Obsessions and Lamentations #12

Excuse me, was that a question?

Ok, some smart social anthropologist needs to get to the bottom of this whole, ending your spoken sentences or phrases with a rising intonation, making a simple statement sound like a question, thing. You know what I’m talking about. If you don’t, just download any podcast in which a group of educated American people under 30 talk to each other and your bound to hear it a thousand times. Here’s an example. Say the following statement of opinion and make sure to turn it into a question: “Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill has a kind of 70’s chop-suey film aesthetic that is meaningless outside of a context of omnipresent nostalgia?” I single out Americans because as far as I can tell this habit has only infected the US at present (I’d be curious if the Brits on the site disagree). 

At first blush this may seem like just another rant where an older dude whines about how the young people keep changing his beautiful language by introducing innovations like ‘23 skidoo’, ‘daddy-o’ or ‘fa shizzle’. But this isn’t about words, it’s about the way they are spoken. From my research, I date the beginning of this phenomenon to sometime in the early grunge era, though I can’t really see a direct correlation between wearing flannel and speaking with all the confidence of a ten year old giving her first oral presentation in class. So where is this coming from? The only thing I can think of is that the age of non-stop ironic detachment, relativism and post modern meta-reality has finally taken its toll on the young, who no longer have the cojones to express a thought or an opinion without a hedge. Maybe I mean this, but maybe I don’t? Who’s to say what’s real? I can’t even be secure enough in my own feelings to express them with any definitiveness?   Doncha think? Whatever it is, it’s annoying to the rest of us who don’t need external validation for anything we might say, so please stop. And if you need any further encouragement, just imagine your boyfriend taking you by the hand in the silver moonlight, looking directly into your eyes and saying, “I love you?”

. . .

Bruno

It looks like Bruno is not going to be the mega-hit that Borat turned out to be, and it’s no wonder. It’s probably not quite as funny, though that’s not the reason. In Borat, a large segment of the country could laugh at its ostensible targets, strange foreign people and xenophobes, because a healthy segment of the population was neither. In Bruno, Baron-Cohen again runs two extremes right into each other, except this time it's flamboyantly gay men and homophobes. Most straight people have no problem laughing at a preening, prancing man, but when the mirror is turned on their own fear of gay men, things get a little dicey. The explicit nature of the movie and its over-the-top frankness is just too much for too many people to take, keeping them away in droves. How many people are really prepared to walk into a movie which, in order for it to work, would make them question their prejudices and lifelong social conditioning? I have to say that several scenes made my sphincter tighten involuntarily, as if under threat. But if we don’t watch we miss Baron-Cohen’s satire, which is different in kind from almost anything most of us have ever seen. That’s because it is satire without a clear target, or perhaps with a rapidly moving one. Am I supposed to laugh at the crazy gay guy or the wary rednecks? Is he mocking the celebrity worshiper or the celebrities? I suspect the answer is all of the above. He seems to have found a method for making fun of everything.  Even in the scene where Bruno takes his adopted African baby, who he calls O.J., onto the Richard Bey show and proceeds to tell the almost all-black audience how he traded the infant for an iPod, we laugh at the audience, despite their justifiable outrage. Why? Because what the hell are they doing on the Richard Bey show, lining up for a chance to vent their spleens on the latest carnival attraction dug up by daytime television? You see? No one is safe, we are all ridiculous, and I say, relax and enjoy it.