Aaron Taylor | University of Lethbridge (original) (raw)
Videos by Aaron Taylor
Thinking Through Acting examines Marilyn Monroe’s performative indices at work in Some Like It Ho... more Thinking Through Acting examines Marilyn Monroe’s performative indices at work in Some Like It Hot. If offers a videographic close analysis of a seminal star figure – one whose creative agency and thoughtful artistry tends to be unduly minimized in many critical accounts of her films. This video essay represents a novel way forward for performance studies scholars: a means of demonstrating the exquisite eloquence of actors’ work – activity that one may very well wish to call philosophy in motion.
Co-authored with Bryn Hewko
Published in [in]Transition 4.1, 2017. https://bit.ly/3oYqkfO
26 views
Papers by Aaron Taylor
Literature/Film Quarterly, 2021
A remixed, televisual Watchmen trains us how to re-view the original comic book anew, with the ma... more A remixed, televisual Watchmen trains us how to re-view the original comic book anew, with the maxiseries’ narrative, graphic, and thematic elements not simply resurrected but reconstituted. Indeed, sampled and remixed music has extraordinary sonic impact on our apperception of an original composition. As with music, the remix teaches us how to recognize formerly unperceived qualities of an original composition, and to appreciate their surprising applicability to a different context. Indeed, such recontextualization is vital for Watchmen’s anti-racist agenda. Lindelof’s series enables latent and overlooked qualities of Gibbons and Moore’s series to engage first and foremost with race—a subject to which the original work was indifferent. By drawing on viewers’ long-term memories of the comic, the HBO series plays with interpenetrating layers of remembered (and misremembered) material. It is this cognitive activity—enabled by the series’ remixing tactics, especially in relation to its performance elements—that will be analyzed in this essay.
Cognition, Emotion, and Aesthetics in Contemporary Serial Television, 2022
How might we describe an actor’s contribution to the aesthetics of complex television? It is pro... more How might we describe an actor’s contribution to the aesthetics of complex television? It is profitable to investigate how the choices and strategies adopted by Twin Peaks’ recurring performers might stand in for broader formal developments in complex TV as a whole. Further, it is possible to identify the interest that these systematic techniques might have for cognitive theorists of complex television in general.
To these ends, we can first itemize some specific impressions of the acting on Twin Peaks, and theorize why they may prove profitable to analyze carefully. Influential aspects to discuss will include: (1) the surprising degree of oratorical flatness and archetypal embodiment vs. declamatory amplification and emotional excess; (2) an elastic approach to duration, rhythm and temporality; (3) modal and generic blending; (4) musical rather than dramatic logic; and (5) abrupt affective shifts and absurdist cognitive dissonance. These distinct features will be connected to more expansive performative trends in complex TV as a whole. Some of these general conventions under discussion will include: (1) character density vs. telegraphed repetition; (2) serial consistency and episodic logic vs. the fluidity, verticality, and withholding tendencies of a complex series; (3) the privileging of an aesthetic of decipherment over the establishment of parasocial relationships; and (4) the elasticity of the televisual body. This discussion of Twin Peaks’ fascinating and paradigm-changing performance strategies should prove to be a useful taxonomy for future analysts of an equally captivating televisual mode.
Comics and Pop Culture, 2019
What is noteworthy about superhero cinema, however, is the considerable impact a relatively small... more What is noteworthy about superhero cinema, however, is the considerable impact a relatively small body of movies is proving to have on familiar and longstanding ideas about film genre. These effects – particularly their formal, structural, and industrial dimensions – are deserving of closer scrutiny. First, we can speak of superhero cinema itself being subsumed within a broader, popular taxonomic structure loosely dubbed “the comic book movie.” In this section, the broad historical perception of comics as a lowbrow genre, rather than a medium, will be considered, as well as the effects of these assumptions on film adaptations of superhero titles. In addition, many representative films also reflexively address their own categorical designation and processes of adaptation, and so the cultural status of these often lowly “genres of remediation” will also be discussed. Secondly, the possibility of superhero cinema manifesting its own semantic and syntactic elements will be explored. More importantly, it will be suggested that the discursive flurry around the attempted categorization of superhero cinema neatly exemplifies the “pragmatic” dimensions of genre-making. Indeed, the character of these discussions is deliberately fan-oriented in nature and appropriated from well-tried traditions in the comics community. Finally, I will show how the manufactured intertextuality of superhero cinema is subsumed within new and evolving industrial praxes of generic formation and branding. Two significant developments – brand continuity and generic grafting – will be outlined. The first concept refers to the corporate and narrative strategies that established the so-called “DC Extended Universe” and the “Marvel Cinematic Universe.” The second concept denotes the relatively novel trade discourses that situate superhero cinema in relation to other genres. Both suggest a new managerial hyperconsciousness of genre, and a concentrated effort to employ it in order to stake out brand identities within a competitive marketplace.
Screening Characters, 2019
An Introduction to SCREENING CHARACTERS - an anthology of essays about characterization in film, ... more An Introduction to SCREENING CHARACTERS - an anthology of essays about characterization in film, television, and interactive media.
Close-Up: Great Cinematic Performances. Vol.2, 2018
Make Ours Marvel: Media Convergence and a Comics Universe, 2017
Not just the defender of your friendly neighborhood, he is the nerd whose labor supports an age o... more Not just the defender of your friendly neighborhood, he is the nerd whose labor supports an age of marvels. And why shouldn't the exploits of this nebbish teen from Queens inspire delight, play, creativity, lunchboxes even? Like Billy Batson and Steve Rogers before him, he is the ninety-eight pounder's revenge, the secret hope of every locker-stuffed milquetoast, the ugly duckling's swan song. Consequently, he heralds a Silver Age because he embodies a simple narrative truth: power fantasies are not universally palatable visions of infantile wish-fulfillment; rather, they are illusions that only render the helplessness of one's everyday circumstances more salient. Simply put: superpowers wouldn't make things better; they'd only limn the ordinary pain we struggle to overcome. Stan Lee and Steve Ditko's profound revision of a basic superheroic trope is arguably the conceptual cornerstone upon which Marvel was built, and it is certainly no accident that the child of their insight -Spider-Man -is the company's most public face.
The Velvet Light Trap, 2016
The acting style in Stanley Kubrick's films can be regarded as a symptom of the "other minds prob... more The acting style in Stanley Kubrick's films can be regarded as a symptom of the "other minds problem" and its ramifications for the cinema. Performances in Kubrick's work reveal the complications involved in positing narration as a rhetorical system with a priori claims to direct and accurate evaluative knowledge of characters. For Kubrick, narrative discourse is not a systemic correlative for authorial mastery over characters, and so, his actors help establish narrational patterns that collide with the intricacies of fictional subjectivities. The performative techniques that complicate our ability to conceptualize and engage with characters' emotions are itemized with the aim of precisely conceptualizing the director's unique approach to performance. These strategies include strategic improvisation, excessive ostensiveness, expressively neutral action, and artificially immobilized expressions. Such techniques allow us to appreciate Kubrick's "skeptical classicism": a mode of narration whereby we negotiate various avenues and impediments surrounding our longing for knowledge of an other's mind.
Often the most immediate object of interest for audiences, characters frequently serve as the dir... more Often the most immediate object of interest for audiences, characters frequently serve as the direct means by which we engage with a work of media. The figures represented onscreen tend to be one of the moving image's most captivating elements. We are absorbed by their fictional dilemmas, preoccupied by the circumstances of their creation, fascinated by their varying treatments across traditions, and engrossed in debates about their broader cultural impact. An ambitious collection of new essays, Screening Characters will be the first major Englishlanguage anthology with a concentrated focus on this relatively neglected subject.
In Media Res, Apr 10, 2014
Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance 7.2, 2014
Through a case study of The Avengers (2012) and other recently adapted Marvel Entertainment prope... more Through a case study of The Avengers (2012) and other recently adapted Marvel Entertainment properties, it will be demonstrated that the reimagined, rebooted and serialized intermedial text is fundamentally fan oriented: a deliberately structured and marketed invitation to certain niche audiences to engage in comparative activities. That is, its preferred spectators are often those opinionated and outspoken fan cultures whose familiarity with the texts is addressed and whose influence within a more dispersed film-going community is acknowledged, courted and potentially colonized. These superhero franchises – neither remakes nor adaptations in the familiar sense – are also paradigmatic byproducts of an adaptive management system that is possible through the appropriation of the economics of continuity and the co-option of online cultic networking. In short, blockbuster intermediality is not only indicative of the economics of post-literary adaptation, but it also exemplifies a corporate strategy that aims for the strategic co-option of potentially unruly niche audiences.
Press Play, May 30, 2014
In the contemporary solipsistic romance, marriage is an altogether distant consideration for the ... more In the contemporary solipsistic romance, marriage is an altogether distant consideration for the young lovers within them, and the possibility of remarriage is out of the question entirely. An examination of love and digital mediation in Edgar Wright's SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD and Spike Jonze's HER.
Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image 4, 2014
If one does as God does enough times, one becomes as God is.
The Works of Tim Burton: From Margins to Mainstream. Ed. Jeffrey Weinstock. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013
Millennial Masculinity: Men in Contemporary American Cinema. Ed. Timothy Shary. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2013
Theorizing Film Acting. Ed. Aaron Taylor. New York: Routledge, 2012
I think so much of what we respond to in fictional movies is acting. That's one of the elements t... more I think so much of what we respond to in fictional movies is acting. That's one of the elements that's often left out when people talk theoretically about the movies. They forget it's the human material we go to see." -Pauline Kael 1
Acting and Performance in Moving Image Culture: Bodies, Screens, Renderings. Ed. Joerg Sternagel, Deborah Levitt, Dieter Mersch. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2012
Actors actually make manifest specific lines of thought. That is, they are able to articulate com... more Actors actually make manifest specific lines of thought. That is, they are able to articulate complex assertions via their performances. Further, one’s instinctive evaluation of acting can be understood as a tacit acknowledgement and appreciation of these embodied suppositions. With star acting in particular, we can identify the creative mobilization of various, recurring discursive clusters surrounding an actor’s work. These core principles can be referred to as performative indices. Not only can one appreciate an actor’s creative enactment of these performative indices, the more skilled actors use them to make assertions regarding broader concepts and notions that their performance and stardom dramatizes. To become cognizant of such underlying conceptual dimensions of screen acting, then, is to recognize that our interest in actors’ mimetic capacities and/or their cultural connotations as stars is neither axiomatic nor exclusive.
Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 2012
This article identifies and evaluates some of the narrational, performative and cultural assumpt... more This article identifies and evaluates some of the narrational, performative
and cultural assumptions that underlie the classification of certain performers as "supporting actors." By disentangling a number of the intertwining constituents of this categorical position, I hope to reveal certain dominant assertions about cinematic characters and the actors who portray them. I will respond to the situation of the supporting player as a mere ally or adversary, lacking complexity as a “flat” character or “type,” and whose performance lacks what Richard Maltby has described as star “autonomy” (389). More importantly, it shall be determined how these assertions implicitly suppress alternative conceptions of character, performance and narrative engagement.
Thinking Through Acting examines Marilyn Monroe’s performative indices at work in Some Like It Ho... more Thinking Through Acting examines Marilyn Monroe’s performative indices at work in Some Like It Hot. If offers a videographic close analysis of a seminal star figure – one whose creative agency and thoughtful artistry tends to be unduly minimized in many critical accounts of her films. This video essay represents a novel way forward for performance studies scholars: a means of demonstrating the exquisite eloquence of actors’ work – activity that one may very well wish to call philosophy in motion.
Co-authored with Bryn Hewko
Published in [in]Transition 4.1, 2017. https://bit.ly/3oYqkfO
26 views
Literature/Film Quarterly, 2021
A remixed, televisual Watchmen trains us how to re-view the original comic book anew, with the ma... more A remixed, televisual Watchmen trains us how to re-view the original comic book anew, with the maxiseries’ narrative, graphic, and thematic elements not simply resurrected but reconstituted. Indeed, sampled and remixed music has extraordinary sonic impact on our apperception of an original composition. As with music, the remix teaches us how to recognize formerly unperceived qualities of an original composition, and to appreciate their surprising applicability to a different context. Indeed, such recontextualization is vital for Watchmen’s anti-racist agenda. Lindelof’s series enables latent and overlooked qualities of Gibbons and Moore’s series to engage first and foremost with race—a subject to which the original work was indifferent. By drawing on viewers’ long-term memories of the comic, the HBO series plays with interpenetrating layers of remembered (and misremembered) material. It is this cognitive activity—enabled by the series’ remixing tactics, especially in relation to its performance elements—that will be analyzed in this essay.
Cognition, Emotion, and Aesthetics in Contemporary Serial Television, 2022
How might we describe an actor’s contribution to the aesthetics of complex television? It is pro... more How might we describe an actor’s contribution to the aesthetics of complex television? It is profitable to investigate how the choices and strategies adopted by Twin Peaks’ recurring performers might stand in for broader formal developments in complex TV as a whole. Further, it is possible to identify the interest that these systematic techniques might have for cognitive theorists of complex television in general.
To these ends, we can first itemize some specific impressions of the acting on Twin Peaks, and theorize why they may prove profitable to analyze carefully. Influential aspects to discuss will include: (1) the surprising degree of oratorical flatness and archetypal embodiment vs. declamatory amplification and emotional excess; (2) an elastic approach to duration, rhythm and temporality; (3) modal and generic blending; (4) musical rather than dramatic logic; and (5) abrupt affective shifts and absurdist cognitive dissonance. These distinct features will be connected to more expansive performative trends in complex TV as a whole. Some of these general conventions under discussion will include: (1) character density vs. telegraphed repetition; (2) serial consistency and episodic logic vs. the fluidity, verticality, and withholding tendencies of a complex series; (3) the privileging of an aesthetic of decipherment over the establishment of parasocial relationships; and (4) the elasticity of the televisual body. This discussion of Twin Peaks’ fascinating and paradigm-changing performance strategies should prove to be a useful taxonomy for future analysts of an equally captivating televisual mode.
Comics and Pop Culture, 2019
What is noteworthy about superhero cinema, however, is the considerable impact a relatively small... more What is noteworthy about superhero cinema, however, is the considerable impact a relatively small body of movies is proving to have on familiar and longstanding ideas about film genre. These effects – particularly their formal, structural, and industrial dimensions – are deserving of closer scrutiny. First, we can speak of superhero cinema itself being subsumed within a broader, popular taxonomic structure loosely dubbed “the comic book movie.” In this section, the broad historical perception of comics as a lowbrow genre, rather than a medium, will be considered, as well as the effects of these assumptions on film adaptations of superhero titles. In addition, many representative films also reflexively address their own categorical designation and processes of adaptation, and so the cultural status of these often lowly “genres of remediation” will also be discussed. Secondly, the possibility of superhero cinema manifesting its own semantic and syntactic elements will be explored. More importantly, it will be suggested that the discursive flurry around the attempted categorization of superhero cinema neatly exemplifies the “pragmatic” dimensions of genre-making. Indeed, the character of these discussions is deliberately fan-oriented in nature and appropriated from well-tried traditions in the comics community. Finally, I will show how the manufactured intertextuality of superhero cinema is subsumed within new and evolving industrial praxes of generic formation and branding. Two significant developments – brand continuity and generic grafting – will be outlined. The first concept refers to the corporate and narrative strategies that established the so-called “DC Extended Universe” and the “Marvel Cinematic Universe.” The second concept denotes the relatively novel trade discourses that situate superhero cinema in relation to other genres. Both suggest a new managerial hyperconsciousness of genre, and a concentrated effort to employ it in order to stake out brand identities within a competitive marketplace.
Screening Characters, 2019
An Introduction to SCREENING CHARACTERS - an anthology of essays about characterization in film, ... more An Introduction to SCREENING CHARACTERS - an anthology of essays about characterization in film, television, and interactive media.
Close-Up: Great Cinematic Performances. Vol.2, 2018
Make Ours Marvel: Media Convergence and a Comics Universe, 2017
Not just the defender of your friendly neighborhood, he is the nerd whose labor supports an age o... more Not just the defender of your friendly neighborhood, he is the nerd whose labor supports an age of marvels. And why shouldn't the exploits of this nebbish teen from Queens inspire delight, play, creativity, lunchboxes even? Like Billy Batson and Steve Rogers before him, he is the ninety-eight pounder's revenge, the secret hope of every locker-stuffed milquetoast, the ugly duckling's swan song. Consequently, he heralds a Silver Age because he embodies a simple narrative truth: power fantasies are not universally palatable visions of infantile wish-fulfillment; rather, they are illusions that only render the helplessness of one's everyday circumstances more salient. Simply put: superpowers wouldn't make things better; they'd only limn the ordinary pain we struggle to overcome. Stan Lee and Steve Ditko's profound revision of a basic superheroic trope is arguably the conceptual cornerstone upon which Marvel was built, and it is certainly no accident that the child of their insight -Spider-Man -is the company's most public face.
The Velvet Light Trap, 2016
The acting style in Stanley Kubrick's films can be regarded as a symptom of the "other minds prob... more The acting style in Stanley Kubrick's films can be regarded as a symptom of the "other minds problem" and its ramifications for the cinema. Performances in Kubrick's work reveal the complications involved in positing narration as a rhetorical system with a priori claims to direct and accurate evaluative knowledge of characters. For Kubrick, narrative discourse is not a systemic correlative for authorial mastery over characters, and so, his actors help establish narrational patterns that collide with the intricacies of fictional subjectivities. The performative techniques that complicate our ability to conceptualize and engage with characters' emotions are itemized with the aim of precisely conceptualizing the director's unique approach to performance. These strategies include strategic improvisation, excessive ostensiveness, expressively neutral action, and artificially immobilized expressions. Such techniques allow us to appreciate Kubrick's "skeptical classicism": a mode of narration whereby we negotiate various avenues and impediments surrounding our longing for knowledge of an other's mind.
Often the most immediate object of interest for audiences, characters frequently serve as the dir... more Often the most immediate object of interest for audiences, characters frequently serve as the direct means by which we engage with a work of media. The figures represented onscreen tend to be one of the moving image's most captivating elements. We are absorbed by their fictional dilemmas, preoccupied by the circumstances of their creation, fascinated by their varying treatments across traditions, and engrossed in debates about their broader cultural impact. An ambitious collection of new essays, Screening Characters will be the first major Englishlanguage anthology with a concentrated focus on this relatively neglected subject.
In Media Res, Apr 10, 2014
Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance 7.2, 2014
Through a case study of The Avengers (2012) and other recently adapted Marvel Entertainment prope... more Through a case study of The Avengers (2012) and other recently adapted Marvel Entertainment properties, it will be demonstrated that the reimagined, rebooted and serialized intermedial text is fundamentally fan oriented: a deliberately structured and marketed invitation to certain niche audiences to engage in comparative activities. That is, its preferred spectators are often those opinionated and outspoken fan cultures whose familiarity with the texts is addressed and whose influence within a more dispersed film-going community is acknowledged, courted and potentially colonized. These superhero franchises – neither remakes nor adaptations in the familiar sense – are also paradigmatic byproducts of an adaptive management system that is possible through the appropriation of the economics of continuity and the co-option of online cultic networking. In short, blockbuster intermediality is not only indicative of the economics of post-literary adaptation, but it also exemplifies a corporate strategy that aims for the strategic co-option of potentially unruly niche audiences.
Press Play, May 30, 2014
In the contemporary solipsistic romance, marriage is an altogether distant consideration for the ... more In the contemporary solipsistic romance, marriage is an altogether distant consideration for the young lovers within them, and the possibility of remarriage is out of the question entirely. An examination of love and digital mediation in Edgar Wright's SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD and Spike Jonze's HER.
Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image 4, 2014
If one does as God does enough times, one becomes as God is.
The Works of Tim Burton: From Margins to Mainstream. Ed. Jeffrey Weinstock. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013
Millennial Masculinity: Men in Contemporary American Cinema. Ed. Timothy Shary. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2013
Theorizing Film Acting. Ed. Aaron Taylor. New York: Routledge, 2012
I think so much of what we respond to in fictional movies is acting. That's one of the elements t... more I think so much of what we respond to in fictional movies is acting. That's one of the elements that's often left out when people talk theoretically about the movies. They forget it's the human material we go to see." -Pauline Kael 1
Acting and Performance in Moving Image Culture: Bodies, Screens, Renderings. Ed. Joerg Sternagel, Deborah Levitt, Dieter Mersch. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2012
Actors actually make manifest specific lines of thought. That is, they are able to articulate com... more Actors actually make manifest specific lines of thought. That is, they are able to articulate complex assertions via their performances. Further, one’s instinctive evaluation of acting can be understood as a tacit acknowledgement and appreciation of these embodied suppositions. With star acting in particular, we can identify the creative mobilization of various, recurring discursive clusters surrounding an actor’s work. These core principles can be referred to as performative indices. Not only can one appreciate an actor’s creative enactment of these performative indices, the more skilled actors use them to make assertions regarding broader concepts and notions that their performance and stardom dramatizes. To become cognizant of such underlying conceptual dimensions of screen acting, then, is to recognize that our interest in actors’ mimetic capacities and/or their cultural connotations as stars is neither axiomatic nor exclusive.
Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 2012
This article identifies and evaluates some of the narrational, performative and cultural assumpt... more This article identifies and evaluates some of the narrational, performative
and cultural assumptions that underlie the classification of certain performers as "supporting actors." By disentangling a number of the intertwining constituents of this categorical position, I hope to reveal certain dominant assertions about cinematic characters and the actors who portray them. I will respond to the situation of the supporting player as a mere ally or adversary, lacking complexity as a “flat” character or “type,” and whose performance lacks what Richard Maltby has described as star “autonomy” (389). More importantly, it shall be determined how these assertions implicitly suppress alternative conceptions of character, performance and narrative engagement.
Stages of Reality: Theatricality in Cinema. Ed. André Loiselle & Jeremy Maron. Toronto: University of Toronto Press., 2012
Theorizing Film Acting, 2012
This comprehensive collection provides theoretical accounts of the grounds and phenomenon of film... more This comprehensive collection provides theoretical accounts of the grounds and phenomenon of film acting. The volume features entries by some of the most prominent scholars on film acting who collectively represent the various theoretical traditions that constitute the discipline of film studies. Each section proposes novel ways of considering the recurring motifs in academic enquiries into film acting, including: (1) the mutually contingent problematic of description and interpretation, (2) the intricacies of bodily dynamics and their reception by audiences, (3) the significance of star performance, and (4) the impact of evolving technologies and film styles on acting traditions.