Three of the pages that discuss the image on my website used formalism in a modified form. They were "Resa ipsa loquitor", "What Is A Care Bear?", and "What Is Hellraiser?"
Formalism is the idea that works of art should be discussed on their own merits and not offshoots of religious, political, or other considerations (Bressler 51). In fact, a formalist reading would say that the image has its own meaning outside of that brought in by the reader, or in this case, the viewer (51). I wanted to look at the image's constituent parts but realized those parts have some kind of cultural meaning. So it would be misleading to say the image has some kind of autonomous meaning. I tried to discuss its cuteness factor outside of the Care Bear franchise, but even that led to a discussion on teddy bears that could not be avoided. If Berryman had never drawn that cute image of a bear, the first teddy bear would never have been made and we would not have that cultural touchstone. Yet, he drew the image that way partially because of the narrative that Roosevelt would not attack a defenseless bear; the cuteness probably just made that characteristic stand out.
Whether we are talking about the Berryman cartoon, the Care Bear/Hellraiser mash-up, or either franchise alone, we recognize them as having some kind of heightened reality, whether it is a cute reality or ugly. Russian Formalist Victor Shkloysky would call this defamiliarization, except he would use that term when considering language, not images. However, if we look at the parts of the mash-up as made up of discreet components, symbols that convey some kind of feeling, then they bring us to a heightened awareness that makes us pay attention, just as defamiliarization of language would (Bressler 52). Our eye does not ignore the mash-up because it is unusual, a cute bear with pins in his head. Context just deepens the meaning; in fact, the more context one has into what the parts represent, the more one sees that a simple mash-up for the lulz has a deeper meaning than it probably should.
The Care Bears convey empathy, caring, and yet are the product of a company that manufactures cards and gifts to manipulate people into feeling these emotions. Hellraiser is the personal vision of an apatehtic race of demons that torture others. Clive Barker has seen this world through the remediation process, from book to film form. It is his "baby." So we have a mash-up between a race of helpful bears created by a corporate entity that sells emotion and a race of demons created by one man who wait for humans to enter their dimension so they can mercilessly torture them.
If we consider that the representations of the franchises and the representation of the teddy bear are forms in themselves, we can see that their synergy in this image creates a feeling of unease because of the tension created between empathy and apathy. The connection between these two franchises goes deeper than just one is adorbs and the other is grimdark.
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Work Cited on this page:
Bressler, Charles E. Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice. 4th ed. New Jersey: Pearson Prentice-Hall, 2007. Print.
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