everyth1ngisembarassing

[everyth1ngisembarassing]

Do bad people deserve good art?

'High Fidelity' follows Robyn, a music fanatic, on her mission to understand why each of her exes broke her heart. More precisely, she plans on retracing her ‘All-Time Top 5 Most Memorable Heartbreaks’-as she calls them- and confronting each one to better understand why she always gets her heart broken. The show was produced by Hulu and released in early 2020, and a few months later the news broke out that it hadn’t been renewed for a second season despite substantial critical acclaim. ‘High Fidelity’ is an adaptation of the 2000 film by the same title, albeit with a switch of the protagonist's gender, with John Cusack playing the original Rob.

We meet Rob (Zoe Kravitz) just as Mac- her fiancé- is breaking up with her and packing his bags before leaving their shared home. A one-year time jump shows us that she hasn’t gotten over him, and still hopes that they will eventually get back together. In the meantime, she turns to her friends Simon and Cherise, with whom she runs ‘Championship Vinyl’, a record shop on the brink of bankruptcy. In a show of false bravado, Rob goes on a date with a random guy named Clyde to try to prove to her friends and family that she has gotten over her fiancé. She actually ends up liking Clyde, but her lingering feelings for Mac inhibit her and Clyde's connection from going any further. As the story unfolds, Rob progressively checks off each ex from her ‘All-Time Top 5 Most Memorable Heartbreaks’ list, before she getting to Mac- the one who broke her heart irreparably. Besides the diverse plotlines and outstanding soundtrack, ‘High Fidelity’ raises thought provoking questions about music worthy of litmus tests.

A recurring moral dilemma, beyond the show, is that of wondering whether it is politically correct to enjoy art made by morally corrupt people. The ambivalence in the “right” answer is at the root of “separating the art from the artist”, that is, when you consume a work of art without considering the context of its creation. This means that in your consumption, you completely ignore the artist's view on the subject, their character traits, or past actions. With an increasing number of artists being called out for their polemic behavior, their defenders often resort to saying that they simply “separate the art from its creator”. That’s how you get people saying: “I don’t agree with Kanye recently, but he still made ‘College Dropout’!”. This seems feasible, as a lot of people don’t bother with investing in the person behind the art, and simply enjoy art for art’s sake. However, there is insurmountable hypocrisy behind the idea that you can detach an artwork from the artist.

This argument is only ever used when it comes to defending the enjoyment of art made by “bad” people. A simple example is that of fans of Kanye who continue to promote the rapper despite his antisemitic statements in 2022. His fan’s don’t out-rightly defend his actions, yet they continue to listen to his music, generating excitement for his upcoming music and in general engaging with him online and sharing their support for him. 

It seems obvious that you wouldn’t be willing to give up your favorite music just because you discover that the person behind it isn’t respectable. I’m not saying that you should, either. Especially today, when the criteria for being deemed a “good” person is becoming increasingly strict. It also doesn’t help that we are connected to artists more than ever because of social media. A single post is enough to have people throwing stones at you and condemning people with a substantial internet presence. 

Having known the height of his fame over 40 years ago, Michael Jackson’s legacy as the king of pop will live on forever and override the significant accusations made against him late in his career, as well as posthumously. He faced his first criminal charge in 1993 and continued to garner more for the next and last decade of his life. The lawsuits against him were especially brought to life by the 2019 documentary ‘Leaving Neverland’. The film covers in great length all the crimes he was accused of, with exclusive intake from the victims themselves. As soon as the documentary was released, it sparked massive outrage, with most of the viewers bashing it for spoiling a deadman’s image as a great artist and others praising it for revealing the skeletons in the closet. This release also led to a dip in Michael Jackson’s streaming numbers, proving that for some usual listeners, this new perception of the artist directly impacted their consumption of his music. 

In episode two of ‘High Fidelity’, Rob is summoned to settle a debate between the shop clerks and a customer looking for a vinyl of ‘Off the Wall’ by Michael Jackson. The lady explains that she wishes to give it to her boyfriend, but as she goes up to the counter, Cherise refuses to sell it to her because that would be supporting him knowing the horrible crimes he was charged with. Rob is then called in to decide whether or not they can sell it to her in good conscience. 

Rob initially sides with Cherise and politely turns down the customer. But just as the lady is about to walk out the door, she remembers a particular song that made her so fond of the album: “oh, but those fucking horn charts on ‘Workin’ Day and Night’!”. With this in mind, she ushers the customer back and reassures her that she can purchase the vinyl. When criticized by Cherise for betraying her values, Rob defends that those “horn charts” were written by Quincy Jones, not Jackson himself. By saying this, Rob is implying that by refusing to sell the vinyl, she would be depriving someone of enjoying the work put into the album by other artists besides Michael Jackson, because he didn’t create it on his own. 

As a rebuttal, Cherise sarcastically offers to play music by Charles Manson, the 1960s cult leader who drove his disciples to commit cold-blooded murders. This is meant as a hyperbolic joke, but Charles Manson actually did make music, however, his notoriety as a ring leader will always override the possibility of appreciating his prolificness in music.

Lastly, Simon, the other shop clerk, chimes in and suggests that it would be borderline impossible to limit ourselves to music made by irreproachable artists: “we’d have to destroy every record in existence except for..”. Each person in the store then suggests an answer and it quickly becomes apparent that not more than 5 artists fit the mould. 

Moreover, we are only partial to separating the art when it is made by people who have done bad things. Conversely, when the creator is virtuous, or at the very least not despicable, we accept their personhood in our enjoyment of their art. Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings and legacy is a perfect example. 

No fan of Van Gogh bothers to separate him from his art. His mental illness plagued him throughout all his life and it remains an intrinsic part of all his paintings. Everyone knows that behind those vibrant yellow flowers and mellow landscapes lies a man troubled by his borderline personality disorder. We know that his stunning paintings were sometimes created during bouts of depression and anxiety, or ���crisis” as he called tem. are a direct result of his struggles and that he suffered during the entirety of his career. Vincent was ahead of his time. His contemporaries couldn’t see past his experience with mental health issues and his work only began to be revered posthumously. Today, he is deemed as a tortured artist with a big heart who was snubbed of praise during his lifetime. Furthermore, his struggles are constantly addressed in analyses of his work. The contemporary fan sympathizes with his Van Gogh, they consider his experiences as a frame for his paintings, and have no problem doing so, because he was a “good” person. Likewise, we don’t systematically separate the art from the artist, only doing so when it is convenient. This showcases our hypocrisy and the convenience with which we apply our opinions and values when faced with moral dilemmas. 

This example vows to bring nuance to the idea of consuming art made by “bad” people. Here, we focus on the artist’s ethics, not the consumer’s. If we decide to reverse the role and question the consumer’s morals, we’re met with a question seldom tackled: “do bad people deserve good art?”

In episode 5 of ‘High Fidelity’, Rob travels to Uptown New York City alongside Clyde, with the intention of purchasing a rare vinyl collection from a private collector. Once they get there, they are met with an eclectic woman who explains to them that she recently found out that her husband cheated on her, and that she is in the process of ridding her house of all his belongings. Rob finds out that the expansive record collection up for sale is actually his own and he is unaware that his wife is attempting to sell it for the symbolic and laughable sum of 20$.  His passion for music is transparent in the enormous stack of vinyls. Some even stand out amongst all the admirable records: she spots a limited edition David Bowie vinyl she’s been after since the 8th grade. While Rob is looking through all the records, the seller details all of her cheating husband’s flaws, including the fact that he never seemed to care about anything besides music. 

Having eyed some extremely rare records in the stack, she decides that she would be justified in taking them, because their owner is a lowlife man-child who cheats on his wife with young girls in pretentious bars. However, when reminded of the 20$ price, she understands that the collection is collateral damage in a failing relationship. The lady is instrumentalizing a possession she knows is so near and dear to her husband’s heart: “a dagger through his rotten heart”. By selling it at such a low price, she is getting revenge in showing just how little regard she now has for her husband and anything he cares about. Despite the once-in-a-lifetime bargain, Rob tries to negotiate the price upwards in an attempt to justify the betrayal she would be committing to the man. But the lady insists on accepting no more than a crisp 20$ bill in exchange for the records. On one hand, she is ecstatic at the thought of owning such an impressive collection, and on another, she feels like taking the records would essentially be stealing from a fellow music aficionado. 

So, she becomes resolute on meeting the guy and assess whether or not he deserves to suffer this daylight robbery. Clyde and her go find him at a nearby upscale bar, predictably on a date with an disgustingly age-inappropriate date. Clyde manages to strike a conversation with him and soon enough, the four of them are sitting at a booth and listening to him rave about music. He goes on and on about his expansive and niche knowledge on the subject. Sharing this passion, Rob tries to chime in but promptly gives up because it’s clear the man only wants to listen to himself talk. During the entire afternoon spent at this bar, she only manages to get a few hours, being constantly interrupted, ignored and shut down by the man. She calls him out for getting the release date of ‘Wings Over America’ wrong, but he seems willing to die on the hill of that faulty information. Moreover, he only talks to Clyde and excludes both Rob and his date from the conversation. Overall, he comes off as a misogynistic, mansplaining and self centered man going through an overdue midlife crisis. However, towards the end of the conversation, his loftiness momentarily leaves place to earnestness when he admits that “music saved [his] life”. This stands out to Rob and becomes what she takes away from the interaction. 

Clyde and her then go back to the lady’s house with a crisp 20$ bill in hand, ready to take the vinyls. Just as she’s about to hand the seller the bill, the thought of the man’s reaction to this ploy leaves a bitter taste in her mouth. Regretfully, Rob tells the lady that she can’t purchase this collection in good conscience:  “I don’t think I’m qualified to decide who deserves to get what they get”, “I get that he’s a bad guy [...] but he loves music, and I love music!”. The lady seems quite confused by this sudden change of heart, and Rob goes on a tirade about the importance of music in people’s lives, especially hers. She reveals that similarly to the husband, “music has saved [her] life, so many times”. She continues to explain that music is an invaluable element of her life and that everyone should have access to this art, regardless of their moral corruption:  “I think it should be for everyone, you know? It should be for good people and for shitty people, and just for everybody, you know, like wifi or.. healthcare.”. The lady tells her that if she doesn’ buy the vinyls, another person will come get them right after, meaning that Rob is just a pawn in this game. She knows that the collection will end up being sold regardless of whether or not she is the one to purchase it. The only question that remains is whether she is willing to be the one to plant the dagger in the man’s heart. 

Clyde and her leave the lady’s house empty handed and Rob is having a hard time processing everything that happened throughout the day. A small part of her feels as though she ended up siding with the bad guy and she’ll never forgive herself for letting an amazing opportunity go to waste. Seeing how down she is, Clyde suggests that her decision wasn’t just about the guy. Maybe deep down, Rob thinks she is also a bad person and therefore undeserving of music. Clyde suggests that she is worried that when her skeletons come out of the closet, her music will be someone else’s for the taking: “It seemed like you were thinking : “if they can take away this guy’s records just ‘cause he sucks and made some bad decisions”, then you’re wondering: “when are they coming for mine?””

This episode raises the question “do bad people deserve good art?”. On one hand, it seems futile to question if everyone deserves access to art. Why would someone’s ethics rule their access to music, visual arts, fashion etc? Art serves a great purpose at enriching our lives, regardless of our moral standings, especially when we enjoy art for art’s sake, not because it might have a certain influence on our behavior. Art allows us to expand our consciousness, it is also a breeding ground for vital personal and social development.

Contrarily, you can argue that “bad” people aren’t worthy of enjoying themselves, or of enriching their lives. By depriving people of art, we would be concomitantly denying them of cultural understanding. This is because art provides insight on the cultural zeitgeist and thus allows us to foster a sense of community and shared experience. By missing out on the art, we would essentially be denied access to a greater human consciousness.

[everyth1ngisembarassing]

bones & all on inherited plight

Luca Guadagnino has a romantic way of approaching already scenic landscapes--rarely leaning far away from Italy, his country of origin- to bring to the screen precious coming of age stories that keep us talking for years at a time. The feature that secured him a title as a household name was undoubtedly Call Me By Your Name (2017). Critics rushed to acclaim it for its high fidelity depiction of the eponymous novel, as well as the dreamy scenery it allowed us to indulge in through the big screen. The chyron ‘Somewhere in northern Italy’ during the exposition translates the dreamscape quality of the overall story. In Bones and All (2022) Guadagnino comes back in full force, scouting his previous star Timothée Chalamet, and coupling him with breakthrough actress Taylor Russell. Guadagnino also graduates from his preferred setting in favor of discovering eastern USA, all the while bringing back the 80s timeframe which he tackled in Call Me By Your Name. This adaptation of the Bones and All novel by Camille DeAngelis tells the story of two offbeat teenagers struggling to come to terms with their cannibalism. What draws the characters to one another is their shared inheritance of this uncontrollable cannibalism they owe to their parents.

We are first introduced to Maren, whose life with her dad consists of constantly moving from town to town, adopting new identities hoping to leave behind the times she mauls somebody. We quickly understand the father and daughter have been through this routine of fleeing to another city quite a few times, and having to adjust to their new environment to the best of their ability. Maren’s mom isn’t in the picture and her father alludes to the woman as being disturbed, and the root of Maren’s issue. Ever since she was a baby, Maren has eaten people and interprets this as involuntary and uncontrollable. Her fathers sets up strict rules to avoid her from encountering instances where she could give in to this hunger, an act which is later referred to by others of her kind as ‘feeding’. Maren’s dad sticks beside her no matter what, always cleaning up her mess and ensuring they escape the scene seamlessly. However, one particular night, she lets the urge get the best of her during a sleepover she sneaks out to in the middle of the night.

The scenes that ensue are the turning point of the movie and the story finally centers around Maren’s cannibalism. Her father abandons her and leaves behind only Maren’s birth certificate, revealing her mother’s identity. With this newfound information, Maren sets out to find her estranged mother so as to understand why they each became cannibals. Along with this birth certificate, Maren’s father also left her a cassette. Maren listens to this tape over the course of her long road trip to find her mother. The stories told by her father give her a retrospective on her ‘condition’, and help her to better understand how it shaped her upbringing.

Maren discovers she’s not the only one of her kind when an off putting man approaches her and explains he “smelled” her from across the street. This encounter encourages Maren to tap into this side of her so as to better know herself, and hopefully control her craving. The old man, who nicknames himself “Sully”, offers to take her under his wing and show her how she can hold sway over herself. He confides in Maren and reveals he too pushed his parents away with his tendencies. Sully ends up scaring Maren when he reveals the spineless boundaries with which he lives his life. Despite upholding honorability amongst his values, the young girl deems Sully merciless towards his victims. She then decides to put an end to her short lived mentorship in favor of continuing the journey on her own.

This posture as a solo rider lasts less than a day when she crosses paths with Lee in a nearby small town. She notices him luring a man towards an abandoned building, from which he later emerges covered in blood from the chin down and the man’s belongings in hand. This time Maren is the one to make the first step in meeting another cannibal. She persuades him to take her on despite the initial imbalance in their relationship: he’s bordering on professionalism in cannibalism and she barely knows how to go about it. Lee eventually realizes having a partner in crime can only do him good, it could also help fulfill the inherent loneliness of his lifestyle. Much like Maren, Lee never stays in one place for too long after he’s struck. The young man seems self assured and comfortable in his own skin and this gives Maren the confidence to trust him and believe he won’t desert her, as he’s familiar with the part of herself she’s most afraid of.

Lee agrees to tag along on Maren’s search for her mother across the country. His janky stolen car alternates between mode of transportation and shelter on certain nights. Maren and Lee fall for each other over along the scenic road trip across America. Whether this stems from genuine infatuation or lack of choice remains unknown until now. The couple hops from town to town and coax victims wherever they land, and promptly drive away once they’ve fed. 

After what feels like months, Maren ends up finding her mother in a psych ward in the middle of nowhere. Lee warns her she might not like whatever happens in there and offers to stand by her side during her conversation with her mother. However, Maren insists this is something she must do on her own, and so Lee reluctantly waits for her outside. Her usual shyness and reservation is replaced by an unprecedented assertiveness and curiosity to finally unearth the answers she’s been longing for since she was a child. The lady at the front desk of the ward reveals Maren’s mother, Janelle, wrote her a letter several years ago. The young girl is relieved to find out her mother’s been expecting all this time. Upon walking into her mothers room, she’s met with a disheveled Janelle whose forearms are missing. The lady from the front desk reappears behind Maren and whispers to her that Janelle bit off her own arms in a manic episode. She also adds that she’s been put on sedatives which seemingly cause her to be irritable and paranoid. This leaves Maren disconcerted and she resorts to reading the letter in hopes to move on from her initial shock. The letter starts off sentimental, as Janelle expresses her apologies for passing on her cannibalism to her daughter. As her mother and a cannibal herself, Janelle is the only one who fully grasps the implication of the need to feed. She remains silent throughout Maren’s entire out loud reading of the note. The daughter gets to the segment explaining that her condition hinders her from ever experiencing happiness and peace. She goes on to say that this burden will only get worse as she gets older and that she’s reserved the same faith endured by her mother. As Maren approaches the end of the letter, Janelle grows uneasy before leaping towards Maren and trying to maul her. Maren escapes the ward just on time, and rushes to Lee in a state of confusion and anger. In a heated argument between the couple, we watch them each attempt to come to terms with Janelle’s words. Maren remains in shock and denial, while Lee argues that there’s no shying away from the truth behind the letter and that she must tackle her faith head on. Here we see the young girl having to face the inevitable consequences of her cannibalism, up until now, Maren remained hopeful her condition would someday recede and she would be able to live the normal life she dreams about.

Janelle’s letter casts a shadow on Maren as well as on the rest of the movie. By the end, her words become almost a prophecy and each of its foreshadowed events are crossed off the list one by one. Firstly, we learn that Lee’s father, much like Janelle, was also an eater whose life was ruined because of this. Lee shares that his own father attempted to eat him and that as a young boy, Lee managed to beat him to it and mauled him to death. Secondly, another pillar of Janelle’s prophecy is that being an eater means being incapable of maintaining relationships. This translates directly to Maren being abandoned by her father earlier in the film. Lastly, Janelle’s words come back to haunt the film in the unfolding of the last scene. Just as the couple has settled down and started to live a somewhat normal life, their repressed cannibalism is called upon as they confront Sully, the old cannibal who’s been searching for Maren across the country. The movie ends with Lee pleading with Maren to put him out of his misery by feeding off of him and giving into their nature they’ve tried so hard to leave behind: “I want you to eat me Maren, Bones and All”

Maren and Lee’s relationship balances visceral love and inevitable violence with a paramount theme of cannibalism as a shameful act neither of them can shy away from. Throughout the film, Maren searches for answers more than she searches for her mother. It's her conviction that she is owed an explanation as to why she has to helplessly carry a boulder of a burden that ostracizes and terrifies her. Bones and All is definitely not the first story to tackle cannibalism in the frame of a love story, but it differs from the precedent movies and books by emphasizing the inheritance of this craving. All of the “eaters” in the movie have in common abandonment and estrangement from their families. Their common untethering leads them to commit to a culture of nomadism and social reclusion for their entire lives. Lee and Maren stand out amongst all these people due to their ultimate desire to lead normal lives and fit in. However, not wanting to be defined by cannibalism proves to be a challenge when this trait continuously occupies center stage in their lives. 

In confronting her mother, Maren tries to deny that she holds the same faith as her: ostracized and maimed at her own will. She tries to move on from Janelle’s warning and set her own rules for how to live her life. In an interview for GQ, director Guadagnino draws a metonymy between Maren’s superseding of her mother’s speech and an earlier scene in which Maren is still figuring out how to survive on her own. In this earlier segment she’s seen cautiously and quietly shoplifting a few items so as to feed herself. Searching for onlookers, her gaze falls on the first man she sees Lee lure and then eat. Eliciting the challenges of this scene, Guadadigno comments “ I like the way, the direction of your gaze toward what you're leaving behind because both Maren and Lee, they particularly fight their identity and they're trying to find a place in the world that could contain them despite who they are and what they have to do by the sheer power of their nature”. This condenses the dynamic we witness Maren enact in her newfound life. It also plays on the road trip story the story is anchored in for the majority of the film. We’re reminded that the couple are simultaneously leaving their old life behind and trying to find foundations for a new and better life in which they get to set the terms.

Mitski touches on the themes of inheritance and the search for happiness in her song Crack Baby, featured on the 2014 album Puberty 2. On this track, she tells the story of a young person longing for a feeling they can’t name but have experienced before. She akins this sisyphean search for pleasure to the physical trauma suffered by a ‘crack baby’, that is, a person whose mother was a user during pregnancy, and the addiction was passed on to them. When this inherited addiction is unbeknownst to the person, this can create an immense void in their life they don’t know how to fill. Mitski equates this unbridled high to feelings of loss and craving, she sings: ‘Crack baby, you don’t know what you want’, ‘like wild horses running through your hollow bones’. These crack babies go on to spend their lives-‘It’s been a long hard twenty years’- trying to replicate the high they’ve felt before- ‘but you know that you had it once’- in an attempt to soothe and itch caused by their mothers’ actions: ‘and you know that you want it bad’

Much like Maren and Lee, the character described in this song is haunted by a nature that precedes them and diligently rules their life. Try as they might to distract themselves from it, it will always remain a burden they carry around and can’t put down. Lastly, we can also place Maren’s mother in the narrative explored in the song. Mitski sings in the first person about trying to relieve the protagonist of their craving: ‘Went to your room, thinking maybe you’d feel better’. However, her attempts remain feeble in the face of the enormous void suffered by the main character: ‘but all I saw was your burdened body waiting’. Similarly to this character, Janelle is set to spend the remainder of her days secluded in a psych ward, in other words, a room in which she would ‘maybe feel better’. Facing her mother for the first time in years, Maren sees her as a shell of a person who becomes invalid from giving into her cannibalistic nature. x

[everyth1ngisembarassing]

Clairo’s Charm & panopticism

On her third studio album Charm, Clairo offers sensitive self reflection and soft-spoken lyrics over distorted synths and piano. On the lead single Sexy to Someone, she draws from wanting someone to admire her, for the sake of having something going for her. She manages to put into words what seems to be a universal feeling. By its lively production and prosaic lyrics, this song doesn’t take itself too seriously and paints a pretty picture out of the underlying meaning.

Clairo starts off poignantly, leaving no room for interpretation: “sexy to someone is all I really want”. She repeats and nuances this motif throughout the track, which lets us in on how the sentiment actually translates in her day-to-day life. Right after the first hyperbolic line, she cuts in with a more realistic take “sometimes sexy to someone is all I really want”. As she goes on, we understand that this longing sets the tone for everything she does, it underlies her every action and commands how she moves forward. Clairo showcases what it’s like to want to appeal to others for the satisfaction of knowing you are desirable, which immediately reminded me of panopticism and the male gaze.

In the 70s, French historian Michel Foucault leaned on the notion of ‘panopticism’ as a metaphor in his analysis and critique of “the modern disciplinary society”. The panopticon metaphor has long before him been applied onto diverse contexts, ranging from interpersonal relationships, citizen’s relation to power, social media and even the relationship with oneself. This metaphor that seems so far removed from reality actually draws from blueprints for prisons in the 18th century drawn by Jeremy Betham. The idea behind the architecture of panopticons was to create a space in which the prisoners felt constantly supervised to ensure they behaved as was expected. The ideal type of a panopticon is a circular building, plus a tower in the center. The guard occupies the tower and all of the prisoners’ cells are located across the arch. Only the cells are lit, and this ensures that the guard can see all the prisoners, but they cannot see him.Given that the prisoners have no guarantee or whether the guard is watching them or not, they perpetually feel monitored. This constrains them to behave properly, regardless of the actual presence of the guard.

Feminists of the second and third wave have applied the concept onto interpersonal relationships and identity. In this frame, panopticism translates to the influence of what many have nicknamed the “ever present watcher”: feeling like someone is looking into your home through the window, an open door, a keyhole… This presence would be the embodiment of the ‘male gaze’ that has permeated our lives and conditioned us to appeal to this ever present watcher. The leading idea of this theory is that this feeling of being watched fuels women and girls’ efforts to present and carry themselves in a way that caters to the ‘male gaze’. This term was coined by film theorist Anna Mulvey in the 70s in an attempt to synthesize motifs she had noticed across several movies at the time. In her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, she defends that lead female characters were portrayed in an unmistakably suggestive light. Whether it be unnecessary nudity, revealing costumes, panning up and down their bodies etc. the list of techniques that aim to objectify actresses and legitimize their looks as being the most important thing they bring to the film is endless. The agenda of the male gaze is to put forward the feminine ideal and demand it of girls and women. Although the portrayals in movies seem extreme, Mulvey underlines the responsibility of the societal context that allows and encourages these tropes to be produced. From this point of view, we could argue that the male gaze in film is just an exaggeration of the lens women are subject to everyday.

The male gaze, as interpreted by Mulvey, exists beyond film: it’s in music videos, magazines, ads, what have you. Its ubiquity and quasi-monopoly of women’s image in media aren’t inconsequential either. You’ll rarely meet a girl who hasn’t at some point been partial to adopting these superficial stereotypes, even if her efforts were subconscious. Catering to these insatiable fantasies is a means to making yourself more comfortable in the context of most interactions being ridden by the male gaze. Having been made aware of these expectations, women have one of two choices: conform or defy. Conforming would entail bending towards beauty standards, whereas defying would mean presenting yourself the way that you ‘truly’ want, even if this happens to align with the feminine ideal. Margaret Atwood honed in on the subconscious aspect of catering to the male gaze, underlining that it leaves no room for anyone to exist outside of its spectrum: “Even pretending you aren't catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you're unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else”. Atwood defends that the internalizing of the male gaze has pushed girls to demand the feminine ideal of themselves and become their own guard in the panopticon: “You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur”.

Panopticism and the male gaze are intrinsically two sides of the same coin; they both subject people to constant voyeurism and thus conditions us to act a certain way. It goes without saying that the consequences of not abiding to the male gaze are obviously less severe than the punishment inflicted on out-of-line prisoners. However, being illegitimate by virtue of straying from the feminine ideal does cost women opportunities, with attractiveness influencing the way people are judged. In this sense, it becomes a part of our daily lives to dress well, to put on make-up, to invest time, money and energy into healthy diets and skincare in an attempt to live up to the feminine ideal we’re entertaining and reinforcing with our every action, even if we deem that we’re doing these things for our own enjoyment.

Coming back to Clairo, in Sexy to Someone she tells us that feeling sexy/valid would motivate her to complete simple tasks, which would feel incomplete if she wasn’t admired: “it's just a little thing I can't live without”. There’s a chance this doesn’t stem from a need for validation on the singer’s part, but just a wish to be seen. This idea is solidified in the chorus, where she explains this desire “it would help me out, Oh, I need a reason to get out of the house”. Her desperation also grows as the song continues; from the chorus on, “someone” is switched out for “somebody”. Considering that “somebody” is generally used to refer to people more specifically than “someone”, this indicates that she doesn’t really care who it is, as long as she gets the satisfaction she so wants. Clairo also thinks of finding something “sexy” as appreciating it: “Sexy is something I see in everything”. Even the smallest things, “Honey stickin' to your hands, sugar on the rim”, are worth being acknowledged and cherished. In this sense, what she dubs wanting to be sexy to someone can also just mean she wants to be acknowledged and romanticized, even for the most trivial things.

As Clairo gets increasingly vague about who she seeks this admiration from, we’re led to believe she isn’t aiming to please to get something from someone, she just wants the satisfaction for the sake of it. Perhaps it’s a futile desire, but the fact that it resonated with so many listeners proves that this is a behaviour stemming from latent expectations placed upon us, and that we’re becoming both the guard and the prisoner in the panopticon.

[everyth1ngisembarassing]

I am waiting, I am waiting..

Childhood is above all else a matter of waiting. Waiting for your parents to come pick you up from school when all your friends have already left. Sitting on hard waiting room chairs at the doctor's office knowing the only thing that will come from it is a piece of paper with words that are unknown scripture to you. It's tugging at your mom's sleeve when she's talking to someone while your incessant cries "Mom! Mom! listen to me" get drowned out by conversations you can't keep up with. It's standing in front of your best friend's front door and telling yourself that the next time you ring the bell she'll magically materialize in her home and come greet you at the door. It's listening to the cars outside, distorting their sounds until you mistake them for your parent's car. They're finally home. It's being frustrated you play no part in the passing of years until you're old enough to drive yourself home, until you can talk to the doctor yourself, until you don't hide behind your mom when she talks to someone else, until your best friend has grown up and doesn't live on the 3rd floor anymore, until you don't pay attention to the cars outside because you know your parents aren't driving home to you.