Scared Straight - Influencer Edition
Media Round-Up:
Anthem (1991) - Basically the musical remix of some of Tongues Untied. Fucking LOVED IT! I feel like the more I look at the work people like Riggs, Hemphill, Assanto etc the more I feel how much we were fucking robbed.
Branded To Kill (1967) - I am EMBARRASINGLY late to the work of Seijun Suzuki, but I’m glad I got here! This particular one possibly has one of the best endings I’ve ever seen in a film?
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Scared Straight - Influencer Edition
Earlier in the week, this tweet went around showing some influencers at the Malmaison Luxury Hotel in Oxford, which resides in a converted prison which was inside Oxford Castle. The posts had some shitty jokes about getting the real experience behind bars and were generally jarring given that the hotel retained a lot of the prison-like internal furnishings. There was a lot of (correct) outrage at the influencers and the grossness of making the prison aesthetic a selling point. Of course, since it is impossible for me to see something related to the criminal justice system and not have 900 thoughts about it - I decided to write this.
An important question which I keep chewing on is - would the reaction have been the same if the Malmaison wasn't presented as an ‘influencer hotel’? To me, the answer is a no. Whether it’s days of debate about bending the rules of COVID restrictions to fly abroad for ambiguous work purposes, or lamentations over surveys saying kids want to be influencers when they grow up, the figure of The Influencer has become an incredibly safe punching bag. This is not to say that they’re blameless, these people are often very willing cogs in the cruel machine of late-stage capitalism, but crucially they are not where the machine originates. To get deep into this would be another essay, but in short, The Influencer functions as a vector through which people can vent their frustrations at systems without ever confronting those systems or their creators head-on (there is also something to be said for the gendered nature of this vitriol). One thing to note on this topic is that from what I could see this hotel isn't aimed at influencers, given that it predates social media as we understand it today, but instead is aimed at rich white people in general. I think that rhetorical shift says something about how focusing on The Influencer obfuscates the broader class dynamics at hand with a narrow framing.
When we look at the actual harms being perpetrated here what is especially violent? If we’re talking about harm done to living humans then there isn’t much going on here. The prison has been out of commission for 25 years, so all that’s left is a hotel which (from what we can see) isn’t doing more or less harm than any of its contemporaries. If that is the case then any harm that’s really being done here is symbolic. This is not to say that I would ever stay at that place. I think it is kind of grotesque to fetishise the aesthetic of the prison (as is shown in the captions of people who went there) - especially for people who will likely never have to interact with its harms in a meaningful way.
However, what really interested me here is how the reaction links broader way in which optics are essential to the maintenance of the carceral state.
I think the crime here wasn’t just that people were using a site of previous carceral violence for monetary/social gain. Otherwise, we would be burning down every former school, every former civic centre, every former court and every other repurposed building that previously belonged to the state. Intertwined with the police power which Mark Neocleous discusses, carceralism is infused in everything that the British state touches, the evil of the prison doesn’t solely reside in steel bars.
However, that carceralism is normally hidden behind institutions and euphemisms. In fact, one of the key social functions of the prison is to separate society from the worst of state violence and the recipients of it (the underclass). So I think the real crime that these influencers committed, beyond just being gauche, was bringing their hypervisibility to a situation that breaks down the mental barrier we have between the prison and society at large.
The days of public hangings are over. Our thirst for (domestic) blood has abated, but hunger for punishment has stayed and the worship of Security has only heightened*. Any public spectacle attached to so-called justice is far more professionalised and the really awful stuff has been pushed out into our peripheral vision. The little that we do see, we convince ourselves is happening to irredeemably evil monsters who deserve the dehumanisation. “The people in general cannot bear very much reality”˟ and to confront the sheer scale of harm done in our name to uphold this facade of ‘security’ that we have under capitalism would fundamentally break how we understand ourselves to be.
How many prisoners have died of COVID-19 in the abysmal conditions they have been forced to live in?
How many of them have had their pre-existing stress and mental health issues drastically exacerbated by the extreme limiting of socialising caused by the prisons' pandemic response?
How many stories do we get about the rampant physical and sexual abuse of prisoners by guards that actually recognise the tremendous power dynamic rather than spinning it into some equal exchange of blows or tabloid romance?
This is why When They See Us, especially the scenes with Jharrel Jerome (as Korey Wise), makes such a striking case for abolition even when DuVernay’s politics are nowhere near that radical. Most people will acknowledge that the criminal justice system disproportionately criminalises Black people. Everyone knows that prison is tough and that solitary confinement exists. It is different to see that in process, and to see the long-term effect that something like that has on a person. I think it is incredibly hard to come out of that and think anyone deserves to suffer in this way, guilty or not.**
To push for a better world, we are going to have to face that shit head-on. We cannot limit our outrage to when shit is so aesthetically grotesque that it’s impossible to ignore. We have to reckon with the harm being done in our name and we have to end it.
* "the State expects a commitment to security to lie in our very souls" - Mark Neocleous, A Critical Theory of Police Power
˟ James Baldwin - Mass Culture and the Creative Artist, Some Personal Notes
**It is for similar reasons, though with another marginalised group, that Hunger’s expertly drawn-out scenes work so well.
I’m less online lately, but whsiper on the winds and maybe you’ll fine me! Always appreciate your support whether that’s verbal, financial (ko-fi.com/tayowrites) or whatever else.