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. 

career decisions

PRESTIGE RANKINGS

Plz rank the following:

Harper's MAGAZINE (smoking cigarettes and discussing the relative merits of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Stein in a Soho office building)

Graduate school

the opportunity to continue driving your "vintage" car in nice weather, reading theory on the beach, listening to LCD soundsystem while driving to class (UCLA)

being super interdisciplinary, getting real rigorous (chicago)

mnstrm academic prestige (YALE)

i-BANKING: whippin tradez, broing out at the office, feeling real good walking home from work, or taking a black car - really, whatever you feel like. you're liberated - you don't need need the convenience of a cab, instead you can flâne all the way from the FD to the LES. on the other hand if you're tired, it's not a problem, just take the black car. the confidence, convenience - the choice - to contemplate that which you understand, dialectically, from a position of comfort. 

Lifestyle Irony

Why Can't Anyone Tell I'm Wearing This Business Suit Ironically?

This piece in the Onion, about ironizing one's life to the point where one has actually assumed the traits which one is ironizing, is quite amusing:

"But what good is all this hilarity if there's no one else hip enough to appreciate it? On the 8:12 a.m. commuter train, everybody just assumes I'm one of them. So does my secretary, my assistant, and every single one of my colleagues at the law firm, where I'm now a partner. I even married this clueless girl from Connecticut—loves shopping and everything—and we have two ironic kids. I swear, they look like something out of a creepy 1950s Dick And Jane reader—I even have these hilarious silver-framed pictures of them in my cheesy corner office. But still, the humor is lost on everybody but me. I'm probably the most fashionable guy on the planet at this point, but no one understands. God! Do you have any idea how difficult it is being so far ahead of your time? Some days, it's enough to make me want to embrace conformity like all the other sheep."

The serious question which I believe this article implies is: to what extent does ironic performance depend on 'an audience'? The article hinges on the "writer's" assumption that the effectiveness of irony lies in other people "getting it"; that is, it implies that the subversive effect is to be gained through making others realize that, e.g., corporate existence is hollow and worthy of parody.

Yet - and I say this in all honesty - if we were to be a bit less ridiculous than the ostensible writer of this column, I think that this type of "lifestyle irony" could be a legitimate form of subversion. The key is not conceiving of it as a sort of external performance, a question of instructing others or revealing to them their own conformity - in the end obviously a self-aggrandizing hipness, which is obviously where this article gains its humorous effect - but rather as a practice. If we look at Foucault's notion of ascesis (in Vol. 3 of the History of Sexuality), the"work of the self on the self," I think we can come to conceptualize lifestyle irony as a legitimate way of navigating one's social existence. If one feels - how could one not? - that this social existence is in some fundamental sense patently absurd, and that the options for a self-sufficient, self-realizing subjectivity are extremely circumscribed, I think a limited self-ironizing which is directed at assuming one's position in the social order while attempting to preserve a critical perspective on it at the same time, and artfully "enhancing" that existence with a sense of the existential hilarity of the whole situation, is a potentially ethical position to take. Though it is easy to criticize such a practice as pure aestheticism and ultimately conservative - and this is a critique often leveled at Foucault, e.g., by Habermas - I think it provides a potential foundation for a critical existence that, while it may not presume the progressivist ability for constant, real, and practically unemcumbered social change - is a more solid foundation for anything that could come to be useful as social praxis. I subscribe wholeheardtedly to the Marxist notion that some sort of critical subjectivity is necessary for praxis; thus I think we need to start by examining the positions of possibility for such a position. I don't believe that these positions are easy or well-defined; the unpredictable and "irrational" commitment to "lifestyle irony" mirrors these difficulties, and is I believe a site, perhaps, for their realization.