Supplemental 4- Sabina

 Television and The Globe - What happens when a show goes international?

Not to continue on this whole Drag Race trend, but I mean it is interesting to me! Drag Race is popular not just in the United States, but around the globe, with syndicated episodes on various channels, streaming available through Netflix, BBC iPlayer, and Paramount+, and repeated calls from the fans for “RuGirls” to visit specific countries and interact with fans of the show inside and outside of the U.S. As of 2015, Drag Race has expanded into several different countries and territories, starting with Chile, followed by Thailand, the U.K, Canada, Holland, with Spain and Australia/New Zealand being released this year. I've personally watched a couple of these seasons, but the ones that get the most attention are the Western ones specifically that English speakers can understand. I've noticed that the seasons with RuPaul as a judge are skewed toward an American judging perspective, and what I mean by that is despite the nation specific nuances each franchise attempts to do, it always comes down to if RuPaul likes it or not. Doesn't that seem to create a conflict of interest between, say the national specificities of drag in the UK if RuPaul is questioning that drag's validity? What I often wonder is, how are the contestants themselves reacting to the franchising? Are they frustrated at having to perform a drag style that is potentially different than one they are used to performing on the regular? I began to wonder this because in series one of Drag Race UK, during one of the confessionals, contestant Baga Chipz expressed disdain for another contestant using certain slang words like “yaas queen” and “werk” because according to Baga Chipz, “we don’t do that here”. What is it that is being mistranslated to Baga Chipz and why is she rejecting this? Do queens feel like they have to use Black American drag slang in order to appeal to RuPaul? What would happen if the show removed RuPaul entirely? How can the shows be true to their national identities and still create an interesting international viewing experience?

Core 4: Sabina

 I've been thinking a lot about Anna McCarthy’s “Reality Television: a Neoliberal Theater of Suffering” and how much it relates to my own work on RuPaul's Drag Race. I kind of alluded to this in the group post about Reality TV, but I wanted to take a moment and expand on it. In that post, I talked about contestant Roxxxy Andrews sharing that she was left at the bus stop by her birth mother and raised by her grandmother. Expanding on the theater of suffering, I have this idea that reality television fans love to consume personal crisis. I use the word “consume” here to reference the actions of a vocal subsection of the fanbase that feels entitled to the contestants’ lives and, as such, treat them as inconsequential commodities instead of whole, individual, people.Where the consumption and the exploitation of crisis becomes overt is post-viewing when the audience is free to react to the episode. When I searched Google for “Roxxxy Andrews bus stop speech” to remind myself what exactly she said, the first video that popped up was “Bus stop roxxxy Andrews LOL”. This is a 16 second fan-edited video with 164,000 views that splits Roxxxy Andrews’ speech with a previous video of RuPaul laughing while saying, “That’s funny, tell it again!”. Recommended videos included “Roxxxy Andrews/Say So mashup” and “8 Most Emotional Moments on RuPaul’s Drag Race” but I couldn’t find a video that showed the scene as it aired on Logo without ultimately turning to Netflix. What this tells me is that something in the production is allowing the queens to be treated as a product meant for consumption. The authenticity of whatever the moment is doesn’t matter, the trauma doesn’t matter - what matters to production is how viral and sensational (memeable) the moment is, translating to the audience that the queens are an endless commodity. 

When read through a critical lens, the “Bus stop roxxxy Andrews LOL” video is a reflection of Drag Race’s exploitation of trauma and the way fans will react: the audience comes to expect a traumatic storyline and fanvideo RuPaul applauds Roxxxy for making this happen and producing the scene, knowing that it will be it viral moment asking her to “tell it again”. A reliance on traumatic events to create a good storyline is inherent to reality television, sure, but the way Drag Race churns out the personal trauma storyline reveals (ru-veals) how the show exploits trauma from contestants of color and prioritizes the white queens over other contestants, unequally creating racial differences within editing practices.

Supplemental Post #5 - Alexandria

 This year is the first time I’ve watched a couple shows in Norweigian and French. I watched Hjem til jul or Home for Christmas, a Norweigian romantic drama/comedy and the French mystery thriller Lupin on Netflix. Both were recommended by friends. And I realized very quickly that I really don’t like English dubbing and that subtitles are much better. I’ve been studying lip sync on TikTok, and when attempting to watch these shows with English dubbing, I had the hardest time being able to understand what the characters were saying. There was a delay in processing in which my brain was trying to catch up and make sense of the audio/visual mismatch. It made it a hard and uncomfortable experience. 

This IndieWire article from last year describes how the demand for dubbing is increasing and that an insistence on the superiority of subtitles mostly comes from a vocal minority of cinephiles:

https://www.indiewire.com/2020/02/subtitles-vs-dubbing-what-you-need-to-know-1202212800/

But the debate over subs vs dubs has resulted in heated twitter discourse as well. An article for Mother Jones in which the author said that subtitles are only for countries too poor to afford dubbing resulted in heated Twitter debate over the author’s classist and racist assertions:

https://twitter.com/maxwelltani/status/1226931132068966400

Despite the sociocultural dynamics around this question of subs vs dubs, as someone who is relatively new to this, I still need subtitles to understand lol

Supplemental Post #4 - Alexandria

 

Why must Marvel ruin all good things? WandaVision honestly started so strong. I was amazed by the creative risks being taken in a Marvel project—the mystery lingering throughout the first half of the series, the domesticity, the dystopian small town setting. I really enjoyed the glitches that started appear as the episodes progressed. 

*Spoiler Alert* 

Even the concept of Wanda taking an entire town captive and designing her ideal life and family as a way to cope with her grief was truly compelling. Is was a beautiful illustration of what grief can look like, as a character’s interiority was projected into every element of the show—the town she constructed, the characteristics of classic tv shows she incorporated as the days progressed, the way that other characters that were under her control actually felt her pain and grief and were scared by it. But Marvel, in typical Marvel fashion, had to end it with a CGI showdown in the last episode in which Wanda battles Agatha the witch and makes things right. After most of the episodes prior to the finale were so carefully designed and modeled on classic tv shows, all the red cgi splattered across the screen simply looked messy. How could the show have ended differently and maintained its intimacy? I think Marvel missed a great opportunity to explore that, without relying on the classic hero CGI fight. It reminds me of how The Mandalorian ended by having Luke Skywalker come to claim Baby Grogu. Even shows that are extremely well executed can falter as they rely on formulaic and reliable elements in order to please audiences for finales. It’s kind of lazy writing. But I think these larger franchises—Marvel, Star Wars—have definitely conditioned us to expect grand endings, instead of offering more subtlety. 

Supplemental Post #3 - Alexandria

 I truly did not watch much TV this semester, at least not in a traditional sense of watching complete episodes. I think what I’m realizing increasingly is how much my day to day experience of TV shows is actually through shorter clips posted on YouTube and memes and references on platforms like TikTok. Even though I don’t often sit down to commit to a show in its entirety and I tend to be much more of a movie person, I am constantly exposed to shows as they are referenced within a platform environment. Some of the audio clips I quote and have memorized are actually clips from reality tv that have been taken up by TikTok users. I am constantly exposed to memes that use characters from TV shows on Instagram. And when I think of a scene from a show that I want to experience again, I usually search for the clip on YouTube instead of locating the full episode. So my experience of TV is much more fragmented, but also more seamlessly integrated into the ways in which I use social media, which I suspect is something that a lot of people experience in our current digital environment.

Supplemental Post #3

 

Media in general is not kind towards anarchists. At its best, depictions of anarchists tend to portray them as innocents who don’t know what is best for them. Other times, anarchists follow normal societal structures but loudly proclaim their antipathy towards the state. In The Expanse, the government-less Belters who dwell on the spaceships, moons, and asteroids around the Solar system are a fairly good depiction, but their anarchy is still bound by this militarized, naval sensibility of ranked hierarchies that pervades science fiction. (I had a short conversation with Anita Sarkeesian about this on Twitter, which I tried really hard to humblebrag about as an introductory anecdote for this post, but I couldn’t figure out how to make it work so now it’s a parenthetical normal brag).

Elsewhere, however, anarchists are a shorthand for a type of violent nihilism that demands no explanation or justification. Enter Marvel’s Falcon and the Winter Soldier, a superlative distillation of superheroic neoliberalism. In FatWS, a world struggling to pull itself out of the chaos of the events of the Avengers films, finds itself facing a new threat – a popular-supported underground group of anarchists called the “Flag-Smashers,” whose villainy at first consists of stealing food, vaccines, and other critical supplies from governmental storage and distributing them to a disaffected populace.  However, the political sensibility of the show cannot allow them to merely remain thus: they become increasingly violent as the show progresses, with murders and bombings that are both ideological non-sequiturs to their stated objectives, and inconsistent with established characterizations. Meanwhile, the US government has created a new “perfect soldier” in a new Captain America, named Walker (the default military name). However, this isn’t a review, so I’ll remain light on the evaluations.

Ultimately, Falcon and the Winter Soldier is concerned with power: who gets to wield power, and what should they do with it. The titular characters, Falcon and Bucky, the Winter Soldier, both struggle to assume the responsibility left by Steve Rogers, the former Captain America. The show has a clear hierarchy of who deserves power, which in this case is represented by the super-soldier serum that bequeaths its imbiber with superhuman abilities. At the top is the dead Steve Rogers, who was Morale, Humble, and Good. Rogers fought the people who were threats to the status quo and did little other than react to villains. Falcon and Bucky aspire to maintain those ideals, and so are also deserving of the power. The fascist Captain Walker misuses his power by committing murders on behalf of the government, but is ultimately redeemable because he too fights for the continuity of global and domestic capitalism – his fascist tendencies are an unfortunate affectation, an uncouth mannerism that needs correction. Finally, Karli Morgenthau, the leader of the Flag-Smashers, is the real threat to the systems that the other characters represent. She presents a possible future without a corrupt and overbearing state, a world in which ordinary people are empowered to take care of themselves. For that, she must be punished. The show culminates with her death, but Falcon and the Winter Soldier is not content with just killing the character: her ideology itself must be attacked, and its method for doing this a clumsy twisting of plot and contrivance. After stealing trucks of food and medical supplies, Karli blows up a building full of hostages, before turning to her partner and saying “This is the only message they’ll understand”. Who is they? What was the message? The show isn’t particularly interested in those questions, it is only interested in reconciling its new Captain America as being as unambiguously good as possible in a world in which global distrust of police and government is steadily increasing.

Jensen Supplemental 5

And it all comes down to this.

With bloodshot eyes and carpal tunnel laden hands, I type my last supplemental post...

ROUND 3: NETFLIX'S FIRE DOCUMENTARY GAME

    I have been CONSUMED with Netflix's documentary content lately. First, it was the true crime stuff. You know, murderers next door, art heists, spooky supernatural business, all that good stuff. Next, I got to the more political stuff: JFK theories, Jeffrey Epstein (he didn't kill himself), and Seaspiracy (which facetiously inspired me to go fishing, but don't worry I throw them back). It just seems Netflix is constantly coming out with new and fascinating nonfiction material, and it got me wondering why such stuff is so popular these days.

    I think the rise in documentary-style content from companies like Netflix can be traced to the popularity of nonfiction entertainment in today's world. Much of the content on social media sites like Instagram or TikTok is nonfiction in nature: lifestyle videos, political commentary, clips of drunks doing stupid things. People love using the Internet to peer into the lives of others and participate vicariously with their influencers of choice in whatever antics they are up to. 

    A documentary provides a similar effect for the viewer. They are able to explore a niche topic guided by an expert in the field, or be walked step-by-step through an investigation by those involved. It grounds the events in reality, and allows viewers to explore worlds they may not have access to. No wonder Netflix is constantly pumping out this type of material, especially during these COVID days when half the world can't leave their houses. 

    And with that, comes the end to my blog posts. It's been a wild ride, and I thank all those who have stuck with me on this blog-writing extravaganza. Thank you Dr. McPherson for a great course, now I'm going to go grab a beer...