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Cult Studs
Aug. 11th, 2010 07:46 amI have a brilliant friend, my Old Hell Freezes Over friend, who for reasons not entirely clear to anyone got sidetracked in her long and luxurious career as a professional grad student. Her thing is the chapel at Karlstejn, the 14th c. Gothic castle of the first Holy Roman Emporer, and it is a worthy opponent. You have to like learn Latin, Czech geology, and what a chapel for personal, private worship means to the first Christian hegemonist, and stuff, yummy.
At some point she zagged into cult studs, partly I think because the art history department at her huge suburban red brick university was trashed and turned into $omething trendier.
I remember at some point they unleashed this terrific discernment on Harlequin romance novels, in which she discerned that the actual place the heroine felt a throbbing was "my bottom" [sic]. This was the locus of some very chaste but throbbing events which led to marriage to the duke, who was always fiddling with "my bottom" but not actually, -- well, you know.
This was hilarious, and in the great scheme of things, making it okay for Suzy Creamcheese's "bottom" to throb, actually not a bad thing. If that's what she's reading and sex ed is what she's getting, it can't be all bad.
My question is, what is the purpose for grad students? I can see the purpose for reporters, getting a grip on the Zeitgeist for Zeitgeist stories, and I can see the political and dialectical purpose for Marxism of good analysis of majority culture, I can see the prophylactic and pedagogical purpose of teaching consumers of television and Harlequin romance novels and Hirohito's revenge video games et al how to talk back to the very derriere-garde and often fascist capitalist values embedded in the Aristotelian (still!) heroic unities, all that. Like they'd want to.
But I don't see the actual cult studs people making the larger picture. I see, instead, really really intelligent people analyzing media the form of whose actual dialogue and character is conferred by television commercials. Now as it happens, I studied television commercials back in the dawn of pre-history and learned two things. They are made by the best and brightest art school graduates, and they are formidably avant-garde -- or at least the best cherry-pickers of what's happening in the streets -- in Zeitgeist, music, camera work and, for lack of a better word, fashion. They do a far better job reporting on the culture than culture critics and reporters do. Their product, the commercials, is completely atavistic, however, in the purity of the Aristotelian narrative arc -- as easily seen in any screenplay you can think of -- toward any number of antediluvian values. Starting with a protagonist. And so on.
(I would like to emphasize an important nuance here. The best and brightest art school grads who make commercials are not the manufacturers of the culture. They get it from the streets. What they get from the streets is actual culture; the picture I have in my mind is of Karl Lagerfeld chickenhawking the trendy clubkids clothes.)
If the Zeitgeist really is, as it was said recently to be, somewhere, that young people don't believe in a personality anymore, or a psyche, or values, but rather trying different ones on, picking them up and laying them down, then cult studs can be seen to be another sort of cosplay game, I suppose, in which the relative values of a throbbing bottom are just as worthy of study -- without relating it to a larger and irrelevant world -- as, oh, let's say, the politics of famine.
I remember as a young woman reading Pauline Kael and thinking that it was crazy and elitist and just so totally French, disputatious and spurious, to take movies, their form being conferred basically by commodity fetishism, seriously.
I still do.
At some point she zagged into cult studs, partly I think because the art history department at her huge suburban red brick university was trashed and turned into $omething trendier.
I remember at some point they unleashed this terrific discernment on Harlequin romance novels, in which she discerned that the actual place the heroine felt a throbbing was "my bottom" [sic]. This was the locus of some very chaste but throbbing events which led to marriage to the duke, who was always fiddling with "my bottom" but not actually, -- well, you know.
This was hilarious, and in the great scheme of things, making it okay for Suzy Creamcheese's "bottom" to throb, actually not a bad thing. If that's what she's reading and sex ed is what she's getting, it can't be all bad.
My question is, what is the purpose for grad students? I can see the purpose for reporters, getting a grip on the Zeitgeist for Zeitgeist stories, and I can see the political and dialectical purpose for Marxism of good analysis of majority culture, I can see the prophylactic and pedagogical purpose of teaching consumers of television and Harlequin romance novels and Hirohito's revenge video games et al how to talk back to the very derriere-garde and often fascist capitalist values embedded in the Aristotelian (still!) heroic unities, all that. Like they'd want to.
But I don't see the actual cult studs people making the larger picture. I see, instead, really really intelligent people analyzing media the form of whose actual dialogue and character is conferred by television commercials. Now as it happens, I studied television commercials back in the dawn of pre-history and learned two things. They are made by the best and brightest art school graduates, and they are formidably avant-garde -- or at least the best cherry-pickers of what's happening in the streets -- in Zeitgeist, music, camera work and, for lack of a better word, fashion. They do a far better job reporting on the culture than culture critics and reporters do. Their product, the commercials, is completely atavistic, however, in the purity of the Aristotelian narrative arc -- as easily seen in any screenplay you can think of -- toward any number of antediluvian values. Starting with a protagonist. And so on.
(I would like to emphasize an important nuance here. The best and brightest art school grads who make commercials are not the manufacturers of the culture. They get it from the streets. What they get from the streets is actual culture; the picture I have in my mind is of Karl Lagerfeld chickenhawking the trendy clubkids clothes.)
If the Zeitgeist really is, as it was said recently to be, somewhere, that young people don't believe in a personality anymore, or a psyche, or values, but rather trying different ones on, picking them up and laying them down, then cult studs can be seen to be another sort of cosplay game, I suppose, in which the relative values of a throbbing bottom are just as worthy of study -- without relating it to a larger and irrelevant world -- as, oh, let's say, the politics of famine.
I remember as a young woman reading Pauline Kael and thinking that it was crazy and elitist and just so totally French, disputatious and spurious, to take movies, their form being conferred basically by commodity fetishism, seriously.
I still do.
