The problem with Cargo 200, in a sentence: it wants to maintain the shocking locus of the film as both a thematically coherent linchpin of events, characters, narrative strands, etc. and as a decidedly “meaningless,” shocking violence that cannot be articulated, grasped, or accounted for “finally” by the film in which it appears.

Accordingly, the literature that attempts to negotiate or justify this rhetoric of shock – that is, where the shock must both “exceed” and “express” meaning – finds itself in a tight spot. Gregory Carleton’s article in Studies in Soviet and Russian Cinema, “A tale of two wars: sex and death in Ninth Company and Cargo 200,” seems to me representative in this regard (and there don’t seem to be all that many English language essays on Cargo 200). On the one hand, he writes, Cargo 200 is “groundbreaking precisely because of the visual explicitness of sexual scenes”: which is to say, it is the “explicitness” and “excessiveness” itself that becomes meaningful through its negative, transgressive gesture. This is also to say that the “content” is both relatively unstylized and of secondary importance. What matters most is the raw, visceral shock of the scenes: for this reason, “the graphic scene is essential, especially as it plays on audience expectations.”

It is thus first and foremost a matter of “affect” and moving the spectator, of which “shock,” in this view, occupies a privileged relation, as the first affect amongst affects. (Much could be said of the literalist, direct, and unmediated character attributed to “shock,” and how this “ground for the real” itself piggybacks off conceptions of the body as “corporeal” and “material” – or in any case, self-identical.) The proximity of discourses of shock to discourses of physiology should in this respect be questioned. I mean, are “quieter” responses the less affective for it, or for that matter the less shocking? Can love shock? Can laughter? If shock is nothing more than the “touching” of the subject, as told through a discourse of physiology, then it becomes difficult to assign a magnitude or threshold past which a given affect breaks free of the pantheon of responses to become a more direct, visceral elicitation. It seems to me that everything said of shock could just as well be said of jokes and laughter.

That being said, this logic of shock is in actuality only strategically (and rather disingenuously) dispensed, if only for the reason that, paradoxically, it is the shock itself that is supposed to express, or bear the weight of, determinate, historical themes. Which is to say, shock cannot remain an exclusively affective phenomenon if it is to find historical or cultural justification. To become allegorical, it must move beyond this simple, reductive “explicitness.” So after describing the rape scenes as “groundbreaking” for their “visual explicitness,” Carleton turns to their “symbolic conceit,” though it’s never said how the one is able to suddenly, if selectively, coextend with the other. The “explicit” is after all directly opposed to the “symbolic” and the “allegorical”; where the former claims to require nothing of the viewer, of culture – it circumvents the interpretive process, which is why it’s presented as “affective,” i.e. direct, unmediated, ‘of the body, not the mind’ – the latter suggests a specific critical or allegorical motivation at work in its presentation.

Though the affective, unmediated character attributed to shock is able to secure for itself a “ground” for inquiry, it also, for the same reason, cuts itself off from history, politics, culture. How can the explicit, the unmediated, the direct, be made to link up with the broader, and certainly “mediated,” problems that surround it? Carleton seems to be struggling with this problem when he writes:

“Moreover, visualized sexuality in each [Ninth Company and Cargo 200] is not a coincidental occurrence but connects the films in an intertextual relationship and broader meta-narrative. It draws from and informs the legacy of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, in particular how the war’s figuration has been shaped by glasnost/early post-Soviet representations. Central to this meta-narrative is rape, as a symbolic conceit of the anti-epic and its themes of violation and betrayal.”

In a way, Carleton here simply repeats the question. Even his language for describing the relationship between the rape scenes and the historical forces represented in the film carefully maintains their distinction (”connects,” “draws from,” “informs,” etc.), no doubt because the relationship between them is tenuous, unmotivated, and difficult to locate. In which case, it becomes difficult to describe the shockingly violent center of the film as an allegory for anything, if only because it is what it was meant to be: arbitrary, gratuitous, and non-symbolic.

Carleton’s attempt to find a “symbolic conceit” in the rape scenes, after having presented them as “explicit” and ahistorical in their “affect,” seems to me symptomatic of the methodological problems within the film itself. But even if we were to give generous readings of Carleton and Cargo 200, the allegorical reading suggested would be just as problematic. I mean, if, as Carleton argues, “Central to this meta-narrative is rape, as a symbolic conceit of the anti-epic and its themes of violation and betrayal,” then it would be like comparing the relationship between the Soviet people and its government to the rape of an adolescent girl. So, even if we did grant this film the allegorical status it seems to desire, we would be confronted with still more problematic metaphors and analogies, none of which seem particularly insightful or sophisticated.

After all, the film is titled Cargo 200, which suggests that the true concern of this film is the death of soldiers in a needless, foreign war; in which case the rape of Angelika would stand in for the “rape” of Soviet men by the Soviet state? That the corpse of Angelika’s fiance is rolled into bed with her suggests as much, symbolically-speaking, but why these two acts – rape and war – should be drawn as homologous is left unexplained, assumed. (That both are horrible seems to me the thinnest of possible relations. By this logic, any horrible act could serve this narrative just as well.) In any event, the rape of Angelika would in this sense appear as a rather curious, and it would seem inappropriate, symbol for what “cargo 200″ represents: the murder of young men by the state. That said, we are never really told why this young woman’s body has been made the site for the suffering of innumerable symbolic violences, why this body should be made to bear the problems and violences of the nation in its entirety – from religion to politics to the military to pop culture. However, as soon as the question becomes too irritating to turn away, the film is of course able to fall back on the “shock” alibi, according to which the film’s own inability to explain itself is supposed to be the explanation.

After having established the “determinate functioning” and systematic appearance of the Cecafumo cityscape shot in relation to the narrative of Mamma Roma – “The shot is inserted each time Mamma Roma or Ettore begins or concludes a line of action meant to improve his or her social position” (116) – Rhodes now argues the opposite, that its repetition is uncontrolled and unprovoked – which is to say, incessant (”it keeps returning” [121]) and therefore symptomatic of a “maddening” disavowal.

“Furthermore, the shot’s power extends out of its own indeterminate functioning in regards to the narrative. Again, its muteness and repetition and detachment from the characters’ point of view all contribute to make the shot ever more strange. Meanwhile, it brushes so close to familiarity (it ‘recalls’ neorealism; it almost suggests subjectivity grounded in point of view; it keeps returning) that it maddeningly seems to solicit and refuse comprehension through the simple fact of its mute, insistent reappearance. This shimmering opacity induces a restless, uncertain experience that draws us into the register of the sublime.” (121)

Drawing upon vaguely psychoanalytic concepts (trauma, disavowal, the uncanny) to characterize this shot, or the repetition of this shot, Rhodes describes the repetition as the effect of a kind of “organizing intelligence” (127) or subjectivity coextensive with the film itself (and not with Mamma Roma). Thus the image’s recurrence is described in terms of an affective, experiential subject, as a matter of traumatic repetition – “It is something not so much understood as suffered” (120); it marks “the ‘pain’ of a ‘failure of expression’” (121) – but its appearance, “diegetically,” is non-subjective. For Rhodes, that is, this shot specifically resists attaching itself to a character or assuming a point of view.

Rhodes then turns to Micciché who argues that the shot does not correspond to a strong and completed narrative nucleus, that it is “discontinuous” within “the diegetic fabric of the film,” and that it is therefore not a “subjective image,” but an “ideological image.” “Thus the image’s logic and its message belong to the organizing intelligence of the film, to Mamma Roma, if you will, but not to Mamma Roma.” (127) Though it’s safe to say that this particular logic of repetition does not find its means of expression in a character, neither do most shots: which is to say, it’s simply not clear why this logic should secure the impossibility of that shot (which is not, mind you, the same exact shot) becoming “inhabited” by a character, by a point of view – or at least opening onto that possibility, rather than specifically canceling it out. Rhodes, however, defines point of view in opposition to repetition, as if subjectivity itself – and, by extension, shots that represent subjectivity through point of view – cannot only not be ideological but is by definition insulated from pregiven forms, patterns, and repetitions.

“But we would be wrong to ascribe the landscape image to Mamma Roma’s point of view. First, this shot has been repeated too often at too many different moment following too many different types of shots for us legitimately to believe that it belongs to any character’s point of view. It has established its own autonomous functioning.” (126)

In point of fact, arguing that the final instance of the “sublime” panorama is also not a point of view shot is especially difficult because it is the first instance where the shot does approximate, and rather clearly suggests, the point of view of Mamma Roma. Which is why Rhodes is forced to admit that the point of view of Mamma Roma is at least “solicited.” However, following a rather contorted logic, Rhodes declares outright his agreement with Micciché, who “argues forcefully, and I agree, that the shot ‘is never – not even when it seems to be – a subjective image but is instead always an ideological image, and it does not function within the film as a diegetic surplus (which would enrich the story) but rather an ideological surplus (which enriches the meaning of the film).’” (127) So even where the shot “seems to be” subjective, it’s not “really” subjective – which is a fancy way of rendering this argument unfalsifiable (and unverifiable).

In anticipation of the more predictable objections, Rhodes lingers on this last scene, struggling to recast the shot sequence as one that specifically neutralizes the possibility of a point of view. So, though the shot does “solicit our identification of the sequence as point of view,” it is only a simulation:

“I want to add to Micciché’s analysis the further consideration that the work of this shot sequence (shot/countershot, character looking/putative object of vision) is precisely to solicit our identification of the sequence as point of view. Furthermore, an identification of the sequence as such solicits our identification with Mamma Roma. These solicitations, however, are lures, ideological snares. We are meant to understand that such a pursuit of identification (of shot with character’s vision, of our emotions with those of Mamma Roma) is exactly what this film means to disrupt, to interrogate.” (127)

Rhodes here cleverly turns the appearance or possibility of the point of view in the final shot into the lure, or snare, of ideology itself, and in such a way that to affirm the shot as suggestive of a point of view (and not a “point of view” qualified by quotes) is to fall for the trap, the trap of “sentimentality.” For Rhodes’ argument, to be sure, much is made to hang on this final shot not being subjective, to the extent that subjective means “sentimental,” as in the comparable scene in Umberto D where the image dramatically assumes the character’s point of view (looking down, out a window) (127), though for this viewer the comparison seems overly literal and rather inappropriate. Yes, it’s a shot looking out a window; but beyond that, it’s hard to see how the one and other relate to the same object or the same state of affairs. (One could just as well refer to the final scene of Germany: Year Zero, though to what end, I don’t know.)

In any event, the more obvious, or less counter-intuitive, reading of the final shot would make room for the possibility that it does in fact suggest, or “solicit,” Mamma Roma’s point of view. This seems to me not only intended, but essential to the film’s trajectory: it marks a final, dramatic coincidence of the film’s and Mamma Roma’s points of view. As Rhodes himself points out, “The shot [of the Cecafumo cityscape] is inserted each time Mamma Roma or Ettore begins or concludes a line of action meant to improve his or her social position.” But in each case, the damning representation of the cityscape or the INA Casa Tuscolao project – beginning with the “ironic” nod to Renaissance architecture – contradicts the optimism and false hopes of Mamma Roma’s dialogue. It’s as if she has not yet learned that her “dreams [are] fostered by the INA Casa Tuscolano project’s masquerade of progress and social equality” (125), a critique reflected or anchored in the framing and representation of the projects.

In other words, as a viewer, we are consistently clued-in, behind Mamma Roma’s back, to the fate that awaits to her. Thus, in the final image, Mamma Roma finally “gets it”: the ideological image to which we have been privy all along is suddenly, through her loss and wretchedness, “inhabited” by her, subjectively. Or, from another perspective, this image which was previously extra-diegetic becomes diegetic; the “organizing intelligence” of the film now coincides with her “intelligence.” That the image is not entirely or exclusively a point of view shot does not seem to me evidence of a “lure” or “solicitation”: aside from the fact that point of view shots don’t have to be strictly or exactly from the point of view of a character to approximate it or reference it, the framing of this final shot seems to be strategically oriented to mediate or convincingly “span” subjective and objective views. In being loosely centered on Mamma Roma, it prevents the “ideological image” from being eclipsed, and vice versa. In this way, without devolving into a pure sentimentality, Mamma Roma and Mamma Roma do finally coincide.

Brakhage Meets Tarkovsky

Amid growing international concern over the India-Israel arms trade, the Israeli firm Rafael unveiled the below marketing video — described by Stephen Trimble of The Dew Line as a “catastrophic collision of Bollywood and the arms industry” -- at the Aero India 2009 defense convention in Bangalore. In the months since its posting, the video has become the errant poster-child — even earning a reprimand from The Jerusalem Post — for the new age of covert international arms trading.

Noah Shachtmann of Wired’s DangerRoom has deemed it “the most atrocious defense video of all time, just days into the Iron Eagles — our celebration of the awesomely bad videos of the military-industrial complex”.

Every element of the promotional film is just plain wrong. The sari-clad, “Indian” dancers look all too ashkenaz and zaftig. The unshaven, hawk-nosed, leather-clad leading man appears to be a refugee from You Don’t Mess With the Zohan. Then of course, there’s the implication that the Indian military is somehow like a helpless woman who “need(s) to feel safe and sheltered.”

But for my rupees, the worst thing about the video is the damn theme song they’ve concocted for the thing. To pimp its weapons, Rafael produced a sitar-heavy twist on Rick Astley’s love letter to Satan, “Together Forever,” complete with a new chorus: “Dinga dinga, dinga dinga, dinga dinga, dinga dinga dee.” The rest of us now have to suffer for that bad, bad choice.

The video may be as offensive to our tastes as to our morals, but it’s also, perhaps, a sign of things to come. As a kind of post-modern pastiche of traditions and fads, light-hearted pop songs and mechanistic war, the video seems to embody perfectly the brazen disregard — where anything goes, and nothing is sacred — that we would expect from an arms dealer. Even more remarkable is the fact that these videos are themselves the product of a formula of sorts, where diverse archetypical cultural affects are combined, to easy effect. Saurabh Joshi of StratPost, the South Asian Defense news site, inquired further into Rafael’s marketing practices:

StratPost spoke to Assy Josephy the Director of Exhibitions for Rafael about how this video came about. “In Israel we have Jewish people from India, so we know about Bollywood and the song and dance numbers. Israelis are generally aware of Indian culture. This video is to help build familiarity between India and Israel and Rafael,” he says.

But this is not the first time Rafael has exhibited something of the sort. Josephy says Rafael has displayed such videos in many countries with various themes customized to the culture of the locations. “In Brazil we did a video of football. Football is very big there. In Paris the video had a theme that included Napoleon and the Renaissance. In Poland our video had themes of Chopin and Copernicus. In England it was about Shakespeare,” says Josephy.

Though we can only hope to one day get our hands on the Shakespeare defense video — an odd phrase to be sure — the greater point to be taken here is that even arms dealing can be “Epcotized”. The Rafael video is, no doubt, a classic case of a capital enterprise creating an image of cultural understanding that disguises its opposite, a generic, reproducible schema that can be ‘customized’ to capture any given culture. Only in this case, the product is a missile, not international cuisine, and the means for marketing — “culture” in quotes — is also the target.

Three recent films/series use the plight of fantastical beings (vampires, mutants, aliens) trying to gain acceptance into society as metaphors for the real life struggles of embattled, minority groups. Is the metaphor successful, or does it also work against its apparent progressivism by indulging in the very stereotypes it claims to resist? But first, a brief summary:

* True Blood uses the fictional acceptance of vampires into society as a metaphor for how the United States regards the gay community and the gay rights struggle. (A stream of amusing markers draws clear parallels between the two: in the opening credits a lit up sign displays the message “God Hates Fangs”; vampires are said to “come out of the coffin”; and it’s mentioned in passing that Vermont was the first state to legalize marriage between humans and vampires.) Michelle Goldberg nonetheless finds True Blood conservative through and through: though the vampire-homosexual analogy is “cheeky and clever”, “it has troubling implications, because the vampires, political rhetoric aside, aren’t really interested in joining human society. Unlike the misunderstood X-Men heroes, most of the vampires we meet are arrogant, perverse, and cruel—everything the far right believes gays to be.” So is True Blood a sophisticated, sympathetic tale of the plight of an excluded, embattled group, or does it simply make use of that plight to imbue its story, at strategic moments, with a serious, charged, and culturally relevant aura?

* X-Men also borrows heavily from the culture wars landscape to cast the mutants as a misunderstood, vilified group that’s gradually gaining acceptance. And just like in True Blood, a more militant faction, here lead by Magneto, threatens to sabotage the advances made by the mainstreaming, well-behaved majority. But the more heavily the mutant struggle for acceptance draws on gay rights themes, the more problematic its relation to it becomes. Mutants are, after all, by definition more dangerous and threatening to humans proper. They have a power in excess of the norm, which at once differentiates their clearly demarked kind from that of the ‘normal’ and pitches it against them. Though this lack of self-control is just as often likened to adolescence and sexual development, the fact that it’s unique in posing a real danger to their world limits the comparison and ultimately distinguishes it from safe, nonthreatening sexuality ‘proper’.

* District 9, still out in the theaters, presents a similar problem. The aliens stand in for all sorts of subaltern or excluded groups, and through that substitution the film is able to elaborate a powerful, progressive critique of certain states’ treatment of different groups; but at the same time, a delicate dance is required to keep the metaphor from circling back and affirming the common, derogatory representation of particular ethnic groups as nonhumans, subhumans, animals, etc.

Each of these films (or series) also makes consistent use of ‘fake’ news footage that invokes past and ongoing civil rights struggles, and borrows heavily from the politically-charged atmosphere most associated with culture wars social issues. In all three we are sporadically treated to clips of warring pundits, for instance, one conservative, the other ‘tolerant’; or heated split-screen debates between vampire and church, or mutant and human, spokespeople. The specter of a high-stakes national debate, sensitive to the slightest misstep, is everywhere present, hanging precipitously over the heroes’ heads – mutant, vampire, and alien.

The progressive, or empathetic, representation of subaltern groups as fantastically, often physiologically different is of course not a recent phenomenon; nor is the prominent inclusion of a media or public relations sphere in the development of narrative events and the creation of a ‘national’ atmosphere (as in King Kong, for instance). But what is perhaps historically novel in this gaining trend is the media’s dramatic promotion in importance: it is a premise of all three – District 9, especially – that the media world holds a powerful, if not determinate, position over the fate of the groups in question. In the latter film, news footage of alien riots, with shaky, live, street footage and commentary from ’specialists’, approximates the familiar instant-retrospective gaze of a culture comfortable with having an underclass and the violence required to maintain it. Whether we see in this footage the LA riots or the razing of Cape Town’s District Six under the Group Areas Act of 1966, the image of history we are given is purposefully generic and prepared.

Freud said of the dream that it’s not just what reality the dream is representing that matters, but why that reality had to take the dream-form it did. We know that the vampires represent homosexuals, but what is it of our time that encourages the representation of homosexuals as vampires? Or of Zimbabwean, Mozambican, and Malawian migrants as aliens? The ease with which matters of race, in particular, have been reimagined, historically, as matters of species needs no introduction; nor for that matter does the habitual representation of ’sexual deviants’ as predatory beings.

True Blood in particular runs up against this problem repeatedly: namely, how to draw upon the thematically-rich struggle of gay rights, as a readymade template for any mythical excluded identity, while at the same time stopping short of affirming, through the thriller/horror genre, the very prejudices it otherwise claims to regard as oppressive. Because the vampires really are dangerous, and do actually prey on humans, the comparison with homosexuality must be handled delicately, if not avoided altogether at the appropriate moments. When Godric blasphemes that humans are justified in fearing vampires, his wisdom assumes an almost extra-diegetic, directorial position. Does this blasphemy, then, amount to a tacit endorsement of the conservative view that finds the alleged promiscuity of the gay community to be the true roadblock to their social acceptance – hence the prominent vampire ‘mainstreaming’ theme of the show – or is it the opposite, an instance of the vampire rights theme diverting from its occasional analogy, gay rights?

In this light, to be sure, the show’s invocation of the plight of the gay community can seem disingenuous, a plundering for story parts.

All of this is driven home by the recent episodes with Godric (Allan Hyde), Eric’s (Alexander Skarsgård) ‘maker’. Where it was assumed that Godric had been captured by the Fellowship of the Sun, the extremist conservative Christian church, he had in fact turned himself over in an attempt to create peace and understanding because, as he says at one point, ‘let’s be honest – vampires have not exactly acted peacefully to humans’ (paraphrase). This admission raises the issue of the vampires’ true dangerousness to a thematic level: it’s the first time the vampires’ culpability is acknowledged and treated explicitly by the show. Until Godric made this perspective his own, and introduced it to the storyline, it existed solely as a contradiction or ideological problem in the makeup of the True Blood universe, rather than a problem the characters themselves are dealing with, diegetically. Accordingly, the clip above, in two parts, shows Nan Flanagan (Jessica Tuck), the vampires’ lead PR agent, chewing out Godric for creating a national PR disaster for the vampire cause. It’s the first time we see the characters interact with the national campaign, and it’s the first time that we get a real sense for ‘the politics of vampirism’ and the concessions that must be made, if only to prevent a battle that cannot be won. It’s also the moment when the blame shifts, however gently, from the humans to the vampires. As a result, it would seem, the homosexuality-vampirism comparison is here put on hold, as if the writers did not want this shifting of blame to be ‘misread’ as an analogy for the gay community’s culpability, but even so the implication is somewhat unavoidable if unintentional.

In this respect, we may see some of the philosophical and political commentary on the show move into its inner workings. So maybe the Godric theme will crystallize into a more nuanced social commentary, or it could simply feed into the ‘mainstreaming’ theme, where the ‘vamps’ need to come to terms with their scary, violent nature and learn to domesticate themselves. I’m betting on the latter – Bill, after all, is supposed to be the model vampire of sorts – but either way the writing seems to have grown more sophisticated over the last season and its politics should be expected to do the same in the season ahead.

Though the main fixtures of a classic, Hollywood film are conspicuously absent – narrative, sequential time, protagonist – it would be a mistake to describe Terence Davies’ film as experimental. Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) does not, after all, revel in its play with filmic form: it does not push the limits of film language for the sake of pushing the limits of film language, or at least that’s not the impression we’re led to get. In place of brazen self-consciousness, we find moderation and modesty, a fealty of form to subject. So if the meditative, ponderous movement of the film does not offer itself up as experimental – its radical temporality is not achieved through a virtuosity of editing (as it is in, say, the battle scenes of The Desert Fox [1951]), nor through well-timed plot tricks designed to relentlessly complicate who knew what when (as in Memento [2000], for instance), – it is because its language is justified by the subject of the film itself, which, in this case, is memory broadly speaking.

The children’s memories of the father structure the film and provide it a logic [above], and it is the father’s recollected brutality and callous love that keeps the memories in abundant supply. Torn, then, between nostalgia and trauma, the film belongs to an an incessant displacement: as soon as a memory is summoned, it must be turned away for another, lest its horror overwhelm. No scene conveys this tortured figuration more succinctly than that of the air raid. Angry out of worry that they’re late in reaching the bunker, the father slaps the eldest of the bunch, then tells her to sing. For Davies, what allows, or makes endurable, the convolution of love and violence is art, or song, so rendered.

Song both binds the film together on a formal level, forcing into succession asynchronous times, and offers the children means for a pleasant, psychological distraction from the conditions of their lives. It would be tactless, however, to call this distraction an escape, if only for the reason that the songs themselves, in their subject matter and oftentimes-melancholic delivery, repeat or return to the trauma they otherwise appear to disavow. Their love of song is perhaps then less a means of escape than of mythology. Interrupted by a song, whole scenes come to a stop, and a welcome lethe descends upon the characters: one must sing about the war to forget it just as they remember their father to forget his brutality.

Though it is true that the disavowal of the father is never complete – in the last scene, the son is shown weeping on his wedding day (although this time, importantly, no memory accompanies the recollection) – the figuration of love and violence he enacts retreats into new, less conspicuous forms: as a cruel oedipal fate, he reappears in the daughter’s husband [below], only with this repetition she finds herself unable to finish singing. We are left, then, with the impression that the whole story will begin again, through a new generation, but that song may not be able to soothe the mind the way it used to.

Like the thousands of nymphs and demi-gods that peppered the landscapes of antiquity, each with their own affectations, stories, and symbols, the TV shows that populate our cities with a different kind of legend constitute a pantheon of their own — one that’s proving to be as extensive, interwoven, and diverse as the myths of old. That we claim to have no place for magic in our realism is, perhaps, just one of the lies we tell our selves to make possible the pervasive presence of our own living mythology.

NYC Sitcom Map

USA Sitcom Map

UK TV & Radio Map

Ever since Ken Hudson Campbell, playing a jaded but well-meaning Santa (--in his first role, it turns out), put out his butt and pulled up his beard to accommodate one last request (in Home Alone of course), I, and perhaps every adult American my age, have been uniquely attuned to Hollywood’s penchant for ironizing — prematurely, some would say — the myths and fairy tales that would otherwise populate our youth. Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin) himself seems designed to embody this perplexing contradiction. An immature, rascally troublemaker, on the one hand, and a grown-up-too-fast adult on the other, he brings to life, as a character and as a concept, a happy, if impossible, reconciliation of two stages of life collapsed into one.

Though this kind of character probably isn’t quite as new as we think it is, its enduring popularity signals a uniquely post-modern turn in its development. Today’s family film and the recent string of Disney animations all seem to make concerted use of this formula. Just think of the ‘family’ Santa film genre. Nearly every one that’s come out in the last thirty years — Santa Claus (1985), the The Santa Clause trilogy (1994, 2002, 2006), Fred Claus (2007) — is built around some ironic, disenchanting reinterpretation that ends, sure enough, with a sentimental attempt at recuperation. But why, we should ask, is it so important for children to view Santa through a specifically bureaucratic, legal, or corporate lens? Is it enough to say that the Santa myth has merely been ‘reimagined’ or ‘adapted’ to modern sensibilities?

We do, I think, live in an age of snark, as David Denby put its. His May 2007 review of Shrek the Third is in this regard illustrative.

But there’s a mystery here. Did the girl’s parents read to her from the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen? Has she seen “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” or any of the other drippy-beautiful Disney animated features, with their butterflies and wondrous glades and shimmering harp glissandos? DreamWorks must assume that she has, and has no tender feelings for them, because the “Shrek” movies are filled with parodies of the old, honeyed Disney style. The parents may get more of the jokes than the children do, but the kids are being fed non-stop satirical hobbledehoydom, in which past and present, Gothic dungeons and Valley Girl talk, are all jumbled together. The “Shrek” phenomenon is one of those seeming oddities in our culture—children being entertained with derision before they’ve been ravished by awe. Maybe seven isn’t too early for irony after all. “Shrek” is postmodernism for towheads, pastiche for the potty-trained.

Does our culture, as a general rule, expose children to the parody before exposing them to the object parodied? And if so, why? Do the writers even realize that the children aren’t actually seeing Santa as ironically translated into a legal-bureaucratic milieu but only Santa-as-bureaucrat (with no prior model to deviate from, ironically)? Or is this no different from how it’s always been done — i.e. every new version of an old myth can only appear ironic? After all, isn’t this just what they said about Disney’s Pinocchio, vis-a-vis the darker, less toothless short story on which it’s based?

Every Valentine’s Day, it seems, we are subjected to the same old top ten lists and gushing silver screen memorials to the greatest, most memorable kisses to light up the screen. Casablanca, Gone with the Wind, Titanic, and now Spiderman and Brokeback Mountain are the familiar finalists — but none, I think, compare to that of The Pirate (1948), a Vincente Minelli musical starring Judy Garland as the soon to be unhappily married-off Manuela and Gene Kelly as the “amazing,” womanizing Serafin, a traveling magician and performer, who falls for her.

The Pirate, as anyone can plainly see, just might be one of the most erotic, playful films to come out of post-Code Hollywood. The “Niña” number [above], which is basically a seven-minute long thinly-disguised orgy, ends with Gene Kelly pole-dancing on a stage before a crowd of entranced, eager women. Sure, there are some clear ‘ideological’ problems with the scene — the women are, after all, rendered indistinguishable by Serafin’s womanizing song — but then again, it’s precisely this attitude that’s renounced when he meets the incomparable Manuela.

Now, without going too much into the film — a discussion of its premise, which occurs too far into the movie to reveal, would spoil its effect — I’ll just turn it over to the clips below, the first of which features (beginning at about 3:30), as mentioned, a kiss that’s remarkable not for its “steaminess” or “passion” or rain-soaked, forbidden transactions in a field — it has none of those things – but rather for its ingenious inclusion in the choreography of the number in which it occurs. It is, to be sure, more abstract and technical than loving and emotional, the opposite of what we have to come expect from a cinematic kiss. Instead of signifying ‘two souls enjoined’, it makes of the kiss a capricious, elaborate, and decidedly casual instrument for still other pleasures — the pleasures of the magician, of the trick, of a kind of spontaneous, creative virtuosity that cannot help but turn the world, body included, into its playground. And this, of course, is the heart and soul of the musical.

I have also included a second clip, the “Pirate Ballet” [below], a sequence just as transgressive and erotic in expression. Beginning with a sort of S&M whip fantasy, as registered in Manuela’s voyeuristic glances (–she’s framed by half-closed shutters, and her wedding veil), it shifts abruptly to her identification with a sitting mule around which Serafin circles seductively (which in turn echoes an earlier scene where he circles her, much to her discomfort). It then fades into her own private fantasy, which features, rather forwardly, Serafin in a thinly-clad Peter Pan-ish pirate suit, battling soldiers with gusto in the most apolcalyptic of settings. Large, jagged ominous shadows reminiscent of the German Expressionist vein of noir, or the bold Soviet silhouettes of iron men, fill the screen, with orgasmic explosions billowing up from below as Serafin, now up on the crow’s nest of a ship, drops torches below. More dramatically still, in the final moments he slides down a zipline with exuberant speed and all in the same motion lands, jogs, and seizes the treasure from two treacherous pirates (–who upon fleeing he murderously shoots in the back). Then, the camera pulling back, we see him approach and take with force — or rape, it would seem — a ‘reluctant maiden’ whose face we never see, but who for all intents and purposes is none other than Manuela, to whom the camera then returns, ending the fantasy (a rape fantasy).

They just don’t make ‘em like they used to.

But in what way, exactly, are Kutiman’s works mashups? The prevailing theories — Vague Terrain, Eduardo Navas, Remix Theory, the whole remix/copyleft movement — tend to conceive of the mashup as 1) depending on the audience’s recognition of the samples, and/or 2) interacting, on a legal level, with the copyright laws governing sampling; but Kutiman’s work does none of that. The samples are ‘found‘ fragments, a different status entirely, and the audience is in no way expected to recognize the source, or the ‘trace’, as it is frequently described. So how, then, are we to describe the effects, and beauty, of, say,”I’m New” [embedded below]?

Putting the dominant remix theory in perspective, Kutiman’s ThruYOU album (of which “I’m New” is the third track) shows just how defined by ‘referentiality’ the former has become — to the point where mashed-up texts that do not explicitly refer to, or ‘cite’, other, already known works are discounted from consideration. “I’m New” shows this plainly. The video is a mashup, but without intelligible outside reference. There are credits, yes, but the work is composed from found YouTube videos – which is why copyright considerations, and their associated sampling strategies, are for the most part extraneous to his work.

This isn’t to say that copyright issues aren’t somehow touched-upon in Kutiman’s work. They are, but in a different sense altogether from classic remix works, the most famous being Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album (which mashes Jay-Z’s The Black Album with unauthorized samples from The Beatles’ LP The White Album). Kutiman, however, strategically renders the politics of sampling moot by using authorized, found samples, which involves copyright only to the extent of neutralizing its application. The same could be said for the question of ’sample recognition’. The samples are recognizable, but in a different sense than customary. As the ‘album sleeve’ puts it, “what you see is what you hear”. Since the video sources of the remixed sounds are shown throughout, mostly in accompaniment to what is heard, recognition is maximized, though the form of intertextuality produced hardly participates in the sort of closed economy of texts that the prevailing remix theories favor.

In fact, it is from this closed textual economy, where remixes are expected to refer to and modify other well-known texts, that Kutiman liberates the mashup. Which is also why détournement, the Situationist term for the artistic, politicized reuse of popular, well-known media documents (and the term Kishik uses to introduce Kutiman’s works), is exactly what Kutiman’s work is not. There is nothing recognizable, mainstream, or parodied in Kutiman’s work or method. The sources are not used to be turned against themselves, ironically or politically. He is only interested in the aesthetic effects and possibilities of the sources, which are, moreover, decidedly folk or amateur in nature. If anything, Kutiman subjects the concept of détournement to its own law of disruption, freeing the technique of appropriation and citation from the superficial conception of subversion that has come to restrict it.

Finally, where the dominant theories focus on the mashup’s mashing-up of texts, Kutiman’s work mashes-up much more than texts. Wildly diverse traditions, aesthetics, performers, and settings — in short, whole milieux — form a cultural smorgasbord that seems to take us on a tour of the nation and of music, and all through a decidedly folk, populist (rather than popular) sensibility. Brilliant musical moments are discovered and extracted from easily overlooked, mundane sources. In place of the institution and the ‘text’, thus appear ‘the people’ and their private, unassuming talents: high school bands, recording sessions, instructional videos, private performances, industrial videos, webcam solos, and amateur rap videos all make an appearance. The album cover even recommends that you “Check out the credits for each video — you might find yourself …” And it’s this kind of endearing pulp folkism that, I think, truly recovers Benjamin’s revolutionary philosophy of montage and citation, which the dominant theories have unfortunately disposed of in twisting his words to their purposes. For these reasons, amongst others, we can also, I think, safely call Kutiman a technical master and a virtuoso, a term that today, for reasons still unclear, seems very much in search of an author.