A reason for humans' desire to anthropomorphize that McCloud presents is simply that "we humans are a self-centered race" (32). "We see ourselves in everything" (33) because we perceive ourselves as supremely important. And we want to see patterns of recognition even where there are none. Companies that "traffic" in ecoporn can exploit this desire to see human characteristics in the natural world. Welling states that, "ecoporn supplies viewers with a fantasy of benign but total visual power over these nonhuman creatures and habitats that are both comfortingly humanized and pleasingly 'untained' by humans" (57). We see what is recognizable when we look at ecopornographic images, and yet we also see a natural environment that appears to be pure from the destructive impact of humans.
Cartoons also provide people with a sense of "visual power" because they see what is human in an image which is really only abstractly related to human features. The image is recognizable, allowing the viewer to "see [him]self" (36) in the image, to relate to it. And yet it is also pleasingly separate from the viewer, an icon which allows the viewer to, in a sense, become someone else, while still remaining comfortably in his own skin.
It seems that our constant desire to see human characteristics can have either good or bad consequences. It can lead us to gain new understandings from cartoons, or it can blind us to the true human influences in ecopornographic images. More generally, it seems that anthropomorphic tendencies are not necessarily bad when we ascribe them to inanimate objects or icons, but when we anthropomorphize living things, we are on a dangerous path towards destroying the true characteristics of an animal.
This is exactly what I was thinking when McCloud began to describe the way humans place ourselves into everything we see; we really are a "self-centred" race, constantly placing "emotions where they don't exist" (this is exactly where McCloud blurs into Welling).
ReplyDeleteWhen companies like Disney create projections of nature that become filled with human emotions (Simba rode a roller coaster of climactic emotions very unfitting for an aging lion throughout The Lion King). The main reason why this is wrong is because human emotions are human, not animal. And when we anthropomorphize animals and nature we really do become self-centred in that we lose the regard for our injustice to nature, we create an unrealistic humanized nature. Nature deserves better than to be conflated with human-ness
McCloud's piece brought up the question, why is it ok to do in comics and not in nature? And I think it's because comics deal with self-placement within the human race, or in inanimate objects like you suggest. It's alright to apply our emotions to human projections because, unlike nature and animals, humans can have human emotions. You can't anthropomorphize what's already human. In this since we our only doing ourselves a subjective injustice, and this is better than perverting nature. Also it often says very interesting things about ourselves while keeping our inherent self-centredness within our own race.
The implementation of ourselves is only ok when handling the human form.