viz. - genre

Winning Humility at Awards Shows

Rachel Schneider — Tue, 28 Jan 2014 03:15:06 +0000

Image Credit: Huffington Post/Getty Images

The Grammys provided plenty of viz bait: Beyoncé twerking with Jay-Z, unlikely performing duos like Robin Thicke and the band Chicago, Pharrell’s be-memed hat, and Taylor Swift’s GIF-able dancing. However, what I want to discuss is something that occurred after the Grammys: Macklemore, who won awards for Best New Artist, Best Rap Song, Best Rap Performance, and Best Rap Album, acknowledged another victor after the fact.

On his Instagram, Macklemore not only tweeted a picture of a text he sent to his fellow nominee Kendrick Lamar, whose album good kid, m.A.A.d. city was also nominated for Best Rap Album, but also explained the image to his readers:

Image Credit: Screenshot from Instagram

It seems like Macklemore may have anticipated some haters here, who would agree with his assessment. But to privately send Kendrick Lamar his sympathy is one thing; to show it to others on the Internet is quite a different act. If rap is a genre known for battling, here Macklemore displays how “honored” and “completely blown away to win anything much less 4 Grammys” he is. Instead of asserting his talent, he gives his thanks to his fans and bluntly tells Lamar, “You got robbed.” Saying “That’s what this is about. Progress and art,” Macklemore plays the part of a liberal do-gooder, conscious of his humility. If he failed to show respect in his acceptance speech, he does so here. How does this rhetoric also work alongside the Grammys’ performance of his hit “Same Love”?

The enormous spectacle—the song is taken over by Madonna’s “Open Your Heart” and Queen Latifah marrying 33 couples, many of whom were gay/lesbian—moves Macklemore away from center stage, literally. This may be necessarily, considering that Macklemore has been critiqued as a straight white man for speaking on behalf of GLBT rights in “Same Love” in place of queer black performers, as well as directing critiques to a largely African-American hip-hop community without acknowledging his cultural privilege. Writing about this particular Instagram, the New York Times’s Jon Caramanica frames it as “a cleansing and an admission of guilt” for succeeding in rap without proper street cred:

So when Macklemore bests Mr. Lamar — and Jay Z, Drake and Kanye West — for a rap award, he makes sure that he kisses the ring. “I robbed you” is a strikingly powerful phrase in this context: a white artist’s muscling into a historically black genre, essentially uninvited, and taking its laurel. In a nutshell, this is the entire cycle of racial borrowing in an environment of white privilege: black art, white appropriation, white guilt, repeat until there’s nothing left to appropriate.

It’s interesting to read this moment against other award acceptance speeches, as the genre requires artists to show gratitude and humility in their moment of triumph. Witness, for example, Sally Field’s tearful declaration that “you like me, right now, you like me” for the 1985 Best Actress Oscar:

Yet if Sally Field musters this earnest thanks for her second Oscar win, the extremely talented and frequently-nominated Meryl Streep playfully mocks the genre in such moments as when she stated at the 2004 Emmys, “There are some days when I myself think I’m overrated … but not today.” As The New Yorker’s Michael Schulman says, “The Meryl Streep acceptance speech is an art unto itself: elegant, loopy, cunningly self-aware, and impeccably delivered—in short, everything you expect from a Meryl Streep performance, condensed to three minutes. Where else can you see fake humility, fake gratitude, and fake spontaneity delivered with such aplomb?”

Image Credit: Know Your Meme

Though, perhaps the most infamous awards speech came at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, where Kanye West interrupted Taylor Swift’s speech to praise Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies” video: “Yo Taylor, I’m really happy for you, I’ll let you finish, but Beyoncé has one of the best videos of all time. One of the best videos of all time!” Considering that Beyoncé’s husband Jay-Z and West are close friends, it makes sense he’d speak up for her. It’s also interesting that West wasn’t advocating for his own excellence—he interrupted the speech to praise another—but hijacking Swift’s speech got him called a “jackass” by the President. The moment turned into a major meme that even Jay-Z had to imitate, interrupting Kanye at a different awards ceremony. In fact, after that outburst, Kanye himself had to perform humility by publicly apologizing:

Image Credit: The Los Angeles Times

In fact, part of Kanye’s explanation involves an assertion of his character, he’s “a fan of real pop culture!!!” so much so that “I gave my awards to OutKast when they deserved it over me ... that’s what it is.” If not humble for Beyoncé on the stage, he later insists that he bows to the greats too.

Kind of like how Macklemore did, too. It might be interesting to consider what kinds of humility can be possible within moments of triumph. How can you be authentically humble or a gracious winner, especially depending on your position within the community? For many of his fans, Macklemore’s text was him showing he was a good sport. For others like Jon Caramanica, Macklemore’s appeal failed:

In his effort to be gracious, Macklemore was uncomfortably splitting hairs. As has so often happened in the year or so since he emerged as a pop force, an act that was presumably meant to be selfless and open-minded instead came off as one of self-congratulatory magnanimity.

In such large venues as nationally televised programming, it may be hard to win over all audiences. But perhaps #respect never hurts.

Reading Django Unchained as Camp

Laura Thain — Sat, 02 Mar 2013 08:13:13 +0000

Image Credit: Vanity Fair

Although it’s been two months since its initial release, the internet is still abuzz with social critique of Tarantino’s newest film Django Unchained. Roxane Gay, a staff writer for Buzzfeed, argues that rather than encouraging a national discourse on slavery, slavery is instead “the movie’s easily exploited backdrop.” The movie functions instead as “a white man’s slavery revenge fantasy, and one in which white people figure heavily and where black people are, largely, incidental.” Finally, she concludes, “Django Unchained isn’t about a black man reclaiming his freedom. It’s about a white man working through his own racial demons and white guilt.”

Many of Django’s critics couch their arguments in similar terms—that is, that while Tarantino claims to reignite a discourse on slavery in Django Unchained, he in fact privileges genre over content in a way that dangerously decontextualizes our most central national trauma. I have argued in an early post that privileging medium over content can function as a form of censorship. Here, I want to discuss how the same aesthetice practice can simultaneously suggest and defer engagement with tragedy and trauma.

When Django Unchained was in the drafting stage, Tarantino hinted at his new project to The Telegraph’s John Hiscock:

"I want to explore something that really hasn't been done. I want to do movies that deal with America's horrible past with slavery and stuff but do them like spaghetti westerns, not like big issue movies. I want to do them like they're genre films, but they deal with everything that America has never dealt with because it's ashamed of it…But I can deal with it all right, and I'm the guy to do it."

In trying to find a way to engage with Tarantino’s claims—his claims to authority, his privileging of genre--I found DD’s argument on WhitesEducatingWhites the most provocative. In his article entitled "Whiteness Unchained: When A National Shame Becomes Camp," the author argues that although “[the] movie supposedly centered around a slave turned bounty hunter in pursuit of revenge,” it “stars white people with Black people in supporting roles.” Although DD never unpacks his claim that Django Unchained is campy, it struck me that reading Django Unchained as camp is key to deconstructing some of its problematic relationships to slavery, race, violence, and history. I refer here to Sontag’s seminal essay “Notes on Camp” for some basic definitions of the form and its mechanisms.

First, “the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.” Camp depends on hyperbole and in always privileging form above content. Second, camp requires rhetorical distance: “Things are campy, not when they become old - but when we become less involved in them, and can enjoy, instead of be frustrated by, the failure of the attempt.” Third, camp is a comedic form, it “proposes a comic vision of the world. But not a bitter or polemical comedy.” Following this, it requires aesthetic engagement in the act of detachment: “If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.” The aesthetic experience in camp is formed with a sensual engagement with the artifice—the genre, the medium, the act of mediation—itself, rather than, as in tragic forms, the content of that artifice. And, as Sontag notes, “Detachment is the prerogative of an elite.” Finally, its “essential element is seriousness.” Camp is earnest, even when that seriousness fails. Camp cannot be ironic.

Image Credit: Chief Crew

“Campifying” violence and tragedy becomes especially problematic because earnestness is the defining element of camp. There is no room for irony, critique, or satire in camp as a discourse; rather, respect for the artifice or mediation itself is the militant narrative force. If, as Northrup Frye argues, irony is the central discourse of satire, then sincerity has the same function for camp. The moment campiness attempts irony, it becomes satiric. This is why a movie like The Producers draws on elements of camp but is not campy itself—it instead implements elements of irony to levy critique against the “producers” of Broadway performances specifically by way of aestheticizing the public’s near-universal disdain for the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany. The moment The Producers ridicules Nazism through camp, it becomes satire.

For Tarantino to claim the rhetorical distance that irony provides in addressing the national shame of slavery would be problematic from the onset, but in privileging genre over content, he extinguishes even this possibility. Instead, the film functions to aesthetize a violence so terrible that, as Tarantino notes, we as a nation struggle to “deal with,” especially in filmic depictions. By doing so, he creates rhetorical distance from the content itself. He does not campify the experience of slavery so much as he avoids its portrayal, which exists little outside of highly-mediated (i.e. highly aestheticized) depictions of violence. It is the “campification” of this violence that is so dangerous, because it encourages the reader to indulge in the violent fantasy from all angles—that of the slaver, that of the slave—without interrogating it. In operating on the assumption that slavery is universally rejected by the contemporary American audience, Tarantino defers engaging with violence in an immediate sense. Rather, he hypermediates and hyperaestheticizes violence at the cost of content—and in the case of Django Unchained, that content is any substantial character development for the people of color within the film, as well as any depiction of the actual practice of slavery.

Image Credit: Wondersinthedark

What we receive instead is proto-Klansmen who are humanized through the demotic language that distracts from the intent to commit unspeakable violence. We see women slaves sauntering the plantation grounds or dining aside their masters in the garb of the aristocracy. And we see Django himself executing his first act of revenge in emasculating, Fauntleroy garb. (Sharen Davis, the film's costume designer, designed the valet "uniform" after Gainsborough's "The Blue Boy".) The lives of slaves themselves are mythologized—most explicitly, Django and Broomhilda as Siegfried and Brünnhilde in the Nibelungenlied—while the white characters are humanized, individualized, and given complex characteristics. Because of this dynamic, King Schulz leads the film, acting as its primary agent.

Image Source: Think Progress

Finally, I would like to suggest that the film’s Academy Award nominations serve as further evidence for the dangers of camp and Hollywood’s complicitness in this sort of problematic and incomplete engagement with slavery. The film was nominated for a total of five Academy Awards: Best Cinematography, Best Screenplay, Best Picture, Best Sound Editing, and Best Supporting Actor. Best Screenplay and Best Picture are all accolades that belong primarily to Tarantino himself and show the Academy’s admiration for Tarantino’s vision, and Best Cinematography and Best Sound Editing rely heavily on the film’s engagement with the genre of the Spaghetti Western. All of these nominations demonstrate the Academy’s deep respect for the bare-bones aesthetic of the film itself. But Christoph Waltz’ nomination and win for Best Supporting Actor implies complicitness even with the false premise (of engagement with national trauma, of engagement with slavery) of the film itself. Although Christoph Waltz has the most lines, the most screen time, and the most character development—criteria that in virtually any other film would qualify him as the “lead”—his nomination for Supporting Actor is necessary to support the films’ other Academy-nominated accolades. We must believe that Waltz supports Jamie Foxx as lead to believe in the film. But this is one final fantasy that collapses under scrutiny.