[A draft of a short panel presentation for a Los Angeles symposium on musicals. Rather on the speculative/bonkers side – in the tradition of Adorno and the post-structuralists – but then I like that kind of thing....]
Here we sit, in the unnamed capitol, or at least the largest marketplace, of accelerating physical transformation: from facelifts to liposuction, Botox to retinoids, street meth to Prozac, Viagra to steroids. The culture of chemical and surgical alteration is increasingly ubiquitous, and has been long in coming – in the mid-1990s the doctor at my Los Angeles HIV clinic continued giving me testosterone injections even after blood tests showed that my levels had returned to normal, because it would cheer me up, and make me slightly more like the opulently handsome patients who, instead of shriveling and dying, strode grandly in and out of his waiting room. A few years later, on having to start injections of interferon, I was offered a range of antidepressants to counter the side effects, then cautioned about the side effects that would come from them – and of course we all have colleagues, family, friends, taking antidepressants, antianxieties, and other behavior modifiers.
All that is merely prelude, of course: an accelerating biotech industry, operating almost invisibly behind the medical industry, has already started developing astonishingly powerful innovations of body, and mind, modification. Though we are accustomed to correcting physical problems and defects and repairing biochemistry and neurochemistry when it seems to go awry, the border between correction and modification is already extremely porous; cosmetic surgeries and Viagra are only occasionally used to help those suffering from actual problems, and body modification will soon, and increasingly, be a matter of taste. Taste, desire, imagination, self-image: when gender construction, as well as the body’s energy, shape, and movement, are increasingly a matter of choice – as were tattoos and piercings for what may seem to our grandchildren the primitive trends of the late twentieth – the sheer fluidity and intricacy of those choices will change everything.
[show DVD – Volkswagen commercial, breakdancing Kelly – 1:00]
It’s too bad you didn’t see this wonderful, disorienting, and faintly disturbing commercial on television – Volkswagen made this ad for its Golf GTI in 2005, and it played across televisions in Europe; there are of course copies on YouTube, but they are in disappointing resolutions. The dancer is ‘Elsewhere’, aka David Bernal (a Santa Ana lad who became famous for his breakdance skills in popping, locking and liquiding); the video was constructed by giving him a suit like Gene Kelly’s original, choreographing him to move along the same directions and distances but in a completely different manner, and then digitally mapping the older actor’s face onto the younger man’s body. The music for the commercial, a remix by UK electronica duo Mint Royale, became popular enough to be released as a single later that year.
This shimmering, popping body, all flexion and energy, makes Haraway’s cyborgs, and even Butler’s performing bodies, nearly, or about to be, obsolete: increasingly the boxes that hold the body, and of course gender, are dissolving, eliding – naturally this has been happening in waves of cultural change over decades, possibly centuries; but once again the change is speeding up, the distinctions dissolving. This goes beyond the transformation of the body’s image, or the mechanical transformation of the cyborg body: this is the body that functions as its own processor, which may be out of the control of the person who seems to be in charge of the brain – this is thus beyond Butler because even performed gender implies a certain agency; this is beyond agency, a body that has its own (ecstasy- or speed-fueled) movements and flexibility, beyond anything the person stuck inside can dictate to it… The chemical body is subject to changes that are invisible, unlike the cyborg body; and the chemical body is not performed by any agent of identity or personality, it is performed by chemicals – the location of agency shifts, vanishes, behind a series of scrims, and we literally don’t know what we are doing.
Consider another video clip: the eerie and unforgettable transformation of Kylie Minogue, as the Green Fairy, from Moulin Rouge in 2001. The CGI transformation of human into sprite ratchets up a step, her voice morphs to a masculine roar (overdubbed by Ozzy Osbourne), and she becomes a male/female figure of threatening, inhuman excitement, her body changing to represent the experience-altering wormwood of absinthe. This constellation of meanings connects to other aspects of the show – especially the overwhelming Can Can, where the film’s action takes hold for the first time, a fanned-out beam of cultural references distorted through drunken and drugged transformations of space and sensuality…
Of course, the moving images I am using as examples are digital video transformations – merely examples of contemporary virtual technology, not examples of real chemicals altering real bodies. But they point forwards towards that which will be more disorienting than any virtual reality – they suggest to us, they make us feel, the rush of changing chemical compounds, things that will make our relations to dancing, to singing, to romantic love, completely other. That will confound those of us who are accustomed to thinking of themselves as having identities, or even those who have tried to move past identities to have only experiences and desires – if even desires and experiences are contingent on changing streams of chemistry, where do we locate our selves?...
And equally none of this centers on the musical: it merely hits it on a side bounce, as it were, as the musical has not been culturally central for more than forty years now. I’ve written elsewhere that contemporary television musicals, such as those in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Simpsons and South Park, as well as those in Family Guy, Xena and other shows, normally begin by displaying smug contempt for the old-fashioned, conformist, emotionally predictable world of the musical; but then each is gradually overwhelmed by the sheer power of musical-emotional technology, with its strong feelings that trump any televised cynicism. But what I’m trying to get at here, looking at these voluntary and involuntary digital transformations of Gene Kelly, of Kylie Minogue, is a next step that is waiting in the wings – if the body’s shape and sound can be changed, how will we recognize the leading lady? If the body’s energy and flexibility can be changed, how can we still be impressed by the virtuosic dancing body?
So, as many of the outré theoretical pyrotechnics of the past forty years reappear, not in the mind, but in the body: body-altering drugs, bodies as simulacra, bodies without organs, because they have dissolved in rapidly changing chemical systems: we finally admit to ourselves that we have always been puppets of organic chemistry…. And, as Rent suggests through its junkie heroine who just likes to “feel good”, and then tries to hide with grandiose ensemble numbers: if the love interest is chemically altering her- or him-self – how can we believe in the romance, in any kind of love, in any experience at all; how can we take the emotions of the music or the plot seriously enough to care?
We will struggle to find our balance in a world where our very perceptions are endlessly modified, change upon change until we can’t remember where we started; but for another generation this may simply become their reality: and the strong theories of the twentieth century, the culture of suspicion, which is based on the importance of hidden meanings, will continue to dissolve; as everything becomes equally, endlessly, internally-because-chemically, suspicious…
[7/20/07-10/13/07]
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Posted by: lfaeo | December 24, 2008 at 11:39 AM