Amedeo D'Adamo

The editor seeks short essays (to be grouped into chapters) that describe the new fields of producing in today's shifting context of production, distribution and audiences. In a student-friendly style, the book discusses the skills and the complexities of being a creative producer, using examples and explaining their context while deferring the definitions of key terms to footnotes. Case-studies that illustrate key aspects of producing are also welcome, but at all times a pragmatic approach is encouraged. While describing the landscapes of the profession in different regions, this will not be a how-to book with legal forms, back-end deal memos and such but rather will offer the non-professional a close attention to the large economic outlines, the social pressures and the specific skill-sets that producing now demands in its many different contexts and marketplaces. These essays will be interspersed with interviews (already transcribed) of luminaries in the field such as Lianne Halfon (Ghostworld, Juno, Perils of Being A Wallflower, Young Adult), Jack Lechner (Fog Of War, Blue Valentine), Katriel Schory (20-year head of the Israeli film fund), Peggy Rajski (Matewan, The Grifters, Little Man Tate), director Kim Peirce (Boys Don't Cry, Dear White People) as well as many other up-and-coming figures working now within the field's new possibilities.
Routledge/Focal Press describes the book series as “an easy-to-read series for undergraduate and graduate students that ... offers a broad but detailed view of the industry and varying career tracks within it, ultimately bolstering readers’ confidence that they have a solid understanding of what it takes to achieve creative and financial success with their art—in other words, what it takes to make a living as an artist." In addition, some critical attention to the field's boundaries and social history is also invited.
The final style of the book will be conversational and direct : examples can be found in previews of earlier editions : https://www.amazon.com/Writing-Screen-PERFORM-Anna-Weinstein/dp/1138945129

This chapter completes three related investigations.  First it proposes that our three aesthetic forms are emotive stances towards the world as well as forms of political and ethical culture.  Second, in a bid to escape Dantean space as the horizon of empathetic space, it proposes a close study of Ecstatic narratives like Amelie and The Secret Garden which have a unique ability to empathetically enfold others into spaces where they connect with the protagonist and with each other on a positive emotional and social level.
Finally, this book has treated Guilt, Bitterness and Innocence as different cognitive stances and forms of discernment towards the world, arguing that each determines an approach to relationships, morality and possibility.  And while Dantean space has often tied empathy to guilt and bitterness, the fresh perspective of Ecstatic space opens up the ignored and complex possibilities of the Innocent for the next generation of storytellers.

Advancing us into Heavenly spaces, this chapter uses two famous statues by the Baroque sculptor Bernini to launch new questions about narrative space.  First, it argues that Bernini’s statue the Ecstasy of St. Teresa (1647-52) introduces an inviting form of Character space that might be called Ecstatic space.  Unlike Dantean space, Ecstatic space is imbued with an ethics of care and a Communal empathy and not the compassionate empathy common to Dantean spaces.
The chapter then examines three readings offered by Bernini’s tableau Apollo and Daphne (1622-25), revealing that viewers bring their own tendencies towards DisPassionate, Dramatic and Dantean readings to a work, imposing their own empathetic culture on the world.  By contrast, Macdowell’s answering sculpture Daphne purposefully closes down all other spatial readings leaving only a Dantean Space empathy for the raped Daphne.
Lastly the Innocent character as a bearer of new narrative spaces and social bonds is introduced.

This chapter examines the individual elements and devices of Dantean space that appear in Dante's precursors in the Western canon from Aeschylus to the Psychomachia.  Singling out six attributes, it then asks whether Dantean Space is committed to an alienating aesthetic of guilt and punishment.  Distinguishing Judicial pleasure (the judging of actual people in life) from Juridical pleasure (the judging of characters who get their ‘just’ deserts at a story's end), it interrogates the juridical pleasures of Dantean space.    Furthermore, is it a coincidence that Dante's landscape is so marked by alienated, atomized, misanthropic characters who are trapped within themselves by themselves?  Does Dantean space carry a sense of self that necessarily imposes certain forms of alienation, teaching us to see ourselves and others in a specifically anti-social way? What are the effects of consuming narratives that deploy Dantean space?
In short, is Dantean space bad for us?

This chapter examines forms of Alienated Space beginning with the Death Star of the Star Wars franchise.  Using the different spatial critique of Marc Augè and of Ray Oldenberg, four attributes of DeathStarchitecture are identified that contrast this space with those of Rebel zones to create a DisPassionate alienation that distinguishes the good from the bad guys. These attributes are : non-place with no memorable markers, highly-rationalized spaces of instrumentalism, surfaces and spaces featuring little or no history, and a lack of ‘third space’ zones of relaxation and socialization. 
However, unlike Star Wars' Dispassionate characters who pursue largely external goals,  a very different effect happens when these same attributes appear in films and television shows with Dramatic characters who possess inner conflicts. In The Graduate, Playtime, Pleasantville, Mad Men and Homeland similar alienation devices instead convey a inner lack, despair and need specific to and reflecting the story's protagonist.

This chapter shoes how Dantean space is often a zone of broken boundaries.  Beginning with a close study of the one-shot scene in La Vie En Rose but also offering examples from Dante, the analysis shows how the boundaries of time and space, of self and environment, of source and score and musical perspective are all often broken in Dantean spaces.  After an overview of such techniques in narrative documentaries such as Tarnation, Elena and Waltz with Bashir, the chapter ends with an extensive analysis of the boundary-breaking Dantean Spaces of the film Apocalypse Now.  The final section notes how both Apocalypse Now and the film Secretary offer prismatic characters whose inner conflict can be interpreted in two ways, and that this prismatic nature also makes the spaces of these narratives prismatic, making us unsure at times whether they are real or are projections of the person’s own conflicted character.

It is useful to distinguish the cinematic and dramatic tools of Ghosts from that of Shades, comparing these two very different cinematic manifestations of the dead.  Ghosts are easy to identify: they are essentially characters with desires and memories who haunt a place or person and possess unworldly powers, and usually we see their faces.  Shades, however, are not characters but instead are spatial presences of negative emotional loss: unlike a Ghost, which voices warnings and makes requests of the living, a Shade in cinema is a hauntological force and presence (Derrida 1993; Fisher, 2014) that holds the power to make the living see the world in a certain way, absences whose faces and voices are often not even represented to the viewer.
      Three films that possess shades illustrate the phenomenon.  Gravity (2013), where the main character's dead daughter is a shade) is like Lars and the Real Girl (2007) where the protagonist's dead mother is a shade, but both can be contrasted with Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) where two different shades are represented in very different ways: the grief-stricken main character wanders desperately through a psychological space shaded by her dead German lover (and which the viewer can also occupy) while her Japanese lover is haunted by his own dead family, though his haunting is largely off-screen: the viewer stands outside of the frame of loss that he is trapped within.  These examples show us how the shade, in contrast to a ghost, is a specific form of psychological space that can be found across many narratives that feature a character grieving over a death.

Key Words : Ghost, shade, Hauntology, Empathy, Dantean space, Film, TV series, Characterological manifold.


(NOTE: an expansion on this chapter will be presented at the 2018 SCREEN conference in Glasgow, Scotland.)

Examining the pictorial framing of different character arcs - contrasting purgatorial and therapy arcs with other forms - this chapter begins a 4-chapter-long analysis of Hellish, Purgatorial and Heavenly spaces.  Through comparing Camus’ novel The Fall to the film One Hour Photo, we begin by examining many different narrative spaces that each represents a protagonist’s personal Hell (an endpoint of negative outcomes after which a character has no character arc change).  We distinguish the film-craft terms Active and Passive characters, then make the different distinction between Active and Passive Hells in narrative. 
A typology of framing techniques is then proposed that reveals how a character’s Hellish struggle is realized spatially in the Mis-en-scène of a film or television show.  This example of how a type of character arc is expressed via certain techniques of framing, illustrated here by analyzing the film One Hour Photo, shows how framing can link many otherwise disparate elements in a film to communicate deep empathetic aspects of a character’s relationship to her space.  We then use these tools to examine Poe’s Dantean short stories, Murnau’s film Sunrise, and the Dantean Spaces of the film version of The Third Man.

Key Words : Empathy, Active Space, Dantean space, Film, TV series, Frame techniques, Mis-en-scene.

Are We Empathizing With the Situation, The Character or the Space? : A Methodology of Defining Space and Character using Little Miss Sunshine, Lego Friends, 50 Shades of Grey, Twilight, and Secretary.

In order to connect narrative analysis to the actual nature of film craft, this essay offers a clear description of the craft-term character and applies it to many examples, which then helps us distinguish between narrative elements that express Character from those representing Emotions, a fundamental distinction that helps clarify the way that narrative cinema is crafted and operates.

We start with an analysis of the use of Emotional music in the child television show Lego Friends and contrast that music's narrative role and craft function with the Character music of the film Little Miss Sunshine.  This allows us to define what we call the Characterological manifold which helps us recognize when narrative space becomes a tunnel of rich Character expression as opposed to expressing emotions or plot.  We then apply this method to three different tryst spaces - spaces where a romantic couple first broaches their intimate issues - in the movies 50 Shades of Grey, Twilight and Secretary, showing how it distinguishes each in turn as a DisPassionate space, a Dramatic space and a Dantean space.  This comparative analysis then reveals how the music of 50 Shades expresses only emotions, while that of the film Secretary shows how music can change the nature of a narrative space by expressing character and not simply emotion.

This essay details Dantean characters and spaces, defining them and offering many examples while also tracing their invention to Dante’s Inferno.  A Dantean Character is someone who has had an experience of high emotional intensity that connects him to a place and time (which we define as a Dantean Moment) who then remains partly 'stuck' in that experience, viewing future experience through the sensible lens of that Dantean Moment.  A Dantean Space is a subjective narrative space that is both in the present and also in some sense imbued with a past experience so that it reveals the internal emotional struggles, history, and hopes, dreams or fears of the character.  An example of a Dantean Character (someone who is in a sense frozen in a specific powerful emotional moment in her or his past) is Miss Havisham from Great Expectations.  Because she was brutally betrayed and abandoned as a young woman on her wedding day (her Dantean Moment), decades later she still lives in her tattered wedding dress in her dark grand parlor with the table still laden with the rotting wedding feast, her sensibility trapped in the past.  Dante Alighieri invented this aesthetic form and used it repeatedly in his Inferno.  Contemporary examples of films that utilize Dantean Space include Aliens, Amelie, Sunset Blvd, and Nolan’s Batman trilogy.

After defining the terms Character, external and internal objectives and intimacy, this chapter uses those definitions to define two of the three forms of narrative space.  DisPassionate characters like Superman have only external goals and lack intimacy, which limits their empathetic response while pushing their Spaces towards spectacular adrenalynic engines.  By contrast Dramatic characters (the most common form of character) possess both external and internal goals.  In Dramatic characters internal conflicts create the possibilities of empathy, pushing setting into a quiet unobtrusive role that won't distract from the emotional conflicts inside and between characters.  For these reasons DisPassionate Space is largely spectacular and non-empathetic while Dramatic Space is usually an unengaging backdrop behind empathetic characters.
However, since 9/11 many traditionally DisPassionate characters, from Spiderman to James Bond to Sherlock Holmes, have acquired dramatic internal goals while Dramatic characters and spaces have increasingly migrated from the big screen to small-screen outlets.

Key Words : Character, Empathy, DisPassionate space, Dramatic space, Film, TV series.

Welcome to Dantean Space! : Empathy and Space in
Singin' in The Rain, Legally Blonde, The Pursuit of Happyness and Aliens.

While the settings of most films pass by as an un-intrusive backdrop, or erupt into adrenalynic escapades or eye-candy, and therefore have a weak relationship to the protagonist, the settings in such films as Aliens (1986)), Amelie (2001), The Third Man (1949) and some television shows are  heightening and entangled with the protagonist's emotional struggles, sharing a narrative architectural form we will call Dantean space.  Examining that rush of feelings of such empathetic settings reveals ten story tactics that trigger our empathetic reactions, tactics we label the Machinery Of Empathy.  In fact Dantean Space is one of three distinct forms of narrative architecture that make a kind of ascending ladder of emotional involvement between protagonist, setting and viewers.  This account helps reveal the intersection of narrative space and empathy as well as the cues, materials and production design techniques commonly used to create these spaces across Media forms.

Key Words : Empathy, Empathetic space, Dantean space, Film, TV series, DisPassionate space.

THE UNSTEADYCAM, Take 1 :
results of reconstructive research building the 1928 Camera designed by Alessandro Blasetti and Ernesto Cauda

For the last five years a small team has engaged in a specific historical and phenomenological research by building a camera designed in 1928 by famed Italian director Alessandro Blasetti and his colleague Ernesto Cauda. Though their remarkable design, which we named the Unsteadycam,  was curiously never built, it is important in the history of cinema : from our own research it seems to be the very first camera designed hands-free free movement, a new kind of paintbrush for directors the like of which was finally realized in 1975 when inventor Garrett Brown's Steadicam was finally produced.

As reconstructive researchers we built mockups and prototypes of the Unsteadycam and then field-tested them with users, all in order to explore the historically-bounded phenomenology of both innovation and camera use. This collective physical realization of the design's limits, achievements, material choices and uses showed the ways it broke from and was continuous with the limits of 1920s camera technologies : it helped reveal the barriers of working handheld with earlier cameras, the historical elimination of opaque film-stock, and even engaged with the question raised by Mckernan (2015) of why early moving-image technology privileged the rectangular frame over the round frame common among early still-image cameras.  Our work also revealed how the Unsteadycam sits at a crossroad between the democratic vs the corporate form of innovation and dramatizes the evolution of the innovation hub, the post-war material history of wood and steel, and even the professional and amateur technical streams in camera history (Schneider, 2016).

But constructing the Unsteadycam also suggests that certain innovations in camera design made new physical and conceptual demands on humans, demands that in turn created breaks in our collective embodied knowledge.  Here we focused particularly on the new phenomenological demands that the parallax viewfinders of early film cameras placed on users which this design tried to change.  Our research suggests that different iterations of a film camera's image-capture system dictated different embodied practices, in turn provoking different kinds of abstract reasoning about the world.  At this stage our research crosses over into the terrain recently described by Vincenz Hediger (2018) who has proposed that film technology grants “unconscious knowledge about what a human being is” and that this knowledge “turns into a driver of self-consciousness.”  In the end this project becomes an investigation into methodology : in attempting to describe the 'embodied history' of film cameras, the Unsteadycam project is an extension of what I have elsewhere called Craft Theory (D'Adamo 2013, 2017, 2018 : p. 23), which proposes to ground theoretical analysis of media in the specific, actual and historically-determined methodologies, technologies and practices of media makers.

In this investigation we argue that the polyphonic stardom of David Bowie can illustrate the concept that celebrity stardom serves a " navigational function " for fans (Mendes & Perrott, 2017). In doing so we sketch out a theory of agency for fans, seeing them as sometimes using celebrity to navigate conflicts between their necessity and their possibility. This helps offset the view often found in psychological studies that Fandom is a kind of spectrum of pathology. It also helps address the lack of an account of agency in more recent theories that wish to consider fandom as empowerment.

If conceived as an existential concept, Mendes & Perrott's term is useful for at least three reasons. First, it captures the vivid, yearning hope of a fan that a luminous celebrity will illuminate her life, helping the fan make sense of her past and present experiences. Second, the concept assumes that celebrity is a tool that a fan uses to steer her life and self into the future. Finally, a star's navigational function isn't itself a singular fixed signpost for all fans to reach one destination but instead can allow different travelers to get to different goals.
But how can a self like Bowie’s, which appears to have no constancy - a Star that seems to wander at random across the sky - serve any such “navigational functions” for his fans?  Does Bowie's gravity only pull us into a decaying orbit of the dissolution of our own self : is that this dark star’s only attraction?
In fact his function is that of a Gramscian clown, a puckish figure who continually re-dramatizes and re-draws the relationship between social necessity and possibility, in the process helping the fan to reimagine self, community and nation (Anderson, 1991) and thus helping the fan both to expand her possibilities but also to melt her social necessities.
Through a close craft-oriented study, this essay first examines how these navigational functions are overtly dramatized on Bowie's last phase of work in the video for “Blackstar”, understanding it as the capstone of a long, weirdly-purposeful and purposefully-weird Dantean psychomachia (D’Adamo, 2018).  By doing this Bowie succeeded in productively putting all the personaes created across his prismatic career into conversation, a phenomenon we call a Meta-Machia and whose roots we trace to Kierkegaard, whose empowering media-manipulations and stardom holds many parallels with Bowie’s.

How is the evil of the Evil Empire of the Star Wars universe constructed and codified in its spaces? In SW space is binary : the spatial cues of Deathstarchitecture – its slick surfaces, rational codes, restricted color palates, alienated unscarred unmarked surfaces, corporate culture and lack of any bathrooms or amenities – oppose it to the good Rebellion which is marked by aged, rough and marked surfaces and a deeply-inscribed sense of historical place, ornament and habitation.
Here the spatial theories of non-place (Augé : 1995, 2002, 2004) and of the Third Space (Oldenburg : 1989, 1999) help us see both how spatial codes in the Star Wars universe manufactures its concepts of good and evil, and also how its spaces – and therefore its sense of 'palpable evil' - changes over decades. Certain spatial differences between the 1977 Death Star of A New Hope and 2015's StarKiller Base in The Last Jedi reveal that by wordlessly expressing the audience's actual, unevenly-shared and historically-determined social and spatial background, space in a fictional universe can be less stable than a canon that is more overtly fixed in the dialogue and actions of characters. This spatial slippage can also help unveil profound shifts and social disjunction in its audiences.

Keywords : Star Wars, Whiteness, Death Star, Non-Place, Third Space Theory, Augé

ABSTRACT FOR That Junky Funky Folk Vibe :

The TV sitcom Sanford and Son (NBC, 1972-77) ranked in the top ten shows for five straight years, a shocking success in the early 70s for a show where the main cast was entirely African American.  The show's theme song “The Streetbeater,” written and produced by Quincy Jones, is no less surprising; its rattling-along energy and new mix of styles is nothing like the then-dominant sitcom theme-songs and retains a compelling power even today.  Highly successful in grounding the show in the Black Inner City during a time of heightened social and racial strife, it also managed to avoid many other pitfalls in Black representation.  Yet the song like the show managed to succeed with a broad audience; as recently as 2011 it was ranked as the 9th Best Television Theme song by Rolling Stone magazine, which described the sitcom’s theme as “the best example of how theme-songs don't even need words to get the vibe of the show across.”
But what exactly is this “vibe,” and how did this theme-song help position this groundbreaking African American sitcom for its largely-white audiences?  After all, somehow this unfamiliar and aggressive theme-song managed to evoke the authentic black experience yet safely invited a divided white public into a junkyard in Watts, Los Angeles.  And the fact that the junkyard is in Watts is even more surprising than that the Sanfords are black.  Though the average viewer today might not realize this, any viewer in 1972 would know that LA, like the US itself, was dangerously divided, that both Sanford and son, as black denizens of Watts, would have been described not so long before in the national press by the L.A. chief of police as “monkeys in a zoo.”  In 1972 Watts was riven by racism, violence and recent historical traumas.
Understanding this history is central to any attempt to “reconstruct the sonorous frame” of this sitcom's music (Deaville, 2011).  Three different, long-lived, battling American publics watched the show, publics that listened to different music, held distinctly different political positions and had different ideas of Watts and race.  These publics are those of Blacks, of progressive Whites and of the conservative white majority that twice voted Richard Nixon into the White House.
This fractured American ear is, I argue, not only understood by the creators of the show but is audible in its strangely-hybrid theme-song.  The genius of Quincy Jones' theme lies in the ways it encodes distinct musical and genre elements that would be familiar to each of the three publics that watched the show.  Here musical and sound effect references are brought together in a unique synthesis that work well as an ear-worm but yet makes the song harder to classify precisely on closer listening.
In trying to tease out reception among these three groups we focus on four levels of symbolic operation in the song : its evocation of Place (Watts), of acoustic Materiality (the Junk of the junk shop), of Musical Style (Funk, Folk, Street and Circus), and of Voice (the song's echo of the star's distinctive and musical speaking style).  At every one of these four levels, we'll argue, the song offers different cultural and musical associations, a purposeful poly-vocality created by Quincy Jones in the face of the show's intended poly-vocality of reception. 
Analyzing the show's distinct musical tropes within its own period of social struggle helps us understand just how much triangulation had to be practiced in the Black community in 1972.  Though this community had found its distinctive, rich and effective voice, and had done so by mining its own ethnic, musical, political and cultural history, in mediated arenas of mixed publics and under pressures of gaining audience shares like Sanford and Son it also had to encode that same voice to make it acceptable to the shattered ear of a broken republic.

NOTE: the version of this essay which appears as Chapter 3 in the Routledge book Music In Comedy Television (2017), was highly edited for style and content by the book's editors at the behest of a reviewer. This version however is the one I consider definitive; it is I believe somewhat clearer and more readable and also has I think a more cohesive and politically-and socially-grounded thesis. Aside from basic differences in style and content, this version also does not contain the many references in the published version to the work of a particular Semiotician, the noted theorist Phil Tagg. My original intent in writing this essay was to position the show and its title theme in terms of the politics and racism of its unusual audience. Since I am not trained as a Semiotician (and possibly for that reason do not find the editors' additions clarifying), this version has both a much greater stress on the sociology and the political history of culture and racism and also lacks the references to Tagg that were added by the editors.

ABSTRACT FOR That Junky Funky Folk Vibe :

The TV sitcom Sanford and Son ranked in the top ten shows for five straight years, a shocking success in the early 70s for a show where the main cast was entirely African American.  The show's theme song “The Streetbeater,” written and produced by the famous Quincy Jones, is no less surprising; its rattling-along energy and new mix of styles is nothing like the then-dominant sitcom theme-songs and retains a compelling power even today.  As recently as 2011 it was ranked as the 9th Best Television Theme song by Rolling Stone magazine, which described the sitcom’s theme as “the best example of how theme-songs don't even need words to get the vibe of the show across.”
But what exactly is this “vibe,” and how did this theme-song help position this groundbreaking African American sitcom for its largely-white audiences?  After all, somehow this unfamiliar and aggressive theme-song managed to evoke the authentic black experience yet safely invited a divided white public into a junkyard in Watts, Los Angeles.  And the fact that the junkyard is in Watts is even more surprising than that the Sanfords are black.  Though the average viewer today might not realize this, any viewer in 1972 would know that LA, like the US itself, was dangerously divided, that both Sanford and son, as black denizens of Watts, would have been described not so long before in the national press by the L.A. chief of police as “monkeys in a zoo.”  In 1972 Watts was riven by racism, violence and recent historical traumas.
Understanding this history is central to any attempt to “reconstruct the sonorous frame” of this sitcom's music (Deaville, 2011).  Three different, long-lived, battling American publics watched the show, publics that listened to different music, held distinctly different political positions and had different ideas of Watts and race.  These publics are those of Blacks, of progressive Whites and of the conservative white majority that twice voted Richard Nixon into the White House.
This fractured American ear is, I argue, not only understood by the creators of the show but is audible in its strangely-hybrid theme-song.  The genius of Quincy Jones' theme lies in the ways it encodes distinct musical and genre elements that would be familiar to each of the three publics that watched the show.  Here musical and sound effect references are brought together in a unique synthesis that work well as an ear-worm but yet makes the song harder to classify precisely on closer listening.
In trying to tease out reception among these three groups we focus on four levels of symbolic operation in the song : its evocation of Place (Watts), of acoustic Materiality (the Junk of the junk shop), of Musical Style (Funk, Folk, Street and Circus), and of Voice (the song's echo of the star's distinctive and musical speaking style).  At every one of these four levels, we'll argue, the song offers different cultural and musical associations, a purposeful poly-vocality created by Quincy Jones in the face of the show's intended poly-vocality of reception. 
Analyzing the show's distinct musical tropes within its own period of social struggle helps us understand just how much triangulation had to be practiced in the Black community in 1972.  Though this community had found its distinctive, rich and effective voice, and had done so by mining its own ethnic, musical, political and cultural history, in mediated arenas of mixed publics and under pressures of gaining audience shares like Sanford and Son it also had to encode that same voice to make it acceptable to the shattered ear of a broken republic.

For at least fifty years Science Fiction’s dangerousness has sprung largely from its leaps into the transgressive.  But something has now changed; the biggest problem today for anyone trying to create dangerous science fiction is that in the developed countries we now live largely in a libertarian, post-transgressive culture. There is, however, at least one target for Science Fiction that grows increasingly dangerous; the border between scarcity and post-scarcity. This danger is perhaps best realized in the great Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson, which not only imagines a bridge from our current scarcity-based culture to a post-scarcity culture, but also shows people building this very bridge up from the foundations of our life today.  Perhaps more dangerously, he then follows Marcuse and Mumford in envisioning not only an end to the economic problem of poverty but also to the social, anthropological and psychical forces of scarcity, showing step-by-step the dramatic changes in psychology, values and lives that post-scarcity would bring. And so like certain tales by Plato and Tolstoy it is a ‘Threshing Tale’, a tale that forces us into an imaginative confrontation with our current values, intending to winnow the false from the true.  This epic sets out to alter the way we see ourselves and our social sphere, hoping like William Blake that altering the eye alters all; perhaps nothing but such a plausible, non-utopian and social vision of life in post-scarcity can be truly dangerous to the way we now think, love, work and war.

This essay appears in the book Enchanting David Bowie, edited by Toija Cinque, Christopher Moore and Sean Redmond and published by Bloomsbury Academic Press, July 2015.

Abstract :
Among all the fabulist baubles of five decades of David Bowie's work, is there one damn song that consciously tries to make us break down and cry, one that is uniquely political and uniquely emotionally real? Yes; there is his hit song 'Young Americans.'
By no coincidence, 'Young Americans' is also Bowie's singular foray into the rich tradition of the American Anthem, that long chain of storytelling songs that set out to portray the state of the nation. This great songbook opens with the classical American Anthem itself but of course the pro- nationalist tradition takes a critical, modernist turn in the 1950's as the U.S. folk movement writes Critical Anthems for the anti-war and civil rights movements. Suddenly the tree begins producing strange fruit; the Anthem's formal choral nature, featuring many people pursuing many objectives and faiths but all united by a certain pursuit of happiness, is suddenly ironically appropriated. In the resulting Critical Anthem, a myriad of American characters are all lost in a morally-empty American landscape, their naïve faiths shattered.
The pop-chart debut of 'Young Americans' in 1975 marks the withering end of the modernist Critical Anthem. Here Bowie's unparalleled skills as a vocal, lyrical and character menagerist peoples a materialist landscape with no myth left from the Ghetto, no hope to be found in marriage or sex, no way to tell emotion from alienation. But, whereas other Critical Anthems use many personal stories to express a political problem, Bowie brilliantly flips this to make the political personal, using the political exhaustion of the US after Nixon as itself a metaphor for the country's exhausted gender- roles and paralyzed pop-cultural hopes. And so, as the story ends in a swirling choral cacophony of unsatisfied desires, it also opens the Post-Modern chapter, the inner turn, of the Critical Anthem songbook.
This essay appears in the book Enchanting David Bowie, edited by Deakin's Toija Cinque, Christopher Moore and Sean Redmond and published by Bloomsbury Academic Press, July 2015.


For an earlier draft of this essay, please contact me at amedeo.dadamo@gmail.com.

Dantean Space In The Homes Of Homeland :
Violations of the Gendered Spaces of Carrie & Brody


The television show Homeland dramatizes the War On Terror as a massive storm of social distortion, a hurricane wreaking transgression through its many Home Spaces.  Understanding Homeland's strange homes – these sites of capture, torture, alienation, surveillance, terror plots, killings, orientalist and homosocial transgressions and gender violation - requires a dual topology of Spaces that can detail how their gendered nature is being coded through specific story craft techniques.
To help us explicate the gendered dramatic architecture here, I suggest we read our Feminist categories of Space through a neo-Aristotelian ontology that specifically describes the unique Spaces native to storytelling.  To do this I offer a three-part topology of Story Space, dividing Space in all stories into Dispassionate Space, Dramatic Space and Dantean Space,  and then I apply these Building Codes specifically to the gendered, damaged and transgressed Home Spaces of Homeland.
In our first category of Dispassionate Space, a character is within a Space but detached from its normal uses or roles, pursuing an objective that treats the Space as a backdrop.  In drama, DisPassionate Spaces that are homes usually signify a deep, often gendered alienation.  Think for example of how Carrie, the heroine of Homeland, uses her Home-Space almost entirely as a Work-Space, and think too how, by contrast to Brody's home, Carrie's lacks the 'Feminine Touch' of Personalized Objects, historied surfaces and 'homey' activities.  Carrie's Driven-Working-Girl schizophrenia is reflected in her home's Spatial-use confusion and gender alienation.
Our anti-hero Brody suffers from a different alienation from his 'homey' home.  Because his white male body has been feminized by force - double-gendered through the violent, scarring Homosocial events in his 'homes' in Iraq - Brody is now neurotically alienated from his old feminized American Home-Space; he is repeatedly unable to have 'normal' heterosexual sex with his highly-feminized wife and he secretly crouches in stillness for hours in his bedroom without touching anything.
The second category of our topology is Dramatic Space.  In Dramatic Space a character is using or struggling against, with or for that Space. Consider the contested state of Brody's Home, its perverted intimacies dramatized through Carrie's obsessive installation and intent monitoring of surveillance equipment. Consider too Brody's physical prevention of his daughter from entering his bedroom, repeatedly insisting he's 'getting dressed' as he straps on his murderous suicide vest under his military uniform.
Thirdly there is Dantean Space, that rarest yet most sensuous, powerful and phantasmagoric form of Story Space.  In a Dantean Space a character is both within that Space but is also in a dramatic sense also within her- or himself because the Space itself has become a kind of projection of the character's dramatic objectives, inner space, passions and character history.  Dante invented this form of Story Space in his Divine Comedy, a panoply of spaces where each character is physically immersed in him- or herself, surrounded by a physical-yet-metaphorical manifestation of the character's actions and life.  In Dantean Spaces Spectacle mirrors Character, creating a sensuous, storied Sublime.
This dramatic architecture is also there in Homeland, first in the spatial metaphor of the maze in the opening credits.  More importantly, both Carrie and Brody each ends their story-arc's trajectory and gender conflict in a dramatically-powerful Dantean Space.  Carrie's paradoxical efforts to construct a Home composed of Work comes dramatically crashing down as her living-room's wall of 'borrowed' classified documents is ripped apart.  For Brody, it comes when he finally enters the bunker to kill the Vice President, turning this Space into a Dantean cauldron of gendered schizophrenia, the final dramatic collision of his three gendered Homes; his old masculinist American home, his tiny torture cell in Iraq, and his feminizing Arabic home where he played the role of loving wife and mother.
These penultimate settings bring home the Homes of Homeland; they are each a Dantean Projection of a violated psyche, places where these two characters wrestle with their own shifting desires for non-anxious, gendered ideals that neither can realize.  In the melancholy tragedy of our violated Homeland, this masculinized woman has no Home at all while this feminized man now has two too many.
What does this mean?  On the face of it, the message of the show's Producers seems to be the progressive one that our old constructions of Home cannot withstand this borderless war.  Like the CIA 'safe-house' – a suburban home now used for torture – the old Spatial boundaries of Military and Non-Military zones, of Home and Work, of Intimacy and Instrumental Calculation, of Criminality and the Law, of alien and native, of Lover and Enemy, and finally of male and female are all made unstable by this war. And as these binary oppositions all grow dangerously porous, this world literally threatens to explode.  But what gender message is being sent here?  What exactly do these calculated dramatic violations all signify?  What is the real ethnic and gendered anxieties of the Frankenstein-like Brody, this secretly-double-gendered male marine and his tortured male body?  Why on earth does Carrie love him?  What world is she trying to protect, that he is trying to first destroy and then flee from?  And what if this world were finally to end, these boundaries to collapse; what might come next?

These drawings from 1928 are a practical plan for a radical new kind of camera, one especially rich in history and mystery and tied to the creation of the Neo-realist movement in Cinema. This design for what was perhaps the very first hands-free camera, created by the legendary Alessandro Blasetti and Ernesto Cauda, was mysteriously never executed and the camera never built. Why not, considering its revolutionary design? After all, at the time this camera was designed a director had only two basic choices for working with a camera: put it on a tripod - either standing alone or itself on a moveable dolly - or take it off the tripod and use it handheld. Blasetti's and Cauda's design, however, represents a new, entirely different approach, offering three great advances. First, it distributes weight to the neck and chest, making it far easier than a handheld camera to operate for long periods. Second, it offers a new mobility of movement, allowing the entire body to become a flexible moving tripod, giving a certain steadiness that handheld does not offer. Third, it leaves the hands free to crank the film and adjust focus. Why would such an important set of advances be abandoned? Why was the design, which won its patent, then abandoned? To answer this question, we set out to finally build this camera, some 84 years after it was designed and forgotten. We will offer it to the public to try it on and experience a piece of cinema history, and to come to understand something new about the remarkable historical currents and utopian dreams in the 1920s.

In the dominant neoliberal theory of innovation as modeled in the industrialized countries's patent systems (Adams, 2008), a craftsperson usually creates an invention because they want, first, to solve certain specific technical difficulties and, second, to profit (Taalbi, 2017).  But after building the Unsteadicam, a radical hands-free camera designed and patented in 1928 by Blasetti and Cauda but mysteriously never built, we found ourselves faced with an object whose revolutionary technical solutions and clear market the inventors themselves seemed to dismiss, seemingly because they focused on a modernist aesthetic dream instead - capturing spontaneity and immediacy (Batchen, 1997; Belgrad, 1998; Bull, 2010; De Man, 1970; Fineman 2000, 2004). 
Meanwhile, and again in contradiction to the obvious uses of the camera, their design loudly announces the cameraperson as a kind of eerie cyborg, which depresses spontaneity in subjects. 
Our investigation positions this complex and strangely-elided invention as another example of how in the history of technology “there is no inevitable link between innovation and rational motivation” (Post 2003).

Key Words:  history of technology, Neorealism, Spontaneity, history of cameras, Blasetti, snapshot.