AMERICAN RUNESCAPES (CHILDSCAPES #40)

"It is conventional to call 'monster' any blending of dissonant elements.... I call 'monster' every original, inexhaustible beauty."
Alfred Jarry

AMERICAN RUNESCAPES (CHILDSCAPES #36)

AMERICAN RUNESCAPES (CHILDSCAPES #35)

TWILIGHT WEEK

Reading: Latham, “Youth Fetishism: The Lost Boys Cruise Mallworld”; Edwards, “Good Looks and Sex Symbols: The Power of the Gaze and the Displacement of the Erotic in Twilight”


The Vampire is big in popular culture today. Twilight and True Blood are more than giving the zombies a run for their money. And when a film genre or trope catches a popular wave, I believe it means something. Zombies and vampires are bigger than ever before in popular culture but not for the same reasons. Sticking to images of youth and vampires per our class parameters, I would like to take some time and explore potential meanings. Why do we love the beautiful sexy vampires so much that True Blood and Twilight can rule the worlds of cinema and television all at the same time. Despite this week’s academic articles, I would argue that the reasons have very little to do with capitalist theory or the Mormon religion. A few other elephants in the room are likely much better justification for the popularity of this genre and these entertainments.

The Edwards article makes some very interesting observations about the significance of the glance in high school culture, and its ability to destroy and categorize the creatures of high school culture. He/she is right that the film does a brilliant job of capturing this key element to the Twilight novels. And, it is even interesting that the author’s Mormonism informs the erotic dance of abstinence that is our character’s main struggle. The denial of sex, whether actual or as in Twilight represented by the vampire’s potential bite, is erotically charged and, ironically actually draws greater attention to the desire left unmet. Good strategy, good moviemaking and interesting stuff – but it’s not really getting to the heart of the appeal of the films, though it does dance around it a bit.

“Youth Fetishism: The Lost Boys Cruise Mallworld,” by Latham is a horse of an entirely different color. Basically, it argues – in a much more confused and qualified manner -- that vampires and cyborgs are metaphoric representations of the capitalistic economic world feasting on the misled and abused workers of the world. The case he makes is complex and ideological and seems to rest on unidentified and unproven ground. It’s like a dedicated Marxist stumbled into a film department in the academy and tried to figure out what to do with himself. Marx mentioned a vampire metaphor at one point, so our author is off and running with theory as reality. I kept thinking of the film, “Being There,” with “Peter Sellers,” and wondered if I was being tested. Academic Hidden Camera, anyone!?!

I don’t mean to be dismissive, perhaps everything he says is true and our attraction the vampire actually does have something to do with consumerism and misplaced erotic consumerist desire or something like that. Really though? Can’t we come up with some reasons for the vampire’s appeal that are a bit more down to earth? Especially as we study images of youth, I can’t really imagine why it’s necessary to throw Karl Marx into the mix of explaining why we so desire The Vampire Lestat, Edward and Bella, and the entire cast of the sex-drenched True Blood.

I guess I’m just going to come right out and say it. We want to have sex with these beautiful young creatures – and – we’d like to live forever. Our puritan based society also has a deep-seated fear of uncontrolled sexuality, and the vampire represents a safe but scary look at that chained beast. We love Edward and Bella because we want to be them. What man does not desire Kristen Stewart? And why do you think that Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise (and the sexy then-child Kirsten Dunst) were cast in 1994’s Interview With The Vampire? The modern vampire is all about sex and desire and eternal life – and don’t we all want eternal love and eternal life? Karl Marx anyone?

Is our culture particularly obsessed with staying fit and youthful and desirable? Our friend Edward Cullen gets to stay beautiful and seventeen forever. Isn’t that exactly what plastic surgery and workout regimens and skin cream are all about? When someone is wealthy and powerful, like the actor Michael Douglas for example, what does he do as he gets old? Well, Michael Douglas dumped his long-time age appropriate wife, got plastic surgery to look younger, and married a very young up and coming actress and started a new family. C’mon, this is not rocket science, and Michael Douglas is, in fact, starting to look like a vampire.

Vampires are an erotic jolt that scare us and attract us all at the same time, while messing with our deep-seated fear of death and obsolescence. You mean I really could perhaps live forever and even have sex with Kristen Stewart, Kirsten Dunst and maybe even Brad Pitt as a bonus? Sounds like fun, and blood to boot. Cringe inducing and emotion-inspiring all at once. Monsters… and monsters, that touch some of our most primal emotions. AND, intense sexuality without pornography even!

We can make vampires a metaphor for a lot of things, for certain, but their twenty-first century Kunstwollen appeal is likely much easier to explain.

Todd Rongstad

AMERICAN RUNESCAPES (CHILDSCAPES #34)

AMERICAN RUNESCAPES (CHILDSCAPES #33)

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AKIRA, KUNSTWOLLEN AND THE JAPANESE ADOLESCENT

Readings: Otomo, Akira (on reserve in the library); Napier, “Akira and Ranma ½: The
Monstrous Adolescent”; Ruh, “The Robots from Takkun’s Head: Cyborg Adolescence in FLCL”

Our immersion into the alien world of Japanese anime brought Walter Benjamin and his Kunstwollen to mind. Kunstwollen is the idea that popular culture – of particular societies, ethnic groups and so on – is the artistic projection of a collective intention. Stated more broadly, this theory posits that a society’s art and popular culture is the best reflection of its nature, conflicts and desires. Akira and the other anime in this week’s deliberations is a simplistically interesting window into a very traditional and alien culture with some very obvious fault lines. It should be no surprise that the storm and stress of adolescence should be particularly noteworthy in a culture that stifles individualism and rewards conformity – or that simple-theme art, like anime, should result from the inevitable clash.

Otomo’s Akira is an animated Japanese film from 1988 that set the stage for many to follow. Without having to go into the plot, such that it is, in any great depth, Akira is about a group of family-less adolescents in a post-apocalyptic Tokyo ruled by evil and cynical grown-ups. Our hero, Tetsuo, is immature and angry and is transformed into an all-powerful source of energy and destruction. The parents are absent and the politicians and military are corrupt and the world has been spoiled by grownups. What’s a young juvenile delinquent to do? The article also addresses a show, Ranma ½, a show about an adolescent who turns back and forth between a boy and girl while struggling to define his/her identity. The last article goes into depth about a show FLCL that plays with ideas of the human identity combining with technology to form a type of human cyborg. All of these anime enterprises of course wrestle with questions of identity and where our characters fit in the modern world of rapid technological and cultural change.

Japan is a very closed society where the youth are under a great deal of educational pressure to succeed and societal pressure to conform. The genesis of this particular brand of Japanese Kunstwollen is of course this particularly rarefied form of moving in between childhood and adulthood. Any self-respecting adolescent would feel neglected and angry with this process, and our characters are extreme examples of individuals wrestling with this very difficult transition. It reminds me of Rebel Without a Cause without any good acting or reality of any kind. Of course, James Dean’s character from the 1950’s was frustrated as well, but one can only imagine what he would have done in the Japanese environment. No doubt, scream a lot and turn into a destructive force of world crushing energy.

It’s the simplemindedness of all anime that strikes me as so juvenile and alien. Does this really speak to the American version of adolescence, given the difference between our cultures? Akiro exploded in popularity in Japan because it spoke to the frustrations of that culture, but it only really works as a tangential freak show from the American perspective. Every emotion is distilled; every evil is distorted to the extreme. The immaturity of Tetsuo leaves us at a distance, and could even be seen as a judgment by the mainstream culture against the rebelliousness of youth. Things are out of control and in flux in much of this anime messiness, thank goodness the uniformed/establishment culture of traditional Japan awaits to calm these crazy kids down (read sarcasm here). This culture thinks in stereotypes and so I guess it should be no surprise that it’s pop culture anime output should obsess over and eventually embrace a categorical world.

Relative to our class, anime is a representation of a particular form of youth culture in our global economy. Yes, adolescence must be a tough experience in a racist, insecure, imperial, orderly nation like Japan and the movies that resonate and generate from this bizarre mix are likely to turn out just like the silliness we find in Akira, Ranma ½ and FLCL. But this is not my culture, and it is not my children’s culture. It only echoes as an extreme reflection of a typically difficult age in the human transition from child to adult. Happily, globalization has not yet made the experience of adolescence a shared universal. Kunstwollen remains relevant to specific, distinguishable groups of humanity. I’m thrilled not to have a lot in common with the Japanese adolescent, and am convinced that my thirteen-year-old sons would share my sense of alienation from this alienating material.

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HALL, ARNETT, ERIKSON

Out of order
Readings: Hall, “Preface” to Adolescence; Arnett, “Adolescent Storm and Stress Reconsidered”
(on D2L); Erikson, “Prologue,” “Adolescence,” and “Beyond Identity”


G. Stanley Hall was a pioneer in psychology and a foundational figure in the defining of adolescence in a rapidly changing world. His views were very much in line with racist separations of humanity, yet he specialized in categorizing young people as savages in a similar way. According to Hall, people are built from the savagery of their youth out of the raw material of their genetic past. They needed discipline to do so.

He talks about the dangers of the adolescent period, this time of storm and stress, when youth are vulnerable to all sorts of temptations and dangers. He defines adolescence as from 14-24 and says his greatest desire is to help people avoid the potential dangers of this time. He wants to impose rules religion and structure on the lower races – rather black Africans or young Americans. To his mind, we are all savages needing to be tamed.

It’s easy to be critical of Hall’s outdated hierarchical and racialist views, but we mustn’’t lose sight of his attempt to address issues that had never before been tackled by the academy. And by attempting to define this age group, he also played an elemental role in how the world defines adolescence. Funny how supposed scientific observation and analysis can determine a group’s own self image. If society tells us we are entering a period of storm and stress, then I suspect that we will often strive to fulfill that definition.

In Jeffrey Arnett’s article, Adolescent Storm and Stress Reconsidered, he reviews Hall’s case for “storm and stress” and details more modern and multicultural takes on the concept. He writes a great deal about the Lamarckian theories of “memories and acquired characteristics,” as key elements of Hall’s philosophy. Again, as mentioned above, that we and our behavior is a product of our ancestors and their lives. This theory is discredited but one an understand its appeal in the near post-Darwinian era. Arnett defines storm and stress and breaks it into the categories of (1) conflict with parents, (2) mood disruptions, and (3) risk behavior. I particularly liked the Shakespeare quote:

At the beginning of a scene in "The Winter's Tale," Shake- speare (1623/1995) has an older man deliver a soliloquy about the youth of his day. "I would that there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest," he grumbles, "for there is nothing in between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting..." (Act III, Scene 3).

One can get carried away with all these definitions, but the difficulties of this period are built on observation and seem fairly predictable. As we move out of parental control and begin the immature process of searching for what we want in world of rules – we are bound to run into some challenges. The inexperienced often make bad decisions and early romance can be a deeply despairing thing. As we struggle to define ourselves and find our place in the world, is there any surprise that it results in some storm and stress?
Psychoanalyst Erik Erikson spends a great deal of time in his prologue wrestling with the concept of “identity crisis.” He is obviously also writing during a time – the late 1960’s – where upheaval and challenge to the accepted order are in the air. What is it to have an identity? And what is the reason that it can be such a complicated and complex struggle in the modern technological world?

“When it comes to central aspects of man’s existence, we can only conceptualize at a given time what is relevant to us for personal, for conceptual, and for historical reasons.”
Erik Erikson

Refreshingly, for a scientist, he resists the effort to establish universal rules – a la Hall – and says that the best we can do in attempting to understand an individual’s search for identity is that the process will change relative to time, place and culture. We do need to define ourselves, but the way that this happens is always in transition and that there are many ways that we bring ourselves into being.
As issues of gender and sexuality and race and identity have transformed in the last forty years, Erikson’s conclusions about our inability to pin down a formal structure of identity formation seem even more true. We strive to determine an identity, but the choices grow exponentially and the issues relate to far more than just adolescents. As we continue to struggle with an identity crisis, there is no longer a single linear way that it is to be done. Confusing, liberating or both?