Journal articles on the topic 'Rap (Music) in motion pictures'

Cinema is one of the most popular art forms among people of all ages. Just like music, theater, architecture, literature or painting, cinema certainly has an impact on people. At the same time, it has the capability to not just draw attention to social problems, but also to change people’s attitudes and behaviors — thus changing the world as a whole. This article provides an overview of various approaches to researching social impact of motion pictures and raises a number of important issues related to the current state of the impact assessment industry in motion pictures.

This study examined the relationship between five motives—sensory arousal, cognitive arousal, escapism, mastery-control, and emotional involvement—and preferences for different types of content in three cultural media—television programs, motion pictures, and books. The findings both confirmed and extended prior theorization and found some intriguing differences in content preferences between women and men.

Several summers ago, the album Chant, a collection of plainsong performed by the monks of Santo Domingo de Silos, hit the top of the popular music charts, triggering the release and reissue of more chant albums by other groups. These included Greatest Hits—Chant, Mad About the Monks, and Chill to the Chant. In the meantime, the monks of Santo Domingo de Silos have followed up Chant with several other albums (Chant Noel, Chant II, Easter), and there is also a Chant video (see Chant, Visions, and Requiem). Though it may seem that plainchant has only just been discovered in popular culture, it has been heard for many years in film, a medium with strong ties to popular as well as "art" audiences. Some chants have become standard melodies for films, in particular the "Dies irae" from the Roman Catholic Mass for the Dead. The "Dies irae" is, in fact, one of the most frequently heard chants in film, used in television theme songs, commercials, and even a Christmas film (It's a Wonderful Life). Death, danger or the supernatural are invariably part of the story or visual situation where it is used.

This report reflects on a follow-on initiative from the AHRC-funded project “Fifty Years of British Music Video” designed to explore a collaboration between Cuba’s dance, film, and music cultures to create non-performance-based dance videos. Facilitated by service company Island Pictures, we worked with a young director, Giselle Garcia Castro, dancers at Danza Contemporánea de Cuba, and leading Cuban rap artist Telmary. The result was a single-shot video for Telmary’s “Soy el Verso” (2018), filmed in the dance studio, based on an improvisation guided by Giselle, and inspired by the José Martí poem in the song. The video fulfilled PI Caston’s ambition to break down the barrier between “dance film” and “music video” by building the choreography from the lyrics and making it the centre of the exercise. It endorsed Caston’s conceptual aim to encourage practitioners to identify and articulate their own narrative and iconography. The team also produced a fifteen-minute documentary of the process including interviews with filmmakers, teachers and students. The project demonstrated that academic collaboration with artistic communities can stimulate new creative practices and economic development. It also showed how creative industries researchers can use networks established by institutions such as the British Council and British Embassies to exchange media practice.

This account is a commentary on efforts to incorporate a "creative" project into a graduate-level public management course. Students must complete an "Images of the Public Sector" project for which they review, reflect on, and analyze the effect of specific media images of the public sector on public perceptions. The students select the images from books, music, television, motion pictures, or other art or literary form.

Background. M. Gogol’s «Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka» often attract the attention of theater directors. Thus, in June 2009, the premiere of the play «May night, or Moonlight Witchcraft» directed by Oksana Dmitrieva, took place at the Kharkov Puppet Theater. Trying to reveal the genre nature of the production, theater critics give it such definitions as a fairy tale, musical, fantasy, ethno-folk show, liturgy, mystery play, as well as analyze individual finds of a young director, but the complete picture of the artistic features of this performance is absent yet. In this regard, the purpose of the article is to identify the features of the interpretation of the Gogol story by director O. Dmitrieva. Results. The «May night...» begins with a musical introduction consisting of two themes: the lyrical theme of the pipe with intonations of Transcarpathian melodies (which is connected with the young couple Hanna and Levko and the image of Pannochka) and the theme of hand drums, which reveals the inner strength of the Ukrainian people, as well as demonological beginning associated with the witch-stepmother. The music gives way to the sounds of night nature and the stars appear on the backdrop. Their low location and shape resemble the Christmas stars, with which carolers sing for Christmas. In the dark, the figure of Pannochka appears, wrapped in white cloths remembering a shroud. The unfolding of intersecting clothes above Pannochka’s head, and then their rotation symbolize both the alternation of day and night and the winter solstice. Thus, there are both, the Orthodox and the Pagan features, in depiction of the Ukrainian village. From several notes that the heroine sings, her leitmotif grows up. He fits well on modern arrangements of Ukrainian music, and is easily recognizable on his own. In combination with Pannochka’s sudden gusty movements (as if a bird is trying to break out of the snare, fly up into the sky), it helps to reveal her ambivalent nature: on the one hand, of the martyr, on the other – the representative of evil forces. Pannochka becomes the main character of the performance, and the Moon becomes her attribute, which can turn into the tambourine of shaman, the lyre, the sword, etc. The youth walking scene “on the garden” with the use of the jigging puppet, accompanied by folk songs differs in tempo and rhythm from previous mysteriously lyrical scenes. In the next episode, Pannochka enchants the characters on the stage with moonlight, so the meeting and the dialogue between Hanna and Levko begin to be perceived as a dream of heroes. This is facilitated by both the slow movements of the actors, the lengthy summons into the names of the characters, their flight around the stage, and the dialogue with the Moon that Pannochka props up. The tragic history of Pannochka is depicted first with the help of portraits of its participants on round screens, and then the screens are assembled into the figure of a Witch-Cat. This form also is reminiscent of a Chinese dancing Dragon. The episode with the hand fans depicting the “cat’s claws” is accompanied by alarming drum sound: Pannochka has no repose from the Witch even after death. The village in the new picture is reflected in the ripples of water: the real world is floating, swinging. Hanna and Levko confess their love to each other, however, Kalenik suddenly appears, recalling the Head. The image of the Head is solved by the director using two masks – large and small. At the beginning of the second act, the actors appear on the stage with long poles, which are similar both to the Chinese combat weapon and to the Ukrainian musical instruments “trembits”, allowing the actors to show brilliant plastic technique of “slow-motion”. Stylized masks of animals (cows, goats, pigs, roosters), which the walking lads pulling on themselves are the allusion to the Christmas fests. The lad boys strive to annoy the Head, so Head masks reappear on the scene, but there are already three of them: large, medium and small. With their help, there is a debunking of this character losing his power. The action transferred to the bottom of the pond, as symbolized by stylized fish. The drums and the fans – the cat’s claws – once again remind of the conflict between Pannochka and the Witch. Like in Gogol’s novella, the heroine asks Levko to find the Stepmother-Witch. The marionnette a la planchette and then – a shadow paper doll represent the image of the hero. Thanks to Levko, Mermaids (the original puppets) seize the Witch, and her death is symbolized by a broken rattle-rattle with the image of the cat’s muzzle. Next, the scene action follows by the Gogol’s novella: grateful Pannochka given to Levko the note, Head read it and allowed his son to marry Hanna. The image of Levko is represented here both in the system of the tablet puppet and in the means of the shadow theater. And the long clothes-shrouds acquainted from the first episodes of the play perform a number of new functions: this is the water of the pond, where Pannochka floats, and the paper, on which the note is written, and later – the wedding table. In this way the end of the Pannochka plot line comes. The spiritual verse «The soul with the body was parting» sounds, and in the hands of actress V. Mishchenko, the light paper doll, as the soul of her heroine, seeks up into the sky. Pannochka redeemed her sins, and now her soul can fly to heaven, because Easter has come. The last episode uses the “time-lapse” technique symbolizing the cleansing of the world from evil, and Pannochka’s leitmotif is organically superimposed on the Easter chime of bells. The action ends with a rap on the words “The Angels had opened the windows and they are looking on us” and the news that Easter has come. The final supports an idea that a person’s life moves from Christmas to Easter, from suffering to light, thus closing the spectacle into a ring composition. Conclusions. The original Gogol’s text allowed O. Dmitrieva to show a wide palette of modern possibilities of the puppet theater and the high skill of the actors of the “live plan”. In addition, the interweaving of national and foreign, Orthodoxy and paganism, an appeal to the expressive possibilities of the Ukrainian folk and modern music and to the ballet plastique suggest the postmodern nature of the play «May night, or MoonlightWitchcraft».

Previous studies have shown that pairing a film excerpt with different musical soundtracks can change the audience’s interpretation of the scene. This study examined the effects of mixing the same piece of music at different levels of loudness in a film soundtrack to suggest diegeticmusic (“source music,” presented as if arising from within the fictional world of the film characters) or to suggest nondiegetic music (a “dramatic score” accompanying the scene but not originating from within the fictional world). Adjusting the level of loudness significantly altered viewers’ perceptions of many elements that are fundamental to the storyline, including inferences about the relationship, intentions, and emotions of the film characters, their romantic interest toward each other, and the overall perceived tension of the scene. Surprisingly, varying the loudness (and resulting timbre) of the same piece of music produced greater differences in viewers’ interpretations of the film scene and characters than switching to a different music track. This finding is of theoretical and practical interest as changes in loudness and timbre are among the primary post-production modifications sound editors make to differentiate “source music” from “dramatic score” in motion pictures, and the effects on viewers have rarely been empirically investigated.

‘Oscar’ is the best-known symbol of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. But there is more to the Academy than the golden statuette. The Academy’s Margaret Herrick Library, which has been in existence for 80 years, is widely regarded as the pre-eminent research and reference facility for the study of all aspects of motion pictures, as an art form and an industry. The non-circulating research and reference collection, located in Beverly Hills, California, is open to the public, free of charge, and is heavily used by students, scholars, industry personnel, journalists, filmmakers and the general public. Its holdings document the multiple facets of the film industry and its personnel, past and present, and include books, periodicals, clipping files and screenplays, as well as special collections of photographs, manuscripts, posters, graphic art materials, music and recorded sound, and oral histories.

During the 1980s, media images of white boomer nostalgia were often accompanied by 1960s Motown songs due to the popularity of the hit film The Big Chill as well as advertising and licensing strategies inspired by it. In previous decades, however, Motown was used to dramatize onscreen representations of Black male film characters’ emotional experiences of aspiration and resilience. This article explores how 1960s Motown songs came to be employed in two motion pictures—Nothing But a Man and Cooley High—to represent particular notions of everyday Black life, and then provides an industrial backdrop for why such cinematic uses of Motown came to effectively be replaced by invocations of white nostalgia. By analyzing the uses of Motown music within film narratives and the industrial conditions through which such licensing took place, this study goes beyond the formal analysis of film music in order to demonstrate how the act of licensing popular songs for film participates in the making of songs’ social, cultural, and political meanings. In so doing, this article shows how the material conditions of licensing music for film shape what and whose experiences of popular music are able to be represented onscreen.

In recent years, numerous marketing and organizational theorists have called attention to the analogy between jazz and management strategy. From the perspective of this jazz metaphor, key questions concern the implications of jazz training for marketing education. Too often—say, in motion pictures or television dramas—jazz is portrayed as an innocent folk music whose performance requires more feeling than knowledge. This inaccurate stereotype colors the treatment of music instruction found in the film Mr. Holland’s Opus (1995). A contrasting view of jazz as a technically demanding art form appears in the movie Whiplash (2014). These two films also represent diametrically opposed teaching styles—the first nurturing and customer-oriented, the second sadistic and product-oriented. A third motion picture entitled Keep On Keepin’ On (2014) presents a resolution of this dialectic in the form of a marketing-oriented instructor whose method of teaching combines kindness (the customer-oriented thesis) with rigor (the product-oriented antithesis) to achieve a balanced reconciliation (the marketing-oriented synthesis). From this perspective, like jazz training, marketing education is itself embarked on a marketing project that benefits from a rapprochement of customer-oriented and product-oriented impulses to attain a marketing-oriented synthesis. Thus, insights about jazz training become relevant to the challenges of marketing education—as illustrated by various examples from the author’s own experiences.

“We live in an age of wonders!” exclaims a character in Henry James's The Bostonians (1886). And so it must have seemed to any American who could read the newspapers, which thrived, in the 1880s, on the business of proclaiming marvels. In The Bostonians one of the “wonders” is Miss Verena Tarrant, whose precocious and hypnotic speaking powers on the subject of women's rights — together with a pretty face and trim figure — succeeded in selling out the Boston Music Hall. Other wonders of the decade were less comely but more enduring: the lightbulb, the electric generator (which so awed Henry Adams), the telephone, the automobile, motion pictures, the linotype machine, the Kodak camera. The hawking of Verena Tarrant outside the Music Hall followed the American pattern of packaging, promoting, and generally celebrating (in a chauvinistic spirit) all manner of sensational feats, new technologies, and even writers and painters who caught the public's fancy. One of these was, of course, Mark Twain, who successfully promoted his own works through direct subscription sales. Also included among the sensational feats of the period were the trompe l'oeil (trick of the eye) still-life paintings by William Michael Harnett, who was heralded in a feature article that appeared in the New York News at the end of the decade. The headline ran as follows:Painted Like Real Things. The Man Whose Pictures Are a Wonder and a Puzzle. How He Began and the Success He Has Met With — Poverty Forced Him to Earn a Living in the Line in Which He Excells.

Abstract: In the first two decades of the People’s Republic of China (PRC; 1949–present), the filmmakers were caught in a dilemma between a fast-growing film industry and Chinese moviegoers’ pervasive lack of cinematic literacy, that is, a proper understanding of cinematic techniques, such as the use of shots in films. To make motion pictures a mass culture by enhancing cinematic literacy among Chinese viewers, filmmakers produced over one hundred opera films—a filmic genre that resorts to cinematic techniques to represent Chinese theater on the silver screen. Considering Chinese audiences’ familiarity with China’s operatic arts, such as singing and music, filmmakers in post1949 China deftly synchronized close-up shots with operatic music/singing in opera films to highlight characters’ heightened emotions and thereby popularize a filmic mode of narration and presentation. This paper argues that close and close-up shots provided an avenue for a transition from stage to screen as a chief means of entertainment and a widely accepted mode of representation in the early years of the PRC.

ABSTRACTElectronic picture storybooks often include motion pictures, sounds, and background music instead of static pictures, and hotspots that label/define words when clicked on. The current study was designed to examine whether these additional elements aid word learning and story comprehension and whether effects accumulate making the animated e-book that also includes hotspots the most promising device. A sample group of 136 4- and 5-year-old kindergarten children were randomly assigned to one of four conditions: static e-books, animated e-books, interactive animated e-books, and a control group. In experimental conditions, four on-screen stories were each presented four times during a 4-week intervention period. Children in the control condition played nonliteracy related computer games during the same time. In all conditions, children worked independently with the computer programs. Strong treatment effects were found on target vocabulary originating from the story. Pupils gained most in vocabulary after reading interactive animated e-books, followed by (noninteractive) animated e-books and then static e-books. E-books including animations and interactivity were neither beneficial nor detrimental for story comprehension. Findings suggest that electronic storybooks are valuable additions in support of the classroom curriculum with interactive animated e-books being the best alternative.

In spring 1957 the Juvenile Division of the San Francisco Police Department seized copies of Howl and charged the poem's publisher, Lawrence Felinghetti, with obscenity. Tried in summer 1957 and defended by the American Civil Liberties Union, Ferlinghetti was exonerated by a District Court judge. Scholars typically place the Howl trial at the beginning of a cultural and social revolution that flourished in the 1960s or place it amid the personal lives and rebellions of the actors composing the Beat Generation. However, these treatments do not fully consider the ways the prosecution reflected trends in law, shaped debates over juvenile delinquency, and amplified distinctions between legal censorship and public censuring. This paper situates the Howl prosecution amid the regulation of comics, rock music, motion pictures, narcotics in postwar America, to tell a story about California, conservatism, radicalism, and censorship in the Cold War Era.

Purpose This paper aims to explore how sounds and attunements to particular organizations of sound collide across an English language community learning space. The activities in the paper come from a six-week summer initiative that connected middle school youth with community artists for writing songs and rap lyrics, making beats and hip-hop DJing. Design/methodology/approach This paper draws from the interdisciplinary field of sound studies and, specifically, the concept of aural imaginary to explore the collisions alive and in-motion across the learning space. The paper uses qualitative and ethnographic approaches to explore the research questions. Findings The findings focus on how youth hear certain sounds and organizations of sound in music as “old” and “new,” and how these shifting listening entangle talk, claims and interactions in the learning space. The findings also trace the ways that youth use sound as an active, aural resource to make competing distinctions between rapping, singing and talking. Originality/value This paper reasserts the role of sound in multiliteracies, hip-hop and English education work, keying into the ways it collides with other aspect of the learning space. The paper raises questions about what educators might attune themselves to by considering English education as already taking place in a youth aural imaginary.

Background. The “melos” and “colourfulness” terms are used in various meanings both, in music and fine arts. The ambiguity of these concepts in our time of unlimited possibilities for creative experiment and bold search for new semantic levels, interest in establishing versatile inter-scientific relations allows us to apply innovative analytic methods to the works of art. Among these methods, intermedial inter-disciplinary researches seem to be extremely promising, especially when applied to such traditional, well-established forms of art as academic painting and music. The article uses the innovative method of intermedial research, which consists in attempts to trans-code the elements of the musical semiotic system into a pictorial one and vice versa. B. Asafyev (1987, р. 83) determined the “melos” in music as an abstract notion that unites all the forms of melody and the properties of melodiousness: the qualitative, expressive sides of all kinds of sound correlations as sequences in time. The consistent movement of sounds in a piece of music is called “a line” (for example, a “melodic line”) that gives the reason to see a certain parallel between music and painting. Accordingly, the concept of “melos” in music correlates with the concept of “linearity” (graphics) of a picture. The notion of “colourfulness” was first introduced in the fine arts. The colourfulness is a total of correlations of colour tones, hues, which create a certain unity and are an esthetic reflection of the colour diversity of reality (based on Bilodid, I., 1973, p. 232 and others). In musical science there is no well-established definition of this concept, however, we find such attempts: “Colourfulness [in original –’kolorit’ – translator’s note] (from the Latin ’color’) in music – is the predominant emotional colouring of one or another episode, which is achieved by using various registers, tones, harmonic and other expressive means” (FDSTAR. Electronic music. The site of composers, CJs and DJs). The adjoint concept “colouristics” is used, which is described as follows: “… colouristics – music of subtle and colorful sounds, in which all tones are distinguished (the beginning of the Etude in G sharp minor by Chopin, the scene of the transformation of fishes in the 4th Picture of “Sadko”, bell harmonies by M. P. Mussorgsky, S. V. Rachmaninoff)”(Maklygin, A., 1990, in Musical Encyclopedic Dictionary). The purpose of this article is an attempt to determine the correlation of melos and colourfulness in the musical and fine arts on the example of musical portraits and landscapes from the M. Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” cycle. Research results. The “Pictures at an Exhibition” piano cycle is created under impression of works by Viktor Hartmann, the artist, architect, and designer. The content of the cycle is a vivid example of music and painting interrelation, therefore it gives an occasion to detailed intermedial analysis to understand the melos and colourfulness correlation in the musical pictures. So, the peculiarities of the melos in “The Gnome” are the quick broken zigzag lines, contains brief chromatic motifs, separated by pauses, grace notes and trills. A special role is given to syncopation, which imitate the Gnome’s limping gait. The texture of M. Mussorgsky’s piece – the octave movement in the party of the right and the left hands without a clearly defined accompaniment can be seen as a musical analogy to colourfulness of V. Hartmann’s sketch with its transparent background. Thus, in Mussorgsky’s play “The Gnome”, melos prevails over colourfulness that coincides with the ratio of melos / color in V. Hartmann’s sketch, since the artist gave preference to drawing creating this picture as monochrome one. “The Old Castle” is extremely colourful, as the composer deals great importance to modal, harmonic and textural factors. In general, it can be argued that the composer inherits the ratio of drawing and colouring in the painting by V. Hartmann, embodying the overall emotional and colourful palette of the picture with the help of tonality (“mysterious” G sharp minor) and texture (basso ostinato as an expression of the statics of the massive old building). Melos prevails over colourfulness and expresses the individuality of images in the “Samuel” Goldenberg and “Schmuÿle”, the musical portrait based on two paintings by V. Hartmann (“Poor Jew”, “Rich Jew in the Fur Hat”). The melodic (linear) component of the work is represented by two musical themes. The first is a characterization of a rich man, in which ascending intonations are used as a symbol of his high social status, by analogy with the proudly raised head and upward glance in the painting by V. Hartmann. The melodic theme of a poor Jew with a downward motion corresponds with the image of the poor man’s stooped figure. “Colour” of the musical portrait, as in the V. Hartmann’s painting, serves only as a background. In the piece “Catacombs. Roman Tomb”, the colorfulness prevails over the melos, The “gloomy” tonality (B minor) and the figurative textural techniques used by the composer (the sound of the melody against the background of tremolo octaves in high register, which can be compared with flickering lantern light in the darkness of the tomb, also juxtaposition of the fragments of the theme in different registers, creating contrasts of light and darkness), clearly reflect the overall colouring of the painting by V. Hartmann. In the musical portrait “The Hut on Hen’s Legs (Baba Yaga)” melos prevails over colorfulness, because it is with the help of melodic means that the portrait of a fairy-tale character is depicted, while the coloristic component of the music in this composition corresponds to the sketch of V. Hartman (where the clock in the house’s form depicted) only partially and plays the role of a landscape background (tremolo and triplets in accompaniment performing a coloristic function). “The Bogatyr (Great) Gates (In the Capital in Kiev)” is based on V. Hartmann’s the architectural and painting project of the city gate. Melos of the composition is presented by three contrasting themes. The graphic drawing of some fragments of these themes associatively correlates with the individual elements of the graphics of V. Hartmann’s picture (the peaked line of the passage in the right hand’s party, the tremolo-like figures). The colourfulness of the piece expresses in part by its texture and tone (E Flat Major, according to N. Rimsky Korsakov, the tone of “walls and cities”). In V. Hartmann’s painting, the drawing prevails over colour; however, M. Mussorgsky rethought the melody / colourful ratio in the piece. Melos conveys only some of the features of the drawing, its most important lines, while textural and coloristic musical means reproduce both, the linear side of the image and colouristics as such, that is, the colouristic component dominates. Conclusions. 1. The melos/colourfulness correlation in M. Mussorgsky’s cycle is regulated as follows: melos prevails over colouring in the pieces “The Gnome”, “Samuel” Goldenberg and “Schmuÿle, “The Hut on Hen’s Legs (Baba Yaga)”; colourfulness prevails over melos in “The Old Castle”, “Catacombs. Roman Tomb”, “The Bogatyr Gate in Kyiv”. 2. The melos / colourfulness correlation in the analyzed pieces from M. Mussorgsky’s cycle corresponds with the melos / colourfulness correlation in the respective V. Hartmann’s paintings. The musical portrait of Baba Yaga in “The Hut on Hen”s legs” is an exception: V. Hartman painted the stylized clock as an example of decorative and applied art, but M. Mussorgsky emphasized the reflection of the fairy-tale image; as well as “The Bogatyr Gate”, where colouristics and volume prevail over grafics and planeness of the architectural sketch. 3. The main expressive means of creating a portrait, as a rule, is the melody (melos), and the landscape – tonality, texture, timbre (colourfulness). The intermedial analysis of the above portraits and landscapes from M. Mussorgsky’s piano cycle confirms this concept.

The current acceleration of digitalization at least erodes the religious humanist values in children. This study aims to analyze the strategy of instilling basic religious humanist values in early childhood at RA Al-Hidayah Sunggal. This study uses a qualitative approach with the method of case studies (case study), data collection instruments using the method of observation, interviews, study documentation. Furthermore, the data were analyzed using data reduction, data presentation, and drawing conclusions. The results of this study concluded that first, the basic religious humanist values that were instilled in RA Al-Hidayah Sunggal students were the value of freedom, the value of creativity, the value of cooperation, the value of honesty, and the value of self-actualization. Second, the method of instilling basic religious humanist values in early childhood is carried out using four methods, namely the BCM (Playing, Story and Singing) Method, the habituation method, the exemplary method, and the advice method. Third, the media in instilling basic religious humanist values in early childhood, namely using the media of people, games, pictures, story books, animated films, laptops, projectors, music and motion.

Shakespeare’s plays were first adapted in the Chinese cinema in the era of silent motion pictures, such as A Woman Lawyer (from The Merchant of Venice, 1927), and A Spray of Plum Blossoms (from The Two Gentlemen of Verona, 1931). The most recent Chinese adaptations/spinoffs include two 2006 films based on Hamlet. After a brief review of Shakespeare’s history in the Chinese cinema, this study compares the two Chinese Hamlets released in 2006—Feng Xiaogang’s Banquet and Hu Xuehua’s Prince of the Himalayas to illustrate how Chinese filmmakers approach Shakespeare. Both re-invent Shakespeare’s Hamlet story and transfer it to a specific time, culture and landscape. The story of The Banquet takes place in a warring state in China of the 10th century while The Prince is set in pre-Buddhist Tibet. The former as a blockbuster movie in China has gained a financial success albeit being criticised for its commercial aesthetics. The latter, on the other hand, has raised attention amongst academics and critics and won several prizes though not as successful on the movie market. This study examines how the two Chinese Hamlet movies treat Shakespeare’s story in using different filmic strategies of story, character, picture, music and style.

Vaudeville theatre was an important visual form of popular culture and entertainment that featured such specialty acts as comedy and song and dance, as well as lectures, lantern slide shows and motion pictures with subject matter from faraway lands, and themes of American patriotism. American vaudeville began in nineteenth-century saloons as floorshows and burlesque, but it was eventually upgraded to family entertainment, which appealed to middle- and upper-class audiences, before individual theatres were subsumed by franchised theatre chains. Vaudeville theatre directors, who were known as impresarios, programmed an innovative spectrum of acts that ranged from classical music and art to folk songs, and to acrobats, which appealed to a wide range of social classes. Following the theories of Henri Lefebvre, the social space of the theatre became a conceptually dynamic space, where class distinctions blurred and audience members could then dream of life in a higher social station, or what American Mid Victorians knew as ‘self-improvement’. A conundrum emerges, however, when we see that most of the programmes were plentiful with racial, ethnic and gender stereotypes, which were entertaining to White audience members. The vertical social climb of the gilded age in the 1900s was complicated with the social relations of uneasy, decadent consumerism. Individuals driven by desire thought their ‘un-comfort’ might be remedied by entertainment, as they looked for an upswing to something better.

This study aims to explain the emotional representation of the Joker as a victim of violence in the 2019 Joker film based on Ferdinand De Saussure's theory. Joker is a psychological thriller genre film. The film opens with Arthur Fleck trying out various expressions. With a clown-style make-up, Arthur pulled his face in a motion pulling the corners of his lips up to create a smiling facial expression. Arthur then lowered the corners of his lips down to make a sad expression with his lips down, and then pulled his lips back into a smile. A few tears flowed between her black eye makeup. The research method used in this paper is descriptive qualitative. This means that the data used in this study is qualitative data (data that does not consist of numbers) in the form of words and pictures that may be the key to what is being studied. Then the existing data are described from a number of aspects of signs or semiotics in a number of scenes. For example, from the emotional side that appears in a scene, the facial expressions of the actors, the dialogue delivered by the actors, background music and so on. Emotional representation is also shown through messages that are interpreted semiotically based on Ferdinand de Saussure's theory through changes in costumes (markers), from being originally monochrome (dark dominant) to being more colorful, and changes in a person's character from being closed to being more expressive in expressing their feelings sign).

The purpose of this study was to describe and analyze the Choreography of Sakato Plate Dance in Nagari Abai. The object of research studied was Sakato Plate Dance in Abai Sakato Art Studio, Nagari Abai. Stationery is used to record information or data obtained from sources and information related to Sakato Plate Dance. Photo Camera to take pictures of the form of motion and everything related to Sakato Plate Dance. Audio Recorder, this tool is used to record information about dance history, background, dance music and other information from informants and sources about Piring Sakato Dance. Primary data, namely data obtained from the main source, namely the choreographer of Sakato Plate Dance. Secondary data, which is supporting research data obtained through data that has been collected or the results of relevant research, then the data is also obtained from documentation owned by the Sakato Plate Dance choreographer in the form of photos, video recordings and others. The analysis steps taken are, the data is selected as needed and related to the problem posed, namely about the Sakato Plate Dance Choreography then arranged systematically and descriptively. The energy aspect used in this Sakato Plate Dance is that there is slow, medium, and strong energy this aspect aims to beautify the Sakato Plate Dance. As for the interaction that occurs in the Sakato Plate Dance, the property used in this Sakato Plate Dance is a plate with a plate size of 5. The clothes used in the Sakato Plate Dance are costumes that have been created so that dancers are easy to make movements and are not disturbed when holding plates.

The thesis focuses on the analysis of three program pieces - Catacombs, The Hut on Hen's Legs (Baba Yaga) and The Great Gate of Kiev from the Modest Mussorgsky's piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition. A starting point is the analysis of the wider context out of which the mentioned pieces originated which throws light on the stylistic characteristics of Romanticism, and provides grounds for a detailed pondering on the artistic creations of the iconic composer. The study can be valuable for the pianists and musical pedagogists, as the analysis in its essence explores the ways of interpretation of the mentioned compositions. The article PROGRAM CONTENT IN RELATION WITH COMPOSITIONAL AND TECHNICAL SOLUTIONS FOUND IN PIANO PIECES BY MODEST MUSSORGSKY consists of the following chapters: Introduction, Modest Mussorgsky - Features of Artistic Oeuvre and Musical Language, Pictures at an Exhibition: Catacombs, The Hut on Hen's Legs (Baba Yaga) and The Great Gate of Kiev - Analysis of the Contents and Performance Aspects, Conclusion and References. The introductory part offers an explanation of the research framework, presents the research methods and objectives and gives a short review of the literature used for the study. The following chapters are drafted in such a way as to offer to the reader the important information on the characteristics of Mussorgsky's oeuvre in order to provide for a well-founded introspection of the selected compositions. The central part of the thesis is reserved for the analysis of the compositions, first by presenting their program content, and then by focusing on its bonds with compositional and technical solutions found in each piece. In order to come up with fuller consideration of the employed means of expression and their role in evoking the specific contents, the work offers the author's own solutions, all backed up by notational examples and explanations. The piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition by Mussorgsky is a work of exceptional value, very inspiring for the performer. Pieces contrast with each other in tempo, character, as well as harmonic and expressive means. In addition to achieving it's unity, it is important that each piece is well conceived, that the main points are singled out and that the narrative of each piece is recognized and complied in the interpretation. Taking into account the atmosphere of the piece Catacombs, the performer should keep the chords long enough and move from one to the other without haste. Another important element of the performance is the acoustic connection of the chords without interruption and being out of context, so it is important to listen well to each chord, with a special focus on the sound level just before the next one. Baba Jaga's flight in a large attic is characterized by a constant vertical in the texture, largely composed of octaves and massive chords, frequent leaps and rapid changes of the register along the entire keyboard. In order to evoke the fierce and evil nature of the character, the composer establishes a characteristic rhythmic scheme. The witch's impatient and angry steps are represented by accents on the weak parts of the beat. The invoice is composed of unison, doubled or tripled octaves. With its sumptuous sound, in full piano capacity, the piece The great gate of Kiev completes the work in an imposing way. Inspired by folklore and church motifs, the composer pays tribute to the Russian people, historical heritage, tradition and cultural values. The grand fi nale opens with the long chords of E-flat major, a key that has often been associated with heroism and fame in the history of music. The massive sonority and triumphant character of this theme, which also closes the cycle, can be connected with the sound of a Russian folk melody sung by large masses of people, in a way that symbolizes the vitality of the national spirit. Mussorgsky's melodic line is characterized by a wide range of expressions, in accordance with the aesthetic and psychological principles of individual paintings; it less often contains "long breath" or longer motion in one direction. Of the selected pieces in this work, except in The great gate of Kiev, the melodic lines are mostly comprised of short motifs. The rhythmic component is extremely important for certain pieces of the cycle (among which is certainly baba yaga). Harmony includes unusual and frequent changes of tonal centers, as well as the appearance of modality. Particularly expressive properties of harmony can be observed in the Catacombs, where dissonances are supported by sharp dynamic extremes, with the aim of evoking the psychological state of the observer in the eclipse of ancient Christian hiding places and tombs. The fi nal considerations, which are focused on the contribution of the research, offer possible perspectives for further studies of pianistic poetics as a means of interpretation of program compositions. I believe that my research has contributed to the elucidation of possible perspectives for further reflections on pianistic poetics in the service of interpreting and evoking compositions of a programmatic character. Also, I hope that this work will be useful to all pianists who are looking for their own solutions and personal path to achieving high creative and artistic achievements.

Background. The beginning of the development of musical art in Transcarpathia dates back to the end of the nineteenth century and lasts during the first third of the twentieth century. First of all, it was an interest in the genre of choral music (a synthetic genre based on the merging of the Word and Music), which fully corresponded to the enlightened spirit of life of the Transcarpathians under the political conditions of that time. And only in the second half of the twentieth century intensive blossoming of the varieties of instrumental (kind of «pure») music with its conceptually most complex types of creative thinking and adaptation to the methods of style transformation takes place. The piano music, one of the most abstract forms of the creative process, has revealed its peculiarities in this process. However, the researchers virtually never paid attention to piano pieces for children, which are naturally inferior by their practically necessary and didactically appropriate visual simplicity of musical vocabulary to the works of the so-called large genre. In addition, historically, the creative work of Transcarpathian composers has been considered only as a product of a purely regional significance. Therefore, it is important that the piano works of Transcarpathian composers for children should also be considered in the context of such integrity as the Intentional period of the music history, which has been defined as non-classical and at the same time permeated with the idea of global cultural synthesis Objectives. The essence of the tasks and the purpose is to present the "Child Album" by V. Telychko (the first in Transcarpathia sample of the genre of children’s musical album, 2016) as an example of the creation of the modern intonational image of the world - in its associative diversity and intentionality. Methods. A selection of research methods, namely, analytical (analysis and synthesis, induction and deduction, systematization, classification and generalization), comparative, systemic, phenomenological, functional, has been used in view of the holistic approach – in the spirit of spiritual development of the world. In this regard, the interpretive potential of the concepts of the intonational model and the modal nature of musical themes as types of thinking by sound images is considered methodologically appropriate: both purposefully focus attention of the recipient on the sound «body» and the intonational "soul" of the musical matter in the integrity of the creative idea of the work, and also is didactically productive in terms of comprehension of the architectonics of the world of music as a world of musical ideas. Results. V. Telichko’s "Children’s Album" is a cyclic structure of the linear/plot type, where step-by-step compositional and dramaturgical organization of the whole ensures the principle of successive naming of new, but equal in figurative semantic content pieces. At the same time, it will be superfluous to reflect on the fact that the structure of cycles such as "album" is rarely evaluated as such that it is actually "filled in" (for example, with memorable photos or pictures), and only since then its "white" (from alba) of the blank/empty sheets is filled in with the semantics and the logic of placement of fixed events, phenomena, impressions, etc in a certain order. Against the background of such reflection the memory recalls such "albums" of romantics: all of them are based on the logic of the course of a day lived by a child (for example, P. I. Tchaikovsky). V. Telichko’s principle of collecting pieces "into the album" has such a life-justifiable logic – the gradual flow of events of the day, embodied in a child’s only perception of the world and itself. The semantic code of the composer’s plan is referenced in his dedication: "I devote my love to grandchildren Angelina and Anna" - expressing love for grandchildren, admiring their fantasy and energy, caring for the formation of their worldview on a certain system of values (family, native land, diversity of traditions of the countries of the world , historical memory): the pieces "Morning", "My Mother", "Our Grandmother" represent an idea of an ingenuous and happy feeling of a child in the family; "Anna’s Teddy-Bear", "Angelina’s Hobbyhorse" and "Angelina’s Waltz " represent a lively imagination of children, each of them having a favorite game "theme"; the plays "About Transcarpathia", "Kolomyika", "Tropotyanka", "Long road" and "It’s raining" are outlined by the situation of instructive stories of grandfather about the regionally formed traditions of the Transcarpathians, their spirit and uneasy destiny; while the pieces "On Scotland", "On Slovakia" and "On Japan" outline the interests of somewhat different cognitive significance - the intention to comprehend a certain national "otherness", which has its own color of its culture; in the end, "A Lullaby for Anna" creates, so to say, a backlash against the grand finale-prologue, consisting of the pieces "On Austria" (the cultural center of the European musical classicism) and "On Romania" (regionally closest to Transcarpathia country). Another signifying circumstance of the idea and plan of the cycle refers to the types of performances and personification of images, both as members of the family circle and as a certain social unity: in addition to the versions of solo performance, in a considerable number of plays there is ensemble performance in four and six hands; at the same time, each of the parts is composed as a certain texture layer, which in aggregate (duo, terzetto) gives the effect of an "orchestral" score. However, the most important thing is that for the instrumentalist performer, and for the listener or analyst (who is also a "listener"), the "Children’s Album" by V. Telichko is a test of the ability to perceive musical vocabulary in the form of a certain sound form/idea with which it is necessary to have a relationship according to the algorithm of personal identification. On the one hand, in the musical text there is an opportunity to recognize the classical models of musical vocabulary (cantilena, recitation, motility, general forms of motion, signaling, sound illustration); and on the other - due to the constructive interference of the classical techniques of the creation of musical matter (emancipated dissonance, the non-systemic character of the tonality, etc.) the meanings are accumulated. Another important component of the composer’s plan is to introduce a purely methodical (level of methodical reception) task of developing the technology of the game on the piano into the original sound form/idea, which first of all requires a skillful usage of all the fingers. Conclusions. As a research material the "Children’s Album" by a contemporary composer from Transcarpathia, V. Telichko provides several important and mutually perceptible scientific tasks directly related to musicology and pedagogical practice: testing of the theoretically updated analytical apparatus for tracking the intonational field of music and its thoughts and comprehension of the didactically expedient implementation of its results in the educational sphere; in particular, in terms of the prospective guideline for the development of musicality (a high measure of the ability to self-identification with the musical image) and the piano skills of a child musician.

Background. The beginning of the development of musical art in Transcarpathia dates back to the end of the nineteenth century and lasts during the first third of the twentieth century. First of all, it was an interest in the genre of choral music (a synthetic genre based on the merging of the Word and Music), which fully corresponded to the enlightened spirit of life of the Transcarpathians under the political conditions of that time. And only in the second half of the twentieth century intensive blossoming of the varieties of instrumental (kind of «pure») music with its conceptually most complex types of creative thinking and adaptation to the methods of style transformation takes place. The piano music, one of the most abstract forms of the creative process, has revealed its peculiarities in this process. However, the researchers virtually never paid attention to piano pieces for children, which are naturally inferior by their practically necessary and didactically appropriate visual simplicity of musical vocabulary to the works of the so-called large genre. In addition, historically, the creative work of Transcarpathian composers has been considered only as a product of a purely regional significance. Therefore, it is important that the piano works of Transcarpathian composers for children should also be considered in the context of such integrity as the Intentional period of the music history, which has been defined as non-classical and at the same time permeated with the idea of global cultural synthesis Objectives. The essence of the tasks and the purpose is to present the "Child Album" by V. Telychko (the first in Transcarpathia sample of the genre of children’s musical album, 2016) as an example of the creation of the modern intonational image of the world - in its associative diversity and intentionality. Methods. A selection of research methods, namely, analytical (analysis and synthesis, induction and deduction, systematization, classification and generalization), comparative, systemic, phenomenological, functional, has been used in view of the holistic approach – in the spirit of spiritual development of the world. In this regard, the interpretive potential of the concepts of the intonational model and the modal nature of musical themes as types of thinking by sound images is considered methodologically appropriate: both purposefully focus attention of the recipient on the sound «body» and the intonational "soul" of the musical matter in the integrity of the creative idea of the work, and also is didactically productive in terms of comprehension of the architectonics of the world of music as a world of musical ideas. Results. V. Telichko’s "Children’s Album" is a cyclic structure of the linear/plot type, where step-by-step compositional and dramaturgical organization of the whole ensures the principle of successive naming of new, but equal in figurative semantic content pieces. At the same time, it will be superfluous to reflect on the fact that the structure of cycles such as "album" is rarely evaluated as such that it is actually "filled in" (for example, with memorable photos or pictures), and only since then its "white" (from alba) of the blank/empty sheets is filled in with the semantics and the logic of placement of fixed events, phenomena, impressions, etc in a certain order. Against the background of such reflection the memory recalls such "albums" of romantics: all of them are based on the logic of the course of a day lived by a child (for example, P. I. Tchaikovsky). V. Telichko’s principle of collecting pieces "into the album" has such a life-justifiable logic – the gradual flow of events of the day, embodied in a child’s only perception of the world and itself. The semantic code of the composer’s plan is referenced in his dedication: "I devote my love to grandchildren Angelina and Anna" - expressing love for grandchildren, admiring their fantasy and energy, caring for the formation of their worldview on a certain system of values (family, native land, diversity of traditions of the countries of the world , historical memory): the pieces "Morning", "My Mother", "Our Grandmother" represent an idea of an ingenuous and happy feeling of a child in the family; "Anna’s Teddy-Bear", "Angelina’s Hobbyhorse" and "Angelina’s Waltz " represent a lively imagination of children, each of them having a favorite game "theme"; the plays "About Transcarpathia", "Kolomyika", "Tropotyanka", "Long road" and "It’s raining" are outlined by the situation of instructive stories of grandfather about the regionally formed traditions of the Transcarpathians, their spirit and uneasy destiny; while the pieces "On Scotland", "On Slovakia" and "On Japan" outline the interests of somewhat different cognitive significance - the intention to comprehend a certain national "otherness", which has its own color of its culture; in the end, "A Lullaby for Anna" creates, so to say, a backlash against the grand finale-prologue, consisting of the pieces "On Austria" (the cultural center of the European musical classicism) and "On Romania" (regionally closest to Transcarpathia country). Another signifying circumstance of the idea and plan of the cycle refers to the types of performances and personification of images, both as members of the family circle and as a certain social unity: in addition to the versions of solo performance, in a considerable number of plays there is ensemble performance in four and six hands; at the same time, each of the parts is composed as a certain texture layer, which in aggregate (duo, terzetto) gives the effect of an "orchestral" score. However, the most important thing is that for the instrumentalist performer, and for the listener or analyst (who is also a "listener"), the "Children’s Album" by V. Telichko is a test of the ability to perceive musical vocabulary in the form of a certain sound form/idea with which it is necessary to have a relationship according to the algorithm of personal identification. On the one hand, in the musical text there is an opportunity to recognize the classical models of musical vocabulary (cantilena, recitation, motility, general forms of motion, signaling, sound illustration); and on the other - due to the constructive interference of the classical techniques of the creation of musical matter (emancipated dissonance, the non-systemic character of the tonality, etc.) the meanings are accumulated. Another important component of the composer’s plan is to introduce a purely methodical (level of methodical reception) task of developing the technology of the game on the piano into the original sound form/idea, which first of all requires a skillful usage of all the fingers. Conclusions. As a research material the "Children’s Album" by a contemporary composer from Transcarpathia, V. Telichko provides several important and mutually perceptible scientific tasks directly related to musicology and pedagogical practice: testing of the theoretically updated analytical apparatus for tracking the intonational field of music and its thoughts and comprehension of the didactically expedient implementation of its results in the educational sphere; in particular, in terms of the prospective guideline for the development of musicality (a high measure of the ability to self-identification with the musical image) and the piano skills of a child musician.

In the 1920 s, the politically heterogeneous Ukrainian emigration community in inter-war Czechoslovakia, with its back in World War I and losing national liberation competitions, desperately needed both physical and spiritual rest. However, the status of «emigrants» transformed the imagination of the natives about leisure and leisure. The recreational regulator was, on the one hand, the scientific and technical implications of the 'stormy twenties' and, on the other, the urgent need to keep 'one's band', that is, a collective form of rest and leisure. Ukrainian exiles visited various theatrical performances, book exhibitions, music concerts, sections and circles, and enjoyed excursions. Slowly, with some nuances, cinema was also part of the Ukrainian emigration leisure. It should be noted that the Ukrainian emigration in the inter-war Czechoslovakia, because of the 1920 s «quick return concept» and the priority, first of all, of its own political projects, did not leave any jobs or references to film vacations. The Great Depression of the 1930 s and the Losses dismissed the issue of leisure in general and film recreation in particular, making it difficult to physically work to survive. Contemporary scientific intelligence on the impact and role of cinema in the life of the Ukrainian emigration community in the interwar CSR is absent because of the fact that despite the status of Prague as a powerful political, cultural and scientific emigration center, it has not become a leading European cinema center, yielding here Berlin. Only those edited by Doctor of Historical Sciences, Professor IB Matyash, the book «Diplomatic History of Ukraine by Yevgeny Slabchenko (Eugene Deslav)», relevant to the subject of our intelligence, and the article by Roman Roslyak «Ukrainfilm».Based on the above, the purpose of the publication is to argue that, despite some efforts by the Ukrainian emigration community in the interwar CSR, a powerful European film center in Prague, unlike Paris, Vienna, Berlin and New York, never. The Ukrainian emigration community in the Czechoslovak Republic numbered about 20-22 thousand people. In its social composition, it was mainly peasant workers, the layer of her intelligentsia was small. Thus, most Ukrainian immigrants either used the moment to seek education in order to further have a higher social status or to work hard without being able to study. First of all, the Ukrainians, as a national community in exile with a lack of sufficient financial base, even in the «scientifically technical twenties» and «economically unstable thirties», were forced to stand in conservative positions on leisure issues. The first «moving pictures» appeared on the territory of the Czech Republic in 1896 in Prague and Karlovy Vary, thanks to the director and cameraman Jan Krzyzyniecki, who, since the second half of the 1890s, made several short documentary films. And a year later, one of the private American film companies came to the Czech Republic to start filming a black and white silent film in Bohemia. Whereas the first permanent cinema on Czech lands was started by the illusionist Victor Ponrepo (1858–1926) in 1907 in Prague. The Czechoslovakian film industry gained considerable momentum during the interwar period. Since 1921 professional film studios have started. And by 1932, the championship was kept by black and white silent films. The soundtrack of films in the Czechoslovakia began in 1930. In addition, in 1930 Czechoslovak authorities imposed a ban on the import of any German-language films. Prohibition of German-language film production leads to the fact that in 1933, the Czech studio «Barrandov Studio», established by the brothers Vaclav and Milos Havel in 1921, is firmly on its feet, and the number of cinemas is counted in 1938. 1824. However, there were attempts to create a quality Ukrainian emigration film product and, accordingly, Ukrainian (emigration) film studios in the Czechoslovak Republic. These attempts were linked to the names of Boris Khoslovsky and Roman Mishkevich. Khoslovsky since 1926 the head of production of advertising departments of the firm «Vira Film». Since 1928 organizer and owner of the «Mercury Film» Studio, specializing in the production of promotional films. Another Ukrainian film studio, «Terra Film», originated in Brno in the early 1930s on the initiative of Roman Mishkevich. This film studio tried to shoot science and plot (situational-natural) films. Until 1939, Myshkevich's firm remained the largest importer of motion pictures from the Czech Republic to Japan, China, India and Central America. Yet, to develop a powerful Ukrainian film industry in the Czechoslovakia proved impossible. There were several reasons for this. First, political (emigrant status) and economic (lack of sustainable financial flows from the Czechoslovakia) were hampered. Secondly, the Ukrainian film industry did not have the support of both Ukrainian and Czech (private) businesses. Thirdly, the low potential of Ukrainian film enthusiasts and the lack of professional education and experience were evident. Fourth, the Ukrainian Prague film production consisted mainly of documentaries, short films, plot films, reports and chronicles.

Music in Indian era ranging from 70s to 90s previously was perceived as a medium that united our diversified Indian society using Bollywood as ‘projected motion pictures medium established in a commercial theatrical setting’, however with passing ages, the art form has not been credited enough in influencing and mending habitual realities as an equipollent democratic medium of social interaction, recreation, and evolution. While India and Indians have respected and celebrated all genres of music since ages dating back from being musical maestro gems in the Mughal durbars to making music from movies as Mother India (1957) ever-perennial milestones in Indian music industry. The spread of music in between the 20 and 21 centuries shared a parallel realm of pragmatism altering the seriousness with which music was created and listened to in the past and the concerning western music streaming influence that it is consumed in currently.

Abstract Purpose To assess the impact of different electronic relaxation devices on common stressful patient symptoms experienced in intensive care unit (ICU). Methods Sixty critically ill patients were enrolled in four relaxation sessions using a randomized cross-over design: standard relaxation (TV/radio), music therapy (MUSIC-CARE©), and two virtual reality systems using either real motion pictures (DEEPSEN©) or synthetic motion pictures (HEALTHY-MIND©). The goal was to determine which device was the best to reduce overall patient discomfort intensity (0–10 Numeric Rating Scale (NRS); primary endpoint). Secondary endpoints were specific stressful symptoms (pain, anxiety, dyspnea, thirst, and lack of rest feeling) and stress response measured by Analgesia/Nociception Index (ANI). Multivariate mixed-effect analysis was used, taking into account patient characteristics and multiple measurements. Results Fifty patients followed the full research protocol, and ten patients did at least one research planned session of relaxation. HEALTHY-MIND© was associated with a significant decrease in overall discomfort, the primary endpoint (median NRS = 4[2–6] vs. 2[0–5]; p = 0.01, mixed-effect model), accompanied by a significant decrease in stress response (increase in ANI, secondary endpoint; p < 0.01). Regarding other secondary endpoints, each of the two virtual reality systems was associated with a decrease in anxiety (p < 0.01), while HEALTHY-MIND© was associated also with a decrease in pain (p = 0.001) and DEEPSEN© with a decrease in lack of rest (p = 0.01). Three incidents (claustrophobia/dyspnea/agitation) were reported among 109 virtual reality sessions. Cybersickness was rare (NRS = 0[0–0]). Conclusion Electronic relaxation therapy is a promising, safe, and effective non-pharmacological solution that can be used to improve overall discomfort in alert and non-delirious ICU patients. Its effectiveness depends on technical characteristics (virtual reality using a synthetic imagined world versus a real world or music therapy alone without virtual reality), as well as the type of symptoms.

Background and Purpose: PTSD and mTBI are persistent and frequently comorbid after combat, yet current therapies often achieve only modest impact. A novel exposure-based “walk and talk” cognitive therapy, Motion-Assisted, Multi-Modal Memory Desensitization and Reconsolidation (3MDR), featuring participant-selected music and pictures and an eye movement (EM) task in an immersive virtual environment, has shown efficacy in treatment-resistant male veterans, but has not been studied in women or after TBI. The EM task is adapted from eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy, but dismantling studies of EMDR have questioned EM benefit. This pilot study assesses 3MDR in male and female veterans with comorbid PTSD and mTBI, and the impact of EM on response. We hypothesized that 3MDR would prove efficacious, both with (EM+) and without EM (EM-).Design: Participants with probable PTSD (PCL-5 ≥ 34) and mTBI were randomized to EM + or EM-across 10 sessions. Participants provided songs and pictures that they rated on impactfulness. While walking in the 3MDR virtual environment, participants started with a song to bring them back to the time of their trauma, and then traversed two hallways, actively walking toward emotionally evocative pictures that they then discussed with their therapist. Key words or feelings they expressed were superimposed over the picture, then read aloud, whereupon EM + participants recited numbers flashing on a ball crisscrossing the picture. These procedures were repeated for multiple pictures per session. A song to return the participant to present day closed each session. Change in PCL-5 score from pre-to post-intervention was the primary outcome, with additional measures at 3 and 6 months.Results: Sixteen (80%) of 20 participants completed the intervention (8 EM+, 8 EM-); 9 (6 EM+, 3 EM-) had resolution of PTSD diagnosis and two improved significantly without resolution. Average PCL-5 score declined from 52.0 (95% confidence intervals: 46.3, 57.7) at baseline to 33.6 (24.3, 42.9) post-intervention (p &lt; 0.01). The EM + group achieved statistically significant improvement (p = 0.01) while the EM-did not (p = 0.10).Conclusion: For veterans with PTSD and comorbid mTBI, 3MDR is effective, and the EM component may add value. Confirmation with larger studies is important.

My performative paper makes the suggestion that the act of incorporating Jazz samples into Hip Hop music is a type of disruptive performance that interprets a standard musical form to create new styles, producing hybrid genres of music, such as jazz-rap. I examine the sample as a cultural tactic that enacts what Hip Hop scholar Tricia Rose terms as “flow, layering and ruptures in line.” “Layering” is comparable to what we might term in literary studies as intertextuality. DJs layer sounds literally one on top of the other, creating dialogues among samples, sounds, and words; the layers function as dialogue, commentary, percussive rhythms and counterpoint. Julia Kristeva argues that “any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another. The notion of intertextuality replaces intersubjectivity, and poetic language is read as at least double.” In Hip Hop, visual, physical, musical, and lyrical lines are set in motion and broken abruptly with sharp angular breaks, yet they sustain motion and energy through fluidity and flow. The song “Shame on a Nigga” (from 36 Chambers) samples “Black and Tan Fantasy” as performed by Thelonious Monk. Using sampling as a tactical style that denotes improvisation as a disruption (or break) from classical European tradition to posit African American priorities, many of the songs on 36 Chambers participate in polyphonic layering and center around three central concepts outlined in Tricia Rose’s Black Noise: flow, layering, and ruptures in line. Further, the rupturing effect of incorporating a jazz sample into a Hip Hop production compels us to think about how disruption can function as a model for critical practice that relates to the notion of a globally improvised community.

The film business is a billion-dollar business, and extensive measure of data identified with motion pictures is accessible over the web. In this system we are analyzing the dataset for predicting the success of the movies. For doing this the analysis of the dataset is done in which the chronicled information of every segment, for example, actor, actress, director, music that impacts the achievement or disappointment of a motion picture is given weight age and after that dependent on different parameters we are predicting whether the movie will be a flop, average or superhit. Certain algorithms are used that can help to predict whether the movies will be a flop, average, or superhit. In this model we focus on the attribute selection for predicting success of the movies. A comparative analysis is to be performed so as to find the accurate results among the algorithms used. Few parameters that are important for predicting success of a movie are gross, genres, release date, star powers of actors, actress, directors, and budget etc. In the dataset there are 28 parameters. The task is to find out most relevant parameters. This will be achieved by Feature selection method as shown in figure 1. Feature selection method is present in “sklearn” library of python. Feature selection method includes Decision trees, information gain, gain ratio. Generating heatmap to visualize success of movie in different regions. Various graphs are generated between time vs algorithms and accuracy vs algorithms for analysis.

Since the beginning of civilization, humans have always been inquisitive about ways to uniquely express their sides of stories. Traditional Art forms like drawing, painting, sculpting, literature, music, and many others have helped to make it possible. More unconventional new art possibilities have emerged with the introduction of new technologies and industrial revolutions. Motion Pictures and Animation are the two most fascinating forms of artistic expression in these areas.Often, animation is considered a fascinating medium of entertainment for kids and the younger generation. However, many artists have demonstrated that it also has enormous potential to articulate and express life experiences and their minds creatively. As Walt Disney rightly said Animation can explain whatever the mind of men can conceive Thomas (1912-2004). It can take you as far as human imagination can go.This paper delves into how animation has been used as an alternative medium in contemporary New Media Art practices in India. It explores the potential of animation as a medium for creative expression and representation of complex ideas, and how it reflects changes in society brought about by technological advancements. The paper examines the approaches and experiments of Indian contemporary artists, such as Akbar Padamsee, Nalini Malani, and Vivan Sundaram, who have used animation to break free from the confines of traditional mediums and push the boundaries of visual storytelling through technology-based art.

Recommendation System (RS) is procedure that recommends comparative things to a purchaser dependent on his/her prior buys or enjoying. Recommendation framework examine a huge sum information of articles and arranges a record of those items which would accomplish the prerequisites of the buyer. Book Recommendation System is being utilized by Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Flipkart, Goodreads, and so on. Amazon is notable for realization and suggestions, which assist clients with finding things they may somehow or another not have found. Recommendation frameworks are impressively utilized for proposed new things to clients and assume a significant part in the disclosure of relevant new things of books. Books are basically appropriate to content based and sifting as they are presently commonly reachable in computerized designs which can permit diverse content mining ways to deal with uncover content associated data. This paper addresses a structure to encourage a substance based proposal framework for books. The book proposal framework should recommend books that are of buyer's advantage. This paper introduced book suggestion framework dependent on consolidated highlights of substance sifting, collective separating. In Online business today, substance given to clients to investigate are overpowering in light of the fact that a normal online business site is around (70%) in excess of an actual store in whole number of clients and things. The created framework is utilized To work with online buy a shopping basket is given to the client. The clients are suggested dependent on going before clients rating utilizing network factorization strategy. Recommendation frameworks are widely utilized for prescribe new things to clients and assume an dispensable part in the revelation of related new things, it can be books, motion pictures or music. A fruitful suggestion framework should gives heterogeneous outcomes and ought not be one-sided towards just the most famous things..

Bollywood films are known for their songs, and in many cases Bollywood films are known because of the songs. It is not merely in Bollywood films that songs have a significant role, but also in the lives of myriad composers, lyricists, singers and so on, lending an opportunity for their creative expression in addition to serving as a means of livelihood. Ideally, it should be possible for composers to be able to earn an income by composing music for films, as well as by being a member of a collecting society in such a way as to maximize their returns. From the bundle of rights they have, the composers should be able to transact with both the producers and the collecting societies, but with rights that do not overlap. However, in reality the rights could get tangled in a legal quagmire between the collecting society and film producers, as each demands exclusivity. The article is an attempt to show how the rights of composers is meddled with by both the film producers and the collecting societies, leading to gross unfairness in the distribution of the returns from exploitation of their rights. To this end, the article examines the UK Court of Appeal decision in B4U Network (Europe) Limited v Performing Rights Society Limited, which upheld the rights of the collecting society, and compares it with the Indian Supreme Court decision in Indian Performing Rights Society v Eastern India Motion Pictures, where the rights of the film producers was upheld. This article then goes on to examine what it means to the composers if the film producers’ rights trump those of the collecting societies. The article also explores how the amendments introduced to the Indian Copyright Act in 2012 address the situation.

Abstract Currently 1.7 million people in Germany are living with dementia and two out of three such persons are nursed at home. Considering this challenging situation, we started in 2010 the project “moment! - motor learning and mental training for people with an incipient dementia”. Our aim was to develop a special qualification for people who are interested in conducting physical exercise groups for persons suffering from dementia. It has been scientifically proven that physical exercises show a positive impact on people with dementia: Training in groups is motivating and influences the emotional state in a positive way. Furthermore, social contacts are supported and maintained and prevent from social isolation. Therefore, a higher life fulfillment can be increased temporarily, and self-confidence is growing as well. Socio political goals are the integration of affected persons into existing social structures like sports associations, the raise of public awareness for dementia, and to strengthen the possibilities of integrating people suffering from dementia into regular social life. All scientific analysis proves that motion has a positive impact on the process of dementia and is a successful prophylactic and therapeutic support of the common medical treatment. The project includes a qualification for multipliers such as care assistants, trainers in local sport associations, nursing staff and volunteers in care organisations in order to support people suffering from dementia. This training consists of five days (and a total of 40 learning units) and is offered as an attendance seminar. During the course the participants will be trained in basic knowledge and clinical pictures of dementia, above all they receive many ideas for practical motor and mental exercises. Additionally, all participants receive a workbook and a music CD for the rhythm and dance lessons. Within the last 10 years we have qualified about 440 people in 27 trainings. Many “moment!” training-groups have been built - most of them in nursing homes and a few in cooperation with a local sports club.

One of the greatest joys in watching Foxtel is to see all the crazy people who run talk shows. Judgement, ridicule and generalisations slip from their tongues like overcooked lamb off a bone. From Oprah to Rikki, from Jerry to Mother Love, the posterior of pop culture claims a world-wide audience. Recently, a new talk diva was added to the pay television stable. Dr Laura Schlessinger, the Mother of Morals, prowls the soundstage. attacking 'selfish acts' such as divorce, de facto relationships and voting Democrat. On April 11, 2001, a show aired in Australia that added a new demon to the decadence of the age. Dr Laura had been told that a disgusting video clip, called 'Rock DJ', had been televised at 2:30pm on MTV. Children could have been watching. The footage that so troubled our doyenne of daytime featured the British performer Robbie Williams not only stripping in front of disinterested women, but then removing skin, muscle and tissue in a desperate attempt to claim their gaze. This was too much for Dr Laura. She was horrified: her strident tone became piercing. She screeched, "this is si-ee-ck." . My paper is drawn to this sick masculinity, not to judge - but to laugh and theorise. Robbie Williams, the deity of levity, holds a pivotal role in theorising the contemporary 'crisis' of manhood. To paraphrase Austin Powers, Williams returned the ger to singer. But Williams also triumphed in a captivatingly original way. He is one of the few members of a boy band who created a successful solo career without regurgitating the middle of the road mantras of boys, girls, love, loss and whining about it. Williams' journey through post-war popular music, encompassing influences from both Sinatra and Sonique, forms a functional collage, rather than patchwork, of masculinity. He has been prepared to not only age in public, but to discuss the crevices and cracks in the facade. He strips, smokes, plays football, wears interesting underwear and drinks too much. My short paper trails behind this combustible masculinity, focussing on his sorties with both masculine modalities and the rock discourse. My words attack the gap between text and readership, beat and ear, music and men. The aim is to reveal how this 'sick masculinity' problematises the conservative rendering of men's crisis. Come follow me I'm an honorary Sean Connery, born '74 There's only one of me … Press be asking do I care for sodomy I don't know, yeah, probably I've been looking for serial monogamy Not some bird that looks like Billy Connolly But for now I'm down for ornithology Grab your binoculars, come follow me. 'Kids,' Robbie Williams Robbie Williams is a man for our age. Between dating supermodels and Geri 'Lost Spice' Halliwell [1], he has time to "love … his mum and a pint," (Ansen 85) but also subvert the Oasis cock(rock)tail by frocking up for a television appearance. Williams is important to theories of masculine representation. As a masculinity to think with, he creates popular culture with a history. In an era where Madonna practices yoga and wears cowboy boots, it is no surprise that by June 2000, Robbie Williams was voted the world's sexist man [2]. A few months later, in the October edition of Vogue, he posed in a British flag bikini. It is reassuring in an era where a 12 year old boy states that "You aren't a man until you shoot at something," (Issac in Mendel 19) that positive male role models exist who are prepared to both wear a frock and strip on national television. Reading Robbie Williams is like dipping into the most convincing but draining of intellectual texts. He is masculinity in motion, conveying foreignness, transgression and corruption, bartering in the polymorphous economies of sex, colonialism, race, gender and nation. His career has spanned the boy bands, try-hard rock, video star and hybrid pop performer. There are obvious resonances between the changes to Williams and alterations in masculinity. In 1988, Suzanne Moore described (the artist still known as) Prince as "the pimp of postmodernism." (165-166) Over a decade later, the simulacra has a new tour guide. Williams revels in the potency of representation. He rarely sings about love or romance, as was his sonic fodder in Take That. Instead, his performance is fixated on becoming a better man, glancing an analytical eye over other modes of masculinity. Notions of masculine crisis and sickness have punctuated this era. Men's studies is a boom area of cultural studies, dislodging the assumed structures of popular culture [3]. William Pollack's Real Boys has created a culture of changing expectations for men. The greater question arising from his concerns is why these problems, traumas and difficulties are emerging in our present. Pollack's argument is that boys and young men invest energy and time "disguising their deepest and most vulnerable feelings." (15) This masking is difficult to discern within dance and popular music. Through lyrics and dancing, videos and choreography, masculinity is revealed as convoluted, complex and fragmented. While rock music is legitimised by dominant ideologies, marginalised groups frequently use disempowered genres - like country, dance and rap genres - to present oppositional messages. These competing representations expose seamless interpretations of competent masculinity. Particular skills are necessary to rip the metaphoric pacifier out of the masculine mouth of popular culture. Patriarchal pop revels in the paradoxes of everyday life. Frequently these are nostalgic visions, which Kimmel described as a "retreat to a bygone era." (87) It is the recognition of a shared, simpler past that provides reinforcement to heteronormativity. Williams, as a gaffer tape masculinity, pulls apart the gaps and crevices in representation. Theorists must open the interpretative space encircling popular culture, disrupting normalising criteria. Multiple nodes of assessment allow a ranking of competent masculinity. From sport to business, drinking to sex, masculinity is transformed into a wired site of ranking, judgement and determination. Popular music swims in the spectacle of maleness. From David Lee Roth's skied splits to Eminem's beanie, young men are interpellated as subjects in patriarchy. Robbie Williams is a history lesson in post war masculinity. This nostalgia is conservative in nature. The ironic pastiche within his music videos features motor racing, heavy metal and Bond films. 'Rock DJ', the 'sick text' that vexed Doctor Laura, is Williams' most elaborate video. Set in a rollerdrome with female skaters encircling a central podium, the object of fascination and fetish is a male stripper. This strip is different though, as it disrupts the power held by men in phallocentralism. After being confronted by Williams' naked body, the observing women are both bored and disappointed at the lack-lustre deployment of masculine genitalia. After this display, Williams appears embarrassed, confused and humiliated. As Buchbinder realised, "No actual penis could every really measure up to the imagined sexual potency and social or magical power of the phallus." (49) To render this banal experience of male nudity ridiculous, Williams then proceeds to remove skin and muscle. He finally becomes an object of attraction for the female DJ only in skeletal form. By 'going all the way,' the strip confirms the predictability of masculinity and the ordinariness of the male body. For literate listeners though, a higher level of connotation is revealed. The song itself is based on Barry White's melody for 'It's ecstasy (when you lay down next to me).' Such intertextuality accesses the meta-racist excesses of a licentious black male sexuality. A white boy dancer must deliver an impotent, but ironic, rendering of White's (love unlimited) orchestration of potent sexuality. Williams' iconography and soundtrack is refreshing, emerging from an era of "men who cling … tightly to their illusions." (Faludi 14) When the ideological drapery is cut away, the male body is a major disappointment. Masculinity is an anxious performance. Fascinatingly, this deconstructive video has been demeaned through its labelling as pornography [4]. Oddly, a man who is prepared to - literally - shave the skin of masculinity is rendered offensive. Men's studies, like feminism, has been defrocking masculinity for some time. Robinson for example, expressed little sympathy for "whiny men jumping on the victimisation bandwagon or playing cowboys and Indians at warrior weekends and beating drums in sweat lodges." (6) By grating men's identity back to the body, the link between surface and depth - or identity and self - is forged. 'Rock DJ' attacks the new subjectivities of the male body by not only generating self-surveillance, but humour through the removal of clothes, skin and muscle. He continues this play with the symbols of masculine performance throughout the album Sing when you're winning. Featuring soccer photographs of players, coaches and fans, closer inspection of the images reveal that Robbie Williams is actually every character, in every role. His live show also enfolds diverse performances. Singing a version of 'My Way,' with cigarette in tow, he remixes Frank Sinatra into a replaying and recutting of masculine fabric. He follows one dominating masculinity with another: the Bond-inspired 'Millennium.' Some say that we are players Some say that we are pawns But we've been making money Since the day we were born Robbie Williams is comfortably located in a long history of post-Sinatra popular music. He mocks the rock ethos by combining guitars and drums with a gleaming brass section, hailing the lounge act of Dean Martin, while also using rap and dance samples. Although carrying fifty year's of crooner baggage, the spicy scent of homosexuality has also danced around Robbie Williams' career. Much of this ideology can be traced back to the Take That years. As Gary Barlow and Jason Orange commented at the time, Jason: So the rumour is we're all gay now are we? Gary: Am I gay? I am? Why? Oh good. Just as long as we know. Howard: Does anyone think I'm gay? Jason: No, you're the only one people think is straight. Howard: Why aren't I gay? What's wrong with me? Jason: It's because you're such a fine figure of macho manhood.(Kadis 17) For those not literate in the Take That discourse, it should come as no surprise that Howard was the TT equivalent of The Beatle's Ringo Starr or Duran Duran's Andy Taylor. Every boy band requires the ugly, shy member to make the others appear taller and more attractive. The inference of this dialogue is that the other members of the group are simply too handsome to be heterosexual. This ambiguous sexuality has followed Williams into his solo career, becoming fodder for those lads too unappealing to be homosexual: Oasis. Born to be mild I seem to spend my life Just waiting for the chorus 'Cause the verse is never nearly Good enough Robbie Williams "Singing for the lonely." Robbie Williams accesses a bigger, brighter and bolder future than Britpop. While the Gallagher brothers emulate and worship the icons of 1960s British music - from the Beatles' haircuts to the Stones' psychedelia - Williams' songs, videos and persona are chattering in a broader cultural field. From Noel Cowardesque allusions to the ordinariness of pub culture, Williams is much more than a pretty-boy singer. He has become an icon of English masculinity, enclosing all the complexity that these two terms convey. Williams' solo success from 1999-2001 occurred at the time of much parochial concern that British acts were not performing well in the American charts. It is bemusing to read Billboard over this period. The obvious quality of Britney Spears is seen to dwarf the mediocrity of British performers. The calibre of Fatboy Slim, carrying a smiley backpack stuffed with reflexive dance culture, is neither admitted nor discussed. It is becoming increasing strange to monitor the excessive fame of Williams in Britain, Europe, Asia and the Pacific when compared to his patchy career in the United States. Even some American magazines are trying to grasp the disparity. The swaggering king of Britpop sold a relatively measly 600,000 copies of his U.S. debut album, The ego has landed … Maybe Americans didn't appreciate his songs about being famous. (Ask Dr. Hip 72) In the first few years of the 2000s, it has been difficult to discuss a unified Anglo-American musical formation. Divergent discursive frameworks have emerged through this British evasion. There is no longer an agreed centre to the musical model. Throughout 1990s Britain, blackness jutted out of dance floor mixes, from reggae to dub, jazz and jungle. Plied with the coldness of techno was an almost too hot hip hop. Yet both were alternate trajectories to Cool Britannia. London once more became swinging, or as Vanity Fair declared, "the nerve centre of pop's most cohesive scene since the Pacific Northwest grunge explosion of 1991." (Kamp 102) Through Britpop, the clock turned back to the 1960s, a simpler time before race became 'a problem' for the nation. An affiliation was made between a New Labour, formed by the 1997 British election, and the rebirth of a Swinging London [5]. This style-driven empire supposedly - again - made London the centre of the world. Britpop was itself a misnaming. It was a strong sense of Englishness that permeated the lyrics, iconography and accent. Englishness requires a Britishness to invoke a sense of bigness and greatness. The contradictions and excesses of Blur, Oasis and Pulp resonate in the gap between centre and periphery, imperial core and colonised other. Slicing through the arrogance and anger of the Gallaghers is a yearning for colonial simplicity, when the pink portions of the map were the stable subjects of geography lessons, rather than the volatile embodiment of postcolonial theory. Simon Gikandi argues that "the central moments of English cultural identity were driven by doubts and disputes about the perimeters of the values that defined Englishness." (x) The reason that Britpop could not 'make it big' in the United States is because it was recycling an exhausted colonial dreaming. Two old Englands were duelling for ascendancy: the Oasis-inflected Manchester working class fought Blur-inspired London art school chic. This insular understanding of difference had serious social and cultural consequences. The only possible representation of white, British youth was a tabloidisation of Oasis's behaviour through swearing, drug excess and violence. Simon Reynolds realised that by returning to the three minute pop tune that the milkman can whistle, reinvoking parochial England with no black people, Britpop has turned its back defiantly on the future. (members.aol.com/blissout/Britpop.html) Fortunately, another future had already happened. The beats per minute were pulsating with an urgent affirmation of change, hybridity and difference. Hip hop and techno mapped a careful cartography of race. While rock was colonialisation by other means, hip hop enacted a decolonial imperative. Electronic dance music provided a unique rendering of identity throughout the 1990s. It was a mode of musical communication that moved across national and linguistic boundaries, far beyond Britpop or Stateside rock music. While the Anglo American military alliance was matched and shadowed by postwar popular culture, Brit-pop signalled the end of this hegemonic formation. From this point, English pop and American rock would not sail as smoothly over the Atlantic. While 1995 was the year of Wonderwall, by 1996 the Britpop bubble corroded the faces of the Gallagher brothers. Oasis was unable to complete the American tour. Yet other cultural forces were already active. 1996 was also the year of Trainspotting, with "Born Slippy" being the soundtrack for a blissful journey under the radar. This was a cultural force that no longer required America as a reference point [6]. Robbie Williams was able to integrate the histories of Britpop and dance culture, instigating a complex dialogue between the two. Still, concern peppered music and entertainment journals that British performers were not accessing 'America.' As Sharon Swart stated Britpop acts, on the other hand, are finding it less easy to crack the U.S. market. The Spice Girls may have made some early headway, but fellow purveyors of pop, such as Robbie Williams, can't seem to get satisfaction from American fans. (35 British performers had numerous cultural forces working against them. Flat global sales, the strength of the sterling and the slow response to the new technological opportunities of DVD, all caused problems. While Britpop "cleaned house," (Boehm 89) it was uncertain which cultural formation would replace this colonising force. Because of the complex dialogues between the rock discourse and dance culture, time and space were unable to align into a unified market. American critics simply could not grasp Robbie Williams' history, motives or iconography. It's Robbie's world, we just buy tickets for it. Unless, of course you're American and you don't know jack about soccer. That's the first mistake Williams makes - if indeed one of his goals is to break big in the U.S. (and I can't believe someone so ambitious would settle for less.) … Americans, it seems, are most fascinated by British pop when it presents a mirror image of American pop. (Woods 98 There is little sense that an entirely different musical economy now circulates, where making it big in the United States is not the singular marker of credibility. Williams' demonstrates commitment to the international market, focussing on MTV Asia, MTV online, New Zealand and Australian audiences [7]. The Gallagher brothers spent much of the 1990s trying to be John Lennon. While Noel, at times, knocked at the door of rock legends through "Wonderwall," he snubbed Williams' penchant for pop glory, describing him as a "fat dancer." (Gallagher in Orecklin 101) Dancing should not be decried so summarily. It conveys subtle nodes of bodily knowledge about men, women, sex and desire. While men are validated for bodily movement through sport, women's dancing remains a performance of voyeuristic attention. Such a divide is highly repressive of men who dance, with gayness infiltrating the metaphoric masculine dancefloor [8]. Too often the binary of male and female is enmeshed into the divide of rock and dance. Actually, these categories slide elegantly over each other. The male pop singers are located in a significant semiotic space. Robbie Williams carries these contradictions and controversy. NO! Robbie didn't go on NME's cover in a 'desperate' attempt to seduce nine-year old knickerwetters … YES! He used to be teenybopper fodder. SO WHAT?! So did the Beatles the Stones, the Who, the Kinks, etc blah blah pseudohistoricalrockbollocks. NO! Making music that gurlz like is NOT a crime! (Wells 62) There remains an uncertainty in his performance of masculinity and at times, a deliberate ambivalence. He grafts subversiveness into a specific lineage of English pop music. The aim for critics of popular music is to find a way to create a rhythm of resistance, rather than melody of credible meanings. In summoning an archaeology of the archive, we begin to write a popular music history. Suzanne Moore asked why men should "be interested in a sexual politics based on the frightfully old-fashioned ideas of truth, identity and history?" (175) The reason is now obvious. Femininity is no longer alone on the simulacra. It is impossible to separate real men from the representations of masculinity that dress the corporeal form. Popular music is pivotal, not for collapsing the representation into the real, but for making the space between these states livable, and pleasurable. Like all semiotic sicknesses, the damaged, beaten and bandaged masculinity of contemporary music swaddles a healing pedagogic formation. Robbie Williams enables the writing of a critical history of post Anglo-American music [9]. Popular music captures such stories of place and identity. Significantly though, it also opens out spaces of knowing. There is an investment in rhythm that transgresses national histories of music. While Williams has produced albums, singles, video and endless newspaper copy, his most important revelations are volatile and ephemeral in their impact. He increases the popular cultural vocabulary of masculinity. [1] The fame of both Williams and Halliwell was at such a level that it was reported in the generally conservative, pages of Marketing. The piece was titled "Will Geri's fling lose its fizz?" Marketing, August 2000: 17. [2] For poll results, please refer to "Winners and Losers," Time International, Vol. 155, Issue 23, June 12, 2000, 9 [3] For a discussion of this growth in academic discourse on masculinity, please refer to Paul Smith's "Introduction," in P. Smith (ed.), Boys: Masculinity in contemporary culture. Colorado: Westview Press, 1996. [4] Steve Futterman described Rock DJ as the "least alluring porn video on MTV," in "The best and worst: honour roll," Entertainment Weekly 574-575 (December 22-December 29 2000): 146. [5] Michael Bracewell stated that "pop provides an unofficial cartography of its host culture, charting the national mood, marking the crossroads between the major social trends and the tunnels of the zeitgeist," in "Britpop's coming home, it's coming home." New Statesman .(February 21 1997): 36. [6] It is important to make my point clear. The 'America' that I am summoning here is a popular cultural formation, which possesses little connection with the territory, institution or defence initiatives of the United States. Simon Frith made this distinction clear, when he stated that "the question becomes whether 'America' can continue to be the mythical locale of popular culture as it has been through most of this century. As I've suggested, there are reasons now to suppose that 'America' itself, as a pop cultural myth, no longer bears much resemblance to the USA as a real place even in the myth." This statement was made in "Anglo-America and its discontents," Cultural Studies 5 1991: 268. [7] To observe the scale of attention paid to the Asian and Pacific markets, please refer to http://robbiewilliams.com/july13scroll.html, http://robbiewilliams.com/july19scroll.html and http://robbiewilliams.com/july24scroll.html, accessed on March 3, 2001 [8] At its most naïve, J. Michael Bailey and Michael Oberschneider asked, "Why are gay men so motivated to dance? One hypothesis is that gay men dance in order to be feminine. In other words, gay men dance because women do. An alternative hypothesis is that gay men and women share a common factor in their emotional make-up that makes dancing especially enjoyable," from "Sexual orientation in professional dance," Archives of Sexual Behaviour. 26.4 (August 1997). Such an interpretation is particularly ludicrous when considering the pre-rock and roll masculine dancing rituals in the jive, Charleston and jitterbug. Once more, the history of rock music is obscuring the history of dance both before the mid 1950s and after acid house. [9] Women, gay men and black communities through much of the twentieth century have used these popular spaces. For example, Lynne Segal, in Slow Motion. London: Virago, 1990, stated that "through dancing, athletic and erotic performance, but most powerfully through music, Black men could express something about the body and its physicality, about emotions and their cosmic reach, rarely found in white culture - least of all in white male culture,": 191 References Ansen, D., Giles, J., Kroll, J., Gates, D. and Schoemer, K. "What's a handsome lad to do?" Newsweek 133.19 (May 10, 1999): 85. "Ask Dr. Hip." U.S. News and World Report 129.16 (October 23, 2000): 72. Bailey, J. Michael., and Oberschneider, Michael. "Sexual orientation in professional dance." Archives of Sexual Behaviour. 26.4 (August 1997):expanded academic database [fulltext]. Boehm, E. "Pop will beat itself up." Variety 373.5 (December 14, 1998): 89. Bracewell, Michael. "Britpop's coming home, it's coming home." New Statesman.(February 21 1997): 36. Buchbinder, David. Performance Anxieties .Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1998. Faludi, Susan. Stiffed. London: Chatto and Windus, 1999. Frith, Simon. "Anglo-America and its discontents." Cultural Studies. 5 1991. Futterman, Steve. "The best and worst: honour roll." Entertainment Weekly, 574-575 (December 22-December 29 2000): 146. Gikandi, Simon. Maps of Englishness. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Kadis, Alex. Take That: In private. London: Virgin Books, 1994. Kamp, D. "London Swings! Again!" Vanity Fair ( March 1997): 102. Kimmel, Michael. Manhood in America. New York: The Free Press, 1996. Mendell, Adrienne. How men think. New York: Fawcett, 1996. Moore, Susan. "Getting a bit of the other - the pimps of postmodernism." In Rowena Chapman and Jonathan Rutherford (ed.) Male Order .London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1988. 165-175. Orecklin, Michele. "People." Time. 155.10 (March 13, 2000): 101. Pollack, William. Real boys. Melbourne: Scribe Publications, 1999. Reynolds, Simon. members.aol.com/blissout/britpop.html. Accessed on April 15, 2001. Robinson, David. No less a man. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University, 1994. Segal, Lynne. Slow Motion. London: Virago, 1990. Smith, Paul. "Introduction" in P. Smith (ed.), Boys: Masculinity in contemporary culture. Colorado: Westview Press, 1996. Swart, S. "U.K. Showbiz" Variety.(December 11-17, 2000): 35. Sexton, Paul and Masson, Gordon. "Tips for Brits who want U.S. success" Billboard .(September 9 2000): 1. Wells, Steven. "Angst." NME.(November 21 1998): 62. "Will Geri's fling lose its fizz?" Marketing.(August 2000): 17. Woods, S. "Robbie Williams Sing when you're winning" The Village Voice. 45.52. (January 2, 2001): 98.

IntroductionMusically-inclined people often speak about the soundtrack of their life, with certain songs indelibly linked to a specific moment. When hearing a particular song, it can “easily evoke a whole time and place, distant feelings and emotions, and memories of where we were, and with whom” (Lewis 135). Music has the ability to provide maps to real and imagined spaces, positioning people within a larger social environment where songs “are never just a song, but a connection, a ticket, a pass, an invitation, a node in a complex network” (Kun 3). When someone is lost in the music, they can find themselves transported somewhere else entirely without physically moving. This can be a blessing in some situations, for example, while living in a disaster zone, when almost any other time or place can seem better than the here and now. The city of Christchurch, New Zealand was hit by a succession of damaging earthquakes beginning with a magnitude 7.1 earthquake in the early hours of 4 September 2010. The magnitude 6.3 earthquake of 22 February 2011, although technically an aftershock of the September earthquake, was closer and shallower, with intense ground acceleration that caused much greater damage to the city and its people (“Scientists”). It was this February earthquake that caused the total or partial collapse of many inner city buildings, and claimed the lives of 185 people. Everybody in Christchurch lost someone or something that day: their house or job; family members, friends, or colleagues; the city as they knew it; or their normal way of life. The broken central city was quickly cordoned off behind fences, with the few entry points guarded by local and international police and armed military personnel.In the aftermath of a disaster, circumstances and personal attributes will influence how people react, think and feel about the experience. Surviving a disaster is more than not dying, “survival is to do with quality of life [and] involves progressing from the event and its aftermath, and transforming the experience” (Hodgkinson and Stewart 2). In these times of heightened stress, music can be a catalyst for sharing and expressing emotions, connecting people and communities, and helping them make sense of what has happened (Carr 38; Webb 437). This article looks at some of the ways that popular songs and musical memories helped residents of a broken city remember the past and come to terms with the present.BackgroundExisting songs can take on new significance after a catastrophic event, even without any alteration. Songs such as Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans? and Prayer for New Orleans have been given new emotional layers by those who were displaced or affected by Hurricane Katrina (Cooper 265; Sullivan 15). A thirty year-old song by Randy Newman, Louisiana, 1927, became something of “a contemporary anthem, its chorus – ‘Louisiana, they’re trying to wash us away’ – bearing new relevance” (Blumenfeld 166). Contemporary popular songs have also been re-mixed or revised after catastrophic events, either by the original artist or by others. Elton John’s Candle in the Wind and Beyonce’s Halo have each been revised twice by the artist after tragedy and disaster (Doyle; McAlister), while radio stations in the United States have produced commemorative versions of popular songs to mark tragedies and their anniversaries (Beaumont-Thomas; Cantrell). The use and appreciation of music after disaster is a reminder that popular music is fluid, in that it “refuses to provide a uniform or static text” (Connell and Gibson 3), and can simultaneously carry many different meanings.Music provides a soundtrack to daily life, creating a map of meaning to the world around us, or presenting a reminder of the world as it once was. Tia DeNora explains that when people hear a song that was once heard in, and remains associated with, a particular time and place, it “provides a device for unfolding, for replaying, the temporal structure of that moment, [which] is why, for so many people, the past ‘comes alive’ to its soundtrack” (67). When a community is frequently and collectively casting their minds back to a time before a catastrophic change, a sense of community identity can be seen in the use of, and reaction to, particular songs. Music allows people to “locate themselves in different imaginary geographics at one and the same time” (Cohen 93), creating spaces for people to retreat into, small ‘audiotopias’ that are “built, imagined, and sustained through sound, noise, and music” (Kun 21). The use of musical escape holes is prevalent after disaster, as many once-familiar spaces that have changed beyond recognition or are no longer able to be physically visited, can be easily imagined or remembered through music. There is a particular type of longing expressed by those who are still at home and yet cannot return to the home they knew. Whereas nostalgia is often experienced by people far from home who wish to return or those enjoying memories of a bygone era, people after disaster often encounter a similar nostalgic feeling but with no change in time or place: a loss without leaving. Glenn Albrecht coined the term ‘solastalgia’ to represent “the form of homesickness one experiences when one is still at home” (35). This sense of being unable to find solace in one’s home environment can be brought on by natural disasters such as fire, flood, earthquakes or hurricanes, or by other means like war, mining, climate change or gentrification. Solastalgia is often felt most keenly when people experience the change first-hand and then have to adjust to life in a totally changed environment. This can create “chronic distress of a solastalgic kind [that] would persist well after the acute phase of post-traumatic distress” (Albrecht 36). Just as the visible, physical effects of disaster last for years, so too do the emotional effects, but there have been many examples of how the nostalgia inherent in a shared popular music soundtrack has eased the pain of solastalgia for a community that is hurting.Pop Songs and Nostalgia in ChristchurchIn September 2011, one year after the initial earthquake, the Bank of New Zealand (BNZ) announced a collaboration with Christchurch hip hop artist, Scribe, to remake his smash hit, Not Many, for charity. Back in 2003, Not Many debuted at number five on the New Zealand music charts, where it spent twelve weeks at number one and was crowned ‘Single of the Year’ (Sweetman, On Song 164). The punchy chorus heralded Scribe as a force to be reckoned with, and created a massive imprint on New Zealand popular culture with the line: “How many dudes you know roll like this? Not many, if any” (Scribe, Not Many). Music critic, Simon Sweetman, explains how “the hook line of the chorus [is now] a conversational aside that is practically unavoidable when discussing amounts… The words ‘not many’ are now truck-and-trailered with ‘if any’. If you do not say them, you are thinking them” (On Song 167). The strong links between artist and hometown – and the fact it is an enduringly catchy song – made it ideal for a charity remake. Reworded and reworked as Not Many Cities, the chorus now asks: “How many cities you know roll like this?” to which the answer is, of course, “not many, if any” (Scribe/BNZ, Not Many Cities). The remade song entered the New Zealand music charts at number 36 and the video was widely shared through social media but not all reception was positive. Parts of the video were shot in the city’s Red Zone, the central business district that was cordoned off from public access due to safety concerns. The granting of special access outraged some residents, with letters to the editor and online commentary expressing frustration that celebrities were allowed into the Red Zone to shoot a music video while those directly affected were not allowed in to retrieve essential items from residences and business premises. However, it is not just the Red Zone that features: the video switches between Scribe travelling around the broken inner city on the back of a small truck and lingering shots of carefully selected people, businesses, and groups – all with ties to the BNZ as either clients or beneficiaries of sponsorship. In some ways, Not Many Cities comes across like just another corporate promotional video for the BNZ, albeit with more emotion and a better soundtrack than usual. But what it has bequeathed is a snapshot of the city as it was in that liminal time: a landscape featuring familiar buildings, spaces and places which, although damaged, was still a recognisable version of the city that existed before the earthquakes.Before Scribe burst onto the music scene in the early 2000s, the best-known song about Christchurch was probably Christchurch (in Cashel St. I wait), an early hit from the Exponents (Mitchell 189). Initially known as the Dance Exponents, the group formed in Christchurch in the early 1980s and remained local and national favourites thanks to a string of hits Sweetman refers to as “the question-mark songs,” such as Who Loves Who the Most?, Why Does Love Do This to Me?, and What Ever Happened to Tracey? (Best Songwriter). Despite disbanding in 1999, the group re-formed to be the headline act of ‘Band Together’—a multi-artist, outdoor music event organised for the benefit of Christchurch residents by local musician, Jason Kerrison, formerly of the band OpShop. Attended by over 140,000 people (Anderson, Band Together), this nine-hour event brought joy and distraction to a shaken and stressed populace who, at that point in time (October 2010), probably thought the worst was over.The Exponents took the stage last, and chose Christchurch (in Cashel St. I Wait) as their final number. Every musician involved in the gig joined them on stage and the crowd rose to their feet, singing along with gusto. A local favourite since its release in 1985, the verses may have been a bit of a mumble for some, but the chorus rang out loud and clear across the park: Christchurch, In Cashel Street I wait,Together we will be,Together, together, together, One day, one day, one day,One day, one day, one daaaaaay! (Exponents, “Christchurch (in Cashel St. I Wait)”; lyrics written as sung)At that moment, forming an impromptu community choir of over 100,000 people, the audience was filled with hope and faith that those words would come true. Life would go on and people would gather together in Cashel Street and wait for normality to return, one day. Later the following year, the opening of the Re:Start container mall added an extra layer of poignancy to the song lyrics. Denied access to most of the city’s CBD, that one small part of Cashel Street now populated with colourful shipping containers was almost the only place in central Christchurch where people could wait. There are many music videos that capture the central city of Christchurch as it was in decades past. There are some local classics, like The Bats’ Block of Wood and Claudine; The Shallows’ Suzanne Said; Moana and the Moahunters’ Rebel in Me; and All Fall Down’s Black Gratten, which were all filmed in the 1980s or early 1990s (Goodsort, Re-Live and More Music). These videos provide many flashback moments to the city as it was twenty or thirty years ago. However, one post-earthquake release became an accidental musical time capsule. The song, Space and Place, was released in February 2013, but both song and video had been recorded not long before the earthquakes occurred. The song was inspired by the feelings experienced when returning home after a long absence, and celebrates the importance of the home town as “a place that knows you as well as you know it” (Anderson, Letter). The chorus features the line, “streets of common ground, I remember, I remember” (Franklin, Mayes, and Roberts, Space and Place), but it is the video, showcasing many of the Christchurch places and spaces only recently lost to the earthquakes, that tugs at people’s heartstrings. The video for Space and Place sweeps through the central city at night, with key heritage buildings like the Christ Church Cathedral, and the Catholic Basilica lit up against the night sky (both are still damaged and inaccessible). Producer and engineer, Rob Mayes, describes the video as “a love letter to something we all lost [with] the song and its lyrics [becoming] even more potent, poignant, and unexpectedly prescient post quake” (“Songs in the Key”). The Arts Centre features prominently in the footage, including the back alleys and archways that hosted all manner of night-time activities – sanctioned or otherwise – as well as many people’s favourite hangout, the Dux de Lux (the Dux). Operating from the corner of the Arts Centre site since the 1970s, the Dux has been described as “the city’s common room” and “Christchurch’s beating heart” by musicians mourning its loss (Anderson, Musicians). While the repair and restoration of some parts of the Arts Centre is currently well advanced, the Student Union building that once housed this inner-city social institution is not slated for reopening until 2019 (“Rebuild and Restore”), and whether the Dux will be welcomed back remains to be seen. Empty Spaces, Missing PlacesA Facebook group, ‘Save Our Dux,’ was created in early March 2011, and quickly filled with messages and memories from around the world. People wandered down memory lane together as they reminisced about their favourite gigs and memorable occasions, like the ‘Big Snow’ of 1992 when the Dux served up mulled wine and looked more like a ski chalet. Memories were shared about the time when the music video for the Dance Exponents’ song, Victoria, was filmed at the Dux and the Art Deco-style apartment building across the street. The reminiscing continued, establishing and strengthening connections, with music providing a stepping stone to shared experience and a sense of community. Physically restricted from visiting a favourite social space, people were converging in virtual hangouts to relive moments and remember places now cut off by the passing of time, the falling of bricks, and the rise of barrier fences.While waiting to find out whether the original Dux site can be re-occupied, the business owners opened new venues that housed different parts of the Dux business (live music, vegetarian food, and the bars/brewery). Although the fit-out of the restaurant and bars capture a sense of the history and charm that people associate with the Dux brand, the empty wasteland and building sites that surround the new Dux Central quickly destroy any illusion of permanence or familiarity. Now that most of the quake-damaged buildings have been demolished, the freshly-scarred earth of the central city is like a child’s gap-toothed smile. Wandering around the city and forgetting what used to occupy an empty space, wanting to visit a shop or bar before remembering it is no longer there, being at the Dux but not at the Dux – these are the kind of things that contributed to a feeling that local music writer, Vicki Anderson, describes as “lost city syndrome” (“Lost City”). Although initially worried she might be alone in mourning places lost, other residents have shared similar experiences. In an online comment on the article, one local resident explained how there are two different cities fighting for dominance in their head: “the new keeps trying to overlay the old [but] when I’m not looking at pictures, or in seeing it as it is, it’s the old city that pushes its way to the front” (Juniper). Others expressed relief that they were not the only ones feeling strangely homesick in their own town, homesick for a place they never left but that had somehow left them.There are a variety of methods available to fill the gaps in both memories and cityscape. The Human Interface Technology Laboratory New Zealand (HITLab), produced a technological solution: interactive augmented reality software called CityViewAR, using GPS data and 3D models to show parts of the city as they were prior to the earthquakes (“CityViewAR”). However, not everybody needed computerised help to remember buildings and other details. Many people found that, just by listening to a certain song or remembering particular gigs, it was not just an image of a building that appeared but a multi-sensory event complete with sound, movement, smell, and emotion. In online spaces like the Save Our Dux group, memories of favourite bands and songs, crowded gigs, old friends, good times, great food, and long nights were shared and discussed, embroidering a rich and colourful tapestry about a favourite part of Christchurch’s social scene. ConclusionMusic is strongly interwoven with memory, and can recreate a particular moment in time and place through the associations carried in lyrics, melody, and imagery. Songs can spark vivid memories of what was happening – when, where, and with whom. A song shared is a connection made: between people; between moments; between good times and bad; between the past and the present. Music provides a soundtrack to people’s lives, and during times of stress it can also provide many benefits. The lyrics and video imagery of songs made in years gone by have been shown to take on new significance and meaning after disaster, offering snapshots of times, people and places that are no longer with us. Even without relying on the accompanying imagery of a video, music has the ability to recreate spaces or relocate the listener somewhere other than the physical location they currently occupy. This small act of musical magic can provide a great deal of comfort when suffering solastalgia, the feeling of homesickness one experiences when the familiar landscapes of home suddenly change or disappear, when one has not left home but that home has nonetheless gone from sight. The earthquakes (and the demolition crews that followed) have created a lot of empty land in Christchurch but the sound of popular music has filled many gaps – not just on the ground, but also in the hearts and lives of the city’s residents. 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Introduction “Unboxing the New Barbie” explores Barbie’s new image in Greta Gerwig’s 2023 film, Barbie, where Barbie appears initially in a perfect shape and enjoys her ideal life in Barbie Land. The film presents Barbie Land as a female-dominated space with Barbies at the centre of authority, with a utopic lifestyle of freedom and joy. However, the film immediately troubles this utopia through a set of cinematic devices. First, the stereotypical Barbie’s life appears as a series of monotonous routines within the pink plastic structures, and later, her utopic body image and Barbie Land are distorted due to the shortcomings and malfunctioning of the Real World. The Real World, with patriarchy at the core of it, contradicts Barbie Land’s female-oriented constitution. Presenting all the contradictions through Barbie Land and the Real World, hence, the film attempts to address Barbie’s entrapment, first by capturing her image within the pink plastic frames in Barbie Land, and later through her framed reputation as an ostentatious product of a consumerist culture in the Real World. In this article, I argue that Barbie unboxes a new Barbie who recognises her framed image in both Barbie Land and the Real World and breaks free from those frames to define a new and real role for herself. In so doing, I compare Barbie’s (Margot Robbie) image in Barbie Land inside the pink frames to Carol White’s (Julianne Moore) image in Californian Suburbs in Safe (1995), a melodrama by Todd Haynes where she is also trapped in the domestic spaces of her suburban house, experiencing mental and physical break down. The article, hence, concludes that Barbie relies on the aesthetics of melodrama to first refer to Barbie’s entrapped image in Barbie Land, and later to unbox her new image to the Real World. Melodrama in Barbie Land In “Tales of Sound and Fury,” Thomas Elsaesser defines melodrama: “considered as an expressive code, melodrama might … be described as a pictorial form of dramatic mise-en-scène, characterized by dynamic use of spatial and musical categories, as opposed to intellectual or literary one” (75). He further elaborates on the genre and writes that “this type of cinema depends on the ways 'Melos' is given to 'drama' utilizing lighting, montage, visual rhythm, decor, style of acting, music – that is, on the ways the mise-en-scène, translates character into action” (78). Elsaesser in his essay describes the mise-en-scène of the genre as “the middle-class home, filled with objects, [which surrounds] the heroine in a hierarchy of apparent order that becomes increasingly suffocating” (84). Jackie Byres refers to the rise of melodrama in the timeline of Hollywood films and writes that most of the women’s films of the 1930s and 1940s ended tragically, but in the 1950s, the (eventually unsuccessful) return to an emphasis on woman as wife-companion, exemplified by the suburban housewife, required a different ending, a “happy ending” that provided the female protagonist with a male companion, a husband, a strong and capable patriarch to whom she could submit. (112) These female-oriented melodramas, according to Jackie Byars, are “communities of women and children” in which “the absence of a patriarchal figure motivates the narratives” (106). Drawing attention to the female-centred plots, Byars also considers these films as long-awaited products of cinema where women eventually obtained space to be seen as independent entities with relative subjectivity. In this regard, she further elaborates: “the female-oriented melodrama cannot end with its female protagonist continuing a life independent and alone” (106). Douglas Sirk was one of the prominent Hollywood filmmakers whose films in the 1950s were the archetype of family melodramas where he centralised women’s images and consequently engaged the diegesis with their private and public affairs. In melodrama, there are always reflective surfaces and frames such as windows or mirrors where the characters, particularly women, are framed within these frames. Mercer and Shingler write: “in Sirk’s films we see characters looking in the mirrors when they are conforming to the society’s rules, when they are playing a role, when they are deluding themselves. Mirrors then, represent both illusion and delusion in his films and were to become such emblematic device” (54). These women are usually alone and staring at themselves or gazing out the windows, which is an additional emphasis on their loneliness and insecurities. “Mirrors then, represent both illusion and delusion in these films and were to become such emblematic device” (54). Mercer and Shingler refer to this technique as “frames within frames” where the characters are “contained within mirror frames, doorways, windows, pictures frames and decorative screens. These devices once again suggest that characters are isolated or confined in their lonely worlds, or oppressed by their environments” (54). Against this backdrop, Barbie refers to the conventions of melodrama to represent Barbie’s entrapped body inside the plastic frames of Barbie Land and her willful body that resists these frames. Barbie represents the dual – inside vs. outside – nature of melodrama through the duality in Barbie Land and the Real World. Barbie Land stands for the domestic space in melodrama and the Real World represents the emotionally and politically suppressive public. By the look of it, Barbie Land pictures a feminine utopia: women as the forerunners in politics, sports, and literary competitions; ever subjective, and never sexualised or objectified, with Kens in the background, living a peaceful life. Barbie Land hence adheres to the melodramatic style of filmmaking with communities of women, lack of patriarchal figures, and a female-dominated space. However, fifteen minutes into the film, Barbie problematises this utopia by constantly placing the stereotypical Barbie inside the pink frames of the dream houses, windows, or mirrors, performing a set of dollish routines; eating but not eating, drinking but not drinking, until she is infected with the malfunctioning and diseases of the Real World. She wakes up to the nightmare of flat feet, bad breath, a cold shower, and cellulite. The pink utopia hence stages the colorful wraps of the melodramatic suburbs with its corrupted domestic interiors. In other words, Barbie Land equals the domestic settings of the suburban houses where women appear to have a satisfying luxurious material life, whereas in truth they are overburdened with the expectations of their roles as wives and mothers. The Real World in this equation represents the patriarchal outside and its authority over women, and the temporary Kenland refers to the corruption that is the outcome of the patriarchal Real World. Similar to suburban houses with a glamorous façade and patriarchy at the centre, Barbie Land represents a marginalised female utopia in pink plastic, designed and sold by patriarchy in the Real World. “Mattel: We Sell Imagination!” Barbie hence strongly resembles Safe (1995) in form and content, with its pink utopian external image and unfulfilling conditions in the interiors. Todd Haynes’s Safe is also a family melodrama, set in the 1980s in the Californian suburbs where Carol White is a homemaker living in a spacious suburban house who develops puzzling allergies to common environmental chemicals contained in everyday-use materials. This leads her to abandon her household and live in a remote sanatorium located in a desert where she is immune from any contact with chemicals. In short, Carol’s allergy is triggered by the unnecessarily consumed products every time she is exposed to them. Her physical intimacy with her husband fades away every day due to her intolerance to all the unnatural and industrial products. Simultaneously, the disease signifies her inner desire to free her body from the suburban life and unfulfilling marriage. Safe addresses the industrial developments of the 1980s in the US through the conventions of melodrama to illustrate the emotionally and physically unhealthy environment contaminated by toxic chemicals. Carol White’s health deteriorates due to environmental toxicities and chemical attacks, and Barbie’s health is affected due to metaphorical toxicities such as toxic masculinities in the Real World. More importantly, Barbie’s notoriety for being unrealistically skinny and her responsibility for pervading eating disorders is another evident feature in Safe. Criticism around Barbie’s physical features has usually addressed her “unrealistic and unattainable bodily proportions [that] make women feel inadequate” (Toffoletti 59). The American Addiction Centers, in their article “Dying to Be Barbie: Eating Disorders in Pursuit of the Impossible”, hold Barbie accountable for girls’ eating disorders and write: the anxieties they experience are the product of a society and media culture that prizes a thin image for women above anything else, and devalues any woman who strays outside the false "norm" of a skinny body. In pursuit of that unattainable goal, they will literally starve themselves to death. They are dying to be like Barbie. (2013) Similar to Barbie, Carol appears with unrealistic and even unnatural physical features. First, she is presented as a skinny woman relying only on dairy (milk), and later she adopts the uncommon fruit diet. Moreover, in her regular aerobic classes, her body never sweats. By characterising Carol through her uncommon physical and mental features, Safe insists upon the female character’s resistance against the norms. “Haynes wanted Carol to evoke vulnerable, fractured nature of modern identity, an issue that American films have rarely addressed” (Levy 177). According to Glyn Davis, Haynes’s cinema “explores the tensions and discrepancies between pristine public surface and that which lies beneath: hidden emotions and passions, closeted identities and the truthful nature of relationships” (123). Both Safe and Barbie trouble the comfortable image of Barbie Land and the Suburbs and alternate it with discomfort and non-conformity. Unboxing the Real Barbie Mattel’s debut doll in 1950s America coincided with the after-war ideologies of the scared home which drove women into domesticity. “Beginning with the Second World War years of the 1940s and extending through the 1950s, 'home' stood for the utopian myth of a coherent, homogenous popular culture” (Cohen 143). Within this utopia, women were placed in domestic environments, and the interior spaces of the household where they were anchored to the bosom of the family. The bourgeois culture evolved the home as the temple of femininity. Domestic life was radically segregated from the public sphere. Although women obviously inhabited public space, they did so under the protection of a chaperon. Women who attempted to roam the metropolis freely struggled with deep male prejudices regarding sexuality and space. (Rojek and Urry 16) Therefore, Mattel’s launch of the first Barbie doll in 1959 and before the advent of second-wave feminism in the 1960s and 1970s seems like an attempt to introduce a woman at the end of a decade when women were forced back into the domestic spaces of their homes and honoured by their roles as homemakers and devoted wives. Barbie hence became “the first feminist that pointed the way out of kitchen” (Stone 7). M.G. Lord, the author of Forever Barbie, credits Barbie as an icon who “taught us independence. Barbie was her own woman. She could invent herself with a costume change: sing a solo in the spotlight one minute, pilot a starship the next. … She was all that we could be [and] more than we could be. And certainly more than we were” (9). Barbie is a “happily unmarried woman. Ruth refused to give Barbie the trappings of postnuptial life; the doll would be forever independent, subservient to no one” (51). Barbie’s place in the history of popular culture marks her a controversial cultural icon who rises between the decades of women’s passivity and the following feminist decades. In other words, while in the 1950s, she is a pioneer feminist figure, in the 1960s and 70s, she is recognised “as an object of fascination, conflict and rancour for a generation of second-wave feminists” (Toffoletti 60). In Marilyn Ferris Motz’s view, “Barbie is a consumer. She demands product after product, and the packaging and advertising imply that Barbie, as well as her owner, can be made happy if only she wears the right clothes and owns the right products” (128). Accordingly, all the props that followed Barbie and her diverse roles as an affluent independent woman echoed “the idea that women in capitalist culture are themselves commodities to be purchased, consumed and manipulated” (Toffoletti 60). This oscillation in Barbie’s reputation makes her an everchanging cultural product and the interpretations of her subjective. According to M.G. Lord, “to study Barbie, one sometimes has to hold seemingly contradictory ideas in one’s head at the same time ... . People project wildly dissimilar and opposing fantasies on it. Barbie is a universally recognized image, but what she represents is as personal as fingerprints” (10). Taking Barbie’s dynamic identity and reputation into account, Greta Gerwig in her 2023 film summarises sixty-plus years of an ongoing renewal in Barbie’s image and the unstoppable criticism that follows her. While Barbara Handler introduced a strong female doll in the 1950s as a protest against the decade’s imposed standards on women, in 2023 Barbie is still stigmatised and forced back into the margins by remaining in the box of Barbie Land. “Mattel: No One Rests until This Doll Is Back in a Box.” Barbie’s journey to the Real World and her straying from Mattel’s laws pose a threat to the patriarchal establishment in the Real World. Similar to melodrama where women “seem trapped in an image of themselves as dangerous women, threatening to a patriarchy that strives to maintain their willful bodies in a patriarchal, dichotomous situation as gendered bodies” (Ceuterick 42), Barbie’s unboxed figure in the Real world disturbs its marginalising structures. The unboxed new Barbie refuses to go back to the perfect pink world; instead, she allies with the Real-World women to fix the corrupted Barbie Land and decides to become a Real-World woman, accepting its imperfections. Barbie breaks free from the box to recognise herself, Ken, Barbie Land, and the Real World. The unboxed new Barbie hence is an attempt to represent New/Real Barbie’s subjectivity in the Real World and not just in Barbie Land, which is an ostentatious design of the patriarchal Real World. Gerwig chronicles Barbie’s evolving image through her journey from Barbie Land to the Real World and back, and eventually her settlement in the Real World when she breaks free from the pre-determined literal and metaphorical frames of both worlds. While in Barbie Land she is framed within pink plastic frames, in the Real World, she is framed with stigma and criticism for withholding feminism. Conclusion In this article, I argued that Greta Gerwig’s 2023 film Barbie unboxes a New Barbie who eventually becomes a Real Barbie/Woman, rejecting all the stereotypical labels that have been attached to her. Decades after her first appearance in popular culture, Barbie remains a highly controversial cultural product, facing criticism for her unrealistic affluence, independence, and physique. Addressing all these arguments and controversies, the film unveils a new Barbie who breaks free from the margins of Barbie Land to raise her awareness and resist the stereotypical stigma around her image. Facing the harsh realities of the Real World that constantly force her, first, inside the plastic frames of Barbie Land, and later into Mattel’s box, Barbie learns about her entrapment and the patriarchal control over women’s bodies. Experiencing the discrepancies in Barbie Land and the flawed Real World, the Unboxed Barbie escapes Mattel’s box to reinvent herself in Barbie Land and the Real World. Boxing and framing Barbie is a cinematic device used in melodrama where the mise-en-scène is staged with luxurious furniture, costume design, and colour palette, but it suggests a sense of entanglement with domestic affairs for women. Barbie is comparable to Todd Haynes’s Safe due to the film’s pink undertone, the frames of suburban houses that entrap the female character in domesticity, and more importantly, her deteriorating mental and physical health. Similar to Barbie, the female character in Safe resists the frames of patriarchy to free her body and define a new identity for herself. Both Barbie and Safe deploy the conventions of melodrama to depict the entrapment and resistance of the female characters to submit to these frames. References Barbie. Dir. Greta Gerwig. Perf. Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling. Warner Bros., 2023. Byars, Jackie. All That Hollywood Allows. London: Routledge, 1991. Ceuterick, Maud. Affirmative Aesthetics and Wilful Women: Gender, Space and Mobility in Contemporary Cinema. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. Cohan, Steven. “Almost like Being at Home: Showbiz culture and Hollywood Road Trips in the 1940s and 1950s.” In The Road Movie Book. Eds. Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark. London: Routledge, 1997. 113–142. Davis, Glyn. Far from Heaven: American Indies. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2011. “Dying to Be Barbie: Eating Disorders in Pursuit of the Impossible.” Drug Rehab Options, n.d. 12 Apr. 2024 <https://rehabs.com/explore/dying-to-be-barbie/>. Elsaesser, Thomas. “Tales of Sound and Fury: Observation on Family Melodrama.” In Imitations of Life: A Reader on Film & Television Melodrama. Ed. Marcia Landy. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1991. 68–91. Levy, Emanuel. Gay Directors, Gay Films? Pedro Almodóvar, Terence Davies, Todd Haynes, Gus Van Sant, John Waters. New York: Columbia UP, 2015. Lord, M.G. Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll. Liveright, 1994. Mercer, John, and Martin Shingler. Melodrama: Genre, Style and Sensibility. New York: Columbia UP, 2013. Motz, Marylin Ferris. “'I Want to Be a Barbie Doll When I Grow Up': The Cultural Significance of the Barbie Doll.” In The Popular Culture Reader. 3rd ed. Eds. Christopher D. Geist et al. Ohio: Bowling Green UP, 1983. 122–136. Rojek, Chris, and John Urry. “Transformation of Travel and Theory.” In Touring Cultures: Transformations of Travel and Theory. Eds. Chris Rojek and John Urry. London: Routledge, 2002. Safe. Dir. Todd Haynes. Perf. Julianne Moore. Motion Picture Rating, 1995. Stone, Tanya Lee. The Good, the Bad, and the Barbie: A Doll’s History and Her Impact on Us. Penguin Young Readers Group, 2015. Toffoletti, Kim. Cyborgs and Barbie Dolls: Feminism, Popular Culture and the Posthuman Body. Bloomsbury, 2007.

It all started with a tweet. On the afternoon of 2 June 2013, Professor Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico (UNM) and visiting instructor at New York University (NYU), tweeted out a message that would go on to generate a significant social media controversy. Addressing aspiring doctoral program applicants, Miller wrote:Dear obese PhD applicants: if you didn’t have the willpower to stop eating carbs, you won't have the willpower to do a dissertation #truthThe response to Miller’s tweet was swift and fiery. Social media users began engaging with him on Twitter, and in the early hours of the controversy Miller defended the tweet. When one critic described his message as “judgmental,” Miller replied that doing a dissertation is “about willpower/conscientiousness, not just smarts” (Trotter). The tweet above, now screen captured, was shared widely and debated by journalists, Fat Acceptance activists, and academic social media users. Within hours Miller had deleted the tweet and replaced it with two new ones:My sincere apologies to all for that idiotic, impulsive, and badly judged tweet. It does not reflect my true views, values, or standards andObviously my previous tweet does not represent the selection policies of any university, or my own selection criteriaHe then made his Twitter account private. The captured image, however, continued to spread. Across social media, users began to circulate a campaign that called for Miller to be formally disciplined (Trotter). There was also widespread talk about potential lawsuits from prospective students who were not selected for admission at UNM (Kirby). Indeed, the Fat Chick Sings blogger Jeanette DePatie offered her own advice to Miller: #findagoodlawyer.Soon after the controversy emerged a response appeared on UNM’s website in the form of a video statement by Professor Jane Ellen Smith, the Chair of the UNM Psychology Department. Smith reiterated that Miller’s statements did not reflect the “policies and admissions standards of UNM”. She also stated that Miller had defended his actions by claiming the tweet was part of a “research project” where he would deliberately send out provocative messages in order to measure the public response to them. This claim was met with incredulity by a number of bloggers and columnists, and was later determined to be incorrect in an Institutional Review Board inquiry at UNM, which concluded Miller’s tweets were “self-promotional” in nature. Following a formal investigation, the UNM committee found no evidence that Miller had discriminated against overweight students. It did however pass a motion of censure that included a number of restrictions, including prohibiting Miller from sitting on any graduate admission committee at UNM.The #truth about Fat PhDs?Readers may be wondering why Miller’s tweet continues to matter as I write this article in 2015. It is my belief that the tweet is important insofar as it affords an insight into the cultural scene that surrounds the fat body in higher education. The vigorous debate generated by Miller’s tweet offers researchers a diverse array of media texts that are available to help build a more comprehensive picture of fat embodiment within higher education.Looking at the tweet in the cold light of day it is difficult to imagine any logical links one might infer between a person’s carbohydrate consumption and their ability to excel in doctoral education. And there’s the rub. Of course Miller’s tweet does not represent a careful evaluation of the properties of doctoral willpower. In order to make sense of the tweet we need to understand the ways cultural assumptions about fatness operate. For decades now, researchers have documented the existence of anti-fat attitudes (Crandall & Martinez). Increasingly, scholars and Fat Acceptance activists have described a “thinness norm” that is reproduced across contemporary Western cultures, which discerns normatively slender bodies as “both healthy and beautiful” (Eller 220) and those whose bodies depart from this norm, as “socially acceptable targets for shaming and hate speech” (Eller 220). In order to be intelligible Miller’s tweet relies on a number of deeply entrenched cultural meanings attributed to fatness and fat people.The first is that body-size is primarily a matter of self-control. Although Critical Fat Studies researchers have argued for some time that body weight is determined by complex interactions between the biological and environmental, the belief that a large body size is caused by limited self-control remains prevalent. This in turn supports a host of cultural connotations, which tend to constitute fat people as “lazy, gluttonous, greedy, immoral, uncontrolled, stupid, ugly and lacking in willpower” (Farrell 4).In light of the above, Miller’s message ought to be read as a moral one. I have paraphrased its logic as such: if you [the fat doctoral student] lack the willpower to discipline your body into normatively desired slimness, you will also likely lack the strength of character required to discipline your body-mind into producing a doctoral dissertation. The sad irony here is that, if anything, the attitudes that might hamper fat students from pursuing a doctoral education would be those espoused in Miller’s own tweet. As Critical Fat Studies researchers have illuminated, the anti-fat attitudes the tweet reproduces generate challenging higher education climates for fat people to navigate (Pausé, Express Yourself 6).Indeed, while Miller’s tweet is one case that arose to media prominence, there is evidence that it sits inside a wider pattern of weight discrimination within higher education. For example, Caning and Mayer (“Obesity: Its Possible”, “Obesity: An Influence”) found that despite similar high school performances, ‘obese’ students were less likely to be accepted to elite universities, than their non-obese peers. In a more recent US-based study, Burmeister and colleagues found evidence of weight bias in graduate school admissions. In particular, they found that higher body mass index (BMI) applicants received fewer post-interview offers into psychology graduate programs than other students (920), and this relationship appeared to be stronger for female applicants (920). This picture is supported by a study by Swami and Monk, who examined weight bias against women in a hypothetical scenario about university acceptance. In this study, 198 volunteers in the UK were asked to identify the women they were most and least likely to select for a place at university. Swami and Monk found that participants were biased against fat women, a finding which the authors interpreted as evidence of broader public beliefs about body size and access to higher education.In my examination of the media scene surrounding the Miller case I observed that most commentators associated the tweet with a particular affective formation – shame. Miller’s actions were widely described as “fat-shaming” (Bennet-Smith; Ingeno; Martin; Trotter; Walsh) with Miller himself often referred to simply as the “fat-shaming professor” (King; ThinkTank). In this article I wish to consider the affective-political dimensions of Miller’s tweet, by focusing on one digital community’s response to it: Fuck Yeah! Fat PhDs. In following this path I am building on the work of other researchers who have considered fat activisms and Web 2.0 (Pausé, Express Yourself); fat visual activism (Gurrieri); and the emotional politics of fat acceptance blogging (Kargbo; Bronstein).Imaging Alternatives: Fuck Yeah! Fat PhDsBy 3 June 2013 – just one day after Miller’s tweet was published – New Zealand-based academic Cat Pausé had created the Tumblr Fuck Yeah! Fat PhDs. This was billed as a photo-blog about “being fatlicious in academia”. Writing on her Friend of Marilyn blog, Pausé explained the rationale behind the Tumblr:I decided that what I wanted to do was to highlight all the amazing fat individuals who are in graduate school, or have completed graduate school – to provide a visual repository … and to celebrate the amazing work being done by these rad fatties!Pausé sent out calls for participants on Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook, and emailed a Fat Studies listserv. She asked submitters to send “a photo, along with their name, degree, and awarding institution” (Pausé Express Yourself, 6). Images were submitted thick and fast. Twenty-three were published in the first day of the project, and twenty in the second. At the time of writing, just over 150 images had been submitted, the most recent being November 2013.The Fuck Yeah! Fat PhDs project ought to be understood as part the turn away from the textual toward the digital in fat activist movements (Kargbo). This has seen a growth in online communities that are interested in developing “counter-images in response to the fat body’s position as the abject, excluded Other of the socially acceptable body” (Kargbo 162). Examples include a multitude of Fatshion photo-blogs, Tumblrs like Exciting Fat People or the Stocky Bodies image library, which responds to the limited diversity of visual representations of fat people in the mainstream media (Gurrieri).For this article, I have read the images on the Fuck Yeah! Fat PhDs Tumblr in order to gain an impression about the affective-political work accomplished by this collective of self-identified fat academic bodies. As I indicated earlier, much of the commentary following Miller’s tweet characterised it as an attempt to ‘shame’ fat doctoral students. As Elspeth Probyn has identified, shame frequently manifests itself on the body “most experiences of shame make you want to disappear, to hide away and to cover yourself” (Probyn 329). I suggest that the core work of the Fuck Yeah! Fat PhDs Tumblr is to address the spectre of shame Miller’s tweet projects with visibility, rather than it’s opposite. This visibility also enables the project to proliferate a host of different ways of (feeling about) being fat and doctoral.The first image posted on the Tumblr is Pausé’s own. She is pictured smiling at the 2007 graduation ceremony where she received her own PhD, surrounded by fellow graduates in academic regalia. Her image is followed by many others, mostly white women, who attest to the academic attainments of fat individuals. My first impression as I scrolled through the Tumblr was to note that many of the images (51) referenced scenes of graduation, where subjects wore robes, caps or posed with higher degree certificates. Many more were the kinds of photographs that one might expect to be taken at an academic event. Together, these images attest to the viability of the living, breathing doctoral body - a particularly relevant response given Miller’s tweet. This work to legitimate the fat doctoral body was also accomplished through the submission of two historical photographs of Albert Einstein, a figure who is neither living nor breathing, but highly unlikely to be described as lacking academic ability or willpower.As I read through the Tumblr subsequent times, I noticed that many of the submitters offered images that challenge stereotypical representations of the fat body. As a number of writers have noted, fat people tend to be visually represented as “solitary, lonely figures whose expressions are downcast and dejected” (Gurrieri 202). That is if they aren’t already decapitated in the visual convention of the “headless fatty” used across news media (Kargbo 160). Like the Stocky Bodies project, the Fuck Yeah! Fat PhDs Tumblr facilitated a more diverse and less pathologising representation of fat (doctoral) embodiment.Across the images there is little evidence of the downcast eyes of shame and dejection that Miller’s tweet seems to invite of aspiring fat doctoral candidates. Scrolling through the Tumblr one encounters images of fat people singing, swimming, creating art, playing sport, smoking, smiling, dressing up, and making music. A number of images (12) emphasise the social nature of fat doctoral life, by picturing multiple subjects at once, some holding hands, others posing with colleagues, loved ones, and a puppy. Another category of submissions took a playful stance vis-à-vis some representational conventions of imaging fatness. Where portrayals of the fat body from side or rear angles, or images of fat people eating and drinking typically code an affective scene of disgust (Gurrieri), a number of images on the Tumblr appear to reinscribe these scenes with new meaning. Viewers are offered pictures of smiling and contented fat graduates unashamed to eat and drink, or be represented from ‘unflattering’ angles.Furthermore, a number of images offered alternatives to the conventional representation of the fat subject as ugly and sexually unattractive by posing in glamorous shots bubbling with allure and desire. In one memorable picture, blogger and educator Virgie Tovar is snapped wearing a “sex instructor” badge and laughs while holding two sex toys.Reading across the images it becomes clear that the Tumblr offers a powerful response to the visual convention of representing the solitary, lonely fat person. Rather than presenting isolated fat doctoral students the act of holding the images together generates a sense of fat higher education community, as Kargbo notes:A single image posted online amidst vast Internet ephemera is just a fleeting document of a moment in a stranger’s life. But in the plural, as one scrolls through hundreds of images eager to hit the ‘next’ button for what will be a repetition of the same, the image takes on a new function: it becomes an insistent testament to the liveness of fat embodiment in the present. (164)Obesity Timebomb blogger Charlotte Cooper (2013) commented on the significance of the project: “It is pretty amazing to see the names and faces as I scroll through Fuck yeah! Fat PhDs. Many of us are friends and collaborators and the site represents a new community of power.”Concluding Thoughts: Fat Embodiment and Higher Education CulturesThis article has examined a cultural event that that saw the figure of the fat doctoral student rise to international media prominence in 2013. I have argued that while Miller’s tweet can be read as illustrative of the affective scene of shame that surrounds the fat body in higher education, the images offered by the Fuck Yeah! photo submitters work to re-negotiate implication in social discourses of abjection. Indeed, the images assert that alternative ways of feeling about being fat and doctoral remain viable. Fat students can be contented, ambivalent, sultry, pissed off, passionate and proud – and Fuck Yeah! Fat PhDs provides submitters with a platform to perform a wide array of these affects. This is not to say that shame is shut out of the project, or the lives of submitters’ altogether. Instead, I am suggesting that the Tumblr generates a more open field of possibilities, providing “a space for re-imagining new forms of attachments and identifications.” (Kargbo 171). Critics might argue that this Tumblr is not particularly novel when set in the context of a range of fat photo-blogs that have sprung up across the Internet in recent years. I would argue, however, that when we consider the kinds of questions Fuck Yeah! Fat PhDs might ask of university cultures, and the prompts it offers to higher education researchers, the Tumblr can be seen to make an important contribution. I am in agreement with Kargbo (2013) when she argues that fat photo-blogs “have the potential to alter the conditions of visual reception and perception”. That is, through their “codes and conventions, styles of lighting and modes of address, photographs literally show us how to relate to another person” (Singer 602). When read together, the Fuck Yeah! images insist that a different kind of relationship to fat PhDs is possible, one that exceeds the shaming visible in Miller’s tweet. Ultimately then, the Tumblr is a call to take fat doctoral students seriously, not as problems in need of fixing, but as a diverse group of scholars who make important contributions to the academy and beyond.I would like to use the occasion of concluding this article to call for further conversations about fat embodiment and higher education cultures. The area is significantly under-researched, with higher education scholars largely failing to engage with the material and affective experiences of fat embodiment. Indeed, I would argue that if nothing else, this paper has demonstrated that public scenes of knowledge creation have done a much more comprehensive job of analysing the intersection of ‘fat + university’ than academic books and articles to date. While not offering an exhaustive sketch, I would like to gesture toward some areas that might contribute to a future research agenda. For example, researchers might begin to approach the experience of living, working and studying as a fat person in the contemporary university. Such research might examine whose body the university is imagined and designed for, as well as the campus climate experienced by fat individuals. Researchers might consider how body size could become a part of broader conversations about embodiment and privilege in higher education, alongside race, ability, gender identity, and other categories of social difference.Thinking about the intersection of ‘fat + university’ would also involve tracing possibilities. For example, what role do university campuses play as spaces of fat activism and solidarity? And, what is the contribution made by Critical Fat Studies as a newly established interdisciplinary field of inquiry?Taken together, I hope the questions I have raised in this article demonstrate that the intersection of ‘fat’ and higher education cultures represents a rich and valuable area that warrants further inquiry.ReferencesBennet-Smith, Meredith. “Geoffrey Miller, Visiting NYU Professor, Slammed for Fat-Shaming Obese PhD Candidates.” 6 Apr. 2013. The Huffington Post. ‹http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/04/geoffrey-miller-fat-shaming-nyu-phd_n_3385641.html›.Bronstein, Carolyn. “Fat Acceptance Blogging, Female Bodies and the Politics of Emotion.” Feral Feminisms 3 (2015): 106-118. Burmeister, Jacob, Allison Kiefner, Robert Carels, and Dara Mushner-Eizenman. “Weight Bias in Graduate School Admissions.” Obesity 21 (2013): 918-920.Canning, Helen, and Jean Mayer. “Obesity: Its Possible Effect on College Acceptance.” The New England Journal of Medicine 275 (1966): 1172-1174. Canning, Helen, and Jean Mayer. “Obesity: An Influence on High School Performance.” The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 20 (1967): 352-354. Cooper, Charlotte. “The Curious Case of Dr. Miller and His Tweet.” Obesity Timebomb 4 June 2013. ‹http://obesitytimebomb.blogspot.com/2013/06/the-curious-case-of-dr-miller-and-his.html›.Crandall, Christian, and Rebecca Martinez. “Culture, Ideology, and Antifat Attitudes.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 22 (1996): 1165-1176.DePatie, Jeanette. “Dear Dr. Terrible Your Bigotry Is Showing...” The Fat Chick Sings 2 June 2013. ‹http://fatchicksings.com/2013/06/02/dear-dr-terrible-your-bigotry-is-showing/›.Eller, G.M. “On Fat Oppression.” Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 24 (2014): 219-245. Farrell, Amy. Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture. New York: NYU Press, 2011. Gurrieri, Lauren. “Stocky Bodies: Fat Visual Activism.” Fat Studies 2 (2013): 197-209. Ingeno, Lauren. “Fat-Shaming in Academe.” Inside Higher Ed 4 June 2013. Kargbo, Majida. “Toward a New Relationality: Digital Photography, Shame, and the Fat Subject.” Fat Studies 2 (2013): 160-172.King, Barbara. “The Fat-Shaming Professor: A Twitter-Fueled Firestorm.” Cosmos & Culture 13.7 (2013) Kirby, Marianne. “How Not to Twitter: Dr. Geoffrey Miller's 140 Fat-Hating Characters of Infamy.” XoJane 5 June 2013. ‹http://www.xojane.com/issues/professor-geoffrey-miller›.Martin, Adam. “NYU Professor Immediately Regrets Fat-Shaming Potential Students.” New York Magazine June 2013. ‹http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/06/nyu-professor-immediately-regrets-fat-shaming.html›.Pausé, Cat. “On That Tweet – Fat Discrimination in the Education Sector.” Friend of Marilyn 5 June 2013. ‹http://friendofmarilyn.com/2013/06/05/on-that-tweet-fat-discrimination-in-the-education-sector/›.Pausé, Cat. “Express Yourself: Fat Activism in the Web 2.0 Age.” The Politics of Size: Perspectives from the Fat-Acceptance Movement. Ed. Ragen Chastain. New York: ABC-CLIO, 2015. 1-8. Probyn, Elspeth. “Everyday Shame.” Cultural Studies 18.2-3 (2004): 328-349. Singer, T. Benjamin. “From the Medical Gaze to Sublime Mutations: The Ethics of (Re)viewing Non-Normative Body Images.” The Transgender Studies Reader. Eds. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle. New York: Routledge, 2013. 601-620. Swami, Viren, and Rachael Monk. “Weight Bias against Women in a University Acceptance Scenario.” Journal of General Psychology 140.1 (2013): 45-56.Sword, Helen. “The Writer’s Diet.” ‹http://writersdiet.com/WT.php?home›.ThinkTank. “'Fat Shaming Professor' Gives RIDICULOUS Excuse – Check This Out (Update).” ThinkTank 8 July 2013. ‹https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ey9TkG18-o›.Trotter, J.K. “How Twitter Schooled an NYU Professor about Fat-Shaming.” The Atlantic Wire 2013. ‹http://www.thewire.com/national/2013/06/how-twitter-schooled-nyu-professor-about-fat-shaming/65833/›.Walsh, Michael. “NYU Visiting Professor Insults the Obese Ph.D.s with ‘Impulsive’ Tweet.” New York Daily News 2013.

In his directorial debut, The Man with the Iron Fists (2012), RZA not only evokes the textual borrowing techniques he has utilised as a hip-hop producer, but also reflects the influence of filmmaker Quentin Tarantino, who has built a career upon acknowledging mainstream and cult film histories through mise-en-scene, editing, and deft characterisation. The Man with the Iron Fists was originally to coincide with Tarantino’s rebel slave narrative Django Unchained (2012), which Tarantino has discussed openly as commentary regarding race in contemporary America. In 2011, Variety reported that RZA had joined the cast of Tarantino’s anticipated Django Unchained, playing “Thaddeus, a violent slave working on a Mississippi plantation” (Sneider, “Rza Joins ‘Django Unchained’ Cast”). Django Unchained follows Tarantino’s pattern of generic and trope mixology, combining elements of the Western, blaxploitation, and buddy/road film. He famously stated: “[If] my work has anything it's that I'm taking this from this and that from that and mixing them together… I steal from everything. Great artists steal; they don't do homages” (“The Directors of Our Lifetime: In Their Own Words”). He sutures iconography from multiple films in numerous genres to form new texts that stand alone, albeit as amalgamations of references. In considering meanings attached particularly to exploitation films, this article addresses the significance of combining influences within The Man with the Iron Fists and Tarantino’s Django Unchained, and the ideological threads that emerge in fusing exploitation film aesthetics. Ultimately, these films provide a convergence not only of texts, but also of the collective identities associated with and built upon those texts, feats made possible through the filmmakers’ use of pastiche. Pastiche in Identity Formation as Subversive A reflection of the postmodern tendency towards appropriation and borrowing, pastiche is often considered less meaningful than its counterpart, parody. Fredric Jameson suggests that though pastiche and parody share commonalities (most notably the mimicry of style and mannerisms), they do so to different effects. Jameson asserts that parody mimics in an effort to mock the idiosyncrasies within a text, whereas pastiche is “neutral parody” of “dead styles” (114). In short, as Susan Hayward writes, “In its uninventiveness, pastiche is but a shadow of its former thing” (302). For Jameson, the most ubiquitous form of pastiche is the nostalgia film, which attempts to recapture the essence of the past. As examples, he points to the George Lucas films American Graffiti (1973), which is staged in the United States of the 1950s, and Star Wars (1977), which reflects the serials of the 1930s-1950s (114-115). Though scholars such as Jameson and Hayward are contemptuous of pastiche, a growing number see its potential for the subversion and critique that the aforementioned suggest it lacks. For instance, Sarah Smith reminds us that pastiche films engage in “complicitous critique”: the films maintain the trappings of original texts, yet do so in order to advance critique (209). For Smith and other scholars, such as Judith Butler and Richard Dyer, Jameson’s criticism of pastiche is dismissive, for while these scholars largely agree that pastiche is a form of mimicry in which the distance between original and copy is minimal, they recognise that a space still exists for it to be critical. Smith writes: “[W]hile there may be greater distance between the parody and its target text than there is between the pastiche and the text it imitates, a prescribed degree of distance is not a prerequisite for critical engagement with the ur-text” (210). In this regard, fidelity to the original texts is not only required but to be revered, for these likenesses to the original “act as a guarantee of the critique of those origins and provide an opportunity for the filmmaker to position [himself or herself] in relation to them” (Smith 211). Essentially, pastiche is a useful technique in which to construct hybrid identities. Keri E. Iyall Smith suggests that hybrid identities emerge from “a reflexive relationship between local and global” (3). According to popular music scholar Brett Lashua, hybrid identities “make and re-make culture through appropriating the cultural ‘raw materials’ of life in order to construct meaning in their own specific cultural localities. In a sense, they are ‘sampling’ from broader popular culture and reworking what they can take into their own specific local cultures” (“The Arts of the Remix: Ethnography and Rap”). As will be evidenced here, Tarantino utilises pastiche as an unabashed genre poacher; similarly, as a self-avowed Tarantino student and hip-hop producer known for his sampling acumen, RZA invokes pastiche to reflect mastery of his craft and a hybridised identity his multifaceted persona. Plagiarism, Poaching, and Pastiche: Tarantino Blurs Boundaries As a filmmaker, Tarantino is known for indulging in excess: violence, language, and aesthetics. Edward Gallafent characterised the director’s work as having a preoccupation with settings and journeys, violence (both emotional and physical), complicated chronological structures, and dissatisfying conclusions (3-4). Additionally, pieces of Tarantino’s cinematic fandom are inserted into his own films. Academic and popular critics continually note Tarantino’s rise as an obsessive video store clerk turned respected and eccentric auteur. Tarantino’s authorship lies mostly in his ability to borrow (or in his words, steal) narrative arcs, characterisations, and camera work from other filmmakers, and use them in ways that feel innovative and different from those past works. It is not that he borrows generally from movements, films, and filmmakers, but that he conscientiously lifts segments from works to incorporate into his text. In Postmodern Hollywood: What’s New in Film and Why It Makes Us Feel So Strange, Keith M. Booker contends that Tarantino’s work often straddles lines between simplistic reference for reference’s sake and meditations upon the roles of cinema (90). Booker dismisses claims for the latter, citing Tarantino’s unwillingness to contextualise the references in Pulp Fiction, such that the film is best described not an act of citation so much as a break with the historical. Tarantino’s lack of reverence provides him freedom to intermingle texts and tropes to fit his goals as a filmmaker, rather than working within the confines of generic narratives. Each film feels both apart and distinct from genre categories. Jackie Brown, for example, has many of the traits attached to blaxploitation, from its focus on drug culture, the casting of Pam Grier who gained status playing female leads in blaxploitation films, and extreme violence. Tarantino’s use of humour throughout, particular in his treatment of character types, plot twists, and self-aware musical cues distances the film from easy characterisation. It is, but isn’t. What is gained is a remediated conception of cinematic reality. The fictions created in films of the past are noted in Tarantino’s play with tropes. His mixes produce an extreme form of mediated reality – one that is full of excess, highly exaggerated, and completely composed of stolen frameworks. Tarantino continues his generic play in Django Unchained. While much of it does borrow heavily from 1960s and 1970s Western filmmakers like Leone, Corbucci, and Peckinpah (the significance of desolate landscapes, long takes, extreme violence), it also incorporates strands of buddy cop (partners with different backgrounds working together to correct wrongs), early blaxploitation (Broomhilda’s last name is von Shaft suggesting that she is an ancestor of blaxploitation icon John Shaft, the characterisation of Django as black antihero enacting revenge on white racists in power), and kung fu (revenge narrative, in addition to the extensive training moments between Dr. Schultz and Django). The familiar elements highlight the transgressions of genre adherence. The comfort of the western genre and its tropes eases the audience, only for Tarantino to incorporate those elements from outside the genre to spark interest, to shock, to remind audiences of the mediated reality onscreen. Tarantino has been criticised for his lack of depth and understanding regarding women and people of colour, despite his attempts to provide various leading and supporting roles for both. Django Unchained was particularly criticised for Tarantino’s use of the term nigger - over 100 instances in the film. Tarantino defended his decision by claiming historical accuracy, poetic license, and his desire to confront audiences with various levels of racism. Many, including Spike Lee, disagreed, arguing Tarantino had no claim to making a film about slavery. Lee stated through Twitter: “American Slavery Was Not A Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western. It Was A Holocaust. My Ancestors Are Slaves. Stolen From Africa. I Will Honor Them” (“Spike Lee on Django Unchained: Filmmaker Calls Movie ‘Disrespectful’”). Not only does Lee evoke the tragedy of the American slave trade and the significance of race within contemporary filmmaking, but he uses genre to underscore what he perceives is Tarantino’s lack of reverence to the issue of slavery and its aftermath in American culture. Django Unchained is both physically and emotionally brutal. The world created by Tarantino is culturally messy, as Italian composers rub elbows with black hip-hop artists, actors from films’ referenced in Django Unchained interact with new types of heroes. The amounts of references, people, and spectacles in his films have created a brand that is both hyperaware, but often critiqued as ambivalent. This is due in part to the perception of Tarantino as a filmmaker with no filter. His brand as a filmmaker is action ordered, excessive, and injected with his own fandom. He is an ultimate poacher of texts and it is this aesthetic, which has also made him a fan favourite amongst young cinephiles. Not only does he embrace the amount of play film offers, but he takes the familiar and makes it strange. The worlds he creates are hazier, darker, and unstable. Creating such a world in Django Unchained provides a lot of potential for reading race in film and American culture. He and his defenders have discussed this film as an “honest” portrayal of the effects of slavery and racial tension in the United States. This is also the world which acts as context for RZA’s The Man with the Iron Fists. Though a reference abandoned in Django Unchained, the connection between both films and both filmmakers pleasure in pastiche provide further insight to connections between film and race. Doing the Knowledge: RZA Pays Homage As a filmmaker, RZA utilises Tarantino’s filmmaking brand techniques to build his own homage and add to the body of kung-fu films. Doing so furnishes him the opportunity to rehash and reform narratives and tropes in ways that change familiar narrative structures and plot devices. In creating a film which relies on cinematic allusions to kung fu, RZA—as a fan, practitioner, and author—reconfigures kung fu from being an exploitative genre and reshapes its potential for representational empowerment. While Tarantino considers himself an unabashed thief of genre tropes, RZA envisions himself more as a student who pays homage to masters—among whom he includes Tarantino. Indeed, in an interview with MTV, RZA refers to Tarantino as his Sifu (a Chinese term for master or teacher) and credits him not only for teaching RZA about filmmaking, but also for providing him with his blessing to make his first feature length film (Downey, “RZA Recalls Learning from ‘The Master’ Quentin Tarantino”). RZA implies that mastery of one’s craft comes from incorporating influences while creating original work, not theft. For instance, he states that the Pink Blossom brothel—the locus for most of the action in the film—was inspired by the House of Blue Leaves restaurant, which functions in a similar capacity in Tarantino’s Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (“RZA Talks Sampling of Kung Fu Films for Movie & The Difference Between Biting vs. Influence”). Hip-hop is an art form in which its practitioners “partake of a discursive universe where skill at appropriating the fragments of a rapidly-changing world with verbal grace and dexterity is constituted as knowledge” (Potter 21). This knowledge draws upon not only the contemporary moment but also the larger body of recorded music and sound, both of which it “re-reads and Signifies upon through a complex set of strategies, including samplin’, cuttin’ (pastiche), and freestylin’ (improvisation)” (Potter 22). As an artist who came of age in hip-hop’s formative years and whose formal recording career began at the latter half of hip-hop’s Golden Age (often considered 1986-1993), RZA is a particularly adept cutter and sampler – indeed, as a sampler, RZA is often considered a master. While RZA’s samples run the gamut of the musical spectrum, he is especially known for sampling obscure, often indeterminable jazz and soul tracks. Imani Perry suggests that this measure of fidelity to the past is borne out of hip-hop’s ideological respect for ancestors and its inherent sense of nostalgia (54). Hallmarks of RZA’s sampling repertoire include dialog and sound effects from equally obscure kung fu films. RZA attributes his sampling of kung fu to an affinity for these films established in his youth after viewing noteworthy examples such as The 36th Chamber of Shaolin (1978) and Five Deadly Venoms (1978). These films have become a key aspect of his identity and everyday life (Gross, “RZA’s Edge: The RZA’s Guide to Kung Fu Films”). He speaks of his decision to make kung fu dialog an integral part of Wu-Tang Clan’s first album Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers): “My fantasy was to make a one-hour movie that people were just going to listen to. They would hear my movie and see it in their minds. I’d read comic books like that, with sonic effects and kung fu voices in my head. That makes it more exciting so I try to create music in the same way” (Gross, ““RZA’s Edge: The RZA’s Guide to Kung Fu Films”). Much like Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) and his other musical endeavours, The Man with the Iron Fists serves as further evidence of RZA’s hybrid identity., which sociologist Keri E. Iyall Smith suggests emerges from “a reflexive relationship between local and global” (3). According to popular music scholar Brett Lashua, hybrid identities “make and re-make culture through appropriating the cultural ‘raw materials’ of life in order to construct meaning in their own specific cultural localities. In a sense, they are ‘sampling’ from broader popular culture and reworking what they can take into their own specific local cultures” (“The Arts of the Remix: Ethnography and Rap”). The most overt instance of RZA’s hybridity is in regards to names, many of which are derived from the Gordon Liu film Shaolin and Wu-Tang (1983), in which the competing martial arts schools come together to fight a common foe. The film is the basis not only for the name of RZA’s group (Wu-Tang Clan) but also for the names of individual members (for instance, Master Killer—after the series to which the film belongs) and the group’s home base of Staten Island, New York, which they frequently refer to as “Shaolin.” The Man with the Iron Fists is another extension of this hybrid identity. Kung fu has long had meaning for African Americans particularly because these films frequently “focus narratively on either the triumph of the ‘little guy’ or ‘underdog’ or the nobility of the struggle to recognise humanity and virtue in all people, or some combination of both” (Ongiri 35). As evidence, Amy Obugo Ongiri points to films such as The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, a film about a peasant who learns martial arts at the Shaolin temple in order to avenge his family’s murder by the Manchu rulers (Ongiri 35). RZA reifies this notion in a GQ interview, where he speaks about The 36th Chamber of Shaolin specifically, noting its theme of rebellion against government oppression having relevance to his life as an African American (Pappademus, “This Movie Is Rated Wu”). RZA appropriates the humble origins of the peasant San Te (Gordon Liu), the protagonist of The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, in Thaddeus (whom RZA plays in the film), whose journey to saviour of Jungle Village begins with his being a slave in America. Indeed, one might argue that RZA’s construction of and role as Thaddeus is the ultimate realisation of the hybrid identity he has developed since becoming a popular recording artist. Just as Tarantino’s acting in his own films often reflects his identity as genre splicer and convention breaker (particularly since they are often self-referential), RZA’s portrayal of Thaddeus—as an African American, as a martial artist, and as a “conscious” human being—reflects the narrative RZA has constructed about his own life. Conclusion The same amount of play Tarantino has with conventions, particularly in characterisations and notions of heroism, is present in RZA’s Man with the Iron Fists. Both filmmakers poach from their favourite films and genres in order to create interpretations that feel both familiar and new. RZA follows Tarantino’s aesthetic of borrowing scenes directly from other films. Both filmmakers poach from films for their own devices, but in those mash-ups open up avenues for genre critique and identity formation. Tarantino is right to say that they are not solely homages, as homages honour the films in which they borrow. Tarantino and RZA do more through their poaching to stretch the boundaries of genres and films’ abilities to communicate with audiences. References “The Directors of Our Lifetime: In Their Own Words.” Empire Online. N.d. 8 May 2013 ‹http://www.empireonline.com/magazine/250/directors-of-our-lifetime/5.asp›. Booker, Keith M. Postmodern Hollywood: What’s New in Film and Why It Makes Us Feel So Strange. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007. Downey, Ryan J. “RZA Recalls Learning from ‘The Master’ Quentin Tarantino.” MTV. 30 August 2012. 14 July 2013 ‹http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1692872/rza-man-with-the-iron-fists-quentin-tarantino.jhtml›. Gallefent, Edward. Quentin Tarantino. London: Longman. 2005. Gross, Jason. “RZA’s Edge: The RZA’s Guide to Kung Fu Films.” Film Comment. N.d. 5 June 2013 ‹http://www.filmcomment.com/article/rzas-edge-the-rzas-guide-to-kung-fu-films›. Iyall Smith, Keri E. “Hybrid Identities: Theoretical Examinations.” Hybrid Identities: Theoretical and Empirical Examinations. Ed. Keri E. Iyall Smith and Patricia Leavy. Leiden: Brill, 2008. 3-12. Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.” Postmodern Culture. Ed. Hal Foster. London: Pluto, 1985. 111-125. Lashua, Brett. “The Arts of the Remix: Ethnography and Rap.” Anthropology Matters 8.2 (2006). 6 June 2013 ‹http://www.anthropologymatters.com›. “The Man with the Iron Fists – Who in the Cast Can F-U Up?” IronFistsMovie 21 Sep. 2012. YouTube. 8 May 2013 ‹http://youtu.be/bhJOQZFJfqA›. Pappademus, Alex. “This Movie Is Rated Wu.” GQ Nov. 2012. 6 June 2013 ‹http://www.gq.com/entertainment/movies-and-tv/201211/the-rza-man-with-the-iron-fists-wu-tang-clan›. Perry, Imani. Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2004. Potter, Russell. Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip-Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism. Albany, NY: SUNY P, 1995. “RZA Talks Sampling of Kung Fu Films for Movie & The Difference between Biting vs. Influence.” The Well Versed. 2 Nov. 2012. 5 June 2013 ‹http://thewellversed.com/2012/11/02/video-rza-talks-sampling-of-kung-fu-films-for-movie-the-difference-between-biting-vs-influence/›. Smith, Sarah. “Lip and Love: Subversive Repetition in the Pastiche Films of Tracey Moffat.” Screen 49.2 (Summer 2008): 209-215. Snedier, Jeff. “Rza Joins 'Django Unchained' Cast.” Variety 2 Nov. 2011. 14 June 2013 ‹http://variety.com/2011/film/news/rza-joins-django-unchained-cast-1118045503/›. “Spike Lee on Django Unchained: Filmmaker Calls Movie ‘Disrespectful.’” Huffington Post 24 Dec. 2012. 14 June 2013 ‹http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/23/spike-lee-django-unchained-movie-disrespectful_n_2356729.html›. Wu-Tang Clan. Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers). Loud, 1993. Filmography The 36th Chamber of Shaolin. Dir. Chia-Liang Lui. Perf. Chia Hui Lui, Lieh Lo, Chia Yung Lui. Shaw Brothers, 1978. Django Unchained. Dir. Quentin Tarantino. Perf. Jamie Foxx, Leonardo DiCaprio, Christoph Waltz. Miramax, 2012. Five Deadly Venoms. Dir. Cheh Chang. Perf. Sheng Chiang, Philip Kwok, Feng Lu. Shaw Brothers, 1978. Jackie Brown. Dir. Quentin Tarantino. Perf. Pam Grier, Samuel L. Jackson, Robert Forster. Miramax, 1997. Kill Bill: Vol. 1. Dir. Quentin Tarantino. Perf. Uma Thurman, David Carradine, Darryl Hannah. Miramax, 2003. The Man with the Iron Fists. Dir. RZA. Perf. RZA, Russell Crowe, Lucy Liu. Arcade Pictures, 2012. Pulp Fiction. Dir. Quentin Tarantino. Perf. John Travolta, Uma Thurman, Samuel L. Jackson. Miramax, 1994. Shaolin and Wu-Tang. Dir. Chiu Hui Liu. Perf. Chiu Hui Liu, Adam Cheng, Li Ching.

IntroductionThe Internet (especially in the so-called Web 2.0 phase), digital media and file-sharing networks have thrust copyright law under public scrutiny, provoking discourses questioning what is fair in the digital age. Accessible hardware and software has led to prosumerism – creativity blending media consumption with media production to create new works that are freely disseminated online via popular video-sharing Web sites such as YouTube or genre specific music sites like GYBO (“Get Your Bootleg On”) amongst many others. The term “prosumer” is older than the Web, and the conceptual convergence of producer and consumer roles is certainly not new, for “at electric speeds the consumer becomes producer as the public becomes participant role player” (McLuhan 4). Similarly, Toffler’s “Third Wave” challenges “old power relationships” and promises to “heal the historic breach between producer and consumer, giving rise to the ‘prosumer’ economics” (27). Prosumption blurs the traditionally separate consumer and producer creating a new creative era of mass customisation of artefacts culled from the (copyrighted) media landscape (Tapscott 62-3). Simultaneously, corporate interests dependent upon the protections provided by copyright law lobby for augmented rights and actively defend their intellectual property through law suits, takedown notices and technological reinforcement. Despite a lack demonstrable economic harm in many cases, the propertarian approach is winning and frequently leading to absurd results (Collins).The balance between private and public interests in creative works is facilitated by the doctrine of fair use (as codified in the United States Copyright Act 1976, section 107). The majority of copyright laws contain “fair” exceptions to claims of infringement, but fair use is characterised by a flexible, open-ended approach that allows the law to flex with the times. Until recently the defence was unique to the U.S., but on 2 January Israel amended its copyright laws to include a fair use defence. (For an overview of the new Israeli fair use exception, see Efroni.) Despite its flexibility, fair use has been systematically eroded by ever encroaching copyrights. This paper argues that copyright enforcement has spun out of control and the raison d’être of the law has shifted from being “an engine of free expression” (Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. v. Nation Enterprises 471 U.S. 539, 558 (1985)) towards a “legal regime for intellectual property that increasingly looks like the law of real property, or more properly an idealized construct of that law, one in which courts seeks out and punish virtually any use of an intellectual property right by another” (Lemley 1032). Although the copyright landscape appears bleak, two recent cases suggest that fair use has not fallen by the wayside and may well recover. This paper situates fair use as an essential legal and cultural mechanism for optimising creative expression.A Brief History of CopyrightThe law of copyright extends back to eighteenth century England when the Statute of Anne (1710) was enacted. Whilst the length of this paper precludes an in depth analysis of the law and its export to the U.S., it is important to stress the goals of copyright. “Copyright in the American tradition was not meant to be a “property right” as the public generally understands property. It was originally a narrow federal policy that granted a limited trade monopoly in exchange for universal use and access” (Vaidhyanathan 11). Copyright was designed as a right limited in scope and duration to ensure that culturally important creative works were not the victims of monopolies and were free (as later mandated in the U.S. Constitution) “to promote the progress.” During the 18th century English copyright discourse Lord Camden warned against propertarian approaches lest “all our learning will be locked up in the hands of the Tonsons and the Lintons of the age, who will set what price upon it their avarice chooses to demand, till the public become as much their slaves, as their own hackney compilers are” (Donaldson v. Becket 17 Cobbett Parliamentary History, col. 1000). Camden’s sentiments found favour in subsequent years with members of the North American judiciary reiterating that copyright was a limited right in the interests of society—the law’s primary beneficiary (see for example, Wheaton v. Peters 33 US 591 [1834]; Fox Film Corporation v. Doyal 286 US 123 [1932]; US v. Paramount Pictures 334 US 131 [1948]; Mazer v. Stein 347 US 201, 219 [1954]; Twentieth Century Music Corp. v. Aitken 422 U.S. 151 [1975]; Aronson v. Quick Point Pencil Co. 440 US 257 [1979]; Dowling v. United States 473 US 207 [1985]; Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. v. Nation Enterprises 471 U.S. 539 [1985]; Luther R. Campbell a.k.a. Luke Skyywalker, et al. v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc. 510 U.S 569 [1994]). Putting the “Fair” in Fair UseIn Folsom v. Marsh 9 F. Cas. 342 (C.C.D. Mass. 1841) (No. 4,901) Justice Storey formulated the modern shape of fair use from a wealth of case law extending back to 1740 and across the Atlantic. Over the course of one hundred years the English judiciary developed a relatively cohesive set of principles governing the use of a first author’s work by a subsequent author without consent. Storey’s synthesis of these principles proved so comprehensive that later English courts would look to his decision for guidance (Scott v. Stanford L.R. 3 Eq. 718, 722 (1867)). Patry explains fair use as integral to the social utility of copyright to “encourage. . . learned men to compose and write useful books” by allowing a second author to use, under certain circumstances, a portion of a prior author’s work, where the second author would himself produce a work promoting the goals of copyright (Patry 4-5).Fair use is a safety valve on copyright law to prevent oppressive monopolies, but some scholars suggest that fair use is less a defence and more a right that subordinates copyrights. Lange and Lange Anderson argue that the doctrine is not fundamentally about copyright or a system of property, but is rather concerned with the recognition of the public domain and its preservation from the ever encroaching advances of copyright (2001). Fair use should not be understood as subordinate to the exclusive rights of copyright owners. Rather, as Lange and Lange Anderson claim, the doctrine should stand in the superior position: the complete spectrum of ownership through copyright can only be determined pursuant to a consideration of what is required by fair use (Lange and Lange Anderson 19). The language of section 107 suggests that fair use is not subordinate to the bundle of rights enjoyed by copyright ownership: “Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work . . . is not an infringement of copyright” (Copyright Act 1976, s.107). Fair use is not merely about the marketplace for copyright works; it is concerned with what Weinreb refers to as “a community’s established practices and understandings” (1151-2). This argument boldly suggests that judicial application of fair use has consistently erred through subordinating the doctrine to copyright and considering simply the effect of the appropriation on the market place for the original work.The emphasis on economic factors has led courts to sympathise with copyright owners leading to a propertarian or Blackstonian approach to copyright (Collins; Travis) propagating the myth that any use of copyrighted materials must be licensed. Law and media reports alike are potted with examples. For example, in Bridgeport Music, Inc., et al v. Dimension Films et al 383 F. 3d 400 (6th Cir. 2004) a Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals held that the transformative use of a three-note guitar sample infringed copyrights and that musicians must obtain licence from copyright owners for every appropriated audio fragment regardless of duration or recognisability. Similarly, in 2006 Christopher Knight self-produced a one-minute television advertisement to support his campaign to be elected to the board of education for Rockingham County, North Carolina. As a fan of Star Wars, Knight used a makeshift Death Star and lightsaber in his clip, capitalising on the imagery of the Jedi Knight opposing the oppressive regime of the Empire to protect the people. According to an interview in The Register the advertisement was well received by local audiences prompting Knight to upload it to his YouTube channel. Several months later, Knight’s clip appeared on Web Junk 2.0, a cable show broadcast by VH1, a channel owned by media conglomerate Viacom. Although his permission was not sought, Knight was pleased with the exposure, after all “how often does a local school board ad wind up on VH1?” (Metz). Uploading the segment of Web Junk 2.0 featuring the advertisement to YouTube, however, led Viacom to quickly issue a take-down notice citing copyright infringement. Knight expressed his confusion at the apparent unfairness of the situation: “Viacom says that I can’t use my clip showing my commercial, claiming copy infringement? As we say in the South, that’s ass-backwards” (Metz).The current state of copyright law is, as Patry says, “depressing”:We are well past the healthy dose stage and into the serious illness stage ... things are getting worse, not better. Copyright law has abandoned its reason for being: to encourage learning and the creation of new works. Instead, its principal functions now are to preserve existing failed business models, to suppress new business models and technologies, and to obtain, if possible, enormous windfall profits from activity that not only causes no harm, but which is beneficial to copyright owners. Like Humpty-Dumpty, the copyright law we used to know can never be put back together.The erosion of fair use by encroaching private interests represented by copyrights has led to strong critiques leveled at the judiciary and legislators by Lessig, McLeod and Vaidhyanathan. “Free culture” proponents warn that an overly strict copyright regime unbalanced by an equally prevalent fair use doctrine is dangerous to creativity, innovation, culture and democracy. After all, “few, if any, things ... are strictly original throughout. Every book in literature, science and art, borrows, and must necessarily borrow, and use much which was well known and used before. No man creates a new language for himself, at least if he be a wise man, in writing a book. He contents himself with the use of language already known and used and understood by others” (Emerson v. Davis, 8 F. Cas. 615, 619 (No. 4,436) (CCD Mass. 1845), qted in Campbell v. Acuff-Rose, 62 U.S.L.W. at 4171 (1994)). The rise of the Web 2.0 phase with its emphasis on end-user created content has led to an unrelenting wave of creativity, and much of it incorporates or “mashes up” copyright material. As Negativland observes, free appropriation is “inevitable when a population bombarded with electronic media meets the hardware [and software] that encourages them to capture it” and creatively express themselves through appropriated media forms (251). The current state of copyright and fair use is bleak, but not beyond recovery. Two recent cases suggest a resurgence of the ideology underpinning the doctrine of fair use and the role played by copyright.Let’s Go CrazyIn “Let’s Go Crazy #1” on YouTube, Holden Lenz (then eighteen months old) is caught bopping to a barely recognizable recording of Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy” in his mother’s Pennsylvanian kitchen. The twenty-nine second long video was viewed a mere twenty-eight times by family and friends before Stephanie Lenz received an email from YouTube informing her of its compliance with a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) take-down notice issued by Universal, copyright owners of Prince’s recording (McDonald). Lenz has since filed a counterclaim against Universal and YouTube has reinstated the video. Ironically, the media exposure surrounding Lenz’s situation has led to the video being viewed 633,560 times at the time of writing. Comments associated with the video indicate a less than reverential opinion of Prince and Universal and support the fairness of using the song. On 8 Aug. 2008 a Californian District Court denied Universal’s motion to dismiss Lenz’s counterclaim. The question at the centre of the court judgment was whether copyright owners should consider “the fair use doctrine in formulating a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.” The court ultimately found in favour of Lenz and also reaffirmed the position of fair use in relation to copyright. Universal rested its argument on two key points. First, that copyright owners cannot be expected to consider fair use prior to issuing takedown notices because fair use is a defence, invoked after the act rather than a use authorized by the copyright owner or the law. Second, because the DMCA does not mention fair use, then there should be no requirement to consider it, or at the very least, it should not be considered until it is raised in legal defence.In rejecting both arguments the court accepted Lenz’s argument that fair use is an authorised use of copyrighted materials because the doctrine of fair use is embedded into the Copyright Act 1976. The court substantiated the point by emphasising the language of section 107. Although fair use is absent from the DMCA, the court reiterated that it is part of the Copyright Act and that “notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A” a fair use “is not an infringement of copyright” (s.107, Copyright Act 1976). Overzealous rights holders frequently abuse the DMCA as a means to quash all use of copyrighted materials without considering fair use. This decision reaffirms that fair use “should not be considered a bizarre, occasionally tolerated departure from the grand conception of the copyright design” but something that it is integral to the constitution of copyright law and essential in ensuring that copyright’s goals can be fulfilled (Leval 1100). Unlicensed musical sampling has never fared well in the courtroom. Three decades of rejection and admonishment by judges culminated in Bridgeport Music, Inc., et al v. Dimension Films et al 383 F. 3d 400 (6th Cir. 2004): “Get a license or do not sample. We do not see this stifling creativity in any significant way” was the ruling on an action brought against an unlicensed use of a three-note guitar sample under section 114, an audio piracy provision. The Bridgeport decision sounded a death knell for unlicensed sampling, ensuring that only artists with sufficient capital to pay the piper could legitimately be creative with the wealth of recorded music available. The cost of licensing samples can often outweigh the creative merit of the act itself as discussed by McLeod (86) and Beaujon (25). In August 2008 the Supreme Court of New York heard EMI v. Premise Media in which EMI sought an injunction against an unlicensed fifteen second excerpt of John Lennon’s “Imagine” featured in Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, a controversial documentary canvassing alleged chilling of intelligent design proponents in academic circles. (The family of John Lennon and EMI had previously failed to persuade a Manhattan federal court in a similar action.) The court upheld Premise Media’s arguments for fair use and rejected the Bridgeport approach on which EMI had rested its entire complaint. Justice Lowe criticised the Bridgeport court for its failure to examine the legislative intent of section 114 suggesting that courts should look to the black letter of the law rather than blindly accept propertarian arguments. This decision is of particular importance because it establishes that fair use applies to unlicensed use of sound recordings and re-establishes de minimis use.ConclusionThis paper was partly inspired by the final entry on eminent copyright scholar William Patry’s personal copyright law blog (1 Aug. 2008). A copyright lawyer for over 25 years, Patry articulated his belief that copyright law has swung too far away from its initial objectives and that balance could never be restored. The two cases presented in this paper demonstrate that fair use – and therefore balance – can be recovered in copyright. The federal Supreme Court and lower courts have stressed that copyright was intended to promote creativity and have upheld the fair doctrine, but in order for the balance to exist in copyright law, cases must come before the courts; copyright myth must be challenged. As McLeod states, “the real-world problems occur when institutions that actually have the resources to defend themselves against unwarranted or frivolous lawsuits choose to take the safe route, thus eroding fair use”(146-7). ReferencesBeaujon, Andrew. “It’s Not the Beat, It’s the Mocean.” CMJ New Music Monthly. April 1999.Collins, Steve. “Good Copy, Bad Copy: Covers, Sampling and Copyright.” M/C Journal 8.3 (2005). 26 Aug. 2008 ‹http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0507/02-collins.php›.———. “‘Property Talk’ and the Revival of Blackstonian Copyright.” M/C Journal 9.4 (2006). 26 Aug. 2008 ‹http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0609/5-collins.php›.Donaldson v. Becket 17 Cobbett Parliamentary History, col. 953.Efroni, Zohar. “Israel’s Fair Use.” The Center for Internet and Society (2008). 26 Aug. 2008 ‹http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/node/5670›.Lange, David, and Jennifer Lange Anderson. “Copyright, Fair Use and Transformative Critical Appropriation.” Conference on the Public Domain, Duke Law School. 2001. 26 Aug. 2008 ‹http://www.law.duke.edu/pd/papers/langeand.pdf›.Lemley, Mark. “Property, Intellectual Property, and Free Riding.” Texas Law Review 83 (2005): 1031.Lessig, Lawrence. The Future of Ideas. New York: Random House, 2001.———. Free Culture. New York: Penguin, 2004.Leval, Pierre. “Toward a Fair Use Standard.” Harvard Law Review 103 (1990): 1105.McDonald, Heather. “Holden Lenz, 18 Months, versus Prince and Universal Music Group.” About.com: Music Careers 2007. 26 Aug. 2008 ‹http://musicians.about.com/b/2007/10/27/holden-lenz-18-months-versus-prince-and-universal-music-group.htm›.McLeod, Kembrew. “How Copyright Law Changed Hip Hop: An interview with Public Enemy’s Chuck D and Hank Shocklee.” Stay Free 2002. 26 Aug. 2008 ‹http://www.stayfreemagazine.org/archives/20/public_enemy.html›.———. Freedom of Expression: Overzealous Copyright Bozos and Other Enemies of Creativity. United States: Doubleday, 2005.McLuhan, Marshall, and Barrington Nevitt. Take Today: The Executive as Dropout. Ontario: Longman Canada, 1972.Metz, Cade. “Viacom Slaps YouTuber for Behaving like Viacom.” The Register 2007. 26 Aug. 2008 ‹http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/08/30/viacom_slaps_pol/›.Negativland, ed. Fair Use: The Story of the Letter U and the Numeral 2. Concord: Seeland, 1995.Patry, William. The Fair Use Privilege in Copyright Law. Washington DC: Bureau of National Affairs, 1985.———. “End of the Blog.” The Patry Copyright Blog. 1 Aug. 2008. 27 Aug. 2008 ‹http://williampatry.blogspot.com/2008/08/end-of-blog.html›.Tapscott, Don. The Digital Economy: Promise and Peril in the Age of Networked Intelligence. New York: McGraw Hill, 1996.Toffler, Alvin. The Third Wave. London, Glasgow, Sydney, Auckland. Toronto, Johannesburg: William Collins, 1980.Travis, Hannibal. “Pirates of the Information Infrastructure: Blackstonian Copyright and the First Amendment.” Berkeley Technology Law Journal, Vol. 15 (2000), No. 777.Vaidhyanathan, Siva. Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity. New York; London: New York UP, 2003.

In an article in the Sunday Tasmanian shortly after the deaths of Melbourne teenagers Jodie Gater and Stephanie Gestier in 2007, Tasmanian Catholic Schools Parents and Friends Federation president Bill Button claimed: “Parents are concerned because all of a sudden their child, if they have access to a computer, can turn into an Emo” (qtd. in Vowles 1).For a few months in 2007, the dangers of emo and computer use were significant themes in Australian newspaper coverage. Emo, an abbreviation of the terms “emocore” or “emotional hardcore”, is a melodic subgenre of punk rock music, characterised by “emotional” or personal themes. Its followers, who adopt a look that includes black stovepipe jeans, dyed black hair and side-parted long fringes, might merely have been one of the many “tribes” (Bennett 605) that characterise contemporary youth culture. However, over an approximately five-month period in 2007, the deaths of three teenagers in two separate incidents—the murder Carly Ryan in February and the suicides of Jodie Gater and Stephanie Gestier in April—were linked to the emo subculture and to the social networking site MySpace, both of which were presented as dangerous and worrying developments in contemporary youth culture.This paper explores the media discourse surrounding emo and social networking technologies via a textual analysis of key reports and commentary pieces published in major metropolitan and national newspapers around the times of the three deaths. Although only a small selection of the 140-odd articles published Australia-wide is discussed here, those selected are indicative of broader trends in the newspaper coverage, and offer a means of examining how these incidents were constructed and understood within mainstream media discourse.Moral panics in relation to youth music and subculture are not uncommon in the news and other media (Cohen; Goode and Ben-Yehuda; Redhead; Rose 124-145; Weinstein 245-263; Wright). Moral panics related to social networking technologies have also been subject to academic study (Hinduja and Patchin 126; Livingstone 395; Marwick). In these cases, moral panic is typically understood as a force of normalisation and social control. The media discourses surrounding the deaths of the three young women possessed many of the features of moral panic described in this literature, including a build-up of concern disproportionate to “real” risk of harm (see Goode and Ben-Yehuda 33-41). But while emo youth were sometimes constructed as a straightforward “folk devil” (Cohen 11) or “enemy” (Goode and Ben-Yehuda 31) in need of clear sanctions—or, alternatively, as victims of a clear folk devil or enemy—the “problem” of emo was also framed as a product of much broader problems of youth culture.Connections between emo, MySpace, the deaths of the three young women were only ever tenuously established in the news reports and commentaries. That the stories appeared to be ultimately concerned with a broader group of (non-subculturally affiliated) young people suggests that this coverage can be seen as symptomatic of what John Hartley describes—in the context of reporting on young people more generally—as a “profound uncertainty in the textual system of journalism about where the line that defines the boundary of the social should be drawn” (17). The result is a “cultural thinking-out-loud” (Hartley 17) in which broader cultural anxieties are expressed and explored, although they are not always clearly articulated. While there were some attempts in these reports and commentaries on the three “emo deaths” to both mobilise and express specific fears (such as the concern that computer access can turn a child “into an Emo”), the newspaper coverage also expressed broader anxieties about contemporary youth culture. These can be described as anxieties about disclosure.In the cases of Carly Ryan, Jodie Gater and Stephanie Gestier, these were disclosures that were seen as simultaneously excessive and inadequate. Specifically, the newspaper coverage focused on both the dangers of young people’s disclosures of traditionally private material, and the ways in which the apparent secrecy of these disclosures made them inaccessible to adult authorities who could otherwise have “done something” to prevent the tragedies from occurring.Although some of these concerns were connected to the specificities of emo subcultural expression—the “excessive” emotionality on display and the impenetrability of subcultural imagery respectively—they were on the whole linked to a broader problem in contemporary youth culture that was seen to apply to all young people, whether or not they were emo-identified. Specifically, the deaths of Carly Ryan, Jodie Gater and Stephanie Gestier provided opportunities for the expression of anxieties that the private lives of young people were becoming increasingly “unknowable” to adult authorities, and, hence, that youth culture itself was increasingly “unknowable”.The Case of Carly RyanIn February 2007, the body of 15-year-old Carly Ryan was found in Horseshoe Bay at Port Elliot, just south of Adelaide. Several weeks later, a 48-year-old man and his 17-year-old son were arrested for her murder. The murder trial began January 2009, with the case still continuing at the time of writing. In the early reports of her death, particularly in Adelaide’s Advertiser, Ryan’s MySpace page was the focus of much discussion, since the teenager was understood to have presented an image of herself on the site that left her vulnerable to predators, including to one of her alleged killers with whom she had been regularly communicating in the weeks leading up to her murder (Littlely, Salter, and Wheatley 4; Hunt 2; Wheatley 4).The main report in The Advertiser, described Ryan’s MySpace page as “bizarre” and as “paint[ing] a disturbing picture of a world of drugs and sex” (Littlely, Salter and Wheatley 4). Ryan was reported as listing her interests as “drugs, smoking, music and sex”, to have described herself as “bisexual”, and to have uploaded images of a “girl injecting herself, a woman with a crucifix rammed down her throat and a woman with her lips stitched together” (Littlely, Salter, and Wheatley 4).Attempts were made to link such “graphic” imagery to the emo subculture (Littlely, Salter, and Wheatley 1; see also O’Donohue 5). The imagery was seen as subcultural insofar as it was seen to reflect a “bizarre teenage ‘goth’ and ‘emo’ world” (Littlely, Salter, and Wheatley 1), a world constructed both as dangerous (in the sense that her apparent involvement in subcultural activities was presented as “disturbing” and something that put her at risk of harm) and impenetrable (in the sense that subcultural imagery was understood not simply as harmful but also as “bizarre”). This linking of Ryan’s death to the emo and goth subcultures was done despite the fact that it was never clearly substantiated that the teenager did indeed classify herself as either “emo” or “goth”, and despite the fact that such links were contested by Ryan’s friends and family (see: “Gothic Images” 15; Riches 15).The repeated linking, then, of Ryan’s death to her (largely unconfirmed) subcultural involvement can be seen as one way of containing the anxieties surrounding her apparently “graphic” and “inappropriate” online disclosures. That is, if such disclosures can be seen as the expressions of a minority subcultural membership, rather than a tendency characteristic of young people more generally, then the risks they pose may be limited only to subcultural youth. Such a view is expressed in comments like Bill Button’s about computer use and emo culture, cited above. Research, however, suggests that with or without subcultural affiliation, some young users of MySpace use the site to demonstrate familiarity with adult-oriented behaviours by “posting sexually charged comments or pictures to corroborate their self-conception of maturity”—irrespective of whether these reflect actual behaviours offline (Hinduja and Patchin 136, 138). As such, this material is inevitably a construction rather than a straightforward reflection of identity (Liu).On the whole, Ryan’s death was presented as simultaneously the product of a dangerous subcultural affiliation, and an extreme case of the dangers posed by unsupervised Internet use to all young people, not just to those emo-identified. For example, the Sunday Mail article “Cyber Threat: The New Place Our Kids Love to Play” warned of the risks of disclosing too much personal information online, suggesting that all young people should restrict access to private information only to people that they know (Novak 12).Such reports reflect a more widespread concern, identified by Marwick, that social networking sites lower cultural expectations around privacy and encourage young people to expose more of their lives online, hence making them vulnerable to potential harm (see also De Souza and Dick; Hinduja and Patchin). In the case of Carly Ryan, the concern that too much (and inappropriate) online disclosure poses dangers for young people is also subtended by anxieties that the teenager and her friends also did not disclose enough information—or, at least, did not disclose in a way that could be made comprehensible and accessible to adult authorities.As a result, the so-called “graphic” material on Ryan’s MySpace page (and on the pages of her friends) was described as both inappropriately public and inappropriately hidden from public view. For example, a report in The Advertiser spoke of a “web of secret internet message boards” that “could potentially hold vital clues to investigating detectives” but which “have been blocked by their creators to everyone but [Ryan’s] tight-knit group of friends” (Littlely, Salter, and Wheatley 1). This “web of secret internet message boards” was, in fact, MySpace pages set to “private”: that is, pages accessible to approved friends only.The privacy settings on profiles are thus presented as an obfuscatory mechanism, a refusal on the part of young people to disclose information that might be of assistance to the murder case. Yet these young people were conforming to the very advice about online safety provided in many of the news reports (such as the article by Novak) and echoed in material released by the Australian Government (such as the Cybersmart Guide for Families): that is, in order to protect their privacy online, they should restrict access to their social networking profiles only to friends that they know.This contradictory message—that too much disclosure online poses safety risks, while conservative approaches to online privacy are evidence of secrecy and obfuscation—expresses a rather tangled set of anxieties about contemporary youth culture. This is part of the “cultural thinking-out-loud” that Hartley characterises as a feature of news reporting on youth more generally. The attempt to make sense of an (apparently motiveless) murder of a young woman with reference to a set of contemporary youth cultural practices that are described as both dangerous and incomprehensible not only constructs technology, subculture and young people as problems to be “fixed”, but also highlights the limited ways through which mainstream news coverage comes to “know” and understand youth culture.Jodie Gater and Stephanie Gestier: The “MySpace Suicide Girls” News reporting on Carly Ryan’s death presented youth culture as a disturbing and dangerous underworld hidden from adult view and essential “unknowable” by adult authorities. In contrast, the reports and commentaries on the deaths of Jodie Gater and Stephanie Gestier only a few months later sought to subsume events that may otherwise have been viewed as inexplicable into categories of the already-known. Gater and Gestier were presented not as victims of a disturbing and secret underground subculture, but a more fully knowable mainstream bullying culture. As a result, the dangers of disclosure were presented differently in this case.In April 2007, the bodies of 16-year-old friends Jodie Gater and Stephanie Gestier were found in bushland on the outskirts of Melbourne. The pair was understood to have hanged themselves as part of a suicide pact. Like the reporting on Carly Ryan’s death, anxieties were raised, particularly in the Melbourne papers, about “teenagers’ secret world” in which “introspective, lonely, misunderstood and depressed” young people sought solace in the communities of emo and MySpace (Dubecki 3).Also similar was that the dangers posed by emo formed part of the way this story was reported, particularly with respect to emo’s alleged connection to self-harming practices. The connections between the emo subculture and the girls’ suicides were often vague and non-specific: Gater and Gestier’s MySpace pages were described as “odes to subculture” (Dowsley 73) and their suicides “influenced by youth subcultures” (Dubecki and Oakes 1), but it was not clearly substantiated in the reports that either Gater or Gestier identified with the emo (or any) subculture (see: Dubecki 3).It was similarly the case that the stories connected the deaths of Gater and Gestier to personal disclosures on MySpace. In contrast to the reporting on Carly Ryan’s murder, however, there were fewer concerns about inappropriate and overly personal disclosures online, and more worries that the teenagers’ online disclosures had been missed by both the girls’ friends and by adult authorities. The apparent suicide warning messages left on the girls’ MySpace pages in the months leading up to the their deaths, including “it’s over for me, I can’t take it!” and “let Steph and me be free” (qtd. in Oakes 5), were seen as evidence of the inaccessibility of young people’s cries for help in an online environment. Headlines such as “Teen Cries for Help Lost in Cyberspace” (Nolan 4) suggest that the concern in this case was less about the “secrecy” of youth culture, and more about an inability of parents (and other adult authorities) to penetrate online youth culture in order to hear disclosures made.As a consequence, parents were encouraged to access these disclosures in other ways: Andrea Burns in an opinion column for the Sunday Herald Sun, for example, urged parents to open the lines of communication with their teenagers and not “leave the young to suffer in silence” (108). An article in the Sunday Age claimed developmental similarities between toddlers and teenagers necessitated increased parental involvement in the lives of teens (Susan Sawyer qtd. in Egan 12). Of course, as Livingstone notes, part of the pleasure of social networking sites for young people is the possibility of escape from the surveillance of parental authority (396). Young people’s status as a social category “to be watched” (Davis 251), then, becomes challenged by the obvious difficulties of regular parental access to teenagers’ online profiles. Perhaps acknowledging the inherent difficulties of fully “knowing” online youth culture, and in turn seeking to make the Gater/Gestier tragedy more explicable and comprehensible, many of the articles attempted to make sense of the apparently unknowable in terms of the familiar and already-known. In this case, the complexities of Gater and Gestier’s deaths were presented as a response to something far more comprehensible to adult authorities: school bullying.It is important to note that many of the articles did not follow government recommendations on the reporting of suicide as they often did not consider the teenagers’ deaths in the context of depression or other mental health risks (see: Blood et al. 9). Instead, some reports, such as the Neil McMahon’s story for The Sydney Morning Herald, claimed that the girls’ deaths could be linked to bullying—according to one friend Stephanie Gestier was “being bullied really badly” at school (1). Others simply assumed, but did not substantiate, a connection between the deaths of the two teenagers and the experience of bullying.For instance, in an opinion piece for The Australian, Gater and Gestier’s deaths are a segue for discussing teenage bullying more generally: “were Gater and Gestier bullied?” writer Jack Sargeant asks. “I do not know but I imagine they were” (10). Similarly, in an opinion piece for the Herald Sun entitled “Why Kids Today Feel so ‘Emo’”, Labor MP Lindsay Tanner begins by questioning the role of the emo subculture in the deaths of Gater and Gestier, but quickly shifts to a broader discussion of bullying. He writes: “Emos sound a lot like kids who typically get bullied and excluded by other kids [...] I’m not really in a position to know, but I can’t help wondering” (Tanner 21).Like Sargeant, Tanner does not make a conclusive link between emo, MySpace, suicide and bullying, and so instead shifts from a discussion of the specifics of the Gater/Gestier case to a discussion of the broader problems their suicides were seen to be symptomatic of. This was assisted by Tanner’s claims that emo is simply a characteristic of “kids today” rather than as a specific subcultural affiliation. Emo, he argued, “now seems to reflect quite a bit more than just particular music and fashion styles”: it is seen to represent a much wider problem in youth culture (Tanner 21).Emo thus functioned as a “way in” for critics who perhaps found it easier to (initially) talk about suicide as a risk for those on the cultural fringe, rather than the adolescent mainstream. As a result, the news coverage circled between the risks posed by subcultural involvement and the idea that any or all young people could be at risk of suicide. By conceiving explicit displays of emotionality online as the expression of bullied young people at risk of suicide, otherwise ambiguous disclosures and representations of emotion could be made knowable as young people’s cries for (parental and adult) help.ConclusionIn the newspaper reporting and commentary on the deaths of Carly Ryan, Jodie Gater and Stephanie Gestier, young people are thought to disclose both too much and not enough. The “cultural thinking-out-loud” (Hartley 17) that characterised this type of journalism presented young people’s disclosures as putting them at risk of harm by others, or as revealing that they are at risk of self harm or suicide. At the same time, however, these reports and commentaries also expressed anxieties that young people do not disclose in ways that can be rendered easily knowable, controllable or resolvable by adult authorities. Certainly, the newspaper coverage works to construct and legitimise ideals of parental surveillance of teenagers that speak to the broader discourses of Internet safety that have become prominent in recent years.What is perhaps more significant about this material, however, is that by constructing young people as a whole as “emotional people” (Vowles 1) in need of intervention, surveillance and supervision, and thereby subsuming the specific concerns about the emo subculture and social networking technologies into an expression of more generalised concerns about the “unknowability” of young people as a whole, the newspaper coverage is, in John Hartley’s words, “almost always about something else” (16). Emo and social networking, then, are not so much classic “folk devils”, but are “ways in” for expressing anxieties that are not always clearly and consistently articulated. In expressing anxieties about the “unknowability” of contemporary youth culture, then, the newspaper coverage ultimately also contributed to it. This highlights both the complexity in which moral panic discourse functions in media reporting, and the ways in which more complete understandings of emo, social networking technologies and youth culture became constrained by discourses that treated them as essentially interchangeable.ReferencesAdamson, Kate. “Emo Death Arrest.” Sunday Herald Sun 4 Mar. 2007: 12.Bennett, Andy. “Subcultures or Neo-Tribes? 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Australian Communications and Media Authority, 2009. 24 Sep. 2009 ‹http://www.cybersmart.gov.au/Parents/Family safety resources/information for you to download.aspx›.Davis, Mark. Gangland: Cultural Elites and the New Generationalism. St Leonards: Allen and Unwin, 1997.De Souza, Zaineb, and Geoffrey N. Dick. “Disclosure of Information by Children in Social Networking: Not Just a Case of ‘You Show Me Yours and I’ll Show You Mine.’” International Journal of Information Management 29 (2009): 255–61.Dowsley, Anthony. “Websites Hold Key to Teens’ Suicides.” The Daily Telegraph 28 March 2007: 73.Dubecki, Larissa. “Teenagers’ Secret World.” The Age 28 April 2007: 3.Dubecki, Larissa, and Dan Oakes. “Lost in Cyberspace: Fears That New Networks Are Breeding Grounds for Real-Life Tragedies.” The Age 24 April: 1.Egan, Carmel. “Being 16.” Sunday Age 29 Mar. 2007: 12.Goode, Erich, and Nachman Ben-Yehuda. Moral Panics: The Social Construction of Deviance. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002.“Gothic Images Appealed to Artistic Soul.” The Advertiser 24 Feb. 2007: 15.Hartley, John. “‘When Your Child Grows Up Too Fast’: Juvenation and the Boundaries of the Social in the News Media.” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 12.1 (1998): 9–30.Hinduja, Sameer, and Justin W. Patchin. “Personal Information of Adolescents on the Internet: A Qualitative Content Analysis of MySpace.” Journal of Adolescence 31 (2008): 125-46. Hunt, Nigel. “Teen Murder Breakthrough.” Sunday Mail 4 Mar. 2007: 1-2.Littlely, Brian, Chris Salter, and Kim Wheatley. “Net Hunt for Murder Clues.” The Advertiser 23 Feb. 2007: 1, 4.Livingstone, Sonia. “Taking Risky Opportunities in Youthful Content Creation: Teenagers’ Use of Social Networking Sites for Intimacy, Privacy and Self-Expression.” New Media & Society 10.3 (2008): 393-411.Liu, Hugo. “Social Network Profiles as Taste Performances.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13 (2008): 252-275.Marwick, Alice. “To Catch a Predator? 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From elephants to ABBA fans, silicon to hormone, the following discussion uses a new research method to look at printed text, motion pictures and a teenage rebel icon. If by ‘print’ we mean a mechanically reproduced impression of a cultural symbol in a medium, then printing has been with us since before microdot security prints were painted onto cars, before voice prints, laser prints, network servers, record pressings, motion picture prints, photo prints, colour woodblock prints, before books, textile prints, and footprints. If we accept that higher mammals such as elephants have a learnt culture, then it is possible to extend a definition of printing beyond Homo sapiens. Poole reports that elephants mechanically trumpet reproductions of human car horns into the air surrounding their society. If nothing else, this cross-species, cross-cultural reproduction, this ‘ability to mimic’ is ‘another sign of their intelligence’. Observation of child development suggests that the first significant meaningful ‘impression’ made on the human mind is that of the face of the child’s nurturer – usually its mother. The baby’s mind forms an ‘impression’, a mental print, a reproducible memory data set, of the nurturer’s face, voice, smell, touch, etc. That face is itself a cultural construct: hair style, makeup, piercings, tattoos, ornaments, nutrition-influenced skin and smell, perfume, temperature and voice. A mentally reproducible pattern of a unique face is formed in the mind, and we use that pattern to distinguish ‘familiar and strange’ in our expanding social orbit. The social relations of patterned memory – of imprinting – determine the extent to which we explore our world (armed with research aids such as text print) or whether we turn to violence or self-harm (Bretherton). While our cultural artifacts (such as vellum maps or networked voice message servers) bravely extend our significant patterns into the social world and the traversed environment, it is useful to remember that such artifacts, including print, are themselves understood by our original pattern-reproduction and impression system – the human mind, developed in childhood. The ‘print’ is brought to mind differently in different discourses. For a reader, a ‘print’ is a book, a memo or a broadsheet, whether it is the Indian Buddhist Sanskrit texts ordered to be printed in 593 AD by the Chinese emperor Sui Wen-ti (Silk Road) or the US Defense Department memo authorizing lower ranks to torture the prisoners taken by the Bush administration (Sanchez, cited in ABC). Other fields see prints differently. For a musician, a ‘print’ may be the sheet music which spread classical and popular music around the world; it may be a ‘record’ (as in a ‘recording’ session), where sound is impressed to wax, vinyl, charged silicon particles, or the alloys (Smith, “Elpida”) of an mp3 file. For the fine artist, a ‘print’ may be any mechanically reproduced two-dimensional (or embossed) impression of a significant image in media from paper to metal, textile to ceramics. ‘Print’ embraces the Japanese Ukiyo-e colour prints of Utamaro, the company logos that wink from credit card holographs, the early photographs of Talbot, and the textured patterns printed into neolithic ceramics. Computer hardware engineers print computational circuits. Homicide detectives investigate both sweaty finger prints and the repeated, mechanical gaits of suspects, which are imprinted into the earthy medium of a crime scene. For film makers, the ‘print’ may refer to a photochemical polyester reproduction of a motion picture artifact (the reel of ‘celluloid’), or a DVD laser disc impression of the same film. Textualist discourse has borrowed the word ‘print’ to mean ‘text’, so ‘print’ may also refer to the text elements within the vision track of a motion picture: the film’s opening titles, or texts photographed inside the motion picture story such as the sword-cut ‘Z’ in Zorro (Niblo). Before the invention of writing, the main mechanically reproduced impression of a cultural symbol in a medium was the humble footprint in the sand. The footprints of tribes – and neighbouring animals – cut tracks in the vegetation and the soil. Printed tracks led towards food, water, shelter, enemies and friends. Having learnt to pattern certain faces into their mental world, children grew older and were educated in the footprints of family and clan, enemies and food. The continuous impression of significant foot traffic in the medium of the earth produced the lines between significant nodes of prewriting and pre-wheeled cultures. These tracks were married to audio tracks, such as the song lines of the Australian Aborigines, or the ballads of tramping culture everywhere. A typical tramping song has the line, ‘There’s a track winding back to an old-fashion shack along the road to Gundagai,’ (O’Hagan), although this colonial-style song was actually written for radio and became an international hit on the airwaves, rather than the tramping trails. The printed tracks impressed by these cultural flows are highly contested and diverse, and their foot prints are woven into our very language. The names for printed tracks have entered our shared memory from the intersection of many cultures: ‘Track’ is a Germanic word entering English usage comparatively late (1470) and now used mainly in audio visual cultural reproduction, as in ‘soundtrack’. ‘Trek’ is a Dutch word for ‘track’ now used mainly by ecotourists and science fiction fans. ‘Learn’ is a Proto-Indo-European word: the verb ‘learn’ originally meant ‘to find a track’ back in the days when ‘learn’ had a noun form which meant ‘the sole of the foot’. ‘Tract’ and ‘trace’ are Latin words entering English print usage before 1374 and now used mainly in religious, and electronic surveillance, cultural reproduction. ‘Trench’ in 1386 was a French path cut through a forest. ‘Sagacity’ in English print in 1548 was originally the ability to track or hunt, in Proto-Indo-European cultures. ‘Career’ (in English before 1534) was the print made by chariots in ancient Rome. ‘Sleuth’ (1200) was a Norse noun for a track. ‘Investigation’ (1436) was Latin for studying a footprint (Harper). The arrival of symbolic writing scratched on caves, hearth stones, and trees (the original meaning of ‘book’ is tree), brought extremely limited text education close to home. Then, with baked clay tablets, incised boards, slate, bamboo, tortoise shell, cast metal, bark cloth, textiles, vellum, and – later – paper, a portability came to text that allowed any culture to venture away from known ‘foot’ paths with a reduction in the risk of becoming lost and perishing. So began the world of maps, memos, bills of sale, philosophic treatises and epic mythologies. Some of this was printed, such as the mechanical reproduction of coins, but the fine handwriting required of long, extended, portable texts could not be printed until the invention of paper in China about 2000 years ago. Compared to lithic architecture and genes, portable text is a fragile medium, and little survives from the millennia of its innovators. The printing of large non-text designs onto bark-paper and textiles began in neolithic times, but Sui Wen-ti’s imperial memo of 593 AD gives us the earliest written date for printed books, although we can assume they had been published for many years previously. The printed book was a combination of Indian philosophic thought, wood carving, ink chemistry and Chinese paper. The earliest surviving fragment of paper-print technology is ‘Mantras of the Dharani Sutra’, a Buddhist scripture written in the Sanskrit language of the Indian subcontinent, unearthed at an early Tang Dynasty site in Xian, China – making the fragment a veteran piece of printing, in the sense that Sanskrit books had been in print for at least a century by the early Tang Dynasty (Chinese Graphic Arts Net). At first, paper books were printed with page-size carved wooden boards. Five hundred years later, Pi Sheng (c.1041) baked individual reusable ceramic characters in a fire and invented the durable moveable type of modern printing (Silk Road 2000). Abandoning carved wooden tablets, the ‘digitizing’ of Chinese moveable type sped up the production of printed texts. In turn, Pi Sheng’s flexible, rapid, sustainable printing process expanded the political-cultural impact of the literati in Asian society. Digitized block text on paper produced a bureaucratic, literate elite so powerful in Asia that Louis XVI of France copied China’s print-based Confucian system of political authority for his own empire, and so began the rise of the examined public university systems, and the civil service systems, of most European states (Watson, Visions). By reason of its durability, its rapid mechanical reproduction, its culturally agreed signs, literate readership, revered authorship, shared ideology, and distributed portability, a ‘print’ can be a powerful cultural network which builds and expands empires. But print also attacks and destroys empires. A case in point is the Spanish conquest of Aztec America: The Aztecs had immense libraries of American literature on bark-cloth scrolls, a technology which predated paper. These libraries were wiped out by the invading Spanish, who carried a different book before them (Ewins). In the industrial age, the printing press and the gun were seen as the weapons of rebellions everywhere. In 1776, American rebels staffed their ‘Homeland Security’ units with paper makers, knowing that defeating the English would be based on printed and written documents (Hahn). Mao Zedong was a book librarian; Mao said political power came out of the barrel of a gun, but Mao himself came out of a library. With the spread of wireless networked servers, political ferment comes out of the barrel of the cell phone and the internet chat room these days. Witness the cell phone displays of a plane hitting a tower that appear immediately after 9/11 in the Middle East, or witness the show trials of a few US and UK lower ranks who published prints of their torturing activities onto the internet: only lower ranks who published prints were arrested or tried. The control of secure servers and satellites is the new press. These days, we live in a global library of burning books – ‘burning’ in the sense that ‘print’ is now a charged silicon medium (Smith, “Intel”) which is usually made readable by connecting the chip to nuclear reactors and petrochemically-fired power stations. World resources burn as we read our screens. Men, women, children burn too, as we watch our infotainment news in comfort while ‘their’ flickering dead faces are printed in our broadcast hearths. The print we watch is not the living; it is the voodoo of the living in the blackout behind the camera, engaging the blood sacrifice of the tormented and the unfortunate. Internet texts are also ‘on fire’ in the third sense of their fragility and instability as a medium: data bases regularly ‘print’ fail-safe copies in an attempt to postpone the inevitable mechanical, chemical and electrical failure that awaits all electronic media in time. Print defines a moral position for everyone. In reporting conflict, in deciding to go to press or censor, any ‘print’ cannot avoid an ethical context, starting with the fact that there is a difference in power between print maker, armed perpetrators, the weak, the peaceful, the publisher, and the viewer. So many human factors attend a text, video or voice ‘print’: its very existence as an aesthetic object, even before publication and reception, speaks of unbalanced, and therefore dynamic, power relationships. For example, Graham Greene departed unscathed from all the highly dangerous battlefields he entered as a novelist: Riot-torn Germany, London Blitz, Belgian Congo, Voodoo Haiti, Vietnam, Panama, Reagan’s Washington, and mafia Europe. His texts are peopled with the injustices of the less fortunate of the twentieth century, while he himself was a member of the fortunate (if not happy) elite, as is anyone today who has the luxury of time to read Greene’s works for pleasure. Ethically a member of London and Paris’ colonizers, Greene’s best writing still electrifies, perhaps partly because he was in the same line of fire as the victims he shared bread with. In fact, Greene hoped daily that he would escape from the dreadful conflicts he fictionalized via a body bag or an urn of ashes (see Sherry). In reading an author’s biography we have one window on the ethical dimensions of authority and print. If a print’s aesthetics are sometimes enduring, its ethical relationships are always mutable. Take the stylized logo of a running athlete: four limbs bent in a rotation of action. This dynamic icon has symbolized ‘good health’ in Hindu and Buddhist culture, from Madras to Tokyo, for thousands of years. The cross of bent limbs was borrowed for the militarized health programs of 1930s Germany, and, because of what was only a brief, recent, isolated yet monstrously horrific segment of its history in print, the bent-limbed swastika is now a vilified symbol in the West. The sign remains ‘impressed’ differently on traditional Eastern culture, and without the taint of Nazism. Dramatic prints are emotionally charged because, in depicting Homo sapiens in danger, or passionately in love, they elicit a hormonal reaction from the reader, the viewer, or the audience. The type of emotions triggered by a print vary across the whole gamut of human chemistry. A recent study of three genres of motion picture prints shows a marked differences in the hormonal responses of men compared to women when viewing a romance, an actioner, and a documentary (see Schultheiss, Wirth, and Stanton). Society is biochemically diverse in its engagement with printed culture, which raises questions about equality in the arts. Motion picture prints probably comprise around one third of internet traffic, in the form of stolen digitized movie files pirated across the globe via peer-to-peer file transfer networks (p2p), and burnt as DVD laser prints (BBC). There is also a US 40 billion dollar per annum legitimate commerce in DVD laser pressings (Grassl), which would suggest an US 80 billion per annum world total in legitimate laser disc print culture. The actively screen literate, or the ‘sliterati’ as I prefer to call them, research this world of motion picture prints via their peers, their internet information channels, their television programming, and their web forums. Most of this activity occurs outside the ambit of universities and schools. One large site of sliterate (screen literate) practice outside most schooling and official research is the net of online forums at imdb.com (International Movie Data Base). Imdb.com ‘prints’ about 25,000,000 top pages per month to client browsers. Hundreds of sliterati forums are located at imdb, including a forum for the Australian movie, Muriel’s Wedding (Hogan). Ten years after the release of Muriel’s Wedding, young people who are concerned with victimization and bullying still log on to http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0110598/board/> and put their thoughts into print: I still feel so bad for Muriel in the beginning of the movie, when the girls ‘dump’ her, and how much the poor girl cried and cried! Those girls were such biartches…I love how they got their comeuppance! bunniesormaybemidgets’s comment is typical of the current discussion. Muriel’s Wedding was a very popular film in its first cinema edition in Australia and elsewhere. About 30% of the entire over-14 Australian population went to see this photochemical polyester print in the cinemas on its first release. A decade on, the distributors printed a DVD laser disc edition. The story concerns Muriel (played by Toni Collette), the unemployed daughter of a corrupt, ‘police state’ politician. Muriel is bullied by her peers and she withdraws into a fantasy world, deluding herself that a white wedding will rescue her from the torments of her blighted life. Through theft and deceit (the modus operandi of her father) Muriel escapes to the entertainment industry and finds a ‘wicked’ girlfriend mentor. From a rebellious position of stubborn independence, Muriel plays out her fantasy. She gets her white wedding, before seeing both her father and her new married life as hollow shams which have goaded her abandoned mother to suicide. Redefining her life as a ‘game’ and assuming responsibility for her independence, Muriel turns her back on the mainstream, image-conscious, female gang of her oppressed youth. Muriel leaves the story, having rekindled her friendship with her rebel mentor. My methodological approach to viewing the laser disc print was to first make a more accessible, coded record of the entire movie. I was able to code and record the print in real time, using a new metalanguage (Watson, “Eyes”). The advantage of Coding is that ‘thinks’ the same way as film making, it does not sidetrack the analyst into prose. The Code splits the movie print into Vision Action [vision graphic elements, including text] (sound) The Coding splits the vision track into normal action and graphic elements, such as text, so this Coding is an ideal method for extracting all the text elements of a film in real time. After playing the film once, I had four and a half tightly packed pages of the coded story, including all its text elements in square brackets. Being a unique, indexed hard copy, the Coded copy allowed me immediate access to any point of the Muriel’s Wedding saga without having to search the DVD laser print. How are ‘print’ elements used in Muriel’s Wedding? Firstly, a rose-coloured monoprint of Muriel Heslop’s smiling face stares enigmatically from the plastic surface of the DVD picture disc. The print is a still photo captured from her smile as she walked down the aisle of her white wedding. In this print, Toni Collette is the Mona Lisa of Australian culture, except that fans of Muriel’s Wedding know the meaning of that smile is a magical combination of the actor’s art: the smile is both the flush of dreams come true and the frightening self deception that will kill her mother. Inserting and playing the disc, the text-dominant menu appears, and the film commences with the text-dominant opening titles. Text and titles confer a legitimacy on a work, whether it is a trade mark of the laser print owners, or the household names of stars. Text titles confer status relationships on both the presenters of the cultural artifact and the viewer who has entered into a legal license agreement with the owners of the movie. A title makes us comfortable, because the mind always seeks to name the unfamiliar, and a set of text titles does that job for us so that we can navigate the ‘tracks’ and settle into our engagement with the unfamiliar. The apparent ‘truth’ and ‘stability’ of printed text calms our fears and beguiles our uncertainties. Muriel attends the white wedding of a school bully bride, wearing a leopard print dress she has stolen. Muriel’s spotted wild animal print contrasts with the pure white handmade dress of the bride. In Muriel’s leopard textile print, we have the wild, rebellious, impoverished, inappropriate intrusion into the social ritual and fantasy of her high-status tormentor. An off-duty store detective recognizes the printed dress and calls the police. The police are themselves distinguished by their blue-and-white checked prints and other mechanically reproduced impressions of cultural symbols: in steel, brass, embroidery, leather and plastics. Muriel is driven in the police car past the stenciled town sign (‘Welcome To Porpoise Spit’ heads a paragraph of small print). She is delivered to her father, a politician who presides over the policing of his town. In a state where the judiciary, police and executive are hijacked by the same tyrant, Muriel’s father, Bill, pays off the police constables with a carton of legal drugs (beer) and Muriel must face her father’s wrath, which he proceeds to transfer to his detested wife. Like his daughter, the father also wears a spotted brown print costume, but his is a batik print from neighbouring Indonesia (incidentally, in a nation that takes the political status of its batik prints very seriously). Bill demands that Muriel find the receipt for the leopard print dress she claims she has purchased. The legitimate ownership of the object is enmeshed with a printed receipt, the printed evidence of trade. The law (and the paramilitary power behind the law) are legitimized, or contested, by the presence or absence of printed text. Muriel hides in her bedroom, surround by poster prints of the pop group ABBA. Torn-out prints of other people’s weddings adorn her mirror. Her face is embossed with the clown-like primary colours of the marionette as she lifts a bouquet to her chin and stares into the real time ‘print’ of her mirror image. Bill takes the opportunity of a business meeting with Japanese investors to feed his entire family at ‘Charlie Chan’’s restaurant. Muriel’s middle sister sloppily wears her father’s state election tee shirt, printed with the text: ‘Vote 1, Bill Heslop. You can’t stop progress.’ The text sets up two ironic gags that are paid off on the dialogue track: “He lost,’ we are told. ‘Progress’ turns out to be funding the concreting of a beach. Bill berates his daughter Muriel: she has no chance of becoming a printer’s apprentice and she has failed a typing course. Her dysfunction in printed text has been covered up by Bill: he has bribed the typing teacher to issue a printed diploma to his daughter. In the gambling saloon of the club, under the arrays of mechanically repeated cultural symbols lit above the poker machines (‘A’ for ace, ‘Q’ for queen, etc.), Bill’s secret girlfriend Diedre risks giving Muriel a cosmetics job. Another text icon in lights announces the surf nightclub ‘Breakers’. Tania, the newly married queen bitch who has made Muriel’s teenage years a living hell, breaks up with her husband, deciding to cash in his negotiable text documents – his Bali honeymoon tickets – and go on an island holiday with her girlfriends instead. Text documents are the enduring site of agreements between people and also the site of mutations to those agreements. Tania dumps Muriel, who sobs and sobs. Sobs are a mechanical, percussive reproduction impressed on the sound track. Returning home, we discover that Muriel’s older brother has failed a printed test and been rejected for police recruitment. There is a high incidence of print illiteracy in the Heslop family. Mrs Heslop (Jeannie Drynan), for instance, regularly has trouble at the post office. Muriel sees a chance to escape the oppression of her family by tricking her mother into giving her a blank cheque. Here is the confluence of the legitimacy of a bank’s printed negotiable document with the risk and freedom of a blank space for rebel Muriel’s handwriting. Unable to type, her handwriting has the power to steal every cent of her father’s savings. She leaves home and spends the family’s savings at an island resort. On the island, the text print-challenged Muriel dances to a recording (sound print) of ABBA, her hand gestures emphasizing her bewigged face, which is made up in an impression of her pop idol. Her imitation of her goddesses – the ABBA women, her only hope in a real world of people who hate or avoid her – is accompanied by her goddesses’ voices singing: ‘the mystery book on the shelf is always repeating itself.’ Before jpeg and gif image downloads, we had postcard prints and snail mail. Muriel sends a postcard to her family, lying about her ‘success’ in the cosmetics business. The printed missal is clutched by her father Bill (Bill Hunter), who proclaims about his daughter, ‘you can’t type but you really impress me’. Meanwhile, on Hibiscus Island, Muriel lies under a moonlit palm tree with her newly found mentor, ‘bad girl’ Ronda (Rachel Griffiths). In this critical scene, where foolish Muriel opens her heart’s yearnings to a confidante she can finally trust, the director and DP have chosen to shoot a flat, high contrast blue filtered image. The visual result is very much like the semiabstract Japanese Ukiyo-e woodblock prints by Utamaro. This Japanese printing style informed the rise of European modern painting (Monet, Van Gogh, Picasso, etc., were all important collectors and students of Ukiyo-e prints). The above print and text elements in Muriel’s Wedding take us 27 minutes into her story, as recorded on a single page of real-time handwritten Coding. Although not discussed here, the Coding recorded the complete film – a total of 106 minutes of text elements and main graphic elements – as four pages of Code. Referring to this Coding some weeks after it was made, I looked up the final code on page four: taxi [food of the sea] bq. Translation: a shop sign whizzes past in the film’s background, as Muriel and Ronda leave Porpoise Spit in a taxi. Over their heads the text ‘Food Of The Sea’ flashes. We are reminded that Muriel and Ronda are mermaids, fantastic creatures sprung from the brow of author PJ Hogan, and illuminated even today in the pantheon of women’s coming-of-age art works. That the movie is relevant ten years on is evidenced by the current usage of the Muriel’s Wedding online forum, an intersection of wider discussions by sliterate women on imdb.com who, like Muriel, are observers (and in some cases victims) of horrific pressure from ambitious female gangs and bullies. Text is always a minor element in a motion picture (unless it is a subtitled foreign film) and text usually whizzes by subliminally while viewing a film. By Coding the work for [text], all the text nuances made by the film makers come to light. While I have viewed Muriel’s Wedding on many occasions, it has only been in Coding it specifically for text that I have noticed that Muriel is a representative of that vast class of talented youth who are discriminated against by print (as in text) educators who cannot offer her a life-affirming identity in the English classroom. Severely depressed at school, and failing to type or get a printer’s apprenticeship, Muriel finds paid work (and hence, freedom, life, identity, independence) working in her audio visual printed medium of choice: a video store in a new city. Muriel found a sliterate admirer at the video store but she later dumped him for her fantasy man, before leaving him too. One of the points of conjecture on the imdb Muriel’s Wedding site is, did Muriel (in the unwritten future) get back together with admirer Brice Nobes? That we will never know. While a print forms a track that tells us where culture has been, a print cannot be the future, a print is never animate reality. At the end of any trail of prints, one must lift one’s head from the last impression, and negotiate satisfaction in the happening world. References Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “Memo Shows US General Approved Interrogations.” 30 Mar. 2005 http://www.abc.net.au>. British Broadcasting Commission. “Films ‘Fuel Online File-Sharing’.’’ 22 Feb. 2005 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3890527.stm>. Bretherton, I. “The Origins of Attachment Theory: John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth.” 1994. 23 Jan. 2005 http://www.psy.med.br/livros/autores/bowlby/bowlby.pdf>. Bunniesormaybemidgets. Chat Room Comment. “What Did Those Girls Do to Rhonda?” 28 Mar. 2005 http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0110598/board/>. Chinese Graphic Arts Net. Mantras of the Dharani Sutra. 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.cgan.com/english/english/cpg/engcp10.htm>. Ewins, R. Barkcloth and the Origins of Paper. 1991. 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.justpacific.com/pacific/papers/barkcloth~paper.html>. Grassl K.R. The DVD Statistical Report. 14 Mar. 2005 http://www.corbell.com>. Hahn, C. M. The Topic Is Paper. 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.nystamp.org/Topic_is_paper.html>. Harper, D. Online Etymology Dictionary. 14 Mar. 2005 http://www.etymonline.com/>. Mask of Zorro, The. Screenplay by J McCulley. UA, 1920. Muriel’s Wedding. Dir. PJ Hogan. Perf. Toni Collette, Rachel Griffiths, Bill Hunter, and Jeannie Drynan. Village Roadshow, 1994. O’Hagan, Jack. On The Road to Gundagai. 1922. 2 Apr. 2005 http://ingeb.org/songs/roadtogu.html>. Poole, J.H., P.L. Tyack, A.S. Stoeger-Horwath, and S. Watwood. “Animal Behaviour: Elephants Are Capable of Vocal Learning.” Nature 24 Mar. 2005. Sanchez, R. “Interrogation and Counter-Resistance Policy.” 14 Sept. 2003. 30 Mar. 2005 http://www.abc.net.au>. Schultheiss, O.C., M.M. Wirth, and S.J. Stanton. “Effects of Affiliation and Power Motivation Arousal on Salivary Progesterone and Testosterone.” Hormones and Behavior 46 (2005). Sherry, N. The Life of Graham Greene. 3 vols. London: Jonathan Cape 2004, 1994, 1989. Silk Road. Printing. 2000. 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.silk-road.com/artl/printing.shtml>. Smith, T. “Elpida Licenses ‘DVD on a Chip’ Memory Tech.” The Register 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02>. —. “Intel Boffins Build First Continuous Beam Silicon Laser.” The Register 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02>. Watson, R. S. “Eyes And Ears: Dramatic Memory Slicing and Salable Media Content.” Innovation and Speculation, ed. Brad Haseman. Brisbane: QUT. [in press] Watson, R. S. Visions. Melbourne: Curriculum Corporation, 1994. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Watson, Robert. "E-Press and Oppress: Audio Visual Print Drama, Identity, Text and Motion Picture Rebellion." M/C Journal 8.2 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0506/08-watson.php>. APA Style Watson, R. (Jun. 2005) "E-Press and Oppress: Audio Visual Print Drama, Identity, Text and Motion Picture Rebellion," M/C Journal, 8(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0506/08-watson.php>.

IntroductionRecut trailers typically mix footage from one or more films to create a preview for a feature that will never exist. Challenging the trailer’s assumed function as existing merely to gain an audience for a main attraction, the recut trailer suggests that the trailer can exist separately from a film. This paper will ask if recut trailers are evidence of fan enthusiasm and question precisely where this enthusiasm is directed. Do recut trailers demonstrate there are fans for the feature film that is recut, or does this enthusiasm extend beyond an appreciation and anticipation for a feature film? It will be ascertained if the recut trailer – as a site for homage, parody and fandom – transcends the advertising imperatives of box office success. This paper will demonstrate how fan-made trailers are symptomatic of the need for a new critical approach to trailers, one that does not situate the trailer as the low advertisement to the high cultural text of the film. It will be proposed that trailers form a network, of which the feature films and other trailers that are invoked form only a part.Recut trailers, while challenging the norms of what is considered an advertisement, function within a strict frame of reference: in their length, use of credits, text, voiceover in direct address to the audience, and editing techniques. Consequently, the recut trailer parodies and challenges the tools of promotion by utilising the very methods that sell to a prospective audience, to create an advertisement that is stripped of its traditional function by promoting a film that cannot exist and cannot be consumed. The promotion seems to end at the site of the advertisement, while still calling upon a complex series of interconnected references and collective knowledge in order for the parody to be effective. This paper will examine the network of Brokeback Mountain parodies, which were created before, during and after the feature film’s release, suggesting that the temporal imperative usually present in trailers is irrelevant for their appreciation. A playlist of the trailers discussed is available here.The Shift from Public to PrivateThe limited scholarship available situates the trailer as a promotional tool and a “brief film text” (Kernan 1), which is a “limited sample of the product” of the feature film (Kerr and Flynn 103), one that directly markets to demographics in order to draw an audience to see the feature. The traditional distribution methods for the trailer – as pre-packaged coming attractions in a cinema, and as television advertisements – work by building a desire to see a film in the future. For the trailer to be commercially successful within this framework, there is an imperative to differentiate itself from other trailers through creating an appeal to stars, genre or narrative (Kernan 14), or to be recognised as a trailer in amongst the stream of other advertisements on television. As new media forms have emerged, the trailer’s spatial and temporal bounds have shifted: the trailer is now included as a special feature on DVD packages, is sent to mobile devices on demand, and is viewed on video-sharing websites such as YouTube. In this move from the communal, collective and directed consumption of the trailer in the public sphere to the individualised, domesticated and on-demand consumption in the private sphere – the trailer has shown itself to be a successful “cross-media text” (Johnston 145). While choosing to watch a trailer – potentially long after the theatrical release of the film it promotes – suggests a growing “interactive relationship between film studio and audience” (Johnston 145), it also marks the beginning of increasing interactivity between the trailer and the audience, a relationship that has altered the function and purpose of the trailer beyond the studio’s control. Yet, the form of the trailer as it was traditionally distributed has been retained for recut trailers in order to parody and strip the trailer of its original meaning and purpose, and removes any commercial capital attached to it. Rather than simply being released at the control of a studio, the trailer is now actively shared, appropriated and altered. Demand for the trailer has not diminished since the introduction of new media, suggesting that there is an enthusiasm not only for coming feature films, but also for the act of watching, producing and altering trailers that may not translate into box office takings. This calls into question the role of the trailer in new media sites, in which the recut trailers form a significant part by embodying the larger changes to the consumption and distribution of trailers.TrailerTubeThis study analyses recut trailers released on YouTube only. This is, arguably, the most common way that these trailers are watched and newly created trailers are shared and interacted with, with some clips reaching several million views. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the network that is created surrounding the recut trailer through addressing its specific qualities. YouTube is the only site consulted in this study for the release for fan-made trailers as YouTube forms a formidable part of the network of recut trailers and studio released trailers, and currently, serves as a common way for Internet users to search for videos.YouTube was launched in December 2005, and in the following 1-2 years, the majority of popular recut trailers emerged. The correlation between these two dates is not arbitrary; the technology and culture promoted and fostered by the unique specificities of YouTube has in turn developed the recut trailer as “one of the most popular forms of fan subversion in the age of digital video” (Hilderband 52). It is also the role of audiences and producers that has ensured that the trailer has moved beyond its original spatial and temporal bounds – to be consumed in the home or on mobile devices, and at any stage past any promotional urgency. The Brokeback Mountain parodies, to be later discussed, surfaced mainly in 2006, demonstrative of an early acceptance of the possibilities that YouTube and mass broadcasting presented, and the possibilities that the trailer could offer to YouTube’s “clip” culture (Hilderbrand 49).The specificities of YouTube as a channel for dissemination have allowed for fan-made trailers to exist alongside trailers released by studios. Rather than the trailer being consumed and then becoming irretrievable, perpetually tied to the feature film it promotes, the online distribution and storing of trailers allows a constant revisiting of the advertisement – this act alone demonstrating an enthusiasm for the form of the trailer. Hilderbrand argues that YouTube “offers[s] new and remediating relationships to texts that indicate changes and acceleration of spectatorial consumption” (49). Specifically, Hilderbrand proposes that YouTube functions as a collection of memories, which in turn present a “portal of cultural memory” (54) – amplified by the ability to create playlists and channels. The tagging of trailers to the films from which they drive, the official trailers released for a film referenced, or other recut trailers ensures that there is a physical trace of the network the trailer creates. Recut trailers demand for knowledge and capital to be shared amongst viewers, the technical attributes of YouTube allow for much of this knowledge to be available on demand, and to be hyperlinked or suggested to the viewer. In order for the parody present in recut trailers to function at the level intended, the films that are drawn upon would presumably need to be identified and some basic elements of the plot understood in order for the capital imbued in the trailer to be completely realised. If the user is unaware of the film, however, clips of the film or the original trailer can be reached either through the “related videos” menu which populates according to the didactic information for the clip watched, or by searching. As the majority of recut trailers seek to displace the original genre of the film parodied – such as, for example, Ten Things I Hate about Commandments which presents the story of The Ten Commandments as a teen film in which Moses will both part the sea and get the girl – the original genre of the film must be known by the viewer in order to acknowledge the site for parody in the fan-made trailer. Further to this, the network deployed suggests that there must be some knowledge of the conventions of the genre that is being applied to the original film’s promotional qualities. The parody functions by effectively sharing the knowledge between two genres, in conjunction with an awareness of the role and capital of the trailer. Tagging, playlists and channels facilitate the sharing of knowledge and dispersing of capital. As the recut trailer tends to derive from more than one source, the network alters the viewer’s relationship to the original feature film and cultivates a series of clips and knowledge. However, this also indicates that intimate fan knowledge can be bypassed – which places this particular relationship to the trailer and the invoked films as existing outside the realms of the archetypal cult fan. This challenges prior conceptions of fan culture by resisting a prolonged engagement normally attributed to cultivating fan status (Hills), as typically only one trailer will be made, rather than exhibiting a concentrated adulation of one text. The recut trailer is placed as the nexus in a series of links, in which the studio system is subverted while also being directly engaged with and utilised. The tools that have traditionally been used to sell to an audience through pre-packaged coming attractions are now used to promote a film that cannot be consumed that holds no commercial significance for film studios. These tools also work to reinforce the aesthetic and cinematic norms in the trailer, which provide a contract of audience expectations – such as the use of the approval by the American Motion Picture Association screen and classification at the beginning of the majority of recut trailers. The recut trailer assimilates to the nature of video sharing on YouTube in which the trailer is part of a network of narratives all of which are accessible on demand, can be fast-forwarded, replayed, and embedded on numerous social networking sites for further dissemination and accompanying editorial comment. The trailer thus becomes a social text that involves a community and is wide-reaching in its aims and consumption, despite being physically consumed in the private sphere. The feature which enables the user to “favourite” a video, add it to their playlist and embed it in another site, demonstrates that the trailer is considered as its own cohesive form, subject to scrutiny and favoured or dismissed. Constant statistics reflecting its popularity reinforce the success of a recut trailer, and popularity will generally lead to the trailer becoming more accessible. Hilderbrand argues that YouTube has nutured a “new temporality of immediate gratification for audiences” which has in turn contributed to the “culture of the clip” (49), which the trailer seems to exemplify – and in the absence of feature films being legally readily accessible on sites such as YouTube, the trailer seeks to fill the void for immediate gratification.Brokeback MountainsWhile fan-made trailers can generate enthusiasm about the release of an upcoming film they may be linked to – as was recently the case with fan-made trailers for teen vampire film, Twilight – there is also a general enthusiasm to play with the form of the trailer and all that it signifies, while in the process, stripping the trailer of its traditional function. Following the release of the trailer for feature film Brokeback Mountain, numerous recut trailers emerged on YouTube which took the romantic and sexual relationship of the two male leads in the film, and applied this narrative to films depicting two male leads in a non-romantic friendship. In effect, new films were created that used the basis of Brokeback Mountain to shift plots in existing films, creating a new narrative in the process. The many Brokeback… parodies vary in popularity, and have been uploaded to YouTube continuously since 2006. The titles include Brokeback to the Future, Saved by the Bell: Brokeback Style, Brokeback of the Ring, The Brokeback Redemption, Broke Trek, Harry Potter and Brokeback Goblet and Star Wars: The Emperor Brokeback. The trailers use footage from a variety of film and television sources that show a friendship between two men and introduce it to the “style” of Brokeback Mountain. There are several techniques which are used uniformly across all of the trailers in order to convey this new plot: the original score used in the Brokeback Mountain trailer begins each recut trailer; the use of typically white text on a black screen based on the original trailer’s text, or a slight variant of it which is specific to the film which is being recut; and the pace of shots altered to focus on lingering looks, or to splice scenes together in order to imply sexual contact. Consequently, there is a consciousness of the effects used in the original trailer to sell a particular narrative to the audience as something that an audience would want to view. The narrative is constructed as being universal, as any story with two men as the leads and their friendship can be altered to show an underlying homoerotic story, and the form of the trailer allows these storylines to be promoted and shared. The insider knowledge of the fan that has noticed these interactions is able to make their knowledge communal. Hills argues that “fans participate in communal activities” (ix), which here takes the form of creating a network of collective stories which form Brokeback – it is a story extended to several sites, and a story which is promoted and sold. Through the use of tagging, playlists and suggested videos, once one recut trailer is viewed, several others are made instantly available. The availability of the original Brokeback Mountain trailer then serves to reinforce the authenticity and professionalism of the clips, by providing a template in which existing footage from other films is moulded to fit within.The instant identifier of a Brokeback… trailer is the music that was used in the original trailer. This signals that the trailer for Brokeback Mountain was itself so iconic that the use of its soundtrack would be instantly recognisable, and the re-use of music and text suggests that the recut trailers reinforce this iconography and its capital by visually reinforcing what signifies Brokeback Mountain. The network these trailers create includes the film Brokeback Mountain itself, but the recut trailer begins to open a new trajectory for the narrative to mould and shift, identifiable by techniques present in the trailer but not the feature film itself. The fan appreciation is evident in several ways: namely, there is an enthusiasm to conflate a feature film into Brokeback Mountain’s general narrative; that there has been enough of an engagement with a feature in order to retrieve clips to be edited into a new montage, and consequently, a condensed narrative with a direct mode of address; and also the eagerness to see a feature film in trailer form, employing trailer-specific cinematic techniques to enhance parody and displacement. Recut trailers are also subject to commenting, which generally reflect on either the insider fan knowledge of the text that is being initiated to the world of Brokeback Mountain, or take the place of comments that reflect on the success of the editing. In this respect, critique is a part of the communal fan interaction with the creator and uploader in the recut trailer’s network. As such, there is a focus on quality for the creator of the fan video, and rating occurs in order to rank the recut trailers. This focus on quality and professionalism elevates the creator of the recut trailer to the status of a director, despite not having filmed the scenes themselves. Demonstrating the enthusiasm for the role of the trailer, the internal promotion on YouTube of the most successful trailers – designated as such by the YouTube community – signals an active engagement with the role of the trailer, and its social properties, even though it is consumed individually.ConclusionWhile the recut trailer extends the fan gaze toward one object or more, it is typically presented as a parody, and consequently, could also be seen as rejecting elements of a genre or feature film. However, the parody typically occurs at the site of displacement: such as the relationship between the two male leads in Brokeback to the Future having a romantic relationship whilst coming to terms with time-travel; the burning bush in Ten Things I Hate about Commandments being played by Samuel L. Jackson as “Principal Firebush”, complete with audio from Pulp Fiction; or recutting romantic comedy Sleepless in Seattle to become a horror film. The parody relies on knowledge that can be found easily, aided by YouTube’s features, while requiring the creator to intimately engage with a feature film. The role of the trailer in this network is to provide the tools and the boundaries for the new narrative to exist within, and create a system of referents for the fan to identify, through parodies of star appeal, genre, or narrative, as Kernan proposes are the three ways in which a trailer often relies upon to sell itself to an audience (14).As this paper has argued toward, the recut trailer can also be released from the feature films it invokes by being considered as its own coherent form, which draws upon numerous sites of knowledge and capital in order to form a network. While traditionally trailers have worked to gain an audience for an impending feature release, the recut trailer only seeks to create an audience for itself. Through the use of cult texts or a particularly successful form of parody, as demonstrated in Scary Mary Poppins, the recut trailer is widely consumed and shared across multiple avenues. The recut trailer then seeks to promote only itself through providing a condensed narrative, speaking directly to audiences, and cleverly engaging with the use of editing to leave traces of authorship. Fan culture may be seen as the adoration of one creator to the film they recut, but the network that the recut trailer creates demonstrates that there is an enthusiasm in both creators and viewers for the form of the trailer itself, to exist beyond the feature film and advertising imperatives.ReferencesBrokeback of the Ring. 27 Feb. 2006. YouTube. Video. 2 March 2009 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgt-BiFiBek›.Brokeback to the Future. 1 Feb. 2006. 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Kerr, Aphra, and Roddy Flynn. "Rethinking Globalisation through the Movie and Games Industries." Convergence: The International Journal of Research Into New Media Technologies 9 (2003): 91-113. The Original Scary ‘Mary Poppins’ Recut Trailer. 8 Oct. 2006. YouTube. Video. 2 March 2009 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T5_0AGdFic›.Saved by the Bell: Brokeback Style. 4 April 2006. YouTube. Video. 2 March 2009 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHLr5AYl5f4›.Sleepless in Seattle. Dir. Nora Ephron. Film. Tristar Pictures, 1993. Sleepless in Seattle: Recut as a Horror Movie. 30 Jan. 2006. YouTube. Video. 2 March 2009 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frUPnZMxr08›.Star Wars: The Emperor Brokeback. 14 Feb. 2006. YouTube. Video. 2 March 2009 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omB18oRsBYg›.The Ten Commandments. Dir. Cecil B. DeMille. Film. Paramount Pictures, 1956. Ten Things I Hate about Commandments. 14 May 2006. YouTube. Video. 2 March 2009 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1kqqMXWEFs›.