Real and Irreal, White and Other; i.e. Class, Power, Finance, and
Portrayal
. . .[In Jurassic Park]
the scientist [Wu] wants to perfect the dinosaurs, to make them safe for
a modern theme park, to make them slower, more stupid, more tractable, more
in
keeping
with our stereotype of creatures destined for extinction. . . he points out
that “nobody really knows what” the dinosaurs were “really
like.” When Hammond
objects that docile, domesticated dinosaurs “wouldn't be real,” Wu
replies:
“But they aren't real now. . . . That's what I'm trying to tell you.
There isn't any reality here.”
. . . “The DNA of the dinosaurs was like old photographs that had
been retouched, basically the same as the original, but in some places repaired
and clarified.”
The image and reality they present are already a manipulation: they are palpable,
living beings whose relation to “real” dinosaurs is already within
a regime of illusion, so that the only question is what illusion we happen
to want to present to ourselves, what illusion might
be safe and attractive to the consumer. . . .
The interesting thing about this debate. . . is that it stages the opposition
between irrealism and realism as wholly contained within a framework of consumption
and display. Nowhere in this debate is it possible to ask whether it is a
good idea to clone dinosaurs in the first place, much less to present them
as commodified
images in a theme park. The debate is completely contained within the assumptions
of specular (and speculative) capitalism. What we display, what we visually
produce and consume, may be debatable from a standpoint like “product
safety”
(a debate rather like the endless and pointless squabbles about whether television
and movie violence “causes” violence in the streets), but specular
economy itself cannot be critiqued. It can only be “regulated” or “de-regulated.” The
debate about Jurassic Park the movie is thus mainly about whether
children should be allowed to see it, not what it means that adults have
produced a film whose special effects for recreating dinosaurs cost “more
money. . . than on funding all scientific research on dinosaurs undertaken
to date.”
– Picture Theory, pp 360-361, by WJT Mitchell
I'm nearly done reading this dense and fascinating book. Something that's
stuck with me throughout is this assertion on page 91: ‘Even
something as mundane and familiar as as the relative proportion of image and
text on the front page
of the daily newspaper is a direct indicator of the social class of its readership.
. . the real question to ask is . . . why does it matter how words and pictures
are juxtaposed, blended, or separated.’
And from page 161:
“Children should be seen and not heard” is a bit
of proverbial wisdom that reinforces a stereotypical relation, not just between
adults and children,
but between the freedom to speak and see and the injunction to remain silent
and available for observation. . . this kind of wisdom is transferable from
children to women to colonized subjects to works of art to characterizations
of visual representation itself. Racial otherness
(especially in the binarized “black/white” divisions of US culture) is open
to precisely this sort of visual/verbal
coding. The assumption is that “blackness” is a transparently readable sign
of racial identity. . . Race is what can be seen (and therefore
named) in skin color, facial features, hair, etc. Whiteness, by contrast,
is invisible,
unmarked; it has no racial identity, but is equated with a normative subjectivity
and humanity from which “race” is a visible deviation.
Visiting the Norman Rockwell museum this summer, I found out that the policy
of most major magazines during the early 60s was that negroes could only be
depicted in subservient roles. CNN's coverage of New Orleans after Katrina
seemed to unearth an entire subclass of people who normally don't merit depiction
(not seen/not heard). The press complies with the US government embargo on
depicting dead US soldiers, but they had no problem repeatedly showing one
particular wheelchair-bound corpse draped in blankets.
Pictorial exposition always entails a power relationship.
