According to Sturken and Cartwright, a distancing irony is used to “ask viewers to notice the structure of the show in order to distance them from the surface pleasures of the text…” and helps “viewers be engaged at a critically conscious level.” Quoting can be a reference to something, in manner, mode, or style, and in postmodern examples, irony is usually used to reflect on different aspects of contemporary culture.

David Fincher’s Fight Club (as well as the original novel by Chuck Palahniuk) integrates many postmodern ironies into its narrative structure. Overall, the film displays a flattening of affect: using hyper violence, media, and drug use to depict an emotionless, detached, and unauthentic life of the main character, while commenting on society as a whole.

The unstable narrator immediately makes the audience suspend their belief in the alternate reality and aware of their own existence. The story is framed by entering the ending first and tracing back from the beginning. Everything that the main character is thinking, he is directing towards you, in your seat in your world.

The plot turns the “truth” in many human events that we see as normal on their heads, which is a component of postmodern work. This includes the notions of empowerment and masculinity, the redundancies of a desk job, hurting the ones you love, consumerism, and even the illusion of safety on airplanes. The narrator is a character that is struggling with his identity and one aspect of this is tied to the consumerism of the culture he inhabits. When looking through an Ikea catalogue he asks the viewer: “What kind of dining set defines me as a person?” He is placing what is on the surface as the “truth,” which is another point of postmodernism.

He attends an “AA” style meeting in the beginning of the film called “Remaining Men Together.” This scene draws on the stereotypical support group setting, and is ironic in itself due to our societies beliefs on how to “be a man.” Then as he sits at his numbingly painful desk job, like millions of Americans do each day, he states “everything is a copy of a copy of a copy.” This disassociation from reality and popular thinking is a technique to distance the character from society, and make the audience think critically about their own reality. This is coupled with a fourth wall break, where his sidekick (ahem) goes from questioning him to speaking to the audience directly. He calls out the “truth” that society feeds us, and how we as individuals proliferate all of our own made up problems.

By the end of the film, the narrator’s own sense of self-awareness is what brings the narrative full circle. Although we want nothing more than to escape from our perceived “truth,” ironically we are just trapping ourselves in our own irrational desires.

These questions are based off of the “Embodiment and Interface” reading.

1. How can interface differences affect the sense of presence within a simulated world and the enjoyment from a video game?

2. How can one experience both agency and ownership within a game world? Give at least one example.

3. How have virtual reality devices like the Oculus Rift expanded on the writer’s analysis of the way devices like the Nintendo Wii work? How do they differ?

4. Do different game genres require different considerations for where their sense of agency lies between the two poles of schema and image? (Ex: RPG vs Sports game)

5. How can virtual experiences extend your body image onto an outside object?

1. With the rise of original content from streaming services, how does that raise the stakes for network television?

The rise of original content from streaming services is definitely something that is going to be putting more and more pressure on network television. Thousands of people are ditching cable for Netflix, HBOnow, Hulu, CrunchyRoll, etc in the recent years. And the more that do, the more capable these companies are to dish out higher production value programming. Take Netflix’s House of Cards for example. The first season was directed by David Fincher, a director known for movies such as Fight Club and Seven. If you watch the show, you will see just how much Fincher is weaving in cinematic qualities of filming to a “television” program. Shows that compare on network TV are AMC’s Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and pretty much any HBO program (though they also have their own streaming service now that is not linked to a television provider). Network TV is going to have to incorporate more cinematic qualities into the shooting of their programs if they are going to keep up with the streaming services, which means spending a lot more money on the production side. They also need to adapt to the way that people are watching television programs these days, by binge-watching. Some providers already have an on-demand feature that has the recent episodes of the most popular shows for their subscribers to watch whenever they want. I think there will have to be more of these options for people with non-traditional schedules that want to be able to view their programs at will. This goes against the traditional weekly episode system that has been around for decades of serial TV, so I don’t think it will be the easiest change for the medium, especially when factoring in the networks’ advertisers.

2. How has portability impacted television? Discuss both negative and positive impacts.

I think the portability of television has a lot of different negative and positive impacts. The fact that we can pull out our cellphones at almost any time (depending on the quality of your service) and watch something on Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, or HBONow is pretty remarkable when compared to just a few years ago. I think it has been a good thing, following the invention of TIVO and the DVR, because not all of us can be home to watch what we want when we want. But on the other hand, I have seen it drastically change the way people are parenting their kids, for better or for worse. At a boring wedding last summer, I saw a few children just sitting at their table the entire time watching a program on Netflix. When I am at a restaurant, most children I see have an iTouch or iPad to keep them entertained. Lots of parent’s these days just hand a child a device to get them to keep still and quiet. Not that this is necessarily harmful in all cases, but I think it could be a potential negative impact for the children’s developmental and social skills. I think the portability is also changing the way we watch some genres of TV. In my opinion you wouldn’t choose to view the latest Batman movie on your phone, you would lose that cinematic experience. The same goes for more cinematic television programs such as Game of Thrones. So when people choose to do that, I think they are losing some of the intensity and production value just by staring at a 4 inch screen. I think we are going to start seeing more productions that are explicitly made for portable viewing, whether that be a good or a bad thing.