Paranoid Park (Gus Van Sant, 2008.) has a power that comes from the mind of a teenager. When the film finished, there was no conclusion to the story. We had no closure. But Alex’s (Gabe Nevins) story had finished, he had moved through his thoughts and come out with a deeper knowledge of himself.
The meditating slow-motion shots accompanied by music for the mind of a melancholic teen (eg. Elliot Smith) communicate both the stillness and the rage in Alex’s mind. Apart from the detective, the adults in the film are held out of focus for most of their time in the film. Rather than this acting as a sort of ‘segregative social practise’ for Gus Van Sant, as an adult, to isolate his teenager from the ‘real’ world, it suggests that Alex’s becoming into the world of responsibility is entirely his own journey, his own choice. No one, not even adult, can help him through it.
All the mechanisms producing a “machinic” subjectivity, everything that contributes to provide, a sensation of belonging to something, of being somewhere, along with the sensation of forgetting oneself, are “drugs.”
Felix Guattari, ‘Machinic Junkies’.
In Alex’s case, his subjectivity as a skater is his own, but he has also been put into the collective assemblage of ‘skaters’ by his peers, mother (“Where’s your skateboard?”) and school institution. His skating culture was for him a drug, it gave him the sensation of belonging somewhere, feeling surrounded by something meaningful – so much so that he could go there alone. His skating, and the skating set-up at Paranoid Park, represents a new system, ‘capital as a mode of semiotic reterritorialization of human activities and structures uprooted by machinic processes’ (Guattari 1995:121). Paranoid Park was built up from nothing, entirely by the cultural group who were going to use it. It is not a space that has been imposed upon public space by an external power, not, for example, a city square that is designed by an abstract fore but used by the people. Thus it uproots the ‘human’ structures of government and council, it is a space made as a new subjective form.
Madonna: Do you believe that? You think things just happen?
Me: I think that just happened.
Madonna: Mm-hmm.
Me: So who’s making the decision?
Madonna: You are, you and your missus.
Me: About what kind of kids we want?
Madonna: You chose it. Your soul chose it.
Me: No. Do you believe that? That my insides wanted boys?
Madonna: Unconsciously. Yes.
Me: I kind of like the idea, three sons—it’s like having a little army out in the woods.
Madonna: And all the work they can do, and you can teach them carpentry and then build houses for you in Old Greenwich, or wherever you live.
…She then said, “If your joy is derived from what society thinks of you, you’re always going to be disappointed.”
Is this hypocrisy? Does Madonna construct herself around what society thinks of her/wants her to be? Yes, but she also perpetuates it – for example, by continuing even now to publish an image of youth and beauty. Tetzlaff writes that the audience is aware that none of her presentations represent the “real” woman (1993:256), but this is not relevant to her place in the culture machine. Fans of Madonna are infatuated with her different images, because her image is her product, and her product is what they buy and love. Tetzlaff calls Madonna ‘a marvelous icon’ (1993:241). In a book about another great icon, Marilyn Monroe, S. Paige Baty writes that Marilyn has an iconic force that is ‘bolstered up by reproduction’ (1995:64). And while Madonna does not quite have the catalogue of items upon which her image can be bought that Marilyn Monroe has, she as an icon is reproduced upon her own ubiquitous, and still very much alive, body. Her iconic status is preserved by her constant reinvention (which will keep her always with mass culture’s attention), by her never submitting to her age, and by her identity existing only above the surface and in front of the camera. And it really is like her identity is only comprised of what we see in the media – but this does not seem to only be one side of her. With Madonna we seem to get everything – as Warren Beatty says in In Bed With Madonna (Keshishian, 1991), ‘She doesn’t want to live off camera…what’s the point existing?’
So even back in 1991 Madonna lived a whole lot of her identity for us on screen, and now she gives us more! We get to see all of her commodity-images, we know what she does when she goes to bed, we’ve seen her eat, her religion (or is it spirituality?), we see her children, so I think that what she gives to the culture industry, and what she gives to her audience, is pretty much all of her. Madonna’s ‘art’ is her life. This result of her star status began with her – her desire to ‘be a star’ and that’s all – but that wouldn’t have held if it wasn’t for the intervention of the culture machine. Deleuze and Guattari (1983:26) write, ‘Desire is a machine, and the object of desire is another machine connected to it’; fans desired Madonna as a product, so the Madonna-machine created herself to fulfil their desire (disguised as needs, ‘derived from desire’ [1983:27]). Tetzlaff documents that the intense desire for Madonna as product does not singularly come from her music, her personality, her films, or her ‘sex appeal’ (because really, her crotch-grabbing is just not attractive), but that it comes from her ‘aura of power’ (242). Her power is connected to her audience having access to all of these facets of her life, and more even than I listed above.. Cuba Gooding Jr. was quoted in The Sunday Age ‘Life’ magazine (5/4/2008), in regards to Tom Cruise, that the more people know about your life the less they are able to believe a character you may play. And while this sounds true for Tom Cruise the actor, Madonna the celebrity uses her life to allow people to be continually attached to her. For people who possess knowledge of Madonna, they don’t want to lose it, so they continue to consume her life.
‘The real is not impossible: it is simply more and more artificial’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983:34). I have thought/written earlier about how the real is not diminishing in the world, it is just something that is becoming much harder to negotiate when we think about the presence of culture. So thinking of Madonna, and her excessively mass-mediated character, we should not think of her as not being real, and not of the cultural world as being too artificial, but of Madonna’s life-as-art machine being the real source to access her. As Baty writes, ‘The circulation of an issue or figure through mass-mediated channels serves to grant a form of “real” public status’ (1995:17). Madonna, so present in many forms of media (so that even in The Age she had a head shot taking up a quarter-page), is ‘real’ in our world, we have access to her ‘real’ self as all of her, not just some, exists to us. In her Hall of Fame speech (I think in this part), Madonna said, ‘I am only the manager of my talent, not the owner,’ and this is somewhat accurate. She is not an authoritative owner. As explained on screenmachine, when Madonna’s idea for her own fame was formed, her celebrity became affected by its own path – for example, her becoming as a style icon is made continuous by the style-machine, her figure always mutating so it/she could remain alive in the machine. Adorno and Horkheimer write, ‘In the culture industry the notion of genuine style is seen to be the aesthetic equivalent of domination’ (1993:37). I don’t know what genuine style is but Madonna’s recreation and presentation of herself through her shifting style has definitely given her some hold of domination. A whole audience of people dressed like her, after all, and her first line at H&M ‘sold out in minutes’. She presents herself as very dominating in the commercial for her collection. Further presenting herself as distinctive, and powerful, was her appearance at the 2003 Video Music Awards. She is an entirely different image to the other two ‘Madonna wannabes’ (as JT calls them), ensuring that remains distinctive and dominating: taller, black over white.
Yet, it has not all been her, the standards and requirements of mass culture that the culture-machine have inflicted on her played a part in how she has become. So although as a product this commercial is for Pepsi (albeit only screened a few times in 1989), its content of Madonna watching herself as a child, morphing into her child-self watching (dreaming/desiring) Madonna-as-star enforces the account of Madonna-as-star-inherently. The culture machine attempts to enhance Madonna’s celebrity by trying to remove its involvement. Plus, people even want her daughter Lourdes to succumb to the machine and get a makeover. In In Bed With Madonna, we can see a more innocent side of her, of a person who, although very much desiring and aiming for stardom, was not affected by the commodified image-machine as much as she is now. On screen, Madonna claimed she didn’t care what people thought of her, that her breasts were hers and she didn’t believe in plastic surgery, etc. But the expectations of the culture machine for her to remain marketable, and her own desire to not look ageing, made her resort to all this. But maybe that’s okay – according to some she is the queen of good plastic surgery.
I don’t think sexy or seductive work for her anymore. At least not where her crotch is heavily featured.
In her latest feature in Interview, she says that she wrote one of her recent songs just so that she could have a good time doing it in a stadium. And then her interviewer says that a lot of other people are about only wanting money, implying that Madonna’s values were different. Which they may very well not be – see the blog linked from screenmachine: ‘Funny how it’s always the richest acts who expect their fans to dig the deepest.’ It doesn’t do too much for her values of caring about poverty and children in Malawi (+ ‘I think women are the future of Africa’ – buzz feminism, means nothing) when she blows money on a commodified spectacle about her, and not her ‘values’. Much of that Vanity Fair interview, especially the section I have included above, and this response here, gives me the feeling that it not really hypocrisy. It just suggests that she doesn’t know what she’s talking about or what her thoughts are, but that is trying to be as much in the focus of the publicity-machine as she can be. This is not to suggest that Madonna does not have ‘substance’, which Greg Seigworth wants to make sure we don’t forget (1993:299). It is just all on the surface, and she knows it. She knows that all of her has become a marketable star-image, so she plays on that and builds herself up as the most powerful/important.
The truly remarkable thing here is that Madonna’s conscious self-commodification may be the primary trait for which she is admired by her mainstream audience. This is a frightening indication of how deeply late-capitalist values have been absorbed into our popular culture. Commodity values are more precious than human values. Our culture validates success no matter what is sacrificed to achieve it. (Tetzlaff 1993:258.)
In From Hegel To Madonna, Robert Miklitsch writes that this reading is a wholly negative reading of Madonna-as-commodity (1998:120). But Madonna is not a negative commodity, despite her in large part not really having any idea what she’s talking about. She is an important figure because her entire body is part of a commodity-machine. She fulfils peoples’ needs – needs that we have in the same way that Edgar Morin (2005:111) talks about cinema – ‘those that practical life cannot fulfil.’
Post Thoughts: Madonna’s video for American Life which she pulled herself out of respect for the soldiers in Iraq, then made some replacement lite-version. Is this the point where she began to really care what people thought of her? Where she didn’t make statements because it’s what she wanted to do (like the masturbation performance in Toronto), but she wanted to go with whatever her fans wanted – ie. latest album, collaborating with JT and Timbaland, ‘so hot right now’ type of status.
References
Adorno, Theodor and Horkheimer, Max, 1993, ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’, in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During, London: New York; Routledge. 29-43.
Baty, S. Paige, 1995, American Monroe: The Making of a Body Politic, London: Los Angeles; University of California Press.
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix, 1982 [1973], Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Minneapolis; University of Minnesota Press.
Miklitsch, Robert, 1998, From Hegel To Madonna: Towards a General Economy of ‘Commodity Fetishism, Albany; State University of New York Press.
Morin, Edgar, 2005 [1956], The Cinema, or the Imaginary Man, Minneapolis; University of Minnesota Press.
Tetzlaff, David, 1993, ‘Metatextual Girl: -> patriarchy -> postmodernism -> power -> money -> Madonna’, in The Madonna Connection: Representational Politics, Subcultural Identities, and Cultural Theory, ed. Cathy Schwichtenberg, Sydney; Allen & Unwin. 239-263.
the owls are not what they seem 
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