You will suffer for this. What you have done will have to be paid for.

In the wake of Extreme Makeover, the most evil show on television. Saw an episode at the gym the other day (not sure which it is, they all look the same). Two points: the girl's parents buy her a $7,000 dress that fits horribly. Then, on the day of the party, the girl is smitten, karmically, with a massive zit next to her nose. Rather than panic, she GOES TO A PLASTIC SURGEON to have the zit burned off. THAT DAY. No sweat!

In an addendum to my "Reality TV" rant below, we see in this show a perfect example of the economy of American entertainment, fundamentally structured by envy and retribution (that of the viewer). We are given something to envy: whether it is the very fact that this person is on television, the fact that they're rich, that they're talented, whatever. Something is presented that we, the viewer, lack. Then the owner of that something is systematically punished for having it-- humiliated or tortured, and always enthusiastically. We are thus immediately comforted for not being that person-- what might be called "anti-envy."

Think about every Hollywood/Miramaxian film about an artist ever created. Only unstable artistic personalities-- the Van Gogh mold-- are chosen. We see their genius, and then they self-destruct. They are punished for their talent-- punished for daring to be superior to us. Entertainment is not complete without the entire cycle. Were we to only see their genius, we would merely be reminded of our own inferiority. This winning formula is dementedly, infinitely repeated (the recent films Walk the Line and Ray are virtually identical), particularly in the case of female artists --Sylvia Plath, Frida Kahlo, Diane Arbus, etc. etc. etc.--who dare to upend the ideological ordering of gender and are inevitably beset by neurosis, hysteria, disease, suicidal tendencies...

In My Super Sweet 16, a curious play of class is added to this formula. In reality these people are the most empowered members of society, caught in the midst of their appallingly lavish adolescences. But the camera is somehow able to make them suffer-- precisely because they don't know they are suffering-- and in that moment they go from victimizers to victims, felled in the subtlest of modes of class warfare.

I celebrate the guy's entire catalog

Oscar Watch:

Actually, I hate the Oscars. But this post is based on my prediction that The Departed is going to win Best Picture. Lately Academy Awards have been doled out based on a split agenda of affirming market trends and assuaging faux-liberal guilt, the latter being the reason for the success of the hilariously atrocious Crash (apologies to Robert Ebert).

Here is my theory about the "improbable" victory, last year, of Crash: it is based on the Schindler's List-principle in entertainment that movies that are "good for you" (i.e., which address "real" (i.e., tragic, traumatic, uncomfortable, or topical issues) require you to suffer. This is the flipside to entertainment that relieves you of the burden of thinking (which for some of us constitutes an equal degree of suffering).

The logic of Crash operates as follows:

We really can offer no answers for the quandaries presented by race relations in America (such as, for example, a decidedly un-entertaining discussion of intersection of economic power relations with race). But we can make you suffer, via a ludicrous script in which every single event, character and conversation is structured around racism and a score, particularly in the last fifteen minutes, that is the musical equivalent of waterboarding. Through this suffering, you, the moviegoer, have done your penance and are forgiven for your racist thoughts and desires.

This year, the joyless Babel occupies the place of Crash, substituting a nonsensical discussion of globalization for its predecessor's nonsensical discussion of race. But the joyless, guilt-ridden flick won last year, and the market demands constant adaptation. Thus my money is on the genuinely wildly entertaining The Departed, which just might represent a new trend in Hollywood.

What trend? I'm not sure I have the words for it. Last night I was discussing both The Departed and the strangely similar Casino Royale with some friends, and different terms came up: "campy," "parodic." None of them seemed quite right. The consistent thread in these two films, which is surely the kernel that makes each so fun to watch, is a remarkable level of self-awareness in two closely related genres (cop and spy) that normally have utterly none.

Both films implode spectacularly at the end. Casino Royale, perhaps because it was cut down from a longer version, becomes incoherent. The Departed becomes bizarrely cynical about itself, wiping out all of its characters (not to mention its love subplot) with maximum arbitrariness and minimal pathos, culminating in the much-loathed concluding shot in which a rat is framed before Boston City Hall. This truly pathetic metaphor for corruption (both the city's and the mob's) is a sort of fuck-you to the audience, a total surrender of any attempt to conclude the film at the level or tone that it begins (that of a "quality" Scorsese picture).

Both films depend upon a certain thrill of inconsistency, a kind of fake transgression of genre. Casino Royale, being the "first" Bond (even though it is set today, definitively after all the periods of all the other Bond films), shows us "Bond in formation": he doesn't order the drink right, he loses at cards, he gets flustered, he falls in love, he has no idea what's going on in the last fourth of the film (a trauma bigger than the death of his only love). The Departed features a dead-on, absolutely earnest performance from Leonardo DiCaprio, and then a series of increasingly camp performances from the rest of the cast (Alec Baldwin, Mark Wahlberg and Jack Nicholson most of all). Wahlberg in particular doesn't even bother to act, and that is probably the perfect way to have played it-- his line readings are all text, completely unrealistic; they are written, their humor in the foreground. Thus the film keeps oscillating between different registers, from serious drama (the ever-more-stressed DiCaprio channeling Pacino in Serpico to laugh-out-loud camp (Wahlberg's chains of insults, Nicholson's "rat" speech) to the flatulence of the final shot.

What is it about these two films that might represent a turn in Hollywood movies? It is as though it doesn't matter one bit that they are not particularly well made or consistent-- they feel like a new mode of stripped-down entertainment. Some pretension has in the process been gleaned away. Maybe.

Out On Love

The Essential Youtube Collection, Vol. 1.

old posts

So... the normally reliable hegemon Google has cut me off from editing the first Critter Blog. These were the initial posts before I couldn't post no more:

Wednesday, December 6, 2006

Balls to Monty

What a shocker. David Stern finally concedes that those new balls, which were never even tested on the players and which all the players complained about, are bollocks after all. Thus, an addendum to the reality TV discussion below:

Pro sports are fundamentally about a dialectic between outsize player personalities and the (presumed) desire of the viewer to see such personalities forced to obey. This push-and-pull is built into sport as part of the entertainment. This is periodically borne out in other sports (such as the Terrell Owens controversy in Philadelphia), but is an absolute constant in basketball (in which, because of the requisite uniforms, players' appearances and literal flesh are most visible), where it becomes a thinly veiled discourse on race. "Overpaid" (i.e. black person who should be grateful for the opportunity to receive such a salary) player acts "selfishly" (either in doing something unknowingly destructive or knowingly self-interested, which is understandable when such money is at stake in a business) towards his team, and then must be punished (humiliated). This is a crucial narrative that Stern invokes repeatedly throughout each NBA season.

The failure of the new balls is an example of the discourse cracking; that is, it didn't produce its intended entertaining effect. For the entertainment to work, basketball fans have to buy that there is an actual code of ethics in sports that white managers such as Stern are responsible for enforcing over black players. Thus for the publicity event of the new balls to have fully succeeded, the players would have had to complain, as they did, and then ultimately take their lumps and shut up about it. Not only did this not happen, but it became apparent that the ball is so defective that it is causing injuries-- albeit minor ones-- even to beloved white everyman point guard and league MVP Steve Nash, who has been photographed with the cuts on his fingers pathetically bandaged. Awww. No more ball.

Grime

I should have started this blog two or three years ago, when grime was on the rise and I had lots of thoughts about it. Now it is apparently on the "decline" (meaning that at very least the record industry, particularly in the States, has completely refused to attempt to promote artists other than Dizzee Rascal). This little clip is a glimpse of the relentless energy and genuine weirdness of the music... a freestyle battle that doesn't really involve freestyling, but is more like a collision of demented forces. No better image of a subculture, though, than the crowd, who seem to "get it," even if I barely do...

http://youtube.com/watch?v=c8ObP7zPlDM&mode=related&search=

Tuesday, December 5, 2006

First post

This is the first post. The post with the most. Actually subsequent posts will probably have more.

But I am very excited to have a blog. Yes sirree. So excited I'll post one of my little writings that I can never manage to put anywhere else.

Ok, this is slightly outdated, but here it is.

Reality TV: The New Sadism

Since the rise of the American version of Survivor in 2000, the “reality show” has eclipsed the antiquated laugh-track sitcom as the top prime-time format in the United States. While there were predecessors of the genre, such as the long-running The Real World, its more obvious moment of ratings dominance was Survivor. Survivor is a serial game show; instead of appearing on one or perhaps a handful of episodes (such as the then-adored Who Wants To Be A Millionaire), here ordinary people were the stars of the series; viewers could get to know them over the course of a multi-week run. From the very beginning, however, the new twist in this brand of reality show was clear: these ordinary people had no business being on television, let alone becoming stars, and thus had to be systematically punished. One could not simply get famous for nothing; here one had to risk one’s health and sanity on a remote island for weeks. This formula is now ubiquitous, and has taken on a number of variations.

This marks a dramatic shift from the conventional game show, in which the ordinary person who wins cash or prizes is a surrogate for the viewer. The game show promulgates the myth that anyone can win—almost always, little or no skill is required, only luck—and thus we identify with the contestants. The reality show reverses these terms—reverses them utterly—and converts the television viewer into a sadist. The contestant inspires our indignation; he or she has the nerve “to try to get on television”— that is, to seek undeserved fame. The game show contestant appears on television by right of a magnanimous miracle, and thus cannot be accused of cunning or violation, whereas the reality show contestant tries to permeate the sacred world of Hollywood stardom, the green pastures on which graze Brad Pitts and Angelina Jolies. In this trespass, we find our excuse; it is okay for suffering to be inflicted. They deserve it.

An old hierarchy that used to structure the entertainment industry has been disrupted. Even in the very recent past, this order was quite simple: television stars might be popular, but there could be no doubt that they were inferior to movie stars (unless they could make a very rare sort of leap a la George Clooney). Yet now that the outer gates of Hollywood, those of television, have been opened to the imperfections of the boundless hordes of reality, measures must be taken to keep them in line; to subjugate them; humiliate them; degrade them. Better yet; they must be made to degrade themselves, so as to hide the hand of any outside force. The simplest of dynamics: people can be found who want so badly to be famous that they will gladly subject themselves to torture. Ambition and self-flagellation have become synonymous. Thus such people will and must half-starve themselves on third-world beaches, eat huge insects, box each other black and blue, get drunk and slobber all over each other whilst animations and captions mock them relentlessly, make fools of themselves in every imaginable way, and proudly expose themselves as incorrigible lies, cheats, lechers, paranoiacs, hysterics, and gluttons. The most appalling villains, particularly those who are black and gay and hence allow us to indulge in not-so-veiled racism and homophobia (Amarosa from The Apprentice, Richard from Survivor), are even permitted to reappear on subsequent reality shows.

Even the stars are not immune—once their glow has faded or is not yet bright enough. Today there is an endless array of reality shows in which burnt-out, fallen stars are merrily flogged for outstaying their public welcome, or in which the embarrassing private moments of the spoiled, insane children or siblings of stars are revealed for all to see (their just due for thinking they can ride their last name to stardom). These D-List celebrities join the hordes of “ordinary” reality show contestants in the murky, forbidden space between mundanity and celebrity. It is a space where categories blur, where definitions fail, and torment serves to restore order. If celebrities are shimmering apparitions of perfection, projected at us from every magazine, television and movie screen, ordinary people are flesh and bone; the easiest way to tell the difference between the two is to inflict pain, and see who jumps. Reality TV people are real people run through a passion for their (fleeting) conversion into pure image. They are so overjoyed, so grateful to be permitted to await the lions in our new Colosseum. Bobby Brown and Whitney Houston mug for the camera, sharing their descent into lowliness and addiction with us. Even the collapse of someone’s life, their wallowing in failure and misery, can be commodified, and we’re buying. In the new VH1 show Breaking Bonaduce (could any title make more explicit the sadistic relationship of reality show to character?), Danny Bonaduce, clearly obsessed with his opportunity to live publicly, goes to therapy, takes steroids, watches his marriage collapse, and actually attempts suicide. He fails, thus the show remains somehow permissible. This should clue us in to the limit of the reality show: it must keep its victims on the edge of death, but cannot kill them. Only near death will permit us our fantasies of the actual murder of the idiot onscreen.

Sex is here, too; perhaps this too obvious to merit mention. Reality shows are as heteronormative and patriarchal as anything in the history of the medium; the fantasy of control and subjugation offered to the viewer most consistently takes the form of the sexual humiliation of women. Female contestants or characters on reality shows are of course completely aware that this is the case, and take every opportunity to debase themselves in their scant time on the program. They get drunk, they hook up, they bear their breasts, they “unknowingly” wear ridiculously revealing clothes. These titillations range from the honest (dating shows ranging from the sleaziest to the “classiest,” i.e. The Bachelor, in which only the most wholesome girls are allowed to backstab one another in a frenzied effort to win the attentions of the viewer-surrogate bachelor) to the more subtle and daring—by this I am referring to the shows that feature very young would-be starlets such as Ashlee Simpson and Hulk Hogan’s daughter, in which their very incorporation into an entertainment machine, their very control by their managers and even their parents, takes on an edge of manipulation and violation (not to mention that all the while they are scantily clad, their bodies being one of their chief selling points).

And yet perhaps there is a sexual dimension to all the shows, including the ones relatively free of hot tub sequences, for ultimately such programs are about obedience. In the end the biggest turn-on for the viewer is watching people who will do anything asked of them; it allows us to disavow our own obedience to television’s endless, cunning manipulation of our fantasies. By watching, by laughing at the hapless fools laying themselves low again and again and again, we are affirm our devotion to the Big Other, to the authority that sends free programming from up on high, that organizes our leisure time so effectively. Thus we are not unlike those poor fools, who never see the incredible joke being played on them and insist on never criticizing, never exposing the powerful forces that control them. Like the reality show “star,” we have to be content with what we get.

Television offers a counterpoint to the reality show that could be called the “improvement show,” in which experts appear in an ordinary person’s life and “fix” whatever is wrong, be it wardrobe, car, house, sex life, or body parts. It is the same Big Other, now benevolent instead of sadist. We imagine, once again, that we are the feckless ordinary person on screen, visited by the Entertainment Deity, showered with gifts. Is not the endless magnanimity of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, Pimp My Ride and Extreme Makeover the equivalent of the abusive husband the morning after, making nice in an excessive show of guilty conscience? All of the fuss merely affirms the identity of the master.

But back to “reality” for a moment. If what we are saying is true—if there is in fact a sadistic dimension to reality TV—does the situation not propose its own remedy, its own ethics of viewing? If such “programming” renders us sadists, couldn’t the argument be made that it is not, as so many of us would like to think, “harmless entertainment,” but a harmful sort of programming of viewers? Or perhaps this is the wrong way to look at it, considering current events. If it can be said that America’s recent policy of torturing detainees and prisoners is a fact that has been largely repressed, if not by individual Americans then certainly by the American media in its many guises on television, is it possible that the return of this repressed takes place within this very medium, in this medium’s most seemingly “harmless,” or meaningless, sectors? In the reality show we watch the Other, we make him or her Other, interpellate him or her as not-us—less-human, perhaps—by watching he or she suffer. When we enjoy reality shows, we join our brothers and sisters in Abu Ghraib.