Francesca Lyn: Screens as Mirrors in “Bitch Planet”
In “How Do Screens Function as Mirrors in Bitch Planet?” Francesca Lyn argues that the comic “presents a foreboding techno-future where screens are used as an ubiquitous method of patriarchal control” and proceeds to discuss the many ways screens signal surveillance & subversion. 1/11
Lyn argues that in Bitch Planet, “screens are an oppressive, claustrophobic presence that emphasize homogeneity and conformity through the aesthetics of screen culture.” Visually, panels often evoke the practice of “double screening,” i.e. engaging with more than one screen at the same time. 2/11
Panels are designed and composed to evoke screens within screens. Screens are also designed to evoke meaningful juxtapositions. Here, images of idealized white women are projected behind and aesthetically tower over the imprisoned women as their Black bodies run, fight, and discuss rebellion. 3/11
Screens also symbolize the claustrophobic influence of the patriarchal society and the prisons it creates & maintains. Prisoners are interrogated by an enormous bright pink hologram who’s sometimes a nun, sometimes a domanatrix, but always squeezed into a very tight corset. 4/11
Lyn also highlights the interrogation room where Kamau Kogo is pressured into making a false confession. Kam is confronted with towering stacks of screens depicting the life of the woman she supposedly killed. Notably, wholesome moments are mixed with sexualized images, a chaotic onslaught. 5/11
Lyn additionally notes that in Bitch Planet, “the viewing of screens is compulsory. It is part of the duties of being a good citizen.” This is emphasized in a flashback wherein “a male customer interrupts Penny and demands she put ‘the feed’ (the state run media channel) on the big screen.” 6/11
It is Penny’s violent rejection of the feed she’s forced to watch–which manifests, in Lyn’s words, in Penny “smashing the screen with a rolling pin and then using the same rolling pin to hit a male customer that made racist and lewd remarks about her”–that lands her in prison. 7/11
Screens are also used to torture Penny via a computer meant to read her brainwaves & manifest an image of her ideal self. Per Lyn, “Penny is afraid to look, as she is aware that society thinks that the way she looks is wrong. She is too fat, her hair is wrong, she is neither black nor white…” 8/11
“However, Penny’s idealized self looks exactly like her… Significantly, this image visualization is presented not in a square of a rectangular screen but in what resembles a full-length mirror.” For once, then, a screen becomes an accurate mirror, bending to the strength of Penny’s will. 9/11
Observes Lyn: “Rather than accepting that Penny likes her appearance, the technicians comment that the visualization must somehow be broken… Penny’s response is to laugh, recognizing that it is not she who is broken and that these screens, these black mirrors, cannot break her.” 10/11
In Bitch Planet, screens manifest control & resistance. As Lyn observes, even as they “function as a panopticon where every individual is aware of being watched,” they also “function as mirrors that are continually being broken by women that are deemed Non-Compliant.” 11/11
You can read Francesca Lyn’s entire discussion here, within a three-part roundtable on Bitch Planet hosted by the website The Middle Spaces and edited by comics scholar Qiana Whitted.
Caged and Enraged: Bitch Planet Comics Studies Round Table (part one)