Tell Me What You Mean, Pepper-Spraying Cop!

Somewhere, U.C. Davis Lt. John Pike, otherwise known as The Pepper-Spraying Cop, is probably smiling.  Or at least breathing a sigh of relief.  His 15 minutes of fame seem to be just about over.  There are fewer Pike spottings on the Internet now.  He is being voted off Meme Island.

Photo by Louise Macabitas.

But not after having been placed in thousands of images from great moments in history and great works of art.  A sampling of the latter can be found here, where the corpulent cop has been placed in works ranging from Futurama to Heironymous Bosch.  The Washington Post has run a collection of them, too.  At other sites, and among friends on Facebook, etc., I have seen the images of Pike being placed in famous photographs.  I have been interested in seeing the narrative and symbolic logic that influenced these mashups of a lone campus cop and images from history and art.

As I looked at them, I wondered, "What does Pike mean?"  In semiotics, we look at signs and how they work in systems.  No sign has meaning by itself.  It has meaning in relation to other signs.  So, how does Pike function as a sign within a system of other signs?

These signs work in ways obvious and not so obvious.  Pike could not signify "power" if there was no sign of "non-power."  His signification of "power" works, in part, because the students are present as the subject or target of his power -- placement in space also signifies power relationships, with the higher position signifying greater power than the lower position.

The pepper spray has special signification of state-sponsored authority and even inappropriately applied coercive power, thanks to recent events.  It had this potential before Pike doused those students, thanks to Anthony Bologna of the NYPD, who weeks before had sprayed women at the Occupy Wall Street protests.  These women were not violent, not threatening anyone, and had been placed behind a police barricade.  After that, pepper-spray images at OWS events became almost common.

It is easy to see then that the sign of "pepper spray" was part of a system.  Any image of it being used was going to be related to other images of its use, and it was going to be placed in context of them.

From The Woeful Office blog.

We could look at many things in the image and place them within other signifying systems.  For example, Pike's apparel.  He is dressed in black.  He has a dark helmet with a shield over his face.  He is wearing boots.  His apparel resembles the riot gear we have seen in other OWS images, and at some level the viewer attaches, rightly or wrongly, connotations of the violence from those images -- Oakland, let's say -- to Pike.  On a less practical level, his apparel resembles another notorious figure, also known for bullying: Darth Vader.

When people started extracting Pike from the original image and placing him into other images, we could see some "slippage."  When a sign is removed from a system, it loses some of its meaning.  And when it is placed in a new system, it gains new meaning in relation to the signs that now surround it.  However, even though a sign is removed from a system, some of its original meaning clings to it -- like a cloud of pepper spray -- and influences its meanings in the new system.  In this regard, despite the slippage that occurred, I was impressed with the consistency of the meaning of "Pepper-Spraying Cop" across the Internet and through his many iterations.

In some images, he was used as a sign of the power of the state trampling on the rights of the people to express themselves.  This was most cogently communicated in an image of Pike spraying the freshly signed Declaration of Independence.

In other images, Pike is the sign of the Punisher, the force dishing out punishment for those who misbehave.  Such as this Peanuts image.

These images would resonate with those whose sentiments lay with the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators and those who were outraged as his actions that day.  In other images, he becomes a sign of something more generic, less overtly political.  He becomes a sign for "inappropriate response."

For instance, he can mean "a lack of sympathy."  That is what I took him to mean in this image, where has been inserted into Andrew Wyeth's Christina's World.  Not that I ever truly understood that painting, but I have always felt the woman in the foreground is in some kind of distress, perhaps needing to get to that house in the distance.  Rather than help her, Pike blasts her in the face with pepper spray.   

Despite the changes from his original context, Pike still functions in some similar ways -- as a sign of power and as a sign of power misapplied.  My first effort at creating a pepper-spraying cop mashup worked along the same lines.  I placed him in an image by Dorothea Lange from the Great Depression.  In my image, Pike is a sign of state power being used to control the downtrodden and powerless rather than help them.

In many images, Pike becomes a sign of "killjoy," a general disapproval of those having fun.  A friend of mine tried his hand at creating a Pike mashup.  In the video of Pike's notorious pepper spraying, someone being overly dramatic can be heard saying the students are "children" that Pike is mistreating.  So Bill Genereaux in his blog, TechIntersect, created the image of Pike spraying children on a picnic.  The children are not misbehaving.  They are not protesting or challenging the authority of the state.  But that does not free them from Pike's wrath.

I would say that Lt. Killjoy seems to be the dominant theme, more so than overtly political images.  When Pike is inserted into famous works of art, he seems to function there as a sign of disapproval of fun, especially naked fun.

One of the first images I saw was of him in an Eduoard Manet painting, The Luncheon on the Grass.

I want candy!

Notice how Pike ignores the men and sprays the woman, who happens to be nude.  We could say that in more than one way she functions as a sign of "vulnerability."  She is the female among men, and in Western traditions the "female" functions as the sign of "vulnerability" (all of CSI: SVU is based on this premise).  She also is marked as "vulnerable" because she is nude, and especially since she is nude among clothed men.  (Even without the addition of Pike, this painting has always struck as me as really, really strange.  Though I didn't complain when it was cribbed for the cover of Bow Wow Wow's 1982 album The Last of the Mohicans.)

These dynamics were at work in my second attempt at a Pike mashup.  An idea that came immediately my mind was to insert him into Henri Rousseau's famous painting, The Dream.  Some of this inspiration simply came from my memory's catalog of images featuring a person who is facing in the right direction to be sprayed by Pike's canister -- and images in which Pike's actions would be inappropriate.  But perhaps at some conscious or unconscious level, my use of Pike followed the dynamics I just described -- he is spraying a woman who happens to be nude (vulnerable + vulnerable).  The woman in The Dream seems less vulnerable than the woman in Manet's painting.  In some way, she seems to be in control of the events in the jungle; she does not seem threatened by the lions in the grass.  Yet, I have Pike spraying her and not the lions.

In some images, Pike signifies something less sinister or aggressive.  Sometimes he signifies simply "pest," more El Barto than evil.  For instance, in the Futurama image (an animated gif) mentioned above, a tiny Pike sprays Fry in the eyes, causing him to squint.  In that image, very little of the original meanings of the sign "Pepper-Spraying Cop" are carried over.  There is little or no connotations of power relationships, for instance.  In fact, the size=power dynamic is reversed.  Fry is larger than the cop, so he should be more powerful.  But the cop's implied ability to evade that power, as small pests frequently can do, mocks that power.  And mocking power is not what Pike's image communicates elsewhere.  While some viewers may chuckle at the Futurama-themed image, it gains little traction in the public imagination; it does not resonate strongly or widely, as measured by how much it gets passed around by e-mail, Facebook shares, and the like.

"Shoo, cat!"

While I have seen several of these Pike the Pest images, I have seen very few Pike the Hero images; that is, very few images of Pike spraying his pepper appropriately.  In fact, I played with inserting Pike into another Rousseau image, The Sleeping Gypsy.  This time he sprays the lion.  In this mashup, Pike would be a hero, scaring away the lion from the vulnerable gypsy.

Sorry, Lt. Pike.  That just does not make sense to me.

The Badness of King George (Lucas)

Believe it or not, there was a time when people tried to defend George Lucas's storytelling abilities. 

Who ya gonna call?

He withstood the criticism fairly well, until cracks in his narrative armor began to appear with Return of the Jedi.  The highly merchandisable cuteness of the Ewoks and the wretched sentimentality of the "family photograph" at the conclusion -- when ghosts of Obi-Wan Kenobi, Yoda, and Darth Vader appear with Luke and company --  foreshadowed things such as Jar-Jar Binks.

What the duck?

Sure, there was his involvement with the Indiana Jones series.  But when people wanted to talk about Lucas as if he possessed undiluted genius, I had a standard response to them: "Always remember three words: Howard. The. Duck."

I waited nearly 20 years between the release of Return of the Jedi and A New Hope, only to be horribly and bitterly disappointed in the crapulence Lucas threw at us and was somehow proud of.  I then began to think perhaps Howard the Duck was the norm and the first Star Wars movies were the exception.

Now it seems Lucas was not satisfied ruining my expectations for the Star Wars prequels.  He now wants to ruin the originals.

Still lame.

Back in 2004, in the re-release of Return of the Jedi, Lucas replaced the original image of Sebastian Shaw, the actor who played Darth Vader during the brief moment when we saw beneath his mask, with Hayden Christensen, who played Annikin Skywalker in Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith.

I don't really care about that.  That doesn't make that cinematic moment less groan-worthy than it already was.  I say that Lucas is determined to ruin his legacy because, in the latest Blu-Ray release of Return of the Jedi, he is injecting groan-worthiness where it had not existed before.  (Link to story about changes.)

In a key scene, Luke is saved and Darth Vader turns against the Dark Side -- he stops the Emperor from Tazering Luke with the Force and tosses him down the funhole of a Death Star.  In the original scene, Darth does all of this silently.  In the "improved" version he says "Noooo!"  Twice.

I understand the problem Lucas might have felt he was addressing.  There is a lot of emotion going on in Darth Vader's mind in this scene and he makes some key decisions.  But the character's face is hidden behind his famous mask.  Giving Darth dialog, however inarticulate and unconvincing it might be, would communicate to the audience what he was thinking and feeling.

But there is no problem for Lucas to solve here.  We do not need any verbal assistance to make up for a lack of facial cues from Darth Vader.  His actions tell us what he is feeling.  Tossing one's boss into a pit of blue fire is not very ambiguous.  But that wasn't enough for Lucas, the Master of Obviousness.

Seeing this revised scene made me think about the peculiar convention of the wordless close-up.  Most films have at least some of them.  The shots rely upon crucial information being communicated through the close-up of an actor's face, which focuses the viewer's attention on the emotions taking place within the character.  Even when that face is relatively expressionless, the audience can be trusted to understand what is happening beneath the calm surface.  This is partly through the dialog and action that surrounds the close-up, but it also is through the audience's training.  We have been taught how to understand such film conventions by watching thousands of hours of film and television.

The Searchers (1956)

A famous example would be a scene with John Wayne in The Searchers.  After his character, Ethan, and others have determined that they have been lured away from the settlements by the Comanche and that all of their families are in great danger, the posse races back to save them.  But Ethan knows their horses cannot make the hard ride.  Racing back will kill their mounts, which will keep them from saving the families AND leave them without horses.

He is left behind and wipes down his tired horse.  Across his still somewhat stoic face we see the concern and fear for what might be happening to his brother's family.  No dialog.  No scenes of mayhem.  No overwrought expressions.  Some of his frustration is evident in the way he wipes down the horse.  He is helpless and he hates that.

In film studies we talk about "reading" images.  But with many wordless close-ups, we are not really reading the face of the actor -- at least not reading it separate from the dialog and actions that have come immediately before or that will follow.  We must admit that a face without dialog can sometimes be ambiguous.  But if the elements surrounding the close-up are clear, the viewer is not so much reading the face in the close-up as he/she is projecting expected feelings onto that character -- or what they would be feeling themselves.  In a sense, the face can be like an empty space that the viewer fills in.

My evidence for this is Team America: World Police, a film with no actual faces, only puppets.  This movie has close-ups and reaction shots of puppets.  Some of them are rigged to have expressions, but many times the faces do not change during the shot.  The emotions are conveyed through actions and dialog.  However, in some scenes we are given reaction shots from puppets who are showing no reaction and who have no dialog or actions for cues of their emotions.  But the audience, I believe, understands what is going through the character's mind.  The close-up functions as a time not for the audience to "read" the face and decipher its meaning, since there is nothing there to read on the surface.  Instead, the audience uses the time of the close-up to register or sense more deeply the emotions and thoughts of the character they are projecting there.

In this scene from Team America, the leader of the agents tries to recruit Gary Johnston to join them.  The scene includes reaction shots of Gary during the pitch, but, of course, his face never changes.  Yet somehow the audience understands what he is thinking and understands when he declines the offer.

If you think about it, what is Darth Vader but a large puppet?  If we can understand Trey Parker and Matt Stone's marionettes, then we do not need George Lucas's help to understand one of the world's most iconic villains in his moment of redemption.