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On Christmas Eve of 2014, Eric Meyer wrote a blog post on his personal webpage detailing his Facebook Year in Review video. Like most Years in Review, it displayed pictures of loved ones, algorithmically found, over upbeat music; unlike most, it featured pictures of his deceased daughter, Rebecca, who had died of brain cancer on June 7 of that year. Her sixth birthday. In his essay, Meyer wrote: “I know, of course, that this is not a deliberate assault.” Still, he warned of the importance of investigating ‘edge-cases’ when companies make the decision to create highly personalized content pieces such as these.

Meyer’s piece made the rounds on the Internet space of 2014, two years after Facebook’s IPO, and the same year of their acquisition of What’s App and Oculus. Facebook in 2014 was just starting its massive growth towards the number 8 spot in market cap ranking it enjoys today; on April 30 of that year, Facebook hosted its fifth f8, a roughly-annual developer conference held around the Bay Area. Meyer’s essay became so popular that he wrote a follow-up post clarifying his original intent; the people at Facebook are not heartless ‘brogrammers’, Facebook is far from the only company that makes such data-driven mistakes, etc. Rather ominously, at that year’s f8 held in San Francisco, Facebook acknowledged the steady unease among consumers regarding proliferation of data: “We’ve heard from people that they are worried about sharing information with apps, and they want more control over their data. We are giving people more control over these experiences so they can be confident pressing the blue button.” Misuse of Facebook information by third-party apps is by now a familiar refrain; the problem of the Year in Review video, however, persists. Meyer dubs it ‘inadvertent algorithmic cruelty’, further suggesting that the main issue with the video is the lack of an option to opt out. But what about the option to opt in?

To retroactively focus on Facebook is partially an exercise in recency bias as the company just now seems to be recovering from the major drop in stock price following the Cambridge Analytica disaster. Facebook is by no means the only large tech firm to have had major PR issues regarding data abuse; Google CEO Sundar Pichai was summoned to a legislative hearing of his own in December of last year, where he was grilled on a broad yet focused, at times seemingly common-sense, array of questions by a mostly boomer House Judiciary Committee. The hearing was expectedly partisan, as much of the concern on the right was regarding the possibility of bias in Google search engine results and much of the concern on the left was in battling this assertion, insisting that search engines are democratic – a majority information vote decides your popular standing. The hearing was also expectedly frustrating for a relatively tech-savvy audience to watch; NowThis News posted an edit of the hearing titled “Congress Was Confused by the Internet During Hearing With Google CEO”. Ted Poe (R-TX) is a main feature, asking Pichai if Google can track his short movements across the congressional hall. Pichai struggles to explain in between Poe’s interjections that it depends on if Poe had opted in to use certain Google software. Other features include Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), who insists that there is human manipulation of search results, and Rep. Steve King (R-IA), who confuses Apple and Android mobile devices.

Towards the end of the hearing, however, Representative Karen Handel (R-GA) asked the following:

“For years, the FTC on a bipartisan basis has affirmed that precise geolocation information is considered highly, highly sensitive, and that consumers must opt in to that… Do you think there is other information, privacy information, of consumers that should also be required to have opt in vs. opt out?”

Pichai responds to Handel: "In general, I think a framework for privacy in which users have a sense of transparency, control, and choice, and a clear understanding of the tradeoffs they need to make I think is very good for consumers, and we would support that." Assumedly, Pichai is concerned for the consumer, and Poe does not understand how privacy settings work. Fatally, the same issue of consumer choice arises. Did you opt out? Equally as important: did you opt in? Increasingly, the types of choices that consumers are presented with regarding data are contingent on their knowledge surrounding the significance of their data and the methods through which they are collected. Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN) admits that he uses Google services often but is so confused on how to turn off location services that he wants Pichai to consider an online help center for users like him. Even if Representative Cohen’s best efforts were fruitful, however, this congressional hearing was called in part due to an Associated Press report released in August of the same year that discovered that, among other misconceptions, Google still collected location data even with the Location History privacy setting turned off. Is confusion, then, so unexpected?

Pichai’s hearing and Zuckerberg’s own Senate hearing are centered around the services provided by their respective companies, and the questions asked of both men were not existentially threatening but instead mirror a familiar situation in 2008. Though these conditions are not quite as dire as those under the Great Recession, there was a similar significant reckoning that our fabric, then financial and now also social, is too dependent on too few private, unregulated companies. Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) asks, incredulously: “So your chief operating officer, Ms. Sandberg, suggested…that Facebook users who do not want their personal information used for advertising might have to pay for that protection. Pay for it. Are you actually considering having Facebook users pay for you not to use the information?” Though Facebook has no such system in place, the idea of a paid Facebook seemed impossible, antithetical even. It appears as though Congress (and the Senate) was not ‘confused’ about the Internet at all, and in fact, this group of boomers have the same realization as their younger counterparts: Increasingly, many technological services no longer exist as luxuries, but instead as necessities. Computer literacy classes in schools, investment by big tech in lower income communities, and the extensive PR material released by companies such as Facebook and Google detailing how their products help small businesses all point to the importance of technological fluency for successful financial and social lives. Lost among all the talk of services provided, data protection needed, etc., is the recognition that companies such as Facebook and Google, like JPMorgan and BoA, may have become too big to fail. The minimum cost of living in a connected, ever progressing world is your data, and consumers are faced with increasing options of which to opt out – one should hope that opting in is part of the equation as well.

So, we are faced with a dilemma. To survive/thrive, one must surrender some amount of personal data. The problem with data is that it is equalizing – though certain demographic groups are highly valued, disaggregation of demand curves has allowed for almost infinite customization. As technology has advanced, media has advanced in tandem, at first allowing advertising to reach mass audiences, then allowing advertising to perform limited targeting using Nielsen statistics. As media moved closer to the individual rather than the collective due to the innovation of the Internet and personal computers, the value of demographic targeting subsections of mass audiences lessened as highly specific ads could now be instantly and invariably served to those to whom they are most likely relevant. It does not matter if one does not understand what can be collected for which purposes; the data is uniquely valuable. Mark Andrejevic, in his seminal essay from 2002, “The Work of Being Watched: Interactive Media and the Exploitation of Self-Disclosure”, describes such data-production as the ‘work of being watched’. Initially used by Andrejevic to describe users of services such as TiVo, the ‘work of being watched’ refers to the self-disclosure of personal information in exchange for convenience or customization. This personal information is indeed labor produced – shows are stacked on the TiVo hard drive by the consumer – and also labor saved – demographic surveys, capital expenditures, and more are decreased due to the work produced by the consumer. This work of being watched has only increased exponentially in efficiency; we carry media streaming, geolocating devices in our pockets at any given moment of the day. There have been many that suggest paying consumers for their data. Regardless of pay, our legislators have understood that we have undergone a contractual exchange of service for service, the received service is becoming more and more crucial to life, and the given service is becoming more and more expensive. As Andrejevic writes: “A discussion of surveillance might… be couched in terms of conditions of power that compel entry into the digital enclosure and submission to comprehensive monitoring as a means of stimulating and rationalizing consumption.” One can make a strong case that there exist conditions of power that compel entry into digital enclosures. Perhaps, as Andrejevic and Ibarra, Goff, Hernandez, Lanier, and Weyl suggest, we are working multiple jobs in multiple capacities.

An essay I wrote for my class on nostalgia

“The Entire History of You” is the third episode of the first season of Black Mirror, aired on the British Channel 4 broadcaster on December 18, 2011. Black Mirror, created by Charlie Brooker, likens to a contemporary The Twilight Zone, exploring possible future states where technological and social progress result in micro-conflicts among everyday people. In “The Entire History of You”, people are able to record everything they see through a chip - a “grain” - installed behind the ear. More importantly, they can playback - “re-do”- everything they see either in their head or projected on a screen. Throughout the episode, we see our main character, Liam Foxwell (Toby Kebbell), gradually ruin his relationship with his wife, Fi (Jodie Whitaker), by using “re-dos” of Fi’s interactions with a past lover, Jonas, at a dinner party they are all attending. The episode culminates in Liam and Fi’s split, and Liam gouges out his grain.

This episode has a particular relationship to time and memory. The ability to totally recall one’s memories both supports and challenges some foundational assumptions that some of our theorists have based their arguments upon – namely, Fredric Jameson, whose notions of nostalgia as a product of postmodernism are supported in this episode. “The Entire History of You” heavily relies on nostalgia to create its emphatic ending; I am mostly concerned with how nostalgia is constructed through the lens of re-dos in other moments in this episode. Nostalgia, as Jameson has pointed out, has always been dependent on memory, and has been further complicated by the introduction of media and methods of temporal/spatial capture (i.e. print, archiving, photography, video, etc). “The Entire History of You” presents a theorized future with perhaps the latest method of memory capture: re-dos, which lie somewhere between memory and material, but with the same capability to be imbued with affective meaning. This paper is dedicated to exploring exactly how re-dos function, and how they fit into Jameson’s postmodern view of society and nostalgia.

Re-dos: Archive and Colleen

As previously stated, re-dos are neither memory nor material, but instead lie somewhere within the two (and perhaps somewhere without). In the ways that memory is unreliable (its fickleness, its impermanence, its malleability), re-dos are not.

At the dinner party, a character, Colleen (Rebekah Staton), who works in grain development, confronts Hallam (Phoebe Fox), a character whose grain was forcibly gouged. Hallam says that she enjoys living life without a grain. Colleen, visibly disturbed, replies: “You know, half the organic memories you have are junk. Just not trustworthy.” Colleen gestures towards the more productive elements of re-dos (productive in the sense of labor produced – i.e. utile). Colleen is wary of living a life affected by manipulated memory.

Our first couple of encounters with re-dos are mostly utile. We first encounter the re-do phenomenon after seeing Liam at a job interview. He gets into a cab on the way to a party, and plays back his interview, watching his interviewers’ reactions to gauge whether he got the job or not. At the airport, we see Liam’s memories run through by security. We then see Liam re-do an interaction with the host of the party to remember the name of the host’s wife. In all of these depictions of re-dos, we see the ways in which re-dos supplement memory, filling in its ontological flaws.

Re-dos are, then, specifically not memory. “The Entire History of You” suggests a future in which we can use re-dos, which are more reliable than memory, allowing users to document every moment of their lives. Re-dos are only similar to memory; they are also similar to videos/video documentation.

However, the difference between video and re-dos is subjectivity. The grain is inseparable from the subject, both in the recording and the re-do process, as it is literally ingrained behind one’s ear. The re-do is imbued with the consciousness and the interests of the subject, inseparable from what the brain commands the eye to do. The camera, however, is an apparatus without the body; the video, then, is further removed from the subject.

Re-dos: Affect, Positive and Negative

Colleen also said to Hallam: “With half the population you can implant false memories, just by asking leading questions in therapy. You can make people remember getting lost in shopping malls they never visited, getting bullied by pedophile babysitters they never had”. Hallam’s response to Colleen is: “I’m just happier now.” While Colleen looked to the more utile elements of re-dos, Hallam looked to the more affective elements of re-dos. As stated before, Colleen was afraid of a life that would be affected by manipulated memory.

Strangely enough, it appears that Hallam and Colleen are both gesturing to the same perceived ‘problem’ with re-dos and memory – the ability to displace emotion through a process of reliving past experiences. For Hallam, re-dos became affectively imbued. Once she was gouged, she found that life was more enjoyable. For Colleen, re-dos are an answer to affectively imbued memory. Memory, for Colleen, is too unreliable. According to Colleen, re-dos imitate life, precisely, in a way that memories cannot.

Still, re-dos are undeniably used affectively in the episode. Paul (Jimi Mistry) suggests that the group watches a re-do of “the Frasier Road days,” hearkening back to a time in the past where they were all partying together. This is not a phenomenon specific to re-dos – this is very similar to the act of reminiscence. Reminiscence, however, is not a simple recall process. It is, specifically, a reliving process of the past. Memories are created of this moment of recollection of memory (the reminiscence). When Paul makes his suggestion, the group cheers, displacing positive emotion onto a past experience. This part of the episode places re-dos in direct relationship with nostalgia, as re-dos serve as a replacement for memory in the function of reminiscence (reminiscence itself being a form of nostalgia).

Re-dos: Formally distinct from memory

Re-dos, however, are not the beginning of nostalgia. As previously mentioned, the subjectivity of re-dos separates it from videos – however, it also is one degree removed from the subjectivity of memory. Memory is embodied. It is in the brain; it is neurologically programmed. Re-dos are without the body. Re-dos are linked to biology (using the eyes to record, and the brain to replay memories in one’s head) but do not themselves produce intra-bodily functions. They are dependent on a technology. They are one step removed, and video is one step further. Paul’s suggestion to the group originates from a memory; re-dos do not themselves perform the labor of recollection. Memories perform this labor of recollection, and then call for re-dos.

Memory is actually just used as a reference point for re-dos. Jameson offers a Lacanian understanding of the relationship between memory and re-dos:

“Lacan’s model is the now orthodox structuralist one, which is based on a conception of a linguistic sign as having two (or perhaps three) components. A sign, a word, a text, here modelled as a relationship between a signifier – a material object, the sound of a word, the script of a text – and a signified, the meaning of that material word or material text. The third component would be the so-called ‘referent,’ the ‘real’ object in the ‘real’ world to which the sign refers – the real cat as opposed to the concept of a cat or the sound ‘cat’” (Jameson 136).

When Liam and Fi return home after the dinner, they start arguing about Jonas. Fi reveals that she saw Jonas for about a month. Liam immediately counters by re-doing the conversation the first time he and Fi had sex, during which they discussed each other’s sexual history. During the re-do, Fi had said she dated Jonas for only a week. Memory is used to recall re-dos. Roughly, the word “remember” is the signifier, memory is the image of an experience (i.e. the signified, the reified concept of the word ‘remember’), and re-dos are the referent.

Near the conclusion of their argument, Liam states: “That was a nice night. Used to be.” Fi responds: “You’re getting obsessed.”

What used to be a positive memory for Liam became a negative memory through an affective reading of a re-do. Here, we see re-dos move closer towards video. Video, since it is removed from the subject and it is material, can be imbued with meaning by the subject depending on the time it is viewed and the state of the subject. Liam used to enjoy this moment of intimacy with him and his wife; upon finding out that she had lied, it no longer was an enjoyable memory.

The Final Scene

In the final scene of the episode, Liam walks through the house after he and Fi split. A couple of important visual tools that the show uses should be pointed out. The show is making a nostalgic appeal to Liam’s former life using these memories as flashbacks. When displaying re-dos, the show is always in a point-of-view, handheld shot. As it intercuts between the memories and present day, it either cuts to a close-up, fixed shot of Liam’s pained face or a to a POV, handheld shot that is a visual match of the previous shot, with different mise-en-scene and color correction.

Liam replays a memory of Fi eating breakfast in the kitchen, which has large windowpanes with yellow sunlight beaming through. The show cuts to the present, with the same exact viewpoint of the kitchen, except the kitchen is cluttered with beer bottles and crumbs, the scene is color-corrected blue, and it’s cloudy outside. Liam looks at the kitchen and looks down, clearly upset. He re-dos Fi approaching him with a smile, turns off the memory, shakes himself, and slowly walks through his completely stripped home, re-doing insignificant but warm memories of their relationship. Throughout the re-dos, we see how bare his home is now. Furniture is missing, the house is far messier than before, and everything is evenly lit in a melancholy blue. He touches his grain. There is a cut to Liam brushing his teeth in the bathroom while Fi changes behind him, which cuts to Liam in present day staring in the mirror. Liam then takes a razor blade and makes an incision behind his ear, through which he pulls out his grain. As he is pulling it out, footage from his relationship with Fi replay rapidly until the show cuts abruptly to credits.

The show is clearly implementing nostalgia to make an emotional appeal to its viewers. As indicated by the camera work, the editing, the mise-en-scene, and the color correction, Liam is in deep regret that his relationship with Fi has ended. Their home, what was once where their relationship flourished, is now merely a cruel reminder of his mistake. Liam, as he walks through the house, retraces the exact steps he took in his re-dos, effectively reliving previous, happier moments of his life. The POV visual match cuts indicate that the present is irremovable from the past. The show clearly states that Liam’s present is far darker and unhappier than his past. Crucially, however, this statement is only and specifically informed by and mediated through his re-dos – a present-day recall of the past.

Conclusion: Where do re-dos fit?

“All of this puts us in the position of grasping schizophrenia as the break-down of the relationship between signifiers. For Lacan, the experience of temporality, human time, past, present, memory, the persistence of personal identity over months and years – this existential or experiential feeling of tie itself – is also an effect of language… But since the schizophrenic does not know language articulation in that way, he or she does not have our experience of temporal continuity either, but is condemned to live a perpetual present with which the various moments of his or her past have little connection and for which there is no conceivable future on the horizon. In other words, schizophrenic experience is an experience of isolated, disconnected, discontinuous material signifiers which fail to link up into a coherent sequence (emphasis mine)” (Jameson 137).

“I believe that the emergence of postmodernism is closely related to the emergence of this new moment of late, consumer or multinational capitalism…I will only be able, however, to show this for one major theme: namely the disappearance of a sense of history, the way in which our entire contemporary social system has little by little begun to lose its capacity to retain its own past, has begun to live in a perpetual present and in a perpetual change that obliterates traditions of the kind which all earlier social formations have had in one way or another to preserve” (Jameson 143-144).

Conceivably, with the rise of technology and memory-capturing capabilities (cameras, and in this case, grains), the ability to remember would increase and nostalgia would decrease. This is a future that Colleen points to. Yet, what Jameson suggests is that technological advancement has only blurred the temporal boundaries between the past and the present. Jameson suggests the need for a clear delineation between past and present; without this delineation, it becomes difficult to understand or remember either. Our understanding of the past becomes too specifically linked to specific instances, and thus our understanding of the present is a patch of symbols rather than a cohesive whole, a phenomenon Jameson refers to as “schizophrenia”.

Technology has long had this temporal blending capacity, dating back even to the written word. But the question we are left with is: What exactly do we do with re-dos? Throughout this paper, we have seen that re-dos are like memory in its proximity to subjectivity. Re-dos, however, do not produce, and must be recalled by memory to exist. Further, re-dos, in their materiality, can be replayed precisely and imbued with meaning upon replay, moving them more towards video.

The final scene of this episode presents a future where, if we take Jameson’s word as truth, re-dos indeed further complicate our understanding of the present. It is memory that can be replayed, bringing the personal past into any given moment of the present. It is not just video; it is constant surveillance, mediated through the eyes of the subject. “The Entire History of You” gives us a new future where Jameson’s postmodern state is even more muddled by the addition of re-dos, neither memory nor video, but both.

   Bibliography

Excuse the poor audio quality - I don’t have Tim and his mic, and it’s a recorded call over Google Hangouts.

I guess to introduce this piece: I was applying for a storytelling workshop in Cape Cod for the Spring term, and was editing some footage I previously recorded back in Evanston. The idea was names : given that we knew so many people with really strange or unique names and situations - someone with the legal last name of Butts, someone that went through multiple legal names and nicknames, a Muslim friend with a Jewish first name - we figured this was a good, fun, first episode that would provide us a way to kind of ease into the podcast as well as describe ourselves and the name we chose for our podcast. Of course, our model was This American Life and of course, we grandly failed. Still, I thought the material was good.

I won’t lie, an impetus for starting my own podcast (the TPodcast, a name at least for the interim) was the release of Northwestern’s first relatively high profile podcast, Nine Lives. It’s not bad - but it’s not great, and honestly I felt like I could do better. The “names” episode was not better. And after I had this impromptu, amazing conversation with my sister, which crossed seas and nations by the way, I knew that I was really onto something that was good, and honest, and special.

My mother’s mother raised 6 women, the second oldest of which died three years ago. My mother’s second oldest sister. I am writing this from my cousin’s home, my mother’s oldest sister’s younger daughter, in Oklahoma City. My cousin is 35 and her older sister is 39. She has two children, aged 7 and 4. Her mother and my mother’s father are also staying with us, for the week.

My mother ages the same way as her sisters. When she’s confused, she clicks her tongue and tilts her head. She laughs with her eyes. She juts her teeth when she laughs. I get really sad when I see her wearing scarves. She has a lot of back and shoulder and hand pain. She physically cannot run. She loves doing pottery. I’ve learned to watch her reactions every time we see a plate or a bowl or a mug anywhere. It’s hard for her to do pottery with her pain. My cousin makes tired eyes at her children at the table when they spill food all over the floor. I haven’t had a conversation with her about anything other than her kids. I don’t remember the last time I told my mother I loved her. I joke about becoming more like Buster from Arrested Development but I’m finding the humor less hilarious because of its absurdity and more because it hits a little too close to home.

My grandmother, my mother’s mother, died on June 3rd, 2015. I had a project due by 5pm on Friday, June 5th, so I missed the funeral in San Jose by about an hour. I heard an estranged grandson drove in for the service, bawled for about 30 minutes, then drove back to LA. I saw all my cousins after the funeral, all dressed in black. I mistook a cousin for a different cousin’s husband, and her husband for a cousin. We partied though- it was your typical Korean party, lots of beer, lots of soju, lots of finger foods. My mother’s oldest sister got plastered. We drove my father to my grandfather’s house. He drove back later, came back in the morning, cried, wouldn’t answer us, then crawled onto the floor and slept until the burial. I don’t know why he cried. I think my parents’ marriage is not very happy. I don’t think my mother loves my father in the same way any more. His brother died a little over a year ago. Maybe that was it.

The burial was a separate service from the funeral. I forgot my dress shoes in Evanston, and accidentally washed all my white dress shirts with a red handkerchief, so I showed up in baggy dress pants, a blue striped dress shirt, and a large jacket with black nikes. They told me I was a pallbearer in the car on the way there. The coffin was beautiful. Mahogany. It was really heavy. I was surprised at how intricate the hearse was. I had always assumed they just lifted the coffin into the trunk like I did last night with my bags when my cousin picked me up from the airport. But there’s a railing. You slide the coffin onto it, like drapes, and you slide it out. You carry it across the burial grounds, over other people’s graves, and carefully drop it onto another machine that lets it slowly descend into the hole.

When I told everyone I would be out of town for the weekend, it went:

“OH where??”

“OH I love the bay!!”

“That is so spontaneous!”

“I wish I could just get a ticket for California and go just like that!”

What would I have said? I told my boss, and one of my professors, but acquaintances..

           Generally speaking, when I try to write about film I try to inhabit the mind of the filmmaker. As a film student, most of my filmmaking experience is riddled with personal failures- namely, that I have an idea or a seed of an idea and it just fails to manifest itself visually or rhetorically. This is, still, what amazes me about and attracts me to film. As I previously wrote, film is intuitive but exclusive in who can make it. Most films fail to truly land emotional, comedic, etc moments in a form outside of kitsch/pandering. Welcome to Dongmakgol is, in my opinion, one of these films, though its intentions are hard to parse.

The reason I believe inhabiting the mind of the filmmaker is important is because it helps you realize at which points the filmmaker was working at something his/her own, and it helps you realize at which points the filmmaker took comedic, dramatic, etc. cues from approaches of other filmmakers. Film is incredibly difficult, but I believe that this trap happens in all forms of storytelling. The average audience member has mediocre taste, and the average film has mediocre production (by definition). Mediocre production can be created by many different ways, but most common that I have seen is formulaic storytelling and failed, unintelligible risks. Welcome to Dongmakgol has both in regards to its narrative structure and the two animated scenes (popcorn and boar).

Film more than any medium, in my opinion, has great potential for emotional manipulation. Film most closely mimics real life, with visual and audial stimulation in the form of Point of View. There is a relationship between the director and every audience member, and necessary questions arise: Why is the director making this decision at this moment? You have to be able to trust your director, and you need to be able to know that s/he is neither lazy nor buys into Hollywood ideological emotional manipulation. At the end of Welcome to Dongmakgol, you are sad, but do you really feel anything? Taking a very hard look at ones emotional state during the ending might reveal that, perhaps, you feel sad because you observed typified indicators of sadness.

I emphasize taking a close look at what is artifice and what is truth. I question whether this film represents a truth. I will acknowledge that certain elements of the film worked rather well. The jokes were, generally, well written. Color correction was good, as was composition of certain shots. The story, however, seemed to be a story of characters rather than of people. The reason why, in my opinion, so many student films fail, is because execution is markedly different from ideas. Though the idea of Welcome to Dongmakgol is fine, the execution was typical. The story arc is what you learn in Screenwriting 101: Introduction of characters, conflict, release of tension, climax, and conclusion. There is nothing wrong with this- this structure is proven-yet Welcome to Dongmakgol seemed too packaged. The sentimental shots of Yeo-Il dancing, the awed villagers, the inexplicable shots of the moths (a very heavy handed attempt at symbolism, perhaps), the character tropes, etc. In the ways that Welcome to Dongmakgol was a typical Hollywood style film, it was standard and offered little new. In the ways that Welcome to Dongmakgol strayed from Hollywood style film, it failed to coherently present emotional information.

In my editing class, my professor would always ask if we deserved what moments we are creating. I think this is a good question to ask, and it buttresses against a lot of amateur absurdist/surrealist work. This question is important when considering the absurd elements of Welcome to Dongmakgol, namely Yeo-Il’s character and the popcorn and boar scenes. In regards to Yeo-Il: during our class discussion, I heard my peers describe her as epitomizing peace and innocence. This is where inhabiting the director’s mind comes very useful for me. As a director (or the writer, etc), characters always have a purpose, but main characters should never exist as pure symbolism. Coming from the director’s perspective, having a character like Yeo-Il accomplishes a lot using very little effort. There is high entertainment, sentimental, and plot value, while demanding a lot of strain both on the part of the actress (Kang Hye-Jung) and of the audience trying to make sense of this character, ending up backwards rationalizing her purpose in the film. Does Park Kwang-Hyun deserve this character? Perhaps not. The student’s reflection that we read in class- that Welcome to Dongmakgol is better reflected as a work of theatre- holds very true when thinking on Yeo-Il. Theatre requires more suspension of disbelief than film does, allowing more room for characters like Yeo-Il. But in a film, she sticks out as a device because there she has high potentiality to be used as a shtick or a crutch, which Park Kwang-Hyun does.

In regards to the popcorn and boar scenes: I enjoyed the popcorn scene. I don’t mean to sound like I completely despised this film. I believe the film had good moments, the popcorn scene being one of them. It was harmless, short, and very silly in the best way. Park Kwang-Hyun got away with this joke. The boar scene was the popcorn scene times 1000, and the enjoyment I received from it was the boldness of the choice and the devoted commitment to the joke. Visually, it was absurd, and emotionally, it was taxing. I am unsure if the scene would have worked if the animation was better, and I’m unsure if part of the humor intended was the poorly concealed Adobe AfterEffects animation. The intentionality of this scene comes under pretty serious question, especially since the scene holds so long. I am not sure that Park Kwang-Hyun deserved this scene, and I am even less sure whether he knew what he wanted from this scene in relation to the rest of the film.

Which, perhaps, leads to the biggest question: Do I trust Park Kwang-Hyun ? My answer is no. I found Welcome to Dongmakgol to be emotionally confusing and tiring, with funny, innocent moments, but ultimately too disorienting for anything to emotionally land. Welcome to Dongmakgol is a film of parts that operate more or less fine on their own (with the exception of the English-speaking actors, the music/musical cues, and the sound effects) but are incoherent when pieced together, finding Park Kwang-Hyun struggling to make emotional sense in a film that does not lend itself naturally to making emotional sense. The long, drawn out melodramatic scenes in Welcome to Dongmakgol are evidence of this. I found myself unmoved at the deaths of Yeo-Il and Jang Young-Hee, and contributing to that was poor foley and sound in general. The acting also seemed forced- where acting falls flat, it can be chalked up to bad acting (which this film had) or as evidence of forced writing or forced directorial choices (which this film had as well). Park Kwang-Hyun makes us feel, but in some sense it feels like he is making us feel something so that we do not get bored and so he gets a directorial pass. The alternative is that Park Kwang-Hyun has legitimately bought into the Hollywood ideology (read: corrupted/influenced by the system) and truly believes that the narrative and emotional arc he produced is true to emotion, in which case I merely do not trust Park Kwang-Hyun ’s taste.

For anyone that has completed even a minimal amount of fashion research, Uniqlo should be a familiar name (speaking from a male metro perspective). r/MaleFashionAdvice heralds Uniqlo as an affordable clothing store that produces quality, good looking basics. Which is largely true: the most basic of basics, the Oxford Collar Button Down, is on sale on the Uniqlo website for $19.90 in multiple colors right now (originally only $29.90). Vests, sweaters, slim pants, parkas, also sell for much less than their quality equivalents (at, say, Gap or Banana Republic). I’m not going to pretend like I know a lot about fashion, but Uniqlo makes it incredibly easy for college men like me that care about how they look to look like they know a lot about fashion.

 Uniqlo does a lot of things right. I picked up a linen blazer and two (very) stylish briefs for about $40 + s&h. That’s crazy! But when you sift through the more conventional articles of clothing, you start to see some really interesting collaborations that Uniqlo does with various media/artists, mainly through graphic tees/sweats. They’ve collaborated with icons from Disney to Roger Hargreaves (Mr. Men & Little Miss) to, perhaps most infamously, MoMA, in a collaboration dubbed SPRZ NY, Uniqlo’s flagship claim to relevance in the modern art sphere.

 SPRZ NY (read: Surprise New York) was launched in Spring 2014 and includes clothing with fronts emblazoned with the work of modern art icons such as Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and many, many others. Some of these are really nice- I picked up a pair of Haring polos with the banana and dog logos in the left breast area, and many other pieces such as the Ryan McGinness collection are tasteful and subtle- and some are, to be put lightly, garish.

Fig.1

Fig. 2

Fig. 3

In case you didn’t know who the personage/the author of the works was, his name is conveniently plastered in huge letters on the front! Now, whenever people see my outfits with cool art on it, any intrigue that is originally created by the initial interaction is demolished by the artist’s signature, encasing my clothing as not art but as a brand. Great.

As far as I can tell, there are two possible intentions of these Warhol shirts:

1.      MoMA wants to spread art into the popular sphere through these shirts.

2.      Uniqlo genuinely thinks that these shirts will sell, which means that it thinks these shirts are cool.

The first intention (MoMA’s) is very plausible. By tying art directly to fashion, MoMA creates access to a very powerful form of commodification. Art taste and fashion taste become blended, and the potential for increased engagement increases a lot. MoMA is utilizing a different way of consuming art; making art a commodity i.e. making art consumable. The hope here is that the global consciousness of art will increase as a direct result of this collaboration with a major clothing brand.

The second intention (Uniqlo’s) is kind of weird. From the art perspective, I think that these shirts make a lot of sense. MoMA is not a figure in mass fashion taste manufacturing. Uniqlo, however, is. What MoMA gains from the SPRZ NY collaboration is very clear, but what Uniqlo gains is much harder to parse. In theory, to make money, Uniqlo needs to create items that people want to wear. So what does Uniqlo gain from this? All I can think of is access to huge amounts of symbol –merely reprinting art on fabric and letting the artwork do all the heavy lifting for them. The ‘fashion’ here is, in Figure 2’s case, Sitting Bull.

How can I word this without sounding like an ornery millennial, standing on his hoverboard, shaking his fist in front of his north Chicago suburb high rise? This collection is the one of the most post-modern things I have ever seen. This is the alt-bro alternative to those tattoos in Chinese that non-Chinese think mean “peaceful mountain” but really mean “goat dung”. The value in these shirts are value by association and visual affiliation – an aestheticized version of the colloquial “name dropping”. What does the average wearer of Fig. 3 know about Andy Warhol? That he painted those tomato cans and that he said “I believe media is art”? More importantly, what does Uniqlo think is important to know about Andy Warhol?

Which, surprisingly, posits the idea that Uniqlo is perhaps more self-aware and clever than its SPRZ NY collaboration may suggest. Brash over-branding, media reproduction… hey ! This is starting to sound a lot like a Warhol kind of schtick! Is Uniqlo maybe trying to position these shirts as, in themselves, a Warholian kitsch? Is the idea that these shirts are more than reference, but symbol in and of itself? Has art become clothing, which in turn has become art?

Well, maybe not. Basquiat’s SAMO street art movement seems to fit rather poorly with this post-modern pop culture appropriation assessment. Maybe Uniqlo really is just putting artwork on shirts and calling it a day.

Some of these shirts work rather well as canvases and look really good if you consider the t-shirt as a new medium rather than a piece of casual wear:

An Excerpt

As I said earlier, Oyelowo’s performance requires some unpacking. It’s amazing how much a mustache and costuming can make someone that looks like David Oyelowo:

Look like a believable Martin Luther King, Jr. It’s not just the costuming and the ‘stache, of course; Oyelowo is incredible. Transformative, even. This performance, of all the subtle performances given in the film, was the most subtle, the most nuanced, and the best result. Oyelowo switched from inspiring, powerful leader to insecure, questioning leader; feeble husband; reassuring pastor; diplomat; all seamlessly, with ease, just as MLK presumably did in real life. And those moments of triumph- what moments! Oyelowo’s deliverance of speeches at the Selma congregation and at Montgomery sent literal chills down my spine. His voice is very powerful, certainly, but he also uses his entire body in his words. I especially love his pointed index and thumb fingers used as emphatic punctuations. Oyelowo doesn't deliver the same preacher’s slow, rolling rhetoric, but admittedly as great as Martin Luther King is as an orator, no speeches (delivered by anyone) are themselves very cinematic. Oyelowo does, in a sense, become Martin Luther King. He’s been working on this role for 7 years, and it seems pretty evident that he’s spent a majority of those 7 years hammering this down. He even says in this ABC interview how he woke up one day confused about his identity - a waking Kafka-esque dream of sorts.

I’m pretty sure a large part of the reason I’m so amazed by Oyelowo’s performance is the difficulty and boldness of portraying Martin Luther King, Jr. Not only is MLK such a universally important and revered figure, his history and mannerisms have thoroughly been explored. Oyelowo is under a pretty bright light. Selma’s success is completely dependent on the performance of whichever actor it chooses as MLK. Imagine if Oyelowo sucked just a little bit, or slipped just a little bit! Selma would have been a vast disappointment, and God knows Hollywood does not need another awful biopic (or does it?). In combination with some excellent cinematographic choices by DuVerney, Oyelowo turns in a really masterful performance.

Narrative, too, in Selma is very impressive. As any film creator needs be when developing a film about such a subject like the Selma-Montgomery march or such a figure as MLK Jr, DuVernay is very ambitious. Yet, she is subtly so. I can easily see Selma as a 150 minute biopic highlighting the seminal moments of MLK’s childhood: his early experiences with segregation, his entrance into organizing, the Montgomery bus boycott, the March on Washington, the 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing, his Nobel Peace Prize, the Selma-Montgomery March, and his assassination. You know the story. A child is born, goes through tough times, becomes an incredible leader, then dies tragically. Cookie cutter Hollywood. DuVernay, thankfully, had the wisdom to avoid this mistake- though I have no knowledge of what the original script entailed, DuVernay’s choice of script, her subsequent rewrite, and directing is masterful. DuVernay chose a specific event and detailed it thoroughly, containing the film largely within a single location of Selma, giving weight to the title while simultaneously allowing for the deliberate exploration of one town, its people and its events, and its part in a larger machine. Evil has specific faces; we remember J. Edgar Hoover, George Wallace, and the sheriff of Selma. We see a very nuanced telling of the march at Selma: MLK’s marital issues, the FBI investigation, LBJ’s struggles with morality and his presidency, LBJ’s relationship with MLK, the George Wallace/police force response, Malcolm X’s relation to King and the March....

This is, too, perhaps where the narrative fails. How many characters can DuVernal successfully pull off? How many interactions can DuVernay pack into the film before it starts feeling like a series of chunks with definitive purposes? Every scene is intentional, but sometimes in a bad way. A film is made much like a musical phrase, but at moments Selma feels more like Calvin in this strip, trying to make a dinosaur out of the appropriate pieces of garbage he found. He makes a whole, but it’s kind of wrong and kind of forced:

Scenes that stuck out particularly were when Carmen Ejogo as Coretta Scott King replays the taped extramarital intercourse to MLK and when Stephan James and Omar Dorsey as John Lewis and James Orange, respectively, have a heated conversation about joining forces with MLK (Lewis for, and Orange against). The drama is inherent in these scenes, but feels forced. It’s film undergrad writing- the dialogue carries the drama but nothing else. Silence is used only as absence of noise, not as meaning itself. And this isn’t a bad thing, necessarily, except that the dialogue is so on the nose. You can see the blocking of the actors are pretty awkward- who/what is restraining Carmen Ejogo? Why is she standing so weird? When you think about it, those scenes don’t actually feel like they fit in the film. The extramarital affair never resurfaces! James Orange was on his death bed organizing the 2008 MLK celebration! Drama serves the purposes of drama, and we see that perhaps DuVernay lets herself get carried away in the story a little.

Continuing along this train of thought, there’s an especially interesting moment when the protestors finally do complete their march and DuVernay crosscuts with actual, black and white footage of the march. I think it was powerful? This is certainly a risky move though. By inserting real footage of a real event, the director takes the audience out of the constructed reality of the film and into the real world. Does it match up? Emotionally, I think so. I wanted more though, until I realized that the film up to this point had not been constructed to make this moment be anything more than an emotional peak in a narrative.

My point ultimately roots from one screening of a sequence I saw in an editing class this year:

The Unbearable Lightness of Being- Philip Kaufman, 1988.

I only watched the sequence shown above, so I don’t know about the rest of the film, but this sequence is masterfully edited by Walter Murch. The clip in the trailer does not do the actual sequence much justice, but you kind of get the point. Real footage from the Soviet invasion is crosscut with footage shot by Kaufman, also in black and white, and you get this chaotic, confusing, incredible visual violence that, in the end, is certainly jarring but also very engaging.

I guess when I saw DuVernay switch to the black and white footage I got excited at the possibility of something really cool, but you just kind of end up with a thematically fitting and feel-good kind of match of images. It’s more referential/pastiche than anything else, and I think there’s a reason why I can’t quite figure out why this crosscutting was included at all. In this vein: what was up with the ending texts describing each characters’ lives after the march? What is this, a story about malaised white adolescent prep boys? Maybe I’m nitpicking, but this is all partially informed by the Q&A DuVernay fielded after the film.

--

DuVernay came out to a (partially) standing ovation. She seemed really cool, friendly, and down-to-earth. In the pre-Q&A conversation she had with Medill professor Charles Whitaker, she highlighted certain points about transitioning from independent films to commercial features, with zero formal film education, and as a black woman, which was amazing to hear. Her perseverance and patience is outstanding.

The first question of the Q&A was from a boy who asked DuVernay why, in the racial environment that Selma was released in (post-Michael Brown, post-Eric Garner, etc.), she chose to represent the march as such a closed, historical event. She responded: “Because I’m the artist and that was my choice”. 

Shut down! Rightfully so! Who the hell asks that question? What kind of dumbass verbally assaults an artist’s work like that? There’s a time and place. Ambushing a black, female artist who managed to create the first studio film to prominently feature Martin Luther King, Jr in a public Q&A is neither. Roger Ebert’s sage words at Sundance over a decade back ring true here. This kind of film’s mere existence is amazing in Hollywood’s studio system, and you can sense in the tremendous amount of backlash surrounding DuVernay’s depiction of LBJ that somehow mass America is not ready for a film like Selma- a studio film that lends itself to the black discursive mode rather than the white.

And yet... 

The parallels that so many critics are drawing between the events displayed in the film and the events that took place in Ferguson, Staten Island, Cleveland, and countless more, certainly exist. But so what? If you read the articles, all they do is point out the parallels between the film and the present. DuVernay and Oyelowo themselves even mention these parallels, multiple times, and to what conclusion? Ostensibly, none. The feeling remains that there is a message being sent in a film documenting a specifically non-violent protest/demonstration by THE American icon for non-violent demonstration during a time where violent protests are being condemned by major news media outlets as well as almost every public face, even, amazingly, ex-NFL star and possible murderer Ray Lewis. DuVernay went on to describe how she was interested mainly in storytelling and the story that she found in the march organized in Selma- her mother works in Selma, she has been there on multiple occasions, she found the representations of King and the march terribly wanting. Here’s DuVernay:

“I didn’t want to make ‘Mississippi Burning.’ It had its place; it was among the first that dealt with African-American-centered history and the only way to get people into the theaters then was to have a ‘white savior.’ But we’re past that point. If in 2014 we’re still making ‘white savior movies’ then it’s just lazy and unfortunate. We’ve grown up as a country and cinema should be able to reflect what’s true. And what’s true is that black people are the center of their own lives and should tell their own stories from their own perspectives. That was my first order of business.”

http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/movies/2015/01/03/ava-duvernay-march-direct-selma/aYNxrN3gPjhbalF4QEnO7M/story.html

This is where the LBJ criticisms come back in- fact or fiction, DuVernay is interested in a revisionist telling of protests leading to the Voting Rights Act in 1963. This is certainly needed, but what’s confounding is DuVernay’s follow up to the first student’s question: “Because I’m the artist and that was my choice... I tell stories, and it’s up to the viewer to draw meaning from the story I create”. DuVernay certainly does tell an important story, but it’s hard not to read this as an admittance that she doesn’t really have anything to say about the film’s parallels to the present, other than that they exist.

David Denby over at the New Yorker writes: “DuVernay’s timing couldn’t be more relevant. Next year marks the fiftieth anniversary of both the Selma marches and the passage of the Voting Rights Act. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court overturned a key provision of the act last year, and Republican legislatures across the country have been deploying new voter-I.D. laws. Faced with all that—and with the recent turmoil in Ferguson, Cleveland, and New York—King would have noticed how far we have yet to go, shaken his head, and set to work.”

guess you can’t really escape the xx comparisons- atmospheric bedroom vibe, short guitar/pitched percussive riffs- more to come

So, there's a lot of things that attract me to this.

I guess we can start with the sheer ambition User 113291699 exhibits in even attempting at an a cappella performance of the entirety of MBDTF, without a break, of all parts (vocal and instrumental). User 113291699, at 0:27, attempts all parts of the "Can we get much higher/so high/oh oh oh", cutting himself off, attempting at self-harmonizing, etc. At 46:30 User 113291699 finds himself replicating Kanye's autotuned end of "Runaway", and continues mumbling/humming into the microphone for a complete 3 minutes - and this is all without glancing at the sidebar and realizing there is an entire recording of 808s and Yeezus in addition to this masterpiece. 

Of Kanye's discography, User 113291699 chose the three most personal and turmoiled albums, giving a rough estimate of Kanye's emotional and ideological spectrum (with the notable absence of the college themes/early years). User 113291699 gives himself no mercy when approaching this project. Each album is a continuous recording. He's obviously fatigued- 33:40 finds User 113291699 stumbling over "I'm so Appalled", trying to perform the reverb on the hook "Fuckin ridiculous". Multiple audible yawns punctuate various points of the performance- not even Kanye himself recorded each single part of MBDTF all the way through, in one take. So User 113291699 really loves Kanye- but why? And why this method of expressing that love? And who is this guy, anyway?

One may be tempted to categorize these recordings as manifestations of what we all do as music listeners- we've all done this, to a much lesser scale, admittedly, but we've experimented with our flow, we've imitated instrumentation, we've tried to a cappella a not-very-a-cappella song. But this is different. This is recorded and published. This is exhaustive. The act of recording is usually coupled/associated with perfection and/or drafting, differentiating it from shower singing and the like. Perhaps these recordings are culminations of hours of practice, and we can thus dismiss these recordings as User 113291699 just being a supremely weird person. This is a pretty tempting theory, and then you realize exactly why User 113291699 is stumbling over his words so much- he's listening to MBDTF as he is recording it. The times match up exactly- 808s is 46 minutes long, Yeezus 40, and MBDTF 1hr 8, exactly the lengths of the recordings are. Maybe this is obvious, you can hear the songs every now and then, but User 113291699's performance is at times so abstracted from the actual album that, in combination with the fact that he ostensibly chose to not pull the lyrics up in advance, it blurs the lines between a pre-recording and a sing-a-long.

Could this possibly be a performance then? Have the motives for these recordings changed from merely an appreciation of Kanye to a full-fleshed embodiment of Yeezus himself?

How many rap anthems do you see about cocaine? They exist, definitely in larger quantities than their heroin/acid counterparts, but O.T. Genasis’s “CoCo” isn’t just a rap anthem- it’s a love song!

And yes, O.T howls “I’m in LOOVE with the CO CO” something like six times within the song- the previous statement seems perhaps to only state the blatantly obvious- but in this era of intense semantic pedantry, the greatest epidemic that faces us all is, undoubtedly, the devaluation of the word love. So of course, from just hearing the chorus, one would think something along the lines of “Hmm… Doesn’t O.T. Genasis mean that he just really likes cocaine?” 

This would be true, had the whole video not been entirely structured around cocaine. Despite lyrics suggesting a deeper struggle within O.T’s life at play (“Free my homies, fuck the C.O//Fuck the judge, fuck my P.O”), the only hint at a life other than cocaine is a collective 2 seconds of O.T. and his crew very noncommittally gesticulating a .38 at the camera:

(Caption: O.T. y u make me do dis T__T)

There’s two main ideas at play in “Coco”. The first is, again, cocaine. The second is the “I’m big now y’all can’t fuck with me” motif common in rap- these ideas aren’t necessarily irreconcilable, but it takes a fairly generous benefit of the doubt to present “Coco” as a coherent work. Here are the first four lines of the second verse:

"Thirty six, that’s a kilo (aqui) Need a brick, miss my free throw I’m in love, just like Ne-Yo Bustin’ shots, now he Neo (Matrix)”

The only connection between these two ideas is a homophone. This could work in a song that’s more than two 8-line verses long, or if O.T. used his lines more efficiently, but to say that cocaine is a symbolic culmination of fame that encompasses busting shots and freeing the crew from prison is to put a large burden of conceptual Mad Libbing on the listener.

So is the song more about cocaine or the rise to fame? Indicators point to the former, and the pushing point is the music video. We only see one narrative action collectively taken by the crew, but what are they doing in these shots?

Fig. 1

Fig. 2

Fig. 3

They’re all going to O.T’s crib to do cocaine! (sidenote: shout out to the E.H. Shephard-esque teapot on the curtain in Fig. 3 - is this O.T.’s real crib??) Every shot of the music video is directly linked to O.T. Genasis’s love for cocaine and how he likes to do cocaine with his friends, with the exception of the shots of the crew on the car in O.T’s parking lot and the inexplicable shot of O.T. driving around at night in a rarri.

So the song is perhaps a little disjunctive, as is the video, but it’s really fucking infectious. O.T’s range isn’t as limitless as he might like it to be, but it’s damn powerful and full of an almost anguished passion- you hear the gravelly undertones and wonder if he can continue yelling for the entire song (he does). The chorus is a proclamation: his voice peaks at the word “love”, and any doubt that O.T. really means love instead of ‘really likes’ is erased. Even the beat is a barebones trap/neo-West Coast trap rattling bass that drops at the exact right moments, solidifying “CoCo” as a Hitchcock-reminiscent banger. Part of O.T.’s draw, too, is his openness about his supreme weirdness, perhaps culminating in this infamous shot that made Complex Magazine call him “the rap game Luciano Pavarotti”:

His weirdness doesn’t end there, though. Street names of cocaine are pretty abundant: coke, snow, dust, angel dust, blow, yayo. There’s a lot of pretty neutral sounding names to choose from. The CoCos in my life, however, include an affectionate family name for a sister of a friend, Conan O’Brien, and this bird from Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends:

Other possible usages of Coco: As short for Cookies N’ Cream, perhaps O.T’s favorite Baskin-Robbins flavor; hot cocoa, O.T’s favorite winter-time beverage; a pet name for a girlfriend, perhaps a Coretta or a Colette; etc. etc.

And who the hell raps about how cheap you get your drugs?

"I’m in love with the coco I’m in love with the coco I got it for the low, low I’m in love with the coco”

That’s almost certainly a reference to how many connections O.T. has, and it makes sense given his "little brother" status he grew up with as outlined by Noisey’s interview but: 1) what happened to the rise to fame/money narrative? and 2) there’s got to be better ways to frame that sentiment.