Bombs Over District 9
by Nav
For more reasons than I can count, I’m tired of hating things. I’m tired of saying to myself “you shouldn’t enjoy this film – it’s racist”. I can feel myself becoming an anachronism – out of time, in more ways than one.
As I sat there, reading about “Bombs over Baghdad”, something tweaked inside my brain.
I had seen District 9 a couple of nights before, and the film had stymied me. I could see how interesting the premise was, how well it was done. But I was troubled. The representation of both the black and alien characters as savages irked me, as if the film were setting up stereotypes only to not knock them down. It reminded me of the Star Trek model of tolerance: when we find that rare alien who expresses the same liberal values, then we finally see our common ground. Maybe there’s hope for them yet. If I were feeling even more cynical than usual, Christopher would be Barack Obama.
The cop-out, liberal-humanist ending – look, deep down, those who are different are actually just like us – was played out; it’s been repeated thousands of times in seemingly every film ever made and the fact that this film also went there didn’t just bore me – it made me angry.
These were the things that went through my mind.
It was art that made me who I am. When art expresses beliefs that aren’t mine, become potential fodder for ideologies I oppose, I cringe. I switch the screen off. I move away. I decry, I spit and foam at the mouth. “These things are not me!”, I exclaim. These things are not me.
The overwhelmingly positive web-geek reaction left me puzzled, as if suddenly I were the only one in a room full of sophisticates chewing with his mouth open.
There was one fascinating line in District 9. It was when Wikus says something about ‘the prawns having no sense of property or ownership’. That was difference. That was the insurmountable barrier. That was interesting.
Having spent years steeped in contemporary cultural theory, this was the moment I was expecting big things. Something new. Not the same old story.
But was it?
“OutKast’s B.O.B. is the best because it says YES to everything we are and compresses it to pure energy.” -Tim
“B.O.B” works because it just fucking goes. It’s like someone put a brick on the accelerator at the beginning of the song, and you just can’t help but be carried along with it, in its energy, in its relentless, restless drive. Like the decade it heralded, the song is insatiable in its push to move on to the next moment.
Dance. Drink. Fuck. Lick. Smoke. Abandon yourself. Enjoy.
It was impossible not to be inundated with a thousand opinions of District 9 that were the opposite of mine. They weren’t just babble. They were smart, well-argued perspectives, ones that I could see myself agreeing with someday. Something was different here. Something about art had changed.
Art is not diminished. But it is now something else.
The threat and the danger of art was always its capacity to create subjects in its image. Sexist art begat sexist people. Racist art encouraged racism. This is why we had to force criticism into a box. We had to make it fit to make the world a better a place.
Art made people who they were. This is now a lie.
I’m trying to express something I don’t have words for. This reassures me. I’m trying to express something that exists in the future. Let’s create a picture.
You stand at the edge of the ocean. The tide washes over you. It never goes in. It just comes against you, over and over and over again. It is endless.
You used to get breaks. Breathers. Where you could collect yourself and thoughts and sink your feet a little into the sand. “There,” you thought. Some respite. Ah. This is who I am.
No longer.
The rushing torrent never ends.
“B.O.B” says yes to everything because it can.
Because the tide is always coming in and you are a rock, stable and worn, fixed and malleable.
“District 9 is a racist film!” you say. But it doesn’t matter. Because minds have been made up before. They are also rocks in the tide. And the stream rushes past them too.
Art is not diminished. But it is something else.
The virtual is the canvas for your soul. While your insides were always outside, now the metaphor means something else.
The screen is blank and you are the projector.
And art is not diminished. But it is something else.
Well, there’s a sense in which – the message of “B.O.B.” is not “enjoy.” It’s “this is not all there is.” — or since Andre says it’s better, “believe there’s always MORE.”
Which can be a wry observation – the weatherman tells us it won’t rain, and here we sit, soaked in our convertibles – I mean, it’s a joke out of LA Story, but it’s also a doubt about certainties. Things are worse than ever. No, actually, they were as bad before. Stay street – but before you re up, get a laptop. Make a fat diamond out of dusty coals. Things are not all they seem to be. There is no net, but you will land the somersault anyways. It is a refusal to deny possibilities, some of them utopian, in that weird limited sense of a necessity pushing you forward to the impossible. (I think this is Zizek, but it’s also just OutKast. Stankonia OutKast anyways.)
Relative to um, something else you said; it’s seems like what you’re trying to describe is a transformation of the mimetic anxieties associated with art. Back to Plato, at least, the anxiety about art was about finding suitable anchors with which to identify. Identification and anchoring wasn’t really a problem, just that you might, by seeing something bad or dishonorable imitated in a laudatory fashion, be inclined to identify with and imitate it yourself. Oedipus is a hero despite his mistakes and bad acts, and this is a moral problem for art to solve because it is potentially a moral problem for the publics.
Now, or beginning at a time t>0 to be named later, identification/recognition isn’t precisely the problem. In fact, if there’s ugliness or dishonor or brutality or base desire, we want it there. We want it for a variety of reasons, some political, some aesthetic, some pseudo-moral, some genuinely moral, and some, just for purely kinetic reasons: it’s fun, it makes you jump, it spooks you, it shows you for the glands and meat that you are.
But it’s weird, because wait – is that what I came for? Is that all there is? And it’s stranger still because of the confluences of taste — that the guys and girls who like the smart books and smart indie rock and smart hip-hop and weird electronica tracks and jokes that you like also kinda like to just get pummeled by robots and aliens, to see their guts spewed out, to see themselves projected and not even recognize that they are the projectors too, and the light and the dust… and what is this for? Not that, you know, My Bloody Valentine and Neuromancer don’t harbor some pretty vicious geek embodiment porn. But wait — is that just all we are, fucking hipster nerds, sentimental ones at that, waiting in line for… what, exactly? What are we waiting for?
1. I want Tim’s re-writing/translation of B.O.B. lyrics on a poster, ON MY WALL.
2. This is a great post.
3. The separation of moral and aesthetic content. Have we lost the ability entirely to call something out on moral grounds? Imagine a New Yorker film reviews that pans a movie by saying: “Do not, under any circumstances, see or support this film. It is evil with a capital E.” Feels almost provincial. Should it? (I’ve certainly seen a lot of movies, esp in the theater, and thought: “Ugh. We’re sitting in a room watching a flickering slaughter. This is weird.”)
Tim, I think you’ve won the contest for best comment on Scrawled in Wax ever.
I’m glad you responded in similar langauge. Clearly, I had no idea what I was talking about, but still felt there was something to express.
What are we waiting for? Well, the next moment.
But you’re quite right: mimetic anxieties. I like that phrase. Something I wrote about a lot here a year or so ago was this: is ‘the virtual space’ coming to perform some of the same social functions as art? If art is the place where we play out our stories, our desires, our fears – the place where we temporarily let ourselves go in order to return to ourselves anew – then it would seem that the web is also fulfilling a similar purpose. The virtual canvas is the new aesthetic. It’s the meta-aesthetic place, the blankness that allows for aestheticisation (I know that word is often used pejoratively, but I don’t mean it that way).
So Robin, this is where your point comes in. Is the shift in ‘post-postmodern art’ not some return to realism but, instead, an odd binary of, on one hand, actual sincerity – here this is my art and in whatever way I mean, it’s real as I can make it – and on the other, a kind of hyper- or meta-irony, an acknowledgement of fictiveness that goes beyond the postmodern wink and nudge into something far more about an almost Dionysian and Bacchanalian abandonment to fiction. District 9 is okay and good because it’s not real while it tries so hard to be.
That’s messy, but what I mean is – if we always looked to art to play out our narratives, what happens when ‘real life online’ starts to be the place where we play things out? Does that open art to be somehow less *responsible* for its political impact but more free to effect change?
But here’s the thing: all I was trying to express was that my reaction to District 9 felt futile and anachronistic, because it was all predicated on the idea that my outrage meant something. Somehow, B.O.B., in its rapid-fire release of politicised words, felt more honest, more real and more now.
Something about the frame has changed. I posted a clip of stand-up a couple of days ago that may have been racist, but I didn’t care. That’s strange, because to this day, I can feel uneasy and anxious if I’m in a room exclusively full of white people. But I want that space to have things that are ‘wrong’ because they’re swirling around anyway.
Alright, clearly I don’t know what I’m trying to say yet. It’s an idea that’s going to have simmer for quite some time. Apologies for the rambling and thanks for the comments.
I’m an okay blogger, a solid teacher, and a good scholar. But I’m a really good commenter.
Just to pull it back to other media – the “Time to Pretend” problem. It’s worth noting that when you look at the post-Gen X music and movies that are really, super-sincere – they’re all fantasies. Wes Anderson, The Decemberists — it’s like we can be sincere and nostalgic about our own imaginations, but we’re totally detached, ironic about the real world. This is in some ways the opposite problem from the Tarantino generation preceding us, or pop art, with their culture mashups. We live in hyper-culture, and we take it seriously – we interface with meatspace, and play out our empty rituals there (voting, commuting to work, taking out the garbage). That’s the affectively dead and disoriented place.
You can push this too far, but even it’s 30/70 now rather than 20/80 twenty years ago, it’s a tilt.
“I dreamed I saw a great wave climbing over green lands and above the hills. I stood upon the brink. It was utterly dark in the abyss before my feet. A light shone behind me but I could not turn. I could only stand there, waiting.”
–Tolkien
I think people have been thinking these sorts of thoughts for a long time, but unfortunately they didn’t have blogs like this to discuss them on.