Gwyneth Paltrow, Iron Woman

When I was a tyke, I was fascinated with media theory, particularly the then-ubiquitous paperback ouvre of Marshall McLuhan. One of the things that leapt out from the work of McLuhan and his acolytes was that the photos of people in magazines depict real-world comics characters--the degree to which we manipulate images creates graphic abstractions that are closer, say, to Power Girl than people as they are in real life.

There are any number of ramifications of this that we'll be exploring here, particularly the way that attempts to use visual imagery to rise above nature can reverse into reductionism. For now, since I'm still swamped in end of the semester stuff, a picture and a quick note.

Below: an image ostensibly of Gwyneth Paltrow from a new Vogue Iron Man tie-in. I say ostensibly because if it weren't for the title of the article, I would not have recognized her. The shopped-in Iron Man tech is not the issue; the face has been abstracted to such a degree that it obliterates her distinguishing features. In fact, if you look at it for any length of time, you'll see that her face is essentially bifurcated into a Harvey Dent of idealized beauty--one wider, lighter, larger; the other, shaded, narrow, more compact. The head looks like its been pasted on, and her left arm (from the viewer's perspective, right) has fused into her body to form what looks to be wing-like webbing.

A series of Photoshop disasters? Perhaps, perhaps not. The whole effect is one of mechanized soullessness, which judging from Paltrow's hollow expression would seem to be the point.