Ngai Reading

For this blog post, I decided to deviate from my final project theme and try something different that I thought was an interesting interpretation of the readings. The jumping off point I had for my blog post was Ngai’s quote “desire and disgust are dialectically conjoined” and “the disgusting itself has power to allure.” She describes that something that you may be repelled by also comes with a great deal of intrigue and fascination. What came to mind when thinking about these concepts was a Direct TV commercial I had seen recently on TV. In the commercial people go through different unappealing, disgusting, or annoying situations such as accidentally sitting in gum or having soda spray all over themselves. Instead of getting angry or disgusted over the result, the people are laughing, smiling, and yelling with glee. I felt that these scenes captured the idea that the disgusting becomes fascinating or enjoyable to indulge in, in some way. I thought this clip portrayed these concepts with a satirical edge, that can produce a comedic affect in the viewer.

I wanted to stick with one consistent clip to concisely illustrate the concept I was drawn to in the readings. I wove the text into the video so it played throughout multiple scenes and was smooth and transitional. I also experimented with the voiceover feature which I hadn’t tried and used my own voice to repeat the quote later in the video to further reinforce the idea. Also, I decided to use that to have the quote span throughout multiple of the “disgusting” scenarios.