The New Yorker:
How our ideas about point of view got all turned around.
By Lauren Michele Jackson
You open your short-form online video platform of choice and see:
-A woman dancing in pointe shoes with London’s Tower Bridge in the background, overlaid by text that reads “POV: Dance is your happiness.”
-A man trembling through reps in the gym with the text “POV: doing bulgarian split squats.”
-A man with a mustache refilling a pitcher; “POV: You are the backbone of the household.”
-A gray seal inhaling audibly from waterlogged nostrils; “POV: me trying to breathe with all the pollen in the air”
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.
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