I Miss My MTV: Accidentally Queer
Many music videos are queer even if they are not showing explicitly queer behaviors; the nature of the medium allows for a break from traditional narrative, thus I can gleefully use "queering" as a verb as is the god-given right of a cultural studies graduate student.
What does accidentally queer mean? I am assuming the intent of the rtist/director was not directly to make a queer video, but oops! they did because wuthorial intent means didly squat. The two videos I look at here are nearly 20 years apart, but make the same mistake. It seems like they intended to make a statement about gender roles, but, in fat, have superceded the need for gender roles and made the case that their own statements about gender are rendered irrelevant. In other words, they played themselves.
The Prodigy - Smack my bitch up from ArtOfficial Agency CPH on Vimeo.
I have been chomping at the bit to talk about The Prodidy's "Smack My Bitch Up." It may be one of my top ten pieces of media ever. It’s intricately concocted, entitely made up of samples. The Prodigy is such a force of nature, and the death of the frontman is sad. It's inherently sexist, seemingly promoting violence. The 2000 film Charlie's Angels uses the song whenever the girls fight in some sort of #girlsboss #postfeminist statement. (The aughts were confusing).
Many people know it because it is usually included on lists like "most banned videos" and "most controversial videos." And I say: heck yea. The video at the time was unique in it used a first-person cam, depicting a London partier getting ready for a wild night out, which includes, alcohbol, drugs, vomiting, assualting others, getting into fights, going to a strip club, and then at the end of the night, taking a stripper home to have mind-tripping sex. It is actually near impossible to take any good screenshots because it moves so fast, which is part of the charm. It's disorienting on purpose.
The big reveal however, is that our protagonist, the person whose journey we are following, is a woman. Yes, that's right, the person fighting, fucking, and doing drugs is a pretty little blonde woman, who, at the end, looks into a mirror with sadness, perhaps lamenting her life and how everyone leaves her eventually. The audience is suprised because she is acting in an unexpected way according to her gender, but to the character, our protagonist, is she unhappy because she is not able to act this way? Is it that she is sexual with a woman, or acts aggressively? In service of "tricking" the audience, when we see the protagonist get dressed, she dresses in male clothing. At its best, it’s subversive; at worst, it’s a display the "transexual sociopath" trope, in her gender noncomformity is the root and result of her antisocial behavior.
There is another way of looking at this. Perhaps she is a transwoman, trapped in a body which everyone else sees as deviant, which empowers her deviant behavior. However, the woman leaving at the end, perhaps believing she is not a real woman, or, discovering that the protagonist is a trans woman, leaves because of trans panic. I’m hesitant to assign the protagonist as a transwoman, but if reading against the grain, there’s some ideas to be mined.
I think, ultimtely, the video is about shock value with a twist at the end as a "fooled ya!" to round out a video that the creators knew would be controversial. It worked!
Taylor Swift's brand of feminism is easy to pull apart. Hers is the modern version of the "girl power!" ushered in by the Spice Girls. I can't really get too mad, she is like a freshman who just discovered Gender Studies 101. Her feminism seems to derive from her experience as not just as a woman, but as a famous, successful popstar woman, which makes it seem a bit...self absorbed. But guess what? That's who she is, what she knows, so she can only speak to that.
In "The Man," the video reflects the songs almost exactly. "I'm so sick of running as fast I can/ Wondering if I'd get there quicker if I was a man," No need to wonder, Taylor, it would be different. Taylor acts it out further by physically transforming herself into a man. thanks to behind the scenes bonus info, we know she sat for hours while movie-grade makeup artists applied several prosthetics, facial hair, body hair and body padding to make her a man.
Taylor, as a man, is hot. Mostly because there is something androgynous about him, because he acts so over the top and is still quite pretty. In fact, he almost resembles a drag king, whose performance is often a parady of manhood. Man Taylor acts like a brat, manspreads on the subway, and parties with models. He has temper tantrums. The sexism, however, is that other people reward him; represented by hands reaching out of his walls to high five him at will.
Man Taylor is the worst of masculinity, bypassing the subtle nod of privilege and instituional sexism, all for the benefit of Taylor herself having fun with her character. Again, to call this character transgender is misguided, but Taylor literally puts herself in a different body in order to explore pleasure. And in a meta-view, she is taking pleasure she wouldn’t normally have. Taylor Swift is not known for acting chops and at best, is a bit cringey. Here, she lets go and goes almost full camp. (I think she looks like Scott Disik).
Taylor really saves up her zinger for the end. After breaking the fourth wall, man Taylor asks actual real Taylor Swift, as the video director, if it was good (in the voice of The Rock). Taylor, in purposeful stringy hair and frumpy clothes, answers, "well maybe if you smiled more," which makes no sense because the man Taylor was smiling and laughing through most of it. This is something that directors have probably told Taylor, so her ability to say it to a man is really exciting for her. It’s what I call Control-F feminism, in which typically sexist scenarios are flipped to show their absurdity- or “what if a man did this?” which is the thrust of her point here. I'll bet she imagined it being memed and giphed for all eternity. Sadly, like most of Taylor's efforts, comes across as cringey. She tried!
It seems obvious that Taylor made this video as a statement against sexism and sexism she has experienced. I think what she got, as the artist and protagonist in the video, was not that the man's actions are to be condemned, but the tragedy is that she can't experience it. In a different body, she has the freedom to enjoy fighting and fucking just like a man would. In her prosthetics she is free from judgement about it. Taylor is not shy about inviting handsome young actors to be in her videos, it would be easy to see Miles Teller or a One Direction boy here, but she chose to do it. She didn't want to be a man, but she wanted to be able to express pleasure like a man. It's feminism 101 but then with a surprise appearance by J Halberstram.