Whale wars and the axiomatization of image events on the public screen

Abstract

The essay interrogates Animal Planet's television show Whale Wars, and the use of footage from that show in a commercial for one of the network's other shows, How Stuff Works, to examine the way these texts interact within the public screen. I argue that the (re)presentation of whale kill footage further instantiates an image event as a commodity and rhetorically reconciles the image event into a capitalist ideology counter to the social movement message constructed on Whale Warsand by proxy allows the image event to play out only via a profit-motive tied to the death of the whale. © 2012 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.