The Calculatingly Unobjectionable: Oprah, Urkel & Obama

The LA Times is usually one of the most insipid English-written newspapers in the world, partly due to its proximity to the vapidity of the Hollywood Hills, and not to mention the burgeoning English literacy crisis of Schwarzenegger’s “Kalifornya.”

However, columnist Joel Steins, in a piece called “He’s got Obamaphilia,” trips over a political fact that only years of probing the profound pools of Hollywood’s monotony could prepare one to discover. And that is, that Democratic Presidential hopeful Barack Obama is sooo much hot air.

He is the black Anthony Robbins hyping up the crowd, making one feel inspired with hope. As Stein opines, “I want the man to hope all over me” and I must say, I want him to hope all over me too.

For “What a man, what a man, what a man, what a mighty good man” to persuade the youth of America to even show-up and vote in their respective caucuses. Obama is the guy on the Tonight Show who warms up the crowd: “Where are you from Sir? Carolina? Well hey. Lots of blacks in South Carolina. Anyone know a feminist lesbian midget? I know one. She’s in Seattle. You people rock!”

As Steins suggests, “The dude is Urkel with a better tailor” – charismatic, good-natured and slightly goofy. He is the material recipient of all our quixotic aspirations. Quixotic because, at the end of the day, you don’t think Obama, like Urkel, will be able to pin down the job. But we so want him to. We want him to succeed. We want to live in a perfect world where idealism works and the goofy black kid becomes President of the United States.

But what such a comparison of personalities reveals to us is his calculatingly unobjectionable persona. And at the end of the day, it is a campaign run on persona, as well documented by the image-starved celebrities in the [excuse me while I vomit] “Yes We Can” music video. His one and only personality quibble is a self-confessed short-lived cocaine experience that makes him seem all the more “real,” and when touched on by a Clinton aide, backfired into Hillary’s face. His is a persona so well crafted that the LA witch doctors must have been brought in from the get-go.

Like a great actor – a master of empathy – he is whatever we want to project onto him: mainstream, alternative, activist, socialist, Christian, secularist, black, white, immigrant, native, African, American, African-American… He speaks to and for all of us: from the Heartland of America to the Middle East. He is a man of masks, of tricks, veils and surfaces, which is perhaps what is exactly needed to move mountains in a land that thrives on such impossible illusions.

For who else has such a virtual impact on the lives of so many? Who else turns the nullity of vapid hot air into the airwaves of success and power? The answer is she who has already anointed this one to serve as her demigod. Who else but Oprah, that vacuum of personality, so calculatingly unobjectionable? After all, she is the master of dealing with America’s hopes and inspirations.

“The medium is the message,” said Marshall McLuhan. It’s not what Obama says, but how he says it. It’s not who Obama is, but how we perceive him. Messages don’t matter as long as they’re delivered with, hmmm, inspiration and hope.

And so, in the 54th year of our Lord and Savior Oprah Gail Winfrey, will Barack Obama, on a platform of change – “what change?”… “who cares, just change!” – be anointed President of the United States of America?

As Leonard Cohen sang in his forgotten epitaph “Democracy”:

It's coming from the feel
that this ain't exactly real,
or it's real, but it ain't exactly there.

Super Football Caucus M*A*S*H

According to AC Nielson, a record 97.5 million viewers watched last Sunday’s Super Bowl XLI – the most ever to watch a Super Bowl, and apparently, the second largest for any TV Show, second only to the finale of M*A*S*H in 1983, which apparently averaged 106 million viewers.

I want to know what-the-fuck happened in the last episode of M*A*S*H in 1983? Did Radar finally come out of the closet?



According to the US Elections Project only 122 million of 202 million eligible voters turned out for the 2004 US Presidential elections.

To reduce that margin, let’s run old episodes of M*A*S*H concurrently with the Super Bowl in order to maximise voter eyeballs. And then just before an offensive play, touchdown or the punch line to one of Alan Alda’s intoxicating repartee, we flash, “Press the Red Button to Vote and Continue”. Call it “Vote-per-View”. “This caucus is sponsored by Budweiser and the Church of Scientology: hmmm, thetans taste gooood…”

The Mythology of Beckham’s Bulge

Flipping through my February edition of Vanity Fair I couldn’t help but visually trip over David Beckham’s package on the inside-front-cover.



I thought it ironic to see the once shy and humble boy, who from modest means in a North East London borough rose to become the greatest sporting star of all time, spread-eagled with the insignia of one of fashion’s most successful designers emblazoned on his crotch.

So in the spirit of Roland Barthes, the French philosopher, semiotician and Voted Favourite Person to Have at a Party, I think I’ll entertain a little of my own mythologies on this advertisement.

First of all, what sticks out the second most (hehe) is the complete absence of leg and chest hair. Clearly, David Beckham thinks a good manscaper is imperative!

As we well know, the obsession with expurgating body hair is more commonly associated with the vanity of women than of men (inversely proportional for homosexual circles). According to popular rhetoric, obliging ladies to shave their legs, typifies man’s paedophilic inclination towards the pre-pubescent body; basically, men want women to be infantile. So is this to say that we want David Beckham infantile? He does, after all, play with balls.

Allow me to venture a similar, yet distinct theory. What is it that is said to continue growing once the body is entombed after death? That is, the hair and nails. According to Georges Bataille, in his ground breaking monograph Death and Sensuality, this would have had the gravest of impacts on the first ancient cultures to indoctrinate burial practices. Along with the decomposition of your fellow man’s body is the preponderance of hair.

Hence, shearing this excess growth acts as a symbolic gesture towards deterring death. It is not so much eternal youth that David Beckham’s hairless legs signify, but the universal anxiety over death and the subconscious dream of eternal life. To exist hairless is to exist outside of nature’s logical path of maturation and death and hence, to exist outside of time. Not pre-pubescent, but embryonic.

Consider this photograph of Billy Corgan by the New York based artist David LaChapelle.



Old ladies visit the hairdressers more than anyone else because they want to purge the signs of decay, of grey and thinning hair. With this perspective, this image of the Chicago rocker instils a sense of atemporality. Living, not in the moment, but outside of all moments, before time even has a chance to do its mortal and unholy work. (Monotheistic religions proclaiming an afterlife are obsessed with cleanliness, wanting one to expurgate everything from blood to hair to foreskin in order to reach beatitude.)

Traditionally, grooming was an aristocratic activity. It was reserved for those who had an inexhaustible amount of time and money - individuals who did not actively participate in the laissez-faire economic system, a system controlled by the clock.

It was not until the 18th century Dandies of Western Europe, that the middleclass began to practice the effeminate art of greater upkeep of their physical appearance. They would essentially imitate aristocratic sensitivities, grooming, powdering and occasionally buggering.

It is not so much the appearance in itself, which is significant - as it is with the plume of a peacock – but the perceived time invested in the appearance. And so as class revolution gave rise to the bourgeoisie over the 19th century, time became an accessible luxury and these values were instilled into the bourgeois logic.

So back to the legs. Georges Bataille might have referred to this fetishized act of biomaterial destruction as “negative expenditure”. We negate a part of our body in order to elevate our social and divine standing.

Beckham’s standing is no less than godly. He is a Greek statue, a masculine paragon cast outside of time, to wither eons of birth and death. David Beckham was born lower-middles class. He is now a God. He can afford all the time in the world to veet his legs. (He does, after all, play for L.A. Galaxy.)

And so, it doesn’t seem altogether out of place, to see this man of humble beginnings, laying hairlessly, as a God, bulging, adrift on a satin cloud, awaiting your fiancé’s phantasmagorical orgasm. This will be his myth. Zeus!

(Now I haven’t even talked about the bulge. Well, clearly it indicates a fondness for tennis.)

The Political Unconscious of the Fashionably Conscious

Salon’s Videodog took to Mercedes Benz New York Fashion Week to get the fashion world’s low-down on Super Tuesday. They found a Hillary look-a-like (unfashionable), an oblivious male model (“Is that like Super Bowl Tuesday?”) and a slightly confused fashionista (“I took like an online test and it said to go with Mitt Romney,” very unfashionable).

Psychosexual Vegetarians

PETA Asia Pacific’s recent marketing campaign, which attempts to persuade meat-eaters towards vegetarianism by flaunting fully-undressed supermodels, reminds me of something Jacques Derrida talked about in his seminars on cannibalism: that carnivorous desire is exchangeable with carnal drive.

He says, “vegetarians, like everyone else, can also incorporate, symbolically, something living, something of flesh and blood... if they love, for it is the very temptation of love.” And so to follow the psychoanalytical logic of the undersexed older white male, vegetarians are hence, amazing in bed, because they sublimate their desire for meat into a desire for, well, meat. More fieldwork can only validate this old wife’s tale.

Truly, between Sophie Monk and a medium-rare porterhouse steak, I know what I’d rather sink my teeth into. And so the mantra “sex sells” is really finding a psychosexually suitable place in the anti-flesh industry. PETA is even having a Sexiest Vegetarian Next Door contest! So forget all the feminist objections to the objectification of the female body: we’re doing it for fluffy.

But as The Writer in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker says: “My conscience wants vegetarianism to win over the world. And my subconscious is yearning for a piece of juicy meat. But what do I want?”

Can't I have my steak and eat it?

Hollywood: Too Much Handheld, Not Enough Grip

Kyle Smith, film critic to the New York Post recently wrote an article, “Handheld Cameras Are Officially Over,” partly in response to the lukewarm reception of Cloverfield, J.J. Abrams’ latest soon-to-be forgotten marketing masterpiece, shot entirely with the effect of a shaky handheld camera.



A lot of people cite The Blair Witch Project - equally forgettable - as the beginning of cinema’s obsession with the shaky-cam, but I remember the first big-budget foray one year earlier with Stephen Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, particularly in the infamous Omaha Beach landing scene.



Spielberg commercialized the fly-on-the-wall style of cinema vérité, replacing the fly with Tom Hanks and the wall with a legion of German mortars, giving to the war genre the effect of gritty realism and first-person presence.

Private Ryan’s shooting style foreshadowed the onslaught of Fox News’ own gritty and realistic war coverage as journalists reported from their “embedded” infantries in between gun-battles and car-bombings. Through overexposure, the shaky-cam has entered our visual lexicon and has come to be equated with veracity, courage and truthfulness uncontrived.

The Mancurian author Anthony Burgess labeled America’s demand to “face up to reality” as Nixonian; that is, a nation led by the lying smile of a president thug and fed on the monochromatic bloody images of the Vietnam War is a nation with a predilection for suffering.

On a hesitantly zooming lens, we watched the reality of a Boeing-767 marrying metal-to-metal as it collided into Tower Two of the World Trade Center. Camera phones provided the first glimpses of the 2005 London bombings. All over South East Asia reporters-for-the-day emailed and SMSed anxious holiday footage of a 30-metre wave.

Indeed, the world has become Nixonian. Through images, we deal with the harsh and visceral truth of all things. We have a propensity towards the real, so much so, that all images become a function of the real, particularly those steeped in fiction. We say the computer-generated images of the latest action blockbuster are “so real”. J.J. Abrams goes so far as to produce those effects in the lens of a handy-cam, as if we might be able to recall the images of 9/11 as mere phantasmagorias, conjured up by some studio lot in Burbank.

Perhaps a detriment to Cloverfield, is that for all the reality it professes - heightened by the promotional image of a battered Statue of Liberty (no doubt exploiting the visual unconscious of all New York’s observers) – it treads too close to what Jean Baudrillard referred to as the “hyperreal”, a reality exploited to the point of nonsense. Hollywood dreams of a reality so real, it ceases to be real, or as another post-modern theorist put it, we exist in the “desert of the real.”

Compare the action sequences in Private Ryan and Cloverfield with the impossibly smooth and flowing images of Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men.



In Children of Men D.O.P. Emmanuel Lubezki also utilizes a handheld approach, giving the appearance of documentary. Almost every scene is contained in a single tracking shot, but a single cut where the camera moves seamlessly and unshaken within a chaotic environment. There is an ethereal dream-like quality as the camera pans and follows the protagonist, seeing what he sees and observing what he observes.

Now watch this seminal scene from Stanley Kubrick’s 1957 masterpiece Paths of Glory.



A reverent irreverence or solemn nonchalance characterizes this style. The camera reflects the humorless demeanor of our protagonists as he walks pensively down the trench. Unlike in Saving Private Ryan, it reflects contemplation, not action.

Reality (and I mean hyperreality) stupefies the viewer into shock, causing him or her to reject the experience, alienating one from any deeper understanding. The difference between gritty realism and the ethereal dream is the difference between suffering and contemplation. We contemplate the dream. We attempt dream interpretation.

With hyperreality, we are lost in the moment, lost to the emotive purge: fear, love, dread… we risk seeing reality taken to such a horrifying extreme, that we lapse into apathy: “this is just the way things are.” Or, we go into shellshock and deny the world’s malevolence altogether and simply await Tom Hanks to come pick us up and bring us into the third act.

Perhaps audiences are becoming jaded with hyperreality. In our current wartime, we are constantly bombarded by images on our TVs and in the cinemas dictating to us the veracity of reality. What filmmakers such as Cuarón and Lubezki are doing - and others including Joe Wright, Todd Haynes and Julian Schnabel - is recalling the contemplative and inspirational styles of Fellini, Kubrick and Hitchcock, where dreams have as much validity as reality does.

Canned Laughter Fails To Bring The Funny

In news that is sure to send waves of explosive defecation through production houses across the globe, a primetime comedy has failed to garner a single laugh. Details remain sketchy, however, early reports suggest that Channel 10’s “hit comedy series” skitHouse was met with silence last Thursday night despite the producer’s liberal use of Track 15 from Pet Sounds (of Audience Approval).

“We don’t know what went wrong,” series’ executive producer Craig Campbell moaned, obviously uncomfortable in his rubberized underwear. “Track 15 is a classic! It’s never failed! What else can we do? We turned up the volume; even tried Track 16! It’s as if you people are trying not to laugh!”

Beverley McGarvey, Channel 10’s Head of Programming, knows what’s going wrong: “The problem has always been the viewer,” she said in a statement released this morning from cubicle three of the executive toilets. “You can’t rely on them liking the same thing from one day to the next. I’ve been in the industry for thirty years, so obviously I know good television… there aren’t many viewers that can say that.”

10’s solution, she explains, comes in HD. “It’s simple: we sit the viewer down in front of a TV tuned to 10 and then put the remote out of their reach. It’s the digital revolution.” Of course, some people might still be able to find the controls on the set, and even be willing to get up to use them. “Which is why we’re focusing initially on geriatrics. They can’t even get up to relieve themselves, you think they wont just sit there and take it? This is the genius behind Ten Half Dead!”

Channel 9 is going one step further. For the premiere of their landmark “new comedy” Monster House, they’ve turned to the emergent Blu-Ray technology. “The flaw to Ten HD,” incoming Nine exec Michael Healy explains, “is the restriction to age. Now sure, we all prize the over-80s demographic. It’s pretty clear that most of our programming is targeted to their outmoded ideas of what’s acceptable or even funny, but it’s crazy to ignore the more able-bodied viewers. With this technology, as soon as anyone tries to change channel, a high-powered blue laser simply takes off their finger!” His personal assistant assured us later that Mr Healy’s propensity for miming laser-fire while screaming ‘zap!’ for much longer than can possibly be needed to illustrate his point is the result of a birth defect which rendered him anatomically brainless. “We’re confident that people will soon recognize the quality of our programming.” He eventually concluded.

Whichever technology proves successful, it seems Australian comedy will survive this current crisis thanks to our indomitable spirit of innovation, ensuring that the same quality product is unmissable for generations of obese, fingerless geriatrics to come.