Core Post III -JAE-

 Core Post III

Colomina makes me think about how windows, doors, and other portals play a huge role in bringing the audience into the conflicts/wars of culture and discourse on screen. Relevant to our class, The Goldbergs TV show we watched and discussed last week, commonly uses windows as portals for bringing the viewer into the Goldberg family world. The viewer is brought into the domestic space, where domesticity is a space of conflict. Colomina asserts that “the traditional domestic ideal of “peace and quiet” can only be produced by engaging the house in combat, as a weapon: counter-domesticity” (1991, 20). Domestication, or taming, is also a process of oppressive violence used to force living things into formations and behaviors considered acceptable by the dominant cultural powers. Jack Halberstam, in his latest book Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire, interrogates the desires located in the domestication of wild things as socially marginalized things, in addition to the dehumanization of bodies viewed as things. It begs the question if media intersects its audiences as things, or if the adoption of particular media dehumanizes the consumer? And could the inverse be true too? Can media adoption bridge the socially constructed gap between humans and natural wildness?

Morse writes about how freeways, malls, and suburbia also contribute to a desire for domestication. These structures facilitate semi-successful fantasies of provincial life, away from the wild city, as well as the wild of unincorporated rural life. Morse provokes that “suburbia is itself an attempt via serial production to give everyman and everywife the advantages of a city at the edge of the natural world,” (1998, 104) and of malls states that these creations allow people to “shore up the boundaries of the self via commodities which beckon with the promise of perfection…” (1998, 105). Yet, this falsified frontier gains value from remaining in proximity to the city it looks down upon. And let us not forget how war and the military industrial complex have spearheaded the development of these residential bastions and roadway boons. Furthermore, it is feasible to push further into historical or specific marginal cultural spheres to examine how the fantasy being sold through the discourse of freeways, suburbs, malls, and domestic life pose threats against specific bodies, as well as become extensions of regional or national power structures. 

I could write more, and tie in McCarthy’s essay, but I’m running a bit too long-winded as it is.