Performing Fragility

This chapter argues that the vocal performance of Lara Croft’s character in Tomb Raider 2013 manifests a particular type of media femininity requiring her fear and fragility and contrasts with similar games featuring male leads. Extending the discussion of the male gaze to sound brings new insight to the relationships between a character’s look, her movements and mechanics, and her vocalizations, to embody the character’s gender or act as gendered corporeality. The chapter argues that by virtue of being sound “effects,” women’s voices and feminized sounds in games draw on and solidify some of the most deeply entrenched gendered norms of sound design and voice-over work. Lara Croft’s excessive breathiness, as well as the overuse of environmental reverberation, codes her gendered sonic position as “feminized.” Players experience Lara Croft’s vocalizations as coded with abundant emotionality and fragility—sounds of strain, inner monologue, gasps, reactions, and battle cries—especially when compared with a similar narrative and game character, Nathan Drake, from the Uncharted series. By comparing the gendered sonic positioning of Lara and Nathan, the chapter shows her embodied vocal fragility by linking these characteristics to a transmedia historiography of feminized vocal typologies.

Epilogue

Part of living at a distance has meant relying on a stream. Today alone, so much information has streamed into my home from so many sources on so many devices I would have trouble accounting for all of it. While my daughter streamed her class session upstairs, a selection of music I would be likely to enjoy streamed on my phone, and my son streamed a movie from one of the services to which I hastily (and regrettably) subscribed when the pandemic began. We streamed a bedtime story read remotely by Dolly Parton, a Shakespearian sonnet read by Patrick Stewart, and a silent film playing on the wall of a New York City apartment. Unlike the tsunami of my emotional state for the past few months, these streams have been rather comforting. But how does the metaphor of the stream hold up to the discourses and dangers of ventriloquism we have been addressing throughout this collection?...

Queer from the Horse’s Mouth

This chapter focuses on two mid-century American screen equines who possess the power of speech: Francis, a patriotic U.S. Army mule serving during WWII, and Mr. Ed, a palomino horse living in the suburbanizing postwar San Fernando Valley. Contextualizing Arthur Lubin’s wildly popular Francis films (1950–1956) and Mr. Ed television series (1961–1966) within the tradition of talking horses in literary classics such as The Iliad and Gulliver’s Travels—and also in relation to mid-twentieth-century American debates around gender—the chapter argues that Francis and Mr. Ed’s ventriloquial voices not only serve as vehicles for a critique of traditional masculinity, but also channel some startlingly queer and post-human interspecies alternatives to human heteronormativity.

Ventriloquizing Obama, or, the Ethics of Archival Ventriloquism

Contemporary practices of audiovisual appropriation allow the appropriationist to “speak through” a recorded subject’s voice and body in an act of “archival ventriloquism.” When recorded subjects become—to a degree—ventriloquist’s dummies, they lose control over their own voices as they are “spoken through.” In such cases, new “technovocalic bodies” are constituted: imaginary bodies that are nonetheless related to the real bodies of the recorded subjects. However, some technovocalic bodies reveal their own technovocality, while others do not. When media technologies are used to obscure the fact that the relation between voice and body has been altered, both the recorded subject and the audience are opened up to an abusive form of media ventriloquism. This chapter explores several video works based around the reuse of recordings of former US president Barack Obama in order to articulate the critical, comedic, and abusive potentials of this form of media ventriloquism.

Identity Politics and Vocal “Whitewashing” in Celebrity Lip-Syncs

The popularity of celebrity lip-syncing in contemporary media culture often lies in the presentation of racial and/or gender-based disjunctions between the connotations of the voice that is heard and the body that is seen. This chapter argues that such racial ventriloquism can be conceived as vocal “whitewashing,” which involves changing a preexisting vocal performance by a person of color into one by a white person. With a focus on two performances by white actors (Paul Rudd and Emma Stone) on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and a contrasting performance by a Black actor (Taraji P. Henson) on Lip Sync Battle, the chapter contextualizes and historicizes the trend in which white celebrities “try on” the voices of singers of color. It demonstrates how the racial ventriloquism involved in such lip-syncs intersects problematically with histories of cultural appropriation in the US film and music industries.

“Mike Fright”

This chapter examines the racialization of sound and language during the transitional period in Hollywood. It argues that the studios’ interest in African American representation in the talkies participated in the ongoing construction in US popular culture of the “Black voice” and of ethnically marked ways of speaking as signifiers of substance and vitality. Tracing the genealogy of this “thrown” voice back through white radio comedians’ vocal mimicry, dialect fiction written by white authors, and blackface minstrelsy, the chapter demonstrates that the talkies were a technological medium of racial ventriloquism. Examining the popular RKO feature Check and Double Check (1930)—a complex product both of radio minstrelsy and the early sound era “vogue” for African American musical performance—the chapter centers on a highly revealing gesture of counter-ventriloquism by the members of the Duke Ellington Orchestra, who refuse to adopt the thrown “Black voice” scripted for them, appropriating white singers’ voices instead.

“You’re the Puppet”

In primetime US political discourse, across liberal and conservative outlets alike, accusations of puppetry and ventriloquism proliferate. Despite invoking an anachronism, the ventriloquial metaphor furnishes a reliable means of discrediting presidential candidates and presidents-elect by conjuring the figure of the dummy who speaks in a voice not his own. At the same time, the presidential voice’s constant mediation invites material comparisons to the channeling of voices through dummy and human bodies practiced in stage ventriloquism. This chapter examines how technologies of the voice, from microphones to speech aids such as earpieces and teleprompters, have figured into popular framings of the last three US presidents as speaking puppets, arguing that bipartisan charges of ventriloquism reflect twinned national-cultural anxieties about the voice’s constitutive mediation and power’s constitutive decentralization in late capitalism. Through analyses of liberal speculations about George W. Bush’s use of listening devices, conservative claims about Barack Obama’s dependence on teleprompters, and bipartisan responses to Donald Trump’s self-presentation as a leader whose mediated voice remains perpetually unfiltered, the chapter proposes a new theory of the politics of voice that acknowledges the voice’s technicity and power’s distribution.

Double-Ventriloquism and Aegyo in Overwatch

This chapter considers how South Korean identity is represented in the online video game Overwatch through a close reading of the character D.Va. The term “double-ventriloquism” is proposed to explain the simultaneous representation of South Korean youth culture and an assumed North American player within D.Va’s vocal utterances. Through the combination of the audio generated by the game engine and the actions of the player, D.Va communicates messages of instruction, cheer, and defeat. Speaking through action and flavor dialogue, D.Va becomes recognizable as a sexy, cute, young, and techno-forward character whose character and persona the player audience connects with. However, they remain ignorant of the combined corporate and political interests of the creators. This chapter argues that, through “double ventriloquism,” D.Va manifests both North American game company Blizzard Entertainment’s (which owns Overwatch) financial interest and the South Korean state’s interest in exporting Korean cool to an American audience.”

Broadcasting the Diva of Dubbing

For children growing up in the Pacific Northwest in the 1970s and 1980s, Hollywood playback artist Marni Nixon was known not as the singing voice of Deborah Kerr or Audrey Hepburn, but as “Marni,” the cheerful mother of an incorrigible yellow puppet named Norbert, whose problems she solved on local television with a story and a song. The award-winning Boomerang (1975–1981) reveals how the goals of educational television were linked to expectations of the maternal voice embodied in a figure familiar to parents from the Hollywood musical. The placement of Marni Nixon in a lineage of televisual children’s ventriloquists such as Shari Lewis and Fred Rogers further destabilizes the voice that would only appear to be finally united with a body. This chapter analyzes Boomerang’s structure and style alongside parenting manuals from the period to argue that the fissures in viewers’ perception of Marni Nixon reflect a shift in the cultural understanding of how mothers should interact with their children, a change surprisingly dependent on discourses of ventriloquism.

The Mills Brothers, Animators of the Unseen Stage

The Mills Brothers were a vocal quartet who rose to fame in the 1930s with a distinctive vocal style that featured group harmonies, the imitation of musical instruments, and the incorporation of dramatic scenes into popular songs. That style doesn’t easily fit within the paradigm usually applied to popular singers of the radio age—the “crooners”—and instead, the Mills Brothers are best understood through reference to scholarship on puppetry, ventriloquism, and animation. The Mills Brothers provide an overlooked case study in Black transmedia stardom during the 1930s; the group’s multimedia presence at that time included network radio, phonograph records, live performances, three Fleischer Brothers sound cartoons, and appearances in several Hollywood films. The group’s unique vocal style was perhaps best captured in the Fleischer cartoons, and this chapter argues that they are better appreciated as animators than crooners; that is, as virtuosic practitioners in the art of sonic illusion.