6 6. For example, audience members could hardly shun House if his pain resulted from an injury suffered while saving a child or performing some other similarly heroic act.
4
Looking
Smartphone Aesthetics
HUNTER HARGRAVES
Abstract: Throughout the 2010s, a number of series branded as “quality” began to adopt a range of new aesthetic practices that simulate those of smartphone photography, manipulating color and saturation to produce something akin to the “Instagram effect” for television. Hunter Hargraves examines one such series, Looking, which focuses on a group of gay men living in San Francisco during the height of the city’s Silicon Valley transformation, and questions how such aesthetic techniques speak to the series’ ability to represent authentic queer life in San Francisco. Smartphone aesthetics, he contends, may curtail a series’ potential to develop nuanced political critiques relating to the representation of cultural minorities, much like the social media platforms they attempt to emulate.
In the pilot episode of HBO’s Looking, a dramatic comedy about three gay friends navigating professional and personal relationships in San Francisco, two of the leads try to make sense of how technology has helped—or hindered—gay urban dating. Patrick, a twenty-nine-year-old videogame developer, sits with his roommate Agustín, a thirty-one-year-old artist, in their kitchen. Patrick, introduced by the series as relationship-challenged, observes that “Instagram filters have ruined everything, and I can’t tell if this guy is hot or not” before soliciting Agustín’s opinion. Agustín chalks up Patrick’s inability to notice the guy’s lazy eye to his naivete before the two conclude that maybe a lazy eye can be “kinda hot.” What is most striking about the scene, which otherwise documents a rather banal conversation between two close friends, is how composition and mise-en-scène coordinate with content. Illuminated by his laptop, Patrick sits at the table in focus with the background showcasing the soft green colors of plants and soft white colors of natural light: in essence, mimicking the very process of photographic filtering made popular by smartphone apps such as Instagram, Hipstamatic, and Infinicam.
FIGURE 4.1. The “look” of this shot from Looking mimics the photo filtering popularized by smartphone apps.
If Instagram filters have indeed “ruined everything,” they also establish the dominant aesthetic of Looking, which was cancelled by HBO citing the second season’s poor ratings, with the series’ storylines more or less tied up in a 2016 film. Audiences, and some critics, found the narrative too ordinary and slow moving, and the series incited many debates within its representational demographic of urban gay men surrounding the authenticity of its plotlines about sex and relationships. Watching Looking as an urban gay male might elicit a number of affective reactions: nostalgia for sunny days in Dolores Park or for sweaty dance parties at the Stud; irritation toward characters who desire homonormative relationships; aesthetic satisfaction from the lush colors of Northern California; and anger at how privilege and money anchor the narrative. In this case, these affective poles of displeasure and pleasure represent the conflict that often appears between a text’s politics and its aesthetics. But how might this ambivalence between politics and aesthetics reveal the impact of smartphone technology on contemporary television storytelling?
I highlight these tensions within Looking because the series interestingly stitches together its content with its form. It is set in a San Francisco that has undergone a number of cultural and economic shifts due to the explosive success of Silicon Valley tech corporations. Many blame affluent tech sector workers for driving up rents in the city and pushing poorer residents out of it. But technology is not only an ideological backdrop for Looking but also, as the aforementioned scene suggests, its dominant aesthetic: The series is shot to play with color, saturation, contrast, and brightness in order to “look” as if it was shot through an app such as Instagram on a smartphone. Without question, visual images have been transformed by the smartphone, through which selfies, filters, and tagging have been quickly incorporated into the photographic lexicon.
While most scholarship on the convergence between television and smartphones has focused on the spectator’s increased individual agency over what, when, and where the individual watches, little analysis attends to the influence of smartphones—their aesthetic styles and behaviors—on the production and reception of television. This essay assesses the impact that these aesthetic considerations have on Looking’s ideological messages surrounding gay male sexuality. As a series, Looking plays with the boundary of form and content through its visually appealing style that limits a consideration of queer politics. Ultimately, smartphone aesthetics may be symptomatic of television’s increased convergence with other media platforms, but they may also impose the limitations of those platforms onto the narrative, forcing audiences to balance aesthetic pleasures with the demands of representation.
Looking is one of many series whose aesthetics resonate with smartphone technology. Others we might include in this category include Louie, Girls, Transparent, The Affair, Insecure, and Atlanta. These series are (or were) all shot with a single camera and broadcast by cable, premium cable, and streaming services—markers of so-called quality television—while defying easy generic categorization. With the exception of The Affair, these series are dramatic comedies set in the present day that eschew conventions of the classic sitcom, aspiring instead toward both narrative and cinematographic realism. These series often employ retro color saturations, enhanced brightness, and overlapping textures in order to manipulate the televisual image. Notably, many of these series also place issues of identity at the core of their narratives, becoming controversial for their inability to represent fully the experiences of minoritarian groups (transgender people in the case of Transparent; millennial women in the case of Girls) with their particular characters and storylines. Many of these series (such as Girls, Atlanta, Insecure, and Looking) address these representational tensions by situating their characters as young professionals in the process of figuring out adulthood. Visual advertisements for these programs can signify this through the use of graphic design suggestive of smartphone aesthetics. Looking’s title card, for example, consists of its name in all caps outlined in bright shades of blue, as if made from neon tubing; promotional visuals for Insecure (HBO, 2016–present) displayed protagonist Issa Dee but altered with a misaligned RGB color separation. In both of these cases the condition of feeling insecure with one’s self or “looking” for something to complete the self is crystallized through blurry visuals indicative of a hazy process of self-discovery.
While the manipulation of the visual image is now standard in the contemporary mediascape, these programs illustrate the emergence of a specific set of practices that produce what I call smartphone aesthetics. Commercial advertisers and cultural critics have noted the “Instagram effect,” named after the most prominent social media smartphone app to feature handheld image manipulation. Founded in 2010 by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, the app quickly attracted one million users in two months and was named by Apple as the “iPhone app of the year” in 2011 before being acquired by social media titan Facebook in 2012 for roughly $1 billion. Instagram popularized the use of amateur manipulation through the ability to change an image’s brightness, contrast, warmth, saturation, and sharpness, most easily through the use of preset filters such as Mayfair (described by Instagram as applying “a warm pink tone, subtle vignetting to brighten the photograph center and a thin black border”) or Willow (“a monochromatic filter with subtle purple tones and a translucent white border”).1 Writing in Wired magazine in 2011, Clive Thompson observed that the kind of composition offered by Instagram filters gives “newbies a way to develop deeper visual literacy,” since users gain access to effects formerly attributed to chemical byproducts of material film.2 Along with other smartphone apps that allow users to manipulate certain elements of the