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E-sports, often referred to as competitive or professional gaming, stands as a prime example of the merger of work and play. A growing body of literature has started focusing on this pastime turned profession. As more professionals enter the scene and audiences continue to grow, e-sports broadcasters look towards older models of broadcasting to inform their own style. This reapplication of former conventions stands in contrast to the trends in the larger sports media trajectory. E-sports broadcasting is largely informed by traditional sports broadcasting, yet remains unable to fully capture the success of the global sports industry. On-air talent, once informed solely by traditional sportscasters are now looking to their fellow e-sportscasters to create something new. Revenue streams which form the foundation of the sports industry are making their way into e-sports but not in the way that one might expect. Through a variety of qualitative methods, including historical analysis, interviews, and fieldwork, I have investigated e-sports broadcasting to better evaluate the role traditional sports broadcasting has played in shaping the e-sports industry. This work looks not only to what e-sports broadcasters have borrowed from prior sports media, but also where they have innovated.

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Originally published in Docubase.

Do Not Track is an interactive web documentary series about internet privacy directed by Brett Gaylor and co-produced by Upian, NFB, Arte, and BR. In the project proposal of Do Not Track, director Brett Gaylor quotes Jeff Hammerbacher, a former Facebook employee: “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads”. Channeling the famous first lines of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, Hammerbacher’s statement solidifies what Gaylor identifies as having gone awry with the Internet. Do Not Track addresses questions around this phenomenon: When and how did the internet become home to targeted advertising where a user’s browser history determines the advertisements she sees? How do data brokers collect and sell information about users to hundreds of companies? If we don’t want to be tracked, how do we fight back?

To ask these questions, Do Not Track takes on the same production strategies used by many web developers. Do Not Track is a documentary for the web, rather than a documentary on the web. It optimizes its story for a web experience through offering personalized stories, short video content that keeps the viewer focused and basic interactivity that keeps the user constantly involved.

The storytelling method is not the only thing Do Not Track tailors to the web; it also adopts the agile design production methods of tech and design fields. The documentary content is optimized through web analytics and iterative design. The filmmakers have also developed communication and collaboration strategies to work efficiently with an international and interdisciplinary team. This case study focuses primarily on the methods Do Not Trackcreators used to develop a film in an “agile” method, how they collaborated internationally, and how they composed a script under these conditions.

Agile Filmmaking

Filmmaking models generally follow what Brett Gaylor refers to as “waterfall production methodology”. This means that research, filming, editing, and release follow each other in strict order, using a “top-down” approach. Waterfall development techniques put all the planning and research up front, followed by design, then finally development and testing. If something unforeseen emerges during the testing phase, it is difficult to go back and modify the original design.  Do Not Track borrows its production language from software development, where a host of development methodologies with names like Agile, Iterative, Scrum, and others have replaced traditional waterfall methods. These “agile” methods focus on rapidly creating prototypes, cycling through the entire process of product development quickly and changing approach on the fly as new information emerges. Gaylor explains that the waterfall method is still widely used because it fits into the funding and exhibition models of the film world. Funders do not want to stray away from conventional methods, while exhibition models are not quick enough to adapt to new filmmaking methods. “If you want your work seen at the festivals it needs premieres. But what is a premiere on the internet?” Brett asks.

One way that an “agile” approach benefits the web documentary format is that each episode can be changed based on the analytics of the prior episode. In addition to the “personalized” aspect of the documentary, the documentary is also changed based on aggregate analytics. To picture how this can impact a film, consider how companies like BuzzFeed go so far as to release multiple headlines for the same story, testing each to see which has the highest click-rate. Gaylor says that web documentaries can also apply these techniques. By thinking of each episode and each two-week production cycle as a separate project, rather than a single long project, adapting to previous results and learning from them comes easily. Gaylor compares the phase of releasing a new episode every other week to a festival run of a film, in which you get useful feedback and press attention, then have time to make changes before officially releasing the film.

Though it is true that film production does follow a standardized and linear production process, it is also subject to serendipitous changes, coincidences, and improvisational choices. This type of improvisation is difficult when producing content for the web, because of the technical complexity already involved Gaylor thinks that by considering agile web production techniques as a model, it may be possible to create a new production process that carries over positive aspects of traditional film production but accommodates a more rapid product cycle and web-native interactivity and responsiveness.

International & Interdisciplinary Collaboration

One remarkable feature of Do Not Track is its international and interdisciplinary production team, who collaborates remotely for the majority of production. The team what Gaylor calls the “RACI” model to collaborate.  As shown in the figure below, the model assigns each team member to categories named Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed. This approach indicates the roles of each member upfront and clearly. People who are ‘responsible’, ‘accountable’ and, ‘consulted’ all contribute creatively to the project but, at the end, the final decision is the responsibility of the ‘accountable’ person. The ‘informed’ group receives updates about the project but they do not collaborate creatively. This coherent distribution of responsibility prevents micromanaging and gives people enough room to experiment. Gaylor is a firm supporter of this method: “That’s how I think you get good results when something is distributed like this. If you are in there micromanaging every step and nobody is having any fun, you’re going to just fail, you’re going to have ultimate burnout”.

RACI Model – from the “Episode Guide” of DNT

The team behind Do Not Track was organized into separate core groups for story, design, development, montage, project management and conversation management. The figure below illustrates how the RACI model was employed across these groups.

Team – from the “Episode Guide” of DNT

The Script team creates the story. The UX team designs all the elements that go into the project. The development team codes the interactive documentary,  and the montage team edits the film.

Gaylor explains that on an interdisciplinary team, crosstalk between developers, designers, and project managers is a necessity. A project manager, for example, might not need to be able to code, but should be able to ask the right questions of coders. As Gaylor explains: “A good product manager is going to ask the right sort of naïve questions like, ‘Did you think about it this way?’ Or, ‘Oh okay I understand, it takes too long to create this because of this service, have we considered writing this one our self, what would that take?’”

Team – from the “Episode Guide” of DNT

There are two organizational teams in Do Not Track. The project management team is responsible for the production of the whole project, from filming to web design to development. The conversation management team handles outreach, marketing, and user experience outside of the website. Below is a chart illustrating how the conversation team works.

Conversation Management

But how do you communicate with a team that is dispersed around the globe? Collaborators are from Quebec, British Columbia, France, and Germany, which makes communication a big challenge.Do Not Track began with several large, in-person meetings in Paris, where they developed a style guide and production schedule. After this, the team relied heavily on real-time collaboration tools like Google Docs, Basecamp and Slack, and a weekly online action meeting. For Gaylor, communication is basically project management and that’s part of the work.

Communication through Google Docs

Script & Writing

Writing for i-docs is a challenge: multiple types of media, interactivity, personalization all have to go into the script. How do you organize all this information? How do you create a script format? This is a complex question, and the storyboard of Do Not Track reveals some interesting solutions. Interactivity is communicated through state-based storyboards, where a user is not just at a timestamp, but also has several variables attached based on personalization and prior choices. “Fail-states” convey scenarios when things don’t go as planned (such as viewer’s Facebook do not reveal enough data). The script also has labels to mark different types of media. These labels offer a convenient vocabulary for writing interactive docs.

The labels we find on Do Not Track’s storyboard are:

1-Video: This label is used to mark the video content particularly shot for DNT. Note all the different languages. The film is prepared in different languages and automatically plays in a different language depending on the location of the user.

Video Label

2-Text Input: The information users input to make the experience personalized. Note that the video is “Cinemagraph style” which means it is a moving photograph. It can loop forever until the user puts in information.

Text Input Label

3- Real Time: This label is used to mark the moments when users see information depending on the data they provide and on the data the DNT API collected from their IP, such as where someone lives, which computer she uses, etc. (User Dynamic Information)

Realtime Label

4-Fail States: What if the user doesn’t provide any information, or the information provided is not adequate? For those scenarios there are alternative scenes,  which are marked as Fail States.

Fail States

5-Archive: This label is used for archival footage.

Archive Label

Other labels include “Audio Only”, for cases, where the user only hears audio and “Animation”, when animated images are used.

How do you brainstorm and make decisions? Easy! Discussion about the script was made through Google comments:

An Example of how RACI model works. Since Brett is accountable for the script, he has the last say to reject or accept suggestions.

Collaboratively working on GoogleDocs

***

Do Not Track presents a highly innovative production model; it borrows from web and tech development as well as filmmaking in order to find the best process for the form. It brings techniques from web development into film production: agile methods, long-distance collaboration, and state-based storyboards. While these approaches fit naturally into the distribution system of the web  (making it immediately available and modifying it on the fly), they don’t integrate well with the established funding or distribution models for film. New analytic tools for understanding user behavior can be a powerful source of knowledge about the audience to filmmakers, and can help them identify problems or miscommunication, but these tools are not without risk. The rapid prototyping cycle can be reductive; user-centered filmmaking can lead to flat content. Do Not Track is aware of these shortcomings and tries to walk on a tightrope balancing flashy with meaningful, brief with comprehensive. Furthermore, in order to illustrate its subject, Do Not Track uses the same tools as advertising companies: personalization and social media logins. It doesn’t preach against analytics or algorithmically customized content: rather, it relies on these tools. However, by revealing how the tools work, the documentary seeks to inform the audiences about these technologies and what implications they have on our everyday life while leading the audiences in taking the action steps, using security softwares and websites, to ensure their privacy online.

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Image Credit: Jennifer 8. Lee

For someone who has grown up with reading, the idea of “reinventing” the reading experience might seem either like sacrilege or like a waste of time. At the CODEX hackathon, which ran from June 26-28 in San Francisco, several of us spent the first few minutes of the event rhapsodizing about the physical joys of reading: trailing fingers over unbroken spines, inhaling the rich and varied scents of different papers. To those who read, the book is no trifling matter, and its form is as much a part of its purpose as its content.

And yet, with or without our consent and awareness, the experience of reading is changing under us, and that is part of what this hackathon was meant to address. Newspapers, as has been much noted, have migrated online, but perhaps they were a lagging indicator. The experience of finding and securing information has become a rapid and ideally lossless process. There is something deeply inefficient (and I’m not just talking about time) about finding a book, reading it, taking notes out of it, tracking the notes back to some imaginary writer’s attic, and consulting them as a primary or even secondary sources.

If research has the whiff of necessity about it, how do we address the notion of pleasure? Some 69 per cent of Americans read a print book in 2013, and another 55 percent disagree that libraries have not kept up with new technology. So what are the pleasures of reading in the digital age?

For some people reading is a social experience, and the Internet has enabled a greater breadth of connection.  At one point, Goodreads was one of the country’s fastest-growing social networks. During the two days of the CODEX hackathon, one group decided to create an app that would help people read more, and so their members interviewed the rest of us about the greatest obstacle to our reading.

“What keeps you from reading more books?” asked one of the developers from this group. He’d come over to a corner of the Code for America basement in SF, where my group (there were four of us) were reclining while debating our own ideas. “Is it that reading is a lonely experience?”

The rest of us exchanged looks of astonishment. The idea that anyone could perceive reading as lonely had never occurred to me. Anyone who has “lent a friend a book” understands what it means to exchange a unique intimacy. Here, the action suggests, learn about me by learning what has moved me.

That group eventually went for another idea, but they weren’t entirely wrong: reading isn’t lonely, of course, but it’s precisely that absence of loneliness that might pave the way to other, equally close, connections.

The hackathon attendees being a group of (largely) millennials, one hackathon team evolved the notion of “Kindlr” – a dating app for people who’d rather be reading. A company called BitLit Media has released an app called “Shelfie,” which allows users to take photos of the books on their bookshelf. The app then matches the user with free or low-priced ebook versions of those same print books.  There’s something very nifty about Shelfie’s app, and the Kindlr group used Shelfie’s API to allow potential daters to upload pictures of their bookshelves as the ultimate guide to their psyche. While giving his three-minute demo at the end of the hackathon, the presenter (charming, dry) offered a series of questions on which the app would match potential couples: “what is one book you would never read?”  Or, more tellingly, “what is the last book you lied about finishing?” (Not mentioned: “Is it wrong to lie about finishing?”)

Of all the hackathon ideas, this one got some of the biggest laughs, and possibly also some of the most appreciative glances. Maybe it’s a bad idea to look to readers as models of fidelity: any true reader knows that choosing a “favorite” book is an exercise for noobs, because one of the greatest pleasures of reading is its near-infinite variety.  Even the Kindlr presenter acknowledged the pointlessness of “The One”, saying of a potential profile match who had only 10 books in her digital library, “I’m not going to date a filthy casual.”

In keeping with the theme of unlikely matches, another crowd favorite was “Neural Public Library” – a team that described their concept as “a library of book titles and authors generated by a recursive neural network.” The fictional titles are generated by the network, while the cover images are grabbed from Flickr. Although a “recursive neural network” sounds only slightly more complex than the Dewey Decimal System, NPL’s website (and accompanying Twitter stream!) serve a host of humorous auto-generalia. Today, in the Romance genre, this is what their website gave me:

Speaking of the challenges of finishing, more than one group tried to shorten the physical experience of reading. “Instant Classic” was developed by Media Lab alum Dan Schultz and his team. Their program shortens any text by removing words and sometimes whole sentences. Users can choose the percentage of shortening they require. So, for example, the immortal lines:

“To Sherlock Holmes she is always _the_ woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex. It was not that he felt any emotion akin to love for Irene Adler. All emotions, and that one particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind.”

Become the following, when shortened to 50 per cent:

“To Sherlock Holmes, she is always _the_ woman. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex. It was not that he felt any emotion akin to love for Irene Adler, since all emotions, and that one particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind.”

By reducing to 10 per cent, we get:

“To Sherlock Holmes, she is always _the_ woman, not because of any emotion akin to love.”

What a fascinating transition, and not a wholly nightmarish paraphrase. Maybe Holmes, with his penchant for directness, would approve. In his presentation, Schultz acknowledged that this function may not be the best thing for fiction, where the pleasure lies in more than effective movement from Point A to Point B. But then again, doesn’t everyone kind of agree that Dickens and Hugo could have used some forced-shortening? Of course, set the browser’s view preference to 0 per cent and the text disappears altogether. A great piece of performance art, maybe, but anxiety-inducing if permanence is what you crave.

Another fascinating entry in the “read faster” Olympics was “Boustrophedon,” the practice of reading alternating lines of text in opposing directions. Here are the first few lines of “A Room of One’s Own”, rendered in Boustrophedon’s reader:

According to the project’s creator, “The ancient Greeks and Romans did it!” I leave it to you, dear reader, to decide whether this method of reading feels easier.

Mailchimp contributed an API as well as a prize for the best team that used it: Apple watches, or Android equivalents. Several teams, striving for this trophy, experimented with serialized fiction, an art form that had its heyday in the Victorian Era (astonishing as it may now seem to both industries, fiction once sold magazines). And yet, if serial fiction relies upon the interplay of frustration and longing, then certain authors are already experts at tugging the strings. Or, as one of my friends said in response to the MailBook project: “Can we make something like that for George RR Martin?”

There were many more projects, and a full set of these projects resides here (with demos, if you’re so inclined!) My own group began with the goal of creating an “immersive” reader for an e-text, thereby transmitting the sensory experience of literary place. After two days of hacking and hawing, we had a workable demo of Chapter Five of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “Hound of the Baskervilles.” As a reader scrolled through, a map in the background switched locations, showed images, and even played sound effects. A snapshot from our final presentation, below:

As with all such endeavors, the joy lay not just in releasing a prototype, but in working alongside a group of like-minded individuals. My teammate Eric Gardner, the Digital Publications Developer at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, introduced me to Jekyll, Sir Trevor and Mapbox Studio, all through the simple mechanism of using them while I happened to be looking over his shoulder. Teammate Ted Benson, who describes himself on his website as an “expatriate of MIT CSAIL”, lent us a hand with the spreadsheet-based website management he’s been developing over at Cloudstitch. My final teammate, Arendse Lund, was a writer-in-residence in Colorado.

These relationships were the point, not the byproduct. Jennifer 8. Lee, who curated the crowd as well as the spectacular food (most of the items I didn’t recognize, and I’m not an inexperienced eater), had the following to say about her motivations: “The most important mission of the CODEX Hackathon was building relationships through face-to-face interaction, since publishing is an industry that relies so much on personal trust and it’s an industry that has to move forward as an ecosystem.” (Lee is CEO of the Plympton literary studio, who count the Twitter Fiction Festival among their projects.)

At the hackathon, the best projects didn’t reinvent the reading experience so much as build scaffolding around it. The experience of reading is never face-to-face, which is both its allure and its challenge. In this, reading may be a great correlate for something like Facebook: it flirts heavily with human connection, but at the end, commitment remains uncertain. A great book-based app, then, has to bring the outside world right up to the gate of the word, and then, without fanfare, abandon it.

The next CODEX hackathon takes place in Boston/Cambridge from January 8-10, 2016.

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To the members of the MIT community:

I write to share the findings of the MIT Climate Change Conversation Committee. The Committee submitted this report on Friday to the four faculty members President Reif asked to serve as the “Conversation Leadership,” Provost Marty Schmidt, MITEI Director Bob Armstrong, Environmental Solutions Initiative Director Susan Solomon and me.

Reflecting 10 months of intense effort and extensive community engagement, these findings present an ambitious set of potential opportunities for action.

I am tremendously grateful to the chair, Professor Roman Stocker, and all of the Committee members. By tackling this important assignment with energy, imagination and seriousness, they delivered to our community an exceptionally constructive and illuminating process for exploring the most effective strategies for climate action. In the best MIT tradition of clear-eyed problem-solving, their thoughtful groundwork enabled the MIT community to consider this urgent, complex and highly charged subject in a respectful way that left us all better informed and better prepared to act.

The next step is a 30-day community comment period. I hope that you will review and reflect on the Committee’s findings. If this triggers new insights or further suggestions, please share them via this email address – climateconversation@mit.edu – by July 15.

At that point, the Conversation Leadership will weigh the issues and options, and offer recommendations to President Reif. Early in the fall semester, President Reif will share with the community an Institute plan for how MIT can lead in addressing climate change.

I look forward to joining with you in confronting the grand challenge of climate action.

Sincerely,

Maria T. Zuber

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Automated cars, popularly rendered as “driverless” or “self-driving” cars, are a major sector of technological development in artificial intelligence and present a variety of questions for design, policy, and the culture at large. This work addresses the dominant narratives and ideologies around self-driving vehicles and their historical antecedents, examining both the media’s representation of self-driving vehicles and the sources of the idea, common both among the media and many self-driving vehicle researchers, that complete vehicle autonomy is the most valuable future vision, or even the only one worth discussing and investigating. This popular story has important social stakes (including surveillance, responsibility, and access), embedded in the technologies and fields involved in visions of full automation (machine vision, mapping, algorithmic ethics), which bear investigating for the possible futures of automation that they present. However, other paradigms for automation exist, representing lenses from literature in the fields of human supervisory control and joint-cognitive systems design. These fields—compared with that of AI—provide a very different read on what automation means and where it is headed in the future, which leads to the possibility of different futures, with different stakes and trade-offs. The work examines how automation taxonomies, such as that by the NHTSA, fail to account for these possibilities. Finally, this work examines what cultural understandings need to change to make this (cyborg) picture more broadly comprehensible, and suggests potential impacts for policy and future technological development. It argues that a broader appreciation for our hybrid engagements with machines, and recognition that automation alone does not solve any social problems, can alter public opinion and policy in productive ways, away from focus on “autonomous” robots divorced from human agency, and toward system-level joint human-machine designs that address societal needs.

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Let us first consider the sidewalk. In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, a book about urban planning, Jane Jacobs prescribes conditions for the ideal use of sidewalks: “First, there must be a clear demarcation between what is public space and what is private space. Public and private spaces cannot ooze into each other…Second, there must be eyes upon the street, eyes belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors of the street.” (35) Jacobs points to the inherent relationship of public/private space to surveillance and perhaps even anticipates the problems that may arise when these distinctions are unclear and when/where it is appropriate for natural surveillance to occur. This is exactly what we deal with in Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain. For Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar, love is a spatial problem. Their relationship can only seem to find its full expression in the marginal mountains, backwoods, and wilderness — whereas outside of these spaces, the same relationship comes under scrutiny, becomes muted, and is hidden altogether. Specifically, the film deals painstakingly with what Lauren Berlant calls a “zoning” of love and desire to restricted and restrictive spaces, a term that we can think about in parallel to Jacobs’ language of city planning and clearly demarcating the public and private. This paper will examine how non-normative love/desire functions in public and private space and will aim to deconstruct how surveillance transforms love/desire in public/private space from paradisiacal to problematic. In this essay, I will address the following questions: How does the film structure “zones” of public/private space, and how are these structures antithetical or not to the ideals of paradise/fantasy when it comes to love/desire? How might surveillance disrupt what is allowed or not allowed in the public/private, and what does it mean that surveillance can convert paradisiacal spaces of plenitude into sites of shaming, discipline, and violence? After we’ve looked at these questions, we may then challenge whether love can be paradisiacal at all (as Jack Twist would say: “where the blue birds sing and there’s a whiskey spring”) with zones, or whether love/desire itself simply becomes a no-where or no-place that is impossible to inhabit.

Foremost, we must be clear about how to deal with love and desire as they relate to space, as well as how they relate to notions of paradise and fantasy. I will be leaning on Lauren Berlant’s characterization of these concepts in Desire/Love: whereas desire is a “state of attachment to something or someone,” (6) love “makes a world for desire’s endurance” (7). Thus, love serves as a site for the repetition and continued iteration of desire. That is, love contains desire. This containment maps onto the idea of the “zoning” (14) of love/desire as mediated by external power structures. Berlant draws on Freud to illustrate this interdiction: “Questions about the designs of desire not only have consequences for the ways we think about intimate sexual practices, sexual identity, identification, and attachment: they also help us track sexuality in the political sphere and mass entertainment, since public sites help to designate which forms of desire can be taken for granted as legitimate, in contrast to those modes of desiring that seem to deserve pity, fear, and antagonism” (pp. 23-24). As Jacobs does with sidewalks, Berlant gives us a way of thinking of the relationship between love/desire, space, and surveillance — that is, public space is a zone in which desire is tracked and politicized. We can transpose and invert this notion within Brokeback to evaluate whether private spaces function the same way. Next, Berlant offers a taxonomy for love in relation to fantasy, claiming, “love is deemed always an outcome of fantasy” (69); in other words, fantasy produces love, and love cannot exist without fantasy. (For the context of this essay, I will be talking about fantasy and paradise synonymously, as both serve as utopian counternarratives to misery and suffering.) Williams echoes this in “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess” in her discussion of the structures of fantasy, calling fantasy a “setting for desire” (10), which works productively with the idea that fantasy generates love. Given the logic that both fantasy and love can contain desire, we may also think about how love and fantasy often stand in for each other. Like Berlant, Williams also leans on Freud to introduce the idea of “original fantasy” (10) as a form of solving problems of difference. In this context, in the same way that castration might function as a fantasy to solve the problem of difference in gender and sex, we might say that love and fantasy offer a solution to the “quest for connection” in melodrama (11), e.g. through Jack and Ennis’ non-normative romance. So, if fantasy/paradise produces love/desire, and love/desire tends to be zoned within particular spaces, let us then consider Brokeback’s visual and textual rhetoric to understand how public/private spaces in the film establish where Jack and Ennis’ romantic relationship is cast as legitimate or illegitimate. I will also be investigating how the film treats vision and sight as modes of surveillance. First, I will focus on the problem of public and private zones, then move on to discuss how acts of surveillance can disrupt the function of these zones.

On the surface, the film neither seems to privilege public space nor private space as sites that legitimize Jack and Ennis’ relationship to the viewer; we see positive expressions of their love/desire for each other in both public and private spaces. The film offers rhetorical cues for when public/private spaces are meant to be perceived as paradisiacal and affectively positive, versus when they become problematic and affectively negative on behalf of the viewer and characters involved. From the beginning of Brokeback, the film zones the mountains of Wyoming as a site that visually stands apart from others. In contrast to the bareness of the landscape around Aguirre’s cramped trailer office, wide shots of the landscape evince the openness and vacancy of the area (excepting the occasional wild bear, elk, and the sheep) as well as the distance between the mountains and the conventions that exist beyond them back on ground level. (We later also learn that Brokeback is a fourteen-hour drive for Jack from Texas, so this distance is neither imaginary nor exaggerated.) The mountains are also presented with a sort of Edenic visual language, often represented by verdant foliage and sweeping skies. Brokeback is a public space for unrestricted expression of the characters’ own selves as well as a space that “makes possible the love that overwhelms these two men” (Kitses 23). In a scene with Jack and Ennis in front of the campfire, Jack shrieks and facetiously mimics a rodeo cowboy and Ennis admits, “Hell, that’s the most I’ve spoken in a year.” Conversely, their tent, usually lit with warm yellow tones for its interior shots, serves as a private, enclosed space on the public, open mountain landscape. Using Williams’ concept here, the tent on the mountain is a fantasy/paradise that provides a setting for desire. The only other place that we see this happen is the motel room in Wyoming when Jack comes to visit Ennis, pointing at the scarcity of zones beyond Brokeback for their love/desire’s sexual expression. While public and private settings both enable Jack and Ennis’ romance, we are reminded too that paradise invariably requires isolation, a constraint that consequently disables and impairs their relationship. The public space of Brokeback itself becomes a problematic zone, its openness seeming paradoxically restrictive as it grows more obvious that their relationship can only exist in spatial liminality. This realization spurs a confessional confrontation the last time they see each other:

JACK: Tell you what, we coulda had a good life together, fuckin’ real good life, had us a place of our own. But you didn’t want it, Ennis! So what we got now is Brokeback Mountain. Everything’s built on that.

[…]

ENNIS: It’s because of you, Jack, that I’m like this. I’m nothin’. I’m nowhere…

Here, Jack points out the zero-sum game that they have both been playing with regard to space: it’s either Brokeback or nowhere. In the beginning of the movie, Aguirre tells Jack and Ennis: “You eat your supper and breakfast in camp, but you sleep with the sheep, hundred percent, no fire, don’t leave no sign.” Perhaps the fact that Jack and Ennis are asked to leave zero evidence of their presence on Brokeback foreshadows it as a place that eventually impossibilizes their relationship’s public inscription and existence. The film also casts domestic zones (the home, the workplace), which Jack and Ennis share with Lureen and Alma, respectively, as private spaces that their non-normative romance interrupts. By repeatedly escaping to Brokeback to be with each other, Jack and Ennis grow increasingly distant from their wives and families. Ennis and Alma’s marriage erodes and ends in divorce while Jack remarks about his relationship with Lureen: “As far as our marriage goes we can do it over the phone.” Jack and Ennis’ relationship seems to be impossible within these private domestic zones. We might also consider framing as another mode of zoning in the film. For instance, the dramatic scale of Brokeback that we see in the initial establishing shots shrinks to the dimensions of a postcard contained by the private space of Ennis’ closet. Similarly, the final shot of the film leaves the spectator with an eclipsed view of the wilderness that once dominated the screen, as seen from the inside perspective of Ennis’ claustrophobic trailer home. Furthermore, the problem of framing also manifests itself in the film’s mixing of genres. Whereas genres are designed to frame (and perhaps zone) types of narratives, Brokeback imports the Western into melodrama: “The melodrama contains the action, the heroes unable to achieve self-definition…But at the same time the Western’s conventions can be said to constrain the melos, lowering the emotional and stylistic peaks, the extreme gestures, the ‘music’ of the melodrama” (Kitses 27). Thus the film’s narrative classification itself is one marked by containment and constraint — the same language that Berlant and Williams use to talk about love, desire, and fantasy — with no clear place or definition in one genre or the other. While Kitses might say that the dissonance between genres works to “naturalize” (25) the queer love story, it problematizes both the public identity and private interior lives of the protagonists in that the public performance of masculinity and heteronormativity that often accompanies the Western genre seems irresolutely discordant with the private non-normative sexual and emotional lives of the film’s protagonists. Any naturalization of their relationship is only possible through fantasy (through the characters and the spectator), considering the ultimate death of their relationship. This returns to the idea that fantasy can be read as a convention that solves problems of difference, in this case the difference between heteronormativity and homonormativity. Now that we have looked at how fantasy and paradise operate across the film’s different zones, we can say that both public and private space seem to invite and evict the possibility of Jack and Ennis’ romantic love, making paradise appear reachable and remote in both demarcations of space. If this is true, then these sites have the ability to play twin, Janusian roles: to suspend as well as provoke the Fall. What prompts the oscillation is the figure of surveillance, which we will examine next.

In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault writes, “Visibility is a trap” (100). This could be an appropriate epigraph to consider alongside the discussion of sight and surveillance in Brokeback. Acts of surveillance serve as a means of appropriating political, sexual, and economic power in the film. The power that one gains through surveillance has the ability to transform both public and private sites of plenitude into ones of paucity. To start, let us dissect different readings of surveillant acts in the film. One reading of surveillance is that it is a a way of ensuring security. Jack and Ennis’ sole duty on Brokeback is to watch Aguirre’s sheep (i.e., to surveil them), and the conceit of this act is that watching the sheep equals protecting the sheep. However, despite their vigilance over the animals, their stint on Brokeback inevitably results in the death of sheep, losing track of sheep, and mixing-up of sheep with another herd. While at first blush we are meant to think of surveillance as a form protection or accounting, the film suggests also that it often leads to more violent consequences like tracking and intrusion.

Suddenly, the mountains, “like the oceans, aggressively visible” (Kitses 25), make possible the intrusion of Aguirre’s binoculars on the spectacle of Jack and Ennis’ relationship, changing the initially idyllic setting into one of public shame. Aguirre’s vitriolic denial of a job for Jack is a direct result of his surveillance over Jack/Ennis, from which he makes a judgment on their their lackadaisical work habits and sexuality: “Twist, you guys wasn’t gettin’ paid to leave the dogs baby-sit the sheep while you stemmed the rose. Now get the hell out of my trailer.” While looking is something that grants political and economic power between Aguirre and Jack/Ennis, it is also a mode of gaining and conceding sexual power between Jack and Ennis. Jack holds a sort of ocular advantage over Ennis, the latter characterized by his verbal and visual restraint, usually pictured looking at away from his interlocutor and seldom speaking long utterances. When they first meet, Jack regards Ennis in the rearview mirror of his pickup truck. In the tent the first two times they have sex, we see close-up shots of Jack’s face looking at Ennis, whereas Ennis’ eyes are either closed, looking downward, or unpictured. Hats, especially when it comes to Ennis, work to accentuate when looking happens or does not happen, as they have the ability to obscure and block the gaze. Ennis uses his hat to shield his face from view when he traumatically breaks down in the alley after his and Jack’s first separation. So, if Jack is a character who often looks, Ennis is then a character constantly anxious about being looked at, which prompts further questions about how surveillance can be actual as well as perceived. To revisit Discipline and Punish, Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, as discussed by Foucault, is one of the more widely cited figures in the discourse on surveillance. It is an architectural design for prison institutions that is meant “to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power” and renders surveillance as “permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in action” (201). For Ennis, going into town means entering a panoptic zone that raises certain anxieties about being watched, about others knowing about his homosexuality: “You ever get the feelin’, I don’t know, uh, when you’re in town, and someone looks at you, suspicious, like he knows. And then you go out on the pavement, and everyone’s lookin’ at you, like they all know too?” Ennis’ sense of public space as sites of judgment conjoin both Berlant’s claim that public spaces help to designate what is legitimate (pp. 23-24) with Foucault’s idea of “judges of normality” being present everywhere, making private matters feel as though they are public concern. According to that reading, surveillance is not limited to public space at all; it can also intervene anywhere, through anyone. Foucault suggests, “We are in the society of the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the social worker-judge; it is on them that the universal reign of the normative is based; and each individual, wherever he may find himself, subjects to it his body, his gestures, his behavior, his aptitudes, his achievements” (304). In short, anyone can be a watcher for what is “normative” or not, and anyone can be watched, anytime. Ennis’ decision to live on the outskirts of town and on what Alma calls “lonesome old ranches” is perhaps a deliberate decision to stay away from sight, surveillance, and the judgment that often accompanies it. Still, he is unable to avoid surveillance even in the private space of his home. Alma’s gaze leads her to discover Jack and Ennis kissing in the alley, and her intrusion upon Ennis’ crail case for fishing through her note (“Hello, Ennis, bring some fish home. Love, Alma.”) is an act of surveillance that confirms her suspicion of her husband’s relationship with Jack. She later uses the knowledge of their relationship to disempower Ennis’ role as a husband and father, first through filing for divorce and later during a violent confrontation during Thanksgiving. Even after the divorce from Alma, a reticent Ennis turns Jack away in barely a mouthful of words in front of his ranch. Importantly, he does this in the presence of his daughters, who, though they are not cast as surveillant actors, still seem to give Ennis a sense of being watched and judged. Ennis’ paranoia about being watched may also stem from his childhood memory of seeing the dead body of Earl, a homosexual man in his community, meant to be a warning to others who strayed from society’s conventions. The fact that Earl’s murderers are never revealed and that circumstances of Jack’s death are left ambiguous suggest that anyone in the public anomie could have been and could still be responsible for this policing of sexuality, a notion that would rightly inspire fear and paranoia.

Finally, the most striking convergence of all aforementioned notions of the public/private, fantasy/paradise, love/desire, and surveillance is the figure of marriage. With regard to zoning public/private space, weddings occur in public settings with witnesses. We see Ennis and Alma get married in a church full of people, and tragically, we see their marriage end in a courthouse likewise populated with other bodies. Marriages are officiated/unofficiated (read: made legitimate/null) in these public settings. As far as fantasy/paradise goes, weddings historically bookend narratives to point at a “happily ever after,” a sort of paradise in itself. The final scene involves Alma, Jr., asking for Ennis’ permission to get married, then departing toward her wedding in the proximate future. Alma, Jr.’s marriage-fantasy is juxtaposed with another. What happens next in that scene can also be regarded as a sort of lo-fi wedding: Ennis stands facing Jack (represented by an object, his shirt), backgrounded by a postcard that stands in for Brokeback Mountain, and utters the words, “Jack, I swear…” The incompleteness of this phrase invites the spectator to fill in the ellipses to approach some meaning, but one must not ignore that these are words that we also hear, incidentally, in wedding vows. Despite the fantastic possibility of this wedding, it is a moment that is marked by impossibility. That Jack can never answer to Ennis; that there are no witnesses; that both the shirt and postcard get folded back into the recesses of the closet; that this takes place in a constrained private space of Ennis’ trailer rather than an open public one suggests, like the postcard print of Brokeback, that the fantasy of their love can only be sustained through simulacra, lacking true definition in public space. Then again, what I said about a lack of witnesses in the final scene is not totally correct. There is at least one intended witness to the lo-fi wedding: the spectator. Same-sex marriage had still not been legalized in the United States by 2005, when this film was released. Reading this scene against a real-world political context may assign it a different meaning. Perhaps the fantasy of witnessing a same-sex marriage works toward provoking public surveillance of such an event instead of preventing it, with the sense that such a provocation might instantiate change, evoke empathy, even naturalize this love story.

Ennis declares that it is because of his relationship with Jack that he is “like this,” that he is “nowhere.” Incidentally, the Greek root for utopia, a synonym for paradise, comes from ou, meaning “not” and topos, meaning “place.” As we have seen, Brokeback is simultaneously the only place Jack and Ennis can be together and no place for them to be together. Our investigation into how the concepts of public/private space, love/desire, and fantasy/paradise interact gives rise to a new set of questions to consider, primarily: is it possible at all to achieve or arrive at paradise through love/desire when it must be zoned, surveilled, accounted for, politicized, patrolled? Zoning, in the case of Jack and Ennis’ relationship, seems antithetical to non-normative love/desire and fantasy/paradise. Acts of surveillance work toward enforcing containment, as in the case with the sheep on the mountain and Alma’s fishing note, but we may also read containment as ultimately futile. The sheep still get mixed up; Ennis and Alma still divorce. However, surveillance deeply debilitates those who attempt to cross (or “ooze,” to revisit Jane Jacobs’ language) over designated zones. And given that both public and private space can be disrupted by acts of surveillance, do we also need to think more deeply about what this does to notions of privacy? Perhaps privacy provides a mechanism for self-determination, and since the failure of Jack and Ennis’ romance is rooted in their “inability to achieve self-definition” (Kitses 27), it is lack of privacy (and not lack of private space) that problematizes the fantasy. In both public and private settings, Jack and Ennis’ “life together has been one apart” (27), impossibilized by the zones their love/desire was restricted to. Ennis and the spectator are left the sole solution of resolving this problem of space through fantasy, which, as Rushdie would say, speaks to “the human dream of leaving, a dream at least as powerful as its countervailing dream of roots…It is a celebration of Escape, a great paean to the Uprooted Self, a hymn — the hymn — to elsewhere” (qtd. in Batchelor 74).

Bibliography

Batchelor, David. Chromophobia. Reaktion Books, pp. 64-75, 2000.

Berlant, Lauren. Desire/Love. Punctum Books. 2012.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. Translated from French by Alan Sheridan. Vintage Books: New York, NY, 2009.

Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Vintage Books: New York, pp. 34-35, 1961.

Kitses, Jim. “All That Brokeback Allows.” Film Quarterly, Vol. 60, No. 3. University of California Press, pp. 22-27, 2007.

Brokeback Mountain. Dir. Ang Lee. Perf. Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal. River Road Entertainment, 2005. Film.

Gay Marriage Timeline: 2000-2004, 2005-2011. ProCon.org.

Williams, Linda. “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess.” Film Quarterly, Vol. 44, No. 4. University of California Press, pp. 2-13, 1991.

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