What does it say about the present social and political climate in our country that marches are more or less organized and called by self-avowed "rodeo clowns" and "entertainers" on cable television?
Does anyone even realize that there is going to be a massive march on October 2nd in Washington, called by the NAACP and a huge swath of trade unions and other Left-wing groups (there will even be a socialist contingent (more on that here))? Probably not. But though I'm positive that it will be far more heavily attended, my guess is that the Stewart/Colbert stunt will get more attention.
What is the function of their stunt? It is a smug, self-satisfied gesture entirely akin to the main way in which most people engage with the show. You sit back in your La-Z-Boy and chuckle about how dumb the Right is and how you've got it all figured out. Of course, you're not wrong to think that the Right is crazy. And of course it can be funny to laugh at them. But is that all we'll ever do? Laugh and shake our heads?
The problem with the Stewart/Colbert thing is the passive, cynical orientation towards the world embodied in this whole plop-yourself-in-front-of-the-TV set up. As far as I can tell, this is more or less what this whole stunt is about: being smug and self-satisfied, laughing, and basically allowing things to go on as they are, but with the individual self-assurance that you know it sucks.
What will have changed in light of the Stewart/Colbert stunt? What, besides more endless spectacle and grist for the 24-Hour news circuit, will have been achieved? Will people emerge from that feeling more confident, more organized, more able to build a social movement capable of exerting pressure on the entire system? Or will they walk away feeling that they just lived out an individualistic fantasy not too dissimilar to their interaction with flashing images on the TV screen? It's like virtual combat with Glenn Beck. What about real struggle against real oppression?
I'm sure that cultural studies people all over the country will have a wet dream when this thing goes down. They can blather about the "hyper-real" and the virtues of mass media and the most commodified and tepid forms of cultural "resistance". But the fact is that I am deeply troubled by this march and people's orientation toward it.
For all its flaws, the October 2nd March on Washington at least draws on existing activist infrastructure and makes determinate demands on the system, most of which are worth getting behind. But it is probably already fated to be dwarfed by the ephemeral swells of the Culture Industry.
"Don't just mindlessly punch-in for the two-party straight-jacket. Do it with a chuckle and big grin on your face".
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
On the "March to Restore Sanity"
Monday, February 22, 2010
SW Reviews CBS's "Undercover Boss" -- Calls it a "capitalist fantasy"
Have you caught any of this fabulous new weekly 30-minute commercial (I mean TV show)? America's top CEOs go undercover as regular workers to get the scoop on what life is really like for their lowly exploited laborers, and then they have great epiphanies about how they really should appreciate those workers more and then decide to change their ways, leaving CEO and proletariat to live forever in peace. SocialistWorker.org tells us what it's really all about here. Here's an excerpt:
By the end of the 7-11 episode, for example, Waqat, who had described his job as a "dead end," is now telling the camera that DePinto "cares about me," because he has offered to be a mentor to him. "Only in America" could a boss care so much, says a delivery driver named Igor--who, we are informed at the end of his show, was given his own 7-11 franchise and "continues to live the American Dream."
Nowhere is there a hint of words like: union, strike or benefits. Instead, the underlying, insidious message of the show is that getting through a shitty job--literally, in the case of Fred G., a worker at Waste Management, whose job is to remove human waste from porta-potties--is all about having a "positive attitude."
It's really enough to make me queasy.
Friday, August 14, 2009
Going mad for Mad Men? What's with the feminist love?
For the past few weeks the blogosphere has been buzzing about the premiere of season 3 of AMC's critically acclaimed Mad Men. Feminist after feminist blogger has declared her love for the show and its portrayal of gender roles in 1960s America.
At some points I found myself enjoying the show. The drama was interesting. Some of the characters are incredibly compelling. Everyone can play armchair psychologist while they watch the show. "Pete Campbell has such daddy issue and a huge case of white privilege. " "Peggy is trying so hard to shake the repression she faced growing up, but she can't even fully decide if it was a bad thing." So it has that appeal. Plus, an article in the London Review of Books after the first season really sums up its other sources of appeal perfectly:
Mad Men is an unpleasant little entry in the genre of Now We Know Better. We watch and know better about male chauvinism, homophobia, anti-semitism, workplace harassment, housewives’ depression, nutrition and smoking. We wait for the show’s advertising men or their secretaries and wives to make another gaffe for us to snigger over. ‘Have we ever hired any Jews?’ – ‘Not on my watch.’ ‘Try not to be overwhelmed by all this technology; it looks complicated, but the men who designed it made it simple enough for a woman to use.’ It’s only a short further wait until a pregnant mother inhales a tumbler of whisky and lights up a Chesterfield; or a heart attack victim complains that he can’t understand what happened: ‘All these years I thought it would be the ulcer. Did everything they told me. Drank the cream, ate the butter. And I get hit by a coronary.’ We’re meant to save a little snort, too, for the ad agency’s closeted gay art director as he dismisses psychological research: ‘We’re supposed to believe that people are living one way, and secretly thinking the exact opposite? . . . Ridiculous!’ – a line delivered with a limp-wristed wave. Mad Men is currently said to be the best and ‘smartest’ show on American TV. We’re doomed.
Beneath the Now We Know Better is a whiff of Doesn’t That Look Good. The drinking, the cigarettes, the opportunity to slap your children! The actresses are beautiful, the Brilliantine in the men’s hair catches the light, and everyone and everything is photographed as if in stills for a fashion spread. The show’s ‘1950s’ is a strange period that seems to stretch from the end of World War Two to 1960, the year the action begins. The less you think about the plot the more you are free to luxuriate in the low sofas and Eames chairs, the gunmetal desks and geometric ceiling tiles and shiny IBM typewriters. Not to mention the lush costuming: party dresses, skinny brown ties, angora cardigans, vivid blue suits and ruffled peignoirs, captured in the pure dark hues and wide lighting ranges that Technicolor never committed to film.
Sooner or later, though, unless you watch the whole series with the sound off, you will have to face up to the story.
And the main gist of the story centers around Don Draper. And Don Draper is a real asshole. And that's really what I can't get over when I watch this show. He's a terrible person, and the people around him are worshipping terrible people. That or their victims of the terrible people. And I get so tired of the psuedo-edgy male protagonists in dramas these days...it's nothing new. It's been around at least since Joseph Conrad in the 1890s. The detached male figure, isolated, trying to figure out his identity in a crazy, mixed up, modern world. It's so cliche. And what bothers me even more is that he's portrayed as being so dreamy. He's an asshole, and yet his fellow characters, and even progressives who watch, seem to admire him. You might know he's a sexist, capitalist, narcissistic asshole, but you can't help but gawk at his beauty, his power, his smooth talking.
I think there's a desire to see a lot more subversion in this show than is there. I just can't see the depiction of patriarchy and racism and economic injustice as subversion, if it's never called those things, and the man who stands as their champion is our hero. Yeah, we see a lot of misogyny, and every once in awhile we see a little hope that the women on the show just aren't going to take it any more. But that's not a startling critique of society -- society then or now. It's just a depiction of society in the 1960s.
I think it's part of an artistic cowardice among progressive artists these days that creator Michael Weiner betrays in choosing this approach. They want to show negative social structures, but they don't want to get preachy, because they don't want to alienate people who might still believe in those structures. They'd rather keep their audience big. They want to show self-congratulatory folks how far we've come and how bad things were and make them think they're watching a good piece of criticism, but they don't want to turn off the people who remain misogynists and racists among us, at least not entirely. While some of us are seeing the sexism in the show as exactly that, vintage sexism from a time before the women's movement of the 1960s, others might see it as simply a portrayal of how things once were, and maybe even, be able to watch the show and go on thinking those gender relationships were just fine. Don Draper is sexy. And rich. And he gets everything he wants, even if he is torturing himself a little inside. It's doesn't look all that bad, in the end.
And let's face it, there's something intoxicating about the show and all of its sin, and I don't just mean the incredible amount of alcohol the characters consume. These people are attractive. They have very sexy sex. And the nostalgia of years past, even if we can recognize the social ills of the time, appeals to us at some level, even if it's not the old fashion or the traditional family, but something like the smell of social change in the air. I can understand the desire to try to read more subversion into the show than is actually there. Watching the show has some pleasure in it, so it's not unbelievable we'd want to think we're doing more than we are by watching it.
I just wish we could watch shows like this and acknowledge what it is we like about them, not try to turn them into the works of art for social justice and social commentary that they aren't even trying to be. Showing sexism is not the same thing as fighting sexism or even labeling sexism. And it isn't necessarily progressive in any way (Even Jezebel's feature on "15 Feminist Moments From Mad Men" is really just a list of moments where sexist things happened to women). Let's just face the fact that at the end of the day, watching a drama about Don Draper and the madness of the 1960s is good entertainment. There's little redeeming about him, and as far as I can see, little redeeming about the show and its take on anything, including gender roles.
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
A few quick thoughts
1-I just don't see how anyone can think Obama is secretly not all about the free market. I mean, it's not like this one interview finally convinced me, but I just can't see how progressive can continue to kid themselves into thinking this guy shares their socioeconomic values.
President Obama: Just one thing I was thinking about as I was getting on the copter. It was hard for me to believe that you were entirely serious about that socialist question. I did think it might be useful to point out that it wasn’t under me that we started buying a bunch of shares of banks. It wasn’t on my watch. And it wasn’t on my watch that we passed a massive new entitlement – the prescription drug plan without a source of funding. And so I think it’s important just to note when you start hearing folks throw these words around that we’ve actually been operating in a way that has been entirely consistent with free-market principles and that some of the same folks who are throwing the word socialist around can’t say the same.If the implication of this quote isn't that Obama likens himself as more of a free marketer than his hot shot predecessor, I must be speaking a different English language.
2-Yes, it is stupid for a publication like the New York Times to even humor (see interview above) the thought that Obama is secretly a socialist (it's fear mongering, and not at all based in reality). But can we see any actual engagement with the ideology Joan Walsh is so hell bent on dismissing as a dated wim of the past, or are we all just going to snigger at the thought of creating actual justice from here on out?
3-If you never watched Showtime's The L Word and you'd been meaning to because you'd heard so much about it, please save yourself hours and hours of anger and don't bother. Sunday's finale was the most frustrating series finale I've experienced since Seinfeld and one of the most frustrating series ever. Now, it may have taken me watching the entire series to come to this conclusion, which may indicate there's something of value there, despite the overall shitty writing and shitty assassination of previously likeable characters. Okay, there is definitely value there. But I still wouldn't let a friend get involved...
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Fox's Dollhouse... and Subjectivity
Well, my blogging has been light lately, and I wish I could blame it on extreme productivity in some realm of my life. But no, mostly I've been watching TV.
Among my new TV interests is Joss Whedon's Dollhouse. Yeah, it's a show on Fox. Yeah, it's some fairly trashy drama. But it's also really entertaining and well...thought provoking? To the extent that some cheap scifi drama can be thought provoking.
Here's the premise (trailer after the jump, for those who want to know more): A business for the super wealthy rents out human beings as play things. I guess it's a little more complicated than your run of the mill sex business. For one thing not all of the clients want sexual partners. And for another, the workers themselves aren't remotely conscious human beings with even the slightest amount of agency. They're what the employees of Dollhouse call "Actives," humans who have had their entire memories and personalities and consciousnesses(?) erased from them. They're blank slates. Then when a client needs a person for some task, the techs at Dollhouse download a pre-fab personality onto the Active to fullfill the client's needs.
So here's an observation about the show, related to some discussions we've been having here lately.* The experience as a viewer is really interesting, considering this is a show with characters who are also blank slates at times, in other words, characters who become non-characters. When we see these Actives, most of all our main Active called Echo (cute name for a hollow person ready to be told what to do/say, right?), in their Tabula Rasa state, it's hard to feel much for them. They're hardly human. They aren't subjects, and it's hard to relate to them, to humanize them, to care at all about them as characters.
But when they're activated, when they have a personality embedded, even though as a viewer we know this is a total fabrication/construction/artificial, we do care about their fate. That subject has to be created to evoke any care about the fate of the human body in question.
What adds more intrigue to this show is that the main active, Echo, seems to be gaining some independent consciousness or something. She's having flashbacks while in her activated state and hallucinating about herself before she had her mind wiped by the Dollhouse. Now obviously this fact adds some interesting twists to the overall plot, but I think it adds some other questions. CAN a personality be wiped? Can the "subject" be removed and replaced so willy nilly? From a narrative standpoint, can Echo only be our main protagonist because she is experiencing this ever-increasing consciousness? Would we fail to adequately sympathize with her if we didn't even have the hope that deep down in this "doll" was a static, anchored person?
I can't help but think about our conversations about subjectivity in this context. Do we need a constructed subject to be driven to create a just world in the first place (not just to fathom the idea of activism, as was discussed in previous posts, but to have any motivation to improve human conditions)?
...and more importantly, how many seasons will it take for Echo to become a full human? 'Cause I don't how many episodes I can handle of her in this limbo stage...so frustrating to see her on the brink of agency!
*Does this post seem like a stretch? It probably is. I'm probably guilty of grasping for any intellectual worth in pop culture just to justify the hours I spend consuming it. But hey, is that a crime? One must take extreme precaution to avoid crippling cognitive dissonance.
