On communal trauma

I don't know how many people who will read this might be aware of my educational and research history, so I'm going to give a little bit of background before I start. I did an undergraduate degree in Film Studies and a master degree in Filmmaking. In both my degrees, one of the main points of focus for me has been a struggle between what is depicted on screen and reality, especially when it comes to depictions of a person's inner life. One of the points that has always set me apart from my fellow students is that I was just a few years older than most of them. This meant that while a lot of our cultural memories were the same or similar (at least, when it came to international events), there were large events in the world that impacted me deeper or differently than my classmates because I can more clearly remember them. One of these events is 9/11. This event indirectly has led me to a lot of what became my main research topic in my university dissertations, namely the depiction of trauma in (animated) film. As such, I would like to explore the idea of communal trauma in this weird time of mass illness and uncertainty.

Ideas around communal trauma are not often discussed in how we think about the world. While there are definitely part of history that are by definition traumatic and that effect a lot of people, such as wars and natural disasters, these are usually seen as things that happen to other people (especially in the western world). The Second World War was traumatic for the soldiers, for the people being prosecuted, for the grieving. But, it is not seen by our contemporary society as a trauma that is communal. The horror of the experience does not seem to translate into the idea that everyone alive has been touched by the disaster and has thus been traumatised to a larger or smaller degree. (At this point I think I should make it clear that communal trauma is not something that 'brings people together' by default. Devisions will remain, differences in ideals will not be eradicated simply because of a shared trauma.) The idea of how to handle trauma will not be applied to a whole society. There is no group therapy session for a community hit by a disaster.

Part of my research into trauma also went into the interplay between personal and public mourning. This of course is a very interesting topic in its own right, but there is a strong link to trauma that needs to be discussed. One of the main parts of research within the UK on this topic is related to the death of Princess Diana. This is both a public trauma and a personal one. Public for the whole of the UK, personal for her friends and family. The show of public mourning that happened after her death can be seen as a public display of communal trauma, and there has been no therapy for anyone who was a part of that communal display. The private trauma of her friends and especially her (royal) family was on public display for the world to see. This lack of privacy has led me to the question about trauma and grief that has kept me most preoccupied of all. Who has 'ownership' over trauma? Who is allowed to tell the story of a trauma?

The idea of ownership of a the story of someone's life comes into play here as well. This is something I consider a lot because no trauma happens in a vacuum. Everyone has other humans (or animals) they are connected to. If someone's trauma is connected to another person (which it almost always is), how much right does the other person have to stop you from telling the story? Or does the person who is traumatised have full ownership of that story and are they allowed to use it in any way that helps them? (Basically, if you have lost a family member in a traumatic way, how much of that can be a public story you tell if other family members of that person are also still alive?) I don't think there is a clear answer to all of these questions. If one was to look at ethics and moral philosophy you could possibly find some sort of answer which will be contradicted by another theory. Maybe, if western society had a more open way of talking about trauma and grief, this would be less of an issue. I want to talk about the effects of trauma on people, but every time I bring it up (especially when stating I want to do a PhD in it), people get worried about me. 

And now we are living through a pandemic with more people dying than most communities can imagine. But most of us just see the numbers without realising that attached to every one of those numbers is at least 1 and often many more people who will have to grieve and carry that trauma with them for years to come. We are now a society where trauma has become more widespread than ever. And we are still not talking about it.

On seeing myself on screen

Iris in the mountains as seen from behind during a vacation in France in 2011

Over the past month I have seen myself on screen more than I have in recent memory. This has everything to do with re-starting my #TinyAdventures journey by video blogging my day, but also because I am currently (finally) editing old family footage that I've been carrying with me for the better part of 4 years. The whole working from home video conferencing thing is also still happening. The old saying about the camera adding 10 pounds seems to be holding true. I am seeing myself from a different perspective and sometimes it makes me think that I need to lose weight to look good on screen. Of course, my goal has never been to be on screen, but rather behind it creating new things. However, as I don't really have access to anyone else at the moment (and I tend to feel awkward asking people to act), I am a character in my own work more than ever. Anyway, the thing I have been thinking about so much is the whole 'looking big' on screen. It is so easy to become self-critical when seeing yourself moving and walking and talking on screen. It is so easy to find all your flaws. But, to me it led to a contemplation of both optics (as in, camera lenses) and just generally the type of people who have made it their job to be on screen.

Equipment

A lot of how people look on screen can be brought back to the equipment they use. And with that I basically mean everything apart from the camera itself. It's the lenses and the lights that make you look good. This is why taking a good selfie on your phone is partly an art form in and of itself. Very few people will use external lenses when taking a selfie. More use external lighting, but that is also rare. And even the light you use needs to be right. Most fluorescent lighting has a tendency to flicker at a frequency that can be picked up by a camera (depending on a frame rate). LED or just old fashioned tungsten lighting doesn't have that issue, but can be more difficult to work with (tungsten especially) due to the space it takes up. The direction of the light influences how you look too. If you're only lit from above or from the side, sharp shadows will form. The lighting in a normal house is not designed to make you look good, it designed so you are able to do things without bumping into anything. The same can be said about camera lenses to a certain extend. The lens on your phone (unless you've got one of those multiple lenses in the back affairs) is there to capture things as they are. However, 'as they are' is effected greatly be the distance of the subject from the camera (phone) in question. (As someone with bad eyesight, the shifting of visibility and the distortion that can happen depending on the distance of the lens is something I'm intimately familiar with.) Using the right lens can make all the difference in how a person looks on screen. A wide angle lens will make a person close to the camera look extremely distorted and far wider than they actually are. It's hard to find a lens that completely accurately captures what we as humans see in a moment. This is why there are so many different types of lenses available for cameras. It should also be noted that cameras usually only capture a 2D representation of a 3D object (once again, there are exceptions). It flattens  everything it captures into one layer. Only the shadow and light can add depth to the image. This is why using the right lens and the right light can make you look more 'normal' on screen. Of course, we are inundated with visual representations of humans every day that have been made using external lighting and specialist lenses, and we have started to see this as 'normal' instead of the exception. But it is the exception.

Personal Appearance

The actors, presenters and even the reality stars we see on screen look so different from real-life that it is sometimes difficult to remember that, although they are real people, they are not 'normal' people. They are people who have shaped themselves to be on screen, to be aware of the '10 pounds' rule, to look as flawless as possible. We, the 'normal' people, probably have not built our lives around any of that. I know how to look okay on screen, but I will not put in the hours of work that professional screen personalities do. I can't afford to most of the time. I can't afford a personal trainer and dietician and make-up artist and wardrobe. You probably can't either. So I look 'normal' when I'm on screen. Maybe I wear slightly nicer clothes than I would otherwise do, but for the most part I do not change myself. Even the professional YouTube personalities and Instagram influencers work on their screen presence more than you probably realise. So what I am trying to get at is that even in spaces like YouTube or Instagram or TikTok, 'normal' is subjective. Being widely accessible does not actually mean that you get to see people under normal circumstances. What is being broadcast on most video and image based channels is highly curated content created to give a specific image of a person. As someone who tries to do the same, it would be hypocritical of me to say that that is wrong. But as people keep repeating, what you see online is not the real world. The online version of me is far more organised that the version of me I am in my personal life. I am a lot better at talking to  camera than I am talking to an actual person, most of the time. I will look shorter in real-life compared to how I look in videos, simply because the videos are shot from my eye level. There is so much that I have control over when it comes to my image online that I cannot control if you see me in the real world. That is an important thing to remember. The person who appears in a photo or video that appears on their own social media channel has a huge amount of control over that image before it is released to the public. That control is partly physical appearance, partly editing and a whole load of being able to make a choice in what people see. To be able to make those choices is a powerful tool that should be wielded with skill and is often invisible to the audience. I try to be open about who I am in my presence online, but I also know that I use a certain part of my personality to appeal to people to gain a certain amount of approval which I would not seek in real-life. What you see is not completely what you get, but it is close to it.

In the End

What I am trying to get at is that seeing a 'normal' person on screen is rare and not usually actually the case. I look bigger on camera than I do in real-life. So do many other people, partly through the mechanisms of the camera itself, but partly also because of the way they present themselves in front of a camera. A screen personality is always just a part of a full person, even if you are trying to capture the true essence of who they are. Nobody can be fully understood through the screen, if anybody can be fully understood at all. 

On the Oscars and where they go wrong

To say the Academy award (commonly know as the Oscars) are important in the US film industry is an understatement. This is what the whole film season seems to be about. Almost ever serious drama film gets pegged as 'potential Oscar nominee' and there even seems to be a 'genre' specifically made to be Oscar worthy. The main controversy of the most recent years has been the lack of diversity in the acting categories. It gets discussed in industry papers like Variety (Gray, 2016) and even on late night talk shows as can be seen in the video below.

The Daily Show - Another White Oscars (2016)

But just looking at who is nominated in the Acting categories would be short sighted. The other controversy with this year Oscars appears in it's exclusion of two of the five original song nominees form the broadcast, but the inclusion of Dave Grohl, who has nothing to do with any of the movies nominated this year (Hammond & Pedersen, 2016). This itself is not controversial per se, but that the two songs that were cut are made by people belonging to a minority seems to be strangely coincidental. Best song nominee Ahohni knows she "wasn't excluded from the performance directly because [she is] transgender...But if you trace the trail of breadcrumbs, the deeper truth of it is impossible to ignore...It is a system of social oppression and diminished opportunities for transpeople that has been employed by capitalism in the U.S. to crush our dreams and our collective spirit." (2016) The other song nominees who were excluded from the broadcast, composer David Lang and singer Sumi Jo, have not responded to their exclusion.

The real reason for writing this piece is, however, the revelation in a lecture about politics that the Palestinian film Divine Intervention (2002) was excluded from the foreign language category in 2002. It was thought this came about because Palestine is not recognised as a country by the United States and the Academy seemingly follows their guide when it comes to who to include. A film with a clear country of origin was now considered a creative refugee (Doherty & Abunimah, 2002). However, the film was included in the foreign language selection the following year. The Academy made the decision to treat Palestine the same way they treat Hong Kong, which is as a 'separate entity' (Joseph, 2014). The way this movie was treated demonstrates the Academy's need to put everything into a box from which it can not escape. What will they ever do with a non-binary person...

To actually get an idea of how rigid the Academy is one can look through their eligibility rule for the past year (Oscars, 2015). The specific standards they set for who is able to apply they are hampering young creative people who have the hope to ever win an Oscar. (I know I've given up on that hope, I'd rather win a BAFTA...) The use of certain standards is understandable and a way to ensure quality, however, that quality should not mean that only a small group of people will be able to compete. The rules they have posed have nothing to do with creativity and everything to do with how many people you know in the industry. If you know the right people, your film is going to get funding and going to get screened which is the only way to even be eligible to compete. This is of course not only the case with the Oscars, but with most awards which aren't voted for by the public.

The main concern when it comes to the Oscars is simply its elitist view of film. All nominees for best film/actor/actress/director/writer are drama films (Oscars, 2016). Even movies like the Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) and The Martian (2015), which are not normally considered drama films (The Martian won the Best Comedy/Musical award at the Golden Globes (Golden Globes, 2016)) there is a strong element of tragedy and tension not normally found in movies that attract large audiences. Neither of the two is very likely to win the Oscar for best film, with serious contenders like Spotlight (2015) and The Revenant (2015). The common factor with all these movies is who made them. Every single movie nominated in the best film category is directed by a middle-aged man who has been working in the industry for a long time. This is not to say that the decision to nominate a movies should be based on the age and gender of a director, but it does seem like it is once again an issue of access to the industry.

The movies themselves carry a political message, however one sides. Due to very few non-white characters in the nominated movies, we are only show an all-white world view. This has been the case for most of Oscar history, but now it is damning, when considering the quality movies with a black or otherwise diverse cast that came out this year. The most talked about movie in this regard is Straight Outta Compton (2015), which got nominated for a script written by white people (Dickens, 2016). There have been people who argued that without any available roles it is not possible to be nominated, but now it has become clear that even with the roles and the movies, there are no nominations forthcoming.

The problem with the Oscars is not only the Oscars themselves, but the industry surrounding it. It's the lack of recognition and access for anyone who is deemed different, no matter how strange some of the people working inside the industry might already be.