Wanna Fight? Only God Forgives and Violent Myth-Making

When Drive came out in 2011, it seemed like Nicolas Winding Refn had finally escaped the cult-director ghetto where his early films had left him—here was a movie that spoke English, with trans-Atlantic star power and a mise-en-scene that shrewdly courted relevance by evoking the 80s after a decade of Reagan hagiographies and synthpop. Ryan Gosling and Carey Mulligan humanized its austere storyline, and for the first time Refn's penchant for gore felt like something out of Tarantino—that is, acceptably campy—rather than the ritualistic violence of Bronson and Valhalla Rising. Drive gave the impression that Refn was ready to make truly great films, rather than the niche-market gorefests of his early career.

But the critics have not been kind to Only God Forgives. The prevailing opinion is that Refn has gotten egotistical, that the success of Drive has convinced him he's a genius, and that, like Fellini before him, he's done the worst thing a respected art filmmaker can do: he's indulged himself. Ty Burr at the Boston Globe writes that it's "the kind of remarkable disaster only a very talented director can make after he finds success and is then allowed to do whatever he wants." "Very talented," in this case, is pejorative—Only God Forgives is a bloated, preachy, unbalanced mess, visually inventive but shrill, self-absorbed, and affected to the point of childishness. More to the point, though, it's inhuman.

Virtually every critic shares this last sentiment, and it's the point where we can see most clearly the laziness and dogmatism that color critical discussion of the film. Almost universally, critics of Only God Forgives predicate their criticism on a familiar argument from tradition—the humanist insistence that a work feature only characters who appear as complex and nuanced as actual people. Sometimes they slip consciously or unconsciously into a degraded form of this idea, the equally familiar insistence that a work feature at least a handful of "sympathetic" characters. In every case, they adamantly refuse to consider the movie on its own aesthetic terms; the reviews read like defenses of their own criteria more than evaluations of the movie itself.

In the New York Times, Stephen Holden starts his review by calling Kristen Scott Thomas's character "The closest thing to a human character in Nicolas Winding Refn's blood-drenched, nihilistic reverie Only God Forgives." "Nihilistic" might or might not be a good descriptor for the movie, but Holden never returns to it, and the word expresses nothing more than blank distaste. In Variety, Peter Debruge writes, "Audiences need clues as to what the character is feeling if they're to invest anything in his journey. Does [Julian] care that his brother has died? Is he intimidated by or merely obedient to his mother?" The first sentence is a writing workshop cliché, repeated like catechism. Our need to invest something in his journey is apparently a self-evident truth, and this makes ambiguity an artistic demerit. In the Star Tribune, Colin Covert writes, "The film takes every audience desire and willfully breaks it over a knee." (Maybe it would be better if it broke every audience desire over a knee by mistake?) He later faults the movie for refusing to stage the film's fight scenes with "ingenious daredevil feats," for refusing to give us "the irresponsible thrills we're hoping for"—the implication being that a film is good or bad to the extent that it satisfies or doesn't satisfy audience desires.

The reviews go on more or less unbroken like this—complaints about the movie's pace, its humorlessness, even about how little Ryan Gosling smiles. In almost every case the reviews take vague concepts like "sympathetic characters" as the tenets of good filmmaking, which reveals a disappointing double standard in mainstream film criticism. How would a critic who judged movies based on snappy pacing and likable heroes deal with Monte Hellman? Or Andrei Tarkovsky? Or Jean-Luc Godard, for that matter? It's easy to imagine the reviews—"For all its visual flair, Godard's film is hamstrung. Why? Because we simply don't know who Michel and Patricia are. They never begin to seem like real people, and so it's hard to care when Michel is gunned down." Nobody with any experience has written a review like that since 1959, in part because Breathless's status as a art movie means we're inclined to give it a second chance. No reviewer would earnestly call Kubrick or Pasolini pretentious without a careful argument to back it up. Glib dismissal is only acceptable when the work in question is understood to be essentially Low, the kind of work that wouldn't stand up to sustained inquiry anyway. Only God Forgives, obviously, is understood to be this kind of movie—a failed attempt at art by a talented schlock director who ought to get back to the bloodbaths he does best. Of course, there were dozens of critics who attacked Breathless for its lack of organic characters when it came out, most of them conservative defenders of the Tradition of Quality. It's an important connection to keep in mind, because Only God Forgives is as much a pastiche as anything from the New Wave, and the critical response to it is as inadequate as it was to Breathless.

One of the insights of the New Wave was that if Hollywood composed its movies with a system of what amounted to myths—genres, tropes and stock characters—then parodies of those myths were the best way to overturn a stagnant film culture. Characters were deliberately shallow, referring directly to their archetypal roles without attempts at depth. Godard and Truffaut made genre movies about genre; it would be absurd to suggest that Refn doesn't do the same. What differentiates Only God Forgives, and what makes it the logical continuation of Drive, is render the parody infinitely murkier and more frightening. The movie takes movie archetypes—Ryan Gosling's self-reliant American, Kristin Scott Thomas's doting mother—to pure, nightmarish extremes, extremes that reveal their psychosis and, more often than not, their shabbiness. Critics who find fault with "mythic" undertones are missing half the movie; myth doesn't elevate Refn's characters, it demeans them. His characters are at their worst when they're inhabiting a role that might, in another movie, make them "sympathetic." 

When Julian plays the cool badass, Chang beats him meticulously to a pulp, which makes the Joseph Gordon Levitt ensemble he's just doffed look laughable. The revelation of Crystal's total ineffectuality makes her notorious dining room speech sound like Blanche DuBois myth-making. Even Chang's ritualistic murders are followed by campy karaoke numbers, presided over by a hilariously stone-faced group of cops. If there's anything really sadistic about Nicolas Winding Refn, it's his dedication to iconoclasm. In his world, where people form their identities by assuming whatever role is at hand, there's no part available that isn't vicious, or paranoid, or pathetic; people are isolated, warped and crushed by the myths they use to constitute themselves.

Only God Forgives, like Pierrot le fou, Investigation of a Citizen Above All Suspicion, Mulholland Drive, Watchmen, and dozens of other works, is a reductio ad absurdum of these myths. Accusations of humorlessness are highly exaggerated—this movie is a satire as much as anything else. Insofar as myths encompass concepts like "sympathetic character," and insofar as they coalesce to create audience expectations, Only God Forgives is also a reductio ad absurdum of sympathetic characters and audience expectations. The critical consensus is that this basic premise is wrong, which amounts to nothing more than a defense of the status quo. It ought to be obvious that while it's a critic's prerogative to take issue with a film's execution, it's lazy at best, and dogmatic at worst, to dismiss its raison d'être. 

David Edelstein's review of the film for Vulture is a good note to end on. In the first paragraph, Edelstein gives a straw reading of the film as a mythic melodrama, gives himself a few points to refute, and then breezes through three paragraphs of shallow jokes, during which he refutes none of them. The film is pompous and bloated, and presumably wouldn't stand up to sustained inquiry anyway. He ponders whether Ryan Gosling can see in the dark and calls the karaoke numbers "Lynch with none of the Lynchian frissons," which is not a good sentence to use if you're accusing something of pomposity. In the final paragraph he compares Only God Forgives to Christopher Nolan. Ironically, Nolan's tedious mythologizing, and the pseudofascist heroes he's inflicted on us, are probably the most obvious of Only God Forgives's targets. Edelstein, and everyone else, seem perfectly comfortable with mythologizing itself, in spite of their token objections to Nolan's work. Either that or they've lost their sense of humor. Why so serious?

The Empty Tourist: Lost In Translation and Narrative Alienation

In Obama's Dreams From My Father, he wrote:

To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist Professors and the structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets.At night,in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Frantz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy.When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake, we were resisting bourgeois society's stifling constraints. We weren't indifferent or careless or insecure. We were alienated.

This paragraph, undoubtedly written with a wry and knowing smile, encapsulates a common liberal vision of subculture. If you are rebelling against the "system", it's because you're having troubles dealing with your own problems. These problems may be serious or (more likely) superfluous, but being outside of the mainstream is more about what you are ("expressively") as an individual than any sort of larger statement about the conditions that gave rise to what you are.  Ironically, a famous populist radical put this idea best: "Maybe there ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue, they's just what people does. Some things folks do is nice and some ain't so nice, and that's all any man's got a right to say."

This sort of folksy, sighing rhetoric is pleasant enough as a sort of humanist palliative, the kind of thing that lets us put the book down and go back to our lives, but it buys comforting cliche at the cost of detail. Moreover, the sentiment itself isn't universal. It's born of a certain set of very modern values.

In Lost in Translation we meet two characters, a recent college graduate named Charlotte and a washed-up actor named Bob, adrift in a foreign land. They're both worried about the same things in different ways;  about their respective marriages (new and old), kids, and the deep, hollow aimlessness that they feel stuck in with no agenda in Japan.  Rather than coming off insightful or wise, this feels like a performance of intimacy,  even set against the intended background of "phony" performances that Bob executes with a grimace as a part of his advertising and PR work.  Down underneath the shifting structure of our social duties, Bob and Charlotte tell us, we're all the same kids at the core.  We have common fears, common hopes, and our own little quirks. We're supposed to the see the parallel; two points of the "cycles of life" that come close to one another in the null environment of Tokyo, uniting two people that would otherwise remain strangers to one another. 

This is a compelling line and it's delivered beautifully, but the environment that Bob and Charlotte find themselves in and how they react to it says far more about them than any of their intimate, confessional scenes.  Much of the film depicts Charlotte and Bob wandering in the vast confines of Tokyo. Presumably Tokyo was picked because it is an eminently modern city; despite Charlotte's foray into a Buddhist temple (she feels nothing after) much of the scenery could fit in somewhere between Midtown and Vegas.  For a majority of the movie they could be in any city they don't understand.  Just as we have common fears, hopes, and our own little quirks, the most modern parts of our mega-cities share a cosmopolitan sameness flavored with individual kitschy touches of history.  This is supposed to be a sort of calming realization; a city is just a city just as a person is just a person. It's our common human construction, going back to the dawn of civilization. And, in the hands of Bob and Charlotte, both aimless and both having no apparent monetary concerns, the city becomes a playground.  



Debord wrote in Society of the Spectacle that capitalism was a coagulation.  Like Adorno before him, Debord thought that the specific historical nature of human reason in each period had its own dynamics that worked dialectically.  More specifically, he believed that this dialectical process was slowed by capitalism to the point of arrest.  He thought that our culture was a continual excretion of this arrested process; the modern explosion of fractured narratives was a sort of distorted snapshot of the real material conditions that were the stalled engine of historical progress.  This image of abstract individuals fed back into the dialectical material conditions that were its original basis and continued to slow them down.  Things and people were caught up in a narrative feedback loop that kept them from moving forward.  And the monolithic capitalist city was a physical manifestation of this vicious cycle. 

Though  Lost In Translation doesn't make claims that are this bold or pessimistic, it does recognize that the situation of being a tourist in a large city is a very special one. When you visit Tokyo or New York City or London without an agenda, it turns into a sort of theme park.  All of the compaction that is part and parcel of individual lives in the cramped confines of a city becomes unreal and difficult to penetrate when we don't have a structured interest in the specific details of it.  This is because the public space of a city is excessive, abstract, and impersonal. People who live in it successfully know how to draw off what they need from the excess of things that it offers while maintaining their internal agenda. The unstructured tourist, on the other hand, sees the day-to-day activities of the city for what they are; in the crowds of people they don't know, they see the bare, depersonalized flow of desires and needs that undergirds human individuality.  This can give us insight into what makes a place a tourist attraction; in the faceless slush of the day to day life of the city the most successful activities and locations manage to bring in the most tourists because they have some sort of grounding individuality.  This individuality is commonly historical (Ellis Island), prestigious (Carnegie Hall) and/or extreme (The Empire State Building).

Analogous narratives of individuality and its accompanying security attract Charlotte and Bob to their common stories.  Their stories (marriage, children, career) function like tourist attractions; these historically meaningful narratives provide them with bulwarks against the ego-annihilating buzz of Tokyo.  However, their invocation of these stories to protect themselves also brings into stark relief their failure to measure up to the stories' abstract standards.  Their ennui simultaneously protects them from the harsh alien environment and makes them into self-involved and unaware tourists.  However, we shouldn't think that this failure is some sort of radical deviance from the way these narratives are supposed to work; Charlotte and Bob are exactly what these stories are supposed to produce.  In response to the inhuman whir of Tokyo, they have achieved the modern dream of individuality and self-sufficiency, which is exactly the dream of the isolated, unchanging observer.  The reason that Bob and Charlotte can share their uniform and childlike hopes and dreams is not because they both have a lot in the common human condition, but because they've come through these stories to the same place; they both manage to maintain an identity by constantly failing in comparison to something that will never change. With only the abstract conflict and structure of narratives to limit them, they float free from everything else, wading around in the bewildering, austere, and meaningless beauty that comes with being a tourist. 

The worry is that in the modern situation, we all want to be tourists. And we're going to get what we want.

Life Between the Scare Quotes: Tao Lin's "Taipei"

Young author Tao Lin’s latest novel, the autobiographical Taipei, is being lauded as the Millennial’s most incisive generational statement and as a paradigmatically revolutionary work of literature.  Publisher’s Weekly writes, “…the documentary precision captures the sleepwalking malaise of Lin’s generation so completely, it’s scary” and author Frederick Barthelme states, “There is no mistaking that we live a new, ultra self-conscious life, skating on the surface of things while overlaying that surface with a facsimile of the 'old life' in which traditional values retain their power and majesty. What is fascinating about Tao Lin’s fiction is his willingness, nay, insistence, on sticking to the true life of the new century, as raw, flat, fatigued as it may be". Although Barthelme’s blurb is possibly the most breathtaking blurb ever blurbed (you can read it in full on Taipei’s Wikipedia page), I take issue with both of the sentiments expressed above. Speaking about the book, Lin said, “…in autobiographical fiction, my focus is still on creating an effect, not on documenting reality- so ‘autobiographical’, to me, is closer in meaning to ‘fiction’ than autobiography.” Despite the relentlessly dry prose, the book makes no claim to objective reality. It isn’t an exposé on the hollowness of the facebook generation, and it isn’t committed to representing the “true life”- it can’t be neatly analyzed in terms of the estrangement between the new life and the old life (whatever that means).

Tao Lin

Taipei follows Tao Lin’s alter-ego Paul around the country, through 3 (2 1/2?) romantic relationships and eventually to the titular city where he reunites with his parents. The tone throughout the book is uniformly literal and unsentimental. Lin frequently deploys clever similes and metaphors, but these are always in the service of a more emphatic representation, rather than whimsical association: “he… moved toward the room’s iPod with the goal-oriented, zombie-like calmness of a person who has woken at night thirsty and is walking to his refrigerator and changed the music to ‘Today’ by Smashing Pumpkins.”  Emotions are placed in scare quotes- everything feels “sad and beautiful”, Paul feels “grateful to be alive”—they are disinterestedly recognized instead of vitally described. These plaintive recollections seem to mimic the language of the twitter-sphere, scrupulously confessional and formally anonymous.

That kind of neutrally affected prose finds its most direct manifestation in a recent book by another young author: Eat When You Feel Sad by Zachary German. Here is a representative passage:

Robert plays the song “I’m Insane” by Sonic Youth. He nods his head. Robert looks at his cat. He puts on his shoes. He puts on a light sweater. He looks at his apartment. He walks out of his apartment. He walks downstairs. He walks outside. He walks to a thrift store. He looks at a children’s book about time.

The novel maintains that tone throughout, until the end, when there is an emotional catharsis and the undercurrents of romantic longing and helplessness are brought to the fore. Prior to the ending, it seems that generational “malaise” is embodied by the book’s formal commitment to blandness. The ending’s abrupt shift in tone and content serves to redeem the rest of the work, and reward the reader who has just put up with 100some pages of “Robert does this. Robert does that.” Taipei also has an intense closing sequence, in which Paul, tripping on mushrooms and thinking articulately about death, seeks the embrace of his girlfriend Erin instead of hiding in the bathroom. Nonetheless, this intense experience doesn’t override Lin’s style—the book ends not with Paul feeling grateful to be alive, but “grateful to be alive”. If this book were a millennial cry for help, or an example of the schism Frederick Barthelme blurbed about, there would be a change in tone, and there isn’t one. This is what makes Taipei so brilliant; it doesn’t offer the reader a respite from its neutrality. And, as Lin makes clear, its neutrality shouldn’t be mistaken for objectivity. Just like the neutral gaze of a security camera is more emblematic of power relations than objectivity, Lin’s neutral tone is emblematic of a frame of mind. When Paul asks his drug dealer about the special processes used on the batch of MDMA he was buying, his dealer responds,

 "They do it twice...it goes through once, and they dip it again," he said unenthusiastically, with unfocused eyes and a subtle movement of his upper body that somehow effectively conveyed an additional, unrequired action within the process of an assembly line.

                

This description dehumanizes the drug dealer; comparing him to a mechanical process reveals an arbitrary similarity, not the beautiful symmetry imaginative description usually uncovers. Tao Lin is deeply creative, but also alienated and bored; he sees the world through a gray lens, his imagination working within the anonymity bestowed upon him by his afflictions. Anyone who has read "The Stranger" knows that the perspective of an anonymous, cryptic person isn't afforded special access to reality and truth; the stranger experiences the radical absence of those things.

The first part of Taipei takes place during what Lin calls his “interim period”, the handful of months before his book tour during which Paul indiscriminately does drugs and is generally aimless. Once his tour begins, his drug use (which he planned to decrease) only increases, along with his sense of aimlessness. Both consciously spiraling towards death and practically distancing life, Taipei is a timeless expression of hipster repose: the cool indiscernibility of death and interregnum. 

Talking About Talking About My Generation: Millennials Vs. The Zeitgeist

I'd like to center this around the infamous quote from Girls that goes, "I think I may be the voice of my generation. Or at least a voice—of a generation." Like most of the main character's bumbling hubris, it's played for laughs, the joke being the very idea of The Voice of Our Generation. Despite charges to the contrary, I think it's obvious that the characters of Girls, privileged as they are, are at least aware that they exist in a very specific milieu (young, white, New York, privileged poverty), and that there's nothing intrinsic in that milieu that makes it any more worthwhile than another. So when Hannah says she might be the voice of her generation, she immediately has to walk her claim back, which leads her to the absurd title of "A voice of a generation"—which means she's exactly like everyone else. Ha ha.

There's more to the joke, though, because Hannah's deference to inconsequentiality is a very familiar maneuver. We've been seeing it on television for years, in one form or another, from the passive-aggressive schlubs of The Office to the preening idiots of Arrested Development. These are people who, like Hannah, believe intuitively that they are the centers of the universe, but constantly find themselves in situations where they have to confront their own averageness; the only development in Girls is that we have a character who's smart enough to hold the two concepts in her head at the same time. In a supposedly pluralistic world, the pluralism of which has been drilled into her head for years by the liberal arts philosophy, Hannah desperately maintains her selfish egotism. This kind of millennial doublethink is best expressed in the old demotivator bromide that "if everyone is special, then nobody is." But Girls, in embodying that sentiment, and putting it into the wishy-washy parlance of our times, is not only proving itself formally proficient, but also truly, deeply in touch, which is to say that it's the voice of the generation.

There was an article on Opinionator a few weeks ago about treating prints by Andy Warhol like they were paintings by Jackson Pollock. I think Lena Dunham—and most other people who are attracted to speaking for a generation—are doing the same thing, which is to say applying a modernist concept to a world that no longer accepts it.

It's not difficult to see how the idea of "the voice of a generation" requires the exclusion of most people in that generation; the whole idea of a single, monolithic generation would be incoherent without some degree of cultural hegemony. Most Americans in the 1920s weren't alcoholic expats, but we know Hemingway in part as the voice of the Lost Generation. Being The Voice of a Generation has always necessitated both a broad understanding of the Zeitgeist and a willingness to ignore certain of its features when they contradict one another. Which is to say that it's always been as much about imposing one's will on the culture as it's been about having one's finger on the pulse. (I'd make that metaphor more consistent, but I don't have a crash cart handy.) Put differently, a prospective Voice has to focus on the semantic elements of their generation and then tell us what they mean. In The Sun Also Rises, alcohol, which was particularly prominent in the 20s, refers to simultaneous needs to escape oneself and to connect with others; we have the signifier, alcohol, and the signified, lonely self-hatred. The problem is that after the 60s and postmodernism, it's no longer easy to make a judgment about which set of signifiers to privilege, to say nothing of what's befallen those easy structuralist ties between signifier and signified, so it becomes impossible for anyone to call themselves the voice of a generation without a lot of qualification. 

Hence the joke: it's as absurd for Hannah to call her tiny, unfinished book of essays a major generational statement as it is for Lena Dunham to call her show a major generational statement. Yet that's exactly what they're doing; by putting their self-awareness on display, they're reducing it to a symbol, a soundbite that speaks to the confusion and self-consciousness that, we're encouraged to believe, are key features of the Millennial Generation. Never mind the arrogant rich kids, oblivious nerds and enthusiastic vegans we're familiar with from TV shows, books, movies, comics and everyday life; this is the real generation. Girls comes right up to the absurdity of its own raison d'être and then moves immediately in the opposite direction.

As the idea of The Voice of Our Generation becomes more absurd, we seem to want it more desperately. Girls is just one example of this; others include Scott Pilgrim Versus the World, anything by LCD Soundsystem, or Zachary German's novel Eat When You Feel Sad (the subject of our next post, which archly declares that it is "a book about a generation" on its back cover). All of these have a violent, conflicted relationship with the presumed Zeitgeist; they're obsessed with expressing it, but they either spend half their time trying to suss out what it is in the first place (Soundsystem) or they're content to hold forth about a received set of semantics (Pilgrim, German). In all of them, though, the absurdity of the concept of the Zeitgeist is the Zeitgeist; the failure of its characters to be generational makes them generational. God knows I've enjoyed all of them, but the search for a generational idiom, in every case, is misguided; I think the need to reconstruct cultural consensus, the first phase of which seems to be the airing of all our grievances about aimlessness and vacillation, must be based on a discomfort with irony that leads in its most extreme form to bullshit like Kimya Dawson.

To everyone who's looking for a Millennial idiom based on the disavowal of a Millennial idiom, I'd suggest John Campbell's brilliant webcomic Pictures for Sad Children, which performs the same fastidious analysis of Millennial semantics (privileged poverty, allergies, thin computers, cube farms and multiculturalism all feature prominently at one point or another) but takes the vacillation about a Zeitgeist one step further, turning it into all-consuming self-hatred. John Campbell's comic constantly criticizes the egotism his main characters display in being main characters at all; they're denied victory, redemption and even self-pity, and in this they're no different from Lena Dunham's characters. But Pictures for Sad Children takes the next logical step and starts killing them off, or simply abandoning them after a few pages, as if the universe's attention span was just too short. A comic that treats everybody with the same hostile apathy is the logical resolution to the problem of Girls; unless we want everything on TV to be that hostile and apathetic, we should get the Voice of Our Generation out of our heads completely.

Our Father, Who Art Irrelevant: The Pitiful Political Tragedy of Yeezus

With the first notes of Yeezus, Kanye West's production team makes sure you know you're not listening to My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.

A quick wikipedia search brings up this quote from The Guardian: "With this album, we ain't drop no single to radio. We ain't got no NBA campaign, nothing like that. Shit, we ain't even got no cover. We just made some real music."

This is the central gesture of Yeezus. Kanye fits into a common pattern of mind-boggling success; after ascendance, divergence.  When Cobain saw what he and his friends had wrought with Nevermind, he crafted In Utero in order to try and shake it off.  This is a simplistic interpretation of that record, and a correspondingly fairly childish interpretation of his reaction to fame.  But in its simplicity, and in its childishness, it's a proper analog to Kanye West's move on Yeezus.

After, Kanye assures us with the quote above, he's moved beyond all of the unthinking duplicity of the "mainstream".  When he says "Fuck y'all corporations/ you can't control me" and "Move my family out the country so you can't see where I stay" he sounds about as rebellious as your wealthy, tax-evading uncle when he's had a few too many drinks. The idea that a record released on Def Jam that leaps up to #1 on the charts could in any way be subversive demonstrates what can only be called stupidity.  On The College Dropout, Kanye's political interests sounded intimate and coarsened with a good-humored experience.  What little that does sound interesting on this song comes in the first verse.  This sort of could fit in right alongside the sentiments of his earlier work; for example, "That's that broke nigga racism/That's that don't touch anything in the store/That's that rich nigga racism/Come in, please buy more" could fit perfectly right next to "They take me to the back and pat me/ Askin' me about some khakis/But let some black people walk in/I bet they show off their token blackie." Compared to confrontational honesty of this personal narrative of racism, the inane rhetoric of the second verse sounds even more delirious and paranoid.



West has clearly not taken Drake's latest axiom to heart on this record; The G.O.O.D. Music clique is conspicuously absent on Yeezus, an album replete with new friends.  Pusha T has no verse on this record. Nor does Big Sean. Kid Cudi's bland vocals could have been performed by anyone.  And the rappers that are included are Chicago locals that have little recognition or appeal outside of the city.  This is a piece in Kanye's "rebellious" puzzle; he has rejected the universalist approach of corporate radio and replaced it with a "defiant" provincialism.  This move, like so many of the human gestures on Yeezus, falls flat on its face.  The performances of King L and Chief Keef, while still incongruent, manage enough of a cold, estranged affect that they make Kanye's earnest vitriol sound even more out of place than it already did.

 The production team on Yeezus is staffed by a caste of current indie darlings, including trap hero Hudson Mohawke, Daft Punk (who we've dealt with elsewhere), and Evian Christ from the experimental label Tri Angle. Among them is Justin Vernon, one of a few stalwarts from MBDTF.  When Vernon talks about Kanye in interviews he's depressingly laudatory, sounding more like an excited frat boy than the same man who demonstrated the lyrical sensitivity of the careful and intimate Bon Iver records.

Despite all my venom for Kanye's presence on his own record, I think that the musical environment of Yeezus is truly beautiful and startlingly composed.  From the simplest and least daring choices on the record to the most thunderous noise arpeggio, Yeezus is full of brilliant stylistic decisions.  Alongside MBDTF, Yeezus demonstrates the profound range and depth of Kanye's aesthetic taste.  Highlights include a revitalization of the spirit of 808s and Heartbreak and his work before it in the beautiful "Blood On The Leaves".  The thunderous contribution of Hudson Mohawke's TNGHT "horn section" is balanced perfectly on the edge of discordant.  It's one of many tracks on this record that sounds like Kanye's vocal track has been stolen from some incompetent single and put over a much more elegant standalone instrumental.



Just as on MBDTF, Kanye has crafted a landscape that outpaces him.  On MBDTF, that environment was at least still on the horizon.  On Yeezus, Mr. West sounds like he found himself on an alien planet and desperately tried to make music there.

Nowhere is that more obvious than on "I Am a God."  This beat is as viciously hostile as it gets on this record and Kanye is as bland as he has ever been.   If I had to imagine what sort of a thing God was, I'd suggest that the sounds behind Kanye on this track were a pretty good pop approximation; monolithically alien, thuddingly repetitive, and wholly impenetrable. Next to this sonic monstrosity going on behind him, Kanye's pronouncement "I am a god" sounds vitiated and weak.  The lyrics and this delivery on this track make him sound a lot more like a coked-up douchebag on his cellphone in an LA parking lot than a pop god. His demands ("Hurry up with my damn croissants" etc.) sound cartoonish and whiny where I can only imagine he is attempting to sound charismatic and dominating.  If this was an attempt at laughing self-parody, it would be a startling success.  But Kanye's monotone "aggressive" earnestness suggests that the truth is far more tragic.



The story of Yeezus is ironically more politically telling than its overt "message."  While Kanye spends a good amount of this album "raging" against corporations, the album itself is an unabashed corporate success. Kanye the artist sounds tiny next to the crushing indifference of his own music, and Kanye the man is made irrelevant by Kanye the brand. This is the operation of abstracting market forces at work; the market thrives on what is new, innovative, and "subversive".  "Innovation" and "paradigm-shifts" have been at the core of corporate practice for decades and an "outlaw" spirit is at the heart of every successful boardroom.  Capitalism thrives on breakdown, revolt, and iconoclasm; its strength comes from its ability to assimilate reactive "challenges" to a status quo into an even stronger and more comprehensive network.

In this spirit, Kanye's impotence to produce something "rebellious" has some instructive societal analogs. His ambiguously adversarial attitude is a mirror of the spirit of Occupy Wall Street; because modern international capitalism is a diffuse system that admits of very few obvious targets, it's often hard to know who one should be decrying.  Just as Kanye's railing against corporations has to be framed by his massive corporate success, Occupy's fiery sloganeering  ("people over profits") has to be framed by the infinitely complex intertwinement of  international banks and modern "democratic" states with their individual freedoms (including, obviously, the right to free speech.) Mr. West has unwittingly held up a crystal clear mirror to our current situation; his personality-driven claims to power and "rebel" screed smash to pieces against the cold walls of his beats just as our "human" political agency is stifled in the swarming indifference of the modern economic situation.

Thoughts on Realism and Solidarity (or, Celebrity Deathmatch: Zizek vs. Chomsky)

Several posts on this blog have discussed 21^st century attempts at realism (Griffin’s post on Zero Dark Thirty, Owen’s post on Syriana, my post on The Wire). That topic is, I think, closely tied to how peoples movements (the current protests in Turkey and Brazil, the Occupy movement etc) are documented and received. In this piece I want to offer my own take on Zero Dark Thirty’s attempt at realism, discuss historicism in Slavoj Zizek’s and Noam Chomsky’s appraisals of protest movements, and tie that in with problems I see with American solidarity with revolutionary movements abroad.

Noam Chomsky

            The first half of Noam Chomsky’s 2010 book “Hopes and Prospects” contains transcripts of talks he gave around Latin America in the four years preceding the book’s publication. One recurrent theme in Chomsky’s work is “historical amnesia”. Chomsky describes the historical trends surrounding American imperialism in Latin America; the US government’s main foreign policy concerns (with that region among others) throughout its history have centered around increasing military surveillance and corporate exploitation. The press, because of “historical amnesia”, ignores rather than documents events (the state-sponsored kidnapping of democratically elected Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Arstide in 2004, one among countless examples) which would point to easily discernable historical trends in military and corporate interests. In this way, the American view of the world is de-historicized. This jibes with Griffin’s criticism of Zero Dark Thirty, the film about the manhunt for bin Laden; that the film presents “Central Asia as a place where bad things happen”,  “We never get an inkling of perspective on the causes or even many of the consequences of the American war machine”. Because of this lack of historical awareness, the film is a failure as a work of realism. But I think there is more to it than that. If “Zero Dark Thirty” dealt with terrorists and their motives, then history would matter- bin Laden’s rage was mostly directed towards forces of globalization and empire, his religious fervor more of an incidental cultural artifact than a motivating cause. However, the film deals with CIA strategists on the ground- they may be agents of History, but they don’t know they are. They work in an ahistorical world, one where military strategy and goals are designed to line up with the expansion of empire. Chomsky writes, “By the end of WWII… US industrial production more than tripled, while industrial rivals were severely damaged or destroyed. The US had literally half the wealth of the entire world, along with incomparable security and military power, including nuclear weapons. High level planners and foreign policy advisers determined that in the new global system the US should ‘hold unquestioned power’ while ensuring the ‘limitation of any exercise of sovereignty' by states that might interfere with its global designs… Since then, fundamental policies have changed more in tactics than in substance.” Zero Dark Thirty’s realism would have been more than just an affectation if it had confronted the disparity between the moneyed “strategic interests” that deemed the war a useful tool and the CIA operatives who risked life and limb to capture and kill Osama bin Laden- essentially participating in an ideologically constructed narrative rather than a mission of real pertinence. This disparity creates people like (now disgraced) General Stanley McChrystal, who essentially lived to be biographied and had no stake in the war effort, as well as characters like Maya (portrayed by Jessica Chastain), whose insatiable drive to capture and kill bin Laden comes off as increasingly Quixotic as the al Qaeda leader disappears from the headlines.

Slavoj Zizek

            Slovenian philosopher and “Original Gangster” Slavoj Zizek offers a different critique of realism, and his own historicism. He assesses The Wire’s representation of the present and the Occupy movement’s reaction to the present through a Marxist lens. In my post from couple months ago  that dealt with Zizek explicitly I quoted from his book “The Year of Dreaming Dangerously”; he stated that The Wire had failed to perform the “formal task” of rendering “in a TV narrative, a universe in which abstraction reigns.” That is, a world where neoliberal economic policies all-too-often (and all-too-arbitrarily) determine the living conditions of entire communities. Zizek, however, doesn’t offer any advice on how to go about fulfilling this “formal task”. His assessment of the Occupy Movement is similarly oracular (and perhaps obtuse). He urges us to look for “signs from the future”, i.e. events in the present that contain kernels of a future beyond capitalism. This line of thought is, I think, dangerously dualistic. Although far from being an orthodox Marxist (socialism or barbarism!, etc) Zizek maintains that our world is determined by our economic-philosophical epoch (in our case, capitalism), and that we ought to look for signs of the coming communist epoch within the present. It is no wonder, given the utterly abstract status he affords capitalism and communism, that he ends his book with theological musings rather than concrete advice for protestors or artists. Zizek’s attempt to tie protest movements from around the world together because of their shared connection to an utopian future rather than their shared interpretation of intolerable aspects of the present is dangerous, if only because it leads to navel-gazing rather than discussion.  Chomsky uses the term “really-existing-capitalism” to refer to the web of strategic interests that determine and interfere with economic practices. Here lies an important distinction between these two thinkers. Chomsky studies unjust tendencies that are continually asserted throughout history and applauds movements that recognize these tendencies and rise up against them, however rudderless the movements themselves are. The tone of his work is detached, yet tentatively optimistic. Zizek, and other strict anti-capitalists, is probably too radical to be widely relatable, and too prone to waxing philosophic about a human condition which claustrophobically oscillates between blindness and fatalism (we're blind to the forces determining us, yet aware that those forces will do us in). Marx wrote that truth is without

 passion and passion is without truth. The stark truths documented by Noam Chomsky bring to light a sea of moral relativism and cynicism that send one on excursions of philosophic passion which contain no essential relation to the truths that launched them. Finding a balance between the soft-spoken pragmatism embodied by Noam Chomsky and the brazen polemics of Zizek is a task for artists who hope to create works of realism as well as revolutionaries striving for a working understanding of the modern situation. Chomsky is occasionally bitterly sarcastic, and Zizek often narrates his own wooly solipsism, but neither of them gives in to those transgressive tendencies as far as I can tell.

         The current protests in Brazil and Turkey were widely reported in a blizzard of articles that were abundantly shared on Facebook. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has essentially turned on his people, mobilizing military forces to violently terrorize peaceful protestors. In Brazil, the government has been more positively (if superficially) engaged. But in both cases, the us vs. them mentality is the product of immediate material conditions, rather than a learned anti-capitalist viewpoint. The struggle in South America is between US-backed elites and peoples movements. For Zizek, capitalism is a transgressive abstract force; for Chomsky, it is a collection of historical tendencies. In Turkey, Brazil and elsewhere, people are standing up and saying “no” to these historical tendencies, which are for them a daily fact of life. 

               In his “Phenomenology of Spirit”, Hegel equates abstraction with indifference; it makes sense then that living in an age where increasing overpopulation and increasing wealth inequality coexist (an increasingly few people who benefit from an economic paradigm are indifferent towards an increasingly huge number of people who are being fucked over by it) creates the impression that we live in a “universe where abstraction reigns”, as Zizek writes. Indifference reigns. Indifference towards historical tendencies. If American liberals are going to attain solidarity with protest movements abroad, it won’t be by occasional memetic appropriations in social media. Either we wait until the material conditions of our lives are determined as starkly as they are for people living in Latin America and Central Asia, or we confront the blithe indifference that exists beneath the surface of mainstream liberal narratives of progress. Otherwise, our solidarity will be worthless at best, toxic at worst.

Random Access Memories: Have You Heard the Good News about Disco?

One of the few remarkable things about the new Daft Punk album is the utter lack of deviation, on the part of basically every music critic in America, from the myth of its creation. Looking for an angle, every reviewer seems to repeat a more or less overt version of this story: Daft Punk, having taken the EDM they invented to its tepid extreme with Human After All and vanished in shame, have come back to atone for their past sins. In the yawning eight-year gap between the last album and Random Access Memories, dozens of usurpers have clawed their way to the electronic throne, from Justice to Skrillex to LCD Soundsystem; now the robots have returned, not to take back their rightful place at the top of the EDM pantheon, but to obliterate the pantheon completely.

Which is a nice way of saying that they made an album with no samples. Or not a lot of samples. An album that revels in a different kind of artificiality than their other albums, anyway, a slick analog artificiality rather than a robotic digital one. Whatever they've made, the critics love it: Matthew Horton at NME, as an illustrative example, raves about the opening track's "stupendously vast rock intro" and the way "everything goes ape" on the Giorgio Moroder tribute. I'll let you decide for yourself on that last one. Usually at the end of the review there's some wimpy caveat about how the album is bloated and egomaniacal, but either that's a forgettable detail or, conversely, it's actually crucial to the album's success—Will Hermes at Rolling Stone says the album is "a victim of its own ambition," but "it wouldn't be half as awesome a ride if it had aimed any lower." 

If it's not clear yet, these are reviews that will themselves into positivity. Pitchfork's Mark Richardson notes the album's "mix of disco, soft rock, and prog-pop, along with some Broadway-style pop bombast and even a few pinches of their squelching stadium-dance aesthetic," which makes the album sound so bad that it's almost revolting when he praises it, like listening to someone talk cheerfully about why they enjoy eating mud. That NME review is really the clincher: it praises the resemblance of "Fragments of Time" to Wings, Cliff Richard, and even 70s sitcom themes and somehow calls the sludgy Paul Williams ballad "Touch" both "gout-inducingly indulgent" and "magnificent." These reviews look directly at the terrible things about this album and pronounce them good. If this isn't a little disquieting, I'll refer you to Comrade O'Brien.

Sasha Frere-Jones has the best understanding of the album's weirdly Orwellian nature: he writes, "I replay parts of Random Access Memories repeatedly while simultaneously thinking it is some of the worst music I've ever heard." The record raises what he calls a "radical question: Does good music need to be good?"

Forgive me, but I don't see how this is a radical question at all—isn't it one of the most mundane facts of life since Tin Pan Alley that the catchiest, funnest music is usually also worthless? Who hasn't found themselves humming along to an Air Supply song at the grocery store? Catchy, well-produced schlock isn't remarkable by any means. Good music doesn't have to be good, and we all know it.

Random Access Memories is remarkable, though, in the way it wears its heartlessness on its sleeve. Standard-issue "popcraft" doesn't enter into it, nor does its bruited retro recording process. If Random Access Memories is really about reprocessing Los Angeles circa 1981, then its real success isn't in recording or composition, it's in the adoption of the entire callous, cynical mindset of the epoch that gave us "Hey Nineteen" and "Africa." Not only the mindset, but also the entire industrial organization of the album—the welter of guest producers, guest songwriters and guest musicians, some of whom are as washed up today as Cliff Richard himself was when he came back in the late 70s, and the compositional style, which is as deliberately lethargic as anything on Gaucho. Daft Punk are method acting here, dedicating themselves to evoking in every detail the mythical heyday of the LP, an imaginary time when mad genius producers roamed LA in quest of the perfect concept album. Most of the albums from this era, in retrospect, are unbearable, but you have to respect the insane dedication that went into their creation. Daft Punk have dedicated themselves to simulating this madness. By any musical standard, the album is dumb, forgettable fun, but we're clearly meant to evaluate it as a performance, not as an object, which is exactly what the critics are doing.

As an important sidenote, it's very much a mythical heyday that Daft Punk are hearkening back to, as mythical as Jack White's British Invasion or Fleet Foxes' preindustrial utopia. I think that's the key to the performance; if it weren't a myth, it wouldn't be so impressive to replicate it. It's critical to Daft Punk's interpretation that the epoch they appropriate is intangible. Like Swinging London for Jack White or the American frontier (I guess) for Fleet Foxes, and like the 50s for Ronald Reagan and the 60s for the left today, a historical era has to lose substance, flatten itself into a set of stories and values, for it to be worth simulating. The difference between Daft Punk and these other luminaries is that the others all foreground the authenticity of their eras, the studio craftsmanship, honest labor, white picket fences or free love, while Daft Punk zeroes in on the inauthenticity.

Random Access Memories is so unapologetic, so blatant, so relentless in its phoniness that it attains a grim determination you don't usually see outside of religious zealots. The ironic distance provided by those stupid robots suits is gone; they've become so ritualized and expected that it's not possible to read the album as some kind of big joke, and it would almost be more insulting if it were. I'll hand it to them that they've found a way out of the sincerity/insincerity binary that pop music has been caught in for the last decade or so, but they've done it by pledging something like blind faith. The critics seem to love it, though, and a lot of their love seems to stem from that faith. Maybe the world needs Jesus after all.