tech sector workers for driving up rents in the city and pushing poorer residents out of it. But technology is not only an ideological backdrop for Looking but also, as the aforementioned scene suggests, its dominant aesthetic: The series is shot to play with color, saturation, contrast, and brightness in order to “look” as if it was shot through an app such as Instagram on a smartphone. Without question, visual images have been transformed by the smartphone, through which selfies, filters, and tagging have been quickly incorporated into the photographic lexicon.
While most scholarship on the convergence between television and smartphones has focused on the spectator’s increased individual agency over what, when, and where the individual watches, little analysis attends to the influence of smartphones—their aesthetic styles and behaviors—on the production and reception of television. This essay assesses the impact that these aesthetic considerations have on Looking’s ideological messages surrounding gay male sexuality. As a series, Looking plays with the boundary of form and content through its visually appealing style that limits a consideration of queer politics. Ultimately, smartphone aesthetics may be symptomatic of television’s increased convergence with other media platforms, but they may also impose the limitations of those platforms onto the narrative, forcing audiences to balance aesthetic pleasures with the demands of representation.
Looking is one of many series whose aesthetics resonate with smartphone technology. Others we might include in this category include Louie, Girls, Transparent, The Affair, Insecure, and Atlanta. These series are (or were) all shot with a single camera and broadcast by cable, premium cable, and streaming services—markers of so-called quality television—while defying easy generic categorization. With the exception of The Affair, these series are dramatic comedies set in the present day that eschew conventions of the classic sitcom, aspiring instead toward both narrative and cinematographic realism. These series often employ retro color saturations, enhanced brightness, and overlapping textures in order to manipulate the televisual image. Notably, many of these series also place issues of identity at the core of their narratives, becoming controversial for their inability to represent fully the experiences of minoritarian groups (transgender people in the case of Transparent; millennial women in the case of Girls) with their particular characters and storylines. Many of these series (such as Girls, Atlanta, Insecure, and Looking) address these representational tensions by situating their characters as young professionals in the process of figuring out adulthood. Visual advertisements for these programs can signify this through the use of graphic design suggestive of smartphone aesthetics. Looking’s title card, for example, consists of its name in all caps outlined in bright shades of blue, as if made from neon tubing; promotional visuals for Insecure (HBO, 2016–present) displayed protagonist Issa Dee but altered with a misaligned RGB color separation. In both of these cases the condition of feeling insecure with one’s self or “looking” for something to complete the self is crystallized through blurry visuals indicative of a hazy process of self-discovery.
While the manipulation of the visual image is now standard in the contemporary mediascape, these programs illustrate the emergence of a specific set of practices that produce what I call smartphone aesthetics. Commercial advertisers and cultural critics have noted the “Instagram effect,” named after the most prominent social media smartphone app to feature handheld image manipulation. Founded in 2010 by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, the app quickly attracted one million users in two months and was named by Apple as the “iPhone app of the year” in 2011 before being acquired by social media titan Facebook in 2012 for roughly $1 billion. Instagram popularized the use of amateur manipulation through the ability to change an image’s brightness, contrast, warmth, saturation, and sharpness, most easily through the use of preset filters such as Mayfair (described by Instagram as applying “a warm pink tone, subtle vignetting to brighten the photograph center and a thin black border”) or Willow (“a monochromatic filter with subtle purple tones and a translucent white border”).1 Writing in Wired magazine in 2011, Clive Thompson observed that the kind of composition offered by Instagram filters gives “newbies a way to develop deeper visual literacy,” since users gain access to effects formerly attributed to chemical byproducts of material film.2 Along with other smartphone apps that allow users to manipulate certain elements of the photographic image, Instagram can be seen thus as democratizing image-making, empowering users to assert control over the stylization of the image, and thus how the subjects of the image are presented to the world.
FIGURES 4.2 AND 4.3. The graphic design in these promotional images also is suggestive of smartphone aesthetics.
Smartphone aesthetics are especially prominent in Looking’s first season, which was shot by Reed Morano, the youngest member of the American Society of Cinematographers (and as of 2015 one of only fourteen female active members of the professional organization). Morano has commented that she wanted to replicate within Looking a cinematic experience partially inspired by foreign independent films. “It’s a look that was often associated with Fuji, but I feel like there’s something interesting and anti-television about a kind of a faded blue, cooler tone,” she noted in one interview. “You’re feeling more green or cyan in the blacks, while I personally like keeping the highlights comparatively warm. Part of that look is some added contrast, and we’ll be desaturating the image quite a bit—sort of an homage to the faded look of San Francisco. So I definitely think the show will have a unique look.”3 Specifically, Morano singles out the use of color as Looking’s aesthetic distinction, but this ambient finesse of the image aligns with the branding of HBO as “anti-television,” as encapsulated, of course, in the notoriously value-laden tagline “It’s not TV, it’s HBO.” In another interview, Morano ties the color schema of the series to executive producer Andrew Haigh’s previous film, the 2011 SXSW darling Weekend: “The thing I kept coming back to was the color. Many TV shows occupy the same color space. What Weekend reminded me of, like a lot of work from the UK, was how it kind of had a cool, muted tone to it. I couldn’t really put my finger on it, so I came up with my own version.”4 These cool, muted tones are especially present in the fifth episode (“Looking for the Future”) when Patrick blows off work to spend time with budding crush Richie (Raúl Castillo), in which the two get stoned and explore Golden Gate Park, culminating in a shot just above the Sutro Baths and the Pacific Ocean that emphasizes lush blues and greens against a soft, beige-tinted sky.
This is a kind of televisuality that relies on its antithetical disavowal, common to series subject to what Dean DeFino has called the “HBO effect.” Looking gives the impression that it could have been shot through a more advanced smartphone: It is shot digitally and, importantly, mostly handheld, without dollies or Steadicams. Rather than moving back and forth between medium shots or close-ups of faces—the camerawork indicative of multicamera sitcoms—Looking is predominantly shot on location with a single camera, using long shots and extreme long shots to establish San Francisco as an equal character, if not the main character, of the series. Instead of moving back and forth between medium close-ups of faces, the camera in dialogue scenes moves slower, creeping around the actors while emphasizing their surroundings: the shabby-chic apartment interiors familiar to any San Franciscan or the casual choreography of the city’s neighborhoods. The series is peppered with “walk and talks,” the conversational technique made famous by The West Wing. But whereas that series used movement to structure dialogue around speed, Looking’s characters move much more slowly, reflective of the laid-back California vibe its characters inhabit, or perhaps to invoke the ambulatory high of its frequently stoned characters.
What is interesting about Morano’s description of how she shot the first season is her perhaps unintentional description of the visual practices of smartphone photography. In asserting that, as a professional cinematographer, she had leeway to “[come] up with her own version” of color composition, she also invokes the capacity to self-edit the image definitive of smartphone apps such as Instagram. Moreover, many of the filtering
