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Charlatan · 02-05-2004, 07:59 AM

I've posted this here rather than the large conglomerated "oh my god she showed her breast" thread in an attempt to talk just about this issues this article raises rather than the conspiracies, rumours and gossip that are the main thrust of the other thread...

LINK

Quote:

Janet exposed our inner Clockwork Orange

By RUSSELL SMITH
Thursday, February 5, 2004 - Page R1

The least interesting thing about the Super Bowl entertainment was Janet Jackson's half-exposed breast. I watched it with a bunch of friends and we all saw it and no one commented.

We were too stunned by the weirdness of the rest of the spectacle. In the crazy quilt of visual references in this show, there were: a uniformed marching band, dancing hip-hop style, a gothy SM outfit, and a lot of jazz dancers wearing white overalls with braces and bowler hats that were inspired by Kubrick's 1971 film A Clockwork Orange.

In the hysteria that followed the sight of half a breast -- less breast than you regularly see on Fashion Television, about as much breast as you can see any weekend on any female bartender in a dance club in Toronto -- no one mentioned A Clockwork Orange. No one mentioned that this film was, at the time of its release, widely considered to be offensive and obscene, and it was banned in several countries.

In case you've forgotten that film's gruesome two hours (and most of us have forgotten, which is why it's on the Super Bowl), the banning was provoked by an extended and graphic rape scene.

The passing of this ultra-violence into the most mainstream, the most mundane, the most unadventurous of all art forms -- the mix of hip-hop and jazz dancing that turns contemporary pop music into Broadway musicals for moms -- is surely evidence of . . . something odd. Of what, exactly? This is such complicated semiotic terrain it's really hard to say.

There are two possible explanations.

1) Violence is part of the Super Bowl, as it is part of patriotism, as it is part of hip-hop. The costume designers of the musical dance number wanted to cleverly underline these shared tropes in a subtle visual joke. The outfits of futuristic thugs on very non-frightening gay dancers echoes the blurring of the ugly and the saccharine that occurs when the menacing Blackhawk helicopters rumble over Beyoncé, who's singing an overorchestrated national anthem. The same overlay of real violence and Hollywood schmaltz occurred when another young pop star sang his new soft 'n' sugary ballad while an actor dressed in a spacesuit planted a U.S. flag on a plastic piece of moon, in an obvious reference to the famous staged photograph of U.S. marines planting a flag on Iwo Jima. The point of the costume designers -- either cynical or subversive -- was that all violence turns into entertainment, and that the line between the frightening and the white bread is blurred right now, or perhaps that this link is precisely what exemplifies the American Way.

2) Nobody thought about any of this. Somebody remembered some cool costumes in an old film. They thought it would be fun. Those costumes have been so copied and pastiched and referenced that they have become simulacra: They are representations of which there is no original. Right now, the costumes from A Clockwork Orange are no longer such; they are free-floating visual styles. To the designers, and most likely to the vast bulk of the audience, they are completely meaningless, just another image. In a spectacle made up of widely disparate visual styles -- marching band, spaceman, pimp-rapper, stripper, real military hardware -- the addition of a really off-the-wall reference is not incongruous, it is actually the point. This is a collage, like a David Salle painting, except it is not conscious, not a point about postmodernism but postmodernism itself. We're living it.

Obviously, I think the second explanation is the more plausible. There isn't much that's self-conscious about this euphoric conflation of a lot of different American aesthetic values. When Janet Jackson sang her song about "gettin' together" to solve the world's problems, in the next breath encouraging us to think for ourselves and be different, she was not attempting to subvert the powerfully conformist atmosphere of a televised, nationalistic sporting event. The words don't really mean anything. They are interjections, rather like the military cheer "Hooah," symbolizing all-purpose good vibes and positive energy. Words in pop songs are not really differentiable meaning-units, but styles. Just like the rapid-fire editing of visuals, their meaning is not lexical. Another way of saying this might be that their meaning is symbolic rather than referential. They only have meaning as part of a total package, a package of surfaces.

The Federal Communications Commission was not in fact outraged by the gratuitous references to ultraviolence, but to half a female breast. They are threatening to fine each affiliate station of the network $27,500. As far as I can make out, their outrage is based on the idea that seeing half a female breast would be harmful to children. Nobody has attempted to explain this, but then explanation is really not part of the American Zeitgeist, is it?

Here's something that needs no explanation: Americans were so outraged by the breast-baring stunt that those who subscribe to the TiVo digital television service registered a 180-per-cent spike in replay activity after the half-time dance. TiVo has said that the incident was the most replayed moment of all TV moments it has ever measured. The second most replayed moments of this year's game were the commercials.

Michael Powell, the chairman of the FCC, is such a big fan of TiVo that he once called it "God's machine."

It is here that the most dedicated and objective of postmodern analysts cannot help but throw up his hands and say quite simply that this is the weirdest culture we've ever seen.

I couldn't agree more with this assesment. The breast is almost entirely beside the point and yet that is all that people can seem to focus on (except maybe artelevision)...