Exploitation Films and Poetic Justice

I hope you'll excuse the shamless self-promotion here, and I know I've already blogged once this week, but reading Neve's chapter on the censorship and politics of noir reminded me of a conference essay that I wrote in the spring about poetic justice in exploitation movies of the 1960s (I know, more 60s stuff...).

Here's the thrust of my argument: I talk about the use of poetic justice to "punish" "transgressions" of sex, drugs, and violence in several late 60s movies and suggest that "In the late 60s [. . .] youth culture was no longer incipient. Indeed, there’s much evidence to suggest that while exploitation cinema prior to the 1960s was primarily aimed at parents, late 60s exploitica was aimed at young and old alike. In the late 60s youth culture had itself reached adolescence, and for the first time, youth culture was truly mass culture, not just some underground or alternative. For this reason, the moral stakes were higher and were important not just to the youth and not just to their parents, but to the culture at large."

I thought of this because I feel like it dovetails with Neve's comment that "The censors [. . .] always saw to it that evil was punished in these pictures and that sin or corruption was depicted with a degree of restraint" (98)

If Neve's essay or my preview has piqued your interest, you can check out my essay by following this link.

Again, I apologize if this feels tacky or isn't in the spirit of this blog. My intention here is simply to add to the discussion, so I hope it doesn't seem like I'm instead trying to directed it toward myself. Just give me dirty looks in class today if you feel it's warranted.

The Ritual in the Age of Sonic Reproduction

The last few pages of Jonathan Sterne's chapter, "The Resonant Tomb," brought me back to thinking about Walter Benjamin and his "The Work of Art and the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." In the Epilogue, Benjamin warns of the aestheticization of the politics, the de-humanization of the masses, and how these trends lead to war. Fascism, he argues, "sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right [to change property relations], but instead a chance to express themselves." I believe Sterne's discussion of the Omaha tribe and the desperate, sympathetic attempt of anthropologists to preserve their rituals and songs resonates with this argument. Those anthropologists who recognized the genocidal policies of the United States government toward Native Americans certainly knew they could do nothing to change the property relations (ie: land seized from the Native Americans), so they offered the Omaha, at the very least, "a chance to express themselves." Thus, they launched a project to "preserve music, ritual, and languages that federal policy at the time of their recording had intended to drive into the ground within a generation" (qtd. in Sterne 331).

Benjamin claims that "the earliest art works originated in the service of a ritual," and though these works of art are alienated from their "aura," they are never fully divorced from it. These idols, talismans, or other objects used in ritual are, more or less, constant from one moment to the next. Early recorded sound, on the other hand, was subject to a "triple temporality." The medium itself can degrade. The recorded sound is just a the audible aspect of a fragment of a ritual. The recorded event is separate, modular, broken from the past. These temporalities are symptoms of translating the "interiority" of the "live" event into the "exteriority" of the recorded form. Furthermore, there "was no "unified whole" or idealized performance from which the sound in the recording was then alienated" (Sterne 332). The song or ritual exists within time. It can be present one moment and absent the next. This seems to explain why many members of the tribe were less interested in preserving rituals that the anthropologists. They were not seen as something material, durable. Putting a song in cylinder form and playing it later would not reproduce the ritual.

However, the same techniques of preservation which "exteriorized" the "interiority" of these rituals are also responsible for bringing the audible aspects of the recorded events back to the Omaha tribe nearly a century later. It seems to me that these recordings, in their materiality, can serve as a kind of talisman or spiritual object. An item used in a ritual (an idol, rattle, or drum) is given meaning by the person using it, and these recordings work in the same way. This is achieved through a "re-interiorization" of the "exteriorized" event by the individual. This may seem like a sleight of hand, substituting the recreated or reconceived interiority of someone today for the original interiority at the time of the recording. I would counter this by saying that culture is mutable. The interiority of a song is not static from invocation to invocation, or singer to singer. Each instantiation of a song allows for change; its interiority is recreated each time it is performed.

Sterne stops short of claiming this, saying only that "If the past is, indeed, audible, if sounds can haunt us, we are left to find their durability and their meaning in their exteriority" (333). A return to Benjamin can explain why even if a recorded ritual can be "re-interiorized," this does not guarantee the revivification of a destroyed culture. Benjamin sees the masses under Fascism, subjugated to the will of a dictator, as analogous to art in mechanical reproduction, violated by being "forced into the production ritual values." We only have fragments, both of the remaining Omaha and their rituals. Reuniting the two is "no doubt a good thing," but it is not enough to reverse the damage of this fragmentation and is powerless to change property relations or allow for any real exercise of rights (331).

Our Commodities, Ourselves

Gitelman and Haltman both argue that technologies in their respective periods invoke femininity to ease the user's transition from the old to the new. If the manufacturers of phonographs and telephones had to position their products as feminine, domestic, and personal (or has having a kind of personality), in what forms has this kind of personal identification survived? How do we now cope with new technologies, in a world of niche products and targeted marketing?

I don't really have an answer - this blog is ultimately a shameful excuse to post the above video. I think it's safe to say, however, that personal identification with technology is more important than ever. I think we tend to see ourselves as fully transitioned into our postmodern, posthument era, but our advertising belies this assumption. Apple's TV spots come to mind - the ones with the hip young guy in jeans and the old stuffed shirt. If you'd rather hava a beer with the Mac guy, well, you'd rather have a beer with a Mac. Even without Apple's ads, they've built this idea of "personality" into the way their products work - as in the ipod's request that you give it a name on your computer.

In our cultural characterization, we have slotted contemporary gadgets into the role of domestic assistants - sometimes by invoking gender or race, other times by simply positioning them as human. I also wonder if this positioning relies on the global structure of technological production and support. If my ipod was made in China, and its support network is in India, isn't it a tad disturbing that it's positioned as my servant?

Archiving Ephemera

The archive is a looming figure in both Sterne and Gitleman's histories of new media. So I hope I'm you don't think I'm being to presentist in trying to overlap their methodological concerns onto a current artifact: YouTomb. You've all, no doubt, heard of/visited YouTube, and in doing watching their videos, there's a good chance you've violated the copyright of someone or another. As much as YouTube promotes DIY culture, it also serves as a reservoir of free videos from larger copyrighted works. Not to get too mired in the legal questions surrounding this site, suffice it to say that, there is enough corporate pressure put on YouTube, which, by the way, is owned by Google, to require thousands of video's removal each day to prevent lawsuits. A group of concerned users at MIT have created an archive of these excised videos at the website YouTomb, http://youtomb.mit.edu/. While not all these examples are copyright related (there is also the question of decency, mind you) rest assured that plenty are.

Sterne positions his reading of sound recording in terms of tropes of morbidity and "bourgeois modernity." While I think you could critique him for getting a little "save the rainforest" preachy by the end of his chapter, nonetheless, the stakes are apparent, and intriguing, in his dual reading of death of "other" cultures alongside the material aspects of the machine itself. When we couple this with Gitelman's claim of Victorian fascination with originality and "presence" we see that the question of the fleetingness of both cultural material and archives themselves is a central question for cultural studies, and the academy more generally.

This brings us back to the Internet, the supposed harbinger of ephemeral times, reality here for one click only. While people are trying to refute this notion, convincingly showing that "every click leaves a trace," the sheer number of videos on YouTomb suggests that our culture(s), taking place more and more online are going to be/are an archive we need to start, well, archiving in a serious way. To steal a telling example: When scholars of Salman Rushdie return to his writing after his death what do they count as "work"? Are his text messages worthy of authorial correspondence? Is his Internet history worthy of "creative inspiration"? His iPod playlist? You get the gist. The point here is twofold: first, the Internet is not as temporary as commonly believed, but if we don't start asking and answering questions about the nature of the digital archive we will not be able to reconstruct the terabytes of data we are cleansing, deleting, spilling coffee on, etc. in order to write cultural history or ethnographgies of our textually rich, copyrighted cultures of today.

Conservation, not preservation

Just a quick blog post that on the front page of the Post-Gazette today there was a little info on something called "ecopods" for "green burials." I'm attaching a link to the website hosting the local news article. It's interestingly timed since in this there is no preservation.

Kennedy Parody Records

Sterne’s “A Resonant Tomb” chapter from his book The Audible Past got me thinking about how sound recordings can preserve a voice or culture beyond its natural lifetime. Sterne makes a parallel between sound recordings that “can” the voice of the dead and spirit photography, which similarly captures the exteriority of an individual for the sake of posterity.

For whatever reason—maybe because I’m a longtime record collector, maybe because I often find myself preoccupied with 1960s pop culture bullshit—Sterne’s discussion made me think of a series of pop records made during that era that satirized the US’s “first family”: the Kennedys. These records came about, in my opinion, as a result of two not unrelated things: first, the 1960s witnessed an explosion of recorded music that has never been equaled before or since—not only in terms of volume of music/programming released but also in the boom of the record business as a major industry—and second, the sudden presence of a president who was young, sexy, and cool: JFK.

One such record is Sing along with JFK, released in 1961. This record used actual clips from Kennedy’s speeches that were then crafted into catchy pop songs. This record, like other political parody records of the era, was made mostly for the AM radio market. Click here to check out a paradigmatic sample from this album.

By far the best-known Kennedy parody record was Vaughn Meader’s The First Family, released in 1962. Meader, a stand-up comic, had become well known for his impersonations of the president and decided to make an album lampooning JFK and his political cronies. The spoken-word comedy album was an enormous success, selling 7.5 million copies—more than any long-play record album ever had sold before! It also won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year in 1963. To get a sense of its success, try going into any thrift store in the United States and flipping through their used records: you’ll find at least one or two copies of The First Family. I always run into the damn things when I’m hunting for something cool. Someone on Youtube recently posted the entire album, which you can check out if you’d like.

Of course, the mirth came to an abrupt end in November, 1963 when Kennedy was assassinated. You just can’t laugh about JFK’s Harvard accent once you’ve seen his son saluting his casket. Meader’s top-selling album quickly dropped from sight, and needless to say, the JFK parody record era ended.

In a few years, though, the dust had settled and there was a new Kennedy to make fun of: Senator Robert “Bobby” Kennedy. A trio of comedians who called themselves the Hardly Worthit Players recorded a parody version of the Troggs’ hit “Wild Thing” by impersonating Robert Kennedy and released it as by “Senator Bobby.” The chatter at the beginning of the song declares it “take 72,” and the fake engineer encourages the singer by telling him “All right, senator, this one’s for the Democrats, so let’s really hear it.” The song became a Top 20 hit, and many sang along with Bobby as he crooned, “Uh, Wild Thinga…you make my, uh, haaaart singa.”

An entire album of Senator Bobby music was released with a cover that parodied the Beatles’ cover art for their 1965 album Rubber Soul. The 1967 Kennedy spoof album, to contrast, was called Boston Soul, and it featured Senator Bobby “singing” cover versions of pop hits like “Mellow Yellow,” “96 Tears,” and “Daydream.” Some of Senator Bobby’s political colleagues, including “Mr. President” (Lyndon Johnson) and “William Rebuttley, Jr.” (William F. Buckley, Jr.), joined the senator on several tunes. See this Youtube video for a clip of the Hardly Worthit Players “performing” their hit on the old Hollywood Palace TV show in 1967. Wow, those were the days.

Once again, however, the laughter died when Kennedy died. Robert Kennedy’s assassin also killed the last of the Kennedy parody records.

Nevertheless, these records remain as documents of the era and its political climate. If I may return to Sterne in closing, I think his use of the “can” metaphor to articulate sound recordings’ ability to “preserve” the voice of the dead applies rather fitly here. Although for the most part these parody records don’t capture the voices of either John or Robert Kennedy, what they do capture is the spirit of parody. It’s so easy to retrospectively view the 1960s and its fallen heroes with an inaptly rosy sense of awe or nostalgia. Because of the assassination of the Kennedys, their hallowed history tends to obscure the fact that they—like all politicians—were often the butt of jokes. So, in the case of things like the Vaugn Meader album and the “Wild Thing” record, while they may not have accurately “canned” the voices of the Kennedys (Sterne suggests that such “canning” can never really be accurate, anyway), they did successfully “can” the voice of parody, which we can reproduce simply by finding one of the old records and listening in.

My [Death] Space

Jonathan Sterne introduces a variety of ways in which we may read our media, and our fascination with an ever-growing gamut of new media technology, as intimately connected to human anxieties about death. The idea, even, that recording technology helps us through a conceptual switch from the idea of "live" music or sound (as it is termed) to "canned" (preserved) sound, and that our terminology for it has developed thus, is further evidence that this is eerily the case. Sterne's discussion of Nipper, the RCA dog, is an early example of where we might see media technology hotly pursuing the dream of immortality (and, by the way, I have a reproduced version of Nipper hanging in my house, and it's totally a coffin. Like, totally. It's right above my piano, the dead and the living side by side ... )

And while I'm on the subject ... if you haven't been there before, take a little trip to MyDeathSpace.com, a site which collects, and editorializes upon, the public MySpace profiles of the deceased. The site can't actually contain the profiles, so it links to them and categorically organizes them. It is interesting to note how many of the dead who now populate and sustain the pages of the site are under the age of 35; this, I think, points to some telling generational markers that reveal the modern relationship of death to media and the technology which enables that media. MySpace, thus, appears in fundamental conception to bear a lot of resemblance to early sound recording -- namely, that the ephemerality of human life can achieve permanence in digital format -- since it is able to chronicle a person's chosen public identity, including sounds, pictures, movies, etc., and sustain that public identity into the great unknown.

MyDeathSpace.com, claiming to be "MySpace.com's cemetary," presents an veneered array of the dead much the same way MySpace.com does of the living. And, as with the living, people are allowed the opportunity to "interact" with the deceased. They can leave them messages, make public comments about them, or merely flip through catalogues of pictures, evincing an "active audience role" in the context of these pages. Perhaps these pages constitute, for this new generation, tombstones of the 21st Century.

But, then again, maybe MyDeathSpace.com will have a run for it's money once these babies really take off -- digital tombstones.