Two Hundred and Seventeen

I've been staying indoors and watching music videos on YouTube.  I can’t listen to serious music any more, so I’m watching only popular music videos instead.

Not today’s popular music, but the popular music of my childhood—what other children listened to while I was listening to Bach and Haydn.  It doesn’t seem quite as bad as the popular music of today, perhaps because it reminds me of my childhood.  There was no way of escaping it when I was young, and now I welcome anything that reminds me of my childhood.

But I think the popular music of my childhood really was better than today’s popular music, because it reflected reality more than today’s popular music does.  It was a child’s view of reality, but still reality. 

Back in those days, most popular singers came from poverty, especially black and country singers—Loretta Lynn really was a coal miners’ daughter—and found they could escape poverty by singing about it; at first with honesty, but gradually they marketed their suffering as sentimental self-pitying nostalgia.  Like Loretta Lynn, they performed poverty long after they became rich.

I've found I can enjoy that kind of music when I’m feeling sorry for myself.  The singers really had suffered, and earned the right to make a living performing their suffering for the entertainment of others.  But it is perverse.

Since the days of the Roman coliseum, and no doubt earlier, most popular entertainment has been perverse—a way for the people to forget their suffering, and join their masters in watching others suffer.

Mulvey was wrong about the male gaze.  Hollywood movies don’t empower their supposedly male audience by exposing the actress to their gaze.  On the contrary, they feminize the audience, making them passive and impotent voyeurs who spy on beautiful people they’ll never know having exciting adventures they’ll never have.    

The audience is masochistic, but they have their revenge.  The beautiful people they watch having exciting adventures onscreen pay for it by suffering failed marriages and addictions offscreen. 

If the audience’s gaze is male, as Mulvey claimed, it’s both homoerotic and pædophiliac.  Movie heroes used to be strong men who rescued damsels in distress.  Now they're boyish and vulnerable, fighting strong and powerful men who would have been heroes a generation ago.

Male fans of 'action' films are aware of their homoerotic subtext, and joke about it.  Like most secrets, this one stays a secret because everyone knows it, and keeps it.

The homoerotic male gaze is most obvious in music videos.  Earlier today I watched a YouTube music video of '80s pop star Billy Idol singing Eyes Without A Face.

Idol was absurdly beautiful, yet he dyed his hair platinum blond, making his natural beauty artificial.  He played a punk, and that, too, was artificial. He was actually middle class.  Most revealing of all, the song was about a French cult film.

Or was it?  The only thing the video shows is Idol's face against a black background.  That famous face is the object of Mulvey's supposedly male gaze, watched by Idol's anonymous and faceless audience.  And he's not suffering.