Chapter Four: STORY and IMAGE

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Transcript

Substance Versus Spectacle In Cinema<br>

Style, Boredom, And Narrative Payoff<br>

The Poetics Of Minimal Dialogue<br>

Montage As Nonverbal Storytelling<br>

The Cost Of Overexposure<br>

Innocence, Representation, And Kids<br>

Context, Pornography, And Adolescence<br>

Media Power, History, And Propaganda<br>

Speed, Noise, And The Loss Of Silence<br>

Consumerism’s Loop And National Myths<br>

Why Images Cut Deeper Than Words

SPEAKER_00 0:45

Chapter 4. Image and Story. A picture is worth a thousand words. We've all heard it said. We live in an image-saturated society. I cannot disagree. From the moment the quick editing of MTV began influencing commercials, news broadcasts, and magazine shows, it's been a steady arc toward utter bombardment, sensory overload. In 2022, if there are not at least ten potential distractions on my computer screen or device, pop-up ads, clickbait, notifications, and tickers, I feel certain I've mistakenly wandered through a portal and returned to a simpler time. One with no notifications vying for my attention, complete with audio haptics. A time conspicuously devoid of African princes with money to launder, Russian brides or horny housewives waiting for a click of my mouse. After being advertised to one too many times at a gas pump, I've heard myself swear the moment I'm president, unsolicited advertising will be the first thing to go. Most would agree that the incessant barrage of sensory stimuli has created a sort of cultural ADD. There are countless studies, indeed, entire books, on the addictive nature of social media likes and the rush of swiping left or swiping right. As an artist who values stillness as the source of true inspiration, I have never fallen victim to the peptide addictions of technology or social media. Better put, I am able to tune out the noise when I choose to. In fact, there came a time when I made a conscious choice to limit my intake of imagery. I was already exposed to visual art on a daily basis in my teaching. I had no desire to overdose like Lucy in the chocolate factory. I wanted imagery to maintain its power in my life. Fortunately, I am in little danger of becoming immune. The majority of content swirling around in popular culture and the Twitter sphere is vacuous, devoid of artistic substance. It's been created for the Almighty Dollar, not in response to inspiration from the universe itself. For that reason, the content lacks resonance and fails to steal my attention. When the card of product is placed before the horse of inspiration, work is categorically derivative, reductive. Powerful imagery will never lose its resonance for me because the very thing that infuses poetry or poignance, the very inspiration that affirms life, that elevates or transports, is missing in action most of the time. In its place, the imposter of titillation dominates social media and pop culture. The chances are slim I'll be moved or enlightened by insta-models in yoga pants, reaching for the lowest shelf in the refrigerator, or by shirtless men bench pressing cats and cooking naked. About fifteen years ago, I recall seeing one of the Matrix sequels in the theater and leaving the theater exhausted. Or maybe it was the latest installment of the Lord of the Rings franchise, who remembers? I tend to get my money's worth no matter what I'm seeing, even if it means going home and whistling the production values and cinematography. Even so, I'd found myself more and more resentful of the big budget effects-driven films with nothing to say at which studios were throwing money. Oh, big budget studio pictures had always been mainstream commercial ventures, and Indies had always been low budget affairs, requiring a rich uncle or global foreign investors. But things had reached an all-time high, or low as the case may be. Oh, there had been a brief moment in the early 90s, around the time of Like Water for Chocolate and Life is Beautiful, when distributors caught on that there was a market for foreign films and independent arthouse cinema. This trend led to Disney releasing Studio Ghibli and Miyazaki films that were anything but commercial. The trend quickly passed, however, and in the new millennium, the studios have gone back to throwing money at films with a built-in core audience. Franchises usually with a toy attached. That or they rehash old intellectual properties with name recognition and nostalgia. It wasn't enough to exploit every last Marvel superhero and its distant cousin, along with every young adult novel ever put out by the Big Six. What we ended up with were CG Smurfs, Scooby-Doo, Garfield, a shot-for-shot remake of Psycho, and The Nail in the Coffin, a film that made no attempt whatsoever to hide its unabashed consumerist slant. The Lego movie. What's next, I thought when it came out. The spirograph trilogy? The Lincoln Log feature? Then came the prying open of the Disney Vault with nothing less than a profit-driven crowbar. The trend of remaking every last Disney animated classic as a live-action film began with the realization that those little girls who grew up singing along with Beauty and the Beast were now grown-up little girls with pocketbooks. Sitting in that theater, watching the Matrix sequel or who knows which installation of Lord of the Rings, a resentment dawned on me for the first time. Here I was, unable to rub two pennies together to get a film made, and millions of dollars had been spent on a single set that exploded before my very eyes after thirty seconds of screen time. Oh, there was room for all of it I knew. All types of content. But did every film need to be effects driven? Weren't there decent character-driven scripts floating around Hollywood? Simple stories without exploding helicopters or CG dinosaurs? Before I found myself ruminating about walking ten miles to school in this snow with blocks of soap strapped to my feet, and liking it, I wrangled my resentment and put it in check. I ended up enjoying the film as is my way. But the very next day, I attended a performance of Chinese shadow puppets at the Bodhi Street bookstore in West Hollywood with the guy I was dating. No frills, no effects, no mocap or digital compositing. The simple performance rocked my world, more deeply and profoundly than the previous night's hyper sophisticated flak fest. I was moved viscerally and profoundly, beyond words. As I said, I rarely dislike a film I've chosen to see. There are exceptions, of course. In my twenties I walked out of nine and a half weeks, not because I was shocked or offended, but because I'd made the grave error of downing a twelve pack earlier in the evening. Did I mention I was in my twenties? But it wasn't just the buzz going to waste that compelled me to leave. Even at the tender age of twenty something. I was bored by the watered down, middle America safe depiction of SNM. If I had only known what was to come years later, the yet more vanilla flavored version of SM portrayed in fifty shades of gray. The second time I walked out of a film, the decision did not involve alcohol or inebriation, only boredom. Let me preface this anecdote by saying I do like Quentin Tarantino in small doses, and found Pulp Fiction in particular genius. That said, I find his work hit and miss. I enjoyed the Grindhouse series. I am impressed by any director who can mimic subgenres and emulate the trappings of time-specific movements in film history. But style alone does not sustain me if I don't sense an undercurrent of thematic content evolving. I have a knee-jerk resistance to style for style's sake, and tend to check out if nothing is being said. During Kill Bill, after twenty minutes of watching blood spurt from severed limbs to splatter the walls of a Tokyo restaurant, I'd had enough and began making out mental shopping lists. I left the theater not because I was offended by the violence, I was simply bored. I knew Uma Thurman's character, the bride, had five vipers to kill total. At ninety minutes in, we were only up to revenge killing number two. I was simply doing the math. My error I later learned was in failing to realize the story was split into three volumes. There were two subsequent films devoted to offering the full list of vipers. My fellow theater patrons and I had been nearing the finish line of the first volume. I just didn't know it. The third and only other time I was tempted to walk out of a movie occurred in the late nineties. I'd gone to see a small gay themed Kiwi film, so obscure I only knew about it from having seen its trailer at the Lemmley Theater before another obscure film. All I knew is that in the trailer, the lead actor, all the lead actors, seemed matter-of-factly gay, non-stereotypical in the least. I made sure to catch the film for that reason alone. Still I found myself bored, unable to relate to the image-conscious, superficial characters and their histrionic attempts to be cool. Coolness held no currency in my world, nor did image. I thrived on authenticity, sincerity, and earnestness. For some reason I hung in there. The film turned out to be one of my favorites of all time. The joke was on me. The tone of the film was superficial and too cool for its own good. Style over substance. Because the characters were superficial, as they found themselves ultimately dissatisfied with the scant rewards of the shallow party circuit. The visual style and performances took on more depth and gravity. The filmmaker knew exactly what he was doing. I'd developed affinity for the characters despite myself. I was invested. That experience may have led to my penchant for films in which one grows to love very faulted characters. The series Six Feet Under employed a similar conceit. Unlike the despicable characters in Seinfeld, who are lovable but have zero redeeming qualities, its characters revealed glimpses of humanity under layers of pain and dysfunction. The other films I like best are those in which there is very little dialogue. Ninety-minute films like Beau Trevaille and I'm Not Scared were based on screenplays 35 or 40 pages in length tops. A conventional wisdom dictates a minute per page when it comes to length. The aforementioned films were light on dialogue, relying on cinematography to lend ambiance and texture, to capture poetic imagery as a means of transporting audiences. They skillfully suspended a moment, engaging the senses with scoring and visual splendor, not hyper-stylized visual effects, but the power of unadulterated images from life. These films use juxtaposition, gesture, facial expression, anything but the spoken word to touch audiences. The way I put it, when those annoying words are extracted from the equation, image cuts to the core, circumventing cognition altogether. When preparing week four of the lecture series that became this book, I put together a short video montage to set the tone. I'd been launching each installment with a bit of visual stimulation to inspire and get the dendrites of my global Zoom audience wiggling. Week four's topic was the same as this chapter's image and story, and it was geared toward not wordsmiths but visual storytellers, many of them in the field of animation. The clips for the montage were all chosen strategically, light on dialogue or free of it altogether, nonlinear and rather abstract. In the absence of chit-chat, the sequences I strung together happened to be stylistically lush, but this was simply a byproduct. As was the fact the clips came from some of my favorite films of all time. I took the opportunity to do something I rarely do in my teaching, impose my tastes. The montage featured clips from Pink Floyd's The Wall, the animated sequences by Gerald Scarf, Lars von Trieger's Dancer in the Dark, Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth and The Shape of Water, Neil Gaiman and Dave McKeon's Mirror Mask, Janae and Carot's City of Lost Children, Terry Gilliam's Brazil, and a surreal but charming animated short titled The Lost Thing. Together they accomplished my intention: transporting the group to a nonlinear space beyond words or cognition, a place where poetry reigns and surreal absurd juxtapositions force us to surrender our expectations. Simply put, the visceral impact of these images, when lumped together, engaged our right brain sensibilities and brought the ineffable to the forefront in defiance of language or linear thought. The effect was powerful, elemental, ineffable. So moved am I by those films that cut to the core without the crutch of dialogue, they've become powerful influences in my own films. So passionate am I about the capacity of image alone to circumvent intellect and resonate, I find myself equally impassioned to preserve that power. What is the risk in sustaining an image-saturated society that shows no sign of relenting? What is the casualty of the incessant bombardment? Surely we must become habituated to powerful images. Modernism during the first half of the 20th century saw jaw-dropping travel photography brought to the mainstream by journalistic and fine art photographers, never before seen images of Ubangi's with strange exotic beauty practices, or breathtaking clifftop views of Machu Picchu or even panoramic shots of Petr Seek taken camelback. In 2022, a 30-second scroll on Instagram yields dozens of influencers exploiting the very same sacred sites with smartphones and a selfie stick. The sheer availability of images has hit an all-time high. The trend this week, among influencers, is to return to the supposedly detoxed ruins of Chernobyl and photograph oneself against the dilapidated buildings. The ethical dilemma should be obvious. Anyone who is not conflicted may be part of the problem and not the solution. Still, I'll say it, the troubled history of Chernobyl, and all the moral implications that come with it, are reduced to a photo op. At the risk of waxing moralistic, a familiar phrase comes to mind. Is nothing sacred anymore? You can't unsee that shit. It should be clear by now indelible images are more potent than words in shaping our worldviews. Let's examine the potential reasons for this. Our limbic systems evolved emotions as a warning system for environmental threats. So adept are we at interpreting perceptual data that the requisite physiological response is generated unconsciously. Long after we evolved the emotional guidance system that regulates our physiology autonomically, the prefrontal cortex evolved as a sort of metaconsciousness to temper unexamined Pavlovian responses with deliberation. But the fact remains our limbic systems rely on raw perceptual data as cues or signals. The processing of sights, sounds, sense, and sensations is instantaneous. It's no surprise that the color red, for example, elicits a generalized response not unlike that of blood. The coating bypasses the cognition of the prefrontal cortex, affecting us on a cellular level. Let me explain. The nervous system just happens to have become the sophisticated Pony Express for signaling in higher vertebrates. But long before it evolved, and our brains with it, the same signaling was firmly in place. Single-celled protozoa formed communities that relayed signals both locally and non-locally. Once more complex organisms evolved, long before the sophisticated nervous systems and brains on which we humans pride ourselves came along, environmental messaging traveled via energy channels, permeating gates and receptors in the cell wall. The implication here is that there's something inherently primal about imagery, independent of cognition, something deep-rooted in our DNA, and germane to our survival. Dualism has made sure the metacognition that recognizes our role in all of this is thought of as the ghost in the machine, a product of our biology. But more and more, even Newtonian empiricists are embracing the notion that biological expression is a reflection of consciousness. In other words, that the evolutionary state of consciousness is reflected in its biological expression. On the chance you, the reader, see the above as a tangent, let me assure you it is. It's also a very empowering way to look at things. Image can be used to profound visceral effect by those who master its alchemical potency, or by those artists and storytellers who choose never to examine it, but intuitively speak the language of the soul. Image cuts to the core of the human experience, of consciousness itself. We rely on it to transform our collective noosphere through storytelling. This all seems lofty and admirable if the goal is ushering humanity toward infinite potential. But what about those images that trigger our fight or flight response? Those that flood our bodies with cortisol and adrenaline, leading to inflammation and therefore disease, those that trigger our PTSD or carry over into chronic stress and anxiety. And on the macrocosmic level, what about those images that feed our cultural addiction to violence? Those that desensitize, habituate, or indirectly create climates permissive of exploitation, rape culture, or even war. The introduction to this chapter was devoted to our immersion in what's been called an image-saturated society. In modern culture, sheer availability ensures an inescapable barrage of images on a daily basis. Inspiring and disheartening, benign and toxic, cautionary or redemptive. We've all had the experience of wishing we hadn't seen something, wanting to erase an image from our mind's eye. It could be the image of our parents having a romp in the bedroom, after living a perfectly content life convinced they engaged in such behavior on only rare occasion, and even then strictly for procreation. The image we'd kill or die to delete from memory might be that of a boil, shanker, or lesion we did not ask to see but glimpsed due to the inability to scroll fast enough to escape it during a Google search. Or the image might represent something much darker. I can't help but recall the moment I succumbed to morbid curiosity and Googled the video of ISIS beheading a journalist. In mere seconds there it was, emblazoning itself on my psyche. And there I was, hating myself for succumbing. For thirteen weeks sometime back, I worked as an in-house independent contractor on the video game Silent Hill. The grotesque characters I designed were meant for a PSP version of the game to accompany the release of the franchise's first motion picture. The Silent Hill brand was gothic horror, haunting, disturbing, and fraught with visceral dread. The assignment represented a nice change of pace for me, while being comfortably in my wheelhouse. I sunk my teeth in. It was admittedly a dark thirteen weeks, characterized by internet reference image searches of which I am not proud. I found myself Googling circus freaks, anomalies, burn victims, and birth defects. The final day of the gig, I called my brother, an IT engineer, and asked him to walk me through the process of clearing my browser's cache. Though the work I produced was damning enough, I had no desire to leave anything incriminating behind. A search history that includes the litomide baby is precisely what puts a person on an FBI watch list. It took me much longer to wipe my psyche clean of the images than it did my browser's cache. Regarding hard to unsee images, there have been other low points. Haven't we all found ourselves deep down the endless rabbit hole known as fetish or niche porn? Rule thirty four of the internet decrees that if it exists, they're spawn for it. I've found this sentiment to be true. The good old internet yields everything from stump sex to bestiality, and everything in between. I'm no prude personally, but there is a conversation to be had regarding the effects of exposure. Access to images outside our own personal experience can augment our awareness, our paradigms, thought forms, and worldviews. But just as often, the byproduct of exposure is the erosion of innocence. There is a total exacted knowing what humans are capable of, or having one's eyes pried wide open to what the world is capable of. Einstein is quoted as saying, the most important question facing humanity is Is the universe a friendly place? The Bible refers to the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Partaking of its fruits opened Adam's and Eve's eyes, shattering innocence. Whether or not it exists in the first place is up for debate. What remains true is we have a stake in the idea of innocence. We're invested in it. There's a very good reason endless colloquialisms like ignorance is bliss lament its passage. One of the most enduring story templates in literature is that of loss of innocence, or preservation slash returning to innocence while coming of age. One romantic notion society proffers is that childhood is characterized by innocence, and children themselves are the gatekeepers. Many parents seek to protect their children from disillusionment, shielding their eyes and ears from the world. Though I have no children of my own, I do have twenty two, count them twenty-two nieces and nephews. Suffice it to say that we are Italian, read no concept of birth control, and are fertile to boot. You look at one of my sisters wrong and they're pregnant. Point being, my instinct has never been to protect children from the world. Instead, I find myself adopting the mindset that children are resilient, yet another cherished colloquialism. As an author of middle grade and young adult fiction, I've had to navigate a milieu populated by often conservative literary editors, agents, and publishers. I've been forced to examine and assess my stance on all things coming of age. In my experience, the more conservative set tend to misplace their concerns. A colleague of mine, Illustrator Marla Frazy, once relayed the absurd irony of an exchange she once had with her publisher's rather narrow-minded art director. The woman red flagged Marla's inclusion of a bottle of wine on the dining table of her picture book's protagonist. Keep in mind, the character was a groundhog. The art director's keen eyes arrowed in on the offending wine bottle, while completely ignoring the skewed message of the manuscript itself. In a glorification of vendetta, the groundhog was tied up, preventing him from seeing his shadow and therefore stalling the onset of spring. In my own work, I seek to challenge children, to ignite their imaginations and inspire them to see beyond familiar constructs. Far from breaking them in young to a cruel, cruel world, the prospect of opening hearts and minds is independent of any penchant for idealism, realism, or pessimism. When I say the controversy is misplaced, that boundaries of appropriateness are arbitrary, I have good reason to bristle. As a gay man, I cannot count the times I've had to gently educate or otherwise hold the hand of the skittish. My office mate at Disney Tom was not only conservative but downright backwards, loved him to death, but we were polar opposites. He once relayed a story about bringing his kids to Disneyland without realizing it was unofficial gay night in the park. He resented being forced to have uncomfortable conversations with his children when they spotted two men holding hands or otherwise expressing affection to one another. I gently pointed out that the cart was effectively before the horse, or the chicken before the egg, or some variation thereof. I pointed out that simply exposing children to the fact sands judgment that gay people exist in the world should not be uncomfortable. Minus the institutionalized judgment, hatred, and marginalization that is the currency of socialization, children are clean slates. The conversation to be had, and the earlier the better, sounds like this. Some men love women, some men love men, some women love women. The end. The idea is no more controversial than anything else in this crazy, chaotic world about which children are eagerly learning. If anything, Tom's reticence betrayed his own internalized homophobia more than anything it could have said about children or the world. Furthermore, if we slough off uncomfortable conversations to do with diversity and inclusion, who are we delegating them to? The next generation? The one after that? The 2022 film Bros beautifully expresses the mechanics of social reform by suggesting that we plant positive images of our LGBTQ citizens in children's fertile minds before they learn to bully if they're straight or hate themselves if they're gay. Nail effectively hit on head. Positive representation of the LGBTQ community is but one example of how media images can contribute to tolerance, representation, and inclusion. During the first season of MTV's The Real World, Americans got to witness for the first time the daily life of a respectable, living, breathing gay man, in their own homes, no less. Pedro, the man in question, received countless letters from gay adolescents in cornfields in Iowa, thanking him for his visibility. So starved were they to see themselves represented, not to mention validated. The prospect had been akin to looking for intelligent life on another planet before his appearance. Modern culture is in the process of reframing its narratives, the tropes, stereotypes, and images that constitute social conditioning. Inculcation is inevitable. Ideally, however, the images to which a child is exposed can be cruelty-free, reflecting the interconnectivity and oneness that evolution demands at this moment. Once social conditioning is fixed, it's more difficult to reverse hardwired beliefs. This goes for ideas and models we deem both positive or negative. Unsavory ideas, those that threaten to erode innocence, as touched on earlier, require context. For example, consider that society is in the process of ushering out slut shaming, the favorite tool of patriarchy to oppress women. The exoneration of sexuality in general has experienced an arc, arguably from the sexual revolution of the 1960s through today. The AIDS crisis curbed enthusiasm for a few decades. Otherwise, it's been a steady arc. The shame that Judeo-Christian culture has ascribed sexual impulses has proven largely destructive. Removing fire and brimstone from the already challenging life of an adolescent going through puberty seems to be the order of the day. Does this mean that any and all forms of sexual expression contribute to the mental health of an adolescent? It could be argued that a parent's job is to provide wisdom and context as children navigate the world and encounter life's challenges. The sheer availability of pornography on the internet is of great concern to many parents, and for good reason. Again, I am not prudish when it comes to sex. I actively champion the excision of shame from adolescence and the discovery of one's sexuality. Puberty can be excruciating, even with proper support. But there is an acute danger to being exposed to images without a category for them. A child is more likely to adopt and emulate misogyny, for example, to view the opposite sex as something to be objectified, if exposed to such images for which there is not sufficient context. In other words, only once one has experienced sex as a healthy expression of intimacy within a well-founded relationship can one afford to introduce fetish into the equation. Do not mistake this stance for moralism. A traditionally, quote, healthy romantic relationship need not be the goal. But when it is, the trite and true mechanics of human emotional dynamics, however evolving, tend to retain certain prerequisites. There are countless documentaries about the effects of easy access porn on developing adolescents, both boys and girls. Many lament their early exposure and are hyper-aware of the effects. If only the addictive aspects and the need to constantly up the ante for stimulation and gratification. One's own emotional imprint, crafted by every event and experience since birth, is indelible. But so are the images to which we're exposed, even when they're vicarious. Exposure to images outside our immediate experience can be mind-expanding. But when those images skew toward base drives and impulses, the less savory aspects of the human condition, they can erode innocence, leading to a sense of futility. It's mind-boggling to consider the power of media imagery in forging tolerance for diversity, or conversely, marginalization. The media plays no small part in all kinds of social reform. In 2022, the phenomenon of normalization inherent in primetime programming is weaponized in debates over issues like gender identity politics and sexual orientation. The power of the media to shape culture, to reflect life and to dictate it, is immeasurable. And what is media in the end? Word and image. If I asked you to consider the role of image in culture and its evolution over the course of human history, the prospect would be overwhelming. Any inventory, from the first cave painting to religious iconography and sacred geometry, through medieval illuminated manuscripts and Renaissance traditions, to the narrative and conceptual territory of modernism, would fall short. Something would surely be left out. Don't regional folk art traditions rely heavily on imagery? What about countless theatrical forms like Vietnamese shadow puppetry or kabuki theater? Opera and ballet and musical theater, don't they all incorporate visual communication? Not to mention the fine art world, museums and galleries, as well as graphic design and print illustration. What about fine art photography and journalistic photography? The list is endless, especially when augmented by advertising and propaganda, billboards and magazine ads and marquee posters. They're everywhere. Add to that the advent of the internet and social media. Muddying the waters, we're now bombarded with digital imagery, pop-up ads and tickers in social media on our laptops, desktop computers, and devices. We're assaulted with images in every aspect of daily life, right down to being advertised to of all places, at the gas pump. Seemingly there is no escape. The fast pace of the imagery is another conversation altogether. It started, arguably, with the quick editing MTV introduced to pop culture. It did not go unnoticed at the time, sparking minor controversy. The older generation saw the flashy motion graphics and quick editing of MTV as a grim turn of events, countering to short attention spans and the lack of impulse control that defined the younger generation. The pace of the editing only accelerated in subsequent decades, and sound design was soon to follow. Every gap of broadcast time was filled, from pregnant pauses to handoffs and inner stitchels. God forbid a millisecond of dead airtime make it past editors into Americans' homes. In 2022, although we have not resorted to topless news broadcasts like certain Eastern Bloc countries, American networks have little faith viewers will have the attention span to remain tuned in without being overstimulated. In a true sign of the times, 2002 brought a phenomenon we should have seen coming. Children the world over suffered photosensitivity seizures when tuned into the popular cartoon Pokemon. Though largely dismissed as a product of mass hysteria, the kind that fueled the Salem Witch trials and the McMartin preschool trial, a good percentage of the children in question did, in fact, suffer very real seizures. Granted, those prone to photosensitivity-induced seizures tend to be diagnosed epileptics. Still, the phenomenon has not gone away. In 2021, a marketing logo promoting London, England as host for the 2012 Olympics was yanked for causing seizures. When it comes to sensory overload, we're all frogs in boiling water. It's hard to see just how profoundly times have changed without the benefit of longevity as perspective. A sucker for nostalgia, I occasionally take the plunge down YouTube rabbit holes and watch old clips from the Dick Cavit show, Sonny and Scherer, or Carol Burnett. Some of them are as vivid as ever and feel like yesterday to me. Others are clearly straight out of the Jurassic. In all cases, I am blown away by the degree to which discourse has changed during my time on the planet. The very manner in which people speak, their cadence and mannerisms all have evolved. The guileless innocence with regard to the television medium itself is refreshing. The lack of savvy of both broadcasters and studio audiences reveals just how much has been learned about entertainment value and how it translates monetarily. It could be said that Dick Cavot's audiences lack the sophistication typical of today's audiences. Warm-up comedians, laugh tracks, and crude applause signs were in their infancy. Even so, it could be said that the staunch authenticity of audiences, their refusal to laugh if something landed flat, is arguably more sophisticated than the slick dog and pony shows of today. The Ronus speaks volumes. Most germane to the conversation about sensory overstimulation. These old television clips all have one thing in common innocence. Viewed through a modern lens, the slow pace of the editing, the dead time between witty quips, and the lack of scoring are nothing short of refreshing. Watching them in 2022 for me amounts to more than pure nostalgia. Inevitably, I find myself basking in the moments of silence. As a culture, we are starved for silence. Neil Postman's 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, called out pop culture's preoccupation with entertainment as diversion, pacification, mind-numbing anesthesia. The book was inspired by a talk Postman gave at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1984, in which he was participating in a panel discussion. The panel, among other things, contrasted Aldous Huxley's sci-fi novel, Brave New World, with George Orwell's 1984. In the introduction to his book, Postman posited that contemporary society was better caricatured in Aldus Huxley's Brave New World, whose public was oppressed by their addiction to amusement, than by Orwell's work, in which they were oppressed by state control. My entire life I've heard the theory that government uses consumerism to control the masses, that materialism is an innate survivalist drive that, when subverted, creates a society in which most live beyond their means. The best way to keep a populace oppressed. Though I have no tinfoil hat in my closet, I cannot disagree. But who is the villain with the twisty mustache pulling the puppet strings? Big brother? Does any government really have the power to control the will of the people? Or are folks doing it to themselves? It's entirely possible that human nature is simply being exploited by the powers that be. In any case, it's a climate of permissiveness that opens the floodgates to consumerism as ball and chain. Under the guise of free speech and a free market economy, unmitigated advertising thrives. Hand in hand with a government-endorsed credit system, a vicious cycle is created in which most remain trapped in debt. The lifestyle is further fueled by societal pressure to keep up with the Joneses, and the phenomenon known as FOMO, fear of missing out. It seems clear that no one entity is to blame for our collective consumerist prison. If there is a common player in it all, it's human nature. Not one of us can escape it. But once aware of the vicious cycle, we can choose whether or not to perpetuate it. We can decide for ourselves whether we wish to contribute, enable, or engage in a system so at odds with personal liberty. What role does image play in the current state of affairs, in the vicious cycle of consumerism? In the same way an individual is a product of his or her own personal narratives, a society is the collective product of its history, of the stories it tells about itself. As Americans, we define our own narrative. We're not just a democracy, we're heroic defenders of it. Just look at World War II. We're founded on individualism and personal liberty, on separation of church and state. We are the land of opportunity, a melting pot. We conveniently erase any empirical roots that led to exploitation in favor of images like Native Americans sharing turkey and corn on the cob with colonists. We're rugged individualists, chiseled by determination. The westward movement cemented that image of ourselves, just as the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl defined us as overcomers. Throughout the Westward movement, Americans veiled capitalist greed by telling more palatable stories like Manifest Destiny. In the idealistic 50s, our image of ourselves included nothing less than a white picket fence and 1.5 children. The American Dream promised opportunity, a shiny wagon in the driveway, and well-dressed, well-behaved children with bright futures ahead of them. Magazine illustrations for You Name the Product were no different than real estate billboards in their depictions of this promise. Illustrators like Liondecker and Norman Rockwell mastered the squeaky, clean, well-quift image of family to which so many aspired. For that matter, Walt Disney carried the fantasy further with a brand of idealism that would become synonymous with America's promise. Cigarette smoking became all the rage largely due to its glamorization in cinema. The history of relatively valueless diamonds as a romantic ideal can be traced to similar roots. Diamonds, with their bloody history, cemented themselves for repetition alone as the go-to for engagement rings and wedding bands both. Thanks, Marilyn. Though Valentine's Day has long been associated with romantic love, the images proffered in advertising and the media put heart-shaped conversation candies, chocolates, and red roses on the fast track. A little idealism never hurt anyone. The pervasive conformity of the 1950s aside, I have no problem with imagining the best version of ourselves, individually or collectively. Personally, I do not disparage idealism, as long as it's balanced with truth-telling. Whatever your feelings about the cultural narratives we weave, whatever line you draw between art and propaganda, one thing should be clear images play an undeniable role in the narratives a society adopts. A picture, as it turns out, is indeed worth a thousand words. In the above-cited highlights of American history, image played no small role. Uncle Sam posters appeared as early as the War of 1812. To pull us out of the Great Depression, Roosevelt's economy stimulating New Deal programs like the WPA, Works Progress Administration, Promised Hope. They relied heavily on constructivist propaganda posters, launting idealism and beauty, no different than the Nazi propaganda images of the same time period. Don't say a word. Word and image are first cousins. Both speak to the soul, but in very different ways. In previous chapters, we've crystallized how story is integral to our evolution. It's the means by which our moral realm evolves, as crucial to collective survival as that of our biology. Mechanistically speaking, highly emotional experiences are mapped on our value systems or worldviews for survival, wiring us for metaphor. Metaphor uses symbology to illustrate concepts. In the case of story's role in human history, the concepts imparted usually serve altruism by bonding the tribe and forging affinity through the shared experience of the human condition. Or they impart the life lessons we call wisdom that serve our proliferation in an equally profound way. Story teaches us to navigate life, or put in metaphysical terms, story teaches consciousness to navigate its biological expression in the physical realm. We've speculated that pre-language, man's reverie was dominated by imagery. Without words to serve as conceptual representations of percepts, the images in our mind's eye approximated them. In this way, the absence of a conceptual narrator has many implications. Experience was arguably nonlinear and more intuitive. Language, by definition, is a form of cognition. It evolved as the means to express ideas to other members of the tribe. Words strung together with some version of subject and predicate relied on symbology to convey an idea, however abstract or concrete. Words became symbols for percepts, things we can see, hear, taste, touch, or smell, and perhaps more sophisticated, they evolved to represent abstract concepts that were even further removed from, but based in experience. However, long before oral tradition became written language, image evolved as another means of expression, another way of representing life experience. The world's oldest known cave painting, believed by archaeologists to have been created 45,000 years ago in Liung Tadong Cave, Indonesia, is a life-size depiction of a wild pig. In the tableau, the beast seems to be watching a fight or social interaction between two other pigs of the same species, though the narrative scene is not as well preserved as the first pig. Two handprints levitate over its hindquarters, the kind of negative impression found at other cave drawing sites, created by spitting paint through a straw with human hands blocking the pigment. The rock painting found in Indonesia predates previous contenders for the earliest cave painting on record, those found in France and Spain. One of the most compelling aspects of the tableau at Ling de Tong is that it's both narrative and conceptual. That is, without speculating about the motive for expressing, communicating, or documenting it, the scene depicted clearly draws on observation. The element of the human hand, however, could be described as purely decorative. Or highly conceptual in its symbolism of a human presence, an observer. We could not know if the tradition of graphically symbolizing man's existence by immortalizing the human hand, present in early cave paintings the world over, was simply a cool trick someone discovered that caught on, or a conscious act of representation employed for express purpose. As is so often the case with iconography, myth, and archetype, the fact that the practice appears in isolated cultures who had no contact with one another points to some kind of evolutionary significance. As with all art, the meaning is in the eye of the beholder. The images are either nothing more than a cool trick to pass time and impress the women of the tribe, or a conscious act of communication with a clear intent. One thing is clear the variety of hand impressions in countless paintings in various regions points to the collaborative aspect of the often ambitious projects. Whether the impetus or a byproduct, the communal aspect of art served to bond the tribe from day one. The advent of language, its first appearance in human history, is unclear. Our species is estimated to be about 200,000 years old. Human language is often considered to be at least 100,000 years old. In these artifacts, cave drawings, we can see evidence of the origins of Homo sapiens as symbol-oriented beings. There is speculation among archaeologists and anthropologists that there was a link between spoken language and image making due to the acoustic nature of the caves. More intriguing, geometric shapes appear in the earliest cave renderings and artifacts, a form of iconography that would later evolve into sacred geometry. In my economy, the appearance of geometry in the earliest cave paintings and drawings speaks to images originating not as representations from observation, but from within, from the conceptual realm. Symbol, from Oxford Dictionary, a mark or character used as a conventional representation of an object, function, or process. For example, the letter or letters, standing for a chemical element or a character in musical notation. For example, the symbol R in figure five represents a gene which is ineffective. 2. A thing that represents or stands for something else, especially a material object representing something abstract. Using these definitions, it should be clear that words, in and of themselves, are symbolic representations of concepts or percepts. As such, they are one step removed from actual experience. Images, by contrast, are more directly linked to experience as they bypass cognition. Decoding the symbology of language is a cognitive process by definition. No matter how fluent one is in a given language, consider that by bypassing cognition, the perception of images more instinctual, more intuitive. Remember our example of the rustling bush and how immediately the chemical fight or flight response is induced for survival. A nearly instantaneous judgment is made that the stimulus qualifies as a potential threat to survival. We call this heightened physiological state an emotion. When we indulge story, our limbic systems cannot distinguish between real life and the suggestions made by narrative. If the narrative is conveyed with image rather than word, it has greater potential to be mapped as a highly emotional experience. Such is the visceral impact of image. Though words often indirectly conjure mental images. There is a very real basis to the old adage an image is worth a thousand words.