Category Archives: Contemporary

May 6, 2012 · 1:11 PM

Becoming Complicit: How I Got Sucked into the Disney Racket

About a year ago, I wrote about the reflexive, layered marketing endemic to theme parks. Well last night, I tentatively entered into the “magical” world of the master of all self-promotion: Disney. It was quite the moral struggle, and I’m fairly certain I sold out by going, as will soon be revealed. Consider this post a penance; a form of reparation, inadequate as it may be. Words are cheap, but at least critique offers some substance, however meager.

As I walked with the endless flow of consumers people toward the sounds of the big band, I tried to console myself by saying that I was only entering the periphery of this evil empire, and it was for a swing dance (my rebel base, if you will), and it was free. But alas, I was still complicit in the well oiled money-making machine. As one of my dance partners remarked, we were the entertainment at Downtown Disney that evening. We had played right into the promoters’ nefarious plan: Disney had us working for free to keep the non-dancing crowds there longer. We captured their attention for a few minutes or more with our performance of a bygone era’s social scene, complete with pseudo-costumes. In delaying their journey from one end of the shopping area to another, we helped to break them down so they’d empty their pocket-books at some food stand, overpriced theme restaurant, or over-blown souvenir shop.

The novelty of our dancing to the 1940s music was buttering them up, providing a free service to both the watchers and to Disney by making these consumers think they could afford to spend more at the retail and dining outlets because they’d just experienced a free show. Not that these folks wouldn’t have spent money without us: visitors of Disney come prepared to do so. It’s part of the deal: you know you’re going to drop a couple hundred, especially if you’re there with the kids. But the genius of Disney is that once you’ve done that and you’re inside their cocoon of nonstop entertainment, you feel like you’re getting it all for free.*

Aside from the incessant marketing and consumerism (and the odd sensation of being entertainment in/for a place I object to on principle) the other thing that struck me about the whole experience was the way people dress at the Disney resort. Even on the edges, in this themed outdoor mall, people wore the trappings of the brand. It’s part of the experience of visiting this carefully constructed space: wearing mouse ears on a hat or made out of inflatables, sweatshirts with the Disney name or Mickey’s face on them…the many souvenir outlets make the possibilities of being a walking advertisement endless.

This is all done proudly and arguably to excess. Hats and glasses and clothes and balloons, all can be anchored on one individual! Who dresses like this is “real life”?!! But here, being over-the-top is sanctioned, encouraged. The more branded swag the better! It shows that you are a loyal consumer, a real lover of Disney and its many lands and cartoon inhabitants. And it is understood that this is the way one should be. The little girls wear princess hats and the little boys wear Woody cowboy hats or Indiana Jones fedoras and the grown-ups wear anything and everything with the Disney name on it. And you just know that most of it was purchased here, in the ill-defined confines of this sprawling resort. The hat-wearers may only be here for the day, but the people with the branded clothing are in it for a multi-day Vacation: they are the ones staying in the themed hotels, making a destination out of this glorified retail establishment.

I have no real conclusion. Just a sense of amazement, mild disgust, and guilt at having participated. Because in spite of understanding the mechanics of what was going on and objecting to what dancing there meant, it was still enjoyable. I may not have given them any of my money, but I did (in a sense) give them my labor in return for the pleasure of live music and the space to engage in the best form of exercise ever invented. I didn’t stay away. And that’s why Disney always comes out on top. Damn it.

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*This idea is not mine, but Dan O’Brien’s.

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April 30, 2012 · 9:53 PM

Edible Miscegenation: Food for Thought (groan) on a Recent Ad Campaign

Full disclosure time: I have a nasty note-taking habit, and as a result, the forthcoming book review of Sorry I Pooped in Your Shoe has turned into a bit of a term paper. A term paper that needs some serious work. We’re talking outlines, spreadsheets, coding, lists of themes and tropes, meta-structuring–obscene amounts of (dis)organization, here. And, if history is any indication*, most of this thorough preparation will be ultimately ignored in a sleep-deprived “holy fuck, fuck this fucking shitpile of amassed notes and ragged half-finished paragraphs I’m just gonna write the fucking thing I can’t even gaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhrgh!” moment of desperation.

So stay tuned for that monstrous gem. In the meantime, here are some disorganized and underdeveloped thoughts on a commercial about a new snack food. Fair warning–it’s a messy one:

Mel the Milkbite “has issues.” Yes, yes he does. Milkbite is basically a granola bar, and the advertisers have been tasked with coming up with a clever way to convince American consumers that this particular granola bar is different. It’s what we’ve all been waiting for. It offers hereforeto undiscovered combinations of deliciousness. Their marketing strategy has been to produce a virtual mini-series of these commercials. In each, we are made privy to the fraught inner life of one, Mr. Mel Milkbite, depressed offspring of milk and granola. “Who are you?” he asks his reflection. “I don’t know,” is the whispered reply. This identity crisis seems to stem from his mixed-food lineage.

One commercial in particular seems to play on the idea of a (damaged) mixed-parent child who confronts said parents about their decision to procreate. “You didn’t think, did you?” About how it would affect me, he goes on to say. The idea is that inhabiting an interstitial category makes life hard: one is “unclean” based on normative social structures, matter out-of-place. Mel is a product of miscegenation, and we’re supposed to laugh at this, or at his having “issues” because of it. This is where things get complicated, and I’m not going to pretend that I can tease everything out perfectly. But I do think it’s worth at least trying to unpack what’s going on here.

On a superficial level, it’s pretty dumb that a milk/granola-bar is talking and has an inner life. There’s a type of surreal, absurdist humor in that by itself. But to make the character’s inner life so fraught with the internalization of social stigma is…crazy awful. And in that awfulness, in that banging together of expectations, also comes the humor.

Broadly stated, humor says what cannot be said in serious contexts. It draws its power from placing categories of things together that cannot normally coexist, often exploding them. This is the unexpected aspect of humor–combining those things that are not normally combined (e.g., a granola bar that talks…to a therapist, no less). The other, related aspect, is that one of speaking the unspeakable: drawing attention to what is rendered invisible in daily life. In a way, humor combats erasure and epistemic violence. The ugly side of this is poorly timed and unsympathetic “ironic” humor, to be discussed further on in this “essay.”

To get back to the break-down of the layered humor in the commercials, besides the inherent silliness of a talking snack food is the fact that Mel takes himself very seriously. This is another source of the intended humor of the whole ad campaign: we, the audience, are not supposed to take Mel seriously. We are meant, on some level at least, to dismiss his serious concerns as those of a fake, normally (hopefully!) inanimate character made of food. It’s ridiculousness played as seriousness, which I’m tempted to call satire or irony, but I’m just so confused at this point that I can’t quite suss it out.

The humor of Mel’s milkbite commercials at least partly comes from making fun of the very serious issue of racism and how it plays out in cases where children have parents that society marks as racially different. The commercial serves to reinforce this taboo against miscegenation…or does it question the taboo? I’m not entirely sure if the “humor” in these commercials is combatting or exacerbating the stigma…or denying that the stigma exists all together. But I’m obviously leaning toward the last two.

The commercial takes license to make light of racism because its creators seem to believe that our society is past all that. Look how ridiculous we were to have had anti-miscegenation laws! If those still existed, we’d have a bunch of depressed Mels wandering around, blaming their parents for giving them such a hard life. Boy, I sure am glad we aren’t racist, anymore! In any case, the fact that we identify with Mel and feel sorry for him (do we? or do we think his problem isn’t serious in this day and age? are we just laughing at him?) means that we recognize the taboo being referenced. In encouraging the audience to both understand and then dismiss Mel’s perspective, it at once negates real people’s lived experiences and makes the (faulty) declaration that we are post-racism. But we can’t be post-anything if we still understand the signs of that thing. And anyway, is this laughter at all healing? Because the humor is very dry…almost ironic. And that gets dicey, as I will try to discuss below.

I’d argue that the existence of this campaign and all the cultural baggage it is trading on doesn’t point to a post-racism culture, but rather to one that has a more complicated relationship with its racism. This commercial can only exist in a culture where its producers (in this case, marketers and advertisers) believe that the culture is post-racism. This makes the brand of humor “safe” enough for a mass-media audience. It still messes with expectations, but in a more meta way that comments on a social situation that is assumed to be long past. The producers seem to believe this humorous take on a historical reality–setting it in the present and using a snack food as its face–won’t offend consumers. That it will resonate just enough and in the right ways in order to sell the product. But it’s also arguably a present reality, and even if it weren’t, its “humorous” take on a decidedly un-funny cultural taboo that oppressed real people in real ways is insensitive. (The argument against the insensitivity claim would be something about irony and being post-race and why can’t I just take a joke, which I will touch on later and you can read more about at Jezebel.)

The commercial may trade in deadpan ridiculousness, but it’s still based in something very real. The undercurrent of (anti-)miscegenation is extended to and reintensionalized in this extremely absurd context, rendering it less serious, less worthy of careful consideration. But it is serious. The commercial is playing on the idea that the children of people who aren’t “the same” in one way or another have it harder. That they’re damaged. So, it’s both that this creates issues for the kid, and then creates the stereotype that these “types” of kids have issues, thus making the “project,” if you will, of actually combatting these taboos a bad thing in itself, instead of creating a world where these taboos don’t exist because there are more interstitial people, who then become accepted categories in their own right. (I know that sentence is confusing, but it’s too far gone to help at this point. I don’t even know.) But the point is that making light of the history and ramifications of anti-miscegenation sentiment and policy, “mixed” children of all kinds, and the current (effectively ignored) lived realities of people who inhabit this interstitial social categories is harmful. These commercials operate in a sort of post-racism haze of denial. Anti-miscegenation is over, so it’s okay to joke about it. These commercials try to get us to believe that taking it all seriously would be ridiculous in this day and age–we’d be like Mel.

The thing is, we don’t live in a post-racial world, as Lindy West points out. The “humor” of trying to make it seem like we’re post-race by framing someone’s difficult lived experience as mixed-race individual as funny–implicitly discounting that this experience could be less-than-rosy–falls flat. It makes fun of the individual for having “issues” as a result of their racialized social location; it belittles their own understanding of their particular experience. And that is pretty wrong.

Now, not being what our society would deem a “person of color,” I cannot speak to the lived experience of someone from a mixed-race background. But I don’t imagine it’s always a walk in the park, simply because our society remains socially stratified, and one of the markers that keeps certain populations in disadvantaged socio-economic positions is skin color. Skin color is taken as the definitive sign that signifies one’s race; as if it were a natural thing. As if it weren’t a cultural construct (which it is, and an arbitrary one at that). And in America, we still see people’s skin color. We treat each other in various ways because of this type of discriminatory vision. Now, are mixed-race couples more accepted than they were 50 years ago? Sure…but only in some contexts. Are the children of  mixed-race couples less subject to ridicule? Again, it depends. We can maybe make a sweeping generalization that things are “better,” but it is dangerous to do so. And to base an ad campaign on this very real and personal part of our cultural history (and cultural present) is hugely problematic… and because it’s meant to be funny, it’s quite insulting, as well.

To wrap up before this all gets even more out of hand, let’s get back to the milkbite character himself. Mel, if we are to take his perspective, is the product of an unholy union between milk and granola. The irony, of course, is that plenty of folks enjoy this very combination. The fact that mixing them is “normal” is why milkbite exists as a product in the first place: created to fill a newly discovered [read: invented] niche, marketed as the answer to granola-and-milk-eaters’ as yet unrealized unfulfilled need for a convenient snack that pairs their two favorite things. Milkbite was created because he should have existed all along–so the marketers want us to believe. He’s what’s been missing in this world of fast “health” food.

Is that why we laugh at Mel? Because his underlying “issue” is that he fails to grasp his true role in the world? Bringing us all together in a holy harmony of interstitial bliss? Is milkbite the future? Let’s look to the heated discourse surrounding the controversial ad that South Africa’s Democratic Alliance party put out… They don’t live in the future, and neither do we. In fact, the very existence of this series of commercials implicitly arguing that we do live in the post-race future proves, ironically, that we don’t.

*UPDATE* Balancing Jane has also written about the disturbing nature of this ad campaign and provides a link to sign a petition against it.

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*For example, I once compiled over 200 pages of notes in preparation for a ten page final. Yep. Rifuckingdiculous. It’s kind of a problem.

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April 28, 2012 · 7:02 PM

Freeway Soundwalls as Markers of Affluence

Riding the Metro Goldline along the 210 and 110 freeways of LA, through the many communities it borders and cuts through, it struck me that rich neighborhoods get soundwalls. Poorer neighborhoods get traffic noises. To illustrate this (obvious) point, contrast the route the metro takes through South Pasadena (soundwall! slowing to a crawl!) with that it takes through Highland Park (chain-link fence if you’re lucky!). It is the richer neighborhoods that have the resources to devote to noise complaints. To getting their petitions recognized. These resources can be withheld from the city, the state, by those wealthy citizens if their demands are not met.

To be sure, communities who are not affluent can get soundwalls built, too, given the drive to get organized and a sympathetic power structure. Money is not the only resource–time is another valuable one when it comes to making voices heard. And sense of community ownership, civic pride, etc. But I’d venture that the vast majority of soundwalls are lobbied for by those communities with the financial resources to have leverage against the powers-that-be. Give us that soundwall, or we’re not underwriting anything. You can forget our endorsements during election season. You can kiss our donations goodbye. We want our acoustic insulation, and you’re going to give it to us. We have property values to think about.*

So the noises get shifted to the monetarily voiceless. The disenfranchised without the time or money to devote to standing up for the sanctity of their neighborhoods. And they get even more run down, comparatively, as a result. The gap widens with rows of cinderblock…or lack thereof. The acoustic insulations mirrors the social stratification, the physical isolation of certain classes of citizens from others. From Others.

Who speaks for the poor? And who has the right to?

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*Maybe it has something to do with the ratio of renters to owners.

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April 18, 2012 · 7:01 PM

Performing Togetherness: Sartorial Coordination at School Dances

In an effort to procrastinate on the promised treatment of that dog book, I’ve decided to take a little time to dissect another youthful phenomenon. Today it’s not cheap-ass broken friendship hearts, however. No, this topic is even more worthy of copious eye-rolling and the activation of gag-reflexes. I’m talking about high school students who go to dances together wearing matching outfits.

I’m almost nauseated thinking back on it now–realizing the implications. The market-place/political economy of securing a date for the dance, and being able to identify them as your date with visual cues. Cultural capital made materially concrete through dress. The (gendered?) performance of mutual ownership…turning “relationships” into a parody of themselves. I am ashamed to have actually participated in such displays. (Although I am rather proud for having once done it by wearing a “mens” shirt. Take that, gendered expectations!)

The tradition of dates wearing similarly colored clothing (or a corsage/boutonniere) to dances all seems to boil down to a social performance of togetherness and mutual ownership. Making visually obvious the fact that these two people came to this dance with one another. It “marks” your date as yours. This performance is so that others recognize these two people as being together–if only for the evening. I wonder at what point this matching is for the couple themselves…the chance to recognize themselves in the other and vice versa via the very obvious medium of clothing (a representation or manifestation of their inner emotional connection, if you will)…and at what point it becomes more about the outward appearance of togetherness. My guess is that this phenomenon is heavily weighted toward the latter. It’s mostly about the public’s perception of two people as a couple. The assumption that two people are receiving recognition of their togetherness is made salient in the very performance of this sartorial togetherness. TOGETHERNESS!!! (must. find. synonym.) Ahem.

One aspect of this phenomenon that bears discussion is the fact that all these school-sanctioned social functions are in an effort to play at adulthood. As one of my more arrogant professors smugly loved “revealing” to us, the Prom is in many ways a practice wedding. But these dances-as-social-spaces encourage couples to perform adulthood to a cartoonish degree. What real adult couples make a conscious, agonizing effort to match their wardrobes at social functions? (Irritating ones.) Sometimes this type of couples-dressing is sanctioned, but it’s all about context. Perhaps the most “allowable” social occasion is that of Halloween, but even then adults who match one another can be a bit much. Especially those who are romantically involved. Okay. We get it. You’re together. Enough already. But if we take high school dances as opportunities for young adults to “practice” being actual adults, it seems odd that they perform imagined adulthood to such a hyperbolic degree. Maybe you have to over-do it before you can do it, do it. (Control yourselves.)

The other adult social context in which sartorial coordination is sanctioned, even encouraged, is the wedding. This is the ultimate ritualized performance of couple-dom in our culture, and wedding parties often don similar colors, if not identical outfits. This, it need not be noted, is a special occasion. As is the school dance (albeit a more frequent one). If school dances are a shadow of the ultimate couple ritual, then matching the colors in one’s outfits makes a certain amount of sense. This is, after all, playing at being recognized as being together: practice for the ritual where you perform your together-forever-ness in front of your sacred social circle.

So the color-coordination teenagers endure can be accounted for quite easily. What I cannot fathom an explanation for is why the matchy-matchy gets so overblown at Sade Hawkins dances in particular. Is there a worry that because the girl asked the boy, it won’t be pheromonically obvious that they are together? (That’s stupid and I would never argue that.) The most I can work out is that it somehow off-sets (or complements) the relative informality of the dance. The fact that the girl is supposed to ask the guy, that the traditional gender roles are reversed, seems to be a mere correlation. Why would a switch of gender hierarchy entail the hyper-matching of clothing? Couples often literally wear the same thing, rather than simply matching color-schemes. At the Sadie Hawkins dance, there’s no mistaking who asked whom. It’s an aggressive sign of mutual ownership, commemorated forever in an embarrassing photo in front of a cheesy, themed backdrop. But exactly why the hyper-matching occurs at the informal Sadie Hawkins dance is a mystery to me. So if anyone wants to venture a theory that helps explain why this happens, I’d love to hear it.

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March 27, 2012 · 7:23 PM

Heroic Temporal Authority: What Do You Know About Space, Old Man?

Once again, I’m going to use an incident as a jumping-off point for a more general thematic discussion, largely ignoring the issue itself. This time, it’s about authority, technology, and situated knowledge. And SPACE!

There was a story broadcast by a newsmagazine program about a week ago (might have been 20/20) about the advent and current ramping up of privatized space exploration. A man in charge of a large corporation that develops spacecraft was the primary interviewee, but I would like to discuss a small segment within the larger story. At one point, the interviewer brought up the fact that an Apollo astronaut (we’re going to go with Neil Armstrong because I’m pretty sure it was him, although I wasn’t taking notes at the time) testified in front of Congress against privatized space travel. He stated that no one but the government (NASA) had the technology or training to safely venture into space. Period. The interviewee was very sad that one of his heroes had spoken out against his dream.

Let’s unpack a bit before we blast off. Not that we’re going to blast off, because we’re not NASA and unpacking is the journey/focus here and deal with it. I’m not going to get into the private vs. public -ness of space travel at all. Rather, what I want to discuss revolves around issues of rhetorical authority–who has the authority to speak and about what subjects–historically situated knowledge, and hero-worship. These are all intertwined within this case and exemplify larger patterns in American culture.

1. Neil Armstrong is arguably held up as a national hero. He not only flew into space on a rocket, he walked on the moon! Our culture has remembered him as an icon of our incessant urge to conquer things. A living symbol of the American spirit. Someone who has inspired many a six-year-old to declare that someday, they are going to grow up to be an astronaut. This hero status affords people it is bestowed upon a certain measure of authority: we tend to listen to what they say. Even if they might not know what they are talking about…

2. Knowledge is situated. You know what you know because of your position in society (think occupation or whatnot) and in time (someone in 1670 wouldn’t know how to work my computer, and I don’t know how to work a plow). As I listened to the excerpt of Armstrong’s testimony, I blurted out “but what does he know now?!!” Armstrong was an astronaut in the 60s. Fifty years ago. As I’ve discussed before, as technology changes it tends to pass most people by. Unless the good astronaut has kept abreast of all the technological developments over the years, he has no way of actually knowing how capable a private company is of safely venturing into space. Armstrong’s knowledge–the knowledge he’s using to bolster his credibility as someone whose testimony matters–is situated in the quite distant past, technologically speaking. These issues of credibility bring us to…

3. Authority–where a speaker or writer gets the authority to speak on a topic. I’d argue that Armstrong’s authority is firmly planted in his status as a hero, although he is ostensibly drawing upon his scientific knowledge and that is partially how he is presented at the hearing and probably understood by the audience. But the point is that he’s given the benefit of the doubt when it comes to his actual grasp of this technological knowledge because he’s a hero and has the public’s respect. The public sees him as an authority on all things space travel because he went into space and we have spent 50+ years celebrating him for this accomplishment. He’s the face of all the (old) technology he’s alluding to. Because of his hero-status, we–the public and Congress–overlook the fact that his understanding of today’s technology (and arguably economic markets, as that plays into this whole debate as well) is out-dated. His argument is based on credibility that isn’t there anymore and charismatic authority (hero-status).

It’s fairly dangerous when we allow our heroes to influence our thinking–and our national policies–without first thinking critically about what they know and if we should give them the authority to speak about it. Since rhetorical authority is granted by the listener/reader, one has to wonder if his testimony was taken seriously. If it was, then Congress is as blinded by our culture’s tendency to lift our heroes up to infallible heights. (Of course, Armstrong may actually know what he’s talking about, technologically speaking. Unfortunately for him, my analysis about the interconnectedness of rhetorical authority, hero status, and situated knowledge assumes that he is not because that’s what I felt like writing about.)

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