Jungingen

Booka Shade – Sweet lies

I came across this video on facebook.  A friend who is probably depressed had it posted on his wall.  We see: class escapism and insubordination.  And believe me, this video is escapist par excellance.  The lies that kept the veneer of family coherent.  We have an insatiable, uncontrollable desire to see things turn into the opposite, to hear “i’m leaving you” and “i love you” in the same breath.  The city becomes the symbolic screen to locate the elusive Real of that first trauma.  As such, the city is woman: essentially empty and full of holes.

The video begins of long tracking shots (presumably from a vehicle) of a metropolitan night life which will act as the stage for the rest of the piece.  Like Lost In Translation, the voyeur shot oozes isolation, emptiness, and desolation along with the hollow orphic tones interspersed with inhuman wails of pre-packaged traffic founds.  The city appears to be a ghost town to the alien viewer who cannot recognize any(thing)one.  Suburbia has landed on the moon: ‘I will repopulate it with my memories, fears, and anxiety about the other’.  Its always night and slums of downtown areas are the playpens of the nascent ruling class.  Like vampires, the city disappears in the day.

We get a self-reflection (which is not one) of the camera-car-of-the-law: our ghostly spot-light eye is the ephemeral and mobile center that will organize the city spectacle around us and for us.  It caresses the surface of the under-structure, teasing out its social crevices and contradictions which are ours and us to behold.  A scratchy radio voice announces the awakening night as the beautiful day.  As if to say: “Dance, City! Show me what I want to see, show me my fantasy”

Scene: A cop getting a blowjob in an alley.  The corrupt edifice of social order.  “That’s pretty sweet, but not sweet enough”.

Scene: exclusion and prohibition.  The night club bouncer embodying the regulatory function of social law along class lines which are invisible to us.  Our spot-light eye tickles the scaffolds of the superstructures.  Give me more, it says.

A scene of rejection.  A man advances a proposition to his female companion: stay with me.  We are to sympathize with his dirty face and loneliness.  She says no.  And so the spot-light cannot linger any longer.  It speeds up.  Get out of here,  This is too Real, to painful, to close to home.  Sing!  Sing this street empty of all its vermin like a hipster pied-piper.  You say its not so easy.  You say this life will tear us apart.  Freaks, show me freaks now!  Pretend its a start.  You got to learn to let go

Scene: Our mother is now a prostitute walking resolute.  It morphs into a transsexual prostitute and un-wigs itself, disrobes, strips for us in the street with the cold dead eyes of financial commerce.  Don’t anything, we know your story already, says the spotlight: our spot-light moves on.

Scene: the scaffolds of the superstructure are rejecting the human occupants.  Our mother says she’ll jump, throw herself from these constructions, leave this family, spill revolution into the street.  The invisible man that is us commands “thou shalt not jump”.  Do not leave me mother. Its going to be different.  The transiency of life disavows your class responsibility.  Rock me to sleep in my city-womb.

Scene: Our invisible man spotlight fucks a woman in a stairwell.  Of course she loves it, she can’t refuse, she owes us her life.  A drunk clown is passed out: our bourgeois and golden childhood has dragged itself into the gutter where nostalgia can momentarily rescue it.  Drink, father.  We have fallen there with it.  Let me die here, rather than live here and change things, it says.  I have lost my class roots, my palaces, my horses, my family christmases.  And we let our nostalgia linger, incinerate the invisible people of the city.  The city is a grave.

Scene: our business man father is ruing his automobile, his home, his performance of stability.  self-destruction is socially acceptable as long as its not social.

Our camera car chases down the fugitive protagonist that is not us as such but the fantasy.  Our gaze is the law, the rule, the ruling idea.