Imagining Inside:
The header image of this post shows the most detailed model of a human cell in existence; Evan Ingersoll and Gael McGill used a combination of x-ray, nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), and cryoelectron microscopy datasets to create an interactive cellular landscape. Anyone can visit the website and transport themselves into a cell that, while “dilute in its concentration relative to the real cell,” is a rendering that attempts “to visualize the great complexity and beauty of the cell’s molecular choreography,” (McGill) taking us closer (in)to ourselves than previously thought possible. Despite the fact that we have not, until recently, been able to visualize the human cellular anatomy with such incredible detail, many have tried to illustrate what it would be like to traverse the railways—or should I say veinways—of the human body in medical history, literature, and popular media.
Our bodies are aswarm with microscopic organisms, Pam. Literally aswarm.
“Vision Quest”
Germs:
Turn on any service or device that streams with ads and, especially these days, you will almost undoubtedly be shown a host of ads for cleaning products that promise to eliminate 99.9% of all bacteria from your surfaces! Whether we are oblivious to the existence of bacteria and germs on our surfaces or hypervigilant to their presence, they are something unobservable to the naked eye and we must therefore rely on figurative representations of them.
Above we have two visualizations of germs: the first is a pseudo-obsessive compulsive imagining of each and every surface covered in harmful particles, represented by lime green dots; the second, featured as art in an online article about preventing so-called childhood plagues, visualizes them as childlike colouring marks. The scribbled marks in multiple colours, which overlap haphazardly in every direction, do not stay inside the lines of the printed images, and, in this sense, are not unlike the germs and infections that seem to recognize no bodily boundaries.
Anatomical Metaphors Abound:
David Biro, expanding on the metaphors highlighted by Elaine Scarry in her seminal text on pain, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, suggests that, in our attempts to verbalize pain and physical discomfort, our language commonly falls into three metaphorical strategies—or combinations thereof.
The weapon
David Biro
The Mirror
the x-ray
In the first metaphor, the weapon, or the agency metaphor, there is an active agent or object that damages the body (ex. someone says that frostbite made it feel like their toes had been chopped off with an axe); those metaphors utilizing the second strategy, the mirror, can also be seen as metaphors of projection (ex. an elderly arthritic man speaks of brittle branches on the withering winter trees, observing his own condition in this statement); and, lastly, there is the x-ray (ex. Frida Khalo’s painting The Broken Column wherein her fractured spinal column is represented as a decaying Doric column of the classical era) also called the anatomic metaphor.
It is with this last rhetoric technique that this blog post ultimately concerns itself. These metaphors are seen as anatomic in nature because they “reflect the ongoing human desire to open up the body and peer inside,” (Biro 22) and, unlike the aforementioned cellular landscapes, rely less on creating as close to a mimetic iteration as possible and more on a creative reification of internal processes using known cellular anatomy—and sometimes speculative or completely fabricated conceptualizations—as the basis of their designs.
Anthropomorphic Illness:
Anthropomorphized figures are those non-human entities that have been imbued with human attributes. John Sparks, writing about classic fables and fairy tales as well as contemporary children’s literature, suggests that anthropomorphic animals were, and still are, so popular among storytellers because “casting animals allowed each character to be endowed with instant personality without any need to elaborate,” (Sparks 68) something illustrated in this recent comic, satirizing America using Richard Scarry’s classic style of children’s books illustrations, pictured below.
Sparks’ observation can be effectively transposed onto an analysis of anthropomorphic representations of illnesses. To this end, there are three common narratives I found while examining historical examples of anthropomorphizing disease. Disease as represented by:
- Women: the seductress tempting (hu)mankind to their doom
- Male-type figures: frequently utilizing tactics of orientalism
- Death: often used as a warning or an appeal to mothers
Women:
Clockwise from top left: 1913 poster features “tuberculosis […] personified as the writhing, petrifying head of the Medusa” (116); in a poster from 1905, “a girl with tuberculosis beckons her fellow-sufferers into the healthful air of the pine forest,” Richard Barnett suggests that “snakes, as in the [Medusa] image, here curled around the tree trunks, are [perhaps] seen to embody some particular aspect of the disease” (116); “yet another beautiful and blowsy woman embodying the threat of syphilis: this example […] offers a flower in one hand while concealing a black viper behind her back” (186); “male artists of the European fin de siècle could rarely resist the urge to portray syphilis as a voluptuous, alluring and deadly woman, as in this 1912 gouache by Richard Tennant Cooper. Note the wizened figure, showing the facial disfigurement characteristic of tertiary syphilis, lurking within the woman’s veil,” (186); and, lastly, this Tennant Cooper watercolour “offers another gendered vision of syphilis as a provocative, voluptuous woman, this time lying on a bed and accompanied by a cloaked skeleton, as a naked man leaves her bedchamber, trudging to join a throng of the diseased and dying” (186).
Men:
Slides (from first to last): Barnett writes that“[t]his coloured lithograph, showing John Bull defending Britain against the invasion of cholera, personified as an Indian immigrant, also satirizes resistance to the Great Reform Bill of 1832” (134); coloured lithograph c. 1818 by George Cruikshank exemplifying how “eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century caricaturists took got as a metaphor for laziness and genteel excess,” (238) and reified this notion through their art; and, lastly, Barnett suggests that these “[s]atirists and caricaturists found many ways to represent the fearsome pain of gout. In this 1799 etching by James Gillray, a tiny black demon sinks his claws and fangs into a gouty foot,” (238) still a common representation today, as demonstrated by the ad below.
Death:
Clockwise from top left: Barnett writes that “this coloured lithograph, made by the artist Alice Dick Dumas and distributed by the American Red Cross in France, highlights the threat posed to the health of young children by dirty industrial townscapes—here embodied in the skeletal figure of Death,” (Barnett 116) aimed towards low-income mothers in attempts to curb the rising infant mortality rates; drawing from 2011, by Robert Warren Harrison, depicting the Spanish Flu as a somewhat feminine, death-like figure, whisking away an infant and young girl, as the onlooking family mourns; my own depiction of chronic pain takes the form of a pseudo-grim reaper, although it does not appeal to mothers specifically, as Elina Conis illustrates is the standard tactic.
Images from Popular Media
The Magic School Bus
Ms. Frizzle is a teacher endowed with supernatural capabilities, ones she uses to teach her students about science and my first experience with a pop culture icon venturing inside the human body was with her and that magical bus. One of the earliest books—and subsequent television episodes—takes place inside one of her students, Arnold.
Points of interest: ( ● ) Notice how the artist(s) render the human interior in the book (slide a) versus in the animated series (slide b); what similarities and/or differences do you see?
( ● ) We see the bus transported to the stomach along with some green olives; once in the stomach, the bus hoists an Arnold flag (slides c, d). Depictions of the host body inside their own body are an interesting point of comparison between examples in popular culture.
Inside Out
A more recent example of the x-ray metaphor, also made for a childhood demographic, comes in the Pixar film Inside Out. Riley is a pre-teen girl experiencing mood swings and the movie transports the audience inside her brain where a composite of five anthropomorphized emotions regulates her experiences and their ensuing memory-formation. The plot thickens as the mind-body connection is explored through the lens of how one’s personality is affected by their emotional experience of events and later recollection of them.
Points of interest: ( ● ) In both Inside Out and the Riley’s First Date? short the audience is shown the anthropomorphized emotions of various characters besides Riley. Now, while they all have their own individual characteristics (ex. purple Fear is tall, lean, and bendy; red Anger is squat and square-ish; etc.), each emotion also takes on characteristics of their host, whether by means having a moustache or wearing glasses; all emotions, with the exception of Riley’s, even have the same gender as their host.
( ● ) The scope of the x-ray metaphor is truly apparent in the concept art of Inside Out. See the early drawings of memories depicted as glowing orbs (slide a, above) and their iteration in the film (slide b). Concept images of the brain go so far as to accurately incorporate the gyri and sulci (ridges and grooves) which make up the surface of the cerebral cortex, shown to compose the islands of Riley’s personality (slide c) and their corresponding representation in the film (slide d). Art and notes for the brain’s control-room and emotional-reaction control-panel show the level of detail to which different aspects of the design are inspired by actual neuroanatomy (slides e, f, g) as well as depictions of background characters (slides h, i) and their scientific inspirations.
Osmosis Jones
In Osmosis Jones, a film which straddles boundaries, between being aimed at kids but whose consistently purple, albeit subtle, humour is geared towards adults, takes place in the real- and animated-world, with the former situating the host-human within the broader context which makes going into the latter world, literally inside the human Frank, necessary.
When Frank eats a dirty egg (see—viscerally disgusting snapshots—above) he contracts a potentially lethal virus which the titular white blood cell must investigate.
Points of interest: ( ● ) There is not flag hoisted but, instead, Frank’s bodily interior differs based on region, with a city-like metropolitan feel for the denser areas and a decrepit, abandoned tone in those areas of Frank’s body he’s let fall into disrepair. The use of bones as backdrops or ligaments as apartments, as well as background art featuring various topical posters, propaganda, and graffiti, which serve as fascinating easter eggs throughout the film, make the animated art-design sone of the most creative aspects of this film.
( ● ) In the wake of George Floyd’s death and the resulting protests, outrage, and catalyzation of the BLM movement, we might be inclined to consider the ideological function of having a black stand-up comedian working as voice actor for the films’ white blood cell cop-protagonist. The fan made image above shows the character harbouring the same gun from the film, also adding the element of militaristic war imagery to the debate, in his battle against an anthropomorphized chronic-bronchitis.
Fan-made iterations will be explored in context of the coronavirus pandemic momentarily.
Futurama
This animated comedy series takes many of its cues from classic sci-fi, so the crew is often seen traversing bizarre locations. In an early episode, Philip Fry contracts parasitic worms from an intergalactic truck-stop egg-salad sandwich and the rest of the crew are miniaturized and ingested by Fry (unbeknownst to him) so they can eradicate the worms from his body. Chaos ensues, much of the hilarity and depth of the episode stemming from the philosophical conceit of Leela, Fry’s love-interest, falling for the worm-riddled—but infinitely more charming and appealing—Fry. This realization comes much to his dismay once he’s forced to consider whether she truly loves him or whether she loves his parasites.
Points of interest: ( ● ) Just as in Osmosis Jones, it is an egg which harbours the bacteria that infects the human (slides a, b).
Ovalbumin: A Haiku why is it the egg that is always an omen of portentous doom?
( ● ) The Fry statue has a sign which reads “the known universe”. The fact that the host-human has entered what constitutes as the worms’ entire known universe is used for a laugh when Fry mimics the pose on the statue and they momentarily fall in worship of him (slides c, d).
Archer
The team, which started out as a spy-agency, is enlisted for increasingly precarious—and, like Futurama, sf-inspired—missions throughout the series; more than one has ventured into the cellular universe.
Those are the giant man-eating parasites that have been chasing us since Archer set off the blast chargers [Captain] Price told us not to.
“Dining with the Zarglorp”
Points of interest: ( ● ) The parasites pictured above are the only examples in this blog post of non-anthropomorphized beings. The episodes’ visual designers clearly went to extreme lengths to make the Zarglorp’s parasites look just as alien as their host. The visualization is, perhaps, most terrifying in the uncanny manner in which the parasites resemble our own planet’s quadrupeds and yet are, in their own way, entirely unfamiliar; and just like that, the audience may, in turn, see their own microbial parasites, viruses, bacteria, etc. as monstrously vicious creatures that simultaneously live within and compose us as potentially dangerous.
( ● ) As is the case with Inside Out, it’s in the concept art for those Archer episodes which take place inside beings—human and otherwise—where we can see the immense amount of work put into accurately depicting the interior of bodies. From tumors and blood clots to parasitic alien-organisms, the animators on this show deftly blend realism and imagination to bring these bodyscapes to life (see below).
So, What Does This Have to do With COVID-19
Whether it’s through shrinking ourselves down to microscopic size or magnifying the virus cell until it’s the size of beach-ball, art-makers have a consistent tendency of placing the virus within our literal reach or playing with metaphorical ideas through the arts’ content.
So, how are we imagining COVID?
These are two ads from the Alberta government that imagine coronavirus as a partying dude who simply wants to wreak havoc on you and your loved ones. A little bit funny and little bit nightmare fuel, the ads straddle the line between being informative PSA’s against holiday gathering without verging into fear-mongering territory.
Similarly, a SNL sketch from December 12, 2020 figures coronavirus as a nuclear family; the rebellious teenage son (Timothée Chalamet) disappoints his parents by wanting to ingest the upcoming vaccine. The skit also takes shame cheap shots at the herpes simplex virus and features cameo appearances from anthropomorphized (well, silly paper machine head-omorphized) Ebola virus and Spanish Flu characters.
Ultimately, mainstream imaginings of the virus seem to be created with the goal in mind of portraying the virus in a less threatening anthropomorphized manner; keep this in mind as we look through some fan-made images that feature a very different messages.
Warning: Page 2 contains sensitive images. Proceed with caution.
defective princess 