Mary Flanagan’s chapter “Language Games” within her book Critical Play: Radical Game Design discusses the different ways language is used to create layers of meaning. Artists can utilize abstract language to craft their artwork. These layers create an underlying meaning or tone called subversion. From my perspective, subversion is the crafted or hidden message that must be decoded by the viewer. This can add interesting aspects of the thought process to a storyline. It is the job of the viewer to decode the presented message. It takes intellect and some level of experience to uncover the author’s message.
As someone who has difficulties with abstract language, I find the subversion of puns to be quite fascinating. I take pleasure in deciphering the true meaning behind the artist’s words. Puns are a figure of speech that utilizes wordplay to transform a simple, direct message into something more engaging or amusing. The versatility of puns allows them to be in a visual or logistical form.
A visual form example of a pun is Marcel Duchamp’s art piece “…Fountain (1917) presented a urinal as a readymade art object that mocked art world conventions but also contained a play on language in the artist’s signature, ‘R. Mutt?’” (Flanagan 133). The piece’s underlying message discusses and reinforces Duchamp’s argument that anything could be a work of art, good, bad, or ugly, as long as the artist chose it and called it art.
A logistical form example of a pun is to get the ball rolling. From an objective lens, the pun could mean to physically make the ball roll. However, by unraveling its subversion the pun means “…to make a start or set something in motion, physically or metaphorically” found in Lucy Pembayun’s article “Get the ball rolling: idiom translations across Europe”. Some people say that its origins are based on the 19th-century croquet or “American [P]resident William Harrison’s victory balls” but to Lucy, a qualified German-to-English translator it is unclear (Pembayun). Overall, depending on how wordplay is used in figure-of-speech in visual or logistical forms they have a more personal connection with their audiences.
Vik Verplanken’s article “Cinema and Subversion: Exploring the Ontologically Subversive Potential of Psychedelic Cinema” showcases the future of having layers of meanings in films by analyzing Jordan Belson’s film Samadhi (1967).