Katniss Everdeen is valued because she’s good at something.

The feminist community has been enthusiastic about The Hunger Games because it subverts the tired filmic focus on the bodies of heroines in favor of evoking a competent, self-secure young woman with goals and skills, and an identity apart from her sexuality.

This interpretation seemed far too simplistic and pat for me. I spent a long time trying to figure out why. And now I know it’s because this diminishes the film’s complexity. Her story actually forces us to ask a much more difficult set of questions.

First of all, her presentation in the film doesn’t diminish her attractiveness. I find active, badass women attractive. In fact, she’s specifically attractive because of her resourcefulness, her effectiveness, her independence, her lethality, and her dedication to aggressively defending those close to her. I know a lot of males that feel the same way, a lot of males that are far more riveted by an onscreen female like Katniss than by images of Halle Barry strutting around in a vinyl costume.

Are women more comfortable with men being attracted to them in this way?

Feminist critics have been thrilled about the fact that hers aren’t qualities traditionally associated with hegemonically enforced femininity. But you know what they are associated with?

Hegemonically enforced masculinity.

We attain our status as culturally approved males by being good at three things: violence, financial success, and sexual conquest. Katniss has two down, and by remaining basically sexually chaste (but charged with romantic possibility) lifts one of the standard tropes of female objectification and implants it in her performance of capable self-reliance.

Now, within the context of the story, this performance is highly problematized. After all, these kids are being forced to fight to the death on a reality TV show. They’re subject to a very oppressive system, and this system functions as a sort of microcosmic, very aggressive capitalism– they’re commodified, they’re used, they’re filmed while they hack each other to bits. And we can see, via the encasing story, that this is a problem. we can see that what’s done to these kids is desperately sick, and we can all nod our heads sagely and agree that the world really shouldn’t be like that.

The problem is, the world is like that. That’s the genius of the film’s commentary. When we grow up, we’re forced, in a capitalistic society, to survive via our skills, and we’re assigned value based on whether or not we can provide the culture things that it wants. And if we can’t, we’re in trouble. Historically, women and men have been forced into cramped, stunting boxes vis a vis their social value– women are reduced to their bodies, and men are reduced to their economic accomplishments. If you’re an unattractive female, you’re not worth much. Ditto if you’re a male who doesn’t contribute valued labor.

If you get the urge, after that paragraph, to shout, “that’s not true anymore! Women can accomplish things now, and men are allowed to be pretty! The lines are blurring!”– You’re right. But only certain lines. If you can’t prove your value to the culture in one of the above two ways, you’re still fucked, no matter what gender you are.

I’m not sure that, in our struggle toward a level playing field, we have any really thorough understanding of what kind of game’s going to be played ON that field. I don’t know what we think is going to happen when we’ve finally eliminated every apparent person-to-person disparity in initial starting-gun position. But the existence of a film like The Hunger Games provides some interesting glimpses.

It would be so much simpler if the film offered, via some sort of critical evaluation, an implicit alternative. If it forced us to envision a world without blood-sport, that might eliminate some of the anxiety of our position. But that’s precisely what the film fails to do– people flock to see it because it contains violence and adventure. Because they want to watch Katniss triumph in kill-or-be-killed situations. Exactly the same reason people flock to the Hunger Games.

The critical subtext is there, to be sure. We’re made to feel the pain and horror of the situation. But any way out of our own capitalistic, bloodthirsty predicament as men and women is sabotaged by our attraction to the film, and by the way the dynamics of the film work on us. Does anybody really like the fact that Katniss is forced into a sort of romantic facade with Peeta? No. Because he’s unattractive. And weak. Wherever we go, our mating responses are there waiting for us. Would you want to be with somebody you found unattractive? Do you compete for mates? It doesn’t matter if you do it with makeup or with acts of valor, what I’m asking is, do you do it at all?

The removal of the masks of individual (and, admittedly, problematic) hegemonic struggles doesn’t reveal some shining, egalitarian utopia underneath. It reveals what Howard Bloom called The Lucifer Principle. We’re all here to win, in a very real way, and that is where evil comes from.

Our inability to excise value-judgement and competition from our sexuality testify loudly. Aleister Crowley apparently had sex with people that he found repulsive, on purpose, in an act of rebellion against the fascism of his own biology. Everyone I tell that fact to recoils in awe, as though he’s performing some kind of heroic or terrifying act. We want what we want, and generally speaking, we’ll fight to get it. Monastic orders the world over regard controlling sexual impulses as primary on the road to enlightenment, and there’s a reason for that.

It’s possible, to mitigate these atavistic impulses with social structures, and that’s basically what we do. But we should be clear that that’s what we’re doing. We’re not trying to unmask some kind of smooth, happy system of human interrelationships by scraping away the grime of barbarism. We’re creating a tenuous web of restraints and parsing-tubes, customs of interaction, a system that does its best to reduce human pain while giving us all what we want. The fight against evil is an act of creation, not an act of destruction. This is precisely, and paradoxically, the impetus for the creation of the Hunger Games too– the book, the film, and the blood sport.

“People joke all the time about the horrible things they don’t do, they don’t do them. It’s absurd.”
-Debi Newberry

Here’s to absurdity. The controversy surrounding the new Katy Perry video completely misses the point, and the implications of the dialog vis a vis the current American cultural mainframe disturb me in a couple of directions.

I’ve seen two arguments fronted. The first is that she’s participating in irresponsible military propaganda by glorifying the process of joining the marines. The second is that those condemning the video are being disrespectful to the marines and those serving in general by decrying their calling as reprehensible.

This kind of black-and-white thinking about art will always make me want to throw up.

During the 90′s, Marilyn Manson’s frank deconstructions of violence, fascism, religion, and sexuality earned him the enmity of the country’s conservatives, who seemed terrified that any young person exposed to his messages would immediately and literally enact the gruesome imagery Manson was so good at evoking. General consensus among creative people dismissed this approach to his work as paranoia. Despite the spottiness of his later work, his status as a rock gonzo journalist was cemented in Bowling for Columbine, where he did a better job of summarizing the zeitgeist in five minutes than Michael Moore did with his entire film.

The moment we suspect a music video of being subversive of our own more liberal framework, all the nuances in our thinking go out the window in favor of decades-old media theories that draw direct one-way relationships between the broad ideological markers of a piece of art and the behavior of that art’s consumers.

This narrowness of thinking has blinded us to the nuances of an evocative filmic reimagining of a relatively straightforward pop song. The song’s chorus is the key. “This is a part of me that you’re never going to ever take away from me”. This is a song about individuality.

“But joining the military is the opposite of individuality!” come the plaintive cries. This is where the problem begins. Individuality is a function of one’s degree of self-definition outside of compulsory structures. This means that an Individual is one who makes a choice– to join or not, to get this job or that job or no job, to self-direct based on the idea of “free will” (which may not exist). The video makes it very clear that Perry is choosing to leave a cultural architecture with one set of expectations– her relationship and her normal life, grown sour and emotionally harmful to her– for another cultural architecture, one that will gift her with experiences that have nothing to do with her man. She wants to be challenged, she wants to be changed. She wants to learn how to kill.

I’ve seen people make decisions like this before while leaving relationships only instead of joining the military they move to Paris, or cut their hair, or do a bunch of hallucinogenic drugs. The video even incorporates the ubiquitous “post-breakup haircut” (guys, ask a girl about this) as a trope. The common thread is that the person wants to take apart their old identity and experience something that would be totally alien to their old partner. They want to emerge on the other side of that a totally different person. The first person, the person beholden to the crippling relationship they left, they want to kill. As thoroughly as possible.

The purpose of military training is to break down the identity, initially. Candidates for service are abused, degraded and subjected to withering physical strain. This is classic brainwashing: one of the effects of this process is to make the initiated person totally dependent on their new masters for food, shelter, and physical safety. The individual is stripped of everything that characterized their former social self so that a new self can be installed: the identity of a skilled, lethal machine. How many of your own values you can maintain in the midst of that is sort of an open question. They will try to destroy you.

It’s the perfect post-divorce vacation.

Perry doesn’t join the military in this video for selfless, nationalistic reasons. She joins for totally selfish reasons. The problem is that in a globally connected culture, we’re incapable of thinking of her as an individual. If she’d been a princess who’d cut off her hair and decided to be a knight, we would be able to totally disconnect the story of her personal psychological transformation from our reductive obsession with two-party war politics. But since she chose a modern, more relevant, more impactful set of symbols, we can’t.

Try for one second to think as something other than the representative of an ideological camp. Try to think as an individual, and to see Perry’s character as an individual.

If we take a look at the video through that lens, a formerly boring haze of presumed propaganda lifts and the video becomes rife with symbolism. When she’s dancing under the flag, we can see what the flag was designed to represent in the first place: a sky full of stars, individual states, rebellion, freedom. These words have been coded as shorthand masks for oppressive politics, but we shouldn’t abdicate our right to re-program them ourselves. Fuck that. That flag will mean what I want it to mean, because I’m an American too. I’m also a global citizen, but  that doesn’t mean that I forfeit my right to interpret that flag. Anybody who wants to can do that, and anyone who wants to can interpret this video.

The primary emotional fuel of this video is the exhilaration of escape– from the self, from shitty relationships and from people and jobs and institutions that you’ve grown sick of, toward being a totally self-sufficient killer animal. To argue that she’s just joining another institution is to imply that it’s possible to escape institutions altogether, or that what institution you throw yourself into is always going to be a totally premeditated choice, where you understand all the implications first without doing it. College, anyone? Listen to the words of the song. Do we really want to junk this defiant message? Should we simply assume that in the modern world existential tantrums, transcendent escapes, are impossible? What kind of people do we want to be?’

Can the decision to submit be empowering and individualistic? Google “BDSM.”

The counterargument is, of course, that we can no longer escape the global implications of decisions like these. But that terror of these symbols ignores this video’s status as mythology. And if we’re thinking that way, then we need to level the same criticisms at our images of holding a job, driving a car, and buying expensive gifts. We can never again derive deep, existential joy from blasting across the United States in a rented convertible, because that joy is regressive, selfish, and anti-postcolonial. The military isn’t on trial here– what’s on trial alongside this video is individuality itself. Is it over? Is it dead? The artifact of an less globalized time? It may be; I’m not presupposing an answer. Can we no longer make any decisions without considering their planetwide implications, or is there a balance to be struck there? Can we no longer say “fuck it” as individual people?

This video is pornography for the concept of individuality. We can fantasize, even if we can no longer partake. May the American Dream rest in peace.

I’m going to teach you how to use Christian rock to become invincible.

I associate hard, cold tile floors with sexual pleasure, because when I was a kid I locked myself in the bathroom to masturbate. It smelled like earthy grout and wood, because I always had my head close to the door. I felt guilty afterwards every time. I locked myself in the bathroom because I already thought I was going to hell for doing it but my parents walking in on me would be even worse, apparently.

I would go on the fledgling internet, print out pornographic pictures, and prop them up against the wall of the bathroom: lesbians, furries, S&M…I think taboo excited me more back then than it does now. Anything weird would do. Afterwards, I would destroy the pictures as thoroughly as possible– tear them up and stuff them in the big smelly trash can by the curb, try to flush them down the toilet, it was uncannily like disposing of a body. I don’t know why I never thought to bury them.

I destroyed the pictures instead of hiding them, even though printing them out every time was an enormous amount of effort. I did this not because I was afraid of them being found (I managed to hide other things from my parents), but because I actually felt physically ill with guilt every time I finished getting off. Religious programming is effective. I actually told myself, every time, that I would never do it again. Being at war with my own biology was horrifying at the time and is fascinating in retrospect. I always relapsed.

I really wanted to break the cycle. I was thoroughly brainwashed into believing that I was destroying myself. Then, finally, I found a way. I managed to stop jacking off for months at a time. I still succumbed eventually, of course (and eventually left the Church, never to return), but I want to share with you how I held out: I did it with late-nineties God-fueled grunge-ripoff superpowers.

This song is called Some Kind of Zombie, by a band named Audio Adrenaline. The irony of a Christian band calling themselves Audio Adrenaline escaped me then, though it doesn’t now, but you should know that it isn’t entirely overreaching. Those dancing, clapping, tongues-speaking, floor-falling Evangelical get-togethers I was terrorized into attending are nothing if not adrenaline-fueled. They are selling drugs without drugs, rock without the devil, and I dare you to participate fully and then dismiss the significance of what you’ve experienced. It’s as problematic as dismissing an acid trip.

In this case, the drug Some Kind of Zombie is a world-class inoculant against your own biology. The song title is earnest in a shocking way, and comes at the culture from an insane angle: most songs with that title would be referencing the negative terror of media-ubiquitous flesh-eating monsters. Undead. Shambling. Horrifying. Run away. But Audio Adrenaline are positing zombification as a positive process of spiritual transcendence.

Let me say that again, slowly: they are advocating becoming a zombie, in a Christian rock song. Some call Christians zombies as a joke, but they’re not joking at all.

Some lyrics from the song will illuminate the issue thoroughly. I usually refrain strictly from posting lyrics, it seems lazy, but these are too ideologically evocative to ignore. Just a small sample:

“I’m obliged, and obey…I’m a slave to what you say.
Oh, here they come– but I’m not afraid. There’s no temptation I can’t evade.
I stand up straight and look through the haze. I begin to walk through the maze.
Yeah, here they come, and they’re all around me, But I shed the sin like some kind of zombie”

And lest you think he’s terming sin as the zombie here, the end of the chorus clarifies:

“I hear you speak and I obey (some kind of zombie)
I walk away from the grave (some kind of zombie)
I will never be afraid (some kind of zombie)
I give my life away”

This is an unambiguous exhortation toward, basically, performing voodoo on yourself. And it works. Evangelical Christianity’s urging to “die to yourself” manages to brand ascetic self-denial, Buddhistic practice’s controlled triumph toward peace over atavism, as a militaristic act. When you accept Jesus, you join an invincible army of zombies.

This sounds horrifying, but it was an enormous help to me as a teenager. My urges gave me all kinds of problems, but if I could convince myself that my body was merely the inert, rotting tool of a higher power, a superhuman level of detachment was possible. This transformation was enabled by my age; the fertility of my childhood imagination. Because I was already deeply engaged with wizards, dragons, and spaceships via a young life buried in my favorite books, because I longed for fantastic, heroic, and magical experiences beyond suburbia, this mythology about magic transformational zombiehood appealed to me not just in a moral dimension but in a creative dimension. I was the empowered undead, right out of a young-adult novel. And I had my own theme song. And best of all, the religious teachings of my community made it clear that I could regard it all as real, not just as a game I was playing. What power. What purpose.

There are a dense set of lessons here for the nonreligious adults in the audience, and the primary one is the power of the combination of imagination and faith. By the time we’re adults, we’ve learned very thoroughly what’s possible and what’s not. But if a preteen male can stave off masturbation for months at a time because he listened to a song about God and zombies, all kinds of insane things are possible. It’s worth asking what twisted metaphors for heroism could help you get done the things you want to do.

The development of technologies like this come out of creative processes; come out of a child’s willingness to embrace stories as true. We have girded ourselves up to prevent the mutilation of our minds by awful mythologies like fundamentalist Christianity, but in the process we’ve made our minds proprietary pieces of equipment, and we’re nervous about hacking them and about playing with faith.

The other day, I was preparing to approach a girl in a coffee shop that was very pretty, and she was reading a book I knew and loved.  All kinds of negative emotions and beliefs about romance and relationships surfaced in my mind. I pictured invincible rotting flesh, and I walked over to her table.

come

with us.

This video crystalizes something about modern music consumption that’s been shifting beneath our feet in the baroque technological unconscious of the age that’s been bugging me. Or, I mean, I’ve noticed it, and I haven’t articulated it and that’s bugged me.

When we consume music now, we no longer inhabit the music by itself as an immersive experience. Lady Gaga is only the consciously commercialized aspect of a media-wide perspective crack-up, an artistic trend towards multidimensionality: the song is now the centerpiece of a larger emotional architecture. This, I think, might be part of the disjunct between people that prefer carefully-crafted, nuanced aural compositions and those that champion “pop” as a legitimized form– they’re talking past each other; talking about two distinct cultural products, one involving notes and instruments, the other decidedly multimedia.

This seems obvious– this is the age of multimedia– but it affects our information digestion in subtle ways that we don’t necessarily think about mid-listen. The dimensions of new cultural artifacts, and their pressure on our emotional centers, spring out from the artforms we consume as though we were wearing some bizarre kind of 3D glasses. If you’re only listening to the music, you’re not getting the entire emotional message.

The original song is a fine one, evocative and heartbroken, but this cover is an entirely different animal, and it seethes with pain. It’s better, really. But is the song better? The song is the same. Does it sound significantly better? No. A little. In other words, it’s clearly not about the song.

Too often videos like this rely entirely on gimmick, and this one walks a razor-thin wire over that banal pit. OK GO’s treadmills, paint splatters, and yes, even their drag racing have left an acrid stench over the entire Rube Goldberg enterprise of bedroom auteurs, quirky songsters, and a-capella vocal renditions that characterize the YouMedia age. They entertain, and are quickly forgotten. Merely clever. The visuals and physicals often share very little emotional territory with the music. The components don’t make you feel anything greater when put together than they would separately or attached to other things; their purpose isn’t fully integrated.

Not so here.

This is about community. The reason this video works is that it creates a tiny community, holding up candles against the dark. We know how vital it feels to touch another human being, and these people are all touching each other. And they’re playing music together, so the effect is even more dramatic. Breathing and rhythmic tension and physical flow constitute involvement with an instrument, and so doing that with someone else, while touching them, is a lot like sex. But the most innocent form of sex, innocent because the opposite of innocence is experience, and first experiences are what this song is all about– the impact of sudden heartbreak. The moment of violation, of penetration. So this little tribe of people is living out an essential human myth. They’re all experiencing it together.

It’s hard to put a premium on this kind of experience. I’m not interested in joining the luddite throngs championing the end of social media in favor of localized forms of contact, those shrill voices constantly preaching the vacuousness of Facebook on Facebook. Those people are boring. Moderation: for me that’s where that conversation ends. But this video isn’t about day-to-day media usage–it’s about a singular act.

I like to imagine what they’re thinking. Have you ever been hanging out with a member of the opposite sex, or the same sex, and wondered if they were on the same page as you? You’ll have little interactions, little physical dynamics and touches, and you’ll catch a whiff of their hair, and you’ll think, is this person experiencing the same feelings as me, right now? These experiences can be so mutual and at the same time so numinous, and there are a billion things communicated that don’t come packaged in words, that aren’t resolved easily. This kind of physicality is confusing in the best way possible. How did they feel while filming this?

This wonderful confusion, with the music as a homeostatic guide, is what charges the functioning of a group like the one in the video. I am telling you, you should be jealous of these people. Feel the tension. Do you realize that they can all feel each other breathe? That they’re touching, and all working to express the same thing at the same time, as a collaborative orgasm? And they’re expressing pain, which in social situations with those kind of close quarters is always a risky proposition. It takes courage to link arms with someone and sing about your pain. Everybody makes embarrassing faces when them cum.

What makes it culturally (and probably commercially) viable, of course, is their technical skill. So there are these two components: the courage to connect, and the language you use to connect. If you get people together who are virtuosos with the same language, an architecture of magic, a really real moment of being loudly and successfully human is possible. Communication.

Ever had a conversation that makes you want to jump up and down with excitement? That’s what playing music like that feels like. It’s ecstatic.

This whole architecture, all this shit that I’ve been rambling about, this is all overlaid on top of the song. It’s open-source. We see the real human process involved in the music we’re hearing, and it blossoms open like reality television into a candid presentation of moments in lives, of a documentary of effort toward creation. Music is no longer this pure Platonic artifact–it’s the direct processing of somebody’s lived experience. They make us feel like we’re sitting in the room with them, sharing a campfire moment. We’re not all the same, but we can certainly all feel pain. Would that we could all sing about it.

God help me, I’m about to write a POPOCALYPSE on Lady Gaga. I swore I would never do this, because doing this is like staring into the abyss and having it stare back.

I have become Lady Gaga, and she has become me. Long live the new flesh.

I’m having an increasing amount of difficulty, because of her, telling what’s good and what isn’t anymore. This is because, to me, she represents a personal evolution in aesthetics. Not a wide cultural one. I’m not comfortable generalizing this outside of my subjectivity.

But a personal one. I could visit the lush landscapes of her videos over and over. Not because they contain intrinsic value, but because I’ve allowed her to become slotted into places in my neurology usually reserved for religious worship. Though the images appeal to me, they appeal to me via her dimensions as a mythological creature. I want her to be the ultimate symbol of human potential, so she is. The transmutation of the Eucharist takes place.

This is not a difficult leap to make. She’s openly discussed her own self-conscious deification, and the role of faith in her becoming. She has said that her work is a lie so beautiful that her fans make it true. This is the very model of faith, a model to be transcended only when I become a god myself.

Yes, the dream of Fame has infected even me. She told me that we’re all superstars, and I believed her.

This is the new aesthetics: the transfiguration of personal object and experience by baptism in the hyperreal. We have the perfect machinery to make our own gods, and we’re each afraid to use it. You’re afraid to use it.

There is no media of personal power, despite what we’ve been told about the internet’s potential vis a vis the collective voice of the populace. We still don’t understand our power. We’re still afraid of it.

This lack of comprehension manifests as judgement. There are products of culture, and these products of culture are deemed to be either products of culture with merit or products without. Cultural products worthy of critical attention or products unworthy. Cultural products that fascinate and rivet us or bore and disgust us. We decide this, and we write our critical and evaluative thoughts, either in the form of catty YouTube comments or published academic papers, yet we have very little firsthand understanding of how these products get made. If we weren’t so afraid, we’d be producing our own cultural products. When discussing an entity like Gaga, published articles and Facebook updates are basically of equivalent value.

Into the midst of this frantic taxonomy, she stepped. She is irritatingly evasive, because she pretends to just enough violation of pop formula to be deemed interesting by those conscientious excavators of counterculture, academics. Also, academics want an excuse to enjoy pop music. She provides them that excuse.

But why do we need an excuse to enjoy pop music?

Here is where, for me, the situation begins to break down. I used to understand why Katie Perry was “bad”, why Ke$ha was “bad”, why Britney Spears was “bad”. I have unlearned that understanding. Have I been programmed, or deprogrammed? Have the marketers of mass culture gotten to my brain at last? Or has something far more sinister happened?

I vote the second thing. I have stopped seeing it as creatively productive to judge things the way I used to. I’ve become what they call a “fan”.

The above commercial reveals the missing link in people’s evaluation of Mother Monster: the experience of fandom. We want a superstar, so we’ve made one. Even she realizes that’s what’s going on; she talks about it all the time. But it doesn’t matter, because we still need it. We still need to believe this vision of a superwoman that she’s created, a person who gives everything she’s got to inspire the fans she cherishes. A person who exemplifies our best desires about ourselves. A person who cares. About me.

This is where the cynicism is supposed to come in, of course. She’s not doing this for you. she’s doing it for the money.

No. I’ve arrived at the point where I believe her mission. I believe her when she says she actually cares about her fans. Just doing it for the money? We’re all in it for the money. We would all like to be in her shoes, doing what we love for a paycheck. There are far more difficult jobs, but there are far, far easier ones, too. She’s breaking her back. What she does takes an enormous amount of ambition and puts her under an enormous amount of pressure. People act like she’s pretending not to be an entertainer. She’s an extraordinarily hardworking entertainer. And she knows it.

But let’s assume you think she’s lying. You’ll find it doesn’t matter: what’s important is that she projects the image that she’s a hardworking every-girl who’s managed to make herself into this extraordinary creature. In this context, even her flaws become signs of her humanity, evidence that we can relate to her, signals that she’s just like us.

Of course she wants fame and success and acceptance. She says she does. And so do you. And she knows you do. And what she’s telling you is, that’s okay.

I don’t feel I have the luxury of criticism. I’ve just graduated college, and I have no idea what’s going to become of me. I doubt everything from the security of my future to the authenticity of the human relationships I’ve formed over the past four years to the validity of my artistic efforts. I have nothing left to hold on to, and I’m apparently a much weaker person than I though I was. I’ll take whatever ray of hope I can get. I don’t listen to her ideas about hope and perseverance and loving yourself so much as I cling desperately to them.

The first time I saw that television commercial, I started crying. Even though it’s a television commercial. Even though it’s supposed to be a cynical, manipulative appeal to my wallet, it made me cry. I actually teared up. Because at the end of the day, we’re all engaged in the commercial enterprise. We buy things at stores, we try to sell ourselves to employers. She’s on the same sinking ship that everyone else is on, but she’s managed to inject a little humanity into that world, and she’s trying to get us to do that same thing. You can call it crass commercialism, but I can wander around my neighborhood and go days without experiencing the kind of humanity she communicated through that television commercial.

I’ve read article after article and Facebook update after update concerning irritation over Gaga’s: “edgyness” (“she’s trying too hard”). Her “politics” (“she’s trying too hard”). Her “crazy videos” (again, “she’s trying too hard”). What nobody can tell me is exactly what it is she’s trying.

Fame, right. That’s what it is. She’s trying to be famous. Even she admits it. She’s such an attention whore. It’s so predictable. It’s so passe. So cliche.

And it’s working.

This is the kink in all that criticism: WHY IS IT WORKING?

If she has nothing new to say, then WHY IS THE ENTIRE WORLD OBSESSED WITH HER?

WHY ARE WE EVEN HAVING THIS CONVERSATION?

She’s a good pop musician. That’s one reason. Because at the end of the day, we like to watch her, we like to hear her, we like to experience her. Even if we’re just experiencing our hatred of her.

But beyond that: it’s because she cares.

This is really all just speculation. I’m just trying to justify the fact that I’ve watched the Judas video ten times, at least, since it’s been out. But I have, see. Watched it ten times, I mean. At least. It’s so stimulating, and the images in it are captivating. Sure, it’s the whole Mary madonna/whore thing all over again. Sure, dicking with biblical tropes courts cheap controversy. Every predictable, boring criticism we all knew was going to be leveled at this video has been leveled at it. Now that everyone’s shut up, I can finally watch the damn thing. Because the video is gorgeous. Because it’s her, my hero, kicking ass, again.

The fact that she’s only my hero because I made her that way is the most important part of the equation. Because in that world, I could be a hero to millions of people too. You could be.

See, all that cataloging of the itsy bitsy tropes and minutia in her videos pales in comparison to the reality of the fan’s experience. Because she doesn’t just represent the apparent symbols she uses, to us. She represents our own potential, and she’s said over and over that that’s exactly what she’s trying to represent. She’s crafted music and visuals and performances, but more important than that is the fact that she’s crafted a fan experience: something people can imitate, participate in, and project their own value onto. People that characterize her discourse as limiting aren’t listening to her, and they aren’t looking at her in the right way. It’s just like drugs: you have no business evaluating an experience you haven’t had. The only proper way to experience her is as a fan, because that is part of the work.

It’s all about faith. As the great George Michael put it, you’ve got to have faith.

To wake up in the morning, to create a life for yourself and your loved ones out of nothing, and to face a cold and uncaring universe with nothing but your tools in your hands and determination in your eyes. And then to go jogging with your headphones on. And then to dance.

You’ve just got to have faith.

Thank you, Lady Gaga, for giving me my faith back.

When I watched the Teenage Dream video it seriously fucked me up.

I’ve been listening to this song over and over again for weeks, and I haven’t gotten tired of it yet, so I decided to watch the company-approved visuals. They made me feel the same way the song did: young.

I’ve had a problem over the past year or so with youthfulness. Right now I’m supposed to be growing up, and everyone has a different idea of what this means. Some people tell me I need to grow up in my relationships, others tell me I need to grow up in my career, in my dreams or interests. In many different ways, my adult identity should be calcifying by now.

This video rails against all of that, and thank god. I’m tired of other people’s value systems, because I know what most of those value systems are. They’re excuses.

I don’t believe for a second that anyone wants to get old. I believe, don’t get me wrong, that people are glad for the wisdom and maturity they’ve gained. But to age? No one wants that. No one wants to decrepify and die.

There is much made, in modern critical theory, of the idea that popular culture in general has an unhealthy obsession with youth and beauty. There’s a beauty industry. The impossible dream of attractiveness and eternal youth and physical satisfaction, the critics tell us, is empty and meaningless. They urge us to leave these dreams, and the pop starlets who rub these dreams all over their oiled, nubile bodies, far behind.

But this rhetoric hides a sinister lacuna: the critics say this because they rest assured that eternal youth and beauty are impossible. Because they know this, they devalue them. Because it’s safer. Because the body dies, but wisdom, the life of the mind, of the spirit, are eternal.

This sounds suspiciously religious to me.

It sounds that way, of course, because it’s motivated by precisely the same engine: fear. Deep, desperate, and inexcisable fear. There is no escape from death. Best learn to love it.

This video shits all over that vacant value system, and that’s why I like it. It knows what we want. We want to feel the way we did when we picked up our first date for the prom, forever. We were high on hormones that were a part of our own bodies; we didn’t need drugs. We felt hot and wet and light like hummingbird wings. We felt like Christmas fucking morning, excited just to exist.

This video, this song, Katy Perry, they know there’s no defense against the teenage dream.

This video is…juicy. The synth sounds in the music are juicy, the bodies are juicy, the colors and the cars and the scenarios.  They pulse with life and hormones and indefatigable youngness. But most importantly, they conjure moments. Like that moment he pulls off her pants in that hotel room. Jeans and underwear and skin. Yeah, you remember a million moments like that. And so do I.

You know why I’m obsessed with this video? Because it shows me things I want. It’s that simple.

That scene where she’s watching him punch that bag from behind the locker, where he looks over, that drenched young buck, at his tentative worshiper, that’s the shit dreams are made of. If that moment, and then that moment consummated, was all I got out of my life, I’d die happy. That’s it. All the rest is a big lie.

No, really. I remember my first date to the prom. It was this girl I was obsessed with. Some of you know her. She was my first kiss too. It didn’t even make any sense. We have nothing in common. But these things don’t make sense. It’s human chemistry, and that chemistry produces some of the most intense experiences of your life. You remember your first kiss? You remember the person you first felt yourself go completely stupid for?

What are our feebly constructed academic meanings next to that?

In my mind, our rationalizations amount to nothing by comparison. I remember what those feelings were like, and I want them back. This is a hopeless and regressive attitude, some might say. Psychologically unhealthy. But you know what I like about it? It’s honest. If I said something else, I’d feel like I was placating myself. I’d feel like I was searching for the safest, least scary answer.

We might consider for a moment the possibility, however terrifying, that we’re fundamentally imbalanced creatures. That our engine is desire, and that we’re designed to want more than we can ever have, which keeps us moving forward, living, working, being. We always hear about balance. I’m sick of hearing about balance. There is no balance to be found here. You are going to decay until you die, and though your mind will learn, your body would always be better off younger than it is after the age of about 25. Birth at one end, shitting yourself and rotting at the other. That’s about as fucking imbalanced as you get.

So because of this, I wonder what my goal in critically analyzing these desires, these high-school dance memories of mine, has been. I take them apart, why? I think it’s because I want to get rid of their power; to reduce them, to slice them up into manageable chunks. They terrify me because they clearly matter, and I feel they shouldn’t. I don’t want them to. Because they’re gone.

But in the process of doing this, I’ve made sure that I don’t know what I want anymore. That’s the realization I had while watching this video. Every desire is an enemy now; every twitch of my loins is suspect. My enthusiasm for being young and beautiful, for wanting to be with someone else young and beautiful, has been disassembled, stamped shallow, meaningless. I’ve ridiculed it into non-existence, but what has risen to take its place? Something better?

That love-at-first-sight feeling, they say it fades. But to say something fades is not the same as saying that it doesn’t exist.

So let’s watch, and reminisce about a time when we actually knew what we wanted.

At some point while watching the new Linkin Park video for Waiting for the End, I realized that I was having a transcendent experience. I was inside the interrelated nature of all things; I had that…overview. Why, caught in the gears of the power-chord angst-pop machine, was I thinking of the big picture? The walrus, as it were.

I think the problem was precisely the solution. In other words, the video is vacuous and so is the music, and that’s what did it. Nothing there. I stared into the abyss and it stared back.

Linkin Park don’t write songs about anything. That’s their most awe-inspiring skill and it’s made them lots of money. They’re very angry and it’s all very important but take a look at a sample of their early work:

…I tried so hard/and got so far/but in the end/it doesn’t even matter/I had to fall/to lose it all/but in the end/it doesn’t even matter…

It doesn’t even matter which example I pick, because any lyric will be illustrative. The fact that they’ve come up with this many ways to approach nameless, characterless emotionality in song makes my point: they care very much. They care, but that caring does not have specificity; it is not reduced to mere events or feelings or issues. No, this is a greater vision.

They misplaced their calling, and should’ve been wandering madmen instead.

The Waiting video is a celebration of a this panpsychism: the interconnected baubles of light, a graphic design of Indra’s Net; the shooting, sparking blueprint of glowing lines outlining the skulls of our mortality and drawn between the constellated stars of our insatiable desire. Big budget, big-picture synaesthetic nirvana.

The band is spun around and broken down into particles and we have an intensity of myopia about the subject matter that induces the existential vertigo which precedes mysticism. The band is about the song is about the video is about AAAHHHHH WE CARE RISE UP RAISE YOUR HANDS REACH PUSH SCREAM WANT EMOTE BE….

We Are, they cry. They’re asserting the undifferentiated self, the chaotic ground of being. The perfectly produced pop crescendo is symptomatic of symmetric exultation, the way a good trip on LSD results not in a sense of disconnected lopsidedness but an obsessive conviction of perfectly synchronistic underlying order, the Feeling itself, signifying nothing but the void. Linkin Park are messengers of Illumination; they are the Magister Templi of the Inland Empire, and no thickness of suburban schmaltz can hide the truth.

According to the band, this album was their attempt to push their music to the edge after a long slump; to do something really “different” and “experimental”, to “unleash their creative energies.” They unleashed them, alright. All over the place. In all directions. The album is a monument to completely unfocused enthusiasm. God forbid any of these songs actually contain subject matter. It would ruin their genius.

The new disc is a concept album. The orders of magnitude of this thing are truly stunning: this is a concept album with no concept. There are spoken-word segue tracks. There are cinematic musical interludes. There is repetition of thematic material. The album has an arc. And at the center of this architecture of madness, this crescendo of hormones? Nothing. There is nothing there. This is a lesson about the nature of the universe, people. The narrative of liberation, the revolutionary ire with which we approach our spiritual problems, is a prologue to a realization of the brain-shattering complexity, and therefore irreducibility, of the system. All our narratives come to nothing, not because there is nothing there, but because the truth is just too big.

That’s why Linkin Park doesn’t make apathetic music, even though their music contains a heart so nihilistic you can’t see it beating. Their music is as far from apathetic as music can get, oh they care, they do, but what do they care about? They care about caring. The lantern is held up to ward off the encircling dark. They know the truth, and the truth is too immense to be expressed in three minutes of rhyming couplets, but goddammit, the truth shall set them free.

Is The Social Network a sexist film, or a film about sexist people?

I think both, and this can be confusing. There are exactly three types of women portrayed in the film. There’s the perfect shining girl that got away at the beginning and the end, there are all the useless hysterical famewhores in the middle, and there are the flat, vacant, desexualized older women/moderators/lawyers scattered throughout.

There is one female character that breaks this virgin/whore/witch pattern: the young lawyer who talks to Zuckerberg in the empty meeting room at the end of the film. She alone among the female characters has some dimension and agency, and she appears in the movie for all of maybe five minutes total. Was she there because a well-rounded woman was the only character archetype with the symbolic headroom to actually tell Zuckerberg off?

Chew on that for awhile. I did.

The complicating factor is that the portrayal of sexism in the male characters in the film is very unflattering. These technically inclined, socially inept young men are obviously very excited about being surrounded by coeds willing to give them blowjobs in bathrooms, but the giddiness of sexual acceptance turns into something empty, eventually, in the eye of the camera.

This is a story about men who don’t really know how to define success. At first success means success with one girl, and then it means sexual conquest in general, and then it means money, and then it means social impact, and then at the end of the film Zuckerberg is sitting there refreshing his browser just like the rest of us, waiting for that one girl to message him back.

The problem with the film’s admirable effort to portray the complicated relationship between success and sex in these men’s lives is that that narrative is hamstrung by the vapidity of the female characters. The other half of the equation isn’t there.

There is something worth noticing here, though, and that’s, well, the relationship between sex and success in men’s lives. This is the relationship that turns the female into a sex object, like many of the women in this movie. Success doesn’t allow you access to friendship with women; the ability to relate to women asexually doesn’t factor into these characters’ calculations of the gifts or definitions of success.

Sex with women. Attractive women. That’s the goal.

This is objectification, pure objectification.

Wait, stop the script.

What the fuck is objectification?

The reduction of a woman to her biological parts; her transformation into a device for the procurement of male (or female) pleasure. This is objectification, and in objectifying a woman, we remove value from her, fragment her, make her less than human.

Right?

If I see a woman on the street, and I look at that woman, I have access to a certain amount of information about whether or not I want to have sex with her. If I talk to that woman, I gain additional information about whether or not I want to have sex with her. Which information is more important is predicated on what I want out of a sexual encounter. This is all, of course, assuming that I’m looking for someone to have sex with.

Which, often, I am. I would guess you often are too.

This process of evaluation and arousal, does it involve a fragmentation of her being? Does it involve a division of her wholeness into disparate parts? Does it involve her reduction to something less than human?

Interesting question, isn’t it?

So this is my question about the film. The characters are looking for a particular thing from women, and they find women willing to give them that thing. This is eventually not the answer to all their life’s problems the way they thought it would be. But does that mean these women don’t have other aspects to their personalities, aspects that weren’t shown in a film focused on male success?

Do women actually blow rich and powerful men in bathroom stalls at a moment’s notice? Is that an accurate and balanced representation of female attitudes and behaviors?

I’m not rich or powerful, so I wouldn’t know. If someone rich and powerful would answer that question it would be appreciated.

The filmmakers, however, created this world. From their perspective, these groupies don’t exist beyond the boundaries of the celluloid, and so Sorkin and Fincher have decided their entire personalities. They’re the ghosts of male desire, and for how satisfied or involved the Facebook crew is with these relationships by the end of the movie, “ghosts” looks to be an accurate description.

So who’s more sexist: the characters, or the filmmakers?

What do hetero men want from women? What do women want them to want? What do hetero women want from men? What do men want them to want?

In other words, is it even possible to separate someone’s mind and body, someone’s ass and tits, someone’s vocabulary and intellect, in real life, the way Sorkin and Fincher have tried to do in the film?

I wouldn’t know. I’ve never managed to know a fragmented person or a whole person. Because getting to know a person isn’t a dissection, it’s a process. And I don’t mean for me. I mean for everyone. All the parts of a person affect all the other parts. The next time you manage to take a person apart and put them back together into a working person, you let me know.

In the meantime, we deal with each other, and with this strange thing called success.

Whatever that is.

I wonder if I’m obligated to make sense here.

Postmodernism happened. Do I need to have a thesis? I’m not getting fucking paid or anything, that’s for sure. Easy to read or incomprehensible?

I could divide cultural products into two categories, or maybe I could divide consumption of them into two approaches. There are things that I’m interested in because they’re easy. 3OH!3 write catchy songs, Piranha 3D had tits and violence, Yogurtland tastes good. These things are crafted by teams of people to appeal to my biology. I like them for very basic reasons, and despite the pretensions of cultural criticism, it’s hard to bypass the orgasm or the full stomach as bedrocks of tautological value.

Then there’s another kind of cultural experience.

There’s this band I like, they’re called Skullflower. They make 14-minute Wagner-inspired noise compositions. It’s indistinguishable from TV snow run through a chorus pedal.

This does not push any obvious biological buttons. It even kind of annoys me. But there, in that space, forcing myself to listen to it, I’m finding value in nearly random patterns, in the nothing, in the cracked wall of culture, the blackness of death, the death of desire. It’s akin to ascetic religion that way: it’s antibiological.

I listened to this band while driving through Trona with my friend Omar this summer, toward Death Valley. Trona is a tiny town near a chemical plant a million miles from anywhere. Charles Manson hid out near there. It is the devil’s bleached asshole.

Why would I go there? The same reason I listen to Skullflower. There’s nothing there. And sometimes nothing is what you need.

But most of the time we want something, and that’s where the first cultural category comes in. That’s what I’m interested in right now. Pop is religion to me. People don’t like Ke$ha for no reason. They like her because she gives them what they want. It’s the same reason people like The Cheesecake Factory. There are experts working on that shit. They’re creating the new gods, gods the people asked for. This is Alan Watts’ “democracy in the kingdom.” This is religion you got to vote for with money. These are gods you can touch. But what gifts do these gods bear?

Popocalypse: If the culture scientifically satisfies everyone’s desires, does the world end?

Stay tuned.