Paradise. What is Paradise like to us? What is our conception of Paradise? Is it the same all over the world? Do the Burmese/the people of Myanmar dream of the same kind of Paradise as I do or is our perception of Paradise vitally different? And is what we consider Paradise really Paradise when we dig deep into or behind the scene?
Does Paradise in fact exist outside our imagination?
The advertisers tell us that Paradise is somewhere out there, showing us pictures to make us dream of a nice, warm, sunny, and cozy place when we are covered in snow to our knees. But is it only the façade they show us, what about the things behind the curtain that we ought to see?
Let’s have a closer look at how Paradise is represented in advertising and the two images provided.
What do I see
- when I look at the images with my objective glasses?
To the right I see two young, white, suntanned people playing / resting in the shadow of a palm tree on a white sandy beach. They are both wearing bathing suits. The sea is light green and the sky is “heavenly” blue. There is a fisherman’s boat placed in the water to the left. The sea is calm and there are only a few clouds far in the horizon (no signs of a devastating tsunami approaching).
(There is a badge stuck to the upper left corner of the image, but I will disregard it in this text as I think the visual signifiers are more important – the sticker doesn’t really say much)
- and when I look with my “feelings”?
I see Paradise! I see white sand, I feel the heat and yet the shadow is there to protect me. I see original / local culture and living (the fisherman’s boat) alongside me relaxing as a tourist. I am shown that this is the place where I can have the most precious of all gifts – Time!
I can relax and enjoy myself and have no worries, but a lot of time to spend as I want. This could easily be the western perception of Paradise.
When we are presented to visual texts, this could be either film or photography, we immediately produce a narrative to go with it, to be able to construct meaning. We seek meaning in all the text we are surrounded with and when I look at the picture I quickly imagine my own story about the scenery.
Being who I am, carrying my cultural inheritance with me in everything I do, I look for signifiers and their signification to support my narrative, my life story. I look at the sand and imagine long hot childhood summer days at the beach, no worries and everything provided for. I imagine my skin being suntanned and my image in the mirror being so much nicer.
My curiosity for foreign cultures is being awoken by the fisherman’s boat, which to me is a signification of old mysterious cultures to be explored. The light green sea, the heavenly blue sky and just a vague line on the horizon shows ultimate freedom and undreamt of possibilities.
My narration of the picture could go on and on, and I would tell my story of the Paradise in my imagination.
But reality bites! The façade will crackle when I leave the golden, sandy beach and take a closer look at the other text / image you have provided us with.
When analyzing the image I still have to bear in mind that I am a middle aged white female living in the center of a Scandinavian capital. This is very important – especially the age and the fact that I belong to the white race.
But what does the other picture show me?
I see four pictures of what the advertisers consider important for the tourist gaze. Leisure, food and cultural inheritance.
Image 1: Leisure – long sandy beach, palm trees and no other people than the photographer. A real “Bounty Land”.
Image 2: Food - A woman carrying bananas to the market, in two obviously very heavy baskets.
Image 3: Food – The market place. All vegetables lined up in neat and orderly rows for the customers to be attracted to buy.
Image 4: Culture – A beautiful house or pagoda built in the original oriental style with roof corners where the evil spirits, when falling from the sky, will subsequently on hitting the roof, be swung or glide up into the sky again. A beautiful yellow coloured house which matches the green palm leaves in the upper left corner perfectly.
When I look at the pictures in the second text I come to think of the image of Paradise being the longing for the original. That in our industrial society we are so far from the “original” life of human beings that we can be. We are under a lot of pressure to perform, to develop physically, mentally and proceed financially upwards in society. We are striving for financial security, because a healthy and stable economic situation is vital to survive in our western hemisphere. There is a lot of self applied public pressure in our part of the world. I wonder if we just want to let go of this responsibility and dream of a place where we can live and be male / female as we were originally thought to be.
The pictures signify to me the tourist gaze. We don’t want to know what is behind the scene. We don’t want to know that the people in the pictures are striving as hard as we (or even more) to survive. We don’t want to know that they work for a minimum of salary and they are only earning just enough to have their family survive – either as a fisherman or by selling vegetables in the market place.
We don’t want to know that their government constantly violates the Human Rights Act by not allowing freedom of speech. Remember the Buddhist monks who in 2007 protested against the dictatorship I Myanmar? Maybe not – because we don’t want to remember. We need to have our perception of Paradise intact to survive ourselves. We are not concerned with politics when we are tourist gazing into Paradise…….
Wow - you have really got into semiotics! Really interesting analysis!
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