Scopophilic Convergence

      In 2008, then Presidential candidate Barak Obama had a picture taken of him that was eventually turn into his ubiquitous Hope poster.  This poster became synonymous with his campaign.  For good or ill, people remembered his campaign for the poster; muted red, white, and blue, a face looking at something in the distance, and the simple word ‘Hope’ emblazoned across the bottom.  The poster was designed by a street artist and became the icon of the election.  Countless media outlets showed the poster and image when talking about the soon to be president.  But something interesting has occurred.  The image has taken a life of its own.  In 2012, a Provo High School student created a T-shirt that aped the Obama poster but with his own face in its place.  He gave these shirts away to the students as part of his bid to win student body president.  He won by a landslide.  If you want you can go to http://www.obama-me.com and make your own photo into an imitation of that poster.  Various websites have adapted that concept into a means of distilling a face into a single idea.  One such replaces Obama with a skull and the word ‘Hope’ for ‘Fate’ perhaps making a commentary on the expected doom of the Obama administration.  Others have taken that image and applied it to completely unrelated things, like an image of Flappy Bird, or crazy ol’ Nick Cage (with a simple ‘Cage’ at the bottom’).  What was once a very specific image for a unique purpose has grown to pervade multiple media as it has been appropriated and adapted by consumers.  This example represents the idea of convergence.  According to Jenkins’ work Worship at the Altar of Convergence, Media convergence is when “Old and new media collide, grassroots and corporate media intersect, where the power of the media consumer and the media producer intersect in unpredictable ways.” (2)  No one probably expected that a poster of a presidential candidate would eventually evolve into a poorly rendered graphic of a bird from an addictive app.  Yet these things are inevitable when media convergence occurs.

      The Star Wars Uncut project represents another interesting example of media convergence.  Firstly old and new media have collided.  The film consists in almost 500 15 second cuts of Star Wars Episode IV: a New Hope that were then taken by fans of the film and re-shot using whatever means they had available.  Then the clips were sent in and edited together with the original sound track as a connecting thread.  What resulted was the film as a mass of individual perceptions and interactions with the original text.  The film is the old media and the new work is new media.  They converge in the space and create something very interesting (albeit, difficult to watch) that while it has the impression of the original text, is also something new and unique.  It also shows the convergence of grassroots and corporate media in that the film.  The original film coming from the corporate and the uncut from the grassroots.  The individuals who made the cuts of the film received no remuneration for their efforts and is therefore done out of the powerful desire of the individual to connect themselves with the project.  Unpredictably, the film has won awards for its work as an interactive experience, representing the ability of the consumer and the producer to intersect.

      There is something about this that is disconcerting.  For thousands of years media consumers have only been engaged with the text on one end.  Projects like this allow consumers to engage on the producer end of the project.  However, the place of the consumer has always been as audience.  In connection with Mulvey’s work from a few weeks ago, it was made clear that the role of the audience is to look at fetishized gaze, and then look with the protagonist through their narcissistic gaze.  This creates a strong connection to the subject/object relationship established by certain cinematic elements.  What seems to happen is when the consumer (audience) is given the power to produce and adapt the text, he or she does not know how to navigate the subject/object relationship, or rather they go nuts.  

In Star Wars Uncut, there are several scenes in which Princess Leia is portrayed by one of these fans in which her clothing bears little to no resemblance to Carrie Fischer in the original film.  In many cases the actress is significantly less dressed than Ms. Fischer.  The most extreme example being with the recut trash compactor scene shows a man and a woman in a bathtub, with the woman in a bikini.  The bikini has nothing to do with the scene, and relates in no way to what Ms. Fischer is wearing in the original film.  The makers of this recut scene have replaced the character in the original with a more extreme sexualized object.  As with the fetish gaze, the plot ceases for the purpose of looking at the female form.  This seems to be the case several times as the consumers take the subject of the audience and treat them to a more sexualized object.  This indicates that when consumers are given the reigns, they do what they know how to do, look at the object.

      They also know how to look with the protagonist.  Interestingly, in most cases this gaze becomes homoerotic.  If the sexualization of the object is part of the narrative, the object is the receiver of the gay gaze (gayze?)  In one striking animated sequence, C3-PO is shown rubbing his body with oil and wearing a red g-string (all dialogue in sequence is from the film).  He gazes at Luke with lust and thrusts his pelvis rhythmically ultimately removing the underwear.  I this case, the audience gazes with instead of at.  The result a homoerotic sexualized gaze, though in this case the placement of the characters implies a shot/reverse shot of placing Luke in the power position that could be a lack of cinematic prowess on the part of the maker.  There is no scene playing out a sexual relationship other than those that already exist in the original unless they are homoerotic.  So either we are looking at the body of the woman or looking with the man at the man.

      This is seen in many instances when a consumer takes the work of the producer and adapts it with their own articulation.  Many fan-fiction sites focus almost entirely on changing the object of the sexualized gaze or inventing new ones. It is not likely that anyone predicted that that would be the result of this kind of convergence, but it is not surprising as the role of the consumer has always been to gaze with scopophilic pleasure at and with the characters on screen.  There are other ways in which the consumer converges with the producer, but this is obviously the most striking, and perhaps concerning.