Category: Group C

Sterne casually mentions early on in his chapter the way in which a recorded voice is abstracted from the body, similar to our definition of the abject as something which once belonged to the body now existing outside of it. Though I don’t think we consider the recorded voice to be abject at this point, the idea of a voice recording existing while the voice box which gave rise to those sounds rots in the ground merits further contemplation.

I was originally very skeptical of voice recordings aimed at an imagined future audience, mainly for reasons of human pride and narcissism I feel must be inherent in such a recording. However, I remember in one of my classes last semester we listened to a recording of a black Southern woman as part of our examination of Zora Neale Hurston’s anthropological work. Hurston (one of Franz Boas’s mentees) recorded this woman herself, and the existence of this recording allows us to now examine Hurston’s use of dialect in comparison to how people actually spoke (and find that Hurston’s work was incredibly accurate and thorough). Some of Hurston’s recordees had also been enslaved and the phonograph gave them a method in which to tell their own story on their terms. As with Fewkes’s research, there is a sense of time stripping away this opportunity. Hurston’s method was to use her positionality as a Southern black woman to ingratiate herself into the communities where she was performing ethnographies, so I wonder how her recordings compare to those of Fletcher and Fewkes in terms of constructed and only external nature. Regardless, when we consider anthropological work, clearly the voice beyond the grave has intellectual and academic merit beyond self-important postulating.

To say that sound reproduction is both hypertemporalized and detemporalized, as well as storing time itself is very theoretical, but makes me think of how I use song recordings to tell time in my life. For example, when I shower, I track how long I take by how many songs I’ve listened to (assuming most songs are between three and four minutes as has become the standard) (another interesting investigation might be into why this time length is so popular). I also demarcate certain periods of my life by what song I was listening to on repeat (do not ask about the month where all I listened to was Landslide). I wonder how we can connect the despacialization of sound/communication as introduced by the telegram and phone and the detemporalization of sound as introduced by the phonograph.

Jonathan Sterne’s “A Resonant Tomb” likens voice recording to the embalming of a corpse, a comparison I don’t understand or with which I disagree. Sterne writes extensively about exteriority vs. interiority in methods of preservation – embalmment is concerned with preserving the exterior of the body instead of the inside – and uses this as the primary link between embalming and sound recording. He asserts that while “speech is traditionally considered as both interior and exterior,” recorded voices, especially of the departed, “no longer emanate from bodies that serve as containers for self-awareness,” and by that token, retain “none of [their] interior self-awareness” (290). His argument seems to be that the interiority of a voice lies in its point of origin – if it is no longer linked to a body, it has lost its core.

What about voices we hear when we can’t see the speaker, then? When we are too short to see the lecturer over the heads of the people standing in front of us? Is the speech any less substantial for us than for those who can see the body from which the voice is produced?

Later, examining the painting His Master’s Voice, Sterne writes, “when we see a dog listening to a gramophone, we understand that the important issue is the sound of the voice, not what was said, since dogs are known for heeding the voices of their masters more often than their words” (303). The painting is heartbreaking because we imagine the dog recognizing the voice of his master from beyond the grave, and not understanding his absence. Another of Sterne’s anecdotes mentions a priest who recorded a sermon for his own funeral. He begins to cry at the end of his recording, after preaching, and the sound “caused a shudder of horror among those who were present” (303).

These qualities, I think, are the core of voice, a true interiority that is not lost in recording: our ability to find identity in a voice, and its ability to manipulate our emotions. In Sterne’s closing summary, he writes that voice recording “does not preserve a preexisting sonic event as it happens so much as it creates and organizes sonic events for the possibility of preservation and repetition” (332). Perhaps the emotional burden of hearing the dead priest’s eulogy, for someone hearing it in person before he was dead, would have been different from the burden on someone present at the funeral. In this way, the sonic event has not been duplicated, per say. However, the voice still has the power to affect powerful emotion, which I think is proof of some eternal interiority in sound.

I know this idea of grasping for a sort of immortality in technology all too well, I fear. To avoid a sob story of sorts I’ll skip details, but last year my grandmother died after a surgery. While the initial reaction was likely similar to every death of a grandparent who was far away, what struck me when reading A Resonant Tomb was how much it reminded me of my mother as she grieved for the death of hers.

A few days after my mother came home from handling my grandmother’s affairs, my mother approached me with my grandmother’s cellphone, asking how to pull my grandmother’s voicemail message onto a computer so she could save it. My mother is also an aspiring videographer, and wanted to save my grandmother’s voice so she may use it in later videos.

What I think is special about this is we now no longer run into the problem of the phonograph’s lackluster recording quality, as a digital audio file is a bit-for-bit exact copy of the speaker’s voice. Archival-quality recording material is no longer needed, as the voice file could be put onto a CD, a flash drive, or maybe even the cloud. But then this raises a question similar to the one Be Right Back was asking, is this extended preservation good for you?

This ability to hear someone as if they were sitting next to you, despite their death years ago is a definite double-edged sword. A person can be memorialized, using their voice to remind those who love them of whatever goodness they left in the world. A musician’s best music can be immortalized and can influence generations beyond merely the time they were alive. But also this constant, true-to-life reminder of loss could also cause someone to become stuck in a more comfortable past, one where they don’t have to face the harsh realities that await them when they take off their headphones.

When reading “A Resonant Tomb,” with all of the focus on preserving someone’s voice beyond their death, I was reminded of characters in films and television shows such as Cole in M. Night Shyamalan’s 1999 film The Sixth Sense or Klaus in the new Netflix show The Umbrella Academy. Both of these characters can “see dead people,” as Cole says in that famous scene, but what seems to be more frightening to them is not only the visual aspect of being able to see ghosts, but more so the fact that they can also hear these dead people speaking (or weeping or screaming or whatever the case may be).

In Jonathan Sterne’s article, he writes that sound recording was “aiming for the preservation of the voice in such a form that it may continue to perform a social function” (297). This reminded me of the two examples mentioned above since, in the case of The Sixth Sense and The Umbrella Academy, the dead characters speaking to Cole and Klaus are doing so in order to pass on some sort of message to those who are still living or to gain peace so they can move on to the afterlife. Furthermore, later in the reading, Sterne examines the painting His Master’s Voice (aptly, the cover image for this unit of our class), stating that “When we see a dog listening to a gramophone, we understand that the important issue is the sound of the voice, not what was said” (303). The same is true for both Cole and Klaus; what is alarming is not necessarily what the ghosts are saying, but rather the fact that they are hearing the voice of someone that no one else can. This implies that Cole and Klaus won’t stop being haunted by the dead beings until they rectify their situations and allow the ghosts to be at peace with their deaths. 

Finally, on a deeper level, sound is obviously a major part of visual and audio media such as films and TV shows, and therefore the actors who play and voice these characters are embodied and stored in time. After all, no matter how many times you watch a movie or video or how many years it has been since it was created, the people within that video exist within a “carefully bounded frame” of “repeatable time,” in the words of Sterne (310). In this way, sound recording, films, and television gives us the opportunity to relive the past in the present.

Having spent the last several class periods discussing Edison’s spirit phone, Be Right Back, and attempts at immortality through AI, I’ve come to realize that all of our attempts to achieve immortality through rapidly advancing technologies have been fundamentally futile. While we have been trying to use the phonograph, photographs, videos, and now even artificial intelligence to preserve and capture ourselves, none of these efforts have come even close to truly capturing our essence.

This is not to say that we can capture some elements of ourselves and indeed it is becoming easier to capture more of ourselves as technology continues to develop. However, as Sterne describes the phonographic recording as “a resonant tomb, offering the exteriority of the voice with none of its interior self-awareness” and Rahnma describes AI as missing “context,” both hit on the essential failure of technology to holistically capture who we are in our entireties. For example, my roommates and I went down to the Charlotte Fillmore this past week to see one of our favorite artists, Anderson .Paak and the Free Nationals, perform live. Now, if you go on Apple Music or Spotify, you can listen to lots of recordings of Anderson .Paak’s songs, but none of those capture the joy and energy he brings to his concerts. None of the recordings capture the collective experience of seeing Anderson .Paak live and thus none of them have the self-awareness that Sterne describes. We see a similar experience with pseudo-Ash in Be Right Back as the AI robot version of Ash fails to impress Mar because he does not adequately capture the idiosyncrasies and nuances of Ash’s personality. What exists, be it a recording on Spotify or an AI robot of our dead boyfriend, still is not the same as the real, living manifestation.

Rahnma also outlines the limitations of the AI renderings of our personalities, explaining that the digital personas created by AI are useful for counseling but do not capture the context to be legitimate replacements for our actual living selves. The AI rendered persona of a CEO, for example, is still not capable of running a company in the way that the living, breathing human being can. All told, our efforts to capture or preserve ourselves through technology render versions of ourselves that could not hold a candle to who we really are as individuals. Certainly, our efforts have improved as technology has advanced, but even with the most advanced technology at our disposal today, we have still been futile in our pursuit of immortality.

Dead Set is an extremely effective piece of zombie driven postmodern horror. One of the show’s strongest aspect is its characters in that every single character plays their role in the narrative extremely effectively. In this post I will ponder what effect these character archetypes play and how their being part of a Big Brother season changes and affects the story.

The first thing that I find the Big Brother backdrop being effective in is the fact that the real show establishes cast archetypes. Typically in reality shows they attempt to cast people who fit a specific profile hoping that the individual personas will play out in specific ways that make for good television drama and compelling story. Dead Set capitalizes on this same premise as their cast is equally made up of the archetypes but the setting of Big Brother allows this to be more natural. From the creepy perverted Joplin, douche stud Marky, flamboyantly gay Grayson, down to earth Space, attractively naive Pippa, kindhearted Angel and beautifully strong Veronica, the show is made up of stereotypical personalities. Throw in the disgustingly self-centered Patrick and flawed heroine Kelly and the show is all set for a perfect storm. The characters get to act in very stereotypical ways defined by their basic characteristics. This allows a predictive story yet a compelling one as it is one that has been repeated so many times over the years in vastly different mediums.

The most interesting aspect that Big Brother has on the impact of Dead Set however is in the characters who have no relation to the show. It is in Riq as well as Alex where the true heart of the story lies. It is these two characters who honestly acted fully with pure hearts throughout the show with care for their fellow humans and never crossed boundaries such as killing or mutilation of live people. Together the two work together solely for survival and it is a great tragedy when Riq is forced to kill Alex after a bite but even then both handle the situation with absolute class. They show complete respect and adoration for one another that is truly touching and they are both true heroes worth rooting for.

Meanwhile all of the other characters are all fallible in their own ways and nearly all cross boundaries in their efforts to survive. Almost all of the cast members at one point or another vote to kill another person in effort to save themselves. The worst offender is of course Patrick who is a completely despicable human showing zero remorse for his actions towards others but even the “main” protagonist Kelly shoots multiple people and lest us not forget cheated on her boyfriend. A common trope of Zombie apocalypse situations is where the line between good and evil becomes quite blurred in the nature of survival. The question of what is allowed to be morally done in an effort to see the next day leads even the heroes of stories to cross the line. I find it very intriguing that the characters in Dead Set who engage in such behavior that crosses the line are all essentially members or creators of the reality show Big Brother. In the same way that reality show manipulates events to create heroes and villains for their audience, the lines of reality are too crossed in the apocalyptic world where good and evil is not as clear cut as it seems.

The end of the Bishop’s chapter leaves us with the anecdote of a student who post 9/11, “claimed he had be emotionally prepared for the tragedy, not by his family, community, or government, but by the zombie movies of which he had long been a long-time appreciator” (Bishop 36). This sentiment can be easily tied to the inclusion of survivalist fantasy elements in many zombie films, which give viewers the strange sensation of believing themselves capable of surviving an apocalypse because they’ve seen someone else do it on television. The characters of Dead Set mirror this mentality in the last episode, when they toss ideas around about how to kill Patrick. They have detailed and logically sound ideas, but they got all of them from the media. None of them have been in such a situation before, but they feel they have expertise because they watch television. Important to note here is also that it is Kelly who is the most effective leader and zombie killer post outbreak. Unlike many of the other characters, she is portrayed as much more working class, and her likeability is posited against the uselessness of Patrick and the show contestants. Although many of them are also seemingly lower and middle class (though again, the British cultural context is missing from my comprehension) the fact that they applied to be on a reality show and are making money by indulging their own vanity and fulfilling the voyeuristic desires of the British public. The end of Dead Set depicts the remaining show’s contestants being literally what consumed by their fans, furthering the metaphor which ties zombies to the ravenous media public. Are the media creators (Patrick, Kelli) then the creators/originators of the zombie virus?

I’m also interested in the camera work of Dead Set, outside of just the usage of the Big Brother cams. For example, often when characters are sneaking around, the camera will turn the corner for us, showing the audience directly what the character would see. This technique serves to pull the viewer into the plot and amps up the suspense, rather than distancing. Additionally, the close up shots of dead corpses and zombies eating flesh is revolting, but keeps me interested in the narrative. Other times, the camera uses distancing techniques, such as during a kill, the camera gets fake blood splattered on it. The shot reminded me that what I was watching was being filmed, and immediately pulled me out of the action.

I’ve seen enough zombie media to know that there are only ever two outcomes in these types of movies or TV shows: either the characters die, or they become zombies themselves. For example, whenever I watched a long-running zombie show such as The Walking Dead, I would only be interested up to a point, and then I’d give up and stop watching; after all, the show has to end eventually, and realistically no one can survive, so what’s the point of still continuing to watch?

However, when watching Dead Set I somehow hoped for a different outcome (at least for the characters I liked—I have to say I was waiting from episode 1 for Patrick to either be killed off or zombified). But the show is a miniseries with only one season, so it makes sense that all the characters either died as humans or became members of the living dead. I have to say, at the very end of episode 5 when Kelly was in the diary room, I know it was unrealistic, but I still had a shred of hope that she would make it out of the Big Brother House alive. But true to character, this is a show written by Charlie Brooker, who we all know from Black Mirror constantly critiques media culture, and that’s why I was struck by one of the final shots of the series finale: the image of Kelly’s zombie face, covered in blood, staring accusingly at us, the viewers, through multiple television screens.

This is another example of the hypermediation we talked about in class last Wednesday, and it might be too obvious to say so, but this scene really hammers home the media critique theme of the  show by calling attention to the act of looking that we, the viewers, are doing on our own screens, which mirror the television screens in the shot above. This scene seemed to me to be Brooker’s way of turning the message of the show onto the audience and critiquing the way we consume media most of the time: mindlessly. So who’s next to be zombified? Arguably, the audience ourselves.

I want to continue our class discussion of “hypermediation” in Dead Set by examining the closing scene from episode 3. In this scene, Riq and Alex are safe from the zombies for a moment, in the house in the woods, watching the Big Brother live stream on TV. All the other channels are out, but Riq is hoping to catch a glimpse of Kelly to confirm that she’s alive. About two minutes before the end of the episode, he does.

First, he sees four of the Big Brother contestants from this season walk across the screen and says to Alex, “We’re not the only ones!”

She responds, “They’re miles away; we might as well be looking at cartoon characters.”

This exchange could happen under any circumstances between two people watching any television program. Isn’t Riq’s observation the point of television? Whether we’re watching the news, a fictional program, or reality TV, television, like any form of media, gives us figures with whom to empathize, sympathize, and relate, reminding us we’re not alone – “we’re not the only ones.” But take a step back, like Alex, and we realize that whether or not the characters we’re seeing are real, they can’t hear us and we can’t communicate with them. Once we realize this, Riq’s ability to see Kelly onscreen almost distances them further. Now he has proof she’s alive, but for all the efficacy he has in helping her stay that way, he might as well not know.

I was especially struck by this scene because of the way I watch Dead Set on my computer. I pull up the Netflix window, but because the show is scary and I’m a weenie, I don’t blow it up to full-screen. I keep the window open so that I can see my desktop and applications around the program so I can remind myself that it isn’t real when the action gets too intense.  Being aware of the screen on which I was watching Riq watch Kelly on another screen really heightened the drama of this scene: in the same way that Riq can’t help Kelly from his vantage point, I couldn’t do anything to change the ultimate outcome of the show.

Riq takes that problem into his own hands and goes to Kelly. He makes the TV program real so he can affect it. Should we try to affect the truth we find in Dead Set – the zombification of humanity by the media?

Holy crap. I’m not sure what the rules are with cursing so I’ll stick with that statement for now. I have yet to see a more gruesome depiction of the zombie story, so thanks for that. But despite the general goriness of the show, I genuinely thought it provided a realistic and logical depiction of how a zombie apocalypse would go down. The zombies didn’t ever break their own rules (fast, but dumb) and the characters reacted in a way that followed along with their characters (Pippa – screaming, Patrick – self-centered, etc). But there are some moments I’d like to break down.

First, the scene which gives this post its name. The horrifically uncomfortable, totally gruesome Grayson slicing scene. Here Patrick is tearing apart the now-deceased Grayson for “bait” for his so-thought brilliant plan, while berating the rest of the house for not having his sense of entrepreneurship and keen sense of leadership. He also adds in narration at times, commenting on the morsels of flesh he pulls from Grayson’s corpse. What caught me in this scene was how Patrick mocked the group for not having “real” jobs, or actual work ethic, and claimed they were a bunch of useless good-for-nothings. Patrick seems to have forgotten that those people were the reason why Patrick had a job in the first place. He has transformed the Big Brother contestants from actual human beings into money-making pieces of flesh. Hopefully (maybe) this is a less obvious moment that Brooker put into the show as a method to hint at his greater point.

Next, mainly because I think it was pretty humorous, the police scene. What we saw there was a moment where someone (the police) was trying to make sense out of a completely nonsensical situation. These police officers were the last holders of authority, and they’ll be damned if they lose it thanks to some smelly zombies. I particularly liked the “I’ll let you off with a warning […] You could at least say thank you” bit at the end. Yet I think Brooker put that scene in there for a reason other than a bit of much needed comic relief. Those officers were desperately trying to hold onto some sense of normalcy by going about their regular patrols. I can’t help but think how others might try to retake control of their lives in times like those.