Violence and Popcorn
Recently I’ve been watching more Indie horror films (Possession, 1981) which has brought me back to the conversation about the role class plays in the discussion of mediated violence.
→How can we categorize and order reception/perception of violence in commercial films vs. commercial indie films vs. art house films vs. video art?
→What can one get away with when the violence has been “intellectualized?” (what does it even look like/mean to “intellectualize” violence?) This question makes me wonder about the elements of fun/play/pleasure that I detect in certain forms of “trivialize violence”. They certainly appear in some forms of “intellectualized violence” but seem less self-aware or intentional.
Within the vein of “getting away with violence,” I’m also curious about the role of intended audiences. In my mind, it breaks down to:
People who hate all violence in film
People who hate “trivial violence”(action/horror) but appreciate “intellectual violence” (commercial indie/ art house/video art)
People who hate “intellectual violence” (it’s weird/not for me/ I don’t get it) but appreciate “trivial violence”
People who appreciate all violence in film
I’m taking a media anthropology class and so far my take away from all the case studies that we’ve read about the film is that perhaps the only thing separating the commercial film end of the spectrum with the video art end of the spectrum is ROI risk analysis.
→What role does this assessment play on my work? (spoiler- not sure)
I keep imagining an installation where I blur the context clues between cheap commercial entertainment and the gallery white cube. (Is this too on the nose??)
How does “tackifying” the gallery environment change the experience of viewing “intellectualized violence”?
There’s the additional context of me working at a movie theater for 6 years, and it was actually during a work birthday party that my assault happened. Within that- I think notions of fake/real movie violence/art violence/lived violence generalized/personal begin to collapse.
One way I’ve thought of creating that collapse is to serve popcorn to the viewer as a way to queer the experience of the gallery and hopefully cause the viewer to reflect on the cultural implications of violence as entertainment. ★Here I’m really not interested in making a judgment call, I think my only aim is for the viewer to become curious about that idea (violence as entertainment) the same way I’m curious about it. I am a little worried that popcorn+” intellectual violence” runs the risk of feeling finger-pointy. Which I suppose is information in itself that I need to reflect on
Anyway…
I bought a popper.
And I hate the look of it- so I’m grappling what to do with it because there’s the added component of heat. A quick google search tells me that they make heat resistant vinyl so I think that’s the avenue that I may pursue. Unfortunately, the popper is in my studio at Green Rd. and I am in Pittsburgh. But I can make the files for the vinyl cutter in the meantime.
Beyond the practical considerations of how to apply the modification to the popper, I’m also concerned about the aesthetics of it. I both love and hate the idea of making everything tacky
The popper is actually a secondary component to the initial idea of providing information about the work on popcorn bags. What this does for me is to create another nodal conversation of accessibility when it comes to art which is subsequently a conversation about class and access. Who feels invited to the party when it comes to contemporary art? By providing an entry point into the content of the work through the text provided on the bags my hope is that I’m able to make the work intelligible to more people while hopefully not sacrificing the magic of allowing the viewer to come to their own conclusions and meaning-making through the work.
There’s a specific bag from my days working at the movie theater that I had in my mind when I first thought of this piece. Perhaps because it was it was only bags we could eat from for free so it’s most likely receptacle from which I’ve eaten most of the popcorn in my life.
I actually had a hard time finding it initially. I think it’s because I was searching for generic popcorn bags rather than searching restaurant depot sites. Here is the additional bag research I conducted.
These are a lot more fun. It’s interesting to me that the color pallet is limited to blue,red, and yellow (and white). I haven’t looked up any history of popcorn bag printing yet but I would assume it has something to do with cheap or accessible ink.
My plan of action for creating these bags was to:
Create a design
Print the design on the risograph printers (here’s where I might run into trouble, I was planning on printing the designs on a light weight paper (something similar to newsprint) because that how I remember the bags- however, when I was reading through the Stamps Risograph Handbook it said something about thicker, more absorbent paper being better. So I need to email Matt Prichard. It M.P. seems to think it’s won’t work I’ll talk to Ben Winans about screenprinting)
Laser-cut those designs and assemble the bags
I unfolded one of the bags that came with my popper and created a laser path based on the measurements (I know it needs to be red, not green) This is a pretty simple design but creating a model based on precise measurements felt like a maturation on my behalf because I’m usually such an “eye-baller”. Earlier in the semester, I took two four-hour weekend workshops on Rhino with Mark Meier through “Sessions @ Michigan” and found it extremely helpful and feel a lot more confident in what I can do in Rhino.
I started drafting designs in Illustrator and so far I’ve been pretty unhappy with the results.
I liked the idea of using Pluto’s face from Bernini’s Rape of Proserpina. Firstly because I think it’s striking how jovial he looks and secondly because the joviality fits into the aesthetics of commercial imagery. Perhaps too successfully? He looks like the fucking Burger King mascot.
Honestly, at the moment the bags feel like a graphic design challenge and maybe that’s part of my problem. Moving forward I think it’s alright I move away from the red and yellow aesthetic of the normal popcorn bags and popper. I think the hazy picture in my mind of what the bags look like is almost like an infographic- which doesn’t feel right either. I want the bag to inform, but still be art. For some reason, I also feel hyper-vigilant that the bags not fall into the realm of trendy marketing aesthetics. Perhaps because I like the aesthetic but know it’s certainly wrong for the project
Funnily enough when I was looking through the images that I saved of beer packaging (my partner and I used to brew beer and I would design labels for it) I came across this image that seemed- not wrong? Maybe not 100% right but perhaps inching towards something right
It kind of reminds me of this Norman Rockwell painting.
This image reminds me of something that I read in Men, Women, and Chainsaws by Carol J. Clover.
First, it’s important to define the term “Final Girl”. Here are some excerpts
“The Final Girl is boyish, in a word. Just as the killer is not fully masculine, she is not fully feminine—not, in any case, feminine in the ways of her friends. Her smartness, gravity, competence in mechanical and other practical matters, and sexual reluctance set her apart from the other girls and ally her, ironically, with the very boys she fears or rejects, not to speak of the killer himself. Lest we miss the point, it is spelled out in her name: Stevie, Marti, Terry, Laurie, Stretch, Will, Joey, Max. Not only the conception of the hero in Alien and Aliens but also the surname by which she is called, Ripley, owes a clear debt to slasher tradition.” (p. 40).
“The decisive moment, as far as the fixing of gender is concerned, lies in what happens next: those who save themselves are male, and those who are saved by others are female. (p. 59) “
“At the moment that the Final Girl becomes her own savior, she becomes a hero; and the moment that she becomes a hero is the moment that the male viewer gives up the last pretense of male identification. Abject terror may still be gendered feminine, but the willingness of one immensely popular current genre to rerepresent the hero as an anatomical female would seem to suggest that at least one of the traditional marks of heroism, triumphant self rescue, is no longer strictly gendered masculine.” (p. 60)
I like this idea of the Final Girl. I think it fits in rather neatly in the shift I’m interested in talking about. Feeling critical of the violence that goes undetected in classical sculpture (the beginning of the movie where the Final girl is cautious, aware, virginal) to finding the pleasure and control in being able to laugh at things that were once scary (the end of the movie where the Final Girl has been through the gauntlet and steps into her power- and violence- to kill the monster)
Also— I think there is case to be made for Rambo as the Final Girl if you understand the whole movie as the last act of Final Girl-dom. Part of me wonders if I need to drop the Rambo thing for my thesis as it sometimes feels like the singular action movie I like to shoe-horn in
However! Clover brings up an essential point in the subsequent chapter that looks at the Rape Revenge genre of Horror (I Spit on Your Grave, 1978)
“…there is some ethical relief in the idea that if women would just toughen up and take karate or buy a gun, the issue of male-on-female violence would evaporate. It is a way of shifting responsibility from the perpetrator to the victim: if a woman fails to get tough, fails to buy a gun or take karate, she is, in an updated sense of the cliche, asking for it. Moreover, if women are as capable as men of acts of humiliating violence, men are off the guilt hook that modem feminism has put them on. (p.143)
DAMN CAROL.
So how do you grapple with that and keep the notion of the Final Girl as a symbol of empowerment?