Fliptomania, 350 Townsend Street, Suite 120
San Francisco, CA 94107, © Fliptomania, 1997.
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http://www.fliptomania.com
fig 36a - i, cells 1, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40

Images reproduced with permission.
Simultaneous gifts of Professor Janice Yellin (Babson College) and
Professor and Mrs. Carl Selkin (California State University, Los Angeles, 1999)
and Christine L. Sundt

Flip-book sequencing and computer morphing manipulation brought to the Mona Lisa, in this example by Fliptomania, offer an opportunity to follow a somewhat more complex narrative development than that proposed by the twelve-stage laugh sequence seen in a previous page.

In this example Mona's face begins just as it is seen in the original painting, but, over time, it contorts into ever increasingly horrid and painful variants, until, finally, the source of the pain seems to disappear, and Mona is left in a much happier state than when she began. Her emblematically mysterious smile is now gone and she is left grinning an uncharacteristically toothy smile at us.

These images play against the reputation of her mysterious smile and tell us, jokingly, of course, what pain she must endure in order to present a state of happy contentment. The structure of this journey, curiously, perhaps even unavoidably, is that of the epic journey, where the hero undergoes a painful trial, or a series of trials, as he journeys from a state of being incomplete to wholeness or contentment.

The archetype of this journey theme, of course, is Ulysses returning from the Trojan War to Penelope. This, in contrast, is the journey theme writ small -- compressed into a ten-second narrative. In it, we are asked to ponder what it will take to make the world's most famous face smile happily. Obviously, though famous, this author thinks of Mona Lisa's smile as something incomplete, something lacking -- hidden.

Readers who are offended by less than polite analogies should stop here, because to this observer, the entire sequence, has the look of a cartoon, the subject of which might be the pain and relief that comes from an episode of constipation. In less sensitive times such a sequence might even serve as an advertisement for a laxative. Script-writers for television advertisements are experts at compressing narratives into fifteen or thirty-second dramas.