Post-prestige spectacle renders plot obsolete in favor of experienced excess

Evidence

The spectacle is for its own sake; there is no apparent further point, only relentless repetition and distribution (the violence in Thrones notably accreting from intimate and interpersonal to mass slaughter rendered in CGI). “Power is power,” the queen Cersei pronounces; tautology is all. … This irrelevance of the plot is integral to spectacle, as visual extremities render plot obsolete, prioritizing instead “experienced” excess, as the critic Elizabeth Alsop outlines: excessive movement of both the camera and bodies (think swarming scenes of dance or labor through which the camera quickly moves), excess duration (long sequences, both with and without music, in which the camera does not move and nothing happens), excess spectacle (increased representations of sex, death, intoxication, consumption), and excess discontinuity (think dramatic ruptures in the diegetic universe or dramatic jump cuts in the film work). Such modes of excess thwart summarization and demand a different kind of spectatorial engagement than watching for the plot: riding the waves. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 239

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines immediatist spectacle’s four modes of ‘excess’ — movement, duration, spectacle, discontinuity — that are the chapter’s inventory of the feature.