We all love Simian Mobile Disco, or at least we did last year before they got all recuperated and stuff, and of course we still welcome any new pearls of culture they might have for us post-electroclash Brown students who still like to sweat out those $15 drinks at Bungalow 8 courtesy of our trust funds.
This new video for "Hustler," which, as even the most aged, Wheetabix-and-prune-eating gramps knows is the dopest track on their album, thus initially seems like good old hipster fun: some bitchez dancing around in American Apparel bikinis, and before we get uncomfortable and start feeling like bros at a strip club, they luckily start 'ironically' smearing food on their chests, spraying Redi-whip in their mouths, and puking up neon colors. Just like Vice: we get to see some hot anorexo-bunnies in various sexually compromising situations, but the gross-out factor makes it a. hip (i.e. different from, say, Maxim) and b. politically correct, for those in the know, since it's not actually debasing women or satisfying voyeuristic male desire - it's teasing us for our desire to see them debased, dancing around for our pleasure, and then allowing us the convenient self-critical perspective within the text itself. While we get grossed out by the spectacle of these hotties throwing up peanut-butter and smearing it all over their face, it becomes funny because we're slightly embarassed that we were just plain old aroused - no irony (gasp!) - before it got gross. Their fetishistic pleasure - satisfied with hot dogs, Twix, and Redi-Whip - becomes our passive affirmation of a feminist "fuck you."
Yet is it really a "fuck you"? As our favorite over-the-hill theory dork Stanley Fish says, "Think Again!" Like Godard's ironic cinema, in which we, the spectators, are "given" what we "want" from capitalism - fine honey$, dudes with dope suits smoking unfiltered Gaulloises - and then castigated for it with a formal, Brechtian distantiation - Simian Mobile Disco, or whatever RISD grad directed this video, are offering us a too-easy way out. We still want these things from our films and our music videos. Bridgette Bardot in Contempt is maddiningly beautiful and unsatisfactory. We always want MORE of her, the same way we want MORE of Britney Spears (well, no longer). This is precisely what is unfulfilling about these so-called false desires that are supposedly being critiqued by, e.g., Godard and our RISD grad. To critique them as such does nothing; it makes us feel guilty for what is essentially not our fault, and it denies us the modicum of satisfaction offered by the staging of these false desires.
Rather, what they should do is "go all the way"; give us what we want. This, in fact, is what capitalism, or whatever ideology we're trying to transcend here, is afraid of and always denies, because it reveals precisely the failure of capitalism to contain within itself "all that we want." Instead of this safe distance of already-given self-critique and ironic awareness, a truly progressive hipster (we all want to be progressive, right? Even when we're being un-PC "asshole" hipsters it's as an ironic 'performance' of the failure of progressive politics.) would make a video like that for Eric Prydz's "Call on Me".
I'm not joking. This yuppie-wet dream, with an appropriately 'happy ending', is a perfect evocation of the sexual fantasies of upper-middle-class quasi-urban, quasi-'metro' bro or sorority girl. What it offers is not only a modicum of satisfaction - and I'm sure many a pimply teeny-hipsters has wasted a few tissues over this one - but also a sense of the dissatisfaction of this type of completely eviscerated culture. We don't get this "easily," through the text, as we do with Godard, but rather through a confrontation with our own reaction to it. Why is it satisfying? Why is it unsatisfying? Why is it funny when it really should be depressing? Why don't bangin' 80s aerobics-instructor hoez be all up on my dilz? There are no easy answers to these questions, as there are to those posed by Godard's cinema and Simian Mobile Disco, and it is this difficulty that art can and should be staging.
-Slavoj Zizek
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