Creator's Statement
Videographic criticism challenges the primacy of words as the appropriate medium for carrying an argument, a critique it shares with comics scholar-artists like Sousanis (2015) and McCloud (1994). The videographic epigraph, from the Middlebury Workshop Videographic Exercises, encourages creators to experiment at exactly this point where words, images, and sound meet. And yet a common challenge for epigraph creators is overcoming our learned tendency to privilege words, automatically using them to decipher the images and sounds rather than 'reading' the two in concert. This video work suggests one answer to the challenge: rather than sourcing words from critical academic texts, I use the less authoritative words of fan-written fiction and tags as well as popular song lyrics.
The televisual work that provides the images—and arguably inspired the words—is Amazon Prime’s 2019 mini-series adaptation of the Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett novel Good Omens. The adaptation kicked off a new explosion of fan interest in the Good Omens world, particularly around main characters Aziraphale, an angel, and Crowley, a demon (destinationtoast, 2019). In this video I create a character study of Aziraphale (Michael Sheen) by collaging together his canonical depiction in the mini series with quotations from fan fiction featuring the character and Jaymes Young’s song 'I’ll Be Good'. As Morimoto explains in a roundtable on remix and videographic criticism, in fan vidding 'song lyrics contribute to meaning in vids, [but] the effectiveness of a vid depends on a kind of symbiosis between images and lyrics (or music), in which one augments (rather than directs) the other' (Creekmur et al., 2017, p. 165). My goal in this video is precisely this augmentation, to allow depictions of Aziraphale to multiply, working against the idea that any could be definitive, while still demonstrating the way all of these interpretations coalesce around the question at Aziraphale’s core: What does it mean to do good in a complex world? Young’s song provides this thematic throughline while the images and text on the screen both present refractions of Aziraphale’s character, carried to an extreme when listing all of the fan-written tags on the Archive of Our Own fan archive that begin with 'Aziraphale is'.
Following Morimoto (2016), this remix is intended to trouble the demarcation between fan video, a grassroots and popular form, and videographic criticism, an academic form, of commenting on media through media. This blurring of boundaries begins immediately in the title, as I use both the 'academic power colon', common to many conference paper and journal article titles, and parentheses, a fannish convention for doing essentially the same thing: giving a more concrete explanation of what a work intends to do after a more lyrical beginning phrase. I continue this approach through highlighting long unedited sequences in which Aziraphale inhabits the body of Madame Tracy, an older woman who might serve as a stand-in for many viewers and academics alike. This bodily possession gives identification a very real, physical meaning while the words on the screen offer more distanced refractions of the same, as each fan author takes on the character of Aziraphale in different ways.
Works Cited
Creekmur, C., Kohnen, M., McIntosh, J., Morimoto, L., Morrissey, K., Scott, S., & Stein, L. 2017. ROUNDTABLE: Remix and Videographic Criticism. Cinema Journal, 56(4), 159–184.
destinationtoast. 2019. The second coming of the Good Omens fandom [Tumblr]. Toasty Stats (July). https://destinationtoast.tumblr.com/post/186381761679/toastystats-the-se...
McCloud, S. 1994. Understanding comics: [The invisible art]. HarperPerennial.
Morimoto, L. 2016. HANNIBAL: A Fanvid. [In]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies, 3(4). http://mediacommons.org/intransition/2016/10/06/hannibal-fanvid
Sousanis, N. 2015. Unflattening. Harvard University Press.
Biography
Samantha Close is an Assistant Professor of Media and Popular Culture at DePaul University. She earned her PhD in Communication at the University of Southern California. Her work focuses on the intersections between digital media, popular culture, and creative work, with a particular emphasis on fans.
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