Thursday, June 02, 2005

Arnold: 2, Girlie Men: 0.



Yes, that's pop cultural critic/novelist Gary Indiana. And, yes, he's wearing a feather boa. It's the author's photo used in his latest work, Schwarzenegger Syndrome: Politics and Celebrity in the Age of Contempt. (Subtext: "Eat it, Terminator. I'm a girlie-man and I'm'a fuck you up.")
What sounded like a promising deconstruction of the intersection of politics and celebrity/film is, um, actually kinda crappy according to Marc Cooper in the LA Weekly. It seems that Mr. Indiana isn't so much interested in really digging into what happened in that 2003 election* and really exploring how pop culture shaped the outcome. No, he's content to offer up the same, tired bullshit about how dumb California voters are, how easily elections are bought and how the press manipulates us.
Cooper isn't having any of it:
There are much simpler explanations for what has transpired in California. An electorate thoroughly disgusted by the corrupt politics of both parties found itself slightly amused and guardedly optimistic that a wild card like Arnold could use his celebrity to make things a little better in a state that had seemed to lose its way. The voters elected him, gave him a one-year probation period, and when he began to fail, they started turning against him and now threaten his political future. Seems like good collective common sense to me. And in the meantime, no one was sent to Dachau.

Ouch.

* I haven't actually read any of Indiana's book, but I have picked it up and skimmed it in a store. The first "Houston, we have a problem" moment: the book jacket states that the recall election happened in 2002. Oops.

3 Comments:

At 11:29 PM, Blogger Joshua said...

Gary Indiana amuses me more than any other pomo homo. I mean, take his totally accurate, yet hilarious, take on Salo: "Salò tries to explain fascism as this physical expression of the will to power, and to lure the viewer into complicity by showing a lot of stunningly gorgeous, naked teenagers. So we become accomplices to this horror by virtue of our own desire to keep looking, to keep cruising these adorable kids."

 
At 2:16 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

the best part of that book jacket is that it's a crotch shot.

i mean really, after that you just do not need to flip it over.

 
At 12:10 AM, Blogger Joshua said...

"someone who thinks he owns the state and hasn't had a decent bowel movement in all the time he's resided there."

Game, set, match Indiana. Huzzah!

 

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