the iafor journal of media communication & film Volume 5 – Issue 1 – Summer 2018 Editor: Celia Lam ISSN: 2187-0667 iafor The IAFOR Journal of Media, Communication & Film Volume 5 – Issue I IAFOR Publications IAFOR Journal of Media, Communication & Film Editor Celia Lam, University of Nottingham Ningbo China, China Associate Editor James Rowlins, Singapore University of Technology and Design, Singapore Assistant Editor Anna Krivoruchko, University of Southern California, USA Advisory Editor Jecheol Park, National University of Singapore, Singapore Published by The International Academic Forum (IAFOR), Japan Executive Editor: Joseph Haldane Editorial assistance: Nick Potts IAFOR Publications Sakae 1-16-26 – 201, Naka Ward, Aichi, Japan 460-0008 IAFOR Journal of Media, Communication & Film Volume 5 – Issue 1 – Summer 2018 Published August 14, 2018 IAFOR Publications © Copyright 2018 ISSN: 2187-0667 ijmcf.iafor.org Cover: Duangphorn Wiriya Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/@ph_an_tom IAFOR Journal of Media, Communication & Film Volume 5 – Issue 1 – Summer 2018 Edited by Celia Lam Table of Contents Notes on Contributors 1 Editor’s Introduction 3 Celia Lam Documenting the (Un)official Kevin Carter Narrative: Encyclopedism, 5 Irrealism, and Intimization in House of Leaves Jason S. Polley Reality of Trap: Trap Music and its Emancipatory Potential 23 Jernej Kaluža Whose Story is This? The Non-existence of the External 43 Gaze in David Lynch’s Films Asli Favaro The Chronicle of Yerevan Days: Spatial Representation 59 and Authentic Realism Shmavon Azatyan Metaconsumption, Convergence and Stylization in 75 the “Real” Teens of Laguna Beach Myles Ethan Lascity Sexualization of the Journalism Profession: TV Representation 91 of Female Journalists’ Intellect, Labor, and Bodies Ivana Cvetkovic Kimberly R. Oostman IAFOR Journal of Media, Communication & Film Volume 5 – Issue 1 – Summer 2018 Notes on Contributors Shmavon Azatyan is a doctoral candidate in Humanities and Social Sciences, Department of English and Creative Arts, at La Trobe University, in Melbourne, Australia. His dissertation is practice-led, consisting of a screenplay and an exegesis. In his screenplay, The Station of Fossil Man, he explores the impact of cultural imperative on an individual in post-Soviet Armenia, while in his exegesis, he self-reflexively investigates the presence of narrator and makes a case of authentic realism as his writing style in his screenplay. His research focuses on narrative (fiction and screenplay) theory, realism as a writing convention, spatial narrative in film, and Danish cinema. Ivana Cvetkovic is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the University of New Mexico, USA, with research and teaching interests situated at the intersection of journalism, technology and culture. She primarily focuses on news discourses and the ways new technology affects journalistic norms and routines. Her work has been published in several internationally recognized journals, including Journal of Communication Inquiry and Newspaper Research Journal. Her research interests have been impacted by her long-time career in journalism and rapid changes in the news industry. Dr Aslı Favaro is assistant professor at the Radio-TV-Cinema Department, Faculty of Communications, at Ege University in Turkey, İzmir. Her research includes dystopian narratives, postmodern narratives, technoculture in cinema, and auteur cinema. She is also the co-translator of Baudrillard's work Le Système des Objets and she is the co-author of the upcoming book Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema – Technocultural Dreams and Nightmares (Altıkırkbeş Yayınları, 2018, Turkey). Dr Jernej Kaluža obtained a PhD in Philosophy (The Concept of Habit in Gilles Deleuze’s Philosophy) in May 2017 at the Department of Philosophy at the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana. His professional research interests are mainly focused on three fields: 1) History of Philosophy (Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Bergson, etc.), 2) Media, journalism and pop-culture, 3) Contemporary theory in general. During his PhD study, he was employed as a researcher at the Institute for Humanities Nova Revija in Ljubljana (2013-2016). Besides that, he has been an active journalist for almost 10 years. In the last two years (2016-2018), he was employed as the editor-in-chief of the Slovenian alternative radio station – Radio Študent. Dr Myles Ethan Lascity obtained a PhD from Drexel University (Communication, Culture & Media), and is an assistant professor and director of the Fashion Media program in the Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX, United States. He was formerly an assistant professor of communication at Chestnut Hill College, Philadelphia, PA, United States. His research interests include popular culture, fashion, and communication, and has been published in various journals, including Fashion, Style and Popular Culture, Fashion, Film and Consumption, and Fashion Practice. Kimberly R. Oostman is a PhD student in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the University of New Mexico. Her research interests include crisis communication, social media and regret, female portrayals in mass media communication, and interdisciplinary work with social and computer science projects. 1 IAFOR Journal of Media, Communication & Film Volume 5 – Issue 1 – Summer 2018 Dr Jason S Polley is associate professor in the Department of English Language & Literature at Hong Kong Baptist University, where he teaches literary journalism, post-structuralism, and graphic novels. His research interests also include Indian English fiction, contemporary literature, and Hong Kong Studies. He has published articles on maternal property in Banville, media manipulation in Watchmen, gender and race in The Greenlanders, slum ideology in District 9, and Hong Kong Identity in Wong Kar Wai. His two creative nonfiction books in verse are Refrain (Proverse, 2010) and Cemetery Miss You (Proverse, 2011). He is co-editor of the essay volume Cultural Conflict in Hong Kong: Angles on a Coherent Imaginary (Palgrave, 2018). 2 IAFOR Journal of Media, Communication & Film Volume 5 – Issue 1 – Summer 2018 Editor’s Introduction The IAFOR Journal of Media, Communication and Film (IJMCF) is associated with IAFOR’s MediAsia, FilmAsia and EuroMedia annual conferences. IJMCF is committed to publishing peer-reviewed scholarship that explores the relationship between society, film and media – including new and digital media, as well as to giving a voice to scholars whose work explores hitherto unexamined aspects of contemporary media and visual culture. This fifth issue of the IAFOR Journal of Media, Communication and Film features contributions from multiple disciplines and nations from around the globe, and reflects upon the concept of reality. From Plato and Aristotle to Bazin and Baudrillard, reality and realism have been topics of reflection, debate, articulation and re-articulation in (among other fields) philosophy, media, communication, and film. Photographers and documentary filmmakers, theorists, and writers have pondered the indexical connections between image and mechanical reproduction; the construction of subjective reality; and the attempt to capture reality. In contemporary journalism “fake news” is a topic of (occasionally politicized) discussion. While television genres capitalise on a “reality” that is often more akin to fiction than fact. The articles in this issue present ruminations on the notion of reality in television, film, music, and literature. The issue starts its exploration of reality with two articles that reflect upon the intersection between notions of reality and the production and consumption of texts. “Documenting the (Un)official Kevin Carter Narrative: Encyclopedism, Irrealism, and Intimization in House of Leaves” explores the ways in which the novel House of Leaves finds stability within interconnections of the (unstable and) numerous paratexts of the novel. Adopting critical theory and documentary theory, the article posits the reader’s relationship with the text to be one that transcends boundaries between fiction and fact, and one that is grounded in belief. In a context when realism is a construct (as documentary theory argues), belief becomes central to the coherence of the text as well as anchoring it between official-unofficial and fiction-nonfiction binaries. In “Reality of Trap: Trap Music and its Emancipatory Potential”, trap music which originated in the South of America becomes a lens through which to reflect upon the “reality” of late capitalism. Adopting the perspectives of Foucault, Mbembe, Balibar, Marx, Moretti, and Deleuze and Guattari, the article argues for the emancipatory potential of identification with trap music, through which Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of “becoming-minoritarian” can find expression. The next two articles explore the relationship between fiction film and reality. “Whose Story is This? The Non-existence of The External Gaze in David Lynch’s Films” attempts to locate the relative viewing position of the audience of Lynch’s films. It argues that, in a Lynchian universe, attempts to seek truth and reality through an external gaze is futile as the construction of Lynch’s films highlight and reveal the artificial nature of material reality. Exploring the view of the audience thus exposes the lack of boundaries between fictional and material reality, and the subjectivity of the experience of reality. Conversely, the material world is considered