VVC09: Problematic vids
I was going to do this later, as part of my general round-up on premiering vids, but since I am already getting queries about my initial comments on two of the vids, I'm breaking it out. I found two of the premiering vids shown racist and one to display cisgendered erasure of trans/genderqueerness. By "racist" or "cisgenderist" I do not mean that the creators of these videos or the people who enjoyed them consciously intended to cause offense, harbor conscious racial or gender prejudice, or commit or support hate crimes. I mean that I believe the videos perpetuate and reinforce racist or cisgendered ideologies and the erasure of genderqueer people and people of color.
I am a white, cisgendered woman. I don't speak as a person of color or a genderqueer person; I don't know if any of the people of color or genderqueer people at the con agree with my complaints, because I did not discuss the vids below with them. If I am saying something problematic with respect to race, genderqueerness, or any other oppressed identity in this post, I hope readers will feel safe to point it out, and that my friends will not attack just complaints out of mistaken loyalty to me. I am leaving comments unscreened for now but may change this if heavier moderation seems required.
deejay, Fight the Power (Tropic Thunder)
In Tropic Thunder, Robert Downey, Jr. plays an Australian actor (hair dyed blonde, blue contact lens) who wears blackface makeup to prepare for a role as a black man. I'm told the movie is a parody of Method acting. I haven't seen it.
The vid is about the vidder's desire [appreciation] for Robert Downey, Jr.['s sexiness], and uses clips of his other roles to illustrate her appreciation for him [this]. The vid doesn't comment on Tropic Thunder as a movie, because the particular vices or virtues of the movie clearly do not concern the vidder; instead, she clearly wants to share her appreciation of Downey's sexiness and her happiness in fandom as a place where she can celebrate that sexiness with other women. It is a light-hearted, playful vid.
Blackface doesn't make me feel light-hearted and playful. Blackface makes me feel like I've been slapped in the face. Watching blackface in a vid that doesn't comment on it at all, among an audience of a hundred fifty of my friends and acquaintances who mostly seem to be laughing and enjoying the ride, didn't actually make me feel slapped. It made me feel so thoroughly disassociated from my own emotions that I might as well have been floating above my seat, looking down at everyone. I could not talk to people about it then, and I could not talk about it the next day at Vid Review, and I'm not particularly happy to be talking about it now.
No, I don't think the vidder intended the use of the blackface clips, without commentary, to be offensive. But that's what being white in a racist society means: you don't have to think about racism, because it doesn't hurt you.
Anon., "Right in Two"
This is a Supernatural vid in which Castiel, an angel played by a white male actor, reflects on the violence of the human world and how it has drawn in his fellow angels, as illustrated by real-world news footage and clips from Supernatural in which Uriel, an angel played by a black male actor, feels contempt for humans, goes evil, murders other angels, and is eventually killed himself. This follows a common pattern in the mass media in which people of color appear only in relation to violence--usually as perpetrators, occasionally as victims. I found the use of real-world news footage, and the pain of people of color both imaginary (Uriel) and real (Rodney King, Iraqi people, black people in footage of the LA riots from the 90s), to give "depth" to the suffering a white male protagonist horribly offensive and trivializing, and thoroughly disengaged from any understanding of the causes and consequences of violence. (I am reminded, unfortunately, of
morgandawn's "Testify," a Starsky and Hutch vid in which footage of the U.S. Civil Rights movement and the use of a song associated with queer pride are used to express the stories of two white male cops.)
By framing this as the "universal" story of an angel responding to the "universal" tragedy of human violence, this vid erases the specific political, racialized, and imperialist history of many of the clips used. Furthermore, by sending this in as a response to a challenge for a theme of I.D.I.C (Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations), the vidder seems to be saying that diversity leads to violence and warfare. Frankly, that is not what I had expected from the challenge responses.
For a very different take on the vid, see
destina's comments.
jescaflowne, Go Baby (Cherry Lips)
This is a colorful, energetic vid that's mostly about action, based on the Charlie's Angels movies. Laura's post singles it out as "mainstream sexual objectification"; during Vid Review,
jarrow mentioned the vid didn't work for him because the visuals were of women but the song was about a man. My issue wasn't quite either of these. I'm very fond of the way lots of vids genderfuck pronouns, either deliberately inverting them as commentary or just plain ignoring them in favor of emphasizing the story rather than the ostensible gender roles, each of which is a subversive move in its own way.
But "Go Baby (Cherry Lips)" is about genderfuck, or genderqueerness, about a boy who's addressed as male or described as male in the second person/apostrophe ("You're such a delicate boy/in the hysterical realm"), but who's described as female in the first verse ("This life can turn a good girl bad/She was the sweetest thing you had ever seen"), is based on the work of J.T. Leroy, and was first paired on a single with the song "Androgyny." Notably, it celebrates genderqueerness--and particularly the "femininity" of "men"--rather than using it as an insult or a put-down. For me, using this to talk about the sexiness of cisgendered women--who are already expected to follow those dictates of femininity--erases the genderqueerness of the song and contributes to the invisibility of genderqueerness and the policing of gender identity in popular culture.
I am a white, cisgendered woman. I don't speak as a person of color or a genderqueer person; I don't know if any of the people of color or genderqueer people at the con agree with my complaints, because I did not discuss the vids below with them. If I am saying something problematic with respect to race, genderqueerness, or any other oppressed identity in this post, I hope readers will feel safe to point it out, and that my friends will not attack just complaints out of mistaken loyalty to me. I am leaving comments unscreened for now but may change this if heavier moderation seems required.
deejay, Fight the Power (Tropic Thunder)
In Tropic Thunder, Robert Downey, Jr. plays an Australian actor (hair dyed blonde, blue contact lens) who wears blackface makeup to prepare for a role as a black man. I'm told the movie is a parody of Method acting. I haven't seen it.
The vid is about the vidder's desire [appreciation] for Robert Downey, Jr.['s sexiness], and uses clips of his other roles to illustrate her appreciation for him [this]. The vid doesn't comment on Tropic Thunder as a movie, because the particular vices or virtues of the movie clearly do not concern the vidder; instead, she clearly wants to share her appreciation of Downey's sexiness and her happiness in fandom as a place where she can celebrate that sexiness with other women. It is a light-hearted, playful vid.
Blackface doesn't make me feel light-hearted and playful. Blackface makes me feel like I've been slapped in the face. Watching blackface in a vid that doesn't comment on it at all, among an audience of a hundred fifty of my friends and acquaintances who mostly seem to be laughing and enjoying the ride, didn't actually make me feel slapped. It made me feel so thoroughly disassociated from my own emotions that I might as well have been floating above my seat, looking down at everyone. I could not talk to people about it then, and I could not talk about it the next day at Vid Review, and I'm not particularly happy to be talking about it now.
No, I don't think the vidder intended the use of the blackface clips, without commentary, to be offensive. But that's what being white in a racist society means: you don't have to think about racism, because it doesn't hurt you.
Anon., "Right in Two"
This is a Supernatural vid in which Castiel, an angel played by a white male actor, reflects on the violence of the human world and how it has drawn in his fellow angels, as illustrated by real-world news footage and clips from Supernatural in which Uriel, an angel played by a black male actor, feels contempt for humans, goes evil, murders other angels, and is eventually killed himself. This follows a common pattern in the mass media in which people of color appear only in relation to violence--usually as perpetrators, occasionally as victims. I found the use of real-world news footage, and the pain of people of color both imaginary (Uriel) and real (Rodney King, Iraqi people, black people in footage of the LA riots from the 90s), to give "depth" to the suffering a white male protagonist horribly offensive and trivializing, and thoroughly disengaged from any understanding of the causes and consequences of violence. (I am reminded, unfortunately, of
morgandawn's "Testify," a Starsky and Hutch vid in which footage of the U.S. Civil Rights movement and the use of a song associated with queer pride are used to express the stories of two white male cops.)
By framing this as the "universal" story of an angel responding to the "universal" tragedy of human violence, this vid erases the specific political, racialized, and imperialist history of many of the clips used. Furthermore, by sending this in as a response to a challenge for a theme of I.D.I.C (Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations), the vidder seems to be saying that diversity leads to violence and warfare. Frankly, that is not what I had expected from the challenge responses.
For a very different take on the vid, see
destina's comments.
jescaflowne, Go Baby (Cherry Lips)
This is a colorful, energetic vid that's mostly about action, based on the Charlie's Angels movies. Laura's post singles it out as "mainstream sexual objectification"; during Vid Review,
jarrow mentioned the vid didn't work for him because the visuals were of women but the song was about a man. My issue wasn't quite either of these. I'm very fond of the way lots of vids genderfuck pronouns, either deliberately inverting them as commentary or just plain ignoring them in favor of emphasizing the story rather than the ostensible gender roles, each of which is a subversive move in its own way.
But "Go Baby (Cherry Lips)" is about genderfuck, or genderqueerness, about a boy who's addressed as male or described as male in the second person/apostrophe ("You're such a delicate boy/in the hysterical realm"), but who's described as female in the first verse ("This life can turn a good girl bad/She was the sweetest thing you had ever seen"), is based on the work of J.T. Leroy, and was first paired on a single with the song "Androgyny." Notably, it celebrates genderqueerness--and particularly the "femininity" of "men"--rather than using it as an insult or a put-down. For me, using this to talk about the sexiness of cisgendered women--who are already expected to follow those dictates of femininity--erases the genderqueerness of the song and contributes to the invisibility of genderqueerness and the policing of gender identity in popular culture.