Kodachrome, or the Polaroid, a direct correlation to the “faded look of San Francisco” Morano aspires to with her camerawork.
The algorithms that drive this software are those of a control society, such that Instagram users create a distinctive, dividuated aesthetic underwritten by the same array of filtering options. According to Nadav Hochmann and Lev Manovich, the uniform appearances on Instagram photos create a sense of atemporality and shared aesthetics dependent upon the app’s interface signature: An individual user’s photos become unique through the same aesthetic filters used by all other Instagram users. Hochmann and Manovich’s analysis of Instagram uses data visualization to conceptualize the practices unique to specific cities, or those cities’ “visual signatures.” “If Instagram’s affordances indeed offer a new global style,” they write, “its universality possesses distinctive characteristics in different social timespaces.”5 The idea of a regionally specific visual signature—warm highlights, a desaturated image—ties into the market logic of Silicon Valley, in which regionally networked publics emerge through social media, working in tandem with other data collection services to create targeted advertising profiles.
How one manipulates an image comes clearly across in Looking’s first episode, not only through Patrick’s comment that “Instagram filters have ruined everything” but also when Patrick responds to his hunky (yet aging) friend Dom’s (Murray Bartlett) question about his age by in turn asking “in daylight or candlelight?” The way in which light might be able to distort perception seems to structure the series’ own narrative about queer self-exploration in a world oversaturated by technology: Instagram filters have ruined the ability to find a romantic partner, for example, because the normative standard by which the urban gay man finds sex, love, or some combination of the two is entirely mediated through digital spaces. The show’s title, Looking, directly evokes this as well, with the word commonly used on smartphone apps such as Grindr and Scruff to indicate a user in search of casual sex.
Yet Looking also tenders another kind of digital malleability, one of San Francisco itself, which has struggled to broker its image as a bohemian mecca for cultural minorities with the rapid gentrification spurred by tech corporations. Critics of this gentrification frame the “techification” of San Francisco as a metaphorical urban death measured through extended temporalities of population displacement and lateral change, not unlike the process of slow death described in Lauren Berlant’s formulation of cruel optimism. But while for many queer residents the struggle to survive exponential increases in the cost of living saturates urban life with a melancholic grittiness, Looking’s characters appear to be unaffected by San Francisco’s status as the most expensive city in America in which to live. While some storylines peripherally mention these changes—Dom compares the present day to 1999 and the first dot-com bubble; Agustín notes that San Francisco has become overrun by “kimchi tacos”—none of its characters experience displacement in a diegetically significant way. The love-to-hate character of Agustín nearly approximates this in his unraveling development: At the beginning of the series Agustín moves in with his then boyfriend in Oakland, but following an ugly breakup, he moves back in with Patrick, embarking on drug-fueled binges that culminate in passing out on the street on more than one occasion. Yet Agustín’s narrative drama is never truly economic but rather cultural in nature; though he doesn’t pay rent, Patrick’s tech salary can cover him, and as such Agustín’s precarity functions to shore up his relationships with his friends and prospective crushes instead of rendering him homeless or, in what would be a more realistic scenario, prompting his exodus to more affordable locales outside of the Bay Area.
Indeed, this is perhaps a telling example of Looking’s politics as a whole: Being gay is only made legible through stable incomes propped up by Silicon Valley. This amounts to a filtering of sexuality through what Lisa Duggan has termed homonormativity: “a politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions … but upholds and sustains them while promising the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption.”6 Assumptions such as monogamy and institutions such as marriage are rife within the series’ construction of gay relationships; in the most climatic example of this, Patrick ultimately breaks up with his eventual boyfriend (and boss) Kevin (Russell Tovey) at the end of the second season after finding out that Kevin has a Grindr profile.
Such homonormativity, like its heterosexual counterpart, has two distinctive effects. First, it suggests a “post-gay” sensibility more interested in documenting queer subjects as ordinary rather than as invested in the political visibility congruent with identity politics. As Tim Teeman wrote for The Daily Beast, “Looking seems at special pains to be so nonpolitical, so over all the kind of nitty-gritty stuff that people do talk about and experience: marriage equality, homophobia, discrimination, the plight of gays abroad.”7 Such a review resonates with numerous descriptions of the series, including one from executive producer Haigh, as less about what it means to be gay and more about a group of men who happen to be gay. Second, its homonormativity removes the edge from the stereotypical depiction of San Francisco gay culture as salaciously hedonistic, rendering sexuality in rather stale terms. And indeed, most criticisms of Looking revolve around it being “boring,” even from the series’ defenders. This may be a part of a larger generic and aesthetic project of HBO, who programmed Looking with its widely discussed series Girls and the also short-lived Togetherness on Sunday nights: All, to varying extents, engage in citations of mumblecore cinema, focusing on the mundane problems of privileged, mostly white people often through improvised dialogue and the slow progression of plot. When applied to the concept of queer television, however, this produces an uncomfortable approach to the expectations many viewers have about the role of representation.
To claim that Looking is not representative of a coherently imagined gay community may be a common complaint, but it is not a necessarily deep critique. Rather, its productive value lies in how irritation and frustration become wielded as strategies for viewing: in forming the backbone of practices of antifandom, perhaps, or in asserting an affective texture to the politics of representation. Yet Looking presents this texture as aesthetically technological, illustrating how representation becomes literally filtered to beautify its characters in uniformly bland ways. In one Out magazine profile lauding the series, Christopher Glazek writes that “Looking does not rely on glittering wit, slick fashion, or edgy transcendence to power its storyline. It relies on the joy of recognition that sometimes accompanies viewing a well-calibrated reproduction of daily life.”8 The “well-calibrated reproduction of daily life,” of course, is what attracts millions of users to apps such as Instagram, in which ordinary and ephemeral routines and rituals are captured, stylized, and presented to the general public. Instagram’s interface does not privilege political discourse, as opposed to that of other social media apps such as Facebook, where one can engage in a heated political debate with estranged relatives, or Twitter, both the preferred platform of President Donald Trump and a tool erroneously credited with bringing democracy to many parts of the Middle East. The Instagram effect allows for brand stylization (of babies, vacations, food, or selfies) in narcissistically beautiful yet universally flattening ways. Perhaps it should then come as no surprise that a television series that evokes such a visual signature of San Francisco technoculture could not sustain itself against the demands of serial television, which require more attention to narrative storytelling and character development.
In his canonical essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin proffers the concerning idea that capitalism and fascism function through the aestheticization of politics. The discontents of different social groups, normally promoted through collective struggle, become neutered through mass reproduction and the loss of the art object’s aura. For Benjamin, this is potentially liberating, as it allows for the formerly passive mass spectator to adopt a critical and rational stance.9 Looking’s smartphone aesthetics certainly fits within such a schema, as the desire for accurate or realistic representation is an impossibility for Looking’s idealized post-gay audience. But Looking
