teleidoplex

You are the mystery woman

Which Ultimate Beautiful Woman are You?
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I intend to not do many of these, but I really liked the artwork they used on this site. Since I found my new favorite artist (Stephanie Pui-Mui Lam) because of an online quiz, I'm happy to spread good artwork through quizzes.

I spent last night searching the web for commercials. On Monday I'm doing a group presentation for my tourism class on the representations of tourists and tourist encounters in the media. Others in the group are working on things like the National Lampoon movies, but I was interested in representations that didn't consciously *mean* to be representations. Parody is a great way to control and dismiss the things we fear through stereotype. However, unconscious representations, if closely examined, have the potential to show that fear stripped of the control of parody.

So, I'm going to be showing two SUV commercials and commenting on them. My premise is that many of the tourism media narratives that we see are about fear -- fear of the other, fear of liminal spaces, fear of our own transformation. A lot of tourism analysis focuses on the tourist as a pilgrim on a sacred journey. The tourist seeks out the other (the exotic, the foreign, etc.) in order to be educated and enlightened. This enlightenment leads to a transformation; The person comes back fundamentally changed. Thus, the tourism space is seen as a kind of liminal space.

Liminal spaces are in-between spaces where identities (mostly class, but also age and gender) are broken down and reconstituted. This idea was originally developed by Victor Turner in his examinations of ritual. One is prepared for and then enters a ritual liminal space. While in this space, one's identity is mutable. When the ritual is done, one leaves the liminal space and is reborn into society with a new identity. Think of baptisms, or weddings. At a wedding, both the bride and groom are sequestered, with a bunch of prohibitions about how they are to prepare to enter the liminal space of the ritual. When they stand at the alter, their identities are fluid. They aren't really single, but they're not quite married. At the end of the ceremony, the pastor has to reintroduce them to the community with their new identities.

But liminal spaces are dangerous. One enters them expecting to be changed in a certain way. When you go to your wedding, you expect to come out married on the other side. As Buffy fans have seen with the narrative of Xander and Anya, however, this isn't always the case. They both came out the other side changed, but not in a way either of them expected. Liminal spaces are dangerous because the outcome of the change may not be what was expected or desired. My confusion on this is whether this is necessarily bad? Liminal spaces can only be dangerous if you *fear* your own transformation.

That fear gets constructed through narrative. We know that liminal spaces have expected outcomes (marriage), but we also know that there are other potential outcomes (being left at the alter). The irony of this is that I wonder how many of us have actually seen this happen. It's not quite an urban legend, but it has some of the same qualities. And yet, most people weren't all that surprised when Xander left Anya at the alter, because how many times have we seen and heard stories about weddings gone wrong? How boring and uninteresting would stories about weddings gone right be?

So, back to tourism. Tourists have certain desires and expectations before they go on a trip. They seek the "other" to be enlightened and transformed. But do they ever actually become transformed in the manner of those expectations? My argument is that most of the time they do not. They are afraid of their own transformation because they are aware that there are alternate possibilities that are not as desireable. This fear is in large part created through narratives of tourism that focus on the abject.

A century ago, when film was just starting, images of the sublime constituted a large part of what was being filmed. Films about Sunsets, the Grand Canyon and trains barrelling through the landscape were popular. These films didn't rely upon a narrative structure. The Sublime is something outside of us that is both awe-inspiring and awful. Narrative tames and lessens sublimity. It fixes it into a specific context and use. Later, films began to use plot and narrative structure. Since narrative (or at least Western narrative) is structured around conflict, the sublime was abandoned in favor of the abject (our relationship with the abject being one of conflict. It is part of us but repulsive to us, and thus on a very visceral level we are conflicted).

So, from this we get media narratives about tourism experiences that focus on fear and the abject. These narratives construct touristic expectations along the lines of "something is going to go wrong, you are going to be invaded and transformed by an unnatural other, the only way to survive this is to resist it". Thus, the transformations that most often occur in tourism are ones of conquest and survival, rather than enlightenment and understanding.

There are a variety of examples of this that the other students are going to talk about. My interest is to present two alternative representations, one focusing on the sublime and the other on the abject.

The Sublime example is the Volvo SUV ad that appeared in theaters this christmas. In it, a (white, middle-class) family of four are driving around an empty, unpeopled landscape in their SUV. The son sees what might be the Loch Ness Monster (or might just be his over-active imagination, inspired by the book he's reading), a dark shape cruising through the waters below. Then the daughter wakes up to spy through the trees what might have been a unicorn. She cranes her neck to get a better glimpse, to no avail. Then the parents see a young Elvis driving a cadillac -- or is it just an impersonator? The tag-line for the ad is "To the list of things you'd always hoped you'd see, add one more -- an SUV from Volvo"

With no particular narrative structure, and images that have us and the characters questioning our perceptions, this is a good example of the sublime transformative touristic experience. Sublimity (and thus transformation) occurs in the strangest places, at the most unexpected times, and can be missed if you're not paying attention (I won't get into the class/ethnic/gender issues of this commercial regarding who *gets* to be transformed in this way).

Counter to this is the recent backwoods SUV ad from Saturn that focuses on the abject. A group of (white, middle-class) guys are going out to the supposedly unpopulated forest primeval to camp. As these intrepid explorers set up their camping equipment in the growing dusk, they hear the opening strains from Dueling Banjos. For our culture this group of signs (the backwoods, dusk, a group of urban male visitors, and Dueling Banjos) is a powerful signifier for anal rape. Many people (like myself) who have never even seen the 1972 film Deliverance still recognize this. The men in the commercial certainly do, and they rapidly shove their camping gear into the SUV and tear out the the wilderness. The tagline for this commercial is "Get in, get away".

While anal rape is not usually the abject presented in tourist narratives, it has a freudian type of poetry. It is representative of the greater touristic fear presented, that we will be unnaturally (and unwillingly) invaded and transformed by the "other". It is this fear of unnaturalness, invasiveness and unwilling transformation that color most media narratives of tourism, and that effect the tourists' expectations and experiences.

Hmm...well, that's my line of thought. I need to polish it up for the presentation.

Kitsune Zen -- Delayed gratification is paying for your pleasure with pain...like peeing after holding it for too long.