BOB ROSS: MODERN PROPHET

By Yuhao Chen

Nearly as much as the average person shrinks from the experience of being requested to complete an impossible task, he will wallow in the pleasure of choosing not to engage when shown how to do something in a step-by-step process. The popularity of the do-it-yourself home improvement show, the home economics show, the cooking show, etc., is a testament to the pleasure that must be derived from being very clearly shown how to do something and having the freedom to choose not to do it. But are the personalities on such shows aware of this? Would their awareness alter anything in contemporary television? Would they care? Perhaps they depend on it; perhaps they know of this; and yet, one must still occupy the role of a legitimate instructor in order for the charade to work.

A favorite example comes in the form of the beloved Bob Ross. Via his television program The Joy of Painting, which aired on PBS from 1983-1994, Bob Ross reached thousands, if not millions, of viewers – supposedly as a private in-home painting instructor. Ross primarily painted pastoral settings with specific seasonal themes. All of Ross’ scenes were created with the same ‘wet-on-wet’ painting technique, the same collection of brushes, and various combinations of a set color scheme. Over the course of the show, Ross discussed the importance of nature, his genuine happiness about being able to paint with everyone, and even invited the occasional guest (albeit many of these were small animals like chipmunks or baby squirrels). Viewers were eventually taken through various techniques for depicting trees, clouds, snow, sunlight, etc., encouraging them to improvise and take risks.

At this point, one must consider the criteria for a legitimate painting instructor. For the show to function with any legitimacy, Ross must be defined so. But it must also be considered if Ross’ activities beyond the context of the show compile into an adequate form. After a troubled career in the military, the gentle, nature-loving Ross decided to dedicate his career to spreading the joy of painting by teaching others how to appreciate this activity as much as himself. Although he did do some work as a traditional, non-televised painting instructor, it was not until the development of his long running PBS series that his talents were popularly appreciated. Appreciated, though, for something other than his ability as an artistic educator. As has been suggested, the show was primarily attractive for its ability to provide the viewers the opportunity to participate in passive observation. Most importantly, no one was actually learning.

When a teacher of any sort, a master craftsman, chef, or artist, finds an apprentice or group of apprentices, the activity of the craft metamorphoses into the activity of demonstration. The objective is no longer towards personal innovation or for the benefit of any audience. Now, the master’s objective is to produce something exemplary and within the apprentice’s ability to reproduce. As soon as the apprentice is acknowledged by the artist, the latter becomes a teacher. When the apprentice is no longer present, the basis of the teacher’s identity is removed, and he is now a fraud or has-been. This progression may seem harsh, but it is not a matter of personal development or an assessment of the artist’s skill; instead, this demotion is strictly a result of the human incapacity to define his meandering lack of function as anything else. In the same way, the artist will continue to be respected as such in every phase of his existence despite his humiliating endgame status.  

 

For the average watcher, The Joy of Painting may be a joy to watch, but it is hardly a pedagogical experience. Just as the average cooking show is observed from the couch and not the counter, there is little reason to believe that many, if any, of Bob Ross’ viewers had any intention of actually setting up an easel, filling their pallets, and preparing their brushes in order to follow along with his gradual and encouraging instructions. At best, there might have been a lonely artist among the PBS viewers, bereft of original techniques and helplessly without personal inspiration, who might have privately tested some of the displayed techniques at a later time, but even this is a far cry from apprenticeship. Most likely, viewers are completely passive – watching along as Ross guises them in a wadi of meaningless encouragement and whole-hearted absolutions for technical errors that will never have any chance of being made.

Television, after all, is a mechanism for pleasure. Pedagogy is something very different. Bob Ross was a joy to watch because viewers are seduced by his soothing presence, entertained by the effectively arbitrary painting displays, and addicted to the super-natural phenomenon of receiving and neglecting instruction without the faintest sign of consequence. Just as Ross fed nuts to baby squirrels while they patiently perched on his shoulder and looked into the camera, the pleasure comes from a certain part of the sequence and not the process as a whole.  The Joy of Painting was very successful. Its viewers were doing it right. Pleasant experiences were produced and experienced in a regular cycle, and so there was no reason to complain. There are certain points of the learning process that are indeed pleasurable, but they do not come without others that can only be described otherwise. No baby squirrel will conveniently wait on a shoulder to be fed a nut before the prerequisite scratches, bites, and escapes have been endured. Therefore, the viewers’ abbreviated pleasure circuit – though appropriate for television – has no place in a legitimate pedagogical experience.  For the viewers to choose an interpretation of The Joy of Painting is undeniably a concession that must be made for personal discretion, But what does this mean for the status of Bob Ross?

Consider a televised news broadcast. Perhaps a politician will appear at some point; he may even speak; he may even recognize the fact that he will eventually be broadcast on television. The same might happen for a doctor, a random local resident, or even an artist. But these personalities are not defined by the program that they are included in. The news program is merely employing them in excerpted form in order to represent a specific theme or topic, to support a more significant constituent of the program itself. Ultimately, the doctor is still a doctor, the politician a politician, etc. Simply being broadcast on television does not, by itself, distinguish an entertainer. The matter has more to do with a person’s function on television. One would like to think of Bob Ross as a genuine artist. In all likelihood, that is how he thought of himself. A native Floridian with a distinguished military career and scenic post in Alaska doesn’t abandon the legacy of the last forty years of his life to spend the final ten as a penniless painter in Indiana if not for true passion. And to continue his life cycle as an artist, he became a master in search of apprentices. But it is at this point in his development when something baffling occurred. His ‘apprentices’ on the other side of the television set did appreciate him, but for pleasure and not pedagogy. Therefore, the Bob Ross of PBS was no artist.

Throughout the course of his years on television, Bob Ross completed 381 paintings. All of these paintings depicted pastoral settings. Nearly all of them included at least one mountain, primarily pine forests, a ‘warm’ sky, and evidence of recently passed ‘happy little critters.’ Each painting occupied precisely 30 minutes from inception to completion, and each one required a distinct set of painting skills – typically displayed while painting “happy clouds,” “lonely trees,” etc. Also included in Ross’ skill sets were other painterly techniques like brush cleaning, canvas preparation, and discussions about palette preparation. Certainly, these were not ventures of artistic passion. These were pedagogical tools. But if no one was following their example, if there were never any true apprentices, was Bob Ross any sort of a master? Did he skip straight to an artist has-been? Or did he cease to be an artist?

Just as puzzling as the condition of Bob Ross and his television show, are all do-it-yourself shows. Their identity belies their function, and their function dismantles their identity, and yet viewers from around the world love them. Not only is it possible to ignore the contradiction and appreciate the remaining substance, but the simultaneous existence of two incompatible experiences is a source of pleasure on its own. If one would ever like to find the source of this pleasure, he could simply attend a lesson. Imagine being told to attempt a specific brush-stroke, to season a chicken breast, to remove all the nails from a picture frame. Then imagine not doing it… Suddenly, one’s underarms begin to perspire, and there is a hiccup in the heart. But then this jolt of anxiety is met with an encouraging smile: the teacher moves on to the next step, and again extends an invitation to follow along. 

DICK'S SPORTING GOODS

By Evan Richards

            Dick’s Sporting Goods has a longstanding array of narrative-focused commercials that all utilize the language of myth. I have selected two commercials that exemplify this process. Mythology is evident in the key moments of these commercials, and due to the aggressive and fine-tuned use of mythic imagery, these moments constitute the commercials in their near-entirety. Though the myths specific to each commercial vary, the commercials as complete forms function as similar mythologies that encourage consumers to buy their products.

            The first commercial, titled “The Hoop,” centers around a free-standing basketball hoop. The hoop is first shown on front of a snow-dusted, two-story suburban home that is decorated with wreathes and Christmas lights. A reverb-heavy Christmas tune plays, but is soon replaced by an acoustic guitar number. A father leads his young daughter outside, where he presents the hoop as a gift, and the two embrace after he assists her in making a basket. In a series of shots, the daughter aging considerably in each, we are presented with the hoop standing in a cul-de-sac of similar houses full of children playing and riding bicycles. We see many neighbors gathered around the hoop on the 4^th of July, complete with tables, chairs, canopies, etc. The backboard of the hoop reflects the fireworks (the angle is towards the basket), and the hoop itself stands centered in two lines of patriotic-colored banners, the support to which these decorations are tied. The hoop is covered in thrown toilet-paper rolls to giggling of children. The hoop is battered with rain in a thunderstorm.  The father and the daughter play basketball together, and in the next cut the father watches the daughter play basketball with a similarly aged boy. Finally, the daughter bids farewell to her parents, drives a heavily packed sedan down the street and off, presumably, to college, and in the final shot the father shoots a basket alone. Super-imposed text encourages us to “give a gift that matters,” and the commercial ends with the typical sign off: the word “every” appears, followed in sequence by the words, “neighborhood, family, gift, legacy, and season,” the last becoming the phrase, “every season starts at Dick’s.”

            Clearly, the largest myth present in this commercial concerns the relationship between a father and a daughter. This myth, and the smaller myths beneath it, almost all utilize the basketball hoop as its signifier. The commercial mimics life and parenthood, utilizing the basketball hope to evoke several signified notions: the hoop is a hub of community and friendship amongst neighborhood kids, the hoop is a conduit of mischief and life’s high points in the shot with the toilet paper, and the hoop in the rainstorm is evocative of the low points, and so on. In the 4^th of July shot, with the backboard reflecting the glow of fireworks and supporting the lines of red, white, and blue pennants, the hoop is analogous to the American flag itself. When the father first plays basketball with the then-teenage daughter but then watches her play basketball with a boy her own age, the signified, conventional/conservative concept of a father being the first man in a woman’s life who hands her off to her future spouse, is abundantly clear. The short duration of these shots barely prevents the myth from becoming too explicit. In the final two shots, the daughter has been successively raised, and the father pays homage to the hoop, which in a quite real sense is more the daughter’s second parent than her own mother. The commercial’s high-saturated, slightly grainy home video feel combined is highly nostalgic, and it is purported in the commercial that the successful raising of the daughter substituted sports and athleticism in place of more conventional feminine hobbies or past-times. Thus the myths in this commercial effectively appropriates conservative notions of fatherhood, growing-up, patriotism, and gender, and speaks most clearly to young or soon-to-be parents who were raised amidst these environments. Overall, the myth is made from the basketball hoop, the signifier, and the process of a father raising a daughter, the signified.

            The second commercial, titled “Who Will You Be?” features a more diverse cast of characters and a voice-over narration. A young boy looks up in awe at an immense, mirrored trophy case in a high school. We see several young men and women practicing golf, lacrosse, soccer, weightlifting, etc., most of which are alone, many at night. A young man in a full baseball uniform hits several balls tossed by his coach, the camera positioning him directly in front of the diamond’s empty stands. Meanwhile, a gruff, masculine narrator tells us that so-called true tests “won’t come easy,” “won’t last long,” but that “that is why [we’re] here.” He then reiterates “for these very moments,” as we are presented with a young football player in a red, white, and blue uniform, standing mid-game in heavy rain in front of packed stands. The soccer player, hockey star, and fellow athletes are each shown in-game, often leading a pack of charging players, and nearly every character shown practicing is allowed a brief moment of performative glory. The narrator asks, “Who will you be?” as we see the same text super-imposed over the boy from the opening shot’s wide-eyed face. The commercial signs off in the same manner as previous, this time with the sequence of words “Choice, Lesson, Athlete, Season.”

            In comparison to the pervious commercial, “Who Will You Be?” entails a more complex array of signifiers in its umbrella of myths. The common signified notions in this commercial are centered on the individual, as opposed to a sense of community or on a familial relationship. In each shot of a young man or woman practicing, the isolation, darkness, repetition all evoke not only the value of individual perseverance but the prototypically American notion of self-made success against all odds. The shots of the empty stands and the timbre of the narration suggest vindictiveness. The footage itself appears less like a home video and more like a dramatic film. The football player dressed in red, white, and blue football regalia, complete with stars and a mustang on his helmet, is the rain-defying, pseudo-military hero that American culture idolizes. The narration prompts us to think of life as a series of escalating achievements in sports (the athletes shown certainly do), and when it asks both us and the little boy who we will be, we understand that to work hard and become a star athlete is to be a success, and to not arrive at these pinnacle moments is to be a failure. The common signifiers are diligent practice, athletic success in various forms, and the trophies/trappings of victory. The signified, therefore, is something akin to persistent, individual, physical work, despite odds and the sacrifices required, allows one to achieve the kind of greatness that matters, namely glory on the modern equivalents of the gladiatorial field of battle.

            Ultimately, both commercials hold several myths in common and in doing so achieve the intended purpose of alluring shoppers. The idea that investing in sports and sports equipment is fundamental to being an American is manifest in both commercials. Furthermore, the idea that one’s involvement in sports determines their success as a social individual is common ground. The two series of words are direct statements of the franchise’s intent: “neighborhood, family, gift, legacy, season,” and “choice, lesson, athlete, season,” are all identified in plain text as “starting at Dick’s.” The mythology of Dick’s purports that, to be a successful American, father, or individual, one must not only engage in the realm of sports, but must do so correctly by investing in their products from the very beginning.

ETERNIME: Internet Promised Land

By Austin Shepard Woodruff

An imperative of modern life is to at once produce and maintain an online presence, to be involved in the digital age as it unfolds. Social conventions require that individuals keep at least one email account as a kind of online holding where formal business and other forms of exchange can take place. Similarly, cultural norms demand connection via social media platforms; we are expected to present ourselves online in both a professional sense as well as for personal relationships. But always already carried into the development of online interactions are the political and ethical challenges of human life, what marks the difference between virtual and physical engagement is a matter of distance through the medium. The medium of the Internet provides us with a means of connecting with other people around the world as never before, but caught up in this apparatus is the question of how to represent non-digital life as it synthesizes with our digital experiences of the Internet.

As the Internet becomes an increasingly relevant influence on the ways in which we live our lives, it becomes a horizon towards which we can lay our greatest hopes and our most terrible fears. The Eternime project embraces the Internet as the frontier of the future, the frontier which will finally solve the life-anxiety of the human condition; Eternime seeks to overcome the consequences of physical death by building virtual avatars based off an individual’s online presence during his or her life. Subscription to Eternime entails that an individual will string together their profiles on several social media platforms, provide basic information, and include intimate details of formative memories into an algorithm which then authors an avatar. This avatar, upon the individual’s death, will continue that person’s online presence, acting virtually as though death were no longer an obstacle to engaging in social action. The project is therefore a modern attempt at achieving immortality and as such it imports cultural mythologies about death, transcendence, and memory.

With this in mind we must then say that the Internet embodies a web that catches and then feeds off of data input, growing ever more expansive with each morsel of information included into its frame of reference. In this way it is a rabbit hole in which virtual identities are constantly transitioning to fit the model of digital interaction. The rate at which these identities (and the platforms that sustain them) grow and change is a reflection of the flow of the real public’s withdrawal and resurgence into virtual rendezvous. The Eternime project tracks this flow on an individual level, collecting the sum total of one person’s digital footprint in order to simulate that individual’s personality. It is clear then that the project has a certain understanding of what constitutes personhood online; Eternime states that one can live forever if one subscribes to the program and uploads their private digital presence into the project’s database.  The immortality at stake for the project is in a person’s virtual conception of him/herself, and while the digital components that make up a profile are finite, the project aspires to create from their finitude an infinite presence. The question remains whether this immortality will be static, in the sense of repetition ad nauseum, or if somehow the avatar algorithm can predict the trajectory of that person’s identity over time had they not died.

In light of this consideration, we ought to inspect what makes up the profiles that defy death and the motivations involved in both the process and the product. For example, the social pressure to represent oneself online dictates that in order to stay ahead of the competition we must build the most appealing profiles on the many platforms. But these platforms, each with their own set of mores and economies of performance eventually become their own reason for participation; one is more likely to post on Facebook if that online community takes well to what that person is sharing, thereby encouraging further posting. The appeal to social approval ends up as not only the consequence of online interactions but often the principal or even the sole reason for it. An online profile constitutes a tool that one can use to garner attention, but just as much as this is true we always run the risk of setting our online presences as indispensable priorities, priorities which ask for constant attention and in effect distract from physical non-digital action. Under these conditions, in the worst of circumstances, the infinity we ask of Eternime then becomes a closed loop of superficial interactions online perpetuated into the future of the Internet.

For this reason we must look carefully at the mythologizing of death that the project engages in in order to provoke subscription. Roland Barthes speaks to this in the book Mythologies in writing that “myth…is a language which does not want to die: it wrests from the meanings which give it its sustenance an insidious, degraded survival…it turns them into speaking corpses” (244). Barthes’s understanding of myth ties directly into the Eternime project, drawing together the end goal of overcoming death by birthing a virtual avatar with the dramatic irony that Eternime performs in making these digital puppets speak endlessly beyond the grave. The simulation of life is not life itself, but the project of Eternime collapses when this is spoken out loud.

Furthermore, Eternime more than represents but indeed enacts the very process of mythologizing; we project the image of ourselves into the algorithm, hiding behind the digital footprint of our time spent online. We cover over our real selves with the pictures, videos, memes, and posts of our profiles. There is a ringing falsehood that inaugurates the profile into being, a call which the profile itself promptly ignores by means of continuing to engage with the online community. The profile is a myth of personhood, and in buying into Eternime’s project we succumb to the cultural mythologies that assert the fallibility of human memory in the face of digital immortality.

And yet to cheat virtual death by creating virtual immortality is to cheapen the meaning of digital presences entirely. The eternal avatar is a semblance of personhood evacuated of any real human substance behind it, monitoring its growth and nurturing its involvement in the online community. If what I post online is to last forever in the care of an algorithm calibrated to my personality, why not subscribe while I still live and let the virtual life I spawn tend to my concerns on the Internet now? Why not let the avatar become the idea of me while I ride out the rest of my time in this meat reality without needing to check on how “I” am doing online? Eternime suggests boldly that we can live forever and that nothing can be lost to the failure of memory if we are within the project’s folds. Yet what the project always wants us to forget is that we are not safe from death no matter how much we pretend that we may live beyond it in the digital memory of its vast databanks. Material death remains our fate.

In order then to live the good life in the light of Eternime, in order to take refuge in the algorithm’s care of your personhood, you must believe that your online presence is the same thing as you yourself, that it is a result of your action and that what you do you freely choose to do so. Without this freedom of choice the program will not be able to accurately illustrate your personality. Such being the case, we notice that the algorithm is a causal chain of factors taken into account which then produce a certain portrayal of what data is plugged into it. Eternime is founded on a mathematical prediction of the person behind the virtual mirror of the computer screen. The algorithm then takes on the profile, much like a vampire sucking the life from its victims or like a zombie spreading death in its bite. Once claimed by physical death, the algorithm continues into the future as its own end, not changing or growing but merely representing what you probably would have been because there is no need to change or grow. The profile is the myth of the person, and as Barthes says, “myth plays on the analogy between meaning and form,” for “there is no myth without motivated form” (236). The profile in this sense is a kind of tombstone, a grave-marker that is made to continue speaking as though the person it represents were immortal, untouchable, and unstoppable. This is foul puppetry indeed.

Eternime therefore falls into the great threat the human ego always holds against itself. We seek perfection and eternal life, but in each attempt we make to reach for it we only highlight its impossibility. The myth of life beyond death in our modern world has made a dash for the material platform of the Internet, building for itself a foundation on which to lay out its most recent monument to this betrayal of the ego. We do not have gods to whom we pray for everlasting life, no, now we have near-omniscient avatar profiles whose ontological positions are almost those of demigods, on the Internet. These are empty profiles whose emptiness we worship. Eternime demands we pretend all the while that there is the ghost of the person lost looming there in the avatar’s endless online presence, projecting into the future the recorded memories of a life apparently lived in vain.

Click here to enter Eternime!

TINDER

By Austin Shepard Woodruff

A principal goal for most cultures, both implicitly suggested by their social structure and explicitly enforced by certain norms, is to successfully develop relationships with one’s surrounding cohort. In general people are expected to establish and cultivate working and sustainable connections with one’s immediate and extended families, one’s peers, one’s coworkers and employers, as well as to be more or less receptive to meeting new people somewhere between or outside of these categories. While there is a great deal of variety in the degrees to which these expectations are fulfilled and enforced, the pressure to relate to other people remains a steady driving influence on cultural life, and on our American bourgeois culture today in particular. The obligation to be social in distinct modes of interaction is in turn confirmed by the mythologies with which we surround ourselves, mythologies which then we perpetuate to engender the others around us. Folded into an historical narrative weaving together nationalism, capitalism, and post-structuralism, we can understand the social media game Tinder by taking a closer look at the presuppositions of the urgent need to connect with others on which the platform finds its ground.

Within the context of the contemporary obsession with technology and social media it comes as no surprise that we have come up with many ways of interacting online through various platforms, rather than in person, to satisfy these needs to connect with one another. Social technology does not alleviate the need to relate to other human beings; Tinder, Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, and Instagram instead all function as media through which we can satisfy this social drive. These platforms mark the need to relate to each other in their overabundance of information, in the constant updating about the status of the others around us in the world. Thereby we set into practice an economy of information, valuing not only how relevant something is to a contemporary context, but also taking into consideration the magnitude of the information surge, putting high value in large quantities of tiny, easily digestible morsels of social exchange. However, inasmuch as human contact is an imperative we set upon ourselves, this urge manifests in strange and inelegant ways that call into question the very need to connect, online or in person, in the first place. The social media platform Tinder represents a modern insecurity in our abilities to connect with one another on levels beyond the superficial pretense of social life; the performances we play out in our characters demand of ourselves and everyone else that we be polite, presentable, and follow a guideline of cues in order to successfully develop socially appropriate relationships.

Tinder first and foremost is a game. While other online platforms offer users media which essentially function as texts to be read, shared, and otherwise observed in a distant, banal sense of the word, Tinder presents the worlds of other people as opportunities to make evaluative choices based on profiles consisting of a few pictures, some mutual interests, and a couple lines of text. One plays this game by swiping right or up on the phone screen to indicate interest/ hyper interest or swiping left to indicate disinterest. Based on anywhere from hardly a second or two to several minutes of consideration, one makes the choice to express their approval or disapproval of the profile on trial. The consequence for mutual interest is a connection on the platform, where the two parties may interact via standard text share, while the consequence for neither parties indicating interest is merely an absence of connection (no consequence). To play the game effectively one must present oneself in the most efficiently interesting manner possible, balancing carefully between the small portion of text and the couple pictures of oneself. Cultural instinct and the ability to instantly read into the social mythologies in place therefore take precedence in this economy of the profile.

The profile picture of a young smiling woman surrounded by other young smiling women at what appears to be a birthday party becomes an overtly obvious message that carries to the recipient the social value of this person in question. This person appears to be not only sociable, but apparently very successful in her relationships with her friends; the picture becomes a kind of evidence to convince the observer of her social prowess. Valued highly by the game, this player could typically expect attention from the other players, depending on the social context in which they currently play. Yet this attention validates a profound distance between the players, who in reality are interacting with their phones rather than with the other person, even though these signals somehow constitute normal interaction in our world.

This model of presentation speaks directly to the role that mythology plays in modern life, and Roland Barthes in the book Mythologies affirms this in writing that “the function of a myth is to empty reality” (255). What can one possibly express on such a limited scale about the whole of one’s entire life? And what does this premium on our lives mean for the connections that follow? It is always readily apparent that the groundwork for any further interaction between players of the game is based on a mere swipe, an action of interest in the minimal information given in the users’ profiles. In the capitalist sense of the interaction, we are selling ourselves as products to one another, and the obvious desire is acceptance manifested in the act of swiping right, or touching the green heart button. The language of the game, both visual and verbal, is a form of speech, and Barthes testifies to the mythological nature of precisely such presentation in saying that “speech of this kind is a message” (218). The visual elements thus  capitalize on the cues that we send to one another to assure our social worth; physical attractiveness, style of photography, other characters in the pictures, relative wealth, and geographical context (with famous monuments) thereby all become mythologized into a profile whose ultimate goal is to appear as desirable as possible.