The Media Swirl: Politics, Audiovisuality, and Aesthetics

by Carol Vernallis

Overview

From fan-generated content on TikTok to music videos, the contemporary media landscape is becoming ever more vast, spectacular, and intense. In The Media Swirl Carol Vernallis examines short-form audiovisual media—Beyoncé’s Lemonade, brief sequences from Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby, TikTok challenges, YouTube mashups, commercials, and many other examples—to offer ways of understanding digital media. She analyzes music videos by Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, Janelle Monáe, Kendrick Lamar, Anderson .Paak, and others to outline how sound and image enhance each other and shape a viewer’s mood. Responding to today’s political-media landscape through discussions of Fox News and Presidential inaugurations, Vernallis shows how a media literacy that exceeds newscasts and campaign advertising is central to engaging with the democratic commons. Forays into industry studies, neuroscience, and ethics also inform her readings. By creating our own content and knowing what corporations, the wealthy, and the government do through media, Vernallis contends, we can create a more just world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478019060
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	03/17/2023
Pages:	464
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Carol Vernallis is an Affiliated Researcher at Stanford University, author of Unruly Media: YouTube, Music Video, and the New Digital Cinema and Experiencing Music Video: Aesthetics and Cultural Context, and coeditor of, most recently, Cybermedia: Explorations in Science, Sound, and Vision.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments  xi
A Note on the Cover  xiii
Introduction  1
I. Post-Classical Cinema at the Limit
1. Partying in The Great Gatsby: Baz Luhrmann’s Audovisual Sublime  27
2. Shattered Pleasures: Michael Bay’s Transformers: Age of Extinction  48
II. Music Video and the Art-Video Border
3. Beyoncé’s Overwhelming Opus; or, the Past and Future of Music Video  71
4. Avant-Gardists and the Lure of Pop Music  97
5. Beyoncé’s Lemonade: She Dreams in Both Worlds (Carol Vernallis, Lisa Perrot, and Holly Rogers) 122
6. Tracing the Carters through the Galleries: “APES**T/APESHIT” and the Louvre 138
7. Storytelling on the Ledge: Lady Gaga and Jonas Åkerlund’s “Paparazzi”  154
III. Music Video’s Late Late Style
8. How to Analyze Music Videos: Beyoncé and Melina Matsoukas’s “Pretty Hurts”  175
9. Dave Meyer’s Moments of Audiovisual Bliss  196
10. Janelle Monáe’s “You Make Me Feel” and Anderson.Paak with Kendrick Lamar’s “Tints”: Getting Up in My [Rearview] Mirror  211
IV. Audiovisual Aesthetics Online
11. Who Needs Music Documentaries When There’s TikTok and Carpool Karaoke?  231
12. TikTok and Costume-Drama Mashups on YouTube  247
V. New Modes of Analysis: Industry
13. The Art of Color Grading (Carol Vernallis, Jonathan Leal, Eric Weldt, and Aubrey Woodiwiss)  265
14. Music Video Directors, Production Houses, and the Media Swirl  290
VI. New Modes of Analysis: Neuroscience
15. Music Video’s Multisensory  307
16. Tracing the Asset: Humanistic and Quantitative Approaches to Cybercrime Film Trailers (Snowden and Bourne)  319
VII. New Modes of Analysis: Politics and Vernacular Culture
17. New Technologies, Social Justice, and the Future in Beyoncé’s Audiovisual Albums  335
18. Fox News, COVID-19, Brief Media Aesthetics, and Historical Resonances  356
Afterword  369
Notes  373
Bibliography  403
Index  429

What People are Saying About This

Anecdotal Evidence: Ecocritique from Hollywood to the Mass Image - Sean Cubitt

“From analyzing splashy Hollywood sequences to understanding the short form in social media, news, and commercials as an increasingly significant part of audiovisual culture, Carol Vernallis gives an impressive account of the success of the MTV aesthetic in colonizing large swathes of the audiovisual landscape. Offering a critically informed view of the evolution of spectacle in cultural politics, she develops and expands work emphasizing the sonic aspects of audiovisual media in intriguing ways. Bold, extremely readable, and exemplary in its clarity and ease of communication, The Media Swirl invites readers to participate.”

Steven Shaviro

“Others have written about contemporary media spectacle but not in the way that Carol Vernallis does here. Powerfully contributing to media theory and criticism, this exhilarating book exemplifies in its contents and strategies the very media swirl of which it speaks, and it will entice more people to engage in this sort of research, scholarship, and adventurous investigation. With this indispensable book, Vernallis confirms her status as the premier scholar, theorist, and interpreter of music videos in the twenty-first century.”

Editorial Reviews

"In The Media Swirl, Vernallis articulates an insightful standpoint for the analysis of audiovisual media content as she shifts her focus from ‘close readings grounded in entertainment to an engagement with politically oriented content’ (356). . . . Anyone who is interested in drawing conceptual and cross-disciplined connections from audiovisual media content may find Carol Vernallis’s The Media Swirl a valuable resource."

Visual Studies - Munire Burcak Gezeroglu Christensen