one, as the camera pans across the faces on the bus, you see a variety of ginger. at one point, she zeroes in on a young man who could "pass" as not ginger. here she's illustrating something a professor i knew used to do at the beginning of his social problems class: he'd line all 150 students up by shade such that "whites" from italian backgrounds were darker than some who saw themselves and were seen as african americans. such was his wedge to continually return to throughout the course.
two, before they leave the bus the camera focuses on one member of the military. (this is before the halfway mark of the video). Behind the mask that mostly covers his face, you see the markers: very fair skin, green eyes, reddish eyebrows, light lashes. he's the last face of the military you see at the end - i think. i can't be sure about this, but i'm curious if others saw that too.
three, the massacre. why didn't they just shoot them all and be done with it. instead, what they made them do was run for their lives, each an individual, so terrified that there's no time to focus on anything but survival, saving your own ass. of course, they are running into a minefield anyway.
four, another important point, i think, is that none of the military are signaling that they are doing this for sport, that they are laughing as people blow up. i think a lot of pop culture refs to this sort of thing would individualize it: they get pleasure out of the sport of killing people, that something about what they do is unique to them, as individuals. thus leading people to conclude that it's just aberrant individuals.
five, the other thing is that the military follow alongside them as they are running, tossing grenades I gather, and shooting them. they are not in a super-hummer, they're exposed - albeit still slightly protected, with gear, and knowledge of where to drive and where not. the debris and smoke from an exploding body enters the vehicle.
curious if others saw the same things I did.
At 03:01 AM 4/28/2010, wrobert at uci.edu wrote:
> I thought it was an interesting piece. I think that it operates on
>several levels, all of which are engaging in a kind of either
>cognitive or emotional estrangement. The first thing that I thought
>about when I saw it is that it clearly was in conversation with
>representations of the Iraq occupation. It asks the question, what
>would the occupation look like if it occurred in the U.S. The second
>level is the one that Shag points to, a critique of the arbitrary
>nature of racism, by taking a far less charged physical trait and
>giving it the symbolic power of racial signification. The red hair
>also ties into the symbolic power of 'red' that Joanna brought up,
>and there also seemed to be a reference to the struggles in Northern
>Ireland. That being said, I still have a certain amount of
>ambivalence about the sort of emotional manipulation around racial
>signification that seems to define the directors work (see the
>Justice video he made.)
>
>robert wood
>
>P.S. I think most of what M.I.A. had to say about Lady Gaga was right, but
>I still have a fondness for some of the songs (then again, I own a lot of
>Pet Shop Boys albums.) I also think that the videos are really clever.
>
> > Shag writes
> >
> > "it's a video that asks the viewer to imagine the world if we were to
> > racialize red hair. it's supposed to get the viewer to say, "oh fuckin
> > stupid would that be?" and then use that as a wedge to get them to see
> > how stupid it is to racialize any supposed sign of difference."
> >
> > I don't think it works like that. People would look at this and say,
> > discriminating against redheads is stupid. But it would not follow that
> > discrimination in general is a bad thing because a particular instance
> > is stupid.
> >
> > That's not how prejudice works.
> >
> > Joanna
> > ___________________________________
> > http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
> >
> >
>
>
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