My dear friend Chris, who loves the Pixies, mentioned their new song “Bagboy” to me. The song is a cryptic quiet-loud hiss-shout anthem in their classic style, but the video overwhelms it somewhat for me, as it features a young white boy trashing a house with colorful items (Froot Loops, balloons, liquids, sundry mists and sprays)– a house that, at the very end, is revealed to (presumably) belong to an African-American woman who is tied up in the bedroom (foreshadowed by a photo early in the video). Perhaps a potent metaphor for post-multicultural something. Perhaps an unproblematized depiction of a hate crime. Perhaps a strange reference to the mad Negress of Jane Eyre– who knows?
Anyhow, here’s a digest of my conversation with Chris, but I’m paraphrasing his devil’s advocate parts, as he felt a tad reticent.
So, for openers, I feel irritated by the video’s attempt at being controversial. I mean, Family Guy annoys me, but I still watch it. The Seth MacFarlane edginess is usually part of some narrative. When a character pukes on a copy of The Feminine Mystique, it seems like a somewhat harmless boneheaded provocation that might get kids to read Betty Friedan. When he makes a joke about how quiet restaurants were during Jim Crow, it’s really not offensive to me, even if it might irritate someone older who lived through Jim Crow.
But in Chicago, where I live, there’s a long history of police torturing black people– we live in a country with lots of black people in jail. There’s also a long history of housing discrimination against blacks. You could use that to make an edgy joke, like Chris Ware did when he advertised prisons as “Large Negro Storage Boxes.” But the video did it in a way that was basically “Birth of a Nation” with a soundtrack; my vibe was that “terrorism against middle-class black people is awesome!” I disagree.
On the other hand, I’m told that one member of the video production team is black, and it could certainly be read as an indictment of white entitlement and hatred, or just an Obama-era version of A Clockwork Orange. Or the white kid could be read as a trailer-trash shithead a la Gummo (which then raises the specter of class war). Maybe, in the class war frame of mind, it doesn’t matter that she’s black, but only that she’s a homeowner. Maybe he’s just an evil kid.
Well fine… I would read it differently if it was a black band, or a band with one black member, or a band with any significant black fan base. But the Pixies are predominantly white people (excepting Filipino-American guitarist Joey Santiago) predominantly addressing white people, and their message (in general) is about how mutilation is fun and how blaming “redneckers for getting pissed at stupid stuff” is stupid. Drop out of college and tell women about how you fear losing your penis to a diseased whore. Which is cool- they’re a great rock band with decent angry-white-male anti-intellectual intellectual lyrics.
But to me there’s no question that the kid was the protagonist, and he was victorious. It takes some serious rationalizing to make him a villain (even though that may have been the intention). And, just to touch on the lyrics– they would seem fairly opaque without the video as context, but now I can’t help but read “She had some manners and beauty but you look like a bug,” accompanied by the sneering insistence to “polish your speech” and “cover your teeth” as patrician advice on proper racial assimilation that not even Bill Cosby would utter.
After reading a draft of the above, Noah pointed out quite astutely that the departure from the band of bassist Kim Deal, known for having a strong woman-positive voice in her other musical projects, does coincide neatly with a video that is not only depicting violence against blacks, but violence against women. It seems doubtful that a country act, a rapper, or a metal band would get a pass for making their misogyny visually explicit, but the fact that an “alternative” act apparently can should certainly provide food for thought.
So yes, “racist” and “sexist” does account for perhaps a majority of, well, all recorded music. Non-recorded as well maybe. There is an entire musical subgenre known as “murder ballads,” this subgenre forming one element of the blues, noted target of wholesale white appropriation, etc. It just might be fun for at least a moment to consider the ways in which the quasi-elite pop culture pantheon, seemingly a sparkling realm of gender- and race-blind self-made genius, have some connection, however tenuous and refracted, to the ongoing worldwide disenfranchisement and exploitation of a teeming underclass.
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Update (by Noah): One of the video’s creators replies in comments; please scroll down to see his response.
For what it’s worth, Jesse Lamar High — half of Lamar+Nik — is more than just a “member of the video production team”; he’s one of the co-directors of the film.
….not that you were incorrect. It just sounded to me like you were referring to was the guy manning the clapperboard. (Also, my friend tells me it’s supposed to be “LAMAR+NIK.” So then there’s that.)
Duly noted. But then I think about it and go, I don’t deeply care if was a black band (since there is still a woman in the band and what good did that do?). Kanye is into choking girls, and (not only for that reason) I think he’s a creepy guy. Good producer, annoying rapper, general creep.
It would be different if someone like Kanye had this exact same video though, wouldn’t it? The identification would at least be weird, or hard to parse; you might feel there was more distance from the snot-nosed rebellious somewhat nerdy punk kid. With the Pixies, it’s just almost impossible to see that kid as anything but a stand in for the band and the band’s image and the band’s fanbase, or at least it’s impossible without the video doing a lot more work to distance him or undercut him.
As Bert says, it is feasible the Pixies wanted to distance him or undercut him; they’re pretty smart, and they certainly could want to stick a thumb in the eye of their fans, or comment on some of the possible problems with the romanticized white boy aggression that’s central to their persona (especially their persona-robbed-of-Kim-Deal). If that was their plan though, I don’t think they manage it.
I hate to say it, but…the music is kind of boring too. More knock-off Pixies than classic Pixies. As with so many bands, it seems like they maybe would have done themselves and everyone else a favor if they could have resisted the urge to cash in.
Yep, Noah, “doing it” and “doing it well” are two different things, whether the “it” is making a Pixies song or undercutting forms of emotional identification in film or rock-n-roll.
I think my only defense of the video is that we have so clearly seen this kind of celebratory cathartic destruction countless times before, that even the film-makers (and the Pixies’ home-owning fans) can no longer see those images as wholly innovative or appealing. (Any more than it is easy to identify with a “protagonist” with such highlighted acne.) The video must, I’m thinking, be somewhat about that discomfort too.
Then again, if you go to LAMAR+NIK’s Vimeo page, most of the comments talk about how this kid sure knows how to ROCK and how he should have been MORE destructive. And the directors mostly say Thanks and Awesome!
But they have responded to every comment so far; maybe a link might coax them over here.
http://vimeo.com/69293130
I had to join Vimeo but I left a link on the chest-bump thread. Yeah Noah, point well taken about Kanye, but I just meant to disperse the inevitable accusation that I am merely projecting my white male guilt (not that there aren’t tons of white men who project their white male guilt by getting all “feminist” about hip-hop).
Thanks for your critique of the video! We welcome hearing anyone’s views on any of our projects. This one is arguably the most controversial.
We knew we were taking some risks when we made the video. When most people see a white kid (Nik’s little brother) and a black woman (my older sister) they can’t help but think “racist” and “misogynist”. This is pretty sad.
From the beginning, when we originally thought of the concept, it was never our intention to make it about a white kid terrorizing a helpless black family. I, myself, being black have gotten to the point where I don’t automatically see color in people. It’s the same for Nik. If the character’s races were switched you’d probably have the same amount of stuff to say about the video.
It’s 2013, at what point do we stop seeing everything as racist. At what point do we stop making things a bigger deal than they are.
As far as the Pixies are concerned, it’s understandable that you’d see them as a big part of the video. To be honest, they didn’t have anything to do with the video until they saw the finished product.
The truth is, we used the resources that we had at hand. If we had had more time we could have done a whole casting session. You wouldn’t be able to say much of what you said in this article if it was a white man and white woman that were tied up.
Our hope was that people would see the video for what it is. It’s a story about a kid getting to do what he wants with a credit card and no supervision, with a twist. It doesn’t matter if he’s black, white, hispanic, Native American or Indian, he’d still be doing the same activities. In the video he’s playing with bubbles, balloons, and soaking in a giant cereal bowl these are pretty light-hearted activities. The only thing the end is supposed to give you is the knowledge that it wasn’t his house.
Thanks again for your critique in this article. We’re sorry you didn’t get as much enjoyment out of it as most other people did.
I absolutely appreciate the time and attention (if you’re still reading)– but I would contend that you don’t make art in a vacuum. If a tree makes an exploitive rock video in the privileged forest and no exploited people see it, is it still exploitive?
Hey Lamar. Thanks so much for your response.
I think Bert actually anticipated most of what you say here when he used the adjective “post-racial.” You’re saying that we’ve gotten to the point where race is so unimportant, and people are so equal, that anyone using race as a lens is thereby racist. By that account, folks who point out that black people are disproportionately incarcerated are racist, whereas the systems doing the incarcerating are not racist. Or, folks who point out that my home town of Chicago is segregated, still, are racist, while the people who work systematically to move resources away from the south side are not racist. Is that actually what you want to be saying? Because that seems really quite problematic to me.
If it had been a white woman tied up, it would be a somewhat different discussion — but you’re still plugging into the rock tropes where controlling or torturing or occasionally killing women (especially upper class women) is part of being edgy and cool. (See “Under My Thumb,” as just one example.) Switching other marks of race or gender (making the kid a black girl, for example) would I think, yes, change the meaning of the video in various ways, because race and gender are still hugely important in terms of privilege and power and meaning in our society. Hoping for a post-racial society is cool, but declaring that it’s already here is often a way to deny the way prejudice and discrimination still work on people.
The argument that you have limited resources for casting seems kind of specious. You chose to tell this story. You had at least a couple actors; the woman could have been totaling the house and the kid could have been tied up, if you really couldn’t think of another narrative. If race and gender don’t matter, why not do that? Did you flip a coin?
It’s interesting that the Pixies didn’t have more input…but they did put their name on it. I think it’s fair to hold them responsible for it. I presume they could have said, “this is a problem” if they wanted to.
Anyway…thank you again for taking the time to respond. It’s extremely generous of you to take the time to talk to critics in this way, and I very much appreciate it.
Also (speaking of the forest– not sure if anyone’s reading this at all), tying someone up and trashing their house is not light-hearted. Pretending it is is disingenuous. If the kid did it in real life and got caught he would be arrested and possibly charged with a felony.
In fact, that’s what makes it an interesting video. If there was no credit card and no tied-up homeowner, it would be basically “Fight for Your Right to Party,” light-hearted and empty-headed,
I’d really rather see someone step up and talk about why showing the violent part (even if they just got the idea from Gummo and Pulp Fiction) makes it “real” and therefore not a lark. I would disagree but it would be a conversation.
I think Lamar made some interesting and good points (and deserves all kinds of credit for sharing his thoughts here). Specifically, he reminds us that the aspects of an artwork that we focus on tell us as much about us, the viewers, as they do about the artist.
Lamar does this most effectively at the end of his comment when he points out how we focus on the boy’s actions (as violence) generally, but ignore the kinds of things he actually does — actions which might have seemed very different without the final shot.
Lamar point out how playful and childish the boy’s actions are, with colored smoke, bubbles, silly string, fake drums, and turning a bathtub into a giant bowl of Froot Loops. He is made to look young — even small — and made to act young. Perhaps this makes the violence of the actions even more disturbing, but that disturbance is built into the fact they they are also presented as acts of play. (A kid with power and no oversight, as he puts it.)
Lamar implicitly asks us, then, “Why did you see X, but not see Y? Why did you focus on what makes an action A, but not on what makes it B (or A plus B)? And at what point exactly did aspects “X” and “A” gain their interpretive privilege in our eyes?”
This, of course, informs Lamar’s earlier discussion about race and gender, too, but less effectively in my opinion. Still, his comments made me feel the tables turn in a way that I did not expect.
Thanks, Lamar, for your visit.
Here’s the deal though, I’M BLACK.
I’m all for intellectual debates, but…
How are you to tell me what is racist to me, not being a minority yourself?
How are you to know my experiences?
This video is open to interpretation, much like any piece of art, but to sit here and TELL me what I am or was thinking is ludicrous.
What’s the point of making ART if you have to make it to appease others? It wouldn’t be art at all at that point. We never thought about making the video “not racist” because it was never “racist” in our minds in the first place.
As an art teacher yourself Bert, I would hope you would understood this.
Noah, I’m not saying that their isn’t racism in the world that needs to be dealt with, but those issues you adressed are much larger issues than a PIXES video. Why not put that energy into one of those causes?
To repeat ourselves…the video was about the kid. The story would not have been as appealing or believable if it were an adult. You cannot honestly tell me the video would have made much sense with an adult doing these activities.
The budget on this particular video was not as large as you would think. I don’t know how much you think it was. The house actually happens to be my mother’s and YES these definitely were are relatives.
The racism in the video you perceive is clearly personal opinion. Once again these are YOUR thoughts and YOUR opinions. Not everyone has the same reactions to material. This does not make you a better person, this make you human. People have different reactions to different things.
The PIXIES didn’t have a problem with it because, much like us, they didn’t see the race as a problem.
The main thing we would just like you to understand is we made this from our point of view. It’s wasn’t part of a larger racist scheme. It was merely a twist at the end of a video.
I’m not telling you it’s racist to you. I’m saying that, as a white person on whose behalf and in whose name a certain amount of racist actions get perpetrated, I look at the video and I see tropes that are familiar. And, frankly, I think it would be a kind of racism to just give you a pass on things that I’d find problematic in the work of a white creator.
As for why not focus on other things…I’ve written about the prison system and segregation in Chicago before. But I care about art, and I care about the Pixies, and this is the thing in front of me at the moment.
“The racism in the video you perceive is clearly personal opinion. Once again these are YOUR thoughts and YOUR opinions. Not everyone has the same reactions to material. This does not make you a better person, this make you human. People have different reactions to different things.”
Interpreting art isn’t exactly objective, but that doesn’t quite make it just personal opinion either. It’s about worldview, about references, about social context. In this case, it’s an argument about whether showing a white kid perpetrating violence against a black woman is light-hearted fun in a post-racial world, or, alternately, whether it seems to be getting mileage and cred out of the edginess of both the violence and the racial juxtaposition. Again, that’s certainly a difference of perspective, but I don’t think calling it just opinion is quite right.
Having said that…I certainly don’t believe, nor do I mean to say, that you had racist intent, nor that you meant to suggest that white kids should trash the homes of bourgeois black people. But art sometimes says things that its creators didn’t intend; tropes have lives of their own and they can cause problems if you don’t think them through all the way. I don’t think LL Cool J meant to apologize for slavery, either — but, again, sometimes you end up saying things that aren’t precisely what you intended.
“I think Lamar made some interesting and good points (and deserves all kinds of credit for sharing his thoughts here). Specifically, he reminds us that the aspects of an artwork that we focus on tell us as much about us, the viewers, as they do about the artist.”
I agree with that.
Right– my name is on the blog post just like Lamar’s is on the video. I don’t claim to have ultimate objectivity when I write about art (I write art criticism semi-regularly) and I don’t claim to control how people receive it when I make art (which I also do perhaps less semi-regularly, but still do).
I work with low-income youth of color, and I don’t speak for them, although their worldviews certainly affect mine when I hold forth on race. I had one kid memorably tell me this year, in a discussion around police torture, that racism didn’t exist anymore. Plenty of kids disagreed, but they certainly did not all see things one way. If I actually got a class to sit through the Pixies video, I can imagine a few responses like “Fuck that white kid” but probably a lot of “He’s crazy” (in a good way) and maybe even “He’s gay” (for using rainbow colors). What would they think about the girl at the end? I would guess it might divide down gender lines, but I think there would be pushback. I am being just as presumptuous to imagine how I think black adults would receive the video, but I bet there would be a higher level of anger.
Here and elsewhere I offered a variety of responses that seemed intelligent, some positive, but the negative one stuck with me. My response is just as valid as your right to free speech, Lamar, and I honestly don’t think saying “race and gender don’t matter” is a thoughtful justification of your work. But again, your willingness to discuss it is commendable.
So I just watched the video and I can’t see any reason why you couldn’t read it as a critique of adolescent white male privilege and the anger that attends it. The kid comes off as a creepy little monster, after all. Anyway, this itwould make the video of a piece with a lot of Pixies songs, including the ones cited above (“I’ve Been Tired” and “U Mass”), which I definitely read as critiques of white male privilege.
I don’t know that I see him coming across as a creepy little monster. It seems pretty much like he’s supposed to come across as playful and cool.
What in the video marks him as creepy? I don’t really see any particular critique…. I don’t think “he seems creepy to me” really quite gets you there….
Yeah, now that Lamar has weighed in and characterized it as “light-hearted,” reading the kid as creepy is decidedly heterodox. As both Lamar and I said, he’s the protagonist and the victor.
Sure, he comes across as a victor until the end, at which point the image a hostage colors your interpretation of the actions prior and he becomes a victimizer (or a creepy little monster). So he seems lighthearted and playful at first, albeit a little awkward and not so pretty. But what starts off as a celebration of unchecked adolescent vigor ends on an unsettling note. Kind of like a better Pixies song. Folding in the racial and gender politics, that all his fun depends on the literal oppression of a black woman reads like a pretty heavy handed indictment of white privilege, though based on Lamar’s comments it seems that wasn’t the intention.
at which point the image a hostage= at which point the image of a hostage
Apologies, my brain is addled from other writing.
I dunno, Nate…you could call the song “Accidental Racist” a clever parody of myopic white nationalism, I guess if you wanted to…and I’d be dubious about that too. I don’t see anything in the video that suggests you’re supposed to be disturbed by the final image; on the contrary, it underlines his rebelliousness and cool, it seems like.
You could make her more of a character and a person in various ways, or let us see him from her perspective…but the video doesn’t do that, as far as I can tell. It doesn’t seem any more self aware than a murder ballad or bog standard gangsta misogyny. To the extent that it’s upsetting or uncomfortable, it adds to the mystique of the hero. Showing a bad boy is a bad boy doesn’t undercut a bad boy narrative. You’ve got to do more work than that.
Yeah, it’s what makes the Family Guy examples relevant. They do their job by problematizing some accepted taboo in a clearly oppositional way that you can interpret, as opposed to a lazy juxtaposition with no obvious reading.
I’m not sure how I could have not been disturbed by the last image, or how it wouldn’t make the kid seem terrible. That having been said, I watched the video after reading the article, which meant I knew the kid had tied someone up before he went on his rampage, so my read could have been tainted by the expectation.
Having said that, I’m non-plussed by the idea that I’m arguing this video is an incisive anything (note my use of the qualifier “heavy handed”). I’m not even wedded to my reading. But I’m not willing to concede to its heterodoxy. A twist ending is a pretty standard satiric device (see every other EC comic published).
I think I’m with Nate here. If you’re going to cast a race-based reading over the proceedings, it definitely seems like a “heavy handed indictment of white privilege.” Or even white male privilege.
To be honest though, I was more interested in whether the song was any good musically speaking and hence listening to the guitar and bass line.
I just don’t think Cannibal Corpse wants you to exactly condemn the narrator in Stripped, Raped, and Strangled. Or any condemnation just goes to reinforce the bad-assedness.
Alternative rock is a different genre than metal…but I think Bert is correct when he suggests that there are similarities as well.
Oh, I just want to say that Bert’s review of this new Pixies video arrived just as I was watching a repeat of the BBC’s Seven Ages of Rock where they made a *BIG* point that Nirvana took the Pixies’ “quiet-loud hiss-shout anthem” (Bert’s words) style for their big hit. Who needs enemies with this kind of banal, insipid musical commentary? Certainly a clarion call to not think too hard, kind of like the pop-rock intellectual equivalent of your typical “Biff Bam Pow” comics article.
Sorry, did you want to explain to me why “quiet-loud hiss-shout” is too pedestrian a summary of the Pixie’s epic musical genius? I doubt I have the cranial capacity (or the Cannibal Corpse).
“Pixies’,” I meant. And I do appreciate the memo that race and gender and violence are no longer loaded signifiers, Suat.
It’s an excellent summary of the Pixies’ “epic musical genius.”
Unfortunately, the producers of the Seven Ages of Rock thought this worthy of a great musical thesis pertaining to the wonder of Smells like Teen Spirit.
Ah. Well, there’s a similar dynamic there, can’t argue with that. The only cure is not to watch non-parodic rockumentaries of any kind.
Y’ALL NIGGAS IS STUPIFIED!!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQBNH3UFEC0
Huh…well, John Agnew appears to be Lamar, or coming from the same IP anyway. FWIW.
At what point did Suat argue that race and gender are no longer loaded signifiers?
And I certainly hope you didn’t take my reading as based on the notion that race and gender aren’t loaded signifiers. The reason I had the react I did was because those signifiers are so loaded. I found the image of a black woman held hostage by a white kid striking because of America’s long history of oppression through raced, often sexual violence.
I think maybe I misapprehended Suat. “If you’re going to cast a race-based reading over the proceedings” was too much internal rhyme for my senile organ.
But no, Nate, I think you share my slackjawed befuddlement at the denouement of this video. Sorry to be dense.
Also, perhaps a final note– I really did not talk about gender enough. The “rape culture” skeptics who frequent this blog haven’t weighed in, but this video seems like a pretty strong argument that just maybe our culture promotes rape.
I read this as an aesthetic appreciation of destruction that grounds one’s enjoyment in victimization (imagine Spike Jonze showing the setting of the man on fire in his video, rather than the beauty of the man simply running while on fire). Whether it’s a surprise ending is dependent on one noticing the discovery of the credit card and picture at the beginning. As far as how important gender or race are for the video, invert its characteristics, e.g.: It wouldn’t make much of a difference to my mind if it were a man tied up, but it would with a girl replacing the boy. The assumption here would be that the girl was likely getting revenge on a dirty old man, the stereotype being that girls don’t destroy things just to be destroying things like little boys do. If you invert the racial makeup (but not the gender), it would say something different regarding stereotypes if a black boy were destroying a middle class white woman’s home while she’s tied up. People would be more likely to call the filmmakers racist for making the video. It’s a lot safer (outside of racist circles, that is) to make it a white boy terrorizing a black woman, because fewer people are likely to read it as playing into a stereotype about white boys. Of course, no matter how safe you play it, some people like to be offended.
The Jonze video I mentioned.
It is amazing, the invocational power of the phrase “rape culture.” But sincerely, I am glad to hear from the HU post-feminist contingent.
It reminds me of the Public Enemy sample of so,oneone explaining, “Black man, white woman, black baby. White man, black woman, black baby.” Etc.
Yes, of course– I would say that a black man tying up a white woman would be the closest parallel to Birth of A Nation, and thus a pretty deplorable combo as well– and, as you suggest, would have been self-censored from the get-go. Anything involving tying up a kid would have also been red-flagged immediately.
And of course one can imagine a context in which the white kid trashing a tied-up black woman’s house could have some justification. She could have done something horrible to him or his family, sure. Race and gender wouldn’t disappear, but there would be a narrative to support it.
But there’s no narrative, other than, yes, highly aesthetic destruction. AND– the race, age, and gender of the two characters. That’s all there is to go on, and it seems blockheaded to me not to imagine that many viewers may suppose that what is being represented is being glorified (as with the Confederate flag controversy re: Brad Paisley).
So, if other situations are obvious red flags, why not red-flag the black woman and the white boy? What makes that combination relatively harmless?
Other than, as I suspect is the case, not really thinking about it too hard.
I hope all those flags didn’t confuse the issue. There’s a sensitive-new-age-liberal-PC-latte-pansy art piece waiting to happen in those two red flags, one with and one without the stars and bars.
“Of course, no matter how safe you play it, some people like to be offended.”
I really, really, really have not even a little desire to be offended by a Pixies video, thanks. I love the Pixies. I want their comeback to be joyous and awesome, not something that depresses me.
I’m willing to say that I “like” being offended if others are willing to admit that they “like” resenting me for being offended. There’s anxiety being released in most every voluntary action, including writing holier-than-thou blog posts.
I just don’t cop to what’s really being implied, which is that there was no tension there, and I just invented it. I like pointing it out, because people like me feel that the Pixies represent them, and, without being a Pharisee about it, it’s okay to say “I don’t want that shit to represent me.”
You know, I don’t think you bother with the credit card and the kidnapping if you’re not trying to milk the rape and/or hate-crime controversy. I feel like the budget thing is crap and they got exactly the video they wanted.
Another in a series of final statements–
I think they want to pass it off as being broke. But I think they could get anyone to be in a video for five minutes for a beer, or they could actually think out a script. They had expensive cameras, plenty of lighting, props, etc. Lazy, possibly dumb, but also wanting to be “dark” without having the stones to own it.
…and I’ve got a piece at the Atlantic up about the video here.
OK, so I read Noah’s piece at the Atlantic, and I feel compelled to chime in (again). Even if I agree that the kid comes across as “cool,” and the mood “lighthearted” right up until the end of the video, how does the denouement not force a rethink about both his character, and my reaction the the wanton destruction. That is, if I think everything looks like a good bit of rock n’ roll fun, and then I find out it happened at the expense of a black woman, how am I supposed to just go on thinking the kid was cool and fun lighthearted?
Is it that he isn’t punished for his crimes, or that the woman doesn’t ultimately get the better of him?
One aspect of your and Bert’s argument that I concede is that the video might have made the same point with different actors, but I’m not totally certain how. As was noted above, had the victim been a white male the video would have been an ode to rebellion, a white female victim would garner charges of misogyny but not racism, and a black male the reverse.
Of course, the other possibility is to avoid dealing with race or gender politics unless you intend to do a super sensitive job of it, but this is something I can only sort of get behind. After all, we learn how not to talk about things by talking about them. The obvious rebuttal to this is that this talk can have material consequences, but I’d counter that so too can fear of talking.
Hey Nate. The problem is…I just don’t think most people have any problem just going on thinking that the kid’s actions are lighthearted and fun. Lamar seems to think they are. Most commenters on the video seem to think they are. The piece in the Guardian I linked from the Atlantic piece doesn’t even mention it as an issue.
What I was trying to say in the Atlantic piece is that there is a long history of using violence against women to signify coolness and awesomeness in rock music. Given that history, I just don’t think that violence against women, in itself, comes across to fans as disturbing or problematic; it comes across as edgy and exciting and controversial, maybe, but that’s somewhat different. If you want it to be disturbing (and Lamar gives us no indication that he did, for what that’s worth) you kind of need to work at it.
Have you heard de La Soul’s Biddies in the BK Lounge? They basically flip gender and class roles in the middle of the song. But they’re smart and thinking about what they’re doing. Not so sure that’s the case here, unfortunately.
Bert,
Tortured reasoning isn’t the same thing as hard thinking, but is related to hard-headedness.
I was baffled about the reference to “rape culture” until I did a page search. I see, you and I cross-posted. Anyway, I don’t see that the video indicates a rape took place and must’ve missed anyone claiming that it did. I’ve argued here about the stupidity of the term before. It has noxious, racist implications if its users take any time to “think hard” about it (ethnicities that have a higher instance of rape, must therefore be part of a rapier culture — Native Americans rape because it’s part of their culture). But, its users aren’t interested in reason, or evidence, only propaganda to shut up opponents (what, you must hate women, then; as you say, must be post-feminist; and, finally, as the “debate” would go if pursued, must not take rape seriously; etc.). Maybe evolutionary psychologists need to give an ad hoc explanation for why we can’t escape a rape culture to suddenly find support on HU. But where are the caveats to objectivity? Noah gets offended without caveats. Moving on …
I agree that race is part of how we read what goes on in the video. We have stereotypes, identity scripts, etc. that make some readings more probable than others. That’s what I was getting at. It would’ve been more likely offensive with black on white crime for the same reason that Hollywood depicted so many Jewish gangs back in the late 70s. And it would’ve said something else if it had been black on black crime, in which scenario fans might’ve wondered what the fuck that had to do with the Pixies’ music. I agree that their music is targeted at white people and the color of the protagonist reflects that (even if unintentional or a matter of happenstance for the video’s creators).
Even taking any ridiculous assertion you or Noah want to throw at the video as the un-caveat-ed truth of the matter, you’re still left with a really big gap that needs a really big leap to get from the ‘is’ of art to the ‘ought’ of morality. Just because a heinous act is depicted doesn’t mean that the heinous act is being argued for. Without that leap, you haven’t covered the grounds to an actual offense.
And, yes, you’ve invented the cause of your offense. Nate’s already covered this, but why depict only a terrorized woman at the end if the audience is in any way supposed to think whatever the kid did to her (again, granting your assertions) is being justified by the video? You mention Brad Paisley’s song, but what if the video showed pictures of hanging black men or slave imagery while he’s making his point about wearing a rebel flag in Starbucks? That would really change the message. I guess you might still read a man in a rebel flag shirt dragging a black guy from the back of a pickup truck as promoting both violence and the confederacy, but I can’t see anyone but racists and sociopaths agreeing with you.
The video hardly takes takes a risk in trying to appeal to a liberally inclined target audience (college kids of the late 80s to 90s who grew up to be left-leaning to liberally concerned adults). A middle class black woman being terrorized by a white kid in the suburbs. That just says everything about who it’s supposed to appeal to, except for you and Noah, who have a kind outdated media effects approach to pop culture. Appearance equals promotion. (And if something doesn’t appear, you’ll conjure up a reason for why it does.) This video is tailored for your type, and still you get offended.
I’d rather have someone defending Stockhausen’s view that there was something beautiful in destruction. Instead, if anything, the video gives the same old left-leaning moralism that spectacle violence always has its roots in some controlling moral base structure, which reveals about its consumers … blahblahblah. I’m with Jonze and Stockhausen (and Beavis), sometimes we can just enjoy things on fire as things on fire. It’s easy enough to build the “surprise” lesson into it, but the audience isn’t learning anything, only being patted on the back for agreeing. They can feel better for enjoying the destruction because they’re made to feel bad about it. And, yet, you and Noah require a note at the front saying that the videomakers don’t agree with or support any actions depicted in what is about to be shown. That this is a work of fiction. Gah!
“It has noxious, racist implications if its users take any time to “think hard” about it ”
Yeah…again, Charles, this really does not make the kind of sense you seem to think it does. And, again, it seems to be much more about leveraging different oppressed communities against each other than it is about any actual concern on your part for anybody. Or possibly about denying that your community can do anything wrong because somewhere over there are statistics that say that people who you don’t identify with are doing something worse. It’s just not a particularly enlightening or pleasant line of country, and I wish you’d stop wandering around in it.
“And, yet, you and Noah require a note at the front saying that the videomakers don’t agree with or support any actions depicted in what is about to be shown.”
Why don’t you think they agree with it? It’s a light-hearted video about the coolness of rocking out. What’s not to agree with?
If you think it’s a critique, what exactly makes you think that? There’s a history of rock songs celebrating the edginess of violence against women. Or, on the other hand, there’s Stockhausen. You think the video makers are really more conversant with Stockhausen than with the Rolling Stones? What leads you to think so?
Well, in “Under My Thumb” the girl is supposed to deserve her oppression as revenge for her oppressing the male protagonist. Delia done him a wrong. Etc.. Here, a woman is being portrayed as terrified because of what some boy is doing to her house. If it were shown that the woman did something awful to the kid, then it would be another example. However, if the video is supposed to be about rock’s history of violence against women, then it’s critical. Unless you’re a sociopath, racist or misogynist, you’re not going to sympathize with seeing a black woman being tied up with terror in her face at the end. Instead, the target audience is supposed to feel bad about enjoying the destruction that just took place. You’re not supposed to feel bad about Axl killing his girlfriend. (I prefer the amoral approach, of course. I can make up my own mind about whether this is an action one should really take in the real world. I don’t need sanctimonious art, the PMRC, Fredric Wertham or the HU to point out the evil of killing women. I know this already, thank you.)
I mean, I’ve probably explained this before, but…”rape culture” does not mean, “American culture is solely about and defined by rape.” It’s a reference to a particular set of practices and assumptions that are used to legitimize rape and harassment, and to the idea that women’s bodies are fair game and that consent is not necessary are desirable. It’s a way to talk about the fact that street harassment and rape are on a continuum, and reinforce each other, so that you don’t get folks doing what you occasionally do, and saying, “hey, why are we talking about pinching butts when all serious people talk about serious things like rape”?
I don’t want to argue about rape culture. It goes nowhere but down. Thus, you can have last word on it.
But…you’re sanctimonious too, right? It’s just that it’s free-speech sanctimony. Why do you think people need you to tell them how to think about what Bert and I are saying?
I don’t buy that you’re supposed to condemn Axl, or the kid in the video, or the narrator in the Cannibal Corpse song who bellows about stripping, raping, and strangling women, or the narrator in Nick Cave’s murder ballads, or the narrator in NWA’s murder ballads. It’s supposed to be edgy and fun and dangerous; it makes the speaker look cool and badass and frightening. Unless you’re seriously arguing that gangsta rap is uniquely sensitive to the concerns of women and has been on a multi-decade crusade to raise consciousness about rape and battery? Eminem is an agent of NOW? Or what?
Sorry, Charles. I really thought writing “rape culture” made you appear like a genie. No offense intended.
I know Stockhausen thought that 9/11 was the greatest art piece of all time. That involves some serious bracketing (caveats if you like, art pour l’art, “art is art and everything else is everything else”), but I can support that, on its own terms. “Funny Games,” the Michael Hanecke sadistic torture home-invasion film, is one of my favorite aesthetic depictions of sadism ever.
Destruction is aesthetic, insofar as it is pleasurable. But first of all, stylized destruction is a fairly banal rock-video trope. So then the directors said (I think), let’s add in kidnapping and credit-card fraud, and, as I said, they went for the gender/race combo that would get them the most provocation for the least blowback.
If they had then gone and added a narrative context of some kind, a setup, a background, that could have worked, in the “Family Guy” mode mentioned above. But (as I commented on the Atlantic piece), slapping a signifier on your art (whether it’s patriotism, rape, guns, antisemitism, religion, nihilism) and not putting any work or thought behind it, is lame. And when that lameness relates to recent history and current events, it’s an aesthetic failure that has an ethical dimension.
Do the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the Birth of A Nation, Mein Kampf, defy simultaneous aesthetic and ethical evaluation, and, if they don’t, is it impossible that there might be some crossover?
If anyone wants, the previous discussion about said culture.
Gotta go, but I’ll be back, fellows.
The Guardian video focusses on the song, not the video, as do the comments. We can read sins into the silence (they might well be there), but when the video does get mentioned you see things like this:
dominicdelaware
01 July 2013 12:05pm
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Creepy video. Good song.
and
2 PEOPLE, 2 COMMENTS
pogrud
02 July 2013 8:19am
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1
Is it just me or is that video pretty sinister? To me it looks like the boy has got into a house of that tied up black lady, nicked her credit card and bought loads of stuff with it and then used it to trash her house.
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Martin_C pogrud
02 July 2013 9:52am
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I thought the same. The journo’s comment about it being “what looks like the best solo house party ever” makes me think he didn’t watch to the last ten seconds.
Your take is interesting, Nate… you see it as a creepy video, but what do you think aesthetically? Is it a good video?
I don’t think it’s a particularly good video, in part because I don’t think it’s sufficiently creepy. Lamar’s comments suggest to me that it wasn’t particularly thought out due to time and budget constraints, and I think whatever political valence it has is accidental.
I do think it’s a bit of a stretch to say the director should have given it more context, as the video’s central narrative conceit was the surprise ending, which by definition requires leaving context out until the end.
PS:
As someone who loved the Pixies through high school I sort of wish this had never happened. At this point I prefer my memories of the band to anything else.
There’s a picture of her early on in the video, so the twist as such is set up. That’s not context. My point is not that the twist is always a shlocky move (although it usually is), my point is that this freewheeling sadism (which can be great, as in “Funny Games” and many other places) needs to be either a) made SPECIFIC, supported by at least a hint of a background story (especially when you’re dealing with loaded signifiers), or b) made extremely NON-specific, as in the random phone-book killer in The Jerk (“…random bastard!….”). Otherwise people are left flailing all over the place, and if a strong, viable reading is that you enjoy scenes of white-on-black rape, your story needs to do some work.
“As someone who loved the Pixies through high school I sort of wish this had never happened. At this point I prefer my memories of the band to anything else.”
It’s definitely a jump the shark moment. Rock band come backs are brutal.
I didn’t mean to argue that the twist had zero context, just that the withholding of context is important to the twist. As for hints, I think the photo and the last image are sufficient to make most viewers rethink any sense of identification they might have had with the kid, and the comments section at the Guardian and the ones here suggest that this reading is neither aberrant nor even unique.
As for this: “if a strong, viable reading is that you enjoy scenes of white-on-black rape, your story needs to do some work,” I’m not sure who the “you” of the sentence is… Are you saying that a viable reading is that the director enjoys white-on-black rape scenes?” If so, that’s a pretty uncharitable reading. If you’re that the average viewer of the video likes it because they like white-on-black rape scenes, or even a milder version of that like “white-social-sexual-oppression of black women” scenes, then I’m going to argue that you’re simply wrong. And this is coming from a guy not known for his faith in humanity.
Put another way… I’m willing to concede that this video is sloppy and problematic, but I don’t think it’s a straightforward glorification of racially motivated violence, sexual or otherwise.
I think Bert is saying that there is a reasonable reading whereby you are supposed to identify with the kid, and the frisson of dangerousness from the final shot makes that identification edgier and cooler.
And I do think that’s a reasonable reading. What he’s doing is presented as fun, and giving that fun a fillip of danger doesn’t necessarily tip it over into being critique, that I can see.
I think we’re not far apart on this. I don’t think the “critique” reading is aberrant, but neither do I think it’s the solitary obvious reading. The Atlantic comments are split as well, but self-selected populations are not always the best metric for these things.
Now I’m just wondering about why people want to feel bad about the violence, but not about the gender or race of the victim.
To be clear, I did not intend to argue that the reveal gives the fun “a fillip of danger.” I intended to argue that the reveal makes the what seemed like fun seem like sadism. I agree, this does not a critique make. But I do think it’s sufficient to make a reading of it as a celebration of violence wrong. A reading of the video as a poorly constructed text that is problematic and doesn’t say a whole lot in the end, I buy.
So yeah, I agree with Bert that we’re not that far apart on this.
As for the question about the stress on violence as opposed gender or race of the victim, I think that’s an unfair, sort of mean spirited question. To the extent I discussed violence it was always with reference to to race and gender. Charles worked through the various permutations of race and gender available to the video maker.
No mean spirits intended. There seem to be a lot of comments here and on the Atlantic, not yours in particular Nate (so, again, sorry), that want the tied-up figure to be a critique of the violence, but not of misogyny or racism. I am dubious that it critiques anything, but separating the violence from the racism and misogyny seems as arbitrary as insisting that the video cannot be read as glorifying violence in the first place– and this is coming from a staunch Tarantino fan.
Now I should write something about why I think glorifying indiscriminate violence is more okay than glorifying violence against women and minorities, but I’ll spare people unless that seems counterintuitive.
I hadn’t done much more than skim the Atlantic comments, but I can certainly see why you’d question why somebody would acknowledge the violence and not the gender or the race.
People are just really resistant to acknowledging or thinking about gender or race, in my experience — moreso than violence, perhaps, which implicates everyone, and so is easier to see as implicating no one in particular.
In a way, I think it’s because race and gender make it more real? (Which is structurally nice, because the assertion is that those things are illusions, or subjective only.) If it’s about some kid trashing a house, that’s fun or problematic, but isn’t something that ever needs to have actually happened or been perpetrated by anyone but deviants who can safely be ignored or cheered on. If it’s connected to a history in which black people were terrorized for living in places like that, suddenly there are people to actually blame, and an implication that maybe, somewhere, violence had an effect on people, and/or continues to underlie the way we live.
I had one black friend (who was overall sympathetic to my gripe) suggest that the setting could have been a black suburb. Which makes me wonder– do most white people know that black suburbs exist? They’ve seen an assortment of post-Cosby sitcoms, but I wonder.
I also wonder if most people are familiar with rape statistics (I wish there were statistics on rape-denial, but that seems unlikely).
Noah,
I don’t want sanctimonious art about violence or free speech.
Here’s a similar, but much better video: Justice’s “Stress.”
I can’t tell what point you think you’re making here:
I said, “You’re not supposed to feel bad about Axl killing his girlfriend,” which was contrasted to the terror depicted on the woman’s face in this video. Quite clearly, you’re supposed to feel something for the woman, which will only put some critical distance from the boy’s actions. That’s not the same as being ok with Axl burying his girlfriend in the backyard. It the video comments on such songs, it could only be as a criticism of them. Yet, you still choose to lump them all together as if there’s no difference in narrative approach or message.
Bert,
Funny Games? Man, I disliked Haneke’s moralizing in that film and in general, for that matter). Since it’s fairly relevant to the current discussion, you can read all about why here. (It’s about the American version, but I didn’t notice much of a difference with the original after seeing it later on.)
As for the video’s quality, I agree with Nate about why it has just enough context for its narrative purpose, the surprise twist of making one feel guilty for enjoying the destruction. And I also agree with him that it should’ve been a lot creepier (see the Justice video I linked to).
You demand specificity, but the video is very specific with an allowable gender-race division. It keeps it from being dangerous to the target audience of likely Pixies fans. No one (but you and Noah) will be offended by having a white kid shown to be a little terrorist asshole to a middle class black lady. It supports identity roles allowable to the audience and avoids the ones that are negatively associated with racism — i.e., beliefs about what constitutes racism. Again, all your trouble is rooted in believing that showing violence promotes the violence. If you don’t have that, you have no offense. Many critics made the same leap regarding Funny Games. Haneke just couldn’t moralize enough for them, because he showed the violence, despite both sides sharing the same nannyish desire: a need to protect those whom you believe to be too dumb to be offended on their own. Offense by proxy.
Charles, I wasn’t saying you wanted sanctimonious art. I was saying you were being sanctimonious. You get moralistic and cranky if you feel anyone is suggesting an ethical response to art. It’s nannyish anti-nannyism; a common but rarely diagnosed affliction.
“but the video is very specific with an allowable gender-race division.”
Sure; white guys are allowed to commit violence; black women as victims raises no comment. That’s what I said. The difference is that I think there’s something problematic there, while you appear to believe it’s more problematic to question (what we both agree are) established and safe tropes.
“which was contrasted to the terror depicted on the woman’s face in this video.”
I don’t see a lot of terror there. There’s a brief glimpse of her mostly in darkness, and her face isn’t especially readable that I can see.
How do you square your reading with Lamar’s statement about intent? I’m saying the tropes he used got away from him, but you seem to be arguing that there’s an intentional critique, which seems hard to parse with his failure to articulate any such critique…though not impossible, I guess.
This is where you lose me:
“black women as victims raises no comment”
Sure, nobody actually said they were creeped out by the fact that the victim was black, but several pointed out that the video was creepy. Isn’t it possible that race contributed to that reaction?
Sure. But Charles is saying that it’s an acceptable racial dynamic to have white guys as perpetrators and black women as victims. I think there’s something to that (though Charles thinks that means the video is avoiding racial unpleasantness for some reason that I don’t quite follow.)
There are an awful lot of images of sexualized, dominated black women in our pop culture. You may be right that it still raises flags though…which seems to contradict Charles’ argument that they’re avoiding racial controversy.
Somebody somewhere said it was important she be black as a mark of difference; so you knew it wasn’t his mom, I guess (though, of course, it could actually be his mom; such things happen.) That would sort of go with Bert’s point that they’re courting controversy for its own sake — or with the argument that its supposed to make the violence there edgy.
I am all for making the video creepier. That would solve a lot of the readability issues. Because what all the “critique” readers are saying is that you can reverse your empathy, which has been with the kid, in the last five seconds. It’s not impossible, but according to Charles nobody but me and Noah (but also other commenters elsewhere) think that maybe the empathy doesn’t switch at the end.
I actually admire Charles’ attempt to discover an absolute sadism, free of moral complication– though this video doesn’t offer it, for the boring reasons of history and specificity I have mentioned. And I will look at the Funny Games discussion, though it might be tangential to discuss in detail.
“I actually admire Charles’ attempt to discover an absolute sadism, free of moral complication”
I think that’s actually the dream of absolute sadism is the same as the dream of sadism, isn’t it? Sadism is pretty absolutist; the desire to erase everything but the self includes almost by definition the erasure of moral context, since others cease to exist as moral actors.
I guess there’s the question of whether or not you actually need the moral to exist as a trace to give meaning to the erasure — or whether as with slashers you have a sadism where the moral impulse to destroy is validated by the sense that we all deserve death. But that’s a kind of dream of escaping moral distinctions too…
Speaking of slashers…it seems like if the video actually wanted to reverse empathy, you’d need a kind of rape/revenge structure, where the victim gets to become the victimizer (which is actually sort of what that de la Soul song does in a bizarre way, now that I think about it.
Wandering off the freeway here just a tad. But Noah and I have discussed rape-revenge vs. absolute violence before, and I would like my violence to be free of moralizing (as would Charles in his Hanecke review) because, frankly, that’s how violence works, says me.
The kid steals a credit card and colorfully trashes a house… fine! Not brilliant, but fine. Now there’s a black woman (or girl) tied up in the bedroom. To me this works like the rewind scene in Funny Games, it disrupts the identification, but doesn’t give it any time to reset, ad allows it to land in some shitty moral territory. People are familiar with the black prostitute trope?
I probably have to write these responses differently to embed links and I’m too lazy, so here’s Noah and I discussing Funny Games v. rape/revenge classic I Spit On Your Grave: http://darkshapesrefer.blogspot.com/2010/10/black-beacon-in-blinding-storm-or.html
If you’re going to have a villain-victim scenario, the safest thing to do is have white-white, in terms of stereotypical liberal-leftist reaction. The next safest thing is to have the victim be from a historically oppressed minority and the villain be white. That would be this video. I don’t know what’s hard to follow: it’s safer to sympathize with a minority victim, because it’s perfectly parallel with the overarching story of oppression left-leaning types (including the average Pixies fan) believe in. You can see this in your own gender-reducing take on life and art, Noah. Everything is misogyny, so you have much less of a problem with violence against men than women in art (this video is but another symptom). Once again, there’s nothing in the video or Lamar’s response that suggests one should think terrorizing women or blacks is okay or should be done. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Fair enough about the look. I should’ve used ‘learned helplessness’. She doesn’t look like she’s having a great time. But why aren’t you this literal with Bert’s reading of rape having taken place? She’s fully dressed.
I’m not sure what’s to square up with Lamar’s statement. I can read the video just fine without any statement on racism. I’m saying race is still going to be noticed no matter how much I can ignore it or Lamar wants it to be otherwise. And if you’re going to read a statement on racism into the video, then it’s anti-racist, if anything. That is, even if it’s safe, anti-racist message was unintended by the video’s creators.
First, the white on black woman crime should raise no comment about its racism or sexism, because the most reasonable ideological reading one can give it is that whites terrorized blacks and/or men terrorize women. There is no ‘ought’ here — something you’ve failed to prove, but it’s necessary for your reaction. Second, I do find it problematic that minorities tend to excluded from villain roles. It’s a variety of racism — structural, not subjective, but one that’s rooted in nannyish reactions like yours and Bert’s. (Granted, it’s not a separate water coolers kind of bias, but it’s still a problem, rooted in stereotypes.)
And I don’t hate ethical reactions to art, just overly reductive ones. Maybe you confuse this because of reductionism. I mean, how many posts and threads here are about misogyny or rape? It’s at least weekly, but probably more frequent. So, if I disagree with the prevalent “moral” criticism around these parts, it appears to you that I don’t like moral criticism. However, I believe that every contribution I’ve ever made to this site contains such criticism. My take on Marston’s work was that it’s morally repugnant.
Bert: “[A]ccording to Charles nobody but me and Noah … think that maybe the empathy doesn’t switch at the end.”
That’s a pretty generous reading of what you’ve been saying, isn’t it? I can find quite a few places where you say that the ending — through intention and effect — ratchets up one’s identification with the boy, making him even awesomer. I didn’t see a whole lot of “maybe” in there.
Then again, this may be an effect of the rhetorical one-upmanship on both “sides” of the debate, leading to comparisons to “Birth of a Nation” and “Mein Kampf” — plus Noah’s diagnoses of interpretive bad faith — on the one hand, and the director’s insistence that he never noticed his sister was a black woman on the other.
“Everything is misogyny, so you have much less of a problem with violence against men than women ”
Except for the part where I’ve written multiple essays about violence against men and even sexual violence against men. And about pacifism for that matter. Said essays also tending to piss you off, because anything that suggests that maybe violence or representations of violence might be something to hesitate about tends to cause you to rise up in moral condemnation of moral codemnation.
I said your reactions to art are ethical. They just tend to take the form of saying that ethical reactions are unethical, generally (as with Marston) because said ethics are seen as automatically totalitarian. Moral responses are fine as long as they’re insisting that moral responses lead to the pit. It’s convoluted, which is a kind of complexity, I’ll grant you.
And not really sure what world you’re living in where minorities don’t get to be villains. Olympus Has Fallen? Any cop show ever? Hell, hip hop generally is all about black people getting to be gangsters (I think there’s even a subgenre?) Again, your vision of the world seems to be this nannyish terror that someone somewhere will be a nanny by suggesting that perhaps racism and sexism still exist. Anti-PC is the only true ethics. Orwellian double-think, in various senses.
I just want to say that I enjoy violence of all sorts: mythic (Arnold movies), revolutionary or divine (The Dark Knight), sadistic (I Stand Alone), masochistic (slashers) and absolute (Three Stooges). It’s like mustard with me.
“plus Noah’s diagnoses of interpretive bad faith”
I’m not sure who I’ve suggested is engaged in interpretive bad faith?
I don’t think Lamar is; I think he used tropes he wasn’t in control of. I don’t think Nate or you are. I don’t think Charles is…I mean, I kind of think Charles’ ideology is noxious, but I don’t question that that is his ideology, nor that he sees the video in the way he says he sees it…
Violence in entertainment is really fun, there’s no question (I don’t like the Three Stooges much, but slapstick can be great.)
I just feel like there’s things to be said about the way that violence is really fun in entertainment and the way that violence works in life that doesn’t just boil down to “they have nothing to do with each other.”
Are any of your violence against men essays not rooted in misogyny, though? Really, regardless of a few exceptions here and there, my generalization holds. You care far more about violence against women than men and tend to reduce violence and a whole hell of lot of other problems to that. I can’t believe you don’t proudly accept that. (You just don’t like me calling it reductive.)
And I’ll stand behind my view that the tendency these days is to not put minorities into villain roles. The black Kingpin is one exception. But black on black crime isn’t a contradiction, because it supports prominent liberal views about the plight of inner city blacks. It’s an interesting issue to me, but not one I’m real definite about.
For blacks as villains– don’t forget Birth Of A Nation! How’s that for mustard, Charles?
I brought up Mein Kampf because it’s generally regarded, among educated internet users, as unambiguously evil, much like Birth Of A Nation, because I wanted to ask a question about ethics and aesthetics. From Wikipedia to many people’s lived hearsay, Birth Of A Nation was considered a huge formal innovation in cinema. Roger Ebert certainly felt ethics and aesthetics could be separated, at least for the more cranially advanced specimens among us– read this and imagine transposing it on to the video, only with the “postwar” section as about five seconds:
“Those evolved enough to understand what they are looking at find the early and wartime scenes brilliant, but cringe during the postwar and Reconstruction scenes, which are racist in the ham-handed way of an old minstrel show or a vile comic pamphlet.”
But it’s okay that it’s vile, because it’s actually a critique of the war footage (glad we could work in the pamphlet, since this is nominally a comics blog).
Of course Birth Of A Nation was racist in its intention, and massively harmful, and this video was not racist (I don’t buy anti-racist) in its intention, and will likely cause zero hate crimes. Nonetheless, a lot of people will see this video, millions probably, and the idea that discussing the race/gender element is less moral than not discussing it, is absurd.
You know what would make us nannies? If we were actually censoring anything. If we complain about a shitty video, like you complained about Funny Games, Charles, for reasons that we find compelling, our misguided understanding of race and gender as factors in violent acts, maybe you should take on the actual question– why is it the race and gender no longer matter?
Paula Deen has plenty of supporters. And, much farther out on the spectrum, white and “patriot” hate groups are not shrinking in numbers– not unrelated to the prison population, of course.
Hi Noah,
Probably an unfair translation on my part. Here is the post that was sticking in my brain. It opens like this: “People are just really resistant to acknowledging or thinking about gender or race.”
I took “People” — coming in this place in the conversation — to mean “People like those Atlantic readers who refuse to acknowledge race (because it’s more real and implicates them in an uncomfortable way)….” That reads like bad faith to me, but — honestly — it may be “me” who is doing all the reading.
“That reads like bad faith to me” –> meaning, “That reads like an diagnosis of bad faith to me.”
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I think violence against women is quite important for the way violence against everyone gets structured and thought about. That only means I don’t care about violence against men if you think focusing on one excludes the other or is at the expense o the other. I really don’t — and I think the suggestion that it is is noxious and fairly evil. Also, if you’ll pardon me, reductive.
Hmmm…okay Peter. I see “bad faith” as meaning intentionally deploying duplicitous arguments, I guess. When folks resist race and gender readings in that way, I don’t necessarily see it as intentional or malicious. Discomfort isn’t necessarily duplicitous (though it can have bad effects, and I think does in this case.)
Though maybe I’m just shilly-shallying. James Baldwin would I think probably say that, yes, the insistence that race and gender don’t matter in discussions of violence is an example of bad faith; Americans should know better, and indeed at this point in our history have a moral responsibility to know better.
Fair enough. I was thinking about “bad faith” in a more existentialist (but also, more or less, a psychological, feminist, Marxist, etc.) sense: a semi-willful, if not truly conscious, self-deception.
It’s more like, “People are just really resistant to [agreeing with] or thinking [like I do] about gender or race.” If they don’t, then they don’t care about gender or race. That’s an ideologue. I will say that I don’t think Noah’s “ideology” is particularly noxious, though. He’s not a right-wing fundamentalist, even if his approach to understanding others often offers about as much nuance.
Bert,
I was thinking of villains with a more recent vintage. I agree about the silent age. But think of the way the Chinese stereotype was avoided in Iron Man 3, not by making him into an interesting, thoughtful villain who provides a potential critique of the hero, but by simply making him white.
“You know what would make us nannies? If we were actually censoring anything.”
That’s not the only way, although it’s the worst. As I was saying, you and Noah hold views based on what you believe others should but won’t notice in something. It’s not that you’re really all that offended, but you’re being offended for others, because art X just might give them the wrong ideas. And you even give me an example right before your denial:
“Nonetheless, a lot of people will see this video, millions probably, and the idea that discussing the race/gender element is less moral than not discussing it, is absurd.”
That’s nannyish.
“That’s nannyish.”
As is racing about the net to tell people they’re wrong, wrong, wrong to think about race and gender in a way that makes you unhappy.
Either it’s okay to tell people they’re wrong, or it isn’t. If it is, then you should maybe engage with the arguments presented rather than jumping up and down in rage that we dared to present them. If it isn’t, then you should probably close up your internet and go home, yes?
There’s that nuance. I just came on here without addressing anyone’s argument. Why, I just ignored everything that you or Bert said.
Disagreeing with people because you don’t share the same reaction to something isn’t the same as disagreeing with art because you think someone else might be harmed through the unconscious or structural control of the psyche by some imagined baroque network of dangerous implications lurking around the corner of what was said or depicted. The person taking the latter tactic is, of course, able to freely maneuver through all those hidden dangers, like the censor viewing all that pornographic imagery.
I didn’t say you hadn’t addressed anything. I said that the additional ad hominem argument of nannyism is ridiculous.
And Bert has been at some pains to say he didn’t think it was harmful, but that it was bad art. Nuance!
I think it’s fairly nannyish to imply that folks are causing harm by pointing out racial and gender problems, don’t you? Isn’t the whole point of nannyism that it’s harmful to people and to society to treat others like children? Otherwise, why bother pointing it out? Or is your nannyishness so overwhelming that you can’t stop telling the children, “don’t do that!” even though you don’t think it actually has any effect? It’s just knee jerk scolding with you?
Also…not sure what there is about the video that’s particularly hidden. The suggestion that it’s celebrating a white kids’ assault on a black woman seems like the most obvious interpretation. To argue that it’s a critique seems like it requires more reading in (though not ridiculous amounts or anything.) Both seem like they require some sort of recognition of race and gender — though again, recognizing that people have race and gender hardly seems especially complicated. Most people do it all the time, I’d think.
Just to underscore my initial point, for which I have taken a bargeload of flak but which Charles seems to be denying for some reason– yes, the video offends me. Me. It personally offends me. Shitty art is offensive.
Weren’t you offended when the rewind scene happened in Funny Games, Charles? It sounds like it ruined the rest of the movie for you, you were so offended. It didn’t offend me terribly, so it didn’t ruin the movie for me.
Or is it that I care about people that aren’t like me (i.e. women of color) in a way that affects my ethical, and thus also my aesthetic worldview? If you are a man of moral outrage, as you claim, do you reserve all your moral courage for white men? If so, you’re definitely concerned about race and gender.
Yeah…part of the offense is definitely that it’s the Pixies, too. I love that band,so it especially hurts to see them doing something stupid (even if they just signed off on it rather than created it.)
In These Times has a nice follow up piece here.
Ha. I made the comment above: “And, yet, you and Noah require a note at the front saying that the videomakers don’t agree with or support any actions depicted in what is about to be shown. That this is a work of fiction.”
And now Noah links favorably to a piece that says:
“The video [by Kanye West] was widely decried even before it was officially released and eventually had to be issued with a disclaimer: ‘The following content is in no way to be interpreted as misogynistic or negative towards any groups of people. It is an art piece and it shall be taken as such.’ There’s been no similar official disclaimer, outside of a blog comment, from the Pixies’ camp – nor has there been the sort of public pressure that might result in the need for one.”
And there was a followup to my mockingly inserting a few comments of my own into what said Noah said: “‘People are just really resistant to [agreeing with me] or thinking [like I do] about gender or race.’ If they don’t, then they don’t care about gender or race.”
Bert gives me this interpretation of my own reason for resisting his interpretation of the video (i.e., the representative view for women of color everywhere):
“Or is it that I care about people that aren’t like me (i.e. women of color) in a way that affects my ethical, and thus also my aesthetic worldview? If you are a man of moral outrage, as you claim, do you reserve all your moral courage for white men?”
But, Bert was generous enough to recognize that I, as a committed racist and misogynist, do care:
“If so, you’re definitely concerned about race and gender.”
Beyond satire.
Welp, I really thought we were going to all come to an agreement on this one, but no such luck.
I don’t actually think disclaimers are the way to handle this sort of thing. Fwiw. I doubt Bert does either.
Maybe on another note…re the rewind scene in Funny Games. Your take was that it was trying to tell you that you were implicated in the violence, and was therefore insulting, right?
I don’t think that’s what was going on. I think Haeneke put the rewind in to fuck with you, yes…but he’s mocking his audience for believing justice will be done, not for enjoying the violence. Its a sneer at the week minded who believe that all will turn out okay in the end. So…I think it should make you like the film more, Charles. He’s explicitly rejecting soft minded appeals to justice, and telling you that violence is the only truth.It’s not a way to implicate the audience in the sadism; it’s a way to deploy sadism against the audience.
But! Maybe you prefer your reading because you like to be offended?
Charles, of course (nothing is “of course” in the digital text-world, but of course to me) I don’t actually think you are a committed misogynist and racist. I actually think there are an extremely small number of self-proclaimed racists and misogynists out there– even among right-wing zealots, among whom I emphatically do not include you. This is still what amazes me with fascists who deny the holocaust. Why aren’t they proud of it?
And yet racism and misogyny, while dissipating but also mutating, persist– at least that is my worldview. I see this as a video that plugs into a very recent history in a way that does not make a positive use of that history– and by “positive” it could still be bloody and hideous, but still taking the history into account.
I guess where we differ, Charles, is that if a piece of art has a fairly reasonable reading that reinforces a deplorable worldview, but that is not the foremost explicit reading (as in this video, where I think there is no foremost explicit reading, which is normally fine, but I think matters in this case), I object. it’s sloppy and irresponsible. Whereas I think you would only condemn something that had an explicitly hateful reading as the foremost obvious reading.
And in addition, people like me who think that evil histories didn’t magically disappear with the Civil Rights Act, are, in your view, fussy nanny-men who don’t realize that history has finally ended and no good-intentioned (or at least ethically noncommittal) art can be criticized for anything other than its formal aesthetic qualities.
I think propaganda exists, and artists make propaganda all the time. Regardless of their intention. I don’t think I’m oppressing anyone by pointing that out. And I still enjoy beautiful sexy violent art– no problem.
Re: holocaust denial. I think it’s strategic and ideological. Strategic because the Holocaust is seen as absolute evil, so there’s an interest in distancing. Ideological in that it’s a problem for anti-semites to have Jews be victims; they’re supposed to be all powerful.
I think that’s quite likely. Nonetheless, If Aryans are pure and superior, why couldn’t they have pulled off a fairly impressive genocide? They can always blame the sneaky Jews for the heroic Ubermenschen losing the war.
Noah,
I agree with half of this:
Haneke does the rewind to merge the kinoeye perspective with the sadistic killer’s (as male gaze and the like would have it). This is very much a critique of violence in film. (Haneke clearly sees it as such if you read some of the interviews I link to in that post.) Thus, you’re right about how the rewind steals an eye for eye justice from the audience, who’s then supposed to wallow in the denuded sadism that’s supposedly inherent to these films. But you’re wrong that I should like it, since it simply makes all the horror of the film into cartoon violence, just like a Road Runner cartoon: don’t worry, no one stays dead for too long. And, contrary to Haneke’s intention, all he does is prove that the audience strongly identifies with the victims here. … Then again, I guess maybe I do like that it’s more evidence against the notion that we tend to identify with the monster in horror films.
Bert,
They don’t magically reappear, either. Who’s denying these histories? Saying some video about a boy criminal terrorizing a black woman isn’t about the celebration of slavery is hardly denying slavery. Good grief, get a grip on your rhetoric.
“Saying some video about a boy criminal terrorizing a black woman isn’t about the celebration of slavery is hardly denying slavery. Good grief, get a grip on your rhetoric.”
It’s not slavery. It’s the much more recent history of terrorist violence against black people who move into suburban homes.
So…insisting you’re not denying the history while being unable to even figure out which history is being discussed is not an especially convincing rhetorical tactic, whether you have a grip on it or not.
I don’t see how it turns the film into cartoon violence. Only the bad guys don’t stay dead. That hardly seems like a comforting road runner vision….
And I guess I may disagree that Haneke’s intentions are what the film does…it may be better than he wanted it to be, from my perspective.
Noah, “evil histories didn’t magically disappear with the Civil Rights Act” hardly evokes the past few years of history. But if it works any better for you, I’ll say that denying this video celebrates the Jim Crow era doesn’t entail denying the existence of that era, or even ignores it. It’s all pretty silly, and makes a cartoon out of left-leaning criticism.
Speaking of cartoons: I don’t see why the wife couldn’t’ve hit the rewind button, too.
Or maybe she tried; I can’t remember now. Regardless, the film stacks the deck in such a fashion that it doesn’t do much towards criticizing violence. It makes it pure entertainment.
I think it’s too easy to say that you symapthize with the victims in horror films, especially since a lot of them deliberately play with or flip victim and victimizer. In that rewind scene where she gets the gun and shoots the guy, you’re sympathizing with her as attacker, right? In Hostel, you’re supposed to root for the marginalized scum to kill the asshole Americans…though you also root for the asshole Americans to kill the marginalized scum. I mean, you could say that horror films get you to sympathize with victims, but you could also say they encourage you to cultivate a sense of victimization in the interest of embracing/justifying violence or violent fantasies. I think both of those things are true, actually. But I think the idea that you are supposed to simply and unproblematically identify with the stalked is no more true (and not really less true either) than the claim that you’re supposed to simply and unproblematically identify with the stalker.
Funny Games screws with this in interesting ways, in that it presents the usual narrative of victimized turned to victimizer, with the resultant endorphin rush, and then short-circuits it. But, either way, I don’t think you entirely or always identify with the brutalized family per se. The attackers are fun and appealing and funny, and the wish for a purer sadism (which you’ve expressed) is certainly one the film shares, and is embodies in the attackers, I think, not the victims.
I tend to like horror films because they engage with issues of violence and identification so forcefully. The Pixies video is extremely half-assed in comparison — not really willing to follow through on its rape-revenge tropes, not willing to think about what it would mean to really do the work to switch identification.
“In Hostel, you’re supposed to root for the marginalized scum to kill the asshole Americans…though you also root for the asshole Americans to kill the marginalized scum.”
As sad as it may be, Eli Roth really seems to identify with all those assholes he puts in his movies. I don’t think he wants you to think they deserve to die. Take his recent disaster/apocalyptic film, Aftershock, where the guys, including one played by Roth himself, are assholes that I really loathed, but the scenes of their death are played for sympathy. (Roth only wrote and produced this film, but it follows the same pattern.)
But I agree that some films want you to identify with the monster. It’s just not automatic or even the prevalent source of identification in the genre.
The video fails at rape-revenge tropes, in large part because it’s not a rape revenge story. It also fails at cannibalistic hillbilly tropes. So what?
It’s kind of a rape/revenge film, Charles. It’s about a woman kidnapped and abused, and then at the end (at least according to many readings) it’s supposed to flip identification along gender lines. That’s how rape/revenge works.
I don’t really see anything about hillbillies in there…but if you have a reading, I’d be interested to hear it.
And of course you sympathize with the assholes, even as you root for their deaths. That’s what I’m saying; the identification is multiple and complex, rather than “I want this person to win.” It’s a slasher; you want everybody to be put to the scythe, and part of that is rooting for everyone to kill everyone else, which means you’re also masochistically wincing as everyone kills everyone else. It’s both/and rather than one/or.
Different films tip the identification in different ways at different times. But Hostel definitely enjoys the deaths of the American assholes, as well as of everyone else.
We were discussing The Birth of A Nation, Charles, which predates the Civil Rights Act. You said that you like all genres of violence, but not the racist violence of TBoAN, because (I assume you believe) our society has, at some point in between, been utterly transformed so that racial signifiers don’t refer to lived racial violence (like the decades of documented housing discrimination and Chicago police torture I mentioned earlier– I’m sure you’ll ding me if I mention Trayvon Martin but oops I just did).
The video is like Hostel if the idiot Americans captured and tortured the marginalized foreigners and then the movie just stopped.
I think you need the rape or revenge for it to be safely labeled rape/revenge, unless you wish to suggest all home invasion films belong to the rape/revenge genre.
I think you’re confusing identification with the enjoyment of a genre. I might like to experience an uncomfortable feeling by watching a slasher film, but that doesn’t mean I’m actually rooting for the slasher. There are, of course, slasher films, gore films, etc. that are watched mainly about the killing itself — i.e., we just want to see bloodshed — but those largely fail to elicit a horror affect for a similar reason to why the Hulk isn’t much of a horror story. Sadistic sympathies works against horror just like sympathizing with the monster does. I don’t much care if you call most cheesy slashers horror, since they are by most definitions, but they fail to horrify, terrify, etc.. The reason Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a cut above all those Friday the 13th sequels is because you don’t root for/sympathize with/identify with Leatherface. Similarly, suspense is ruined by identifying with the killer. Even though the camera lets you see what he’s up to before the potential victim knows, that doesn’t mean the camera is actually interpellating you as the killer subject (Clover, among others, really gets this wrong). In such a case, you’re really invested in the victim (if it works), which is why you feel tense about his not noticing what you’re being shown. This is 3rd person narration, not a switch to another first person position. In the case where you’re just wanting to see carnage, I’m not sure you’re really particularly identifying with the killer or victims. You’re just enjoying the aesthetics of butchery.
Anyway, I agree, this all gets really complicated. I don’t think you really ever root for Jack in the Shining, even though the film does take his perspective and you do identify with him at times. It gives you enough to make you feel him slipping, and you do feel the horror as he’s being manipulated and victimized by the house. But once his mind’s gone, the horror effect is achieved when you’re placed in the position of Shelly Duvall or the kid.
I could go on about this, but that’s enough.
Bert,
I don’t feel like sussing out why I responded the way I did, or you used the example that you did or Noah read what I wrote the way he did. We wouldn’t agree even after the discussion, so let’s just leave it at that. (If we go long enough, will there be any racial incident that isn’t invoked by your reading of this video?)
Right, it’s a slop video by the moralistic/nasochistic standards of horror. You identify with the killer, cause it’s a kid having fun (keep telling me that’s crazy, I dare you), and then you’re supposed to be able to parse the last few seconds as some sort of Hitchcock twist?
When non-blacks consistently get away with violence against blacks, year after year, and you want to tell me I’m the one making that up or imagining that it’s relevant to fictional scenarios, I don’t think I’m the one with the active fantasy life.
PS: Air-quotes implied around “killer;” hyperbolic nanny that I am, I still realize that the woman in the video wasn’t dead.
I think a home invasion film that turns on violation/reversal of gender identification is at least flirting with rape revenge…and something like Straw Dogs is definitely as well (there’s even a rape in that, isn’t there? Followed by a revenge? So the most famous example of the genre is actually also rape/revenge. That seems relevant.)
“I think you’re confusing identification with the enjoyment of a genre.”
No…I’m saying that when the genre actively works to switch identifcation on you over and over, then the switching of identification seems like it matters. Slashers put you in the position of victim then killer over and over again. It’s not about the camera angle; it’s about the fact that narratively, you’re the victim, and then at the end you’re the final girl/avenging killer. The victim becomes the slasher…which means you are victim and slasher both, and not just in the film, but throughout it.
Action movies are much less interested in cross-identification; one reason they’re significantly less interesting to me. Part of the videos problem is that it’s an action film (fun in destruction) which attempts to turn into horror at the last minute without working at it.
Also, not really sure what you’re talking about re: Clover? She resists the idea that the camera work means identification with the killer, and generally agrees that identification is masochistic and with the victim. That’s her core argument, actually. In insisting that the identification is multiple, I’m further from her than you are, I’m pretty sure.
I’ll have to look this up, but the way I remember it is that Clover sees the slasher as exceptional, that the majority of horror films actually encourage you to identify with the monster, or interpellate you as the sadist. Believing this, Haneke tried to create a horror film that critiqued your sadistic vantage point, by making the killer/monster POV and camera eye explicitly conjoined. So I’m not disagreeing here that we switch identification in horror films, but with a certain view about how identification works in creating horror.
Bert,
“When non-blacks consistently get away with violence against blacks, year after year, and you want to tell me I’m the one making that up or imagining that it’s relevant to fictional scenarios”
Hey, where’s Mike Hunter? I said neither of those things. I believe that if you’re going to kill someone, don’t have much money, but want to get off, pick a black victim. And I believe racism relevant to this video, namely that the video plays it safe if you accept such disparities as fact.
“You identify with the killer, cause it’s a kid having fun (keep telling me that’s crazy, I dare you), and then you’re supposed to be able to parse the last few seconds as some sort of Hitchcock twist?”
I did, quite easily, as did many others. It seems to me that the core of your concern is that many might not get the twist. I mean, you seem to see that reading easily enough, but are worried by more elaborate possibilities.
Charles says to Noah, “I agree that some films want you to identify with the monster. It’s just not automatic or even the prevalent source of identification in the genre.”
But to me, when I challenge the obviousness of such a reading of the video: “I did, quite easily, as did many others. It seems to me that the core of your concern is that many might not get the twist.”
I just wonder if race has nothing to do with the flip-flop there. I acknowledge your point that blacks are “safer” to murder, although it’s chilling that that’s your only acknowledgement of a continuing relationship between race and violence. If you think black lives *should* be valued, does culture (like a video) have any role in changing that?
Stupid, tiny, minor quibble, but Bertha Mason, from Jane Eyre, is not black.
It is debatable. “Creole” can mean white or mostly-white in a Caribbean context, but there are plenty of aspects of the description that suggest a racialized depiction. See for example http://cherwelltragedy.blogspot.com/2011/10/significance-of-race-in-jane-eyre.html
That blog is unconvincing. The point in that scene, it seems to me, is the extent to which her position racializes her. It would be akin to reading similar descriptions of the Irish from the 19th century and declaring them black. Racialized, yes, black, no.
This goes quite well with Isaac’s post on HU today about hardwired bias as predispositions to infer from stereotypes. I read it several years ago on my own and (obviously) read the bushy-haired animal-woman as black, based on my experience with similar period depictions.
Definitively black, no. Splitting (bushy) hairs, yes.
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