When A Wall Isn’t A Wall
A brief treatise on symbolism, presentation and board games
You may have noticed that Adam Brown tends to use his board game collection as a set backdrop quite frequently. On the surface of it, this appears to be a decision motivated entirely by practical constraints; despite his lordly position as a tertiary educator, Adam quite probably doesn’t have room in his house for a dedicated film set. His props consist of whatever comes to hand: a water bottle, a phone, a tablet, or (equally frequently) @virtualtiff.
But it’s worth remembering that our subject is a lecturer in digital media. You can’t demonstrate proficiency with digital media and also be accidentally letting slip about your home address, pants size and credit card number. Thus, everything becomes considered and deliberate, and it’s my theory that Adam’s set design is no different.
But first, a primer on the use of symbolism in film. Or, as they’re often called, tropes.
Tropes?!
Yes, as the black hole of a time-waster TV Tropes describes them, a trope is a technique of quickly conveying information in a way that is commonly recognised. It takes the cognitive effort off the viewer, and thus makes screenwriting easier, because everyone just knows that a person wearing a white coat is a doctor or scientist, an object introduced in a long, lingering shot is going to be significant later, and a slow walk down a quiet hallway is going to end in a jump-scare.
When applied incorrectly, the use of said objects is transparent, clunky and contrived, like when Doctor Oz struts about the studio wearing scrubs (because he’s a doctor, you see), but when applied with a degree of subtlety, they can bestow authenticity by taking advantage of our unconscious methods for decoding visual media.
Consider the humble news anchor. They’re well-informed professionals certainly, but they’re also actors who are competing for our attention with every other TV channel, YouTube stream and Twitter stream. Thus, they need to take advantage of every possible edge in order to appear more authentic and compelling than the competition. They wear suits to convey how serious they are and are regularly positioned behind a desk to demonstrate how they’re working professionals. They’re filmed in front of a cityscape, which not only contextualises the broadcast (this is where the news comes from), but also puts the news anchor in a position of power above the city; they are literally above it all.
Shows like Seven’s Sunrise or WIN’s Today do the same thing, but with a twist: the anchors are suited to convey authority, but are often seated on a couch instead of behind a desk, which gives a more casual feel and makes the anchors seem more human and approachable (even though the unholy monstrosity wearing a human suit known as ‘Kochy’ is anything but human). Sunrise goes a step further and keeps the cityscape background, but places the anchors at ground level; they’re contextualised, but on the same level as the everyman who walks past the window and presses his flesh to the glass. The show even routinely positions anchors outside on the street, making them literally approachable.
“Look!” the show desperately cries. “We are one of you! We are of the people! Just like you hu-mans!” And for moment it’s adorable to watch Kochy strut about on his hind legs and wave proudly, but then he flaps his meat lips and the horrible realisation that you’re watching the banal harbinger of slow cerebral suffocation dawns upon you and before you know it you’re twitching on the ground, frothing at the mouth while your spouse tries desperately to remember how an epi-pen works.
Strategically Inverted
Which brings us back to Adam and his board games. It’s safe to say Adam has watched television. It’s quite possible he’s read TV Tropes before, or at the very least would recognise the application when he saw it. Which begs the question: why board games?
To answer, lets consider: what tropes tell us the subject is a lecturer, professor, or some other learned professional? Greying hair, neatly trimmed beards, glasses and a thickly stacked bookshelf or lectern. Since Adam lacks the first three (unless that’s a very convincing dye job), we’re left with the last. Does Adam have bookshelves in his home? Almost certainly, but he’s used board games instead. It may well be that he’s chosen board games precisely because he doesn’t fit the traditional learned lecturer archetype. We can therefore conclude that Adam’s choice of background is a deliberate deconstruction of the trope he invokes. Adam lacks a trimmed grey goatee and horn-rim spectacles, but is still learned nonetheless. The board games matches the physical arrangement and presence of books, but are clearly not books. They instead add a subtle humour to the video by drawing attention to and then averting the traditional signs and symbols associated with academics — and specifically how we expect to perceive them. They also help to signal Adam’s interests and area of expertise — and it’s certainly easier to amass and display a collection of board games than it is with holocaust memorabilia.
Or, perhaps all this is simply me drawing an unnecessarily long bow, and his use of set dressing and props is all entirely motivated by convenience and practicality. It is, after all, terribly hard to balance a tripod on a mattress, and filming in kitchens is almost the literal definition of playing with fire.
But even if this were the case, I doubt he’d ever admit it. Certainly not now that I’ve given him all this credit.
