Scrawled in Wax

Does R. Kelly’s Opus Herald the End of Postmodernism and the Death of Irony?

In Planet Simpson, Chris Turner’s smart, fawning dedication to The Simpsons, he rather grandly suggests that, despite two or three decades of ironic detachment, “the future belongs to the sincere”. The self-reflexive irony so characterised by The Simpsons, Taylor argues, is merely a cultural transition period, a stopgap solution to the postmodern re-understanding of the world. Postmodernism and its pastiche and irony - these are merely placeholders while we figure out what the hell to do when meaning and morality are constantly in flux.

The postmodern destabilisation of old hierarchies and axioms has had broad-ranging, diverse effects, some positive (e.g. feminism, civil rights etc.), some less so (e.g. The Simple Life). Indeed, there is not enough time or space on this or any blog to document the swath that postmodernism has cut through culture. But the effect of the postmodern on art specifically might be summed up by saying that it challenged how artists approached representation i.e. what it is that art purports to actually show. While for centuries it was verisimilitude that was key - that art should approximate real life as much as possible, whether in painting, drama or film - postmodernism suggested that the only option left was to lay bare the art-ifice of art, to focus all the attention on the prefix “re-” at the beginning of ‘re-presentation’. To wit, the audience have to be in a double space, aware that that a picture of a pipe is not a pipe while they simultaneously enjoy how realistic the picture seems.

In the later half of the twentieth century, artists worked to reveal artifice much more directly through the aggressive use of irony, a wink at the viewer that detached him or her from the presented ‘reality’. Ironic representation might be exemplified by Charlie Kaufman’s films, particularly Adaptation, as its focus on the writer forces the viewer into the the ‘double view’ that irony demands - the film moves its plot forward by forcing the viewer to engage the constructedness and cliché of the plot while enjoying the very same patterns. This wryness, this wink and nod to the viewer is the contemporary standard - everything from music videos to film to blogs revel in this knowingness, this subtle admission that this all really just a game of sorts in which the rulebook has been thrown out of the window. Far from being an occasional technique, irony is the current model for representation and, according to many, is the only sensible approach to a world rightly wary of sincerity.

Now, if you have been dedicated enough to read this far - you might well be asking: what the hell does this have to do with R. Kelly? Well, I’m about to suggest that if ironic detachment has been our culture’s artistic M.O. for some time now, then Kelly’s recent opus Trapped in the Closet might signal some sort of shift - that the age of irony is ending and is being replaced by an even drier, more layered and inscrutable one. Now if you’ve been living under the proverbial rock, Trapped in the Closet is a 22-part musical narrative following the trials of protagonist Sylvester through a maze of romantic attachments. And watching Kelly’s ‘hiphopera’, it is definitely inscrutable that first comes to mind - it is an entirely discombobulating experience, one in which you are completely unsure where you the viewer are supposed to be. Are you supposed to be laughing? Moved? Caught up in the plot, but ironically detached? Tense? Analytical? Or just enjoying yourself? Yes - all of those.

When you first enter Trapped your reaction depends largely on your perception of R. Kelly. If you, like me, are generally convinced that he’s a bit of a musically gifted idiot, then chances are your impressions won’t be good. You feel as if you have stumbled onto a bad high-school production. But somewhere around Chapter 9 or 10 - where Kelly, putting on a ridiculous Southern accent while dealing with a little-person hiding under a sink in yet another layer of infidelity in the tale - you start to get the sense that maybe things aren’t quite as Jerry-Springer-stupid as they seem. What caught my eye particularly was that the layering and (mis)use of so many cliches, stereotypes, contrivances and deux ex machina twists is so prevalent that it becomes impossible to take the story at face value. But unlike so many other ironic, postmodern clips before it, Trapped is not attempting to undercut its own sense of representation. The in-joke here is not in the disjunct between the real and the fictive, the wink coming at the point you realise you’re having fun watching a silly story. It is not revelling in the ironic fragmentation of narrative or identity. It is not saying “these stereotypes” - which can often feel markedly sexist and homophobic - “are just representative shortcuts because real life is so much more complicated” as a postmodern piece of film might do.

Instead, its stone-face, dialogic implementation of identity and cliche is simply saying ‘this is all there is‘. There is no wink, no knowing nod; there is only a fragmented narrative that has given up on the notion of representation. Irony, despite what smart-ass grad students will tell you, demands that you still believe in something beyond irony, some kernel of truth at the root of it all that allows you to be comfortable in your seat of detachment. Trapped’s post-ironic approach has thrown it all to the wind. There is only a sea of perspectives and no stable point from which to judge them. When Kelly’s character approves of a lesbian relationship by saying “you’re just lucky I like that shit”, it is utterly devoid of irony. The point, however, isn’t that Kelly is a homophobe - it’s that it doesn’t matter whether or not he is, because the political certaintity from which to condemn him has evaporated. Rather than laying bare the artifice or art, Trapped lays bare the artifice of everything (oh, and in case you’re wondering, I do not think that’s a good thing…). People wondering about the potential for postmodern politics need only use Trapped as a a guide; politics is only performance because the distinctions between narrative and reality, inner and outer, surface and substance, have vanished.

This wasn’t, of course, the only path. Some decided that the fitting reaction to all this irony was to return to the straightforward sincerity of the past: from Dogme 95 to Grunge to realist postcolonial fiction, people furiously attempted to backpedal and say “no, we didn’t really mean it - we still believe in things”. But Kelly’s approach - which I still condescendingly believe is inadvertent - is actually significantly more sincere. Instead of either attempting to return to the fixity and hierarchical of the pre-modernist or wallow in the potential nihilism of the postmodern, Trapped is - if you’ll excuse the obtuse academic language - an engagement with the fundamentally narratological nature of all mediated reality. To wit, representation isn’t a story about reality, but a story about the stories that make up reality. Reality is simply pushed out of the equation here; irony still clings hopefully to it. Yes, that’s a central ‘tenet’ of postmodernism, but the response has always been to try and make the reader/viewer aware of the breakdown of the master narratives, as if the position of reader was somehow untouched by it all. Trapped throws you into the mess of meaning’s diaphanous multiplicity and gives you nothing with which to save yourself.

And if Trapped were merely nonsensical or badly made, it wouldn’t resonate at all - it would simply be DOA, a laughable joke, entertaining but ultimately pointless. But it does resonate. Something about the constant shift in modes of representation, the seamless, unabashed movement between verisimilitude, comedy, farce and tension just works. Some ineffable quality just feels ‘new’, somehow so much more sensible in its decision to abandon what’s sensible.

Now it’s very possible that I am just missing things - that I do not know enough to position Trapped as “a product of late-stage capitalist excess” and that it merely repeats the usual postmodern tropes. Still - maybe it’s just Rex’s influence, but I can’t get over the sense that there’s something very different about how this works. And hey, maybe Sorgatz is right - in five years from now, we’ll see an academic book published on Trapped.

For the time being though, everything you want to know about the contemporary state of discourse, politics, identity and narrative is bound up in a catchy, catchy tune by R. Kelly (would you ever have believed you’d hear that?!). While it’s plastered all over YouTube, the intros by Kelly at IFC.com reveal far more than they’re supposed to and are great to watch. If you’ve struggled all the way through, hit the comments to let me know what you think.