Journal articles on the topic 'Charlie's angels'

<p><em><span lang="EN-US">Film is a medium for delivering messages through moving images. However, often in film narratives, there is a point of view of the dominance of male characters as subjects and active characters while women as passive characters or objects. Thus, women are often seen as a group that is vulnerable to violence, both sexual and symbolic violence. This article aimed to find a woman's point of view in Charlie's Angels, where women are seen as the dominant subject and not a vulnerable group. This research employed a descriptive-qualitative research method with primary and secondary data sources. The primary data was the Charlie's Angels film, while the secondary data was supporting documents such as books and articles. Data collection techniques employed documentation techniques. The data analysis technique applied Roland Barthes Semiotics to find denotations, connotations, and myths in film scenes to explore their meaning. In addition, this study used Tseelon's theory which states that in the film, there is a woman's point of view that rejects the notion that women are considered sexual objects formed from the point of view of men. The results of this study indicated that the Charlie's Angels film transparently applied a female perspective, made women's roles more dominant than men's, and negated the concept of women as sexual objects from the male point of view</span></em></p><p>Film merupakan media penyampai pesan melalui gambar bergerak. Namun, sering kali dalam narasi film, terdapat sudut pandang dominasi tokoh laki-laki sebagai subjek dan tokoh aktif, sementara perempuan sebagai tokoh pasif atau objek. Sehingga, perempuan seringkali dipandang sebagai kelompok yang rentan dengan kekerasan, baik kekerasan seksual maupun simbolik.<strong> </strong>Artikel ini bertujuan menemukan sudut pandang perempuan dalam film <em>Charlie’s Angels </em>yang mana perempuan dipandang sebagai subjek yang dominan dan bukanlah kelompok yang rentan. Penelitian ini menggunakan metode penelitian deskriptif-kualitatif dengan sumber data primer dan sekunder. Data primer yang digunakan ialah film <em>Charlie’s Angels</em>, sedangkan data sekunder berupa dokumen pendukung, seperti buku penunjang dan artikel. Teknik pengumpulan data menggunakan teknik dokumentasi. Teknik analisis data menggunakan Semiotika Roland Barthes untuk menemukan denotasi, konotasi, mitos dalam adegan-adegan film dalam teks, sehingga dapat digali maknanya. Selain itu, penelitian ini menggunakan teori Tseelon yang menyatakan jika dalam film terdapat sudut pandang perempuan yang menolak adanya kepercayaan jika perempuan dianggap sebagai objek seksual yang dibentuk berdasar sudut pandang laki–laki. Hasil penelitian ini menunjukkan bahwa film <em>Charlie’s Angels </em>secara transparan menggunakan perspektif perempuan dan membuat peran perempuan menjadi lebih dominan daripada laki-laki, serta meniadakan konsep perempuan sebagai objek seksual dari sudut pandang laki-laki.</p>

The recent films Charlie's Angels and Josie and the Pussycats, filmic remakes of 1970s television series, and furthermore of each other, may be indicative of a new direction for film, which is precisely the direction of television. These new films serve as indexes of each other and of the popular culture from which they have been compiled. As remakes become more common and films rely ever more on our familiarity with other forms of mass media, the vast cultural-industrial complex Theodor Adorno denounced a half-century ago seems to be at its most effective.

Charlie's Angels (2019) is considered a feminist film, dedicated to promoting women's empowerment and gender equality related discourse. Don't Call Me Angel is the theme song of Charlie's Angels, co-performed by Ariana Grande, Miley Cyrus and Lana Del Rey, which advocates women's control over the body, eliminating gender stereotypes, bold self-expression as well as encouraging sisterhood. This article critically discusses the construction of female images in this pop music video from a postfeminist perspective, which means that this study adopts a qualitative method of social semiotics to draw conclusions by sorting out some scenes, lyrics and performances of Don't Call Me Angel. Firstly, some of the objectified female and sexual expression scenes in this music video reflect complex postfeminist emotions. Secondly, the music video retains the characteristics of the classic Hollywood action movies' femme fatale when constructing female images, especially highlighting the pornographic femininity and the masculinity of violent female images.

The study entitled Women's Language Features on Utterances of Charlie's Angels Movie seeks to examine women's language features and the reasons of using the features by the three main women character. The data was taken from the utterances of the Charlie's Angels (2019) movie. The researchers used Lakoff's hypothesis to investigate women's language features. Lakoff (1975) suggested ten language features for women, but this analysis only found nine features in this movie, namely lexical hedges or fillers, intensifiers, tag question, emphatic stress, rising intonation on declaratives, avoidance of strong swear words, super polite forms, empty adjectives, and hypercorrect grammar. The findings indicated that intensifiers appeared to be the most prominent attribute utilized among the three main women’s characters in the movie (45.4%), and the least feature is the tag question (1.81%). Regarding the reasons for using Women's Language Features as the most frequent feature in this movie, the feature occurs when the speakers try to give a strong opinion or persuade the other person. Furthermore, the reason of tag question occurs in this movie because to convenience the hearer about what the speaker’s said.

The study entitled Women's Language Features on Utterances of Charlie's Angels Movie seeks to examine women's language features and the reasons of using the features by the three main women character. The data was taken from the utterances of the Charlie's Angels (2019) movie. The researchers used Lakoff's hypothesis to investigate women's language features. Lakoff (1975) suggested ten language features for women, but this analysis only found nine features in this movie, namely lexical hedges or fillers, intensifiers, tag question, emphatic stress, rising intonation on declaratives, avoidance of strong swear words, super polite forms, empty adjectives, and hypercorrect grammar. The findings indicated that intensifiers appeared to be the most prominent attribute utilized among the three main women’s characters in the movie (45.4%), and the least feature is the tag question (1.81%). Regarding the reasons for using Women's Language Features as the most frequent feature in this movie, the feature occurs when the speakers try to give a strong opinion or persuade the other person. Furthermore, the reason of tag question occurs in this movie because to convenience the hearer about what the speaker’s said.

This research is a pragmatic study of the use of negative politeness strategies. This study aims to identify negative politeness strategies used by characters in films and to analyze why characters in films use negative politeness strategies in their speech. This study will use a qualitative method in utilizing the study of negative politeness strategies by describing the problem as clearly as possible. The data will be taken from a film called Charlie's Angels 2019. The theory that will be used in this research is the theory proposed by Brown and Levinson's negative politeness strategy in 1992. The results of this study conclude that there are ten strategies proposed by Brown and Levinson as a way to direct, does not assume or presuppose, and does not force and fulfill the other wishes of the listener. The negative politeness strategy has several sub-strategies that have different goals. They use strategies related to the context of the conversation and the situation.

This study was focused on determine the types of use slang language style. The types of slangs were analyzed from “Charlie’s Angels” movie. Theories used in this research were Sumarsono (2007) about the types of slang language style and Zhou & Fan (2013) about the functions of slang language. This study was conducted using a descriptive qualitative method.This research is the kind of content analysis study based on the way to do qualitative research. The way to collects the data are; downloading movie, watching movie and downloading movie subtitle. The data were from a movie entitled “Charlie’s Angels” in the year of 2019 with action-comedy genre.After conducting the analysis, this study showed that there were four types of slang language style from six types of slang language. They were clipping, creative, uses the existing words and metaphor. Creative was found as the most dominant types of slang language style in the movie with 10 data (40%), metaphor with 7 data (28%), uses the existing words with 5 data (20%) and clipping with 3 data (12%). Finally, the reseacher hopes that this study will be useful for the future improvement of studying literature, especially about slang language style

Various gender-biased films still place women as weak and only occupy tasks in the domestic sphere. There is still a public perception that women cannot carry out significant tasks in the public sector. This study aims to represent girl power and the resistance to female domestication through film media based on these problems. This study uses a qualitative method of John Fiske's semiotic analysis, including the code level of reality, representation, and ideology. The study results show that the power of women in the Charlie's Angel (2019) movie has intellectual abilities. They can become a leader, fighting negative stereotypes of society by maximizing the power of skills possessed, including self-defense, disguise, shooting, and a programmer who can hack security. The women in this film prove their resistance to women's domestication by working in the public sector, namely in an international-scale investigative security organization called the Townsend Agency.

Jurnalistul britanic Charlie Ottley este, de aproape un deceniu, unul dintre cei mai perseverenți ambasadori ai imaginii României în lume. Fascinat de frumusețea și naturalitatea țării noastre, Charlie face emisiuni de televiziune, scrie editoriale și reportaje pentru cele mai prestigioase canale media din lume, necontenind să laude măreția și sălbăticia munților Carpați sau biodiversitatea. Născut în urmă cu 49 de ani la Winchester, în Anglia, Charlie a devenit prieten al României după de a colindat lumea în lung și-n lat spre a descoperi frumuseți. Mereu a fost omul încercat de focul cunoașterii și a căutat să descopere părțile frumoase ale națiilor. Dublu licențiat al Universității din Bristol, în teologie și filosofie, Charlie Ottley și-a încercat norocul și în jurnalism, absolvind și facultatea de profil de la City University din Londra. După un scurt stagiu la Londra, a ajuns șeful biroului de corespondenți de la Los Angeles al grupului media World Entertaiment News Network. Acum, Charlie Ottley scrie constant pentru The Dail Mail, Food and Travel Magazine şi Vanity Fair. În urmă cu două decenii și-a făcut propria televiziune, Forge TV, filmând reportajele pe care le făcea pentru Daily Express. A călătorit prin lume producând o serie de emisiuni culinare spectaculoase. Astfel, a descoperit ”aromele” mâncărurilor din Chile (Flavours of Chile), Columbia, Peru, Mexic, Spania, Grecia, Scoția sau Africa de Sud. Succesul seriei, difuzată pe Travel Channel, a asigurat o nouă serie bazată pe partea culinară şi de călătorii, intitulată Flavours of Chile. În următorii 12 ani a realizat serii similare în Peru, Spania, Mexic, Scoţia, Africa de Sud, Columbia şi Grecia. În 2011, Charlie Ottley a venit pentru prima oară în România cu același scop de a descoperi tradiția culinară și de natura. A fost fascinat și de atunci își canalizează eforturile pentru a ajuta la păstrarea bogăţiilor naturale ale României. A realizat celebra seriei de reportaje televizate, Wild Carpathia, difuzată în 110 ţări şi tradusă în 11 limbi. În vara lui 2017, Charlie Ottley a prezentat ultimul episod din Wild Carpathia la sediul ONU din New York, fiind aplaudat la scenă deschisă de reprezentanţii a 193 de ţări şi sute de personalități mondiale prezenți la acel eveniment. La finalul anului trecut, ambasadorul României sălbatice și-a cumpărat o casă în Bran și intenționează să o transforme într-un veritabil loc de pelerinaj al prietenilor englezi care, la rândul lor, vor deveni – asemenea lui Charlie – ”reprezentanți diplomatici” ai României.

A film is a collective interpretation of various elements like lighting, visuals, Camera angles, set design, costumes, acting of the actors involved in the film and last but not least the sound.To list out there are several elements that create sound of a film. The list includes sound quality, continuity of sound, timing, diegetic and non-diegetic sound, pace, level and pitch of sound.The presence of these audio elements in a certain manner represents a particular emotion depicted in a scene of a film.This paper tries to explore the significance of the audio element ‘Pitch’, in the representation of the emotion ‘Love’, considering Charlie Chaplin’s ‘The Kid’ as a sample for the present study.The paper dealt with one of the most iconic film by the legendary filmmaker Charlie Chaplin who is known for his famous character ‘The Tramp’. And this comic character is unique as it represents almost all the emotions in its signature style. This paper is a sincere effort to understand the significance of the audio element ‘pitch’ in representing the emotion ‘love’.

David L. Ulin's essay finds William Mulholland doubly generous—he gave LA both water and a motto to live by. Ulin begins with the Los Angeles Aqueduct's inauguration photographs taken in November 1913. Here is where Mulholland said the five words that Ulin proposes as LA's manifesto. As Ulin reports, within the last one hundred years many (in)famous Angelenos, like oil baron Edward Doheny, studio head Louis B. Mayer, and gambling kingpin Charlie Crawford, followed Mulholland's prescription. For popular writers Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain, "There it is. Take it" describes their license to fictionalize scandal. But obeying Mulholland's imperative, as Ulin reveals, was not without negative consequences. Mulholland, especially, with the 1928 collapse of the St. Francis Dam, for which he held himself responsible, found out the hard way the cost of trusting his authority. In the end, "There it is. Take it," Mulholland's directive for the future, is a lesson from the past that haunts us today.

Abstract This article explores the phenomenon of “carceral accuracy” in order to index how minoritarian participation into state antiviolence measures continues to reproduce and prioritize social scientific, criminological, and quantitative data-driven efforts to rationalize crime and punishment as a necessity for disrupting bias-motivated violence. In Los Angeles from 2014 to 2015, in the span of just five months the premature and violent deaths of three transgender women of color would exacerbate longstanding political rifts in the trans and queer community. These rifts formed along the lines of either divestment or reinvestment in criminal policy and legislation via a call for prosecution of “anti-trans hate crimes.” Considering that over the last four decades Los Angeles has been lauded for its progressive LGBT policies and inclusive policing reforms, this article traces how trans and queer community safety agendas have become so easily conflated with policing and imprisonment technologies that presume to speculate, track, manage, and inoculate social risk. Focusing on examples such as former LAPD (Los Angeles Police Department) Chief Charlie Beck's 2012 LGBT Police Forum proclamation of a “transgender progressive paramilitarism” to the LAPD's 2015 “Transgender Walk of Remembrance,” these instances of “trans inclusive” pro-policing efforts demonstrate how antiviolence coalitions remain tied to carceral outcomes by way of routinized and compulsory participation in criminological discourse and technologies cloaked in the rhetoric of public safety. In conclusion, this article asks how carceral coalitions are maintained through law enforcement agencies’ control of select community partnerships that prioritize how we count crime and who is represented in crime data. Carceral accuracy thus wrestles with the shared cultural preoccupation with upholding a mythos that “cold calculations,” such as the counting of trans deaths, can provide any relief or disruption to anti-trans violence. In the end, what remains unshakeable in the wake of such violence is a heteropatriarchal and white supremacist possessive investment in improving criminal data.

ABSTRACT This paper provides a telling case account of how a child called Charlie was positioned and (re)positioned himself within and across different situational types of classroom literacy encounters in his first-grade classroom. This telling case is based on a re-analysis of an originating study conducted by the author (HARRIS, 1989); and is founded on a history of research based on revisioning archived data records as new theories develop. Providing a profile of different ways in which a child positions self and is positioned by the teacher, the system and peers, this telling case presents a research approach for understanding positioning processes and their consequences for children as they develop literacy processes and identities. To make transparent how the telling case study led to new theoretical insights, this paper makes visible multiple levels of analytic scale and angles of analysis of positioning (ANDERSON, 2009) that were undertaken to make visible the dynamic nature of positioning as understood through Positioning Theory (HARRÉ & LANGENHOVE, 1999; HARRÉ, 2012). This telling case study, therefore, builds a foundation for developing theoretical understandings of the fluid and dynamic nature of positioning in classrooms, and influences of positioning on children’s opportunities to enact and demonstrate their literate identities and capabilities.

Abstract The Cloud Absorption Radiometer (CAR) was flown aboard the University of Washington Convair 580 (CV-580) research aircraft during the Chesapeake Lighthouse and Aircraft Measurements for Satellites (CLAMS) field campaign and obtained measurements of bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) of the ocean in July and August 2001 under different illumination conditions with solar zenith angles ranging from 15° to 46°. The BRDF measurements were accompanied by concurrent measurements of atmospheric aerosol optical thickness and column water vapor above the airplane. The method of spherical harmonics with Cox–Munk wave-slope distribution is used in a new algorithm developed for this study to solve the atmosphere–ocean radiative transfer problem and to remove the effects of the atmosphere from airborne measurements. The algorithm retrieves simultaneously the wind speed and full ocean BRDF (sun’s glitter and water-leaving radiance) from CAR measurements and evaluates total albedo and equivalent albedo for the water-leaving radiance outside the glitter. Results show good overall agreement with other measurements and theoretical simulations, with the anisotropy of the water-leaving radiance clearly seen. However, the water-leaving radiance does not show a strong dependence on solar zenith angle as suggested by some theoretical studies. The spectral albedo was found to vary from 4.1%–5.1% at λ = 0.472 μm to 2.4%–3.5% for λ ≥ 0.682 μm. The equivalent water-leaving albedo ranges from 1.0%–2.4% at λ = 0.472 μm to 0.1%–0.6% for λ = 0.682 μm and 0.1%–0.3% for λ = 0.870 μm. Results of the validation of the Cox–Munk model under the conditions measured show that although the model reproduces the shape of sun’s glitter on average with an accuracy of better than 30%, it underestimates the center of the sun’s glitter reflectance by about 30% for low wind speeds (&lt;2–3 m s−1). In cases of high wind speed, the model with Gram–Charlier expansion seems to provide the best fit.

Abstract KRAS is most frequently mutated in pancreatic adenocarcinomas (PDAC) with more than 90% of cases having a KRAS mutation. This leads to constitutive activation of the downstream signaling pathways, driving tumor cell proliferation whilst co-opting the tumor microenvironment (TME) to promote tumorigenesis and immune escape. The mutant specific KRASG12C inhibitor (AMG510) has been shown to suppress tumor growth and reconfigure the immune TME. However, covalent binding KRASG12C inhibitors have no efficacy on other KRAS alleles, such as G12D and V, the majority of KRAS mutations in PDAC (37% and 28%, respectively). Here, we use a SOS1 inhibitor (BI 1701963) in combination with a MEK inhibitor, blocking two non-redundant steps in the KRAS pathway, on a library of congenic tumor clones derived from an autochthonous mouse model of PDAC deemed the KPCY (Pdx-1-Cre, KRASG12D, p53-/-, YFP+). These tumor lines can generate both “hot” and “cold” TMEs regarding T cell infiltration. We observed that combined SOS1 and MEK inhibition suppressed tumor growth of all KPCY lines irrespective of their cold or hot TME status. In some KPCY lines, CD8 T-cells significantly increased in the TME following combination treatment. We found that the CD8 T-cell increase is restricted to the individual tumor site and resulted from both recruitment and intra-tumoral division. This was accompanied by a decrease of tumor associated macrophages and myeloid-derived suppressor cells. Single-cell RNAseq profiling of the TME was performed on three KPCY lines with distinct immune response to the treatment to characterize cellular composition change induced by the SOS1 and MEK inhibitor combination. To take advantage of the treatment-induced immune TME reconfiguration, we examined combination immune-oncology (IO) targeting T cells and antigen-presenting cells and found that the combination of SOS1i and MEKi with PD-1/CTLA4/CD40 enhanced and prolonged tumor growth inhibition mediated by anti-tumor immunity. Collectively, these results reveal that the combination of SOS1 and MEK inhibitors can be used to convert cold to hot tumors and highlights how we can rationalize combination of cancer-targeted therapy and IO therapy to prolong anti-tumor effects. Citation Format: Robert J Norgard, Pratha Budhani, Sarah O'Brian, Jessica Potts, Brianna Flynn, Xavier Salce, Joshua Tagore, Lucinda Thiede, Joseph Seco, Suzanne Segal, Mark Love, Ania Mikucka, Charlie Cote, Ruby Wasti, Mohanapriya Kamalakannan, Astrid Jeschko, Gabriela Melo-Zainzinger, Angela Mcnabola, Varenka Rodriguez Rodriguez DiBlasi, Joseph Tumang, Ulrike Tontsch-Grunt, Melanie Hinkel, Jeanine Pignatelli, Francesca Trapani, Sandra Martinez-Morilla, Kaja Kostyrko, Marco H Hofmann, Abhishek Kashyap, Emilio Flano, Kang Liu. Combination of SOS1::KRAS inhibitor with a MEK inhibitor reconfigures the immune tumor microenvironment of KRASG12D pancreatic ductal adenocarcinomas and sensitizes to immunotherapy [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the AACR Special Conference: Tumor Immunology and Immunotherapy; 2022 Oct 21-24; Boston, MA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Immunol Res 2022;10(12 Suppl):Abstract nr B23.

This article considers Mulvey's male gaze in today's postfeminist media culture in the latest remake of Charlie's Angels. Male gaze is analyzed as form, as production ecology, and as narrative. Since the inception of Charlie's Angels in the 1970s, the TV and feature film franchise has tried to balance feminist concerns with notions of femininity, in more and less successful ways. Although the 2000 remake of Charlie's Angels could be considered as an exemplar of objectifying and sexualizing women, the 2019 film barely presents such instances. Instead, it offers a male gaze directed at a female audience and internalized as a measure of success for its female protagonists and the implied female audience. Through practices of othering, and by placing male characters in morally inferior positions, the female audience is presented with hegemonic conceptions of white, middle-class femininity as an ideal that female viewers can and should aspire to be.

Title: Quality Improvement in the Outpatient Setting: Observations from the PINNACLE Registry® 2009 Q4-2013 Q1 Authors: Katie Kehoe BSN, MS 1 ; Sherry Shultz RN, BSN, CIO 2 ; Fran Fiocchi MPH 1 ; Qiong Li PhD 1 ; Thomas Shields 1 ; Charlie Devlin MD FACC, FACP, FASNC 2 ; Nathan T Glusenkamp, MA 1 ; J. Brendan Mullen 1 ; Angelo Ponirakis, PhD 1 ; 1 American College of Cardiology, Washington, DC 2 South Carolina Heart Center, Columbia SC Background: The PINNACLE Registry® at the American College of Cardiology is the first outpatient practice-based quality improvement program in the United States. Begun as a pilot program in 2007, the registry systematically collects and reports on adherence to clinical guidelines in the care of patients with coronary artery disease, hypertension, atrial fibrillation and heart failure. Over time, these reports offer a unique opportunity for Quality Improvement (QI) in the outpatient setting. The current study aimed to assess the effect of QI in the outpatient setting using PINNACLE Registry data. Methods: The South Carolina Heart Center is a cardiovascular practice in Columbia, South Carolina. There are 19 providers, 5 office locations and NextGen EMR. The practice’s Quality Committee and Board meet monthly to review PINNACLE reports and identify areas for QI. This Clinical Quality Improvement Initiative began 10 years ago and consists of physicians, nurses, administrators, medical assistants, a medical record analyst and information systems staff. During this review, providers’ data was not blinded to others. QI Interventions implemented included physician and staff education, improving documentation during the office visit, addition of necessary fields to capture missing data and routine planned internal audits. Between October 1, 2009 and March 31, 2013 a total of 161,873 patient encounters were submitted to the registry. A two-tailed z test was performed to assess the significance in percentage changes between 2009 to 2013. Results: The following table showed significant percentage changes in six performance measures indicating interventions implemented by the practice demonstrate significant quality improvement over time from 2009-2013. Conclusions: Utilizing their PINNACLE Registry reports, the South Carolina Heart Center identified several areas for QI. Implementing multiple interventions, this practice was able to significantly improve their PINNACLE Reports and the quality of care provided.

There was a moment just after September 11, 2001, that many commentators heralded the end of our celebrity obsessions and the emergence of a new sobriety in politics and culture. We had the mediated version of atonement when the famous presented their most serious sides for television specials in support of the families of the victims of the September 11 attacks. But within a matter of weeks the celebrity industry was back on its old track – salacious rumors about J-Lo and her movement through the entertainment industry A-List, further debates about the propriety of Michael Jackson’s behaviour, Demi Moore’s new love interest Ashton Kutcher – who is and was young enough to be her son and so on. The machine and industry that had been in place tested whether it could continue its dance with public intimacy and private turmoils of the rich and famed. Fame is both fickle and incredibly enduring. It relies on a public individual’s connection to an audience and how that persona can embody some form of affective investment (Marshall, Celebrity and Power). Audience’s loyalty can migrate, but the machinery of fame can produce new variations for newly minted moments of affection or even its opposite, intense dislike. What is enduring is the process. There is the manufacture of celebrities and stars that were produced with regularity by the old movie studios in the first half of the twentieth century that are now produced with astonishing levels of success through the current array of reality/game shows via television. Beyond these public variations, there is the will-to-fame that is expressed by the various webcam sites and weblogs where a new era of public narcissism is mutating with new media forms. This issue deals with fame; but it is not alone. The academy has embraced the study of celebrity and fame over the last decade and it has accelerated in recent years. Sport stardom (Andrews and Jackson), film stardom (Austin and Barker), literary celebrity (Moran; Glass), journalism and celebrity (Ponce de Leon; Marshall, “Intimately Intertwined”), the psychology of fame (Giles), and media and the celebrity (Turner; Marshall, Celebrity and Power) have appeared as full-fledged books with the regularity that echoes the celebrity system’s own production process. This burgeoning interest in fame cuts across disciplinary study in surprising ways. Chris Rojek’s discussion of religion and celebrity is but one interesting recent variation in the study of fame (Rojek). The interest in this issue has been impressive and, for an editor, at times overwhelming. Nonetheless, we have collected an intriguing array of articles to advance the study of fame and to engage with the way it reflects and refracts the complex crystalline structure of popular culture. Understanding fame demands a form of perceptive interdisciplinarity that our group of 18 authors has worked to achieve. Gerard Goggin and Christopher Newell’s article on how Christopher Reeve’s fame has transformed and disciplined international debates on disability to narrowly focus on the agenda of the “cure” serves as our feature article. The article paints a fascinating picture on the reconstruction of this particular dimension of the public sphere via the agency of a persona. Goggin and Newell’s writing is particularly valuable to understand the legacy of Reeve since his recent death and how it will continue to shape the concepts of disability for years if not decades to come. Dealing with Ziggy Stardust, the contrived fictional star that Bowie incarnated in the early 1970s, allows Suzanne Rintoul to work through how celebrity and fame provide a discursive narrative that can be the source for performance of the public self. Bowie plays with ironic distance that is understood as a debate about authenticity in a way that is implicitly understood as a trope of contemporary popular culture and the audience’s understanding of popular figures. William Tregonning explains that authenticity remains a central feature of how the famed – in popular music at the very least – refer to their identities. Via Britney Spears, Jennifer Lopez and Christine Aguilera, the author weaves a reading of their moments of their publicly reported self-reflection that entreats their audiences to understand their desire to be seen as real and identical to their pre-famous identities despite/because of their heavily hyped and inauthentic pop presence. Jonathan Goldman’s reading of Charlie Chaplin provides one of the more fascinating intertextual readings of how the famed persona can be used and turned back towards the production of the film narrative and how it can be read by audiences. Goldman deftly reads the closing image of the film Modern Times as an epigraph that identifies how the extratextual of celebrity and persona flow back into informing the reading of an actor’s work. And all of this “work” is done quite consciously by Chaplin as his own persona – his “trademark” as tramp – can work as a powerful shorthand for his films. Gordon Fletcher provides an entry point to determine the extent and reach of fame through a study of the frequency with which different public figures’ names are used in Internet searches. Fletcher’s work presents “an index of fame” as these particular personalities intersect with the promotional culture’s intentions via releases and with specific events that have clear connections to public individuals. The Web serves as a way to map these cultural trends in a manner that was more difficult to undertake in the past. Reality television internationally has produced famous people with astounding regularity and three of our authors have tried to address the way in which television practices have articulated fame and celebritydom. Su Holmes’s inspection of reality television programmes explicates that the production of the celebrity is revealed as much as traditional notions of earning one’s acclaim through talent, hard work and understanding the industry. Tom Mole’s “hypertrophic celebrity” refers to the way that the entertainment industry via reality television has engaged in many more ways of promoting and cross-promoting individuals through a variety of technologies and “intertextual networks”. Ultimately, it is the formats that have been more successful and sustained than any individual star that is created and quickly disappears. Mole indicates that observing this element of celebrity culture reveals a great deal about the new machinations of sophistication of the entertainment industry. Douglas Fairchild’s study of Australian Idol dovetails into Mole’s insights. One of the lacunae of research in popular music, according to Fairchild, is the operation of public relations in musical cultural production. Fairchild draws on research that discusses how the “attention economy” wraps around contemporary cultural production through the techniques of publicity and public relations to deepen their significance and play in popular culture. The decline in recorded music – or its change to downloading – has demanded a refocusing of an industry to make particular individuals as entertainment stars that move between the media of television and music (and other cultural forms and venues if possible) and thereby produce a strong divertissement for the attention economy. Fame and infamy blur in David Schmid’s study of the collection of serial killer memorabilia online. Collectors are condemned for their fascination, but contemporary culture’s relationship to the fetish objects of infamy demands a more careful reading. Schmid relates the fascination with how central serial killers are to the celebrity system and “America” and become prominent idols for consumption – to paraphrase Leo Lowenthal. In three of our articles, artistic practices are investigated but from quite different perspectives. It seems almost de rigeur to have some mention of Andy Warhol in an issue devoted to fame. Michael Angelo Tata’s work moves laterally (which is always appropriate for Warhol…) along the surface of Warhol to debate his ruminations of the fabrication of the self through his fascination and play with the world of modeling. Davin Heckman explores the production of persona not through the extensions of fame provided by contemporary mass media, but rather through the intensive production of graffiti tags in Los Angeles by the irrepressible “Chaka”. Heckman’s study of fame makes us think how the enigmatic can be played out in a geographical space (contemporary Los Angeles) that is inundated with the production of other images of fame. Carrie LeBlanc’s analysis of the British celebrity-artist Damien Hirst attempts to tread the line between the value of the artist persona to the meaning of artistic practice and what we could now call – thanks to Fairchild’s article in this issue – the ‘attention economy’ that circulates around the meaning of the artist and art work. Celebrity is integral to the interpretation of Hirst and his working class persona is integral to his play in British media as much as the meaning of his shock-art. The Harry Potter phenomenon has produced a number of famed individuals, from its author to the actors associated with the three principal roles; but this fame presents an elaborate textual field that becomes the territory of fan fiction. Lelia Green and Carmen Guinery investigate the permutations of fame that envelope fan fiction and provide one of the motivations for fan fiction authors and the expansion of their influence among fan groups. Fame is a kind of moving signification system that draws on popular culture fragments and elements to buttress the centrality of its various personalities. Mohmin Rahman has posited that David Beckham’s fame in both photos in magazines and in descriptions of his body rely knowingly on queer iconography but only as a surface meaning system. Ultimately, Beckham after playing with the codes of queer must reassert the bedrock of his identity through heterosexuality; nonetheless, Rahman identifies the uses made of queer representations in displaying the male sporting hero in the most coded way. The last two articles deal with the politics of fame and its projections on to obvious personas. Paul Allatson writes a wonderful review of the existent but non-existent Elián Gonzalez and how the virtual Elián is deployed as a persona for all sorts of positions in the United States and Cuba for specific political ends. As much as Elián was converted and passed between countries, the virtual Elián becomes a vessel for the construction of a variety of political postures that can be framed in national desires and ethnic ambitions. Kevin Howley, drawing insights from the remarkable reincarnation of the legacy of Reagan through his death and funeral, provides an outline of how the myth of the famed president is maintained and actively fostered by a variety of groups. Embedded in the production of Reagan in death is his originary filmic persona, transplanted into the Teflon presidency and finally into a conservative politics of the future of the right. This collection on the concept of fame provides an intellectual gestalt of the some of the tropes that circulate around the production of public personalities. The ephemeral nature of fame means that it can be attached to and detached from individuals relatively easily. Fame is surface meaning that may correlate with deeper issues and more profound essences, but fundamentally fame is designed to be a play on the surface and to allow that surface pattern to circulate widely across a culture or, on occasion, transculturally. Fame moves readily and easily between the domains of the public and the private for public consumption. Reading the production of fame is a reading of popular culture itself as it is reproduced and expanded via its various forms of mediation. In this issue of M/C Journal, we can see the dispositifs of how public identities – the material instances of fame production – refract publics and popular desires. Dig into the various narratives of fame that these 16 articles present – they are both intellectually challenging and – in the wonderful tradition of M/C Journal – great reads as well. References Andrews, David, and Steven Jackson (eds.). Sport Stars: The Cultural Politics of the Sporting Celebrity. London: Routledge, 2001. Austin, Thomas and Martin Barker (eds.). Contemporary Hollywood Stardom. London: Edward Arnold, 2003. Glass, Loren. Authors Inc: Literary Celebrity in the Modern United States. New York: New York UP, 2004. Marshall, P. David. “Intimately Intertwined in the Most Public Way: Celebrity and Journalism.” Journalism: Critical Issues. Ed. Stuart Allen. Maidenhead, Berkshire, UK: McGraw-Hill/Open UP, 2005. 19-29 Marshall, P. David. Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture. U of Minnesota P, 1997. Moran, Joe. Star Authors: Literary Celebrity in America. Pluto Press, 2000. Ponce De Leon, Charles S. Self-Exposure: Human Interest Journalism and the Emergence of Celebrity in America, 1890-1940. Chapel Hill, N.C.: U of North Carolina P, 2002. Rojek, Chris. Celebrity. London: Reaktion, 2001. Turner, Graeme. Understanding Celebrity. London: Sage, 2004. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Marshall, P. David. "Fame's Perpetual Moment." M/C Journal 7.5 (2004). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/01-editorial.php>. APA Style Marshall, P. (Nov. 2004) "Fame's Perpetual Moment," M/C Journal, 7(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/01-editorial.php>.

I. Happy Endings Chaplin’s Modern Times features one of the most subtly strange endings in Hollywood history. It concludes with the Tramp (Chaplin) and the Gamin (Paulette Goddard) walking away from the camera, down the road, toward the sunrise. (Figure 1.) They leave behind the city, their hopes for employment, and, it seems, civilization itself. The iconography deployed is clear: it is 1936, millions are unemployed, and to walk penniless into the Great Depression means destitution if not death. Chaplin invokes a familiar trope of 1930s texts, the “marginal men,” for whom “life on the road is not romanticized” and who “do not participate in any culture,” as Warren Susman puts it (171). The Tramp and the Gamin seem destined for this non-existence. For the duration of the film they have tried to live and work within society, but now they are outcasts. This is supposed to be a happy ending, though. Before marching off into poverty, the Tramp whistles a tune and tells the Gamin to “buck up” and smile; the string section swells around them. (Little-known [or discussed] fact: Chaplin later added lyrics to this music, resulting in the song “Smile,” now part of the repertoire of countless torch singers and jazz musicians. Standout recordings include those by Nat King Cole and Elvis Costello.) It seems like a great day to be alive. Why is that? In this narrative of despair, what is there to “buck up” about? The answer lies outside of the narrative. There is another iconography at work here: the rear-view silhouette of the Tramp strolling down the road, foregrounded against a wide vista, complete with bowler hat, baggy pants, and pigeon-toed walk, recalls previous Chaplin films. By invoking similar moments in his oeuvre, Chaplin signals that the Tramp, more than a mere movie character, is the mass-reproduced trademark image of Charlie Chaplin, multimillionaire entertainer and worldwide celebrity. The film doubles Chaplin with the Tramp. This double exposure, figuratively speaking, reconciles the contradictions between the cheerful atmosphere and the grim story. The celebrity’s presence alleviates the suspicion that the protagonists are doomed. Rather than being reduced to one of the “marginal men,” the Tramp is heading for the Hollywood hills, where Chaplin participates in quite a bit of culture, making hit movies for huge audiences. Nice work if you can get it, indeed. Chaplin resolves the plot by supplanting narrative logic with celebrity logic. Chaplin’s celebrity diverges somewhat from the way Hollywood celebrity functions generally. Miriam Hansen provides a popular understanding of celebrity: “The star’s presence in a particular film blurs the boundary between diegesis and discourse, between an address relying on the identification with fictional characters and an activation of the viewer’s familiarity with the star on the basis of production and publicity” (246). That is, celebrity images alter films by enlisting what Hansen terms “intertexts,” which include journalism and studio publicity. According to Hansen, celebrity invites these intertexts to inform and multiply the meaning of the narrative. By contrast, Modern Times disregards the diegesis altogether, switching focus to the celebrity. Meaning is not multiplied. It is replaced. Filmic resolution depends not only on recognizing Chaplin’s image, but also on abandoning plot and leaving the Tramp and the Gamin to their fates. This explicit use of celebrity culminates Chaplin’s reworking of early twentieth-century celebrity, his negotiations with fame that continue to reverberate today. In what follows, I will argue that Chaplin weds visual celebrity with strategies of author-production often attributed to modernist literature, strategies that parallel Michel Foucault’s theory of the “author function.” Like his modernist contemporaries, Chaplin deploys narrative techniques that gesture toward the text’s creator, not as a person who is visible in a so-called real world, but as an idealized consciousness who resides in the film and controls its meaning. While Chaplin’s Hollywood counterparts rely on images to connote individual personalities, Chaplin resists locating his self within a body, instead using the Tramp as a sign, rather than an embodiment, of his celebrity, and turning his filmmaking into an aesthetic space to contain his subjectivity. Creating himself as author, Chaplin reckons with the fact that his image remains on display. Chaplin recuperates the Tramp image, mobilizing it as a signifier of his mass audience. The Tramp’s universal recognizability, Chaplin suggests, authorizes the image to represent an entire historical moment. II. An Author Is Born Chaplin produces himself as an author residing in his texts, rather than a celebrity on display. He injects himself into Modern Times to resolve the narrative (and by extension assuage the social unrest the film portrays). This gesture insists that the presence of the author generates and controls signification. Chaplin thus echoes Foucault’s account of the author function: “The author is . . . the principle of a certain unity of writing – all differences having to be resolved” by reference to the author’s subjectivity (215). By reconciling narrative contradictions through the author, Chaplin proposes himself as the key to his films’ coherence of meaning. Foucault reminds us, however, that such positioning of the author is illusory: “We are used to thinking that the author is so different from all other men, and so transcendent . . . that, as soon as he speaks, meaning begins to proliferate, to proliferate indefinitely. The truth is quite the contrary: the author does not precede the works. The text contains a number of signs referring to the author” (221). In this formulation, authors do not create meaning. Rather, texts exercise formal attributes to produce their authors. So Modern Times, by enlisting Chaplin’s celebrity to provide closure, produces a controlling consciousness, a special class of being who “proliferates” meaning. Chaplin’s films in general contain signs of the author such as displays of cinematic tricks. These strategies, claiming affinity with objects of high culture, inevitably evoke the author. Chaplin’s author is not a physical entity. Authorship, Foucault writes, “does not refer purely and simply to a real individual,” meaning that the author is composed of text, not flesh and blood (216). Chaplin resists imbuing the image of the Tramp with the sort of subjectivity reserved for the author. In this way Chaplin again departs from usual accounts of Hollywood stars. In Chaplin’s time, according to Richard Dyer, “The roles and/or the performance of a star in a film were taken as revealing the personality of the star” (20). (Moreover, Chaplin achieves all that fame without relying on close-ups. Critics typically cite the close-up as the device most instrumental to Hollywood celebrity. Scott J. Juengel writes of the close-up as “a fetishization of the face” that creates “an intense manifestation of subjectivity” [353; also see Dyer, 14-15, and Susman, 282]. The one true close-up I have found in Chaplin’s early films occurs in “A Woman” [1915], when Chaplin goes in drag. It shows Chaplin’s face minus the trademark fake mustache, as if to de-familiarize his recognizability.) Dyer represents the standard view: Hollywood movies propose that stars’ public images directly reflect their private personalities. Chaplin’s celebrity contradicts that model. Chaplin’s initial fame stems from his 1914 performances in Mack Sennett’s Keystone productions, consummate examples of the slapstick genre, in which the Tramp and his trademark regalia first become recognizable trademarks. Far from offering roles that reveal “personality,” slapstick treats both people and things as objects, equally at the mercy of apparently unpredictable physical laws. Within this genre the Tramp remains an object, subject to the chaos of slapstick just like the other bodies on the screen. Chaplin’s celebrity emerges without the suggestion that his image contains a unique subject or stands out among other slapstick objects. The disinclination to treat the image as container of the subject – shared with literary modernism – sets up the Tramp as a sign that connotes Chaplin’s presence elsewhere. Gradually, Chaplin turns his image into an emblem that metonymically refers to the author. When he begins to direct, Chaplin manipulates the generic features of slapstick to reconstruct his image, establishing the Tramp in a central position. For example, in “The Vagabond” (1916), the Tramp becomes embroiled in a barroom brawl and runs toward the saloon’s swinging doors, neatly sidestepping before reaching them. The pursuer’s momentum, naturally, carries him through the doorway. Other characters exist in a slapstick dimension that turns bodies into objects, but not the Tramp. He exploits his liberation from slapstick by exacerbating the other characters’ lack of control. Such moments grant the Tramp a degree of physical control that enhances his value in relation to the other images. The Tramp, bearing the celebrity image and referring to authorial control, becomes a signifier of Chaplin’s combination of authorship and celebrity. Chaplin devises a metonymic relationship between author and image; the Tramp cannot encompass the author, only refer to him. Maintaining his subjectivity separate from the image, Chaplin imagines his films as an aesthetic space where signification is contingent on the author. He attempts to delimit what he, his name and image, signify – in opposition to intertexts that might mobilize meanings drawn from outside the text. Writing of celebrity intertexts, P. David Marshall notes that “the descriptions of the connections between celebrities’ ‘real’ lives and their working lives . . . are what configure the celebrity status” (58). For Chaplin, to situate the subject in a celebrity body would be to allow other influences – uses of his name or image in other texts – to determine the meaning of the celebrity sign. His separation of image and author reveals an anxiety about identifying one specific body or image as location of the subject, about putting the actual subject on display and in circulation. The opening moment of “Shoulder Arms” (1920) illustrates Chaplin’s uneasy alliance of celebrity, author, and image. The title card displays a cartoon sketch of the Tramp in doughboy garb. Alongside, print lettering conveys the film title and the words, “written and produced by” above a blank area. A real hand appears, points to the drawing, and elaborately signs “Charles Chaplin” in the blank space. It then pantomimes shooting a gun at the Tramp. The film announces itself as a product of one author, represented by a giant, disembodied hand. The hand provides an inimitable signature of the author, while the Tramp, disfigured by the uniform but still identifiable, provides an inimitable signature of the celebrity. The relationship between the image and the “writer” is co-dependent but antagonistic; the same hand signs Chaplin’s name and mimes shooting the Tramp. Author-production merges with resistance to the image as representation of the subject. III. The Image Is History “Shoulder Arms” reminds us that despite Chaplin’s conception of himself as an incorporeal author, the Tramp remains present, and not quite accounted for. Here Foucault’s author function finds its limitations, failing to explain author-production that relies on the image even as it situates the author in the text. The Tramp remains visible in Modern Times while the film has made it clear that the author is present to engender significance. To Slavoj Zizek the Tramp is “the remainder” of the text, existing on a separate plane from the diegesis (6). Zizek watches City Lights (1931) and finds that the Tramp, who is continually shifting between classes and characters, acts as “an intercessor, middleman, purveyor.” He is continually mistaken for something he is not, and when the mistake is recognized, “he turns into a disturbing stain one tries to get rid of as quickly as possible” (4). Zizek points out that the Tramp is often positioned outside of social institutions, set slightly apart from the diegesis. Modern Times follows this pattern as well. For example, throughout the film the Tramp continually shifts from one side of the law to the other. He endures two prison sentences, prevents a jailbreak, and becomes a security guard. The film doesn’t quite know what to do with him. Chaplin takes up this remainder and transforms it into an emblem of his mass popularity. The Tramp has always floated somewhat above the narrative; in Modern Times that narrative occurs against a backdrop of historical turmoil. Chaplin, therefore, superimposes the Tramp on to scenes of historical change. The film actually withholds the tramp image during the first section of the movie, as the character is working in a factory and does not appear in his trademark regalia until he emerges from a stay in the “hospital.” His appearance engenders a montage of filmmaking techniques: abrupt cross-cutting between shots at tilted angles, superimpositions, and crowds of people and cars moving rapidly through the city, all set to (Chaplin’s) jarring, brass-wind music. The Tramp passes before a closed factory and accidentally marches at the head of a left-wing demonstration. The sequence combines signs of social upheaval, technological advancement, and Chaplin’s own technical achievements, to indicate that the film has entered “modern times” – all spurred by the appearance of the Tramp in his trademark attire, thus implicating the Tramp in the narration of historical change. By casting his image as a universally identifiable sign of Chaplin’s mass popularity, Chaplin authorizes it to function as a sign of the historical moment. The logic behind Chaplin’s treating the Tramp as an emblem of history is articulated by Walter Benjamin’s concept of the dialectical image. Benjamin explains how culture identifies itself through images, writing that “Every present day is determined by the images that are synchronic with it: each “now” is of a particular recognizability”(462-3). Benjamin proposes that the image, achieving a “particular recognizability,” puts temporality in stasis. This illuminates the dynamic by which Chaplin elevates the mass-reproduced icon to transcendent historical symbol. The Tramp image crystallizes that passing of time into a static unit. Indeed, Chaplin instigates the way the twentieth century, according to Richard Schickel, registers its history. Schickel writes that “In the 1920s, the media, newly abustle, had discovered techniques whereby anyone could be wrested out of whatever context had originally nurtured him and turned into images . . . for no previous era is it possible to make a history out of images . . . for no subsequent era is it possible to avoid doing so. For most of us, now, this is history” (70-1). From Schickel, Benjamin, and Chaplin, a picture of the far-reaching implications of Chaplin’s celebrity emerges. By gesturing beyond the boundary of the text, toward Chaplin’s audience, the Tramp image makes legible that significant portion of the masses unified in recognition of Chaplin’s celebrity, affirming that the celebrity sign depends on its wide circulation to attain significance. As Marshall writes, “The celebrity’s power is derived from the collective configuration of its meaning.” The image’s connotative function requires collaboration with the audience. The collective configuration Chaplin mobilizes is the Tramp’s recognizability as it moves through scenes of historical change, whatever other discourses may attach to it. Chaplin thrusts the image into this role because of its status as remainder, which stems from Chaplin’s rejection of the body as a location of the subject. Chaplin has incorporated the modernist desire to situate subjectivity in the text rather than the body. Paradoxically, this impulse expands the role of visuality, turning the celebrity image into a principal figure by which our culture understands itself. References Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1999. Chaplin, Charles, dir. City Lights. RBC Films, 1931. –––. Modern Times. Perf. Chaplin and Paulette Goddard, United Artists, 1936. –––. “Shoulder Arms.” First National, 1918. –––. “The Vagabond.” Mutual, 1916. Dyer, Richard. Stars. London: BFI, 1998. Foucault, Michel. Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology. Ed. James D. Faubion. New York: The New Press, 1998. Hansen, Miriam. Babel and Babylon. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991. Marshall, P. David. Celebrity and Power. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1998. Juengel, Scott J. “Face, Figure and Physiognomics: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the Moving Image.” Novel 33.3 (Summer 2000): 353-67. Schickel. Intimate Strangers. New York: Fromm International Publishing Company, 1986. Susman, Warren I. Culture as History. New York: Pantheon Books, 1973. Zizek, Slavoj. Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out. New York: Routledge, 1992. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Goldman, Jonathan. "Double Exposure: Charlie Chaplin as Author and Celebrity." M/C Journal 7.5 (2004). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/05-goldman.php>. APA Style Goldman, J. (Nov. 2004) "Double Exposure: Charlie Chaplin as Author and Celebrity," M/C Journal, 7(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/05-goldman.php>.

Music from Another Time – One Perth Night in 2009The following extract is taken from fieldwork notes from research into the enduring Northern Soul dance scene in Perth, Western Australia.It’s 9.30 and I’m walking towards the Hyde Park Hotel on a warm May night. I stop to talk to Jenny, from London, who tells me about her 1970s trip to India and teenage visits to soul clubs in Soho. I enter a cavernous low-ceilinged hall, which used to be a jazz venue and will be a Dan Murphy’s bottle shop before the year ends. South West Soul organiser Tommy, wearing 34-inch baggy trousers, gives me a Northern Soul handshake, involving upturned thumbs. ‘Spread the Faith’, he says. Drinkers are lined up along the long bar to the right and I grab a glass of iced water. A few dancers are out on the wooden floor and a mirror ball rotates overhead. Pat Fisher, the main Perth scene organiser, is away working in Monaco, but the usual suspects are there: Carlisle Derek, Ivan from Cheltenham, Ron and Gracie from Derby. Danny is back from DJing in Tuscany, after a few days in Widnes with old friends. We chat briefly mouth to ear, as the swirling strings and echo-drenched vocals of the Seven Souls’ 45 record, ‘I still love you’ boom through the sound system. The drinkers at the bar hit the floor for Curtis Mayfield’s ‘Move on up’ and the crowd swells to about 80. When I move onto the floor, Barbara Acklin’s ‘Am I the Same Girl?’ plays, prompting reflection on being the same, older person dancing to a record from my teenage years. On the bridge of the piano and conga driven ‘’Cause you’re mine’, by the Vibrations, everybody claps in unison, some above their heads, some behind their backs, some with an expansive, open-armed gesture. The sound is like the crack of pistol. We are all living in the moment, lost in the music, moving forward and backward, gliding sideways, and some of us spinning, dervish-like, for a few seconds, if we can still maintain our balance.Having relocated their scene from England south to the Antipodes, most of the participants described on this night are now in their sixties. Part of the original scene myself, I was a participant observer, dancing and interviewing, and documenting and exploring scene practices over five years.The local Perth scene, which started in 1996, is still going strong, part of a wider Australian and New Zealand scene. The global scene goes back nearly 50 years to the late 1960s. Northern Soul has now also become southern. It has also become significantly present in the USA, its place of inspiration, and in such disparate places as Medellin, in Colombia, and Kobe, in Japan.The feeling of ‘living in the moment’ described is a common feature of dance-oriented subcultures. It enables escape from routines, stretches the present opportunity for leisure and postpones the return to other responsibilities. The music and familiar dance steps of a long-standing scene like Northern Soul also stimulate a nostalgic reverie, in which you can persuade yourself you are 18 again.Dance steps are forward, backward and sideways and on crowded dancefloors self-expression is necessarily attenuated. These movements are repeated and varied as each bar returns to the first beat and in subcultures like Northern Soul are sufficiently stylised as to show solidarity. This solidarity is enhanced by a unison handclap, triggered by cues in some records. Northern Soul is not line-dancing. Dancers develop their own moves.Place of Origin: Soul from the North?For those new to Northern Soul, the northern connection may seem a little puzzling. The North of England is often still imagined as a cold, rainy wasteland of desolate moors and smoky, industrial, mostly working-class cities, but such stereotyping obscures real understanding. Social histories have also tended to focus on such phenomena as the early twentieth century Salford gang members, the “Northern Scuttlers”, with “bell-bottomed trousers … and the thick iron-shod clogs” (Roberts 123).The 1977 Granada television documentary about the key Northern Soul club, Wigan Casino, This England, captured rare footage; but this was framed by hackneyed backdrops of mills and collieries. Yet, some elements of the northern stereotype are grounded in reality.Engels’s portrayal of the horrors of early nineteenth century Manchester in The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 was an influential exploration of the birth pains of this first industrial city, and many northern towns and cities have experienced similar traumas. Levels of social disadvantage in contemporary Britain, whilst palpable everywhere, are still particularly significant in the North, as researched by Buchan, Kontopantelis, Sperrin, Chandola and Doran in North-South Disparities in English Mortality 1965–2015: Longitudinal Population Study.By the end of the 1960s, the relative affluence of Harold Wilson’s England began to recede and there was increased political and counter-cultural activity. Into this social climate emerged both skinheads, as described by Fowler in Skins Rule and the Northern Soul scene.Northern Soul scene essentially developed as an extension of the 1960s ‘mod’ lifestyle, built around soul music and fashion. A mostly working-class response to urban life and routine, it also evidenced the ability of the more socially mobile young to get out and stay up late.Although more London mods moved into psychedelia and underground music, many soul fans sought out obscure, but still prototypical Motown-like records, often from the northern American cities Detroit and Chicago. In Manchester, surplus American records were transported up the Ship Canal to Trafford Park, the port zone (Ritson and Russell 1) and became cult club hits, as described in Rylatt and Scott’s Central 1179: The Story of Manchester's Twisted Wheel.In the early 1970s, the rare soul fans found a name for their scene. “The Dave Godin Column” in the fanzine Blues and Soul, published in London, referred for the first time to ‘Northern Soul’ in 1971, really defining ‘Northern’ directionally, as a relative location anywhere ‘north of Watford’, not a specific place.The scene gradually developed specific sites, clothes, dances and cultural practices, and was also popular in southern England, and actually less visible in cities such as Liverpool and Newcastle. As Nowell (199) argues, the idea that Northern Soul was regionally based is unfounded, a wider movement emerging as a result of the increased mobility made possible by railways and motorways (Ritson and Russell 14).Clubs like the Blackpool Mecca and Wigan Casino were very close to motorway slip roads and accessible to visitors from further south. The initial scene was not self-consciously northern and many early clubs, like the ‘Golden Torch’, in Tunstall were based in the Midlands, as recounted by Wall (441).The Time and Space of the DancefloorThe Northern Soul scene’s growth was initially covered in fanzines like Blues and Soul, and then by Frith and Cummings (23-32). Following Cosgrove (38-41) and Chambers (142), a number of insider accounts (Soul Survivors: The Wigan Casino Story by Winstanley and Nowell; Too Darn Soulful: The Story of Northern Soul by Nowell; The In-Crowd: The Story of the Northern & Rare Soul Scene by Ritson & Russell) were followed by academic studies (Milestone 134-149; Hollows and Milestone 83-103; Wall 431-445). The scene was first explored by an American academic in Browne’s Identity Scene and Material Culture: The Place of African American Rare Soul Music on the British Northern Soul Scene.Many clubs in earlier days were alcohol-free, though many club-goers substituted amphetamines (Wilson 1-5) as a result, but across the modern scene, drug-taking is not significant. On Northern Soul nights, dancing is the main activity and drinking is incidental. However, dance has received less subtle attention than it deserves as a key nexus between the culture of the scene and black America.Pruter (187) referred to the earlier, pre-disco “myopia” of many music writers on the subject of dance, though its connection to leisure, pleasure, the body and “serious self-realization” (Chambers 7) has been noted. Clearly Northern Soul dancers find “evasive” pleasure (Fiske 127) and “jouissance” (Barthes v) in the merging of self into record.Wall (440) has been more nuanced in his perceptions of the particular “physical geography” of the Northern Soul dance floor, seeing it as both responsive to the music, and a vehicle for navigating social and individual space. Dancers respond to each other, give others room to move and are also connected to those who stand and watch. Although friends often dance close, they are careful not to exclude others and dancing between couples is rare. At the end of popular records, there is often applause. Some dance all night, with a few breaks; others ‘pace’ themselves (Mercieca et al. 78).The gymnastics of Northern Soul have attracted attention, but the forward dives, back drops and spins are now less common. Two less noticed markers of the Northern Soul dancing style, the glide and the soul clap, were highlighted by Wall (432). Cosgrove (38) also noted the sideways glide characteristic of long-time insiders and particularly well deployed by female dancers.Significantly, friction-reducing talcum powder is almost sacramentally sprinkled on the floor, assisting dancers to glide more effectively. This fluid feature of the dancing makes the scene more attractive to those whose forms of expression are less overtly masculine.Sprung wooden floors are preferred and drink on the floor is frowned upon, as spillage compromises gliding. The soul clap is a communal clap, usually executed at key points in a record. Sometimes very loud, this perfectly timed unison clap is a remarkable, though mostly unselfconscious, display of group co-ordination, solidarity and resonance.Billy from Manchester, one of the Perth regulars, and notable for his downward clapping motion, explained simply that the claps go “where the breaks are” (Mercieca et al. 71). The Northern Soul clap demonstrates key attributes of what Wunderlich (384) described as “place-temporality in urban space”, emerging from the flow of music and movement in a heightened form of synchronisation and marked by the “vivid sense of time” (385) produced by emotional and social involvement.Crucially, as Morris noted, A Sense of Space is needed to have a sense of time and dancers may spin and return via the beat of the music to the same spot. For Northern Soul dancers, the movements forwards, backwards, sideways through objective, “geometric space” are paralleled by a traversing of existential, “conceived space”. The steps in microcosm symbolise the relentless wider movements we make through life. For Lefebvre, in The Production of Space, these “trialectics” create “lived space”.A Sense of Place and Evolving IdentitySpaces are plastic environments, charged with emerging meanings. For Augé, they can also remain spaces or be manipulated into “Non-Places”. When the sense of space is heightened there is the potential for lived spaces to become places. The space/place distinction is a matter of contention, but, broadly, space is universal and non-relational, and place is particular and relational.For Augé, a space can be social, but if it lacks implicit, shared cultural understandings and requires explicit signs and rules, as with an airport or supermarket, it is a non-place. It is not relational. It lacks history. Time cannot be stretched or temporarily suspended. As non-places proliferate, urban people spend more time alone in crowds, ”always, and never, at home” (109), though this anonymity can still provide the possibility of changing identity and widening experience.Northern Soul as a culture in the abstract, is a space, but one with distinct practices which tend towards the creation of places and identities. Perth’s Hyde Park Hotel is a place with a function space at the back. This empty hall, on the night described in the opening, temporarily became a Northern Soul Club. The dance floor was empty as the night began, but gradually became not just a space, but a place. To step onto a mostly empty dance floor early in the night, is to cross liminal space, and to take a risk that you will be conspicuous or lonely for a while, or both.This negotiation of space is what Northern Soul, like many other club cultures has always offered, the promise and risk of excitement outside the home. Even when the floor is busy, it is still possible to feel alone in a crowd, but at some stage in the night, there is also the possibility, via some moment of resonance, that a feeling of connection with others will develop. This is a familiar teenage theme, a need to escape bonds and make new ones, to be both mobile and stable. Northern Soul is one of the many third spaces/places (Soja 137) which can create opportunities to navigate time, space and place, and to find a new sense of direction and identity. Nicky from Cornwall, who arrived in Perth in the early 1970s, felt like “a fish out of water”, until involvement in the Northern Soul scene helped him to achieve a successful migration (Mercieca et al. 34-38). Figure 1: A Perth Northern Soul night in 2007. Note the talcum powder on the DJ table, for sprinkling on the dancefloor. The record playing is ‘Helpless’, by Kim Weston.McRobbie has argued in Dance and Social Fantasy that Northern Soul provides places for women to define and express themselves, and it has appealed to more to female and LGBTQIA participants than the more masculine dominated rock, funk and hip-hop scenes. The shared appreciation of records and the possibilities for expression and sociality in dance unite participants and blur gender lines.While the more athletic dancers have tended to be male, dancing is essentially non-contact, as in many other post-1960s ‘discotheque’ styles, yet there is little overt sexual display or flirtation involved. Male and female styles, based on foot rather than arm movements, are similar, almost ungendered, and the Soul scene has differed from more mainstream nightlife cultures focussed on finding partners, as noted in Soul Survivors: The Wigan Casino Story by Winstanley and Nowell. Whilst males, who are also involved in record buying, predominated in the early scene, women now often dominate the dance floor (Wall 441).The Perth scene is little different, yet the changed gender balance has not produced more partner-seeking for either the older participants, who are mostly in long-term relationships and the newer, younger members, who enjoy the relative gender-blindness, and focus on communality and cultural affinity. Figure 2: A younger scene member, ‘Nash’, DJing in Perth in 2016. He has since headed north to Denmark and is now part of the Nordic Northern Soul scene.In Perth, for Stan from Derby, Northern Soul linked the experiences of “poor white working class kids” with young black Americans (Mercieca et al. 97). Hollows and Milestone (87-94) mapped a cultural geographic relationship between Northern Soul and the Northern cities of the USA where the music originated. However, Wall (442) suggested that Northern Soul is drawn from the more bi-racial soul of the mid-1960s than the funky, Afro-centric 1970s and essentially deploys the content of the music to create an alternative British identity, rather than to align more closely with the American movement for self-determination. Essentially, Northern Soul shows how “the meanings of one culture can be transformed in the cultural practices of another time and place” (Wall 444).Many contemporary Australian youth cultures are more socially and ethnically mixed than the Northern Soul scene. However, over the years, the greater participation of women, and of younger and newer members, has made its practices less exclusive, and the notion of an “in-crowd” more relaxed (Wall 439). The ‘Northern’ connection is less meaningful, as members have a more adaptable sense of cultural identity, linked to a global scene made possible by the internet and migration. In Australia, attachment seems stronger to locality rather than nation or region, to place of birth in Britain and place of residence in Perth, two places which represent ‘home’. Northern Soul appears to work well for all members because it provides both continuity and change. As Mercieca et al. suggested of the scene (71) “there is potential for new meanings to continue to emerge”.ConclusionThe elements of expression and directional manoeuvres of Northern Soul dancing, symbolise the individual and social negotiation of direction, place, space, identity and time. The sense of time and space travelled can create a feeling of being pushed forward without control. It can also produce an emotional pull backwards, like an elastic band being stretched. For those growing older and moving far from places of birth, these dynamics can be particularly challenging. Membership of global subcultures can clearly help to create successful migrations, providing third spaces/places (Soja 137) between home and host culture identities, as evidenced by the ‘Southern’ Northern Soul scene in Australia. For these once teenagers, now grandparents in Australia, connections to time and space have been both transformed and transcended. They remain grounded in their youth, but have reduced the gravitational force of home connections, projecting themselves forward into the future by balancing aspects of both stability and mobility. Physical places and places and their connections with culture have been replaced by multiple and overlapping mappings, but it is important not to romanticise notions of agency, hybridity, third spaces and “deterritorialization” (Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia). In a globalised world, most people are still located geographically and labelled ideologically. The Northern Soul repurposing of the culture indicates a transilience (Richmond 328) “differentially available to those in different locations in the field of power” (Gupta and Ferguson 20). However, the way in which Northern Soul has moved south over the decade via migration, has arguably now provided a stronger possible sense of resonance with the lives of black Americans whose lives in places like Chicago and Detroit in the 1960s, and their wonderful music, are grounded in the experience of family migrations in the opposite direction from the South to the North (Mercieca et al. 11). In such a celebration of “memory, loss, and nostalgia” (Gupta and Ferguson 13), it may still be possible to move beyond the exclusion that characterises defensive identities.ReferencesAugé, Marc. Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity. Trans. John Howe. London: Verso, 2008.Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975Browne, Kimasi L. "Identity Scene and Material Culture: The Place of African American Rare Soul Music on the British Northern Soul Scene." Proceedings of Manchester Music & Place Conference. Manchester: Manchester Metropolitan University. Vol. 8. 2006.Buchan, Iain E., Evangelos Kontopantelis, Matthew Sperrin, Tarani Chandola, and Tim Doran. "North-South Disparities in English Mortality 1965–2015: Longitudinal Population Study." Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health 71 (2017): 928-936.Chambers, Iain. Urban Rhythms: Pop Music and Popular Culture. London: Macmillan, 1985.Cosgrove, Stuart. "Long after Tonight Is All Over." Collusion 2 (1982): 38-41.Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977.Engels, Friedrich. The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844. Trans. Florence Kelley Wischnewetzky. London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1892.Fiske, John. Understanding Popular Culture. London: Unwin Hyman, 1989.Fowler, Pete. "Skins Rule." The Beat Goes On: The Rock File Reader. Ed. Charlie Gillett. London: Pluto Press, 1972. 10-26.Frith, Simon, and Tony Cummings. “Playing Records.” Rock File 3. Eds. Charlie Gillett and Simon Frith. St Albans: Panther, 1975. 21–48.Godin, Dave. “The Dave Godin Column”. Blues and Soul 67 (1971).Gupta, Akhil, and James Ferguson. "Beyond 'Culture': Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference." Cultural Anthropology 7.1 (1992): 6-23.Hollows, Joanne, and Katie Milestone. "Welcome to Dreamsville: A History and Geography of Northern Soul." The Place of Music. Eds. Andrew Leyshon, David Matless, and George Revill. New York: The Guilford Press, 1998. 83-103.Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.McRobbie, Angela. "Dance and Social Fantasy." Gender and Generation. Eds. Angela McRobbie and Mica Nava. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1984. 130-161.Mercieca, Paul, Anne Chapman, and Marnie O'Neill. To the Ends of the Earth: Northern Soul and Southern Nights in Western Australia. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2013.Milestone, Katie. "Love Factory: The Sites, Practices and Media Relationships of Northern Soul." The Clubcultures Reader. Eds. Steve Redhead, Derek Wynne, and Justin O’Connor. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997. 134-149.Morris, David. The Sense of Space. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2004.Nowell, David. Too Darn Soulful: The Story of Northern Soul. London: Robson, 1999.Pruter, Robert. Chicago Soul. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992.Richmond, Anthony H. "Sociology of Migration in Industrial and Post-Industrial Societies." Migration (1969): 238-281.Ritson, Mike, and Stuart Russell. The In Crowd: The Story of the Northern & Rare Soul Scene. London: Robson, 1999.Roberts, Robert. The Classic Slum. London: Penguin, 1971.Rylatt, Keith, and Phil Scott. Central 1179: The Story of Manchester's Twisted Wheel Club. London: Bee Cool, 2001.Soja, Edward W. "Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real and Imagined Places." Capital & Class 22.1 (1998): 137-139.This England. TV documentary. Manchester: Granada Television, 1977.Wall, Tim. "Out on the Floor: The Politics of Dancing on the Northern Soul Scene." Popular Music 25.3 (2006): 431-445.Wilson, Andrew. Northern Soul: Music, Drugs and Subcultural Identity. Cullompton: Willan, 2007.Winstanley, Russ, and David Nowell. Soul Survivors: The Wigan Casino Story. London: Robson, 1996.Wunderlich, Filipa Matos. "Place-Temporality and Urban Place-Rhythms in Urban Analysis and Design: An Aesthetic Akin to Music." Journal of Urban Design 18.3 (2013): 383-408.

IntroductionNew digital technologies hold promise for equalising access to information and communication for the Deaf community. SMS technology, for example, has helped to equalise deaf peoples’ access to information and made it easier to communicate with both deaf and hearing people (Tane Akamatsu et al.; Power and Power; Power, Power, and Horstmanshof; Valentine and Skelton, "Changing", "Umbilical"; Harper). A wealth of anecdotal evidence and some recent academic work suggests that new media technology is also reshaping deaf peoples’ sense of local and global community (Breivik "Deaf"; Breivik, Deaf; Brueggeman). One focus of research on new media technologies has been on technologies used for point to point communication, including communication (and interpretation) via video (Tane Akamatsu et al.; Power and Power; Power, Power, and Horstmanshof). Another has been the use of multimedia technologies in formal educational setting for pedagogical purposes, particularly English language literacy (e.g. Marshall Gentry et al.; Tane Akamatsu et al.; Vogel et al.). An emphasis on the role of multimedia in deaf education is understandable, considering the on-going highly politicised contest over whether to educate young deaf people in a bilingual environment using a signed language (Swanwick & Gregory). However, the increasing significance of social and participatory media in the leisure time of Westerners suggests that such uses of Web 2.0 are also worth exploring. There have begun to be some academic accounts of the enthusiastic adoption of vlogging by sign language users (e.g. Leigh; Cavander and Ladner) and this paper seeks to add to this important work. Web 2.0 has been defined by its ability to, in Denise Woods’ word, “harness collective intelligence” (19.2) by providing opportunities for users to make, adapt, “mash up” and share text, photos and video. As well as its well-documented participatory possibilities (Bruns), its re-emphasis on visual (as opposed to textual) communication is of particular interest for Deaf communities. It has been suggested that deaf people are a ‘visual variety of the human race’ (Bahan), and the visually rich presents new opportunities for visually rich forms of communication, most importantly via signed languages. The central importance of signed languages for Deaf identity suggests that the visual aspects of interactive multimedia might offer possibilities of maintenance, enhancement and shifts in those identities (Hyde, Power and Lloyd). At the same time, the visual aspects of the Web 2.0 are often audio-visual, such that the increasingly rich resources of the net offer potential barriers as well as routes to inclusion and community (see Woods; Ellis; Cavander and Ladner). In particular, lack of captioning or use of Auslan in video resources emerges as a key limit to the accessibility of the visual Web to deaf users (Cahill and Hollier). In this paper we ask to what extent contemporary digital media might create moments of permeability in what Krentz has called “the hearing line, that invisible boundary separating deaf and hearing people”( 2)”. To provide tentative answers to these questions, this paper will explore the use of participatory digital media by a group of young Deaf people taking part in a small-scale digital moviemaking project in Sydney in 2009. The ProjectAs a starting point, the interdisciplinary research team conducted a video-making course for young deaf sign language users within the Department of Media, Music and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University. The research team was comprised of one deaf and four hearing researchers, with expertise in media and cultural studies, information technology, sign language linguistics/ deaf studies, and signed language interpreting. The course was advertised through the newsletter of partner organization the NSW Deaf Society, via a Sydney bilingual deaf school and through the dense electronic networks of Australian deaf people. The course attracted fourteen participants from NSW, Western Australia and Queensland ranging in age from 10 to 18. Twelve of the participants were male, and two female. While there was no aspiration to gather a representative group of young people, it is worth noting there was some diversity within the group: for example, one participant was a wheelchair user while another had in recent years moved to Sydney from Africa and had learned Auslan relatively recently. Students were taught a variety of storytelling techniques and video-making skills, and set loose in groups to devise, shoot and edit a number of short films. The results were shared amongst the class, posted on a private YouTube channel and made into a DVD which was distributed to participants.The classes were largely taught in Auslan by a deaf teacher, although two sessions were taught by (non-deaf) members of Macquarie faculty, including an AFI award winning director. Those sessions were interpreted into Auslan by a sign language interpreter. Participants were then allowed free creative time to shoot video in locations of their choice on campus, or to edit their footage in the computer lab. Formal teaching sessions lasted half of each day – in the afternoons, participants were free to use the facilities or participate in a range of structured activities. Participants were also interviewed in groups, and individually, and their participation in the project was observed by researchers. Our research interest was in what deaf young people would choose to do with Web 2.0 technologies, and most particularly the visually rich elements of participatory and social media, in a relatively unstructured environment. Importantly, our focus was not on evaluating the effectiveness of multimedia for teaching deaf young people, or the level of literacy deployed by deaf young people in using the applications. Rather we were interested to discover the kinds of stories participants chose to tell, the ways they used Web 2.0 applications and the modalities of communication they chose to use. Given that Auslan was the language of instruction of the course, would participants draw on the tradition of deaf jokes and storytelling and narrate stories to camera in Auslan? Would they use the format of the “mash-up”, drawing on found footage or photographs? Would they make more filmic movies using Auslan dialogue? How would they use captions and text in their movies: as subtitles for Auslan dialogue? As an alternative to signing? Or not at all? Our observations from the project point to the great significance of the visual dimensions of Web 2.0 for the deaf young people who participated in the project. Initially, this was evident in the kind of movies students chose to make. Only one group – three young people in their late teens which included both of the young women in the class - chose to make a dialogue heavy movie, a spoof of Charlie’s Angels, entitled Deaf Angels. This movie included long scenes of the Angels using Auslan to chat together, receiving instruction from “Charlie” in sign language via videophone and recruiting “extras”, again using Auslan, to sign a petition for Auslan to be made an official Australian language. In follow up interviews, one of the students involved in making this film commented “my clip is about making a political statement, while the other [students in the class] made theirs just for fun”. The next group of (three) films, all with the involvement of the youngest class member, included signed storytelling of a sort readily recognisable from signed videos on-line: direct address to camera, with the teller narrating but also taking on the roles of characters and presenting their dialogue directly via the sign language convention of “role shift” - also referred to as constructed action and constructed dialogue (Metzger). One of these movies was an interesting hybrid. The first half of the four minute film had two young actors staging a hold-up at a vending machine, with a subsequent chase and fight scene. Like most of the films made by participants in the class, it included only one line of signed dialogue, with the rest of the narrative told visually through action. However, at the end of the action sequence, with the victim safely dead, the narrative was then retold by one of the performers within a signed story, using conventions typically observed in signed storytelling - such as role shift, characterisation and spatial mapping (Mather & Winston; Rayman; Wilson).The remaining films similarly drew on action and horror genres with copious use of chase and fight scenes and melodramatic and sometimes quite beautiful climactic death tableaux. The movies included a story about revenging the death of a brother; a story about escaping from jail; a short story about a hippo eating a vet; a similar short comprised of stills showing a sequence of executions in the computer lab; and a ghost story. Notably, most of these movies contained very little dialogue – with only one or two lines of signed dialogue in each four to five minute video (with the exception of the gun handshape used in context to represent the object liberally throughout most films). The kinds of movies made by this limited group of people on this one occasion are suggestive. While participants drew on a number of genres and communication strategies in their film making, the researchers were surprised at how few of the movies drew on traditions of signed storytelling or jokes– particularly since the course was targeted at deaf sign language users and promoted as presented in Auslan. Consequently, our group of students were largely drawn from the small number of deaf schools in which Auslan is the main language of instruction – an exceptional circumstance in an Australian setting in which most deaf young people attend mainstream schools (Byrnes et al.; Power and Hyde). Looking across the Hearing LineWe can make sense of the creative choices made by the participants in the course in a number of ways. Although methods of captioning were briefly introduced during the course, iMovie (the package which participants were using) has limited captioning functionality. Indeed, one student, who was involved in making the only clip to include captioning which contextualised the narrative, commented in follow-up interviews that he would have liked more information about captioning. It’s also possible that the compressed nature of the course prevented participants from undertaking the time-consuming task of scripting and entering captions. As well as being the most fun approach to the projects, the use of visual story telling was probably the easiest. This was perhaps exacerbated by the lack of emphasis on scriptwriting (outside of structural elements and broad narrative sweeps) in the course. Greater emphasis on that aspect of film-making would have given participants a stronger foundational literacy for caption-based projectsDespite these qualifications, both the movies made by students and our observations suggest the significance of a shared visual culture in the use of the Web by these particular young people. During an afternoon when many of the students were away swimming, one student stayed in the lab to use the computers. Rather than working on a video project, he spent time trawling through YouTube for clips purporting to show ghost sightings and other paranormal phenomena. He drew these clips to the attention of one of the research team who was present in the lab, prompting a discussion about the believability of the ghosts and supernatural apparitions in the clips. While some of the clips included (uncaptioned) off-screen dialogue and commentary, this didn’t seem to be a barrier to this student’s enjoyment. Like many other sub-genres of YouTube clips – pranks, pratfalls, cute or alarmingly dangerous incidents involving children and animals – these supernatural videos as a genre rely very little on commentary or dialogue for their meaning – just as with the action films that other students drew on so heavily in their movie making. In an E-Tech paper entitled "The Cute Cat Theory of Digital Activism", Ethan Zuckerman suggests that “web 1.0 was invented to allow physicists to share research papers and web 2.0 was created to allow people to share pictures of cute cats”. This comment points out both the Web 2.0’s vast repository of entertaining material in the ‘funny video’genre which is visually based, dialogue free, entertaining material accessible to a wide range of people, including deaf sign language users. In the realm of leisure, at least, the visually rich resources of Web 2.0’s ubiquitous images and video materials may be creating a shared culture in which the line between hearing and deaf people’s entertainment activities is less clear than it may have been in the past. The ironic tone of Zuckerman’s observation, however, alerts us to the limits of a reliance on language-free materials as a route to accessibility. The kinds of videos that the participants in the course chose to make speaks to the limitations as well as resources offered by the visual Web. There is still a limited range of captioned material on You Tube. In interviews, both young people and their teachers emphasised the central importance of access to captioned video on-line, with the young people we interviewed strongly favouring captioned video over the inclusion on-screen of simultaneous signed interpretations of text. One participant who was a regular user of a range of on-line social networking commented that if she really liked the look of a particular movie which was uncaptioned, she would sometimes contact its maker and ask them to add captions to it. Interestingly, two student participants emphasised in interviews that signed video should also include captions so hearing people could have access to signed narratives. These students seemed to be drawing on ideas about “reverse discrimination”, but their concern reflected the approach of many of the student movies - using shared visual conventions that made their movies available to the widest possible audience. All the students were anxious that hearing people could understand their work, perhaps a consequence of the course’s location in the University as an overwhelmingly hearing environment. In this emphasis on captioning rather than sign as a route to making media accessible, we may be seeing a consequence of the emphasis Krentz describes as ubiquitous in deaf education “the desire to make the differences between deaf and hearing people recede” (16). Krentz suggests that his concept of the ‘hearing line’ “must be perpetually retested and re-examined. It reveals complex and shifting relationships between physical difference, cultural fabrication and identity” (7). The students’ movies and attitudes emphasised the reality of that complexity. Our research project explored how some young Deaf people attempted to create stories capable of crossing categories of deafness and ‘hearing-ness’… unstable (like other identity categories) while others constructed narratives that affirmed Deaf Culture or drew on the Deaf storytelling traditions. This is of particular interest in the Web 2.0 environment, given that its technologies are often lauded as having the politics of participation. The example of the Deaf Community asks reasonable questions about the validity of those claims, and it’s hard to escape the conclusion that there is still less than appropriate access and that some users are more equal than others.How do young people handle the continuing lack of material available to the on the Web? The answer repeatedly offered by our young male interviewees was ‘I can’t be bothered’. As distinct from “I can’t understand” or “I won’t go there” this answer, represented a disengagement from demands to identify your literacy levels, reveal your preferred means of communication; to rehearse arguments about questions of access or expose attempts to struggle to make sense of texts that fail to employ readily accessible means of communicating. Neither an admission of failure or a demand for change, CAN’T-BE-BOTHERED in this context offers a cool way out of an accessibility impasse. This easily-dismissed comment in interviews was confirmed in a whole-group discussions, when students came to a consensus that if when searching for video resources on the Net they found video that included neither signing nor captions, they would move on to find other more accessible resources. Even here, though, the ground continues to shift. YouTube recently announced that it was making its auto-captioning feature open to everybody - a machine generated system that whilst not perfect does attempt to make all YouTube videos accessible to deaf people. (Bertolucci).The importance of captioning of non-signed video is thrown into further significance by our observation from the course of the use of YouTube as a search engine by the participants. Many of the students when asked to research information on the Web bypassed text-based search engines and used the more visual results presented on YouTube directly. In research on deaf adolescents’ search strategies on the Internet, Smith points to the promise of graphical interfaces for deaf young people as a strategy for overcoming the English literacy difficulties experienced by many deaf young people (527). In the years since Smith’s research was undertaken, the graphical and audiovisual resources available on the Web have exploded and users are increasingly turning to these resources in their searches, providing new possibilities for Deaf users (see for instance Schonfeld; Fajardo et al.). Preliminary ConclusionsA number of recent writers have pointed out the ways that the internet has made everyday communication with government services, businesses, workmates and friends immeasurably easier for deaf people (Power, Power and Horstmanshof; Keating and Mirus; Valentine and Skelton, "Changing", "Umbilical"). The ready availability of information in a textual and graphical form on the Web, and ready access to direct contact with others on the move via SMS, has worked against what has been described as deaf peoples’ “information deprivation”, while everyday tasks – booking tickets, for example – are no longer a struggle to communicate face-to-face with hearing people (Valentine and Skelton, "Changing"; Bakken 169-70).The impacts of new technologies should not be seen in simple terms, however. Valentine and Skelton summarise: “the Internet is not producing either just positive or just negative outcomes for D/deaf people but rather is generating a complex set of paradoxical effects for different users” (Valentine and Skelton, "Umbilical" 12). They note, for example, that the ability, via text-based on-line social media to interact with other people on-line regardless of geographic location, hearing status or facility with sign language has been highly valued by some of their deaf respondents. They comment, however, that the fact that many deaf people, using the Internet, can “pass” minimises the need for hearing people in a phonocentric society to be aware of the diversity of ways communication can take place. They note, for example, that “few mainstream Websites demonstrate awareness of D/deaf peoples’ information and communication needs/preferences (eg. by incorporating sign language video clips)” ("Changing" 11). As such, many deaf people have an enhanced ability to interact with a range of others, but in a mode favoured by the dominant culture, a culture which is thus unchallenged by exposure to alternative strategies of communication. Our research, preliminary as it is, suggests a somewhat different take on these complex questions. The visually driven, image-rich approach taken to movie making, Web-searching and information sharing by our participants suggests the emergence of a certain kind of on-line culture which seems likely to be shared by deaf and hearing young people. However where Valentine and Skelton suggest deaf people, in order to participate on-line, are obliged to do so, on the terms of the hearing majority, the increasingly visual nature of Web 2.0 suggests that the terrain may be shifting – even if there is still some way to go.AcknowledgementsWe would like to thank Natalie Kull and Meg Stewart for their research assistance on this project, and participants in the course and members of the project’s steering group for their generosity with their time and ideas.ReferencesBahan, B. "Upon the Formation of a Visual Variety of the Human Race. In H-Dirksen L. Baumann (ed.), Open Your Eyes: Deaf Studies Talking. 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In a 1999 interview with the online magazine The AV Club, a subsidiary of satirical news website, The Onion, Bret Easton Ellis claimed: “I’ve never written a single scene that I can say took place, I’ve never written a line of dialogue that I’ve heard someone say or that I have said” (qtd. in Klein). Ten years later, in the same magazine, Ellis was reminded of this quote and asked why most of his novels have been perceived as veiled autobiographies. Ellis responded:Well, they are autobiographical in the sense that they reflect who I was at a particular moment in my life. There was talk of a memoir, and I realized why I couldn’t write a memoir, because the books are the memoir—they completely sum up how I was feeling, what I was thinking about, what my obsessions were, what I was fantasizing about, who I was, in a fictional context over the last 25 years or so (qtd. in Tobias).Despite any protestations to the contrary, Bret Easton Ellis’s novels have included various intentional and unintentional disclosures which reflect the author’s personal experiences. This pattern of self-disclosure became most overt in his most recent novel, Lunar Park (2005), in which the narrator shares a name, vocation and many aspects of his personal history with Ellis himself. After two decades and many assumptions made about Ellis’s personal life in the public media, it seems on the surface as if this novel uses disclosure as the site of closure for several rumours and relationships which have haunted his career. It is possible to see how this fictional text transgresses the boundaries between fiction and fact in an attempt to sever the feedback loop between the media’s representation of Ellis and the interpretation of his fictional texts. Yet it is important to note that with Ellis, there is always more beneath the surface. This is evident after only one chapter of Lunar Park when the novel changes form from an autobiography into a fictional ghost story, both of which are told by Bret Easton Ellis, a man who simultaneously reflects and refracts aspects of the real life author.Before analysing Lunar Park, it is helpful to consider the career trajectory which led to its creation. Bret Easton Ellis made his early fame writing semi-fictional accounts of rich, beautiful, young, yet ambitionless members of generation-X, growing up in the 1980s in America. His first novel, Less Than Zero (1985), chronicled the exploits of his protagonists as they drifted from party to party, from one meaningless sexual encounter to another; all while anesthetised on a cocktail of Valium, Prozac, Percocet and various illegal drugs. The brutal realism of his narrative, coupled with the structure—short vignettes like snapshots and short chapters told in simplistic style—led the text to be hailed as the first “MTV Novel” (Annesley 90; see also: Freese).It is not difficult to discover the many similarities that exist between the creator of Less Than Zero and his fictional creation, Clay, the novel’s narrator-protagonist. Both grew up in Los Angeles and headed east to attend a small liberal-arts college. Both Ellis’s and Clay’s parents were divorced and both young men grew up living in a house with their mother and their two sisters. Ellis’s relationship with his father was, by all accounts, as strained as what is represented in the few meetings Clay has with his own father in Less Than Zero. In these scenes, Clay describes a brief, perfunctory lunch meeting in an expensive restaurant in which Clay’s father is too preoccupied by work to acknowledge his son’s presence.Ellis’s second novel, The Rules of Attraction (1987), is set at Camden College, the same college that Clay attends in Less Than Zero. At one point, Clay even guest-narrates a chapter of The Rules of Attraction; the phrase, “people are afraid to walk across campus after midnight” (205) recalls the opening line of Less Than Zero, “people are afraid to merge on highways in Los Angeles” (5). Camden bears quite a few similarities with Bennington College, the college which Ellis himself was attending when Less Than Zero was published and Ellis was catapulted into the limelight. Even Ellis himself has admitted that the book is, “a completely fictionalized portrait of a group of people, all summations of friends I knew” (qtd. in Tobias).The authenticity of Ellis’s narrative voice was considered as an insight which came from participation (A Conversation with Bret Easton Ellis). The depiction of disenfranchised youth in the Reagan era in America was so compelling because Ellis seemed to personify and even embody the malaise and listlessness of his narrators in his public performances and interviews. In the minds of many readers and critics, Ellis’s narrators were a fictional extrapolation of Ellis himself. The association of Ellis to his fictional narrators backfired when Ellis’s third novel, American Psycho (1991), was published. The novel was criticised for its detached depiction of Patrick Bateman, who narrates in minute detail his daily routine which includes an extensive beauty regime, lunchtimes and dinnertimes spent in extravagant New York restaurants, a relationship with a fiancée and a mistress, a job on Wall Street in which he seems to do no real “work,” and his night-time hobby where brutally murders women, homeless men, gay men and even a small child. Bateman’s choice of victims can be interpreted as unconsciously aimed at anyone why may threaten his dominant position as a wealthy, white, heterosexual male. While Bateman kills as many men as he does women, his male victims are killed quickly in sudden bursts of violence. Bateman’s female victims are the subject of brutal torture, prolonged violent sexualized attacks, and in many cases inhumane post-mortem disfigurement and dismemberment.The public reception of American Psycho has been analysed as much as the text itself, (see: Murphet; Brien). Because American Psycho is narrated in the first-person voice of Bateman, there is no escape from his subjectivity. Many, including the National Organization of Women, interpreted this lack of authorial comment as Ellis’s tacit agreement and acceptance of Bateman’s behaviour. Another similar interpretation was made by Roger Rosenblatt in his pre-publication review of American Psycho in which he forthrightly encourages readers to “Snuff this Book” (Rosenblatt). Rosenblatt finds no ironic critique in Ellis’s representation of Bateman, instead finding himself at a loss to understand Ellis’s intention in writing American Psycho, saying “one only assumes, Mr. Ellis disapproves. It's a bit hard to tell what Mr. Ellis intends exactly, because he languishes so comfortably in the swamp he purports to condemn” (n.p.).In much the same way as Ellis’s previous narrators had reflected his experience and opinions, Ellis was considered as accepting and even glorifying the actions of a misogynistic serial killer. Ellis himself has commented on the popularised “misreading” of his novel: “Because I never step in anywhere and say, ‘Hey, this is all wrong,’ people get upset. That’s outrageous to me! Who’s going to say that serial killing is wrong?! Isn’t that a given? There’s no need to say that” (qtd. in. Klein)Ellis himself was treated as if he had committed the actual crimes that Patrick Bateman describes. The irony being that, as I have argued elsewhere (Phillips), there are numerous signs within the text which point to the possibility that Patrick Bateman did not commit the crimes as he claims: he can be interpreted as an unreliable narrator. Although the unreliability is Bateman’s narration doesn’t remove the effect which the reader experiences, it does indicate a distance between the author and the narrator. This distance was overlooked by many critics who interpreted Ellis as agreeing and condoning Bateman’s views and actions.When Ellis’s fourth novel, Glamorama was published, the decadent lifestyle represented in the text was again considered to be a reflection of Ellis’s personal experience. The star-studded parties and glamorous night clubs seemed to be lifted straight out of Ellis’s experience (although, no-one would ever claim that Ellis was a fashion-model-turned-international-terrorist like his narrator, Victor). One reviewer notes that “even when Bret Easton Ellis writes about killer yuppies and terrorist fashion models, a lot of people still think he's writing about himself” (Waldren).With the critical tendency to read an autobiographical confession out of Ellis’s fictional works firmly in place, it is not hard to see why Ellis decided to make the narrator of his fifth novel, Lunar Park, none other than Bret Easton Ellis himself. It is my contention that Lunar Park is the site of disclosures based on the real life of Bret Easton Ellis. I believe that Ellis chose the form of a mock-autobiography-turned-ghost-story as the site of exorcism for the many ghosts which have haunted his career, namely, his public persona and the publication of American Psycho. Ultimately, it is the exorcism of a more personal ghost, namely his father Robert Martin Ellis which provides the most private disclosure in the text and therefore the most touching, truthful and abiding site of closure for the entire novel and for Ellis himself. For ease, I will refer to the narrator of Lunar Park as Bret and the author of Lunar Park as Ellis.On the surface, it appears that Lunar Park is an autobiographical memoir. In one of the many mixed reviews of the novel (see: Murray; "Behind Bret's Mask"; Hand), Steve Almond’s title describes how Ellis masquerading as Ellis “is not a pretty sight” (Almond). The opening chapter is told in autobiographical style and charts Bret’s meteoric rise from college student to member of the literary brat pack (alongside Jay McInerney and Tama Jancowitz), to reviled author of American Psycho (1991) reaching his washed-up, drug-addled and near-death nadir during the Glamorama (1998) book tour. However, careful reading of this chapter reveals that the real-life Ellis is obscuring as much about himself as he appears to be revealing. Although it takes the form of a candid disclosure of his personal life, there are elements of the narrator’s story which do not agree with the public record of the author Ellis.The fictional Bret claims to have attended Camden College, and that his manuscript for Less Than Zero was a college project, discovered by his professor. While the plot of this story does reflect Ellis’s actual experience, he has set Bret’s story at Camden College, the fictional setting of The Rules of Attraction. By adding an element of fiction into the autobiographical account, Ellis is indicating that he is not identical to his narrating counterpart. It also signifies the Bret that exists in the fictional space whereas Ellis resides in the “real world.”In Lunar Park, Bret also talks about his relationship with Jayne Dennis. Jayne is described as a model-turned-actress, an up and coming Hollywood superstar who in the 1980s performed in films alongside Keanu Reeves. Jayne is one of the truly fictional characters in Lunar Park. She doesn’t exist outside of the text, except in two websites which were established to promote the publication of Lunar Park in 2005 (www.jaynedennis.com and www.jayne-dennis.com). While Bret and Jayne are dating, Jayne falls pregnant. Bret begs her to have an abortion. When Jayne decides to keep the child, her relationship with Bret falls apart. Bret meets his son Robby only twice from birth until the age of 10. The relationship between the fictional Bret and the fictional Jayne creates Robby, a fictional offspring who shares a name with Robert Martin Ellis (Bret and Ellis’s father).Many have been tempted to participate in Ellis’s game, to sift fact from fiction in the opening chapter of Lunar Park. Holt and Abbot published a two page point-by-point analysis of where the real-life Ellis diverged from the fictional Bret. The promotional website established by Ellis’s publisher was named www.twobrets.com to invite such a comparison. Although this game is invited by Ellis, he has also publicly stated that there is more to Lunar Park than the comparison between himself and his fictional counterpart:My worry is that people will want to know what’s true and what’s not […] All the things that are in the book—my quote-unquote autobiography—I just don’t want to answer any of those questions. I don’t like demystifying the text (qtd. in Wyatt n.p.)Although Ellis refuses to demystify the text, one of the purposes of inserting himself into the text is to trap readers in this very game, and to confuse fact with fiction. Although the text opens with a chapter which reads like Ellis’s autobiography, careful reading of the textual Bret against the extra-textual Ellis reveals that this chapter contains almost as much fiction as the “ghost story” which fills the remaining 400-odd pages. This ghost story could have been told by any first-person narrator. By writing himself into the text, Ellis is writing his public persona into the fictional character of Bret. One of the effects of blurring the lines between public and private, reality and fiction is that Ellis’s real-life disclosures invite the reader to read the fictional text against their extra-textual knowledge of Ellis himself. In this way, Ellis is able to address the many ghosts which have haunted his career—most importantly the public reception of American Psycho and his public persona. A more personal ghost is the ghost of Ellis’s father who has been written into the text, literally haunting Bret’s home with messages from beyond the grave. Closure occurs when these ghosts have been exorcised. The question is: is Lunar Park Ellis’s attempt to close down the public debates, or to add more fuel to the fire?One of the areas in which Ellis seeks to find closure is in the controversy surrounding American Psycho. Ellis uses his fictional voice to re-write the discourse surrounding the creation and reception of the text. There are deliberate contradictions in Bret’s version of writing American Psycho. In Lunar Park, Bret describes the writing process of American Psycho. In an oddly ornate passage for Ellis (who seldom uses adverbs), Bret describes how he would “fearfully watch my hands as the pen swept across the yellow legal pads” (19) blaming the “spirit” of Patrick Bateman for visiting and causing the book to be written. When it was finished, the “spirit” was “disgustingly satisfied” and stopped “gleefully haunting” Bret’s dreams. This shift in writing style may be an indication of a shift from reality into a fictionalised account of the writing of American Psycho. Much of the plot of Lunar Park is taken up with the consequences of American Psycho, when a madman starts replicating crimes exactly as they appear in the novel. It is almost as if Patrick Bateman is haunting Bret and his family. When informed that his fictional violence has disrupted his quiet suburban existence, Bret laments, “this was the moment that detractors of the book had warned me about: if anything happened to anyone as a result of the publication of this novel, Bret Easton Ellis was to blame” (181-2). By the end of Lunar Park Bret decides to “kill” Patrick Bateman once and for all, by writing an epilogue in which Bateman is burnt alive.On the surface, it appears that Lunar Park is the site of an apology about American Psycho. However, this is not entirely the case. Much of Bret’s description of writing American Psycho is contradictory to Ellis’s personal accounts where he consciously researched the gruesome details of Bateman’s crimes using an FBI training manual (Rose). Although Patrick Bateman is destroyed by the end of Lunar Park, extra-textually, neither Bret nor Ellis is not entirely apologetic for his creation. Bret argues that American Psycho was “about society and manners and mores, and not about cutting up women. How could anyone who read the book not see this?” (182). Extra-textually, in an interview Ellis admitted that when he re-read “the violence sequences I was incredibly upset and shocked […] I can't believe that I wrote that. Looking back, I realize, God, you really sort of stepped over a line there” (qtd. in Wyatt n.p.). However, in that same interview, Ellis admits to lying to reporters if he feels that the reporter is “out to get” him. Therefore, Ellis’s apology may not actually be an apology at all.Lunar Park presents an explanation about how and why American Psycho was written. This explanation is much akin to claiming that “the devil made me do it”, by arguing that Bret was possessed by “the spirit of this madman” (18). While it may seem that this explanation is an attempt to close the vast amount of discussion surrounding why American Psycho was written, Ellis is actually using his fictional persona to address the public outcry about his most controversial novel, providing an apology for a text, which is really no apology at all. Ultimately, the reliability of Bret’s account depends on the reader’s knowledge of Ellis’s public persona. This interplay between the fictional Bret and the real-life Ellis can be seen in Lunar Park’s account of the Glamorama publicity tour. In Lunar Park, Bret describes his own version of the Glamorama book tour. For Bret, this tour functions as his personal nadir, the point in his life where he hits rock bottom and looks to Jayne Dennis as his saviour. Throughout the tour, Bret describes taking all manner of drugs. At one point, threatened by his erratic behaviour, Bret’s publishers asked a personal minder to join the book tour, reporting back on Bret’s actions which include picking at nonexistent scabs, sobbing at his appearance in a hotel mirror and locking himself in a bookstore bathroom for over an hour before emerging and claiming that he had a snake living in his mouth (32-33).The reality of the Glamorama book tour is not anywhere near as wild as that described by Bret in Lunar Park. In reviews and articles addressing the real-life Glamorama book tour, there are no descriptions of these events. One article, from the The Observer (Macdonald), does describe a meeting over lunch where Ellis admits to drinking way too much the night before and then having to deal with phone calls from fans he can’t remember giving his phone-number to. However, as previously mentioned, in that same article a friend of Ellis’s is quoted as saying that Ellis frequently lies to reporters. Bret’s fictional actions seem to confirm Ellis’s real life “party boy” persona. For Moran, “the name of the author [him]self can become merely an image, either used to market a literary product directly or as a kind of free floating signifier within contemporary culture” (61). Lunar Park is about all of the connotations of the name Bret Easton Ellis. It is also a subversion of those expectations. The fictional Glamorama book tour shows Ellis’s media persona taken to an extreme until it becomes a self-embodying parody. In Lunar Park, Ellis is deliberately amplifying his public persona, accepting that no amount of truthful disclosure will erase the image of Bret-the-party-boy. However, the remainder of the novel turns this image on its head by removing Bret from New York and placing him in middle-American suburbia, married, and with two children in tow.Ultimately, although the novel appears as a transgression of fact and fiction, Bret may be the most fictional of all of Ellis’s narrators (with the exception of Patrick Bateman). Bret is married where Ellis is single. Bret is heterosexual whereas Ellis is homosexual, and used the site of Lunar Park to confirm his homosexuality. Bret has children whereas Ellis is childless. Bret has settled down into the heartland of American suburbia, a wife and two children in tow whereas Ellis has made it clear that this lifestyle is not one he is seeking. The novel is presented as the site of Ellis’s personal disclosure, and yet only creates more fictional fodder for the public image of Ellis, there are elements of true and personal disclosures from Ellis life, which he is using the text as the site for his own brand of closure. The most genuine and heartfelt closure is achieved through Ellis’s disclosure of his relationship with his father.The death of Ellis’s father, Robert Martin Ellis has an impact on both the textual and extra-textual levels of Lunar Park. Textually, the novel takes the form of a ghost story, and it is Robert himself who is haunting Bret. These spectral disturbances manifest themselves in Bret’s house which slowly transforms into a representation of his childhood home. Bret also receives nightly e-mails from the bank in which his father’s ashes have been stored in a safe-deposit box. These e-mails contain an attached video file showing the last few moments of Robert Martin Ellis’s life. Bret never finds out who filmed the video. Extra-textually, the death of Robert Martin Ellis is clearly signified in the fact that Lunar Park is dedicated to him as well as Michael Wade Kaplan, two men close to Ellis who have died. The trope of fathers haunting their sons is further highlighted by Ellis’s inter-textual references to Shakespeare’s Hamlet including a quote in the epigraph: “From the table of my memory / I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records, / all saws of books, all forms, all pressures past / that youth and observation copied there” (1.5.98-101). The names of various geographical locations in Bret’s neighbourhood: Bret and Jayne live on Elsinore Lane, named for Elsinore castle, Bret also visits Fortinbras Mall, Osric hotel and Ophelia Boulevard. In Hamlet, the son is called upon by the ghost of his father to avenge his death. In Lunar Park, Bret is called upon to avenge himself against the wrongs inflicted upon him by his own father.The ambiguity of the relationships between fathers and sons is summarised in the closing passage of the novel. So, if you should see my son, tell him I say hello, be good, that I am thinking of him and that I know he’s watching over me somewhere, and not to worry: that he can always find me here, whenever he wants, right here, my arms held out and waiting, in the pages, behind the covers, at the end of Lunar Park (453).Although Bret earlier signals the reader to interpret this passage as a message from Bret to his son Robby (45), it is also possible to interpret is as a message from the fictional Robert Martin Ellis to the fictional Bret. In this reading, Lunar Park is not just a novel, a game or a post-modern deconstruction of the fact and fiction binary, it instead becomes an exorcism for the author. The process of writing Lunar Park to casts the spectre of the real-life Robert Martin Ellis out of his life to a place where Bret (and Ellis) can always find him. This relationship is the site not only of disclosure – reflecting Ellis’s own personal angst with his late father – but of closure, where Ellis has channelled his relationship and indeed exorcised his father into the text.Lunar Park contains several forms of disclosures, most of which transgress the line between fiction and fact. Lunar Park does not provide a closure from the tendency to read autobiography into Ellis’s texts, instead, chapter one provides as much fiction as fact, as evident in the discussions of American Psycho and the Glamorama book tour. Although chapter one presents in an autobiographical form, the remainder of the text reveals how fictional “Bret Easton Ellis” really is. Much of Lunar Park can be interpreted as a puzzle whose answer depends on the reader’s knowledge and understanding of the public perception, persona and profile of Bret Easton Ellis himself. Although seeming to provide closure on the surface, by playing with fiction and fact, Lunar Park only opens up more ground for discussion of Ellis, his novels, his persona and his fictional worlds. These are discussions I look forward to participating in, particularly as 2010 will see the publication of Ellis’s sixth novel (and sequel to Less Than Zero), Imperial Bedrooms.Although much of Ellis’s game in Lunar Park is to tease the reader by failing to provide true disclosures or meaningful and finite closure, the ending of the Lunar Park indicates the most honest, heartfelt and abiding closure for the text and for Ellis himself. Devoid of games and extra-textual riddles, the end of the novel is a message from a father to his son. By disclosing details of his troubled relationship with his father, both Ellis and his fictional counterpart Bret are able to exorcise the ghost of Robert Martin Ellis. As the novel closes, the ghost who haunts the text has indeed been exorcised and is now standing, with “arms held out and waiting, in the pages, behind the covers, at the end of Lunar Park” (453). ReferencesAlmond, Steve. "Ellis Masquerades as Ellis, and It Is Not a Pretty Sight." Boston Globe 14 Aug. 2005.Annesley, James. Blank Fictions: Consumerism, Culture and the Contemporary American Novel. London: Pluto Press, 1998."Behind Bret's Mask." Manchester Evening News 10 Oct. 2005.Brien, Donna Lee. "The Real Filth in American Psycho: A Critical Reassessment." M/C Journal 9.5 (2006). 30 Nov. 2009 < http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0610/01-brien.php >.Ellis, Bret Easton. Less than Zero. London: Vintage, 1985.–––. The Rules of Attraction. London: Vintage, 1987.–––. American Psycho. London: Picador, 1991.–––. Glamorama. 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