Ubiquitous Visuality: Towards a P While the dominant discourse of bodily spectacle looms large, with the development of franchise films in the past decade in particular, sensibilities to what bodies do what on screen, and how, have developed, testifying to a complex spectatorial engagement with the phenomenon. And while bodies on screen are still central to their attractiveness, the nature of these bodies begs attention: a gangly crew of children in Stranger Things , nerds and geeks in The Big Bang Theory , all matter of grotesque characters in American Horror Story , an African American female lead in How to Get Away with Murder or Scandal.
As Hollywood regularly struggles with accusations of whitewashing and sexism in its most popular vehicles, popular TV fiction chips at the ideological edifice, promoting a more diverse visual environment. Yet it is a challenge that a handful of films are also trying to meet, encountering opposition proportionate to their intended viewership.
Attention focuses primarily on the female body and how its relationship to beauty as a generic expectation is problematized, concentrating on recent tv shows, How to Get Away with Murder , Dietland , Girls , and films Nocturnal Animals , Tom Ford, and Blade Runner , Denis Villeneuve, Oversized, magnified bodies spread over giant billboards have become a fixture of the contemporary metropolitan cityscape. They are seductive bodies, staring unabashedly into the camera or averting their faces the better to draw attention to their fetishized parts.
They are wealthy bodies, professional bodies, or in turn bodies enjoying the comforts of leisurely activities or lazy reposeβemotional and communal bodies, surrounded by friends and family, active, performative bodies dealing out a tale of perpetually renewed success and happiness for the price of whatever products they happen to be selling. Screens big and small give additional resonance to their visibility as they keep popping up on our mobile devices, with which we in turn produce images of our bodies beautified via countless apps for further circulation.
The body beautiful, fashioned at the movies and promised by commercial culture, is constantly paraded as the ultimate signifier and capital of our liberal societies, caught in an economy of permanent exposure.
