Malls on My Mind

There’s something incredibly monstrous and yet incredibly soothing about strip malls.

There’s one Midwestern strip mall in particular that I like. Like many others, it’s quite a large strip mall–large enough to require its own street signs, and it’s located near other shopping plazas, making the entire area around it a sort of shrine to capitalism. In any one direction, looking out at the horizon, all a person can see are shops.

So it’s quite ironic that all of the times that I’ve been to this particular mall, I’ve had no money. The first time I was there was on a weekend during the summer. The mall was packed with people and I was overwhelmed with the size and architecture of the place. I’ve been to lots of strip malls. I’ve even been to strip malls larger than this particular one, but I’d never been to a strip mall built to resemble small-town America. Or, rather, built to resemble someone’s idea of small town America. In my four years as an undergraduate, I lived in small-town America, and it left me with a strong impression of just how poor people can really be and just how difficult getting a job with barely a high school education can be. In fact, I was living in that small town over the summer and making a small amount of money as a tutor at a program for international students. I’d gotten a year-round taste of just how poor small-town America can be. There was none of the opulence of this mall. None of the wealth. I was overcome with the crowds of people rushing in and out of stores and restaurants. All around me there were Things To Buy: Calvin Klein, Michael Kors, Chanel, Gucci, Coach, Prada. I was also captivated by the ambiance. The stores were all designed to resemble old houses, the streets were lined with street lamps, and there was a mural of white people in Victorian dress riding a trolley. Red telephone boxes sat on the street corners between shops. There were speakers hidden in trees that played music! I felt like I was in a grown-up’s Disney World.

The second time I was at this mall, I was again a broke undergraduate. I was there briefly with a couple of friends when we stopped to pick up some dinner at the Cheesecake Factory nearby. We had come from a Renaissance Festival and were dressed in corsets, long skirts, and boots. We were dressing up in a dressed up town, playing pretend in a pretend town. We were a modern day idea of the Renaissance in a modern day idea of some nostalgic past between the Victorian era and the 1950s. At the time we attracted a lot of stares and strange looks, (a group of tourists was even trying to covertly take out picture) but looking back, we fit right in.

On my third and most recent trip to to this mall, I stopped on my way from a job fair in the area. The job fair had an air of desperation about it. I arrived half an hour early and already a crowd of people had formed around the convention center doors. Some people were wearing suits and ties. Others had on khaki and sneakers. Some had on a strange mix of both casual wear and business attire. I saw button-up shirts and vests mixed with jeans and tennis shoes. People clutched their resumes and carefully checked and double-checked their applications for cashier and food service jobs. Some of them couldn’t have been more than sixteen years old. Others could have been my grandparents. No one smiled or chit-chatted. Instead, they scurried from booth to booth with their eyebrows furrowed and their jaws clenched. Everyone was there because they needed a job–any job!

As soon as I set foot in the mall, however, I felt the mixture of grim determination and despair fade away. There were Things to Buy. How bad could the world be? Even though I couldn’t afford any of the beautiful clothes or cookware that beckoned to me from the windows, I felt comforted to see them. Someday, I thought, someday I will be able to afford all of this. I’ll have my own kitchen that I can stock with ceramic pots and I’ll have a walk-in closet that I can fill with designer suits. I’ll have the money to buy a car and drive out to a place like this for lunch and cocktails with friends. Never mind that I’m planning to make a pittance in non-profit communications. Never mind that I don’t even really care about designer brands. Never mind that I have my own perfectly serviceable cookware.

The mall offered up a dream, and it was a dream that I wanted to live in for a while. I walked up and down the streets. I watched a young man wash the hot pink walls of a Victoria Secret store, which featured large posters of busty, skinny, blond models with flawless skin. I marveled at the neo-Classical fountains, featuring cherubs and Greek god figures, and wondered how they looked so at home next to the Tiffany’s store, designed to resemble a 1950’s-era bank. I saw the local police and the mall security circling the center fountain and felt secure, knowing that I was being watched over. At the mall edge, dwarfed by an enormous XXI Forever store, was a small, nondescript building labeled “Community Center Room.” It seemed so bland in comparison to the colorful, bright ads that surrounded it that I hardly noticed it. I enjoyed the perfectly cultivated trees and flowers, especially the exotic palm trees. Everything looked beautiful and bright and pleasant. It’s fake, but it’s lovely, just like the Photoshopped Victoria Secret model’s poster. I almost forgot about the job fair.

Unfortunately, the job fair is far more real than the manicured streets of the mall. It’s been a couple years since I read Baudrillard, but the word hyperreality kept flitting through my mind as I wandered around the mall.Calvin Klein, Michael Kors, Chanel, Gucci, Coach, Prada.  Simulacra. A simulacrum is, if I’m remembering my postmodernism correctly, a sign without a referent. It harkens back to an original that never existed. The rosy glow of an American small town that never was is being invoked in the mall’s nostalgic streets. Hyperreality is a reality that is so mediated by technology–radio, television, the Internet–that people can no longer distinguish between what is real and what is mediated to them. A walk through mall is a tightly controlled, mediated experience. The street signs point to shops. Hints at anything to disrupt the illusion are hidden. (I spied a mess of gas pipes hidden behind a black screen painted to look like a garden wall.)

The dream of the mall, is ultimately a lie, I know. The endless luxury, endless leisure, and endless wealth–none of them exist. Its promise is ultimately unrealistic. The merchandise at the mall can only be sold because workers in developing nations are underpaid and overworked, not to mention the underpaid cashiers and sales clerks who work in the mall shops. The location of the mall, accessible only from interstate highways, is also unfeasible. As we approach peak oil and the price of gas rises, driving to such locations, not to mention sending merchandise there by truck, will become increasingly costly. This is not to mention the carbon emissions of these vehicles that increase greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, driving up the temperature of earth’s atmosphere and radically altering the planet’s weather patterns, destroying coastal towns with hurricanes and floods. The visions of endless Things to Buy encourage conspicuous consumption, buying certain products only because they make one seem richer or more sophisticated and not because these products are inherently useful. It also encourages planned obsolescence, creating products only meant to last a few years, only to be thrown away and replaced by new products. The “free market” isn’t free, and the cost will be paid in an unhealthy environment and shrinking middle class by the poorest and those least able to pay those prices.

Logically, I know all of this. I’m critical of the inequalities that capitalism perpetuates. I shun designer brands. I try to use and reuse and recycle. I take public transportation whenever I can. A part of me feels as though I should be disturbed by the mall. It broadcasts cultural messages that I’ve chosen to deconstruct and expose. It upholds outdated ideologies that, I believe, are crushing common people under their teetering weight. But I’m not immune to the messages. I’ve grown up with the ideologies. I’m just as taken in by the simulacra as the next person. Sometimes, I’d like to ignore reality and exist in a space of hyperreality, in which money is endless, resources are endless, and the past was always perfect. So I find the streets of the mall peaceful and calming. I enjoy walking up and down them, staring into the windows, imagining what I would do with new furniture or a stationary set, and for a couple hours, ignoring reality and living in a dream.

Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road?: Hyper-Irony in Robot Chicken, Part 1

“Why did the chicken cross the road?”

“I don’t know. Why did the chicken cross the road?”

“To get to the other side!”

Everyone knows this joke, so much so that it is no longer funny. And yet, is has become a sort of symbol for comedy. Though no one laughs at it, it has almost become synonymous with the word “joke.”

It is also the beginning of Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim show Robot Chicken (RC) created by Seth Green and Mathew Senreich. In the opening, a mad scientist (we know he’s mad because his hair is messy and he has a maniacal grin on his face) finds a chicken, presumably dead, in the middle of the road. The opening obviously references the classic joke that no one finds humorous anymore. However, in this version of the joke, the chicken has failed to complete its passage across the road. In fact, it is lying dead in the middle of the road. The old joke has been left incomplete, perhaps even died itself. The mad scientist takes the chicken back to his laboratory and rebuilds it as a cyborg that is half machine and half organic. A melodramatic voice announces, “It’s alive!” Then the scientist forces his resurrected creation, a la A Clockwork Orange, to watch the comedy sketches that comprise the show.

In just the opening, we see exactly what RC’s take on comedy is, as well as what it sets out to do to with comedy.

Just like the robot chicken, the show itself is a combination of the new and the old. Despite their crude humor and ever-current pop culture references, in many ways, the RC sketches are no different than previous forms of comedy. They are incredibly brief, some lasting merely a second or two, but comedy, unlike drama, is a fast-paced medium. A joke can’t have a long lead-up, otherwise the audience will become bored. Stand-up comics often offer jokes that are one-liners before moving on to new material. Sketch comedy is also not new in television. The Ed Sullivan show and others like it offered their viewers a wide variety of entertainment, and if audience members found one act boring, well, another, more interesting one would soon follow it. Monty Python’s Flying Circus also bombarded its viewers with comedy sketch after comedy sketch, some sketchs being very brief and others weaving themselves throughout the show. Saturday Night Liveoften focuses on short sketches that parody some form of popular cutlture. RC uses this same technique. Its humor is quick, with little build-up or introduction. As soon as we’ve seen the joke, we’re on to the next one, and if one sketch fails to satisfy, well, a new one will be on shortly. The humor itself would probably have shocked and disgusted Ed Sullivanviewers and may be too risque for even Monty Python or the not-yet-read-for-Prime-Time players, but the style in which it is presented is not unlike old-time variety or sketch comedy shows.

The humor itself often relies on parody, either by stretching the object of ridicule to its ludicrous extreme, such as the militarism of George W. Bush or the violence present in U.S. television, or by inverting a well-known pop culture phenomenon. (The kind and loving Care Bears become racists promoting ethnic cleansing.) The show, like most comedy, also often relies on stereotypes, such as the recurring nerd character, who may be brilliant but cannot overcome his social awkwardness to find a girlfriend. Parody, in any of these forms, is nothing new. Even the ancient Greeks used parody to critique their social institutions, so parody is nothing new to comedy.

Though RC is not completely new, it is also different from any show that has come before it. And in the opening, the mad scientists does not remake the chicken only to have it complete its road-crossing journey. Instead, the old seems to be thrown out in favor of a new one. The chicken may be resurrected, but the joke itself is not. As John Cleese might say, “And now, it’s time for something completely different.”

In many ways, RC is a response to our postmodern, technology-driven lives. The chicken itself is half biological, half machine, just as we have built our lives around our machines. We carry phones with us everywhere that can connect us to the internet in a matter of seconds. We check our emails daily, if not hourly. Cars, buses, and airplanes carry us to our destinations. Our homes can be heated or cooled, regardless of the temperatures outside. We are a sort of cybog, a robot human that is so reliant on technology that it might as well be physically attached to us. RC is responding to that change. Our lives are fast-paced, and require a fast-paced television show. After all, one RC episode only lasts fifteen minutes, while other shows are at least half an hour long. We expect web pages to download in seconds, we express ourselves through 140 characters on Twitter, and we want our entertainment to be as immediate and brief. RC delivers with bite (or byte?) sized humor.

However, to say that RC is merely pandering to an audience whose attention spans are stretched thin is to miss the show’s full significance in the evolution of comedy. Specifically, the show relies almost entirely on what Carl Matheson called “hyper-irony.” In his article “The Simpsons, Hyper-Irony, and the Meaning of Life,” Matheson tracks the changes in American comedy up until The Simpsons, which he cites as the first show to make use of hyper-irony, often through quotationalism, a “rapid-fire sequence of [pop culture] allusions” used in “a constant process of under-cutting.” One cannot understand the humor of The Simpsons, he asserts, unless one has a thorough background in popular culture.

For those of you who don’t have the time to read Matheson’s argument, I will summarize it thus (Although, seriously, go read it. It’s entertaining, well-written, and academic. A rare combination, indeed!): What makes The Simpsons different from the shows that came before it that referenced popular culture is that The Simpsons lacks any sort of moral agenda. It does not parody or allude to popular culture in order to promote any sort of values, be they liberal or conservative, but instead merely references for the sake of referencing. Matheson’s explanaition for the continuous use of allusions is that in our postmodern society, all authority is in question and we lack a solid place in which to put our faith. In such a social climate, Matheson asserts, contemporary artists often go back to the past for inspiration. However, because even history if one of the forms of authority in question, this inspiration from the past is often under-cut. What results is a constant flow of references, and those who can catch the most references are lucky enough to be “in the know.” They are members of what Matheson calls “the cult of knowingness.” This cult is built, Matheson claims, by the idea that even though there may be no ultimate truth, one can demonstrate one’s superior understanding of a set of intellectual rules. The point is not to have a depth of knowledge, but to have a broad understanding of a variety of ideological positions…and popular culture. One then proceeds to tear down any sort of ideological ediface that claims to have an understanding of ultimate knowledge. In other words, anything and everything is up for grabs as an object of parody. However, in the process of tearing down every source of ultimate truth, the show itself lacks any sort of ideological ground to stand on.

The Simpsons may have begun to maximize quotationalism and hyper-irony in comedy, but the show has since stalled. Both society and The Simpsons have changed since Matheson’s essay, and the show is now something of family-values comedy with liberal-leaning politics. While it paved the way for many of the popular comedy shows today and has had a huge influence on American entertainment, it has not been able to uphold its hyper-ironic stance for twenty-two seasons. I believe that the nature of The Simpsons as a situation comedy prevents it from being able to uphold a hyper-ironic worldview indefinitely, and that shows in sketch comedy form, like RC, are the natural progression of hyper-ironic comedy.

Stay Tuned for Part 2!

Are We Cyborgs Yet?: Evolution of the DROID Commercials

I distinctly remember the first DROID commercial I ever saw. It was for the DROID 2, and it ran in 2010. Somehow, it seems so long ago, perhaps because the idea of a smartphone still seemed novel and now it’s become a part of everyday life. In any case, upon seeing the commercial, I was taken with the way in which the smartphone turns the man in the commercial into a machine—literally. As he types on the slide-out keyboard (which only a year later seems so quaint), his fingers, hands, and arms gradually become metallic, his muscles replaced with metal and his tendons transforming into wires. The phone has made him a cyborg—an amalgamation of human and machine.

I found myself mesmerized and a little disturbed by the commercial. If the comments on the commercial’s YouTube video are anything to go by, I wasn’t the only one. Most of them approved of the commercial, but others seemed displeased with the lack of humanity, references to The Terminator and Cybermen of Doctor Who, and disgust with corporations turning their clients into robots. Personally, I think the red DROID eye is reminiscent of the glowing Hal of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Whatever the reference, the glaring red light that seems to be looking at the viewer is reminiscent of various movie and television examples of technology gone awry and controlling people’s lives. Hal takes over the ship in 2001. The Terminator, a robot meant to infiltrate human society and kill a particular human target, is the result of Skynet, a self-aware program that rebelled against the humans that created it in the Terminator movies. The Cybermen are the frequent adversaries of the Doctor in Doctor Who, as they overpower biological subjects and turn them into metal automatons. All of these robots are pop culture warnings of what can happen when technology becomes too all-consuming in our lives.

Other DROID commercials also portray the smartphones as part of a person or in one case, a snowman, and not merely a tool to be used. However, the commercials seem to be moving away from presenting the DROID as a physical part of a person. The DROID Bionic commercial places the smartphone outside the protagonist of the commercial. In fact, the ending tagline states that the DROID was “made from machines to rule all machines.” This most recent commercial seems to be making up for the earlier ones, in which the phone was so seemlessly melded to its user that it was hard to tell who was controlling whom. The statement that the DROID Bionic “rules all machines” suggests that the smartphone is giving the user control over machines instead of being controlled by them.

So, who really does control our smartphones? Do we control them, or do they control us? Or have we entered into a sort of symbiotic relationship with them? In many ways, we are beginning to think of our technology as extensions of ourselves, though whether this is due to marketing that gives us an identity associated with a product or to the increasing prevelance of technology in our society, I can’t say. Most likely, it’s some combination of the two. In any case, as these commercials show, our close relationship with our technology is turning us into a sort of cyborg, something part human and part machine. Technically, anytime our culture presents the human body as being something like a machine, like a piece of technology, it is presenting us as cyborgs.

Rather than worry about whether this is a good thing or a bad thing (because there are good arguments on both sides), I’d like to focus on how these commercials present our interactions with technology as embodied. Usually, when we think about going on the Internet or using smartphones, we aren’t thinking much about our bodies. We tend to think more about our minds, since Western culture has generally placed more emphasis on the mind over the body. But using technology is an embodied experience. We type on our keyboards, our smartphones, our iPads or tablets with our fingers. We manipulate webpages with our hands, whether through a touchscreen or a mouse. Our interactions with technology are not something that takes us out of our bodies. Instead, they do the very opposite. They rely on our bodies, so much so that they have become an extension of our bodies.

As changes in the DROID commercials suggests, this doesn’t seem to be a concept that we, as a culture, are completely comfortable with yet.