Warped Ways of Seeing “P.O.V.”
You open your short-form online video platform of choice and see:
You notice an issue here—a seeming confusion on the “point of view” in question, the who or what doing the looking. The annotation “POV” proposes that these are P.O.V. shots, with the camera’s vantage standing in for a subject’s perspective. Yet this description is incongruous with the footage being described. Is the mustachioed man the “backbone of the household,” or, as the low-angle shot from the corner of the kitchen sink suggests, is it his dish sponge? The camera’s steady gaze upon the woman dancing or the man exercising belies the idea that it belongs to a dancing or exercising person—though we can suppose that a person who enjoys these activities does sit and watch others doing them, in London or at the gym, or from the comfort of their phones. But you sense that this is not what these users—creators—meant. The snuffling seal is the P.O.V. of “me” who is “trying to breathe” only if I am looking in a mirror.
How did P.O.V. get turned around? Shall we, per usual, blame kids these days, their rumored—and, it must be admitted, routinely demonstrated—lack of media literacy? The “point of view” shot in cinema is an old trick. When the camera is submerged in “Jaws,” searching among treading limbs, we perceive that this formal choice signals a change in perspective, a seeing through new eyes. (P.O.V.: You are a miracle of evolution. All you do is swim and eat.) And, with due credit to their makers, videos labelled “POV” on social media do follow convention some of the time, in ways that can be silly or sociological. People have placed their phones inside microwave ovens in the interest of showing what their “food sees.” In one video I saw on Instagram, a blonde in no-makeup makeup rushes toward the camera, holding eye contact and gushing over the viewer’s West Village address, knocking poor people who “just aren’t trying hard enough,” unlike “you, who had to work really hard for your dad to give you that down payment on your apartment.” We are seeing through the eyes of a “finance bro” and we are “on the best date of his life.” This P.O.V. recruits us—compromises us—in its line of sight, not unlike the swimming footage in “Jaws.” We are what we see. Horror fans are especially familiar with this effect—the P.O.V. shot became a staple of the genre under the influence of Italian giallo films of the sixties and seventies. “Halloween,” released in 1978, memorably begins with its killer’s creeping P.O.V., which is then cut with a shot unmasking the entity behind the gaze, a child named Michael Myers.
P.O.V. takes us for a ride, lulling us back onto our laurels, as if the work of seeing is already done. The movie “Nickel Boys,” adapted from Colson Whitehead’s novel and shot from the alternating P.O.V.s of its two protagonists, received short shrift at this year’s Oscars, but critics were rapturous, with sound reason; still, I winced to see the film received as experiential, as if the director, RaMell Ross, and his cinematographer, Jomo Fray, had dropped the veil cloaking Black experience, permitting the audience to become a passive witness to the way things were. (“Organic, immersive, essential,” one reviewer wrote.) Such language tends to attach to films featuring Black people, and responses to “Nickel Boys” might have been the same old shame if not for the film’s interest, on behalf of its source material, in manufactured apertures. What we see in the movie in first person has been arranged and circumscribed. How “Nickel Boys” sees is clearly not “organic,” given the laborious technique involved; the film goes as far as to dispense with any pretense that unmediated looking is possible—there to prove otherwise are historical memory, newsprint, and clips from “The Defiant Ones,” starring Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier, with its own ideas about race and escape. My colleague Doreen St. Félix was right to observe an “uncoöperativeness” in the film’s field of vision. Ross’s “first-person world,” she wrote, is built with “closeups, fadeouts, visual ellipses,” a.k.a. the stuff of cinematic technique, which will “sometimes orient us and other times alienate us.” Everything captured, every scar and smirk and shaft of light, is as relevant, and as ripe for notice, as the upside-down Statue of Liberty heralding U.S. soil in “The Brutalist,” or the tour of grinding asses in a strip club in “Anora.” “Nickel Boys” begs of its audience an active, critical attention.
P.O.V. is, as St. Félix notes, “the perspective of our cell-phone era,” alerting us to the device’s evolution, somewhere around the turn into the twenty-tens, into the predominant tool of artistic, pragmatic, and intellectual expression. And memes, like it or not, are the grammar of that expression. The Yale English professor Marta Figlerowicz has written that most memes function “through immediate, self-objectifying identification,” or “a nearly childlike, exuberant finger-pointing.” The pointed finger says, “It me,” sometimes in those exact words. Memes illustrate interiority, using third-party images to display a mad self-portrait; they are a way of showing oneself in how others are seen. The ascendance of meme culture has coincided with the increasing sophistication of the phone camera and its attendant software and, as important, with the migration of the principal camera from the back of the device to the front—from “phone eats first” to “what my food sees,” if you will. Recording with the front-facing camera is a little like looking in a mirror, watching yourself as others see you, which, in the tradition of psychoanalysis, can be called constitutive of human experience. But P.O.V. videos are of another order altogether—P.O.V. referencing P.O.V., the P.O.V. of posting P.O.V. We are watching people who are watching themselves film themselves in the way others see them. As Benjamin Morse, who teaches new media at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, has said, of how P.O.V. has been redefined on social media, “It’s sort of like saying, ‘I think,’ but with the emphasis of a personal endorsement or a rejection.” He added, “It’s an extra layer of intensity and certainty which says, ‘I really ascribe to this’ or ‘I’m taking ownership of it.’ ” This is the P.O.V. of someone who cannot rely on visual language to convey a message, who cannot trust the empathetic mechanism of someone seeing what they see. And can you blame them?
