Just to put this week’s readings in conversation with last week’s, I’m intrigued by the varying portrayals of America and the extent of American influence, especially in contemporaneous articles. Specifically, I’m looking at Morley and Rovins vis a vis Appadurai, writting in 1995 and 1990, respectively. For all the subtlety that they exhibit elsewhere, Morley and Co. seem to espouse the common (overly simplistic?) view of American exported culture as being one of homogenization, if not outright imperialism, “The flow of images and products is both more intensive and more extensive that in the past. What should also be emphasized is how much American cultural domination remains a fundamental part of this new order…”(14-15). While they do acknowledge a tendency towards particularizing the product for the economic imperative of niche marketing (15), they still seem to contend that this is ultimately in the service of homogenization, American style. It’s interesting then, that writing five years before, Appadurai already sees the fallacy or perhaps the overstatement of the claims and fears about American cultural influence:
The central problem of today’s global interactions is the tension between cultural homogenization and cultural heterogenization…Most often, the homogenization argument subspeciates into either an argument about Americanization or an argument about commoditization, and very often the two arguments are closely linked. What these arguments fail to consider is that at least as rapidly as forces from various metropolises are brought into new societies they tend to become indigenized in one or another way (“Disjuncture and Difference,”32).
His prescience in deconstructing the common global cant suggests that maybe the globalism discourse is not so much beholden to periodization and academic trends as it is to individual scholars, because writing years before Morley and Robins, he already sees the flaws.
I’m fascinated by the discourse around globalism, the lexicon, and what seems like the ever-shifting currency of certain terms and ideas—perhaps that’s what makes me feel like a perpetually uncool kid who can’t hang with the hipsters at lunch—just when I think I grasp a concept, it is pronounced faddish, reductive, or outmoded. So this conceptual obsolescence is something I’d like to look at throughout the semester. To that end, the Morley readings cite the now foundational Dallas research, which makes me wonder if the idea of “transparency” is still viable; that certain cultural products have an innate appeal and transmissibility that either retain their probity through travel, or engender specific reading strategies that become tailored to the receiving culture. If anyone knows what’s “sexy” in the academic discourse of global media culture, please let me know. Maybe I can be cool for once.
Balkanism, Regressive Regionalism, and Rane
All of our readings have articulated the recurrent notion that pervasive global shifts have caused an inchoate anxiety that transfers into mythologized nostalgia, reactionary nationalism and regionalism, or at its most extreme, fundamentalist ethnocentrism. Additionally our reading this week references Said’s Orientalism, so I’d like to address the related concept of Balkanism and put it in dialogue with the idea of atomized regional/tribal identities, and the film Rane. The Wounds (which I would subtitle “Nasty People Doing Nasty Things”) offers us a sort of micro/macro portrayal of post-communist Yugoslavia, most potently, in the fragmentary nature of self-identification (Croats versus Serbs etc.), and the insular nature of the criminal street world that seems to disavow national and ethnic ties in favor of opportunistic materialism.
While Pinki’s father maintains strong political ties, to the point where his fervor becomes manic, we get the sense that his Tito-worship and outbursts are anachronistic, futile, and code him as a tragic clown who can’t adapt. The youth generation on the other hand has a bit of gritty pragmatism in that they’ve abandoned their allegiance to ineffectual authority figures and political parties, and instead have created a cottage industry based on greed and their own aggrandized romanticized images of gangster culture, largely gleaned from American products –even they way they dress and ridiculously brandish their guns seems like the effect of watching Scarface too many times, peppered with some music videos. It’s no accident, that Pinki wears Mickey Mouse print boxers and the well-meaning, trashy moll wears a John Wayne shirt—emblems of American supremacy, transnational corporate dominance, and Western influence.
Returning to the concept of Orientalism and by extension Balkanism, I’m interested in this film and its adherence to or rejection of Balkanist motifs and clichés. The only other experience I’ve had with Yugoslavian film is the 1995 movie Underground that Priya screened for us last semester. It’s a madcap, carnivalesque imagining of Yugoslavia from WWII through the fall of communism and the subsequent territorial division. It’s highly self-reflexive and an ironized, fanciful interpretation of history, and despite, or perhaps because of its self-awareness, it makes full use of Balkanist clichés, even while making deeper implications about the state of in-fighting and divisive tribalism. To paraphrase a complex theory, like Orientalism, Balkanism suggests that there is a constructed imaginary of the Balkans created from aggregate representations of mediated images in literature, art etc., and some argue that even filmmakers who seek to offer alternate or realistic approache are still fated to employ the familiarized Balkan iconography, which is essentially riotous gypsy life: drinking, dancing, screwing, and playing the violin.
Underground takes full and winking advantage of this by having a raucous gypsy band absurdly follow the main characters around, playing an incessant oomp-pah-pah that serves as both the diegetic and nondiegetic score (incidentally, the actor who plays Pinki’s father is the Chaplinesque lead in Underground). By contrast, in The Wounds we see a hint of that gypsy jollity in the street parade scenes where a band plays, and then perhaps more subtlety, we could also interpret their gangster mentor’s glorified lifestyle as being constructed as somehow “Balkan”—he lives big, drinks, smokes, fucks, kills with equal zeal, with a sort of primitivist passion that is bedrock of Balkanism.
I also find it interesting the way the film introduces and then ironically undercuts the phenomenon of regressive regionalism: the boys aren’t actively engaged in the political scene, but they distractedly follow the news and reference the Yugoslavian division—however, the new Balkan identities are more a source of childish taunts then actual upheaval and destabilized identity. In their first scene, they hurl the new national titles as slurs, like little boys name-calling as they play their imaginary war game. Of course the playground become a literal battleground by the film’s final scene, but it is significant that the conflict, anger, and revenge are all mobilized by familial ties, lust, and betrayal—none of which are tied to localities, but caused by interpersonal relationships.
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