Zimmer's written breakdown of the featured clips is here. (But he doesn't even take up with the whole hamster debacle.) [Via.]

---

See more posts by Regina Small

9 comments

---

See more posts by Alex Balk

1 comments

---

See more posts by Alex Balk

5 comments

---

See more posts by Alex Balk

0 comments

---

See more posts by Alex Balk

10 comments

Depp isn’t the first actor who’s had to apologize for comparing photography to sexual assault. Just last year, Kristen Stewart told Elle UK that seeing photos taken of her by the paparazzi felt like "looking at someone being raped." It's an extreme reaction to the medium, and one that Susan Sontag addressed in her seminal On Photography, in which she argued that, while images can be violated, the people on whom those images are based cannot. "One can't possess reality, one can possess images," she wrote. But in Hollywood, a world where image is everything, how do you tell where reality ends and image begins?

The answer is clearly not provided on the big screen. On the contrary. Interestingly, Depp uses the term "stupid" at least a couple other times in the interview. One of them comes when he's describing his opposition to a staged cockfight in the upcoming film, The Rum Diary. Though the cockfighting scene reportedly looks real, the roosters were protected from killing each other with pieces of invisible monofilament (in accordance with American Humane Association regulations), a precaution he appeared to think detracted from the viscerality of Hunter S. Thompson's original scene. "I think it was stupid," he told Tosches. Extrapolating from that comment, Depp use of the term "stupid" suggests his aversion to false representation. Given his stated pleasure at being photographed by fans in his everyday life, it’s the falseness of the photo shoot and the poses associated with it that seem to bother Depp.

In this, Depp brings to mind Diane Arbus' "freaks," who remain some of the most extreme examples of the falsely represented. In On Photography, Sontag refers to the technique used by Arbus, famed documenter of New York’s marginalized (dwarfs, giants, transvestites, nudists etc.): "Instead of trying to coax her subjects into natural or typical position, they are encouraged to be awkward, that is, to pose. Thereby, the revelation of self gets identified with what is strange, odd, askew. Standing or sitting stiffly makes them seem like images of themselves." In a similar way to Arbus’ subjects—whose real selves are undermined by the images the photographer wishes to present of them—Depp subverts his own persona and projects that of the various fashion photographers who shoot him for magazines. In this way Depp maintains the Hollywood illusion of himself as poster boy for celebrity eccentricity.

The photographer’s power lies not only in determining how his or her subject poses, but also in how the image is ultimately produced (cropping, editing, Photoshopping, etc.); as Sontag put it, “in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects.” Small wonder that Julia Roberts could tell American Photo in 2004 that she feels “stupid,” “goofy,” and “nervous"—like Depp—when being photographed and, in the same breath, say that when she handles a camera (as in the film Closer, in which she played a professional photographer), it “instantly makes you the coolest person in the room.”

Other celebs try to wrest control back from the cameraman. When I interviewed Shirley MacLaine a few years ago on the set of the TV movie Anne of Green Gables: A New Beginning, during our photo shoot, she chose the position in which she sat and dictated the light and filters the professional photographer was expected to use. Using a different tack, Lady Gaga caused a stir in March when she issued a release form demanding that concert photographers sign over to her the rights to all their photos taken at her shows.

Slightly harder to control are the rabid paparazzi photographers that have proliferated in Hollywood over the past decade. Popular targets have taken to disguising themselves, holding up signs (see Scarlett Johansson’s famous “I’m being harassed by the person taking this picture” sign), running from location to location, and sometimes even attacking the photographers who are following them (cf. Sean Penn and Woody Harrelson). But besides the immense danger the celebrities (and passersby, on foot and in vehicles) face in being mobbed, these off-duty stars also appear to be fighting what Sontag refers to as the democratization of their experiences.

“A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it—by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir,” she wrote. In short, part of what these stars may be objecting to is their day-to-day experiences being nullified by the paps that are falling all over themselves to snap them for our viewing pleasure.

“Why would I want anything that's private to become entertainment for other people?” the infamously camera-shy Kristen Stewart seemed to ask for all celebrities in that 2010 interview with Elle UK. At the height of her Twilight fame, she was so used to her experiences being captured by journalists and photographers both that during the interview she hesitated before removing an iPod from her car’s glove compartment to show the journalist her music. “You want to be excited about something, normal people can be excited about their lives, and I am too, but it's such a different thing,” she explained of her hesitation. “It comes out as entertainment for other people and that makes me want to throw up.”

Explaining her moodiness around paparazzi, Stewart contended that the public is not often privy to what happens before the pictures are taken. “What you don't see are the cameras shoved in my face and the bizarre intrusive questions being asked, or the people falling over themselves, screaming and taunting to get a reaction,” she told Elle. “All you see is an actor or a celebrity lit up by a flash. It's so... The photos are so… I feel like I'm looking at someone being raped.”

In her book, Sontag anticipated this type of comparison, stressing that photography requires distance while attacking someone sexually requires proximity. “The camera doesn’t rape, or even possess, though it may presume, intrude, trespass, distort, exploit, and, at the farthest reach of metaphor, assassinate—all activities that, unlike the sexual push and shove, can be conducted from a distance, and with some detachment,” she wrote. Though the use of “push and shove” does conjure images of photographers clamoring to snap Stewart, the sexual aspect of the action is missing.

In the same interview, Stewart did, however, seem to be in tune with Sontag. “Your little persona is made up of all the places that people have seen you and what has been said about you, and usually the places that I am are so overwhelming in the moment and fleeting for me—like one second where I've said something stupid, that's me, forever." The words conjure up Sontag’s suggestion that “the force” of a photo is such that it allows viewers (including Twilight fans) to scrutinize “instants which the normal flow of time immediately replaces.” So, one image of Stewart grimacing at a crowd of paps, or a moment in which she says the word “rape,” reverberates across the universe and single-handedly becomes her undoing.

Though the camera doesn’t “rape,” it does “violate” its subjects, but according to Sontag, it’s only a figurative violation “by having knowledge of them they can never have.” Stewart herself cannot be possessed but as the subject of a photograph, an object that can be physically held, she is “symbolically possessed.”

This so-called symbolic possession becomes all the more realistic when you consider the way photography works, which Sontag explained as “never less than the registering of an emanation (light waves reflected by objects) — a material vestige of its subject.” Because of this, images can “usurp reality” since it is essentially “a trace, something directly stenciled off the real.” Sontag concluded by stating that the photograph being an extension of the subject captured, the image becomes a kind of means of acquiring the subject.

The statement gives a literal bent to Sean Penn’s comment in Playboy in November 1991 in which he described himself and Madonna as “public property.” It also makes Keira Knightley’s 2007 Crocodile Dundee-style, quasi-spiritual fear of being photographed appear slightly less ridiculous. "I'm not comfortable having to be myself or being photographed as myself,” she said. “Australian Aborigines say that with every photo that is taken, a piece of your soul goes with it. And there are some days when I kind of believe that."

But Sontag's book rebuts the idea that photography has the power to capture a piece of one’s real soul. “It is not reality that photographs make immediately accessible, but images,” she wrote. What’s confusing to celebrities (and much of the rest of the world) is that our era confounds reality with photographs. “Instead of just recording reality, photographs have become the norm for the way things appear to us, thereby changing the very idea of reality, and of realism,” Sontag claimed, adding that the “true modern primitivism” is not to consider the image real, but to consider reality an image that can only be realized through photographs.

Unfortunately, the only way to combat this primitive behavior, Sontag argues, is to see the photograph for what it really is, not a real instance of power, but merely a weak expression of it—as it is a weak expression of the real Depp and the real Stewart, and as such is no real replacement for the stars themselves or their bodies. “The knowledge gained through still photographs will always be some kind of sentimentalism, whether cynical or humanist,” Sontag explained. “It will be knowledge at bargain prices—a semblance of knowledge, a semblance of wisdom; as the act of taking pictures is a semblance of appropriation, a semblance of rape.”

Soraya Roberts is an entertainment writer and editor. She writes about films on her blog, Incinerater. She is also on Twitter, much to her dismay.

Photo of Stewart by Joe Seer, via Shutterstock.

---

See more posts by Soraya Roberts

28 comments

---

See more posts by Alex Balk

15 comments

---

See more posts by Alex Balk

7 comments

As media critic Friedrich Kittler proposes, technologies repeatedly find their ancestry in the mouth of war: “war was called the father of all things: it was supposed to have been responsible (borrowing loosely from Heraclitus) for most technical inventions.” For Kittler, all technology begins as war technology. Whereas contemporary and commercial uses of machines obscure their military roots, languages face similar signifying concealments. Expressions such as “airminded” disappear from the vernacular as they decrease in culturally potency, or are reinvested with new meaning. “Trench coats,” for instance, initially referred to coats worn by soldiers in the trenches, while “going over the top” once pointed to the moment when British soldiers crossed the parapet that separated trench from no man’s land. "Airminded" is just one significant example of how war and its accompanying innovations have always shaped how we speak.

***

A search for “airminded” on Google’s Ngram Viewer yields the following graph:

The rise of the expression began around 1926 and hit a peak near 1945, around the end of World War II. Known as the war that radically and violently expanded the range of air warfare, World War II is unsurprisingly the period where “airminded” most infiltrated printed matter.

While the invention and fetishization of the airplane began in the 1900s, its take-over of, at least, the American and British imagination occurs closer to the mid-century. In this, the Ngram reveals its geographical limitations. (In reality, aerial bombardment began as an exclusively colonial technique beginning as early as 1911, but the likely airmindedness experienced by Tripolitan, Indian, Egyptian, Somaliland, and Afghanistan communities are not reflected by the graph.)

The Second World War might be viewed as the apex in the development of aerial technology, but even World War I hardly saw a period of peaceful sky. In The Great Air War, Aaron Norman notes that the bombing of cities began mere weeks into the war, when a German dirigible dropped 1,800 pounds of shrapnel bombs over Antwerp. Paris was bombed three days later. In his essay Air War Prophecy and Interwar Modernism, literary scholar Paul Saint-Amour lists the following incidents:

Between 1914 and 1918, bombs dropped from airplanes and airships by both sides killed more than 2,000 people and injured nearly 5,000 others. German zeppelin and bomber raids on London between May 1915 and May 1918 set 224 fires, destroyed 174 buildings, seriously damaged 619 more, and caused total damages in excess of £2,000,000.

In July 1917, Lovat Fraser wrote in the London Times, “If I were asked what event of the last year has been of the most significance to the future of humanity, I should reply that it is not the Russian Revolution, nor even the stern intervention of the United States in a sacred cause, but the appearance of a single German aeroplane flying at high noon over London last November.” Surely, airmindedness had begun to touch people's imaginations even before the archival resources of the Ngram indicate.

***

Nonetheless, the prevalence of “airminded” during the war years is indicative of how increased aerial activity demanded new phrases and concepts with which to comprehend the sky. In La Machine de la Vision, urban theorist Paul Virilio describes airmindedness as a general cognitive overhaul brought on by war technology: “1914 was not only the physical deportation of millions of men to the fields of battle, it was also, with the apocalypse of the deregulation of perception, a diaspora of another kind, the moment of panic in which the American and European masses no longer believed their eyes.” Writing in 1988, Virilio does not invoke the exact word “airminded” (the expression having fallen out of vogue decades prior), but the implications are all there. Where masses no longer believed their eyes, they sought to understand their war-torn environments via slang, colloquialisms and euphemisms that saturated the cultural ether. “Airminded,” for instance, appears in newspapers and periodicals under a myriad of connotations.

Cultural preoccupations begin before their entrance into public print. The OED lists the first documentation of “airminded” in a February 26, 1927, London Times article on “The Norfolk and Norwish Aero Club.” The article itself indicates the prior prevalence of aerial interest: “The growth of flying clubs since the Air Ministry first arrange to subsidize six clubs 18 months ago is most encouraging, for they offer one of the most economical and direct ways of making the nation, in the words of Sir Samuel Hoare, ‘air-minded.’” (Like “week-end,” “air-minded” began in its hyphenated form—a piece of casual slang as well as stilted, literal description.) While many citizens wrote letters censuring such enthusiasm for the airplane, London publications were, on the whole, ready to promote a pro-air outlook.

Airminded “news” also followed the lines of poorly veiled propaganda. Periodicals like The Pennsylvania Medical Journal and The Trained Nurse and Hospital Review asserted that the airminded spirit was essential in good nurses. Naturally, only the airminded would be assumed to work in an airport.

In 1931, the London Times published a six-article series titled “Why Don’t You Learn to Fly?” Due to its popularity, it was reprinted as a little booklet free to anyone who asked. “The purpose of the articles was to help in the process of making Great Britain more air-minded,” the London Times stated in a subsequent issue, “We believe that the technical and economic aspects of flying are far ahead of the national psychology on the subject, and that the two need to be brought into adjustment by the people of this country developing more practical interest and confidence in flying as a form of travel and a form of sport.” Flying is fun! Don’t be scared. Aviators would even take those sufficiently airminded enough for a short spin between towns—an experience known then as “barnstorming.” With increased exposure to aerial technological, one might finally embrace flight as a thrilling component of modern life.

***

Despite widespread journalistic endorsements, getting on an airplane demanded more faith than many were willing to offer.

The April 13, 1929 edition of The New Yorker included a piece of short fiction by Alice Frankforter titled, “The Airplane Ride.” Published just a few years after the emergence of America’s first airliner, Frankforter’s story opens with a sentence that unexpectedly downplays the novelty of flight: “The light-hearted suggestion that you all drive over to the aviation field.” The sentences continue like this. Clipped. Lacking predicates. Fragmented phrases that command and demand one’s discomfort. “The Airplane Ride” both exposes and mocks the anxieties of “you,” the 1920s readership, the inexperienced airplane passenger. As though mimicking accelerated flight, the terse story transports readers from its initial “light-hearted” takeoff to a doubt-filled landing. “The thrill that is two-thirds pure terror,” writes Frankforter near the end, “The grim determination to enjoy this ride if it’s the last thing you do.” Such harsh and curt direct addresses rhetorically simulate the uncanny alienation people felt regarding air travel during the early twentieth century.

In the 1930s, few people accurately comprehended the degree to which the air power had advanced. As evinced in Farebrother’s story, one approaches, at best, the airplane with a “grim determination to enjoy this ride if it’s the last thing you do.” And that’s being positive. For many, flying was viewed as life threatening. To be fair, there were then few government regulations for either the carrier or the pilot. Most machines flown immediately following the World War I were surplus from battle.

Only near the end of the decade did airmindedness blossom as a phenomenon of mass culture. Saint-Amour observes that, by the late 1930s, premonitions of the next war had saturated public dialogue in Europe; the H. G. Wells and Alexander Korda film Things to Come (1936), with its opening scene of aerial bombardment, poison gas attacks and mass death in “Everytown,” offers only the most infamous example.

***

With looming threats of miliatary bombardment during the interwar period, mentions of airmindedness were largely future-oriented. The Ministry wanted young boys properly brought into the airminded fold. One British “Exhibition for the Modern Boy” was comprised of mainly airplanes. In America, Henry Arnold “wrote a six-volume adventure series for boys—based on the exploits of a young flyer named Bill Bruce—designed to raise ‘airmindedness’ and to create a favorable image of the “airman” for America’s youth. In the 1930s, boys’ aeronautic organizations flourished: the Junior Birdmen of America had no less than 500,000 members by 1936.” With preoccupations of technology and war, the first consciously airminded generation could not but fixate on how aircrafts might play into the plans and predictions of battle. As Tami Davis Biddle writes, the “development of aircraft in the early part of the twentieth century posed a problem of great significance to the military planners of all modern states. How were these new machines—as yet untested—to be integrated into existing military structures?” Thoughts of airmindedness are inextricably linked to wartime anxieties on the future and the threats therein. This pattern of fearing the advent of the ever-modern machine has, it seems, little changed since then.

With the rising acceptance of mechanical flight came a growing fear of the powers and efficiency of aerial bombardment. During the interwar period, exaggerations of air power hit a peak and, for many, the looming Second World War promised total annihilation. In the November 2, 1935 The New Yorker, E.B. White announced in his Talk of the Town column:

[I]t is our intention, from now on, to say something about flying machines every week. Aviation is the one subject to which we get an instant and violent response. Letters are still coming in, tearing us to pieces and gnawing at our entrails.

At the same time, for Londoners, the threat of the bomb became a widely publicized concern. As Tami Davis Biddle describes in her introduction to Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare, the increase of airmindedness throughout the interwar years lead to greater “claims about the power of bombers and the vulnerability of enemy societies” and “contributed to deep public anxiety about future wars." Especially in the 1930s, the airminded took it upon their fraying nerves to anticipate, expect, and thereby potentially control, the approach of the bomb.

One prominent method through which civilians attempted to rein air power inside the zone of their comprehension was to train their ears to its sounds. No longer able to trust their eyes, the airminded listened to the modern acoustics that signaled flight and danger. Not uncommon was the complaint of the very noise of the airplane. This August 10, 1938, London Times letter exemplifies the concerns of a population who had already suffered an “apocalypse of the deregulation of perception” and were, once again, bracing again for another:

The blitzes that came a year later left cities caught in blackouts, where civilians learned to gain a heightened awareness of their acoustic environment. The routinized anticipation of air raids produced a population who were not only prepared, but who actively listened, for danger.

***

Aircraft exemplifies the history of technology as a double-edged sword—one that advances and modernizes a society, while also increasingly threatening its eradication. The trouble with the shock, the violence, the very newness, of machinery lies in how human sensibilities will integrate such instruments into their contemporary landscape of thought and experience. One might begin with words and stories: expressions to thread together a narrative that might otherwise appear hopelessly erratic and unpredictable.

To prepare for the future is to write about it: to talk about it, quite literally, to death. How many times has history repeated this philosophy of anticipating apocalypse by beating apocalypse to its own deployment? As early as a 1929 volume of the American publication Building Age, one writer announces, “This country is already airminded; it is now becoming airport-minded.” The piece turns to discuss transforming “an amazing variety of buildings” into flying fields and airports composed of passenger stations that closely resemble “a modern railroad terminal.”

The narrative here is to make the future something that resembles the past: a modern airport is like a modern railroad terminal. The July 31, 1935 London Times published part of a speech by one headmaster Dr. J. A. H. Johnston: “The road to progress lay in the air… it was obvious that within a very few years the private airplane would be as much a commonplace as the private motor-car and a wireless set was to-day, Britain was far behind the United States, Germany, and Italy in air-mindedness.”

The paradox of technology is more precisely the irony of war technology. Machines meant to drive progress not only threaten a suspension of progress, but the very termination of life itself. Before technology can be put to “productive use,” there often exists a period of experimentation where every incident of chaos desires only to relocate its origin of stasis and peace—in some place, time, or thing, of yesterday. Perhaps, then, technology begins too often as an experience for the sake of experience. As Frankforter intimates, after the initial take off, there is “The bare-faced lie to the effect that if you had a chance you’d do it again tomorrow.”

Jane Hu is our official correspondent for very recent history.

---

See more posts by Jane Hu

7 comments

---

See more posts by Alex Balk

3 comments