How and why things are popular
In a 2008 essay that I still refer to because I am too lazy to read new things, Rana Dasgupta speaks of the 'brick wall of the imagination' in reference to the unceasing trend for disaster movies. In discussing the two versions of The Time Machine, he notes how the newer version cannot imagine a future for us or a moral order in which things could work; so, he claims, disaster movies perform the end of civilisation and thus allow us to put a full stop to the problems that worry us. As much as The Day After Tomorrow sounds like a warning, it is actually a reassurance: there is nothing you can do. Do not stir; this will come. The moral laxity of this position is explored in this insightful but uneven essay, as he runs through the effects of the increasing exclusion of the ordinary person from participating in any processes that govern our globalised ethics (through looking, bizarrely, at genetic modification of the human - but it could really be any other thing). Read the essay, it's good.
Anyway, this analysis of disaster movies was shallow but worked for me and opened up the rather arrogant possibility that you can have insight into trends of global culture beyond just the identification of memes and the production of descriptive narratives. So I started asking myself, what is this with vampires?
And zombies and werewolves. I know there are various people on my flist who somehow find the trend for zombies fun and cool, and I don't want to alienate you because fun is fun and we should all totally have it - but I just don't get it. If I'm really honest I find myself irritated by any attitude that says 'this cultural artefact is cool just because' (the same way anything to do with monkeys is apparently, inherently funny) and then the next thing we know, we're doing zombie flash mobs (flash mobs is another thing that I'm intensely disturbed by - that's for another entry).
Vampires I can sort of get, and it's interesting because with Buffy we've had, for ten years or more, not only a notable cultural product but, I'm reported, a meaningful and excellent and loved one (quality matters when discussing trends, I think, because you need to differentiate between a hit and its cash-in echoes - you know, like when everyone went a bit Titanic for a while - versus a general, overall trend across the board. With Buffy we had the hit, but the eventual, longterm cultural fallout is now general and overall, and, I feel, not wholly attributable to Buffy). And Buffy was preceded by a not-dreadful 80s film. So the vampire-pop culture thing has been buzzing there on its own terms for a long time, along with other pop culture things that have their place and, like, that's their thing, man.
But now, vampires are big in a different way, on their own terms. Twilight and True Blood filtering through the consumption chain down to all the Chinese-manufactured detritus suddenly available to us, taken up with the intensity of a hormonal teenage girl desperate for erotics but channeling it through whatever means her social universe allows her. It's not a Buffy cash-in, it's a thing of its own. It's quite readable. Anyone could produce the analysis on this and I'll perform it here.
****
Firstly the blood- and life-sucking is obvious as capitalism - this position is only sustainable through the existence and literal draining of morally whole living ordinary unprivileged people. The repetition with which we describe global capital as 'vampiric' means I barely need to point this factor out.
We love vampires because they represent a selfhood that has had its basic ethics removed, and crucially, this is not willingly, so there is no blame for this (hence the sexually repressed teenage girl thing, it's identical to rape fantasies - you have the hottest sex ever and yet you preserve your moral innocence). With those ethics are also removed any human anxieties. (The adaptations to this, in which vampires have feelings and stuff, is a complication added because narratives become flat and unsatisfying without the presence of feeling, and vampire cultural products heavily depend on narratives - in meta this is a contradiction in which the vampire probably becomes actually something else, another kind of reflection of what we want to be; but the a priori of a vampire remains the same.)
And in place of ethics and anxieties, we gain all the status and decadence a human could crave - long life, perfect health (and with these, eventual fortune), immense power of sexual attraction, and most problematically of all, beautiful beautiful white skin (yes there are exceptions, we can note that one down to the 'reasonable pressures of narrative and audience' spoken of above). This is not a life position to which we can produce a comparative moral judgement, as we could judge, say, Paris Hilton, and say oh I would not like to be her no matter how rich she is, she's an asshole. This instead is how vampires are, this is their ontological basis. They are exempt.
I would really love to be a vampire, for example.
The will towards this position probably again speaks of, as Rana Dasgupta pointed out, how we have resigned ourselves from participating in any form of collective ethics. As with vampire conversion, we can barely be blamed for that - there is no meaningful process of ground-up ethical regulation in any of our systems of governance, finance, and global circulation of resources. We've always desired long life, status, beautiful jewels, literally, glamour, but it has always been accompanied by a narrative that at least claims to provide the ability to gain fulfilment from moral participation. The vampire lacks that capacity; we are slowly losing that capacity. The vampire looks good; we look like shit. Better be a vampire.
So it's readable in terms of the decadence of the final days of empire, which is a bit over the top sounding and I don't have the philosophy for this, but let's say the vampire represents the most fulfilling available experience for the ordinary person within this moment. You can fill in this part re capitalism and consumption, it feels a bit hackneyed to me. You get the idea.
***
There, I rehearsed the vampire reading. I think it's easy to put together, so much is obvious and would be better explored by someone smarter than me. Werewolves I don't get; nobody wants to be the werewolf. I think they're just there to add diversity to the vampire-universe's narratives. But zombies? Zombies seem meaningful again, and I don't get it.
Zombies are hollow in different way to vampires, and they have no agency; so there is nothing to aspire to. There is no glamour to them. They're under someone else's control and so they're a double negative. And I'm sure this is a full-on, total appropriation, incision, removal from Haitian culture: if early zombie movies dwelt heavily on that exotic, we ignore it totally today: aesthetically the zombie is a white person in Victorian dress (the ultimate 'white culture' clothing). So I think we're not really getting that pleasure of theft from an exotic culture. The only satisfying thing about zombies, then, can only be viewed from the outside. They have a thrilling (geddit?) and uncanny aesthetic. It is the embodiment of the uncanny.
For certain sure, the CPDRC performance of Thriller deserves more analysis (prisoner as zombie) than it got (it was basically read under 'oh the things we do in repressive regimes' or 'heartwarming prisoner rehabilitation activities'):http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMnk7lh9M3o.
And what Thriller proved, and was re-proved again, is that the undead, being empty hungering bodies, provide amazing possibilities for choreography: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPzcsdlOB7g (Ramalama Bang Bang ensemble dance for So You Think You Can Dance).
We want to watch the shit out of zombies. So then we get to zombie flash mobs. What are they to us? I think my critique here will now meld into my critique of flash mobs, so I'll stop. But I don't get it, any more than that. Why are zombies cool? Do we need to produce an image of an empty, killable, fascinating, deathly other? Why do we need them in our lives right now? Can someone tell me?
The short version of this is, we should all be reading Avery Gordon's Ghostly Matters. But I haven't read it.
ps my life is genuinely falling apart in a very serious way. I don't want to write about it. Exhaustingly pretentious entries like this seem to help, so you may be getting a lot of radio silence followed by crap like this for a while.
Anyway, this analysis of disaster movies was shallow but worked for me and opened up the rather arrogant possibility that you can have insight into trends of global culture beyond just the identification of memes and the production of descriptive narratives. So I started asking myself, what is this with vampires?
And zombies and werewolves. I know there are various people on my flist who somehow find the trend for zombies fun and cool, and I don't want to alienate you because fun is fun and we should all totally have it - but I just don't get it. If I'm really honest I find myself irritated by any attitude that says 'this cultural artefact is cool just because' (the same way anything to do with monkeys is apparently, inherently funny) and then the next thing we know, we're doing zombie flash mobs (flash mobs is another thing that I'm intensely disturbed by - that's for another entry).
Vampires I can sort of get, and it's interesting because with Buffy we've had, for ten years or more, not only a notable cultural product but, I'm reported, a meaningful and excellent and loved one (quality matters when discussing trends, I think, because you need to differentiate between a hit and its cash-in echoes - you know, like when everyone went a bit Titanic for a while - versus a general, overall trend across the board. With Buffy we had the hit, but the eventual, longterm cultural fallout is now general and overall, and, I feel, not wholly attributable to Buffy). And Buffy was preceded by a not-dreadful 80s film. So the vampire-pop culture thing has been buzzing there on its own terms for a long time, along with other pop culture things that have their place and, like, that's their thing, man.
But now, vampires are big in a different way, on their own terms. Twilight and True Blood filtering through the consumption chain down to all the Chinese-manufactured detritus suddenly available to us, taken up with the intensity of a hormonal teenage girl desperate for erotics but channeling it through whatever means her social universe allows her. It's not a Buffy cash-in, it's a thing of its own. It's quite readable. Anyone could produce the analysis on this and I'll perform it here.
****
Firstly the blood- and life-sucking is obvious as capitalism - this position is only sustainable through the existence and literal draining of morally whole living ordinary unprivileged people. The repetition with which we describe global capital as 'vampiric' means I barely need to point this factor out.
We love vampires because they represent a selfhood that has had its basic ethics removed, and crucially, this is not willingly, so there is no blame for this (hence the sexually repressed teenage girl thing, it's identical to rape fantasies - you have the hottest sex ever and yet you preserve your moral innocence). With those ethics are also removed any human anxieties. (The adaptations to this, in which vampires have feelings and stuff, is a complication added because narratives become flat and unsatisfying without the presence of feeling, and vampire cultural products heavily depend on narratives - in meta this is a contradiction in which the vampire probably becomes actually something else, another kind of reflection of what we want to be; but the a priori of a vampire remains the same.)
And in place of ethics and anxieties, we gain all the status and decadence a human could crave - long life, perfect health (and with these, eventual fortune), immense power of sexual attraction, and most problematically of all, beautiful beautiful white skin (yes there are exceptions, we can note that one down to the 'reasonable pressures of narrative and audience' spoken of above). This is not a life position to which we can produce a comparative moral judgement, as we could judge, say, Paris Hilton, and say oh I would not like to be her no matter how rich she is, she's an asshole. This instead is how vampires are, this is their ontological basis. They are exempt.
I would really love to be a vampire, for example.
The will towards this position probably again speaks of, as Rana Dasgupta pointed out, how we have resigned ourselves from participating in any form of collective ethics. As with vampire conversion, we can barely be blamed for that - there is no meaningful process of ground-up ethical regulation in any of our systems of governance, finance, and global circulation of resources. We've always desired long life, status, beautiful jewels, literally, glamour, but it has always been accompanied by a narrative that at least claims to provide the ability to gain fulfilment from moral participation. The vampire lacks that capacity; we are slowly losing that capacity. The vampire looks good; we look like shit. Better be a vampire.
So it's readable in terms of the decadence of the final days of empire, which is a bit over the top sounding and I don't have the philosophy for this, but let's say the vampire represents the most fulfilling available experience for the ordinary person within this moment. You can fill in this part re capitalism and consumption, it feels a bit hackneyed to me. You get the idea.
***
There, I rehearsed the vampire reading. I think it's easy to put together, so much is obvious and would be better explored by someone smarter than me. Werewolves I don't get; nobody wants to be the werewolf. I think they're just there to add diversity to the vampire-universe's narratives. But zombies? Zombies seem meaningful again, and I don't get it.
Zombies are hollow in different way to vampires, and they have no agency; so there is nothing to aspire to. There is no glamour to them. They're under someone else's control and so they're a double negative. And I'm sure this is a full-on, total appropriation, incision, removal from Haitian culture: if early zombie movies dwelt heavily on that exotic, we ignore it totally today: aesthetically the zombie is a white person in Victorian dress (the ultimate 'white culture' clothing). So I think we're not really getting that pleasure of theft from an exotic culture. The only satisfying thing about zombies, then, can only be viewed from the outside. They have a thrilling (geddit?) and uncanny aesthetic. It is the embodiment of the uncanny.
For certain sure, the CPDRC performance of Thriller deserves more analysis (prisoner as zombie) than it got (it was basically read under 'oh the things we do in repressive regimes' or 'heartwarming prisoner rehabilitation activities'):http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMnk7lh9M3o.
And what Thriller proved, and was re-proved again, is that the undead, being empty hungering bodies, provide amazing possibilities for choreography: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPzcsdlOB7g (Ramalama Bang Bang ensemble dance for So You Think You Can Dance).
We want to watch the shit out of zombies. So then we get to zombie flash mobs. What are they to us? I think my critique here will now meld into my critique of flash mobs, so I'll stop. But I don't get it, any more than that. Why are zombies cool? Do we need to produce an image of an empty, killable, fascinating, deathly other? Why do we need them in our lives right now? Can someone tell me?
The short version of this is, we should all be reading Avery Gordon's Ghostly Matters. But I haven't read it.
ps my life is genuinely falling apart in a very serious way. I don't want to write about it. Exhaustingly pretentious entries like this seem to help, so you may be getting a lot of radio silence followed by crap like this for a while.