Ontology, Aesthetics, and Cartoon Alienation

Georgia State University ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University Film, Media & Theatre Theses School of Film, Media & Theatre Summer 7-31-2018 Animating Social Pathology: Ontology, Aesthetics, and Cartoon Alienation Wolfgang Boehm Georgia State University Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/fmt_theses Recommended Citation Boehm, Wolfgang, "Animating Social Pathology: Ontology, Aesthetics, and Cartoon Alienation." Thesis, Georgia State University, 2018. https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/fmt_theses/2 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the School of Film, Media & Theatre at ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. It has been accepted for inclusion in Film, Media & Theatre Theses by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Animating Social Pathology: Ontology, Aesthetics, and Cartoon Alienation by Wolfgang Boehm Under the Direction of Professor Greg Smith ABSTRACT This thesis grounds an unstable ontology in animation’s industrial history and its plasmatic aesthetics, in-so-doing I find animation to be a site of rendering visible a particular con- frontation with an inability to properly rationalize, ossify, or otherwise delimit traditionally held boundaries of motility. Because of this inability, animation is privileged as a form to rethink our interactions with media technology, leading to utopian thought and bizarre, pathological behavior. I follow the ontological trend through animation studies, using Pixar’s WALL-E as a guide. I explore animation as an afterimage of social pathology, which stands in contrast to the more lu- dic thought of a figure such as Sergei Eisenstein, using Black Mirror’s “The Waldo Moment.” I look to two Cartoon Network shows as examples of potential alternatives to both the utopian and pathological of the preceding chapters. INDEX WORDS: Animation, Aesthetics, Ontology, Cartoons, Utopia, Technology, Film studies, Media studies, Walter Benjamin, Television. Animating Social Pathology: Ontology, Aesthetics, and Cartoon Alienation by Wolfgang Boehm A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in the College of the Arts Georgia State University 2018 Copyright by Wolfgang Boehm 2018 Animating Social Pathology: Ontology, Aesthetics, and Cartoon Alienation by Wolfgang Boehm Committee Chair: Greg Smith Committee: Jennifer Barker Angelo Restivo Electronic Version Approved: Office of Academic Assistance College of the Arts Georgia State University May, 2018 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I could not have written this without the support, advice, and help of the Film, Media & Theatre faculty and staff. Also, of course, my friends and family. Thank you! TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................................. v TABLE OF CONTENTS ................................................................................................ vi LIST OF FIGURES ........................................................................................................ vii 1 INTRODUCTION........................................................................................................ 1 2 BLURRED ONTOLOGY ........................................................................................... 9 3 CARTOON PATHOLOGY, ANIMATED ALIENATION ................................... 26 4 DEATH AND THE ANIMATING APPARATUS .................................................. 58 5 GENDER, RACE, AND PLASMATIC UTOPIA ................................................... 82 6 CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................ 102 ENDNOTES................................................................................................................... 106 LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1 ............................................................................................................................. 16 Figure 2 ............................................................................................................................. 30 Figure 3 ............................................................................................................................. 62 Figure 4 ............................................................................................................................. 76 Figure 5 ............................................................................................................................. 79 Figure 6 ............................................................................................................................. 86 Figure 7 ............................................................................................................................. 86 1 1 INTRODUCTION When Sergei Eisenstein first described the early work of Walt Disney, he wrote that the animator provides spectators “a momentary, imaginary, comical liberation from the timelock mechanism of American life. A five minute ‘break’ for the psyche, but during which the viewer himself remains chained to the winch of the machine.”1 With this sentence, Eisenstein character- izes a problematic in animation studies that persists in the present day. Can a product of such a rigorous, industrialized practice contain liberatory potentials? When stated broadly, this issue echoes questions regarding the relationship between the economic base and cultural superstruc- ture and the self-undermining logic of capitalism. In this thesis, I hope to respond to these ten- sions not from an industrial or historical analysis, but from an ontological and aesthetic one. This requires tracing the ironic relationships between this industrial practice and animation’s puzzling ontology. Animation studies is a body of theory that revolves around various paradoxical or op- posing ontological categories: animation and automation, mechanism and animism, or, perhaps most importantly for this project: “the motion of life” and “the life of motion”2 described by Alan Cholodenko. These ontological conundrums inform animation’s aesthetic practices and thus, by my utilization of Walter Benjamin’s work, its political dimensions. I use Over the Gar- den Wall (2014), The Lego Movie (2014), and WALL-E (2008), as well as select episodes from the television programs Adventure Time (2010-) and Black Mirror (2011-) to highlight iterations of how these ontological and aesthetic qualities give rise to utopian orientations towards technology’s role in our social and political lives. These texts likewise highlight the tension between this utopian register and the peculiar way social pathology is rendered as pathological behavior in cartoon animation. I demonstrate how these texts act to underscore the role of animated motion 2 in our orientations toward technology, the desire to enter and lose oneself in animated space and hopes of a future where technology and nature have beneficially merged. I find I need to briefly explain, perhaps justify, my method for the present project. A reader will note a reluctance to limit myself to a particular type of text—I cross the television and cinema barrier, the SVOD and cable network divide, and I even, on a project involving the ontology of animation, include live-action in the form of Black Mirror. In my analysis I similarly shift between aesthetic concerns, allegorical readings, and comments on industrial practice. A critic might call this approach a scattered one, but in the spirit of animation I prefer to describe it as a mutable one—an approach that, like the animated image, seeks to cross various boundaries and defy certain categorical assumptions. Second, I feel the need to justify my use of the term ‘utopian.’ Utopian cartoon theory does not refer to an ability by which animation can produce or initiate a utopia. Rather, it refers to a specific strand in animation studies that celebrates the plasmatic, morphing, category-defying potentials of the medium. It is perhaps best expressed by Ei- senstein when he writes if “Chaplin is the ‘Paradise Lost’ of today” then Disney’s shorts are “paradise regained.”3 Cartoons might indeed be a homeopathic remedy to the social unrest pro- duced by industrial modernity, but for Eisenstein these shorts do not serve the exploiters, they are “anti-ideological” in their brevity and aloofness. I find Eisenstein’s ideas form a trend in animation studies, which I explore in depth in the ontology chapter, of theorists expanding on the chaotic, disorderly, utopian rebellion present in animation and cartoons. The theory of animation that emerges from Walter Benjamin’s writings on Mickey Mouse is much more ambiguous than the one presented by Eisenstein. Miriam Hansen writes of the mouse’s role in Benjamin’s overall project: “the image of the frantic mouse is brought to a standstill at the crossroads between fascism and the possibility of its prevention.” This potential 3 for prevention Benjamin describes as a “psychic immunization” against the “mass psychosis” of fascism. By highlighting the “repressed pathologies of technological modernity” characters like Mickey Mouse or Charlie Chaplin can perhaps diffuse the psychosis through collective laughter.4 Mickey and the Silly Symphonies were not explicitly praised by Benjamin, however the theorist saw some homeopathic potential—not the traditional Marxian opiate shot that allows the worker to continue work, but a potential remedy to the

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