Here in Detroit this week, celebrities and representatives of the national media have flooded town in anticipation of the Super Bowl, throwing parties and throwing around money. Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick's administration has led efforts to mask Detroit's abandoned buildings with fake facades and little-to-no-mention has been made of Detroit's status as the nation's poorest city, where one-third of the population lives below the poverty line, nor of last week's news about the auto industry's latest crippling round of lay-offs.
But perhaps the most striking feature of the pre-Super Bowl action has been the prominent place of mainstreamed softcore porn. Two of the most talked-about (in the mainstream press)parties are the Playboy party and the Maxim "are you hot?" shindig. The hook of the latter party: local women e-mail their photos to Maxim and receive invitations based on hotness. Slightly less racy fare included a party on Belle Isle where guests could pay top dollar to hang out and have their pictures taken with hot twins.
A Penthouse party admittedly has received less ink, but is part of the festivities nonetheless. And Jimmy Kimmel, Kid Rock, Tommy Lee, and Snoop Dogg (who produces pornography videos on the side)--the latter two host the Penthouse party--are four of the high-profile revelers in town, so lots of lines are blurring between "mainstream entertainment" and the once-marginal world of "adult entertainment." Lots and lots of jokes about Detroit's storied stripclubs (never anticipated a joke on national tv about 8-Mile's Booby Trap club). Detroit alt-newsweekly Metro Times includes a story in its Super Bowl issue about the stripper district along 8-Mile, which is anticipating big business this weekend.
And a not-unrelated dynamic of the media coverage this week: the acceptability of fat jokes regarding Aretha Franklin, who will sing the national anthem. The Detroit News speculates that perhaps Franklin will join the Stones during halftime, tacking on the smarmy headline, "Franklin may provide a Super-size surprise." Various news outlets and commentators have made the obligatory joke about how appropriate it is for Franklin to perform at Super Bowl XL (get it? extra large? wocka wocka, stick around folks I got a million of them). Not just late-night comedians. Mainstream news outlets. Because bodies--whether the disciplined, elevated, valued bodies of strippers and hot twins and Playboy playmates or the transgressive, ridiculed body of Aretha Franklin--are here for our consumption and critical commentary, like a well-executed ("that was awesome") or flubbed ("aww, would ya look at that") touchdown pass.
9 comments:
aretha IS fat and the culture IS fucked. people love porn because it's another very lazy avenue towards celebrity.
detroit happens to be in the unhappy position of, thanks to poverty, political incompetence and horrible schools, not being able to hold back the forces of fat and filth that have made it such a vexing place.
update: Adult filmstar Jenna Jameson also hosted a party last night.
Anonymous: I'm not sure what you mean by porn as a "lazy avenue toward celebrity"...could you clarify?
I guess what's striking for me about the whole Aretha Franklin thing isn't the actual state of her body as much as the fact the media feels obliged to offer commentary on it. As with a Jenna Jameson or "hot twin" party, it seems like mass acceptance (and *lucrative* mass marketing) of the body of a human being. "Sell" tickets to a party where you take your picture with the star of pornographic films. "Sell" newspapers because puns about Aretha Franklin's corpulescence are soooo funny.
So, anonymous, whereas you see her fatness as significant, I see attention to her fatness as being the more striking thing. What do you mean by the forces of fat exactly? There, too, I'm not clear on what that means.
Thanks for commenting.
according to james monaco, there are three products of fame:
stars
celebrities
quasars
when you have a culture that fetishizes the quasar, perhaps it does so not so much to democratize fame but as a last ditch effort to avoid the dread of anonymity.
likewise, in a country where over 65% of the population is overweight, poking fun at fat celebrities while ogling hardbody porn "actresses" is yet another way to, as erich fromm might put it, escape from freedom.
your invocation of Fromm is interesting. both acts of objectification (the ogling, the poking fun) create the illusion of transgression, when of course both result from dominant conceptions of able-bodiedness, femininity, and civic duty (the patriotic obligations of restraint, efficiency, etc.).
but that allusion of transgression is why I question your "lazy avenue toward celebrity" and "forces of fat" formulations. what does laziness mean in such a context? and who constitutes the ranks of these "forces of fat"? insomuch as they play a normative role, the mass media seem to constitute "forces of thin."
it is a delicate balance indeed between obligation to self and obligation to society. i would argue that an individual who is committed to moderation and mindfulness as a means to enjoying life AS IT IS LIVED not as IT SHOULD BE will be a better citizen.
the forces of thin and the forces of fat are two sides of the same coin: the inability to negotiate a livable subjectivity for oneself.
an individual committed to moderation will enact a **particular version** of citizenship. isn't moderation an abstraction along the lines of "competition" or "humility," i.e., carrying with it particular value systems and advancing particular (albeit multiple, conflicted) causes? a co-opt-able abstraction, in other words?
who is served by moderation? and how does moderation as an exalted "good" lead to exactly the kinds of body hate that facilitate those hilarious Aretha jokes? her body marks her as a failed citizen (unlike the porn star), and is thus ridiculed.
moderation is a strategy, a stance in the maintenance and nurturing of subjectivity.
if your consciousnesss, by its very nature, is gloriously provisional, then part of "enjoying" that provisionality comes from a sense of mastery over its confederate, the body.
the fetish for fat and for thin come from the same place - a dearth of subjective "peace" or rather, an inability to understand the true nature of subjectivity. hence, the concurrent fetish of objectification.
a fat body is marked as a failure of "moderation." and also, a failure on the part of the 'mind,' engaged in a mythic battle with the 'body.' why does a body that doesn't fit an externally determined (determined by for-profit interests) set of criteria necessarily signify a lack of peace? or a lack of subjectivity?
isn't there a greater peace, a greater subjectivity, that comes from disengagement with said criteria?
interesting exchange. thanks for reading and thinking.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=yUTJQIBI1oA
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