In our visually saturated culture, meaning is relentlessly constructed and contested through images. From the carefully composed frames of narrative cinema to the volatile, user-generated humor of an internet meme, a torrent of visual information vies for our attention. How do we make sense of it all? The essays in this theme week propose a compelling answer: by turning to the fundamental cognitive tools of metaphor and metonymy, we uncover a shared grammar underlying these diverse media forms. This very architecture of thought allows creators to translate complex arguments, abstract emotions, and cultural values into perceptible, persuasive, and memorable visual language.

Take cinema, for instance. Meaning in film is constructed not verbally but visually, through a fundamentally metaphorical language. The cinematic apparatus translates intangible concepts into tangible forms, using light, movement, and composition to render thought visible. Emotion, in particular, is often conveyed metonymically through effects that stand in for their unseen causes. A filmmaker may present the physiological or behavioral traces of feeling, such as a trembling hand, a disordered room, a sudden act of self-harm, as potent signifiers. These gestures become visible echoes of an internal state and lead the audience to bridge the distance between what is seen and what is felt.

This same cognitive logic fuels the engines of social commentary in static media, from the legacy of the editorial cartoon to its chaotic digital descendant, the internet meme. Here, metaphor becomes a tool of compression and critique, distilling entire political or social crises into a single potent image. Such figurative condensation makes the visual both immediate and interpretively rich.

At its core, what these diverse analyses reveal is the sophisticated cognitive work that underpins our daily media consumption. Whether in a darkened theater, before a newspaper, or scrolling through a social media feed, we are constantly decoding messages that depend on our innate ability to think metaphorically and metonymically. To be visually literate today is to recognize that every image is already a thought in motion; an argument unfolding in metaphor.