dave hickey explains it all, pt. 3 [book it]

Have you heard of Dave Hickey? I came across him this weekend in the Los Angeles Times' occasional Sunday magazine, LA (why this paper can't manage a Sunday magazine of any consistency or caliber like its pretentious New York competitor is beyond me, but that is a matter for its own diatribe). Inspired by the brief interview, I picked up Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy, the 1997 collection of cultural commentary that helped him earn a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" in 2001, and can assure you after a premliminary perusal -- it's worth a read.

- thoughts, quotes, SPOILERS -

The Birth of the Big, Beautiful Art Market

Dave Hickey loves cars, and it's been an on-going affair. As a kid he would plug into car culture wherever his family moved, and he outlines this as the foundation for his art criticism with sharp and lovely brevity:

"Wherever I found myself, kids bought [cars], talked them, drew them, and dreamed them -- hopped them up and dropped them down -- cruised them on the drag and dragged them on the highway, and I did, too. Thus, of necessity, I learned car math and car engineering, car poli-sci and car economics, car anthropology and car beaux-arts.

Even my first glimmerings of higher theory arose out of that culture: the rhetoric of image and icon, the dynamics of embodied desire, the algorithms of style change, and the ideological force of disposable income. All these came to me couched in the lingua franca of cars."

He writes with such force and clarity that I find myself relating to experiences I've never had. It gives a fresh perspective on how hobbies shape and specialize you, and the different narrative and sociological threads that form any social experience or currency.

"All of us who partook of this discourse [...] understood its politico-aesthetic implications, understood that we were voting with our cars. [...] We also understood that we were dissenting when we customized them and hopped them up - demonstrating against the standards of the republic and advocating our own refined vision of power and loveliness."

This collection's art and democracy premise has seem rather vague and shaky to me in previous entries, but Hickey really brings it home and makes it count in this essay. I'll need to dig up what he says about Internet zines and social networking artwork/projects (like JPG), because it seems like contemporary culture's crystallization of his point.

"My optimum set of wheels, then, looked and sounded like a high-performance production model from a company you never fucking hear of -- as if I had walked into a Dave dealership one afternoon and bought it off the showroom floor--and now you wanted to buy one, too. That was my idea of cool."

This, then, is the beating heart of the designer -- a unique creation in which others see such value that it becomes a commodity. Is that art and democracy, or art and economy? [sidenote: this is the kind of true car-love by which the Fast & Furious films could enormously benefit if that just gave it some intellectual weight]

Hickey goes on to poke fun at how the new art establishment oddlly reveres the pop art 60s for "commercialization" whie, in fact:

"Works of art, after all, had been commercial objects for two hundred years, but commercial objects, like the cars we loved, had only recently become works of art -- and they did so in response to the market conditions that would ultimately create the post-industrail world. As Warhol was fond of telling us, the strange thing about the sixties was not that Western art was becoming commercialized but that Western commerce was becoming so much more artistic."

This guy is pretty much the coolest professor I never had. He then goes on to explain the artistic and economic implications of the evolution of differently priced lines by a single label, using the GM tailfin as an example of how to diversify your market and create loyalty to the brand:

"The tailfin technology, say, that had become stylistically obsolete on the Cadillac, could be retooled and used to produce Oldsmobiles, then Buicks, then Pontiacs, then Chevrolets, by which time it had been totally redesigned. From a marketing point of view, it was heaven. It bound consumers to the parent company and invited them to make incremental steps up the price ladder, as the exquisite, finny grail gradually descended toward their aspiring spirit."

The rest of the essay devolves into a wildly diverse philosophical rant against the high culture of the last few decades by citing the car as intellectual meeting of the Baroque and Enlightenment, the Catholic and Protestant, while also tracing hispanic culture's love for customizing it to a romantic Spanish heritage and basically refuting the notion that the aesthetics of car culture is low. I think. The essay is honestly a bit murky on the back end. but its core themes of democracy by commodification and dissent by modification ring clear and true.

Related:

dave hickey explains it all, pt. 1

dave hickey explains it all, pt. 2

fast & furious [cinefile]

Fast & Furious: It’s baaaaa-aaaack. The original 2001 street-racer (now an official classic to any fan of overdone action schlock) is back to its big-budget beginnings, having survived two successively more forced derivatives. The most recent, Tokyo Drift, was an especially mind-boggling display of lazy writing and blatant misogyny, and but its director, Justin Lin, returns anyway for the series’ fourth installment. To enjoy it, you have to momentarily stash your brain and just go along for the ride.

- thoughts, quotes, SPOILERS -

Dom (Vin Diesel) – street-racing crook-with-a-conscience; hulking teddy bear

Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) – buff street-racer; Bonnie to Dom’s Clyde

Brian (Paul Walker) – undercover cop with street-racing skills; pretty-boy square

Mia (Jordana Brewster) – Dom’s cute sister and Brian’s ex; otherwise undistinguished

Synopsis: Dom and Letty are renegade street-racing thieves wanted by the feds. After a close call, Dom goes into hiding, leaving Letty behind in Los Angeles. When she is murdered, he returns to LA to find whoever's responsible and crush them to a fine powder. Brian is also looking for these same evil folks, as they are a Mexican drug cartel (how timely!) and he is some sort of federal agent. He and Dom find themselves on the same hunt and try not to step on each other's toes as they go after the cartel the only way they know how -- street-racing. Brian and Dom have some history, of course. Brian once went undercover in Dom's street-racing ring to bust it up (Point Break-style), befriending Dom and dating his sister Mia before betraying them to the cops in the end. And, action!

So, basically: Fast & Furious is yet another installment of the recent sweep of bromance movies.

Or is every buddy cop movie essential a ‘bromance’? Maybe now we just have a word for a genre/dynamic/narrative that has always been there. There’s already a good deal of Internet literature, mostly amounting to lists, of movie bromances. Time’s Top 10 listicle includes Dean Martin & Jerry Stewart, Butch & Sundance, Point Break, Lethal Weapon, even Jules & Jim, a variety pack of dude-loves with an admirable diversity. I'd add Ricky & Fred, Starksy & Hutch, Speed. I could spend the rest of the day thinking them up, really. Whatever your personal top 10, in any case, I can assure you that Dom & Brian aren’t up there, and that, in a nutshell, is why this movie doesn’t work. Its action-team format requires a charismatic twosome, and Diesel and Walker just don’t click.

This production had the potential to truly go gangbusters, and not just because its brilliant theatrical trailer had me at hello [although that certainly didn't hurt -- plunging through a deftly edited sequence of three hot rods robbing an oil tanker (the movie's actual opening) without any indication of the film’s F&F identity, the trailer’s first minute ranks with pop culture's greatest action clips (like those Clive Owen BMW ads) as far as I'm concerned. If only its on-screen cousin was that lean and crisp.] With its fresh, streamlined title and a cast that still flies rather under the Hollywood radar, Fast & Furious could have finally shed that shiny MTV quality that has always kept it low-camp and emerged as a meaner, weightier action flick. 

I think it wanted to. There are several obvious Bourne attempts to grit up the action and suggest some emotional depth (although they ultimately remained hollow - more on that later). But you just have to check out the poster to see that the production kept its bar low. It didn't even think to capitalize on the great action star potential of its leading men's last names (DIESEL and WALKER, for christ's sake). This movie is just shilling once again to the sameold  narrow-minded demographic, and for that it is a failure.

The thing is, gender-wise, F&F wants to have its cake and eat it, too. Of course, the whole series is a gender debacle, filled with the skankified, underdressed and totally silent female hangers-on that dishearteningly symbolize 'partying' for this generation (Tokyo Drift, in which the supposed heroine literally offers herself as a prize before the hero and the villain's final drag race, is some of the most horrifyingly straight-faced misogyny I've ever encountered in pop culture), but I knew that going in; I came not to bitch and moan but to examine. So, yes, F&F features a handful of blatant ass shots and even a totally unnecessarily foray into homemade lesbian porn, and even revels without apology in this sexploitation. But it also revolves around one man mourning his one-true girlfriend (shades of Bourne, of course) and another returning to a past girl that he really loved. Our heroes endorse do true interest, even monogamy. 

The problem is, the movie itself doesn't likewise disown the seedy world of female-as-object that gives it its titilation. Dom and Brian align briefly with the enemy and, seated in a booth of some low-lit club, the villainous cartel kingpin proposes a toast to “the ladies we love and the ladies we lost.” He then rises, excusing himself with a reminder that all the pleasures of his club are for our heroes' gratis enjoyment. “Booze, broads…it’s all good.” Welcome to the classic machismo binary, Madonna/Whore.

Meanwhile, the purer heterosexual love stories that are supposed to give the movie its heart feel forced, even fake, because while our heroes dutifully look moonily at their ladies (Dom watches Letty sleep; Brian attempts a heart-to-heart with Mia over coffee), they gaze with true love at their cars. Despite several obligatory make-out scenes, the most erotic thing in this movie is the quick sequence of gauzy lighting and bare sweaty skin in which Diesel and Walker work on their engines. 

This action-team movie is not about girlfriends. It is about machismo, specifically in car culture. These men discuss being drivers like Tom Wolfe’s Right Stuff astronauts spoke of being pilots. It’s a thing of honor and skill and cajones, and those who belong to the club just know it. And the key is, we don't really see ladies drive in this one. We know that Letty and Mia can drive, and that this is part of their appeal to our heroes, but we don't actually see them take part as drivers. Instead, Mia comes to dress Dom's wounds when he's shot (she also brings dinner and makes the table say grace before they eat it). In a strange moment when Dom and Brian come face-to-face with the well-coiffed and pink-shirted cartel kingpin once more, Brian has the balls to call him out: “were you wearing pink when you clawed your way out of the barrio?” (btw, as if Blondie here were some expert on barrios, ha). There’s even a brief scene with an actual cockfight, a 15-second sliver which I like to think of as the inside joke of some female producer tinkering (unnoticed) with the script. This is about dudes, and dudes defining dude-ness.

Walker and Diesel could be up to the task. They make for a classic buddy-comedy mash-up: one, sleek and quiet, the other, muscular and flashy. But they have no spark together. In fact, they don't really have sparks individually. Diesel is too one-note (all brooding big guy), and Walker is an utterly blank Ken doll. A little age has grizzled him a bit, and in his opening one-on-one chase sequence (dashing through windows and across rooftops, again Bourne-style) he shows real action-guy promise, but there's no apparent charisma beyond that. His every line is a reading, like a first take. These guys barely register themselvs, certainly not enough to connect to each other.

In many other ways, this is not a subtle movie. Its embrace of untextured cultural stereotypes leaves us with a Latin villain in a snakeskin-patterned disco shirt in a sunburnt church in the north of Mexico. Its unbuyable CGI car-chase sequences curiously undervalue actual driving. Its plot's most interesting actual question is who the cartel kingpin actually is, but even that is obvious from the get-go. The kingpin's knock-out lady associate directly compares herself to a car in a heavy come-on to Dom (not unlike my own favorite chauvinist, R. Kelly). Etc. But almost anything can be popcorn entertainment if done with the right joie-de-vivre or schlocky-ness. F&F somehow takes itself too serious to be stupidly fun while still being too stupid to be taken seriously, and for managing neither it's a disappointment.