Friday, August 10, 2012

Another image: What are they selling?

Preparing the teenfiction post for earlier this morning, I came across the cover of A Ring of Endless Light by Madeleine L'Engle. The book is pure hackery but that cover is brilliant.




Notice how the dolphin's reflection and its body produce a circle. The girl is on her own little world confronting the universe. That should seem familiar because it evokes one of the genuine classics of the genre:



That's brilliant and so is the deliberate evocation of it on the L'Engle cover done by Fred Marcellino.

But it's not quite the same is it? There is something in the Marcellino cover to A Ring of Endless Light that you don't find in Le Petit Prince. I mean, she sure is "riding" that dolphin isn't she?

And notice what her hands do. A dolphin's fin is roughly triangular but her hands block part of it out such that it looks like ... well, you tell me what it looks like.


That's not an accident folks. It works like the symbolism in a Japanese garden. In a Japanese garden, everything is what it is. That rock is a rock. But look at it in the right frame of mind and you can see it as a Mount Fuji in the midst of a vast landscape instead of a rock in a small garden. That's how you sell sex to teenage girls folks. An obviously sexual image would put the teenage girl off. She doesn't want sex, if you'll pardon the expression, thrust upon her. That girl has to be riding a dolphin but just maybe our young reader looks at it in the right frame of mind, say on day fifteen of her cycle, and she sees something else.

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