Whale Wars and the Axiomatization of Image Events on the Public Screen

Abstract

The essay interrogates Animal Planet's television show Whale Wars, and the use of footage from that show in a commercial for one of the network's other shows, How Stuff Works, to examine the way these texts interact within the public screen. I argue that the (re)presentation of whale kill footage further instantiates an image event as a commodity and rhetorically reconciles the image event into a capitalist ideology counter to the social movement message constructed on Whale Wars—and by proxy allows the image event to play out only via a profit-motive tied to the death of the whale.

Keywords:

• Environmental Rhetoric
• Public Screen
• Image Events
• Sea Shepherd Conservation Society
• Capitalism

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Danielle Endres and Kevin DeLuca for their early work with this essay, Daniel Emery for his help with the final draft of this essay, and Dr. Steve Depoe and the reviewers at Environmental Communication; their combined efforts have undoubtedly made this essay stronger.

Notes

1. I borrow this phrase from BLDGBLOG, an architectural website which used it to describe California City, a suburb that was abandoned before it was finished, a failed extension of an already existing city (Bldgblog, 2009).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

George F. McHendry

George F. McHendry, Jr., is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Communication at the University of Utah