Subversive Commercials

This commercial, which I just saw while watching the Hannity report on my flatscreen television, may at first seem to reify blah blah sexism. However, we might look more closely to find the potentially subversive element lurking within. As the burglar waits in the dark, his reflection on her pristine floor-to-ceiling windows the only hint of his presence, so too does this subversive kernel lurk within the fabric of this supposedly "mainstream" commercial. As in Britney Spears' performance at the 2007 VMAs or Hans Holbein's "Ambassadors", there is a "tache" (stain) on this work.  But in a move that makes this work perhaps more radical than the aforementioned canonical texts, it consists precisely in the (unheimlich) aesthetic contours of the work.

"Treadmill" appears to be a commercial targeted at the merely-conservative, middle-American male or even the particularly interpellated soccer female. An attractive but "mainstream" 30-something woman prepares to "work out" in her spacious suburban home. She talks on her cell phone to her girlfriend, puts on some trance music, and gets ready to "blow off some steam"/burn off the cheeseburger she snuck for lunch. The threats that she faces (her house being burgled, possibility of rape) and the vehicle for her subsequent rescue (institutionalized authority of the panoptic "security system," comforting voice of the white male phone operator) seem to reify this conservative ethos. A male viewer might want to get Brinks for his stay-at-home wife; the stay-at-home wife might see it as a way to protect herself from the fears that she must invent for herself to assuage her constant boredom.

Yet there is something both menacing and awkwardly comic about "Treadmill," and moreover the menace and the comedy are mutually reinforcing in a decidedly unheimlich way. The threat of sexual abuse - the fact that the burglar (there are actually two - are you seeing the possibilities here?) decides to break in while looking at the woman, dressed in her tight running clothes, knowing that some sort of confrontation would ensue in the "break-in" - is quite risque for a Fox ad. More intriguing is the shot at 0:15-0:17, a zoom in from behind the woman on the treadmill. Whose perspective does this shot represent? The viewer of "Treadmill," a sexual pervert who has violent scopophilic designs on the soccer mom? (This would be a traditional film-theoretical, Mulveyian position). Or perhaps the woman herself, fantasizing about her own violation from the security of her treadmill and iTunes?

And what of the awkward little dance our fair-haired heroine performs at 0:20 when she jumps off the treadmill? How does she know to head for the loveseat, in which the cordless phone is buried? Here we go: because she knew that Matt From Brinks Home Secuity was going to call. Why does it matter that he has called? The "breakers-in" have already left. Most crucially: Matt From Brinks Home Security is going to "send help right away." Again: why? why is she reassured by this? What kind of help does a lonely, scared woman at home need? And what kind of help can Matt From Brinks Home Security provide?  

The tache, then, is the fact that the woman's self-negating desire is revealing to have structured the very aesthetic form of "Treadmill" itself. The woman - who exists, needless to say, only within the diegesis (or does "woman" exist at all?) - has structured this explicitly "sexist"  and sexually violent tableau via her own fantasy, which itself is a symptom of the larger cultural gestalt in which the viewer is thus seen to participate. The unheimlich of "Treadmill" - the simplistic, declarative title serving as deadpan reminder of the totalizing nature of suburban spleen - consists in our realization that the double-mediation of the fantasy (the masculine-interpellated viewer's [even if female] voyeuristic/sexually fantasy of transgressing this 'idyllic' - for the Fox News demographic - scene) is rendered comical and unerotic because the female character who is supposedly the object of the scene is in fact its subject. 

LOL @ CAPITALISM

What It's Like to Date a Hotshot

WHAT IT'S LIKE TO DATE A HOTSHOT
COSMOPOLITAN
JULY 2006
BY JULIA ALLISON

Congressmen in Washington are like movie stars in Hollywood.  They’re everywhere, they’re always shorter in person – and yet, everyone is still totally impressed.

As a government major at Georgetown, I was a shameless political groupie.  I tracked the rarest of species in our nation’s capitol – the young, unmarried, good-looking politician.  Actually, I only found one.  The year before, he was one of People’s 50 Most Beautiful People.  Like a teenager with a crush on Brad Pitt, I taped the photo to my desk, where it stayed (embarrassingly) for 8 months.

Of course, I never expected to actually meet him.

But one evening, out to dinner, I spied him at the table next to mine and courageously introduced myself.  I was 21; he was turning 32 that evening.  A junior in college, I had never dated a guy older than 24, let alone one with such a formidable resume: Ivy League school, law degree, a prestigious political family, and – oh yeah – an office on Capitol Hill with 20 staff members.

I didn’t realize it then, but I had already fallen into the insidious “he’s better than me” trap – by putting him on a pedestal, I was unconsciously telling myself that I wasn’t worthy.  In the coming months I would realize how misguided this mindset was.

Our five-minute intro turned into an entire evening of flirting as he invited me along with as he celebrated his birthday.  We went from the restaurant to a swanky hotel bar, where he asked for a birthday kiss – and I practically fainted from excitement.

When he said goodnight late that evening, it never occurred to me he would call again.  But I was wrong; he called the next week, and the week after.  

In retrospect, I’m not sure why I was so surprised – as the dating columnist for The Georgetown Hoya, I knew a thing or two on how to keep a man’s interest.  Or at least, a college guy’s interest!  But one of the most eligible bachelors in DC?  I really believed I was in over my head.

The concept of him being interested in me was so shocking that my normally healthy self-esteem couldn’t get to my brain!

Unnerved by talking with him on the phone, I would prepare little “cheat sheets” so I wouldn’t blank on conversation topics.  (Who does that??)  I would compare myself constantly to him: He makes six figures, I get an allowance.  He meets with world leaders, I stopped by my professor’s office yesterday.

Again and again, I fell short in my own mind.  Of course, I’m not the only woman to find herself involved with a man who she views – either consciously or unconsciously – as “superior” to herself.  He doesn’t have to be a movie star; I’ve watched beautiful, confident girls reduced to awkward, desperate messes wondering why their boyfriends – the star of the basketball team or a rich doctor or anyone else who generally intimidates them – would ever want them.

I was pretty far along that road when he asked me on a weekend ski vacation.  I lost five pounds, bought a new pink ski suit and compulsively planned out every outfit.  Then we got there – and … he couldn’t ski.  Not sort of couldn’t ski, but god awful, I-hope-he-doesn’t-break-his-leg couldn’t ski.

Out there on the slopes, he wasn’t a hotshot politician, he was just a guy.  A guy with no coordination.  Later, watching C-Span together (although I’d really rather watch Oprah), he got the Kuwaiti ambassador’s name wrong – and I corrected him!  Suddenly, I began to see beyond the image to the real person, who wasn’t so intimidating after all.

And when I took the big man OFF campus, I realized that I … well, I just wasn’t that into him.  Sure, it was an ego boost to date a prominent A-Lister.  But beyond that, we didn’t have much in common.

The irony didn’t escape me.  All this time I had been building him up in my mind and underestimating my own qualities, forgetting that no one can be in a good relationship with an idol – it has to be equal.  And if you don’t have self-respect, how can he respect you?

The whole thing made me laugh.  After all, I had asked myself so many times, “Why does he want to be with me?”  when I should have been asking “Why do I want to be with him?”

Culture Industry: DA REMIX!

Someone tipped me off to this paper by Xiaochang Li, a Comparative Media Studies master's student at MIT on Soulja Boy in the context of "viral video." Let me say that it is more than worth your time to read this, in the same way that it is more than worth your time to watch the YouTube video that Soulja Boy released and on which this paper comments.


Aiyo, Lil Chang, lemme break dis one down for you. Aite, one, you've clearly read some Noam Chomsky or something. I'm sure your school makes you read all the pomo-generator shit that MIT Press puts out. Lemme hit you with some fresh azz isht: dis Culture Industry jaint, by my dog T.Ado (Theodor Adorno).

Lil Chang seems to unquestioningly accept the "Soulja Boy phenomenon" as a story of someone "making it big" without the assistance of - even in defiance of - mainstream labels and the corporate culture-industry-esque record industry. Soulja uses methods "theoretically available to every member of his generation" to promote himself; though his goals may be self-promotion and financial gain, he supposedly has found a way to achieve these goals in such a way that the power is in his hands and not that of the corporation - he makes them come to him (as evidenced by the fact that he IMs the record executive, instructing him to "Meet me at my crib"). Though the culture industry is intact, it is seemingly just a shell of its former self, eviscerated of any economic power, and only providing the means through which the individual can realize himself. (Isn't this already sounding suspiciously like the free-market wet-dream?)

Lil Chang really hits his or her stride, however, when they break down the utopian political possibilities engendered by Soulja Boy's viral video self-promotion:

"What's more, there are a number of disparate groups represented across gender, age, and location, all of them reinterpreting the dance through their own communities, and linked through their ability to watch the videos across various devices, emphasizing at once a sense of connectivity, but also an urge to represent local communities and groups. In short, Soulja Boy as a phenomenon presents itself as more of a mode than a community, a practice that allows existing communities based on characteristics that are generally thought to be "disappeared" in the digital space (gender, age, race etc.) to foreground themselves."

(By the way, hasn't your thesis advisor at MIT told you that identity politics is DEFINITELY not hip anymore?)

Let's grant Lil' Chang that this phenomenon really does represent the possibility of individuals having access to the tools to "make it" in a radically democratic way that was never before possible. Though I think this is a bit utopian - isn't this the type of claim that's been made for every new form of mass media in democratic states? - we can let it stand. In fact, I think Lil Chang's argument reveal itself to be even more pwned if we grant that this is the case. Because if Soldier Boy has used radically democratic means to achieve his dream, we must next ask: what is his dream? What has he achieved?

He has precisely pwned himself, and this time it's not something to be proud of. As Adorno trenchantly perceived over 60 years ago, the culture industry (i.e., capital's colonization of the cultural sphere) has most insidiously and effectively achieved its ends precisely when it seems to have gentrified itself, when the desires of the masses are seamlessly congruent with the interests of capital. What the culture industry is 'selling' is mass culture as such, or better capitalism as such - a subjectivity perfectly adapted to the imperative of culture that is purchaseable, disposable, and constantly unfulfulling (thus creating the need for ever more consumption). One line T.Ado drops is particularly on point here: "The culture industry does not so much fabricate the dreams of the customers as introduce the dreams of the suppliers among the people." Thus it is not just that we are 'sold' the idea that we want a certain type of culture, or that we want ever more of it, but that this type of culture is essentially a conduit for the reproduction of subjectivities that are subjected to capital. Having "made it," having "achieved his dream," what will Soulja Boy do now? Well, he's signed to a major label, so most of the (substantial) profits from CD sales, tours, merchandise (tee-shirts, customizable Soulja Boy shades - did they come up with the idea to sell those after he wore them or was it the other way around?) will go to the label owner. But he will become rich too; then he'll buy lots of shit, such as the shit that he talks about in the song (BAPES, etc) that he probably couldn't afford when he was first rapping about it.

This much touted "radical democratic" "convergent" media which brought Soulja Boy to fame has achieving nothing more than reproducing the economic structure which it supposedly evaded and laying the ground for its further acceptance in the millions who watch, listen to, and buy Soulja Boy. Soulja Boy may feel himself to have "achieved", to have become successful, and - as have similar artists whose careers progressed the "normal" way, i.e. through being promoted by a label - he is successful, and he probably is happy. Without going into the question of false consciousness, the point is that the objective effect of his use of "viral video" and "radical-democratic" media is the same as if his rise to fame were due to overpromotion through marketing, except that now, the labels don't have to waste their money, Soulja Boy did all the work for them, and the profits - but more importantly the reproduction of mass culture - will be generated just the same. Soulja Boy may be evidence of a "new" trajectory for mass cultural phenomena, but to look naively at this as an instance of increasing individual creative freedom and self-actualization ignores the end result of such "new media," which is anything but liberatory.