grindlousing: more on spoiling self-righteous ecstasy

Music: The Wolfgang Press: Funky Little Demons (1994)

On Wednesday NBC/Universal pulled the cameras from Imus, and yesterday CBS pulled the plug. After a week of public outcries, Imus was finally fired, and presumably, because he violated the moral majority's will. I agree with William Houston: Imus was fired for financial reasons. Sure, moral outrage (1) caused the deep pocketed advertisers to pull out (2), but CBS fired Imus for (2), not (1).

This week I have been arguing that firing Imus was the quick-fix business-based solution that would, effectively, sweep the discussion of race under the proverbial rug, again. My argument was based on the logic of what Melanie Klein, following Freud, termed "projective identification." Projection is a psychical defense mechanism whereby a person attributes unsavory characteristics or beliefs or shortcomings onto someone or something else. Identification is the attribution of feelings of love or hate onto a person that reminds one of an earlier, parental figure in life. Projective identification is thus a kind of dehumanizing process: a person or thing is made to embody something that is innermost to ourselves. We "project" our sins and shortcomings onto this goat and send it out into the wilderness, taking our problems with it, away from our now more harmonious community. In groups, acting out in this manner is especially common during cataclysm and crisis (and not just with the enemy; it also happens with leaders as well).

The self-righteous outrage and demand that Imus be fired is at least on some level a response to guilt about Katrina.

I don't have time to develop and support that claim except to say that the rhetoric about and around Imus seemed "much ado" about something we already know is deep-seated in our culture. Take, for example, Quentin Tarantino's much ballyhooed work, especially the most recent Grindhouse double-feature. Brooke and I screened it yesterday. It was gross throughout, and as a zombie movie nut I really enjoyed Rodriguez's Planet Terror, and especially appreciated this current squeeze Rose McGowen (I mean, that scene where she descends upon a military gang guarding a helicopter and shoots a rocket out of her right leg is so over-the-top absurd I laughed myself silly). Tarantino's follow up, Deathproof, is an excellent example of white people calling people "nappy headed hoes," but in a way that somehow escapes public moral censure.

Deathproof begins with a lot of banter (Tarantino's indulgent, stupid dialogue has always gotten on my nerves; Mamet less-so, but he's so much more clever) among women talking about their boyfriends or getting a boyfriend. There is more banter. Banter banter. Rose McGowan's character needs a ride home. She meets up with "Stuntman Mike." Banter banter. More banter. Stuntman Mike gets Rose into his car. She is trapped. He terrifies her by driving recklessly. Then he brutally kills her (in un-fake looking broken face bones). Then he decides to run straight on into a car full of the women bantering at the bar. No explanation, just that he is death-proof and wants to kill the women. The moment of impact is stretched out and repeated for what seemed like two minutes. Tarantino shows how each woman dies. One woman's leg comes off and bounces in the road. Another gets thrown from the car in a heap. Another has her neck broke (which is shown in excruciating detail).

Jump cut to the hospital: Sheriff theorizes Stuntman Mike deliberately killed the women, but cannot prove it.

Jump cut to new set of women. Two black, two white. Two are stunt women. They banter about the size of their men's dicks, what they do with them, and so on. Banter banter. One of the black women calls everyone a "nigga,"—a lot, even the white girls are "niggas." They call each other "bitches." But this name calling is in the tradition of black vernacular, so it's "ok." I guess. The women somehow manage to get a hot rod, race about. Stuntman Mike decides to play with them. Rams them. They are terrified. He almost kills them. The women vow revenge. They decide to chase after Stuntman Mike. They beat him with a pipe upside the head, joust-style. They keep "ramming" him "up the ass like a bitch." "I'm going stuff a nut up that ass," screams the driver, likening the car ramming to anal rape. "How you like that, bitch?" They scream and call the man a bitch. The film ends when three women beat Stuntman Mike to death. The final film shot is of one of the women caving in Stuntman Mike's face with her foot.

Now, the psychoanalytic argument about films like this goes something like this: by film going, we get to "project" otherwise unacceptable feelings and desires onto the screen. Unquestionably Deathproof was Tarantino's idea of a "feminist" turn on his unabashedly misogynistic repertoire; it's clear he was going for a positive female response (watch these tough-as-nails ladies bash in Patriarchy's face! woohoo!). True, I found the car chase pretty thrilling, but everything else in the film was a racist, (hetero)sexist send-up of "everyday life" (as opposed to the properly PC lives we live on screens, pages, and . . . classrooms?). I have never really liked Tarantino (I liked Pulp Fiction, but that's about it), and maybe that's because as a projective technology it reminds me of things in myself that I hate and that I cannot "give up" or exorcise in the movie theatre---I'm not sure. But watching the racist stuff come out of these women's mouths, seeing the ecstasy of violence, I kept thinking in the theatre: firing Imus is something like watching a Tarantino film. Once the deed is done, the lights come up and you go home, freed from the burden.

Jenny and Jaime, I do very much recognize the symbolic gesture of firing Imus, how it sets up the moral benchmark for public behavior, and so on. I understand how not firing him appears as some sort of commercial sanction. I suppose what I would point to is the phantasmic nature of our social reality, that in some sense that firing represents a distinction between "real life" and, well, the movies. It's fantasies all the way down. The Imus scandal might as well be Stern's Private Parts. And I predict in two week's time the dialogue on race will be absolutely gone---like we just walked out of the theatre.