Finding Subtext In ‘Finding Dory’

Pixar recently released the trailer for “Finding Dory,” the animated kids film about a lost fish. But the conversation that was generated around it on social media didn’t involve finding Dory, but rather about finding out whether or not a couple of incidental characters featured for just seconds might be a lesbian couple.

Before long, people were tweeting kudos to Disney for featuring the first lesbian couple in one of their films, while others promised a boycott. (The latter, in spite of famous lesbian Ellen DeGeneres being the voice of Dory herself.)

It used to be that “close reading” or reading between the lines was primarily the province of earnest undergrads and grad students in English seminars.

But in a world where conspiracy theorists abound, social media thrives on controversy, and few people take in media uncritically, examining content for underlying messages has practically become the norm. We call this drive “background as foreground.” As a result, adding a layer of background messaging, i.e. hiding your messaging and making your audience uncover it, might just be a paradoxical way to get them to pay attention