Abstract:
Covid has ushered in an age of anxiety. Mathematical models for mapping the spread of the virus are statistical and lived experiences that both create and effect relationships to media. This paper examines Loki, the 2021 Marvel TV series about the Norse God of mischief who is caught by The Time Variance Authority, run by mysterious ‘time-keepers,' focused on protecting the sacred timeline. The production of the show was paused on March 13, 2020. During that time, the director, cutting the show at home, had a creative impulse to further the love story of Loki with the female Variant of himself. Through analyzing the disruptions in the production alongside the text and its intertexts, I consider how disruption affects the convergence of media, through alterations in the spatio-temporal fabric of human interactions enforced by social distancing and the enduring rhythms of lockdown/confinement experience impacted the production, text, and receptions of the show. Loki is a variant disrupting the sacred timeline who exists as the inevitable offshoot of the nature of causality, not as chaos, but as possibility. Spatial dynamics between certainty and never ending uncertainty are not only metaphors for the issues at stake in analysis of representation and matter, they are constitutive and circulatory in nature. Media should be analyzed in its constitutive temporality and spatiality. The disruption in production enables us to explore what disruption means for today’s convergent topographical media. Linking post-structuralist theories on being and time through khora, I argue Covid created a surprise event allowing new subjectivities to arrive within and outside media production itself. This collective event creates communal relations to time and space through the Void, which I argue is Khora, the impossible becoming of non-space non-time that defies translation. I explore the concept of the void in the series as a “collapse of form and matter,” exploring the topography of media’s ecological topography towards media khora-voids. Covid and love emerge as khora, at the site of risk, in the face of the unknown. In the void we face ourselves as Other, a space of being with. The surprise of the event returns again and works with this element of risk and chance. Through easter eggs, production disruptions, and intentional playing with time, Loki khoratically weaves threads that help us make sense of our spatio-temporal-verse and what it means for our present and surprising future “to come.” Bibliography: Jacques Derrida, On The Name, Translated by David Wood, John P. Leavey Jr, and Ian McLeod. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. Lorenz Engell, Thinking Through Television, Translated by Anthony Enns. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019. Jean-Luc Nancy and Aurelien Barrau, What’s These Worlds Coming to? Translated by Travis Holloway and Flor Mechain. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, Translated by Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O'Byrne. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Michael Waldron, Loki, directed by Kate Herron. 2021: Atlanta: Disney Platform Distribution, 2021, television.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
BlogA collection of my writings and musings. Archives
December 2021
Categories |