s conception, vocalizing what Bordwell apparently cannot bring “himself to say explicitly … that, when intensified continuity is pushed to this absurd, hyperbolic point, it does indeed result in a radical aesthetic ‘regime change.’”⁴ What Shaviro refers to as the “stylistics of post-continuity,” we call stupid.

Storytelling, as others have observed, is not static. Rather it adapts and evolves to meet emerging and converging media platforms, changing along with technology, and to satisfy evolving tastes. “The triumph of intensified continuity reminds us that as styles change, so do viewing skills.”⁵ Indeed, without making allowances for storytelling innovations, and ill-equipped to “read” “intensified” storytelling elements a viewer understandably might profess, “that’s stupid!” Bordwell focuses on cinematic storytelling, and he illustrates that contemporary films have much shorter average shot lengths (ASL). No surprise there. Digital editing software, Bordwell observes, contributes to shorter ASLs. “By cutting on computer, filmmakers can easily shave shots frame by frame, a process known as ‘frame-fucking.’ Frame-fucking is one reason some action sequences don’t read well on the big screen. After cutting the car chase from The Rock on computer, Michael Bay saw it projected, decided that it went by too fast, and had to ‘de-cut’ it.”⁶ But it is not simply the duration of shots (read: speed) that is at stake here, but the integrity of spatial relations and the legibility of the cinematic text that establishes clear cause and effect relationships. Bordwell proclaims that intensified continuity does not change storytelling conventions writ-large. “Contrary to claims that Hollywood style has become post-classical, we are still dealing with a variant of classical filmmaking.”⁷ And perhaps this is where intensified continuity and the stupid part ways because the latter (at least in certain instances) very well might depart from established storytelling conventions.

Bordwell , and others in decidedly more staunch terms, still cling to narrative. Lisa Purse observes that the frenetic possibilities of cinema need not explicitly present events, rather that the “[p]opular cinema is free to think bodies-at-speed in ways other than the literal show-and-tell, and is increasingly doing so.”⁸ A fight sequence in Gladiator (Ridley Scott, 2000) dispenses with longer shots and longer takes in favor of a more kinetic camera style and lightning quick cuts—the “reality” of a gladiatorial battle is given over to the sensation of it.⁹ The sensate experience (body) is privileged over the intelligibility (mind) of the onscreen events—stupid. Matthias Stork vociferously bemoans current trends. Referencing Bordwell’s intensified continuity, Stork laments, “In many post-millennial releases, we’re not just seeing an intens...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. The Stupider the Better
• 2. The Stupid in the Contemporary Hollywood Vernacular: Spectacularly Stupid Transformers
• 3. The Stupid in Genre Fails
• 4. The Stupid as Narrative Dissonance
• 5. The Stupid as Ludonarrative Dissonance
• 6. Conclusion: Well That Was Stupid
• Back Matter