The Address of the Ass: D-BOX Motion Code, Personalized Surround Sound, and Focalized Immersive Spectatorship

Abstract

the space of the film, D­BOX’s motion effects prompt the spectator’s body to mirror those bodies depicted on the screen and identify with a particular point of view. As opposed to notions that immersive cin­ ema, and by extension D­BOX, is often focused on haptic thrills rather than narrative coher­ ence, through analyses of recent films featur­ ing motion­code tracks, including Whiplash (Damien Chazelle, 2014), Furious 7 (James Wan, 2015), Lucy (Luc Besson, 2014), Captain America: The Winter Soldier (Anthony and Joe Russo, 2014), Guardians of the Galaxy (James Gunn, 2014), San Andreas (Brad Peyton, 2015), and Magic Mike XXL (Gregory Jacobs, 2015), I will argue for how D­BOX’s address of the ass in addition to address of the eye goes beyond providing an embodied mimetic engagement with the film text. Through the personalization of surround sound, D­BOX not only enhances existing thematic elements but also adds an additional layer of narrative focalization. In the case of the latter, D­BOX can effect changes in the spectator’s experience of character identification as compared to the non­D­BOX experience of the film. Due to the technology’s standardization of immersive viewing, current uses of D­BOX technology ironically represent a return to the ideological concerns of 1970s apparatus theory—most notably, the solitary, transcendent, disembodied nature of film view­ ing linked to an empowered gaze. In this way, D­BOX’s technology, marketing, and aesthetics currently transform the shared aspects of cin­ ema into an individual experience of renewed narrative absorption that further supports on april 3, 2009, the newest iteration of immersive cinema technology quietly rolled into two American multiplexes—the Mann Chi­ nese in Los Angeles and the UltraStar Surprise Pointe in Surprise, Arizona (Harris). In both theaters, Fast & Furious (2009) debuted with the option for audiences to experience the film in D­BOX motion code. Select spectators paid a premium to “live the action” through D­BOX’s patented motion effects and specially equipped seats in an update of Hale’s Tours (1904–15) and William Castle’s Percepto. Like these earlier motion­based immersive tech­ nologies, D­BOX offered moviegoers a sense of presence at a remove from one’s lived experi­ ence and a feeling of embodied participation in the world of the film (Griffiths 2). However, although it shares aspects with earlier visually immersive “movie rides” and other contempo­ rary 4­D exhibition technologies, D­BOX owes more to the development of film sound technol­ ogy and aesthetics, particularly digital surround sound. As I will discuss, D­BOX is a digital cinema technology that “envelops” the specta­ tor in the cinematic diegesis through a person­ alization of the surround­sound experience. Rather than amplifying the surround­sound effects to make spectators feel like they are in