FIGURES 4.2 AND 4.3. The graphic design in these promotional images also is suggestive of smartphone aesthetics.
Smartphone aesthetics are especially prominent in Looking’s first season, which was shot by Reed Morano, the youngest member of the American Society of Cinematographers (and as of 2015 one of only fourteen female active members of the professional organization). Morano has commented that she wanted to replicate within Looking a cinematic experience partially inspired by foreign independent films. “It’s a look that was often associated with Fuji, but I feel like there’s something interesting and anti-television about a kind of a faded blue, cooler tone,” she noted in one interview. “You’re feeling more green or cyan in the blacks, while I personally like keeping the highlights comparatively warm. Part of that look is some added contrast, and we’ll be desaturating the image quite a bit—sort of an homage to the faded look of San Francisco. So I definitely think the show will have a unique look.”3 Specifically, Morano singles out the use of color as Looking’s aesthetic distinction, but this ambient finesse of the image aligns with the branding of HBO as “anti-television,” as encapsulated, of course, in the notoriously value-laden tagline “It’s not TV, it’s HBO.” In another interview, Morano ties the color schema of the series to executive producer Andrew Haigh’s previous film, the 2011 SXSW darling Weekend: “The thing I kept coming back to was the color. Many TV shows occupy the same color space. What Weekend reminded me of, like a lot of work from the UK, was how it kind of had a cool, muted tone to it. I couldn’t really put my finger on it, so I came up with my own version.”4 These cool, muted tones are especially present in the fifth episode (“Looking for the Future”) when Patrick blows off work to spend time with budding crush Richie (Raúl Castillo), in which the two get stoned and explore Golden Gate Park, culminating in a shot just above the Sutro Baths and the Pacific Ocean that emphasizes lush blues and greens against a soft, beige-tinted sky.
This is a kind of televisuality that relies on its antithetical disavowal, common to series subject to what Dean DeFino has called the “HBO effect.” Looking gives the impression that it could have been shot through a more advanced smartphone: It is shot digitally and, importantly, mostly handheld, without dollies or Steadicams. Rather than moving back and forth between medium shots or close-ups of faces—the camerawork indicative of multicamera sitcoms—Looking is predominantly shot on location with a single camera, using long shots and extreme long shots to establish San Francisco as an equal character, if not the main character, of the series. Instead of moving back and forth between medium close-ups of faces, the camera in dialogue scenes moves slower, creeping around the actors while emphasizing their surroundings: the shabby-chic apartment interiors familiar to any San Franciscan or the casual choreography of the city’s neighborhoods. The series is peppered with “walk and talks,” the conversational technique made famous by The West Wing. But whereas that series used movement to structure dialogue around speed, Looking’s characters move much more slowly, reflective of the laid-back California vibe its characters inhabit, or perhaps to invoke the ambulatory high of its frequently stoned characters.
What is interesting about Morano’s description of how she shot the first season is her perhaps unintentional description of the visual practices of smartphone photography. In asserting that, as a professional cinematographer, she had leeway to “[come] up with her own version” of color composition, she also invokes the capacity to self-edit the image definitive of smartphone apps such as Instagram. Moreover, many of the filtering styles key to the Instagram effect mimic the style of traditional photographic technologies such as the daguerreotype, Kodachrome, or the Polaroid, a direct correlation to the “faded look of San Francisco” Morano aspires to with her camerawork.
The algorithms that drive this software are those of a control society, such that Instagram users create a distinctive, dividuated aesthetic underwritten by the same array of filtering options. According to Nadav Hochmann and Lev Manovich, the uniform appearances on Instagram photos create a sense of atemporality and shared aesthetics dependent upon the app’s interface signature: An individual user’s photos become unique through the same aesthetic filters used by all other Instagram users. Hochmann and Manovich’s analysis of Instagram uses data visualization to conceptualize the practices unique to specific cities, or those cities’ “visual signatures.” “If Instagram’s affordances indeed offer a new global style,” they write, “its universality possesses distinctive characteristics in different social timespaces.”5 The idea of a regionally specific visual signature—warm highlights, a desaturated image—ties into the market logic of Silicon Valley, in which regionally networked publics emerge through social media, working in tandem with other data collection services to create targeted advertising profiles.
How one manipulates an image comes clearly across in Looking’s first episode, not only through Patrick’s comment that “Instagram filters have ruined everything” but also when Patrick responds to his hunky (yet aging) friend Dom’s (Murray Bartlett) question about his age by in turn asking “in daylight or candlelight?” The way in which light might be able to distort perception seems to structure the series’ own narrative about queer self-exploration in a world oversaturated by technology: Instagram filters have ruined the ability to find a romantic partner, for example, because the normative standard by which the urban gay man finds sex, love, or some combination of the two is entirely mediated through digital spaces. The show’s title, Looking, directly evokes this as well, with the word commonly used on smartphone apps such as Grindr and Scruff to indicate a user in search of casual sex.
Yet Looking also tenders another kind of digital malleability, one of San Francisco itself, which has struggled to broker its image as a bohemian mecca for cultural minorities with the rapid gentrification spurred by tech corporations. Critics of this gentrification frame the “techification” of San Francisco as a metaphorical urban death measured through extended temporalities of population displacement and lateral change, not unlike the process of slow death described in Lauren Berlant’s formulation of cruel optimism. But while for many queer residents the struggle to survive exponential increases in the cost of living saturates urban life with a melancholic grittiness, Looking’s characters appear to be unaffected by San Francisco’s status as the most expensive city in America in which to live. While some storylines peripherally mention these changes—Dom compares the present day to 1999 and the first dot-com bubble; Agustín notes that San Francisco has become overrun by “kimchi tacos”—none of its characters experience displacement in a diegetically significant way. The love-to-hate character of Agustín nearly approximates this in his unraveling development: At the beginning of the series Agustín moves in with his then boyfriend in Oakland, but following an ugly breakup, he moves back in with Patrick, embarking on drug-fueled binges that culminate in passing out on the street on more than one occasion. Yet Agustín’s narrative drama is never truly economic but rather cultural in nature; though he doesn’t pay rent, Patrick’s tech salary can cover him, and as such Agustín’s precarity functions to shore up his relationships with his friends and prospective crushes instead of rendering him homeless or, in what would be a more realistic scenario, prompting his exodus to more affordable locales outside of the Bay Area.
Indeed, this is perhaps a telling example of Looking’s politics as a whole: Being gay is only made legible through stable incomes propped up by Silicon Valley. This amounts to a filtering of sexuality through what Lisa Duggan has termed homonormativity: “a politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions … but upholds and sustains them while promising the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption.”6 Assumptions such as monogamy and institutions such as marriage are rife within the series’ construction of gay relationships; in the most climatic example of this, Patrick ultimately breaks up with his eventual boyfriend (and boss) Kevin (Russell Tovey) at the end of the second season after finding out that Kevin has a Grindr profile.
Such homonormativity, like its heterosexual counterpart, has two distinctive