CO-OP Platform Text 3: Occufest [A Media Proposition]

By Chris Moylan

Occupy Wall Street has been relentless in demonstrating the structural, legal and financial dimensions of a systematic and well-financed process to corrupt Congress, paralyze the executive branch, manipulate the courts, and weaken financial regulations to allow speculative banking and investment practices ruinous to millions and exorbitantly profitable to the few. This calling to account extends to environmental practices, war policy, food production and marketing; the list goes on.

It stands to reason that harm to art and culture has paralleled harm done to economic and political life. On a practical level, when millions lose their homes and their jobs the arts suffer in varying degrees along with other elements of a society. However, detecting changes in discourse, as opposed to changes in attendance or viewership or the like, is difficult and to a large extent requires the wisdom of hindsight. We can track accurately how many people are attending what kinds of movies, but it can take some time to determine what a given cluster of comedies or action movies says about the zeitgeist at given time.  It can take time for the effects of social trauma to manifest themselves in fiction, movies, tv shows, not to mention more ambitious or serious undertakings in music, visual arts, poetry, and dance…

We can, however, identify some of the egregious forms of damage being inflicted on the public psyche right now, leaving the more subtle analysis of cultural artifacts to another time and context. In particular, the working poor and lower middle class people are subject to insult in the guise of entertainment and degradation in the guise of advertising. The Occupy Wall Street ambition to build a better world might include the task of defending and supporting the dignity of those who would inhabit. In particular this is something that artists and writers associated with OWS can do.

Meaning It

Has the one per cent inflicted cultural harm (assuming one can identify what constitutes cultural harm) on the ninety-nine? If so, and of course that is a large if, is it possible to demonstrate intent?  If a television show is degrading to women or working people or African Americans, or all of these combined, does it matter if one can demonstrate that the writers and producers of the show intended to do this, or if they knew that they were following genre formulas (the fat bumbling worker with a fondness for beer and chesty women; the nosy, hilariously dumb secretary who can’t get a date)?  Probably not; when a sportscaster lets slip a racial insult the ‘I didn’t mean it, that isn’t me’ excuse is hardly ever sufficient. The point is that one can identify harm and wrong without concern for whether media collude to inflict it, or resorting to conspiracy thinking (the corporations are out to control and pacify us, turning us into compliant, uninformed consumers), meta-critique and art or media teleology.

TV shows, for example, are just trying to sell ads and ads are just trying to induce consumers to buy things. This is just capitalism, a system as vast as the weather and as blindly reliable as the ebb and flow of the tides—except. The marriage of capitalism and culture, imposed shotgun-style during the Reagan administration, with the elimination of federal support for arts organizations, has resulted in the commercialization of cultural life to the extent that it is rare to encounter any manifestation of creativity that does not carry the intro “brought to you by…” This commercialization carries with it a power imbalance in the relationship of seller to consumer. This imbalance results in a sickness that even the shield of iron and the armor of market savvy are scarce able to protect us.

Bathtubs and Scratch Cards

It’s fairly common for people to take a chance on the lotto, not so common to take a chance on, for example, a book of poetry.

Imagine coming up to the guy you see on the train to work every now and then, someone you don’t know much about, and saying ‘I think there’s a poet you should read.’ It would make as much sense as telling him there’s a trout he should look at.

Yet, most of us know that poetry has intrinsic value, even if this value is difficult to identify precisely, whereas (many of us know) playing the lotto has just the opposite: negative value, in a mathematical sense. The purpose of the lotto is to make you lose. Revenue is derived from losing tickets. There is no ambiguity in this. Playing the lotto to make money is like going to church to become pope. Walk down the aisle and tell the congregation, “You never know until you try.“

The lotto is designed so that all of us (except one or two) will lose always. The exception of the one who wins confirms the rule of the millions and millions who lose every time they play…Likewise, the current economic structure is designed to make us lose. An economy of falling wages, declining benefits, vanishing jobs, and all but nonexistent job security is a bad bet for most of us, and the tax benefits, loopholes, income shelters and Tarp bailouts allow the wealthy to rig the table for themselves… The purpose of the tax structure is to make us losers, and to make the wealthy winners; winners—through enormous bonuses, and other “merit-based” schemes, even when they make disastrous investment bets for their companies…

The word “loser,” of course, is provocative. People have a right to play the lottery. Not every investment of a dollar or two has to be rationally calculated. But when the lotto is played, week after week, as if it were a game that the player could reasonably expect to win, then it is an apt symbol, I believe, for other systems, campaigns, cultural forces that manipulate us into participating - as if we didn’t know we are being taken and mocked while we are being taken. We are conditioned to feel powerless and inferior, to say, “What’s the point of voting or reading a newspaper or taking to the streets to protest? Not because things always stay the same, etc., but because we the little people get what we deserve: to lose.

Susan Boyle

Music contests are fun, and there is a long history of such contests through the history of the television age and before. But why are such contests interwoven now with celebrity judges giving bland psychological analyses and reassurances that even Bugs Bunny would be too proud to parody? Doesn’t such quasi-psychotherapeutic talk - ‘I’m so proud of you for being brave enough to take a chance on the cha-cha. You’ve grown so much in the past two weeks on this show!’ - induce at least momentary delirium in the viewer rather than address performance anxiety in the contestant? Whom are the judges protecting and soothing this way? - Certainly not the contestants. The numbers are so staged and elaborately produced, the contestants often so thoroughly professional in their training and approach, that the sentimental pep talks can’t be intended for them. Clearly they are meant to reassure the audience.

Everything on the show is lovely. Even rejection is pleasant and mildly affirming. The contest show is a fantasy of a fantasy, a distanced and screened dose of attractive performers faking it one after another while we watch. So what does that say about what the producers of such shows think of us?

This is not to deny that there are occasional moments of transcendent beauty and achievement on contest shows; Susan Boyle comes to mind. Yet the reaction of the judges to her famous performance (which became a viral video on the web with millions of plays) - nods of utter disbelief, bulging eyes, standing ovation, rapturous shock— were altogether so extreme as to encapsulate and minimize just who Susan Boyle is or was in actuality. That is, Susan Boyle is in one way her own audience; lots of people look like her. My mother could have been her twin. The ‘Oh-my-God-can-you-believe-an-overweight-middle-aged-lady-can-sing-like-THAT’ reaction carried with it the implication that, indeed, what happened made no sense, that it was insane. Susan Boyle delivered the shock of the real, of an impossible reality—we were supposed to mock, boo, paralyze her and through her, ourselves—then she sang. Whose voice was that?

When that Voice becomes ours, the revolution will begin.

At some point, perhaps soon, the trap doors will open beneath the feet of contestants on debasing quiz shows and the contestants will stand there, in mid-air, refusing to fall.

But before that revolution, time for a commercial interruption: “…Erectile Dysfunction?”

What’s up with four-hour sex in separate bathtubs, and why bathtubs? What’s the subtext of bathtubs on porches?

Advertising is an easy target, and ads for erectile dysfunction are easier still, despite the important clinical benefits they provide for most men who take such drugs. But the interest here is not in the vulgarity, intrusiveness, and other annoying qualities in the ads, but in the support the ads provide for the ‘You are powerless and small and not good enough’ subtext of much popular culture.

Commercials often are simply demeaning. They tell you to buy your beloved an expensive car for Christmas when you can’t afford the rent. They tell you that anyone who watches national and international news requires a diaper and medicine for gas, medication for clogged veins and a remedy for shortness of breath. If you listen to Brian Williams you are going to die. They sell remedies for illnesses that don’t exist, and construct the body as a site of stench, stains, pains, infections, dental necrosis, bacterial colonies, and virile hostile takeovers of the gums, brains, feet, teeth, genitals… Many Ads - OK, maybe not all - sell self-loathing. And yet the attractive men and women who slip into the leather interiors of luxury automobiles are as immune to such concerns as scientists in hazmat suits are to infection. They are happy and gentle as sunbeams, they are semi-divine. If only we could be like them.

The problem is, for many of us, this is out of the question.

The post-coital image of a married couple (a close-up of the wedding rings is inevitable) relaxing in separate bathtubs offers the reassurance that clinically delivered fucking is clean, sanitary and somehow chaste. The further implication is that references to erectile dysfunction and the anxiety of not being ‘ready’ insert such a moment of stress into the evening’s TV entertainment, such a heavy dose of the explicit, that the viewer requires an antidote of a cleansing, soothing soak in the absurd—a man and a woman on a porch in two bathtubs. The commercial regulates the fantasy—just a random touch of the hands, and you are handsome and virile, and she is lovely, and you have great sex! …Enough of that: into the bathtub!  

The message here? The chemical delivers the potency.

The ads are a response to market demographics, of course; people of a certain age range and medical status are likely to watch the news. Capitalism has no conscience; neither, more often than not, do those who serve it. And those who produce ads cannot be expected to know that an ad for impotence will follow a report on bludgeoning of protestors in Tahrir Square. Fine. But if the profit motive demands the placement of a Viagra or Cialis ad in the news or a football game, can’t the ad be whimsical or funny or tender? Is it not plausible that an ad of that sort would be as effective, perhaps even more so, than images of bathtubs and waterfalls and the ideology of repression that employs them?

The capitalist idea of culture—market response should dictate the success or failure of a cultural enterprise or offering—has become a power relationship so one-sided and insidious that we pay for a punch in the face as if it were a beauty treatment.  The car commercial that appropriates a sixties rock anthem of freedom and rebellion isn’t merely exploiting nostalgia and a dated sense of cool, it is using that music as a funeral dirge for an identity and way of life, and enlisting us as accessories in the murder of our own fantasies of escape, rebellion, and self-assertion.  The ad for fast food that employs a cast of young African American men and women with a vaguely hip hop soundtrack is selling a largely white largely suburban audience the imaginary that Blackness can be bought at McDonald’s, with a side of fries, and selling the idea to its African American viewers that McDonald’s is their thing—as if this were a good thing. Yet such ads are models of respect and understanding compared to the endless representations of blue collar men and women, of all races, as semi-literate, overweight, uninformed, and inarticulate.   

The Wizard of Us

In the penultimate scene of “The Wizard of Oz,” Toto jumps out of the basket of the balloon that was to carry Dorothy and the Wizard back to Kansas. Dorothy chases after Toto and the Wizard sails away, leaving Dorothy stranded once again in Oz.  The story ends happily, of course, with Dorothy tapping her ruby red slippers three times, at the good witch Glinda’s instruction, and repeating “There’s no place like home.” There’s a certain cruelty to the scene. Dorothy is reduced to tears.  The Wizard, who was a fraud, after all, drifts away to Kansas while poor Dorothy, who has done so much good and has been so brave throughout her journey, is left behind, only to learn that she could have spared herself hardship and bewilderment merely by incanting that hypnotic formula…

That moment of Dorothy abandoned and in tears is a last, unsettling return to the glimpses of a grim, sometimes violent other-world running through the film: Depression-era Kansas in black and white, the neighbor turned witch crushed under a house, the flying monkey creatures tearing the Scarecrow limb from limb. If Dorothy is always home, as the good witch implies, then home is, in a sense, ‘no place,’ a faded screen that can be penetrated at any moment by a grotesque Other, something that can rip a house from its foundations, send it skyward to fall with a crash onto the (Capitalist?) yellow brick road and its attendant little people. It would be simplistic to reduce this terrifying something to the Depression or to the earlier economic issues that concerned the author of The Wizard of Oz series, L. Frank Baum (the gold standard), but something of the ambient anxiety and distress of the times has entered the movie and magnified and distorted within the narrative.

Compare this to the media treatment of an actual case of a child jumping off the basket of a hot air balloon before it took flight. In Oct., 2009 a six year old boy named Falcon Heene was reported to have stolen onto the basket of a homemade hot air balloon. According to the boy’s parents, the balloon accidentally slipped from it mooring before they discovered that their boy was missing.  The balloon sailed at 7,000 feet for 50 or 60 miles trailed by television helicopters.  Federal and local officials became involved…Live coverage of the story was picked up on television stations, radio, and the internet around the country. When the balloon landed and it was discovered that the basket was empty, media attention turned to the search for the body… There was none, of course; the story was a fraud concocted by the boy’s parents.

In the postmodern version of the balloon story, the child is the fantasm, the hallucinatory trick that draws us, the little people, on a journey, one in which the intermittent motif of cruelty or even sadism in the movie has become the dynamic of an all-encompassing, fascinated gaze: sadism everywhere, without commercial interruption. The story, as it was presented to the world, wasn’t that of a child’s flight to home and warmth but a child’s (possible) slow death of exposure and oxygen deprivation. The house doesn’t fall out of the sky, the child does.

There is nothing new in this phenomenon of a collective timeout as social resources are given over to the delirium of spectacle.  One could draw analogies to carnival, ancient tragedy, or event to medieval mystery plays with their coordination of guilds in presenting religious stories. Of course, these were performances. And the child in the balloon story was not performing, except, oddly, in agreeing to hide out somewhere while the drama played out. Yet the event was framed by performative and narrative devices—split screens, flash of ‘breaking news, news crawl on the bottom of the screen, commentary by journalists hardly differentiated from actors. This was an ‘event’ with production values and corporate implications (market share, advertising revenue).

What does this incident, with its coincidental parallels to that scene in “The Wizard of Oz,” suggest about cultural discourse and the prospects of art for the ninety-nine? A couple of things. First, the central concern in this incident is not what the TV and internet audience imagined it was witnessing but in whose eyes they saw themselves as witnessing it.  Clearly, the extent and magnitude of the attention devoted to the story was out of proportion to the importance of the event—incidents even more harrowing occur in war zones and famine zones and poor areas around the world, all the time—it was a story of privilege and command, of the power to suspend all interests except that of one family, to command the resources of government at all levels to address this incident. As was true of the parents, for those caught up in the story, the child was a pretext for a fantasy of stop-the-world–and-summon-the--aircraft privilege. The audience identifies with pharaoh and not the boy in the basket, with Herod and not the child in the cold: in other words, with the one per cent.

In Whose Eyes?

Thinking back on images of working class dads on television, scarcely any one of them resembled my father. The stupid, beer-swilling, oversexed, inarticulate fool on television didn’t resemble the men in the working class neighborhood where I grew up.  Most of the mothers on television didn’t resemble the mothers I knew, either. The mothers on TV were too wise or too shrill, too pretty or too haggard. They were constructs more than characters or types. They were constrained, polite vehicles with which to sustain interest sufficiently to sell ads. Some dads in my neighborhood - a few - drank too much, some mothers were shrill, some pretty, but they were not like those people on television. The men went off to work early in the morning and came back home tired nine or twelve or sixteen hours later. They had skills, they spoke in paragraphs, they, or a good many of them, read books and newspapers. The tribe of blue-collar oafs from Ralph Kramden to the King of Queens (peripheral smart or hip characters on these shows excluded) never made it to (or in) the real neighborhood I knew. This is not to exalt or idealize working class people. They had faults and limitations, in some instances tragic or violent shortcomings. They were just people. But they were not television people.

The debasement contests and adventures that take up so much air-time now dispense with the pretense of insight or sympathy.  Over and again the premise of contemporary programs is to establish a vulnerable group in a position of command or judgment over another vulnerable group: gay men refashioning uncomfortable straight men; a ‘third grader’ pitted in a general knowledge contest against a cheerily dumbed-down adult; an admitted sexual offender united on stage with several of his victims.  Those of us watching at home are enlisted in this configuration either through our supposed ironic detachment (look at those idiots on TV; they’re a riot!) or our consciously voyeuristic curiosity and enjoyment (we can learn something about people watching the serial rapist discuss his life history). 

Can one imagine members of the one per cent, or of even not quite one per cent, consenting to such a structure; here are four traders on Wall Street (identities concealed) baring their souls to a marriage counselor on TV, or a panel of lobbyists discussing their sexual proclivities with, say, a sex therapist or the retired madam of a high priced brothel… Such programs could conceivably draw large audiences, but they will not happen. Ordinary people will watch any level of humiliation of people like us on TV. TV is the marketplace of middle class self-loathing. Not only does it sell us things that contribute to problems with weight, lack of exercise, social anxiety (Am I attractive? Do I have an odor? Are my teeth bright enough) and so on, but it makes a comfortable evening ritual of decadent self-mockery. The ancient Romans watched slaves and war-prisoners fight in the arena; we watch ourselves knock each around emotionally and psychologically.

Greed is Soul Murder

Every major holiday these days, and some minor ones, provide an occasion to buy expensive things, if the corporate world has any say in the matter: diamonds for Valentine’s Day, a luxury automobile for Christmas, Prada for Easter and champagne for Thanksgiving. In America, the sentiment is, apparently, ‘I love Jesus so much I will buy a Lexus for His birthday.’ Capitalism, American-style, is undertaking a form of normative reprogramming in such instances, shifting the emphasis of a holiday from charity and simplicity to material pleasure to the patriotic obligation to spend (boosting the GDP) to competitive pressure to spend lots on that special someone in your life. Induce people to buy cars as Christmas presents and the baseline for a respectable present shifts to computers, flat screen TV’s, and so on. Those who cannot afford such spending, or who feel uncomfortable with the whole premise, are so marginalized as not to be acknowledged in public life, anywhere. To exist is to spend, and to spend beyond your means, so to exist is to incur more and more debt…

Similarly, a rite of passage for college students, even high school students, is to get a credit card. It has been established that kids in this age range have yet to develop the neurological basis for an understanding of the long range consequences of their actions. To exist is to exist now, for these kids, and to exist now is to spend and incur debt….

Thus, we begin young adulthood, many of us, from a position of material deficiency and obligation. Consumer debt and college loans compound our anxiety and our longing for comfort and ease, a state that the economy defers to retirement, if that… It is little wonder that the fantasy of achieving abundance, real wealth, becomes reified, for so many people, becomes a precious something we must protect, honor, and defend, despite all evidence that for most of us achieving such wealth out of a position of want is becoming increasingly rare… The system of debt and desire, of longing for things and racking up credit card debt to get them, becomes a familiar kind of self-torment, like drinking and drugs and overeating, a destructive feedback loop that starts to feel familiar and comfortable even though we know it is hurting us.

Guiding this process are conservative politicians, preachers, and affluent people who insist that greed  (euphemistically called free enterprise, the free market, and so on) is a utilitarian good, a force to push all of us to work hard and enjoy the benefits of our labor. How often have we been told that a certain billionaire or multi-millionaire ‘worked hard for his money’ and ‘deserves’ all the money that is coming to him or her, as if some formula or scale of ‘hard work’ were actually operative in this country, so that those who worked hard would be rewarded with riches and those who were lazy would have to content themselves with little? The subtext is much simpler, though no less deluded; everyone wants to be rich and the rich inspire us to work hard or do whatever is necessary to have that kind of life. In this theory, unlimited greed, or making and spending in the tens and hundreds of millions, inspires unlimited ambition and hard work.

 On the contrary, I argue, the extreme disparity in wealth and material comfort between the one percent and the ninety nine has encouraged a culture of self-loathing, self-destruction and self-abuse, particularly among those who do indeed work hard for their money.  Some are immune to such influence, but many are not. We eat too much, drink too much, spend too much time online or watching TV, we surf for porn, we troll for things on EBAY, we don’t climb enough mountains.

But the 1% do climb mountains, and swim in crystal waters in the Caribbean, do yoga, eat sushi, get their teeth whitened, take their libidos out for weekends in the Hamptons.

Greed is not good. Greed is soul murder. Greed degrades, mocks, and diminishes those subject to its influence. Greed doesn’t empower us; it puts down men and objectifies and exploits women. It may inspire on occasion, but not nearly as often or as powerfully as the intrinsic interest of a given subject or pursuit, be it mathematics or computer graphics or teaching, police work… How often have you encountered greed as a motivation for a teacher? Yet, who works harder, and to greater effect, than a second grade teacher?

In whose eyes do we see ourselves? Those of the Democrats and Republicans, the one per cent, the corporate owned media… In secular America, it can seem that there is nothing else…

Constructive Response

Road Runner paints a tunnel in hard rock and escapes into it. We can do the same. Neo takes the blue pill and follows Road Runner into the playground of the Matrix. We can do that as well. In both instances, the empowerment comes with a refusal to accept the premises given. 

Can you imagine a waste treatment plant or chemical plant blowing up near an expensive private school in the Upper East Side? Or a bus depot moving to Chappaqua and one in three children in the town developing asthma? In post-Reagan America, environmental racism is but one form of toxic classism. The media construction of working poor and blue collar workers portrayed as vulgar, crude, semi-literate and politically and culturally passive assists a social process in which environmental racism and other injustices may go unnoticed, until a crisis occurs that is so severe it cannot be overlooked. Conversely, the construction of the affluent as accomplished, intellectually and socially superior, beautiful and gifted contributes to a social process that makes it unimaginable for them to be exposed unnecessarily to pollution, toxic chemicals, fumes…

What does it feel like to be the kind of person for whom such scenarios are unimaginable, the kind of person whose sense of self-worth and place in the world is so unassailable and culturally protected that such scenarios just don’t occur? One premise of the Occupy movement is, I hope, that everyone in the ninety-nine per cent should feel emancipated this way.

 Is it appropriate to apply this premise to artistic expression in the Occupy movement, to consider work in film, photography, poetry and fiction, etc.? Does a given work contributes to this sense of dignity and self-worth or detracts from it? To the extent that this approach can be applied it will be an advance on typical practice in a great swath of social discourse now. As an illustration of this, a short film by Occupied Cinema  follows a whimsical direct action that culminates in the projection of the silhouette of the dancer Pavlova dancing in projected light over the walls of Grand Central Station, stepping people short with its beauty and simplicity. One fellow quite obviously falls in love for a few seconds. A public interlude of such elegance requires daring, the daring to respect the intelligence of the ordinary people walking through the station…

The Pavolva event was, of necessity and by design, free. Certain art forms—poetry, for example, and to a large extent dance—have for all but a very few practitioners lost any practical connection to making money. Yet impromptu and improvised forms of poetry—spoken arts poetry, slams and so on—enjoy enormous popularity. The zine world, as another example, is a place utilizing academic forms in innovative ways, and this world is as large as ever. Alongside the commercial and corporate venues of culture, another world is not only possible - it is here, available Now. We will see if Occupy Wall Street will encourage an alternative or counterculture artistic upsurge analogous to the one that happened in the sixties, the Beat era, the Harlem Renaissance, and so on. Perhaps it is already well underway, with peace gardens and untold numbers of Youtube Occupy videos, Occupy art shows, the bat projections during the Brooklyn Bridge march in November, posters and paintings, silk screen t-shirts, blogs and public readings. The spirit of this work is inclusive, dignified, engaged and generous. If this kind of work can help ordinary people—me, you, the people who repair your car or do your manicure or serve your food—to see ourselves as the people who matter most in this country, this will be a great thing.