I woke up with this song in my head a couple of days ago and was really struck by what an apt analysis of addiction it is. Iggy feels like an outsider, a status of which he's both proud and ashamed. To console himself, he turns to some taboo behaviour which temporarily makes him feel better, even as it confirms his non-belonging. While he feels better he is defiantly contemptuous of the straight culture that he knows is not for him. But he knows that eventually he'll be "trying to break in" again, and again being frustrated because he is too much of a "freak". And then of course he'll be driven to the destructive behaviour again.
I think this is a scenario with which a lot of people are intimately familiar. It's a kind of infinite loop that the human brain can get stuck in, a bug in the program that has something to do with living in a culture sophisticated enough to temporarily override more basic biological impulses. And I also think that in our particular culture advertisers and less malevolent mass media have learned exactly how to take advantage of this bug to serve their own ends. It's to their advantage to have everyone feel like some kind of outsider and therefore be driven to learn all they can about the culture that doesn't accept them, while still partaking of the products and services that they feel define them as a non-conforming individual.
But the simple truth is that the culture outside of which we all supposedly lie, the "straight" life which we yearn to be a part of but which suffocates us when we approximate it, doesn't exist. Life is much too complicated and people are much too varied to be defined by one single set of cultural values. The lifestyle which Iggy defines himself in contrast to, which he falsely imagines is shared by the majority of "normal" people around him, is nothing more than an ideal, and not even one to which anyone should aspire. By buying into that ideal, or even by believing that others are successfully buying into that ideal, we make freaks of ourselves. Ironicallly, if we could all realize that everyone is some kind of freak or other, we'd all be a little more well-adjusted.
Terry Zwigoff, the director of Crumb, Ghost World, and now Art School Confidential, was on Definitely Not the Opera on CBC Radio yesterday. The show is a generally kind of annoying look at pop culture to which I sometimes catch myself listening if there's an interesting guest. This week they had this theme of "Geeks" going, and had been talking to various people about what's particularly geeky about them or what they sympathize with about geeks. The host, Sook-Yin Lee, asked Terry why he seemed to always make films about outsiders, and he replied that he didn't think he did. "I just make movies about normal people that I see in my life," he said. "I don't meet people like the guy in Mission Impossible in my life, but I meet lots of people who feel frustrated in one way or another with the way society and the world are shaping up. And I think that's a reasonable feeling; I don't think that makes you an outsider."
She pushed the point. "Well we've been talking about geeks on this show, and we've come to realize that a geek is really just someone with a lot of knowledge in a very specific area, about which they're maybe a little too obsessive." Terry actually got a little peeved at this. "I don't think so at all. I think the word 'geek' refers to someone who is generally unattractive and socially inept, and that's it. I don't think there are any positive or even neutral qualities that are part of the definition, and I certainly wouldn't want to be lumped in with anyone under that term. Sometimes the media will try to pretend temporarily that there's something hip about it, like 'This week the hottest new look is "geek chic",' and then next week it'll be green shoes or something. Frankly I find that term an irritating and nauseating cultural shorthand." I was cheering in my seat as Sook-Yin cut the interview short, and I turned the radio off just after she called the director a curmudgeon.
Art School Confidential, by the way, is really great. We went to see it last night with Joan and Jason. Like Ghost World, it's based on a Daniel Clowes comic story and cowritten by him. Also like that movie, there's plenty of hilarious Clowesian misanthropy balanced with disdain for the attitudes that allow the misanthrope to create himself.
Another great movie, which we watched tonight, is the Marx Brothers' Monkey Business. That's the one where they're stowaways on an ocean liner. It was their third film and the first one which wasn't just a screen adaptation of a stage show. We rented a box set of their first five films and have been watching them in order. The first one, The Cocoanuts, I have to say is kind of a snorefest. Really not very good. The only things that make it worthwhile are Chico's piano solo and Harpo's sour expression
when he gets up from the table every time someone starts to make a long-winded speech. But Animal Crackers (best line: Groucho is trying to convince two women to marry him and one complains that that would be bigamy, to which he replies, "Sure, and it'd be big of you, and you — it'd be big of all of us! Let's be big for once. I'm tired of these conventional marriages. One husband and one wife was good enough for your grandmother, but who wants to marry your grandmother? Nobody. Not even your grandfather.") and especially Monkey Business are full of hilarious gags and charming anti-bourgeois antics. Those guys were outsiders who were able to have a lot of laughs while they made a place for themselves by poking fun at the status quo.- Andrew
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