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. 

Britney as Vanitas

Does anyone else see a relationship between this Holbein painting ("The Ambassadors," 1533) and Britney Spears? Holbein's use of the vanitas/memento mori is striking it a way that I cannot get over. While one is tempted to dismiss the "anamorphic" rendering as sort of silly, a "vain" technical flourish, it makes the skull completely unintegrable with the aesthetic and narrative space of the painting itself. The vanitas is somehow excessive, scandalous even; or rather it makes the painting itself scandalous, uncomfortable to look at, embarrassing. The work of art is of course always 'calling out' to us, interpellating us as a subject that sees it; yet here there is another layer: it sees us seeing ourselves as called out by it, and it mocks us for it. I think, then, that this is a sort of formal achievement of the representative function of the vanitas in painting. It's not just a question of either the futility of earthly existence or the carpe diem imperative, but a reminder of our position in creating the terms by which such questions arise in the first place (i.e., how our subjectivity is not given, not transcendent, not 'eternal').

Take another look at the Britney video below. Obviously this video is very uncomfortable. There is something about how she sort of stands around with this spectacle whirring along effortlessly around her. When she used to make all of the moves, when her body was 'toned,' more machinelike (a sex robot, both there just for me and totally indifferent to my existence), when her face was more successfully frozen into an expressionless come-hither/I-don't-even-need-you-to-get-off look, she was integrated into this spectacle, it worked with her and around her. Now she is a "stain," as Lacan calls it, in this spectacle: that which destroys the interpellative coherence of the representation. When she moves around awkwardly, it's too human; her body is too voluptuous; her wig reminds us that she has real hair; her off-cue lip-syching makes it too obvious that she actually speaks. Yet we can't help but feel that she is now somehow less real, less human, less "Britney" than she was before. The stain is that unassimilable mark that is both more human (the skull, the fact of death) and less human (it feels less alive, less "full," than the ambassadors standing next to it) And this "stain" calls out to me; in noticing it I have let myself be tricked into acknowledging the fact that it is there for me, that, to the extent that it is a signifying event, it is there in me, and that it is signifying nothing other than 'me'.

So, Holbein. The vanitas reminds us of our frailty, of the essential constructness and humanness (i.e., in the sense that these are the same thing) of aesthetic pleasure, of life as experienced by the subject; with Holbein (as opposed to the traditional use of the vanitas, where it is simply a 'normal' skull placed along with other objects in the picture), it does so in a thoroughgoing way, not just as one more 'motif' in the work; we must experience this constructedness and our own place as the chief (if you'll pardon my reference to Ayn Rand) 'architect' of it. The new Britney, this 'failed' Britney, this 'more real' Britney, is fascinating, horrifying, and most of all uncanny for this same reason: we cannot get over, we cannot 'forget,' her 'actual' presence in this spectacle, which is actually nothing other than a sign for our own presence which her 'absence' would/should otherwise smooth over.