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The emergence of these media enables new modes of perception that create 'special' sensations of wonder, astonishment, marvel and the fantastic. Such affections subsequently become mined by consumer industries for profit, thereby explaining the connection between media and consumerism that today seems inherent to the culture industry. Such modes and their affections are also translated into ideology, as American culture seeks to make sense of the sociocultural changes accompanying these new media, particularly as specific versions of American Dream narratives. Special Affects is the first extended exploration of the connection between media and consumerism, and the first book to extensively apply Deleuzian film theory to animation. Its exploration of the connection between the animated form and consumerism, and its re-examination of twentieth-century animation from the perspective of affect, makes this an engaging and essential read for film-philosophy scholars and students.

This essay forwards an intensive model of mediation contrasted with the extensive model implicit in much of media theory, which conceives of communication media as an extension of human faculties. An intensive model, instead, conceives of mediation as a phenomenological process of splitting or folding affective capacities. An extensive model results in a dualistic, essentialist theory of communication media and unresolvable normative debates about the connecting or disconnecting consequences of media. An intensive model avoids these limitations by diagramming various modes of mediation and illustrating how their consequences stem from alterations to intensive properties, thereby helping constitute subjects and media objects alike rather than presuming a media bridge between pre-existing subjects and objects. The essay employs a number of examples to illustrate the extensive model, including telephone conversations, cinema, animation, and social media. The essay concludes with the division of families over QAnon conspiracies to illustrate the analytic gain from an intensive model.

When numerous scholars, from Christian Metz to Jacques Derrida, Richard Grusin to Victor Burgin, Jacques Ranciere to Rosalind Krauss discuss a work, as they have Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida, one can expect the critical ground to be well trod. Indeed, the book's two major concepts have garnered so much attention that their depictions approach consensus. As the epigraph indicates, Camera Lucida outlines two punctums--of detail and of death--that Barthes discovers in the \"Photograph.\" Given his phenomenological commitment and ontological desire to \"learn at all costs what Photography was 'in itself,\" many readers understand the punctum as exclusive to photography, making any attempt to expand the concept to other media seem dubious, at best. Here, Jenkins elaborates the concept of the punctum and considers its importance to media and ideology.

The movie … offers as product the most magical of consumer commodities, namely dreams. It is therefore not accidental that the movie has excelled as a medium that offers poor people roles of riches and power … The life of display that the photo had taken from the rich, the movie gave to the poor with lavish hand … It meant that in the 1920s the American way of life was exported to the entire world in cans. The world eagerly lined up to buy canned dreams. The film not only accompanied the first great consumer age, but was also incentive, advertisement and, in itself, a major commodity.McLuhanHere McLuhan outlines a connection between classical cinema and modern consumerism that many others have since repeated. Indeed, cinema's influence on consumer culture is practically a tenet of studies of contemporary capitalism. The front cover of Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle features cinemagoers in 3D glasses, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno often equate the culture industry and Hollywood, and Jonathan Beller describes contemporary capitalism as operating through a cinematic mode of production. For these scholars, cinema represents the penultimate example of consumer culture, since it trades in images that garner attention, entice commodity fetishism and generate affection. As McLuhan says, cinema is an incentive, advertisement and itself a major commodity.Although undeniable from the epochal angle of the modernity (or postmodernity) thesis, such accounts perform two conflations – conflating all forms of consumerism with cinema's lifestyle consumer and conflating the impact of animation and cinema on consumerism. In this chapter, I argue against these conflations, illustrating that the classical cinematic mode contributes to consumer culture in ways distinct from other forms of consumption. The classical mode makes perceivable a virtual body that will become envisioned as a lifestyle consumer, one that the culture industries will seek to sell particular commodities. While cinema retains a definite connection to consumerism, these connections, as well as the predominant theories of the emergence of modern consumer culture, become refined when understood through the perspective of affect and modes.

Disney's full-length features of the 1930s and 1940s create an interface for animistic mimesis by actualising animation's potential for transfer and transformation in mutual affection-images. Although Disney's features follow much of the movement-image regime, mutual affection-images mark Disney as one of the first to begin the transition to time-images, enabling a direct experience of time, of affection, of life. As such, Disney's translation will have a unique impact on consumer culture, one that extends into the affect economy and controls society today. This unique impact occurs because the mutual-affection images offer an interface for the innervations of wonder, and the mode of animistic mimesis makes visible a daydreaming consumer bent on the pleasures of self-affection much closer to commodity fetishism than cinema's lifestyle consumers. How, then, does Disney employ the formal features described in the previous chapter to create an interface for animistic mimesis?It would be easy to show that, despite their cinematic features, Snow White, Pinocchio and Dumbo employ the characteristics of animistic mimesis described in the previous chapter, from the use of colour and shadows to the synchronisation of sound and movement, from the drawing of gestures to the squashing and stretching rhythms. Each story features hybrid characters, including the dwarfs in Snow White, the boy-puppet Pinocchio, the flying elephant Dumbo, talking animals, and numerous mythical and mysterious characters practising magic. In almost every scene, water, fire, smoke, bubbles, rain or lightning transfer(s) colours from surface to surface, forming a musical play of colour. Music, in particular, is an essential element. Lest anyone doubt the constant fusion of sound and movements, they need only learn that, at Disney, the conductor and director planned the entire movie together before any animator ever began to draw. Each movie has multiple musical numbers where the characters move rhythmically to the music. In fact, the bulk of the viewing time consists of musical numbers, and each feature produced a hit song. Characters move to the music and then, at times, the direction reverses and their crashes, bangs or pranks move the music as well. The music and characters experience a mutual affection, in nearly every moment on the screen, so much so that the movies are practically musicals.

By the time of Disney's 1930s and 1940s full-length features, live-action film had become the feature attraction. Mickey, Felix the Cat and other animated stars received face time on the silver screen only as seven-minute shorts tacked on to the features. They ran alongside newsreels, previews and other acts on the ‘film bill’. The film bill harkened back to an earlier time in cinema history beginning just twenty-five years prior, an era Tom Gunning bills as the ‘cinema of attractions’. The cinema of attractions describes a pre-classical film practice located in the vaudeville stage and travelling shows, not the nickelodeons (5-cent theatres) and Hollywood studios of classical cinema. At these shows, audiences witnessed a performance featuring a series of attractions, each seeking to produce ‘peak’ or ‘aggressive moments’ generating the ‘shock’ or ‘astonishment’ central to the attraction's attraction. Attractions were not limited to reproducible media; music, comedy, live performances, animated images, live-action films and many other attractions shared the same stage and competed for attention.By the time of Disney's full-length features, however, the classical cinema dominated. Movie theatres dotted the globe, with fifty million watching motion pictures weekly in the United States, equivalent to onehalf of the population. Studios had established institutional roots, big budgets and industrial production methods. Film had produced its first recognisable auteurs and stars, and birthed its first mature mode, the classical mode. As a result, almost every other cultural form felt an irresistible pull to become more cinematic, including painting, novels, theatre and animation. Hollywood had developed a mode that would significantly shape American culture as well as transforming the consumer and commodity. From the perspective of 1929, it indeed seemed that cinema embodied the essence of modern consumer culture and that animation would remain a silly sideshow, a mere footnote easily ignored or readily incorporated into analyses stressing Hollywood's dominance.Hollywood's influence explains why we will spend this chapter, in a book about animation, detailing the translation of the cinema of attractions into classical cinema. Disney's animistic mimesis translates the classical mode, emerging in a context where live-action drove studio imperatives and had repeatedly attracted audiences. A quick word on the concept of translation is necessary.

These chapter outlines how Disney's full-length feature films developed an alternative mode to graphic narrative called “animistic mimesis.” This mode enabled viewers to feel the special affection of wonder, which means sensing something as alive that one cognitively knows is not. The chapter illustrates, through an analysis of Fantasia, how Disney's use of colour, shadow, sound and gesture enabled the development of animistic mimesis.