a reflection of kitsch

From a work published in 1991 as ‘The Transparency of Kitsch: A Conversation between Jean Baudrillard and Enrico Baj:

JB: Conventional art has to look clean. There’s such a demand from museums and from the public at large for sanctifying anything and everything. And it’s precisely this cultural demand that’s kitsch (145).

JB: I’d say that the masses are the supreme kitsch product. At the same time the masses are a mirror of power that has itself become kitsch (146).

JB: People consume art, they devour it. But we will never know whether they really needed it or whether they really wanted it (151).

In a recent outing to the ‘mass cinema’ I was struck as I noted the three above quotes reflected so keenly while attempting to ‘turn off’ and ‘take in’ a movie. I was struck by the way that readings from days previous had permeated deep enough to expose themselves in an everyday life situation when I wasn’t even trying to get some writing/thinking done. Instead, like the poets say, carry a notebook wherever you may go for the best ideas are always caught floating in the wind. And thus like an unorganized grad student who thinks that they are quite organized I scribbled and jotted with a black felt pen found in my bag – a note book, not quite but rather the in-flight magazine served the purpose of papyrus. I say in-flight because it seems that the purposes of both flight mags and cinema belching advertisement coupled with ‘an inside look’ at the ‘new movies’ are equally consumed as are the products on the page.

Thus we come to Baudrillard and the cinema, that is, the large scale VIEWING/ CONSUMING room located in the middle, between two formerly independent towns. The SILVER CITY looms and casts a shadow not unlike the massive grain towers that occupy the waterfront of this northwestern Ontario hub. And like the grain towers, the cimenaplex is tall enough and large enough to draw the attention of a large area. I shudder to imagine or rather admit that Mount McKay which stands guard on the south side of town, the largest land mass in the near area, has been relegated for a long time now, as simply background – i.e., a First Nations population backgrounded’ like an artists underpainting. It is with machinic precision that we have refocused the gaze of the populous away from a previous primacy of the mountain and erected in it’s stead, a cinema house bearing the sameness that poisons much of North America.

In this sense, the cinema is not a reflective place of art, rather it is evidence of the distillation and synthesis of refined cleanliness and modernist calculation. A place which hosts an impossibly burdensome cleanliness, managed by teams of employable youth, welcomes with dull passivity the masses of movie goers in a voracious production of consumption. But it is the mirror, the one that reflects kitsch, that is hardly seen. The reflection may only be caught when there is a divergence from the status quo featuring passively sedated movie goers.

It was precisely at such a moment, at a break from patronage and societal norms that a lone voice reacting to a display of for lack of a better word, cinematic performance art in the form of nude painted bodies crashing into a pool of water below only to resurface as elated faces and masks – that the audience sat still, the discomfort was thick as the light reflected onscreen caused a moment of discontent that spread like a rabid infection over the faces aghast. A tri-syllabic utterance of the most monotone expression, lips barely pursed (to be sure) spouted “what the fuck’? and with that a silenced audience was once again free, free from any sense of captive space that the film had managed to create. My immediate instinct was a shattering, a broken spirit, like a cell phone ring at a funeral. I felt cheated and angry that a singe voice had managed to create a fracture and dissonance that would for the rest of the film render the voices in the crowd louder than the screens.

It was this point, the moment that ‘wtf’ was uttered that I felt a chill run down my back as I realized that within the ever clean space of the cinema there is no possibility for anything but kitsch. For the space which hosts the sanctification of display must equally champion condemnation as well as painful ignorance. The question of whether ‘they needed it or not’ had been haplessly answered in a moment of ‘truth.’

And now for the film:

A romanticized romp through an elated 1960’s fantasy tinged with anti-war sentiments and bohemian artists caught in the ‘helter skelter’ of Vietnam era contestation. Dr. Roberts guides the bus as a transcendence of the bullshit is made coupled with the groans of stereophonic mindfuck artillery. At times the film reflects the ebb and flow of great seas reflecting calm and storm in constant flux. The spectacle touches on and anchors itself amidst a caucus of recently released ‘musical’ films such as ‘walk the line,’ ‘ray’ and ‘a prairie home companion’ – however the cleanliness of these films is outdone by the psychedelia of this musical voyage through some 40 Beatles songs. At times, it’s a ‘flying circus’ at others it’s reminiscent of ‘clockwork’ and occasionally the starch just needs to be drained from the screen. Fluxes of engagement and disengagement might be a proper use of words to describe the film. The power comes from the ability to actively propel scenes forward through the clever use of names, dates and places in the Beatles songs. This is no review, this was dialogue, conversation, or perhaps literary masturbation.

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