Commodification: a dirty word?

I keep coming to (friendly) blows with John Doe in my class who in good Adorno and Horkheimer fashion tends to see ALL popular culture as good for nothing. We were arguing about the political positioning of English-Sri Lankan rapper M.I.A. He suggested that M.I.A’s cross-cultural anti-establishment aesthetic was just as empty as Madonna’s various guises due to their marketability.

Now it IS true that M.I.A. commodifies herself and her politics and that she IS embedded within the capitalist ideology.

This is what I want to ask: Is this necessarily a bad thing?

Isn’t everything commodified? – even Iggy Pop? (sorry Felicity)

In my opinion, the mere fact that something is commodified and cleverly marketed does not of itself drain a cultural machine of its political meaning.

Instead, shouldn’t we be asking:

• What concepts is the commodity selling?
• What kinds of desire are being produced?

Madonna was ultimately selling herself as a symbol of economic power through the manipulation of self-image. M.I.A. on the other hand is selling a certain brand of politics. She is successful at it but we can’t deny that she is genuine with her politics. Or can we? (I love her.)

Perhaps we could also ask:

• What aesthetic is being used?
• Is the commodity a result of prescriptive determinants

M.I.A.’s aesthetic incorporates a myriad of sounds from various world musics.

Here we see the commodification of images and sounds of the third world.

Is this the most deplorable thing you’ve seen in the world. Or do you think something more valuable is going on here?

Stupid-looking Theorists competition

Thanks to everyone who has been submitting ideas for stupid-looking theorists, though I must say that I’m a little discouraged by the lack of attention paid to my “serious” blog posts. That said, there is a huge gap in the blog as we have not made a snarky comment about the stupidest-looking theorist of all, Michel Foucault. Ideas for comments that would do justice to the misfortune of his genetic makeup are welcome. May I also add that whichever fan of I Can Has Cheezburger who came up with the following gem is a semi-genius?

Idol voting and prosumer subjectivity: Empowerment or illusion?

1

In American Idol, TV viewers are not only given an insider’s look at the process of creating a pop star, they are invited to participate in the process by voting for their favourite from among several competing performers. This participatory aspect of the Idol machine marks a shift in viewer subjectivity. In discussing this, I will be making use of Guattari’s argument that the contents of subjectivity are dependent on a multitude of machinic systems (1995, p.112). He distinguishes three distinct paths/voices in these systems; paths/voices of power that coerce human groupings from outside; paths/voices of knowledge; and paths/voices of self-reference that develop a processual subjectivity that is self-defined but can still maintain relations to outside mental and social stratifications (1995, p.114). I will outline the paradigmatic shift from the passive TV viewer to the participatory viewer emblematic of the Idol voting process. I argue that this process produces a “prosumer” subjectivity that serves the capitalist system through gifting the viewer with illusory empowerment but also opens up a fissure in the star creating process that has seen the emergence of Idol winners that subvert the traditional image of pop stars. The voting process also (re)produces a “democratic” subjectivity whose fetishization of the voting process distracts the masses from alternative modes of consumption and cultural production. There is, however, the possibility that participation in the process of creating a pop star creates a heightened media awareness and produces a viewer subjectivity that questions patterns of production and consumption.

2

Since the end of the last century, there has been a shift in the way the televisual image is consumed and experienced, marked by reality shows such as Big Brother and American Idol. The old paradigm is exemplified by John Ellis’ observations about the experience of events through the mechanically reproduced image, a mode of perception he calls “witness” (2000). One of the televisual image’s effects is a feeling of “separation and powerlessness: the events unfold, like it or not… So for the viewer, powerlessness and safety come hand in hand” (Ellis, 2000, p.11). This view of the spectator/consumer as passive informs arguments that consumers of the culture industry are slaves to the capitalist system, pre-determined to choose a category of mass product churned out by the industry (Adorno & Horkheimer, 1993, pp.32-33). These arguments all rest on a conception of the culture industry that separates consumers and producers. But as pointed out by the clip below (at 1:03), media advances have seen the emergence of a new subjectivity, that of the prosumer.

The word “prosumer” was coined by Alvin Toffler who wrote in 1980 that businesses using a model of production that increased profit through the mass production of standardized products would initiate a process of mass customization to increase profit margins. But this would involve consumers taking part in the production process. (see “prosumer” wikipage). Contemporary examples of this include the online serial It’s All in Your Hands where the audience can choose the plot of a thriller and American Idol where the audience can choose a pop star. The element of Idol wherein the audience can vote via SMS for their favourite contestant marks a new paradigm of televisual experience in which the spectator does not simply consume the image but is actively involved in it, shaping the events on the screen live through the participatory act of voting.

3

The prosumer subjectivity, as one might suspect, is not necessarily empowering. In a sense, the Idol machine reinforces our subjectivation under the capitalist regime through the illusion of choice. Adorno & Horkheimer discuss this illusory element of the culture industry, arguing that all mass culture is identical and standardized for economic efficiency despite the existence of various brands: “What connoisseurs discuss as good or bad points serve only to perpetuate the semblance of competition and range of choice” (1993, pp.30-33). In Idol, the voting process creates a semblance of power over the process of creating a pop star but closer analysis shows that the process is manipulated towards homogenization. This is seen in how the panel of judges dominate discourse on what determines “quality”, how the “genre themes” of episodes force a standardization of performance style, how the two last finalists are required to sing the same “Idol song”. Voting in the grand finale gives the impression that one has control over the product one consumes (i.e. the Idol CD) but one inevitably ends up with the same product. As such, the machinic subjectivity of the spectator/prosumer/voter is circumscribed through the imaginary capture of the mind (Guattari, 1995, p.114). Thus, the industry’s maintenance of cultural standardization is served rather than the self-defined subjectivity the audience imagines it attains through voting.

4

What this analysis of the Idol machine cannot account for is the emergence of atypical pop stars from the process. In 2003, the audience of Australian Idol voted the afroed Malaysian-born Guy Sebastian to victory over the arguably more marketable Shannon Noll. In 2004, the overweight, chain-smoking emo Casey Donovan won Australian Idol only to be dropped by SonyBMG for failing to fit a marketable image. Ellis argues that the televisual image always contains more than their manipulators, organizers and explainers can bring to our attention and whether any viewing witness notices them is “a matter for the vagaries of the individual viewing experience” (2000, p.12). Perhaps audiences see something of themselves, of their immediate reality, in the unconventional contestants of Idol. By inviting the audience into the process of pop star creation, the audience can reconfigure celebrity images to encompass persons traditionally considered “not-ready-for-prime-time” (Williams, 2005, p.639). This is contrary to the needs of the culture industry that prefers predictable standardized commodities, a “unity of style” (Adorno & Horkheimer, 1993, pp.35-36). The voting process of Idol does open up the concepts of “pop star” and “celebrity” to creative and subjective mutations (Guattari, 1995, p.114) which serves to produce a more self-defined, processual subjectivity.

5

The emphasis on voting for a pop star in Idol produces a democratic subjectivity that circumvents human groupings by paradoxically distracting the spectator from real participation in culture. As Williams notes, “the equation of democratic citizenship with the exercise of suffrage rights is a distinctively twentieth-century phenomenon, one that emerged at a time when public faith in the feasibility of democracy in mass-scale modern societies faltered under the pressures of modernization” (Williams, 2005, p.641). She goes on to argue that “electoral democracy” is a form of rule designed not to empower the people but to pacify the masses by reducing civic participation to voting rights, “a manoeuvre that allows the citizenry to participate, not in power but in the rituals and festivals of power” (2005, p.641). Idol’s unveiling of the process behind the creation of a pop star and the ability to vote, all speak to a growing desire in people to participate in the culture industry, the prosumer subjectivity. Voting is by far the primary avenue for the viewer to engage in the process. The program’s presenters constantly ask of the viewer something along the line of, If you want X to be your next Idol…SMS their name to XXX-XXX, while the SMS number appears on screen.

Idol’s emphasis on voting as an entry into the culture industry machine distracts them from engaging in other potentially disruptive or transformative modes of production and consumption. The viewer is content to vote from their couch and disregards other activities such as creating original music or seeking out alternative media outlets (such as community media or local venues) or navigating music-related communities both online (e.g. last.fm) and offline. In these alternative avenues of production and consumption there is the potential for the development of a “processual subjectivity that defines its own coordinates” (Guattari, 1995, p.114) but they are activities circumvented by the production of a democratic subjectivity by the Idol machine that equates voting in a reality show to cultural empowerment.

6

The democratic process of Idol may, however, encourage paths/voices of self-reference (Guattari, 1995, p.114) through the contradictory discourses on what constitutes the quality of a performance. Williams argues that reality TV constructs a more active and engaged ideal of the voting process than that in news coverage of elections because emphasis is placed on the reasons and rationale of decision-makers’ choices rather than just how the public will vote (2005, p.643). In Idol, the judges comments, the words of supporters in the audience, the posted comments of fans-they provide contradictory opinions on who should win Idol and, more importantly, why that person should win Idol. In this way, the spectator becomes a “witness” to the decision-making process behind the creation of pop stars. From the resulting media consciousness emerges a political consciousness (Ellis, 2000, p.11). A good example of this is how Idol’s exposure of practices of body fascism in the pop star-creating process resulted in the emergence of Casey Donovan as winner of Australian Idol in 2004 and Ruben Studdard as winner of American Idol in 2003. One possible outcome of Idol’s voting process, then, is the emergence of a media-savvy subjectivity that encourages the re-evaluation of consumption patterns. Paths/voices of knowledge enabled by the Idol machine create ruptures in capitalist logic that can serve to enlighten consumers and loosen the culture industry’s grip on consumer subjectivity.

7

The voting process of Idol serves the needs of the culture industry by purporting to empower consumers while maintaining market standardization and discouraging subversive engagement with culture by fetishizing the power of the vote. However, opening up the process of pop star creation to the TV viewer is changing consumer subjectivity in unpredictable ways. I have argued here that the new prosumer subjectivity has seen the emergence of pop star images that subvert the standardized image of pop music and might also see the emergence of a heightened media consciousness that questions how me consume and how we might produce culture. These changes to a prosumer subjectivity means a greater emphasis on Guattari’s path/voice of self-reference and in which the subject is less passive and more empowered to engage with culture according to more self-defined co-ordinates.

Key texts cited:

Ellis, J. (2000), ‘Witness: A New Way of Perceiving the World’, Seeing Things: Television in the Age of Uncertainty London: IB. Tauris, 6-16.

Adorno, T. & Horkheimer, M. (1993), ‘The Culture Industry: enlightenment as mass deception’, in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. S. During. London & New York: Routledge, 29-43.

Guattari, F. (1995), ‘Regimes, Pathways, Subjects’, in Soft Subversions, ed. S. Lotringer. New York: Semiotext(e), 112-130.

Williams, J. (2005), ‘On the Popular Vote’, Political Research Quarterly, 58(4), 637-646.

Brad’s random, skeletal musings on Idol and the culture industry.

The topic: Culture is not neutral: whom does it serve?

Case study: American Idol.

Who are the players?: Audience, participants, producers, advertisers, subcultures (gender, race, class, religion, genre)

Who is benefiting from the process of pop star creation?

Who is being duped?

Clearly the contestants are being duped. Take young Sanjaya for example: the world was his oyster until he decided he wanted to express his individuality with a faux-hawk and now he’s sweating it on the Bat Mitzvah circuit.

THE TELEVISION AUDIENCE

Since American Idol is primarily a televisual event, let’s talk about how the audience might be being served by the Idol machine. John Ellis‘ article, Witness: A New Way of Perceiving the World, talks about the shift in how we experience events brought about by the televisual screen. He notes several effects of televisual experience (what he calls witness):

• Feeling of separation and powerlessness, provoking guilt or disinterest.
• Panoptic view, a multitude of perspectives.
• Feeling of complicity in the events.
• Superabundance of information, offhand details, as opposed to the written word, undermining the control of the television producer.

In regard to American Idol, the spectator is put in a position of (illusory?) power as American Idol opens up the machinic processes of pop star creation to the viewer and gives them the chance to participate in the process by voting. The process of voting via SMS certainly indicates a different paradigm to the witness paradigm of Ellis.

The audience of American Idol is constructed as being in the place of music industry bigwigs.

But of course, this is all part of raising revenue for the telephone companies.

Exposure to the inner-workings of the culture industry: This is a common theme in a lot of instances: DVD extras, web blogs such as CHUD.com and Defamer, TV shows such as 30 Rock and Entourage. – Is this democracy or just the industry adapting to leach more money from us?

“Experience is the new reality” – check out this video which explains the hot new buzzword in marketing: prosumer

Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter…and Spring: a rant on an intensely stupid film

Let’s start by discussing the quite formidable entry on Spring, Summer at to taste.

Basically, I’m pretty sure I disagree with the author, Richard Camilleri, but he is much more eloquent than I could hope to be. Kudos, Richard, Kudos!

Anyway, he writes:

Some have argued that Ki-duk engages in “reverse Orientalism,” a self-exoticisation, essentialising national identity in a utopian pre-modern, pre-colonial imaginary as if such a space were retrievable, and uninflected by recent history (Faure). Likewise, one could designate these critics as re-orientalising, reducing through bifurcated Western categories (and as if the West isn’t far more complicated and always colonised/ing itself). Yet, it is exactly this multi-layered terrain upon which these categories converge that Ki-duk explores. Questions of orientalism, or reverse-orientalism also seem to ignore the very tangible, valued, and ubiquitous place of tradition in Korean culture; a tradition which isn’t static, but is both a ghost and a body within the present.

Richard is arguing that Orientalism is flawed because it assumes a “Western” view of the East and this relationship is always more complex as the West cannot itself be seen as static and monolithic. My view is that Kim Ki-duk is creating a national self-image that is problematic not because it is filtered through a Western gaze but because it fantasises an authentic, utopian, pre-modern, pre-colonial imaginary. The problem is not the representation of tradition in Korean culture, but rather that traditions of religion as represented in Spring, Summer are idealized and static. I guess the debate between me and Richard and Life Out of Balance is that I see the representation of rituals (the religious/Buddhist aesthetic) as static and repressive while the others see the rituals as fluid.

The problem that both of them face is the film’s cyclical structure. Richard writes:

Whilst Ki-duk seems to promote Buddhist thought and the view of samsara, he complicates things too. In the final scenes the new initiate is seen tormenting a turtle; a reflection of his master who when young tormented the snake, fish and frog. This torment prefigured his attachment to dukkha in the sexual relationship he has with his to-be wife, who he ends up murdering. “Lust awakens the desire to possess, which ends in the intent to murder.” Kim-duk seems to suggest that the logic of samsara is a hopeless one; that any positive movement (Nibbana) means nothing in a recurring universe in which murder and violence are eternal.

Ki-duk does not only paint an ideal pastoral image invaded by contemporaneity, but questions that pastoral image also as a possible triumphal illusion. The resolution to the film is continuation of a cycle of violence in which neither tradition nor modernity can be disentangled and figured as the cause.

A recurring universe in which murder and violence are eternal. A cycle of violence. This is a film obsessed with seasons, and constant, permanent cycles. It is obsessed with making universal statements and in the end Buddhist/Christian redemption prevails. The murder of the wife is not part of the cycle but Buddhism has an answer for that too. The film does show flaws in the Buddhist cycle but tries to ignore them. For example, the monks are not supposed to give in to lust but surely a lack of sex is unsustainable. Isolated from society, how is the cycle to continue? But the film isn’t about Buddhists who are fading from contemporary life or Buddhists who adapt to modern society in order to survive. They can always depend on women from “out there” to be adultering, baby-disposing whores so that the question of sustainability doesn’t have to be asked. There is certainly a criticism of Kim’s invented Buddhism evident in the film, but Kim is more interested in his super-narrative about the circle of life to give these fissures the time of day.

WHAT IS DANIEL FRAMPTON GOING ON ABOUT?

Daniel Frampton talks about film phenomenology. If Phenomenology is the philosophy of experience – the study of consciousness and the phenomena of direct experience – then film phenomenology  has to deal with a film body. The film body has its own perceptive and intentional life. If this sounds like another way of bringing author’s intention into discussion, it’s not. The spectator doesn’t experience the filmmaking. There is a double experience: the filmgoer’s experience of the film and the film’s ‘experience’ of its characters and objects. He writes:

What is important about seeing film as a body is the way that it allows for social meaning – allows for a historical, situated film: a body that intends in relation to the world and other films. This other-body is thus ethically invested.

How do I consider Spring, Summer in light of all this? The film-body situates itself in a pastoral landscape, away from modern Korea, with little acknowledgement that it exists. The film’s gaze focuses on the natural beauty of water, trees, animals. What is the film doing here? It is idealizing an idea of a natural cycle. It is giving identity to Korea through images of nature and religious ritual. What does this say about the film’s subjectivity? That it perceives of Korea in essentialist terms, unwilling to engage with the vagaries of modernity and cross-cultural exchanges. What does this say about Kim Ki-duk? That he’s a simplistic hack who makes pretty images. What does this say about me? I’m a disillusioned Buddhist.

Links:

• The Kim Ki-duk Page by Darcy Paquet
• Interview with Kim Ki-duk by Volker Hummel for Senses of Cinema
• Cinematic Seoul by Victoria James, article for New Statesman looking at the film boom in South Korea

More Kim Ki-duk…

Totally overlooked the extensive writing on Kim Ki-duk at to taste. Will definitely check it out.

Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter…and Spring: an overview of opinions from the blogosphere

Here’s my overview of opinions from other World Screen students before I launch into my own rant:

From Life Out of Balance:

 It is easy to conclude that Kim Ki-Duk is both orientalizing Korea (by stressing the traditional rituals as good, pure, natural), and reinforcing social norms (because not following the social norms of walking through doors, not sitting on Buddhas, listening to your elders results in murder; women are the bringer of men’s corruption). However, penance and correction of the balance are not associated with a complete return to the norms of Spring… Spring, Summer doesn’t reflect a reinforcement of social norms, but a subtle shifting of them, as seen through changing rituals. By adapting to changing external contexts (namely political contexts), the temple neither gives in to the force of change nor completely retreats from the force of change.

I personally found Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter…and Spring to be an extremely conservative film. But the author here is arguing that Kim’s film presents ritual as mutable and fluid, in dialogue with changing circumstances. I wasn’t really convinced by the examples that the author gives. The 1st example is how  the ritual of carving out sutras is changed by painting the characters different colours and using a cat’s tail as a brush. To me, this is hardly radical. It’s merely cosmetic fancy which still promotes the fantasy of a pre-modern Korea. The 2nd example is that, despite the spiritual cleansing of this ritual, the boy must still go to jail and face modern law. Again, this reinforces the success of the spiritual cleansing ritual (otherwise the boy would put up a fight) and also fits in completely with the film’s narrative of crime and punishment. The 3rd example is that at the end of the film, the man acknowledges the transparency of the walls when he sees the woman crying in front of the Buddha. I haven’t come to my own conclusion on what the imaginary wall means but I don’t think Buddhist strictures or rituals denied that you could see through them. And again, this might have some extremely subtle symbolic significance but it is hardly radical in a political sense. I mean, what does it mean to see through an imaginary wall? It is not even clear that this was a positive thing either. It is a valid reading that seeing through the wall and touching the woman is yet another crime for which he has to seek penance. Hence, walking up the mountain with a huge fucking stone. I guess all the punishment and masochism got to me because of the Catholic overtones.

There might be something to say about the Catholic-Buddhist hybrid aesthetic. My first thought is that there is definitely an intriguing element in that area to discuss but I suspect that it ends up regressive politically anyway. Religion…

Anyway, moving on. From The Forestry:

the film offers a stark view of emotional materialism pertaining to lust, resulting in his emotions becoming a symbol of moral decay that the young man succumbs to (p60).

Highlighting his talent for “evocative imagery” and his ability to advance narratives with little dialog, the films aesthetic ‘floats’ the audience through the narrative like the tiny monastery on the lake. One must also note that the trailer for Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring, while its aesthetic integrity remains no plot is revealed. The two men just float around the lake to calming music, there is nothing shared with the audience to incite one to see what the films narrative is.

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring appears to fail in the South Korean market for a number of reasons, but principally audience demographics. If the majority of filmgoers are females in their 20’s and 30’s, are they going to choose a film that explores internally the understanding of human nature over a romantic comedy or a science fiction love story, not likely.

In addition, if you were male you would choose action over meditation, safe to assume usually not. As Darcy Paquet suggests, people do not judge movies only by objective measures, particular works speak to them personally drawing them in, so it is also reasonable to say that women will probably find Kim Ki-Duk’s ideas on the treatment and portrayal of females distressing and steer clear.

And, if it is true that more upbeat genres such as comedies tend to do better at the box office when the Korean economy has been well, then unfortunately for Kim Ki-Duk everything aesthetically from his treatment of subject matter, to the genre chosen and the aesthetic applied, distance his films from Korean audiences. With that said he makes films for his own comprehension so low box office attendance is not going to deter him when his films stand in as personal therapy.

Geez, I have a list of things in this post I have a problem with. The author doesn’t critique the idea that emotional materialism equates to moral decay. (My feeling: That’s bullshit). In the second paragraph, he both praises Kim’s ability to advance the narrative visually and then praises the film’s lack of narrative. I’m not sure what the author means by aesthetic integrity but I suppose what is meant is the films “meditative” quality. Meditative my arse. Freaking Marie Antoinette was more meditative than this claptrap. If anything, Spring, Summer’s narrative is overly facile.

Here’s the perfect example: Boy falls in love with girl. The master finds out and tells him (and I am paraphrasing) that lust is bad because it leads to possessiveness and then murder. That’s quite a statement and not something I’ve seen evidence of in practice. The girl is sent away into urban society. The boy misses her and leaves for her. Cut to the master reading a newspaper clipping that reads: “30 year-old man murders his wife”. Of all the most stupid plots…

Anyway the author defends Kim’s lack of success in Korea because apparently he is making films for his own personal therapy and that is enough. The author feels the need to insult both men and women by suggesting that all men only like action movies and all women will react in the same way to Kim’s films (that is, negatively).

I much preferred my mum’s three word review:

It’s just stupid.

And because I’m not sure that I’ll have a chance to talk about my next annoyance with the film, I’m going to air it right now. I found the character of the Master to be extremely irritating. I am so sick of the cliched, old, Buddhist sage who is ALWAYS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING! It’s as if to suggest that the bearers of tradition are perfect and hold all the answers which is totally bullshit. (Now I like the Dalai Lama as much as the next person, but see this video of John Safran debunking the myth that the Dalai Lama is a leader of the left). This cliche just gets worse when the revelation comes that the Master has the power of the force. That’s right, when the boy gets carted off to prison, the Master stops the boat moving through sheer willpower a la Yoda in Empire Strikes Back so he can say goodbye to the boy. (Being a “meditative” movie, he says this by just looking). I feel like if Kim’s film was indicative of Asian representation in film, then we haven’t progressed much past the days of good old Mr Miyagi from The Karate Kid. Heck, even Mr Miyagi was allowed some human element when you see him getting drunk and remembering his dead wife. I guess we’ve regressed from Mr Miyagi.

On the subject of Asian representation, I’ll leave you with this brilliant post from SuicideGirls:

  This is it, the bottom of the barrel. You won’t find a more offensive batch of “orientals” than these right here.

This is not a bitter, angry list. I actually like some of these characters, though no one could argue the fact that they’re terrible. I don’t know why, (especially considering I was called one or more of these character names growing up) but, characters like these really do make me laugh. Not intentionally (obviously) but the fact that someone actually wrote them… with their brazen, completely un-PC traits…

Maybe ’cause at one time, they were all there was? I used to have a joke, in answer to another friend’s complaints about the lack of black role models around, that all asians had was Bruce Lee… followed by Pat Morita from The Karate Kid … and uh, after him was Pat Morita from “Happy Days”… Not exactly an all-star super hero team-up…

I draw a line betwen ignorance and racism and, well, ignorance is funny. Somebody not knowing how bad these guys were is fucking hilarious to me.

The 9 Worst Asian Characters of All Time

1) Short Round from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. I’m too lazy to look it up, but I think this same kid was the “gadget” geek in Goonies.

He actually drives a pedicab/rickshaw in this movie, but his legs don’t reach the pedals so he’s got wooden blocks on his shoes. Ahh, I guess I know why they call you Short Round, Short Round. Coming up short in height, as well as dignity. What was it you said,”No time for love, Dr. Jones”? If only it was your tiny simian head Jones had torn into, rather than those frozen monkey brains.

2) Mickey Rooney as the upstairs neighbor from Breakfast at Tiffany’s. He actually donned a pair of “asian-eye” specs for the role. What about broken English? Fear not, it’s more broken than the hearts of every asian man who auditioned for that role. Although, my gut tells me that the number of asian auditioners was none.

Part of me really looks forward to the day Daniel Day Kim plays James Dean in a biopic with “round eye” glasses, white-face, and a slice of apple pie in his hand.

3) Long Duk Dong from Sixteen Candles. When a “gong” sound announces your arrival on the scene, the odds are fairly high that you’re not a great asian character. Other not great signs are an intolerance to alcohol, a habit of getting kicked in the nuts, and your presence, naked, high in a tree on the morning of your white family’s big important wedding. The “Donger need food!” indeed.

4) Trade Federation alien bad guys from Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace. The absolute worst. Asian-style clothes and a Death Star’s worth of broken “Engrish.” I’m surprised they weren’t wearing rice hats, solving equations, and driving the wrong way down a one way street. Believe it or not, these guys aren’t even one of the 3 most racist characters in the movie.

5) Takashi from Revenge of the Nerds. Why Takashi, you ask? Well, at one point he asks to eat some “robster craws.” At another he’s mixing a huge bin of dirty jock straps with a spoon when he exclaims “Ahh, is like salad.”

When he answers no to the jock’s question of whether he knows karate he gets a jock strap put on his head. Classic asian-stereotype mistake…

6) Kwai Chang Cane from “Kung Fu.” Let’s take an awesome show idea, fire the guy who developed it as a passion project, then get a white guy to star in it. Um, you know, a “squinty,” one… Clint Eastwood or… David Carradine! Yeah, perfect.

Oh, who did we let go? Whose idea was it, the guy that we fired? Bruce Lee.

7) Wong, Dr. Strange’s manservant. Doctor Strange, for those of you who grew up handome and playing sports, is the Sorceror Supreme of the Marvel Comics universe. Heck of an existence. Picking up the Doc’s laundry, keeping the Mansion tidy… oh, and getting the shit beat out of him every time some supervillain decided to come a calling.

How hard would it be for Strange to teach him a few self-defense spells to fend off interlopers? Who knows, cause the Doc can’t be bothered. Too busy gazing into his precious Eye of Agamotto, which as we all know, isn’t slanty.

8) Any Jackie Chan character from an American film, including Jackie himself during any appearances on an American talk shows. Sorry kung fu fans, he’s an asian “Uncle Tom.”

Nodding, grinning ear to ear like a moron, and happy to kick and punch on cue, no different than a trained animal. At least the animals got treats, all Jackie got was a handshake and a poor showing at the box office. Blisswully unaware of the host’s jokes flying up and over his head, sadly, they were the one oppenent too fast for him to block.

9) Tom Cruise from The Last Samurai. Remember that formula that worked so well for David Carradine? Let’s do that again, only this time we won’t even bother making the character asian. White guy in samurai armor and gear who, like, kills a bunch of asians and then teaches them to get along, or something.

But, he’s the last samurai, okay? It’s got to be him, no one else. If we have to we can make the asian guy the “last railroad worker”? Is that cool?

Honorable mention: The “Howard Cosell” asians from Better Off Dead, asian nail salon ladies from “Seinfeld,” Rob Fukuzaki.

Great Film Reviewers: Charles Taylor

There are not really that many great film reviewers out there but when I find one I want to spread the love. Charles Taylor from Salon.com is brilliant because he doesn’t follow trends. He isn’t dazzled by cinematic flash but acknowledges its appeal. He doesn’t gush but can give a highly favourable review while pointing out the flaws. He will defend a terrible movie where its heart or politics are in the right place. Here are some of his review:

• Kill Bill, Vol. 2 – “Tarantino’s movies don’t raise any questions about our relation to our movie past.  What does any of this finally add up to except that Quentin Tarantino has seen a lot of movies?”
• Life is Beautiful – “Any treatment of the camps that attempts to dodge the singular and irreducible fact of them hasn’t reckoned with its subject. The enormity and inexplicability of what happened there cannot even be acknowledged within a winsome comic fable.”
• Bulworth – “As a movie, it’s a disaster. As political speech, it’s imprecise, shrill and sometimes clichéd, but it’s also alive. It rejects the false terms in which both Democrats and Republicans are trying to frame our political discourse. As writer, director and star, Beatty flails all over the screen, but he’s also made the only recent political satire that draws blood.”
• demonlover – “The movie feels like a shambles, and yet it’s a stunning example of a director in complete control of his material. At times, “demonlover” plays like the most paranoid fantasies of anti-globalization and anti-porn activists. But Assayas has locked on to some ugly truths about corporate and private life and about our relation to technology right now, and what he’s saying is no more dismissible because it’s obvious.”

But, you know, I suggest heading over to Salon.com, searching under “Charles Taylor”, and discovering some insightful and engaging film-writing for yourself.

Marie Antoinette is not there…

“Identities are mobile, a becoming rather than a being” (Patricia Pisters, 175)

“Most of the stories we know about her come from other people’s perceptions of her. I was much less interested in the political and historical views of her and more in her personal experience. ” – Sophia Coppola, interview by Emanuel Levy

In high school, I spent some time in France on exchange. Forgive me, I went to a private school. Our French teacher took us on a day trip to Versailles and while we were wandering the gardens, she told us the story of Marie Antoinette: Spoilt, snobbish, so disdainful of the plight of her people that she would spend days in her pretend village at Versailles pretending to be a commoner. When confronted with the truth that her subjects had no bread to eat, she said, “Let them eat cake”.

That stayed with me and that narrative still persists today.

From Wikipedia:

Even during her life, she was both a popular icon of goodness and a symbol of everything wrong with the French monarchy, the latter being a view that has persisted to this day far stronger than the former. Some contemporary sources, such as Mary Wollstonecraft^[99] and Thomas Jefferson^[100] place the blame of the French Revolution and the subsequent Reign of Terror squarely on Marie Antoinette’s shoulders… Immediately after her death, the picture painted by the libelles of the queen was general held as the “correct” view of Marie Antoinette for many years, as the news of her execution was received with joy by the French populace, and the libelles themselves did not stop circulating even after her death.^[102]

Marie Antoinette has been described as a “prison film” by J Hoberman at Village Voice, while Felicity similarly titled her blog post on Marie Antoinette, “A Girl in a Cage“. The cage/prison they are referring to may be the social constraints Marie Antoinette found herself under at Versailles but it might also refer to history. History has pinned down the historical figure, Marie Antoinette, as a symbol of bourgeois decadence. Typical that his-tory would pin that weight onto a woman. (Have I scored points with the feminists? Thank you very much). Marie Antoinette is, or was, trapped by history’s patriarchal narrative.

But why bring patriarchy into it? Bob Dylan is/has suffered from the same problem as Marie Antoinette (i.e. pin him down as being, not becoming) as is evident in Martin Scorsese’s doco, No Direction Home, and these trailers for the awesome looking biopic from Todd Haynes, I’m Not There:

Quoted from the trailer (and presumably Bob Dylan. Oh I’m sorry, “Bob Dylan”):

People are always talking about freedom. Freedom to live a certain way. Of course, the more you live a certain way, the less it feels like freedom. Me, I can change during the course of a day. I wake and I’m one person and when I go to sleep I know for certain I’m somebody else.

ON PATRICIA PISTERS’ (DE)TERRITORIALIZING FORCES…

Pisters argues that music “offers a key to identity” not because it reflects them but because it forms them (175). She then borrows from Deleuze and Guattari (at page 188):

They consider sound in its potential force to engender all kinds of molecular becomings. Furthermore, an important aspect of music is its power to create territories and, by the same token, its power to deterritorialize… Deterritorializing forces allow music and sound to become great lines of flight, but the equally great territorializing force also allows sound easily to become fascistic.

The territorializing force has 3 aspects: Forces of chaos, terrestrial forces, and cosmic forces.

• Forces of chaos relates to the lulling function of film sound.
• Terrestrial forces relates to the creating of a “home” or at least a recognizable environment.
• Cosmic forces relates to the opening of the home, the image, to something beyond.

The trailer for I’m Not There is interesting because the main Bob Dylan tune they use is Like a Rolling Stone, a song that marked a defining change in Dylan’s career. It deterritorialised “Bob Dylan music”. People were so resistant that a crowd booed his first performance with a rock band at the Newport Music Festival because they felt it to be a betrayal to the protest folk music he had become famous for, become a messiah for, become a symbol for.

Link: DYLAN GOES ELECTRIC

What were people booing for? Because they had a preconceived idea of Bob Dylan. They didn’t want to see Bob Dylan whose identity was mobile and who strived for the freedom to be anyway he wanted. They wanted to see their idea of “Bob Dylan”. And the sound of folk music had a territorializing force too. It situated the figure of Bob Dylan in an identity that the fans were comfortable with and identified with: the political, folk-singer hero. The electric guitars, the drums, and Bob Dylan’s body in the midst of it all – this all served to break down Dylan’s established persona, or if we use Pisters’ terms, it provided a great line of flight. Not only Dylan changed, but the audience’s perception of him changed, so in a way they were changed too.

This is allows me to make a neat analogy to the reception of Marie Antoinette at the Cannes film festival.

From the New York Times:

CANNES, France, May 24 — The first sounds you hear in “Marie Antoinette” are the abrasive guitar chords of the great British post-punk band Gang of Four. The effect may be jarring; this is not the kind of thing you normally associate with the 18th century. But the song turns out to be bracingly apt.

The applause after the press screening Wednesday morning — there was some! — was mingled with boos, perhaps from die-hard republicans (in the French rather than the American sense) offended by Sofia Coppola’s insufficiently critical view of the ancien régime in its terminal decadence.

Sophia Coppola on MSNBC in response to the booing:

“We always knew that the French are protective of their history, and that’s one of the challenges,” Coppola, 35, told The Associated Press. “But I wanted to show it in France first, because we made it here and it takes place here.”

Also see USA Today’s story: Coppola’s movie booed at Cannes: Was something lost in translation?

From Dave Calhoun at TimeOut:

Coppola’s film may give fashion fans and music video heads cause to celebrate, but it will leave anyone looking for a strong perspective on the life of Marie Antoinette severely disappointed. She’s not interested in looking beyond the walls of the palace, in considering this queen in any critical depth. Ultimately, considering Coppola’s attempt to shoe-horn the French revolution into the film’s last ten minutes, her disengagement is more than lazy; it’s a little offensive. It may be hip, but it ain’t history.

From James Rocchi at Cinematical:

Imagine that you are a 14-year-old girl, part of a wealthy and powerful family, and you’re sent to a foreign land, to marry a man you’ve never met in the name of peace and power. Everything is foreign to you: The codes, the rituals, the etiquette. And you’re saddled with a single expectation: Produce a son who will be the heir to the throne; everything else you might do or might want is irrelevant. This is Marie Antoinette’s story.

Unfortunately, it’s not the story in Marie Antoinette – or, rather, while those elements are in Sofia Coppola’s new film about the historic French Queen, they’re not its focus. Actually, the question of what, exactly, is Coppola’s focus is a good one

The mistake that all these writers make is to assume that there is a “point” to any one person’s life, that there is a “true history” with a “strong perspective”. They assume that Marie Antoinette is the story of the French Revolution or that Marie Antoinette is the  story of a girl under the strictures of court life feeling the pressure of having to bear an heir. In Coppola’s film, Marie Antoinette avoids being either of these things. Or, she is all of these things and at the same time, she is none of these things. In fact, when Rocchi asks, what is Coppola’s focus?, the answer is that Marie Antoinette’s lack of focus is the film’s focus. Marie Antoinette is many things: captured princess, party animal, despairing, rapturous, devoted wife, adulterer, shallow, philosophical, materialistic, generous…

(great scene in the movie: Marie Antoinette’s friends are bickering. One calls the other a “prude”. The other responds with “slut”. Marie Antoinette gazes on the hot Swedish army dude she has just bedded…)

So what part does the music play in all this? Let’s consider the following scene:

The crashing beat of Siouxsie and the Banshees’s Hong Kong Garden has a territorial force. The use of modern pop music (rock, post-punk, new romantic, shoegazer) is creating a “home” for the youth. The music marks the young person’s territory as a hedonistic place free of protocol and in doing so creates a collective identity (that is extremely attractive to me). As a young, pop-savvy spectator (I guess the target demographic for this kind of film), I became swept up in the music as it has personal relevance to me and I became more involved, identified with, the action on the screen. My identity was being subtly formed (I say “subtly” because I don’t want it to sound like the movie was life-changing) by the music in conjunction with image so that I became involved in the lives of historical teenagers from 18th-Century France. (For me, the success of the film is that I was emotionally affected by the anachronistic nature, unlike in A Knight’s Tale.)

Of course, the soundtrack also has a de-territorializing affect. It de-territorialises the “historic drama”, “Marie Antoinette” and on a larger scale, “history”. But I have addressed this above.

Also, what the aesthetic of Marie Antoinette’s soundtrack achieves is to provide a modern filter on history. It’s an acknowledgement that what we are seeing isn’t factual reality, as history often pertains to be.

On the subject of history, from Ranciere’s “Thinking between disciplines: an aesthetics of knowledge”:

We know how the historical discipline, for more than a century, has declared itself in revolution. It has thus proclaimed its separation from chronicle-history which attached itself to facts about great men and to the documents written by their chroniclers, secretaries and ambassadors, and by this to devote themselves to material facts and long periods of the time in the life of common people. They have thus related its scientific status to a certain democracy. However, it is clear that this democracy is also one democracy opposed to another. It opposes the material reality of long cycles of life to the agitations which disturb the surface

It confirms that the true time of the builder is the long time of life which reproduces itself, and not the suspended time of aesthetic experience, and that towards which it makes time deviate: the ‘short’ time, the ‘ephemeral’ time of actors in the public sphere. It functions as an ethical principle of adherence, defining what can be felt and thought by the occupants of a space and a time.

The feelings and thoughts of Marie Antoinette have often been defined in relation to the French Revolution, so much so that Coppola’s attempts to explore other aspects of her were deemed “offensive”. Marie Antoinette’s avoids the trappings of history to engage an immersive, dream-like aesthetic certainly personal to Coppola, that creates an awareness of the Queen’s fluid and mutable identity. She refuses to be defined.

Dogville, Elsaesser…

“There is no European…whose identity is not always already hyphenated or doubly occupied.” (Elsaesser, 647)

In response to criticism over his apparent indictment of America in films like Dogville and Manderlay, Lars Von Trier responded thus:

A big part of our lives has to do with America. In our country it is overwhelming… America is sitting on the world and therefore I am making films about it. I’d say 60% of the things I have experienced in my life are American, so in fact I am an American. But I can’t go there and vote. That’s why I am making films about America.

Felicity talked about Dogville as operating in a confessional mode. It got me to thinking: Who is confessing? Lars Von Trier? It seems that Von Trier’s comments quoted above are disingenuous for to be 60% American and make a film criticising America should be in part an admission of guilt. Watching the film, it didn’t seem like the case to me. It was more like Von Trier pointing the finger at America as an outsider/Dane. Do Lars Von Trier and his films belong, in part, to America? I’d suggest not. In fact, Dogville’s aesthetic reinforces the endurance of identities drawn along nationalist lines, the film’s conclusion an apocalyptic illustration of Samuel P. Huntington’s “clash of civilizations”.

ON DOUBLE OCCUPANCY…

In order to address the condition of the contemporary era in which the “nation” has become inadequate as a concept for defining the individual’s identity, Thomas Elsaesser posits the term “double occupancy” as:

the intermediate term between cultural identity and cultural diversity, recalling that there is indeed a stake: politics and power, subjectivity and faith, recognition and rejection, that is, conflict, contest, maybe even irreconcilable claims between particular beliefs and universal values, and between what is ‘yours’ and ‘mine’. (648)

Because the individual is always “diasporic in relation to some marker of difference” (647), the nation’s old way of including/excluding must be broken down. The contemporary condition is thus simultaneously belonging and not belonging. In other words, if we were to use the Hegelian dialectic, the clash of tribalism and globalism can be seen as thesis and antithesis. Double occupancy is the answer, the synthesis.

The problem is that Elsaesser tries to have his cake and eat it. He writes at page 648 that:

I want the term to be understood as at once tragic, comic and utopian.

 

 

Tragic or utopian? Which one is it? The fact of the matter is that there are plenty of instances in which shifting identity paradigms have a far from utopian outcome. Elsaesser pays lip service to this on page 651 where he admits:

There is little doubt that that…bringing unprecedented hight-tech media-consciousness and media skills to diaspora communities in Britain. Denmark, Germany and France, have played a major role in the present resurgence of nationalism and the polarisation of public culture and politics.

DOUBLE OCCUPANCY AS (SOMETIMES) CRISIS NOT UTOPIA (NOT THAT I WANT TO BE A PESSIMIST)…

I mentioned “plenty of instances”. What may they be, I hear you ask? The examples that come to my mind usually involve the migrant experience. Most recently in Australia, we have seen the issues surrounding Kevin Andrews’ comments about the Sudanese community’s “difficulty in integrating”. Here are a handful of articles from The Age:

• Sudanese settlers feel ‘thin sense of belonging’
• Andrews unbowed, Sudanese tensions brew
• Violence not way: minister stands fast
• Cops slam ’soft’ approach
• For refugees, it’s been a hard, dazed journey into the light
• Attack on officer is un-Australian: Andrews

Want I want to suggest is that double-occupancy is not always a positive condition. It is not always experienced as a new way of being, but as identity-crisis. And the resulting anxiety can lead to a resurgence of tribalism as is the case with the London bombers.

Links:

• London bombers ‘were all British’
• London bombers: Key facts
• 7 July 2005 London bombings
• The London bombers
• An In-Depth Look at the London Bombers

From Amy Waldman, ‘Seething Unease Shaped British Bombers’ Newfound Zeal’ New York Times (found through Nexis Lexis):

It is a broader narrative being played out by such immigrants across Britain, and Western Europe … “They don’t know whether they’re Muslim or British or both,” said Martin McDaid, a former antiterrorist operative who converted to Islam … They are alienated from their parents’ rural South Asian culture, which they see as backward. Reared in an often racist milieu, they feel excluded from mainstream British society, which has so far not yielded to hyphenated immigrant identities as America has … So some young men have solved the “don’t know” riddle by discovering a new assertive and transnational identity as Muslims … The young have no anchors; they sometimes seem to be living in rooms without walls …

In the case of many second-generation Muslim migrants, double-occupancy is a burden. As such, they are resorting to monolithic cultural identities. I’m not saying that Islam is a monolithic cultural identity but extreme Islam would like to paint itself as such with its emphasis on purity and that has been attractive to many Islamic-British youth.

What to make of Lars Von Trier’s Dogville in light of all this? Felicity said:

In the creation of a particular space for a highly pared and iconically materialist attuned view of politics through his mise en scene, von Trier gives us an amazing cinema of the psychological constitution of gender roles and social order roles. These spaces for consideration are acheived via a specific dialectic aesthetic.

From Cognitive:

I guess the power of Dogville was the articulation of space which helped to create a basic but dramatic and choreographic rhythm of the whole film.

That was just a whole lot of words in aid of nothing.

From Eloise at World Aesthetics:

Unlike other European films that Elsaesser discusses, from France and Germany, Denmark’s aesthetic has Dogville analogise that the ‘utopian reality’ of a coexistence of perceptions will not happen/is not sustainable. The other European films suggest a successful and comfortable model of double occupancy, because of this idea of mutual interference- alterations of perceptions to benefit on a two-party level. So what does this say about von Trier’s aesthetic judgement of Denmark? Why is Denmark unable to produce a model of mutual benefit, to alter and expand perceptive range in pursuit of democracy?

Oh my god I totally agree with Eloise! Shock horror! Though, I’m not sure how wise it is to read Dogville as indicative of Denmark’s (as a whole) inability to produce a model of mutual benefit. But I haven’t seen enough Danish films to know if this is a trend. Who knows?

From Life Out of Balance:

I thought about Dogville on the walk home to my apartment, and kept getting reminded of different stories, one after the other, like Dogville had set off some kind of fuse in my history of literature and cinema, on the path to some great explosive realization about, at least, a common universal theme … Asian revenge movies, at first Oldboy and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, until I realized that given Grace’s womanhood and the sexual aspect of her degradation, revenge B-movies, like Last House on the Left and I Spit On Your Grave, because Dogville is really just a high-art version of them that plays much less to the sensationalism of sexploitation

This is not really relevant to this post, but it does touch on something I felt. The author makes a connection with revenge films, particularly those of the 1970s. I really felt that Dogville fits into a trend of post 9-11 films that deal with revenge in order to grapple with that historic event. Movies I would list under this include Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy, Steven Spielberg’s Munich and Hirokazu Koreeda’s Hana yori mo naho. (What to make of Kill Bill? Nothing, it’s fun, disposable, hack filmmaking.)

From Mandytrev’s Weblog:

When Grace accepts an opportunity to annihilate her abusers at the close of the film, her visage as the ‘model of an ideal immigrant’, accepting of her exploitation and construction as a scapegoat in order to fit in (Elsaesser 2006, 654), is supplanted by a Foucaultian image of power relations that belies the idealism intended by Hegel. It is a moment that refuses spectator identification with Grace and instead re-contextualises the community of Dogville as a rather insignificant participant in the dog-eat-dog ’state of nature’ expounded by Hobbes…

I believe that it is important to understand that although the film can be and is read as allegorical of America’s war in Iraq, the exclusion of former Eastern block countries from the EU, the various immigration policies in place the world over, or more abstractly the neo-libralism versus neo-realism debate, the film’s minimal scenography offers a rather more universalising affect. As a result the film exceeds specific contexts to paint a nihlistic view of humanity and its persistant politics of fear and violence, us and them, that is historically and spacially unmoored.

Far from synthesising spectator thought perceptions with the reason that structures Hegelian or Hobbesian philosophies, von Trier ultimately refocuses upon the sensory, the visceral affects of such political reason.

She reads the film in a similar way to both Eloise and me – as denying the posibility of Elsaesser’s utopia of double-occupancy. But while, I have used direct analogies to specific historical events to make sense of the film, Mandy stresses that the film’s minimal scenography offers a more universal, nihilistic view of humanity. And I suppose, she is absolutely right. The first thing I said after watching this film was, “That Lars Von Trier just hates everybody doesn’t he?”

The film deploys a minimalist aesthetic, depicting a town whose boundaries and buildings within are signified through chalk lines drawn on the floor of the film studio. The actors treat this universe as if it was real, miming the opening of doors, acting an inability to see through the imagined boundaries. The minimalism, as argued by Bo Fibiger,

offers ample opportunity for the story to travel into the mind of the spectator. Thus we are very much interpreters, and this contributes to giving the statement of the film a more universal dimension: Dogville is not just a place in the United States, it is also Rønde or Høje Gladsaxe or any other suburban town that we carry around with us in our minds.

The film’s minimalist scenography contributes to the dialectic aesthetic. Elsaesser says (at 655):

spaces are mostly delineated by chalk marks and whose boundaries are at once imaginary and real, invisible  and brutally enforced. Here, space is doubly occupied, insofar as the spectator is forced to superimpose…a different cognitive mapping of what constitutes inside and out, exclusion and inclusion

The chalk outlines suggest a universal parody of (nation-state) borders. For example, in one scene Grace is denied access to walk through a garden because she is not one of the town’s people. The bone of contention, that Grace has crossed a forbidden borde, is patently ridiculous because all that we see is a chalk outline. The border, stripped of its physical reality, becomes a purely ideological barrier built on sand, separating Grace (the Other) from the community. However, the people never transcend these boundaries, thus their potency is retained.

The dialectic is between an internationalist mindset which sees barriers as increasingly less relevant (and this is the mindset of Children of Men and Babel) and a more pessimistic, conservative mindset
that sees humanity as blocks of monolithic cultures, as in Samuel P Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations:

 It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.

In Dogville, Grace tries to transcend ideological boundaries. She tries to become an internationalist. She tries to belong to the town. But as a stranger, a migrant, she is subject to the condition of double-occupancy. Much like the British bombers, she experiences this as a crisis and resorts to a singular identity by reuniting with her mobster family and destroying the town, Other-ing the town to which she used to doubly-occupy.

So the dialectic doesn’t result in a synthesis. The thesis merely negates the antithesis. So while Von Trier brilliantly parodies the ideological barriers that divide humanity, his film is politically problematic because he doesn’t allow the possibility of transcending them. We need a third way and Von Trier can only provide nihilism.