antipopper

I’ve recently spent a lot of time with my niece and nephews, tagging along with their obsessive, serial re-viewings of particular Powerpuff Girls episodes. I particularly love the way Josh, my six-year-old brunette nephew, indentifies so totally with Bubbles, the blonde Powerpuff who’s basically the Baby Spice of the group. Josh goes as far as to provide a running commentary on each episode from Bubble’s perspective. “I punch the evil clown! I save the day!”

We’ve always had a couple of Powerpuff DVDs in our collecction, but under the kids’ influence, I’ve recently gone as far as to learn how to play the Powerpuff Girls End Theme by Bis so I could serenade them on guitar, and in a widening search pattern, I’ve been really getting into Puffy AmiYumi‘s theme song for Teen Titans.

My long-running resistance to the Powerpuff Girls has always been over its somewhat pat recapitulation of various dodgy pop-culture tropes, in particular its quite obvious racialisation of evil (in particular the oriental-ism of Mojo Jojo, their ineffectual chimpanzee nemesis). Of course, creator Scott McCracken is quite consciously playing with the flotsam of American pop culture — its monsterism-of-the-week, anime-like iconicity and appearance of Shonen Knife on the soundtrack notwithstanding, the show’s heritage is squarely in the yankee doodle Roger Ramjet “camp”. But despite this, and the show’s obvious wit, The Powerpuff Girls is not nearly as reflexive or subversive as Ramjet or Rocky and Bullwinkle, so this recapitulation of stereotypes, no matter how playful, has never sat well with me. Add to this its comparatively de-ironised context within the childrens’ cable television universe, where the more overtly reactionary flavours of TV history are given an undead afterlife in prime time for kids who really lack enough practical reference points to place them historically, and we have a recipe for “worry”.

The programmers and latter-day producers who juxtapose and create these shows obviously enjoy the camp ironies of this process, and I’m not disputing the very real capacity for young people to grapple with whatever currents of pop culture they’re swimming through. But the camp contexts of retro Anglo culture can’t be assumed to be universal, and certain kinds of reflexivity are not a given, but are undoubtedly bound up in whatever we’re calling “cultural capital” these days. (And remember, like money, this isn’t something to be simply redistributed, but is the manifestation of a reified social relation that must be be subverted.) This isn’t an argument for “protecting our children from television” or a return to an unwittingly fetishistic hermeneutics of judgement — anyone who’s read this blog for a while will know my continuing demands for an ambivalent and joyous engagement with popular culture that can smash through moralist disavowals — but we do need a materialist stocktake to avoid a real slide into smug, postmodern “relativism” (as opposed to one imagined by the tabloids and right wing think-tanks) and an unquestioning complicity with Rupert Murdoch (“TV is great! Capitalist culture is All Good!”). I guess this is a note-to-self that cultural engagement should never be laissez faire.

In a parallel case: to escape well-wishing visitors the other night, Lena and I snuck out of the house and caught the most enjoyable Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. (You could call this “blockbuster mourning”.) Lena quickly noted the stunning absence of people of colour in the film (beyond the mystical monks and duplicitous natives), which I immediately explained was kinda “necessary” in such a knowing retread of endless pulpy, colonial fantasies. A certain amount of reactionary consistency is required for the narrative to function as a signifying chain. But even the last Harry Potter film contained an interesting number of “pointedly black extras” to punctuate its English public school dioramas (which actually prompted a double take from me, but that’s because I was actively looking).

I guess that one of the best interventionary readings of the Dan Dare-style retro narratives that Sky Captain reanimates can be found in Warren Ellis’ unusually good Ministry of Space comic, in which its breathtaking alternative history scenario (that the British Empire beats the Americans and Russians into space and colonises the entire solar system) is revealed to be not only underwritten by the spoils of genocide, which we could see coming a mile away, but also by oh-so-discreet racial segregation. Ellis’ story escapes the usual trap of trying to smugly step outside these compromised narratives, and instead engages in a more interesting kind of critique. It’s been de rigeur to knock Ellis’ dependence on dialogue-free, “decompressed” narratives of late, but the final two pages of the series, which wordlessly span the wonders and the everyday, boring oppressions of a reimagined history, can’t be faulted. It’s a colonial haunting. That’s what we need to do: continue to explore dodgy narratives, and increase the haunting. Invocationary engagement.

[ technorati tags: animation, powerpuff, tv, skycaptain, film, pop-culture, racism ]