Cinema inferno
Our experience of culture has never been more visual than it is now. There is an unprecedented amount of gazing in today’s everyday experience. The vast majority of it is the stuff of creepy, uncanny goings on: for every hundred low-budget, indie films — and thousand mobile phone camera candids for that matter — there is probably only just a foot or so of video surveillance recorded by the omnipresent CCTV, our very own real-life Big Brother.
What, however, unites these many, disparate canvases is the spirit of youth.
Its essence is what is pushing forward the greater part of looking today, especially in film where new vitality is not just reinvigorating the industry from within — for examples you only have to turn to your local DVD store and rent David LaChapelle’s newly available, first full-length feature, Rize (2005), or indeed MTV and its various offspring for the continuous loop of video work from his protégé Johan Renck: Love At First Sight (2002), Me, Myself, and I (2003), Hung Up (2005) — but
lso through the flesh of film itself. Take the Shibuya girls at the centre of New York-based filmmakers Rikki Kasso and Jake Clennell’s recent adult film, Somewhere In the Middle, who are worldly-curious from unpreformulated points of view, beyond the scope of even the most visionary of our Hollywood screenwriters such as Charlie Kaufman and Sofia Coppola.
This mediation on sex and sensibility, in particular the individuals’ fetishes within the consuming cityscape, is a chronicle of shared experiences in love and affection, an explicit essay on “the psychology of sexual activity documented, decorated and consumed as entertainment,” as Kasso herself maintains.
Where else but in the isolated, overtly exploitative society of Tokyo would it be possible to stage such a daring blurring of fantasy with reality? In her new book, Female Chauvinist Pigs, Ariel Levy relates this strange sensation of misplaced intimacy through what she sees as the final saturation point of our society’s obsession with celebrity.
Waking up one morning to realise that she feels more intimate with Britney Spears than with her own husband, after having seen the starlet in various states of undress through the years — from her (ironically so) David LaChapelle Rolling Stone cover in April 1999 to David Edwards’ life-sized clay statue of the icon on all-fours, giving birth to her first child, entitled Monument to Pro-Life: The Birth of Sean Preston (2006) — Levy concludes the huge mystery and wild, forbidden promise that forms the basis of celebrity scandal is almost always followed by a profound sense of deflation and an urgent need to shower. I guess the queasy experience, however artful and purposeful its intentions may be, of watching Madonna leaping and stretching in a hot fuchsia, high-cut, crotch-clinching leotard for the duration of her last video, the Jamie King-helmed Sorry, takes on a similar, all too-familiar hue.
Watching the near-on fifty year-old perform her gyrations has been likened to accidentally walking into a gynaecology lecture then having to look on at your granny as she ice-skates. Is this all a post-nouveau, tongue-in-cheek take on her 1992 book, Sex, a document of outrage co-authored with Steven Meisel towards the sensibilities of white conservative America? Whether or not this is the case, that was then, this is now. The shock of the new is no longer what it was.
Ariel Levy’s point is that this reclassification of sluttishness from a slur to a cause for celebration comes at a net loss to us all. Porn has been domesticated. We have all been privy to the commodification of every area of human life without ever really questioning it. It is a cliché, but we are all hookers now. The selling of bodies and — more pertinently — minds through visual frames of reference is no longer questionable.
There may exist the faintest hints of a backlash — style bible POP recently sent out a press release complaining of celebrity overdose, promising never again to fall for their literal naked appeal — but the mood of earnest sobriety will always be replaced by the hedonistic lure of skin on celluloid. Our culture is only skin-deep: not a thing to be disparaged, more so it should be tighter woven into our visual literacy.
While film has also lost the all-embracing dominance of the days of Albert Camus, when he remarked that young men tried to look like Clark Gable and young women copied Marlene Dietrich, it is unarguable that cinema has seeped ineradicably into our collective consciousness. When New York’s Twin Towers fell on 11 September 2001, the most frequent comment was how “just like a movie” the event was.
One reviewer of Paul Greengrass’ current critically acclaimed 9/11 drama on the subject, United 93, said: “We keep replaying that day in the movie-eye of our mind”. It is that movie-eye that has fed the rise of mass communication to its towering position as the governing influence of our everyday lives. Mass media are like the memories in a mind half-asleep. They are flatteners and foreshorteners. Everything is interwoven.
Mass arts offer prêt-a-porter words and images, ready for us to try on for size. I am presently in awe of how I always try to second-guess (consistently incorrectly) the contestants on whatever series of Big Brother that happens to be playing, solely from some fleeting first impression. I love how, within the course of the programme’s run, those impressions will have been wholly dispelled in favour of some other character sketches.
Take Lea, the thirty-five year-old glamour model who I at first thought to be a nurturing mother figure for the hoards of pram-faced twentysomethings thrown en masse into the house this year. After having seen snatches of her backstabbing as this week progressed, it quickly transpired that I could not have been more wrong from the start. Ultimately though, this is always to be the primary plot device of our nature: for us to exist as such casual yet acutely sensitive voyeurs.
The pornographic visuals then become part of our everyday, internal fictions. The very last picture show.
8th Jun 2006