you guys! vote for this design! it is great and designed by ray b!
DIY video games and cabinets + sabrepulse live set @ future babycastles secret arcade, brooklyn (reboot 2)
Knife City (Anamanaguchi’s Luke Silas) killing it at a rooftop barbeque in Brooklyn earlier this week.
He lays down some crispy tracks with his Game Boys throughout the entire vid, no doubt, but then his swag goes over 9000 at around 4:30, when he breaks into a chiptune rendition of Alice Deejay’s “Better Off Alone”.*
Buy: Anamanaguchi albums
Hear also: Knife City’s “Running In Dreams”, “Party In The USK” (Miley Cyrus cover OMG)
[Via @mareodomo]
*Bonus “Tik Tok” [Ke$ha], “We No Speak Americano” [Muffy] and “Satisfaction” [Benassi] chiptune covers up in there as well. Leave your irony at the door; rave on children, rave on.
Batman and Psychoanalysis
And thus we begin a new round of Weekly Cultural Critic! Each week I will be over-analyzing an aspect of pop-culture. These short essays are written by Eric Shorey, each in under an hour, with little to no editing. If you have suggestions for future essays: email me at eshorey88@gmail.com or leave them in our ask box!
Psychoanalytic criticisms of literature, as Andre Green often notes, are usually met with reticence. Most literary critics tend to find that this critical lens ties the work too closely to the author, or, instead, is just plain obsolete or representational of an alternative system of hermeneutics. Much to many peoples surprise, psychoanalytic literary criticism is not a hunt for penises and vaginas: not all oblong objects are phallus and not all concave things are wombs. In fact: it might be helpful to re-examine some of the cannon of our contemporary western mythologies utilizing the lens of psychoanalysis. In this short essay, I will attempt to understand the character of Batman / Bruce Wayne through Freudian psychoanalysis. I will not refer to specific works or authors, but the general mythology of The Bat – in the same way that psycho-histories of mythological characters were once interpreted by Freud, I, too, will offer up my own psycho-history of this character.
Batman and the Super-ego
The super-ego, in Freudian theory, is a part of the mind that is partially conscious and partially unconscious. The super-ego acts as a persecutory force or a kind of categorical moral imperative in the mind. While, technically, in service to the Id, the super-ego keeps the id in check by preventing the realization or inaction of carnal desires such as sexual or violent lusts. The super-hero is the result of the precipitated (imagined or real) punishments enacted upon a child by his (usually paternal) authority figures. While we know little about Bruce Wayne’s parents other than their un-measurable wealth, we can probably assume that little Bruce had a slew of nannies, butlers, and guardians to watch over him. These paternal and maternal authorities may or may not have enacted punishments upon him but, because of his undertaking of crime fighting, we might be able to retroactively extrapolate that his father was somewhat of a tyrant: having enacted severe punishments upon his son, the voice of Bruce’s father becomes internalized and then externalized into/as (Batman) a hyper-moral authority. The loss of his parents is critical to understanding the internalization of hyper-morality: when a person is lost the memories of that person, through the process of mourning, are incorporated into the ego. Batman took the punishments of his father into himself, they became parts of him, when his father died, so that now he has the ability to punish others. His super-ego has now become corrupted, it is too powerful, and allows for him to violently punish others for their transgressions.
Batman and the Fetish
Freud stated in his essay on Fetishism that a fetish is a replacement for the penis the child assumed the mother once had but then lost. The child, upon seeing the mother’s vagina, fixates on the object right before this traumatic scene: shoes are a common fetish because they are often the last thing a little boy sees before looking up his mothers skirt. If a person can fixate on an object before a scene of trauma, so much so that it can obliterate the potential for hetero-normative sexuality, can a scene of trauma like the death of (a) parent(s) be equally as affecting? Bruce Wayne becomes Batman because, as he sees his parents die, bats fly around him. This is the transitional object of his trauma (half self and half other) and he holds on to the symbol of the Bat for the rest of his life. The fetish is a symbolic replacement for a penis believed to be lost – the bat is a symbolic replacement of his parents. The Bat is a kind of anti-fetish for Batman. It exists as a psychical memorial to his parents, erected in his unconscious for eternity.
Batman and Reaction Formation
Numerous jokes and inquiries have been made about the lascivious relationship between Batman and Robin: are they gay? Writers of the comics avoid this issue altogether. Batman would probably make more psychoanalytic sense if we assume that he is gay, or if we consider the idea that his entire identity is formed around his repressed homosexuality. (A close reading of Joel Schumaker’s Batman films will be offered in the future.)
Bruce Wayne, supposedly, retains his personality as a playboy to cover up for the fact of his secret identity. And yet, could we see his playboy-ism as a Reaction formation against homosexual desires? Even Batman, the hyper-masculine crime fighter, is a way of fighting accusations of homosexuality: he forecloses the possibility of criticism by way of brute force. That is to say: Bruce Wayne/Batman display prominent hyper-masculinity and misogyny in order to defend against (accusations of) homosexual desires. Like the politician who fights against gay marriage but secretly solicits males: reaction formation works through by way of a strong over-compensatory denial of desire.
If we look at the women Batman has fallen in love with, his inability to understand femininity qua femininity becomes clear: Bruce Wayne has a penchant for picking hyper-feminine mates. Selena Kyle, Poison Ivy, Talia Al Ghul: these women are closer to drag queens (or, more accurately, faux queens: women dressed as men dressed as women) than actual females. (I fully recognize that this kind of analysis posits the male/female binary as a kind of fact, which it isn’t, but bear with me.) Bruce Wayne / Batman has a complete inability to access the feminine, his object choices must either be masculine or hyper-feminine (in order to compensate).
This kind of defense mechanism ultimately fails: Batman does end up having an inappropriate relationship with a number of boys. I am not saying that Batman is sleeping with any of the Robins, in fact he probably isn’t, his super-ego is too strict to allow such a sexual transgression, but simply that the presence of these boys allows him to procure a bizarre homosexual voyeuristic pleasure, under the guise of hyper-morality (crime fighting).
Conclusion
The genesis of the persona “Batman” by Bruce Wayne would not make sense unless fueled by a modicum of traumas and repressed desires: If Batman were to exist in reality, we would label him a megalomaniacal schizophrenic. If, instead, we consider the creation of The Bat as a result of the cataclysmic psychic facts of Bruce Wayne’s hyper-moral super-ego, his repressed homosexual desires, and the failure of the repression of scenes of childhood trauma we can better understand the pathology of the character.
-eric
[hope you enjoyed this one guys! As always: Damage into MP will be taking your requests! do you have any cultural curiosities you want to see addressed? any theories you need sussing out? let us know!]
WOW.
(there is a crystal at the center of each of these monuments: fight the demon inside it to obtain a new summon. duh.)
In the three days that I was at Anime Boston, I saw a lot of bad cosplay and some good cosplay. These are the best of the best, the ones that I actually made an effort to seek out for photographic evidence. Thank god for these types of people who are willing to put extraordinary amounts of work and detailing into these costumes.
~ Sam
Our panel, What is Superflat?: Postmodernism in Anime went off without a hitch. Not only did we fill the room, we finished early and had a half an hour long Q and A session with our attendees. I know that we are both extremely pleased with how this turned out and are overly excited to share our discussion with you all earlier this week in video format! Keep an eye out for the update!
~ Sam & eric
Can we(just me) see some essays on Kung-Fu films such as Ip Man, House of Flying Daggers and even Red Cliff? Maybe draw some easy parallels to video games due to their over the top action sequences and such.
P.S. Dynasty Warriors and Red Cliff are about the same thing.
P.S. Dynasty Warriors and Red Cliff are about the same thing.
So I actually am a bit behind on my Kung Fu movies, although I have passingly studied Hero and am an avid Bruce Lee addict. I don’t really have a comprehensive thesis about Kung Fu movies so I’ll just make a few observations that I found interesting:
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Movies like Crouching Tiger, Hero, and House of Flying Daggers are usually utilized as propaganda pieces by the Chinese government. While I don’t quite remember the machinations of any of the movies, they usually end up vilifying small rebel factions who fight against a hegemonic, authoritarian, tyrannical ruler. As if the opposite of Star Wars, contemporary chinese martial arts films necessarily need to be praising the Empire or else they won’t get made: under the strict Communist regimes, stories that lionize resistance groups are not allowed. Hero specifically, a movie explicitly praising a monolithic empire led by a Machiavellian (willing to sacrifice entire cities for the sake of unifying China) does a good job of inciting nationalistic pride for the PRC. The hero of Hero is not any of the actual fighters, but the emperor himself, who so bravely invades neighboring regions for the sake of creating one great nation. Veiled by hyper-stylized mise-en-scene, it is easy to overlook the bizarre morals of the movie.
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In the Costume Drama (what the Chinese call Kung-Fu movies that take place in ancient times) we can see the bizarre post-modern logic of late capitalism, which has even invaded Chinese Communist logic. The Costume Drama, like any movies that take place in the past, recapitulate an idea of the past, and not an actual past. We take these aestheticized interpretations at face value, as a kind of fact, and yet they hardly resemble an actual past that ever happened: as if the word “actuality” had any weight in such a conversation. Like retro fashion, like period pieces, like biopics: these movies are copies of copies (of copies) which lack an original referent. I have been abusing this quote lately but it seems relevant here: in the costume drama we can see what Frederick Jameson calls “the insensible colonization of the present by the past”; we cannot think about the present without references to the past, but even these references are tainted with present-ness, with present ideology. Perhaps the aestheticizing of Kung-Fu movies is necessary for us to cope with this kind of dissonance: the characters can fly around and jump over buildings and move like the Flash because they are not real, because the past is a fairly tale, because the past is as fictional as a fairy tale, because we have no idea what it was ever actually like.
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A comparison of Kung-Fu movies to video games is already erroneous because the comparison is anachronistic. To say that Kung-Fu movies parallel video games is sort of wrong because Kung-Fu movies came first: video games parallel Kung-Fu movies. But both have such long-standing traditions and semantics and grammars that seeing the influence of one in the other, while seemingly apparent, is a bit illusory. Sure, both mediums influence each other, somewhat: but because both mediums exist in a web of referentially and intertextuality, to try and trace particular semiotics, symbolics, or grammatical structures from one into the other feels a bit futile. If we are looking for a contemporary correlate for the Kung-Fu movie we might look, not towards video games, but to a much more obscure sub-culture: the vogue / ball scene. In this scene, catwalks and vogue dances are performed in battle settings: performed with prescribed sets of rules (like the imagined rules of a “fight” scene in a Kung-Fu movie, which recapitulate a different kind of bizarre post-modern logic) there is a fight, performed through bodily movements to a beat, with a clear winner and loser. The carefully choreographed battles of new Kung-Fu movies resemble complex dances much more than simulated virtual reality combat.
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The Kung-Fu movie, or at least how the Kung-Fu movie is consumed in contemporary American culture, represents a strange kind of cultural fetishism in which the Asian (or, the body of the Asian) is fetishized. In an orientalist move, the Asian male and female are both transformed into a kind of super-hero, capable of lightning quick movements, magical flying abilities, and scrupulous logic. The fact that Kung-Fu movies have a certain cultish aura around them (fetishists worshiping their cultural fetish) seems to confirm this reading; Kung-Fu fans are their own kind of otaku who childishly desire their objects and thus reduce them to fetishes. And yet, the body of the Asian person is sort of replaceable to the American: the American thinks all Asians look the same. In a move of shockingly poor taste, the re-constructive gesture of the movie Game of Death (which was made of cobbled together left over Bruce Lee footage and a bizarre plot revolving around a Bruce Lee look alike; a movie which actually used footage of Lee’s actual funeral in a movie claiming to star the master) demonstrates the modular nature of the actual bodies on film.
Those are some thoughts I have been collecting on the subject. Hopefully they are interesting (probably not). I could probably do a more comprehensive essay on post-modern logic and kung-fu or on the myth of Bruce Lee’s body. If anyone is interested: let me know?
-eric
[as always: feel free to send essay requests, commissions, thoughts, ideas, response, debate topics, questions, comments, or love to our ask box or emails!]
