Movable Type Edition 5.1 - Fall 2017 by MovableType UVA

MOVABLE TYPE EDITION 5.1 FALL 2017

RE â&#x20AC;&#x153;Re-â&#x20AC;?: a prefix in the English language that denotes a return, or some form of backward movement Rethinking is an exercise inherent to the field of Media Studies. The authors whose pieces are featured in the following pages work to reexamine advertisements, recontextualize and reframe films, reinvigorate genres and reconceptualize mediated performances. They return to works created in the past and revisit preconceived ideas, restructure ideologies, and rewrite narratives as a means of progressing forward in Media Studies scholarship.

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REEXAMINE:

A SEMIOTIC ANALYSIS OF INTERNET COFFEE ADS JAMIE SWANSON

RECONTEXTUALIZE:

THE CRITICISM OF THE PURITAN ELECT IN JOHN FORD’S STAGECOACH ERICAJOY OLIVERIO

RECONCEPTUALIZE: PHILIPPE PETIT’S GIFT KATIE DUDGEON

REFRAME:

ETERNAL CONRADICTIONS: FRAMING KENNEDY’S DEATH THROUGH ART BETSY SEDNAOUI

REINVIGORATE:

“ONE STORY, TOLD WEEK BY WEEK:” SERIAL AND TRUE CRIME IN THE 21ST CENTURY MOLLY EASTON

EXECUTIVE TEAM CARRIE WEST

Co-Executive Editor Class of 2018 Media Studies DMP and Government Minor Song on repeat: “Across the Room” by Odesza / “Drinkee” by Sofi Tukker ______ made you rethink: Bojack Horseman made me rethink my distaste for animated adult comedy Favorite Coffee shop in Cville: Grit BuzzFeed Quiz: Which Guy Fieri are you based on your zodiac sign? Favorite MDST class: Women and Television Favorite non-MDST class: Sex and Sentiment

CAMILLE SIDES

Co-Executive Editor Class of 2018 Media Studies and American Studies Major and Leadership Minor Song on repeat: “Lose My Cool - Franc Moody Remix” by Amber Mark, Franc Moody ______ made you rethink: Get Out made me rethink the horror genre Favorite Coffee shop in Cville: Grit BuzzFeed Quiz: Which Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream Flavor Are You? Favorite MDST class: 1930s Hollywood Cinema Favorite non-MDST class: Comedy as Protest

NATALIE BEAM

Submissions Coordinator Class of 2018 Media Studies DMP Song on repeat: “Morning Sound” by Grizzly Bear ______ made you rethink: Blade Runner (1982) made me rethink science fiction films Favorite Coffee shop in Cville: Grit BuzzFeed Quiz: Which Primitive Spongebob Meme Are You? Favorite MDST class: Watching the Detectives Favorite non-MDST class: Fiction Writing

MADELINE SPEIRS

Social Media Coordinator Class of 2019 Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Major Song on repeat: “Unforgettable” by French Montana ______ made you rethink: Peter’s Friends made me rethink the many manifestations of friendship Favorite Coffee shop in Cville: Mudhouse BuzzFeed Quiz: Launch Yourself Into Space and We’ll Tell You How You’d Die There Favorite MDST class: News Media Favorite non-MDST class: POV Journalism

DYLAN BEDSAUL

Assistant Editor Media Studies and American Studies Major Class of 2018 Song on repeat: “Young Lover” by St. Vincent ______ made you rethink: Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt made me rethink the dark comedy Favorite Coffee shop in Cville: Grit BuzzFeed Quiz: Is This A Gucci Shoe or A Guinea Pig? Favorite MDST class: Women and Television Favorite non-MDST class: Advanced Playwriting

PEER REVIEWERS

Charlotte Scharfenberg Class of 2020

Cameron Leventen Class of 2017

DESIGNERS

Meghan Hale Class of 2020

Isabella Whitfield Class of 2020

Dean Sublett Class of 2021

Special thanks to our Media Studies Faculty Advisor, Professor Christopher Ali, for providing us with guidance and support throughout the semester, and thanks to Grit Coffee for being our meeting spot and assisting with our cover design.

A SEMIOTIC

INTERNET C

By Jamie Swanson, Cla Introduction

the global economy is worth studying for two co-dependent reasons: 1) n the past three centuries, cof- its status as a major commodity for fee has surged to become a near trade1 and 2) its place in the everyessential to human society. At day lives of millions of individuals.2 various points in the past few In order to get a glimpse at decades, coffee has been the numcoffee’s function in culture, I will ber-two commodity in the world— only behind crude oil. Often asso- use semiotics to analyze a small set ciated with physiological effects of recent Internet coffee ads with induced by caffeine, coffee serves to the following research question wake up the world and fuel produc- in mind: What sentiments do tivity in many forms. With its perva- select online ads from the sive use in countless cultures over a top 5 American coffee long period, coffee’s specific role in companies portray?

I 6

Literature Review

ANALYSIS OF

COFFEE ADS

ass of 2018 In order to further focus my analysis, I will incorporate theory rooted in Marxist thought because of coffee’s close relationship to labor, capital, and capitalist productivity. Through the combination of semiotics and inherent ideologies of capitalism, this brief analysis will hopefully contribute to a better understanding of the ways in which certain ideological messages are communicated through the enormously prevalent medium of Internet advertising.

The first known origins of coffee consumption come from 9th century Ethiopia, but records suggest it first gained popularity in the Yemen during the 15th century.3 During the 17th century, it spread through Europe, gaining footholds in urban centers like London, Paris, and Vienna. Over centuries, coffee consumption spread across the world, especially once colonists established large plantations in South and Central America. In various parts of the world, coffeehouses have often been associated with universities, liberalism and political dissent; however, coffee has also been part of communities associated with traditional values and the working class.4 At this point, “coffee drinking has become ritualized as the focal event in everyday sociability,” resulting in a unique cultural phenomenon that combines “labor enhancement… with leisure” across many communities.5 To address coffee’s role in the workforce, it is important to identify the reasons why people work and the inherent goals of any form of labor. Marx establishes the mentality of rational, self-interested individuals in a capitalist economy and states: “Private interest is itself already a socially determined interest, which can only be achieved within the conditions established by

society and through the means that society affords… independent of these individuals.”6 In other words, people must work for “exchange value,” i.e. money, in order to survive and attain their own “private interests.”7 Without some form of labor, an individual will not receive any form of value to exchange for food, water, or shelter to survive. As is such, a rational individual will want to maximize their “exchange value” in order to maximize the attainment of their “private interests.” Odih adds, “The dominant logic of global capitalism is the relentless annihilation of space by time.”8 So, the success of an individual under capitalism depends tremendously on the speed at which one cycle of production can be completed and repeated. By this logic, with faster turnover come higher levels of production and eventually more value through exchange. This value is then split between labor, capital, and the “capitalist,” so theoretically, every party benefits from higher levels of production.

and mood. Caffeine may be particularly beneficial when factors that degrade performance are present.”9 These traits are very desirable for reaching high levels of productivity and, eventually, fulfilling more private interests “in a world where bodily rhythms are not necessarily synchronized with work hours.”10 Additionally, coffee can fulfill other desires because of its taste, temperature, and various health benefits, making it a desirable commodity itself.11 This complicates its role in society because it not only functions as fuel for the processes of production, consumption, and exchange, but also becomes subjected to the same processes.

While caffeine may help people serve their private interests, it simultaneously bolsters the alienation of the worker caused by private ownership of capital. As Marx describes it, “All progress in civilization…[does] not enrich the worker, but only capital… [workers] merely increase the productive power of capital.”12 Further, the value derived from production is not always split proportionately between laborers and owners. With that in mind, the productive fuel that caf With this in mind, coffee’s feine may provide for labor could psychoactive ingredient, caffeine, only ever serve to accelerate the perfectly supplements the capitalist exploitation of labor by capital, its system. “Across a wide array of cir- owners, the inherent imbalances of cumstances, moderate doses of caf- power throughout society by extenfeine…improve vigilance, learning, sion. This exploitation is amplified 8

when anxiety, tremors, sleep irregularity, adverse health effects, and even addictive qualities are considered among coffee’s effects, as well.13,14 As the society progresses economically, value for the sake of subsistence turns into surplus value for the sake of purpose. With this progress, individuals’ “private interests” transform into “symbolic needs.” These not-so-necessary needs equate goods to signs of lifestyle features like “status, self-image, and love.”15 From the perspective of structural theory, the selection and combination of signs in language (first described by Saussure) work very similarly to the selection and combination of signs that individuals use as communicative messages of identity. Because of this, individuals can use material items produced by labor to equate themselves to certain ideals. This moves the value of the material goods beyond exchange value based on labor into social value based on symbols.16,17 As the production/consumption system made of labor and capital repeats and evolves, fulfilling “symbolic needs” becomes more important to the social order, so in turn, labor becomes the gateway to socially desirable and meaningful lives (as defined by humans).

Countless people have attempted to understand the many complicated ways in which “symbolic needs” and social ideals are established. In the past few decades, advertising has become an inescapable force in establishing social ideals, especially because of its presence in most every medium for communication. Its extensive role as intermediary between producer and consumer is vital to the process of endowing goods and services with value. With this power, advertisements have the ability to establish, reflect, and potentially transform the social order. As they contribute to “cultural codes and conventions,” their content helps signify which “status or group affiliation” are of most value.18 For that reason, studying advertisements can lead to important conclusions regarding the priorities produced within society that make it back to the surface in communicative events.

Methodology

in this study were found on the same site and displayed during various pe Because of availability, con- riods between August and December temporary relevance, and personal of 2016. interest, I chose to analyze coffee Semiotic analysis is approads from the Internet. Due to the complex nature of advertising and priate for decoding these advertisethe immense size of the world cof- ments because, in the words of Osfee market, I decided to restrict my wald, “Brands are multidimensional search to the United States, the num- sign systems that can be analyzed ber-one coffee market in the world.19 in terms of their material, convenTo narrow it further, I decided to an- tional, contextual, and performative alyze one advertisement from each structures.”21 Therefore, interpretof the top five coffee companies in ing the messages that major brands the U.S. (in order from first to last): convey through ads can help in unKeurig, Folgers, Starbucks, Max- derstanding “nonlinguistic semiotic well House, and Dunkin’ Donuts.20 structures such as social organizaDuring a long search, I stumbled tion, ritual behavior, and the mass upon an advertising database (moat. media.”22 In the unique case of cofcom) that contained hundreds of on- fee, this interpretation can also conline ads from each of the five com- tribute to understanding the perceppanies, including dates during which tion of labor and capitalist ideals in each of the ads ran. So, all five ads present society.

“Brands are multidimensional sign systems that can be analyzed in terms of their material, conventional, contextual, and performative structures.”

Case Studies Keurig (Fig. 1.1 & 1.2): The ad consists of two images, both with a welcoming light blue background. At the top of the first image, white text reads: “When your family shares a lot, but not their choice of coffee.” Below, four different “K-cups” are displayed: three standing upright, one lying with the top label facing toward the viewer. The one lying down facing out has a green label that reads: “Breakfast Blend.” Four cups with the accompanying text suggests a norm of four family members,who all have unique tastes that can be satisfied with this device. Additionally, the text promotes coffee drinking as a family activity that is not exclusive to certain members and cannot be tainted by the compromise of a standard type of coffee. Furthermore, the prominence of the cup that says “Breakfast Blend” might be promoting that specific product, but it is also associating coffee with breakfast as a morning routine. When the second image comes, white text at the top reads: “Variety That Fits Your Life.” The image below depicts four different style mugs filled with hot coffee around a sleek Keurig coffee maker. Once again, the emphasis is placed on a particular characteristic of a family and the ability of the Keurig machine to satisfy more personalized desires.

Figure 1.1

Figure 1.2

Folgers (Fig. 2.1): This ad consists of one image that is predominantly red, the color of the brand’s logo and many of its products. At the top sits a standard form of the brand (found on many products). Below it, large white text reads: “Wake up with Folgers; Since 1850,” with Folgers as the largest text in the whole ad. This text primarily places the brand at the forefront of the ad. It also clearly portrays the expected use of the product: to wake up. In this case, the ad does not specifically denote the purpose of waking up, but the implicit meaning could be understood as 1) coffee being a necessary ingredient to waking up at any time and 2) coffee being consumed for either labor or leisure. Below the text, a picture depicts nine different mugs with different colored coffee sitting on a wooden table next to a bowl of sugar, a cup of cream, and a beige towel with red stripes. This emphasizes the versatility of Folgers coffee, as it can be personalized

depending on the consumer. It also situates the consumption of Folgers coffee in a pleasant, warm light at an earthy and “homey” wooden table, making the act more inviting.

Figure 2.1

Starbucks (Fig. 3.1): Because Starbucks does not advertise their more general products, I chose to utilize an ad for cold coffee drinks. At the top, the Starbucks logo rests on top of white text that reads: “Starbucks DOUBLESHOT Coffee Drinks.” Closer to the center of the ad, more white text reads: “REAL LIFE ENERGY.” With “ENERGY” centered in bold, the main use of the product as fuel is established. With “SHOT” in bold above, emphasis is placed on the speed of accessing the energy—it’s a shot, like a bullet out of a gun. The reference to “real life” attributes a degree of purposefulness to the consumption of the drinks, as if consuming these energy drinks is supposed to provide energy that is more applicable to things that matter. Below all the text, a picture depicts three of the flavors sitting on top of a mound of unground coffee beans. The center can is white (vanilla-flavored) and situated the highest among the three. Two smaller brown cans sit next to it. The placement of the cans on coffee beans visually associates the drinks with coffee’s rawest form. This can help viewers mentally associate the beverages with coffee, which is important because these drinks are only coffee-flavored, not actual coffee. The image along with the word “REAL” above it combine to convey one of the primary messages of the ad clearly without making the unnatural characteristics of the product more obvious.

Figure 3.1 13

Fig. 4.1

Fig 4.2

Fig 4.3

Maxwell House (Fig. 4.1-6): In this ad, white capitalized text that quickly fades in and out is the predominant mode of communication. The first background is a wooden table with scattered coffee beans, a couple of Maxwell House “K-cups,” a box of “K-cups,” and a full white mug of black coffee on it. The first text reads: “It’s go time,” which is followed by “Fill your cup,” then “With a coffee that tastes good.” At this point, the ad has been very visually stimulating with quick fades and large centered text that pops. The first message communicates the feeling of getting yourself ready for something important and the following suggests that Maxwell House is a delicious and essential element of preparing for whatever the act is. The way the text appears in the rest of the ad follows a slightly

Fig. 4.4

Fig. 4.5

Fig. 4.6

different pattern. “Cup after cup” fades in, and then it remains as “After cup” fades in below it. Then, the entire ad scrolls up into a different background and text. The background is an empty wooden table with an image of a Maxwell House ground coffee tin superimposed over it. The new text reads, “After cup,” and is followed by yet another line of, “After cup.” Finally, the text disappears and a white teacup (from the logo) swings in from the top and pours out one drop of coffee, which hangs right off the edge of the tilted cup. An orange banner unfolds from the top and Maxwell House’s slogan in white text appears: “Good to the last drop, every time.” This second half of the ad serves to promote the consumption of hefty amounts of coffee in association with preparing for activity and delicious flavor.

Dunkin’ Donuts (Fig. 5.1): This ad also makes significant use of visual stimulation. It opens with a white background and brown coffee streaming from a source outside of the top of the frame. As the coffee pours, the Dunkin’ Donuts logo (the name and an animated image of steaming cup of coffee) emerges. As the coffee continues to pour, another logo and the slogan dissolve into view. The second logo consists of four images: the first is a picture of the continental United States, the second is a stick with one arm and one leg lifted, the third is just the word “ON,” and the last is another Dunkin’ Donuts logo (“DD”). The text below the second logo reads: “America runs on Dunkin’.” The most striking feature of the ad is the coffee constantly pouring from the top of the frame. This portrays a notion of infinite amounts of coffee and perhaps high levels of consumption. The first logo mainly establishes the brand identity. The second logo and text, however, hold significant meaning, as they explicitly claim that America, a global standard for capitalism, functions through the consumption of Dunkin’s Donuts’ products. Along with the coffee pouring into frame, coffee is established as a never-ending resource to fuel American values, which include hard work, freedom, and social mobility.

Figure 5.1

Analysis Overall, each of the ads promotes the use of coffee as preparing for something, whether it is specifically for waking up or a more generic source of fuel or inspiration. None of the ads explicitly state a particular time of day to drink coffee or a specific activity to do after drinking coffee. This allows for a perception of coffee as a versatile product that people can use for a variety of their personal purposes at any time. The vagueness of the purposes, however, leaves room for an interpretation that people should “wake up” and be doing something (labor or leisure) at nearly all times. Multiple ads take personalization further and directly promote easy access to different types of coffee based on individual taste. Keurig even tried to combine this individuality with a particular type of family—one in which there are four members who all want to enjoy their own tastes, but do not want

to sacrifice the enjoyment they get out of sharing the experience with family. Some other features include making coffee seem natural, hefty consumption, and good taste. The Internet as the common medium of all these ads is a very important feature to discuss. Relative to TV, the movement is constricted. However, many of these ads contained movement that helps attract attention. A lack of sound leaves another important sense untapped, but some Internet ads have the unique ability of granting access to other places on the web. Three out of the five ads featured a button at the bottom to visit the firm’s website and explore products. This allows an instantaneous satisfaction of curiosity and an extremely simple purchasing process, which encourages consumption. The Internet’s speed and role as a portal to seemingly endless fulfillment are especially noteworthy in a discussion about coffee because of its association with quick energy and dependability.

“Coffee offers such a unique look into human power structures and systems of behavior.”

Conclusion The five coffee firms of this study promote the use of coffee as a ritualized fuel for productive processes, both in and out of the workplace. The firms’ advertisements also portray ideals such as hard work, family, inclusivity, and individuality. By doing so, the coffee ads implicitly establish these features as goals to achieve for the ideal social status and suggest that these goals are attainable through the consumption of coffee as a commodity. However, the ads purposely neglect coffee’s exploitative production processes, which occur disproportionately in “developing” countries for equally disproportionate consumption in “developed” countries.23 They also encourage

high levels of individual consumption (as is compatible with the firms’ “private interests”), which has been proven to have adverse physical and cognitive effects.24 All in all, coffee has an extremely complicated role in human society and its true cultural value remains unclear. Regardless, it is a massive social phenomenon with deep roots in colonization and a heavy influence in industry, art, literature, science, and many other disciplines. Because of this, the production, consumption, exchange, and marketing of coffee should all continue to be examined because coffee offers such a unique look into human power structures and systems of behavior. 17

RECONTEXTUALIZE:

THE PURE AND THE PROFANE: THE CRITICISM OF THE PURITAN ELECT IN

JOHN FORD’S STAGECOACH By EricaJoy Oliverio, Class of 2017

s the title of the genre indicates, Western films are deeply connected to the space of the wild, uncultivated American West. It is a space that is defined by movement— both the movement of its “continually advancing frontier line” and the movement of its pioneers, who were driven westward by the promise of exploration or settlement.1 Though cinema has traditionally defined the West through imagery of the geography of the American deserts, the first Western frontier was, in fact, the Atlantic coast, and it was a space that was settled by pious pioneers— the Puritan elect who abandoned a “corrupt” Europe in pursuit of the North American Promised Land. As Doug Williams details in his essay “Pilgrims and the Promised Land: A Genealogy of the Western,” several Western films pay tribute to the Puritans’ westward movement, and John Ford’s Stagecoach is no exception. In Stagecoach, Ford creates a Western narrative that parallels the Puritan narrative by sending a select cast of characters on a journey

from a corrupt town to a destination that is defined by promise. However, just as Ford parallels this narrative, he also critiques it; in particular, he critiques the Puritans’ belief in their elite status as “the Elect of God” by crafting a socially diverse and morally questionable Elect and by disrupting the established social order through water imagery and the fugitive protagonists of Ringo Kid and Dallas. The parallelism between Ford’s narrative and the Puritan narrative is deeply embedded into the plot of Stagecoach. In the film, the cast of characters departs Tonto for Lordsburg. From the very beginning, Ford codes Tonto as a corrupt space. It is a town that is bound by the trappings of money, materialism, and a rigid social order. Although Tonto is a developed town, it also has some of the markings of a profane space. In the few long shots of the town, there is no clearly identifiable town center, and the streets are oftentimes chaotic, overun with passersby and 19

livestock. Furthermore, Tonto is marked by the presence of a “mythical dragon,” the moralistic vigilantes of the Law and Order League who run Dallas and Doc Boone, the two characters that they deem reprehensible, out of town.2 Lordsburg, on the other hand, is coded, by its very name, as a place that is connected to the Lord—a place that is sacred, protected, and full of promise. This coding of Tonto and Lordsburg parallels the Puritans’ beliefs in Europe’s corruption and North America’s promise.

Ford continues to parallel the Puritan narrative in the journey itself. Much like the Puritans who crossed the Atlantic Ocean to reach North America, the titular stagecoach and its passenger pilgrims must cross the unsettled wilderness of the American desert to reach Lordsburg. Ford chooses to set the journey in the American desert because, like the Atlantic Ocean, the setting possesses many characteristics of profane space. Both the desert and the ocean are homogeneous, amorphous, unknown spaces that offer no orientation and that exist in a state of fluidity or formlessness. Both spaces are also “a sort of ‘other world,’ a foreign, chaotic, space, peopled by ghosts, demons, ‘foreigners.’”3 The desert and the ocean are foreign and otherworldly because they both lack one of the four classical elements—water

and earth, respectively. Additionally, they are both haunted by foreign, unseen threats; early cartographers believed that mythic “marine monsters” threatened transatlantic travelers, just as Geronimo and the Apaches threaten the travelers in Stagecoach.4 These shared journeys through profane spaces further code the characters in Stagecoach as representative of the Puritan Elect. However, while Ford codes the journey to Lordsburg as similar to the Puritan journey to the North American Promised Land, he also critiques the Puritans’ belief in their elite status as “the Elect of God” by crafting a socially diverse and morally questionable Elect. Unlike the Puritans who shared particular morals and religious beliefs, the individuals in the stagecoach are wildly different in their social classes, experiences, motivations, and beliefs. Although these characters would rarely interact with each other in the civilized world, the profane, isolated setting of the desert completely disrupts the predetermined social hierarchy, and the confinement of the stagecoach forces the characters to interact and re-configure their social positioning. Since the desert is a profane space without order, a Western film set in the desert is fundamentally “a Darwinian trial, in which the natural laws that had created social classes [are] reproduced in individual struggles.”5 In each social interaction,

the characters attempt “to bring order out of the wilderness chaos,” the classless void that is created through the profane space of the desert landscape.6 While the more elite characters like Mrs. Mallory defend “entrenched privilege” and attempt to replicate the social hierarchy that had existed in Tonto, the more ostracized characters like Dallas and Ringo attempt to establish a new social order that will actually include and respect them.7 In addition to crafting a socially diverse and morally questionable Elect, Ford also criticizes the Elect’s elitism by establishing Ringo Kid and Dallas—a criminal and a prostitute—as the protagonists of the film. Of all of the characters in the stagecoach, Ringo and Dallas are the only two characters that

experience any personal growth or change. While they might seem like unlikely protagonists, Ford definitely codes them as the main characters of his narrative. This coding is further supported through Ringo’s and Dallas’ character foils—Mr. Hatfield and Mrs. Mallory, respectively. Ringo Kid and Mr. Hatfield are character foils that exemplify a common tension in Western films— the tension between the true dandy and the false dandy. “The true dandy is the gentleman/gunman,” the natural hero who proves his hero status through his consistent character and selfless actions.8 He is the character that John Wayne became famous for playing—“the pure type of the Western hero…torn, damaged, a castrated hero, denied progeny.”9 The false dandy, on the other

“The confinement of the stagecoach forces the characters to interact and re-configure their social positioning.”

hand, is “a churl posing as a gentleman.”10 False dandies, like Hatfield, are “pretenders [who] aspire to the prestige that the dandy receives. They may be skillful, perhaps, but fail the test. The false dandy tries to look and act like the true dandy, just as the false Puritan might not attend church.”11 In Stagecoach, Ringo Kid easily establishes himself as the true dandy whereas Hatfield, his character foil, assumes the role of the false dandy. Hatfield pretends to be the gentleman hero by acting chivalrously towards Mrs. Mallory, but his chivalry is a charade, one that is selfish and elitist. Ringo is the true gentleman hero because he is able to treat everyone in the stagecoach— but particularly the prostitute Dallas—with kindness and respect.

Dallas, the second protagonist, has a foil in the character of Mrs. Mallory. Dallas is a prostitute who has been exiled from the town of Tonto by the Law and Order League; Lucy Mallory, in contrast, is the most socially and morally respected woman in the stagecoach. Lucy is a Southern lady, an officer’s wife, and a soon-to-be mother; she is respected by all of her traveling companions because of her proper femininity, whereas Dallas is condemned for her promiscuity and deviant sexuality. Mrs. Mallory is a classic example of the Western archetype of “the civilized woman [who] enters the wilderness already

pregnant with civilization.”12 However, while Mrs. Mallory is socially superior, as a character she is often in the periphery; she speaks infrequently and she is often physically or emotionally removed from what is happening on the screen. Dallas is the protagonist because it is through her transformation from a prostitute into a paragon that Ford most explicitly criticizes the elitism of the Puritan elect. Dallas’ transformation from a prostitute into a paragon is accomplished in large part through water imagery. Ford’s use of water imagery to transform Dallas’ character is a deliberate choice. First, the consistent water imagery throughout the film serves as an important symbolic reflection of the Puritans’ oceanic journey. Second, water is incredibly rare and valuable in a desert setting, so its presence in a scene immediately indicates to the audience that something important is happening. Finally, and most importantly, Ford uses heavy water imagery throughout the film because water is a cleansing agent, one that can be used to symbolize both purification and democratization. Water is symbolically used in media texts and in religious ceremonies such as Christian baptisms to symbolize the washing away of an individual’s sins and the purification of an individual’s soul. By associating Dallas with water imagery, Ford indicates that

she is a character who will be cleansed and made pure again. Water is also symbolically used as an agent of democratization. Water is a universal element, one that all human beings, regardless of their race or gender or social class, need to survive. In its most destructive nature, water also has—as in the case of the biblical Great Flood— the power to annihilate and renew. Since Ford is deeply concerned with criticizing Puritan elitism through the disruption of social classes, water becomes an important cinematic symbol of the promise and power of democracy. Though water imagery is visible throughout Stagecoach, the two most important water scenes as they apply to the fugitive protagonists of Ringo Kid and Dallas are the silver cup scene and the birth scene. In the silver cup scene, Hatfield, the false dandy, attends to Lucy Mallory by giving her water in a silver cup. When Hatfield refuses to offer water to Dallas, Ringo calls him out and personally hands the canteen to Dallas. This scene is important for several reasons. First, it furthers the coding of Ringo as the true dandy and Hatfield as the false dandy. One of the characteristics of the false dandy is that he “abuses his presumed possession of mastery to take over water rights.”13 Without Ringo’s intervention, Hatfield would have sole control over the

canteen, and he would deny Dallas her basic human right to water because of his own personal prejudices and elitist attitude. Ringo’s intervention is important in his coding as the protagonist because what helps to define the true dandy is his “almost physical revulsion at the crude selfishness of false dandies.”14 Ringo’s intervention clearly establishes his democratic ideals and places them in sharp contrast with Hatfield’s elitist pretensions. Additionally, by drinking the water from the canteen instead of the silver cup, Dallas participates in “an act of defiance against the material world.”15 This defiant disregard for the trappings of the material world indicate that she, unlike Lucy Mallory, is capable of achieving “the mythic accession of God’s Community to the Promised Land.”16 This small act of defiance against materialism codes Dallas as one of the “Elect of God” even though she is a prostitute, and her inclusion in the Elect of God helps criticize the Puritans’ elitism.

The second most important scene as it applies to Dallas and Ringo is the birth scene. When Mrs. Mallory goes into labor, the only two people who are able to help and save her are Dallas and Doc Boone—the two characters who were exiled from Tonto because of their immorality. Dallas immediately takes charge of the situation, demanding that Ringo “go into the kitchen and get some hot water—lots of hot water.”17 Ringo acquiesces with a “yes ma’am,” indicating that she is someone whom he respects and is willing to take orders from. Meanwhile, the sheriff splashes water on Doc Boone’s face, cleansing him of his drunkenness and awakening him from his alcoholic stupor. The water transforms Doc Boone from a stammering drunk into a doctor who is capable of delivering a child. The water in the delivery room initiates a similarly miraculous transformation in Dallas. When Dallas enters the delivery room, she is a prostitute, but when she emerges, baby in hand, she is someone entirely different—a mother figure, a Madonna figure, a figure who has, through the hot water of the delivery room, been washed of her sins and re-born. For the first time in the film, the characters gather around Dallas instead of avoiding her. All of the characters are seen in the same frame, creating a space of inclusiveness, and the characters’ order in the semicircle indicates a disrupted hierarchy.

Through the ritual of birth, Dallas herself is cleansed and reborn. Dallas’ transformation of character is particularly apparent through her interactions with Ringo. According to Williams, “the Western draws its symbols from European culture in which the woman represents land, immanent fecundity, awaiting the male’s animating spirit and will to awaken her power of life.”18 Although Ringo has always been kind to Dallas, this is the first moment that he has seen her as a potential wife and mother figure. Before Dallas’ transformation, she was a prostitute and thus not a viable mother figure. She was perceived to be, like her desert surroundings, infertile, but the hot water of the delivery room and Ringo’s male gaze “awaken her power of life” and transform her into a viable romantic interest and potential mother figure. Through the close-up shot of Ringo’s face and the reverse angle close-up shot of Dallas’ face, the audience can see Dallas as Ringo does—as a paragon of femininity. Ringo looks at her with an expression of such love and devotion that it almost seems, for a moment, that the baby is his and Dallas’ instead of Mrs. Mallory’s— which in turn would make Dallas a “virginal” mother figure like Madonna, one who was immaculately conceived and who is miraculously capable of giving birth without having a sexual relationship. Dallas’

transformation from a prostitute into a paragon, which was catalyzed by the hot water in the delivery room, inspires Ringo to propose to Dallas and to officially “elect” her as his spiritual partner. While Ford’s Stagecoach does successfully criticize the elitism of the Puritan Elect, it also perhaps unconsciously promotes a different kind of elitism—the presumed elitism of the white American population. The non-white characters in Stagecoach exist entirely in the peripheries of the film, and most do not even have a speaking role. This presumed elitism has

colored every aspect of American culture, and it continues to have an incredible influence over American cinema as a whole. Williams argues that “the Western has survived by progressively broadening its identity of the chosen people,” but I think his argument applies to all cinema as well.19 Cinema is a “mythic frontier,” and with diverse casting, progressive narratives, and more diverse content creators, it can remain a frontier that has the potential at least to be “a place where utopian versions of the City on a Hill can be re-imagined to incorporate those who are left out or repressed in the current social order.”20

“This presumed elitism has colored every aspect of American culture.”

PHILIPPE PETIT’S GIFT By Katie Dudgeon, Class of 2018

On August 7th, 1974, French high-wire artist Philippe Petit walked on a wire strung between the still unfinished twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. Walking between the towers was an act bound up in death that allowed Petit to embody the modern world where “the idea of freedom seems inseparable from the scandal that nothing at all needs to exist, least of all ourselves.”1 The 2008 film Man on Wire chronicles Philippe Petit’s meticulous and miraculous execution of the performance. Director James Marsh omits any mention of the 9/11 terror attacks from the film, refusing to entangle Petit’s act with death and destruction: “It would be unfair and wrong to infect his story with any mention, discussion or imagery of the towers being destroyed. Everyone knows what happened to those buildings. The film has poignancy for that reason, but not one that needs to be overstated.”2 Marsh demonstrates reverence for the victims of the attack, for Philippe Petit’s high-wire walk, and for the towers.

At first mention, it seems disturbing and insensitive to consider that the will of the hijackers who destroyed the World Trade Center buildings on September 11th is not entirely different from the will that drove Petit to walk between the Towers twenty-seven years before. Using the film Man on Wire to examine how the will of Philippe Petit could resemble the motivations of jihadist terrorists is by no means an attempt to use one to justify the other, but an attempt to develop a psychoanalytic understanding of the condition of modernity. A murderous suicidal sacrifice in the name of God is done with the belief that such an act is God’s will, and “God wills what is inherently good.”3 Constructing the difference between the will of Petit and the jihadists is contingent on an understanding of their respective assumptions of “good.” Both express their visions of the good through their bodies, and both want freedom. While the terrorists saw goodness and freedom definitively in God, Petit found his freedom in art. Philippe asserts his vision of the “good” to consist of loving people and experiencing delight. He is driven by his will to obtain security and pleasure, a force that he describes as “impetuous.” His wire walk was an act of Art that accomplished and was motivated by the same things that sustain God.

A close reading of accounts in the film shows that the harmless highwire act has parallels to the destruction of the World Trade Center. These parallels are a disturbing indication that, indeed, “formalism and nihilism turn out to be sides of the same coin.”4 A comparison of Petit’s motivations in relation to religion is implicitly encouraged in Man on Wire. Before Petit walked between the WTC towers, in 1971, he walked between the spires of Notre Dame. Edited over dreary footage of the Paris cathedral, Philippe explains as the bells toll that his “dream [was] not so much [of] conquering the universe.”5 Then, panning behind the fence of the lookout of the Notre Dame, the viewer sees Paris at twilight with human lives emanating through the lights of windows. He is motivated by earthly life. The film then cuts to a ceremony inside the cathedral. The lightness of his suspension in mid-air has a great disparity from the rigidity of the Catholic ritual. While the priests are inside of the Notre Dame, “lying on the floor, their heads against the floor,” Petit was far above them, looking to the sky and juggling. He is in a state of jocular focus that captivates the spectators below.

Philippe Petit is enthralled

with life, his girlfriend Annie conceives: “Each day is like a work of art for him.” While he is able to thoroughly enjoy his earthly life, others struggle. with life, his girlfriend Annie conceives: “Each day is like a work of art for him.” While he is able to thoroughly enjoy his earthly life, others struggle. Ruth Stein connects the rise of fundamentalism to modern discontentedness with life: “Increasing religiosity of the world is linked with the inextinguishable human need, growing in proportion to the emergence of Enlightenment rationality, for magic, for transcendence, for places where one is elevated above finitude and suffering.”6 Petit achieves transcendence not through practicing religion but through his art. In the darkness of night while he is preparing the equipment for his walk, Petit describes the feeling: “There was peace and immensity. And in the middle of madness, I suddenly had hope and joy.” Petit’s accomplice Jim Moore felt exactly this as he watched his friend walk between the towers: “Beyond anything you could ever imagine, mind boggling. The awe of the event and the overwhelming largeness, the scale of the situation took my mind to a place where I wasn’t concerned about him.It was magical, profound.” Even the police responsible for apprehending him were “spellbound.” The

theme of inexplicable magic cited throughout the film is the same feeling religiousness constantly desires. His balancing act achieves the religious sense of the sacred: “Whereas the religious sense of the sacred is the facing of the numinous and the sublime by letting oneself go and being open and receptive to a sense of deep mean all this him were “spellbound.” The theme of inexpliingfulness and benign presence, fundamentalism is a sense of being held tight, enveloped by a comforting straightjacket.”7

At no point in the film does Petit mention a belief in an omnipotent presence, only impetuous forces: “Something that I could not resist, and I did not make any effort to resist, called me upon that cable. And death is very close.” Both the hijackers and Petit must overcome a fear of death. Philippe does not want to die, but he also does not fixate on the possibility nor dread it: “If I die, what a beautiful death.”8 He is “in Keatsian phrase, half in love with easeful death.” This is only a half love of death, because Petit does not plan to die. He wants to continue his earthly existence. In the film, Jean-Louis Blondeu proudly proclaims, “We’re not going to die. We’re going to live.” Petit’s conception of death

establishes the “[distinction] between the kind of love of death which is really just a raging appetite for annihilation, and the view that only paying our dues to death as the ultimate signifier of our fragility and mortality can value accrue to the living.”9 The hijackers were motivated by a destructive death in which they are to obtain an immortal soul merged with God. The sacrificial violent act is done for the promise of eternity, “promise of immortality in exchange for total submission to God.”10 It is carried out in a desire to rid oneself of the dread of like “human finitude, of personal annihilation.”11 Petit embraces finitude like no other. He spends years preparing for a walk that would only last for less than an hour. Jean-Louis took much comfort, rather than dread, in the flashing light atop the tower during their preparations, “turning like a metronome, that’s giving you an idea of time going by.” While the terrorists spent their lives in exchange for something greater, Petit values his temporal life.

The jihadists’ quest is to transform not only a fear of death, but also fear of “the other’s existence, of the force of the other’s own intentions and aims.”12 Petit does not fear the other. On the contrary, people fuel his drive. His dream to wire walk was to do so

“as a poet, conquering beautiful stages.” Petit’s vision of the “good,” expressed through his body, is in his love of human beings. A performance depends on spectators. Walking between the Towers, he indulges in the crowd below: “So I could tell you, and yes probably it’s a lie. But to me it’s not—I heard the crowd. I saw the crowd. I hear them murmur.” A fundamentalist mindset, in strict opposition, “aims at liquidating the necessity to surrender and depend on other human beings; it wants to destroy its own fears of dependency and the helplessness, humiliation, and rage they engender.”13 For Petit, even those who are obliged to apprehend and oppose him are people he enjoys. Petit is happy to provoke those who enforce the law, but he does not revile them. Shortly after society becomes conscious to his walk, there are policemen at each end of his wire, contextualizing his act within a litigious society. A policeman recalls, “When he got to the building, we asked him to get off the high wire, but instead he turned around and ran back out to the middle.” When Petit first spots the officers he smiles and laughs. His behavior shifts slightly from a reverent, beautiful performance to an assertion of powerful meaninglessness over the law.

“They don’t know how to react to a day-dreaming wire walker lying down and dialoguing with a seagull.” Petit’s funambulism involved much work in subverting law enforcement. Jean Francois, another accomplice, cites the seduction: “Jean-Louis had told me right away it was illegal, so I knew it was illegal but of course that’s what got me a bit excited! Against the law but not wicked or mean. It was wonderful!” For Philippe, “what excited him most about this adventure, aside from being a beautiful show, was that it was like a bank robbery.” Law is thought to exist to prevent harm and wickedness, yet all members of society know it is an imperfect and too often oppressive method of control. “The criminal and the avant-gardist, or the outlaw and the artist, are closely allied.”14 However harmless the trespassing and “disorderly conduct” was, the stunt resulted in Jean Francois’s expulsion from the United States. Although the judge waved Petit’s charges in exchange for community service, he could be said to be no less a criminal than he is an artist. “Moreover, if the ‘law’ of the artifact is invisibly incarnate in the subject matter it shapes, then the artwork is politically speaking an image of hegemony rather than coercion. Metaphysically speaking, it is a working model of that reconcilia

tion of love and law which was once known as God.”15 Petit’s spectacle is an image of hegemony, especially considering the structure that was suspending him, and by reconciling love and law, the performance once again functions in the same capacity of a divine God. Petit depicts his vision of the good using his body, contextualized within a litigious, religious, and materialist society. His image of goodness is defined by impossibility, delight, and love. Above Notre Dame, he delights in juggling. Between the Towers, in a reverent action, he lies down on the wire. He kneels and salutes. In preparation for the extreme high wire, he practices walking across the tightrope in his garden. He has his friends try to dislodge him by jumping up and down, bouncing on his wire. The film does not depict this as a serious challenge of life and death, but as playing. This is exemplary of Petit’s appreciation of Dionysian activities that have “no need to justify themselves before some sourfaced tribunal of social utility.” 16 Jean-Louis applauds that these acts, while playful, meet “the challenge of doing something that’s supposed to be impossible.” This challenge harnesses the “complexity between desire and the forbidden, between sexuality and the

unattainable.”17 In addition to desiring the forbidden, Petit is thoroughly in touch with his sexuality. He admits to indulging in a sexual encounter for its own sake. After gaining fame and admiration from the stunt, he says, “I went for a very short little moment of, I don’t know—pleasure of the flesh! How disgusting. But, but, but, I am sorry, how beautiful too.” Petit is aware and unashamed of his flesh. On the night of preparation inside of the tower, he cannot find the fishing line that they will use to connect the wire from one tower to the other. He removes all of his clothes and moves about the darkness so he might feel the line brush against his skin. This is effective, and he locates the fishing line. Petit uses his body for temporality, earthliness, and feminine desire. All of these are “linked in the fundamentalist’s mind and must be obliterated.”18 Those who carry out human sacrifices carry out “the violent erasure of human obstacles” to search for meaning and transform their fear.19 “Like a pencil that is reduced to nothing by continual sharpening, the terrorist’s body will find its redemption by becoming a pure instrument of God’s will, eventually merging with God in a cataclysm of purifying fire.”20 Philippe could not be more opposed to such an idea. Jean-Louis’s appreciation was that Petit was doing

something “that not only doesn’t hurt anybody but gives something to somebody.” Petit has no desire to dispose of his own body or cause harm. A religious quest is a quest for meaning, offering “protection against the dream of death by endowing life (and death) with meaning.”21 Petit is not so concerned with an actual meaning: “I’ll let the psychiatrists decide why. Maybe I wanted to escape my time. Maybe I wanted to see the world from a different perspective and I was an explorer at heart. Who knows? And who cares? […] Nobody could stop me […] I did something magnificent and mysterious and I got a practical, ‘why?’ And the beauty of it is that I didn’t have any ‘why?’ […] There is no ‘why.’”

Petit’s denial of a ‘why,’ and the symbolic poetry of the void beneath him, shows he believes “nothing is more perfect than nothingness.”22 If Petit is willing to die for a beautiful death, he “[forces] a contrast between [his] own mortality and the imperishability of what [he would] die for.”23 Petit is implying he would die for two things: beauty (a manifestation of pleasure) and

for the freedom his act of art gives him. Petit unabashedly embraces pleasure, whereas fundamentalists see “desire for anything that is not divine is a dangerous subversive force.”24 A fundamentalist must more strongly value meaning since the experience of pleasure is to indulge in impure desires. The hijackers planned to obtain freedom in their eternal life. Petit enjoys immortal freedom in a different fashion: “The unprecedented freedom enjoyed by the modern work of art gives it the opportunity to express the clash between the impermanence of the present and the weight of eternity.”25 Petit’s exercise is not merely a brush with death. He says, “I need complete detachment. I need absolute freedom. I must be a castaway on the desert island of my dreams.” That is the object of his performance. Walking four thousand meters high provides him and his spectators security. Art provides a gift of security. “What we need for our security, it appears, is a kind of freedom which could not not exist, and whereas premodern civilizations found this in God, modernity is forced to substitute this august solution for the far less popular, far less effectual idea of art.”26 Petit was able to create Art that provides the security people normally look for in God that

“[fends] off the frightful disorder which death represents.”27 He exercised this not just during his tightrope stunts, but regularly. His girlfriend Annie observes, “He got great pleasure from taking certain ‘liberties.’ He’s so excessive, so creative.” This mindfulness is a different sort of religion. “[Humanism] sees the work of art as reconciling energy and order, individual and universal, flux and stillness, freedom and necessity, time and eternity.”28 Fundamentalists and Petit alike work to transform fear, have a belief in their respective conceptions of “good,” and possess a desire for security. It is tragic that one entity can attempt to manifest these things in violence. Philippe Petit is an exceptional human being. He is able to find delight in his bodily artistic performance that has the capacity to balance his indulgence in pleasure, pushing the limits of life, and the fulfillment of giving joy to other people.

E T E R N A L

CONTRADICTIONS FRAMING KENNEDYâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S DEATH THROUGH ART

By: Betsy Sednaoui, Class of 2017

Mainstream representations of the Kennedy assassination typically zoom in on the linear facts of both official and unofficial record, such as timeframe, angles, motives, and location.1 Outside the historical realm of neutrality and transparency, however, artists have synthesized the assassination through the function of mediation, which, as Yale professor J.D. Connor states, “liberates Kennedy-era reflection from eventfulness, casting it adrift toward the eternal.”2 At the site of President John F. Kennedy’s grave, there glows an eternal flame to memorialize the eternal quality of Kennedy’s spirit. While the memorial is undeniably poignant in nature, it also represents a series of oppositions underlying the image of Kennedy as it survives in our collective memory. As Connor argues, the “temporal boundedness” of the four days in November is inherently contradicted by the “temporal unboundedness” of an eternal flame.3 The “contradiction in temporality,” abound in mainstream attempts to contain the event in intelligible formula, is amplified by the inherently accidental nature of the entire assassination: President Kennedy did not plan to get shot; Abraham Zapruder did not plan to capture the assassination on film and subsequently produce the most influential mediation of the original event; and

television reporters did not plan to need the tools of live footage to cover the spontaneous murder of the President.4 At the heart of the assassination, there are multiple layers of opposition, each worthy of individual investigation; the awareness, dissection, and reflection of these layers can formulate a holistic lesson in representation and mediation. As Connor explains, “At the still point where the oppositions cross we find the icon, the spontaneous revelation of durable character, fixed as an image, lasting through time.”5 The crossroads of still imagery and moving footage begins with the Zapruder film. I am interested not in the microscopic details of the assassination, but rather, in the mediated experience of memory and spectatorship, as the imagery of Zapruder’s footage travels through time and context. This consideration of Kennedy’s character extends beyond the realm of television, and critically examines the ways in which the meanings of the assassination have changed through artistic representations that mirror, manipulate, perform and exhaust the Zapruder imagery that was ingrained in collective memory after Kennedy’s assassination. As David Lubin argues, “limitations of motion picture equipment make fractional gaps inevitable even in continuous

filming” thus, the unattainable gaps in time, unrecorded by Zapruder’s camera, continue to haunt each inspection of the Kennedy assassination.6 These gaps, made so glaringly apparent by the black space between frames in Life Magazine’s printing of the footage, will forever escape the grasp of pure understanding. While assassination researchers narrow their investigation to microscopic details, and historians attempt to tell history through a neutral lens and with temporal continuity, artists have shifted the focus away from the facts and toward the visceral impact of this mediated imagery on our memory of the President and his death. Three primary objects of study will inform this analysis of mediation: Bruce Conner’s film Report (1967); Ant Farm’s/T.R. Uthco’s film The Eternal Frame (1975); and Maurizio Cattelan’s sculpture Now (2004). Each work of art examines the historicization of the Zapruder film by manipulating the original through techniques of repetition, simulation, and disorientation, all of which expose inherent contradictions and weaknesses in our entrustment of the Zapruder film as a sober, neutral experience of the Kennedy’s death.

Bruce Conner’s 1967 film

Report, running only 13 minutes, 36

captures the disjunction between

memory and understanding that plagues our assassination imagery. The film uses stock footage and radio recordings to flash familiar sights and sounds to the viewer, but disfigures them so strongly through incessant repetition and temporal discontinuity, they eventually lose their original meanings. In his book Zaprudered, Øyvind Vågnes describes the process of quoting as “both a creative and a destructive act,” whereby the familiarity of original imagery is simultaneously perpetuated and scrutinized through mediation of a new context.7 Report places quotation marks around the hegemonic imagery of the assassination, made privileged by the heavy and immediate mediation of television, which inherently sculpted viewers’ memories by narrating the assassination. With Report, Bruce Conner attempted to expose “the exploitation of [Kennedy’s] death,” as he recalls in a 1969 interview.8 “The problem in making the film,” or simply the irony, was that Conner had to scrupulously examine the imagery of the event in order to acknowledge the failures for our memory of doing exactly that.9 Taken from recordings of radio newsmen narrating the day of the assassination, voices speak over mirroring repetitions of a short clip of the motorcade before

Dealey Plaza. At first, the footage resembles traditional film editing of sequential, unique events, but it turns out to mock our expectation of temporal continuity, traditionally found in mainstream film editing. Following this scene is a continued narration, voiced over a lengthy shot of a black screen pulsing with flashes of white. The rate of the pulsing increases exponentially, eventually becoming so disconcerting that it is all but impossible to keep one’s eyes locked on the screen. Arguing the lasting power of the Zapruder film, Vågnes says, “that which keeps us looking...depends as much on what the image conceals as on what it shows.”10 As Marita Sturken concurs, the Zapruder film functions as “a secret image, hidden from view, imbued with a kind of sacred status.”11 Conner’s film conceptualizes the “sacred” image’s unattainable quality, dramatizing its invisible effect of inflicting dark stains upon our memory. The repetition of short shots reappears at numerous times throughout the film, playing and replaying identical shots of familiar imagery, such as a man holding Oswald’s rifle above his head, Jackie opening the car door of the ambulance, and the Kennedys deboarding Air Force One in Dallas. As the recordings of radio voices

continue to tell the news story of the assassination, the film replays grainy countdowns from 10 to 1, each time raising the hopes of viewers for a performance to follow; each time, the countdown delivers nothing, and immediately restarts. Conner confronts these naive desires for coherence and familiarity, simultaneously provoking and reflecting responses of confusion (about time and singularity) and distance (from the original copy of the images). While the narrator claims he is “positive” in his accounts of the day, our own eyes are playing tricks on our minds. The torture of Conner’s forceful repetition of memory--flashing each moment across the screen as it flashes across one’s consciousness--is the most at play near the middle of the film: a shot from Jackie’s side of the Lincoln (not a perspective one is used to seeing from the Zapruder footage) is repeated countless times, with minute differences in each start and finish. The more the shot replays itself, the farther from our grasp the subjects move; additionally, the speed and brevity of each shot increases as does play count. Eventually, the figures in the motorcade become completely unrecognizable: by the end, a dark torso and a white helmet, streaming across the frame from right

to left, are the only discernible figures in a moment of such haste and incompleteness. In the aforementioned interview, Conner describes the negative, sometimes “violent” emotional reactions his film provoked in many audience members when he first showed Report. Ironically, the people who reacted most adversely to the film were those who had not supported Kennedy as a politician while he was alive. The President’s death, then, triggered a visceral change in those people: “It altered their relationship to him,” Conner states.12 Through the intercutting of imagery from the assassination with familiar imagery from modern life, Conner complicates our linear reality and exposes the marriage of mediation and memory. “A great work of art is a great communication,” Conner continues, “a certain level of communication wherein it can be reflected back in many forms.”13 By this definition, Zapruder’s imagery serves not only as historical record, but also as a work of art, as far as it is recycled and quoted in repeated artistic attempts to question our relationship to it as an image.

As Vågnes argues, one can understand “the act of witnessing…[as] a continual and collective process, amended and

extended” by the complicated marriage of old and new imagery.14 Whereas Conner’s film positions the television coverage of the assassination as the event itself, The Eternal Frame parodies the Zapruder film for becoming the event; thus, as new information, new images, emerge, yet another degree of mediation enters the network of imagery shaping what it means to witness--and then to remember--the event. Each artist both creates and destroys the layers of imagery through self-reflexive performance of the President’s image as it suffers its “image death.” In The Eternal Frame, the Artist-President declares the date of his “image death” not as the day of the assassination (November 22, 1963), but instead as the day the audience witnesses the performance of the assassination (“August 10, 1975”).15 Speaking to the audience as both the President and the image of the President, the Artist-President exposes the contradictory element of spectatorship: “I am in reality nothing more than another image on your television sets,” he says. The marriage of “reality” and “image” is troubling and yet characterizes the matrix of fact and fabrication saturating our mediated memory of Kennedy. In her book Between the Frames, Heidi Dawidoff argues,

“life isn’t itself graphically realistic to our minds;” instead, it is constantly constructed through a process of “coloring and discoloring...by means of memories, fantasies, and feelings.”16 The Eternal Frame exposes itself as a parody of both life and death, dramatizing a question of representation through multiple means of mediation. The Eternal Frame is self-reflexive in its examination of representation as a matrix of mediation, “moving from the grainy film image imprinted in our memory as Greek tragedy, through the copy of the actor’s preparations, rehearsal, and performance, to a model—the videotape.”17 When The Eternal Frame debuted, the Zapruder film had only recently premiered to the American public as moving footage; thus, at the time, the Zapruder imagery “still existed mainly as still images to many; now it existed as both.”18 The film thereby places viewers at a crossroads of still and moving images--of frozen and fluid time. This activity is most overtly reflected during the backstage rehearsal of the motorcade performance, when the film simulates a freeze frame from the Zapruder film. The camera continues rolling, as the actors hold a single pose to mimic a still frame of the Zapruder film. Not only do the

actors mime the scrupulous investigation of Zapruder’s frames for clues on the assassination, but they also disturb the viewer’s innocence as a spectator. Here, one’s mind is searching for a still, unthreatening image of a moment, upon which one can shamelessly project the gaze of memory; however, the actors have rehearsed and prepared for this response, and thus no gaze can remain invisible, as no layer of mediation is left alone. The contradictions between stillness and motion are abound in the intention of the performance as well. Ant Farm/T.R. Uthco could not have planned for the reaction their street performance ended up causing in its spectators; however, by capturing the surprisingly emotional and personal responses many witnesses had to the apparently realistic reenactment, The Eternal Frame both created and manipulated the power of familiar imagery (shaped by television and repurposed by art) to define our memory. In one shot, set from above like stationary security footage, the camera shoots the actors waving from a stationary convertible. Then the film cuts to a profile shot of them in the same car, this time with a green screen showing the streets in Dallas behind the actors, showing the performance with one more step of mediation. Then, in a heightened

display of mediation, the film cuts to a black and white shot of that very scene playing on a TV screen, and the camera zooms out to show the cast watching and laughing at the footage in a living room. In The Eternal Frame, the Artist-President stresses his own condition of death, while also critiquing the immortality of his mediated image. As his speech expresses, the television screen-and, a few degrees removed, Ant Farm’s/T.R. Uthco’s cinematic screen--preserves the image of the President in death and beyond. Four decades later, the “self-conscious criticality” of The Eternal Frame, expressed in its crossroads of humor and perplexity, resurfaces in post-9/11 art through an unexpected medium: sculpture.19 Maurizio Cattelan’s wax rendering of the slain President “records for posterity an image of what once had been but no longer is.”20 As with many visual representations of Kennedy that appear after his death, the wax sculpture reiterates the underlying contradictions of his image--between life and death, still image and moving footage, accidence and calculation.

Cattelan’s 2004 sculpture, Now, is a wax replica of President Kennedy’s corpse laid to rest in an open casket. “Impeccably

groomed,” as Nancy Spector describes, the President is framed in a clean suit and with no sign of any wounds from the assassination.21 Rather than indulging in the realism of gore, which is achievable in such a unique medium of replicability, Cattelan portrays the slain President through a simultaneous reflection and critique of his eternal image in the nation’s memory. The artist quotes the imagery of The Eternal Frame through the irony of trying to relive an image from the past as it never actually existed. Having experienced The Eternal Frame before visiting Cattelan’s exhibition, “it was impossible to look at the barefoot figure without thinking that he was nothing but an empty vessel, an image confiscated by yet another allegorist,” writes Vågnes.22 When contextualized as a quotation of The Eternal Frame, Now is a copy twice removed from its original (the Zapruder film), which itself, argues Mellencamp, is “only an image—an indelible one.”23 Through the lens of a scientific purveyor, the “ keystone” of Cattelan’s wax artwork “is realistic resemblance” to life (Ballestriero). However, it is not the realistic resemblance, but rather, the performance of familiar imagery--the simulation of realism--that distinguishes Now from other recreations of Kennedy.

Now is a significant example of art’s simultaneous destruction and creation of an image, and represents the assassination as a commentary on the contradiction between mortality and eternal image. The “essential cruelty” of wax sculptures, Spector argues, is its material delicacy: “when cast, it can easily break apart or collapse, and it melts completely when exposed to heat.”24 Cattelan’s sculpture is therefore torturous, for it represents the paradox of striving to recreate a life through the replicability of its image. Cattelan’s historicization of Kennedy an almost religious icon--the bare feet symbolize sainthood--is negated by the fundamental fragility of the material he used to craft such an image. While the delicate restoration of Kennedy’s beaming image may evoke the immortality suggested

by the eternal flame that glows at his gravesite, the figurine--and all its imagery--can be destroyed by the very heat that radiates from his image. For as much as the sculpture replicates, it beholds a haunting emptiness; just as the Artist-President predicted, “no image can be anything…but dead.” Today, there continue to be renditions of the assassination through factual investigation, as well as, and perhaps more importantly, further renderings of assassination imagery through artistic means. In 2013, National Geographic released a trailer (“Killing Kennedy”) for its television movie Killing Kennedy, based on the book by Bill O’Reilly, which looks at the events leading up to the assassination as a tale of two opposing human characters with converging fates: Kennedy and Oswald. The trailer exemplifies modern film technology’s 41

capability of capturing discrete motions and emotions of an event. Through a calculated manipulation of time, the cameras work to slide the viewer through time at unprecedentedly slow speeds. The trailer employs only a few flickers of familiar imagery--Jackie’s pink pillbox hat, Kennedy’s fixed wave, the secret service agent running behind the Lincoln--and yet that is all it needs to resurface the mediation of memory bound up in the assassination. A month after the publishing the trailer on YouTube, National Geographic also released a behind-the-scenes video chronicling the making of the trailer, which shed light on the enormity of rehearsal, calculation, and authorship the crew invested in this mediation of time. As three to four sets operated simultaneously, the process was “heavily choreographed” resembling a dance performance of cameras, lights, screens, makeup, and costumes-all to construct a unique mask, a copy, of the original image death.25 One director described the process of achieving the softest light possible, using three different light diffusers--a literal and figurative tool for mediation.

The remarks from directors and actors reveal a continuing quotation of the Zapruder film,

as well as quotations of the desire for repetition and close inspection that are dramatized in Report and parodied in The Eternal Frame. Three-quarters of the way through the “Making Of” video, it shows the set where the crew filmed the motorcade remake, the actors performing Mr. and Mrs. Kennedy sitting in a remake of the original Lincoln convertible. Just as it was impossible for Vågnes to see Now without seeing the imagery of the Artist-President, so too is it impossible to divorce this scene from its quotation of rehearsal in The Eternal Frame. In Frame, the actor performing the image--not the body--of Jackie Kennedy in drag teases the vulnerable viewer’s desire for a spontaneous replaying of history; in fact, the drag performance tells us, the spontaneity itself was a result of rehearsal and planning, a crafted replica of memory, not of reality. On the set of the dramatic trailer for Killing Kennedy, as much as the crew tries to “capture this moment in history” with precision and detail, the technology is used less as a recorder of historical accuracy than as a magnifier of visceral responses to the mediated event. Commenting on the enormity of effort they invested in special effects, the director of photography, Khalid Mohtaseb, says they are “slowing down time and taking

what’s right side up and turning it upside down.”26 This sentiment evokes a shot in Bruce Conner’s film, which vertically flips footage of Kennedy’s casket during the funeral procession. Juxtaposed with the sound recordings of broadcasters narrating the events of November 22, 1963, scenes such as this reveal the contradictions between the desired boundedness of certainty and the resulting unboundedness of insecurity—in both fact and memory. These artistic renderings of the Kennedy assassination reflect the inability of our memory to recall the event through a singular, unmediated experience. By both performing and manipulating historical imagery through an artistic lens, the creators of these texts exemplify (to different degrees)

awareness of the oppositions between rehearsal and spontaneity, repetition and singularity. Through artistic employment of repetition, reflection, and performance, the assassination—as we remember and express it—has been colored and stained with new meanings of mediation. As illustrated merely by the title of Vågnes’ book, the Zapruder film has survived almost invisibly as a trademark of memory; furthermore, as the passive voice conveys, the film will forever “leave questions of agency unresolved.”27 Even today, with the close replica of Kennedy as a wax sculpture, there is something greater that escapes the spectator’s grasp. It seems, the stronger the aura surrounding the image, the more destructive and concealing its replication, mediation, and quotation.

REINVIGORATE “One Story, Told Week by Week:”

Serial and True Crime in the 21st Century By: Molly Easton, Class of 2018

hen the first episode of Serial was quietly released on October 3rd, 2014, in the normal time-slot of This American Life, it was billed as a spin-off, originally conceived of in producer Sarah Koenig’s basement.1 There was no indication it would go on to be downloaded over 80 million times2 and be the first podcast to receive a Peabody Award in 2015.3 In fact, there was little proof it would even transcend the small bubble of This American Life. But, Serial would go on to be a commercial and critical success unprecedented in the podcast genre. The careful re-examination of a 1999 murder, trial, and conviction, Serial didn’t invent the true crime genre. But, its podcast form and use of the Internet allowed it a popularity and influence that would reinvigorate true crime, both reflecting and changing the media landscape of its time. The masses have for centuries clamored for depictions of death and details of criminal activity, long before the podcast became a viable vehicle for stories of this genre. In

Germany, the mecca of early printing, publicly posted pamphlets detailed crimes and executions in the mid-16th century.4 In 17th century New England, preachers would give sermons to large groups of people gathered to watch public executions.5 Such 16th and 17th century crime reporting used the context of Christianity, often setting reports to the tune of hymns and warning against the consequences of committing sins. 18th and 19th century crime reporting, particularly in the United States and Britain, was distinct for the shift towards exploration of the criminal mind. The Newgate Calendars of the mid-1700s, written by a chaplain in London, were anthologized narratives of the lives and crimes of criminals under his care.6 The True and Genuine Account of the Life and Actions of the Late Jonathan Wild, written by Daniel Defoe in 1725, is notable for its novelistic structure and for selectively choosing the most entertaining aspects of the London thief’s life to portray. Julian Ralph’s serialized reporting

in the New York Sun immortalized the alleged crimes and 1893 trial of Lizzie Borden.7 Edmund Pearson brought a specific type of true crime to high-brow magazines like Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, writing with restraint and poeticism about Jack the Ripper and Charles Lindbergh’s infant’s kidnapping.8 Recent longform true crime accounts owe much to the style and structure of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. A staple of the genre, In Cold Blood is still widely renowned for its meticulous reporting and depiction of local culture. Inspired by a short New York Times article about the murder of an entire Kansas family in 1959, Capote saw himself as inventing the “nonfiction novel,” and received much acclaim and financial success despite accusations of improperly crediting co-reporter Harper Lee.9 Anxious about the possibility that literary journalism concerning other topics would eventually date itself, Capote was reassured that murder, as a universal product of modern society, “was a theme not likely to darken and yellow with time.” 46

In Cold Blood succeeds in no small part because of its ambitious narrative structure, depicting with depth and sensitivity the lives of the all-American victim family, the two drifters eventually executed for the murders, and other members of the rural Kansas community.10 Capote would be imitated as true crime writers took the time and space to let stories expand beyond blurbs and into longform accounts. Also relevant are the ethical questions that came up after the publishing of In Cold Blood. Points of contention were the actual chronology of events, mischaracterization and misquotation of scenes, and the nature of Capote’s relationship with one of the killers, Perry Smith.11 Similar ethical concerns have characterized true crime works since. Capote’s success would give the true crime genre momentum and validation in the subsequent decades. Helter Skelter, written in 1974 by Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry, explores the Charles Manson Family murders, and is still the best-selling true crime book of all time.12 Similarly successful was Ann Rule’s The Stranger Beside Me,

a 1980 memoir of her time spent working alongside notorious serial killer Ted Bundy.13 Of particular note are the many works created in the 1990s. This epoch’s ubiquity in the true crime chronicles can be explained in part by the rise of televised criminal trials, the popularity of supermarket tabloids, and the use of violent crime as a political wedge issue. The grisly murders of wealthy Beverly Hills residents Jose and Kitty Menendez by their sons Eric and Lyle, and the subsequent 1993 trial, were memorably depicted in Vanity Fair articles by Dominick Dunne and constant coverage on Court TV.14 JonBenét Ramsey, a six-year old child and beauty pageant contestant, was another victim whose 1996 murder became front-page news nationwide.15 But perhaps the most

fruitful crime of the 1990s, in terms of media output, was the O.J. Simpson case. The Simpson trial, in which the erstwhile football and movie star was accused and ultimately acquitted of murdering his ex-wife and an acquaintance, was dubbed “the trial of the century,”16 with his defense comprising a “dream team” of high-profile lawyers.17 Although the prosecution had a strong case with ample physical evidence and Simpson’s history of domestic violence,18 the defense was able to cast doubt on the DNA,19 which was a new form of forensic science, and used to

its advantage the Los Angeles Police More in-depth treatment was given Department’s long history of racism by Jeffrey Toobin in The Run of His and brutality.20 Life: The People v. O.J. Simpson, published in 1996.24 The Simpson case would receive constant and breathless media The Simpson case is still coverage. The Los Angeles Times being excavated for meaning towould feature front-page stories day. 2016, the 20-year anniversary about Simpson for 300 days after the of the case, saw the release of two murders, and the “Big Three” net- media productions regarding the work news broadcasts (ABC, NBC, case: ESPN’s O.J.: Made in Amerand CBS) would ultimately give ica documentary and FX’s The more airtime to the Simpson case People vs. O.J. Simpson: American than the Oklahoma City Bombings Crime Story.25 Critics have noted and the Bosnian War, combined.21 the trial’s significance in a number According to one of Simpson’s law- of areas, including the trial’s venue yers, Alan Dershowitz, the trial was in downtown Los Angeles instead the subject of 2,237 news segments of Santa Monica,26 the mistreatment between 1994 and 1997.22 The not- of female defense attorney Marcia guilty verdict in 1995 was watched Clark,27 the appropriateness of telelive by over 150 million people.23 vised trials,28 and the prevalence of domestic violence.29 Racially, too, scholars have fixated on the politics of a black football star who moved in white, wealthy social circles,30 as well as the gap in perception of Simpson’s guilt between white and black audiences. The revisiting of the Simpson case in 2016, as well as other works including Making a Murderer and The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst (both in 2015), constituted a strong wave of true crime. As Jennifer Keishin Armstrong opined, “the golden age of TV drama has given way to the golden age of true crime.”31 Serial, released in 2014, arguably bookended this trend. 48

Serial was released into a media landscape very favorable to its aims. A new trend in cultural criticism uses liberal academic terminology around race and gender to create “thinkpieces,” or short analyses that judge works by their political stances. Thinkpieces place a premium on representation and diversity,32 are intended to be widely shared on social media,33 and abound on the Web, creating the term “thinkpiece-industrial complex.”34 They also are known for first-person autobiographical viewpoints.

“Featuring a male PakistaniAmerican suspect and female Korean-American victim, the podcast was ripe for racial and gendered analysis.” All of these factors made Serial conducive to commercial and critical success. Featuring a male Pakistani-American suspect and female Korean-American victim, the podcast was ripe for racial and gendered analysis. Released once a week solely on the Internet, the episodes were easy to share on social media. The many thinkpieces written after each weekly episode were ideal for websites that did not have to pay for column space (unlike traditional media) and were hungry for

content, especially topical and controversial features that would lead to the most possible clicks. Creator and narrator Sarah Koenig’s first-person stance and inclusion of herself as a character in the story mirrored the format of thinkpieces. It is impossible to discuss Serial without analyzing its form. The term “podcast” is a portmanteau of iPod, the Apple listening device, and broadcasting, the traditional way of disseminating entertainment in television and radio.35 Podcasts can be loosely defined as audio shows sometimes played on broadcast radio and always available for download on the Internet or iTunes, created by individual users or companies such as Audible or National Public Radio.36 Although web radio began in the 1990s, the concept of radio shows automatically downloading onto a personal device for later consumption was developed by Adam Curry and David Winer in 2004. Podcasting has been incredibly successful for many reasons, including the ability to avoid traditional programming regulations or time constraints,37 the near omnipresence of Internet access, and the wide range of communities revolving around niche interests on the Internet, to name a few. Customers are able to listen at their leisure, and the production cost is low, especially with advertising integrated into the 49

programming. Additionally important is the amount of time Americans still spend in the car, time well-suited to queuing up a podcast. Podcasts create an “ambiance of intimacy” in which the listener has a one-on-one connection with the podcaster.38 If podcasts constitute a subculture of radio and web entertainment, there is a further subculture of podcasts in the “NPR voice.” This category, described in a 2015 New York Times critique by Teddy Wayne entitled “‘NPR Voice’ Has Taken Over the Airwaves,” is characterized by “looser language,” “generous pauses,” and “particularly at the end of sentences, emphatic inflection.”39 Wayne posits: “A result is the suggestion of spontaneous speech and unadulterated emotion. The irony is that such presentations are highly rehearsed, with each caesura calculated and every syllable stressed in advance.” Wayne compares NPR’s scripted podcasts unfavorably to more improvised shows, such as Marc Maron’s, and blames the “linguistic relaxant” and “slacker-intellectual” tone of the Internet. Another

critic, James Walcott, described the podcast sphere as being dominated by “the chipmunk academy,” naming the “wry curlicues of irony” and “self-consciously offhand microphone intimacy” as projecting “collegial sincerity” and being particular qualifiers of the category.40 Although produced by WBEZ Chicago, the best example of “NPR Voice” comes from This American Life, from which Serial was spun-off. This American Life precedes the podcast form. It was created in 1995 by Ira Glass as a radio show, and its weekly episodes include three segments centered around an individual theme, including both personal anecdotes and occasional explorations into a wider social issue.41 Stories are often told by a first-person narrator, and feature found footage, music, and essays. This American Life has received widespread acclaim, lauded as “intensely literary”42 and as having “built a cult following with its offbeat” tone and style.43 The program has won eight Peabody Awards, and praise from The Guardian exemplifies how acclaim has focused on the program’s form as well as its content: “This is storytelling as a public service, in which the way listeners are told things is treated as of comparable importance as what they are told. The result is enchanting.”44 Inevitably, This American Life

has too been the recipient of criticism. Specific points of contention are the show’s use of personal stories to illustrate vast and complicated social problems, factual errors,45 and reductive or simplistic journalism.46 An entire episode exposing the conditions of Apple factories in China was later retracted for inac-

curacy. The tone has been described as “arrogant,”47 the journalistic front misleading,48 and the overall effect one of “arch knowingness.”49 An article in satirical news organization The Onion, entitled “‘This American Life’ Completes Documentation of Liberal, Upper-Middle-Class Existence,” pokes fun at the program’s myopic focus on “self-congratulatory epiphany” and “the thoughts and tastes of bespectacled cynics prone to neuroses.”50 Serial, which lists Glass as an editorial advisor,51 boasts both the 51

value and the flaws of This American Life and its attendant “NPR voice.” Its deep dive into the trial of Adnan Syed mirrors This American Life’s prioritization of the individual narrative. Host Sarah Koenig, who is a contributor to This American Life, brought with her the first-person style, as well as the penchant for irony and self-deprecation. Serial was reliant on This American Life’s built-in audience and infrastructure. More abstractly, This American Life laid the groundwork for extremely detailed writing, infusing meaning into the smallest of encounters. Thus, a cultural chain of production was created. Serial, inspired by This American Life, aired every week, followed by thinkpieces in reaction both to the program and to each other. The result was a maelstrom of instant reactions and inter-form dialogue threatening to overshadow the podcast itself. 52

Serial told the story of

Adnan Syed, a 34-year old prisoner from Baltimore County, Maryland, convicted at 18 years old of the murder of his ex-girlfriend, Hae Min Lee.52 Syed and Lee, both from first-generation immigrant families, had struck up a romance kept secret from disapproving parents, which ended after Syed’s parents confronted him at a school dance.53 Lee went missing in the winter of 1999, and her body was found three weeks later; an anonymous call to detectives led to the subpoena of Syed’s cell phone records.54 Although no physical evidence existed of Syed at the crime scene, Syed was unable to provide an alibi, and an accomplice, Jay Wilds, ultimately testified against him. Further incriminating Syed were circumstantial evidence about his behavior following the break-up, the cell phone records, a palm print on a map in Lee’s car, and details from Lee’s diary.55 Koenig methodically laid out the cases of the prosecution and the defense, gathering the opinions of outside experts and digging deep into the Syed’s and Lee’s relationship, family lives, and everyday routines. Most distinct about Serial is Koenig’s style. She features raw audio recordings of her many phone conversations with Syed, giving the listener a first-hand experience of their relationship. She details her journalistic methods, providing a meta-commentary on the investi-

gative process, even attempting to imitate the prosecution’s argument of Syed’s actions on the day of the murder in order to test their timeline.56 She brings the listener along as she waffles back-and-forth on Syed’s guilt.

Woodlawn High School was the setting for a high-school drama with social cliques and risky behavior, much like the films of John Hughes. The recordings of detective interviews and the trial brought to mind episodes of Law and Order or C.S.I.

Although featuring complex cell phone records, Serial was a story steeped in age-old themes that referenced numerous other works. The first-generation immigrant families of Syed and Lee formed the backdrop for a tale of forbidden, secret love, in the Shakespearean tradition. Syed and Lee’s class at

Although Koenig ultimately was unable to definitively state Syed’s innocence or guilt, Serial was a huge and unqualified success. It was ranked #1 on iTunes even before it debuted and stayed there for over three months. The fastest podcast to ever reach 5 million downloads on iTunes,57 Serial inspired spin-off

The backlash against Serial did not stem from its ubiquity. To the contrary, critics began to engage with each other as well as with the work, creating a vast eco-system of Serial-related content in both traditional and new media outlets. Three years later, it seems safe to conclude the conflicting critical responses only helped the podcast. With a Peabody award and feet planted firmly in the zeitgeist, Serial will be remembered for its influence and the important questions it raised in multitudes of As the podcast progressed, aesthetic and cultural arenas. though, analyses became more nuanced and critical. Critics pointed In the specific case of Adnan out the questionable ethics of airing a Syed, Serial’s effect is undeniable. podcast before the reporting was fin- A revelation from the Undisclosed ished64 and the refashioning of a bru- spin-off about a disclaimer on the tal murder for entertainment.65 Also AT&T cover sheet from the cell at issue were the reliability of Koe- phone records that helped convict nig’s narration,66 the racial optics of Syed led to a vacation of his convica white woman entering and report- tion in June 2016.71 The tangential ing on a community of minorities,67 nature of this revelation vindicated and the different treatment given by Koenig’s original, meticulous reKoenig to Wilds and Syed.68 Other porting. Books were published by debate centered around the lack of Syed’s cousin72 and former classairtime given to the victim or larger mate,73 and a second season of Serisocial issues69 and the obsessive fan- al portrayed the case of Bowe Bergdom of listeners.70 dahl, who deserted his U.S. Army unit and spent five years in Taliban captivity.74 A spin-off of Serial called S-Town, a Southern Gothic that takes place in a small Alabama town, had downloads of over 10 million in its first four days.75 podcasts in which hosts talked about the program: Serial Spoiler Special,58 Undisclosed: The State versus Adnan Syed,59 Serial Dynasty,60 and The Serial Serial.61 Critically, the reviews were initially extremely positive. The New Yorker hailed it as “the podcast we’ve been waiting for,” and Slate’s reviewer proclaimed it to be “like nothing I’ve heard or watched before.”62 The Telegraph labelled Serial no less than “the greatest podcast ever made.”63

Serial was proof of concept for the longform podcast. Listeners 54

would return week after week, it illustrated, if the story was engaging and the topic intriguing. More specifically, it validated the notion of a true crime longform podcast. Accused, In the Dark, and Crimetown would use the Serial model of weekby-week releases to explore crime stories in-depth.76 Serial would be the first in a wave of new true crime works in all genres of media, beginning in the Fall of 2014. Along with these podcasts and Making a Murderer and The Jinx, these would include: The Night Of, an HBO miniseries; The People vs. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story, an FX miniseries; O.J.: Made in America, a six-part ESPN documentary; Amanda Knox, a Netflix documentary; TV specials about JonBenét Ramsey on CBS, A&E, Investigation Discovery, Lifetime, and Reelz; Unlocking the Truth, on MTV; and Snapped, on Oxygen.77 Obviously, Serial struck a nerve. In an election season defined by a great populist wave, Serial connected with listeners prone to mistrust of institutions. In questioning the police department and prosecution of Baltimore County, Koenig tapped into a frustration with systemic incompetence. Her audience was more inclined to doubt the official word of record, given the eruptions over police brutality, political gridlock, and wrongful convictions.

This same viewpoint would be used to great effect in Making a Murderer. Notable too is the engagement Serial proliferated in its fan base. Not long after it premiered, fans began speculating about the direction of the podcast, Syed’s motives, and the veracity of other witnesses’ accounts. An already detailed piece of art was broken down to a microscopic level, as Internet commentators went to great lengths to discover new information. Ground zero for this engagement was Reddit. The Serial podcast sub-Reddit, which as of April 2017 still has over 52,000 subscribers, was home to Reddit users conjecturing wildly about all aspects of the story. Members of the sub-Reddit came up with new theories blaming tangential people for the murder, made psychiatric diagnoses of Syed, and researched contemporaneous serial killers who could have been responsible.78 Red-

dit users uncovered information before it was featured on the podcast.79 At one point, a user claiming to be Lee’s brother entered the forum to admonish users that Lee was not a character in a fictitious story, but a real person who suffered a horrific death. One user found Jay Wilds’ address and traveled to his home. This would be more alarming if one did not consider the fact that Koenig did the same thing live on the podcast.80 Therein lies the most intriguing aftereffect of the podcast form’s engagement in the true crime genre. Despite Koenig’s ambivalence, Serial has fit seamlessly into the true crime template in inspiring great levels of voyeurism. In interviews, Koenig has disavowed the true crime label and Reddit. In a roundtable interview with David Carr of the New York Times, Koenig was asked about Reddit and claimed, “I didn’t even know what Reddit was before this.”81 She went on to say that the posts had “freaked [her] out a lot” and that she “[didn’t] want to encourage stuff that [she] think[s] is irresponsible.”82 There is perhaps tension here between the highbrow, This American Life milieu and the traditionally lower-class, pulp sensationalism of true crime. What draws somebody to Serial is the same appeal of the O.J. Simpson case or the Newgate Calendars—the chance to look evil in the eye, to wonder about the nature of truth and justice, and to hope that maybe the viewer can 56

be the one to finally crack the case. Unfortunately, the effect of this narrativization, although inevitable given the true crime genre and Internet engagement, is the dehumanization of the victim. Serial was so well-suited to the true crime genre, the podcast form and to Internet engagement via websites because of its emotionality, its subjectivity, and its first-person style. A massive critical and commercial success, it inspired a wave of imitators and reinvigorated the true crime genre. Although the case and the form were new, it used ageold themes and the basic human voyeuristic desire to capture the public’s attention. Ultimately, it is due to Serial’s form and the level of Internet participation that it was able to gain so much popularity and influence, reshaping the terms of engagement and creating a work of great significance to the true crime genre.

“What draws somebody to Serial is the same appeal of the O.J. Simpson case or the Newgate Calendars—the chance to look evil in the eye, to wonder about the nature of truth and justice, and to hope that maybe the viewer can be the one to finally crack the case.”

WORKS CITED A Semiotic Analysis of Internet Coffee Ads

1. “Coffee 1972-2017 | Data | Chart | Calendar | Forecast | News.” Coffee | 1972-2017 | Data | Chart | Calendar | Forecast | News. Accessed November 03, 2016. http://www.tradingeconomics.com/commodity/coffee. 2. Anderson, E. N. (2003). “Caffeine and Culture.” In W. R. Jankowiak & D. Bradburd (Eds.), Drugs, labor, and colonial expansion (pp. 159-176). Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press. 3. Grigg, David. “The Worlds of Tea and Coffee: Patterns of Consumption.” GeoJournal 57, no. 4 (2002): 283-94. doi:10.1023/b:gejo.0000007249.91153.c3. 4. Anderson, “Caffeine and Culture.” 5. Ibid, 165. 6. Marx, Karl, and David McLellan. Grundrisse. London: Macmillan, 1980, 66. 7. Ibid, 65. 8. Odih, Pamela. Advertising and Cultural Politics in Global Times. Ashgate Publishing Group, 2010, 204. 9. McLellan, D.M., J.A. Caldwell, and H.R. Lieberman. “A review of caffeine’s effects on cognitive, physical, and occupational performance.” Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, no. 71 (September 2016), 300. 10. Anderson, “Caffeine and Culture,” 159. 11. McLellan et al. “A review of caffeine’s effects on cognitive, physical, and occupational performance.” 12. Marx and McLellan, Gundrisse, 82. 13. Chambers, Kenneth P. Caffeine and Health Research. New York: Nova Science Publishers, Inc., 2009. 14. Olekalns, Nilss, and Peter Bardsley. “Rational Addiction to Caffeine: An Analysis of Coffee Consumption.” Journal of Political Economy, 104, no. 5 (1996): 1100-104. doi:10.1086/262054. 15. Oswald, Laura R. “The structural semiotics paradigm for marketing research: Theory, methodology, and case analysis.” Semiotica, 2015, no. 205 (2015), doi:10.1515/sem-20150005. 45. 16. Marx and McLellan, Gundrisse. 17. Oswald, “The structural semiotics paradigm for marketing research.” 18. Ibid, 49. 19. Little, Katie. “The biggest coffee markets in the world are…” CNBC. September 29, 2014. Accessed November 03, 2016. http://www.cnbc.com/2014/09/29/the-biggest-coffeemarkets-in-the-world-are.html. 20. Groden, C. “Here Are the 5 Top-selling Coffee Brands.” Fortune. Accessed November 03, 2016. http://fortune. com/2015/09/29/top-coffee-brands-keurig/. 21. Oswald, “The structural semiotics paradigm for marketing research,” 51. 22. Ibid, 19. 23. Grigg, David. “The Worlds of Tea and Coffee: Patterns of Consumption.” Chambers, Caffeine and health research. Images: 1. Untitled. In Healthline. By Annette McDermott. Edited by Debra Rose Wilson, PhD. Accessed November 3, 2017. https://www.healthline.com/ health/is-coffee-a-laxative. 2. Chevanon Photography. Untitled. December 19, 2016. In Pexels. Accessed November 3, 2017. https://www.pexels. com/photo/art-blur-cappuccino-close-up-302899/.

3. Millward, Holly. “Caffeine and health: evidence from Cochrane.” Evidently Cochrane. April 03, 2017. Accessed November 17, 2017. http://www.evidentlycochrane.net/ caffeine-and-health-evidence-from-cochrane/. 4. Coffee Grounds Pictures, Images and Stock Photos.” Coffee Grounds Pictures, Images and Stock Photos - iStock. Accessed November 17, 2017. https://www.istockphoto.com/ photos/coffee-grounds?excludenudity=true&sort=mostpopular&mediatype=photography&phrase=coffee grounds. 5. Bloomfield, Francis. “One cup wonder: How to reuse old coffee grounds.” NaturalNews.com. April 07, 2017. Accessed November 17, 2017. https://naturalnews.com/2017-04-07-20creative-ways-to-use-old-coffee-grounds.html. 6. “Coffee stain png #33672 - Free Icons and PNG Backgrounds.” Freeiconspng.com. Accessed November 17, 2017. http://www.freeiconspng.com/img/33672. 7. Herriott, Michael Graydon Nikole. “Dublin Iced Coffee.” Bon Appetit. May 14, 2014. Accessed November 17, 2017. https://www.bonappetit.com/recipe/dublin-iced-coffee.

The Pure and the Profane

1. Turner Frederick Jackson. “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” The Frontier in American History, Henry Holt and Company, 1921. 2. Eliade Mircea. “Sacred Space and Making the World Sacred.” The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, 48. Harcourt, Brace & World, 1959. 3. Ibid., 29 4. Ibid, 48. 5. Williams Doug. “Pilgrims and the Promised Land: A Genealogy of the Western.” The Western Reader, 98. Limelight Editions, 1998. 6. Ibid., 95. 7. Ibid., 98. 8. Ibid., 106. 9. Ibid., 97. 10. Ibid., 105. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid., 97. 13. Ibid., 105. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., 95. 16. Ibid. 17. Stagecoach. Directed by John Ford. United Artists, 1939. 18. Williams Doug. “Pilgrims and the Promised Land: A Genealogy of the Western.” The Western Reader, 96-7. Limelight Editions, 1998. 19. Ibid., 111. 20. Ibid. Images: 1. Matthew. “Young John Wayne (1939 in “Stagecoach”).” Matthew’s Island of Misfit Toys. December 12, 2013. Accessed November 17, 2017. https://mattsko.wordpress. com/2013/12/12/young-john-wayne-1939-in-stagecoach/. 2. Pratt, Kelle. “Westerns – Outspoken and Freckled.” Outspoken and Freckled. January 24, 2016. Accessed November 17, 2017. https://kelleepratt.com/tag/westerns/. 3. John Wayne, George Bancroft, And Louise Platt In Stagecoach (1939) Picture. Digital image. MovPins. 1939. Accessed November 6, 2017. http://www.movpins.com/ dHQwMDMxOTcx/stagecoach-(1939)/still-263835136.

4. “Militaria.” Pinterest. August 06, 2013. Accessed November 17, 2017. https://www.pinterest.com/ pin/386254105512039614. 5. “-Stagecoach-Cast Still.” Great Western Movies. October 2, 2013. Accessed November 17, 2017. http://thegreatwesternmovies.com/2013/10/02/stagecoach/stagecoach-cast-still/.

Philippe Petit’s Gift

1. Terry Eagleton, Holy terror (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 88. 2. Neil Smith, “Wire-walk film omits 9/11 tragedy,” BBC News, August 02, 2008, accessed November 01, 2017, http:// news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7498364.stm. 3. Eagleton, Holy terror, 83. 4. Eagleton, Holy terror, 10. 5. Man on Wire, dir. James Marsh, prod. Simon Chinn, by Igor Martinovic, Michael Nyman, J. Ralph, and Jinx Godfrey (United States: Magnolia Pictures, 2008). 6. Ruth Stein, For Love of the Father: a psychoanalytic study of religious terrorism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 47. 7. Ibid, 54. 8. Eagleton, Holy terror, 55. 9. Eagleton, Holy terror, 5. 10. Stein, For Love of the Father, 53. 11. Ibid, 57. 12. Ibid,, 45. 13. Stein, For Love of the Father, 46. 14. Eagleton, Holy Terror, 4. 15. Eagleton, Holy Terror, 87. 16. Ibid, 21. 17. Adam Phillips, Terror and Experts (London: Faber, 1997), xi. 18. Stein, For Love of the Father, 55. 19. Ibid, 53. 20. Ibid, 72. 21.Ibid, 53. 22. Eagleton, Holy terror, 9. 23. Ibid, 93. 24. Stein, For Love of the Father, 55. 25. Jürgen Habermas, Jacques Derrida, and Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a time of terror: dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 79. 26. Eagleton, Holy terror, 88. 27. Ibid, 12. 28. Ibid, 87. Images: 1. Zap, Claudine. “”Man on Wire” remembers twin towers.” Yahoo! News. August 15, 2011. Accessed November 16, 2017. https://www.yahoo.com/news/blogs/upshot/man-wireremembers-twin-towers-155014147.html.

Eternal Contradictions

1. Peter Knight, The Kennedy Assassination (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007). 2. J.D. Connor, “An Eternal Flame: The Kennedy Assassination, National Grief, and National Nostalgia,” in The Cambridge Companion to John F. Kennedy, ed. Andrew Hoberek (Cambridge University Press, 2015), 183-4. 3. Ibid., 178-79. 4. Art Simon, Dangerous Knowledge: the JFK Assassination In Art and Film (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), 109. 5. Connor, “An Eternal Flame,” 180. 6. David Lubin, Shooting Kennedy: JFK and the Culture of Images (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 173.

.7. Øyvind Vågnes, Zaprudered: The Kennedy Assassination Film In Visual Culture (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011), 48. 8. “BRUCE CONNER,” in Film Comment, vol. 5, no. 4 (1969): 18. www.jstor.org/stable/43754274 9. Ibid. 10. Vågnes, Zaprudered, 57. 11. Marita Sturken, “Camera Images and National Meanings,” in Tangled Memories: the Vietnam War, the Aids Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 26. 12. “BRUCE CONNER,” Film Comment, 18. 13. Ibid., 20. 14. Vågnes, Zaprudered, 148. 15. “Ant Farm - The Eternal Frame (1976),” UbuWeb Film & Video, web. 16. Heidi G Dawidoff, Between the Frames: Thinking About Movies (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1989), 132. 17. Patricia Mellencamp, High Anxiety: Catastrophe, Scandal, Age and Comedy (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1992), 99. 18. Vågnes, Zaprudered, 62. 19. Ibid., 67. 20. Nancy Spector, Maurizio Cattelan, and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Maurizio Cattelan: All (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications), 2011, 72. 21. Spector, Maurizio Cattelan, 103. 22. Vågnes, Zaprudered, 67. 23. Mellencamp, High Anxiety, 99. 24. Spector, Maurizio Cattelan, 72. 25. “The Making of the Killing Kennedy Trailer | Killing Kennedy,” YouTube, published by National Geographic. 24 Oct. 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyWGbAmzBdA. 26. Ibid. 27. Vågnes, Zaprudered, 138. Images: 1. CBS News. “The Zapruder film: Capturing when the world changed in 26 seconds.” CBS News. November 21, 2016. Accessed November 05, 2017. https://www.cbsnews.com/ news/the-zapruder-film-capturing-when-the-world-changedin-26-seconds/. 2. Zapruder, Abraham. “Frame 150.” Wikipedia. November 22, 1963. Accessed November 5, 2017. 3. Rosenbaum, Ron. “What does the Zapruder Film Really Tell Us?” Smithsonian.com. October 2013. Accessed November 5, 2017.

Serial and True Crime in the 21st Century

1. Lurie, Julia. “In a New Podcast, Producers from “This American Life” Channel “True Detective.”” Mother Jones. Foundation for National Progress, 19 Sept. 2014. 05 Mar. 2017. 2. Mallenbaum, Carly. “The ‘Serial Effect’ Hasn’t Worn off.” USA Today. Gannett Satellite Information Network, 16 Apr. 2015. 05 May 2017. 3. Gorelick, Richard. “’Serial’ Is First-ever Podcast to Win Peabody Award; Creator Sarah Koenig Makes Time’s 100 Most Influential People List [Updated].” Baltimoresun.com. The Baltimore Sun, 21 Apr. 2015. 05 Mar. 2017. 4. Wiltenburg, Joy. “True Crime: The Origins of Modern Sensationalism.” The American Historical Review 109 (2004): 1377-404. 24 Apr. 2017. 5. Cruz, Lenika. “The New True Crime.” The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company, 11 June 2015. 08 Apr. 2017. 6. Rzepka, Charles J., and Lee Horsley, eds. A Companion to Crime Fiction. N.p.: John Wiley & Sons, 2010.

7. Roggenkamp, Karen S.H. “A Front Seat to Lizzie Borden: Julian Ralph, Literary Journalism, and the Construction of Criminal Fact.” American Periodicals 8 (1998): 60-77. 04 Apr. 2017. 8. Murphy, B. The Encyclopedia of Murder and Mystery. New York: Springer, 1999. 9. Plimpton, George. “The Story Behind a Nonfiction Novel.” The New York Times. The New York Times, 16 Jan. 1966. 10. Capote, Truman. In Cold Blood. New York: Random House, 1966. 11. Miller, Laura. “Truman Capote’s Greatest Lie.” Salon. Salon Media Group, 14 Feb. 2014. 12. Stout, David. “Vincent T. Bugliosi, Manson Prosecutor and True-Crime Author, Dies at 80.” The New York Times. The New York Times, 09 June 2015. 13. Moyer, Justin Wm. “The twisted friendship of crime writer Ann Rule and serial killer Ted Bundy.” The Washington Post. WP Company, 28 July 2015. 14. Dunne, Dominick. “Nightmare on Elm Drive.” Vanity Fair. Vanity Fair, Oct. 1990. 15. Casarez, Jean. “The Death of JonBenet: A Case That’s Captivated the Country for 20 Years.” CNN. Cable News Network, 13 Dec. 2016. 16. “The O.J. Verdict.” PBS. Public Broadcasting Service, 04 Oct. 2005. 17. Newton, Jim. “Power Struggle In The Simpson Camp, Sources Say -- Shapiro, Cochran Increasingly Compete For Limelight In Case.” LATimes.com. Los Angeles Times, 9 Sept. 1994. 18. “List of the Evidence in the O.J. Simpson Double-murder Trial.” USA Today. USA Today, 18 Oct. 1996. 19. Meier, Barry. “Simpson Team Taking Aim at DNA Laboratory.” The New York Times. The New York Times, 06 Sept. 1994. 20. Toobin, Jeffrey. “The Danger of the Bloody-Glove Defense.” The New Yorker. The New Yorker, 25 July 1994. 21. Hull, Stephen. “Five Court Cases Which Caused Media Mayhem.” HuffPost UK. The Huffington Post, 29 Nov. 2011. 22. Mathewson, Joe. Law and Ethics for Today’s Journalist. Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2013. 23. Armstrong, Jennifer Keishin. “BBC - Culture - The OJ Case Matters More than You Think.” BBC News. BBC, 17 Feb. 2016. 24. Dean, Michelle. “Jeffrey Toobin’s Book on the OJ Simpson Trial: Worth Revisiting.” The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 19 Feb. 2016. 25. Poniewozik, James. “Two Astonishing Views of O.J. Simpson and His Trial.” The New York Times. The New York Times, 20 June 2016. 26. Corwin, Miles. “Location of Trial Can Be Crucial to Outcome, Experts Say: Court: Simpson Case Is Latest to Show Importance of Jury Pool. Garcetti Didn’t Have to Try It Downtown, Many Insist.” Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles Times, 27 Nov. 1995. 27. Traister, Rebecca. “Marcia Clark Is Redeemed.” New York Magazine- The Cut. New York Magazine, 17 Feb. 2016. 28. Holland, Gale. “Judge Fujisaki Was Able to Keep Trial in Control.” USA Today. USA Today, 05 Feb. 1997. 29. McManus, Jane. “Marcia Clark Explains Domestic Violence Bias in OJ Simpson Trial.” ABC News. ABC News Network, 14 June 2016. 30. Campbell, Duncan. “Sun Still Shines on Bruised OJ.” The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 11 June 1999. 31. Armstrong. “BBC - Culture - The OJ Case Matters More than You Think.” 32. Weinman, Jaime. “Hot Takes and “Problematic Faves”: The Rise of Socially Conscious Criticism.” Vox. Vox, 20 Apr. 2017. 09 May 2017.

33. Schilling, Dave. “How to Write a Think Piece.” Vice. Vice Media, 22 Dec. 2013. 34. Demby, Gene. “Before Diving Into The Raging Flood Of New Beyoncé Thinkpieces, Read This.” NPR. NPR, 25 Apr. 2016. 35. Ciccarelli, Stephanie. “History of Podcasting.” Voices. Voices.com, 15 Oct. 2015. 36. Heffernan, Virginia. “The Podcast as a New Podium.” The New York Times. The New York Times, 22 July 2005. 37. Hammersley, Ben. “Why Online Radio Is Booming.” The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 11 Feb. 2004. 38. Heffernan. “The Podcast as a New Podium.” 39. Wayne, Teddy. “’NPR Voice’ Has Taken Over the Airwaves.” The New York Times. The New York Times, 24 Oct. 2015. 40. Wolcott, James. “So, Like, Why Are We So Obsessed with Podcasts Right Now?” Vanity Fair. Vanity Fair, 08 Jan. 2016. 41.Williamson, Eugenia. “Oh, the Pathos! Presenting… This American Life.” The Baffler 20 (2012): 50-57. 01 Mar. 2017. 42. Corn, David, Paul Roberts, and Ashley Dejean. “Ira Glass: Radio Turn-On.” Mother Jones. Foundation for National Progress, Sept.-Oct. 1998. 43. Ladd, Chris. “A Chicago Radio Hit Moves to New York, and TV.” NYMag.com. New York Magazine, n.d. 44. “In Praise of ... This American Life | Editorial.” The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 14 Mar. 2012. 45. Plumer, Brad. “’This American Life’ Retracts Its Exposé of Apple. But All’s Still Not Well in China.” The Washington Post. WP Company, 16 Mar. 2012. 46. Schmitz, Rob. “An Acclaimed Apple Critic Made up the Details.” Marketplace. American Public Media, 16 Mar. 2012. 47. Franklin, Nancy. “Landscape Artist.” The New Yorker. The New Yorker, 08 May 2017. Web. 48. Heard, Alex. “This American Lie.” New Republic. New Republic, 19 Mar. 2007. 49. Williamson. “Oh, the Pathos! Presenting… This American Life.” 50. “’This American Life’ Completes Documentation Of Liberal, Upper-Middle-Class Existence.” The Onion. The Onion, 20 Apr. 2007. 51. Romano, Nick. “’Serial’ Creators Announce New Podcast.” EW.com. Time Inc, 14 Mar. 2017. 52. Koenig, Sarah. “The Alibi.” Serial. This American Life. 3 Oct. 2014. 53. Koenig, Sarah. “The Breakup.” Serial. This American Life. 3 Oct. 2014. 54. Koenig, Sarah. “Inconsistencies.” Serial. This American Life. 16 Oct. 2014. 55. Koenig, Sarah. “The Case Against Adnan Syed.” Serial. This American Life. 30 Oct. 2014. 56. Koenig, Sarah. “Route Talk.” Serial. This American Life. 23 Oct. 2014. 57. Dredge, Stuart. “Serial Podcast Is an ITunes Record Breaker as It Passes 5m Downloads.” The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 18 Nov. 2014. 58. Haglund, David, Katy Waldman, and Amanda Hess. “Serial Takes a Step Back, and Gets Some Experts Involved. We Discuss the Latest Episode.” Slate Magazine. Slate Media Group, 06 Nov. 2014. 59. Everett, Cristina. “5 Key Findings from ‘Undisclosed’ That ‘Serial’ Missed.” EW.com. Time Inc, 24 Aug. 2015. 60. Dean, Michelle. “Serial, One Year On: Web Sleuths Keep Making Discoveries in Adnan Syed’s Case.” The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 11 Oct. 2015. 61. Eakin, Marah, Laura M. Browning, and Josh Modell. “The Serial Serial.” The A.V. Club. The Onion, Inc., n.d.

62. Mathis-Lilley, Ben. “The New Podcast From This American Life Is Like Nothing I’ve Heard Before.” Slate Magazine. Slate Media Group, 03 Oct. 2014. 63. Richman, Darren. “Why Serial is the Greatest Podcast Ever Made.” The Telegraph. Telegraph Media Group, 14 Nov 2014. 64. Goldstein, Jessica. “The Complicated Ethics Of ‘Serial,’ The Most Popular Podcast Of All Time.” ThinkProgress. ThinkProgress, 20 Nov. 2014. 65. Orr, Deborah. “Was Serial Just Feeding Our Appetite for Stories about Murdered Women? Deborah Orr.” The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 19 Dec. 2014. 66. Friedersdorf, Conor, Adrienne LaFrance, Tanya Basu, and Katie Kilkenny. “Serial Episode 8: A Study in Bias?” The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company, 13 Nov. 2014. 67. Kang, Jay Caspian. “White Reporter Privilege.” The Awl. The Awl Network, 13 Nov. 2014. 68. Smerconish, Michael. “The Pulse: Under the Spell of ‘Serial’.” Philly.com. The Philadelphia Inquirer, 18 Jan. 2015. 69. Lippman, Laura. “Serial: Why I Stopped Listening Long before It Ended.” The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 18 Dec. 2014. 70. LaFrance, Adrienne. “Is It Wrong to Be Hooked on Serial?” The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company, 08 Nov. 2014. 71. Fenton, Justin, and Justin George. “Conviction Vacated, New Trial Granted for Adnan Syed of ‘Serial’.” Baltimoresun.com. The Baltimore Sun, 25 July 2016. 72. Roy, Jessica. “The Book ‘Adnan’s Story’ and What It Tells Us about ‘Serial’.” Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles Times, 04 Aug. 2016. 73. Britto, Brittany. “’Serial’ Alibi Witness Asia McClain Writes Book about Her Side of Story.” Baltimoresun.com. The Baltimore Sun, 12 Apr. 2016. 74. Bradlee, Anna, and Sarah Kolinovsky. “What the ‘Serial’ Podcast Revealed About Ex-Taliban Captive Bowe Bergdahl.” ABC News. ABC News Network, 01 Apr. 2016. 75. Spangler, Todd. “The ‘Serial’ Team’s New Podcast, ‘S-Town,’ Tops 10 Million Downloads in Four Days.” Variety. Penske Media Corporation, 31 Mar. 2017. 76. Stahl, Michael. “Why True Crime and Podcasts Were Made for Each Other.” Rolling Stone. Rolling Stone, 13 Apr. 2017. 77. Jeffries, Stuart. “’We’re All Car-crash Snoopers Now’: The Truth about the TV True-crime Wave.” The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 04 Mar. 2017. 78. Engel, Pamela. “Redditors Are Trying To Solve A Murder That’s At The Center Of The Wildly Popular ‘Serial’ Podcast.” Business Insider. Business Insider, 12 Nov. 2014. 79. Goldenberg, Kira. “Inside the Subreddit Obsessed With Solving the ‘Serial’ Case.” PSmag.com. Pacific Standard, 24 Dec. 2014. 80. Koenig, Sarah. “The Deal with Jay.” Serial. This American Life. 13 Nov. 2014. 81. Dockterman, Eliana. “Serial’s Sarah Koenig Has Mixed Feelings on Reddit.” Time. Time, 06 Feb. 2015. 82. Dockterman. “Serial’s Sarah Koenig Has Mixed Feelings on Reddit.” Images: 1. “Update: Hae Min Lee’s Family Directs New Statement At Serial Fans,” Refinery29, 8 Feb. 2016, http://www.refinery29. com/2016/02/102584/hae-min-lee-family-statement-serial. 2. In Cold Blood, 1967, Heritage Auctions, accessed 15 Nov. 2017, https://movieposters.ha.com/itm/movie-posters/crime/ in-cold-blood-columbia-1967-one-sheet-27-x-41-crime/ a/161321-53250.s#Photo.

3. “O.J. Simpson murder case: ‘Bloody glove’ was key for detectives,” Los Angeles Times, http://beta.latimes.com/ local/lanow/la-me-ln-oj-simpson-murder-case-bloody-glove20140611-story.html. 4. “9 Shocking Pieces of Information That Were Left Out of Making a Murderer,” PopSugar, 30 Sept. 2017, https://www. popsugar.com/entertainment/Netflix-Making-Murderer-Omitted-Evidence-39859597. 5. “Waveform of me saying ‘I love imgur.’” Imgur. Feb. 10, 2013, https://imgur.com/gallery/UKoTUt4. 6. “Serial Podcast and Adnan Seyad.” Roberta’s Blog, Feb. 11, 2016. http://robertaw.blogspot.com/2016/02/serial-podcast-and-adnan-syed.html 7. Kahn, Saliqua. “Adnan Syed case remanded to Circuit Court.” WBAL TV. May 18, 2015. http://www.wbaltv.com/ article/adnan-syed-case-remanded-to-circuit-court/7093667 8. Zurwaick, David In The Baltimore Sun. https://www. google.com/search?q=serial +podcast&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiwkvzukq7XAhXIQyYKHauMArgQ_AUICygC&biw=1169&bih=735#imgrc=yGAP0u2f-u7RwM: January 8 2015. Accessed November 6, 2017. 9. Hildred, Jonathan, Thrice Champions, 2014. http://www. thricechampions.co.uk/podcast/. 10. “Serial.” Stitcher, https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/ this-american-life/serial.

Interested in Learning More?

Image: 1. “Movable Type.” Like Ordinary Life. 2013. http://likeordinarylife.com/post/59764096061/movable-type.

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