Back when the name "Hanna(h)" would make you think "Barbera," not "Montana"

I've been thinking a lot about cartoons lately. So much so that I'm thinking in cartoons, a flickering parade of animated images, projected against opaque white thought bubbles.

And those images that dance before me are the ultimate examples of "Disneying" narrative, reducing every story to a moral duality of good versus evil, love conquering hate. Cartoons were Hanna(h) Montanaing children's entertainment long before Billy Ray ever had a glint of lust in his eyes. The white-washing typically occurred in story, with sanitized plots and simple situational comedy. The studios turned the occasional blind eye to cartoons tackling the real issues, like law enforcement's extended investigation into a string of pick-a-nick basket larcenies. These were, however, exceptional. For the most part, cartoons were a lesson in justice served and evil punished.

Perhaps the greatest dumbing down of material in childrens' entertainment occurred in character. Most of the cartoon characters from my childhood were nothing but stereotypes. Looney Toons was filled with them. Foghorn Leghorn was nothing but a good ol' ill-bred, poorly-educated, down-home country hick. Speedy Gonzalez, his own thick, Spanish accent and vocabulary presented for laughs, was accompanied by his lazy cousin, Slowpoke Rodriguez. And, clearly, Pepe Le Pew was a sexual harasser. That cat never wanted his advances.

Hanna(h) Barbera characters had even less subtlety. Huckleberry Hound, although a sheriff in the Old West, for some reason had the slow stigmatic drawl of the deep south. Honk Kong Fooey's every screen entrance was accompanied by a reverberating gong. Snagglepuss was pink, had a lisp, spent part of the day in a cage, and dressed like a Chippendales dancer. No, he wasn't gay.

Stop-motion animation has also been on my mind, but not because of a tendency toward indoctrinating the idea that the Other can be neatly divided into types and is here to entertain us. Animation is really a time-elimination operation. Not just any time is eliminated, however, but a specific kind of time: non-narrative time. This is the time unfolding in-between the key beats of narrative; this is a liminal time. Non-narrative time necessarily produces narrative time, which is nothing but a spine of sought-out and connected beats, key moments, form. Non-narrative time is real time, measurable in labor and production, and yet it is time that we discard, suppress, willingly forget, sacrifice to the narrative. It's time that exists, but that is literally obscene ("off-scene") in hopes that it will not attract our attention. We're complicit in this operation; we don't want to experience non-narrative time because it reveals the illusion and obscures the spectacle. 

Narrative time is time made spectacular, cut down to the interesting and entertaining bits. It's time edited. It's the product of labor, the strip-mining of coal while looking for diamonds. All else is discarded because the only part that is of value to us is the diamond, the pleasurable illusion, the gem of story. And then, only valuable to us until the next diamond is brought to the surface, followed by the next, in a prescripted cause and effect chain, a diamond choker. It is an order imposed, and the result presented for our distracting entertainment.

The persistence of vision, the illusion upon which animation, and spectacle, is based, has its counterpart in narrative. While our mind blinks to obscure non-narrative time, the imprint of our last beat of narrative time remains there, a distraction from the labors of non-narrative time. It fades only slightly before we're presented with the next beat of narrative time to hold in mind and provide a distracting spectacle. We grasp onto the narrative image, forgetting that the flow of time continues until it becomes time to replace our current narrative image with the next.

We might, however, form our own connective patterns if we can survey the whole timeline. Searching from outside of time, we might find a natural pulse, organic, rather than one constructed and imposed. We, instead of ignoring non-narrative time, might examine it closely enough to recognize Aristotle's unity of time is characteristic of all time. All time is narrative. Not all narrative time has to be spectacular, however. Perhaps if we, as audience, choose for ourselves the key moments of time, the beats, the form, perhaps if we become our own narrators rather than accepting the narrative time that has been selected for us and presented to us as a distraction from the real, then, maybe then, we have the antidote to spectacular time.

To counteract spectacular time, we have to step out of time, in an off-rhythm, syncopated marching to Thoreau's drummer or a wild and spasmodic Butoh dance. We must play with all our being, and not accept leisure time as our time. We have to play and we have to laugh.

My Day at the Movies: The Man with the Iron Fists

8 hours, a full work day, at the cinema seeing the same mediocre film again and again. The crowd for each showing is slightly larger than the last. It's the same 1 hour 36 minute spectacle again and again, preceded by the same 20 minutes of spectacular movie marketing, again and again. And in-between an endless loop of commercials. The long-standing tradition of the no-talking announcement has become no talking/texting/chatting/social networking, and is, in fact, a commercial for a cell phone carrier that wants you to do all of those things. Just not during the film. Ostensibly. Even some of the commercials have been crowd-sourced, sweepstaked, contest-won, as if to say: "Social media isn't replacing film. YOU can be a part of the cinema experience. Or, at least the Sprite commercial before the trailers."

Thousands of cubic feet of unused heterotopic space dwarf the human occupants, who are there to be entertained out of their lives. The trailers begin, lights dimming only slightly.

Movie 43. A Haunted House. Gangster Squad. Carrie. Mama. Markie Mark. Tarantino. DiCaprio.

The similarity in duration and appearance to a workday is no coincidence. Four screenings of The Man with the Iron Fists, two coffee breaks, and an hour lunch. A waste of time? Perhaps, if we determine the value of time based on its conventional use as a measure of labor, as the dollar's alter ego. But a day, a whole workday's worth of time, thrown to the pursuit of leisure... could that really be a waste?

The better question is: "Is it really leisure to which we devote our salaried time when we immerse ourselves in the mediated experience?"

Cinematic leisure time does not come without its cost. We replace hours that could be spent "earning a living" by paying for hours of entertainment. The current value of human life in the U.S., determined by its value to labor, is, at minimum, $7.50 an hour. The human body at leisure, then, is worth negative $7.50 an hour. Rest begins with an economic deficit: were we working, we would at least break even. Then there is the monetary cost of the entertainment. First showing: $6.50. Second showing: $8.50. Third and fourth showings: $10.50. The hourly cost for eight hours of cinematic entertainment averages $4.50. The experience, then, costs us $12.00 an hour, at minimum. I manage to abstain from concessions during the films, but the bottled waters, dried apple chips, tubs of soda, Sno-caps, fried chicken strips, and popcorn raise the cost exponentially. Lunch and coffee are not provided, so those costs might also be included.

And what do I get for my $12+ an hour? An experience much like that of watching someone else play a kung-fu videogame for an hour and a half while you wait your turn. A turn that never comes. Fights that showcase unique weapons and special moves, punctuated by a series of cutscenes that barely attempt to string the fights together. Am I really at leisure, sitting and allowing the mediated experience to work on me? Were I watching this film at a drive-in, I would say that a bandit slowly siphons time from my tank while I sit, unmoving at the wheel. The mediated experience is a simulacrum, an imposter of authentic experience, a time bandit.

My roommate, Freddy, has joined me for the first showing: an unwitting co-worker in this labor. Our shared social experience consists of sitting quietly in the dark next to one another for almost two hours. An occasional chuckle can be heard by the other. We wait until the credits end and the lights come up to speak and then only to concur that it's lunchtime. At lunch, we discuss the film only cursorily (shoptalk) before moving on to friends, current events in our lives, and projects on which we are working. Lunch runs long, but I don't care about being late getting back to work, midway through the second screening. It's the one little consolation for many of us-- to steal an extra 15 minutes of leisure time from the workday.  Others of us, though, must clock in and out, time being rigidly supervised and rationed. We risk our means of making a living if we steal or misplace the time that belongs to labor. The time that labor has seized from us.

Will this workday never end? Caffeine consumed during the two brief breaks spent at a nearby Starbucks makes me antsy to leave. I've lost all productivity. By the fourth showing, I'm checking the time every ten minutes or so, disregarding the-no-cell-phone-use announcement. This draws the attention and silent disapproval of other isolated workers in the theater as they notice the glow of time-checking. Or perhaps the disapproval is because the glow provides enough light for them to see the yellow legal pad in my lap. It's clear to them that I've been disregarding my work responsibility-- to allow myself to be absorbed into the story-- and wasting company time. I've been playing when I should have been hard at work. On my leisure time.

My Day at the Movies truly was an attempt at play, masquerading as leisure, which is nothing more than labor in camouflage. Yet, don't think me terribly enlightened or free from the effects of this repressive system. Most of the day I was worried about what I should be doing instead: grading papers, working at my "serious" academic writing, designing a logo for a conference, researching curriculum for a new program at school. In this case, spectacular time did not do its work; it did not wield enough power to distract me from my own work. To delude me into believing that I am not at work even while at leisure.

But, as Lucy Liu's Madame Blossom in the film tells her prostitutes: "The thing about power is that it belongs to no one... until it is seized... seized by sex, or violence, or gold." 

The film had plenty of all three, yet, in the face of repetition, its power was reduced further with each iteration. "No wonder the mediated experience loses the power to delude," one might argue, "when you sit through the same film four times in a row. It's boredom that brings back thoughts of work."  I would argue that playing the same game but with four different mainstream films would have the same effect. Even costumed as four different films, they would rehash the same mediocre mediated experience again and again. One need only look at the trailers for films mentioned above to see this: a parody of the Paranormal Activity films, the fourth of which is currently in theaters; a remake of the film adaptation of a Stephen King novel; Tarantino's homage to the spaghetti western, with a dash of plantation slavery, oddly reminiscent of the origin story of The Man with the Iron Fists, which, in itself, is an ode to classic kung fu films.

Why do we continue to settle for the same mediated experience? How do we escape the economy of leisure? Is time ever truly our own?

Herbert Marcuse wrote in Eros and Civilization: "Play is unproductive and useless precisely because it cancels the repressive and exploitative traits of labor and leisure; it 'just plays' with reality" (195). 

True play, disregarding time as the measure of anything, could be the antidote to labor. And to the simulacra of leisure.