Music Box: Complicating the Queer Paradox with Memory as a Tool for the Queer (Left) Lens

Thomas, Dawson

Music Box: Complicating the Queer Paradox with Memory as a Tool for the Queer (Left) Lens

Persistent URL

https://dspace.allegheny.edu/handle/10456/56842

Author(s)

Thomas, Dawson

Date Issued

April 20, 2023

Abstract

My art and filmmaking focus on the intersections of gender, memory, and queer life by challenging notions of authorship and utilizing a queer (left) lens. While my medium primarily tends to be digital video, I experiment with a variety of mediums in which I learn and utilize to achieve my artistic goals. I use the medium to achieve the vision. Music Box illustrates the queer paradox: representing queer death with a history of queer regulatory death (Bury Your Gays) tropes and a history of real-life queer death. The narrative film depicts Joy (21), an amnesic genderfluid person on a mission to piece together their life and identity through disembodied fragmented memories defined by their life with Sam (22), their queer love. However, Joy and Sam’s future are disrupted by a traumatic hate crime that severs reality. To restore a future with Sam, Joy must revisit the day they die to alter fate, but this comes with consequences. The two become trapped within the queer paradox resolved through the music box. The film thematically attempts to represent the queer paradox by inherently disrupting normative expectations of filmmaking. The film’s structure remains largely ambiguous and with blatant metacommentary. Normative forms are deconstructed through the use of different ideological cameras (Android Galaxy S10e as accessible, Instax/Polaroid as still, FujiFilm FinePix S9750 as recycled, and Canon 90D/Canon T6i as institutional), all of which offer different resolutions and aspect ratios. Expectations of sexuality, gender, and filmmaking form unravel throughout the narrative. The film utilizes queer regulatory tropes to critique fantastical and real-life queer death in the forms of asexuality, pansexuality, and Bury Your Gays. However, Music Box also aims to disrupt filmmaking form through collective authorship and dismantling the hierarchical positioning of above-the-line and below-the-line filmmaking structures. The installation positions two realms: documentary (collective) and narrative (singular). The documentary aims to surveil filmmaking form and privilege production over product. This is accomplished through rhythmic editing of documentary footage to the narrative film to offer the viewer a glimpse into the production process and the performative conditions. These realms, separated by a wall, provide seating, attributing to the film’s makers from the perspective of production and product. Ultimately, I offer a filmmaking approach found in the conjunction of queer politics and leftist principles known as the queer left lens. What is the queer left lens? How does production/product relate to the queer paradox? What might the separation of the two realms reveal about our relationship with media? How can we define queer life through a queer left lens?

Major

Art, Science, and Innovation

Film & Digital Storytelling

Honors

Art,2023

Film and Digital Storytelling, 2023

First Reader(s)

Keeley, Michael N.