or Failure to Transgress
That was a crime I committed at the Eschaton blog the other night. I failed to say that the boring, stupid, puerile, pointless, inflamed sphincter of a movie, The Aristocrats, was anything except boring and stupid. I was going to say that it was incredibly boring but it wasn't that interesting.
For anyone who was blessed enough to not be aware of it, The Aristocrats is Penn Jillette's - one of America's biggest professional assholes - movie of one boring will be-has been, has been-has been, never were, after another telling what is billed as the filthiest joke in history. There are a few actual comics in the movie who don't do much to enhance their cv by appearing in it, but even they can't carry the lame excuse of a premise for the movie. In my act of mortal sin I said it was "a straight boy's idea of a dirty joke". Since I won't repeat other peoples' material, when it's that filthy, you're going to have to take my word for it that I've heard much dirtier and, marginally, funnier. "The Aristocrats" really exists as a stupid party game among professional stand-up comics, more than as a joke. It's good mostly to show how untalented, uncreative, undeveloped and stupid so many of the people who go into that once fine and now very minor line of show biz are. The really good stand up comics telling the joke could have made this a minor short subject instead of the boring, tedious, stupidity that Penn Jillette makes of it. The commentary does something to relieve some of the boredom of the joke with annoyingly pretentious content.
The substance of the game is to try to outdo other excuses for comedians by coming up with more perverted, more disgusting, more offensively offensive bits for a family show biz act. After as long a stream of that as the ham can manage to come up with, the guy he's pitching the act to asks what the tsunami of depravity is called and the answer is "The Aristocrats". Really clever, huh? You can see how many of the jerks you've seen on blogs would think that was brilliant. The whole point being that you have to come up with something more perverse and disgusting than the one before, the act regularly presents pedophilia, rape, incest, sadism , pointless violence and the like as humor. In what is celebrated as a major cultural milestone jokes about 9-11 figures into its legend. Genocide is presented as an occasion of hilarity as well.
What's most interesting about the thing is the attitude a lot of people who mistake themselves as being on the left have about it. The fact that it's billed as incredibly filthy and transgressive is supposed to make it an object of reverence. I mean that word quite literally, The Aristocrats, by virtue of its intended offensiveness, is supposed to be some kind of icon of freedom and all that is good and wonderful about liberty and modernism and all that is good and sciency. To paraphrase George M. Cohan, many a bum act has been saved by citing the First Amendment. We're way beyond the point where Ulysses, regarded as an oppressed object of sanctity, was succeeded by Last Exit to Brooklyn. Now it's anything the decayed mind of an eternally adolescent asshole can dream up that is to be given a position that places it above allowable criticism in liberalish-libertarian sanctimony. It doesn't hurt its position when it's a piece of commercial garbage guaranteed to turn a profit. Money has such a way of adding respectability. That it's a regressive boys-club retreat to the time before second wave feminism and the civil rights movement took hold is not to be acknowledged .
This is a phenomenon that needs more study because, as I've learned through involvement with the internet, it is among the more widespread of enforced, inviolable orthodoxies on what passes as lefty blogs and the cool class. A lot of the phony excuse of a left that inhabits so much of the blogosphere is really Rupert Murdoch's fondest dream, the world as the toilet of the eternal 12-year-old-boy-assholes-because-we-can-be-jerks who dominate so many comment threads in so may places on the web. And girls who want to be members of the boys club, like Rebekah Brooks, only not as literate. And yet these self-defined liberals wonder why they continually fail at politics*. How could this not fail as liberalism when it is a dependable source of succor for the most degenerate forms of fascist depravity?
This whole thing is just an inversion of the pretensions of middle-brow aspirations in regard to high culture in previous times. It's Eulalie Mackecknie Shinn as a strung out debauchee. This kind of bizarrely irrational, somewhat anxious, reverence on the basis of something being very, very naughty and/or very very stupid accrues to so many objects de fart today. The biggest part of it is that one has to be observed doing it and never seen violating it with that most unfashionable of concepts, moral probity. The phenomenon, the desperate desire to make a display of risk free transgression against social taboos that no one enforces or cares about and the frantic need try to find the last, rare instances of things disgusting enough to create the ephemeral frisson of excitement, has become far more tedious than the stuffiness of those who want to associate themselves with classical art. In experiencing something as tiresome as The Aristocrats, the effort of being seen or heard having the required reaction to it fulfills the tiresome quality of its content by being a social duty.
As a gay man and an adult in the 1970s, who went to clubs the daring, transgressives-in-their-own-minds would probably run away from, I saw some things that a real Aristocrats act would entail. As a young, foolish and passive observer, I'll note. I went through that cycle and jumped off of it before Andrew Dice Clay came on the national scene**. Some other day I might go into what that really meant and its particular stupidity. For now, having seen that, The Aristocrats is a boring, stupid, puerile, pointless, inflamed sphincter of a movie and anyone who think's it's a great movie is too stupid and immature to take seriously on any subject. But they're ready for the blog-time.
The real joke in all of this is that if you refused to fall in line with the boys of the blogs on this you'd be the transgressor. You can tell because they'll fuss at you like a purity campaigner from a 50s movie complaining about dirty words in library books. You might even get banned in blogston. That's what happened last night.
* I will write an addendum this weekend about the clash between a young female "skeptic" and some of the heroes of what passes as the rational class, of both sexes on these issues. Jillette figured into that as did many of the cultural heroes of the liberalish-libertarian blogs.
** A lot of the people I knew then who didn't died in the 1980s and 90s. I'd hazard a guess that AIDs might have figured in some permutations of The Aristocrats over the years.
No comments:
Post a Comment