Literature
She is lying on a First Class sleeper seat. In that luxurious seat/bed she is floating, super-humanly, above snow-capped peaks. She is grounded, but still in the sky. She is?apparently?flying Korean Air.
The seat/bed in this ad is one to be found in a wide-body jetliner. But its luxury is shown to be attached, or just barely floating above, the natural ground. As if, in a way, our passenger never left the Earth.
This advertisement sums up in spectacular form the hyperaesthetic culture of air travel seating. The seating of air travel, whether in the air or on the ground, at the airport, is commonly imagined to be a luxurious experience, where sensations are heightened. Here, in the Korean Air ad, we see that the scale is profoundly out of whack. Thus the tagline??comfort on a whole new scale??plays off the Lilliputian landscape that our passenger finds herself resting on/above.
This is the communicated feeling: traveling Korean Air, you are bigger, your footprint quite literally enormous. No matter that, energy-efficiency speaking, this is in fact true for the space-devouring First Class passenger; the point here is how it is imagined and projected as an earthy phantasm. Our passenger?s bottom blends beautifully into the snowy peaks below; the seat/bed appears as a natural extension of the craggy terrain.
What I want especially to highlight here is the fusion of ground and air?stillness and speed?that is condensed in the marketing and imagery of air travel seating.
On the level of the sign, we might say that the signifier here is this out-of-scale depiction of the woman in a state of repose, seemingly indifferent to or utterly agreeable with whatever is around her (and indeed it is a strange scene).
The signified, of course, would be the concentrated notions of comfort, space, ease, and physical dominance?all while radical mobility (being ?expelled in jet-form,? to quote Barthes) is taking place.
The full matrix of signification here naturalizes an image of human air travel?and not any routine image of hundreds of human bodies corralled into a dented metal tube. In fact this ad, in a miraculous turn, makes the elite mode of commercial human air travel?the singular First Class chaise lounge?seem to be the most natural form of air travel: it is literally connected to the Earth, a sort of peasant offspring of mountains and trees abutting a tranquil sea.
The ad closes with a double-edged line: ?the only space that matters is yours.? Here we are presented with two possible readings: 1) the naturalistic interpretation of isolation in a cold world, where rugged human individuality is the only effective recourse (for philosophy as well as for daily life); and 2) a simple pragmatic message that supports the exorbitant cost for renting a small seat/bed for nine or twelve hours as you are shuttled around the globe: in this time, the space that matters is yours (but it?s only ?yours? on a strictly temporary basis). Either way, the ad does its work, positing the wish image of air travel as both a simple existential reflex and a complex political economic stance.
Yet finally we must wonder: is this disembodied seating fixture the remnant of a crash, à la the opening scenes of Lost? We are not meant to pursue this connotation, clearly. With air travel, nothing must disobey the ground rule of Progress.
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- Air Travel Conundrums
I'm currently writing an article on airport screening for an upcoming issue of the journal Media Fields. I'm going to use this post to think about some of the timely aspects of this topic?some spurs that don't exactly fall into the purview...
- Up In The Air
Jason Reitman's film adaptation of Walter Kirn's novel UP IN THE AIR treats the subject of flight in two not entirely compatible ways, and these ways can be seen in this promotional still, with the singular George Clooney?s contemplative face...
- Air Travel Absurdity, Part 2
The latest article in the NY Times on air travel is awkwardly titled "What Not to Say in an Exit-Row Seat". Passenger Jim Dwyer tells how he was pulled off a flight by security personnel for making a joke in the exit row; but he claims he made no such...
- Airport Reading
I recently completed my dissertation at UC Davis on the textual aspects of airports in U.S. culture. After filing my dissertation I took a short trip to visit some friends in Portland, Oregon. On the way there, I snapped a picture in the Sacramento airport...
Literature
the only space that matters is yours
She is lying on a First Class sleeper seat. In that luxurious seat/bed she is floating, super-humanly, above snow-capped peaks. She is grounded, but still in the sky. She is?apparently?flying Korean Air.
The seat/bed in this ad is one to be found in a wide-body jetliner. But its luxury is shown to be attached, or just barely floating above, the natural ground. As if, in a way, our passenger never left the Earth.
This advertisement sums up in spectacular form the hyperaesthetic culture of air travel seating. The seating of air travel, whether in the air or on the ground, at the airport, is commonly imagined to be a luxurious experience, where sensations are heightened. Here, in the Korean Air ad, we see that the scale is profoundly out of whack. Thus the tagline??comfort on a whole new scale??plays off the Lilliputian landscape that our passenger finds herself resting on/above.
This is the communicated feeling: traveling Korean Air, you are bigger, your footprint quite literally enormous. No matter that, energy-efficiency speaking, this is in fact true for the space-devouring First Class passenger; the point here is how it is imagined and projected as an earthy phantasm. Our passenger?s bottom blends beautifully into the snowy peaks below; the seat/bed appears as a natural extension of the craggy terrain.
What I want especially to highlight here is the fusion of ground and air?stillness and speed?that is condensed in the marketing and imagery of air travel seating.
On the level of the sign, we might say that the signifier here is this out-of-scale depiction of the woman in a state of repose, seemingly indifferent to or utterly agreeable with whatever is around her (and indeed it is a strange scene).
The signified, of course, would be the concentrated notions of comfort, space, ease, and physical dominance?all while radical mobility (being ?expelled in jet-form,? to quote Barthes) is taking place.
The full matrix of signification here naturalizes an image of human air travel?and not any routine image of hundreds of human bodies corralled into a dented metal tube. In fact this ad, in a miraculous turn, makes the elite mode of commercial human air travel?the singular First Class chaise lounge?seem to be the most natural form of air travel: it is literally connected to the Earth, a sort of peasant offspring of mountains and trees abutting a tranquil sea.
The ad closes with a double-edged line: ?the only space that matters is yours.? Here we are presented with two possible readings: 1) the naturalistic interpretation of isolation in a cold world, where rugged human individuality is the only effective recourse (for philosophy as well as for daily life); and 2) a simple pragmatic message that supports the exorbitant cost for renting a small seat/bed for nine or twelve hours as you are shuttled around the globe: in this time, the space that matters is yours (but it?s only ?yours? on a strictly temporary basis). Either way, the ad does its work, positing the wish image of air travel as both a simple existential reflex and a complex political economic stance.
Yet finally we must wonder: is this disembodied seating fixture the remnant of a crash, à la the opening scenes of Lost? We are not meant to pursue this connotation, clearly. With air travel, nothing must disobey the ground rule of Progress.
***
(I'm teaching Roland Barthes's Mythologies in one of my classes this semester, and my students and I are experimenting with the method & form.)
- Environmentality & The Visual Culture Of Plane Crashes
"Project Mayhem" briefing card from the film Fight Club (20th-c Fox, David Fincher, 1999) This post is a sneak peek of part of an essay of mine that is being published in a book called Beauty, Violence, Representation (as part of the Routledge...
- Air Travel Conundrums
I'm currently writing an article on airport screening for an upcoming issue of the journal Media Fields. I'm going to use this post to think about some of the timely aspects of this topic?some spurs that don't exactly fall into the purview...
- Up In The Air
Jason Reitman's film adaptation of Walter Kirn's novel UP IN THE AIR treats the subject of flight in two not entirely compatible ways, and these ways can be seen in this promotional still, with the singular George Clooney?s contemplative face...
- Air Travel Absurdity, Part 2
The latest article in the NY Times on air travel is awkwardly titled "What Not to Say in an Exit-Row Seat". Passenger Jim Dwyer tells how he was pulled off a flight by security personnel for making a joke in the exit row; but he claims he made no such...
- Airport Reading
I recently completed my dissertation at UC Davis on the textual aspects of airports in U.S. culture. After filing my dissertation I took a short trip to visit some friends in Portland, Oregon. On the way there, I snapped a picture in the Sacramento airport...