The Trotsky

There is an unbearable lightness about the post-Hughesian teen movie, wherein all actions are of little consequence, all embarrassment is ephemeral, and all angst finds an outlet in play. Never mind the movies, this is the preponderant message of high school in general; that this too shall pass, as the sheer pointlessness of a whole phase of one's life is explained away with veiled threats of a “real world,” waiting in the wings to surprise the insolent and unsuspecting. High school, at least at the narrow end of the funnel, is very much directed at the creation of an all-penetrating sense of impotency in the student, while educating said subject by a series of creative not-quite anachronisms, which feel like reality, but are statedly unreal.

On a purely conceptual level, The Trotsky would seem to address itself to these familiar conditions. The film, after all, centers on a teenage revolutionary who, believing that he is the reincarnation of a certain Bolshevik revolutionary, attempts to unionize his high school. Thankfully, the deceptively straight-forward comedy takes itself just seriously enough to do justice to its premise; that is, justice. More than a clever riff on the theme of influence or a tribute to teenage precocity, the film is bold enough to take its own conceit at face value, and pauses for nary a second to rebuke its (delusional?) hero's claim to greatness, even endorsing a deeply “inappropriate” cross-generational relationship which, again, does nothing whatsoever to dispel the protagonist's sense of Vanguardist vocation. It is frankly exhilarating that a film boasting all the hallmarks of the “teen” genre, to the number of a loving tribute, would advance the usual, liberal theme of “finding oneself” in so deeply ironic a fashion. After all, its highly individual protagonist finds himself only through the wholesale adoption of another identity, one deeply incongruous with his surroundings, and solidarity with his peers.

The Trotsky uses the unlikely vehicle of its genre (at which, point for point, it excels) to deliver a deeply unfashionable and moving message, and in its very premise speaks symbolically to a powerful truism; that, amid oppressive circumstances, to behave literally can be deeply ironic. As a symbol of eternal recurrence, Trotsky's young avatar is imbued with a sense of living history, one which the high school as a liberal institution disavows, and consequently recognizes in himself an agency which it cannot accommodate, and actively discourages. His character would seem to be addressed to the condition that, in most suburban high schools, delusion and rebellion are virtually synonymous terms, and therein lies the movie's brilliance.

However, as is the case with all good propaganda, you won't have to think too hard in order to enjoy The Trotsky's prevailing mood of righteous indignation and rebelliousness; but if you do, you'll be rewarded. It's one of the very few teen movies of recent years that aren't hypocritical in this sense.

Sweet Little Lies

To further aggrieve the would-be author, I report that as of this month, Lauren Conrad of The Hills is a not-once-but-twice published novelist, having released the follow-up to her bestseller L.A. Candy, entitled Sweet Little Lies. As a suddenly prolific cipher, Conrad speaks from her own experience acting on a fully scripted “reality” TV show, the guilelessness of which brings to mind Patrick Stewart's pitch on Extras: that in his screenplay, his character has the powers of Professor Xavier from the X-Men, only “for real.” To take up the role of author after reciting years of script under the auspices of improvisation constitutes a fascinating turn.

Here I demonstrate a discussion that could occur were one actually to read these books. By way of summary, the nineteen-year-old protaganist of L.A. Candy can't believe her luck when she and her best friend are recruited to star in what is described as a “reality version of Sex and the City.” In this enthralling “fictionalized” (read: written) account of art imitating life imitating art imitating life, Jane and Scarlett find themselves inhabiting a high-gloss world where everything is not as it seems, or whatever. One couldn't be blamed for thinking that this is as much as should be said on the subject. But only one chapter into the book, the reader encounters the following lines:

"Scarlett poured a cup of coffee, black, into her favorite mug, which said: COGITO, ERGO SUM, her favorite saying by her favorite philosopher, Rene Descartes. It was Latin for 'I think, therefore I am,' but she liked to tell anyone who bothered to ask that it was Swahili for 'I'm shallow, but you're ugly ...'"

We can tell that she means business by the mention that this saying is her “favorite.” If this quotation is horribly miscast here, as a citation of Scarlett's rich inner life in contrast to the vapidity of her surroundings, we can still examine it seriously. In a novel of mirrored surfaces, this assertion of interiority, which has been cited as a solipsism elsewhere, may even provide an interesting foil to the text, which is itself a foil to the author's onscreen persona, the opacity of which allows us to start in on Scarlett's favorite (sic) philosopher.

Satire aside, the reality of reality TV is so shaky that it's conceit can only be dismissed entirely, or elicit doubts that shouldn't stop at the program. After all, one has grown accustomed not only to the conventions of narrative television, such as foreshadowing or the MacGuffin, but also to the disperse innocence of most of the encounters comprising one's day; hence it is already understandable how the cast of a reality show could be distrusted as sinister automata even by a participant, willingly thrust into this arrangement. Unlike our neighbours, whose motivations we can mentalize, one's fellow cast members are instated as part of an invisible plot. And addled with the attendant anxieties of frantic, improvised performance, the individual could not be blamed for feeling that empathy is not so helpful an instinct in this place. “I'm shallow,” one can imagine saying to a thwarted automaton agent, “but you're ugly.”

The inscrutable or machinic Other smacks of Cartesian fallacy. But the same paradigm affords us the intellection to understand the body and ascribe motivation to it. Lauren Conrad is in no position to explore this dichotomy, but in her latest offering, she may come close enough to justify a look. Sweet Little Lies picks up where L.A. Candy left off, following the disappointingly unsordid escapades of Jane and Scarlett in Hollywood. Only this time, Jane must contend with the menace of the parapazzi, who, having obtained racy photos of her, are eagerly brewing a tabloid scandal. There is a tantalizing contradiction here.

In the world of L.A. Candy, as well as in our own, the long-standing dichotomy of the Public versus the Private has broken down, and the distinction has ceased to be of any practical use to one who would assert their right to the latter. In Jane's meta-reality, she is a publicly traded property – for that matter, so is Ms. Conrad. It seems contradictory for Jane to insist that at the moment of capture, she was being photographed as a private person. In an illiterate world, one wonders if the trust we place in such images wasn't best described by Guy Debord in the second volume of his Panegyric: “An image that has not been deliberately separated from its meaning adds great precision and certainty to knowledge.” The candid or clandestine image is assumed for being so to match the surface of reality. When a star of reality TV appears in the tabloids, it is tantamount to an accusation of fraud. And by the nature of their world, these headlines function as a prophecy.

Tabloids predict the future, not only because people are inexorably drawn toward the naming of events, nor because our credulous reality is mediated by the same screen that proffers entertainment, hence promoting the forged or merely inopportune photograph on the same level as any other supposedly fidelitous act of witness. What they report is inescapable prophecy because, should the whole world have the wrong idea of you, what does it matter if you disagree? The vulnerability of the celebrity is descriptive of our own standing as individuals in an age of mind-altering social media. In Sweet Little Lies, Jane is forced to see herself as the discomfiting Other to which all external appearances in her world are reduced.

Presently, we may be witnessing the final technologically-induced decay of Cartesian mind-body dualism; although effectively rebutted by certain advances in neuroscience, this fallacy, fervently professed by most of the population up to the minute of our present re-wiring, has nonetheless provided a site for fruitful discussion of individual sovereignty and rights, as well as occasioned abuses and denial of the same. In Lauren Conrad's world of appearances, its most familiar maxim could provide a framework for the same.

Cogito, Ergo Sum: to the public figure, surrounded by automata and bounded by inscrutable external reality, any assertion of individuality becomes analogous to such an assertion of interiority – an interiority that Descartes could assume to exist according to the principles of a God-created world. In the absence of such a world, any insistence on a private or even personal self is only isolating, and not a tool for outreach. To think is to be alienated. Hence one can be oneself only in a state of isolation – a condition that mega-celebrities have grappled with, magnificently and tragically, this entire century.

In such a world, the occupants of which are resistant to any attempt at the aforementioned mentalization, Scarlett's noble assertion of self-knowledge finally becomes the fatal solipsism it is so often mistaken for. For all of the attendant complications of her lifestyle, there is a terrible and beguiling simplicity at its core. And as Nicole Richie so eloquently puts it in the introduction to her novel, The Truth About Diamonds, “... in reality reality, life is anything but simple.”

An Introduction

The challenge is to generate content more interesting than the background noise – which is especially difficult online. So all material herein will boast a symbiotic relationship with the pap culture.

The subjects of these articles are old world celebrities – individuals imbued with special meaning by the people whom they serve, historically regarded with veneration by the common and revulsion by the cultivated; an outdated custom that is likely to become a thing of the past as the pop culture of today further explodes into a billion little self-employed pieces. No longer will less than two dozen pretty people monopolize our envy for a decade at a time. Gradually, we are revoking our promise of attention. But for the time being, we find ourselves with a caged animal at our disposal.

The idea of using unimportant people to discuss big ideas embodies the grand design of our supposed future. For those less inclined toward that future, let it function as a commentary on the structure of all criticism. If the reign of the charismatic figure of genius is truly coming to a close, then what we are seeing is a final, glossy flailing of toned limbs soon headed for a psychic scrapheap. (One thinks of Wikipedia ...) Perhaps certain of those specimens can teach us how not to behave as each of us receives our impending close-up. On a Google Earth, populated by a self-employed paparazzi, everyone's fate will be visibility. And one might as well say it; the last generation of stars produced by the top-heavy Celebrity-Industrial Complex will have taught entire graduating classes everything they know.

Paradoxically, it is often the most trifling and banal events which demand the instantaneous glut of commentary that the Internet provides; words on events that ought to blow over in a week can't flounder in submission piles. Nor do the painfully protracted foreign intrigues of the parent-world much hold the interest of the present generation. They belong to ancient history – a dubious prospect already – and can't be dinted by ironic verve, so they are unpopular subjects for discussion, except among dangerously wilful people who watched too many James Bond movies as teenagers. Consequently, the most insipid incidents are taken out of context and enshrined digitally in the archive, imperishable in all of their humiliating glory, as though they were what really mattered in our lives. This is inherent in the means by which our gossip is disseminated. For this reason, this share of webspace comes with a promise of a date of expiry, to be determined by its uselessness.

Above all else, the meaning of a culture is in what it chooses to remember. Please let this petty nonsense not marr your nostalgia for the flesh.

Battle Studies

As guitar-slinging pop icon John Mayer hurriedly crams all of his limbs into his mouth at once this week, virally infecting blogs around the world, the easily-distracted, dangerously idle and morally indignant ask generously of themselves, Can we understand his mistake? Can we see it as a function of his profession and his bad-boy image, or only of his privilege and ignorance?

As a pop singer, it is possible to see him as the latest victim of his industry; a member of a guild that peddles a sucralose-sweet simulacrum of sex to a predominantly adolescent or chaste demographic. As the singer inhabits this hyper-sexualized realm of non-experience alongside the fan, they too must mistake its frustrated symbolism for a kind of exchange. The singer is part of an elaborate, euphemistic game that adolescents are hardly aware that they are playing. The supervisory figure of the singer, however puerile their adopted symbolism may be, is trusted to know better, and John Mayer's public disgrace is one example of what happens when they do not.

Mayer thinks that he has actually been singing about sex this entire time. So when he opens up his mouth to speak candidly (which means naughtily) about the same, he is astonished to discover that this has not once been the case. Sexual language is often an elaborately coded litany of taboos, and it must above all else have the character of contraband – that is, it must be comprised of words that one has in their possession illicitly. There are fewer of these available to the would-be shit-talking libertine than ever these days, so certain choice words have been imported from the dark (and sadly, ongoing) parallel histories of racial and sexual persecution.

Similarly, his use of the word “nigger” is telling; as an interpreter of the blues, he discovers that he has not in fact sung the blues proper at any point in his career. But it can't be that simple. Decades into a campaign of formal reclamation, the word “nigger” comprises a very different gesture in the parlance of today's pop culture than at any prior point in American history. It makes no sense whatsoever to proceed as though white America, John Mayer included, can't have noticed this shift. The above may, however, have misinterpreted its significance.

As contemporary rap music parodies its own guiding value, namely authenticity, it functions as does the aforementioned parody of sex presented by pop culture – as a deterrent and a substitute, an initiation into and a judgment on a way of life. It's easy to say that it glamourizes its subject matter, but purely aesthetic violence has a correspondingly diminished visceral impact. It becomes a game, and a game which carries over into white and suburban life, even as its elements are organized in emulation of a world elsewhere. Hence in the game are rules which may seem arbitrary, but are elsewhere non-negotiable. In its originary context, which is the complex fraternity of certain African American males, the epithet of “nigger” may have meant one thing, but in the popular culture, it is, even when used to denote a similiar sense of fraternity, essentially a sex word. It titillates because it smacks of degradation, even though its proper use is only where one feels completely safe in deploying it. As certain commentators wonder why so little fuss has been made over his use of the word “fag” elsewhere in the same article, one might suggest that it is not because it displays a more socially acceptable prejudice (which it does), but that it is a less transgressive fetish word.

Perhaps here John Mayer can be found seeking erotic thrills, again through the play of euphemism, only this time without realizing it at all. But where better for an overeager sensualist to show his tail than in the pages of Playboy? And how different to be caught with your pants down on every computer screen in the country than it is just to sing about it.